I used to think this was a cool idea when I worked at big companies. Now I realize when your team is small and you're moving fast, the chaos just happens. No planning needed!

Le Guin should be on this list

This is has been the main cognitive dissonance in bitcoin for several years now: stacking vs spending. There really is no practical incentive to spend.

There is also a network effect that bitcoin just doesn't have yet. It's easy to critique tradfi platforms like Venmo or Paypal for being closed systems... but bitcoin is not all that different right now. If you don't have any bitcoin it is just another payment platform you don't have access to and doesn't work with anything you have. Someone may as well be asking you to Venmo them and sadly, you don't have Venmo.

He makes some good points, as always

this is my favorite comment on the internet today

Is there a hard cutoff coming? I visit the site pretty regularly but can't say I'm fully aware of what's happening with the wallet situation. It's possible I missed an announcement or maybe wasn't paying enough attention.

In short, this is my way of saying there are still some of us casual visitors who don't know what's happening. :)

Yeah makes sense. I think the important thing to realize here is people can come to it in so many different ways. There isn't one approach that necessarily fits everyone. For me I actually came to it from the technology side, mostly just fascinated by the engineering of it all. The money stuff came a lot later.

I think the best place to start learning about bitcoin is not to start with bitcoin at all but to instead start with the question: "What is money?" It's a great, open-ended question that, in the end, really gets to the heart of what bitcoin is about.

Really interesting interview. I didn't realize their original plan was to launch the wallet with coinjoin support. Also love the analogy he makes between email and bitcoin.

I really like Nostrudel. It's fast and simple. And I like the character of the design, it feels unique.

This thing is full of spot-on gems

I think the fear that Nostr is too centralized right now is a bit overblown. With such a small group of users, all with similar ethos, there is no pressing need for decentralization right now because there are so few risks even if things are centralized. When the user base grows into something more substantial and starts fracturing into different ideologies and interests then decentralization becomes a lot more important. IMO it'd be a waste of time and resources to build out large swaths of infrastructure and services just for decentralization's sake when the demand for those resources just aren't there.

I have thought about how to do atomic payments to multiple parties at once over Lightning so much... thanks for laying out the problem space like this and theorizing a potential way Bolt12 could help do it. It's a really interesting idea.

What I struggle with when it comes to all these approaches is -- and this is coming from the perspective that the reason we need atomic split payments is so there is no custodial element when trying to pay multiple recipients simultaneously -- every participant still needs a stable, funded Lightning node for the payment to work at all. I think right now it is still way too difficult for most people to run their own node. And until that hurdle is cleared, non-custodial split payments don't gain most end users very much if those payments are ending up on a node they don't control anyway.

I'll have to read more into the blinded paths pattern in Bolt12. If anything it could serve as a good enough solution in the near future while nodes become easier to run over the longer term.

Great questions. All those are valid concerns and a lot to try and bite off at once, which is why we're taking a more incremental approach. I can assure you that the Wavlake you see today is very much a prototype for a much bigger vision of what we think could be.

One thing to consider is that the distribution and payment model we've built doesn't necessarily have to adhere to a pure v4v application in every situation. For example, if a company wanted to create an ad with a song in it, that license could be secured with a Lightning transaction. And every airing/play of that ad would require the company to pay the artist X amount as part of the terms. That would just be part of the deal. This is just one example, I'm sure you can imagine many more.

In my mind, listeners sending sats to artists is just the tip of the iceberg. It's a really interesting application of this technology, but there are many other ways this could be used to the benefit of artists and consumers.

My naive take is that royalties are complicated because so many parties are involved outside of the artists and their management. When you boil it down splits are relatively simple.

We follow the spec closely, it's why all our music can appear on the likes of Fountain, etc. The truth is we don't know how all this will evolve over time, we're just making choices based on what seems to be working for people.

Royalties are complicated and we don't make any claims to solve for the different publishing, mechanical, streaming, over-the-air, licensing, etc categories. As you may know, each of these are enforced by different entities and can also change depending on jurisdiction. That said, direct payments to creators does create an opportunity to simplify a lot of this bureaucracy and accounting. We're just in the very early stages of unlocking this potential.

Not at all. Comes with the territory :)

Thanks @k00b, appreciate you giving us the benefit of the doubt. What you said is spot on.

A lot of these criticisms are rooted in a very specific ideology about how podcasting 2.0 is supposed to work according to some people. Some of it is also based on a mistaken perception of what Wavlake is simply because we operate in the space.

Fact is: we've always been upfront about what we're trying to do and how we do it. That will surely evolve over time as we figure things out, but for now I think it's safe to say we've helped a lot of artists discover a cool new way to share their music and earn. We're just gonna keep focusing on doing more of that. And even better.

I love this idea.

I've made a few programs like this for just myself or my family. One was an app that would remind me when a Bulls game was going to be on regular TV (never had cable). Another would generate and send weather updates to be displayed on the digital photo frame in my kitchen (too cheap to get a tablet).

My favorite, though, was for an office prank. It was at my first job as a dev and there were just a half-dozen or so of us in a relatively small space. We listened to music a lot in the main room and one of the guys complained about a particular artist all the time. I want to say it was Taylor Swift or Katy Perry, but I can't recall exactly who.

Anyway, another dev and I started monitoring the office router to figure out the mac ID to his phone. Then we set up a script to watch the router for that mac ID and start playing this music he hated every time he entered the office.

He thought it was a coincidence for a couple weeks. Good times. :)

I think the most emotional response I've ever had to a piece of art is in front of Picasso's Guernica.

Not at all! Glad to see this old thread still has some legs 😀

We keep a zine (blog) that might be helpful. This might be a good place to start: https://zine.wavlake.com/value-for-value-music-with-lightning-what-a-concept/

Let me know if you have any questions