Bitcoin’s Trojan Horse: Lightning Network Masterclass w/ Jesse Shrader

The "What is Money?" Show

Robert Breedlove

Bitcoin, Breedlove, What Is Money, Investing, Rabbit Hole, Cryptocurrency, Money, Finance, Education, Robert Breedlove, History

4.8 • 710 Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2025

⏱️ 106 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What is the Lightning Network and why does it matter for Bitcoin? Jesse Shrader joins the show to break down how Lightning actually works, why Satoshi wanted scaling in layers instead of bigger blocks, and how liquidity is solved on Lightning. They discuss earning yield on Lightning, the trade-offs with privacy and censorship, how Lightning is a Trojan Horse for Bitcoin adoption, Core vs Knots, and why the world needs Bitcoin now more than ever. Jesse Shrader is Co-Founder and CEO of Amboss, leading provider of Bitcoin Lightning Network data and insights.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Are we Trojan horsing Bitcoin into the infrastructure of the world?
0:04.3	Or is, you know, the government, Trojanhorcing stable coins into Bitcoin?
0:11.2	How does KYC play into all of this?
0:13.8	Because if Lightning is going to find its way into our existing financial system,
0:18.3	then you're going to need KYC in some capacity. Otherwise, that's a big
0:22.8	problem. Yeah. Okay. So it's going to be different answers for different people. What can people do
0:28.4	to increase the probability of success or increase the time in which we can Bitcoinize the world,
0:36.9	I guess.
0:41.7	Our job is to move the entire global economy onto Bitcoin.
0:43.6	How are we going to do that?
0:49.4	I'm curious your thoughts on the knots versus core issue.
0:53.3	What benefits do we have if we increase the opportunity to 100,000 bytes?
0:54.5	Like, how does that make Bitcoin better? Where it becomes very challenging is that... All right, Jesse, thanks for coming.
1:13.1	My pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
1:18.7	Happy to have you here. And so I'm not a super technical guy. I've talked a lot about lightning over the years being a Bitcoin enthusiast. I can't fully wrap my head around the whole
1:24.9	protocol, how it works. There's a lot to unpack there.
1:27.9	But so I figured we should start with explaining to me like I'm five years old,
1:32.7	what lightning is, why we need it and how it works.
1:36.0	Yeah.
1:36.7	So lighting really started as a way to scale Bitcoin.
1:40.8	Can I pack more transactions into the same amount of data by using the scaling technology?
1:49.0	And it's something that Satoshi wanted to do for a long time.
	...

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