Building on Lightning with Ben Arc - WBD554
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 September 2022
⏱️ 92 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben Arc is a free open-source software advocate and founder of LNbits. In this interview, we discuss how LNbits helps to decentralize custodianship and how Bitcoin's widescale utility outweighs the environmental FUD.
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In April of this year, Arcane Research published the 2nd volume of its "The State of Lightning" report. It showed adoption of the payments system is growing rapidly. Transaction and usage data indicate exceptional growth (e.g. since January 2021 capacity on the Lightning network has increased by 450%). However, they don't provide the full picture: equally important is the flourishing ecosystem.
There are well over a hundred companies working directly with Lightning: developing operating systems, node and liquidity services, wallets, payment infrastructure, financial services, rewards programs, gaming, podcast/streaming and social media payment options etc. etc. The investment such companies are attracting is growing: the prize is access to the world's best payment rail.
LNbits are providing the services of a Point of Sale payment and accounting technology. Its founder, Ben Arc, started hacking hardware to integrate Lightning functionality after attending the very first Lightning hack day in 2018. Since then he has taken a passion to contribute free open-source software for the community, into a VC-funded business seeking to bring scalable products to market.
LNbits already has a free open-source Lightning wallet/accounts system with an array of extensions enabling users to create paywalls, faucets, offline shops, and even a jukebox! But Ben continues to hack hardware: he has created a Lightning ATM that he provided a live demo of during the show. Those who attend Real Bedford should soon be able to see one of these!
Ben is looking to help grow the adoption of a technology that can provide freedom through decentralization. This will occur once we make these technically sophisticated innovations easy to use, and equally, easy to develop as open-source projects. Lightning is the innovation that enables Bitcoin to scale, and LNbits is part of the growing ecosystem we need to help Lightning to scale.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you're decentralized custodianship, if you make being a custodian very, very easy, it kind of makes mockery of laws restricting people from being custodians. |
| 0:10.0 | If you've just got a few big operators, they're kind of points of failure which can be attacked by government, whatever. |
| 0:16.0 | And I think you see that with technology, if you make things easier to run, more people are going to collectively challenge the regulations in those rules. |
| 0:24.0 | Hello there, how are you all? Welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast, which is brought to you by |
| 0:28.8 | Gemini, the only place I'm using for buying Bitcoin. I'm your host Peter McCormack and today I've got an episode with Ben Art from LN Bits. |
| 0:35.8 | Now this is one of my favorite episodes I made when I was recorded here in Bedford because |
| 0:41.1 | one of those ones that wasn't as I expected. We originally |
| 0:44.1 | planned to record an episode challenging some of the ideologies in |
| 0:47.8 | Bitcoin but before we got into that part of the conversation we got sidetracked |
| 0:52.0 | by some of Ben's inventions. Ben brought this briefcase |
| 0:55.4 | which kind of looked like a bomb but was actually a lightning ATM and this this ended up taking us |
| 1:00.5 | down a rabbit hole of all the cool shit that Ben and his team have been working on over |
| 1:04.7 | LM Bits. |
| 1:05.7 | So yeah, it's a very fun episode to record and probably one that if you're listening to, it's also |
| 1:11.0 | worth going and checking out the YouTube and just like seeing how |
| 1:13.5 | this stuff works but yeah his team are building a bunch of cool stuff I think I'm |
| 1:17.3 | going to use some of it for my football club so if you want to check it out please do |
| 1:20.8 | head over to YouTube our YouTube channel is I think it's |
| 1:24.4 | YouTube.com for slash what hyphen Bitcoin hyphen did I mean that will be linked in |
| 1:29.3 | the show notes anyway so you'll find it there anything else you want to reach out to me, |
| 1:33.0 | you've got any questions about this or any other show. |
| 1:35.0 | My email address is, hello, |
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