CD198: JUSTIN - FEDIMINT UPDATE

Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch. The show focused on actual Bitcoin and freedom tech discussion. The current block height is nine four four zero seven three. SaaS per dollar is one four six six. Bitcoin price is $68,189. One Bitcoin in gold terms gets you 14.78 ounces of gold, down 44% of the year against gold. That's one to watch. Today's date is Tuesday, April 7.

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Anyway, guys, with all that said, I got a great rip lined up. We had Justin join us from the project back in September. So what is that? That is about seven months ago, about a little over half a year. He works he's one of the main contributors for the Fediment open source project, not to be not to be confused by Fetty, the company that's building on top of the open source project. And he has a bunch of updates for us. How's it going, Justin?

Good. Thanks for having me back on back on the show. I'm a big fan, so it's always fun to be here. Yeah. Love it. The pleasure's mine. We've been trying to coordinate this for a bit, so I'm glad we finally made it happen. And I in general, I really like this six month cadence covering important projects and seeing where we're at because things moved faster than people realize. People are both disappointed. Things both move slower Yeah. Than people anticipate,

but then also move much faster than people realize. I think you, like, get stuck in, a disenfranchisement loop if you're if you're just paying attention to it every day. Right. Right. Definitely. Yeah. I think we've had we've had two real we try to do quarterly releases. So we've had, I think, two updates since the last time we we chatted. Maybe there was one that was right on the edge there.

The big one for starters, and I think an interesting place to start here is the big release that you had talked about in the last rip we did was the eCash app. Mhmm. Yeah. What's the deal with that at this point? Yeah. We can start there. So eCash app, I didn't mention last time, but we're we're trying to position it kind of as, like, the reference client for Fetement.

Maybe not in terms of, like, this is exactly how you should build a wallet, but it's gonna try to show, like, all the the details of what Fetevent's doing. So I don't remember which update we talked about last time, but No. It's brand new. Last time it was brand new. It was like, yeah, I think you had just released it. Okay. Yeah. We're on o seven o now or o seven one, I think. We have been shipping for that an update almost every two weeks. So there's a lot of UI improvements and stuff.

But, yeah, it's it's generally it's a on chain Lightning and eCash wallet for Fetamin. And so we can do all three of those those payments. We we lean somewhat heavily into into Nostril. So we have, like, a Nostril based contact system now where you don't actually log in with Nostril. You can just give it a public key, your your end pub. So you can actually set it up for anyone's anyone's end pub. You could use, you know, hotels and, you know, see all your contacts to of who to pay.

We have a so we have that. And then, like, on the other nostril beauty, we have nostril wall connect as well, which I always found fun to implement. We kinda have this Nostril based recovery mechanism as well, where it doesn't store we don't use Nostril for any, like, sensitive data. It's essentially we just store the invite codes for your

the federations that you joined. We essentially have this problem where in in Federer, we have like a bit 39 like recovery mechanism where you can write down your seed words and that will restore your secret for your wallet. But it doesn't tell you which federations that you were previously joined to. So unless you just remember that, which

you might be a little confused when you recover. It's like, oh, where's my where's my money? So we yeah. We we use Nostra for that. We just encrypt the invite codes for the federations that you joined and then sort them on Nostra. And we actually derive the Nostra identity based off of the root secret from your seed phrase. So you really just need the seed phrase and all your all your money comes back in the federation.

I first of all, I realized freeze. If you have no idea what Fediment is, go listen to a sale dispatch 178 because, like, we're kinda, like, going from that point. But just like a quick just a really quick one zero one on Fetamin. It's it's can be thought of similar to Cashew. It's another charming e cash implementation. But instead of having a singlement,

right, that is managing the funds, you have a federation. So you can think of it like a multisig where you you would need multiple of the federated parties to collude in order to steal money or to make a mistake to lose money. Yeah. Exactly. Underneath the hood, it it is a multisig. Right? So for a federation with four, what do you call them, like, guardians?

Each guardian holds one key to the multisig, and they all like, three in a typical deployment, three of three of the four I need to sign for any of the the money to move. Yeah. Our most I think yeah. Go on. I was there. Our most common deployments are are for Guardians, but we'd like to see larger deployments going forward. It's just you obviously need to, like, coordinate with the number of people to deploy one of those. So

It makes it more complicated. There's more moving pieces. I think what a lot of people miss too is, you know, there's a lot of focus and maybe rightfully so, whether it's cashew or Fetamin on rug pull risk. Yeah. But the bigger issue is actually just unintentional uptime failures. Right? Where you can't access your money because guardians are offline. And so as you add more

to the mix, you're obviously adding additional concerns on that front now. Yeah. You you stole a point I was just about to say. I think it's it's worth

emphasizing actually because, like running because like so Fetamin's call like was Byzantine fault tolerant, but just running a a fault tolerant system where you can tolerate, you know, a server going down is is is difficult. Right? Like, that's kind of why these big companies have such value prop is that they they can maintain these high up times. And for Fetamin, any just e cash in general, like you said, like,

the the purpose is to kinda target communities and have known people that you interact with running these things. And so it it kind of puts like more, say like average node runners in the position of running running a service, which as you mentioned, like even if they're being, you know, not malicious at all, it's a difficult thing to like pull off with high uptime. So

yeah, it's nice and fediment that that's kind of tied in just to the trust model where if a server goes down, like the system doesn't stop stop working. And I don't I won't say it's this, but I've heard stories. We've had multiple examples of federations running for quite a long time, probably longer than you'd be comfortable with with with a server down and and things just keep

working. Yeah. And on that on that front too, I think a lot of the stuff we've been doing over the last six months has been kinda targeted at, like, how can we make it as easy as possible for people to participate

in running one of these things? So that's where a lot of the improvements have been. Yeah. I think yeah. I mean, a lot of the success and failure. We've talked about Fetterman many times, not only on this on the last rip we did, but on dispatch in general. Yeah. I I'm in I've been been increasingly convinced that this project success and failure relies on one making it reducing friction of actually

spinning up one of these federations. But second of all, that second piece, which arguably is more difficult, which is making it accessible to run a relatively high uptime Guardian. Because if you can just like do the bare minimum, then that's actually maybe even a worse position than if you can't do it at all. So this e cash app, just to put the pin in it is, you know, a front end app that you guys are designing a wallet, you know, a a wallet app that people would be used to that that supports Fediments. That's completely open source. It's available on Android and Linux, and you can get it at ecash.love.

By the way, on the backup thing, the Noster backup thing, just as Yeah. Tangent. Recently, Primal was a custodial strike wallet, which was obviously not ideal. But in Bitcoin land, like accepting Zaps, you know, like someone like signs up for a new Noster account and wants to like immediately receive 10 sets. Right. Your options are quite limited. Obviously we explored e cash and Fediment. We ended up deciding that right now the best trade off balance for our users is spark.

So, have a Spark wallet. And the reason I bring this up is twofold. First of all, with the Spark wallet, we're giving people a seed, right? And now there's multiple Spark based wallets. So there's while the Satoshi, there's cake wallet, there's breeze, there's blitz, there's a couple others, I think. And you can just take the seed and move it over. And restore

it on any of these other wallets, which is great. Any Bitcoin that's used to seeds, that's an awesome feature, I think. Now, for our users who sometimes are Bitcoin noobs, seeds can be a little bit daunting. So, we've been or let me put it this way. So then there's another Noster app. Don't know if you're familiar with called wisp made by this awesome dude UTXO, who I should actually probably have on the show

in the next couple of weeks to talk about wisp. But he has a new Noster Android app, and he also implemented spark and you can take the seed and move it back and forth. But what he implemented was something that we were we've been thinking about, but don't know if the trade offs are worth it. And that's he is taking the seed. He's encrypting it with your NSEC, and then he's storing it on relays.

So if you open up and it's a relatively simple spec, so presumably, like if primal did that as well, then if you sign in with your NSEC on wisp, your wallet is already there, and you don't have to enter seed words, right? It's just pulling it from relays. Now the negative is once you put something on relays, you have to assume it's there forever. And if your end site is compromised, you lose your money. But it's just kind of an interesting thought process on the trade offs of UX and security and

model. It's a interesting idea, like, to reduce the number of things that you need to keep track of. Right? Because if you with an NSEC and a seed phrase, it's like, okay. Now I need to have both of those things. Right. And for yeah. We we didn't take that approach, but we the what we're encrypting is the invite code. So, like, even if that gets leaked, it's at most

a a privacy leak as far as what federations you were involved with. But for us, it reduces the number of things that you need to keep track of. Now it's just a seed phrase. Right. Makes sense. I and then the other piece there is

one of the main reasons we ended up going with Spark over Cashew or Fetamin was this problem that I've been discussing for years now, which is the UX around mint selection. I mean, in this case, Federation selection. How are you guys thinking about that? The issue, just to put the high level, the way I look at the issue is as a wallet developer, you don't wanna choose the Mint for them. Obviously, it's an important choice. So how do users in an educated way make that decision?

Yeah. That's a fantastic question. So I think still still open, like, probably both on the federation side and and Cashew. Right? We Yeah. In an eCash app right now, we do pull there's a nip 87, which allows you to, like, list off, essentially, like, make your federation public or your mid public where you can advertise via noster that you're you're there. And then there's part of it that you can, like, submit recommendations

and stuff. So right now at eCatch app, we just list off those entries and you can can join if you'd like, but we don't we don't do anything more than that currently. Something I wanna add to. I think like

there's there seems to be something as far as like the web of trust plus like Mint selection that could be done there. It's like figuring out, you know, if your friends use it, but it would need to be done sort of in a privacy conscious way. You don't obviously wanna be doxing if you're using a mint or not, unless that's voluntary. So Yeah. No. I think yeah.

I don't have a great solution yet, but it's something we'd like to add add as well. Bitcoin mints.com is is an interesting step in that direction in terms of like Noster Nabil Web of Trust for men's selection, and it covers both cash and fediment. Obviously, I don't think it's a real concern if it's like a local community, You know, like if your your tribal chieftain is running the federation, then you're just gonna use his.

There's a But There's a there's also a observer.fedman.org. What is it observer? Observer. Observer. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Federated Observer. There's a handful of federations on there, and that's also, I believe, pulling public NOSTER data. And then for that, it has a little bit more Federated specific data. So it it'll show some, like, transactions and The on chain data. Right? Because Cashew one of the big differences between Cashew and Fediment is Fediment is on chain native, and Cashew is

I don't even wanna say lightning native, but it's lightning only. Lightning powered. Yeah.

Okay. Awesome. So on that topic of federations and making it easier to use federations, my understanding is that you guys have released an Android app that I can run a Guardian on my phone. Yeah. Well, before we get there Sounds crazy to say it out loud. Sorry. Continue. It's a little crazy. I I'll acknowledge that. So the we I think we probably mentioned it last time, but there right now, there's both Umbral and Start Nine packages for Okay. Running a Guardian.

So I'd say that would definitely be the preferred way to do it given that it's, you know, a dedicated somewhat like server box. Yeah. So let's talk about that because a lot of us have start nines already. Yeah. What does that look like? Obviously, I'm installing it for I assume it's a community registry.

Yep. It's in the community registry. It all works the same, honestly, underneath. Essentially, you install it and it's I guess, a Docker image and it will deploy vitamin d, which comes with a little UI. And really the only the main pain point in setting a federation up is just the beginning part. Once it's kind of set up and you have the backup configured correctly, you don't need to do anything. You just sort of leave it there and let it have power.

But to set one up, that's like the you think of it like the setup ceremony, That's where you need to get together with your other guardians and exchange these like setup codes. You're like basically copying and pasting in signal. Right? Yeah. That's that's, I'd say, recommended way as well. We did add QR codes, which, you know, if you're running it on star nine is not maybe super helpful, but as But if you're in person, it could be Yeah. I mean, you have to be in person. Right? Yeah.

If to use that, I with we can get into the phone, but with the phone, it's really easy to set up via QR codes, and I've I've done that through webcams and stuff before, which is kinda numerous. But Well, let's not we started with the Star nine and Umbral. Yeah. The backup process, everything is built into the app. It should be relatively straightforward. Or Yeah. On on Star nine, there's automated backup, so it will actually

on Fedament is a consensus system. Right? So it we have similar to what our it's like a we have a session where that's kinda like a a a unit of consensus. And on every session, we will there's actually a database checkpoint that gets written out to the Start9 backup. So you're able to easily recover that way.

But the the critical piece of information to backup is available in the dashboard. So Phytoment doesn't use, like, a it's not a standard, like, the 39 wallet, but what you can do is you download this, like, tar file essentially. And that's encrypted with your password, so it's you can store it, say, on a cloud safely.

But that's really what you need to to recover. If you ever need to recover, you need that that TAR file, which has your your secret, essentially. Yeah. So that's pretty straightforward.

That's awesome. What about does it run alright through Tor, or how are you handling that? Yeah. Right now, we're looking at adding that. There's ongoing work for that. There's there's no Tor support between Guardians right now. Do I remember you saying something about Iroh? Was that you? Yeah. So Iroh is kinda how all this works. Like, that's the only reason why we're able to do this start nine in in Umbral packages.

IRO is kind of like the basis for how it's the basis for how the guardians communicate and also how the clients talk to both the guardians and at this point, the gateway as well. And so, yeah, IRO is pretty cool. I think we we chatted about it more in-depth last time, but basically it does like hole punching and uses like these quick streams to So it's establish communicating between the guardians is using Iroh? Yeah. Yeah. Directly. But then what about the user to the federation?

Because it didn't didn't both have a DNS requirement previously? Yeah. And that's all like, the DNS requirement's totally gone now. The clients all know how to talk to the guardians via IRO, and then the guardians all know how to talk to each other also via IRO. Yeah. And IRO is interesting because it it's kind of their tagline is like p to p networking made made simple. So

they yeah. You directly talk to them. That's kind of the whole point of the of the whole bunch of That's awesome. Both the clients to establish direct direct connections. What about, like, the privates from the privacy perspective of someone running this on their start nine? Is my ISP is gonna know I'm running Guardian? Yeah. Again, this is an area of improvement. So we've run Guardians on Mutinet over

molt Moldad before. So you can definitely Okay. Run it behind a a VPN. As I mentioned, we don't we don't currently have, like, integrated Tor support, but we're we're working on that. Yeah. By so by default, if you don't take any protections, like, your IP could be exposed. Iroh has, like it it has two modes. It has, like, direct connection mode and it has, like, this relayed mode. And the relays are are there for helping like establish connections.

So when it's in relayed mode, it doesn't it doesn't leak your your IP, but when it when you do direct connections, it will. So But it would still leak into your ISP now. Right? Your ISP would still know. That you're running a Guardian? Yeah. It would see essentially, I don't the I'm try I'm trying to figure out, like, does Palantir just have, like, a list of people running Guardians at home? I mean, if people were running Guardians at home, let's say at scale.

There might maybe there's a different way of figuring the all the traffic's, like, encrypted via these quick like, the quick protocol. So I think it'd be pretty hard to figure out that you're running specifically a Guardian, like a Futament Guardian. But as far as there there are still, like, ways to to leak IPs right now. And definitely,

you know, if you're running a a Guardian, I'd probably recommend running running behind a VPN. And you're definitely exposed to your end users. Right? Like, the people that are connecting to you and using the federation. Yeah. As long as you're not using a if you're not using a VPN. So if you run Then they know your IP address. Yeah. If you run behind Mulvad, you don't really get that way. And that and that works pretty pretty well. We've

tested that for a while. And Awesome. Okay. So, I mean, continuing on that track of Start Nine Umbral. So what's the deal so then you released a separate Lightning Gateway app

for both as well? Or Yeah. So that's that's worth talking about. Because I think the last time we chatted, that wasn't available yet. Right. So as as you mentioned, like, Fetamin is on chain native. It's like, the the Bitcoin is held in a multisig, and the Lightning integration kinda comes from these these gateways. So the gateway could be a different entity. It doesn't have to be the same person that's, running a Guardian, but the gateway is what facilitates the Lightning payments.

So it it integrates with Fediment, like, sort of via these ink. They're they're Fediment contracts, but they they look very similar to HCLCs. Okay. Essentially, like, you're just sending an outgoing payment. What the client does is it creates what what looks like a HTLC, but it's enforced by the federation. So it's like an e cash HTLC, essentially. Right. And then then the client says, hey, gateway, go go pay this invoice for me.

It does that, gets the pre image back, and then the gateway can go reclaim the e cash that's held in that HCL, that federal agency. Yeah. You're not trusting the gateway with custody of funds.

Correct. You're trusting the gateway with uptime. Like, I'm a user and I wanna make a lightning payment. If the gateway doesn't have sufficient liquidity, then my payment will fail. Yeah. If the gateway is offline, my payment will fail. But then the gateway, if it's not a Guardian member, is trusting the Guardian

with custody of funds. Right? Yeah. Exactly. The the Gateway is like you can think of it just like a special wallet. It's just a client. And the only way that it's special is that it it can do it can, like, facilitate these these lightning payments. Yeah. It it's a it's a different type of model than, like, the Well, Cashew is just like, there's one guy who's running the Mint, and it has an it has a, you know, a a built in lightning node. Right. That's it. Right.

Yeah. And on Futament, well, one one advantage of the the gateway is that there's gateways can serve multiple federations. If, again, given the trust model as long as you you trust them. Right. But so there's a bit of, like, capital efficiency there. You can sort of reuse your out you know, out outgoing and incoming lighting channels. Yeah. The dream the dream is at scale that you'd have,

you know, either straight up professional or quasi professional gateway operators. Right? That are like seeing opportunities in terms of demand for gateway services with growing federations. Yeah. And then you can just not only the users, but also the guardians are basically outsourcing this expertise in this capital management, right? It's not running a high like, people love Phoenix wallet. Like, those guys deserve so much credit for running the async node. Yeah, I don't think everyone.

No one appreciates it unless their payment fails. But as long as their payment's working, no one appreciates it. And it's it's way more difficult of a problem and way more expensive in terms of capital lockup than people realize. Yeah. Exactly. That's kinda core to the architecture here is that we wanna make running the federations, like, stupid easy, essentially just set up and then you leave it versus the gateway operators.

Yeah. Probably do need to be they need to be as sophisticated as a Lightning operator. They need to be able to run a high quality uptime with good liquidity Lightning node, which yeah, is not not maybe super easy, but getting easier with, you know, agents and stuff like that. It is cool that on the Fetamin side, because it's on chain native, you do have, like, if the gateway is just being completely unreliable,

you do have basically, like, a break class method of getting out on chain, which Cashew does not have. Like, if you if your Cashew meant does not have liquidity in their Lightning node, then you're just stuck until they have liquidity. Yeah. And I think it's it's pretty common for at least the federations that I've seen to have multiple gateways. Okay. Which is also same same deal. It's availability improvement because say one is having

liquidity issues, you can switch to the the other one. And so that was one thing we added in an e cash out, if, you know, people are curious. I think I don't think Fetty shows this, but an eCash app, you can change which gateway you use. You manually choose?

You can. It it'll select one for you, but then if you wanna switch it, you you can. If it selects one for you and that one goes offline, does it automatically gracefully switch the other yet? Yeah. It it should. I believe so. Have to check, but it should. I think a lot of these UX things were, like, it requires, you know, personal responsibility and understanding by the user, like, which gateway I wanna choose or which mint and stuff.

I think there's something there about very low powered local AI models making a lot of these decisions for people. I think it like, if you just you're like, basically, like, asking your agent, like, okay. We pick the right mid, pick the right gateway kinda thing. I don't pretend it's there yet, but it's something I think about a decent amount. Yeah. I think that that'd be useful for both, like, UI and and agents. Right? Just to have some of that data to show people.

Yeah. That's probably we'll probably try to work on that over the next couple months. So I have one more question for you on the gateway side. So what does the pairing process look like? Install

I install the gateway app on my the Lightning gateway app on my start nine. How do I hook it into a federation? Does that I assume that requires permission by the guardians. How do what does that look like? Yeah. So first thing to do is set up your your Lightning node. You install the gateway on on Star nine. You can use either your L and D node or the built in LDK

that we have. So if you have L and D, you can reuse use that. Otherwise, you can start a new new lighting node. After that, yeah, you have to join a federation. So similar to if you had, like, an e cash app, you have to have an invite code. So you have to join a federation and then get some eCash. So you have to do a do a PEG in. And specifically, because it's the gateway, you're the one providing the Lightning payments. It has to be in an on chain an on chain payment.

Then after that, you're you're funded. And, yeah, then you give in the UI, there will be like a it's like called gateway endpoints, a little card, and that will show you your iRow endpoint. It'll look like iRow colon slash slash then a long pubkey. You give that to the guardians and they they they have like a little form in their UI.

They register it there. And at that point, you're, like, advertising that you're providing. So you're giving that to them out of band. You're basically, like, asking them, can I be your gateway, and let's connect it out of band? Okay. That makes sense. And I assume a lot at least right now, a lot of times, the gateway is also a guardian. That's my understanding. I so I I run a gateway for a for a handful of federations. So I've

I've done that for a number of federations that have, you know, reached out to me. But, yeah, it's just, you know, it's the same same trust model. And the like you said earlier, the the reason why it's somewhat permissioned is that it's

it's a it's an availability thing. Yeah. You wanna provide you wanna add gateways that will have a high quality of service and not Yeah. I mean, you could just I it's like the easiest DDoS vector ever if you just leave it open, and I'm just not running any liquidity and price pretending I'm a gateway when you mentioned one gateway up, that gives me another question. If a gateway operators operating two federations gateways on two federations, and there's a payment between the two.

Does is it just not even a Lightning payment? Is it just like internal ledger? Correct. Yeah. It does. That's awesome. That's a huge capital efficiency. Yeah. Exactly. And not to, like, not to get into any details, but we have we actually have two lightning protocols as well. We have what's called l m v one and l m v two. And l m v two is sort of our upgrade,

which the new federations will will support. But we also do swaps between those two. So, like, if you have an old client that doesn't speak the new protocol yet, the and the the gateway does, the gateway will do the swap for you and pay a new client from an old client. So, yeah, the gateway provides kind of a nice little upgrade path there as as well. That's awesome.

Running a Guardian on an Android device. Yeah. How does that look? Why why would I do that? So it works exactly the same way. The the project started from we were just trying to show, like, how how could we show, like, cool ways about Iroh and running a Guardian. And the insight is like, because it does hole punching, you can kind of run it run it anywhere. And and given that the

the resource requirements for running a a Guardian are are pretty low. Like, you don't need a lot of memory or disk or anything. You need access to blockchain data. It's like Bitcoin D or Explora. And, yeah, you need to run this this server. So we essentially just wrapped, like, Fetamin D inside a Flutter app that has like a bridge to Rust code. It runs in a like Android foreground, like a foreground task. So it has to there's like a special permission that's like, hey, this thing

This thing always running. This thing always has to run, and it will run-in the background and it like, warning, it it is like pretty It'll run-in the background as a foreground. Yeah. Yeah. Essentially, when you when you move the app down or exit out, it doesn't go away. It's still still running. Yeah, it's it's relatively data and power hungry because it has to participate in this consensus thing. Right? So it's sending even if you're not actively doing transactions,

it will be sending update data to the other guardians to, like, let it know it's still live and participating kind of thing. Yeah.

So why would you wanna do stay in sync with each other. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That's that's why it's they're doing that. So, yeah. Why would you want to run one of these? Well, essentially, it just makes it really, really easy for running a Guardian. Like, you can right now you can go to Zap Store, download the app and in like three taps, can have a federation with just one And then if you if you wanna do a setup with multiple, you can just use the scanning QR code thing to exchange the

setup codes and then hit go and it and it will set it up for you. So wait. I mean, that's awesome. So so you could a small community or whatever could have their their federation could be for older, cheaper Android phones constantly plugged into power connections to Wi Fi. Yeah. But just a QR scan set up. Obviously, do they still need a lightning gateway?

They still need a gateway. So I what you just said, I'm I'm currently doing right now. I have, like, four pixels that I'm That's awesome. Running a Signet Federation on. So if anyone's curious, I can I can send that Is there Any, like, performance negatives versus in in best case scenario? Is it, like, three people are running them on VPSs or start nines and, like, one person's running on an Android phone? Is there I don't have any,

like, hard numbers on that. It's hard to test that. I don't know how you would Yeah. I'd say, I mean, from a from a gut perspective, I'd say, yeah, it's probably better to run more on servers. The Moby Mint Federation that I'm running, the Pixel, it's a Mutiny Net I haven't I use that for just like development

testing and I haven't noticed really any like perf degradation. It's pretty fast and it's yeah. As long as my my phones are plugged in. I there's been a few times where I, you know, forget to plug the phone in and it dies and I we have one one less Guardian. But as long as it's just one, then you just plug it in and turn it back on. Right? Yeah. Exactly. And it also makes like moving your Guardian around

really easy. Like if you want if you wanna start a federation on a phone, what you can do, as long as you have multiple guardians, you can take your backup tar file and move it to a different like you move it to a server and then extract that and and run it from there and it it will just work too.

So you can switch? So you can switch. Yeah. And that the app the the phone app actually has, like, native support for that. It's like when you set it up, it asks you, like, do you wanna restore from a from a backup file? If you click that, it will just un unpack it and then start start going. So That's awesome. Yeah. It's again, just the idea is to lower the bar as low as possible as far as running one of these things.

So I think, you know, getting an old phone, downloading the app, and just, like, keeping it plugged in is pretty pretty low bar. It's the that's, you know, keep it in a closet somewhere as long as it is still running it, it will work. So you said, like, obviously, it's not running a Bitcoin node.

Right. So I guess by default, you said it's using East Flora. Is that just are you just is that like Blockstream API, basically? It's it's configurable. So in in this setup, if you set up a while you're sitting at the Guardian, it will ask you, do you wanna use a Explora? If you wanna use Bitcoin D? So Bitcoin D is is supported. And if you so say you're running like a Bitcoin D node on start nine, like, on your local network. Yeah. As long as that it has the right port open,

you can point it at at that thing and and that should work as well. But we have some sane defaults in there. So if you wanna set up via Explora, there there's a link already in the app that will just let you sort of tap through it, and it'll use a score by by default to do that. But what is that like Blockstreet? Espoores is an open source project. Right? Mempool. Yeah. Mempool. Space. Mempool. Space. Got it. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, I think that's a decent trade off balance.

Yeah. That's that's pretty cool. What about mobile versus WiFi? Have you tested it on mobile or? I guess it doesn't matter. It's just a data cap thing. Right? And Yeah. How good your connection is. Yep. I have. I have tested it on both. It it works. I like yeah. It's really all I can say. I don't know. Like, I haven't measured anything, but I did. I had it on yeah. I I, like, took one of the phones and I had it on data, and I took it out, like,

you know, my house, outside of Wi Fi, and it was it got hot. It got hot in my pocket. So it was definitely, you know, kind of burning through a lot of a lot of data. But, yeah, it it works.

Cool. I mean, so I have a couple more questions.

Yeah. The hype of the day is agentic payments. Yeah. And I like to remind freaks that it's not just agents paying agents, but it's humans paying agents and agents paying humans and agents paying agents who are paying humans. Where do you think Fediment falls in that conversation? Yeah. We've been playing around with this a little bit. I think there's still more exploration to be done. I think I think, like, e cash in general is actually pretty well positioned.

My thoughts are, like, it's it's great to give your your agent, like, a Lightning node, and it it can definitely probably handle, like, dealing with the liquidity. Definitely the smarter models. Yeah. Yeah. But if you don't have to, like, what you know, why why do that? And I think, you know, both with, you know, vitamin and cashew, it's kinda the lightning part is already outsourced.

So giving your giving your agent it it might just be a little easier. That's that's all. One one other thought I had on that was which is not specific to Fetervant, but, like, in in general with eCatchments is I don't know about you, but like I the I've run into a decent amount of problems with like Open Claw, like forgetting about stuff. And I I felt when I was

like looking into doing this, I felt a little uncomfortable. Like, I'm just gonna give you a seed phrase and like let you go let you go crazy. So like, I think I think e cash in general, like you can, especially maybe with the phone app, it's like pretty easy to set up your own you can set up your own Mint and then just give your give your agent like an e cash wallet. Actually, might just do that by giving him SATs? Like, you just don't give him all the SATs.

Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. I think what I was getting at is, like, you could if you have the Mint already set up that you give him, like, an e cash wallet,

if they, like, screw up and, like, overwrite the wallet or it's gone or whatever, you can always just rug your own Mint and take it back. So it's kinda Oh, you kinda have an undo button. Yeah. Because I kinda did this without the undo button when I was first experimenting with OpenClub because I just had to make an end pub dot cash cashew wallet, which I think uses the mini bit Smith by default.

But then he had a lightning address. And then like, sent him 100,000 sats, like, if you screwed it up, then I lost 100,000 sats. Like, was is the titanic approach. But I see what you're saying here. This is more like, you have a little bit of an undue button, at least if it stay if the payments are staying within the mints within the mint. Right. Yeah. Obviously, if the agent, pays a lighting invoice, you know, that

that money is gone. No recourse. But if he if he, like, for some reasons, like, loses the database or something, yeah, you could you could get it back. So I mean, one thought I have is, I mean, it's yet to be seen, and, you know, a lot of our speculations will just look retarded in the future. But that's the fun part. That's why I like the bleeding edge shit. You know, the dream of Fetamin to me was always sold as like, empowering local communities.

Yeah. I still think I actually disagree with a lot of people in the Fetamin space and that I also think it can be incredibly useful as a very large global mints, which I think we might see at scale. But if we just drill down really quick into the local community part and empowering local communities and community banking, obviously I think there's a lot of optimism and hope for good reason in local AI models.

I think some of it is misguided and and it's very like you send out a tweet and you're like, everyone's gonna be able to just run awesome intelligence on their phone for free and not have to pay Anthropic or share their information is there's there's a piece of truth in there, and then there's a lot of bullshit.

And so there's something to be said with I've heard Obi talk about this on the Fetty side, that what they're trying to build is more than just the money piece for empowering And I can imagine a situation where the guardians are running this vitamin for their local community, And then maybe they're running some beefed up hardware with an open source model running on it, that they're able to then provide to their, to their Fedement community.

So it's like, I'm a, I'm a small village or whatever, we have our community bank, but then they're also administrating the local models for you. And then I mean, E cash for tolls is like super simple. And you can just do eCache internally for, like, API calls or whatever till you hit the model. Kinda interesting. Yeah. That that's a really interesting direction. I think I think, like, Jesse Posner's, like, Vora, other things, stuff like that with, like, locally hosted

notes and whatnot. But I don't think he has the community piece. Like, his is, like, a start nine with more security. Right? Like, I think it's still like more family focused. Sure. It's like you're doing it for your family. Yeah, mean, it's tangential. It's easy for him to connect that if he wants to open it up for people. Yeah. I always see, like, Fetamin as kind of the it's like scaling up Uncle Jim to the community level. It's like mayor Jim. Yeah. Mayor Jim.

I don't think we're probably not quite there yet with with LLMs. Right? As far as, like Oh, definitely not. The the the ability, like, share it within your community. But,

yeah, it's something I'd I'd love to see. I know. So we've we've definitely gotten some I was gonna mention, like, there's a there's I won't mention my name, but there's a community in South Africa that's been, like, uptaking Pheidomint and using it more for their daily expenses and as a daily driver And, kind of yeah, they've gotten a lot of people using it, and it's it's been cool to see the the uptake there. So it's definitely

hopefully happening, you know, scaling up slowly, but gotta need that time to build the tools too. So

Yeah. I find it fascinating. Gradually, then suddenly freaks. Okay. So before before we wrap, what's next? What are you excited about? Good question. So we have a bunch of stuff coming soon. I wanna play around with more agent agentic stuff. Personally interested in, like, the on the gateway side for managing a Lightning node. You know, we talked a lot about it requires a bit of a more sophisticated operator, and I think, yeah, agents should probably be able to do that

pretty well. So we've been making a bunch of changes to make the gateway a bit more driven by by agents. We also have some new some new modules coming for Fetamin. So modules are kinda like our you get they get another, like, consensus upgrades. They're new implementations of how

how Fedement works. So there's a lot of nice improvements in in that, but we'll try to do it kind of in a in a backwards compatible way so that most of the complexity is handled by the the clients, like the wallet developers versus, you know, needing to totally redeploy everything.

Yeah. That's that's the main stuff. We're gonna try to start implementing some some Bolt 12 stuff as well coming. Like, FetaMint there has some unique challenges, but we'd like to get some some Bolt 12 support coming soon as well. What are the unique challenges? On the send side, not not so much. It's more on the receive side. In the the the main challenge is that with the the trust model is a little bit shifted where both both 12, like, is is noninteractive

by the end client. Right? So the Right. Whereas Bolt 11 is not. So in Bolt 11, essentially, for the way Federer works is we can create essentially, the receiver encrypts a pre image with the federation. So the gateway can't steal the money in transit. Yeah. Exactly. So in order to do the same thing for Bolt 12, we it's it's very difficult. Bolt 12, like trust model wise euphedimid, looks similar more similar to LNURL.

I think it might be possible to do it if we had, like, PTLCs where, like, the federation could, like, commit to a point that is then revealed as, the Right. The payment. But PTLCs are not quite not quite there yet, so that might be a be a ways off. But

And what the the trust model is that the gateway can steal money, right, in transit? It's similar to LNURL where, like, the gateway can sort of do these, like, amount attacks where it only gives the, like, a lower amount than what the gateway is getting paid to the end user. So and the use siphoned. And it's hard for the end user to to know, which, of course, you can do this in an LN URL right now as well. Like, because ever running your lightning address server basically can do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Like in primal situation, like I have Odell at primal dot net, and it's supposed to map to my spark wallet or whatever, but there's a trust element there. Right?

Yep. Yep. And we did. Yeah. Yeah. Go on. Well, we have we have Lightning address and eCash out, and it's the same the same model. So, yeah, we'd like to get both 12 at some point, but we might start with that trust model. And then, you know, once some of the other improvements are in place, we'll try to make it I mean, I think one of the the that's one of those things that's like,

yeah. Well, it'd be great to mitigate it and improve the trust model, but also, like, in practice, it's not too big of a risk to the user. Yeah. I mean, particularly since in this situation, in your situation, gateways are permissioned and need permission from the Guardian to operate anyway. Right? And obviously, the user's trusting the guardians in the first place when they're using Fedement. So,

I think it's one of those things that in practice probably isn't that big of a deal. Yeah. I I agree with that. That's why we're gonna do it. So

Yeah. I just take a little bit of time. Awesome. I how can the audience be helpful?

Download download eCash App. Download the FetimaD mobile app. Give it a give it a whirl, and give me some feedback. Give anyone or any Fetima feedback would be great. I'm on Nostril at mister cool guy. And, yeah, I don't know. More feedback on usage and feedback would be would be great. So Yeah. I'll tag you in the tag in the nostril post, of course, and I'll put all relevant links in the show notes, freaks.

And just FYI, and it's obviously not pressing, but I think you need to do something to have it available on 04/00/2009, their big update.

We're yeah. We're working we're working on that. We we have we had a draft. We had some initial work working towards that, and that will be, yeah, hopefully happening soon as well. While I have you, how significant is that change having to update an app to o four o? Wasn't point of view. I didn't I didn't do that. It didn't look too I looked through the code just briefly. It didn't look too bad, but I wasn't the one that

Got it. Did did the work for that. So I don't know all the pain points there, but, yeah, hope it's smooth. The new four o four o looks looks great, so we definitely want those. Yeah. It's great. I've been running it. So I have Matt Hill on of start nine sometime soon to discuss, but they just they've been working on this update.

It's like significant, significant update for, like, two years now, I think, And it's finally in beta. Right now, have to manually flash it onto your start nine with the USB drive. Can't. There's not like a big update button, but in the future, there'll be a big update button. They're just slow rolling it right now. I don't know what the timeline is of that. I asked Matt what the timeline of it. It was that he was brought it back to me to get a USB drive. I

bought my thirtieth flash drive. I know for a fact that I have you know, 30 plus flash drives in this house and moving and stuff for the life of me, I can't find any single flash. I'm gonna find a bunch of them after I bought this one, but I wasn't able to find them. Yeah. They're always running away. Because you never throw out a flash drive. No. Right? It's one of those things that's like a seed words. You know? It's like, you just have a drawer full of empty wallets.

Well, then you plug them in years later and see what operating system or whatever you were running, like, how long the time that I was on there.

Blast from the past. Anyway, Justin, this is great. I would love to do another update in, like, a year or so. Keep grinding. You guys have made really massive progress progress. You should be proud. I think there's a decent amount of haters out there that wrote off the Fetamin open source project as all hype and no substance. And I think you guys have have been proving them wrong. So it's been beautiful to see. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Thank you, Freaks. I hope you enjoyed the show. As always, all relevant links are still dispatch.com. Share with your friends and family. Love you all. Stay humble stacks at peace.