Making Bitcoin dev great at Bitcoin++ w/ Nifty Nei

Welcome onto the show.

Sometime in the middle of that, got sort of distracted writing a textbook, which I haven't published yet, on how bitcoin works, which then got me into teaching people about how Bitcoin works through base 58, which is a nonprofit focused on dev education and protocol. Like, how does bitcoin protocol work? And then somehow got quickly nerd sniped into running events back in 2022. It's been like two or three years now. I am basically running events full time, for better or for worse.

Um, so we started with two events a year, went to three, and then this year, for whatever reason, we're doing six events that are focused on the bitcoin technical community, and they are all over the world. They bring two to 300 people together at a time, usually to talk about a specific topic in the bitcoin technical space. So we tend to be focused on topics that I find interesting people want to talk about.

Usually there's like, key players that have interesting things to say about that particular topic. So, for example, we did like an ecash one in Berlin last October. This October, we'll be back in Berlin doing one on lightning. We're Going to be in Riga ahead of the Baltic honey badger. Talking about privacy in Bitcoin, which is exciting. We haven't talked about privacy since December 2022 in Mexico City.

So it's like, hopefully it's a good opportunity for bitcoin developers and people in the space. Maybe like the privacy space more generally. We'll be able to come together and talk about best practices. What's going on? Concerns? I don't know. I think I need to see if Super Testnet's coming to Riga. I'm pretty sure he is. See if he can maybe do a live Monero. I feel like he's been like, I don't know anyone who follows Superset.

Um, we got everyone in the room who cared about mempool and relay policy and like some extension. We also had a bunch of miners and mining people in the room too. Cause they're like pretty related. So we had some people talk about like mining, pool designs, payouts, blockbuilding, templates stuff. So we had a really great talk on datum, which I need to start getting all the videos out now that I'm like, back in one place. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, I'm, like, all over the place.

You asked me a question and I went on a chair.

Yeah, you said you got nerd sniped, but I'd love to hear a little bit more because it's not like you're even just running, like, one small event a year, but you're running. You've run 13 now. You have six in 2025 alone, four more to go. Like, how. How did that transition happen?

We're still kind of like in the middle slash. Like, Covid was still a thing. And I think it was also a point in time. Like, there were a couple of things happening all at once. One is, I was teaching devs about how bitcoin works, but wanted to be able to send them to conference or something as a way to learn more. The other was I was working at Blockstream and realized that there was so much interesting stuff happening at Blockstream with the research, et cetera.

And I felt like Blockstream as a organization wasn't doing an amazing job of bridging the gap between what they were doing and the rest of the developer ecosystem. And then the third thing was it was at the point of time when what's his name, Craig Wright, was harassing developers with lawsuits. And so a lot of what you would see in the media or like, the news about bitcoin and bitcoin development in general was, oh, bitcoin isn't cool.

Like, there's nothing interesting happening in bitcoin development. All the cool, interesting apps are happening in Other ego, like crypto ecosystems and like all the cool, interesting devs are leaving bitcoin. I was like, I know that's not true because, like all of my friends in bitcoin are cool doing interesting things. So I was like, okay, I'll just like do a conference, whatever, if that. How hard can that be? Got some really great names at my first one.

I also ran up the same week as Consensus, which was genius because like Adam Back and Tad Dry just showed up for one of the after parties to hang out and managed to get like, Jimmy Song came and did like a class from one of his workshops. Like, I think our first one was kind of more focused on the education new stuff. My friend Kesey Rodemore came and did his first ever, like ordinals workshop at the conference. That's probably the most famous thing that's ever happened in a bitcoin.

Plus plus is like very first workshop of ordinals. But we also had people like showing off lightning stuff. Dusty was there talking about splicing work. Like, you know, it's just like a nice array of people doing interesting stuff in the bitcoin space. Yeah, that was the first one. And then I was like, immediately, I think the problem with running an event, you know. So I guess it's like they have this like saying in like a relationship when you're dating someone, if you like go to the.

If you go to your first date and you've already kind of just organically planned the next time you're gonna hang out with a person, like, you don't have to worry about it. That's usually a good sign that maybe like a relationship that's sticky. This kept happening with Bitcoin plus plus events.

Like, by the end of the first Bitcoin plus plus I was hanging out with Car from publab and we were like planning, like, what if we went to Mexico City and did our next one six months from now in Mexico City? And then we went to Mexico City and I was like, okay, let's start planning the next one six months from now, et cetera, et cetera. So it kind of just became this thing where it's like you get into conversations with people and they're like, oh, what if we do with this?

And I'm. Apparently, I'm not the sort of person who's going to say no. Also establishing bitcoin as an international conference series, I think really opens up the number of venues, places you can do them times if you're going to do one in the United States, doing Two a year is probably the max, right? Even then I feel like there's so much competition in the bitcoin dev conference space in the United States alone. Bitcoin runs something once a year in North America. Traditionally Austin.

We just did our fourth event in Austin a few weeks ago. There's also tab conf out in Atlanta. They're usually in October. And then there's a conference that started, I think I, I think of it as a bitcoin plus plus spin off. They might see it differently, but OP next started doing like the scaling stuff that we did last year in Austin and now they run two conferences a year. So that's four conferences for developers that are happening in the United States every year.

So I mean, bitcoin plus plus, like we're doing six events, but that means we're doing them in six countries. So we have our North America event. We did a South America event in February. So all of my American events I guess are done now. I'm like running one event in Istanbul. One's going to be in Berlin, one's going to be in Riga. The Riga one will be close to another conference and then we'll be doing our first East Asia conference and in December.

So like, I feel like those three is probably a little bit of a miss. We'll see how that goes. A little bit of a. That was not totally. That just kind of happened. That wasn't planned, whatever. But yeah, but there's definitely room. I think we're, we're gonna looking at adding like an Africa conference next year anyways. Basically this is how you go from like two conferences to like a lot is because you're like, oh wait, I need one conference per year in each quarter of the world, period.

And all of a sudden you end.

So I feel like there's a lot already here. So I'm, I like that you're taking it global and that you're focusing on bringing other people into this bitcoin dev Space and into the, like, the broader technical ecosystem that aren't just us, because there's. I mean, there's also just so many brilliant technical people who, for very understandable reasons, don't want to travel to the US as well.

And I like, you talk about how it's like, it's this organic thing of you just have conversations that spark. Oh, well, we. We really, really need to have a Bitcoin plus plus about this because we had so many of these side conversations here. But we don't have this set as a topic. So, like, is that normally how you're choosing the topics? Is there anything else that goes into it or is it just kind of like.

I think some of it is, like, who do I think I can get to sponsor the event? Like, do I think there's money that will pay for a conference like that to happen? So, like, I recently had someone pitching to me on doing one in, like, on Ark, you know, and they're like, we'll help you find sponsors. Like, we're invested in this space. We want to see an arc event happen. So, yeah, so that's kind of part of it is, like, who can. Who is, like, who convinces me into it? The other thing is, I don't know.

I think it's a little bit of like, just like sort of like lick your finger, put it in the wind, and see which way you feel like the wind is blowing. I think I'm pretty good at one thing I think that makes the conferences really good is I tend to be. And like, you know, we did a layer two conference for bitcoin, like, two years ago, which at this point, the.

It is like what feels right? Who do I think I can get to come to talk? Yeah, I think the privacy. So, like, I think this Riga one's going to be really interesting because I think we're going to have a lot of people. I need to double check that the tour is sending someone. I've been emailing them and they think they're like tentatively confirmed to send someone to talk about tour stuff.

I'm going to have my friend Nick, who Nick T. From Austin, who's been working on an open stats grant on this project called. I think it's Toraln El Toro. Wait, I'm totally wrong.

I think Yuval's going to come from Spiral, who's like. I think of him as like being on the far expert level of like how to. How to transact with bitcoin privately on chain. Yeah, hopefully maybe super Testnet and some Monero people will be there like fighting it out. Yeah. So it's like I think privacy. I definitely thinking like broad spectrum, like network privacy. Privacy in terms of transacting. I think we're going to have another privacy guys coming that are.

I have to go back and relook at what their proposal was. But yeah, so if you're working on privacy stuff or there's something on a privacy angle that you want to talk to people about what your project is or can you in front of an audience of bitcoiners who really care about it. Like, I think this is hopefully this is the event to come to.

Which for those of you who don't know what Dandelion is, it's basically whenever you send out a transaction, how do you hide which node originated the transaction? If you do like a broadcast, like in direct waves, it becomes, I think, more obvious to easily find out which node originated a transaction. Dandelion's a way of being able to one hop it and before it starts, like mass broadcasting out or multi hoppet.

Yeah, I don't think I know any of the people who actually wrote the paper, but he did all the implementation and network level stuff for Dandelion and Monero, which I think would be very, very relevant because that is one of the main network level privacy pain points. If you're not running a node purely behind Tor, you essentially reveal that you're the originator of every transaction.

There's some small mitigation in place right now, but nothing that really prevents an active adversary who runs multiple nodes from knowing that X node was the origination point of this transaction id, which is a big problem when the transaction ID also reveals a lot of information about the transaction itself, since so much is transparent in Bitcoin. So, yeah, I would love to see that the effort get picked back up.

And I mean, it doesn't really feel like there's more momentum behind the topic of privacy in Bitcoin. Over the last like year or so, it feels like a lot of that had kind of died down. And then in the wake of the samurai wallet, indictment, tornado, cash stuff, it feels like a lot more people kind of got woken up to this idea of, like, we can't just rely on companies building and running centralized privacy tools for Bitcoin privacy.

Like, we actually have to think about this holistically from a protocol level, from a network privacy level. Like you mentioned, this is something that's going to have to be worked on across the board. So it does feel like a pertinent time to get into that when it's much more top of mind for people. I mean, Even with page 1v2 just becoming a reality, there's a lot of fun stuff happening there. So I'm definitely excited for that one.

Like the whole point of Bitcoin plus plus events and the reason why we kind of focus on the topics that we do is like, they're kind of meant to be a conversation education moment. Right? Where everyone's like, okay, what is the status of Dandelion? Like, Monero has it. Is it implemented on Bitcoin? Why not? What needs to happen, maybe Bitcoin plus plus by bringing the dubs together especially to talk and work on these things, is like, maybe someone will work on it during the hackathon.

Maybe this is the opportunity where people sit down and they're like. I mean, that's like the whole point. So maybe I should point out that every Bitcoin plus plus has a hackathon. I don't really talk about it because I'm terrible at marketing, but I think that like, like, honestly, our hackathons have some of the most interesting projects. I think at hackathon, bitcoin hackathons happen, period.

And I need to do a better job of like figuring out how to tell those stories about what's happening with those. But yeah, anyway, so, like, this is the reason why our hackathons, I think get such interesting projects is it's a. It's the right number of people in the room talking about a specific topic. So. So you managed to get like enough critical mass that people start working on and contributing and like talking about how to like improve X, Y, Z. Anyways, sorry, that's like kind of a long.

Basically I think how to use like your private keys is more of a digital identity. So like how to use public crane private key wallet as like a more broad use case for things outside of just signing for bitcoin transactions. But don't quote me on that. Also portal guys, if you're listening, I apologize for not knowing exactly what you want for.

But they were like our big winner. We had like a bunch of teams on that. I can't remember again, this is like I was not.

Like, I think having the hackathon as a core part of that is such a fascinating way to do things and let people like of all skill sets jump in in different ways or even just observe people who are much more technical and much more experienced build something, live about an IDE idea they were just talking about and be able to actually like be a part of that. That's. It's definitely a fascinating piece of things.

Maybe I don't really emphasize this enough in my events or like my marketing of them, but like the reason that it's important to get everyone together in real space, especially like newbies, like, and having it be an open forum that's open, like you can buy a ticket, you can show up. It's not like a closed meeting of just spec experts. Like it is spec experts in that particular topic, hopefully talking about what they're working on.

But like, it's also an open forum for anyone who's interested to show up and participate and like learn how experts do things. Like in. In so far, not even just like, how do they do things, but how do we hold conversations, how do we make, how do we like present our position, like, how do we think about new changes, etc. I don't know, like, we just did the MEMPO one which felt like quite contentious.

I was worried people would stop dropping out because they started finding each other on the Internet a week before the event. Which, like, great for publicity, I guess, but also like terrible as event organizing. You're just like, is everyone gonna like leave? Like, is like if these guys get so mad at each other online and can't show up and have a real conversation, like, how ****** am I? You know, like, not that it's about me, but like to some extent it's.

Like, I had a couple people that were like, I want to come, but plane tickets are, like, prohibitively expensive because it's two days before. So if I had planned it. Look, if I had planned that. Not that I did. Not that I would plan such a thing, but if someone were going to, like, the timing was just not like, it was good from, like, getting people's attention online.

And I've always been like that. It's not just in bitcoin. It's like almost in anything. I can usually pick out, like, my favorite song will be like the top hit of the summer. Just.

And it just so happened that that was the right group of people to have in a room to have a really interesting conversation in person and timely. Do I wish that that's what we had talked about? No. There were other More interesting. I really wanted to have like a conversation about Cluster Mempool was like, I really want it. I mean, we did have a talk about it and Peter presented his work.

But yeah, you know, the things that I wanted to shine the spotlight on didn't get as much of the spotlight as I wanted.

Like you understand what the dev side is from bottom to top so you can build ahead of time a much better set of topics, a much better lineup of guests, because you understand how this stuff actually works behind the scenes. I think that's sometimes an issue that happens with conferences.

I'm not bashing any specific conference, but a lot of times it's people that are just so disconnected from what the actual attendees or the actual speakers care about that they're just going to do what they think will sell the most tickets. But they, they don't actually have any kind of. They're not in touch with reality of what's actually the most interesting thing going on right then.

So I think that's something that, that has played out well from how you came from like this hyper technical background into conference organizing. Is it? It actually like that skill set fits together very well to make something that's much better than it would be otherwise.

So like one of the things that like, and it doesn't necessarily sell sponsorships, I think is the other part of it. I've been lucky and grateful to like have me like made money doing the events, but it's like not enough to really like pay me a salary, if that makes sense. Like mostly it's like volunteer work kind of at this point.

And so I think this is one of the reasons that it's like trying to run more events is like, okay, Is there some level of number of events that like brings in enough money? Because I'm not like maybe I should be more focused on selling tickets. I'm not as focused on selling tickets as I am getting the right people in the room to have a productive conversation. And it turns out that sometimes those aren't necessarily the same thing.

Maybe I could get better at manufacturing controversy or whatever it is. Not like, I don't know, I almost feel like I'd have to hire out for that.

Or like, hopefully it just happens organically and this is part of like why like kind of to talk about like one of the things I'm really trying to work on getting the conferences to the point where I have more volunteers or help or like more people working part time to make the logistics and like the agenda and sponsorship stuff like work without less of my time. Because one of the things that I've sort of realized is I feel like,

like we're doing all this work at Bitcoin + to generate all this content and have all these conversations, but it's kind of been difficult to translate those into like making it more accessible for people that aren't at the event. So trying this like new thing, I don't know how successful it's going to be called like Bitcoin plus plus Insider Edition, which is in theory it should be a newsletter though I haven't really been sending out newsletters recently.

I've just been doing a series of interviews with devs about what they're working on, why they're working on it. So we've got the substack which is where I'll put up if I ever start writing articles and newsletters. That'll be where it is more also on YouTube, I started up like a Twitter account, I guess, X account. And the whole reason for that is like there's all this interesting stuff happening.

How can I make a better, how can we like better package it up in a way that it's like consumable for people that aren't at the events, they have a better idea of like what's under, like having. How do I get this understanding, my understanding of what's happening in the ecosystem more legible to people that aren't able to come to the events or I don't know, et cetera. I don't know how successful that's going to be, but I'm going to try it.

Any specific, specific background or any specific expertise or any specific thing that, that you think would be really helpful to jump in and help with the insider edition.

I think it's going to be more. Yeah, I don't know. I'm anyone. I guess, like, I'm not sure. I still need to figure out exactly what I'm doing. I have a friend who's like, so I've been doing interviews. I have a friend who's like, I basically hired a friend to help edit and produce and like put all those out. Already have help on that part, which is huge.

Yeah, I guess it's like, I guess for me, like the thing that would be useful is like, if people find things that are interesting that they want to know more about, like what is it. So one of the things I struggle with is I have such a deep understanding of this space that for sometimes I don't understand like, what is new and interesting to people that aren't that deep in it and like where the gaps are.

So I think it's like if there's like Something people want to know more about or they have questions about or like just want like more explanation about XYZ thing. It would be nice to know like what that is and how I can like help people understand that, I guess.

Newsletter, which is like a dev focused newsletter, but that's bury in the weeds sometimes a little too much for the average person. And outside of that, there's not many resources like that that are like technical focused, but not too, too, not too, too technical. Which is a tricky line to, to ride. But I'm definitely curious how how Insider Edition plays out.

What's popular and what needs more conversations around it?

There's lots of new projects, so it is a little bit of the zeitgeist thing. Personally, I'm pretty terrible about privacy stuff. I think I definitely care about it's like for me on like the thing, like spectrum of things that I care about and pay attention to, it's definitely lower. A lot of my interest tends to go into like liquidity problems with like where liquidity is on lightning and marketplace functionality more so the privacy stuff.

But I mean I personally spent a lot of time working on what is essentially like a coin join protocol for Lightning, which is the interactive transaction stuff. My understanding is a lot of the, like I spent a couple years building that so that we could get to the place where you could have an open permissionless liquidity marketplace protocol. But in order to do that you have to basically build what essentially is like a pay join but for at the lightning level.

So lightning, like if you're using all the stuff that like I worked on plus like lightning payments and bolt 12, I, I would, I would be like. And maybe I should Talk to Yuval, etc. Before I like make a strong assertion here. But I think your privacy and transaction is actually pretty good minus a few things with like Lightning gossip that we still need to fix. Actually maybe I should get some Lightning gossip people to come talk. But like, you know, I guess my whole thing is as a lightning.

Almost like I got into bitcoin mostly through the lightning stuff. I guess I worry less about privacy because I have a better understanding of what like the trade offs are of using lightning as a protocol. Especially if you're using your own node, you're not like using a centralized service. I mean, dude, transacting peer to peer is pretty dope. It turns out like some of the best privacy you can get is transacting peer to peer. Right?

And you know, lightning is so private because the state is just like pairwise state as opposed to global state. Anyways, yeah, I won't get too into that. But yeah, I guess my TLDR is like I don't really worry about it as much because I'm like, well I use splicing on Phoenix and like I, you know, I splice into Phoenix stuff. So like I feel like it's like the tech on Lightning is farther out than maybe most people know about. Maybe.

Like how are you actually receiving payments? Is it Bolt 11 invoices? Is it Bolt 12 offers? Are you using blinded paths? Like how did you open the channels there? There's so many things that go into lightning privacy. Like to me it's one of the hardest technologies to quantify what the privacy that's actually provided to an end user is because you have to set so many parameters before you can actually have like a legitimately useful conversation around how.

How good is the privacy in practice for the average person? And that's one of the conversations I think has to happen because there's a lot of people who think Lightning is not private, which is false, and a lot of people who think Lightning is perfectly private, which is false, also not true. And it's definitely in the middle. And there's huge variance based on how people are using Lightning. So a lot of, A lot of work needs to go into figuring out, like, how do we talk about this?

Both just from like the, the marketing, the documentation side of what the expectation should be for an end user cares about privacy, but also, like, from the dev perspective, making all these tools a reality. Like Bolt 12 does exist, but it's very rare that someone can actually use it still, unfortunately.

So, like, it's great that it's a technology, but we need a lot of developer effort on obviously shipping Bolt 12 and LND, which needs to happen like three years ago, and then having Bolt 12 support within wallets. Like, there's. There's so much things to happen there. So I think that's definitely a critical topic around Lightning. Like, lightning can be a really, really good privacy tool. It can be, and I want to see it get there. So I'm excited for more conversations to happen around that.

But you're right, there's like a lot to talk about there and bring people in.

I don't know how many people who I know within the Bitcoin dev space would come up to me at Bitcoin Vegas and we were chatting about Bitcoin or they were mentioning that I need to get out to Riga or they were talking to me about how much they've enjoyed previous conferences. The brand has such respect. The conferences you put together have such respect within the technical community. That's really awesome to see and I'm excited for the rest of the ones you have coming up this year.

But just wanted to make sure to relay a lot of the feedback that I've been getting. I know I haven't been to many, only been to one so far. Hope to get to Riga, but it's very up in the, up in the air. But it's definitely just one of those conferences, like invaluable. I'm thankful for all the work that you're doing on that behind the scenes and just like, I don't think people understand how much work goes into planning a conference of any size. But like coordinating all of that is monumental.

So thank you for all the work you've been doing around that.

So please, guys, keep coming and bring your friends and yeah, start telling your, your neighbors about how bitcoin technicals work so they can come to the conference and have fun and learn some stuff too, you know, because like, this is how I think bitcoin. I think this is how we keep bitcoin to be like the open ecosystem that I want it to continue being where people can show up and talk about their ideas and work on projects together and move bitcoin as an ecosystem forward together.

I don't know, like, otherwise I think it does risk turning into kind of like a closed door thing where, you know, there's only experts that get invited to expert meetings that are able to contribute. And it's like, how do you make it a wider thing by showing up to events. So I hope to see you in Riga, Seth, if you can make it. I know you have like other obligations that might take your time, but if anyone's listening, check out btcpp.dev.

we've got all of our events up there and Riga is our next one in August. And I really hope a bunch of people can make it.

They sponsored our Brazil conference in February and put up a bounty for devs to go after if they implemented something with Noster Wallet Connect during the hackathon. I think like half of the people in the hackathon did something with nwc. So that's like an incredible, I think, return on investment for them in terms of like visibility and devs that are like touching the tools. So if that's your project and you want that kind of ecosystem engagement, like, love to chat.

The other thing is if you're recruiting or you have like a new project that you want to get, launch into the ecosystem and get feedback from like a, like, I don't know, cohort of your peers, so to speak, definitely love to have people come sponsor and talk about their project. Yeah, and recruiting. Or maybe you just want to show off how cool your engineering team is. You know, I guess it's like sort of a brand building thing, but.

And like, I mean, it's also like, if you think about it like participating in Bitcoin plus plus is an amazing way to give back to the wider dev community of bitcoiners. The sats that you give us help us put money up for the hackathons. Like, we don't usually have hackathon sponsors. That usually comes from like ticket sales. Um, so like getting more money in just makes it such that we can have more, bigger prizes in the hackathons. We can have like nicer lunches.

I can keep doing this, you know, so if you like want to see these things keep happening. Yeah, come get involved, like show up and. Yeah, we'd love to have you.