YouSaid · the spoken record

Alexander Leishman

lines on the record: 47
first: 2023-08-02
most recent: 2023-08-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think Matt Odell says the best. Stay humble and stack sets. We have a long road ahead of us. Bitcoin is by no means guaranteed to win. We have a lot of work to do. And we're still very, very early on this journey. And it's important to keep that in mind.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to be kind of weird one. There's so many books I love, but one that just I think has so many fond memories for me because my dad read it to me when I was a kid was the richest man in Babylon. It's a short book. It's like a series of stories based in ancient Babylon teaching you the principles of saving and money. I just have very fond memories of that book.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Falda was a Netflix show. It's like, it's an elite special forces team in Israel. And it sort of, it captures sort of like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through this really tight knit team.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think if this is one of those, if you know, you know, Uruguay is an underrated country. It is an extremely beautiful and pleasant place to visit with a great culture. The way I would describe it is it's like Argentina, but without all of the sort of political and economic problems, it's not a sort of like lively and sort of like party friendly as Argentina, but it has a lot of that and it's also summer there when it's winter in the northern hemisphere. So if you're looking for a good place to just sort of get some fresh air, spend time on the beach and be in an extremely pleasant culture with very respectful people and a family-oriented place with amazing food or a guy.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I would say running. And I'm sort of just naturally good runner. That's for my body type. My best friend is an extremely strong powerlifter who hates running. I'm like the opposite. Can't lift nearly as much as him, but I can run for miles. Obviously, running and then just chilling in the park with friends. I love that. Touching grass.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Myanmar was a very interesting place. I visited Myanmar in 2013, I think it was. And it was like right after they just got ATMs in the country for the first time And it was one of the most different places I've ever been. It was extremely religious, but in a Buddhist way, I had never like seen like a sort of dogmatic Buddhist country before. And it was really fascinating and very traditional, sort of untouched by a lot of Western culture, very fascinating history, obviously having some issues at the moment, but I really enjoyed that country.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it changes. It depends on who I'm talking with. I think one of my favorite conversations recently was with a group of Puerto Rican friends late into the night talking about Puerto Rican history and Puerto Rican independence and learning about their views on that thing. And so I love other cultures. I love other groups of people. I love learning about how other people think. Yeah, I love like sort of seeing the world and learning about learning.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not guaranteed to want a Bitcoin denominated return outperform buying spot. But there are interesting points in that risk return curve where, for example, the Bitcoin price theoretically could stay flat and you could have an ROI mining but not buying spot. Those are the sort of dynamics that a lot of mining clients find interesting”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Geopolitical bets, right? If there's something that happens with like Taiwan and Silicon manufacturing gets restricted, then there won't be more miners produced. So there's a whole sort of another world of bets you can be making with a mining investment.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, there's a few ways to think about Bitcoin mining. Yeah, our hosted mining product allows you to easily buy Bitcoin miners that get hosted in a co-location facility. And then the Bitcoin gets mined to your account every day. You're the owner of that machine. A lot of the people mining with River are actually optimizing for dollar returns. That's how they're doing the math. We have people mining who never even have bought Bitcoin, which is interesting. But a lot of people have as well. And it's the way I would describe it is it's just at a different point on the risk return curve. You're making a different bet. There's different variables than buying spot Bitcoin. And so what I typically would tell people is if you're just optimizing for like growing your Bitcoin stack, the simplest thing to do is just buy some Bitcoin or set up a dollar cost average. But if you're looking to sort of diversify sort of on that risk return curve, you're sort of making some bets on different variables such as difficulty, maybe even”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hasn't caused us any issues, it just sort of sent more clients our way because Bitcoin is the one thing that the SEC said wasn't security So we just didn't have any issues. And this is sort of another one more example of why running a Bitcoin, why we run a Bitcoin only business. At first, when we were starting, a lot of investors didn't really understand, isn't it just worse to not have more coins? Like, why would you just want Bitcoin? And it's becoming increasingly clear. Like supporting a multi-coin operation is, you know, there's revenue benefits because people like trading this long tail of assets, but it's a huge DOS on your time. And it adds a ton of complexity, not just to your product, not just to your engineering, but also to your legal posture, your regulatory posture, which has ripple effects across the entire business. And so those are problems we completely avoided, thankfully.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there's interesting use cases for this stuff, but my opinion generally as an operator is that simplicity is really key. And the complexity is the enemy of security. So while these things do have merit and benefit, I don't think most people should be using like custom scripts. I think you're much more likely to just mess up something complicated and lose your assets to your Bitcoin than it is. I think that the increased risk of messing something up is not offset by any sort of increase in security usually with that kind of stuff.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“MiniScript really is it's really just a way to it's really just a subset and easy way to use easier way to use the Bitcoin scripting language the idea behind MiniScript is to sort of create the standard way to create more complex constructs in your logic and like wallet logic so instead of just saying hey you know you need one signature or you need two out of three signatures you can say you can more easily sort of create a wallet that has custom logic like you need this signature and this signature or you know a two month delay with just one signature or you know like things like that”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It feels like it's been 15 years, not five years. Everything goes so fast in this industry. We've been through probably the equivalent of like two Great Depressions at this point. So yeah, it's been a fun journey.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Networth, mass market, and businesses in the United States. And that's growing very, very quickly. We're actually seeing all-time high monthly transacting clients month over month for the last five months in a row during this bear market. So we're seeing really nice growth. People are coming to something that's focused and simpler and leaning into doing Bitcoin really, really well, because that's what at the end of the day everyone wants. We're seeing a divergence in sort of crypto trading over here, your Bitcoin bank is over here. And they're probably not going to be the same thing. And then we also have this enterprise Bitcoin payments infrastructure business that I was talking about earlier. So it's been a very”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was like the obvious first step, which is like start at the high end build a Bitcoin brokerage where we're building our brand and reputation around serving the sort of elite clients in the United States, focus on high LTV customers and a smaller number of them so that we could serve them really well. So that was like step one. And then since then, sort of we've expanded to more the broader consumer market, the institutional market, a lot of our early clients also run businesses and have other legal entities. So now we're serving, we provide Bitcoin brokerage, custody, wallet services and a nice easy to use app for”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can have a couple million dollars in Coinbase and you still couldn't get anybody on the phone or get any help. And that was just like unheard of in traditional financial services. If you have a million dollars at a bank, they will be calling you, checking in to see how your weekend is.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Bitcoin alone is redefining money and entirely a new financial institutions are going to be built around this concept. And so I didn't even really know at first what exactly that would look like. And to some extent, we're still figuring it out. We have a much better idea than we did five years ago. But the first place we decided to start was we kind of decided to take the Tesla approach, which was, okay, the obvious gap in the market at that time was Coinbase had really bad customer service. You can have a couple million dollars.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then Coinbase pivoted. They started adding lots of different cryptocurrencies. They started taking this, they sort of took this philosophical approach that this isn't about redefining money purely. This is about this whole new asset class with lots of different cryptocurrencies. And we're going to build a way to trade these things and lean into making this asset class accessible to the world. I very much thought that that was a big mistake optimizing for short-term value and short-term returns. And I thought that they really missed sort of this big picture opportunity out in the distance beyond the behind the fog, right? But I thought that there was that's where the Mount Everest was. Coinbase sort of veered off to chase this local maximum. And sort of the Mount Everest was this building the Bitcoin bank of the world, like leaning 100% into this idea that Bitcoin”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started to remember almost five years ago. And to be totally honest, the original idea, it was more of a feeling than an idea at first. And the feeling and sort of the feeling I was chasing was this void in the market that I saw, which was that Coinbase was what I thought on a trajectory to become the Bitcoin bank of the world. And I'm using the word bank here very loosely, right? Just sort of as word. We are not a bank. I guess it's not a bank.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think it's a better at what? It's a better at what question. I think there's things that it's already way better than Google at. Sometimes you just want an answer to a question. Google's giving you content. You don't want content. You want an answer. For that, I would say it's already getting better. But for reasoning about new things, things that actually still require sort of a first principles understanding of the world and coming to conclusions that you haven't told it that haven't been written somewhere unclear. I don't know how long that takes. I don't know sort of what I think we're still trying to figure out like what are the fundamental fundamental limitations of these LLMs and how close to reason can the approach and the architecture of these GPT models get? I think it's really a question of sort of, yeah, it's TBD.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I think it's further than people think. I would be surprised to see it within 10 years personally. I'll qualify that with saying I am not the most expert on these AI systems. I mean, they have come a long way, but I haven't seen them show real reason. And I don't know, there's a whole philosophical discussion there, but it seems like we're quite a ways away from being able to just say go make money.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's an interesting concept that I've talked about with some friends. One of my buddies runs a startup and he flagged this interesting idea to me, this thought experiment of the single person unicorn. The one person like, you know, you have the spectrum of big company with a lot of headcount making a lot of money on one side of the spectrum. And on the other end of the spectrum is the one person unicorn, right? One guy, billion dollar company, at some point that's going to happen. But this is almost like the zero person unicorn. Yeah. It's like maybe there's somebody who got it started, but can you give this AI access to, I don't know, like a Google Cloud account and just say go or an AWS account and just say go make money? Well,”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably not, right? And then eventually people write Twitter threads about how to make money running these things in AWS once other people figure it out. But I think the building blocks for actually transacting the value are in place, but I think more Lightning Commerce needs to be enabled, right? It's not like there's, what would that AI even be doing right now, right? Is the question. What would it be doing to make money? I don't know the answer to that.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's probably only a matter of time until some developer writes a blog post, or maybe it's happening now when we just don't know. But as lightning gets bigger and bigger and as more and more commerce happens over Lightning, there will be more opportunities for some smart engineer to run an autonomous system on AWS that just starts making money on the internet for him. And would he tell anybody? I don't know.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the internet, each sort of optimizing each sort of like has its own sort of optimization function. What is it trying to accomplish? And I think we're quite a ways from seeing that. From what I can tell, the AI boom we're seeing is very much around sort of LLMs that haven't seen sort of this paradigm of them really serving as like long running agents trying to sort of problem solve constantly to optimize for any sort of economic objective. I don't know. I'm not an AI expert. I'm not deep in it. I have a sort of cursory understanding of the tech, but I haven't seen anyone build this sort of paradigm yet. I actually think this is an interesting situation where the tech for transacting value is ahead of the AI substantially.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An analogy I like to use is when the internet first came out, one way to view it was it's a better way to send a message to somebody else. That's a better way to transmit information to someone else. And that would have been a very myopic view of what the internet is. Like, yes, that was true, but the second and third order implications of that were beyond what most people imagined. The instant settlement of value and open network that Lightning provides developers and people writing software applications, many of which will be AI enabled, the implications of that, I think, are going to be drastic long term. And I think the jury is still out into exactly what that looks like. I wrote a paper when I was in grad school actually about machine-to-machine economies back in 2015 positing this idea that intelligent software agents will be economic actors and will transact with each other via bit.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we're aligned, and I think where we're what, how I would describe my take is a soft fork and adding any sort of complexity is only merited if it's a strong argument that this change can make Bitcoin better money. And so I would say Bitcoin didn't need to launch being programmatic. Like it didn't need to launch with any scripting or anything like that. That was sort of premature complexity Satoshi added. And a lot of it was kind of like never really used, kind of just like technical debt that probably shouldn't be there. But the subset, but he didn't know what would be used. And it turned out that that flexibility unlocked Lightning. And I would say that made Bitcoin better money that is unlocked, the ability for Bitcoin to be better money. And so are there other things like that? I think that's sort of how I think about it.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin Core has always had a very conservative approach to things. I'm sort of like a maybe soft fork once every five to ten years kind of person.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is this concept in the abstract of being able to define how coins get spent after you send it to somebody that could potentially unlock some interesting use cases for Bitcoin? I'm on the fence with that stuff. It can unlock some cool new things, but at the same time, it does have the risk of introducing a lot more complexity to the protocol, adding yet one more degree of freedom, one more thing to keep track of. And I think that these conversations are important to have. I do think it's important to really listen to the core devs. I do think there's a big disconnect between core devs and sort of the Twitter sphere. The core devs, I think, would be the first to agree, adding more complexity. There's just enough to do just to maintain the code base right now and improve the code base and add more tests and get people reviewing more PRs for maintenance, adding yet another big new change is scary. So I'm on the fence. I think it should be done very, very carefully.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there's merit to the ossification argument. That said, there are known bugs in layer one that we do need to fix at some point with a soft fork. And actually there's a bug where I forget what estimated year it is, but sort of like after the last block reward is produced, more Bitcoin will start being produced again. There's like a bug there that we need to just sort of like fix with a soft fork little things like that. You know, we can't totally ossify. There likely has to be another soft fork. And there's a chance I'm mistaken about that, but I'm pretty sure that's the case. And there are also some other little minor things that would just kind of fix a few warts that are sort of known and potential risks to the protocol. There are some changes that probably should be made. And as to whether there should be new changes that unlock functionality like COVID.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It requires the capital, large capital lockups by these sort of hubs that are sort of running and facilitating all these payments and the new structure it proposes, you kind of attach yourself to a hub and it's facilitating payments for everyone in that. And it's also making an on-chain Bitcoin transaction every, I think it's every five to ten seconds. I think the jury's out. I'm sort of skeptical. It's certainly not a silver bullet. I can already tell you that. I think my guess is that there's going to be innovations and breakthroughs in making lightning more capital efficient that will help move the needle faster than arc will.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that question is TBD. I think there will be, it won't be cheap. And some people will be willing to pay that price and many won't. And so the question that Arc tries to tack or the challenge that Arc tries to tackle is, well, how can we avoid having to lock up this capital to one destination? And it makes a number of trade-offs to accomplish that. And I want to be clear, you know, there's a big difference between a protocol that is running live in production that has been hardened over many years which Lightning has to what is still sort of a back of the envelope idea, right? There's still not an arc implementation. So it is in a very different category of protocols, I would say. It's still very, very theoretical. And you don't start, you don't really have any confidence in a protocol until you've actually built a system for it and put it in production. Arc is still really just an idea. And some of the downsides around ARC are that”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To justify that, there's lots of transaction activity happening there. You get a lot out of putting up a little bit of capital. But with the sort of lower volume destinations, consumers, small merchants, et cetera, how much would someone have to charge to lock up Bitcoin in a channel to you? And so that's sort of the question of, so I think this inbounds capital question and lightning, it really is a fundamental question for these small nodes is running a small node in Lightning or having a small node ever going to be economically viable.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are always scaling challenges in building any new system or new protocol. And inbound liquidity is certainly one of them. I'm of the opinion that the lightning network killer app in the short term is connecting exchanges, connecting centralized institutions and making moving Bitcoin between these institutions instant, frictionless, and 10Xing the user experience for any customers of those services. The reason for that is partly because of sort of this if you want to, for consumers who want to run their own nodes, they need someone to open a channel with them so that they can receive payment. Well, that's really challenging economically because that means someone else has to lock up capital, Bitcoin, and put that sort of on the Lightning Network to facilitate a future payment to you. Now with centralized institutions, you have so much volume, so much Bitcoin moving between them that that's justified.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be Think it's inevitable. I think it's just a law of nature, right? Specialization of skills. Everybody can't be an expert in everything. And the people who are experts in building Bitcoin infrastructure will do that better than people who aren't doing better than people who are experts at running an Italian restaurant. And people just naturally specialize. I think it's just a fundamental law of economics and it's just going to play out that way. But the big difference between Bitcoin and the existing system is that you can opt out. You can choose to do it yourself. You can choose to not trust or rely on anyone else. So the centralization is more just, it's really a layer above the lightning network. The lightning network itself isn't centralizing. People are building, are plugging in to the lightning network with big centralized entities, but anyone can plug into the lightning network, unlike Visa.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It's sort of the analogy I would say is it's kind of like Visa, right? Theoretically, if you really wanted to and you were a mom and pop shop, you could build your own credit card payment infrastructure. Or you could just use Square or Strike, right? And that's sort of the analogy here is there's all this complexity behind the scenes and how the Lightning Network works, how these channels work, blah, blah, blah, blah. But 99% of people are never going to need to know any of this stuff. And they're going to use people who've abstracted away that complexity and made it really, really easy.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Yeah, we have an API that makes it easy for apps to add lightning payments. And so, you know, Chivo, the app in El Salvador, uses us and sort of a growing number of exchanges and others.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think what we'll see is you'll see a sort of like a parado distribution of some really big nodes getting most of the payment flows. And then you get these longer tailed nodes. At a company like River, we are running a, we have a number of different business lines. One of them is this Lightning Network Infrastructure Business, which actually gives us proprietary payment flow. Like we're getting people kind of striped does for credit cards, right? We're getting people making lightning payments through us. that flow is sort of like we have that's proprietary coming through us we decide sort of how that gets routed out so that's another way to get payment flow sort of playing a higher level game if you think about it that way”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a lightning note, you're trying to get human flow. And so there's a number of ways to get payment flow. And obviously to do that, you have to open channels with peers so that payments were out through you. But you have to be positioned in a network in an optimal way. Just opening a node, starting a node and opening channels doesn't necessarily mean anyone. Why would they route through you and not someone else? There has to be a reason.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What really matters is how much, so if your goal is to earn returns by running a Lightning node and facilitating payment routing, there's a lot of variables here, but at the end of the day, what you actually want is payment flow coming through you times your average fee rate. So you're trying to optimize that number. So opening more channels doesn't necessarily get you more payment flows. You know, the way I like to think about it is almost sort of like running a lighting node is almost kind of like being Citadel. Like they're trying to get order flow, right? To market make”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lightning network. And I'm not so sure that drop off moves substantially over the next five to 10 years. But we'll see. This is going to be a very competitive market. And I don't know that funds will find that risk-adjusted return worth it.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I personally think it's unlikely that large amounts of Bitcoin in the near future will be able to be efficiently allocated on the Lightning Network to generate yield. The reason for this is because you don't need that much Bitcoin on the Lightning network to process lots of volume. And if you were to draw out a curve of sort of the theoretical yields you could earn by opening channels in a Lightning network and facilitating payment routing and the sort of like maybe Y axis is sort of yield in percentage and per month per se and X axis is amount of Bitcoin you'd see that drop off pretty quickly and there's just not like there's just a point where adding more Bitcoin gets you quickly diminishing returns from a percentage yield perspective and you just quickly drive to zero after putting I think a couple hundred Bitcoin on the”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly possible. I don't, you know, it's funny. I think for most people in this industry, the SEC still feels like a black box. And I really don't know. I think that a lot of people there mean well. They want sort of, they want American capital markets to be the safest in the world. But I do think there's something else in the psyche over there. Or I think there's like sort of political machinations. How big of a driver is it to try and compete with Europe there? Unclear. I really don't know the answer.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One risk is potentially like regulatory capture. BlockRock pushes for this as being the only way to buy Bitcoin, making it really, really hard to actually buy Bitcoin yourself and take control of it. So if we start to see moves like that, then I think we'll know something's afoot.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I tend to agree. I don't think it's going to be a massive amount proportional to the amount of Bitcoin that's already been mined. I mean, I think the thought experiment is, okay, all the Bitcoin that's been mined is either owned by somebody or lost. What percentage of those people are willing to sell that Bitcoin to BlackRock? How many? That I know at least we'll see something there. I think”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way I've always viewed an ETF is it fits the interface that the big money is used to. It just plugs into the existing financial infrastructure for investing, which most capital has access to that's already set up. So what it will do is it will make it a lot easier for the big money to make allocations to Bitcoin. That's the upside, you could say. The downside is the risk that comes with that, which is this becoming the default way for people to buy Bitcoin, which I don't actually think will happen. I think it will attract a lot of investment. But I think that people will start to realize that their Bitcoin is really trapped in this instrument. And by buying Bitcoin through this, you're missing out on a lot of the benefits of having the self-sovereign liquid asset immediately at your disposal. I think we'll see people sort of weigh the pros and cons of this, but I think.”
2023-08-02 · We Study Billionaires · BTC141: Can Bitcoin Lightning Scale Globally w/ Alexander Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT