CD206: ERIC SIRION, JOSCHA, AND HERMANN - FEDIMINT IN THE WILD

Eric Sirion, Joscha, and Hermann join to discuss Fedimint being used in the wild in South Africa. We get into Bitcoin Ekasi’s live five-of-seven federation, running guardians on Start9, how Iroh removes DNS and networking pain, backups, uptime, and why federated custody can be a powerful middle ground between self custody and custodial wallets. We discuss Lightning gateways, Conduit wallet, MoneyBadger payments, eCash privacy, zero-fee internal transactions, on-chain UTXO consolidation, and why Fedimint may become a key tool for Bitcoin communities around the world.

Starting your own federation: https://fedimint.org/guardians/Setup/overview
Conduit Wallet: https://joschisan.github.io/conduit
Fedimint on X: https://x.com/fedimint
Bitcoin Ekasi on X: https://x.com/BitcoinEkasi
Bitcoin Ekasi on Nostr: https://primal.net/bitcoinekasi

EPISODE: 206
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So thank you freaks for continuing to support the show. Anyway, I kind of gave you a teaser. Today, we're talking about Fetamin.

Specifically,

we've talked about Fetamin many times on the show, the open source project that allows anyone

to create a multisig federation to make it easier to use Bitcoin in a freedom oriented way. In the past, we've had more technical conversations about the open source protocol

and the wallets that are being built out on top of it. But today, we're gonna actually be talking about it being used in practice in South Africa.

I have three guests to join us here. We have Eric Sirion,

who is

the the creator, the man behind

the original Federment spec.

How's it going, Eric?

Great. Thank you. Great to be back on the show. I think it has been quite a while that I've actually been here myself.

Must have been at least two years.

We had you, like, right in the beginning. Right? Yeah. Exactly.

And then in the meantime, some other contributors joined on some great shows.

Yeah. But feels great to be back, and thanks for having us.

Love it. I should have asked you how to pronounce your name ahead of time, but we have Joshua.

Is that how I pronounce your name? Yeah. Yeah. That's about right.

He's a contributor he's a contributor to Fediment and has been instrumental. My understanding, you've been instrumental in

the iRow integration. That makes it much easier to run these Guardians in a I would say, Joshua is the mastermind behind Fatemin as it is today. Like, I got it started,

but Joshua brought it to the point where it could actually be rolled out and deployed in the wild.

Yeah.

Legendary. Done a lot of Welcome to the show. Lot of cool stuff. Well, thanks.

And then we have,

on the topic of mispronouncing names, we have Erman here

from Bitcoin Acaci, return guest and good friend. How's it going, sir?

Yeah. It's going awesome, man. Yeah. We had we had the name conversation last time, but you you pronounced it really well, man. Don't don't stress about it.

I'm working on it. I'm working on it. So you guys are running a federation in the wild in South Africa now?

Yeah. Yeah. We're doing we we've been running it for a couple of in in fact, it's the second one. The first federation we set up was a test federation, but

second one we set up is actually being

used. I mean, I've been using it on almost a daily basis and it's just, it works insanely well. I still can't believe it. Every time I make a transaction,

It's hard to believe that it just runs.

Kinda love that. Yeah, go ahead. I've actually been using that one too,

because sometimes,

like some other federations,

I might not have good connectivity to them or whatever,

but

surprisingly enough,

the one in South Africa,

it nearly

always works. And it's just amazing to see it.

Like the one that's being just run at home, it's super reliable.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the one in South Africa, the

new one that we're running now, it's a five out of seven Garion Federation, so two of them can go down and I think that definitely improves

reliability.

So far it already seems

much more reliable than the three out of four one we have been we've been running before that just to test.

Yeah.

So, that the largest is that the largest federation

in the wild?

I think largest that we know of.

A few first things that come together here, yeah, first five out of seven that runs exclusively on Start Nines.

That's so cool.

And, oh, yeah, first 5.07 to run on iROL.

Yeah.

Yeah. So let's so,

mean, that's been a big thing, right, is

in the early days of Fediment first, you had to run them on you had to run them on VPSs. You had to run them on cloud servers, and there was also a DNS requirement.

And a couple of the early test ones,

you know, it it became a kind of a mess. And mostly because of DNS requirement,

but also

due to the complexity of of running it on a cloud server. IRO in the iRO integration, correct me if I'm wrong, it kind of tries to mitigate both of those friction points. Right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It makes it much easier to set it up because you don't have to touch networking at all. It makes it much more secure because everything is end to end encrypted with static public keys now. So you don't rely on like

external

providers to encrypt. It makes it much easier to like port and move the machine around because the public key just follows you and you can now run it basically on every, on any box that has internet. It's just going to find a connection.

Yeah. So I can just like have my like,

start nine running a Guardian in my pickup truck,

and I can just like drive around with Starlink and then I don't have to worry about anything. Yes,

exactly. So the IRA library in the background, it's actually very advanced networking.

So it's gonna, it's gonna use all network interfaces that are available to it. So wifi,

mobile,

etcetera. And it will like switch between them and load balance over them automatically to always give you the strongest,

strongest possible connection. So

we have set up federations

where

Eric was on a mobile

network

in a lobby in Nairobi, I think, and that also

works just the Yeah. Think it was across like three different continents. I was Yeah. In the hotel in Nairobi where on the Starlink, I think in South Africa, actually. And then another

guy was in The US on, like, I think both a Starlink and some other connection. And it just worked perfectly fine.

Yeah. That's really cool. And I mean, specifically, I guess and that's an interesting point you made. So you have the larger federation. You have five zero seven instead of 304.

With the with the three zero four, if

two people went down, if two of the guardians lost self reception or whatever, the whole thing just ground to a stop, like you didn't lose your money. But anyone who's using

a wallet connected to that federation just couldn't send or receive.

And so five zero seven, it means three people would have to disconnect for three guardians would have to disconnect

for the users not to

have access. Does that add additional complexity? Is there concern there? Know, you have like more? I mean, just more people. Like, if you have more people that you have to

coordinate things with, usually, that adds some element of complexity.

Yeah. And I would say this is probably the main one main reason why federations aren't larger right now, like just the coordination complexity.

And but I think over the long run, we will be seeing it pushed towards larger and larger federations

just because it brings way better reliability

and safety for users.

But I think it's a good segue to

ask Herman and Jascha, what was your experience in setting up the federation? You had to coordinate

seven people.

I didn't do much. Think I was like tech I was there's tech support, but they figured it out by themselves.

Mean, it I I was

I I think I mentioned this before, but I I was very surprised by how straightforward it was.

There's there's at least three people

on the federation,

whose three guardians in the federation that like me are,

not technical at all. We like to experience pain. So we figure things out if we have to,

but it's as close as you're gonna get to

I mean, I was talking to people in Nairobi this weekend. I was in Kenya and I was trying to describe

how easy it is to set up, and literally anyone could do it. It is a bit of a coordination effort, so you gotta get people together

to go through that.

But it's relatively easy in terms of

figuring it out. It's really, really quite straightforward. And I think it's also interesting that, I mean, we've got relatively unreliable internet here, and I've been surprised by how well it runs. I was expecting

to have issues with making transactions on a regular basis, like at least a couple of transactions maybe not work, but I've not had a single

Lightning transaction fail.

Every single transaction I've made has gone through

without a glitch. And

we have some people that are not using fiber internet. I think there's

three or four guardians that are not on fiber.

They're on some kind of wireless.

Yeah. Either on mobile or wireless

internet.

So it's

not a reliable connection and

still somehow it just works.

That's wild. So what does that look like? And I mean, and just to confirm, like,

like, Arman's video is is the worst quality out of all of ours on this call right now. He clearly has he clearly has shit Internet over there. So, like, what what is it What does it look like in practice for this setup? Can you just like walk through what that setup flow looks to the to to a guardian to someone who is is gonna potentially set up guardians?

I mean, at the moment, I think the hardest part was actually

having to sideload the Federment application on the Start9. There's

no one click install button yet. But

other than that, it was a click through process. You

you you sideload know, the the obviously, you've gotta you've gotta install the the Bitcoin node, and then you've gotta sync that, which can be a little bit of a pain point if you have shitty internet.

But I don't think that took longer than a week. In the worst case, I did it in a couple of days. And then once that's done, you sideload the

fediment package. And then

you

have to pick a time

where all

seven guardians are kind of online and able to exchange

their guardian codes, and you add that to your

Federmen user interface, and that's pretty much it. I mean, how do you the

codes are what? Copy and paste through like a chat or Copy

paste into a chat. Yeah. You've got a I mean, we did we

used signal to exchange those codes and

that was about it. Other than sideloading the Fetiman package, the most complicated part was not to get confused whose code belongs to who. I mean, that's about as complex

as it is. So it really is at a point where

just about anyone can do it. I mean,

I think the most challenging part is maybe not even the internet connectivity, but keeping

the thing powered on because we've got power cuts as well from time to time. And so

you'd

have to factor that in to get some sort of a UPS

As battery

long as three of the seven as long as

five

of the seven have power, you're good. Yeah. As three of the seven, I would have to lose power and not have battery backup

for it to go on I

would say that's actually like the biggest selling point because, like, Fedement

takes on all the complexity of providing a very reliable service, like something where you'd otherwise be paying big cloud providers like Google or AWS,

like big bucks to have high availability.

It's built into the protocol.

So it can actually run on less reliable hardware.

Like, all the notes in a box or or notes running at home, they are not high availability fundamentally.

But if you still want to keep,

like, significant amounts of money on there, they need some way of ensuring the high availability, and that's exactly what Credit Union gives you. And also one happy news,

like you were a very early adopter in South Africa,

so you had to sideload. But by now, like the version that you're running, it's all in the community store

on Stat 9. And so it's not as cumbersome anymore. I think You literally just pressed down the cutting edge app store. Exactly. Yeah. Like, it just recently did that and

it works perfectly. Yeah. I wanted to clarify that as well. It's like the only reason he sideloaded is because we didn't wanna wait two or three weeks after the release for it to hit the

registry. Everyone else would just like download it from there, and then it should be fine right away.

Yeah, by the way, I

know it can be a mental burden, but I do think it's,

I like how they made sideloading on Star nine a First Class Citizen, especially with the vibe coding stuff.

Like, you can just have your clanker, like, make shit and then just

pop it onto your start nine, which is pretty cool. The other piece

there

so it sounds like it's relatively easy to set up, which is awesome. I always I mean, Eric knows from the very beginning,

I thought the success of this project ride or died on ease

of self hosting guardians, right, particularly since

it might become like a regulatory sensitive type of situation and you want like a thousand flowers to bloom. You wanna see

more options, not less for end users.

The other pain point historically has been backups. Right? I mean, I when

when we've seen issues with past Fediments,

my understanding was at least a quorum of them, you know, if, and if it's three or four or five or seven, they needed to have their backups if, if something bad happened and they needed to recover the funds. How do the backups work in the Start9 setup? Like, is, is it complicated?

Like, what does that situation look like?

Well, you can use a, like regular integrated Start9 backups

or the, the payment backup that you make through our UI. In both cases, the backups are static.

So you do them once at the beginning,

you put them on an USB stick

or similar, and yeah, then you're done.

Am I right? Just a file really Am bunch of private

I right that you wouldn't, you don't need all seven backups to restore? You would just need five of seven in this situation or do you need all seven? Yes,

of course. And in the worst case, to get your funds out, you would need five out of seven,

five out of seven backups, but of course we recommend to back up every single Guardian once in case

something happens to the machine, for example, like,

you know,

we run on like less reliable hardware, maybe even used hardware to keep the costs down, and so you always would want to make a backup.

And that for us in the first federation actually came in very handy when one of the Guardians mistakenly

completely deleted his Guardian and uninstalled it in an effort to upgrade.

And so we had lost one out of the four Guardians and the system was still running,

but that's of course not a great position to be in long term,

but

yeah,

rest assured, he still had his Start9 backup and he recovered from that

without a problem.

Yeah. And the interesting thing about backups, I think the usual case or the more common case is that, like, one or two guardians are maybe affected by some hardware failure, outage, whatever, and then

they can actually recover by asking the other guardians for, like, all the history that happened to restore their database,

and the system just comes back to full operational capacity. That's what Yasha just described.

Like, the worst case of, okay, everyone loses their their database,

and

then they have five of seven backups that gets you the money back, of course.

But, that's not the thing that we're usually optimizing for.

Like, the the goal is, I would say, continue continuity of service.

Like So what does that look like? So so

let's walk through the process. There's five zero seven Guardians running

the South African Federation.

You know, one of them has a power surge go through their house or whatever.

The box gets fried.

They set up a new start nine box.

They installed the Federation app.

How do they

Federation right now is still live. Like, people are sending lightning transactions and Bitcoin transactions and whatnot.

How how does that restore process work where they have the other six are still online and and that seventh person is trying to get back up to speed?

So once they have, you know, their new guardian

up and running and they see our UI instead of,

you know, like they would click the restore button. So the first thing you see, it's basically set up or restore.

They click restore,

they get a

field to upload,

upload the backup file,

they plug in their USB stick, they select it in the browser,

they upload the file, they confirm,

and then thirty seconds later, they are online again.

What if they don't have their backup file? Are they, can they still restore from the Guardians like Eric said or?

Well, they restore the payment history from

the other Guardians but of course they need the backup file. The backup file is just a collection of private keys. They are gone, you can't really participate Right. In this That makes sense. The system at all. Like, if you lose your private keys, we really can't help you. So then you have to create a whole new federation in that situation.

Right?

Yeah. So, I mean, in practice, let's say you have like a five out of seven and one of the guardians completely

loses their backup and their machine at the same time and they can't recover, then you could consider like, okay, are we going to keep running what is now effectively like a five out of six and say, well, we still have like one false tolerance and, you know, we're good to go for a while,

or are we really gonna set up a new federation already and then, you know, move the users over in time. Grainsfully,

yeah. Yeah, we

support that quite well, so you can go into the Guardian UI

and you can configure like a shutdown date

and a successor federation,

and then the,

then the users, they're gonna see a message like, Hey, this federation is gonna shut down on like July 31.

Please migrate your funds. Here's a successor federation, and they press one button and they join the new federation. That's how we So they migrate would literally get a notification in the app?

Yeah, course.

No, no, no, of course not. No, they get it like displayed in the app and it's a one click join basically to the follow-up federation.

We use that to migrate from our three out of four test federation

to like the new five out of seven. That's how we did it.

It was very cool to see some of the people that was on the previous federation

that I hadn't seen in a couple of months

when I saw them recently

and try to get them onto the new one.

It was cool to see how

easy that

kind of flow was.

Because I wasn't sure how that

was gonna work, but it's cool

that you can that you can do that from the Guardian side and just sort of migrate everybody over from one federation to the next. It seemed quite easy from the from the user's perspective.

Which so, I mean, there's a couple different

Federment, like, user facing apps. Are most of your users using the they're mostly using the Feti app?

At the moment, we're using Conduit.

Conduit.

Yeah. That's a new wallet that I developed, like specifically

for South Africa. It's been in the app stores for like a couple of months and yeah, we needed a new wallet for like some technical reasons

and also to go for,

you know, like a like a simpler UI. So Conduit is focused on being just a Fetiman wallet, nothing else,

and it has some features specifically for South Africa. So it does support the money backtrack QR codes. Oh, awesome. You

can use it to, you know, pay Zappa QR codes and so forth. I've been in I've been in South Africa myself for like three months over the winter and was living in in Bitcoin Witzen most of the time where I developed the wallet while I was living on it every day.

So, I can say that the first Federation that we run, the three out of four one actually also

was quite reliable.

I didn't hadn't had a failed payments,

failed payment living on it in three months.

That's awesome. And

later I came to join you there actually

stayed

together there for a bit. It's actually

really amazing how well you can live on Bitcoin in South Africa and was

a great trip. Like, I first stayed at Witsund too, like, Joshua, and then later

I went to Mussel Bay and

spent some time at the Kazi and in both places.

Like, if you figure out, like, the tricks,

like, for example, Money Badger and,

like, know where your local Bitcoin accepting shops are, then I would say you can probably 90%

live on Bitcoin. And it's just I mean, Badger is insane.

Like, the amount of stores that you can you can spend Bitcoin at with Money Badger

blows my American mind.

I mean, And maybe Jack will get to there.

Yeah.

The only reason I still have a bank account is when I travel and I apply for visas, proof of funds does not count if I submit the Bitcoin wallet screenshot. I've gotta show proof of funds in a bank account. If it wasn't if it wasn't for that,

I probably wouldn't need a bank account.

And I mean, Kenya is the same. I mean, you can

I didn't take any foreign currency? I was in Kenya for a week. I didn't take any foreign currency with me, I didn't exchange anything at the airport.

I landed in the country with a Bitcoin wallet on my phone, and I left the country with a Bitcoin wallet on my phone, and I never touched the local shillings. I did bring one or two back from my kids for souvenirs, but other than that, I didn't

really need them. So

both both South Africa and and and Kenya, I think you can pretty much get around anywhere with with with with a Lightning Wallet.

That's awesome.

So, I mean,

we're we were talking about,

like, one person. If if one of the guardians makes a mistake, you know, deletes their back doesn't have a backup or, I mean, god forbid, like, their house catches on fire or something and their box is down and their backup's gone, then you're essentially operating a five of six.

Obviously, my my brain goes, okay.

You got seven people.

The chances that one of them is a dumbass at some point

is probably not that low. Like, I like, mistakes happen. You know? People are living their lives. Everything's going great. You're, like, fourteen months in and

someone messes up something. Now now all of a sudden, you're out of five of six. So are there any technical limitations on

size of these things? Like, it be

could it be a six six of 11 or something? I don't know. Like, is have what what are your thoughts on that?

Well, I think it would be an eight out of 11.

Okay. But that's technically completely possible, yeah. So the next Federation sites we would recommend would be seven out of 10

because the moment you go from nine to 10 guardians, you gain one more guardian that you can lose.

So

we recommend basically the sizes like four,

seven,

10,

and the next one I think would be

13 then,

so like a 10 out of 13.

But right now it seems like five out of seven is the sweet spot.

Maybe in the future we're gonna set up seven out of 10. Does it make performance worse, the larger it is, because, like, they're all communicating with each other all the time, signing things?

No.

It doesn't. Yeah. So latency doesn't change. Like, your transactions are still fast. Like, what might happen is that you consume a little bit more bandwidth, but it's very minimal. So Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it. Yeah. And the maximum that

Yeah. That was part of my first

first project that I did when I rewrote the consensus like way back in the day of 2023,

that was one of the benefits that fell out that you basically

have constant latency with the number

of guardians. Yeah. It goes slightly up if you run, let's say, 20 guardians, but it's like negligible.

Yeah. Yeah. And,

like, we could actually run federations up to size of 20.

Right now, the main limitation is

the multisigs,

like the standard rules around multisigs, I think forbid

anything larger than

20. What would it be?

Because these are native on chain multisig transactions

that are back in the Yeah.

But

we haven't run any or haven't seen any live federation of that size. So we did do some test federations that were that large and just played around with that. But Yeah. And they perform well, but at some point, it's hard to coordinate. So there are some ideas around

just automating coordination,

but that's

something more in the research phase Also, right

the the larger federations, they need to grow over time. You know, you need to, like, grow the social structure.

So you could imagine that you have a two five out of seven federations in the same region that have largely the same users, and eventually,

you know, maybe they have lost some of their machines or some of the guardians wanna switch out.

They could join together and form,

like, now,

like a, I think it would be like a 10 out of 13 federation, for example, and both of them would then like, they could run these like on the same start nines,

they would then just set shutdown dates in the old federation, set the new larger one as a successor, and then the users would like join the new federation. And they could run them at the same time on the same the same starting nodes during the

transition?

Yeah, that would be possible. We would have to ship a second package for that technically,

but yeah.

And then Like a feature request. Be able to run multiple instances of the same package at the same time. That would be so amazing. Yeah. Oh, on start not like a feature request for a start OS. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

Keep being very deliberate about the threshold, like the specific MMN. Does that, is that a personal preference or is that actually a technical, is there a technical reason behind that? There's a technical reason for it. So,

at the lowest level, we use something which is called a Byzantine fault tolerant algorithm to establish consensus,

and there is actually a technical result on the, like,

lowest threshold that you can achieve there. And three out of four, five out of seven,

seven out of 10,

and then the next one would actually, yeah, it would be a 10 out of 14, actually, I think. Nine.

Not 10 out of 14?

Anyway, one side goes up by two, the other by three.

Yeah. That's Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Those are, the the lowest thresholds that you can achieve. Yeah. If we would choose them if we could choose them freely,

we would maybe go for something a little bit lower. So like a four out of seven maybe,

but we can't.

Five out of seven is like the lowest threshold that is technically achievable.

Yeah. So the problem there is that like while you could still access your on chain funds, there's no guarantee anymore that the federation could agree on which transactions

were actually confirmed

or like what should happen. So it doesn't give you much benefit that, okay, you can still access your on chain funds. It actually just adds more

risk for users that someone

could try to steal.

So that's why we don't do that.

Got it. That makes sense. So then, I mean, there are

they're obviously

it often gets compared in the same

in the same conversations, and there's but there's obviously multiple differences between cashew

and Fediment.

But one of the big ones that I think a lot of people don't realize is that Fediment is native on chain. Right? So this is a is effectively like a multi multi sig on chain wallet.

So then as a result,

someone's gotta run the lightning node. I assume most of the transactions that are happening

in Erman's federation is lightning transactions or a lot of them are.

How is that how is that being handled?

So the Fetiman project itself runs the gateway right now, and that's the one that we use to, like, bootstrap new federations.

Yeah. And is it the gateway for multiple federations?

Yeah. Come again. Sorry.

Go on. Yeah. Just to explain, like, the gateway is a service or a piece of software that connects a Lightning node to federation

just for anyone present

Right. Back into Federation into DeepLeap. Which is separate. It's separate of the Federation. Right? It's like a it's a service provider of Federations

that provides It is licensing a service provider. Yeah.

Yeah.

So we we

we split

the servers

from the custody.

So federations

are guardians. They are easy to run. You set them up once. Everything beyond that is completely automated. You just keep internet and power to the box, and then you're fine. Guardians are more involved because you do run a lightning node,

so it's like a continuous effort,

and we split that and then you have an M of N relationship,

so you can connect multiple gateways to a federation and you can connect multiple federations to the same gateway.

So, what we effectively do is initially when you have one federation, we bootstrap them with our gateway,

and when they reach a critical mass volume to warrant their own gateway, they can migrate over, or maybe you have multiple federations in the same region that together

reach that mass, and then they can spin up their own gateway

and connect it to all of that,

all of them initially you could be running then their gateway side by side to ours, the guardians,

the

apps would use them,

then like randomly basically load balance across them. If one of them goes offline, you immediately fall back to the other, So there's a nice fault tolerance there if you have multiple gateways connected to a federation,

and eventually we would just disconnect

our gateway, and then they are completely

separate from us. And this is invisible If to the

there's there's multiple gateways,

they're just making a Lightning transaction. It's just working.

Exactly. Yeah. So actually I

actually had a question from somebody on that, and I wasn't sure if I answered it correctly. But the question

question someone asked me was, okay, if the Guardians are

very easy to run, which they are,

but the Lightning Gateway is more technical and

likelihood of there's something going wrong with the Guardian is pretty low,

but the likelihood of something going wrong with the Lightning Gateway is a little higher.

If the Lightning Gateway goes down,

you're not necessarily disabled in the federation. You could still transact

amongst the people within the federation, obviously with eCash,

and you can still get in and out of federation

on chain. It's just the lightning element. That was my answer, but I wasn't a 100% sure about that.

No, it's right.

Yeah.

ECash and on chain still works fine.

And on the uptime question,

the thing is that

while the federation runs on residential,

where let's say you have like 95%

uptime, which is not enough,

the gateways,

they run-in the cloud

just because of the lightning node that needs to be running in the cloud.

So they should have much better uptime and then it kind of

kind of evens out there. Yeah.

So, I mean, but there's no technical

limitation on couldn't you run it? Could you not run a Lightning Gateway on a, like, a Stark nine as well?

Yeah. You can do it, and we technically support it, but there's inherent problem with Lightning that you just can't back them up well.

Yeah.

So that like limits you, you know, you really want to put like

1 or 2 Bitcoin

in a hot wallet runs on your start line?

Not, but with a five out of seven federation, that's completely reasonable. Like, federations are not made for small amounts. We have

right now it's still possible because your on chain fees are low, but we have really have two types of users here. We have the person that has

their savings in an on chain wallet, and then,

so in a hardware wallet, and then they move it inside the federation, and then they spend it over Lightning, but they move thousands of dollars in value at a time, you know, assuming an on chain transaction is more expensive,

And then you have the other way around, you have the business owner that has

one or maybe a handful

of point of sale systems based on Lightning, and he

collects Lightning payments over time and eventually withdraws on chain

$10.20,

$30,000

of value at

a time. So,

need to be able to save a significant amount

or maintain a significant amount of value, like to yourself significant amount, maybe like a year's worth of savings in that federation,

and this can only be achieved on local hardware with like with like the system being federated. So, this creates a lot of technical complexity, of course, for us, which is also like where the vast majority of our, like,

engineering time goes to.

In practice,

eCache is a very important part of the system, but it is something that was solved like three years ago. We still like run the same

cryptography basically for that, that we wrote three years ago. This was done when I joined the project.

Got it.

In 2023,

and since then everything's been about like

the federated aspect. So you get the data replication

out of the box, like for the people who run Lightning Notes, if you wanna do a series setup,

you like either run it in the cloud where like your storage there just gets automatically

replicated,

or you go even further and then you use like

like managed Postgres with like data replication built in to build your lightning node on top, because if you lose that data, your money's gone. Right. And we brought that into Fediment, so the data replication is extremely important, like your payment is not shown as confirmed

before

the transaction that you created is not replicated and stable on disk of five guardians.

You don't notice it because we do it in two hundred milliseconds,

but

yeah, it happens every time. And the other thing is, of course, the uptime, like if you have a residential Internet connection,

maybe you have 95% uptime, maybe you have 97%,

that's really not the percentage that we are shooting for with the system overall. I think if you, you know, do a payment system that people rely on, like in the two use cases I just described, where, like, people may run a business over it,

you are really like in the category of like 99.5,

99.9%

uptime, but if you have a five zero seven federated system where the individual nodes have like 95 or 97% uptime, overall, you will get like 99.5%

or higher uptime,

assuming that they are like independent,

like if the entire Internet of a region goes down, there's nothing we can do, but

usually that's not the case, and we have individual peers that or individual guardians that go down,

but the entire system just works. Yeah. So spread out your guardians, so they're not affected by the same rolling blackout.

Yeah.

So, yeah. I mean, that all makes sense to me.

So with the gateways,

with the Lightning Gateway so first of all, a lot of this comes down to

trust trade offs and performance optimizations.

And the reason,

you know, one of the coolest aspects of Fedement is that you

your trust is distributed,

like, at at the base of it. Right? So it's five of seven. You you effectively need

you need five of the guardians to basically be malicious to steal money. You also you would need, you know, three of the guardians to be incompetent to lose money. So, like, you're you're you're distributing the trust. You're making it less likely that that people have funds lost. But with the gateways, it's literally a single person, a professional,

running a lightning node and managing liquidity and keeping uptime.

What is that?

What is that trust trade off for the end user? Like, I'm, if I'm receiving,

if I'm receiving, I don't know, $100 over lightning

through a gateway

in transit,

am I am I trusting

that gateway provider? Is that that's a trusted relationship?

Sorry. I think we lost you for a second.

I still can't hear him, Matt.

Yeah. Speaking of

speaking of shitty Internet. Reliability.

Yeah. And he's gone.

Okay.

I see the video move again.

Oh, there we go.

It's back. I think you're back.

Yeah. I lost Internet briefly, but the Federmid stayed online.

Yeah. No.

Did you get my question?

No. No.

So I'm I was my question was,

this all records locally, so they've heard my question. The the listeners heard my question.

The

what is the trust trade off with the individual gateways?

Oh, yeah. So basically, there is none because the gateway is just an extension of the Lightning Network into the federation.

And just like you don't trust any Lightning node on the route when you're sending a payment, you don't trust the gateway.

They can either forward

the money to the end user who receives it and then receive the incoming funds they are routing,

or they don't do that and then they don't receive any funds.

So the only thing you really rely on is them not

denying the service to you.

But that's in their best interest because they're making fees.

That

that was my other assumption was that

at some point, you would probably see people who are good at running Lightning nodes that will offer gateway gateway as a service and would want to connect to federations

as a way of providing a service to federations.

And because you're not really trusting the gateway, that's something that

is an acceptable trade off.

Don't necessarily wanna put yourself in a situation

where you rely on

federations to run their own lighting notes because that

is more technical. And if I think about the use case on the ground here,

it would be relatively easy to

help a bunch of people set up federation, but it's gonna be a whole different story to

help them set up a Lightning node and manage that.

Yeah, it's a completely different skill set. Running something in the cloud, then like running something on a like Start9 or like a different type of home server is a completely different

experience.

And I think what we have seen is that Lightning in general has been moving more into a professionalized

direction,

like the

claps running the whole Lightning node at home and using that for all the transactions

that

was still big in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two.

But I think by now a lot of people

kinda stopped doing that. At least when I go to conferences,

I see many people using the quality of Satoshi. Blink is great. Like, I mean, I saw a lot of people use Blink in South Africa.

Phoenix Wallet. You have Async manage your Lightning Net for you.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I think there's a certain reason

to make

it a separate service that a professional can manage. And

even if you want to manage it yourself, it's pretty easy to run your own gateway. So not to say it's actually hard. Like, have start nine packages. We have unbilled packages for that

kind of stuff. But then

you really need to be aware of the trade off of running a Lightning node on note in a box at home, and also spend the time actually managing that node because otherwise your routing will not be good enough, and you won't provide a good service to your community and nobody wants that.

Yeah. And you have to have I mean, the listeners, the freaks are very aware of running their own lightning nodes and

the mental burden and the financial burden that comes with it. I mean, it's not even just a technical thing. Right? Like, you need to have solid liquidity. You have to lock up funds. You know, it's you're you're

you're in a beneficial situation if you have more money at your disposal for doing that. If you try and run a very tight ship, you're gonna have payment failures.

So on the gateway question,

this is once again, I I I I'm assuming this is like completely detached from end users. Users.

The are the Fediments is the Guardians choosing which gateways they bless? You you mentioned that there's they could have multiple gateways. Like, are they going into, the Guardian UI and being, like, I am adding this gateway and then, like, five of seven of them have to be, yes. We're adding this gateway to the system or how does that look?

Almost exactly right. So they do go into the UI, they add the

the they add the gateways URL there, but it doesn't have to be

it doesn't have to be

at least five for it to work, but so

the guardians, they can actually configure different gateways right now.

Not ideal, but it would work, and then the client, it's gonna use them in the it's gonna try the gateways in the order that they receive votes, basically. The more Guardians configure this gateway,

the the sooner it will be tried.

Yeah. And the idea is that even a single Guardian, if they notice, all our old gateways that we had configured before,

they're all offline. And the others the other guardians aren't online right now, so they can just add another

gateway unilaterally.

And if that's the only gateway that's available, clients or apps will use that. And you can unblock your federation immediately

and then others at the same gateway too, so it gets more votes, but you're never in a situation where you first have to gather the whole team and have to vote on it. That's awesome. That's clever. I like that.

I a different question as well. So I'm asking a bunch of questions, but it's not often I get the two of you together on

one call. Yeah.

I asked somebody from

Fedi's

marketing team, Medibay, and I wasn't sure about

his answer. But so Fedi, obviously, Fedi the app has

a whole communications component to it. It's not just the wallet.

And obviously once you connect the Fedi app to the federation, then I understand that the financial component lives on the Guardian machines. But what about the communications component? Is that still

sort of like cloud based and managed by Fedi? Or does that also live on, does does this become a community custody for for finances,

or does it become community custody for finances and communications

once you're using the Fedi app on a on a federation? No. The So that's that's a great question.

And, yeah, I mean, I'm somewhat more involved on the petty side, so I will just take

that. Take it. But, yeah, so only the custody moves to the community run federation.

The

chat functionality

is still cloud hosted. And the reasoning behind that is,

so for custody,

you actually

like, that's something where you want the trust to be local. Right? Like, you can't outsource that without negative repercussions.

While for the chat,

it's encrypted with state of the art encryption technology using the same protocol as signal.

So even though you're relying on a central service,

the central service can't really see anything about your chat, and that makes it much more viable and made it a lesser priority to decentralize.

But I would say the end goal is and we chose a protocol

called the matrix protocol

as the underlying

that it could be decentralized

in the future.

So I think the direction everything is moving into is decentralization.

And I hope we will see even more decentralized solutions in matrix, like

what was the one MLS based one called that

White noise. White noise. Exactly.

That's being pushed in Nostice space. That's really promising

and

just we need to mature these technologies and then we can really embrace them, not have any single point of failure anymore.

While for custody, I think federations are a pretty good trader and a pretty sweet spot.

For just building easy to use Bitcoin wallets that users can be confident in, that they can hold large amounts of money.

Think

Fedium that just fills a

space in the trade off space

that was underexplored before, and I personally really like it. And

I think

with,

like, being able to show, like, how easy it can be to

transact and still have custody in your community,

many other people will get to appreciate it too.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's awesome. I

got back from the Nairobi conference two days ago, and I spent more time talking about Ferrymand at the conference than I did about speaking

about my own project. So I

think it's fantastic because it a really kind of a sweet spot.

Yeah. I don't know. It just feels like it

was really necessary to have something there.

And trying to explain to people

that you

wanna bring

And another thing is like in these types of communities, trust often a very different kind of trust looks very different. The trust between people

looks very different. So it's totally fine. I mean,

it's

not unheard of for neighbors to trust each other with

bank details and PINs and ATM cards. You you're living on top of one another, so it's

not unheard of. And

it just kinda feels like there's

gonna be a lot of use

case for this kind of setup where you have these community trust models that sort of it kinda feels like it naturally fits into

the social setup that you already have.

And when like, I was thinking about fame in the beginning.

Like, my biggest fear was if we

got hyperbitcoinization

tomorrow,

then most people would actually go to the big banks and just keep their Bitcoin in

JPMorgan Chase or whatever their bank is right now. And that would just be a horrible outcome in my opinion.

So finding

pragmatic ways,

like, that might not be pure from a Bitcoin's perspective, like, because back in 2021 when Freddie Mac was starting out, like, I was kinda scared to get tarred and feathered for even bringing up the idea of not being fully self custody and, like, finding this trade off there. Like, just acknowledging that we could have a trade off, and it doesn't have to be black or white.

But, I think over the years,

turns out

there might actually be something interesting about it. And,

yeah, I'm super happy to after, like, working for five years to see it out in the wild and people use it day to day and,

it's

just amazing.

Lots of learnings on the way.

Definitely. Definitely.

We are Sorry,

was just gonna say it's definitely worth the trade off because there's so many benefits that come with it that you wouldn't otherwise get. It gives you a unique set of benefits. It's definitely,

I mean, it is a trade off, but everything in life is a trade off. And the benefits that you get for it is definitely worthwhile considering for

a lot of use cases.

Yeah. And generally, how I think about federated

applications,

like, we're building a federated eCache platform here.

But, generally, most

centralized services that you can build,

you can probably also build in a federated way

while that is much less

easy to claim about a fully decentralized implementation.

Like, there's a lot of problems that are just impossible to super hard to solve

in a fully decentralized way.

And many people are trying and, like, that's what's happening in shitcoin then, basically.

Like, they're trying to solve a lot of really hard problems fully decentralized and end up with basically a federation with extra steps.

So it's all Yeah. Comes down to, yeah, they have a multisig.

While if you're just honest about, hey, we have a multisig here, then suddenly you get a lot of freedom to implement a lot of cool features.

Like one thing, for example,

Fadi built and Fadi built is a modular architecture, so you can just extend

it, which makes it for an engineer like me, makes it really cool. It might be too much nerd talk, but the functionality that Fadi built is

a way to stabilize

your

Bitcoin in the federation against, like, another asset like the US dollar. Like, I wouldn't do that. I don't think the US dollar's particularly stable.

It goes down all the time. But, like,

if you have a more shorter time frame that you're working on, then it makes sense, like, for a shop owner, if they want to keep their proceeds or, like, their income in USD because they have to restock pretty soon,

then they can do that with Fedi. And

there's a module in FADI Mint that allows you to hedge your Bitcoin exposure

and

basically hold a synthetic USD.

And that solves the problem for real people. So I think that's really cool.

The the other thing lose Met again.

No. I don't think so.

Was gonna say the other No, thing that's Amir, you guys are just running, so I'm enjoying the conversation. Continue, Herman. The

other thing that

I noticed that

is really cool is

that you can't, there's

no better way to do this is,

I mean, you'd be surprised how much attention people pay to

fees in

a setup where the transaction amounts are really, really small, you know, and you might be paying less than a dollar for most of your transactions,

people pay attention to fees. And

I mean, you can if

you've got several people transacting between each other and a community and they're all on the same federation,

you're sending e cash back and forth. There's literally zero fees on those transactions.

And the only other way to do that is to onboard people to like a fully custodial wallet, like Wallet for Satoshi or Blink or whatever, and then sending transactions between each other

in that wallet. And obviously the

trade off between those two, it's way better to have zero fees sending one another eCash on a federation setup rather than onboarding people all to a fully centralized custodial wallet to

cut down on the fees. But because the moment

you're sending transactions over the Lightning Network, people do start noticing the fees.

And they may be really low, but if you're talking about very, very small transactions, people do pay attention to that.

It was surprising for me at first to see that,

but that's definitely a worthwhile consideration.

I

mean, and not only that, you also have incredibly strong default privacy guarantees

bringing financial privacy to people that maybe would not be able to afford it otherwise. On the fee piece, I actually have a technical question for you guys.

So the whole federation's based on on chain Bitcoin.

And presumably, it's particularly the South Africa example, think is probably a great example because a lot of Erman's users are probably,

you know, they're sending

$5 lightning transactions.

All of this stuff is getting presumably at some point settled on chain.

Is there, like, an automatic mechanism that is,

like, combining UTXOs in the background so, like, the federation doesn't end up in a situation where they have a ton of tiny UTXOs

and then

on chain fees spike and then they're in I mean, this almost happened to Coinbase in 2017.

When on chain fees went up, Coinbase had, like 600,000

small UTXOs

or something that were prohibitively

expensive to spend on chain.

Have you guys thought about that? How is that handled?

Yeah,

absolutely. So not to go into it too much, but Hermann and this new federation,

they are running, they're running a V2 generation of modules,

which, especially in that regard, work different.

We gonna

talk more about the V2 modules at some later point, not right now, because they're being still rolled out and we, you know, prefer to talk about stuff that we have already done.

But the federation that Harman is running is it

runs a Wallet V2 module, and it actually consolidates

on every single peg in into the federation. It immediately consolidates

into a single UTXO,

and then

it issues

e cash to the corresponding

to the exact increase

in the federations

UTXO wallet. Yeah. So it's only ever one. The federation only ever has a single UTXO

in their wallet.

That's quite awesome. So the the big benefit of that is that you can always make the user who made a transaction pay exactly the fee that they cost the federation.

Like, what we want to avoid is that we kinda have to socialize

the fees that we're paying for on chain.

Like, you could, do, like, way fancier things if you allow that, but then it's

just impossible

to do that fairly. Like, there will always be some exploit where someone can just

they give the federation a lot of small UTXOs basically and then

drain the fee pool.

So

with this new version,

what we're doing is just anyone who is doing any on chain operation,

they are paying

the cost that

it takes the federation to either consolidate

the UTXO they are sending into the

one UTXO the federation holds or the fee to split it into

like the

amount that the user wants to receive and the change that goes back to the federation.

So everyone's always paying for their own fees.

Yeah. And we also wanted an option that has

zero config and zero management especially, and if you say, okay, we allow for like multiple UTXOs,

then you kind of to do it well, you need to manage that and basically, for example, if the fees start to rise, you would have to take a look and then you would have to do an educated guess, like how the fees are gonna develop

and what your user behavior is gonna be and if it makes sense to consolidate some of the trends some of the UTXOs now. Otherwise, you might end up in a situation where the fees have risen significantly,

and some of your UTXOs are not economically spendable anymore, or just in a situation where, like, users have to pay 20%

of the on chain value that they're trying to transfer in fees. Yeah.

So,

to avoid avoid all that and really have a setup that has zero management,

the

most reliable option is immediate consolidation into a single UTX, or that's also why it was chosen. Like, we need to keep in mind that people,

install a FettyMint

on a box, and they

like, it's either start nine with remote access or it's

like a regular PC,

and they unplug the monitor. They put it in the shelf, and then it just runs there for, like,

months and years uninterruptedly

besides, like, an update now and then similar to Bitcoin Core.

Yeah.

No. That's clever. That makes a lot of sense to me. And, I mean, it goes to reason that that would probably

I mean, especially as it because it's automated, the lowest on chain fee burden possible for the Fediment,

the I mean, short of like actively managing things. How

is there like a confirmation time expectation?

Because obviously,

sometimes fees spike, but like, if you're willing to wait six hours or twelve hours for a confirmation, you can get away with much cheaper fees. Is there a technical limitation there where you need quick confirmations?

Yeah. So, because it is a shared, like the UTXO is a shared resource, we can't have any users federation,

any users transaction just pending there for like twelve hours because they wanted to save on fees. So, the federation is going to tell you the minimum fee it expects, and that should always be the one confirmation

estimation

from the Bitcoin Core node that they're running. So,

there again, we are erring

on the higher side, safer side. Yeah, so we will never have we will never have the

absolute lowest fees

of like someone that would batch transactions,

maybe RBF them if if if they estimated the fees too low or it hasn't confirmed like after two hours.

No, we always

we always require enough fees to have the transaction confirmed, like probably within the next block.

And I think when you assume that

No. Was gonna ask a clarifying question there, or maybe just on behalf of people at

a slightly less technical level of understanding.

This only applies to on chain transactions,

whereas Lightning transactions

are obviously not

has nothing to do with that single UTXO because the gateway is essentially just swapping its own e cash for SATs

back and forth as transactions come in and It's

only on chain transactions

into the federation that gets consolidated

into

that UTXO, obviously.

Yes.

Like the cool thing here is that in a way we are batching all these Lightning transactions into like one large on chain transaction eventually.

You can imagine,

for example, a federation gets set up and

the gateway deposits like 0.1 Bitcoin into the federation, and now the users are depositing.

And after a while, they have deposited 0.08

Bitcoins with federation. The gateway is slowly running out of e cash, and they notice, oh, we have all these Bitcoin in our lightning channels now,

and we are lacking e cash, let's rebalance. And then they might send 0.05

Bitcoin from their Lightning channels via something like Bolt Exchange to the federation

and get more e cash. And then that's how they rebalance. And that's how the federation also gets

more on chain Bitcoin into its wallet. That's in the end backing all the user funds.

So the gateway has some float. They

exchange between e cash

that's backed by on chain Bitcoin

and their Lightning liquidity.

And then if the if it's a net inflow, then over time, they will have to deposit on chain just to get more e cash to swarm.

Yeah.

And what I want to say about the on chain

discussion,

like, my belief is Bitcoin will be successful. And it might take many years

to decades,

but eventually,

Bitcoin will be so successful that most people don't really

do on chain anymore.

Like, we will have to find other ways of transacting for day to day. And so I think what we really need to optimize for

is,

yeah, good layer to support, like finding ways of batching transactions and only going on chain when absolutely necessary.

So that's, I think, very much in line with not optimizing for the having the lowest on chain fees too much because

we probably only have reasonably low on chain fees

in the short term, not the long term. And I think we lost Matt. At least I don't see him anymore. So

much for the good internet.

Yeah.

I think it's recorded

locally though. Afterwards, you'll be able to

up.

Catch up, yeah. I guess

we can

just keep chatting while we wait for Matt to rejoin. But

I was kinda surprised by the number of people I spoke to at the at well, actually, both both the Prague Conference and the Nairobi Conference

that that's

kind of kind of familiar with with Fedi,

Wallet app,

but have no idea what eCash is or that eCash actually

predates Bitcoin. And that it was something that was kind of picked up by Bitcoiners

and

applied in a way that

the creator did not maybe foresee, well, obviously didn't foresee when

he came up with this idea.

That's

why I said I spent more time talking about this than my own project at the conference, because there's,

I mean, outside of a small sort of group of people that are

obsessive with this type of stuff,

there's a lot of people, like it

needed some explaining of what exactly is eCash and

where does it come from and so on.

Yeah, I mean, the question is, do we really need users or people to understand what is eCash?

Like for the longest time, my philosophy has been that if we don't have to explain, we shouldn't. Like if it just works and people can just use ferrymand apps as a more convenient way of interacting with Bitcoin,

then that should be good enough. And we don't have to bother them with, hey. There's this new concept eCache. It gives you this great privacy. They're getting it anyway. Why explain it to them?

And then when they want to get additional benefits or when they get deep enough,

then they will learn, hey. If I use this eCash stuff, then I can actually also send Bitcoin just like a chat message. Like, the conference in Croatia recently, I did a little experiment.

I just sent some, e cash notes on bit mess BitCheck, and whoever claims it first, they get the sets.

And I want to see how many people will get online with BitChat. And that's something you unique to eCash. You just

have money that's data,

and that's really cool. But for the average Joe who just needs

free the money, needs to be financially empowered,

I think it's too much. Like, the more you have to explain to get started,

the harder it is to get people to actually use something.

So I think the gradual approach makes a lot of sense of not overloading or not front loading too much. Yeah. That is one of the coolest features of eCache though, is that you

can literally encode.

It's literally a string of code and that is the eCache.

Had to That took a while to get my head around that, but that is one of the coolest things that you can literally send it like you would give someone a physical

fiat note.

You can literally send this code over a chat message, and it's like sending cash

over an internet connection.

It's one of the coolest features. There were people that was encoding

e cash notes into emojis,

and that became a little bit of a game at some point in our

local WhatsApp chat. That was quite fun.

Yeah. Like what I did at a few conferences, I printed paper e cash.

And, like, I think, Carlo did it first, so props to him.

But, just having some physical voucher that you can hand to people, and you can make it look like real money, like some old US dollars or whatever. And it's

it's just a super cool way to onboard people.

They just scan it. They receive their sets right into their wallet. They get onboarded to the federation that I choose, and it's just very smooth.

And I think also, like, the people not being aware of eCash,

it's just a testament how

big this space has become because, I mean, Cashew has done so much publicity work about the topic,

you know. I can understand that people are not familiar with like what a federated system is, but

there was like there was so much talk and publicity about e cash as a concept, but this space is so huge these days, like you can run into full time Bitcoiners and they have vaguely heard

vaguely heard of this.

Yeah.

And that's what winning looks like. More options for users, the better.

Yeah. Yeah.

Guys, this has been a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. I love what you guys are building. Should we, before we wrap, let's, let's finish up with some final thoughts. We'll start with

Arman final thoughts.

Final thoughts. I think that

it's, I mean, I was talking

Frank

the other day, and I do think that Frank Corva,

and it's

not an

overstatement to say on my part that I think Fediment is

probably gonna be one of the most important technologies in Bitcoin going forward, just because it

creates

this system where

you can

have an acceptable trust model. I see it as an acceptable trust model. I think a lot of people maybe have a problem with that, but in the environment that I'm in, I see it as an acceptable trust model and way better than a fully

centralized trust model. And

it's gonna be very necessary to have these types of systems where I feel okay onboarding somebody to this. I've always had a funny feeling when I onboard somebody to a fully centralized

wallet service, no matter how good the experience is. It's kinda like, do I really wanna do this? But that's kind of like the only option. Whereas now it's

a way more comfortable feeling to onboard somebody to something that I think is an acceptable trust model, but still has a really great user experience. So I think it's probably one of the most important

technologies going forward.

Love it.

Maybe onto Herman's point, it's like the FAMER project is as

much of a social experiment than it is one as a technical one. We put a new we put a lot of, like, new technologies together to, get to this point and make it work. Like, for example, which now even only makes it viable to run on Start nine,

has just only released their OneNote,

like two weeks ago

and now really the question is, can we form like the social

structures around those systems that, you know, make them work for

like communities,

everyday people and so forth.

Love that. Which for me kind of out of my hands.

Yeah. Yeah, makes sense to me. It is a social problem. Those are the hardest ones.

Yeah, to tie back to something you mentioned in the beginning, bear markets are for building

And

more than ever before, we have to need to

fight for our privacy, fight for our freedom. Join us, and thanks for having us on.

Yeah. Thank you, guys. It's an honor and a privilege. Freaks, I hope you enjoyed the conversation. We'll be back next Tuesday.

I got another great conversation lined up. All relevant links will be in the show notes. All relevant links for the show are at civildispatch.com.

Share with your friends and family. Search Civil Dispatch in your favorite podcast app. Thank you guys for joining us.

Awesome, dude. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Take care. Bye.

Love y'all. Stay humble, StackSets.

Peace.