Title: S15 E14: Nicolas Dorier on BTCPay, NBitcoin, TumbleBit & Coding Bitcoin in C#
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Nicolas Dorier (creator of BTCPay Server, NBitcoin and NBXplorer; TumbleBit contributor; author of "Programming The Blockchain in C#")
Published: 2023-12-31
Duration: 1:52:46
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2023-12-31_s15_e14_nicolas_dorier_on_btcpay__nbitcoin__tumblebit__coding_bitcoin_in_c.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2023-12-31_s15_e14_nicolas_dorier_on_btcpay__nbitcoin__tumblebit__coding_bitcoin_in_c.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic diarization, reconciled against a full local small.en (VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps and the YouTube auto-captions of the same episode (three-way comparison over the whole episode). 69 doubtful, dropped or garbled stretches were re-transcribed locally from short audio clips with small.en (67 clips plus 2 re-runs; small.en because the transcription pipeline running on the same machine left too little memory for medium.en). Dropped stretches were restored at 00:09:01 ("You could say something as basic as..."), 00:10:25 (Vlad's question about activating SegWit early and the scaling debate), 00:29:54 (start of the Cryptosteel read), 00:56:35 (BTCPay core bugs that could have resulted in loss of funds), 01:18:30, 01:29:58 (the stable-channel price example) and 01:41:24. Speaker labels were fixed with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (TitaNet reference voices for Vlad and Nicolas) and by hand (Vlad Costea, Nicolas Dorier; the pre-recorded sponsor reads are labeled Ad voiceover). Many short turns that the diarization had merged were split out (for example at 00:01:54, 00:02:08, 00:03:08, 00:04:23, 00:16:33, 00:18:26, 00:20:10, 00:24:13, 00:31:02, 00:41:42, 01:02:33, 01:20:14, 01:33:17, 01:33:48 and throughout the Final Fantasy section). Names and jargon were checked against the title, the show notes and the web: BTCPay Server and its 404 page, BitPay, NBitcoin, NBXplorer, Wallet of Satoshi, Bitrefill, LNbits, lipa, Kukks (Andrew Camilleri; BTCPay issue #50 "Add support for ethereum", likes by Nogreedy and bgits), Rockstar Dev (GitHub @lepipele), Pavlenex (issue #53 U2F login, related to #27; BitcoinShirt), Baltic Honeybadger in Riga, BitcoinTalk, BIP 47 PayNyms, BIP 70, stealth addresses, the Bitcoin Wiki "Segwit support" table (BIP 141, BIP 148, BIP 149, SegWit2x, COOP), Nicolas's BIPxDevs site, the New York Agreement, btc1, Jeff Garzik and VeriBlock (VBK), Ryan X. Charles, BSV, BCH, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Bitcoin.com, nopara73 (Adam Ficsor), HiddenWallet, Avalonia, Wasabi Wallet and WabiSabi, Microsoft Certified Trainer, GitBook, Stratis, TumbleBit, Crunchbase, Zcash Halo 2, BitBoy (Ben Armstrong), Peter McCormack, Andrew Poelstra and Jonas Nick (MuSig), Blockstream, LNbank and Dennis (Reimann), NFC payments plugin, IVPN, Digital Garage, the book Programming The Blockchain in C# (Community Edition; Indonesian, Japanese and Korean translations; chapters "Other types of ownership", "Colored Coins", "Issuing an asset", "Proof of Burn and Reputation"), colored coins, the Open Assets protocol, Counterparty, Omni Layer/Mastercoin, Ordinal inscriptions, ERC-20, a bot front-running the tickers, OCEAN mining, Stratum V2, Polygon, Litecoin Ordinals, Dogecoin, Liquid, Confidential Transactions and Confidential Assets, Casey Rodarmor and teleburning, ordinals.com, OpenSea, Rare Pepes, Spells of Genesis, Pepe Cash, Bored Apes, Monero, Zcash non-shielded addresses, HODLing, Nostr, Nostr Asia in Tokyo, Nostr Wallet Connect, WalletConnect, Prism, Alby and Michael Bumann, hyperbitcoinization, LSPs, stable channels and DLCs, Tether, the BTCPay app, Cryptosteel (BTCTKVR), Satochip, Satodime and Seedkeeper, Opendime, Coinbase, Final Fantasy VII-X (Knights of the Round, Emerald Weapon, gold chocobo, Cloud, Barret, Red XIII, Tifa, Yuffie, Cid, Vincent Valentine, Cait Sith, Reeve, Shinra, Sephiroth, Jenova, the Lifestream, Zack Fair, Rebirth, the Whispers, Kalm, the Chocobo Farm, Fort Condor, Cosmo Canyon, Squall, the junction system, Al Bhed, Dark Aeons, Celestial Weapons, Blitzball, Wakka), jeuxvideo.com, Yakuza and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, Amir Taaki, Tomb Raider and Lara Croft, GameShark. Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:49] Vlad Costea: Hello there, and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I am Vlad, and today I have a super special interview with a royalty among Bitcoiners. He is Nicolas Dorier, the emperor of BTCPay Server, the guy who said, "My faith in you is broken. I'm going to make you obsolete," in a reply to BitPay. And then just a few months later came up with BTCPay Server. And it has been six years since he launched BTCPay Server. It's one of the most integrated payments processors. It was even integrated in Tesla at one point for a month or something while they accepted Bitcoin payments.

[00:01:28] Vlad Costea: It is possibly the most popular payments processor that's open source, that collects no fee, is sort of like this open protocol that anyone can take and modify and use for their own purpose. And his idea started just from this decision by BitPay to do some mandatory KYC. So thank you very much, Nicolas. It's an honor to have you here.

[00:01:54] Nicolas Dorier: It's an honor to be here, [unclear: Vlad].

[00:01:57] Vlad Costea: Oh, the honor is on my side. And also part of the introduction is that every Bitcoiner is going to see that you have the best hair in Bitcoin, except for myself.

[00:02:08] Nicolas Dorier: No, no. I have the best hair in Bitcoin at that point. Did you see the 404 page on BTCPay Server?

[00:02:22] Vlad Costea: Of course. Of course I know about that. Everyone knows about that.

[00:02:30] Nicolas Dorier: Yep. I have the most beautiful hair.

[00:02:32] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's on a 404 page. I can't possibly argue with that. So let's talk about BTCPay. It's a big deal. I've also interviewed Andrew and Pavel. Their names are Kukks and Pavlenex. And it was in Riga that I got this. And I'm wearing this specifically for this interview. I've been told that...

[00:02:58] Nicolas Dorier: No, no, no. You wear it every day.

[00:03:02] Vlad Costea: Oh, okay. I wear it every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Yes. I never take it off.

[00:03:08] Nicolas Dorier: You don't wash it. Take care of it.

[00:03:12] Vlad Costea: Okay. So basically if you ask Pavlenex how I got this, he's going to say that I stole it. Because we were in Riga, there was this box of t-shirts and there was this box of hoodies. And he said, you know, you can take a t-shirt. And I was looking and thinking, oh, it's kind of cool. I don't want the t-shirt. So I put this hoodie on and asked him, so what do you think? And he was like, no, that's only for contributors. You basically stole this. And I was like, I can take it off and you can have it back. And he and Kukks said, oh no, you can keep it. But next year you have to MC our post-Baltic Honeybadger events. And I was like, okay, it's a fair trade.

[00:03:52] Nicolas Dorier: They trapped you.

[00:03:56] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but it was me who put it on. And they said, oh, we shouldn't leave this box here because people are going to think they're for free, but they're only for coders who contribute to the project. So...

[00:04:06] Nicolas Dorier: That's also why you are interviewing us. It's like to pay back your debts.

[00:04:13] Vlad Costea: Yes. I have to pay back for this beautiful hoodie that says BTCPay. It's kind of comfy and cozy. It's good for winter.

[00:04:23] Nicolas Dorier: Yep. And logo made by my wife.

[00:04:28] Vlad Costea: Oh, that's an interesting trivia about BTCPay. So your wife is the logo designer?

[00:04:35] Nicolas Dorier: Yes.

[00:04:36] Vlad Costea: Wow.

[00:04:37] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. Like a few months into the project, she said, oh, I can do a logo for you. So she made this one, and it's perfect, right? Everybody loves it.

[00:04:48] Vlad Costea: No, it's beautiful. And I like that it's not the stereotypical Bitcoin sort of business logo. So you're not trying to use the B from the Bitcoin logo. You have something of your own. It looks like mountains from, if you turn it around 90 degrees, it looks like mountains, or boobs, depending on what you're up to.

[00:05:11] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. I was going to say it here. My French spirit says, see boobs first, but I say mountain.

[00:05:21] Vlad Costea: Okay. So what other trivia do you have about BTCPay? You started this six years ago. I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of interesting information.

[00:05:35] Nicolas Dorier: So on top of my mind, like, I don't have too much trivia about that.

[00:05:47] Nicolas Dorier: Well, a trivia I got, but it's maybe more than six years ago, maybe seven or eight years ago. So I was hanging around on BitcoinTalk at the time. And at one point I wrote kind of like a sort of article about, I don't remember why I called that, but open companies or something like this, I was calling it, where I didn't talk specifically about making a Bitcoin payment processor, but I was talking about how to make some sort of API that is a standard for exchanges to talk among each other, or something like this.

[00:06:44] Nicolas Dorier: Let me browse my posts. Holy shit. I have 45 pages of posts on BitcoinTalk. Can you believe it? I don't remember any of them.

[00:06:55] Vlad Costea: Can I put this in the interview?

[00:07:00] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. I did so much useless stuff. For example, what I'm seeing right now, I tried to make a BIP to propose a standard to be able to easily remember a Bitcoin address. Looking back, it was so silly.

[00:07:14] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Thinking about it, something like vanity addresses, you can do it with BIP 47, I think, the PayNyms or whatever.

[00:07:25] Nicolas Dorier: Yes. It was at the time where, like, the address reuse was very prevalent. I just checked on GitHub. I remember having made a [unclear: report] at one point, but I don't remember if I removed it or not. Oh yeah, I did. Holy shit. I did a standard. I did a standard to, yeah, so, "Remember your own Bitcoin address," "Remember any payment [unclear: request]," BIP 70, so that's now completely dead, and, oh, "A way to remember your own stealth address."

[00:08:04] Nicolas Dorier: So I don't remember if you remember what it was about. So it was kind of reusable address, but that doesn't [unclear: appear to reuse at all]. Holy shit. Okay.

[00:08:23] Nicolas Dorier: No, I will leave it there. I don't find it again, what I wanted to talk about.

[00:08:37] Nicolas Dorier: No, it's not here anymore. Never mind.

[00:08:43] Vlad Costea: Okay. Let me ask the question again. You can come up with a different answer. Or no, let me ask another question.

[00:08:52] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, I don't know. I don't have any specific trivia, I think, that come to my mind.

[00:09:01] Vlad Costea: You could say something as basic as, right now we have 20 open source contributors or something. I don't know. 20 is a made-up number. I don't know how many you have.

[00:09:14] Nicolas Dorier: Ah, it's true. Yeah. Number of contributors.

[00:09:29] Nicolas Dorier: Ah, Wallet of Satoshi use BTCPay Server.

[00:09:33] Vlad Costea: Interesting. So why would a custodial wallet like Wallet of Satoshi integrate BTCPay in its back end?

[00:09:41] Nicolas Dorier: I have no clue. I just know they are using us, but I don't have any clue. Like, Bitrefill is using, not BTCPay Server, but... So BTCPay Server relies on a UTXO tracker, we call that, that's called NBXplorer, and Bitrefill is using this, for example. So it's kind of like the same base as BTCPay Server. It's kind of interesting, I guess.

[00:10:11] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it is. And let me take this a little bit back, because before you did BTCPay Server, you are the creator and maintainer of NBitcoin. And I don't know how many people remember that, but you're also one of the first to activate SegWit. And you also participated in the scaling debate as a developer who gave his opinion on how to activate SegWit. I guess this is an entirely different life for you.

[00:10:39] Nicolas Dorier: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like, before BTCPay Server, it was definitely a different life. Like, lots of my work was more, let's say, technical. Like, everything I built on Bitcoin, it's kind of like layer above layer above layer. When I started Bitcoin, I was really at the bottom layer, understanding the protocol and trying to replicate it in C#. And along the years, I basically made this library bigger and bigger, like trying to support more and more stuff about what the community was doing.

[00:11:19] Nicolas Dorier: Then after, building other tools like NBXplorer, which is a UTXO tracker, and then other projects that use this NBXplorer, like, for example, BTCPay Server. So it's like I'm building all of those layers along the years. And maybe, I don't know, maybe my next step will be building something on top of BTCPay Server. So it's kind of like a big tower of stuff I built. And yeah, I'm quite proud of it. The only thing that most people know is, of course, BTCPay Server.

[00:11:52] Nicolas Dorier: And maybe for those using Wallet of Satoshi, Wallet of Satoshi maybe is more famous than us now. But at the end, they're relying on all these [unclear: types]. So I'm quite proud of it, and keep building it. For now, I have no plan to build something on top of BTCPay Server, but maybe one day, we'll see.

[00:12:15] Vlad Costea: Now, I think right now BTCPay is the benchmark for payments processors. I also know that there's LNbits, which has a similar approach to it, but uses different libraries. And there's also lipa, which is from Switzerland. And I interviewed them, and they said, oh, BTCPay Server is too complicated, and they want to build something simpler.

[00:12:37] Nicolas Dorier: It's always start like this. It's always start like this. Then you have one user who says, ah, it's super great, it's super simple, but I need only this little thing here, like this, you know, simple button that you can have here. And then six years later, you are on a huge project like us. And things are... you try to make it simpler, and most of the time you spend it adding features, of course, but making things simpler as well.

[00:13:11] Nicolas Dorier: It's just like complexity, you know. How can I say? The more time passes, the more the code base becomes complex. And it's kind of not specific to Bitcoin. It's kind of how software in general evolves. It's like this.

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[00:14:29] Vlad Costea: And let me tell you something, like a random piece of trivia, and let me see if I can put it here on the screen, because I'm not sure if you remember how Kukks came to the team, how he became part of the contributing team to BTCPay. Do you remember that?

[00:14:47] Nicolas Dorier: My memory is so shit.

[00:14:50] Vlad Costea: Don't say it's shit. It's a bit muddy, fuzzy, whatever. So...

[00:14:56] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. Oh fuck. Okay. I'm learning this. So actually this is a super trivia, because I didn't remember that.

[00:15:03] Vlad Costea: Okay. So Kukks, for the people listening on Spotify who don't see this, Andrew Kukks, back in February 12 of 2018, he made his first commit by reporting an issue to the BTCPay Server repository. And he said, "Considering Ethereum is the second largest coin in terms of market cap, it makes sense to integrate. You have an amazing project going." And he received two likes, by Nogreedy and bgits. And then you replied on the same day, and you said, "Ethereum is too different in design and consumes too many resources for owning a full node. It is unlikely BTCPay will ever support it."

[00:15:45] Vlad Costea: And he gave you this... Was it him? No, I don't think it was him who gave you this sad face. And Andrew said, "If you could guide us a bit through the current architecture, I would be willing to give it a shot," smiley face. So basically this is the way that he decided to contribute.

[00:16:10] Vlad Costea: Oh, and Rockstar Dev says, "Kukks, here is the video Nicolas Dorier made when he was adding Litecoin as template for altcoin support," as some sort of documentation to prove how it's done. And Kukks said, "I'm guessing I would need to abstract away the NBXplorer layer, since the API calls and system is different. @lepipele..." I'm not sure what this is.

[00:16:33] Nicolas Dorier: Lepipele is Rockstar Dev.

[00:16:35] Vlad Costea: Oh, okay. "Any thoughts?" And then you told him, "Yes, you can try. I think it is a large undertaking though. Just keep in mind that it is important that people host their own node and do not rely on a public API."

[00:16:52] Vlad Costea: "I'm making some refactoring to make it easier to add non-Bitcoin related currencies right now. It might be easier for you to add then." And then he said, "That sounds great. Let me know if you need anything from my side with help." And this is how it started.

[00:17:08] Nicolas Dorier: You know, that's kind of funny, because one of his works, like, very recently, maybe last week, or like in the next week, has been to try to pluginify all the shitcoin stuff. So basically getting all the shitcoins out of BTCPay core. The idea is that all the shitcoins are inside plugins, and then plugins are maintained by the communities of those shitcoins, so that we don't have to deal with it anymore. So it's kind of fun, because when he entered in Bitcoin, in BTCPay Server, it seems he was trying to integrate shitcoins.

[00:17:44] Nicolas Dorier: Now he's like the one that's trying to take them away.

[00:17:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's interesting how he started contributing to the project. I looked this up. I was on his GitHub repository last year when I did an interview with him. I did my homework, and I looked up to see when he started contributing to the project. I was like, oh, this guy wanted to add Ethereum to BTCPay. And I guess along the way, he lost interest and realized, okay, the mission is different here. We need to do something else.

[00:18:17] Nicolas Dorier: I just posted it on an internal chat to remind him of his roots.

[00:18:23] Vlad Costea: You have the link to it?

[00:18:26] Nicolas Dorier: To what?

[00:18:27] Vlad Costea: To the issue number 50.

[00:18:32] Nicolas Dorier: Oh no, no, I just screenshot and sent it to him.

[00:18:37] Vlad Costea: I would tell him it's part of the podcast. I'm sure he will appreciate it. Yeah, I sent you the link also, if you want to read once again and think about the old days.

[00:18:49] Vlad Costea: And also Pavlenex, I can tell you what his first contribution was.

[00:18:59] Vlad Costea: And Pavlenex made a proposal to integrate U2F authentication via Trezor and Ledger hardware wallets. So I guess his proposal was more tame. Let me share the screen with you. This was back in March 1st of 2018. These guys basically came to the project one month apart from each other, and now they're inseparable. So you have this first proposal. It was issue number 53. Kukks was 50, Pavlenex was 53. "Add U2F verification to further secure the server login. Currently there is 2FA authentication, which is great..."

[00:19:42] Vlad Costea: "...which is a great way to secure online accounts. But I would like to suggest adding U2F authentication via Ledger or Trezor to further enhance the security of the server login." And Rockstar Dev said it's related to number 27, and he moved the discussion. And I think this is where it ended. It started... Yeah, I mean, the conversation ended, but you had this process.

[00:20:10] Nicolas Dorier: And Kukks did it.

[00:20:12] Vlad Costea: Kukks did it. He self-assigned in April of 2019, so a year later. Interesting.

[00:20:23] Nicolas Dorier: So yeah, so it's Pavlenex here, but actually the first account on GitHub of Pavlenex was BitcoinShirt.

[00:20:36] Vlad Costea: Oh, interesting. I didn't know that.

[00:20:39] Nicolas Dorier: I don't know if he renamed his account or, like, created a new account. Let me check.

[00:20:46] Vlad Costea: I can look at his GitHub and tell you that it has existed since 2018, which means that probably he switched to this new one.

[00:20:58] Nicolas Dorier: Okay. Wait, wait. Let me check then.

[00:21:04] Nicolas Dorier: GitHub BitcoinShirt...

[00:21:07] Vlad Costea: But it's a lot of fun to reminisce and see, okay, this is where it all started. Some of the most active contributors of today had these first ideas, and you didn't even remember how they started contributing. I guess you see so many people coming and asking questions, and only a few of them stick around.

[00:21:30] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. That's [unclear: here, this], and as well, like, my, my memory is really shit. So yeah, it's interesting to remind that.

[00:21:44] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And what was it like? I want to ask you this, because during the scaling debate in 2017, when it was this proposal for SegWit, it was proposed under three or four different BIPs. And you're one of the developers, as the creator and maintainer of NBitcoin, you're one of the people who was asked which way he prefers to activate it. And what was it like back in the day? This was around the time when Bitcoin Cash forked off, and there was a proposal for SegWit2x coming.

[00:22:18] Vlad Costea: And I guess it was tense.

[00:22:22] Nicolas Dorier: Like, to be honest, like, the only time where I lost faith in Bitcoin, like where really I started saying, oh shit, it's going bad, I need to sell, it has been a bit before BCH. So maybe it was like in May or, like, I don't remember exactly, but I think it was a bit before this war. I saw this trouble coming, and it was the first time where I feared for Bitcoin, actually. And I don't really remember about which soft fork activation mechanism I chose, because there was, like, different ones with different pros and cons.

[00:23:14] Nicolas Dorier: I think I really didn't really care too much about the way of activating it, too strongly. I was just strongly opposed to the B2X, like just bumping the block size [unclear: right two]. That was my main concern. And I was pro-SegWit, but the activation, I don't remember I had a strong position. There was something I was preferring, but, like, whichever was okay, as far as I was concerned.

[00:23:47] Vlad Costea: Now, I have a list here. I just need to look for your name. It's on the Bitcoin Wiki, which presents the SegWit support. I'm going to share the screen right now so you can look with me.

[00:23:59] Nicolas Dorier: I don't even remember if I filled this one.

[00:24:02] Vlad Costea: Oh, you didn't? I know that Adam nopara is here. He was working on TumbleBit at the time. So let's see if you are here.

[00:24:13] Nicolas Dorier: I am here. Yeah.

[00:24:15] Vlad Costea: Up, up, up. Yeah. Sure. You're listed as a Core contributor. You said you prefer SegWit itself, with BIP 141. And for deployment methods, you said you prefer, or you find acceptable, BIP 149.

[00:24:39] Vlad Costea: I don't even know exactly the difference between them, but...

[00:24:43] Nicolas Dorier: I don't really remember, yeah.

[00:24:45] Vlad Costea: You presented your opinion here, but you also had no opinion on SegWit2x and COOP.

[00:24:51] Nicolas Dorier: Oh no, I was completely against that. Like, I think just people didn't fill it. I remember even at the time I created a website called BIPxDevs, where the developers could sign their preference on the website. It's on my GitHub, actually. I find it's a very old website, but people didn't really use it too much. But it was a way for developers to sign with their PGP keys what they were preferring.

[00:25:26] Vlad Costea: Yeah. This was back in the summer of 2017, and the developers were working and voting on their preferred way to activate SegWit. And it's interesting because we haven't really had anything like this since.

[00:25:42] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. But yeah, I was definitely against SegWit2x. It's basically what made me start BTCPay Server, so yeah.

[00:25:52] Vlad Costea: Oh, really? Because I thought it was the fact that BitPay added some mandatory KYC.

[00:25:57] Nicolas Dorier: Oh yeah, definitely. Because they were on the S2X clan. They were trying to impose SegWit2x to their merchants without telling them that they will run a fork of Bitcoin, basically. So basically trying to migrate their merchants without explaining they will migrate, basically, on some shitcoin. And I was against this. So that's why I started BTCPay Server. So yeah, it was a reaction against SegWit2x, yeah.

[00:26:32] Vlad Costea: It's interesting. So this is the best trivia about BTCPay. It came out of the fork wars.

[00:26:40] Nicolas Dorier: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely what kicked it. Like I said, it was the only time where I feared about the future of Bitcoin. Like, nothing else that happened, of all the crashes in Bitcoin, I never got very bothered by it. But only this time I was scared. So I got a very good, strong incentive to move my ass and try to do something so that people don't depend on those providers.

[00:27:13] Vlad Costea: Yeah, unfortunately, I think the price went up like four or five times until December.

[00:27:22] Vlad Costea: But, you know, guys today can look at you and be like, oh, he had such weak hands, no conviction, blah, blah, blah. But probably they're not even around.

[00:27:32] Nicolas Dorier: And yeah, I didn't, I didn't... So I remember at the time I sold a bit, but after, like, basically the war was kind of over. I don't remember exactly when. I think it was in September, where, like, the fork that they did crashed one block before the activation. And I think, like, they figured it out before, and they kind of backed off. And I think at this time, like, it's when I was feeling more confident about the future of Bitcoin. And then after, yeah, I remember the price has gone up a bit, yeah.

[00:28:10] Nicolas Dorier: It was a pretty intense time. I hope we don't have to do that kind of shit again.

[00:28:18] Vlad Costea: It was interesting to see the developers coming together and voting. And now, if you look at the list, you realize how unpopular SegWit2x really was.

[00:28:28] Nicolas Dorier: Oh yeah, yeah, it was. It was like... But like I said, my memory is kind of bad. So I guess the developers that were for it kind of disappeared after the war, and I don't remember them. Like, some developer at the time that was open source in Bitcoin, one was, what was it called? Ryan X. Charles. I just remember him. Oh yeah. I don't remember what he was doing, but I remember he was the Reddit developer guy, and he was into that. And after he kind of, I don't know, completely dropped out of my radar.

[00:29:12] Nicolas Dorier: So I kind of forgot what he did. I remember he was on BSV at one point, but yeah, it's all I remember. But yeah, it was... Most developers were for just SegWit. Most big companies were for SegWit2x, most miners were for SegWit2x. So yeah, it was... And most users, I think lots of users didn't really care at all. But the users that were kind of fanatic about Bitcoin in general were more for SegWit. Part of them have gone with BCH, of course, but I don't think it was a majority.

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[00:30:59] Vlad Costea: It's also interesting, you had Jeff Garzik, who has been...

[00:31:02] Nicolas Dorier: Jeff Garzik, yes, yes.

[00:31:04] Vlad Costea: At the time he had been a developer for six or seven years, and this was 2017. And he was also the first one to propose a block size increase, back in 2010 or something. And Satoshi saw that and told him, you know, it's too early for stuff like this. Don't make consensus-breaking changes to the code, because everyone else is going to be on another chain, and it's a waste of effort. And he was the architect of SegWit2x. He was the guy who coded it, but he was also the guy who gave up on it afterwards.

[00:31:42] Nicolas Dorier: Yes, yes, yes. He's the one that had this one-off bug during the activation of their node as well. But yeah, it's a wild time.

[00:31:54] Vlad Costea: I did hear that that might have been on purpose. He might have self-sabotaged the project when he realized that it's not happening, because it gave the community... So when he saw that their reaction was so hostile, maybe he didn't want to break Bitcoin, and was like, okay, I'm going to develop something buggy on purpose, so people will say it also sucks technically.

[00:32:23] Nicolas Dorier: I don't know, because maybe, but he got some shitty idea after. I don't remember what, as well. They are on Bitcoin, like where... I think there was something where you could... He had another idea on Bitcoin that was kind of spamming the chain as well. VeriBlock, I think it was called, something like this. I don't remember, but he had, like, some kind of shitty idea after. So I will not... I don't think he did it on purpose, but maybe I'm wrong. But it was not his only shitty idea.

[00:33:00] Nicolas Dorier: What was it? VeriBlock, I think it was called.

[00:33:03] Vlad Costea: VeriBlock, a project by former Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik. But I think it's an altcoin right now. It's VBK. Pretty sure it's dead by now.

[00:33:15] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, it's dead. Yeah, yeah, it's dead. But my point is that he had, like, other kinds of stupid ideas that didn't work out. So I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, this bug, but I would be surprised if it was.

[00:33:33] Nicolas Dorier: But I don't, I don't even know. Maybe if there was no bug, like, maybe it would not have changed anything either.

[00:33:41] Vlad Costea: I don't know. But that bug was, you know, for someone who has been working on Bitcoin for such a long time... All he had to do was just activate SegWit on a two-megabyte fork. So it wasn't rocket science, you know. You just change one with two and then put SegWit on top. And it's not like SegWit was not...

[00:34:01] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, but I think they wanted to change as well the activation mechanism, and the activation mechanism was where there was a bug, I think.

[00:34:11] Vlad Costea: Yeah. The best part about it is that they did not push it further. They gave up and said, okay, it's not happening. The New York Agreement fell apart. They said, there is a big block fork, maybe use that if you want bigger blocks. Yeah. Because after SegWit2x was dropped, BCH also had its moment. I think that's when it reached its all-time high. And that's when Vitalik put out that tweet with "congrats on this seriously." It became such a meme. Yeah.

[00:34:52] Vlad Costea: But yeah, I was so detached those days. I was a shitcoiner, not caring about anything. I was reading stuff on CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, and it was super confusing. There was a huge conflict of interest, obviously. And at the time, they didn't even have to disclose anything, that they are part of the agreement or that they have an interest in this whole situation. So it was confusing. Plus, there was that whole Bitcoin.com situation, with the website promoting Bitcoin Cash. And I was still pretty new to the whole scene.

[00:35:30] Vlad Costea: So I did not understand what's happening. But it's part of a decentralized project, you know. You have lots of participants that have different vested interests, and they're going to promote their own agenda. And it was maybe too much for my brain to process at the time. But now I get it. It's confusing for the newbies, but otherwise...

[00:35:56] Nicolas Dorier: I think probably like 70% of people in Bitcoin didn't give a shit anyway, you know. Like, really, the people that were passionate about this are really the people that have been in Bitcoin for a long time and that understand the technology. And I don't think at the time it was, like, the majority of people. So yeah, but for people that knew what was going on, it was very stressful indeed.

[00:36:23] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And before NBitcoin, or at the same time as NBitcoin, you published a book on how to develop Bitcoin projects in C#. And it was that one book that was read by Adam, nopara73, and he was inspired to start working on Wasabi Wallet. And he built Wasabi Wallet in C# specifically because he learned from you. And yeah, so I'm not going to say that he idolizes you, but he respects you as a mentor.

[00:36:56] Nicolas Dorier: Like, it was... So when I wrote NBitcoin... So NBitcoin, really, when I wrote it, it was at first as a learning experience for Bitcoin and [unclear: grow up]. And I wrote this book because I thought... So before Bitcoin, I was a Microsoft Certified Trainer. So I got lots of certifications from Microsoft, and I was going to companies to teach them how to code in .NET, basically.

[00:37:27] Nicolas Dorier: And so teaching people was kind of part of my job before. So I said, okay, I will try to make this book, and maybe I will try to give some courses in Bitcoin and get remunerated for that. So I wrote this book, and Adam read it, and also moved it to GitBook. That was a very good idea to do that. And he really liked it, and he also came... So I came to Japan, I think in 2015 or '16, I don't know, '15, I think.

[00:38:01] Nicolas Dorier: And at the time, he was kind of traveling in Asia, and he came to Tokyo to work where I was working. We were kind of in a small co-working space. And it was before Wasabi Wallet, and the name of his wallet was HiddenWallet. And he was working with a very early technology to do UI in .NET that is called Avalonia. It was very new technology. And myself, I was not very sure that this project could go far. But, like, Adam never gave up.

[00:38:48] Nicolas Dorier: It took time. When Wasabi Wallet released, actually, Adam was maybe working on it for like one year or one year and a half. He did lots and lots of work even before the first version of Wasabi Wallet. And he never changed his mind. It was always, oh, I want to do this. Look at those shitty centralized mixers that are making so much money, and they are shit. I will improve that. And he was always focused only on this.

[00:39:27] Nicolas Dorier: I think that's why Wasabi has been very successful, is that he never spread his attention. It was always his thing, and it's why it has gone so far. And he never got scared about, like, oh, not having, you know, not having any users for several years. He just wanted to make it better until it can get used. So he has lots of credit for that.

[00:39:59] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and I think he also deserves credit for the fact that he invested a lot of money in hiring developers. It wasn't just about releasing this project and abandoning it. He strived to make it much better all the time. And I respect him for this. He got some cryptographers to look at the code and improve it. Now he has WabiSabi, and he's thinking way ahead in terms of how this is going to scale for mobile and stuff like that.

[00:40:29] Nicolas Dorier: And he also really played well in protecting himself, legally speaking. So that was one thing as well that I was worried about, making this type of software, was the legal liabilities. And he found a way to make sure it would be okay, and so far so good, I would say. And I believe he's kind of safe on that. But it took some harsh decisions to make it so. And yeah, it's impressive, very impressive.

[00:41:06] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Weren't you guys involved in Stratis or something like that?

[00:41:10] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. So Stratis is a shitcoin that has been... Well, so everything that is Bitcoin, I call that shitcoin. I had a bit of respect for Stratis, because I know some of the devs there, and some of the devs there, like, they are very good .NET coders. Like, I know them. They were serious in what they were doing. But of course, I will not advise anybody to put money on that. It's dead anyway, so...

[00:41:42] Vlad Costea: It doesn't matter.

[00:41:43] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, yeah, it's dead. Like, the way we collaborated was, I was working on TumbleBit at the time. And basically, TumbleBit was working in a command line. And for TumbleBit, one big issue was having a liquidity pool. So you need to have a tumbler, basically. And having a tumbler is kind of a very big liability concern. And Stratis said, okay, we will develop a wallet UI on top of Avalonia. It's kind of the same... I think it was Avalonia, or was it Electron? I'm not sure. But they did a wallet, and they said, oh, it's for altcoin.

[00:42:30] Nicolas Dorier: And I said, I don't touch that. I want only to work on Bitcoin. And they said, okay, that's fine. Our wallet will support both Bitcoin and Stratis. And so on my side, I worked on the TumbleBit integration in their wallet, on top of Bitcoin. And they asked me as well to make a full node in .NET, a Bitcoin full node in .NET. I never really believed in it, because making a full node is lots of work. And indeed, even the work I did, like, the node could not sync fast enough, basically.

[00:43:06] Nicolas Dorier: Like, the performance was not great. But they sure put lots of effort onto it. So on my side, I was more on the back end, but they did a very good UI on top of it. So they were very serious onto making it. But of course, the problem of TumbleBit is that nobody wanted to be the tumbler. And it's where, like, Wasabi Wallet kind of did it right. Wasabi Wallet was also a tumbler, and Adam did right to protect himself, legally speaking. So it's how it was working out.

[00:43:44] Nicolas Dorier: And I don't regret to have worked with them. Like, I met very wonderful developers there, and I have still good relations with some of them. But yeah, basically it's a shitcoin. I need to say what it is. And I also regret to not have [unclear: been come] more strongly. So one of the ways that shitcoiners are doing is that they're really using their name to pump their bags. And so I saw it a bit. I think I was not strict enough about that. For example, on their website, on the Stratis website, they made it appear that I was one of the main guys behind Stratis, when I was not.

[00:44:32] Nicolas Dorier: Basically, I got money working on the TumbleBit integration, but I never wanted to pump their bags, basically. And same thing, at one point I was on Crunchbase. I think they put me on the Stratis organization. So, like, I didn't like that. And I should have, like, in hindsight, I should have been more strict about this.

[00:45:03] Vlad Costea: Yeah. On the plus side, with all of that money that was made with Stratis, we had some cool projects that were built for Bitcoin. So morally speaking, you can say, oh, it was evil because it was a shitcoin. And of course, it didn't work, because it had some unrealistic ideas for how to implement stuff. But the interface for Avalonia and the base layer of Wasabi, to put it like this, because TumbleBit is the project from which Wasabi originates... And without all of that research that was made at the time, we wouldn't have these Bitcoin projects right now.

[00:45:44] Vlad Costea: I'm not sure about BTCPay. I'm not sure if your work with Stratis or TumbleBit helped you fund your work on BTCPay later, but it's pretty cool.

[00:45:55] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, indirectly, yes. Because, like, when a library gets used, basically I need to incorporate the feedback and improve the library. So indirectly, yes, work has been done there that improved the library, and that was definitely used for other projects, like for NBXplorer.

[00:46:19] Nicolas Dorier: And, like, you know, seeing, for example, trying to implement a Bitcoin full node in C#, like, taught me that it was a bad idea. Already I knew it, but trying to do it, I found out it was a really bad idea. So, like, I think not everything is bad.

[00:46:45] Nicolas Dorier: And yeah, I don't regret any of it. The only thing I regret, of course, is not having been strong enough to say, okay, don't put my name too much on this project, because I don't want to pump your bags, basically.

[00:47:00] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Anyway, we've lost half of the listeners here, not because it's a talk about Stratis, but because they don't even remember that. It was way before the time when most people joined Bitcoin. It was the golden age of creating sandboxes. If you had this idea for Bitcoin and it was not getting integrated, it was so easy to make a fork and release it. And there have been lots of these experiments. In hindsight, I think 90-something percent of them proved that it was a bad idea in the beginning.

[00:47:32] Vlad Costea: So it was not worth pursuing. But sometimes you have some very interesting research that goes into it. For example, I'm proud of what the guys from Zcash have done. And I'm not saying you should buy Zcash. I'm just saying that the foundation that develops that coin has created Halo 2, which is a cryptographic system for very small transactions within a shielded privacy environment. So it's like some sort of mixing pool. And within that mixing pool, the average transaction is smaller than 200 bytes. And one transaction on Bitcoin, which is SegWit-based, with one input and two outputs, is 220 bytes.

[00:48:18] Vlad Costea: So they were able to make privacy scalable, which is admirable. It's something that's worth researching.

[00:48:25] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, I mean, definitely. But the thing is that in Bitcoin, there is already so many things. There was always a point like, oh, why don't you look at what other coins are doing? And my main reason is that I don't have time. Even following everything that is done on Bitcoin, I don't have time to follow everything. So even in BTCPay Server, there is stuff that I don't understand. I didn't code it. I don't have time to follow everything. So the question is like, oh, how can I best spend my time?

[00:48:59] Nicolas Dorier: And best spending my time is definitely not looking into shitcoins. Maybe there is a good idea there. Maybe, I don't know. If there is a good idea, I guess at one point I will hear about it. But yeah, I think that there is so much more stuff to do in Bitcoin that I don't spend too much time looking around on other coins.

[00:49:26] Vlad Costea: Yeah, this is an interesting paradox, because you have the average YouTuber who talks about crypto, and they're going to say, yeah, of course, I know about this project, and I know about that other project, and look, there's news about this and that. The newcomer is going to think that they're super genius experts who know everything about everything, but they're not specialized. They just look on the surface of stuff, and they talk in a language that seems occult and very smart for people who come from outside of the space.

[00:49:59] Vlad Costea: And they're going to say, oh, this guy knows stuff. That's how BitBoy, for example, Ben Armstrong or whatever his name is, that's how he gets so many viewers. Because he gives people the impression that he's knowledgeable, and he also knows how to create drama around himself. But that's the second component. I think in Bitcoin we have Peter McCormack to point to for practices like that. But it's interesting, because if you really take the time, you're going to see that you can bury your entire day into researching one single project, and even be unaware of what's happening with other Bitcoin open source projects. Because you can work on BTCPay all day and not be aware of what's happening with, I don't know, LNbits, which is your direct competitor.

[00:50:52] Vlad Costea: Maybe you don't have time to look into that. It's a different library. It's a different type of work.

[00:50:58] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. And I don't mind, you know. Like, the beauty of open source development is that because there is no permission behind it, like, nobody can tell you what is a good idea to develop or not. Like, nobody knows the answer. The only way that we can reach the answer is by making lots of different experiments, and one of them will stick. And I don't know, maybe LNbits is a good idea. Maybe LNbits can replace BTCPay Server. I have no clue. I don't know. Like, they might have, like, other people that try to replace BTCPay Server with their own stuff.

[00:51:40] Nicolas Dorier: Like, they can try. Like, maybe they will be right. But yeah, it's just, I don't have time to see everything. Like, about those people on YouTube that look very smart and talk about those very complex things and kind of mislead noobs, like, as a technical person, on my side, it never worked. Like, every time I listen to somebody and I don't understand it, like, either it's like a scammer, and then I, you know, I just move along. Sometimes it's just, like, it's a topic that is above my pay grade.

[00:52:24] Nicolas Dorier: Like, if you go to listen, for example, Poelstra, Andrew Poelstra, talking about this crazy, like, MuSig stuff, or, like, Nick, like, I have no clue about what they are talking about. And I try to follow, but it's like way above my pay grade. I'm not a mathematician, so I cannot follow easily. Or if I want to follow, I need to take one day... What they can explain in five minutes, I need to take one day to understand every word, but I don't have time to do that.

[00:52:57] Nicolas Dorier: So it's like, if I don't understand, basically I stop paying attention. Like, the only exception is when... So Poelstra and Nick, for example, from Blockstream, I can't understand what they're talking about, but the nice thing is that they always try to make libraries about what they're doing. And by trying to use their libraries, because I'm a developer, I can use libraries, I come to understand what it does. So that's the only way I managed to understand them. But, like, else I don't spend... If I see I cannot understand, I just drop out and, like, not put too much effort onto it.

[00:53:41] Nicolas Dorier: I just try to concentrate on what I can do best.

[00:53:46] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And I think LNbits doesn't have support for on-chain payments, which BTCPay does, but it's specialized in Lightning. But what the two projects have in common is this WordPress type of approach to it, where you have plugins, and you can add lots of functionality from different developers who work on the project.

[00:54:13] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. So the main point of plugins... So we got this problem with BTCPay Server, that BTCPay Server, as I said, became bigger and bigger. And when a project becomes bigger, it means that it becomes more and more difficult to coordinate people. If you talk with Rockstar, then maybe he will bitch about that, or Pavlenex, he will bitch about that. But it's true. Like, as a project grows, it becomes harder to communicate and to move information along. So the only way to try to scale development is to have a plugin system, because as soon as you have a plugin system, you allow people to develop functionality on top of your product.

[00:54:56] Nicolas Dorier: And you don't have to know what they're doing. You know, as a developer of [unclear: BTCPay core], I don't know what the plugins are doing. And I think it's good, because it encourages experimentation. And if we see an idea that sticks, then we can implement it in BTCPay Server. So a typical idea has been NFC payments on BTCPay. Like, it started out of a plugin that Kukks did. And Kukks is an experimenter, really. We call him the mad scientist, because he likes experimenting with new ideas.

[00:55:33] Nicolas Dorier: You know, they are not fully fleshed out, but you just want to ship it, see how it goes. Okay, maybe it's half-bugged, but we want to see how it goes. And the only way to do that properly in BTCPay Server is to use a plugin system. And he did that for the NFC payments. And we found out lots of people like it and installed the plugin. So we said, okay, now we will bake it into BTCPay Server and make it better. And every one of us will review code touching this.

[00:56:04] Nicolas Dorier: And that's great, but it has disadvantages, because, like, the plugins are less reviewed. So for example, recently there has been a bug on LNbank that caused some users to lose money if they had the LNbank plugin installed.

[00:56:22] Nicolas Dorier: One of the reasons is that LNbank is a plugin, so it's only reviewed mainly by Dennis. But I will not throw him under the bus, because, like, in BTCPay Server core, we did lots of stuff, and actually we had some bugs that could have resulted in loss of funds.

[00:56:39] Nicolas Dorier: They have not been exploited because a good guy found it first, but it could have happened. So, but my point is that on plugins, there are even more chances for it to happen, because there are fewer people that look at it. But fewer people are looking at it, which means they can experiment faster. So it's, you know, there is no good answer. You know, there is nobody that can say what is the right mix of both. We just have to be not hiding the risk, not hiding the failures, like putting the most information we can for people to take their own risk and their own decisions, and, like, let them experiment.

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[00:58:40] Vlad Costea: Definitely get your 30-day IVPN Pro trial by sending an email to trial@ivpn.net. Make sure you use a burner email address that you probably already have for trolling.

[00:59:02] Vlad Costea: Yeah, you reminded me of a quote, which is supposedly by yourself, and I heard about it from Adam, nopara. And he said that your famous quote about coding in Bitcoin is that mistakes on the mainnet are more memorable.

[00:59:18] Nicolas Dorier: Yes. Yes. Yeah. It was in the book, because in the book, like... So I learned, when I was teaching to people in companies, I learned that people had way more attention when they have, like, really concrete exercises. And by concrete... Because, like, very often, if you try to do something that is too abstract, people lose attention. So it's only when something is concrete that people pay attention. And what is more concrete than risking five bucks? At the time, it was five bucks.

[01:00:01] Nicolas Dorier: What is more, you know, motivating than to get back your money? So for example, when I was in Tokyo, I was teaching to a company... I'm working now at Digital Garage in Japan. And at the time I didn't join them, but I was teaching them Bitcoin. And there was a team, like five members, I think. And during the course, like, I said, like, you will all give me like $10, and I will send you bitcoin on your Bitcoin address that you generated with your key. Now, at the end of these courses, you will be able to get it back, to send back the money, and I can give back the cash to you.

[01:00:40] Nicolas Dorier: And it's kind of like, it makes them very attentive to not lose their money. And, like, it's fun. I mean, when you're, you know, when it's not a drill, it's always more fun. Kind of the adrenaline running.

[01:00:56] Vlad Costea: You did mention your book, and it is my duty right now to share the screen, which shows the Community Edition version of Programming The Blockchain in C#. You're using the OG Bitcoin logo.

[01:01:10] Nicolas Dorier: Oh yeah.

[01:01:11] Vlad Costea: It's not the one that Satoshi made, but it's something in the middle between the two designs. Satoshi had B and C instead of this B dollar on the coin. And I see that you have the book translated in Indonesian, Japanese and Korean, which is impressive.

[01:01:31] Nicolas Dorier: Yes. I think, I think Indonesian was so much fun. Like, one day one guy opened a pull request with all the translation. He didn't say a word, like no comment at all in the GitHub. Like, he just pushed it, and, like, okay, we'll just, like, put it. But it was kind of fun to see.

[01:01:52] Vlad Costea: So I see that in the introduction you have these chapters: "Why Blockchain Programming and not Bitcoin Programming?", "Why this book?", "Complementary reading", "License", "Project setup"...

[01:02:05] Nicolas Dorier: On the left, you can see more. This is only the introduction. So on the left, you can see, for example, "Bitcoin transfer", "Key generation", "[unclear: Other types of ownership]". At the time there was stuff about colored coins. So yeah...

[01:02:23] Vlad Costea: Oh, you worked on colored coins?

[01:02:25] Nicolas Dorier: Oh yeah. Yeah. Long time ago I was working on colored coins. It was on the Open Assets protocol, specifically.

[01:02:33] Vlad Costea: Interesting.

[01:02:34] Nicolas Dorier: So I'm covering it in this.

[01:02:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah. It's here. Colored Coins.

[01:02:44] Vlad Costea: It's so succinct. So concise.

[01:02:48] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. Like, if you look, for example, at the next one, "Issuing an asset", you will see there is code, there is drawings, there is diagrams.

[01:02:59] Nicolas Dorier: See, like, there is some code. I did also lots of diagrams. I don't know if you have seen them here. Yeah, there's some diagram here.

[01:03:12] Nicolas Dorier: Like, yeah, there's been lots of effort in this book, and I think it helped lots of people. Like, now lots of content is kind of outdated, I would say. Like, for example, nobody uses colored coins anymore.

[01:03:25] Vlad Costea: Oh, they do. They do. They do. Yeah. I mean, there's Ordinal inscriptions now.

[01:03:33] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. Yeah. So it's... But, like, the Open Assets protocol I was working on is kind of not used anymore. But yeah, I think one day I should take time to write another book. But, same thing, most of my time these days is on BTCPay Server.

[01:03:55] Vlad Costea: Yeah. It can be called "Programming BTCPay Server in C#."

[01:04:01] Nicolas Dorier: Yes.

[01:04:03] Vlad Costea: But I do recall... I'm going to get back to colored coins, because that's an interesting discussion. But I do recall, during the pandemic in 2020, Rockstar Dev was hosting seminars every Saturday, I think. And it was on the YouTube channel, BTCPay, and it was also on Twitter. And he was showing people how to contribute to BTCPay, how to code and stuff like that. And I attended a couple of them. All I had to do was just watch a YouTube video. I think it's still up there. I didn't understand too much from it, but I thought it was interesting.

[01:04:35] Vlad Costea: And I think that a new wave of developers was created with that initiative. You know, maybe 50 people watched, but of these 50 people, maybe 10 of them became developers, and probably are making a lot of money today.

[01:04:52] Nicolas Dorier: I hope so. So one of the annoyances that Rockstar Dev got about this subject... So I think his session was pretty good. But one of the problems he got, there were some people, some interns, that he tried to guide to work on BTCPay Server. And very often what's going on is that to onboard a new developer requires a lot of attention and feedback. You need to see what they are doing. You need to review their PRs. You need to explain to them what's going on and everything.

[01:05:30] Nicolas Dorier: It's a lot of effort. And in 90% of cases, at the end of the internship, the intern was like, okay, bye, and we will not see them again. And I guess after spending so much effort... So I think for Rockstar Dev, it was pretty hard. I think the model that he did with the sessions on YouTube is better, because it's like broadcast to more people. And if somebody wants to onboard, then we have somewhere to send them. You know, we are kind of scaling Rockstar Dev, in a way.

[01:06:09] Nicolas Dorier: So yeah, I think it was a great idea. I don't know... I know his feedback mostly on people he directly tried to mentor, but I don't know why he stopped doing those sessions. I think it was pretty good, but maybe he covered everything he wanted to cover. Maybe that's why.

[01:06:29] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And let's go back to colored coins, because that's sort of a big deal today. You have these Ordinal inscriptions, which are the new generation of colored coins. Few people remember colored coins and can refer to that. It was colored coins, it was Counterparty, it was the Omni Layer, but before Omni, what was it called? Mastercoin. And now we have Open Assets. Open Assets. Yeah. We have all of these protocols that historically have tried to build something on Bitcoin that is not necessarily Bitcoin, but it seems like they were forgotten.

[01:07:06] Vlad Costea: And now that Ordinal inscriptions came around, people act like, oh, this is something new. When in fact, it's not. It has been around for a decade.

[01:07:15] Nicolas Dorier: It's like ERC-20. Like, to people, like, those tokenizations, it's like Ethereum that invented it. And, like, as OGs, we are like, no, like, it was existing forever on Bitcoin. So it's nothing new. So that's why I'm not excited by it, because I think it will end up like the other protocols. You know, it was like... People are excited now for some reason. I'm not sure why, but I think it will starve. Like, at one point they will stop using it. It's like, I don't see any other way.

[01:07:52] Vlad Costea: Yeah. I did see that you tweeted that the fee increase is not organic.

[01:07:57] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. It's strange. Like, if you want to see real organic usage of the chain, normally what should happen is, like, you know, people start using it, and you see slowly and slowly, like, it's getting bigger and bigger. But instead, what's going on is that the mempool was full, then suddenly, like... I think it was somebody that posted a bot that was kind of front-running the tickers or something like this. And suddenly, like, the traffic goes down, and, like, the mempool is almost empty. And then suddenly it starts again.

[01:08:30] Nicolas Dorier: So it's not like... It's not something that is organic. It's something that is sudden. And so it means that... It means two things. It's either, like, a hype, and if it's a hype, it will pass by itself. Like, you know, we got the NFT hype on Ethereum, and it passed by itself. Or it's, like, somebody that is trying to purposefully, like, trying to spam the blockchain for some reason. I have no fucking idea what passed through their head. Or maybe it's a bit of both. You know, they say, oh, we will do that on Bitcoin.

[01:09:02] Nicolas Dorier: So it's like [unclear: to piss off the maximalists]. I don't know. I don't know. For me, it's like completely mysterious. But anyway, I think I will be more patient than them, and I will end up, like, consolidating with one satoshi per byte at the end of the day. So I'm not too bothered. Just have to be patient.

[01:09:24] Vlad Costea: Yeah, you did touch upon a very sensitive topic there. Because is it really spam if they're paying a fee? Because the fee itself is the anti-spam mechanism.

[01:09:38] Nicolas Dorier: Like, I call it spam because I think it's all shit. But, like, I'm against trying to do something against it. That's my point. I call it spam. I think it's shit. I think it's better if it's not there. I think it's, like, hurting the network and all those things. But on the other hand, I think it should... like, nothing should be done against it from the Bitcoin Core side, for people that want to block it. So there is, like, some talk about mining pools trying to block it.

[01:10:15] Nicolas Dorier: Like, I think it's OCEAN mining or stuff like this. My point is, I think it's up to the miners to decide what they do. And there is, I think, Stratum V2 that tries to give this power to individual miners. And if individual miners had this power, then there is no, you know, there is no more drama. The only drama we got is because, like, some mining pool decides to enforce those rules. That's it.

[01:10:44] Vlad Costea: Oh, it's more than that. But it's pretty good marketing for that mining pool, for the record. Everyone's talking about them, even though they only mined two blocks since they started.

[01:10:58] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. I mean, I'm annoyed by it, but I don't think anything should be done for it. Nothing should be done at the Bitcoin Core layer, for sure. And, like, if some people in the community want to modify their node to block those transactions, or, like, some miners decide to filter the transactions, I think they should be able to do it if they want. But I don't think it's something that as a community we need to, you know, say, oh, we need to fight against it. I don't think there is anything to fight against.

[01:11:34] Vlad Costea: I agree with you. I mean, the fact that they pay such high fees for this stuff that may or may not get market traction only proves that they value the Bitcoin network enough to do it on the base layer. And if somebody else objects and says, yeah, they shouldn't be paying such small fees for what they're doing, then the answer is, why don't you outbid them? Because this is what the block space is. It's available out there, and it goes to the highest bidder. So if you don't want these people to get it cheaply, the best mechanism is to use the free market to outbid them, to make it expensive for them to do it.

[01:12:12] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, definitely. And there is also, you know... Like, there was lots of NFTs on Ethereum, of course. And what happened is that some lower-fee chains, like Polygon, appeared to try to get their NFT hype. And I'm wondering, if I had more time, I would try to port everything that the Ordinals community did on Litecoin, and try to market it as a superior alternative to Bitcoin, so they can move to another chain. But yeah, I'm more busy on BTCPay Server. So I don't know...

[01:12:49] Vlad Costea: There's already Lite... Litecoin Ordinals. So, oh, okay, someone ported it. It's nothing new. It's just that nobody really uses Litecoin for that, because they don't see the value, right? They're not sure if the stuff is going to be there. Even though Litecoin is probably the best... I'm going to say something very blasphemous here, but Litecoin has a lot of adoption at ATMs, exchanges and stuff. So when the fees are high in Bitcoin, you can safely use Litecoin, because it's been around for 12 or 13 years or something. So it works.

[01:13:24] Vlad Costea: It has its own proof of work algorithm. It has dedicated miners. It even secures Dogecoin. I'm not saying you should buy or use Litecoin or Dogecoin. I'm just saying that if you want to make payments with low fees, it's more reliable than something like Liquid, which has no merchant adoption, no ATM support, no nothing. You have to swap it. So at one point you do have to make an on-chain transaction, which is right now very expensive. But where was I going with this?

[01:14:02] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, using another chain for this kind of use case makes sense. And it's kind of like, in some of my tweets, actually, I touched a bit on the subject, where I said we should apologize for all the bad things we said to Ethereum, because, like, in a way, Ethereum kind of protected us from all of this stuff. Like, for a while it was... everything was on Ethereum, and we could enjoy lower fees thanks to this.

[01:14:35] Nicolas Dorier: So, like, I will not pump them, but in a way I'm glad they exist. Because, like, if everything was on Bitcoin, it would be way more expensive. So why not, they can use it. I mean, I will not store my money there, but if other people do, why not?

[01:14:58] Vlad Costea: Yeah. You have a chapter in your book that's called "Proof of Burn and Reputation." And what I can tell you is that Casey Rodarmor, I think that's how you pronounce his last name, has created this protocol which allows you to teleburn your Ethereum NFTs and inscribe them on Bitcoin. So he has commodified this, made it possible for people to burn their tokens, because that's what an NFT is, on other chains, and bring it as an Ordinal inscription. And if you look at some of these assets on ordinals.com or whatever, you're going to see that there is a classification there to see if they have been teleburned from other chains, and most of them are.

[01:15:43] Vlad Costea: And I think right now the guys who spent a lot of money to create NFTs on Ethereum and put them on OpenSea and whatever are seeing an opportunity to do it on Bitcoin, which they know is proof of work, which they know has higher value and is going to be around for a much longer time than Ethereum. Possibly it will outlive us. So they see a lot of potential, and they are willing to pay high fees for this, because you never know when this marketplace is going to blow up, maybe not in a couple of years.

[01:16:20] Vlad Costea: But I guess you're old enough, and you have been around for long enough, to remember Rare Pepes and Spells of Genesis and stuff like that. In its time, they were giving them away for free, just trading them within a small community. And then all of a sudden there was a boom. There was a Pepe coin, Pepe Cash, I think that's what it was called. And even after that one, which was in 2017 or 2018, three or four years later, it came back, and right now there are collectors of Rare Pepes.

[01:16:52] Vlad Costea: And I'm not sure if culturally we're going to have phenomena like Rare Pepe, other collections that are just as relevant, maybe Bored Apes or whatever, but it can happen. That's what I'm saying. These markets are not entirely rational. They're based more on the emotional attachment of someone to some sort of asset that was issued on a blockchain. And it's just collectors trading stuff. It's a small niche, and not too many people understand this. Is Bitcoin designed for this? No. Can it do this very well? Yes. Can we stop it?

[01:17:31] Vlad Costea: Yes, if we had privacy. I think this is my argument. If you don't like this, the best way to stop it is to add confidential transactions. And you don't have to add the 2014 research from Blockstream, which was added into Liquid and makes transactions [unclear: a dozen] times larger.

[01:17:50] Nicolas Dorier: Why do you say, like, confidential transactions can stop that?

[01:17:56] Vlad Costea: Because that's what is going to make the currency truly fungible. And if you don't know where it comes from, you're not going to be able to distinguish between them.

[01:18:08] Nicolas Dorier: So in Liquid, typically, like, Confidential Assets is hiding the amount and is hiding the asset that is being transmitted. But you still have the transaction graph that is well alive. So even that is not totally fungible. Like, it's still... even if...

[01:18:34] Nicolas Dorier: My point is that even if, like... It's one thing to make a currency that can be fungible, and another thing to make a currency that makes it impossible to make something fungible. I think if somebody is dedicated to use the currency in a non-fungible way, they can do it, for the fact that, so long as they can embed some arbitrary data on the blockchain, I think they will always be able to do so. I think that's inevitable. So I don't think we can fight this. I don't think we need to fight it.

[01:19:16] Nicolas Dorier: I'm annoyed by it, but what are you going to do?

[01:19:21] Vlad Costea: Well, maybe confidential transactions with a mixer, and that's going to make it much more private.

[01:19:28] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, yeah. But, like, those people don't care about confidentiality, or, like, if Bitcoin was fungible, they would find a way to use it in a non-fungible way to make NFTs. I don't think there is any way to stop them, even with Confidential Assets.

[01:19:45] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but this begs the question why this is not being done on Monero or Zcash.

[01:19:54] Nicolas Dorier: So there is no reason, because Zcash can be... You can do it without... by using non-shielded addresses. I think it's just, like, Bitcoin is the most popular. That's why they do it. Like, why don't they do it on Litecoin?

[01:20:11] Vlad Costea: They do it on Litecoin, but it's not super popular.

[01:20:14] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. Yet.

[01:20:15] Vlad Costea: Yes. I hope it becomes... That would actually be fun. But interestingly, so what's happening with Litecoin is proving that this medium of exchange narrative is not as strong as we think, because the usage has gone up about 10x in the last five years or something, but the price hasn't. So there is no real correlation with the transaction volume that's happening every day if people don't actually hold it, and it doesn't become scarce, and there's not increasing demand as a result of that.

[01:20:53] Vlad Costea: So there is some merit to this whole HODLing meme. Even if I try to disprove it sometimes and say it's kind of stupid if we never use our money, there seems to be some merit to it.

[01:21:08] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. I mean, never using your money is using your money. My point is that, say, holding money is using money, because when you have savings, even if your money never moves, your behavior is changing. If your boss is threatening to fire you, you can say, oh, I don't give a shit, fuck you. It's because you have money in savings. So you are kind of using this money without moving it. So HODLing, I think lots of... When you say... Oh, for people that say, oh, HODLing doesn't serve any purpose if you don't ever use your money, I will say, no, you use your money even if it doesn't move. Like, the way you are behaving is different than if you didn't have this stack.

[01:21:59] Vlad Costea: Yeah. I was going to ask you, since we talked about your past and the work that you've done previously to BTCPay and during BTCPay... We talked about some controversial topics today, which are pretty hot and may not be hot in four years if somebody listens to this, even though you never know what's going to happen. But I didn't ask you too much about the future. What's the future planning for you, or what are you hoping that you're going to achieve in the next couple of years?

[01:22:31] Nicolas Dorier: Frankly, I don't know. I don't know. My focus is really on BTCPay Server. I'm trying to be very responsive to people that are using BTCPay Server daily. And the more people use BTCPay and are critical, the more interested I am, because I'm not a merchant myself. So I'm using BTCPay by myself, but, like, some parts of BTCPay Server can be improved, and I need, like, direct feedback for that. So I'm very happy to see that. I'm kind of interested in Nostr, how it's turning out.

[01:23:15] Nicolas Dorier: So Nostr, I was completely ignoring it for a long time, and I see it still sticking around. And I've been to Nostr Asia in Tokyo, and I saw some talks that kind of, like, kind of sold me on the idea. Like, do you know Nostr Connect Wallet... Nostr Wallet Connect? Does it ring a bell to you?

[01:23:44] Vlad Costea: I heard about WalletConnect, but not in the Nostr context.

[01:23:47] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, Wallet Connect. So basically, like, it's done by the Nostr community. I don't know if it's directly related to Nostr or not, but they call it Nostr Wallet Connect. So it's kind of a protocol where you can connect your Lightning node, a protocol for pulling money out of your Lightning node. So imagine that you have some web extension. You use Wallet Connect, and then you can use your wallet extension to connect, or not to pull the money, but it's kind of standard. And the nice thing about this standard is that the Nostr community is kind of trying to develop interesting tools.

[01:24:28] Nicolas Dorier: So for example, Prism, I don't know if you have seen, but when you receive money somewhere, you automatically forward it to several places. So imagine that you are a streamer or a podcaster like you. People send you tips, and, like, a part of the tip goes to the sponsor, part of the tip goes to you, this type of thing. Or, like, a subscription, for example. Every day, like, get $2 out of somebody. Or if you want to support somebody on the long term, every day sending them $10 or something like that.

[01:25:01] Nicolas Dorier: Like, it's kind of a use case that can be done, that some applications are allowing to do. And they use this Nostr Wallet Connect for doing that. And I'm kind of interested by this, because we have all this community, this Nostr community, that is building lots of infrastructure. And I'm thinking, if we are kind of integrating with their protocol, then, you know, you can combine with what we're doing in BTCPay Server, and kind of, like, have a, how can I say, explosion of combinations of tooling that become possible, and unlock some stuff that we did not think about before.

[01:25:48] Nicolas Dorier: So I'm kind of interested by this. I don't know if it will happen. I don't know if it would be the direction that the market would take, but I find it interesting.

[01:26:01] Vlad Costea: Yeah. I don't know about Nostr Wallet Connect. I just want to add that it was built into Alby, which is a very feature-packed Lightning wallet. It has lots of extensions and integrations. It also does identity. It does a lot of cool stuff. I've recorded an interview with the creator of Alby, whose name is Michael Bumann, and that's part of the podcast for anyone who's curious to check that out. But I'll let you continue. Talk more about your future plans, Nicolas.

[01:26:30] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. I mean, I don't have a long-term future plan. Like, I'm living day by day, like, working my ass off on BTCPay Server, like trying to reply to bugs, review PRs. Like, I see how it goes. Like, the only thing I can tell you is the direction BTCPay Server is taking these days. It's... We noticed that if you want to reach hyperbitcoinization, like, you need to reach people locally. So, you know, we are all connected on the internet.

[01:27:13] Nicolas Dorier: When we go to conferences, everybody knows each other, because we're connected on Twitter and we are connected on the internet. But most of adoption comes from people that are locally connected. So for example, retail merchants. Retail merchants don't give a shit about Bitcoin on the internet. They will never, like, look at podcasts about BTCPay Server, except if they got [unclear: told] by somebody else. But still, most of those people are interested in Bitcoin, but basically they don't want to put their hands in the dirt by themselves.

[01:27:52] Nicolas Dorier: Instead, they want to connect with what I call Bitcoin service providers. And to me, Bitcoin service providers need to be local people, like, handholding local businesses. And in BTCPay Server, the direction we are taking right now is trying to make tooling to help those local Bitcoin service providers to make a profit by spreading Bitcoin locally. So an example we are kind of looking at right now... So you know LSPs, right? You know, Lightning service providers.

[01:28:33] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. Basically they take care of channel management, they take care of liquidity, but every time there is a payment, they can take a cut. I don't like this model, because there is only a few wallets around here in Lightning. Instead, I wish that those Bitcoin service providers that are locally onboarding people on Bitcoin do this role. And so BTCPay will provide them tools to do that. But on top of this, those LSPs can be in a good position to create what we call a stable channel.

[01:29:07] Nicolas Dorier: Did you hear about that, stable channels, or DLCs? So basically, like, a merchant doesn't want Bitcoin. Most of the time they don't... It's not... They don't want Bitcoin. They don't want to be exposed to the volatility of Bitcoin, right? And the common way of doing that, people were using, is that, oh, why don't they use Tether? But Tether is a shitcoin. I will tell it straight, like, Tether is a shitcoin. You are trusting somebody else that can be shut down, that can rug pull you.

[01:29:42] Nicolas Dorier: You don't want to trust that. And it's not Bitcoin. Instead, what you can do is, if you have a local Bitcoin service provider and you're a merchant, you connect a wallet between them, like, the merchant... you know, route payments to the merchant. But what they can do, they can do an agreement that says, every time the price of USD goes up... no, every time the price of Bitcoin goes up, then the merchant sends money to the LSP, and the reverse: if Bitcoin goes down, then it's the reverse. And they both can settle every five minutes, you know, sending payments back and forth to protect against the volatility of Bitcoin.

[01:30:25] Nicolas Dorier: And this is a typical service that I think would interest merchants, if it was technically simple, and that can work locally. So, like, the direction of BTCPay Server will be to empower local people to spread Bitcoin locally. That's our main objective, I would say.

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[01:31:28] Vlad Costea: That's really cool, because as far as I know, BTCPay still relies on a full node.

[01:31:34] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. So here is the thing. Those LSPs, those Bitcoin... So those Bitcoin service providers will have a full node, of course. But I don't expect now... I tried to go this route, to expect merchants to have their own full node, but I don't think it will happen. Instead, what we can do is, for example... So the BTCPay app that we are working on. So the idea is that the merchant has the keys on his device, but can use the infrastructure of the LSP for everything Lightning-related. And we want to make it so that even if the LSP goes down, then the merchant can connect to another LSP somewhere else to get back his money.

[01:32:19] Nicolas Dorier: And so that's the kind of direction we try to take. Like, we really want to take this model of, okay, the end users, which are merchants, retail merchants, don't want to run a node, but they don't mind paying somebody that they know locally for the service of providing them Bitcoin services. But at the same time, we need to protect those Bitcoin service providers from legal liabilities, which means if they go bust, they should not lose the money of their merchants. So that's about what we are working on.

[01:32:56] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And I can tell you that I have four sponsors for this season, two of them... and there's IVPN. IVPN is a VPN service that has been around for about two decades now, and they have adopted Bitcoin for almost 10 years for payments. And there's also... I don't want to say something wrong...

[01:33:17] Nicolas Dorier: We're sponsored by them too.

[01:33:21] Vlad Costea: There's also Cryptosteel, which has been around for 10 years designing metal backups, and both of them use BTCPay for their payments.

[01:33:31] Nicolas Dorier: Yep. IVPN, like, is also one of those sponsors.

[01:33:37] Vlad Costea: That's super cool. I had no idea we have this in common. I'm not sure about Satochip. I haven't checked out how they process their payments, but let me...

[01:33:48] Nicolas Dorier: Satochip? I don't know. I don't know them.

[01:33:56] Vlad Costea: So they have the Satodime, which is like a card that's used for payments, and it's sort of like the Opendime, but open source. It uses this smart card chip to enclose the secret.

[01:34:15] Vlad Costea: Let me see how you can pay here. Uh-huh. Pay with Bitcoin.

[01:34:23] Vlad Costea: Oh, it's handled by Coinbase, so not very cool. I'm going to tell them to use BTCPay. Maybe I can get you in contact. They're Belgian, so they speak French also.

[01:34:35] Nicolas Dorier: Yes, with pleasure.

[01:34:37] Vlad Costea: Yeah, we got to put BTCPay everywhere.

[01:34:43] Nicolas Dorier: Yep, spreading the word.

[01:34:46] Vlad Costea: I'm not sure if I have any more questions at this time for you, Nicolas, except for: what's your favorite Final Fantasy game?

[01:34:55] Nicolas Dorier: That's... So it's big. So I don't know if it's VII or VIII. Maybe VII first, VIII second.

[01:35:05] Vlad Costea: Really, VIII? We spoke about Final Fantasy IX when we met in Prague, and I expected you to have that one.

[01:35:12] Nicolas Dorier: IX, I really loved it as well, but I think it's VII, VIII, IX. IX was one of my best as well. I really loved it. But I think all of them, when I was a kid, each of them, I maybe finished them five times each. Maybe VII, I finished it 10 times. It's really a game I played so much.

[01:35:31] Vlad Costea: Did you unlock the Knights of the Round summon?

[01:35:35] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah, I beat all the Weapons, so yeah.

[01:35:46] Vlad Costea: That's crazy. How did you know to do that? Were you using magazines or something?

[01:35:53] Nicolas Dorier: Wait, the first time? So I don't remember if I used magazines or just the internet. Like, we had a website called jeuxvideo.com. So it was a French website, very early on the internet, with all the video game tips. So maybe I saw that there, how to get a gold chocobo. But I think the first time I got it is that I beat the Weapon in the desert, and from that I could get a gold chocobo. And then I could, like, get the Knights of the Round. The first time, I think I did it that way.

[01:36:35] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and there was another one in the submarine section. I'm not sure if it was the Weapon...

[01:36:41] Nicolas Dorier: Emerald Weapon, yeah. The Emerald Weapon was very tough to beat. But once you have, like, Knights of the Round, it's, like, doable. You know, at the time I was a kid, I got so much free time. So, like, I would spend days trying to beat them. And so at one point, by pure luck, I would manage to get it.

[01:37:05] Vlad Costea: Who was in your party when you were beating Emerald Weapon?

[01:37:10] Nicolas Dorier: I don't remember. My favorite at one point was, I think it was Cloud, Barret and Red XIII.

[01:37:22] Nicolas Dorier: Then in another game, I really liked Tifa and Yuffie, and the rest I didn't really use them.

[01:37:35] Vlad Costea: Oh, so you don't care about Cid or Vincent Valentine?

[01:37:38] Nicolas Dorier: No. Cid and Vincent Valentine, I didn't choose them too much. No, I think I really liked Tifa, because her last limit was making lots of damage.

[01:37:52] Nicolas Dorier: Barret as well. And Cid, I don't remember, he was doing lots of damage for his last one. And Vincent, I didn't really like it. Like, Cait Sith, I didn't really like him as well.

[01:38:03] Vlad Costea: Oh yeah, I even forgot about Cait Sith.

[01:38:08] Nicolas Dorier: He what?

[01:38:09] Vlad Costea: I even forgot about Cait Sith, even though he had an important role in the story. Yeah. I think his name is Reeve, among the Shinra executives.

[01:38:20] Nicolas Dorier: Yes. Yes.

[01:38:21] Vlad Costea: We're such nerds right now. I'm not sure how many people are still listening and caring about this, but Final Fantasy VII is a big deal for our generation.

[01:38:33] Nicolas Dorier: Yes, very inspiring game.

[01:38:36] Vlad Costea: Did you try the remake?

[01:38:39] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, of course, yeah. The remake, I like it. Like, I think it's a great game. I would not say it's my favorite game ever. I think it's up to the expectations. I'm a bit disappointed about the strange shit they did with the Whispers, but maybe it has good justification in the next season. So I'm waiting to see.

[01:39:04] Vlad Costea: Yeah, they're going to have a new release in early 2024. It's called Rebirth, and it seems like they're going to bring back Zack Fair, who is the guy that Cloud thinks he is. I don't know if this is a spoiler for anyone. It's a game that has been around for 26 years. Wow, that's insane. 26 years since Final Fantasy VII came out. But it's really impressive. And let me tell you this before we end this call: I sometimes think that Bitcoin is Shinra. Why? So you have this giant idea about how to make energy more efficient, right?

[01:39:48] Vlad Costea: Then it provides to everyone a cheap and reliable way to generate electricity. Not just electricity, to make energy available to everyone. And it's not just that. It ends up having a space exploration program. It ends up having all the politicians under control. There's one point in the Shinra building where you meet the mayor of Sector 6, or was it Sector 9, I don't remember the name of the sector, but you meet the mayor, and he's like, oh, I'm just a bureaucrat who's employed by Shinra to act like there's some...

[01:40:26] Nicolas Dorier: Oh yeah, in the building, right? Yeah, in the big building, in the library, right?

[01:40:31] Vlad Costea: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:40:32] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, I remember this one.

[01:40:35] Vlad Costea: So it's definitely interesting when you think about this, that Bitcoin is Shinra, except that it's up to us to make sure it doesn't become evil and it retains its mission.

[01:40:46] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, I remember. There's an old guy in the library in the HQ of Shinra.

[01:40:57] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Well, when you think about it back... So this is a spoiler once again, but it gets revealed later in the game that Shinra is not even the enemy. And it's actually the crazy alien DNA guy named Sephiroth, and he's the one who is actually a threat to the planet. Everything else is just like a blip on the radar.

[01:41:19] Nicolas Dorier: Actually, it's more Jenova. Like, the main... the roots of the disaster is not even Sephiroth, it's Jenova. Because Sephiroth became like this because he got injected with the Jenova cells.

[01:41:42] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but didn't Cloud also get that?

[01:41:46] Nicolas Dorier: Yes, Cloud got that as well. I don't remember why Cloud managed to... Because Cloud, like, for the whole game, he's still controlled by Jenova, because Jenova kind of rewrote his memories. But I think it's when he finally falls into the river of life, the Lifestream or something like this, that he kind of becomes himself.

[01:42:11] Vlad Costea: He's trying to figure out his past.

[01:42:14] Nicolas Dorier: Yes.

[01:42:15] Vlad Costea: That's really messed up.

[01:42:17] Nicolas Dorier: It's really Jenova that is pulling the strings all the time. Like, trying to make the Reunion, to try to bring back the corpse together. It's always Jenova, the bad guy here.

[01:42:29] Vlad Costea: I didn't think about this. I always start out with Sephiroth, that's why.

[01:42:34] Nicolas Dorier: I don't know, but I feel like in the new Final Fantasy VII, they will try to make Sephiroth a bit nicer, in a way. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on that. But not making him nicer, but at least make people more understand that he's just a puppet of Jenova, more than the main bad guy.

[01:43:03] Vlad Costea: I honestly can't wait to play that. It's the only game on the PlayStation that I expect right now. Everything else is on the Nintendo side. Are you also into Nintendo?

[01:43:17] Nicolas Dorier: I don't play too much Nintendo these days. These days, I'm playing Yakuza, "The Man That Cannot Be Named," on Yakuza. Like, I really like Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio. Like, they're making games... They are so good at recycling, because basically it's always in Japan, it's always the same assets, but they always change the story. But somehow their story is, like, it's another level. It's really amazing stories. So always looking forward to the games.

[01:43:53] Vlad Costea: Did you like Final Fantasy X?

[01:43:56] Nicolas Dorier: X, I liked it, but I won't say it's my favorite compared to VII, VIII, IX.

[01:44:01] Vlad Costea: Oh, really? I think X is my favorite, but it might be only because I played it first.

[01:44:07] Nicolas Dorier: So also, X, if you wanted to go for, like, finishing 100%, it was tough. Way tougher than all the other ones, I think.

[01:44:16] Vlad Costea: Oh yeah, because you had a lot of other stuff. You had the arena where you could fight beasts, but you also had to learn a foreign language, the Al Bhed. And there was a lot of stuff to do.

[01:44:28] Nicolas Dorier: You had to beat the Aeons in the dark mode. I don't remember what they call that, but...

[01:44:34] Vlad Costea: Oh yeah, yeah. Dark Aeons.

[01:44:36] Nicolas Dorier: Dark Aeons, yeah. It was very tough. I never managed to finish 100%.

[01:44:41] Vlad Costea: It's too much. I mean, the satisfaction is minimal, because you can see what happens on YouTube. And once you see it, you're like, is this it? Someone spent like 100 hours to train for this, and that's all you get. Plus, to get the Celestial Weapons... They're Ultimate in other games, but these are Celestial Weapons. There's... You have to play Blitzball for Wakka, and that sucks, because Blitzball is a terrible mini-game. And for [unclear: Tidus's] weapon, you have to dodge thunders like 50 times or something, or 100 times.

[01:45:16] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was too much, yeah.

[01:45:20] Vlad Costea: Yeah, they went too far with that. But the story, I think, is my favorite. And the characters, and that love story.

[01:45:28] Nicolas Dorier: The story was good, yeah. Yeah, but maybe because I was younger, maybe, like, VII, VIII, IX got more impact because of that as well.

[01:45:39] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but VII, I agree with you, is a masterpiece. VIII, I didn't get too much into it, because I don't like the junction system. And I also hate the fact that if you play more and you grind a bit to level up, the monsters get tougher. So it makes no sense for you to even fight. You can just flee the fight.

[01:45:59] Nicolas Dorier: So one time I decided to... One playthrough of Final Fantasy VIII I did was, I trained only one character up to level 100. You know, before going out the first time of the...

[01:46:22] Nicolas Dorier: You know, inside the university, there is a place where there is a lot of monsters. You know, you can go to training. I don't remember. It's kind of a jungle in the university. You remember that?

[01:46:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah, like a botanical garden, or a jungle?

[01:46:39] Nicolas Dorier: Yes, but it's kind of botanical, more botanical garden inside the university. And there are monsters you can train on there.

[01:46:47] Vlad Costea: Oh yeah.

[01:46:48] Nicolas Dorier: And at the beginning of the game, I decided to kill all my characters but Squall, and bring him to level 100. And I grinded until he reached level 100, only at this point. Then after, I resurrected the two other characters. And I did all the game so easily, because all the monsters were kind of the average of the levels, while Squall was 100.

[01:47:16] Nicolas Dorier: The other characters were like level 5. So, like, the monsters were very easy to beat. And, like, the bosses always had the same level, you know, the bosses don't change. So the bosses, I was just one-shotting them. So it was kind of fun. I also did one playthrough of Final Fantasy VII where I grinded until I could beat the snake, you know, in the... you know, the big snake, how would you call that? Before, normally, you need to take a chocobo and, like, traverse.

[01:47:51] Vlad Costea: Yeah. There's a desert part where there's a snake that chases you, and it's hard to avoid it.

[01:48:00] Nicolas Dorier: So basically I became strong enough to beat the snake.

[01:48:05] Vlad Costea: I think that's just before you go to the observatory. What's it called? Cosmo Canyon.

[01:48:13] Nicolas Dorier: Oh no, no. It's way before. It's way before. It's after the first city, Kalm. Then after, you need to go to the Chocobo Farm, and just next to the Chocobo Farm. So it's very at the beginning. So I grinded until, like, killing this snake.

[01:48:37] Vlad Costea: So I think Fort Condor is nearby.

[01:48:41] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah. Fort Condor is a bit after [unclear: as well]. So it was even earlier.

[01:48:46] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. But now I know why you have so much patience to build BTCPay, because you did these crazy playthroughs with a lot of grinding and leveling up, and you were able to do it only in one section.

[01:49:03] Nicolas Dorier: Yep.

[01:49:04] Vlad Costea: It wasn't fun, but you enjoyed the process afterwards, that you can one-hit most monsters.

[01:49:11] Nicolas Dorier: Yes.

[01:49:14] Vlad Costea: Was it also your gaming that got you into programming and coding?

[01:49:19] Nicolas Dorier: Yes. Yeah. I wanted to make games. So I tried to learn C, and yeah, it's what got me into it, yes.

[01:49:27] Vlad Costea: I heard a similar story from Amir Taaki this year, when we were in Prague. We were having lunch together, and he said that he became a C++ coder after playing Tomb Raider on the PlayStation. And he was trying to insert some [unclear: cheat] code into one of the serial ports to make Lara Croft, you know, reveal the boobs, to make her nude.

[01:49:53] Nicolas Dorier: And it was possible? Like, I always thought it was a myth.

[01:49:59] Vlad Costea: He apparently read that in a magazine, and he inserted the code, and nothing happened. And he was super frustrated. And at one point he was like, okay, I'm going to build my own. And he picked up a C++ book on how to code, and that's how he became a developer. It was Tomb Raider and frustration, I guess, being a preteen wanting to see boobs. And he didn't see boobs, so he started coding to make his own, I guess.

[01:50:30] Vlad Costea: Good motivation. It's interesting how our generation got into coding. Maybe the next one is going to say, oh, I wanted to make this in Minecraft and Roblox or whatever.

[01:50:42] Nicolas Dorier: Yes, it's possible. I wonder if the [unclear: whole] generation will... One thing is that they have to learn way more layers than we had to. So in a way, it's more difficult for them, even if there are more tools.

[01:51:02] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I don't know. But when you think about it, it was much simpler 20 years ago than it is now. You don't know where to start. There's so much stuff out there.

[01:51:14] Nicolas Dorier: Yes.

[01:51:16] Vlad Costea: Anyway, thank you very much, Nicolas. This was so much fun. I feel like it wasn't work. It was just talking to you and finding out stuff.

[01:51:25] Nicolas Dorier: I remember, actually, on the PlayStation, there was a... I had some stuff. You could plug it on some port of the PlayStation, and you could access the RAM of the PlayStation and change the content of the RAM. And that's how you could cheat in some games.

[01:51:46] Vlad Costea: GameShark?

[01:51:47] Nicolas Dorier: GameShark. GameShark. Yes. So I used that, but I don't think I knew what I was doing at the time.

[01:51:58] Vlad Costea: Yeah. It was a way to insert cheat codes into games.

[01:52:03] Nicolas Dorier: Yes.

[01:52:04] Vlad Costea: But it was super nerdy. I guess you could get some presets in a book or something to be able to modify code.

[01:52:14] Vlad Costea: Fun time. Yeah. It should be super late in Japan right now. I'm happy that we got to do this.

[01:52:21] Nicolas Dorier: Oh, no worry, no worry. I do [unclear: often] meetings with BTCPay Server at the end of the day, so it's not [unclear: new].

[01:52:30] Vlad Costea: Make sure you remind Kukks and Pavlenex where they started.

[01:52:37] Nicolas Dorier: Yeah, I will.

[01:52:39] Vlad Costea: Thank you, Nicolas. I'll see you later.

[01:52:41] Nicolas Dorier: Okay. See you. Bye.