Koji Higashi | Connect the World

What was your first experience with the lightning network and do you still know what you did/saw at that moment?

My first experience with Lightning was playing with Acinq’s eclair testnet wallet. At the time, I was not very familiar with the concept of a Lightning channel, routing etc and using it myself really gave me a better picture of hot it worked.  The first time I managed to send and receive payments on Lightning gave me a similar feeling as when I made the first Bitcoin onchain transaction and check the record on an explorer. I was still not sure how it worked exactly but felt something new and cool was happening there.

Also, I was the first person except for the developer himself to buy a coffee with Lightning in the real world situation. (That’s a huge accomplishment!)

What security concerns of the lightning network do you think are undervalued nowadays?

Hot wallet security for routing nodes. For exchanges and large companies with a lot of funding, this can be a acceptable risk for them, but without improving this aspect, the risk for individual operators is still relatively high and routing economics won’t be decentralized.

What do you think is the most promising implementation on Layer 2 on Bitcoin? (Acinq, Lnd , c-lightning or anotha one.)

I don’t really have a strong opinion on this, but we use LND and we like their integration and appls on Umbrel. On the other hand, Core Lightning is much more efficient in dealing with routing history and both have pros and cons. Lightning is not the same as onchain and different implementations compete against each other and offer different functionalities is health.

Do you use node management services like lnnodeinsight, lnrouter or something else to get the best out of your node?

We use Amboss very often obviously but have not been able to utilize lnrouter etc much to be honest. I am definitely interested in using them to help with routing though. It’s just not enough time to try out different things and adjust the node policy manually etc.

In November last year you had some issues with cheating. What security problems did you have?

The main issue was some players basically crack the app’s code and manipulate scoring and/or beat every level in a few seconds etc. This is also very common in gaming in general bu was very annoying. The concept to put Candy Crush and Lightning micropayment’s is not that difficult but preventing cheating is in a way more challenging and something Lightning game companies are all trying to figure out.

What kind of security measures do you take against attacks?

We banned certain IPs if there are suspicious activities(unreasonably short playing time etc) , but this is a whack-a-mole and attacks never end. 

So we ended up limiting the wallets that can link to the game to ZEBEDEE and Nayuta Core. Most attacks were from custodial and non-KYC wallet such as Wallet of Satoshi. ZEBEDEE requires some identification and is game focused obviously, and for Nayuta Core, opening a channel requires some manual work and is not easily manipulated.

This may not be a often discussed point, but if you decide to integrate Lightning to your game or your app, cheat prevention is a huge area of study and there is probably not enough tool set available for this. That’s something I learned from building and maintaining Lightning Crush. (Good experience nonetheless)

How can we influence / motivate users for more adoption? What could be a key element ?

The most basic biggest thing is that more applications adopt Lightning and it becomes useful for regular users. I am a Bitcoin supporter and want more people to adopt Bitcoin and Lightning for ideological reasons as well, but I am a bigger believer in doing things that make economics sense. Convincing merchants to adopt Lightning payment or companies to integrate Lightning somehow won’t happen unless it makes business sense to them. The same goes for user adoption. So, I think it’s a simple matter of building more products and tools that are useful for people. We’ll eventually get there, but I want to help with this cause more personally as well.

What do you notice about the Bitcoin and Lightning adoption in the neighborhood where you live, Taiwan & Japan? Any merchants nearby?

Lightning merchant adoption is close to zero both in Taiwan and Japan. Some merchants in Japan in the past have adopted Bitcoin(onchain) payment but the use is minimal and most have given up on it by now. The reason is a tax system in Japan as well as a  lack of demand and understanding both by merchants and users.

There is actually an experiment Diamond Hands started doing using a lottery system recently. We are hoping something like this will indirectly help with merchant adoption in Japan and possibly in Taiwan and get more people started with Lightning.

You once wrote that the news of El Salvador and Twitter announcing Lightning integration made a lot of Japanese companies pay more attention to Lightning. Can you point out which developments you noticed exactly?

Even the mainstream media covered El Salvador and the Twitter Lightning integration news. Also after those news, it became easier for me to talk to companies and convince them of the usefulness and practicality of Lightning in general. Recent development with major retail stores in the US accepting LN will be a big signal for Japanese companies as well.

What is the reason that Lightning adoption in Asia is very low when you compare it to the rest of the world?

This is a very important question. In general, there is more concentration of Bitcoin developers in the US and Europe. They are the first people to adopt new technology and that’s the main reason why Lightning adoption is lagging behind in Asia. Mostly a lack of skilled/protocol developers in general.

The other huge factor is local communities. Countries where real Bitcoin OGs(2009-2014) are still active have usually better Lightning adoption even in Asia. Japan’s Lightning community is still relatively small but Bitcoin OGs are still more or less involved including exchange founders and they are helping maintain a strong community for adoption.

On the other hand, countries where “OGs” are considered those who started in 2017 during the Ethereum’s ICO bubble era, they tend to not understand Bitcoin and disregard it as some old tech. In my estimation, lots of Asian countries like South Korea, Taiwan are in this category and thus Bitcoin adoption is low.

You once wrote that the news of El Salvador and Twitter announcing Lightning integration made a lot of Japanese companies pay more attention to Lightning. Can you point out which developments you noticed exactly?

Even the mainstream media covered El Salvador and the Twitter Lightning integration news. Also after that news, it became easier for me to talk to companies and convince them of the usefulness and practicality of Lightning in general. Recent development with major retail stores in the US accepting LN will be a big signal for Japanese companies as well.

How do you see the role of social Lightning communities like Diamond Hands, Connect the World and many others for the adoption of Bitcoin in Lightning?

I think it’s huge and they are still under-appreciated sometimes.

Those communities are the backbone of all the activities related to Lightning. Without them, building a successful product or a company with Lightning becomes 10 times harder in my opinion. Building and maintaining an active, well-educated community is as hard and as important as a very successful company in my opinion.

El Salvador is a huge model case for this but other countries like in the US, Germany and the Netherlands also have similar stories because of those local communities. And the Diamond Hands community is doing the same in Japan.

One of my personal goals now is not only grow the community in Japan but work with communities elsewhere more actively and help establish local communities like Plebnet, Ring of Fire, Diamond Hands etc as well. In fact, I have started working on exactly that recently in Taiwan and maybe I can talk about it later.

In our last episode we spoke to Fiatjaf and he is a big supporter of more development of apps using Lightning and showing new use cases. What kind of use cases and apps could developers explore more to further help the adoption?

This is a million-dollar question to be honest lol

But my personal view is that I want to build tools or applications to help integrate Lightning into regular applications for reward distributions. There are still tools missing but microrewards will be a versatile concept that can onboard thousands of more companies and apps potentially.

Do you think it’s more important to raise attention for the use cases of Lightning instead of only building tools that let you earn sats or are focused on gains in some sort?

I think they are both important. Microrewards can be a concept to help with more adoption, but there will be many other important use cases of Lightning in the future, so we should def try to raise attention for those as well. It’s just that it’s easier to show something that works now rather than future concepts sometimes, especially for more casual users.

Fold, Casa, and Umbrel are some examples. Across the breadth of these tools (and a lot more of course!), you see 1 similarity that they all have in common. Their working on making tools more user-friendly and focusing on user experience and security. Why do you think this is so important? And will this make the difference for adoption in the near future?

This is super important. One of the issues I see with the Bitcoin community sometimes is its lack of focus on UX and other crypto communities def did the better job in this aspect.

But I think the attention level for UX has risen with Lightning projects and I think we are in the right track now. Still lots to improve though.

lightning, the solution for the scaling problem of bitcoin, or do you think it’s just a stopover?

It’s one of them but not the only solution most likely.