Olga Ukolova | Connect the World

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

It was with BlueWallet, just paying for some random stuff to a friend at some conference many years ago, soon after it was just announced. I must admit, I had no idea what Lightning was at that point from the technical perspective and I was sure I’d loose all the sats. But oh well, that didn’t happen and I was ‘Damn, ok, this thing probably works, at least to some extent. Interesting.’.

Switzerland is known for frontrunning innovations and also the adoption of bitcoin in certain parts of the economy, do you think swiss will be the first european country which adopts bitcoin as legal tender and if yes wheeeeeen?

No idea about that one and Switzerland, as liberal in this topic as it is, still has a lot of regulations that prevent the ecosystem and progress in the field to grow. I don’t expect it to become the ‘safe heaven’ of sorts soon, but in the current political frame – you never know, they do have the chance to bring back their power that was taken from them after 9/11 (banking secrecy and all).

We see more and more adoption of Lighting and Bitcoin in developing countries. What is needed to have more adoption in other countries where there is more competition with existing fiat systems?

In the more developed countries people are so used to surveillance, slow and inefficient work of banks, dictatorship that they don’t even see all that as a problem, thus they can’t accept Bitcoin and LN as a solution to that as basically they can’t answer the ‘solution to WHAT?’ question. And to do that people need education in the fields actually kind of irrelevant to Bitcoin and finance itself (math, philosophy, game theory, medicine etc) and then, when they realise the problems they have – get educated on Bitcoin. Another way to do it is a rapid change usually brought by revolutions. We actually see that now – many countries are collapsing now and having resolutions and protests. So, the peaceful possibility, probably, will not work any more. Hopefully, revolutions will wake people up and thus – help them use Bitcoin, LN, RGB for solving their problems.

The network is developing fast, but still could develop faster in a more efficient way.
What could be a solution to coordinate different developers with different ideas, timelines, roadmaps, business models in a more structured way.

Abolish woke and cancel culture and come back to the good old times of developing stuff, writing code, testing, exploring – my main remark here. ‘Cultural differences’ and brainwashing is the main obstacle I’ve faced.

Do you see Lightning and Bitcoin as a solution for all big problems in the world? For example the energy transition and the unfair distribution of wealth and power?

Bitcoin doesn’t fix human nature, but it can help with some other things 🙂

Imagine: Lightning suffers a large scale attack in the next two years. How would this happen? What would happen next? as in: in what scale is it gonna affect the adoption?

I don’t really care about the adoption, I care about progress more. Taking the current times of us entering the WWIII I think privacy-related technologies will by default be adopted and used by many. As long as guys like LL don’t create a closed ecosystem where the users would become hostages of it. But even for that situation – there are solutions built by us hehe.

With the LNP/BP Standards Association you work to oversee the development of industrial standards for Bitcoin and Lightning and to drive adoption for censorship resistant infrastructure. Why is it so important to develop these standards on top of Bitcoin and Lightning development?

If you look at how the specs in Lightning are currently put in place you’ll see that it’s even worse organised than a room of a teenager. Some standards overlap each other, some functionality is not covered at all etc. Thus, when devs or regular Joes read through the specs or GitHub issues they make a lot of mistakes, for example generalising the conclusions before digging deeper into the protocols and specs or on the contrary – not being openminded enough to start building something that has not yet been described in the text.

Thus, the importance here goes in multiple directions:

1 – Showing that if something has not yet been described in the specs doesn’t mean it’s not there in the idea, or rather, the potential of what the technology is capable of.

2 – Describing, finally, in proper terms, all of the functionality, layer by layer (not many people know that there’s Lightning Network which is very different from channels, from the protocol etc) of the techs and thus, opening up the full potential of it to every developer or simply lurking curious people.

3 – Helping developers and businesses to build their products in a better, more sustainable (in the normal, not woke sense of this word) way. I mean, Javascript-based solutions can be fancy, but they are often Trojan horses of your device, reading the data, feasting on the battery power etc.

4 – Creating a database of proven effort, not just claims or text, that would guide future thought and exploration narratives in the space.

Is the development of industry standards comparable to the developments on the internet standards as we know and use at this moment?

You can compare it in some ways of course, but they are different on the other hand.

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People have 3 different possibilities to run a node. Do they need to run a node to use the all the services in the future?

There are multiple different options: you will be able to run a node in a box (we’re partnering up with node for that), in a cloud, store it on Google drive, have a third party running it for you if needed etc. As long as you don’t lose the metadata on the assets you’re in possession of them.

If people run a Bitcoin and Lightning node at the moment, can they easily add a MyCitadel node?

So far you need to use our Rust implementation of the LN node called LNP Node, but you can use both our implementation of bitcoin node (BP Node) or Bitcoin core for the base layer.

We saw a great geeky picture on you Twitter feed from a Mycitadel.io workshop. How difficult is it to find new developers in this Space?

Depends on the level of professionalism/knowledge, language and goal. For us it’s been challenging as not too many people know Rust to the required extent.

What kind of layer 3 solutions will be the trigger for mass adoption? Defi, NFT, decentralize mobile apps, live stream (like Vimeo, youtube), podcast 2.0

Hard to say, everything is changing in the world now. I’d say private messaging should boost adoption taking into account our era of mass surveillance. BiFi (Bitcoin Finance) will help a lot, as it gives more tools for asset management, creating rights/access/ownership hierarchies of arbitrary complexity, create new types of DEXes and so on.

When thinking of a change to a multi-asset network: Do you think this will be a game changer to trigger mass adoption?

Well, Lightning Network is already a multi-asset network 🙂
But yes, I think that simple tandem of Bitcoin+LN does not cover the actual real needs of the users, thus what RGB, Storm and other protocols enable will boost the ecosystem a lot.