Lightning fixes the internet!
This week, in Episode 37, we start with revealing an amazing scoop on the website of The Daily Moon thanks to the integration with Mash!
After that we talk with Jared Nusinoff, the founder of Mash, a Bitcoin company trying to remonetize the internet and help people to earn more for quality content, experiences and tools!
Mash provides an integrated consumer wallet powered by Bitcoin and Lightning for any creator. And users always stay in control! They can set budgets, see all prices and auto-pay as they enjoy without any interruption.
Jared shares with us how he came up with the idea to start Mash and the challenge of making it as quick and simple for anyone to implement and understand. He states that every customer demands a different use case. Lightning is the solution to make this all possible!
Interested in earning more and receiving more quality content?
Watch or listen to the full interview or start reading below! Enjoy!
What was your first experience with the lightning network and do you still know what you did/saw at that moment?
Either paying for things via blue wallet on a few random sites – setting up a mynode node with rasperri pi and lots of overheating!
Is it possible to pay for daily needs in your neighborhood with Lightning?
I need to buy food, pay bills, and some entertainment. So no. Majority of experiences don’t accept lightning.
Do you envision a future in which Lightning will be used worldwide as a medium of exchange? And if so, what do we need to get there?
Education. Time. New Use cases.
When we spoke to Fiatjaf in our show he kept saying that we need more use cases! Of course the core protocol needs to be continued to develop, but the use cases are the most important for more adoption. Do you agree with him? And what do we miss in your opinion?
You need both. Use cases, yes. Protocol improvements to help with security, speed, interoperability and enabling more use cases in an open inter-operable way.
How important is self-custody for you? And do you think there will be an easy way for people in the future to still be able to choose for self-custody?
Very important. Especially for savings/vault assets. AND for enabling censorship resistance use of bitcoin + lightning. That being said, it isn’t required for every experience.
Nostr is a “new” protocol for decentralized social media. Can Mash be an ideal use case to work with nostr?
Potentially. Really depends on how things manifest. Note: I’m not an expert in Nostr
What’s your vision about interoperability of Lightning implementations like: CoreLightning, LND, Liquid, Acinq, etc?
We need full interoperability for use cases, changing services/implementations and more. Additionally it’s
important that all the layer 3s, applications and such, like Mash are interoperable with each other. MORE than just invoices.
If you look back to the last years of Lightning development and have to look 4 years in the future, where do you think we are with Lightning by then?
The first few years were making it work. Still LOTS to do there. The future, ubiqituous around the web – if the right use cases are built and appear.
Do you run a node and what lightning implementation do you prefer at the moment? LND (lightning labs), c-lightning (blockstream), eclair (Acinq)?
Personally – have used LND on getumbrel, mynode and voltage. We’ve explore the various
implementations for foundation of Mash + connecting experiences to Mash, there are pros/cons to each and that keeps changing such as…
What do you see as the most important feature for the Lightning Network that is currently missing?
Speed & Latency. Tools for performance.
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With Mash you want to help people earn more for what they are building, creating and developing. How did you come up with starting Mash?
Lots of happy accidents in my career + interests such as. Doing ads at google, being a hobbyiest and trying to get trustworthy information, selling things online, doing payments at google and seeing broken rails.
The connect the world team is already working together with your team at mash for a few months now. Testing out things on the website and much more… What kind of and how many options do creators have at this moment already to monetize their content ?
You can basically create anything to charge for. Any event or action. To make it easy we have lots of little widgets like X, Y, Z, and lots more coming. The challenge is making it as quick and simple for anyone to implement and understand best practices.
How does the implementation exactly work and how can users start using the Mash wallet?
Earning with Mash: Copy and paste a few lines of code. Setup some pricing and away you go. Consumers: Go to connect the world. Create and account/login. Buy a Wallet or Activate it by sending lightning to it.
I immediately believe that many creative makers bring all kinds of ideas to Mash. In this phase of experimenting, does Mash do a lot of custom made work? Or are there a lot of reusable features/options?
We do custom work now for just about every partner – but those custom widgets/components are generalized for those uses cases for anyone to use in a variety of different ways.
In a Twitter Space you did with Nate from Voltage you shared some interesting examples for a musician: He or she could have some kind of donation jar that fans can fill and if it hits a particular number extra bonus songs could be released instantly.
It seems that more monetization is mainly achieved through an increase of interactivity and more contact with followers or fans. Is it true that this is just as important?
Different use cases for different things/creators/people. Community based, interactive based, consumption based. They will all be very important, but in different amounts of different creators and builders.
How do you see the future of how content will be consumed?
INSERT RANT!
It would be amazing if Mash as a product will be able to help creators into the Bitcoin and Lightning world. How important is it to make your product as easy to use as possible and with the best UX to achieve more adoption?
Step 1. Build the platform Step 2. Build the use cases Step 3. Make it as easy as possible to use. Critical to success.
In the Quick Talk we talked about Mash reducing the incentive to abuse privacy, because data scraping will have less effect to earn more money. So incentives are changing…
Can you explain again how Mash is able to have an effect on the quality of content?
Long answer rant.
Do you see Mash develop in the future more as an infrastructure that a lot of other players can also use?
Mash also wants to help people to gain more customers due to there being no commitment or large up-front fee. The main goal is now learning and more adoption.
I understand that you all work as a fully remote team! How big is your team at the moment?
We are 7 people… soon to be 8. Fully remote and spread across Toronto, San Diego, Spain, Florida, Iceland, and soon to be LA.
Has the bear market a negative effect on the further developments of Mash?
What bear market!?!? Price isn’t an indicator of “bear” market. We are in a bull market for lightning. Aren’t nodes growing? Aren’t users of Ring of Fire growing? Aren’t use cases expanding? Aren’t teams growing. More conferences. BULL MARKET
What are future developments you’re working on?
SO MANY!
If listeners are interested in Mash and want to try it. How can they best do it?
Earn with mash -> check out website, and fill out the form, explore the getting started guide with demos/overviews. Very soon, self serve sign-up and lots of pre-built widgets. CONSUMERS: Check out the CTW experiences dropping soon!
Really easy question, when will it be possible for users to use their own node or lightning wallet when surfing on the web and using Mash?
That’s a hard question! Our platform is built that way. People who are monetizing will be first – but we need to care about speed/performance… let me contextualize a bit.
What is the revenue model of mash? How is Mash gonna make money now or in the future.
Goal 1 is to help people monetizing earn 10X-1000X more money. Ads just don’t work. Then it will likely be a % of those earning
s.Are you guys thinking about integrating LNauth or other LN tools/functionalities? for example log in with an LN wallet instead of making an account.
Yes. But like anything we have SO MUCH to do!
Alby is a browser plugin that makes paying for online content easier. Do you, in your opinion, sail in the same waters? and if not, can you point out the differences between Alby and Mash.
I’ll answer this live.
Do you think Mash can also work in brick and mortar environments? And for a street artist for example?
Focus is paramount. While it can, this isn’t our focus. There are lots of great products for this already.
What content creator do you have on your wish list to use Mash?
Connect the world! We are focused on helping all creators. No favorites. Yes, some larger ones are GREAT for exposure, but we will get there 🙂
What is the most noteworthy insight you learned about the Lightning Network while working on Mash?
Difficulty with a user running their own node securely, safely, without the risk of catastrophic loss/ downtime and having it being performent + fast. It’s just not that easy.
What’s the biggest problem you encountered with building Mash ?
We have lots of decisions every day, big and small. The challenge is making sure they all add up to an amazing experinece. There are also LOTS of things we want to build, but we have to remain focused. Staying focused!