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What's going on with V4VApp and a bit of Podping and Pingslurp News

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Dr Brian of London ✅
@brianoflondon
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I'm delinquent in updating here but part of the reason is that most of the day my screen looks like this and I've even become a Hive Witness....

and honestly I'm so heavily focused on pushing out new stuff that I don't come back here and tell you about it enough.

The Philosophy of V4V.app on Hive

The way I view @v4vapp and its development is a public good for Hive as a whole. I want the system itself to be able to self sustain: i.e. a competent operator willing to invest time and some BTC could run a node like this and pay for the hardware and their time. For it to be reasonable that more than one of these bridge gateway's operate, the volume will need to increase, but I believe that will continue.

A large volume of smaller transactions bumps the overall retained value up, I strongly feel that at these small conversions should be made as cheaply as possible to give Hiveans a quick way of accessing the wider variety of services which the VC funded Lightning world is creating.

What's Next

My current funding proposal, which sits at 5th in the list right now, runs out in just under one month. I will be putting in a new proposal in the next couple of days to continue all the work I've been able to do on Hive related projects like @v4vapp and @podping. I would NEVER have been able to do this without all of your support, votes and the DHF. At best this would be a few grabbed hours a few nights per week instead of what has become a full time job.

I will probably ask again for 6 months. Whilst it is easier to ask for a year, I still feel that it is a good discipline to have to renew and review on a shorter timescale than that.

I would welcome any comments here before I put in that proposal.

Review

V4Vapp

V4Vapp has been my main focus for a while now and I'm nearing the end of the current DHF funded proposal. I want to explain the progress that has been made and what still needs to be done.

v4v.app continues to work and has been pretty solid. I don't have any dissatisfied customers (if I do they haven't told me!). Especially over the last few weeks around the hard fork and Binance's Hive wallet being taken off line, I've seen a big upswing in usage. Lots of new people trying out the service.

I need to do a lot of work on the back end metrics but more than 220 Hive accounts have tried the service, more than 140 are repeat customers. The total money flowing through the system according to my rough calc is:

Total Turnover since March in each of the three currencies I deal with is:

  • 62,744,247 sats
  • 26,922 Hive
  • 14,351 USD

For the last 30 days the numbers are:

  • 15,613,927 sats
  • 6,456 Hive
  • 3,069 USD

Notes:

  1. these figures are after excluding my own accounts "brianoflondon" and "v4vapp.dhf" which I've used for testing quite a bit. Some of that use I'd say could legitimately be included as it pays for my Podcasting 2.0 sat donations, but I want to be transparent.

  2. You shouldn't add those together, they are the amounts for transactions recorded when they happened. The total value retained by the system in terms of fees is around 275 USD which is around 2% but doesn't account for exchange rate fluctuations.

  3. This completely excludes streaming sats and boosts for Podcasting 2.0. The individual transaction numbers for those are so high but the overall values pretty low. I'll have to do a separate accounting for that.

And here's a graph, note that we're not even half way through November so October is the last complete month.

Accounting Systems

I'll be completely honest here: the accounting systems right now looks like this and whilst I can use it, there's a lot of work necessary to put this on a footing that someone else can run:

Exchange fluctuations and Bitcoin on chain fees

Another part of the system which is under-developed is my own calculations for the specific exchange rates. I'm charging users a direct quote from an average of Coingecko or Coin Market Cap and then adding my small fee of 200 sats + 0.8%.

I'm constantly moving Bitcoin onto my node because the main flows I see are Hive/HBD to Bitcoin (about 70/30 in the direction of Hive to Bitcoin). This means I have to buy Bitcoin (I've been using Simple Swap for which I have a widget on my site) to buy Bitcoin but then it has to get INTO the Lightning system.

The main way that happens is with opening a channel or paying someone to open a channel to you. This is a black art and results in quite a bit of on-chain Bitcoin fees. That soaks up a fair proportion of the fees I'm charging. Actually working out the real fees I'm paying is probably possible, but not worth the effort.

The funding from the DHF, which is really paying for the development of the entire system, allows me not to obsess over whether I'm running a profitable exchange or not. For sure it is a thin margin but I'm confident I'm just slightly above break even.

Bitcoin Lightning Risk

The other part of this which I'm not taking into account is the at-risk capital investment of Bitcoin which sits on the system's Lightning Node. That Node is a roughly $10 per month expense paying a cloud provider (Voltage). I have been steadily growing the amount of value on that node and today it has roughly 27.5 Million Sats on it (0.27 BTC or a disastrously small $4,634 as I write this the day after the FTX apocalypse).

Lightning is a very experimental systems. There have been two critical problems with the particular Lightning software my node runs in the last 4 week alone both of which required immediate patching and could have put funds at risk.

Personally I consider the BTC on the Lightning node to be a much higher risk asset than Hive or HBD.

Hardware Costs

V4V.app currently uses 3 servers from Privex. $5, $10 and now $50 per month for a Witness Node which I'm running as Brianoflondon. That's a total of $65 per month.

The service also uses a cloud based Lightning Node from Voltage which is around $12.50 per month.

Additionally I work on two old laptops at home and a Raspberry Pi runs a second Lightning Node I use for testing.

That's a total of $77.50 per month. The $50 Hive witness is not strictly necessary for the system but I feel that with Podping and V4V.app together, I needed both the knowledge and the contribution of running my own witness.

Reviewing the last proposal

These were the goals in the last proposal:

  • Containerize the entire operation of a Hive Lightning Bridge

This has been largely done, and my present operation has run almost untouched for a month. I'm very happy with overall stability. There are quite a few bits I'd like to re-factor before I could show someone else how to run it, but the system itself is stable.

  • Work with other Hive projects to make Lightning and Hive interchangeable throughout our ecosystem

I've had a lot of discussions but this hasn't moved forward as far as I'd like. The API calls are all available and some people like @ausbitbank allow payments in Lightning for his Stable Diffusion bot on Discord but more can be done.

  • Additions to the v4v.app website such as Lightning Addresses

This was done and I'm seeing it being used, anyone on Hive can receive Lightning converted to Hive or HBD with their Hive Name @ v4v.app. This is the system behind the QR code in my footer.

  • More promotion of Value 4 Value Podcasting with Hive as the back end

I'm seeing a steady increase in podcasters on 3speak and elsewhere using the Hive/Lightning back end.

I'm working all the time with the SPK Network team including running one of the most delegated to SPK Network Nodes.

  • Explore ways of using escrow functions for larger transfers

I don't think this is a helpful feature at this time.

Other Work

Recurring Lightning Payments

I did quite a bit of work on a recurring payment system, like Patreon for example, but with Hive and Lightning. So you could set up a recurring payment to a creator or Podcast from your Hive Wallet, and they would receive Lightning or Hive. I spoke about this here. Whilst we have recurring payments on Hive there is a limitation which stopped me in my tracks. To lift that I spoke with both @howo and @blocktrades at Hivefest and created an issue on Gitlab. This is now being worked on.

Resource Credits for Podping and HF26 HF27

There were major changes to the way Resource Credits work and the other system I watch over, Podping, was particularly affected. That took up quite a bit of my time. This isn't really ready for public consumption yet but you can see the RC Dashboard I use to monitor Podping: rc.podping.org.

There is more work going on with Podping but I will make a separate post about that.

Attending HiveFest

I attended and spoke at HiveFest which I considered to be essential considering all the support I've had from the DHF. You can see my presentation here.

Podcasting 2.0

Additional to my work directly on @v4vapp, @podping and Hive I continue to contribute all the time to Podcasting 2.0. There's a lot going on in the whole eco-system and I'm always looking for ways to raise Hive's profile. The simple reality is that through Podping Hive provides a set of tools which Podcasting has never had before. This has really given Hive a level of credibility that is hard to gain. It's also still winding up some of the Bitcoin Maxis

https://twitter.com/dergigi/status/1585297598193496065

I'm still waiting for his post.

Lightning's Future

As the rest of the so called "shit coin" casino continues to explode around us like the Universe exploding at the Restaurant at the end of the Universe, two things seem to remain. Bitcoin and Hive.

Where Bitcoin goes, Lightning seems to trot along behind. My phisolophical issue with Lightning stems from the fact that because it is a non-blockchain system, built out from Bitcoin, it has no Layer 1 incentive to exist. That means it is fueled by VC money. However, their money is largely building open source tools so those will probably continue to be used even if the VC money goes away. And there seems to be a reasonable re-supply of Bitcoin Maxis who are prepared to run Lightning nodes unprofitably to "contribute" to Bitcoin even if the Bitcoin protocol gives them absolutely nothing for their service.

In the wider picture, Lightning is still a viable system for high frequency, uncensorable, point to point, small to mid value payments across the Internet. That's why I feel it is still a very promising technology to link Hive into.

What's Next

My current funding proposal, which sits at 5th in the list right now, runs out in just under one month. I will be putting in a new proposal in the next couple of days to continue all the work I've been able to do on Hive related projects like @v4vapp and @podping. I would NEVER have been able to do this without all of your support, votes and the DHF. At best this would be a few grabbed hours a few nights per week instead of what has become a full time job.

I will probably ask again for 6 months. Whilst it is easier to ask for a year, I still feel that it is a good discipline to have to renew and review on a shorter timescale than that.

I would welcome any comments here before I put in that proposal.