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Blogs & Articles: Lightning in the Wild #3: A Creative Family Innovates with Breez 🔗 3 years ago

Breez Technology - Medium

Lightning in the Wild: A Creative Family Innovates with Breez

Lightning in the Wild is the blog series where we investigate how real people are using Lightning right now and describe the experience in their own words. In this edition, we talk to Matthew Haywood, who uses Breez to share his sats and his knowledge with his family.

Fun fact that sounds more like an urban legend: bubble wrap wasn’t invented as a fun thing to pop. It wasn’t even originally intended to be packaging material. No, it was originally designed back in the 1950s as wallpaper (can you imagine? With everybody smoking??). It was then marketed as a way to keep greenhouses warm and bright (following the marketing wisdom of “if your niche is too small, find an even smaller one!”).

In the last 60 years, bubble wrap has taken the world by storm, serving a purpose the inventors never envisioned. And it has spawned further, related innovations, like the perpetual bubble wrap fidget toy.

Sooo much cooler than wallpaper. This is why it pays to watch your community. (Image: SuperSecretAgentMan)

There’s a lesson in that frivolous anecdote: you can gain power by relinquishing control. Let your creation grow organically, and it might surprise you.

When we started Breez, we called it a “bitcoin payment platform.” That’s still true, just like you can indeed cover your walls with bubblewrap. We’ve since added some further functions, but much, if not most, of the innovation comes not from how Breez is designed, but from how it’s used.

Breez and the Lightning community are tinkering with this technology and putting it out into the world. The magic happens out there, when you all start adapting it to your own lives.

Victoria Kayak and #FromTheJump Podcast each showed commercial uses for Lightning, albeit in very different businesses. Most users, though, are just people moving sats around. So we wanted to take a closer look at how one (great) guy and one (cool) family interact with Lightning via Breez. What creative ways have they found to plug our bitcoin thingee into their lives?

Matthew Haywood, a charming Welsh writer and developer, agreed to share how he uses Breez to connect to the broader bitcoin community and his own family. The result is as touching as it is impressive.

From Bitcoin to Lightning to Breez

Matthew started out with software in a more general sense before making bitcoin his life:

In 2017 I had my own software company that I’d been running for several years. … I was spending more and more time reading and thinking about Bitcoin and less and less time focusing on the company. So when I was made a couple of offers to do things in the Bitcoin space … I quickly made my favorite obsession my ‘job’ … I’m now one of those annoying people that enjoys their job.

#Humblebrag. Welcome to the community of annoying people who love their job. About 70% of zookeepers are members. Among people in the bitcoin community, it’s asymptotically high.

Matthew was already experimenting with Lightning back in 2017, and he started using Breez soon after we had released our Android and iOS apps:

I started using Breez in late 2019. In fact I still have the same channel open and have done nearly 900 Lightning transactions using it. I’ve topped up my balance a couple of times but either way, I have certainly got value for money out of the fees I paid to open channels.

His prior experience with Lightning and bitcoin was perhaps a disadvantage though, because he was pretty concerned at first about the technical issues that Breez had already solved and buried in the backend:

When I first started using Breez I was messaging their support group every day asking questions like “How do I get inbound capacity?”, “How do I manage my channels?” and kept getting the reply “You don’t need to, we manage it for you in the background”. After a few days of that I finally understood what the idea behind an LSP (Lightning Service Provider) was and I left the Breez team in peace.

Don’t sweat it. We’ve held many hands and soothed many troubled minds. It’s part of the job, and we don’t mind (just please check our tech-support wiki first!).

Soon, however, Matthew learned how simple Lightning can be:

The most important feature for me is ease of use. This is why I have been such a fan of Breez over the years — you install it and you can receive bitcoin over Lightning … It took me a while to let my experience with early Lightning network interactions fade away and now I don’t even think of the things happening “automagically” behind the scenes. That’s what a good front end should do I think, abstract away the complexities so you don’t even think there’s anything complicated going on.

That’s it. Lightning is basically simple tech ;)

Lightning Is Thicker than Water

So Matthew has performed about 900 transactions in about two years. That’s a little more than one transaction each day. We didn’t ask for the proportions, but many of those are likely to be simple payer → recipient micropayments. The bread and butter of Lightning.

But like bubblewrap, which very simple — effectively just badly bonded shower curtains — , Lightning can serve other cool, creative purposes. Matthew is a true Lightning innovator, and his family is his laboratory. Check this out:

I’ve been paying my son’s allowance in bitcoin since 2019 using Breez. He didn’t need to do anything other than install the app and then straight away he could receive bitcoin. Magic. Before that he was getting it over the main Bitcoin network and it was costing me quite a bit in fees …

Young master Haywood then spends his sats on typical teenager stuff, but he’s also learning about intertemporal currency arbitrage, a topic near to any hodler’s heart:

He uses the sats he saves to buy XBox games, in-game items, food or clothing vouchers etc using the built in Bitrefill app. Initially he used to spend most of what he got as soon as he got it (a habit from having his allowance in GBP) but, as the price of bitcoin continued to rise, those old £10 Fortnite skins he’d bought with his sats suddenly seemed very expensive purchases! He spends less and saves more now.

It might sound like marketing copy from the PR department at Bitcoin Corp., but we have documentary evidence!:

https://medium.com/media/916a930114c4b32b89974fec1845151c/href

As we’ve seen in every interview so far, Matthew is also paying his knowledge forward. He’s teaching the next generation about the cool stuff that his own generation has built so that they continue innovating.

Anyone receiving cash, though, needs a bank, right? Indeed. But with Lightning, you can be your own bank, or — as in Matthew’s case — your family’s bank.

The best bit is as soon as he is given GBP by family he passes it to me and asks for the amount in bitcoin, so I’m acting like his GBP-to-bitcoin-to-GBP exchange. … I do wonder how much use his generation will have for traditional fiat banks in the future, hopefully not too much.

Lightning fuses sand into fulgerite, and the Lightning Network fuses families closer together.

More than Just Micropayments

What bank would be complete without an investment division:

I’m topping my own sats balance up using some lucky low-leverage LN Markets trading from within Breez and, when the market turns against me, I’ve recently started buying azte.co bitcoin vouchers from Poundland stores, which you can buy with cash and scan in Breez to immediately receive over Lightning.

Matthew also concurs with thousands of people who’ve started using Breez since we released the podcast player six months ago:

The extras like built-in Lightning apps and the brilliant podcast player are just an indication of how Lighting is advancing at a fast pace. In the last year or so Breez has gone from being my Lightning wallet to also being my podcast player, small trading platform (LN Markets) to birthday voucher shop (Bitrefill), all natively using Lightning.

Like us, he thinks paying creators for their work is fair; it’s just the subscription-based aggregators that aren’t. And like us, Matthew also seems to suspect that we can improve other kinds of content consumption with the Value 4 Value model:

I really really like that I can just hit a “Boost!” button on a podcast to tip the creator … Some people wonder why people would pay for content that is free but I know Bandcamp sees people pay more than the recommended price for albums of artists they like and I think it’s the same spirit here.

That’s the whole idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if musicians and videographers could profit from the same model that podcasters already enjoy? Stay tuned.

Feedback for Future Innovation

Matthew has also picked up on how Lightning can also perform functions beyond payments:

One thing that really surprised me was signing into sites using LNURL — like lnmarkets.com. The more things like that that add some privacy and let my keys sign me in instead of an email and password that can be stolen from a site the better I think.

Indeed, that’s one of the new uses many people are discovering. Breez can be used for Lightning-fast payments, but it turns out that it’s also making passwords obsolete (thank gawd!).

He’s also got some ideas about facilitating new payment scenarios:

I would love an easy way to pay someone when they aren’t online. The Breez “Connect to Pay” feature is a step in the right direction, I use that once a week at the minute and it works pretty well but something that works across all Lightning wallets would be great. …
I think content providers (e.g. blog writers, journalists) who are not very Bitcoin savvy need an easier way to get paid over lightning given the global time zones of their audience. … A really easy way to pay someone without them having to do anything (like click to generate an invoice or host a webservice) would be cool. Pay to a Lightning name/address or something that works across all wallets would be amazing for example. Something someone could just see in a Twitter profile and tip.

Interesting point. For content in discrete units, like (micro)blogs, services like Twitter, Medium and Substack have tolerable solutions that just need to integrate Lightning as a payment method. Apparently, Jack is on it.

Streamed content is perhaps the more interesting case because fiat subscriptions are so inadequate, which gives instant settlement in Lightning an undeniable advantage. Consider our podcast player a proof of concept for what’s coming.

People Are More than Use Cases

Perhaps one indicator of a technology’s importance is the range of different, unforeseen purposes it can later serve. Once you bond those shower curtains together, people will start experimenting with the result. By mobilizing bitcoin, Lightning is initiating a process of distributed innovation with unlimited potential. Anywhere there’s value, Lightning can help to move it, and there’s value almost everywhere (except perhaps TMZ).

VCs and tech pundits like to talk in terms of “use cases.” But the problem with use cases is that they’re limited to our imagination, to the uses for technology we as developers can anticipate. Matthew and the Haywood clan show the limits of thinking that way. Not only are they using Breez in ways we didn’t foresee when we launched the app, but they’re using it to interact with each other, to strengthen their relationships and stay connected. You can’t capture that kind of value in a use case or a revenue projection. You only learn when you ask and your users are generous enough to share with you.

Sometimes a picture is worth more than a thousand use cases.

Lightning in the Wild #3: A Creative Family Innovates with Breez was originally published in Breez Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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