I host the Kiwi Bitcoin Builders monthly catchup for April 2024. This is a way to bring together people working on awesome Bitcoin businesses and projects in New Zealand. We share what we have been working on and what has been happening in the space. We hear about the Bitcoin Alive conference that was held over in Sydney, follow up on the success of the Lightning Pay beta, as well as hear from Satflow, a new Kiwi Bitcoin business exploring MEV on Bitcoin.

I talk with Christian Lewe from Blockstream Research. Christian is working on Simplicity, a more robust programming language designed as an alternative to Bitcoin Script. The project that has been in the works for over ten years and has been described by Adam Back as “the last soft fork”, and as Christian shares, enabling simplicity could bypass a lot of the contentious soft fork discussions about things like covenants as this functionality is possible with Simplicity.

I host a Kiwi Bitcoin Builders call with a few people working on Bitcoin businesses, education, and projects in New Zealand. We debrief on the success of the recent Bitkiwi meetup event in Queenstown and also share some of the things that people are working on.

Andrew Begin is Director of Marketing at Galoy, a company building Bitcoin-native banking infrastructure for organisations. We talk about Galoy’s Bitcoin projects including the open-source Blink Wallet, made popular through Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador. I learn about the vision for the product as well as its Stablesats functionality and how this work. We discuss the power of communities taking ownership of their financial infrastructure, and the opportunities for grassroots Bitcoin adoption in Africa and Latin America. Finally we talk briefly about permaculture and regenerative farming and the connections with Bitcoin thinking.‍

Nicolas Dorier is founder and maintainer of BTCPay Server as well as NBitcoin Library. We talk about the BTCPay Server roadmap for the coming year, including Bitcoin Service Provider functions, and the bigger vision for the platform. We also discuss Nicolas experience going through the Blocksize War and how it prompted the development of BTCPay Server, his approach to assessing proposed changes to Bitcoin, and how he gets his technical information. We also talk about the impact of transaction fees and Layer 2 solutions.

Brandon Bucher is a Bitcoiner based in New Zealand working on several Bitcoin-related projects and an important figure in the local Kiwi Bitcoin community. We zoom out to discuss the recent high on-chain transaction fees, and what we can expect from discussions about scaling solutions moving forward. We talk about how rough consensus works for making changes to Bitcoin and what the situation was like during the period of the Blocksize Wars and SegWit activation from 2015 to 2017. Finally we discuss the importance of education and support for self-custody of bitcoin.

I talk with gSovereignty, based in Hong Kong, going deep into questions about individual sovereignty and freedom. We also discuss the relationship with the legacy nation state and how Bitcoin and Nostr may interface with collectivist societies such as China. We talk about the Hong Kong protests, the dynamics of state and media, and Bitcoin’s eventual showdown with the Cantillon Pyramid. We also talk about G’s work in Nostr, including running the Nostrovia podcast, and building nostr.rocket – helping Bitcoiners organise projects in a way that is not beholden to the state.

Roland Bewick is a kiwi Bitcoiner and Lightning Developer working on Alby and Lightsats. We talk about Roland’s background and how he become involved in Bitcoin, how value4value and new kinds of revenue models for creators could work in the future, as well as the other possibilities that Bitcoin enables as the money of the internet.

I talk with Jimmy Djabali of Swiss Bitcoin Pay, an app for easily accepting Bitcoin payments at point of sale. This is an important area of development, and unfortunately there are still not that many solutions out there for making accepting Bitcoin as a business easy. Swiss Bitcoin Pay seeks to fix this with a simple interface that is suitable for shops, restaurants, or any kind of customer-facing business.Jimmy shares how the project came about and his vision for it, as well as the Bitcoin merchant situation in Switzerland including the city of Lugano which has over 300 merchants accepting Bitcoin already. 

I talk with Rob Clarkson about scaling Bitcoin’s Layer 2 Lightning protocol, and how changes happen to Bitcoin more generally. Rob provides a technical introduction to some of the proposals such as ELTOO, APO, CTV, and we talk a bit about what covenants and vaults mean in Bitcoin.

Evan Lin is a New Zealand software engineer currently working on the Bitcoin Dev Kit (BDK). We talk about Evan’s journey to get funded by Spiral to work full-time on open-source Bitcoin projects, his experience working and living in Taiwan, and how we can encourage emerging developers to put their time and effort into Bitcoin.