Episode Details

Looking through Ben’s GitHub you begin to appreciate how voracious his creative energy is – meeting him IRL more than confirms these suspicions. I first met him in the backyard of the inaugural 2019 Lightning Conference in Berlin. I was admittedly fueled with limitless, practically free beer from the Lightning Beertap but Ben was brimming with limitless Celtic zeal. He’s a juggernaut of ideas, a self-taught, self-styled, dirty hacktivist who throws his considerable talent and charm into bleeding edge Lightning hardware and OpenSource projects.

"The #1 issue people have with BTC is volatility but with LN just used as a payment rail that doesn’t even matter. No matter what happens, LN is here to stay. "

Ben Arc

Ben’s always been interested in computers and perhaps in another life he’d have had a more computer based background but that wasn’t the case and he’s glad for it. Instead he had a very rewarding 15 year career as a Design & Technology teacher in Wales, sometimes covering lessons in Electronics too.

He specialised in teaching kids with severe behavioural difficulties in special needs classes. Electronics was particularly kinaesthetic and both he and the kids got a real buzz out of those early tinkering projects. For many of his kids, soldering electronics was the one thing that made them sit still. Ben developed a rudimentary understanding of electronics and computing, spinning up WordPress sites and PHP plugins.

The unit where he worked was hit hard by UK economic austerity policies and his services got the squeeze. As disheartening as this clearly must have been it provided him an opportunity to take some time off and pursue his increasing curiosity into tinkering & hacking.

"Bitcoin can & will reduce the power of the State over people by taking away their control over monetary supply."

Ben Arc

The first Bitcoin event he attended was a Maker centric Lightning Hackday in Berlin and like a kid in a candy store, the QR code Sweet Machine caught his attention the most. You could scan the screen’s QR code and go to a website, pay a LN invoice and sweets would come out of the machine.

He saw the potential benefits for the machine itself not to be a full node but rather a secondary device for a full node. So he started playing around with microcontrollers, generating invoices on the machine’s screen and things began snowballing. In a way every LN project he’s done since has been an offshoot from this Sweet Machine concept.

"The word ‘hack’ literally comes from hacking away at a keyboard to make software/hardware eventually do something useful."

Ben Arc

He began to have the opportunity to work on original projects most days, in a sense whatever he wanted. So he sat down and started making stuff, tinkering. One of his first Lightning software projects he made was the Sinclair Faucet using LN-URL. It allowed QR codes to be programmed with value and withdrawal frequency, printed or displayed and drained by people scanning it using their mobile LN wallets. RustyRussel is now building something akin to this into Lightning’s protocol level with Bolt12.org. It’ll enable static but private LN QR codes – groundbreaking stuff and in direct lineage of Ben’s tinkering.

"Bitcoin