Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Adam B. Levine: Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network, LTBCoin, Monetizing Content & Crowdfunding

Episode Date: February 2, 2015

Adam B. Levine, the “Spiritual Grandfather” of Epicenter Bitcoin and Editor-in-Chief of Let’s Talk Bitcoin, joins us to share is “crazy” passion for information and cryptocurrency. Never shy when it comes to talking about complicated subjects, Adam divulges his ideas about the next iteration of the experimental Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network and his newly launched standalone token vending machine, SwapBot. Adam also opens up about his role as the Chief Visionary Officer of CoinPowers and why it ultimately failed as a project. We also get Adam’s take on the future of crowdfunding and what role he sees himself playing within the crypto community moving forward. Topics covered in this episode: The integral part Adam played in the creation of Epicenter Bitcoin How the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast show and network were born The Tokenly Platform The recent discontinuation of certain LTB Network shows LTBCoin and the problems it aims to solve Tokens Vs. cryptocurrencies Content monetization and crowdfunding Episode links: Let's Talk Bitcoin LTBCoin SWAPBOT Prototype Tokenly Project This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/064

This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by Shapeshift.I.O. With no account or signup required, it's the easiest way to buy and sell light coin, doche coin, dark coin, and other leading cryptocurrencies. Go to shapeshift.io to instantly convert all coins and to discover the future of cryptocurrency exchanges. Hello, welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency revolution. My name is Sebastian Guizu. And my name is Brian Friven Crane. Today we're here with Adam Levine. Adam Levine has sort of played a very important role, actually,

in the history of Epson of Bitcoin, in that this wouldn't have happened without him. We met the first time Sebastian and I last December on a conference call with Adam when the topic was to produce some new shows for a contest that Let's Talk Bitcoin was launching. And we were both from Europe. There was only four people on the call. So he was like, let's try it together. And that turned out very well and we were very lucky that way because we really didn't know each other.

So from a prudency perspective, perhaps this is foolish. But so I'm really really happy to have him on today. I mean, probably most of you will know Adam. He's well known of course for let's start Bitcoin and he's also been involved in all kinds of other projects in the cryptocurrency space. So just before we get started with the Commonwealth, I wanted to briefly mention inside Bitcoin's Berlin. So, you know, many of you will know the inside Bitcoin's conferences.

It's actually where we, Sebastian, I met for the first time in real life. It was a year ago at the last last of Bitcoin, inside Bitcoin's conference in Berlin. So it's happening again. And it's going to be a March 5th and 6th. And if you want to, so we will both be there. I will also be giving one of the keynote talks on sort of economic issues in Bitcoin. And if you want to come to, we'd love to see you there. You can get off 15% with the discount code Epicenter IBC.

That's all in capitals. And you can check out the event at insidebikcoins.de. So with that out of the way, thanks for joining us today, Adam. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Sebastian. And I just want to point out, like, how instrumental you have been in, you know, this happening. If it wasn't for you producing your content and me, like at that exact time, getting interested in Bitcoin and seeking out podcasts and then Brian already being a listener and us meeting there, like none of this would have ever happened. And so, I mean, I don't know if we qualify you as some sort of, I don't know what that qualifies you, but it does make you an important part of the epicenter Bitcoin experience and the success of what has happened since then.

very, very happy to have you on. Well, that's very flattering. Thank you. Thank you very much. We can call you the spiritual grandfather if you do. There we go. There we go. Yeah, I like to be a catalyst.

That's what I really, I really enjoy doing is I like setting off chain reactions that then result in cool things happening that I don't really have to be involved in. You know, like, we don't talk, you know, like you guys just do your show. You never ask me for permission or anything. It was just like a suggestion. So I'm really glad that it worked for you guys. And I'm glad that you're having good results.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and with that, let's launch into, into your show Let's Start Bitcoin. Because I mean, I was, you know, when I started becoming interested in Bitcoin, I was writing my master thesis. And I was really, really busy. So I had like no time to read at all. But I was walking around quite a lot.

So when I started initially, I just cut up on the few months of content you'd already produced. So my initial knowledge, the first two months came purely from Let's Start Bitcoin. So, and you've, you've done. an absolutely great job. I think you've produced great content over a long time and, you know, with some great guests. So can you tell us a bit? Like, how did you, how did you start? Let's start Bitcoin. Sure. First off, once again, thank you. That was really flattering from both of you. I appreciate that. I'm glad that I'm glad it's had a positive impact on you.

You know, I make Let's Talk Bitcoin, and I've always made Let's Talk Bitcoin because I'm interested in cryptocurrency. And actually, Let's Talk Bitcoin was the, I can never remember if it's the second or third or fourth Bitcoin podcast I started. But it was not the first. You know, and I started doing Bitcoin podcast. Let's Talk Bitcoin started in 2013, spring of 2013. And before that, I had done two podcasts in 2011 and then a podcast right before it in 2013, too, that sort of exploded right before we started Let's Talk Bitcoin. So this is, it was not something new to me. And I've been doing podcast since 2005. So it's a really natural way for me to kind of just

share my perspective with people. And that's largely what it is. The podcast that I made until Let's Talk Bitcoin were almost entirely about me sharing my perspective and about, you know, trying to help people complete the picture so they could see it as I saw it, because I'm right about almost everything, he said jokingly. So Let's Talk Bitcoin was a little bit different because Let's Talk Bitcoin, I didn't know everything about it. And there were a lot of questions that I had that were really unanswered questions. And so I surrounded myself with experts. And it was sort of, it was a good way to kind of dive in. And yeah, those initial, I mean, I was, I just listened to episode 13 the other day while I was preparing for episode 183, which has Chris Otam on it from Open Transactions. And I was listening to it. And I think I like the old show almost better than I like the new show. You know, like I was just, I guess I was less. tired at the time. I've been doing it for not quite as long. But, but, you know, we've just, the, the journey has been that. It's been a journey. You know, we've, it's been, the show, the network, everything has just kind of happened because it was the logical thing to happen

in order to continue walking down the path that I've chosen to walk down, which is, from my perspective, to try and explore as many of the possibilities that cryptocurrency presents as possible. Did that answer the question? It might not have. No, absolutely. And so what made you decide to want to start a network? Because that was sort of a... Well, I didn't decide I wanted to start a network, to be honest with you. Again, it was just sort of the next natural thing that happened.

You know, in December of 2013, I was, you know, I was traveling a lot for conferences at that point. And I was unhappy with the amount of Bitcoin podcasts that were out there besides Let's Talk Bitcoin. And I had been a big fan of the Ed and Ethan Bitcoin report. and the Plan B from Jupiter Broadcasting. And there was one other one whose name I can't remember. And they all had discontinued because it was hard, you know, because it's hard to do something speculative without monetizing it. And I, again, never cared.

For me, it was always just, I'm doing it anyways. So I might as well, you know, might as well share this with everybody else so that they can kind of share my perspective and journey through the whole thing. So the network happened because we did this contest because I was like, well, there aren't enough Bitcoin podcast. So, you know, Bitcoin was super valuable at that point. It was over $1,000. So we offered a one Bitcoin prize and got like 15 or 20 entries. And a lot of them were really good. And so what wound up happening is, you know, we invited one person who actually won the contest. And he joined. And then pretty quickly we brought on a few others. And we basically just, it became less about, it became less about where you ranked, relatively speaking. and more if you did it and if you wanted to. And if you wanted to and you asked long enough that eventually you got in.

And that's not an ideal situation. That's something that really made me realize that in a lot of ways, I become the bottleneck, right? If I'm the one that has to be responsible for proving things or saying, no, that's not right or whatever, then it really does rely on me. And at this point, I mean, you know, at that time, I was so ridiculously overbooked that it was not even funny. and that got to be more true as time went on. So this is a long way of saying the network happens because there were a lot of podcasts that had the choice of starting over, you know, and building, as Let's Talk Bitcoin had done from the ground up, an audience that listens, or to piggyback on what we were doing and start with our audience and essentially bootstrap up several thousand initial listeners.

It didn't guarantee that people were going to listen to every one of your episodes, but it meant that it was presented to them where otherwise it would have been quite expensive and quite time-consum. in order to gather that sort of initial audience. As we know very well. So almost a year, I mean, it's probably about a year now since the LTV network started off with its initial roster of shows and you've brought on other shows since then. Tell us about how that has worked out over the last year. What has your experience been with the network?

My experience has been that I need to be more transparent to a fault about most things with regards to the network. If somebody asks me something, I tend to tell them. If they don't ask me, then I don't necessarily tend to tell them. So that, again, means that people who ask these stuff get to know what's up and people don't ask me stuff. Don't necessarily get to know what's up. It's not ideal.

With the network, I really wanted to help people monetize. We had monetized well in November of 2013 because the Bitcoin price had skyrocketed up and suddenly everybody felt like they were rich. And so we had for two months or three months been basically completely booked. And towards the end of January, I'm going to be able to, I'm going to end of January, I I finished negotiating a deal with the Crypto Kit guys to sponsor the show for basically a full year, which is just now kind of coming up to its end point. So I was like, well, darn, you know, I mean, like, that was easy.

You know, it wasn't difficult. Everybody feels like they've got a lot of money. And so, you know, we can totally share the wealth and help other people do the same thing, too. And then the price, you know, continued to go down over the year. And basically, as soon as the price dropped below like $900, everybody suddenly was like, well, you know, we probably shouldn't spend any money because it's going to go back over $1,000. And that kind of continued was my experience.

But the other part about it is that it was hard, right? Where before it had been easy. And so when something is easy, I tend to do it. And when something is hard, then I have to really weigh it to determine if it's, you know, going to be worth the amount of time that it's going to take. So that was the monetization side. In spring, we started, we basically launched the new website. And the new website, we were switching from WordPress onto an investment.

entirely custom platform that has become the tokenly platform that is essentially, it's like a content management system and a community platform that's designed from the ground up to incorporate not just cryptocurrency, but also tokens, and not just to accept them and to let you spend them or whatever, but to also let individuals within them make their own token powerful on our platform. That's kind of the important part. So there was all this stuff, right? And as usual, what happened was we just launched the network too early. And so people who were working with it with the expectation that they would be compensated because we had all these monetization plans, they didn't do so well necessarily because we never did monetize. And at that point, we were also on terrestrial radio

in Southern California with this deal that we had made with them and all the shows were on that. So schedules were really crazy. So there were like crazy schedules combined with nobody getting paid. And we didn't know radio. I mean, like we were talking about this for the show. Podcasts, you have no idea how many people are listening. You can kind of guess at how many people have started listening. You can sort of guess at some other things, but you never really know. With radio, it's even more insane because you only know that it's being broadcast, you know, the area that the broadcast is covering, and you know the potential number of people who could, if they turned on the station, right to your, you know, to what you're doing at that point. So it's, it's, it was completely insane.

It sounds like an interesting business model for radio analytics, no. Somebody should get on that. Well, that's actually part of the reason why Magic Words was something that we wound of developing was because radio completely suffers. If you think about it, radio is the medium of last resort. You have no control over it. And the only time people ever use it is when they literally have nothing else that they can do. So it's great if you're multitasking or anything else like that. But yeah, radio has a terrible listener engagement problem. So actually, yeah, part of what we're doing has been to kind of develop this idea that really what you want to do with listeners isn't just, you know, give them something to listen to, but you want to give them a good reason.

to also be part of your community. And then once they're part of your community, then it's much, much easier to see who's actually participating and how many people are actually listening and all these things. So a lot of what we've done has been about that. So this is, you know, like I said, it's a long way of saying that the network has been what it is. And people have chosen to join it because they chose that because they decided that it was to their advantage to be able to speak to our audience. And I agreed that their content was high enough quality that, you know, we were able to put them on. So one thing I recently did was I looked at a Bitcoin podcast that have existed, so both on the LTV network and others that have been independent.

And, you know, some of them I heard off, some of them I saw in the iTunes rankings. And when you'd go back there, it was quite crazy that almost all of them have been discontinued. And including quite a few of the LTV network shows. Why has that been the case? Yes. because monetization is hard because the audience that's interested in this type of content is very small the portion of that audience that is potentially interested in this type of content that is willing to listen to podcasts which is to say to not do video or to read a transcript is very small it's something like

compared to video it's like 75% of people on the net use video and only like 15% use audio right discrete audio formats and it's just a taste thing because a lot of times people can't multitask. So I find that most of the people who listen to podcasts are people who really value or enjoy multitasking, either because they're so busy or because they're, you know, working on something else and can't fully concentrate or in the cars, stuff like that. So you asked why have shows been discontinued? Shows have been discontinued. Because it's hard to do this speculatively and consistently because stuff happens. And your priorities change and your interest level changes. And if you're not getting paid for it,

then the impetus to keep doing it isn't quite as strong. So, I mean, I'm crazy. That's the flat truth of it is I'm just nuts. I'd be doing this really regardless of what's happening. So that I think is the key to let's talk Bitcoin's continued success. You're craziness. I am crazy. We just do this. I think there's, I mean, the crazy part of it, I think you could attribute to be passionate about it. Yeah. I think that's what has kept us going is being passionate about producing great content. And I think you share that same, that same passion. And, you know, I, I wish that I cared more about the great content part. I care about, I care about information. I care about knowing things. I care about people knowing things and people having the correct impression of things.

So for a lot, you know, and the other thing I care about is giving people the ability to share what they care about, right? I'm super passionate about this stuff. But the way that my attention works is that I either care about something 100%, completely, ridiculously, unapologetically, or I don't care about it at all. And that's because I only have those two settings. So if I, like, care about something just a little bit, then that means I basically care about it as if I cared about it fully. And so it's an incredibly irritating trait to have, I have to tell you. That sounds terrible. So where do you see that soft Bitcoin going in the future, so both the podcast itself and the network? Well, so a big part of the reason why the network has been difficult.

not, I mean, like, as individual participants, I would argue it's been difficult for individual podcasters working with it. They get advantage, but they have to work within our system, and that's been difficult. So what we've been doing for the last year is building out, in part, a new editorial system. And the new editor, I'm sorry, what was your actual question? I might be going into the long thing. So the question was, like, where do you see, let's our pick on going, the podcast and the network? So when do you see this in the long, like let's say two years down the line, if you can see that far? There was a reason I was talking about tools. So, yeah, so I think that we'll be much more complete.

I think there will be a much more feature complete platform that will allow its users to interact with each other with no, where the platform enables the, enables the interactions and can enable the commerce. But it's actually just happening between those two participants and they're making all the rules, you know, as they see fit. And the best part about that is that if we make all of these things entirely voluntary, then there's literally no such thing as, you know, as a bad deal because somebody who doesn't want to do it, doesn't do it, you know, somebody who doesn't want to work in a project. And, you know, in order to facilitate that, we need to build in reputation systems. And we're working on a collaborative editorial system and a call. And then beyond that.

So let's talk Bitcoin right now is a front page that's powered by one blog. The system that we're moving to next is one where anybody can make. a blog and then content can be curated up from all of those distributed blogs onto the front page. And then the next phase after that, and actually these will happen at the same time, is that anybody who wants to take content created within the LTV environment and make their own front page where they curate up their own, you know, other content from within the network based on their own standards, they'll be able to do that too. So some elements of Reddit and a community platform.

Let's Talk Bitcoin is a community platform. Part of that is publishing. part of that is commerce, part of that is socializing. Part of that is project management. Part of that is planning. You can think about it like we used to, before the age of the internet, we used to go physical places. And we used to meet people in bars or restaurants or town halls. And we used to be able to interact with people and conduct commerce in public places. And that was easy. And the internet has replaced that partly. But the part that it doesn't do well is it doesn't do anything that has anything to do with ownership or money well, because the only thing that you can do is give somebody

else a debt, which is not that useful. So I think that that's really what's happening here is the platform that we're designing, you know, we started designing it for Let's Talk Bitcoin, but it is a generic community platform in the same way that a town hall is a community platform. Anything that you can do there, whether it's funding something or, you know, talking to somebody or signing a contract with somebody or whatever, you can do it on this type of platform. And more importantly, because of that, because that stops being the hard part,

you can do anything on one of these platforms, literally anything. Well, we've got so much more to talk about, including LTV coin, crowdfunding. We want to talk about content monetization models. But let's take a break before we do that and talk about our sponsor, ShapeShift. So ShapeShift is a fast and easy way

to buy and sell alt coins. And I'm curious, I haven't seen LTV coin on ShapeShift. They've been adding all kinds of new coins all the time, but LTV coin's not there yet. Do they have counterparty yet? If they don't have counterparty or XCP, then they wouldn't have us. No, yeah, I guess that's true. No, they don't have counterparty yet.

I mean, that might come at some point. But anyways, so ShapeShift is a fast and easy way to buy and sell alt coins. They support Bitcoin. They just added BitShares. They just added Starkcoin. Namecoin NextT. They're adding new coins every week, so I can't even keep up. And last week, we tried to do a demo.

We tried to do a demo with their ShapeShift lens plug-in, which is essentially a Chrome plugging, which allows you to use ShapeShift on any website. It wasn't working. There was a bug, unfortunately. It appears that they have fixed it. So we're going to go ahead and demo it this week. And hopefully, if we keep our fingers crossed and we pray to the demo gods, it will, in fact, work. So if if if if we go to the LTB website so we're going to donate to the last episode

which is beyond the blockchain with open transactions. If we scroll down here we get the tip address right here. This is a Bitcoin tip address. I'm going to click on so I've got the shape shift lens plug in install. I installed it with it's in the Chrome web store. You just look for shape shift lens and you'll see the little shape shift Fox logo right here. So if I click that, I get this little pop-up. I click pay with, I'm going to pay with Dochecoin. And so there's my, there's the destination address. So this is the Bitcoin address that we're donating to. And I'm going to go ahead. I'm not even going to put an amount because I'm just going to set in my wallet what I sent. So it's pay. I'm going to get a QR code. I'll go

go ahead and scan that with my doche coin wallet and I'm going to send three dollars there you go so it's sending and you'll see here it's a waiting for your doche coin and just a few seconds there you go so payments been received and now we're just waiting for the confirmation and nice thing about shape shift that it doesn't require any confirmation so zero confirmations as soon as it receives the bitcoins it starts doing its thing Converting those Bitcoin into Dogecoin. You mean the other way, right? Or sorry, converting those Dogecoin into Bitcoin, rather.

And in just a few seconds, we'll be able to even, we'll even be able to look at it on the blockchain and see that it's actually went through. So it's just still awaiting confirmation. And you don't need to make an account, but you can just get started. And I think it's true, no? There you go. So it just went through. And in fact, so this is a nice feature here.

You can get a receipt by email. And if we look, if we click here and we look at the block. chain, we'll see that that transaction is actually went through. So there you go. It took about what, 30 seconds to get Dochecoin sent to that the latest episode's Bitcoin address. So you should be getting that in your wallet very soon, Adam. I should indeed. Very cool. So there you go. Shapeshift.io. Give it a try. Tell us what you think. You don't even need to create an account, as Brian mentioned, and you only pay a small fee, which is included in the price of the transaction. Shipshift.io, the fast and easy way to convert all your alt coins.

So moving on, the next thing we want to talk about, and this is very closely tied to what we were discussing earlier in the network is LTP coins. So in early 2014, you proposed, I mean, you started thinking about creating a currency within the LTV network, which would be used as sort of the the economic, well, the currency, the currency which live inside the network and serve the LTV network for paying content producers, but it would also serve advertisers to pay you to, I mean, donate and buy advertising for the show. What was the main thing that you were trying to accomplish when you first thought of creating LTV coin? I was trying to solve the bootstrap problem, which is what I call the, that like the first thousand people who you are trying to get

involved in a given, in a given project that you are interested in. And the thing that Bitcoin did well that does not really exist anywhere else is they came up with a way where you could create a token, create a, you know, and I say that both technically a token, but also a token of contribution. It's difficult kind of to conceptualize that. So LTB coin, the value of it is very questionable, but the value of it doesn't really matter from my perspective because the thing that we used it for is to incentivize and the thing that we continue to use it for is to incentivize people to participate in our system. This is not to say that it's the only way that you can interact with us. It's just the best way because it is the most cost effective way relative to other options. So the reason why it's worth it to us to do that is because we have not.

no cost when it comes to creating this and using it to administer our rewards program. And, you know, I was just looking at this the other day. We just did a distribution yesterday. It went out to over a thousand people and I think it costs like 0.051 BTC or something like that, which comes to like $11. So, you know, administering our rewards program where we weekly send out, you know, differing amounts of tokens to people, you know, automatically to people for less than $10 in terms of transaction fees and total cost is something that can really only only. be done with tokens. And it means that when people are, when people create something for us, we don't have to wait until we get paid Bitcoin for it, because we're not paying them Bitcoin.

We're passing along LTV coin. And actually, it's not even passing it along. When we create LTV coin, it's distributed based on your contribution, right? So if you're part of the audience, then there's a part of each weekly distribution that is created that's given to you as the first user because you're valuable to the network. You're someone who's spending their time and making their choice to consume content that are content creators, and by our, I mean people using our platform. We have no even formal agreements with anybody. It's just a platform. People use it because they have something to say and because we think that they're, because they haven't disqualified themselves is almost the thing, right? I'm very, very laissez-faire when it comes to allowing

content onto our platform. It has to be at a certain quality level, but besides that, it's been mostly about traffic control and then about, you know, people not, you know, breaking the few rules that we do have. We're very specific about the content that we allow on the network. I'm sorry, we're talking about LTV coin. So anyways, the relevant part of LTV coin is that it doesn't cost us anything. And so because it doesn't cost us anything, just like Bitcoin can give it to the miners for free, even though they're providing a valuable service, it's free to the Bitcoin network. We can do the same thing except it's with the audience, it's with content creators. And then there's a 10% that goes to the platform too. So LTVcoin has been, I don't know, people,

again, focus a lot on the price. And I think that that sort of misses the point. When you create a token, and LTV coin was one of the first tokens, not cryptocurrencies, but tokens ever created. There just wasn't anything you could do with them. And that was what we ran into, is that, you know, I was, you can think about a token, right, like a like a, like a, like a, a marble or like a ball bearing, whatever. It is very like that in that if I hold it in my hand, I have it. If I give it to you, I no longer have it. It's no longer accessible to me. And by itself, it isn't really much of anything. It's this little thing that is itself and that's pretty much it. But if you take that ball bearing or marble and you put it at the top of a Rube Goldberg type

machine that is designed to, you know, like make me toast and kick me out of bed and all that stuff, then suddenly you could make the argument that that ball bearing has the ability to make me toast and get me out of bed. Even though the ball bearing itself didn't actually have anything to do with it, because it was placed in circumstance that was set up for it to trigger certain things, it actually causes that to happen. And then, of course, it's also still a ball bearing. So it, you know, you can't make an arbitrary copy of it and then give it, you know, let somebody else do it. So that's really what tokens are as far as I'm concerned. We now, and that used to be impossible, right? You used to be impossible to make a token.

You used to have to make an entire blockchain and go through mining and do all of this other stuff. So the idea that you could make something for an arbitrary reason kind of wasn't ever really feasible until tokens. But once it is feasible, then suddenly what was impossible becomes the easy part. And what was inconceivable because the thing that preceded it was impossible is suddenly now an incredibly obvious problem. And so when we started, let's talk Bitcoin, like in order to do that, send out to a thousand people automatically and not have me, sitting there doing every single transaction for, you know, 18 hours a day on the days that we have to do this. We actually had to create an entirely new tool that is essentially an automated distributor where you send all of the, where within our system, you give it all of the addresses

or LTV usernames that you want to send to. You put in all the amounts or the percentages next to what it is that, next to each name, depending on how much they should get. And then the system gives you a single address to which you send the full amount of Bitcoin for the transaction fee and the full amount of whatever the token is that you're distributing. And then it automatically goes through, sends out all those transactions at a rate that doesn't overwhelm the network. Let's see here. Does it with fees that are less than half of what the standard counterparty fees are.

Because again, they're just fixed fees that since we built a custom tool, we were able to experiment with and see, okay, well, the network will deal with it here, but it won't deal with it here. And it also tracks confirmations and it gives you essentially the ability to make sure that all the transactions actually did go through and it's auditable too. So that's something that is so basic, being able to send a bunch of tokens, differing amounts of tokens to different people and not have it take a person all day or be a full-time job. And yet, until we created it, it did not exist. So has LDP coin worked? Has it succeeded in things you wanted it to do?

it succeeded in that it let me allocate credit in a way that could later be valuable, right? Because if I just say, you know, if you helped me with an episode a year ago and I say to you, thanks, I'm successful now, but, you know, thank you. You helped me get there. Then that's great. But if instead you got paid LTV coin and then a year later, LTV coin was successful because we're successful, then that's something where your work earlier on actually had a very substantial impact for you and you actually can potentially profit. If, you know, what we're doing doesn't wind up being valuable and it fails and everything doesn't work, then doesn't matter to you.

You know, it was a volunteer effort essentially you did anyways, and the token was just a volunteer token. But if the project succeeds, there's that potential for upside. So that's the thing, is that we already, you can already support things for volunteer for them. You can already, you know, give people money for free. The thing that you can't do is get a token back from that person that represents something that could be valuable in the future, um, with,

it costing that person. Because again, like, you could do this with Kickstarter. You just would have to raise money with Kickstarter in order to then pay people back money with Kickstarter. So it doesn't make any sense. But if it's free, then why not? So you asked if it had been successful. I think that the time frame is too short to really make that sort of judgment. We're moving into a new phase of LTV coin now. To this point, we've been distributing it and there's been no utility for it. We've had, you know, we had no redemption methods that were not completely manual. There was no good way to use it in a lot of capacities. And so that, of course, something that doesn't have utility and has a lot of supply is going to be very low value. But that's the thing that's

changed. Last week, we rolled out the sponsor tool, which lets people redeem, which lets people redeem LTV coin or Bitcoin or a variety of other tokens that we accept for various things that we offer in the network, like sponsorships on the show or display advertisements on the front page. And then yesterday, we rolled out our essentially automobes. vending machine, a project we call swap bot. And the vending machine lets you buy LTV coin for Bitcoin or for a variety of other tokens, including Storges Coin, Swarms Coin, XCP. We're only compatible with counterparty tokens at this point, which are built on the Bitcoin blockchain. But we already kind of have that sort of multi-token. And different tokens achieve different prices,

right? So we give a 40% discount when you buy something with LTV coin. But we actually charge 10% more when you want to spend Swarm with us because Swarm doesn't actually have that much utility. So, I mean, it's a cool project. We'll take it and we'll, you know, trade tokens for it, but it's not the same as if you were using our token within our system. So that's the thing that's different now is that now there's actually something you can do with it. And indeed, since that happened, we've seen the amount of volume trading on the centralized markets like Polonex, where LDB coin has traded, go up quite a bit. And it's been, it's been interesting watching. Because every time we do something, the ecosystem is still small enough that it causes big reverberations.

So yesterday when we rolled out the vending machine, we had been pricing LTV coin at 20% above whatever the current market price was. But then somebody crashed the price because the market is small. And so the price goes way down. Somebody comes over to the vending machine and they say, oh, well, this is 20% above the current super low price. But I can get a whole bunch of coins and I don't have to worry about market depth. So then they bought from us. So we had a conversation with him this morning. We're like, what exactly did you do?

And so now we went through and changed it so that our price for LTP coin is pegged to the 24-hour high of L-TB coin. So you don't really want to buy L-TB coin from us unless you just want to use it right then and it's a convenience thing. But if you're going to spend LDB coin with us, then again, we're recognizing it not only with that 40% discount, but at that much higher price, relatively speaking. So it's just such an experiment. As an experiment, LTPcoin has been incredibly successful because it has shown me all of the things that are impossible to do with tokens because nobody has built that tool yet.

And it's why, indeed, we've wound up building tokenly as a project and as a platform and what I'm spending most of my time thinking about these days. Yeah, I mean, I've been asked by a few people about, you know, with different projects. Oh, couldn't we use a token? And they hadn't known about LTP coin necessarily, but, you know, could we create our own currency to incentivize people and stuff? And I was like, yeah, that's a, it's a great idea, but you probably want to wait for like at least a year. Because I agree, right? There's so many different components that all have to be there.

Otherwise, it just doesn't work. And you have had the sort of, I guess, interesting, challenging, but, you know, also difficult job of having to build all of this from scratch. Well, to be clear, I'm not, I'm not building it. I'm the, like, chief visionary officer, ideation guy. I come up with all the, all the, you know, like big problems that I run into that are super annoying to me and I complain about. I have, so I have two co-founders on the Tokenly project who are, you know, active working on it. Nick Rathman and then Devin Weller are both technical sides of that.

So we've been able to, in the three months we've been working on the Tokenly project as a formal project, been able to make very, very fast progress going through this. And actually, I think that, you know, I probably, you know, in hindsight, if I had the opportunity, to and still learn the lessons, I would have waited a year to launch LTB coin because a lot of people didn't understand the time frame that we were on it. I didn't even really understand the time frame that we were on. I had kind of assumed that we'd be able to build this stuff and have it out in three months. And the reality of development just hits you in the face like a brick. Well, one thing you mentioned that I really like is that, you know, the importance of all this is the experiment. And I think that, you know, judging the success of a project or something like

LTP coin because of price or because of, you know, wide use or is probably not necessarily a good indicator. And perhaps, you know, what you've learned from it is, is definitely more valuable than any of what that may accomplish. I'm very glad that we didn't, we'd never sold it. I was very important to me that it would always be something that we give away to volunteers who were doing stuff for us anyways and not sell it simply because I was not convinced it was going to work, right? I was convinced that it was an experiment worth doing, and I still am convinced it's an experiment worth doing. But nothing is simple. You know, I mean, the thing about all of this stuff, though, is that, like, the usability issues are the issue. And it's not usability with LTV coin. It's not

even really usability with tokens. It's usability with getting people into Bitcoin in the first place. As soon as that problem gets solved, the whole world's going to change, because that is the thing that holds people back. It's the thing where if you hear something cool and want to look at, it's like, okay, well, but, but this is hard. and if it's hard, then why would you spend your time doing it? So, I mean, that's the, that's the core problem, you know, is that like you've got Bitcoin, that's difficult. Counterparty, that's difficult. Their wallet has become increasingly slow as time has gone on. So I don't necessarily know if that's the, you know, best long-term solution or all that jazz. It's a, it's just such a fluid situation.

So that would be the thing, you know, for anybody out there who's wondering what they should do, the thing that they should do is try and learn as much as possible about whatever it is that you're trying to do and try and avoid making decisions about which particular thing to cement yourself on. And that's the thing that I'm going to work on for the rest of my life because things change. And, you know, this is a big project. But I think that we're going to provide a lot of opportunities to a lot of different people to do things that I have no idea about it in much the same way that, you know, we can, I like to cataly other things. I think that the tokenly project and the platform really is going to provide opportunities to do whatever you want and have it be easy. Yeah, I mean, one advantage as well of not selling it, I think, is the whole legal liability side, which I guess we will see where that goes with the crowdfunding projects.

But speaking of crowdfunding, you also launched another project called Coin Powers. I mean, we once had actually Tatiana on ages ago, I think when she was launching her coin through Coin Powers. So can you talk a little bit about what's the real? role of crowdfunding in this? And what were the results you saw with coin powers? So coin powers no longer exists. And part of the reason why coin powers no longer exists, in my opinion, and I want to be clear that I am, you know, I had very little to do with coin powers towards the end. I was mostly involved helping Tatiana go through her project, essentially. That was a large part of my role. And then I consulted with them because I saw

cryptocurrency and crowdfunding is being a very natural mating. One of the things that is interesting, if you think about it, is that you don't really need a site like Kickstarter in order to crowdfund anymore. Why do you need a site like Kickstarter? You need a site like Kickstarter because they have a community supposedly, although it's not that valuable anymore, since, again, they have so many projects on it that it's very, very difficult to stand out. They charge money and they have a payment processor.

And they can tell you that you can't list. So that payment processor is the pretty much single most important part about being a crowdfunding site. And if you're a crowdfunding site that uses tokens or uses Bitcoin, then you don't need a payment processor. And so if you don't need a payment processor, then why do you have to have dedicated crowdfunding sites? Why aren't there crowdfunding blogs where people have crowdfunding campaigns that they run themselves? And then they incentivize people to promote it on their blogs and they get or, you know, they get some sort of commission for things that come through. So that's the thing I think that that, you know, coin powers realized, partly because I told it to them a whole bunch of times. And the core problem,

I think, there was they were building a closed platform. They were building a closed source project, and they wanted to be the definitive crowdfunding platform. And I think that that's not really possible in a world that we're going into. So, you know, the future of crowdfunding, as I see it, there certainly will be, you know, projects and platforms like Kickstarter that people choose to use because they want to use them. But if you don't want to use them, then sites like, you know, projects like Lighthouse

have already started to show us what you can do just with Bitcoin. And that was a great experience. I'm not sure if you guys have tried Lighthouse yet. It's a crowdfunding, essentially Bitcoin wallet. Yeah. Very, very cool technology.

And again, it's fantastic. It will, and the other thing it does is it opens, it asks the question, if crowdfunding can be a wallet, then can't a website be a wallet? I mean, if we're trying to put wallets into websites right now. That's what we're trying to do. And it's hard because you have to do a whole bunch of client site stuff. Otherwise, you have centralization of risks. If the website is compromised and the wallet can be compromised. But Lighthouse shows us that what if we instead just take the wrapper of a Bitcoin wallet and put communities inside of that? And so you just interact with the community there. And because it's built into a wallet, you can do all of these things. And it is just as simple as Lighthouse. They don't have to wait for any confirmations. Because you're just to wait for any confirmations.

the wallet knows what it just did. So again, like this, we, we have to reorient how we think about all of these things, because the possibilities are fundamentally different. So back to crowdfunding. So have I mentioned swapbot yet? I don't know. Yes. You can, yeah, okay, so anyways, if you want to check out the most recent tool we've rolled out for tokenly, you can check out swap bot. If you've heard of the Vend project V-E-N-N-D project, which is, again, an automated token vending machine, it's quite similar to that, except ours also has the ability to peg to market prices and to accept multiple tokens at discounts or premiums relative to those market prices. So the thing that I'm bringing up here is that once you have that basis, right, once you have

the ability to have an automated vending machine, then what is a threshold-based crowdfunding campaign? A threshold-based crowdfunding campaign is logic, basically, for a vending machine that knows how much it's trying to raise in terms of some value number in whatever type of token you want to think about value in. It knows what types of tokens it's willing to accept and what discounts are premiums that it's willing to give for those because it might like Bitcoin more than it likes LTP coin or something like that. And you need to know the date that it should close by, and you need to know the type of token

that people get back, right? Because again, you know, like with the Tatiana coin thing, you, the problem with Tatiana coin, again, it's the same thing with LTP coin. It's that, yeah, sure, you've got the coin out there, but now the coin is the easy part and how do you do redemption? How do you do mass sense? How do you do anything? So actually, to do the distribution of Tatiana coin, we use the LTV distributor. And it's been used by a lot of other projects for the same sort of thing. So that's where, again, I think we're going, is that crowdfunding won't be won't be something that you go to a website for. It'll be something that, like, if you want to be listed on a website, you might even pay to have your project listed on the website. But then you've got your project listed on the website and yet you still retain control over it. So instead, all you do is just take a module, right? Take this chunk of code that has all this logic built into it that you've customized for all of your needs. You know, you put in the address. It's going to send the funds to when it's done. And then you just let it go. And it's this little module. that you plug in and people can choose to send money to it and they get tokens back if the project

successfully funds. And if they don't, then they get back their money. And it's automated. So what you're saying is you're separating the funding from the crowdfunding, basically. You're taking ownership of the funding in a way. Well, what you're doing is you're separating the funding from everything. And that's the important takeaway here is that whatever you're doing, whether it's crowdfunding or anything, you can take, you can separate the token part. You can separate the from the engagement part. And by doing that, you can make it so that you don't have to use a payment processor. And because you don't have to use a payment processor, you don't have to do, I mean,

you can do lots more stuff. You can do lots more stuff. And more than that, you know, once you get past thinking about it like payments, then it's everything because anything can be represented as a token. Yeah, absolutely. I think really lighthouse for me, like using it the first time, you know, sometimes you try to explain Bitcoin to people and like, why is this so special? I think Lightco's is like a great example where you could like show it to people.

And I think most people would understand, right, this is really novel. Like this is something that just cannot do otherwise. So I agree for me. It was also kind of a great experience coming back because I had gotten so used to Bitcoin and using Bitcoin that it become almost normal. And you think like, oh, this is like, you know, like it's maybe not so, not so exciting anymore. You know, it's been a while. I think that's sort of for me, like using it the first time, it kind of rekindled that excitement. Now, I also wanted to, we also wanted to touch on another topic that I think you've been thinking about a lot,

which is the content monetization and especially tipping. So I've heard a lot of people say, and I'm not sure if you were one of them, that, you know, tipping was going to be the future and your Bitcoin makes it easy. and makes that sort of the reality that maybe in the future people can produce content and purely live on donations. I mean, okay, maybe some people are doing it today, but that this could become a commonplace. I personally have always been very skeptical of that. But what has your experience been now with let's talk Bitcoin and tipping?

We really de-emphasize tipping. I'm sorry, I don't mean we actively de-emphasize it. I mean that when we switched to this new platform, it became less of a priority for us. So, you know, I mean, why is that? We do it, but it's really dependent on, it's really dependent on the value of Bitcoin, relatively speaking. People give more when the value is lower compared to what it's higher. And the numbers can change, you know, but that's just true of Bitcoin in general. People are tied to the price. And it makes it really difficult to do anything, because it's not so much about what you're doing then, so much as it is about how excited they are and therefore interested in your

content. So like when the price is down, you know, like we have, you know, like we have, you bad weeks, relatively speaking, in terms of listeners or in terms of overall site users. And when the price is up, then we have really, really good weeks. And it's just sort of this funny thing. And it's a reality in the space. You asked about monetization also. Monetization is a struggle. That's largely, again, what we're trying to do. We're trying to give people the ability to create different monetization schemes. And it's, again, it's not just about LTC. I don't want to give that impression. LTP coin is kind of like the, you can think about it like everything that trades against Bitcoin,

like everything you can buy with Bitcoin, like that's what LTP coin is. Anything within our ecosystem, you can buy it with LTV coin, but it might not be the best price. You know, somebody might want dollars more than they want something else or whatever. And that's sort of left up to the individual users. So in the future, what we're doing is we're continuing this concept of ownership. We're going to be, you know, right now, we're finally automating our advertising system, our display advertising system. And in the future, we'll be offering individual spaces on individual articles.

So basically like, so when you post, okay, so you have to think about it like layers. So you wanted to, I think explain how the monetization was going to work with the tokenless system. So right now on Let's Talk Bitcoin, we only have advertisements on the front page. That's the only place you will find any sort of display advertisements whatsoever. And it's not, again, intentional. It's just that we didn't really know what we wanted to do and it didn't really matter because we didn't really care about monetizing. In the future, what's going to happen is if you write an article or create a podcast, you will have essentially advertising space that you can sell or that can be

redeemed for other things or where you can represent something that you want to sell in that space, or you can sell the space to somebody else. You'll then post that on a blog, and the blog itself will also have at least one ad space that they own. And so when they post your piece of content, you'll have one thing that you own and can sell and do whatever you want with. They'll have one thing that they own and can do what they want with. And this also is true about the front page, then the front page. And so everybody essentially takes ownership of their particular part of the advertisements, monetizes it as they see fit. So you certainly could, you know, like you could in your post have a vending machine embedded that sells tokens that can be redeemed for ad space in that ad that's right below or right at the top of the post.

you could have a subscription program where at the bottom of your posts you have a little, you know, like, here's what we were thinking. We were writing this that you don't want to show to everybody, but people who are kind of in your fan club, that can actually happen on the same page. And again, these are things that aren't in yet, but they're things that exist in prototype forms. What I just described is a concept we call token controlled access, which is the idea that since people can, in their wallets, in their counterparty wallets, have many, many, many types of tokens,

not just Bitcoin. That's why tokens are so important is because you can have a single address, a single Bitcoin address, and it can have a thousand different types of tokens, each one in different amounts. And all we have to do as a service is look at that address. We have you verify that you control that address. And then once you do, we can basically just treat it like anything that is in that address you own. And so within our system then, we say, okay, well, this token, this token that says, you know, early on it, this is a founder token. And so when you have this in your wallet and you're on our website, then you can see the founder

forum that's only accessible to people who are founders. And so that's like, we call it the concept token societies. The idea is, is that you look at the same web page as everybody else, but based on the content of your inventory or pockets, we're kind of going back and forth between the different motifs we want to use. Based on that, you will see something different. And the concept extends beyond this sort of basic, oh, well, what you see on the page. Even again, we have these vending machines, right?

So you can take that same type of token-controlled access concept and pivot it a little bit and turn it into roll coins. And a roll coin is something that you don't see anything differently. But when you visit the vending machine or whatever, then it sees, oh, this person is someone who should get a 10% discount. So you visit the same store as anybody else, but because you have this token that they don't have, the system treats you differently. So this idea of token controlled access is not really so much attributed to tipping where you could use a busker sort of as an analogy, but it's more of a paywall. We've moved beyond tipping.

Tipping implies that you're not giving value back. Tipping implies that there's something that, I mean, like tipping, again, it's not to say that we won't accept tips. It's just to say that the type of people who will give tips are specific and not everybody by any way, shape, or form. So the token controlled access, just to come back to that, it allows you to implement a paywall essentially on your... Yeah, it's more like an intelligent membership site and like really versatile. Right now, the only way we really have to implement this intelligently, I think, is through browser plugins. Do you think that in the future we might see some open protocols, like, be integrated, I don't know, in like the HTML API or something, where browsers,

much like you see now, like when you use a browser and it asks you for your location access or if it asks you to have access to your webcam, a browser would query you and say, okay, this content says that you have to pay for it with a currency. This is the address. This is what you need to send. Do you think that it's a possibility in the future we might see more integrated access and more standardized access to this type of paywall integration? Yeah, absolutely.

And again, we don't really think about it like it's a paywall because it's more, because the, okay, so a paywall, you're paying for access to something, right? And once you've got access to it, then it's over. But with this, again, they're tokens. So if you wanted one and it was valuable to you, then you actually own something valuable, right? Because if somebody else wants it and they don't have it, then that's valuable. So that's the difference. Again, it's this concept of ownership.

more like you get keys. And if you want to sell your key to somebody else, you can sell your key to somebody else, and then you don't have it anymore. And it's a thing. But yeah, it's, it's, it's very, very, very generic. And you mentioned a browser plugin. This actually happens just through right now, let's talk Bitcoin accounts. We're working on another branch called Tokenly accounts. It's actually on, it's in our GitHub, I believe it's called Xoth. And that is a generic service. And it is literally, it's like Oath, actually quite similar. There's no community there. There's no real features there.

All you do is create an account and then associate your wallet so that it can become your inventory. And then you'll use that to log in, essentially, at other services that choose to opt in to get that. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I remember the first time I heard you talk about this on the list of Bitcoin podcast. You know, I really do think this has huge potential and could become in the future how you manage a lot of interaction, monetization and all that. Of course, it is a very big hurdle, no, because then you first need to get people to have a counterparty wallet and somehow give them these tokens. So it's very difficult to get started. The having the counterparty wallet's the hard part.

Once they have that, then everything is easy, everything is automated, all they have to do is show up. But it's that setting up the initial counter wallet and then using counterwallet too. I mean, counter wallet, you know, again, like... Yeah, it's not the most user-friendly. Yeah, it's, well, it's, it is. It's pretty user-friendly. It's just slow. You know, I mean, it just takes forever to do anything.

And sometimes it fails. And it's just new technology. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's the best that was out there at the time. But if we pick in a year, I don't know if that's going to be the case. So I'm very, like, my perspective is that it doesn't matter to me. We are, we're like, they're all down here and they're competing and we're just like up here. And every time, you know, we just connect down to them. So we tie together tokens.

Eventually, you'll be able to take tokens created on the, you know, BitShare's system and they will be able to trade against and interact with tokens on the, you know, on Let's Talk Bitcoin or counterparty or all that stuff. So as a higher platform, a higher level platform, we actually have the ability to connect tokens in a way that, you know, they can't naturally by themselves. So before we're wrapping up, we would like to talk. take a bit of a step back, step back from let's talk Bitcoin and think, and talk about Bitcoin in general and sort of, you know, where we're at in this technological and economical and

maybe social evolution. So, you know, as we all know, 2014 has been accompanied with this massive price decline, you know, whether this is sign something to worry about or not. I I guess opinions differ on that one. I do think we are seeing relatively slow adoption, certainly slower than probably almost all of us anticipated a year ago. So what's your take on where we're at and how things are going? I think that we're at a very healthy place. I think that we're going at the pace that things need to go. you know, moving from being purely a commentator to actually, you know, participating in the creation of some of these tools has really given me a greater appreciation simply for the amount of complexity and the amount of time required in order to build stuff that's new.

And when you're building something that nobody's built before, it's really, really, really hard because you don't know what to do. You just know that I have this problem. Here's what my best guess is at the solution. And then you try, that's really the thing that we've done is try to be as iterative as possible. you know, and we, and it's, it's bad sometimes. You know, I change my mind about things and we, you know, we pivot because of that. And it's a challenging environment to be in. You know, the Bitcoin as a whole, like I said, I think that this is incredibly healthy. And I think it's healthy because the cycle is one that I've now seen a number of times. The price goes up. People start doing projects because they see the prices up and they're like, oh, this is a great opportunity. the price comes down because it takes a long time and there was a lot of hype about the projects

initially. And then a lot of them failed because they weren't very good ideas anyways or because things petered out once the price went down. And then the ones that survive come out. And I think that we saw that very recently with like the coin base exchange. You know, I mean, like that's certainly a project that's been in the work for quite some time. And it's one that will drive legitimacy, quote unquote, and drive adoption, quote unquote, because it lowers the barrier to be able to do this stuff for people who have the greatest barrier. So that's that's where we are. I think that we're about to, as the price continues to go down, you know, we will see over the next six months a bunch of really exciting projects come out that were started during the bubble and that have been, you know,

continued during this drive down in price, much to the chagrin of everybody who started working on it. But eventually it comes out and eventually it makes a difference. So I feel like that's happening everywhere. Cool. So one thing I've been wondering about and thinking about a bit, and I don't know what your perspective on that is, is that maybe if you take the larger picture, then this is all good, because obviously in terms of user experience services, like Bitcoin's not ready for the mainstream. But at the same time, it seems that a lot of people expect, it didn't expect this, right? So regarding the projects failing, it just seems to me that this year, a lot of projects will have to fail, right? Either because they were holding things in Bitcoin and like lost a ton of money, or because they sort of built in their models and their expectations that there would actually be more user growth and they would be off to some start where maybe it's still very much in the building.

building phase. And the third part, and maybe you haven't seen that so much, but I think if the price continues to be that low, maybe it will also come is that maybe it will become more difficult to raise investment money. And maybe to some extent we're seeing that already. Do you see those same things happening, like that we have, you know, first of all, startups losing money because they're holding bitcoins, that, you know, maybe increasingly difficult fundraising environment and also just that the growth isn't maybe as high as it was expected so that as a consequence we will see a ton of projects and startups fail this year. Yeah, projects sometimes should fail and that's a healthy thing.

Those people should go and work on other things that money should be used for other stuff. I don't think that the price necessarily is going to correlate with the ability to find funding. I think that the price correlates with the requirement to find funding. I think that when the Bitcoin price is high, companies that are full-on believers in Bitcoin don't need any funding. And when the price is low, that's the opportunity for people to essentially buy into them. So yeah, I think that there will be, you know, it's an opportunity is the way that I kind of look at. And I think a lot of people are going to be looking at is that with valuations like this, you can buy Bitcoin a lot cheaper. But ultimately it doesn't matter because nobody prices in Bitcoin.

If you're creating a startup right now, you're denominating your costs and dollars. And it doesn't matter what the price of Bitcoin is until that actual moment. then it only matters if you're choosing to keep them instead of immediately selling them with a service like bid pay. So, you know, I mean, it's not, it's a healthy environment. It's a healthy environment. It would be better if the price was higher because we wouldn't need so much venture capital, but I think that it will be even more available now than it was last year. So we're just about to wrap up.

So you mentioned that your role has evolved from a commentator in the space to an actor and actually being involved in many projects. something perhaps that Brian and I have not been so much doing and I have often talked about how it may change our view of the ecosystem. So we were curious where you think your role will be evolving, how do you think it would be evolving in the next year with regards to LTB and regards to the other projects that you're working on. I mean, I know that a lot of the projects that you've been working on, you sort of put on the side for lack of time and they fizzled. So how do you see that evolving over the next year?

Yeah, that's the, that's the, that was the lesson for me for last year is that I took on too many projects and so I backed way, way off towards the end of the year and basically told everybody that if they wanted to keep me around, you know, having regular time they had to pay me. So that was a good way to clear the decks. And now I'm just focused on projects that I really care about. That's, I think, a lesson that anybody who hasn't yet learned, I would really encourage you to think strongly about is only spend time on things that you really, really care about. And if you don't care about something enough to, you know, to really, really care about it, then maybe it's not the best project for you to be working on. Maybe that's just me, though. Like I said, I'm kind of crazy.

I think that my role of Let's Talk Bitcoin, I don't know how long we're going to do the show. You know, might be doing it for another five years, might be doing it for another two years, might be doing it for another year. It kind of depends on how long it's required. And even if I stop doing it, doesn't necessarily mean that it will go away. And indeed, it's my intention for all of these things to continue long after I have ceased working on them. My history is one of working on projects for three to five years and then getting bored and wandering off because all of the kind of basic stuff has happened. So I think that in the future, my role is going to be morphing. In the next year, my role will be morphing from editor-in-chief of Let's Talk Bitcoin,

I'm probably to let somebody who's really going to do the job do that. And instead, I'll move to Curator-in-Chief. Because as I mentioned, in addition to the new collaborative editorial system we're building, we're also building a curation system that lets you sort out and pull from, you know, further down the stack of content creation and that highlights stuff that's good and also builds in, you know, social metrics and things like that. So that's a slightly further out version of what we're doing. But that is where I think I'm going to wind up being.

Because I like to I like to lead from the perspective of laying out the philosophy. saying, these are the things that we value, these are the things that we do. If you want to associate with us, associate with us, use us all you want. If you don't, then there are lots of other people out there too. And that's a philosophy that we're carrying over with Tokenly. Because I've been talking about Tokenly as if it's let's talk Bitcoin. But the reality is that it's an open source platform that has all of these tools and capabilities built into it, that anybody can install and use themselves for free. And really what we're going to be doing with that, what I think that our future with Tokenly is, is to create a very WordPress.com style model.

where if you just want to roll your own and use all our tools, then by all means, go for it. There will probably be some type of app store available for different modules. Because again, the whole idea here is to enable people to conduct commerce between themselves and each other as they see fit and as is in their own best interest. And then just briefly, so in terms of the question you will be focusing on, it is sort of that question of content monetization and that things you think will be preoccupying you through the totally.

That's my itch. That's the itch that I am scratching for myself personally, but the solution that we are creating is regardless of content creation. Content creation is a portion of community. But again, it's the reinvention of community in the same way that we used to have town halls

and now we don't. Now we have internet websites where you can do some of the stuff that you can't at a town hall, but you can't do everything. And you can't do it in a way that's trusted often, we don't really know. Identity is a big question on the internet and tokens solve that problem.

Cool. No, I think that's a great way of thinking about it. That's sort of a reinvented community. And it's interesting how also how the sort of economic interaction and those incentive things then, you know, become a core part of it. I like to say that Let's Talk Bitcoin is that what we're doing is we're not growing the world's tallest tree. Let's Talk Bitcoin isn't supposed to become the biggest website in the world. We're growing a forest. And the way that forests grows, that a tree grows to maturity, and then it seeds all around it. And then other trees grow up and you grow out, you grow horizontally instead of vertically. That's the world that we're moving towards. It's a very decentralized one. And it's because we don't need to be centralized anymore.

We can associate with the people that we want. And they can be multiple groups of people. You can have multiple identities. You can have the same identity. You can do whatever you want. All this stuff will be possible in the next couple of years. It's all enabled by crypto. Cool. Well, Adam, thanks so much for joining us today. It was really great talking to you. Thank you, guys. So just briefly again, if we got an insight. So it's inside bitcoins.D.E. March 5 to 6th. And the coupon code was Epicenter IBC, all link capital. So you get 15% off. So thanks so much for listening. And if you want to support the show, of course, donations are appreciated. Episandabitcom slash tips. You can also subscribe

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