Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Bobby Lee, Charlie Lee, Filip Roose & Philippe Rodriguez: Bitcoin 2014 Amsterdam

Episode Date: June 5, 2014

This episode is part of our coverage of the Bitcoin 2014 Conference which took place in Amsterdam from May 15 to 17, 2014. Topics covered in this episode: Bobby Lee, CEO of BTC China (@btcchina) Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin and software engineer at Coinbase (@litecoin) Philippe Rodriguez, President of Bitcoin France (@philrod) Filip Roose, co-founder of Orillia and co-founder of the Belgian Bitcoin Association (@filiproose) Episode links: BTC China Litecoin Coinbase Bitcoin France Belgian Bitcoin Association Orillia This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/bitcoin2014-03

Hi, I'm Brian Fabian Crane and I'm here with Sebastian Guter. We just got back from Amsterdam where we attended Bitcoin 2014 conference, which took place from May 15th to 17th. It was the second conference organized by the Bitcoin Foundation and over 1,000 people gathered for three days of talks and conversations. We had the opportunity to interview many speakers and attendees and talk about their projects and perspectives. We will release those episodes over the coming weeks.

Today's interviews come in pairs with two Lee's and two Phillips. We begin with an interview of Bobby Lee, CEO of BTC China. Sean Jones and I sat down with Bobby to talk about the current state of Bitcoin in China and to clear up some of the confusions surrounding the PVOC's recent decisions. Then you'll hear my conversation with Charlie Lee, Bobby's brother and the founder of Lightcoin. He currently works as a software engineer at Coinbase. We talked about Lightcoin and he gave me his impressions on how he sees the currency he created, evolve alongside Bitcoin. Brian and I also bumped into Philippe Rodriguez. He's the president of the

French Bitcoin Association, and he told us about the current state of Bitcoin at France and the work the association is doing there. We end this one with Philip Rose, CEO of Aurelia, a consultancy firm based in Brussels, and he is also one of the founders of the Belgian Bitcoin Association. So this is Sean Jones at Bitcoin 2014 in Sunny Amsterdam. I'm very fortunate to have with me. today, Bobby Lee from BTC China. Probably you've been someone right up there in the headlines

these last few weeks with events with regulators in China. Your background is... Welcome. I'm also joined by Sebastian Couture. That's right. One of the two main men on Episcentific.

Bobby, you're CEO and co-founder of BTC China. The first Bitcoin exchange in China, if I remember correct? Yes, that's right. The very first one from three years ago. You started in Silicon Valley. You're a technical entrepreneur. You were at Yahoo. You moved back then to Shanghai, was it, about seven years ago.

That's right. You worked with the MC. You helped set up. was it China's leading IPTV company? Yeah, I was CTO at SMG Best TV. And then Vice President of Walmart's e-commerce business in China. That's right. So you have huge experience in an area which is largely characterized by people with not a lot of experience.

Oh, no, I wouldn't say that. But certainly, you know, digital currency is also new to me. I just got involved in the last few years. And a lot of people say that the price of big, has been affected in certainly the last 12 months significantly by initially people buying Bitcoin in China, the Chinese market for Bitcoin has driven a large part of the price increase. And then most recently, with news from the People's Bank of China, has triggered some of the falls. I'd like to talk a little about People's Bank of China decision

because it's not well understood, certainly outside of China. Maybe it's not that well understood in China. Does you want to tell us a little about that? Sure. So I agree with you. We think that China has had a role to play in the price of Bitcoin in the last six months, 12 months for good or bad. Just like a year ago, a little over a year ago,

when Bitcoin prices first started running up in early 2013, we attributed to Cyprus with this political situation there. And certainly because Bitcoin is a global asset class, there are multiple exchanges all around the world. When one exchange price moves up, inevitably it brings up the prices of Bitcoin across the other exchanges around the world because it's a global asset.

So when there's heavy buying and price increases in China, you see other exchanges price go up as well. And vice versa, when prices fall down sharply in China, you see prices go down in other exchanges around the world. So it's interconnected system that's the way it is. And in terms of the PBOC decision, it's quite understandable, even though it may not be ideal for us Bitcoin fans, but it is quite understandable because I want to explain that from the perspective of government, Bitcoin is so new, so different, and so hard to understand,

even for someone like myself and many others who've been looking at Bitcoin for more than three years. It's very technical, it's very complex and very complicated. We understand some of the benefits of it. We certainly also understand now some of the negative downsides of Bitcoin, the dangers of the volatility, of the fact that sometimes it's hackable from accounts of wallets. And the fact that, you know, people can't feel it and touch it. So for these reasons, the government in China has been cautious. And in their caution, whether you call it knee-jerk reaction or whether you call it planned sort of regulation, they have decided to slow things down first by issuing the memorandum on December 5th.

And more recently, by stopping third-party payment companies, stopping banks, and now even stopping or discouraging media coverage of Bitcoin. What's that right? Yeah. So recently, we have heard from reliable. sources that Chinese state media at all levels, at the state level, county level, province level to city level, they have all been barred from covering the Bitcoin conference last weekend in Beijing. And furthermore, in the same instruction, they've been barred from

essentially talking up Bitcoin in the future unless they get, you know, authority to do so from the leaders higher up. So is this an attempt to take some of the volatility out that's probably created by, shall we say, the Chinese propensity to be free with gambling and to speculate wildly and sort of pile in and pile out, as it were, running? Yeah, I agree with you. Chinese have a history of propensity for gambling and rushing into investments. That might be said of other countries and cultures as well.

But the way I see it is Bitcoin being such a new asset class, so phenomenally revolutionary, it is bound to be highly volatile. Because if you think about if Bitcoin were true to succeed, the per capita Bitcoin value would far exceed the $1 that it is today. So today on Earth with 7 billion people, the per capita value is only one U.S. dollar or one euro somewhere about there. But for Bitcoin to succeed as a global asset class, as a digital asset class for the future, future, I expect they're going to be in the orders of magnitude worth more than a dollar per person. So in that sense, to get from here to there, it's a huge increase.

It's like from zero to one, it's infinite percentage. From one to however many thousands or hundreds, that's a huge percentage. And because of that, it's going to be volatile that rode up. Regardless of whether it's China or Cyprus or yet in another country or culture or a group of people, moving the prices up. So I don't think the China government, the PBOC, is thinking about volatility. They're not, because think about it, if they really were concerned about volatility, they must be really care about Bitcoin. They're, oh, I love Bitcoin.

I want to grow smoothly, therefore I care about volatility. That's probably not the case. They're probably not thinking so much on behalf of Bitcoin. They're just concerns about this thing that's new that they don't fully understand and they're playing it fairly cautiously, as most officials are in most countries. That's right. That's right. Particularly out of Europe.

Now, with regards to the PBS decision, moving forward, what are Bitcoin exchanges in China like BTC China are going to be doing? Yeah, that's a great question. How does your business change with regards to this new decision? And everyone's asking me that. And I would say, unfortunately, we're not quite at the stage of, it's not quite, well, two things. The Bitcoin market in China is not over.

And even the latest moves, we're not, we haven't seen the end of that chapter yet. So it might still take a few more weeks or a few more months for the dust to settle. And then that's when we'll know exactly what we can do and what we cannot do. Okay. So as it stands today, very concretely, so exchanges, can you kind of describe what is permitted and what is not permitted? Sure. What is still possible? Or is anything possible at all?

Yeah. So BTC China today is functioning normally with an asterisk. And what I would say is functioning normally is all the customers who care to do so can easily log on, come in and trade, buy and sell Bitcoins, take money out, put money in, take the coins out, put bitcoins in. So all that is functioning normally. So withdrawals and deposits are still. All the deposits are functionally normally with an asterisk.

And the difference is that the deposit method has changed over time. In fact, throughout the history of BT, China, our deposit methods have always been flexible. We've taken, in the early days, we took deposits via personal accounts. We even took deposits via Liberty Reserve and PayPal, I would say, in the very, very early days. This is before I got personally involved with BTC China. And then in the latter days, we took deposits via third-party payment companies. This is the PayPal equivalent in China. These are via registered, legitimate sort of corporate accounts and corporate relationships with a third-party payment processors.

And then since that got shut down, we started doing. vouchers and also taking deposits through a regular corporate bank accounts. As you may know, corporate bank accounts have been stopped in China as well. We still have several bank accounts open. Some have closed. For the ones that we have open, we have not made them available for customer use because we're afraid that if we do so, they'll get closed as well. So deposits are happening today through the voucher system.

What that means is they're vouchers circulating out there in public. People buy and sell vouchers amongst themselves. to customers buying and selling vouchers paying cash or paying whatever amongst themselves. And then the holder of the voucher will then come to our site and cash it in and get a deposit. Third-party voucher. It will be a BTC-China voucher. Oh, so we issue an own. It's called the BTCC voucher.

Okay. So we've been doing that for close to six months now, five months now. And that's been very successful. People are using that to move money and liquidity around. So we still have people, people are still trading on our site daily. There's healthy volume. we have a healthy amount of customer reserves and all that stuff. So the only friction really is for deposits right now.

Because, I mean, customers can withdraw to their bank accounts. Absolutely. Yeah, okay. Absolutely. And trade. Okay. Eventually, I suppose your own reserves will be diminished by cash outs that are going through the Fiat system. Yeah, it's not our reserves.

It's customer money. So basically, the tank is full. Certainly that we saw a wave of withdrawals in December. We saw wave of withdrawals in January. But then when Confident comes back, people start putting money in again and start trading again. So we're not at the highest level of customer reserves, but we're certainly much higher than we were last summer.

Okay. I was going to ask you a little bit about Bitcoin businesses, how they're regulated in China. I think this is not something that we're familiar with here. Tell us a little about that. Yeah. So Bitcoin is regulated. as a virtual commodity.

So it's not regulated as money instrument. It's not a currency in China. So what happens in the, what happened in December regulation, they said is that they called out Bitcoin exchanges. They called out this class of business as a legitimate internet enterprise. So as an internet company, Bitcoin exchange

we need to register with with the traditional Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. This is what all Chinese internet companies register with. So we, we do that. In fact, we've complied with that long before they, mandated it. So we've done that. And then furthermore, in theory, Bitcoin exchanges should also comply with anti-money laundering and KYC rules as set up by the PBOC. So we're doing self-regulation on that part. The reason is some of these details have not been clearly specified in detail by

the PBOC. So we're doing it as best faith so proactively. And over time, we hope for the PBOC to come in and clarify what exactly they want to make sure we comply. versa. Now, for other Bitcoin companies, whether it's wallet companies or other Bitcoin merchants, unfortunately, as of today, there is no clear saying in terms of how Bitcoin companies should be regulated that's outside of the exchange framework. So, for example, Ministry of Commerce that governs all companies, they haven't come out to say anything specific about Bitcoin. And likewise, the Taxation Bureau has not come out, the state ministry of taxed, they have not come out to say anything about Bitcoin, how it should be taxed, you know, on the revenue versus gain.

versus all that. So that's all still unknown, a little bit in the gray area for now. So at this moment in time, China is actually a very good place to have a Bitcoin startup saves that you can't have a bank account. That's right. Yeah, at least in China, it's a little bit funny, ironic, because what we used to think of Western culture, Western law, is unless it's explicitly forbidden, it's allowed. whereas traditional Chinese law is that unless it's allowed, especially allowed, it's not allowed. It turns out it is true that way, but because of the history of legislation around money and fiat currency and all that, it turns out in the Western world, you know, it's actually harder to start some Bitcoin companies because they are afraid of running afoul of existing laws and regulations like money transmitter, things like that. whereas in China, because historically there hasn't been the money transmitter license,

there's only been a third-party payment license, and since they ruled Bitcoin to be not applicable under that, it's sort of freefall. It's officially unregulated. It's officially unregulated. And you're right that you could go and set up Bitcoin companies and do XYZ. But it can change tomorrow. It can change tomorrow. And there isn't a lot of consultation or even public information.

It's just leaks out of Mexico. That's right. That's right. And then actually the more depressing news is that because of all the regulatory actions taken by the government over the last few months, the people have really starting to feel discouraged. And that's sort of, you know, it's a, you know, I say it with, you know, it's sad, but it's true that a lot of Chinese consumers and the populace feel discouraged about Bitcoin. And they're taking a step back. There's a chilling effect. they are less anxious or less interested in investing in Bitcoin because of some of the actions the government has taken.

Now, we all know, we're in the Bitcoin circle, we all know Bitcoin cannot be squashed and cannot be eliminated. But certainly what China has done has done a good job of suppressing it. And if the Chinese populace knows that the government has been able to suppress, has been able to suppress Bitcoin, then they sort of say, oh, I guess I won't play it with that anymore. So moving forward, I mean, for the time being, you said that China's being cautious about Bitcoin, and this is certainly shown that they're trying to be cautious about it. Where do you think this is going? What do you think China's stance will be on Bitcoin in the next few years when perhaps it's gaining more mainstream adoption in other countries?

Will they kind of reverse course and perhaps regulated in a way that allows companies like you teach China and others to operate in China? That's a great question. People ask me, that's a great question. People ask me as a joke, when would China eventually, were all right banned Bitcoin? Yeah. Well, I don't think that's going to happen. Yeah, I don't think it's going to happen either.

But it is in a realm of possibility. They have every right to do so. But given what they've said, the fact that they've already said that this is a legal, legitimate personal property, it's unlikely they will change course so publicly and call it an actual ban on Bitcoin. Now, what's also good about the Chinese policy is because if you,

if you look at the actual situation, the only piece of writing is what's happened on December 5th. And in the writing, it clearly does not forbid some of these things. So a lot of these situations today, the third-party payment companies are banking, the media coverage stuff, it's all via verbal guidance, via verbal interpretation and guidance. So in theory, over time, if China wants to adopt a more supportive attitude of Bitcoin, it could happen within months or within years, and it could be done very easily without having to, pass legislation. They haven't really gone public. Exactly.

They could just whisper in some people's ears and say, hey, I think we're okay now. And then they'll pick up again. Do I detect in that if it happens that way as inevitably it will in U.S. and Europe and other parts of the world, that China will, is your prediction that China will ease up and allow those whispers, more positive whispers to... Yeah. So I'm crossing my fingers. I'm cautiously optimistic that if the rest of the world start embracing a more supportive attitude of Bitcoin,

which we think it will happen through good education and cooperation, then I think China could very well follow in reverse course. You're not closing up yet. That's right. We're not going to abandon and give up on China. And the reason is simple, right, because you look at all the other decentralized asset classes like gold and silver, precious metals. They're decentralized asset class. They happen to be physical and tangible.

But what's happening in China? The Chinese government has actually had an attitude and a policy of encouraging investment in gold and decentralized in gold and silver and precious metals. So a lot of Chinese consumers, private people, sorry, they have private savings in gold. They buy gold bars and stuff like that. They store it either at home or in banks, much more than other countries. So the Chinese gold accumulation has outpaced the rest of the rest of the world. of the world. It's easily, if not writing, number two holder of gold worldwide behind the United States. So there's a precedent for this. There is. There is. So that's why if, I mean, gold is very transparent.

Gold has been around for 5,000 years. So people understand it. They know the pros and cons. And that's why China has a relaxed attitude on gold. It was not always a case. At one point, gold was banned for personal holdings in China. Really? Yeah. So at one point it was. And then they, relax it over time. So that's something to learn from. Thank you very much, Bobby, for taking the time to speak with us, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you for having me.

It's been a pleasure. Thanks. Okay, so I'm here with Charlie Lee. And you are? I am the creator of Lightcoin. I also work at Coinbase right now. Awesome. And how are you enjoying the conference?

Very good. It's a great conference. Yeah? What's your impression about this conference like compared to some of the out of the conferences you've been recently? There's a lot more people. It's very well organized. And this time, Coinbase has a huge presence, so it's nice.

Yeah. Yeah. So Cornbase is sponsoring. Yes. Yes. And we have like 10 people here, too. Yeah, I know. So tell me a bit about what Coinbase is working on right now.

Like, one of some of the new services they'll be coming out in the next few weeks or months and stuff you can talk about. Well, we don't really pre-announce anything. So there's not much we can talk about. There's not much I can talk about, but we're basically working on all the different fronts, right? Like, working on exchanges, the Paisal Feature, merchant tools, the wallet. So we have people working on all three, and also the API. So there's going to be stuff coming out soon.

That seems to be a big focus for a lot of companies, the APIs, right? The ability for developers to plug in and build things on top of the blockchain, What are your thoughts on that? I think the API is really important. We have like, I don't even remember, like, hundreds of, like, developers writing programs on top of our API. Like, stuff that we don't have, people can just add on. Like, someone wrote something to do limit orders because we don't provide limit orders on our site, but you can easily just implement it.

So that's nice. We're, like, having a website that looks at all your buy-sells, and tells you how much money you've made, how profitable you were. Yeah, a lot of good features. Cool. What's your involvement with Lightcoin right now? We don't hear about Lightcoin very much at these conferences. So what's your involvement with Lightcoin and where do you see it going?

I don't do a lot of day-to-day programming with Lightcoin. Warren Togami is a lead developer right now. He's doing a lot of that. My involvement, I still look at the project, general direction, and I come through conferences and kind of promote like coin, talk to people, merchants, exchanges, payment processors, trying to convince them to support like coin. And how is that been going?

Like, are there very many merchants except in the like coin? Like, it doesn't seem like there are very many. The merchants are, they're not, compared to Bitcoin, obviously, it's not a lot. But we're getting there. I mean, the path right now is to, first you need to exchanges to provide liquidity for the coin. Yeah. And that's, it's really, it's really,

good because a lot of the newer exchanges, all the new exchanges that come out all support Likcoin from the start. It's kind of, people realize Bitcoin and like coin is the pair to support right away. And some of the older exchanges like BITSamp are kind of too busy. They're not sure whether or not they want to support do like multi-currency. So I'm trying to convince them, but I'm not sure how much I can do. And then once you have like the exchanges provide liquidity, then you can have the payment processors like the like Goldcoin now supports. light coin. And then I'll try to convince Coinbase to do it and then maybe BitPay. So once you have the payment processors, then it's easier for the merchants to use the coin, to accept the

coin, because they can do it without any risk, because the payment processors will come ready to the fiat for them. Right. And so what's your idea? Like you say, you're kind of like overseeing the general direction of light coin. Where do you see it going like, you know, two, three years? I know it's like in cryptocurrency times, it's super long, but like where you see it going? I mean, the general idea is the same as what I started off of, which is to create silver, right, to Bitcoin's gold. So I can see, like, Bitcoin and Bitcoin being used side by side. As, like Gavin said just yesterday, the Bitcoin network,

the transactions fee had to increase or the block sizes increase in order to support all the transactions. So in the future, I can see where the transactions fees for Bitcoin is high enough that only, like, the larger transactions will be on the Bitcoin network. the light coin would support smaller transactions. So basically the two networks would handle, would share the responsibility handling all the transaction volumes. So possibly we'll need, like, more than two.

But now, so, but you would still need exchanges to interface between the two coins, like, because for the time being, there's no direction. It's not like light coin, some sort of the side chain off Bitcoin, right? So is that not some sort of a technical challenge, or at least a barrier where you need to have these companies that is sure, or the improbability between both currencies? Well, there's going to be more interesting things like decentralized exchanges where you can easily switch

between Bitcoin and Lightcoin. And you can imagine wallets doing the conversion for you and taking a cut. So, for example, if Coinbase supported both Bitcoin and Lightcoin, you can easily convert between Bitcoin and Lightcoin. Obviously, you'll lose a little bit over from the conversion fees. But if you wanted to, it would be very simple. Okay.

And so with kind of the growth of alt coins, like Dogecoin and all these other alcoins that are popping up all the time, where you see light coins fit into that kind of ecosystem, do you think that it would be more prevalent than some of these newer altcoins that are gaining a lot of popularity, like Dogecoin, for instance? Or do you think that other altcoins might also serve this function, of doing higher transaction volumes and stuff?

Well, people are positioning the wish coin as like the micro-transaction coin, right? So it's possible for a coin to take up like that kind of space. So I mean, I guess like right now. Somewhere in the middle, right? So like those coins like super micro-transactions and Bitcoin would be like high transactions, high volume and like going to be somewhere in the middle. Yeah, something like that. Right now it's so unclear which coins will survive.

the Alcoin market right now is kind of a mess, right? So I think the free market will decide. After, like, next year you'll see, like, all the coins that really provide use will bubble to the top, and the coins that are more scam and more pump and dump will pretty much disappear. Yeah. Okay. And other thoughts on, like, side chains, for instance. Like, that's been talked about a lot and as a replacement for alt coins

to be able to provide more functionality and perhaps higher transaction, volume. What are your thoughts on now? What a thing about side change is it doesn't really solve one of the major benefits of all coins right now. So one of the major benefits of light coin is that it provides

another secured network. Bitcoin has the network secured by Shah-256 A-6. Lightcoin is secured by something totally different, right? So there's a single point of failure with

Bitcoin where if someone wanted to attack Bitcoin, let's see the U.S. government decided to kill Bitcoin, right? They could basically buy a lot of Bitcoin A6 and try the 51% network, right? But they wanted to kill cryptocurrency. They would have to do that to every single coins protected by a different network, right? They would have to buy Bitcoin A6, they'd buy Lightcoin A6. They would have to basically attack every single coin. So Lightcoin provides kind of like a backup to that. Yeah, I mean, to me that seems pretty unlikely that the U.S. government would buy up, like, lots of basics and try to shut down the Bitcoin currency where, like, in effect, it would only affect, like, one block. They would have to, like, pound it for a long time, I guess.

But. Well, they do have a lot of money. Yeah, I guess. So, yeah, as it relates to mining, so we're talking about mining. So there's like script miners coming out now I'm not sure where exactly that's what that is are Are there script miners at the moment? Script A6.

That have been shipped? There's like, I've seen the USB script A6. Yeah. I haven't seen many of the larger ones. So I don't know. I mean, they're supposed to be coming out, but we'll see. So the other thing about side chain is that the side chains have to be merged mine.

So if you have a side chain, you have to convince all the pools to merge mine you, right? And if only like 5% of the pools merge mine your side chain, then it's not very secure because another big pool can 51% attack your side chain if they wanted to, right? It would be free for them to attack it because it's just a merge mine side chain. So I think side chain adds a lot of complexity to the Bitcoin network because then you'll have pools that do like 10 major side chains and pools that if you don't do those side chains, if you don't, then you'll have more centralized mining

because people would want to mine that pool because they provide more rewards, because the side chains provide rewards also. So it gets, I think it will lead to more centralization pools. And if not, then the side chain will not be very secure. So I think there might be some problems with that. And yeah, so going back to mining real quick. Yeah, so where do you see lightpoint mining in the next six months to a year?

How do you see that changing? As right now, I mean, it's just like a lot of just regular people doing the mining. Do you see sort of an industrialization of mining, as we've seen with Bitcoin? Well, I think people are misinformed about current state of mining. People think that with GPUs, it's very, everybody can mine. But in reality, yeah, everybody can mine, but the people, there's still going to be huge mining farms. I think it's just the nature of the thing, right? People who have money who can buy a lot and minimize their costs, right, will do so.

They will buy a lot of GPUs, create a huge farm, and find a place to have. has really low electricity or even no electricity and make a lot more money than the normal individual miners. With ASICs, the same thing will happen. But the individual can also buy ASICs, right? One problem with ASICs right now are really the ASIC manufacturers. They basically over-promise and under-deliver, like almost all of them. So the individual miners will get hurt because they will buy and they'll pre-ordered an ASIC and think that it will be delivered next week, but they're not going to get it for half a year, and then they'll see their profitability just drop to something really low.

Okay. So I think that's going to, that's what I don't like about ASICs. But I think just like Bitcoin will take like a year or two to kind of iron out all these. They'll have more and more honest ASIC creators that will only deliver when they only sell something that they have in stock. So do you think that as Lightcoin A6 are just starting to roll out now, do you think it's a good time for regular people to get into light coin mining through A6 or should just buy Lightcoin without money? I always think that buying the coin is better than mining. I've been mining Bitcoin, Lightcoin, since like three years ago.

You're still doing mining? Yeah, and I've always thought that buying the coin was more worthier than mining. I like mining because it's kind of cool to do the mining, but I never see it as something that's profitable. I don't expect it to be profitable with respect to the coin price. So I would recommend if you really want to make money, mining is probably not the best thing to do right now. Mining for fun is good and to sort of feel like you're protecting network.

That's cool. But if you want to support the coin, buying the coin is probably. be the best move. Okay. Thanks a lot. Sure. Thank you. Thanks.

How you doing, Philipp? I'm doing good. How are you enjoying the conference? Oh, very good. I enjoy it very, very much. So what are your thoughts on this one compared to like the Berlin conference for your last night? First, it's bigger. Yeah.

Much bigger. There is one thousand and one hundred people here. So it's a lot. and I think that I think the people are more keen to to do business, to be more in a proactive way

to evangelize on Bitcoin. And so want to tell us a bit about how the French Bitcoin Association is coming along. So the French Bitcoin Association is doing very good at this stage. We

plan to have a big event in September. that will be a sort of a Bitcoin France event in France we hope to have 300 people and attendees and we are doing good in recruiting all the speakers

in this very conference how many speakers have you recruited so far here we are about to have 30 speakers and I think that we have recruited like 10 or 15 in the year so you have a two-day event or one day? No it will be one day one day even for the first year.

And when we grow, we will have maybe two or three, four, five days in the future. 30 days, a month? A month, yeah. And so I've seen you speaking to other European Bitcoin Foundation leaders. Absolutely. Yes, we had a very good meet up the first day before the conference with all the the European Association. It was very good to see we had the seven countries.

We had UK, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Paland. So it was good. And we were talking about regulation and the way we can or could work together in a way of having something common about the regulation in Europe. And in the morning, we had a big event with the Bitcoin Foundation itself, concerning the way we can be an affiliate.

Yeah, build a partnership with them. Yeah, we talked about that with John yesterday. Yeah, is that something you're considering for the French Frikan Association? It is being considered. Yeah, it is being considered. We haven't decided yet. We have a lot of discussion with the board of the association, and with the Bitcoin Foundation,

and we have to settle something. Or yes or no, but we have to settle something. Yeah, cool. And so, like going back to France, we've been in this discussion about billing local chapters in France. Can you tell us a bit more about that? And so, because I think other Bitcoin associations around the world could probably do the same thing.

I think that we have to make sure that we grow in terms of expertise, like finance and regulation, law and technology and startups and business and so on. But we have to make sure that we expand as well geographically. And this is very important for France because France is not Paris. And we have to make sure that we cover as well the north of France, the center of France, south of France and so on. Because there is a lot of the community that is in this part of France. And there is a lot of expertise. And we will announce soon that we'll have a chapter in Lille.

Yeah, I know. With you, Sebastian. I think that's interesting. And, you know, because, like you said, you know, a lot of times we confuse the country with the capital. Especially if you're in France. Especially if you're in France. And, you know, much like the Bitcoin Foundation is trying to branch out into different countries, I think it's important also for local Bitcoin associations,

national Bitcoin associations to branch out locally and have local chapters. That's why I'm more in favor of having the conference called Bitcoin, France, 2014. rather than Bitcoin in Paris to 2014, because I think that we can do something that is also a very national. We'll see, but I think we have to think about this. Awesome. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Okay, so I'm here with Philip Rose from Aurelia in a Belgian startup company.

And can you tell us about? Well, the thing is in difference with most of the business. Most of the companies who are at this event, we're not super innovative. We're not the biggest mining companies or minor building companies. We're not BitPay itself, but what we try to do is we are bringing Bitcoin to the mass, to the people, to companies, general people, which have never been in contact with Bitcoin. So we're trying to convince them of what the possibilities are with Bitcoin and then try to help them, integrate that in all of their money-accepting solutions, whether it's e-commerce, whether it's

point-of-sales, whatever. And you especially work with BitPay? We have a contract with BitPay, and so we are the BitPay certified partner in Belgium. So if there's anything or any company who starts working with Bitcoin, sorry, with BitPay, through us or not, and they have a certain concern or a certain problem, BitPay will always point them towards us. So you're doing, I mean, I guess what you're doing is consultancy for companies that want to get into Bitcoin and providing solutions for them, such as BitPay.

Correct, correct. Okay, that's really cool. Yeah, sorry. I'm really curious about the business model side of this. Do the companies pay you for your time consulting them? I mean, I assume, I know BitPa has some affiliate program as well. also. Well, indeed. So for standard consulting, of course, there's some kind of a fee

that we charge for our working hours. It's not much more than that. And afterwards, it depends on the kind of what's it called? Like how much transactions there, company dollars? Not only that, but the type of solution they have within bit of pay, actually. And we're paid by that.

We don't get rich on it. We can't live on it even. But it's a good way because through BitPay or services like BitPay, we can easily help people or help companies to get into the Bitcoin world. Because, well, there's a big legal step there. You can't put them into your account to see without having some kind of a legal problem right now. So it brings it back to the mass.

That's really interesting because there's a lot of evangelizing going on and companies are kind of waking up to the reality, which is Bitcoin is coming. I mean, it's here and it's gaining traction. But you're the first company that I've encountered that is actually doing this as a consulting thing. And I think it gives it a very much more serious for companies to say, okay, so I'm not just going to

obviously this meetup, I'm going to actually work with somebody who's going to help me implement my Bitcoin payment system on my e-commerce site, for instance, and be compliant and get the right accounting and have the right solution to do it. So that's really good. You're doing good work there. Thank you. Thank you. That's the whole ideology at which we started actually the whole company.

We said Bitcoin is so great. We should do something for the mask, for everyday people, for just people who haven't even heard about it. So that was the ideology. So what are you finding to be the challenges? Is it hard to find people, interests, are hard to... Well, the thing is we're in Belgium, and I think of about all the countries in the world. Belgium is really spoiled with a standard payment system.

So if I transfer money from A to B, I mean from one banking account to another banking account, it doesn't cost me anything. It goes not in Bitcoin terms, but it goes relatively... fast and these. So it's really different or really difficult to convince companies start using bitcoins because it was so spoiled. But of course there's much more to that. They don't pay any fees if they go outside of the country. It goes way faster. But it's difficult to convince them. How many companies have you signed up? Sign up. I can't actually tell because we've got some NDAs, of course, but we're in contact with 20 companies right now.

And so being in Belgium, so what city you're looking at? Excuse me? What city are you based in? In Brussels. In Brussels. And so Brussels is where the head of the head office of many, well, the EU, but also many banks, European banks. Are you also targeting those as clients potentially?

Not right now. Trying to do evangelization with banks? Not right now. Because there's an opportunity for them. Look at banks like Fidor in Germany who got into it and actually got something really clean out of it. So there is an opportunity, but for us it's still a bit too early. Certainly, it's already difficult to start convincing standards companies, and then going to banks will even be more difficult, I think.

So let's try to gain some extra confidence and qualities in getting to companies, and then go to banks. And so, as a relationship, so you talked about the European Union, is that also, I guess one of your missions is to try to spread the word and get maybe lobby for Bitcoin at the EU? Well, we'll do that for sure,

but by accident, actually. I also am the director of the Belgian Bitcoin Association or one of the directors. By accident. Yeah, it's, it's, It's not connected, but yeah, in the end. So the idea is with them and with a lot of other association and foundations in Europe, we're trying to get a unanimous voice and go with them towards the European Union.

So where do you see your company in two years? Are you planning to stay with the current kind of consulting and becoming a presentation thing? or do you hope to branch out in other services? We're pretty white right now, and I think certainly in Belgium, it's one of the only solutions that is possible, because we also, for instance, are developing our own miners. It's a proof of concept.

It works. It's fun. And now we're looking at much bigger miners that we're going to build. So we're a bit looking at different areas, and we'll see within a few years, will most likely be more niche and be more towards something specifically which might grow out of the growing community which exists. Thanks very much.

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