Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - David Schwartz, Edward Karatov, Eiso Vaandrager, Jon Peters, Matt Tuzzolo & Richard Caetano: Bitcoin 2014 Amsterdam

Episode Date: June 12, 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: David Schwartz, Chief Cryptographer at Ripple Labs Jon Peters, CEO of Cambrian Edward Karatov, responsible for business development at Cryptonit.net Eiso Vaandrager, VC with Green Gateway Fund Richard Caetano & Matt Tuzzolo developers of BTC Report app This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/bitcoin2014-04

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.

On today's episode, we have five interviews from people doing very different things in the Bitcoin space. So in case you still don't know what Ripple is and how it works, David Schwartz, chief cryptographer at Ripple Labs, explains the basic principles of the Ripple payment system. Then, John Peters, CEO of Cambrian, explains his company's very ambitious project to develop an autonomous city with an open-source economy in Honduras. Next, we have Edward Karatov, who is responsible. for business development at Cryptonnet.net.net. A cryptocurrency marketplace. Then we have Aizovandracher from the Green Gateway Fund, who gives us his thoughts on the threats

and opportunities facing Bitcoin from a VC's perspective. And finally, Richard Catano and Matt Tuzolo tell us about their app, BTC Report, which beautifully delivers Bitcoin price charts and recent news updates to your iPhone. My name is David Schwartz. I'm the chief cryptographer at Ripple Labs. So can he tell us a bit about Ripple and how it works? Sure. Ripple is essentially a protocol. It's a system that's used to exchange things of value. And the way the system is designed, the things of value can be anything.

So they can be dollars, they can be euros, they can be Bitcoin. And we're positioning it as a payment platform. And there's also Ripple the currency, right? Right. It has a currency inside it that you can kind of think of as the sort of Bitcoin of Ripple, which is an internal currency, primarily used to pay transaction fees, but it can also be used as a real cryptocurrency.

So if you have to explain people like, where is Ripple going to be used, why is this important, can you maybe talk about that? We're kind of hoping that Ripple will be used for all of the things that payment systems are used for today. So essentially to make payments between businesses, between consumers and merchants, and so on. We're kind of positioning it as a payment platform

built around cryptocurrency technology. And why wouldn't you just use Bitcoin for that? Well, you could if you wanted to hold Bitcoins and you wanted to receive Bitcoins. And perhaps in the future, people will use Bitcoins that way, and that's certainly happening. But the joke that I make is there's still a multi-trillion dollar market in legacy fiat currencies. You can't ignore them. And you're not going to be able to grow Bitcoin if you don't have really good bridges between cryptocurrencies and conventional currencies.

So if I understand it correctly, I basically mean, you kind of have maybe U.S. dollar to ripple, and then on the other side to U.S. dollar thing. So, you know, you have the cryptocurrency backbone that makes it cheap and efficient, but people don't have to hold cryptocurrency. Is that correct? That's correct.

So it's kind of a different approach to what, let's say, BitPay does if they automatically converted or if you had a... Right, except it's distributed and it's all public. So it's an open platform in which anyone can participate rather than a closed platform in which a particular vendor is essentially the party of all transactions. And what do you think about transaction fees? Do you think ripple transaction fees are going to be cheaper than big points? It's kind of hard to predict the future. It's going to depend on the volumes of transactions that both of those systems see and to some extent how well they can scale in the future to accommodate higher transaction volumes. I don't think anybody wants transaction fees to be a barrier. But if either of those systems succeed while, It's natural that transaction fees will go up, but then there will be a lot of technical pressure to resolve those issues.

I'm pretty confident that both systems will be able to scale, whether that's off-blockchain or off-ledger transactions, or whether it's improvements to the core networks themselves. So I've often wondered, because I've read about Ripple, and I haven't read about Ripple in the depth that I truly understand it. I still feel like there are significant parts that still get. So one thing is that you're kind of passing on IOUs, right? Right. So where's the default risk in here? And how is that handled? So one thing that's very important to understand is that you cannot hold an asset you have not agreed to hold in Ripple. So if you want to hold, let's say, Bitcoins at BitStamp, you have to agree to hold Bitcoins at BitStamp.

And there is no sort of cascading default. A payment path exists only for the duration of that payment. And then everybody is just left with a balance in an asset that they've agreed to hold. And that's very important because otherwise you could get things like cascading defaults or assets where you don't know how you're supposed to redeem them. And so we designed the system with safeties to make it practical to have wide varieties of currencies and wide variety of issuers by making sure that everybody knows exactly who they're trusting and what Warren has their choice of who to trust. So you're always only trusting one party. Of your choice, exactly. But then what if that party relies on someone else and someone else defaults are then and now they're unable to pay, even if you're always. So traditionally you would rely on a party who doesn't rely on anybody else.

We call them gateways. And so what a gateway does, and this is a critical concept to make the system scale, a gateway operates very much like a conventional bank. They take deposits in their local currency, and they issue an electronic asset denominated in their local currency on Ripple. And then people can pass that asset around. They can trade it for other assets. And at some point, somebody who holds that asset and Ripple can go to the gateway and

make essentially a withdrawal. We call it a redemption, but it's essentially a withdrawal. one of the nice things about that is the only way to get into and out of Bitcoin is through an exchange, which is a business that has to deal with Bitcoins. You can get into an out of Ripple through a gateway, and gateways don't have to deal in cryptocurrencies. They can deal with just the fiat currencies that you're used to. We're hoping that that will make it easier to scale the sort of cash-in and cash-out pathways in Ripple.

Okay, no, that makes sense. So does that mean you kind of, you will hold your value often with the Gets? gateway or? Right. So the gateway is sort of the custodian of the underlying asset. So like if I put $10 into Ripple, I might go to a company called Snapswop, which is a U.S. dollar gateway. And I give them the $10 and they issue $10 to me in Ripple.

Then I might pay those $10 to somebody else. And they can go back to Snapswop and say, I want my $10. And Snap swap will pay those $10 to them. Okay. I've also recently, there's been used that, you know, there's some cooperation with Fedor Bank. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So FEDOR is a bank and company.

They operate as a bank, and they have internal payments that they make between essentially their own divisions. It's almost like moving money from one pocket to another. And it seems like that would be very simple to do. And it turns out on the type of scale that banks operate, that's actually a fairly complex problem. So we approached them and said, maybe you could use Ripple to solve this particular problem. And that's exactly what they're doing now. So rather than paying a third party, let's say, to move money between their branches, move the money within Ripple themselves.

And that means the money is not held at all. The money is instantaneously available. So is that for the branches in Germany or for international transfers? I'm not certain. I believe that it is just domestic. Yeah. Okay. And I presume that's a problem all banks have.

Yeah. That's true. It's surprisingly true, especially banks that do various different businesses. Like they're not just, let's say, a conventional deposit taking, but they might also have investment arms and they might have more. mortgage arms, and they deal with their own companies all the time. And often they deal with their own companies using the same payment flows that they deal with external companies. So they're using outside payment systems to move money between their own accounts. It's surprisingly

inefficient. It's surprising me, yeah. Right. And that's something that you find throughout the financial system and the payments business, because many of these systems are very, very old. Like, when you use your bank's website or mobile app, you're thinking, wow, this is a website, this is a mobile app, this is brand new technology, and it is. But if you go just the tiniest bit beneath the surface, you'll find the same payment systems and the same rails underneath that that people have been using since the 70s. So one question related to Fedor Bank.

Does that mean each branch or part of the, you know, feeder bank that moves money, becomes a gateway? Not yet. Not yet. We'll see where that goes. One of the nice things about getting banks to do anything with the cryptocurrency is you kind of, nobody wants to kind of take the first move. A lot of companies will tell us that they're very interested in using Bitcoins. They're very interested in doing things with Ripple,

but they don't necessarily want to be the first person. They're not necessarily brave enough or they're regulatory challenges, and it's difficult to get them to sort of push the button and make it live. So anything that we can get a financial institution or bank to do with Bitcoin or with Ripple with cryptocurrencies will help pave the way. No, absolutely. And Fido Bank has been kind of a leading in that way in Europe. Yeah, very encouraging.

So if you look in the future, what's kind of the main challenges that are ripples facing? Problems that still need to be solved. Well, we have a lot of chicken and egg problems. A lot of cases where you have the same problem in Bitcoin. Like if all of your friends use Bitcoin, then it would make much more sense for you to use Bitcoin. But if they don't, then it doesn't make as much sense. And there are a lot of those. And so the challenge is to look for ways to break those dependencies.

Remittance is one area where if you build just a couple of pieces, you have enough to make a remittance path. people will actually use that path, bringing on market makers and ripple so that currency conversion becomes more efficient so that you don't have very thin markets will help to bring payments on board. And then once there's payments on board, that'll attract more market makers. But gateways are a major focus for us. We desperately need more gateways. Okay. And can anybody become a gateway or you have to think about their local regulations episode? Well, as far as the technical network is concerned, if you create an account, you can be a gateway. You can issue an asset and you don't need anybody's permission to do something.

so. But obviously, if you want people to rely on you and you don't want your local government to have a problem, you have to figure out regulatory compliance. A lot of what Ripple Labs does is help people who want to become gateways or people who want to use the network to deal with regulatory challenges and compliance challenges. So please, if you're interested in starting a gateway, contact us. You know, we're looking to help. So where is the opportunity there as a business? Do you take a fee for their withdrawal? So gateways can use any number of different revenue models. So they can charge an account setup fee.

They could charge a monthly account maintenance fee. They could charge for deposits and withdrawals. Ripple also supports what's called a transfer fee, where essentially the gateway takes a small piece every time an asset they issue moves from one person to another. So that way, they essentially can make money without doing anything. Right now, interest rates are essentially at 0%. So there's no benefit to holding other people's money.

But in the future, interest rates may begin to climb, and there may be a revenue model just like traditional banks have where you're holding people's money and you get some interest on that. Cool. And you're going to talk, give a talk tomorrow or today? Tomorrow, yeah. And you say you're going to talk a bit about privacy and how can you talk about that in the context of ripple? Sure. So for the future of cryptocurrencies, they're going to have to be able to comply with existing regulations, regulations about money laundering and so on. And so what we're looking to do is to give consumers more control over the flow of their

own information. So right now, if you want to deal with an exchange, you have to go through there, know your customer policies, you may have to send your passport to them and other documents, and then you have to start that whole process all over at the next gateway, and it's very balkanized, and you don't necessarily know who you're dealing, you don't know who you're dealing with when you send these documents. So we're building an identity infrastructure based around Ripple, where consumers will have control over how their own identity is used, who it's revealed to and when. So law enforcement will be able to get to those things when they need them, but you won't necessarily have to be revealing them to everybody you're trying to do business with.

But that will be kind of a centralized service by Whipple. We're hoping to make it as decentralized as possible. So someone is going to have to hold that information and that entity is going to have to be responsible to do things like respond to subpoenas. We would prefer that not be us. So our general policy is to help other people do things. If we need something to be done and no one's willing to do it, we won't let that hold the network back. We'll do it ourselves if nobody else would. But our business model is essentially to enable other people to do things as much as possible. And then your business model as a company is interesting too, which is essentially that you're

holding the ripple coins and if RIPP is going to become successful, a lot of people will need those for transactions. Is that correct? What we expect is you won't necessarily so much need them. We expect the transaction fees to remain very, very small. Over 100 years, you're talking maybe one or two percent of the value of XRP could conceivably come from transaction fees. We don't see that as a revenue model. The transaction fees are basically just an anti-spam so that someone can't blast the network with millions of transactions and make it unusable. What we foresee is that XRP will become sort of an intermediary currency. So if you imagine that U.S. dollars might be

issued by 20 gateways and there might be hundreds of currencies used on the network, the way to make an asset liquid so that people can use it in payment very easily and convert very easily, we think will be to create markets to and from XRP. XRP is universal in It's trustless, there's no counterparty, and it flows with no fees of any kind. So we're hoping its inherent efficiency will allow it to become sort of like a reference currency or intermediate. And where would the business model for Ripple as a company be then? So Ripple holds a significant amount of XRP. But it would be then profiting from the value increase.

Right. An increased demand for XRP with the growth of the network would increase its value. Okay, cool. I find it fascinating because I think that's the first company I know of that does, you know, that has a business model like that. I guess now you do see more of those decentralized protocols that do a similar thing, but, you know, Ripple's like a VC-funded company. And they're the first company that essentially like it should token to themselves.

And if the networks are discussed, well, that's going to determine the value of the company. It's fascinating. So it makes our financial incentive. to build the network and get as much adoption and usefulness out of it as we possibly can because we believe that's where our revenues will come. Yeah, no, I think in terms of aligning incentives, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Okay, well, thanks very much.

Pleasure. My name is John Peters. I'm the CEO of Cambrian, and I work with Elevator Cities Development in Honduras. And Honduras changed the Constitution and put together some more. legislation to allow for quasi-autonomous semi-itonomous region zones. And so you're in charge of developing one of those? We're a developer of one of the zones. Okay, how big is it going to be?

So they've reserved the entire north coast and south coast of Honduras for developers of these zones. So you could build like a few million people city? If someone wanted to build something the size of Hong Kong over time, they could do it. Cool. And how does that relate to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency? Well, the chance to start from a blank sheet of paper from a regulatory framework means that like many in Bitcoin, we can rethink how an economy maybe as a service could operate from the ground up,

how things could be a little more efficient. Yeah. So are you going to have a national currency? There is no restriction to currencies at all in the zone. So we can use any currency. Do you know already in what direction you want to go? Well, we're really focused on building the software infrastructure, decentralized infrastructure to support an economy as a service.

So the whole stack starting from identity. Economy as a service. Yeah. I like that. So there's a whole business stack, right? So you're going to outsource the I. The economy. Open source.

Yeah. Open source. It's hard to find good business models when you're disintermediating things, right? They're there. They're there. But they're not in the core peer-to-peer infrastructure. We want to build the core-to-peer infrastructure. Give that away.

And then there's educations around decentralized law firms, corporate registries on the ground, that kind of stuff that bridge the gap between the crypto-adferency space. and Bick-2.0 space and the real world. So where do you see that going in a few years? Do you think like a lot of maybe cryptocurrency businesses will move there? Or is that a focus specifically? It's not. Our focus is more than the developing world.

Yeah. And the issues that they have there. So access issues, system access issues is a little lockout, particularly in the developing worlds. We want to develop a system with a very easy owner-up for anybody to use. Yeah. free for the most part. Very, very simple to use. So the system that we're developing is almost Facebook, Skype-like,

in its user interface, so you can send cryptocurrency to another user with one click. Your identity, you own your identity at the center. You can formalize your corporations, your directors in the voting. It's not a gentleman's agreement so much as, say, a corporation is in our world anymore. more along the lines of a smart contract. That kind of infrastructure all the way from identity, communications, formalization, legal systems, arbitration, marketplaces. And in funding, that whole stack is what we're interested in developing on the software side first. And then, yeah.

So where are you guys at now? What's the stage? So we've, our developing team is based out of Guatemala City. And we have 12, 12 people full time on it right now. We started building back in June. And we've got our identity and our end-to-end encryption communications working, and we're going on to multi-sig and marketplace right now. But it's interesting, so you're really focusing on software now?

We're software and hardware. So I'm heading up the software side. And my partner, Gabriel de Gato, is hitting up the ground game in Honduras, so the city development. Are you funding that? Did you raise venture capital? Yeah, we raised plenty of privacy for it. Okay.

So we're first focused on building infrastructure in Honduras, power plants, plain fiber, that kind of stuff for our zone. That's what we're working on right now. That's our priority right now, is to build the core infrastructure for the zone. And when are you going to have to first people move there

or, you know, building scale, etc? Probably at least a couple of years. A couple years. It's a gigantic undertaking. Yeah, starting small. Starting humble and small, right? Yeah. It's how we're starting.

And then, yeah, inviting others to join us. So we're really a platform for other people to come in and build their own communities, really. So are you also going to allow kind of different social structures, different community within that? Absolutely. It's kind of like a HOA, a homeownership association, right? So you can come in. There's a very thin rule set on the top that we've been in place, but, but, the core role set that another developer wants to adopt is really up to them.

It also fits into some basics. You could have like a sub-community that does maybe some social security stuff. Absolutely. It wouldn't be part of the top layer though. Like taxation, is there going to be taxation? The only taxation that we're considering is a land value tax. Yeah. Right, so just property tax.

Okay. The tax nowhere else. We'd like all that alliance incentives, a little, better. It's not perfect, but it's better. Why do you think that land's a sentence? A number of ways, right? Talking about access for people earlier. So, the higher

your land value tax, your property tax, the more incentive there is to develop density, the less speculation there is on the land. So you're not going to hold a piece of land and pay a high tax on it. So that keeps it affordable for hundreds.

Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Well, thanks so much. So if people want to learn more about your project, can I look at Cambrian.org. Okay. And sign up for email newsletter there. And elevatorcities.com. Elevator Cities is different?

Eleveter Cities is the real estate project in Honduras. And Cambrian is the software project. Okay. Economy as a service project. So like two years online, I can just, you know, get forced at. and start my own noise coming out. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this is fascinating.

I've heard this before. You know, I've heard of people working on this vaguely, but you're the first person I met that actually does it. And it's true interesting. You can hear those details. Great talking to you. Thanks so much. Okay.

My name is Edward. I represent the Cryptonit trading platform. So we offer users a possibility to trade crypto coins to crypto coins and crypto coins to fiat money. And where are you guys based? We are legally based in the United Kingdom and we are operationally located in Belarus. So our customer support and technical development is located in Belarus. And when you do the

like cryptocurrency to fiat currency thing, that's euros or US dollars? Yes, it's a good question. We actually offer US dollars and euros. Okay, and then you can also do payouts in both countries. Exactly. So we do deposits and withdrawals both in euros and dollars. Oh, cool. And you have lots of different currencies? At the current moment, we offer trading for Bitcoin, light coin, name coin.

Dogecoin? Not yet. No? Also, Feather coin, Terecoin, and of course, pure coin. Okay. Well, Dogecoin's missing there, no? Yeah. Maybe we should do a job in this.

When did you guys get started? Actually, we have started in the Bitcoin economy quite a while ago. We have launched back in 2012. That's very old. Yeah, we have not advertise or promote our service, but we have recently done a big restructuring. We have launched fiat trading, and that's why we decided that it's time to give our project a second birth.

and now we're starting more active promotion. Cool. And can you tell us a bit about, you know, what's your goal? Do you want to be like an exchange that other companies built their service on, maybe through an API, or do you just want to have like a really liquid old card market? Okay, that's a very good question. Basically, our main purpose is providing really robust and reliable trading platforms. So basically our main purpose is to offer exchange and trading possibilities for people and companies.

And as concerning your second question concerning the API, we do offer this possibility, but it's not our main business. But we're certainly interested in the technical partnerships with other companies and individuals. So it's kind of a service that's designed for frequent traders, day traders. Yes, exactly. So yes, for traders, for people who are interested in earning some margin. Yeah, and also, are you also targeting financial institutions? We have not worked with financial institutions yet a lot, but we're certainly planning to do that as well as we gain some traction.

As for now, we're mostly working with individuals. And how is your trading volume? You have a lot of liquidity? As I said before, we didn't promote our service yet a lot. So for now, you can call our trading more episodical, but we're suddenly starting to gain more liquidity, as we're starting to launch our services, and we will put more attention to promotion now so we could gain more users.

Cool. And so what's, can you tell us a bit about the Bitcoin scene in Belarus? Okay, that's an interesting question. The thing is that it's not regulated. There are no laws that constitute for Bitcoin in Belarus, but there are people, a lot of people who are interested in this. So there's a vibrant community, media, stops. There are people interested in mining mainly.

So there are a lot of mining communities and people, you know, starting to discuss these things widely. So I'm sure that at some point of time and the future, there will be more steps that will bring Bitcoin on another level in my country. So we have the first evening of the conference now. It's kind of before it started. What are you hoping to get out of this conference where you're most looking forward to? Actually, it's the first conference for us as well,

and we're doing our best at finding people who are really putting a lot of effort in the Bitcoin economy at all. We're looking for new partners. We're excited to learn about new services that people offer, and we're excited to meet people who are already using our service, the people who are already having some partnerships with us. We're also happy to meet our people who help us on the legal stage, you know, help with compliance. So we see this as a great networking event and we really enjoy it. Well, thanks, Edward.

And, you know, I hope you'll enjoy the conference. Okay, thank you. I look forward to seeing lots of security from Cryptonit. Thank you. Oh, maybe just if people want to find your website, it's... Okay, it's sure. It's www.comptoenit.net.net. Okay, perfect.

Thanks. Thank you. Bye. I'm Eiser van derager. I'm working at the Green Gateway Fund, which is a venture capital fund. Yeah, doing a little bit more growth to stage investments, so larger tickets. And I'm here at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam, having a look at what's happening in this whole new financial sector. So where does your interest from our Bitcoin come from?

My interest was sparked by my brother. He worked at Google. And several years ago, he got into Bitcoins. And yeah, he's been pretty involved since then. And, yeah, two and a half years, he tried, you know, let me buy some Bitcoins. But I couldn't do it. I wasn't smart enough. It's probably connected with some.

like giving a regret. Oh, well. No, I think the future of Bitcoin is still very much ahead of us. And I really don't care about the valuation, you know, how much Bitcoin is worth, et cetera. Because that's not the real value of it. So I rather see kind of statistics of, you know, the actual transactions between goods. Yeah, yeah. So trading up and down, et cetera, that's less relevant.

But the whole concept of that decentralized trust network. So, of course, money and transactions is one of them. But if you look at the possibilities of Namecoin and Ethereum, those technologies, can be used in such wider applications. So what do you think is the biggest kind of vet to Bitcoin? That's very hard to say. Because first of all, it's so global that if one country bans it, it doesn't really, really affect it. I think that the main thing is that people need to be realistic about it.

It will take a while before this is implemented in society. and it might go faster in certain areas than you would expect, but still, it's a new technology, just like the Internet. You still have to build websites and services, et cetera, on top of it. That will take some while. So I don't think the biggest threat is there, because if one, you know, for example, Bitcoin gets attacked or something happens, whatever. No, of course, they're going to be regulated.

and it's going to be a roller coaster anyway. It's going to go up and now and up and now. But look through it. I feel the regulation can slow it down a lot, but you can't really... Yeah, but then you have one country that deregulates it and everybody goes there. Yeah. So it's a global thing. It's very hard.

And I don't think that all the governments in the whole world are going to come to suddenly consensus. That has never happened in the history of humanity. Exactly. It's a thing that's going to happen for Bitcoin. So you mentioned the decentralized applications. Do you think Bitcoin is first going to be really successful as money, as a currency or payment system, or do you think it's going to be those, you know, Bitcoin 2.0 applications? So it depends on what you think is successful, right?

So if you think a high valuation of Bitcoin is successful, I don't know. Perhaps number of users. Yeah, so a number of... So personally, looking at it, I think a large part of the value is in developing worlds. Because the 5 billion people, you know, don't have a bank account. There are more people with a smartphone in the world than that have a bank account. These people don't have savings. These people can't buy stuff online.

So I think this technology can be, you know, if it's. gets into those areas, that's going to have a massive impact. I don't know how fast it's going to be, but I would say that would be a success, giving access to banking services to people that don't have access to that. So it really depends what you define success. No, that makes sense. So if you think about your work as a VC, but not so much in a Bitcoin space, Are you interested in, at some point, investing Bitcoin companies,

or is that not part of the focus of your fund? The current fund, no, but we're working on a new fund. And then kind of fintech would be definitely, so financial technology would definitely be a component of that fund. And so if you just not only zoom in into, yeah, bitcoins, but just the financial sector itself, the amount of innovation going on right there and how basically the position of banks

are being attacked from all sides with kind of specialized services. For example, Lending Club, they now have $2 billion of loans they've processed. And that's $2 billion going out of the banks. And if, you know, yeah, mortgages, your insurance, etc. That used to be all bundled in a bank,

but that's getting unbundled very rapidly. So, interesting times. Absolutely. So what do you most look forward to at the conference? Do you have any talks you really want to see or people you want to meet? I spoke with Mike Hirsch yesterday. Mike Huron. Yeah, I spoke with Mike Kern yesterday.

I really like how he views this sector. So he'll be speaking around lunchtime. So definitely going to check him out. But, yeah, I think there are too many interesting speakers to hear, you know, what are they thinking at this moment? Where are things happening? So at this moment, We don't have a fund.

We don't do investments in FinTech. But in a year or so, we might. So, you know, this is a long-term thing, and we're having a look at it. Cool. Well, thanks very much, and enjoy the comments. All right. Thank you, Brian. Hi, I'm Richard Cotono and one of the developers of BTC Report.

an iOS app that helps tell the Bitcoin story in an easy way. I'm Matt Tuzolo. I'm currently the lead iOS developer on VTC report. Are you guys just an iOS? Yeah, for now we're just not iOS, but we're expanding our team to develop HTML5 and an Android app. And the app is basically, you know, has a price and you're going to have a news fee as well, Yeah, so the idea was to try and leverage good design to bring this information in a clear way for the maps. You wanted to tell the story of Bitcoin and it's like continuing with the price charts, but also start integrating in like relevant news stories and how those stories impact the average consumer,

the average Bitcoin user. Yeah, I mean, I have the app and I have to use you, you know, for a while, and I can definitely confirm design-wise. You guys are top-notch. So what are the plans with BTC report? Where are you planning to take this? Well, so we're really excited to have Matt just join us. It was about three, four months ago.

Yeah. He took the last version and brought it up to date with a lot of the things that we wanted to build, and so we just released the 5.0. And we have kind of some plans for the next 5.1, 5.2, 5.3. And these plans include just bringing in more features, including we want to work with content providers. We've been talking with some folks from Poind desk

and some other folks that maybe provide commentary on the... And then also we want to integrate, we want to create a way to expand the app to like be able to plug in different kinds of specific things, like maybe mining pool information or open map information. So you can find places where you can spend people on survive. Yeah, like our friends from Spender would be a great example.

We would like to plug them into the report. VTC reports be in one place where you can come and easily find the information to interact with the community. Cool. I mean, there was a similar app, no, it was just zero block. And it seems like they're going towards a sort of a trading support thing. Do you see in the long run, you see yourself being kind of a platform for Bitcoin users? or do you also think it's going to go more in a financial direction? Do you have a view there?

I think the differences are mostly that the BTC report is kind of focused towards people who are interested in Bitcoin. Maybe don't know what some of the more technical aspects of it are. So it's more of like a welcome into the Bitcoin ecosystem for them. They can see price in their national currency where they live. They can choose an exchange that they maybe have bought Bitcoin on. and just focus on that exchange. And hopefully soon they'll be able to do things like

see what's current with the news, maybe find out where they can buy and spend Bitcoin or sort of everyday type uses for Bitcoin. Yeah, I think, you know, if I, when I scale out, I kind of step back a little bit, I kind of see, so you definitely have this trading, day trading, Bitcoin kind of activity. But aside from that, I do see,

as we've become more global, Bitcoin, within the Bitcoin space, that you're going to find a lot of people interacting with their local currency. So for us, it's more important to get a clear and kind of simplistic view of the pricing, of the price between different currencies. So we're more interested in expanding that list as far as we can go out. And so we do also include other, like non-type of market, non-type of trading markets like, say, Coinbase, for example, we include as one of our tickers. but not really a trading platform, but people use them a lot to buy them sell their Bitcoin.

So we want to target those the average consumer Bitcoin and the potential consumer Bitcoin. Who will be coming online in the next five years, right? I think for that, a big focus is I think it has been and will continue to be, is

supporting kind of the international market. So as many fiat currencies as we can, as many small exchanges as we can, localizing the app into as many languages we can. Because ultimately, as Bitcoin grows, it's going to be, it's a global phenomenon.

And the other thing we want to get into, which we are planning probably around the next 5.3 version, would be pulling in cryptocurrencies. So other currencies like Dogecoin, Lycoin, all the coins, all the coins that we can find, basically plugging those in and making it, you know,

it's part of it. Yeah, I think we think that PNTC report can be, I mean, it's obviously a really beautiful tool for people right now. It's a little more geared towards the larger market, but I think it can also be something that's really useful, enjoyable for people who are serious traders who are very well-per-sendip. So if Apple in the future is going to, you know,

go away with their ban or think on wallets, would you want to integrate a wallet as well? Yeah. Possibly. I mean, we've been considering the idea of integrating a wallet or a partial wallet, as much of a wallet as we can implement up until now, which probably isn't very much. But we're looking at maybe being able to just receive points

because it's just a simple QR code for now. But we're modifying the design where we can plug in different widgets into the app. And that could be a launching point for implementing our own wallet or someone else's wallet. Cool. So are you guys working on this full time or do you have other projects as well? You know, sometimes it's full-time, sometimes it's not. There's a, I've been pretty much full-time on BTC report since maybe early spring this year, and probably will be for a little while longer.

But yeah, we have some other projects here, both Rich and I. I've been working on BTC report since 2011, and sometimes it's full-time and sometimes it's not, yeah, we have some other Bitcoin projects that we're working on as well and try to develop. Do you want to talk about that? I'd like to keep it a little secret for now. Okay, we'll come back to that when you're ready to launch. Okay, well, thanks so much, and I'll look forward to hang out at the conference.

Thanks very much. So we hope you enjoyed this episode about the Bitcoin 2014 conference. If you liked our coverage, please consider tipping us at epicenterbitcoin.com slash tips. You can also subscribe. your weekly newsletter at Epcentadibibicon.com slash newsletter and tune in next week for more interviews and coverage of Bitcoin 2014.