Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Ryan X. Charles: Allowing Content Creators to Own and Monetize Content with Yours

Episode Date: August 29, 2016

In the last 20 years, content publishing platforms have proliferated to an almost insane number. There are countless places where people and companies can post articles, blogs, videos, photos, live content and so on. Despite this diverse offering, little innovation has happened in monetizing content, which still mostly remains ad-based. We’re joined by Ryan X. Charles, Bitcoin Developer and Founder of Yours. Yours would like to address the monetization problem by allowing content producers to earnBitcoin when they create good content. Yours is an in-browser application which implements a Bitcoin wallet and enables micro-transactions through their own implementation of the Lightning Network. Content Creators are paid by Curators who attribute value to the content. Curators are themselves rewarded when content they find valuable goes viral. Topics discussed in this episode: Ryan’s background as the Lead Developer of BitCore, and his experience at BitGo and Reddit What is Yours and what types of applications it enables The technical components of Yours The Yours application and how users post and access content Why he chose to build Yours on bitcoin How micropayments are implemented in Yours How Yours addresses the issue of copyright infringement What challenges Yours may face in order to reach critical mass Episode links: Yours website Yours client This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/146

This is Epicenter Bitcoin, episode 146 with guest Ryan X-Charles. This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by the Bitfinity Conference taking place in Miami Beach from October 30th and November 2nd. Join industry thought leaders, investors, and leading blockchain companies to discuss and showcase how they will use blockchains in a wide range of industries. Go to Bitfinity.com slash epicenter for discounts on registrations and exhibitor packages. And by Jax. Jacks is a user-friendly wallet that works across all your devices and handles both. both Bitcoin and Ether. Go to JAAWX.io and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets. Hi, welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin, the show which talks about the technologies, projects,

and people driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Sebastian Kuchio. And I'm Meheroy. Today we are joined by Ryan X Charles, who is the co-founder and CEO of yours. Yours is innovating in the content monetization space with Bitcoin. So we'll be talking about the challenges of content creators and how yours can make a difference to their life. So before we begin, let's have a beef background from Ryan. Ryan, something about your background and how you got involved in Bitcoin? Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me, guys. I'm really happy that you would have me on your show. So, yeah, my background is, so I was a physicist for a total of about

eight years. I was getting a PhD in physics at Washu in St. Louis. I discovered Bitcoin in 2011. And for some reason, I was just absolutely blown away with the technology of Bitcoin. I thought, you know, this is, this is unlike anything I've seen before. I was a little bit clued into the financial system. And I wasn't like an expert on economics at that time. Still not an expert. I've studied a bit since then. But I thought, well, this is really interesting. Like, this is just totally unlike anything else. Like, decentralized money, I didn't know that was possible. So in early 2011, I spent about three weeks just studying Bitcoin. trying to assess whether this was for real.

Like, is this actually possible or is this some type of scam? I think it's for real. And so after I had like this sort of, I don't know, this sort of moment where it was just like, I was just sort of obsessed with it for about three weeks. I then sort of went back and kept being a physicist for a while. But Bitcoin was on my radar, and it was sort of a hobby, I guess you could say. I was sort of a Bitcoin advocate at that time.

Then 2013 came and Bitcoin became sort of sufficiently real, sufficiently big. There were a bunch of VCs that started investing in it all of a sudden, that I decided that, you know, this is for real. I'm going to regret it if I don't get into Bitcoin. So I decided to leave my PhD in physics and I dove into the world of Bitcoin without knowing exactly what I was going to do. But I was an engineer because as a physicist, I wrote lots of software. I'm an experimental physicist. I'm like, well, I don't know much about business, but I know how to write software so maybe I can get a job as an engineer. And so I interviewed with BitPay, the largest Bitcoin payment processor.

I ended up joining BitPay and I worked there for a year. I wrote a lot of open source software. I suppose it's fair to say that while I worked at BitPay, I was the lead engineer on BitCore. I also played a really big role in creating co-pay. BitPay's originally multi-sig wallet. Now it's sort of the general wallet. BitPay was, so it was a really, really great experience for me, really informative.

I met lots of wonderful people. I then had this very unusual opportunity to join Reddit. And I'll let you guys ask questions if you're curious. I'm going to give the light version just because it would take a long time to, you know, give you the full version. It's a light version first. I talked with, basically, a recruiter reached out to me. I can't remember his name now.

But the recruiter reached out to me, put me in touch with Yishon. Yishan was the CEO of Reddit at that time. And I had a really good conversation with Yishan. And actually, I was like, okay, well, if I'm going to meet the CEO of Reddit, I just sat back and thought about this strategically, like, well, this is kind of an unusual opportunity to meet the CEO of Reddit. What am I going to tell him? You know, I should say something to him and not, you know, not waste this opportunity.

I thought the most important thing I could say to Yishan was you guys have got to decentralize Reddit. That's your number one, you know, if I were. to join Reddit, I would work on that because that's a really cool, like that would be, that's the future is decentralization. So that's what I said to Ishaun. And so we had a really cool talk. I mean, they had already thought about doing stuff like this. So I had a really good conversation with Yishan. I then, you know, basically kept interviewing. I interviewed with some engineers. I talked with Yishan again and decided to leave BitPay and join Reddit and figure out, you know, how to how to do something like this at Reddit the company. So as far as I'm aware, I'm the all only person whose official title was cryptocurrency engineer like ever. I'm not aware of somebody else who had that title. And also, as far as I'm aware, the only person who worked on sort of

cryptocurrency projects in a sort of full-time capacity at a mainstream social media company. So now what happened after I joined Reddit, and here's where I'm going to give you guys the light version and feel free to dive into the details if you want. Basically, there was unrelated drama going on at Reddit at the time. And Yishan, decided to resign after I was there for a month and a half. And when Yashan resigned, I kept working on the project. But it's sort of the board and the new executives had their hands full with all sorts of other stuff. So it basically just killed the project that I was doing. And so I had to leave after a little while. And then I decided to join a company called BitGo. And I joined BitGo because

it just sort of fit well with everything I was doing from a Bitcoin. and software point of view. It's a Bitcoin security company since I had worked on co-pay at at BitPay. I knew a lot about multi-sig and, you know, JavaScript engineering and stuff. I'm an engineer. So I worked there for a while. And then last year in the summer of 2015, I wrote an article called Fix Reddit with Bitcoin, because after I left Reddit, Reddit kept going through this sort of period of turbulence. And this article I wrote was really popular. It really caught on with the Bitcoin community. it really caught on with some technology people outside of Bitcoin.

So I realized I had this sort of seed of an idea that I wanted to explore. So I decided to leave BitGo and pursue this full time. And that project would evolve into what is now called yours, which is you could call it a, it's just a social media app where we have integrated Bitcoin micropayments and we're trying to solve this problem of getting content creators pay. Because there are all these people out there that write content, And not just right, but produce videos, music, audio, whatever, on Facebook, on Reddit, on Twitter, on Medium, on SoundCloud, on YouTube.

And they don't get paid anything. Or if they get paid something, it's not very much. And usually they don't get paid anything. I mean, especially on, like, Facebook. So we're trying to solve that problem. And that's when I'm full-time on now. So that's my history in a nutshell. That's a fascinating history.

And I guess we could sort of see the progression from, you know, going from working as, you know, as an engineer at BitPay working on Bitcoin to then being at Reddit and then building a multi-six software at Bitcode to sort of the logical progression out into building a social network that pays content creators and curators for the value that they bring into the system. Before we get into the questions on yours, since you did work at Reddit and you were full-time on this idea of building the decentralized Reddit, they've sort of, you know, the decentralized Reddit, they've sort of moved away from that idea. What are your thoughts on Steam and what they're trying to build? Yeah, so Steam is definitely, Steam executed on this idea of what if you could build like a community

on the basis of a new currency or a new blockchain, and you sort of decide the economics of that community. So Steam invented new economics with their own new blockchain, your own new currency, with this integrated platform where people can create content, right? So it's a really, really cool experiment, I think. I'm really, like, excited to see Steam. There are a lot of, we have this list of related projects that's pretty long. There are a bunch of people that have had ideas that are really similar to something involving like cryptocurrency and monetizing content and stuff.

And Steam took this really, I think, almost most sort of extreme ideas. of like inventing their own, you know, blockchain. So we sort of deliberately didn't go that route, but I'll avoid, you know, diving into that yet. I think it's a really cool experiment. I'm glad to see that, you know, they've gotten a bunch of attention. We've actually gotten a bunch of attention via steam just because people are like, wow, maybe there's something to this idea of cryptocurrency and, you know, social media. So we've actually gotten more attention for our project just because we're like the,

the next closest thing to doing, you know, doing something like this. We haven't launched yet. But, you know, there are, all the other projects are a little bit maybe further behind, I would say. We'll see if anybody else sort of rolls something out soon. But, yeah, so Steam's really interesting. You know, what we're building isn't quite the same. We get compared to them a lot because of the way that I've described the project in the past. And, you know, since I worked at Reddit and everything, and originally I announced our project was a decentralized Reddit,

which is actually really kind of what Steam is. they really actually did that. What we're doing isn't quite a decentralized Reddit, but in any case, yeah, I think it's a really interesting project, and it's cool to see how that'll play out. Cool. So let's get into what yours is. So describe yours and your own words.

Sure. So first of all, I think, you know, anybody who's clued into the space of social media, you're probably aware of things like, at least from a business point of view, you know, Facebook and Google earn a huge amount of money from advertising. They've now like, you know, they're absolutely these sort of enormous sort of giants

compared to traditional media. Google and Facebook, these fairly new companies as far as, you know, history goes, have done a better job leveraging the Internet than New York Times or, you know, television companies, NBC or whatever. But what's happening is there are all these people that create content for these platforms. Facebook being the biggest one probably. YouTube's definitely way up there. Reddit is a big one as well.

Reddit is somewhere in the neighborhood of like 150 million active users. I don't know the latest numbers. But a lot of people create content for these platforms, but they're actually being paid zero. So the companies earn money, and sometimes the companies are profitable in the case of Facebook and Google. In the case of Reddit, the last I'm aware of, I don't think they're profitable yet.

I think they're still spending more money than they're taking in. So there's, there are a couple things maybe wrong with the advertising sort of business model. One is that the content creators usually get paid zero. So that seems a little bit unfair. I mean, like, wouldn't that be cool if there are a way for these people that are creating content for these social media platforms could actually earn money for all the value that they're creating? And the other one is that maybe advertising isn't necessarily the best business model for every type of content. I mean, maybe it's a business model that works sometimes, but maybe there are other things where maybe there are better business models. So anyway, we see this opportunity

here where all these people, and I could give lots of examples of this, but there are just communities of people that create content for free. And I think the real reason why they do this is it wasn't really technically possible to monetize what they were doing until fairly recently. I think Bitcoin creates the foundation and then some type of layer on top of Bitcoin like the Lightning Network, really enables us to finally have actual peer-to-peer micropayments so that you can monetize internet content in a way that's not based on advertising. So that's what we're trying to do.

We're creating a social media destination with an integrated Bitcoin wallet, the user's post-content, and what we're trying to do is find the right model or maybe a market of models where we just empower the users to earn money from this, and then while also solving this complementary problem of giving people a reason to pay for content.

So anyway, all that sounds pretty generic, but I could describe the product maybe in detail, but that's the big picture. There are all these people creating content on the internet, not being paid anything whatsoever, and we think if we can get those people paid, that this is going to be a big deal. That sounds like a really big problem to attack, right?

Like, because being YouTube content creators, we, we kind of see this problem daily. And I've kind of, so for this, for this podcast, maybe we could take a couple of different examples. So when we say content creators, like just to personify content creator in the minds of our audience, we could have a few different examples. So example number one could be some person who has a YouTube channel. where he or she says something and is very popular, goes into the millions of views. So I duck through one of the top people making money on YouTube is Jenna Marbles. Who the hell is Jenna Marbles?

Who the hell is Jenna Marbles? I know who she is actually. So Jenna Marbles apparently makes around $2 million a year on YouTube. Wow. Because she has a total of 3.5 billion viewers. on all of our videos to date. And so that's one kind of content creator. Like this kind of content creator is massive, right?

Like is a lot of, a lot of views, probably very low production costs. And YouTube already kind of has a way of monetizing her content and delivering her part of the things. But the issue also here is in this, in cases like this, YouTube takes a 45% cut. So whatever YouTube makes out of advertising from her videos, 45% goes to YouTube, 55% goes to her. That's one kind of content creator. Another kind of content creator is somebody like us, Epicenter Bitcoin or let's say a talk show that talks about the latest Game of Thrones episode.

So they make reviews of new equipment, new technologies or new shows. And these people generally don't have the number of views in order to really, make a living like Jenna Marbles, right? So that's another kind of content creator. Maybe a third kind of content creator is somebody who either blogs or puts up really great posts about things on Reddit. Let's say they might be a guy who really makes really great posts about virtual reality and he reviews all of the products that are there and he posts them on Reddit and

probably gets paid nothing for it. So we'll have like these three examples. Yeah. Like Jenna Marbles huge. The, let's say the Game of Thrones reviewing channel who doesn't get paid much. And the third person is somebody who blogs and posts on Reddit and who doesn't get paid anything at all. And let's walk through how yours can impact all of them, right? Would that be a good experiment?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great experiment. So that's a great way to frame it. This is one way to look at it. Like, you know, different scales, different levels of, you know, whether you're full-time or not, stuff like that. So Jenna Marbles is, I've seen some of her videos. So she's almost like, I hope I'm not being, I hope I'm not mischaracterizing her,

but she's a very normal person who makes these very normal videos. And so I think she just latches on to people. She's like one of these people that, she's very, very good at capturing sort of an audience of other normal people. So the audience is just absolutely enormous, apparently. I didn't know how much money she's earning. That seems like a huge figure to me.

So she's like a power user. She's a power content creator. And YouTube is an interesting platform just because it's one of the few platforms that actually provides a way for people to monetize. So if you're really successful on YouTube, you can be very successful like Jenna Marbles is. But Jenna Marbles is sort of an exception. Most users are not anywhere near Jenna Marble scales.

There's a long tail here where there's some small number of creators that are earning a lot. and then a long tail of people that aren't earning very much of anything. So sort of on the opposite side of the spectrum would be the small-time content creators. And let's just think, I mean, let's assume we're focusing on people that are actually putting some care into what they're doing and actually doing a good job. Because there are definitely content creators that are, you know, if you just post some random comment, it isn't necessarily good. So some of them are, some of them aren't. But let's focus on people that are actually trying to create something good.

That, like, and it would actually be nice if they could, you know, monetize this somehow. So, you know, most of those people aren't being paid anything. So I don't know where you guys, you're somewhere in the middle on the spectrum. You're not as famous or popular as. No, we're way down, way, way down on the spectrum. We're close to that guy making videos about, you know, virtual reality or whatever. So, you know, so you guys have an audience, though. So you're, you know, you do have an audience.

You're probably earning something, but probably not millions of dollars for your like, like Jenna Marvel says. And then there are the people that aren't earning anything and have a very small audience. Also, there are different types of content to consider. So, you know, like you're saying, mayor, you know, articles, you know, people that write articles. I write articles for free on Medium. We're definitely not targeting the superstars on day one because I think we have very little to offer them. You know, if Jenna Marbles wanted to use your platform, I mean, she has a lot more to give. Like, if she used our platform, that would be amazing because it would draw attention to us.

I don't think she's going to earn very much money on yours on day one. Like, she's already earning enough from YouTube that, you know, if she earns $10 from yours, it doesn't really make any difference to her. But if someone who isn't earning anything earns $10 on yours, that makes a huge difference to them. Especially, there are a lot of people in the world where $10 actually makes a meaningful difference in their life. So those are the people we're targeting. We're targeting the long tail. All these other people that aren't being serviced whatsoever by YouTube or these other

monetization of platforms. And then also just consider the fact that, you know, there are people that are really, you know, professional content creators, creating on content on platforms that aren't social media, you know, on the New York Times or whatever, you might be a writer for the New York Times. We're not targeting those people either because they already have a job. They don't really have the problem we're talking about. We're talking about people that are either not earning anything or not earning enough. You know, there are people where it would make a huge difference to them to earn even just a little bit of money. Those are the people that were that were trying to create a platform for.

Let's take a short break to talk about Bitfinity, the Miami blockchain conference to be held this year from October 30th until November 2nd. Blockchain technology has been exiting the world of nerds and hackers and entering the mainstream. We're at the beginning of a big revolution that's going to fundamentally change how the world works. At the Bitfinity conference, we're going to have the heavyweight speakers such as Don Tapscott who wrote the book, The Blockchain Revolution. or Joe Lubin of the startup consensus, but we're also going to have the industry panels

that focus on the real-world use cases and bring together both the tech expert, who really understand blockchain, and the kind of key decision-makers that will help blockchain become a real commercial success. Now you may just want to pack your bags and buy a ticket to Miami, and that's certainly a good idea, but if you're involved in a project or startup, there's something even better. Bitfinity will feature dozens of presentations by starting startups so you can apply for the presenter package, get an exhibitor stand, and speak on the main stage to an audience of 500 to 1,000 high-level people including many VCs and top decision makers. And of course, all that while

sipping in martini in a luxury hotel in Miami Beach where Frank Sinatra once staying on stage. To learn more how you can join startups like Factum, Consensus, Everledgeer, and Stellar, visit them at Bitfinity.com slash epicenter and find out how you can get 10% off, the company presenter package, or your $200 discount code to attend. We'd like to thank BitFinity for their support of Epicenter. Slightly unclear to me at this point, is yours a simply a technological platform on which social networks could be built, or is it actually a social network? Is it the equivalent of, I don't want to, you know, it's kind of a vulgar description

of what I mean, but like, is it a CMS or is it the, social network on which you build it? Great, great question. So we are trying to build the actual social network, not just a platform for other social networks, but an actual destination. So you'll go to yours.network and log in the same way you would with Reddit or some other social media site. We won't have a mobile app on day one, but I think it's really important that we get on mobile. So maybe the way most people get it is by just going to the app store and downloading yours. So it'll be an actual app that faces end users. But you're asking a good question because

I think once you start considering the possibilities of what if you just had micropayments integrated into content, there's a giant space of possible products. And here's where I start being really generic and vague when I talk about this. We can narrow it down. But it's because it's really like there really are a lot of possibilities. And so we're trying to first build the simplest product that we think will work. But we do think that there's actually a big space of possibilities here. And our role model here is Reddit. Reddit has created a community that is actually a bunch of sub-communities. If you're a big Reddit power user, you're probably on a small handful of subredits, and you don't care about any of the other subreddits. You care about the

subredits that are important to you. For instance, R-slash- Fitness is a big one. If you're a fitness buff, You might like R slash fitness. There are a whole bunch of these that are just, there's R slash Bitcoin, of course, for Bitcoin users, which is basically everyone in the Bitcoin community is on R slash Bitcoin. And there are all these communities for other, you know, various interests. So I think that there's power for us to create a platform of platforms. So we are a destination,

but at the same time we empower the users to tweak the rules of the economics so that they can create something that's appropriate for their community. So I would describe us as a destination. It's not just a protocol, but we are also like sort of, I guess you could say it's market-minded. Like we like the idea of empowering the users to define what the product means for their community. Okay. So when I think about this, and we were discussing this earlier before the show with the mayor, is when you look at the history of social networks that have become successful, because there's been, you know, for every successful social network there have been. been maybe like a hundred that have failed. All of the successful social networks, whether it

be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, some of the other ones like Periscope or whatever, all have a unique position and value proposition in terms of functionality. So, you know, every one of those networks has brought on a new functionality that is very specific and very targeted. So take Instagram, for instance, posting photos with filters and it has been true to that and that's what has made it so powerful and so successful. The monetization often, and for many still doesn't exist, but is often an afterthought. I guess my question is, what is the unique feature aside from monetization, which I don't particularly think would lure people in itself, what type of features would

yours proposed to its users in order to, you know, reach this objective, this goal of being massively used by, you know, thousands and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people? Yeah. So, well, first of all, I actually think monetization may be it. I mean, I think, I think monetization by itself can go a really long way. I think that'll be the strongest reason for people to use this app. If we actually succeed in getting our users paid real money, we actually empower them to really earn money. I think that will be a reason for them to use our platform, at least in addition to, if not as a replacement for other platforms.

With respect to, again, I'm going to be really vague here. Let me try and give you some concrete examples. Let me give you a concrete product idea that has never been done, or rather I should say the way we would do it would be different than anything that's been done before. That's an idea we've run through recently. Now, I'm not promising we're going to launch this idea, but this will give you an idea of what I mean. So there's a website called shutter stock where you can buy stock imagery,

where, you know, imagine you're making a website, you just need like a background photo of some people with a laptop or something. You can go there and get stuff like that. You can buy, you know, content. I think there's a monthly fee or something like that is how they monetize it. So you have to go there and pay a monthly fee to get stock imagery. Well, what if on yours, you know, you can create a community for stock imagery. And the idea is, you know, you can see all the images at low resolution for free.

But in order to see the image at high resolution, which is what you're going to want to print it out or to put it on your website or something, you have to pay one cent. So you have to click a button, you know, to make a payment. But it's that easy, right? It's not like, you know, you don't have to sign up for a recurring payment, which you don't necessarily need. You just want this one payment. and it's worth one cent to you, which is really small. It could be bigger than that, but it could also be that small. Well, that would draw people in.

That would draw in that community of people. That would draw in people that want to produce stock imagery and have a platform where they can share it. And also the people that want to buy just one image. You just want to buy one stock image. I don't need a monthly subscription to a website. I just need this one image. So that would be an example of a little community.

I think that could work. And again, I'm not promising we're going to do, that specific one. But there are a lot of ideas like that. If you just run through the space of possibilities of what if I could pay for things on the internet, it's really, there are a bunch of product ideas involved in who pays for what and when and how much do they pay for and why are they paying? Are they paying to buy it? Are they paying to invest in it? And you just have to have the technology there for some formers. You've got to actually make these micropayments possible first. then building these little products are relatively easy.

So we can we can experiment with adding these features, telling our users, look, we've added this cool new feature. What you can now do is you can display a photo for free and then the users have to pay one cent to view the full, you know, resolution version of this image and let the users design their community, you know, to use that feature. So I think the way I now see it playing out would be, we will empower the users.

users to create these communities with unique features. And the community that becomes the most popular one first will probably not, hopefully not be something that we can conceive of because the whole idea is that they'll be better at figuring this out than we will. So I don't know what product will take off first or what community will take off first. But it'll be something unique with where, you know, content creators, are being paid and it's servicing some type of niche audience that most people don't care about, but that niche audience really cares about. And to them, it solves that problem that they have.

And then once people start, you know, coming to our platform, you know, you can create other communities that service other niches and other communities with other product ideas and stuff. So hopefully that answers your question. In a nutshell, I would, my basic answer is I would argue that the monetization part actually is a really, really good selling point that if we can nail that correctly, that actually will draw people to our platform more than more than anything else. So personally, I believe the monetization is sufficient to draw users. And to give you a feel for some examples I see in my daily life, like I love the show Game of Thrones. And there are these small channels that are they,

they take episodes from the series and they make commentary on the episodes and I love seeing them because these people that create these videos think in ways I don't so I find that really valuable and these people get like 50 or 60,000 views a day

and I walk through their financials and what I kind of realized is these guys can only do this for a hobby with 50,000 or 60,000 views per episode and like four episodes a month. But many of these people actually want to do this full time and they want to branch out to new shows and do it more, but they really can't because there's no way of monetizing what

it is they do. So I'm guessing that if there was a really good monetization mechanism for them, they would go full time. They would be able to invest in equipment and then they would get users. Yeah. So I personally, I completely buy into the premise that. There is a big long tail of people that are creative. And if you could give them the right monetization model,

they would come out in full force. And maybe over a decade, it develops a new kind of media industry altogether, just like YouTube has created a new media industry. Given that, like, I think the interesting questions to me are, how does your start, A, like what kind of communities does it start with? And then come the technical questions, which is, like, if you wanted to build a platform of platforms, then basically you need something like a financial logic, and then something that stores content,

and then there's something that kind of gives a user interface and how do all of these things connect, right? So there are two components here. Maybe we address the technical one later. I'll let you guys maybe ask that again. But then there is the, you asked a good question, though, which is, again, I'm sort of vague about this now. but who are our core users? Okay, like what is community number one here? And the reason why in Vegas, because we actually haven't identified this yet.

So I think it's really important. So we have, you know, you guys have heard of our project. Many people in the Bitcoin space have heard of our project. Okay. We have at this rate, sort of like 3,000 people on our mailing list. I'm quite sure almost all of those people are Bitcoin users. I haven't pulled them, but I bet most of them are. And so we've got attention to the Bitcoin community.

We could make a platform that was for Bitcoin users first. I mean, this would be like a really straightforward. Like, what if we just made, you know, Reddit but with Bitcoin? I bet Bitcoin users would use it. However, I don't think it's in anybody's interest that we do this first. Bitcoin users were probably most benefit from it if we created something mainstream. They would actually probably rather we service a mainstream audience because everybody in the Bitcoin space wins if we start servicing people outside the Bitcoin community. Also, from our business point of view, you know, I'm a Bitcoin user.

been in the Bitcoin space since 2011. If we create a platform that services Bitcoin users, well, okay, I mean, I'd be happy with it and my friends would be happy with it, but we would have no idea whether we are solving a real world problem or whether we're just solving something for Bitcoin users. So I think it's really important that we identify one community to be our core audience that are not already Bitcoin users. Because if we can get some group of people that actually are getting value from this product and actually use it, actually really love what we're building for them, then we can know we've solved that problem of like making a mainstream product, that we're not just making something that's so technically sophisticated that you can

only understand if you're a Bitcoin user. We'll know that if we've got normal, just non-Bitcoin people, they probably won't be normal, actually. Whatever it is, it'll probably be some niche audience that it isn't normal. But it'll be something that's outside of Bitcoin where we can know that, you know, we're solving something for people that aren't already really clued into Bitcoin. So let me give you an example. Recently, I've been learning about a manga in Japan, if you guys know about this. I'm not a big, like, manga fan, but there are a lot of reasons why we think that audience might be good for us. That there are really sort of young, sophisticated people that create manga, which are Japanese comics.

And there are huge communities of these people. And they have the same problem as these other people. They, you know, they're creating content. They're not really able to monetize this anyway. But if they had a way to monetize it, they would love to do this full-time. Like, they would quit their job in a heartbeat and start making internet content. They could only earn money doing this. So that's an example of an audience.

We could maybe start with manga. And the way this would work would be, you know, we basically talk with our manga users, tell them, you know, what our value proposition is that you can start earning money by creating and discovering good manga. And make the product suitable for them first so that you can easily post, you know, graphic imagery. You know, if they're creating in a form of like a, you know, PNG or whatever, or it's a PDF or how it is, make it really easy for them to post that. Make it easy for them to, maybe you have to, maybe you can see black and white version for free and you have to pay to see

the color version, for instance. We'll just talk with them and figure it out. Most of the actual software engineering effort has to go into these micropayments and these little product tweaks that we have to make to service the manga community are fairly easy at a technical level. all we have to do is talk with them and make sure we're sort of actually, you know, making it, you know, tuned for their use. And I think, I think, you know, a group, I don't want to say that manga necessarily would be the first user, but something like that. It's a niche community. It's outside of Bitcoin. Not everyone likes manga, but the people that do like it, really like it. It's a really important part of their lives. And there are these content creators that, gosh,

if only they could earn some money from this, they totally would do it. So that's how it'll really be. And so we don't actually know that core community yet. That's something we have to figure out in the next six months or so, because we're still at a very technical phase. We're going to launch this in phases. We will target, you know, basically just people close to us first. But within the next six months, we'll have to figure out who this core audience is and actually make sure that what we're building works for those people.

I like this idea of going after an audience and really figuring out what their needs are. before building, building sort of a huge product that, so I'm very product focused myself, so this is sort of a construct that I identify with. One of the challenges I'm sure you've thought of is, you know, and has been probably the challenge of a lot of startups in the Bitcoin community, specifically with anything that has to do with payments, is getting people on board into Bitcoin, right? So getting people to have Bitcoin in their pocket or in their sales.

phone to be able to engage in these types of systems. So how do you foresee engaging, say you take the anime community or manga community, how do you foresee them acquiring Bitcoin in order to participate in this system? Yeah, totally. So the onboard, this is something that sort of plagued the Bitcoin community the whole time, right? Like we're, you know, we're like, we're like, we think this technology is so wonderful, there's also many problems, but there really is still, like, there's, there's this onboarding problem where it's, it's still kind of difficult to get it. It's, wallets are, wallets have improved a lot over the years, but they're still kind of technically sophisticated. You know, if a normal user has to back up their private key, you've just lost,

like, a huge fraction of the world population who's, who doesn't understand what you're talking about as soon as you say you need to backup, you know, your private key or whatever. So there is an onboarding problem. Um, uh, I'll just, I'll sort of explain how, how, how I think, to solve this, I think we just need to make it really, really easy to get in and out with fia currency. So, you know, other platforms that involve payments have an onboarding problem. In order to get into PayPal, you've got to, like, put money into PayPal somehow. The way PayPal actually solved this originally was they raised the $100 million. They gave $50 million. I don't know if I'm remembering the numbers exactly, but they gave something

like $50 million to the early users and basically said, you know, if you just sign up, we will just give you $10 or $50 or something like that. That is not out of the question for us. You know, if we raised a bunch of money, we could do that. Like we could maybe raise money with the explicit purpose of giving it away. I don't think we necessarily have to do that, though. The users that create content do not have to have Bitcoin to be paid. So you can start using the app and earning money without necessarily having any Bitcoin at all on day one. But if you're going to make payments to someone, like if you're investing in a piece of content, you're curating content or whatever it is, you do have to have Bitcoin.

Well, we just make it as easy as possible. Fortunately, in the U.S. anyway, Coinbase now has this, you can integrate like a Coinbase sort of widget where you can easily buy Bitcoin with a credit card. We haven't tried using this yet, but that's the right idea. if we could just integrate, like, it's just as easy as typing in your credit card, which isn't that easy. I think if you already had Bitcoin, it would be easier to send it from another wallet. But for those people who don't, typing in their credit card information is no harder than buying something on any website. So if we can make it that easy, then at least getting the Bitcoin is as easy as using payments anywhere else.

So I think that that and then the other thing would be how do you use the Bitcoin? For that, we would just integrate with other services. I like services. I like Purse.io. Wouldn't it be cool if we could just have like a buy, buy this with purse.io button on our app so that when you've got money, you can just basically click a button right away and buy something with it. I think that would be really cool.

So you just have to make it fluid for the users to get on and off. And then again, I'll emphasize that not everyone even has to have Bitcoin to use the app. If you're a content creator, you do not have to have Bitcoin to start being paid Bitcoin. So the onboarding problem for them is you just have to make something that's good quality content and you can earn money for it. Today's magic word is social, S-O-C-I-A-L.

Head over to let's-stock bitcoin.com to sign in, enter the magic word, and claim your part of the listener award. One identifying feature about the yours project is it's kind of, you're kind of betting on Bitcoin all in, right? You're not like Steam it creating your own currency. And you have had like blockpost saying you're also not going to go in the Ethereum direction because you think Bitcoin is the biggest ecosystem. It's going to have the biggest community and that matters a lot. Yeah.

On the other side, on the flip side of this argument that I can think of is, and I'm trying to be the devil's advocate here. You have said previously on the show that you don't know. what community is going to be first, what community you're going to focus on. Right. And my perception is different kinds of content creators need different kinds of financial instruments. So let's let's let's let's take a few examples. For instance, if you're kind of creating video and creating video needs some kind of instrumentation around it, then you might need a financial instrument which is like okay i want to issue shares in the video and if this video

makes advertising revenue then the shareholders that are invested in in the shares of that video get paid yeah that this is like a proto dow it's it's a dow really right but we can't call it a dow because it's centralized across this content theater but it's essentially the financial logic of a dow yeah um something like reddit or steam it um as a different kind of financial logic in which there's the initial content creator and then there are sets of curators that are up-voting and down-voting things, and you want the initial content creator and the curators to be paid. So that's a different kind of financial logic.

Right. Maybe there's a third kind of financial logic in which some content creator needs to buy specific equipment in order to do his stuff, and this guy needs loans. So can you crowdsource loans to the... this content creator. Now, you come into this space where we realize different content creators have different financial needs. And what seems to me the case is because they have different financial needs, Ethereum

might be a better platform for it because using the smart contract architecture, all of these financial needs could be met. Whereas Bitcoin's restriction of scripting language would not allow for many kinds of financial instruments to be expressed well. So why did you go for with Bitcoin rather than Ethereum? Yeah. So that's a really good question. I mean, I'll give you the reason here. So we've been, you know, I guess part of it is the basic answer is very simple. You know, Bitcoin has the biggest economy. It is the most useful. It's the most liquid. You can easily get in and out of Bitcoin relatively easily compared to the other cryptocurrencies. A lot of the other cryptocurrencies in and order to get in and out of it, you got to go through Bitcoin. You know, you got to trade your steam for Bitcoin before you can get dollars. I don't know if that's not true for all of them, but it's true for some of them. You can do things with Bitcoin. You can buy things.

There are many more merchants that accept Bitcoin. You know, more people know what Bitcoin is. The audience is just bigger. Like if you, you know, as small as the audience for Bitcoin is relative to say Facebook or something, it's way, way, way, way bigger than any of the other ones. So it really just has the largest economy. So that's purely at like a sort of social economic level. It's just, it's very fluid.

So it's true that Bitcoin doesn't have the technical features that Ethereum has. But it's not like it's important. possible to do those things with Bitcoin, it's just harder. And my sort of stances, my prediction is that all the things you can do with Ethereum will eventually happen with Bitcoin just later, just when you need it. Right now, we just need money. You know, all these financial instruments are really sort of valuable, and they're valuable for the right, you know, right people. So, you know, let's run through this, how this would work on our platform. So wouldn't it be cool if there is a way for someone to like loan money to another person, that if you are buying audio equipment, so there are two,

ways you could imagine funding this. One would be debt where, you know, someone just gives you the money, but then you have to pay it back with interest. Okay. That would be cool if you could do that on this platform. That would, that's totally a way to get, you know, to, you know, use this funding mechanism or financial instrument to, you know, sort of solve this problem for someone. Another thing would be equity, where rather than give them like a loan, you are actually investing in them. And now you own 10% of, you know, of ownership and that either that piece of content or their company or whatever it is, and you get paid out, you know, if there's a dividend payout, you get 10% of the dividend payout, something like that. So equity is another kind. There are all sorts of other things you can do

as well, like when and how, you know, when you pay for things, who gets what fraction of the money and stuff like that. So you can play with these variables and really come up with, you know, unique solutions to problems that some people would have. But we can do all that with, with Bitcoin, We've not everything necessarily has to be done on a decentralized blockchain. Some of these things are just normal contracts. You know, if it's the case that you can just loan someone money, then you can just loan the money. It doesn't necessarily have to be something that's on a blockchain. If we decide it needs to be, then we would have to solve that problem for Bitcoin.

I think we would. In some cases, you do want it to be on a blockchain. So we would have to solve that problem, which is not trivial. There is, you know, root stock is trying to do exactly that. The side chains, people are trying to do stuff like that. There are other ways. Not everything requires necessarily a blockchain or a separate chain or something like that. You can do a lot of things with just normal smart contracts on Bitcoin.

They are limited compared to Ethereum. It's not term complete, but our micropayments technology is all based on Bitcoin smart contracts. So there are probably other things you can do with just Bitcoin scripts. So the simple answer is, you know, Bitcoin is just the biggest. And we're starting with payments first. I do think if we're successful, we're going to want to really play with all these financial instruments, but that'll be a ways down the line when we have the resources to solve it on top of Bitcoin. So the benefit of Bitcoin is that it's a little bit easier to do it now, but it will be a little bit harder to do those more sophisticated things later.

So that's true. I do think, you know, there is room for experiment here. I mean, like, you know, if, imagine, you know, we would change our minds if Ethereum displaced Bitcoin. Now, I don't think that's going to happen. I think Bitcoin will probably stay the largest. I think there's huge value in being the goal of the internet, which is effectively what Bitcoin is, it doesn't have to have all the features that the other ones have, because the fact that it's the largest and the most stable and there's a finite supply of it actually are the most important features. And it's the most secure, you know, the most proof of work. All these features are actually really, really important. And actually, I think, give it the most value. But, you know, if this argument stopped working in the future because Ethereum became bigger, we would find a way either to switch or to accept

Ethereum, if that happened. I mean, it would be, you know, like, if it's, if it would be, you know, like, If that actually were the case, we want to do the thing that's the best for our users. So it could be that Ethereum would end up being better. I don't see it playing out that way. I mean, I think for now we basically had to pick. We can't do both now. We're limited with resources. I think Bitcoin being the biggest is a really strong argument to do it.

And then I'll just add one other thing, which is that by using Bitcoin, we're really able to offload a lot of really hard work onto other people. So we didn't invent the Lightning Network. We're implementing it. We're writing software, but we didn't have to figure out how to do it. it because other people figured that out. Huge to us that other people were able to make that giant intellectual contribution to create the Lightning Network.

Same thing with all sorts of advances that are happening right now in Bitcoin Core. Segregated Witness was just like merged. It's not live yet on MainNet, but it will be. That's a huge advance that's going to be really, really useful to everyone in the space that we didn't do. Other people in the space did it. And Bitcoin has the largest sort of, you know, it's the largest economy, not just the businesses and stuff, but all the developers and everything.

everybody in the space working to help solve these problems. So it's, I think this will be the right move, but it's, you know, it's hard to predict the future with accuracy. But in any case, the fact that it's the biggest is the reason. Let's take a short break to talk about Jacks. Jacks is a multi-coin wallet created by the people at the Central. Now, in the past, if he had a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies, it was a pain to handle them. You either had to leave them on an exchange, which was insecure, or you had to have all these different

wallets, which was a hassle. Fortunately, now with Jacks, those medieval days of darkness, misery, and suffering are over. Jack supports multiple cryptocurrencies and new ones are being added. But it's not just storing cryptocurrencies you can do with Jacks, but you can also exchange them directly from within side the wallet, thanks to their shape-shift integration. And since there's only one seed, Jacks makes it super easy to back up and sync to the other devices. Jacks, works with Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. So go to jacks.io, that's JAAWX.io,

to download the wallet and get started today. We'd like to thank Jax for the supportive Epicenter. So you mentioned the Lightning Network. So then let's, I guess, let's get into the technical components of yours. So can you tell us broadly, what are the technical components of yours? What does the stack, the technology stack look like,

and how does it leverage Lightning Network in order to make micropayments? So I'll just give you the text tag. We're writing everything in JavaScript. It's Node.js. The reason for this is this is the best way for us to reach consumers, because at the end of the day, we're making a consumer app, and we don't want to write,

we don't want to have to implement things twice. So using JavaScript means we write the code one time and it runs everywhere. So the stuff that needs to run on a server, the stuff that needs to run in a web browser, runs in a web browser, the stuff that needs to run on mobile, runs on mobile. We implemented one time. It's the most sort of cost-efficient way to make it a consumer-facing app.

Besides that, we're using Bitcoin. So here's how it works right now. You have an integrated Bitcoin wallet, like a normal Bitcoin wallet, in the web app. So when you open up yours and you have like an account, you've got the private keys stored in your web browser and a web browser database is called indexed DB, which is built into all modern web browsers now. It's a real database. Your private keys are stored there. We have a normal Bitcoin while working. What we're now working on are the micropayments stuff. Here's how that works. We're basing everything off of the Lightning Network. We write all their papers. They are not, however, done. And so we decided, well, what are we, how are we, you know, we basically need micropayments or our product doesn't make any sense.

We think micropayment is going to be a huge asset and really make the difference between, you know, like, I mean, basically a lot of this content we think is only worth one cent. So like if you had to pay a dollar for it, you're definitely not going to buy it. But if it's one cent, maybe you will. So micro payments make a huge difference. For a lot of reasons, we think it's really important that the users control their private keys. So we are sticking very closely to this decentralized peer-to-peer financial system where the user, Users possess their digital cash and they're sending it directly to another user. Now we're basing everything on the Lightning Network.

So the way this works is in order to send a payment to another user, you can open up a payment channel with them, but in most cases you're not going to want to open a payment channel with another user. You need a payment channel open with someone who has a payment channel open with them. And as so long as there's a route to get to that person, you can make payments across these routes. And the way this works is you basically make a payment to an H TLC hash. The other person generates this hash, only they have the secret. You make a payment, you know, to, like if Alice is paying Carol via Bob, Alice makes a payment to Bob, Bob makes a payment to Carol. Carol shares

this secret with Bob to prove that Bob made a payment to Carol. Then Bob shares that secret to Alice to make sure that Bob, to prove that he made the payment. And then Alice, sort of, now that Alice has a secret, they're able to, they're able to spend the money with the secret. So it's just like Lightning Network. It's really the exact the only differences are things like the actual details of like the message structures

and things like that. I'm not sure the scripts are exactly the same. In fact, I think the Lightning Network people stopped using HCLC hashes. Last I heard, they're doing something different. So they've diverged, they're not the same, but it's theoretically based on the Lightning Network. And then the other trick will be like a matter of, you know, We don't really want to make an incompatible protocol with them.

So maybe those are a way we can reconcile later. But for now, we're just making our own implementation of the lightning. And so I'm not exactly sure at what stage of, in the roadmap, how close the Lightning Network is to being compatible and deployed on the main net. Can you give us an idea of how long it will take until the Lightning Network is live and available? Yeah. So let me, I'll give you some more. background there. So what we're doing is not quite as sophisticated as the real Lightning Network.

They're making something that is decentralized in every way. We're not making something decentralized in every way. We're making it decentralized in the ways we think are the most important while also balancing launching sooner. So we will probably be able to launch, well, I don't want to say this for sure because I don't know what their timeline is, but I'll give you our timeline. We have the logic of our network working sort of proof of concept stage. We haven't tested it on Bitcoin TestNet yet. We're going to test it on Bitcoin TestNet next. That will be fairly soon. I would say, I'll just say a month. I mean, it'll probably be earlier than a month. We're pretty close. What we're then going to do is we have to integrate it into our products because we have the

product working. So we have to integrate the micropayments. That's not trivial to integrate into the product, but it's easier than making the micropayments work. So then we integrate into the product. Then we start launching our product to a really select audience of people to get feedback on the product itself and making sure the technology works and doesn't lose money. Because, of course, you know, you could be hacked or, you know, there could be just bugs that cause people to lose money. So then we launch in phases. So we're going to launch in phases over the next six or so months. So we start with a really limited audience and we think just realistically it's going to take months to build up towards tested with more and more people,

tested under harsher and harsher conditions, eventually migrate from Bitcoin TestNet to Bitcoin Mainnet. and then eventually launched to a real general audience. And that would be, I'll say early 2017 is when we want to launch to a real general audience. So that's our product thing. Some things we're doing differently than Lightning are, we have a messaging system that goes through our servers.

The messages are encrypted, so we can't read your messages, but the Lightning Network requires that you send messages, from user to user. So we don't have a decentralized messaging system. real Lightning Network guys are, from what I understand, making a real decentralized message you system of some form. So there goes a little bit further than we do. So yeah, so there are some minor differences, but it's basically, you know, ours is, I would say it's a step towards the Lightning Network is how to think about it. And we'll sort of iterate towards

full Lightning Network over time. Okay. Now, just coming back to the technical architecture, you mentioned that it was written in JavaScript and Node.js. Just from a user's perspective, Let's take the example of this manga community you mentioned earlier. Let's say you onboard people from the manga community and they start using the app. What does it look like? Is it something that you install? Is it in a browser, like a web address? Do you have to install like a sort of like client in order to access a network?

Yeah. There's nothing you have to install. You visit yours. Network. That's all you have to do. Other than that, it's going to look and feel similar to any other web app. And we will have a mobile app, but we're not building the mobile app now. We're not going to build the mobile app until we're done with the web app and we know that we've built the right product.

Then we go to mobile. In that case, there's a, I assume there's a server somewhere, right? It's not fully decentralized. There's a server. You're not touching the payment and the transactions that happen because they happen on the browser side. but there's a server somewhere managing the content. So the content storage is also centralized.

Sorry to disappoint people. When you save the content, it is being saved on a server. And also we're using a blockchain API on a server. So the way that you query the blockchain is not by running a Bitcoin full node in your web browser. You are querying a blockchain API that we're running on a server. So there are two ways in which it's centralized.

I think, you know, basically we're doing it this way because it's just the fastest way to market. It'd be cool to do it totally decentralized, but we don't think that most of the people that are going to use it are really going to care if it's literally fully decentralized in every way. The one thing that we think is really important that we decentralize are ownership of the digital cash. That's the thing we're being really sure that you possess your digital cash and you're sending money peer to peer. The other things we're frankly cutting corners on it and it's centralized because, because it's just easier to do it. So the content storage is stored on a server, and we are using a blockchain API,

which is also running on server. Sounds really cool. Sounds like a really good plan to have parts of it centralized and just have the payments and monetary section decentralized. So one of the things that comes to my mind listening to you is in this case, what is happening is people are creating content and they are posting it to a central server and then you will have some kind of financial logic by which they get

paid and the users make these payments right now the success of failure of the system rests on solving the problem of attribution that i i created this particular manga comic and only i should be paid for it somebody else can't just post this manga comic like take this comic from me Post it, post his public key and get paid instead of me. So there has to be some way by which the attribution problem needs to be solved. And if we look at the total web today, this is a very big unsolved problem. Like if I do Google image search, I see lots of great images. In none of the cases, do I know who really created it?

So do you have a particular plan for solving the attribution problem or what's your approach? Yeah, so the attribution problem is, it's really important to us because, you know, we're trying to get original content creators paid. We also think you should be able to be paid for discovering content, but let's not confuse discovering with creating. You know, just because you found a gift on the internet doesn't mean that you made it. So this is a really important problem to us. There are a lot of techniques that we're going to employ to address the issue. I think that, you know, it's really hard to thoroughly solve the problem. I'm not sure that anyone has ever thoroughly solved this in a complete way because it's really difficult.

Like if you have a piece of information, how do you know who the author is? Like you can always just copy an image and, you know, like you don't necessarily know. So let me give you the ways that we're going to address this issue. First of all, I think this is the most important one. We need to create a culture of original content creation. We need to make sure that we're not, you know, encouraging people to copy other people. That's wrong. That's immoral. If you're claiming credit for the work that someone else created, you know, that is against our terms of service, first of all.

Now, having a moral stance there doesn't do very much because I think people that don't care are just going to do it anyway. So we have to have some technical means to solve us. So the way we do this is severalfold, just like any other media website. One is, you know, when it comes to just complying with the law, we actually, we have to follow DMCA, which is where like if it's a copyright holder, sends us a DMCA takedown, we have to comply. We have to have a process in place to take down the content. So if somebody posts a Hollywood movie, we have to take it down. And we have to have that process.

So we'll have a way that they can communicate with us to take down the content. We'll have to take it down. But I think there are better ways. I don't necessarily think that DMCA really solves a problem either. So other ways to do this are imagine you're linking to some other piece of content on the internet. there are technical ways we can at least make it harder to copy content. If you have to embed your public key in a piece of content on the internet, so imagine you're linking to a YouTube video, your public key has to be in the video.

If it's not in the description, if it's not, then, you know, it could be that you're copying someone else's video. So if you're really the author, you can go into the description and add your public key to it so that we know it's yours, right? At least you're linking to something that it's a video that you create on YouTube. Now, of course, you could have still copied the content uploaded a video separately. And the only way I know how to address that is twofold. One is users need to be able to flag content as violating copyright so that there's a bit of a human-powered solution to like you're just flagging it.

The other answer is we have to do data analysis. And this is something that the big social media companies do like YouTube. They scan the content. If you're uploading a song that is, you know, whatever, it's some famous artist. They scan it and they can tell, hey, this is the exact same song that somebody else created. And it's known, you know, it's a, you know, whatever it is. It's owned by somebody else. So then they delete it.

So it's human powered plus something automated. And then we also have to, in complying with the law, we'll have, you know, like we have to comply with DMCA. But then the most important of all these, I really think building a culture of people creating original content. We need to make sure that you are rewarded for doing original content and your banned or, you know, you're punished. for copying and content and making it look like you created something that you didn't create. Yeah, so, I mean, the copyright problem is a problem that you're going to have on a digital medium, right, because it's so easy to copy data. I mean, some people are looking at ways that we can solve that, you know, like ascribe,

for instance, is tackling that problem from a different point of view. but so in just before we wrap up here, it has been a very fascinating conversation. Can you tell us about your business model? What is the business model for yours? Yeah. So the business model is really simple. We're going to take a portion of the money.

So if you're making a payment, we'll take a percentage. So, you know, for, you know, hosting the app, creating the app and everything, we take a percent. We haven't decided what that percent is yet. But it will be lower than, say, YouTube. You guys mentioned, you know, Jenna Marbles. You know, she pays 45% or something like that to YouTube. It will be less than 45%. So it'll be low compared to, you know, normal standards.

So I don't want to give a number, but it's not going to be extremely low. We're not going to promise super, super low. We're going to take something that makes sense for our business. And so it will be sort of, you know, a result of computing it sort of, you know, rationally what percent makes sense. So we'll figure that out later. But I think that's the simplest thing. There are other ways we could monetize this.

There are ways we maybe could reduce the fees to zero, like the fees of the company, if we could monetize the data or add ads or something like that. I'd really rather not add ads. I think there are so many ways to, you know, if people have money on the app, why not just take a percentage? Like, we don't need to add ads. Ads are annoying to people.

I'd rather not have any ads. And then, you know, maybe monetizing data, But again, I'd really rather explore these sort of financial techniques that are empowered by our technology, which haven't been possible. I think the reason why most people use ads, like Facebook and Google, is because it wasn't possible to monetize peer-to-peer payments. But now it is. So we can just, you know, earn money directly because people are just paying us stuff. So that's it. It's taking a percentage of payments.

Cool. So before I wrap up, where can people find you? If there is anything that you'd like people to do, this is the time to tell them to do it. Sure. Yeah. So our website is yours. Dot network. You can sign up to get an early preview if you want, add your email address.

You can find us on Twitter. It's at yours network. You can find me personally on Twitter. It's Ryan X. Charles. And I'm also on medium. Ryanxcharles. com is where I write articles. and stuff. So yeah, so yours.network and hopefully some people would be interested in this and

want to sign up for our mailing this. Well, I certainly signed up, so I'm looking forward to seeing seeing the initial versions as it comes out so you can try it out and give it a try. Well, thanks a lot, Ryan, for coming on the show. It was a really fascinating discussion about a topic that I always find this kind of personally interesting since we are content creators and monetization is is something that, well, we do, but we don't get to live off off. So it's nice to see there's initiatives out there trying to solve the issue of monetization with cryptocurrency. Thanks for coming out. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been awesome.

And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We are part of the Let's Talk Bitcoin Network. You can find lots of great shows on Let's TalkBitcoin.com. You can find us at EpicenterBitcoin.com as well as on YouTube at YouTube.com slash EpicenterBitcoin. And of course, you can always find us on your favorite podcast app or SoundCloud. And if you're interested in leaving us a review to get one of these fancy t-shirts, you can do so by leaving us an iTunes review and just sending an email at show at ebiscanurbitcom. Below us and you've done so.

So thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week.