Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - The Big Chain Powwow

Episode Date: December 8, 2015

The Bitcoin and blockchain industry has been through a lot this year. While the Bitcoin price has experienced relative stability, perhaps indicating slow growth, the space has grown into a rich and diverse ecosystem of startups and open technologies. Through inspiring proof-of-concepts and exciting use cases, blockchain technologies have gained legitimacy as a viable technology to improve transparency, reduce costs and optimise processes, to name a few of it’s benefits. In this episode, all three Epicenter Bitcoin hosts, Brian, Sebastien and Meher, come together to look back on the events which marked the space this past year, and speculate on where thing may be heading in the future. Topics covered in this episode: Shift in focus from Bitcoin to blockchain technologies Public vs. private blockchain debate Bitcoin blocksize debate Media censorship and r/Bitcoin dictatorship Ethereum and it’s flourishing ecosystem Sebastien’s new startup: Stratumn This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/108

This is Epicenter Bitcoin, episode 108. This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin is brought to by hide.combe. Protect yourself against hackers and safeguard your identity online with a first-class VPN. Go to hide.combe slash epicenter and sign up for a free account today. And by Shapeshift, with no account or signup required, it's the easiest way to buy and sell gems, counterparty, Minero, dash, and other leading cryptocurrencies. Go to shapeshift.I.O. to instantly convert your old coins and to discover the future of cryptocurrency exchanges. Hi, welcome to Ebison or BitPoint, the show which talks about the technologies, projects,

and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency revolution. My name is Sebassin Kutjou. I'm Meher Roy. And my name is Brian Favian Crane. So this is the first time that the three of us are doing an episode together. I think we've talked about this idea a few times before and now it's indeed happening, which means you don't have a guest to look forward to, but hopefully us talking a little little bit more and talking also a bit more about sort of our opinions of what's been going on

will be interesting as well. And this will be kind of like a state of blockchain Bitcoin episode, you know, where we'll talk about what the situation is, what our views are, what we find interesting, what projects we're paying attention to. And yeah, so I think it will give you a good interesting view of sort of what has been going on overall. Yeah, and very timely since this is the end of the year. It's a perfect time to one of these gathering of the hosts episode. Exactly. So you can sit in front of the Christmas tree, have a nice glass of wine, pat your dog, and listen to us talking about the world of Bitcoin and blockchain. So to get started, I guess one interesting way to sort of lead into this is to talk a little bit about Bitcoin itself.

When we started this, it was at the beginning of 2014, and it was sort of just after it had hit $1,000 and everybody was convinced that this was going to take over the world in no time. And now it's almost two years later. And I think a lot has happened in terms of Bitcoin startups becoming much more mature. also in terms of a shift of attention that has been extremely pronounced in the last six months where there's been a lot of interest from big companies, from banks especially in the finance sector. And I think also a lot of the sort of startup interest has a little bit shifted. I was at the Bruce VC in October, I think, the Bitcoin accelerator or the accelerator in Silicon Valley and one thing that I thought was sort of striking was that there was just five Bitcoin

startups there now and they had 20 at the peak. I mean, the startups that were there were actually quite impressive. They were doing cool stuff. But still, you know, one noticed is that that sort of wave has slowed down a little bit. And there's a new wave. And like you mentioned, shift of attention from Bitcoin to blockchain, I see it sort of as a maturing of the industry, you know, of the sector and really blockchain becoming just another subset of fintech. Yeah, I guess that's an interesting, you know, discussion we can have later also about those different areas. We're also seeing some really bizarre turns in here. For example, people starting to talk of Bitcoin as like the blockchain sort of trying to like, you know,

capture that discussion by like acting as if when people talk about a blockchain or using blockchains in these other contexts, they're really talking about Bitcoin, which of course is complete nonsense. And it's an interesting sort of a marketing ploy, but there's not a lot of substance behind that. But so there's a marketing ploy for Bitcoin. Yeah, it's a marketing ploy for Bitcoin. Bitcoin. I think it's a, I'm not a big fan of that marketing ploy, but it, of course, it makes it confusing. And it also sort of illustrates that people are very different views on this, right? So some people, for them, it's, you know, blockchain and Bitcoin are like synonymous or the

idea of a blockchain without Bitcoin, it doesn't compute, like, doesn't make sense. And then obviously, a lot of other people have a very different view on this and think that there is a lot of value to that. And I mean, I personally find that to sort of negate the fact that blockchains can be used for something else is completely missing the point about what this technology really is. I mean, I think it was Vitalik that posted something on Twitter saying that blockchains are just database technologies.

At the core, we could consider them to be like a new type of database. And the fact that, I guess, sort of the core Bitcoin community doesn't really want to accept that or really taking it in as a possibility just shows that perhaps there needs to be an opening of the mind as to what this can potentially become. Yeah. So there's this quote I just read the other day, which I thought was expressing very well the kind of state of almost the delusion that parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem are in. So this was something Barry Silver said. Barry Silver obviously very intelligent and highly accomplished guy who's also sort of a Bitcoin visionary.

But he said, so all these banks are trying to get the best attributes of the Bitcoin blockchain without the Bitcoin. And ultimately, I think you're going to capitulation. and revert back to the Bitcoin blockchain. So basically the idea that they, I'm not exactly sure what the idea is. So they're trying to use Bitcoin without Bitcoin. And then, you know, at some point, they will realize how futile this has been. And they will come back to Bitcoin say, oh, I am sorry, I will throw away my sinful past

and surrender to the God of Bitcoin. It's absurd. It's not going to happen. And I think it's important to realize that, you know, it's a different thing. Bitcoin is great. And I think Bitcoin's really important. And Bitcoin hopefully will succeed. But the idea that if somebody wants to do something with blockchain, it has to be using Bitcoin.

It's just, it's not going to happen. On the one side, I agree that if somebody, like the blockchain by itself, Minas the token might be useful in many circumstances in the legacy financial system. But my feeling is that the fundamental invention is public economic consensus, the idea that hundreds of computers around the world can coordinate to do something and maintain a currency is the fundamental idea. Personally, when I look back at the year 2015 and I see the shift from like, cryptocurrency and public like focus from changing from cryptocurrency to stuff for banks.

I tend to think that it's just like a very short shift. Like if you imagine the diesel engine was invented in 1895 and we had to wait 13 years for the Model T, 19088. And we had to wait another three years, 1911, for the first good petrol pumps. and we had to wait until 1920 to have a nationwide system of roads and petrol pumps so that the engine could be actually commercialized. If you think about it, if diesel engine was invented in 1895 and suddenly in 1901 people concluded that the diesel engine wasn't interesting and something else was maybe applying the chassis of cars to other things was interesting.

Then maybe it's just like a temporary blip in the... in the focus. And I think this year is like that for public economic consensus. We've all kind of moved away from it. Yes, in terms of media, in terms of developer effort. But I suspect this is like a temporary dip. And it's the real invention. It's the big invention.

And we need many more things for it to really get commercialized, things like stable currencies, low latency systems. So I personally, I don't. I tend to think, like, yeah, Banggrade blockchains are interesting, but like Bitcoin and Ethereum, those are the game-changing revolutionary things, and they'll come back in a big way in 2016 or 2017, maybe 2018.

I don't know when. I mean, the way I think about it is that the potential to have, to remove third parties and to have, it's basically a blockchain. is a fundamental solution to coordination problems, right? And I think that has a huge number of applications. And it's really hard right now to predict where are, you know, where are those areas where they have a huge amount of utility?

And I think that what we will see, at least it's my expectation, that we will have a huge number, first of all, a huge number of blockchains in use. millions. And I also think that they will sort of range from at the one end, blockchain so they're centralized. So, and a lot of people will be like, what is the point of a centralized blockchain? I think there actually is a point of a centralized blockchain. If, let's say we, as episode of Bitcoin, we would say we're going to run our operations on a blockchain, right? We're going to really put the logic of the company on a blockchain. Well, all of a sudden, we could prove to others how, you know, we could have a record of everything that's going on inside the company.

So that could be interesting, for example, for shareholders. It could be interesting for, let's say we did some revenue split with you, Mayher, and well, well, you could verify everything. Or let's say a third party wants to certify that, yes, this is a company, a bank maybe says, okay, do I want to give a loan to represent a Bitcoin? Well, if their operations, we can validate them. Well, that changes a lot. Or let's say an auditor says, okay, let's do real-time auditing. No, no longer like at the end of the year, we inspect all your records. No, we will help you to put all the business processes on a blockchain.

You know, we run a node on that or we have received all the transactions or something like that. And we can do real-time auditing. That's really interesting. and a lot of novel, powerful applications. And then on the other end of the spectrum, right, you have the idea of public chains of like a decentralized currency or like applications that cannot be census, prediction markets and all that,

super interesting as well, amazing, right? And then I think you're going to have a lot in between where it is a group running a network together. And I think we will have simply all of that. And it's, I think it's my expectation that we will be, but this might be very wrong, but I think we might start more in the enterprise context and that it will take longer for the big public chains to succeed. Also because they're harder problems, right? It's hard to get consensus right when you have, in the face of basically attackers. that are unknown and trying to take you down and stuff like that,

it's easier to solve these problems when you have known parties that are participating in that. But I think there's a whole range that is going to happen and that whole range that is really interesting. A couple of things I want to mention about what you just said. So one is this problem with consensus that we've seen over the last year with the scalability debate. which we'll talk about in a few minutes.

And that's really hard to coordinate. And we're still trying to find ways to do that. Maybe those will come. Maybe we'll find solutions to those problems and for governance as well. The other thing regarding the Bitcoin blockchain specifically or public blockchains in general is the question of regulation right now. Can enterprise really use this for regulated industries? And then there's a part of the payment as well. So Bitcoin has a payment system.

If basically Bitcoin can't be used for regulated activities and it doesn't find a real use for the currency, then I think it will cease to exist or it'll become sort of this really sort of niche thing that is used for very specific things or perhaps buying drugs or that kind of thing. But unless we can get over those two hurdles, so either regulation, the regulation issue being solved or Bitcoin really being used as a currency, in the current context of things, I don't really see it as having much of a future just outside of a niche currency that's used by, you know, a subset of people on the internet. Let's take a short break and talk about hide.me. Have you ever tried watching streaming TV from abroad? If you have, you've probably been greeted with an annoying error message written by some idiot lawyer telling you that you have no rights and you can't watch this program from outside the country. This used to happen to Sebastian all the time when he was in lonely France trying to watch his favorite moose hockey game in Canada. And you wouldn't believe how angry he got. That's where most of his gray hair comes from.

With hide.comi, this painful phase of my life is now over. When I want to watch American television or my favorite moose hockey game from Europe, I just changed my IP address and nobody ever knows. knows where I came from. And with gigabit connections, I have zero lag. You can give Haithomi a try with their free plan. Their free plan includes two gigabytes of data at unthruddled bandwidth. You can use any of their free exit notes, which are in Amsterdam, in Singapore and in Montreal. And you can sign up for that at Haithomi slash epicenter. Now, if you use URL and if you decide to go premium down the line, it's going to get you 35% off. And the Premium plan gives you a lot. It gives you unlimited data. You can use as much as you want.

You can connect up to five devices. So your whole household fits on the plan and you can use any of their exit nodes all over the world and they've got like 30 of them. And of course, you can pay with Bitcoin. So give it a try. We would like to thank Haight up me for their support of WebSend and Bitcoin. So regarding the first thing, you know, Bitcoin, where the Bitcoin can be used for regulated activity. Obviously it can. I mean, companies are exacting it and other companies are building things on top of it. I think it is also obviously true that it creates complications, right? I mean, we know, we see that we run episode of Bitcoin as a purely Bitcoin business.

I, you know, the accounting is going to be a nightmare. And so there is obviously a problem here. Also, if Ethereum, right, the companies having to deal with ether and gas, it creates problems, right? What's risk management going to say about that? But that being said, it doesn't mean it can't be used. I tend to think that the applications of cryptocurrencies haven't really come yet. So, I mean, in 2014, when I look back, I see this whole trend that people tried to jump into the remittance market. And then people also try to jump into the idea that Bitcoin will be the currency of

the unbanked. And both of those ideas have kind of failed. And if you look at the fundamental reasons why they failed, in the remittance market, the kind of reason was that people on the other side, like if you're transferring to Canada to the Philippines, people in Philippines did not have a Bitcoin economy to spend those Bitcoins in. Yeah, it's the problem of the last mile. Yeah, the problem of the last mile. And therefore, because there wasn't an economy there, you needed all of those conversion charges, those networks,

and it came out that there wasn't any advantage to using Bitcoin like that. And from the perspective of the unbanked market, many people were bullish about it, Barry Silbert included. And I think it was premature to target the unbanked market. because simply because me being in Indian I I see that in India Indians only use stuff that it has is successful in the West the people over like hundreds like hundreds of years of technology evolution have kind of observed that what becomes successful like whatever is successful in the West just copy that don't try to innovate copy and it's

it's like a hundred years of mentality and so I was actually very skeptical that that people in India would start to use Bitcoin. And this is kind of true, because even if I look at kind of my network in India, which is the very educated class of India, even they don't use Bitcoin today. So the idea that the underbanked are going to be the first people to adopt Bitcoin kind of seemed always a bit foolish to me.

And kind of these things have borne out. So we see we are kind of in this state, where cryptocurrencies have not found a brilliant application if you go beyond like the dark net markets. But I tend to think, I didn't think that this will change. And there are a couple of reasons why this will change. First reason is it is very hard to develop with Bitcoin. So it was really hard to develop with Bitcoin.

So it was really hard to build applications with Bitcoin. And there were very few developers that could actually do it. If I look at Ethereum, the ease of development has increased by an order of magnitude, truly. That's a really big jump. And now that I look back, Bitcoin kind of did miss a lot of the features that Ethereum has built. and now it becomes easier to build applications with cryptocurrencies. And I think in the next two or three years, we will see a lot of applications. Many of them initially will tend to be things that are illegal in certain jurisdictions.

Like, for example, you could use cryptocurrencies to create new kinds of gambling markets. And I think that is a huge market out there. So there will be many applications for cryptocurrencies in the future. and we just haven't discovered them. Now, in the Ethereum ecosystem, what was also interesting is the idea of the decentralized autonomous organization, that is a group of people spread around the world, building a company on the Ethereum network itself. And what this kind of thing could allow them to do is, you know, you have a distributed company like people, people like in India, Israel, Germany, US,

collaborating together with a distributed company. I think these kinds of ideas will come and they will create a demand for the usage of cryptocurrencies. And we'll get there. It's just going to take us time. This is going to be something that develops over the long run. And personally, I'm not sure, bearish about Bitcoins crashing in value. I think digital scarcity is important.

Recently, I saw that a few economists from Bermuda have proposed that the central bank of Bermuda hold Bitcoin as a reserve currency. Now, Barry Silbert himself was advocating this in 2014. He predicted that at the end of 2014, the first central bank, the first central bank, there'll be one central bank that keeps Bitcoin as a reserve currency. And suddenly that idea, which was a very vacow idea, that nobody would have, nobody believed except for Bailbert himself. Suddenly that vacow idea has gone from a vacow idea to kind of a mainstream idea by having two economists from the central bank of Bermuda itself proposing to do that. And I think these kinds of things are going to happen. They'll take time. And it will be a

a two-decade game, but I think we'll have users, and I think digital scarcity is valuable. I completely agree with you. I think we can talk about this a bit more in a second when we talk about the block size and the future of Bitcoin and all. But I think for Bitcoin, simply not to fail is a huge success, right? If Bitcoin is still going to be around in 10 years and it's going to be functioning and doing transactions and stuff. even if it doesn't live up to a lot of its promises, that will be a huge, a huge thing.

I mean, what I mean is simply having like a digital gold type thing that's removed from the control of any government. That's pretty huge, right. And I think there will be a lot of applications. I mean, you mentioned it's totally possible that central banks will start holding that. possible that will become something like that is simply a part of a portfolio distribution of asset managers. Also, it can have a lot of functions in terms of people protecting their asset with that. You know, when people use gold, for example, or U.S. dollars in countries like Argentina or other

countries with not such a good currency, you know, that they say, okay, we'll hold some money in Bitcoin or a tax evasion. I think is that the sort of, you know, there used to be the Swiss bank account, no, but that doesn't really exist anymore. But maybe Bitcoin will be the Swiss bank account of the future. And so there are a lot of applications for sure. And there is definitely a role for a totally decentralized censorship-resistant currency, like electronic cash.

I think that's a huge thing and hugely important thing. And it's also something where it's really hard to displace Bitcoin now. I think if Bitcoin doesn't succeed, it will be super hard for someone else to come in and say, okay, well, here's the successor to Bitcoin. Because there will always be the question, well, if Bitcoin didn't make it, then what about this new thing, right? It looked like Bitcoin was going to make it for years. Now this new thing is here.

But can we trust that this isn't also going to be displaced by like something after it because this really depends on it having a long-term value so bitcoin bitcoin only works as like digital gold if you believe that it's still going to be here in 10 years right but if if you're all always worried that well maybe it won't maybe the next one will come and displace it then that's not going to work so i think that that that trust thing is actually quite fickle and it could go away easily. So I think that that's going to be a key thing.

And that's actually also, and maybe that's something we can talk about right now, is the sort of state of Bitcoin when you talk about development and the block size debate. I remember we had my current on this podcast, and I just looked it up before in June 2014, and he sort of said,

oh, Bitcoin development has granted a complete halt. And there was a lot of arguments about that. people got very, um, innovated, very controversial discussions he created. But my impression is now, or a year and a half later, he was right. It really has, has come to that. How do you guys see that? Well, just before, before, uh, we can go into this, I want to say that, uh, I think you made some good points, uh, just earlier.

And I didn't want to sound bearish about Bitcoin. Like, I really do think that Bitcoin is great. that we need this decentralized censorship resistance currency. I'm slightly pessimistic about the enthusiasm that some people have, that we're already there and it's there. There's still a lot of hurdles to go through, and there will be some challenges if Bitcoin wants to be successful. And the current shift to blockchain by enterprise,

and seemingly enterprise will use public blockchains for most of what they're going to be doing. leads me to question what role Bitcoin will have as a currency and as a platform on which we can develop applications if most of the work is going into private blockchains. So what was your question again, Brian? About the state of development, right? Yeah, so state of development, of course, that also sort of ties into the block size debate that we have had on this show quite a few times from different.

different sides? I mean, I don't have a whole lot of opinions about the state of development because I don't follow the core development very much. I think that the block size debate, though, I mean, the fact that, you know, all the core devs and all other industry players that are building infrastructure have been able to get together at two events and talk about these problems and try to move forward is a step in the right direction as opposed to... Well, I'm not sure if that's accurate description, no,

because, for example, Mike Hearn and Gavin and Driesen, they didn't go to the second one. I think Gavin went to the first one, but so there's... Whether there really is progress there, I think that is... So here's how I think about this. I was in February of this year, I was in Spain for a few...

weeks and sort of working a little bit from there, but I had quite a bit of time. And so one of the things I did was I read this book of Satoshi, which was all his early forum posts. And it was quite interesting because, you know, Satoshi had always been this figure that I had never read anything off except the white paper. And then, you know, you read about this early emergence of Bitcoin, all the questions then. And the thing I came away with, the impression was really that Bitcoin was just a proof of

concept, right? He just wanted to prove that this can be done. And Bitcoin was an amazingly successful proof of concept, a brilliant proof of concept. I mean, there's probably never been a better proof of concept in like ever. But it was a proof of concept developed by one guy, mostly, at least initially, with very little information. I mean, he didn't know, he didn't know about mining pools probably, right? He didn't know about ASIC hardware. He didn't know how it was going to be used.

There was all sorts of things he just had no idea about. And so he made all these choices because they seemed like, you know, reasonable choices at the time or good enough choices or just they had to make a choice because you can, if he had spent, you know, six months really thinking about what's going to be the game theory or like this random variable like three years down the line, you know, you just can't do that. So you just made a bunch of choices. and then Bitcoin started and, well, it was a very successful proof of concept.

It's still running now, 60 years later. But that doesn't mean that all the choices made were very good choices. I think he made a lot of choices. There were turned out in retrospect to be pretty poor choices. And I think if Bitcoin is to be successful, it is just absolutely necessary that there is a sort of an openness and a flexibility from part of the community to say, okay, which of these choices were good choices and which of these were just, you know,

reasonable looking choices at the time that didn't turn out to be so good. And then change them to have, you know, success in the long run. And unfortunately, I see very little willingness and openness to consider any changes. And then even with something as simple as increasing the blog size is, huge discussions and doesn't seem to be possible to do that. And in my view, we would have to go much further actually than just to look at, you know, what's the right block size. I think we should look at other things that, you know, people generally consider like unthinkable.

I think Bitcoin NG sounds like something one should properly look into. That seems like a really good idea. Maybe there's some problems with it. I don't know, but at least we should be open to something like that. I think, you know, the block reward that it's half every four years, I think that was definitely a mistake. I think if it should, if at all, it should be continuously decreasing. But quite frankly, I think one should go even further and think about shouldn't there be a constant block reward? Because I have never seen a convincing argument how transaction fees are going to replace the block reward.

And this just doesn't seem to be going anywhere good. But there's no willingness to consider any such fundamental changes to Bitcoin. And that's something that worries me. And so I guess the question is, why is there no willingness to consider these things? And, you know, there's, I think there's sort of two camps. There's one camp that thinks that Sadrishi made all the right choices and one that thinks that he didn't. I think there's no willingness to.

A huge part is just inertia. You know, there's just a decision was made and, and that's just, you know, decision that's there now. And it's super hard because there's such a distributed network to, like, get people to agree on doing anything. You know, whether it's something meaningful or not. And that's just the way it is. And on top of that, you have, like, disagreements. people don't like each other and people are really rude with each other and people like attack each other personally and that just leads to a an environment where you you know it's going to

be really hard to get any kind of agreement and then of course then the one side also in this debate says well we can't do any changes unless everybody agrees and in an environment where you're never going to get everybody to agree you know that's just great a toxic place where essentially nothing happens. And of course, one can't overlook as well. The reluctance to change is also very much fueled by fear of one losing a whole lot of money. If the choices are bad and the Bitcoin price crashes, I think that if people have quite a few, you know, a lot of bitcoins and they're looking at this and saying, you know, my, my, my, my, my, uh,

my bitcoins might lose their value, then, of course, they're going to be reluctant to making any changes at all. That's absolutely true. And I don't think a lot of people talk about that. No, people, that's absolutely true. And that's also a really valid reason why you'd say, okay, everyone would be careful with making changes. So it's certainly, it's certainly good that it's hard to make changes. It's certainly good that, you know, changes are carefully considered and all because it's a lot of it.

a lot is at stake. But I would say on that spectrum of being, like, aggressive and adapting Bitcoin for whatever the environment is today and the future versus being, like, really careful and conservative and not changing anything because anything might break something. Like, we are way too far on the conservative side. So I think that's true. If I look back at the year and previous two years, really no. no big changes have happened.

In fact, the last big one I can imagine is multi-signature. After that, I don't see any great changes happening. That said, initially, this used to worry me. I used to think, well, Bitcoin development has ground to a halt, and that's kind of dangerous. And when I actually, I went to the Ethereum DevCon this year, and I saw what the Ethereum guys were up to. And I had the feeling,

In terms of pure innovation, Ethereum has jumped ahead of Bitcoin by a very large extent. I mean, it's probably the case that the Ethereum ecosystem, in terms of the core protocol, is probably like 10 times more innovative than the Bitcoin one. And also, if you look at the Ethereum system, it's led by Vitalik, who's 21-year-old. Generally, it's, generally, I mean, it's human nature. The older you get, the more conservative you become. And maybe having a 21-year-old at the head of the organization helps with Ethereum because they are not conservative at all.

And I love that about the Ethereum ecosystem. So if you really look at it in a competitive light, you have Bitcoin. That's kind of becoming this thing that's very hard to change. And on the other side, you have Ethereum that is moving extremely fast and being really innovative, taking really good risks. And the first reaction you can have as a Bitcoin holder is you worry about Bitcoin that, oh my God, I have, I don't know, whatever percent of my savings in Bitcoin. And I see this other currency coming. And that is much more innovative. and will Bitcoin die out because of that. That was my kind of the first kind of worry I had back in the middle of the year.

Then I actually, there was another change in perspective. Now I think that Bitcoin actually doesn't need to be innovative to succeed. That Bitcoin should perhaps just hold the fort. And I'll kind of explain why I think of it like this right now. See, the thing is, the first thing to observe is in Bitcoin, change is really hard because there's a lot of money at stake now. There's this, I don't know, $6 billion of market cap. It's not small. And if you were, if you were somewhere, someone like Vladimir, your career is made.

You are the Bitcoin core developer. your career is really made. You have become famous and you will get good jobs, you'll get good offers once you step down from that role. And if you try to make a very big change to Bitcoin and it fails and Bitcoin gets destroyed, then basically your career is also destroyed with it because that mistake will always be associated with you as the core developer. If I was Vladimir, then if I made a huge change to Bitcoin and Bitcoin ended up failing, in some way, then that's on me. And my career is destroyed.

But if I do nothing, Bitcoin stays, it just maintains its value, then I'm fine. Then I'm already, you know, I have already a name as a Bitcoin core developer. That's a really good tag to have for the future. So I think in terms of game theory,

if you look at all of these developers that are there, they are generally, you know, say 35 to 50, mostly. and they're quite happy in their positions, and I wouldn't begrudge them that. So in terms of game theory, it doesn't make sense for any of these people

to actually go and do something really radical. Whereas if you look at the Ethereum ecosystem, they have to be radical, because if they're not radical, they are not differentiated from Bitcoin in any way. So if you just look at the game theory of this, it makes Bitcoin as the, as the big brother naturally tends to be more conservative.

So the second point now is, if you look at Ethereum, like I love the way Ethereum is innovative. I love the way they take risks. But still, as a holder of cryptocurrencies and as a decently sized holder of cryptocurrencies, I can't actually bring about to sell all my Bitcoins. The thing is, Bitcoin has a claim as digital gold. Like the number 21 million is famous. It's in the minds of many people now.

If you look at Ethereum, their proof of work schedule is like, you know, there'll be like billions of ether. They start off with 70 million. Every year you add 70 million and slowly it goes to around, I think, 3 billion ether in 2040 or something. Ether does not give the feel. to me of being digital gold. And I can't sell Bitcoin, even though I think Ethereum is more innovative, because in Bitcoin,

I feel this is digital gold. So I think for me, these are two different niches. One is like conservative digital gold that you know will keep working because nobody's making any change to it and there's no risks taken with the system. So it's like, you know, you can expect this 21 million to stay. and that fulfills one niche for me. And then there's Ethereum on the other side, which is this young kid on the street,

taking the brilliant risks, being innovative, and building a currency that's not trying to be digital gold. It's trying to have billions of them and inflation will be there far into the future. So these are two different points in the ecosystem. And Bitcoin can actually never play Ethereum's game. I mean, I don't think Bitcoin has it in it to be as innovative as Ethereum. So maybe they should stop trying to be like that and just become the old conservative digital gold niche and let Ethereum be the innovative niche.

And we are all great. We are all better that way because that way I can hold Bitcoin and Ether and have something conservative and have something risky and have a beautiful portfolio. Yeah, so a few things here. So first of all, regarding Ethereum, I think that really remains to be seen whether Ethereum will be able to like adapt and change and take risks in the future. I mean, it's easy to do that, of course, during the development stage and before you've actually launched. And it has not been very long that they've launched.

And they've had some advantages there. And maybe they've made the right choices so that they won't have to make those huge changes in the future. But, you know, one of them that is planned is the switch to. proof of stake and that will be a huge change. And I am, I am personally a little bit skeptical how, you know, how well that is going to go because then you will also have, you know, a huge fraction, for example, of the Ethereum miners who will have a strong incentive to be against that. And so I think it really remains to be seen how well Ethereum can adapt.

I think that's that the judgment on that is still out. The other thing I agree with you, right, that there's sort of two different things and you can totally see both of them being successful and then fulfilling very different functions. It's just that in my view, the prospect of, you know, Bitcoin not making any changes, hence it will not go anywhere and it will keep existing. I think those two don't go together for me. But for me, it's for a Bitcoin to just remain in that niche. of being like the digital gold and sort of electronic cash, it has to make changes, right? So I think we differ there. And I think it's actually important to be aggressive and try to make changes there for Bitcoin

to retain that role without trying to be like Ethereum. That is nonsensical. I think the idea that a lot of these applications will be built on Bitcoin doesn't make sense. I think it's enough to just say it needs to be secure, but changes need to be made for that. I don't think Bitcoin will be secure without changes. It also needs to be able to scale, right, and to actually do more transactions and do them securely. And that's enough, I think, as goals, if you can do that, that's great, right? the idea of having side chains and all kinds of complex applications on there,

I don't think it's essential for the success of Bitcoin. So the reason you believe Bitcoin needs to innovate to be successful is is you think that even to hold on to the digital gold niche, so your argument is even to hold on to the digital gold niche, it needs to innovate and find applications because otherwise how is it going to be secure in the future given that block rewards are going to fall to zero is that yeah so there's a few things i'm concerned about security is definitely a huge one i i have a hard time bitcoin i mean it's pretty simple right the security model of of bitcoin but you know if you look at proof of work then the security

it depends a lot on like, you know, how distributed is that mining power. And also just how expensive is it to attack Bitcoin? And if the revenues of miners go to zero, then, well, it is very cheap to attack Bitcoin. And, you know, with the block of work going down, there's some unsolved problems there. And I think the security is definitely one thing I'm concerned about. And the other thing is just, you know, the scalability. right, the block size, I think, needs to increase. Even though I think Lightning Network and things like that are very interesting.

But so I think from those two angles, it's necessary to make, to make changes. And those might not be crazy radical changes when you look at it from sort of the Ethereum angle, right, where you've done all kinds of different things. But there are crazy radical changes. that are necessary. I think when you look at it in terms of the current Bitcoin debate, where even going from one megabyte to eight or something like that creates a huge amount of controversy. Yeah, I mean, yeah, perhaps, yeah, perhaps these kinds of changes are needed.

I mean, like, I've kind of always thought that, like, Bitcoin will succeed as digital goal, if it will succeed or it will fail. And kind of my impression is that if Bitcoin succeeds as digital gold, it really doesn't need to scale transaction volume for a decade or two. Like, let's take an example. Today you have 25 Bitcoin block reward, right, at a price of, at a market cap of, say, 5 billion. So that is around like $400 to $500 million worth of revenue for the miners.

And most of it is Senoraj. Nothing like there's no transaction fee element. It's a very small, but maybe 1% is transaction fee today. 9% is Senoraj. But you have around say $400 million worth of incentive for miners to mine. And if I actually look at digital gold, the idea that there's something that's limited, something that can't be confiscated, something that's sensitive resistant. If that idea is valuable and if it succeeds on that scale, I easily see the market

cap of Bitcoin going to $60 billion, 10x in 10 years. I'm not saying next year. I'm not a short termist. I'll say in 10 years. If you look at 10 years from now, the kind of block reward would have gone down from 25 to 12 and a half to 6.25. to 3.1 to 5 to 1.5 something per block. But if the value of the Bitcoin has increased 10 times, then actually even with that reduced block reward, even 12 years into the future, we have $400 million worth of incentive for the miners.

So if Bitcoin succeeds as digital gold, what I'm trying to say is Bitcoin has a strategy. Like, don't try to be anything else. Just try to be digital gold. Let the lightning guys handle the transaction volume. Don't even try to scale transaction volume. Just try to be the safe digital goal. And see if the market is willing to accept that as an idea.

If the market does, it's easily conceivable that it goes from $6 billion to $60 billion. And that kind of, for 15 years, you don't need to worry about security of the blockchain if that happens. Yeah, I totally disagree with that. I think you're missing a huge point, which is that when the market cap of Bitcoin goes to $60 billion, which I think is totally possible, right? The problem is also, it's not just that the revenues of the miners stay the same. It's also that the incentive and the payoff to attack Bitcoin's go up, right? So the only way for the security of Bitcoin to scale up is that the miners' revenues have to scale up along with the market. market cap. Otherwise, it gets increasingly unstable and insecure. So I think that doesn't work that way.

At least not in my view. Today's show is brought you by your friends at Shapeshift. Shapeshift is the fast and easy way to trade all coins and they now support over 50 of the most popular alt coins that you know and love. When you want to trade all coins, of course you can do it the hard way, which means creating an account and an exchange, giving them a bunch of personal information, depositing your money, putting your trades through, growing old and hating life waiting for those trades to go through. Or you can do it the easy way, which means no accounts, no signups and getting done in less than one minute. So ShapeShift now also has that lens extension for Firefox and Chrome. Now what the lens extension does is once you have it installed, it's going to show a tiny little fox next to every Bitcoin address that's going to

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but like to thank shape shift for their supportive website and Bitcoin. I want to jump in here and talk about the scalability problem from the transaction volume perspective. So the way that I see it, after which you just said, Mayor, I see it a bit differently now where the transaction volumes, if Bitcoin is to be simply digital gold, and one can assume that if it only serves that function, we don't. need crazy high transaction volumes. Conceivably, you know, they could be handled by something like lightning network or perhaps a small block size increase. The transaction volumes that we're anticipating on the Bitcoin blockchain are mostly, you know,

transactions being executed by protocols on top or transactions, you know, transactions, using Upperturn to notarized data into the blockchain. So if Bitcoin remains as only digital gold and all these other Bitcoin 2.0 applications and everything else that we're building on top of the blockchain goes to Ethereum and private blockchains, then perhaps in that scenario we wouldn't need extra transaction volume. But like you said, the market needs to establish that Bitcoin is digital gold and that's all it is. And all these other applications, well, we need to use Ethereum to do that or we need to use product blockchains to do that. I think the bigger uncertainty in my mind is exactly

that. Like, will the market accept the value proposition of digital gold, like pure digital gold, forget about all of these other things? If the market can accept that, I think Bitcoin has a chance. even like even it being completely conservative but I think the risk for Bitcoin is like what Brian says is right the risk for Bitcoin is that the market doesn't accept it as digital gold

and then this kind of niche falls away and then in terms of creativity Bitcoin has ceded ground to Ethereum I believe it has ceded ground already it's not a question of the future I actually look at slightly differently because I am not really worried about the market not accepting Bitcoin as or the value of digital gold. I think there is a value there and I am I am really optimistic that if Bitcoin solves some of the fundamental challenges it has and just exists as this alternative way of storing value and transmitting value, I think there's going to be a market for that.

I'm really bullish on that. And I'm also, I think it can be a huge market in terms of, you know, just some asset, another asset type, you know. And, you know, as you mentioned, you know, is central bank holding that. But where I'm less bullish is, you know, whether, whether the technical requirements to do that and security and those. things will be sufficient. That's where my fear is. My fear is not that there isn't a market for a digital gold. I think there is.

Yeah. It's interesting. It's very interesting how it's like with Bitcoin, everyone sees the thing a bit differently. And kind of that's that's kind of the challenge as well, right? In all of these proposals, it's everyone sees it differently. I don't really have an answer to it. I mean, my gut feeling is Bitcoin will find it really hard to evolve. Like, seeing the debates this year, I'm pretty skeptical of quick evolution.

But let's see. Like, maybe you're right, Brian. Maybe it needs to evolve beyond the current state in order to be successful. Today's magic word is triangle. T-R-I-N-G-L-E. Head over to Let's-stockBitcoin.com to sign in, enter the magic word, and claim you're a part of the listener reward. So another topic that I wanted to brush on, because I think it's really important and, well,

I think views differ on how important it is, or if it is important, some people clearly think it's not important, which is the sense. censorship that's going on on our Bitcoin. And actually, I don't know if it's going on a Bitcoin talk as well, because I've never really used Bitcoin talk. But so, so before this episode, I was briefly looking at the sort of the stats and got some estimates over in our Bitcoin has about 500,000 monthly uniques. So that's a Bitcoin Reddit for those.

No, no, our Bitcoin. And that's more than CoinDisc. So most likely this is the most frequented source of Bitcoin information and media that there is. And the moderator of our Bitcoin is a guy named Thames, I think, or something like that. And in my view, the guy is completely crazy and like a sociopath. And he has the view that basically, other implementations of Bitcoin are an alt-coin, which seems to be the most nonsensical view one could hold. And he has the view that, you know, people like Gavin and Dr. Eastern and

my career and arguing for a Bip 101, so bigger block size and now having Bitcoin XT as a sort of competing implementation that this is an old coin. I mean, I can see why one is against it, but calling it an alt-coin. And so he censors massively, right, basically any other opinion on there. And the guy also controls Bitcoin Talk, but I don't know if something similar is going on there or not. So, and Bitcoin Talk is, again, is about the same traffic volume as Coin Desk. So this is a huge amount of the where people consume media is controlled by this guy. And this guy is basically massively abusing his position to just censor like one side of the debate.

Personally, I think this is a huge problem. I think this is an absolutely massive problem. And the problem here, too, is it's so hard to move away from that, right? It's just that Bitcoin Reddit, that's the Bitcoin Reddit. Like, you can't just start a new Bitcoin Reddit. And like, because people massively disagree with this guy, everybody switches over. It doesn't really work like that. And yeah, that's, I think it's a big problem.

And I've also been personally sort of highly, I must say, irritated that I have seen a real lack of people standing up against that from the side who is basically supported by Thames. So basically, you know, the people who don't want to, who are against BIP 101, against Bitcoin XT, that they just sort of are, well, you know, it's his choice. And, you know, if he does that, it's nothing to do with us. And then because, of course, they benefit from that. And I think that's something I find, I find extremely hypocritical.

You know, if you sort of on the one hand, you say, okay, I put in all this work to, you know, make Bitcoin great, censorship resistant currency. and at the same time sort of benefit and don't stand up against the main media sites being completely censored of other opinions. This is something,

I think it's a big problem and unfortunately there seems to be no way out of it. Yeah, I agree with you that it's very hypocritical and somewhat ironic that Bitcoin in one hand is a currency

that is meant to be open, censorship resistant and all this. And on the other hand, you have this kind of of this kind of crap happening on Bitcoin Reddit and other places like you mentioned. My opinion on this is that I think you're right that it, you know, being the primary place where people get Bitcoin information is, you know, it does make this a big problem, right? If this one place where a lot of people are getting their information about Bitcoin is

completely censored and they don't have access to information anywhere else or they don't have access to the information simply because it will check anywhere else. Well, that's that's an issue. But I also think that the people that a lot of the people that go on the Bitcoin Reddit and are very active there, like he's preaching to that crowd. Like they're also that also kind of agree with that that, you know, the box size shouldn't be increased. No, that's not true at all.

It's not true? Most people don't agree with him at all. I mean, there's like sticky post, you know, where like new moderation rules, like these are not tolerated. And like 90% of people download him. Like any, any, people are massively against what the guy is doing there. Okay. But he doesn't care. I spend enough time in Bitcoin Reddit then.

He also, he made this comment somewhere. I remember seeing that that he was like, because people were like, well, everybody is against you. Nobody wants to censorship here. And he was like, well, if, I mean, if 90 people, 90% of the users don't want the censorship, then 90% of the users should go somewhere else. You know, so he doesn't care about that. Oh, then they should. Yeah, that's easy to say.

But it's almost impossible to do, right? I mean, that's the exact same reason why Bitcoin might have a great chance of being the sort of digital goal. It's simply it's there and there's inertia and it's like baked in and like it's what people use. that's what people turn to. It's the same thing with this. So the idea that, okay, you can just like start a competing Reddit. I mean, people try it, right? There's Bitcoin PTC, there's Bitcoin, there's Bitcoin, XT and stuff.

But nobody uses it, right? Because it's just like impossible to get everybody to switch something else. And, I mean, that's, that was, I had the discussion with some of the block stream guys about this. because I felt like they should stand up against this. They should like, say, hey, they must like, you know, this, you can't do this. And they were like, well, you know, everybody can start their own Reddit. Which is, of course, true, but it's also like it's a complete nonsense because it's so hard to displace that. It's just, it's like coin market cap, right?

Wasn't a great site. I mean, it's super simple. It just does one thing. It does it okay. But, you know, it was the first one that was there. And if you wanted to look up the prices of different all coins, you went to coin market cap. And now, like, you can make a site 10 times as good. Like, you're going to have an extremely hard time to replace a coin market cap.

It's the same thing here. Yeah. I mean, yeah, Thamos's behavior, I don't think, I haven't met anyone who agrees with him. And kind of, he, he. He is actually creating a big risk for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Like personally, I somehow I do think that right now, Gavin's plan is just too ambitious. And maybe it should be milder.

It would be something milder. Let's go from one to two and just try to see how lightning works. I'm pretty much of that kind of thinking. But I don't like Hymosis' behavior of censorship because what it risks doing is it risks creating an echo chamber. So what would happen is like our Bitcoin

becomes like this one Reddit and then because of the censorship you create another Reddit say R slash BTC or R slash Bitcoin XT and then some people migrate there and these become become like two echo chamber for the future. Now, if you create two echo chambers, two sub-communities that have no links, no cross-communication

to each other, you are actually increasing the risk of a fork because when communication between humans falls down, it becomes harder to prevent wars between people. Like this happens on the scale of nations. Like if you look at the war between, the cold war. Much of it is actually also that all the Russians they are reading one kind of media and all the Americans are reading another kind of media and both come to a completely different view of the world and both find it easy to hate each other because of this different view of the world. And I think this is the kind of thing you risk with censorship. That you create these two echo chambers and slowly over years these two echo chambers come to completely different views of the world for people. Bitcoin and then you actually increase the risk of a fork.

And the actual fork might happen on some other debate. It might not even be this debate. But this kind of thing kind of creates the potential for a fork in the future. And I think that's pretty dangerous. So even as like a small blocks guy quote unquote, I don't like censorship of other opinions. That's sort of a slightly different topic. but I have always been, because our Bitcoin, even before they started this crazy censorship, they did censor, for example, Ethereum stuff and like old coin-related stuff.

And I was never a fan of that either. I always felt like, oh, there should be a much more inclusive way of looking at it because you exactly have that danger, right, that they know you sort of totally ignore what's going on over here. Of course, you can argue about that. I think this is much more a debatable point. You can say, okay, our Bitcoin is about Bitcoin and like you shouldn't have other topic. So I can see that view. I think it's a legitimate view, even though personally I don't

share it. I think it's like on this podcast, right? We certainly aren't, even though there's Bitcoin in the name, we certainly aren't limited to Bitcoin anyway. And I think that's, you know, personally I'm a great fan of sort of, you know, being open and looking at different projects, different opinions constantly also being willing to evolve one's opinion, one's focus. And that already, just by saying, okay, it's only Bitcoin and strictly Bitcoin related, you sort of cut apart there off. And I don't think that's a good thing. Yeah, I agree with you. I don't spend a lot of time on Bitcoin Reddit. So, I mean, I don't know exactly what happens there. But now I agree with you that, you know, if we have

censorship here, then it can definitely be a problem. As you mentioned, Mayor, if we start having two communities, then, you know, perhaps when they will just have a fork or something like that. But, I mean, what are some of the solutions for this? Brian, you don't seem to think it's possible that, you know, another, say, blockchain Reddit emerges because it has this one has so much traction. What do you guys think some of the solutions? It's very difficult. I think the only way would be if you had some sort of community-wide effort, it would be a big effort to switch to like RBTC or something like that. Of course, I don't know who controls that or how exactly the broader version is involved somehow.

So I think it would be essential to have some sort of better governance. type system first, or these have sort of transparent rules first. But yeah, it's a big problem. I think it would at least be worth to make the effort to do so. And unfortunately, there is definitely, my perception is that some parts of the community are basically benefiting because they sort of share some of the views Seth Amos has or like their opponents are being censored. So they sort of say like, okay, well, let's stick with the state of censorship.

It's not the worst of us and certainly not worth it making efforts so that the people who are having different views have the chance to have them discussed in that forum as well. So moving out to the next topic, we wanted also, we mentioned, we talked about Ethereum a bit earlier, but I want to talk about the ecosystem a bit more. Specifically, Mayor, you went to DefCon, which was a few weeks ago and met a bunch of people there. hit a bunch of interviews. And we'd like to get you to give us your view about the Ethereum ecosystem, you know, where do you think things are going? What are some of the things that you saw there that you thought were really interesting? Yeah.

So for our listeners, I recently went to the Ethereum DevCon last month. And I did around 20 interviews with people in the Ethereum ecosystem will be releasing them soon. It was a really awesome conference. There were so many, so many people that I thought were like super smart and they were all there in the room and it was organized brilliantly as well. When like spending five days in the, in the Ethereum DefCon gave me the kind of appreciation of two things. One is like Vitalik's design ideas have been vindicated on one level. Like Vitalik came out in 2014 with the idea that you should like the problem with Bitcoin is not really that it's not during complete scripting language but that the outputs are value blind and they don't have any state except for spent and unspent and then they created this whole thing that kind of takes care of this shortcoming.

And when I think of it like around one or one and a half years back, everyone was like, no, you were trying to solve the wrong problem. This isn't a problem at all worth thinking about. And you look at Bitcoin talk and that was the prevailing opinion at that time. The prevailing opinion was also that Ethereum could not be built. And on both of these counts, I felt at the Ethereum DefCon that finally there's this big community and they have managed to build Ethereum. And also that their design choices are really good because there are applications on Ethereum

that I could never imagine being built on Bitcoin. Like whatever kind of thing you imagine on Bitcoin has a better incarnation as Ethereum. On the simplest level, if you look at Satoshi Dice, in Satoshi Dice became really popular in Bitcoin, but you can actually build Ether Dice, which has way better properties than Satoshi Dice. In Satoshi Dyes, you actually need to send it to another central server, your funds. And that central server is probably honest, but in Etherdice, you can completely remove that central server,

and your funds are handled by the Ethereum network at all. So whatever you think of in Bitcoin, if you think of one application on Bitcoin, it's way cooler and way better on Ethereum. So another example might be Lightning Network itself. like on Bitcoin, the Lightning Network is supposed to be this network that sends money quickly around the world and with low latency, with high speed, and with low transaction fees. And it turns out that you can actually build Lightning-like networks on Ethereum, and these are called state networks.

And state networks, we should have, we have an interview about state networks from the Ethereum DevCon. and we explain what they are there, but you can basically run whole companies as state networks. So instead of just sending money in Lightning, you can run organizations on state networks, the equivalent of Lightning networks on Ethereum. So what I could see is, what I could see is like Ethereum has definitely kind of jumped ahead

as an ecosystem in terms of the innovative potential potential there. That said, on the other side, what I also could see is like Ethereum has its own challenges. Like one of the big challenges is scaling Ethereum. Now, Vitalik had some ideas, some brilliant ideas for scalability, but they are quite undemonstrated. The other challenge Ethereum has, the other two challenges Ethereum has is that their governance is kind of not defined. Now Ethereum development, they have run out of the seed capital, and they don't know where to raise the money from. And there might be some changes coming in terms of how they raise development money. This is kind of undecided.

That's a big challenge. And the kind of third uncertainty that I saw in that ecosystem is kind of nobody knows how many ethers are going to be there. Like the initial idea was to have billions of ether, but now they are going to switch to prove. of stake and then they might go from having billions of ether to only a hundred million, like 200 million ethers or something like that and slowly inflating. So nobody seems to know how many ethers are going to be there. And these are the kind of uncertainties that are there in the Ethereum ecosystem. The other interesting observation that I also could see there was many people think that

side chains are going to come and they are going to kill off Ethereum. There will be root stock. the side chain on Bitcoin and you'll be able to use Bitcoin and smart contracts together and that will be the death of Ethereum or something like that. And at the conference, I realized that things are

a bit more complicated than that. And it's really hard to build a Bitcoin side chain that, so Bitcoin is not tuning complete and let's say the side chain in Bitcoin is tuning complete. It's pretty hard for a decentralized side chain like that to be built because one blockchain that is not Turing complete will find it really hard to verify the transaction of another blockchain that is Turing complete.

So today on Ethereum, you can actually verify Bitcoin transactions, but it's impossible for Bitcoin network to verify Ethereum transactions. And like there's this asymmetry because of the way Turing completeness works. So it might be the case that actually building Turing complete side chains on Bitcoin may prove to be an impossible task. If that happens, actually Ethereum has a really nice mode, like some kind of weapon that Bitcoin can never copy. And that means that Ethereum will be its own big ecosystem. That was another interesting observation. So, but check out the videos that I've developed for the euthers. Ethereum ecosystem.

I think they're quite interesting on their own. And as time goes on, we'll be covering parts of the Ethereum ecosystem on Episand of Bitcoin as well. So I look forward to doing that. If you have any suggestions for guests, do let me know. And we'll be, so yeah, we'll be releasing those videos starting this week. So look for them on our YouTube channel. There will only be as video episodes. So we won't be releasing them to the podcast feed.

so you can find them at YouTube.com slash episode of Bitcoin. And so we've got almost at the end of our episode, but not quite. So, you know, as many of you know, for example, in August I joined Eris. So I started like Episode of Bitcoin sort of became my second priority, second project. And now Cerasia, he has joined a startup, or he's starting a startup called Stratum. So perhaps you can give us just sort of as we wrap up a little bit of status. update or let us know what's going on with that. Sure.

So, yeah, so as you mentioned, I co-founded a startup called Stratum. So there's four of us. Richard Catano, who is the founder of BTC Report, the great iPhone app. And he also just recently read a book about Bitcoin. He's CEO, myself. I'll be doing marketing and project management at Stratum. And then we also have Stefan Flouquin, who is, the CTO and Francois de Orleans are our business developer.

So there's four of us and we've started this company called Stratum. We're based in Paris and what Stratum aims to become is a Bitcoin as a Bitcoin as a service platform so that companies and developers can really, really, really easily deploy blockchain applications. So think of it as sort of Heroku for Bitcoin or for for the blockchain where you'll be able to come on on to Stratum and we'll have a SaaS model where you can essentially just bootstrap and launch a blockchain network. So for different types of use cases, for example, let's say you want to do a Fidelity Point system. Well, we'll have templates there so that you can bootstrap your fidelity point system really easily, you know, tweak a few parameters depending on your needs, and then we'll

have the blockchain solution to do that for you. So we might launch that on like an Ethereum network or a private tenderman network or something like that. And now there's a loads of different use cases that we can think of for iot for finance um for um yeah point systems that kind of thing and so we're exploring those right now we're very much in research and development mode at the at the moment uh and we've just we're closing our round of funding so it's all happening very quickly it's very exciting and yeah so we'll be talking more i'll be talking more about Stratum as we start communicating and releasing our beta platform, which will be in February. So yeah, very excited about that.

And you also wanted to talk about a certain person that we are looking for. Yeah, right. So we're looking for a WordPress developer. We've been saying that we were going to do a new website for a long time. I had been working on it and failed to find the time to properly finish that job. So we need someone to help us build a new website. And so if you're a WordPress developer, if you're good at developing WordPress templates, essentially is what we need. We need.

Then get in touch with us at show at epicenterbitcoin.com. And, you know, well, if it works out, then we can work together and we'll pay you in Bitcoin. And we'll have a brand new website. All right. Well, with that, thanks so much. That was our episode. Now, if you enjoyed this, please let us know. also we should figure out if we want to do this more often.

Personally, I kind of like the idea of doing this, you know, every three months or something like that. But let us know if you enjoyed this and if you want more episodes like this. I mean, of course, we'll be back with our regular episodes next week. So, yeah, we put out new episodes of WebSend of Bitcoin every Monday so, you know, you can get it on iTunes or with any podcast app. And of course, you can get the videos on YouTube. slash episode of PTC.

And as Sebastian Mayher mentioned, Mayhur's has produced a lot of great interviews at DefCon here in DefCon. I think there's 19 of them. It's a lot of content. A lot of content, yeah. They'll all be put out over the coming weeks. So check that out.

There'll be short interviews. So you're not as long, but hopefully interesting and diverse and give you kind of a good overview and impression. of what's going on with Ethereum. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.