Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Wendell Davis: Hive Wallet, Humint, DISH, Bitex.la

Episode Date: June 2, 2014

On episode 22 we had Wendell Davis on, who is CEO of two Bitcoin startups. The first one is Hive, a popular and user-friendly Bitcoin wallet targeted at Mac Users (and Android). His second startup, Humint, aims to help companies and brands issue their own cryptocurrencies – think loyalty points. Our discussion of Hive covered wallet business models, usability and the payment protocol. After we talked about the crazy future awaiting us when everyone from a hot dog stand to your grandmother starts issuing their own currency. Finally, we covered some news topics such as the announcement by DISH to start accepting bitcoin and Bitex.la raising $2m to build Bitcoin exchanges in South America. Episode links: Hive Wallet Hive’s Payment Protocol Implementation Humint DISH Press Release bitex.la This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/022

Hello, everyone. My name is Saba Sincuuchu. And I'm Brian Fabian-Frain. And welcome to episode of Bitcoin, the show which talks about the technology, projects, and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency revolution. Today's June 1st, 2014, and thank you so much for joining us on episode 22. So on today's show, our guest is Wendell Davis. He's the founder and developer of a beautiful and easy-to-use Hafe wallet for MacOS and Android. He's also the CEO of Human, which is a cryptocurrency consultancy that's working on

kind of building branded coins. Hi, Wendell. How you doing, guys? Nice to be on the show. Thanks for joining us. So we'll get to talk to Wendell about Hive and Humeant and all the projects he's working on. We'll also talk to him about the payment protocol as Hive is, I think, one of the first walls to implement BIP70. We'll also weigh in on a few news stories this week, such as the U.S. satellite TV provider, DISH,

announcing that it will start accepting Bitcoin this year. Also some news out of South America with Argentina issuing warnings about Bitcoin, all the while BitX.L.A., South American Exchange is just launching. So, Wendell, can you just briefly introduce yourself and tell us what kind of projects you're working on? Yeah, so I basically am a games developer turned games producer, turned sort of startup guy, who got a little bit obsessed with Bitcoin, kind of starting in 2009. I just happened to be lucky enough to be on the Metz-Doubt crypto list when I guess at least one of the first announcements of Bitcoin was made and sort of like followed it with great enthusiasm since then. In 2009, that is, that is very impressive.

Well, I mean, the unfortunate part is that I simply followed it as a curiosity and not so much as like, oh, well, this is a great investment opportunity. So I didn't actually get my first Bitcoin until late 2010. So I missed that opportunity to be one of those guys with like, you know, 300,000. plus or what have you but I you know just didn't have the vision I suppose to see that it would really become something real yeah that's that's still crazy though I mean it must have been such a small community at a time and it must also have been really bizarre to think that far ahead to see that potential it must have seen so unreal when there was a time you know you couldn't even trade it for dollars or you couldn't buy anything with it yeah that's true I mean I think

though the truth of it is that there really wasn't much of a community around that at the time. I mean, Bitcoin talk didn't exist. I believe there were some IRC channels at the time, but, you know, mostly it was just kind of like almost academic discussion on this mailing list, which was really interesting, of course, but, you know, as tends to go with, you know, many academic discussions, there was this notion that, you know, well, this is really going to go anywhere, but this is a pretty cool idea. And unfortunately, I hadn't really been versed. And at that time, in the full history of, you know, this kind of like cryptographic money. So if I had, perhaps I would have had a different perspective on it.

But I just thought it was extremely interesting. And, you know, it got my sort of like science fiction imagination moving in quite some interesting ways. But I didn't think for a minute they would actually be successful. Yeah, I guess it's easy now to look back and say like, oh, like how could one not see this? But at the time, it was, I'm sure, a lot more difficult. Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, I think to be honest with you, though, like, it was one of those things that kind of, you know, I read the discussions that we're going on in the mailing list. And, you know, it kind of switched around in my mind, like, oh, think of the possibilities. Think of the possibilities. And then I forgot about it for about, you know, eight months to a year. And when I checked back in on the situation, you know, like things were starting to happen, obviously in a very nascent way. But, you know, and ever since then, I pretty much told every single person I know about it. And, you know, I've been.

just living and breathing Bitcoin and related cryptocurrency since then. It seems kind of difficult for, I mean, I always find it difficult for, to try to imagine what things were like back then. I mean, I got to Bitcoin relatively late. And I mean, Brian also, in terms of Bitcoin's history. And so what was it like back then? I mean, you say it was just mostly like an sort of like an academic discussion? Well, what was going on on the mailing list was that.

I mean, and there may have been discussion about it elsewhere. I'm actually not sure because, again, I mean, I wasn't really actively participating in any other way. I just basically like, you know, I read the white paper. I read the discussions that were happening. These were from some, you know, relatively renowned cryptographers and people walking in on this, you know, had, I would say, like, you know, looking back on it now and kind of realizing who some of those people were, I understand that those were people who probably had been thinking about this stuff for quite a long time. So again, I wouldn't say that it wasn't really so much about like a community, that there was this active group of people who were like, yeah, yeah, you know,

this is going to be like X or Y someday. It's going to be huge. It's going to have this huge value. It was just really a discussion about how you could technically implement something like this and, you know, how to do it in the right way. And a lot of people prognosticating on what the problems would be. And that's, you know, that was about the extent of the discussion at the time. There was no, you know, there were, I think the sort of the visionaries,

of like how it would actually be used and implemented and things like that really weren't in the scene at the time. I see. So it was very much a technical discussion and not so much a, this vision of the future that we kind of have now, which is what a lot of the discussion is centered on. Yeah, I think that's probably true. I mean, I mean, in the back of those people's minds, I mean, perhaps there was this kind of thought. I mean, I think a lot of us have read Neil Stevenson and things like that and we kind of had some thought about. how this could all end up playing out, but I didn't see it, or at least, you know, in my recollections of, and perhaps it's worth going back to revisit those old discussions, but I didn't see

that in those talks. And perhaps if I had, I would have been like, you know, a lot more active in 2009 and, you know, had 20 chains mining or whatever, but yeah. And so that was then. This is now, so tell us now what your, what kind of projects you're working on. So you're the founder and developer of the Hive wallet, and you're also involved as a CEO in Humeant? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I'll give you a little bit of the backstory at Hive. I mean, you know, basically by 2012, I'd kind of, you know, I was so enamored and it had become such an obsessive about Bitcoin that I, you know, really kind of decided, well, it's probably time for me to step in and do something. If I'm going to do something, it should be basically now.

And, you know, around that time, my father actually, you know, having, you know, I suppose, I've been listening to a son like raved like a lunatic for the last like two and a half years or whatever. My father was like, oh, you know, hey, son, you know, I'd like to get some Bitcoin. How can I do that? And actually, the funny thing was that at the time, you may remember, actually remind me the day, when did you guys say you got involved? Six months ago. Okay, right. So let me, so I'll just be like the grandfatherly figure here. Sure. At the time, at the time, it was sort of considered a very bad practice to leave any amount of money in a web wallet or an exchange. I believe the latter is still kind of considered a bad practice. But, you know, the web wallets at the time were, you know, frequently just being hacked or alluded or perhaps the founders ran off with them or what have you.

and then basically, you know, the options left to my father where, well, you can run this clunky Bitcoin QT client, or you can run something like multi-bit, which, you know, has its own sort of complexities and isn't really designed for someone like my father who has no experience whatsoever really with this stuff and isn't really that, you know, it's not really computer savvy either. So I decided it's probably time to start, you know, thinking about wallets that are more user-friendly. And that is kind of the birth and genesis of high. So when you started the Hive wallet, you kind of initially, I mean, you put this user experience thing first. Was that also why you focused on Mac or can you talk a bit about that choice? Yeah, sure. I mean, the Mac choice was pretty easy.

I mean, if you kind of go back to the story about my dad, my dad used a Mac, I use a Mac. And frankly speaking, there just weren't like a lot of good options for the Mac as far as wallets are concerned. But that being said, I mean, in addition to that, it's pretty easy if you, you know, you follow these user interface guidelines that are, you know, that Apple sort of dictates. It's pretty easy to make a relatively easy to use application, you know, using that platform. So it kind of just did what we needed to do, which was, you know, sort of like be a proof of concept of like how we thought like a wallet could be, you know, our first stab at in any way. So I'm a user experience designer by trade. So your inspiration for the UI is based on the Mac guidelines?

Or did you have any other inspiration? Because I noticed it looks a lot like Sparrow or the Twitter app. Well, that's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, it was really kind of the Twitter app was more or less the kind of guide, you know, because we found that pretty easy to use. And we thought that like, you know, well, that's something that basically fits our target. like a lot of, you know, Mac people, the kind of people that we'd specifically be targeting would

probably know this. They would know this interface, generally speaking. And, you know, that being said, which is something I can talk about a little bit later. We're actually in the process right now, I'm totally, you know, overhauling that interface. But, you know, again, it was our first stab at it. Cool. We can talk about that perhaps a bit later. Now, I noticed, like, when I first installed it, and this is a question I had before, that I had to install Java. So the app is coded in Java? Are you still, are you using Coco?

So it's Coco for the user interface, but we're actually using Mike Huron's BitcoinJ library to get like sort of the lightweight SPV wallet back in. Oh, I see. Okay, so you're using Java simply to interface with the, with the blockchain. That's exactly right. And, you know, I don't want to put him on the spot about this, but, you know, Mike has been very helpful in kind of trying to get us

to remove our dependency on the user installed Java. So there's a couple of possibilities with getting that done. We're going to try to have that completed, I would say, like in the next three to four months, so that basically that install would never come up. I mean, it's not such a big deal, but I understand that it kind of is a little bit disturbing for users that don't already have it to see that pop up.

And so does that mean that Java will be installed in the background, or are you developing some other sort of library to interface with the blockchain, like a Kogo library, for instance? Yeah, so Mike actually proposed two solutions to this. One is that he has something that basically does kind of this transcompilation to other languages. It takes Java code and basically outputs native code in another language. He's actually had some success with that. Apparently he has managed to get Bitcoin J to compile down in such a way, which we may go that approach.

But the other route is, of course, just to embed a very small Java VM into the application bundle itself, which would basically, you know, it would still be Java, right? But the user wouldn't really have to be aware of that. Cool. So let's talk a bit about Hive as, you know, what it looks like as a wallet. Because I think that's really interesting. So one thing for those who haven't checked it out is that you have applications. Can you talk a bit about that?

So, I mean, it's basically like companies that, did they design those things specifically for Hive? Well, we actually have some third-party applications under development right now, but we basically did all the existing apps, because we're kind of trying to sort of prove out a point and a concept here. The way I like to describe Hive is that it's a great way to get, send, and spend Bitcoin. And, you know, Mark Andreessen and others have sort of like, you know, and even before Mark Davis said this, I mean, they've said, like, well, this is kind of like the internet circa 1995,

in sort of the vibe of the community and where it technically is at and so on. And I kind of agree with that sentiment. But the thing that it kind of lacks right now, in my opinion, is something like a Yahoo equivalent or maybe a browser equivalent even. And so Hive kind of fits in there. You know, it's a little bit like a browser. It's a little bit like one of those, you know, portals from the early days. And a reason I think that's actually really important is because, you know, when someone

gets their first Bitcoin, in my experience anyway, the first question they have is like, what can I do with it? If they're not just simply there to hold it for speculation, people would like to know what they can do with it. And frankly, the opportunity that we saw was that there's a lot of Bitcoin companies out there that are really trying their best to make great products and create great services. But it's quite difficult sometimes to find them unless you're specifically kind of immersed in the scene. And so with Hive, when the app platform, what we wanted to do is surface some of those efforts

in a really simple, easy to understand a way. So that, you know, if you're clicking through there, he's like, oh, well, there's this like this homeless outreach program called Sean's Outpost. That's cool. I can donate to them right here. Or, oh, I can buy something using Bitcoin store. Oh, here's some games. It kind of, you know, helps you to sort of get a broader and more comprehensive idea of what this is all about.

So you have some, you say you have third party apps that are going to be added to the app store soon? We do. I mean, I think actually there are two in there right now. There's the Bitcoin apps. I think they have three apps in there now, but those were not developed by us. but we do have a number that are under development by other parties, and I think I'd probably leave it to them to announce those. But yeah, I mean, you know, as Hive develops more and more users,

I hope that that'll become more and more of a trend. I mean, again, this is a bit of an experiment on our part because, you know, even where Bitcoin is, and it's very impressive, like, the number of, like, walled installs and the amount of value that's been sort of stored in this network, it's still very small, and, you know, the user base is still, I would say, nowhere near when it's going to be in a few years, of course. Yeah, I agree.

So I'm really curious about Hive as a business and where you think this is going to go in the future. Do you have plans to build this into a proper company with full-time employees, maybe raise funding, or is it more of a maybe kind of open source project like, let's say, multi-bit? Well, in fact, it's both. We actually have raised money. Roger Ver gave us some money We are in the seed coin program And I put quite a bit of my own money into it as well

And we have 10 people that are working full time right now I remember meeting you guys I think maybe I met even you very briefly At the Amsterdam conference last fall And I remember I saw all of these hive guys Like wow, you guys are a lot of people I didn't realize you are all full time I mean that's a really big team

Yeah it's quite a big team I mean you know the thing that we're trying to do, though, is something that actually really requires people sitting down and, like, thinking about this kind of stuff on a daily basis. I think that'll become much more apparent over the next few months as we roll out, you know, severely updated versions of our products and a couple of new products as well. But yeah, we're a full-time team that works full-time. And, you know, we're pursuing some additional funding right now. But we are at the same time going to be sticking to our open-source ethics. And Hive, you know,

will be an open source project, you know, as long as I'm in charge. And you, I guess the idea would be in the future that you get some sort of an affiliate commission thing through the app store, or are you also looking in other ways of earning money? Yeah, this is really the great challenge, I think, for wallets. You know, Mike Kern and I've been talking a lot about this kind of issue is that, you know, really, at the end of the day, these things are pretty fundamental to the, the ecosystem, but they are the most difficult to monetize. But you hit it on the head. I mean, I think that we believe, you know, with sufficient user flow and sufficient quality apps,

which is something we really have to work on, that we probably can make reasonable, you know, commissions through those things. Additionally, I mean, I know that Multibit is discussing right now, taking, you know, I think it's just like one or two Satoshi's out of every single transaction as an experimental way of paying for their wallet development. This, of course, requires, you know, millions of users to really be successful. But, you know, I'm putting myself out there in my, I'm putting my money on the line, really, just with this belief that we will get to that point in relatively short order.

I really hope that's the case. You know, and I think that, like, there are probably other ways, too, to do this. But, I mean, you know, we have to kind of, like, you know, go first steps and put the first thing we can out there with the hope that basically it captures the imaginations of users. If it does, I think we'll figure this out. But yeah, I totally agree with you that the wallet space is so fascinating. And it is this fundamental piece of technology.

And then if you look at it in business terms, so the business models they use, there's such a huge variety. And also if you look at them of how they're built, you know, whether you hold the private keys or they hold it, whether, you know, it's a HD wallet that you regenerate or mobile, etc. you know, completely different ways of how they're built. And I think that's extremely fascinating. You know, if you have something like Coinbase, which is really an exchange tied to it, so I think they make their money there or blockchain, which I guess is advertising, then you guys may be affiliate, others donations. It's really fascinating.

Do you have any views of where that's going to go in the future? Well, one thing that I think is definitely going to be true is that we're going to see far more, basically crowdfunding things happening in this space using crypto tokens as the medium. And I think that's going to be really a game changer. I mean, I'm sure you guys

were aware of all the stuff that happened with Madesafe and things like that. But I think that's kind of a first in class of a lot of things that are going to be coming down the line pretty soon. So this is a possible, viable funding model for the kinds of businesses we're building here, you know, where basically, you know, if I needed to

go and raise a couple million dollars. Like, what do I need? What's my option right now? I can go and talk to a venture capitalist, perhaps, you know, an angel investor. I could, you know, kind of try to round up stuff through some of the, you know, the Bitcoin wealthy out there. Or, you know, perhaps there is a way to basically do the funding through a kind of, you know, kind of crowd sale of a unique token, you know, with the hope that like people look at what we're doing and what our plans are and say, yeah, you know, I can see that working out in a couple of years in the same way that a, you know, perhaps Perhaps a venture capitalist would do an analysis, but with maybe a different kind of view on what the end result is, that it's not necessarily an exit or a big IPO, but it's something that happens now using this current technology.

So I don't know. I mean, I think that we'll see a lot more of that kind of stuff. I mean, even in the next few months, I mean, I know about a few projects that are going to be doing big crowd sales. And I think this is pretty fascinating. I don't know if there's enough liquidity out there in terms of like the Bitcoin available for investment. but, you know, I think that there is a strong interest in this and we'll see more and more of it. I guess that may be a good segue into your other project because it seems really related to this, which is Human, where maybe you can introduce that briefly.

Sure, sure. Human basically, we are kind of like an innovation lab and an agency that helps people to really get digital currency. and, you know, I mean get in terms of understand, not get in terms of actually obtain. You know, we basically are trying to do a couple of things. One is, you know, the first thing we announced was that we were really intending to do branded cryptocurrency. That is, you know, cryptocurrency for brands specifically. So, you know, like the example that we often give is like the Whole Foods coin. And the Whole Foods coin is a great example.

This Whole Foods, by the way, is not a client of ours. It's just a sort of like example that we often cite. So the concept is this. A lot of people say that we're going to get to the point where Bitcoin is like the world's in-game currency. It just takes over the world and that's what we use. And I strongly disagree with that because basically the incentives for creating new tokens, new currencies, is enormously strong. It's enormously strong. And I don't think that's ever going to go away because here's what you can do.

In the Whole Foods coin example, we basically say, let's say that we've created a new coin. called Whole Foods coin, and we pre-mine 40% of it. Let's say, and pre-mine, of course, everybody hates this term, but just roll with me for a minute on this. We pre-mine 40% of it, and let's say that you give 10% away to all of the Whole Foods customers.

Like as they come in, maybe you give them some sort of swipable card and say, hey, it's a discount to coins or something like that, bring it back in next time and you get a discount. We also give them away to the entire supply chain. So we say, I don't know, 20% away to like all the people that work at Whole Foods from the farmers on up. Or maybe you give it just all of the Whole Foods employees and then you take, you know,

another 10% and you give it to the farmers, the people that are growing the food or something like this. And let's say that this is a pre-mine and a distribution that happens before the coin ever goes public. Okay. And then once the coin is actually out there, I mean, maybe because, you know, you've basically set up a situation where, you know, hypothetically, we're still speaking in terms of mine coins versus not mine coins.

And we can go into that later because I also think that's debatable. But let's say that the rest is simply just released out there in mind. Well, the interesting thing that would happen, I believe, is as follows. People would recognize, like, wow, there's a big corporation creating its own cryptocurrency. That's pretty interesting. I believe miners would get on to that, even with the pre-mines, simply because there's a massive distribution there. And by the way, for those of you don't know, Whole Foods is a, I believe, primarily

North American high-end grocery retailer. So anyway, what happens to those coins that were pre-mines? Well, the interesting thing is this. Those coins now, presumably, are being traded online and have, you know, receive some kind of, you know, fiat exchange value. So what you've effectively done as an organization is you've basically incentivized not only your customers, not only everybody that works for you, not only the people that you want to support sort of as your like social responsibility side. I mean, of course, you know, let's say cold foods kept a cut of that up themselves at the corporate level. But you

basically, you've basically created like a seeming, significant amount of value out of thin air for all those people. So it's a massive, massive loyalty program. I mean, this is extremely interesting stuff. And I can see that process

happening again and again and again. But the question that comes up is, you know, like, you know, what is that exactly? You know, because, I mean, you can say, yeah, we've just created a new currency. But I've started to become more of the persuasion that, you know, of what Stan Larimer said about this stuff is that these probably, this probably isn't currency so much as it is stock. And then what have you done? Have you created like a second stock offering in having done that? Like something that basically is, you know,

fully fungible. It's, it's open source, etc. You know, I don't really, I don't really know how that plays out because there's a whole, you know, large amount of sort of like legal snafu involved in that. But you can see that that's kind of an interesting proposition for a corporation if they could get the legal side worked out, which is really the challenge. But I view that process as being something that once we get it legally figured out and once people really get their heads wrapped around it, you're going to see that happen again and again and again and again and again. And in the long run, where you end up is that nearly everything, like definitely every brand, every celebrity, etc., is tokenized. Everything has its own token that

is freely tradable, has free-floating value. And the interesting thing that happens at that point, in my opinion, and again, this is me just putting on my futurist hat, is that when you have this, like, interconnected value system, you know, when you can see what something is worth compared to something else, it's really easy to start to track, you know, not only where people are, you know, wanting to put their value. In other words, like, you know, this changes politics, but it also changes things in terms of human behavior because let's say, you know, I could, you know, do one of these, you know, crowd sales for my school, for my water supply, for myself. And what happens at that point is like, if, you know, who's invested in me? If I behave badly and things like that, that could

cause a sell-off. That could cause me to lose value. I believe over the long haul, this is the kind of weird future that we're heading towards with this stuff. And this is why, you know, I'm much more with Stan Larimer's view of this, that this is not currency. This is something else. And maybe it's not stock either, but it's something else. But you mean, you can IPO yourself. Sure, why not? I mean, in theory, you could IPO, quote, unquote, anything. But anyway, so human, to get back to it, I'm sorry for the long wind of this, but that's, that's kind of the stuff that we're looking at, you know? And this is going to be a long,

hard slog, mainly because of the legal issues, but also because there's just an education that has to happen. But this is something. that we're doing. So, I mean, there's that side of it. And then we also are trying to kind of work with like all of the meta coins and things like that that are out there to make sure that, you know, normal people can kind of understand what's happening there and to, you know, bring broad audiences to those things. Let's stick with that grocery example for a little bit. So, I mean, a lot of this would be possible now. No, you could say I'm going to make some iPhone app or some Android app and anyone can download it and there's some way to claim it, you know,

companies have loyalty programs, etc. So do you think the main difference will be that one, maybe it becomes a lot cheaper to do it with cryptocurrencies and two, that it's tradable? Or is there something else that's really different here? Yeah, I mean, it's both. It's both and it's, you know, it's tradable. And I mean, actually, I think the most interesting thing here is that, you know, the fungibility is definitely key. Because if you look at almost, I mean, I can't think

of a single loyalty program that exists right now where they don't simply just lock you in, right? And that means like, you know, you can't really trade it. You can't really give it to somebody else. There are some exceptions,

but that's pretty rare. And the other thing is, like, the idea of free floating value. And I actually think that's a, that's a pretty significant sea change from the idea of the loyalty program. And it's also something that definitely scares corporations, right?

Because if there's suddenly some kind of backlash against, let's say, you know, some corporation behaves badly or what have you, and there's like a sell-off of this coin, if this actually is something significant to them, if like, you know, if like the,

the PR impact of that were, you know, detrimental. And this is something, of course, they have to weigh before they even get into something like this. I mean, that could be, that could be quite bad. But I think in the long run, the companies that will win will be those who embrace this. And in fact, Calvin Soe are, let's see, I want to bring this up.

Hold on, I'm going to bring up my, because I can't remember the quote exactly. So, our chief innovation officer, Calvin, so basically said at a conference, he said, you know, be comfortable with being uncomfortable. If you give freedom, you know, you will be more loyal to me, to my brand. I mean, that's kind of the idea. Like, if I give you this freedom, you will be more loyal to my brand. And I think that's true because we now live in this time in which, you know, it's very hard to pull like the wool over people's eyes.

consumers are becoming much smarter. I mean, we're all becoming much smarter about this kind of stuff. It's kind of hard to BS on the internet, really, because people can look it up. People can find out if you're telling the truth or not. And I think this is one of those kind of situations where people are like, well, look, they're trusting us.

They're trusting us to do this. Like, they have put some power in our hands. You know, I mean, again, it's a sea change from where things are now, which is why it's going to be a long, hard slog for us in that domain. But, you know, there are people who are listening and there are people who are interested in this. And I think this is where this is going to end up going in the long run. I'm interested in this.

Brian, maybe you'll agree with this. I mean, you're quite involved with quantified self. And this is sort of like the next step of the quantified self, in essence, where not only you're measuring, you know, aspects of, I'm talking about at a personal level, you know, when you're talking about essentially giving value to yourself. I mean, this brings it to the next level. level where effectively you're measuring your value up against others and up against,

I don't know, for instance, peers or competitors or what have you. Yeah, I guess there may be a way to integrate that. I guess I do see it maybe more on the side that it does create that stock market for anything. Absolutely. I think that that's interesting. Also, it's scary in the sense that who's going to make. make sure that the company issuing those coins lives up to their promise. I mean, because after all, stock markets are very regulated, which has a lot of disadvantages,

but also has some advantages, which means like not just some fraudulent company can sell some stocks and then maybe never, you know, pay them all the dividends themselves or something like that. So there's going to be, I think that's going to be a big issue as well. Yeah, I mean, I think that you're probably right. I mean, I'd no doubt there will be a lot of fraudulent things. There'll be a lot of like just simply badly executed stuff and people lose a lot of money, a lot of investment. And I don't doubt it.

I mean, the way I see this kind of thing is it's kind of almost like starting over in the same way that Bitcoin was kind of like starting over with money. I mean, it's going to be a little bit, well, it's going to be more than a little bit bumpy. But, you know, the mechanisms and the means and things like that to, do all this stuff in a way that is socially acceptable, fair, et cetera, I believe will manifest. I mean, it may take, you know, 10, 20 years.

I don't know, but I do think that this is where this all ends up going. By the way, guys, there was, I don't know if you've heard about this guy named Mike Merrill, who actually did a self-IPO as a project. And I don't know what the website URL is. Probably you can just Google Mike Merrill, M-E-R-R-I-L.

And if I'm not mistaken, he actually issued 100,000 shares at a $1 per share and basically like, you know, did a public offering of himself. Now, this is a little bit more, I mean, you know, of course, I don't know, Mike, but, you know, I saw this as a bit more gimmicky than kind of what I'm talking about. It's funny, I was on an airplane ride,

I believe, to the Singapore conference last year, and I sat next to a couple of Indian guys. And I kind of realized after talking to them and talking about cryptocurrency, that, you know, they talked a little bit about how there already is sort of a cultural. of not a public offering for itself, but basically of investing in, you know, for example, newborn children or, you know, when someone gets married. There is like this idea that you're

going to like put an investment into them. And that's just like an inherent part of the culture. And that's kind of how I see this too. It's like, you know, if I were to do a public offering of myself, you know, I think it probably would state my goals. I would say like, you know, what you would, of course want to be doing with this. And I'm just sort of putting myself out there to be weighed and judged and ultimately, hopefully supported by my peers and the people that believe in me. It sounds a little bit crazy. I understand. But I think that that's what crypto, I mean, it's one of the millions of things that this technology is going to enable. But I think it starts on the level of corporations, you know, celebrities and so on.

Yeah, no, I think that's very interesting. If you, so I studied economics as an undergrad. and one professor at my university is Gary Becker and he did a lot of research into human capital and of course the way so a lot of like looking at educational investments how people spend your time where do people learn a skill or not and of course always from an economic perspective

so they would look at what's the return and it's very straightforward basically from there to say well what about if someone else from outside can invest in that and then you kind of sell shares and you stub and people can fund you for educational projects, things like that. It's straightforward from that way. It's socially, it seems crazy.

You know, it seems like such a massive change. And I guess we have no idea how that's going to pan out as a society. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, of course, I mean, you're right. I mean, we have no idea how it's going to pan out. I have absolutely no thoughts other than this sort of high-level thing that basically indicates to me that probably were going to be doing something like this. You know, I mean, I think one of the more interesting notions that I've been able to sort of come up with around all this is that I don't know if you guys are familiar with Buckminster Fuller, but he had this idea back in the kind of, I think it was like the early 60s called the World Game Computer, right? And actually just called the World Game, but it involved a big interconnected computer.

And the concept behind this was that, you know, Bucky was crazy about, you know, tracking data. That was really his thing through all time. He loved tracking data about like, where is all the stuff? Like, where are the natural resources? Where are the movements of people? Where is the political power, etc.? And, you know, through that, he became a relatively decent futurist, you know, and his view was that, you know, he confirmed, you know, through ephemeralization,

you would continue to be able to do more and more with less and so on. But he had this vision that you would have a computer at some point that would effectively be able to track all of the flows of all the resources, all the people, etc. And what that would basically allow you to do is make very strong predictions about what was going to happen. And also to kind of be able to say like, you know, well, you know, look, there's a, there's a huge population growth in, you know, sub-Saharan Africa and we need to, you know, and there's like a dearth of these resources. We need to move these things. You know, this kind of stuff, right?

But the thing is, I think what this is in the long run is that same idea, but around, you know, the idea of value in a very general sense, not about any particular things. And maybe those things will also be assigned there. But I think what we're building, and I think that more and more after I've spoken with, like the Ethereum guys and so on, that is where we're kind of heading to with all this stuff.

We are looking at a kind of construction of Bucky's World Game Computer. I'll just be the devil's advocate on this. I mean, where do you think this takes society where, you know, we have a commodity to say, commoditization of everything and a commoditization of everyone and you can basically look up someone's value before you've even had an opportunity to make an idea for yourself of what that person's value actually is. Are we going towards a society where we'll have even more inequalities amongst people, countries, companies and such? I mean, I certainly hope not. And to sort of like tackle the sort of first, I mean, I guess tone of the thing you were saying, I mean, I'm a big privacy advocate. You know, I really. I really believe we need to be very careful about that kind of stuff and to watch how much we centralize, you know, communications and data about ourselves and so on. So, you know, I don't mean to prognosticate about this without some degree of like, you know, responsibility. Like I think that this thing comes with, you know, the other side of it too, that I guess, you know, the more crypto anarchistic side of this equation. You know, I mean, I think that there's the, there's, there's, there's,

there's room and there's importance and seeing kind of both of those things. And, you know, I think one without the other leads to probably not good consequences. You know, and the way that I kind of see this is, you know, I should be able to do these issuances. I should be able to come out and say like, yeah, I'm like publicly offering this and that. But I mean, you know, it doesn't mean I give up everything about, you know, my individuality or what have you, right? I don't think it has to be like that. I mean, we're just, we're speaking a high level about this and it's just kind of the imagination of what this thing could be. But, you know, you're right, though.

I mean, if it goes in the wrong direction, if it's not well thought out, we could certainly end up in a situation where, you know, like the sort of worst aspects of kind of, you know, say a Facebook culture are just greatly magnified, you know, the worst aspects of like massive, massive financial inequality in the world are just greatly magnified. But my hope is, my hope is that, you know, a system like this basically starts to illustrate where there are deficiencies, where people lack, and what that really means. You know, because it's so intangible for people right now to see, like, for example, a company goes and pollutes a water supply. What does that really mean? And what is like the, what does that actually have impact on? If I can see its financial impact rippling to me, you know, it's a lot clearer what it all means. And I hope that we go there with it. Well, you talked about an interesting point was privacy. And to me, that's somehow kind of linked to reputation. And I'm kind of, I mean, to me, for instance, if you're, if you're going to commoditize your values, so I don't know, as a professional, you're going to say, okay, I'm going to issue some sort of an IPO for myself.

And I don't know, something goes wrong or you have some sort of a problem with a client. And so you're, and that comes out and your value goes down. as an individual, I think it's going to be hard for you to redeem yourself and come out of that where you're still the same person. However, if you're a company, you can change management, you can change corporate policy, you can change teams, and you might have an opportunity to bounce back from that. But if you're issuing a coin, which is a reflection of your own value as a person, maybe as a professional or an independent or developer or what have you, I think that's where we might start seeing problems with this is where as an individual, it might be hard for you to bounce back from that.

And your value may be forever kind of, yeah, I mean, your reputation may be forever destroyed because of like one problem that you may have had or something like that, unless you, of course, like destroy that coin and then create a new one. Well, here's the thing, though. I mean, you know, if this is a phenomenon that truly takes hold and happens on a mass scale, then, you know, I believe our sense of empathy, our sense of like, you know, what it means to be like, you know, a merely human kind of comes with that, right? And I don't think that it necessarily implies that we all hold each other to like, you know, superhuman standards. I mean, unless the general like human ethos has changed so that we are basically doing that exactly and we all understand that as the rule. I don't think that, you know, I, I don't think that, you know, I, I That's very important. When it relates to online reputation, and that's been a topic of discussion, there's recent years, I think it's important also to remember that people are people, right?

I mean, if you end up on Facebook with, like, drunk pictures of yourself, I mean, you have to also remember that that happens to everyone. Yeah. Let me maybe jump in here. So I think it's interesting what you said, Sebastian. Because if I, as a young person, let's say, I want to issue shares in myself to finance my education, which may be economically a really good idea, you know, because the return may be pretty high and might not have the money. And this may be a way for me to get an education.

And it may be a way for other people to make a good return on their, investments. But of course, if you think about this sort of abstractly, then I'm not working for myself anymore, but I'm working for this company, really, which is myself, which is interesting, no? I think there is a really radical shift there. And if you think of it, you know, you said the empathy thing, I honestly don't believe that would happen because I believe you would start having, maybe you'd start having portfolios of investments in people's educations, etc. Those would be really be driven financially. So it's a crazy world.

But I do think, you know, if you think of the larger picture, like, is this where we're going? I think so, yes. I agree with you. I think human makes a lot of sense. I think brand requirements makes a lot of sense. And so I think this will happen. but it is it is totally radical what that would mean for our society i think yeah i think i don't i forget who who who we spoke to about this gave the example of like the hot dog stand

that you want to invest in and you have no way of doing so and i mean you know that this guy is a good business guy but you have no idea about hot dogs and you just want to invest in his small hot dog stand i forget who who gave this example and having the sort of branded coin enables that kind of investment at like every level and you can invest in like the potato farmer in a small town in the Midwest Western US or whatever like so I think at that level it's interesting but I think once you get into kind of investing in people that's where it gets kind of tricky and we have to have this kind of societal change which is I think difficult to go through at this point well I think that we, I think you're right. I mean, it is, it, this, this notion of the future definitely

implies that like the societal change either has happened or is happening. But I mean, you know, I mean, yes, the, the hot dog stand is an interesting example, but I think the, the more interesting examples, really, are the things that are not considered businesses now, you know, like, I gave the example earlier, like, the school system. I mean, think about how poorly funded and, like, impoverished, most schools are, honestly, you know, like, everywhere outside of, like, let's say, I don't know, Western Europe and Scandinavia or something like this. I mean, really, like, most schools are in pretty bad shape, and I'm talking about public schools. But if, you know, the concerned individuals of the community could take it up and, like, you know,

basically funded themselves through a mechanism like this, then, you know, there's a lot less need for the kind of, you know, traditional public accounting services, things like that. And there is suddenly this accountability. And by the way, what this also implies is, like, you know, what are you actually invested in? Like, what is, what are you invested in? And like, does that reflect your values? Yeah, this is a lot of the same stuff Mike Huron is talking about, right? With, like, publicly funded goods from crowdsourcing.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a very, very interesting proposition also. And where I can see the value in this and this sort of giving value to just about anything and being able to create these sort of startups, essentially, these coins, but that represent sort of a company that you can just put your money into it if you believe it. Yeah, and I think it's not, we're not going to call it money.

I think at that point, like, it's really something else. We're probably just going to be talking about, like, you know, the free-floating value that is out there. Because at that point, I'm not sure that we're still talking about money, even though, you know, this kind of technology that we're all sort of immersed in does in fact allow us to, you know, spend the stuff as currency. Like it's so easy to do it that we can. I don't think that we're really talking to money anymore because, you know, money implies sort of a, at least to me it does.

It implies like kind of a generic store of value, et cetera. And while that may exist in the world, I'm not sure that it will have as great of a role as it does now. Because it'll just be a lot more, it'll just be a lot more tangible. Like I'll be able to really see what I'm holding and like, you know, others will, I presume, as well. So anyway, that's my prognostication. I've got a question for the economist, Brian. So what happens when, I mean, when you have so many stores of value? So for now we have, I guess you could argue that we have about 200 currencies around the world.

And those are sort of the base, those serve as a way to evaluate value. around the world and most of it is based on the US dollar anyway or euros. What happens when you have 10 million different types of coins? What do you use as a base unit? Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, I get your question. So I guess there's two things, right?

So there are cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, et cetera. Now those are really, I mean, you could say there's an increase in the money supply. so in a sense that should cause some inflation but then of course it depends on the exchange rate so it's but so that that is one side right but then the other side if we talk about what we can talk now so these coins that are issued by let's say a person or a school etc i think those are that value is already there but then you take a representation of that value in the form of this tradable asset

so I think if you look at it from economically it doesn't really change the money supply but it changes it makes it tradable so that will have all kinds of consequences but I think from a monitored perspective that's not such a change I think the interesting change from a monitoring perspective is having the ability or having so many new currencies

and the ability to issue a currency, you know, basically for free. And I think we don't know how that's going to turn out. I mean, there's a question I've been thinking about quite a lot. I've talked to people about. And I think we just don't know. There's no economic research either to, you know, fall back on. So we'll see. So maybe just getting back to Hume.

So you mentioned earlier that, Humet is working on a redesign of the hive wallet for Mac and Android. Are you guys working on other versions as well, like for Windows or Apple? I know that's kind of difficult to do, but... Yeah, no, I mean, I really would love to make a great iOS wallet

to be on a native US wallet. It's just, you know, as you know, I mean, Apple are just, you know, impossibly hard to work with. So as a small startup, we just can't afford to put capital into something that's probably going to get rejected by them. Windows, I wish I could say that we were working on a nice Windows version of Hive, but we have not yet found a really kick-ass developer yet for that. And I hope that we can at some point.

So if anyone's out there and here's this and wants to work on a Windows version of Hive, please get in touch with me. But, you know, I mean, the thing we're working on right now, which is going to be sort of the first representation of our kind of new direction, new branding, is something we call HiveWeb. And HiveWeb is a mobile web wallet that is, you know, basically it's a BIP 32 wallet. If you guys don't know what that is at a very high level, basically, it's about hierarchical deterministic wallets where you initially enter, it's probably some of you have used

Electrum, you enter a seed phrase and that actually generates your wallet. Yeah, we've talked about quite a bit on the show, actually, yeah. It's very interesting. I actually just bought some BIP 32 cards recently. Right, right, exactly. Yeah, I mean, there's going to be a lot. lot of really interesting stuff happening around that. And we're basically trying to, you know, bring a hive experience to the mobile web, meaning, you know, really what we're doing is we're

targeting the iPhone users, right? But I think, you know, with what we have so far, we probably have, you know, one of the, one of the nicest, easiest to use mobile web wallets that has come out so far. And so is the idea to then kind of, because right now you've got the Mac wallet and the Android wallet and, you know, maybe sometime down the future you'll have an iOS wallet, if that if their policies change. But it's the idea to have sort of like a centralized web wallet where all of your wallets are using up the same balance? Because right now that's not the case.

Right now you have two different wallet addresses on both platforms. Correct. Yeah. I don't think that we're actually going to go towards that centralized model. I mean, it's part of our kind of like ethic and ethos is that like we just want to avoid that as much as possible. And, you know, in fact, it's, you know, it's really one of the things that I kind of like rail against whenever I'm out in public talking about Bitcoin, is it like we're, you know, through things

like Circle and Coinbase, even those are like great, easy to use services, we're getting so far away from what I believe was Satoshi's vision about this stuff, you know? So, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm going to say here and now, and I hope that this doesn't get contradicted later, but, you know, we probably will always be pursuing a model like this. That being said, you know, with the BIP 32 wallets, once the OS10 wallet and the Android wallet support that, obviously you'll be. be able to just simply use your BIP 32 passphrase and create your wallet, use the same wallet in those other platforms. Is that how it works though?

Like if you have one passphrase, because I thought using the same passphrase could generate, would generate multiple. Sebastian, I think you're mixing it up with B538, which is different. Sorry, yeah. I think I'm actually thinking of Bip 38. Yeah, so Bip 32 is a seed. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I see.

Yeah, that makes more sense. Now, just, Brian and I were trying to connect each other like on these things. One of the nice features is that you actually have a really cool kind of contacts list where you can add people to your contacts list.

And I, when I first downloaded it, I was on the impression that just simply adding his email address would add him as a kind of like as a friend. But you do have to send the person your actual wallet of that address. That's correct. that will change shortly. We have some new tech in development that's going to kind of allow you to make this whole experience like really tremendously simple.

But yeah, for the moment, I mean, keep in mind, you know, the Android wallet just came out in still in beta form a few weeks ago, right? So we have a lot of work to do. It's not, you know, entirely ready for public consumption, but we wanted to put it out there so people could sort of see that we're, you know, what we're working on, how it's working and so on. But yes, if you kind of scroll through, and I don't know if you have show notes or something like that, but I can include a link. If you scroll through, we have, we have effectively a high

protocol layer that we're working on that's going to allow all that stuff to, you know, pretty much be transparent and simple. Obviously, we're trying to go for the simplest possible implementation that we can, the easiest to use anyway. So, so yeah, that'll come. Can you talk about the hive protocol layer and what that means? Well, sure. I mean, really, what we're working on right now is an XMP-B-based communications layer that basically allows you to, you know, synchronize things like address books, to, you know, share contacts more easily.

We also worked on an experimental thing that would allow you to easily share wallets between it, but I think we've decided that's not super secure and not the best way to do it. But, you know, it's going to be, like all the stuff we make, you know, open source, open available for other people to use, and it will allow, you know, like some degree of wallet interconnectivity. We'll probably be doing some stuff with the apps there as well,

making sure you have the same apps on all platforms. you know, there's really like kind of an endless array of stuff that we can we can kind of pull off with that. But yeah, that's the general concept. I mean, you know, right now there isn't a great, as far as we've seen anyway, there are no great ways to do this. Like there are no standardized mechanisms for doing this. So, I mean, we've started to see some things actually with the K&C wallet. We've been discussing that with them. I mean, hopefully we can, you know, come to some compatibility terms on those things.

We'll see all this all pans out. But I think over the next six months, you know, you're going to see a lot of really cool stuff happen with like wallet compatibility, not just including like, you know, hive to hive. Cool. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. I think that will be a very interesting area to watch. And hopefully the iOS is going to, you know, that's going to change and we'll have a great

higher iOS for all that soon too. Yeah. Maybe let's talk about the few news topic we wanted to cover. So there's a dish thing. Sebastian, you looked into that. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, sure. So the DISH Network is, I guess, one or probably the largest satellite dish provider in the U.S.

And they just announced that they're going to be accepting Bitcoin in Q3 of 2014. So just to give you kind of an idea of how big this company is, they've got 14 million users in the U.S., customers, that is, revenue like 13.9 billion in 2013 and more 30,000 employees. So effectively, this would make DISH the largest company in the world probably to accept Bitcoin. So there's been a lot of talk about this. They're using Coinbase. I think, I guess, obviously they're using Coinbase as a means of accepting Bitcoin. And they're going to be apparently converting the funds directly to Fiat as they accept payment. So like the reasoning behind this,

and this is a quote from one of their executive VPs, is that it's a big part in giving customers choice and convenience. It includes things like technology programming, but also includes how to make their payments. So I don't think they're really giving, they're really betting on Bitcoin as a technology or as a payment system. They're just trying to open it up to Bitcoin users. So I think this is more sort of like a PR move than anything.

Have you guys heard about this? Or what are your thoughts on D.Sha? I don't know if I agree with that. It seems one thing they also mentioned on their blog post is that, you know, they have a very lucrative thing in terms of transaction costs, which of course is obvious, right? So they're going to pay, I don't know, half a percent or less or 0.1 percent or something. fee to Coinbase. So the question is,

you know, when is the time going to come that it makes sense for all the companies, for, you know, major e-commerce company, etc., to start accepting Bitcoin because saving on the transaction costs, even if it's just 2% of people pay with Bitcoin or 1%, you know, becomes economical. People should implement that. I don't know if that's the case yet,

I think that time will come. And then it will just be an economic decision. Simply like we're going to save more money than it costs us to implement it, hence we do it. So I think maybe we're going in that direction. I think overstock was obviously different. There was a big ideological component of it that, you know, the guy cares a lot about it. Here, this may be less the case. And in the medium term,

I think that's not going to be the case anymore at all. It's just going to be simple profit maximization move for companies to accept Bitcoin. You know, I think what you just said, though, is it sounds like, you know, BitPay or if Tony Gallipi or Brian Armstrong are listing, they really need to put on their website some kind of calculator that lets people, when they're deciding whether or not to accept Bitcoin, assuming they're not doing it for, you know, promotional PR purposes, which I think a lot of these offerings are, I agree with Sebastian about this. But if they're not, I think they shouldn't, in fact, include a calculator that says, look, just, you know, put your sales numbers in there that you're projecting.

We'll tell you, like, you know, how much you can end up saving. I'm not sure if they have something like that already, but that would be extremely. No, I think that's a great point. And especially it's striking if you do that calculation for a company like Overstock. So Overstock has a 2% profit margin on their sales. Now, I don't know how much they pay in a transaction fees to the credit cards, companies. but let's say they pay 1.5%. Now, if they pay half a percent to Coinbase,

which they may pay less, I presume, you know, they can save 1% on all the Bitcoin sales. And that means on the whole portion of revenues that they generate with Bitcoin, their profit margin is 3% instead of 2%. So it's 50% higher. So if you look at that calculation, and that's going to hold for all companies.

This is extremely compelling. But yeah, I agree. I think a calculator could really work for that. I mean, for now, a lot of companies, I mean, as sort of like Bitcoin evangelists, we talk to merchants and we say like, okay, you should accept Bitcoin because there's a novelty to it and you're going to be attracting like press and new users or new clients that wouldn't necessarily shop here usually, but they will because they accept Bitcoin and they're just using, like, looking for a place to spend their Bitcoin. So we're kind of selling it

as a competitive advantage to merchants in a lot of cases. How long will this effect last? Like, at which point does it become no longer sort of this, this PR move to accept Bitcoin, but really, like you said, it's like really down to numbers and then the savings in terms fees. I think we're getting there. I don't think this PR move is going to last much longer. Maybe in a few months it's it really won't be newsworthy

anymore when a company starts accepting Bitcoin. So I think the only way for it to work is that we need to see the user base growing a lot. Because even if you have that calculation and it is you know

it is much cheaper for them to accept Bitcoin payments there's still too few users I think. to make this viable on a big scale. So I think user growth is really, really important now. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, I made a prediction late last year. I said that 2014 is going to be the year that Bitcoin reaches a kind of like technological

fashion level. And I don't think we've quite hit that. I actually, either my prediction is going to be wrong or it's going to be the latter half the year of 2015. But I do think it will get to that point where, you know, people are, it basically becomes a fashion statement to say, hey, I just bought this. thing with Bitcoin or hey, I bought some Bitcoin or hey, I'm like spending Bitcoin on this or that. I think that I think actually that the PR possibilities for this kind of stuff have really only just begun.

And I'm not sure if it's just going to be like a two-month window and then puttering out or something like that. Even if it does become sort of the de facto standard in some way, I think we are going to go through this period of, I would say, a year plus even, of just where, you know, every single company is making this kind of announcement because they have to because otherwise they're being left behind. We haven't reached that point yet. We haven't reached the point in which a company really would say,

like, you know what? I was just left behind by all those people that went towards Bitcoin or towards cryptocurrency. I don't think we've even come close to that point yet. I think we have quite a ways to go. You may be right, yeah. I could see that happening and then maybe we will have this effect much longer.

But for that, you need a bigger user base. I could see that happening in the tech industry that you have a really, really strong user base to people who are passionate about it, used a lot. Moving on to the next story, which is just the last story we want to touch on today. There's been some kind of interesting news out of South America

and specifically in Argentina. So Argentina Central Bank has issued kind of the typical warnings about Bitcoin. that it's not a fiat currency, that it's not assured by anything or by anyone, that there's a high potential for criminal activity and money laundering. So we know, and we've been talking about this quite a bit, is that Argentina has pretty strict capital controls. The economic system there is quite closed. And all the while, while this is happening, a Latin American exchange, Bithex.la, so B-I-T-E-X-L-A, so B-I-T-E-X-L-L-A,

has officially launched this week with backing a $2 million investment from a UK-based investment firm. Now, the positioning of this exchange seems to be, seems to go beyond Argentina, and they seem to be targeting all of Latin America. They're positioning it really as a regional South American, Spanish language exchange, which I think, correct me if I'm wrong, guys, probably the first exchange in South America that is positioning its marketing towards the entire continent. Yeah, so Wendell, do you want to wait in here? Do you know any Latin American exchanges? Well, there's MECSBT, which is actually by this guy named Jose Oritz, but I don't know too much about

the space. But I definitely know that there's a lot of interesting stuff happening down there. I mean, it's really unfortunate this year that I haven't had a lot of time to, you know, really go down and travel too much because, you know, I think much, much like Andreas Antonopoulos's view on this, you know, I think that the most interesting stuff will be happening in areas like that. I'm not sure if MexBT has launched. They were also a seed coin funded startup in SF1, which Hyde was also in. But, you know, I can certainly find out about that and let you guys know. But I definitely think that's going to be super interesting. You know, I mean, if you look at it exclusively from the perspective of remittance, you know, massive, massive operatives.

Yeah, but it's just one way in here. So if you look at the, you know, if you think about Argentina, there's no way they're going to permit Bitcoin to pay so exchange that you can kind of pay in with your bank account or something like that. So I think the way this is going to work is that you're going to have to use Western Union or something like that to get money out of Argentina and into this exchange and then it's going to be a dollar Bitcoin exchange.

So I don't think this is going to work for remittances. Maybe in other countries, but in Argentina you know, this is, there's not going to be a solution for that because if it starts getting, used that will be shut down. I think there's more a solution there. Maybe if you talk about local Bitcoins or things like that that are much more resilient to regulatory control. Well, on the other hand, you know, there, I mean, because you're right, like something like local bitcoins, obviously would work a lot better. But there also are, as far as I understand,

a few projects that are going on right now to actually tokenize real US dollars. And by tokenize, I mean, like to create a kind of cryptocurrency out of dollars. I don't know how, how, how, how well those programs are going to end up working out. And, you know, obviously those could end up introducing a kind of counterparty risk as well to the whole equation. But that might be a solution. But of course, you end up with yet another token that you eventually have to convert into a local currency. But perhaps a combination of those two would be some way to deal with this problem. Now, in terms of mitigating the risk of being first to market, they're actually incorporating

in the Netherlands. So if you go on their website, you'll see that the company is actually registered in Hoopsthorpe in Holland. So I think they're trying to mitigate some of the risk associated to starting a Bitcoin exchange in Argentina by registering outside of the country. Of course, they'll have to have banking relationships there or some sort of a relationship with, like you said, Brian, the Western Union or something like that,

in order to be able to accept, well, make that connection with Fiat money. But, you know, I think this is a risky business to get in, but it takes somebody to be the first, right? It takes someone to kind of pierce that market and make things move forward and take the hits before others get the courage to do the same. No, but I don't see it that way. there's no risk for them if they do it that way. I mean, if you have to get your money out of Argentina, they don't care. The Argentinian government doesn't care because it doesn't circumvent the capital controls. So, you know, that's not going to be the risky thing.

Maybe some people will try to do it differently. What do you mean? It doesn't circumvent the capital controls. Well, because you have to get your money out anyway. I mean, of course, Western Union and things like that, they are, you know, capital controls apply there. You can't just use that. you're going to have to use your ID and et cetera, et cetera. So it's not going to be a way, because I think they have a limit of a certain number of U.S. dollars that you're allowed to take out every year.

So you won't be able to use this to circumvent that. That's my point. I see. I honestly think the only way in a country like Argentina where they care a lot about their capital controls and where they don't like people going around it is if you're going to. going to go on a peer-to-peer level. So you're going to actually have cash to Pesor to Bitcoin

transfer in person, which happens a lot with dollar already. So I think that's going to be the only way to go around that. And then maybe at some point the time will come where they say, we're okay with that. And in other countries, they will say we're okay with you using Bitcoin for remittances. this. But yeah, thanks so much, Vendell, for joining us today. If people want to learn more about it, so Hive is at, was it HiveWallet.com, right? Yeah, HiveWallet.com and Humeant is HUMENT.

And you can reach out to me at W at HiveWollet.com. And yeah, thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. It was really interesting to talk to you and get some of your ideas of where this is going. I mean, I really like to discuss the kind of futurist aspect of all of this. And it's always very interesting. Yeah, I think this is the reason to be in the space, to be honest.

No, absolutely. It was lots of fun. And hopefully we'll have you on again. And we can talk about robots or something like that. Yeah, so thanks so much for listening to us. A few things we want to talk about. So first of all, we've been kind of shortening or format a bit. and we've been trying to keep it to an hour.

If you like that or you don't, you know, you can let us know, give us some feedback. We would love to hear that. I think we have gotten some positive feedback, but, you know, we'll try to incorporate what you guys like. Now, we're also looking for sponsors and advertisers. So this is, we're in the process of, let's say, professionalizing the podcast.

So this is going to take a while. We're also doing a new website, et cetera. but what we would like to do is to work with exciting Bitcoin startups, Bitcoin businesses, and, you know, help them grow. And, you know, so if you have something like that, if you're interested, you know, get in touch and we can talk about that. And, you know, if you want to support the show, you can go to EpicenterBitcoin.com slash tips. Follow us on Twitter at Epicenter BTC.

And you can sign up for a newsletter, which goes out every Friday at EpicenterBitcoin.com newsletter and we're also going to have our second episode or a third episode but second episode of interviews of the Bitcoin 2014 conference that we'll be releasing next week so that's something to look forward to so thanks so much for joining and I'll look forward to seeing you next week