TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #292: Diving into tbDEX with Mike Brock

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Mike Brock, lead at TBD, to discuss: - What "is" and what "ought" to be - Mike's history at Block - How bitcoin got integrated at Cash App - How TBD came to be - Creating a decentralized system with limited trust in tbDEX - Creating bitcoin on-ramps for people is a massive hurdle right now - Is tbDEX transitional? - much more Follow Mike on Twitter Check out the tbDEX white paper Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App Unchained Capital Braiins - Daniel's thread Compass Mining HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Ben here to introduce this rip of Tales from the Crypt. Matt joined me for this interview. We sat down with Mike Brock, who's the head of TBD under the block umbrella. And we talked about TBDEX, the decentralized exchange they're building at TBD to create better on-ramps for people looking to get into Bitcoin. Fascinating conversation. Hit on philosophy, hit on history, hit on a bunch of things. I think you guys are gonna like it it was brought to you by good friends at the motherfucking cash app cash apps help you stack sats send sats receive sats and sell sats if you so please sats are the standard on the app there's 100 million sats in one whole bitcoin you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin you

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check all this out at Lend.HodlHodl.com and enjoy this conversation with Mike Brock. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Mike Brock, what is and what ought to be? we're getting we're starting off with a with a philosophy already we're getting right into it and what ought to be um well uh well i mean that's that's a complex question um what is and what is not to be i mean i mean um i think you're obviously referring to my uh get it you know my my delving into hume on twitter um in this conversation around natural law um so i mean so yeah i mean the the the conversation i i was having on twitter uh i guess with uh some some folks from i guess the mises institute in australia uh or something um uh was really just around this idea that um natural law um can't get around the is-ought problem um there's a there's a hume david

hume um had a conjecture that you cannot get from an is statement to an ought statement um the uh there are is statements in the world like the the sky is blue i am a human um oxygen is in the atmosphere uh like all these things that we can just sort of like take stock of there's this giant set of things um that is um and hume said you as many as is statements as you pile up about like you know the world around you and the things that you know and the set of knowledge you can't actually take that and derive an ought statement from it you can't get from you know an elephant is an animal an elephant you know is you know a plant eater to you know an elephant you know ought you know to be given a right like you can't get there and hume so hume

sort of you know took the sort of stick and beat the aristotelian view over the head which is that you know you can't you can't derive purpose from it is and that's what that's kind of the big sort of um uh like idea around the is-ought problem um and so that then therefore the argument is you can't really derive natural law uh purely rationally which leads to a big split in sort of the view around ethics and morality and this represents like a big sort of uh uh you know there's a space um within sort of political philosophy of those who believe that you that you can of which sorry murray rothbard and and hop and and walter block and um a bunch of you know libertarian scholars believe that you can that's like sort of a i guess like rothbard the

rothbardian school and then there's a whole other school of thought um on the other hand like f.a hayek for example like did not agree with that neither did mises by the way mises didn't accept rothbard's um natural law um theory um and so there's actually like uh sort of this really weirdly unknown sort of like schism and and sort of how to build up like morality and ethics even within sort of libertarianism um and that was kind of what i was was getting at yeah rothbard drop Mises was, uh, was a socialist. Yeah. I don't, I don't agree with that. I mean, I mean, yeah. I mean, and, and Hopp thought, you know, Milton Friedman was like a flaming ultra left socialist too, which seems crazy on its face. Um, so yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it's,

it's funny, uh, diving into this stuff because I studied economics and, uh, I didn't major in philosophy, but used all my, uh, electives on philosophy and in college. And after it wasn't until after college and I dove into currency markets and stuff. So I started learning about like the Austrian school and, and, uh, the fights within the Austrian school, you had Rothbard versus Mises versus Hayek. And, uh, they all differing opinions and philosophies and I guess first principles types of thinking uh for these grand ideas but i think uh at the end of the day all of uh a very similar aim which is to empower the individual to to basically make the world a better place um which is why we're here to talk i think all three of us matthew myself and you mike

uh believe that bitcoin is a very good tool for the individual in the digital age is that a correct assessment absolutely i mean i i think it's one of the most exciting technologies for many different reasons um i i have you know you know we can relate back to this conversation around how i may have a little bit of differences on on on why i think bitcoin is so important you know to our future um but i i i think that that it is a very important um you know technological social and cultural um development that i think addresses a whole series of problems not just money um but also you know the more broadly the concentration of power like attached you know attached to um money and i think that it's a you know i i mean to me i think it it might actually be like the

the one thing that um i look at today um that that gives me sort of hope that we can sort of push back against some of these, um, really what I would say are asymmetric risks to the continuation of, of human freedom, um, around the world. And it's not just like, you know, I'm not, and it's not just like the federal reserve printing money. It's, it's also about like the concentration of power and authoritarian countries and the use of, uh, you know, uh, the, the weaponization of the internet, um, in to engage in mass surveillance to um control to influence people like the this sort of scary emergence of using

artificial intelligence and machine learning um to mass manipulate um uh populations um through like extremely like scary like levels of propaganda um and i think bitcoin sort of like kind of touches on all these things in very interesting ways um and i and i think it is um a hopeful technology uh that's what i'll say yeah most certainly hopeful technology for any of you freaks out there like who the hell is this guy who are we talking we're talking to mike brock from is it correct so you're the product lead at tbdex marty skipped that spot yeah so i leave so tbd is a uh a business unit at square um it is one of our four business units um well i just said square i'm sorry we are now block uh it is force of habit uh to been working at the company for

over eight years so it's hard to um to change up so so you're right so we are one of the four business units at block uh you know the others being cash app square um and uh title and so we are a full fully like independent business unit within the organization um that is working on this technology that we're talking about today, like TV decks, but more broadly, you know, building out financial infrastructure for this decentralized world. And we can talk a little bit about that, too, and sort of how we're thinking about that in the future, and how, you know, TV decks is sort of our first major project sort of plays into maybe a longer term vision of what we see we can do to make the world a better place. Yeah, I definitely want to get on that. But I

think it's important to set the stage for your involvement personally at block and cash app and square before that and how you got to where you are uh leading the tbdex initiative within block because i i don't think people understand the amount of influence you've had on on block as a company and it's as sub companies uh over the course of of its life yeah i mean i've been i've been at the company like as i said for over eight years um it's the longest place i've ever worked at i'm sure it's a place i've worked at the longest more than any other job um and i've been and i've and i've worked on some some things um over the years when i when i and when i joined square we were about you know a little more than 300 employees uh globally and and today we're

like 8,000. So, um, it's been a, quite a, uh, quite a, like a ride, um, to, to take a company from that small and, and, and, and help build it to this level. Uh, I, I joined the company originally directly onto what is now known as cash app. Um, I was, you know, in the first, uh, dozen or so employees, um, that, that assembled together to create this really crazy idea for a p2p um payment product um that you know that ultimately you know became the sort of the venmo competitor um of at square and then ultimately um uh you know with its trajectory you know we we sort of became the number one um consumer financial uh p2p app in the united states and so i i was definitely very involved in a lot of the um initiatives that um that led us there

I worked on our instant settlement product within Cash App that ultimately was our, you know, one of our major differentiating features in the initial years. This is the idea that you could get payment or you could cash out your payment directly to your bank account instantaneously. I worked on our consumer banking strategy, which, you know, encompasses the cash card program. And then sort of, I guess, my third major act was Bitcoin in 2017. I worked very closely with Jack and a few other members of the team on a hack week project to bring Bitcoin into Cash App in January of 2017. The initial idea for that was actually quite simple, nothing like we have today. Jack wanted to buy a coffee from Blue Bottle with Bitcoin. And he wanted to be able to do that by the end of the hack week, which we sort of accomplished.

The hack week only lasted until Friday. We didn't get it working until the next Monday, so technically we cheated a little bit. But we got it working. We were able to add a wallet into Cash App, and we were able to load funds into that wallet, and we were able to build a feature that automatically converted that Bitcoin back into dollars to fund the actual card transaction.

And so that was the first time I'd ever even touched Bitcoin. I didn't know anything about it, honestly, even before that I knew, I knew, I knew of it. Um, I knew nothing about its technical implementation. So, you know, we, we really had to, you know, like learn on the fly. Um, and, and we built that in a week and in a sense that the rest is kind of history. Um, ever since that moment, I've sort of had my hands in pretty much everything we've done at the company, um, to do with Bitcoin. Uh, you know, I was responsible for, you know, setting up square crypto now now spiral um i led the you know i led all the interviews to figure out who was going to come in and lead it and ultimately i went with steve lee uh and now to

yeah and and now today i uh i'm running our our new newest business unit which is focused completely um on on this set of technologies so that's kind of a high level overview uh because i don't want spend 30 minutes doing a biography, but I think that's a pretty good big bullet points of my contributions to Square. I do want to get into the man behind TV Dex

and all these things at Square, like the Hack Week specifically. I'm surprised that was the first time you interacted with Bitcoin. What stuck out to you during that about the protocol and attempting to implement it into what you guys are doing at Square? Yeah, I mean

I just have to kind of give Jack like a lot of credit here. Um, and you know, Jack actually told this story at, uh, um, at, uh, at the consensus conference, uh, in, in 2018, um, up on stage with Elizabeth Stark. Um, so, you know, it has been told before and it's not apocryphal. Um, he actually had to work quite hard, uh, to convince me, uh, to even like give, like to even like look at it, right. He came to me on a Monday of the Hack Week, I think, and said, I want to do a Hack Week project with you and I want to do Bitcoin.

And I actually told him, no, I didn't want to do that. I wasn't interested in doing Bitcoin. I also wasn't even going to participate in the Hack Week at all. I was very focused on, at that time, on getting Cash Card out the door. And so I was working on that and we were several months away from from being able to to launch that. And yeah, we you know, he sort of like camped out at my desk for the entire day and told me that he wasn't going to leave until I agreed to do Bitcoin. and i finally broke down uh in the morning on the morning on tuesday and agreed to do it um so he kind of deserves all the credit for pushing me into it uh i i can't actually i can't like tell a story that i was somehow like enlightened or anything like that i was i was actually if

anything i was kind of like what the hell is this i don't understand like how this matters i don't know why we would do this this is crazy um i obviously don't think that anymore but like that I mean, at the time, it was kind of really pushed on. And I'm glad he did. I'm glad, you know, Jack sort of, you know, he's really good at looking around corners and, you know, seeing out into the future and where things are going. And he had this really strong belief at the time that Bitcoin, like, was going to matter in a big way. And he sort of pulled me into it. I'm grateful he did.

Yeah. That happened in 2017. At what point in 2017 was that Hack Week? January. very beginning, right after the year we, like, this was like the, like, I mean, that was the other thing too. This was all kind of happening in the, in the sort of the, the hangover of the election, um, in 2016,

which would have happened obviously just weeks earlier. Um, everyone can kind of come back and everyone was sort of like what happened, like, you know, obviously the world didn't feel the same anymore. And, um, and so, yeah, that, that was, that was right then, right, right in the, in the middle of all that. and then what was the public launch of bitcoin on cash app yeah so we launched the beta uh to a whole bunch of customers by fall uh of that year and then we didn't go into general release until early 2018 gotcha i don't i don't remember the exact date

but i but we members of the public were using it um by i think around thanksgiving of 2017 Yeah, I definitely have some December 2017 buys on Cash App that I can go check. I think that's when I started using the app. No, it's nice to know that Jack's like a typical Bitcoiner. He just pesters people. Teases them into getting into it until they finally relent. But yeah, I mean, I'm thankful that he did. Number one, because Cash App, disclaimer sponsor of the podcast,

I mean, it's just one of the easiest ways to get people in. Go to Cash App. Millions of people already have it. The UX is impeccable. You guys are really leaning into Bitcoin, specifically even at front and center real estate. We're definitely going to get into this conversation, regardless of what you think of KYC AML from a branding and just sort of pushing Bitcoin into the public sphere and pop culture specifically, especially with the partnerships you guys do with people like Meg Thee Stallion. And I think Gwyneth Paltrow is on the team now, Max Verstappen, Cash App, Block in general has done an incredible job of really bringing Bitcoin to the fore of the public conversation via your products. And it's just been incredible to see somebody or excuse me, a company in the stature of Block step in and put your neck out like this on behalf of Bitcoin. And like you said, it's probably a testament to Jack's vision, but getting everybody on board and implementing it into all your products has just been extremely impressive. And like Matt said, going from that hack day in the beginning of 2017, having it rolled out by the end of the year and now seeing what you guys have done in three years. I mean, I mean, that that's actually kind of the more interesting story, right, is is how did we as a publicly traded company in 2017 go from, you know, having nothing to do with it? I mean, in Bitcoin in 2017, it was still like very it wasn't the mainstream thing that it is today.

You know, you you turn on CNBC today and there's a Bitcoin ticker in the bottom right hand corner like all day now, which is like, wow. Um, but like, that wasn't the thing back then. Um, and it wasn't even clear to me when we decided that we were going to go for it, that we were going to develop this and launch it to the public, that we were going to be able to get through all the regulatory hurdles and the, um, you know, convince the, you know, the, the, our, our, our partners within our value chain, um, to kind of go along with it. There was intense amount of skepticism about doing it, not just for me. Um, You know, I had that skepticism at the beginning, but, you know, even after I sort of like agreed to do it, I then had to turn around and kind of go to war against, you know, some of the most intense skepticism that I've ever experienced in my professional life, you know, both inside the company and outside the company. um i i think it i think it's a really uh it's actually kind of a really interesting story uh

how we how we did that it probably would take up two or three hours to fully tell it um but it was certainly filled with lots of drama and twists and turns of like how we actually were able to break through the barriers that that um stood in the way of us actually being able to turn turn the switch on what we're we don't have to get to the two to three hour story but where we're like the biggest hurdles with it and like bitcoin the asset like custody and just how to define it on the balance sheet and stuff like that or you know yeah so yeah there's a lot of that right obviously like how how do we do revenue recognition what's the the balance sheet treatment um you know those were the that a lot of that though kind of came very late in the game um in terms of like

you know finally okay we're now we're actually going to do this and this is going to be part of our quarterly earnings and we're actually going to have to talk about it and um you know the sec is going to have to be okay with it um that actually was very very late in the game and that obviously was still you know a lot of stressful you know late nights and and and like hours long meetings you know going through um you know theories of the case on the accounting treatment and stuff and but you know a lot of it was um the really like was just the fact that like nobody wanted to touch bitcoin with a thousand foot pole um you know in the traditional financial system right like you know you walk in and you you walk to into a bank and you say like hey like

we need a bank account and they're like what for and it's well we're going to be trading bitcoin to in front of it and they're like what what are you what are you talking about what do you what of you are you are you are you kidding me no no absolutely not right like that was kind of like we understand you're square and you're this big company but like we'd rather not do that so go somewhere else um that like that was that was probably like the um you know i don't want to like get too far into like you know like specifics of like you know who and what and how obviously there's non-disclosure agreements and such that have to be respected but um there was just like massive skepticism throughout the entire fight it honestly you don't really have to talk about

ndas really because it was really just everyone like a hundred percent people in the financial system were just like not cool with it um and that was part of the big uh the big the the big hurdles that we had to jump over and and and really like fight to get people comfortable with the idea of doing it yeah yeah well again thank you for doing it the company of block stature doing this is i think massive cultural uh point in history for bitcoin um again having the kutzpa to put uh to put your near your balls on the line and stand up for this and fight through all that adversity i think will be looked back upon as a i mean somebody had to do it first and it seems like you you guys were one of the first which will be will be a cool historical

sticking point um the first sort of external bitcoin company i mean it's gonna sound like i'm kissing jack spot again but like i mean he deserves so much of the credit because um jack knows i you know i'm i have no problem disagreeing with him when i disagree with him um but um you know he he really like had to hold the line too um because uh there was a like the skepticism was as much in his direction as it was mine um like like what are you doing like you know like why like why would you take the company in this direction this is going to ruin our reputation um and he had to really fight back against that and really sort of hold the line um and it took a lot of i think bravery on jack's part uh to um provide the the space that was needed to to

actually get it done yeah and this provides a great transition to uh talking about tb decks because i'm sure the headaches are only going to get larger from here with what you're trying to accomplish with the, how would you describe it? It's an open protocol, right? Again, I re-read, I didn't write it, the white paper today. And I think, let's dive into TBDEX. Number one, why? And then we'll get into the how, because there's many parts. You have DID, decentralized identity. You have PFIs, participating financial institutions. You have vcs which is funny uh considering the uh the last few weeks but vcs are uh um what are i just forgot uh verified credentials as well um so there's many variables that come into play

with this protocol first let's get to the why of tbdex how did it come to be why are you building it and then we'll get into the specifics of how it actually works yeah the way that i would sort of maybe preface everything i'm about to say and to sort of just maybe establish my thinking and and how we approached it is that i just believe that if you want to change the world um if you want to bring about systemic change um whatever it is in in in culture and politics and business and technology you have to accept where you are like where are you standing like what like what like what are the the limitations that i'm working with right now um you know you can't you can't build a

rocket ship if rocket fuel hasn't been invented right like i mean it there's there's you have to sort of put the you know like put all the sort of pieces on the table and say this is what i'm working with right now um and there is a gap between the the capabilities that i want to exist in the future to support this vision um and the sort of the the tools that are in in my toolbox and i think that i really know and i've tried to do that my my whole career um you know in my travails at square i always try to talk start from a very intellectually honest you know starting point um and then you know work towards that future and And so it was within that frame that we really started to explore this idea of, like, okay, well, how can we make, you know, Bitcoin and, you know, decentralized financial services more generally more accessible?

and the big thing that just i kept coming back to and this is something that i've been obsessing over since we we started working on bitcoin in 2017 was that you know there's there's sort of this really kind of fatal conceit almost you know at the at the sort of the center of the user experience of bitcoin which isn't which isn't bitcoin's problem i mean bitcoin does a really good job at solving the problem it's trying to solve but the reality is is that you know most of us almost all of us uh you know we we still have to transact in in in fiat currency and in the traditional financial system with using the traditional payment system um subject to you know the the rules and the regulations and the limitations of that system and there there's

just kind of really no way to sort of just like pack up and and and move to this new world in a wholesale way because there's just real network effects there right like the the consequences i mean you could do it i i suppose but you would have to accept like very significant limitations on your daily life or move to el salvador yeah or move or move to el salvador um and so you know i i looking at this you know i just asked myself like well what what are the things that we can do to accelerate accelerate our progress towards that future taking into account like where we are today and i really always just kind of kept coming back to this idea of like on ramps and off ramps right that you know the more slippery the pipes

to bitcoin and from bitcoin are then you know that you know that has you know you can kind of go back to philosophy and economics a little bit but like just like you know the the argument there is like more sort of liquidity that there are between you know markets you know markets of fiat and and markets of bitcoin um the more uh easy it will be to adopt the less pricing risk the less counterparty risk all these things that would like ultimately reduce transaction costs and then ultimately you know start to like change the equilibrium between the the trade-offs of bitcoin whatever it is like pricing volatility you know transaction costs you know the time spent um you know like going into an exchange and like getting money in and getting money out with like

all these really crappy payment systems like ach um and and just trying to like find a way to to abstract that all the way in a way that like makes that so that liquidity bridge as slippery as possible um and so i've just kind of obsessed with this idea for a long time and when i looked at bitcoin and i asked myself okay well you know i'm a big you know supporter of like the lightning project and um the work that they're doing to um you know scale bitcoin payments um you know it's a very you know i think it's very exciting and i feel it's really started to come up into its own in the last year but i think it still doesn't really address this problem right of like trying to like get people you know to um pick up and and move to this this new system and i think and i

think if we're going to do that then then we have to like be really honest with ourselves um you know the biggest layer to protocol for bitcoin today are exchanges i mean like that's like that like that's that's just true right like you know i mean you i mean i know people might cringe at me saying that but like you know cash app and coinbase and gemini and these companies they're essentially like centralized layer two protocols for you know uh you know for these systems and as long as that's true there's actually kind of really uh i think the incentive structures to long-term adoption have significant problems and so you know it doesn't that obviously doesn't change the fact that the payment system is still regulated it's still shitty it's still slow

But, you know, I looked into my toolbox of, you know, the last eight years of working at a company that operates in traditional financial services. And I asked myself, like, well, can we do this better? We know a lot about payments. We know a lot about managing risk in payments. We know a lot about regulatory compliance and how to deal with that and how to attenuate the impact on customer experience. Can we take that? Can we abstract that away? Can we find a way to maybe even commoditize that?

And this is sort of like, you know, this is sort of the progression that kind of gets you to this like idea that starts to become TV decks. And so TVDex, I think, at the end of the day, is a very just intellectually honest take on where we are and where we need to be. And it solves a problem that's very specific to that context. And so there's this reaction that people have when they say, well, why is it not a trustless system? well it's very simple because tautologically speaking fiat's not a trustless system and if you're exchanging crypto for fiat both sides of that transaction have to be trustless for the exchange mechanism to be trustless and so by one side of that not being trustless it's tautologically true there's that word again with tautologies um that that system is not is

it can't be trustless so we look at this and we say okay well like we can't solve that technologically uh there's no real way around the fact that that the payment system is not you can't do an atomic swap with a bank account you can't do an atomic swap with like you know a visa or a master card there's no way to do this in fact reversibility of payments is built in as a feature of these systems um and so there's no fighting against that like you can try all you want and you'll get nowhere and so we say is well how is it how do we really solve this this problem well how are we solving this problem today and can that be abstracted into something that's that's at least more open and more decentralized and the big idea is that well we the way we solve it

is through these webs of social trust in the real world um we have social trust with cash app or we have social trust with coinbase that that they will do the right thing that they won't just keep our money and not give us bitcoin that they will like make good on mistakes that they will be accountable for you know the performance of the services that they that they promise to perform um contractually and that's a system of social trust um and we take it for granted and so the tvdex protocol kind of looks at that and says well what if we can look at technologies like decentralized identity and verifiable credentials what if we can model that social trust maybe not in a purely trustless way, because we've already established that that seems to be

tautologically impossible, but then at least build a way in which people can, in a far more decentralized way, build up these networks of trust to accomplish the same thing, to be able to interact with these systems that have these impedance mismatches, and at least build something that can long-term drive down risk, drive down cost, and can universalize commoditize the exchange markets between fiat and crypto that's basically the the general like idea and i think it's one that's just very you know uh steeped and just like you know reality and just like the fact that like i can't fix fiat we think crypto fixes fiat or bitcoin fixes fiat um but if that's true we still need to get people there someone has to there has to be a train that

that they can catch. And I think that's what we're trying to build with TV decks. Yeah. Many thoughts after that eloquent description of what you're doing. Number one, it's very Humean of you to say Bitcoin is this way, it's second layer,

and it should be this way. Maybe it ought to be this way. Just an observation. Number two, I do like... Is it a correct assessment to essentially say that you're trying to not realign a sentence, but change the incentives between the individual and a trusted third party by maybe leveling the playing field

and having some of these trusted third parties act in ways which is more beneficial to the end user? I think that's a really great way of putting it. I don't think I would quibble with that. And so how do we get here? I guess let's get into the mechanics of it. So essentially the way I understand it is a messaging protocol that is interoperable that free and open source wallet softwares

can plug into as well as these trusted third parties with varying degrees of necessary credentials on the end user's parts. Yeah, I think there's a few subtle... The obvious criticism that is the first one, it's the first one that occurred to me because I try to be introspective and self-critical you know in my own ideas is that like why would anyone adopt this right like why would

why would a uh bank adopt this like why would any traditional financial service adopt this system um it it seems very you know uh counter to their business goals it seems very counter to the sort of the general um trend of like wanting to kind of keep people inside walled gardens and And not actually commoditize on-ramps and off-ramps. That's actually kind of the counterintuitive, like that's actually the thing that a lot of services typically don't want to do. They want you to, you know, set up shop inside their ecosystem and they want to make it very hard to lead.

And a protocol like TBDEX would appear to be like a shot across the bow of that. And to bury the lead, it is. But I think it ignores a few fundamental things, right, which is that, you know, I think one, I think consumer choice is a very powerful force. And two, and this is actually just very true of any market, there are a lot of incumbents in any market that stand to lose a lot if their business models are disrupted. But there's also a lot of non-incumbents that stand to gain a lot from new models of business and new ways of doing things. and we see this with fintechs like block you know and and other and other companies like you know that are in the space are investing in the bitcoin ecosystem and open systems you see it even outside fintech right like right i used to work at red hat which is a open source software company now owned by ibm but they have found business models around building things that they give away for

free um and they sell services and support and professional services uh to monetize that public good that they're investing in and those models have actually been wildly successful i mean we're talking on the internet right now i'm i the amount of open source software that's standing between my voice and yours right now is like is like insane right like everything from you know the web protocols to the almost certainly the linux servers that the that that this is running on um and all the open source like middleware and software packages that have been sort of compiled into the source code um you know open source is one of the most like wildly successful technological inventions in history and i think a lot of people it's sort of invisible to a lot

of people but if you sit back and think about it the degree to which it's changed the world and has benefited so many um including us right now um is amazing and i look at say something like tv decks and the fact that yes it it challenges existing business models but it also creates new ones and there's a lot of folks out there that um you know like fintechs like you know crypto companies that look at say something like this and they actually see wow like on top of this we can build an entirely new ecosystem of you know financial services and and other types of services that create business models that didn't exist before and so the tvx model is very optimistic and looks at that and says that like i i i think that that i that there's many other

people out there that will believe in this future and will and will come and help us build it and that's actually largely borne out actually like we since we launched the white paper we've had amazing conversations with some uh really really large players uh maybe some even unexpected ones that are like you know what actually like this is great we would really like to pay less money for payments like accepting payments or sending payments or like you know not being held captive to you know these these existing systems which are terrible and we lose lots of money on fraud and the payment system is unreliable and and and and what you find with these things is there's always people that have something to gain um and so i think that yeah i think i think that

that that i'm very optimistic that despite the fact that that the that tv decks is is so disruptive in the sense that it's at of these business models at its core that that yeah i think i think there's enough hungry people out there willing to embrace this change because they recognize that there's other aspects of their business that would greatly benefit from from that um we actually talk about this phenomenon like all the time on the show because we see it firsthand in bitcoin all the time uh because bitcoin is this you know open monetary network and you usually see challengers are the ones who will move uh rather than the leaders in the space the challengers will be the ones who move into uh these open networks these open

protocols first you see that with el salvador right the u.s government didn't do it first El Salvador did, a tiny little country. You see it with MicroStrategy doing it, you know, a small tech company that no one had really heard of. And then they decided to make the first move into Bitcoin. You see it with Cash App versus PayPal. And then what happens? What happens is on a long enough time scale, the challengers come in, they embrace this open network, this open protocol, and then the previous incumbents, the leaders in the field, they have no choice but to embrace it. Otherwise, they're going to get left behind. Well, it's not only embracing it, too. It's a classic Luddite dilemma, if you will. If you do embrace it, and then you can build on top of it,

leveraging its native properties to build new tools and experiences and applications that were never previously possible, which is just like hard. Again, that's why I'm very thankful for what you guys have done at Block is just sort of forcing it on the culture. Like, hey, it's here.

We're going to start building on it. And it's just very exciting. And I'm very excited to see TB DEX come to market because I think, like you said, it is imperative to get people access to this stuff, like the on-ramps. I love the way you described it because it's another thing that we say a lot on this show, especially comparing Bitcoin to other cryptocurrencies. Me personally, I just believe that there is some cool things going on in alternative blockchains. However, I think you didn't say it exactly, but I think what you were describing is there's an order of operations to all this. And you're focused on one of the first operations is actually getting people onboarded in a somewhat seamless fashion. yeah i think the onboarding problem is like the great unsolved issue in this in this space like and i think and i think there's a lot of it like i think there's a lot of people who have their heads in the sand i you know when i launch this or like you know people would come to me and say what are you talking about this is all solved like look at this app i have on my phone it does all

the things and i'm like okay well like go and pay your taxes then or go and buy a coffee at starbucks and they're like well what what do you mean like it's just like like the the ignorance of like sort of the average person's experience is like you know you know real i think really holding a lot of the community back and and by the way i'm not i'm not saying that there shouldn't be an element of the community who are purists they're the ones that are sort of like you know driving things forward driving like you know driving bitcoin forward like and and building it to like what it is and they deserve all the credit in the world but there is a reality that like at a higher level that we have to build experiences for people that solve real problems and we all believe

that bitcoin solves these problems but you know but it there's the the the reality that onboarding into it today from an email fight perspective is very very hard and it's not the sort of thing that like somebody who isn't like you know technically inclined or isn't like very very motivated for some sort of you know exigent reason to like actually jump through all the hurdles of like learning all of these like you know uh particularities around it um and as a product development guy i look at this and i say like look this is this is where i have to focus i have to i have to find a way to um bridge that usability gap and i'm not and i and i'm trying to do it in a way that's like actually like as pure as possible like we said when we launched

this on day one that our guiding principle is decentralization you know you know decentralized as possible with everything we do we ask ourselves a question now as we're starting to build out the the roadmap for tbd like is this decentralized this is advanced decentralization or does it have that or does it have reverse incentives that can lead to centralization long term and so we're still trying to like hold true to that we're not trying to use we're not trying to like use usability as a crutch to justify centralization um at which i think a lot of you know i think a lot of that has happened um it's even happened i guess like you know i like we can i can take the blame right we built a custodial system right in cache because it was

the way to build the the the most user-friendly experience but like you know uh it doesn't change it doesn't change the fact that that making it as easy in a decentralized way is very very hard and we've said with tbd like and starting with tv decks we're going to start doing the things that hopefully can bring a decentralized experience to parity with the ease of use of centralized experiences and that's sort of like where i think we need to like focus very very heavily and that's how we will truly unleash the the potential of bitcoin that's my that's my thesis i mean what i mean what i keep thinking about is and i really appreciate your guys focus on this is that you're trying to actually tackle that US dollar-euro interaction, right?

Because that is where the difficult question lies, which is how to interact with this trusted system that is actually very antiquated in a lot of ways. That's the hard part. And like the elephant in the room right now is, when you're talking about decentralized exchanges, is something like Uniswap, right? And what did they do?

They just they just threw out that aspect. They were like, we are not even going to bother trying to tackle going on and off between, you know, crypto and and fiat into the banking system. We're just going to say, you know, someone else figure that out. We're just going to you can use fiat stable coins. You can use these peg tokens. And it could have been just as easy for you guys to do that. But the reality is that the hard problem here, the problem that it would be really great if it got mitigated, if it became less friction there and more competition there is actually the interaction with the traditional banking system. And you guys seem to be tackling that head on. So I do appreciate that. Yeah. And I do want to admit, I do want to say up front, too, like on the issue of stable coins is I do think that they are a positive in this in this like endeavor. Right. Like I think the idea that, you know, like we likely will support stable coins with TV decks with the belief that, you know, like stable coin to Bitcoin exchange may actually be far preferable to and safer than having to expose, say, like a node on the TV decks network to the pricing risk associated with exchanging directly to Bitcoin.

So that's like something that we're looking at very carefully. And that and once once again, I think that that's just like, you know, a nod towards the fact that like we need like to solve like the problems that we have now. And and so that's actually something that we're looking at very, very carefully, because I honestly that I want the adoption of TV decks to be as easy for a participating financial institution as possible. And so it is very likely, I think, that most of the nodes will exchange dollars for stable coins. And then the next step would be stable coin for Bitcoin as a way to sort of take advantage of actually the – you could do atomic swaps then. And I think that would be a good thing, because I really I think we really want to focus very specifically on how do you get, you know, value out of the fiat system and into the Bitcoin system in the way that's like the most least frictional as possible. Yeah, that's another nod to what is right now, like an emerging economy is undeniable. These end users want the non-volatility of stable coins. They also want the volatility, the upside volatility of Bitcoin, but they have very little savings that they need to protect from downside price risk, which is just a reality of how the people in these emerging economies interact with their money or want to interact with their money. It's probably a better way to put it. yeah absolutely yeah and so let's get into like so another tweet you tweeted out um i don't know if it was last week or in the last couple weeks i was stalking your twitter earlier this morning uh people for some weird reason we find ourselves at the end of 2021 heading into

2022 that decentralization is synonymous with blockchain technology like and you're making the argument like no it's now we have bit torrent we have things like rss we have many other decentralized technologies that don't leverage a blockchain uh you did meant in in the white paper there there is a node topography within tbdex um and dids obviously there's an anchor into a block blockchain at the end of the day how are you guys creating this decentralized system and how if at all is a blockchain involved so tbdex is not a blockchain based protocol um it's you know a you know i i it is a it's a messaging protocol right with you know a a mechanism for you know discovering nodes um in

a decentralized way and in a sense it's it's a lot more like a bit torrent than it is like a blockchain um and like that's i think that that's correct right like i i blockchains i think are really bad solutions for most things um like it's it's actually like it's a it's a slow shitty expensive database that's what is what a blockchain is um and it seems to me that like a lot of people haven't gotten that message um you know obviously like i'm not like obviously I think it's also simultaneously one of the most amazing technological inventions, but it's also like really bad at almost everything except for what Bitcoin uses it for, right? Which is like, you know, building censorship resistance and security around the ledger. That's all it's good for, in my opinion.

And I think that's sort of where the fatal conceit of a lot of this Web3 stuff is, right? like it it's it's almost like people haven't thought about it for more than five seconds they see the dollar signs yeah yeah no it's right i feel like i didn't fully answer your question can you know i just want to dive into it so dive into like the node like how in its current design right because it's still an ongoing design process at TVDEX? What is the current vision of how somebody would enter this network, both from the verified, or excuse me, the financial institution,

the PFI, and the end user who's putting an ask within this messaging protocol? Yeah, I'm like trying to buy Bitcoin with TVDEX. Like, how does that look? Yeah. Yeah, sure. I mean, so I mean, I can talk to you about how I think it'll work on day one and or and how I think it'll work in year two and year five. I think it will be very different at different sort of stages and maturations of the network.

I will say, though, as as it pertains to sort of the ideas around node discovery right now, our our thought process is to is to really keep it simple initially. Um, the idea is, is that, well, I mean, I can just sit back. I mean, like the, the, the real inspiration that we took for how do you build, you know, this network up, uh, in a, in a decentralized way that sort of just takes into account the reality in which we live was to really look at the way that, um, that trust is managed on the internet today using the, the, you know, the public key infrastructure and certificate authorities. And the way that it works, I mean, for people who aren't really familiar with it, the way that you get that little lock icon when you go to a website is that every web browser you use has been preloaded with a list of certificate authorities by the browser vendor, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, whoever it is. and they've said to the browser trust these certificate authorities if a certificate authority issued the certificate to this website then you can trust they are who they say they are and that's how it works right there's just a dictionary of certificate authorities and every and that's local on every web browser that's that's that's sort of pre-listed and we said you know i mean that's as good as any way to like bootstrap this um and you know the wallet person

making the wallet um you know that integrates with the tvdex protocol can include a list of uh dids of you know uh like verifiers that they trust to uh basically say a pfi is who they say they are um and you know we will obviously you know be a pfi ourselves to help catalyze the at work and you know we will happily work with anyone else who wants to and but at the end of the day there's no central registry it's it's really in the same way that it's up to a browser vendor to you know essentially include a um a pre-loaded you know you know trust store um we're sort of following that same model we can't really think of a way to do it in a more pure way um any any other way just ultimately create some form of centralization so in a sense we are putting a lot

of uh we are putting a lot of uh responsibility on the implementers of wallets to you know put in you know a list of of dids that that that they think that their users should trust well that's sort of the key that's sort of the key design uh there and then beyond that if these wallets are open source you could have users initiate prs that say hey i think i like this pfi like it included in the list as well so there's some open nature to that as well there's no there's no central authority like you can and and there's nothing that says that and also even in web browser right you can add your own ca manually if people know how to do it sometimes you have to do that on corporate networks and stuff like that um and there's no reason why someone couldn't do that

there's no there's no traffic cops anywhere saying you can't do business with this pfi or um or you should trust it what we hope what we hope happens is the same thing that's happened with the web which is that there will become sort of a more kind of a collective trust that right like we trust there's these groups of entities on the internet some of them may be non-profits some of them may be for profits and the community says like look i trust this this non-profit you know um entity that maybe it's like a whatever it is like the the bitcoin foundation right that says like we we trust these um these pfis and and and so we think you should trust them too or or we we revoke our trust we think you should stop trusting this guy and um and so we're really

that's that's how we're how we're doing it um we think that and we think that that's the most honest way to do it it puts it gives control to individuals and control to the sort of the the wallet developers um the network doesn't impose that okay and so that's individual users and wallet developers deciding how they trust an institution on the other side of a trade on the sell side of a trade how does an institution establish trust or decide that they trust or don't trust an individual user yeah um i mean it's the same thing in in reverse in a sense but obviously there's no like list of users out there um so we're we're building on the decentralized identity scheme and we have to kind of bring up this we live in reality point again which is that

if a company like Block, and we are a regulated financial services company, wants to exchange funds in exchange for an asset such as Bitcoin, we have certain regulatory requirements, right, around KYC, BSA, AML, OFAC, and a whole bunch of other acronyms. And so, you know, we have to have a way to to deal with that in a decentralized way we actually think that that david vc you know even even though i know there's a lot of people out there and i know you probably have a lot of crypto anarchists and stuff that are throwing up in their mouth as we talk about kyc i would say to those i would say i would say to those people that like i would much rather have a self-sovereign identity system for which you can sort of attach voluntarily you know uh you know credentials of

trust for to satisfy the kyc model than to continue in the centralized world that we are today where you go into an ecosystem like a like a centralized exchange you go through their kyc process they essentially own your data they can sell your data one of the great one of the great things about this approach and saying like we think we can still comply with the law while using this this technology is that this technology gives you the ability to do things like zero knowledge proofs where like you know rather than saying like hey we necessarily have to hand over all of your personally identifiable information we can actually get to a world where all a provider would have to do is build up a uh you know build up a credence based on someone an individual

self-sovereign identity with the attestations of like this person is above a certain age this person has a credit score above this or whatever that without even necessarily having to diverge that but to be able to have these zero knowledge proofs that can attest to that in a way that's mutually through mutually trusted third parties is actually a way i think to at least i mean not completely i'm not going to argue this is like you know some sort of anarcho-utopia but it does actually go a lot of the way to shifting you know control of information back to individuals even though i i have to admit that like there still is the the reality that people have to identify themselves um to a regulated entity but using this technology we can actually reduce the surface area

of that data exchange substantially and we can actually create an account model that's more secure less susceptible to fraud like i mean if you think about it like rationally um like you know like how do we like do kyc today we take a picture of our driver's license a piece of plastic and we basically upload it to a website like that's what we do like that's crazy like that's crazy that we think that's secure and something like a self-sovereign identity with an attestation that says mike has a state of california agrees that this did has a is licensed to drive in the state of california is going to be a hell of a lot more secure than a picture of driver's license and may through zero knowledge proof not even have to require the the uh uh the

actual divulgence of the actual like driver's license information to uh establish the fact that i can drive right and so i think that this is just like a a really like great step in the direction of of shifting the power balance in you know in the account model back to to the individual and so the tbdex protocol is saying that that's how we're going to do it um um you know individuals in a wallet yeah and like in practice right in practice like right now we are like i sign up for cash app i give cash up all my personal information i sign up for coinbase and i go give them all my personal information kraken give them all my personal information bank of america give them all my personal information in practice what this looks like is like a single kyc trusted provider

that is that is taking all your personal information and then basically attesting to all these providers that they have the information without giving the information to the provider and then ultimately i guess like the individual states will be doing that it was a hope i i use driver's license not to suggest that that that we're trying to make this the government's job um i i think in in practice i mean it will be mostly all private actors um the i think i think the way i think about it is right like you're trying to create a venn diagram between the customers you know identity and the attestation of their identity and the the surface area that a pfi trusts so in practice say yes so in a sense the the user is responsible for kyc themselves in

a sense by going out i don't know to finding some company that does did kyc and they verify who you are who you say that they are they put you through the rigmarole and then they issue you an attestation you know a verifiable credential and then you kind of go out and you find these pfis that also trust the issuer of that VC and say, we both mutually trust that third party. So the fact that they KYC you is enough for me. Therefore I will transact funds with you. That's kind of like, that's kind of, and that's at least a far more, it's more, it's not completely decentralized. I'm not going to argue that, but it's a far more decentralized approach than we have today. And I think is a great step in the right direction to find a way to, to balance the fact that we have to comply

with these laws but we would still like the user to have a lot more control than they currently do yeah and then but rather than like cash app holding that information i mean ultimately like the justification for something like kyc aml laws is to stop illicit activity which it doesn't yeah we're not yeah we're not going to get into a debate right now about whether or not it does um but so if if the u.s government says we think uh this transaction is illicit activity then basically in that scenario you say we have this attestation from KYC provider number three

go to KYC provider number three give them this verifiable proof and then they can give you the personal information rather than having your personal information on a million different servers it's on that one provider server generally speaking yeah that begs the question though if it is on this one server does that just shift honeypot risk to this one repository repository of this information this doesn't this doesn't eliminate honeypot it just

doesn't right like i mean and it's like one of these things where um like it's just the reality is that if we're going to do this we have to find a way to comply with the law um and so we're making a bet on doing it in the way that we think is at least a lot better than than what than where we are today um and and look i mean one thing i would love to see with this technology and this isn't where we are today but i would like to see governments around the world that recognize the fact that yeah these that there's significant issues with the way that we do kyc today that exposes people to the risks of identity theft and um and all of these extreme negative um you know consequences that happen when these companies get hacked or these you know large credit bureaus get

hacked these are terrible like terrible concentrated risks asymmetric risks um we would love to see a technology like zero knowledge proof um be able to be used in a sort of like a constellation of attestations of like yes i i will verify that this person who holds this did has a cash app account i will verify that the person with this did i've transacted with and they never screwed me over I will verify that that's the idea that I – that this person sold me products and they were good on it. Like eBay could be – issue a credential that you're like an eBay – that you're an eBay seller that's done 1,000 successful sales. And like I would love to see governments be more willing to accept that this sort of more opaque ways of like building up trust as a way to like manage risk in these systems would be a far better way that would reduce the risks of people's identity being stolen. and give people a lot more control.

And I think this is like the power of decentralized identity and verifiable credentials. And it's one that we're going to be investing in very heavily in the coming years because we just think that it would be a much better model

than what we have today. Yeah. I can't. Matt, I know you said you don't want to go there, but I can't help but go there in my mind. It sucks that we have to design these systems in these ways

around these shitty laws that really do nothing to help the end user at the end of the day. Like, how much time are we wasting designing this architecture around laws that arguably shouldn't exist because they're completely ineffective? That's just the thought in my mind right now. We make those arguments up on the hill, trust me. Like, you know, we are trying very hard to educate lawmakers and policymakers about how we agree with you, like that a lot of these policies are very ineffectual.

Um, and at best, you know, to the, to the, to the degree that I would, I would, I would say that they, that they may be helpful in some respect, uh, to the government's ambitions are always after the fact. It's like, you know, I mean, like the, like the, this information collected may help, you know, solve a crime long after it's already occurred. um it doesn't really stop it from occurring and i think there's i think there is a way with like technology and and self-sovereign identity to significantly reduce the risk at the front end and and remove the the argument that like we have to have this privacy compromising infrastructure um to you know reduce this bad activity to the degree that we do today and that's a very hard argument to make uh people are very just like i mean people sort of in traditional financial regulation are very distrustful of that but it's something that like we're you know i i'm

personally championing yeah well thank you for championing it's not only that's distrustful too it's like it does provide a compliance mode as well i think especially if you have that infrastructure built out already it's like yeah it's just easier to keep complying because competitors can't come in and bigger companies are more more capable of complying it's not as expensive for them percentage-wise. This is why I said earlier, I think it obviously doesn't eliminate honeypot risk, but it significantly reduces it. We see it happen to plenty of people who enter the space. They go sign up for Coinbase. They sign up for Cash App. They sign up for Kraken. They sign up for BlockFi. They sign up for Lolly. They sign up for every service. They

send them all their personal information. If it's just in one spot, it's significantly better than being in eight spots but this is why i said like ultimately um if we are going to have a kyc aml regime i mean i don't know how much we can count on it and you definitely shouldn't build tbd to expect it but uh if if governments actually came around and they're already holding the honeypot the government already has the honeypot information is literally what they do is just take all of our information all the time um if you didn't have to have that third party company hold it in the first place because the government said this person's a citizen here's you know a a string a string of of letters and numbers that proves it um and now you know you you have your due

diligence that you need to have there and this is a trusted individual or whatever then the government then you don't have that in even additional honeypot right then you just have it's like reducing honeypots along the way yeah um i mean i think i think that I'm not trying to not to sound like I'm not responding to your point, but I, you know, one of the things that I think it, I don't know, I feel like I have to say is that, you know, all these conversations right around trustlessness, like, you know, centralization like, you know, censorship resistance,

all these like sort of like, like principles and act like sort of these things that we're trying to, like, we want to kind of be axiomatically true about the systems, but can't quite get there. I actually think is like sometimes a bit of a distraction from what I think is a more important value that I think is maybe the most powerful one that I think that I try to really focus on to really help ground me in how to like develop these solutions. And it's the maximization of choice. Not necessarily the maximization of any of these other things, but the maximization that an individual should have the power to choose. The individual should have the power to choose to trust the PFI, to trust the software that they're using, to trust the people who are sort of provisioning the verification of their identity. and and and more broadly speaking in this like sort of like you know larger conversation we have the right to choose whether they want to trust you know dollars that are not or bitcoin or not or

you know or whatever it is right and and and really thinking about the system design through the maximization of choice and and thinking about it through that lens and that's kind of like how i clarify to myself the trade-offs that i'm making right like i think decentralization i think i think decentralization is like a really important principle that i think is important to maximizing choice for like epistemic reasons but like i mean but i i do think that that choice is kind of the in my mind is like the north star yeah optionality we're always looking to expand optionality here at tftc um we don't need to get too deep into the weeds here we only have seven minutes left and i just have a nagging question i had coming into this after reading the white paper that i want

to make sure i get in before we wrap up here but do you see tb i could go all day i know all day we could too we could too well uh do you see tb decks as a transitionary tool right yeah it's a good question i i think in some respects it is and i think in some respects it's not i'm glad you ask me this question because um and it actually really parlays to the point that i was like trying to make earlier um maybe i can like pull it all together i i am going to say something that might be very controversial to a lot of people right i don't think that anonymity is universally a good thing right um and i don't think that anonymous financial transactions are universally a good thing and that will shock a lot of people because then what immediately

comes into their mind is like well he's basically saying that like he supports financial surveillance that's actually not what i'm saying what i what what what i'm saying is is that like we are the purpose of money of payments of the communication that we're having right now is to like accomplish ultimately social ends right like you know you know economic acts or social acts and i think even if even if we had a completely anarchist society an anarcho-capitalist society um in in sort of the bent of rothbard which i've established i'm not a fan of but like let's let's put that let's put that like on the table for a second i still don't think you would want purely anonymous transactions across the board and it's like not it's not hard to like imagine why right like we

Would you really go on an anonymous website that you have no idea who owns it? You have no ability to evaluate whether the person who owns that website has any sort of reputation whatsoever to perform a service or to provide a good. Would you really do an anonymous transaction and say, I'm going to buy a teddy bear from an anonymous person on the other side of the world who I can't speak to? I have no phone number. There's no means of contact. There's no way in which to basically evaluate whether or not I have any reason to believe this teddy bear will actually show up once I send this completely non-reversible financial transaction to them. And like the second you realize that, you recognize that there is a place in which we always have to have means of establishing social trust for me to basically know you are who you say you are. not because like doing so is in service of making it easy for a state or some other like powerful

entity to surveil us i think that's a completely separate issue i think privacy is something that we should be striving for financial privacy and financial anonymity to me are completely different things um like anonymous financial transactions are transactions that have maximum risk because no party knows if the other one's going to screw the other one over And so I don't think we actually want, you know, 100% anonymous transactions in the sort of, like, when we're engaging in economic transactions in the social realm. That just doesn't make any sense. Would you... And I know that, like...

Would you separate anonymity and pseudonymity? Right? So could a synonymous individual building up a web of trust credit score, if you will, you'd be fine interacting with them? Like Silk Road being a perfect example. I would say that, I mean, I mean, pseudonymity to me is not an anonymity, right? Like, we've already seen that, like, we've already seen that, like, like this, like this idea that, like, that, I mean, anyone who's been in information technology for long enough knows that obscurity is not security. um and so i would say that like you know that the pseudonymity is pretty illusory but but i want to say something very clear i am not in support of financial surveillance i think we should have systems that cannot be surveilled by third third parties arbitrarily like that's

like you know that like i think that we should have ways to do secure point-to-point like transactions like secure point like i mean i like i use signal right as my messaging app it's It is, it's not anonymous in the sense that the person on the other side of that transaction, I mean, on the other side of that, of that, of that communication doesn't know who I am. Of course they do. In fact, if you're using SignalCorrect, we've stood beside each other and we scanned each other's QR codes at some point to like verify we are who we are. What, what we're optimizing for is privacy. And I think we should optimize for that. Right. And, and TVDEX is focused on trying to optimize for privacy to the maximum extent we can within the constraints that we have. but like anonymous financial transactions are definitely not the goal and i just want to say that i know that the key i mean let me see if i can distill this a little bit mike uh the the key here right is that uh we talked about options people having optionality the protocol is basically agnostic to individual uh actors options in that situation right and there's going to be basically actors of different requirements and different necessities that are basically going to be

a bunch of different shades of gray along the scale of what kind of web of trust, what kind of social trust they want to have with the people they transact with and open up those options to whatever. So it doesn't really matter what Mike thinks a transaction should, you know, how much social trust you should have in the other actor when you're doing a transaction because tbd will allow all these different types of actors to basically come together and have a consensus on on how much trust they want right that's absolutely right right both sides of the transaction get to set their standards of trust and and they have to achieve an overlap in order to create a market

yeah for for a transaction that's that's ultimately the the kind of the central game theory if you will okay you said this gray area man like it goes all the way from white to black on the spectrum i think if you were potentially um in that middle area is somewhat gray but the reason i but the reason why i had that spiel before is you asked me if this is a transitional technology and what i'm actually saying is like i think there is a world where tv decks could be useful even crypto to crypto transactions where it's desirable that both sides like it doesn't necessarily have to be kyc i came up with other examples around sort of like how do you establish trust like you know like an e like your ebay score or something like that as like an input

into this as like an attestation but like for there to be models where like i will like you know send you you know one bitcoin for you know that this used ferrari you know that i want or whatever it is um but i also want to trust that you are who you say you are and you're actually You're going to like send me the Ferrari. I think there are, I think that TV decks can be extremely beneficial, like even in that world where you can essentially create common webs of trust in the social realm to over to overlay onto these like purely crypto

transactions. And I think, so I think TV decks could very much be a valid solution in that context to long-term, even long after people stop using it as a fiat on-ramp. Hell yeah. i'd love to hear that like i would love to get together in person over beers talk philosophy expand on this conversation it's been an incredible conversation matt do you have anything

you want to get in here before we wrap up i just wanted to thank you for your time mike i know you're you know one of the unsung heroes working in the background uh at block to to make bitcoin the standard and i just want to tell you i appreciate you and i appreciate your time yeah thank you for having me i'll do anytime this is super fun yeah this is an incredible conversation i want to co-sign what matt just said thank you for all the work that you've done um i'm excited to see td or excuse me tb decks come to market uh good luck building that out seems like you've got the team in place uh where can we find out more about what you're building can anybody can or how people can contribute if they they want to and what you guys may need right

now yeah um i mean so uh you can find us on our uh unfortunately very hard to remember uh twitter account uh you can follow us at you know tbd 545-66975 um yeah you can also find find us at github at that at that same uh sequence of letters and numbers so um and are you going to change that no some people memorize Zman's handle if they can remember that I think they can remember TBD

I dig it 54655 Mike thank you for your time I hope you have a great rest of your day end of your year happy new year to you as well happy new year you freaks listening to this peace and love

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