TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #59: Eric Spano

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Eric Spano, Founder of bylls.com, to discuss building a product with little understanding of code, enterprise blockchain consulting, Bitcoin service provider UX, and much more. Follow Eric on Twitter: www.twitter.com.espano_ Follow Marty on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martybent Peep the Nielsen Norman Group's 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/ Visit www.bylls.com

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the cryptid your boy marty bent here on a what's it tuesday night in the east village in a very foreign studio i'm in somebody else's apartment i brought my gear i uh sort of forced this podcast upon my guests tonight i'm very excited for this I've met up with this man many times in the city to talk about Bitcoin, his experiences with consulting at a big four company for blockchain projects, what he's learned. And actually, most interestingly, what you freaks will find most interesting is that this man is actually also the founder of Bills.com, the popular Canadian company that Francis Paulette is now the head of. i'd like to introduce you freaks to eric spano hey thanks a lot man welcome to the pod man thank you for having me almost forcibly but yeah did i force this on you no no it's been a long time coming i know we've been meeting up for what two years now year and a half i think i think last

i think last february last february year now was when was when uh francis put us in touch so it's been been over a year now been over a year last time i saw you was over the summer we were sweating at the commodore over some fried chicken yep profusively sweating i'm sorry that was thinking of what we would do for a podcast episode so glad that it finally happened it's all coming to fruition um which reminds me actually i have a book that i wanted to lend you when we were chatting about it uh and i have it here now i can give it to you what book is that uh cryptonomicon cryptonomicon yeah is it sci-fi it is yeah neil stevenson yeah i've been told i've been told i need to read some more sci-fi specifically stevenson it's the only sci-fi book i've read so

oh really probably not the best starting point but i highly recommend it all right well i can't wait to take that home and rip into it let's rip into your tail man you've got an interesting one not many people know about you but you started uh i guess under the radar i suppose yeah so you started one of the uh probably one of like the most useful companies in the space right now bills So for you freaks out there who don't know, why don't you, for the freaks out there that don't know, why don't you tell us the story of Bills, why you started it, how you handed it off to Francis, and how you ended up at the Big Four. Yeah. So I guess for those who don't know, Bills is a bill payment service for Bitcoin. You can pay pretty much all of your bills just by making a Bitcoin transaction, and I believe also Lightning transaction now.

Um, and this is only for Canadians before you get super excited. Uh, but, uh, this was, this was my first foray into Bitcoin. It was my first, uh, first real project. I quit my job to start this company. Wow. It was probably 2015, 2014. Yeah. 2014. So it was five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, it was really, it all stemmed from the fact that when I would talk to people about bitcoin the the first question was well what can you do with it like why do you even want to have some uh and the the jokes around buying drugs were prevalent at the time so i was like well there's a lot more you could do that there's just like you just need to think about it and make it happen so i decided to leverage some relationships with payment processors that i knew and just

started buying people's bitcoins and paying their bills so i had a ready-made answer to that question which was well you could do anything with bitcoin just pay your credit card pay your electricity which is handy if you're mining uh or pay whatever your cell phone bill like you basically could pay anything so it gave me a useful answer to that question which was uh which was good so that was really the main driving factor behind it you just want to say oh fuck it i can't take it anymore i'm gonna build a use case that i can show people pretty much and i mean it emphasized the fact that there really was not many use cases beyond well let me give you a do you understand anything about money follow-up question to that um which i mean didn't have the best success rate so still

doesn't practical no still doesn't you have to ask the question chances are good that the answer is going to be no anyways yeah um that question starts a long journey people be be careful be careful definitely but there are other there are other ways to preempt that so i think giving really making bitcoin more useful was the was the objective was to kind of say i'm not going to sell people on bitcoin uh because that's it's it's there's better ways to spend your energy not that that's not a useful way but it was frustrating at the time as you probably could imagine uh in 2014 when i don't know liking bitcoin was a good way to ostracize yourself so it was make people uncomfortable when they start talking to you especially if you're bringing up to portfolio

managers and weekly meetings or anyone that like remotely works even bank tellers oh my god what are you bitcoin like what are you doing so what uh what drove before you got to bills like what drove you towards bitcoin like um anything philosophically curiosity i admittedly didn't have any real economics background uh studied accounting but like the prerequisite economics courses for that are like it's online multiple choice thing i didn't really learn anything um but a friend of mine had told me like hey there's there's a site people are buying drugs on the internet and i was like how are they paying for that like how does that work you're mailing cash it's like no like some something it's a bitcoin thing so i was just mystified like how

is this a thing like how can you possibly like i got i had my paypal account blocked for like buying a webcam on ebay because it was from i was buying from canada and it was like international transaction it's like how the hell could people be doing this and then so goes the story and go down the rabbit hole when you realize like oh wait yeah they actually you can do that like it it works oh then you start to dig deeper around like how does this work why does this have any value and then that's i think when i started to realize i have a lot to learn that has nothing to do with with bitcoin yeah and so what was like the most important thing you had to understand first do you think uh definitely the uh rewiring of what i understood about economics how did you understand

economics before you found bitcoin i didn't i mean when you think about well i mean because if you think about it the the fundamental question about money is always well can't can't can you just print more of it it's like what stops like i remember having a conversation with my parents when i first started learning about bitcoin and i was just picking their brains and like well yeah like do you know how canadian dollar works like no can the government just print it like i guess yeah whenever they want and they're like what the fuck like how does what they could just like print more so then then you start to understand like how modern central banks work and how the supply of money is created and then then if you are approaching that with an open mind and trying

to learn objectively you realize like this is a pretty big scam like this is pretty the answer to that question is yes like they can just print more i mean under the guise of like we're gonna sell we're gonna sell bonds and then get this money but like really like you're just you're just printing it so then what's the antithesis of that and like why do you want that why is that good and then that's when i really started to appreciate like the longer term vision of bitcoin because it's like i don't have any reason to care for this like i canadian banks are convenient i mean you can send money easily like i've never really had major issues um but when you really start to think about it and then you get down to the details of well think about saving money or

like working to earn money you would want to work save as much as you can and like sorry yeah i think we turned just a tad i'm sorry no that's cool wasn't sure i thought i don't know if i had something on me so we have music on in the background i want to keep it a level at the mics do not pick it up because if apple flags this we will lose this incredible conversation forever damn yeah go to play like weird instrumental music then yeah true i'm sorry for interrupting you no it's cool i think what i was saying is around once you once once i wrap my head around how money came to be and like what drove that then it comes down to well money drives most of your decisions I mean dictates kind of what you'll study or what you want to do as a job

so it's like when you think about saving money then you start to realize well you're kind of disincentivized to save generally because I mean putting your money under your mattress is useless because in 10 years 20 years it's going to be worth nothing essentially so you have now you you have to invest which is already like why like i just i can't like you're finally you grow up and you start earning money and it's like it's a bad idea to keep this and not do anything with it right and like what's one percent interest in a savings account like if you have to like if it's gonna sit there and like does it even outpace like the the like official inflation rate like no the targeted inflation rate's usually around two percent yeah so it's like then you

realize the whole the whole notion of what we think about money and and economics is like you shouldn't save you should spend and consume now and money's gonna be worth less later so i i just i was i was very curious about the polar opposite of that which is well no wait money doesn't do that you you are incentivized to save and be conspicuous and that has a ripple effect through like everything that you decide is like an individual and companies that do shit like we wouldn't have apple as we know it if they'd like why would they cripple phones if like no one was buying them anyways like they'd incentivize you to keep them but here we are there's like i'm like we're lucky we're on a one-year release cycle for phones not less than that planned

obsolescence big uh big issue for me really grinds my gears i mean yeah yeah it's a it's again it's one of those like i don't know if i've talked about this story on this podcast yet but in chicago when i lived in chicago in particular is like it's pretty well known in the city of chicago that uh the roads are piss poor but even more like underground known is that the the roads are piss poor for a reason because they use low grade gravel so like after you have a harsh winter with a bunch of snow a bunch of bad weather a bunch of like salt like on the roads like there's gonna be shit ton of potholes so they intentionally use like a medium grade like gravel to repave the road knowing that that grade will produce potholes which will in turn produce jobs the next spring

the recurring supply of people filling up potholes right although legitimately i have to ask you how efficient or quickly are they at patching them up do you end up like no they're not efficient at all yeah you have to drive through a war zone yeah philadelphia has the same problem yeah no you're just giving me bad flashbacks to montreal where it's like rampant too and they use salt instead of sands for some reason so it also just fucks up your car and your clothes and everything right yeah dog's feet but again why use the higher quality asphalt and not come back next year right they're gonna have more money to spend on whatever it is that we're doing so it's uh so it kind of ripples into everything that you wouldn't immediately realize and then that's when

you start to or at least that's that's when i really started to kind of get it and then wanted to explore the technology that enabled it and kind of went down the proverbial rabbit hole but then i started to feel like the guy from it's always sunny in philadelphia and he's got like his conspiracy theory shit on the wall charlie yeah like pepe silvia pepe silvia that is that is how i felt like i was becoming uh because again like it's not like dinner like conversation really hey so let's talk about like the monetary order of the world and and how everything is skewed against us and be like okay man all right take a fucking chill pill smoke your bowl in the corner get out of here yeah but that's exactly and you get like discredited off the bat for having an opinion

exactly don't talk about it don't bring it up oh no you're not allowed to internalize that so it's been great meeting people throughout the years that you don't you don't have to you don't have to explain yourself instead they may actually start to bring up things that you didn't think about or other aspects of this so it's like my opinions today have been formed and shaped by so many different interactions with different people that like it's yeah it's been it's been quite a ride so far let's dive more into that what do you mean by that like how so how often are these interactions happen i mean so when i when i really started to get interested to bitcoin I was starting my career as an accountant, which is, I guess, again, the polar opposite of a lot

of the things that I was exploring, just in terms of what would lead you to that. And so the more I learned and the more I met, I started going to some conferences to see who's building stuff out there, what's going on. And meeting, I remember going to, in San Jose, I met my brother. This was probably after the first meaningful rise in the price of Bitcoin in my entire history of holding onto it and it broke a hundred dollars us we were like holy shit like what's going on like how did this happen so i was like let's go to let's go to california the bitcoin foundation's having this like conference in san jose or something this is definitely in early 2014 at some point or in that shit and that was fun i met the winklevoss twins when they were still working with bit

instant took a picture with them like twice my height which was which was fun but being being out there and and just kind of for the first time outside of montreal seeing like people from around the world all kind of get it and are doing a bunch of cool shit to to in a variety of ways i never imagined before was like it's like i gotta do this like i can't go back i can't go back to it and and i don't even know what i'd be doing like i gotta want to be part of this um so that that was that was again where my my perspective of what bitcoin fee was shaped there i mean people then started bringing in aspects of like well think about war and think about all that like if you aren't in control of printing money how can you buy all these weapons

and things so i don't remember what group it was that was there but they were like a super anti-war group that was supportive of bitcoin at this conference and then that's when i was like i was thinking about this way too like micro around like money and just like making more of it or spending less um that's it was kind of hooked i knew i had to contribute somehow which then led to trying to learn how to run a software project with bills and just traveling around of conferences and talking to people was uh learned it was the best investment of time although it was the worst investment of bitcoins why do you say that i mean that what lessons did you learn running this business i don't spend bitcoins to make bitcoins basically i mean uh it was it was i

tried to create something where i would be able to earn bitcoin over time uh through fees or whatever which is why it's important to like not just uh accept bitcoin and convert it to dollars right the way i wanted to have some mechanism to actually keep some and hold it but started the business um i guess near the peak of when was it uh january 2015 so i think peak of that big run-up after the senate hearings and stuff so from when i launched it until i and a year later was just a constant price decline which is then constant reinvestment of more bitcoin which uh again in hindsight you stop and say well maybe i should have just not done anything and sat sat on everything but i still don't think i could have ever done that because that's that's pretty

fucking boring first of all that and i don't know man i think what you build is it's obviously still around and it is let's talk about let's talk about like what happened like like before we talk about what happened though like i want to sit here reassure you that uh what you built will have a lasting effect and is having a lasting effect it may be worth more than the bitcoin that you spent i i'd like to think so but i appreciate that yeah um so yeah bill those was like i said it was the fuck you to people who were trying to be like bitcoin's not used for anything like to literally use it for whatever i want um but that's why i wanted to start it doesn't mean i was qualified to to do that or in any position to actually successfully run a

a business like that never built software before and just like maybe geocities websites but yeah never built anything or knew how so learned a lot about working with developers uh how to work with them how to identify them um so that was that was a big learning experience wasted a lot of time and money building something that wasn't even really that like technologically like well design are useful what do you mean by that i mean i didn't know the first thing about software development i knew what i wanted my business to do which i needed a nice elegant way to buy bitcoins and pay bills so i mean i didn't think about i didn't i just jumped into it started mocking up what i thought things would look like and was inspired by sites that i was using and

basically just went to a designer and said try to make us look nicer and went to a couple of developers and said let's sit down for an hour i need to talk to you about what i need this to do i'm like that was it didn't start reading books about software development i was just very practical about it i was like all right like they know what they're doing he knows what he's doing like i know what i would like this thing to do so it was hey here's the requirements how long do you think it's going to take how much will it cost boom no concept of like did you talk to anyone who might use this thing did you get any feedback at all about how this would probably work it was just like nah build it build all of it as much as you can possibly build for like this much and in this

time and like six months later the product was delivered and no real plan of continuously maintaining it really i just didn't i just didn't really know and was focused on learning more building uh better relationships with people in the community and like i was busy probably wasn't focusing my effort on what i should have so from a software development perspective learned a lot of i mean lessons that would have been easier to learn just reading a couple good books although i think the books that i've appreciated the most didn't exist back then oh really i don't think if it did i don't feel like an asshole now but i think lean startup wasn't when did eric put that came out like 2014 okay so maybe it was like yeah i did uh i did a something i did a digital design

boot camp the summer 2014 based around the lean startup model okay and i'm sure it's existed before that i mean the big caveat here is i'm uh i'm a i'm an accountant by studying in background like i had no concept of this type of stuff so in hindsight now i feel like oh it's obvious yeah before we go forward i must uh must admit love the king cruel you just had on you may be an accountant but you have an incredible eclectic taste of music i appreciate huge king cruel fan yeah big fan of the guy from glasgow um no but i mean that's the one thing we're going to get and two as this podcast goes on we're we're both ux nerds in particular i want to talk about what i wrote about in the bent earlier this week because this is basically what our conversations

over the last year i've been revolved around is ux and creating these nielsen principles for for bitcoin exchanges wallets and block explorers and companies beyond i guess anything that you're interacting with that hasn't existed before which is everything in this in this space it's all kind of net new type of interactions really yeah so how should we structure this should we keep going on the story of how you handed off to francis and then your your path down i think that segues nicely into all this stuff yeah because there's not that much interesting things in between um but i think to kind of summarize what we were talking about learned a lot about software development by making every possible like amateur mistake uh which was i mean

in hindsight you figure it out eventually so it was it was it was good to have gone through that and got the experience but from a product perspective uh bills in its first version was um i'm happy people used it and and put through the the the painful challenges of using it and the very manual nature of some elements so um learned a lot from that perspective learned a lot about running a business as well traveled to a lot of conferences um which was good networking but service is only available in Canada not that many Canadians at these conferences all around the world so cool cool to network cool to meet a lot of people that I looked up to met Mike Hearn again looked up to his past past

tense I met him at a conference which is cool he's the first person that heard smart contracts about one of his YouTube videos so like it was just surreal to be spending the year building something that people were using and meeting people with similar interests and beyond that like a whole like i said traveling it's first time i traveled to europe first time i traveled to south america right being in these places and meeting people united by this like random seemingly common interest made me i just it was a very great um i guess growing experience uh at the time that i needed from taking a year off of work um but then i also quickly realized well price of bitcoin has been dropping steadily

every month that the whole year this has been running um it's expensive to maintain software you can't just build it yeah yeah you gotta you can't yeah you don't want to get held a ransom by a hacker or something right um so that's expensive adops or not adops excuse me devops um is important like it's important lesson learned like how to set up a server all that shit exactly and then so it's like you got to cut your losses and i had i was i i feared i became what i feared which was like the ideas guy I couldn't build anything I needed to build I couldn't fund anything I needed to build anymore I was just like hey guys like be really cool if someone could do this and if someone would pay them to do that so I was like you know what I need to I need to figure

out something and come back to bring a bit more to the table to this space I was like fuck it let me just finish school be a CPA and then people take my ideas more seriously maybe like I didn't know but it seemed like the right thing to do um and so francis who i'd worked with out of the bitcoin embassy for over a year even before i started bills had been running brokerage business and like very much a visionary um and someone who i looked to to like figure out like okay i understand this but like what's next like where are we looking towards um and so he he just continued he he continued to run it and had actual like real team of engineers i knew what the fuck they were doing to continue to build it and i mean here we are all these years later and there's

more people using it um it's become part of an even bigger initiative that he's pulling off so in the end like i said it was it was a very good learning experience and grown moved on from then but it's still around and it's still been pretty useful for a lot of people right i guess so how's that feel it's cool i haven't really thought about that um i'm telling you man i'm telling you like you just by trying to prove a use case that you could use in an argument you may have put a ball motion that is still gaining momentum and it's one of the was the first snowflake of many to fall on what could be a tipping point of an avalanche of useful products uh built on top of bitcoin but very very eloquently put that was uh i i'd like to think that it was not kind of a

waste of time and money and i haven't really felt that um like i said it's it was cool um but that's nothing that's like a basic use case that's like table stakes like you gotta you gotta be able to do that and i'm glad that i feel that way now because at the time it seemed like the most useful thing but now it's like we're we're on another level of what's possible and bitcoin is still around it's not like yeah it's not like it i was like oh see hopefully it's still everything's still going on like there's more and more to be excited about to start working on so i'm glad that i took some time away to learn other shit uh and come back to it with a fresh pair of eyes uh because it's just been growing like like i could never have pictured yeah and before we

talk about uh how far bitcoin has come let's talk about the dark side of quote-unquote blockchain and what you've experienced over the last year since you left bills yeah and got your cpa and entered uh the world of big four consulting slash accounting yeah the the blockchain not bitcoin crew yeah you've seen both sides dude you you you're like jesus going to hell for 40 days and traveling around if only if only it was 40 days uh although i i will i will admit the the uh the the thought-provoking statement of blockchain not bitcoin um didn't make sense at first and then i couldn't really refute it until i actually went went and explored what that even meant and how all that how what that could even possibly like lead to um so i will i will admit it wasn't

always as um skeptical or cynical about it um there was a point in time when i was like holy shit i i feel like i'm learning about bitcoin again but that's also because i lack knowledge about a lot of other things when i felt that way uh namely sql databases which if i had learned about prior to learning about bitcoin a probably would have understood it technically a bit faster but then b would never really have explored or thought about the the notion of smart contracts in any meaningful way so i really wish i just listened to people that's the thing no one was really talking about now i guess the joke is around like well use a database but like that wasn't really like a thing that that that blockchain is the new database dude well it's uh i guess so

whatever whatever what commercial is that from ibm probably oh god yeah i saw some ibm hot shot like blockchain hot chocolate or some shit they're doing williamsburg a while back i don't know what's worse like seeing that and cringing or then having people be like hey did you see the blockchain coffee dude it's gonna work not ironically like ah yeah so i mean yeah at a point it seemed like it could make sense but then i learned about other technology technology primitives and realized like okay i still don't get it so what was it like on the front lines of consulting like what were the ideas that were being thrown at you uh sort of the specs of products that these companies wanted to build on the blockchain

and how did you approach sort of helping these companies and people within these companies more precisely sort of come to understand? Were any of these people able to see, any of these people, I'm sorry, any of these companies able to see the light on maybe this isn't the most efficient way? Were you even able to give them that opportunity to realize that? i don't think i don't think many people ask that question i guess this is also the same for most new technologies and i think uh the most similar parallel draws with ai like i know the blockchain stuff bothers a lot of uh bothers a lot of people who understand and appreciate bitcoin

but i can only imagine how like data scientists feel about all the ways people talk about ai really yeah like that just seems like that just seems like people are more off base and like don't understand what's happening then even with the blockchain and crypto stuff and this is now after starting to understand a bit more about artificial intelligence it's like yeah the same way i cringe about blockchain coffee is like i could only imagine how people who really appreciate data feeling like well this isn't ai this is like a like a if then if the end function right that's what ai is i mean that's what like when i worked the the managed futures fund like part of our i mean we were an index fund so we indexed a bunch of other hedge funds that were trading

and they had obviously had quants they're writing algorithms and they try to like explain them as like ai like smart like pro algorithms they were like no like you're literally writing if and functions that the price hits this point and the volumes at this point like put a buy order in for this amount yeah it's autonomously making decisions yeah it's like yeah so i mean i guess that aside i just i feel for anyone who's super into anything related to machine learning or artificial intelligence and what you must have to endure um but i guess the good context for blockchain development is that um like at the time when i would talk to people about bitcoin would get and this is like an educated like group of peers you'd always get the like oh like

Like, it sounds like a scam or it's not going to be worth anything. Like, there was no real legitimate discourse. It was just, like, a lot of skepticism. And then, so, when I moved to New York and started working in the consulting side and we would talk about Bitcoin, it went from, like, oh, yeah, it seems like a scam or something shady. You won't make money to, like, oh, yeah, but have you heard about, like, this coin or this thing or, like, all this other shit? Like, Bitcoin is boring. And it's, like, oh, hey.

Dude, you're not on Nano yet? Get the neighbor's hammer and something into the wall. I've been on the other side of that one before, so I get it. It'll happen. Dude, our bed frame, or not our bed frame, our headboard to our bed is loosely attached, and it bangs against the wall, and I have the worst secondhand embarrassment for myself that my neighbors just fucking hate me. Yeah, maybe.

Maybe they've gotten used to the sound amongst the sirens and other noise that's going on. Yeah, that's true. There's a lot of white noise in the background. yeah i mean i've i've put shit on the wall at like 11 p.m so this guy's still still ahead of the game that's sick that's sick that's fucked up dude i can't wait till the morning you could be passive aggressive with some neighbors who stomp really loud oh okay if you're being passive aggressive i can get on it and get on board with it it evens out yeah um so you're yeah so the the vibe of the vibe of what people reacted to bitcoin was from like when i first started uh working to

like the last couple of years shifted from like skepticism to like ah this is boring like there was never this period where people were like oh no like this is cool so that and the reason for that was people were like money like money is not the use case we want to focus on like how do you you can't like you can't do that like no one wants people like how are you gonna like any use case you have like how you can you settle it in dollars like why money like imagine you had bitcoin but it wasn't bitcoin like it was in dollars and now we have that so on a stable coin kick yeah that was front running the stable coin kick well that was the that was the whole like that's the disadvantage of bitcoin is the value so volatile so what what is the profile of

your typical clientele uh it's it it it varies i mean if you think about the way blockchain is being positioned you have to have a blockchain strategy like whether you're a small company or a massive company or even uh i don't know you're in consumer goods or you're in financial services like everyone needs to think about blockchain so there's like do they need to or are they being forced to they feel i think it comes out of a place of you don't know you don't know so you need to kind of you need to explore we need to you need to test it out do a proof of concept to see what it is to see if it'll actually impact us because all these newspapers and websites are saying it's the next like internet so i mean if you put yourself in the in the shoes

of someone who never heard of this stuff before like you can't you guess you can't ignore it um so everyone is curious about it so the question comes to like well what are people building so what are your what are your use cases or what's your value proposition of a of a blockchain not like bitcoin blockchain but just a blockchain i mean it's if someone would answer that they would give you all of the the benefits and uh i guess the value prop about bitcoin well it's immutable um it's uh like it's it's super secure and can't be tampered with it transfers value like uh in automatically or like without uh it's like programmable like so it's all these things and it's like well no the none of the no enterprise blockchain is immutable in any definition of what

immutable could be like you're running a like a private implementation of ethereum like that is even possibly like less immutable than yeah jp morgan coins about to take over bro i mean it probably will people will buy it and be like hey will they even buy it though how will they even access it i mean so from what i understand about uh jpm coin which might actually be a reasonable use case for what they're trying to do is if you hold it then you don't need to actually like settle a transaction and get paid out like you could just it's like a it's like a it's like a credit like a it's like an iou how's it any difference in like what their digital ledger entries are right now thanks it's on their blockchain what is their who has access to

their blockchain can i download their blockchain source code and slightly better my own node permission than the regular infosec type of process i mean so here's the questions that nobody asks man like that's the that's the thing like you the the problem i think is that you can literally solve any problem like a modern business would face and incorporate a blockchain like you can it's it's possible um that doesn't mean that you should and it doesn't mean that there aren't many better alternatives but like if someone asks you the question can i record x on blockchain like you you can't say no you cannot and then that's that's where you get down the slippery slope where people are just okay well you can so we should because everyone's talking

about it but you don't really stop to think about it um so this is the this is again when you're in a like an ibm is i think the best for this because when you're you're a publicly traded company you got to sell so hey they're the best blockchain marketers i don't know if that's a good thing to be but like they're we're talking about here they're bullshit coffee thing they're they're ads everywhere like they've made people afraid of their ignorance of what like bitcoin and blockchain is that they're just like okay cool like i don't whatever like go for it you want to put your whatever on a blockchain like cool so it's it doesn't mean that it makes sense but what really does it anymore like it's not surprising that it's evolved this way well

it's like a giant rube goldberg machine like yeah look we put x thing on a blockchain like our whole supply chain is there this is actually okay it's actually a conversation i've been having a lot more frequently lately and it's been the theme of this podcast i'm sorry freaks i'm probably beating a very very dead horse here no you're not i am um but like society i'm becoming more and more convinced is becoming more and more detached from reality and i would argue that bitcoin in particular like you said what matters anymore i would argue that bitcoin like i like what safe eating said in the bitcoin center like bitcoin provides the only objective truths in the not the only i mean we did say the only objective truth in the world maybe the only objective truth

in the world right now and i tend to agree with that the way the incentive network the incentive system and the stakeholders within the system interact with each other uh i do think everybody keeps each other in check and there is some validity in the fact that bitcoin is sort of a fulcrum for truth you know i mean it it absolutely is and i think that holds true because you have to opt in to to to believe that to be objectively true um and everyone that's participating or in any capacity that's involved is believes that objective truth if you don't it's that's the beauty of it is it's cool and just like leave us alone right you don't and that's that's the problem i think with what you're kind of describing about reality is that people are collectively

rallying around what they believe to be objective truths but they're they're clearly not but like if you don't have the the the i guess critical critical thinking or like sense of awareness to ask yourself whether like something is objectively true and just believe it like are is that how we are like are we like you know what i mean like where do you draw that line of being self-aware enough to say that i just feel like the bar is really low for for the way that things are moving today right yeah so i'm trying to think where we want to go here i think like keep going down like this path of like what it was like consulting like what were so consulting What are the conversations with these people?

Yeah, not again. The people in charge of being sort of the conduit of the blockchain strategy for their company. Like, how did you approach trying to make them understand what this stuff can do, its limitations, how it might be applied, and did you ever say, like, probably don't want to do this?

So, like I said, I think at the beginning i was still curious about all this and when my first experiences in the professional world were people being like ah bitcoin is a scam like why are you even talking about this people were now open-minded about this stuff i mean it came with the i guess some annoying parts of it but generally speaking people were curious like oh well yeah we'd love to please talk to us for 30 minutes about bitcoin and then how blockchain works and all these other use cases and it was it was really cool to to really get the chance to talk to people about it and try to explain to them how it actually works um and then again everyone has their own i guess you interpret it in different ways and

everyone has their own incentives what they do when they learn something new and i think while it's great to learn new things and especially try to teach people about bitcoin and and how everything works um you kind of people hear what they want to hear and that's where again like people will describe i find at least in the whole enterprise blockchain space people describe it as they would the main benefits of bitcoin and it doesn't really have those but it's debatable right because everything is kind of relative it's like pretty secure except if you need to erase something like you can because why would you want it to be really immutable like what if something bad happened um so i think what i mainly noticed though is that uh i was excited to be in consulting

after being an accountant for a while but uh it is really a lot like the show um um house of lies yeah surprisingly like that show it's with don cheater right yeah and my thing from that show i mean it's a great show i love to watch it but it's like could management consulting really be like that much bs and maybe it was because i was initially exposed to it from a blockchain lens where i was like yeah it probably is but yeah really it you're not if what you need to say is not going to necessarily lead to a massive like solution or project for your client and this is not blockchain this is just consulting in general like don't tell them that like you you you there's there's obvious incentives being in those type of roles so for me i think of it when i used to work

at at best buy like i wasn't on commission so when someone asked me information about tv i was straight up with that this cheaper tv is good like don't buy the hundred dollar cable yeah i'm not i don't care i'm unaccentivized now it felt a bit like i would love to sit here and talk to you about bitcoin all day but like what am i gonna do like what i'm like you want to buy some bitcoin like i'm gonna build i'm gonna build you something so i mean i was quickly disinterested because then it was like okay well so you want to manage your supply chain on a blockchain like if you're using something with physical goods don't really care because like someone's gonna come and steal that shit like you're not gonna you can't be like hey i have my private key like bring back my bag of

whatever the fuck you're selling like yeah that apple's on the blockchain come back with it it's mine they'll know you can track it on this block explorer just scan that little qr code somewhere enter this 42 somebody scanning it in new york city will come track you down in texas so i was like fuck this like i i didn't didn't necessarily know that was what i was going to be working on and doing and so I just decided to try and find more software and product oriented roles which brought me into actually building now software for accountants it's kind of full circle but I realized to my point earlier like I wanted just to like I needed to learn more and it didn't feel like in consulting and then especially like once I really started to get my head around like what

is a an enterprise blockchain or what is like any other blockchain that's not bitcoin it's kind of like okay like i feel stupid for being excited initially about this stuff like i just don't it's not if it makes sense and you could build it that's cool it might save you some money somewhere but like it's not it's not interesting so i needed to to move on from that yeah and i think like our paths are very similar but like uh the the checklist uh was in a different order So you're learning more about UX and product management later on in your career. You're still young, but coming around to the software stack and user experience is focal points of building these products. So what's happened, moving away from blockchain and then learning more about product management and UX in particular?

It's been fascinating. i have a a strong appreciation for something that i didn't even really know existed a while back what's that uh just the the amount of i think the amount of uh i guess thought research strategy and like just testing and iteration that goes into building something that's actually like great like the difference between a product and like a great product i understand that now whereas before it was just this like indescribable like this thing looks better than than the other so i have like a i understand why you need to have someone in these various roles of like ux is a role it's not a ux ui design this is like it is a very imperative it is it makes the difference that

it makes is shocking now that i've been exposed to it um and i i again now i can't it's so let's talk about i can't imagine i can't imagine like it's it in hindsight it's obvious and again when you first hear about like design thinking and ideo especially it was the like the once you hear about the d school and all the stuff we're doing i mean design the design the mouse and and all this stuff like you start to realize damn like this makes sense but then like yeah of course empathize with people like no shit why why is it why is it not obvious when you're building software like and it wasn't for me like i said i didn't do that but now i hear and it's like well yeah where will you start if you don't talk to someone that's using it but you realize you

make a lot of assumptions when you're but you think it's a good idea so you just jump in like i know this is going to work and i think becoming more interested or obsessed with the problems you're solving and not like this is the right way to do it is is one of the biggest takeaways from all of this type of uh i guess this field of of uh of knowledge yeah i think the tipping tipping point i have so many buzz fucking phrases that i use i think the point at which i had an aha moment around ux design was we watched it was actually a documentary on netflix i forget exactly what it's called but it basically described how like something as small as a toothpick can be designed where like japanese toothpicks in particular have like a divot where

you can break it and then you can rest a toothpick on it so the tip of the toothpick doesn't get dirty on the table so you can clean your teeth with a clean toothpick like something on a three inch piece of something that's a quarter of a centimeter thick and you never think twice about it exactly but it has design and ux design implemented into it and that really opened my mind to like hey you can design fucking anything like a conversation an experience at a concert a lot of people just pigeonhole this stuff to digital experiences but ux goes beyond and um yeah i mean i say products as if like software products are the the only thing but obviously this this this goes way beyond or even before we were even designing software or even

yeah any type of interactions could be physical things but what i like we mentioned about kind of learning about design is like you learn it because it's not a for some people i think it could be an innate thing or your skills or characteristics that lend yourself to it but it's also just very much a process and a discipline of making sure you just do certain things because you will learn from it yes that was again it's like cool like you can you can teach yourself this you can you can understand it's not just by chance like someone figured that out or gotta made it work better it's like it's a it's a process and if you refine that process and become more comfortable with just trying to learn stuff instead of always being right like

you'll be you actually have some pretty good ideas yeah and there's i mean i think this is a great segue into what we've been talking about for the last year is there's heuristics and guidelines out there that have been around for decades now it's fucking been two and a half decades and still super relevant and underutilized right so what we're talking about in particular something i wrote about in the bent uh late last week or was it earlier this week days are blending together but i think it was late last week um yeah because we decided to meet up last week uh the nielsen norman group correct yep nielsen norman group in 1994 put out a a guy a 10 bullet point guide of uh user interface design heuristics that people should follow

it's basically like hey if you're designing a software product where people are going to be interacting it with it via screens and clicking and blah blah blah like here's basically the basics of what you should provide the information you should provide to them as they're using your product in a digital realm uh you can definitely describe this far greater than i can but i mean that's that's pretty spot on yeah it's it's it's just a 10 10 things to be mindful of when you're designing interfaces, simple things like always have the status visible. So user knows, are they logged in or not?

Is the service active or not? Is something happening? Should they expect it? Keeping language consistent. If you're going to say sign in, then always say sign in. Don't change it up. Not using jargon. Making language simple.

Don't write like a robot. Just be conversational. And it's, again, things that you might take for granted with lots of experience and doing this but it's a good set of guidelines and when you think of it at face value yeah you can analyze your favorite sites or apps and maybe not all important to you but some of them are and they're all a lot of them lacking even though like web design seems to be very standardized and like homogeneous type of designs everywhere people still leave out some pretty or some pretty important elements or have some glaring ux hiccups in general and then

And this is especially, I think, true in the crypto space. And I say crypto space in general because everyone in whatever coins you're using, especially whatever projects you're looking at, they have more complex use cases. Key management is something we all struggle with. And there's no guidelines or best practices there. Or if there are, then they're secure but not usable. So, yeah, the thinking through guidelines for design for web apps is cool. but then when you start thinking about those guidelines and best practices for a bear asset

that you have like i've been saying this a lot in the band but you have extreme ownership over like there's a lot of stress that comes with a lot of responsibility that comes with it yeah it's the it's it's your it's your classic kind of spider-man type of scenario like you you have you have your bank and wow i haven't heard it described that way i really like that With great power comes great responsibility is what Bitcoin is all about. But people often neglect the responsibility part because, well, I need my keys.

I can't call Trezor up. They don't have backup somewhere. So it's important. But then, yeah, you need to balance usability. You're not going to sign all your transactions on an air gap computer somewhere. Yeah. Secure, sure, but that's really inconvenient.

And so what I'm referring to in the bent is a Bitcoin Optex initiative by Chaincode and other players in the industry like Blockstream. Mike Schmidt from Blockstream actually wrote this particular piece on RBF replaced by fee user experience like across wallets, block explorers and exchanges. like how they were displaying the experience of using RBF across the space and it was piss poor so like if you're sending a replace

to describe it, a replace by fee transaction is enabled via BIP 125 I believe or 135 it's 125 or 135 I believe it's 125 don't quote me possibly quote me though written by Peter Todd

enabled I believe in 2014-2015 but basically the gist is if you send a transaction during a time of high congestion on the network and you sent it with the fee that you thought was going to get through in a reasonable amount of time but it just so happens fee is not high enough and it's not being included in blocks you have the opportunity to send a replace by fee transaction with a higher fee that has more likelihood to get it included in the block and this is one whole aspect of Bitcoin that's very fascinating we get into altogether but well really what the article focused on was the ux somebody who sends

an rbf fee or excuse me an rbf transaction and then trying to follow what's going on with their original transaction what's going on with the rbf transaction and basically uh the services across the wallets the exchanges and the explorers uh sort of displaying this information as people's money was being sent through the bitcoin network yeah just hanging in the balance like right what's what's going to happen and it and it's true like you can't treat that as a regular transaction because i mean the stakes are a bit different but also you need you you're seeking more different information than you would be if you were just checking on your balance or something right and so it's like there's experience around like these very situational use cases right and it's like

thinking through that and bitcoin has a long way to go to like as an ecosystem as a quote-unquote industry yeah to figure this stuff out but the i think the the reason i feel like using a lot of platitudes in this conversation but it always captures what i'm trying to say so well but i mean the devil's in the details and if you think about bitcoin as a as a as an experiment these are the details to focus on because when you think about usability i mean there are the obvious usability gaps around like actually acquiring cryptocurrency which you could do very easily if just accept it for something instead of trying to buy it and give some type of like dna sample to do so but the real usability uh issues around replaced by fee transactions and all the type

of things that we're seeing even with lightning network and wallets mobile wallets and stuff like lightning network like uh uh what am i thinking of um lightning wallet balance changes like from day to day like because you're because you haven't satoshi sent from one end of the channel to another people getting confused around that and and so these are these are worthwhile things to focus on it seems super like detail-oriented and like something so specific but when you think of like the some of some of like other like projects or grand claims of like revolutionizing all these other types of areas or industries it's like we're still focused on such a narrow use case and trying to make it like better and improve it for the unique considerations of how bitcoin treats all

this stuff it's like this is how the hell are we gonna do this shit yeah like how i can't even think about what like the how much effort it would take to try and solve like all the other stuff when we're like yeah like i'm just trying to i'm just trying to like get this transaction to go there faster i'm like you can't really visibly do that or without having a panic attack yeah so it's like this is this is what always gives me a bit of pause and kind of makes me feel more more just more optimistic in general about the evolution of of bitcoin is that like this is the type of shit people are sitting around trying to like trying to figure out and and work on as opposed to like either things that are table stakes like that you should just that that that should should

theoretical token economics yeah or like i mean i've been reading i've been reading into a couple of these like accounting related ico tokens and like i've honestly been kind of impressed with some of the ideas up until they find a way to throw in a token into it and like it's like you're trying to reinvent like the economics of something so yeah i mean usability across the board is something to focus on but i just think that the the unique usability considerations for for bitcoin is is it's it's great that these are the topics of conversations people are having and putting uh thoughts out there about yeah so if you were to create like a nielsen norman group specific guideline for bitcoin and bitcoin companies particularly exchanges block explorers

and wallets like where would you start and how can we get you working full-time on that i mean it's basically where i'm getting at tonight it's like how can we get you working full-time on this i think the best place to start is exchanges and that's the last place that i would want to try and work or do anything i mean the sooner we move any any any custodial business just scares the shit out of me um i mean when when started bills the key thing was like i don't just the set transaction settled instantly like you don't have a wallet like it's cool like i don't want to i don't want to hold or have any liability like that because there's a lot to consider when you're holding other people's funds i think exchanges are the i mean usability is probably not the main

focus uh there's a lot of other i think operational and security things that should be focused but yeah i mean exchanges have always been a somewhat scary experience for me when you make withdrawal or deposit and you're kind of like everything is in limbo they do it they do a shitty job and again i'm generalizing about exchanges i haven't used too many recently but like there's so many scary moments where you know people have been scammed by an exchange before when doing something routine or like the support like my transaction hasn't showed up in three days like i shouldn't panic but like there's precedent for people not receiving money no i know i had a instance like that fucking love the cash app been pumping it hard their response for this pod but i did

have an experience with the cash app where i withdrew bitcoin to uh to cold storage like and like i couldn't see it on the blockchain right away i couldn't see that like the transaction was pending and had to wait until like cash i got a cash app notification like literally 20-25 minutes It's like your transaction's been confirmed on the blockchain and then sold in my wallet, but I couldn't see a pending or anything for 20 minutes. I was just like, ah, fuck. And I QR scanned it, knew it was pretty much foolproof.

And in the end, you were right. But you have that moment where you're not getting any visibility into what's happening. Your mind goes to the worst place possible. Exactly. So exchanges just scare the crap out of me. I think from the perspective, when I send funds there, do do is this like is this i might get like the address i sent it to like is that my address is

this like a is this like my account or is it just like this massive hot wallet and like i don't know where my money is or if they have my money ultimately or my coins like um there's no so i mean there's some have done proof of reserves you know cracking that cracking offered it nobody uses it no and then so this i think and we reached this conclusion the last time we spoke about this like there's a ton of things exchanges could do but like do people care do people using exchanges like i think this is the answer i've been coming around to is people don't know that they can care and again it goes back to and that's why i've been stressing that bitcoin is a bearer asset like there are different like levels of responsibility needed for bearer assets in particular like yeah

i mean if you were gonna go and like leave a an envelope of cash and mail it to some company like what would you what would you want to see to make sure that that was actually a legit thing right like but people don't the concept of money has been so bastardized and so abstracted that people don't even know that they should care about this when it pertains to bitcoin they don't know that it's different they expect it to be the same yeah but then i guess our exchange is incentivized to i guess educate people and maybe even not hold uh people's cryptocurrency like i i don't i'm trying to think through a business model of like if you are holding people's coins i mean a that enables you to potentially yes operate in a fractional reserve fashion and actually scam

people we'll assume that not all exchanges do that um but then if you're holding people's coins if there's forks you don't have to necessarily give it to them if you've never specified most probably won't have a policy on that i don't know right so maybe that's one way you'd want to keep them but like otherwise are you are they staking people's coins is that a is that a thing that they would do if you had binance coins coinbase and who else i know binance coinbase i can say for certain have said that they will offer staking services in the future so then there's an incentive to hold those coins but otherwise it just seems like such a i mean i guess you need to there's where i haven't used any of these um kind of these other exchanges or non-custodial type of services

for that so i guess you kind of have to but it just seems like there's ways to minimize like the exposure to someone potentially like like losing your funds when you leave them on an exchange right and but probably not a priority to to uh to develop right and i think but i'm actually very intrigued to see the uh sort of push towards uh custodial services that use multi-sig uh sort of solutions where you have two or three signatures they have one and like in a worst case scenario like you can have them intervene and like you're still able to get the benefit of the the service but you still have full custody true yeah and i think and this is like this is one of those companies that has like a pretty they've been around forever uh they've got like a multi-sig

setup i know well jameson lopp yeah work there ben davenport yeah so they and they've been i mean And they've kind of, they were the first, I think, to really put that, the multi-sig setup out there. It makes sense. But then now we're, like, you've got to, again, that's probably best practice. I don't know all exchanges do that. But that would be useful. But I guess then the other thing about exchanges is, like, and this is where usability is one thing. But also if you think about it, like, these are, they're holding people's funds.

They're making, they're large businesses. They're facilitating a lot of trades. like there's there's like no there's no concept of uh like of internal controls or of like we don't want regulations so sure but like there's there's still like there's no you have no assurance from any exchange that like they're doing a what their policies might be or that they even have posted policies like just scares the shit out of me thinking about like how many things could go wrong in a place like that like quadriga in canada the exchange i used to do like work with primarily many years ago is like really example like how the like if you believe the story how

the fuck does that happen and then if that's not what happened like so there's no exchanges just what's the uh what's the skinny on quadriga what are you hearing i mean quadriga has always been a mystery to me because in canada banking for as like i guess for as for as big and uh active the bitcoin community is banks really just not fan it's very difficult if not impossible as a bitcoiner let alone a bitcoin business to sustain a banking relationship um learned that with bills uh although we weren't as like uh we're not like selling bitcoins or anything so a bit easier um but the banking environment very hostile towards bitcoin companies so when i was doing business with quadriga it was like one of like i was like the fourth exchange i started

using there was one that closed down and then another one that also closed down like they just couldn't it was too expensive to sustain their banking relationships quadriga was always around um and their ceo gerald was like your bitcoin maverick like constantly building new relationships with credit unions and this so i mean i was happy to do business with them um but again like any exchange there's like delays for withdrawals and i got a bad feeling eventually i mean we all know what happened with gox and like that's a that's i mean that's a cautionary tale of just like how did it how did that how did mark carpelli's end up with like all of this like responsibility like no oversight no i got into a debate with this like nobody calls out jed mccaleb enough

for handing Mark Capellas a steaming bag of shit. Granted, Mt. Gox was not as prominent as it was when Mark eventually had it fail, but... Fair. He was a fucking... Yeah, he's got some blame in there. But I don't know if he realized what he was unleashing upon everybody by doing that.

Right. But, I mean, that's, like, the cautionary tale, and then Bitfinex is a whole other story. But I, as soon as, like I was saying before, as soon as I started noticing like, oh, and this was like, this was like four years ago, I like delayed withdrawals and was like, you know what, got to try to find alternatives and, and, and work around that. So eventually the, just the, the delays and whatever kind of turned me off from using a service. Um, I was surprised to hear that there was still actually, um, operational, uh, when, when, when this all went down. but it kind of again comes back to like and they were publicly traded at a point too i remember they did like a reverse yeah they did this weird there's a lot of there's a lot of weird shit with quadrigo like they did in like 2015 they did like an rto reverse takeover random company that was publicly listed traded and they were yeah and then they that was like they did that for a year

and they think they released like they didn't release audited statements for their their annual thing and then they just kind of like that's why i wasn't sure they're still around because i knew that the public company wasn't active but who knows what company is running it i guess that's how you get banking relationships uh but it's all to say that like if if the ceo of this place had it just there's just it just doesn't make sense but it's plausible given the terrible is it that most of these exchanges probably have i mean i don't get all like they're saying it's like two or three cold wallets right i it's it's 200 million dollars it's just so it's just it's it's just so it's so crazy that it could have gotten to that point and then so shady that like

hey we don't have access to this cold storage as it seems like it seems like it seems like it seems like somebody there's some like some exit scam happening where like somebody's been stealing from the exchange and now it's like oh shit like i don't know what do we gotta we gotta to get out of this somehow but like nothing there adds up but the fact that they had so much people's money and this is how they were running their shit like again whether it's true or not like the fact that it got to this is like i think all right people don't know that they that that this could even have like is happening people are just blissfully ignorant well it brings me back and again i hate to fucking live in the glory days when i worked at the managed futures fund

but like again since we were an index fund a fund of funds like we had due diligence checklist that we had to check off like we literally had to go physically to the manager's location look at their servers like look at their debt disaster like disaster recovery plan like and actually we had to put one in motion while i was working at the fund uh did it all work out according to plan it did yeah it worked out like it's a sad story a very prominent managed futures fund uh or prominent cta uh liz chaval uh she was the head of emc i believe a hedge fund she just uh passed passed away like suddenly oh wow and she was the head of this fund and they had to put in put enact their disaster relief fund

which quadriga x obviously did not have and yeah like we clearly not we would not have been allowed to invest in emc unless they had that relief that relief path in in in play and so someone's in they're like thank god we actually like did that and this is the it's a really good example of why it's not necessarily that regulations are important but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have any like recourse any recourse any just basic like risk mitigation strategies as a business first like if you if you want to think of it in the most like capitalistic like greedy sense from a shareholder perspective you don't want your business being run like that don't give a shit about your customers or regulations you just like from a baseline

shouldn't run shouldn't run stuff like that like that's just like bad form like from business risk management yeah then you get into well okay maybe you're not on that extreme maybe you do care about your customers too like again why expose them to that risk so it all is either like negligence or like willful um uh lack of having any process in place but um what kind of what you describe is like the due diligence that happens like this is what kind of eats me up a bit about um all like my experience as a as a cpa i'm kind of thinking about audit and stuff like that is that i've become very skeptical just because of the rampant kind of scandals and things like that that are always going on but then i look in the bitcoin space and it's like if we had even like a fraction

of a percent of like just like not even talking about rules or like hoops to jump through but just like basic like operational and risk management considerations like we could have avoided so much and like it's not that hard but it takes yeah roger ver going on youtube saying mount gox's solvent is not enough due diligence he didn't sell it well enough that was a that's just yeah man bitcoin exchanges are so sketchy right still to this day all of them even coinbase like the best like i shit on coinbase a lot and i have a lot of respect for coinbase i would argue that we would not be where we are today without coinbase no say that with coinbase was one of my favorite bitcoin websites when i was looking at bills because they were the only one that actually

could you could buy stuff and it wasn't like send a money order to this random fucking place like they they paved the way for the the more like the the next wave of adoption so i will yeah i won't hate on them for that i won't like we can't i mean we can hate on coinbase now but like we cannot neglect the fact that we would not be where we are today without coinbase that is a full-blown fact i would argue um but along the way like they had charlie's cto launched light coin as their second coin on exchange like what they're doing now with like earn.com and like it's basically an a16z portfolio consolidation company where they're they're trying to like consolidate their portfolio and pump everything that they thought was going to work out yeah i

I mean, it's the almost inevitable conclusion of any VC foray into cryptocurrency. That's a bad match. Right? Yeah, because then you get, it's again, just this disingenuous type of... Incentive model. Pivots and incentives for businesses.

It's not aligned, especially, I mean, 21, that's the saddest story I think, because they're so well-funded. Such a great idea. Such a great head start. machine payable web still makes a lot of sense in my mind and i think lightning makes it possible and maybe there's a time it was just off instead of buildings usb miners could have i don't know right well not anymore but yeah that's so i mean those companies all paved the

way but it's just like i think we when you when you think of like regulations the knee-jerk reaction is like oh my god we don't need that and it's like i don't think we do because if you look at what regulations have brought like regulated industries it's like it's it's like it's one extreme to the other it's like we don't have any rules but now let's make like this random arbitrary body of people who don't know what they're doing make the rules it's like there's there's a middle ground where you could you could reduce the risks and not like fuck people over without having like i don't know some like 60 year old senator be like this is how the rules need to be your exchange or whatever you're doing and i think the solution the perfect solution that

presents sort of uh an elixir to the problem or we're thinking of right now is open source software like you can literally create an open source github page it doesn't even have to be code it could just be like hey if you're a fucking block explorer or an exchange like you need to hit these check boxes like and if you're a customer uh using these exchanges or these block explorers or these wallets uh you don't need the government to come in and say hey these companies can't operate unless they get a license and follow these credentials as a free individual sovereign consumer you just say hey if this company does not check the boxes of this open source sort of heuristic guideline for what it what you should be doing if you're uh custodying funds in a secure

way or storing funds in a secure way like you're not going to use that service so like you don't even need the government to step in and accredit people you use open source guidelines and a checklist where you say all right if if you're gonna be using bitcoin storing bitcoin trading bitcoin whatever it may be here's uh basically guidelines that have been open source by the community by the people that use bitcoin and say if you're using an exchange that doesn't check this box this this box this box and this box probably don't want to use it yeah like watch out or something like that yeah and i think so i think so when i think of stuff like that there's a couple of there's a couple of projects that come to mind one like older that uh it's from a

an organization i actually love the name of those organizations they're called c4 and it's a cryptocurrency certification consortium it's a blowing shit up it's a good abbreviation yeah um and they came out with um they came out with like this like this guide for um exchanges around like key management and and custody and it was from like the the method of generating your keys to like your recovery disaster recovery plan they had like the four levels and all this shit you needed to do and it's all they have it's still up there on github actually i don't know i don't remember i don't remember if they've called it some what other standards it was but like it's really prescriptive and like really like the best practices you could think of

and i don't know the single exchange that like does any of that shit really um and if they do they're not they're certainly not putting out there like hey we're like level four like certified or matching this and it's like and these are some of the principles that i've looked at and was like like just like the fact that they've that it's so end to end just around not only like how did you generate like you know how the keys were generated like was it done like what type of random number generator like what method they were used so it's like it's so detailed and extensive and it seems like a no-brainer but like again i don't know anyone that uses it i think it kind of comes back to maybe even incentives of like it's a lot of work to do that and like will

customers will more customers use it or not well i think no so my argument would be the first company that puts in the hard work to provide that service is going to be like hey i'm an idiot if i don't hit again hit these check boxes if this company is going to put in that hard work and basically prove to me that my bitcoin is as secure and as safe and as possible through every step of the process i'd be an idiot as a bitcoin investor to not use them yeah and i think so that i like that because you're you try to you try to lead by example and exactly be the the better alternative be the change you want to see in the talking shit just go and do it yeah um and when i when i when i when i think down that path it makes me realize that while exchanges are probably the area that's

most like fraught with the need to like just just like to do something like incrementally more to to be more safe or secure i think that there's other aspects of uh of bitcoin and how people are using it that lend themselves much better to to the to the notion of like this more open source and kind of uh almost by design of how bitcoin works like enforcing certain things as well and what i mean by that is like exchanges are full of problems because it is literally the like the like big line in the middle between like bitcoin and and fiat matrix and the other world It's this, like, big, yeah, like, whatever analogy you want to use, it's, like, a place you don't really want to be or be for very long, and that's the type of thing, like I said, like, that's not where I think that there's no, there's, I mean, I think Binance is an example, is an exchange that, I mean, for as much, I guess, hate as I'm putting on exchanges now is, like, doing a lot of cool stuff, like, the way their company is organized, like, that's an outlier in this example, but generally, like, exchanges not really want to be. but when you think about payment networks i think about lightning or you think even just about

if you're managing your own like hd wallet and you have all the addresses linked like we could you could start thinking about well i mean if if you have if you're let's use a simple example to kind of describe what i'm thinking through but if you are running a business and you want to and a bitcoin business and you want to report back to your owners or shareholders if you're kind of exclusively operating in bitcoin as an operating assumption we have a lot of cool possibilities now because you don't need to worry about the constraints of like oh well bank or this and so if you think about it all transactions are visible in blockchain if you have the address and you know like you're looking out for it um so once transactions happen

and you have all the details that are there. If you have some, you design some type of, I guess, best practices for tagging different addresses or these open source type of standards to do that, you can have automatically generated reports or things about your activity that, by nature of using Bitcoin transactions, you can now function with that because,

well, you know when the transactions happen. You don't have to export your history because all the data's sitting there. So I feel like when we move away from exchanges and you think more about these type of things, it's kind of more interesting because there's just so much more possibility. We're not trying to solve these constraints just because, oh, well, it's an exchange. They're holding your funds. Like, OK, well, then use a non-custodial service. But then what do we do?

And what else is there? Yeah. And I think you bring up a very interesting point because ideally, in the long run, if we believe Bitcoin is going to be successful, exchanges will become sort of obsolete. and a lot because yeah if we do truly transition into a future uh of money or whatever this turns out to be run on bitcoin or cryptocurrency like there won't need to be on ramps it'll just be the way things work and then so you're thinking about you're thinking a step ahead scenario exactly because the other problems are too hard to solve and and i admittedly like from running bills like the last thing i wanted to do after that was run any bitcoin business that had to

deal with banks like that was that was it no matter how potentially lucrative because the fees like i just didn't want to deal with that because most of my time was spent trying to open a bank account um trying to deal with payment processor trying to deal with all of like the non-bitcoin stuff so i was like all right and when i think of things to do or opportunities it's tempting to go down and and start to be like well we could pick exchanges by doing this and this but when you think about just outside of that i mean if you think of you're thinking of the closed loop how does it work how does it work in the vacuum and and when you go down that path it's just so much more it's so much more interesting so let's let's go down that path so what do you what do

you envision what are you thinking about like what applications that maybe you haven't we haven't talked about or i i think of it less from applications and more i mean we pitch pitch bitcoin as this like kind of trust reduced or trust minimized machine i won't say trustless because it's kind of it's kind of misleading yes it is but it's a trust minimum you want to reduce um the amount of trust you need to put in like points of failure exactly across like i think as a guiding principle um and so you do that at the at the monetary layer because well you have fixed supply and you've uh the block rewards and it kind of it's all at least predetermined whether this is the optimal approach or not is a TBD but like no one is necessarily saying it is let's find

out but the odds are that it could be whereas we know others alternatives probably aren't we've seen that that this case so that's cool but then well then what where else can you minimize trust exchanges are a huge failure and that because that's like the gaping like there's a whole bunch of trust issues so then if we think about um things like we're talking about key generation or even around having like multi-sig you have to trust your key holders right maybe that's not a bad thing but what if someone's reputation is is staked on being a good like extra key holder yeah like a lawyer or something or any professional i envision like services where like there's like lawyers key services or something like that executor executor services yeah like notaries

and stuff exactly even even cpas it's like look the and i don't put too much emphasis on those type of roles because then again we're go down go down that path like there's still trust so i mean if you minimize that by saying well only lawyers or cps people who have like a professional obligation yeah i'm not saying these people the gatekeepers of this i'm saying lawyer and notary like services they're good and they're good but they're good examples because these are people who've taken and swear a professional obligation to like do their job and like be trustworthy so why i think this breaks down a little bit in the modern world is just because again incentives like people are human i said that i'm gonna do x and i took an oath but like

hey this is a lot of money like let's cash it out and run type of thing so what if you can't access it like you well now exactly and now so when you go and that's like you your only service is like hey you're or you try it once and then your one signature of a two of three yeah uh i lost actually yeah this actually does bring up an interesting situation but that might so and i don't know if it's a two of three situation yeah um and and there's but but more around like if you just if you need that like a key signer or someone to even i mean i guess what i'm trying to get at is we could because of bitcoin like i said you might in in the real world someone might say oh forget about my oath or something i'm just going to do this now they're prevented possibly technically

from doing that but they can also be more incentivized to do it cooperate cooperate because now you you have a reputation you have uh an address that you've been using or you have something like it's you can take advantage of the the functions of of the network yeah so whether it's from keys or even if you think about generating keys like why why not have like if if you want to do it in a secure way and you have someone who who does that or again i think to lawyers and notaries professionals who attest that this was done in a certain way like we can trust that like we could be skeptical but like you eventually you need to trust something so at least like dude i have these areas where you can do that i have this idea for that exact service

you're describing is basically like a hardware wallet they can literally go to where it's made and just like pick it up and just be like hey you can come watch the whole process like literally a fucking storefront for hardware while it's like hey you can look at the assembly line it's behind a glass wall we'll show you how it's made the whole way and you can have certainty that the supply chain was not fucked up i have daydreams about this i don't know if it's practical but i mean it'd probably be a mad expensive hard wallet but it would be cool right it would be it would be great and you're again you're minimizing the amount of trust you need to put in certain things and some people will find that worth it for sure but i guess the the the

opportunity in in a sense is with with this all this new stuff that we're talking about whether it's like i think lightning is also raises a lot of uh a lot of interesting questions just around like i mean well there's there's a whole bunch but around like if you're running a node like are you or or even if you're opening up payment channel like people will go like are you money transmitter do you have this and it's like those are valid questions but it doesn't matter because we can you can start to design how everything works without like from first principles we don't care how payments work today because this is fundamentally different so who cares if your money transmitter or not if there's no risk that you're going to lose your funds like why why would

you even care if this person is is licensed for something you you don't need one because they can't do anything to you type of thing right so and again it's like people don't again they don't don't know that the i don't want to say they don't know that these options exist but they they don't understand these options are different maybe or are different than the way or even i guess maybe maybe necessary because we're what we're talking about now and how i guess lightning as a payment network is fundamentally different from from the way payment networks work today i mean bitcoin is different from the way payment networks are today but i guess a better analogy would be to lightning but try talking to somebody about how you could make a like a more efficient

like uh payments like i what's more efficient than venmo or like sending of money and messages and stuff like cash app's way more efficient it is i i've been i i love cash app i like i got my card etched i thought it was the coolest thing ever people are like whoa like what card is that like i got this for free my black card baby yeah my black boost card but nobody nobody uses it My old roommates all sent me Venmo. I was like, guys, switch to the Cash app. And they were just like, well, why? I forgot about the other apps.

We're all Cash app now. I mean, cool. We can start to... I legit use the Booze program every day. Whether it's at the coffee shop or... I haven't saved a lot doing that, but I've saved something. Yeah, just a little bit of money. At least you know you're saving.

Yep. This wasn't planned to talk about this app, by the way. I just... No, it wasn't. I use it. I don't know if you have to do that, but... No, they're not currently sponsoring the pod. Oh, damn.

All right. It was a free show. that was a free show damn um but yeah like from a payments perspective again it takes you need to make that leap of saying like we should reinvent this type of stuff because again i think for most people at least in u.s north america like everything is relatively convenient if you accept the premise that like you're okay with the money you're using like payments i think a lot of the fintechs have done a good job improving the payment experience um so i think the opportunity for lightning is to completely from the infrastructure perspective like completely

flip everything over because now i mean anyone can be facilitate the transact these payments not just like use the network you can be part of it which most people like what again like what are you smoking man like you want to be part of the payment network why don't you just want to use this app like what the fuck do you what do we need to install to do that you're incentivized participate then so it you could earn like 10 cents a month routing payments that but like it also that's not the selling point to do it but the it's getting to a point though where it's going to be obvious that as a payment processor it's going to be dumb not to use this infrastructure if it's fully fleshed out from yeah so i think it was just announced

yesterday or the day before that mastercard or visa is about to raise their like processing fees like on merchants and stuff like that like lightning network if it becomes if it comes fully into fruition of what people envision that it can be as a second layer on bitcoin where it's the fees are hyper competitive with traditional payment processors if not make traditional payment processors obsolete because the fees are so low yeah like it's going to be as a decision maker like in the future you're going to be an idiot not to use it because the cost savings are so much and then compound that with the uh the inability to have chargebacks because it's a push system not a pull system and you create a completely different paradigm where it's like all right

you completely nix the possibility for chargebacks as a merchant and the credit card companies are be like all right let's make this happen yeah i mean thinking thinking down that that line of that line of thinking of if if the network matures into into the way that people are envisioning it i mean now first i guess in any anyone can kind of be that the role of payment processor kind of fundamentally chair richard's the shining example what he's trying to do with his uh no launcher yes it's it's it's like now you can't not do it i can't say no just that the barriers are gone right and anyone can do it and it's like so from an infrastructure perspective that's the coolest piece because well it's the coolest piece i think because in this future of

payments there's no multiple credit card networks do you accept this card you accept that one this one has higher fees this one doesn't it's just like no like it's just there's it's there's a universal qr code you accept cash like yeah just give it to me and so i think that's really compelling but especially because it doesn't mean that payment processors won't participate if you allocate capital to fund a channel the more you put the more you stand to control in terms of the network or control i mean the more market share or whatever transaction the more flow you have the more velocity you have or not a lot let's say velocity the more volume have come through your channel produces a better opportunity for collected fees yeah but now well

what does that mean as a as a payment channel then what you're doing as a business and how you're operating and thinking is so different from how it's done today like we can compare fees but there's like there's a hidden cost of these payments and shit like it's expensive to pay all those people and to run all these networks and to do customer service for lost pins and whatever else so like that will need to exist some to some degree but who knows kind of if you have a really efficient way of doing it or you you it just it changes the whole nature of what it is to be in payments i guess well it's like also hyper competitive to the point where it it's It's impossible not to see a scenario in which it drives these payment networks to the most efficient form that they can be because you get incentivized to basically route payments as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Yeah, because charging more fees is not going to solve your problem. They want speed. they want yeah but i mean you it's not you you would you will earn i think more fees through just volume than by just trying to like the the model of like oh hey let's pass on the cost to everybody else now because there's there's just too much fraud or we're just inefficient let's make it easier for everybody else completely flips it but but because you don't need to own the infrastructure it's already much cheaper and then again if instead of these three i mean visa mastercard amex you probably will have them participating on other banks participating

but because of how many individual people will do it too like you you reduce again it'll be somewhat centralized it maybe makes sense to use these certain payment networks but we're minimizing the level of trust overall that you have in the whole space so that it's like it's still a fair compromise so that the idea of what could become is is really promising and that's why like the beating out like venmo type app like all of that like other side of things has already been figured out in in the legacy system there's the kind of the the i guess the piping and the under the under the underpinnings of the network that need to be built out and if you consider the usability at this stage when you're building like the infrastructure the fact

that so many i guess there's so much volume on the network now in its in its kind of state even it's getting easier to your point to to spin up a note and to use it is like yeah like it's like if people were it's like when people are using credit cards and like you have to like use that like take a scan it yeah and like lost in new york baby it's like that's cumbersome but it was like revolutionary it's like we're like it's like we're probably not even at that stage of this yet right but the yeah it's it's it's just it's very exciting to to think about now having a more tangible way to like create a new or an alternative financial system kind of starts to make sense bitcoin you get all pumped about it but now it's like well this is actually practical this this

could become more usable and yeah how do monty damn eric's cat monty just hopped over my shoulder gave me half a heart attack yeah so this is like what i think i wanted to jump into was like where's the tipping point at which like people realize like holy shit we don't need to do this anymore like so you're talking about uh you mentioned the printing press or something earlier uh like we were at this inflection point where we're just sort of realized like holy shit like humanity in general has been handed this crazy technology that gives us affords us a crazy ability to be magnitudes of order more productive than we ever have been uh in human history and we just so happen to be born in that inflection point i would argue the internet and bitcoin

in tandem are sort of paired together and bitcoin coming a little bit later sort of helping us realize that holistic view like holy shit like we have this inflection point and we are literally like the pivot and being alive in that pivot like how do you how do we comprehend this and and sort of react accordingly i mean sorry for getting cosmic on you no it's just just realizing We're really at that point of knowing enough about the pre-internet and Bitcoin world to appreciate what we have now in a way that I know older generations don't typically because of, I guess, just being more far removed from the internet in general. but then now what i think makes me more optimistic about this is the younger generations um like digital natives like people who are probably like 10 years old right now like these are these are these are kids especially i mean especially in in the western world this is

my experience to speak from like you picture 10 year olds here today like this is a kid who's probably has a good chance of not opening a bank account not wanting to or needing to which is pretty fucking cool but then what does that impact a person who's like yeah well i don't obviously i don't want to bank out like it's inconvenient to deal with look at all this other stuff like that's that's pretty interesting and then also imagine being like i mean i don't know i'm a new i guess as a canadian we kind of know a bit about american politics but like don't really care but like as a i don't care either yeah and not to get into politics in any stretch but as a 10 or 12 year old now and seeing like seeing what's seeing what's going on in the u.s is kind

of like it's got to make you stop and be like like when i was 10 years old like that shit was on the simpsons now it is actually happening so like this confluence of things for younger generation i think is is that might be the tipping point because we get it out of effort and interest and like in spite of surviving comfortably without really needing to know about bitcoin maybe shit's not going to hit the fan to the degree where it's like people will forcibly be like yeah we need to get this but i think that if we've made this mental leap to understanding and kind of going like going down this bitcoin rabbit hole i think that's like the generation that's primed to beat us there in terms of comprehending it and kind of taking us to another level about

it because they have the i guess the benefit of not knowing what it was like to deal with what we've all had to deal with growing up and i guess financially and just otherwise in the world so i think that might be the the tipping point man i find it hard not to agree with that and again i don't want to get politically here but like i have been so turned off by the particularly here in the united states political system like i can't take the fucking constant churn of election cycles election cycles the fact that we're already fucking talking about the 2020 election makes me want to shoot my dick off fuck like it never ends and it's yes it's it's it's hard to tune out what i find especially interesting is that's like that's a common i

guess american complaint around just there's between i think the four-year cycle of presidential elections and then whatever there's the other multitude of other elections that are going on in between that there's a lot it's every two years you have like a major election cycle it's like i don't even want to pay attention to this and like so like it's non-stop really it's non-stop and then nothing ever changes you go from democrats or republican democrats or republican republican republican democrat democrat republican democrat republican really does it make nothing meet the new boss same as the old boss but people find ways to fucking bicker and nothing ever changes and i me personally i'm at a point where that's another driving force of my bitcoin sort of

journey is like i honestly like this is a fucking alternative that if we build it correctly can fucking make this shit obsolete we can stop fucking bickering like a bunch of bitches put energy to anything more productive but no that's it's well said man there's that's that's the crazy thing about the u.s there's like just this politics are everywhere especially i don't know i moved here in october of uh 2016 so it's like this is the only america welcome to america bruh but like in canada my gripes are around well the way that we don't the two-party system here whatever in canada there's like three larger parties and like the prime minister they will win the election like 32 of the vote like more than 60 of the country did not vote for that

person but because of the electoral system there it's like well they're they have a they have a minority they can't do shit but they're still in charge type of thing like so that's like in the u.s a different problem same type of shit so for me it's just like oh like it's just so it's such a better way to to probably spend time than right because it's it's apathy i think i don't care anymore because exactly unless it's like that's my biggest worry for bitcoin is apathy yeah but apathy from politics could be beneficial it could be a boon for bitcoin people just realizing like well this is a more productive way to actually do something well it becomes a slippery slope when that apathy can turn into nihilism because right but that's why i'm grateful for uh donald

trump because instead of feeling nihilistic about the like futility of the system it's like this guy is the like walking example of like why everyone that talks shit about like government in general is right like right it's like it's like and again i say this as a canadian because if i lived here i would be much more like distraught about it but at the end of the day it's like i'm pretty distraught about it all of it it's like it's all i've been saying like your outrage like yeah like the whole like the whole thing is kind of a joke right he's just the the big punch line that that now people are starting to like oh shit maybe the system is broken like right but it goes back to theme of like it worries me that we're becoming too disconnected from reality we're like again

that apathy can turn into nihilism it's like well like we pretend like the blue team versus the red team matters and we debate about it election after election every four or two years whichever you want to measure it on and nothing ever fucking changes like oh shit like nothing matters like now i'm nihilistic arby's like come on down eat some meat and die in your car yeah no that's it fucking worries me though and like and i do think like we have something to strive for as like humans i don't know i think we've been handed a special opportunity as the species that we are specifically we can fucking think and fucking and and and and that's my biggest fear is nobody fucking thinks for themselves no no sadly sadly

not we've been given this opportunity there's too many other there's too many other things to do next to monty the cat monty can think but he can't communicate that to us no if only if only he could i'm sure he'd say some fucking dope shit but like probably we're handed this opportunity i'm trying i'm getting very cosmic here i've drank a lot of your bullet looking down on us yeah stupid humans but like i don't know man but that's again this this is all kind of why i'm still optimistic about this kind of this like tipping point that we're talking about bitcoin because i think and and your fear of apathy is is well warranted but we're also kind of again grown and tired of this like it's it's this like you said like a cycle politically and

just kind of in society well like this is just repetitive cycle around politics and it's becoming more divisive i feel like again we know what it i vaguely remember but kind of know what it's like for everything not to be hyper politicized and maybe it kind of goes hand in hand with technology internet social media like i i don't i don't know i don't know the causes of these things but i know what it was like before and people growing into this that don't have to hope that like this isn't to like the standard for them like oh yeah this is what this is what everything is like like hopefully gets better like i have to feel like there might be some more renewed energy of like this is really fucking crazy like we got to do something anything's better than this so

cautiously optimistic but i i i get that sense that like if this if bitcoin made sense to to us and people who are currently in some way contributing to it being involved in this giant thing like it only makes more sense now like imagine never hearing about bitcoin and learning about it tomorrow like right this is where your starting point is it's like you have a you have history to look back like it's not just like learn about what this is you have history like you can spend years reading about talking to people with the shit that's gone on in this space since the beginning of time so you have a bunch of like context to get into and they have this fresh mind of like yeah you have more distrust for banks financial institutions governments like

i don't know i feel like it's like the um like uh gunpowder very ripe like very yeah yeah i agree at least that's that's the best hope that's what i'm thinking i'm all jacked up now spending all time trying to convince baby boomers to invest their retirement savings in bitcoins like no like let's get let's get let's get kids let's get kids fucking fighting for satoshis on fortnite yeah right damn not a bad idea right as long as they could buy some skins or something with it exactly or even fight no but you need a you need a non-fungible token um to represent that asset in your video game otherwise you need to copy it you need an nft monty right i think we're close to video games video games are probably a good on-ramp just seeing like

holy shit like i could actually do this that was the episode i dropped today with uh andre neves from koala studio like the simple act of creating like a chess game where you can fucking bet against the person you're playing anonymously online like i mean online gambling has been taboo in the u.s more recently but was it ever like did you were you ever uh did you ever play like poker or anything online luckily never became a gambler in any form sports gambling card gambling i mean i played i played poker before with friends in person but never online i've actually won a couple that's more fun i've won a couple texas texas hotel games probably played 10 games probably won twice i don't know if that's good record not very good

poker players yeah oh me neither but playing playing online poker is always fun it was just a huge pain in the ass i never got into that i never got into it like so i hear online poker is like a huge like i mean you got to train for six windows open and probably using all kinds of like not cheat codes but people are good at math yeah um but i mean like i don't know i think i think it was fun and not not certainly a way to make a living but when you when you add that element of financial gain to a game that you're playing which is kind of how i always viewed gambling was like oh i could finally play the game but like it's not for like some tokens or some like like points or something you could play it just always card games there's not many now you

can do that i mean now you can kind of wager on games and there's there's it's becoming more of a seamless experience so i think that's that's kind of cool yeah fun and i again i'm excited like i i've said this many times the last couple weeks like i think the uh sort of collision of gaming and bitcoin specifically bitcoin and lightning network and satoshi's in particular is just like natural and inevitable at this point uh imagine being able to trade your v bucks for satoshi's and just make v bucks obsolete and just earn satoshi's like just makes sense to me i think so and even if you have to kind of work your way there earning satoshi's playing any game and just being able to buy shit with it or take it out would be great too right like that's the thing

video game companies don't want competition to their shitty tokens either what if they become big routers and they're able to get yeah i mean that that kind of goes that kind of goes back to saying before those that i think bitcoin has so many use cases in these other areas but people kind of are just like no no we've got to have our own token or something in there to make it work and it's like don't like no not really provide efficiencies in some areas of the system you can benefit and participate what if video game companies didn't have to create these tokens and manage them whatever just like hey spend your money here i don't care we're not gonna pay like crazy credit card fees and put your credit card number in when you're playing playstation is

exactly imagine like the amount of money that will be transacted just because it's easier to do it probably a lot i hope i don't want him to to break any of your stuff here no he's fine i just need to open this laptop to make sure there we go cool um we're an hour 48 minutes in i've drank half your bottle of bullet bourbon i'm pretty hammered right now it's been incredible conversation yeah i'm glad uh i don't usually have my conversations recorded when i'm hanging out but this is this is cool this has been fun we always have great conversations i've got one last question for you so it goes yeah it's on your left arm your left forearm what does it mean uh it was a convenient size of a phrase to put on my arm yeah uh yeah i mean i

mean it's from it's from the it's from the book slaughterhouse five um never read it it's like a world war ii sci-fi book okay interesting but uh basically anytime someone dies in the book just right to the end of chapter so it goes i thought it was a funny way to kind of morbid way to to have a reaction to that um and kind of highlighted i think at least in the story just the the futility of really like getting worked up about that type of stuff so if you had to get a tattoo is always going to be sitting there reminding you it's kind of like well yeah so it goes so it goes kind of the the shruggy shruggy emoji guy i love it in a in a tattoo you only have one life right fucking that would have oh man that that i think that acronym is well into

a tattoo i think that's what drives me towards bitcoin is like we're talking about like the younger generation get into it and we were talking about our generation earlier and i do like going back to that inflection point we're born i were like literally the bridge between fucking the age before aol aol and like the internet as we know it now yeah like we have a lot of shit to feel hold about right whereas that used to be like a wow or cutting cutting edge you know yeah so bar has been set higher for what it is to be like a like a old like have old like just like the old school view on things yeah and this like but like this is like making me think of like the conversations i've been having more recently about how fast or slow bitcoin adoption will

happen and i think more recently it's been trending towards people like ah it's gonna happen slower than you would imagine but after this conversation and thinking about uh the potential users coming up from uh under us in a demographic perspective is like holy shit maybe these people will surprise us uh from an adoption standpoint and i mean if it's easier for them to adopt which it already is then that's a good starting point i don't know numbers around how many young people there are in in in in the world really but i'd assume there's at least as many as as us probably around that but i guess what it comes down to is that at the pace of which it will grow is going to depend what like what you what what did what you can do with it or how

much of like how integral part of your life it would become and that it could happen like that like it could be it could be just in an instant where suddenly well again you think of younger people bank accounts whatever political leanings but also jobs like i don't know what was your first job hot dog stand baby yeah they're actually delivering papers on the beach but then first real job right made some real cash was able to buy gum with it and other stuff hot dog stand yeah i i worked at mcdonald's yeah and it's like get your first job you start to make some money and do stuff like i feel like that experience probably different for younger people now too because i mean i think that most most of these jobs that we had are being automated or

you can contract out well one of the best uh hardware wallet hackers is a fucking he started hacking these wallets when he was 14 um god i'm sorry i forget his name one of you freaks who remembers his name please mention it in the comments after we put this on twitter but the kid's literally 15 years old and has hacked the ledger and the trezor like new additions like every time they'd come out that's amazing and nobody nobody knew he was as young as he was until he basically made people aware like hey i'm like further shame i'm like a 15 year old and now i'm hacking all your shit like that's wild look at the tools he has his disposal now like it's right so that's that's that's what i'm saying like these these i mean i think back to my

first job i was so happy to get it i could buy maybe a laptop later it was great but now again just i think about the gig economy the way that kind of these entry-level jobs are like a you might not really want to do that and you may also be incentivized not to work that type of job by like finding another way to make money right and if there are and they're become increasingly like easier more ways to just either earn bitcoin because you you actually want to which i mean i think it's it's a great way if you're doing any type of any type of service just accept it as payment you don't only have to accept it but just take some like why not but that could become more prevalent that's what i do with so i still need to get a job it's like hey you can

i'm still a wage cuck i still have a nine to five job i i work for a salary uh and i i still do like uh bi-weekly buys when i get paid like i'll buy a little bitcoin but to supplement like more recently like i've been selling podcasts and newsletter ads and say hey i'll accept this revenue for bitcoin just huddle it and there you go it's been a great way to accumulate and it's honestly brought like a peace of mind and like i don't have to like worry about buying bitcoin like just being able to be like hey you kind of just you earn it you get it when you can but again you're trading something that's still quite valuable for it which is your time yeah exactly but you you want to because you want something and i think that's that's where

that's where we'll hopefully end up with again uh as more people learn about it now it's again more slightly well not slightly it's it's it's always becoming more useful more that you could do with it there's more ways to contribute than ever so i don't know i mean maybe if there's even slightly more in the younger generations people who get more involved earlier it will already have i think a pretty big impact and again it's just it's an it's people are just opting into this like people just it's just eventually they're drawn to it for one of many reasons and people are way more tech savvy now than they were like generally so i i just i'm optimistic about not that we're going to gain this mass adoption and i said when i say we i've been

talking about this this entire kind of community and experiment maybe mass adoption isn't the best thing now or ever better to have that kind of group of people who believe in kind of why they're they're participating in this and just do it because it makes sense tired of people just being like hey man like when do you think price is gonna go up to this oh my god i don't fucking know right don't don't like go and buy go and buy a ripple or something like right like that's not speculation is great it's part of why the the ecosystem of cryptocurrencies are so big and bitcoin is super liquid for that but like i mean that's not unless you're trading as a trader what you could do and then you feel like that's not the point think bigger think bigger exactly

everything if everything you believe about bitcoin becomes true then like fuck yeah it's probably going to be worth a lot more than it is today there's a lot of ifs there and you're not rationalizing a huge valuation it's like there's it's going to take work and it might not happen but that's kind of people that see it or see differently or want to get there is like that's that's i would take like a thousand people that are contributing like that than to get like 100 000 people who are like oh like my money's still stuck it's gonna go when can i trade my bitcoin for this or like well that's what's a what's a paper wallet that's another thing of the beauty of bitcoin is like it really instills this if not me then who mentality and like if you

want to make bitcoin a thing you can like i would argue we have tried to like i obviously do with this podcast every single day every single day you're you're out there and people i mean how do you get well you must get a lot of cool fan mail and stuff like how many people like this would be a fascinating introduction to bitcoin listening to your podcast i feel bad for the people i get introduced to bitcoin vma um i don't know like i just like feel like the average joe trying to explain this as i'm learning it and but like that and that's why i want to have this conversation with you that's why i fucking forced this podcast on you it's because i think you have such an incredible perspective and the mindset from which you

approach building bills and and then leaving bills and sort of approaching the other side of the bitcoin or excuse me the blockchain not bitcoin mentality like fascinates me because you sort of like have a holistic view of bitcoin the philosophy how uh corporations approach it how designers approach it how practical entrepreneurs approach it from your own view and i feel like five six years after you first started bill is your you're sort of coming into your own like all right now i gotta lay the landscape starting to make a bit more sense yeah exactly no i think I think that's spot on, and it reminds me of something, actually.

A mentor of mine, someone I've looked up to a lot professionally over the years, who actually kind of helped me get more involved in Bitcoin. Monty. Hey, man. He's very talkative sometimes. He doesn't want to be alone. Eric's cat, Monty, is probably the prettiest cat I've ever seen in my life.

Give me a sec. Get him. 158. 28. I'm going to go pee real quick. We've got plenty of time. Yeah, awesome. I just, yeah, he, he, uh...

Uh, what you were saying reminded me of, uh, of, uh, of something one of my mentors had, had had explained to me uh about his his journey into bitcoin okay um and so i i got i got my opportunity to uh to work in in new york do kind of like blockchain type of stuff uh through co-worker uh from new york at the time who had seen uh a talk that i had done about bitcoin and was like hey like we should put together some training material and stuff and like talk to people about this at the firm this is a TEDx talk yeah okay yeah I did that one in uh at some point in 2015 um so that was a fun experience and so he saw this this guy that I worked with in New York and was like hey like saw your video like we should we should chat and like put some stuff

together so that was the start of like my side projects and stuff at the at my firm and trying to get more involved and we just basically put together bitcoin trainings and stuff um and so recently uh he was he was explaining his journey through i think just different blockchains or other projects he basically said it's kind of like sleeping in someone's house that you've never met before and trying to find your way to the bathroom in the dark kind of stumble around the room and like knock into a bunch of shit like you make it there eventually um but you kind of hurt yourself bit and got lost along the way and that's kind of i love this kind of kind of how kind of how it kind of feel and have evolved related to bitcoin the way you describe it is kind of that like

you learn by doing things that you realize eventually are like wrong or don't make any sense to kind of come back full circle and realize like okay yeah like this is what i thought it was and i you have more of that appreciation when you realize like okay yeah those were all the other opportunities or ways that didn't really make sense right Eric it's been an incredible conversation yeah man thanks for doing this

I'm sorry I'm closest glad that you showed up with your podcast gear I'm sorry I did this to you I feel like I needed to though I said this after the first time we met I was like we need to sit down and talk I mean if not this may have either never happened

or happened so far into the future that God knows what we'd be talking about. Right. So, no, I'm glad that you came by us. This has been fun. Maybe I'll get a few more followers on Twitter today. You don't want that. You don't want that, Eric.

They're all haters. I mean... I'm kidding. At least I don't have to pay for them. That's true. Yeah, paying for followers is pretty weak. Yeah, I mean, I've never done that before, clearly, But I'm just saying

I don't have to Although that's probably another market that could be Facilitated through It's so obvious though like when you buy followers Yeah People's follower counts drop like by millions I don't know That and then like

Somebody with like 25,000 followers gets like A like and maybe a retweet Like on most of their tweets It's like eh do you really have 25,000 followers I mean does it really matter No it doesn't matter at all be your own be your own freak freaks that's the advice tonight i'm uh i'm semi black out right now uh i want to thank our gracious guest eric spano for coming on you freaks don't know it

but he was the founder of one of the most integral uh bitcoin companies that's alive still alive today i would argue uh started from a need to explain bitcoin and turn into an integral part of actually helping people actually helping people in bitcoin in canada in particular eric i'm happy to to introduce you to to the tales from the crypt universe thank you again for having me this has been fun oh thanks for coming on monty it's been chill hanging with you too that's the cat peace and love freaks