TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #70: Ruben Waterman

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

Join Marty and Matt Odell as they sit down with the one man team behind Bittr, the easiest way to stack sats in Europe. We discuss Ruben's path to Bitcoin, his experience getting a Masters in Blockchain from the University of Nicosia, why he built Bittr, what it's like bootstrapping a company, and much more. Check out Bittr: https://www.getbittr.com/ Follow Ruben on Twitter: https://twitter.com/watermaniak Follow Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/matt_odell Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/martybent Shoutout to our sponsor, Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today.

This episode of Tales from the Crypt is sponsored by the Cash App. You freaks already know all about them. They're helping us stack stats. They've also been the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years. They're the first peer-to-peer payments app to allow you freaks to buy Bitcoin. It's the easiest way in the U.S., in my opinion. No more having to wait five days for your ACH transfer to come through. With Cash App, you can buy Bitcoin instantly, and then when you're ready to take full ownership, When you are comfortable taking possession of your UTXOs and custodying your own private keys, just use the Cash App to scan an external wallet's QR code and send your Bitcoin off where you can copy and paste the address into the Cash App and take custody of your own Bitcoin.

Cash App also comes with standard banking features like direct deposits, other things that your bank doesn't offer like the Boost Program, the Cash Card, which is customizable and comes with the Boost Program. It helps you instantly save anytime you use it at Lyft, Whole Foods, Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, local coffee shops, which is my favorite. I used it two hours ago down the street and saved a dollar. Download the Cash App today from the App Store, Google Play, Store Freaks, and keep stacking sats. Hope you enjoy this conversation with Ruben from Bitter. I know Matt and I had a really fun time talking with him. Okay. Tales from the Crypt.

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here in the studio for recording number two of the day. Matt and I just ripped a rabbit hole recap that just went live, so I hope you freaks are liking that. We're sitting down with a very special guest. He's come all the way from Portugal just to come on Tales from the Crypt. I'd like to introduce you freaks to the founder, CEO,

and one-man team behind Bitter, Ruben Waterman. And Ruben, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks for coming, man. It seems like you had the most pleasant New York City customs. Yeah, it was super fast. Just 20 minutes.

Like, what's going on here? You guys actually want tourists? Yeah. Yeah, I've been a big hater on the customs in my last few international trips. It's been very hard for me. and I'm happy to hear that your experience was seamless because it's a pretty terrible introduction to New York City as JFK Customs.

I don't think I've ever heard one positive thing ever said about New York City Customs. Here's the first. There you go. Ruben's with the first. We forgot the third mic before we recorded Rabbit Hole Recap, so Matt scooted back to his apartment to pick up that mic, and while we were there, I was diving into your tale.

I think it's very interesting. So as we do on Tales from the Crypt, how'd you find bitcoin you seem to have a very uh very funny story yeah so while i was studying i studied abroad for a while uh in boston in the u.s and one of my roommates was like oh you guys you guys have to look into bitcoin and this was like kind of the crazy roommate and i was like oh whatever and they were he was like yeah that's what they use on on silk roads you know like this this dark web and i was like not really intrigued by bitcoin but this dark web sounded interesting So I got the Tor browser and figured out the onion address for Silk Road.

And I just saw all these weird things that were for sale. And everything was priced in Bitcoin. So I was like, that kind of scared me off. And I was like, oh, no, no, no Bitcoin for me. You were studying in the States, what, 2011? Yeah, this was 2011, yeah. So you have a very common story where you find it on the Silk Road. And then a couple of years later, it comes back to tap you on the shoulder and says, hey.

yeah so then in my last year of the bachelor back in holland um one of the major dutch banks asked a couple of students from my university like hey can you send in like a couple of students every friday for three or four months and study bitcoin for us and see what we should do with it and uh well we were a team of six all the other guys they don't do anything with bitcoin but i stuck with it because i was like oh if this actually is going to work it's amazing what uh what sort of piqued your interest about it um it being not inflatable it's like my main yeah what what got me into it is like the the supply is fixed it's 21 million and nobody can ever create more of it just like i mean this was while we were going through the 2008 financial

crisis and just quantitative easing all over and i was like oh i mean say goodbye to your savings So what was it like experiencing that crisis as a European? I mean, we have a lot of guests that come through and talk about the American point of view of the global financial crisis. What were you seeing over in Holland? I think overall in Europe, I think we saw even more, like the government intervening even more than here. Like we had not a single bank collapse. I mean, not really. Like everyone got bailed out except for Cyprus.

um like here at least i believe some major companies went bust in the 2008 financial crisis and not in europe i let a couple go lehman salomon brothers like kind of went fake bust right yeah let a couple of the old heads die and like a lot of gobbles there was a lot of gobble ups yeah the consolidation it was more of a bank consolidation play and we had massive bailouts too yeah two trillion dollars or yeah it's the simplicity it's not just it's like just 21 million it's just so simple it's simple yeah when all this shit's going flying around you know you just 21 million yeah and um so you got reintroduced in 2013 at this course in holland but you said you spent some time in cyprus too correct yeah yeah so then after my bachelor's i did my um

master's in cyprus and this was the master's in digital currency it's hosted by the university of nicosia it's it is completely remote but as a kid i we we went on holidays a lot in cyprus and was like you know actually that would be a nice place to live at least for a year or so and that's what i did i um met a bunch of the staff at the university but none of the lecturers because everyone is remote like there's people from the us uh teaching and from australia all over would you recommend the class yes yeah you're probably like one of the oldest like masters recipients of digital currency oh well no because i only graduated last uh what was it last july or so oh okay so there have been a couple of cohorts before me yeah i think they launched in like 2014

or something yeah that's right what was uh what was the course like what was the structure of it um so basically you start a new class every eight weeks and it's just one class at a time so that really helps with the focus and you start off with a money and banking course so you really look into like you know what the current financial system is and then you move on to a class called open financial systems uh where you kind of reinvent the current currently existing business models in the financial industry and like try to figure out something that could be decentralized or could be done on top of bitcoin so did you uh run into a lot of bad ideas of people trying these to decentralize things that probably shouldn't be oh yes absolutely so i i tried to do like a

a stupid blockchain project like in the supply chain and i was like at the end of the like you compose a nice report but then yet in the end of the class i was like this is not going to work why um i mean we were like so in europe you've got these um like way bills you also have them in aviation for cargo we also have it for road logistics so i was trying to like put those on a blockchain and like make it better but at the end of the day someone still needs to put that data on the blockchain so you there's really no use of it i think um did you guys see the block stream clip they did like the parody clip of like the the time stamps being on every like water bottle and thing to sort of to sort of like illustrate what it would be like the blockchain

the supply chain it's hilarious thinking that you would need to like use proof of work to hash some data to prove that a water bottle got to you from a certain supplier it's just silly yeah no but i think we should find that video and post a link because it's a very good visualization of how stupid blockchaining the supply chain is i'm sorry i'm sorry is it older is it an older link it's last three months i'm pretty sure i think it was like an april i think it was an april fools thing maybe oh i just i turned off the internet especially in the fucking bitcoin industry it's the worst it's the worst day of the year yeah because you don't know you already don't know what's real and what's not real like someone could actually be fucking tokenizing water

bottles or something and you would have no idea i think coinbase like actually launched a real product on april fools which is it's the exact issues like you have no idea what the hell is going on especially with coinbase i tune off tune off don't i don't i don't participate but um back to this master's class like economic theory projects like how you make decentralized like then are you diving into like the nitty-gritty code of how to yeah so i took the like i mean it's not really computer science but they have two tracks one is more like financial and one is more like computer science so i did that one um you look a bit into cryptography that's one course and there's a programming course um i'm not a developer myself but i did take that course and

it was hard it was uh my lowest grade of of the whole masters but i actually learned the most so it was really good awesome what uh so yeah so what do you think you learned over over this master like how did your perspective of this stuff shift over the course of your master's when you went to the masters yeah i was okay um well for one so i did my my bachelor and masters at normal universities back in holland and you know you get all those micro and macro economics courses and like just in the very first course in in the degree in cyprus i was like oh actually there's more like i had never heard of the austrian school of economics until i came there so so yeah that was big it's another common trope between bitcoiners yep it's uh

it is fascinating though how this is a broken record at this point on tales from the crypt but it's fascinating somebody who studied economics myself and you get a degree and you don't even think about it while you're getting that degree but you're supposed to have like a a well-rounded knowledge of the subject yet you're only force-fed a very very thin sort of school of thought behind the whole encompassing subject i just find it weird that you they only teach you canes and they don't even tell you that there's other things like in normal universities it's just the way it is yeah it's the way it is it's the right way according to them it's reality but don't even get me started i've been triggered enough on this podcast last

month and a half talking about central bankers uh so you got injured to austrian after bitcoin yeah i feel like bitcoin really it almost like memifies austrian because it it in a way it makes it so simple to understand because it's just what it used to be that could you used to be just like a theoretical case study what happens if you had a perfectly fixed supply of just this number and that's it it's just fixed but but but now that's real and it makes i think a lot of people like they they see it they understand the value of that just straight fixed supply first and it allows it like really opens up austrian economics to them in the first place yeah no and it's satoshi early on on i forget it was the mailing list or bitcoin talk sort of said this will probably

appeal to the libertarian austrian school very innately and sort of attack that uh demographic to help uh bootstrap the network and it just makes makes sense and again going back to like not being taught in schools it's the other great thing about bitcoin is it forces you learn it forces you to get a master's degree so let's get back to that like uh the comp side part of it do you think you would be able to have built better without this program um i don't know if i would have gotten the idea but i mean i'm still like i'm still hiring external developers to actually build it but uh yeah the idea definitely came out of the master's degree so in the very first course money and banking um we had to think of just one one

financial industry a company that could be done on top of bitcoin and back when i lived in the us i was using acorns back in 2011 and i was like there should be something like this for just to do bitcoin i mean you don't need to invest in all the other shit coins but just bitcoin and then like doing the recurring buys doing your change automatically invest that in Bitcoin and what I also like about acorns is they team up with kind of like what lolly does like they team up with other companies and they say they go if you spend like a thousand dollars with us we invest $50 back into your acorns account stuff like that and I was like well actually that should be done for

bitcoiners and so um with bitter i started just with the recurring buys but like that's kind of like the long-term vision that i have um yeah just acorns but then for bitter uh for bitcoin so what's the the mechanics of building that product been like like acquiring the bitcoin divvying it out after purchases or and stuff like that so the mechanics of how bitter works nowadays days yes so basically we just automatically check our bank accounts every hour and then we check for new transactions if the incoming transactions is from a customer that we've already signed up in the past they just go through automatically up into a certain amount we place the buy order at

either Kraken or bitstamp and then from our own wallet we pay out the Bitcoin directly into the customer's wallet and at the end of each business day we just like um reconcile the balances and add up funds in kraken and bitstamp and uh to our own bitcoin wallet basically do you have special deals with those exchanges where they where they're like we know you're going to provide some volume so um no but it's just volume based anyway so like on kraken you um the fee drops with every 50 000 euros of volume yeah um so how's you said you've been working on this for two years but you're able to go live in august of 2018 correct yeah that's right so what uh what's sort of the hurdles that you saw oh i mean yeah i started this during my

study still um and i probably spent about six months with the developers to build the whole product and i was like in april like oh yeah i'm ready to go so i you know went to the i don't know this agency that you register a company with in holland um and i thought okay next step is getting a bank account and i was like oh that's pretty difficult if you're a crypto company because uh all of the major dutch banks they were from the like very very first appointment they were like no you're not getting an account with us just no and there was like one that's like kind of like a startup bank like it's a bit more modern they only have an app there's no physical branches and they they promote themselves as crypto friendly banks so i was like yeah i should try

them they have a nice api too so that's that's great for bitter and um it took some time but eventually they did give me an account what bank is this bunk bunk bunk b-u-n-q p-u-n-q nice so um i guess that's something that i'm interested in as an american like like that's something being in new york state too that's something we talk about is like regulatory hurdles a lot with bitfinex being in the news a lot oh yeah and we have the bit license here which makes it really difficult extra difficult so yeah i think that's funny like on some crypto platforms when you sign up it's like you have to put a checkbox like i'm not from cuba sudan or iraq or whatever or new york or new york state i think that makes us feel

it makes us feel horrible no the one like yeah it was like north korea iran and new york state yeah exactly in cuba or whatever yeah it's ridiculous so in europe it's a bit vague at the moment um for example i've i've asked my uh central bank so the central bank of holland like what do you guys think do i need to do a license for this and they're like no not yet we don't regulate it um so that's a bit strange but um starting from december no january 2020 uh there's like a new update for the european legislation on this anti-money laundering stuff and then uh that will be able to apply for a license and it's it's like not that bad right um i don't know yet i mean for as for the kyc we still need to do that because our bank requires

it to do it like there's no way that we can offer our service without doing some kyc right so i feel like we kind of like skipped over what bitter was a little bit right oh yeah it's so i so i just you tweeted at us right that's how we discovered each other um and immediately going to your website i love like the simplicity of it it's just you register an address right the customer registers an address with you and then anytime they transfer money to your bank account you buy the equivalent amount of bitcoin and send it to them did i get that right exactly yeah it's that simple they don't have to register like what time they're sending it or anything they just send it to you and i'm not doing anything for the customer until they send me their money so it's not like

they have a subscription they're free to come and go whenever they want and and i like that kind of product why did you uh pick this setup in particular um because i thought the way to do dollar cost averaging on coinbase is horrible like nobody makes the effort to actually withdraw other coins so it's like i mean you have bitcoin and people are storing it massively at a massive bitcoin bank which is coinbase like i thought i should do that better hence bitter is so i think it's such an awesome it's such a cool setup because you don't have to worry about custodying their bitcoin it doesn't i don't want to take that risk yeah exactly it makes it so much lighter on you and on their end they can just whatever their bank they just set reoccurring payments if they

want to do reoccurring or whatever order they want to do and they can just do it and also on the website there's not there's nothing like a customer portal so i mean i hope it'll never happen but if i get hacked like the most i could lose is my own bitcoin like there's not never any customer data exposed on the website how about like the kyc all the kyc data stuff like that Yeah. The KYC data is stored offline. The addresses are obviously in my database because otherwise I can't operate, but that's not exposed to the website. Yeah. That's the one we've been talking to Michael from Noddle. That's the one question he had is about reusable addresses and adding the functionality to be able to dump a bunch of addresses to get to help with that obscurity. yeah so when i designed the product i was like i wanted to be as simple as possible like i want to know as little as feasible about the customer but i also want to make it like you know as easy for

them as possible so i just figured four steps first step email address then the phone number bitcoin address and then done like that's it um now being almost like almost a year life i found quite a bit of people requesting for like the possibility to to enter an xpub key so that you know for every deposit i could use a new address in your wallet but i was like i don't i don't want to have people's xpub keys because then i could like i mean not that i'm interested but i the just the fact that i have that information bothers me you could see every transaction exactly i don't want i don't want to do that so now i've thought about a bit more about it and um i'm thinking that you know if people are responsible and they enter an xp key that

hasn't been used yet um that at least says that it was empty when they signed up and i can check i can like verify if it was empty when they when they sign up so that's what i'm gonna do and and implement it that way so before actually paying out to any of those addresses i'm first gonna check if that expert was ever used if it's used i'm just not gonna take it i like that so they don't act they can't accidentally expose their past transactions and you just hope the customer is smart enough to just understand like that's their bitter wallet yeah and they should transfer out of that so so that that xpub doesn't uh show any other it's a nice simple way to do it i think i think it's the best alternative like at the moment it's address reuse which is not great um

getting people's xpub is also not great but then again like for some merchant to sit from for some merchant providers they also do that so that they can pay out to every new address yeah i guess like the issue i guess the issue would be with the single addresses is that if someone is watching that address they if they figure out what that address is they can see how much bitcoin you're buying yeah just to easily track how much bitcoin you're buying so like Like, that's why this XBug idea would be a big improvement, I think. No, but I think this particular product feature highlights the sort of push and pull between users and builders who you're trying to take in as little data as possible, users want as much functionality as possible,

so it's having that conversation with your user base, like, all right, what are we comfortable with? And how, I guess, the question I'm leading into is, like, how do you try to explain these tradeoffs, like, within the product? that's a bit difficult i mean i for sure i'm i still want my mom to be able to use the service so i'm gonna leave the sign up as it is today uh but then on the page where i would normally ask the user's bitcoin address i would just add a button like hey if you know what you're doing you can enter an xpub key here like the advanced button yeah whatever exactly i think that's a nice balance that is because i really love how simple your service is it's like the ultimate stacking sats like reminds me of esteco a little bit um obviously with a big account instead of cash yeah

exactly um that's incredible that's like one that we've been pumping stacking sats uh here on this podcast um we stack sats with cash app here in the states but i think so like in europe you're saying coinbase was the only thing how many other like bitter like products are there um well well obviously there's nobody doing exactly my way of being non-custodian but i guess like there's in every european country there's usually like a brokerage firm they would probably offer like a recurring buy option but then they're always going to be custodian yeah it's almost like similar to like i feel like how like an otc would be set up OTC relationship, but

with actual end users that anyone can... So you're available all of Europe? Anywhere in the EU? Yeah. I'm currently talking with the German regulator, so it's not available in Germany yet, but

it should be soon. Everywhere but Germany, in the EU. Awesome. Thank you for building this. It's crazy that you're a one-man team. yeah i mean when back in in university it was actually two of us working on it but the guy i was working with during the studies was a bit older had a family and he got a really good job offer for one of the major polish brokerage exchange companies so he went there

then i first tried to find someone else to do to do it with but i just couldn't and i was like i need to get going like needs to be built and you've been bootstrapping this bitch too haven't you yeah how's that been uh i mean this is a conscious decision right to bootstrap instead of yeah i mean i don't i don't like you know over planning everything and like oh we need a lot of money and like get investors on board and get a whole team set up it's like no it's it's a super simple service i'm just gonna see if it works if people actually want this and we can always grow like at the moment the most time i spend on is like verifying new customers and doing a bit of customer support but uh and and that's like the only thing that would require more people at the

moment i think this is a very underappreciated mindset in the world right now especially the vc world that we're in like the fact that you're able to bootstrap this is sort of ingenious way of getting bitcoin to people is is a a case study and like hey you don't need to go raise eight million dollars to provide utility and no ico is necessary yeah you're stacking stats on your own because of this you're like basically an easy way to accumulate bitcoin yeah true um but you haven't been through a bull market yet a bidder hasn't been through a bull market yet that's true so yeah you remember last pull market last pull market things got crazy yeah customer service you had to scale up yeah so that's actually that's a good segue into like

how do you plan on scaling up and how before we even get to plans on scaling up how things been up to this point how are users interacting with better well at first it was a bit slow because nobody knew about the service obviously um but then um one of the guys in my co-working space in in lisbon um suggested like yeah you should just integrate it with with existing wallets because i like your service but it's just too much work to go to a separate website for it and like so yeah that's what i did i reached out to trezor and ledger and the guys from trezor were like kind of like you are like oh this is this is great we should we should integrate it so that's been been bringing in a lot of new customers the last two months wait wait how's the integration how

does that work is it in their web wallet yeah yeah so uh yeah they have the exchange tab on it yeah there's a bunch of places where you can buy with your um like credit card these are master card and then all the way at the bottom unfortunately but i'm still happy uh there's an option to buy recurrently via sepa which is like the european payment system and that's that's better and you're the only one listed there yeah awesome that's a big comic congrats on that thanks How have users been using the platform? Do you have a lot of recurring users, monthly active users coming back? I would say the majority of my users buy weekly. I have only five people that buy daily, but I mean, that's great.

And then there's a couple that buy monthly. Wow, the daily buy is an interesting one. That's perfect dollar cost averaging. yeah it's literally yeah i mean i mean at that point well you can get down to the hour right uh yeah in theory yes that's a bit crazy daily is pretty crazy i mean your bank won't let you do hourly payments like the minimum with a standing order with the bank is daily yeah that'd be a little bit ridiculous that'd be so it's yeah like it seems like you haven't done any marketing at all or like a lot of marketing at all no just a bit of random stuff on twitter

like reaching out to you guys for example and but the treasure thing has helped me most i think the tftc pump is going to be bigger than the treasure pump you're gonna love this one our european freaks they've been waiting you know because we keep we keep shilling cash app yeah and it's not available for us yeah exactly so so they've been they've been waiting for something and i think this is a really good fit i think it's an incredible fit so let's talk about going into the future like as you scale up what it's just very simple product right now do you think there's beauty in its simplicity and doesn't need much tweaking other than adding features that customers are asking for yeah i think it's that simple really like i like in the long run i still

have this vision like oh it should be like acorns you know where we can also look into people's bank accounts and then add up every transaction to like the nearest number like rounding them up that's what acorns does and i think it's really nice way to to to buy bitcoin like very small amounts and you don't really notice it but um i've been looking into it a little bit and it's kind of difficult because you've got as a business you have transaction fees for separate transactions so like if you're taking um i don't know like 40 cents as a roundup i mean all my margin is gone within the fixed fees so it's it's kind of difficult to make the experience for the consumer still like oh yeah it's actually rounding up the numbers because like obviously you could take

all the all the roundups at the end of the month but then people still see it as like oh i'm i'm spending like 60 euros on material it defeats the psychology exactly like bank integrations and stuff yeah but that's that's getting pretty easy because i mean in in well supposedly this year already we're we're supposed to have psd2 regulations which allow third-party companies to look into people's bank accounts in europe in europe yes so that's not the difficult part the actual difficult part is moving the money and no i remember we had something like that in america for a little bit lawnmower do you remember yeah yeah lawnmower that's like they went out of business i think um but why acorn for bitcoin i think they were a little too early yeah they

were too early and i think there was a lot of in america it's a lot more difficult to integrate with the different banks and see everything oh yeah true so i think that was you know they had to pour a ton of money into that and that didn't work out well yeah for for bitter it's also like i started with this most simplistic component which is the recurring bite yeah i almost like that it's just i it's so much cleaner you know it's like this is how much money i'm putting in converting into bitcoin you know on a daily weekly monthly whatever basis like i'd be all about that in america like that would be that's that's the ideal it's just it's just super simple it's ridiculous yeah and i think moving so moving forward like is there anything i guess let's

talk about more about the mechanics a bit or like in the bitcoin side of things like are you batching transactions are you looking forward to snore and being able to like one sig send out multiple outputs and stuff like that um like scaling on the bitcoin side and then the infrastructure side on on the traditional banking yeah so we've been batching from the very start like i've always thought like yeah it's stupid to pay out all the separate transactions and something i we've only been doing this for the last month but i really like the idea is that we pay out with super low transaction fees so like one or two satoshi per byte transactions and then they all add up to each other so you know we're spending our unconfirmed change and we'll keep doing that

and then at the end of the day or like more like at the end of next business day if the transactions are still unconfirmed then I'm just spending like a little bit bigger transaction

to myself and that's going to confirm all the transactions from the past day so it's like really cheap for the customer

because the customer is paying the transaction fee the mining fee that's creative that's a great idea child pays for parent that's a great idea

yeah or it just confirms on its own and then you don't even have to worry about it then it's also good and it's perfect

for this use case which is like the small people are occurring by people are not in a rush with the bitcoin they buy through me like if they would be in a rush they go somewhere else do you have like a day is it like a daily clearing time where you send out all your withdrawals or no it's every hour every hour are we gonna have is like bitter gonna start having the bitmax effect on the uh on the mempool wait so bitmex at 9 a.m 9 a.m this time bitmex sends out all their transactions at the same exact time

so so the fees go up the fees go up because they only send out their their their big transactions all at once well yeah mine are every hour and I mean I'm not I'm not increasing my own transaction fee so it's I mean no yeah every hours is probably better in terms of like transaction fee spikes this is gonna be a good problem to have to know that that's great that's I like that idea of keeping fees as low as possible so it seems like bitter is like a beautifully simple and elegant product like outside of bitter like what other types of stuff would you like to build for bitcoin good question yeah we just built an awesome ass product i know mom that's not enough

we need more what's next oh well i don't have my next great idea yet so not your next great idea what's something that you're looking for or looking forward to being built out whether there's Bitcoin at the protocol level or sort of utilities on top of Bitcoin. Put you on the spot. Yeah, I'm thinking. I think Lightning Network payouts, are you thinking about that on your roadmap at all? Yeah, so I was thinking with the other part of Bitter that we were discussing previously with the rounding up of people's normal spending

to pay out those via Lightning because they're super small. Like we're talking basically 1 to 99 euro cent payments. Like that's going to be too expensive to do on-chain. So that would be really cool to do via Lightning. I mean, I think it's the only way to do it through Lightning. And then we really get to stacking sets. Like it's just a few sets at a time.

Here's three sets. That'd be awesome. it's like you talk about efficiencies a lot in bitcoin like services like this help make the price appreciation as efficient as possible i would argue right yeah i absolutely it's infrastructure and it's like my favorite kind of infrastructure because it doesn't rely on any custodial that doesn't exist does anyone else i don't know except for like otc desks once again is like i don't know anyone else who's doing like a non-custodial bitcoin on ramp I mean again I guess like local bitcoins hodl hodl yeah but in different ways this is like

seamless like you're not getting like a seller like on local bitcoins or something and then having to send to a different person like you just always send to the same account I have a question what are your fees like what oh yeah we should we should have talked about this much so it's it's just 1.5 percent and the bitcoin mining fee which I try to keep at a minimum right as you said cool that's nice and uh um i guess we already said who told us michael michael said that he really liked he sent us a screenshot of of what your breakdown looks like and it's really nice how you really lay out what what fees are being taken what exchange rate is being taken that's a good point actually so in the very first version of of bitter it was just

showing like the incoming euro amount and um the outgoing uh bitcoin amount and those divided by each other so that was like kind of showing an exchange rate but i was like that's not really fair because like you're integrating your own fee into it and you're integrating the uh the mining fee into it like people should just be able to see what my service costs like i i hate other platforms that that put their spread inside of the exit into the spread yeah that's nasty like i loved how you had just like written out exactly what you're paying to the miner paying to you is that was pretty you saw that screenshot that was fantastic yeah you've thought through this very uh very thoroughly and it's again like improving on the ux improving on and that is part

of the ux is something we talk about here a lot is especially when you're taking bitcoin in your own and your own custody there's like those moments like all right what's happening with my bitcoin why am i only getting like what fees were taken out like we were just talking i have a very simple request um maybe also like list the amount of satoshis all right instead of like zero points oh both okay you know because like people are comfortable with bitcoin so like you can tell them just how many satoshis they've also we start out with both and then slowly over time you just make it satoshis only you start normalizing exactly yeah we're in a big normalization phase here with uh making sats the the denomination with which we talk about bitcoin you gotta think in

sats so i'm seeing here a um bitcoin piggy bank and i'm trying to incorporate that more and more inside of bitter because i think it's like the perfect model like you're putting every week a little bit more into your piggy bank and uh i'll make some animation or so that shows sats going into a piggy bank in the email i like i love that yeah sure pig gets a little fatter every email so what's this what this piggy is this is bit piggy uh shout out farface 2000 yeah farface 2000 made them it comes with an open dime okay it comes with an open dime and just qr stickers for the uh the address for the address and so like so then kids so kids can have their little piggy bank nice it's pretty cool very uh very cool interactive way to stack sats and meet space

if uh if you ask me i do like the piggy bank i do like the piggy bank uh metaphor i think it's pretty good it's like every email from bidder starts with oh yay there's more bitcoin in your piggy bank i saw that i wasn't i liked it well all right let's get a little cosmic here this like turns into like why we're into bitcoin and this is something that uh sort of on my mind today like a lot of people shitting on bitcoin for sound money and all that stuff and we're really i think caught in this conspicuous consumption debt finance lifestyle and i think small things like helping people realize that saving money is cool and probably worthwhile by incentivizing stacking sats with the piggy bank stuff is important so like the whole concept of of

financing your life via debt or capital accumulation is is a discussion as a society i think we've gotten away from in a while i'm like for a while excuse me um and in america here it's becoming more and more like of a of a topic conversations monetary policy and stuff actually the bubbles that we're in i'm not sure if it's pervasive beyond the bitcoin bubble not pervasive at all but like do you do you see the value like the sound money of bitcoin and and the like saving aspect that it brings to the world and the the store value yeah i think that that's what attracted me most to it it's like the fixed limit of 21 million then it's done as opposed to you know having savings and just seeing them become worth less and less over time that's just

unfair um so i when i was promoting bitter before i started building it to some people in the university i i showed a graph and like i think it only takes uh 36 years before whatever you have a savings account is worth half of it that's crazy that's insane like that doesn't attract anyone to save basically so i think i mean if bitcoin is working out then then we do have a money that's worth saving and i mean do you think do you think holding is using i actually gave a talk in in lisbon which i called the huddle problem because if everyone just huddles then nobody builds stuff and then like bitcoin is not going to be great by itself we need people building small like even a product as simple as bitter like we need people to build that right but we also need people to

hold it right yes we need both yeah but i mean i think this is pretty much been uh debunked as fun i mean with drew bensal shout out on chain and everything they're doing but drew's huddle waves analysis in particular shows that when the price rises the distribution of bitcoins rises or bitcoin supply distribution the bitcoin supply becomes more distributed because big hollers are selling i guess huddles i think huddle is important like we need hodlers obviously but people spending too doesn't hurt the network in my opinion it's just interesting to me how i feel like it's amazing how frowned upon saving is yeah that's crazy yeah like no one there's no one who's on the the store value side of bitcoin's valuation saying no one should spend like

everyone who wants to spend should spend but um there's plenty of people on the opposite side who are like if you save bitcoin if you if you hold on to it because you think that it will both protect your wealth and actually grow your wealth because we're still in like an adoption phase then you're you're wrong like you shouldn't do that that's not a valid use case of bitcoin and i would say like right now like that's like the most valid use case of bitcoin yeah especially in this hyper volatile period where we have price discovery going on yeah you want to protect your wealth like that's the main if even even and they happen to be speculators too because if you're trying you're protecting your wealth then you're also speculating that it'll go up in price

but uh like i think like the key value prop is that like your wealth doesn't lose value like not even you know it makes value that's even better but but like that it won't lose value yeah you're not going to lose your satoshis are not going to depreciate against the the whole pie or become depreciate or excuse me yeah one satoshi is one satoshi yeah exactly there you go start the normalization process um yeah i guess just open it up here what else you uh from holland live in portugal now you studied in the united states are you digital nomad yeah kind of but i don't like the term no like it's that i i think it sounds silly like i'm this hipster uh digital nomad no it's just i move often just because i like it yeah and i'm

not bound to any place and now especially with bitter it's like yeah i mean i just need my laptop and i can work like recently i was like yeah it's kind of stupid that um people can't enter a back 32 address so i looked a bit into the code myself and i was like yeah i can fix this so now since i think two weeks ago people are able to do it and i didn't make any announcements but in my database i'm seeing a lot of back 32 addresses straight to wasabi and then they can that whole problem is solved without an expo yeah actually this is uh i guess it's not they can still watch the address but this is another really cool idea a friend of mine told me that i should only allow my customers to do increments of 25 euros and then pay

everyone in 25 euro increments so that you know whenever someone is trying to do some blockchain analysis they just see only 25 euro that's a great idea yeah i like that idea it's like a massive coin join us thing going on yeah but it's kind of difficult to force the customer because i'm not in control of their payment so you know i'm not pulling money from their bank account so it's kind of difficult to be like okay you can only do 25 50 75 100 it's yeah so never mind just not but i like the idea it's cool it's a nice it's a nice shower thought so that's a fun one yeah that would be dope you could even like do satoshi's dude i'm about to do 25 euro right no it has to be euros like the euro amount has to be fixed the beauty is that it's a push

the beauty of the whole thing is that i'm literally doing nothing on your website except the original setup then i just go into my banks app or whatever and i just whenever i send ruben money like bitcoin comes out the other side like that's the beauty the the no app nothing it's just send it and that's also part of the security model so um once people have done a transaction they can't change their bank account or their address anymore because i'm thinking uh if you were somehow able to change the address through our customer support then nobody nothing changes on the customer's end in terms of paying but now like people would like kind of need to have access to their bank account which like that's not my

problem the bank should protect it so it's really secure too by not having anything on our website that can be changed afterwards because if they if you if you change like if like a malicious individual or something changes the address and the person keeps sending the reoccurring payment doesn't check the address exactly because like there's no i mean also since recently there's a reference to the block stream block explorer to like see your transaction that i'm sending with my confirmation emails but before that there was like no there's no mentioning of your bitcoin address so you would literally not see anything changed and you just keep receiving those emails and you think oh i'm getting bitcoin every week but in fact someone else is getting them

more of a reason to do this x pub thing too though yeah true true right because that was like the complaint we heard was that they couldn't change their address but that makes sense that's a valid reason not to change it just keeps it simple and secure and uh one small other thing that i have heard some complaints about is like why don't you pull the money from my bank account which is also a possibility throughout europe but the problem there is like consumers can revert those transactions up to 13 months after so i would need to you know well that's for a start it's a huge risk on me because if i pay out bitcoin they're gone like i'm not getting them back but but the consumer can take their euros back for up to 13 months afterwards so like that's

similar to ach here yeah but that's not the case if they send it if they send it no if they send it they push the transaction and it's it's irreversible oh that's interesting yeah is it irreversible in the united states with ach it is if they can pull from your or push to your account and yeah then it's a river they can pull it from there too otherwise there's like a five day clearing if they pull it or something yeah i mean five days is okay it's still risky but 13 months that's right that's that's way too ridiculous and then bitcoin could go through the roof or something too in the meantime yeah um i'm trying to think where i want to go next what um i think we've covered bitter pretty entirely i guess let's keep talking down like

the the the risk security scenarios that you find yourself in like it's something that we didn't have on the docket that just came out like what else what else are you thinking of from like an attack vector perspective what's it like being the one man behind this uh this project i mean that's not great because i've uh i'm actually writing a manual at the moment that i can pass on to someone that explains like the technicalities of the project and like if something were to happen like for example on my flight here um that someone else would still be able to do the ongoing transactions um but yeah that's something that's been on my mind only recently with increased volume i was like oh actually there's some serious money going through this company now like i i

shouldn't create a backup plan and uh yeah figure out i mean like you set it up like ideally for this because he doesn't he doesn't hold much of their dollars or much of their bitcoin at any given time no it's maximum one hour yeah that's fantastic like that is like in terms of like bitcoin businesses especially bitcoin businesses that interact with fiat he's already reduced his attack surface like tremendously do you think this business model be the first in sort of a an explosion of similar like models um i would expect in a couple of years to see banks integrated but they would be custodian so it's like i mean not the same they could give you like an address they give banks are not gonna do that seems like you found like a like a sweet spot where

i think so too you've uh you've eliminated a lot of or a lot of custody risk and sort of created seamless process and seem to be have having some happy high uh high value customers already so um i think i just make like why did it take so long for this service to come to be why do you think i don't know maybe like when i started the project i thought i would address people that are new to bitcoin but that turned out to be quite difficult um because people need to set up their wallet need to back up need to make a backup and it's kind of hard to do it that way so for those people they would be more likely to use coinbase and what i'm seeing most of the traffic from is people that you know already know bitcoin and they just want to buy it recurrently and apparently

they didn't find a service to do that either before bitter yeah um well what i like is this is completely i guess i'm like first of all marty usually i'm not in the interviews but i was just so excited about your product and like all of that just felt together so beautifully that i was like i'm absolutely going to join this interview um the second thing is um what what's what's really interesting about um cash app is like i feel like is is you can do you can have your your paycheck get direct deposited into your into your cash app account and then and then buy bitcoin um via ach yeah via ach i think that your service basically allows anyone to get paid in bitcoin that wants to get paid in bitcoin without ever getting paid in bitcoin because like if their

paycheck comes in like on like a friday then they just set like their reoccurring rubin send like over to a bidder and whatever portion of their salary that they get in get automatically gets converted to bitcoin so like basically like anyone in europe right now can get paid in bitcoin without their boss ever knowing they're getting paid in bitcoin right thank you for your service that's pretty cool yeah it's very cool and i i remember uh what i wanted to touch on is like so it seems like a lot of people haven't come up like it seems like it took 10 years almost for your business idea to come out because people sort of approach the way these products should be built from like a traditional financial mindset and you're saying like while you're at

that master's program you're looking for use cases that bitcoin would be unique for and this seems to be one of them so i guess what we could talk about here is like the a lot of people i would argue have like these uh blinders on in front of them like approaching products from like a traditional banking system fintech perspective and what opportunities bitcoin opened up that that sort of you're leveraging and yeah but as a as a bitcoiner you look the other way around it's like i want a service that fits my needs not the one that's served the needs of the banks it's still like i i do think that bitter is only a temporary company like i don't know in how many years but it won't be necessary anymore to do the conversion so it's not like an eternal company but

that's okay yeah that's why we're waiting to hear your next idea no but no i think it i think your bitter highlights an inherent design first principles design flaw that a lot of people have when approaching bitcoin like you can get creative with it like you don't need to custody the bitcoin you just need to set up these ramps for like hey i'm the dude who sends you bitcoin when you when you send money to this address and so i think that's one thing i want to highlight in this interview is you're thinking of unique ways that bitcoin can be leveraged that i don't think people have been thinking about up to this point enough people yeah i love like just like the super simple tools you know it's just it's super simple he collects his big it like operates like

on bitcoin's like greed system where like he gets paid to offer everyone else an additional service and all of a sudden bitcoin gets like a beautiful additional on-ramp and it's even a little bit cheaper than coinbase does it at least in europe is it coinbase one and a half percent i think it's 1.5 percent on the conversion but they have another fee added there afterwards which is also have a percent so it ends up being two i think that's last last time i checked right yeah they like hide it a little bit yeah yeah they like make it like a little bit confusing but either way like fuck coinbase so yes delete coinbase yeah you have that you have that advantage and then like kraken like you have to like actually like i'm pretty sure you have to actually like set a limit

order like on like use it like a traditional exchange you can't just like press buy bitcoin it's a market order yeah but you'd have to like literally you'd have to open up the order book and do a market order yeah but it's all through their api that is done right no but i'm saying not for you i'm saying like just a typical european oh yeah i mean i feel like that that is a is i've tried to so so i have a older co-worker in my in my meat space business uh that that wanted to get into bitcoin and you know fuck coinbase and cash app is app only and he's not an app dude you can't do apps so like i tried to onboard him onto gemini right oh okay and with gemini there's no brokerage element to it like coinbase has a brokerage

element where like you can just like buy bitcoin um gemini you have to like open up the order book and like place like a market order to uh to buy and that is like a people don't like that are in this space don't realize but that's a major ux hurdle like that bothers people i think my mom can use bitter she wouldn't be able to use kraken right but she could probably use coinbase yeah right yeah is your mom using bitter uh not at the moment no you gotta get your parents on board you gotta show it to them my dad is my mom is it yeah but uh i'm my parents i'm still trying to sell them oh my dad's he's in the rabbit hole try to get the uh bitcoin rabbi book i ordered a bunch but i haven't read it yet actually uh i got it waiting for me downstairs it just arrived

oh i want to see it too i haven't ordered a dead confession uh i'm going to i must confess to be a good boy here i did not order it bitcoin rabbi sent me one oh awesome yeah that's fantastic yeah i i actually i did read it but i didn't like hold it like i read it in pdf form and it was fantastic yeah yeah um that's gonna onboard a lot of new people potentially yes yeah a lot of new kids i like i don't know if this is going to be a controversial statement or not it's probably going to be a controversial statement just say it might might be more might be more influential than the bitcoin standard whoa whoa whoa it really hit home it just like it dove in it just like and just hit you right yeah it did it's a good it's a very it was

like 10 pages versus like 300 yeah i mean massir mamadav that's who that's who held it up massir held it up at columbia university i talked about this in the previous podcast but butchered the thing but he held up like the uh bitcoin rabbi's book the children's book behind uh columbia university was like i learned more from this children's book than i did at this university um no so the more educated like again like we were talking about this on rabbit hole recap right before you hopped in here like it seems like the on ramps are being built out the education's being refined it's like what can stop bitcoin at this point which i think is a good question for you like what worries you about bitcoin uh what what scenario can you see bitcoin failing um

well i was a little bit scared for the uh new eu regulations that were gonna affect crypto companies but then looking at it it's like we're doing what they're asking for already because our banks ask us to do it so it was like okay that will that'll do but if they would have cramp down on all the on and off ramps then that would have i think hurt bitcoin because if if all those people that buy bitcoin through me now have to you know only use cash to get it it's going to be a lot more difficult yeah so i mean that's the big uh sort of overarching topic about bitcoin's biggest hurdles going forward is state clamping down do you see a scenario in which like states compete for bitcoiners like do you think eu regulation is fighting against us regulation

right now is fighting against latin american african it will probably be smaller nations like i think there's already a little bit of that going on in georgia where they're pretty crypto friendly and let's dive into that what's going on in georgia i don't know the particulars but i've heard that it's welcoming to like you can buy property with bitcoin and yeah belarus just announced they want to do uh georgia's bitfury it's like uh they they love bitcoin over there they have hydro they have like massive hydro i'm like 99 sure they have massive hydro and they it seems like to convert into money like eastern europe's like on top of it like huddle huddle has a riga conference they've got a nice presence over there belarus treasures

treasures czech republic yes czech republic um and then the government more particularly like the governments like belarus just came out so they want to start mining with nuclear energy georgia's on top of it cyprus on top of it is there anything about like eastern europe do you think in particular sort of drives people towards bitcoin i couldn't point that a single reason no no no i think what do you think well actually maybe in like for example uh there was this study by ing that was like where is the most interest in europe in bitcoin and romania was scoring really high and um i was asking my friends there like why do you think that is and they were like well we've got

so much corruption that we just would rather have our own money and not the government's money yeah that's and also like soviet bloc countries in general like they recently had massive massive hardship they understand devaluation of currencies like on a rapid scale like in recent super recent history and the corrupt officials love bitcoin right that's the other thing it's like not only do the people see the appeal of bitcoin like the corrupt officials fucking love it like if the u.s if they think that bitcoin is the money the only money in the world that the u.s can't get their hands on like they're gonna flock to it i think bulgaria is like the like in terms of governments It possesses the most Bitcoin

Wasn't that the BTCE Wasn't that guy hiding in Bulgaria They denied it They denied it afterwards Which would be the smart move Was it a dark market or was it BTCE It was a dark market I'm pretty sure

The money that was It was dark market related Not BTCE related And then they denied it like a week later It came out like They had like a shit ton I think it was like 300,000 Bitcoin it was a lot yeah it was it was a lot of bitcoin you remember that right yeah yeah and then and

then they denied it which is what i would absolutely do like you do not want that information just sit on it just sit on it just wait just wait it out you know stuff's gonna happen you don't have it the year is 2050 like what country was it was it belarus bulgaria bulgaria it was bulgaria the year's like 2050 bulgaria is like the richest country out of like sheer luck and like a little bit of skill like they were like oh we'll deny it and like we'll store it on our treasure or something you know they're just like they didn't they didn't store it that well but they stored it like decent i hope they got a multi-sig at least i mean that's like the rumor like north korea holds like a ton of bitcoin venezuela is

mining some that's the other thing is like it's bitcoin's heavy man like if it gets could get i mean is there such thing as bitcoin being in the hands of the wrong people like a venezuelan government's mining and getting bitcoin is that in the hands of wrong people or is the fact that it's an amoral uh protocol that has no idea how we're using bitcoin is non-political like i mean everyone can own it yeah no this is i mean this is a big big thing of fud production i mean obviously i agree with you guys i'm just trying to play devil's advocate here this is a big fud producing sort of late uh line of thought is hey venezuela is accumulating north korea is accumulating iran maybe accumulating like how do we how do we get over that pr hump i guess is

what i'm trying to get at by just having enough normal people own bitcoin all right like just like why cash works is like yeah i mean there's still a good amount of normal people that have it and yes criminals use it too yeah but i think i again i completely agree but we've obviously as bitcoiners been tasked with i would argue uh a more arduous path uh to explaining the benefits of bitcoin where mining mining fuds a big thing we're boiling the oceans criminals and drug dealers and terrorists are using it um these are very unique hurdles to bitcoin and bitcoiners trying explain the use case that we have to overcome and it's always something i'm fascinated to hear people's ideas on and this is what are your thoughts on this what is the best way to just

use it and get into normal people's hands have them use it and people just won't be able to refute it well there's also another side to look at that so nowadays um euros and dollars are by like is the normal money but it's also the state's money and the big banks and the big corporations is what use that money but if all the normal people use bitcoin then at some point the governments are just playing their own game with their own money and like it doesn't affect anyone else and that's like where i would love to see in the next 20 30 years i love this talk ribbon this is the type of talk i'm looking for like and this is something we've been talking about with wasabi and coin joining in particular is like if we want a certain degree of privacy on the network we need

people to participate you need people to participate in coin joins and sort of the utx set just passed four percent of all transactions were coin joins recently um i mean yeah like look at it from like ruben's perspective like so if he goes with this xpub route right they uh his customers receive it to a new xpub address so if anyone's watching a specific address they don't see it happen unless they have the x pub then they know um and then from that point he could still presumably track your transactions whatever you sent to on the blockchain um because he knows your your your original he sent them to your original address but if you go through coin join then ruben doesn't have to know you know like that helps that doesn't just help the person who did

the coin join it helps it helps you as well because you don't want to you don't want to know i don't want to know what my customers do with that bitcoin it's none of my business exactly so that secures it it helps bitcoin on two fronts like yeah i completely agree and it's how do how do we like you're saying your mom doesn't use bitter yet she uses probably easier for her to use another exchange no she's just not into bitcoin yet she's not into bitcoin yet her is that if she was into bitcoin she'd be using bitter like that'd be that'd be a little bit yeah yeah that'd be fucked up i wonder if my mom listens to this podcast mom if you're listening i love you that's uh my dad doesn't know how to download podcasts yet which is part of my bitcoin

thesis is they can't even download podcasts yeah uh wait wait you know they can't get into bitcoin yet they'll figure it out yeah um hour and five minutes in here i want to keep going we got plenty of time i guess we should just riff on on what's going on right now like what are your thoughts what about conferences are you guys going to any in the near future we're going to bitcoin 2019 san francisco we're going to bit block boom i'll be at value of bitcoin in belgium we'll obviously be here in two weeks for shitcoin week yeah which is in new york we have a massive influx of people i feel like we're we're winterfell uh gearing up for the battle of all the white walkers are gonna come into town it's gonna be great i went to consensus last year last year yeah what were

you doing there i got a free ticket okay uh this guy i met at a bar at an after party the after parties are good the after parties are good i thought you said african party first i was like well you were talking about african crypto regulation or whatever and i was like there's no regulation but uh they just outright ban it but he gave me a ticket that he found in the trash so like i went it was actually really fun because i i went as like an ernst and young uh employee because that was the guy's ticket who threw in the trash he only went for the first day so the second day i actually went like all the blockchain not bitcoin people were like coming up to me because i was the eny guy you know like i was the as i was like i was a bitcoiner in

disguise so it was like extra shit corny did you get your blockchain socks or me why uh no i just had the ticket from the garbage like they didn't give me like the swag bag and shit okay we don't get media passes here at tftc we have to dig through the garbage to get our confidence it's an honor it's an honor no but it is uh it's funny it'll be interesting to see how uh how well received consensus is this year we're going to riga too right why are you guys not going to breaking bitcoin in amsterdam maybe i love amsterdam you should come the freaks it'll be fun i'm gonna be in munich that week so i may hop over to amsterdam for that maybe i'll do that we're doing we're doing a dinner the uh thursday before i think it's the sixth okay so the sixth

the what june of june i think the conference is seven and eight but so if anyone's interested they can just message me on twitter for a steak dinner awesome picking a steak here i know now i'm getting fomo i might do it amsterdam is probably the second best city in the world after new york i would say i can't attest i've never been you've never been but it's i've recorded podcasts from there and that was a great podcast i was just like on a canal you know it's like beautiful so i i fucking love it and reuben was kind enough to bring some stroopwafels with him oh some Dutch special specialties i'm excited to dive into those um now yeah but we're about to get attacked with shit coiners in this city i guess that's another

good luck yeah so somebody who studied and again you said you tried that supply chain thing like how many how how long do you think it will take for people to sort of come to grips with how these networks are very limited in their abilities and probably only work for very limited use cases not so long anymore i think i hope but to be honest like a lot of the other students in my cohort they're like i would only know like one i was with 14 14 of us and there's only one other guy that's like a true bitcoiner all the others are like still i mean some are employed some are looking for like blockchain related jobs which i know that's one thing i ponder about or think on a lot too is like how many more of these all coin cycles can we have is there like a price point at

which bitcoin hits the threshold that bitcoin hits where it's like all right they're probably we give up yeah this is we give up it's not like we give up it's we submit like if we submit it's probably not likely that something will overtake this because that's like a lot of the banter that goes on particularly with crypto traders people are trading these markets is like ah these altcoins are going to be around forever but there has to be a psychological price point at least in my mind where people say right probably won't be a bitcoin 2 2.0 if it's reached this market cap and is this saturated um not a question just a just a random thought to put out there do you have anything to say about this room um well i hope i just hope that sooner or later that you can just go to any

conference and just not meet any blockchain people just bitcoin i don't think that will happen anytime soon so you were at rega last year yeah was that your first conference no no how great is it like going to these conferences it's amazing just like these people that you follow on twitter that you have no idea who they actually are and you just like meet them in person during these conferences it's so weird but awesome but weird yeah it's really and it's just a few conferences like breaking bitcoin uh baltic honey badger yeah you have to be selective yeah because most of them are absolutely garbage right even last year i went to uh bitcoin expo in boston i just like going back to boston because i studied there a few years ago next week yeah oh nice

and i i went again this year and i was like it's not as diehard bitcoin as it was a year ago which is bad like it's very bce bce same with new york same with new york there's a lot of bullshit there's a ton of bullshit in the city but there's also a ton of very good signal in the city too if you know where to look the weirdest part about conferences like like meeting people especially as like a as a podcaster the and we do like a weekly podcast are we officially podcasters now i think so i guess i mean we're first and foremost we're bitcoiners and then maybe like number four we're podcasters there's all these other things in our lives that matter that are after bitcoin because we're just way too obsessed um but the weird thing is like as like a weekly

bitcoin podcaster is like you meet people and they're like i've been talking to you for months you just never respond to me i just hear you i just hear your side but i like i know exactly what you're going through but i have no you have no idea what i'm going through but i know you it's uh it's weird but it's awesome it's an awesome experience i was just thinking of my twitter bio if i made a bitcoiner comma husband like put bitcoin before like being like a husband definitely not it's also true for like me as a guest now on the on your podcast like i know your voices but it's kind of weird to see the face with it in real life very underwhelming very underwhelming this is our first time here your voice it's like a little bit unfair

it is not unfair i love it this is like my favorite part of it like i didn't i want to recognize you until i opened the door i was like i know this is a ribbon and that's the thing about beauty of bitcoiners we hit it off right away we're that's another thing that makes me bullish on bitcoin is that i'm not meeting more bitcoiners makes me think i'm a little less crazy than i thought before i met a new bitcoiner it's like all right you seem like a very rational person a very smart person a well put together person who knows what they're doing you've come to the same conclusions that i have and uh you don't seem like some insane person that's fucking just in this for some well i think that also shows if you start a company a bitcoin

company in like 2018 like bear market i think that shows your own values it's like you're not into this i mean because of some crazy hype you actually believe in this yeah you're either you either believe in it you're a fucking idiot i wouldn't say that matt i mean it's one of the other he's right he's right like why would you launch in the bear market you would launch it if you either believed in it or you just were just fucking no matter yeah what's it been like launching in a bear market you think this is like would you rather launch here than november this was fantastic because like in the beginning the volume was quite uh little but it helped me figuring out like small things that i was doing wrong so for example i used to use limit

orders on the exchanges but i actually got burned once on that because i had paid out the customer and just that order never failed so like bitcoin just did bitcoin yeah exactly right so uh that made me change like how we do it and now we just place market orders and we wait like a couple of seconds to see how many bitcoin we bought for the customer right yeah definitely better way better if you look at like every company in the bitcoin space every single one that's launched in the bear markets has done better because every time someone launches in a bull market they set their expectations like ridiculously high and it's like not even they might have the best idea ever uh but they're they just get fucked you see this a lot with noobs getting like drawn to mining in

particular they'll like get into bitcoin and a bull run they'll be like oh mining is the next big cloud mining they love cloud money i guess cloud mining is kind of a competitor to you why because people view it as i want reoccurring income right like i'm gonna i'll pay them if this amount of money and they're gonna get their their their weekly payouts or their daily payouts or something like that if they understand mining a little bit they should know that it's just better to buy than to do it this way but no they don't they always i like 2017 so many people like decent acquaintances of mine and close friends alike went with the cloud mining approach because it like mentally psychology wise like made sense to them and i told them like a million

times i told them don't do it i did it don't do it they can they can leave with all your money you're even if they don't leave with all your money you're better off buying it all these different things doesn't matter they need to go through their like little cloud mining phase where they don't make as much money as if they've just bought it and then they will eventually graduate you gotta learn you know you gotta you gotta take your lumps but it's it's it's funny it's funny the how it's like almost predictable seeing i've been through two full bull bear markets now um seeing people come in make the same mistakes you did it's inevitable on this thing that's what like a lot of people like oh we want to save noobs

save noobs that was that guy too but it's like it's impossible at some point like human nature no people just i mean it's kind of bad but it's just like with children like they just need to get burned once you get to the stove they have to touch it yeah yeah i i think we've protected some noobs from not touching the stove to begin with and that's fucking dope but I think that the majority will have to like we are not at the point at least Bitcoin is not at the point right now

where the majority of people will come in and they will get burnt first and then they will ultimately realize that Bitcoin is the best money we've ever had and then they will start accumulating Bitcoin like I think like maybe in the future we'll hit that point probably not

but no matter what like once you have to take responsibility into your own hands and like do your own thing with money people are going to get burned and they learn along the way yeah then they end up on bitter if they're in europe they start buying stacking stats through that yeah that's that's also one of the values i started a company with is like i want to promote responsible investment like don't go and buy all of your savings at once don't put it into bitcoin at once just do of your own like of your work or whatever of whatever income in euros just set a little bit aside in bitcoin yeah it's again like we touched on this earlier too like it's changing that mindset of debt-driven

conspicuous consumption to hey throw a few shekels away every paycheck is is a cognitive shift that needs to happen and on the planet not only in this country but like in the the whole fucking planet the rock that we're flying on right now are shekels a shit coin i don't think i think shekels were shekels were silver weren't they i don't know i don't know they might have been i think a shekel was like a silver well silver is a shekel yeah maybe gold will still have value but silver like how could silver still have it i don't have like a little bit i don't have any silver yeah not a silver bag holder not a silver bag holder either ruben what interests you outside of bitcoin traveling traveling yeah and flying in particular i love flying why why do you love

flying i hate flying what airline did you fly here just now on delta what'd you think it's all right i like i prefer klm or air france going here but that's but why do you like flying you don't like flying you like arriving and departing right you know i actually like i like the act of flying because like you're completely disconnected you can just read a book and like i love that that is cool that is cool i might my thing with flying is it's like the one i'm a control freak and it's like the one time in my life where like i when when i take off i'm just like well the dude i've never met who's in the cockpit is completely in control of my life and i might die because of his actions and i'm at peace with that it's the one time in my life where i'm at peace

i'm the same exact way and it blows my mind like my wife and my sister-in-law have like flight anxiety i'm like this is like the one thing where you just submit yourself right i'm coming on here there's nothing i can do there's this not in my hands i bought the ticket you're most likely not going to die unless you're in like a boeing max 70 but you just got to submit yourself and like people get freaked out on flights say hey don't freak out drink a little bit yeah it's the last moments of your life you should be enjoying them you should be anxious but the internet element is interesting too it's because it's the one time in life nowadays where if you don't respond it's completely acceptable well i am traveling the uh being in a cross-country flight was the reason

that i've only ever missed one bent in the last two years i could not get my 2fa on my internet wi-fi so i could not write the bent um i was pissed off at that but it was therapeutic as well no the funniest part about this story is that i went then i went to give him shit because you know uh two-factor authentication through email or text is worse for you than if you use like actual otp two-factor through an app and he was like i actually did use otp two-factor through an app but it needed an update and i couldn't get the update on the wifi so i was like okay like i'll give you that i guess yeah that's the one instance where i was like all right maybe i should buy a yubi key or just like use an app that doesn't require you to update to get the code

that's true that's ridiculous yeah so what's portugal like it's really nice like i actually i would invite all bitcoiners to just like we have a co-working space it's called the block and it's just super nice there like everyone is doing something with crypto everyone is doing their own project but we have lunch together we talk bitcoin um just come over for a month check out lisbon yeah what's the food scene like over there it's really nice and you know it's it's dirt cheap in this one like compared to any other european city yeah i mean you're talking to new yorkers so like literally everywhere but iceland is cheap here's here yeah it's like here's zurich san francisco tokyo yeah they're all cheap

yeah except except for iceland iceland's the only place i've went to iceland once super expensive from new york point of view it's the only place i've ever been as i went to hong kong went to 118th floor because Murad recommended the bar and it was a fucking Ritz Carlton and I walk into

the Ritz Carlton bar at 118th floor like one of the highest the highest bar in the world except for fucking

a dry country like Dubai has a higher building which is like bullshit like that's not a bar if it's a fucking

dry country and I looked at the prices and I was like this is cheap because of New York because New York is like ridiculous new york is absolutely ridiculous in prices yeah it's pretty so it's

pretty fucked up here when i moved to new york from chicago like when i was paying in rent in chicago i was paying like 600 a month for one bedroom of a three bedroom like 1500 foot monstrosity moving in and paying double for a 250 square foot studio i shared with my wife that was a huge like kick in the dick that's rough bitcoin bitcoin lisbon i would love to move to lisbon i mean just try it out for a month that's what i did we do that as americans can we just go there for a month yeah you can come up three months oh there you go that's actually i love the idea of like we have super fast internet too that's like the only thing that matters to people like us like fiber like i agree the digital nomad name is a horrible fucking name but that lifestyle is a

fantastic fucking lifestyle let's jump into the lifestyle like well how did you decide to move to portugal are you like in a month-to-month rent situation um lockdown a lease well no i am renting a room like for there's no end to it but uh so i came to breaking building on bitcoin last uh summer and then part of the event was also hosted at the block the co-working space and i was like that's a much better environment than being back at home in holland and doing it there out of my bedroom um because here i get to meet some other bitcoiners and and it's a nicer city so yeah that's how i moved to lisbon yeah um that's uh you're speaking to somebody this is my corner you freak i'm in my corner i write the band record the podcast i'm pretty much in this corner for like

80 of the week the corner the corner what is what about the language difference because like you obviously dutch is your first language right yeah i speak english too but um obviously clearly you you really don't need good english you really don't need portuguese speaking dutch have we been speaking dutch all the time yeah so you don't need portuguese uh in lisbon outside of lisbon you would yeah but you have no porch do you have you've been working on it no can you give us that's the only portuguese i know stacking sats like wherever it's pretty universal is it i usually whenever i go somewhere i know please thank you where's the bathroom can i get a beer but like stacking sats should be like you should know if you're a big if you're a true bitcoiner and you

you like go to another country like you should know how to say stacking sats in in their language well sats would be universal right so you should figure out how to say sat right because it's satoshi yeah yeah so stacking you have to know how to say stacking as long as you know how to say stack do you know how to say stacking in portuguese i think it would be poop bitcoin yeah poop sats yeah wow that just doesn't have the ring to it no stacking sets is amazing it just sounds so nice it sounds so good we just put in an effort to uh to spread the message to the world if you freaks out there want to uh poop sats want to uh no want to tweet at us uh what stacking sats would be in your native language feel free yeah that's cool yeah i like that one

yeah i like that too um well thank you for building bitter to help people stack sats out there thanks for hosting me today well thanks for coming i'm i don't know if there's a whirlwind from you like off the airplane through customs on the subway to my apartment um excuse me to our studio uh i'm honored that you would take some time out of your schedule to come speak with us man thanks for inviting me have you ever been in new york before i have been when i was uh living in boston oh right right of course so before we ended here like do you have a parting note for the free so what you're building a bidder sort of the mission uh any advice for newbies getting in anybody learning how to build a business on bitcoin any sort of tidbits that you learned

from your master's program anything you want to end it on well for all your listeners just stack set and if there are some other founders that want to talk to me like i'm starting a company or getting some advice just feel free to dm me on twitter and where can we do that it's at water maniac at water maniac i love that i love that and then what's the better channel get bitter at get bitter yes and then it's at get bitter.com it's bitter b-i-t-t-r we're big on cutting out uh cutting out and uh switching letters and in the bitcoin space i so what the one of the things is so you reached out to us on twitter and then in uh the following rhr i basically reached out to all of our listeners and i said to them let us know if

because let's be frank like in this space there's so many fucking scams and like horrible people that operate in this space so like i would never and marty as well would never we would never blindly shill a company that that that we had no experience with um and because you're european only we can't actually experience uh your business we can't try out your business ourselves we should do a test transaction just here after the podcast yeah that would be awesome but but the key thing i was going to say is is that so we reached out to our listeners and we said a lot of you are in europe can can you test this out for us or have you used it before and we had some very quality uh people that we that we respect a shit ton they they said that they had a great experience with

with your uh that's great product and um i'm i'm very excited to to show your product going forward is basically is basically what i'm saying is that i feel like this is is the best way to stack stats in europe i would agree and i'm excited to see other wily entrepreneurs take after you and build a business model similar to yours because i think it makes the most sense and reduces risk for everybody involved yep um so thank you again for building this for spreading the good word of bitcoin uh and for joining us today in the studio thank you anything to add on stay humble stack sets peace and love freaks