The Pomp Podcast - #255: Matt Luongo on Bridging the Gap between Bitcoin and the Real-World

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

Matt Luongo is the CEO of Thesis, a cryptocurrency venture production studio that includes Fold App, Keep, and tBTC. In this conversation, Anthony and Matt discuss bringing the worlds of Bitcoin and Ethereum together, how Matt is a monetary maximalist, what tBTC is and why it should be valuable to the DeFi community, and how crypto companies are prepared for working through the COVID-19 crisis. =============================== BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. ~If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, tech, and finance. Check out my newsletter by visiting pomp.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Matt Luongo is the CEO of Thesis, a cryptocurrency venture production studio that includes FoldApp, Keep, and TBTC. In this conversation, we discuss bringing the worlds of Bitcoin and Ethereum together, how Matt is a monetary maximalist, what TBTC is and why it should be valuable to the DeFi community and how crypto companies are prepared for working through the COVID-19 crisis. I really enjoyed this conversation and Matt didn't disappoint. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about the sponsors that made it possible. The first is BlockFi. BlockFi has three products today. The first one, you can deposit crypto and receive a US dollar loan. The second one, you can deposit crypto and receive up

to 8.6% interest in an interest bearing account. And the third is a cryptocurrency exchange where you can buy and sell crypto. They'll be coming out with a Bitcoin rewards credit card later this year. That is a normal credit card where you can earn your reward points as Bitcoin rather than loyalty points or mileage. I'm an investor, a user and a big proponent of BlockFi. The wealth management services they're building, I think are incredibly important for the crypto and Bitcoin ecosystem. You can go to blockfi.com slash pomp, again, blockfi.com slash pomp. And you can learn more there, sign up for an account and even receive some free money. So blockfi.com slash pomp. Now remember, the podcast is also a newsletter, you can go to pomp.substack.com

and receive an email from me every single morning with my analysis of markets and join 40,000 other investors who received the same email. So pomp.substack.com. And lastly, we've been cranking out tons of video content. So head on over to our YouTube channel, just search Anthony Pompliano, and you'll find the YouTube channel and hit subscribe. We've doubled the number of subscribers in the month of March, and we're going to continue to cranking out that content throughout the year. So let's get into the episode with Matt now. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions

of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Matt here. We've got a lot to get through. I appreciate you doing this from quarantine. Yeah, great to see you. For sure. All right, let's jump right in.

Why don't you go through your background and how you eventually got into Bitcoin, Ether, and crypto, and then we'll jump into some of the stuff you're working on. Yeah, you got it. So I joined the space in 2013. I built this little app. You know what? I'm going to take you through it. I was working on a startup and I was trying to make rent and I was like looking around what can

I sell in my house and one of the things I had was this stack of Starbucks cards and I kind of I realized like well not only could I sell these like I don't really drink Starbucks but I bet I could buy all my friends unused cards and of course not only did I do that then I built an app around it and I partnered with a local coffee shop to buy all these unused Starbucks cards and start making rent. And so I turned that into an early Bitcoin project way back when called Card4Coin.com. And we would just buy our Starbucks cards for 60 cents on the dollar. And this is the funny thing. I wasn't really in crypto, but I was trying to build this site and PayPal was like, oh, gift cards? No, we're not going to play with that. And so that's what got

me into Bitcoin. I actually had to solve my own problem. And so I got down the rabbit hole, Card for Coin.com became another product, actually, I think you've had on Fold with Will Reeves. So eventually, that grew and spun out into its own thing. But since then, I'm a technologist, but I believe in money crypto. So after working on Fold, I started trying to solve problems like, what if I could decentralize these gift card marketplaces? What if I could get in kind of fancy?

And I went through all of the stuff on Bitcoin, like Omni back in the day, and kind of all the second layer toys, looked at stuff like OpenBazaar. And eventually, I actually started playing early 2017 with Ethereum. So I think like at heart, I'm still a Bitcoiner. I got into the space for the censorship resistant money and open finance. Eventually, like I've always been a libertarian, but eventually I became kind of a money crypto person as well. But I still like to build cool things. And a lot of that means playing with other chains. Very cool. And so you describe yourself as kind of a monetary maximalist, which I think is a really interesting way to describe a point of view. Maybe explain what exactly does that mean?

Yeah, yeah. So I think today when people say Bitcoin maximalists, they can mean all sorts of things, depending on who's saying it right. Like it's a badge of honor for some and it's kind of like a troll for others. It's kind of mixed. But there's this like partisanship around it that maybe sometimes goes beyond just the asset. Like sometimes it's about the tech and it's about being surrounded by all these crappy scams, right? I think it's a little overboard. So for me, Bitcoin, the asset, that's our shot at taking on central banks and taking on the status quo. So Bitcoin, the technology, is legacy.

And it's great. It's great legacy. It's kept running all these years. And that's what you need out of a strong, hard money layer is stability. But the newest scalability and privacy improvements aren't happening on Bitcoin anymore. So that's kind of why I say I'm a monetary maximalist. I'm OK with playing with Ethereum and Zcash and places where I think the tech is interesting. But ultimately, my goal is still going to be coming back to Bitcoin, the asset.

Got it. And so there's a very hotly debated and to the point of controversial viewpoint. And I basically break it down into two components, right? You have sound money in Bitcoin, but all of the infrastructure surrounding that historically has been centralized. And then you've got on the other side in the kind of Ether DeFi world, you have decentralized infrastructure. But then you have this asset that's kind of masquerading as money, but probably doesn't have the same sound money principles that Bitcoin has. Right. And so it feels like there's a mismatch between centralized and decentralized infrastructure, sound money and not sound money. You are taking the approach of how to marry Bitcoin and DeFi together. Describe your kind of viewpoint and how you plan to do that.

And then we could talk about the reverse of, you know, why not bring DeFi to Bitcoin? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I think you've nailed it right. I think for so long in Bitcoin, we've only had centralized alternatives. And a lot of the stuff, OpenBazaar as an example, that tried to go to the next level and take decentralization to the next level, it was so difficult to use. And we look at things like BISC, for example, just very little real world usage today. But then, you know, I'll say even a little bit more about Ethereum. There's a huge cultural divide. So it's not just that Ether isn't the same sound money as Bitcoin. It's that a lot of people working Ethereum don't care. there's sort of like a left right like optimist versus conservative thing going on

and you know as someone who was in bitcoin as an engineer i wanted to do all the things people were doing with ethereum but just with bitcoin there was no reason for me to add another asset so when i'm talking to folks who came to the space ethereum first to tell them like all this eth is money stuff like cut that that's not useful find your own narrative for Ether. Bitcoin is money. Maybe Ether will be like gas or fuel or something else, but the tech is interesting. So what we've done is a project called TPTC. And the idea is that we're building this bridge that I hope is going to be a bridge between the communities as well as the technology and the assets. So we'll bring Bitcoin onto Ethereum. It's one-to-one backed. It's always

redeemable. So you never have some token on Ethereum that you can't immediately get back to Bitcoin on L1 for. And then we maintain sound money and inflation ship resistance. We maintain censorship resistance. So there's no Bitcoin bank in the middle that's kind of like printing tokens on the Ethereum side. Got it. And so maybe walk us through exactly how TBTC works, right? Because I think a lot of people know, oh, TBTC is the idea of how do we bring Bitcoin to DeFi, but like, how does that actually work? Yeah. So it's taking the idea of sidechains that we've been playing with since 2013, 2014, and kind of iterating a little bit, right? So in Bitcoin, I think the closest we've had with any commercial success to a sidechain was something like Liquid.

And the basic idea is you take Bitcoin and you trust a 15-member multisig. So you put your Bitcoin in that multisig. And then the members of that multisig run another chain based on the Bitcoin that you've put in. So that's called a federated peg. And it's like a step. It's better than just putting your Bitcoin in exchange, right? But at the end of the day, you're trusting a majority of those signers to like be good guys. And really, if they just walk with your Bitcoin, there's no recourse, except for legal, right? Which is like, when I hear that from a Bitcoiner, oh, just sue them. I'm like, oh, guys, why are we building in this space if that's the answer, right? So our model is a little bit different. We take this federation, and we make that the

first step. But instead of having a federation for the whole economy, every single deposit gets a new micro federation. So every time you say, you know, I want to move one Bitcoin onto Ethereum, we put together a new randomly chosen federation of signers. And then the other piece is that we use SPV proofs, which have been around since Satoshi. So it's the basic idea is that you can prove when you move Bitcoin, you can prove that on the Ethereum chain. And so because you do that, you can actually say, look, I moved Bitcoin into the system and you can successfully print TBTC. The last part is redeemability. So this is the part where if you're using a system like Liquid, you have to hope, like, please guys, send me back my Bitcoin. But in our system,

if the federation doesn't send you back your Bitcoin, you slash them so they can put down Ether, they can put down USDT or other collateral types. And if they don't do what you ask as the depositor, we just take away their money. So it kind of removes the reputation component. Yeah. Got it. And so do you see this first being valuable for developers or for users? And what I mean by that is there's a lot of technical challenges with integrating Bitcoin into DeFi. you guys are building a lot of those bridges you're trying to kind of break down those barriers or obstacles um is this a let's solve the developers problem and then consumers follow or is it the opposite the consumers want this and the developers will build around it

yeah so i'm trying to tackle both right so like build it and they will come as nonsense like if you just build things for developers and developers don't show up users won't won't use it like what is their use so uh so our go-to market is you know we focused heavily on integrations early. Most of the major DeFi platforms will support us out the gate. So you can get leverage, you can start lending out your Bitcoin, borrowing against it, earning. It will be a safe way to make yield as an alternative to things like BlockFi on the one hand, right? And that'll be immediately available. But on the other hand, we're also empowering devs who care about things like privacy products to build on Bitcoin on Ethereum. So that's really like my heart of

parts, what I really want to see is fungibility solved. If Ethereum's reason to exist is as a fungibility layer for Bitcoin and a place to experiment for Bitcoin, then we've won. Got it. And what are the initial use cases that you see people kind of going after? Are there specific products or these use cases or more of a you're going to give it to the world and let them figure out what to do with it? No, I mean, you know what I'm most excited about? This is just totally my life. So like, I have a couple kids, we moved back, we were in California for maybe four years, and we moved back and decided to buy a house in Georgia. And my wife said, you know, it's time, it's time to sell your Bitcoin. And I just laughed, like, I am not

selling crypto to buy a house, like I would rather take a mortgage and keep it. And so, but I did look into it right and this was kind of before we have loan desks now but this was before we had loan desks so I heard oh there's a lender down the street who loves bitcoin and that I was introduced to so I went to talk to him and they said yeah we do love bitcoin it's so great that you came in sell your bitcoin come back in 30 days and we'll pretend we never talked about this and I'm like I'm not trying to avoid taxes here guys I just I mean well I am but like I'm not trying to launder money. It's not hidden that I have Bitcoin. I want to be able to take a loan against my Bitcoin as collateral. So one of the things that I think about crypto is it's sort of

millennial money, right? So now the answer is, well, there are all these lenders that will accept Bitcoin as collateral. OK, if you are a high enough net worth individual, that's true. But I shouldn't have to ask anyone. And so what I would like to see TBTC for is taking stablecoin loans out immediately against my Bitcoin and accessing the equity while still holding my BTC and not disposing of it. That's my goal. It should be good to go four to six weeks after TBTC's launch. Then in the meantime, there are tons of places to earn yield. For example, Compound is integrated with TBTC on testnet right now. Check it out. Got it. One of the things that I think you believe, but correct me if I'm wrong, is that moving Bitcoin into the DeFi world is a massive

inflection point of growth for DeFi, right? This idea that like TBTC can help to inflate the size and kind of engagement in DeFi. One, is that true? And then two, if it is, maybe describe a little bit about how you think that through. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I look at the market cap numbers are changing every day, but $140 billion, give or take, in Bitcoin right now, and 12 or 14 in Ethereum. And so for me, that's like Bitcoin is super collateral, and DeFi runs on collateral. It's not about uncollateralized loans. It's about taking different positions against different assets.

And if you're building a decentralized lending platform and you haven't brought in the best collateral possible, clearly, you're missing out. But I also think that it's going to be big for Bitcoin. And I think that's a little understated. So obviously, like DeFi needs more collateral, and that's big for DeFi. But I think Bitcoin wants utility. I think we have the technology for it. And this can prevent miners from needing to sell because they'll be able to take loans

out against their Bitcoin after it's minted. Actually, they can even keep their new Bitcoin. So they don't need to lose that premium that you get on freshly minted coins. And it'll kind of let us like actually like not just stick it under our mattress, but make Bitcoin more a part of our lives on top of the store of value it has now. Got it. And so you have taken the approach of how do we bring Bitcoin and that sound money to the DeFi world? The other option would have been how do we bring the decentralized infrastructure to Bitcoin? Maybe talk a little bit about the trade-offs between those two decisions and you chose to go the path you chose. Yeah. Honestly, going the other way, it's tough. Either way, I have to get into some serious low

level Bitcoin development. We are the guys who are in there and messing around with script and odd transaction types and all the stuff that you hear people who have been playing with Bitcoin for a long time will talk about. Going the other way is difficult for two reasons. One is that this DeFi ecosystem already exists. So if you look at something like a root stock or a project that's trying to go the other direction, they've got all the additional work of needing to build the ecosystem. And I think that's a huge lift. And related to that is just standardization. So suddenly you need to come up with, how are these things going to interoperate? How are we not going to splinter liquidity all over the place? How can we keep this all together?

So I think there are two directions. One is the tech is very hard going the other direction. A lot of the tools that Ethereum developers are used to are maybe three steps in abstraction above what we can do in Bitcoin today. And on the other side, just like that's where the users are. And ultimately, I think that I think that there are going to be more users from both systems combined than I think they're going to be from either individually. So that's kind of my take is like, yes, we'll be bringing some Bitcoiners into this new tech, but we'll also be bringing more people into Bitcoin that weren't there before. Got it. That makes sense. And do you think that in the future, even though it's hard to bring the decentralized infrastructure to Bitcoin, we'll kind of have both decisions end up being brought to reality, meaning we'll bring Bitcoin to DeFi, but we'll also bring DeFi to Bitcoin. And it's just two different types of projects, two different types of teams. And over a long time horizon, we'll get there. Or do you think it's really, really hard? so um so with like my full if i'm trying to like troll an ethereum i'd say like bitcoin was the

first defy we don't need to bring defy to bitcoin you know you guys are the ones that want the collateral and bitcoin's doing just fine by itself so um now but but i think the question is like do the two technical approaches kind of net out and i think that at the end of the day bitcoin's reason to exist is to move slowly and safely. And Ethereum doesn't have that culture for better or worse. And the upside of that is we can build things very quickly. And the downside is the stability is not there to nearly the same degree as Bitcoin. So I do think that Bitcoin will win for the monetary premium. But I actually think that the move a little bit faster than Bitcoin, Dev cycle will probably win more users in the interim.

I could be wrong. We've obviously seen, I'm a huge Lightning fan. We've obviously seen uptake in Lightning. People are starting to use Liquid lightly. But I think you have to ask yourself, do I want to trust 15 people or 2,000 when I'm using a system like this? And what's my risk?

For sure. Vitalik recently tweeted, basically saying that we needed something like this. Maybe talk a little bit about what he said and kind of your reaction to seeing that. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, he said a couple of things. There's a lot to unpack. So, you know, he said that he wanted to see a Bitcoin Ethereum bridge. But he also said that he wanted to see a Bitcoin Ethereum DEX.

And the funny thing about that is I want to build what the market wants. And I think what the market wants is stronger collateral. And I think the market wants Bitcoin. I don't think what the market wants is going from BTC to ETH faster or more smoothly. And so that might just be my bias against ETH as an asset. But I just see like, you know, Maker needs more collateral. It doesn't need faster BTC ETH swaps. I like to think we're solving half of his problem.

That makes sense. Are there other projects that you see working on similar things that you're like, you know what, that's cool, and something where either you guys work with them in the future or it could be other solutions? Yeah, of course. I mean, I think if you want to take the other side of the bet, which is that Bitcoin on Ethereum is cool, but you don't need decentralization at all, then WBTC, where Bitcoin kind of, or Bitco acts as the Bitcoin bank, you know, it's interesting. I haven't seen the extreme interest that I would hope. I think I've also seen some stuff around like hash rate derivatives and more decentralized miner products, which I'm really excited about, because, you know, eventually you can imagine a world where there is a crackdown even further than there has been on mining. And I'd like to see, like, how can you how can you still run a large mining farm and get the whole thing financed if your government is against you? Right. And so I think we're going to see some really interesting products there cropping up as well.

And speaking of kind of just working in general, you're in Georgia. The coronavirus is running rampant around the world. It is really interesting to me how crypto has been built in a decentralized kind of remote way for years now. and it seems like most teams are having no disruptions for the most part are you guys seeing any disruptions uh or is it kind of business as usual for you um look times are different this is a big thing and it impacts everyone um whether or not you're a remote team so like i have a family they're you know my kids grandparents i'm not comfortable with them watching my kids i don't want my grandparents my parents to get sick um i think you know

so we are a remote first team and we're not a team like coinbase where it's just a whole bunch of people in one spot in san francisco we're globally distributed it doesn't impact us nearly as much as other teams but i think like the human aspect is still there so a lot of us in crypto we have so many friends globally that we knew like i knew people in wuhan when the outbreak first happened i was deciding whether or not to go to satoshi roundtable because some friends got stuck in Wuhan. And we had to be like, is it even safe? And that was what, February 6th. So I think, I guess to answer your question, the company's in a good spot, but we're all having to deal with, you know, worry for our families and whatnot. And I also think that, at least for me,

I had a brief heart attack with that early Bitcoin drop. I think this is an opportunity for us to really show the world what we're made of. And it doesn't just have to be the ticker, right? It also needs to be like, let's actually deliver products that help people through this time. I think that when we kind of wake up from this disaster and from the hangover, from all the free money and all of the attempts at fixing the economy, we need to, crypto needs to be there and be ready to onboard the next, you know, billion users. And so that's kind of my take is like, this is unfortunate this is impacting everyone but it's also the best time for us to build and get something out for sure that makes a ton of sense um let's talk about that drop uh i was sitting there like

everyone else watching and it just kept falling and falling and falling and it's one of those situations where you're like i i think i'm gonna go to zero with this thing but like damn this is happening really fast and this scares the shit out of me uh what were you thinking how that's going on and what's going through your head i mean i was gobbling up uh cheap coins if i'm being honest i um i have this thing in my life where on the one hand i want to have dry powder so i can buy the dip but on the other hand i hate having any non-crypto at any time so like it's a tough it's a tough trade um yeah i mean i think when we when we went below four that's when i briefly was like, Oh, like maybe I made a mistake, but you know, I, you know, I remember when, gosh, like

things were really bleak through 2014 and 2015. And, uh, and we got through that just fine. It just, it always takes longer. It never, it never happens when you want it to. And the market doesn't care about, uh, your holdings or your position right now. Um, but eventually, eventually, i think it's clear that this is this is a good bet and so uh so i guess i'm like a permable a little bit i try to not give people like people are like should i buy and my answer is always yes so you should never ask me for trading advice but um but yeah so that was that was my take and the other thing is like honestly i try to take a little pleasure when people get washed out um because with that deleveraging and with that bitmax cascade some people who were in the space

the wrong reasons got wrecked and uh okay like i'm sorry guys you lost money but also more for the rest of us yeah i think one of the really interesting things with nick carter and the coin metrics team uh they did this analysis and they basically showed that most of the coins that were being sold uh were had been moved in the last six months but pretty much nobody who was a long-term holder was selling and so when you start to look at that it's uh the strong hands aren't going to going to get shaken out. I don't care what happens to the price. That's right. That's right. Yeah. I mean, the only way I sell is if I think I'm going to get more Bitcoin out of it, you know, so yeah, that's kind of my take. Very cool. What do you think is the most important company

in crypto outside of what you guys are working on? Cool. Good question. Well, obviously you've excluded us. I get that. So I'm a huge fan of, and a co-founder. So I'm going to say, I think fold is quite important. But I think it's really important to let people get into crypto in a way that's not scary, a way to earn into crypto rather than having to like bet their life savings on it. And so anything where people are shopping and they're immediately seeing discounts uh you know airline miles don't matter anymore and bitcoin does so i i love seeing like sats back programs um so after fold i think uh i think lolly is really interesting i think uh block fi anything that lets us start earning and stacking uh rather than spending um and i also

think like one of the things that i love about the space is this kind of counter consumerism like if we all believe that long-term number will go up we should not spend money right now and we should delay gratification and i actually think that's a great antidote for sort of uh the state of american consumerism you know so um so anyway so i'm a huge fan of savings apps um and that's on the kind of like onboarding side i think i'll stick with that there's a lot of cool infrastructure being built but like at the end of the day i think what convinces people to join the space is the most important. What's your most controversial thought in the space? What do you believe that everyone else will disagree with you on? Oh, man. Well, I've got a couple. So

as you can imagine, my old Bitcoin friends hate me and my new Ethereum friends hate me. And so I'm sort of right by the fence of no one wants to have me at a party because I'm going to piss everyone off. But getting more specific, so like on the Bitcoin side, I don't think this matters, but I ultimately have a problem with the cap. I think that we need to be really honest that now it might be five halvings from now, in which case I don't care, but that eventually we need to consider a better way to pay for security. It doesn't have to be the cap moving. And I think the strength of the meme is more important than what will actually happen when we eventually have to deal with it but that got me a pretty big uh slapping around in the bitcoin community uh last

year i think um i think on the ethereum side just the fact that i say ethereum the technology but not ether the asset is infuriating to a lot of people but they have this funny thing so like the bitcoin community right is is like they have this like social immune system where um if they don't like what you're doing and you don't really prove yourself like you're a scammer there's just sort of like a like a hierarchy of things you go down and it's and it works it works very well to um to remove bad actors from the community early but on the ethereum side uh they're incredibly tolerant and so there's this paradox of tolerance where if you have like a heterodox opinion in ethereum they still invite you to other things and try to take you very seriously and be nice

And so I think when I say, you know, I believe in the tech, but not the asset, it really, it really bugs them. Those are two highly controversial opinions. So you didn't disappoint with that answer. Different audiences. What's the most important book you've ever read? oh man oh god you're asking a good one um okay so so I wanted to be a writer for a long time um and it was either a writer or a computer scientist so I went on this deep dive uh through like through the beat poets and existentialism and I got into some Russian stuff big fan of Russian literature but I still think uh there's a book by Jack Kerouac that I think a lot of

people would really frown on even that i would mention him uh but uh but it was called the subterraneans and i think he got like super high i think it was like on mescaline and just like wrote this thing out and like it's beautiful um and so i think i know the right answer would be this like cool not money in the state or whatever but like actually it's just a beautiful book uh he uh i don't know i'm a great writer but it definitely gets to you so uh so yeah subterraneans by jack kerouac probably top of mind um and then if we're getting to like other stuff you know i mean i don't know just like let's name all the cool sovereign individual things that's probably good for my personal brand or whatever i love it i love it um so before i uh finish up and let you

asked me one question. I normally ask people about aliens, but you've got a dinosaur sitting over your shoulder back there. You got to tell me the story of the dinosaur and then the believer in dinosaurs, or are you one of these people who believes they are not real? Oh, all right. Got you back. Joe, can you hear him? Oh, okay. All right. No, we're all good. Let me ask the dinosaur question again. We'll go from there. Got five minutes probably left. Yeah, sure. um so you've got a dinosaur back over your shoulder normally ask people about aliens

uh you got to tell me the story of the dinosaur and then uh believer or non-believer that uh dinosaurs are real so so my son definitely believes in dinosaurs he was a pterodactyl picture day uh a few days ago at school or not a few weeks ago at this point with this quarantine but um but yeah you know what i believe in dinosaurs i do not think that uh god just left fossils for us to find um i do believe in dinosaurs and i will say i also believe in aliens uh i think the world is too interesting for aliens to not exist i hope that uh the various paradoxes about how far away they are and the speed of light will be resolved somehow somehow and my descendants will be able to meet them. I love it. I'm a believer in dinosaurs as

well. I'm with you. I don't think that it's possible that they could be fake, but I've got a couple of friends who say, well, I've never seen one, so I don't believe in them, which always gives me a good laugh, but I don't think that's really good science. What one question do you have for me to uh to wrap this up what do i need to do to convince you to move 10 of your bitcoin onto ethereum um well i think i've said this on a podcast before i have no control over anything i was uh super worried um a long time ago and so uh basically took a lot of kind of security steps to uh, to not have any control. So first I would have to have some conversations. Um, but second is, uh, on top of that, um, I think it's a market decides thing. Like you probably know this more

than most, but the whole idea of like compounding trust almost, right. It's like, as the market determines a winner, I think that then you get the flywheel spinning. Um, and so what I always say is developers are actually probably going to be the first to use something like this. Uh, but as users. And what I mean by that is they understand the technical components. Uh, they can actually underwrite the, um, the safety, the security, the risks, et cetera, much better than someone who's non-technical. And so as you see some of them move over and start using it, I think then that's when that flywheel really starts. And then you start to see people say, Hey, you know what I am, uh, you know, I'm in to do this, try it and kind of continue using it. Totally. Well,

Well, for the rest of you, if you want to be an early adopter, it's tbtc.network. Come check it out. We'll be announcing Mainnet in a couple of weeks. And the other thing is that if in the meantime, if you don't want to move all your Bitcoin to Ethereum, but you want to make some money, help us build that bridge. Get involved. It's permissionless after all. For sure.

tbtc.network is the website. Where else can people find you guys online? so um i mean we have all sorts that we've got maybe 30 brands but just hit me up on twitter it's mhluongo um tbtc.network will tell you a bit about that project we've got another one keep.network we're all over the place um so if you just google bitcoin on ethereum i i imagine we'll be top three check us out well so we got to get you to top one right can't can't have other people beating you in the SEO game. I love it. All right, man. Listen, I really appreciate you jumping on and doing this. I think people are really going to enjoy it. I hope so. Talk to you

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