{ "episodeId": "SLP16", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "beautyon": { "name": "Beautyon", "role": "guest", "tag": "BEAUTYON" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:04", "start": 4.38, "text": "Welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "00:13", "start": 12.55, "text": "Hey guys, welcome to Stephan Livera podcast episode 16, and my guest today is Akin, or also well known as Beautyon. Welcome Akin, thanks for coming on." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "00:23", "start": 23.39, "text": "Thanks for having me." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "00:25", "start": 25.41, "text": "Excellent, it's great to have you on today. And just to intro, Akkin to the audience. Akkin is a software developer. He is the owner of a Bitcoin business called Azteco, and he is very, very well known in Bitcoin for his Twitter and Medium posts. So I thought I just had to get him on the podcast, and we're very lucky to have him on. So he's quite, influential and very, very well, very articulate guy within the space. So, Akine, maybe let's just start with, what's your story on Bitcoin and what would you say are your intellectual influences?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:03", "start": 63.12, "text": "Well, my story with Bitcoin starts in the late 1990s. With a charming eCash, when we the, what, the people I was working with tried to use that, system, we designed a, a, a service based on that system where the eCash we based, would be backed by gold. Which we kept in a secure facility. That didn't come to fruition, and, I put the, the, the, idea aside. And then many years later About 2010, I read about Bitcoin on a forum, and by then I'd become a, a software developer, and so it was obvious to me what needed to be done. Since, the people who, whoever it is that developed Bitcoin, had solved the double spending problem and removed the need for a custodian of any kind or a centralized, a central point of authority. And so it was obvious what, needed to be done with that, that people needed to have a way to turn their fiat into Bitcoin. And that's when I started to do, as tech essentially." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "02:18", "start": 137.64, "text": "Excellent. And so, can you outline a little bit around what were some of your intellectual influences that made you more open to Bitcoin, like p-potentially your economic or political views?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "02:33", "start": 152.61, "text": "Well, my first introduction into the nature of fiat was, happened when I was given a lecture by my father, and he- Put in front of me a five dollar bill and a ten dollar bill, and he asked me, \"Son, what is the difference between these two notes?\"\"\" And of course, obviously being a, a well-trained person, I said, \"One is a ten, one is a five, one's worth twice as much as the other.\" And he said, \"No, son, you're wrong. Both of these notes are worth...\" Nothing. Both of these notes are made out of the same kind of paper, and the only difference between them is one has a number five printed on it, and the other one has the number ten on it. But they're exactly the same, they're both worthless. Now, to cut a long story short, this was a very shocking revelation to me because I'd grown up, Understanding that the US dollar was money and it was something that everybody was chasing after, it was the, you know, basically the raison d'être of being an American. And All of a sudden, that illusion was taken away, and it, it, it, it troubled me very, very greatly. Everybody was participating in a mass delusion, a mass fraud, and they seem to be totally unaware and uninterested in the nature of this fraud. And when I talked about this with other people, they didn't know what I was, they didn't know I was talking about, they had absolutely no idea. So fast forward many years, later, and Ron Paul was running for president. That's how I discovered Murray Rothbard and the Austrians, who described in a formal way that lecture that was given to me by my father about the true nature of money. And so with those two things, I knew that it was possible to have a real money, to have a proper money, which is obviously gold and silver. Which the American Constitution explicitly, commands to be money, and that was really the, the, the genesis of my understanding of what money is, how money should work And the, the problems with the Federal Reserve, the problems with the government-controlled money, and obviously when Bitcoin came around, that married with that information so that, The, the opportunity was, just mind-blowing and explosively, made real for me. So that's the, the story of my background to do with, that stuff." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "05:23", "start": 322.97, "text": "Yeah, it's interesting you point out the Austrian economics influence, and what I notice f-when I look out at who else is in Bitcoin, it tends to be people who have some level of Austrian economics influence, but also some level of technical competence, and I think in this case, your- ability or your background as a software developer that perhaps made it easier for you to grasp Bitcoin at such an early stage? Can you comment a little on, you know, whether you believe that, you know, your that background as a software developer helped in this case?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "06:00", "start": 360.16, "text": "Absolutely, yes, because when you're dealing with the databases and, and, and software, you understand the nature of data, you have to, otherwise your, your, your stuff won't work. So The, the solution to the double spending problem really makes software into something that it's actually not by nature. It makes software scarce. So people who don't understand how a database works won't have any, clue about what it means to have, for example, replication or that, you can copy a database or any kind of, data an infinite number of times. Quite trivially, a lot of these people don't pirate software either. They don't understand that, people can copy, data without permission. So without this, the understanding of what data is, without understanding what software is You can't really understand the problem that, Bitcoin solved and how, very significant that p-solution that problem is. There's also another, key element to understanding why this is so, important, significant, and that's cryptography. A lot of people have absolutely no idea of what public key cryptography is How it works, even on a fundamental, you know, principle level. And so it's very difficult for them to, understand what a digital signature is, for example, that you can verify that somebody who made a signature made that signature. And so without all of these, different elements in place, in, even on a cursory level, it's not easy to understand Bitcoin. And so people with a software background, have an advantage when it comes to, understanding Bitcoin, but even amongst software developers, if you don't have any experience in, PGP or, or digital signatures The concepts can be very, very hard to, to learn, and of course, if you're in any way, rational, you're skeptical at first of, any kind of claim that people make, and so when you talk about unbreakable digital signatures or unbreakable encryption, unbreakable isn't absolute. And so that, to, to, anybody can think is a, is a, is a red flag, but in math, you can actually have things that are, possible and impossible. So this," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "08:31", "start": 510.62, "text": "mixture of many different disciplines in Bitcoin, ex-naturally excludes, always excludes somebody It's very, very rare to have people who understand every single aspect of it, and I don't claim that I do either, because, you know, I do have my, my blind spots. But to have, even a surface understanding of every single part is very, very rare, and that's why you have different factions who are all trying to approach this problem from their own perspective without knowing anything about the other parts, and that colors their perception and makes it impossible for them to come up, for example, with the correct business model. So that's, a very, very inter-interesting aspect of this, of this whole, area, and I don't think that problem's gonna go away either, because the amount of, learning that's required is, significant. Somebody's always going to have to be there as the delegated person to understand what's going on. And, you rely on them having that whole picture, overview, and not many people do have" }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "09:39", "start": 578.73, "text": "that. yeah, I think it's a good point that you make around the, the amount of learning that's required to really understand Bitcoin, not that any of us really fully understand it, but even to just have a, have a chance at u-understanding a small part of it." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "09:57", "start": 596.68, "text": "Actually, you don't have to understand all of it All you have to do is, understand enough of it to be able to make the cor- a few correct assumptions. So if you have Bitcoin that's been running now for nine years flawlessly And you understand the effects that it has and, and the way to address it, you can put that essentially into a box. So you have your Bitcoin box over on one side, and it's reliable, it's just like the web essentially. Everybody knows what the website is, but very, very few people understand the depths of Apache. And if you've seen the Apache configuration file, you know what I'm talking about. It's, it's, it's an absolute nightmare. But people put web servers into that, Minespace into that box and they say, \"Okay, we need a web server.\" They don't think about the Apache configuration file or the Jetix configuration file or anything else. They just know what that does. The same thing is going to-- it must happen with Bitcoin. Bitcoin must be put into a box which everybody understands as a thing that does a, a certain single thing and that can always be relied on. And once you do that, once you abstract it away into, a tool, then you can start building stuff on it and actually use it and make something useful of it, just like we've seen with the web, which is- done all sorts of things which many, many people don't understand how it actually works, but they know that they can do this thing with a web server or JavaScript or anything else." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "11:32", "start": 691.96, "text": "Yeah, it's a good point around abstracting and keeping things simple for people, and I think this is probably now a good time to ask you about your business as Techo and how you've kept that simple. Do you wanna just tell the listeners a brief overview of what your business is?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "11:50", "start": 709.77, "text": "Esteco is a way of supplying Bitcoin to the consumer. The way Bitcoin is being delivered now is Not by its nature. It's, the business models are superimposing the thinking from the banking sector and financial sector on top of Bitcoin, whereas we don't think like that. We think of Bitcoin more like a top-up. Anybody's used a pay-as-you-go mobile, mobile phone, will know about mobile phone top-ups that come on a, a slip of paper that you buy from a supermarket or a corner store, you get given a sixteen-digit voucher code. You then redeem that voucher code to your mobile, SIM number, and then you have that airtime, whatever it is, twenty dollars, twenty pounds, on your phone, and you can make calls. Well, Bitcoin is no different from that. We provide a voucher that you can redeem to your Bitcoin wallet on your phone, and then you have Bitcoin to send anywhere in the world. It's exactly the same as topping up your phone, both in its form and in its nature, because Bitcoin isn't, money. It's actually a, a, a database that you access with software. Now, people use it as money, and it is in fact the best money ever created, but In the gears of it, it is not software. It's, sorry, it's not money, it is software. So if you design your business model correctly, as we have Then you can start to deliver Bitcoin in a frictionless way to many, many, many, many people, and it's better for Bitcoin because more people will be using it. When we ran a pop-up to test this idea with the public, most of the vouchers that were being redeemed were on the order of forty pounds, fifty pounds, sixty pounds. That's going to be the average ticket for as Techo user, and that's perfectly good for us because it means that we'll be able to service a lot of people and get Bitcoin into the hands of many, many, many people." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "14:02", "start": 842.29, "text": "Yeah, I like the point that you make around leveraging pre-existing knowledge of consumers who are already used to re- topping up their mobile phones, because one barrier that many- Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, crypto companies will face is the time and the cost of educating the user." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "14:25", "start": 865.2, "text": "That's exactly right. And if the applications that you're using to access Bitcoin are properly designed, like Samurai Wallet Then using Bitcoin is gonna be like falling off a log. It's not more difficult than sending an SMS when your application is designed correctly. And of course When you're talking about getting Bitcoin with a voucher, everybody understands how to redeem a voucher. It's very, very simple. So when you remove all the complexities, all of the, old wives' tales about Bitcoin, it's actually a very, very simple thing. And what people are going to do next, I'm convinced of this, is that they're gonna stop talking about all of the technical aspects, all the monetary aspects, and everything else to do with how Bitcoin works, and they're just only going to talk about the user experience, the ease of use, and, and stuff like that, which is going to be, beneficial for everybody because How ac- Bitcoin actually works is something that's inaccessible to the vast majority of people, and they actually don't care. In the same way, they don't care how their SMS gets from one point of the globe to the other, how their phone, the, the, the, the voice compression algorithm which is actually A5 on the, on the GSM works, nobody cares about that. All they care about is that they can make a call, it's simple to do, and they don't have to pay very much for it. This has to happen with Bitcoin, and it's services like Aztec that will make this happen because we remove the complexity, there is no complexity involved in getting- Bitcoin, all you need to do is hand over your money, get your voucher, redeem it, and you get the Bitcoin literally in twenty seconds. And in" }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "16:15", "start": 974.75, "text": "fact- Yeah, okay." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:16", "start": 976.46, "text": "In fact, while we're on this call, I'm going to issue an aesthetic voucher. So you ask me a next question, and I'll talk as I'm issuing the voucher." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "16:27", "start": 987.47, "text": "Okay, sure, I'll do that. so how long has Azteco been in operation?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:34", "start": 994.0, "text": "Azteco isn't in operation yet. We're lining up our first batch of vendors right now. And we are about to close our seed round, believe it or not, so you can say congratulations on that. And so once we launch, everybody will be able to buy their Bitcoin from us. In a very, very simple form, and we don't abuse our customers, and we don't keep databases of everybody's names or anything else. So all of our administrative Overheads are smaller than with other kinds of Bitcoin companies, so I think we have a compelling, product, compelling service. And, we're looking forward to, serving everybody." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "17:22", "start": 1042.06, "text": "Excellent. Okay. And then with the, I guess this is related to the common regulations that will apply to basically every other company that tries to do a Bitcoin business, particularly the exchanges, where they have to put in various controls that are basically requested or required by the government. Government, for, for in relation to regulations like anti-money laundering laws, it's interesting that the, in the design of AztecO, you've sort of gone around that because The news agent or whatever the business partners are, they don't necessarily have to identify the customer." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "18:08", "start": 1088.08, "text": "Well, first of all, when you talk about regulations We need to be very, very, very specific. First of all, what regulations are you talking about? What jurisdictions are you talking about? These are very, these, these, these things can't be just glossed over. When the first, batch of, Bitcoin businesses start to operate back in two thousand and fourteen, when the first batch of them that, that, starts to make noise about Finset and everything else, there were-- there are no laws that these people are referring to. There are no laws referring specifically to Bitcoin. And Without, in, in a, a, a country that's run properly under the, Anglo-Saxon, system of law, laws have to be actually on the statutes for the-- for them to be actual laws. So unless you can cite the law, cite the jurisdiction Then talking about, Bitcoin regulation as a general thing, as a global thing, isn't a, a, a rational way of go- of having this con- this conversation. You've got to go Jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and I'll give you a, a perfect example. Look at BitMEX. BitMEX is doing a huge amount of money in Bitcoin with a hundred x, ten x on leverage, whatever it is they do there. It's a very, very popular site. There's no KYC/AML there of any kind. Now, nobody's asking, Arthur Hayes when he goes on CNBC about KYC/AML. Now, why is that? Why is it that the, the don't, there's no KYC/AML on BitMEX, but, other, other- exchanges and other co-companies have to have it. Doesn't make any sense. So this is another thing that's going to happen and there is going to be a legal challenge inevitably. That will settle this once and for all, and then the state's going to either have to legislate and say that this kind of database is subject to a particular, Set, set of rules and other databases aren't, or all databases are under the same rule. Now in the United States, where they have a written constitution The, there have been two court cases already saying that Bitcoin isn't money, it's just another form of data, and so all these financial regulations don't apply to it. Now that's absolutely correct. So in the United States at least, there's gonna have to be a change in the Constitution at a minimum. To s-to ring fence Bitcoin as, a kind of speech which the government can regulate. Now, we know that Bitcoin is speech because Bitcoin is made up of only software. And there have been, cases in the past where, for example, with the Phil Zimmermann's GPG case, where the, I think it was the Department of Defense brought a case against him because he, exported the source code for it. The binaries for GPG. We know for a fact that printing out the source code of GPG is a constitutionally protected Act. And nobody says anything, other than that, nobody makes that claim other than that. And what will happen is somebody's going to, make this demonstration in front of legislators, and it's going to be obvious that Bitcoin is just another form of speech Now, is this gonna cause a problem for anybody? I don't think so. GPG is spread everywhere, it's used to verify whether binaries have been tampered with or not, it's useful to everybody. You know, Bitcoin is going to be exactly the same thing. What we're, what we're experiencing now is once again, the people who don't understand what it is, how it works, what it's for, and making all kinds of assumptions based on their background. So you'll get some lawyers Who look at Bitcoin only from the perspective of a lawyer, not from a p-perpective of a software developer or a, somebody who's, expert in databases or Or an entrepreneur, for that matter, they look at it only from their perspective and then they try and bring that perspective to bear on Bitcoin. Now, that's absolutely not acceptable. It won't be accepted, and I think companies like BitMEX, which are doing fantastic amount of money, are going to be the things that refute these bad ideas, forever. And destroy them because everybody understands that the profit motive is, essential to," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "22:58", "start": 1378.5, "text": "to our-- basically to the way things keep stay in order. And so we're not going to get these lawyers saying that, for example, the BitMEX must change their, their, their model just because they say so. You know, just reality is just gonna work like that. And as Bitcoin spreads, especially to the people who need it the most, and, and the ordinary person, it's just gonna become a fact of life. And, the way people get it, the way people get inured to, to getting it in a simple form, it's gonna change everybody's perception. And so that's, Essentially, the, the, the objection I make to people talking about, regulation and Bitcoin, it's got to be specific. You can't just, cast a wide net and treat the whole world like it's one big place. It isn't one big place." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "23:54", "start": 1433.79, "text": "Agreed. I, and I think the point that you're making there is about the fact that we live in a world with many different nations, there is interjurisdictional competition, and there will always be some nations and some areas of the, of the earth that are less regulated. And Bitcoin entrepreneurs can, as you've mentioned in the BitMEX example, tr- you know, try to relocate or restructure their business in such a way that You know, the regulation of some other country won't apply, and that, that is one way that Bitcoin's adoption may be speeded along further. but yeah, I think that, that, that brings up an interesting point around just regulation in, in general and how should Bitcoin businesses try to deal with that. one question I had for you was, which one do you think will change more in response to the other? Do you think Bitcoin or regulation?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "24:55", "start": 1495.49, "text": "Well, it depends once again what, what, what country we're talking about. the, the, what I object to is the idea that Anybody should be talking about regulation in Bitcoin at all. I mean, why, why don't people talk about regulation when they're, we're, we're talking about, when they're- The subject of MySQL is on the table. When we're talking about MySQL, nobody talks about regulation. Why is that? We're gonna take one step back and Ask the fundamental question, why is this question being asked in the first place? Why is it being asked at Bitcoin, which is a database, but not MySQL? And that's, that's where, that's where you've got to start. People from, countries that don't have a, a written constitution, don't have, the, the, the rights of their citizens, protected by fundamental law. They, you know, they have an excuse because they, they don't have any rights, and what the government says is just basically it. I mean, they can just make up anything, and that's, you know, that's just the way, that's the way they roll, as they say. But when you come from a free country A country w-uh, run by laws and not men, then these sorts of questions should raise a red flag instantaneously. What are you talking about? Bitcoin is software. I have the right to run software, to write software, to distribute software under whatever license I, I, you know, I, I, I think is appropriate, and that's the end of the story. What I, you know, if, if I want to, take a pencil and, and mine Bitcoin with a pencil and a piece of paper, no doubt there's gonna be some lawyer somewhere that says that you shouldn't be allowed to do that. But the fact of the matter is, if I have a pencil and a piece of paper and I know math, I can mine Bitcoin with a piece of pa-paper and a pencil. Now, why is it that Bitcoin mining or Bitcoin transactions performed with a, the calculations performed with a piece of paper and a pencil shouldn't be regulated, but when they're done with a computer, they are? You see, this is the kind of question that you need to ask, and it's not being asked enough. Now, because the people who are asking these, questions incorrectly are a very, very small, group Statistically insignificant, but they have a very, very big voice. When Bitcoin adoption is widespread and there's a hundred million people using it all in one way These voices will go away, just like all the people who said Bitcoin was a Ponzi, Bitcoin was a scam, Bitcoins, they're all those, those lists of the, Bitcoin skeptics. Nobody listens to those people anymore. They've all just faded away, and this too will fade away once what Bitcoin is is made plain to the man in the street and everybody's using it. And also, I was, another thing, you won't get any journalist ever writing anything about Bitcoin that's negative if those news, if newspapers are taking Bitcoin micropayments for page views. There's no way they're gonna cut their own throats by cut, by saying the Bitcoin shouldn't spread to every single mobile phone, because they need that Bitcoin to pay for those page views. So it's very important that, micro-payment services Start to roll out and then roll out to the people who will be defending their own interest by defending Bitcoin, and by that I mean journalists. The Guardian has posted some anti Bitcoin, articles recently, and I guarantee you that if they start taking Bitcoin micropayments for paid views, you'll never, ever see an anti Bitcoin article on The Guardian ever again." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "28:51", "start": 1731.46, "text": "Yeah, it's a good point around, let's, let's call it skin in the game or not wanting to bite the hand that feeds that these media companies may not want to speak out against Bitcoin. But I suppose there have been questions raised on things like the viability of a micropayments model, or famously Nick Szabo has commented on, the mental costs associated with micropayments also." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "29:19", "start": 1759.26, "text": "I think, I think that's, I think that's, that's a very interesting point, but I'm very reticent to, say something's not going to happen. If you look at what's, the, the developments in, in Lightning, it's not a very big leap to go from what we have now to newspapers accepting Lightning payments for page views. It's a no-brainer. So just be very, very careful about saying things are impossible. This is the kind of thing that you just say about Bitcoin itself, that double spending problem made something like Bitcoin impossible. Skepticism isn't rational. You have to see what people are gonna come up, come up with, see what kind of software they're gonna develop, and, now, nine years into Bitcoin, anybody saying that something is impossible I don't know, I raised my eyebrow at that," }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "30:11", "start": 1811.32, "text": "frankly. Sure, sure. It may not be impossible. we'll, we'll have to just see how that particular, business model or potential business model plays out for them. and I think that this concept as well of- You know, the, the regulation applying to, you know, companies and banks, one, one area that I was curious to get your thoughts on is the possibility of seeing what we might term crypto anarchist banks, you know, banks that are kind of run like a BitMEX, say, a-and perhaps they could be done in a way with multi-signature or, y-y-and in that sense, there could be like financial services where you can still hold your own keys or have, you know- A multi-sig, you know, component to that. Do, do you see any possibility for that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "31:00", "start": 1859.94, "text": "It's a very, very, very big possibility. And it's interesting that you use the, the, the phrase crypto anarchist and BitMEX in the same sentence. And anybody looking at BitMEX, looking at the people who run it, the way that it looks, you wouldn't call that, you wouldn't associate that normally with, anarchism. It's basically a free market service that treats, Bitcoin by its nature, which is data, and it's grown Fantastically large and it's unarguably beneficial to everybody. So, as a matter of, PR, public relations, I think Using, terms like crypto anarchist is not a good, it's not a good look to want to, to want to phrase. I think it's very important that we just treat these things as businesses. So is it possible To have a, non-custodial Bitcoin wallet that uses multi-signature to keep your, Bitcoin safe, obviously yes, and Casa Huddle are working on exactly that thing And so these things are going to come. They're all matters of software development and business model development. I think the po-the political aspect of Bitcoin needs to be, understood certainly if you're a, a Bitcoiner. yeah, so it's very important not to, color your thinking about Bit-- about Bitcoin with, terms like crypto-anarchism, because what we're talking about essentially is the provision of services. Now, as I said, Bit- BitMEX is serving people and serving people very, very nicely. Casa Hold will serve people also by using multisig. And so these things are not crypto anarchists, even though, you know, they, in effect, they, they, they might be, but what they're doing is they're serving people, and Bitcoin is about serving other people, it's not about, the philosophy when you're talking about serving other people. So it's important not to use, in my, in my view, not to use these, inflammatory and alien terms when we're talking about Bitcoin, because we don't know who's gonna be listening to this, we don't know who's going to, you know, cotton on to this and say, \"Oh, boy, these people are crypto anarchists, we've gotta shut them down,\" 'cause that's, that's exactly what happens. Bitcoin is about serving people. It's about advantaging the disadvantaged. It's about making people's lives easier, making them more efficient. It's about solving problems. It isn't a problem itself. I think it's a very, very, impor-important point that, we, we can't gloss-gloss over and must keep reinforcing. As we go along." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "33:57", "start": 2036.63, "text": "Yeah, so it's around, winning that, you know, the battle for hearts and minds. And, a-and as you point out, it might be a little bit beyond the pale for people to accept, you know, the concept of crypto-anarchy or, or, you know, full-on, full-blown anarcho-capitalism." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "34:15", "start": 2054.63, "text": "Think about this. WhatsApp wasn't, end-to-end encrypted, and the people from Whisper Systems, I think it's a team of six people, made WhatsApp end-to-end encrypted and unbreakable. Now, a hundred million people now have end-to-end encryption that can't be broken on WhatsApp. They don't care about crypto-anarchism or anything like that. All they want is their privacy, all they wanna do is keep using WhatsApp. In fact, if WhatsApp had never been, been encrypted, they would still use it. It's very important to keep this in the proper perspective. When we're talking about a hundred million people, they're not interested in any of this stuff, they're interested only in getting stuff done. And I think this is the, the new frontier for Bitcoin, helping people to get stuff done." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "35:03", "start": 2103.43, "text": "Agreed. those are very good points around Focusing on what, where the real value of Bitcoin is and what it really does for people. let's now talk about open source software philosophy versus closed source software development. I know you had some comments on this recently. Did you want to expand a little bit on your thoughts there?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "35:27", "start": 2127.24, "text": "Well In the, in, when we're talking about software, it's important to be able to know how things work if you're going to build, services and systems on top of them. If you're dealing with a closed proprietary system, the people who own that system, first of all, keep how it works secret from you. Don't allow you to inter- to, to interact with it, fully, and you're obviously not allowed to copy it and do other sorts of stuff with it that you can with Linux. Now, when you're trying to build- Something very, very complicated. You don't want to have that, the underlying tools that you rely on changed arbitrarily, and that's what happens in closed systems, in closed, Licensed software. Anybody operating a Macintosh as a software developer knows exactly how this field, when they update Mac OS X Many times they'll break tools that people rely on to do their work, and this will happen without any notice, and there's no, sort of rolling it back so that you can get your tools back, and even if you could You can't go forward with, with OSX because those breaking changes make your tools broken. So on, on that level as a developer, you're much better off with open soft-open source software, quite apart from the ethical concerns, because your tools are knowable, they're reliable. And you have direct access to every single part of them. This overlaps somewhat with Bitcoin. Everything about Bitcoin is known. From the, the source code in the clients, the money supply and the rate of emission, everything about it's known. But in fiat, the money supply in some countries is kept secret. The money supply can be changed arbitrarily by a group of men for their own interests. And so the parallels are, quite eerie, I think, in The open source thinking and the money, and the monetary policy and openness of, of Bitcoin, and I think the world is definitely moving towards everybody understanding that these tools, whether it be the money itself or the, the tools that make the money, need to be open. When you have many, many eyes on a project, the problems get solved quicker, they get identified quicker, everybody's kept more safe if- The tools are open and inspectable and changeable. Everybody has more or less a stake in the tools when the, they're under a license that gives you full control over what you're doing. It's taken a long time for people to start to understand Why these open source, software licenses are important, but I think now, there's no dispute about this, being better for everybody. The next frontier, which I've been reading about in the, the last couple days, is the, the hardware. Being totally open and inspectable and modifiable. Apparently, Intel and AMD have secret sauce in their, chips, which means that they can do all sorts of things that the people who are running their hardware wouldn't rather not them do. So Once this happens, everybody will have also hardware platforms that are totally trustworthy because everything about them is known. I think this is very, very important, especially now that, money is turning into a form of data. Or accounting for money, depending on the perspective you're looking at it. And so we do need to have, hardware platforms that are, don't have any parts in them that are in any way questionable or mysterious or proprietary. It's gonna take a long time for, these devices to become ubiquitous. But, you know, you've got to start somewhere, and so they've, they've essentially started, but it's, it's a very good direction to go in, and, I think it's the, the momentum Of the old systems, takes a long time to, to, to wind down, and it's not made any easier by people not using the correct language when it comes to all these things. It's very, very important to be able to think about these things correctly. You've got to use the right language, you've got to be fastidious about it, you've got to be rigorous. Otherwise, the, the lies and misconceptions will just carry on, ad infinitum." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "40:21", "start": 2421.32, "text": "Yeah. And I think, the point you make there around using the correct language for things. Speaking of, I, I noticed on, Twitter, you made a comment about how- Basically, you're talking about Microsoft and how Steve Ballmer had called Linux, he said Linux is a cancer. but then later, Microsoft has now started to introduce Bash shell into Windows. So do you, have any comments on that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "40:46", "start": 2445.52, "text": "Well, yes. Microsoft was engaged in many practices during, the nineties up to, up to now. which are not beneficial to the, to the public. So this is a, an object lesson in why proprietary operating systems, Are very, very dangerous when the people who run them will do anything to stop competition, including aggressive patenting and all kinds of other, other shenanigans like that. You get a, a, a, a good picture of why these, practices can be very, very harmful. Now, Bill, to Balmer was correct that Linux is, a cancer. It's a cancer that kills Microsoft. And so he wasn't actually wrong. Linux has, improved, when I say Linux, I mean of course GNU plus Linux. It's improved dramatically over the years, and there's literally no excuse for anybody to use anything else. I had the misfortune of Helping somebody in-install Windows on a machine, out of love and duty. And, I hadn't touched Windows for many, many years, and it is literally the most appalling pile of garbage. It's absolutely incredible. When you compare to Linux Mint or to Ubuntu, it's just a night and day, it's incredible, and that's before you start talking about having total control over your system as an option if you, if you need it. So I think, Ballmer, Microsoft, and to a certain extent, Intel and AMD are all part of this old world Pre Bitcoin world, where the old ways of doing things, persist, and they're all changing now. I would be very surprised if AMD or Intel don't start producing, at the very least, a line of, CPUs that are totally open because they know that once, a, a manufacturer comes out with a killer product open integrated circuit, I'm sorry, central, central processing unit, that they could have their business impacted. It's very, very possible. Apparently Nvidia is, putting a lot of money into this new, open source, chip fabrication. So You know, it is very possible that it can be disrupted. So, Microsoft incorporating Bash can be followed as night follows day by Intel or AMD. Producing something of a similar, philosophy where the user has total control. If they don't, they will be disrupted. The same thing with Bitcoin. If the legacy system doesn't- Integrate Bitcoin. They are going to be disruptive, there's no two ways about this. Just the, the payphones all over the world are, are Essentially, museum pieces because everybody has a, a mobile phone. The same thing can happen to any industry. All these people need to be very, very, very careful." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "44:16", "start": 2656.05, "text": "It's, yeah, that's a good point around how leg- legacy systems around the world will need to integrate Bitcoin, and if they don't, people may simply leapfrog. And so, the, an interesting example is if you look at developing countries, many people there don't actually have a, a landline phone, they just jump straight to mobile phones. And so maybe we will see a future where people jump straight into having Bitcoin and Lightning apps on their phone And using that as money." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "44:49", "start": 2688.73, "text": "That's exactly right. And a-l-a, in these countries where they don't have, basically landlines, they also don't have the banking system so that people can be charged on a monthly basis. So, you know, you're not gonna get, People with the, a SIM card where they pay monthly, because their societies don't work like that, they're all on pay-as-you-go. So these people are already in a culture where pay-as-you-go is the norm They pay as you go for their telephone services. There are many, many telephones in the third world, and a lot of these people don't have access to banking, and the ones that do have access to banking under onerous conditions. All these people need to do is download a s-Samurai wallet. Load it with Bitcoin via their Zetco voucher, and then they have access to the entire world where they can send and receive money at will without permission. So to me, it's obvious that this is, first of all, should happen, and secondly, that it's going to happen. Because it solves a real problem for people and it fits in perfectly with the societies and the, and the conditions on the ground as they already are" }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "46:04", "start": 2763.98, "text": "Yeah, great example with the Samurai wallet. Let's talk a little bit about that. What, maybe let's talk about Samurai wallet and other good, examples of Bitcoin applications that are open source. What is it about them that makes them better?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "46:21", "start": 2781.39, "text": "Well, without going into the, the technical details, which I will actually, because they're, these guys are the, the total rocket scientists of Bitcoin. They have some The new thing called Whirlpool, which is a, some kind of privacy, software that they're working on that's been rolled out. These guys are the creme de la creme developers. But what they've got right is the interface to all that super complexity is brain dead simple. You can show Samurai Wallet to anybody and they'll be able to use it Out of the box with very, very little training. And so they've got the mix totally correct, their philosophy correct, their software is best in class and outclasses everybody else. Their interface is very simple, well considered. For the, the ordinary user. So I think that they're going to do very, very, very well in the future and it's going to be used by, literally the same su-number sort of numbers that WhatsApp has. It will be the, the go-to, Bitcoin app for a huge number of people People, it's not easy to imagine it right now, but if you look at the way these things spread and consider the way things, these applications, these, these phone apps spread, actually it's not that hard to imagine A hundred million people using Samoura wallet, and when that happens, we're going to see a very big economy that wasn't there before all of a sudden spring up There'll be people feeding samurai wallets, people, being asked to be paid via a samurai wallet. It's, which of course means Bitcoin. So this, we're still at the early days of the- The explosion in Bitcoin use globally, and it is going to happen because the problems that people have, are still there, they still persist, and the services that are available to them are, inferior. So as long as that's true, we're going to get a massive disruption event, it is going to happen." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "48:52", "start": 2932.34, "text": "Yeah, that's a good point around the big opportunities that are available now to Bitcoin and Lightning businesses and applications that Provide a very simple, easy to use interface while at the same time providing very strong functionality. Are there any other big opportunities that you can see in Bitcoin now if somebody were to come out with a really good service or a really good application?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "49:19", "start": 2959.25, "text": "Absolutely, yes. I think the, the main thing that anybody wants to develop a, a Bitcoin application, the main thing that they have to concentrate on Is making the operation of it as simple as possible. If you want to, it can't be more simple, it can't be, sorry, it can't be more complicated than using WhatsApp. We know that a hundred million people can use WhatsApp, we know that many people use Twitter, and it is possible to have a Bitcoin service that's more simple than WhatsApp, as Techo is one of them. More simple than Twitter. So that's gotta be your goal. You've got to, to fit inside that usability gamut of the big online Social media services. And if you can do that, and also onboard people in just the same, with just the same amount of ease, then you've got something that's going to be very exciting. When you go and get a new Twitter account, you're not asked to provide three forms of identity and all kinds of other stuff, and they have to wait four or five days before they, quote unquote, verify you before you can start tweeting. It is, it's, and, and, and Twitter is no different to Bitcoin. And anybody who says that it is different to Bitcoin is not telling you the truth, because it is literally the same thing. It's just a software client that sends a message to a database, and then that database stores it, and then the, the, the background machinery does Something with that message is exactly the same. The only difference is nobody owns the background m-machinery of Bitcoin. When you send a message to the, to the Bitcoin network, it's stored on many people's, Copies of the, of the database, everybody can see that message, and just because you can't read it, doesn't say, you know, this is what my dinner is tonight. Just because you can't read it, doesn't mean it doesn't, it doesn't have the same nature. It does have the same nature. It's very important to bear this in mind. So I think that whoever's going to crack this nut is going to have to address Bitcoin solely by its nature, keep it very, very, very simple. And solve a real problem, not an imaginary problem that they think people, they think people have, although that is also important, when you're trying to create a new, a product or service. And the iPhone is a perfect example of that. Nobody thought that they needed a phone with no buttons on it, and now of course, phones with buttons on it are a joke. So it's, you've got to have a, a, a, a balance of imagining what people could want and also being realistic about things that they will never ever want. And there are things that the vast majority of people who use Bitcoin will never use. The only way that they can use them is when it's abstracted away, underneath the hood, where they can't see it. And once again, end-to-end encryption. And WhatsApp is a perfect example. No WhatsApp user has to manage their private keys. Managing private keys is something normal people can't do. So if you want to bring private key, public key exchanges and everything else that's nice into these applications You can't expose it to the user because they're not interested, they're not capable of understanding it, and you introduce all kinds of complexity which nobody wants to bother with. They just want to get things done." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "53:02", "start": 3182.37, "text": "Yeah, fantastic. I agreed with that. The next business, Bitcoin businesses that do well will be those that keep it simple while still offering a good level of, you know, privacy, encryption, and that level of functionality. Obviously, it will take some time for that to be fully built out, but we think that that is quite likely. Okay, so I think we're getting sort of to the end of the hour. have you got any closing remarks, or maybe you can just- Tell us a little bit about what's coming up in terms of Azteco or any other projects that you have on, Akin?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:37", "start": 3216.98, "text": "Well, I just emailed you your voucher, which I- Issued in four seconds. If you take that voucher and go to a z t e dot c o, you can redeem it right now. Into your own Bitcoin wallet or anybody else's Bitcoin wallet, and that experience is the experience that everybody who uses AsTeco will have" }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "54:05", "start": 3244.69, "text": "Oh wow, that's amazing! Yeah, definitely. Oh yeah, and you can redeem it directly in the Samurai wallet as well." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "54:11", "start": 3251.21, "text": "That's coming next. So This is how Bitcoin should be delivered, and it's going to be delivered to a, a very large number of people. It's essentially disposable because you buy it Throw away the voucher after you redeemed it, and then you've got your Bitcoin. We don't have, a, a user database, users of any kind. It's just a, basically a through, a through system where people come in one end and go out the other end, just like McDonald's. McDonald's doesn't have usernames and passwords and user databases, you just go in there, you get your burger, and then you get out, and that's how Bitcoin should be delivered, that's how Bitcoin's going to be delivered. And all of these, businesses that have been treating Bitcoin like a financial service have been doing it wrong. And that's why," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "55:10", "start": 3310.26, "text": "we're gonna disrupt them. That's quite a boast, but, what do you want? It's Wednesday." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "55:21", "start": 3320.54, "text": "Very nice, Akin. I think that's a great way to finish the episode, and I really like the way you are able to quite, easily simplify things and, bring them down into a way that's quite Easy for the average, you know, for the guy on the street to understand. so guys, I will just read out, Arkin's social media accounts. So look him up on Twitter. His Twitter account is at beauty on underscore, and you can also look up his Medium account, which is under the same username, which is at beauty on underscore. So I'll put the links for those in the show notes. And also, obviously, look up his service as Techo. I believe the website for that is a z t e dot c o. Is that correct, Akin?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "56:07", "start": 3366.51, "text": "That's completely correct." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "56:08", "start": 3368.13, "text": "That's right. Okay, excellent. Well, that's-- It's been a fantastic conversation with you, Akin, and, Yeah, I, I really appreciate you coming on the show today." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "56:19", "start": 3378.54, "text": "I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me." }, { "speaker": "beautyon", "time": "56:21", "start": 3380.56, "text": "Alright, guys, that was my conversation with Akin Fernandez, also known as Beautyon. So you can find the show notes on my website, stephanlivera dot com. Just go and search SLP sixteen, which is the episode number for this podcast. Lastly, come and find me on Twitter, my handle is at stephan livera. That's it from me, guys. Thanks, and I'll see you next time." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:44", "start": 3403.51, "text": "Thanks for listening. You can find the show notes on stephanlivera dot com, and please share the podcast on social media." } ] }