{ "episodeId": "SLP18", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "daniel_alexiuc": { "name": "Daniel Alexiuc", "role": "guest", "tag": "DANIEL" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:04", "start": 4.38, "text": "Welcome to the Stefan Livera podcast." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "00:12", "start": 12.03, "text": "Hey guys, welcome to the show. This is Stefan Livera podcast episode eighteen, and my guest today is Daniel. How are you, Daniel? Hi everybody, good, thanks Stefan. Excellent. So Daniel Alexiuc, is it pronounced Alexiuc? Close, it's Alexius. Alexius, okay. Daniel Alexius, yeah. So Daniel is the CEO of Living Room of Satoshi, so they are an Australian Bitcoin startup, he's based in Brisbane, Australia, and he is also a partner to the, to another Australian Bitcoin business called Travel by Bit, and one, Really cool video that I saw recently with Daniel, and I think that was in, May, so a couple months ago, it was this really viral tweet or tweet video of Daniel paying for coffee with a Lightning Network in the real world. so I, my, I thought it'd be a good example to speak to you first. So Daniel, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're doing in that video?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:13", "start": 73.21, "text": "Yeah, we got a lot of attention with that, video. I guess it's the first time we've seen Like a real world example of a coffee purchase, and that's, that's like the stereotypical thing that people wanna do with new payment systems, don't they? Buy a coffee. and it turns out Lightning is, is kind of well suited, for retail environments like that, much more so than, than blockchains are." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "01:37", "start": 96.8, "text": "Yeah, that's a great, example of use of the payment network, of Lightning. And, you know, a-and the cool thing about that is, I think in that video, you mentioned that the total- cost that you paid was about forty-three thousand satoshis, and the fee you mentioned was only one point six satoshis. So what's that in Australian dollars or in, you know, in fiat money?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "02:00", "start": 120.32, "text": "I think it works out to about a one-hundredths of one cent. So yeah, I mean, the, the fees are just very, very minimal and the payment is fast. It's everything you want in a payment system, really. And I guess over the years we've had a number of firsts, I, I, a technologist, I guess. I've always been a programmer and interested in trying new things. So, you know, when Bitcoin came out, I wanted to m- do something practical with it, and, and get people paying their bills with it. but I guess one thing I've learned over the four or five years we've been operating now is that, Blockchains are terrible payment systems, honestly, they're terrible. The-- and I say that as a, a CEO of a payments company, they're ju-just not designed, to be good payment systems, and there's a lot of reasons for that, but to have a technology like Lightning or other second layer technologies like that that are designed to compete as proper payment systems, you know, designed, to do payments well in a retail setting, it was really exciting to try that out, and, it's still very early stages, but it's, it's good to see that it's working." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "03:10", "start": 190.5, "text": "Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, I think the way many, Bitcoiners would describe it nowadays is really Bitcoin is more like the settlement layer, and Lightning Network and other technologies will be the actual payment network for retail payments." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "03:25", "start": 204.53, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "03:25", "start": 204.91, "text": "So let's talk a little bit about how you set that demo up. So that cafe H-how what was the process with setting it up for them?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "03:34", "start": 213.76, "text": "Yeah, so we've been working with Travel By Bit for a little while now, to enable a whole bunch of merchants to, you know, accept crypto for payments at their retail businesses, and most of them are accepting, well, all of them are accepting Bitcoin, and some are accepting a few other coins, Dash, Ethereum, Litecoin, I think. so we've got probably a hundred merchants up and down the east coast of Australia now, with these kind of payment terminals where they can accept- Except crypto. now this one at the airport, i-is an excellent test case because, you know, people who go to the airport or arrive at the airport are often, international tourists, and crypto is the perfect, payment mechanism for those people. They don't have to exchange their money, they can use the same money that they brought from their own country and buy a coffee straight away. So we turned on, Lightning at that coffee shop there, and you can go down there, to the Brisbane Airport if you're ever there. Yeah, stop in and, and try it out. Excellent," }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "04:34", "start": 273.78, "text": "excellent. So what implementation of Lightning is being used on the back end here?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "04:40", "start": 280.02, "text": "So we've got a bunch of, Lightning nodes at the moment. We're, we're trying them all out just to see, you know, what the pros and cons are. I, I believe that one's still running on C-Lightning, which was the, the first implementation we ran up, and that's been very good, very stable. It's got a nice API. we've since, launched some LND nodes as well, a-and they're working well too. So w-we kind of always have a redundant backup of a few nodes," }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "05:11", "start": 311.22, "text": "Oh, cool. So, are you actually using- Okay, so is it like one node per store or is it just you've got a, a bunch of nodes ready? No, yeah," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "05:18", "start": 318.49, "text": "the nodes, the nodes are four living room satoshi basically. we don't, we don't have one per store. So, m-most merchants still want, to their payments to be converted to fiat money. So, that's what living room of satoshi does. We take the payment in crypto or, through the lightning network, and it ends up in fiat in their bank and the plan is to just, just get them used to the idea of accepting crypto and showing them that it's a real, alternative and, especially the fact that they don't have any fees, you know, it, it makes it very appealing to them." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "05:54", "start": 354.35, "text": "Right. Yeah, yeah. And I think the other thing is we're seeing, it's a bit of a similarity with, with what people are doing in China now with the QR code payment on using, I think, apps like WeChat or is it WePay, Alipay, et cetera. So Similarity that you can see there. Yeah. Is there a potential there as well for NFC? I," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "06:15", "start": 375.07, "text": "I think so. Yeah. Australians still aren't very familiar with QR codes, we, we don't really use them at all, we're kind of more used to NFC, so I, I mean, it's gonna be QR codes for the near future, but that, I mean, there's no technical reason we can't use NFC, it's just a matter of, getting access to the payment terminals, and we're working on that at the moment." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "06:38", "start": 397.91, "text": "okay. Yeah, and I think the other thing is really just if it's good enough for, you know, how many, a billion people who live in China, well, yeah, you know, it must be, good enough for everyone else to try as well." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "06:49", "start": 409.0, "text": "Exactly. I think we're gonna, we're gonna start seeing more, more Alipay terminals in Australia soon, so that might help people get used to it as well." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "06:57", "start": 416.81, "text": "Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, so let's, let's talk a bit on living room of Satoshi. So when did you set it up, and can you just give a bit of an overview of the overarching service, like what are the potential offerings it has?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "07:11", "start": 431.26, "text": "so we started in 2014, and basically just as a way to use your crypto to do something real with it, 'cause at the time, it was very difficult to do anything with your Bitcoin. so we allow people to pay, basically, Any BPay, BPay bill, which there's like forty-five thousand billers, almost every biler is on that system. or you can, transfer to any bank account as well, your own bank account, or you can pay your plumber, your electrician, or whatever. So a lot of people, who choose to live solely in crypto make heavy use of our service for all their bills. And it, it, we've always tried to make, make it very easy to use as well, make it usable, because crypto's hard enough to understand without, having a bad user interface on top of it. So when you come to our site and try and pay a bill, it's, it's all very straightforward and as easy as we could make it." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "08:05", "start": 484.63, "text": "With the service, is it Australia only or what is, what's the deal with international?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "08:10", "start": 490.11, "text": "Yep, at the moment it's Australia only. we are potentially looking at New Zealand possibly later this year. But it's very dependent on, each country has, you know, their own regulations around crypto. That's the hardest thing. The technical side is the easy bit, but, dealing with all the regulations country to country is very difficult." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "08:31", "start": 511.43, "text": "Yeah, I see. And I, I suppose it is a bit more difficult for you as you are interfacing more closely with the fiat side and thus have to, obviously, there's all that, fiat side regulation that comes in. Yes, that's right. Okay. Sure. Okay, yeah. And I think the other thing is it's I guess for the hardcore Bitcoin maximalists who have, let's say, a low time preference, i.e. they're willing to wait for Bitcoin to go much higher, many of us would prefer to, you know, hold, obviously. a-and because obviously we don't wanna incur the transaction costs, the opportunity cost of, you know, Bitcoin going huge in the meantime, why would I spend it now? However, obviously I appreciate that, you know, life happens, sometimes expenses come up and they need to-- people need to spend their crypto. Or, and, you know, also I appreciate But not everyone is a maximalist and, yeah, not everyone is willing to sort of hold for the long haul. and I think it's great work that you're doing to really pioneer some of the lightning Payment use cases and also just to help show that it's possible, I think that's the real, value with, one, one of the, you know, that's part of it. And also, i-it's there to help enable the payments that, you know, not everyone-- It's there to help enable real freedom of payments and free, you know, the ability to take payments as well." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "09:51", "start": 590.75, "text": "Yeah. I mean, this, this is just the first step. Yeah. I mean, it's just the first step in the process of getting people used to using crypto, getting people Used to seeing it, you know, a lot of people still have no idea what it's all about, so this is an easy way to get into it." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "10:05", "start": 604.8, "text": "Yeah, agreed, agreed, and, I think it will just be a natural process over time of people becoming familiar with it, and then, I think what's happened is in the first few years we saw a bit of a, maybe too much focus on the merchant adoption story when really that's something that's gonna come, it's kind of later in the piece. Exactly. but, yeah, speaking on that, You see and how have they kind of trended over the last few, you know, four years?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "10:34", "start": 634.22, "text": "so I was just having a look at some stats before. So we've done, we've paid over a hundred and forty thousand bills through our system, in all of the years of its operation. the last twelve months have, have been, you know, the, the largest volume of transactions by far, possibly because the price has gone up a long way, people have more money to spend. but in general, you know, we're finding and you talk to any crypto business and it's the same, there's, there's just more and more customers all the time, more people using crypto." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "11:06", "start": 666.22, "text": "Excellent. Yeah, so I think, actually, Daniel, are you familiar with the concept of, the wealth effect?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "11:14", "start": 674.43, "text": "remind me what it is." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "11:16", "start": 676.31, "text": "Yep, so it's basically that concept that when, say, the stock market goes up, people feel rich and then they start spending more. Okay. So I think, my question to you then is, you know, related, it's, have you noticed a wealth effect in the way people use Living Room of Satoshi?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "11:34", "start": 694.37, "text": "W-We've tried to look at trends over the years, to identify that sort of thing. The hard thing about it is that, Bitcoin is, is still, you know, w- While it's not anonymous, it is a pseudonymous system, and people don't have to give much information about what they're doing with it. w-we've tracked the volume of payments against price And honestly, the number of payments isn't really that affected by price, you know, whether the price goes down or up, we still seem to get a, a consistently increasing number of payments. so I don't know if the wealth effect is, is such a big effect in this case. I think it's just generally, greater adoption of crypto, and it's just gonna keep continuing until it hits that, volume. You know, where everybody knows about it." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "12:21", "start": 741.06, "text": "Right. Yeah. That's a, that's almost a counterintuitive finding, but I think it is good that what we're seeing is just a general continued trend upwards in the adoption. okay. so let's talk a little bit about your partnership with Travel by Bit and, the Brisbane Airport news." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:40", "start": 760.19, "text": "Yeah. So, Travel by Bit, approached us about a year ago. They wanted to, you know, specialize in the, the travel- Travel sort of industry, because, as I said before, crypto is very well suited to this industry. you've got, d-- you know, currency exchanges all over the place, just, you know, charging people all sorts of fees just to change from one national currency to the other. Whereas if you can use the same currency and hop on a plane and go and spend it in that other country, you save all that hassle, and you don't have to exchange it back when you come home either. So that was Travelbybits' idea, and, you know, we're, we're just starting this process. As I said, we've got about a hundred merchants trying it out. we've got a whole town, 1770 in Queensland, that's the name of the town, 1770, we've got about thirty or forty merchants just in that town. So if you go on holiday there, you can, you can basically have a whole holiday, and spend your crypto if you want to. And so w-we're, we're still trying to increase the number of merchants we get there and show that, you know, this is a real alternative payment system." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "13:48", "start": 828.05, "text": "Right, that's very nice. Yeah, it's, it's good that you've managed to get a whole town going with that. And so if I understand correctly, then does that mean all of those thirty merchants will take either Bitcoin or a li- like, or a Lightning payment?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "14:01", "start": 840.74, "text": "Yeah, all of those have, those four currencies set up by default, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, and Litecoin. I think a number of them And on Bitcoin Cash as well. they're the main ones, and we've got Lightning in a few stores at the moment." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "14:15", "start": 854.53, "text": "Okay, right. So it's not all of them, but it, it is a number of them. That's right. Yeah. and then I'm curious in terms of the dif- if whether you've noticed any differences in terms of Lightning payments versus Bitcoin payments. And what I'm trying to understand there is, have you noticed, let's say, a difference in terms of customer support tickets or, you know, are there- Any other benefits that you're seeing?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "14:42", "start": 882.01, "text": "it's hard to know, as I said, it's still very early. We've only had probably a hundred Lightning payments done, just because there's not that many people with Lightning wallets yet, and the Lightning wallets on mobile phones just aren't very good yet, which is something that we're working on as well at the moment, trying to get a nice usable Lightning wallet. but we haven't really had many problems with it at all. I mean, it's, it's pretty reliable, if for small payments. you People talk about routing issues and, you know, capacity issues, but w-we haven't seen anything like that. All of our payments have been successful, we haven't really had that many complaints about it And I think that layer two solutions like that really are the su- you know, the end solution for payment systems, because that's what they're designed to do. Bitcoin is, is designed as You know, it, it might not have originally been designed that way, but it turns out that it's a much better, you know, s-s-system of security than a pay- a proper payment system. And so if we can build on that security layer, a proper payment system on top of it, I really think that's gonna help everybody. And it's not just end users that are gonna benefit from Lightning, it's also companies, like businesses like mine, companies, retailers who are selling things, they also want, fast- Most reliable, secure payments, and that's, that's what Lightning gives you." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "16:09", "start": 968.89, "text": "And I think the other thing is maybe this is something that you might see, you know, over time as the volumes come up. but my understanding is with just regular Bitcoin on-chain payments, in some ways there's actually more risk because let's say the customer could pay to the wrong address if they copy-paste it wrong, they might pay the wrong amount, or there might be more difficulty with doing a refund. Whereas my understanding with Lightning is it's all encoded into that invoice." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:38", "start": 997.87, "text": "That's right, yeah, the, the, the invoice system that Lightning's got is one of the best payment system features about it. We've had a lot of problems, I don't want to go through it all, but it's mostly with Bitcoin Cash because they decided to keep the same, you know, payment format as Bitcoin when they split, we still get All sorts of problems with that all the time, people sending money on the wrong blockchain. it, it just definitely shows that blockchains aren't designed to be good payment systems, whereas Lightning is built from the ground up to be one." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "17:14", "start": 1034.0, "text": "Excellent. Yeah. So I think that's a, it's a good example of how, with further engineering effort, a more elegant technological solution can be crafted." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "17:26", "start": 1045.71, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "17:27", "start": 1046.53, "text": "so let's, yeah, let's talk a little bit on how did you- Did you educate yourself on how to develop in Bitcoin and Lightning? That's a good question." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "17:36", "start": 1055.93, "text": "Google, I guess." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "17:39", "start": 1059.37, "text": "yeah? I mean, the, the Lightning, the, the Bitcoin white paper was the thing that sparked my attention initially. I, I was just so amazed that somebody had made this technological system where you could have money without, you know, anybody issuing it. And it, it just still blows my mind that that's been possible. And And I think we've only scratched the surface of, of what we've, you know, what's possible with a security system like that that everybody has access to. but Lightning, there's a lot of, a lot of people working on Lightning at the moment, And they're willing to share their experience in blogs and things online, so yeah, there's plenty of resources around if you wanna, if you wanna try it out." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "18:22", "start": 1101.95, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "18:22", "start": 1102.25, "text": "And, have" }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "18:23", "start": 1102.89, "text": "you gone on into any of the Lightning Slack channels or IRC or have you used any of those resources in teaching yourself or have you just sort of learned it and just by tinkering?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "18:34", "start": 1113.64, "text": "Yeah, no, I haven't been on any of those, Slack channels recently, but possibly I will in the near future as we sort of ramp up our- Lightning payment system." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "18:44", "start": 1124.19, "text": "Wow, okay, very nice, very nice. Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of chatter now around, you know, the d-- some of the different, implementations and even some of the wallets like Zap, they have, they've all got their own Slack going and, you know, if you look at, some of the other ones like BTC Pay and stuff. So I was just curious whether you were interfacing in with any of them or you're kind of doing your own thing," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "19:05", "start": 1144.88, "text": "yeah? Yeah, we've, we've been trying Just a way to, to easily launch a, LND or see Lightning node, like a wrapper around those projects. But that's a very important thing for people who wanna get started, so yeah, we definitely support those guys." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "19:26", "start": 1165.78, "text": "Very nice, very nice. okay. And then another question I had, and this is something personally even I have experienced, I personally remember seeing some businesses around Sydney take Bitcoin payments on chain, obviously, back in, you know, two thousand and thirty 2013 or the 2014, and then they later dropped it, or the people didn't know, like the people, the staff wouldn't be the same. Have you noticed any examples of that, or is it just, you know, it's just been sort of a steady upwards trend?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "19:56", "start": 1195.88, "text": "Yeah, I, I think there's a couple of reasons for that. a few years ago, it was probably too early to try it, I think. now it's still very early, but we've kind of, tried to target Or limit the amount of merchants that we bring on, because there's only a, a certain number of people willing to spend with crypto at the moment, and if we have too many merchants, then they're not gonna get enough payments through their, their system. So we've limited artificially how many merchants we bring on just so that they all get regular payments with it and become familiar with it, all their staff become familiar with it, and so far that strategy's worked pretty well because we're getting regular payments at most of our merchants, and we expect that to continue." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "20:40", "start": 1240.05, "text": "I was gonna make a joke about, artificially limiting the merchant size, but, let's not do that. Raise the merchant size, Daniel. No, very good. I, but that's really good. I think, it's, you know, it's just a, what's the word? It's like a phenomenon of, you know, maybe i-in the earlier days there was just a, a lot of exuberance around merchants and people would try to tell the merchants to take Bitcoin when maybe those merchants weren't ready yet." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "21:11", "start": 1270.87, "text": "Yeah, I would agree. and I don't think the, the payment, it's just the network itself is ready for that. I mean, that's kind of, company takes is to take on all the risk in that conversion from crypto to fiat for these merchants, because they're not interested in risk. None of their other payment systems have any risk involved at all, they're fully guaranteed by their payment processors, they don't have to worry about exchange rate risk, whereas that is still a real problem in a, a blockchain-based system where it takes time to confirm things, So, you know, once we come up with solutions for that, it'll be better for everybody involved, including the payment processors who will always be there." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "21:54", "start": 1313.87, "text": "Yeah. And so I guess on that question, how do you manage the fees and the exchange rate risk really? How do you manage that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "22:03", "start": 1322.75, "text": "yeah, we've got a, a number of strategies. Basically, we, we try and, keep access to a diverse range of li-liquidity providers, both domestic and international, because o-often the domestic and international prices go out of- Sync, it's still a, a little bit of an immature market, especially when it comes to a, a small, isolated country like Australia, but that's something that we've developed strategies for over the years, but it, it's something we're seeing less of a problem with as time goes on, and I think that will continue to be the case. You know, I think, I, I don't- Expect Bitcoin to ever be a stable currency like a fiat currency? I think, it will always, be volatile, a-and that sort of reflects the volatility in society too, just like gold does. It's not a stable currency despite being existing for thousands of years. but I, I think it's still worth trying out a payment system on top of this thing and seeing where the technology can take us." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "23:04", "start": 1383.85, "text": "I see, I see, yeah. I think, I think even with gold, it may just be a function of size as well. It just could be that None of these, you know, even gold, has got to the, you know, to the level or to the massive size that's needed to kind of have, well, that's true, lower volatility." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "23:20", "start": 1399.73, "text": "Gold never really functions as a proper payment system either. I mean, nobody uses it to buy coffee, do they?" }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "23:26", "start": 1405.81, "text": "Exactly, exactly. You'd have to carve off like a tiny little chunk of your gold to do it. Okay. and I think one other area that I've, that, that I've seen you comment was around, The use of blockchains for other things, so let's say supply chain blockchain. I've seen you comment there, you mentioned it's, it was like a Rube Goldberg machine spreadsheet. Do you wanna comment on that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "23:50", "start": 1430.06, "text": "Yeah, I, I've been pretty vocal about these things. I, I just think there's, you know, I've, I've worked in, in these industry, for a little while, and I've seen companies like Accenture and IBM come in with their salespeople, and they've latched onto this blockchain word, it's just a perfect buzzword for them 'cause it can mean basically whatever you want it to mean, and so they're able to use it to sell whatever product they wanna sell, they can slap this blockchain word on top of and it's the same thing with a lot of companies who claim to be using blockchain in their products. When you dig into it and you look at the white papers, well, really they're not, not at all. so, I'm just very skeptical about the use of, blockchain in a lot of these, proposed technologies." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "24:43", "start": 1482.82, "text": "yeah, I think it's, like you say, it's almost like a roach ark test. Sometimes people just see whatever they wanna see in it." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "24:50", "start": 1489.76, "text": "Yeah, it's true." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "24:51", "start": 1490.92, "text": "Excellent. Okay, well, I think the other key questions I had for you, Daniel, was there anything else you wanted to, bring up and talk about with, living room of Satoshi?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "25:03", "start": 1502.67, "text": "maybe your in-listeners are interested in what's happening from a regulatory standpoint, because that's something we've had to deal with heavily over the years. we actually shut down in two thousand and fourteen for a number of months when the ATO made a poor decision regarding crypto, and that affected a lot of the, blockchain Companies in the space. since then, the government's been, a lot better. They've, they've listened to industry a bit more, they've talked to blockchain companies, and so the three main- government agencies that are interested at the moment are the ATO, ASIC, the securities regulator, and Oztrack, who does, transaction processing. So all crypto companies in, in Australia will have some sort of dealings with those three. And, you know, I'm kinda happy to report that although the regulations are pretty strict, they are paying a lot of attention to what we wanna say these days and are being a little bit more hands off in the laws that they make around crypto. So that's encouraging, because what we don't want is for them to stifle innovation, and, that's something that definitely happened in two thousand and fourteen, but we, we need to, you know, time and space to, to try out these technologies. As I said, we're still not there with, blockchains as a payment system, and there's still a long way to go, so we need the time and space to try a few different things and see what works. And I, I'm happy to report that The, the government agencies are mostly okay with that, and I hope that continues." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "26:43", "start": 1602.92, "text": "Yeah, and I think that's a great comment. I think what you're referring to there might have been the, the infamous double GST, which was, yeah, I think that, for most of my listeners, you're probably in the US, and basically that was around, an application of the tax law in Australia, which has only recently been corrected actually, and that was the reason for some of the other startups, such as CoinJar, leaving Australia, going to the UK. And sort of now coming back now that the rule has been, fixed up a bit." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "27:12", "start": 1631.97, "text": "Yeah, I think where they've still got some way to go though is in dealing with these ICOs, I, I know the, the US has the SEC and we have our own regulators. At the moment, they've been pretty hands off and the way that they've talked about them, it has kind of encouraged them a little bit more to try things out, which I think is a little bit dangerous as well But it's, you know, it's an evolving space, and we'll see where it goes." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "27:38", "start": 1658.4, "text": "It's very, it's a really exciting space, and I think, you know, you're a real, from what I've seen, you're a real pioneer with Lightning payments in Australia, in the real brick-and-mortar world. So, you know, hats off to you for that, Daniel. and guys, if you wanna find Daniel, you can find him on Twitter. His handle is, yeah, so it's Daniel A L E X I U C. Look Or his business, Room of Satoshi. So the, Twitter handle is at room of satoshi, and you can find the website livingroomofsatoshi dot com. Have you got anything else, anywhere else that you would like the listeners to find you at, Daniel?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "28:21", "start": 1700.65, "text": "nah, those two are the best places." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "28:24", "start": 1703.7, "text": "Excellent. Alright, well, thank you very much for coming on, Daniel." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "28:27", "start": 1706.84, "text": "Alright, thanks for having a chat." }, { "speaker": "daniel_alexiuc", "time": "28:29", "start": 1709.1, "text": "Alright, guys, that was my conversation with Daniel Alexiuc. And I understand that if you're a Bitcoin maximalist with a low time preference, you're all about that hodl life, you're not gonna be spending any significant portion of your bitcoins anytime soon. However, Daniel is a great example of someone who is pioneering Bitcoin and Lightning payments and is showing what's possible with Bitcoin as the settlement layer and Lightning as the The payment layer, and he's showing that both on his website, Living Room of Satoshi, and also in real life, brick and mortar stores through his partnership with Travel by Bit. So make sure you check those sites out, all the links will be on the show notes page. Go to stephanalivera dot com and search s l p eighteen on the website. And lastly, if you have any feedback for me or suggestions, come and find me on Twitter, my handle is at stephanalivera. Thanks guys, and I'll speak to you next time." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:21", "start": 1761.45, "text": "Thanks for listening. You can Find the show notes on stephanlivera dot com and please share the podcast on social media." } ] }