{ "episodeId": "SLP556", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "patrick_van_der_meijde": { "name": "Patrick van der Meijde", "role": "guest", "tag": "PATRICK" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:00", "start": 0.4, "text": "Hi, you're watching Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by Swann dot com. Now, many of you are probably aware of Bitcoin Beach and El Salvador's Bitcoin law, so a lot of people think of that as the first Bitcoin circular economy, but are you aware that actually there was an earlier one from twenty fourteen, believe it or not? And so joining me today is Patrick van der Meijde. He is the founder of Bitcasa and also co-founder of the Arnhem Bitcoin City, which is in the Netherlands. And so we're talking about that today and his journey of how he got started taking payments pre-lightning and, some of the experiences around trying to grow a Bitcoin circular economy. So onto my chat with Patrick." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:50", "start": 50.37, "text": "Patrick, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. So, Patrick, I know you are, you have a long history with Bitcoin, you've been involved as a founder of Bitcasa and also a co-founder of Arnhem Bitcoin City, which, as I understand, is the first Bitcoin circular economy. So, let's get into some of this, let's, yeah, let's get into how you sort of when you first got into Bitcoin and how you, how you got started with all this stuff." }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "01:15", "start": 75.4, "text": "Yeah, so in, 2012, a friend of me and Rogier, which is one of the partners which I, founded to Arnhem, Bitcoin City and Bitcasa with And so a common friend of us, just, told us about Bitcoin and that maybe we should check it out. So that's actually how we, yeah, how, how the rabbit hole opened for us and, how we dug in. And, yeah, by 2014, we were, really sure that, Bitcoin was going to be much more important in the future than it was, back then in two thousand and fourteen, that, and that we really should, do something with it. Yeah. So on the twenty" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:56", "start": 115.55, "text": "fourteen question, I'm curious, I'd love to hear a bit of your insight or a bit of your recollection from that time, because narratives have changed over time, right? Like, I, I came in in early twenty thirteen, and I remember at that time there was way more talk about remittance, there was way more talk about merchant acceptance. There wasn't as much of the kind of understanding of, At least, and I'm curious how you thought. Yeah, I think those," }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "02:19", "start": 139.48, "text": "those sounds were also there, but yeah, I think the main thing was, okay, this is going to change, the world, and especially in third world, countries, where the, the financial infrastructure isn't as good as, as in the Western countries. So, yeah, I think that was, that was about it, but Yeah, even then in 2014, I gave, presentations about Bitcoin to a general audience in, in Arnhem who were, just interested in the topic. And one of the questions we got was, okay, so this Bitcoin money, what, what can I buy with it? And then we, we could only refer them to some online, service where you could buy pizza and let them order it at your house. So, yeah, we thought, how cool would it be if you, if we could actually manage that you would, be able Your beer in, in a cafe in Arnhem or, or, or something else. And that's, that's a bit how, yeah, how we started it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:16", "start": 195.82, "text": "Yeah. And so I think it's funny that a lot of people, when they first hear about this idea, their, their-- oftentimes their first thought is, \"Where can I spend it?\" Right? There's no, there's no sort of understanding. And, and I understand now, sort of the way often we will teach Bitcoin now is more like, \"Hey, you can use it as your savings" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:38", "start": 217.57, "text": "Our understanding of, okay, it's like collective, then a store of value, then these other stages that happen." }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "03:43", "start": 223.36, "text": "True, but also I think there is, some misunderstanding, I think that's how, how I see it, about the value of hodling Bitcoin. If everybody is only hodling Bitcoin and at one point people just want to get it, want to get out and, get fiat money again Then, yeah, we're all just looking at each other, okay, who's gonna be the, the, the, the first one to, to step out of this and then use, use fiat money again. While if you can just use your Bitcoin for everyday purchases and you, you have absolutely no need to get back into fiat money again, then, the, the, that changes the whole, the whole game in my, opinion. So for me, I'd say if, if you couldn't spend Bitcoin at, at, at, Then that would really lower the value of, of, yeah, of its practical use and therefore why should you hold it if you one time you really have to sell it again, for something else? So yeah, I," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:44", "start": 284.32, "text": "I think the way I see it is more just like there will be, you know, obviously it's impossible for everyone to huddle, there will be some people who have to obviously to spend 'cause, you know, you gotta eat and live in somewhere and pay your rent and all this. Yeah. but, I think what would be really interesting as well is It's like in the earlier days, fees were so low, or people didn't even really think about the fees, right, in those days, and yet this was all pre-lightning, right? So I'm curious how that worked for you guys as well. Like, what was the, the thinking at that time? I mean, obviously most few people, you know, the block size walls hadn't happened yet. So do you wanna just give us your think-- your thoughts on how people were seeing that?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "05:24", "start": 323.84, "text": "Yeah, I think, I absolutely did a few Bitcoin transactions without paying any fee at all. You could just broadcast Bitcoin transactions without any fee and they would still be mined, at, most of the time. so the thing of course was that, a Bitcoin transaction, will only get confirmed in probably like ten minutes. So we were taking a risk for the, for the merchants as, as, as, Bitcasa, and we told them, so whenever, you see the screen, the, the green, Bitcasa screen, then the payment is done, and we make sure that you all get, the fiat money back then, because every merchant in two thousand and fourteen, wanted to get just the fiat money, from Bitcasa, so we automatically converted the bitcoins into, euros for them. So we, yeah, there was some risk of, of people double spending or, or something, and we were well aware of that. Actually, I think, Peter thought And two thousand fourteen was the first one to tell us, interface, okay, you're just doing this, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're getting rekt by this. You're taking" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:33", "start": 392.87, "text": "a risk, right? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "06:33", "start": 393.45, "text": "you're taking a risk. And we were like, yeah, sure, we are aware that we are taking a risk. However, we did manage to, to get some extra checks where, where we checked for a few seconds if there was another transaction on the, on the network going on with a higher fee and, and some of the things, and we, we also checked if there were unconfirmed inputs from the, from the transaction. so we had a little bit of more, certainty, but still it was a risk." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:00", "start": 419.75, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "07:00", "start": 419.91, "text": "But" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:00", "start": 420.33, "text": "and I'm curious, did you ever get scammed? Did anybody try to double spend on you and scam you that way?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "07:05", "start": 425.23, "text": "No, there was, however, in two thousand and seventeen or eighteen, when the, the, the mempool was really, filled up with, with transactions, one of my friends actually, used I don't, I don't remember which wallet he used, but he was actually just paying for a burger at a restaurant, and then like two, a few weeks later, the transaction had still not confirmed because he was, giving it a low fee. And then at some time, he, yeah, the transaction disappeared from his, from his wallet, and we checked, at Bitcasa, oh, there's now another, transaction where he actually double spent it from his, from his wallet without, doing it Like, I think the only occasion where we, we had a double spend happening in, yeah, in the real world. But, of course, we weren't, selling yachts or, that sort of stuff. there was a jewelry, for insta-for instance, where you could, pay for gold or, or jewelry with, with bitcoins. But at that service, we made sure that there, there was one confirmation needed, so it was only small payments Most of the time. And we were, yeah, we, we, we said to ourselves, okay, let's just see how this happens. And if, yeah, if, if we find out that we do get double spent, then, yeah, of course, we need to, to close it down and, see how to, resolve it then. Which was obviously a problem because the Lightning Network wasn't around, for that time. So yeah, it was just some fun experimenting or, in our minds." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:46", "start": 525.6, "text": "Yeah, interesting. And so let's bring it back to 2014, and I guess just to set the context as well, just for people who are overseas, they don't know Arnhem City, tell us a little bit about Arnhem City and the context of where it is in the Netherlands." }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "08:58", "start": 537.65, "text": "So Arnhem is, like, a province capital in, in the Netherlands, in the east of the Netherlands, so has like one hundred and sixty thousand, citizens. And, yeah, you can now pay with, with Bitcoin, actually only Lightning, at over, sixty merchants at the moment, I believe. a lot of restaurants, but also a flower store, the Spar supermarket or a BioLogical supermarket. so there's still- Just a lot of places where you can actually pay with, with Bitcoin. And, yeah, it just started with only some, some bars and restaurants, and that gained some, some attention. And then other merchants, also, reached out to us, for instance, a dentist who wanted to join the project and also started to accept Bitcoin in two thousand and fourteen, I believe he was, one of the first also." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:51", "start": 590.83, "text": "Great. And so I, as I recall, there were-- I saw news articles about, in Germany as So there was, you know, the infamous, you know, Bar 77, a-a-and that was kind of one of the, I believe it was the first bar to take Bitcoin payment, and then I, as I understand, you know, Arnhem City was one of the other ones, although I didn't actually know about you guys back then, but, I'm curious what it, what it was like in those early days in twenty fourteen. I guess it would have been mainly a vibe of curiosity, but, you know, it Yeah. Would have happened, I think, late twenty thirteen, and so twenty fourteen would have been kind of like a bear cycle, right?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "10:33", "start": 632.61, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. We started in a bear cycle, yeah. Not the best way, to start, your project. But yeah, we, we started it in that. And I remember that people, who came to our meetups, our monthly meetups. They were, yeah, just wondering, well, will Bitcoin ever reach the thousand euros again, or, was it just one peak and then, fade out? but, yeah, we were still very convinced about the, the Bitcoin concept, so we continued, with it, and, yeah, turned out, pretty well. But still, payments in, in Arnhem Bitcoin City is something that, doesn't happen ve-very often. There's like, for instance, a group, in the Netherlands, who are Many of those, are, often visiting, Arnhem and just, going on a buying streak at, at, merchants that accept Bitcoin. But, as for the locals, there's just a, a small group of people who are actually using, Bitcoin. So it's still, most of the merchants that now accept Bitcoin are very used to it and some of them don't even blink an eye if you want to, pay with Bitcoin, but for some others, it's still, something that" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:46", "start": 705.82, "text": "I guess one other interesting context point here is, correct me if I'm wrong, Netherlands doesn't have capital gains tax." }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "11:53", "start": 712.89, "text": "Yeah, that's absolutely true. Yeah. Right. So that's another" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:55", "start": 715.45, "text": "important factor, right?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "11:57", "start": 716.69, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even the, the, the complete, legislation was, was very positive in the Netherlands because the, authority that Might want to interfere with, Bitcoin back then, said, \"Well, we don't consider Bitcoin as money, so for us it's the same as if you were, selling chairs or whatever.\" so they completely pulled off their hands of, of, of any Bitcoin thing, so we could just go ahead and, and do, do this. Which obviously, changed completely in two thousand and twenty with, with the, the European anti-money laundering, rules. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:34", "start": 753.65, "text": "So, so even, so I guess you would say in the twenty fourteen days it was like really light in terms of AML and from the capital gains tax perspective, so people, you know, were more easily able to spend because they didn't have to worry about doing capital gains tax accounting, record keeping, all that stuff, right? And that's" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "12:49", "start": 768.68, "text": "still the case for the capital gains tax, part. Right. So people who want to spend Bitcoin in the Netherlands don't have any administration whatsoever. The only thing that you have in the Netherlands is a wealth tax. So at the first of January, you have to, know how much your Bitcoin is actually worth at that date, and then you pay, wealth tax over that, over that amount, and it's like, two percent or one percent, something in, in between there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:17", "start": 797.23, "text": "Damn, okay, yeah. So that kind of, that's, that's a real, that's a real bleed over time. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "13:23", "start": 803.16, "text": "over time it's, it's a real bleed, yeah. But much better than, capital gain tax, in most cases. Especially with, with the, with the rise of Bitcoin, in the past few years, of course." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:36", "start": 815.51, "text": "Yeah, interesting how you think about that. And then, yeah, 'cause I mean, capital gains tax, as you said, would be, in most countries, it might be, it might be twenty, thirty percent, forty percent, depending on the tax rate, that people are paying every time they spend. So," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:52", "start": 831.92, "text": "On your total stack every year, or would you rather pay, yeah, twenty-five percent or thirty percent on what, only on what you spend, though? So that's kind of, it depends on what you spend. But the whole thing is," }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "14:00", "start": 839.86, "text": "it is, being discussed at the moment, so things might change in the near future, but, they, they still, can't agree on what it should be, and so, But it's a, it's a topic of discussion in Parliament at the moment." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:13", "start": 852.77, "text": "Okay, great. And so in those early days, as you said, there were some merchants who were taking Bitcoin, and most of them were just using fiat, right? Like, so they would just kind of take Bitcoin on the front side, and you would obviously, as Bitcasa, you would help flip it into fiat for them, and then they would take fiat. That's" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "14:29", "start": 869.48, "text": "how we started it. Yeah. But then, I think in two thousand and fourteen, maybe the end of two thousand and fourteen or Keep the bitcoins, myself. And so we had like, a restaurant owner, for instance, who would, keep the bitcoins and actually use them to buy bread at a bakery that also accepted Bitcoin. So that's, that was like the very start of, of a circular, economy that we, that we have here in, in Arnhem." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:59", "start": 898.56, "text": "On a very" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "14:59", "start": 899.02, "text": "small" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:59", "start": 899.32, "text": "scale, but But still. Back to the show in a moment. The lead sponsor of this show is Swan dot com, and as you might know, I also work at Swan as Head of Education. Over at Swan dot com or using the Swan Bitcoin app, you can buy Bitcoin. You can either do a, an ACH transfer of fiat in or wire in a larger amount of funds and either instantly purchase Bitcoin or set up an automated recurring purchase plan to just regularly stack Sats. Now, Swan makes it easy for you to withdraw your Bitcoin. They are Free withdrawals. So you can set up, you can put in your Bitcoin address or a list of Bitcoin addresses and automatically withdraw that Bitcoin once it gets above a certain threshold or on a weekly basis. Now, with Swan, there's so much free educational content and material out there, whether that's Swan's newsletter, Swan Signal Live, Dante's Daily Bitcoin Show, there's just so much material out there that Swan makes available for free because part of the mission here is to help create a- A real base of hardened Bitcoin hodlers and to create these intransigent Bitcoiners who are the intransigent minority. So that's part of the mission. Go and sign up to Stackzats over at swan dot com. Next up, mempool dot space. Mempool dot space is the leading Bitcoin and blockchain visualizer. I use mempool dot space all the time when I wanna keep track of what's going on in Bitcoin's mempool. And on the front page of mempool dot space, you can see the transaction fee estimates. So if If you want to get your transaction confirmed in the next block, I like to use the high priority fee estimate over on mempool dot space. Now, mempool dot space has a range of features and the, the team is continually innovating. They've got some real heavy hitters on their team. They're continually adding new features and new ways to visualize and understand what's going on on the chain. You can search Bitcoin transactions by pasting in the TX ID, that's the transaction ID of a particular Bitcoin transaction. You can view the Lightning Network, you can view Liquid Network, you can view the mining exploits Laura, there's just so many things you can explore there, and they have a Mempool accelerator program with a waitlist, so you can sign up for that over at mempool.space/accelerator. And finally, coinkite.com, Coinkite make the best Bitcoin hardware that you can use to secure your coins. So when you get a Coldcard or the new Coldcard Q device, you can generate your keys in an offline way, without connecting to a computer, without connecting, to an online service, you can generate those keys offline. Now you can add additional entropy using dice rolls, or you can use the, inbuilt, entropy, and then you can sign those Bitcoin transactions also offline. So that's a really cool feature. Now, don't be scared if you're a beginner, just directly plug your Coldcard or Coldcard Q device in. But, I think this is a great way to get started, and then later, as you increase your knowledge, you can then start to move to things like airgapping and potentially to using SeedX or, or multi- Sig if you choose, or potentially a passphrase. So there's all kinds of different options you can use to secure your coins. You can use the cold card easily with desktop software such as Sparrow Wallet or Specter Desktop, or on the mobile, you can use it easily with Nunchuck or Keeper as an example. So go and get your cold cards over at CoinKite dot com, use code Livera for a discount on your cold cards. And now back to the show with Patrick. Interesting, yeah. So as you, as you say, I've heard people use the term hodl" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:31", "start": 1110.52, "text": "This much and you're flipping the rest into fiat because you obviously have to pay your bills and your rent and all these other aspects, you know, business expenses, which is fair enough, and so in those early days, did you also get a sense of merchants who start accepting Bitcoin, but then not enough people come and spend there, so then they kind of forget or they, they leave the terminal somewhere else and that, you know, only the manager knows how to use it, that kind of-- Did you get that same kind of pattern" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "18:54", "start": 1133.7, "text": "happening? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's for Bitcassa you only need to open actually a, a webpage, so we just have a, a shortcut on their, mobile phones, which they obviously, always have. or if, if it's, a place with a lot of employees, then they just have a shortcut on their, tablets, or, or, or iPad or whatever they use at, at the store. So you don't have a, a, a separate terminal for just the Bitcoin payments. We have seen that happening in 2014 as well in Amsterdam, where another, group was actually orange-pilling Amsterdam And they were, teaming up with BitPay back then, and they had, a hardware device where, yeah, all these merchants, could use, this hardware device, for, for processing the payments. But my experience as well was whenever I went to Amsterdam and tried to rent a bicycle, at the place where they, said they accept Bitcoin, then, yeah, I came there and the, the guy was, oh, yeah, where, w-where's the thing again? Oh, yeah, here it is. Oh, Yeah, yeah, charge it and, and so, yeah, that was, that was a horrible, experience. So we were, yeah, pretty happy that we just, kept Bitcasa as a, as a, as a website actually." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:16", "start": 1216.01, "text": "Right, I see. And so then if you sort of move it forward over the years Did you sort of have like merchants come and go and sort of with bull and bear season, like was that kind of how it happened?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "20:28", "start": 1228.07, "text": "Yeah, not really with the bull and bear season, but, I think the, the things that changed the very most was, of, obviously the corona, period with all the lockdowns, because, yeah, simply a lot of the merchants, that accepted Bitcoin didn't survive that, that period at that, at that time. And in that same year, also the new, anti-money laundering, regulation kicked in in the Netherlands, where Bitcasa was no longer allowed to actually convert the bitcoins into euros. So we were only allowed to forward the bitcoins into the wallet of the, of the merchants. And they needed to convert them themselves at one of the exchanges that, had a legisli-- had a, a license at, the central bank. And that cost, for instance, at a gas station, I was really fond of, of a gas station where I could just, pay, with, with Bitcoin. But yeah, they told me, it's too much of a hassle for the administration if we can't just, automatically convert it into euros. So they, yeah, decided to no longer accept Bitcoin. But so that cost us like half of the, of the merchants in, in, in Arnhem, I'd say, because at the, at the height there were like one hundred and twenty, merchants in Arnhem, accepting Bitcoin And yeah, of course, not every, one had, a lot of transactions, so probably I've also, had some merchants tell me, \"Well, I haven't had a single Bitcoin sale in a year, so, yeah, I don't see any reason to, to accept it any, any longer.\" That's also how we, we lost a few. But for, we started it with fifteen merchants. recently I checked out how many of those first fif- fifteen were still accepting Bitcoin, and just last month another one, retired, and that left us with only two merchants, of the original fifteen, we're still, yeah. But I think in, yeah, in those ten years, I probably, onboarded like three hundred merchants or something like that. But yeah, because the churn factor. Yeah, churn, and, and it's amazing, it was an eye-opener for me at least, how often, a merchant just, goes bankrupt or, leaves or they get, another owner takes over the place or, that sort of stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:57", "start": 1376.76, "text": "I mean, business is hard, right? Like there's a lot of, especially amongst restaurants and clubs and bars and things, there's just a lot of turnover in general. Like even if they like Bitcoin, their business might not survive, so, you" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "23:08", "start": 1387.97, "text": "know. The merchant that retired had a, a restaurant for, for lunch only, and now the new owner, has also a dinner option and, a, a lunch. And the old, owner told the new one, \"Yeah, you should really, accept the Bitcoin part. Let me just introduce you, to Patrick, and you will, you will help me out.\" Yeah, cool." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:30", "start": 1409.84, "text": "No, that's good. I mean," }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "23:31", "start": 1411.32, "text": "yeah. So the next meetup will be there?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:34", "start": 1414.02, "text": "Yeah, the importance I think to me as well is having local people around, yeah, because if there's no, nobody sort of local around to sort of drive the adoption in terms of, yeah," }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "24:02", "start": 1441.9, "text": "My, my town. And yeah, that's, that's not how it, how it happens. you-- there, there needs to be a local community who drives this, this adoption. And yeah, I don't have any time to, to also, onboard merchants in, in other mer- in other cities. Of course, whenever I go to another place, I'll just ask the, the, the merchant if I can pay with Bitcoin and just plant a seed in their head that there is some, A request for it, but, and sometimes it works, and sometimes I see, that, they, accept Bitcoin, a few months later and sometimes not, but, local adoption is very important." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:42", "start": 1481.76, "text": "Yeah, I see. and I'm curious how you would compare with any of the other circular economies out there. Obviously, there's El Zonte, Bitcoin Beach, and various ones around the world now. How'd you compare, you know, things, how things have gone with Arnhem City versus others?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "25:00", "start": 1499.89, "text": "well, I've been to El Santí and Berlin in, in November, in, El Salvador both. And yeah, I, I really liked what I saw there. El Santí is just a beautiful, Beach village, and Berlin is slightly bigger, but also much smaller than, than Arnhem. But, yeah, how they-- it's, the, the drive over there is amazing, and, they, they've got like all these, people, that are actually going to live over there. And of course, it really helps that, the, that Bukele is very positive about, Bitcoin and made it legal tender, while here in the Netherlands, there's still like banks who, who are, And merchants have a hard time whenever they, try to convert, Bitcoin into, into euros and that sort of stuff. So, yeah, that's, that's a different part. So, but, yeah, I'd say Arnhem is, a really nice, nice place and, but, yeah, Elzanti is like a beautiful, server village, uncomparable, to me. But, and what I also see in Elzanti and Elkazi, for instance" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "26:11", "start": 1571.38, "text": "That actually has on the local, community where people, were not having modern, financial tools, to use, and with Bitcoin they suddenly have international options with, with payments and that sort of, stuff, and that actually changes people's life where they can get remittances, very easily, and, here in Arnhem that's totally not the case. So here in Arnhem, we were more like, okay, we just want to have some sort of a showcase to let people- See that Bitcoin isn't only something that you can use on dark markets, but you can also just use it to buy your groceries or it's actually just working as, as ordinary money. And, yeah, that was just our main goal to actually open the eyes of people, that there is an alternative for, for the financial system, where taxpayers are bailing out, banks. yeah, we, we really wanted to show that there is an alternative." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:10", "start": 1630.44, "text": "What about, on the, the other side of it, people earning Bitcoin? I'm curious if you have seen any of that, and that's something that I know even, Bitcoin Akasi and Bitcoin Beach in El Zonte, they sort of, those projects did try to make sure people locally were earning. Maybe in your case, it might be more like, you know, Bitcoin hodlers who move to Arnhem city because they can spend their You think like, do you, do you see that or what do you see?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "27:36", "start": 1655.56, "text": "Yeah, I, I think in two thousand and fifteen actually, when, Otto, Otto de Vrogh, who's also a Dutch guy, but he lived in Estonia for ten years, and he, he had some trouble with the Estonian government about his Bitcoin exchange which he was, running, over there, and he no longer wanted to live in, Estonia, and he was looking for a new place, and, he was actually, considering Dubai of Arnhem Bitcoin City and, yeah, we just welcomed him, to the, to the place. And, Otto was, able to pay his rent with Bitcoin also, so yeah, he was like living the Bitcoin standard, in Arnhem in 2015, already. But it's not like there's a lot of people who, who are doing that, yeah. Who are doing that, it's still an exception. yeah, I know some people, in the Netherlands who, who are, being paid in, in Bitcoin. Aaron from Weirum, for instance, is one of those. but it's not like he's visiting Arnhem very often to, to, to do some shopping, I believe. But yeah, it is possible, and I really recommend Of course, the, the, the, the Bitcoin economy in Arnhem." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:54", "start": 1734.33, "text": "Interesting, yeah, that's great. so let's talk a little bit about adopting Bitcoin, Arnhem. So I know, that this is coming up, so tell us a little bit about that. What are you hoping to achieve there?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "29:05", "start": 1745.04, "text": "Yeah, we, we did a conference, in 2016 where, for instance, Peter Todd was one of the speakers, and back then, Giacomo was also present, but I didn't know him, so he was just as a visitor, present back then. And, then a year later, there was like another conference in Arnhem, which we didn't organize ourselves. And, that was the future of Bitcoin, I believe that was called. And it was, yeah, a remarkable, conference because Bitcoin Cash was launched, at that conference, and I-- we weren't aware that that was going to happen in, in Arnhem. And yeah, now that the Arnhem Bitcoin City is, turning, yeah, into the anniversary of ten years, we thought we should do something with that. So I was already planning on, organizing another conference. And then I went to El Salvador at the Adopting Bitcoin conference, and I noticed that, in Cape Town there was also an Adopting, Cape Town conference. So I reached out to the organization of, Adopting Bitcoin, what does it take to, to adopt Bitcoin in Arnhem, and is it something that you w-would, support? And they were re- they were really supportive about it, and they just asked, \"Oh, how can we help you?\" And, yeah, please do, and, So yeah, we're just adapting, we're, we're bringing adapting to, to Arnhem. And yeah, it's, it's coming, it's going to be a one-day, conference, but with a lot of, satellite events, before the conference date. So there's like, Pizza Day, twenty-two of May, which will be about a bit of the opening of these, of, of this conference week And then on the 25th of May there will be actually the, the one-day conference where we have a lot of speakers, doing talks. And, yeah, in between there's like, a Bitcoin walk with one of the notaries in the beautiful nature around, around Arnhem. but probably also a board game, session with the Huddle app and, Block Hunters, game. There will be a BitDev, meetup, a Bitcoin mining workshop which you can follow. So yeah, there will be a lot of things that you can do, in, in Arnhem in those, in this, this period. And it's, yeah, it promises to be a, a very nice, conference. I'm looking really forward to it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:31", "start": 1890.98, "text": "That's cool to see. I'd also wanna get Sort of how you dealt with the, you know, the SegWit, the block size wars aspects of it, and then shifting to Lightning. I think that might be interesting for people to hear about as well. So let's start with the kind of the, yeah, kind of your experience with the block size war and sort of the fees, 'cause as, you know, I recall the fees were rising, and for somebody who's trying to get people to spend, that's obviously gonna be difficult. So what was that like?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "31:57", "start": 1917.05, "text": "Well, everything went pretty well up until, 2017, and then at November, December, 2017, the fees started really to rise, and back then most of the people, were using, wallets like Mycelium or Bread Wallet. And Bread Wallet, for instance, wasn't very clear about how many fee, how much fee you would pay for, for a transaction. So we had people who were buying for fifteen dollars of, fifteen euros of, groceries and were actually also paying like, fifteen dollars of fee for the Bitcoin transaction, but they didn't really, really notice it because, yeah, it was a bit of hidden in that, in the interface of, of that wallet. And but we did get, remarks about it also from merchants who were, spending some bitcoins themselves. Hey, what, what, what's this? Why, why am I, am I losing so much, of my, of my Bitcoin for this? And yeah, things went really out of control in, January 2018. And yeah, the, the average fee was like thirty dollars, for a transaction back, back then. So, yeah, we decided, okay, this is, this is a problem. We don't know how to handle it. we just told the merchants, okay, sorry, at the moment it's not possible to, to use Bitcoin, and we advise you not to accept Bitcoin because of the, the- Transaction fees and, yeah, that was a really, a very, a very tough time because the Lightning Network wasn't around at the time. The paper was there, but there was no working, Lightning Network. So for one month we closed the, the, the Bitcoin City, project, and then in February when the, the mempool was, lowering again, we reopened it and just prayed for a bit that it wouldn't, rise as much, again. But yeah, it was, it was, not a very good time, back then. My first tests with the Lightning Network were also not very great. I remember testing the, the mobile Eclair wallet, back then. And I think the majority of my transactions failed because of routing problems or other problems. I, I still got screenshots from these, error messages, I, I got back then. So yeah, actually we were looking at, okay, maybe we should try out all our, cryptocurrencies as well. We were like Bitcoin only at the time, and we had like a lot of people coming, to Bitcasa and asking, hey, can you maybe also, Shill or, or, or Shitcoin, and we'll pay you, a good amount of money if all these merchants in Arnhem will also accept our Shitcoin, but we also, we, we, we, yeah, we were very re-reluctant for the, for the long run, and we really believed in, in Bitcoin, but yeah, there was a problem back then. So we were actually working on, Bitcasa, integration for Litecoin and, and, and other coins. And yeah, then Jos Jager, one of the developers of, L&D Labs, came to us, which is, which is happened to be also someone we knew from the, from the past it came to us, hey, you should now check Lightning Network again because it's actually much improved. And, yeah, you just check it out and, it will probably work, pretty fine, by now. So, at Pizza Day two thousand and nineteen, we, yeah, had, Lightning integrated into Bitcasa and everybody, was able to, to pay with, with Lightning at all, all of the merchants in, in Arnhem. So, yeah, that's a bit how," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:44", "start": 2143.51, "text": "I'm curious from twenty nineteen onwards, how were the payment success rates at that time?" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "35:50", "start": 2149.93, "text": "Pretty good, I'd say. I've rarely had any problems with people, paying with Lightning or trying to pay with, with Lightning that I'm, I'm aware of, because sometimes I talk to merchants and then I, get a story about somebody who wanted to pay with Bitcoin. But most of the time, those people were, coming to the merchant with their, Byn-Binance app, and, thought they could pay with- With, from the, from the Binance app and by just scanning the QR code, which obviously doesn't work. But no, for Lightning, it was pretty-- I think, the success rate is, yeah, nearly hundred percent, I'd say." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:28", "start": 2188.44, "text": "Interesting, because, depending on who you talk to, you get this, different story. People are saying, \"Oh, look, it fails all the time and doesn't work and etcetera.\" But, I think there is a very clear use here that in person, you About this sort of underpay, overpay situation. Oh, yeah. It's just instantly done. There, there is a lot of simplicity to that, and, I think that's one area where maybe it's still, despite all the work of the community to sort of show how easy Lightning is, a lot of people still don't get it. They still kind of parrot this line of, \"Oh, ten minutes for confirmation,\" and that's true for larger values, but if we're just talking retail level payments, clearly, Lightning is good enough. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "37:13", "start": 2232.73, "text": "Yeah, I remember some meetups, for instance, the meetups in, in Amsterdam, where they were also using, Bit, Bitcasa. some of the people were running their own node and they used- Zeus, I believe, and, there was some sort of, yeah, and, and, and Tor, and I believe they had some problems with, the communication with their own nodes, at the time. Not, not just the, the, the, the channels, I think the channels were, were, were done, but, yeah, so that might be something that, that, yeah, some people had a, had a problem with, but, yeah, it was, it, most of the time actually worked, quite well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:53", "start": 2272.9, "text": "Yeah, well, that certainly, corrects the narrative a little bit, because I think people were saying it was, it was still bad even up until recently, but here you're saying even in twenty nineteen, it was still working." }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "38:04", "start": 2284.11, "text": "No, yeah, twenty eighteen it was not good. Twenty eighteen was, was very bad, in my, in my, my personal experience, but twenty nineteen, from May on, yeah. It was, pretty good." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:17", "start": 2297.38, "text": "Yeah. Fantastic. Well, yeah, well, I, I'm looking forward to, seeing how the event goes. h-hope you get a, h-hope you get a good, attendance there, and, yeah, let's, let's see how the, how the adoption goes." }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "38:30", "start": 2310.21, "text": "Yeah, adoptingbitcoinarnhem dot com is the, the website of the conference where people can, can check it out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:36", "start": 2315.9, "text": "Great. We'll, we'll put that in the show notes and, Patrick" }, { "speaker": "patrick_van_der_meijde", "time": "38:39", "start": 2319.42, "text": "Thank you so much for having me, Stephan." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:41", "start": 2321.44, "text": "Bye. Alright, I hope you enjoyed the show. Get the show notes at stephanlivera dot com, and I've got a newsletter over at stephanlivera dot substack dot com. Thanks, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }