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All welcome to epicenter Bitcoin the show, which talks about the
Technologies, projects and startups, driving
decentralization, and the global cryptocurrency Revolution, my
name is Sebastian with you. And my name is Bryan Ferry in
creative. And today, we're here with Adam
Levine. Adam Levine has sort of played
a, very important role actually, in the history of epson a
Bitcoin in that this wouldn't have happened without him.
We met the first time. Sebastian died, last December on
a conference call with Adam when the topic was too.
To produce some new shows for a contest that let's talk pecan
was launching and we were both from Europe.
There's only four people on the call so he's like, let's try it
together and that turn out very well.
And we were very lucky that way because we really didn't know
each other. So from a prudency perspective,
perhaps, this is foolish. But as I really, really happy to
have him on today. I mean, probably most of you
will know Adam. He's he's really not known.
Of course, for let's talk Bitcoin and Also been involved
in all kinds of other projects in the cryptocurrency space.
So, just before we get started with the conversation, I wanted
to briefly mention inside Bitcoins Berlin.
So, you know, many of you will know, the inside Bitcoins
conference has. That's actually where we
Sebastian, I met for the first time in real life.
It was a year ago at last. Let's start with point a inside
Bitcoins conference in Berlin. So, it's happening again, and
it's going to be a March 5th and 6th.
And if you want to, so we will both Be there.
I will also be giving one of the keynote talks on sort of
economic issues and Bitcoin and if you want to come to you with
love to see you there, you can get off. 15% with the discount
code, epicenter IBC, that's all in capitals and you can check
out the event at the inside Bitcoins dot d e.
So with that out of the way, thanks for joining us today and
thank you, Brian. Thank you Sebastian.
And I just want to point out, like, how instrumental you have
been in, you know, this happening.
I mean, if it wasn't for for you producing, your content and me
like, at that exact time, getting interested in Bitcoin
and seeking out podcasts and then Brian already being a
listener. And that's meeting there.
The none of this would have ever happened.
And so I mean, I don't know what if we qualify you as some sort
of, I don't know what that qualifies you but it does make
you it important. Part of the epicenter Bitcoin
experience and the success of what has happened since then.
So very, very happy to have you on.
Well, that's very flattering. Thank you.
Thank you very much. We can that we can call you the
spiritual grandfather, if you, there we go.
There we go. Yeah.
I like, I like to be a catalyst. That's what I really I really
enjoy doing as I like setting off chain reactions, that then
result in cool things happening that I don't really have to be
involved in, you know, like we don't talk to, you know, like
you guys just do your show, you never asked me for permission or
anything. It was just like a suggestion.
I'm really glad that it worked for you guys and I'm glad the
charm good results. Yeah, absolutely well and with
that, let's launch into integer show.
Let's talk Bitcoin. Because I mean I ate was, you
know, when I started becoming interested in Bitcoin, I was
writing my Master's thesis and I was really, really busy.
So I had like no time to read at all, but I was walking around
quite a lot. So when I started initially, I
just caught up on the few months of continued already do.
So My, my initial knowledge, the first two months came purely
from, That's So Bitcoin. So and you've done an absolutely
great job. I think you've produced great
content over a long time and, you know, some great guests.
So can you tell us a bit like, how did you, how did you start?
Let's not pick on sure first off, once again.
Thank you. That was really flattering for
both of you. I appreciate that.
Um, I'm glad that. I'm glad.
It's had a positive impact on you, you know, I make let's talk
Bitcoin and I've always made, let's take Bitcoin because I'm
interested in cryptocurrency and actually let's talk Bitcoin was
the I can never remember if it's the second or third, the third
or fourth Bitcoin podcast, I started.
But it was not the first, you know, I and I started doing
Bitcoin podcast but let's talk to Quinn started in 2013, spring
of 2013 and before that I had done to podcasts in 2011, And
then podcast right before it in 2013 to that sort of exploded
right before we started, let's talk Bitcoin.
So this is it was not something new to me and I've been doing
podcast since 2005. So it's a really natural way for
me to kind of just share my perspective with people and
that's largely what it is. The podcast that I made until
let's talk Bitcoin, we're almost entirely about me, sharing my
perspective and about, you know, trying to help people complete
the picture. So they could see it as I saw
it, because I'm right about almost Everything he said
jokingly. So let's talk the corn was a
little bit different because let's talk back when I didn't
know everything about it. And there were a lot of
questions that I had that were really unanswered questions.
And so I surrounded myself with experts and it was sort of it
was a good way to kind of dive in.
And yeah, those initial I mean, I was I just listened episode 13
the other day. While I Was preparing for
episode 183, which has Chris Odom on it, from open
transactions and I was listening to it and I think I like the old
show all Was better that I like the new show, you know.
Like I was just I guess I was less tired at the time.
I've been doing it for not quite as long but but you know we've
just the journey has been that. It's been a journey.
You know, we've it's been the show the network, everything has
just kind of happened because it was the logical thing to happen
in order to continue walking down the path that I've chosen
to walk down, which is from my perspective to try and explore.
As many of the possibilities that cryptocurrency presents as
possible. Did that answer the question of
might not have no. Absolutely.
And so, what made you decide to want to start a network?
No assets. That was sort of a.
Well I didn't decide. I want to start a new book to be
honest with you again, it was just sort of the next natural
thing that happened. You know, in December of 2013.
I was, you know I was traveling a lot for conferences at that
point and I was unhappy with the amount of Bitcoin podcast that
we're out there. Besides, let's talk.
A coin. And I had been a big fan of the
Edmund, Ethan Bitcoin report and the plan B from Jupiter
broadcasting. And there was one other one,
whose name I can't remember. And they all had discontinued
because the because it was hard, you know, because it's hard to
do something speculative without monetizing it and I again never
cared for me. It was always just I'm doing it
anyway. So I might as well might as well
share this with everybody else so that they can kind of share
my perspective and journey through the whole thing.
So, so the network Happens because we did this contest
because I was like, well, there aren't enough Bitcoin podcast
tool, you know, Bitcoin was super valuable that point was
over a thousand dollars. So we offered a one Bitcoin, one
Bitcoin prize and got like 15 or 20 and trees.
And a lot of them were really good.
And so what wound up happening is, you know, we invited one
person who actually won the contest and he joined and then
pretty quickly we brought a few others and we basically just it
became less about It became less about where you ranked
relatively speaking and more if you did it.
And if you want it to and if you wanted to and you asked long
enough that eventually you got in and that's not an ideal
situation, that's something that really made me realize that.
That in a lot of ways, I become the bottleneck, right?
If I'm the one that has to be responsible for approving things
or saying, no, that's not right or whatever.
Then it really does rely on me. And at this point, I mean, you
know, at that time I was so Leslie overbooked that it was
not even funny and that got to be more true as time went on.
So this is a long way of saying the network happens because
there were a lot of podcasts that have the choice of starting
over, you know, and building as let's talk Bitcoin had done from
the ground up in audience, that listens or to piggyback on what
we were doing and start with our audience and essentially
bootstrap up several thousand initial listeners.
It didn't guarantee that people were going to listen every one
of your episodes, but it meant that, it was presented to them.
Where otherwise, Why's it would have been quite expensive and
quite time consuming in order to gather, that sort of initial
audience as he no way with. So almost a year, I mean, I've
probably got about a year now since the LTE network started
off with its initial roster of shows and you've brought on
other shows since then tell us about how that how that has
worked out over the last year. What is their experience been
with the network, my experience has been that I need to be more
transparent to a fault about most things.
Regards to the network. If somebody asks me something I
tend to tell them if they don't ask me that I don't necessarily
tend to tell them so that again means that people who ask these
stuff get you know get to know what's up and people don't ask
me stuff. Don't necessarily get to know
it's up. It's not ideal with the network.
I really wanted to help people monetize.
We had monetized well in November of 2013 because as you
know, the Bitcoin price had skyrocketed up and suddenly
everybody felt like they were rich and so we had for two
months or three months been basically completely booked and
towards the end of Of towards the end of January, I finished
negotiating a deal with with the crypto kit guys to, you know,
sponsor the show for basically a full year, which is just now
kind of coming up to its endpoint.
So I was like well darn, you know, I mean like we that was
easy, you know, it wasn't difficult, everybody's feels
like they've got a lot of money and so you know we can totally
share the wealth and help other people do the same thing too.
And then the price, you know, continue to go down over the
year and as basically as soon as the price dropped.
Like $900 everybody suddenly, it was like well you know, we
probably shouldn't spend any money because it's going to go
back over a thousand dollars and that kind of continued was my
experience, but the other part about it, is that it was hard,
right? Where before it had been easy.
And so when something is easy, I tend to do it.
And when something is hard, then I have to really weigh it to
determine if it's, you know, going to be worth the amount of
time that it's going to take. So that was the monetization
side in Spring, we started we basically launched the new
website and the new Site, we are switching from WordPress on to
an entirely custom platform that has become the token Lee
platform. That is essentially, it's like a
Content management system and a community platform that's
designed from the ground up to incorporate, not just
cryptocurrency, but also tokens and not just to accept them and
to let you spend them or whatever.
But to also, let individuals within them, make their own
token, powerful on our platform. That's, that's kind of the
important part. So there was all this stuff
right. And as usual, what happened was
we just launched the network too early.
And so people who were working with it with the expectation
that they would, you know, be compensated because we had all
these monetization plans. It didn't do so well necessarily
because we never did monetize. And at that point, we were also
on terrestrial radio in Southern California with this deal that
we had made with them and all the shows were on that.
So schedules were really crazy so they were like, crazy
schedules combined with nobody getting paid and we didn't know
of radio. I mean like we were talking
about this. For the show podcasts.
You have no idea how many people are listening.
You can kind of guess at how many people have started
listening. You can sort of guess it's some
other things, but you never really know with radio.
It's even more insane because you only know that it's being
broadcast, you know, the area that the broadcast is covering
and, you know, the potential number of people who could if
they turn on the station, right? To your, you know, to what
you're doing at that point. So it's it was completely
insane. Sounds like an interesting
business model for radio analytics know, sometimes you
get on that. Well, that's actually part of
the reason why man. Words with something that we
wound up developing was because radio completely suffers.
If you think about it, radio is the is the medium of Last
Resort. You have no control over it and
the only time people ever use it is when they literally have
nothing else that they can do. So it's great.
If you're multitasking or anything else like that.
But but yeah, radio has a terrible listener engagement
problems. So actually yeah, part of what
we're doing has been to kind of develop this idea that really
what you want to do with listeners isn't just you know
give them something to listen to but you want to give them a good
reason to also be part of your community.
And then once the part of your community that it's much, much
easier to see who's actually participating and how many
people are actually listening and all these things.
So a lot of what we've done has been about that.
So this is, you know, I like I said, it's a long way of saying
that the network has been what it is and people have chosen to
join it because they chose that because they decided that it was
to their advantage, to be able to speak to our audience.
And I agreed that their content was high enough quality that,
you know, we were able to Remind so one thing I recently did was
I looked at Bitcoin podcast and have existed.
So both on the LTE network and others that have been
independent and, you know, some of them had heard of some of the
mess hall and iTunes rankings. And when you go back to, it was
pretty crazy. That almost all of them have
been discontinued and and, including quite a few of the LTE
network shows, why has that been the case?
Yes. Because monetization is hard
because the audience that's interested in this type of
content is very small. The portion of that audience
that is potentially interested in this type of content that is
willing to listen to podcasts, which is to say to not do video
or to read a transcript is very small.
It's something like compared to video.
It's like 75 percent of people on the net use video and only
like 15 percent use audio. Right?
Use all discrete audio formats and it's just a taste thing
because a lot of times people can't multitask.
So, I find that most of the people who listen to podcasts
are people who really value or enjoy multitasking either
because they're so busy or because they're, you know,
working on something else in can't fully concentrate on the
cars stuff like that. So you asked why have shows been
discontinued shows them a discontinued because it's hard
to do this speculative lie and consistently because stuff
happens and your priorities change and your interest level
changes and if you're not getting paid for then the
impetus to keep doing, it isn't quite as strong.
So I mean I'm crazy. That's the that's the flat truth
of it is. I'm just nuts.
I'd be doing this really regardless of what's happening
so that I think is the key to let's talk Bitcoins continued
success, it's crazy. I am crazy that we just do this.
I think there's any the crazy part of it.
I think you could attribute to be passionate about it.
Yeah, I think that that's what has kept us going as being
passionate about producing great content and I think you share
that same that same passion. And, you know, I wish that Cared
more about the great content part.
I care about, I care about information, I care about
knowing things. I care about people knowing
things and people having the correct impression of things.
So, for a lot of, you know, the other thing I care about is
giving people the ability to share what they care about,
right? I'm super passionate about this
stuff but the way that my attention works is that either
care about something, 100% completely ridiculously
unapologetically or I don't care about it at all and that's
because I only have Of those two settings.
So if I like care about something just a little bit,
then that means I basically care about it as if I cared about it
fully. And so it's incredibly
irritating trait to have. I have to tell you that sounds
that sounds terrible. So when you see that stock
Bitcoin going in the future is above the podcast itself and the
network. Well.
So a big part of the reason why the network has been difficult.
Not. I mean, like as individual
participants, I would I would argue.
It's been difficult for individual podcasters That they
get Advantage but they have to work within our system and
that's been difficult. So what we've been doing for the
last year is building out in part a new editorial system and
the new edit, I'm sorry. What was your ex might be going
into the wrong thing. So the question was like, wait,
do you see? Let's go pick on going the
podcast and the network. So where do you see this in the
long? Like, let's say, two years down
the line, if you can see, therefore, there was a reason I
was talking about tools. So yeah, so I think that will be
much more complete. I think that will be a much more
feature complete platform that will allow its users to interact
with each other with no, where the platform enables the
enables, the the interactions and can enable the Commerce, but
it's actually just happening between those two participants
and they're making all the rules.
You know, as they see fit and the best part about that is that
if we make all of these things entirely voluntary, then there's
literally no such thing as, you know, as a bad deal because
somebody who doesn't want. It doesn't do it, you know
somebody who doesn't want to work on a project and you know
in order to facilitate that we need to build in reputation
systems and we're working on a collaborative editorial system
and a call and then beyond that. So let's talk Bitcoin right now
is a front page that's powered by one Blog.
The system that we're moving to next is one where anybody can
make a Blog and then content can be curated up from all of those
distributed blogs on to the front page and then the next
phase after that. And actually, these will At the
same time is that anybody who wants to take content created
within the LTB environment and make their own front page, where
they curate up their own? You know, other content from
within the network based on their own standards?
They'll be able to do that too. So some elements of Reddit and a
community platform. Let's talk Bitcoin is a
community platform part of that. Is publishing part of that is
Commerce. Part of that is, you know,
socializing part of that is project management.
Part of that is plan. I mean, like there's you can
think about it like We used to before the age of the internet.
We used to go physical places and we used to meet people in,
you know, bars or restaurants or town halls.
And we used to be able to interact with people and conduct
Commerce in public places and and that was easy and the
internet has replaced that partly.
But the part that it doesn't do well is it doesn't do anything
that has anything to do with ownership or money?
Well, because the only thing that you can do is give somebody
else a debt which is not that useful so-so I think that that's
that's really what's Happening. Here is the platform, the were
designing, you know, we started designing it for let's talk
Bitcoin but it is a generic Community platform in the same
way that a town hall is a community platform, anything
that you can do there, whether its funding something or, you
know, talking to somebody or signing a contract with somebody
or whatever. You can do it on this type of
platform and more importantly, because of that, because that
stops being the hard part, you can do anything on one of these
platforms, literally anything, Well, we've got so much more to
talk about including LTV coin, crowdfunding want to talk about
content? Monetization models.
But let's take a break for. We do that and talk about our
sponsor shape-shift. So Chef is a fast and easy way
to buy and sell altcoins and I'm curious.
I haven't seen LTV coin on shape-shift.
They've been adding all kinds of new coins, all the time and and
but LT becomes not there. Yet, do they have counterparty
yet? If they don't have counterparty
or xcp then they wouldn't have us know.
Yeah, I guess that's true. They don't have, they don't have
counterparty yet. I mean that might come at some
point but anyway so shape-shift is a fast and easy way to buy
and sell altcoins. They support Bitcoin.
They just added bitshares. They just added start coin
namecoin XT. They're adding new coins every
week so I can't even keep up. And last week, we try to do a
demo touch to a demo with their shape shift lens plug-in, which
is essentially a chrome plug-in, which allows you to You
shape-shift on any website, it wasn't working.
It was a bug. Unfortunately, it appears that
they have fixed it. So we're going to go ahead and
demo it this week and hopefully if we keep our fingers crossed
and we printed the demo Gods, it will in fact work.
So if if If we go to the LTB website.
So we're going to donate to the last episode which is beyond the
blockchain with open transactions.
If we scroll down here we get the tip address right here.
This is a Bitcoin tip address. I'm going to click on so I've
got the shape shift lens plug-in install.
I installed it with it's in the Chrome web store, you just look
for shape shift lens and you'll see the little shape-shift Fox
logo right here. So if I click that I get Will
pop up and click pay with. I'm going to pay with Dogecoin.
And so there's my those the destination address.
So this is the Bitcoin address that we're donating to and I'm
going to go ahead I'm not even going to put in an amount.
I'm just going to set in my wallet what I said so let's pay.
I'm going to get a QR code. I'll go ahead and scan that.
with my Dogecoin wallet, and I'm going to send three dollars,
There you go. So it's setting and you'll see
here. It's a waiting for your
Dogecoin. And just a few seconds, there
you go. So payments been received and
now we're just waiting for the confirmation and nice thing
about shape-shift that it doesn't require any
confirmation. So 0 confirmations, as soon as
it receives the Bitcoins, it starts doing its thing.
Converting those Bitcoin into Dogecoin, you met any other way,
right? Or sorry, converting those
Dogecoin into Bitcoin rather and in just a few seconds we'll be
able to even will even be able to look at it on the blockchain
and see that it's actually Trip. So it's just still awaiting
confirmation. Stick will and and you don't
need to make an account, but you can just get started and I think
it's through know, there you go. So I just went through and in
fact, so this is a nice feature here, you can get a receipt by
email and if we look if we click here and we look at the
blockchain will see that that come from that transaction is
actually went through. So there you go.
It took about 30 seconds to get Dogecoin sent to that the latest
episodes Bitcoin address. So you should be getting that in
your wallet very soon. That I should indeed.
Very cool. So there you go ships.
If dot IO? Give it a try.
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If that I owe the fast and easy way to convert all your alt
coins, So moving on the next thing I want to talk about in
this is very closely tied to what we were discussing earlier
on the network is LTB coin. So in early 2014, you propose, I
mean, you started thinking about creating a currency within the
LTE network, which would be used to sort of the the economic
while the currency, the currency with the which live inside the
network and service. The LTE network for paying
content producers, but we also serve advertisers to pay you to
buy me donate and buy advertising for the show.
What was the main thing that you were trying to accomplish when,
when you first thought of a creating LTB point, I was trying
to solve the bootstrap problem, which is what I called the, that
like, the first thousand people who you are trying to get
involved in a given in a given project that you are interested
in. And the thing that Bitcoin did,
well, that does not We Exist anywhere else is they came up
with a way where you could create a token create a you know
and I say that both technically a token but also a token of
contribution. It's difficult.
Kind of they're going to conceptualize that.
So LTD coin, the value of it is very questionable but the value
of it doesn't really matter from the, from my perspective.
Because the thing that we used it for is to incentivize and the
thing that we Use it for is to incentivize people to
participate in our system. This is not to say that.
It's the only way that you can interact with us.
It's just the best way because it is the most cost-effective
way relative to other options. So the reason why it's worth it
to us to do that is because we have no cost when it comes to
creating this and using it to administer our Rewards program.
And you know I was just looking at this the other day we just
did a distribution yesterday went out to over 1,000 people
and I think it costs like .05 one.
PTC or something like that which comes to like $11.
So, you know, administering a Rewards program or weekly send
out, you know, differing amounts of tokens to people, you know,
automatically to people for less than $10 in terms of transaction
fees and total cost is something that can really only be done
with tokens. And it means that when people
are, when people create something for us, we don't have
to wait until we get paid Bitcoin for it because we're not
paying them Bitcoin. We're passing along LTB coin and
actually, it's not even passing it along when we 8l T be coin.
It's distributed based on your contribution, right?
So if you're part of the audience then there's a part of
each weekly distribution that is created.
That's given to you is the first user because you're valuable to
the network, you're someone who's spending their time and
making their choice to consume content that are content
creators. And by our, I mean, people using
our platform we have, we have no even formal agreements with
anybody. It's just a platform people, use
it because they have something to say and because we think that
they're there. As they haven't, disqualified
themselves is almost thing, right?
I'm very, very laissez-faire. When it comes to allowing
content onto our platform, it has to be at a certain quality
level, but besides that it's been mostly about traffic
control and then about, you know, people not, you know,
breaking the few rules that we do have.
We're very specific about the content that we allow on the
network. I'm sorry, we're talking about
LTB coin. So anyways, the relevant part of
LTB coin is that it doesn't cost us anything.
And so because it doesn't cost us anything just like Bitcoin
can give it to the minors for free while even though they're
providing a valuable service, it's free to the Bitcoin
Network. We can do the same thing except
it's with the audience, it's with content creators.
And then there's a 10% that goes to the platform to so LTB coin
has been, I don't know people. Again, focus a lot on the price
and I think that that sort of misses the point when you create
a token and LTB coin was one of the first tokens, not
cryptocurrencies, but tokens ever created.
There just wasn't anything you could do with them.
And that was what we were in into is that, you know I was You
can think about a token, right? Like a like a marble, or like a
ball bearing, whatever it is very like that in that.
If I hold it in my hand, I have it.
If I give it to you, I no longer have it.
It's no longer accessible to me. And by itself, it isn't really
much of anything. It's this little thing that is
itself, and that's pretty much it.
But if you take that ball bearing or marble, and you put
it at the top of a Rube Goldberg type machine that is designed
to, you know, like make me Host and kick me out of bed and all
that stuff. Then suddenly you could make the
argument that that ball bearing has the ability to make me toast
and get me out of bed. Even though the ball bearing
itself, didn't actually have anything to do with it because
it was placed in circumstance that was set up for it to
trigger certain things. It actually causes that to
happen. And then of course, it's also
still a ball bearing. So it, you know, you can't make
an arbitrary copy of it and then give it to, you know, let
somebody else do it. So that's really what tokens are
as far as I'm concerned. We now have 80 and that used to
be impossible, right? Used to be impossible to make a
token. You used to have to make an
entire Block Chain and go through Mining and do all this
other stuff. So the idea that you could make
something for an arbitrary reason kind of wasn't ever
really feasible until tokens, but once it is feasible then
suddenly what was impossible, becomes the easy part and what
was inconceivable. Because the thing that preceded
it was impossible is suddenly now an incredibly obvious
problem. And so, when we started, let's
talk Bitcoin, like in order to do that, send out to a thousand
people. Automatically and not have me
sitting there doing every single transaction for, you know, 18
hours a day on the days that we have to do this.
We actually had to create an entirely new tool.
That is essentially an automated distributor where you send all
of the we're within our system. You give it all of the addresses
or LTB usernames that you want to send to you, put in all the
amounts or the percentage is next to what it is that next to
each name, depending on how much they should get.
And then the system gives you a single address to which CH you
send the full amount of Bitcoin for the transaction fee and the
full amount of whatever the token is that you're
Distributing. And then it automatically goes,
through sends out. All those transactions at a rate
that doesn't overwhelm the network.
Let's see here. Does it with fees that are less
than half of what the standard counterparty fees are because
again, like they're just fixed fees that since we built a
custom tool, we were able to experiment with and see.
Ok, well the network will deal with it here but it won't deal
with it here and and it also Tracks confirmations and sends
you a set. It gives you essentially, the
ability to make sure that all the transactions actually did go
through and it's auditable to. So that's something that like is
so basic, right? Being able to send a bunch of
tokens differing amounts of tokens to different people and
not have it. Take a person all day or be a
full-time job and yet until we created it.
It did not exist. So it has led be coin.
Worked has it succeeded and things you wanted it to do it,
succeeded in that it let me In that it let me allocate Credit
in a way that could later be valuable, right?
Because if I just say, you know, if you help me with an episode a
year ago and I say to you, thanks, I'm successful now.
But, you know, thank you. You helped me get there, then
that's great. But if instead you got paid LTB
coin and then a year later, LTB coin was successful, because
we're successful. Then that's something where your
work earlier on actually had a very substantial impact for you
and you actually can potentially profit.
If you know what we're doing, doesn't wind up being valuable
and it fails. Thing doesn't work, then doesn't
matter to you. You know, you it was a volunteer
effort essentially you did anyways and the token was just a
volunteer token but if the project succeeds there is that
potential for upside. So that's the thing is that we
already I mean like you can already support things for
volunteer for them. You can already, you know, give
people money for free. The thing that you can't do is
get a token back from that person.
That represents something that could be valuable in the future
without it costing that person. Because again, like you could do
this with Kickstarter. You just would have to raise
money with Kickstarter. In order to, then pay people
back money with Kickstarter. So it doesn't make any sense,
but if it's free, then why not? So you asked if it had been
successful. I think that the time frame is
too short to really make that sort of judgment.
We're moving into a new phase of LTB coin.
Now to this point, we've been Distributing it and there's been
no utility for it. We've had you know we had no
Redemption methods that were not completely manual.
There was no good way to use it in a lot of capacities and so
that, of course, something that doesn't have utility and has a
lot of supply. Is going to be very low value,
but that's the thing that's changed in the last two weeks.
The last week, we rolled out the sponsor tool which lets people
redeem, which lets people redeem LTB coin, or Bitcoin or a
variety of other tokens that we accept for various things that
we offer on the network like sponsorships on the show or
display advertisements on the front page.
And then yesterday, we rolled out, our essentially automated
vending machine, a project we call swap bought and the vending
machine lets you buy. EB coin for Bitcoin or for a
variety of other tokens. Including storage is coin swarms
coin xcp. You know, we're only compatible
with counterparty tokens at this point, which are built on the
Bitcoin blockchain. But but, but we already kind of
have that sort of multi token and different tokens, achieve
different prices, right? So we give a 40% discount when
you buy something with LTB coin, but we actually charge 10% more
when you want to spend swarm with us.
Because swarm doesn't actually have that much utility.
So I mean it's it's a Project will take it and will, you know,
trade trade tokens for it but it's not the same as if you were
using our token within our system.
So that's the thing that's different now is that now
there's actually something you can do with it.
And indeed, since that happened, we've seen the amount of volume
trading on the centralized markets, like Polonia X, where
LTB coin is traded, go up quite a bit and it's been, it's been
interesting watching you know because every time we do
something, the ecosystem is still small enough that it
causes big reverberations. So yesterday when we We rolled
out the vending machine. We had been pricing LTB coin at
20% above whatever the current market price was.
But then somebody crashed the price because the market is
small and so the price goes way down.
Somebody comes over to, somebody comes over to the vending
machine and they say, oh well this is 20% above the current
super low price, but I can get, you know, a whole bunch of coins
and I don't the worry about Market depth.
So then they bought from us. So we had a conversation with
him this morning were like how do you know what exactly did you
do? And you know, so now we're
going, we went through. And changed it.
So that our price for LTB coin is pegged to the 24-hour high of
LTB coin. Yeah, I'm so you don't really
want to buy LTB coin from US unless you just want to use it
right then and it's a convenience thing.
But if you're going to spend ldb coin with us, then again, we're
recognizing it. Not only with that 40% discount,
but at that much higher price relatively speaking.
So it's just such an experiment. As an experiment, LTB coin has
been incredibly successful because it is shown me, all of
the things that are impossible. Able to do with tokens because
nobody has built that tool yet, and it's why indeed.
We've wound up building token Lee as a project and as a
platform and what I'm spending most of my time thinking about
these days. Yeah, I mean, I've been asked by
a few people about, you know, you know, with different
projects I'll get couldn't we use a token and they hadn't
known about LT because necessarily but, you know, could
we create our own currency to incentivize people and stuff and
I was like, yeah, that's a great idea, but you probably want to
wait for At least a year because I could rewrite this so many
different components that all have to be there otherwise it
just doesn't work and you have had this sort of I guess
interesting challenging but you know also difficult job of
having to build all of this from scratch.
Well to be clear, I'm not I'm not building it, I'm the Like
Chief Visionary officer ideation guy, I come up with all the all
the, you know, like big problems that I run into that are super
annoying to me and I complain about I have Have.
So I have two co-founders on the token, like project who are
active working on it, Nick rathman and then Devon Weller
both technical sides of that. So so we've been able to in the
three months, we've been working on the token Lee Project as a
formal project but able to make very very fast progress going
through this. And actually I think that you
know, I probably, you know, in hindsight if I had the
opportunity to and still learn the lessons, I would have waited
a year to launch LTB coin, because a lot of people didn't
understand the timeframe we were on it, I didn't even really And
the time frame that we were on, I had kind of assumed that we'd
be able to build this stuff and have it out and, you know, three
months and the reality of development just hits you in the
face like a brick. Well, one thing you mentioned
that that I really like is that, you know, the importance of all,
this is the experiment. And and I think that the judging
the success of a project or something like LTD coin, because
of price or because of the wide user isn't probably not
necessarily a good, a good. Decatur.
And perhaps the, you know what you've learned from it is is
definitely more valuable than any any of what that may
accomplish. I'm very glad that we didn't,
we'd never sold it. I was very important to me that
it always be something that we give away to volunteers who were
doing stuff for us. Anyways and not sell it simply
because I was not convinced it was going to work, right?
I was convinced that it was an experiment worth doing and I
still I'm convinced it it's an experiment worth doing but
nothing is simple. You know.
I mean the thing about all of this stuff though is that like
the Use the usability issues are the issue and it's not usability
with LTB coin. It's not even really usability
with tokens its usability with getting people into Bitcoin in
the first place. As soon as that problem gets
solved, the whole world is going to change because that is the
thing that holds people back it's thing where if you hear
something cool and want to look at, it's like, okay, well, but
but this is hard and if it's hard, then why would you spend
your time doing it? So I mean, that's the, that's
the core problem, you know, is that like you've got Bitcoin,
that's difficult counterparty. It's difficult.
Their wallet has become increasingly slow as time has
gone on. So I don't necessarily know if
that's the you know. Best long-term solution Are All
That Jazz. It's a it's just such a fluid
situation. So that would be the thing.
You know, for anybody out there, who's wondering what they should
do, the thing that they should do is try and learn as much as
possible about whatever it is that you're trying to do and try
and avoid making decisions about which particular thing to cement
yourself on. And that's the thing that I'm
going to work on for the rest of my life because things change.
And, you know, this is a, this is a big project, but I think
that we're going to provide a lot of opportunities to a lot of
different people to do things that I have no idea about it in
much, the same way that, you know, we can the, I like to
catalyze other things. I think that the token lie
project in the platform really is going to provide
opportunities to do whatever you want.
And have it be easy? Yeah, I mean one advantage has
well of not selling it. I think it's the whole legal
liability site which I guess. We will see where that goes, 50
crowdfunding projects. But speaking of crowdfunding,
you will also launch another project called coin Powers.
I mean, we once had actually Tatiana on ages ago and I think
when she was launching her to her coin through coin Powers.
So can you talk a little bit? But what's the role of
crowdfunding in this and what what we the results you saw with
with coin powers, So coin power is no longer exists and part of
the reason why coin power is no longer exists in my opinion.
And I want to be clear that I am, you know, I had very little
to do with Korn Powers towards the end.
I was mostly involved, helping Tatiana, go through her project.
Essentially, I was a large part of my role and then I consulted
with them because I saw cryptocurrency and crowd funding
is being a very natural mating. One of the things that is
interesting, if you think about it is that you don't We need a
site like Kickstarter in order to crowdfund anymore.
Why do you need a site like Kickstarter?
You need a site like Kickstarter because they have a community
supposedly, although it's not that valuable anymore.
Since again, they have so many projects on it that it's very,
very difficult to stand out. They charge money and they have
a payment processor. So, and they can tell you that
you can't list. So that payment processor is the
pretty much single most important part about being a
crowdfunding site. And if you're a crowdfunding
site that uses tokens or uses Bitcoin than you don't need a
payment, Assessor. And so, if you don't need a
payment processor, then why do you have to have dedicated
crowdfunding sites? Why aren't there crowdfunding
blogs where people have crowdfunding campaigns that they
run themselves? And then they incentivize people
to promote it on their blogs and they get you know they get some
sort of commission for things that come through.
So that's the thing I think that that you know, coin Powers
realized partly because I told it to him a whole bunch of times
and the core problem I think there was their ability a closed
platform. They're A closed source project
and they wanted to be the definitive crowdfunding platform
and I think that that's not really possible in a world that
we're going into, so you know, the future of crowdfunding is, I
see it there certainly will be, you know, projects and platforms
like Kickstarter that people choose to use because they want
to use them, but if you don't want to use them, then sites
light, you know, the projects like Lighthouse have already
started. To show us what you can do just
with Bitcoin and that's of that was a great experience.
I'm not sure if you guys have tried Lighthouse yet, it's a
crowdfunding essentially Bitcoin.
Yeah very very cool technology and again, probably fantastic.
Know it will end and the other thing it does is it opens it
asks the question if crowdfunding can be a wallet
then can't a website. Be a wallet.
I mean if we're trying to put wallets into websites right now
that's what we're trying to do and it's hard because you have
to do a whole bunch of client side stuff.
Otherwise you have centralization of risk.
If the if the website is compromised in the wall it can
be compromised, but light Shows us that what if we instead just
take the wrapper of a Bitcoin wallet and put communities
inside of that? And so you just interact with
the community there and because it's built into a wallet you can
do all of these things and it is just as simple as Lighthouse.
They don't the way for any confirmations because the wallet
knows what it just did. So again like this, we have to
reorient how we think about all of these things because the
possibilities are fundamentally different.
So back to crowdfunding. So have I mentioned swat-bot
yet? I don't know.
Yeah, okay. So anyways, you if you want to
check out the most recent tool we've rolled out for token, Li
you can check out swap bot. If you've heard of the vent
project, ve + ND project which is again an automated token
vending machine. It's quite similar to that
except ours also has the ability to Peg to market prices and to
accept multiple tokens at discounts or premiums relative
to those market prices so due to do.
So the thing that I'm bringing Here, is that once you have that
basis, right? Once you have the ability to
have an automated vending machine, then what is a
threshold based crowdfunding campaign?
A threshold based crowdfunding campaign is is logic.
Basically for a vending machine that knows how much it's trying
to raise. In terms of some value.
Number in, whatever type of token.
You want to think about value in, it knows what types of
tokens. It's willing to accept and what
discounts are premiums that it's willing to give for those
because it might like Bitcoin more than it likes LT.
Be coin or something like that. And you need to know the the
date that it should close by. And you need to know the type of
token that people get back, right?
Because again you know like with the Tatiana coin thing, you the
problem with Tatiana coin. Again, it's the same thing with
all TB coin. It's that yeah, sure, you've got
the coin out there but now the coin is the easy part and how do
you do Redemption, how do you do Mass sends?
How do you do anything? So, actually to do the
distribution of Tatiana coin, we use the LTB distributor and it's
been used by a lot of other projects for the same sort of
thing. So, That's where again, I think
we're going is that crowdfunding won't be won't be something that
you go to a website for it'll be something that like if you want
to be listed on a website you might even pay to have your
project listed on the website. But then you've got your project
list on the website and yet you still retain control over it.
So instead all you do is just take a module, right?
Take this chunk of code that has all this logic built into it
that you've customized for all of your needs.
You know, you put in the address, it's going to send the,
it's going to send the Funds to when it's done and then you just
let it go. And it's this little module that
you plug in and people can choose to send money to it and
they get tokens back. If the project successfully
funds and if they don't then they get back their money.
It's automated. So what you're saying is you're
separating the funding from the crowdfunding.
Basically, you're taking ownership of the funding in a
way. Well, what you're doing is
you're separating the funding from everything and that's
that's the important takeaway here.
Is that is that whatever you're doing whether it's crowdfunding
or or anything you can Tate, you can separate the the token part,
you can separate the payment from the engagement part and by
doing that, you can make it so that you don't have to use a
payment processor and because you don't have to use a payment
processor, you don't have to do. Maybe you can do lots more
stuff. You can do lots more stuff and
more than that, you know, once you get past thinking about it
like payments, then it's everything because anything can
be represented as a token. Yeah, absolutely.
I think really Lighthouse for me, like using it the first
time. You know, sometimes, As you try
to explain Bitcoin to people and like, why is this so special?
And I think light causes like a great example where you could
like show it to people and I think most people would
understand what this is really novel.
Like this is something that just cannot do otherwise.
So I agree with me, it was also kind of a great experience
coming back because I'd gone gotten so used to bitcoin and
using Bitcoin, daddy become almost normal.
And you think that God this is like, you know, it's like it's
maybe not super now. Exciting anymore.
You know, I it's been a while, but I think that's the sort of
for me like using it the first time kind of rekindled that
excitement. Now, I also wanted to, we also
wanted to touch on another topic that I think you've been
thinking about a lot, which is the content monetization and
especially tipping. So I heard a lot of people say
and I'm not sure if you were one of them that you know tipping
was going to be the future. Sure and your Bitcoin makes it
easy. And it makes that sort of to
reality that may be the future. People couldn't produce content
and pure live on donations. I mean, okay.
Maybe some people are doing it today but that this would become
a commonplace. I personally have always been
very skeptical of that. But what has your experience
been now with, let's talk Bitcoin and tipping, we really D
emphasize tipping. We do.
I'm sorry, I don't mean like we actively D emphasize that.
I mean, the, when we switch to this new place, Form it became
less of a priority for us so you know I mean is that we do it but
it's really dependent on it's really dependent on the value of
Bitcoin relatively speaking people give more when the value
is lower compared to what it's higher and in the numbers can
change you know but that's just true of Bitcoin in general.
People are tied to the price and it makes it really difficult to
do anything because it's not so much about what you're doing
then so much as it is about how excited they are and therefore
interested in your content. So like when the prices down,
And you know, like we have you know, bad weeks relatively
speaking in terms of listeners or in terms of overall site
users and when the prices up than we have really, really good
weeks. And it's, it's just sort of this
funny thing. And so reality in the space, you
asked about monetization also, monetization is a struggle,
that's largely again. What we're trying to do, we're
trying to give people the ability to create different
monetization schemes. And it's again, it's not just
about LT Beacon, I don't want to.
That impression LT be coin is kind of like the, you can think
about it, like, everything, the trades against Bitcoin, like,
you know, everything you can buy with Bitcoin.
Like that's what LTB coin is anything within our ecosystem?
You can buy it with LTB coin, but it might not be the best
price, you know, you might it, somebody might want dollars more
than they want something else or whatever, and that sort of left
up to the individual users. So in the future, what we're
doing is we're continuing this this concept of ownership, we're
going to be, you know, right now we're finally automating our
advertising system. Our display advertising system
and in the future we'll be offering individual spaces on
individual articles. So basically like so when you
post okay so you have to think about it like layers.
So you wanted to I think explain how the monetization was going
to work with the token list system.
So right now on let's talk Bitcoin we only have
advertisements on the front page, that's the only place
you'll find any sort of display advertisements whatsoever.
And it's not again intentional it's just that we didn't really
know what we wanted to do. And it didn't really matter
because we didn't really About monetizing in the future.
What's going to happen is if you write an article or create a
podcast, you will have essentially advertising space
that you can sell or they can be redeemed for other things or
where you can represent something that you want to sell
in that space, or you can sell the space to somebody else.
You'll then post that on a Blog and the blog itself will also
have at least one ad space that they own.
And so when they post your piece of content, you'll I have one
thing that you own and can sell and do whatever you want with.
They'll have one thing that they own and can do what they want
with. And this also is true about the
front page, then the front page. And so everybody essentially
takes ownership of their particular part of the different
of the advertisements monetize. It is monetizes it as they see
fit. So you certainly could, you
know, like you could in your post have a vending machine
embedded, that sells tokens, that can be redeemed for ad
space, in that ad that's right below or right at the top of the
post, you could you Have a subscription program.
We're at the bottom of your posts.
You have a little you know, like here's what we were thinking.
We were writing this that you don't want to show to everybody
but people who are kind of in your fan club that can actually
happen on the same page. And again these are things that
aren't in yet but they're things that are that exist in Prototype
form. So what I just described is a
concept, we call token controlled access which is the
idea that which is the idea that since people can in their
wallets and their counterparty wallets have many, many, many
types of tokens. Not just Bitcoin.
That's why that's why tokens are so important is because you can
have a single address a single Bitcoin address and it can have
a thousand different types of tokens.
Each one in different amounts and we all we have to do is a
service is look at that address. We have you verify that you
control that address and then once you do, we can basically
just treat it. Like any thing that is in that
address you own. And So within our system, then
we say, okay, well, this token, this token that says, you know,
early on it. This is a Founder token.
And so when you have this in your wallet, You're on our
website then you can see the founder Forum.
That's only accessible to people who are founders.
And so that's that's like a we call it with the concept token
societies. The idea is that you look at the
same webpage as everybody else, but based on the content of your
inventory or Pockets, we're kind of going back and forth between
the different motifs. We want to use based on that.
You will see something different and the concept extends Beyond
this sort of basic. Oh, well, what you see on the
page, even again, we have these Vending.
Machines, right? So you can take that same type
of token, controlled-access concept, and pivot it a little
bit and turn it into roll coins and a roll coin, is something
that doesn't it, you don't see anything differently but when
you visit it, you know, the the vending machine or whatever.
Then it sees oh this person is a someone who should get a 10%
discount. So you visit the same store as
anybody else but because you have this token that they don't
have the system, treats, you differently.
So this idea of token controlled access.
It's not really So much attributed to tipping where like
you could use a busker, sort of as an analogy, but it's more of
a pay wall. We've moved Beyond tipping
tipping, implies that you're not giving value back tipping.
Implies that there's something that I mean, like tipping.
Again, it's not to say that we won't accept tips.
It's just to say that the type of people who will give tips are
specific and not everybody by any way, shape, or form.
So the token controlled-access just to come back to that.
If it's, it allows you to implement a pay wall
essentially, on your, yeah, it's more like an intelligent
membership site. And like really versatile,
right? Right now.
The only way really, really have to implement this intelligently.
I think is, it's true browser plug-ins?
Do you think that in the future? We might see some open
protocols, like, be integrated. I don't know.
In in like the HTML, APR, something where browsers much
like you see now, like when you use a browser and ask you for
your location access or it asks you to To have access to your
webcam. A browser would query you and
say, okay, this content says that you have to pay for it with
with a currency. This is the address is what you
need to send. Do you think that it's a
possibility in this, in the future?
We might see any more integrated access and more standardized
access to this type of payment under gration.
Yeah, absolutely. And again we don't really think
about it. Like it's a pay wall because
it's more because the mm. Okay, so a pay wall, you're
paying for access to something, right?
And once you've got access to it, then it's over.
But with this again their tokens.
So if you wanted one and it was valuable to you, then you
actually own something valuable, right?
Because if somebody else wants it and they don't have it, then
that's valuable. So that's that's the difference
again, it's this concept of ownership, it's more like you
get keys. And if you want to sell your key
to somebody else, you can sell your key to somebody else and
then you don't have it anymore and, and it's a thing.
But yeah, it's, it's very, very, very generic.
And you mentioned a browser plug-in.
This actually happens just through right now.
Now let's talk Bitcoin accounts. We're working on another branch
called a token Lee accounts. It's actually on, it's in our
GitHub. I believe it's called X off, and
that is a generic service. And it is literally, it's like
oauth, actually quite similar. You like, there's no Community
there. There's no real features there.
All you do is create an account and then associate your wallet,
so that it can become your inventory.
And then you'll use that to log in essentially at other
services, that choose to opt. In to get that cool.
Yeah. I mean, I remember the first
time I heard you talk about this on the list of pecan podcast.
You know, I really do. Think this is a huge potential
and could become in the future. How you've managed a lot of
interaction monetization and all that.
Of course, the it is a is a very big hurdle.
No. Because then you first need to
get people to to have a counterparty wallet and have
somehow. Even these tokens.
So it's very difficult to get. Started the having the
counterparty wallets, the hard part.
Once they have that, that everything is easy.
Everything is automated. All they have to do is show up,
but it's that it's that setting up the initial counterwallet and
then using counterwallet to, I mean, counterwallet, you know,
again likes, not the most user-friendly.
Yeah. It's it will, it's it, is it's
pretty user friendly, it's just slow, you know?
I mean, it just takes forever to do anything and sometimes it
fails and it's just, it's just new technology.
So yeah. I mean, you know, it's the best
that was out. At the time, but if we pick an
ear I don't know if that's gonna be the case.
So I'm very like my perspective is that it doesn't matter to me.
We are, we're like, they're all down here and they're competing
and we're just like up here and every time, you know, we just
connect down to them so we tied together tokens eventually.
You'll be able to take tokens created on the you know
bitshares system and they will be able to trade against an
interact with tokens on the you know on let's talk Bitcoin or
counterparty or all that stuff. So as a higher platform higher
level platform we actually have the ability to connect tokens in
a way. Way that, you know, they can't
Naturally by themselves. So before we are wrapping up, we
would like to talk a, take a bit of a step back, step back from,
let's talk Bitcoin and think, talk about Bitcoin in general,
and sort of, you know, where we're at in this technological
and economical and maybe social Evolution.
So, you know, as we all know, 2014 has been accompanied with
this massive price. Fine.
You know, whether this is sign something to worry about or not
I guess opinions differ on that one.
I do think we are seeing is relatively slow adoption.
Certainly slower than probably almost all of us anticipated a
year ago. So what's your take on?
Kind of where we are at and how things are going?
I think the word very healthy place.
So I think that we're, you know, going at the pace that things
need to go, you know, moving from being purely a commentator
to actually, you know, participating in the creation of
some, of these tools has really given me a greater appreciation
simply for the amount of complexity and the amount of
time required in order to build stuff that's new.
And when you're building something that nobody's built
before, it's really, really, really hard because you don't
know what to do. You just know that I have this
problem? Here's what my best guess.
Is that the solution and then you try?
That's really the thing that On his try to be as iterative as
possible, you know, and we and it's bad sometimes.
You know, I changed my mind about things and we you know, we
pivot because of that and it's a challenging environment to be
in, you know, the Bitcoin as a whole.
Like I said, I think that this is incredibly healthy and I
think it's healthy because the cycle is one that I've now seen
a number of times, the price goes up, people start doing
projects because they see the prices up in there, like Oh,
this is a great opportunity. Then the price comes down
because it takes a long time and there was a lot of hype about
the Project's initially. And then a lot of them fail
because they weren't very good ideas anyways or because things
petered out, once the price went down and then the ones that
survived come out. And I think that we saw that
very recently with like the The coinbase Exchange, you know.
I mean like that's certainly a project that's been in the works
for quite some time and it's one that will drive legitimacy quote
unquote and drive adoption quote unquote because it lowers the
barrier to be able to do this stuff for people who have the
Barrier. So that's that's where we are.
I think that we will we're about to as the price continues to go
down, you know, we will see over the next six months, a bunch of
really exciting projects come out that were started during the
bubble and that have been can you know, continued during this
drive down in price, much to the Chagrin of everybody who started
working on it but eventually it comes out and eventually it
makes a difference. So I feel like that that's
happening everywhere. Cool.
So one thing I've been wondering About thinking about a bit and I
don't know what your perspective on that is, is that maybe if you
take the larger picture, then this is all good.
Because obviously in terms of user user experience services,
like Bitcoins, not ready for the mainstream, but at the same
time, it seems that a lot of people expect it didn't expect
this, right? So regarding the Project's
failing, it Seems to me that this here.
A lot of project will have to fail, right?
I did. Because they were holding things
in Bitcoin and like, lost a ton of money or because they sort of
built in their models and their expectations that they would
actually be more user growth, and they would be off to some
start where, maybe it's still very much in the building phase
and the third part. And maybe you haven't seen that
so much. But I think if the Price
continues to be that low. Maybe it will also come, is that
maybe it will become more difficult to raise investment
money. And it may be to some extent.
We're seeing that already. Did you see those same things
happening like that? We have, you know, first of all,
startups, losing money, because they're holding Bitcoins that
you know, may be increasingly difficult fundraising
environment and also just that the growth isn't maybe as high
as it was expected. So that as a consequence we will
See a ton of projects and startups.
Fail this year. Yeah, projects sometimes should
fail. And that's a healthy thing.
Those people should go and work on other things.
That money should be used for other stuff.
I don't think that the price necessarily is going to
correlate with the ability to find funding.
I think that the price correlates with the requirement
to find funding. I think that, when the Bitcoin
price is high companies that are full-on believers in Bitcoin,
don't need any funding. And when the price is low,
that's the opportunity for four You know, people to essentially
buy into them. So yeah, I think that there will
be, you know, it's an opportunity is the way that I
kind of look at. And I think a lot of people are
going to be looking at is that with valuations like this, you
can buy Bitcoin a lot cheaper, but ultimately, it doesn't
matter because nobody prices in Bitcoin if you're creating a
start-up right now, your denominating your cost in
dollars and it doesn't matter what the price of Bitcoin is
until the at that actual moment. And then it only matters if
you're choosing to keep them instead of immediately selling
them with a service like bitpay. So, you know, I mean, it's not,
it's a healthy environment, it's a healthy environment.
Be better if the price was higher because we wouldn't need
so much Venture Capital, but I think that it will be even more
available now than it was last year.
So we're just about to wrap up. So you mentioned that your role
has evolved from a commentator in the space to an actor and
actually being involved in in many projects something perhaps
it's bright and I have not been so much doing and I do often
talked about how we may change our view of the ecosystem.
But so we were curious. Where you think your role will
be evolving? Where you think, how do you
think it would be evolving in the next year with regards to
LTB? And we're going to the other
projects that you're that you're working on.
I mean I know that a lot of the projects that you've been
working on sort of put on the side for lack of time and the
fizzled. So how do you see that evolving
over the next year? Yeah, that's the, that's the
that was the lesson for me for last year is that I took on too
many projects and so I backed way way off.
It's the end of the year and basically told everybody that if
they wanted to keep me around, you know, having regular time
they had to pay me. So that was a good way to clear
the decks and now I'm just focused on projects that I
really care about. That's that's, I think a lesson
that anybody who hasn't yet learned, I would really
encourage you to think strongly about is only spend time on
things that you really, really care about.
And if you don't care about something enough to, you know,
to really really care about it, then maybe it's not the best
project for you to be working on.
Maybe that's just me though. Like I said, I'm kind of crazy.
I think that my role of let's talk Bitcoin, I don't know how
long we're going to do the show, you know I might be doing it for
another you know five years might be doing it for another
two years might be doing it for another year, kind of depends on
how long it's required and even if I stop doing, it doesn't
necessarily mean that it will go away.
And indeed, it's my intention for all of these things to
continue long after I've ceased working on them.
My history is one of working on projects for three to five years
and then getting bored and wandering off because all of the
kind of basic stuff has happened.
So I think That in the future. My role is going to be morphing.
In the next year, my role will be morphing from editor-in-chief
of let's talk Bitcoin, probably to let somebody who's really
going to do, the job do that. And instead I'll move to curator
and chief because as I mentioned in addition to the new
collaborative editorial system or building, we're also building
curation system that lets you sort out and pull from you, no
further down the stack of content creation and then
highlight stuff that's good and also builds in you know social
metrics and things like that. So that's a slightly further out
version of what we're Doing. But that is where I think I'm
going to wind up being because I like to I like to lead from the
perspective of laying out the philosophy saying these are the
things that we value. These are the things that we do
if you want to associate with us associate with us, use this all
you want. If you don't then there are lots
of other people out there too. And that's a philosophy that
we're carrying over with token lie because I've been talking
about token lie as if it's, let's talk Bitcoin.
But the reality is that it's an open-source platform that has
all of these tools and capabilities built into it that
anybody can install and use themselves for free.
And really, what we're going to be doing with What?
I think that our future with token Lee is is to create a very
wordpress.com style model where if you just you know want to
roll your own and use all our tools then by all means go for
it. There will probably be some type
of App Store available for different modules because again
the whole idea here is to enable people to conduct commerce
between themselves and each other as they see fit and as is
in their own best interest and and then just be play.
So, in terms of the question, you will be focusing on it.
It is sort of that question. One of content monetization and
things you think will be preoccupying you through the
totally. Yeah.
That's that's my Edge. That's, that's the itch that I
am scratching for myself, personally, but the solution
that we are creating is regardless of content creation
content. Creation is a portion of
community, but again, it's the reinvention of community in the
same way that we used to have town halls and now we don't.
Now we have Internet websites, where you can do some of the
stuff that you can at a town hall.
But you can't do everything and you can't do it in a way.
That's trusted often because we don't really know.
Identity is a big question on the internet and token solve
that problem for. Now I think that's a, that's a
great way of thinking about it. I said of are being invented
community and it's interesting how also how that there's a
economic interaction, and those incentive things then, you know,
become a core part of it. I like to say that, let's talk
Bitcoin. Is that what we're doing is
we're not growing the world's tallest tree.
Let's talk Bitcoin isn't supposed to to become the
biggest website in the world. We're growing a forest and the
way that forests grow is that a tree grows to maturity and then
it's seeds all around it and then other trees grow up and,
you know, grow out, you grow horizontally.
Instead of vertically, that's the world that we're moving
towards. It's a very decentralized one.
And it's because we don't need to be centralized anymore.
We can associate with the people that we want and they can be
multiple groups of people. You can have multiple
identities, you can have the same identity, you can do
whatever you want. All this stuff will be possible
in the next couple of years. It's all Mabel by crypto cool.
Well I didn't thanks so much for joining us today.
It was really great talking to you.
Thank you guys. So just briefly.
Again if regarding an inside peek concerts inside Bitcoins,
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