This is epicenter Bitcoin episode 99 with guests manual
arrows, and Esteban or Dano. This episode of epicenter
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Hi, welcome to epicenter Bitcoin the show.
It's talks about the Technologies, projects and
starts driving decentralization and the global crude Currency
Revolution. My name is Sebastian, cuju and I
met Roy. Today, we are joined by two at a
pair of talented developers, from Argentina.
They have worked on many projects.
Some of them are quite well-known in the Bitcoin
industry. These projects are proof of
existence streamium Paradigm, and D Central, and we are going
to talk about their projects and the prospects of Bitcoin and
Argentina to introduce our guests, they are manual or outs.
And Esteban, oh Don. Oh, we are very happy to have
you on The Show, manual. And Esther one.
Hamer, thanks for having us. We're glad to be here.
Hi. Thanks a lot for having us here.
Okay, so so perhaps we could start with Bitcoin in Argentina
because there's this impression in the in the Bitcoin media that
Argentina is the one country which could adopt Bitcoin and
and jumpstart a jumpstart Bitcoin, and LeapFrog ahead of
all the other nations in this technology.
What's your opinion on that? Yeah, it's actually pretty funny
to us to read all those articles claiming Argentina is like the
center for Bitcoin, and where Bitcoin is growing faster than
it's actually not quite true. As I always tell everyone,
Argentina is kind of a good, a good spot in many ways for
Bitcoin because our local currency is really, really bad.
And there are big Capital controls and it's hard to Get
foreign currencies but actually I do option is is pretty slow
and I would say Bitcoin is growing much faster and other
option is much wider in other countries.
So I wouldn't say Argentina is the, the best place for Bitcoin
right now. It's and it's actually I read
many things in news articles that are totally, not true about
Argentina Bitcoin. So be careful about that.
But at the same time, the development seen in Argentina is
quite good. There are many companies and
cool projects that are springing from Argentina so that kind of
counterbalances the low usage of Bitcoin in general.
And how, I mean, I think one thing that has been pretty
consistent is the Argentinian governments attempts to sort of
stop Bitcoin from perfect proliferating in Argentina
regardless of whether or not it's being used.
How are those startups coping with that?
Yeah. Actually the the Argentinian
government is not is not actively working against
Bitcoin, I wouldn't say that there was The only official
communication or action about Bitcoin was a posting by the
Central Bank warning, the the population about Bitcoin not
being minted by the by the government like saying, okay, be
careful with this, because we don't regulate Bitcoin.
We don't regulate its emission, so be careful and that's about
it. As far as I know, I'm not a
legal expert but it's actually, More or less friendly
environment for Bitcoin companies in Argentina.
So we've been duped by all those corn desk articles telling us
that that Argentina is like so much stuff.
Having internet Argentina. That is like the you know, the
next the next place where Bitcoin was going to be
developed when in fact is just like anywhere else.
Well as if ya as it down was saying, I think there are some
really good developers working on on the technology side and
there are some interesting companies down there too.
But as far as What we read at least about adoption how it's
the perfect ecosystem and that we will get millions of users.
I think that's not going to happen.
I mean it's not going to happen in Argentina first at least
Okay, well, let's let's talk about you guys background a
little bit. It seems like you've both been
working together for so long and you've been together on many
different projects. Tell us a bit about how you both
got into Bitcoin. So we've been working on
Bitcoins and since like two or three years ago Manuel started
on this. We actually have a chat
conversation back in that time. Trying to finish organized a
Bitcoin development meet up. Then manually went out to create
proof of existence. I was doing, I was working at
Google some point out. And that there and we when
another train is Big Bay, I joined a few months later and
that's when we started working together in this space.
We already met each other from college.
We're actually pretty good friends from many years ago from
college. I as it turns out we were at
first interested in Bitcoin, like, from from the side, we
were not working with it, but we chat about it, then I did Proof
existence as a small experiment. It turned out to be pretty well
received in the community. So after that I was unemployed.
So I started doing freelance work for Bitcoin companies
mainly or trying to work with Bitcoin given that I had asthma.
Experience with that. And it was really interesting in
the technical side and after working for a year and a half in
a sock with Consulting in Bitcoin, I met Tony from bitpay
and I joined there and a few months later I convinced that
Steven and a couple of other friends to join and we'll be
working there on all the, all these projects you mentioned
extremely impera, damned essential.
And we also collaborated on bit core Building B core which is
the A source, JavaScript library, for Bitcoin
applications, as part of the open source initiative by bit
by. So so some maybe with that we
could go into discussing your your new project streamium.
So for the for our listeners that have never tried streaming
more heard of it could, you could you describe what it does?
And who it is meant for? Yeah, sure.
So streamium is a live streaming application that uses Bitcoin
payment channels are some more money.
Station option. So it started off as a hackathon
project between seven friends. It's actually the team is quite
big. We it was a group that we used
to get together in during the weekends.
For we call them Bitcoin dinners.
We got together and talked about latest news about Bitcoin, what
we saw about the future. And after a, while we got bored
about just talk Talking, because most of us are developers or
work with technology. So we want to do actually do
something one of the guys suggested doing a hackathon.
So we got together on a weekend than started.
It was actually Stevens idea to build swimming.
We were talking a lot about payment channels and we wanted
to build an application. That was interesting in the
sense that it shows the real value of payment channels as a
protocol So we built it over a couple of weekends and we
launched it several months later because it was super slow
development in our free time. That's the story.
So what it basically does is it allows a user to record
something and stream it live and stream it life and in exchange
receive payments through through Bitcoin, Bitcoin micro payment
channels. So maybe we could discuss part
of the architecture of off streamium, then, there are two
important sections to it. One is, how does the money flow
and the second is how Does it data flow and could you explain
how both of these things happen? When I create my own streamium
stream? Yes, of course.
So stream use is webrtc which is a decentralized peer-to-peer
protocol so browsers can talk to each other.
We are currently relying on print, the Vu server so that
browsers can create the connections between each other.
And with that, we were to see connection.
You can send both data and the video.
What do you see The capability of sending data so they can
negotiate a Bitcoin payment Channel.
And this is actually I think it's the first implementation of
a payment channel for some kind of like real world usage once
that payment channel is established.
The video streaming starts and it's broadcasting mechanism.
So if If I'm broadcasting my video every body that is
receiving be, the video will have to be paying me through a
payment channel. So from a from a technical
standpoint, it's a Well it's not fully fully decentralized, we
have, I will say that they got just in a second but both the
video goes through a peer-to-peer protocol and
underpayments because payments grow through Bitcoin payment
channels, which will know is decentralized pregnancy.
The, the video goes through webrtc, which is a peer-to-peer
protocol for the browser and the the to the two points of
centralization are what Esther mentioned?
The Rendezvous server were Pierce can get the other Pierce
information for Discovery and of course the the static HTML
server that serves the files for the client to run the
application. Okay, so could you describe The
payment channels and how they work in more detail.
So a payment channel is kind of like opening a tap in a bar.
You set a certain amount of money that it's the maximum that
you want to spend in that payment Channel and you lock
those funds in a true of to others.
So this 2 of 2 is controlled by both parties in the payment
channel. So any transaction that gets
signed will have to have the Approval of both parties and
there is a time lock mechanism. In, in case I funded this
payment Channel, but the other party that is going to be
receiving. The funds will not be willing to
sign a section, giving back all the funds.
So, after a day, you can recover all your videos.
Is that clear enough? Yeah.
Yeah, but so in, so if I understand those two, in this
case, what you're doing is you're doing it to of to Transit
multicenter transaction. The, the person that's doing the
streaming will have incentive to to sign that.
But so for the for the viewer so they were anywhere is forces him
to the won. The reward is the one that will
fund the channel. We usually call them technically
the Consumer and the provider of the service.
So the consumer funds the channel and asks, the provider
for the signal transaction that becomes valid the next day so he
can have the fund of funds back if the protocol gets interrupted
interrupted. Okay, so once the stream is an
is initiated, the consumer has already signed his part of the
transaction and is waiting for the provider to sign his part of
the transaction. Yes, he actually does.
Is this, he signs a transaction and he waits for the provider to
sign a transaction. A second transaction spending
that first two of to paint to, to virtue of to address
transaction. It's kind of like complicated, I
would need a black border to explain it.
So, Well, that's okay because this is a podcast.
So people don't necessarily see if they're not watching the
video that I'm going to see it anyway.
But and so the the payment channel is opened and then so
there's a payment for every chunk of let's say, 30 seconds
of video. How does that work?
How do you, how does the money keep flowing.
All right, so as sending an update of the payment Channel,
which means spending a little bit more, The from those locket
funds. When I send one of these small
micro payments to the provider of the service, he will send me
back the video right now in streaming, what we are using, is
we interrupt the video, if the payment flow stops coming and if
the video stops coming, we interrupt the payment flow.
So it's a trustless solution for payments.
So basically could we say it like this suppose, it's me me,
the creator of the video and Esteban is the consumer.
I'm the producer and Esteban is the consumer.
Then what is happening, is when I start my stream, Nothing
happens. Now when you want to, when you
want to, when you want to see my stream, then you will send your
Bitcoins into a multi signature address that is controlled by
you and me jointly, right? Yes.
And so now, so so basically, when the service started, you
agree to watch the service for a maximum of one hour and then
let's say the price of that one hour is $50.
Our. So you log $50 worth of bitcoin
into a into a into an address, which is jointly controlled by
you and me now. Now, what now what starts to
happen is there has to be data that needs to go from my webcam
because I am the producer to your your terminal.
So with each item of data, let's say like there's a there's a
there's a big packet that that has 30.
The 30 seconds of video. So corresponding to the transfer
of that item, that packet of data, from my computer to yours,
you need to send me a transaction, which allows me to
claim part of the funds that were locked into the multi
signature account, right? Yeah.
That's that's correct. And we it doesn't have to be 30
seconds. It can be one second, it could
be one minute. It and you may want to be sure
that you have a certain margin of error.
So you don't stop the video because you didn't receive the
payment so it's actually more like a flow of video from one in
one connect, in one way and a flow of payments in the other
way. Okay, so the question is, I
start to have here is let's say let's say I am I am creating a
stream and I have already created this multi signature
account with Esteban because it's the one is watching my
stream now. Manual joints Manuel wants to
see my Stream, So I create another account with manual and
then Sebastian wants to join. There's a third one created.
Is it the case that I am broadcasting?
My video data to all three of you through webrtc.
She wouldn't that need a lot of bandwidth on my side.
Yes, you are constrained by the amount of bandwidth the your
Upstream connection has. So if you want to have many
users, let's say I guess that more than 10 will start to
really stress the connection. You may want to look into
another a different solutions, some kind of like First cast to
server. That will then broadcast the
video to a lot of users or maybe use a more decentralized
solution like BitTorrent for the distribution of the video,
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So, I guess this is sort of a structural problem with webrtc
is that it's it's a peer-to-peer only protocol.
Now, you mentioned BitTorrent. That's interesting because we
had thought about different ways that you could scale webrtc.
And I guess this would not only apply to what you're doing and
sort of the, you know, Bitcoin micropayments space.
But also So could be potentially used for your large-scale webrtc
broadcasts, by just about anyone is by using BitTorrent or
perhaps ipfs or some other distributed file sharing
protocol to stream. Video has that does that already
exists as I've been done before, or is this something that you're
looking into for streamium? Well actually, one of the other
premium developers, his name is Chemin.
He did a small experiment about that.
We had the same idea and key he wanted to test it out and it
actually worked pretty well but while not pretty well it could
work but it was hard to make it perform well talking about video
live video quality. So there are some complications
where you're dealing with a live stream of video and we were
having like because torrents are predetermined size files because
you need to check the the file integrity and it has, it's not
it's not designed to stream files.
So you have some problems when you're connecting, several
chunks of video and it's also as Esteban pointed out in live
streaming, you can drop some frames and it's fine.
But the BitTorrent protocol, doesn't support, that kind of
stuff, you need to unload the whole file.
So, We caught some pretty successful experiments with
that, but there are still a lot of work to be done to optimize
the protocol and allow other ways to distribute the video
without relying on, on the provider to share the same video
to everyone. And just, I mean, is this
something that has been addressed?
Like, I mean, the, the problem of streaming live video to a
large audience Without having to rely on some centralized
third-party, like you stream or something like that.
Is just something that has been addressed, or perhaps we have
actual solutions for outside of what you guys are doing.
Not that I'm aware of, but it will be interesting to see if
there's a Distributive peer-to-peer version of the real
time protocol, which is what we're RTC.
And I meant Skype or all those Solutions, use, it's either RTP
or X h.263 or 363 or something. I don't remember the name.
It could be a really cool experiment to build something on
that. But I mean, if you guys
successfully do this with bit torrent, I essentially be the
first to achieve that, right? Yeah.
We actually don't know if there's another brush egg doing
Something similar, we should look it up.
But as I told you what's what it worked, like, as a proof of
concept body, it still needs a lot of work to actually work
correctly. You will need to polish the
protocol in many ways and I don't think the best solution is
to use. BitTorrent based on the things I
mentioned earlier. But maybe building a specific
protocol for this could work. Another question is doesn't the
doesn't the fact that Bitcoin need confirmations to confirm a
Bitcoin transaction one needs one hour and zero confirmation
transactions are are not secure? Doesn't it impede impede
streamium in any way like for example if I if me and Esteban
won't do, launch this stream, then esteban's money needs to be
locked in this to of to multi signature account and the
process of that locking to be Needs one hour.
So, how how does it work out? Well, if I try to double spend
you. So right now streaming uses
several confirmations by block Cipher.
And we are using the confidence in transaction parameter from
them because the threat model is quite quite low on restrictions.
If like the worst thing that could happen for you is that I
can watch. Ouch, a few seconds of video
from you because the stream right now when that it detects a
double spend, it will cut the channel off.
So you could be stolen of a few seconds of content from me, but
that's kind of like the worst that could happen tearing me in
on your side, will take care of that and if the transaction gets
confirmed, then it will stop checking for double Spencer.
Stuff like that. Okay.
So so basically what you're saying is that when when I'm
trying to create the stream, there is a risk of double spins,
but the value at risk is very low.
So, for example, if I'm, if I'm taking, if I'm charging $10, an
hour for a stream and you do a double spin, maybe it's the case
that you saw two point five dollars worth of video and and I
didn't get paid for it. Besides we managed to
successfully double double spend and probably Even less because
right now block Cipher the moment.
It detects in any any transaction anywhere it will
report that and streaming on your side will say no.
Hey, this guy is trying to make a double spend, so let's stop
the video. Right now, today's magic word is
stream. Stre am head over.
Let's talk patreon.com to sign in, enter the magic word.
Work and claim your part of the listener award.
So what is the monetization model for a, for a service such
as for a service such as streamium?
Are you looking to monetize it in any way?
Yet. So sue me, we saw is an open
source and free brochure. Anyone can use it for free.
There's no charge. I mean, the the strimmer charges
the Their audience but to use the the product is completely
free. There is no fees, we're not
playing. We're not planning to to
monetize the monetize it in any way, we had some ideas of doing
like a separate service that allows streamers to Increase
their their potential audience. Based on the scalability
problems, we already discussed. Given that it's completely
peer-to-peer. And the limit is based on the on
the streamers bandwidth and we're thinking about building a
service that broadcasters could connect to for a fee distribute
it is, it could distribute the video for them so still using
words to see, but with an intermediary for Vo
distribution. But we haven't completed that.
I mean, we haven't moved forward with that.
It's an idea. It's, it's there.
In case we want to pursue monetization of streaming.
So then the content producers get a hundred percent of the
money that But they charge for the video.
Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's really cool.
So, I mean, this isn't that. So, we had another question
regarding piracy, what prevents someone from rebroadcasting a
stream that they're paying for on, for free, or for, for
cheaper than what they're paying for it basically nothing.
I think information wants to be free.
The moment that you gave out information, the people that
received it is free to rebroadcast it.
I think that what weight in favor of the content producer is
that probably the quality of the rebroadcast, will be lesser
because of the video streaming, it kind of like a losses, some
quality. It's important to note that
we're not trying to solve piracy with with For you, it's just a
way to monetize live content, you create for free, but of
course, once the viewer gets the video on their machines, they
can rebroadcast it in any way. They they want they already have
like any content essential. Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Okay, well then I mean my my my next question is on on use
cases. So you know there's so many ways
to do steering video. These days.
So we're using Google Hangouts right now, of course, that
doesn't provide monetization, but, you know, some other
Solutions do I Believe. YouTube is now starting to do
monetization in their streams and those other services, that
allow that, what differentiates a streamium user from YouTube,
paid live streams. I don't know what they call it
but, you know, from Centralized Services.
What types of people you see using streamium as opposed to
other types of streaming services It's kind of funny but
we have like 50 percent of our users are basically porn.
So it's girls come girls doing shows online for their clients,
I guess the other is Big use cases are education and live
gaming. So it's people doing online
classes or showing their their screens while they play video
games. But the biggest one by far is
porn. We think that it's probably
based on the advantages you have with Bitcoin where you don't
have the so-called we learned about this after luncheon
stream. Your meat is something we don't
know about, but in life porn, like live camera porn.
There's the problem of what they call the wife chargeback were
It's they have a really high rate of charge back and it's not
based on the actual user, but when the wife's is what is this?
And he says, no, I don't know, I didn't use that.
Okay let's do a chargeback and that's a big problem apparently
and this sort of solves that. But it also allows the user to
sort of end the stream at any point in time.
So you don't have to prepay for something you want to watch.
And it's sort of a win-win in both sides.
That's our analysis of why? This is interesting for the porn
use case. But so there's the privacy and
anonymity part on the client side and I suppose on the
provider side is more money in the girls pockets.
And yeah, I'm not having to subject to the rules and
restrictions of some campsite yeah.
Essentially the people using it are completely in the Pendant.
Yeah. And apparently the, the feast
those sites charge for the girls or the, what the video producers
is really, really high. Like, I don't remember exactly a
numbers. But I heard something like 40 or
50 percent. So it's not.
So on the other types of people using it or you mentioned,
education and online gaming. Are you talking about sort of
twitch style, people streaming their online gaming.
Exactly. So in education, we have several
language classes like English or Spanish teachers, and some a
small amount of users doing consulting.
And on the gaming side, it's mainly just people playing video
games and streaming their screens while they play.
That's a feature, we added some weeks after we launched stream,
you the possibility to broadcast your own screen.
Because some people some user has requested that so we got it
so like I mean obviously like we do with everything Bitcoin all
the Technologies are in this super early face and somehow it
also resembles the the internet of old in which pornography was
the first killer application. So maybe it's it's fitting that
even for Bitcoin, this should be one of the, one of the first I
had this imagination that maybe one day The drones could stream.
Like I have this, I have this like four hundred dollar parrot
Bebop drone that you can fly around, and even though it's
moving in the air, the video quality is extremely still like
it. It will, it seems like it's it's
a tripod flying in the air and I was, I had this imagination that
perhaps in the future, I will go to a concert from Pantera or
some band or Bono and they'll be drones flying around.
And I can actually Check out and they'll be using something like
streamium to send out the video and I can actually take any of
this stream and see what the Drone is seeing basically.
So, so maybe I mean like I had the feeling that it's it's an
idea that has a lot of lot of users in the future and maybe it
needs just Bitcoin to catch on in in order to be be really use
bdd really widespread. It was interesting also to to
see like you mentioned that you have this service that just does
Micro payments. Could you could you tell us what
that is? Yes, based on what we talked
with our early users, mainly the on the education side, most were
requesting some features. We were not ready to develop
like, okay, we need a digital whiteboard where we can sort of
write stuff, and the student can watch that, or we need a dual
video communication, so that the Your can also send their webcam
content and we said okay to want to really build a, an education
product because what they we based on what we talked with
them, but they really valued was the fact that they could charge
by the second, they were doing the class because sometimes I
have problems charging after the class ends.
So you do a two-hour class and then the student disappears and
they never pay. And so it's hard to get the
money. The money is a problem in in
online teaching. And so, when do you charge
before the class after the class?
So this solve this and we thought that maybe extracting
the, the payment system from streamium and doing a super
simple app, where you can use payment channels inside of any
other application could be interesting.
So, we did that. We built for another.
It's just a good way to describe it is.
Premium without the video. So you have a, you create a
session, it's like a timer, where you create a timer, you
set your hourly rate, or your rate per minute.
And then you can connect a client and charge them by the
second. And you can use it combined with
any other application like Skype or whatever it could actually be
chat session or or whatever you want and charged by.
Charge for your time to your clients.
So which gave each gets the higher number of users is
streamium, or is it? Is it fair that?
I'm so as I understand it it's streamium is feridem plus plus
the, plus the software to do live video streaming so which
one is proving more popular. Yeah.
Actually four of them was a pretty unsuccessful experiment.
We are really few users. It was basically the, the users
that requested that functionality, that you A couple
of times but then we didn't see any actual growth even though we
try to make it grow in some, in some ways.
So, it's definitely streamium is way more popular and we have
more users there. I mean, it seems kind of obvious
since still streaming is sort of more of a final product, where
feridem, I mean, you sort of have to make it.
You have to, you have to come up with the, the means to provide
the service, which you're charging.
Enforce. Oh and of course you have all
that porn on streaming and we all know that brings in a bunch
of people, right? I wanted to talk about
alternative funding models. I mean micropayments have sort
of been touted by. The Bitcoin Community is one of
the killer apps and Bitcoin has often been described in in some
sense as a way to solve the content monetization problem
that we have. I mean we've definitely it's
been something that we've thought a lot about how do we
monetize our content? I think a lot of content
producers off. Also ask themselves that
question. There's different.
Ways to monetize your content, you can sell advertising, is we
do? You can have a pay wall, you can
charge by the article which much like pay-per-view.
And for the most part advertising has won pretty much
for every types of content that you don't literally pay for with
money. Now, with regards to bitcoin and
microtransactions and how you would pay for Content.
I mean, it seems promising, it seems interesting as an as a
thought experiment that, you know, you would go on some
website and you would come up to an article and it would tell
you, okay, you want to pay for this and you just say yes or
YouTube video or perhaps a stream but in reality I'm not
sure that people are ready to do that.
For one, you need to have people using Bitcoin in this.
Typical example, and two people are so used to, you know, not
paying for Content directly that in order for that for that
behavior to change, you would need a whole lot of sort of
pressure. I guess from the content
industry. I'd like to know what your
thoughts are on this. Where'd you see micropayments
going in the future? I have some thoughts about that.
I think I'm talking too much. I want to know if it's down cut.
Comments there first. Well, one of the biggest issues
that we've seen with user-facing micropayments is the mental cost
of those transactions. You don't want to be browsing
around and at the end of the day knowing that you lost $10 $20 in
some random website. But at the same time you don't
want to be agreeing to Be paying one cent per each article that
you're ready. So it's kind of like an unsolved
problem from a new civility point of view.
But at the same time, it's probably going to be most used
in machine to machine the this aspect of micropayments.
Although, right now, the best solution that we've seen for
content monetization is this one of recording every website that
you've been to, and at the end of the day, pay out accordingly
to each each one website that you seen based on how much time
you spend on it or how much you like it.
Or how many which ones you like the most as a donation
essentially, yeah, something like that.
With right now. I think it's the best kind of
like solution. I don't know where the man with,
that's one of the things that we were discussing with 11.
Yeah, I agree. It's a, it's a really hard
problem that there's many, many, many companies, and many smart
people working on this. Because we all know, You see, we
all have the intuition that there's some way of using
Bitcoin micropayments to sort of change.
The way content is money is monetized on the web or in
generally online but it's a really hard problem.
We need to work on the really small details of the user
experience. And there's a really great
article by Nick Szabo talking about the the mental transaction
costs of micro payments and how smart contracts can help with
that. I recommend reading that If
you're interested in the topic, but it's actually, it will be a
really long work of trying to figure out what the user
interface is in, the case of human level micropayments for
Content. I agree with Stephen, that will
probably see other applications where there are no humans
involved and there are micro payments.
Make much more sense because ition essentially what my group.
Payments and smart contracts solves, the problem of trust
between the parties and they reduce the the trust between the
two parties for an economic interaction.
And in the case of computers, I mean in the case of humans that
trust is usually there. So it's really in the details
where you can improve the experience with micro payments,
but when you have two machines, interacting it's really
machines. Cannot trust Other machines
because they can break or they have.
I don't know, the concept of of trust is really human and it
makes a lot of sense to try and build some applications of micro
payments with machine to machine interaction.
There's one interesting example of an attempt to try to solve
this, the content monetization problem or to, at least reduce
the number of ads that we see is perhaps you've seen a Google
contributor. So basically, what Google has
done is said to their users, I mean to everyone who uses the
internet and sees Google advertising.
So whenever you go on a website for instance, and you see an ad,
there's a pretty good chance that that ad was sold.
And through Google and the content producers making money
when you see that Adam when you click it and what Google has
done is they said okay we're going to put up this platform
called Google contributor and as a user of the internet you can
pay up front say to five ten twenty dollars per month to not
see ads and rather than paying the content producers through
the display of ads you're going to pay the content producer
directly. Through through Google
contributor and we we will give them the money.
Basically as though you were seeing an ad instead, you'll
just see a white box or even you can put custom HTML in there or
whatever. So, I thought that was really an
interesting experiment. But you know, Google is in a
particularly good position to do that because they own the
advertising space. That's part of the.
The problem with these kinds of solutions to, it's hard to solve
the distribution of Micro payment solution for Content,
monetization. Because when you don't have any
sites that support this, you have no reason for users to have
the, the client side of the application, and if you have no
users, that can pay for that, can pay for this micro
interactions and the sides don't have any reason to implement the
system to. So it's also a business or sort
of growth hacking Problem, where someone needs to figure out a
way to, to make the this grow in some way to solve the chicken
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Today, we would like to thank V or for their support of
represent a Bitcoin. So you've mentioned that the
mental cost of transactions is a barrier to micro payments.
And on this front I think streamium has innovated quite a
bit like all the user sees is how much somebody charges per
hour and then the system works and you just decide whether you
want to give something fifty dollars an hour and then you
watch the stream and you close out and everything else is
handled on its own. User doesn't really see the
meter running. For example, have you what kind
of user feedback have you received regarding regarding
this aspect? Our users happy with this kind
of system, or you think something else is needed.
Something even better is needed. Well, right now, the highest bar
are for using payment channels is the knowledge of the.
You are sending this transaction with a for the maximum amount of
time. That you will be watching, and
that's kind of, like, confuses the users because, well, I have,
I've already tried to explain the payment Channel, but it's a
complicated thing to do with the streamium.
We are having that maximum amount of money to be locked in
thing, which is the current biggest problem for payment
channels for users. Because the fact that the users
Need to lock funds and there are currently no wallets supporting
payment channels natively. We need to ask them to make a
sort of deposit, then we grade the payment Channel and even
though it's trustless, we require the user to send the
actual total amount. So it feels like okay am I
preparing this or not. So a big barrier to that is
actual wallet adoption of the payment channels protocol that
would decrease The mental costs a lot, I think.
But with regards to the metered payment, we actually asked this
question because we were afraid of the same thing about users
being, I don't know, nervous about the costs not knowing how
much they're actually paying. But from what we interviewed,
all of them were said that it was okay.
Like they understood it and they were not nervous, there were not
checking the time to see if they were wasting a lot of money or
not it. Cuz I think we did a pretty good
job, but we still we're still really far from an Optimum
solution. I think.
Yeah. I used your service.
And in the beginning, I I saw this multi signature address and
the first thing I thought was it's a centralized service that
I'm sending money to you and you will partition.
The money between me and the and the stream Creator.
But then that turned out to be turned out to be wrong.
It's actually a world, it in a browser that we have to code so
we can have the payment Channel. So basically when when I put in
money, I'm actually creating a new set of private keys and with
those new private keys. I'm, I'm putting money into this
multi signature signature address, so it's my own browser.
That is my own wallet in the background without me, even
realizing it right. Yeah, that's right.
So some maybe we could we could talk about one of your other
projects that that is that is quite interesting.
It's it's called decentraland. And it's a project that I that I
saw that merges virtual reality and blockchain Technology.
Now, I've been surfing around the virtual reality World for,
for the past half a year. And you see, you see many people
talk about the The intersection of the blockchain and the
virtual reality there is their statements, like Bitcoin will be
the currency of the metaverse. The metaverse is the virtual
reality universe or or you see statements like that, the
virtual reality needs to be decentralized.
So could you explain? What is what is the connection
between these two technologies and why you chose to devote some
of your time to it? It's actually a super
experimental project we did for fun.
So don't expect a lot of Since to come out of this.
But we were also really, really excited.
Personally about virtual reality and of course blockchain
technology, because we work there in the in the industry and
we wanted to do a small experiment where we could
combine those two cool ideas. I don't know how much sense that
makes, but we wanted to build a blockchain based virtual reality
world. The idea is to use the
blockchain as the support for the structure of the world.
So, in between you have The blockchain as a data structure
that allows you to synchronize the state of the decentralized
network. So that all the nodes can agree
and reach a consensus on what the to simplify it the balance
of every Bitcoin addresses. So the same idea could be
applied to a network where the nodes synchronized the state of
virtual world. So transactions in this in this
Block Chain would be a state model.
Vacations of the world. So, I'm in the case of the
Central and we need a really simple technical prototype where
you have the model of the virtual world is just a pixel
grid. So a two dimensional color grid
with where each pixel can have different colors.
And transactions, represent a color change in the
two-dimensional grid. So one transaction in the
Central and is a message that changes the color.
ER, of one pixel at coordinator at an XY coordinate and Mining
is, is used as in Bitcoin to validate and provide security to
do the transactions and when you generate a new block, the coin,
very Stern section in the center line allows you to add a new
pixel to the grid. So initially you have a 1 by 1
grid so only 1 pixel and when you mind the next blog, you can
add a new pixel to the grid. In an adjacent position.
So the idea is that the the grid of pixels will grow over time
when users are mining new blocks and then we're the owners of
each pixel can change the color. So, it's actually a really
simple model of a virtual world. It's sort of a proof of concept
that has no actual use, but it was a fun experiment to do.
So it was like, I could see that it's a prototype, but it could
to my eye, it also. It was sort of the answer to one
of the problems that that, that virtual reality has, well not
not an exact answer, but I've got a really interesting one.
So, with virtual reality, I think the the problem is if I
actually start to live my life in virtual reality, then I want
to have my own house or how my own property in virtual reality
and I want to own something in virtually like like the way
people used to own stuff in in Second Life but the problem is,
if If all of the information to create this virtual space is
with a company like Google and I call something my house in
virtual reality. But actually all the information
to build. It is owned by Google.
That can go down in any day that can prevent me from own
accessing my own house in virtual reality.
So, a centralized model is like, II want to own something, but I
really can't own anything in a, in a centralized model of of The
processing. So so they it seemed to be that
with these rental and I could have my ownership over
something. And the data structure that is
giving me ownership is not a centralized entity and that
makes it really interesting. What do you so do video agree
with that. It's exactly what we try to do
with the Central and this first version you could see those
pixels as Parcels of the world and you own those parcels and
you get to decide which color you can buy pink, dogs back
pixels. But in a further version that
would be your land your house instead of a pixel and The
color. Also the motivation for that,
like, why why would you want it to be decentralized and actually
own it? We even even today where we have
Virtual Worlds that are super centralized say.
I don't know Games, like World of Warcraft players, spend a lot
of time and invest a lot of money and time into those
Virtual Worlds. We think that when you actually
own the stuff and you don't have the risk of a company changing
the rules of the world, or taking ownership of what you
build the, the time and the things we will see created in
those Virtual Worlds will increase a lot.
Like the investment of users into Virtual Worlds will grow a
lot because they will actually know that there is no risk to
lose that to the whims of a company.
Before we wrap up here, I'd like to briefly talk about proof of
existence, Manuel, you sort of pioneered this, the idea of
proof of existence, and it's funny because I was reading a
just randomly reading this white paper, this week, and it
mentioned you in the abstract is the the person had pioneered,
the sort of idea that proof of existence in blockchain.
So proof of existence is essentially is time stamping.
Piece of data with a hash that you then put into a transaction
and knee in the Opera turn and that hash is is sort of
notarized into the blockchain forever.
So you can prove that, you know, Timex this piece of data
existed. So it could be a document.
That could be an MP3 file. It could be, could be a
contract, whatever, and that allows you to notarize a piece
of information at a certain point in time, I personally find
that this is one of the most interesting use cases for
Bitcoin and blockchain Technology outside of payments.
And I wanted to get your ideas about what you think about that.
And where do you think this is going?
Yeah, first first of all, I have to say that I was not the first
to think about this after building proof existence.
I found that there are several projects doing the same thing
the same idea. Although proof of existence was
certainly the first user-friendly experience.
Most of our tools for developers, where you had to
download some fun, command line, utility to do this and running a
full node. So, it was actually the first
user accessible way of Of doing it.
But yeah, it was, it is considered by many like the
first real world application of the blockchain that is non-final
non-financial. And I think it's a it's a really
interesting way to think about the blockchain.
Like there are a lot of things we can.
There are a lot of properties of Bitcoin that can be used for
other systems other than payment and mainly, what perfect system
does is using the, the fact that it's a public, Ledger where you
have this interact consensus on data is published and that that
the, the blockchain structure allows the timestamp that data.
And so, I brought this, this project was launched three years
ago or so. And since then there have been
many, many similar projects coming out some trying to
improve on the technical side. I'll some time to sort of build
nicer product more targeted to a specific use case.
Recently, there have been a couple of really interesting
developments and the Tyrion project sort of improves both in
the technical and the business side, they are building a system
where it's based on an open source.
Project called chain point, where what you do is, instead of
inserting each documents cash in a single Bitcoin transaction,
they use a code 3 to insert several documents.
So, you only insert one hash per each Bitcoin block, which is The
it's a better way to do it because with Bitcoin you only
have one time stamp for each block.
So it makes no sense to add many documents into the same Bitcoin
block, but they solved it in a really interesting way where
they can provide you a proof like approved for you.
Don't need any of the other documents.
In the same block to know that your document actually is in the
in that Bitcoin block. So the The idea is you have a
set of documents each 10 minutes and you build a miracle tree
from that and you insert the root of the tree into a Bitcoin
block. And then you give each user
Merkel proof or the path in the Merkur tree that proves that
your document is part of that Merkle tree.
So the user can then use his document and the Merkel proof or
how they call it. I think it's a blockchain
received or something that with those two pieces of information,
you can prove that your document had a certain time stamp in the
using the Bitcoin blockchain. That's an interesting project.
Yeah, I'm I'm very interesting to see interested to see where
this goes. Are you aware of any?
Any instances where a motorization in the blockchain
was? My question is, basically, is
there a legal precedence, for this to stand up in court, or in
some sort of a dispute resolution in, for instance,
copyright because there's other companies, like we've talked to
Trent McConaughey of a scribe, you know, they're doing certain
nerves. Ation of digital art on the
blockchain and like you mentioned, there's so many other
projects that are doing similar things.
I feel like this might be something that sort of gains
somewhat. Interesting quantities of
adoption. How do you think that?
How do you think that it would be legally?
But will it become legally binding soon?
Do you think if you think that it would be adopted as something
that people would sort of trust as a, a A viable way to notarize
documents rather than going through like a notary or what
other copyright registration. Things like that.
Yeah so that there's no legal precedent yet the only similar
case we have is the Canada State kind of Senate that they when
they did a cryptocurrency research they actually used a
similar. Well actually the same protocol
from proof of existence to certify their own cryptocurrency
report in the blockchain. That's the only like government
acknowledged. Moment of this technology
working but it's we still haven't seen any legal precedent
of someone using it in court. I think that the the way this
could develop is someone that used proof of existence or a
similar blockchain based time, something system going to court
about something and they will need to have a an expert
witness. Like I don't know how these are
called in English but and the I go to court and try to explain
to the judge. Yeah an expert witness.
Yeah. Okay.
Expert witness in that case, we'll see what what president is
set and if we can actually holding holding court or not but
I think that as it works technically it only needs time
so that people sort of understand it and see the the
value and sort of this kind of things need to Time.
So it's a matter of and as you said with all these companies
emerging and doing work in this area, I think it's it's better
even. But we still need to see what
happens in court. The technology is solid and when
we asked some lawyers in Argentina, they said that this
could pretty easily hold the an investigation and it will
actually be could be called correctly against the shots,
which actually surprised me because I was, I thought that it
was, there will be no chance that that charge will take
something like this into his trials.
Yeah. Maybe we need a good.
We need a big big case, where it's like a hundred million
dollars on steak and the proof is on the Bitcoin blockchain.
And then and then the judges agree on it and then that that
really drives this kind of thing mainstream, it's pretty similar
to what what happened in in biology like people were
shouting that can we patent life for 20 years and then there's,
there's one guy who actually did patent it and then there was a
huge case for fifty fifty million dollars.
And after that suddenly this this idea of Patenting genes
went into the mainstream, maybe maybe, maybe Bitcoin will be
similar. It needs this big lawsuit moment
where some big parties are suing each other and the only proof is
the Bitcoin blockchain. Well what I find really
interesting about the sort of service like proof of existence
or some other services out there, is that it I find that it
opens up the business model. There's the business model is
not necessarily reliant on bitcoin payments.
So a service like proof of existence or others, that you
mentioned, Tyrion and services, like this can charge per
notarization with a credit card or whatever.
So it allows people from outside of the Bitcoin and blockchain
space to use the blockchain for something actually pretty useful
which is notarizing documents. Yeah, that's true.
And I think that that's a really big strength for a Bitcoin
business right now or abduction based business because user
adoption is growing pretty slow. So if you're basing your product
on the assumption that your users will have Bitcoin you
really, you need a really really compelling use case so that you
get users to actually buy Bitcoin to use your application.
In another case you need to have have an application where
Bitcoin is invisible and you as you said you can have credit
card or PayPal payments and still use the blockchain in some
other way where it's invisible to the user.
So before we wrap up we just want to mention briefly.
So you guys have a new company. Can you just tell us briefly
about the company which are trying to achieve?
Yeah, we just started a new company.
It's called smart contract Solutions, we're doing work with
smart contracts. We're currently in stealth mode.
So we cannot talk about the details, but hopefully,
hopefully we'll have something we can talk publicly about soon.
Okay, great. Well, I want to thank you both
for coming on today is really interesting discussion.
I think that, you know, this problem.
I mean, problem, the issue of content monetization is one that
There's definitely a Bitcoin, definitely tries to solve it in
some way. Now whether or not it will catch
it'll catch on because of user adoption of Bitcoin.
Or, as we mentioned, the user experience problem, that needs
to be solved, the Still Remains to be three seeing.
But in any case I think that it does provide a really
interesting way for Content providers to monetize their
content. Yeah definitely we are also very
eager to see Ian's in that space content.
Monetization stream. You fire them proof of
existence. They oh there is something from
that into all this. Okay, well, thanks for coming
on, thanks for joining us and to our listeners.
Thank you for, for joining us today and another episode of
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