This is epicenter Bitcoin, episode 102 with guest flavian.
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account today. Hi, welcome to Epson or 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 Brian fog and rain.
We're here today, with Flavia shallow Flavia is one of our
recurring. Guest is here for the second
time. We already had come on last
August to talk about a coin prism in Flavia has this great
town of just putting our project after project after project.
And he's put out the new project, which is very
interesting. It's called open chain and we
wanted to get him on to talk about that and look forward to
catching up. So, thanks for coming on,
Flavia. Yeah.
Thanks for having me. Yeah.
We were joking before that. You're basically like a machine
no, like producing projects because the first time he The
actually on you already had two projects and I think we only
really talked about one of them. So you already had to prediction
Market predictions and then you had a caller coins, right?
So you came up with the you'd invented this sort of I guess
most popular color, coin protocol open assets and then
you also doing this exchange or wallet colored coins wallet,
right? And that block Explorer so
already you had a lot. Going on back then.
I think in French politics, they call this export exporting a
French talents outside of the national boundaries.
Yeah, yeah. I live in Ireland so I don't
live in France anymore but still French.
I'm So tell us about what's this what's the status with those
project? How is open houses doing?
What about their the wallet and what about your prediction
Market? Yes oh well it basically
discovered Bitcoin I think now more than two years ago I kind
of you know I've always been passionate about prediction
markets and the time I wanted to build one as a side project as
for a fun project but like the the issue you know, was like
exit accepting payments also. Did you not pay out to users who
win the predictions? So this was kind of always liked
the the problem with building a prediction market.
So when I heard about Bitcoin, I start started to look into it
and then the more I looked into it, the more I thought I was the
perfect thing to use for prediction market.
So basically, I built a the prediction markets called
predictions, it still exists today so you can place, you
know, you can place money and different predictions, you know,
there's politics economics, you know scars.
You know, a lot of different things and yes, it works
completely with Bitcoin. So that was my first project
that's what got me into Bitcoin. So that was in 2013 after that I
kind of you know when you start learning about Bitcoin you you
know some people they get really sucked into it.
So that happened to me and I started to read a lot about it
started to read about all the different projects that that
were happening around Bitcoin and I discovered colored coins.
So the Time. That was kind of the first
application, like the first blockchain 2.0 or like, you
know, like the first thing that wasn't currency that that had
been described. And so that was pretty exciting.
They were, you know, some people talking about it at conferences
at the time, but was kind of early stage.
So there was no, there was no like product at the time that
existed, that was just a small group of people talking about it
on forums and I kind of, you know, had like A vision of, you
know like having digital assets on the blockchain using the
blockchain for transacting so at the time because there was
nothing that existed and I felt like this was you know something
that had a good future. I started to work on you know
incarnate coins and basically I kind of designed protocol like a
new protocol that that didn't exist at the time there was, you
know, just a few drafts of different protocols that were
the white paper as well. Think metallic wrote the white
paper. But nothing was really, you
know, satisfactory for the use cases that I wanted to that.
I had in mind basically so I develop this open assets so
that's the name of the protocol and, you know, because it's just
a protocol. Nobody was really, you know,
nobody could use it without programming stuff.
So basically, in order to bootstrap the adoption I built
this wallet which which is called coin prism and so it is
this is also like the name of the company now so we can
presume is basically Well, it which is web-based where people
can, you know, send receive Bitcoins as well as colored
coins and they can even create their own colored coins.
So it's everything is guided through user interface.
So it takes a few minutes and it's pretty easy.
And yeah, after that, we built an API which allows people to
programmatically interact with colored coins, Mobile wallet, is
to suppose we talked about that last time we talked to, with I
was on your show, but yeah, like a Oh, well it for inter it bunch
of other things like support for cold storage and so on.
And yeah. So and then now last week
actually, so we just launched a new new product which is called
open chair before we get into that.
I'm curious. So what's the kind of Attraction
you seeing with coin prison and open assets?
Because it seemed like to get a big getting, you know, quite a
bit of attention and projects being built on?
Yeah. So I mean so, Open.
Open assets was sort of, I think the first protocol that was sort
of usable and had Tools around it, that was launched at the
time and this Head Start kind of was very useful for adoption of
open assets. And so initially it was like
just, you know, startups or just small like project like groups
of people who were trying to do things and experimenting.
So we have like the first week after lunch, we had the crowd
sale which was the hair salon in Australia, which wanted to Raise
some money to open a new store so they use going prison for
that was just a week after lunch.
So that the that kind of small projects and over time, you
know, as interest picked up on blockchain technology, which
kind of happened in the past, in the past, six to 12 months, I
would say people started to also pick up interest in independent
set and just the fact that it was like a simple protocol which
was easy to re-implement. There's no, there's no vendor In
pretty much because, you know, you don't have to use coin prism
to use open assets. It's like there's plenty of Open
Source tools that exist in different languages.
It's like very wide. So it people started to get
interested into that. Also at the time when ready to
wanted to make crypto note, they actually shows up and I said to
do that. Well, then after there was some
changes in management and they decided they don't want to work
with cryptocurrency anymore. So that kind of fell apart, but
I was kind of the big project that started to look into it.
It and more recently, there was well, there's basically
change.com which is a, it's an API provider, but they're
pivoting heavily towards digital assets.
So they also adopted open assets and they work with NASDAQ and
the basically nasdaq's experimenting now with open
assets for their private Market platform.
So this is, this is really as big as it can get.
There's also Overstock, which is building their 2-0 platform so
that they probably use a mix of technology and they say they
want to be blocked like blockchain, added nasty.
In quotes but they're using for the first thing they did they
created a crypto bond for like a corporate bond for Overstock the
company, a five million dollar Bond and they created it on open
assets. So you can actually find the
transaction on the blockchain which has like you know open a
set marker and so on which shows the the five million dollars
Bond being transacted. So you know now it's it's
getting picked up by lot of bigger companies so it's not
really something for small companies to play with anymore.
It's like something with a lot of traction.
Now, and so all this, all this interest interaction around the
open assets protocol, is it generating any business for corn
prison at all or is or they just implementing the open standard
which is open assets? Yeah.
So it's much like those big companies.
Mostly they usually, you know, they want they want to deal with
like bigger companies are going present at the moment is quite
small. So they so they usually they
rather hire their own people. Their own Engineers to work on,
on the technology and re-implement their own stack,
which works Open assets, which is what Overstock data think
they have like, a team of Engineers working on that.
So they, you know, because it's such a simple protocol, it's
easy to build your own tools around it.
So that's what they're doing. We still doing some Consulting
with some companies which are interested you know in yeah,
independent sets so that there is still some business here but
yeah, it's definitely it's marketing.
That's expanding so it's it's going to grow very fast at some
point. So so wave The NASDAQ example
you mentioned, they want to use colored coins on for their
private chains. But then how does that work?
Because color coins is a protocol that runs on top of
Bitcoin. You know, what exactly they have
in mind or how that's supposed to play out much luck.
So, I think NASDAQ they want to use it for settlement.
So in their private Market platform, they have they don't
have so many companies that I think they have about 60
companies. It's just private companies.
It's like so It did from their big, you know, public exchange
where, you know, obviously you have like thousands of companies
and there's like millions of transactions per day, but there
are private Market platform is like a test bed for them.
So they have a smaller amount of transactions and think they can
use it for settlements, so they can probably every day, or even
every 10 minutes, they can adjust accounts, but obviously,
I think they might de probably will retain the keys for that.
So you won't be able to join the exchange and, you know, Pate as
an anonymous user because obviously there's a lot of
regulations that that would be violated if you if you were
doing that. But basically I think that use
it for settlement. It's not clear exactly what they
plan to do because obviously a lot of it is still hasn't been
really discussed yet. But yeah, so at least in the
initial press release they said they were experimenting with the
benefits. Is this where the idea for open
chain originated is there, is there some correlations there?
Because it seems kind of similar from From the open chain
protocol. Yes, so open chain.
So basically, so so I've been talking to a number of companies
for some time and usually there's some some questions that
keep coming back and so one of those questions is scalability
so as we all know Bitcoin has unlimited scalability because of
you know, the fact that it uses proof of work and this
distributed architecture. So it's limited to more or less
7 transactions per second. So this is always a question
that comes back and, you know, there's ways to address it with
it open assets by using, you know, lightning networks, this
type of things but basically you end up building a lot of things,
you know, a lot of complicated layers on top of it.
And so yeah open chain solves that problem by just not doing
all of these complicated things and just, you know, stepping
aside proof-of-work, you know, stepping inside the Bitcoin
blockchain even and doing transactions of change directly.
That's one question that always comes back.
And another one is the control of the transaction.
So, you know, NASDAQ, they cannot afford having
transactions being completely open onto the network.
And letting anybody do any kind of transactions?
They, you know, there's a lot of regulations that requires them
to know if all the parties involved to its kind of, has to
work in a closed loop. And then there's some, you know,
there's some other restrictions, you know, maybe the, you know,
the the trading can only happen. During day time, for example, I
don't know if that's the case for private Market but might be.
So in that case, you know, that's another type of thing
that they need to be able to restrict there's plenty of rules
that they can actually enforce easily on the Bitcoin
blockchain. So that's why open chain kind of
provides the way to do that. So the way that I sort of see
this, I mean I we've been we've been researching this for the
for last a while Brian and discussing it.
The way that I would explain it in one sentence and I'd like to
know if you think this is correct is It's a distributed
database that gets blocked. Stamped.
Every 10 minutes to the blockchain.
Is that sort of accurate or parts missing there.
You mean open chain? Yeah, yeah.
So it's basically a yeah, it's a database basically, it's
actually built on a database you know because databases have been
around for decades. They kind of work now we're
pretty well. So it's a database except we add
on top of that. We had basically her shoulder
transactions and every 10 minutes, we take the cumulative.
Of hash of all of that and we put it in the Bitcoin
blockchain. So the Bitcoin blockchain is
irreversible, you know, as we know because of proof of work
and it's very expensive to reverse the transaction.
So this kind of ensures the immutability of everything that
happened, you know, as part of this cumulative hash.
So it kind of protects against their, you know, reversibility
of the of The Ledger while still providing the same scalable
scalability as you get from a, you know, a simpler system.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot to talk.
But then we want to come back. So we have we have a lot of
questions, sort of regarding you need the security, the consensus
because you start getting interesting discussions.
I mean, save Asia said they sentence me before as well.
But you know, when I read through it, I was like, well,
it's not actually this should be database, right?
It's actually Center. I said, wait, which makes sense
when the what you are aiming for is scalability, right?
Because as soon as you start having this issue with consensus
process, it was called ability because Seems almost, I mean,
much more difficult at least, but maybe before we get to that,
let's talk a little bit about sort of, what's the structure of
open chain. How is what's the architecture
of the protocol? Yeah, so the the idea behind it
is for every organization that's issuing an asset.
They would run their own instance of open chain.
So if I take the example of, let's say Starbucks coupons,
like, you know, which you can spend for, you know, dollars at
Starbucks, they're issued by Starbucks, what Starbucks would
run their own instance. And that instance would control
other transactions where you have Starbucks coupons, and on
the other side, maybe you have Well, maybe you have Macy's
coupons and those Macy's coupons are controlled by an instance
that that's controlled by Macy's.
And you know, you that way, you know, Macy's has complete
control over what happens to their point.
So they can set rules, you know, you can put its expiration
dates, you can, you know, you can freeze an account.
If it turns out gift card as been you know stolen from the
store and you know you want to be able to block the points that
were on the card. So you know this is a lot of
fraud with give Guards. So you can you can set the rules
that that much, your business needs basically.
And so we have many different instances.
So you know, every organization has their own instance and then
you can connect instances to each other when you want to
have, let's say you want to swap Macy's coupon for a Starbucks
coupon, then you will have they would have to be connected in
some degree in some way. So either they're directly
connected to each other or they're connected to a third
chain. Are you can do this webs but
basically, you can form a like a sort of a mesh network of
different chain, open chain instances and the, you know,
transact assets depending on which connections exist.
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And what about the structure of the protocol?
Like what what does it contain? Yeah, so basically the so it's
it's a simple architecture. So, so Bitcoin needs a
peer-to-peer system because there is no Central Authority
obviously so essentially the Bitcoins are issued by the
protocol itself through consensus so you don't have a
central Authority. So the network needs to needs to
be peer-to-peer. That's that Something you have
to have but peer-to-peer are, you know, it's it's a nice tool
but there's also like some issues with peer-to-peer because
it's very, you know, consuming in terms of requiring like in
terms of resources. So it consumes a lot of
bandwidth because you need to you have such redundancy that
there's a lot of bandwidth. It's latency usually would be
higher in peer-to-peer systems because it's harder to obtain
mais. So we basically also like
another big reason When their big issue is phones, for
example, or like mobile devices, they, it's hard for them to
connect to a peer-to-peer Network because usually your
mobile network will only, you know, will block some ports and
they won't let you connect to you know for example the Bitcoin
Network or if you know turn the torrent like a BitTorrent or any
kind of P2P Network. So it's harder for mobile
devices to connect to, to a peer-to-peer Network.
So we've basically taken a simpler approach, and we've just
using a client-server architecture because we only
have one note that validates a given asset.
So that's node can be a server and it's actually in the
interest of the of the organization, you know, of
having a note that trans well, that's highly available and so
on. So Starbucks has like a big
interest in, you know, keeping that node running and having lot
of bandwidth and so on. So they're the ones who are
going to pay for it, but the end users are not going.
I have to pay for it, they're just connect to a server
because, you know, the end-user shouldn't have to pay for being
able to use gift cards, like Starbucks gift cards, and
Starbucks doesn't even want to have the end users pay for it.
So, it's better alignment of the of the cost essentially, and
it's easier for devices, like lightweight devices, like mobile
phone, to connect to it. Because, well, basically, it's
just exposing HTTP, interfaces, and pretty much every device the
world that's connected to the internet can connect through it.
To be, so it's much easier interface to connect to for
lightweight device. So, in this example of Starbucks
points, Starbucks would be the validator node.
So they have a an open chain instance, which is just like an
npm, like it's a node implementation and the
participants. So the customers would be
Observer nodes. Yes.
So so there's this concept of of observing notes.
So So an observing note, connects to a validating note
and it receives it receives a copy of all the transactions as
they get validated. So basically there's a choosing
web socket so you can actually have an observing node which is
implemented in your browser if you want to but you basically
connect to this web socket and you receive all the transactions
that they get confirmed and that allows you to reconstruct a
complete copy of The Ledger. So you have your own copy of The
Ledger, you can verify everything.
You can calculate the cumulative hash and compare it to what's in
the Bitcoin blockchain to ensure that the integrity's, you know,
that everything is, you know, there's still Integrity still
have the correct copy and nothing has been reverted.
And the observing notes, they have the ability also to examine
every transaction they can't verify digital signatures, they
can also verify who's doing what.
So, there's this concept in open chain, where the validator can
Define when you're when you own the validator, you can Define
administrators. So you define a public is which
which are the public is of the administrators of the instance
and those administrators can do things that At normal users
going to do. So they can, for example, issue
tokens the, you know, by default normal users can't issue token,
although you can also configure it so that normal users can
issue tokens. But, you know, they can also
make transactions from two accounts that they don't
necessarily own. Because, you know, in case of
fraud, for example, they might want to revert transaction, they
can also affect permissions, so they can remove the permission
on an account, so that this account can is not allowed to
trade anymore. If If they want to freeze an
account. Let's say so when you do that,
it's visible. That this transaction, let's say
a transaction freezing, an account has been signed by the
administrator so all the Observer can see that, you know,
the administrator Frozen account or the administrator revert, to
the transaction. And, you know, basically it kind
of keeps them honest, right? If the validator, that's
something that, you know, they start freezing lot of accounts,
The observables Observers would notice and two things can
happen. The first One is they might lose
trust. So if their customers they might
they might lose. Trust stop using the service and
the state's second thing is the customers.
If they believe that something illegal happened, they can
actually use The Ledger, the copy of The Ledger in court as
an evidence that the administrator did that because
everything is digitally signed. There's the signature of the
administrator, and this can hold.
This can be used as an evidence in court, so it kind of keeps
the validators honest. So, but then it's okay.
Like the Starbucks model would with the customers or the the
customers are Starbucks. Speedy's.
Validator nodes or these Observer nodes, or should it be
some auditing party? Like Deloitte or something like
that? Which is auditing.
The, the validators copy of the blockchain or not at the
blockchain but if their Ledger. Yeah, so the customers can be
observers but they don't have to.
They can also just be just like with lions if he talked about
the case of Starbucks. I mean, if you talk about
scalability, right? Right.
Then you start having huge volumes of transactions.
Oh yeah. Do that.
Customers would run. Observer knows as make sense.
No. Because they would have the same
number of data, the same volume, that would be coming in.
Yeah, I mean, if you're usually a suppose long term, it would be
firms. That would be like auditing
firms. Maybe that would be doing that
for the users. You know, it could be like a
consumer protection company, like, organizations that exist.
In some countries. They could No check that the
ledgers are working properly, but yeah, like, yeah.
It's depending on the scale, the number of transactions.
Yeah, the end users might or might not be able to do that,
but at least the it's possible for someone to do it at least.
So maybe it's going to take some more money.
Maybe it's going to take some resources to do, but at least
it's possible to do it. Yeah, I think this is this is
interesting though because we've had this discussion profile,
right? So there's this been Bitcoin and
there's a whole philosophy around Bitcoin and then there's
been a lot of work on On permission blockchains.
And then a lot of people sort of say our permission blockchain or
at least if you read Reddit, then people that are permission.
Blockchain is just a database and this is a sort of like
nonsensical statement, right? Because you still have a
consensus process that ministers has rules, you know.
So, but but it obviously isn't the same thing as peer-to-peer
Network. We're sort of anybody could join
in the consensus process, right? So that's it.
That's a clear difference. But then of course you can say,
well, I mean, in some cases is that even necessary?
Like do you even need to have, you know, 10 entities like
administrating the process together and you know, voting on
blocks or whatnot? Or can you just stop like, get
rid of that? And instead, you know, again
some, you know, enormous scalability and speed and cost
savings as well, right? And then I mean, open chain is,
is that right? It goes.
Go sort of to The Very extreme to say, what?
We don't need a consensus process, like, there's no
peer-to-peer Network here. This is just a database with
digital signatures. So, you know, you see who this
water. I mean, at least someone sees it
and and then, okay, you can, you can put an observer note in
there. So, let's say somebody has has a
record of what that sees there. And then of course you do get
some Um, security aspects. Again, I mean, how much?
Of course, that depends a lot on who runs the Observer.
What exactly is the is being done, but it's interesting
because then, you know, in a ways is this to what extent?
This is this coming from Bitcoin and blockchain and this or to
what extent is this something that you could do completely
independently and is not actually that related Yeah.
It's it's kind of a departure from from Bitcoin and blockchain
I guess it's uses some of the ideas that weren't pioneered by
Bitcoin sort of as you know Bitcoin the core feature of
Bitcoin is censorship resistance and it's been designed in a way
that it enables censorship censorship resistance and the
transparency is part of you know that you need transparency to
enable that. But you know it still is Still
use useful to have a transparent Ledger, even though you don't
need censorship resistance. Obviously, it's not as necessary
because, you know, people have been doing that today for, you
know, for a while without transparency, and it works to
some degree. It's not necessary, but it's
still a nice thing to have and also digital signatures are used
today. I mean, they've been used for a
while now but not completely across the board, you know, like
There's always a bunch of systems that don't rely rely
completely on trust and do digital signatures.
So if you use something where it's they are enforced across
the board and it kind of increases security.
Also, there's this idea of using the blockchain for immutability
or publishing the hash, which is it's kind of a small thing but
it's still very nice to have but you know it chooses some of the
ideas of Bitcoin. But yeah, it's still very
different from cryptocurrency. So the important ideas and you
see being used here, Our digital signatures.
So the idea that I guess every transaction is associated with
the public key and sign so you I guess you see where it comes
from and what is that is that the most important aspect here
that you sort of taking from Bitcoin?
So there's the yeah like the transparency is very important,
the fact that anybody can become an observer and replicate The
Ledger is I think is very important.
Oughtn't. There's also the fact that, you
know, it's a simple API, it's, you know, it's easy to program
against which you know systems tend to be very complicated that
they have load of bells and whistles, but here like the
core, the core API is very simple.
Yeah. And also the immutability is
also a nice feature, but yeah, obviously there's no censorship
resistance because it's like the assets, the assets were talking
about, you know, you can always go to the company that holds
Those assets like Starbucks, if you're the government and force
them to do something, or they go to prison.
So in that case they're going to find a way to do it.
Even if the technology prevents them from doing it, they're
going to find a way one way or another.
So the either technology is going to help them do it or it's
going to, you know, slow them do it.
But in at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.
It's going to happen because they, you know, they they're
still biting the do. Right.
So and of course, one of the
interesting aspects, Stu and and consequences of that.
And I think that's the sort of a logical decision you made there
where is that you get rid of blocks, right?
So it's not a blockchain because we're why do you need blocks,
right? So you need blocks, of course,
if like let's say there's there's different parties
administering, this process, right?
And you know, they may have received stuff in different
orders and somehow they've come to agreement, right?
So you bundle them all together and you're sent me around and
then somehow they all say, okay, this is status.
But of course, if there's a sin Real server, but what's the
point of a block, right? You don't need a block.
Yeah, absolutely. And the blocks essentially, the
introduce a delay because when you submit a transaction to a
system that's based on blogs, like, you know, Bitcoin you have
to wait for the next block for confirmation.
So it is, first of all, it's not synchronous.
You have to wait for confirmation which is a
different event, so it takes time and even some systems like
some systems based on proof of stake.
They are produced The Block time to like few seconds sometimes.
But even few seconds is still a long time for some of some
applications, like trading. For example, is something where
every millisecond counts. So if you have confirmation time
of two seconds, you cannot use it for like, you know, markets
and trading because it's, it's too slow.
So, you know, if you do synchronous confirmation.
So, basically eliminate the blocks and confirm instantly,
then then it becomes usable for this type of applications.
Let's take a short break so I can take you to Paris.
I walked into lemons on your Bitcoin, the house of Bitcoin,
and the Heart of silicones on CA home, to many startups,
including Ledger, and I spoke with LED flash, Avec Ledger, CEO
about the all-new unplugged, NFC Hardware wallet, The Ledger
unplugged is NFC based Hardware wallet, that you can use with
compatible, Android phones, the private keys are stored in a
secure element and you can Use them with wallets such as
mycelium and green beads each time you want to make a
transaction, the signature will be done by the unplugged and
this way, your private Keys is critical data.
Will never be exposed to the Android from.
This is a secure way to use your Bitcoins undergo in mobility and
you will also be able to pay directly with the unplugged with
compatible point-of-sale terminals.
The larger unplugged is the simple solution for secure
contact list. Point payments, you can get the
unplugged at Ledger wallet.com. And when you use the code
epicenter at checkout, you'll get 10% off your order.
By the way that code works on their entire range of products.
So we'd like to thank Ledger for their support of epicenter.
Bitcoin. Let's get sound this topic of
consensus. One thing that we mentioned
earlier is, before the show, is this idea that, you know, the
valid, the observer in our roads could do real-time auditing.
So in, in this case, of Of Starbucks or perhaps, like, you
want to do a stock exchange rather than having auditing at
the end of the month or the end of the year, you could have
auditing happening in real-time. And the value of having the hash
of all the transactions added to the blockchain, every 10 minutes
is that you can point to that transaction in that hash.
And all of the Observer nodes can say, okay this come to a
consensus I guess without knowing each other that all
these transactions happen. Because you know, there's The
proof of it in the blockchain. Does does this imply that you
could have multiple observers? I don't necessarily know each
other and You can still validate that these transactions took
place and then what is to stop? The validating node from sending
different copies of The Ledger to the different Observer notes?
Yeah, it's a good question. Yeah.
But you can definitely have multiple observers that don't
know about each other and actually it's even possible to
have observers expose the transaction stream so that you
have like a second level of observers that connect to the
first level of observers. And, you know, it kind of built
sort of a graph or three. I would say, where, you know,
you can actually scale out nicely like this.
You know, you would have just for, let's say for observers at
the first level, then you have 16 at the second level and then
in the 64, the third level. So it's it's it's much easier to
scale this way and what? Yeah, you're right that The
Observers could send different versions to different observers,
but if they do that, the cumulative, hash, for those
different observers would be different and one of those
Observers with realize that the cumulative hash doesn't match
what's in the blockchain. So the blockchain is like that
part that everybody has to agree on.
You know. It is.
That's the one thing that ensures that there's only one
version of History, right? And so in your dock in the
documentation, you mentioned that you can do or you can do
like a large volumes of transactions and those
transactions get the passion to the blockchain and which comes
up to if you do once, if you hash If you send the hash, once
every block that comes up of ten dollars a month or something
like that, what would be some of the criteria that would push an
organization to say role? Rather than push.
These two every block will push them to every 10 blocks or every
100 blocks because you can you can also you can also adjust
that, right? Oh yeah.
You cannot just a frequency depending on your needs, you
know? If you don't have a lot of
transactions, maybe you know, over ten blocks is enough.
If you do it every ten blocks, you actually save 90% of the
cost. So Like $10 for every block
according to the current fees. I mean the fees vary over time
if you you know you divide it by 10, if you do it only every ten
blocks, you know, if you do it once every day then you you're
going to pay less than a dollar per month.
And this is, you know, there's no point in any case, there's no
point having more ink anchors than more than one anchor per
block because it doesn't add anything.
You know, the block is like a it's like a snapshot in time.
So you know if you have two anchors at the same time as you
need, Doesn't bring more so you don't need to have more than one
per block but you know what the the maximum resolution you can
have is one per block and it gives you the same level of
irreversibility as you get with Bitcoin because with Bitcoin you
have to wait 10 minutes before you know that the transaction is
in irreversible. So it's the same level of
irreversibilities. So so, you know you mentioned
that? Yeah, you can have instant
confirmations, right? So essentially, I mean tried,
like, let's say I make a transaction.
I send it to The validator. And now, of course, if the
ballot because the valid isn't charged, you can immediately
say, okay, you know, like just actually proved right.
But that also means there is no security there, right?
Because he could throw it out again and but there's nothing.
I mean the chain would be perfectly valid, right?
I mean it's true that if you have like the chain hashed in
between, you know, then the hash, you know, you can't throw
out things that let's say before the hash I mean, you could throw
them out but at least it would be noticed, people would say,
okay, well, what happened here, but otherwise, if I other than
just sort of do whatever they want with it, right?
They can they can go back and change the sequence of
transactions or they can just block incoming transactions.
I think that's what you mean. Brian.
Is that incoming transactions? Get just thrown out.
You could you could put a transaction and say like add it
to the to the chain of transactions but then later take
it out again. Yeah.
So blocking a transaction is kind of there.
Right. If they want to block it as long
as you tell you that it's been blocked, it's fine.
But yeah, they could, like you said, they could accept the
transaction, tell you that it got accepted and 10 minutes
later when they published the hash then that transaction is
not in the chain anymore. So yeah, if you don't trust the
validator, you might need to wait for 10 minutes to be sure
that the transaction has been confirmed.
But usually, in this kind of setup, the end user would trust,
the validator, which was the company.
Because the validator, you know, you would trust Starbucks to you
know, tell you when the transactions are confirmed for
their point is that there's no points ready for them to cheat
on that right? I mean another small question so
how would you so? So they put the hash in the
blockchain, how would you know black is it possible to see if
the which hashes or like tie together with previous hashes or
like does that you have to see that from somewhere else someone
else's go and say okay these are The has just that belong to that
open chain. So basically you, when you
configure your opinion instance, you give it to the private key
of a Bitcoin address, which should have some funds and then
the, the hashes are published from that address.
So like the fees are taken from that to dress.
And so, actually, we have one a dress like this for for the test
instance that we have. So, so far there has been like
five or six anchors since since when we rebooted it.
Like a couple of days ago so you know every time you know every
like every so often he publishes a harsh there and every
basically every instance would have a different address that
they would use. So that's how you identify.
That's a nice way of handling that but yeah.
So now I was just saying you need to keep finding that
address with Bitcoin to pay those transaction fees.
Yeah, yeah. So you need you need like to
fund it like for like 10 then depending on the fees you know
ten twenty dollars per month to make sure that you can still
publish the hash there. So it's using up return.
It's pretty simple. It's just or per turn and then
change. And then some some goes to the
fees as well. But it's a very small
transaction but you still need to pee like a small amount of
fees. And what's nice about this is
that you can always look at that address and you can just see the
list of transactions basically in in one big one address.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
You can see the list and then every anchor has also the number
of transactions that are encapsulated into that hash.
So you can track, you know, like what stage Every anchor is that.
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Sebastian million. I'm stealing your great
question, Sebastian, he made an increased even interesting
observation before and so, well, let me let me take a step back.
So one of the things that a Terry's, right?
We do is that you say okay, you sort of take the consensus
really put it in a smart contract, right?
So, you could have like, let's say one party in control or you
could have multiple parties, so it seems like here as well.
Okay. You, maybe you say it's fine.
If just Starbucks is in charge because, you know, they can
always refused to give me the coffee anyway, but maybe also,
you say, well, I don't want to Starbucks in control.
I want. Maybe these three entities in
control, or like you might want to have all kinds of rules
regarding that. So it's the same as able to
pinpoint your well, could you run an open chain as a
distributed application? Would that be possible?
That's might be possible. Yeah.
I haven't really thought in that direction but it might be
possible. Yeah.
But going back to like having multiple parties controlling,
let's say Starbucks transactions or let's say for the purpose of
this example. Let's say it's like paper Lee.
There's like a PayPal chain and you have other companies
validating the PayPal change it. So you have also like visa and
MasterCard. And then on the PayPal chain.
So people chain kind of controls the funds, you have on PayPal,
and Alice makes a payment to Bob like $100.
So Bob has $100 and then PayPal decides that the transaction was
fraud or something in the derivative transaction but visa
and MasterCard don't agree. So the Visa and MasterCard
refused to take that transaction.
So they essentially Fork assuming that you would have
like this consensus, you know, with PayPal visa and MasterCard.
Visa and MasterCard would Fork into a Version of History, where
the reversal didn't happen. So but still has a hundred
hundred dollars, but as far as PayPal is concerned, Bob doesn't
have a hundred dollars anymore. So when Bob comes to to PayPal
and tries to withdraw his hundred dollars, he says okay
I'm the main chain I'm supposed to have a hundred dollars to
give me those hundred dollars. You know I want to withdraw into
my bank account paper is going to say no because you know as
far as we know, you don't have $100 the transaction was
reverted so and there's nothing that the user can do it.
You can say, okay, we look but like the other Isn't the main
chain. Think that I have $100, right?
The end up by the end of the day you need to to resolve this.
In course, maybe or, you know, that's the only way.
So it doesn't really change the bottom.
Well, I don't think I agree with you, and I think in the example,
you gave that would would be an indication that the chain and
the contracts, you know, if we talked about this being an,
like, a smart contract land, or the chain wasn't set up
properly, right? Because if, if it's a thing
where we're like the ultimate judge of, you have $100 with
PayPal or not, it's just PayPal. Well, yeah, then PayPal should
be able to make that decision. But other things, you know, you
may have different rules, right? Or you may have multiple parties
being in charge or So so then you might still have a process
of like let's say, for example, payment is reversed but, you
know, maybe you encode who gets to choose in that process, like
where does it go? You know, I mean I think there's
all kinds of things you can do. I mean, you certainly right that
it's crucial for these kind of things that they're sort of the
state of the chain is in accordance with the state of,
you know, the legal stage. So you know someone controls the
sort of the reality they have to be able to Those changes in the
chain. Otherwise it becomes irrelevant
what you have on there. It's Tricky though.
Because at the end of the day, those hundred dollars are going
to leave on someone's bank account, you know, maybe okay in
my case it's PayPal's bank account.
So people has all the controls but even if it's a bank account,
that's controlled by the three companies, it means that in that
case, you have some kind of legal structure which
encompasses Visa, Mastercard and PayPal, and in that case, that
legal structure becomes the legal structure that can be.
That can maintain the ledger so you can of always have to have
an owner. You cannot really have an asset
that's being. I mean, as far as I know, as far
as loading is law is concerned. You cannot really have an essay
that belongs to many people at the same time, there has to be
one legal owner, that legal owner, is the one that would be
in control of their later. But, you know, maybe laws will
change in the future and maybe it's possible to have this kind
of setup, but it's still very tricky.
Yeah, it's definitely true that It's tricky to get these things,
right? I was gonna talk about, The I
want to talk about the technical implementation, so, can you
describe how a company would Implement an open chain server?
Yeah, so I mean like if we're going to take Nicole detail, so
we have documentation website. It's dogs that open change.org
and there's like a lot of documentation and there's one
document that explains how to deploy an instance.
And so it runs on right now the supported mode of deployment is
through Docker which is like a container system.
So it's an easy way to deploy applications its kind of popular
at the moment. So it's the type of thing you
just install Docker on your Linux machine or it also works
on OS X and windows. By the way, you just install it
there and then and then you just execute the few common lines
that are described on the, on the, on the documentation
website. And and then, you're going to
have your instance and there's a configuration file, which you
can modify. And so, that configuration file
today, it has a few settings that you can change.
So the first one, is the public keys or dresses?
The administrators. So if you want to be an
administrator you would generate HD wallet.
You would, you would generate a public key from that HD wallet
and put that public key into the configuration file.
And so from that point on, you can use that HD.
Well, it's to sign an admin transactions so you can a
Bitcoin HD wallet. Yeah, so we actually open chain
uses the same elliptic curve as Bitcoin so all the libraries
that you can use for sending transactions with Bitcoin like
Bitcoin Or Bitcoin J and so on you can use the same with open
chain. So yeah.
You generate HD were late and then you you sign administrative
transactions with that key. So like you can, you know,
change permissions on account. Yeah.
The the structure of a can see is hierarchical.
So you can, you can set a permission at a, you know, at
top level and that applies to all these sub accounts below
that you can walk, you can do a lot of things.
As the admin another city. That you can configure is
whether you want to allow the end user to to issue their own
assets. So if you want to have a ledger
where anybody can issue their own assets, then you can turn
you just set it to true and that becomes possible.
There's a few other settings and then once this is all
configured, you just set up the, the permissions on The Ledger
and so permissions, they have there's a number of permissions,
so there's the right to spend money so you you can associate
an Accounts with a public key and give it the right to spend
money, which means, then that this public key is allowed to
sign transactions spending money from that account.
There's also the right to receive money, so you can by
default, you can either set it to allowing everybody to receive
money. So in that, case, in your
account, can receive money, or you can use like more like more
pattern where you have to be wait-listed to be able to
receive money. So if you want to only allow
your users to be able to receive money, then you use it.
False by default and then you enable only some accounts, some
public keys to receive funds. And there is a few of the things
you can also. So you can store what's
interesting is because with Bitcoin, obviously it's a common
blockchain, everybody shares the same Block Chain.
So there's a lot of limitations in what data can be put in the
blockchain, but with open chain because you're the one who sort
of it's your service running on your server, so you're paying
for the hosting cost so you can put as much data.
As you want, basically There's No Limit because, you know,
you're the one and it's not even really a, you know, it's not
replicated on six thousand nodes.
So it's not as expensive even so you can store kilobytes or
megabytes of data if you want. And you can also give the right
to the users to store their own metadata.
So we use that metadata for a few different things you can,
for example, Define the terms of service of your instance.
So there's a special piece of data that you would put which is
bit with a special name and the user.
When they connect with their wallets, they will see that
terms of services and they have to accept it.
For example, you can. Also we also use this ability to
store data to store a Asset definition on the later.
So when you create an asset you can, you can say, okay this this
asset is called the epicenter of coins and it has this icon and
this is the short name and so on much like you do with gold
coins. Yeah exactly.
Except in the case of open chain is actually stored in the later
itself so it's all completely signed all the way in its part.
You know, it's actually a transaction that creates that
data and put it in the blockchain so it's all
completely unified with colored coins.
It was a bit more complicated because we cannot put so much
data in the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain.
So instead we store the data outside of the blockchain and
would refer to it with the URL. So it's not as elegant with open
chain you can put their data completely indirectly.
Yeah. So there's a few Few of the
things you can, you can have also pointer records.
So you can have an account pointing to another account with
a pointing, with the pointer record.
So, whenever someone sends money to that Source account, they
automatically get forwarded to the other account.
Yeah, so there's plenty of things, the plenty of features
like this, that can be done by using data records.
Okay. And so you also have client-side
libraries then, so then you can easily deploy wallets and
applications that use open us or sorry that use a open chain.
Yes. So I mean we have to the the
wallet has been open sourced and it's completely web-based
because we're talking about HTTP apis.
So it's pretty easy to program. A web-based interface to deal
with that in this completely open source.
And actually, we use, you know, there's no complicated things
really happening in there. It's just, I would say, the most
complicated thing that happens is signing the transaction.
And for that, we use bit core which is the library that the
open source library from bitpay. And it's just a few lines of
code with bit core. You just signed your transaction
and then send it to the server. So it's actually pretty simple
and, you know, it's in any language.
You could deal with it pretty easily.
Okay. And so regarding the capacity,
so, you know, your Starbucks for instance and you deploy instance
and then all of a sudden, you start getting into the thousands
of transactions per second. How does the server architecture
have to scale? Is it pretty low balance?
Or, you know, if you start Into those High service or
transaction volumes. You have to have like perhaps,
you know, a pretty hefty server or you know, distributed servers
around the world that are managing these Ledger's.
That are validating transactions.
Yeah, it's a very good question. So, actually open chain has kind
of this, modern architecture, and we have this concept of
storage engine and, you know, by default it uses a, just a
simple, you know, SQL database locally, but we plan to add more
support for more storage ends in engines and potentially, you
would be able to store data in the like scale of databases like
a Cinderella or mongodb and those are, you know, made for
scale. You know, you like Facebook and
Twitter. And those guys, this tour, you
know, thousands of terabytes of data in those databases and and
when you will be able to use those databases as a storage
engine, then yeah, it's then it's easy to implement scale
out. You would have, you know, you
can have like 16 notes shortly, no shorting the data and storing
hitch. Some part of the data is
replicated, And so on. And so you can Ensure High
availability as well as, you know, scalability scale out.
So it that would be a way to scale.
Basically, we rely on. Well, that is possible because I
mean it seems like that or would you have to compromise on?
For example, the instant confirmation, then if you start
shortly. So naturally, I mean, you would,
you would still commit the The the database into Cassandra.
So, you have different. So, you know, I don't know if
people are familiar with Cassandra, but there's many
right modes and there's some right modes where you have, you
know, delays consistency. Some of them, were you have
instant consistency. If you use there is a cyst like
a system called Quorum, where you write to a majority of nodes
and by doing that you ensure that there's actually you know,
it works actually with consensus, you know, Cassandra,
implements its own consent, This is mechanism.
So when you write to majority of nodes, you know that the data is
committed and even if you lose a note, you you don't do the data.
So you can still, you can still have instant confirmations.
It might be a little bit slower, of course, because now you're
talking to different notes. But this is the type of thing
you can scale, you know, like, you know, like I said, Facebook
Twitter are using those, those databases and they, they
obviously have a very large scale.
Today's magic word is open. Ope n head over to, let's talk
Bitcoin.com to sign in enter the magic word and claim your part
of the listener award. So regarding the security model
and sort of linked to the Privacy model.
Could you have Have a an open chain Ledger that is behind a
firewall. So you want to have sort of a
private? Private Ledger.
How would you prevent I guess your Observer nodes from leaking
the data outside of that? You know behind that far wall,
if indeed you could Yeah, so if there's plenty of models that
can work. So but the fact that it's a
server means that you if you Shield it, if you put it behind
a firewall, you can prevent anybody from accessing accessing
it. So if you want to use it
internally for your organization but you don't want to let other
people accessing it, you just use it on an intranet, for
example, or on into your local network and then only it's get.
Then, you can only be used with from within your organization
and you can still have Observer notes but they will be inside
the Organization obviously. So yes, they like the kind of
architecture, you know, Network architecture that people have
been doing in the past 20 years. This type of thing completely
applies. One thing that's also
interesting is because it's exposing HTTP interfaces, you
can put it behind cloudflare so cloudflare for, you know, I
don't know if you're familiar, it's a service that provides
DDOS protection, so they sort of intercept the course and then
forward them to your own server. So they have a free tier Which
is very good and then they have like Pro additions and so on.
But they basically protect again DDOS attacks and lot of
different attacks, the provide caching and so on.
And so you can, you know, if you want you can put your server
behind cloudflare to protect it against the dose like everything
that works with web servers. Today there's a lot of tools
that works with web servers you know for 15 years a lot of
things have been running on web servers everything all of this
can work with open chain because it's using HTTP interfaces.
Okay, that's interesting but but sir Regarding privacy, though.
If you are you, if you're using open chain behind a firewall,
you'd still have to trust the lowest common denominator not
not to To leak the data of your Ledger outside the system.
Yeah. If you want to use it just
internally, then you would not expose it at all to the outside.
And The Observers would also have to be inside you would need
to make sure that you, I mean, you would, you wouldn't trillion
have you wouldn't really be able to have observers outside of the
network because they couldn't connect it to the validator node
but yeah. And then if you you know it
depends what, what the scope of that instance is supposed to be,
if you want to expose it to the outside.
Then yeah, you you can. Farewell, but if you wanted to
remain internal, then you need to make sure that the validator
node and all the Observer notes are within the firewall.
So one of the use cases that, it seems like this is tiered for,
and you mentioned before is the idea of trading, right?
Because you certainly right that block chains aren't very good at
that, you know, I mean, Bitcoin certainly wouldn't be useful for
that and then even if you take like permission chains, you
still have problems, right? As you mentioned, right?
If there's a curfew second confirmation, Nation time and
well, that's probably too slow. So, one of the interesting
things here and I'm curious how that's going to work.
Is the idea that would you in a trading, use case?
Let's say we wanted to stock market with open chain, would
you have a different open chain for each stock?
And would those be issued then by the company or would like,
let's say NASDAQ would have like one open chain that includes
all. The stock of the entire stock
market. It's an interesting question.
So right now, there is this, this concept of stuck
depositories which is like the dtc's in the US and there's a
few also in Europe and this is where the stocks are held
ultimately. So those those companies could
be the ones running no punch and edger and the, you know, have
people, you know, instead of having this nice.
This Very tiered approach where you have like a repository then
you have Brokers, and you have the exchange, you could have the
depository, holding the stocks, exposing a open chain Ledger and
then everybody could connect to that directly.
So you can eliminate a few intermediaries, that's one way
to do it. And then you could as far as the
exchanges are concerned, you know, if you're an Asda, can you
your you want to run an exchange?
You would have maybe second instance where you have tokens
that represents It's kind of a proxy for a token on the at the
dtcc, for example. So and then you still don't have
to do reconciliation because everything kind of happens
automatically. You can have like, a smart
contract in a way that makes sure that everything is always
in sync, but still, but then you can use the NASDAQ, has the
ability to have their own, sort of small instance, where all the
trading happens and for let you know, to go back to your first
question, if you would have different.
Instances per different stocks. I mean everything is possible.
You can have multiple, you can have just one instance with many
different stocks on it. But let's think for again, for
scalability, just very practical reason, it would probably be
better to have one server / security, but you know,
different leaders, many architectures possible depending
on, you know, the the creativity.
So it's so that that kind of leads into the next question.
No, because if you start, Having 100 chains with one chain /
security. How can those interoperate?
Yeah. Basically there's a concept of
Gateway so you can establish a Gateway from one chain to
another. And what it does is it creates
let's say you have Starbucks points on the Starbucks chain
and then you want to have a like you want to have like an
exchange for Starbucks point. So that's exchange for Starbucks
points. You on that, on there, you would
have special I'm Takin that that is a proxy for the actual
Starbucks points on the the Starbucks chain.
And so you would as far as Starbucks would be, is concerned
would be an account. And when someone would want to
transfer Starbucks point from the main Starbucks chain onto
the exchange chain, they would send it to that special accounts
that you own and now you as the exchange you, you kind of on
that point and you create the equivalent on the, on the
exchange chain and then you give it to that.
There because you can map that user different ways.
Like the easiest way to do it is by, you know, giving it to the
same public key. So as you know, as long as the
person has the public key, you know, that it has it because it
sent the Starbucks point from that public key.
So you can give it to the same public key.
But on the other chain and then, on the extension, you can run
your exchange. You know, you can have rolls,
you know, specifically for that exchange, and people can cash
out from the exchange by sending it to again, to a special
account on the Exchange chain, which unlocks the coins on the
main Starbucks chain. So, what I just explained, it's
actually very similar to the concept of side chains.
This is actually, you know, the exchange chain would be a side
chain of the main Starbucks chain.
And you can actually have a chain like an open chain
instance, which would be a side chain of the Bitcoin blockchain
as well. This is also possible.
But so yeah let's talk about the example right because let's say
you you had you know you're allowed to put Bitcoin on some
open chain. So that means you would put them
in a certain account, I would be controlled, I presume by the
validator of the open chain on the Bitcoin Network and then
that validated with issue you a Bitcoin token on the open chain.
Is that how it work? Yeah, that's how it would work.
Although it says it's possible to decentralize it's a bit
because we're talking about Bitcoin, so a setup that would
be interesting is to it. Actually doesn't really have to
be the validator although it's probably no actually doesn't
even have to To be the validator, could be a third
party company or group of companies which come together,
they create a multisig, address amongst all of those and and
that multisig address is the Gateway.
So when you want to send Bitcoins from the main chain to
the side chain, which is like that specialist open chain
instance, descended to the multisig address.
So it gets locked by all those. Let's say five companies and
then those five, and then they, and then it took on is issued on
the side chain. Then, you know, People can trade
that took and represent exactly when Bitcoin people can trade
under chain and when they want to cash out the send it to an
address which is again controlled by those five
companies. But on the side chain and and
then the five companies unlock the coins on the main chain and
give it back to you on the main chain, right?
But I mean, I can see that making some sense, especially
glad say, If you think one of those multisig, addresses, or
something would be controlled by people running, like Observer
notes on the Unchain right. Exactly.
Would be, yeah, but still though, because if he say, there
is an account that's like, controlled by the same three
entities, let's say on the open chain, I mean, in the end every
account on the open chain, you know, if if the validate, you
can reverse transactions. And yeah, but this is where this
is a very good observation and what would happen is that the
the five or three entities that control that multisig address
They would be observing The Observer notes and if they
realize that the administrator reverses transactions and they
don't agree with this reversal of those transactions.
And let's say, you know, you have money that you shouldn't
really have and they know like the five Observer notes agree,
that you shouldn't really have that money then they just
wouldn't sign the transaction when you try to cash out.
So when you trade a cash out, you still get need to get the
signature of those five companies and because they're
observing and they realize that it was not right, that can just
refuse to give you or your money because you, you have money that
you shouldn't have. So, even if the administrator
reverse is transaction, then the Observer knows still have the
power of controlling the coins in that multisig address.
Yeah, that's right. Right.
Yeah. So you could have that security
that the Bitcoins would be. Yeah.
Presumably reasonably secure at least if the Observer nodes,
would be able to see and know what's going on, right?
Because it might not, I'm not sure if it will always be
obvious. When I mean yeah I mean this
service that those five companies they would run
probably special software to identify any type of transaction
that that's not right because you know, they would be running
this type of service but this setup is actually exactly what a
Federated side chain is. So this is you know this is
basically you can set up a Federated site.
Yeah, abscess on a train. Yeah.
So before we wrap up like to get Mimi, you're sort of your views
on where the Bitcoin ecosystem is going.
And we've seen a proliferation of these protocols and standards
that are built on top of Bitcoin.
And you know it seems like it was just yesterday that Bitcoin
was going to be the currency that was going to everybody was
going to use it but now we're seeing that in fact you know
companies and Enterprises and Joe.
Of larger players are building all this infrastructure on top
of Bitcoin and using Bitcoin, not necessarily as a payment
mechanism but as rails on which other Protocols are implemented.
Where do you see this going in the next five to ten years?
Yeah, I think I see Bitcoin becoming more of an
infrastructure service. You know like this the fact that
you can publish a hash and it becomes mutable, you know, like
like open Chinese doing, it's very valuable and I think people
are going to realize that You know, Bitcoin is going to.
It's going to stay as a store of value just because of that that
value that it provides to as an infrastructure as a currency.
I don't know if I see it as a currency because there are still
a lot of problems to overcome for people to use it as you
know, for payments and this type of things we need works, okay.
But do user experience. You know when you try to pay in
a store I mean it's not great right now.
There's a lot of progress to be done and I'm sure it is going to
evolve over the next 5 years and 10 years it's like You know,
it's such a long time for this type of things, you know, five
years ago, Bitcoin was barely, barely existed.
So who knows? You know how the user experience
will I will have improved in five to ten years but yeah, like
those companies you know there's always this debate there like
with the blockchain without Bitcoin versus Bitcoin, I think
it's like two different use cases, two very different
things. Those companies trying to build
a blockchain. What they want is like, like a
secure system with like nice properties like, you know, it
Ability and transparency. And digital signatures did not
necessarily interested in for it, as a payment, like, as a
commodity, like, Bitcoin is, but Bitcoin itself, as a commodity,
is very useful for some things as well, which is not what the
banks are interested in. But it's different use cases,
but it's still very interesting. Like the fact that, you know,
you can store the fact that it's like gold but digital you know.
So if you want to buy gold it's not very easy.
If you want to buy physical goal, you have to start
somewhere. So definitely using Bitcoin is a
much easier way to do that, you know, Bitcoin has also has this
property of censorship resistance.
So I mean okay I'm it's definitely useful for some of
the illegal use cases. I mean, there's I mean, I'm not
saying it's a good thing but at least you know, it's useful
there and just because of that, it's not going to disappear.
So it definitely has its use cases.
It's just not what the banks are looking at.
Or like, you know, the financial institutions are looking at.
It's too different. Think think blockchain is kind
of in the middle but it's like very like two different angles
really but they both have their merits.
Yeah. Absolutely.
So when it comes to you like coin prism as a company, is your
plan. Now to build a business around
open chain and also is it because for a long time it was
confusing was basically mainly you, is that still the case?
Or is there a larger team? Now, so it's still me the main
person on the team, you know, working with like few people
part time but yet like we're still looking to grow the team,
you know, in the next few months.
Hopefully, but as far as far as product goes, yeah, obviously
going prism and colored coins are still still around and we we
want to, you know, also keep our focus on that.
And as a matter of fact, will will also allow pegging And
assets tokens from the main chain to, as to open chain
instance. So, you know, like I was talking
about using open chain as a side chain.
Well, it's not only going to be for Bitcoins.
Also going to be for current coins, so and we're going to,
you know, enable that kind of scenario, so that people who
want kind of The Best of Both Worlds, they can use the open
chain for scaling and then they can then go back to the main
chain for settlement or whatnot. So it's kind of two sides of the
spectrum. Um, and we still want to, you
know, to be able to have offerings on both sides, on the
permission left side, which is Colonel, Cowen and Bitcoin
because there's some use cases where it just works better.
And then on the permission side as well because you know,
there's also use cases where permission the makes more sense.
So we want to again keep the offering on both sides and be
able to offer to people what they what's the best solution
for them? Cool great.
That sounds fantastic. Thanks so much for coming on.
Flavia. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Yeah. And to listen to thanks so much
for listening, it's always a pleasure.
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