EP07 pt. I Bitcoin podcast with Christian Moss

Welcome back to the bit by bit podcast in this episode I sat down with Christian Moss, we talked about lightning, gaming, Bitcoin and much more. I split the recording into two parts. I really enjoyed this one. I hope you do too.

We're recording by the way. Oh yeah, this should just tap your mic. Do an official, I'll just sort of jump in just for just the listeners. Christian Moss here sitting with me doing some really awesome game developing. You just introduce yourself a little bit and tell the listeners what it is that you're doing and it's zebody isn't it.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me on the podcast Max. Yeah, so I've actually been in Bitcoin in gaming for quite a while.

Since late 2013, I think I started with my first Bitcoin game and it was kind of a simple game where people was like a mobile game where people would like, they would tap a screen and they swing a monkey to see how far they can make it fly. It's very simple arcade game and then the game would reward the player's Bitcoin.

And that was kind of popular in the Bitcoin circle and that's how I kind of got into it. But then it became apparent quite quickly that building games that were going to scale would not work on the Bitcoin blockchain because just the fees and the scaling issues.

So yeah, I kind of waited around for something like lightning to come. I was one of the first people to jump on it and at the moment, I'm quite fortunate that when I started a company with two co-founders called zebody, which is basically building tools, SDKs,

APIs for game developers to build on lightning as well as we're also building some games as well. When I saw last night, that was really cool, like Street Fighter style. I haven't played games in years, but it's all game I used to play. It looks like a lot of fun. It looks great.

Yeah, well, I guess the idea is it's quite a simple game. It's just two people punching each other. But it's a good kind of game to use just to show the use cases.

I think there's a lot of games on blockchain that come out and they're quite complicated. They have all these ideas of tokens and trading and tracking and it's a bit complicated and I think the gameplay can feel a bit clunky, but just like a simple game where you have two players fighting each other and as you hit each other,

Sats are just being like swapped between you. It's quite a good game to kind of show off the concept and that's kind of the game we're building. We're already building a game. It's going to be released, but the purpose of the game is not for the game itself to become successful.

It's just to kind of demonstrate to other game developers. This is what you can do. So a game developer sees what is possible and they think, right, that's really cool. I hadn't thought of doing that. What's their next move? They contact you guys.

Well, pretty much so. We're actually having a workshop in London and we're going to have another workshop in San Francisco. So there's a couple of workshops that people can attend.

Yeah, the main idea is that once we start marketing a little bit more, by that I mean the game will be out for people to try and game developers to find it, then they can just head over to our website, you know, log into the developer dashboard and start to play around, you know, with the tools and integrate lightning into their games.

And do you have an idea of when the one I saw yesterday will be playable? It's really cool. I liked how you'd put in the bear and you had protesters and the right police and all the different.

Yes, one of the reasons I chose that concept of a game, like a street fighter or Tekken, I was more of a Tekken guy actually. If you ever play Tekken, all the characters were based on kind of real people. So they had like a Jackie Chan character or they had a Bruce Lee character.

But they'll be changed the names a little bit and that was quite fun. So there's like a fandom that came into that. I remember that Eddie Bravo or something like that. Eddie Bravo was a cartoon network guy. What was his name? Eddie something anyway. He did like the street fights.

Oh, Eddie, yeah, it was like the couple arrow guy. Yeah, I always used to use him. Yeah, no, he was quite good. No, I was a Yoshi Mitsu because he had the sword.

But also like Law or Bruce Lee is used to call him. Yeah, that's kind of the idea with this game is that it just makes, especially in the Bitcoin community, where we can, you know, we can make kind of like characters that people want to play as like, you know, I don't know, like a block stream guy beating up,

say a Bitcoin cash guy or vice versa, right? Or something like people want to kind of have these Twitter fights and play the match. That's the idea. You know, it's certainly work in that group. I'd definitely play that. Yeah, for sure.

You know, and also we've got some kind of collaborations going. So we're going to have Nicole Doria. I'm not sure if you're listeners are aware, but you know, actually they won't because this is fairly, fairly new.

Yeah. Well, anyway, he's kind of like a famous Bitcoin dev. So I've got some facial scan recognition. So I've managed to make a character of him. So that'll be fun that you can actually play as, I don't know, like Bitcoin people you like, you know? Yeah. So yeah, we've got a few interesting ones done to BTC pay, wasn't it? Is that right?

Yeah, that's what he's kind of most known for. Originally, he made like a Bitcoin framework kind of, sort of like a net developers. And then he made BTC pay. It was not famous tweet. It's like, what was it? I'm going to make you irrelevant. It was too. Yeah, that was a basically it was bit pay, which was quite a good company.

And people use them a lot, but they were obviously, they sent out an email saying that all their users would have to upgrade their node to continue to use like, like, they'd have to upgrade the SDK to continue to use Bitcoin.

Because they were going to the Bitcoin fork that the two X fork. And that was kind of quite rightly seen as basically, it wasn't Bitcoin, but they were saying, this is Bitcoin now. And you know, if you want to use our bit for simply, you have to use this version of Bitcoin. So, Nicola, Dory, I think BTC paid on a few things.

So I bit paid on a few things before that that annoyed developers. If you like, they hadn't updated their libraries properly and all these things. So that was like the final store. And I think Nicola door, door is like, you know, I had enough. I'll just replace you.

You know, your API wasn't that great anyway. So, you know, we might as well build it from scratch. And that's what he did. Yeah, that was really cool. I like that. I'm looking to integrate BTC pay into for my art.

Yes, because I see that as a little niche because I'm trying to with this podcast is to try and pull people in who aren't already interested. Yep. I see a little niche where in the same way, people who are using bit pay within four store or doing something they didn't want to find that with artists as well.

You either have to really suck up to people and talk a lot of bullshit to get your work into galleries. Sure. And if you don't do that and you want to just sell it online, then you're using shitty services basically as an intermediary.

And I find a lot of artists are on that side of, I don't want to be told what to do. I want to, there may be slightly outside of the more formal type of work. I think it's a really good fit for people to have BTC pay serve and integrated with their work.

Makes sense. I think I do some photography. I've tried, at one point, I tried to sell some of it online. Some of the sites, like the amount you get, your cut is ridiculous, right? Yeah, it's so bad.

And then you can't like cash out until you've got a certain amount. And then these rules where I couldn't sell it because I actually did a lot of cosplay and cosplay photography. And then you can't, a lot of sites won't let you sell cosplay photography.

Oh, really? Yeah, there's like some rules. I think one is that because it's a people, like you have to make, like the company doesn't want you to sell a photo of somebody. And then that person complained to the company, hey, I didn't get all, you know, you have to the permission.

So I couldn't sell that and then, you know, it was all. So yeah, so for that stuff, in the same way with gaming, I think there's so many of these niche markets where people don't even know that.

They want Bitcoin. Yeah, I don't know what it is and they don't know they want it, but it sounds like what your business is doing is making it so that game developers can see that it's possible.

And I think that's just going to spark them. I think they're going to be like, why wouldn't I do this? I was watching a presentation last night. I was like, why would any, I'm not developer, but why wouldn't any body want to use this?

Yeah, well, the thing is you don't have to exclusively use it either. You can, you know, you could keep your current kind of, I don't know, like, PayPal or whatever.

And add this on later. It just, it just opens up your market. And I think what a few people do is, you know, if you pay with Bitcoin or something as opposed to PayPal or something, you can offer them a cheaper rate.

Yeah, definitely. You know, because obviously you're not paying like the, like, for example, in games, like Apple takes 30% of your purchases, right? So if you don't have to pay 30% to Apple and then you get cheaper and also Bitcoin has like a time value preference.

So because a dollar of Bitcoin, in a way, is worth more than a dollar, you know, because buying Bitcoin can be difficult. You have to go on an exchange. You've got the KYC, but if you just get it paying for a good, you'd be willing, it's worth more in a way because you've got that Bitcoin and you haven't had to done KYC.

You think it's going up as well, so, yeah. I'd take 10% discount on anything I was selling for Bitcoin 100% because of that reason. Yeah, I think it's the same thing. If you go and buy something in the real world, if you pay by cash, you'll get a better deal.

You know, because the dealer, if you're buying a car, would prefer the cash. So you'd take less cash because the cash is more useful to him in a way, or it's better. It's valuable to them.

So a similar thing with Bitcoin, yeah. So if you've found it's had a good uptake so far, I know it's very, very early stages, but... Oh, yeah, for sure. I just keep getting asked when's it coming out? When's the game coming out and when are the SDKs coming out?

I wish we could move faster than we are. We've only just launched in October. So we've been building, like, the last few months just starting to build out, you know, the back end and the APIs and all that kind of stuff.

So we're moving as fast as we can, but it's going well so far. So hopefully, towards the middle of this year, we'll have production-ready SDKs and dashboards that people can try, and also the games that people can download.

And the other games we're not going to monetize them. It's more for... We kind of want players to play the games and, like, earn stats themselves. Another interesting concept, I think, is cool with Lightning.

Bitcoin is that you can kind of now send the player, like, stats and tips. We take no game, whatever does that, because you couldn't really do it, right? You can't, like, pay pal a user. And if you could, you'd have to, like, at least a dollar, and then, like...

What was it? Minimum $5 or something? Yeah, and no one's going to play the game. But with Lightning, I think I'm Jack at the event yesterday, he demoed in his game, you know. The user can play, and, like, they haven't done any KYC, they haven't signed up, they just downloaded a wallet and a game.

And, like, a few minutes later, they've got, like, you know, like, a few pennies, but it's just... But it introduces people. Yeah, and it's just so, like, low barrier, right? I don't think that people who aren't already interested in this kind of stuff really think about it,

but you've never been able to do that and have final settlement and actually have digital cash. Well, I gave a talk about this before the Lightning Conference in Berlin. And I think the point to the talk was, we actually did have this, but when it wasn't digital,

when people would play games for, like, cash, you know, obviously most of them were gambling, but, you know, since the start of gaming, people would just have, like, the gold coins and the cash mercy play, they would instantly be kind of transferring them, and it was, like, direct peer-to-peer.

And then, with the event of digital games, that wasn't possible because you couldn't do payments digitally. So, in a way, games tried to, they still kept the concept of money in games, so you had a lot of the first games, like, Mario, you're collecting coins, but it was kind of superficial.

And then, when they did have payments digitally, they weren't, like, cash payments, they were just more, like, you know, credit cards. So, then, the next iteration was, instead of getting those coins in Mario, like, you know, picking up real coins, you could, like, you know, you could do an in-app payment.

And then, you know, it was fun out of it. But now, with, like, Lightning and Bitcoin, which is, like, a digital cash, you can basically have something that's the same as kind of physical cash, right?

As you play, and you run and you collect Mario coins, then the user's actually getting direct cash or the game, like, Sats that they own. So, I think it's really nice. So, it makes sense that it would come back into gaming, in a way, it's always existed in gaming before, just not in the digital gaming, because...

So, it's been like a... So, it's been, like, a 20, 30-year period where it hasn't been like that, but always since then it... Yeah, and I think people have forgotten that, like, you can do this as games.

Like, I think it's innate in us, so I remember when I was a kid at Christmas, you know, Christmas, you get, like, when you're a kid, like, I did. You got this, like, all the brothers and sisters and cousins, we'd all get, like, chocolates, like, boxative, whatever.

Like, the gold coins and those sorts. Yeah, all this kind of stuff, isn't it, anything, but then after Christmas, we'd always play Monopoly. And it was our instinct to change the Monopoly money with our sweets on our candy for the American listeners.

And that was kind of obvious that we'd play Monopoly and we'd actually use our sweets, you know, kind of thing. So, I think it's kind of... But in digital games, people lost that connection, just because you can't really do that, right?

Like you say, it's something that you don't even think about. You do it as a child. So, I used to do it. I mean, I haven't gained in years. But it doesn't matter how much money it is, like you're saying, it's not because it's of great value.

The sweet chocolate isn't, you know, sort of make or break your life, but it just makes it a bit more fun. It sweetens the deal. Yeah, yeah. Even if it's like, you're playing Call of Duty or something and there's a pound on it.

Sure. It's just so much more fun than having nothing on it. And it's not going to... I suppose you can say it is gambling, but I would say it's not really it. Yeah, not what you're saying. It's like different levels of gambling, right? Like you said, there's like people just sweetening the deal, just making the game a bit more fun.

And then there's a proper gambling, right? I guess, personally, I'm more interested in the former, the idea. And that's, I think, a good distinction between Bitcoin and Sats. There's the same thing, but I always see Sats as more as like, play money in a way.

Or a bit more... Certainly now, isn't it? Yes. Well, Bitcoin is more the money you put in cold storage and forget about. Even though it's the same one, but there's some sort of, I think there's a psychological distinction there.

Yeah, I think there definitely is, because I'd never want to spend Bitcoin. No, ever. Well, you've got some Sats in your wallet. Yeah, you know, Sats come and go. Yeah, it's kind of... Like you say, it is playing money, and it does bring that extra dynamic to gaming.

Plus, you could earn Sats as well, so, you know, you might not be losing Sats, right? When people, when they're first coming in, who was the chap who was talking yesterday that you just mentioned?

The bounce got jagged. Yeah. That was cool. That was a... Thunder Games on Twitter, if you wanted to become the Games. All right, I'll link it in the show notes as well. Yeah, that seemed cool. It was just like an easy fun game that I would see anyone playing on a train or something like that.

But it was yearning. My first game in Bitcoin was a similar thing to that. The idea is like a simple mobile game that you just, you know, it's like a tap and play kind of game. But I think as Jack said, a super casual game. And the idea is that people would just...

It was just an easy way to introduce people into Bitcoin. Like, as Jack said, how do I get my friends into Bitcoin, you know? Just give them a game. Yeah. Then you get some Sats rather than tell them to sign up for this exchange and upload their passport.

And, you know, it's quite cumbersome. Yeah, it's a monetary policy. Yeah, yeah, no one cares. Yeah. And I'll say back in the early days with my game, I'm like, you know, I think quite a few people got introduced to Bitcoin because of the game, you know,

especially a lot of kids did as well. A lot of kids would download the game and just play it because they liked the idea that it had a monkey in it and whatever. You mentioned... Yesterday in the talk, you were saying about kids getting into this sort of stuff

and actually earning. Yep. And obviously in some countries what they would actually earn over the course of a month, for me, I can see that being replaced by this kind of stuff. Yeah. And I've talked about it with friends and sort of as a theory of like,

could Sats actually be earned by people in these countries and it could be like a job? Yeah. And it just reminded me yesterday when you said it, I was like, is this actually happening? Is this just a dream or is it actually happening now with Amazon vouchers, I think, right? Yeah. Have you heard that? I think it's

Mechanical Turk, I think, is something that Amazon does. It's something where I don't know the details exactly, but I think the idea is that a lot of people in poorer countries can do some sort of like medial data mining style task and Amazon pays them in Amazon vouchers.

Then once they've accumulated enough Amazon vouchers, they sell these Amazon vouchers to like people in the West, you know, for like real dollars or something or Bitcoin. So I think there was a startup, I believe they're still around, where you could purchase Amazon. It's per star I.O. that was it. You could purchase

anything on Amazon with Bitcoin and you'd get a discount. So, you know, if something was like a hundred dollars on Amazon, if you go through per star I.O. and pay the Bitcoin, it would cost you like 90 or 80 dollars.

And the idea was that behind the scenes, your Bitcoin was purchasing these Amazon vouchers off these people in India who had just earned them. And, you know, they were willing to sell that less than the buy it's worth because they didn't pay for them, you know.

So that was the model. So that kind of kind of works. But I think now you could do that a bit more directly, you know, especially with a game, for example. So, could say you released a game. Yeah. Take your street fight again. Sure. And you had someone in a country where either they can't get bank accounts or

work isn't available to them or if it is, it's there and such little money. Sure. That they potentially earn more gaming. The currency could be terrible as well, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They might not want their own currency. And even if they wanted an account, they couldn't get it anyway.

And there'd be corruption everywhere. So, in theory, could you see that people could get very, very good at one of these games and literally be doing that as their job? Yeah, I actually had that.

I think I mentioned the talk on a small scale with my first game. I had like a kid who was just in Afghanistan. It was like maybe 16 or something. We'd just like be playing it all the day, every day.

And how that game worked is the game had ads and the money from the ads I'd kind of give back to the players in Bitcoin. So, in a way, he was like watching ads or viewing ads and getting some money for watching it.

I think a more interesting business model and I'd love for a game developer or a game studio out there to kind of contact us and work on it together. But I kind of like the idea that a lot of people play games, but games nowadays are kind of like a full time job. If you want to get good at a game,

you're going to play like eight hours a day. They're so hot. Some of these games. Yeah, literally. It's not just like 30 minutes anymore a day. But people have to work, right? So, I think there are a few companies at the moment. I know this one in Korea that

whilst you go to work, you pay somebody to play the game for you to level up your character. I think that would be a really interesting way to do it. So, if you have a game, you basically, you pay somebody's stats in a poorer country just to play your game whilst you're sleeping. So, they're kind of like playing it for you and

earning the stats to make sure your level is your character is leveled up, or you've gathered enough ingredients or something. So, I think that's a really simple thing in a market around that could.

There already is a market, by the sounds of it. People are doing this now. I heard it about it in Korea, yeah. But I think it's not as direct, you know, you hire a company, or I don't know, it's a bit clunky, right?

But I think there's people who are willing to pay others to play a game for them. For sure, yes. So, it would work presumably better for both parties. At the moment, that's only accessible in Korea, because then they have a banking system and most people in South Korea, but people in India or Africa can't do that.

But why shouldn't they be able to do it? They'd be just good. They'd probably be cheaper as well, you know. So, that's one aspect. I think there's a few companies, a similar thing in Africa, where I think they train captures. So, you have to do the capture, where you have to choose all the traffic lights in the image.

Obviously, somebody has to, at first, the way that works is, I think a human has to first say which one is these are the traffic lights and tell the computer that, you know. So, it needs a human at the beginning to kind of sort out which is which. I think that's being done.

This company is at the moment in Africa, but, you know, those people, kind of, it's not for everybody, you know, like those are kind of the middle-class in Africa that can do that. But that could be something that, if a poor country just has like a cheap smartphone, they could just do that and just guess that's directly, right?

That would make sense, you know. So, as the cost of these smartphones drops and this becomes sort of more user-friendly, I can definitely see it as a trend. And it's a good one as well. It's like, you're helping people who don't have another option, get money, that they couldn't otherwise get, which is amazing.

I think, I don't know about yourself, but for me, that's why I'm here. This stuff is just, I think, I really believe this stuff can change the world. And I think what you guys are doing is a key that no one would ever think of.

Unless you're in this space already, he'd never think gaming can help people's lives. It's strange because it should be intuitive because that's how, like, you know, money should work. Like, I guess we get accustomed to the idea of, you know, using cards.

And I have nothing really against, like, credit cards per se. I use a credit card. I like getting, like, reward points, you know. But just the fact that, you know, money is permissioned. It's just, it should be foreign to us, but it's not, you know, such a new concept, isn't it?

Yeah, like, for me personally, I kind of find, like, the idea of a cashless society is one of the things I find a bit most scary, right? You know? Yeah. The idea that, like, because at the moment, cash is dying out, right?

And it wouldn't surprise me, like, five, ten years. Yeah. You go to the supermarket and you have to pay by card. It's already happening. Yeah. It's already, like, slowly but surely it's happening more and more.

Oh, yeah. The implications of that are, you know, if you can only pay by card at a supermarket, you basically have to be KYC'd to buy food. And then they know you're spending habits, they know everything about it.

They can turn you off, right? You know. Yeah. And then before you know, you're in, like, a dystopian state, right? And, well, I think that's the way it's going, but sure. But people are trading off ease of use for, they're not really thinking, right?

Oh, well, if I just, because it is so easy, isn't it? You just get your phone and just, you know, tap the screen and it's dumb. I use it, you know? I mean, I use it as well. And it is easy.

But it's just, we're not thinking about, yeah, like, say, where it can go. I don't mind it happening as long as we have, like, Bitcoin, you know what I mean? Yeah. Because Bitcoin wasn't there, I'd be a lot more concerned.

I'd probably be more, like, pro, like, let's just use cash. Yeah. I kind of don't mind us going, like, cashless, i.e., like, we don't have physical notes of coins. Because we've got, like, we have a strong Bitcoin as a backup.

Yeah. There's, like, a safety net. Yeah, exactly. OK. All right. I think Andreas says there's, like, a counterbalance. Yeah. Which is what it is. It's like, OK, you know, if you go too far one way, if you start really messing with people, well, there is this counterbalance.

And people will then say, well, I've had enough, I'm going to Bitcoin. I think we kind of see that as well. In other technologies, um, Giacomo Zuko, who's, this is mine now. I think he did a tour once before.

He's kind of saying a similar thing kind of happened with, like, pirating and, like, iTunes or something or, like, Netflix and Popcorn Time is, like, as soon as, like, things start to get too expensive on, like, buying, like, you know, or if they become too cumbersome to download this and pay for a song, people start to pirate.

Yeah. And because people start to pirate, then, um... it forces them to be forced to make better services that are cheaper and streamline. So I think a lot of people don't pirate because it's easier now just to sign up for a spot.

Exactly. It's not because, um... I remember a similar thing where, um, I had a friend who, he wanted to listen to a song and his CD was downstairs. It was easier for him to download it than it was to go and get the CD from down to downstairs.

So I kind of think that this kind of, like, pirate technology, we kind of need it to keep in check the Paytiff. So I think maybe you could have a summer thing with, like, say, Bitcoin and credit cards, you know?

Mm-hmm. You've kind of Bitcoin and Lightning kind of forces credit card companies to behave or, you know? Like, in a way, I guess you don't have a monopoly. Or the same, if sound money forces governments to be more responsible.

Well, yeah. It's fine having credit cards in governments because we've got something that keeps it in check, you know? Yeah, absolutely. It's fine to have all of those things as long as they behave and we didn't have anything before Bitcoin as a counterbalance.

And if we had gone fully cashless and we didn't have Bitcoin, we'd be in real trouble. Yeah. Well, I think Japan is quite an interesting country. I live there. And they're a cashless society. People don't use cards, funnily enough, which is...

Oh, really? Yeah, they're quite an advanced society, but they, it's weird, you know? Like, when I lived in Japan, I used cash all the time. And when it seems I came to England, I started using cards, credit cards.

But yeah, they're strange. And I think it kind of comes from that people don't trust cards, maybe at some level or something. Okay. But how long was it you were in Japan for? About 10 or 11 years or something.

Yeah. We spoke about it on the way here in the car, but it sounds like an awesome place. Sounds so interesting. The difference between the two just... I kind of find England interesting now because I've been living in Japan.

It's kind of become like a climatized deal and now I find stuff in England strange and weird. But no, but it's definitely an interesting place. And yeah, it's a great place. Yeah, it's definitely on my top of my list, places to go.

I've always talked about going to China, but some of the things that are going on there and getting me off from going, whereas Japan still, I wouldn't feel bad. I think Japan must be, because it's like, I think it's the most...

One of the most advanced kind of capitalist, kind of safe Asian countries to go to. Obviously there's lots of nice Asian countries, but they're either not capitalist or the communist. Or the capitalist, but they're kind of still developing.

You know, Japan is very comfortable in that respect. I think it's the third biggest economy or second. It's the third, I think, China second, but it's much nicer than most first-world countries.

Because it is a first-world country, right? Which is very strange to have in Asia, right? Most of the other countries, obviously it's a different thing. You go to Thailand or somewhere like that.

But Japan is like, it's Asian culture, but also quite comfortable. In a way, you have things work, you clean water, all that kind of thing. You're not going to have to be concerned about being mugged or getting some sort of...

It's completely safe out there. Yeah, it's completely safe, yeah. The only thing I didn't feel safe about is, you know, you always have this idea that's going to be a massive earthquake in these sections.

You know, when you're like on the subway, you kind of think, "What is this an earthquake?" Well, I'd be trapped here. Especially in Tokyo, there's like a big one that's overdue, right? Yeah, it's a big one every hundred years and it's overdue.

That must be quite worrying. I think I was there when the last big earthquake I was there. So that wasn't actually in Tokyo, but it was so strong that you felt it in Tokyo. That was the one with Fukushima, with the power plant, that famously went into meltdown.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost went there. So that was kind of like scared in me. I wouldn't say scared me, but that kind of like left a little bit of a trauma maybe, you know? I remember when that happened, I was like thinking, "It's the building meant to be sideways."

You know, kind of thing, you know? What did it feel like? I mean, I was actually getting ready for work and I was getting changed. And then the building, I had tremors before. Well, I just thought it was a trauma, but then it started to get bigger and bigger.

I was in an apartment, so it was quite high up. And the higher you are, the more the building sways, right? A lot of the time, if you're on the floor, you don't notice earthquakes. But if you're in an apartment building, and then I just remember the building being sideways.

And they always tell you, like, "Never leave your apartment to this earthquake," you know? But your first instinct is to get out of that, right? Yeah, of course. So I kind of like told my wife we'd better get out the building.

And she was like, "Wait, I've got to put my makeup on or something." "No, get out of the building." So I picked her up and we ran down the fire exit. And like everybody was running out at the building.

And then it was strange because people were panicking and running out. And on the fire kind of stairs, the escape stairs, I bumped into another person in the building. A typical Japanese style that kind of stops it.

And you first, no, you first, no, you first. You'll be completely complete. And then after that, then he continued to go, "Ah, and run down." Yeah, and so that was quite scary. Like the earthquake itself, it was amazing.

I think any other country would probably have a lot more like riots and people stealing. But in Japan, it's a nice country, like all the power went tough, right? And the power went tough for a while and everything stopped working, the phone stopped working.

And because of the power plant, they also turned off all the nuclear power stations. Right. So then there was a power shortage, so they had like planned blackouts and everything. But everybody was kind of nice in a way because Tokyo turned off all its lights for quite a while.

And it kind of, in a way, kind of brought people together. Oh, that's nice. It wouldn't happen here. We'd have riots. Yeah, it would be carnage. The only thing that happened is that some people were a bit naughty and they'd buy too much stuff from the supermarket.

Because obviously there's a bit of a food shortage. I'm not sure if there was a food shortage or if people thought the world. So people would go into the supermarket and try to buy all the milk and bread.

It was the only thing I really ate. People were like kind of hoarding. Well, apart from that, it wasn't too bad. But apart from that, Japan's a fairly, it's a very safe country. And do you see a lot of Bitcoin usage out there?

But Japan is, I think, one of the forefront in a way. Oh, it's a lot of that actually, you know, probably am I getting trouble for saying that. But a lot of that is due to Roger Verra, because he is in the early days.

He was out there kind of, he was going round and like promoting Bitcoin and getting all the stores to accept it. So a lot of stores started to accept it. The biggest department store in Japan, which is, I think, it's hard to say what it would be like.

It'd probably be like, I don't know, it's hard to compare it to a Western store. But it's like the biggest department store. It's normally sells electrical things. But I don't know what you have in England.

Something like, I don't know, maybe in America, it'd be something like Target. You know, I get big stores everywhere, every station has it. They accepted Bitcoin. So, you know, you could live off Bitcoin quite easily.

But I don't think it got much actual usage, right? Because people don't necessarily want to spend their Bitcoin. Yeah. And it's still a taxable event, right? It's the biggest problem with it.

What is it? It's capital gains, is it the same out there? It's like capital gains when... Yeah, no, no, tell me about it. Yeah, and it's complicated. So, and, you know, also it's just like, it's not a more pleasurable experience buying physical things in a physical store with Bitcoin.

It's not really fixing a problem. Like, you know, the system paying with cash in Japan or card works fine. Yeah, I agree. You know, some people did it. And I think like, tourists, for example, we didn't have yen, they would do it.

I had like a few tourists who kind of, like, the card didn't work or something. So, you could send them some Bitcoin and they could actually feed themselves. So, that was quite nice to have it as an option.

But yeah, but Japan was quite... Quite a big community. Progressive, yeah. But, yeah, but they also, it's not just Bitcoin, they also like other coins over there. I think Ripple is very, very big in Japan.

Wow. I don't know why. Yeah, that's amazing. Did you meet Roger? Yeah, a few times, yeah. So, yeah, he's actually the founder of the Bitcoin meet-up there. Right, okay. So, also, we need to attend that weekly.

And now, that's the Bitcoin cash meet-up. And there's another Bitcoin meet-up there. If you're going to Tokyo, look for the Bitcoin hackers meet-up, which is... Right, the Bitcoin... Bitcoin meet-up, yeah.

I always feel like it didn't start from a place of trying to... trying to cause problems. No, no. It just feels like he's really misguided to me. I think a lot. Yeah, it's just... I'll try and...

Yeah, I'll have a biscuit. I don't want to make too many munching noises. I'll edit any bits out. I try and keep the conversations fairly. No. I'll try and say nice things about Roger. I don't know him too well, you know.

I think he's genuine in his belief. He really wants to change the world, he wants to help people with Bitcoin. I just think some of his thinking is a little bit... I think he gets confused.

He's very passionate. He's passionate, yeah. But, like you say, just confused. I think some things he'll do things which... Like, for example, he's supporting Hex, that kind of scam point.

Really? Yeah, they put on bitclean.com, right? I try not to. Sometimes he shoots himself in the foot and... Well, he was in bit CSW and all of that sort of stuff. Oh, well, I was kind of there when that all happened.

I was actually in the room. Before CSW came out, we actually had this Bitcoin event. And Roger was invited, I think, the lady. Miss Bitcoin Japan, she organised it. And she's like an old friend with Roger.

So she invited Roger to come over and do the... Like, just speak at something, you know, just to show his face. And he spoke... He did, like, a Q&A at the end. And this is when all the tension was happening.

Like, the wars, the block, size wars, you know. Like, I think Roger was, I think, supporting Bitcoin Classic or Limited at the time. And, um, joining the Q&A, somebody said, you know, if you got any information that you can tell us, you know, some inside the knowledge.

And he said, and he kind of had this massive, happy grin on his face. He said, well, actually, I shouldn't say this, but Satoshi Nakamoto is coming out soon. We've got the words. We're going to announce it.

So he had heard about, like, this was, you know, Craig Wright. Like, a few weeks later, Craig Wright came out with the BBC interview and everything. But just kind of like the look on his face, he was so happy that, like, Satoshi was coming out and he was a big blocker.

And then... Sorry, I just moved. Yeah. Obviously Craig Wright was nice, Satoshi. I mean, a child could see that. But I'd be gutted if the real Satoshi came out. Yeah, and he knew he was. It would not ruin...

I think we should be comfortable with the fact that he's a horrible person. That we've ever done come out. It shouldn't matter. Yeah, not look at him as like a god, just like what he's done is awesome.

Well, it's kind of like a point to me made with somebody like Isaac Newton. So everybody, like, Newtonian physics is great, but Isaac Newton was a terrible person. You know, he would basically... I think he had somebody he didn't like, so he bought up all the paintings of him and burnt them.

And all this because nobody would remember him in history. So I think it was a terrible person. So I think Satoshi could be the same, right? Yeah, of course. And most geniuses are not the most nice...

Or just the weird, right? And the rude or something, you know? But I don't know, but like Craig, right? I remember when Craig, right? He came to Tokyo and at that time the Bitcoin meet-up was very divided.

So we'd go to the meet-up and there would be like most people that were big blockers. And it'd be a few of us kind of like small blockers, I guess. It would just be like sent to the corner where we'd sit and talk to ourselves.

It wasn't literally sent, but there's that kind of... Yeah, definitely. I think it was like me and three other people. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Like me, probably Nicola Doria or something.

And you know, Craig, right, came to the meet-up and everybody. Like everybody was like, "Hi, fiving him in gin and buying him drinks." It's like the Savior had come. And we kind of just said like, "Look, Roddy's a scam."

He's using you because he's telling you what you want to hear. You know, he knows you guys have money. No, no, no, no. He's fine. You just say, you know. And yeah, and you know, I think Craig, right, just played them all.

And then as it came out now, Roger, I think eventually he saw the light and to his credit, he made a video saying, "Look, you know, I was wrong." Yeah. But it was just like those little things with Roger.

You kind of think like sometimes maybe it's because he's a nice person inside. He trusts people, but there's been a few incidents like that. I mean, it's just like you look at my view of like whoever Satoshi is or was.

Like you say, I would say they're a genius. I would say my image of who they're going to be is nothing, nothing, nothing. Like a Craig Wright. And the things that Craig Wright is talking about are like so the other way of what Bitcoin stands for and was built for.

It's changed his tune. If you ever like, I can't, I follow the Craig Wright thing. I have interest. I just found like an interesting kind of story. But I remember, I'd say I also have a friend who remember him from his old Twitter account.

So this is before he had an old one. And this is before he came out as Satoshi like back in 2000, maybe 1340 or something like that. He had his old account. And he changes what he says is opinions depending on who he's working with, right?

So I think six gamma. Now he seems to be very much for like we are working with governments and banks and regulation. But I remember when he first came out, it was, it had a different tune.

So I guess maybe it's who he was talking to, right? So I think now, you know, I don't want to say anything, they'll get me into trouble. But maybe he's, you know, he's trying to impress a certain type of client or something.

So he's gonna, you know, because that's the sort of, that's what I've seen as that side. And I've been like, what are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's odd. Yeah, I don't know. He just reminds me of, I'm not sure of any of your listeners have ever seen them, 40 towers.

I think it's the first episode with Lord Melbury. Right. OK. So Basil is a complete snob. He just wants to be, he wants to be friends with the lords and the ladies. Lord Melbury, the con man comes in and basically is everything that Basil wants to see.

So he believes him completely. You know, I kind of think it's a little bit like that, right? He comes in and he, you know, people, certain people want to believe he is. Yes, of course. So Toshi, he agrees and, you know, yeah, that's odd.

So the hacker, the Bitcoin hacker group is for any listeners who fund himself in Tokyo. Yeah, Bitcoin, Tokyo hackers. Yeah, Tokyo hackers is the place for the real Bitcoin meet up. Yeah. And that's managed by, I think, Wiz, if people know him on Twitter, Wiz.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's like a real, he's like the most cyberpunk sovereign guy. Oh, no. He has his own, like, internet service provider or something like that. Yeah, I listened to an interview with him. He's a cool guy.

Yeah, I know. He's got some interesting stories. Hasn't he got some involvement with this? Is that right? Yeah, yeah. He's working with Bess. Yeah. I think he's just trying to solve the issue that, you know, how to buy Bitcoin without having to KYC or, yeah.

I've used Bess a little bit. It's pretty good. It's like actually sort of somewhere in the middle of, you're not KYC, but you still have someone has your details. So it's not quite cash, but it's pretty good.

The only thing I've found is that in the UK, anyway, the liquidity is really poor. I think it's a really good product. I can't think of, yeah, it's a guess. It's a little bit, you know, it's like the chicken in the egg, right?

How do you start that liquidity going? Hopefully, one day, you know, there'll be something, I don't know, maybe exchanges really clamp down. You know, and as people flocked up Bess can just put some orders there, and then it kind of, there's no balls from there.

But I think, but Wizz is trying to work with them to try and make it more user-friendly, you know. But, yeah, it's a difficult problem to solve, but, you know, I think we'll get there eventually.

Pretty user-friendly. Like I said, I'm not a techy person. No, I think it's quite good. Yeah, it's fine. It took me half an hour just to sort of sit and work, you know, just play around, and I was like, okay, yeah, this is all right.

Like, it's not as simple as like something like Coinbase. Sure, yeah. Most people work it out. Yeah, I think it's pretty decent. Yeah, you know, I think it could say it's just the liquidity issue.

But I think, like I said, it's people, I think people maybe aren't aware of the dangers of buying on KYC exchanges, you know. Especially, you know, like, I don't know, always worry one day that, you know, somebody will buy Bitcoin on an exchange.

And they'll forget about it, and then some government introduces the Bitcoin tax, you know. And somebody says, hey, by the way, you owe us 10 grand because Bitcoin went up this much, and that person's like, well, I don't have it.

Yeah, I lost it. I don't know. I was gaming or something. I don't know what happened. So, well, no, you have to prove to us you don't have it, and then they've got to go through all this legal issue.

Yeah, you know, that's the problem with it. So, yeah, I have no intention of buying on a KYC exchange. No, we're just just for safety and the principal reasons, really. I think with lightning, all these cases where it creates the circular economy, the way I see it is really, really early.

And, you know, it's still a really fringe thing, but with gaming and with people buying online. And sort of, once you have more of that, and from what I understand, lightning actually helps with privacy to some extent,

I do see that we're almost just in this transition period where people will still always go to KYC exchanges, especially new people, because it's like, for them, it's more trustworthy. Sure, yeah, no, no.

But once you understand why we have Bitcoin and why maybe KYC is not a good idea, that once you get used to that and there's all these options and this network grows, it's going to become much, much easier and much more private.

And I sort of do hold, always, I try not to get too overexcited, but it feels to me like lightning is sort of, this is the key to unlocking, you know, it feels really like it's an important step.

I wouldn't say it's lightning per se, I think it's the concept that you don't, because originally on Bitcoin, any change you had to make had to be like a protocol change and need consensus.

And it's very difficult to get changes in, but what lightning shows is, like what lightning is, are just basically agreements between two parties, the rest of the network doesn't have to know about.

So that concept of that now that as long as party A and party B agree on something, then they can use the Bitcoin base layer, it's like a settlement layer. I think you can innovate quite quickly.

On top of that, a lightning network is obviously the first use case of that, but just that concept, you know, there. And there'll be more, no doubt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think once we have a bit technical, but if something like L2, if that did, then that will even help even more. There's a few interesting proposals.

I've heard a little bit about L2, but I say I'm not so technical and probably a lot of my listeners aren't. Can you describe a little bit more what L2 would allow or enable? OK, let me try. Sorry.

No, no, no, no, it's good. I think for lightning specifically, it would just allow a much better user experience. The idea that currently the way lightning is enforced is you have this concept of if somebody tries to cheat you, there's a punishment transaction.

So if somebody tries to cheat you in lightning, you get a period where you can kind of like prove that they are cheated, that they are cheating you, and then you basically get all their stats.

But it just makes the protocol a bit more complicated to do that. So L2 simplifies that way. It basically makes it so they can't cheat it even if they wanted to. Where currently it's like they can cheat, but the incentive of them to not cheat is that if they cheat

and you realize which you should, then you'll be able to steal their funds, but they can still give it a try in a way. Is that why we have these watchtowers? Yeah, you still need watchtowers with L2, but it's another reason, like with a lightning channel, you need to have like,

you can't spend all your funds because you need something to lose if you try and cheat. And also there's like a storage overhead how it works. But L2 itself actually, it's actually not L2 per say, it's the thing behind L2.

So it's actually called SIG Hashno Input, which is basically a new kind of rule opcode in a Bitcoin. And that allows you to do L2 on lightning. That SIG Hashno Input lets you do other stuff on Bitcoin.

So there's another interesting thing that I'm quite excited about called state chains, which is, and again, it's like lightning in a way, it's like a technically, it's a layer two technology, I guess.

This is done by Ruben Thompson, if people know him, he proposed it. But it's kind of like a more, I guess in a way, it's like a more trustless side chain. So if we have the SIG Hashno Input or L2, we'd be able to make these state chains.

And not to get too technical, but one thing I can see it being useful is it would allow you to have like a Bitcoin off chain NFTs, which you can't do on lightning. And it's hard to do on other chains because you can do it on Ethereum, but Ethereum is, I think, it's not too, in my opinion, it has scaling issues.

Non-fungible token. Yeah, so just going back to gaming, you know, lightning would be used for maybe payments. But say you could have like a token that represents a game item. So say in a game I have like a sword, and that sword, the ownership of that sword is represented by a token,

a sword token, and with L2, or SIG Hashno Input, you could build a state chain, which would basically just allow me to send other players that token off chain, so it would be very cheap. There'd be no fee to send that. There would be no fee to send it, I think.

So it could, in theory, could you have a sword, which you own, and then you could send that to another player, like you had in your game the other day where you're checking the bomb in and you can have participation from viewers?

Could they maybe use that token to throw into a separate game? Yeah, so this is actually what I kind of did before lightning, actually. There was actually a token protocol on Bitcoin. It still exists. It's called Counterparty.

It's kind of predates Ethereum. And we were doing like tokens for gaming at it. I made a few games that used this. There is a popular Bitcoin game called the Spell of Genesis. It's like a card game, a digital card game. All those cards were represented as tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain.

And I made a game where I let anybody who had those tokens use the same game items in my game. If they had that token in a wallet, my game would detect they've got this Satoshi card. And I will give them access to a Satoshi currency in my game.

So you could have these kind of cross-game game items. That's really cool. Yeah, yeah. And that's the thing that was done on Bitcoin, but obviously it's hard to do. It was expensive to do on the main base layer. And arguably you don't want to spam the base layer too much.

Well, let's argue. Yeah. People are spam if you pay for it, right? That's the way I look at it. Well, true, that's technically true. Yeah. But in a way, so we were making these token transactions on the Bitcoin chain.

And the fee market is what stopped us doing it. So in a way, kind of the Bitcoin itself, its mechanism worked. Because that's kind of what stops people spamming or filling the blockchain full of data because it's too expensive to do so.

So we did that and it got expensive. So all my contemporaries moved over to Ethereum and they had the same issue on that. But they have some scaling solutions, which I'm not an expert on.

But now with something like state chains, it becomes, yeah, you could do that on Bitcoin off-chain, which is quite nice. So on Bitcoin, technically, it's settled on Bitcoin, but it's off-chain, yeah.

So we look going, I've noticed with a lot of developers, they don't like to look too far into the future. It seems to be like these are the problems we got in front of us. I want to fix these.

I'm a bit more of a dreamer, like I like to look 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, ow. So if you were just entertaining my ideas for me. No, I love this stuff. Okay, all right. So have you seen the, I always talk about this film on this podcast, but have you seen Ready Player One?

I haven't seen it yet. I know of it though. Okay. So you could get, you know, the sort of basic, like the end to like in the R world or something? Yeah. So it's set in 2050. It's quite dystopian. People are living in like shipping containers and the world's fucked, basically.

Okay. Did you film that in Birmingham? No one said a lot. Did they? I don't know. Like where can we choose a dystopian, like horrible place? I don't know. Yeah. So set in Birmingham. It's filmed. They have this sort of escape, which is the virtual reality world.

And they put on their VR and they have like body suits, so they can feel like, you know, if you get punch, you feel it in the, we can get hit in the shoulder, you feel it there, and they can run on sort of like a treadmill thing that goes each way.

So because the world around them haptic and knee treadmill, right? Something like that. Yeah. And so because the world outside is pretty terrible, what they'll do is they'll put on their VR stuff and they'll meet their friends in these virtual worlds.

And there's all the different games. You can go to the beach and go surfing or there's like, I don't know, like Call of Duty or whatever it is and you just enter. But in there, they have this thing where all the coins and things that they, so if they kill someone, they'll take what they have.

So that's like, in my head is like NFTs. That's like, they've killed that person. So now they take their sword and they've taken it in a game where they're like surfing and they've beaten that character or whatever.

But they can then jump into another game with all of those things. Can you see sort of 30 years out or 20 years out, whatever it's going to be, that we can have virtual reality that people can not only go to meetings and chat to people in virtual reality,

but they can also game and they have their Bitcoin as their money and they have their non-functional tokens that can then be traded between players. We're taking it as the extreme where you might have a kid who is really, really good at a certain game.

They can go in, they can kill a character, take their Bitcoin and their sword and their this and their that and then they can go into a virtual sort of market basically and sell to people.

Can this be possible? Yes and no. I could actually thought about this myself and I think it's definitely possible, but I'm not sure it's the same as what people think it would be. So, for example, I think there's a distinction between a Bitcoin in a game and an NFT in a game. I think a little bit two different things.

Bitcoin is Bitcoin only, it is itself. A Bitcoin in your wallet is the same as a Bitcoin in a game. It's the same thing. An NFT just represents something digital in a game.

So, for example, I think there was one presentation of a game developer who was saying, "With NFTs, you can have true ownership in a game, so if I have this spaceship token, this spaceship is my spaceship and I can send it to a player, then it's their spaceship."

But that's not true because all that token does is give you access to a spaceship in that game, but ultimately that game is controlled by the developers. So, you might have this spaceship token. You go into the game, but the developers can just say, "Don't give Max a spaceship, even if he has a spaceship token."

So, I think that if you have a world where you have game developers making games and say there's a fantasy game and there's a sci-fi game, and the game developers agree that these tokens will represent the game items in the game, you're still at the mercy of those game developers, right?

And it wouldn't necessarily be interoperable. And you rob them. And then, apparently, you say that you shouldn't have done that, or you've done it in a bad way, or you've tripped them, or you've socially engineered, or you've broke the rules, then the game developer can just reverse that transaction.

Maybe, you know, that's why I think it's not as simple. Well, they could do it with... It kind of depends how you implement it, right? So, like, if I'm playing a game and I end up SATs, and that's a cent to me, and it's non-custodal, they can't reverse that.

But if I'm playing a game and I steal somebody's spaceship and they send me a spaceship NFT token, they can still blacklist me, like, you know, I can't use that spaceship in the real world outside of the game in a way, but the SATs I could.

But say I wanted to... I had that spaceship token, and that token has now become, like, blacklisted, or I've become blacklisted. I might go back to the game and find out, hey, no, you can't actually redeem the spaceship token for the actual digital spaceship, because, you know, we don't think you should have it.

Maybe you're still able to send that token to somebody else, but in a way, I think you're still with NFTs. Again, it's not like Bitcoin represents itself, did it, but a token, again, it's more of a... It's like a link to an item, but it's not necessarily an item.

That's why I think it's a little bit more difficult. Having said that, if we go 100 years in the future, maybe you could have, I think some people have played this, you know, where the developers don't make the game, so maybe you could have games that are run by some sort of, like, decentralized AI.

So in a way that there's no developers controlling it, so they couldn't stop you, because there's some sort of consensus algorithms where all the developers, all the nodes, the AI nodes, decide if people get blacklisted.

So maybe you could have something like that in the future, but then I can't even imagine what kind of game that would make, right? It sounds like the matrix almost, doesn't it?

It does sound weird. Yeah, but I guess maybe in 100 years time. So really, maybe it's better than any NFTs or anything that you get in a game. Maybe you can sell them within that game to other players for Satsback.

You could sell them outside the game as well. So one other thing was when we played around with NFTs, Counterparty actually had a DEX, a decentralized exchange. It worked quite well, apart from fees made it expensive to use, but the idea is that people could trade, like, the game items outside of the game, and people could do that, right?

So, like, I had some game items that people traded on the DEX outside of the game, so a user acquired a game item via a token from the exchange, not from my game, and it came to my game, and he could use it.

So I think that's in a way where NFTs are kind of used, but I think the main purpose of NFTs at the moment is just this more this concept of a shared database. It's like a standard where games want to do trading or they want to kind of be interoperable with other games.

Those game companies' programs don't have to get together and agree some sort of collaboration. It's just like a standard. Imagine, like, any one mainstream game, which is, if they were to go on a blockchain, they would completely stop that blockchain from working.

I think that CryptoKitty's pretty much kind of stopped Ethereum, and that wasn't even a popular game in the scope of games, right? So that's the main issue with them. If you have a blockchain that allows you to register tokens, i.e. it's basically a database. You store tokens in your database.

And what's the cost for that? If it's free, then every indie developer will be just dumping their tokens on there. If it's not free, then the usability starts to hurt because it's too expensive to use these tokens.

I think there's all these kind of things which are making energy hard, in my opinion. And the trailer for the moment is people are using databases and calling them blockchains. Yes, they'd hate to admit that.

I took your game show a few years back, and there was this project built on Ethereum. He said, "We all our game items are tokens on Ethereum, and the game looked really, really cool, so I went over to them, and I kind of knew that it was probably nonsense."

And I said, "Oh wow, so how does that work? Are really all your game items on Ethereum on chain working?" I was like, "Oh no, no, we actually have a side chain. We're using an Ethereum side chain."

At a time, I knew there was no real production side chain out there. So what side chain on Ethereum are you using? Actually, it's our database, but the user can make a withdrawal request to go to the main chain if they want to.

So really, they just had in-game game items where there's no difference. A user could withdraw what they were saying in their media was like, "We have an Ethereum, NFT, decentralized blockchain kind of games."

Probably raised a couple hundred million as well. Maybe. I don't blame them technically, because that makes a lot more sense to you. You want to make a game, just keep the game items in the database in a way.

It's just using the hype, isn't it, the blockchain hype. I've noticed from the little time I've been in this space, it's sort of not died out, but maybe it's because I'm in my own echo chamber, but it seems more and more people are sort of realizing and accepting that blockchains aren't magical.

It's not useful for a lot of things to chuck the word blockchain in with it. It's very specific things that it's going to be good for. Use it for those things and then use these layer two solutions to do those other things.

A lot of these projects just seem like absolute nonsense to me. They just don't make a lot of sense to me what they're trying to do with blockchains. It seems like people are sort of waking up to it a little bit more.

Perhaps, yeah, again, I'm probably in the butt by a circle. I just hang out with developers in Bitcoin, so they kind of know. But speaking to new people, I think they have no idea that any other blockchain is better or worse than any other.

I think most people I speak to, they just think blockchain is a technology you can copy and paste. So you kind of hear this, it's not really Bitcoin, it's interesting. Even here is some kind of famous or people who've been to Bitcoin for a long time who still kind of spout this.

The idea that it's Bitcoin isn't the amazing thing, it's the blockchain technology. But I think it's completely backwards because you can't just copy and paste a blockchain technology. I kind of like to say that if you try to make Bitcoin now, you can't do, it wouldn't work.

I think the thing that Bitcoin works is because it had this immaculate conception. It was kind of had this period where it started off and the founder disappeared and nobody paid attention so it could spread out and decentralize.

You can't copy and paste that in the network effect. That's why I think the blockchain technology, maybe there's something for distributed ledger technology. You can find financial institutions to find that interesting.

That's not blockchain. No, I agree. Like you say, it wouldn't work now because it doesn't have that element of surprise almost. How would you do the consensus if you did it with proof of work?

People have got all these mining rigs set up and they just hijack your chain, which is what we've actually seen when people, you know, we can't spread out. How do you fund it, you know? Yeah, it's interesting, I pretty much see it as like we've got one chance.

But the way I look at it is, and I don't understand the most technical details, but looking at it as like a social experiment is that we've got one chance. And as far as I can see it, that's Bitcoin because it is, to me, it looks like the only one that's decentralized.

Yeah, well, I think that's why a lot of people are so conservative when they go into block size, you know? Like, obviously, would it be nice if we just increase a block size, you know, helped a few businesses, you know, having issues, but we can't risk it, you know?

For what? Risk it so that you can buy a coffee. Risk this counterbalance we're talking about. Risk the one chance we have this counterbalance, the one chance where people can actually make sure that governments and big businesses don't take advantage of them.

And then to risk that so that you can buy a cup of coffee that you can buy anyway or, you know, do some useless nonsense. That's why I really, really respect when I listen to what the developers are doing and that that slow incremental, like, really taking time.

But when you first come in, you're like, "Oh, well, the next thing is faster and it's quicker and it can do this and it can do that." And so you don't realize that probably have got one chance and that conservative nature is what's made Bitcoin survive.

And I really appreciate that anyway. I think that that is definitely the way to go. It would seem like a waste. No, no, yeah. I completely agree. And I just also think that, you know, technically point of view, just increasing the block set doesn't make any sense.

It's like you keep adding lanes to a road instead of, like, making a train or anything like that. Yeah, but I think a lot of people, especially a lot of newbies or something will kind of like tech people, I think they've always missed, understood Bitcoin from the beginning.

I think they always thought, "I think this is the idea with, like, I kind of like to call Bitcoin an anti-technology." Like, a lot, people hear Bitcoin and see it's technology. And people have this idea, this, like, kind of San Francisco app idea of technology, that technology is all about kind of making things easier and being usable.

I'm not saying that Bitcoin shouldn't be that, but it's the idea that, you know... That's the most important thing. Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin is like an anti-technology. It's not about necessarily being easy like Venmo or something.

It's first priority is to, you know, kind of be... Be decentralized. Well, decentralized, like, I wouldn't even say, like, I think, I like to think that decentralized is kind of like a side effect.

The main effect is that you can be sovereign, you know, and you can not rely on a third party. If everybody can do that, that's what makes it decentralized, you know? But that's very kind of hard to say to people, you know, that I think that's why Bitcoin gets a lot of, like, heat for, like, not being usable, right?

You know, it's like terrible, you know, like, the U.S. poor, which is poor compared to Venmo, but, you know, it's priorities, right? You know, if we did everything to make it, it's easy to use.

I think it's kind of what Bitcoin cash guys, I suppose, they wanted to do. They wanted to try and compete with, like, centralized apps, you know, because that's how technology works, right?

It's all about making a nicer user experience. But for the first time, it's like, or maybe not the first time, but it's, for me, it's interesting. It's like an anti-technology, right? Yeah, that makes sense. I hadn't really thought of it like an anti-technology, right?

Yeah. Obviously, we want to get to a point where, you know, it's as easy to use as possible, but, you know, not like the sacrifice of its core thing, you know? I think privacy is another thing like that, right? You know.

Yeah, another anti-technology. That's the one thing in Bitcoin where, like, in my head, this thing, there's no, or basically no drawbacks. And I see this as an obvious, more and more people are going to wake up and go.

Yeah. This is amazing. This is what we should be using. This is this counterbalance. But the, yeah, the usability isn't, to me, it's not even that bad. No, it's not that hot. It's not that hot. I downloaded that blue, blue bullet yesterday.

Like, I hadn't used it before, downloaded it on the train, on the way up to the meeting. And I was like, right, okay, and I'm not a technical person, and it took me five minutes. And it's fine. It's not, it's not hot.

Yeah. I think to, to kind of play devil's out, I think you hear, blue wallet is not really sovereign. No, okay. But I know you're saying it is, actually, I think there's a place for these custodial wallets.

It's a great way to get introduced to it. Yeah. You know, you get into, you start to use that, and then you start to learn more about it, and then maybe, and then you go to, yeah, but for five minutes to do that, and I think the experience was, I haven't used them though, but as good as anything.

Yeah, you don't have to sign up as good. No, I've, I've used. And then so if you use that and you say, okay, that was easy enough. And then you actually understand you can have complete control, and there's no third parties, and you have to spend even if it's an hour to mess around.

Or even if it's a weekend to say, like, all right, I'm going to set up a node. I'm going to have my, you know, have everything, hold my own keys and do all this sort of stuff. It takes you a weekend, the power that it gives you for spending a weekend.

That was great. I kind of think, like, I'm quite, I'll call out the ideas of, like, nodal in those cassoboxes. And BTC pay had their own one coming out with DG Labs, Japanese, did you just talk garage?

I can't remember, but it's a Japanese company. I think that they're working with them called Hack Zero, which is actually, it's Hacker, which in Japanese means box. It's kind of like, upon the words, but it's like, the idea is you just buy this inexpensive box, which is like a router or a modem.

You plug it in at home, like, on the shelf, and it's just, that's your sovereign. You only think you need to transact with anybody in the world without permission. That's kind of from a usual point of view.

Obviously, the only two there is just to get the cost down, you know. Yeah, that's the thing. I've been toying with the nodal because I think the nodal, you can set it up and you can have whirlpool and BTC pay.

And I think it's like an easy set up and it looks, it looks really good. Okay, it's not massive money, but it's like $400 or $499 or something like that. Which, for some reason, okay, I didn't raise this, it's not cheap.

Like, for someone company to me, it looks like the best option that I've seen. I've seen those cheaper options, but I should probably point out that I also, I do consulting with a Japanese company called Naita.

And they actually also, they build Lightning, a Lightning company. I think they also worked, they're one of the implementations, along with Claire and L&D, and what we're doing together. I actually, working with them, I managed to run a fully validating Bitcoin and Lightning node on a $40 Amazon fire stick in my TV.

Oh, really? Yes, that's what, I'm still working with them now and we're trying to get BTC pay server to work with it. The idea is that we can basically, we can compile a Lightning node and a Bitcoin full node, L&D and Bitcoin core.

We can compile them so they run on an Android operating system. Is that like a pruned node or is that a full? Yeah, it's a pruned node, so I think pruned nodes actually are fine because you're still, you're validating everything.

How many blocks did, how many blocks did they go back to pruned node? Well, you validate the whole chain first, but you don't say, like with Bitcoin, there's no point to save the whole blockchain once you've validated it.

It's like 200 gig or something like that. Yeah, you can do that actually. It doesn't have to be on pruned, but you just have to have some storage. The only reason why you'd want to keep the whole blockchain, if you want to help other people download the blockchain, you're seeding it, you know, kind of thing.

But if you just want to make sure, if you want to validate transactions and not rely on a third party, you can run it pruned because you validate it and that gives you a proof at the end.

That's the proof, that's the only thing you need. And there's actually some cool tech coming out which will let you kind of represent that proof in a QR code. So you basically have this like very like, you know, one kilobyte of data, even less, which is like the whole proof of the blockchain.

You've proved yourself and that will let you bootstrap a full node to your phone, for example, by just by scanning a QR code. It's kind of some cool stuff. But yeah, but the idea behind that is that anybody with like a cheap Android tablet, so like say that you're a merchant and you've got like a cheap Android tablet,

you just download Bitcoin and BTC pay, like it's all in just one app you download. And then you've just got like this sovereign store on your iPad. It's like, it's a fully, it's a full Bitcoin node.

It doesn't keep the archive data, but it's fully validating. And it's a store because you've got BTC pay server in there. And it's cheap because, you know, it's just an Android app. You don't have to buy specialized equipment.

So that's something that we're working on. It's just hopefully going to make running a full node much easier. It's the easiest downloading in app. But these are the sort of things that just make it so much more accessible.

Yeah, yeah, we're getting there, you know. Yeah, it is. But then there's always, I always find whenever I get to a point where like, "Oh, yeah, that sounds like the option for me." And then I'm like, "Oh, but can you run Tori?"

Or can you do this? Yeah, Tor will work on it. Oh, well, okay. But there's always something, you're like, there's always that extra because of the privacy aspect. Only issue with it is that if you have kind of this kind of full node,

full-lining node that I'm dealing with, Niuta, because it's designed to work on like Android tablets and devices, the idea is that it doesn't relay data on the network. So if you have like a full Bitcoin node, if somebody sends a transaction, you would like get that transaction and you'd pass it on, right?

You relay, you know, all the network. And the issue with that is there's a lot of overhead. It's like a terabyte of bandwidth. Yeah, it's quite high. So it's quite high, and that's very high for a mobile phone, right?

It's okay if you have like unlimited broadband at home. So what you can do is you can turn that off. You don't need it. The only thing you need to be able to like make and send transactions is something that downloads blocks, that verifies the blocks, and then basically lets you broadcast.

The problem is though, if you don't have that all that, so all that traffic that you're kind of relaying, that gives you extra privacy, because if you broadcast a transaction, you're not just broadcasting your own, you're broadcasting everybody's.

Yeah. So it's like, if you only broadcast your own, if you turn it off, you're only having one. People can say, "Hey, it's one, just come from your IP address." So you do lose privacy. It's like hiding in the crowd when you're broadcasting everything.

Exactly, yeah, but this way is around that again. It's like, it's a slow process, but there's some like proposals in like, in how things are broadcasted, that we can mitigate that. And then obviously, if you broadcast over a tour, that helps a lot.

And it's slower, isn't it? Yeah, but yeah, you know, everything's traded off. Well, yeah, that's the thing, it's what you find when you become a developer, it's like, "Yeah, can we do this now?" We're getting that slowly.

First, before I just go on to my next question, would you like a beer, or a coffee, or...? Yeah, I have a beer, why not? Yeah. Man, I just need your money. Yeah, no worries. Look, is this your artwork, by the way, huh?

Yeah, that's actually a piece of Bitcoin artwork there. Yeah, I don't know if you can turn on the... It's not the stenography, isn't it? I don't know if you can see, there's a code behind it.

It's in the middle where you've got jam, blue bit. The whole, all behind there, is what you've got in this mic, I'm sure. Yeah, okay, sure. It's got first block, or hidden behind it, and I've done...

The genesis block. Yeah. I've stopped the recording there, don't worry, you haven't missed anything. It's just me mumbling on about art and design for about 20 minutes. So join us for part two for more Bitcoin, Lightning, and Gaming.