EP74 Bitcoin podcast with Julian Liniger the Co-Founder & CEO of Relai

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

Now, what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.

Alright, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space, and deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's guest is Julian Linniger. He is the co-founder and CEO of Relay. Relay is onboarding users in a KYC free or as close to it as you can. Manor, they still have to have your I-band number, but they don't take any other details.

It's a pretty interesting concept and it's available to people in Europe. I had a really good chat with him. We had some technical issues as is usual, but actually not on my end for once.

I had some issues also with background noise. I've really done my best to edit all of that out and make it as clear as possible. It's worse for the first sort of five, 10 minutes, something like that.

But I hope it's bearable. I hope you should enjoy. Definitely gets better as the interview goes on. There were some long gaps and pauses which I've edited out, so we ran a little bit over.

So it's a little bit of a shorter one this episode, but yeah, really enjoyed chatting to him, really like what he's built, and yeah, go check it out. For anyone who is in the UK and is looking to stack Sats, you're looking to dollar cost average.

Don't forget my sponsors, Coin Floor UK. They have incredible security. They're very, very upfront. I love their team, and I wanna say thank you for sponsoring the show and allowing me to continue with it.

I really do appreciate it, and it's well worth checking them out. It is worth also using my referral code. That is in these show notes. It gives me a little bit of help when you do stack Sats.

I get a little bit of a kickback from it. I'll always be open about things like that, but at the same time, it does help and actually bring your fees down as well. So check it out. Go to the link and enjoy stacking those delicious Sats.

Julian, can you hear me? Hello. I can hear you well. Thanks, Max, how are you? Yeah, good, thank you. Very, very well. Sorry if you could hear us snorting in the background. That was my dog sound, my lap, snorting down the microphone.

Awesome. (laughing) Easy, I love this. Yeah, a little Frenchie, so he sounds a little bit like a pig. Nice, I used to have a little chihuahua with my, together with my ex-girlfriend. Unfortunately, chihuahua then stayed with the girlfriend, of course, probably was a good idea for him.

But yeah, I like little dog. They're Sats, you know, it's chihuahuas. They have a big character. They do, he was a nice guy, I really like this little acry. (laughing) So, yeah, thanks for joining me, mate.

I've been looking at Relay and listening through, I didn't know you guys had your own podcast, so I was listening through a little bit of that today. I've been looking at Relay for some time, actually.

Or is it Relay? You pronounce it all Relay. Relay, okay. But yeah, it's cool. It's a nice thing to have a sort of middle ground where you have not full KYC, but it's somewhere in the middle of peer-to-peer exchanges.

And I think that has a good fit for a lot of people. So yeah, I was excited to jump into that with you. - Cool, thanks for doing this. Yeah, I'm really happy to come on and show. I've heard of it.

I've never actually listened to it myself, to be honest, but I've heard of it. And I think a lot of, especially real big corners, I guess, is your audience. - The players. (laughing) - That's it, yeah, it's the plebcast.

I kind of try and have it so that I only have people on or businesses on, or that I think are good for the space. I don't do the sort of, I don't know, like the carousel of finance guys and all that kind of stuff too much.

It's trying to sort of push privacy and talk about the stuff that really matters in Bitcoin. You know, the reason that I'm here and most of the people who stick around are here and really that is freedom.

And it's something that I think is so important and that I think a lot of people who are first coming into the space really miss. And it takes some time. You sort of go further and further down the rabbit hole and then you suddenly go, "Ah, shit."

You know, "I shouldn't have done the KYC stuff." "Oh my God, I should have held my own keys out." And you learn all these things. So I try and push that and so that listeners don't get caught out.

- Cool, cool. - That's the idea with it. So what's your story? Like how did you come into this space and how did Relay come about? And yeah, how did you get to where you are now? - Yeah, I mean, I was getting into this space slowly but steadily in 2015 where I talked to some of my nerd friends, especially one nerd friend

that I had since like kindergarten. I remember chilling at his place back then and we were talking and he was telling me about this thing called Bitcoin and there were like thousands of these strange cryptocurrencies out there and it's internet money and it worked without banks.

And I was like, "Oh, that's really fascinating." And then he got me into some of these things. I bought one Bitcoin back then from a hit you through him because he was too complicated for me.

I thought it was too much of pain because of these exchanges and making these accounts and it was just too complicated, too technical for me. So I stand to buy one on my behalf. I gave him 500 bucks cash and he bought it for me and he held it for me on the exchange, on some strange exchange.

I don't remember what it was. Maybe even anti-gox, I don't know. Then yeah, that worked out for like a couple of months and then when Bitcoin hit like 600 bucks I asked him to sell it again and he sold it again and gave me back to 600 bucks and I thought I was the genius, you know?

I made one on my behalf. And that's basically how it got into it. But then it didn't really fall into the rabbit hole because I just didn't think it was a big deal back then. I didn't spend the time that would actually have been necessary to really do the deep dive on it, do the research on it and everything.

So I didn't really understand what it was. I just thought it was a cool magic internet money thing. But then beginning of 2017, when I kind of noticed that this is not going away but it's not going, it's not going away anymore.

It's still here and more and more people are interested in it, you know, it's, the value is higher but then it was like 1K, I think. Then I was really thinking, you know, that could be a long term, very cool thing.

So then I got deeper and deeper in it and did my research and did my homework. And then I actually, you know, it made click and that I understood it. And from there on, I was actually working towards having a career in this as well.

So I wanted to make this kind of hobby also, the professional focus of mine. - You were saying, obviously, you had some nerdy, more technical friends who helped you at the beginning. So I'm guessing that wasn't initially your background.

What were you doing before getting involved in Bitcoin? Was it finance or something completely different? - Yeah, actually, I studied psychology. I did a bachelor's degree in psychology and then I did a master in business administration.

And while doing this, I worked at a bank at some point. So I had some, I was interested in finance and tried to get some finance knowledge and experience. Worked for a bank, then I worked in management consulting, small management consulting company for around four, four and a half years until I then founded my own.

So the first company, Bregas, which where we still are doing some consulting work here and there. But there we focus on Bitcoin and blockchain and crypto finance, like trying to give, trying to give a traditional financial service providers access to this space.

And then obviously after that, I found it relay where I spent most of my time on now. It's basically my back. - Okay, cool. The move, is there a move to go to Switzerland or were you already there?

'Cause I know obviously some of the regulations and environment are a little bit better for Bitcoiners out there than other places. Were you already living in Switzerland? - Yes, I do have the privilege to be born and raised and living still here in Switzerland.

That basically also, it was not actually a very strategic decision, to be honest, to choose this place, to choose this jurisdiction. Even though, as you said, it's the best jurisdiction, probably to do something like that in the world.

Very, very crypto and Bitcoin friendly. - Okay, we see AML, antimony, logging, all that stuff. It's very, you know, very progressive and open here. And also politics and everything. Government is very open and very decentralized.

And yeah, so it's best, it's actually one of the best jurisdiction you can be as a Bitcoin startup. And I had the lock and the privilege which just happened, I just happened to live here.

So I started here. - Do you think that played into your view of Bitcoin if you're already in a place that is a little bit more free thinking and a little bit more smart about the way they manage their currency?

Do you think that that played into your understanding of Bitcoin at the beginning? - I don't know, it could also be the opposite because as you say, we have like probably the best, oh, sorry, that was my email, I'm just closing it.

We probably have one of the best currencies in the world, you know, very solid currencies with France. So it's very solid against all the other currencies. We don't have big inflation and we don't have any political problems.

You know, we trust our government quite a lot. We have a very well-functioning democracy, very nice political environment, very stable legal conditions and everything. So if one nation doesn't need Bitcoin, then it's probably sort of true.

(laughing) - Very true, yeah, very true. - Yeah, so that's why probably we, like I didn't really feel the pain and didn't feel like Bitcoin is a solution for the pain, which almost every other country quite feels more, especially, you know, South American, African, Asian countries and so forth,

even the US and then a lot of European countries as well. But the interest of the U.K. - Also the U.K. - Also the U.K. - But not so much the currency side, most people don't know enough to understand what's happening to their savings, but definitely there's more of a mistrust here, government-wise for most people,

or anyone who's paying any attention. It's definitely a little bit easier in that sense, I think, to wrap your head around. But you're absolutely right. The people who get it first, the people who understand it straight away, are people who need it usually.

And they're like, "Ah, that just makes sense." But, you know, even though I don't trust my government here, at all, I still am in a place of privilege. In comparison to a lot of places in the world, it's pretty safe where we are and, you know, we don't have massive issues with the money.

Like, it's not great, but it's not as bad as other places. So I think most people just don't wake up to it for that reason. They're like, "Hmm, I'm comfortable enough." - Absolutely, man.

I mean, like, we're comfortable. We're privileged Fox, you know, actually. - Yeah. - That's a good way to put it. - Yeah, we don't see that problem. And that's why we probably don't understand, like, people in these other countries, in emerging countries, they understand it earlier than we do here, I think, in these privileged countries.

Because they just, for them, it's a solution to a problem. It's really a need that they feel, you know, and they have pressure, they have sense of urgency. They need to do something about it.

They need to find alternatives. And for us, it's just really, oh, okay. It's a cool thing. Kind of a number goes up. Okay, let's speculate a little bit with it. That's more how a lot of Swiss people and probably also European people feel.

Oh, I see you kind of disconnected. I don't even know if I'm still recording. Hello. - Hello. - Oh, hi. - I lost you there. I lost you. - Sorry for that. I have-- - That's okay. - It looked, on my side, it looked like I lost you, but probably it was my problem here, because of some internet connection, something like that.

- That's okay, well, it makes a change, 'cause it's usually my internet that cuts out and causes problems. So, at least I'm not the only one now. But yeah, no problem at all. I can't remember where we got cut off there, basically, to say that, yeah, we are lucky, lucky fucks to be where we are. - Exactly.

- But it doesn't mean that there is a massive room for improvement. And I think that's what Bitcoin brings. And for any of us who lurk around on Bitcoin, Twitter enough and who are obsessive enough, I think it's clear as day that this is the future.

This is the new financial system. And it is infinitely better than what we currently have, no matter where you are or where you're living. So, what was it that drew you in? Can you remember a time you were saying, you're buying at 500, you sell at 600?

- What drew me in, it's like when I did my, oh, sorry, I think you're going again. - Oh, fuck, I'm so sorry. I lost you again. - I lost you again. - Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm here again now, but let me just switch to...

Can you still hear me? - I can hear you, yeah. - Okay, so one second now, I'm just switching to another Wi-Fi. All right, what about now? Now, can you hear me? - Yeah, yeah, I can hear you fine.

- Awesome, I think now it should really work like this. If that is not gonna be strange. I'm really sorry because... - That's all right. - I don't have to. - Like I say, it is usually me.

I have two separate internets that I pay for here, one upstairs, one downstairs, and I have problems with both constantly, so... - Exactly, it's telling you the same problem. - Yeah, it's crazy.

- So what drew me in to Bitcoin, and I'm talking the second incident when I actually did, you know, rabbit hole and deep dive into it, is the savings technology and digital gold aspect of it.

So, you know, even... We talked about it before, a lot of inflation, you know, you can't really save your money, you're losing purchasing power every year due to inflation, due to zero or even negative interest rates, due to banking fees and everything.

So you're actually losing money every year. That's very apparent in the emerging countries, where, you know, Venezuela currencies, Zimbabwe currencies, they can lose hundreds of even thousands of percent each year.

So you actually, there's actually no way you can save with fiat currency there. And so it runs a bit different, for example, also in the US, at first sight at least. Like you see, okay, we have a 1% inflation, that's okay, maybe 1.5% per year.

Not too bad, you know, you don't really feel it. It's not acute, it's not that you, you know, prices double every year, but it is, I mean, 1% in 50 years, it's half of your savings are gone.

And this 1% is what the government says, it is, you know, so. But then the real, a lot of experts call it the real inflation, which is funny, because okay, there's a fake inflation that the government tells us, and then it's a real inflation, right?

Because the real inflation takes into account the price increases not only in the basket that the government takes as an index, but it takes, you know, everything, and that includes huge aspects of our life, like services and goods like real estate or like healthcare and stuff like that

is not in the index basket, but that's actually the, these are the areas where prices increase most, and that's why they have a big influence on inflation. So basically, you can assume that if the kind of fake inflation or the official inflation, if that's 1%, then the real inflation is usually between three and 10x higher.

So in Switzerland, the real inflation is something around 5%, I think in the US, and then a lot of other European countries where they target the two to 3% official inflation, then you can probably imagine that the real inflation is around 10%, which is huge.

And that's also what, you know, Michael Saylor and all these big guys are talking about now, all these guys that put big parts of their treasury and of their company's treasuries into Bitcoin, that's exactly the reason that that reason to have a hedge against this financial system and the inflation that goes crazy.

And that's what drew me in and kind of convinced me about Bitcoin back then in 2017. - The melting ice cube, as Saylor says. I think we all feel it, whether people understand economics or not, people will say, "Oh, you know, five years ago, I'd go and do my shop "and it was less than half what it is now.

"Now I can't get out of the shop. "I go in for milk and it's 100 pounds." And you're like, "Yes, this is what I keep fucking telling you. "This is why I'm talking to you about Bitcoin." And everyone knows that these prices keep going up and the cost of living goes up and the wages stay the same.

And so people understand it, but like you say, they then look at the figures provided by the government and they're like, "Oh, that's reasonable, 1%, 2%. - That's not too bad. - Yeah, but they know deep down that it's a lie, they just can't put their finger on it.

So you worked that out and you realized, okay, this is something that is a great way to store my value. And then how long did it take until you sort of fully immersed yourself in this and got to the stage of sort of thinking, "Well, I wanna actually start a business "and I want to actually work in this industry."

It's quite a big leap to do it. It's still quite fringe even now. I don't know how long you've actually been doing what you're doing, but to most people they'd probably call you crazy. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So it took me around one and a half years then to actually make the jump, you know, from a nice job, well-paid job and security and everything to make the jump transition to be full-time in Bitcoin.

You know, it's two things, two aspects to it. One is, you're already called crazy, at least in Switzerland, if you make this leap to build a startup and be self-employed. Because Switzerland wages are so high, especially if you did university, like you can just get out of university

and get a nice job and earn between eight and 10K per month. You know, and so who in his same mind would consider to, you know, leave such a job where you have to work 40 hours and you gain eight to 10K and you basically just become rich just by, you know, doing an easy work as a job and who would consider, you know, leaving such a job

and starting a business where nine out of 10 fail and you're sure that for at least one or two years you're not gonna earn anything. Like you're basically gonna almost sleep on the couch of a friend, you know, like this startup grind.

Who would do that? So already if you go into a startup then people are already called you crazy. I mean, my mom said, what the fuck are you doing? Like just, just go out and make a career smart guy.

Like, why would you do that? And then the second aspect is if you do that in Bitcoin, you know, then everybody thinks like this by it's just in, say he lost his mind, like totally. Yeah, yeah, I heard that a lot.

- By bad. - But yeah, so that's why also it took me really like one and a half years to, so I spent some time so beginning of 2017, I got into Bitcoin and then I invested in some of my money and obviously it did very, very well, like everyone else in 2017.

So that I could finance an exchange semester in California with the gains, with the shit coin gains that I made back then. And when I came back from California that was beginning of 2018, then for me it was clear, okay, you know, that's really it.

I wanna do entrepreneurship and I'd wanna do something in Bitcoin. But then it still took me from there, it still took me, yeah, well, almost, yeah, one and a half years until then really I could, because I had to finish my studies and then I was still working 60% to pay my bills and already, you know, working on the idea and everything

for a year and a year and a half and then really summer last year, then it was the time where we launched the app and the same day I launched the app, I quit my job. And then I went on. I love how Bitcoin allows this in some ways.

If you stay around long enough and you have enough conviction and you decide this is somewhere you want to work, it allows you this time. You know, it allows people who have been smart and they've huddled and they haven't fucked around and they've held on.

It allows them this time where I can't think of any other asset that can have these sort of moves and allow so much freedom from holding it. You know, if you hold for that four years or so, you can then actually go out and create something and what's interesting is that most people end up

wanting to start something that pushes this industry further forward and that's a really cool aspect. - That's very cool. Yeah, if you're early and you hold then you get rewarded with, you know, time just because currency gains value and then you gain time with that.

You don't have to work every day to pay your bills but you can actually free yourself and then do what you like. And obviously for a lot of these people doing what they like is supporting Bitcoin and doing something on Bitcoin and then because of that, they enhance the value of it and then more people can do this

and that's really the magic of it, right? So it's like a self-fulfilling circle also that gets more and more people and more and more people kind of get wealthy or at least wealthy enough so that they don't depend on a job and then they can do more for Bitcoin which makes Bitcoin more healthy, more, more healthy again and more successful

and that goes on and on and on for 10 years now and see where we're at now. - Yeah, it's incredible. It's like a living thing. It takes people in and once you're in, I don't think many people want to leave once you really wrap your head around what this thing can do and you suddenly have more time

to actually think a little bit deeper about how do I want this world to look for me and for my children? How do I want to spend my time that I have? You know, you work out, time is the only thing that is more scarce than Bitcoin for us and what do we want to do with it?

One day we're going to die and when you're on your deathbed, I think most people want to say, oh, I did some good in this world and I can't think of a better place to spend time than in this industry and the amount of freedom it can allow.

Was it always that you wanted to allow people to use an on-ramp? Did you always have an idea that that's what part of Bitcoin you wanted to go into or were there other ideas that didn't quite make the cut?

Yes, now it was really always the kind of pressure that I had or like I was always driven to do that. I had the passion of salt for that because that's where I felt I can help most, you know, to make big, going successful and that's also where I saw the biggest problem that people still had.

I mean, I really had a lot of people in my network, you know, my friends and colleagues and family and all of these people, they wanted to get into Bitcoin, like they wanted to try at least with 50 or 100 bucks or, you know, maybe setting up a savings plan with 20 bucks a week.

So just, you know, have a small exposure to it, like a lot of people wanted to try it. And as we know, once people try it, then obviously they kind of have skin in the game and so they then they get educated, they research about it, they read about it, then at one point everybody kind of understands it

and once they understood it, they're convicted and almost nobody leaves again, you know, if you once into Bitcoin and you once understood it and you once huddled it a little bit and then most people don't go back.

But the problem was really that as I saw a lot of interest in that from normal people on the street, but then the big problem was that this barrier was just too big and that's why we still have only 1% of the world's population owning Bitcoin now because it's just in my opinion, still too complex

for norm people that don't have a tech or finance, you know, expertise and way too complex. I mean, people are struggling with their e-bancings, right? Still, a lot of people are still struggling with e-bancing.

How can they use something like Binance or a Kraken? You know, it's just way too much for them. And so that's what I wanted to change. I really wanted to have an easy, an easy one. I wanted to onboard people who wanted to be onboard and first, I kind of tried with this consulting approach as well, so I tried to help just in my private,

like as a private person, try to help set up these people with all these accounts and the wallets and explain them, you know, you need to hold your private key and how everything works. Then obviously very fast, I came to the conclusion that's not scalable at all.

I mean, if we want to, if we need to onboard 99% of the world population, then probably it's not gonna work with just one-to-one coaches. - Just you, in that kitchen. (laughing) - Would be quite some hours to spend, right?

And so it wasn't really scalable. The whole consulting approach and then so the next idea, which was quite of, oh, the next logical step was to make this software-based so that everybody could do it him or herself.

And so it was quite clear that we needed an app for that and we needed to make it very easy, you know, within one minute and we needed to do it without all this onboarding KYC bullshit and uploading selfies somewhere and doing video calls with some legal people and stuff.

So we solved that, yeah. And then here we are now with a very simple app that has basically four buttons, buy Bitcoin, sell Bitcoin, send Bitcoin, receive Bitcoin. And so it's basically everybody, everybody can understand this.

We have customers that are 86 years old, we have customers that are eight years old and we have customers really, it's really funny. Some people working in on construction and barely use a laptop or even have a laptop that everybody has smartphone and everybody can use things like WhatsApp or Tinder or enough.

And now they have something like that to buy and sell Bitcoin. - Yeah, it's really cool. And like you say, getting the app to be simple is so important and stripping out all of that bullshit that you're talking about, the uploading of the selfies, all of this stuff that is not only a pain in the ass to do,

but it's all so stupid and dangerous because someone has to store that data and we know that these exchanges are not very good to keeping that safe. And especially with a bare ass that like Bitcoin, it's a very, very stupid idea to be asking for all of that.

So I love that you have an app that is so simple that like you're saying, people who aren't tech savvy can use it, people of all ages can use it because I've found that as much as I show Bisc and Hoddle, Hoddle and say to people, you know, maybe consider mining or maybe consider just buying off friends for cash,

the reality is that the majority of the world are not gonna do that. And most people are not ready to set up their cold card and have their own keys stored and do all this kind of stuff at all at once.

When you just say to someone, his Bitcoin, his what it can do, it can preserve your wealth. And they're like, okay, cool. So what do I do? And you're like, right, you wanna buy this hardware wallet, have your seeds, stamp them into steel, blah, blah, blah.

And they're like, whoa, it's too much. It's too much. So I kind of see it's like a stepping stone. It's like, why don't you do this, which is, you know, it's 80% of the way there and it isn't completely KYC-less, but it's much better and it's simple.

And that's brilliant. That I think is really, really cool. So how did you get to a point? Is this something that's just because you're in Switzerland or are you just worked things out in a clever way where you can get around this?

Because, you know, it seems like every other company is asking you for more and more information and you guys are asking for the bare minimum, which is great. - It's both, it's a combination of both.

It's because we're in Switzerland, this is actually possible. It's almost not possible in all, it's not possible in any EU countries. In any EU country, they have different legislations in Germany, for example, like every transaction, crypto to fiat transaction is KYC.

It requires KYC, even if it's 10 bucks. In Switzerland, we have these limits. So we have a limit up to 1K per day per user. And 100K per year per user, this doesn't require KYC. So the KYC and the AML regulations in Switzerland are very cool, very open, they're limit based.

So that's a big factor. That's number one. But number two is also we found a clever setup where we actually, we never hold the money of our users. And we found a way to, you need to make sure in this setup that the money that is being sent is from the same person that already also gets the Bitcoin.

Otherwise, it would not be compliant. So if you could send us money and then send a bit, then we would send the Bitcoin to someone else. That would be not KYC, that would be not AML compliant.

So we needed to find a way, and this is through a signature scheme where we can actually prove cryptographically that the sender of the fiat is also the receiver of the Bitcoin, that's kind of the magic behind it.

And also at no point in time, we hold the money of the customer and we limit and we respect these limits. And so all these kind of regulations put together in a nice kind of setup, a nice legal and technical innovation, if you wanna say that was kind of solving this problem.

Basically, we act like a Bitcoin ATM. In Switzerland, you can really go to any Bitcoin ATM, you put in 100 Swiss francs, you get out of the paper wall, then you're gone. You don't have to do any KYC, AML, no account, no nothing.

Because also these Bitcoin ATMs, they respect these regulations. And we were thinking, okay, why can't we just do this in an app, we'll basically find a way to do this and not do it, which is obviously cool in a lot of ways, better than Bitcoin ATMs, because everybody can now use this Swiss Bitcoin API, a Bitcoin ATM from the whole world.

It would be like, where are you in Britain, in England? - Unfortunately, yeah, unfortunately, yeah. - So you're in England, it's not legal to smoke weed in England, right? But if you travel to Amsterdam, there, it is legal, and then you can smoke as much as you want and get high and have fun.

And it's legal, but you cannot do it in England. And same thing here, you're from England, it's maybe forbidden to buy KYC less Bitcoin there. But you can travel to Switzerland and use a Bitcoin ATM.

And you can also do this digitally, it doesn't have to be physically. You can digitally travel to our country and use our digital Bitcoin ATM and go back and that's legal. So we can actually scale this to the whole world, which is the goal.

- That's very cool. And so you said that obviously you didn't have a tech background. What was it like saying, okay, I've got this idea, this is what I wanna build. And then actually having to build this app and get people involved, because I just, I firstly give a shout out to Satoshi Baggins who reached out to me and said, look,

you've gotta have this call, explain what you guys were doing. I knew of it, but he went into a little bit more detail. Who's helping build it? These kind of guys involved, or did you have someone right from the beginning involved in actually building the application?

- It was a very messy process in hindsight. It was very messy. Like a lot of people kind of got involved and they left again, and a lot of promises and a lot of ideas that then didn't realize or materialize, and it was very messy, but I really like how it unfolded.

It was not easy, it was not efficient, but it was community driven. It was a chaos where people with kind of the same vision got together and tried to do something, and in the end something magical came out.

And without one guy being dominant, I will never saw myself as like the authority, or like I'm the boss of this or whatever. It's really like just an idea that seemed to attract people, and then people came and they come and go.

They came, they left again, they did stuff, and everybody kind of contributed. Those really, from the beginning, like Bitcoin, itself, a community effort, which is what I really, really like about the project.

- That's cool, like you say, it's very, very Bitcoin. It's fascinating for me. This industry is so different in that way to see people, whatever it is you need help with. If you have a good idea and people are like, yeah, that'd be useful or I like it.

People are so willing to jump in and help and give advice or lend a hand, and it's very rare to see that in any other industry. It's just fun to be around. - Absolutely. - People don't seem to hold things so close to their chest and be so mean.

People are very willing to help. I love it. It just gives a lot of energy. It makes the whole thing more fun. - For sure. And it really enables such projects to come alive because there was so much effort and so much work being done for no cash, you know?

Just because people had passion for it and they wanted to help make this happen. It really started and when, first year, we all, more and more, probably the first one and a half years, we all talked about it a lot and worked on it and went to startup competitions, went to hackathons and tried to get these things off the ground.

It was a lot of work being done, you know, technical work, marketing work, legal work, community building work, you know, business planning, strategy and everything. And so many people, there was no money involved.

Nobody wanted money off it, you know? It was just really, they just wanted to make it happen because they wanted to see this app out there. And that's really, as you say, this is unique to the Bitcoin community.

I don't, I don't, I've never saw, I've never found an area or an industry or, you know, a topic where there's quite such a passion, you know, for really doing things without any financial motive or whatever.

- Yeah, it's incredible. And did you find that when you have all these people jumping in and helping, did the project evolve sort of organically and as you went along, new ideas were thrown in or did you have a very, very clear vision from the start of exactly what you wanted and it stuck to that or did it evolve naturally?

- I think the vision was really clear and uncompromised from the beginning. Like we wanted to make it easy for people to invest in Bitcoin. That was like the North Star, which still is the exact same now and will still be the exact same in 10 years from now.

You know, we're not going to stop working towards this before every person in this world, you know, has an easy access to Bitcoin, okay? So this is the North Star, basically forever. But then the whole, the rest of the process, like the ideas and the work and the creativity and different approaches were obviously tested

and experimented with and discussed and prototyped. That was very messy and very creative and that there are a lot of different things that went well and other things didn't. There it was not structured or efficient at all and it changed a lot.

But the North Star was really always the same. And I think that's important to give continuity and to give a very clear orientation. Where do we want to go? Then how do you get there? This is always going to be very messy.

- Yeah, and like you say, getting those other 99% of people to buy some Bitcoin, to hold, to understand the ethos is not an easy thing. So you have to have a very, very strong vision and be uncompromising and work fucking hard because it's not, that the world is not cheering us on.

Let's say there's a huge amount of friction. I can only imagine the friction, even if you are in Switzerland, I can only imagine the friction that you have to deal with running something like this.

But is there moves that you're looking at to expand, not necessarily outside of Europe, let's say to expand and reach people who maybe wouldn't otherwise see this or understand why it's important?

How are you looking at marketing it? How are you looking at reaching people who especially over the coming years, it looks like are going to seriously need this. There's a lot of craziness going on in the world.

The money printers are going burr. They're only going to keep ramping up. So how do you look at that? - Yeah, exactly. As you say, does the faster the better? The ultimate goal is that everybody can be involved even as easy as in the country.

So the first obvious is that for us, it's really to build kind of the infrastructure for it so that we can allow the app to be downloaded in every country. Right now we're focused on Europe only.

We're also quite young still, so it's still going to take us quite some months or maybe years to be available to make the app available in every country. And also to accept every currency, every local currency.

Right now we only accept Swiss francs in Europe. So that's why we're quite focused on Europe. So the first step, we need to have the infrastructure to be international adult. But that's kind of just a technical problem.

That's not a, there's no magic behind that. We will solve that, it's just take some time. And then how we want to reach all these people I really think about it like a viral, we need to have this in some way a viral development.

If you see, if you look at the coronavirus, how the coronavirus reached every country in the world and a lot of people globally within a year or two, then I think we can learn a lot from that.

(laughing) How can we reach a lot of people? Basically how the coronavirus did it started locally, very locally, and it didn't have a big marketing but budget or everything, it was really peer to peer.

I don't know, this I think the marketing budget for coronavirus is pretty massive these days. (laughing) To sell a product and service that is so stupid to so many people, take some serious planning and a lot of money because everyone has fallen for a hook line and sinker, they're wearing their little masks,

they're closing their businesses down, they're giving up their freedoms, and they're celebrating it, they absolutely fucking love it, especially over here, it is quite a sight to behold. (laughing) - That's true, okay, your point.

But what I try to get across is really like, it's about small networks and it's always people referring it to other people, that's what I think works best. And also for us now it works best so far, like the referral program, we had a very small marketing budget, so Google ads and stuff, that kind of works as well.

But that's not what's gonna make it global phenomena. And also, we do a lot of social media engagement and community building and stuff, and that all works, but I think what will work the most is if people start referring it to other people, like with the coronavirus.

If you infect someone and this guy infects another one, that's how we can make it really global really fast, and that's why I think that would be my answer. The referral program is we really need to be at a point where people love the app so much that they are happy to refer it to other people, and then incentivize this

in a clever way, so that both parties have something from it, like right now, if you refer the app to someone, this person gets a small reduction on the fees, so this person is happy, can stack sets for less, and you get kind of a kickback, so you are happy because you can earn some sets with that,

and so everybody's happy, and so that's how we think about growing it globally then. - It's something we learn about in this space, incentive structures, and Bitcoin has the best incentive model on the planet, so yeah, there's a lot to be learned from that, and yeah, back to the point of the virus,

this is a virus I'd very much like to see spread. The more sets we can get in people's hands, the better, as much as I'm for all these ballers coming in, and billionaires, and Tesla buying, and all this kind of stuff, which is great for the price.

I think really we need to get this into the hands of the people who need it, and services like this are the way to do it, so I'm very much for that. How do you see that changing the world if you manage to do this, and do you change that number from 1% global penetration, and we get into double digits?

How do you see the world changing over the coming years? - I hope to see it changing towards people having more time and being able to make better decisions, and really care less about money, about saving, because now if you want to say if it's a hard thing, you really need to almost have a degree in finance

to get your wealth stored in a good way. And because of the inflation, because the loss of purchasing power is getting lost, we are always running, and running, and working, and working, we need to get more money in, and we need to spend it as fast as possible, because otherwise it depreciates, and so these cycles,

I really hope to see these cycles broke, breaking in the next couple of years, and make the world with better time preference, basically. So, like Cai 15 says in his book, The Bitcoin Standard, like the time preference, where people really have a stable, or even slightly appreciating store of value,

so that they have time to really make the right decisions, and do quality work, and to make good investments, that's what I would like to see, like a golden age again, as he in this book, he explains it, and he had the actual gold standard, the non-doluted gold standard, the original one,

where people had a lot of time to spend on their work, on their craft, on art, on architecture, and everything. I really hope we can get to this kind of situation back, whereas now we were definitely far away from that.

- There's a lot of fiat fuckery that's going on at the moment. It's not great. It's frustrating because we know what humans are capable of, and now that we have technology, we've seen what's possible hundreds of years ago, we've seen the architecture, we've seen the art, we've seen what people can do,

and yeah, it feels like we're really holding ourselves back, so it could be such an exciting time, and also just the time for people to think, for people to actually consider what they're doing in life, rather than running around like headless chickens, just trying to pay the bills, which, yeah, and decide what pair of trainers

they need to buy to show off to their friends, that they don't even really like anyway. It's just, it's such a fucking weird situation. - 100%. Mate, I really enjoyed the conversation. I have to go into, I need to go into a meeting in five minutes, so I would really appreciate it if you could wrap it up.

But then it was a lot of fun. - Cool, well, yeah, thanks for coming on. It's been great chatting to you, and the product's fantastic. I'm gonna be suggesting it to my friends, and everyone in Europe.

It's nice to have something out there that sits in the middle of all the different options, and yeah, it's been great fun, so thanks very much, and good luck in the meeting. - Thank you very, very much.

It was really a nice kind of philosophical discussion, which I really liked, and definitely gonna subscribe to your podcast, and also refer it to newcomers and other bit corners. - Appreciate it.

- And yeah, if you really want to, I don't have to, but if you really want to become a referrer, you ask a person who has some reach with your podcast. You can send me an email and ask for a referral page, so we can make you a referral page, so that you have a link to a page where there's your podcast also in your photo,

and maybe a little quote while you refer relay, and then your code, we can make you an individual code. You can call it plep, or max, or whatever. And then people who use this code to buy, they're basically gonna get a free reduction, and you get some kickback.

So if you want that, just feel free to send me an email with your photo and your quote, and then I'm happy to create your landing page. - Cool, all right, mate, I appreciate that. We'll speak in the background.

I won't take any more of your time, enjoy your meeting, and yeah, really, really good speaking, too. Thanks a lot, mate. - Absolutely, thank you, mate. Have a great day. - Bye, bye.