Pay me in bitcoin with Jonathan Chester the CEO of Bitwage

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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, 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 slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is with Jonathan, the CEO of BitWage. I'm Denard, if I'm honest a little bit about having them on when they reached out to me, but on reflection, I think that they're actually really useful for the space.

I think that the ability for people to take a percentage of their wage in Bitcoin is amazing, and it's also really good for businesses who want to incentivize their staff. You can really help to orange peel your staff and allow them to take a percentage in Bitcoin.

You can vary the amounts, and they don't hold any funds. It's something that I really like, so you'll just give them an address. It will be sent to you, and at no point do they ever actually hold your funds.

Really enjoyed the conversation, and reached out if anyone wants any information. Before we dive in, I want to say thank you to my sponsors. I want to say thank you to CoinFlow UK for sponsoring the show.

You can put in the UK, and you're looking to buy weekly or monthly. You can use the code in the show notes and get a 30% discount off your fees. I'd also like to say thank you to Crypto Clopes.

They do some amazing 3D print designs for no cases, blockmits, and all sorts of other amazing things. I'm sure you already checked them out, but if you haven't, go to CryptoClopes.com. Enjoy the show.

(upbeat music) - Jonathan, how are you doing? - Yeah, I'm doing well. - Nice to finally speak to you. I've been chatting to Mino in the background who kind of arranged the interview, and I've been doing a little bit of digging on the company and bits and pieces.

So yeah, really looking forward to getting to know you and what you guys are doing. Welcome to Bit by Bit. - Yeah, happy to be here. Are we recording right now? - We're recording. - Yeah, I did say to Mino, maybe you didn't pass it on.

It's kind of the style of the show. I just dive straight in and sort of get to know people on air. So it's more of an authentic feel. - Fun. - Sorry, I should have said that to you as well.

But yeah, we were called from the beginning. - Cool. - But yeah, nice to meet you. Thank you for coming on and thank you for reaching out. So yeah, let's get to know each other. How long you've been doing this?

How long you've been running BitWage and what made you start to? - Yeah, so I got into Bitcoin in 2013, actually. So a little while ago. And BitWage was a result of me working at Oracle at the time and really feeling the monotony

of being in such a large corporation and working as just one of the little cogs there. But I became very fascinated with Bitcoin through a TED talk and when I did, the price of Bitcoin was going crazy.

It went from $200, I think, to $700. So I got very excited about this and I started telling everyone I knew, you got to buy Bitcoin, you got to buy Bitcoin. This is going to be the future.

Everyone thought I was crazy, you know? They thought that Bitcoin was just something for drug lords and hackers, knew nothing about it. But I really liked the fundamentals and so I was telling everyone they needed to learn about it and what happened was I got connected with my co-founder,

my now co-founder, who was also a crazy Bitcoin guy. He was doing some Bitcoin mining on the side. When we got together, we looked at what was missing in the market of Bitcoin. We realized that there were merchant processors, there were exchanges, there were wallets.

But in order to actually close the financial loop, there would need to be a way for companies that receive payments in Bitcoin to then use those payments and pay their employees. So we said, okay, let's be the first to do this.

And so in 2014, I quit my job and started going full time a bit bitch. Very cool. And so that must have been quite a change. You're in 2013, you're working for a massive corporation and let me say just a small cog in that wheel.

How did your views change if at all once you started going down the rabbit hole and did it get to a point where you were just like, right, I just have to fucking, I have to be working in this.

I have to be doing something around this. You got pulled in or like, how was that transition? - So yeah, I think that I first saw Bitcoin in a TED talk that was just about the future of money.

And Bitcoin was just one of the few things I was talking about. But in that TED talk, I learned about financial inclusion, financial sovereignty, banking the unbanked, the efficiency of international payments.

And so that got me initially excited. But going down the rabbit hole, there were two resources that I relied heavily on. I read the Bitcoin white paper. And to be fair, originally I didn't quite understand the more technical elements of it, just the high level synopsis in the beginning.

And then Andreas Antonopoulos. And it was really watching Andreas that it really clicked for me. He was really able to bring the technical concepts to a high level economically, socially.

And after that, it was like, okay, this is the future. How do I become a part of this? And that's how it started. - That's cool. Yeah, he played a big part in my journey as well, Andreas.

And I think for a lot of people, and he gets a lot of flack now for the shit coining and some of the other stuff that he's doing, but I will always be thankful to him because me being non-technical, the way that he puts these ideas together.

And I think because his understanding was so good that he managed to just make analogies and ways of putting these ideas across that I don't really think I would have got otherwise. And I think his passion came across, you could feel how excited he was about this and it made you wanna learn more.

And so, yeah, I've got a lot of respect for what he's done. And I think he's onboarded so many people into something that could easily be just seen as, oh, it's just nerdy gig money. And then, like you said, you realize that this is, this really can bank the unbanked.

This really can do some amazing things. And once you realize that, it's hard to step away and do anything else because I think for most of us here who are working in Bitcoin and obsessing over it, it is something that you really feel, right, I can change the world with this and I can be part of it.

And what else are you gonna do? You're gonna go back to a nine to five. I don't think that's really possible once you work it out. - Yeah, and I think that some of the important pieces in my journey, the two pieces that I thought were really important was the objection handling because in the beginning, you just learned the vision.

But if someone challenges you, you don't know enough to understand how to respond. And I think Andreas was another resource. I was good for that. But beyond that, I think that what was also really important was to really understand how mining worked and how all the nodes in mining infrastructure all connected.

So I did spend maybe a couple years later watching some much more technical videos to get a deep understanding of how all works. And that has essentially informed me to understand why Bitcoin is so much more secure, how it's so much more secure, and why some of these other coins that are out there just pale in comparison.

- Yeah, it's crazy. And I like the approach that you guys have taken. My show is very much on the privacy security side and generally no KYC. And so generally I sort of avoid that kind of stuff, but I see its place and I think it's really important.

And it's really important to normalize Bitcoin. It's really important not to just go at it from one angle. And the fact that someone can, from what I understand, from what you guys are doing, someone could just have their paycheck paid either directly to them in Bitcoin without even having to let their employer know is one thing.

'Cause you don't wanna necessarily be the kooky Bitcoiner who everyone thinks is a criminal. But also it looks like businesses can get involved as well. And that I think is really cool because that, you know, I don't like people saying, oh, well, this is sort of giving it legitimacy because Bitcoin is the most legitimate thing

on this planet. It does not need legitimacy, but it certainly needs people to see it that way and realize how special it is. So I think it'd be cool to dig in a little bit more about how it works and what was the pushback when you first started taking it back to the beginning.

I can imagine it was not an easy sell. I can imagine this was not met with the best response at all times. - Yeah, I mean, 2014, it was pretty interesting back then because, you know, we've started with our B2B product, which is a company signs up and they invite their workers and they pay their employees in a portion

of their salary in Bitcoin. And you can imagine that most companies were not ready for that in 2014. I mean, this is still very early days. And actually that's how our B2C product came out.

Where an employee or freelancer or gig worker could sign up and get paid from their employer, maybe, you know, from Uber or from Facebook or Google or whatever, without them having to sign up.

Because there were lots of people who wanted five, 10, 15, 20, 30% of their salaries in Bitcoin, but the companies were not ready to offer that. And there was this period, I think it was probably from 2015 to 2017, where Bitcoin was actually a dirty word to companies, to banks, to investors.

We'd go into business meetings and the people were expecting you to not talk about Bitcoin but to talk about blockchain, right? Blockchain was so hot, but blockchain without Bitcoin. So we'd go into these meetings and we'd say, "Yeah, we do salaries using blockchain value tokens."

You know, of course, those value tokens were Bitcoin, but by rephrasing it in that way, you didn't get laughed out of the room. Everything changed in 2017. When there was that big bubble, all of a sudden Bitcoin was cool again and we could start actually telling people about it.

But it wasn't until really 2020 this year where we've started to see much more adoption from companies. So I meant 2020, in 2020, we see much more adoption from companies. Companies are seeing the value in offering Bitcoin salaries to their employees because it helps the employees hedge against the losing value of their salaries.

They see that this is a new benefit that will help them navigate the remote workforces. A lot of companies are thinking, "Oh, we can't do bring your dog to workday. "What kind of benefits exist now?"

And they're looking to this. So it's the first time that we had Fortune 1000s coming to us, talking to us, considering onboarding this. And I think that we're really at the beginning of what's going to be a large movement over the next four or five years till we get to a point where offering a Bitcoin salary

or part of your wage in Bitcoin is just gonna be a benefit that's offered everywhere. - And you seeing that this is something that's taken up by more individuals in these companies over time.

A people, for example, hearing that other people within the workforce are doing it. And once you're a Bitcoiner, and especially when numbers going up, you wanna tell everyone, is that sort of spreading through some of these workplaces?

- I will say that people's adoption of getting the part of their salary in Bitcoin does tend to lag the price movements because the decision to just buy a little bit of crypto or the decision to borrow a bunch of money in buying to crypto is really FOMO and greed.

- I mean, it's not always, but a lot of it can be a result of FOMO and greed. Whereas when you're doing it through your salary, you're actually taking a step back and you're looking at it from a much longer term approach or saying that I want to do this for years, actually.

My goal is to actually accumulate for years because I believe in sort of this longer term vision. That being said, when the price goes up, we see more people signing up, we see more people referring, we see people on Twitter who are talking about how using Bitwage has saved their lives or been one of the best financial decisions

that they ever made. - That's really nice. It's cool to hear that with everything that's going on in the world and people have been taking advantage of, people are losing their value and a lot of people don't even realize it.

And so the more normalized this gets, it's the best savings account in the world as long as they're holding their own keys and no one can fuck with it. And that's such a powerful thing for people to have access to.

And it sounds like it's very, very easy for them with what you're doing. Like what does someone have to do if they just suddenly decide, okay, I want to put 10% of my wage into Bitcoin. Like how would they go about doing it with you guys?

And what's the storage method? Like is it something where they'll give you an ex-pub or they'll give you a static address? Or is it custodial? Like how is it held? And what does it feel like for an end user?

- Yeah, I mean, the magic here is that you actually don't even need a bank account to use us, right? You come to Bitwage, you sign up, you could live entirely in crypto. And then we have no custodial option at all.

You give us where you want the money to go to. So if you want to direct deposit into your ledger or your treasure or whatever hardware wallet you want, you just put that in there and you get paid direct deposit each paycheck into there.

So you don't need to interact with any custodial system at all. It goes directly to where you want, which I think is really the way that things are going to move in the future. I mean, right now I like to think of the world of crypto, kind of like the world of when people's paychecks were actually paper checks, right?

They would get the paper checks, they would take those checks to a bank, they'd cash those checks and maybe they'd even take that money and stuff it under their bed 'cause they didn't trust the bank, right?

There wasn't maybe insurance for the banks during those times. And I think that's what we have today. You get your paycheck, you put it onto an exchange, you convert it into crypto, and then the more sophisticated people are withdrawing it to the whatever wallet they prefer.

And what I expect in the future is for this to all go away and for people to just do direct deposits into whatever wallet that they feel the most comfortable with. And people are going to be using this as their natural savings account because as you and I both know, Bitcoin is not just one of the hardest forms of money,

one of the most reliable deflationary currencies in the world, but it's also the most liquid. You have access today to basically purchase anything through the Visa MasterCard network and tomorrow we'll be able to do it on Lightning.

- Yeah, it's amazing to see how this thing is growing up. It does often feel though, there's sort of two complete, separate sides with Bitcoin. You have like people who are doing everything non-custodial, everything on Lightning or using, you know, Samurai wallet and all these different services

that are available and doing things very privately. There's that whole movement. And then there's just the more normies who literally just want to store their wealth. And although it's not something that we really focus on this show too much, it is so important and like there's never been a time

in history I think where this has been more necessary. And so it kind of feels like it's now or never and this is a great way to onboard people and take the complexity out of it because, you know, when people are in this Bitcoin world and we get sucked in, we get obsessed with it,

it can be easy to forget that people have really busy lives and jobs and families and loads of other stuff going on in their lives. And they don't necessarily want or have the time to be digging in.

And so if they can just share a wallet address and have this paid in over time, I think what will happen naturally is they will see number go up, their interest will grow and a percentage of those people will really start to dig in, start running nodes, start playing with lightning, start really using the tech.

And, you know, that's how we onboard more people more quickly. You can have these niches, you can have, you know, a small percentage of people who are obsessed with it, but it doesn't grow without things like this.

- And, you know, for us, the way that we see ourselves in the market is that we are connecting what is traditionally a very slow moving, conservative part of the financial economy, which is HR systems, payroll systems and platforms.

And we're connecting them into, you know, the high, the fast moving, high paced disruptive area of Bitcoin and everything involved in that industry. And we think that it's important that, you know, while we have an approach that is compliant and considers regulation and, you know,

is comfortable for those groups, also make sure that when those groups get access to this technology, they are future proofing for essentially a world where everyone has their preferred wallet, whether it be their hardware wallet or, you know, a microchip they have under their skin or, you know, having it go to an exchange

or what I'm expecting will eventually happen even a bank account, right? Not that I advise that, but I think that's where the world's moving and I wanna make sure and that we have the whole vast options and array available for these systems so that people are not locked in, right?

I think that there's a little bit of a risk of these systems locking into a particular wallet, right? And I think that that's a disservice to the industry and instead our system creates that flexibility for a more integrated Bitcoin financial system.

- And you see lightning being a big part of that over the coming years, is that something that you've considered using for the payments to bring down fees or are you just batching? Like, is it something you think you might incorporate?

- So we do batching for now, lightning is not going to probably bring down our fees that much. I think that our transaction amounts might be hard for the lightning network to handle, but I think that's just today.

I'm experimenting with lightning and I'm constantly looking for ways to make it work. Most of the wallets have this structure where the user has to create an invoice first before you can pay into the wallets and that doesn't really work very well for our system where you just put in a wallet and you get paid each time.

But I know for instance, moon wallet doesn't require that functionality and we're on the sidelines waiting for the right opportunity to get into lightning because I want people to be able to get their salaries on lightning so that they don't have to essentially pay money

to do the onboarding into lightning, right? That initial transaction, it would just be beautiful for the user to not have to do the initial Bitcoin transaction 'cause we all know that that fee's going to go up over time and instead they'll get paid directly on lightning so they never had to do that and then they can spend.

But I have personally some worries in the current state of just you can't just let anybody do it. They've got to kind of know what they're doing because you're going to run into the channel liquidity issues if someone decides they want their entire salary on lightning, right?

So I'm eager and excited about what's going to happen when we can do it and I'm trying to think through some kinds of POCs that we can do until the system is ready for a full-blown integration.

- Is the tech side something you really dive into and geek out with the EU sort of into playing around with it? Is it something you enjoy? - Yeah, yeah, on my free time. Although I must say that I haven't spun up a lightning node yet.

I have spun up my own personal Bitcoin node and I'm planning to at some point do a lightning node.

I do like to geek out on understanding the architecture of things. I'm not a coder, I don't know. I don't really know how to code but I do like understanding the technical architecture of how all these things work because it's only when I understand the architecture that I truly understand how innovative these things are

and how I can truly compare. 'Cause you can get some of these shit pointers coming around telling you, "Oh, this shit coin is better for X, Y, Z." But they don't really know what they're talking about because they don't understand the architectural layers underneath.

And while I'm able to build very strong objections to that because I do have an understanding, sometimes it might fall on deaf ears if they just don't understand. So that's part of the reason why I like to understand architecture.

And node-wise, what are you running? - Bitcoin Core. - Bitcoin Core, just on a laptop or something. - Yeah, exactly, exactly. - And lightning nodes, if you've got any that you sort of, would you just run that on the laptop as well or would you run that on a pie or something like that?

- Yeah, I'm pretty interested in, I think it's Umbril. I have, again, I haven't done any of that. That's the one I think I would like to use. I'm connected with the plebnet. I don't know if you know that telegram group.

It's a pretty cool group. - Yeah, one of my friends is helping run it. I love it. I think it's really cool all these lightning groups and getting it back to that peer-to-peer idea is really, really cool.

- Yeah, and it's actually pretty funny. Lalo, roast beef, he was actually one of my friend's roommates in college. - Oh, really? The fastest talking man on the planet. - Yeah, exactly. So we've been fung out our fair share at Dolores Park in San Francisco over the years, but he's a little busy these days.

- Yeah, no, that's cool. He's awesome. It's great to have somebody just great minds building this stuff. It makes me feel very confident about it. I'm also not a coder. I'm also not highly technical, but I mess around and I build nodes and try them out.

And yeah, just like to play around with it and try and get a feel for it, because I feel it's one of those things that the more you immerse yourself in it, you start to have little breakthroughs, don't you, over time, where you have new ideas of where this technology can go and what would be possible.

And what's so interesting is just seeing these super smart people come up with just solutions for everything it seems. Like, you know, you're talking about with lightning, you have to send an invoice and now it's becoming possible that someone can just send straight to you without you having to create an invoice.

And there's all these things that just happen very, very fast. I wondered, did you have any thoughts on where you think this is all going? That can be sort of, you know, over the next two years and then over the next 10.

- Let's see, over the next two years, I think that lightning might come into its own over two years, two years still might be fast. I think that lightning is one of those things where it's gonna take a long time to build its initial liquidity and it's already doing pretty well.

I mean, I find it amazing how easy it is for essentially channels to be used to send to people. I mean, I remember when lightning, you didn't have multi-channel hops, right? You need to create channels directly with people.

So the whole idea of, oh yeah, I just create a wallet and someone can just send to me. It's, that is so cool that it's already gotten to that point. And I think that two years will probably be at the point where there's so enough liquidity that you can start doing some serious, some serious movement and transactions on it.

You know, my belief is that it takes, it's gonna take somewhere between three and five years for the concept of Bitcoin payroll to really penetrate the market. And this is, you know, my cap as a guy in the Bitcoin payroll industry, right now we're just seeing the beginning of this interest.

And, you know, I like to think of it as a snowball. The snowball just formed. It's very small, but it's rolling down the hill and it's gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think that, you know, in the three to five year timeframe, we're gonna get to the point where pretty much everyone is going to be expected

to offer Bitcoin payroll. And at that point, you know, I still think Bitcoin is going to be, is going to be fairly volatile. So people won't put their entire savings in it. They'll just have an allocation of their savings, except for maybe in high inflation countries.

You know, a lot of Latin America might adopt it a lot more, but maybe let's say 10 years from now. Eventually, I expect that Bitcoin is going to go from this really cool, sexy, volatile financial asset to a very boring, somewhat stable deflationary asset where it's going to grow at a minimum,

the average global inflation at a maximum average global inflation plus real growth, right? And when we get to that point, as I said before, it's gonna be just obvious for everyone to have their savings accounts in a deflationary currency, Bitcoin, as opposed to an inflationary currency, which is people's local currencies.

And people will use lightning as their checking account and Bitcoin as their savings account. And do you think we ever get to hyper-Bitcoinization? Yeah, I mean, I think that my version of hyper-Bitcoinization is a one where Bitcoin is the store of value,

but we won't live in a totally decentralized world. Banks are gonna have wallets. People are going to be using Visa and MasterCard with Bitcoin. They're gonna have this huge, you know, group of the population that's going to be using Bitcoin on centralized systems and probably still using fiat as well.

But fiat will be just your checking account, whereas you would have Bitcoin as your savings account as your store of value. And when you need to move money out of Bitcoin, you would either do it through lightning, through Visa, or you might convert it into a fiat currency to do a transaction.

So that's how I see this all playing out in the future, is some form of coordination between the two, because let's face it, Bitcoin doesn't have guns, whereas the governments that have the ability to print their fiat currency, they have guns.

And the people with guns don't want their currencies to go away, so they're going to do what they can to keep it around. And only in an environment where there's some sort of, you know, cooperation between fiat and Bitcoin is there going to be, you know, governments

that are okay with it. - Yeah, I kind of hope for the opposite. There is a rational part of me that thinks, yeah, you know, maybe the people with all the guns do always win, but there is an optimistic side, which thinks, well, maybe if they are as irresponsible as they have been and continue to be at the moment,

devaluing their currencies as fast as they are, creating this trust to anyone who is paying attention. Maybe their time is limited, and if their time is limited then, and Bitcoin does start to really take off and people really start to see the value in it, they do lose that ability to print money

because they lose all trust, no one uses them anymore, no one needs them anymore. And in that case, it could happen very, very quickly. But yeah, I mean, it is pipe dream stuff at the moment, but it does feel to me like, I don't know about you, but the last two years have been so crazy.

- Yeah. - They've been so crazy that I couldn't have imagined it. Like, this is where I thought we'd have been, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, if I'm honest. Like, I didn't think it would happen this quickly.

It's just like, it seems to be accelerating. The general consensus from most sane rational people that I speak to is like, yeah, we don't trust governments. They're not all the fuck they're doing.

Yeah, we don't wanna, like, yeah, we don't trust the money. We don't trust, like, it does seem that it's becoming more normalized to be like that. And I don't know whether it's social media, whether they're just rushing things, whether they're just like, particularly incompetent and untrustworthy at the moment.

But I don't know, like, yeah, maybe I'm being too hopeful. - Yeah, I mean, I think that the real catalyst here is at some point, the dollar is gonna lose its dominance. I'm not saying that it's happening right now, but all fiat currencies lose their dominance at some point, all major countries lose their dominance

at some point. And when the dollar loses its dominance, you know, there's gonna be this question of, you know, what should people use? And I don't think that governments are going to wanna use the Chinese yuan 'cause of how heavily manipulated it is.

And there's all sorts of risk around the European Union, you know, because they always have this risk of people wanting to leave the EU in times of crisis, right? So when looking at the actual currencies available to use as a global reserve currency,

Bitcoin becomes pretty obvious once the dollar is no longer, no longer dominant. And I think that that's going to really be the path to get to, you know, one of our versions of hyper Bitcoinization.

- Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to watch it play out. And, you know, all these fiat currencies trend towards zero eventually, same as the shit coins, because they are them. It is the same thing.

It is a centralized, manipulated, shitty currency. And my hope is that once it becomes clear that Bitcoin is the obvious choice, the greed makes us win because all of these people in power, all of the governments, everyone, all the central banks, even though they might not say it, they will be stacking because they wanna hedge their bets.

And that means that to protect themselves, they have to attack themselves. And over time, it kind of just works as a really good marketing tool for Bitcoin because number go up is just captivating.

Everyone can't help watching that happen. And once that happens and it does become the global reserve currency, they lose a lot of power. They lose a lot of control. And I think that we'll see some crazy innovation happening with it, you know, with more freedom, more people with more access.

It could be a very exciting time, but I do think you're right. I do think that people with the guns are going to make this as difficult as they possibly can. And I think we're seeing that in many different jurisdictions that making things difficult.

Is it something that makes your life particularly difficult or have you just got a particularly good team that help you navigate and get to a stage where you can actually still run the business or does it impact you?

- Yeah, so when it comes to regulation, the way that I think about regulation is there's a couple of layers to it. The first layer, should we even regulate at all? And really the question that the government's asking when it comes to a financial asset, like Bitcoin is, should we regulate it?

Or should we ban it, right? And the choice to regulate over banning is ultimately a good thing. I think for everyone involved. If the government bans it, of course, Bitcoin will continue.

It'll just become a dark market asset, which I would argue is not great for the participants in the ecosystem, not great for the government, not great for anyone overall. So the smart choice is to regulate.

And in general, that's a positive step for crypto because they're not going to just not do anything. They're gonna do one of those two things. So then the second step is how do you regulate, right?

There are different ways to regulate. One is with, you know, complete incompetence. The other is with an iron fist. And then the most ideal is, you know, light enough to protect people without, you know, slowing down the innovation within the industry.

And I think that what happens more often than not is that the people writing the laws and regulations for crypto don't know any, and Bitcoin rather, don't know anything about the industry, the technology or how it works.

And so we end up seeing a lot of bad regulation because people are trying to put Bitcoin. And really it is the whole industry, the blockchain crypto industry as a whole, but they bucket it into something that they think they know when really Bitcoin is not just a commodity

or just a security or just a currency. And as a result, when they try to bucket it into one of these things and regulate it in that way, without understanding how it all works, it results in potentially bad regulation, which is what we're seeing right now with this bill.

And what we're lucky about with the infrastructure bill in the United States is even though the senators who are creating the law don't know anything about it, the actual regulators have done their research and are, you know, claiming that they are, you know, not going to do enforcement exactly as the law was written.

Of course, that relies on sort of this like benevolent dictator kind of theory, right? When the government is good, things are good, but if the law is bad, then it allows a bad government to act worse.

So, you know, that's kind of where we are, at least with the most recent US infrastructure bill. - They sort of cracked down pretty hard in the UK as well. They make got a few friends who run Bitcoin businesses here and they've made their lives very, very difficult.

I guess it's a fine line. It's a line they have to tread like you say. If they outright ban it, that's going to cause them a lot of issues because it will just drive it underground. It will mutate and morph and it will be much, much harder for them to stamp on.

If they regulate in a reasonable manner, that would be lovely. And, you know, if they actually realized how much, how much good could come of this, that would be great. But I think it's certain jurisdictions where they're just making it so difficult to the point where a lot of these businesses

are having to either fold or constantly change. And it's, they're not knowing, which I think makes it difficult. It's, you know, you can create an entire business around something and with a certain goal or an idea, and then overnight with the stroke of the pen, it's fucked.

And it must be incredibly frustrating having to deal with that. - Yeah, and, you know, I do understand some of these concepts around, you know, anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing.

These are things that I can definitely get behind, right? I mean-- - They should bring it to the dollar as well, shouldn't they, really? (laughing) - They should absolutely hold the dollar to the same standard as they do crypto.

- Exactly. - But, you know, it's, as a business owner, I can get behind the concept of, you know, making sure that, you know, if you are facilitating the use of a technology, that that technology is not being used in a way that hurts people on a mass scale, right?

I mean, in general, you don't want that for society. And I think that having some form of regulation there makes sense. I think that when you start adding things like bonding requirements, you know, when it goes from, you know, a level of bureaucracy and having some people on your staff to enforce the bureaucracy,

to now you need to have millions of dollars of licenses to work. I mean, there's a huge difference there, right? - Yeah. And I think that, you know, one thing that I like to take away from the world of Uber is how they showed regulation can really be outdated, right?

Before Uber, you had taxis. And in order to drive a taxi, you needed a taxi medallion. And a taxi medallion basically was a way for the government to filter out bad actors from driving taxis.

And what technology brought us was essentially a way for people to easily rate their drivers, right? So easily complain about the drivers. So with Uber, instead of needing to go through a long, you know, arduous and expensive process to get a license, you just do the drives and you get reviews.

And as long as your reviews are high quality enough, you get to continue being a driver. And so you actually crowdsource this kind of regulation which allows more participants into the market, the markets to be more efficient for the consumers to be less cheated while achieving the same result

that was initially, you know, being thought through. And I think that, you know, the regulators think in ways that are historic, prehistoric even, whereas technology today, I mean, they should be thinking how can we enable technology to do things more efficiently

and lower cost while still protecting everyone? Or, you know, large groups of people. Is this something that you can allow people to access worldwide? Like, for example, like I said about England being an absolute pain in the arse regulation wise, like are you US only or is this something that you can do for anyone?

- Yeah, it's a great question. So maybe let me talk a little bit more about Bitwidge, right? So we talked about our B2B and our B2C product, which allows you to get any percentage of your salary in Bitcoin.

And actually, all that matters is where the company is paying you from. So you could be like a freelancer in Argentina or Nigeria or Turkey or Brazil or Philippines working for like a company in the US or the EU or the UK and you can get paid through our service.

It doesn't matter where you are, it matters who's paying you. So if you're in the UK and you wanted to get a portion of your salary in Bitcoin, you could do that. If you were in South Africa and you were freelancing for a company in the UK, you could also use us.

So really it's a global product. Anyone in the world can use us. But the companies that are funding the payrolls and the invoices and the benefits are US, EU and UK-based. OK. And so if someone's coming to you on a personal basis, so an individual, do those companies still have to be

only in US, UK, EU or is there some sort of workaround? - So there are other countries that they can do. If the company is like a crypto native, we can also work in other countries. So like let's say the company, instead of wanting to fund us with fiat, they wanted to fund us with crypto.

They don't have to be based in those places. For instance, you could have a company that has a treasury in Bitcoin and they need to pay their global workforces and their vendors, but their workforces, they need 50% of their salaries in euros and dollars and present in reality, let's just say.

They could then come to us and they could fund their payrolls with Bitcoin and then we would pay out local currency, 50% to their employees and 100% to their vendors and then their employees would get the other 50% in Bitcoin.

And that company could be a Dubai company or a South Africa company or a Polish company. I know Poland is EU, but you get my gist.

Yeah. And so let's talk a bit about how this differs from somebody just being paid in their dirty dirty fear and then going to an exchange or an ATM or whatever else they decide to do. Obviously it's much more convenient because it's just getting paid directly.

What are the other differences? For example, like fees-wise, KYC-wise, how do these two options differ? Sure, yeah. So, yeah, I think that that ease is really one of the key things here. Also, it's a dollar cost average purchase.

So instead of doing a big scary bulk purchase at once you're doing small amounts of your time, which is smoothing out your short-term risk but still giving you access to that nice juicy long-term upside, which is what most of us are here to believe in anyways.

We are pretty much the only service that goes directly to your wallet, right? So another service is you actually buy it on the exchange and the exchange may cause you issues when you're trying to withdraw that money.

Whereas with us, it's gonna go directly to the wallet. So there's less work and less risk involved there in terms of a centralization risk. The funds are gonna get into your account faster because we get the funds on the same as your payday and then we can turn around same to next day into your account.

Whereas you might have to send the money to an exchange. I could take some days. Maybe after you buy it, the exchange won't let you withdraw for a few days. In terms of KYC, I actually think that our KYC for our B2B product, so like your worker for a company that's offering this, is pretty light.

It's gonna be less than an exchange. But if you're using our B2C product where you come on without your company, it'll probably have to provide more information. And that's partially because we're receiving money from someone that isn't you and then we're paying it to you.

And it's going out of our service. So while we're giving you more control, there's technically a little bit more risk in terms of the kind of transaction that occurs. So we ask for more KYC than you might get on an exchange for the B2C product.

- What do you ask for? Do you inside leg measurement or something? 'Cause by a KYC requirement side. - We're asking for information on the company that's paying you pretty much. Like who is it?

- Who is it? - Like who is it? Like what's the company? And I mean, it's not that heavy of information. It's actually pretty light additional information. It's just, you know, some high-level company info that you're probably able to think of off the top of your head.

- Okay. - But we need that information to confirm sort of, you know, who we're receiving money from. Yeah. - Sure. And percentage-wise, like is there a spread on top? Obviously this is a service you're providing.

You know, you have to make something out of it. Like how does that side of it work? Is there just a spread on spot price? And the other question that I was wondering is, if someone is being paid either biweekly or monthly, when you say they're dollar-cost averaging, do you mean that on the exact time that the wages are put through,

then that is processed and they buy Bitcoin and it sends their wallet? Or do you literally mean that it's agreed with the employer that it's like an upfront one for that month? And then it trickles in sort of daily or weekly or there's some sort of dollar-cost averaging service you do that I wasn't quite sure on that.

- Oh, I see, I see, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's actually something that we want to implement, the second thing that you're talking about. For now, it's just you're getting the spot price on payday.

- Okay. - But and that, and part of the reason why we do that is, it's the easiest flow to comply with basically payroll regulations globally. Some of these other more fancy things get into a lot more complicated HR and payroll calculation risk.

But in terms of fees, there's about a 1% spread from the market rate to what the users get. That can vary depending on if it's an international transaction,

but in general, that's the base layer for someone in the UK getting paid a portion of their wage in Bitcoin or someone in the US getting paid a portion of their wage in Bitcoin.

And I think you, I can't remember the other question that you had. - Yeah, no, you covered both. So 1% is pretty reasonable. To be honest, I was thinking you might have said higher. 1% is pretty reasonable for the amount of hassle and faff it takes out for people.

And it's interesting the dollar cost averaging and breaking it down daily that that just, I can understand that would be a pain in the ass, but it'd be really cool to have if it was possible in the future.

Yeah, so many people want that just so that you completely even things out as much as possible, even if it just goes from monthly to weekly, that would be cool. - Yeah, so the feature that we're thinking about is you can turn it on and when you get paid, instead of it paying on the same day, it pays out over five days, is there?

- Okay. - Once up there. - Cool. - Okay, and when these payments go through, when you're buying, is it literally when the money hits the account from the-- - It's not when the money hits the account, it's just prior to when the funds are deposited into the wallet.

So basically, it's usually gonna be somewhere between 10 minutes to an hour, prior to when you receive your BTC when we get those prices. - Okay, cool. Very cool. And so if anyone's listening to this and they've got a business and they are thinking, well, for both, actually,

but we'll start with the business. If they're thinking, right, I'd like to offer this to my employees. It sounds cool, it sounds like a perk. It would be interesting. Is there any sort of limit on the size of the business?

Is there any other limits on the type of business? Or is it literally anyone who's on any payroll in those sort of three major jurisdictions can just give you guys a shout and set something up?

- Yeah, I mean, in general, there are not really any limitations. We get lots of companies that are below 20 people or lots of companies in the hundreds of employees that aren't bored with us as well.

So there's really no minimum or maximum. I would just say that if a company was having thousands of employees, it's better to reach out to support, whereas if it's in the hundreds or in the tens or in the less than tens, you can just sign up directly at bitwage.com and reach out to support as you need help.

- Very cool. It's been interesting to learn a little bit more. I'm really glad we had the discussion and I think it's a great service you guys are doing. I think it just helps onboard it or give the ability to onboard more people.

And the other thing that I sort of thought while we're on the call is it also, I think we'll probably take the fear away from people. That first time where someone's going on either decentralized exchange or just even a normal exchange and they're signing up and putting in their details and they're worrying if they're doing it right

and then they're trying to withdraw to a wallet and they're worrying about that. I feel like this would be a much more comfortable experience and not everyone's that tech savvy. People are gonna be worried and it's nice to have something that's gonna be very simple for them to get them onboarded.

So yeah, it's great. I think what you guys are doing is fantastic and I would urge anyone who's listening to this and has a business to at least consider offering this to your employees 'cause you might orange pill some of them.

- Yeah, yeah. We would be happy to help you orange pill your employees. We definitely get a lot of business owners who do this and they're actually surprised at how many people opt into it because people are able to do just $10.

I mean, usually people are doing $400 to $1,000 a month but some people are doing as low as $10 each pay period and I think it's a great way to orange pill your employees or just to offer a benefit that's unique.

A lot of companies that are more people focused where instead of providing a good or a technology they're providing like human services, accounting, marketing, software development. We see a lot of those kinds of companies onboard because they're just looking for more ways to differentiate in the market

and with the increase of popularity and crypto and the increase of remote work, this is just one of these perfect benefits for helping to acquire talent for those kinds of companies. - Definitely.

Well, before we wrap up the call, is there anything else that we hadn't covered or anything that people should know about before reaching out to you guys? - Yeah, I mean, you can just reach us.

Website is www.bitwage.com. We are also active on Twitter, which is @bitwage and we host a weekly room on Clubhouse, Bitcoin from Business to just talk about Bitcoin in Business and talk about whatever's hot.

So, yeah. - Excellent. Well, nice to speak to you. Enjoy the rest of your day. I will, when I stop the recording, if you just stay on the line for a minute to make sure that we get it all, but yeah, absolute pleasure speaking to you and hope to speak again soon.

- Perfect, thanks Max.