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John Carvalho (00:13): Obviamente, conozco muy bien su participación y la mía también, supongo, con Bitcoin Uncensored. ¿Hiciste otros proyectos de Bitcoin? No sé qué tan estrechamente estuvo involucrado con Counterparty o ayudando con eso, pero ¿hizo algo más en el mundo de Bitcoin?
Joshua Unseth (00:30): Aparte de comprar Bitcoin, no realmente, pero sí, realmente no hice ningún negocio de Bitcoin por la razón que tiendo a pensar, si Bitcoin es dinero, entonces todas las empresas eventualmente estarán relacionadas con Bitcoin o algo así. Así que siempre pensé que puedes construir negocios generales y puedes ganar Bitcoin.
John Carvalho (00:57): Sí. Mucha gente piensa que debe haber una versión de Bitcoin para cada negocio, y así es como iba a funcionar. Joshua Unseth (01:03): Correcto.
John Carvalho (01:04): Sin embargo, eres un hombre de negocios, ¿verdad?
Joshua Unseth (01:06): Sí, sí, sí. Si absolutamente.
John Carvalho (01:07): Definitivamente tienes una relevancia.
Joshua Unseth (01:11): No, definitivamente. Sí. Creo que es importante hablar sobre el hecho de que Bitcoin es literalmente… Si es dinero, entonces todos los negocios son negocios de Bitcoin. Y creo que la idea de que un negocio es un negocio de Bitcoin… Quiero decir, hay negocios absolutamente relacionados específicamente con Bitcoin, pero todos los negocios pueden ser negocios de Bitcoin.
John Carvalho (01:33): ¿Crees que existe una definición real para un negocio de Bitcoin?
Joshua Unseth (01:39): Veamos. Quiero decir, creo que las empresas están relacionadas con la incorporación o salida de Bitcoin. Obviamente, los intercambios son negocios muy específicos de Bitcoin, las billeteras son claramente negocios de Bitcoin, pero nuevamente, es muy difícil saber cómo vamos a ganar dinero con muchos”negocios”de Bitcoin. Creo que las billeteras siempre han tenido problemas con la pregunta de, nosotros tenemos usuarios, pero ¿cómo ganamos dinero?
John Carvalho (02:05): Sí. Quiero decir, definitivamente hemos visto algunos patrones con las billeteras con la forma en que intentan ganar dinero, y definitivamente algunos errores repetidos que solo se salen con la suya debido a los mercados alcistas.
Joshua Unseth (02:14): Correcto. Lo cual es realmente extraño porque las billeteras lo encuentran muy difícil. Quiero decir, ninguna billetera toma una salida, por ejemplo, cuando envía Bitcoin, lo cual tiene sentido, pero dificulta tener una billetera como un negocio de Bitcoin puramente. No estás ganando dinero. Y ese es el caso si nos fijamos en muchas empresas de Bitcoin y es que realmente no tienen una forma de monetizar. Y creo que está bien, pero en general, en los negocios, se construyen cosas al servicio del negocio. Por lo tanto, puede crear una billetera porque necesita que sus usuarios la tengan. Los cajeros automáticos de Bitcoin pueden construir una billetera. Sé de algunos que lo han hecho. Pero aparte de eso, los negocios de Bitcoin, por el bien de los negocios, puede ser muy difícil ganar dinero, lo cual creo que ustedes conocen muy bien, ¿verdad? Creo que Exotica era un negocio de Bitcoin.
John Carvalho (03:09): Sí. Creo que hay dos tipos diferentes de dinero difícil de ganar en Bitcoin. Existe el tipo que, como con Exotica, es difícil de arrancar y difícil de conseguir usuarios, etcétera, usuarios reales, solo dificultad general para ganar dinero. Pero también existe la dificultad de encontrar una forma de monetizar que realmente funcione o incluso tenga sentido para muchos proyectos de Bitcoin. Y supongo que quizás sea un término mejor para ellos: un proyecto de Bitcoin en lugar de un negocio de Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (03:36): Correcto. Derecha. Sí. Y esa fue una buena [00:03:38 inaudible]. En realidad, nunca quise que ganáramos dinero porque pensé que nos comprometía, pero también la forma en que la mayoría de las empresas de”blockchain”, supongo, ganan dinero, es que a menudo publicitan estafas. Así es como Coinbase está ganando dinero.
John Carvalho (03:53): Creo que este es un buen momento para hablar sobre negocios específicos de Bitcoin, y no para hablar una mierda sobre ellos, sino básicamente para evaluar cómo han tratado de manejar este problema. de monetización, y si es realmente legítimo o probable. Por ejemplo, una buena opción para empezar es probablemente Blockstream. Por lo que puedo decir, encontraron formas de ganar dinero a través de la minería y posicionándose con productos financieros, y luego lo están usando aparentemente para arrancar sus productos más riesgosos, como líquidos y cosas como esta.
Joshua Unseth (04:28): Creo que hay muchos problemas con respecto a los negocios y el desarrollo de una base de usuarios, en particular las empresas que necesitan una gran base de usuarios para ganar dinero. Entonces, por ejemplo, un negocio de billeteras atrae usuarios a su billetera específica, y hay mucha competencia. Entonces, si busca carteras de Bitcoin, hay todo tipo de ellas. Y están los que han existido durante mucho tiempo, como, ¿qué es, Airbitz…
–TIMESTAMPS DESACTIVADOS POR 5 MINUTOS ABAJO–
Joshua Unseth (00:00:00): Por ejemplo, un negocio de billetera que atrae usuarios a su billetera específica. Quiero decir, hay mucha competencia, así que si buscas carteras de Bitcoin, hay todo tipo de ellas y están las que han existido durante mucho tiempo, como ¿qué es eso, Airbitz o como se llame, Paul Puey? billetera y está la billetera Coinbase y todo tipo de billeteras, ¿verdad? Y creo que es muy difícil construir un negocio que requiera una gran base de usuarios y creo que, fundamentalmente, lo que sucede en un negocio como Blockstream es que tienes una gran cantidad de personas competentes. Creo que, por lo que he escuchado, Blockstream no es la empresa mejor administrada. Creo que Adam no es necesariamente un gran gerente de una empresa, como creo que ahora es el CEO. Austin Hill, creo, fue antes.
Joshua Unseth (00:00:54): Pero lo que han hecho es el resultado de la competencia es que pueden entrar allí, ver lo que Bitcoin puede hacer y hablar con la gente y construir cosas que se dirijan a un mercado real. Y de esa manera, pueden ser los primeros en comercializar y la fuente más confiable para muchas de esas cosas. Por lo tanto, pueden ganar dinero sin tener que atraer a un gran número de usuarios y no tienen que preguntar eso. No tienen el problema de empezar desde cero, por así decirlo. Y pueden innovar continuamente de esa manera. Y la otra cosa es que muchos de ellos son titulares de Bitcoin desde hace mucho tiempo, por lo que probablemente ni siquiera necesiten el trabajo. Lo hacen por pasión.
Joshua Unseth (00:01:38): Y Blockstream no estaba muy claro cuando comenzaron lo que iban a hacer. Creo que han hecho muchas cosas interesantes. Como resultado de su competencia, han podido construir muchos modelos comerciales que otras empresas ya están construyendo. Entonces, por ejemplo, creo que ahora están ofreciendo minería. Puede comprarles una plataforma de minería y ellos pueden alojarla, y estoy seguro de que en realidad no lo hacen, probablemente subcontrataron mucho de esto. Probablemente sean como una capa para otra persona. No lo sé con certeza, pero me parece que ese es un negocio en el que les confiaría, ¿verdad? Confiaría en un montón de estos bloques de chicos para hacer lo que creo que antes habríamos llamado minería en la nube, en mi nombre, porque sé que su reputación es muy diferente a la de otras empresas que han hecho esto anteriormente.
Joshua Unseth (00:02:18): Entonces, ese es el resultado de incorporar a personas que tienen grandes niveles de competencia. Y es muy diferente a muchas de estas billeteras, que son personas que simplemente están construyendo billeteras porque saben que las necesitamos y piensan que solo van a obtener muchos usuarios. Una especie de mentalidad de”si lo construyes, vendrán”.
John Carvalho (00:02:35): Son un buen ejemplo porque creo que son un buen modelo a seguir en general para las empresas de Bitcoin y los empresarios de Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (00:02:44): Sí. Creo que es cierto, pero no sé cuántas empresas pueden ser Blockstream, ¿verdad? Blockstream, Bitcoin tiene los desarrolladores centrales más competentes, creo, de cualquiera de estos proyectos en el espacio. Y creo que Blockstream tiene un monopolio sobre ellos en términos de estos programadores dispuestos a trabajar para ellos. Y luego está la gente que se está yendo y desarrollando sus propias cosas que también son muy competentes. Un buen ejemplo es la billetera Strike. No sé si lo has usado, Lightning.
John Carvalho (00:03:14): Sí. Bueno, no creo que-
Joshua Unseth (00:03:15): Sigue siendo de Jack Mallers.
John Carvalho (00:03:17): Sí. La mayoría de las personas en personas en Bitcoin estarán familiarizadas con un Strike. Creo que lo están haciendo muy bien. Creo que están mostrando el tipo de agregar Bitcoin a las finanzas con una buena dirección de experiencia de usuario.
Joshua Unseth (00:03:32): Bueno, también están haciendo algo que creo que soñamos hace mucho tiempo, que es que puedes usar Strike y como si fuera Venmo y la gente no lo hace. ni siquiera sepa que están usando Strike o que están usando Bitcoin necesariamente, a menos que estén enviando ese dinero como una billetera Lightning o algo así. Y creo que es bastante sorprendente, porque hemos hablado de eso durante mucho tiempo, pero nunca lo hemos visto realmente puesto en práctica.
John Carvalho (00:03:54): Sí, creo que Strike es genial. Creo que definitivamente es un caso de uso necesario de la experiencia del usuario que debe resolverse o supongo que lo están resolviendo, pero eso debe abordarse. Y luego Blockstream es como si quisiera abordar su comentario en la medida en que no hay espacio para más de un Blockstream. No creo que alguna vez haya un clon real de Blockstream. En realidad, es una empresa bastante diversa en lo que respecta a lo que les gusta tener desarrolladores centrales, trabajando en el protocolo, también haciendo productos de minería y en capas, y todas estas cosas diferentes en las que trabajan. Pero sí creo que en la medida en que me refiero a ellos como un modelo a seguir, me refiero simplemente a navegar siendo un negocio en esta industria. Se han diversificado. Encontraron algunas cosas que funcionaron y generaron dinero. Se apegaron a algunas de las cosas que más les importan, este tipo de cosas.
John Carvalho (00:04:48): Pero también quería pasar a Lightning Labs, porque creo que cualquiera los definiría como un negocio de Bitcoin. No son una organización sin fines de lucro, pero, hasta donde yo sé, trabajan casi exclusivamente en software de código abierto para un protocolo. Y sí, ¿qué piensas sobre eso?
Joshua Unseth (00:05:06): Supongo que eso es mucho… sí, son mucho-
John Carvalho (00:05:07): ¿Cómo van a ganar dinero?
Joshua Unseth (00:05:07): Son en gran medida el modelo Blockstream que mencionaste, eso es cierto. Y no sé, quiero decir, allí, tal vez proporcionen liquidez en Lightning. Creo que hay muchas cosas realmente interesantes que veremos con Lightning. Quiero decir, Lightning, Lightning, ¿has jugado con él?
John Carvalho (00:05:23): Por supuesto que sí. Bueno, y literalmente brindan liquidez en Lightning a través de su último producto, se llama Pool. Es como un-
Joshua Unseth (00:05:30): Ahí lo tienes.
John Carvalho (00:05:31): No sé si quiero llamarlo una forma descentralizada de venta, es una forma descentralizada de agrupar a las personas en un área central para vender canales. Y para que estén trabajando. No sé qué tanto éxito ha tenido en cuanto a uso y aceptación. ¿Pero ese es uno de sus últimos productos?
Joshua Unseth (00:05:47): Bueno, creo que Lightning es lento en la captación en este momento. Entonces, estoy seguro de que muchas de esas fuentes de ingresos para ellos son cosas que prevén como centros de ganancias, pero son cosas que no lo son. Lightning todavía no está listo. No está listo ni siquiera un poco. Se están acercando.
John Carvalho (00:06:07): ¿Qué crees que no está listo sobre Lightning?
Joshua Unseth (00:06:08): Bueno, hay muchos problemas que Lightning aún no ha abordado con respecto, no sé, creo que la penalización de tal vez de la radiodifusión en un estado antiguo. Por ejemplo, una de las personas se lleva todo el dinero. Creo que eso es, muchas de esas cosas tendrán que ser resueltas, cambiadas y modificadas, y vamos a tener que averiguar cómo hacer esto. Pero, quiero decir, el miedo a ejecutar un nodo es, creo que cualquiera que esté ejecutando un nodo Lightning si tiene dinero sustancial debería sufrir una especie de ansiedad de nodo. No desea que su nodo se caiga y vuelva a estar en línea incorrectamente.
Joshua Unseth (00:06:51): Y creo que claramente es un producto beta. Hay muchos, hay muchos pequeños problemas con eso. Ninguno de ellos es un factor decisivo, pero deben desarrollarse y, por lo tanto, cualquier cosa que esté construyendo sobre Lightning en este momento, creo que está muy sujeta a su tipo de estado naciente actual. No está listo, ¿verdad? No está listo para el horario estelar. Y me sorprende la aceptación que tiene de un producto que está esencialmente en versión beta.
John Carvalho (00:07:21): Veo un poco diferente. Estás diciendo que no está listo, pero creo que lo dices en serio, tal vez de dos maneras o al menos en más de una. No está listo en lo que respecta al nivel de protocolo, donde cree que el diseño real podría no estar listo, como mencionó la penalización. Y ese es un aspecto bastante fundamental del diseño y no va a cambiar hasta que tengamos, creo, la bifurcación blanda CTV, que probablemente no lo será en el corto plazo.
Joshua Unseth (00:07:45): Estuve hablando con alguien hoy sobre uno de los problemas en los que, si cierras, si abres un canal sin una tarifa suficiente, puedes tener problemas reales para intentar para cerrar ese canal más adelante. Y no soy exactamente como si estuviera literalmente poniendo mi nodo Lightning en funcionamiento en este momento para comenzar a jugar con él. Pero hay problemas definidos con Lightning en todo tipo de frentes. Pero lo siento, te dejaré continuar. Pero creo que los problemas que estamos viendo, estoy emocionado de verlos y resolverlos, pero sí, no se solucionarán hasta que tengamos usuarios sustanciales, de hecho, funcionando. Pero muchos de estos no afectan necesariamente a los usuarios, afectan a los operadores de nodo, lo cual es muy diferente…
John Carvalho (00:08:30): Alto.
Joshua Unseth (00:08:30):… sí, en lugar de personas-
John Carvalho (00:08:31): Ahora, voy a Tómate eso como una transición, porque no estoy en desacuerdo contigo, pero lo veo un poco diferente. Y tal vez puedas tener esto en cuenta mientras continúas tu viaje Lightning. Porque lo que he aprendido después de investigarlo es que en realidad creo que estamos cometiendo el mismo error con Lightning que cometimos con Bitcoin, donde estábamos como,”Oh, hace esto y hace aquello. Y va para arreglar esto, y va a matar monedas de mierda”. Y pensamos que tiene todas estas propiedades mágicas, porque es genial y estábamos proyectando lo que todas estas cosas podrían ser posibles, mezcladas con nuestra ignorancia de lo que realmente es posible.
John Carvalho (00:09:08): Y creo que lo que he aprendido es que, mencionaste operadores de nodos, creo que Lightning no es para usuarios. Creo que Bitcoin es para negocios, quiero decir, Lightning es para negocios. Y quiero decir, obviamente, eso significa que también es para los usuarios finales, porque se conectan con las empresas. Pero creo que las personas que ejecutan Lightning y se preocupan por él e incluso sabiendo que existe, deben ser las empresas, no los usuarios. Y como mencionaste a Strike, son un buen ejemplo, pero me refiero a la otra cara de Strike, donde Strike se esconde, enmascarando literalmente todo lo tuyo y tú solo pagas y pagas y así deberían ser las cosas. Pero también tenemos situaciones en las que necesita obtener, debe indicarle al usuario que pueda hacer cosas en Lightning que son más complicadas que eso. Y esos deben abordarse en experiencias de usuario que no lo son actualmente, por lo que es más un nivel de aplicación que no está listo para Lightning, en mi opinión.
John Carvalho (00:09:57): Entonces, creo que a nivel de protocolo, mucho de él está prácticamente listo. Sí, hay algunas cosas que son errores y algunas cosas que podrían optimizarse, pero puedes conectar una billetera a un intercambio para un usuario y puedes hacer una pequeña red completa y pagar a todos y todo funciona bien. Entonces, el aspecto de la experiencia del usuario está en el nivel de la aplicación y no sé si Lightning Labs incluso intentará resolver eso o cualquiera de ellos o Blockstream tampoco. Bueno, Blockstream tiene algunas aplicaciones, pero ninguna tiene Lightning. Joshua Unseth (00:10:30): Es cierto.
John Carvalho (00:10:31): Entonces creo que es algo que está a nivel de red y se resolverá y tratará más como tener minutos de teléfono celular o habrá algún tipo de experiencia de usuario por manejarlo. Y creo que encontrará que no lo es, no sé si los usuarios deben al menos saber que están ejecutando un nodo Lightning. En las aplicaciones móviles, puede obtener Neutrino allí y, por lo tanto, puede tener este nodo liviano que funciona. Pero incluso eso, es complicado instalar aplicaciones y no es ampliamente compatible, etcétera. No sé. Estoy despotricando un poco, pero sí. No estoy en desacuerdo contigo.
John Carvalho (00:11:05): Creo que creo que el lado de la pregunta del que no hablamos tanto con Lightning Labs es que creo que tienen un desafío que intentar para descubrir cómo ganar dinero. Y sí, tienen este producto Pool, pero es un producto descentralizado y cualquiera puede ejecutarlo y ejecutar su propio Pool. Y así, sin embargo, todo lo que hacen tiene su propia competencia incorporada también.
Joshua Unseth (00:11:29): Estoy emocionado de ver adónde va Lightning Labs y otros tipos de protocolo Lightning o estas otras aplicaciones Lightning que se están creando. Estoy asombrado por el progreso de Lightning. Creo que mucha gente piensa que es lento, no creo que lo sea. Creo que ha sido asombroso. Escucho a personas criticar su aceptación, pero sé que las personas que ejecutan nodos Lightning están ganando más y más dinero sentados entre transacciones cada año. Y creo, quiero decir, que es un poco realmente genial… es una adición increíble a Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (00:12:01): Creo que de lo que me di cuenta sobre el espacio de bloque limitado de Bitcoin es que forzó un momento de ir a la luna en el espacio, donde teníamos que calcular encontrar formas de solucionar estos problemas percibidos, como el hecho de que no hay suficientes personas que puedan interactuar en la cadena principal, como decía la gente. ¿Cómo resuelves ese problema? Bueno, existe una función realmente sorprendente en Bitcoin que nos permite básicamente abrir estos canales y la red. Y creo que fue un tipo de propuesta realmente asombrosa y la implementación, tienes razón, es una especie de protocolo comercial. La implementación es funcional y simple, y realmente increíble.
John Carvalho (00:12:48): En el lado comercial, también me refiero a que la calidad es básicamente lo que creo que Lightning aporta a Bitcoin es que obviamente te permite realizar transacciones instantáneas, lo cual es, quiero decir, relativamente instantáneo, lo cual es bastante nuevo para Bitcoin sin tos cero. Y luego le permite tener alta frecuencia, por lo que no tiene que pagar tarifas si sabe que va a hacer muchos pagos. Y los pagos de alta frecuencia normalmente solo se realizan en empresas, ¿verdad?
John Carvalho (00:13:15): Y luego lo último que hace es agregar centralización a Bitcoin. Te permite tener la centralización de forma segura, porque el usuario tiene las llaves y lo peor que puede pasar es que el canal se cierre, y tienen que esperar la liquidación. Y entonces, básicamente, solo existe el factor de molestia. Y entonces creo que esas son las tres cualidades que trae como centralización, alta frecuencia e instantánea. Estas son cualidades muy, muy favorables para el comercio minorista, ¿sabes?
Joshua Unseth (00:13:42): Sí. Bueno, los pagos instantáneos, quiero decir, para mí, siempre he dicho esto. La gente ha estado construyendo estas monedas para abordar el tiempo de bloque de 10 minutos de Bitcoin, que creo que es muy gracioso en sí mismo, pero nadie parece darse cuenta de que lo único que realmente importa, las únicas velocidades que importan son cero segundos, ¿verdad? ? Si no puede reducir los pagos a cero, 10 minutos equivalen a dos minutos. Si tiene pagos con tarjeta de crédito para una empresa-
John Carvalho (00:14:11): Definitivamente estoy de acuerdo con esto.
Joshua Unseth (00:14:12): Sí, si tiene pagos con tarjeta de crédito para negocios, está obteniendo una liquidación, está compensando una vez cada 24 horas o una vez cada… tal vez usted estás recibiendo los pagos tres días después de que se hayan ingresado en tu cuenta de Strike o algo por el estilo. Y creo que eso en general está bien, las empresas operan en eso, hay muchas formas de mitigarlo si necesita el dinero en este momento. Puede obtener préstamos factorizados de alto interés o algo así. Pero Lightning trae estas velocidades de pago, esencialmente la velocidad del efectivo, ¿verdad? El tipo de transacción de tiempo cero, que es asombroso, y es realmente genial que puedas hacer eso en Bitcoin porque no pensamos que pudieras hace unos años. Pensamos que necesitabas 1, 2, 3, 4 o 5 confirmaciones y era Lightning, básicamente puedes sentarte y tomar dinero a la velocidad del rayo. Es muy, muy rápido.
John Carvalho (00:15:08): Sí, creo que fue un buen punto señalar que no hay diferencia entre dos minutos y 10 minutos. Esto es una cosa que realmente me frustra sobre el líquido es que creo que son tiempos de bloque de dos minutos o algo así. Es como,”¿Por qué no es más corto?”Si tuvieron la oportunidad de diseñarlo ellos mismos, ¿por qué no es más corto? Y supongo que me van a decir que es por razones técnicas, que va a ser que yo diga,”Está bien”. Regrese a mi creencia de que no creo que las cadenas laterales sean algo real o una forma de escalar Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (00:15:35): Bueno, creo que las cadenas laterales son una forma de experimentar con Bitcoin. Creo que las cadenas laterales podrían ser una forma de escalar Bitcoin, ¿verdad? Podrías hacerlos en un segundo o algo así o, pero esencialmente, las cadenas laterales, creo, son principalmente para experimentación. Paul Sztorc habla de que las cadenas laterales son una forma de matar shitcoins, pero creo que son realmente, no creo que esa aplicación exista realmente, porque la verdadera aplicación de shitcoins es que los fundadores se enriquezcan imprimiendo su propio dinero. Y si de repente atas estas cosas a Bitcoin, no hay una razón real para tener una shitcoin.
John Carvalho (00:16:10): Estoy totalmente de acuerdo.
Joshua Unseth (00:16:10): Y eso es [diafonía 00:16:12]. Es solo que le he hablado de esto antes. Si tiene Darkcoin o algo así ejecutándose en Bitcoin, eso es lindo y todo, pero a menos que esa funcionalidad se agregue al protocolo principal de Bitcoin, realmente no importa. Pero la razón por la que comenzó Darkcoin no fue para tener una Darkcoin de $ 50,000, fue para comenzar desde cero y hacer que un montón de gente lo comprara y ganara dinero con esto. No sirve a una aplicación, por lo que no habría ninguna razón por la que estaría en la cadena lateral.
John Carvalho (00:16:49): Sí. Lo que creo que Paul y algunas personas a veces no entienden es que no se puede resolver el”problema””de las shitcoins”agregando algo a Bitcoin, o haciendo algo en Bitcoin, porque el objetivo de las shitcoins es no ser Bitcoins.. Y así, como Drivechain, etcétera, no se pueden solucionar esos problemas de Allcoin. El problema de Allcoin es que la gente quiere una alternativa, y quieren especular sobre una alternativa y quieren que las narrativas sean la razón que impulsa esa especulación.
Joshua Unseth (00:17:21): Pero creo que hay algunas cosas interesantes como Rootstock que lleva el EDM a Bitcoin. Quiero decir,”Adelante”. Creo que será algo interesante. De alguna manera elimina muchas de las afirmaciones sobre Ethereum, ¿verdad?
John Carvalho (00:17:33): Sí. Renunciaré por completo a la ignorancia sobre Rootstock en este momento. Recuerdo, probablemente ambos lo investigamos en algún momento, en 2016 o 2015, o lo que sea, pero no lo he hecho últimamente. Pero realmente siento que recuerdo el último mercado alcista, resurgieron e hicieron una ICO y ahora tienen dos tokens o algo así. Y ahora este mercado alcista, realmente siento que es solo el mercado alcista lo que los revivió. Y realmente no creo que haya una exageración o interés real por lo que están haciendo.
Joshua Unseth (00:18:03): Sí, quiero decir, podría muy bien ser. Pero tendría curiosidad por verlo, porque no sé si realmente han logrado que el EDM funcione o no o cuál es el estado de ese proyecto. Pero sí sé que parece haber vuelto. Y sí, pero tendría mucha curiosidad. Si tenemos un EDM ampliamente utilizado en Bitcoin o uno que sea de fácil acceso, elimina muchas de las propuestas que hace Ethereum. No creo que sea necesariamente más útil en Bitcoin. Pero es una perspectiva interesante poder señalarlo y decirle a la gente:”Puedes hacer eso en Ethereum, pero puedes hacerlo con la misma facilidad en Bitcoin con exactamente el mismo idioma”.
John Carvalho (00:18:42): Tengo la sensación de que muchas de las cosas realmente interesantes, como las más cercanas a ser cosas realmente interesantes que están sucediendo en shitcoins y supuestamente no en Bitcoin, en realidad creen que serán descubiertos primero como tecnología web descentralizada. En otras palabras, solo será cuestión de integrar Bitcoin de esta manera con sus compañeros intencionalmente y podrás hacer las cosas interesantes de shitcoin. No es el mejor ejemplo, pero tenemos DLC, por ejemplo, y estas son solo una forma diferente de hacer contratos inteligentes, pero no tenemos esto en cadena, por lo que existen diferentes desafíos para el tipo de coordinación utilizando esto.
Joshua Unseth (00:19:22): Este es el problema del navegador Brave, diría yo, ¿verdad? Brave browser habría sido un producto muy bueno en el que le dabas propina a la gente sobre Bitcoin en todo Internet.
John Carvalho (00:19:35): Sí.
Joshua Unseth (00:19:36): En cambio, lanzaron su propia ficha. Pero estoy de acuerdo, hay aplicaciones interesantes que la gente ha construido con shitcoins en las que fácilmente podrían lanzar Bitcoin, pero no es así. Y de hecho creo que representa una muy buena oportunidad para los Bitcoiners. Si el navegador Brave proporciona un valor que la gente cree que lo hace, entonces creo que, en particular a medida que Lightning se pone en marcha, creo que es un poco difícil dar a la gente estos pequeños consejos cuando tienes que pagar 40 centavos o 60 centavos para tenerlo puesto y obtener algo. desencadenado. Y en este momento, incluso eso es un sospechoso en cuanto a si una transacción se extraerá a ese ritmo.
John Carvalho (00:20:19): Y eso eventualmente también resultará sombrío en Lightning, porque las transacciones Lightning serán más baratas que las transacciones de Bitcoin, pero no necesariamente baratas.
Joshua Unseth (00:20:27): Sí, no creo que sea gratis de ninguna manera, pero sí creo que serán lo suficientemente baratos como para enviar un 30 centavo o 40 centavos de propina a alguien y eso sería genial. Creo que eso se aplica a muchas de las aplicaciones de las que escucho hablar a personas como Elizabeth Stark, como que los pagos en línea para los trabajadores son absolutamente estúpidos. Y no creo que esos solicitantes, como no lo sé. Tiendo a ser muy crítico con los libertarios. Tiendo a pensar que tienen algunas de las ideas más tontas. Y ese es uno de ellos. A los trabajadores se les paga en un lapso de tiempo de dos semanas o cada segundo que están trabajando, en realidad no es tan diferente. No me importa lo que alguien te diga, simplemente no lo es.
John Carvalho (00:21:13): Sí, quiero decir, te lo perderías. Para pagar en transmisión, necesitas que tu trabajo sea básicamente súper, súper importante y peligroso, supongo. Esa es la única razón por la que le gustaría que le pagaran de inmediato, ¿verdad? [diafonía 00:21:25].
Joshua Unseth (00:21:25): Tal vez, pero incluso entonces, incluso si lo fue y estás enfermo, tenemos depósito directo. Entonces, también, si mueres el jueves, porque estabas haciendo algo, limpiando ventanas en un rascacielos, todavía vas a tener dinero en tu cuenta bancaria hasta la fecha en que trabajaste, [diafonía 00:21:41] en Viernes, una semana desde el día en que murió.
John Carvalho (00:21:44): Creo que la transmisión de pagos solo será interesante donde sea que la transmisión de datos sea interesante, entonces. Joshua Unseth (00:21:49): Eso es lo que pienso yo también.
John Carvalho (00:21:50): Sí, si estás transmitiendo…
Joshua Unseth (00:21:52): Pero incluso-
John Carvalho (00:21:52):… si necesitas una transmisión en vivo de algo, entonces está bien pagarlo en una transmisión. Pero, en última instancia, todo en realidad es una frecuencia de muestreo. Solo puede presenciar algo en un momento, ya sea digitalmente, como un ojo humano o lo que sea, todo está a una frecuencia de muestreo. Entonces, solo hablando de la frecuencia con la que está haciendo una frecuencia de muestreo.
Joshua Unseth (00:22:09): Correcto. Y esa es la cuestión, la frecuencia. Supongo que podría llamarlo resolución de pago es la resolución de pagos. ¿En qué momento se vuelve importante y es necesario que se les pague a los trabajadores cada dos semanas o se les debe pagar cada cuatro minutos y medio? Muchas de estas preguntas son muy estúpidas. Y Lightning realmente no los resuelve ni hace que las preguntas estúpidas sean más interesantes. [diafonía 00:22:35].
John Carvalho (00:22:36): También hay algo como,”¿Me gustará eso? ¿Me gusta? ¿Cómo se sentirá estar realmente en el reloj?
Joshua Unseth (00:22:44): Sí. Y es un problema muy extraño. Y creo que la gente está en Bitcoin y en shitcoins, en general, siempre han estado muy obsesionados con los tiempos de liquidación, ¿verdad? minutos es demasiado para mucha gente. Los bancos tardan uno o dos días a veces en hacer las cosas. La razón por la que existen estos tiempos de liquidación es para que pueda encontrar errores.
Joshua Unseth (00:23: 09): Un buen ejemplo si tiene empleados trabajando, digamos que alguien se olvida de fichar su salida, pero no quiere pagarles esas tres horas en un pago continuo, ¿verdad? Quiere poder corregir eso antes de la nómina sube. Y es por eso que las empresas hacen eso. Es decir, hacen ajustes antes de que se agote la nómina. Necesitan tiempo y no es así, muchos de estos problemas, escucho a personas decir que las soluciones Lightning están muy mal. No hay razón para hacerlo Lo tengo así. Pagando por una taza de café, por otro lado, puedes hacerlo con Lightning. It’s kind of cool.
John Carvalho (00:23:43): I guess in the end, the amount of the optimum amount of action is the fewest amount of actions, right?
Joshua Unseth (00:23:49): Yeah,
John Carvalho (00:23:49): So, you always want to try to batch or optimize something if you can, regardless of the format.
Joshua Unseth (00:23:55): Well, and I think it isn’t any less efficient because Lightning, right? We, as people as businesses, you want to net. Netting is an important feature and Lightning makes the ability to net a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper. All that’s good, but you want to net. You don’t want to necessarily be doing things like sending 12 cents every second.
John Carvalho (00:24:19): Yeah, yeah. Está bien. What do you think about Counterparty, do you still follow that at all?
Joshua Unseth (00:24:26): Yeah. Especially during the NFT boom, Counterparty has been very interesting to me. The NFT stuff is interesting, only insofar as I don’t think anybody really knows what they are. And I think in Counterparty because of the rare Pepe stuff people have been thinking about what NFTs are for a very long time. And I think that the NFT has really worked well when the NFT itself is like a database object, right? So like Magic: The Gathering cards may be a really good application for NFTs, but I don’t think that it makes a lot of sense, so it’s very interesting when applied to a piece of art.
John Carvalho (00:25:07): Yeah, I agree.
Joshua Unseth (00:25:08): As like a digital receipt. I find it to be very dumb. And it’s sort of arts DRM, if you will. What are they going to do? [crosstalk 00:25:18].
John Carvalho (00:25:18): Well, it’s not even bad as our DRM, even though it’s not, just because something is not easy to enforce doesn’t make it useless.
Joshua Unseth (00:25:26): Correct. John Carvalho (00:25:26): But most of them aren’t even that. NFTs are usually just metadata pointing to a link somewhere.
Joshua Unseth (00:25:35): That’s what I’m saying though. If you bought the Beeple, the one that was at Christie’s for what $60 million? And you’re like,”I own this Beeple.””How do I know you own it?””Well, I have the digital receipt.”So, what do you do with this Beeple? I don’t know, you put it on display at your house, somehow. You put it on your TV. Well, if I have access to that file, I too can put it on my TV. I can put it on there in exactly same way. It doesn’t-
John Carvalho (00:26:01): Well, the question would be, do I actually own any rights? Do I get to own the painting and so, I can license it to let somebody put it on their book cover, for example?
Joshua Unseth (00:26:09): You probably, well, no because you don’t even own the copyright, right? The artist retains copyright.
John Carvalho (00:26:15): [crosstalk 00:26:15].
Joshua Unseth (00:26:16): So, what you do is I don’t know. I think the only real thing it gives you is the conference of the idea that you own it. So, if a museum wanted to display, they’re going to have to ask you first…
John Carvalho (00:26:28): Well-
Joshua Unseth (00:26:29):… in some weird formality and you could say,”Yes, I’ll lend it to you.”And then I don’t know, you have to take it off of your TV while they have it also. But if I download the file and I put it on my TV, my having it on my TV doesn’t diminish your ownership at all. And we have equally valid copies of exactly the same thing. So, you can own it, you might be the one who holds the receipt, but I have exactly the same thing in my house and I can get exactly the same experience, which is very different than owning the Mona Lisa or owning a counterfeit of Mona Lisa.
John Carvalho (00:26:59): Yeah. So, and this is something I’ve been thinking about recently, and I just said it in a podcast a few days ago. But I think what NFTs are what people are not really fully understanding that they need to be is metadata objects. They basically are, you need a way for creating and enforcing a network of people that define this key as something else. Right? Because you can’t. There’s something else. It isn’t in the key. It simply isn’t. And so, the key is just like a credential and actually, no, the NFT is actually a credential. And so like the people, your key is just your ability to prove that credential.
John Carvalho (00:27:39): And all NFT is trying to do is take that credential and make it into a bearer instrument because for some reason giving credentials requires bearer instruments. No sé. But the truth is, they could do the same thing just for the art use case, even if it included rights, they could do the same thing just by using any key pair signing a message to another key pair and that’s it.
Joshua Unseth (00:28:01): Right? Or even more of that, like if I were a Christie’s and I saw this, I’d be like,”What we could do is we could build a database of provenance, where if you want to sell digital works then you can bind the digital work and we will record in the Christie’s database, that this person owns this work. And then when that person wants to sell the work, they can come to Christie’s and they can be the only ones to do it. So, if people are buying this digital art and owning digital art is an actual thing, which I can at least acknowledge that there’s some validity to that, then there should be a centralized database that has all the owners of these things in some way. You don’t necessarily have to use your name, you could literally just use PGP or something like that to prove that you’re the person who has the right to sell it, but it doesn’t need to be on a Blockchain. That doesn’t actually confer any rights or anything interesting.
John Carvalho (00:28:53): Yeah. Agree. Agree.
Josh ua Unseth (00:28:59): I don’t know. I mean, like again, as database objects, I think it’s interesting enough. Again, if you’re playing a card game online or something like that, but generally, these NFTs really do not confer anything to the end user. It’s kind of the same problem as the ICOs from the last boom. People were buying them as if they were equity, but they weren’t equity, right? They were-
John Carvalho (00:29:20): Yeah, I call them sentimental equity, basically.
Joshua Unseth (00:29:23): Yeah, people were treating them like equity, but they weren’t equity and they were stated as not equity in all the documents and white papers. And I always thought that was very interesting that people still treated them as equity, and still bought them as if they were equity.
John Carvalho (00:29:37): And they did the same thing with NFTs?
Joshua Unseth (00:29:39): Yes. And that’s, what’s really interesting about the space, I found that there’s a lot of things about Blockchain and Bitcoin that are very interesting to me. And one of those things is that we tend to smell as humans a hole in the universe. We know that there’s something there. So, NFTs are an example of this. We know that there are some use, that there could be some use cases for this NFT stuff, right? I’m giving a good example, I think, the idea of trading cards. Perfectly good use case. The reason it’s a good use case is because digital trading cards are essentially bearer instruments and Blockchains are for bearer instruments, digital bearer instruments. And that’s, that’s perfectly interesting, very interesting thing.
Joshua Unseth (00:30:25): But the idea, this idea before people have figured out what NFTs are for, they’ve smelled that there is some sort of use case here and they’ve then extended it to things that isn’t useful for such as art, generally. And the fact that people are using it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is interesting or useful for that purpose. And I find that to be sort of a difficult thing for people to realize that things can pop in value. But essentially, what you’re selling in this case is a receipt that can pop in value. It doesn’t make the market right.
Joshua Unseth (00:31:02): The market can be very wrong about what it’s doing and we see it all the time in Bitcoin, where the market is completely wrong about how this technology ought to be used and yet, people use it that way for a while until it falls out of use because people realize that it’s kind of bullshit or in the case of the ICOs, a lot of these companies end up failing. And it’s interesting, because now, we have a bull market, and there’s no more ICOs. They’re pretty much done, at least, conceptually. Maybe it will return in the next bump.
John Carvalho (00:31:34): Yeah. I think it’s just a weird phenomenon where when you’re new here, you have this weird mix of ignorance and greed that allows you to basically ignore things and gloss over things. The cues are there. You could learn them if you dug in and actually paid attention a little bit and actually know what’s going on. But you would more prefer to ignore them, so you can believe this, that you have this opportunity to make money and it will just kind of stay in that state for as long, until they stop making money.
Joshua Unseth (00:32:05): Right, and then they move on to the next thing. And I’m wondering what’s going to happen if like Christie’s or Sotheby’s if they’re jumping into these things, what are they going to think? Because I’ve talked to a couple of people and they’re always saying that they’re researching this very exciting new art stuff. And I’m trying to figure out what they’re going to discover. Because when you take, it’s sort of an emperor has no clothes situation. And are we just going to pretend for the next 10 years that NFTs are things in the way that we’re saying are things, or we can ever discover that they’re not? Does that happen sometimes?
John Carvalho (00:32:41): I think it will depend on how well it actually sticks as a narrative for raising money through the bear market. If I can keep raising money for my shitcoin company by saying I’m building an NFT platform or revolutionizing NFTs, then it will be around for the next bull market. But if I can’t do that, then it won’t because it’s just going to be like a retired narrative
Joshua Unseth (00:33:01): Meanwhile, I see companies like Masterworks, which allow you to buy fractional shares of our pieces and they do it in a full-fledged database. No shitcoin, nothing.
John Carvalho (00:33:12): Yeah, totally, incidentally, I actually had a call. I don’t know why they asked me or why they wanted my opinion, but I had somebody like a gallery like Christie’s. I had recently had a meeting call with them, because they wanted to get my thoughts on NFTs and how I thought they should do it and such. And I’ll tell you what the result is, I’m pretty sure what they’re doing is building an NFT platform for Ethereum. And so, I even had the chance, so I literally had the chance to tell a gallery, you can just use any key pair and sign a message to somebody else’s key and keep it that. The example you just gave, I literally gave it to them. I said,”Look, if you wanted to do the total Chad kind of aristocratic kind of move.
John Carvalho (00:33:58): And actually do it like how I think Christie’s should do it, it would be like I have this formal white glove thing where you’re having high security for the keys and how you generated the keys. And you would prove that,”Now, this is now Christie’s key.”And you would sign a message to the buyer and you would give him a printed copy of what was encoded in the message and you would frame it. Everybody would see it, make news and there’ll be nothing to do with Blockchain.
Joshua Unseth (00:34:24): They could absolutely build any of these platforms and actually make some money. There’s a giant hole in the market. And it’s funny to me that that solution has been around for, I don’t know, 50 years. So far about 50, but probably 30, 40 years, essentially since PGP. I don’t know when PGP was developed, but you could have done something this that long ago. And yet they’r e pretending like, well, they’re not pretending. They truly believe that this is a new innovation that has recently been come up with and it’s not. It’s just something that is the word Blockchain is involved, so they think it couldn’t have been developed the other way.
John Carvalho (00:35:04): The same thing happens when people get into shitcoins, and they hear about all the narratives. They don’t actually realize that a lot of those narratives are narratives from the past two decades from people trying to build the internet. And it was just like things that people have always wanted people to do in the internet, but they don’t for some reason or they’ve never been designed well or finished. And now, shitcoins are going to claim to finish them and that’s it.
Joshua Unseth (00:35:26): Well, this is the thing I’ve always said about the blockchain stuff is if you listen to pitches of a Blockchain, what you end up with is a realization that oftentimes the word Blockchain is substituted for this idea of human coordination. So if you have Blockchain, then you don’t need human coordination, right? And Blockchain doesn’t really solve that problem. Blockchain doesn’t solve the problem of human coordination. You still need people to do things, so the key pair signing that you’re discussing, the reason it hasn’t been developed is because someone would have to develop it.
Joshua Unseth (00:35:59): And now that we have Blockchain, the fact that you could develop it doesn’t go away. But now they think it has essentially been developed because blockchain exists. And, blockchain doesn’t even really facilitate it or make it easier. It’s just that someone else has done this and made it easy for them to do. And I feel like given that, given that fact, there actually would have been possibly a way that Christie’s could have developed this in the’90s and made a ton of money in the meantime selling digital artwork. And I wonder if that’s true. I wonder what would have happened if they had done that back then.
John Carvalho (00:36:37): I bet we could find this in the wild if we actually looked that it already [crosstalk 00:36:40].
Joshua Unseth (00:36:40): I bet you it does exist. Sí. It’s interesting, isn’t it? But again, the provenance thing in that sort of environment is a little bit difficult, right? What if I want to do a private sale of a piece of art? Now, in a world where you do the key pair stuff, you could transfer it by going in signing and giving it to this person. But if you forget to do that, does that person now not own the art? Do they not own the ability to sell that in auction?
John Carvalho (00:37:14): Well, if the person loses the proof, do they not own the art?
Joshua Unseth (00:37:17): Yeah, and this has been my question with Ethereum like if you don’t transfer the rights, let’s say have a physical piece, people say you could tie one of these receipts to a physical piece. If you have a physical piece, and you don’t sign off that you sold it, does that person not own it? Do you own it still? Because it just seems to me that the mess of provenance isn’t the fact that paintings move, art moves all the time, and it’s going to move-
John Carvalho (00:37:40): Well, because they’re really talking about trust and whether or not and basically substitute witnesses, that’s all.
Joshua Unseth (00:37:45): And it’s going to move, regardless of the token.
John Carvalho (00:37:48): All right, let’s move on. I think we should talk about maybe Bitcoin Uncensored and more specifically, Bitcoin maximalism a little bit?
Joshua Unseth (00:37:58): Sure.
John Carvalho (00:37:59): And let’s see if we can try to put it through the lens of business. I don’t really know what that means or what that would look like, but so much as like, I don’t know, maybe. Do you think Bitcoin maximalism is good for business?
Joshua Unseth (00:38:11): Bitcoin Max, yeah, I do. And I would say I would say it’s good for business because it moves you towards a consistency of direction, but also, it means that as a business operator, you don’t have to kind of be up on the latest trends, if you will. You can focus on building your business. I think that it’s actually really dangerous for businesses to become obsessed with cryptocurrency. And I think we’ve seen this a lot where businesses come into the space and the first thing they do is spend a lot of time trying to research exactly what they should do, and what they ultimately end up on is Ethereum or Dash or something else. And they’ll try that for a while. And then eventually they make their way to something else, and then something else and something else, then Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (00:39:09): And I think that that’s a giant waste for businesses to spend all of the time and money to develop all of these different types of platforms or on all of it. Because what businesses really are in the business of making money. So if you know not a Bitcoin business, necessarily, let’s say you’re building a business selling food, if you’re trying to focus on any crypto at all, you’re going to waste a lot of time trying to just market your business and build your business. That said, I would say that a lot of this stuff, I mean, no one spends their coins right now anyways. I tend to believe, I tend to be a believer in the idea that if you’re a business, you probably shouldn’t focus on this space at all if you’re not directly in Bitcoin for that exchange.
Joshua Unseth (00:39:52): Businesses should be in the business of making money and then if the owners when they get their dividends want to invest in Bitcoin, more power to them. And I think that’s the best way for businesses to focus on this space is to have a founder maybe that really likes Bitcoin and to watch it closely, and then to just not really participate in the business aspects of Bitcoin. Bitcoin as money eventually will make it into your business if it works as money.
John Carvalho (00:40:19): Yeah, I would agree with most of that. I would say that, there is a little bit of a flipside where probably and I only would really appreciate this because I worked at [inaudible 00:40:27]. But probably a business should just be currency agnostic for the most part and just accept whatever form of payment they can actually parse through their own business system, which may include adding payment processors.
Joshua Unseth (00:40:41): Well, if a payment processor takes Bitcoin cash or Ethereum, or Cardano, or any of these others, if you’re a business and you getting the cash in your bank account is fiat, you’re going to be ambivalent as to what people is paying.
John Carvalho (00:40:54): Yeah, because you can always buy Bitcoin with whatever they paid you in any way.
Joshua Unseth (00:40:56): Yeah, absolutely.
John Carvalho (00:40:57): Which one.
Joshua Unseth (00:40:59): And that’s what I’m saying is what you want as a business really is just, you want to not have to think about the payment process at all. You want to receive fiat, you want that to go into your bank account, and then you want to be able to extract that as dividends or as payroll or whatever. So, it’s really dumb for businesses, unless they’re Bitcoin businesses to really focus on that. And Gen-X or whatever the company that does a credit card processing, if they add a way to pay with Bitcoin, that’s great. And you as a business, all you have to do is turn it on.
Joshua Unseth (00:41:29): But there’s been a lot of studies, particularly with eCommerce, I don’t remember which company it was, but many years ago like probably seven or eight, there was a company that added Bitcoin processing to their checkout, and it lowered their checkout percentage, because people had another option to pay. And that’s not good. You really want, you want businesses, too. Businesses want as many customers as they can possibly get going through that checkout process and finishing it, and putting in their credit card number or their ACH or whatever it is that they want and they just want the money. So, to add Bitcoin because out of principle or something that, especially if it hurts your business, that’s in my opinion, a violation of your fiduciary duty as a business owner.
John Carvalho (00:42:17): But what about the concept of we have hyperbitcoinization, which I kind of, the way I interpret that is basically like circular economy. In which my definition of that or I think the actual definition of that is something of basically about removing as much conversion as possible, reducing the amount of friction, having the least amount of points between nodes, et cetera. Circular economy is about efficiency and removing conversion. And so, if you are somebody that subscribes to hyperbitcoinization or the concept of a circular economy for Bitcoin, you probably want to be part of some kind of movement towards Bitcoin businesses that only use Bitcoin and don’t accept all the things, because all the things are an inefficiency.
Joshua Unseth (00:43:10): Yeah, except that businesses, again, are trying to receive fiat, so.
John Carvalho (00:43:16): Well, that’s an assumption. I definitely think they’re starting to be people that businesses that do want to accumulate Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (00:43:22): Yeah. Well, I think it’s different when you put it maybe in your Treasury, like some of the MSTR or Tesla talking about it now. Other company is probably going to do it at some point.
John Carvalho (00:43:35): Yeah, I don’t think people are using Bitcoin for their overhead. Sí.
Joshua Unseth (00:43:39): Yeah. I think that most businesses really want fiat for the most part. And if you want to make an ideological statement with your business, I mean, that’s the business owner’s prerogative, but I do think that businesses really have an obligation just to accept fiat or to get money into fiat and then the business owners themselves or the business employees or whoever, they can do whatever they want with their money. If they want to invest in crypto, they can. If they want to invest in gold, because they’re gold bugs, they can. If they want to invest in silver, they can. If they want to put it into equities, they can.
Joshua Unseth (00:44:16): And I think that it’s just, it’s incumbent on businesses to operate in a normal environment with something very stable. I think it kind of adds a layer of risk to business that isn’t necessarily what they should be taking on as businesses. As an individual, I think it’s a very different question, but as a business, it’s just not. I mean, to me, the risk of a highly volatile asset being added to your businesses.
John Carvalho (00:44:40): I want to nitpick and say I don’t know if it adds risk so much as changes the risk profile in a way they may not know how to handle.
Joshua Unseth (00:44:47): Yeah. It definitely adds risk, though, because volatility is risk in the markets. I think there are people that disagree with me on that, but that tends to be the sort of accepted definition of volatility is risk.
John Carvalho (00:44:57): Well, I think this goes into the sample rate thing like I think everything has the risk and it’s just like how big and how often it will happen, particularly with money. What will happen with your fiat is suddenly in 2020, they’ll print half the money supply, like that’s a risk.
Joshua Unseth (00:45:14): Yeah, but businesses are generally not, they’re not there to, like I don’t think that businesses should be accepting big currency risk as a part of their portfolio. And maybe your thesis is that it’s not risky, because it’s less risky than holding US dollars. I tend not to subscribe to that.
John Carvalho (00:45:35): No, no, no. My thesis is not that, it’s not that. My argument is that it’s not more risky, it’s just different risky.
Joshua Unseth (00:45:44): It’s absolutely more risky than fiat, though, it just it is. It’s just much more volatile. And if volatility is risk like you are adding a dimension of risk to your business.
John Carvalho (00:45:53): But Fiat has volatility as well, it’s just on a different sample, really.
Joshua Unseth (00:45:57): It’s just very minor. It’s very minor… John Carvalho (00:45:58): It’s not minor, really.
Joshua Unseth (00:45:59):… volatility.
John Carvalho (00:46:00): But the past year, it’s been huge.
Joshua Unseth (00:46:04): It’s been within like 6%.
John Carvalho (00:46:07): Okay, I mean, I don’t want to get in a conversation about how we measure inflation, but I would prefer to measure by the money supply, that’s how I would measure.
Joshua Unseth (00:46:14): Yeah, I don’t measure inflation that way. I measure it.
John Carvalho (00:46:16): Yeah. I understand that there’s a delay to the effect but in the end, that’s the truth of it. And even that, we don’t know it’s true. It’s probably worse than that.
Joshua Unseth (00:46:25): I’m guessing that the US over the next, I mean, we’ll see. And but per my very sober view on things, I tend to think that we’re probably going to have a lot of deflation this year and in spite of the money printing and in spite of the Fed lowering the reserve ratio. So if I’m right, even if I’m wrong, let’s say that there is a lot of volatility this year in the value of your currency, we’re still talking within a few percentage points whereas Bitcoin fluctuates. The other day, it dropped at 40%, something like that, 35%, it’s huge. The volatility in Bitcoin is very big and that just adds a completely new risk dimension to business.
Joshua Unseth (00:47:11): And if you’re a Bitcoin business, that’s one thing. If you’re taking on Bitcoin, you need a certain inventory of Bitcoin, whatever the case is, if you’re a Bitcoin ATM, that’s you’re literally the business that you’re operating, it’s the business of volatility. But if you’re just selling, I don’t know, doughnuts, that’s not a risk that you should be taking on.
John Carvalho (00:47:31): Maybe I’m packaging it wrong. What I’m trying to do is I’m trying to say that you can design, you can choose any configuration and achieve the same risk exposure if you design it properly. You can hold your Bitcoin and then do a future shorts or something to make it stable to whatever degree of stability you want to offset whatever amount of volatility you want. And it could be totally stable or a little bit within 1%. You can have whatever you want if you configure it.
John Carvalho (00:48:00): And so the point is the reason why I’m framing it this way is because if you think this way, then it makes you choose, which makes you actually think about what your actual risk choices are and what you really think about the risk of having your money in fiat, because there are different risks. That’s typically going to be held in a bank and what risks of you being able to access that money someday when you might not have total access, the money printing, et cetera. There are real risks and you could design yourself into a situation where you have less exposure to them. Well, with less exposure to some instead of others.
Joshua Unseth (00:48:36): That’s true.
John Carvalho (00:48:37): Basically, you can rearrange things however you want.
Joshua Unseth (00:48:40): Yeah, you can absolutely rearrange your risks. But for me, the business question is whether businesses themselves should be putting their money into Bitcoin or accepting Bitcoin. I mean, I just tend to think that fiat is the more responsible alternative right now in this era, and that you as a business owner can take on different risks personally, then I think your business should.
John Carvalho (00:49:06): Yeah. Well, I’ll agree in this way. I’ll say if your specialty is not something to do with Bitcoin or risk or financing…
Joshua Unseth (00:49:13): Or trading.
John Carvalho (00:49:14):… then don’t do those things. Outsource them to people you trust or just don’t get involved with them.
Joshua Unseth (00:49:20): Yeah. I just, I mean, what you’re talking about is a fairly sophisticated set of trades. And if you’re a business owner, that’s probably not what you’re focused on.
John Carvalho (00:49:28): Yeah. You’d end up outsourcing that to someone else, too and trusting that anyway.
Joshua Unseth (00:49:32): Yeah. You have to trust them. Yeah, it really is a different set of risks. Like I said, if you’re selling donuts, you want to sell donuts for cash, and you want the cash. And then again, if you want you can take your salary or your dividends and you can buy Bitcoin.
John Carvalho (00:49:49): So, what do you think Bitcoin Uncensored would be like if it happened this year?
Joshua Unseth (00:49:55): Man, we’d probably be making a lot of fun of the NFTs. We’d probably be making a lot of fun of these DeFi projects. We’d be focusing a lot on like I hear a lot of these DeFi projects are pretty scammy, very obviously Ponzi scheme.
John Carvalho (00:50:15): We have Elon now.
Joshua Unseth (00:50:16): Elon’s here. I’d probably be laughing at Elon.
John Carvalho (00:50:21): Imagine Elon in Bitcoin Uncensored that would have been so much better than S&L.
Joshua Unseth (00:50:25): Yeah. I mean, Elon would never have come on.
John Carvalho (00:50:29): Well, maybe.
Joshua Unseth (00:50:30): But you know. Sí. Well, the Elon thing would have been interesting, because I think he would have probably done two shows. The first one would have been that Tesla is accepting Bitcoin. We probably would have diagnosed it correctly. We would have said no one’s going to buy a car with Bitcoin. And very soon, he’ll probably get back out of Bitcoin and we would have been right two weeks later. Muy divertido. Elon coming into Bitcoin, Bitcoiners, I was surprised by the reaction to it, because they were so happy. And I think that people don’t remember the history of all of these guys.
Joshua Unseth (00:51:09): Every single person that comes into Bitcoin and begin selling things for Bitcoin, very quickly has a realization that nobody uses Bitcoin and at least not for purchases of that sort or of that magnitude. This was my realization at the Bitcoin Ball if you remember that. We went to the Bitcoin Ball.
John Carvalho (00:51:28): I wanted to bring this up, because I don’t know if you noticed, but we’ve had a series over the years of people that have sponsored things with Bitcoin, like Superbowl ads or whatever. And you bringing up the Bitcoin bull, which I believe was Bitpay. And recently, we had Strike, who you also mentioned, they did, they sponsored an Indie race car again. And I was like,”Oh, man, this is feeling very dangerous.”
Joshua Unseth (00:51:54): Yeah, yeah, it’s a misuse of money, I think, especially [crosstalk 00:52:00].
John Carvalho (00:51:59): There were so many top signs in hindsight.
Joshua Unseth (00:52:06): But the Bitcoin Ball was interesting, because they had arranged for this one taxi driver to begin accepting Bitcoin and you had this large concentration of Bitcoiners. Bitpay tweeted about them. Everybody was talking. There were articles written about this taxi driver. We took the taxi at, we called that taxi driver and we had him come pick us up at around 1:00 AM, basically, the last trip, this taxi driver took. And we asked him, we said,”So, did anybody pay in Bitcoin today?”The whole day, tons of Bitcoiners. He said,”Zero, zero people paid with Bitcoin that entire day, not one.”
John Carvalho (00:52:47): Awesome.
Joshua Unseth (00:52:48): And I remember, we went back to the hotel and we were looking at each other like,”What the fuck is happening?”How is it that you have the most Bitcoiners here and nobody, not one person was willing to spend. And this was when where everybody was so excited. I mean, I’ve seen this, the shitcoins do it too now. They get really excited when some little piddly vendor somewhere starts accepting their shitcoin. And what I know is that nobody spends that shitcoin at that vendor ever. And that’s always going to be the case for a long time until people feel comfortable like they have maybe some of it, like a lot of the growth, maybe a squeeze out of this. But I could have told you that.
Joshua Unseth (00:53:35): Elon opened it up for Bitcoiners. I bet you, I bet he sold one and a half cars to Bitcoiners to a Bitcoiner. I bet almost nobody used Bitcoin to pay for them and, two weeks later, they pulled the plug. And he pulled it with a fair amount of resentment, which I thought was interesting, the amount of resentment he acquired in those two weeks.
John Carvalho (00:53:57): Yeah, well, I think what the resentment was paired with that like he was on his little kind of Dogecoin adventure, and he didn’t like that. Basically, Bitcoiners were making fun of them the whole time. And so, he wanted his Dogecoin adventure to be pure and true and novel, and Bitcoiners just kept wanting to shit on him for it, which I think he deserved, but-
Joshua Unseth (00:54:19): I agree.
John Carvalho (00:54:22): So, yeah, Bitcoin Uncensored. I don’t know if it’s still got the same mystique that it had a couple years ago. People always talked about it say,”Oh, you got to go watch that.”I kind of wonder what the new crop of Bitcoiners is, how they’re getting exposed.
Joshua Unseth (00:54:37): And they’re making a note of it. No, they hadn’t heard about it.
John Carvalho (00:54:38): Well, hopefully this will help. I’m not very famous, but some people will hear this and hopefully go back and listen. You guys should if you’re listening, Bitcoin Uncensored. I think the whole anthology is still on YouTube. It was a-
Joshua Unseth (00:54:51): I think Chris took them down, but I think there is stuff-
John Carvalho (00:54:52): Did he?
Joshua Unseth (00:54:54): Yeah, you can find it. I think there’s a couple of people talking about hosting it. So, I think that soon, you’ll be able to find it in places.
John Carvalho (00:55:04): We can make a version of The Biz web, so we put it all up there and people have to pay for it.
Joshua Unseth (00:55:07): That’s true as well. But yeah, I think that a lot of the new guys haven’t heard of Bitcoin Uncensored. They don’t know what it is. And it’s funny because a lot of the stuff, like I’ll be in these rooms and I’ll hear arguments that I created being told to me about these things. I think it’s very funny. Just because it was, it really was sort of the cultural pivot for Bitcoin when we did define culture.
John Carvalho (00:55:32): It was like Bitcoin Twitter before Bitcoin Twitter kind of.
Joshua Unseth (00:55:34): It was, yeah. It really was. It really did define Bitcoin culture for many years. And a lot of the stuff, I just heard about”Bitcoin, I’m here to fix it”me and stuff like that. A lot of the stuff that was-
John Carvalho (00:55:48): It’s getting used a lot lately.
Joshua Unseth (00:55:50): Yeah, especially on Elon. A lot of that stuff, it was developed in real time on Bitcoin Uncensored and exported to the world. And now, I hear people repeating these things. And I think it’s cool. It’s had a long lasting effect on Bitcoin culture. And I don’t think there’s been anything quite like it, at least in terms of its effect. So, hopefully, that remains, I think that we did set sort of a toxic culture that Bitcoin has, which I think has really kept Bitcoin pure and very free of a lot of the scams that Bitcoins have had to endure and seem to be okay with enduring, which I think is, again, interesting.
John Carvalho (00:56:35): I think I’m just thinking this out loud right now, but what Bitcoin Uncensored was for me, and I think maybe a good cultural theme for Bitcoiners in general was like it was just sincere, it was genuine. It was like no matter how stupid or wrong or right or whatever, everybody was just trying to experience Bitcoin in the open with the clothes off.
Joshua Unseth (00:56:54): Correct.
John Carvalho (00:56:54): That’s what it felt like. And certainly, it was honest.
Joshua Unseth (00:56:55): But like, yeah. Bueno sí. And I think that’s important, because, again, I think encountering a lot of the FUD that we see in Bitcoin, right now we’re dealing with this energy FUD again, which we’ve seen for many, many years, and watching Bitcoiners freak out about it. I think Bitcoiners have a tendency to be very dishonest about the protocol and what’s going on with it. The claim, for example, that Bitcoin uses renewable resources, it’s complete bullshit, for the most part. It really is not running on renewables. That’s objectively false and it always will be until, you know?
John Carvalho (00:57:40): I’ll tell you this, I don’t know if it’s subjectively true or false, so I think all of it is bullshit, so I don’t even go looking into it. And that’s how I handle it.
Joshua Unseth (00:57:46): Well, yeah, but like I’ll make the simple argument. Bitcoin goes to where the energy is cheapest and the energy is cheapest in places with subsidies, real simple. So, you have Bitcoin going into places like Niagara Falls where they sell their Niagara Energy to New York cities, right? And the energy that comes off of the falls is very cheap, but the cities have limited amounts of that, so what will happen is Bitcoiners miners would go into these cities, eat up the entire subsidy, and then the town from then on runs on like 11 to 13 cent per kilowatt hour electricity after the Bitcoiners eaten a lot. And so, net-net, there’s a lot more energy used, but the Bitcoiners technically were running on renewable energy. And I think it’s funny to watch Bitcoiners be on their back heels trying to defend it rather than kind of just making the argument like,”Okay, so what’s your point? Bitcoin uses a lot of energy.”It has to. There’s no alternative.
John Carvalho (00:58:54): Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if you follow me on Twitter, but I did try to kind of bring these sides of things to the debate. But I don’t get to-
Joshua Unseth (00:59:01): I don’t follow anyone at Twitter these days. I got kicked out from it.
John Carvalho (00:59:04): Yeah, I looked for you. I looked for you today. I was like,”Where’s his account?”
Joshua Unseth (00:59:07): I got kicked off.
John Carvalho (00:59:08): Yeah. No sé. Well, the energy debate, I mostly agree with you. I think that like a lot, at the very least, a lot of the people that are kind of cheerleading these narratives for either side are definitely not verifying or researching these narratives on how true they may or may not be or how technically true they may not or may not be, which can be pretty important when you’re talking about energy.
Joshua Unseth (00:59:30): I just don’t think that Bitcoin needs to lie to win.
John Carvalho (00:59:33): Yeah, exactly.
Joshua Unseth (00:59:34): That’s what really bothers me. That’s always bothered me. It was funny to me when people said that Bitcoin was not used for drugs. That was Bitcoin Uncensored would go out and be like,”Yeah, okay. Well, here’s a drug user, how do you get your drugs?””Oh, we use Bitcoin.””Oh, I guess it is used for drugs.””Okay, this is a hooker, what do you do?””Oh, I use Bitcoin to list my stuff on back pages.””Oh, interesting. Okay.”Bitcoin was Dark World money, and it still is and probably less so now. But it’s hard to deny that that’s what it was.
John Carvalho (01:00:10): Well, it is because it is the black market. It’s like…
Joshua Unseth (01:00:13): Correct.
John Carvalho (01:00:14): There is no rules other than the rules in the Bitcoin protocol, so it’s like literally the only place you can’t make rules, so it is the black market. I actually think the energy debate is totally a false premise anyway on many levels. Just the idea of that we should decide which energy is okay, and which energy is not okay, and how we buy it because it’s like once you decide,”I’m going to sell coal energy, I’m going to sell solar energy,”it’s just a question of price, right? And so, if you start making a question of who or for what, this is like regulation at a kind of granular level, what you can’t actually enforce? You can’t enforce how individuals use energy, which means you can’t enforce any type of regulation in any special way, but you know?
Joshua Unseth (01:01:05): Yeah. Well, I mean, I see that all the time. I saw it on YCombinator the other day. Someone said we should ban proof of work chains, which I thought was a very funny idea.
John Carvalho (01:01:15): Well, the other absurd thing is that like I don’t know if I even believe that there’s such a thing as more energy being used. And what I mean by that is like thermodynamically, there’s all the same amount of everything all the time, right? So it’s like if the miners are using energy to mine in a trend, that means they’re not doing something else they would have done.
John Carvalho (01:01:38): And so, what would they have done with their energy or how would they have used energy if they weren’t mining Bitcoin? They probably would have started storage farms or who knows what they would have done, but they would have done something, right? And they would have done something to try to make as much money as they could close to that situation. So, I don’t think you can actually, it’s like the whole Bitcoin doesn’t create evil. It’s just, just because people do stuff with it, it doesn’t mean that those things are newly happening because of Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (01:02:07): Yeah, but they would have burned far less energy. I just find that uninteresting [crosstalk 01:02:10].
John Carvalho (01:02:11): Maybe they would have learned more. Maybe they would have become coal miners or literally.
Joshua Unseth (01:02:14): True. But so what?
John Carvalho (01:02:16): [crosstalk 01:02:16] idea. Right, so what is the bigger point, but just in general, yeah, I don’t know. It just seems like a stupid argument. And you’re right, I think Bitcoin should just be more honest and say,”Okay, yeah, Bitcoin is used for crime, Bitcoin is used for drugs, and it probably will be used for pedophilia and all these bad things.”Because it wouldn’t actually be freedom technology, if that weren’t true.
Joshua Unseth (01:02:38): Right. And again, you get to these libertarians and they go,”Bitcoin is going to make everything hunky dory. It’s going to make war stop. It’s going to make criminal stop. It’s just amazing tech.”And you kind of, you sit there, you’re like,”No, it won’t.”It will continue to be used for all of these things like criminals. It will continue to be used for all sorts of nefarious activity and it will be used for a lot of good stuff, too.
John Carvalho (01:03:07): So, I guess we should take a moment and tell everyone that you also have a podcast, right? Junseth’s World.
Joshua Unseth (01:03:12): I do. Yeah, very infrequently. We release an issue sometimes more frequently than others. We try to do every week and that turns into once every couple of months sometimes, but we’re over there, Junseth’s World at soundcloud.com/junsethsworld. And we got some good interviews. Interesting stuff on there.
John Carvalho (01:03:30): I don’t listen to that many podcasts, but I do I listen to yours about as frequently as any other.
Joshua Unseth (01:03:35): Good.
John Carvalho (01:03:35): I listen maybe once a month to a podcast episode these days.
Joshua Unseth (01:03:39): Nice, so you’ve probably caught up.
John Carvalho (01:03:41): I don’t remember. I’d have to look at the latest episode and try to remember it. But your topics are always so variety, so I’d have to.
Joshua Unseth (01:03:51): Yeah, we tend to swing from topic to topic and I just talk about stuff that interests us. And we’re Bitcoiners, so everything in the world kind of relates back to Bitcoin.
John Carvalho (01:03:59): Yeah, that’s the fun part of being Bitcoiners, you can just make everything about Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (01:04:04): Yeah. And again, it’s not as frequent as Bitcoin Uncensored which is once to twice a week. In what we could do, but it’s just our thoughts. It’s me and a group of guys that are in varying stages of Bitcoining. Some of us have been around for a long time. Others have been around for less long. It’s funny I think Bitcoin TINA put it up today talking about how basically every single person that comes to Bitcoin has to follow the same journey no matter what.
Joshua Unseth (01:04:32): You can’t really jump over the journey. You have to shitcoin for a while. You have to you have to experience all the exact same mistakes that every other person who got here made and you will not listen to anybody as you’re making those mistakes. You have to do them yourself. It’s a very interesting phenomenon. And I’ve witnessed it now, I don’t know. It seems to happen most often during bull runs when people come into the space. You get new people and they just start making the same mistakes. And it’s very, very funny.
John Carvalho (01:05:03): Yeah, I think Bitcoin kind of in a way attract a type as well or multiple types. There are certain kinds of people that are just more likely to put themselves in that position.
Joshua Unseth (01:05:15): Right. Sí. And I do wonder when we have had enough people in this space for a while and have had enough people lose money in the space that they sort of consolidate. I wonder if that will happen or when. I do fear, one of my big fears here is that we end up with a lot of people, putting a lot of money into these projects that end up being scams. And maybe they won’t be figured out today, but they might figure it out in five years, six years, 10 years.
John Carvalho (01:05:45): Well, that’s the deep fear that kind of drives most of Bitcoin Twitter tweets, right?
Joshua Unseth (01:05:49): Yes.
John Carvalho (01:05:50): They just want, it’s Catcher in the Rye syndrome. You just want to stop everybody from falling off the cliff.
Joshua Unseth (01:05:56): Yeah. And that’s why Bitcoin maximalism exists because so many people here have been, we’ve been through the fire. We’ve been burned. We’ve lost our money in Ponzi schemes. We’ve given our money to projects we thought were good. We realized we didn’t understand mining or proof of stake or whatever the case it is. And we did things that were stupid.
John Carvalho (01:06:19): And now, we need you to buy a Bitcoin, so we can get out of it.
Joshua Unseth (01:06:22): Correct. Yeah, we’re trying to pump our bags.
John Carvalho (01:06:26): That’s a joke, by the way.
Joshua Unseth (01:06:27): Yeah. That’s been mentioned a number of times [crosstalk 01:06:30].
John Carvalho (01:06:30): But not really, but yeah.
Joshua Unseth (01:06:31): What’s interesting about Bitcoin is that all these other shitcoins people buy and they buy for a profit, but in Bitcoin people hold and they just only want to hold. They want to get as much Bitcoin as they can hold it. And that’s a phenomenally different use case than like an Ethereum or Monero or any of these others. Which are essentially just transaction mediums or in the case of Ethereum, it’s pump projects, whether it’s the DOW or whether it is NFTs or what, the ICOs.
John Carvalho (01:07:07): Yeah, people get so excited about what’s possible with networks and with the internet and with computers and with programming. And then they actually they confuse discovering all of that stuff with discovering cryptocurrencies.
Joshua Unseth (01:07:19): Yeah, and it’s interesting. Ethereum is like this masturbatory project, failed projects that are basically projects to fund other projects. And I find that very interesting as well, the fact that there really is nothing useful anywhere except Bitcoin. And I’m curious as to how long it will take people to realize that. I hope sooner than later.
John Carvalho (01:07:41): So, I want to come back around and talk about business-y stuff for a little bit.
Joshua Unseth (01:07:44): Sure.
John Carvalho (01:07:47): I want to do like a kind of think like a case example like you mentioned Bitcoin wallets earlier and you mentioned, we talked about Bitcoin businesses. Let’s talk about like bootstrapping and marketing, and that kind of thing. Let’s use the wallet as an example. What do you think, using your own expertise and recommendations, how would a Bitcoin business with an app or a product go about marketing itself effectively in the current internet environment?
Joshua Unseth (01:08:20): I guess it depends on what the-
John Carvalho (01:08:22): Let’s use the wallet app, I guess. Because I know you have experience with eCommerce, and I’m trying to tap into that a little bit.
Joshua Unseth (01:08:33): I think that the wallet space is very crowded. And what I probably would do if I were developing a wallet would be I would probably do it as an ancillary to another part of my business. If I ran Bitcoin ATMs, I’d have a lot of people with the opportunity to then download a wallet, because they’re going to get that receipt from the ATM and they’re going to look at it and be like,”Well, what do I do with this?”And the answer is,”Put it in our wallet.””Well, what’s a wallet?””Here’s the wallet, you put it on.”
Joshua Unseth (01:09:03): So, that’s a pretty good use case, I think, for wallet development and it’s very interesting. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. Again, you’re not really monetizing the wallet. In that sense, you’re monetizing sales of your Bitcoin. But the wallet, the wallet has some cool opportunities there too. I mean, I’ve always been amazed by wallet developers. I would think they would take a de minimis output or something like that from transactions. Maybe, they can’t. I don’t know enough about wallet development, but I would think that that would be something they would do that you submit it to the chain, and-
John Carvalho (01:09:40): It’s actually something, it’s not something they typically do, but it is something that actually Lightning makes actually possible. I don’t think you could do it before, not trustlessly. But Lightning will make this possible by basically if your channel is with the wallet company, the wallet company gets to set the first fee that you pay and allow-
Joshua Unseth (01:09:57): That’s true. And I think they should set a small fee. I mean, I do think that wallets should be able to be a service that can generate income. And I think in Bitcoin, it’s difficult because the easiest way to generate income in a wallet would be to show people advertisements, but I think that that would be extremely unsafe and insecure and privacy violating. So, they’ve been reluctant to do that.
Joshua Unseth (01:10:25): So, what a lot of them have done is they’ve tried to build these little marketplaces in their apps, I don’t think that really works very well. So, I think the wallet business is a really hard business and that’s why I would say it should be probably be ancillary to an actual use case, if you’re running a business.
John Carvalho (01:10:44): Yeah, I definitely agree. I think that having context for your products is super important. And I think that a lot of Bitcoin businesses and businesses in this space in general, there are a lot of times engineer led and they don’t have a lot of specific experience with marketing or product and these kinds of things, so they tend to have certain bents to how they do things.
Joshua Unseth (01:11:06): But there’s a lot of opportunity here. I mean, I think [inaudible 01:11:09] was a great example of opportunity that exists. You’d think that someone would have come up with that entire business plan years ago, but they really didn’t. And I think it’s because it’s so hard to understand how Bitcoin works. It’s really difficult to get your mind around how seed phrases and seeds work. And it’s just difficult to build a business like that. It really is.
John Carvalho (01:11:35): So, apart from how the actual product and decisions about which product and the challenges of it. What about what’s going on in the internet and eCommerce world with just as far as like channels and advertising and approaches, guerilla marketing. I used to be savvy in this kind of world. I don’t follow it at all anymore. As far as if I had a Bitcoin wallet and I wanted to advertise it and promote it and get people to bootstrap it, what kind of trick kind of traditional means that you think are out there that actually would be appropriate?
Joshua Unseth (01:12:08): I’d probably build a website that answers Bitcoin questions and then [crosstalk 01:12:14]-
John Carvalho (01:12:13): So, SEO route, I guess is what you’re saying.
Joshua Unseth (01:12:16): Yeah, I mean, that’s my expertise. I mean, you could certainly do Google AdWords, but I probably have people literally just purchasing or just coming to my site and making the site as useful as possible and then trafficking that into the wallet. In a wallet. I mean, I’m kind of amazed that more wallets don’t do things like integrating with Coinbase or with these other exchanges. I think more and more have been doing that, but-
John Carvalho (01:12:42): It’s becoming a trend, yeah. You’re starting to see, well, at least you’re starting to see exchanges have pet wallets basically.
Joshua Unseth (01:12:49): Yeah, I would have done that very early on. I probably would have used, I use affiliate marketing links and stuff like that to get people into Coinbase. And then encourage them to dump those coins into their wallet. That sort of thing would have been the thing that I think could have monetized wallets a little bit earlier, but a lot of them didn’t really do that. And that’s always kind of baffled me.
John Carvalho (01:13:11): Do you include any type of support strategies for your SEO like social media behavior or other aspects to it?
Joshua Unseth (01:13:20): It depends on the business. I tend to believe that in eCommerce, you should let your business speak to you as to what the next step is. So, there’s a lot of businesses that do very well on Instagram. I know a guy down here, he started a fishing lures company. He built his entire reputation on Instagram and then he launched his eCommerce site. The result is that he was able to translate those Instagram subscribers into actual buyers of his fishing lures and he’s doing phenomenally well as a result. So, that business is an Instagram component. I don’t think he has Twitter. He could probably do very well on YouTube.
Joshua Unseth (01:13:55): And that’s certainly my strategy for business has always been if you’re going to start another channel, the channel needs to be unique, number one. And number two, it needs to have a definite use case in ROI. So, I don’t generally start social media channels for my company unless I have a very specific sort of methodology about going into that channel and actually turning that channel into a revenue generating engine.
John Carvalho (01:14:21): It’s interesting because-
Joshua Unseth (01:14:23): Or a cost lowering engine.
John Carvalho (01:14:26): Yeah, well, the default is Twitter is everything to Bitcoiners. They think that all of Bitcoin happens on Twitter and they don’t, you know? This is something that you can see a lot better once you actually work for a Bitcoin business that has actual customers, you’ll see that most of Bitcoin Twitter has nothing to do with it.
Joshua Unseth (01:14:42): Yeah, it’s interesting, though like I think the podcast space is huge in Bitcoin. Yeah, and I think that’s why podcasters in Bitcoin, they command absurd amounts of money for fairly small audiences. I think it’s because Bitcoiners it’s a very targeted group.
John Carvalho (01:15:03): Yeah, well, it’s also very hard to target them from working at [crosstalk 01:15:08] trying to do advertising and sponsoring and events and all the different ways that you could market the company and the products. It’s actually not that many that you’re even allowed to if you just mention cryptocurrency and even the ones you are allowed to, it’s inconsistent and they’ll treat you weird and yeah.
Joshua Unseth (01:15:25): Yeah, so I think that the podcasts provide a really good opportunity for getting the word out.
John Carvalho (01:15:30): There’s too much now.
Joshua Unseth (01:15:31): Well, it’s it depends on what your product is. You have to, Bitcoin is hard because in order to advertise, you have to have this product that’s very valuable or it’s going to attract basically every Bitcoin in the known universe, so that you can sell a lot of it, right? And that, there aren’t a lot of those products.
