EB79 – Rodolfo Novak: Coinkite And The Feature Factory

Transcript

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discover the future of cryptocurrency exchanges hi welcome to epicenter Bitcoin the show which talks about the Technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is Sebestian C and my name is Brian Fabian crane we're here today with the golf of Novak uh many of you probably heard of his startup he's a CEO and founder or co-founder of coin kite they're Canadian company and uh as we were talking before and looking at the website one thing became very apparent to us they are probably the Bitcoin company with the most features of anyone so it's quite insane all the things that they've done

so rudol thanks so much for joining us today hello thanks for having me me so for those who don't know about coin kite or perhaps let's let's take a step back before that even can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved in Bitcoin originally sure so I think it was uh mid or late 2011 uh my current co-founder and CTO uh came across the paper and uh and you know he shared it with me and we sort of you know found this thing amazing and uh we we started a project called BTC look it was a a a visualization of the blockchain uh you know that was that was

a fun project and then we sort of kind of like okay great so now let's get people on it let's build a project too to to get the Bitcoin going and uh and that kind of got us into into the the terminals and and coin kai.com the wallet so when we first met uh actually we met in Amsterdam the Bitcoin 2014 conference I think yeah so our our listeners will probably remember uh your interview uh that we did back then and at that time you were doing uh this uh really interesting and somewhat out of place I found uh payment terminal I mean out of place within sort of the Bitcoin

space because it looked a lot like a like a credit card payment terminal and I just uh pulled out of my like wall here like this coin kite card that you uh that you gave me um the business has changed uh since then uh as Brian mentioned correct yeah so so the the terminal was was a little bit of ahead of its time and uh and and what we realized was that the terminal was a much better exchange machine and that's sort of like where all the sales of terminals have been this is like people use this terminal because it's so secure and Reliant that that you can just operate a brick and mortar exchange to buy and sell Bitcoin uh and that's sort

of like uh where we focus that part of the business is a you know resellers or uh bigger companies come to us and they say hey I want you know 50 Terminals and I want to put my brand on it and I want to use it to do remittance in Asia for example and and that's how they use those terminals I think that's definitely probably where you're I mean when I talk about coin Kai to people they definitely mention the term but uh we're we're learning that you guys have a a bunch of other features that that we can talk about we can talk about the terminal as well a bit later on on the show um so yeah tell us about uh about the the enormous amount of features that you seem to have so on coin so we've

always taken this approach of of not spending money on marketing and putting all the money in R&D because we really believe that it's so early in the Bitcoin space that we need to be build infrastructure right and um so so what we did is we we started with a wallet right a quality wallet we we we invented a Bitcoin HSM so that you could do transactions securely on server side and um what's an HSM can you it's a Hardware security module right so so this is kind of uh for example Tails or all these sort of security companies make these machines but when we started out there weren't any that could do the Bitcoin curve uh

so they couldn't sign Bitcoin transactions natively and and that's the only secure way of doing Bitcoin server side can you can you explain a bit more about that sure how exactly does that work and why is that more secure than doing it some other way so okay so it depends on your needs and threat levels right so you know your phone is more secure to you for small amounts right but you know your phone also has some vulnerabilities right and and it's okay to keep spending money on your phone wallet um it's also you know you also don't want to trust us with all your money unless you're using multisig where we cannot take your money right and but the thing is when you're processing

signing transactions server side um you need uh a machine that can do that securely right you can't just use any kind of like pling computer or anything because those things are not meant to to handle sort of like side Channel attacks cold boots or uh hackers trying to get in right these machines are specially made to do cryptography on server side right banks have been using these machines for like over 30 years to do their key signing for their domains or for you know all their kinds of security things is just that they were not able to do Bitcoin specifically right so we had to create one that so that we could

build Bitcoin point the scale that we do so so is that how so those machines are online or are they offline they're online but they're kind of like black boxes right and keys never leave them or never really see the light of day so what happens is they the keys are generated inside them inside a secure element right and then when you make a call to them saying hey can you please sign this transaction here's my authentication right the machine knows it's you and then it signs the transactions right but but the keys themselves never leave those

machines okay so it's somewhat similar to the secure elements that we now see appearing in Mobile phones like in the iPhone exactly some Android phones yeah which which is interesting making a l ex yeah like a treasure yeah yeah so but this is done in Secure sort of like a server sort of level of transaction amounts right you know when you have you know a lot of users and and you know a lot of Bitcoins moving through per minute you need sort of like a server grade thing that can do that securely okay that's really interesting so it seems like there's another thing that I wasn't wasn't totally aware of that you guys are

doing today's magic word is API head over to let's talk bitcoin.com to sign in enter the magic word and claim your part of the listener [Music] reward it definitely seems you guys have have evolved a bit because originally with the payment terminal that I think maybe most people know you for also because it's you can take pictures of it and put it on websites know so that people like to do that uh and it it seems or my impr question was of you guys that you had this really strong bet on mass adoption happening of Bitcoin like soon right and people start using

it to pay their coffee because then obviously this makes a lot of sense and also the debit card you guys uh you guys created I don't know if we've mentioned that yet so um how is the company evolved from there and and why did you choose to focus on on that area initially so initially you know what is the immediate reaction it's kind of like okay great so brick and mortar want to accept Bitcoin what is the safest and easiest way of doing that is a payment terminal right I mean it really is what most that's why visa and MasterCard chose those th th those uh those machines is because they what what a lot of people fail to realize is that

when you're a business owner you can't just give an app to your staff needs to be something truly thought out and that's why it took so long for payment terminals now to be tablets and those things right and it's still taking time um but but um that that machine is it's truly sort of resilient for a business right it can be dropped you can't hack it there's all sorts of reasons for that um and it's a similar UI to what people are used to using with payment terminals yeah exactly but we are we realize that machines work much better and especially because of their price point for exchanges right so people buying and

selling Bitcoin in person uh on brick and mortar they love those machines because you can print paper wallets you can scan people's wallets um it's secure they don't have to trust their staff um you know it's GSM so Works anywhere in the world uh you can't get robbed you know there's a a lot of a lot of reasons for that but uh but as as you were mentioning um we we've noticed that because we had to build infrastructure for that a lot of people wanted to take advantage of that infrastructure for themselves right so you know our customers keep a lot of funds in our system because they know they we using the same system to handle a payment Network right so it was very natural for us to create a wallet that's for

consumers and for advanced users too um and now I mean startups are using that Galore um and then what we did is for all those functions for the wallet we we enable that as an API right and that's being an enormous success so so early on um you were sort of taking this bet of uh uh I mean when we met in Amsterdam you he specifically told us you were trying to become a Bitcoin Bank um right and I I think it was a Mis choice of words I mean you know the the cuz see we like to see ourselves as sort of like um uh uh you know an old school place where

you can have your gold you know and it's on your name on it we we never had IUS right so coin kite is fully blockchain everything that goes through coin kite is on the blockchain yeah which is why the term Bitcoin Bank H seemed at the time to me a little offputting because I mean even though um the sort of services that you were trying to provide then perhaps were resembling those of a bank in reality like everything is on blockchain and uh even more so now that you do multisig you're not holding any customer funds can you talk about how the vision has evolved from there sure so I think that the the misuse of the the term Bank came from the fact that we wanted to create something because see like banks have

you know a history of solving problems for people financially you know doing that well or not that's a different conversation right but people have a certain familiarity with the understanding that banks are secure and that you know they you know they're online banking they understand all those things right all those metaphors so when we build quink Kai we try to to bring some of that in so it's not just like this new thing that's shiny right but he also has some of that inherent like security value to it that it looks like you know it does what it says it does um that's why our interface it's you know it's not so shiny and you know full of like cute little things around

you know we we we are security company at heart so with the debit card that you guys have issued I thought that was sort of an interesting thing too right because you could use the card and and you know you can pay with it with a terminal uh like one of the terminals and you know be super convenient because it's like directly deducted from your wallet and stuff but of course one of the problems with that that product that you know sort of immediately apparent right you can only use the card you know with a coin K terminal and you know if you guys have maybe a few hundred now you know for most people it's it's not a particularly useful product unless you're have lucky enough to be surrounded by people Merchants who have

that which you know there aren't many so one of well one of the things that I was thinking about and I don't know if if you guys have thought about that as well would it be possible to create kind of an open standard uh that you know anybody could create a terminal uh you know big imersion terminal that then you know one could use any conat card wve or also that the coin card General could accept these sort of debit cards from other issuers yeah I mean it we've always been very open to that uh but there is a larger barrier of entry for Hardware sort of products and you know a lot of the startups don't get into Hardware

right especially smart cards um but yeah I mean we've always been open to that um what what's really interesting is that yes it's not as available as you know like Visa is but what what happens is a lot of uh people doing remittance with our terminals actually issue cards to the people who use their terminals right and we actually make those cards customized brand wise for them so for example there is this guy in Asia he has uh one terminal pretty much like every island of South Asia and he has cards with his brand on it and he's literally offering the whole service to

People by leveraging coin kite on the back end so his customers when they go send money to their family in The Other Place uh they already have money in that card so so this guy is using uh well he's offering this kind of room service in different Island in different countries in South Asia yes and so does that mean I how does that exactly work people pay him to buy Bitcoins and then they get sent around so I mean I presume you can only offer this kind of service if there's a Bitcoin exchange in in each of those countries and happening right yeah that and that's

happening I mean I've been in talks with Uno coin as well uh Sunny is a friend of ours um you know they're looking into dispersing Quai terminals in India um there is there are terminals you know a bunch of them in Ireland there's a bunch of them in Holland you know it's happening but you know they're tracking the Bitcoin adoption as well you know Bitcoin adoption you know have Peaks when it's all over the media because the price goes up but you know it's going to take time I mean it took credit cards 30 years to happen the way it is now you know it's start started as a dining club and you know it's people people need to understand that things take time

but what is what is fascinating is the amount of startups coming up with way more novel ideas and uh you know have and I'm you know happy to to know that they're using our system to to do that yeah it seems to make more sense than to than white label especially in the exchange uh scenario to White Label the machine and in and it also seems make more sense to be issuing these cards in that sort of remittance uh model where you're going to have repeat business anyway you're going to have the same people coming and using the same terminal all the time and if they can have uh their card in which they just keep uh their Bitcoins then um yeah they're not they're not going just any any store to to buy anything they're always coming back to the same

uh to the same terminal you nailed it that's that's exactly how they're using it let's take a short break to talk about our sponsors Ledger makers of the Nano Hardware wallet they offer the easiest way to keep your Bitcoin secure it's basically a small device that you plug into the USB slot of any computer and it allows you to send Bitcoins and because the private Keys stay on the device this is secure even if the computer is malware and fasted or even if your it guy is certain not so trustworthy propino loving Frenchman so the Nano comes with a beautiful Chrome app Wallet I feel this is probably one of the the best wallet experiences I've

seen so far it all just works together especially with a two Factor app for IOS and Android it makes you feel like your Bitcoins are in some bulletproof system it looks great and it feels safe and since we're talking about coin kite today it's a good time to mention as we mentioned with Rulo that uh The Ledger now works with coin kite so you could use the Ledger as one of the signing keys in your multi signature setup So It Go show how Ledger is working hard to give you even more options to use their technology so to get started we have a special offer for you if you head over to Ledger wallet.com and use the offer code eb09 at checkout you get 10% off so this offer code is valid until September 30th 2015 uh they also just released a new lowcost version of their bulletproof

bubble Nano uh and that's obviously the same security and features but at half the price so Ledger Nano smart card security for your Bitcoins give it the try we would like to thank leder for their support of representer Bitcoin let's talk about the API so I mean it sounds a little bit like that this sort of happened by accident know that you guys just build so many features and then you decided to open them up to other companies and and somehow there's been a really strong demand for those um can you tell a little bit about what kind of startups are using this and in what ways sure so so what's funny is that before we

actually wanted to get into terminals we thought about offering bitco ining as an API to companies but then we kind of like okay this is too early there's nobody using this yet we you know we kind of Gone full circle uh so what happens is startups and and and businesses wanting to do Bitcoin uh have been have had this inherent problem which is you know keeping Bitcoin secure and making it easy for the whole organization to handle it right and uh so what we did is we got all the features that kind offer right so you know the multisig stuff the send by SMS the email uh funds forwarding uh dims everything right and we we made an API

that that lets you access all those functions so what happens is startups now don't have to build all that infrastructure that we already have right to do those things and and startups are using this completely different some use just the wallet some use just the AP AP some use the API with the wallet um so for example uh let's say coinapult uh coinapult uses our cosign API right so what they do is they have two keys that they generated and it's on their servers and we have one key and then they access our system where the funds are stored to to transact out right so if we cease to exist they still have their money we

can't do anything about it um for example uh bit refu bit refu uses our API to to transact the Bitcoins in smaller quantities because they let people um pay for their cell phone bill minutes with um with uh with Bitcoin and uh they have a lot of transactions right so so they use the API for that um there are exchanges uh bitmax uh taus exchange uh there's guys doing uh other marketing agent staff like block trust uh where they do crowdfunding oh uh there's purse.io they

use our wallet uh they don't use our API um there are there I mean it's like every day I hear of a new one using our API in a different way I I think being able to offer all of our services and and not constrain people to two out of three or three out of five bu for multi for example we let you do any out of 15 uh really sort of empowered people to come up with Creative Solutions right um for example Bitcoin not bombs uh what those guys did is very clever they have I think like eight to 10 people in the organization so they created Eight Keys in a multi- wallet and then what they do

is they do two out of eight so anytime a person wants to take money out of the account they need a second person of anybody in the group to authorize it as well so it creates a lot of accountability for a nonprofit that's that's sort of uh some of some of the uses that people have so so going forward do you guys uh anticipate that you you'll focus more on that API business and and scale that or do you think you will continue to do offer like a really broad range of services you know ranging from terminals to wallet to debit card to API to and we have more

coming yeah we have lots more coming um I I I I think that we always had this sort of idea of you know build it we we are not so much as the Ling mentality internally right we we do it slightly different we say okay great we need this therefore you just do everything right no it's it's more like we think that you know if I need this internally other people are going to likely need it for their businesses as well so we go we build it well so it doesn't break and then we put it out there right because half of the problem when you're trying to do too many things is just kind of like handling bugs right um so we try to

like spend enough time building the feature and testing it so that we don't have to revisit it so much later and that affords us yeah right I mean I think it's it's it's pretty amazing and astonishing you know cuz cuz you guys really seems to be like anything you're building it from scratch and and op offering it as products or API and stuff and you know if you compare that to let's say a company like bit pay that is I think about 100 people and you know they are you know they have some other things like the copay multi- stuff but you know it's pretty much one thing right uh and so that that's quite amazing the contrast that and and it seems you guys have definitely taken a

very different approach a lot of companies to try to focus on a niche and you know do a good job there you guys doing a really wide range of things yeah I mean we love that we just you know to me there is no right answer yet um we we're kind of like you know see some people think we're we're like you know in the in the sort of like 95 of the web I think we're still in the BBS days for Bitcoin I think it's so early but so early there is no right answer so we just we just want to build whatever people need you know like when people hit our support asking hey you know I need this extra feature for for you know

my API or I when I'm trying to do this you know we normally just have a meeting and say like hey you know somebody needs it can we build it in a you know in a decent amount of time then sure let's make it uh we want to empower everybody to be able to build what they want to build with Bitcoin and not get robbed right because that's the biggest problem right so and so another thing that's a special I think about you guys besides the doing a really wide range of things is that you haven't raised any investment and and as you know we were chatting before the show a little bit that you know also means maybe you haven't been as much in the headlines because the number one thing that you know is always on coin desk if a company's raising money you know that's

a great story uh what why did you not choose to do that and how has that been for you so I think it's two things right we were fortunate enough to be fairly early movers in the space so we have a significant amount of traction in our services right I mean we have like over a thousand startups using uh our apis we have you know like I think 160,000 active wallets um you know we have paying customers you know we believe in in in three things it's it's like security privacy right and a Sound business model right so I know it sounds

insane in this market to have those very sort of you know yeah we've never heard of that before in the Bitcoin space that is you know we you know we have a free wallet and and it's great and and if you use multi you can keep any amount of money in it um but we we really believe that in order to offer real privacy like real privacy like the Privacy that I don't need to know who you are using my system we had to do two things we couldn't do Fiat right so we could not be a money service business I could not touch money because then I'd have to you know ID everybody that's just a law

right and I do don't want to sell customer information I don't want ads right and there is something nice about just sort of like the craf of making a good product that people are willing to pay for right so what's nice is that when when people start using our system you know they start with a little bit of money and then we have customers that have been with us with like over a year and a half you know and they've been paying us you know $10 $30 a month for a year and a half because they they really want to support what we're doing and they know the pathway taking right and and you know this support that we have from our customers and consumers sorry and the community is what you know make sure

that we don't screw up privacy Brian I'm not sure I agree with with you on coin kite not being in the headlines because every time I I often see new features coming out like coin kite's not doing this or coin kite's partnered with the like Ledger for instance which we could talk about a little bit later or coint guys doing these uh um what do you call the Nim Pages or like there's just I always see some sort of coin kite headline and it just keeps bring me back to when we first met so I was curious I mean this is something I've been thinking about is as uh in last year and in a half you we've seen the the the use case from for multisig really become really prevalent

for a lot of uh Bitcoin startups and simply from a security perspective and also there sort of the idea that you know people should control their keys Etc uh however there are other companies that have a different approach and they do uh hosted wallets you know like obviously coinbase and uh and others like like Circle for example um where where do you see the that going like do you think that we consider to have that dichotomy or I I think I I think one of the most beautiful things about Bitcoin is the fact that we can have everything right and and it's a true free market it's it's it's something

that there is there is you know we need to educate people as to what they're getting into when they use a certain service or type of system right it's very important they make an informed decision as to what to use but the the nice thing is you know if people want to use a service that offers IOU where you don't own the Bitcoin that you know you have by all means use it and you know some of those companies do offer sort of like other great things to bit to bitcoin which is you know bring more users into Bitcoin or quickly sell them Bitcoin uh now what I find fascinating is that we

actually end up getting a lot of those users after a few months so a lot of people when they get into Bitcoin they go like great you know there's this company that offers them Bitcoin super easy to buy and then they get into it and then as everybody that gets into Bitcoin buys a tiny little bit and then they get addicted to bitcoin and then they want to know everything about Bitcoin and then the obvious thing that comes to m is okay great now I need to move my Bitcoin to a wallet in which I own the keys right and there is this very clear path of of adoption where where they go from the easy where I buy to then they go to hey great I'm going to go to this

multisig solution or I'm going to go to this phone app where I own the Bitcoin right yeah I think that is that is an extremely interesting point you're making and I'm really curious and totally unsure whether that's going to continue to be the case right so because right now we still have people using Bitcoin who are you know technologically very Sav who are well educated Etc so I I think it will be one of the most interesting things and perhaps important things to see whether as cryptocurrencies get more adopted and as the people who start using cryptocurrencies are more just the sort of average person versus this you know very specific type of people you know

whether they're actually going to have that same that same pull towards Services where they control the private key or whether they're going to stay with the services that can offer a better user experience because you know they uh control the private keys and they just make it as easy as you know using Gmail well I mean that's one of the reasons why we still offer the custodian type of account as well like the the HSM only where we you know we can do stuff for people and we're very clear to them that we will charge you money if you want to keep too much Bitcoin in this account type that we control so that we force people to use

multisig via Market forces so that they use multisig in our system and we don't control the coins it's we want people to move on to multisig but it takes time right but but also you do but most don't right like coinbase is not trying to do that circle is not trying to do that right want people to say if they're hosted wallets it's it's a motivation problem right I mean most most people you know they don't want to have to handle understanding their money right I mean that's why Banks exist the way they exist but there is an awful lot of people in the world you know there's s billion people and and I I think there's room for everything and what's nice is that

when people get burned because of you know losing money with a service that maybe has control over their keys um they often don't do that again um and and another thing too is that I I mean in all fairness the the services that do uh offer uh what the coin Bas and uh Co and circle do they will be legislated to death right I mean those guys are going to have to soon I I cannot I I cannot see we are going uh going too far without having to start offering FDIC and uh you know Insurance over their stuff and you know having more government oversight so I think what's

going to happen is you're going to have two choices right you can own your own money and bear some responsibility for it right where you have the the multisig and we're going to help you make that as easy as possible Right including with like the The Ledger or something like that or you're going to let somebody else handle your money and rely on the government to keep them in check and which kind of already happens right with like you know you you can keep your money in your savings account or you can keep gold on your basement no I I think you're totally right and and I think that's that's going to be very interesting especially as sort of the spit license thing is is coming up right what are the repercussions going to be for the

companies you know like coinbase that just can't avoid it and so for for you and coin kite because of the thing we just talked about do you think you're going to have to shut down the custodian Accounts at some point because otherwise you'll fall into the same regulatory categories I I don't think that at least for the foreseeable feature we're going to have to just because the the way it's set up is in a way that's auditable by the user and it's not an IOU system right there's a very big difference there and the user has notification systems and everything like we can't just move that money around right it's

only you can move that money right we still need your password and and you know accounts Quin Kai takes a whole different approach I mean so so when you do the custodian account is it a little bit like blockchain or info that it's um it's not as far as that and that's why you know we have the multisig stuff where we truly have no access to your funds but but our system is built in a very sort of like security Focus way and privacy Focus way where even each row of our database is encrypted right so we we can't even check your account name like it's it's a whole sort of like new way of doing things right which you know cut through our our sort of Matrix and profits in a

big way right we can't do queries in our system to know fangs about the users or we can't sort of like we don't run analytics inside the site right there is literally no analytics within the logged in area that's interesting yeah no that's uh that's super fascinating and I wonder if that's going to you know if the if the pool of analytics won't be too strong for a lot of stups but it makes a huge difference right because when you're trying to to grow your startup you know one of the bigger ways you do that is by checking your numbers and say hey this works this doesn't and sort of optimizing it right yeah how do

you how do you then how do you how does that work for if you can't even if you don't even know how people are using your service you have to have you have to ask them I suppose right exactly and you know we we're one of the Fairly few companies that I mean we have a substantial user base now and and we still only get like 10 tickets of support a day kind of thing like it's very little because we are actively talking to the users people send us an email saying that there is an issue here or something that we immediately stop what we're doing we go fix it so that we do not ever get an issue about the same thing and then we also pull the users

you know asking like you know a lot of the users are our friends and we are part of the community I mean a lot of people know I'm on Reddit like pretty much like live there and uh I I mean I I read what people want and and and I want to have this conversation with them and and you know people complain about something or they want something go and we build it and people use it and then some of them pay for it it's pretty simple so coming back just I was I was curious about multisig um I mean it's I got say so I mean I I we talked about this earlier um uh I I use another multi wallet and I've been

personally wanting to like use my ledger with some other wallet Su like that's not um a single signal signature and so you guys do that now okay so I'm going to go and try to get that set up um but it seems like the the ux around getting multisig uh your multisig setup is really complicated I mean and and it shows when you when you go on coin kite although you guys do a really good job at like doing everything step by step if you want to do a 15 like a n to 15 multisig and have different types of um uh of so say you want like a hardware wallet on one key and you want to have

like a custodian account on another and then perhaps you want to have like a key that somebody else holds uh on another uh one of those keys the the this the ux to get that set up is going to be quite complex like how do you guys plan to make that easier where do you see that going so I I don't know when was the last time it checked but it got substantially easier right I mean so what we do is it's actually uh of course there's some complexity to to multisig right and the only way of making inherently it's complex exactly right and and the the only way of making it truly easy is by making it less powerful right I mean it's always a

trade-off between powerful and easy right um we we're letting you know some of other companies kind of do the ultra easy less secure right that's not our business right our business is it's private secure and and and sort of like quality right um it got substantially easier now yes it is step by step so I mean all you have to do is you know create an account you choose Bitcoin you give it a name and then you know it's going to ask you how many keys and how many of these Keys you need to sign right and then on the next page you literally pick what kind of key do you want for each key so if you want to be

super quick you know you just press simple simple simple and you're done right and and we could have made it a little easier but that would have made it um you you would we would have had to hide some education we want to educate users right we want people to know what they're buying into and that's why when you choose a key beside each key option there is a little explanation and it says what kind of risk it entails because the nice thing is for multi you only have to set up once right so I think that you know like a lot of our users hold a lot of funds when you're going to put your you

know few thousand Bitcoin in a wallet like you know I think it's worth taking five minutes to read through the options before you commit to it and that's sort of the approach we have taken you know if you want to keep a few cents great go use somebody else's wallet that you know has a app and you know it's free and they you know know who you are and all the good stuff right now with El is different if you want to know what's happening and and you want to make sure it's secure you know it takes five minutes cool no I mean I think uh multi there's no question I mean before the show we were just people looking at the site

which by the way I I highly recommend people uh check out there's a nice graph on there it's called p2s hinfo which pay descript hashino right which stands for the the type of um transaction you do with multisig and uh and they show a chart of how many Bitcoins are held in multisig addresses and it's just crazy how that has gone up from a year ago it was literally almost zero and now it's 1.2 million so 8% of all the Bitcoins are held in multi- and it's just it's obvious that this is uh this is going to be the future because it's just so easy to have a high level of security I mean

from a ux perspective maybe not so easy but uh it's it's fairly easy to have a very high level of security you know even if people's computers are compromized uh and it seems like so Brian it seems like the the ux seems to be getting better all the time because like what two months ago we went through this whole setup to set up electrum to manage our funds like printing these paper wallets that I had to mail to you and everything and I mean now you know using we could be using coin kite and like these Ledger um um Hardware wallets and like that whole thing just goes out the window it seems like every time we set something up I mean we I mean people you you know

using Bitcoin there's always something like much easier it's just coming up right I mean I think the electrum setup is actually pretty easy I mean if you if you think back to when I first used multi with Armory they lock boxes and there you'd actually have to you know like mail the transaction to someone as an attachment I mean of course the the reason why they do it like that is so that you know they literally have no involvement whatsoever whereas electrum This electrium Server that you use um see I love this model of of sort of um having different trust uh parties in in in anything so that you don't have

to trust one solution right so for you know for for the multi you can have a ledger you can have multiple users we're actually looking into uh supporting electrum as well we are actually big fans my first wallet was electrum uh I mean right of course it was Bitcoin you know wallet but when electrum came out I was like yes know this is so much better and uh I I always love the laum um and uh I I really want to support it as part of the multisig and also a way for people to sort of uh uh redeem their funds in case you know Quin kite

explodes um because people do have a way of redeeming the funds just you know pay in the ass so so then what you mean so basically then an electrum uh seed could also so like you could have another wallet uh on coin kite essentially so one one of the other Keys would be on coin kite yeah that's interesting and vice versa too right so we would build the the p2sh like the the multisig wallet and you because you already export right so when you create a coin kite multisig you get an email with a backup right um and and you know if you created your keys offline then you're already supposed to have those but you know it's a way for

you to reload sort of the the the reconstitute the wallet and send the funds out uh we would love to make it work with them like we made it work with ledger so taking a step back a little bit from from talking about features and multisecond stuffff what's your vision for Bitcoin where do you see this thing going in the next five years or Beyond I I I'm still the kind of person who gets sort of like like like giggy like every time I make a Bitcoin transaction and I do those a lot of times a day it always just puts a smile on my face see it's fascinating because I can pay my like my Factory in China I

converted them into Bitcoin we convert everybody to bitcoin I've been I've been earning Bitcoin for the last two years now you know I have very little Fiat and uh so Bitcoin adoption is happening it's just that it's not on you know on the this sort of like famous wallets or on on exchanges it's happening but it's really through organic peer-to-peer you can look at the transaction volume it's growing so much every time there is a a price Movement we see our system kind of like you know like the amount of coins going in and out just kind of like balloons to um so it is happening right I mean I am able to sell my terminals to

somebody in a country where there is a lot of credit card fraud because you know they pay in Bitcoin and and this is happening more and more and more um I think the major thing that's happening now is remittance is actually starting to happen right we're finally figuring out proper remittance channels between countries because see before you had sort of like a a centralized entity like like Western Union right where they have all the expensive business and too they have the machines they have the licenses in each country you know and the liquidity to move the the funds around what happen with Bitcoin is you have different companies doing each part of the bits

right so one compan is where you buy the Bitcoin another compan is where you sell the Bitcoin other compan is the one that handles the remittance you know so you know another couple years you're going to see an insane amount of remittance happening on bitcoin it's just that the dots are still getting sort of like traced together right I mean what the guys sorry yeah so I take it also that kind of means so do you see Bitcoin also being used W as as a payment system and as a currency to have you know like our parents to keep Bitcoin and see I I I think that I think that there is this fallacy that

you know like you know people who live in Silicon Valley have which is you know everything is easy and everybody's just going to use the easy stuff and that's not the reality of the world right I mean people use different things in different places and I mean you know you look in some countries you know some Merchants have literally five terminals on their counter people outside of very technologically developed areas understand that you know you will have different solutions simultaneously happen right I think I I really think that people will use Bitcoin as Bitcoin is as well as

using sort of like fake Bitcoin right like a an IOU system or or just dollars they use Bitcoin on the background Today's Show is brought to you by shapeshift the fast and easy way to trade all coins tell you what go to shapeshift.io right now and check out the coins They just added gems storage coin swarm and master coin which brings the total number of coins they support now up to 32 so you want to trade some old coins you want to use exchange to do that what do you still use Hotmail too no forget about it go to shapeshift.io and get it done in less than 1 minute with no account or sign up required here's how this works you head over to shapeshift.io you choose the currency you want to sell and which currency you want to buy let's say you want to sell

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mean super great if you like your altcoin slows you pay anywhere uh with altcoins and you can get that in the Chrome web store and Firefox addons so go to shapeshift.io and put even more of your altcoins to use we'd like to thank shape shift for their support of epicenter Bitcoin just before we wrap up here um so you're you're in Canada um and uh I haven't been there in a few years but I I hear there's quite a few things happening there in the the Bitcoin space can you talk a bit about the the scene in Canada this is something we always try to come back to when we talk to people from you know different places around the world like what's going on in your in your local area and in your country so so Toronto is an interesting place because we have a history of

fintech here uh you know lots of payment processors for different Industries more non-traditional Industries and uh and and the Ontario is a great place to start a business because of the the you know tax here super low for businesses and um legislation is a lot more favorable uh stock uh like when when you have a private Equity Firm like a private Equity company it's a lot easier to handle all that stuff in Ontario um so we we sort of like have a lot of this this this pieces needed to start a Bitcoin company like done well right it's not too hard anymore to get a

bank account for a Bitcoin business there's you know there's always been exchanges here um what banks are most favorable I'm curious to to um businesses it depends right so if you are an exchange is a whole different problem right because you know they are concerned about cash flow problems and and exchange problems right now if you're just a business that does Bitcoin I I there's I I have not heard of a Bank closing a bank account because you are a Bitcoin startup it's only if you're trying to buy and sell Bitcoin but that's normal right that's like if you are even Advanced cash business um banks will have will take a

closer look at your books uh because they don't want to be exposed to it um yeah I mean there's main four Banks here TD Scotia Bank and CC and and they all they're fine um I heard from Mars Mars is sort of like a startup incubator kind of half government Le initiative here they're working on having some some cool announcements around the banking situation too and what's the uh what's the Bitcoin startup scene in like in Toronto can you talk about some of the other startups that uh sure did you see that so um there's a quick BT and spend BT those guys are really cool so you can pay your credit card of Bitcoin without creating

an account right and you can buy Bitcoin of your debit card up to a certain amount of course but without having any account so it's kind of like shape shift but for literal Fiat Services right uh Jamie very cool guy um then there is quadriga it's an exchange here as well those guys yeah yeah you can buy and sell gold on the exchange as as on top of uh US dollar and Canadian dollar um I heard yesterday of uh big gold being launched uh there's the guys from pay looking at remittance um there's a there's some connections with India through sunny and uncoin um I don't want to forget anybody

but there's a lot going on here um I mean the conference we we had a conference here like I think like last year and you know it was fairly packed even we even though we only have you know 6 million people in Toronto uh things are happening and we are you know like one flight one flight away from New York you know for 40 minutes or an hour and is most of the startup activity happening in Toronto or do you hear of any other like monreal Vancouver like what what's happening there do you have any so Vancouver has a lot of Bitcoin adoption actually which is kind of nice like in the city itself right you can go to a lot of establishments and pay in Bitcoin really they doing yeah they they do a great job there the the Bitcoin

Co-op uh and and coin fast uh they do a great job with adop I wish we did as much of a good job as they do here um but there is quite a few startups there too um there is even one guy there who buys and sells Boolean like real bullion with one of our terminals in person so he he's been a Boolean house for ages uh so now you can actually go there with a quink K card and buy a bar goat cool okay and and any any clue as what's happening in Quebec and Montreal or in the Maritime Provinces I just cuz I'm from New Brunswick so right um I I to to be honest I'm sure there are startups I just I'm just not super familiar with them um and oh and then there is the guy so in monreal there's the the Bitcoin uh

Embassy there right and those guys a great job of adoption and they just made that funny video with the guy in the you know pilot outfit of the Bitcoin symbol doing the airdrop for mcil students uh that was really cool uh and you know they they have other F going on there too cool cool well uh Rulo thanks so much for joining us today it was a it was a great pleasure talking with you oh thank you for having me I mean it's it's it's nice to get uh to get to talk to you guys you you guys do some some awesome work um thanks and it's nice to talk to you because you're it's you're so you're so passionate about it I mean when you're talking about about your

about your startup and just Bitcoin it's like you know you see that it's something that you're really passionate about and I think that's uh that's really that's really great I listen it's a Bitcoin know it's a society changing technology right and we don't get to have many of those uh come by often no that's very true yeah well thanks so much Rula if people want to check out coin kite you can go you can do that on coin kite.com so that's c i n Ki t.com and of course we'll have the link in the show note and yeah to to your listeners thanks so much for joining us today so we release episodes every Monday and you know you can subscribe to

the show on iTunes on Soundcloud or in your favorite podcast app for Android or iOS or if you prefer a video you can do get our videos and our YouTube page which is youtube.com/ epicenter bpc and of course if you like the show then you know we would certainly appreciate tip and you can find the address in the show notes so uh thanks so much and we'll be back next week [Music] n