How to Build on Bitcoin – Lucas Betschart, 21 Lectures, Bitcoin Association Switzerland

Transcript

hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers this episode has support from eighth grade story driven media eighth grade is a media production company with a focus on telling engaging stories about new technologies and the future with films interviews podcasts and other media that make an impact to learn more about story driven media visit 8 gr8 calm my guest today is Lucas bed chart lucas is president of the Bitcoin

Association Switzerland the world's fourth largest Bitcoin community he is involved in Bitcoin since early 2013 and he is head of technology crypto assets at in ACTA and the founder of 21 lectures with the mission to bring more developers to the Bitcoin ecosystem and now to the conversation with Lucas spec chart hi Lucas and many thanks for taking time today thanks for having me Lucas Europe developing 21 lectures your own program teaching blockchain coding skills to people what kind of skills do you teach there so the skills depend a bit on the goal and the goal is them to

enable people to build applications with Bitcoin and Bitcoin the currency so we're teaching about Bitcoin protocol about also the tools around it so what kind of tools can you actually use we're teaching about cryptography and we also teach about lightning so how the protocol works but also how to build applications on top of lightning so we learn about the basics of Bitcoin itself meaning about how transactions are built what kind of signatures there exists just on the basic levels we learn about the peer-to-peer network how blocks are blocks or parts how they're built then

we always have the practical exercises using a lip bitcoin bitcoin explorer which we also introduce like how we would use that library to build applications yourself afterwards then we have more about cryptography more a bit hardcore stuff also outside of bitcoin but which are very interesting to know is to zero knowledge proof and ring signatures and then we also have to some some stuff on the history of bitcoin so people get a little bit of insight how it all started how the theory and practice of actually dealing with Bitcoin itself especially when you build your own wallet and then on the last day Christian Decker is talking about

lightning where we have similar similar again very he explains how the lighting protocol works but also how how can you build on lightning and then we have at least last time he had a a small demo of somebody who built something lightning with lightning and what kind of software stack he used for that so it's a mix between theory and practical exercises and the end goal is that after this course people should be able to sit down use the library and build an application on top of Bitcoin who's the class for mainly the classes for people with a technical background so developers

mostly we also had consultants attending the last one but it's really you need to have a technical understanding otherwise it's it's difficult to follow a technical understanding meaning a coding background or what do you mean is that a coding background is for sure the most helpful but if you're a sa Software Architect or a system administrator or you just have some education in weave technology then that you should be fine mmm okay we also just before before we started recording we spoke about you know some of the difficulties with understanding you know all the things involved in coding in in the blockchain

field and and you mentioned you know some people may have a very good tech background but then they don't understand really how how Bitcoin works and how blockchain works so how do you go about teaching that part yes our first version was like four days about Bitcoin and that was really tough because it was very fast into the details so now we decided to actually make additional two days beginners class or just give a high-level overview for stuff that is very easy for people are in Bitcoin also be since longer time that have no technical background maybe but just like what does a node actually do how does the network look like what is mining all that stuff that is obvious to us it's

still new for us for developer right and that's that since the goal is getting any more developers and not just educating the developers that are already in Bitcoin mmm I just want you just mentioned gold I just wanted to ask you what is the goal that you that you pursue with with the class so it's it's really I think my net when we have more developers in the space then it's a benefit for everyone that means companies have more more potential hires with their I already have the skills but also open source projects I mean my which would of course be that people actually who attend his class will contribute to open source projects in the end Bitcoin open source project obviously because that's a better win for everyone in the ecosystem I mean the

more people contribute to open source projects the more usable Bitcoin gets as itself the more other people can use those open source projects and build stuff on top of it which also means that we make it easier to use we create more use cases which create creates more adoption so that also potentially increases price which is again a win for everybody who is in Bitcoin because then he has more resources again to do more stuff so it's like a positive loop and that's why I think it's very important that we have more and more developers in the space and I mean it's not just everybody knows that it's not just Bitcoin it's in all kind of ecosystems where this supercritical death many developers you just mentioned open

source projects and and I think that's I mean it's a big question right for all kinds of open source projects not just Bitcoin and and other cryptocurrencies how do you get people to contribute and develop ecosystem so do you think education is it's the bottleneck there that just not enough people know how to do that Torah what's your you on that it's both I think it's education for sure I mean this sounds like the door opener but us the incentive I mean having a direct incentive by being paid from somebody to do that of course it's that's the easiest one but it's also the trickiest one but the other is having like getting a reputation from contributing to that

so that is something Bitcoin core solve very well I mean it's like Bitcoin core developers are kind of like seen as semi gods within some parts of the crypto coming Bitcoin community and unfortunately other projects are in my opinion as critical don't get as much as tension so you don't have that much of an incentive we contribute to those as a if you're just like working out helping them in the you free time which is tough tough to solve but I think if like if we as a community to try to focus also a bit on you like um promote to other projects we thought I mean you don't need to contribute code than yourself

but just like making them more visible so others also get bigger incentives to actually contribute again to those open-source projects I think that's a way to solve this problem a little bit what is the main difficulty in learning blockchain specific coding I don't think it's any different than learning about any other technology you just need to have good material material good teachers and then everybody can learn it I don't think there is any special magic to it mm-hmm okay and you as a programmer you got started with which languages C++ C++ okay and then Bitcoin is it's just a protocol in the definition of the consensus but the main implementation is or Bitcoin core is in C++ but the

libraries around that you can actually build transactions and addresses mmm okay let's say you know C++ right if you want to start working and contributing to open source projects in the Bitcoin field what else do you need to know you should know how now Bitcoin itself works meaning the how the button notice how mining works how transactions are built how addresses are built and then so all this this Bitcoin basics and then it depends what specifically you want to contribute you need to dig into that and then you need to know about how how's the contribution process working for that specific open-source project I mean Bitcoin itself is a protocol and

definition they come to consensus part and then it can be implemented in a in any language so you have Bitcoin core which is implemented in C++ and if you want to contribute a bit Khan core itself yeah then you need to write some c++ like for bitcoin core but if you just want to build an application on top of it then you can pick any language and just use the interfaces that Bitcoin core provides to you and then let's say if you use go you're probably going to pick one of these go libraries so you don't have to reinvent the wheel and this is like also big big part of what we try to teach said but it's actually out there that you can already use so we don't want people to write their own

full note software it doesn't make sense but we want people to be able to interact with the Bitcoin network build software on top of it okay so if somebody had an idea for a new kind of wallet you know for example what would they what would they do well they would pick the technology stack that they know best and make most sense for them with the programming language and then look out for what's the best between library in that language or pick the library and learn the language maybe that's not the best approach then but and then more X tends to get feedback as early as possible I would say and then try to build it there hmm okay is there a specific Anatomy to building an

application on top of Bitcoin I wouldn't say it's any different than another software development project but it's very important to have additional view on security because it's about other people's money so make sense to have blank orders from from a company or maybe if it's an open source Plex you get some free audits from others and they just put a lot of stuff in what could go wrong that's very important here because if it's a bokkeum it might not just be that the app crashes like somewhere else but that somebody loses money so in your class you focus mainly or you focus only on Bitcoin why not other block chains like a theorem for

example yes we focus only on Bitcoin because for two reasons I think if you cannot cover all the other block chains and then where do I put the limit and the other thing is I'm interested in Bitcoin and not in the old coins so I don't think that would make sense to to expand it and then also like that the course would take away more days it would just be too much so I expect people to sign up because they want to learn more about Bitcoin additionally I have to say when you understand Bitcoin really well it's all the way easy to understand the other cryptocurrencies so it's a good starting point mm-hmm what is your view on some of the other currencies besides Bitcoin so I mean I

like a few of the other projects like Manero I see some synergies that you can take advantage when you like build on one project and then you can like when you very close to Bitcoin like light cone or feather cone you can use that synergies and like build for both currencies at the same time so you can finance Bitcoin development by developing for another currency but I don't like this this theorem I don't like especially because they opened the door for like they kind of made Isis legit before if Ihram how I see it at least it was everything there wasn't the first start was considered a scam meaning if you if you did some pre mining or salt coins before you you

actually had a product or or let's say if you didn't start with everybody has the same sense and everybody starts mining at the same day then it was considered a scam and then if helium came and changed that they kept a lot of coins for themself and they solved like I don't know 80% of the soup of the ever existing supply to the market and this is not something I can agree on with I don't think this is a this is the idea behind Bitcoin or so I really don't like it fearing for that reason that's their like the motivation ideological part and from technical part of the position I just don't think it will work

out that's the diss Dave I don't think they were self to scaling and then the third one is I don't believe in decentralized turing-complete smart contracts I'm asking the feeling guys the same thing always like what's your use case why do you actually need that and then they come up with something some things and decentralized but if you don't need to be censorship resistant you don't you don't want to be decentralized since the only disadvantage is being decentralized and I haven't seen anything of that that need to be censorship persistent but maybe I'm just too conservative and not too futuristic in my thinking but your analysis of avi theorem is that it's

basically just an IC o---- platform and that was that had its moment in the Sun and it's over exactly I think long term there's no no value there hmm okay but how's that affecting to the whole crypto space I mean imagine all these I SEOs go down to zero that's not good not necessarily good to press yeah that's that's a bit of problem for us because like from the outside all crypto looks the same on the other hand I mean if you have some shake outs and all the good apples stay that's I think that's good for the long term so maybe they will just quietly disappear I mean most of those projects will shut down it didn't

make a press release and say you're not here anymore so you can't just hope that the media doesn't pick it up cool speaking of the media what do you think journalists and people in general should understand better about Bitcoin that the currency and the technology are two different things so for me you can have Bitcoin the currency in very many different ways and transfer it in many different ways and then it's Bitcoin blockchain as the technology which is the underlying thing that enables the others to transfer Bitcoin in different ways but it's really like I have Swiss francs in my in my wallet and my own bank accounts it's

the same Swiss francs but it's also different technology stacks and the same is possible for Bitcoin but how does that what does that mean exactly I mean what what is an example of this just that you can transfer bitcoins without transferring it on the Bitcoin blockchain meaning you can use lightning you can hand out paper wallets so you have different features by using different technologies to transfer bit control to do something with Bitcoin it's not all relying on this one Bitcoin blockchain so it's like when people say oh Bitcoin you only have seven transactions per second now that means in the Bitcoin blockchain which is the settled super secure decentralized sensors resistant settlement layer you only have seven transactions per second

or seven to ten but that doesn't mean Bitcoin the currency only has seven transactions per second so they're like pointing out technical limits which don't really apply to the currency itself but just one piece of the technology that you can use the currency with mm-hmm okay I want to ask a few questions about the Bitcoin Association Switzerland where you're currently the president how did you get involved there so in 2013 there was one guy organizing Bitcoin meetups I mean like Christian talked last time in 2011 the very first VidCon meetups

Christian Decker exactly but in 2013 it took a bit more off I mean our meetups crew bigger we were on up to 30 people which was quite a big number of back then and then end of 2013 some people are around Lucius master so if it's a good idea to start a bit to Bitcoin Association because there are several reasons that is still the same as now this the Bitcoin Association is helpful that is the first one back then also the reason it was founded so you the media has it like a neutral point to talk to we of course we're talking about Bitcoin but we're not trying to sell it

and we're not trying to sell like a service or a company while talking about Bitcoin that's one reason the other reason is to talk to the regulator yeah the last thing we're doing is community events same same motivation there again it's education so when I got involved or how I got involved then it was like in 2014 I started to organize events with the speaker so it was very lucky that we had some very well-known local guys around like Peter Wooley Christian Decker Mike earn your nationality I lived in Switzerland so he could just like leverage that and like put him on stage and then we had a small crowd from 30 to 50 people attending and over some time the Bitcoin Association the only thing

it was left doing was salutes just doing the regulation work nobody else in the board really did much it's like always the problem also their volunteers I did my events without being part of the Bitcoin Association but then Lucius asked me do you want to take over be President Susie yes sure why not - back then nobody cared about Bitcoin right or mean the general attention wasn't that big so it was just like yeah and look Lucas will be next president more or less who vote for him everybody like of these 10 people showing up on our General Assembly voted for me that's how I became president so it's an unpaid job is still an unpaid job nobody gets paid in the associations all volunteers it's all nonprofit it's just about we are

people who are promoting the Bitcoin in various ways that's the goal and this is it's still what we do we organize events we talk to regulators we talk to media and we just got a bit bigger being maybe a bit a little bit more professional but still very much like grassroot driven community - mm-hmm what the events definitely got much bigger I mean now if you had 200 people it's always a wait list yes that I mean that also comes a little bit with with the price obviously the higher the price the more people attend but yeah we grew from like 50 people attending to up to 300 it was in November last year so that's a very important part for us also what makes

just a little bit known outside of Switzerland that we have these events we make high quality videos for everybody can like learn afterwards so we have very strict rules with whom we put on stage we don't have anything isolated we don't have any usually we don't have any products we just talk about ideas open-source projects regulation that kind of stuff so that people learn something and the motivation there is the same as before people learn something and they hopefully contribute something back to Bitcoin in in any way I mean you mentioned that it picked up the whole topic and I mean that's obvious that's obvious right since in the last few years what kind of topics do you think

currently are important you know for people to know about in this field so I mean lightning is very important as everybody who comes into Bitcoin right now or who has been in Bitcoin should know about lightning and how it works then also I mean security is like a constant important topic and the other one is privacy which is also very important so people learn how that they're actually not anonymous when they use Bitcoin but at least how they can protect themselves a little bit if they have to and the other topic is it's also related to lightning but in general is scaling scaling is like this topic that is always around when it comes to

Bitcoin and blockchain and what I'm personally very interested in right now is sidechains and specifically the liquid side chain and because I think if you have semi trusted parties you don't need to be fully decentralized because the only reason to be fully decentralized it is to be senselessly persistent but if you anyway you have like trusted parties I mean among each other you don't always need this so it's always about trade-offs right mmm interesting I mean all the things that you mentioned now are quite you know quite advanced I think right and but but people who have been in the space for a while they know about lighting they know about liquid they

know what side chains are but do you see sometimes a danger that you know the specialists of people who have been in the space for a while just build up it's like a house right they build a story on story on story and at some point there there's on such a high level that it gets very difficult for newcomers to catch up with that I mean have you have you observed that as well yeah that's true and I also hear this feedback so we don't have enough beginner events that's true we also only have events in English which excludes a big part of the Swiss population there isn't for the English is that I think bitcoin is not yet ready for mainstream so if you don't speak English you shouldn't deal with Bitcoin

or any cryptocurrency which is a bit harsh but that's just how we see it and also what 50% of the people attending our events they don't speak German mr. two more beginner events but in the end it always falls back to we do that kind events the organizer of the events likes to do so if you don't have any volunteers that doing it like bringing Bitcoin no like soup beginners then nobody's doing it and I'm personally I always cared a bit more like I invite the speakers that I'm most interesting so we fly it speakers from all over the world that talk about specific topics and usually those topics are more advanced than because I don't want to hear bit confession basics ten times in a row obviously so it's a little bit ago

a stick thing also there obviously it's my free time and it's also like to keep the like them the current community happy that makes also sense to have more advanced topics but mean bouncing doesn't exclude the other so it just depends on do we have enough volunteers or not but current leaders for the beginner events I mean what what you're saying is there's not enough no there's not enough at all I mean we don't both I mean but would it help to have that or is this too basic currently and is this is just the wrong focus what would it help to have these kinds of events I think it will help a lot I mean we need to people are an easy entrance into Bitcoin but also a neutral entrance you know there are many companies to do this

beginner events and usually they have something to sell and then people get suspicious and or they already get scammed I mean often like people sell something is like a Bitcoin free Bitcoin class and then then they pump their coin or their ICU and so on and that's that's actually yeah a problem but strictly to soulful so you said I mean you've been in crypto space since 2011 right or 2013's still late but well still early I think pence today what fascinates you still about this technology so the most fascinating seeing in Bitcoin is actually there is so much happening

there's always news and there is always like since this is about money it's always like some critical news also like it there's always something going on and the stuff changing and into Bitcoin itself from the like the protocol is moving very slowly but the stuff around it is happening very fast so that that's very exciting let's take a quick break for a message from our sponsors eighth grade is a media production company with a special focus on telling engaging stories about new technologies and the future companies work with eighth grade to turn relatively dry content such as scientific articles business white papers or corporate narratives into engaging stories with films interviews

podcasts and other media that reach people on social channels and offline to contact eighth-grade and learn more about making an impact with storage driven media visit 8 gr8 calm into it's gonna sell from the like the protocol is moving very slowly but the stuff around it is happening very fast so that that's very exciting but in terms of the ideology behind it what what do you think interesting there so the ideology is that you give people an alternative to what they have that means to their money that I have from government they can use Bitcoin but they don't have to use Bitcoin so it's very much in line with this libertarian thinking that people have freedom of choice and I think also this is what

keeps people motivated to stay in Bitcoin over a longer time so those I know of that wouldn't have to work in Bitcoin anymore or wouldn't have to work anymore they usually stay around because the reason they came into Bitcoin was this ideological reason and they didn't change just because they got rich so they still work on Bitcoin they they're like you don't see when you come to our Bitcoin meetups you have like a handful or a dozens of those but you don't see difference to all the others because they really care about the idea and that's different to all most of other fields I think mmhmm yeah yeah and that's that's I think a very good good part of it I think it's a very flat community yes exactly I mean it really

depends on what you do and not how much money you have or who you are it doesn't really matter it's just like the core of the Bitcoin community is really about what you build what you contribute I mean I'd like to ask a question about about that about the ideology that you just mentioned about that spirit also because besides all your work right with the Bitcoin Association with 21 lectures you also work at a commercial software development company and you're on advisory boards to the government and there's bankers on there and politicians and and you know some of them you know may also like this ideology but many of

them have very different goals and targets that they have to reach so do you feel there sometimes kind of attention that you have to bridge somehow yes it's very tricky to keep balance I think for everyone but you cannot be like in real life you need to take some trade-offs you cannot be just pour 100 percent bit kind of thing nearly nobody's able to do that I'm not so lucky that I can just work on bit kind of my free time because I mean when I got into it when I was 21 so I didn't invest a lot of money I just like the concept and the idea behind it so with this with this myth my day job of course we also do things that I wouldn't like do if it would be just for Bitcoin but

the the end cold air is actually the same I want to push adoption of Bitcoin bring that forward build up the technology around it and it's also to like you know you when when a client comes to your muscle to do something that doesn't make too much sense in European and you can still educate him and with time and time he will maybe go more towards Pitkin so you can do things and get the opportunities to put position bit content at companies that you couldn't before for the for the government or the advisory chops around for that binary chops around regulation for us it's either we talk with them and be like try to give our view puns or they will just

do whatever they want and be found somebody from the field giving inputs so do so it's obviously that we do the second that first version where we try to give as much input as possible but still right I mean those are people again right i mean they're they're older they're new to Bitcoin many of them or to crypto and blockchain technology and you know they're the last thing they have on their mind is anarchy yeah and and they don't have to I mean for me it's it's not that we will create energy with Bitcoin but that we give people an option a choice and I think that's something everybody into its own

actually likes it doesn't like conflict even the Swiss National Bank doesn't have a problem if there's competition on the currency market it's just their job is to provide the Swiss franc job isn't to hinder others from issuing their own cryptocurrency or something or having their alternative currency to the Swiss francs interesting have you noticed like maybe in personal conversations with people that you work with and also maybe in in some of these advisory groups while with the government or with banks that some people privately were actually quite interested but that there may be job or their position wouldn't allow them to express that yes quite a few people working at banks usually have that like

they're privately interested but they can not do anything at the company the bank usually fares reputational risk but that also like it's not as bad anymore as it used to be like in 2016 everybody talked about blockchain but everybody didn't want to deal with Bitcoin at all or cryptocurrencies in general now since the hype last year it got a lot better many like bigger companies like all traditional companies want to get involved in Bitcoin want to provide storage custody services and also it's just that the market asks for it if enough clients are asking for for Bitcoin and they see that there's money to be made they will sell it yeah just as they sell apples and oranges the

market in that's how it should be I mean that's the job of the companies to make money and not to push ideology how do you I mean when I spoke with you or nationally as well he's a core developer at you know for Bitcoin and and he said he spends many hours each week just a reading about you know the technology because he still needs to learn much more about it but he's I mean you know as much at the core as you can be there but for you how do you keep current on on the developments in this field yes sir I mean but you're honest probably does it goes very much into the deep so you really like digs into Bitcoin and every like piece of it of Bitcoin itself to protocol shows so this is a bit would

be a bit too much for me because I need to like have a broader overview also to to present to our members like from the Bitcoin Association new interesting topics that are in Bitcoin but not always Bitcoin itself so what I do is mean I spend a lot of time on Twitter which gives you like a good high-level overview of what's going on it also shows you actually who is interesting who gives good talks and who you couldn't maybe could put on stage and then it's just like if you find this project that seems to be interesting then it's breeding papers trying to stuff yourself and yet that's the most important one learning by doing

discussing with colleagues and then also again when you go to these events instead of having to read everything myself I just ask my my colleagues and my and attendees of our a long time community members and so on about protesting about this and and so on so you know you have some people you trust you know their worry is knowledgeable then you don't have to do all the hard ground work yourself if if somebody's new to this whole topic right and maybe read somewhere in newspaper or some kind of hype story or you know just have some kind of half knowledge about about what bitcoin is or what cryptocurrencies are and what blockchain technology may or may not be able to do where where do you think should they start well the first

thing even before they start reading a lot they just just try it I think because when you try actually see where bitcoin is right now when it comes to usability so just install a wallet go to a Bitcoin ATM buy bitcoins for ten Swiss francs and send around a few bitcoins to get a feeling but then they just know how to use something right but still they they may want to know about I mean you mentioned before ideology you mentioned adoption you mentioned you know possible use cases I mean how how would they getting involved in those things so what the next thing I would do is to treat a Bitcoin right paper maybe you don't understand everything

immediately depending on your understanding of technology but it really it's very short and easy to understand I would say and then the next thing there is if you want to learn about the ideology then it's pursue the Nakamoto Institute which has lots of great articles and then the easiest again shilling bitcoin association or her events but likeif is gone you talk to people and then you learn from other people I mean this is also how I figured out about the a logic ideological part of Bitcoin I went to this Meetup and this guy told me about how all of this could work without government and I was very skeptical but I started reading I just started like

looking up names of these authors and beginning to that and the more rhythm the more convinced I am what for you is the main promise you know of I mean we spoke a little bit about ideology but what is the main promise for you off of these currencies it's to give people a tool to not rely on government when it comes to money because money is like the most important thing or one of the most important things in the economy I think if you control the money supply then you more or less control the economy and for many places in the world you don't want the government to control the government money I mean do you see that on the

horizon that that's possible it's very tough to get there but I think we should at least aim for that and we need to solve a lot of problems on the technical and especially on the usability side before we can actually put position Bitcoin as a real alternative to most government money more community work needed and open-source development exactly it comes back to that more open source development more community but also more companies building apps around it because let's say you build a Bitcoin wallet in your free time maybe after a

year you have an accident you can't like work on that that many hours anymore so it's really like you need to have some kind of business model early in 74 and to build end-user application convinced of that are you I mean we're here in Switzerland right and you focus very much on Switzerland with Bitcoin Association Switzerland but are you connected with other communities as well in this field yes we have very good connections to the community Milano and the Munich Stuttgart mostly in Europe because yeah we take it when we fly in a speaker from oversea to Switzerland the bît-yakin association has a little bit of budget by keeping all our money in Bitcoin since 2013 that was our trick

helps yeah but the other associations or the other local communities are usually to meetups without like without some money this just paid from the lot from the organizers so when you fly in somebody we try to make sure the speaker also goes to speak at those locations and choose the others I mean there are these few big Bitcoin conferences to where everybody or most people who are in Bitcoin go to then you meet those people who only who you only know from Twitter usually right mmm if you compare you know the Swiss crypto community to to those other communities that you know

what where do you think are the advantages and maybe also the disadvantages I guess the Swiss Bitcoin community is very international as I said fifty percent of our people don't speak German so that's you thinking it's an advantage because everybody can easily attend at least everybody with technical background speaks English can easily like join the meetups and also we have lots of forints just flying in and when we have big meetups people come from Germany to Switzerland to attend they have a very technical community thanks especially in the beginning it was mostly or many people who came from Google and from DTH Zurich to attend our meetups that's for sure an advantage and

that the Zurich where most of our events happened is also a hot spot for finance so we have like this nice crossover of Technology in finance compared to disadvantage Jesus I mean we will right now we are the fourth or fifth biggest event meetup group in around Bitcoin in the world but we will not be able to hold positions just because with Switzerland only has 8 million people's living here so if the orders do that job well they should grow much faster and much bigger than we do in the crypto space in Switzerland what what do you think should be better I would like to have less focus on Isis let's focus on

utility tokens and less short-term pumps in the kernel crypto scene but more and more focus on Bitcoin and equity token security tokens just more things that make sense talk more with technical people talk more with developers and don't just let the the don't let the business guys write my papers and stuff like that it's just so many people want to build things that don't make sense don't make sense of the technical perspective or sometimes just don't make sense um economical perspective of course it makes sense for them to raise money but that's really bad for the reputation of Switzerland in general and that it did happen in the past and there

were big fall outs that actually weren't helpful I think yes we have this phew I see us and then of course this is very big I see us with the scandals all around and back bad governance and that kind of stuff yeah correct but still I mean if you that's a problem everywhere right but for example if I look at you know some of the of the new block chains that come up many of these developers may have started in Switzerland and may have their foundation in Switzerland but then they're working in Silicon Valley tender working in New York or in Berlin why do you think that is well there are two things the one is the cost of living in Switzerland is very high then it's also that the developers the number of

developers in Switzerland is of course limited and you can only easily like getting people who spits on the dollar from the European Union which makes it a bit more tricky and the third one is if you really want to have the best people in this space that already have a lot of experience you cannot expect them to move to Switzerland so I think it's a contradiction when you say you're going to build this decentralized ecosystem but everybody has to move to Switzerland this doesn't make sense to me yeah good point so yeah how we do it in now in my team is like we have one guy in in the Netherlands then we have one guy is utin of the year in Malaysia and someone else a bit more far away in Switzerland because I don't want to have everybody

here having to sit here in the office all the time mm-hmm exactly I think so too did you I mean you have all this knowledge as well I mean you as your coder you know deeply how Bitcoin works did you ever think about starting your own company I only had my own consulting company for two years but I guess that doesn't really count as a start-up so yeah I'm singing about it but I always also think about the business model and that's very tricky to make money with bitcoin I mean miners make money brokers make money exchange just make money but that's all not so interesting so what is most interesting for me it's like user adoption meaning wallets and application

around that and I mean there were so many wallets from the early days that just disappeared because they couldn't find a business model and I think it's the same right now it's still the business model of the wallets as far as I know it's mostly getting paid to add old coins that's one thing and then it's AI didn't know that I'm not fully sure but that's my interpretation because I couldn't see anything else how they make money the other thing is that the revenue share of shape-shift like in wallet common conversion I hear that's a big chunk and then the search thing that I like most is white lightning so hopefully you find some company that pays you good amount of money just to have their own logo on your wallet more

or less but it's tricky to to finance to make enough money from that in Bitcoin but what about you know starting your own token like an IRC 20 with an ICO back in 2017 I mean Ted never didn't ever cross your mind no because I mean this for one thing is the ideology so I don't believe that it makes sense to have more than one currency actually in the end it's just from from my understanding from from monies that I want to have the money that everybody else wants and everybody else has now if I create a new money then I have to build up this network again and

then also matter whether the reason I don't like old coins too much is that I think we have this really big challenge ahead of us with Bitcoin like bringing that somewhere and now I'd like everybody to work on this making this a success now if everybody goes and makes its own coin then which is competing with each other or we have we suck waste of resources I know it's a free market everybody can do whatever I want but I still I like that you have like everybody working together on this one thing and pushing it forward instead of how can I get rich with making my own token mmm yeah and that's exactly what it was 2017 yes for 99 percent of the project it was for sure that mm-hmm

okay what about other you know blockchains tezo's neo yours what about those same they're ready to create their own currency just out of greed my opinion if they didn't need like that's the dr. pre financing and all that stuff they would have built a side chain mean yes side chain technology is also still in its early stage but I think it would already be possible to build something with that now so it's if they would care about the technology they wouldn't have their own currency if it would be that there is driving them okay are you in any way collaborating with them you know

because they also of course would benefit if there's more developers you know if they if there's more action in the ecosystem because that's also they need they need to show that there's adoption then they also they're also interested I think in you know in having this whole in having to succeed and they don't want to see Bitcoin fail either so I mean are you do you have any common ground I mean I like their ideology to the part that they believe in to have an alternative to government money and that everybody should be able to pick his own money so that's that's fine we share lots of ideological belief if with those people I think of course they also need a lots of developer but I don't see this as my

job on by no the reason I'm doing the Bitcoin Association is also knock when I help Bitcoin I'm not making somebody else richer I would never organize a tasteless meetup where I know like the day the investors who bought this joint account kind sheep get literature by me doing free work that I don't see I don't have any incentive to do that same if theorem or all of those pre mine coins I don't see why I should put in my free time to make this guy's richer hmm yeah good point I mean you mentioned the up and downs in the market you mentioned some of the projects that may disappear but how in general how to market downturns affect your work with with

Bitcoin so it's loud slows down a little bit and because some companies traditional companies maybe if the whole market goes down they put their projects they that are still in very early stage a bit on hold because the customers don't ask for Bitcoin that much anymore but also on the other hand we have this few crypto banks and other big startups erased a lot of money in Switzerland from twenty to a hundred million and they're still building their thing I mean they're much disappearing just because the market goes down so it's like long-term or midterm it doesn't matter short-term it has a little bit of an impact okay what's on the horizon I mean what's in the future with Bitcoin

Association and with 21 lectures Bitcoin Association has I think we will just keep things how it is we don't change your running system we have good big events we have good work on the regulation side and good connection to the media if twenty one lectures I might imagine that we also organize classes in Germany and in Austria expanding a bit because right now we have a focus on suruc it's the easiest for us to start with but I want to have more developers everywhere I mean like I said before I don't think everybody should sit in Zurich or in souk so you just want to have more develops in the Bitcoin space in general and then also oh one thing

regarding that is all our our resources for teaching or open source so I would love if somebody in an other count it just picks it up and organizes his own courses Lukas do you have I mean if you had imagined you had one wish and and there was something that you could change in in the past or in the present of how the block chain space evolved and how Bitcoin came up and how cryptocurrencies evolved if you could change something there what would that be I wish to people who are wasting their time on blocks and projects that don't make sense and altcoins come back to Bitcoin and contribute back there so we

are like one big community all working on the same so do you think you'll still be working with Bitcoin in 10 years so Bitcoin is a big experiment I don't know if it's still around in ten years but I hope so if it is I think I will unless I found something that is it interests me even more but there's so much enthusiasm in this community and so much stuff to be built and so much going on I don't think I will find something somewhere else anytime soon okay where can people find you I'm most active on Twitter it's Lucas on the line LC LC or on the Bitcoin Association dot CH websites

there's an email address to contact me fantastic it was great thanks a lot Lucas for taking time thanks for having me thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors is in the show notes of this episode and on the podcast website the blockchain does calm to help people find this podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel stackers and I thank you very much for listening [Music]