Interview with Chris Eliis of ProTip at DEVCON1 in London

Transcript

right now I'm with Chris Ellis who's working on a very interesting tipping solution let's say tipping SL microp payment solution for content on the on the internet so uh Chris first we'd like to have an introduction from you your background hi well my name is Chris Ellis I guess most people in the crypto Community would know me as one of the the sort of early adopters of feathercoin back in the day but before that my background was in the film industry I used to work in post- production and still images so I was kind of closely related to to marketing and I was constantly surrounded by very very talented artists um and content producers who would always kind of just like you know work in the film industry work their way up they thought that they

could get in you know get a career out of this by being an assistant or a run or an account manager and then what I used to see was this very UNM meritocratic system where the people that tended to be successful the ones that were business savvy perhaps they already came from money often times um and they were the ones that got rewarded and sometimes that was meritorious and sometimes you would have somebody like you know cppa or Ridley Scott who no one's going to dispute worked very very hard to get where they were but there were certainly some some real um unjustified uh people there that were making particularly towards the end of my time in the industry towards the 20091 industry where decisions about what went in the trailer of the film or

what went into the film itself was dictated based on Focus groups and business models more and more MBA started showing up and as if you don't put this thing in the trailer we're not going to get a 5% uplift on our profits on the first weekend you know and all of these kind of formulaic things and so the art really disappeared from the industry and it became more of a Sausage Factory so that's my background so then Bitcoin came along saved my life I was like ah F finally you know I'd saved enough money uh working in that space that I could carve myself our career in the space mhm so uh so now you're building this uh system called Pro tip can you explain what Pro tip is trying to solve yeah absolutely we're trying to

help people connect to one another on the internet in more ways than just likes and and favorites on on Twitter we want to help everyone be discovered for what they have to to contribute and help everybody earn money and of course the easiest way for us to do that as developers is to use Bitcoin um so some people describe it as a micro tipping platform but basically Pro tip is a Chrome extension a lightweight bit wallet as a Chrome extension at the moment um that automatically finds Bitcoin addresses on web pages it times how long you spend looking at content on those web pages and then tallies up every week a proportion of of your Bitcoins and your wallet to all of those content producers so the way it works for you as a user really is you just top up your wallet you tell it how much you

want to spend uh per week looking at uh images and videos and so forth and pro tip will do the rest for you it will automatically detect the Bitcoin addresses it doesn't have to be using any any special plug-in as far as an artist is concerned all they have to do is install a Bitcoin wallet and copy paste the address in the content a lot of people say to me but no really like do I have to sign up anywhere no you don't have to sign up anywhere you get a Bitcoin address you copy paste it into into the body text if you do want to get more technical we do have uh solutions for you there is a meta tag which you can find on our website Pro tip. is where you can put it in the HTML header for those of you a little bit more

security conscious okay um and working on more you know improving that a little bit more but that's basically what it does that's a that's a really cool solution so essentially essentially you can picture uh that you're browsing browsing a certain website and while you browsing the website there's this Chrome extension in the background that's monitoring what you're browsing where the places you have spent more time at mhm and then once a week passes it tallies tallies up all of these places that that you visited yeah and then you have your weekly budget or something like that right so maybe my weekly budget is $10 I want to give $10 to whoever created the content which I'm seeing mhm and then the Chrome extension extracts the

addresses of all of these websit that I visited uh the Bitcoin addresses M and automatically uh the Chrome extension has a wallet of its own yes at the end of the week it sends 10 it devides those $10 where I spent my attention yes and it gives money to all of these people right yes uh that's right that's because humans have what's called discretionary attention in the lingo of Behavioral economics you can only have one thought at a time you know look in one place at a time and the internet has really challenged us and made us realize that time is the ultimate currency because you never get it back it's the ultimate deflationary currency actually it gets more precious the older you get because you have less of it and everyone has the same number of hours in a day so it's

also a great equalizer somebody uh in Rio has the same amount of time as somebody living in central London um and so really what we wanted to do was rather than people getting into Bitcoin by um you know going onto one of these exchanges and they end up falling into the sort of gambling addiction where they're trying to trade to get more Bitcoins we wanted people to earn Bitcoins right there are three billion people on the internet right now that's more people than we're on the planet in 1960 you've got a huge what's known as addressable Market okay if you can't make yourself valuable to somebody out there then I don't know so you need help but the the difference between Pro tip and and other Solutions like this before is

there's no plugin required right the the artist like if you were using something like flatter and I'm a big fan of flatter I'm also a big fan of patreon nothing against them I support them and I would if anyone came to me and asked me what to use and they were shy of Bitcoin I'd direct them there but the problem is if you got a YouTube channel it doesn't work so well you can't put a plugin on YouTube and often people don't want to go to these other third party websites and have to sign up for yet another database which could end up getting hacked like patreons did and then they get their credit card detail have to cancel their credit card they have to change all their passwords it's nightmare so all you have to do with this is just put your Bitcoin address in

the description of your YouTube video in the description of your SoundCloud pretty much every social network has a space for you to say something about you and all you have to do is copy paste your Bitcoin address and pro tip will automatically be compatible wow so this is like in so if I have my own website this is like you know it's something I can do in 5 minutes right just put just open up the HTML and put my Bitcoin address there we we actually timed it it takes less than 30 seconds um because if you go to Pro tip. is for example and you just you can just single click the install if you're running Chrome that takes about 10 seconds to complete and then the time it takes you then to go to to copy paste the address from the extension into your WordPress I think

somebody did it in about 30 seconds so it actually is very very quick to set up and you don't have to give your email address to anyone you don't have to register with anybody you don't have to like do any kyc AML you know the banking regulation stuff like on patreon for example as as one of their contempor myself I have to fill out this obscure tax form to tell the American authorities that I'm going to pay tax in the UK and it's based on some weird treaty that the UK and the US signed at some point I don't know where to find this form it doesn't really help you I have to then Google it so they won't let me earn more than $600 like is it really worth my opportunity cost to go hunting down the paperwork of this thing just no just no okay so on the background U are

you using some kind of microp payment technology on bitcoin well sort of sort of yes we're using the good the good people at block Cipher have a micr payments API which we haven't employed yet but it is we are using their API as standard at the moment the reason we didn't need to do that straight away is because we're bundling the transactions up weekly in any case so it's not like you're tipping people as you're viewing them it waits for a week and then you tip all in one go and because Bitcoin works by charging you for data rather than the amount which is what the Legacy banking system does it's much more efficient now the largest fee that we've seen so far under a stress test was 39 cents that's obviously very large but that was under stress test conditions

that was us spamming one of our own addresses um with lots and lots of unspent you know produce lots of unspent outputs which were very large in size and then when we tried to make a payment of course yes you you do end up paying a large fee but that was that was an outlier most people are telling us that they're only paying between two to four cents per week so that's that's a pretty reasonable I think model yeah so I think the the most interesting thing about Pro tip that what that I that I saw was um that Nick savoo has this article called the mental cost of microtransaction payments and there uh in that article he basically talks about how the barri to micro payments and these ideas is essentially that humans don't want to

account for every 10 cents or 5 cents cuz it's exhausting mentally so how how how have we exactly solved it could you explain to our viewers yeah so what what you can yeah so I'm also an aid reader of Nyx and I also am an aid reader of Behavioral economics so I used to be and and still am um a member of the Quantified Self Community here in London and that was where my inspiration came from and I'd been using a lot of self-tracking apps on my computer for some time one of them being rescue time and rescue time monitors what you do on your computer I call it self surveillance I don't have an objection philosophically to surveillance per se I have a problem to the asymmetric info that the information that that results

in so if if the NSA know more about you than you do or actually worse let's pick a worse example Facebook know more about you than you do because they're tracking every login they're tracking every person's page you visit and they obscuring that away from you so for example if every day you make a trip to the coffee shop and then one day you don't because you have a hospital visit that shows up on their data doesn't show up on yours because you don't think about it you're just getting on with your life and now they have more information about you than you do and the problem is is that these companies care about us more than we care about ourselves and thus we are in this situation so I was a big proponent of what I call selfs surveillance um this idea of self-monitoring nothing none of

the data in Pro tip goes to to us as developers there's no server for it to go to we don't run a server it's completely decentralized your private keys or on your computer the browsing data is wiped every time you spend out some people have asked if we can you know export that for them and of course we'll work on a on a solution for that as well and so the way it works is that rather than you having to the cognitive overhead is the lingo rather than you having to think about paying somebody each and every time you interact with content there's really only two events per week that you have to engage with or one and a half the first time when you deposit the money and set how much you want to spend the second time when it makes the payment the app has two ways

for you to pay something I call opt through so it's not opt-in or opt out it's opt through you can either choose to manually donate based on a reminder and it's not pest aware it's not going to keep popping up and binging at you and telling me if you want to remind me later if if you stop responding to it it just won't bug you anymore until you click on it again or you can say no you know what I trust this algorithm automatically just pay they actually in fact it's the top 10 websites that you visited to to to uh prevent spamming attacks on it and any subscriptions that you've made so when you visit a website it will tell you up how much time at the end of the week it will take your top 10 websites and it will just pay a divide

that up by your amount by 10 and pay the more equally and you can choose if you want to to uh to opt in And subscribe now what's what's the verb here right eBay had you know buy and and and like is the is is the verb of Facebook and retweet is is another action that you want to commit on Twitter and so it's not unfamiliar to people to uh to content producers to invite people with verbs Their audience with verbs to say subscribe using Pro tip or subscribe using any derivative of pro tip if any developer wants to Fork Pro tip and and use it as long as they maintain the core protocol and the specification they don't start introducing any artifacts um into the design all content producers should be compatible with all

derivatives of pro tip in the future including Mozilla if they choose to to put it into Firefox as we're currently discussing with them at the moment okay so you so let's say i i s the web for one week and there's this software running in the background that has detected which websites I visited what time I stayed on on each of these websites and it's essentially collecting this this data in order to figure out who to pay how much yeah does this data always stay on my computer yes it stays in your uh chome content folder in your applications data folder um so yeah you you can dig it out um with a little bit of rooting around it's a bit complicated to explain verbally but yes with a little bit of

research you can dig it out and we're actually working on a way for you to export that because actually people said to us you know what I actually kind of like this app because it just tells me what I'm viewing um but it'll only tell you uh what you're viewing if there was a Bitcoin address on the page itself okay so you don't hold any of this data so it's completely a we don't want it either like we have no intention there is no business model the business model of pro tip is that we earn money the same way our users do so there is an option to tip us as artists we consider ourselves artists for sure you see what I mean so like okay so the inspiration for this remember was that I had a YouTube channel called World crypto Network I have in present tense a

YouTube channel called well crypto Network I felt ill I couldn't do it anymore I wasn't making much money doing it it was a vocation but nevertheless I had earned in about 18 months or so 41 Bitcoins net and now that that they all went towards projects so that didn't go on my lifestyle but that went on you know my trip to Washington DC for the conference where I gave a talk and to to to the pork fest where I engaged a little bit more and did another talk there and was on a panel there but what I found was is that if you make yourself vulnerable and you know to your to a community of people online in my case it was YouTube and Twitter with the two channels that I chose people will reach out and they will say Hey you know you've got something valuable you know

but you've got to lay yourself bear like you're already naked anyway you may as well and you've just got to display to people what it is you've got to contribute and they will find you valuable and once you've built a community in my case I've got now something like 5,000 followers I guess if around 5 to 10% of them pay 25 cents a week if you do the maths you know that starts to work out as as a passive income right I start to get an income stream on that and if you check my Bitcoin address on my Twitter at Mr Chris Ellis you can look up my Bitcoin address you can see how much I've earned right so it works for me why doesn't it work for anyone else well okay maybe you could say well Chris you know you're very charismatic and you've got all

these other qualities about you but I don't know I think that I've got real hope in voluntary payments this is a kind of an algorithmic Market that we've come up with it doesn't work in theory but it could work in practice that's what I'm hoping for I'm hoping that that you know actually with a a planned feature that we're working on at the moment called the pro tip faucet um which will then distribute Bitcoins out to its users uh we could engage with spons and get them to sponsor the faucet a lot of Community Management go around that that could end up mitigating a lot of the fees that people might be paying particularly in regions of the world like I say like South America and India and China where perhaps you know 4 cents is is a lot of money to these people um

and as a result effectively making Pro tip free to use and free for people to interact because like I say it really is about giving people the ability to connect and the ability to to pay one another for the contributions they have to make to the world so I I are you looking to raise any funds for pro tip using a crowd fund so yes so as I said we currently we raise money the same way that our users do which is a voluntary donation that you can make in the app itself as a Weekly subscription we recommend 25 cents we would be very grateful for that I'm also working on another project at the moment the working title is not just made in China where I go on live stream for a prolonged period of time and for the price of a Chinese factory worker at

foxcon I make one of these which is a Bitcoin full node on a Raspberry Pi which is made in in Wales Raspberry Pi 2 uh it's a tonch case which is actually produced in China um and then of course you know you have all the other bits and pieces it's running um rasb and Jesse it also has ipfs installed and it costs about 50 to produce that could end up coming down if I'm able to do deals with the manufacturers I've somehow got to do this in the next few weeks because I'd really like to get them out for Christmas so yeah you know if you'd like to see me on live stream you know for as long as I can stay awake pretty much um May these things then you can donate to us so you can go to Pro tip. is for any

updates or protip HQ I'm @ Mr Chris Ellis on Twitter we'll be announcing when that's going to take place and you can actually pledge to buy these or donate them to be sent off to to places like Botswana South America we have users in India anyone that uses Pro tip will basically send them out a full node and then not only will they be able to download the blockchain but we'll also tell them how they can relay transactions on the blockchain okay so not just Distributing the blockchain as a data set but also helping facilitate payments it incentivizes any local developers in these regions to build things like SMS gateways right and now all of a sudden you've disrupted Safari com right it only takes one sort of enthusiastic kid okay to look at the code to to to to reach out to me and

through social media as you can now and I can direct you to all the code you want and now you can be build your own SMS relay you know gate wve in your local community and now you've got access to the blockchain cool so you said you you're shipping them for 50 pounds no no sorry the production cost is 50 pounds of this like the case was about £6.99 and the actual raspberry price 35 and then the memory card is like 30ish so it's about 60 but I've worked out that I can get the cost down if I buy in B because I've reached out to some of these companies wow so bit nodes already makes these nodes but they are $200 yes correct so the thing about the bit noes is is a minor as well this is not a minor it's it's just going to

be a Bitcoin full node relay which actually is very important also for the par in the network you want to have as many different copies of the blockchain as possible um but of course you can improvise with them um and you can use the Json RPC that comes as standard in Bitcoin D um and you can plug a minor in if you want at the moment these raspby pies you have to overclock them a little bit for them to run Bitcoin in a stable way you usually need to reset them every 24 hours or so because they will crash um but like we're looking for enthusiasts basically in regions of the world that are not Europe or America to start hosting full not and if you give us your IP address I can connect you to my more powerful machine in my flat in North London and then I

can relay your transactions because you know there are commands in Bitcoin D where you can force peer connection between you know two two IP addresses we can even set up vpns and and things like that if anyone needs added security cool that that also sounds like a really great project so where can the uh uh where can our view viewers discover more about your projects Pro tip and the node yeah so as I said uh Pro tip HQ on Twitter I'm Mr Chris Ellis and pro tip. is is the name of our website Cool was great to have you on the show it was a pleasure thank you thank you