#DappCon22: Day 3 - Trustlines Protocol. The Swiss Army Knife For Alternative Money!

Transcript

I love presenting after circles because I can skip so many slides because circles Works similar not the same to trust lines my name is Andreas I work at brainbot I have been working together with the team on trust lines for four years and we have learned a lot so I'm going to talk a little about about how trust lines works and more about what we've learned during the period I'm going to start the presentation by asking who in this room loves money awesome I love money I think money is the best product that there is because

you can do everything with money problem is only banks can create money or states can create money question mark so we introduce the concept of people-powered money where basically every person on the world is able to create their own money with the people that they Trust so that they can exchange with those people and be part of the financial system without relying on traditional Finance we didn't invent it the old concept Mutual Credit the traditional Financial system works very similar to it a lot of other projects use very similar Concepts what we basically just did we used

Mutual Credit we use blockchain we rumbled it up together in one and built basically infrastructure that is censorship resistant that cannot be shut down by government so that we can go into different countries where there are corrupt governments and basically um you know people are able to use it without the fear of presidents or dictators coming and saying well you have to shut it down and they can still say it's illegal but they cannot shut it down because we're using blockchain quick recap of how trust lines Works basically you need two people that's the minimum set of people that you need you need

Alice you need Bob they can be named different but you always need at least two they create a credit line with each other basically your trust lines two credit lines how much will I be able to spend with you how much will you be able to spend with me and what they then issue between each other are ious so that if for example Alice wants to buy something from Bob they don't need money they just need ious that are represented on the Chain itself and Alice can buy something from Bob Alice issues five ious in for example dollar and Bob receives the ious and he has basically five dollars more and Alice

can buy an Apple from him it works good with people that you know it doesn't work too good with people that you don't know because I would not lend money to a stranger but that's where basically and Julio already mentioned it the you know trust graphs and the Six Paths of Separation works we know enough people on the World to reach the people that we want to exchange goods and services with so if you basically have Charlie here and Alice wants to buy something from Charlie but Alice does not know Charlie and Charlie does not know Alice it's not a problem because both of them know Bob and they can basically jump over Bob and still be able to exchange goods and

services and this works basically up to a lot of different people up to having a new person for example Dave and one of the core components of our system itself is that credit in the system always aims to balance down so every payment that is triggered in the system always looks for is there a path of connected people that will reduce the total imbalance of the system so it's netting basically or like traditional Finance always trying to net and clear reduce the overall depth in the system and if it doesn't find a path that basically reduces the overall depth it'll just take the shortest one

and then also maybe in regards to the Civil attack discussion that was just with circles Etc um yes Eve could create a lot of different accounts and have huge you know trust lines with herself but at the end it's always bottlenecked by one person that basically Shields the whole network from civil attacks and you could scale that up to if having a billion accounts it wouldn't matter so the question is is this money and as I did say I think money is the best product uh answering this question is really really hard because at the end money is something that is either defined by people that created

themselves or something that is needed by people to conduct payments with each other and now I'm going to go a little bit in the experience that we had over the past four years and why systems like trust lines or circles are really hard to implement in societies because people don't know what money is people don't understand what money is and if I say people I'm referring to the minority of the people people in crypto I would argue have a better understanding of money than the average person who lives every day in you know Germany has a bank account knows that they have money on their bank account goes to River buys bread apples

Etc if you explain them what money is the minority of the people don't understand it and trust lines itself is more like a project that we're trying to go into countries where they don't have traditional Payment Systems because we believe that those are the countries that we can Empower to have basically their own Financial system and they have totally different problems that are unrelated to the lack of money we have one project or we have one project in Venezuela and Venezuela was one of the best fits that we had had ever so Venezuela they have a huge problem

with their local currency it's worth nothing they use US dollars to do payments and we said that's awesome because we have you know more than 30 different currencies in the trust landsat they can use trust lines and they can use US dollars and we had three people on the ground talking to locals talking to businesses and going into deeper of how they use the dollars we got more and more hype that you know trust lens could be a good fit because the problem that they have with dollars is they have only big dollar bills so they have 20s they have 50s they have hundreds and if they go into a shop and they buy something for like six dollars the shop is not able to give them change that's small so what do they

do they use a piece of paper and they say I owe you 14 and we're like this is trust lens this is awesome just use the app we like did meetups there we onboard at bar Bakery Etc and one of the biggest problems was they don't want to pay with their phone they're scared to get you know take their phone out because it can get stone so we're like okay back to back to the problem that you know the concept is good the people understand what you can do with the app but they don't use it because they don't want to pay with their phone they'd rather have some dollar bills um in their pocket and pay with dollar bills rather than taking out their phone in regions where it can be stolen well um of course other problems also

even though we built the trust lens app as simple to use as possible for people that don't know what crypto is so abstract the public address as a way only used in vanilla names basically um still very complicated another project that we have Myanmar after the military queue that they had there the problem number one is military walk into people's apartments and shoot people because they're using alternative currencies and therefore they are scared to use alternative currencies and that's something that we cannot solve as trust lines and we can we can go them we can go there and we can say Hey you can use

alternative currents you don't have to use the local currency you can use trust lines to pay Etc but we can't stand in front of the military and say well it's okay for them to use trust lines so again good fit for you know out of a third perspective but if you actually go into the country really bad concept then we had a pilot project in Africa and we always thought Africa is also a good fit so Kenya especially the problem in Kenya is that they really don't understand the concept of money because all the concepts that they pitched us where they where they were like okay we could do this we looked at it and we said this is a Ponzi scheme what you're illustrating to us and they did not mean

to you know flunk people but they just did not have the understanding of networks Etc and they said that for them this sounds plausible this is workable we said we cannot help you do this because the people on the bottom of the pyramid they will you know lose a lot of money so again lack of Education there so that's basically one of the experience that we had overall with trust lines and um for people that listening and people that are in the room here that's basically the challenge that I'm giving you with and so we have spent a lot of time a lot of money a lot of resources trying to find fits for trust lines not necessary in Germany or Europe

because German systems were good European Payment Systems also work good but if you have any ideas or any connections or any networks outside of Europe where you think alternative currency systems are useful please feel free to approach me let me just double check bootstrapping so this is the app basically it's freely downloadable on Apple Store and and IO store very easy to use very robust we're currently migrating to the gnosis chain which will probably be done end of November and we have different currency networks that you can use and that's basically trust funds questions

[Applause] no questions okay um two questions what's the biggest trust lines you have can you see that I can see it I also know who it is but I'm not telling all right second question um can you use different tokens or is it just the trust lines token um so the the the we deployed more than 30 currency networks which are smart contracts in itself that represent real

world currencies so we did not want to go into the challenge of you know for example circles or other community currencies that create their own currency and then you have to go into the price finding of what is that token worth Etc we just said we'll use existing currencies so that they can create trust lines in the existing currencies but you can also create your own and deploy that also and then you can have that in the app too yeah I um so when you first developed it was it was the intention for it to be used in say the global South as you described and not in sort of European or Western

societies the the initial aim was to provide an alternative to traditional Finance but always with the aim to go into countries that have um either no Financial system and therefore the people are excluded basically out of you know traditional Finance or to go into countries where there is some type of dictatorship pressing on the on the people yeah to basically provide them with an alternative interesting thank you so much for your time Andre thank you oh one more question one more question no no uh do you have one more question okay

sorry uh what exactly I mean obviously this depends on which country you're in but what exactly are the on-ramps and off-ramps um systems especially for countries where on ramps in general are very hard to come by for any kind of crypto and with on-rems you mean like in exchange too so that's that's the that's the the thing you don't need on and off ramps for trust lines you create your own money based since it's a Mutual Credit system basically I extend the credit line to you you extended credit line to me and if I pay you I create the own money that's why people powered money I create ious that I issue to you I don't need any access to crypto I don't need any

access to Legacy Finance I create my own money I replace Banks gotcha thank you [Applause]