EB132 – Stephan Tual: Building A Universal Sharing Network On Ethereum And A $150M DAO

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by highme protect yourself against hackers and Safeguard your identity online with a first class DPN go to high. me/ epicenter and sign up for a free account today and by Ledger makers of the Best Hardware security devices half piece of mind and knowing your private keys are protected by industry standard physical security go to legal.com to see the full range of products and use the code epicenter at checkout to get 10% off your first order hi welcome to epicenter Bitcoin

the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is Sebastian and I'm me Roy today we have a very special guest for you Stefan tual who is the Chief Operating Officer of slockit and one of the people who kind of triggered the the Dow so before we start let's have an intro from Stefan Stefan a bit about your background and how you got interested in this space sure hey guys um hello everyone so a bit of background well um I got interested in the space because I was sick and tired of working for my previous employer uh simple as that uh where some of the best Minds in their generation were working to sell 2% more shampoo on

you know some Shelf in White Rose or Asda or Walmart um and I thought it was very depressing I had an interest in Bitcoin um and cryptocurrencies in general I was really um enticed by the Mike Hearn speech at the um uh Venice I think it was during complete Festival um and I I highly recommend you guys watch this and it was all about you know autonomous cars and things that nature cars that buy cars and I thought that sounds crazy I need to get into this it sounds like the future so I got into it a little bit I started a crypto consulting company heard about ethereum and the white paper around Christmas 2013 like everyone else I just uh my mind was just blown by how smart vitalic

was and by how interesting this project was and I did everything I could to join so that's how I joined ethereum uh two and a half years ago then I left ethereum to start slet um and that's what we're here to talk about today it's funny you mention that my current talk and well how how it's become such an iconic talk when people talk about um smart contracts and they sort of describe it through person who doesn't really know anything about it how that talk gets gets brought up over and over and over and I I've certainly uh spoken to people and like you sort of re reave that talk to people trying to explain what a smart contract would be right and uh yeah so I mean you actually one of our first guests you

were on episode 16 which was was I wow ages ago and uh back then you were working at ethereum as the as the chief Communications officer and this is now your new gig but uh yeah welcome back and it's thank you and thank you for paying attention to ethereum back then not many people did you know well I mean I remember when we first heard about it I mean Brian had told me about it he's like yeah there's this kid and he wrote this paper and like he's 19 and then you know we read the papers the the first thing that came to my mind was what the hell was I doing when I was [Laughter] 19 uh cool well um let's uh maybe talk about uh well slockit obviously I mean

that's what you heard to talk about tell us uh what is slockit and well me first of all so there there are multiple things we want to talk about we don't want to talk about we want to talk about slockit and we want to talk about the Dao as well um so give us a broad introduction those two concepts those two different entities sure um well slet is a a a company which purpose is to create autonomous objects in order to reduce operating cost for corporates so for example if you had um 10,000 objects talking to each other to scale to 100,000 objects talking to each other via a centralized server you wouldn't just need to buy 10 times more servers you need um exponential cost um increase in terms of your devops and in terms of

um you know the infrastructure that's required to maintain all this and then scaling to a billion object is just pure impossible today um well at least as of today so with blockchain technology and in particular ethereum what we're capable of is having all those objects synchronized around a sh blockchain state so to speak and considerably reduce operating costs throw away centralized servers in certain cases for clients um and that's um what SLU it is in a nutshell it's a company that's registered in Germany um currently a small business we got five people as part of the team right now um and as part of the project uh we thought about hey you know this technology would be awesome for the sharing economy and we could have objects that rent themselves

and pass on the cost savings if you will to the people renting these places and that opened all sorts of ideas around decentralized insurance and decentralized cleaning services and things of that nature um so in order to to to fund this project we thought about starting a Dao and Kristoff yens uh the CTO of um of slockit um devised this thing that became a framework and the next thing you know is we're spending quite a bit of time on the framework and on our slack Channel you had 4,000 people interested in the framework and 100 people interested in what slet had to offer as a as a as a corporate company so the deal really took a life on its own so what we did is we created this framework and we made available

made it available to everyone want to use and deploy and a group of people um from the community um deployed a bunch of these and one of them had some ideal optimal parameters for us because it corresponded exactly to a framework which meant entirely fair and we decided to make an offer to build this sharing economy network if you will that we call the universal sharing Network um for the down as a as a product as a service uh both really um and that's how it all started and as you can tell the do worked out really well okay so so to so to recap like there are two main entities which is one is slockit so slockit as I understand it is uh a game Bea registered in Germany

right yeah gmbh yeah yeah so um that is like part like its own structure is part of the Legacy legal system right it is governed governed completely is yeah especially in Germany very strict laws and regulations very strict laws and regulations and people who don't know game is like one of the forms uh that you could register a company in Germany there's the other form called the AG um and uh and and the Dao is a separate entity completely yeah completely which lives entirely on the ethereum blockchain right correct and uh both of these entities like both of these companies were triggered by people were triggered by people in your team but

your team no that's not no no only the gmbh was built by us and the do was built because I I heard you reference that early on in the in the show you mentioned um you know I was one of the people starting the D actually I wasn't um you know we we rewrote the code for that powers the D in the sense that we wrote a framework that anyone can spawn so in our minds what we would see would be a a car D and um a rental agency d and whatever farming equipment down and a in this case a sharing economy down um and that's that's what hope to form is a network constellation of if you will of D that people spawn and the reason why we thought that was important is because

a lot of people talk about DS if you look at the Wikipedia page the place where we did our initial research I mean the whole thing is just pure nonsense I mean it just doesn't describe at all principles of of a doubt that would actually be functional in the real world and that's why we put a lot of research into it how to protect people from the minority from the majority for example so-called 51% attacks and all sorts of security and and um social attacks um that we had to bake into the framework or at least bake protections from these attacks into the framework and then make it available and then the community spawned this Dow um but will spawn many other many others I'm sure after the success of this first one okay so I I get I get that the The Da is something completely different

from slockit and it was triggered by Comm community members like it was deployed by community members part of the code was written by one Kristoff yench who is uh also part of the co-founding team of slockit right but the deployment and the management of the Dow is entirely a separate a separate entity from slockit and say imagine if somebody if somebody was pissed off at Kickstarter and wanted to do their own Kickstarter and I think some quite a few people did actually build alternative crowdfunding platform and then they they go and they deploy it on their websites and one of them might realize hey you know this is actually a really good framework I think it happened I think the guys from space CI did that and then make it available as a framework for

others so in this case what we did is we build it down and we make it available as a framework for others but we were also interested in benefiting from the existence of adal because we think it's a superior model to the kickstarter model or the VC model in order to start a project with whether if the entity purchase product and services from us and have that client supplier relationship but also give you know the the leeway for people to write their own proposals to a doubt that may include other things than just product and services it could include um I don't know providing maybe equity in exchange of ether or things of that nature okay so perhaps like like we we'd like to explore uh the relationship between slockit the da and uh this other third company that I keep hearing about which

is Da link yeah later on in the show but let's let's just start first with the da itself because it's a New Concept and our listeners would like to learn more about it and then it's perhaps easier to fit lock it and DOW link later on in the exactly step at a time you know yeah step at a time so like what would you say uh can you describe the Dow and what what would be the vision of The Da itself well I mean the what's interesting about the Dow and the da framework in particular is that the code has been audited by um the company that audited the ethereum code Base called Deja Vu one of the best if not the best in my opinion auditing company for smart contract in the world at this present moment it's been audited by the

Community um it's been you know 3,000 pairs of eyes or at least at the very least I think there's 5,000 people on a slack now um and it's been audited by some of the best people in crypto including vitalic butterin so the inventor of ethereum and of course our our adviser Gavin wood the um former CTO of of ethereum and current founder of eore as well as um the So-Cal father of uh of solidity um Christian rights visner um who who basically wrote the language that that that makes smart contracts even possible um so the first thing I would say that makes the Dow very different is that its code is well understood um by a large group of people that are trustworthy and in that sense

it becomes trustless right and that's really what makes this whole thing different um it's the trustless aspect you don't have to trust me that the D does this this and that you can go and read the code and if you don't trust the code you can go and get the opinion of other people if you can't read code you can maybe get the opinion of a professional advisor or just you know maybe you're happy with the opinion that you find on certain forums it's up to you really the level of trust that you want to have with that organization but it's the most trustless one out there so that's the first thing um and the second thing I would say that makes it interesting is that it's cely entirely fair so 100% of the tokens um and the tokens by the way give it its brains

right its voting power is driven by by those tokens 100% of the tokens belong to the people that made the Dow possible right not me not velic butterin not anyone else um if we wanted oursel as individuals to own that token we would have to go and purchase them with their own you know Bitcoins or ether or whatever um I think that's really important to understand because there's a lot of uh projects I'm seeing out there that call themselves Dows and actually are just centralized things where people think hey you know free money because right now there's a bit of excitement around around the field of crypto so the fact that it's fair and the fact that it's trustless makes makes it unique uh and so the the Dow itself so

you mentioned that slockett had uh sort of initialized development on this framework and it was just taken over by the community and the community deployed it are there any other Dows right now other than the Dow that have been deployed and there's a bunch of test uh test Dow that were deployed some of them on the main net some of them on the live net um you know the way things work everything in life is on a paral curve right you know the curves that go a bit Boomer rank shape if you will on the XY axis and so obviously the main one theal um as it's called um is the one that received all the attention and because there's value um in having this D um holding a lot of ether um and the more ether It Holes the stronger the stronger

it gets actually it became sort of the one right um actually lived up to its name um because the more ether is inside this this Dao um the more projects the D can invest into or purchase or you know obtain services from or donate to if they're charity services maybe to uh donate to the further development of uh of of the ethereum network it's underlying Network which obviously has indirect benefits to it um it can do a lot of things and the more the more money if you will it has and the more powerful it gets so there's an interest there's an advantage to always go and and put your ether into the biggest one so you get this sort of noble effect going on yeah I mean you you mentioned that this one was sort of geared towards

the sharing economy uh do you do you anticipate that you know maybe there's a dow for like farming or there's a dow for some some other uh Niche uh where you may see that same amount of traction or like I mean this this this Dow raised over $150 million I think which is a substantial amount of you know dollars in ether which is a substantial amount of money do you think that the amount of success that this you know initial Dow how the da uh can you know can also uh see the same sort of success in in other areas yeah definitely so um I think what's going to happen is that at the

moment um a lot of people I mean at the very at the beginning of the project actually people described Vidal as being this um amiba like shape so Having no shape um and I think a lot of people had a a problem with that and and rightly so you know in a company like apple you know that tomorrow they're not going to produce Farming tools U because its shareholders in this case the D the D token holders um well you know they know that the brand for apple is iPads and things of that nature so yeah you'll have the eyewatch and whatnot but you won't have um you know the eye farming tool so a lot of people were worried that the D Having no shape at the beginning and no real cohesiveness if you will um made it too vague and what

they're starting to find L is that the proposals that are submitted to the D are very much in line with u The slucket Proposal uh and you know ideally there's no guarantee of it but ideally The slet Proposal would pass um in order to deliver this U this Universal sharing Network and some people are submitting proposals for insurance for example Insurance over the universal sharing Network or usn for short other people are are talking about hey you know we need light clients for this um this little eum computers to exist so give me money so I can go and develop that um so we're seeing that actually it's starting to take shape into this sharing economy related um doubt because people

understand that there are network effects and synergies between those projects just like any VC will have synergies between its different um sort of projects and its table of projects if you will so I think it's going to get a shape and I think yes there will be all the doubt you bet there will be um I think this year you know people were surprised to hear about 150 million plus dollar um I think we're well on our way for next year to see a billion dollar project in crypto I wouldn't be surprised at all really that that's an ambitious uh objective a billion dollar down I mean that I I I don't think it's it's necessarily unlikely that it'll happen uh but I think that there needs to be

some some company backing it to to get to a billion dollars there need needs to be some investment in marketing and I wanted to ask you about that so how much what do you attribute the success of this campaign because there was there was sort of a campaign around it there was a lot of a lot of I mean not only from the community's point of you but you know slockit went out and spoke at conferences and things like that um how much of the success of this Dow would you attribute to slock it uh sort of pushing it as you know as an initial Dow project and the community's work in in trying to raise awareness about about this

Dow um not that much actually I mean certainly not to the 150 million plus that it currently has collected I mean um if you were to ask a traditional company hey how do we raise 150 million bucks they would tell you we need to go see a PR Company and and H you know and pay two or three million do at the very least maybe probably even a lot more than that I don't I know very little about PR so I imagine they would need maybe $10 million for a campaign where they would have ads on the Super Bowl and whatnot um you know clearly that didn't happen here um I think what's uh there's there's there are two factors um that are uh linked to the success of this project so the first one is people can see that it's fair and it's secure

um these are the two major um Advantage as I said earlier in terms of its code um the second thing is I think a lot of people um have been quite vested in ether and as the price of ether went up they thought well you know I could always put 10% of my ether Holdings into this project or other projects like you know there's there's plenty others out there um and they felt more comfortable with that which helped with the um the amount of um of ether injected into the Dow um the other thing I think is so there's there's The Snowball Effect that we touched on earlier um but also um in terms of um um the the the project itself um we're seeing a lot of Comm community support for it so when you

have 4,000 people 5,000 people 6,000 people all promoting this to their friends and their families that really really helps the project and we're going to see this translated to the companies the startup that the D will support um because obviously these guys will be a early adopters b um they'll have the the back of the down and of its project through social media understanding the local culture and so on um I think there's 11,000 account holders now I mean I could be wrong I mean 11,000 even they were only 10,000 that's insane Ian in terms of you know how big of a social media team you need to beat that it's unable and that's why I think the D is very good prospects going forward let's take a short break and

talk about hi me H me is a VPN provider and if you don't know yet why you should need a VPN provider let us help you I'm sure you like me and when all the crazy Revelations came out during the Snowden time uh of all the the spying that is being done by the NSA and other government agencies you were shocked and you said not with me not with my own rights now the way government agencies can spy on you there's many of them but the most easiest way is by simply going to your ISP and getting all your traffic capturing all your traffic and the VPN can protect you from that it can give you a secure tunnel from your computer to any of the exit nodes all over the

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on your phone your tablet your computer at work your personal computer and just be completely protected all the time and of course high. me accepts Bitcoin so we'd like to thank high. me for their support of epicenter Bitcoin so uh let let us kind of describe uh the different different roles people could take in the Dow so as I as I see it um there's like investor SL Dow token holders right people who own tokens of the Dow then there is this thing called the curator right uh and uh and then and then there are the proposal makers when slockit is just one of them so describe to us roughly who what do the token holders do what do the

curators do and what do the proposal makers do yeah sure um so the do token holders what they do is that they vote right um the way to think about the D is it's this um um sort of very weak AI that incentivize humans to go and find the best projects out there for it to put its ether into okay so that's how it's a d right and um today we don't have strong AIS that can go and make investment decisions in in companies so what it does is it harness if you will the the the the wisdom of the crowds the D token holders so the D token holders kind of like tools for the D actually really um for for it to to to be able to succeed by giving their opinion by

promoting it like I said earlier by being early adopters for its project and by lending it their brains to go and find interesting projects to vote on um so that's what the Dow token holders do they vote and then obviously they hope I imagine to see some benefit out of this whole Venture it's a for-profit d this one I mean they don't all have to be for-profit but this one is so imagine they want to see submit her back right um so that's what they do the second role would be the um the proposers if you will right the guys that submit proposer so proposals so in a client supplier relationship they would be the supplier they build products they build Services um they offer stuff to the D for profit not for profit it could be

anything right each proposals is defined into a a smart contract itself and it's it's the smart contract that gets signed by the D and defines the Rules of Engagement if you will with the contractors and so that compl that can vary dramatically in our case we have an interesting model of monthly payments so if we don't do our job we can get fired someone could have another model where they say just trust us because we're well known in the community and give us a big fat paycheck and we promise we'll deliver a product if the D wants to engage in that the kickstarter model they can um you could have a completely simulated Kickstarter model I don't think it's a very good idea but it's possible where they would get uh the the people voting would get early Rewards or things like that or you could have

people voting on a proposal that give them Equity into a real life startup once we establish that bridge between the two worlds right um that's the role of um the the D token holders and of the the the people submitting proposals and then your third group is the curator now the curator tends to be and it doesn't have to be but probably is going to be a each case a multisig of people and it gives them it gives the Dow a bit of a shape you know it tends to be imagine if you have a dow around racing racing cars you you would have a famous um driver you would have somebody from one of the Formula One Stables or at the helm of one of them uh you know being a curator lending its name to the D but really the

job that they do is very limited it's it's it's a bit of a crappy job actually to be honest they don't get paid so the D doesn't pay them uh what they do is they look at proposals and they say right the code is the code's okay uh it is what it is in the block chain so they validate that the bite code matches the source code that's the F first step that's the first thing they do and the second thing they do is they establish that this isn't an obvious uh ripoff so for example it's not a project that's going to take 51% of the fund to then send 100% of the money to something else you know like it it needs to be serious proposals that are passed in front of uh the do token holders and they add uh the address of the proposers the the The

Ether address of the proposer to a white list that can receive money for this down and it's implemented that way because at the moment as of Deo version 1.1 it's the ultimate fail safe in terms of security versus social attacks which are very very hard to predict and we have some very smart people on our team but they can't predict everything Unfortunately they left their crystal balls at home so um we had to have this mechanism of creators um to be able to to back up back the down if you will in case of social attacks that could shouldn't be defined code and in this case the the initial uh curators that are listed on the Dow website who picks them who decides is it

the is it the people who initially deploy the Dow or do they just how does that work yeah so ideally in a in an ideal world where you don't have chicken and egg situation it's the people that um well it self forms if you will so people people raise their hand and say oh I want to be a I want to be a a cator so it goes to the person who's already a curator and the curator adds them to the multisig and somebody who's already a Creator can say you know what um I'm not getting paid it's getting a lot of attention on me that I don't need I'm busy I have a work to do um and I can leave um it's it's harmless I mean it's normal in fact for people to come and go as part of the Creator list now as I

said chicken and egg problem the do didn't have anything so what we did is that because of our contacts in the industry you know with some of the best people in the field um that were kind enough to accept to be cators probably before they realized this thing would be as large as it got right um kindly agreed to become uh the first initial set of creators for this one D so you got vbin in there you had recently Gavin wood you had you have Christian rice Winer you have all sorts of very smart people like Vlad zenir and Victor Tron and people that are really into this stuff and they did it because they felt well you know this is an interesting project um I think ultimately though um and sorry guys but I think ultimately I'd personally see them dis

intermediated I mean the only role they serve is to act as a fail safe for something that one day will be able to be achievable with code with pure code so my hope is that we're going to fire these guys as part of a doo 2.0 framework that will be entirely run by computers but keep in mind that they themselves don't have much of power right now if they were to become evil and somehow collude with a a proposal supplier um they would get they could get fired by the people um the do token holders that would immediately recognize them as a threat so they can be fired easily they don't get paid much their role is limited to something that one day computers will be able to be my good feel one day they're going to end up

like Uber drivers you know so you mentioned Gavin wood uh he recently wrote a medium Post in which he says that he resigns as curator and sort of uh urges those who plac ether to look under the look on the faces and the research structure Etc and can and warns people that uh perhaps uh you know in in in putting money in this do wasn't such a a good place to put your ether can can you comment on that that's actually not what he said I mean Gavin told us days did I get that wrong then you get definitely rad the blog post um so two

days before he uh he he he left as a CER um G Gavin kindly contacted us um to say hey guys you know I'm getting uh people telling me hey you know did you buy a yacht recently or do you have a plane now you know and I'm getting myself and Christian and all these guys are getting the same sort of crap by people who do not understand that actually what's holding the ether is the Dow code and I think that's a lot of people having a mental block with this a computer program that holds $160 million it doesn't quite register so immediately they think nah it's not possible Gavin wood is holding all the money and he's proba buying himself nice arm money suits uh fact is as I said earlier he's not getting paid he was getting a lot of

flack because he's quite you know well recognized in the community for being a a curator because people thought he was rich somehow um so um he said you know what that's you as much as I love the project um I'm out because I had enough of this and if you read the code uh well if sorry if you read the blog post that he wrote he's actually very supportive of the project uh is supportive of slockit in general and he continues to be in fact one of our advisers at slockit um is he right to say to people hey go and read read that source code hell yeah go and read the source code I have the same warning if you want to call it that to people never trust others always check out the buy code always do your homework always ask people hey is this valid code or is this

taking some of the tokens and putting them in someone's pocket um if you go and check out the D you'll see that actually it's 100% fair and Gavin would be the first one to agree with that okay that's that that's very interesting right like it's it's probably the first time that we have a governance mechanism that um that mediates how a lot of people uh collaborate with each other and that governance usually we have had governance mechanisms but we used to have another human to govern other humans or a set of humans to govern other humans is the first time we have a piece of code or a software program that serves as a governance mechanism for for humans so it is something that is truly groundbreaking

as a as a conceptual idea itself today's magic word is token t o Ken head over to Let's stock bitcoin.com to sign in enter the magic word and claim your part of the listener [Music] award now um like one of the one of the interesting questions that comes to my mind is the the Dow itself is decentralized and autonomous but it interacts with uh with services in the world that are inevitably centralized and I'm wondering how how this interface works so let's take a simple example Twitter accounts

now the The Da quote unquote um has a Twitter account the Dow quote unquote has a slack um has has a slack so who is the administrator of the slack account who is the administrator of the Twitter account how do these H how did these like you know they really assets of the the Dow right that's something that's that wants to be decentralized and the Twitter account though needs to have one particular owner right so how how does this interface get made and who picked them yeah chicken and egg again um so once the Dow is deployed um they they will be I mean in fact there already are multiple numerous proposals some good some bad um to go and provide the

services that you describe to the D so there's a proposal right now of a group of people that are um admin on the slack because they were part of the community early on and they're saying hey you know we might as well get paid to do this job so they're bending together and they will submit a proposal to the D to uh maintain a media presence um you know it would be nice for the D to be able to reply to journalist but it can't because it's a computer program so what it needs to do is needs to hire people to do that on its behalf um so it will sign off on proposals that will include media PR Community social you name it um and that's how that's how it does it at the moment um it's entirely run by volunteers just like any other you know

slack is free actually um the slack that belongs to the D is our old slack we just gave it away we changed the name from SLO to the DA that was it and say y That's it it's the communities of youo um in terms of these interactions you raise a very good point though um which is well you know it works for maybe small things like um hey make me a logo or hey we need some press because New York Times said something bad about us or something like that but it you know what about the big proposals right what about the legal related proposals what about the circuit proposal itself you know the big stuff that will run potentially into the millions of pounds um that's obviously where we can introduce this concept of Dow link that

we're talking about earlier so D Link ex exist because we areel a slck it we immediately recognized that we wanted to make a serious proposal to the Dow a proposal that would last two three years long right in terms of the amount of work that needs to be delivered we're gmbh as I said earlier we live in a country where the regulations are super tight and it's the German Administration you know they are pretty serious about their regulations and so we had to build this bridge because we ourselves cannot issue an invoice to something that doesn't have an address right yeah as in as in meaning like like you want to be a contractor to the D you want to be a service provider right so in your income statement you're going to get some ether

so that has to show as Revenue in your income statement so the German tax authorities or some authorities are going to ask where did you get this revenue from exactly as the way I think of it is as per German law you aren't allowed to get revenue from an entity that doesn't have uh real world postal residential address or let's say head headquarter address or something like that it's not exctly that now I mean it's more of a case of you can't receive money from people you don't know it's just common sense I suppose it's how the world works right um so that's why we created this uh this organization called do link and do link is residence in Switzerland um and in Switzerland they have a much more interesting set of flow

for the people who are into crypto my gut feel is that Switzerland is going to get all the entrepreneurs for crypto for the next say two to three years and it's going to start a brain drain if you will from France Germany Britain the United States wherever else people moving to Switzerland to operate those companies because at the moment it's the only country that has a very friendly set of regulations around Theos as they are um and crypto in general I mean you know that ethereum uh was continues to be actually based out of Switzerland and the zuk Canton to be specific um plenty of other projects are located there including d link so what do link offers is a bridge between this world of Dow

and the world of Regulation that I live in um so what we'll do is we'll invoice Deo link which has a physical address and do link will engage into a smart contract with the people in the D because in Switzerland you do not need a written paper um that says that you engaging with someone into into a contract just the intent of having a contract which can demon be demonstrated in code is sufficient to establish a legal relationship so in s and for example if you receive £3,000 a month um in your bank account from the same company over a year then you can totally go to court and say I was employed with these people even though you never signed a a physical contract now that's very very unique to Switzerland you

can't do that in Britain you certainly can't do that in Britain you can't do that in in in Germany or as far as I know pretty much everywhere else um I could be wrong about the everywhere else part but I know Switzerland is they get it you know they understand this is the future and they're willing to adapt so so then d link is a company that was started by so slockit the slet team it was started by uh so it's a a joint venture between SL gmbh and an exchange called bb.com um who have a very solid legal understanding of the local regulation very good contacts with people that are actually uh helping uh shape this uh

this Juris jurisdictional environment if that's a word I'm not sure I'm not a lawyer as you can probably tell um and they've done their homework because they're already an exchange they audited by KPMG and so on um so that's match made in heaven you know the people that have built the D framework and the people that um understand how to apply this stuff in the physical world and have the right contacts and the right have done the right groundwork in order to make it possible I think D Link we're going to hear a lot more from in the coming six months 12 month something like that okay so the do link for you as slockit Ser only serves the purpose of sort of being the intermediary between uh the the Doo and and your

company if you if the doo accept your proposal uh you'll be invoicing do link and do link will be accepting money from the Deo that is correct okay that's that's interesting that that you'd have to well I mean it's interesting that it's set up that way but that you need that sort of intermediary uh to do that and so I guess why why did you create slockett in Germany then and not in in Switzerland wouldn't that be easier no because um it's a compl different business um I believe you know do link will be a successful company of its own I believe that it's going to look into a lot of things so one of the things it's going to look into is how can a d uh take actually real Equity

into a that's what people really want if you read the forums they're saying hey why can't we take stake in slued gmbh why do we have to uh you know buy a product or a service well because for now that's how the world Works um ether as you know is a fuel and it was purchased as a product under the Swiss export lows um so I believe dink has a lot more to offer than just being a bridge between us and and the Dow token holders and the future uh proposers if you will and the Dow token holders I think it's going to play a very important role in the crypto space but it's a separate business from what we do at sucket which is relating as I said earlier to autonomous machines smart blocks things of that nature so the two

have to be separate and plus you know my two co-founders are German and live near Berlin so um makes no sense they have plenty of children I I also have kids they're big now though um and you know it makes sense to be based where we want to live D Dowling seems really interesting uh let's let's let's just drill down into this a bit so mhm um uh the first thought that came into my mind when I when you described it is um ding Cod conceivably take not just locket as a customer but other companies in other jurisdictions around the world that want to make proposals to Da as customers so it becomes sort of let's say like you had bit pay right when whenever a uh

Merchant wanted to accept Bitcoin bit bit pay would uh make sure that they they got fat and the the customer could pay in Bitcoin Dow link is something similar it's like the let's say the bit pay of dows where any anybody who wants to get money from the their Dow or other Dows could just go to them sign a contract with them and then receive money from from Dow link if the proposal gets passed yeah that's sounds about right I mean I think um you're starting to see where this is going it's very very exciting there's already people that intend to submit proposal to the Dao that have contacted Dink and say Hey you know we want to work with you because we want to do things by the book help us with vat help us with regulation

help us with uh importance export laws help us with all the legal framework what comes with this stuff which has held back this is what's holding back the ecosystem by the way what's holding back the E well there's two things that hold back the ecosystem the first one is this stuff is pretty damn complicated and so um in order to be a coder you have to learn solidity and all that it's not really user friendly just yet that's the first thing not enough developers the second thing is the jurisdic jurisdic jur jurisic aspect of this stuff um which is holding entrepreneurs back from getting into this think ah yeah I could do the Dow way fine but um looks exciting this crypto stuff but uh I don't want to spend all this money building a legal framework just for this

one project you know what I'll just go on Kickstarter let's go uh or I'll just go get VC money let's go um it's what's holding people back and we want to fix that and that's what theing which doesn't even have a website yet by the way we haven't done enough way enough marketing on it but we're about to start in the coming month as I said um is is trying to resolve um as a as a as an aside I was at the um national uh French National Assembly uh three months ago or two two and a half month ago I believe yeah we're on the same on the same panel so you remember then um how receptive the audience was I mean this was the French National Assembly that's as high as it gets in the pecking order of uh uh of legal aspect in France right this is

where laws are made um and these guys were very receptive and that the at the end of the little talk you know I was walking around the little reception they were having and people including some some French Deputy approached me and said you know what absolutely right people left France 20 years ago because we were stuck up with a mini tail and we didn't make it easy for these guys to to work on the web we don't want to miss the blockchain reolution revolution we need to go and make uh good regulations for these uh for these entities so they can be based in France and why well why simple because they're going to pay tax and that's going to go into the French uh bank vault if you will so they they would love that and unfortunately or fortunately depending how you look at it

right now Switzerland has the lead so I look forward to France the UK Germany to start waking up and say we need to make it easier for blockchain entrepreneurs to work no so regard regarding regarding France I mean there there is sort of a double discourse there I think anyway being in France and having a blockchain startup there is that uh on the one hand I think that the French government is very much interested in learning more about how blockchains can sort of shape the the French economy in the coming years but you know as we know in France things do take a long time to implement and and and for laws to change and for anybody who's interested in knowing what a minel is you should definitely check it out uh it's an interesting piece of Internet an

interesting piece of internet history I didn't live but that Stan definitely probably did um so let's talk about let's talk about the proposal process coming back to the do uh can you walk us through how uh a project would make a proposal to the Doo and a different steps and voting and all that stuff yeah definitely so uh well now is the right time to I mean if you guys have projects the guys watching us have projects and you were thinking of doing a crowdfunder of some sort or if you were thinking of getting VC now is the time to actually look into to the Dow and think hey maybe that's an option so how do you do this well the first step is you contact the creators um there's going to be a form on the do Hub website that's going to be created to make that process a lot

easier but right now you know who they are just go on the website you'll have their Twitter handles just send them a message and say I want to make a proposal right and send them the proposal send them the buy code address obiously send them the source code on GitHub I imagine or whatever service you like or you want a text file doesn't really matter really and so they can verify you and once they ify you they'll add you to the white list well that's that's easy because you know we assume that that's just the step to avoid obious cameras from get going in right so once that's done the real work starts the real work is you're going to have to convince people that your project um is worth something any any amount right the amount that you ask for the amount that's asked for in your proposal under

the conditions that are defined in your proposal and that's really much like any other projects you need to pitch right so suck it to a certain extent you know what we've done in the last six month is we've pitch we went to conferences we went to uh we build a website we you know explained what we wanted to do we wrote a proposal in plain English an overview if you will of what we intend to deliver when we intend to deliver it's 29 pages long which I think is um probably too long for most people um we would have maybe preferred in this case a one pager from the kickstarter environment but here it is 29 pages of what we intend to do and then you just Supply the code um and once the DAT is deployed in when is it eight days now I

think maybe less it's next Saturday um you just push it to the to the to the chain um and you advertise it and people can go and vote on it immediately there's a little voting interface that that'll pop up in mist or into um various websites including Doo Hub my ether wallet and others um even exchanges are working on voting interface for the da by the way which is kind of cool um so that's it you go and um you know people will vote and they'll vote Yes well they'll vote no um if it vote Yes congratulation you're prob went through if they vote no better luck next time submit a new proposal let's take a quick break so I can take you to Paris I stopped Into The Ledger offices and met with Eric lar Ledger CEO and he filled me in on the

upcoming Ledger blue in early 2016 we are going to release the Ledger blue this is a personal privacy device which runs on a sec element has a touch screen NFC Bluetooth and USB connected it and it will be a full-fledged Hardware wallet with a second Factor validation of the transaction directly on the screen it will be fully open source you will be able to add your own apps and it will also be compatible with fedo second Factor authentication password as going are going to disappear and it will be replaced by this kind of cryptographically secure

authentification The Ledger blue will be certified by f and will give you the possibility to log in on any website very easily just by signing a cryptographically secure challenge Ledger is making Hardware wallets easy and convenient without compromising on security if you want to get a secure setup for storing your Bitcoins go to Leger wallet.com and use the code epicenter to get 10% off your order we'd like to thank Ledger for their support of epicenter Bitcoin so Stefan um the down that looks really great but the first question that came to my mind was if uh if if I'm I'm building a product right and I have now

many options to to raise uh funds I have friends and family first of all I have engine investors if if if I need more funds I have VCS I have a crowdfunding the option and finally I have the Dow right now yeah you're lucky though if you have all five yeah all five now now uh what what kind of uh worries me about a bit about the Dow is um let's say with with with an angel investor let's say there's a famous angel investor in my city uh the the root to getting money is to just convince this one guy or just these two two or three people yeah but the root to getting say $500,000 out of R is to perhaps convince like a thousand people

that are stakeholders in the da more more right so uh it's like I have to convince maybe 100 100 times more people to get the same money out of the da as compared to a traditional uh source of source of venture funding yes and and this and convincing people takes time right like it distracts distracts me from building the thing that is my job as an entrepreneur that's right don't don't you think this is this is a problem no I don't see it as a problem um you go see VC there'll be some set of problems um you know this is let's name a common issue with VCS in 2016 they claim to understand blockchain all they hear is a buzz word right so

they're putting their money into whatever they hope something sticks to the wall right to pardon my French um but um so there's a that's a first problem with v Kickstarter yeah there's a there's a few problems with Kickstarter if you go and look at the horror stories of uh what can happen with kickstarters you'll very quickly understand what the downsides are you also see that Kickstarter takes a fairly chunky bit of money out of the project to to do that friends and families you know friends and families seriously is bad I mean I personally wouldn't touch it with the 20 foot pole um it's one thing that you you know that nine projects out of 10 um probably more in the crypto space are failures um it's for some people they can create and I've

read some really really Grim stories about people who lost their families money because they got very excited about this project and they they couldn't deliver unfortunately not because they were malicious just because that's how the market works I mean that has a big downside especially if you're a very famous family focused sort of guy I don't know maybe you don't care it's up to you but it's your options you have options and the die is just one more option I'm absolutely right it's going to be hard to pass something uh through a set of uh you know 10,000 pairs of eyes that's a good thing that means the stuff that's going to actually make it through it's going to kick serious ass and these guys um that are in the Dow the Del to holders as the Dow that we're

talking about now right they're the early adopters of Bitcoin they understand this space they know what's good they know what's bad they don't take any accounts SAR on this show can I but they're very astute let's put it that way um and that's a good thing I think it's awesome I think that's um that's how things should be in my opinion okay so so so let's let's have a follow on question to this one um what according to you is the uh is this thing that you worry about in the da like like like like any Venture right it has uh it has a lot of underlying assumptions that are baked into it right big time Big Time right what what assumption about human behavior or crowd

Behavior or Etc or legal system Behavior worries you the most about the The Da yeah I mean I I wouldn't say it's any par worry there's a everybody's aware that when we started this thing did anybody body rais their hand and say $165 million equivalent will go into that smart contract code um I can't remember anyone saying that I do remember one person in particular uh shooting for 130 million but I think he was being just maybe um cheeky fous um so let's put it that way nobody expected this um I think Kristoff yance who is the inventor of this thing after all let's not forget that um if he was in this room he would say what he

often told me which which is you know it would have been ideal if we started off a model that maybe receives 10 million right uh because then we can start looking at what works what doesn't work etc and nobody gets too excited 150 million there's a danger that there's too much hype you know and if you look at the mainstream media it's it's just a big hype train they don't understand this technology they write things they don't parly I think even grasp um I had one par a journalist who was just completely obsessed about numbers they just wanted me to say numbers so give me numbers numbers numbers numbers and they don't care about the underlying technology or why this is important so that creates a lot of um uh you know

invalid of expectations about the project and one of these invalid expectations is that tomorrow on the 29th well not not tomorrow well maybe tomorrow depending on what time this is released but at some point uh right after the creation of the Dow that's it proposals are getting passed and everybody is putting a proposal and it's all way very well organized and there are governance tools and no that's not that's not at all how it's going to happen guys so we need to be very uh clear about this you know in terms of expectations for me would be we're going to start seeing uh proposals around governance models we're going to see proposals around forums that are backed by the ownership of token uh tokens we're going to see voting mechanisms um like uh lumo style voting mechanisms

being put in place uh existing company are going to submit things um new companies are going to submit things that's not going to happen overnight that's going to take I would say a good three to six month at the very least to go and put in place this governance model so I wouldn't expect that many proposals to be passed at the beginning I wouldn't expect the doubt to um stupidly if you will if that's if you can call it that sort of take all of its ether and boom stick it into something or six different proposals that's not how it's going to happen it's going to take time the people that are vested in the Dow are smart people I think a lot of people look at this stuff and you know it's it's almost patronizing sometimes I read some comments about how it's going to be a big shouting match

and people can't coordinate because there's too many people etc etc they just you know these are smart people these are people that that bet on ethereum you know and if you look at some of the people are invested in there for you know $1 million in some cases if you believe the statistics um these are not idiots they know exactly what they're getting into they're going to want to see the right governance tools they're going to want to see the right jurisdic um legal Frameworks put in place and that could be include the o link and they're going to want to see serious proposals um so to me these are all good things but it's not overnight um the Dow could take several years to grow and that's a good thing before it even hits Dow 2.0 and some people are excited about Dow 2.0 before Dow 1.0 is

even launched I mean that's a little bit High pish isn't it yeah sure sure like I mean so uh that that was a that was really great answer and kind of it it clarifies the expectations and uh the way the way our listeners can think about it is um when you when you own uh when you are a dow token holder because the Dow is holding ether you are indirectly also benefiting if the value of ether Rises so as long as the Dow doesn't spend a big chunk of its funds in some bad proposal uh your ether now is holding the ethers and you'll still get uh the benefit of that appreciation and on the other side the upside is if these governance issues can

be solved and uh a good process made to fund great projects and they uh they start producing a return then you have you have your upside right so your your downside is uh your your floor of your investment is what happens to Ether which probably the token holders would have held anyway and the upside might be something something even better so they can weather through this uh adjustment process at least that's that's how I I I I think about it yeah I think a lot of people are you know share that opinion um I'm not an investor you know I can't give investment advice things like that but that sounds about right um there's a few limits to that model um you know keep in mind that once The Ether uh that

the D holds has been committed to a proposal um you know it's no longer something that you can take out right it's locked into that proposal smart contract that neither the D nor the uh supplier have control over it's the proposal that mediates between the two parties so that ether is locked in if you will so the only ether you can take out of the D is The Ether that um hasn't been um um locked in in a proposal and you alluded to this you say as long as they don't spend it all in one place right which would be silly thing to do um but I guess an interesting art project whatever um but um yeah so that's one thing the other thing to remember is that this is still a technical process to be able to extract your ether out of the Dow it takes about

I think 21 30 days something like that so it's not immediate um you know it's not um it's not a sure guarantee of anything plus um you know we we touched on that briefly but there's also the risk element around the the newness of this platform but also the newness of the underlying ethereum platform I mean ethereum you know is brand new um in terms of grand scheme of things it's what six seven month old more um not that much not that much older um so I would um you know for people who are risk averse this may not be a very good place to be for people who enjoy risk and think hey you know this is an interesting experiment I want to be part of it I think it could lead to some interesting governance model and it

could lead to some great projects that otherwise wouldn't wouldn't receive attention and go for it MH okay so so one of the one of the other challenges that I kind of um so I I I read through the code of The Da and U uh I I was I was I was like I was thinking of um as an investor right like should I should I buy the doubt open or not and I um I read through the code of the Dow and one of the questions that came to my mind is um if if I had if I had say let's say I don't know 10 million Dow tokens or whatever right um whatever big amount um and let's say Sebastian had the same big amount

right and you had the same big amount all three of us in in the room we had the same amount of D tokens right now um all three of us are kind of expected to vote and contribute our knowledge into into evaluating proposals right now um let's say like Sebastian works a lot right you know 10 or 20 hours a week and evaluates the proposal and votes and the da does makes a good decision based on his vote mhm um let's say Stefan you you are somebody who has the nature of okay you know Sebastian is good therefore you will vote wherever Sebastian votes or something like that so you are you are evaluating at least who is good right

don't do that and then by the way and and then and then there might be somebody like me who be like who'll be like okay I I don't care I'm I'm just going to buy it and forget it right mhm yeah right now the the problem I had like is like the payoff the payoff for all three of us is the same yeah if the Dow tokens go five times Sebastian Stefan and M will make the same money even though M contributed nothing to it right yeah so I I kind of I kind of had the feeling that uh this is like a tra this is like a tragedy of the commons problem right because everybody's

incentivized kind of not not like the optimal strategy for everybody is to not do any thinking any thought process or any voting and just benefit from the appreciation of the doubt open in the hopes that other people other people will do the work for you yeah I see what you mean um W um that's a very interesting thing if you draw parallels to the real world what happens when people do that usually very very very bad things happen in terms of governments being elected um that probably don't have the people best interest at heart so uh L lazy voters are probably not welcome in this project

and you're right some people might be lazy and say yeah I trust that the other voters are very smart well that's a lot of trust to put in I mean I personally think you know that they're going to be more vested than what you describe I mean you yourself you said um we all hold a large amount right and you say you don't really want to vote because you see me voting and you think okay he's a good guy whatever um okay well I mean it's it's the same reasoning as you know who votes for the president I don't really care about who the president is cu they're Left Right same same you know Pepsi and Coke a lot of people think that um you know that it's all the one and the same one party sort of uh world that we live in so this there's no point

voting this is different though because you're vested I mean you have 100 bucks into it and in your case it sounded like you had 10 million bucks vested into it I mean if you had 10 million bucks vested into something wouldn't you do the least bit of due diligence at the very least and to me that sounds like common sense um if don't expect bad things to happen yeah but a lot I mean I haven't looked at the amount of ether that people are investing in uh or have have put into the Dao uh to purchase tokens but I I I suppose it's not you know tens of thousands of dollars um and you know to mea's point I I think that that freeloader

problem may may be an issue in the long term and maybe it'll iron itself out uh you know in in a few years if if this if this de was successful but if you look at something like Bitcoin if you look at all of the other cryptocurrencies that have come after it uh a a lot of people have their money in there and are not using it they're waiting for something to happen in order for them to make to make I forgot who the guy is Chris Dixon or something like that on Twitter and he wrote um you know the D is like for ethereum if ethereum was a company the D is its R&D Department right and and he somebody else said oh well it would be nice to have this for Bitcoin so you know you don't have it for Bitcoin when

you put your money in Bitcoin and you hold it you hold Bitcoin you hold a currency it's like holding dollars or holding pounds right in the context of the Dow you know there's projects coming in that you have to vote on now you're right that a lot of people might say hey only I think to your point the point you're trying to make is the long tail isn't going to vote right because they got 10 bucks into this thing sure maybe they don't but um I think the the the the short top whatever they call the people at the top the people that just happened again distributed on the paral curve if you look at the stats um I think 80 accounts on about 50% of the D um these guys are going to vote um and they're going to vote right they're going to vote the right decision in the

future it's also possible to imagine a context where you would have delegate voting that reminds me a bit of proof of stake to a certain extent where people could delegate their vote to someone else and say yeah well you know IBM has just announc that they're going to they have a lot of those tokens and we think IBM is a very good Doo token holders because they have the means of doing due diligence so we'll roll with that or maybe um this very famous guy uh in the crypto space that I'd love to follow I listen to all the the the podcast you know he said he had a lot of that token and he gave the address so what I'll do is I'll set it so that automatically my vote goes to whatever he does I think that's kind of cool actually that would

be a really cool experiment to see what happens and I would see that as a tragedy of the comons at all I would see that as common due diligence and good good Common Sense okay so let's uh before we wrap up let's come back to to slockit and the ethereum computer that you guys have proposed to build for the Dow can you tell us about the ethereum computer and what it's trying to achieve yeah so the ethereum computer is part of the um set of deliverables um that we have in mind for proposal which is really to deploy this this thing called the universal sharing Network so the universal sharing Network the vision is you have a car you can share it you have a house you can share it you have an office you can share it without third

party without middlemen um if on the other hand you somebody wants to rent something you have an app you look at the app and it says right 2 kilometers to your left there's a 3D printer where you can go and print whatever you know maybe you're an artist and you want to use that there's a laser cutter which would be kind of nice for the maker space and decentralize the maker space itself you know that kind of stuff so the idea is to share everything and anything and as part of that we have this ethereum computer which is this little piece of consumer electronics which um mediates if you will objects that don't yet support the blockchain but when they will um and helps them interact with people that are using the blockchain to rent sell or share stuff so for example it could be a door loock

now as you know there is hundreds I wouldn't say thousand but definitely hundreds of types of smart door locks out there um there's hundreds if Definitely Maybe thousand in this case of initiatives but large companies like Samsung and so on to build smart objects so the Samsung smart things um the logit Harmony Hub you know things like that um so the idea is to help these guys on board um the blockchain technology by having this piece of consumer electronics that mediate do transactions in someone's home or someone's office right um it's one part of the big picture because the big picture is really to have this stuff running on apps and have an app running on a router and the router speaks Wi-Fi and so it can operate an August lock at the door

for example and maybe that's sufficient or maybe there's a Sams uh smart things Hub and that thing speaks Zed wve and zigg so now a sudden the slet app if you will the universal sharing Network app would be able to mediate all those objects without the need for an ethereum computer so the idea is to have the etherum computer as a um sort of uh Vanguard into this space um a bit a bit of technology that would really be groundbreaking and demonstrate how useful this technology is um so this piece of consumer electronics sits in your home talks blockchain and allows people to come in and out by renting and rent your stuff rent and sell share your stuff what what is the barrier to entry for someone who were to acquire an

ethereum computer to have their devices set up on on this on the system yeah so we that's exactly what we're trying to lower so that's part of The Proposal um to lower the barrier of Entry by making objects automatically discover The Ether computer or vice versa probably more like the computer discovering objects so we're working with Partners like Noki for example which does bike locks and they do um uh little padlocks as well um that and and they they the idea is youd have on NE etherum computer display if you will whether that's HDMI art or a display panel on the etherum computer itself um the view of the state of these objects and be able to rent sale or share them and control overc Access

Control permission how much you're going to charge to use this stuff if anything at all cuz you might just want make it available to anyone that's okay too just have this sort of governance in place still um so that's that's the barrier of Entry would be to um to have access to objects that recognize it um and that's exactly what we're trying to lower what we're building really isn't an etherum computer or an app or building is a network and that's really important to understand building a network means everything we do is open source the ethern computer itself we're going to give away all the the designs everything it's going anyone can rebuild one at home if they have the means to and we're going to try to make it simple we're going to try to make simple versions that run on a pie for those who just

want a simple version we're also going to let the Chinese clone go and and clone that stuff as well that's cool too because the more the merrier because everything ultimately is mediated by the uh this usn and ultimately the D benefits from all those transactions that are mediated by these application these devices these routers whatever they might be so do you think that uh so people that would rent things on the ethereum computer or on sorry on the universal sharing Network what what are some of the sort of first things you think people will put on the universal sharing Network what door loocks door loocks yeah 100% sure that's the first that's the first thing everyone looks at I don't know what it is with do loocks that's That's so exciting uh but because

I can think of a lot of exciting stuff but um um everyone that's from a maybe mainstream sort of point of view rather than crypto point of view say oh that's great because then I don't I can continue using Airbnb but at the same time I get this sort of uh Sid track if you will where I can actually rent things directly on top of my existing Airbnb or whatever other app they may be using right um and that sort of gives them a way out that gives them that sort of opening of the door and the next time somebody comes into their house they'll use the usn rather than use the Airbnb approach I mean the universal sharing network is uh is like is like a brilliant Vision uh and I'd like to actually describe this Vision a bit

differently and um and uh and like talk about a like a different way of seeing it and I like your opinion on it right because this is what I've been using when people ask me about slockit and out here in in some of the meetups in Switzerland so um so the way I like I I I tend to think of it is the you the what's locket score technology is a way of mapping physical object object s mapping the ownership of physical objects in the real world to Smart contracts on ethereum so as a first approximation you you start to think that a physical object uh let's define that the a particular smart contract on ethereum is

the owner of the physical object and then once that smart contract is the owner it can sell it sell rent or do anything uh with that physical object it can rent it to other people so that other people can use it for the time being right so you're mapping all of the objects in the world to Smart contracts on ethereum that can kind of interact with each other at fun level and then also like the brilliant part about this idea seems to be to me that if you look at daos right Doos if you think of them as organizations today they can own ether they might be able to own uh other kinds of currencies if they issue them on ethereum blockchain but today daos

find it very hard to own physical assets if I think of a company like a pharmaceutical company like no artist it has a lot of physical assets it has laptops it has tables it has benches it has land Etc so today daos have no way of owning physical assets but once you start to map the O ownership of physical objects as smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain then daos as a whole can own these physical objects or rent these physical objects so you can have these virtual corporations interact with physical capital that's a mindblowing way to describe it um you know we have some uh some openings at lock it for marketing

positions you're more than welcome to join um but that's how you would describe it to to a crypto audience yes yes um I'm you know what I'm trying to do and I think this is going to be a a very very very ambitious goal very tough proposition is I'm going to try to to explain what you just said to people who've never heard about blockchains and um one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people in fact the vast majority of the world guys don't care about blockchains they don't care about blockchain just like they don't care about what's uh powering Facebook Facebook works why do I need to know about it's using Hadoop I mean Hadoop is

an amazing technology I hear so what does it does Facebook work yeah it works okay so I'll use that um does it bring me value does it make me money these are the questions that the non-blockchain people are going to be very interested in um and in fact the only questions that people that don't know about blockchain are going to be interested in so our job is going to be to explain to these guys and but the way you've described it is just absolutely spot on in terms of vision for the US and long term from a crypto Vision yeah and so then tell us about some of the uh maybe some of the initial pox that uh you have been working on with some of your initial Partners or at least you can talk about yeah so um and again this is important to understand just for this

because I'm used to the questions nowadays it's important to understand that what I'm about to describe is very much um separate from the business that we would have with the D with our proposal right these are existing clients just like the daer client these are other clients so um one client in particular that is uh very um candid with information is a company called rwe um they're based out of Germany they have about 30 million customer so they're an established billion dollar player in the nuclear energy um they operate nuclear power plants and they're hurting um you know they're hurting because this stuff is getting disintermediated just like the phone companies got disintermediated this 10 years ago in most countries in Europe so

um they're being pulled apart and they're thinking we still need to maintain our profit we need to find a way to make more money we need to find a way to lower our cost we need to stop this uh this bleeding so to speak and so this see blockchain as a way to incorporate things like faster payments um make it easier for people to have access to things like charging your your electric car you know they look about at the future five years down the line and I think a lot of people will have Teslas there'll be lots and lots of charging stations out there but they all speak different protocols they're all different so you have a card and maybe you can tap on One charging station or insert your car or whatever but it won't work in the next one and then when you

travel to France when you bought the car in Germany and that won't work um so basically the experience will be rotten and rubbish so um they're trying to simplify that experience by having a blockchain based layer to simplify all this accounting um and obviously gain more customer that way and maintain their their market shares that way so it's pretty clever and they're very very candid as I said and forthcoming with information so if you go online you'll see there's a chap called ction sterker who's their I believe head of blockchain innovation um who's doing a lot of meet s with ethereum was explaining a lot of the things they do um in a completely transparent way and uh to me that's really exciting because that's the first time I see a billion dollar company

that's not a bank looking into this stuff I like that a lot yeah yeah yeah I mean they so they sponsored a couple of episodes uh a while back cuz they had this contest did they your show yeah for uh um they had this sort of contest where you know you could submit ideas for blockchain startups and they would fund you that you could win some prize money uh okay so then then in that sense slock it if if you don't win the proposal which you know obviously you we all hope you do uh then then slockit is sort of Consulting with uh existing players on blockchain and iot is is that's what where you're positioning as

oh I mean whatever happens we will continue to provide consulting services and extend our offerings to um you know companies that are interested in this technology but with a focus I think on blockchain plus iot because that's where our heart and the passion is if you will I'll leave uh private blockchains for for banks for other companies we're not really into that okay well thanks so much for coming on Stefan it's definitely a very interesting and fascinating topic uh and one of the obviously one of the most uh established projects uh in in the smart contract space in terms of Mind share and and our money uh since uh since it's ra since the Dao has raised uh quite a bit of

money and uh you know we definitely uh wish slock it a lot of well a lot of um a lot of uh uh well to be prosperous in this space well thank you very much really appreciate it and great questions as usual thank you well thank you very much for coming on and again uh thanks to our listeners for tuning in eper Bitcoin is part of the let's talk Bitcoin Network you can go to let bitcoin.com to find all kinds of great shows about blockchains Bitcoin cryptocurrencies Etc uh we release episodes of epicenter Bitcoin every Monday and you can find those on iTunes SoundCloud YouTube uh or wherever you get your podcast and of course if you're a loyal listener you can leave us a

review on iTunes and send us an email at show at epicenter bitcoin.com and we will send you a t-shirt so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week n [Music]