Will Bitcoin continue to surge in 2016?

Transcript

hi everybody welcome to a new episode of the reinvent manisha my name is Paul biting my guest today is Erik Voorhees he's a well-known bit co-investor and also CEO of shape shift I oh hi Eric hey hey done and my coast is dim poster of to wait I oh hi Tim hey so eric has been a half year since we love spoke and that was just when you decided to close shape-shift for new year customers based in a license yeah so hon since good we got a lot of good publicity actually about that I think a lot of people in

the community liked what we did we essentially blocks New York before the actual bit license became law so we tried to be very proactive and not just blocked New York but explain to the world why we thought the the bid license was so damaging and terrible so we you know a lot of other companies also blocked New York which is great and we we're out all of our new york traffic to website please protect consumers org where we explain why why we thought that law was so bad yeah and I've seen the website there's quite a few other companies that have joined in shape shift and blocking new your customers right yeah and I and I wish more would

and of course with with something like the bid license the real cost is not the companies that you see leave but the companies did that you never see because they never get started there because they need a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to start operating in New York so the real tragedy is is the unseen all the damage that people will never know about because those things just couldn't happen exactly and was there any response from the regulator's based on your action maybe like a they reached out and wanted to talk to you about your action uh no well what does name the head of the New York Department of Financial Services he ended up quitting his job right after he unveiled

the bit license and we but you know that Ben lawsky I guess his response was to quit and enjoin the private market so he's he basically crafted this horrendous piece of legislation through it upon the world and then left so everyone gets to deal with his mess forever now right no but no other states motors days in New York students no one has followed New York and thankfully i think that the public perception of the villi since New York was was a negative enough that other states don't want to follow in that path they they see it as clearly something that was done poorly and so they you

know a lot of states will regulate Bitcoin in various ways but I think they all realized that that the way that New York did it was really really damaging and dangerous yeah so New York residents have been sacrificial lamps and yeah yeah and shape-shift tells more about shape-shifts I mean you've me you gave been operating for quite some time now I see a shape shift buttons and everywhere on all sorts of sides and then wallets and you name it so how's business does this is good we're we're growing very fast for doing about five hundred percent the volume we were doing at this time last year so we've grown 5x just need to do that a few more times will be

a pretty big company so it's going well I mean I think a lot of companies are finding our API to be really useful and because it's it's freely accessible and open to anyone all sorts of people are integrating the API into their website for things and they don't need to get our permission they don't need to go through some lengthy you know signup process it's just crypto currency exchange the way it should be which is frictionless and instant and convenient and safe thanks in one of the most folks your hell's going to moma athyrium is big i think it people a lot of people are excited about it i know there are a lot of financial institutions playing around with it i think it a theory amiss

probably the first i'll call it an altcoin but it's not really a good term for but the first alternative block chain that is getting some institutional adoption and a lot of that is just because it works differently enough from bitcoin that it can do things differently than Bitcoin you can do things that big wing cannot and so people are using it for those purposes but ultimately I think anyone who's following the space sees a really I helpful and healthy you know bridge between those two platforms so what are the plans for the future for shape-shift

you just talk a little bit about the API about how secure reliable etcetera but can you tell us maybe a little bit also about back end what the plans for the future are and yeah where it comes to decentralization what applies to the shape ship right now and what I would could be potentially further decentralized in the future well so we are not decentralized we are a a central company but we achieve I think one of the important goals or purposes of decentralization which is safety and not having funs stored with one party that can either through negligence or malice

or or outside theft compromised user funds so so with shape-shift it doesn't hold any customer money so even though it's not decentralized it can never have a box-like incident which i think is a really important advancement for the industry and we're currently working on our new website which will be pretty exciting it'll be released q1 of this coming year the first version of shape shift that we launched about a year and a half ago was was very simple it was basically just a way to convert between bitcoin and litecoin and since then we've added all sorts of features and lots of other coins and we just kept sticking things on to the to the old website and it's gotten a little a

little complex and confusing now so we're you know reimagining the whole thing to be something even more user-friendly and right that was how many people work work through a shapeshifter 7 and there and how many are based in Switzerland well the company is based in Switzerland people are scattered around all right there's no one actually physically working in from Switzerland office or anything there is there it yeah but we keep a lot of that info private is I think generally it's a good security idea for Bitcoin companies to the extent that they can to not reveal where they

are who works for them or where those people are because due to social engineering the more information an attacker has about those kind of things the worse and if you can build a service that is trust lists by design and that people don't need to trust shape-shift in order to use it because again we don't hold customer money that allows us to also operate with a certain degree of privacy for the business which provides more more safety and security because all that information doesn't have to be out there now if you said you don't hold customer phones but don't you all too briefly the moment the phone the phones are shifted shape shift so to say it depends how you define custody but

essentially once funds the moment of fund input has confirmed the user has been sent there their return transaction so it could be argued that shape shift is holding the funds for a moment well the transactions happening in the same way that if you walked into a convenience store and you hand over your cash the teller might hold on to it for three seconds before before you have your goods and walk out of the store so there you if you can trust shape-shift for a second then then you're good but there's not this sort of lingering requirement of trusting and institution with millions of dollars of health customer funds which is how almost all

financial institutions have had to work in the past in which you know gox proved is a fallible model what types of should I put this what types of possible integrations for shape-shift on Io for other applications do you see that you haven't seen yet well it's meant to be it's meant to be very flexible essentially just the easiest way to convert any digital asset into any other digital asset so it's it's use cases will grow as the use cases of digital assets grow right now most digital assets are you know either Bitcoin or a

bunch of old coins but more more people are seeing sort of platform tokens tokens that represent rights in IP tokens that represent shares of equity tokens it represents an item in a video game tokens that represent you know a key to access something so as that universe of tokens expands the applications for Bitcoin and how up for a shape-shift and how it gets integrated will expand simply written yeah that's a good for me good again what you're I mean you've been based in the past and

implant I'm not right eric mr. are you currently because you said already that we need to be careful with with the go disclosing where people are based are you can you say anything about where you base right now or do you prefer to keep this for yourself yeah i mean i'm in denver I'm just kidding most most people know that and recognize the bear will painting of lost time yeah the bear whale painting is my inspiration every day for those listeners who don't know what this painting is behind me this is the bear whale and it was essentially a piece of artwork that shape-shift commissioned after the the great bear whale was dumping bitcoins on the market i think in fall of last year and it's very beautiful it's essentially this

this big bear whale in the ocean and these spartan like soldiers attacking it so this barns are meant to be bitcoin you know fighting off the then the cynicism of the world and if you look very closely at the bear you see that I has printed in its fur the little symbol of the federal reserve note which is a nice little um a nice little touch that the artist made which I didn't even realize until I got the big print right so to answer my question like we're let me put it this way d don't you think this is there's a security risk for you then or for the company by being Denver well as opposed to what being in a

similar jurisdiction like Switzerland or I don't know maybe we'll forgive your vision where companies based is not nearly as important as where its customers are so since the bid license was the first legislation that actually required by law certain provisions which shape-shift was not comfortable with we blocked New York now it doesn't matter if if shape-shift was based in New York or was based in China the New York Department of Financial Services will claim jurisdiction if even one customer is is in that jurisdiction so where someone's where someone's customers are is in some ways more important than where the business is based and the

concept of a business being based somewhere i think is very anachronistic and now dated now I mean especially in the Bitcoin world a lot of these services are based on the internet the proper jurisdiction for them to be a you know understood is is as a as an entity on the internet close you know a lot of companies don't have a an office with a bunch of employees working at a fixed physical location and this and their customers are not in that physical location so trying to understand a business based on where that business is based starts to fall apart very quickly when you get into a lot of these um digital currency companies I think that's that's an improvement all right so um just to rewind a little bit back

in history before shape-shift etc I you you infested you work for some other companies in the Bitcoin space one of them was a bit instant where you work together or where your colleague or partner was a charlie shrem start of curiosity he's are you still in touch with him I haven't heard much about him lately so I was curious do you know how it's going I think he's doing pretty well um he he is a really wonderful girlfriend who has been there for him throughout this whole ordeal and she sort of been his you know lifeline connection to the outside world and she's helpful for for communicating with Charlie and keeping him in touch with

people but um I think he's the majority of the way through his caging right now and when he's released I'm sure it'll be a grand celebration for for a lot of people will be good to see someone who who didn't harm anyone be released from sitting in a state cage yeah look at the foot of viewers at home k maybe till I tell the people a little bit about what happened to him Hawaii has been config yeah so I worked with him at an early become company called bitinstant bitinstant was essentially a way to move money into exchanges quickly because let's say the exchange is mal Cox there

in Japan to send a bank transfer there is going to take several days and with the volatility of Bitcoin that can be a serious problem if you're trying to get in at a certain point so bitinstant essentially held money fiat app the exchanges and back then it was pretty much only only cox and then if you if you essentially brought cash to us we would take your cash and then credit you instantly at at mount so you could get money to gox in an hour instead of three to five business days so in any case Charlie got in trouble because someone who was purchasing bitcoins through bitinstant was selling those

bitcoins to people on Silk Road which was the online drug market and so apparently Charlie knew that this guy was selling some of these coins to people on Silk Road and he got imprisoned essentially for selling something selling an asset to someone who sold the asset to people who did something illegal online and the illegal act they did online was was buying drugs to put into their own body so and Charlie was imprisoned for one to two years based on that egregious act and I think it woke a lot of people up to how unjust the the legal system is in

the u.s. it's it's not only bad enough that peaceful people who do things with their own body or imprisoned someone who sells coins to someone who sells coins that person doing peaceful things with their own body is imprisoned I don't think properly understood I don't think people in America support that at all and the drug war i think is coming to an end here I mean I've lived in Colorado and there are marijuana dispensaries all over the place and when I was young that that was not the case and I grew up in a world saying that that you know marijuana was this terrible thing and if

you do it your life is going to fall apart and it has to be illegal to keep society safe and then here we are and I'm grown up and I see it become legalized and it's you can buy it as easily as as walking in and buying some beer and has society fallen apart now are people running around in the streets you know murdering each other because they're doped up on on we'd know it has brought peace and safety to an industry that was formerly in the black market and anyone in Colorado who has seen this unfold I think sees the absurdity of the drug war and throwing peaceful people in cages for essentially acting on their own you know Liberty with their own body you gotta don't mean to in to hold on to

Erica because we so this distance the country is so far enough disintegrated based on our drugs policy so yeah and it's it's it's crazy that that that the same action which if you do it on one side of this arbitrary line on the Colorado side of the line is legal and fine sanctioned by the government if you step over this arbitrary line and do the exact same activity suddenly it is a criminal action and you can be thrown in jail for it that should generally set off you know a warning signal to any thinking person like what why is there that either that discrepancy and hopefully people will slowly wake up to the fact that that the drug war is

immoral unethical extremely expensive and ruining the lives of a lot of good people so in regards to warning signals what do you think the message is that the people who have prosecuted Charlie shrimp are trying to send to the world is it something like don't do anything with Bitcoin or I'm not really seeing the pointer what it doesn't uh it didn't really have anything to do with Bitcoin if if Charlie had sold bananas to someone who sold them to someone who used the bananas to make a trade on Silk Road that would essentially do the same criminal act the the medium of exchange doesn't doesn't matter and i don't think the i don't think the the prosecutors were doing anything but trying to make

an example of someone because they realized that the Silk Road was out there the people were buying and selling drugs peacefully with each other out of their control it was yet one more example of how much of a terrible expensive failure the drug war is and they saw charlie is it is an easy person to make an example of and I think it kind of goes to show you the kind of people that a lot of these government types are that they would throw a peaceful person in a cage just because they're doing something that they don't like that isn't hurting anyone know what it was maybe my point earlier also made anyway arrogance you know shape-shift of course can be seen in future as a money transmitter or anything like that and you would be seen as a person running

it's being in the state's you know they would just demand jurisdiction and goods possibly cage you as saying look American your company made possible that illicit funds have traded or I've been send around the world maybe even find us and terrorism something like that is that other scenario you could you potentially fail am I afraid of the government yeah but I'm not going to live a life based on fear I'm going to do what I think is was right is right and productive than you know the there's going to be a lot of interesting legal questions that cryptocurrencies bring to the forefront is shape-shift a money transmitter under current law it most definitely is not it

would be very difficult for a prosecutor to argue that and we don't we don't touch money whatsoever we don't touch Fiat we never will and a lot of digital assets are going to be not not even used as money in any way shape or form so if the if government agencies start regulating blockchain assets as as money they are going to end up saying that the exchange of a Taylor Swift song for a world of warcraft sword is a is a money transmission because both of them are tokenized on the block chain and it's going to be very absurd and and I'm I welcome them to to run into that

absurdity in the courts cool now let's hope it's I'm gonna come to that just a message to the audience so you guys can also submit questions for Eric and so I'm use this opportunity to I'll scary whatever you want to ask him and and also of course like this video and subscribe to our channel Eric let's talk a bit about our three and overstock this week there was positive news that as he approved over stock issuance in the block chain and but also at the same time the CEO of overstock Patrick Byrne warned about our three this blockchain consortium that includes a lot of big banks so could you comment on both news items yeah so they're somewhat unrelated

they they involve the same person but so are three is a essentially a consortium of banks and baking interests who are exploring blockchain technology trying to figure out how to use it either for or clearance or settlement or or to make protocols for interbank block chain use not a lot of details are available about it and apparently overstock.com which is very much getting involved into the cryptocurrency world tried to join this this consortium and they they denied they denied overstock despite the fact that unarguably or irrefutably overstock

is one of the one of the experts in this field they are one of the largest companies studying this they've been one of the pioneers they probably have some of the best experts on you know a big corporate use of of block chains so be very interesting to know why they were rejected from this but probably a lot of conspiracy theories abound the the cooler news is that the SEC the lest the request of overstock to issue its own equity shares on over the block chain so um I think most people in the industry realize that you can essentially color coins as whatever you want so a coin can

represent a share of a company or or a house or a contract or a Taylor Swift song as I mentioned and so over stock has been wanting to issue some of its own equity so shares in overstock which is a publicly traded company over the block chain which means that if you held one of these shares you'd actually holding a blockchain token in some form of wallet and this is good China just just to make sure that the weakest blog changed the words of the day but we are talking about the Bitcoin blockchain yeah they're there I believe they're using the Bitcoin blockchain for this but whatever whichever blockchain is is in use the point is that the SEC has approved a request to issue a share as a

blockchain token so this is a really big important move and I think when the history of cryptocurrency development is being written that is actually going to be a really really big point to note so it could be you know some number of months until it's actually done but they have the approval from the from the overlords at this point so once people realize that that such shares could be traded over blockchains I think that's going to cause a explosion in exploration of that activity and there's no reason that that all the many forms of value shouldn't shouldn't be transferred over over block chains as opposed to sitting in a closed permission database somewhere which is

how it's all done right now yeah but then the identity a question comes to mind and we haven't left him on the show was an identity expert but already share is going to be in someone's name or or how does that work out because I can imagine that would be an demand from the regulators to to make sure they can follow basic gateway seeing all these things who owns what share at what time um well the purpose and the reason everyone is in this habit of knowing who owns what share at what time is because until blockchains you you needed to know that information you needed to know the Nathe the person who owned a share it

had to be a tested somehow so they had to say here's who I am I own the share and the actual holder of the shares which is essentially just a database somewhere has that all written down that all changes if you have a blockchain doing it because the owner of the share is simply the one who possesses possesses that uh that block chain credit so functionally you don't need to know anything about the person at all and the system can work very fluidly and efficiently without that so it's a great achievement for privacy and for safety and security since the SEC doesn't really care about those things I don't know that they'll allow this stuff to be done privately and safely but it's a first step at least so could we maybe

compare them to the to the old paper bonds that we're going back to such sort of a system I like way of the butter woods tree on on Wall Street people used to come together up there that's pretty much decentralized fashion of trading assets right yeah it kind of kind of harkens back to how stock trading used to be done which was with essentially bearer there were notes bearer slips and whoever had the slip on the share and you didn't necessarily need your name to be in a database because if you held that piece of paper than you were assumed to own the chair there's obviously a tremendous problem with forgery and if you lose a share it gets lost in a house fire or something that's gone so there are lots of imperfection

you can't very safely transfer you know a thousand paper shares to someone very easily so that that system is very inefficient but we moved instead to this sort of permission system where it was all recorded in databases and all your identity and personal information need to be known and now we move beyond that back to an actual custodial arrangement where you can possess the shares that you own yourself and you get all the benefits of those old paper slips without the inefficiencies so we when we look at the Bitcoin blockchain we see electronic cash these so-called the paper bearer bonds in an electronic form also seem to or also seem to return in an electronic form but when we look at

all the other types of payments that most people do every day with their credit or debit cards or pin cards through paypal cetera that's all identity based so first of all in regards to Bitcoin and decentralisation what are your thoughts on identity in general well first of all the way that identity is done currently is is terrible so since I've been involved in the Bitcoin world every time I have to sign something or there's a check or a contractor I I realize how absurd it is to to essentially scribble ink on this piece of paper which somehow

demonstrates who I am but of course it doesn't do that at all it's just a silly ritual that the people are used to and in the world where people can have actual cryptographic signatures that proved mathematically that one person is is who they say they are that's an amazing human achievement it's not been adopted widely yet but I think it will be and and our children and grandchildren are going to think it's really funny that you know back in the early 20th century people were people were doing this kind of thing with scribbling on paper so I'm identity is going to be a really interesting concept going forward I think what you'll have is identity

systems that are so I possess my identity which is essentially a set of information about who I am whether it's like biometric information how tall I am and my eye color and that kind of thing my fingerprints or my history you know where I went to school who my parents are all these kind of things there's thousands of individual pieces of information that make up my identity and to demonstrate to a counterparty who I am I shouldn't have to divulge all of that information to everyone only all I should need to do is sign something cryptographically that proves that what that person needs to know so we're going to have a world where people are a lot

safer and it can be a lot more private and we won't have this silly problem of identity theft anymore of course the caveat here is this is this assumes that regulators actually see the value of this a see the value of people being able to be private which I don't I don't think they do and so it's going to it's going to require sort of a generational argument about the value of these things and how important it is in a free society so maybe thanks in mathematics we won't even need identity as Bitcoin produce or electronic cash orever even when looking at overstock personally I'm a bit more familiar with with counterparty where you can also acid or issue assets on the Bitcoin block chain

so that so that's identity but identity always intertwines with reputation so what if we don't really need identity for payments for like electronic cash or the bearer assets that we can issue on the under Bitcoin blockchain do we still need reputation and you think it's interesting for Bitcoin for example with something like the Bitcoin OTC web of trust or maybe another possible occasion well reputation is important when Trust is required if you can remove the need for trust than the need for reputation in some ways goes away so when when someone pays with cash with physical dollar bills there's no

personal information or anything that goes along with it you know when someone pays you ten dollars in cash you don't care who they are or their reputation because you know that that instrument is valid and as long as you possess it then then it's good the reason people have to spew their personal information all over the place which is attached to reputation when it comes to electronic forms of payment is that you do care who the person is who's sending you a bank transfer largely because those things could be reversed they can be messed with or distorted in various ways so you don't you have to there's a certain amount element of trust that's why you wouldn't just give your bank account number to someone on the street and in a world like Bitcoin where you don't have

to trust people in order to make payments that prevents you from having to also convey personal information and to convey the reputation that doesn't mean that reputation is unimportant in every aspect of society it just means that it's unimportant in the transfer of payments which is which helps greatly for efficiency right point taken let's go to a question the audience Eric question is from flush he says I guys great to see it you're interviewing Eric does he think the Bitcoin network will be a protocol for small and large payments like Visa or more for high-value transactions trying to predict predict the future of how

Bitcoin will play out is is a problematic I think the market finds a way if blocks are too small people will build augmented systems to handle small transactions and if blocks are big enough then people won't need those augmented systems so who knows but I think the the important point is that cryptocurrency and block chain systems will take over the world of payments for all types small and large from from micro to two very huge and the specific way that plays out is is probably unpredictable but a smart people are building these kind of

systems and wherever there's a roadblock people and you know entrepreneurs figure out ways to to overcome it that's why I having so I having an open source and an open inclusive system that anyone can build on is so powerful and ultimately why an open platform like Bitcoin will always dominate a closed platform such as you know an interbank lending network where you have to be one of the banks to use it I really want to say I agree with you Deb because if you look at shape-shift for example it's a micro intimate it's like a micro intermediary on top of the decent mediating layer like a base layer protocol so there's a level playing field for everybody to compete against anybody else within the

space within the economy or in the market and I think that's very interesting because from my perspective that also has to do with reputation because shape-shift do doesn't hold my friends but if they mess up several transaction they could lose the reputation so this way you see that it's much more about reputation for companies who work on a micro intermediary level instead of when you carta lies and centralize all the revenues when you have a decentralized system you also decentralize the revenue so everybody becomes an equal player within such system you agree yeah and you know i think you know in some ways shape-shift

doesn't need to be trusted so its reputation doesn't matter because it's not holding a bunch of money but that's only um that's only for some ways like in other ways our reputation is really important so we spend a lot of time making sure our customer service is good that the transactions processed quickly and these these types of reputations keep people coming back to us so there's lots of ways in which we still need to earn people's trust but those are essentially earning people's trust in order to show them a good product as opposed to earning people's trust in order to endanger them by by collecting and holding all their money for an extended period of time no you yeah we remove the need for trust in in in parts of the business

which shouldn't have to have a trust element to them right so people can voluntarily choose to trust you if they believe you add enough value to the network for them essentially right and then the the cost of losing trust is not devastating to to customers what if we if we breach trust that probably means if a few customers are upset we have one transaction as opposed to losing three hundred million dollars because the exchange disappears and blows up like and so silver miner wants to know Eric do you have a position in etherium or ether it's personally uh like do I own some yeah I guess I own I own some

Bitcoin is probably about ninety-five percent of my cryptocurrency holdings used to be 19 used to be 99 things it's a yeah vidya align it with the dominance index on your market capitalisation site yeah yeah the vast majority of what I hold in july sets is in Bitcoin but I cheat a little bit because by owning shape-shift that is essentially a position on the universe of of digital assets so if we have a world where there's lots of valuable digital assets shape-shift will be valuable so I don't feel the need as much to own a portfolio of lots of different assets if I'm

exempt yeah your hedge did way and one more question from flourishing and then we can talk a little bit about what you expect for 2016 before you before we wrap up fluish asks do you think private ledger private Ledger's have used for companies to be more efficient and or reduce costs or will people always seek the most secure and distributed ledger and the Bitcoin blockchain so basically is asking if there's a case for private change I guess I'm I'm sure there will be companies that successfully and efficiently use private chains for various things I think blocking technology can absolutely help with with things like that i also am quite sure that those systems can never

become as widespread and powerful as a system like Bitcoin because it it's open so the you know if if efficiency of transactions is your goal for a specific use case blockchains may not be the right tool for other use cases black jeans are going to be very powerful so it really depends on on which case you're talking about but I think the real the lesson that people has learned over and over in the technology world should be that open platforms tend to out-compete closed platforms and this was true with the I mean the internet itself was the biggest example of this where you had in the 90s you had half a

dozen or more these sort of closed systems like compuserve and AOL which were very well-funded very powerful companies were building them and they had all the lead at first you know the early 90s AOL was how people used online services and they just they failed because the openness of the Internet allowed so many people around the world to build so much and experiment in so many interesting ways that there's there's no no possibility for a for one company or one organization or one government no matter how well funded to ever compete with that kind of thing you want to chip in there Tim well I like the analogy with the early internet another one I find interesting

personally is that the early PC market in a 19-8 if you compare these three then in the first two instance as you saw that in the end price speed so performance and reliability were the main factors that decided which ones would come out as winners so it wouldn't surprise me if we could take these analogies when looking at the rise of the internet and the rise of the PCs and see market in the 1980s that we could see a lot of similarities here of course it's totally different topic not everything is compatible in this scenario but yeah I do agree yeah the sort of VHS first beta max is

also a good example of it right where Betamax was the sort of proprietary closed system from a very powerful well-funded company Sony and uh it was it's generally understood that that was the better technology from you know from a technological point of view but the openness of the VHS platform allowed so many more people to use it and build on it that it ended up becoming the standard yeah that's correct only at the same time it's really difficult to build something outsource and monetize it at the same time and that's what I was pointing at earlier that when you have a protocol that doesn't require any intermediaries then it will all depend up on the people who will actually add

value to network to the users themselves and those will be the winner said I'm not sure at this point if that's going to be shape-shift that's not what I'm saying here but I do believe that that shape shift is getting pointed yeah well in I think he to a decentralized system and an open platform like bitcoin is it's not that everything on the platform has to be free and open it's that the the base layer the platform layer itself needs to be free and open and then people can build whatever they want on top of that so if you want to build a closed exchange that's fine you can do that and other people can try building other types of exchanges and they can all compete with each other the platform specific business models can you know at

the discretion of the of the owners can can try out different things in different models so what do you see as potential or like the most interesting business models or revenue streams for open source or company said that are based on hopes or software because that's what you see a lot in this space either either with the Bitcoin block chain or or private block chains most of it is open source nowadays so people do seem to realize that the openness transparency is really important at least to some extent well I'm not an expert on open source software but it's uh it's an industry which I think the world was very skeptical of and has proven itself to be workable from a corporate business model

perspective so companies like red hat I think has shown that you can build open source software and still become a giant corporation making lots of money it changes the way that people have to do business but it doesn't it doesn't prevent business from happening and and also I think it doesn't mean that that all businesses need to be open source completely sometimes it makes a lot of sense but it's it's just up to the up to the company how they want to do that and it's very clear that companies can be completely open source and make a lot of money and so that's a really good it's a really good model to aspire to interesting link there to IBM is that they do seem to get the importance of

blockchain whether there's the Bitcoin blockchain or private block chain and we look at ABM in the past they have at some point stopped working stop developing OS to in order to put those resources into the development of Linux and they've had a lot of profit from doing this so I do think that a lot of big companies out there are seeing this the same thing goes for even for companies like Microsoft nowadays who are open sourcing some parts the software so I do think that's a that's a good good path where we're heading into but I'm really curious to see what kind of business models people will come up with on top of obese or software yeah and sometimes there's hybrid approaches like some of the things that we build a

shapeshifter is open source and some of its not so we we decide you know on a case-by-case basis so often the company can create all sorts of open source software in it can even be free or free services and then also have other other software that is you know subscription or pay to use type thing they can work pretty well in harmony I only Simmons so Erica we're almost at the end of the year and what are the two key things you're looking forward to in terms of Bitcoin for next year and of course we have the bloke reward it will be half if I'm mistaken so I guess that's that will be interesting to watch with an ongoing scalability discard discussion and some solutions will be implemented what is

what are some of the things that you are looking looking into our things that you think should be on the mind of investors I think that over the last year and a half or two years all the venture capital that has gone into various Bitcoin companies that stuff takes a while to turn into actual products that consumers see and enjoy and over the next year I think a lot of those products are going to be coming to market so very slick polished you know Bitcoin based products that were that were the big investments of the last couple years are going to be visible and those if they've been done well those will attract users and build the

ecosystem I'm I'm very excited about the Lightning network and it is it certainly has lots of potential and yeah you know if if that gets done well and people can can really do micro transactions essentially it at no cost and in any number that'll that'll just blow out a whole whole bunch of interesting use cases that the world should probably get prepared for I'm also really excited about auger on on athyrium I think that that has also another one of those projects that is huge potential and if they execute it well and that is really

going to change the way the world works being able to price information in a distributed manner is really important service that I think the world is is poorer without so and that'll be I believe live 2016 those are some of the things I'm keeping my eye out we we still have a secret project its shape shift that we will announce in q1 that I think will be pretty impressive to people so good on websites yeah it's not the new website but it is a the new website will will help it examines a lot of stuff to look forward to and do you care to give us a price target for a friend of day of 2016 for end of the

only thing to hold you to it sure uh end of year 2016 I think the price will be seventeen hundred dollars okay cool yeah thanks to the Eric did maybe final some fun and find a question from your side I know nothing in particular this one cool you want to add something Eric no I'm good thank you guys so much for having me on the show yeah it's a great tradition and now every have fear like there's a third time already lost a year ago and guess more or less you were together with Roger there and we had tier as well and then half a year ago we had with the Tyrian Yelp so let's keep on doing it every half year and so we

get to know more and we learn more about everything in shape she hasn't all the amazing products that you work on so keep on keep on doing the good work and keep on whispering the good work and let's listen it again all right exactly Merry Christmas Christmas your than that Christmas and Happy New Year Merry Christmas deoxy you might