Skycoin Coin Interview 2 Youtube Transcript

Originally held December 11, 2017 on the Coin Interview youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRjfbR44F9A)

Synth is the Skycoin representative in this AMA. Christian is interviewer

Christian So guys welcome back to Coin Interview. Today we are going to have an update from Skycoin with one of the core developers, Synth. Before we get started, obviously we only have two sponsors, one of them is on the show. Ark is the other sponsor. You know.. just look here. They have nothing really going on in the last few days, just marketing. All attention is on Bitcoin right now let’s just be honest. Love Ark though go check them out. Get a ledger nano. If you are storing these coins on exchanges, you better start storing them on hardware. Go get a ledger if you don’t have one already. Stay up to date with their development because there are always lots of competitions always going on with the Ark team. We’re going to turn it over to Synth. Synth has a lot of development updates for you guys. Skycoin is one of our core sponsors, so Synth how are you doing man?

Synth Hey, so I think we were on here what about a month ago?

Christian Yea I think so about a month ago.

Synth Oh ok, yea it has been absolutely crazy. Skycoin ICO’d I think around $.01 and last week we hit $20, which was just absolutely crazy.

Christian Only on one exchange too.

Synth Yea we are still just on Cryptopia. I think Skycoin is going to hit five hundred million dollars or a billion dollars before we get listed on the other ones. We were going to get listed on Bittrex but then they SEC letter basically shut down the listings on all of the US exchanges, so we went back to square one. Binance has switched countries like four or five times in the past month. C2CX still has us listed but they also switched countries like four times because of the changing regulatory things. So the exchange situation is crazy right now, and we are also in a bubble. What has happened is we have twenty or thirty companies per day doing ICOs and even if you raise a hundred fifty million dollars you are not getting on an exchange because these exchanges have two hundred coins and you have ten coins a day who are doing one hundred million, one hundred fifty million, fifty million ICOs with huge marketing budgets and they can’t get listed. So you have this situation where you have a huge user community, you are growing really rapidly and you can’t get on any exchange. So I think we are even lucky to have gotten listed on Cryptopia when we did.

Christian Well yea I mean, so if I talk to Bill, we could probably try to help you guys out with getting listed on Bittrex. Obviously I can’t promise anything but I know one of the lawyers is in DC, so I have some connections to that. 100% of what you are saying is true. With getting listed on the exchanges now its all lawyers, making sure you arent a security and making sure you have a legit project.

Synth Yea. One of the exchanges that we are talking to.. their parent corporation is like a two trillion dollar forex broker or something and their retail clients are like pension funds, institutional investors and they keep getting asked about Bitcoin or Ethereum and they want to have some type of crypto exposure in their portfolios because they want to capture some of the growth, but they don’t necessarily like Bitcoin or Ethereum or even IOTA because they don’t feel like they are backed by anything. So one of the things that we are lucky on, Skycoin has Skywire, so Skycoin is a commodity backed currency. The value of Skycoin is backed by bandwith. Another coin on Fiber is https://solarbankers.com/, Suncoin, and they area solar energy backed coin so those institutional investors are coming in now and launching their own Bitcoin exchanges and they are trying to find any coin that has any economic basis to the price, so that they can list it and sell it to retail clients and the institutional investors. I think we might actually end up being on that exchange first, but all of their customers are basically… they are not crypto people. It is like a whole another segment of people. They are very slow. Cryptopia when they listed Skycoin it took them like four hours to get listed on the exchange from when the user community emailed them. They didn’t even tell us that they were going to list it they just ninja’d us like Polo does. With these other exchanges, its like NDA, NDA, NDA, like four levels of frickin NDAs, and then they’ll say that, “oh yea we’ll have it listed but it is going to take our tech team eight months.” It is completely… it’s like going back to the corporate world you know and you are working with these mega-corps. Like I worked for this company and we would do contract negotiations with Thomas Reuters and we would spend like two years in contract negotiations. [laughs]

Christian Right… that is common yo. I was talking to some guys in Hong Kong and they were working with a bank. They didn’t even start yet after being like two and a half years into negotiations. It’s crazy.

Synth [laughs] Yea Kraken was the same thing. I think they went to Dubai. They spent like six years in Dubai and they spent six or ten million dollars or however much it was and they got all of the permits. They wouldn’t commit to anything and nobody would tell them no but nobody would tell them yes. Then they got the regulatory permits and all the money license things from the US and whatever they needed, but they couldn’t get a bank account. They couldn’t get a bank account to trade crypto. Or they had an agreement… I think it was that they couldn’t get the bank on US, but then in Dubai they were going to setup an exchange in the free trade zone but they weren’t allowed to have customers inside of Dubai. They couldn’t sell to people in Dubai, but then the bank wouldn’t even give them a bank account even though they had met the regulatory requirements and they had spent like six million dollars on lawyers.

Christian So one more time Synth, the name of the exchange that you are talking about… what is it?

Synth I can’t talk about it.. I can’t talk about it.

Christian It’s not the one that you guys retweeted on December 7th is it?

Synth I can’t.. I don’t know [laughs]

Christian Ok, well I mean it’s on your Twitter so.. it says Next Exchange?

Synth Ohhh no no no, we just launched on Next. We have a community poll now. So in Skycoin Telegram, we had 300 people in it about two months ago and now there is about 2,000 people in the telegram, so we are getting 15% growth per week in the Telegram. We are hitting like 70 people a day and its crazy so… the user community just started and they saw this poll online and they just started hammering the poll, so we won this poll to get listed on NextExchange. I think that we are getting listed on three other DEX things, but basically I’m not involved with the exchange listing stuff anymore because it’s just a waste of time. You would just keep reminding these guys over and over again like, “list us, list us, when are you listing us..” They are getting messaged by three or four hundred coins at the same time, so I delegated that to someone else. We have a team following up on exchange listings and I think we are targeted for three DEXs. Two of the DEXs we have to do timelocked… so there’s like two public key multisig with a timelock so the coins revert back to the first address. That’s required in order to do DEX. You send your coins to a multisig address and one of the signatures is from an address controlled by the DEX and one is controlled by your address and then there is a timelock that says the coins will revert back to your ownership after thirty days or something. So if the exchange goes down, or disappears, you will get your coins back after thirty days. When you make a trade on the exchange.. when you settle it, you sign it and they sign it and then the transaction will go through. If they don’t sign it, the transaction doesn’t work. If you don’t sign it, the transaction doesn’t work. You both have to sign it. So this prevents the DEX from stealing your money and it prevents you from taking your money back from the DEX. So anyways, we figured out how to do atomic blockchain swaps with minimal technical requirements, nothing complicated, to get DEX functionality. Also, we are building our own internal DEX too, which is a decentralized exchange, and we are also building our own OTC market and our own internal exchange. Also, we also have six partners lined up who have licenses to operate exchanges and they don’t have software. So we are trying to get a development team together now to finish up the SKY exchange, so we might have four to six white label exchanges that we basically own or are operating partners on. This is actually very funny because a week ago this company, very large company, announced that they are doing equities trading on the blockchain so they wont need a broker anymore. Before when you owned a stock you didn’t really own the stock, the broker owns the stock for you. Well this guy said with blockchain, then you own the stock and you don’t need a broker anymore so you wont have to pay the broker fees. There are some things you can’t do like the broker can sell stocks he doesn’t own and do naked shorts or something, but with the blockchain system you cant do that. Sometimes the broker would say that you have a million shares in your account, but he only owns six hundred thousand shares and then the broker goes under, so you lose half your portfolio. It happened like with like MF Global, whatever that ponzi was a few years ago. With the blockchain though, you have this real time settlement and clearing mechanism. So there’s this huge company interested in doing equities on the blockchain, which is something a lot of people are looking at. Some company got a fifty million dollar contract to implement the exchange software for doing that and that company is like shit.. “We did these powerpoints. We got the contract. We have the MOU agreement… but we don’t have any software developers and any software.” So they told this company that they had the best software in the world and they sold it really well and they won the contract, and then they basically came to me and they say can you get us some software for a decentralized equities exchange in a few weeks.

Christian That’s crazy…

Synth [laughs]

Christian Wow.

Synth Another thing, in the market, we are in a bubble right now. I am getting 150 messages per hour. People are just crazy. You can see the mania in their eyes, just raw greed. I had a meeting with someone and they wouldn’t tell me what they meeting is for and they just said, “Oh I want a meeting I want a meeting.” They had to go though like four people to get to me, but they wouldn’t say what the meeting was for. I ended up having three meetings with three different people all at the same time. This one guy was like, “I want the Skycoin miner. I want it now. When are they shipping? I want it now. Give it to me now.” I felt like he was going to physically assault me… I was like feeling threatened. I was like, “ok, ok.” I told him that I would make sure he was on the list and blah blah blah and I gave him the contact of the guy doing assembly and stuff. People are getting like… they just see these coin prices going through the roof and they just want to get rich right now. They want to buy the thing that it going to go from a penny to one thousand dollars next week.

Christian The whole space is 1.. the whole space right now is too top heavy. 2.. There is too many noobs entering. 3.. The whales have too much control of the market. Especially the miners with Bitcoin, they are really showing that they have power. It’s crazy.. it really is.

Synth I have a story about this.. I don’t even know if I should publicly say this. Basically, we brought on this marketing firm and they are relatively powerful like comparable to New York Times, Wall Street Journal. This guy’s network… he’s like a guy that can say do this and it happens. He brought in this guy and he emails me and he says, “Watch this.” He sent the Skycoin price up to $11.11 and he then he set the market cap at like $66,666,666. Then he set the Skycoin price to like Hitler’s birthday for an hour and then he emails me like, “What do you want it to be tomorrow?” and then he showed up in the channel and he is sending screenshots. One guy came in and we are doing an OTC sale so you have a guy who says, “I want to buy $70 worth of coins.” I just send him the coins.. I didn’t even ask for the Bitcoin because I didn’t even have time like… I have 300 people messaging me for the OTC. Until we have the automated system in place, which is just being turned on now, I had to do these things by hands, so we were getting 100 messages an hour for OTC sales. It took three weeks I think for me to finish all of the OTC sales just from the period when the Skycoin price went from $2 to $20. It was going up at 30% per day every single day for like a week. Coinmarketcap actually delisted Skycoin and they were like, “What the hell is this coin? I’ve never heard of this. Who invested in this coin?” They were freaking out because price was going up like 30% per day and like, “I’ve never heard of this,” so Coinmarketcap delisted us for like a day and I had to spend like 12 hours emailing them and screaming at them and going down the investor roster and pointing them and showing them to the Forbes articles. So they were like, “whatever, whatever” and they fixed it. So we have these OTC orders and some are like 5, 10, 200 Bitcoin…” And this guy shows up, and he’s like, “I want 5000 Bitcoin worth..” I was like what? You know the market cap is like $40,000,000 and you want to buy $60,000,000 worth? So he’s like, “Ok, when is the OTC starting?” I had a feeling about this too like two months ago. These VC firms who do crypto investing started showing up and one of them was like they will buy $20,000,000 of a coin at a time. You know Arlington? The guy who founded Techcrunch is doing a crypto fund of funds and he will take your money and invest in other people who are investing their money in crypto. So basically you give him the money and he takes a fee and he invests that in other people taking your money to buy Bitcoin. Which makes no sense like, why don’t you just buy the Bitcoin?

Christian That’s a scam dude.

Synth [laughs] Well it’s a good business like… it’s a good way to get a billion dollars right?

Christian Yea sure.. but.. if anybody had common sense they would not be going that route. Anyways..

Synth It’s the same with investing. People don’t want to make their own decisions. They want someone else to tell them what they should buy and what they should do. “Oh I want to be rich tomorrow. I want to double my money.” They just want to get the quick advice, so that they are just letting someone else make the decisions for them and paying them a fee to do that. So one of these firms messages me and they were like, “We want to buy $40,000,000 of Skycoin.” I was like you know the market cap is only $25,000,000? And the guy was like, “Uh how many coins is that?” So they aren’t even researching like what the coin is, how many… They just see oh you have a github, oh you have developers, can we put in forty million? This is definitely a bubble right now.

Christian I’ll tell you what. There’s Bitcoin. The problem is like we haven’t had a market until now… like a real market. So, now the rodeo is just starterd. In ten years, some things are going to smooth out, but until then scams are going to keep running rampant. Projects that have no real substance to them are going to get weeded out. Projects like this are going to keep chugging along.

Synth This is very interesting, so I’m talking to people in the market. My personal opinion is that this is going to be the biggest financial bubble in human history. If you look at the dot com bubble they went up to like ten trillion dollars and I think that we are going to see the same thing for altcoins. So right now, the market is about three hundred billion dollars, about three hundred fifty billion with the current Bitcoin run up and the whole market is going to go up 30x. It doesnt matter what you buy, whether you buy Litecoin, Dogecoin, cryptokitties, because the whole market is going to go up 30x. So people are going to be like, “Oh I’m hot shit, I’m such a good trader..” They are going to be dropping out of college to daytrade altcoins because they were buying into a market where everything is going up. It doesn’t really matter what they do. There’s several reasons that this money is flooding in. One of the reasons is that the US government shut down a lot of the tax havens. They shut down Panama. They shut down the Virgin Islands. They shut down Meritius. They shut down Hong Kong. They even went into Switzerland and they started putting KYC on the accounts. So all of these rich people… nobody actually knows the number, but I think its actually… from what I’ve heard over seventy trillion dollars in assets that are held offshore. Then they had the Panama Papers and they started publicly shaming these people, hacking the accounting firms and leaking their names to the media and what was leaked was basically a threat. So all of these people now are moving their money into crypto. They don’t feel safe even in these offshore tax havens after GAFTA and FACTA with the US and this international tax regime that they are implementing. So we have a flood of about seventy trillion dollars right now that is slowly trickling into crypto, which is still only a three hundred billion dollar market and that is going to cause a bubble that could last like ten years. I see all of that money shifting into crypto but the market is not currently large enough to absorb that and there’s certainly not enough companies or real crypto assets that are backed by anything. Most of these cryptos do not have anything. They don’t have developers. They don’t have a blockchain. They’re just ERC-20 tokens and there is no economic substance behind the coin, so what we are trying to do with Skycoin is to create a commodity backed asset. We are trying to create a coin that is backed by a user base, a community, and backed by bandwith. So we can compute what the cost of bandwith is and how much you pay per gigabit and we can buy and sell bandwith through Skycoin. Solarbankers is doing a similar thing with their ICO. They are trying to create an energy coin. They have an asset backed coin where people would produce energy and then their neighbors would use the coin to buy the energy. So I think right now we have this flood of money, all of the cryptos are going to go up 30x. So basically everyone who is buying cryptos now is going to feel very rich at the top of the bubble, we are going to have a lot of millionaires and billionaires being created overnight. Some guy that bought $30,000 of Litecoin a few years ago, you are going to see that guy quitting his job to go full time condo shopping, all of these hot girls around him, three gold plated sports cars. He is going to be quitting his cubicle fund job to have enough free time to figure out what he is spending all of his altcoin bubble money on. By February, I think every single person in their family, or in their office, is going to know some guy who made ten or fifteen million dollars in altcoin money. They are going to get jealous and greedy and say, “I want to be rich.” They are going to flood into altcoins, but the mistake that they are going to make is that they are going to flood into Bitcoin because that is the most visible currency and that is the one that has gone up the most so far. When Bitcoin is like three hundred billion dollars, it can only go up so much. It might double. It might even hit 60k or even 100k before crashing. You know the peak could be pretty high, but um, everything will go up. Bitcoin might go up 10%, but the top 40 alts I’m expecting will increase at least 30x from their current position. The people who are going to be making the most money who are going to be turning $1 into $5,000 or $10,000 are really the people that are investing in the #80, #90, #100 position coins before they are listed on the exchanges. So what happens is you have a coin. You bought the coin at $.10 before anyone heard of it. You had to go onto some obscure exchange and buy these byteballs and then suddenly it gets on Bitfinex and Binance and all of this money and all of these bots start trading on it and the volume blows up into billions of dollars. The price will ramp up in like three months from $.10 to like $800. This is exactly what happened to IOTA. If you look at IOTA was listed on I think Binance at about a billion dollars and then they went to five billion and now fifteen billion, so before I would think that these coins would go to one billion or two billion or three billion, but a one billion dollar crypto now is just small cap. That’s just the base. These cryptos once they hit one billion, they still have room to go up 40x or 60x during this bubble. So those investors can still make money on that, but the people that are really going to do well are the people that are coming in when the coins are like 90th or 80th. Like, some people bought Skycoin at $2 and it went up to $20 so they made 10x. They are holding out for like $800. They want it to be triple digit. The youtubers say, “yea I bought it at $2 and it went up 10x, but I’m not going to sell because they want it to go up triple digit.” The people that bought at a penny, if you go from a penny to $1,000 its just crazy. There are people who have bought up a 100,000,000 coins for just a penny and rode that coin up to $1000 or $800 or $500 and that is becoming more and more common.

Christian What’s going to happen with all of this infrastructure? So one example, I mean we both know that Bitcoin will have to scale at some point. There is no way that we can just… its a circus right? So what’s going to happen to five hundred mill– actually probably over a billion dollars in mining hardware at this point. It’s worthless right?

Synth Bitcoin is dead. Bitcoin only has three developers. G. Maxwell, sipa, and Luke Jr. and if you look at the other coins. Like Skycoin, we have eight development teams with different github repos and each team has like five people. We get a new feature release, or a new product release every month or every two months and we have a mobile wallet and a hardware wallet. If you look at Bitcoin, it hasn’t changed in six or eight years. They haven’t upgraded the wallet. They don’t have a web wallet. They don’t have a hardware wallet. They have three developers and it takes them four years to get anything done. Like to get header’s first download down, it took four years. So Bitcoin right now has the largest market cap, but in terms of technology, Bitcoin is the worst coin. It the slowest coin. It’s bloated. It can’t handle scaling. It is a project that is barely kept together, but it has a great brand. Everyone knows Bitcoin, so the problem is you have these other coins coming in and basically appropriating the Bitcoin brand and diluting it. You have Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin 2x, Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Legacy, Bitcoin Advanced, Bitcoin Platinum. Like, there is going to be forty frickin Bitcoins and you are going to be like, “Is this Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash? Is the Bitcoin logo tilting to the left? Or tilting to the right?” If you go to your Grandma and you look at the Bitcoin logo, Bitcoin Cash looks the same as Bitcoin to her. She can’t tell the difference like which Bitcoin is it? “Is it Bitcoin Cash? Or Bitcoin Diamond? Or Bitcoin Platinum?” So right now these investors piling into Bitcoin are idiots and there is two reasons for that. The first reason is that Bitcoin is already so large in market cap. It’s already at three hundred billion like how much more can it go up, right? You can make a little bit if it goes up 5x or 10x right? But if you want to make ten million dollars or one hundred million dollars with a one thousand dollar investment, then you have to come in at the penny stocks before the coins are big and you have to research. You are not going to make money coming into the biggest thing and expecting it to get 100x bigger when it is already the biggest coin. The second mistake they make is that they are investing in the coin with the worst technology. If you look at Skycoin, we can do three hundred transactions a second and Bitcoin is struggling with six. It’s like every single coin that has launched today is a better, faster, more secure, more features, better supported, more developers than Bitcoin. So it’s like, you have a sick dying horse right? And you are in a race right? Everyone is putting their money on this sick dying horse in last place.

Christian Makes sense right?

Synth [laughs] People really don’t care about the technology either. Like Ark is a really good project. Some of the Ark founders, like Mike, is one of the largest Skycoin investors. All of the tech people.. we all invest in each other’s coins. There are only twenty people in the whole market maybe who actually do real tech in crypto. Our coins didn’t do as well as the scammers and the pump and dump people and the people who just had good marketing. We are like, “Ohh ok we have to improve on marketing.” We found out eventually that people are just greedy. They aren’t investing in the coin because it is better or because it is going to be around in twenty years. They’re getting greedy. They just want to know, “how is your coin going to double my money? I put a dollar in, am I going to get fifty dollars tomorrow?” That is what they are looking at. If you tell them that you are going to double their money in two weeks like… one of the most successful coins is Bitconnect right?

Christian Yea it’s a ponzi scheme right?

Synth It is a straight ponzi. It says, “You buy our coin and we pay you money for owning the coin.” Then they pay youtubers, with like affiliate program links to bring in more people and you know… this is the most successful coin because that is really what people want. They don’t really care about the technology. I’ll tell you right now what is going to happen is besides the offshore money, those people bringing in the money from offshore aren’t stupid. They aren’t necessarily piling into catcoin. They are looking into coins that have some kind of economic basis behind them. Those people however have a diversified portfolio to hedge against Bitcoin going up and down, so they have what’s called an index traded fund. Their fund will say, “buy 0.3% of catcoin.” They might have a fund of eight hundred million dollars, so if they put in 1%, 2% portfolio allocation then two million dollars floods into catcoin in like thirty minutes. So when the market goes up, those coins will go up just because of those index traded strategies that a lot of these bot people are running. What’s going to happen is a lot of dumb money is going to flood into the market. All of those coins are going to go up 30x and you are going to get rich no matter what you invest in. Some of the people who did research on the coins, like who has developers? Who has a github? Who actually has a blockchain? Who actually isn’t just lying out of their teeth? Some of those people are going to make 1000x 10000x and they are going to turn like $10,000 into $50,000,000 at the peak of the bubble. I guarantee you. I’ve seen this happen before. I’ve seen it happen when Bitcoin hit $100. I saw it happen when Bitcoin hit $5. I’ve seen it happen when Bitcoin hit $1,000. This is maybe my fourth or fifth coin bubble that I am living through. I can’t even remember how many bubbles there were before this. It just seems to happen every two years. What will happen is that at the peak, everything is going up no matter what you buy. No matter how shitty the coin is, whether its shitcoin, catcoin, dogcoin etc. whatever you buy it’s going to go up. At the end, people start asking, “Is there any value behind this coin? Does it actually do anything? Is this really worth five billion dollars?” Then what will happen is all of the money will start to flow into coins that are actually backed by something. The coins that have an economic basis. The coins that actually have some utility and will retain some value through the collapse. At that point, people are going to start to hedge against Bitcoin. So when Bitcoin drops, Skycoin goes up because people are using it as a hedge… well until like last week actually because we have a lot of Bitcoin money flowing in now, but people use these coins as a hedge against Bitcoin falling. What is going to happen is called the flight to safety. When all of the market starts getting frothy, the smart money will start moving a lot of their loot, their billions of dollars they made in this bubble, into a very small subset of coins that actually have developers and have an actual economic basis for value. I think that we are going to have a commodity backed coin bubble. I think Cliff High mentioned this. He mentioned that you are going to see a proliferation of people investing in like silver coin ICOs or sandcoin or some guy owns a tungsten mine so he starts putting kilograms of tungsten bars on blockchain and preselling them. So you know that the tungsten bar might sit in a warehouse for four years but you are going to be able to sell it and you might get like $15 a pound for it. You might not be able to sell immediately, but you know that it is a tangible asset that will retain value. So you have a speculative bubble, the thing that the smart money will do towards the top of that bubble is to move their money into hard assets and the people that don’t do that are going to get wiped out. I think that this is going to start a flood of money in Skycoin, solar coins, silver coins. What we are trying to do with the Fiber platform is build up these commodity backed currencies, like we are having a metallic coin ICO in February. I think that they have 150 mine sites in Mongolia. Some are in production. Some are in different metals and things. For instance, there is a silver mine and the ownership of the silver mine would be ten million dollars but that mine is producing twenty million dollars a year of silver. So you can essentially pre-buy the production of the mine by investing in a coin ICO and then you have a basket which is basically representative… you might have 150 coins in a basket which are independent mines and you may have a master coin that is an index of that basket. We are looking at coins actually being used for real world investment. We are looking at people coming in from the existing financial world and asking how they can use blockchain to do real world economic activities. I think that going forward we are going to see a bubble in those coins. We are going to see people dumping Bitcoin at the peak to buy Goldcoin and they are going to be paying 4x-6x the underlying value that the gold is worth just because they don’t have any other assets to dump the crypto into. I think that this is going to be one of the largest financial bubbles in human history. I think that we are going to see at least six to ten trillion dollars in market cap for the cryptos. I think that we are only at three hundred… well we are at four hundred forty billion right now. Last time we did the interview a month ago we were only at two hundred billion.

Christian Someone is asking well what about Lightning Network? Is Lightning Network going to scale Bitcoin?

Synth They have been talking about lightning for six years. It’s just like Ethereum Plasma. If you have the miners and they are making $6 a transaction on Catcoin, are they really going to fix that problem? They are just drowing in fricking money from people buying catcoin right. The miners don’t want low transaction fees. The miners make their money out of transaction fees and the miners control… the miners will fork Bitcoin before they lower the transaction fees. The miners… it’s a business for them. Bitcoin has two choices. They can lower the transaction fees, which would destroy the incentive for mining and undermine Bitcoin security. Or they could increase the transaction fees and a Bitcoin transaction will cost $50 and nobody will use it. So you are either for A or you are for B. Bitcoin has A or B and both choices lead to the graveyard.

Christian Yea that’s what I was thinking too.

Synth The other thing too is like… our team just for Skycoin’s Obelisk Consensus is twice the size as Bitcoin’s development team and we have like eight githubs. If you look, Bitcoin doesn’t even have salaries for its’ developers. They are basically like volunteers and there is only like three of them and only one of two of them are working at the same time. I have talked to G. Maxwell in private and he says Bitcoin is a social experiment and he’s not wrong. It is a social experiment. His job is basically to hold off the wolves and the bcashers and the idiots and try to hold back the idiots. It is like one guy fighting off two thousand idiots. As soon as these idiots get in there and get control, they are going to destroy the thing. I have some stories about this. So there was this thing called the Bitcoin Merchant Protocol and he fought them for months on this.

They had this thing like, “Let’s add bare sign x11 certificates to Bitcoin.”

And he was like, “You’re retarded, we should never do that.”

And they were like, “Oh no no, let’s compromise in the middle”

So it’s like… you are sharing a bowl and you ask a monkey to eat 1kg of their shit and they are like, “No no I don’t eat human shit.”

Then they’ll say, “Ok let’s compromise. I’ll only eat ¹⁄₂ a kg of human shit.”

That’s basically the development process for Bitcoin right now. He somehow managed to whittle it down to like one tenth of what they were going to do to destroy Bitcoin. They got the Bitcoin Merchant Protocol into Bitcoin in the next version and he managed to get it not enabled by default. Then three days after the version of Bitcoin was released with the merchant protocol, Bitcoin was hit with a heartbleed. Basically if you had Bitcoin Merchant Protocol enabled, anyone could connect to your Bitcoin VServer, send you a packet, buffer overflow your Bitcoin node and steal your private keys and loot your wallet. Literally, the heartbleed exploit came out three days after that was enabled and then they took it out because Bitcoin started using OpenSSL. G. Maxwell and sipa had spent like six years tearing OpenSSL dependencies out of Bitcoin and these people wanted to throw it all back in all at once at the level of the protocol where you couldn’t get rid of it, so Bitcoin is hella good at duct tape. These people… I shouldn’t say this publicly but this is actually how it is. They are holding back the idiots from coming in and trashing this thing.

Christian The easiest analogy is it’s like a dam right. You need all of this energy and it is just fucking cracking. It is not going to last forever.

Synth Mhm, so one of the things we did in Skycoin. We saw that this was a problem. As soon as you have something that is a one hundred billion dollar asset, you’re going to have twenty different groups coming and you’ll get Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Platinum, Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin 2x, Bitcoin Legacy, BCash. You are going to have them come in and fight over this thing like starving wolves fighting over a piece of meat, so Skycoin’s main blockchain is only two thousand lines of code. There is no scripting language and nobody even thirty years from now could come in and say, “We need to add a feature to this and try to take over.” There is nothing to add. This is done. We have not changed it in four years and it is not going to change for the next one hundred and fifty years.

Christian It does not have a scripting language. So can you get into that because doesn’t Ethereum have a scripting language?

Synth Ethereum does. So for Fiber, we have a scripting language called CX. For Skycoin, we want people to make Catcoins. I think the Catcoins, FPS games, poker on the blockchain are all good. We are currently funding like three or four development groups to do that and there’s this I/O guy that I just picked up and he’s doing like ERP Systems on the blockchain. So we are going to do that but we are giving each of these projects there own blockchain. We don’t want ten thousand Catcoin clones fighting on one blockchain driving the gas price up to $50 a transactions. We just don’t want that. If you build an application on Fiber, we give you your own blockchain. You can screw up that blockchain. You can bloat it as much as you want. We don’t want it to be a situation where… you know if your transactions are $50 a transaction you are not going to have users. So Ethereum in the short term, the miners are making a lot of money on this and they are doing very well. In the long term, this is what is stopping Ethereum from displacing Bitcoin. There are people who are actually benefiting from the situation, so I don’t necessarily see it being resolved. They say Plasma.. they say for four years, “Plasma is coming! Plasma is coming! Plasma is coming!”

Christian I was talking to people about that. That’s not going to happen guys. The Plasma shit is not going to happen dude. It is way too complicated.

Synth It is way too complicated. I talk to developers. It is just simpler to just give each application its’ own blockchain. That’s the strategy we did with Skycoin, but that also means.. you have to have a different model with how you are going to monetize it. What this means is that we can have different blockchains with different EVMs. So if you someone wants to use the QTUM EVM, the virtual machine, they can use it on this blockchain. If someone wants to use the R3 VM, they can use it on this blockchain. If someone wants to use the CX virtual machine, they can do it on that blockchain, so what this allows us to do is to experiment. We aren’t locked in. I don’t think that the virtual machines running the smart contracts.. I don’t believe that is mature at all. I am not ready right now to right a spec… for the coin I can write a spec and expect Skycoin to be running one hundred and fifty years from now. For the blockchain scripting language, I do not know how to make a scripting language that is not going to be obsolete in two months. So we designed the architecture to allow experimentation for that.

Christian So this is what we need right, we need industrial scaled solutions. We need blockchains running with industries on them. You can’t just have like cryptokitties forever right?

Synth [laughs] I love the cryptokitties. There is this one guy on the youtube channel who says that cryptokitties are exactly the same as Bitcoin. He says, “It’s just pixels on a screen and this is the future of the digital economy and that cryptokitties are the same as Bitcoin.” It is very funny because there are only so many Bitcoins. It is a finite deflationary asset, so the price is supposed to go up. The cryptokitties are breeding like mad like the cryptokitties are literally a ponzi. You have a level one cryptokitty and it breeds with a level two cryptokitty and you get a level three cryptokitty right? So you own the level zero cryptokitties that are like having sex every thirty seconds and printing money and then you are flipping the cryptokitties for like two hundred thousand dollars and then they are using that money to buy out their own cryptokitties to bid the price up. It’s just like uh.. the funny thing about the cryptokitties is this can go on for months. It’s just the way human psychology is. You remember we had the interview? I said that you can’t run your business on Ethereum because you are a power utility company on Ethereum and can only handle thirty transactions a second and then Catcoin is going to have an ICO and shut down the blockchain for two days… and then like two weeks later cryptokitties comes out.

Christian That’s what I was thinking.

Synth [laughs]

Christian The bullshit is.. the real bullshit is… nobody gives a fuck even probably about Skycoin. They would rather have a product like cryptokitties. Are you going to give Skycoin to your mom? Or are you going to give cryptokitties to your mom? I’m sure the developers on Skycoin, like the four projects that you are funding. I’m sure they are going to come out with some great software, like the FPS shooter, or poker, and those are the applications that are going to onboard the mainstream. Because nobody wants to sit here and daytrade on Bittrex. Nobody wants to do that. It’s madness. Your head is going to fucking explode. Like that’s just not going to happen.

Synth Oh yea, like these games on blockchain. I’m going to have SimAnt on the blockchain and there are going to be these gold nuggets that you dig out of the ground for like virtual ants. The ants will have addresses and you do a transaction on the ant to move the ant. People will be like fighting over the gold nuggets that the ants dig out of the ground and you’ll have to go get food to feed the ants and you can go fight against other people’s ants and kill their ants and steal their gold. So we are actually going to start a whole platform for video games on the blockchain. Each video game is going to have its’ own blockchain. We have over 300 transactions per second. We can get the block time down to 300 milliseconds, so we are almost down to the point now where we can run a first person shooter on the blockchain. I don’t know why someone would want to do that, but someone is going to make real money quick on blockchain, on top of Fiber.

Christian Demo that shit on Times Square dude.

Synth [laughs] You know like shooting each others heads out for like one hundred thousand coins. You know real money sports arena right? Like you are shooting the person’s head and Dogecoin is just popping out of his head like [laughs], “triple kill!”

Christian We gotta wrap it up.

Synth Oh yea.

Christian We should probably have you back for Christmas. We have to record the next group of cats coming in in like five minutes. You are welcome to stay.

Synth Yea, yea, lets uhhh… I’m swamped until like the 22nd, but yea let’s do another interview in like two weeks. That would be great. I didn’t even get in the Sky miner. I had two hours of Sky miner news and I didn’t even get into that I was just ranting.

Christian Ok well lets sum it up. Anything you want to say? There are a bunch of people watching. They love you. I mean obviously you need a voice in this community so we definitely welcome you back in two weeks for a more in-depth interview.

Synth The Skywire Miners are ready to ship. I have like three hundred boxes cluttering up my living room. We are just trying to hire some guy to assemble them and get them in the boxes to ship. They’re going to ship. So this is crazy though because we are doing three hundred Sky miners the first month. That is thirty days with ten Sky miners a day. The next month we are doing a thousand. We have a guy working like ten hours a day and he has to package three Sky miners an hour. We are doing like ten Sky miners an hour or something. It is just absolutely crazy. We have our hardware wallet set up and ready to go but we don’t have a factory to make the cases and we just… everyone is overloaded. So anyways..

Christian Everyone is screaming at me now because we have to cut it for the Ethereum devs coming in here, but we are going to get you back on. I may have to come out to Shanghai or Hong Kong and bring my Sony Camera to start filming. I want to see the technology. Who else is out there filming? Is anyone else out there filming you guys? You gotta get some—

Synth We are getting our film crew. We have four video production teams now. We are getting another two video production teams We are getting a live video person to do updates to Sky miner assembly. We are doing something with CoderBunker in Shanghai and Singapore. We are getting like twenty developers from CoderBunker to work on… they are going to be building like a 256 node Sky miner. We are going to have 80 coins… this is a quick rant… but we are going to have 80 coins on Fiber by February probably, so we need 80 raspberry pis running one node each. Then we have orderbooks for each coin, so if we have four orderbooks per coin we need four hundred raspberry pis with one orderbook per pi to run these orderbooks. This is going to be craz– we are building these computing clusters out of raspberry pis with like four hundred nodes in them. It’s just insane. We have to get a full time DevOps guy and a full time Networking guy. We are building our own custom open source Open WRT routers because we can’t get the port forwarding working on these eighty one Chinese firmware whatever the hell routers that we have been using. We couldn’t find anything that met our specs, so we are actually going into manufacturing our own routers just so that we can programmatically configure the port forwarding for the reverse SSH proxy for the Sky miner hardware. So this is just.. it’s really crazy.

Christian Alright Synth, we are going to have to get you out of here they are calling us. You know February, give me some timelines after the New Years and I will free up some time. Cool. Right on. Alright Synth, we are going to switch over to some Ethereum work now guys. I appreciate the audience for coming in. It sounds like one guy couldn’t hear me, but I have a backup copy that I have to upload because I fucked up the overlay in the beginning. Synth thanks for coming on thank you for the quick updates, the rapid fire updates, and yea hopefully in two weeks we get you back on.

Synth Yea let’s do this.

Christian Cool, alright guys signing out. Coin Interview, Skycoin. This has been the second broadcast of Skycoin. Yup, looking forward to that hardware wallet coming out soon as well. Alright we are going to end it here and see you guys hopefully in two weeks. Peace.