Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Silhouette Dispatch. The show focused on Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. The current block height is nine five two nine eight nine. Sats per dollar, 1,640 Sats per dollar. That equates to a full Bitcoin price of $60,990. We just fell below 61. Guess markets are feeling a little bit bearish right now, but not me. I'm feeling bullish. Let's fucking go. The current time in fiat time is is sixteen hundred UTC,
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and then they'll just get that sweet, sweet signal. They won't even know what hit them. Anyway, freaks. I have a great show lined up today. We have Jason here. He's the cofounder of Tando, a Bitcoin payments app in Kenya. How's it going, sir? Well, thanks for having me. Is it Tando or Tondo? I say Tondo. Tondo. Noted. I've been doing podcasting for a while. Pronunciation is still not my strong suit. The what let's give.
So I think this app is awesome. I think what you guys have been building over there is fantastic. I have brought great shame to my family because I've never made it over to the Continent Of Africa, period. Even though through Bitcoin, I've made many friends that are based there. What is Tondo? And, you know, what are you guys building over there? Yeah. So at the basic level, Kenya's had fantastic payment rails since 2007 with M Pesa.
Pretty much runs the entire country. There's 40,000,000 people that have M Pesa accounts. Everyone from your street vendor to retail shops to ISPs, pretty much everyone except M Pesa there. And so what we did is we took their API, and we took the Lightning Network, we merged the two, and so now you basically have a way that you can spend Bitcoin anywhere in Kenya. So, yeah, that's cool. A high level. Wait. So first, I guess a good place to start is actually
let's start with M Pesa. So M Pesa's mobile money. I guess a lot of people in Kenya still have feature phones. Is that correct? Yeah. There's both feature phones and smartphones, and some people carry both. Like, they'll have their their smart their feature phones where they keep their money, their own basic account, and then their smartphones for maps or whatever else, Twitter, whatever else they're doing. And I think that might be for security reasons or discomfort purposes.
They're just used to using like a regular old school cell phone to send money via cell phone number. Right? Yeah. It's just intuitive. They just, you know, second nature. They've been doing this for twelve plus years. So, yeah. So how does that work? There's no usernames or anything with M Pesa. It's just all based on phone number. Correct. It's all number based. So there's three types of payment methods. There's the kind of the p two p, which is phone number to phone number. Then there's
tills, which is kinda like retail shops. So if you go into a restaurant or something, they'll give you like a short five to seven digit number. Type that in. It maps to that merchant's account. And then the third type is bill pay where you have an account with someone else, so like it could be your ISP or schools or your rent. So you'll type in the number of the account owner, so that could be your ISP, and then your account with them.
And so, the first two methods, money stays within the M Pesa ledger, that third method goes to a bank or a third party, So those are the three types of payments that you see in M Pesa. Do most people use it just they don't even go to a bank account? They're just constantly just staying within the internal M Pesa system? Pretty much. Your daily spending is all on M Pesa.
Like, why would you even use a bank account at that point? You just Just higher limits. And Pesa is limited to 2,000 shielding account balance and 250,000 per transaction. What is that? It's about $1,000 a little bit higher somewhere around there. 1,200 maybe. So if you need to go bigger, bigger spending, you'd probably go through a bank account. That's pretty high limit, be honest. Yeah, for most things. Especially. Yeah, fair enough. Okay, so that's how M Pesa works.
40,000,000 users and most merchants are you like accept M Pesa? Like if you is very rare that if you're going into you're going into a random shop in country that that they don't accept it. Yeah. Especially in the rural areas. You know, in Nairobi, in the big cities, you'll get merchants that accept Visa, Mastercard, cash, and then Pesa. Because of tourist. Right? Yeah. Once you get out of the city, it's pretty much only M Pesa and cash.
What about what is the breakdown do you think about between, like, cash and M Pesa? It's probably skews much more higher to M Pesa just for security reasons. You don't have to carry on lots of cash, and it's convenient. It's just on your phone. You're already carrying your phone. So I think most people use M Pesa these days. Mean, that's what it's obviously There's
a way that you can take your M Pesa account. You go to an agent, which is just like a person on the side of the road, and you can get cash from them. So, like, human ATMs, essentially. So you're withdrawing your your M Pesa digital money into physical cash. And then, just take some kind of vig. Exactly. Whatever. It's like market rate. Yep. And that's kinda how M Pesa really blew up, is like empowering
people to make money off these little, you know, kiosks at the side of road where you could be an ATM, you get your little vig. And so, yeah, people love the affiliate programs here in Africa. It's interesting because for years, people have said, The war on cash, governments want to ban cash, it's too private, it gives people too much freedom. I mean, obviously, it's a different situation in The US.
Same, same, but different. But I mean, most of my peers have moved away from cash just from a convenience point of view. Like governments didn't even really have to ban it. Yeah. Well, that was always my biggest concern. When I first moved to Kenya about four years ago, it was like, this is the easiest way to turn a system into a CBDC. It could be a CBDC overnight if the government came in and said, Hey, we're taking this over.
The government actually owns 30%. Well, 30%, and they're trying to sell some of it. Take in SafariCon, which is the the company that runs M Pesa. I mean, it's I like to call it. I it's easy meme wise for people to be and politicians to be anti cbdc. Right? Because for whatever reason, I guess it's a success in that. It's just really bad marketing. Like people know that cbdc means evil. And but what we're seeing globally is basically what I call like pbdcs, like private bank digital currencies,
that are nearly as bad as CB can be nearly as bad as CBDCs because of public private partnerships and coercion and centralized points of failure, maybe not quite as bad. Like it doesn't give governments like fine tuned control over the money that a pure play CBDC might. But on that note, like, do you is that a is that a
obviously, mean, I think people should probably just operate under the assumption that there's there's complete surveillance on the M Pesa system. But unlike the censorship, money freezing side, is that a is that a common problem? Do people see their M Pesa accounts get frozen a lot? It's a good question. You know, if you're not doing anything illegal or suspicious, I think you're okay. Of course, M Pesa does have that power.
They got a little bit of heat during, I think about a year and a half ago, there was a big set of protests in Kenya over the financial bill. They're trying to raise taxes and tax some things that people didn't want taxed, and people took out to the streets. There were some rumors, I don't know if it's true, that the government was locating people through Safaricom, you connect to the tower with your phone, things like that. It's hard to prove that, but that was the concern.
I didn't ever hear stories about anyone getting their account shut off, but yeah. I mean, certainly possible. I I assume it happens, but if it's not widespread, then that's a win. Yeah. I mean, what we see in The US is, and this was notorious, especially early in my Bitcoin journey, PayPal was just freezing accounts like crazy. And yeah, I mean, the common
gaslighting is like, Oh, if you're not doing anything illegal, then you shouldn't have any concern. But there's a tendency with these large corporations to proactively overstep out of an abundance of caution and liability. Where,
you know, there's they're they're freezing accounts, not they're not getting a warrant, there's not like a judge's order or whatever. They're just lawyers are like, Nope, this is too risky. This is too risky for us. So we're just gonna they're gonna freeze it, and then the customer can come and complain to us afterwards and try and call back their money or whatever. That's exactly Especially what for lower value accounts, right? It's like.
Sorry, I was just saying that's exactly how I got into Bitcoin, was I had a startup back in 2005, pre Bitcoin, and I got debanked by PayPal. I was bootstrapping the company with PayPal. They kicked me off, for whatever reason, they don't tell you, and that was the moment where I realized, hey, I need unsensible money. Then, you know, ten years later, discovered it. It's like, okay. Yeah. Seems so it's a real purpose.
Yeah. I mean, it's actually in America, I believe it's actually illegal for them to tell you if it's for a suspected criminal reasons. And once again, suspected, alleged. Right? This is not I'm obviously not insinuating that you were doing anything particularly nefarious. And, like, once again, like, classic regulation sense, it's pitched like it's coming from a good place. It's like, well, why would you wanna tell the criminals what you know about them?
But, like, you think about it from, like, an average user point of view, you're running a business, and you're completely caught up caught off from your financial rails, and they won't even give you the most basic explanation of why that happened. They're just like, go go to hell. Yeah. After we left PayPal, we went the traditional route to, you know, credit card, accepting credit cards. So, I mean, they obviously accepted the account, but it was a constant
cat and mouse. Like, you know, six months we have an account and then whatever they'd get acquired, small banks would get acquired, they'd, you know, derisk for whatever reason. And then we had to go find a new account to replace that one. It was just a joke. Tondo
yeah, go on. Sorry. Yeah. Just like you're saying, they don't tell you why they shut your account down. Yeah. It's ridiculous. So Tondo is basically kind of almost like a translation layer between M Pesa and Bitcoin, if I'm understanding it correctly. I would download the app when I'm in country. And then I do I just plug in an M Pesa account number of someone I want to pay and then lightning invoice pops up and then I just pay the lightning invoice and then they receive M Pesa showings.
Exactly. So you put in someone's phone number, you put in the amount of shillings, we tell you how many sats it is. We don't have a wallet service built in, so we just trigger your external wallet, whatever is installed on your phone, whatever your default is. You get to choose your own wallet based on your preferences,
opens that, and then you authorize the payment within the wallet, and then Tonda receives the Bitcoin. And once that's received, we release the shillings that you originally typed in to the endpoint you typed in. Pretty simple. Yeah. I mean, I kinda love that it doesn't have the wallet built in. You just outsource that. There's plenty of good mobile wallets. Just pops you out to Phoenix Wallet or whatever, and then you just pay it.
Exactly. And we don't wanna have to deal with the customer service of, you know because these a lot of these people are new to Bitcoin, and so dealing with that, it's like, no. Waldustoshi, Phoenix, they have great customer service that can handle that. It's a whole another it's a whole different business. It's it's so are you familiar? I've had Carell on from Money Badger in South Africa. It's Yep. It's quite similar to what he's doing in South Africa. Right? Very similar. Yeah.
And what what are the do you know what the main differences are? My understanding is that so in South Africa, they have had like a QR code payment system for a long time. And what they do is they they do something clever with the QR codes where they turn it into a l ln URL, and then your Lightning Wallet can pay that LN URL, they do And some translation on the back it's more merchant focused, guess, because South Africa doesn't have an M Pesa like system, or?
No, they don't do as much mobile money. And so, is much more retail focused in South Africa there. Whereas Kenya's, you know, mobile money plus those two other payment methods I mentioned. Yeah. It's super interesting this mobile money piece. And my technologists have talked about this for a while where,
you know, in the Western world, like we laid down phone lines, and then like we had a transition to like cell phones or whatever. But Africa just went straight to cell phones and then kind of skipped bank accounts in a lot of ways and went straight to mobile money. And so as a result, they kind of leapfrogged us. And it does give you this huge advantage that you can just plug into this existing network and system that is like relatively programmatic. I mean, it's not like
it's not like cryptographically verifiable, but it's relatively programmatic. And I actually saw something similar in Costa Rica. They have something called SIM Pay, which means a much smaller population. I think it's a little bit less sophisticated of a system. But both Bitcoin and specifically the Bitcoin jungle community over there plugged into that system. And for instance, when I was in Costa Rica, I was able to just like simply pay my nanny. And she didn't even know she was, you know, getting paid in Bitcoin. She was just getting paid, you know, through her sim pay account.
So a Tondo is the obviously with a smartphone, it's it's you're you know, you're you're showing an invoice or I guess, yeah, you're showing an invoice that is just text that can be copied and pasted into any wallet or a QR code that can be scanned. Mhmm. What what if the user doesn't have a smartphone? Can they still participate? Or is it smartphone only right now? Well, the Tando side is smartphone only, because you have to generate that invoice.
Right. You could, if you had both. There's no reason why you couldn't pay with Muchenkora, because Muchenkora can pay Lightning invoices. Right. You can paste it over to that and paste it from your Machin I've had KG on this show too. Machin Kurra is awesome. Yeah. He's great. So the so we we covered the sending side. Mhmm.
Is the reverse true too? Can someone pay me through M Pesa and I receive Bitcoin or no? That's not something we do just because we don't want to deal with the fiat side of things. We like the Bitcoin. There is a company here called Botika that kind of does the opposite. So you can put in your M Pesa phone number and a Lightning address, and it'll prompt you on your phone, do you authorize this payment? And then it'll basically you're basically buying Sats through M Pesa.
It's pretty quick, so it's kinda like the inverse of Tondo. But didn't you guys didn't did you guys not just announce something where, like, every phone number has a Lightning address? Yeah. Exactly. So that's it's basically Tondo without the Tondo app. Every phone number, since it can receive That's still sending. That's still Right? And then we also added a feature where so at some point, we hope that as more people understand that Bitcoin is just money, and
integrate with your daily life, they will actually want to start desiring the Bitcoin. That's kind of the ultimate goal there. And so what we did with this feature is like,
since your account number everyone is so used to your phone number being your financial account number. Right. Which is something I wanted to ask to actually talk to you about because I know you're very sensitive about giving out phone numbers, but here, like, that's the norm. Like, people just take out phone numbers. It's like, so what is the difference between a phone number and a bank account number? Nothing really. It's just a string of numbers. Right? So anyways, but back to the the point is that once once you're comfortable with Bitcoin and you wanna receive it, you claim your phone number, and now instead of receiving shillings, you'll receive Bitcoin. So it's kinda nice. Awesome. Yeah. So I already I if I obvious, like, I'm let's say I'm Kenyan, I already have a phone number. If I'm not a Bitcoiner, any Bitcoiner can pay me with just my phone number at what's the domain?
At bitcoin.co. They literally just put my phone number at bitcoin.co.ke, and I I just receive M Pesa shillings. But then if I'm a Bitcoiner, I can just enable it within your system or whatever. And then that conversion never happens. And I'm receiving Bitcoin instead.
Goes right to whatever lightning wallet you want. So we're kind like a proxy in that situation. And we just never have to have that conversation. Like, if I go to a merchant and the merchant likes Bitcoin, he receives Bitcoin. If I go to a merchant and the merchant doesn't like Bitcoin, he receives shillings. Boom. Exactly. So pragmatic.
This is what I love about this is like, the Bitcoin. One of the cool parts about the Bitcoin community is that we go so deep on like technical nuances and third party risk and trade offs and whatnot. But one of the things that's so frustrating is and I think the shit corners have done a much better job than us at it is like, oftentimes we lack, like pragmatic tools that just help people that just work well. And
I think that's what you guys are doing really well. I think that's what money badgers doing really well. I think that's what munching Cora is doing really well. And it's just fantastic to see that. Mean, that's like, that's the dream if I could. I mean, I guess we don't have mobile money here. But the corollary would be like, we have we have so much of the,
like, the non official economy runs on Venmo, which is owned by PayPal and Cash App. And so the corollary would be like, if I paid my nanny on Venmo or at the farmer's market or something, and they were a bit corner, they would just receive Bitcoin. And I wouldn't have to like, have a conversation with them and see if they were a bit corner and deal with the whole back and forth and the mental friction of them exchanging invoices or whatnot. That is awesome.
Yeah. It's personal choice. Right? There's a company in Europe, I think they're out of Estonia, Bringin, they kinda have something similar where you can create a lightning address that you connect to your European, I guess it's an I band bank account. And so you can then and then funds will go right into that account. So That's cool. Yeah. We're seeing quite a few of these pop up. Yeah. I mean, I think it I mean, obviously, you live and die from the permission of
M Pesa or whatever the mobile money is, right? Like, M Pesa wanted to kill your business, they could literally just you could wake up tomorrow morning and you'd be done, right? A 100%.
We've actually talked to the people at M Pesa Africa. We were at a conference and they came up to the booth and big scary looking guys, like, are you guys doing? Because, like, we didn't really seek permission. We kinda, like, went under the radar for a long while. Let's just see if this thing works. Like, scratch our own head. And I explained to him, I was like, look. You know, Kenya's got a pretty
large tourist economy, a lot of people come here for the safaris and this and that, and I said to him, like, any tourist that comes in the country, they're gonna be spending money Visa and Mastercard. Right? You get none of that revenue. So with this feature, now we've got this global money called Bitcoin, anyone that comes into the country can spend it right on your rails, you get the revenue from that. He's like, Okay, keep going.
Yeah, I mean, you're pushing volume through their system. Exactly. And then presumably over time, there's like the most dangerous time is the growth stage on your side where you start to get big enough where they notice, but you're not big enough where you're driving a significant portion of their revenue. Yeah. But I mean, if we're right about how bullish most of us are on Bitcoin, I mean, it shouldn't take too long for you to be a significant
share of their revenue. Why would they cut you off? That would just be bad business.
Right. I mean, the other risk, if you wanna call it that, is like, they could just take the idea themselves and do it. Like, we're not doing anything magical. Right? They just need to They can just give everyone an M Peso Lightning address. Boom. Done. Yeah. I guess, like, the one moat we have is now that we have that at bitcoin.co.ke, you know, we own that domain, they don't own that, so they probably have to buy Yeah.
But, yeah, they, I mean, they could do it, but then, great. And also, why would they? Like, it's the same reason why you're not running a wallet in Tondo, right? Like, they, you're doing all the heavy lifting for them. You're doing the hard work. They're still making just as much money as they would So what is your I assume you charge a transparent fee to make this whole thing sustainable. What is that situation?
Yeah. We don't actually charge anything. We actually eat the cost, so that's another, like, incentive for user adoption is, like, you know, M Pesa charges us a small fee because we're using the API. It's much smaller than the retail cost of using it in M Pesa, But, you know, we can we can afford that just based on when we sell our Bitcoin to liquidate for more Kenyan shillings if we're So what is your business model? This is a for profit business. Right? Yeah. So
this new feature that we just announced, that does have a 1% transaction fee. The Lightning address? Yeah. Got it. So, the idea is like, build brand recognition with Tondo,
build trust, that's another big element, because we have to prove to the people that we're reliable, that you know, if something goes wrong, which can happen sometimes, you know, we're dealing with technology, we we refund them back to SATs. Everyone's made whole. And so as we build up that trust, then people will use more services. We've already had we've talked to Akawala and a few other companies. They already wanna integrate with that lightning
phone number service. And so that that side of the business can be, you know, revenue generating at that 1% rate. I like that. I mean, 1%, and that's completely reasonable. Very competitive. And we're just starting there. We we can adjust that as we go, see how it goes. Yeah, I mean, like, I'm, I'm like,
I'm a capitalist. Like, I think what would you want to like, we want to hit scale, we need like sustainable, Speaker ethical, profitable percent that don't rely that don't rely on like charity and open grants. Unknown Yeah, exactly. And then me going out and raising money all the time for no cut. I cool. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Let's talk about phone numbers. You brought up phone numbers. They they hold a special place in my heart. What is your opinion there? Podcast.
You're railing on them as you always do. On the web podcast? I guess Mara. You're talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking phone numbers, man. Yeah. When we She was blown away she was blown away how angry I was about phone numbers. Anyway, continue. We when we made that announcement on Twitter, there's a sorry. X.
Yeah. One of my favorite photos is, you know, an Uber driver. He literally took a Sharpie and writes his phone number on the ceiling of the car just so it's easy to, like, pay him. Yeah. Like, people will just give out their numbers like it's nothing because there's a chance someone might send you money. Yeah. So, yeah, people are just used to it. It's not an issue here. No. Mean, look, I think it's the same in America.
That's the problem. Right? In America, you're born, and then if you're registered with the system, you get a social security number, like a digital ID number. And then when you're like, I mean, I don't know. It was obviously it was a little bit different when I was a kid. But presumably now it's like when you turn like eight years old or nine years old, and your parents get you a phone and you have a phone number.
And then the phone number never changes for the average person. They have the same phone number for the next sixty years, seventy years of their lives. And so from a convenience point of view, it's the most lending network effect ever. This is why WhatsApp got 5,000,000,000 users. This is why Telegram has 2,000,000,000 users because they just plug into the existing phone number system
that everyone is already a part of and has all their friends and family's phone numbers. And they can easily just bootstrap off that network effect. It's the ultimate network effect. Now, but that's also the danger, right? The danger is that's effectively a it's a de facto digital ID, right? To the point of the CBDC versus PBDC, right? Everyone is, I think rightfully scared of a move into dystopian digital IDs,
where they track everything you do. Well, society already opted into it with the phone number system. And you don't realize how bad it is. But the difference is with the phone number is privately run, right? But it's still there's public private partnerships all the time. Once again, there's coercion, there's data sharing, there's data collection. There's a profit motive for collecting data, right? Data is the
quote, Data is the new oil, right? Like you can profit off of people's information. So, there's marketing companies and whatnot that are collating all this information.
And so, then you go to the hardware store and you sign up for the rewards and you give them the same phone number that you've been using for the last forty years. And then you go and use Venmo and you use the same exact phone number and you do every one of your financial transactions through there. And then you go apply for an apartment
and you give your landlord your phone number and then you go get a car and you put you doing the car loan, you use the same phone number. And then there's like 50,000,000 different marketing companies that all see every single transaction you're doing and everything you're doing living your life and buying and selling it and sharing it and using it against you all the time. And if you just even just barely try and opt out of that system, it is the most painful process. Like, I have
maybe 30 different active phone numbers right now. Really? Wow. How do you And I don't really. It's really hard to manage. Like I like like it. I I'll miss miss messages from plumbers or I don't like everything like like car payments. I do a solution there. Just aggregate all my messages into one. Let me reply and you route it where it needs to go. Yeah. There's some so so I, you know, this is threat modeling, right?
My goal with using phone numbers is multiple phone numbers isn't to be NSA proof, because I'm trying to live my life, right? I have a family to raise, I have businesses to run. Life is short. And ideally, like my own government shouldn't be in my day to day threat model, even though there can be arguments on both sides there. But that's part of the reason why Bitcoin Policy Institute exists is like, okay, let's try and remove the US government from most Bitcoiners
in America's threat model. But anyway, I digress. So I use an app that is tied to my real identity. So there is a there's I'm like, I'm trusting a company, but and as a result, I have all of the phone numbers in a single app interface. Now the interface sucks and it's still really hard to manage, but at least it's more it's more reasonable to manage
than, you know, managing a bunch of SIM cards and phones. And like, I don't know. That would be insanely difficult. It's already difficult as it is. But even that little step helps a lot because it means the bank has a different phone number than the hardware store that has a different phone number than,
you know, the the plumber that has a different phone number than the car dealership or whatever. So those connections are a little bit more difficult. Obviously, I'm trusting this company that this company isn't making the connection for people. But you know, in their best interest not to do that. Like that's their business model, right? Like their business model is, people that at least want some modicum of privacy.
I was gonna ask, like, do you have like so do you have to remember or do you have something like a big word and like, which number do I have with my bank? And you just type in the That's the hardest part. Yeah. So like the app has like basic labels. Okay. But yeah, it's like good old fashioned organization. I need to keep track of which phone number. I mean, look, and my wife does it too, by the way. Because look, at the end of the day, we're running this family together.
So if if she's making mistakes, then I'm making mistakes. And so for instance, there she's she's she takes care of her own garden. We have, a nice nice garden at the house. And my oldest son wanted a wheelbarrow, a specific wheelbarrow that they saw at the garden store. It's like a child sized wheelbarrow, but nice quality. And
she sent me on Saturday. She sent me to the store to get with him to get the wheelbarrow. Super excited. I get to the cash register and she's like, Do you have a phone number with us? I was like, Oh, my wife put the phone number. She's like, they go, So what's your wife's phone number? It's like, I don't really know. I don't care about boards. Just give me And they look at you like you're crazy. It's like, how do you not know your wife's phone numbers? Like, well, I know one of her phone numbers. I don't know which one she used for this specific store. And so it causes all those sorts of little issues around and you know, like you miss out on some rewards, you miss out on some text messages, whatever.
But it's a real pain in the ass. And and society has basically defaulted into the expectation that every single person has a single phone number is kind of my point. And I think people don't realize how much that exposes you. It's possible. It must be worth it to you in the end. I imagine. Unknown I mean, I think probably. Okay. Speaker You know, there's definitely
you don't you end up you know, you end up not doing like one phone number per service, right? Like I group things together that are like, kind of thematically connected because it would just be ridiculous. Retail, friends, family, etcetera. Well, I mean, honestly, the single biggest hack I did was I created a independent burner for signal because signal requires a phone number to register,
but no longer shares it with people. So you use it. They use it as like a spam mitigation technique. A lot of companies use it as the de facto bot mitigation technique. It's relatively hard to get a phone number.
And so they require a phone number and a text message verification to sign up. But then after that, you know, they don't require the phone number anymore unless you get locked out of your account. So you still have to keep the phone number just in case. But anyway, so I set up a signal with this separate phone number, and 99%
of friends, family business runs through signal now. So they don't even they don't text me or call me traditionally. Like, they can call through signal too, which was that was the key unlock. And with family, actually, the cheat code is
with friends, the cheat code was they just would never hear from me if they didn't message me on signal. So like, I might have lost some friends as a result or I, you know, don't stay in touch with them as well as I could. With family, the easy one was you want baby photos? You want baby photos, you gotta get signal my 90 year old grandma has signal, it's the only way she gets baby photos.
Well, that's I the high think Kenya recently, SIM card swapping could be an issue, especially if you got money in your account, There's a financial incentive to take someone's account over if you can. And also, ability to port your number to a different carrier if you wanted was another concern. But the High Court of Kenya recently ruled that now your phone number is yours. Like, it cannot be ported. It can well, you can port it if you want to, but the companies cannot, you know,
give your number out to someone else. It's yours for life, essentially, at this point, I guess Yeah. Something affects I mean, as long as the user still has control over if they want to switch carriers or switch numbers, then that's how it should be. I mean, to your point, right? Like if, if the user is going to have to deal with the bad parts of having a unified identification number for their life, they should at least get the benefit of
some level of ownership of it. Like that's like debanking on steroids. If you take away if someone's phone numbers, their entire financial, financial life, and you take it away from them, that's an incredibly powerful ability for a corporation to have. So I think that's probably think. Well, I'm glad we got the phone number conversation out of the way. I hope we move away from it. I mean, I don't know. It's
gonna take a while, I think. Well, what would be the alternate mean, a bank account is also a number, and that's a way to But even email is emails So, not perfect. Right. But that's a perfect that it's, it's, it's a good counter example to the phone number situation. Like it's so it's so much easier to spin up a new email account, and manage it and manage multiple email accounts than it is to manage multiple phone But
that's just because the carrier is the issue, right? Ultimately, they have to route the number somewhere, whereas email, you can just do it yourself. Yeah, I mean, because email is internet native, right? While phone numbers are still based on this legacy system of routing calls through cell networks. There's Phone calls these days are voice over IP, right? It's all the I know. But it's still that legacy piece, right? Like and then, I mean, the other piece is like, if you are using VoIP numbers,
like just Internet native numbers, which do exist, like companies have come out to to do that. Like a lot of services will will block those numbers. The big two exceptions that don't block it are signal doesn't block it. Telegram doesn't block it. I mean, I have lot of issues with Telegram, but they do not block VoIP numbers. But, like WhatsApp blocks it. WhatsApp's used in a ton of places around the world. Like if I
I like I don't like having WhatsApp isn't that heavily used in The United States. But when I travel abroad, it's like, you know, you gotta use it. And so I don't like keeping it on my phone. And I I have to install it. I so I install it when I like right before I go going in LatAm or whatever, I'll install WhatsApp ahead of time. And that that requires a sim based, like physical phone number.
So like I have a phone that I have to have on me when I install WhatsApp because it sends me the text message verification. Like I have to actually have a physical device that is charged, that is carrying a phone plan just for just for WhatsApp use. And that's intentional. Like they know they know exactly what they're doing. And so you don't see that necessarily with email that That lever just doesn't even exist.
Obviously, like if I was going to live in a perfect world, it should just be a public key private key pair. Right? You can generate millions of those on the fly offline whenever you want with no company involved. Other the first way of that is, like, if you we were trying to get our company's X account, you know, the blue the company blue check, and we're trying to get the Kenyan phone number,
X will not send the SMS verification to Kenyan numbers. I think Nigeria's got the same issues. Like, no, 254, we're not handling that. And so it's like They just rejected. Yeah. Just flat out.
And I I wonder if that's for spam reasons. It might be for they see a lot of spam and bots come out of there. Could be. But when there's also legitimate use cases, and what do we do? So it's like, now you have to go jump through hoops to figure out some other solution. Right now compare that to like a Gmail, or I mean, and obviously, is like the most dystopian of email providers, and sometimes requires you to authorize with a phone number.
But like compare that to an email address, it's like relatively easy to spin up an email address. Yeah. But I mean, at the end, we all need some sort of identifier, right? Guess, you know, the ultimate is just like you said, a private public key pair that anyone can generate and it's not owned by any corporation, but it needs some way to route whatever it is, email, phone, I mean, money to techies,
the techies will say like zero knowledge proofs. They have like a bunch of different technical solutions for giving you like an identifier that that that is that is a static identifier that is that is useful for a lot of the things we use these things for, but doesn't allow linking between a bunch of different services. But I mean, the status quo is so bad that there's simple answers for these things, I think. I think the biggest thing
is it's a societal problem. Right? It's just and so that makes it much it's not a technical problem in search of a solution. It's a societal problem under the expectation that of course you use the same phone number and same email address, to be honest, for everything you do in your life. Right? Yeah. And so you get burned before they figure out that the solution. Yeah, I mean, problems like it's just windy. It's hard to move move society in a fundamentally
a fundamentally different direction. But in the ideal world, yeah, like you, I mean, you should have you I think you should probably have the ability, you should have the ability to basically have multiple identities that you can use for different things. Because, because some of those identities are,
if you use the same identity, they will undoubtedly be linked to each other. In the age of constant surveillance, and digital lives, and now with AI, which is like, you can ignore all the AI today already. LLMs are amazing at, like,
combing through large data sets. And so you can just imagine, just think about it in your head, just like some random person. And by the way, you can think your intelligence services are great. Like, maybe you think the NSA is their patriots, you know, and whatever, like, I don't know, like, mi six, whatever, wherever country you are, like, oh, they're patriots. They're spying on the terrorists for me. But like, it's not just them anymore. Like, it's some random person that works for Facebook.
In a simple language search can be like, okay, like, what? Where does Jason like to travel? Right? Where is the most? Where's the most of on a Tuesday at 4PM? Where is he usually at? And it's, it's, they're not coding. They're not looking through any, they're just doing a simple language search is coming through all the marketing data. And they're like, okay, well, you know, he usually goes and buys a kebab at this place, you know, and he clearly works over here.
The IRS in France just gives away the data, right? Exactly. When you have one identity to rule it all, when you have one identity attached to everything, then it gets really scary and really dangerous, very quickly. And so the fundamentally, what is the solution there? The fundamentally, the solution is empower people to and and make it the status quo that people effectively have multiple identities. Right? It's like, okay, I own a I own a kebab shop.
And that kebab shop has a fixed identity. And so if you if you go there for the next ten years, like it'll always have the same payment code, you know, And that's normal and expected. But then when I go and pay my rent, it's a different one, right? You just separate the two. This is kind of bringing it to the Noster part of the conversation, public private key pairs. I know in the beginning, there's no easy way
to have multiple private key or public keys that map to one master key. Has that been solved yet, Nostr? No. No. Okay. Like I said, I think the technical solution to something like that is over my pay grade is like $0 proofs or something. But on a practice to my point about what what I love about Tondo and Money Badger and stuff is like pragmatic solutions.
And so like, I think from a practical solution is what you see in primal right now. In primal, we we make it easy for you to make multiple accounts. It's literally like two clicks, you make another account. And it's all in the same app. Right? And so do they cryptographically map to each other? No. But it's all in the same interface for you. And then people say, oh, well, like people aren't gonna back up private keys. Well, it's like, okay, I'm gonna get shit on by the hardcores here. We just
opt in, you can opt in to back it up to iCloud. And so like you have your seven different identities, you opt in to back it up in iCloud. You know, is it is it perfectly private? No. Is it perfectly secure? No. Is it significantly better than the status quo? Absolutely. Does it solve real problems for people where they're, they're managing seven different keys, and they're worried about losing them? Yeah, it solves, it solves significant problems for them for the average person start model.
That is probably an incredibly secure way for them to use these these keys and and they with very reduced risk. Right? Yeah. I mean, the reason I asked was because, you know, currently with Tondo, when we built it out, we didn't wanna do any sign up process, but we needed to generate some unique identifier to so if you ever have an issue, you need to contact us. Okay. Send us your app ID.
And so we just said, alright. Well, maybe at one point, we'll use Nostre Wallet Connect as a as a wallet interface instead of opening up a different wallet. So we said, We might as well use Nostre keys as your unique identifier for your app ID. And so in the next version we want to have, you know, customer support would be just a Nostrad chat interface eventually.
So that's kind of what was asking, if there's a way to have multiple Nostrad keys all tied to your, you know, your Odell account, and then you'd have your Tondo account, which would be a sub account, but we're not there yet. Yeah, no, I think the answer is you kind of like you're doing on the Bitcoin side is you just saw you saw that on the app on the app level.
Mean, I think part of the cool part about Noster is the simplicity of the protocol design. So when you start trying to add all this stuff in, it's like you're adding a bunch of complexity. Different apps are not going to support the same thing. And when when you can get 99 there by just doing things on the app layer, And we, you know, a lot of my bias comes from Bitcoin side, right? It's like Ethereum, Solana, they tried to add it all.
And so, but on the Bitcoin side, you keep the protocol stupid simple. And then you add things either on second layers like lightning or on the app level or a combination of the two. Right? It's like so we add a second layer with lightning.
And then people say, Oh, well, at its core lightning is, you know, a open protocol and open interoperable protocol for batch Bitcoin payments using multi sig, and you need to have an on chain transaction, blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, well, that sounds really complicated. Maybe some users will do that. But other users will use an app, different apps that have different trade offs that make it very simple for them. And,
and move it up another, another notch. And so I think that's probably the way to do it on Noster too. I mean, I think that's the coolest part of where we are now in development cycle. It took fifteen years to get all the protocol level stuff dialed in, and now we're in a place where people like me that aren't protocol developers and co founders, like, can kinda just play around with the tools and build things that are more application side,
and, like I said, pragmatic for people. I mean, it gets really interesting with the AI dev stuff too. I don't know how much you played around with it. But once you have open protocols for these things, like I what there's been like a million different projects that have focused on, like making it easy to accept Bitcoin donations, right? So dispatch.com. Like, I literally just said to the LLM, here's my lightning address, receive Bitcoin donations on the site.
And so like, you press the donate button. And it just generates an invoice from my lightning address. Like, that's all it does. Like, I don't need like a, I don't I don't need a separate company to do that for me. I don't need you know, a full fledged open source. Like, I love BTC pay, but like, I don't need BTC pay to do that. I just need someone to like, click donate,
and get a lightning invoice. And I have a way to receive lightning and generate lightning invoices through the open ln URL spec with lightning address. So I just gave the ln my lightning address one prompted a donation flow.
Like that shit gets really powerful when you start mixing and matching open protocols. And then it was like, okay, well, one thing I've noticed is one thing I've noticed is that people are more likely to donate if they have a leaderboard, right? It's one of the reasons I shout out people that support the show in the beginning. And then you know, like I said, brighter die freak map 21. Thank you for supporting the show at 10,000.
So in the donation flow, my first prompt was generated an invoice for my lightning address. It did that I was like, Okay, that was super easy. And then I was like, Okay, I need a leaderboard. And then I was like, add a section for an optional Nostril username. If you put like odellaprimal.net in the donation flow, then your little profile picture with a link to your Nostril profile gets put there. Boom, done two prompts. Yeah. That's kinda what we we we use a little bit of LLM
for the that phone number feature. Like, how do we route this? Like and and, know, build me the regular expression for Kenyan phone number. I can't do that off the top of my head. Like, it's so good. It just figures it out, and then you're off to the races. Yeah. I think we start to see really good compounding acceleration effects with open source, with open protocols, and with open source AI, just because it's just so much easier to integrate. Like that example,
you just can't do with Venmo. Like, I there's no way for me to have an LLM set up a donation flow that goes to Venmo. Now, if we use your example with the Kenyans, because they have M pace and because Tondo exists as a translation layer, they can literally have an LLM set up a donation flow to receive shillings. Yeah. In one prompt, this is my lightning address at bitcoin.co.ki.
And then it just gives them they can set up a whole merchant thing probably with like two prompts, three prompts, Totally. Where anyone in the world can pay with Bitcoin and they just receive shillings.
Yeah, we've already had a couple people reach out and they like said, oh, we want a Tundra API. Was like, well, we don't have a proper API, but it's just an LN URL. You can request, you know, dot LN URL at this string, put in the phone number at the end, and it'll tell you if that's a valid phone number, and we'll we'll handle the the payment, whether it's shillings or Bitcoin on the on the back end. I mean, in a lot of ways, it's better that's better than an API.
Yeah. I wonder if it might, you know, this AI revolution might force people like Venmo to say, well, I guess we need a way to plug into LLMs and let people use the platform. So maybe it's I think a so. You're seeing that. You know, they keep the words the hype word is agentic payments. I think it's like a little bit too much hype, but is they love doing that web three agentic payments.
But it's directionally correct. I mean, and you see that with look, the way I always say is the innovation doesn't happen from the incumbents. Right? It always happens from the challengers. You know, in the in The US, Venmo was the number one p2p payments app. I hate calling it p2p because you know, but whatever. That's their vernacular number one p2p payments app. So Cash App adopted Bitcoin. Cash App was number two, they needed an edge, they needed to try and supersede
Venmo. So they added it right. Every Cash App user has a lightning address. Yep. Right now, it's not as clean as Tondo as Tondo's implementation in my opinion, but every Cash App user has a Lightning address. And so as a result, they can do all this LLM stuff without basically, you know, without Cash App's implicit permission. And so Venmo is gonna see that if that gets significantly more used.
If that gets significantly more use, then they're gonna adopt it. If you wanna go even further on the step of the challenger side,
like Strike is a challenger to Cash App. Right? I'm very involved with Strike's development. We're the largest investor in Strike. And, you know, we have significant user growth, but it's negligible in comparison to cash apps user base. And so like, one feature we have is obviously not only do you have a lightning address, which we had, by the way, before cash app, because we were the challenger to cash app and cash ups a challenger Venmo. But like, if you go to strike.meodel,
like, you can just pay me. Any person can just pay me straight to my strike account. Like that is something that has always been foreign to at least the American based FinTech apps. And that's only the received Bitcoin and do you get to choose if you receive dollars or? Yeah, on the user side, I can choose, right? But like, let me I'll use it as an example. My wife actually
gets credit for this one. So whenever I would like, one of the ways like I try and incentivize Bitcoin payments in like my small local communities is I'll I'll say to like, different contractors we have or whatever, I'll give you 10% more if you accept Bitcoin. And when I say contractors, I mean like the nanny, right? It's like, okay, if you take Bitcoin,
I will give you 10% more. And historically, I've always tried to go like the pure cypherpunk route, like the least cypherpunk would be like a Phoenix wallet, like iCloud backups, like, okay, like have a proper Bitcoin wallet, whatever. My wife, like, a year and a half ago, two years ago, she's like, Matt, this isn't working. This is like, it's a complete freaking mess. You should be onboarding these people to strike. Right? So like, I
they're already using Venmo. So like the trade off, like, KYC is dangerous. Okay. I agree. I've been very loud and outspoken about it. Ultimately, KYC is a list of Bitcoiners in our transaction history. But Venmo is fully KYC ed and a list of their of them and their transaction history and all their financial transactions. So they're not actually making a trade off there if they're using strike instead of Venmo.
And then the beauty there is I can actually go without them sending me a bill or sending at the end of the week, I can just go to strike.me slash my nanny's username. It generates a lightning invoice, and I can just pay with any lightning wallet. That's great. Right? And and, and strike has no idea that who paid it, first of all, and they have no idea the transaction history because it's lightning. Lightning, by default, gives the sender incredible privacy. Get very strong privacy guarantees.
That was kind of Yeah, more on. I was just gonna say, one of the nice perks we originally started Tonda just to scratch our own itch, like, could this be done?
And then once we got into it, was like, wait, we're stacking all this KYC free Bitcoin as part of the process. This is awesome. Feel like another great side benefit. It's like, oh yeah, this is great. I want you to Well, I mean, I think that's when you start to see so like, I think I think pragmatic tools like yours are incredibly important right now. It makes owning Bitcoin and earning Bitcoin just way more useful. Right? Yeah. We've actually heard from
I don't know if you know, Afrobit is in Kibera. It's kinda like the largest slum in in Nairobi. They've got a pretty good system in terms of trying to educate the the locals there on what Bitcoin is, and how to use it, and trying to start circular economies there. And we went there and visited, and there's a lady, she's got her small hut where she sells her goods out of. It's probably like three feet by three feet by four feet,
and just selling vegetables or food out of it. And we were talking to her like, why do you accept Bitcoin? And she told us like, well, now that I have Tondo, I'm not worried about what I can do with the Bitcoin. So they're much more willing to accept Bitcoin because of tools like Tondo. It's like, oh, that's such an exciting Cool. Would've thought of. Yeah. So I mean, where yeah, exactly. Where I was going with it is the ultimate
vision that I think a lot of Bitcoiners want to see, and I I think you're probably in this category as well, is merchants accepting Bitcoin natively, that they want Bitcoin. They actually want they want your Bitcoin, they would rather you pay them in Bitcoin than shillings. They don't want to go through M Pacer or Tondo, they just want to actually receive actual Bitcoin.
And that's when you actually see really sticky merchant adoption. That's when you see merchants that stay the course, accept Bitcoin for years, train their employees on how to talk about Bitcoin and receive Bitcoin, educate their customers on paying in Bitcoin, maybe offer discounts, stuff like that. But the biggest problem is even if you're ideologically minded, you receive the Bitcoin, and then you have to pay for supplies, you have to pay for other things. So things like Tondo
supercharge that they accelerate that because as the merchant, they can go buy the different goods and things they need to facilitate their business and continue going. You need the circular, you need to be, I should be able to use the Bitcoin easily for receiving it to make sense. I've had this vision. I don't know what the right tool is to build it. But like, in my mind, I see like things like money badger or Tanda, like, we're like the clutch that keeps the gears spinning in circular economy.
And, you know, when you let off the gas or, you know, you wanna switch gears, like, we we keep that going, the flywheel going, until we get to that point where, yeah, the merchant says, oh, wait. I want the Bitcoin. Okay. Cool. Let's go. Help you get set up your BTC pay or whatever it is. And now you're accepting the Bitcoin, but it's a it's a slow grind getting people on there. Every bit helps. Just gotta whereas life is short, the grind is long. Yeah. One of the little
tweaks we made to the app after we launched it, this was like some feedback from users. So the payment flow with regular and Paces is you make the payment and then you show the merchant, here's my receipt number. It's like a eight digit string of, you know, some random string, and they compare that to their point of sale system and says, okay, mine matches and the amount matches, cool, you paid your bill.
So we generate that same receipt number on the Tondo side, and so all we did was like, you know, you have you still have to show that to the merchant, and then at the bottom it says, I paid with Bitcoin using Tondo. And so now it starts that conversation. It's like, oh, I keep seeing these people come in here paying with this Tondo thing. What is this Bitcoin thing? Tell me about it. And now we've got this army of people that are using Tondo that can kinda do the orange billing and have that That's awesome. Point of sale where they're actually spending.
So, yeah. Nice, beautiful feedback loop you got going there. It's the little things. Yeah. Yep. I am. You don't have to be there at every purchase to try to orange pill every merchant. Like, no, you do it. Yeah. I mean, that just wouldn't be scalable. Exactly. Awesome, Jason. I mean, I I enjoyed this conversation. It was a good chat. What are you I mean, before we wrap here, what are you excited about? What are you thinking about lately?
Well, I think we kinda touched on it is that, you know, with these interoperable protocols and these AI tools is like, you know, especially in Africa, the youth, there's so many young people that have access to laptops and Internet, and like, what are they gonna build, and how are they gonna integrate these things and solve real problems here on the ground for them that, you know, as we just don't see as Westerners looking in from the outside.
So I think that's kinda what I'm looking forward to. I know right now there's like three conferences coming to Nairobi. There's Bitcoin plus plus is coming up in like a week. There's the Bitcoin Sorry. Nairobi Bitcoin conference. And then the Africa Routing Hackathon is happening as well, run by Africa free routing that's going on soon. That's awesome. Big month this month in Nairobi.
But, actually, that actually reminded me. What is the, like, current regulatory environment over there? Isn't it a little bit tense? Yeah. So, you know, we launched about eighteen months ago, and back then, there were no rules specifically around crypto generally. I think it was 2015,
if I'm not mistaken, the Central Bank of Kenya issued a notice like, this is the Wild West. We can't do anything. We can't regulate it. You're on your own. For me, was like, great, that's all I want. It's not illegal, and, you know, everyone's on their own, perfect. But I think the rumors I've heard is that, you know, Kenya is very dependent on the IMF, IMF loans, and FATF had Kenya on the gray list, and so they kind of twisted their arms, like, hey, if you want off this gray list,
you gotta pass regulations on this crypto stuff because too many people are using it for illicit purposes. So we're kinda still in the in the process of learning what that exactly is, but long story short, come November, there's gonna have to be registration and and figuring out where we fit into the the legal structure of a a crypto company in Kenya. So, unfortunately, there's been a lot of scammers taking advantage of Kenyans, and so the government has to kinda step in and set the
rules for everyone else. Can Many such cases. Yeah. I wanna be left alone, but, well, they no. I can't be left alone. Look, this is one thing I learned from Adam Back very early on in our friendship was the early cypherpunk movement, and everyone always disagrees. They've disagreed since the beginning, but like, it has to be when they were when they were dealing with encryption and message encryption and the legal attacks against it. Especially
if you're raising a family and you're running businesses, and you're trying to build things, it's got to be a two pronged approach. Got to be you have to be constantly fighting the legal battles, while you're also shipping useful tools that empower people. Because you can you you can ignore your government, but your government isn't gonna ignore you, especially if you're doing anything interesting. They're going to, you know. My And sometimes they might mean well.
The results are still bad, you know? Yeah. No, I think, you know, the Bitcoiner philosophy is like, okay, eventually everyone on the planet, all 8,000,000,000 people, is gonna need Bitcoin. So you're gonna need your personal Bitcoin strategy, your company Bitcoin strategy, even your government Bitcoin strategy, and kinda starting to see the beginning of that, maybe.
And so, my delusional dream is like, one day Kenya wakes up and says, wait, we need Bitcoin. He's like, okay, we've got a service, you give me shillings, I'll turn it into Bitcoin for a fee for you, at, you know, whatever rate that the people that are spending Bitcoin wanna spend it at. But, you know, that's a long conversation, and I don't know if I exactly wanna get in bed with the government, but it is what it is. You gotta get this thing out to more people. Well, mean, it's kind
of same, same, but different on what we were saying with M Pesa cutting you off. It's like the most dangerous time is when you're like just getting past that growth stage, and you're like big enough to notice, but but not big enough to be significant. But I mean, we see this with the big tech companies right now, right? It's like Bitcoin miners had a lot more difficulty getting power agreements and whatnot, than the AI companies are getting.
Even though the AI companies are much more hated. Like I thought people hated Bitcoin miners, like Bitcoin miners are boiling the ocean. The amount of hate people have for big AI is wild. Some of it is founded, absolutely. But my point is, governments are cool to bend the rules for them, because they're a significant portion of the GDP, right? They are a major part of the economy.
Especially the way these AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are selling it to the government like, you need us. Yeah, you got to surveil all the people and fight China. Yeah. Awesome, Jason. Oh, I guess one more thing. And you can just tell me now. No. Because I know how it is running a private business. Do you have any numbers you can share about adoption of Tondo? Like how many?
Like, on the on the volume side, any direction on, like, what kind of user user growth or acquisition you have? We're just running these numbers. Sabina, the cofounder, she did a fireside chat with Gladstein in in Oslo. So about 5,000 different user accounts that have made transactions, a 112,000 total transactions, and 31,000 distinct recipients across the entire M Pesa network. How many recipients? 31,000. That's awesome. In eighteen months? Yeah. That's impressive. You should be proud.
That's really good. I'm in the fortunate position to see a lot of numbers. You should be very proud of that number. Cool. Yeah. Maybe off air, I'll tell you volume numbers. Fair enough. Jason, this was awesome. Before we wrap, final thoughts for the audience. Go. Keep building, keep exploring, be curious, don't stop believing. Love it. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Freaks, for listening. As always, all relevant links are sealed dispatch.com. Share with friends and family. Usual Bitcoin
is easier than you think. Stay humble StackSats. Peace.