This is epicenter Bitcoin episode 99 with guests manual arrows, and Esteban or Dano. This episode of epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by hi dot meat. Protect yourself against hackers. Hers and Safeguard your identity online with a first-class VPN. Go to hide dot me slash epicenter and sign up for your
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It's talks about the Technologies, projects and starts driving decentralization and the global crude Currency Revolution. My name is Sebastian, cuju and I met Roy. Today, we are joined by two at a pair of talented developers, from Argentina. They have worked on many projects. Some of them are quite well-known in the Bitcoin
industry. These projects are proof of existence streamium Paradigm, and D Central, and we are going to talk about their projects and the prospects of Bitcoin and Argentina to introduce our guests, they are manual or outs. And Esteban, oh Don. Oh, we are very happy to have you on The Show, manual. And Esther one. Hamer, thanks for having us. We're glad to be here. Hi. Thanks a lot for having us here.
Okay, so so perhaps we could start with Bitcoin in Argentina because there's this impression in the in the Bitcoin media that Argentina is the one country which could adopt Bitcoin and and jumpstart a jumpstart Bitcoin, and LeapFrog ahead of all the other nations in this technology. What's your opinion on that? Yeah, it's actually pretty funny to us to read all those articles claiming Argentina is like the center for Bitcoin, and where Bitcoin is growing faster than
it's actually not quite true. As I always tell everyone, Argentina is kind of a good, a good spot in many ways for Bitcoin because our local currency is really, really bad. And there are big Capital controls and it's hard to Get foreign currencies but actually I do option is is pretty slow and I would say Bitcoin is growing much faster and other option is much wider in other countries. So I wouldn't say Argentina is the, the best place for Bitcoin
right now. It's and it's actually I read many things in news articles that are totally, not true about Argentina Bitcoin. So be careful about that. But at the same time, the development seen in Argentina is quite good. There are many companies and cool projects that are springing from Argentina so that kind of counterbalances the low usage of Bitcoin in general.
And how, I mean, I think one thing that has been pretty consistent is the Argentinian governments attempts to sort of stop Bitcoin from perfect proliferating in Argentina regardless of whether or not it's being used. How are those startups coping with that?
Yeah. Actually the the Argentinian government is not is not actively working against Bitcoin, I wouldn't say that there was The only official communication or action about Bitcoin was a posting by the Central Bank warning, the the population about Bitcoin not being minted by the by the government like saying, okay, be careful with this, because we don't regulate Bitcoin.
We don't regulate its emission, so be careful and that's about it. As far as I know, I'm not a legal expert but it's actually, More or less friendly environment for Bitcoin companies in Argentina. So we've been duped by all those corn desk articles telling us that that Argentina is like so much stuff. Having internet Argentina. That is like the you know, the next the next place where Bitcoin was going to be developed when in fact is just like anywhere else.
Well as if ya as it down was saying, I think there are some really good developers working on on the technology side and there are some interesting companies down there too. But as far as What we read at least about adoption how it's the perfect ecosystem and that we will get millions of users. I think that's not going to happen. I mean it's not going to happen in Argentina first at least Okay, well, let's let's talk about you guys background a
little bit. It seems like you've both been working together for so long and you've been together on many different projects. Tell us a bit about how you both got into Bitcoin. So we've been working on Bitcoins and since like two or three years ago Manuel started on this. We actually have a chat conversation back in that time. Trying to finish organized a Bitcoin development meet up. Then manually went out to create proof of existence. I was doing, I was working at
Google some point out. And that there and we when another train is Big Bay, I joined a few months later and that's when we started working together in this space. We already met each other from college. We're actually pretty good friends from many years ago from college. I as it turns out we were at first interested in Bitcoin, like, from from the side, we were not working with it, but we chat about it, then I did Proof existence as a small experiment. It turned out to be pretty well
received in the community. So after that I was unemployed. So I started doing freelance work for Bitcoin companies mainly or trying to work with Bitcoin given that I had asthma.
Experience with that. And it was really interesting in the technical side and after working for a year and a half in a sock with Consulting in Bitcoin, I met Tony from bitpay and I joined there and a few months later I convinced that Steven and a couple of other friends to join and we'll be working there on all the, all these projects you mentioned extremely impera, damned essential.
And we also collaborated on bit core Building B core which is the A source, JavaScript library, for Bitcoin applications, as part of the open source initiative by bit by. So so some maybe with that we could go into discussing your your new project streamium. So for the for our listeners that have never tried streaming more heard of it could, you could you describe what it does? And who it is meant for? Yeah, sure.
So streamium is a live streaming application that uses Bitcoin payment channels are some more money. Station option. So it started off as a hackathon project between seven friends. It's actually the team is quite big. We it was a group that we used to get together in during the weekends. For we call them Bitcoin dinners. We got together and talked about latest news about Bitcoin, what
we saw about the future. And after a, while we got bored about just talk Talking, because most of us are developers or work with technology. So we want to do actually do something one of the guys suggested doing a hackathon. So we got together on a weekend than started. It was actually Stevens idea to build swimming. We were talking a lot about payment channels and we wanted
to build an application. That was interesting in the sense that it shows the real value of payment channels as a protocol So we built it over a couple of weekends and we launched it several months later because it was super slow development in our free time. That's the story. So what it basically does is it allows a user to record something and stream it live and stream it life and in exchange receive payments through through Bitcoin, Bitcoin micro payment
channels. So maybe we could discuss part of the architecture of off streamium, then, there are two important sections to it. One is, how does the money flow and the second is how Does it data flow and could you explain how both of these things happen? When I create my own streamium stream? Yes, of course. So stream use is webrtc which is a decentralized peer-to-peer protocol so browsers can talk to each other.
We are currently relying on print, the Vu server so that browsers can create the connections between each other. And with that, we were to see connection. You can send both data and the video. What do you see The capability of sending data so they can negotiate a Bitcoin payment Channel. And this is actually I think it's the first implementation of a payment channel for some kind of like real world usage once that payment channel is established.
The video streaming starts and it's broadcasting mechanism. So if If I'm broadcasting my video every body that is receiving be, the video will have to be paying me through a
payment channel. So from a from a technical standpoint, it's a Well it's not fully fully decentralized, we have, I will say that they got just in a second but both the video goes through a peer-to-peer protocol and underpayments because payments grow through Bitcoin payment channels, which will know is decentralized pregnancy. The, the video goes through webrtc, which is a peer-to-peer protocol for the browser and the the to the two points of centralization are what Esther mentioned?
The Rendezvous server were Pierce can get the other Pierce information for Discovery and of course the the static HTML server that serves the files for the client to run the application. Okay, so could you describe The payment channels and how they work in more detail. So a payment channel is kind of like opening a tap in a bar. You set a certain amount of money that it's the maximum that you want to spend in that payment Channel and you lock those funds in a true of to others.
So this 2 of 2 is controlled by both parties in the payment channel. So any transaction that gets signed will have to have the Approval of both parties and there is a time lock mechanism. In, in case I funded this payment Channel, but the other party that is going to be receiving. The funds will not be willing to sign a section, giving back all the funds. So, after a day, you can recover all your videos.
Is that clear enough? Yeah. Yeah, but so in, so if I understand those two, in this case, what you're doing is you're doing it to of to Transit multicenter transaction. The, the person that's doing the streaming will have incentive to to sign that. But so for the for the viewer so they were anywhere is forces him to the won. The reward is the one that will fund the channel. We usually call them technically the Consumer and the provider of the service.
So the consumer funds the channel and asks, the provider for the signal transaction that becomes valid the next day so he can have the fund of funds back if the protocol gets interrupted interrupted. Okay, so once the stream is an is initiated, the consumer has already signed his part of the transaction and is waiting for the provider to sign his part of the transaction. Yes, he actually does. Is this, he signs a transaction and he waits for the provider to
sign a transaction. A second transaction spending that first two of to paint to, to virtue of to address transaction. It's kind of like complicated, I would need a black border to explain it. So, Well, that's okay because this is a podcast. So people don't necessarily see if they're not watching the video that I'm going to see it anyway. But and so the the payment channel is opened and then so there's a payment for every chunk of let's say, 30 seconds of video. How does that work?
How do you, how does the money keep flowing. All right, so as sending an update of the payment Channel, which means spending a little bit more, The from those locket funds. When I send one of these small micro payments to the provider of the service, he will send me back the video right now in streaming, what we are using, is we interrupt the video, if the payment flow stops coming and if the video stops coming, we interrupt the payment flow. So it's a trustless solution for payments.
So basically could we say it like this suppose, it's me me, the creator of the video and Esteban is the consumer. I'm the producer and Esteban is the consumer. Then what is happening, is when I start my stream, Nothing happens. Now when you want to, when you want to, when you want to see my stream, then you will send your Bitcoins into a multi signature address that is controlled by you and me jointly, right? Yes.
And so now, so so basically, when the service started, you agree to watch the service for a maximum of one hour and then let's say the price of that one hour is $50. Our. So you log $50 worth of bitcoin into a into a into an address, which is jointly controlled by you and me now. Now, what now what starts to happen is there has to be data that needs to go from my webcam because I am the producer to your your terminal.
So with each item of data, let's say like there's a there's a there's a big packet that that has 30. The 30 seconds of video. So corresponding to the transfer of that item, that packet of data, from my computer to yours, you need to send me a transaction, which allows me to claim part of the funds that were locked into the multi signature account, right? Yeah. That's that's correct. And we it doesn't have to be 30 seconds. It can be one second, it could
be one minute. It and you may want to be sure that you have a certain margin of error. So you don't stop the video because you didn't receive the payment so it's actually more like a flow of video from one in one connect, in one way and a flow of payments in the other way. Okay, so the question is, I start to have here is let's say let's say I am I am creating a stream and I have already created this multi signature account with Esteban because it's the one is watching my
stream now. Manual joints Manuel wants to see my Stream, So I create another account with manual and then Sebastian wants to join. There's a third one created. Is it the case that I am broadcasting? My video data to all three of you through webrtc. She wouldn't that need a lot of bandwidth on my side. Yes, you are constrained by the amount of bandwidth the your Upstream connection has. So if you want to have many users, let's say I guess that more than 10 will start to
really stress the connection. You may want to look into another a different solutions, some kind of like First cast to server. That will then broadcast the video to a lot of users or maybe use a more decentralized solution like BitTorrent for the distribution of the video, right? Let's take a short break to talk
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Now, we'd like to, Welcome. Hi to me as a new sponsor excited what they're doing and of course, we would like to thank them for their support of epson Bitcoin. So, I guess this is sort of a structural problem with webrtc is that it's it's a peer-to-peer only protocol. Now, you mentioned BitTorrent. That's interesting because we had thought about different ways that you could scale webrtc.
And I guess this would not only apply to what you're doing and sort of the, you know, Bitcoin micropayments space. But also So could be potentially used for your large-scale webrtc broadcasts, by just about anyone is by using BitTorrent or perhaps ipfs or some other distributed file sharing protocol to stream. Video has that does that already exists as I've been done before, or is this something that you're
looking into for streamium? Well actually, one of the other premium developers, his name is Chemin. He did a small experiment about that. We had the same idea and key he wanted to test it out and it actually worked pretty well but while not pretty well it could work but it was hard to make it perform well talking about video
live video quality. So there are some complications where you're dealing with a live stream of video and we were having like because torrents are predetermined size files because you need to check the the file integrity and it has, it's not it's not designed to stream files. So you have some problems when you're connecting, several chunks of video and it's also as Esteban pointed out in live streaming, you can drop some frames and it's fine.
But the BitTorrent protocol, doesn't support, that kind of stuff, you need to unload the whole file. So, We caught some pretty successful experiments with that, but there are still a lot of work to be done to optimize the protocol and allow other ways to distribute the video without relying on, on the provider to share the same video to everyone. And just, I mean, is this something that has been addressed?
Like, I mean, the, the problem of streaming live video to a large audience Without having to rely on some centralized third-party, like you stream or something like that. Is just something that has been addressed, or perhaps we have actual solutions for outside of what you guys are doing. Not that I'm aware of, but it will be interesting to see if there's a Distributive peer-to-peer version of the real time protocol, which is what we're RTC.
And I meant Skype or all those Solutions, use, it's either RTP or X h.263 or 363 or something. I don't remember the name. It could be a really cool experiment to build something on that. But I mean, if you guys successfully do this with bit torrent, I essentially be the first to achieve that, right? Yeah. We actually don't know if there's another brush egg doing Something similar, we should look it up.
But as I told you what's what it worked, like, as a proof of concept body, it still needs a lot of work to actually work correctly. You will need to polish the protocol in many ways and I don't think the best solution is to use. BitTorrent based on the things I mentioned earlier. But maybe building a specific
protocol for this could work. Another question is doesn't the doesn't the fact that Bitcoin need confirmations to confirm a Bitcoin transaction one needs one hour and zero confirmation transactions are are not secure? Doesn't it impede impede streamium in any way like for example if I if me and Esteban won't do, launch this stream, then esteban's money needs to be locked in this to of to multi signature account and the process of that locking to be Needs one hour.
So, how how does it work out? Well, if I try to double spend you. So right now streaming uses several confirmations by block Cipher. And we are using the confidence in transaction parameter from them because the threat model is quite quite low on restrictions. If like the worst thing that could happen for you is that I can watch. Ouch, a few seconds of video from you because the stream right now when that it detects a double spend, it will cut the channel off.
So you could be stolen of a few seconds of content from me, but that's kind of like the worst that could happen tearing me in on your side, will take care of that and if the transaction gets confirmed, then it will stop checking for double Spencer. Stuff like that. Okay. So so basically what you're saying is that when when I'm trying to create the stream, there is a risk of double spins, but the value at risk is very low.
So, for example, if I'm, if I'm taking, if I'm charging $10, an hour for a stream and you do a double spin, maybe it's the case that you saw two point five dollars worth of video and and I didn't get paid for it. Besides we managed to successfully double double spend and probably Even less because right now block Cipher the moment.
It detects in any any transaction anywhere it will report that and streaming on your side will say no. Hey, this guy is trying to make a double spend, so let's stop the video. Right now, today's magic word is stream. Stre am head over. Let's talk patreon.com to sign in, enter the magic word. Work and claim your part of the listener award. So what is the monetization model for a, for a service such as for a service such as streamium? Are you looking to monetize it in any way?
Yet. So sue me, we saw is an open source and free brochure. Anyone can use it for free. There's no charge. I mean, the the strimmer charges the Their audience but to use the the product is completely free. There is no fees, we're not playing. We're not planning to to monetize the monetize it in any way, we had some ideas of doing like a separate service that allows streamers to Increase their their potential audience. Based on the scalability
problems, we already discussed. Given that it's completely peer-to-peer. And the limit is based on the on the streamers bandwidth and we're thinking about building a service that broadcasters could connect to for a fee distribute it is, it could distribute the video for them so still using words to see, but with an intermediary for Vo distribution. But we haven't completed that. I mean, we haven't moved forward with that. It's an idea. It's, it's there.
In case we want to pursue monetization of streaming. So then the content producers get a hundred percent of the money that But they charge for the video. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's really cool. So, I mean, this isn't that. So, we had another question regarding piracy, what prevents someone from rebroadcasting a stream that they're paying for on, for free, or for, for cheaper than what they're paying for it basically nothing. I think information wants to be free.
The moment that you gave out information, the people that received it is free to rebroadcast it. I think that what weight in favor of the content producer is that probably the quality of the rebroadcast, will be lesser because of the video streaming, it kind of like a losses, some
quality. It's important to note that we're not trying to solve piracy with with For you, it's just a way to monetize live content, you create for free, but of course, once the viewer gets the video on their machines, they can rebroadcast it in any way. They they want they already have like any content essential. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Okay, well then I mean my my my next question is on on use cases. So you know there's so many ways to do steering video. These days.
So we're using Google Hangouts right now, of course, that doesn't provide monetization, but, you know, some other Solutions do I Believe. YouTube is now starting to do monetization in their streams and those other services, that allow that, what differentiates a streamium user from YouTube, paid live streams. I don't know what they call it but, you know, from Centralized Services.
What types of people you see using streamium as opposed to other types of streaming services It's kind of funny but we have like 50 percent of our users are basically porn. So it's girls come girls doing shows online for their clients, I guess the other is Big use cases are education and live gaming. So it's people doing online classes or showing their their screens while they play video games. But the biggest one by far is
porn. We think that it's probably based on the advantages you have with Bitcoin where you don't have the so-called we learned about this after luncheon stream. Your meat is something we don't know about, but in life porn, like live camera porn. There's the problem of what they call the wife chargeback were It's they have a really high rate of charge back and it's not based on the actual user, but when the wife's is what is this? And he says, no, I don't know, I didn't use that.
Okay let's do a chargeback and that's a big problem apparently and this sort of solves that. But it also allows the user to sort of end the stream at any point in time. So you don't have to prepay for something you want to watch. And it's sort of a win-win in both sides. That's our analysis of why? This is interesting for the porn use case. But so there's the privacy and anonymity part on the client side and I suppose on the provider side is more money in the girls pockets.
And yeah, I'm not having to subject to the rules and restrictions of some campsite yeah. Essentially the people using it are completely in the Pendant. Yeah. And apparently the, the feast those sites charge for the girls or the, what the video producers is really, really high. Like, I don't remember exactly a numbers. But I heard something like 40 or 50 percent. So it's not. So on the other types of people using it or you mentioned,
education and online gaming. Are you talking about sort of twitch style, people streaming their online gaming. Exactly. So in education, we have several language classes like English or Spanish teachers, and some a small amount of users doing consulting. And on the gaming side, it's mainly just people playing video games and streaming their screens while they play. That's a feature, we added some weeks after we launched stream, you the possibility to broadcast your own screen.
Because some people some user has requested that so we got it so like I mean obviously like we do with everything Bitcoin all the Technologies are in this super early face and somehow it also resembles the the internet of old in which pornography was the first killer application. So maybe it's it's fitting that even for Bitcoin, this should be one of the, one of the first I had this imagination that maybe one day The drones could stream.
Like I have this, I have this like four hundred dollar parrot Bebop drone that you can fly around, and even though it's moving in the air, the video quality is extremely still like it. It will, it seems like it's it's a tripod flying in the air and I was, I had this imagination that perhaps in the future, I will go to a concert from Pantera or some band or Bono and they'll be drones flying around.
And I can actually Check out and they'll be using something like streamium to send out the video and I can actually take any of this stream and see what the Drone is seeing basically. So, so maybe I mean like I had the feeling that it's it's an idea that has a lot of lot of users in the future and maybe it needs just Bitcoin to catch on in in order to be be really use bdd really widespread. It was interesting also to to see like you mentioned that you have this service that just does
Micro payments. Could you could you tell us what that is? Yes, based on what we talked with our early users, mainly the on the education side, most were
requesting some features. We were not ready to develop like, okay, we need a digital whiteboard where we can sort of write stuff, and the student can watch that, or we need a dual video communication, so that the Your can also send their webcam content and we said okay to want to really build a, an education product because what they we based on what we talked with them, but they really valued was the fact that they could charge by the second, they were doing the class because sometimes I
have problems charging after the class ends. So you do a two-hour class and then the student disappears and they never pay. And so it's hard to get the money. The money is a problem in in online teaching. And so, when do you charge before the class after the class? So this solve this and we thought that maybe extracting the, the payment system from streamium and doing a super simple app, where you can use payment channels inside of any other application could be interesting.
So, we did that. We built for another. It's just a good way to describe it is. Premium without the video. So you have a, you create a session, it's like a timer, where you create a timer, you set your hourly rate, or your rate per minute. And then you can connect a client and charge them by the second. And you can use it combined with any other application like Skype or whatever it could actually be chat session or or whatever you want and charged by.
Charge for your time to your clients. So which gave each gets the higher number of users is streamium, or is it? Is it fair that? I'm so as I understand it it's streamium is feridem plus plus the, plus the software to do live video streaming so which one is proving more popular. Yeah. Actually four of them was a pretty unsuccessful experiment.
We are really few users. It was basically the, the users that requested that functionality, that you A couple of times but then we didn't see any actual growth even though we try to make it grow in some, in some ways. So, it's definitely streamium is way more popular and we have more users there. I mean, it seems kind of obvious since still streaming is sort of more of a final product, where feridem, I mean, you sort of have to make it.
You have to, you have to come up with the, the means to provide the service, which you're charging. Enforce. Oh and of course you have all that porn on streaming and we all know that brings in a bunch of people, right? I wanted to talk about alternative funding models. I mean micropayments have sort of been touted by. The Bitcoin Community is one of the killer apps and Bitcoin has often been described in in some sense as a way to solve the content monetization problem
that we have. I mean we've definitely it's been something that we've thought a lot about how do we monetize our content? I think a lot of content producers off. Also ask themselves that question. There's different. Ways to monetize your content, you can sell advertising, is we do? You can have a pay wall, you can charge by the article which much like pay-per-view. And for the most part advertising has won pretty much for every types of content that you don't literally pay for with
money. Now, with regards to bitcoin and microtransactions and how you would pay for Content. I mean, it seems promising, it seems interesting as an as a thought experiment that, you know, you would go on some website and you would come up to an article and it would tell you, okay, you want to pay for this and you just say yes or YouTube video or perhaps a stream but in reality I'm not sure that people are ready to do that. For one, you need to have people using Bitcoin in this.
Typical example, and two people are so used to, you know, not paying for Content directly that in order for that for that behavior to change, you would need a whole lot of sort of pressure. I guess from the content industry. I'd like to know what your thoughts are on this. Where'd you see micropayments going in the future? I have some thoughts about that. I think I'm talking too much. I want to know if it's down cut.
Comments there first. Well, one of the biggest issues that we've seen with user-facing micropayments is the mental cost of those transactions. You don't want to be browsing around and at the end of the day knowing that you lost $10 $20 in some random website. But at the same time you don't want to be agreeing to Be paying one cent per each article that you're ready. So it's kind of like an unsolved problem from a new civility point of view.
But at the same time, it's probably going to be most used in machine to machine the this aspect of micropayments. Although, right now, the best solution that we've seen for content monetization is this one of recording every website that you've been to, and at the end of the day, pay out accordingly to each each one website that you seen based on how much time you spend on it or how much you like it.
Or how many which ones you like the most as a donation essentially, yeah, something like that. With right now. I think it's the best kind of like solution. I don't know where the man with, that's one of the things that we were discussing with 11. Yeah, I agree. It's a, it's a really hard problem that there's many, many, many companies, and many smart
people working on this. Because we all know, You see, we all have the intuition that there's some way of using Bitcoin micropayments to sort of change. The way content is money is monetized on the web or in generally online but it's a really hard problem. We need to work on the really small details of the user experience. And there's a really great article by Nick Szabo talking about the the mental transaction costs of micro payments and how smart contracts can help with
that. I recommend reading that If you're interested in the topic, but it's actually, it will be a really long work of trying to figure out what the user interface is in, the case of human level micropayments for Content. I agree with Stephen, that will probably see other applications where there are no humans involved and there are micro payments. Make much more sense because ition essentially what my group.
Payments and smart contracts solves, the problem of trust between the parties and they reduce the the trust between the two parties for an economic interaction. And in the case of computers, I mean in the case of humans that trust is usually there. So it's really in the details where you can improve the experience with micro payments, but when you have two machines, interacting it's really machines. Cannot trust Other machines because they can break or they have.
I don't know, the concept of of trust is really human and it makes a lot of sense to try and build some applications of micro payments with machine to machine interaction. There's one interesting example of an attempt to try to solve this, the content monetization problem or to, at least reduce the number of ads that we see is perhaps you've seen a Google
contributor. So basically, what Google has done is said to their users, I mean to everyone who uses the internet and sees Google advertising. So whenever you go on a website for instance, and you see an ad, there's a pretty good chance that that ad was sold.
And through Google and the content producers making money when you see that Adam when you click it and what Google has done is they said okay we're going to put up this platform called Google contributor and as a user of the internet you can pay up front say to five ten twenty dollars per month to not see ads and rather than paying the content producers through the display of ads you're going to pay the content producer
directly. Through through Google contributor and we we will give them the money. Basically as though you were seeing an ad instead, you'll just see a white box or even you can put custom HTML in there or whatever. So, I thought that was really an interesting experiment. But you know, Google is in a particularly good position to do that because they own the advertising space. That's part of the.
The problem with these kinds of solutions to, it's hard to solve the distribution of Micro payment solution for Content,
monetization. Because when you don't have any sites that support this, you have no reason for users to have the, the client side of the application, and if you have no users, that can pay for that, can pay for this micro interactions and the sides don't have any reason to implement the system to. So it's also a business or sort of growth hacking Problem, where someone needs to figure out a way to, to make the this grow in some way to solve the chicken
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And on this front I think streamium has innovated quite a bit like all the user sees is how much somebody charges per hour and then the system works and you just decide whether you want to give something fifty dollars an hour and then you watch the stream and you close out and everything else is handled on its own. User doesn't really see the meter running. For example, have you what kind of user feedback have you received regarding regarding
this aspect? Our users happy with this kind of system, or you think something else is needed. Something even better is needed. Well, right now, the highest bar are for using payment channels is the knowledge of the. You are sending this transaction with a for the maximum amount of time. That you will be watching, and that's kind of, like, confuses the users because, well, I have, I've already tried to explain the payment Channel, but it's a complicated thing to do with the streamium.
We are having that maximum amount of money to be locked in thing, which is the current biggest problem for payment channels for users. Because the fact that the users Need to lock funds and there are currently no wallets supporting payment channels natively. We need to ask them to make a sort of deposit, then we grade the payment Channel and even though it's trustless, we require the user to send the actual total amount. So it feels like okay am I
preparing this or not. So a big barrier to that is actual wallet adoption of the payment channels protocol that would decrease The mental costs a lot, I think. But with regards to the metered payment, we actually asked this question because we were afraid of the same thing about users being, I don't know, nervous about the costs not knowing how much they're actually paying. But from what we interviewed, all of them were said that it was okay.
Like they understood it and they were not nervous, there were not checking the time to see if they were wasting a lot of money or not it. Cuz I think we did a pretty good job, but we still we're still really far from an Optimum solution. I think. Yeah. I used your service. And in the beginning, I I saw this multi signature address and the first thing I thought was it's a centralized service that I'm sending money to you and you will partition.
The money between me and the and the stream Creator. But then that turned out to be turned out to be wrong. It's actually a world, it in a browser that we have to code so we can have the payment Channel. So basically when when I put in money, I'm actually creating a new set of private keys and with those new private keys. I'm, I'm putting money into this multi signature signature address, so it's my own browser. That is my own wallet in the background without me, even
realizing it right. Yeah, that's right. So some maybe we could we could talk about one of your other projects that that is that is quite interesting. It's it's called decentraland. And it's a project that I that I saw that merges virtual reality and blockchain Technology. Now, I've been surfing around the virtual reality World for,
for the past half a year. And you see, you see many people talk about the The intersection of the blockchain and the virtual reality there is their statements, like Bitcoin will be the currency of the metaverse. The metaverse is the virtual reality universe or or you see statements like that, the virtual reality needs to be decentralized. So could you explain? What is what is the connection between these two technologies and why you chose to devote some
of your time to it? It's actually a super experimental project we did for fun. So don't expect a lot of Since to come out of this. But we were also really, really excited. Personally about virtual reality and of course blockchain technology, because we work there in the in the industry and we wanted to do a small experiment where we could combine those two cool ideas. I don't know how much sense that makes, but we wanted to build a blockchain based virtual reality
world. The idea is to use the blockchain as the support for the structure of the world. So, in between you have The blockchain as a data structure that allows you to synchronize the state of the decentralized network. So that all the nodes can agree and reach a consensus on what the to simplify it the balance of every Bitcoin addresses. So the same idea could be applied to a network where the nodes synchronized the state of
virtual world. So transactions in this in this Block Chain would be a state model. Vacations of the world. So, I'm in the case of the Central and we need a really simple technical prototype where you have the model of the virtual world is just a pixel grid. So a two dimensional color grid with where each pixel can have different colors. And transactions, represent a color change in the two-dimensional grid. So one transaction in the Central and is a message that changes the color.
ER, of one pixel at coordinator at an XY coordinate and Mining is, is used as in Bitcoin to validate and provide security to do the transactions and when you generate a new block, the coin, very Stern section in the center line allows you to add a new pixel to the grid. So initially you have a 1 by 1 grid so only 1 pixel and when you mind the next blog, you can add a new pixel to the grid. In an adjacent position.
So the idea is that the the grid of pixels will grow over time when users are mining new blocks and then we're the owners of each pixel can change the color. So, it's actually a really simple model of a virtual world. It's sort of a proof of concept that has no actual use, but it was a fun experiment to do. So it was like, I could see that it's a prototype, but it could
to my eye, it also. It was sort of the answer to one of the problems that that, that virtual reality has, well not not an exact answer, but I've got a really interesting one.
So, with virtual reality, I think the the problem is if I actually start to live my life in virtual reality, then I want to have my own house or how my own property in virtual reality and I want to own something in virtually like like the way people used to own stuff in in Second Life but the problem is, if If all of the information to create this virtual space is with a company like Google and I call something my house in virtual reality. But actually all the information
to build. It is owned by Google. That can go down in any day that can prevent me from own accessing my own house in virtual reality. So, a centralized model is like, II want to own something, but I really can't own anything in a, in a centralized model of of The processing. So so they it seemed to be that with these rental and I could have my ownership over something. And the data structure that is giving me ownership is not a centralized entity and that
makes it really interesting. What do you so do video agree with that. It's exactly what we try to do with the Central and this first version you could see those pixels as Parcels of the world and you own those parcels and you get to decide which color you can buy pink, dogs back pixels. But in a further version that would be your land your house instead of a pixel and The color. Also the motivation for that, like, why why would you want it to be decentralized and actually
own it? We even even today where we have Virtual Worlds that are super centralized say. I don't know Games, like World of Warcraft players, spend a lot of time and invest a lot of money and time into those Virtual Worlds. We think that when you actually own the stuff and you don't have the risk of a company changing the rules of the world, or taking ownership of what you build the, the time and the things we will see created in those Virtual Worlds will increase a lot.
Like the investment of users into Virtual Worlds will grow a lot because they will actually know that there is no risk to lose that to the whims of a company.
Before we wrap up here, I'd like to briefly talk about proof of existence, Manuel, you sort of pioneered this, the idea of proof of existence, and it's funny because I was reading a just randomly reading this white paper, this week, and it mentioned you in the abstract is the the person had pioneered, the sort of idea that proof of existence in blockchain. So proof of existence is essentially is time stamping.
Piece of data with a hash that you then put into a transaction and knee in the Opera turn and that hash is is sort of notarized into the blockchain forever. So you can prove that, you know, Timex this piece of data existed. So it could be a document.
That could be an MP3 file. It could be, could be a contract, whatever, and that allows you to notarize a piece of information at a certain point in time, I personally find that this is one of the most interesting use cases for Bitcoin and blockchain Technology outside of payments. And I wanted to get your ideas about what you think about that. And where do you think this is going?
Yeah, first first of all, I have to say that I was not the first to think about this after building proof existence. I found that there are several projects doing the same thing the same idea. Although proof of existence was certainly the first user-friendly experience. Most of our tools for developers, where you had to download some fun, command line, utility to do this and running a full node. So, it was actually the first user accessible way of Of doing it.
But yeah, it was, it is considered by many like the first real world application of the blockchain that is non-final non-financial. And I think it's a it's a really interesting way to think about the blockchain. Like there are a lot of things we can.
There are a lot of properties of Bitcoin that can be used for other systems other than payment and mainly, what perfect system does is using the, the fact that it's a public, Ledger where you have this interact consensus on data is published and that that the, the blockchain structure allows the timestamp that data. And so, I brought this, this project was launched three years ago or so. And since then there have been many, many similar projects coming out some trying to
improve on the technical side. I'll some time to sort of build nicer product more targeted to a specific use case. Recently, there have been a couple of really interesting developments and the Tyrion project sort of improves both in the technical and the business side, they are building a system where it's based on an open source.
Project called chain point, where what you do is, instead of inserting each documents cash in a single Bitcoin transaction, they use a code 3 to insert several documents. So, you only insert one hash per each Bitcoin block, which is The it's a better way to do it because with Bitcoin you only have one time stamp for each block.
So it makes no sense to add many documents into the same Bitcoin block, but they solved it in a really interesting way where they can provide you a proof like approved for you. Don't need any of the other documents. In the same block to know that your document actually is in the in that Bitcoin block. So the The idea is you have a set of documents each 10 minutes and you build a miracle tree from that and you insert the root of the tree into a Bitcoin
block. And then you give each user Merkel proof or the path in the Merkur tree that proves that your document is part of that Merkle tree. So the user can then use his document and the Merkel proof or how they call it. I think it's a blockchain received or something that with those two pieces of information, you can prove that your document had a certain time stamp in the using the Bitcoin blockchain. That's an interesting project.
Yeah, I'm I'm very interesting to see interested to see where this goes. Are you aware of any? Any instances where a motorization in the blockchain was? My question is, basically, is there a legal precedence, for this to stand up in court, or in some sort of a dispute resolution in, for instance, copyright because there's other companies, like we've talked to Trent McConaughey of a scribe, you know, they're doing certain
nerves. Ation of digital art on the blockchain and like you mentioned, there's so many other projects that are doing similar things. I feel like this might be something that sort of gains somewhat. Interesting quantities of adoption. How do you think that? How do you think that it would be legally? But will it become legally binding soon?
Do you think if you think that it would be adopted as something that people would sort of trust as a, a A viable way to notarize documents rather than going through like a notary or what other copyright registration. Things like that. Yeah so that there's no legal precedent yet the only similar case we have is the Canada State kind of Senate that they when they did a cryptocurrency research they actually used a
similar. Well actually the same protocol from proof of existence to certify their own cryptocurrency report in the blockchain. That's the only like government acknowledged. Moment of this technology working but it's we still haven't seen any legal precedent
of someone using it in court. I think that the the way this could develop is someone that used proof of existence or a similar blockchain based time, something system going to court about something and they will need to have a an expert witness. Like I don't know how these are called in English but and the I go to court and try to explain to the judge. Yeah an expert witness.
Yeah. Okay. Expert witness in that case, we'll see what what president is set and if we can actually holding holding court or not but I think that as it works technically it only needs time so that people sort of understand it and see the the value and sort of this kind of things need to Time. So it's a matter of and as you said with all these companies emerging and doing work in this area, I think it's it's better even. But we still need to see what
happens in court. The technology is solid and when we asked some lawyers in Argentina, they said that this could pretty easily hold the an investigation and it will actually be could be called correctly against the shots, which actually surprised me because I was, I thought that it was, there will be no chance that that charge will take something like this into his trials. Yeah. Maybe we need a good.
We need a big big case, where it's like a hundred million dollars on steak and the proof is on the Bitcoin blockchain. And then and then the judges agree on it and then that that really drives this kind of thing mainstream, it's pretty similar to what what happened in in biology like people were shouting that can we patent life for 20 years and then there's, there's one guy who actually did patent it and then there was a huge case for fifty fifty million dollars.
And after that suddenly this this idea of Patenting genes went into the mainstream, maybe maybe, maybe Bitcoin will be similar. It needs this big lawsuit moment where some big parties are suing each other and the only proof is the Bitcoin blockchain. Well what I find really interesting about the sort of service like proof of existence or some other services out there, is that it I find that it
opens up the business model. There's the business model is not necessarily reliant on bitcoin payments. So a service like proof of existence or others, that you mentioned, Tyrion and services, like this can charge per notarization with a credit card or whatever. So it allows people from outside of the Bitcoin and blockchain space to use the blockchain for something actually pretty useful which is notarizing documents. Yeah, that's true.
And I think that that's a really big strength for a Bitcoin business right now or abduction based business because user adoption is growing pretty slow. So if you're basing your product on the assumption that your users will have Bitcoin you really, you need a really really compelling use case so that you get users to actually buy Bitcoin to use your application.
In another case you need to have have an application where Bitcoin is invisible and you as you said you can have credit card or PayPal payments and still use the blockchain in some other way where it's invisible to the user. So before we wrap up we just want to mention briefly. So you guys have a new company. Can you just tell us briefly about the company which are trying to achieve? Yeah, we just started a new company. It's called smart contract Solutions, we're doing work with
smart contracts. We're currently in stealth mode. So we cannot talk about the details, but hopefully, hopefully we'll have something we can talk publicly about soon. Okay, great. Well, I want to thank you both for coming on today is really interesting discussion. I think that, you know, this problem. I mean, problem, the issue of content monetization is one that There's definitely a Bitcoin, definitely tries to solve it in
some way. Now whether or not it will catch it'll catch on because of user adoption of Bitcoin. Or, as we mentioned, the user experience problem, that needs to be solved, the Still Remains to be three seeing. But in any case I think that it does provide a really interesting way for Content providers to monetize their content. Yeah definitely we are also very eager to see Ian's in that space content. Monetization stream. You fire them proof of existence. They oh there is something from
that into all this. Okay, well, thanks for coming on, thanks for joining us and to our listeners. Thank you for, for joining us today and another episode of epicenter Bitcoin, we release new episodes, every Monday, you can subscribe to the show on iTunes SoundCloud or wherever you get your favorite podcast, it could be also on the iOS or Android and you can also watch the video version of the show on YouTube at youtube.com slash epicenter Bitcoin.
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