 So I do have a couple like introductory slides, so maybe this is redundant for everyone in this room, but maybe we have a couple of viewers who don't know. So I guess, so I'm just gonna give kind of like an overview of OpenBizarre a little bit, and then I think kind of what I wanna do with this talk is just talk about kind of my vision for, this conference is called like Satoshi's vision. I kind of wanna talk about my vision for OpenBizarre, how that fits in with at least what I view to be Satoshi's vision for Bitcoin. I hope I'm not being terribly presumptuous on that, but we'll see. So what is OpenBizarre? I've got a couple of nice headlines here that I like. This is Forbes Magazine, OpenBizarre is an anarchist eBay on acid, so I kind of like that, right? I can run with that title. This was Fortune Magazine, America's Most Dangerous Startup. I'll take that title too, I guess. Then if you're a core supporter, then OpenBizarre is a scam, and it's a failed project, useless, you name it, we've heard it all from them. So what is it? Essentially, OpenBizarre is an e-commerce app. It's an app that allows people to buy and sell, to list products for sale. This is a screenshot of the app, how it works. This girl's located in Arkansas, and so this is her store. She's selling artwork that she makes. I've actually bought something from her on there. And it's a little bit, I guess you could maybe say, maybe a little bit more like Etsy in terms of like you set up an actual store and people can browse it and buy things from you. Or eBay, I guess you could say. We don't sell anything ourselves on there. I guess maybe we sell some t-shirts, but it's primarily an app that allows other people to buy and sell. So you can say, what's so unique about that, right? There's a million e-commerce applications, Amazon, eBay, they just dominate everything. Why does OpenBizarre exist? And it's really a fundamentally different technology than what we have with the web. So OpenBizarre could be thought of as, I don't really wanna say the first, but maybe one of the first well done, if we can pat ourselves on the back, kind of well done app that could fit into this kind of web 3.0 paradigm, which is kind of like the new decentralized web. So the way the web works today is we have the image on the left, it's the centralized client server model. So you have all these clients, and in order to fetch data, they have to connect to this single server to download data to, in the case of an e-commerce application to make transactions. And so we just have this one corporation in the middle here that controls everything. It controls what you see, what you can do with their app, and what have you, whereas the new model is this more decentralized web. So OpenBizarre is, we're building on top of a protocol called IPFS. Some people may have heard of IPFS. It's self, it combines ideas from BitTorrent and Git and Kedemlia. These are all concepts that have been around for over a decade, but we're just kind of now combining them in a way that allows us to build really useful stuff with it. So we can ask, what are some of the benefits here? If we just look at the architecture on the left, it's kind of like a, to some extent a really inefficient architecture. Like let's say we have a scenario where you wanna download an image from a server. It could be the case that every one of those other clients have already downloaded the image and that they've got it in their browser cache or whatever it is. And instead of downloading it from those people who already have it, you're instead gonna go and download it from that central server anyway. So everyone's just gonna bombard the central server with requests when the data you're looking for is actually spread around thousands of computers that are already on the internet. So it's kind of inefficient when you think about it from this perspective. And it's also, we see in times when sites come under heavy load, they slow down, right? If everyone is trying to request stuff all at once, websites can just grind to a halt sometimes. So what we have with this other architecture that we're using with IPFS is the data, whenever you download something, the data is cached locally on your node in your browser. And that data is essentially made available in a way that anyone else who's looking for it can find it. So when you go to download something, you just download it from anyone else who had previously downloaded it and we eliminate that need for that that kind of central server that controls everything. And unlike the client server architecture where things slow down when everyone just bombards the server with requests, in IPFS things actually speed up, right? Because you have, let's say you have a big file, it's broken up into chunks, and you can start downloading these chunks from a bunch of other people and then you can reassemble it. And what happens is the more people who are downloading these chunks, the more they're making it available. So you actually end up with faster downloads of the content as a result. And what's probably really interesting for us in addition to just kind of a more, like a better architecture, better architectural design for the web, is it creates kind of a form of censorship resistance. So all of this content is spread around hundreds or thousands of computers on the internet. There isn't that central computer in the middle, that central server who can deny you access to data or dictate how you're using the app. So if we think about in terms of like e-commerce applications, this implies that people can essentially trade with each other without anyone being able to stop them or kind of censor that trade. So just to kind of give you an example, this is one of my favorite headlines here, which is our furious at Etsy for banning the sale of spells, right? So this is maybe not the worst thing that can happen as a result of censorship, but although, but these people have been disenfranchised. Yeah, so, but this is a direct result of that architectural design where you have that one company in the middle that gets to make these type of decisions. And when we talk about this in terms of, we could look at this from a couple of perspectives, but we have Etsy's not even that big of a company, but when you talk about bigger companies like Amazon and eBay, these companies like one decision that they make can have like a chilling effect throughout the entire economy just because of how big they are. We see this with like YouTube and Facebook and the free speech battles that are going on. It's just because they're just so darn big, one decision from them just affects everybody. So by having this kind of more decentralized model, we can kind of get around this. So, what else did I wanna say? Hold on, let me get on my, I actually wrote some notes to make sure I didn't forget anything. Okay, yeah, so basically, I mean, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do here is basically kind of create like a free trade zone for the internet, right? I don't know about you guys, but I believe that people have essentially a fundamental human right to free trade, right? And we see this, so I mentioned kind of large corporations, large entities can kind of be a threat to that stuff. We also have governments, right? So when we talk, we kind of think that we have the ability to trade freely with each other, but when you take a step back and you look at it, we've got, there are more regulations regarding what we're allowed to trade, how we're allowed to trade it, when we're allowed to trade it, that you couldn't possibly read all those regulations in your lifetime if you wanted to. And so regardless of how well Open Bazaar does, I actually think there's a pretty strong case for Open Bazaar as just like a mainstream e-commerce application because if you're a seller who's selling stuff, there's no middleman, there's no one taking any cut of the transaction. So this can save you maybe 10%, 15%, depending on what platform you're using. And if you consider the profit margins that many of these sellers have, they're real tiny. So this is potentially talking about seeing your profits increase by 3, 4, 5x just by cutting out the middleman. But even if Open Bazaar doesn't achieve that kind of sort of maybe mainstream adoption, I still kind of fundamentally believe that this is a type of platform that just like it just needs to exist. Like even if Amazon's fine for like 99% of your transactions out there or the things that you wanna buy, there's always gonna be people who are victimized by censorship, they're disenfranchised, they're threatened with imprisonment for trying to buy things as innocuous as medicine to help them ease their pain or whatever it is. So people have a right to trade with each other. And so Open Bazaar is trying to be this free trade zone where you'll always know there's at least some place you can trade with people where you're not going to be censored or prohibited from doing so. So obviously this kind of transitions nicely into Bitcoin. So what good is all this technology this kind of decentralized way of sharing data and pushing data around the network if we just at the end of the day we just have to pay people in like Visa Mastercard, right? So Bitcoin being a decentralized like censorship-resistant currency just fits in like perfectly with Open Bazaar. So we get from Open Bazaar, we get a decentralized payment system that just keeps our entire platform decentralized and makes the whole thing work. Bitcoin gets from Open Bazaar, we have a mechanism where you can kind of like you can spend what you earn on there, right? I don't know about you guys, but like the purpose of Bitcoin as I see it is not to like cash out into fiat at the end of the day but it's to get that crypto economy going, that kind of counter economy, right? And maybe this is probably where I go off on a little bit of a tangent, but this is like what I view in my vision like what we're doing here. We're fundamentally building a counter economy. Kind of whether we realize it or not. Give me one second. Okay, so yeah, so I know many people in this room, you know, myself, I know Roger, you guys heard Roger talk about a lot of this earlier, but you know, we come at this from like a pretty strong like libertarian perspective. So, you know, us libertarians, we spent, I don't know what decades like lobbying the government to try and like reimplement the gold standard, right? Reimplement the gold standard, try to get sound money and it's like totally useless, right? Didn't, you know, didn't even make a dent all that effort and it's kind of like, you know, why would it make an effort? Because they have, you know, they're the recipients of all this largesse. They have like no incentive to change anything. So, maybe this might be a good time to kind of do a little bit of review of like why Bitcoin anyway? Like why not fiat money? I just got, I got like maybe three points that I can talk about as it relates to fiat money. So the first is certainly from like our libertarian perspective, it's we have with fiat money, what we see is this like upwards redistribution of wealth kind of from like the poor and middle class to the rich. So how does that actually happen in practice? Well, consider like, you know, people counterfeit money for a reason, right? Like when you counterfeit money, you're actually, you're getting a real economic benefit from that, you get goods and services and you don't actually produce anything, right? You just produce pieces of paper or whatever it is. And so the counterfeiter has this like real benefit, but so does the merchant that the counterfeiter bought from because if the merchant, if this is a good counterfeit and you can't tell it apart, the merchant sees his income increase as a result of this. And so the merchant sees his income go up before the, you know, inflation hits. So this confers a real economic benefit there and so on and so forth throughout the economy. So we see a scenario where the early spenders of the money, like the people who are close to the source, their income goes up before the inflation hits and then everyone else sees the inflation hit before their income goes up, creating like this real like upward redistribution of wealth. And when we talk about central banks counterfeiting money, which is basically what they do, it's that new money, the people who are the first spenders of it who are close to the source, it's the banks, the large financial institutions, Wall Street corporations. So we have this scenario where like average people are paying a tax to the bank every year. And most people don't even really know it, but effectively that's what's going on. And it's not just this tax to the bank, but then this money is used to buy primarily government bonds. This pushes down interest rates on government borrowing, which lets them finance all this stuff that they otherwise wouldn't be able to do. Like we're going on like close to 20 years in Afghanistan, just like perpetual war in Afghanistan. And so it's not just, it's that, we're financing like drone strikes on people's weddings and all this stuff. So, and then I guess lastly, it has like this like fundamentally like destabilizing effect in the economy. So it's like, you know, they take all this money, they dump it into the laps of the large financial institutions that pushes down these interest rates. And it makes all these loans that were otherwise unprofitable loans or bad loans, it makes them look like good loans on paper, right? So it creates these like asset bubbles. And if you go back and you read like, you know, the very first post that Satoshi put out there introducing Bitcoin in like February 2009, he talked about, you know, banks, the reason for Bitcoin was, you know, banks were like loaning out all this money in like waves of credit bubbles, right? So this is like baked in like, right in the reason why Bitcoin exists. It's a very kind of libertarian reason. So, you know, we spend decades trying to lobby the government for, you know, like a return to the gold standard to end all of this stuff. And, you know, like along comes, oops, along comes Satoshi and who, you know, he may or may not be speaking after me, I don't know. But, you know, like along comes Satoshi and he's just like, you know, I'm, you know, forget all like, you know, lobbying the government, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna do it anyway. I'm not gonna ask for permission. So he puts out this, this alternate, you know, competing like, you know, market based currency. And he's like the way that we're, the way we're gonna end the Fed, the way that we're going to, you know, the end the ECB and all the fiat money is we're gonna put out a superior alternative and we're gonna outcompet it, right? And to me, that's like the really powerful vision for Bitcoin. That's why I got into Bitcoin. That's why Roger got into Bitcoin. I know that's why a lot of people here. And it's, we're kind of fundamentally like building a counter economy. We're trying to get as much economic activity moving out of fiat and into Bitcoin as we can. And even if you think that's like a really bad idea, like even if you're on like the Paul Krugman side or Joseph Stiglitz or these type of people who would probably dramatically disagree with everything I just said, like Bitcoin's probably still gonna prove to be a pretty useful experiment in that regard to get us like actual real world data for how these type of market based systems work. And it can inform our view of like monetary economics going forward. So I just wanna say like a couple words about Bitcoin Cash. So I won't make your eyes. So that's what I kind of view as like Satoshi's vision. I think it fits very well into like open bizarre and what we're trying to do and create this kind of like free trade zone kind of outside of state control. And that's the vision that many of us who got into Bitcoin very early on, I was in Bitcoin since like 2012, that's a vision that attracted us into this. And here we come along with the core developers and they're like, well, we have a radically different vision for Bitcoin. Our vision for Bitcoin or speaking as them, our vision for Bitcoin is just this kind of like speculative trading asset, right? That it's not gonna be money. There's not gonna be any counter economy. No one's gonna be buying stuff with it. It's just gonna be this like speculative trading token with $30 transaction fees, right? And so it's like, it's just like, I mean, that's not what I got into Bitcoin for. I know that's not what anyone else did. And I don't know about you guys, but when you think of like all the use cases for this technology, like store value is gonna be like the most boring one out of all of them, right? And it's, so, you know, as far as Bitcoin Cash goes, if they wanna work on store value and they wanna have a trading asset and whatever it is, I mean, that's fine. I'm happy to let them do it, but I'm gonna be over here like working on Bitcoin Cash with all the rest of you guys. So I guess that's just a round of applause. Thank you. Test, test, test. Test, okay. Thank you, Chris. All right, here we go to the Q and A. And then we got some awesome questions for Chris. Hey, great talk. Can you tell us a bit about the protocol for actually the distribution of content and particularly, I already asked one question about URIs today, but like the URI scheme and what that resolves to. Distribution of digital content. No, just, you know, where do the images and the content in the app come from? And I see you've got the OB URI at the top. Yeah, so they- And that's for IPFS reference, I was wondering. Yeah, so nodes will like seed their own content, so it's like, if you make a new store and you put out some content, node seed that and make it available to anyone, then when anyone else comes around, they download it and they make it available to every other people, every other person. So kind of by itself, IPFS, it doesn't provide any guarantees that your content will remain available. So if everyone else who had downloaded your content goes offline, then your content's not available to other people, but it's, we also have this like pub sub mechanism in there where like people can subscribe to updates from other nodes and they can like proactively seed that content if they want to. So haven't really kind of enabled that yet, but what I wanna do is kind of give people the ability to say like, you know, I'll reseed maybe a gigabyte worth of data or something like that. I mean, right now it's kind of like a volunteer thing. I don't know if it needs to be anything more than a volunteer thing, but I guess we'll see. You got a question on the left? So as it is now with OB, you can use both Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and ZCash. I've played around with it a little bit, but I'm not 100% sure. When you create a store, you have to create a new store for each of the three currencies and they're not interoperable. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, the stores are all part of the same network, but you're right. That was just kind of like the quickest path to getting something out the door. You know, our usage went from like, you know, it was spiking like really high and then you get $10 fees, $30 fees and then usage starts going like this. So we just had to get like something out the door as quick as possible and that's what it was. So we are working on making it so you can kind of like, it'll be checkboxed what you can use, which currencies you want. So you can use more than one. That'll be coming pretty soon. We have a question on the right. I got it. Yeah, here you go. Oh, thank you. Great talk. I remember when you guys started, you had this idea of using Namecoin for the names of stores and like currently the stores just like huge strings of characters, names, letters, whatever. What's the idea for the future on the names of the stores? How's that gonna work? Are you guys gonna go back to using Namecoin or how's that gonna work? Thank you. Yeah, so we were using Blockstack, which was kind of like the next kind of evolution of that project, one name project that was built on Namecoin. We might still use that. We'll probably still will at some point, but like Blockstack, it was starting to get very expensive to register names and it got to the point where our users aren't gonna want to pay $10 or $30 or whatever it was to register a name. So we didn't take the time to actually implement that yet. Maybe we will at some point, we'll have to see. Alternatively, it does, on my side of the code on the backend, it does work actually with regular DNS. So let's say there's a store that sells hot sauce, it's called Pexpeppers. He could have pexpeppers.com and if he just puts his open bizarre ID in the text record, then he can resolve open bizarre.com in open bizarre and it'll take it to his store. That just hasn't made it into the UI yet, but that functionality's actually there. Whether that's authenticated or not, it kind of depends on whether it's using DNS second and what have you. That might be an alternative, but some kind of like blockchain-based naming systems like Blockstack, if the fees remain low or something like that, it would be nice to implement too. Also, I think we have a question about? Yeah, hello, thank you for the great talk. Could you comment a little about the number of stores you have, the number of transactions and how that is growing? Yeah, so I know that the app has been downloaded like several hundred thousand times. It's had a lot of downloads. In terms of users online at any given point in time, it's like in the thousands and the stores, it's maybe like, I don't know, 500 to a thousand stores online, maybe within a week's period of time. Can only kind of gauge when was the last time we've seen the store, just by kind of crawling. Usage, like I said, usage was going up pretty good until the fees hit and then it dropped way down. Still hasn't kind of recovered back up to that level, but I think we still have a good amount of work to do just to get it to like, at least in my opinion, to get it to kind of like feature parity with like eBay and Etsy and this sort of stuff. So I think a big one is kind of like the browsing, improving the browsing experience, because right now it's just kind of like loading random stuff. I feel like having a better browsing experience is key to having users, right? So we still haven't fixed that or improved that in the app, but that's one thing we also would like to get like a web version going. So you can use like OpenBizarre on the web and there's actually the IPFS guys have written this JS IPFS library which it runs a full peer-to-peer IPFS node in the browser, right? So you can literally have like a peer-to-peer app running in the browser, which is kind of like bleeding edge tech. So I'd like to get that at some point too. That might not be the first step for getting it in the browser, but that's kind of where I'd like to go with it. And I mean, right now OpenBizarre desktop nodes take web socket connection. So you can actually, I've played around, you can have a web browser can communicate with the OpenBizarre network today. It's just a matter of kind of like writing that code to make it work. Was there a second part of that question that I missed? Yeah, it was growing pretty well. I mean, it's still, like I said, it still hasn't reached back to the point where it was in maybe like November when, you know, before the fees hit, but we're getting back there. All right, any other questions? Got one more? Hey, great work on this. Just wanted to know, what are the strongest growing pains you're having and how can the community help promote and help, yeah, participate? Yeah, I think growing pains, I mean, it's just, we just don't have enough resources to do everything we want to do, right? I'd like to have like 10 more developers if I could, but that's probably the most frustrating part is just like the speed at which it takes to develop stuff, but it's been working surprisingly really well. The network's been like really stable and if you knew everything it had to do to get the data to the user, it's like much faster than you would expect it to be given what it's doing behind the scenes to gather all that data and bring it in. So it's working pretty well from that standpoint. So I just think kind of like getting features out the door and kind of polishing it is like our biggest challenge at this point. Chris, thank you very much. A round of applause for Chris. Yeah.