 Oh, welcome to the Daily Decrypt, where currency competition is always on the menu. I am your host, Amanda, and today's episode is brought to you by Fort Galt. I suppose your name isn't Mr. Veerhoos. I suppose your name is Eric and Fort. Depends who's asking. Depends who's asking, okay. All right, well, for anybody who doesn't know, tell us who you are. Yeah, so my name is Eric Voorhees. I've been in the Bitcoin world as an entrepreneur and advocate for five years now, since 2011. Involved in a number of companies. I started Satoshi Dias most notoriously. I was a early member at BitInstant, as well as a co-founder of Coinipult. And for the last year and a half, I've been building Shapeshift.io. Neat. Well, the main reason I wanted to talk to you is because I respect and appreciate your obvious short to medium term vision of where cryptocurrency markets are going. And really, I think currency markets, because when you first got involved in Bitcoin, there wasn't this whole growing ecosystem of cryptocurrencies that were seriously competing with Bitcoin. And so what was it in 2011 that made you think, hey, this Bitcoin thing might actually catch on. I think I'll start a dice game online. What was it? Well, it didn't all happen that quickly, but when I first heard about it, I got excited because it was essentially a way to move money around without anyone's permission. And that had never been done before. So there had never been a way to move value at a distance between two people without someone else, whether a bank or a company, having a say in it or being able to block it or censor it or taking a fee or telling you when and how you can do it. And so that, I realized pretty quickly that that was a very substantial innovation and pretty much just throughout everything responsible I was doing and dove headfirst into the Bitcoin world. And how did you hear of Bitcoin? Did you have a dream of it? Did Satoshi write you a Facebook message? How did that happen? Yeah, I'm best friends with Satoshi on Facebook. He wrote me a message. But actually it did come from Facebook. I had a friend who part of Free State Project. He was a friend up there in New Hampshire with me and he posted about it some article. This was like early May of 2011. And it just said about this interesting digital currency that had gone up 500% since the fall or whatever and caught my eye. And then I just spent hours and hours and hours reading about it. I think a similar story to how many people got involved which is that they just fell down the rabbit hole and most of us are still down here. Did you end up in the hospital like Bitcoin Jesus from dehydration or something? I didn't, I remember to eat and drink. But I did stop doing everything I was doing and just became totally obsessed with it. So I want to, I've heard you say in a presentation before that you used to be a Bitcoin maximalist. And now your current business, shapeshift.io of course is proof that you are no longer a Bitcoin maximalist. But I want you to define that term for us and tell us what it was that caused you to change your mind. So the term Bitcoin maximalist means someone who thinks that Bitcoin will be the only form of digital value, the only form of digital exchange, the only cryptocurrency. It's the idea that you don't need multiple monies. Bitcoin's the best, it has the most traction, it has the most security, it has all the momentum by far the largest market cap and liquidity. So it will over time push all the others out of the market. And I generally agree with that sentiment to a point which is that there isn't a need to have lots of forms of money. Just like there's not a need to have lots of different units of measurement for distance, right? Even two, standard metric is too many. We should all be using the metric system for measuring distance. Money is a measurement of wealth and value and you don't need lots of ways to measure it. But when different digital assets can do unique things that Bitcoin cannot do, then they have a place and a value and a role to play as complements, not necessarily as competing currencies, but as other digital assets that do special things. And so you have coins that are more private than Bitcoin, they just have different ways of panning the privacy aspect. You have coins that are pegged to the value of dollars. You have coins that have advanced scripting languages like Ethereum. These won't necessarily compete with Bitcoin as pure money but they will exist in tandem with Bitcoin fulfilling different needs that Bitcoin doesn't fill and that's a good thing I think. Hmm, now this gets to the crux of what I wanted to talk about because it seems like currency is a thing in which obviously the network effect is paramount and so one may want to hold the currency that the most other people hold because that guarantees that you'll have the most other interested trading partners. And I can see that aspect of it. And then other times I wonder, as you've said, you don't believe that cryptocurrency, any other cryptocurrency will compete with Bitcoin in the exact space where Bitcoin performs basically nothing that is just like Bitcoin can compete with Bitcoin. And I'm wondering what your view is on, do you foresee people just enjoying diversity for the sake of diversity? Yeah, for a while. I think during its experimental phase, which is its first 10 years of life, there is value in simply having other coins purely for diversity reasons. There could be some terrible bug with Bitcoin that causes it to collapse. There could be some regulation that applied to Bitcoin, but for some reason didn't apply to something else. There is, it's an unknown, an unknown world and often it's better to have a diverse ecosystem of lots of different types of assets. So I think there's certainly value in that. In 50 years are people gonna have five different coins in their wallet that are all purely for payments. I don't think so. I think that wouldn't make sense, but they may have 20 different types of blockchain assets that all do different things. Some might be access tokens for certain programs. Some might be stable with certain assets. Some might represent certain assets. You could have a coin that represented a share in a Taylor Swift song and it would pay you dividends over time from her earnings, that kind of thing. Bitcoin's not gonna do that and it shouldn't. I mean, it fulfills the role of money really well, but there are lots of other ways of using value that are not necessarily money that other types of digital assets can take on. Neat. Well, that's very interesting. And what, as far as development, do you foresee these say it's 50 years into the future and I have 20 different kinds of blockchain assets in my wallet? Do you foresee those living on 20 different blockchains or what's your take on this whole notion of side chains and that alternate view of how different functionalities might be achieved? I think most coins will be on a few blockchains. So I imagine the world and predictions of this kind are always gonna be wrong, right? But I imagine a world where there are several large popular blockchain protocols and millions of different assets live on those things. Maybe there will just be one. I mean, maybe the Bitcoin blockchain will become the platform on which absolutely everything is built, but I think it's more likely there will be a small handful of popular blockchains that are used. I don't think if there are a million digital assets out there that there will be a million blockchains that would be highly inefficient. All right. Well, let's shift gears to shape shift. That was good. Yeah, you like that? Yeah, you've been working on that one for a while, right? Free for you here on the daily D-Crip, Eric Hughes. Yes, yes, yes. So I wanted to ask, I guess, I remember when shape shift first came out and I thought, oh, that's a clever name. And then I saw like no account needed, just come to our website and we'll swap a doodle for you. I remember thinking like that's just like a bold move. Like what made you think that you could have an exchange without accounts, Eric? What made you think you could do that? Who told you you could do that? I got Obama's permission first. I spent two years trying to get a call with him and then pitched him the idea and he said, yeah, sure. So after his endorsement, I felt like it was probably good to go forward with it. No, in reality, I wanted to speculate on some strange altcoin that I heard of, like in mid or early 2014. And I just wanted to put a few hundred dollars into it. I didn't want to spend a lot of time researching or like setting up an account and figuring out a wallet situation and all that. I just, I wanted to have some within one, within 10 seconds of having the thought. And I was like, I have some Bitcoin. Why the hell can't I just snap my fingers and turn it into some other digital currency? It really shouldn't be any harder than that. And so as I thought about that, I just realized, well, of course it can be done. It's just one of many things in the ecosystem that people haven't built yet. So I thought, well, I should build this because I think it'll be very important to have a mechanism by which any digital asset can be instantly converted into any other digital asset. So that was the idea. It was sort of something I built for myself. And often when there's something that a person wants, lots of other people want it too. And I read on Reddit the other day that Shapeshift had a record sales date over the weekend or something. Yeah, we, I mean, ever since January volumes have been growing like crazy. So January was like 10x the volume of a year before. And already in February, we've gone more than, it's halfway through the month and we've already gone beyond volume we did in January. So it's growing very fast, which is exciting and a little scary. But, you know, it's fun. Right on. Well, and I have one final question for you, which is a bit of a reference to something you had said earlier, which is that you used to live here in the Free State, New Hampshire, where I am now. And you may or may not have heard that the move got triggered last week. And I just wondered if you had any plans to ever visit again or perhaps even return here. And if so, what would it take for you to do that? I certainly plan to visit often. The Liberty Forum and Pork Fester two awesome events that I try to get to when I can. You know, if Bitcoin can get a little higher, I wouldn't mind buying some land out there in the Free State and being partly involved in that world. You know, largely I got excited about Bitcoin because it had the spirit of the Free State project, which was, you know, to actually do something to expand Liberty in the world. Something which people think, well, I'll just go vote for a politician, but it's a very pointless and futile exercise. And the Free State project was a really innovative way of changing things. And it was that sort of spirit that got me extra excited about Bitcoin when I saw it as something that would help bring Liberty, not by asking permission from anyone, just by people voluntarily starting to use it. So I like to think that I am furthering the spirit of the Free State projects in my career and in my work in Bitcoin. But yeah, I have a lot of love and affection for what the Free State project is doing and try to get out there when I can. Righteous, righteous. Well, I do believe that you have a blog and it's a cleverly titled one. Tell people where they can find that if they're interested. The blog is moneyandstate.com, moneyandstate.com. So I post there occasionally when I get on a coffee-fueled binge of opinionated thinking. And the Bitcoin, I think to some people in the world is sort of a way to move money more cheaply, but to a lot of us who got involved early on, it's really a very powerful tool for bringing Liberty to the world to separate money from state in the same way and for the same reason as it was important to separate church from state and for the same reason that it's important to separate speech and thought and relationships from the state. Money is no different in that aspect and so that's where the name of the blog came from and ultimately I see my role in the Bitcoin world as trying to build a system that demonstrates that money should be left to the marketplace and not to government. Well, that's excellent, Mr. Virhuz. And I am confident I will see you at a future Liberty Forum or pork fest. And so until then, thank you for your time. Thanks so much. Have a good one. Today's episode is brought to you by Fort Galt, an early-stage community on the coast of Chile near Valdivia for entrepreneurs and their families. The 100-acre property is pre-installed with water and power lines and Bitcoin is now being accepted for the purchase of both residential lots and apartment units. The first apartment building is almost entirely sold out and construction on it is set to begin within three months. You can learn more about the project and its prices by visiting fortgalt.com. Feel free to leave your wisdom or otherwise in the comment section below and have yourself a righteous day. I mean, I can let you in.