Posted in /f/AMA
I've been building crypto apps for 10 years, AMA
I changed careers to get a full time job in crypto in 2016. Today I maintain Cashtab and developer libraries for eCash. I'm also the founder of Firma, which issues USD, EUR, and CHF stablecoins on XEC.
I have so many questions for you so thank you for doing this @bytesofman and helping to promote this platform! First thing I'll ask is what excites you most about eCash?
I first got into bitcoin in 2013. The idea of replacing institutions (even in 2013, obviously corrupt and declining) with open source protocols was a no-brainer. The monetary properties and performance were even then much better than USD. I never stopped working on that. Crypto is not immune from the kind of capture forces it was engineered to evade. But money is a social problem, and social problems do not have solutions. It's an arms race. XEC is the only crypto product that is still iterating on the tech to accomplish what made bitcoin interesting when the tech first dropped.
Amazing. We have this oportunity in the best space. What would the expansion plan and global adoption timeline for Firma Wallet look like?
Firma is the first real bridge between XEC and the real world economy that isn't exclusively a crypto exchange. While I'm excited to leverage the numerous technical benefits of stablecoins on XEC vs legacy stablecoins on account-based chains, the first opportunity for Firma is better banking. Banks today are de facto government offices. Going into a bank is like going into the DMV. You cannot speak with a banker. Moving your own money requires insane questions that get more insane every year, esp as inflation makes "suspicious" limits pedestrian. You don't really need technology to solve these problems. But, the way regulatory capture has worked, we know that existing banks and existing financial infra will never solve these problems. They were bad 10 years ago and get worse every year. Today, the biggest opportunity for stablecoin fintechs is banking without the bullshit. Everyone assumes that banking has to be awful because, well, that's just the way it is. But unlike the DMV, we are seeing all kinds of competition with banks. Unfortunately, even fintech banking still scales with compliance more than with technology. The more interesting opportunities are in creating closed loop crypto economies. This is where Firma's technical advantage in parallelism and zero-fee txs over legacy stablecoins shines. But you can't simply create an enormous global agent economy. Finding the right niche and starting small is the path to global adoption.
banking without the bullshit should be your tagline =)
Great and thanks. Without getting into a debate about the global economic system—and the structure that has dominated and exhausted it for decades—or considering the varying economic models across countries, continents, and hemispheres, some of the most critical issues involve governments, banking, interest rates, loans (such as UVA-indexed loans), and runaway inflation. In this context, what would be FIRMA’s overarching strategy to drive adoption?
be useful
I recently learned the difference between bearer stablecoins and issuer-controlled stablecoins. Given the attitude towards bearer stablecoins by major world governments, how are you looking at the future of Firma? Will you focus more on developing economies?
There is absolutely nothing interesting about stablecoins that can be frozen by the issuer for any or no reason. The problems these products are solving are not technical in nature. They are pure competence arbitrage. You have smarter, smaller, more focused teams building fintech on stablecoins. So you get better services. But fundamentally, the regulatory picture is the same as banking, and those smaller, smarter, more focused teams will not stay that way as they find commercial success. So many projects today are using crypto as an excuse to build a financial product with smarter people and more workable regulations. But this "competence arbitrage" is a short term thing. Real change will come from technology arbitrage. Using crypto in your business without any technical justification is crazy, even though it's currently making a lot of founders and VCs very rich. Crypto imposes all kinds of costs vs a simple database. There is no reason to use crypto if you must still use a database to determine who gets what and why, which is the fundamental equilibrium of all account-based "freeze & seize" stablecoins. Firma will focus first on Switzerland as the historic international hub for users looking for competent, flexible, and sane financial solutions. But Firma products that are issued "exist in the wild" and can be bought be anyone over DeFi. We haven't seen significant interest from developing economies yet, but our technical advantages (like zero-fee txs) make us a no-brainer over legacy stablecoins.
I agree on your points about the insurer-controlled stablecoins. I meant more along the lines of how you are navigating the regulatory landscape going forward. It seems to me that the general wind of regulation in developed markets is pushing against bearer stablecoins even though you have countries like Switzerland that are workable. Is your vision for Firma to base your operations in friendly international financial hubs and be the bearer stablecoin of choice?
It all goes back to the original point of cryptocurrency. The idea is to leverage technology to prevent regulatory capture and corruption from gatekeeping the most important social technology we have: money. The vision for Firma is like any successful business or nation. Make sure your defense is asymmetric and, where it isn't, make sure you don't neglect diplomacy. Switzerland is a good teacher.
Love this: "There is no reason to use crypto if you must still use a database to determine who gets what and why" What's the wildest "using blockchain in this application makes absolutely no sense" situation that you've come across? Also, have you been involved in any such projects that resulted in a ton of pain later on from using blockchain where it should never have been used?
I've been working full-time in crypto since 2016 so fortunately I was never in a corporate situation where someone tried to just inject a little "blockchain" into the mix for asinine reasons. Still, looking for the wildest "using blockchain in this application makes absolutely no sense" is the wrong question. 99% of blockchain applications should not use a blockchain. Cashtab -> uses a blockchain because you can't otherwise give usable money to someone instantly without them going through various regulatory hurdles Firma -> uses a blockchain because cash should be the dominant payment method on the internet, not credit cards, and database-cash movement is reversible + seizable + depends on ID; you lose important cash-like properties For the most successful crypto apps today, they actually don't need a blockchain at all for their fundamental tech. It's almost always a wild complication. Though in many cases, the wild complication is legally or semantically important. For example all of these "prediction markets" would be better and more efficient as databases. But they would also be shut down or never allowed to start up. Most of the top 100 cryptocurrency projects do not need to exist, let alone "be blockchains." XRP is the big standout here. But the blockchain part has become spiritually important.
Mengapa anda menerbitkan stablecoin ? Dan menjadikan XEC sebagai bahan bakar stablecoin tersebut. Bukankah XEC telah menjadi lapisan 1 ?. Mengapa tidak fokus untuk pertumbuhan eCash yang lebih besar lagi? Menurut analisa saya di masa mendatang eCash adalah stablecoin yang siap melampaui USd bahkan Euro dan USDc di masa depan .
Unfortunately success is based on outcomes and not focusing on nebulous concepts like "even greater growth for XEC." You can sit around all day "focused on greater growth for XEC" to the exclusion of all other activities. At the end of the day nothing has happened that benefited XEC. Building stablecoins that leverage the unique tech capabilities of XEC to be more performant than existing stablecoins with market caps in the 100s of billions is, in fact, "focused on greater growth for XEC." There are all sorts of other opportunities for this kind of focus. Unfortunately "complaining to devs" is not one of them.
What is your approach to making transactions programmable? Do you write on-chain code like smart contracts or off-chain like the code is executed elsewhere and executes a regular transaction when conditions are met? Or is there some other solution you prefer?
All cryptocurrency transactions are programmable. Transactions have been programmable since Bitcoin's genesis block in 2009. Programmable transactions is not some kind of software problem. Programmable transactions is a social problem, in that outside of cryptocurrency such transactions are subject to various regulatory gates. Increasingly, this is also true within cryptocurrency (see USDT and USDC freezes). As for optimizing the programmability of transactions, a good way to do this is strongly typing your UTXO set, baking the indexer into your full node, and maintaining extensive well-tested libraries in a monorepo where any AI can easily see how everything works. We do this.
POW is a testament to this. Purely built by AI thanks to eCash’s “extensive well-tested libraries in a monorepo where any AI can easily see how everything works.”
Bukankah setiap transaksi eCash di eksekusi akan mencetak smartcontrack dan kode secara otomatis. Saya rasa itu sudah lebih dari cukup. Bahkan saya sudah menggunakannya bertahun tahun. Sebelumnya perkenalkan. Saya adalah seorang pedagang penjual roti dan coffe. Saya memperkenalkan eCash kepada beberapa pelanggan saya dan mereka menyukainya. Sy memperlakukan eCash lebih dari fiat usd/euro. Aset digital diciptakan karena lemahnya uang fiat. Namun apa jadinya jika digital cash (xec) yang digunakan adalah aset itu sendiri. Bukankah itu luar biasa?😅
Can you compare what it’s like living in the various countries you’ve lived in? What are some similarities and differences?
For me the list here is USA (Texas) Netherlands UK USA (east coast) Canada Switzerland Stuff just works in Texas. It boasts the best creature comforts maybe in the history of the world. Problems are typically solved and business owners rush to meet demands. This is characteristic of a lot of the US, especially 30 years ago. Moving to Europe was my first introduction to social complications from over-regulation. I remember being excited when someone opened up a new TGI Fridays restaurant (ofc, I was a spoiled American and missed US restaurants). But after the staff had worked there for some mandatory minimum time, suddenly they were impossible to fire and they all stopped coming to work. The restaurant shut down a couple months later. It was probably a case of some American trying to start a business in Europe and not realizing how things work there (who would DO SUCH A THING). But also, it's not great to organize your society in such a way that you go out of your way to punish people who try to start something. That said NL was great bc as an 11yo I could ride my bike to different cities and enjoy a lot of freedom without needing a car. Though that is out the window for most places worldwide today due to declining public safety everywhere. I went to high school in the UK. Really enjoyed the driving culture. Was incredible that the newspaper had a motoring section. Also nice being able to go to the pub in high school. Still tho I remember to this day going into a restaurant that was completely empty and we had to leave bc "no reservation." Totally alien experience for Americans tho pretty standard everywhere else. This type of thing is indicative of many levels of cultural difference.
USA (east coast). Totally different from Texas. I was in DC and it really is a political city in basically every way. When you land at Dulles you get on the stupidest machine in the world (the mobile lounge, check wikipedia) and you know it is from some insane contract that favors some political interest group, part of the same reason why every airport everywhere is perennially under construction. One time leaving the airport, I was stuck in the parking lot for 45 minutes, because the gate arm wasn't working and the parking attendant didn't have the agency to just lift it and let people leave. Also a case of: the airport parking in DC is about political favorites who were rewarded with some kind of contract. In Houston if a parking lot behaved this way they would be out of business the next day. As with the other examples, these little anecdotes tell you so much more about the local culture than just the parking experience. Canada is very beautiful but I do wish they would stop defining themselves as "not American." Canada is easily the most anti-American place I've ever been. It is also more obsessed with American politics than anywhere else I've ever been. Strangers would see my Texas license plate and start complaining to me about Trump. People you just met will say insane communist stuff out loud in public social situations all the time, which in Canada is called "polite society." Switzerland, well. I just got here. But I have to say, it has been EXTREMELY REASSURING that the grocery stores here have plastic bags, just like the US. Also you can buy cigarettes here without scary pictures on them. I don't smoke, but you can extrapolate a lot of good things about a country from its refusal to implement this globally popular and ridiculous policy. Switzerland is big on rules but, unlike Canada which is also big on rules, in Switzerland it seems to actually work and create clean public spaces, public safety, effective public transportation, etc.
@bytesofman so, FIRMA, in the future.(and i might have got the wrong end of the stick with this relating to google pay)..but will we for example... be able to swap some Staked XEC rewards, to FIRMA lets say EUR and have our FRIMA wallet accessible/ loaded into to Google Pay for example, then rock into a shop and then tap to pay using google pay and it pays out in FIRMA nfc? would that be posisble?
Yes, but NFC Firma payments in stores won't happen tomorrow. One issue is that physical stores are also subject to all kinds of "capture." Cash has been disappearing from stores for lots of reasons, and I'm not sure technology can bring it back without an accompanying cultural shift. For example when you use a credit card in a foreign country, you often get a stupid msg asking if you want to pay in <localCurrency> or <yourCurrency>. You should ALWAYS choose <localCurrency> but the prompt is always such that you are pushed to choose the other one, which charges usually a 5% fee. Some fintech huh? This "service" only exists to add time, complication, and cost to millions of transactions around the world. But stores get a cut so they usually enable it on their POS systems. Merchant and regulatory incentives have been against cash for a long time and are against digital cash even more. The internet and the agent economy will be the first important arena here.
yes very cool, all i hear is get more rewards ready for spending free money ;) 🍻 dont worry, im very patient - longer it takes more rewards we have to spend
Hello, mabuhay from the Philippines. May I ask if there are any plans for integrating Cashfusion support directly into Cashtab? What is the current roadmap status for bringing Cashfusion privacy features to the Cashtab wallet?
Yes, this is currently under development. You can follow progress at reviews.bitcoinabc.org, look for diffs with [alp-fusion] in the title. The roadmap is [] fusion for tokens [] Improve HD support in Cashtab [] fusion support for HD wallets in Cashtab Because fusion requires txs to be made in the background, it is uniquely suited to servers and desktop wallets like electrum. But we could include it as a feature in the mobile app, with the caveat that it will have some battery impacts.
You mentioned "The more interesting opportunities are in creating closed loop crypto economies." I assume by closed loop you mean the stablecoins circulate without exiting into fiat. I think the Firma card is a huge strategic step. If merchants see users paying via a Firma card (Firma balance -> Card payment -> Merchant gets fiat) it will build trust in a way that makes merchants far more likely to accept Firma directly since they know it can be spent in ordinary card-accepting businesses. Once the trust is built, how would you proceed to go fully closed loop? Would you create a merchant app for accepting Firma (e.g grocery stores can't just use a regular peer to peer phone app) or would you give the merchants some sort of hardware for accepting Firma?
It sounds good but in the real world this is not an effective strategy. A lot of people felt this way about crypto for direct payments when it was just getting off the ground, 2013-2015. Some stores even responded and did accept crypto payments. These were complicated to deal with and ended up being a fad when leading cryptocurrencies like bitcoin deprecated onchain payments. Even money didn't start in this way. It's not like oh trust is built bc I see money in the stores. No, money got off the ground bc the state required it for taxes, or militaries/mercenaries/commodities-producers demanded it for payment. Then stores take it because it is useful to them. Being useful is always step 1. Starting a credit card is a relationship with a bank. You will always be beholden to that bank, unless you are the bank. Banks also typically expect a lot of money for this specific type of relationship. Because it's a bank, there are special rules and costs for every jurisdiction involved with the card. One can not simply "start a card" and have it work for every user who wants this card. Cashtab "just works" exactly the same for a user in Jakarta or Tokyo or Bogota or El Paso. So does native Firma. But credit cards will never be like this. We would like to get there someday regardless. But to start we will support users to paying their existing credit card bill with Firma.
@bytesofman - in your last podcast, you mentioned AMM's (automated market makers) will they be coming to eCash this year potentially? was hoping you could briefly descirbe what this looks like on eCash
This is actually live in Cashtab right now. If you go to the Agora Page, check out the "alp-dex" pair of XECX and FIRMA I think the market price is actually off because it is not being used a lot. Instead of Agora, where the price is set at a specific quantity of sats, the AMM sets the price based on available inventory on the server. It's like Uniswap but it "just works" with one click in an atomic swap instead of interminable permission and signing txs and then finally a (maybe) successful swap. For now XECX/FIRMA is the only pair, but any two ALP tokens could be swapped like this. Could also add support for any token to be swapped like this vs XEC. Give it a try! It's working now.
What is the best way to secure FIRMA?
The Firma app (android/iOS) or the Cashtab Android app. Of course, it would also do fine in any cold storage option (paper wallet or similar). We are working on token support for Trezor at BitcoinABC, but this will probably not come until next year.
In your opinion, has there been any cryptocurrency over the past decade with technology superior to eCash (XEC)? And can eCash achieve success in the crypto world?
There are a lot of projects out there with impressive technology. However most (all?) projects with impressive early tech have suffered from some combination of premature ossification and "everyone got rich last cycle and now nobody cares about this" Take a look at, for example, the Ethereum Foundation. Ethereum UX is just as terrible as it was 5 years ago. It remains some of the least bad in crypto, which is great. But they've been spending 100s of millions of dollars to do what exactly? Pet political projects, paying professional job-havers to have jobs. You don't have to poke around the dev docs of major projects for long before running into puzzling gaps, inside baseball. Solana is also technically impressive. They are first and foremost a VC project. As such, they pivot into the demands of the crypto market to chase the highest growth, leading to "innovation" like pump dot fun. Okay great. Do you need crypto to speculate? No. It is though an enormous (and enormously profitable) Rube Goldberg machine. eCash is the only project that (1) isn't chasing something shiny and off-mission and (2) has a mission that means a technological step change in money. I have to add (2) because projects like Doge are also, for better or worse, also not chasing anything shiny and off-mission. But they are also pointless. I'm not going to pretend I don't envy the success of these other projects. But they are exciting businesses at best, fads at worst. Very few technological step changes.
GM What’s your insight about the Clarity Act? What do you think about the actual bonds market turmoil? How close we are to a financial crisis like in 2008? BTW Firma it’s great!
Politics is fundamentally about who gets what and why. It's entertaining how these acts get names and personalities and reputations and lip service and narratives and hopes and dreams and fears and curses. Everything ultimately comes down to who gets what and why. What technology will be tolerated? What technology will be erased? What technology cannot be stopped? Re: bond markets and financial crises. I have no idea. The world is far more complex today than it was in 2008. Even a shadowy force with perfect information could not crunch all the variables at play in an effective way. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that we are probably leaving the period of unipolar relative peace and entering a multipolar period of increased violent conflict vs the last 50 years. This is also a reason to bet on unseizable assets and, separately, Switzerland. Re: Firma; thanks!
This whole site was vibe coded (I'm still shocked by this). As a developer, are you increasingly using AI for coding?
Yes. If you aren't using AI for development at this point you are going to be pwned. You might be pwned nevertheless. Still, not using AI dev at this point is like riding a horse into a drone fight.