Bitcoin is software, and software is made by people.
Bitcoin's software developments are difficult to quantify.
Bitcoin also needs very good wallets.
Mr. Jason loves developments that Bitcoin and Bitcoin wallets make him a modern-day hero without a cape.
Enjoy this great interview.
Well, it really came about as a result of my hobbies and interests.
So I've worked as a software engineer for about 15 years, and I've never worked full-time on free open-source software,
but I got into development of free and open-source software when I got interested in Bitcoin.
And the first thing that I did was fork the Bitcoin Core repository and created my project that I called Statoshi,
which basically did a lot of metrics and statistics collection of what the Bitcoin node was doing.
And so that was the first of what eventually turned into about a dozen different open-source projects that I maintain now.
And pretty much all of these have come about as a result of my own personal research
and also just things that I've run into while building other wallets and applications on top of Bitcoin,
various utility tools and things that I think would be of use to people other than just myself.
So this really comes down to the philosophy of if you are doing something new that is repeatable or is a tool that can be used by other people,
and it doesn't cost you anything to make that available to everyone, then why not?
So there are certain aspects of, I think, society, humanity, and so on that belong to everyone collectively.
And one of those is money.
This is a sort of abstract concept that I and a lot of other people believe should not be controlled or owned by anyone because it is a collective agreement.
And if we are trying to improve money, then the changes that happen to whatever monetary system we're building ought to be done through some sort of consensus process
where anyone who cares can contribute, can chime in, and can really make their own decision about what they think the attributes of the system should be.
So this is the case for Bitcoin, for a lot of crypto systems.
It's also the case for certain operating systems like Linux.
I'm a big fan of Linux and have been running it almost exclusively for 20 years now.
And it's once again because I think that something like an operating system,
which is like one of the most fundamental aspects of what a lot of your life is now built around because you're running so many other pieces of software on top of the operating system,
that in order to be able to provide the best level of security and to make it as open and available to everyone in the world, you want it to be a free open source software project.
So at the end of the day, it really comes down to philosophy and also I think a certain security mindset.
But this can be difficult for some people to understand because in terms of capitalism and monetization, it can certainly present itself with a lot of different challenges.
It's certainly a lot harder to make money when you're spending all of your time writing something that you just give away for free.
Absolutely. This actually ties in well to what I just stated about open source software is that the monetization aspect is difficult because you're not charging people to download, install and use the software itself.
And so I've been writing Bitcoin wallet software for seven years now, and this has generally been a challenge.
The first few years I was working for an enterprise company, so we were entering into actual contractual relationships with other companies.
That was more straightforward. But when I look at the free open source wallet scene, what you see is that if there's a actual organization or sort of company or a set of people around that that do need to earn some sort of predictable revenue,
and they're not charging for the software itself, then probably what's going to happen is there's additional sort of add on features and other services that they'll then take a cut off of.
So, you know, one of the most common things that we've seen to date is that wallets, they look out at the ecosystem, and it's very obvious that like the most profitable thing to do in the crypto ecosystem is to offer exchange services.
But the infrastructure and business differences between a wallet and an exchange are pretty huge, and sort of the requirements for what you have to do on the back end.
So what we're seeing more wallets do to date is integrating with other providers.
I think also my own wallet has done this. I think most of the hardware wallets like Trezor and Ledger have also done this, or at least the ones that support many different crypto tokens because then, you know, it makes sense that they can basically get in there
and offer swapping services that they can take a cut out of. And so, you know, where's it going to go from there? Yes, perhaps other services that can be tied into private key management.
So we certainly think that things like identity are going to become more important in the coming years.
Securing your data in general, I think, is important, though it will be challenging to, I think, get people to understand the value of some of those things, at least to the point that they value it enough to pay for it.
So that's, I think, what's going to be the harder part is not necessarily building these tools and services, but being able to convince people and give them a user experience that they think is worthwhile and is actually something that they're going to pay for.
The question is always funny because I try to stay as much away from government and regulation stuff as possible.
You know, the Bitcoin wallets that I've worked on have always been these distributed multi SIG wallets so that, you know, we're not considered a financial institution and we don't, you know, fall under any existing regulations.
And as a fairly staunch like libertarian myself, I like as little government as possible.
So, you know, when, when people ask, you know, what are the best policies, I kind of flip it around on its head and at least in the terms of like looking at the United States and our history.
When you look at all of the laws and to date, you know, insane number of regulations that have been piled on top of each other, you know, over the generations.
I think that the most valuable policies and regulations that can be enacted are those that instead of trying to protect the consumer or the citizen against scammers or bad actors or whatever is actually much more valuable to enact policies that
protect the citizens against the government enacting bad policies, but it's you know it's not something that you see very often.
Definitely here and there maybe like one city or state or something that's kind of an outlier will do that, but it's certainly not something that we tend to see at the national level.
It seems to me like the, the best policies that have been acted at least in the United States where the things like the Bill of Rights and a lot of the amendments to the Constitution, which the overarching theme there was actually limiting the government.
So, I would much rather see policies that do that but unfortunately this day and age that's a very rare thing. It tends to go against the interest of the people who are creating those policies in the first place.