Humans of Crypto #4 with Paul Puey

welcome to the humans of crypto podcast this is episode number four and i'm joined by the wonderful paw pooy i've been raving about the edge wallet for many years now one of the only non-custodian hd multi-asset really nice mobile hot wallet out there for for beginners and paul has been at the back of all of this since 2015. so let's see how much of him is in the product i'm so excited for this episode thank you for joining and let's jump in [Music] hello everyone i can't believe this is already episode four and i'm joined by the one and only paul puy founder and ceo or i said co-founder and ceo of edge wallet thank you so much for being here paul i'm i'm really really honored to have you here well thanks for being honored thanks for having me glad to be the fourth person on the episode moment we look back after you've got a thousand episodes we'll go oh my god i was number four can you believe it you're such an early adopter paul like for everything obviously very cool well we try to be i i try to be although it can be it can be tough especially in this space when you're a super early adopter things kind of hurt you know when they say bleeding edge it's uh it's definitely partially true this technology can be a little tough at the beginning but that's when you have the most reward you know adopting something early is not easy but you know a risk reward and also um effort to reward i think it's pretty high uh when you come in early yeah where are you tuning in from today ah from home base in san diego this is edge headquarters we're actually in our offices we've got a space specifically for doing things like this little podcasts uh we'd like to kick up one of our own and also for whenever we're on other podcasts such as your own wow so your own little recording uh studio yeah it's our own little mini recording studio it doubles as a small conference room when necessary because we're obviously not recording all the time um yeah here in beautiful san diego it's a bit of an overcast day but our location overlooks the harbor it's a great little spot we love it over here close to a lot of the restaurants and bars of you know little italy um not quite as much as what's going on in amsterdam you guys have hustle and bustle all over the top like i can't walk far enough it's no matter where i am there's just hustle and bustle but we're we're kind of a i don't call it the quieter town but it's a bit more relaxed but with still a lot to do so happy to be over here out of the four guests that i've had you're now the second coming out of san diego and this is completely coincidental is there like the other uh kalani mo from the velaz community a hawaiian guy san diego okay well he'll have to come on by to the meetup we just hosted one had about 70 80 people come out to the meetup uh was it earlier this month no middle of last month in july i forgot we're already in august um and yeah he's got to come out and maybe even talk about what he's up to so we're looking for speakers for the meetup eleanor if you're ever in in california definitely you have an open invite to come by chat and kind of tell your story of what you've gone through in the crypto world you've been in the space for quite some time working from some very established big names in the space so you know i think you deserve to be interviewed you have been interviewed a bunch of times on other podcasts but we'd love to have you here in person you know and actually uh get a chance to interact yeah for sure for sure is that is that a thing does everybody just goes after work goes to the beach and something like is that like the lifestyle that i'm missing out is that the crypto community is like do you go surfing and talk about krypto is that what happens there's definitely some surf there's definitely some surfers one of my co-founders damon cattillo's a big surfer he loves to get out there i'm more of a snowboarder back when i was a board sports person so it's not quite really a san diego thing but in california you're two hours away from anything you want snow a couple hours away in the winter time you want the desert which is gorgeous at times a couple hours away you want the beach a couple hours away probably the only thing you don't get as far as weather and environment is humidity ironically no matter where you go you can't find humidity in and around san diego for the by and large compared to most parts of the world that sounds nice yeah no that's actually actually sounds really lovely amazing you can have 90 degrees outside and it's nice and calm and dry you know the nice little breeze that's a gorgeous spot to be so please all you people out there in the crypto space come and visit and come by the meetup which we hold you know at least once a month yeah you've been hosting that meetup for a couple of years i believe no yeah i know we've been hosting it in our office originally in 2017 when we moved into a new office in a different part of san diego and downtown gaslamp area we kind of outgrew that space and we filled it so we didn't really have any space that we could host a meetup in anymore and it bounced around to a few other co-working spaces and then we just a month ago it's actually pretty much today is our our month adversary of being in our new space um here in little italy and we did host one event so far one of the bitcoin cryptocurrency meetups of bob bitcoin and open blockchain meetup um over here and a lot of people came out they were you could see there was a pent up demand to finally interact with people again in person and so we're looking at doing that on a regular basis and so we have a dedicated space for it looking to have various projects present yeah educate people on the industry in the space nice i i think we both share that that interest for the community side of things for the crypto community because like you said we've been we've been longing for human contact but even more for crypto people oh yeah how has is that been like an integral part of you being in crypto has been to just be with other crypto people oh absolutely um i i got into cryptocurrency in 2013 discovered it just online watching a blog post no friend told me about it no co-worker told me about it and a lot of my contacts that i knew my friends family they had barely heard of it and none of them had any interest in it um i did have one friend though he said that oh bitcoin you know i remember i remember dabbling in that a couple years ago this is 2013 so a couple years ago was like 2011 and he said yeah i think i mined half a bitcoin on my laptop and this is a good friend of mine he's also a software engineer got technical background like me we talk about all sorts of dorky you know computer science stuff and you know technology geeky stuff and i got mad i was like how is it that you managed to mine bitcoin and of all the conversations we've had you never once mentioned it to me in 2011 nonetheless like a time when i would have loved to get into it especially that early but that was it that's the closest and so really i needed to kind of seek out other people to interact with and talk to about get insights from and that's when i found the local bitcoin meetup here in san diego and actually through that i actually met all of my co-founders and our early investors our early seed bootstrap investors that helped form the company so i have a lot to i have a lot that i owe to that community and so this is part of how i kind of give back you know both helping supply a space a venue and sponsorship you know pizza and beer to our local community as well as helping um other communities that do these kind of events to onboard their community into crypto so yeah this is definitely a big part of kind of my past and i feel like i'm a lot to thank for it i still enjoy being a part of it yeah it's interesting i i fell into crypto as well through a meet-up so it's interesting to to see those that come in through different venues to crypto but it's sure that once we come in through the human side and obviously this is called the humans of crypto podcast i wanted to be able to shine light on people that are passionate about this industry and yeah just to get to know them better but also to realize that maybe you have the same feeling we meet amazing people all the time at these meetups like all the time like i feel like they have cool stories it's just it's a really interesting crowd and i felt just so privileged to to have all of these wonderful interactions and and that's why i wanted to also this is also my way of getting back i guess to a wider audience i feel so much more real like that i remember that first meet up i went to and actually saw other people who were interested about interested in technology had been in it for longer than i had been told their stories of what it had felt like getting involved what things were like in 2012 and 2011 when i wasn't involved and it felt like wow it inspired me a lot like i was already kind of inspired by you know having read the white paper having researched it but meeting people in real life that are driven can tell you how they feel and also understand that there's different perspectives and interests in crypto at the time it was bitcoin and pretty much no other currency was really talked about much i mean doge hit the scene i think in 2014 but you know for the most part people were talking about bitcoin but even then there were already different takes on it and different um pieces of it that made people interested in the technology i remember one person that showed it to me to be shut up once that i had seen but they said oh yeah he's come a couple times and he was huge on privacy like he didn't introduce himself with his real name he literally brought a wi-fi router that would connect to tor for him to connect his laptop and his phone to while he was at the meetup he didn't want to use his regular phone going over normal 5g he he had equipment to help preserve his privacy and that made me like wow this isn't easy to do but there's people that care enough about it to jump through huge hoops to achieve it and so just meeting the different characters the different humans in crypto and how you know as humans one of the the hallmark traits of humanity and what a lot of people hate about it but as well what makes us so powerful is our is our differences the fact that we are different people um and that that can bring about a lot of inconvenience frustration because like i don't get why you don't see it the way i see it blah blah blah isn't it obvious but you know it's because they're different they're different people they value different things they come from different backgrounds um but with that comes the the variety of people that have different expertises and that i think is what makes us very powerful is coming from the different angles having different ideas and where new ideas come and change the old is because we have such different backgrounds and if we were all just homogeneous and all the same it would be kind of boring and innovation wouldn't really flourish so um that is a definitely a huge piece of why i appreciated meeting the real people and you and and seeing how both alike and their interesting crypto but how different they are and what brings them to it in the first place so what brought you to crypto would you are you now uh going around with your own tour wi-fi router what what how did you stick i'll preface it i'll just be straight up honest i'm one of the biggest privacy hypocrites okay okay but i'll explain that a little better hopefully i can gain back some of that respect i just lost by all the snowden fans um and so why am i a privacy hypocrite it's because i do fundamentally believe in a strong level of privacy especially at the technology level but i'm not willing to jump through hoops so i'm not that guy that will go and bring a router around or have tor installed and change the settings of all his app to route through a tour on another phone that kind of thing because fundamentally i want i want it for everybody i want it for the masses even the people that don't care so my only option is to promote those that i think are those tools and software and services that provide privacy kind of by default automatically without jumping through hoops and then we try to build that as well an edge like we try to build a product that provides i won't call it the absolute highest level of privacy ever because in order to do that you've got to jump through a lot of hoops but we're trying to up the bar and i feel like other products have done that as well up the bar for what is your ideological goal right so you want your ideological goal you want that to be adopted well you want to up the bar for what kind of product you can build that achieves the highest level of whatever that is privacy autonomy security but for a 90 percentile group versus a one to five percentile group so if you want the one to five percentile group you can always layer more things and make things more difficult and achieve very very high levels if you want the 90 percentile group you have to make some compromises unfortunately but fundamentally i think making those compromises is far better than just saying sorry for everyone else there's really nothing accessible to you you just you go and stick with you know the basic tools that don't give you any don't give you any privacy and so like a good example of that is i tried signal years ago like seven or so years ago or six years ago i hated it it was garbage um very unusable very minimal feature sets and so i stuck with the junk good old sms and uh what is it at that time telegram which is horrible for privacy uh ironically um at least for encrypted level privacy um and then signal got a lot better and it actually is better than many of the not so private applications including telegram whatsapp and whatnot and like that's what i'm talking about right where i can now recommend the product to my friends that don't give a damn about privacy and now when i chat with them i get that privacy even if they don't care about it i get it and so fundamentally i think that's what the industry should be building is the stuff where your ethos is hidden under the covers right if you've got some weird agenda that's just you know ethics thing and what you believe in what your soul wants to see in this world well you can't go in preaching that in your product you just got to deliver a good product and then people get it you know and and that's kind of why i'm a hypocrite to go back i'm hypocrite because i don't use it i don't like it until it's it's at the 90 percentile usability that's kind of what i feel and that was to answer why you're encrypted that was like i think it's so easy to go back for you to go back to your product and we will go to edge because i want to talk a lot about this wallet which i've been raving about for years as well but i want to get back to you to to you to like you're that that okay that that friend who missed this opportunity to talk to you about crypto in 2011. no forever like guilty uh because never early enough right um but then you like you went from and this is just a sneak peek you went from rock climb from nvidia to rock climbing to crypto like yeah how did you know what was that i even there's even before that i went from nvidia to um co-owner and operator of a restaurant bar nightclub right to being a climber an instructor and gym manager program manager to bitcoin crypto how in the world did all of that happen um so at my heart i'm a technologist i think that's that's the root of my soul yes i do love technology i'm a dork and geek at heart um when i was i think in fifth grade i didn't know what age that was eight or nine years old or so i already started to like pick up coding this is when coding wasn't very easy you couldn't learn the stuff online and you know there were no boot camps you could pick up there were no drag and drop coding type of lessons that you could give to little kids i started picking up coding i picked up a book on how to program and and asked my mom who was in the technology field as well hey what does an array mean what what does that mean and i started writing some things that i just felt like were interesting i uh i built a database on an old computer that maybe most people most of your listeners might be too young to have ever heard of but the commodore a really old 80s computer that was very popular at the time i wrote a database because i kind of showed my entrepreneurial spirit which also dates pretty far back i ran a small company called miracle mail outs where i i created databases of uh mail farms you know all the spam you get in the mail like little cards from real estate agents from insurance agents well guess what i wasn't junk i was at fault for all that spam you get in the mail my dad was a real estate agent all of his co-workers were real estate agents and they farm out and they pass out the little flyers yeah mail out all these flyers saying hey would you like to sell your house you know we'll help you out so i created a database to hold all the names and addresses because one didn't exist that was actually usable had it print onto labels and had some buddies literally physically sticking labels on envelopes and then mailing them out um and yeah nothing existed so i built a database for that and put it on shareware made a few hundred dollars in shareaware back in the commodore days of the 80s so i've always been a technologist went to school in berkeley for engineering software engineering loved it especially loved kind of solving the hard problems of engineering like in graphics graphics was easily the thing that kind of caught hold of me like my god this is like magic you know you've heard the term anything sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from magic and to me seeing like i was you know many computer people were gamers seeing the graphics rendered in the game always brought up the question of how do they do that like how do those beautiful images get on screen how are they rotated to look like real life how are they shaded all of that just blew my mind and so that was one of my early passions in computer science was graphics the the math involved in it transformations the lighting calculations all of that blew my mind so um right after i graduated went into the graphics field i worked for a company that's now defunct it's called chromatic research uh left there after a few months after they went defunct and went to nvidia that's probably the most recognizable company to your listeners obviously now they're very relevant in the crypto space being very very relevant for chips that can mine cryptocurrency at the time they were purely graphics uh when i joined and i was surrounded by some of the smartest people i'd ever you know just even been around let alone worked with but where i think my life changed that made it that made cryptocurrency more relevant was uh i actually had to stop working as an engineer what got into a lot of physical limitations uh health issues repetitive strain which is really common with engineers like using a computer and i had gone through a lot of you know kind of western conventional medicine therapy you know shoot me up with some painkillers and tried to uh get me to not really get into surgery but kind of talked about that as an option and nothing really worked and you know i call that the traditional system versus kind of the the new wave of thinking the traditional system in medical and health and wellness really failed me like nothing worked and it wasn't until i started to see what i call kind of the the more forward-thinking vision of i guess healthcare physical therapy chiropractic uh natural natural wellness healing that i started to get better wow right and looking at not just what you do but also than what you eat and so having transitioned to working in uh the health and wellness space at the gym that i worked at and going into the rock climbing world where you're surrounded by i look for lack of a better term a lot of the granola personalities that believe in more natural living and stay away from just kind of drugs and medicine and you know the typical stuff i started to see and open my eyes to this concept of wow everything that we've been told all our life as far as how to live what you do for yourself and for the world just being correct is really mis misguided right it was really open my eyes like wow this is a pretty misguided world like and it's a lot driven by money the the medical industry the pharmaceutical industry being very very very driven by money that kind of left an impression on me as like hey i'm going to question authority from now on i'm sure that's the way you're supposed to be doing things well let me let me really ask that question a little bit harder and that started to really ring true when some family members and actually an old pet of mine a dog were diagnosed with cancer my i lost my dad to cancer and at the time that he was diagnosed i started to kind of research it and and learn about what western medicine does to deal with it and really learn that all of that is a total band-aid it doesn't address both the the root cause like how should we be living different to avoid it and then also what can you do to what gives your best chance of survival all right and as opposed to the traditional like all right let's just blast this person with radiation and poison their body um there are significantly other ways you know especially via diet that can help and have shown to be very effective and so that was kind of like you know because i had left technology i started to open my eyes to hey how does the world really work i wasn't just sitting in front of a computer and creating software even though it was beautiful imagery so yeah it was really starting to open up so you went from graphics computer to discovering a different way of of taking care of your life and living yeah and how people should be so you started questioning authority before getting into crypto so we're getting the crypto health made you questions actually health majors and everything interesting yeah health made me question a lot of things um and really they're it's just big big organization i started to question big organization a lot of people that are in the anarchist libertarian space are very anti-government they're like oh it's all about private sector right anti-government no public funding no taxes whatnot i don't actually agree with that philosophy but i don't wholeheartedly disagree with it what i've found is it's not about government versus private it's about just large enterprise versus the individual and government is just the largest of largest of enterprises they're the biggest company and i think elon musk had a famous tweet right is that governments are just i can't remember the exact quote but they're the largest companies that just happen to have a monopoly on violence but large companies are not that different they're just small countries and countries are very large companies and someone said no well you know companies don't have armies right well well if you were to if you were to go into the middle of the apple space station headquarters dead center in the middle of it walk up to some apple employee and kick them in between the legs sure do you think do you think apple doesn't have an army of lawyers okay of security of security that will quickly detain you and escort you either out of the building or into what is the equivalent of a jail cell in their building until someone in a larger a larger entity such as the state or the city would escort you out of it that's a mini version of an army many very many it's a mini version of an army now it's probably not the kind that just goes and patrols the streets and you know arrests people that look suspicious they patrol what you can download or not so through their their walled gardens they they can enforce certain policies and their way of thinking over their use absolutely so that in the digital world they have their own digital country yeah and in their digital country they have their own rules which they can enforce now they don't enforce them via violence which at least appeals to the anarchist philosophy but physically inside of their headquarters you're you know they will enforce their rules via violence if necessary so yeah to me there's not a big difference and i think the larger the companies get the closer they get to having the corruption of a country and so kind of getting back to that you know human experience i had was yeah i'm not trusting some of these large organizations anymore because they really have a lot of financial gain to be had by misleading what is the truth of our world and how we live and so i you know started to question that and about three years into working in that space it was between about 20 2009 to 2013 is when i discovered bitcoin right and bitcoin really put it all together for me um there was a little bit of not really the distrust but frustration with the financial system as well um working in small business i'm not sure how many of you listening to this have ever worked in small business but just taking credit cards all right the process of taking credit cards in your business should be pretty straightforward for us at the gym we had to do an annual audit of our pci compliance and it's about a 300 question 300 question survey asking about different processes that we go through in our company to make sure that we don't compromise user information and credit card information everything from do you have a separate network that is used to swipe a card versus what people use to surf the internet i'm like who has that right do you have uh cameras to make sure that when someone hands over their car that card isn't uh isn't compromised by the staff member that happens to be physically holding it and there's about 300 of these type of questions and by the way we said you know a lot of these we can't comply with like we'd have to shut the business down in order to comply with a lot of these um these requirements and then guess what the pci compliance experts say okay that's fine just put not applicable there's always a third box yes we're compliant no we're not or not applicable or we simply can't we're not able to otherwise it would affect the business so about sixty percent of the questions literally said okay we can't comply and we submit that and we're like okay great there's your pci compliance certificate what was the whole point of this in the first place oh it's you could still operate if you're not compliant but if there's a breach and that breach was due to one of the things that you're not you you claim you're not compliant with then you're liable as a company and can be fined and blah blah blah so you're this is this now goes back to an experience i had working at the restaurant bar nightclub which is you're pretty much assumed and actually not even assumed you are shoveled down the path of guaranteed to break the rules that way the big brother or law enforcement brother at any point in time when they don't like what you're doing can come knocking at the door because you're always breaking the rules when i worked at the when i worked at this nightclub the capacity of the building was claimed into being 150 people if we literally put 150 people 150 people in the size of our building people would walk in and think it was a dead night and leave we needed to at least have about 300 to 400 people and that was what you would consider to be a comfortable nightclub for our size that was but that was simple you just we couldn't operate and we realized that was the way things operated across the entire industry is you're given a little sign that placard that you can put up at the entrance saying this is the capacity of the building but they know you can't operate at that capacity so if it for whatever reason they don't like what you're doing they can shut you down same thing with this pci compliance is you're pretty much guaranteed you're not going to comply so you're given just rope to hang yourself and you're already hanging and as soon as you stumble and you just kind of rub elbows with the wrong people and upset the wrong people they can come knocking at the door so that was an experience in the financial side of my world before bitcoin yeah both the financial side and the house i mean i wasn't i didn't feel like it was corrupt it was just broken right i was like oh this seems pretty broken but that was the level of my kind of understanding of the financial side um i did feel like the large companies in the health and wellness and pharmaceutical and medicine space those i felt like were corrupt discover bitcoin in 2013 it all definitely tied together like oh my god a way for me to be able to receive money without that weird risk of pci compliance right also to be able to receive an equivalent of cash without having to deal with physical cash i used to spend my moneys riding my bike with a backpack with about thirty to forty thousand dollars worth of cash to deposit in the bank from the uh the nightclub i'd work that because i was the manager over there and so mondays where we're closed and go count wet dirty dollar bills that were placed on a bar like oh in a way the the fees that you pay for a credit card felt worth it at the time so you're just stuck between a rock and a hard place right you're gonna pay a ton of the fees have the psa compliance nightmare or you're going to be dealing with cash which is a big mess and a security risk and you just feel uncomfortable literally trying to deposit this cash and so that that all set the stage it all really really set the stage it didn't take anything for me to believe in bitcoin i wasn't the kind of person that discovered it and put it down i go oh it looks interesting i'll take a look at it a year from now no i went full head first into it and i hope none of my old co-workers from the gym i worked at are listening but easily in the last three months of me working there i was the worst employee because all i wanted to do was listen to podcasts and watch videos about about bitcoin and learn more read blogs i would drive to work sit in my car in the parking lot and just oh i got to finish this podcast and co-workers would drive by they'd see me just sitting there you go hey and walk in walk into work while i was still there uh and uh that was just the the drive that i had i i got to get into the space and say i said okay after using bitcoin and crypto for a little bit so yeah i think it's still early there's a lot to build yeah and uh let me join this revolution be part of the history books you know that my kids will read about and so here i am today wow i i i can imagine you're in that parking lot and i can also imagine the couple of months of your rabbit hole because i saw an sorry but an old video from 2015 of you pitching air bits and oh wow i was like oh yeah it was so green back then nobody's probably nervous it's touching because this industry is so young and at the time already you're already questioning the early adopters which feels weird because i was not even in the space at that time right i only came in 2017. and you're like yeah i know i'm late or something and i'm like oh my god no you're so early you don't even realize it when you're in it but you're so early and you had such an amazing premise through that pitch you were saying you know there's some of some you were talking about the disagreement between byron and his other co-founder with coinbase to whether you have these yeah the founders of blockchain info and uh so you start that way and i thought oh my god like time has gone has gone since obviously um but you've stuck to those ideals you you've kept even though you're not the crazy person with your own tor router you've built a product that has been aligned with those values since day one and i think that's really unique i think that's really unique and even to hear you presented in 2014 everything you're saying is still what edges today so i think that was yeah i don't know just to see your progression and it's it's been six years it's only only only or it still feels like a lifetime it feels like a lifetime yeah it feels like yesterday because i i have to look back at some of those old videos and some photos like sometimes my iphone goes back to 2014 go oh my gosh number one look i had more hair then and less gray hair but number two gosh what was life life like then what were we pitching were we building what was the team like who were the customers um yes in the industry what were the products to deal with video in that video just to say you mentioned that you you say yeah someone on the panel is like i think there's even peter todd on that pen one stuff oh he was it was the miami conference i remember 2015. now we can also talk about this miami conference of this year but some of one of the person on the on the panel is asking um how many users you have at that time and yet three thousand at three thousand you three thousand downloads yeah how many do we have just launched how many times i think we're approaching two million i think we're just shy of two million so we've definitely come a long way i do remember when we first launched um oh thank you thank you i do remember i when a day with like 30 installs was a good day like oh wow we got a whole 30 but i mean it was so early the industry was so small at the time you know where i could go to an event and triple our downloads i can go to event like literally because our downloads were like low tens and if we had a 30 downloads because i literally installed 30.

oh paul went to a meet up yeah we can see it on the ground spike now it's it's hardly a blip and it's like you know the numbers are large enough for a meetup will hardly make a blip at any one point in time but in aggregate you know i i don't want to downplay those little events because in aggregate they're the things that seed the user base over time you know if people are happy with the product they let other people know who let other people know and so those seemingly small and hard to measure you know roi events where you meet real people and they engage with you and the product um yeah they're the hardest roi to measure but we fundamentally fleck are some of the most valuable so what inspired you you saw this industry you went you jumped right in by by rock climbing world and you wanted to solve an issue you wanted to you saw the wallet worlds you saw how difficult it was for normal people to deal with cryptocurrencies i think um and you wanted to create a convenient product with privacy not by default but in like you mentioned earlier that is that is seamless so people do have a product that protects them gives them privacy but they don't have to jump through hoops what sparked that like was that was that always you like i'm wondering like is this product you know what will edge be in 50 years you know what is what is this type of products what is so different about them than the others of this world that do hold your private keys so the trying to think of it more of an ideological level than like the nuanced details of edge but and yes it is me i think the the user experience part um and simplifying the technology is me and at its heart i wasn't this way early on i think it was actually the experience of having to leave technology so when i left nvidia you know i had repetitive strain i couldn't really use a computer i could barely use my candy bar phone at the time this is literally this is the 90s here right which is uh you did like a weird did you get like a really horrible carpal tunnel syndrome is that i had all of the above like i was admittedly a workaholic i first had tendonitis which was just achy hands um and then it started to kind of radiate up shoulders and arms wrists um then it started to affect the nerves with both carpital and cubital tunnel for those of you that know your biology and anatomy um and at one point in time i literally would tape pens to my hands and then hit the keyboard this way then it started to hurt a different part of my wrist no you did not do that oh no i was you believe me i was a wreck but i loved i see i love technology i love what i was doing i i i loved just building and i did whatever i could to be able to keep going and that where i called it quits or i said okay i've gone too far was when i remember uh it was you know it obviously uses your hand you need to use your hands to click a mouse right and use it using a mouse is pretty important so the keyboard you've got to use there's no good not really much of a alternative there but you've got you've got to click a mouse and so instead of having to click with my hand or fingers i remember apple was kind of new to the space and launching a mouse where the whole mouse is clickable right there wasn't the button on the mouse the whole thing could be pressed and that was a button so i literally put one of those on the floor and routed a usb cable to my computer so i could tap it with my foot i know this is total face palm right this is i was young and stupid i already admit that i was a workaholic young and stupid um and then my ankle started hurting from doing that and i said okay i gotta stop and that's when i kind of started exiting the uh the space oh my so you physically couldn't be a computer science like i couldn't be i couldn't i couldn't use a computer for anything like just my day-to-day stuff like just surf the web and order stuff online pay bills that are online i i couldn't even do that and gratefully thankfully i was surrounded by friends and family and significant others that helped me through those years and of course good health and wellness advisors and not called doctors chiropractors that helped me through those times as well which i appreciate but uh that that experience actually helped with my drive to really simplify ux because bad ux physically hurt it physically hurt if i had to use a computer and something made me go click click click click click click i can't find what i need to do and then click click click click clicking it physically would hurt so i remember that was a metric for me when going into what the design of air bits would be and edge is is this going to physically hurt me i see you know um can i simplify this so like to this day if i have to use another app to do like to put my keys into you right i switch phones i've got to transfer my keys entering 24 words is a pain in the ass like i don't want to have to do that i don't want to type those things in and so that is a physical pain i'm not as bad as i was before it doesn't hurt nearly as bad but i you know i still have some remnants of rsi so it still keeps me on check um and that is a driving force because generally speaking good ui won't hurt someone who has rsi or at least it would hurt a lot less so i'm gonna this is the 10 20 minute answer to your question you know what did i why did i want what do i do in the space to simplify and make things easier and then the why so i kind of answered the why in a long-winded story answer the why i want ux to not hurt and then what do we do in edge that helps drive that well i've always been uh i wouldn't call it a hater but yeah i kind of admitted i've kind of always been a hater of key management um at that meetup that i was a part of i started to become an organizer and helping get events kicked off and i remember saying i'm going to teach people how to use an app called armory which i think might predate you ellie it was pretty popular in 2013 2014 it was a one of the first multi-sig wallets but it wasn't really multi-sig it was split key where you can split your key into multiple shards and then bring them together to sign a transaction it was also offline or you could be offline and i started uh giving a presentation at a meetup there's only a small meetup like 13 people showed up i was giving a presentation on how to use armory and i had all my notes ready together i'm like oh this is going to be a great educational event because i know it's you know somewhat complicated but i can help people understand this better yeah literally 15 minutes into my 30 minute presentation i wanted to throw my laptop out the window because i could see people look in their eyes going what are you serious this is how i use bitcoin and and i felt really bad i still finished the presentation close the laptop and go i am so sorry everybody i know that that was really complicated and um you know i hope you got something out of this but i'm convinced that this industry will will simplify this in the future and i said i'm going to be a part of simplifying this it was that moment still rings i still remember that exact moment it was a small little restaurant you know 13 people around the dinner table and they had a little tiny presentation area but that was a real eye-opener i'm like yeah we can simplify this and i started looking at the different technologies that could do that and and that's where kind of the original idea of air bits which is now edge came about which is simplified key management we apply that at the time in air bits to a wallet focused on payments all right and that's really what walt's for is the money that you use to pay we don't call ourselves a wallet anymore because a wallet's so ambiguous we don't know what a wallet does it's literally a piece of paper with a qr code on it it's a usb stick or it's a piece of software or it's literally a bank account like a custodial bank account is now called a wallet so i kind of refrain from that now i def we define that by what it does and so our original app airbits it was a cr is a bitcoin payment application it helps you pay with bitcoin it lets you find places to spend bitcoin and as you know eleanor i'm big about actually wanting people to use crypto i mean that's what i love about the initiative with bitcoin cash is you know it's spend it let's use it let's spread it it's not just hold it and see it go up in value and that was the initial you know drive around air bits um quickly the cryptocurrency space expanded with many different chains especially when ethereum came around yeah and we said well we need to rebuild and refactor this to support multiple assets as well the realization at that time that payments wasn't really a widely interesting use case like people can use it they do use it but it wasn't one that we could anchor an entire company around and that's when we pivoted to offer trading functionality buy sell from fiat to and from different cryptocurrencies and other financial services in the app and so that's what edge is today it's a self-custody exchange where you still hold your own keys you hold your own money but the primary functionality is exchange services like a lot of the big centralized providers but we make it where you actually hold your funds and you have much much elevated level of privacy much higher elevated level of autonomy and in some ways much lower friction because you don't have to for much of the functionality and edge you don't have to deal with a lot of the kyc you know personal info application process especially if you're just doing crypto crypto crypto trades but that key management part um i kind of glossed over that that's where we differentiate from most other apps we have like i said i was kind of a hater of that 24 words seed we abstract that out people don't have to they can if they want if you really want to see 24 words in every wallet and edge you can you can see them prove that you own them but we make it such that you create what is familiar what feels like a coin base you just create you know a login a set of login credentials and that automatically encrypts your keys and backs them up you get a new phone you lose your phone no sweat download you know get another phone download edge and just log in and fundamentally we think we're the bridge it's the bridge from the the old to the new where we give you that user experience of what you're used to but with the core benefits so the autonomy the privacy that the new world is trying to offer this new financial world for those that don't know what edge is or haven't been lucky enough to be part of the 2 million users until now i've been a hardcore dye fan of of edge for a long time and i say this because no but i it's it's very so i've i've started working in the crypto industry at bc.com the sirens go on as i mentioned this obviously you can hear them but this is when i no it's fine this is when i started downloading a bunch of wallets right because i had to see what was out there what was different what could we do better um an edge just put so many features into one but while staying like a nice easy user-friendly wallet and for me what was what you guys have done which not many people or companies out there have done is do several things one it's multi-assets and that's very important so it doesn't force people into one uniqueness right that's so like you mentioned earlier diversity and you can see that in the product then there's privacy features like it's only login with a password and username they don't take your email there's none of that type of stuff going on it's also hd meaning it's hierarchical deterministic so it allows basically so it creates for you public addresses you don't have to take care of that again that's another really important privacy feature in spv wallets that you are lifting for people and that they don't have to take care of and of course to be able to have your your private keys because when i'm teaching and when i give these one-on-ones you know a lot of people are like oh we'll just give them a coinbase you know like why do you have to like bother these these newbies these these people that have never dealt with crypto with with their keys and i'm like wait okay first of all like you teach you i teach me you can all like there's ever so many different people teaching in the space but of course i teach people about private keys because i feel like that's the big difference in cryptos that you can be your own bank you can be your own custodian versus another industry where you just don't have that choice so i want people to have that choice from the get-go and not to be stuck in a weird product and then they can't move uh here they can swap their coins they can exchange them you don't like that asset boom change it for something else it's fine but on top of everything you have your private keys and that and like you said it's not like in your face first thing you have to do when you download edge it's a few steps in and then it's also available it's just the idea of having it available that's what matters right um exactly yeah that's very important yeah we felt very strongly that like self-custody has it has the uh all the core advantages that bitcoin was built for or it is required in order to achieve all the core advantages that bitcoin was built for so obviously bitcoin was built to obviously to have a level of privacy and control you you 100 lose that privacy in a custodial in the custodial app that holds your keys um you lose the control the whole point when it's one of the biggest value propositions of bitcoin when it first came out you can send money to anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection that's gone if someone else holding your keys because they will say sorry that address is blacklisted oh sorry that area which i think this address is from is blacklisted oh you received money from what we think is an area that is blacklisted all of that can happen and that that happens almost certainly with any custodial service but i think the thing that people forget about um because we talk about the accessibility hey you can you know do it from anywhere in the world you talk about the privacy aspect you also talk about the security aspect which is a bit more nuanced the fact that you know a lot of the centralized services are big targets of hackers um but the thing a lot of people don't talk about which is also somewhat nuanced but i think is um equally important is the value proposition of even bitcoin is a store of value right any crypto is a store of value people say oh well if i'm not spending it i'm just putting it away and why not just leave it on robinhood you know or coinbase well that's the methodology and thought process people had with gold and the dollar like if i'm not actually using gold as a means of transacting then why not put it in a bank and have them give me a paper representative of gold right i'll just take this piece of paper it represents gold it's lighter cheaper faster for me to transact um i don't have to deal with the actual security of my gold which is very inconvenient blah blah blah that is the perfect analogy with bit custodial bitcoin versus self-custody bitcoin and crypto like oh you know i'm not really paying for anything i'll just leave it over there in the exchange well if you believe in the store value narrative then realize that that breaks down if a vast majority of people are holding their value in a custodial service because you don't actually know how much is being stored and there's a very strong incentive to break that amount of being stored and dilute it there's a hugely strong incentive that's what banks do today with dollars even with no gold backing them it's a it's almost like a derivative a derivative the dollar was a derivative of gold and now dollars in a bank account are a derivative of dollars in the sense that your balance might save five hundred thousand dollars but what's backing it isn't that and it's diluting its value same thing can and i'll stake my reputation at least on um knowing that it will happen with bitcoin if that's the route that we take going forward if it's just oh it's just a custodial it just becomes another dollar it comes in another you know barnacles it's not it's not it's not interesting i'm sorry i didn't it's not yeah it's not it's not it's not well you discuss about why you got in but for me it's definitely not to just talk about how we're going to keep like a weird internet gold in custodians that's that's not why i got into this and also i think something only becomes really a store of value if it has utility and if it's used so things have to go round and round and crypto has to go round and round and has to be used as well and even better if it's used while people have their private keys it's like several levels it's like don't don't just leave it there use it spend it exchange um you know steak if you really don't want to do anything and then stake it and then try to stake it and um yeah in decentralized staking exactly in services that allow you to control the funds or have an autonomous program control the funds such as these smart contracts where you're not privy to poor decision making by a custodian and that's i think a fundamental shift in the space is that we're not just shifting over who controls the ledger of what balance each person owes and or controlling the ability to to send value between people but now we're also shifting the control of the rules by which a financial service will move money such as when you're staking or providing liquidity being an lp liquidity provider or borrowing or lending all of the rules of borrowing and lending have typically been in the hands of these custodians which could be privy to government regulation kyc moving i was gonna i have to ask i have to ask um and i saw this in the wallet last year you were recommending a certain third party uh to stake and that third party is now gone it's the biggest black eye in our company's history yeah and i i'm happy to talk about that actually i know i feel like it's it's just that i think people need to everyone needs to stop i mentioned them should i mention their name i don't even know yeah whatever it's called they're happily so their name is cred yeah no absolutely their name is cred um yeah we had talked to them and you know they had pitched wanting integration into edge as many similar services have pitched multiple and we're still up to this day getting pitched hard by services wanting integration edge that do exactly the same thing as cred and admittedly i was always hesitant i'm like ah custodial service so custodial oh boy mismanagement of funds but it was such a high demand functionality that our users asked for like we got asked for this with some pretty good regularity so we try to do our best due diligence yeah and cred was a unlike some other services a california company in the u.s had a lot of vc backing from very reputable silicon valley venture capitalists we knew and met in person with their team at conferences in california so these were not like the shady overseas who are these people type of a company um that worked for reputable projects in the past so we did our best in the due diligence they seemed like they would be of a good service to add they were growing in popularity with an edge but they effectively made a mistake they mismanaged funds put funds into what sounds like was a fraudulent service basically a money manager that was fraudulent and it could have been the fault of somebody in cred that might have been in cahoots with this fraudulent money manager or it could have just been grossly negligent due diligence on their side but this is exactly the risk you take with any custodial service that's trying to make money on your money yeah right you're giving them money and they're trying to make money on it so in order for them to make money on it they have to look at ways to do so and they might make bad decisions bad decisions that could be 100 fraudulent or they could just compromise it themselves and just take and take the money and run so in this specific case it's not even determined which one it was was it someone took the money and run by is it still unclear yeah it's still unclear but these are the risks you take and so this is the biggest black eye in the history of our company one that has caused many many uh support calls a lot of blame on social media we've had to write a couple different articles to the public both apologizing and b most importantly promising that that is the last instance of a fully custodial service they'll ever see inside of edge and we had a few others that we're interested in doing to offer different types of financial services such as leveraged trading but that would have to be custodial at least at the time yeah and we said nope those aren't ever coming to edge again we've learned our lesson we've always had the ethos of self-custody and the one time we compromise on that ethos um and maybe this is a good thing because we compromised on it when admittedly yes people lost money including myself i had money in cred fortunately not a lot and maybe this is a good thing to get the black eye on a service that was still relatively small within our user base versus us growing and sacred did really well with an edge and we go wow that's doing really well let's incorporate another centralized service such as such as hedging and leveraged trading and then that grows really big and then we get hit really hard yeah so not to say that this is the silver lining of having people have lost their money but it's good that it was eye opening at a time when it wasn't huge to the user base but we've made that commitment and we're going to stick to it we've had this ethos from day one why we didn't stick to it i feel bad for it okay that's entirely my fault but yeah we learn we live and learn and many companies make mistakes i think fortunately it wasn't a like what i'd call a critical disaster for our company like you know takes down our company um but it's one that we've definitely learned from it's uh yeah thank you for opening up and sharing about it i just remember seeing the cred button and being like i had spoken to them at the time as well uh for other things when i was working with bitcoin.com and stuff like that and i was like oh have fun you know they're into edge now and because it was edged i think it's also because it's for me it's such a trusting app you know it's like oh wow if if edge verified these guys like wow um but thankfully i didn't stake i think i was just too lazy at some point i then do it and that sometimes that'll help that's for another another story but it's it's really interesting and i can imagine that this weight is on you because like you said edge is a lot of you and so every decision you make whether it's to improve the app or whatever whatever every third party you're you're working with uh just so that people may not know all the uh edge works with third parties and integrates with other exchanges to be able to offer this exchange functionality but you're yourself not an exchange so you never actually touch the fonts so people are just yeah our company never touches the funds that users transact with um we are in a way the interface yeah to various exchanges yeah um much like if you're accessing uniswap yeah uniswap is a protocol to offer exchange uniswap.com is an interface to that protocol and people forget that the two are different yeah are fundamentally different things and you can enter you can access the unit swap protocol from other interfaces i.

e edge so edge actually does interface with uniswap indirectly um in ways you don't even know that you're using it no but we're an interface just like the website uniswap.com is an interface as well um but yeah we don't do any of the exchange services ourselves we connect the decentralized exchanges centralized exchanges but non-custodial and offering the services that we have that lets us be very global to service a lot of people with a lot of different assets [Music] with also minimal minimal friction that's kind of been our goal so yeah and we're headed and uh yeah we won't make that mistake again that's it's but it's fascinating i think like a lot of people do that mistake uh you know privately i hear stories all the time of people you know losing funds on xyz exchange or something didn't go well or yeah i mean crypto is risky first of all for everybody listening out there and who's just happy to you know it's it's i try to calm people down i know that i'm running a telegram community i should probably switch and have one on signal but um i see people come in all the time right i'm always facing use you know facing new big you know beginners to the space and usually it's a lot of you know there's a lot of greed motivating a lot of people in this and they want to trade these really weird coins it's like just you know just just wait a little just just chill and just let's go back to the fundamentals because sometimes they're trading super weird stuff and and they don't know the basics they no they don't know they really they have no idea they and i and i try to just bring more education but you can do mistakes like trusting the wrong person is the same in business as it is you know private drive or with cred and uh i'm sorry for the users that you know used cred and just for any other people out there just remember not your coins not your crypto it's as simple as that it's a mantra we need to just keep keep it going keep it going keep keeping and everything is still at risk i like what you said you mentioned yeah using crypto has comes with its risks and i'll be the first person to mention that there are many alternatives to services like cred and block fi and salt and i carried a handful of others that are all doing similar things but in the centralized space there's d5 alternatives but the d5 alternatives don't come with don't come with no risk no they also have just a different set of risks and when a lot of these centralized services pitch me saying that oh but those are risky too you might have a d5 bug and an exploit i go yeah but i would sooner put my risk in an industry that improves over time which is software right so software technology like the bugs that exist get fixed over time and get hardened over time trust financial trust and humanity feels like it's gotten worse over time or it just kind of goes in and cycles gets better it gets worse gets better gets worse good and so what what would you rather bank on like what would you rather put your your trust in or rely on to be more fail safe not nothing is fully fail safe but an industry that generally hardens over time or one that has just kind of stagnated or gotten worse like the the issues with trusting central counterparties with money has always been there and the issues from that continue to arise so i don't think that's a problem that ever gets better so i'd rather put my trust right in technology versus custodial human decision making better trust the code and talking about code i remember a wonderful presentation you did in amsterdam a couple of years ago when yetis slide and this was i think just before or after the fork but it said forking is freedom so in this world where we have to trust people still and people disappoint or are great and you know it's very we don't know we have code in this space right and so we're trying to rely on these protocol and we but as a community communities are also like at play um yeah can you explain that slide again yeah so forking is freedom i know that in the the mids of the fork wars of 2017 especially with the advent of i mean really the fork started with uh ethereum classic right that was kind of the original fork war but i think it didn't make quite the headlines that the bch fork did from bitcoin and a lot of the rhetoric around that i felt like was very close-minded to the benefits of just forking like the idea that you can take a currency and fork it when there's a disagreement on the direction that it should go and change the rule sets of that currency um and i think what's so powerful about that is currency has been one of those industries or assets that didn't didn't really you couldn't really compete with easily so if there was a currency that had network effect and people were using it was very hard to compete with it it's such a powerful network effect and we know in general that systems with network effect are hard to displace because when a lot of people are dependent on that system a lot of people have their money in the in that system people have a lot of their time invested in that system and and they connect with other people in it right it's a network effect yeah it's just sticky it's really hard to displace so with money and what we've been doing cryptocurrencies when we forked in the past we were not forking the chain we were forking the code right so prior to bch by and large you know if litecoin was a fork of bitcoin but it was a completely different network it didn't retain the same network effect you were starting over from scratch and in a way even if you had a better product it was still harder for you to displace the the champion because you have to start over on that network effect the ability to fork a currency has never existed until cryptocurrency it's one of the actual unique value propositions of cryptocurrency the concept that you could take an existing currency that's in the hands of millions of people and copy paste it not just the currency and its rule sets but also the ownership right the ownership being forked was a valuable thing that we had never seen before and i you know in that presentation i give the analogy of imagine if i wanted to fork the dollar because i didn't like the fact that the dollar couldn't be sent to iran iraq or whatnot i could fork the dollar and i have paul dollar but everyone would say why should i buy paul dollar i've got a bunch of dollars like who wants paul dollar why should i trade in the ball dollar doesn't have an ecosystem oh but what if i would fork paul dollar and suddenly everybody that had a dollar also had a paul dollar and they could track they could transact between each other the way they normally would and also oh i'm going to change some of the rules such as you can transact more than seven transactions per second you know one of those features one of those random features right so what if i did that um that is in a new level of a more level playing field competition yeah than what's ever existed in currency and that's what i thought was very unique and i think downplayed as far as the value proposition now granted though and that's part of the freedom all right so now we have the freedom to fork with the freedom to copy and paste the ownership of a currency and create a whole new one well one thing people forget and i think this is the other argument both against freedom if you don't like something that that enables freedom what you do is you complain about it being messy if you like something that's enabled by freedom then you kind of say you know it's it enables freedom yeah right so i'm going to kind of flip the coin on the other side now well what are the people that were against forks like oh great now there's confusion you know which bitcoin is which oh it's messy oh there's all these coins do we really think we'll have all these coins in the world oh freedom is messy yeah that's the first thing i'll say like when you give people options it's just as messier and in the end i think people i think it's true though in the end people don't like too many options but that's not a core part of humanity which is i think one of the challenges in in adopting a lot of the anarchist and libertarian principles is a lot of those principles give ultimate freedom but you realize that most people don't really want that they just they want to live a simple and happy life right and if freedom is required to do that great if giving up freedom is required to get that then fine so you have to appeal to what people generally want and so enough freedom for them to not feel stifled and want to leave that that system that they're in um but not so much that they feel like they have to spend most of their waking hour evaluating their choices right that's actually very expensive time evaluating their choices i think that the phase that cryptocurrency is in is so early with you know sub five percent of the population adopting it that we're not in the phase where we're we're so dramatically trying to adopt it that the options and the freedom need to be stifled yet i don't think the handful of cryptocurrencies that we'll be using long term have been decided yet and that the functionality that we want and the way we achieve that functionality has been decided so i think we still need that freedom to experiment to flourish and then the words of one of our blogs that we had written um the the coin terminology and meme that's been given to anything but bitcoin um let's flip that upside down what fertilizes creativity and innovation you know in in the field in this field of cryptocurrency oh wow right now it's manure this is manure right and if without the manure it's crypto manure sure call us the coins call all of anything other than bitcoin should coins but absolutely from all that manure come amazing growth of ideas like no question about it it has been the fertilizer idea of ideas um and i think it it i went to at that miami conference which you were alluding to oh yeah adjacent to it was the coin the coin conference and just the way bitcoin maximus used the term maximus as a badge of honor now before was an insult yeah now it's a badge of honor i think coiners can almost use the term almost as a badge of honor sure call us coiners but we're creating and flourishing and fertilizing innovation and creativity within the space at a time when it's still needed you know i think things will settle down over time but for now we still need a lot of that innovation yeah i'm subscribed to the coin newsletter from andres brecken so he already like used the coin uh uh term a while back but it's interesting what's happening in the space right now and i i like to say that buying a coin is a political statement but what i what i like to do even more in the future i think is looking at people's portfolio because when when you see what people are holding you can see what what they want to see in the in the world or what they want to use i think from what coins you're supporting or using every day it says a lot about who you are as a user right and we don't know we like you said it's too early and we don't know what it's going to look like in 10 15 that's and that's quite that's still very close to us but like in 50 years 100 years a thousand years you know we and no you know this sounds very grandiose to be like part of the early adopters or something like this but it's true we're fundamentally changing money we're fundamentally changing you know how we're decoupling money and state that is happening that was something that was always in the hands of the state and it's it's not anymore um and we're still in the beginning of all this tribulations around just and then for those that are getting into all this you have to learn what money is understand the differences and what what is crypto offering that what's what's so different about it all but yeah like you said we we still are in the trial and error phase we are and i'm very happy as well for ethereum just with which just hard forked yesterday trying to also change then certain things in their gas fee structures and a lot of other things i keep trying to learn about eip 1559 and every time i get into it i learned something different but yeah this is it's almost all still at play and they just changed basically how miners are rewarded they just changed a big big feature they changed uh how the fees are being managed basically now they're being burnt i mean we can talk about this for another another time but that's a whole another yeah that's a whole other thing understand that protocol that took me hours to read into and chat with our team and like what is it really gonna do where do you learn your stuff because i personally love to listen to bankless they're one i i think to cover the d5 space i don't know if you know them do you know the bank lists i've i've heard i think i've covered i think i've ran into some of their content but i don't follow them on like a regular basis where do you get your your information i think that's something that's so difficult as well where do you i mean obviously you have your own team of developers you can budget anytime but how do you do it how do you stay informed i think at the high level i really like uh omar baum his podcast he doesn't go into a lot of technical details but he keeps me up to breast as far as what people are thinking of these technical implementations coins protocol changes and whatnot and then from there i've just got a search all right like okay eip1559 what's the actual white paper say and then come up with my thoughts and then find what other people are thinking of it as far as what's the impact there's a technical implementation of something and then what do we think is the actual impact that we'll have that may align with or be different than what the proposal says and so i personally had some differences in what i think would happen from that proposal than what it was intended for some were aligned some weren't that was one of the more difficult ones to tease apart to say oh what will actually happen because it's really predicting human behavior based on monetary incentive and so it's a it's a guess really it's a guess you're hoping that this is how the game theory works but uh that one is a bit harder to tease apart so yeah i mean some of the the big uh some of the bigger crypto sites you know i've definitely read a handful of coin desk articles uh coin telegraph articles um and sometimes some smaller some smaller writers and [Music] video youtube video creators help describe things visually that help me understand various top topics and concepts and whatnot but it's a bit more varied than i don't think have any hard influencers or content creators that i follow um but just just searching and see who who seems to have the best description that i can understand on some of this technology then of course these in-person events i just came back from one recently in mexico that helped me understand consensus systems proof of work versus proof of stake versus bft versus you know nakamoto consensus i'm like wow no one's really written anything that i've found to the level of understanding that i got interacting with people in person that were experts in the space so i think i'm fortunate to be able to to do and travel and meet some of these people absolutely no and let's let's hope we can travel more and talk yes can't wait to get back to amsterdam one of my favorite places yeah i'll be back there sometime i'm now hosting a a monthly meet up by the way it's happening so all right hosting a monthly meet-up is happening every last wednesday of the month and i first do my crypto 101 online so i always teach the basics to all free airdrop bch i give them edge all right all of that stuff goes on and then um and then yeah and then we have drinks in the center of amsterdam so now you know that when you're coming to amsterdam you have to book for the last wednesday of the month last wednesday of the month all right that's easy to remember yeah we'll definitely do that yeah no it's one of my favorite cities to visit um same with my wife and actually one of my co-workers so hopefully we'll bring a crew over next time we come back yeah absolutely was it hard by the way to like i don't know like to bring your family into crypto how they've seen you go through all of this these last six years how is that for your closer net friends and family at do they get it so my mom definitely gets it she's had issues with the financial system in the past we're also immigrants and so we understand the value of of different currencies and being able to transact over borders so my mom got it pretty quickly she understood it i remember her saying back in 2013 oh um yeah maybe we should go to that san jose conference and it was like may or april of 2013. we never quite lined it up but she was interested in going with me because i lived in san diego she was she lives in the bay area in san francisco area yeah you know in silicon valley and so she says yeah maybe we should go to that check it out so she's always been open to it my wife is an anchor of support in every weird crazy thing that i do and so she gets it she's promoted it she's a she's a dentist and actually she used to own her own practice until she sold it and worked worked for the new owners but when she owned it she accepted bitcoin you know and so people did pay pay with bitcoin if not too many but a few people did you know they were on the air bits merchant directory they were in the merchant directories of places durham like i think the third third or fourth uh uh business that accepted bitcoin in san diego um so she's been a huge supporter she owns her own stash as well separate from mine um we occasionally pay each other back in in bitcoin oh that's awesome she's even gotten involved with a mommy dentist facebook group which you know a bunch of moms that do dentistry yeah and they started chatting about crypto really and and suddenly they got there was so much chatter about crypto that they had to form a separate group mommy dentists in cryptocurrency which they took to discord and my wife's not one to install discord right so when she brought up oh yeah they're on this thing called discord i'm like you're on discord you know that's amazing learning about the different assets and i think you know she owns more of some assets that we support in edge than i do like ave she's she got involved in avi before i did interesting and matic i hear about some of these things from her actually oh she's high level i think from the yeah from the viewpoint of like support i think uh family has been supportive and have gotten involved lightly but no one in like friends and family have gotten into it on a more professional level where they make it like a passion of theirs but they definitely support both what i'm doing and support the industry but you know they've got their own jobs owned careers and it's it's a little thing that they they look at on the side um but no one's doing like their own podcasts and their own content creation or blogs or their own startup um not within at least my my inner circle but that's okay because i feel like my inner circle has expanded and a lot of my friends that i know now are cryptocurrency friends yeah that's weird they've i won't call it displaced but they've augmented my my pre-bitcoin friends yeah i think that's also something that i found as well of course i have my like pre-crypto friends of course that i'm very attached to um yeah but it's it's a whole other world to connect with people because there's something tangible yet untangible that connects us all right this yeah peer-to-peer electronic cash world that we want to see for so many more people yeah exactly i'm going to ask you to bring and this is a special segment in the show where i ask every guest to bring something that we can remember them by it can be anything and this is a show-and-tell segment what have you brought i've got this little bitcoin guy that had i think since 2014 or early 2015 um at our office he was actually mailed to us from australia in late 2014 i did a trip to australia in the philippines very early on airbitz wasn't even i think it just launched it was in the era of you know less than 3 000 users at the time yeah and i had a great time with uh i remember his last name but martin who was the operator of one of the bitcoin centers in melbourne australia really great contact he was also an arabic user and he promoted he had meetups onboarding people onto bitcoin and he yeah sent this over to us all the way to san diego and said hey you know bring this guy around you know have them on your podcasts and and recordings and videos um use them kind of like as a little traveling no which would be like i haven't used them as that i you know you kind of bring them around with you when you travel and take photos with them i'll selfie i need to do that bring him around a little bit more but for the most part he's been in san diego present at our meetups frequently present in a lot of my conference calls especially at our old office he was just kind of sitting there so a lot of people got to know me never having really given him a name i think he was given a name uh when he was sent to us but he's just our little bitcoin guy you know and i realized that the bch fans he's kind of like the wrong color but he was given to me back when there was only one bitcoin there was only btc at the time it's fine we are in a pluralistic diverse world and i love that little that little guy that you have it's such a vintage crypto merch item it's very vintage very vintage you know and you know just like the anarchist philosophy peace peace above all no wars right no violence no worries so yeah he's been a nice thing to see as i kind of come in and out of the office just kind of grounds me and says yeah i'll be well yeah smiling shades all's gonna be good nice smile on his face yeah he has a good vibe he has a good we need more of that vibe and crypto we want to bring that back that just sunny yeah sunny happy less less arguing and infighting you know let's all get along and just you know if we're gonna if we're gonna fight any battles it's it's with the banks um not between each other not with each other yeah i saw your tweet about that recently i think that's a good reminder to people to just sort of keep your eyes on the prize eyes on the ball yeah yep cool cool well thanks for having me yeah this has been fantastic to to catch up with you paul thank you so much for being here and for sharing all your wonderful knowledge and story of being in crypto i hope that edge grows to many many more uh users um i'm very always very uh happy to recommend it and i'm glad to know that it's someone like you behind it and of course i know it's a team but thank you for creating such a product for everyone thanks for the support happy to be on the show look forward to maybe revisiting on the 100th episode you'll get there for sure ugh you'll finally get there do you know matt aaron matt already gave me that sort of uh that cause no no no i'm on the 100th episode i gotta be on the hundred thousand he was he was on the first and he was like i'll see you at the hundredth and i'm like oh my god just it's already yeah it's already like such a process to to create those yeah baby steps but i'll get there i'll get there thank you for coming thanks so so much for having me ellie have a great day yeah you too thank you okay bye [Music]