# TOKEN2049 - Fireside Chat: Charlie Lee and Peter McCormack

- Channel: [TOKEN2049](https://streameth.org/token2049)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-vrkPztVarYI
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrkPztVarYI

## Transcript

so a year ago today pretty much we met up in San Francisco I just got into podcasting you like my sixth interview the market was great we were all very wealthy and then since then it's been nothing but a dire market but you've been evolved in crypto and Bitcoin and it's pretty much the start so can you give some words of reassurance to everyone here about what we what we're going through well I've seen seen these like marcasite was a few times so I think will be will come back I have no doubt that this is not the end of crypto yeah a year ago like you were new to the scene Jameson lob wrote me a message saying that I should talk to you and no idea who you are and I said fine I'll talk to you then you flew all the way out here up to San Francisco to chat with me so I kick started your career and believe well I have to credit Jameson a lot as well who I went out to North Carolina with and shotguns which for my first time which was scary and also ended up eating meat even though I was a vegetarian because I was too intimidated to tell him I was a vegetarian but no thank you thank you both so much so so how's everything going with litecoin good good prices up everyone's happy most people are happy most people are happy and you're looking at privacy right now right or you keep correcting me to privacy yeah privacy yeah privacy yeah well specifically fungibility right I think one of the key properties of some money that's missing from like coin and Bitcoin for that matter is fungibility which means that like any coin is exactly the same so it doesn't matter which coin I send you just like it doesn't matter which $20 bill or whatever currency you have in your wallet you pull out it doesn't matter which one you used to pay you don't to decide should I use this one or that one and that's not the case today with bitcoin and litecoin so I'd like to and I push this make this more functional make the coin more fungible and privacy is is kind of required to be fungible people often talk about privacy as a human rights as well is that if you believe - I do believe that people should have right to privacy yeah I think today these days it's far too easy for people to kind of give up privacy for more features and more cooler stuff that they're doing but I think people are starting to hear like sorry understand the need of privacy more and more with like the stuff Facebook is doing and just it's you hear more and more of in the news and I think it was will wake up when they realize they shouldn't give up their privacy for the next cool little thing that they're using I think the Facebook thing is really important as well I just interviewed Amber Paul day we talked about surveillance capitalism and you've spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley and we've seen increasing numbers of what you would really define the scandals with regards to data that Cambridge analytical with Facebook and such yeah we still don't seem to be on mass rejecting the behavior of these silicon valley behemoths so why do you think there is so much apathy towards taking privacy seriously um I think just people are used to giving up their data just ease-of-use using Google or Facebook you basically you get that product for free but you're it's not really free because it's costing you in terms of privacy if it's free you're the customer exactly if it's for your customer right but I think what another thing about privacy is Bitcoin itself like using cryptocurrency helps in aspect if you're using credit cards companies are you have to tell the company like the merchants like all your information right your these are address and all that personal identifiable information you're giving up when you're using another ephemeral payment so we have cryptocurrency you don't have to give that information up and I think that's good for privacy it's also good for if these companies actually get act which they eventually do they don't leak all your like identity outs I'll be everyone so what approach is like on taking to implementing fungibility because there's a number of different options right yeah so initially we were looking at confidential transactions it's something that's been proposed or system worked on for for Bitcoin for quite a while the issue of company transactions is that the transaction size is at least initially it was like 20 times larger than every good transaction so by adding by using comdata transaction you're making the blockchain a lot less scalable and the trade-off is it's not worth it for for privacy that you get but with recent technology improvements it's been down to like three times the transaction size it becomes more manageable and recently we started looking at something called nimble window it's what beam and green two recent projects are using it's a way where you get privacy with bas sacrificing scalability so I think it's a very cool technology and it's something that we're researching and looking figuring out how to add to litecoin with something like extension blocks so what kind of timeline are we looking at for seeing this two weeks three weeks you can do it no I think it's gonna take more work to you to do it right all right we don't want to rush it so this is quite complicated stuff so we're working with the with the beam privacy team on this will come up with like a design of how do you do this and then implement it okay and what else is happening with litecoin i've heard something about a like queen bank yeah so we last year we purchased part of a bank of a german bank called weg bank or vague bank and they're working on crypto quick up related products it's a slow process thanks move slowly because of all the regulations so we'll see what what kind of cool stuff we can actually work with them on is there any plans do you think for you guys to consider a merged bank account between crypto and it's something maybe like bit while are doing wooden memory bank account so for example one of the difficulties I have of my business is opening a bank account when I finally did I have my fiat money in my account but half of my invoices are sent out in Bitcoin yeah the Bitcoin then has to go to a wallet then it goes from a wallet to an exchange it gets converted then from the exchange into my bank account the obvious answer for to me is to have a bank account where I have my crypto accounts next to my Fiat accounts and it's Auto rebalances as I choose yeah that's definitely in that works that's something that I would like to see where your regular bank will provide you with USD bank account and a crypto bank account where you can store bitcoin and litecoin Eric whatever coins that we support and then it'll be cool where be just like cows or banking as you can have US dollar in another foreign currency cryptocurrency is just another form of money so okay you've also got your first conference coming up right well I have I'm organising two conferences so is it - I know of one yeah so there's the magical crypto conference coming up in May right before consensus in New York and in the end of October we have the like my side Micron's summit ii like when summit this year so tell everyone about the magical crypto conference why they should care who here has actually watched one of the magical crypto friends podcasts there's like a few of you well I'll go check it out it's a podcast for of us Samsung mal fluffy pony ricardo swag knee and wheel Panda and I do its we cover it's like a funny podcast we cover everything crypto related so we are hosting this conference and trying to make a more affordable conference in New York it's still it's not cheap it's still $300 but it's a lot more affordable than other conferences and we try to make it more more interesting more technical and more fun you get a great set of speakers lined up there right yeah yeah it's basically who's who in crypto but we started before the best people in Krypton so yes yeah you got Jameson there right yeah who else is coming Adam I believe Adam back is coming yeah so what have you learnt about organizing a conference then it's hard it's hard to not lose money we don't expect you to make any money at all we'll see how that goes especially in this bear market right it's it's hard people don't have extra money if you go to your conferences but we try to I think our goal is not necessarily to make money our goal is to just have a great conference have a lot of good speakers and have a lot of good content okay so over the bear market I personally have found it I don't about anyone else but it was first really hard to deal with you're trying to see assets you have drop in value you just try and see a market there that keeps dying but during that period as it started to bottom out I started to enjoy it because we've seen real you know we've seen poor projects die but real projects start to show the creation of value where do you think the opportunity is for the creation of value within the crypto market over the next you know one three five years so I would give a good example of that as something like we just had Bilbao hard I'm from our bra so he's merging crypto with real world with the creation of synthetic assets so he's created on there's an actual utility there for Bitcoin but to go out and make another market more efficient whereas we may have seen sometimes with some of these protocols that have struggled to create products that people have started to use so I see that as value creation one of the things are exciting you that you think will be interesting about what happens in the in a bear market is waiting a bull market when prices are going crazy is you really get distracted by the price for example when I when I was looking at coinbase we went through the bear market more our was low but everyone was just working we're just creating products but when the bull market started happening people we just like chatting all the time about what what's the next point invest in what's cool like just just having fun right and then work doesn't get done so I think the cool thing about the bear market is people actually well one thing is you kind of the bad ideas get flushed out right they fail which is important in that and the good companies and good ideas get to build build out the great great companies and products in the future same thing happen with the with the internet bust right the boom in the bus and then the companies like Google Amazon come out really stronger than and then the best common other field about to die off so where do you see the strength in the market right now what are the companies and products that excite you I think what average the average being is very cool something that's never been done before in yeah let's see what else I like Casa Casa yeah definitely Casa is building just making it easy to restore it to secure your own coins I think that's the one thing that is kind of hindering adoption today is just ease of use and ease of securing your coins because they're one of the things with with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is you are your own bank so the flipside is you have to secure your own money previously if you put money in a bank they're securing your money for you and if money gets stolen from that bank it's protected by FDIC insurance or whatever that's in the u.s. obviously so with with critical currencies you have to be able to kind of technical enough at least in the beginning to be able to store your own on your own coins and that's that's tough for most people and then they start relying on crypto currency exchanges to store money and as we know they get hacked and then people get hurt because they lose all their money so having a product like Casa help people secure their own coins is really quite important basically the it's important to have an easy-to-use product yeah I mean we've still seen it today with exchanges right this year we've still had we've had Krypto Pia have obviously been had we had Quadrajet was you know who knows what's going on there and I think the trace mayor campaign for own your keys was a really great campaign but we're also now seeing the contrasting clash of new products coming to the market for example with block by block might have introduced crypto back to interest accounts similar with Celsius how do you feel about these kind of products whereby there is a merge between crypto and the real world but you haven't to give up ownership of your private keys how do you feel about these I'm on the fence like on one hand I think products like block fly or even like coin base where it makes it very easy like they secure the coins for you and they're competent they do a good job but you also give up kind of the control to a third party right so I think coinbase can do a much better much better job and most people can so it's a currently the better option for done but I could see us move towards making it easy for people to just store your own coins I mean you had quite a techie role at coinbase a while back yeah how scary is this how scary is it and how much of these exchanges being attacked on a kind of constant daily basis it keeps me awake at night it's one of the reasons why I like because storing like billions of dollars worth of other people's money it's just not fun because you yeah you constantly get attacked hackers love to attack what the currency exchanges because bitcoin or to cook the crime soon once you take them you can't get it back right so yeah it's it's definitely scary it's I think kwame's has said the tremendous job in securing the coins we worked very hard on that it's one of our like core competencies yeah and like thing is like most most companies and exchanges don't do a good job in the stories you hear about what happened like for example with quadriga right like they Derek or walnuts were empty like more than a year ago isn't like that it's it's pretty pretty crazy that they've been hiding this for so long and now we don't know if the founder really died or he faked his death and that's like it's like the Hollywood story like a big mysteries you know so most people obviously know you so litecoin the creative litecoin but take us back take us back to the early days of Bitcoin when you first discover that you know we talked about this before but tell us about like the early scene the early meetups tell us what it was like sure yeah like so I discovered Bitcoin in 2011 around like April timeframe do you remember the price yeah it was basically the it was the peak I bought in at the peak he bought at the top yeah I did I bought a few bitcoins from from my current actually I was like ooh at that time in my career was also working at Google and he was a big proponent of Bitcoin inside Google so I I reached out to him and talking about it and bought my first Bitcoin from my current well you didn't tell me that last time I guess they didn't yeah and then and I watched it drop like 90 plus percent until I hit like $2 did you then sell it - no I didn't sell it right the reason is because the price drop but the fundamentals haven't changed at all right it's still it's still to say nothing has changed it's just that it was a it was a kind of a bubble right a bubble burst but it's not nothing has changed I similar to you did it today the price were not - almost $20,000 it pops you know it's at 4,000 but the fundamentals have to change if anything like the the current space is a lot stronger than what it was a few years ago so I have no doubt that the price will come back up yeah I definitely feels a lot stronger now there's a lot more is happening in terms of the markets we have gabor in the audience somewhere from who are applying to have an ETF approved we have weeks that's what that one is on me like like developers but it definitely feels like there's a lot more strength in the market now there's a lot more people involved in Bitcoin there's a lot more mature me media coverage it's don't you find it strange that when Bitcoin is its strongest that the price usually is at the weakest and everyone gets a bit scared to buy yeah it is it's human nature where when a price is like at $20,000 everyone's asking you about how to get into Bitcoin and now it's so much cheaper and no one wants to touch it yeah it's same thing happening in 2011/2012 right when the price dropped to like two dollars no one wants to touch it when was that thirty everyone wants to get in and then of course I came back I guess I have a already talked about the early days when I first got in the community is really small right and I could pretty much like read everything written about Bitcoin like everything written about Bitcoin at that time like all of course there's no podcast or anything like that but there's on the Bitcoin talk forum people post a lot stuff I follow like every single project related to Bitcoin you can't do that any more honestly in the first Bitcoin conference I went to was in New York and English June May or June of 2011 that's where I met Roger here and although he's earned four he's jesse powell as you power yeah yeah it was a it was a pretty cool conference i think it was only maybe like 50 people that attended was it the keynote Gavin Gavin was there he was talking about multi SIG's multi-sig transactions and yeah pretty much everybody in this space one came here for that conference right yeah and what was it like in those early days we were working together meeting of regularly all the same people working together everyone were really into kind cryptocurrency Bitcoin sound money or I guess there's only Bitcoin back then but [Music] people are doing different things right everyone no one's really are doing a Bitcoin full-time right it's all they're just doing their own thing then it invested in Bitcoin so when were the first all coins I guess the first one is name point okay alright training the DMS on the blockchain before litecoin there were about a dozen or so all coins okay and what when did litecoin happen why why did like own happen like when was launched in October of 2011 it happened just because I was having some fun creating coins so it's about of fun you created something that at the peak was worth how many billions well a few billion dollars today but the funny thing is when I created like wine Bitcoin itself was worth like 100 million I didn't expect like going to be anything close to 100 million when I created like when so you accidentally created something worth billions of dollars something like that yeah but you'll do that right so I've never told I didn't tell you this last time I have a hidden wallet somewhere with a lot of like coin in it that I can't find I lost the password to I bought it when it was really really cheap something I kind of remember like low dollars and yeah I lost it you want me to find it for you in your heart for me sure well it's hard for Peter so who wants your heart for Peter no one one guy at the back what guy at the back I think I might open the questions up to the floor cuz it's not often that people get a chance to ask Charlie a question but the final question from me you know what are you excited about for the future Charlie um I'm excited about what I was excited I'll be like in the earliest which is creating a new form of money like sound money that's something never previously seen before I think Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is is here right we can't put the genie back in the bottle I think I'm excited about where we go next with it all right we've got under five minutes left if anyone would like to ask Charlie a question please do put up your hand because it's a rare opportunity to get them like this anyone want to ask Charlie a question yep I'll come down so hi Charlie I do have um a lot of friends of mine in the Philippines that are holding litecoin and they're quite fascinated with where the coin itself so is there any message that you could actually give to the Filipinos and could you tell something like why should they keep like coin I think in the Philippines I think the the major Philippine exchanges are not supporting like coin yet right so I think you guys should go talk to your local exchange and convince them to support like coin to make it easy for people to buy a light coin in the Philippines really buy like coin just only by trading it into the exchange because I do have a group in the Philippines right now that are trading like coin Eater Bitcoin Tron so these are the the coins that we are trading so I mean they're quite excited as well that I'm here today and to see you here yeah thank you anyone else want dollars charlie a question come up hold home to you hello okay cool hi Charlie my question is like we were talking about like the humble beginnings when when you had like smaller meetups and everyone was working together and now we see like projects bashing each other like it's becoming like isolated silos so how do you feel about that and what is your message to the community or to these project managers out there I think it's just inevitable it's just too a lot of people it feels like a zero-sum game so if foreign or in order for the to succeed someone else has to fail and because it's there's so much money involved it becomes very personal so that's why you see like Bitcoin cash attacking Bitcoin and everyone attack and everyone attacking Ripple and yeah I've been attacking rapport everywhere attacking you when you go interview scammers yeah so he's a scammer who's just chemical dependency there we're all scammers at heart though aren't we yeah I think yeah I think it's yeah I'm not sure what we can do about that I was sorry to self out as like the real scam projects feel and the real good projects kind of surviving I see the top so outside of Bitcoin obviously like coin and I suspect Manero what other projects coins are you interested in what excites you I mean to be honest I don't really follow most coins I focus on like coin and Bitcoin and just yeah I don't I try not to and if I say like I've been I've said like this projects interesting and then it gets taken out of context and we try to plump it so and then you have to sell it at the top yeah so I try I try not to to be vocal about other projects if I so you're not a Maximus or you're a Bitcoin litecoin duelist I'm a dualist script or maximalist script I'm I think cryptocurrency will take over all right but look this is my first time to Hong Kong it might be some other people's you know the city well you could a city or country I guess it's I don't know anymore what is it is it state I don't know yeah I say something wrong so my first time here I've got one day off tomorrow recommend something for me to do and anyone else here it's their first time visiting write of this one down I haven't been to Hong Kong for like five years so yeah well used to come here quite a bit right where you going tonight what parties you going to tonight I am actually flying out today I'm going to tonight I won't deny all right well I think it's been great to have Charlie on he's a little bit of a hero of mine he supported me so much with my work behind the scenes so can you give your biggest round in the pores of the day for Charlie neat [Applause] you