you know paying it show they're getting paid buying stuff and so on and there were bits of those is that we enable people to rely on bitcoin as money by making sure that they're able to buy whatever they want with their coins yeah this is interesting because you know as you point out back in the two thousand and eleven twelve and thirteen it was big coin was going to be the pay pal of you know crypto and it was about being able to use it to buy stuff and then at around twenty six team this idea well you know actually it's best use cases as a store of value it's digital gold and you have a lot of dissension in the ranks in the big going community in the crypto community had hard forks of big quiet and people claiming that this is what is for us actually for spending and buying a cup of coffee etc but what you guys have done is you've kind of like brought in all the way back and said you know what the problem is not really that merchants are not accepting it this quiet so much it's that we need to make it easier for

users to spend their big call and you kind of looked at the problem in a new way and in so doing i think i've solved for the most part this whole bitcoin used as payments problem so if i'm not mistaken. it's kind of like you're in the gift card business if you will our voucher business i think one of your biggest customers is hotels dot com and so i can actually go to your site and i could. buy big coin for a voucher on hotels dot com and i go to hotels dot com i can spell i can spend big on right but that's pretty much the bread and butter of the business that is the best and you've got one thousand merchants now who are signed up right and we're expanding quickly correct now where mostly most of our merchants it is in the u.s. and u.k. but to where we have a pretty aggressive plan for for covering the road there with it with gift card support that country by country is doing during the rest of the year and that

referral is actually takes a fee for the transaction in most cases that the gift card of the customer and buys from us even if it's a hundred dollar gift card and it cost a hundred dollars but we actually bought it. and that's also about hodler first second of our saddlers and this is the idea that well because people are skinflints they're not spending their money they want to hold onto it because the prices go higher i believe if i've read your tweets and your blogs and your comments correctly well you've noticed is that no matter what the price is there is a subset of people who want to spend their frickin bet on right and ok the price could go to ten thousand one hundred thousand a million it just means that that ratio of people within that subset are going to be spenders a big going to need notice that throughout this bear market there are still people looking to spend but going correct completely unchanged in fact with growth three or four x. during it during this year asking about hardliners and so on is the wrong perspective

and the way we see it is we're looking for people that have course to spam and someone who just bought a thousand dollars worth of bitcoins as an investment they're not going to you know go and buy stuff with it the first thing they do. but so people with going to spend are people look the simplest example of someone who's getting paid in bitcoin right their whole salary is a big question guess what they're going to be spending but couldn't because that's how life is you buy stuff with it right though this is a simplistic example and there's other cases in the in the bitcoin economy people that are trading the participate in the front the different programs and affiliates and so on the earnings that way but but also people you know who started out as all theirs and the bought a thousand dollars of bitcoins you know three four years ago and i was worth quite a bit you know what they also coined spenlow and they are suddenly you know both feeling rich and being rich and we offer them a great experience to buy things with the coins so i think looking at it from that

perspective is a lot better than trying to resist the question of hobbling or not hobbling it like but they will do what they want of course you know if if if if you think the big going to go up of value and you want to hold it do it make it as fine there are going to be people who want to spend the big client and the price goes up just means every more because you spend and so this is about your business or you could call it a get card business but not everyone uses as gifts but it just is structured in that way and so you are basically have a relationship with all these merchants and if you want to go spend your big point at those merchants you guys a big point of the way to do it you get a code for that merchant you go to happen to come home and you've just spent your big going and also you have a technique or your strategy is zero confirmations just on the tactical side you know because it is something where some merchants or some folks will want to wait for five or six confirmations before they totally accept the payment you say we've

got zero confirmations which is that kind of innovation in the space if you well and speaking of innovations so you get there so it's a deep thinker and a technologist and a whiz kid you have jumped. on the lightning network right away that's captured the imagination of bitcoin world but those in the audience don't know what lightning network is what is it and how are you using it and the like thing that's work very simply is a way to make big question transactions no fast and cheap and good sort of with a nice user experience and technically how it's built up i think it's it's not as interesting it the important part is that it gives people these benefits it's what we thought the big clue was all along. but then learned that maybe it wasn't entirely and lightning is is is that acknowledge it was sort of always envisioned

that one day we will have at the knowledge that it uses this this payment channels to do transit a little bit of start lighting networking now she says if i find going to try to quote her here out i do a good job in doing so but she said look big cohen is like the basic protocol the internet and on top of internet where many applications were built right so you have a big point is a basic protocol level technology and on top of that there will be applications and just to do payments you know just delighting that works and that's you know reminds me back in the one nine hundred ninety s. when i was in the technology business everyone sat around all day long asking when is video coming one is video coming and then suddenly flash came with. you tube and it wasn't necessarily the best technology out there but it was adapted quite quickly and it gave people videos finally on the internet to dig a little bit deeper into what bit refill is doing you've got now what you call the thor products really became quite prominent during the lightning network trust's chain or pound l. and t.

trust chain as torchbearers confronted liquidity issues so now we're going to we're going to drop down into a bit of a technical level here right but describe your product to thor product in the lightning network and tell us a little bit about that the way the life and the. like the network works is that there is channels between people and the channel surfing someone explain it as be on the accounting work right so you open a channel to you and usually in the beginning the money will be on my side that means that if i open a chance you can send money to you but you can some money to me not right away not until i sent them over to you right and this creates a problem because what if. i were them to fight that a big part of creating this circular that earnings both for big jobs and small jobs and whatever to get paid in the points and getting paid over lightning is difficult if you don't have a channel and so what the ford product does is that it lets people get

a channel opened to them from us where one of the most connected notes on the like network with you know been. always first with all of the new technologies and so on so if you know you it's in a lot of ways it's like internet service provider if you think of. if you think of a nice be it interacts someone and it interacts with the whole internet with everything is as fast as home and so on but on the other end it connects to someone's apartment downtown right that's similar to what sort of takes the sort of well connected parts of the light the network and it connects it to your place and your place and so on ok so i hear some you know maximalist screaming in the in the far away land saying oh it sounds like centralization vs decentralization. is at an issues and not an issue is a non-issue it's always good to drive for four more decentralisation and so.

thor is a non-custodial service so we don't know once the channels been set up we're out of the picture a kid where we are a lightning node but we're not the we're not extolled in of the funds we're not the money service business things like that so it's still in a lot of ways it's as decentralized as a smoker services and in this base are but obviously we are a company break you know and the companies by definition isn't closed entity just like every other company in the space right so now what person what how much your business is is this lighting stuff down so. last month we hit the milestone of six percent of our of our purchases happening on the like network ok so many sounds like something like you know netflix was in the cd business first and then they want to live streaming so you know your primary business isn't gift cards which sounds remarkably low brow but it's kind of a dumb solution to a very simple problem people spend their frickin decline right you're looking down

the path or saying well you know lightning is kind of like are going to be our netflix point two or the next level do you think it will be the next thing the come down the pike and why not why lighting an outside change like liquid i think lightning is good enough. lightning is. the most sort of decentralized solution that we have a scale. from the perspective i think it likely will be enough but it doesn't really matter if even if i'm wrong and it is a change the becomes a big thing the show will support that's how gyal are you as a startup because that's really an important feature and we will go around saying that we're the best in the world except encrypt the currency payments so. some people have challenged that but. in the world that's the thing cryptocurrency pain that sounds like a unicorn waiting to happen. we like to think that as an investor well how long before the unicorn thing hits because i want to be able to buy stacey another cup

of coffee. and i think about that i would guess i could buy but anyway circuit thanks for being on the kaiser report thank you well that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser part was me nice guys are on stage heard like to thank our guests are gay cutler he's the c.e.o. and founder a bit re felt a bit re felt. yeah we own shares of the company if you want to catch us on twitter it's guy's report. what is it calling his magic and the new type of digital currency. digital scarcity chancellor. of second for bankers call the genesis blog for reason calling it civil disobedience a source of optimism because i can control my own financial destiny it's just

a new way of coming to consensus it's a game changer in the human history this is columbus discovering the new world this paradigm shifting technology that transforms economics and finance in a heartbeat the apollo eleven landing. to the max and stacey. facebook and google started with a great idea and great ideals unfortunately it was also a very dark so. they are constructing a profile of you and that profile is real it's detailed and it never goes away turns out that google is manipulating your opinions from the very first character that you type into the search bar it will always be one dog food over another one comparative shopping service over another and one candidate over another they can

suppress certain types of results on what they think you should be see if they have this kind of power then democracy is an illusion the free and fair election doesn't exist the more we give them the sooner we are all. if. we could only be done. with it. supper's you did something to me if you don't have to keep. playing well. there you are among the group of us in the mob. if you

did what you except your then he says and pulls with folks like me that the securely take the. oath. well. while the closure we're going to produce a. month it is a way to say to the pacific that this is the last stop that the push and i wish i. was.

i. thought. i thought it was. they are trying to save face and to avoid looking ridiculous they sentenced to two eighteen months just to show she is guilty of something which is new in this lunch time president putin slow. the eighteen month jail sentence of maria boots and failing to register as a foreign agent by the us face we speak to a lawyer. none of. us were illegal. in and of themselves but she got caught up in this.

french media companies joined forces to condemn the country's intelligence questioning about the leaks.