0:00 there is a different feel between transacting in in bitcoin or lightning versus the fiat rails like venmo other 0:06 kind of fiat applications zelle wire transfers right and when i think of 0:12 bitcoin i think of actually emotions right bitcoin is tech but it's very emotional in the sense of at least when 0:19 i make of bitcoin transactions it's it's uh there's anxiety involved you're you're scared right you feel emotions 0:26 and that's actually a good thing because you know you know you could get wrecked so you know there's danger and there's some like back of the brain mechanism 0:32 that kicks in that's very emotional before you send bitcoin and that's because you know when you play with fire 0:38 you can get burnt and you know bitcoin and fire are very similar 0:46 medium of exchange is sponsored by the bitcoin payments adviser if you own or 0:51 run a business and you'd like to accept bitcoin but don't know how the bitcoin payments adviser can help from specific 0:57 software recommendations and accounting implications to training employees and 1:02 marketing so your customers know you accept this new form of payment the bitcoin payments adviser can help 1:08 simplify your journey in accepting bitcoin for your business check out bitcoin paymentsadvisor.com 1:15 again that's bitcoin paymentsadvisor.com now let's get back to the show so welcome back everybody to the medium of 1:21 exchange podcast really excited for today's conversation we're joined by Keith the founder and ceo of branta um 1:28 that is really working on building more trust in enabling bitcoin payments which 1:35 is obviously the core tenant of this podcast how can we get bitcoin to become 1:40 a medium of exchange so Keith thank you so much for joining us really just want to pass over the mic to you and give a 1:46 little introduction into who you are what what you've worked on what you're working on and how you got into building 1:53 and progressing bitcoin payments yeah cool sounds good um first thing 1:59 appreciate you having me jack and jason and uh yeah for the listeners i'm Keith working on Branta and uh yeah maybe just 2:08 historically how Brantais started was i i wanted to see how i could take my own bitcoin for myself and this was around 2:15 uh maybe very late 2022 but more 2023 probably late 2023 actually and what i 2:23 looked at was how do you catch that inflight so like can you can you do a little trick like a little party trick 2:28 to hack yourself or divert your funds when you're sending bitcoin because at 2:33 that point in 2023 there are already quite mature solutions for kind of 2:38 keeping your bitcoin like if your bitcoin's ice cold and it's not moving uh if you generate that on a cold card 2:44 or some other device uh your seeds your seeds kind of offline as long as you use entropy correctly uh that's fine so 2:51 really my focus was on if i'm using bitcoin as a medium of exchange right if i'm paying people whether that's rent uh 2:58 commerce food whatever um even invoices right like pdfs and online invoices that was the attack 3:05 vector that i wanted to look at and so it was a quite creative process getting to the point where we are now um but 3:12 yeah let's let's keep going i i don't want to just ramble too much here but no i think i mean that's that's a really 3:19 interesting perspective of taking almost like a hacker's mindset of how can we how can i look at this this thing that 3:25 i've been told is unbreakable and try and break it and i i almost just want to 3:30 ask that as a follow-up there is what did you find and how did that lead to what you're working on right now yeah 3:37 right so um so basically what i found wasn't too great like there's a lot of gaps 3:43 actually and um yeah we don't we don't have to be too nerdy i guess about the attacks but you hear about things like 3:49 people losing their bitcoin or certainly a lot of the other cryptos as well that's kind of a different story and we 3:54 don't focus on that at all but with bitcoin it's pretty basic things so the 4:00 mindset that i have is that basically uh like bitcoin is very cool and it's a 4:06 different class of cool than the rest of like technology that we have um in the sense that it's like it goes back all 4:12 the way to money in our evolution whereas internet facebook ebay paypal 4:18 all of these things really don't go back to like humans origins um and so 4:26 unfortunately bitcoin is kind of running on that tech stack that that is modern that doesn't 4:31 go all the way back so you have digital scarcity than everything else and when i 4:36 say the word unfortunate what i mean is like we're using chrome and brave and windows computers and uh wi-fi routers 4:44 right like the same wi-fi router that uh maybe the neighbors are using your xbox on is maybe what you broadcast your 4:50 transaction to the memool with so there's a lot of weird overlap between consumer tech and then uh bitcoin right 4:58 and so in bitcoin really the only dedicated hardware tech or at least the most popular would be mining right 5:05 that's very obvious we're we're at the a6 stage these are all produced uh at this point mainly in asia as well as uh 5:12 signing devices those are also quite well there signing devices for broad 5:17 broadly for crypto and signing devices only for bitcoin so those are kind of the the main two categories in the 5:24 bitcoin only tech stack but then where Branta came in was like i i was confused right i was saying "wait a minute if i'm 5:30 if somebody is running bitcoin core on a mac as their wallet uh that's not great 5:36 because there's easy exploits um like the clipboard." and one of the really 5:41 annoying and trivial attacks we don't want to popularize it too much but this happens actually pretty often is 5:46 clipboard swap attacks and just leaking privacy through using a clipboard on a 5:52 consumer tech like mac or windows or linux and so one of the first kind of 5:58 iterations that we took um which i i think it will come back and have more of an impact but it's not really our core 6:05 focus right now is kind of an iteration to get to where we are today with guard rail uh and this kind of intermediary 6:11 product was called Brantatoore and it's very cool uh and what this does is run 6:16 on your computer and kind of exploit your clipboard for you right and i kind of said like my my mindset is kind of 6:24 adversarial against myself probably there's people that think like this and people that don't but i think if you can 6:30 take that and turn it on yourself but then give it to the public in a way that protects the public this is very cool so 6:35 basically arming people almost with this like how would you attack yourself mindset this is how consumer tech works 6:42 versus bitcoin tech this is kind of the mindset and the approach that we've had so far 6:47 and so you're taking that approach you're looking to basically build a layer on with using bitcoin to be native 6:55 for bitcoin to to allow transactions to feel like it's any other venmo or paypal 7:02 payment that consumers that have not been using bitcoin are like relatively used to they trust that when they put in 7:08 their friends or or client's username it'll go to that account or wallet and 7:13 it'll get settled in the back end where we don't worry about all of the plumbing that's happening in in in that The Emotional Experience of Bitcoin Transactions 7:20 transaction so just can you explain to to myself and and jason and our 7:26 listeners of what does that feel like for a bitcoin payment using Branta and how does it how does it work from the 7:34 you know the the the common process that is today of like scanning a qr code or 7:39 pasting in a a bitcoin or lightning address yeah for sure so um i'll talk 7:45 about mainly what's live and what's available today uh and so the first thing that you touched on is really it's 7:51 a great point there is a different feel between transacting in in bitcoin or lightning versus the fiat rails like 7:57 venmo um other other kind of fiat application zel wire transfers right and when i 8:06 think of bitcoin i think of actually emotions right bitcoin is tech but it's very emotional in the sense of at least 8:13 when i make a bitcoin transactions it's it's uh there's anxiety involved you're scared right you feel emotions and 8:20 that's actually a good thing because you know you know you could get wrecked so you know there's danger and there's some like back of the brain mechanism that 8:27 kicks in that's very emotional before you send bitcoin and that's because you know when you play with fire you can get 8:33 burned and you know bitcoin and fire are very similar so all that to really say bitcoin's early 8:40 and now there's a number of platforms running Branta and the experience of 8:46 paying a on a platform that is running Branta versus one that's not it's subtle 8:53 but it's very important um sometimes sometimes it doesn't matter if you're 8:58 sending $5 of coffee to a friend uh not a big deal to run something like Branta 9:03 and really the term that we use here is prepayment verification and so the key uh reason that we're even having this 9:10 conversation is that bitcoin's irreversible right there's no middleman it's peer-to-peer and so one of our core 9:15 ethoses in terms of design is we want to stay very protocol adjacent um because 9:22 that's that's how bitcoin is right it's decentralized you have onchain and lightning and now with that bitcoin's a 9:28 push system so th this is the core difference between venmo and chase where 9:33 yeah maybe you're pushing money to a friend but like what's really happening it's not your it's not your money anyways like where is the money it's in 9:40 a database but with bitcoin like yeah you actually are pushing your value across the public mempool uh and you 9:47 don't need permission so right bitcoin is a push system fiat usually is a debit credit sort of pull system is how i 9:53 think of this and what guardrail from Branta enables is for you paying another person to look 10:02 and see that you're actually paying that person so prepayment right so Branta is comes in 10:09 before you pay uh and that's really nice because uh 10:15 that that's the whole problem right like if you get scammed uh you don't know you're getting scammed no one wants to 10:21 get scammed right but right now consumers don't have a way to verify 10:27 their money's actually going where they want it to go in a nice way 10:32 Keith i want to get into like the nuts and bolts of the user experience of how this works but like stepping back for a 10:39 second what are the odds that you get scammed like what's the what percentage of 10:45 bitcoin transactions are you know failing like it goes to the wrong place 10:51 what scenario would that be yeah um so so my real answer is the numbers too 10:57 high um i i'm not a huge stats and numbers guy all my friends and all you 11:03 know the people that i talked to were like "you should get more stats you should come out and really hammer these points." and in my head i'm like "yeah 11:09 like that's true." um so i don't have hard numbers on like how many transactions uh go arai um but but 11:18 there's too many right and not only is there too many like one of the problems is yes you actually send your money to 11:24 the wrong place but the other problem is just hesitation to onboard to bitcoin 11:30 right so like you can imagine if if there's a bank in new york that wants to settle at the end of the month with a bank in london um we don't need to name 11:37 names but there's a lot more confidence if you can have some sort of prepayment verification on like a hardcore channel 11:44 and that just doesn't exist today right and so like when we allude bitcoin to fire um it's just the early days so yeah 11:53 in terms of the number of scams it's it's just too many it needs to be like flat zero and like that is explicitly 12:00 our mission that's that's a big mission it's a it's a huge mission and i you know on the 12:07 personal side like i i do think that uh if if you can really give yourself to a huge mission that's cool that's fun 12:13 there's a lot to bite off and chew right yeah and i mean yeah what's what's cool 12:19 is like you're you're not only uh approaching bitcoin itself that alone is 12:26 a huge mission right but then solving the money problem is not just the store of value it's great if you stick money 12:33 under your mattress and it actually stays there and doesn't you know rapidly turn into nothing uh but you also 12:41 probably want to like buy goods and services with it and know that it will get to your destination that you have 12:47 confidence is this primarily for for consumers or for banks or yeah uh we we can stay more 12:55 on the consumer side i guess for this podcast um tlddr like it's for everybody i'll just spoil it but one of one of the Addressing Security Concerns in Bitcoin Transactions 13:02 recent platforms we onboarded uh shout out to satoshi coffee company now uh jay 13:08 runs that jay's here in north carolina um kind of close to where i live and he 13:14 sells bitcoin for coffee jack maybe you've met jay i don't know but um you know what Brantae kind of unlocks for for 13:21 use case like jay is there there's kind of two one if you're on a super sketchy setup like a public windows computer 13:28 with chrome there's actually just an article recently on how i think like a printer device driver was doing 13:34 clipboard swap so that's annoying you copy the address whether it's the segwit or the lightning and it just changes on 13:40 your windows so that's kind of the one use case for something like a retail um use case but then with that retail like 13:48 if a restaurant wanted to order $5,000 worth of coffee in bulk or something like this right all of a sudden if 13:54 you're moving $5,000 you you really just you don't want to get wrecked because it's just a it's just a loss 14:02 it definitely addresses like one of i think the big concerns the nice thing about credit cards is you can always 14:08 issue a charge back if you're a consumer you can always get your money back and it just like takes the stress off and i 14:14 think that is one of the like concerns so often for bitcoin and i like how you 14:19 tie in the emotional aspect like you're kind of on the edge of your seat like is this actually going to work or not 14:25 yeah the the emotional aspect it's that's an interesting way to to think about it because i sometimes view that 14:31 emotional aspect as just the opportunity cost of separating yourself with the bitcoin of like is this actually worth 14:37 it do i actually want to buy it but then there's also that other piece and this is probably more for to your point 14:43 getting people onboarded and comfortable of holding you know their own bitcoin and their own keys of i don't want to 14:49 lose this thing i've heard nightmare stories of people losing their bitcoin of people spending uh spending their 14:56 bitcoin to the wrong address and i'm a non-technical person myself so that that 15:02 could i'm i fit the profile of somebody who lost who lost their bitcoin and the 15:08 way that we can to i like how you said really flatten that uh that experience 15:13 is just something that you know it's early days so it it is playing and 15:18 testing and what it will look like of of how you can be so sure and and what that you know address looks like in a way 15:25 that's easily verified um because right now you know we're looking at what the first like five uh numbers and letters 15:31 of of the string and the last five and or 10 uh numbers and letters of the string and and it's a it's it's 15:39 not necessarily the greatest ux let alone ui um so i'm just curious to hear 15:45 your thoughts on where where you see this kind of progressing in terms of what that can look like and in terms of 15:50 how we can make it as simple for the coffee shop owner who wants to buy beans for that month uh and pay in bitcoin in 15:56 a in a secure way yeah yeah for sure no i i think that's a really important topic and i'm actually surprised it's 16:02 not more discussed on on you know bitcoin twitter um so yeah we have a 16:08 bunch of other things to argue about at the moment i don't know if you're that's true there does seem to be a lot to argue 16:15 about uh yeah i mean for me like i i love ux so i'm always focused on ux and 16:20 you're right that we are using alpha numeric strings that are not human readable or not easily human readable 16:27 and kind of like the the point there like if nobody's convinced on that um if we just dropped like a segwit address 16:33 here i would wager that uh jason jack and i like none of us would i wouldn't know whose address it is so for all 16:39 intents and purposes like yeah bitcoin onchain lightning certainly uh well at least bolt 11 uh there's not human 16:46 readable so then right there comes the question of like do you use something human readable um maybe like ellen url 16:55 uh maybe some sort of static address there's kind of higher level designs um that look familiar more like right um 17:03 without pitching any other companies kind of like um sending money to an email this sort of idea now that's great 17:10 and i i'm actually really in favor and i i would like to see more design on that and specifically on that so maybe you 17:17 know there's conferences that will be focused on almost identity and like 17:22 usability on the human side now nonetheless even if we did move to something like a very like a very human 17:29 readable like jack atmoney.io or some sort of thing that i'm like "yeah i i can actually remember this." 17:36 then you know there's still the problem of shuttling that information to you uh and that problem is highlighted because 17:43 of the fact of irreversibility so you still even if you have some sort 17:49 of human readable address and whether you're on a platform whether you're depositing to a vault say this is like 17:55 Keithvault company.com right even then like getting that string into my 18:00 clipboard there's still a gap in the clipboard um there's still the possibility of hijackings or fishing or 18:06 fraud like the l maybe looks like a wand etc and so for that reason like you do 18:12 still really want a way to doublech check um against a different source and 18:17 that's really what Branta is offering like uh right i'll speak to what we have now so like right now what Brantato 18:24 really offers is kind of a mirror that will mirror back at you kind of like a phone book or a contact book right and 18:30 Brantato will say hey yeah this address checks out to actually uh satoshi coffee company like yes you are you are paying 18:37 satoshi coffee company because you see it on satoshi coffee company whatever the website is and then you see it on 18:44 Branta but importantly um Branta's cross device so we've specifically designed Branta to basically 18:51 uh be i have to be careful with my words to be comfortably used on 18:59 not so secure devices point being like you can you can go from your imac to your iphone or your wife's android 19:06 easily and still verify like super quickly uh so it's like a super easy there's no sign up there's no friction User Experience and Verification Process with Branta 19:12 there's no software and that's why the design is cool so if you're about to say you're about to buy $5,000 of bulk 19:18 coffee for a restaurant or a festival or whatever it is the next bitcoin conference you can yeah pull up your 19:24 checkout pull up your invoice okay here's the address from the merchant but boom all right on the same computer i 19:29 verify with Brantae and if i want i can uh check that on my mobile as well so yeah i think the original question was 19:36 more along the lines of like you know the nuts and bolts of the alpha numeric addresses but and i thought about this a 19:42 lot right because i i do think there will be advancements in like are you really going to open strike and look at 19:49 a segwid address in 10 years maybe um that's the protocol maybe not you know 19:55 advancements can and probably will be made very you know slowly and carefully but nonetheless we do have final 20:01 settlements so like a precautionary layer like Branta um we see a lot of 20:06 value in it and how does it work like let's say i'm a consumer i'm buying some coffee do i got to download an app do i 20:14 like how does it work yeah no you you don't so uh i hate apps there's too many apps i don't even like my phone so yeah 20:21 we we specifically said um without cursing uh no no more apps there's 20:27 there's too many it's security halls sometimes they're necessary but yeah if you have a checkout and you're about to 20:32 drop in 5k for the coffee since this is now our official example 20:37 um how it works is at the checkout screen uh you'll see a little link that says verify with Branta boom you can 20:44 click that and then in the same browser new tab Branta will mirror back the address to you so that's that's the very 20:50 very basic use case and that's kind of the sort of attack where maybe you have a browser extension or your actual 20:57 browser or somewhere on the screen the guey is attacking that merchant maybe it's a very popular website like 21:04 mycoinvault.com uh right so Brantato mirrors you in that case now if you're more paranoid maybe 21:10 you scan the qr with um so in the future we'll have wallets integrated that's 21:16 coming online where you can just scan and the wallet actually offers that you know metadata to you right now we kind 21:22 of have a qr code on the website that does this or you can just check on a different device but yeah so basically 21:29 i'm probably elaborating a bit too much here but at checkout you click the verify with Branta link shows up a big 21:35 green bar or a big red bar address verified address not verified and then you just have you have that extra 21:42 confidence so it's almost like a like credit card transactions like accepted or declined it just tells you accepted 21:49 or declined yes before yeah it's exactly like that but before you broadcast to me 21:56 yeah it's amazing this is really helpful this is a needed product yeah i thank you man that's cool to hear that's kind 22:03 of what we've been hearing but we also like kind of we failed like a thousand times before we got to this model or or 22:09 a lot it felt like so um yeah we're still polishing but we think it's really good and like we're really excited to 22:15 share it and um yeah um yeah you know to anybody listening too like like roast me um in 22:22 the comments or whatever i i want the harsh feedback and yeah appreciate the words jason hey we do too like give us 22:29 all the comments you want on the uh on the podcast we need the feedback too so but i i mean i've been i've been in the 22:35 fiat payments world for a long time and it it's it's a you know as a consumer 22:42 you run the transaction it's a big transaction your bank declines it let's say well you you you you don't have to 22:48 worry like did that $5,000 transaction did the money get moved out of my bank account into the merchant's bank account probably not because it's declined right 22:55 and so for bitcoin you really need that you right like but on you flip it so it's before the transaction it's 23:01 verified you're good to go accepted or declined you know and then so right now this is like on the merchant side 23:07 they're the ones that have to implement this until it gets implemented in like consumer wallets and stuff right yeah so 23:13 there's actually a lot of nuance here in ter like in terms of our obligation to build this properly right for the 23:20 consumer we will always not even the consumer for the consumer at home or the professional in the office uh we will 23:28 always um you know design everything to be as absolutely sleek and basically we 23:34 we're going for security through convenience which i've never heard before i'm making that up so don't repeat me but security through 23:41 convenience is really interesting and so yes we should trademark that 23:46 i've never heard that either you should trademark that all right we'll make a we'll make a note um 23:52 yeah so in in terms of like adoption right like if we want to put on our 23:57 business hat because i know bitcoiners are actually super smart everybody's smarter than me so uh if you if you were 24:02 running a business and you wanted to onboard 10,000 coffee shops um okay you 24:08 need a lot you you need help that's hard right but it turns out um you know you 24:13 can do that kind of hight touch in the beginning perhaps and then you know use 24:18 that to um how do i say this properly you can kind of go from uh that approach 24:26 on maybe you get a few bespoke integrations but then if you go for the uh the bigger fish in the pond i i'll 24:32 name a couple i i won't name names but the bigger payment processors right so for any businesses out there that are 24:38 using something like btc pay or the commercial alternatives such as uh let's 24:43 just say ibex zap pay with flash open node right there's many payment gateways 24:49 payment processors these sort of things for Brantae to have an integration there all of a sudden you have many more uh 24:56 kind of kind of all in one go maybe you get 10,000 merchants maybe you get 500 businesses right so that's kind of on 25:03 the receive side and uh that's really cool so then all of a sudden all these businesses offer to their consumers a 25:10 way to make sure the consumer is not getting wrecked the con you don't have a chargeback in bitcoin but like all right The Role of Guardrail in Bitcoin Transactions 25:16 well if your customer got wrecked what do you do it's not great the business doesn't want the customer to get wrecked 25:21 the customer does not want to get wrecked so but solving this peace of mind bottleneck is a huge issue like 25:28 this is like in addition to tax implications and all the various other bottlenecks like this is a huge 25:34 roadblock i think for consumers yeah i i mean i agree my yeah so so 25:39 that's kind of like on the business side and then i completely agree too and like you know we had a a very short story 25:45 here there's a a very uh a very cool um 25:50 person who lives in my town maybe you can guess who he is or you know who he is but he's he's kind of big on twitter 25:56 he's a funny funny guy super smart and he got scammed from our bitcoin telegram meet up what happened was a fake Keith 26:03 uh messaged the fake let's call him bob and said "hey i want to i want to buy through your mining site you know 600 26:10 bucks can you front me the money?" and anyways my bob sent money to the fake 26:15 Keith but even in that use case there's applications now that's really small peanuts compared to the wire the bank 26:21 wire analogy or the mass retail um but even there right you have you have gaps 26:27 that keep coming up and and i could go on but let me let me ask let me let you ask more questions here too well i i 26:35 have a kind of more i guess broader question and more about Keith the Keith 26:40 the entrepreneur Keith the person and i'm interested i know a little bit about your background but i don't want to i 26:45 don't want to share too much but i i want to just give you the floor of kind of where you grew up in a professional 26:51 setting how how you got kind of molded into that um perspective and then what 26:56 you've learned from the uh former industries that you were working in and how you've applied that to really 27:03 bitcoin and and and pushing forward the mission that you described before 27:09 yeah so i i think i've kind of said this before and i i'll repeat it because it's true uh when i was very young what i was 27:16 very drawn to was design first of all kind of in an artistic way in a creative way and in a freedom way right like 27:23 design is the ultimate freedom like how how many so if you're at home like maybe 27:29 go on the sec or the various three-letter agencies and try and find like any regulations on design i don't 27:36 know if you can there's there's no regulations on creativ creativity or art unless if you get cancelled maybe if you 27:42 get cancelled online that's a that's like an unspoken regulation but anyways the point is i was very drawn to design 27:48 because i felt a lot of freedom and expression and that's very human and i also felt a lot of attraction to uh 27:54 programming now i was born in the i guess there was like a nirvana album when i was born 94 so i was born in 94 28:02 and at the time computer science was very hot you can make a living i wanted to eat eat well so i studied computer 28:08 science and i was drawn to computer science for the same reason as i was drawn to design because uh it it's 28:15 actually you can't really regulate speech either or code and code is speech 28:20 and programming is just speech so i was very attracted to that now obviously for commercial applications yeah there's 28:26 regulations there's compliance uh and that's more of like a kind of civilizational level implication but on 28:33 a personal level you can program and you can design what you want so that's very 28:38 much what i was drawn to and what that spun into was a you know i studied computer science in college and i landed 28:47 at bloomberg uh full-time uh writing code and that was a very formative 28:53 experience experience and uh that that was in london england new york city a 28:58 bit in washington dc and uh yeah i mean bloomberg's huge they have like 6,000 engineers there's only 29:04 like 89 people in bitcoin total so uh obviously it's a it's a big firm and 29:10 obviously i'm joking with those numbers but um yeah you know somewhere along the way uh i think every you know human 29:18 should try and get creative and the timing kind of just worked for me with bitcoin and and starting Branta and 29:26 seeing the the number go up and also you know reading books like the bitcoin standard and really just my approach 29:32 with everything is curiosity so yeah i kind of just wanted to go where 29:37 uh you know no one had gone before with Brantae and just kind of see what came out of it and and so we're here and um 29:45 what was the last thing i was going to say yeah the only other note i would make is probably many of many listeners uh are 29:53 entrepreneurs probably a lot also are in nineto-fives which i think is a great way to just stack sats and probably a 29:59 lot of people in nineto-fives are kind of bored how like how many i don't know i don't 30:04 want to ask the audience to comment but like like low-key how many of the nineto-five uh you know professionals 30:11 are are bored or have downtime in their day i i did and so what i did was kind 30:16 of hack internal systems in a white hat manner at bloomberg um not as like a formal designation but like let's let's 30:23 see what where the holes at and i think that really carried over directly to to Branta 30:30 that's really cool and i i like how you're able to bring that institutional 30:35 understanding of how both these payment processors and how the code and the 30:41 engineering within a very large organization works and then transfer that to you know like you said a very a 30:49 much smaller developer community in the bitcoin world but for a much much more 30:54 profound and broader mission that bitcoin represents um and i think that that's that's great because i i have a Keith's Journey and Vision for Branta 31:01 similar background not from a not in a technical sense at all but in a more like kind of human sense of how do we 31:07 get people to understand the importance of why saving is matters and how you can 31:12 use a better savings technology like bitcoin to then ultimately decrease your or increase your purchasing power over 31:19 time where things prices actually decrease in in when denominated in bitcoin to then where you want to spend 31:25 it because it's kind of all own it's your it's your savings uh and and and 31:31 that's where we're in this this transformation right now of building out the tools of of building that trust and 31:37 and creating those experiences for users that using bitcoin just makes sense 31:44 because it's the better faster cheaper option and i think those of us who are in the weeds and who are fully orange 31:50 pill get that but then it's translating that to uh to be able to market to the 31:56 masses to as many people on this on the earth that have connection to an 32:02 internet and can download a bitcoin wallet and start sack stacking sats 32:07 yeah that's awesome Keith so you were at bloomberg what is your bitcoin story 32:14 uh i think i've said this before too but really like i just don't like complexity 32:21 and like bloomberg's kind of the king of complexity and like also first first thing like much respect to bloomberg 32:26 it's a phenomenal company it's very wellrun uh so so not dissing bloomberg 32:32 at all um in a lot of yeah in a lot of ways many of the companies such as 32:37 bloomberg that are you know on top of the fiat um system uh they're actually 32:43 there to add transparency and try to add simplicity but fiat fiat itself adds so much complication and that's kind of 32:50 that's that's my bitcoin story that's all i'm really going to say is like you know um if you see complexity you are 32:57 probably getting lied to like you know you know like when you study 33:02 physics it's like man there's like three things there's like atoms electrons and neutrons obviously i'm simplifying here 33:08 but like that's all it is it's just the same few things over and over like the physical laws of the universe are not 33:14 that complicated like yeah there's other mysteries but the point is like i got 33:19 orange pill because i i just saw the complexity and then i just felt like i was getting tricked 33:25 and that you know that led to the the motivation to to 33:31 say what the heck is money and i mean i'll credit safodine's book like the bitcoin standard definitely illuminated 33:38 like this is kind of what's going on that that book like tore down my understanding and it rebuilt it 33:44 yeah as for so many i could imagine uh it's pretty much pretty much same for me i saw safedine speak when i was 33:51 interning at a large financial services company in boston in the summer of 2018 i was an intern and he had just released 33:59 the um bitcoin standard and he like basically gave a keynote on it uh and i was lucky enough to be in attendance 34:05 there and i had known about bitcoin before that but after that i was like okay this thing is this thing is legit i 34:13 believe in this i'm orange pill and you know it's funny because over the last few days just especially with the price 34:19 run up i feel like it's natural uh kind of thinking back on that journey and and 34:25 over the last you know seven or eight years what it's what it's actually looked like of getting orange pill and 34:31 being to where i'm at now where i'm comfortable uh talking to people teaching people about bitcoin having a bitcoin podcast where i can bring on 34:38 entrepreneurs like yourself and really just get into the details of how others will 34:44 eventually have to have to come on too but we want that experience for them to be as uh as um smooth and and and 34:52 integrated as possible uh and and kind of that leads me to my question of um 34:58 with Branta i want you to kind of go deeper into what guardrail is and and how guardrail has really uh been um you 35:06 know one of the defining products for you uh in and how you've uh come to market and announced a few partnerships 35:12 and i'll let you uh kind of elaborate there medium of exchange is sponsored by polaris payments let's face it for now 35:21 businesses still need to accept fiat and credit cards polaris payments helps with all your credit card processing needs 35:28 using a consultative approach think of polaris like a performance coach helping 35:33 take your business to the next level when it comes to accepting all forms of money for more information about polaris 35:39 payments visit polarispayments.com now let's get back to the show yeah yeah 35:44 for sure thanks for the question so yeah guardrail is the product so yeah Brantae the company Brantae actually means goose 35:52 uh it's like the latin name or the species of a goose and it kind of just came to me but guardrail is the product 35:58 and the the name guardrail is because i thought we had emotional guardrails before sending bitcoin and i thought 36:05 that was inefficient right so like apprehension anxiety like why scale out or like let apprehension 36:13 and anxiety lay dormant in say however many millions of people as a guardrail instead of just building a codified 36:19 guardrail so that's why it's called guardrail and it's also just metaphorical of like yeah don't run off the road right don't don't lose your car 36:26 off the road don't or if you're bowling right you know the bumpers in bowling for all the bowling people don't let 36:32 your ball roll off into the gutter there so that's why it's called guardrail and yeah what guardrail does is just like a 36:38 wormhole like it lets you look through to the other side and see yeah you're paying bill if you want to pay bill or 36:44 you're depositing to your own vault from another one of your vaults right so there's actually like the funny thing is 36:52 as we've gone we've realized that every single use case of sending bitcoin uh applies to guard rail uh and so it's 36:59 funny i was kind of bashing complexity but now like we're kind of at this inflection point of there is a lot of 37:05 complexity actually because there's every single use case for guardrail there's the interbank right so there's 37:12 the bank in new york settling with the bank in london you know how you you punch in a wire for for everybody who's 37:18 punched in a wire you do uh count account counting account number routing 37:23 number and then boom there's like a pre-population field right so that's almost like a prepayment verification 37:28 actually that's probably the closest analogy although i didn't realize that until you much after we started guard 37:35 rail there's that use case there's also the use case of putting money in your own bank there's there's there's so many 37:41 use cases of guard rail um and we want it to be seamless so yeah what was your 37:47 what was your main question there like did you want to hear about the the guardrail product yeah and just how 37:54 businesses are really partnering with with Brantae and the guardrail product and i know you announced uh back over in 38:00 during takeover uh in austin uh with the partnership with ambos um and other i'm 38:07 sure companies uh that that you you're working with uh to to bring it to market and further bring it to the masses yeah 38:14 yeah for sure so yeah the amboss partnership is actually um kind of a layer on top of guardrail that uses one 38:20 of amboss's products for risk compliance um specifically on lightning so bolt 11 38:26 and that's for things like making sure you're basically not monitoring money so like aml ofac sanction sort of thing and 38:35 Branta and amboss partnered because uh we're adjacent to each other in the 38:41 market uh the data flow is very similar there's a lot of you know shared um kind 38:46 of incentives and business alignment there so that's kind of that partnership and then yeah in terms of guardrail 38:52 actually kind of going to market um obviously i think it's probably fair to say like right now it's may 22nd 2025 so 39:02 um yeah i mean i don't i i'd be really curious to know i wish i could know how many people in your audience have heard of Branta i'm guessing it's very little 39:10 right so like yeah it's probably not many people we haven't really tried to make a big splash yet we just want to 39:16 build we just want to get out get the product out there get it you know doing what it needs to do we'll be loud later 39:24 um and so yeah with going to market we have a lot in the pipeline i wish i could just drop names um we've had a lot 39:30 of conversations uh some of them i have already kind of dropped the name and i won't point them out some of the payment 39:36 processors um a lot of the one-off merchants now the payment processors make a lot of sense for us business-wise 39:42 just in terms of efficiency um the one you're talking about like the the gateways like bitcoin payment yes 39:49 software okay yeah yeah because that's kind of like one uh one stone many birds 39:55 i think is the expression now on the other hand like we do just have friends and family or you know kind of friends 40:02 in our bitcoin network that have uh onboarded early so yeah we're kind of 40:08 attacking all fronts to be honest and uh we we've specifically spoken less about the institutional case and uh the larger 40:15 vault cases just to be you know a bit more i'll say reserved and professional 40:22 in the sense of there's levels of seriousness in terms of volume right so 40:29 you cannot really compare a retail merchant or an apparel merchant to somebody like a two of multi-stig 40:37 provider with you know $15 billion locked up it's just different so um 40:44 there's a lot of conversations in the background uh there's been a lot of good feedback like we're we're very excited 40:50 we think this infrastructure really is just you know it's just going to take things to the next layer in terms of 40:55 polish for the the user case medium medium of exchange specifically 41:00 i mean yeah i'm imagining the use case of me opening my wallet and i'm getting 41:07 ready to send you or jason money and it just i click on almost b what feels like just a a tab or a hyperlink in the 41:14 wallet and it connects to a brand to a brand of verification or guardrail verification green good to go all right 41:20 sweet send it's the it's the same thing as that 2fa when i'm logging into my 41:26 bank account and it's like "yeah send me that extra verification to my phone and i'll put that into my computer." and 41:33 that that added security although it although it takes a half second longer 41:39 it makes me feel more secure because i know that the person who's halfway across the world that's trying to log 41:45 into my email account they're not going to be able to get in and that happened that happened to me literally last week 41:52 uh and i had to go and update my passwords and go through that whole song and dance but at least i was like i have 41:57 two 2fa enabled so i i haven't i haven't lost any important information at least 42:03 as i know of yet i wonder if 2fa could even be more of a psychological anchor 42:09 than credit card authorizations and declines because it's before it's it's 42:16 prepayment and so you're you're already used to like banking security you know 42:24 2fa right like like all kinds of that's the very thing at this point yo i i'll drop some alpha yeah like we we're Innovative Security Measures in Blockchain 42:30 actually that's one of my one of my notes right now is like yeah 2fa for segwit or not segwit but 2fa for onchain 42:36 addresses right where you have like a rotating sixdigit six-digit pin all right so i'm being creative here this is 42:42 off the script alpha um but yeah like so prepayment it's before the thing happens 42:49 before you stamp it same with the 2fa and so we literally have these design mods on like do we kind of you know tell 42:56 the story it nothing fundamentally is changing but like Branta is new there's no way to describe it really um so 2fa 43:04 is useful i completely agree and um you know like maybe there is an 43:09 interesting scheme for any builders out there like maybe you do a short hackathon project where you you know get 43:15 some sort of hash or salt from the address and obviously there's more addresses than there is in a six-digit 43:21 pin but like if you could somehow like reference an address to a rotating pin totally anonymously like that's really 43:28 interesting in its own right now that's a whole new technical sort of design but yeah just the metaphor of the 2fa as 43:36 well it's like yeah you're 2fa yourself now the interesting thing too and jack you were kind of talking about this with 43:42 the wallet you pull up your wallet boom half a second it's more like 200 300 milliseconds for the you know the round 43:48 trip um but software can actually require that in a hard-coded way or not 43:55 require it so in the case of a merchant like one br so if you're using your own 44:00 wallet because it's bring if it's bring your own wallet which it is right now like the kind of the implementations out 44:07 there uh we don't we can't block payments right like it's a user's funds it's peer-to-peer they can send money 44:13 wherever they want but if you imagined a wallet and i also have to be a little 44:18 careful what i hear uh what i say here as well but if you imagine a more tightly integrated wallet that had Branta 44:25 hardcoded and would not allow you to send if the address wasn't verified that's a whole 44:31 different ballgame so just i'm just going to kind of make this up but imagine a slush fund of like 10 grand 44:37 for a business account and that 10 grand was authorized with you know seven different uh business vendors right 44:44 approved vendors then you've got that 10 grand but that wallet is hardcoded to only accept these vendors by the Branta 44:52 integration so like you can actually build custom rule sets for something like this as well and now this is all 44:58 kind of we're talking about the future but like none of this is built programmable money yes and and i like 45:05 the fact that we're talking about the future because i think that we are approaching that future of bitcoin being 45:11 that medium of exchange and if we don't have that type of programmable applications that are enabled and 45:18 accessible for people then we can just keep we can keep seeing tweets from uh 45:23 bitcoin influencers saying never sell your bitcoin and never use your bitcoin and you know that's one way to use 45:30 bitcoin but there's other ways to use it as well uh and there are ways that can that can be of great advantage to to 45:37 those who uh to those who adopt yeah yeah have you guys been to steak and shake yet and pay with bitcoin The Future of Bitcoin as a Medium of Exchange 45:44 we don't have it here where i am it's like 6 hours away yeah there's none close there's none close in austin 45:49 either but steak and shake uh steak and shake got a huge presence in uh indiana 45:54 when i was living out there so uh i haven't made it over there yet i'm i'm like 30 minutes away from one i'm 46:01 planning on going over there but and i'm i'm pumped to to to pay with bitcoin i 46:08 mean it's pretty it's exciting uh but i'm imagining that's probably not like the primary use case because the average 46:15 transaction size is so low um what do you expect 46:21 you know your ideal client to be or ideal uh average transaction i'm sure it's 46:27 like a threshold and then everything up from there right yeah um yeah i mean the 46:32 first thing is so one i hope there's steak and shake in las vegas i haven't looked but i can't i've never had steak and shake like i'm on the east coast 46:39 here in north carolina we don't have it but dude seeing those receipts and like the uh speed the try speed i think uh 46:46 provider of the the lightning um yeah i have like fomo but i love to see people 46:52 spending their bitcoin honestly i i believe there is a steak and shake in vegas and i'm slightly concerned for 46:59 whoever the manager of that restaurant is next week they're going to have to staff up man they're gonna have to staff 47:04 up for next week you guys are both going right oh yeah all right steak and shake next week that'll be good but yeah you 47:11 know like at steak and shake do you need to prepay verif prepayment verification for a burger i'm not going to who cares 47:17 i'll just buy another you know it's like what no that's also yeah it's like it's like the risk like 47:23 what's the what's the motive right so really like for this type for something to go wrong it's like actually the funny 47:30 thing is Brantae yes is is built for adversaries but oftent times we're our own 47:37 adversaries and so you know engineers are smart but if something goes wrong in like a backend system with a vault um 47:44 gosh and if the vault internally doesn't even get hacked and starts putting out bad addresses that's equally as bad so 47:51 that's another way things can go wrong actually and that Branta can you know mirror back to you hey wait a minute 47:56 something's up in the case of not even being attacked so i guess the point was Understanding Client Needs and Use Cases 48:02 there was like with steak and shake right what's the incentive to attack i'm not going to hack somebody for a burger 48:08 i don't hack people anyways but the hackers probably won't either hackers are going for bybit and by bits peers 48:16 right um so yeah i mean our ideal client it's it's interesting to think um you 48:22 know ultimately the market will decide in terms of what the pricing is right but you can imagine uh if i'm sending 48:30 you know if somebody is sending $100 million of value you you want to you 48:35 want to do prepayment verification and then some you know test transactions are kind of used today um and as that dollar 48:43 as that amount gets lower i think you know the incentives to attack it lower but there's other variables as well so 48:50 when banks start custodying bitcoin your product would probably be pretty useful 48:55 oh for sure and i know you talked about you know the size of a two of three companies is very 49:02 different than like a solo merchant and you're getting into a whole another territory with banks but um even more 49:11 use cases there right yes yeah that's right definitely a lot of opportunity 49:16 for you my friend because the banks are coming everybody the banks will be yeah 49:21 they're going to be it's this is like like to your point this is like very useful on the medium of exchange era 49:28 right like everyday consumers buying goods and services especially for larger 49:34 you know medium to larger transactions um but institutional 49:40 movement of money uh you know no one wants to go to their customers and say 49:45 we lost $100 million yeah and you know like intern right no one wants to do 49:50 that and you know today like internally yeah companies can do they can build whitelist themselves right and i thought 49:57 about this a lot as well and like why why doesn't everybody offer prepayment verification themselves why why would 50:04 they use a third party right and so like i really thought about this thing and like how would i how would i attack the 50:10 business if there's a business here in the early days that was my thought right well if i'm going to spend time on this how would i destroy this and one of the Navigating Third-Party Security Concerns 50:17 you know maybe what's the word attack points would be well hey third parties are security holes why should we trust 50:23 you okay heard that a million times um not about Branta but you've heard the saying and what i you know kind of came 50:30 to conclude is that yes third parties um okay third parties are security holes but what what does somebody mean 50:37 typically that means when a third party is integrated into the stack as a requirement of the runtime meaning you 50:44 you have a flow and and you inject a third party as a dependency right whether that's a ui library on a website 50:51 whether that's a backend runtime thing whether that's another step you have to do an onboarding like kyc that's a 50:58 attack vector obviously um and then i realized really at Branta like like yeah 51:03 we have our own tech stack but our tech stack layers on top it's augmentary it's to the side it's really not in the 51:11 critical flow um for the use case that we're talking about right like Branta um 51:16 Branta doesn't custody the funds and in that sense it wraps around so is it a 51:22 third party or is it more of like this different thing on the side that's more of a mirror like an authentic 51:29 authentication tool yeah that's a that's such a interesting perspective to look 51:34 at it and taking that approach of like of what you were saying like third parties can you know raise some eyebrows 51:41 and i i think what's interesting about your story and how you're how you've 51:47 kind of presented this uh this whole use case is that idea of of relationships of 51:52 being almost like that friend or that guardrail that keeps you on the tracks uh for for um that ease of mind and 52:00 peace of mind uh when sending a payment and i just kind of what what are your 52:06 thoughts what are your thoughts on that and and the the idea of building these relationships and and creating that kind 52:12 of uh you know collaboration between different uh technologies that you're 52:17 able to to just be like "hey i'm going to be i'm going to be that good neighbor that's that's gonna watch your watch 52:22 your uh watch your house while you're while you're out." i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go in don't worry yeah so so two Building Trust and Relationships in Payments 52:29 thoughts um we so we actually have a post on our substack called on decency because i hate the word privacy and i 52:35 like the word decency and privacy is a negative word no privacy is the least sexy topic if you uh if you're in a 52:42 romantic setting do not talk about privacy if you're in a privacy is just not hot so anyways so yeah for the first 52:49 thoughts go to our substack read the post on decency we can put it in the show notes second thought is um if we 52:56 had had this conversation six months ago i actually think the name mirror like mirror would almost be a good name as 53:02 well instead of guard rail right it's a new thing but like i now that we're talking about this it's like yeah it's a 53:08 mirror that's showing you back that tr uh source of truth but but yeah so on the point of the third party um yeah as 53:16 a runtime dependencies but one of the decisions that we made was like you know and we almost did this subconsciously 53:23 but we didn't want to inject runtime libraries into uh our clients right 53:28 because then you do have a then you are a third party so how the actual technical integration works is it's via 53:36 like a network h like a secure off network handshake native to the client 53:41 stack so say we have um uh what's the name but maybe like a a 53:47 fake payment gateway let's call it fake payment gateway um they don't install any of our libraries because then all of 53:54 a sudden wait we're distributing binaries to them we have to support 20 different binaries very weird weird sort 54:01 of setup we have to have python rust javascript ruby java like right that's annoying for us first of all and we have 54:08 a huge um we have a huge risk on our hands and then we're literally a third 54:13 party dependency and we're a security hole yeah so yeah how we how we operate is not that it's a mirror over the 54:20 network preemptively ahead of payment so it's kind of this weird thing where like 54:26 so in terms of building a valuable company um this is a whole another kind of angle but like bloomberg it's a data 54:34 company google is a data company uh they have different sources of revenue yes 54:39 but they're they're data companies right and so Branta is very uniquely positioned in the 54:45 sense that we actually know where payments are going before they go there 54:51 now not every payment we see is actually going to be completed right because somebody can open a shopping cart and see a checkout and they can just leave 54:58 they can say "oh i don't i don't want these shoes anymore i'm going to leave." or "i don't want to i'm not going to pay 55:03 this billing invoice to this business in europe forget about them." right so you can maybe not pay but Brantae actually 55:09 knows the data ahead of time too so in terms of just like acrewing value uh 55:14 that's really interesting because we're not really aware of other companies that kind of 55:20 you know label um in a sense like we yes we preserve privacy but there is some 55:25 knowledge right that the platform gives us i'm like hey yeah this address is mapped to myvault.com or whatever we're 55:32 not taking people's socials and phone numbers we actually really don't want that all we take is ip but everybody 55:38 should run a vpn anyways and the ip is just because we're a computer company you can't really not see the ip um so so The Value of Preemptive Data in Transactions 55:46 yeah i mean there's a lot there but um yeah i think we covered like thirdparty security holes like we've taken measures 55:52 to avoid that the preemptive data is really interesting that's probably like a third order effect that we uh you know 55:58 i'm basically saying it now but you can't really see it until it happens and somebody smarter than you approaches you 56:04 and says "oh like maybe there's this use case or whatever." but um but yeah i 56:09 mean it's just a very like there's there's so much open space in bitcoin like your question jack was like how do 56:14 you think about this it's like i don't know like you just kind of get in the weeds and look around 56:20 that's awesome yeah i was just going to say this is probably i have to go back and listen to more of your shows but 56:25 this is probably one of the more abstract uh medium of exchange reps huh it's great i mean i love it because so 56:33 much of bitcoin is still being built out right like it's this is a form of money 56:38 that's like what 15 years old or so so uh this is really important to think 56:44 about these things and build this stuff out so that the world can to your point 56:50 feel emotionally safe and secure when they move their storage of time and and 56:58 energy which is money it's pretty important yeah and like another of the like really gnarly topics here is like The Emotional Connection to Bitcoin 57:05 like would satoshi approve does that matter whatever i'm not going to ask that question but like would hal finny approve would adam back approve you know 57:12 like would the og what would the ogs think of the design like Branta yeah and my my last sentence there would be like 57:19 because we're literally colliding with centralization and decentralization and that that's a crazy place to be in yeah 57:27 no and and i appreciate your perspective on this from the fact that you are an 57:32 engineer but you can also take it and look at it from a true like end user 57:38 experience perspective and a lot of the tools in bitcoin don't necessarily feel 57:43 that way so building those out and at least seeing those use cases in action 57:49 allow us to see what happens and to what you just said like if figure it out 57:54 explore see see where it goes cuz at the end of the day it's anybody on the protocol can you know put put something 58:01 out and try to try to improve bitcoin uh and try to make it better for others um and your abil the way that you've been 58:09 able to weave that web of of the technical versus non-technical 58:14 explanation in the the emotional versus like you know uh yeah the emotional 58:21 piece of it too is something that is going to be extremely important over the 58:27 next you know 5 to 10 to 50 years of adoption um because if it's going to 58:33 where we think it's going then i there there needs to be solutions in place and you're you're kind of leading the way on 58:40 on helping bring those to market yeah that's awesome to hear i love the feedback thank you for that yeah and 58:47 like one of the yeah you know the the power of podcasting is crazy too cuz like if we 58:53 had this conversation six months ago it would have been it would not have been as good if we have it we we should have 58:59 it again probably in six months and it'll be a lot different and i suspect better um and 59:05 so yeah you know i i really think like being creative and trying to bring something to market too and like i really think bitcoin is still a blank 59:12 canvas like obviously right like it it's just so early still and everybody says 59:17 that the blank canvas of bitcoin being money yeah from there from there you could 59:24 just see what happens you know just we'll see we'll see yeah i i guess i was i was kind of i was going to kind of go 59:30 in the direction of like you know the concept of really throwing yourself into something and just seeing how it evolves 59:36 and like when i when i started Branta it was literally just the idea of like how how would i wreck myself um it was 59:41 literally that uh but it was also how would i wreck my friends or how would my friends or family or my loved ones get 59:48 wrecked right like how can i try and prevent that and then um yeah it just kind of unraveled from there that's 59:56 awesome solving problems so Keith let's say so we talked about the coffee shop 1:00:02 or the coffee wholesaler let's say you are you know you make you roast coffee 1:00:08 or whatever it is that you you know good or service you provide um just getting super practical for a second what is 1:00:15 like one piece of advice you would give to a business owner considering bitcoin payments obviously Branta make sure your 1:00:20 customers don't get wrecked um but just like practical like they currently take 1:00:27 visa and mastercard and maybe paper checks yeah yeah what i would say is um Practical Advice for Business Owners 1:00:34 yeah no hate on the fiat i would lead with that you know like no hate on the fiat it works cool but what's really 1:00:40 cool is like a little bit of redundancy because i think a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs have had the problem 1:00:46 of a single point of failure but bitcoin or lightning and just use a hosted solution if you're not already up and 1:00:53 running use a very easy off-the-shelf sort of thing to get started and then maybe you get more advanced but that 1:00:59 will give you full redundancy for if you you know vote the wrong way if you get canceled if your bank account gets 1:01:05 frozen if there's an outage you have a totally different rail to run in parallel and you're going to get more 1:01:12 rich and if you're more rich you can that's really good because you can do things like eat a little better food 1:01:18 have a little more time with your loved ones you can get a little more sun so yeah if you're if you run any business 1:01:25 you should accept bitcoin and just talk talk to these guys talk to me talk to anybody like bitcoiners are overly 1:01:31 passionate we're all turbo nerds and we love you if you're going to come in and and also accept you know cool cool money 1:01:39 you could literally talk to just about any bitcoiner and they would excitedly give you their their time and energy 1:01:45 into helping you get set up yeah there's no celebrities in bitcoin there's just people i love that yeah it's it's really 1:01:54 true yeah i appreciate it Keith i had a lot of fun learned a lot yeah cool no 1:02:00 this is super fun this is like a perfect podcast for Branta too it's funny um i i'm so excited for your product i i 1:02:07 think that's what i i'm pretty sure that's what i said or if i didn't then i meant to when i when i uh reached out to you on linkedin i was like "dude i 1:02:13 started a podcast about medium of exchange and i just kind of thought of Brantato immediately." yeah that's 1:02:19 awesome wait jack are you in are you in bitcoin park austin right now 1:02:24 so i actually came on to the park full-time so i'm leading our uh office down here uh working as rod's chief of 1:02:30 staff oh amazing helping put on all of our summits conferences workshops 1:02:35 meetups everything in between yeah amazing i'm stoked to get back and jason where are you 1:02:42 uh i so i work out at bitcoin park in nashville okay just the other location 1:02:47 so yeah if you're ever in nashville hit me up man yeah uh it's not it's not that far the last time i was there was the 1:02:54 2024 conference mhm yeah i mean hey let me ask both of you one question though 1:03:00 so i think you first of all the branding is on point it's great medium of exchange that's yeah like let's hammer 1:03:07 that for a while but um what are you most excited about uh and i would just ask each of you that for the next 1:03:14 specifically for bitcoin medium exchange next this year so okay i i run a fiat payments company The Optimism of the Bitcoin Community 1:03:24 still today and i have hundreds of merchants that i work with on a almost 1:03:31 daily basis you know and so many of them 1:03:37 could utilize could could gain so much from bitcoin 1:03:44 and if you're a business owner well what better way to stack sats than 1:03:50 to just like turn on the neon sign or flip the sign around that says like we accept bitcoin or stick that sticker on 1:03:57 your you know right in front of the visa and mastercard logos you know you're effectively dcaing in dollar cost 1:04:04 averaging into uh stacking sats and to 1:04:09 your point redundancy alternative rails all of that and i think that um i cannot 1:04:16 predict the future but if we do go into a bull run then that kicks off the media 1:04:21 cycle and people start talking about bitcoin again um and then i mean like 1:04:27 number go up is like the best marketing tool ever and so if more merchants can 1:04:33 provide can can like grab hold of the hope that bitcoin brings um that is 1:04:38 something i'm really excited about because so many small business owners are the joke is like twice the work for 1:04:45 half the pay like if you're a small business owner cuz you you you wear all the hats like you're you're just 1:04:50 grinding and a lot of small business owners kind of get out of that fiat track trap but a lot of them don't and 1:04:57 they end up you know doing a great job serving their community and their employees but they're just like overworked and bitcoin in some ways 1:05:05 fixes that and so that's my hope yeah that's awesome yeah for me i mean i'm 1:05:12 just i'm so bullish on bitcoiners like the people that i've met the people that we've talked to both on this podcast and 1:05:18 just at the at the park over the last 3 or 4 months between the takeover week 1:05:23 that we put on that Keith you were in town for uh between all of our meetups that we've been doing uh in austin uh 1:05:30 and then last week we had our texas energy and mining summit where we brought together you know close to 200 1:05:37 energy leaders policy makers entrepreneurs grid operators bitcoin miners obviously uh and just seeing 1:05:45 these people all with the same mission working towards the same end goal of making bitcoin a better money for you 1:05:52 know the future and really saving the the debt crisis that we're that we find ourselves in and the inflationary spiral 1:05:58 that uh many have um you know pointed out it just creates this optimism of a 1:06:05 better tomorrow that i that i i it's hard to like it's hard to 1:06:11 keep a keep a straight face when you're talking about it um you know you mentioned adam back uh as like would he 1:06:17 approve of um of what you're building and we were able to host adam back at the park yesterday or two days ago 1:06:24 whatever it was um and it was just so surreal of seeing him in the in the stands or in the in the crowd at first 1:06:30 listening to other bitcoiners who are building really cool things and just taking it in and then he gets on the 1:06:37 stage and those same people who were just talking are now in this are now in uh sitting in their seats listening to 1:06:42 this og this guy who you know was one of eight works cited in the white paper in itself um so just to see like 1:06:51 at a back who's as og as they come and then someone like dr thomas hogan who is 1:06:56 a professor at university of austin a literal one-year-old university like 1:07:02 that spectrum of people who are continuing to build this mission and spread bitcoin and and educate and 1:07:09 provide products and services and goods to the market is just it's hard not to 1:07:15 be bullish and and i i i think of uh you know i think i sometimes i think of what 1:07:21 it's like to be a bear and i get sad for 30 seconds and i'm like damn that sucks 1:07:28 like that sucks so i it's nice being perpetually bullish because of because of bitcoin and because of the people 1:07:35 that you know were able to curate these experiences to just let let the smart ones cook you know like there are a lot 1:07:42 of really smart really driven really uh impressive people in bitcoin and if my contribution can just be like create a 1:07:50 space to bring them together and have that opportunity to talk and to collaborate and to build then that's 1:07:58 that's all i can ask for um so yeah it's just bullish on bitcoiners perpetually 1:08:03 but especially right now yeah yeah so true i think like there's that tweet that keeps going around 1:08:10 that's like you don't change bitcoin bitcoin changes you but like that's actually really deep and it's it's kind of like not that well said in my opinion 1:08:17 that that tweet and it should be more like you know bitcoin it yeah it touches 1:08:22 people but like or it changes people but it touches their heart too and like you see these you see bitcoiners come in 1:08:28 like who leaves who leaves bitcoin there's some cases early days right like with the the foric wars and some other 1:08:35 uh kind of drama and that's healthy you know it's an adversarial environment but 1:08:40 yeah can't be more bullish on the people themselves have you guys read the book 21 lessons 1:08:46 what i've learned from falling down the rabbit hole oh yeah 1:08:51 book standard which don't tell the bitcoiners that that's a jason that's a swap for 1:08:58 for you and i yeah yeah yeah uh the way i like to to say it is like once you 1:09:04 look down the bitcoin rabbit hole you can't unsee it or you can't forget it's been said before in other ways but it's 1:09:11 said been said more eloquently than that but um so actually that's one thing yeah that's very true like you actually can't 1:09:16 unsee truth you can like layer lies on top of yeah that's the thing is like once somebody sees a true system or um 1:09:24 yeah something factual yeah how do they people don't even see that do they hey take the orange pill 1:09:32 there's no going back neo exactly yeah and that's why it's so powerful 1:09:38 yeah and it's the same thing on like like truth like you can't closed source truth either like truth is also open 1:09:44 source isn't that funny like what's what's truth it's like okay love well you can't close source love and uh the 1:09:51 laws of physics well you can't close source the laws of physics you can just reach out and touch them uh growth like energy you can't close 1:09:59 source energy or bitcoin it's just so it's just so deep i heard of that yeah 1:10:05 it's pretty it's pretty it's pretty cool that we've uh we've discovered it and 1:10:11 that our friends and family and others within our own personal network will 1:10:17 discover it because knowledge um expands yeah and discovery expands 1:10:25 each and every day steak and shake next week 1:10:31 i'll see you there yeah awesome thank you for joining us Keith thanks so much guys dude this is awesome 1:10:42 [Music]