FFS063 - Obi Nwosu

[00:00:00]

[00:00:00] Introducing Obi Nwosu

Luke: Welcome to the Freedom Footprint show,

Obi: Obi. Thank you. Thank you for having me guys. We finally did it. Yeah, finally.

Luke: Yeah. We, we tried in vain and Riga just didn't quite get the schedules connected. I think we were looking, we were both looking for each other for a good

Obi: hour or something. Yeah. It was one of these sort of movies where you just keep missing the person that you're looking right and the other person's looking left and you walk past each other.

Yeah. Um, but

Luke: anyway. Here we are, Sonny Lugano.

Obi: Yeah, I, last year Lugano was, um, it was glorious forever. It was the first time I went to Lugano and it was amazing. This year, not so much, not so much, but still the energy, the, the, the orange energy is strong.

Knut: And we're happy because we're in a five star hotel, in a five star city, in a five star country, right?

Obi: You can really feel it. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. Just ignore these guys. They're

Luke: [00:01:00] letting it get to them. Well, at least Knut is. I think Obi is so humble, but you

Obi: know. So, well,

Knut: this is the exception to the rule. Uh, I mean, uh, I've lived in everything from best Western to

Obi: worst Eastern,

Knut: you know?

Obi: Yeah. All right. I remember backpacking, um, around the world and actually you would think that the worst places would be in like. Africa or Southeast Asia, but actually the worst, um, hostel I stayed in was in, in the U. S. All right. Um, it was in Hawaii and the, and you shared your bed with, I don't know, several dozen cockroaches and you went into, I remember going at night, I, I, I only stayed there one night, but I had to, I remember going into the bathroom and I was like, weird, the floor's black.

And then I opened the door, turn on the lights, and then the cockroaches [00:02:00] scattered, but it was so many cockroaches. Initially, I thought the floor was black and that's how bad it was. And when you went to bed, there was cockroaches in the bed and you've, you normally, you think open the bed and the cockroaches would run away.

They just, they don't, they didn't care. They just would still just be hanging around. Pull her out. And I was so tired. I had to sleep. I just, just tried to not imagine what was crawling over me. Stayed there one night and then the following day I found someone else, but it was so crazy.

Knut: It reminds me of the shittiest bar I've ever been to, which was in Bahrain.

So it was an illegal bar called Old Beams, and imagine, you know, the toilet scene from Trainspotting where he dives down the toilet to get the suppository, that kind of

Obi: vibe. Did you try to reenact that there? No, no, no, I didn't, fortunately.

Knut: And there were a lot of stories about the place. Apparently some guy died of a heart attack in the bar and just fell down with his head to the bar.

And they didn't [00:03:00] find out until the, until closing time because they thought it was just drunk and sitting there. So like, wake up and the guy's dead.

So Obi, give us the TLDR on Obi Wan like, what's

Obi: your story?

My background is, you can hear from my accent, I'm British, English, member of the United Kingdom. Um, but, um, my back background is Nigerian descent. So both my parents, um, were from Nigeria. Um, um, sadly they both passed away in the last sort of five, six years. Um, but they were both from Nigeria. Um, I was actually conceived in Nigeria.

Um, but born, born in the UK, so I always like to say that my mother made a T for airport and I combat rolled down the stairs into, into the United Kingdom. Um, yeah, grew up in inner city, [00:04:00] um, early 70s, mid 70s, early 80s, UK. Um, very early on, I discovered that I was really interested in computers and soon after that I discovered I was really interested in neural networks.

So I was building neural networks in secondary school, um, university, I studied computer science and cognitive science, and then I discovered my passion for entrepreneurialism. So I worked on some of the earliest sites for the BBC and News International, and then And then I built a massively multiplayer virtual world with, um, with a million users and then another one with 30 million users.

And then I went from being a CTO for 15 years to being a CEO. I had a couple of companies, one did well, sold, one did really badly, lost a lot of money. Um, but that's where you learn all your lessons. And then I went on to, um, while working on that one, I discovered the 2011. Bitcoin and I [00:05:00] bought a little bit and I thought it was really interesting technology, but I didn't think it was going to succeed.

It was going to be squashed. Two years later after I'd sold, um, uh, my second company, uh, my soon to be co founder came up and said, we should set up a Bitcoin exchange here. And I was like, okay, this Bitcoin stuff in 2013 is still around and it's still around. Great tech staying in power. Let's do this. And ran the UK's longest running Bitcoin exchange.

It started three people with a dream, and then we were 1. 70 percent market share in the UK for eight years. The first to do this thing called provable solvency. We did it for the longest unbroken record. Listed, um, via Blockstream on the New York Stock Exchange, one of the first regulated, um, exchanges in Europe.

Um, but that's when I realized over that eight years that one, um, regulation was eventually going to make it harder and harder and harder for people to self custody. The unintended consequence of that was certainly... Unhosted [00:06:00] wallets and all that. Well, the onboarding experience was just going to get more and more and more.

The UX was going to be... Um, more and more and more difficult and challenging and whatever the reasons for the regulation, this unintended consequence had to be resolved. And, um, I felt that it was important to find ways to get people to custody of exchanges. Um, but I also found that just human nature, people were...

Most people, most people in the Bitcoin space are sort of like trails, trailblazers and so on. Um, but most people want safety and security and want what they can understand and so on. And so most people that we talk to from our customer base were very uncomfortable with self custody. And they trusted us more than they trusted themselves.

And from that research and from those conversations, I realized that they trusted their friends and family more than they trusted us. Um, and the reason they came to us was [00:07:00] normally from a recommendation from a friend or family. So, so that told you that the trust level was... Close friends and family, then strangers who advertise and show themselves to be really big and important and well structured, i.

1. companies, and then themselves, almost a third, in terms of order. So, uh, that's where the seeds of the ideas, if there's a way to get people to at least trust them, use the sort of their, the power of their community, um, that could be interesting. And

[00:07:30] The Origins of Fedi and Fedimint

Knut: that's, that's how the idea for FedeMint

Obi: was born.

That's how my thinking about this approach to potentially getting people off exchanges came, but I didn't come up with the idea of FedeMint. Um, that was my co founder, um, Eric Sirian. Um, and he'd been working, so he's separately, he was, you know, pure, um, you know, cypherpunk, um, strong background in cryptography.

He's An incredible guy. Very, very, very humble as well. Um, [00:08:00] and he, his story. So we met in Hacker's Congress in Prague, but his story, the few years before that was, he was working on cryptography and so on. And as a cypherbunker, as a cryptographer, um, he was very interested in Charmy and E cash. Uh, and the way I describe it, it's like catnip to cryptographers.

The idea of Charmy and E cash is an incredibly simple protocol. Um, this year it's 40 years, um, young. So it's been around for a long time, very mature. 40 years? 40 years. Oh, right. It predates, yeah, it's, it's, the idea came out, came out, was based on a paper that came out in 1983. Yeah,

Knut: I always say that Bitcoin is not the first cryptocurrency,

Obi: it's the last.

Yeah, it's the last. So. Um, and it has a number of incredible properties with one downside. So, um, whereas Bitcoin doesn't have that downside and has very strong properties, but in some respects, not as strong as Zcash, the one that's most important, [00:09:00] um, essentially resistance and decentralization, it's nothing could beat it.

And that's, we now know is the most important criteria, but in terms of privacy. It's good, but, but e cash is in, technically it can be cryptographically near perfect privacy. It's also a very, very simple protocol. So it's really easy to understand. You can use easy analogies and people understand it. And the e cash you get as a result acts the way when you first heard about Bitcoin, you expect it to act like actually it acts like cash in your pocket.

You have a file per coin. So if I want to send you, so it's a bearer instrument. Each file you, when you have e cash on your phone, it is literally on your phone. It's not on a blockchain. You'll have, if you have 10 e cash notes, each one being worth 0. 1 Bitcoin, then you'll have 10 files of 0. 1 Bitcoin. And if I want to send you 0.

1, I will literally just take one of those and just. Send it to you. In any mean possible. Um, it does, it could be sent it over the internet. It could be [00:10:00] sending it offline. It could be sending it through your screen. It could be however.

Knut: So how do I know that you don't still

Obi: have the file yourself? No, you, you don't know that.

So that's where you still can go back to, that's where you, the mint is important. You go back to the mint. And tell them that it's proved that you have it and they can issue you a Newman. It's like going to the bank and getting a change. So, but again, conceptually, we understand these concepts of, okay, I've got some old dirty notes that have been used a lot.

So I go to bank, get some fresh, fresh notes and they burn those ones. Then the question is, so it works, but it all requires trust. Yeah. In this mint. Yeah. And, um, so, um, all these great properties, but all require trust in the center actor. And he'd been thinking about this and he thought about a way of taking some of the concepts of from Blockstream and Liquid and federations and say, well, why can't I take this federation concept and apply it to Chammy and Ekesh?

So federate the Chammy and Ekesh mint. So [00:11:00] FedE Mint. Oh, right. So that's where the name comes from. But then you realize, okay, well, you've got that, but I also have to put value in and out. And so what is the money to that? Well, clearly you should use the best money there is, and that's Bitcoin. So you also have a federated.

Wallet for Bitcoin. So when, and that effectively is a multi sig wallet.

[00:11:19] The Design of Fedimint

Knut: Okay. So, so, so Fedimin is not a Bitcoin specific, but you could like use

Obi: it for anything. Fedimin is, so the idea came from the, from the passion to take Charmin e cash. And make that better. And the way to make it better is federated, as opposed to retrusting one single party, which was, which was the idea from 40 years ago.

It's not new to have a single party, which I mean, it's a 40 year old idea, but the idea of making it federated was the new concept. And you'd think, okay, but if it's federated, but the money that you deposit in and out is not, so let's say someone deposits money in the bank and then. They issue this in a federated manner.

It doesn't matter [00:12:00] because the money's still, um, not federated, but Bitcoin is the first money that you could hold in a federated manner, i. e. multisig. Multiple people are simultaneously owning this. That wasn't possible before Bitcoin. You can't have... You know, 40 owned by four different people, each can have 10 each or, but you, unless they all holding 40 in their hand and said, I never move, go to the toilet together, go to sleep together.

That's not practical. So at a distance, multiple people simultaneously collectively owning something only possible with Bitcoin. So, um, and prior to that, that wasn't possible. So it now made sense to federate the e cash mint because the money can also be federated. But then you think, okay, but sending Bitcoin around.

If I do need to take money and, um, from this, uh, wallet and send it around. Bitcoin by itself is going to be slow, it's going to be expensive. So really to make the system practical, you also need to have federated lightning as well. So what he [00:13:00] really built is a system where his intention was to build a system to federate Chime and eCash.

What he built was a system to take any process you want and make it federatable, federated. Um, but clearly not, you don't want to do federated grand theft auto. It's not really important to have the overhead of federating, but you could, you could do federated grand theft auto. It's just wouldn't serve. So what it comes down to is things that would do with really important things.

So money, maybe certain important data like passwords, you might want to federate that, you know, for example, backing up private keys across multiple as opposed to one, um, and also conversations instead of having it stored with. Just one provider like, um, um, WhatsApp or Telegram or WeChat having all access to all your conversations, you could instead federate the running of that, uh, to multiple people.

So, so you, there could be other things, but the obvious ones are your communication, your money and [00:14:00] certain sensitive data. You'd want it to be federated and shared.

Knut: So how, how does that work though? Like what, what, how does the, what does the app look like? How do I federate

Obi: information? I can, I can show you the app, um, but I don't know how it will look on the screen.

But, um, Uh, so there's, there's two things. So first of all, there's the service that can take any process and federate it. And it comes a standard with, I should have worn my FedeMint t shirt, cause then you could see the code on my chest, but, um, it's, it, it, the first thing it does is it. Launches the federation and the way it does that is us, let's say there's a three of us plus one other and, and as we recommended minimum, you can have a federation of one, but then that's basically, I mean, it's, it's useful for testing.

Um, if you want to, you know, developer, you want to test an idea because [00:15:00] it will operate the same if it's one or it's four or if it's 50 years. So you, you develop and you start working on it. And then once you're happy, you can, you can, you can, um, expand, or if you only have one to begin with, you can start a process, but as it gets above a certain size, you can say, okay, let's add more and create a larger federation and a larger federation as your community expands, that could be useful.

But let's say.

The point where you start getting redundancy, i. e. protection from bad actors, is at four. So let's say we have four, four guardians, you would, um, we call them guardians, people who run it, they will download the FediMint software, um, and they will run it, and it will ask you how many other people, how many people in the federation.

And one of them, you can, it can be anybody. You can elect one to be the person who just fills in the form, basically. They all, anyone can do it. It doesn't really matter. Um, they don't get any power from that. They just get the admin work of writing the name of the federation, the number of people, say it's [00:16:00] four, um, and then you, a description of the federation.

That's pretty much it. There's a few of, uh, Do you want to just have money handled or do you want money in chat handled? And so a few things, it takes two minutes, depending on how quickly you type an average type of one minute to fill. It's like five questions on a form, um, about just telling you the information about the federation and you click go and it will, um, effectively.

Give you the, it'll give you a string, which represents the federation and you take that string and you copy it and you send it to the other four people and they paste that same string into their filaments. And that string allows that information allows them to find the other servers. So they connect up to the other servers and you'll wait.

Three or four seconds later, hey, presto, federation formed. So at that point, the, each person's software is just running a little bit, but a little bit like a [00:17:00] Bitcoin node. It's, it would just continue just to run, tick, tick, tick. You need to just keep that machine fed and watered with internet and electricity, a bit like a Bitcoin node.

Um, and they will communicate with each other. And so they, they have a number of, of programs that are running on them that are federated. So all FedEments by default become a standard with Bitcoin Lightning and E cash. And so all of them will have Bitcoin Lightning and E cash and they will communicate with each other and it becomes this one federated E cash, federated Bitcoin, federated Lightning all running.

So what that means now, for example, the federated Bitcoin will give you a deposit address, just like a, like a Bitcoin wallet. And you can say, I can send money to it. And, um, also you can. Um, it has an API as well, effectively an application program interface. So programs can use, um, this service to [00:18:00] know when, when, when the federation has received money, ask it to send money and so on.

It has to provide certain information.

Knut: Yeah. So if it's, if I have a multisig on a fetti, like, uh, how does that work? If I wanna send the Bitcoin, does three outta four people have to send

Obi: it? Yes. But, but the three outta four. Three out four. The Fed servers. Yeah. Yeah. So, so each server will recognize there's a request to send.

See that you have the relevant, um, rights to send that money Uhhuh , as part of the request. You have to prove that you have the rights to send the money. You have to. Effectively provide the information needed to prove that, and once it sees that you have the proof you have the right, it will also pass with your request where you want to send the money to, and then it will negotiate with the others, check that at least two of the other three have also confirmed that.

And then once we've all confirmed, then they will collectively also sign together a transaction to send and publish. One of them will publish, it doesn't really matter, just round robin between them, but that's all [00:19:00] handled in the background. So it's like the simplest way to set up a multisig as well. If you wanted, even if you didn't want to, if you wanted to have a federation for yourself.

You might find that's easier than to set up a multi sig for yourself, because it's just like, you download four pieces of program, you can put them all on the same machine, you can put them onto different machines, and then set up with one, click, click, click, and you know, you've got this multi sig, which you could use to receive and send, and if one of those machines was destroyed, it would recover and handle all of that, for example, or lost and so on, so.

[00:19:29] How Bitcoin Works on Fedi

Obi: Yeah, I have a

Luke: specific question about that. Like, how would the, how are the Bitcoin addresses then stored? Like, if someone gets access to the computer where the software is running, is it, is it, Can, can they just have the, the private key

Obi: there? Is that sort of how that works? Or the com, the computer where it's running?

Um, well it depends on how the computer's set up, but, um, funda, fundamentally, if a computer is compromised, um, then you can have access to the keys on it. Just in case of, uh, hot wallet's compromised, you can access, access the keys to it. So it's similar, but it's a multisig. So, [00:20:00] but everybody, you would have to compromise multiple of them.

And if it was seven, you have to compromise. You'd have to compromise at least two to be able to prevent this, well, no, at least three to be able to prevent the system, um, from being able to create new transactions, but you still couldn't take anything. You'd have to compromise, um, five of the seven to be able to take money.

But you'd have to compromise three of the seven to be able to prevent the others from spending the money.

Knut: And how do you find peers? Like, how do you find the other parties to, to feddy with? To form the

Obi: federation. Yeah, it's

Knut: a rating system or something like?

Obi: Um, so the idea, this is where, this is where, um, we, we collided.

Um, so he was working on this idea. Um, and he was thinking about it, um, technically as, okay, I can federate this. Um, uh, [00:21:00] charm me a mint. And also I should federate Bitcoin as well, which is already done Multisig and federate lightning. And now it makes this cohesive idea Bitcoin Lightning and Fed. And, um, you know, other, um, peoples really liked this idea.

He got, initially, the first people to sort of hear it was Blockstream Uhhuh, and they started sponsoring him. I think over a year before I, I met him and, um, also they use the people who worked on Liquid, which was another form of federation, gave him input on this. Um, so he was able to take that and build something which had similar properties, but focused on being really, really, really easy to set up and run.

That was the difference of focus. So he, he had that, but he wasn't really thinking about the, the sort of the. Logistical aspect of, okay, how do you form the federations? It's like they are fed, this is, this is software that allows us to happen, but the actual creating a federation, who should be, who should be the people running it, that was different from him.

While I was looking for, uh, [00:22:00] I had this insight that, um, communities were. Potentially a powerful new, um, unit for running, um, for, for, uh, working with Bitcoin as opposed to the individual or very large, um, strangers, uh, centralized strangers and nothing in between. You have this community of second parties, people that you know, friends and family.

So, um, and so when I met him in Hacker's Congress by pure luck, cause we live in different circles, um, he's like pure, you know. Alpha, Alpha, CryptoPunk, um, Cypherpunk Circles, and mine was more commercial, but I was in the middle of selling my last company and I just thought, okay, I can finally go to Hacker's Congress.

When you're running a regulated financial institution, it's very, it's not a, it's, you'll get asked lots of questions if you decide to go to Hacker's Congress, you know? So, but now that I was selling it, I was like, finally, I don't, I can just go to something I wanted to go to. So I went for the first time and.

Trans encounter, you just meet [00:23:00] people, started talking, I explained what I was trying to do, explained some of the ideas I had at the time. He politely explained why they were really bad ideas, technically. And, but it was also just very impressive how he could explain it, be very clear about it, but not like, but be diplomatic as well.

Um, and then I asked him what he was working on and he started explaining and I thought this was a very interesting idea and then it just clicked. This is the way to solve my problem, actually. Um, and, um, but the, the, the missing piece was community that if you find, if you find and focus on communities, whether it be a company for internal companies, that's a community or a village or a family, and who regularly have an uncle Jim, who's handling custody for the children or the grandparents and so on, they're all a community.

Different forms of community. So how do you find people? Well, then the answer is obvious. If it's your community, you've already found them. It's [00:24:00] not KYC, it's KYF, know your friend, know your family. You've already spent your entire life already knowing them. And there'll be some people you really love, but you wouldn't know them.

Trust them as far as you can throw them, you know, and, and there'll be other, whether it's because they're untrustworthy or whether it's because they just not really technically complimental enough to it. And there's other people, you know. You probably think these people could be trustworthy enough and combine that with the fact that 30 minutes are incredibly simple to set up.

No, that's the target. I mean, it's, it's a year ago and I'm talking about, it was still quite a complex thing to set up, but the vision was, it was going to be easy. And, and what we've been doing really hard over the last year is getting it easier and easier. So now. It was just a demo right to one sort of organization just yesterday.

It was amazing because it used to require a skilled technician, you know, a day to set up one. But now we just clicked a button at the beginning of the, of the, of the talk [00:25:00] and we fill in the form, click the button. And then we'll come back to that. And we did the presentation for like 10 minutes and, and it set itself up.

And I go, to prove it works, you took an app, the Feddy app, but it could be any other app, just like the multiple lightning apps and multiple Bitcoin apps, scan the QR code and you would, you'd join the federation. So it's 10 minutes and one click pretty much to set up a federation now. Um, as at the, at the, and we think we can get it down to two minutes and well, you just have to have at least one click, you don't have to download it and click go pretty much.

That's it. I mean, this is,

[00:25:37] KYF - Know Your Friends and Family

Knut: this is so fascinating because the way I see it, this don't trust verify attitude in Bitcoin, it. Over time it creates a layer of trust between bitcoiners, like we, we, we trust each other to a larger extent. Like if someone on Twitter DMs me and say, Hey, you want to go to Mexico?

Like, uh, sure.

Obi: Yeah, but this could be a random [00:26:00] person, but you now know this. Yeah, because

Knut: the proof of work or for the person or like. The interactions you've had with them on Twitter or anything else over the years. It's sort of Bitcoin has become trustworthy because it becomes easier to, to like weed out the bad seeds.

If someone starts shit coining or something like, ah, I'm not going to trust that guy. So, so ironically don't trust verify leads to more trust.

Obi: I think, I think, um, I think you had this sort of process of maturation of Bitcoin. Yeah. So I think. It was absolutely important to have the base layer to start with, don't trust verify, because we were living in a world at that time, and we still are, but it's changing because of what we're doing.

But we were living in a world of, um, don't verify, just blindly trust. That's the world we were living in. And so you needed to have a very, very clear counter to that. [00:27:00] And you didn't want to have any uncertainty. Thank you. Any caveating, any, it needs to be a clear message. So it needs to be, don't trust, verify, and that should be the base and the foundation.

And that should be, um, but, um, over time now it's gaining traction and people understanding that we can now actually explain that. The ideal is to trust, but also verify to do both. And in fact, actually, you know, I was supposed to give you those dog tags, um, from the, the bad boating club. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I didn't keep it because it was like, yeah, but I still, I've got to say, but maybe because I just like it for myself because it's 21 divided by infinity. And that's, that was what was stamped on the other way around, right? Yeah, so infinity divided by 21, sorry, you were right, I was, I was testing you. Um, but, uh, but you, you, you still remember that, that's good.

Yeah, yeah. Um, but, but, um. Um, my [00:28:00] one was trust and also verify. Trust and verify. Yeah. So trust is a very, very powerful tool. It makes things more efficient. It is, it is. So, um, however, um, and to not trust to go through a world of not trusting anybody, no, no one does that. Even the most ardent persons who don't trust verify will.

The very fact of their day to day existence, they'll be trusting thousands of different people, whether they realize it or not. When they eat food, they have to trust that the food is not being poisoned. You know, drink water hasn't been poisoned. When

Knut: you cross a bridge, you need to

Obi: trust the engineer.

Yeah, so you're gonna, you're going to need to trust. Um, otherwise you're just gonna be in a hole, not talking to anyone. But, that being the case... You should also build up the habit of verifying them. And so I think that's the, that's the sort of the Nostr. Um, and where that, where that meets is I think at community.

Yeah,

Knut: there's another aspect to it. Like, uh, the, um, Bitcoin removing the profitability from violent [00:29:00] behavior. So, so since if. If most of my wealth is in my head, as in keeping a secret or owning a Bitcoin, uh, if you kill me, you don't get anything. So you're like moving the shelling point of violence, like, uh, and that, that in itself, that very concept of Bitcoin being, Bitcoin's being very hard to steal, uh, from people who know how to store them properly, especially if you have a multi sig set up in different countries and all this stuff is, it's quite hard to get another And that, in a way, creates more trust because you know that the guy you're trusting doesn't have the incentive to attack you in the same way as they do in fiat.

You think there's something to that?

Obi: Yeah, I think incentives are really important and you're right, it's making it as difficult as possible to be able to. Um, take it from you is, is important and that's why there's, [00:30:00] that's why the best possible, and that's also important to be clear, the best possible is to have something which is trust minimized, self custody is, is the best possible at this point, although Um, if we can get, and our objective is always to keep analyzing this, but if we can get the efforts to custody within the community, um, to be close to that, we, we work on that.

So we work, we, I said, I had a background in provable solvency for eight years. Um, so. So, really early on, we, I think it was about a year, even a few months of meeting, we discussed how to, um, add proof of, um, proof of reserves to, to FediMint as well. So we've been working on that in the background for the last year.

There's many things we, we tend to just work on it quietly and then when it's ready, release. But so all these things are important and there's always new innovations and technologies in the Bitcoin space, which will. Make that even closer and closer and closer to the experience of [00:31:00] lightning and maybe even closer to the experience of self custody.

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[00:32:30] How Federations are Structured

Luke: I have a couple of follow on questions here. First of all, that provable solvency thing, I think you explained that, but I sort of have a question about like, how does the e cash actually get created and then How does that get used, uh, outside of the federation? Because this is, this is sort of the, the point that, uh, I, I understood, uh, that you have the guardians that are in control of, uh,

Obi: multisig, uh, Bitcoin, um, uh, [00:33:00] Federated lightning, for want of a better phrase, um, and obviously the federated e cash.

And any other application that you want to federate, they would be in control of running those. So they're in control of

Luke: it, but then there are the members, I think. That's the point to be. Yes, sure, sure,

Obi: sure. Because members could mean guardians or the users. So it's like, I just say users and guardians, yeah.

Luke: Okay. So you have the users, right? And so how does, how, what's the mechanism of, of getting, uh, something deposited into the federation, uh, into the hands of those, those users? How do they, how do they join? This is really 80 IQ question here, or 85.

Obi: I don't know. No, no, that's, that's, that's a good question. So, so there's a few things you say, how do you get, um, money into the system and how they join?

So, Let me first say how you join. To, to join, you just need to know the, um, the [00:34:00] details of the guardians. So you need to have the address of the federation effectively. Um, it's, you can think of it a bit like, uh, um, an, an internet URL web address, almost like, so as long as you can know that and you get that from another, again, it depends on the federation, how they set it up.

Sometimes only the. Guardians can allow, um, give that address to people and they're the only ones who can allow people to join. Or, um, the default way is anyone who's a member can pass on the details to someone else, so it can be very viral. You have connected to the Federation, and in the Federation details would be the address of the Federation, which you can display as a QR code and you give to someone else.

And they can just scan. So as long as you have the address, you can join. And, and a

Luke: thing here, as far as choosing to join a federation, that it only makes sense to join federations where you trust the guardians. Yes.

Obi: Yeah, that's, that's what, I mean, I mean, does it make sense to join it where you don't trust the guardians?

I don't know, [00:35:00] but it does make sense to join ones where you trust. And, but, but then you have degrees of trust. And again, you use your human intuition on... The trust levels, uh, about understanding, knowing your friends, knowing your family to determine how much you hold. Cause you can be a member of multiple federations.

Yeah. And so just like I can visit multiple websites, you know, and, um, I can be a member of multiple federations and it might be on one. I store very small amounts, but. It might have lots of guardians and lots of other users, um, because it's, I'm going to come back to the other part of your question soon, because it's related.

Um, and so there's benefits for me to use that, but I might only hold the amount of money I would, um, keep for, if I'm going out and I, and I put in my wallet. So, so worst case, if I get pickpocketed, I lose. Uh, you know, um, an evening's worth of money. Whereas, um, ones where it could be set up by my friends and family or, and Uncle Jims [00:36:00] and, and Auntie Janet's or whatever the female criminal uncle Jim is, , um, if that one, I might store a lot more value because I've known them for my entire life and, or, or, and they've been consistent, et cetera, and I, I might saw more there and then there might be.

Sorry, there might be a, um, company and all of its employees already, um, the company is in, um, is, uh, relying on and trusting the senior executive in the company to look after the money of the company already, by definition. The C F O and the c e o and so on could run off of the money. So, uh, you might as well consider putting in a, in a federation for if you have it, maintaining a Bitcoin treasury.

And if people have expenses in Bitcoin, well, in which case you can have those run through a federation and fed. And, but now you have a multisig set up for your company as another form of community. [00:37:00] So, and then it's a different amount of money will be stored there. So you would store the amounts based on who the people are.

So, so how does

Knut: it, how does it scale though? Like, is there a, um, some form of vouching system or rating system where people in one

Obi: federation can recommend? What's the rating system for your, for your family? No, no, but you have family A here. But you have a rating? No. But in terms of, so the question is, within your community, you already know.

So it's outside of the size of the community. Outside of the community, it doesn't scale. So that's, and that's a feature, not a bug. Because it means that you don't have this, um, we don't expect to see one monolithic. Um, you know, rollup or sidechain or so on, what everybody in the world uses, and with five people or 10 people or a hundred people running it, instead, you're going to have just like how many communities are there, how many families, how many towns, villages, and how many [00:38:00] companies are there worldwide, millions, and you want to see millions of these fediments, but, but, and to your previous question, the e cash, It's only usable within that community.

However, if I want to send it from one community to another, that's where Bitcoin and Lightning comes in. I have to convert that e cash back into, um, Bitcoin or Lightning Bitcoin and send it over the Lightning network to someone else, either on, who's on main chain or on the Lightning network directly because they, they.

They're self custodial or they're running their own lightning node or so on. Or there could be someone in another federation and it will go from Ash, my federation, which is, uh, which is, um, acceptable within anybody within my community or even my company or even my family, to lightning. And then it'll go over the Lightning Network to another federation, which then gets converted by the federations there to ash and, and on a balance.

But from our experience from the ux. The UX will be, [00:39:00] I open up my app, um, and there's, there's, there, there was, um, there was, uh, uh, I'm trying to remember, there was, uh, a FediMint wallet. I'm trying to remember the name, but there's a new one called, uh, WebbyMint. And then there's Fedi, is the one we're working on.

So there are different implementations of FediMint, um, or FediMint protocol. So I could take my wallet. See yours, you give me a QR code that can look like a Lightning, it will look like a Lightning invoice. I scan it in the same way I would do with any other Lightning wallet. And my balance will go down and yours will go up.

You're on a different federation or it could be a Breeze wallet or any other wallet. You show me the QR code and the lightning address and I will pay it. And it doesn't, the details of whether it's converting or so on is all happening automatically [00:40:00] because you've got these federations running this code 24 7 in the background.

And they could be sleeping while it's doing it. So long as they make sure that machine is protected and it's fed in water with electricity and internet, it all just works. So that's how it scales. The Lightning Network makes

Knut: it scale.

[00:40:15] Bitcoin Scales Fedi Scales Bitcoin

Knut: Okay, so Bitcoin scales Feddy and not the other way around.

Obi: Bitcoin scales Feddy and Feddy scales Bitcoin.

I did a talk last year in an Afro Bitcoin conference that said, Africa wins with Bitcoin's help and Bitcoin wins with Africa's help. Yeah, yeah. But this is actually another one of these things. Lightning, without lightning, you're going to have tens of thousands of these islands that were with, but lightning, on the other hand, there was a talk the other day, um, in, um, Bitcoin Amsterdam with, um, a number of people on scaling lightning and their calculations was you can get to maybe 10 million, maybe 20 million people using the Lightning Network directly.

Yeah. But if each, [00:41:00] if, if, if a million of those were federations, each one's with, you know, somewhere between five people to 50, 000 people on them. Now that scales to billions of people. So what's, what's

Knut: the limit of a federated, like how big can it be? Uh, does it have to do with Dunbar's number? It's

Obi: like, no, no, it doesn't have to do.

I mean, technically yes and no, actually. Um, on a technical level, you could get to hundreds of thousands. Um, but on a practical level, because of the fact that it's going to be people that you trust and so on, we, we expect that number to be lower because it's the trust limit is going to actually prevent it getting above a certain size.

Um, but you could have somewhere people will be very large, but people will store small amounts on like a spending wallet, which, and your anonymity sets, um, uh, or your. Protect your privacy set, I think is a better way of putting it, um, is limited to the number of people in the [00:42:00] federation, but, but basically you could be a family, it could be a size of one, you could just set up, you might want to do this as a simple way, or an alternative way of setting up a multi sig for yourself, and you have, um, four nodes, in fact, someone just the other day showed a FedEmint running on a mobile phone, so you can get four mobile phones.

Plugs into power in four different places, like in your office, in a, in a, in a cupboard somewhere and, uh, in your house and, and, and a friend's place, you know, and they're former phones, so they're waterproof and so on. And you can, you know, have them solar powered or whatever you get four phones in theory.

I mean, we're not, we're not there yet, but just someone literally was just quite excited about that, but you could have, or four umbrellas or whatever, and they form a federation. Just for you, and you can be the only user of it, but the benefit of that is that if one failed, you'll immediately know, and you can have software, which would immediately, [00:43:00] you can, again, you could create, uh, people are thinking about so many different ideas, but this is for other people to build because it's an extensible platform.

You can have this federated sort of emergency exit button where if the number of guardians went down below a certain level, it'll take your balance and send it immediately off to. Another federation or another address or something. Okay. So

[00:43:21] Resiliency of Fedi

Luke: it's not that you can recover a lost guardian. That's, that's not possible, or it is

Obi: possible.

If they're lost, you can't recover them. If they're damaged or their machines failed or so, and then that can be recovered. You just restart the machine and it will, it will automatically catch up. And again, all of this. So when you see a website that's very popular being used by multiple people. They, they, um, are, there's a machine called a web server, I don't know if I can teach you, it's like a web server where the actual code for the site is, and when someone goes to a website, they connect up to that web server, that machine, and it will [00:44:00] take the code for a given page.

And send it back to the person and the person will display that on their web browser. But the reality is, is that beyond the most trivial websites, there won't just be one machine. There will be multiple machines, um, that all have the same software running on them. And so when you ask for that website, um, it will basically, there'll be another service which will say, Okay, this time machine A responds, then machine B, then machine D.

And then if. If someone tries to modify any data on machine A, they communicate to each other to make sure they all have the same data. Now, typically the way that would work is it, it's, it can be a little bit complex to set up. You have all these different types of machines involved. You have database servers and you have.

Application servers and web servers and load balancers, and there's all this other stuff. All that's replaced with a federation, and it handles that. And you have software to handle if one fails and I'll recover. That's [00:45:00] all handled by the federation. You just set it up, five minutes, and then, um, if one machine fails and you restart it, it will catch up and recover, it will synchronize information.

That's, that's why, although this was made to resolve Um, making chammy and e cash mints, um, decentralized, it has way more applicability. If there's anything that you think benefits from redundancy and reliability, then you should run it in the federal, you don't need that to run noughts and crosses, but you know, tic tac toe, some people might call it, but it's useful when you're dealing, if you think about it, definitely when it deals with money, you want redundancy, you don't want to lose one machine and everything stops, definitely with chat.

And certain sensitive data, your passwords, you might want it to be on multiple machines, not one machine failure. Does

Luke: that make sense? And, and last redundancy question on, on that, can you transfer the identity of a guardian? Because, because, uh, in, in my thinking when I, when I talked about that, if something fails, right?

Uh, the, the question I have is [00:46:00] what if you have multiple, uh, failures and, and then you say you, you can transfer the balance out and, and, but you would, you would lose your federation in, in, in

Obi: that respect, right? Yeah. If you, so you, yes, you can. Um, and Casa does a good job of this as well. For example, you have, with the guardians, when you set up a multi sig, um, so multiple people signing own, having collective ownership of certain Bitcoin or control of certain Bitcoin, um, that set is, is fixed.

There are protocols to. Allow you to add more to that set. There's a, there's something called Frost that's recently come out that allows you to take a multisig and then, um, you can add more people to it, but you can't remove people from it. But you can add people to that set. Okay. You can, so, so you have to be aware that you can make them, not, you no longer talk to them, but their, their keys are still active, so you have to track that.

But, and, and already someone has made something called frosty mint, which was using fetty mint and [00:47:00] extended it to support. Extensible sets. However, even without that, what you can do is if someone loses their keys or becomes a bad actor, or you decide, I don't want to be a guy anymore, and a different person comes in, you form a new federation with the new set of people, and then you transition everybody's balances over, over the lightning network.

To the others, but like traditional multi sig, but what Casa did very well and others do is made that process when you go in, what you see is I've got these people who are the signers for the multi sig and I'm now want to delete this person, add this person, you make the change you want, you click confirmed, and then there's an hourglass and it goes done, but what's actually done is it's formed a new multi sig, transferred balances, but from your point of view, it's just felt like I've just made a change.

And that's where, from a UX point of view, all of that should be hidden from the user. And so we should have it where we transfer your, you know, transfer [00:48:00] your, your, um, Bitcoin across your, your e cash and your, um, And your, if you're using chats, your chat conversations, everything should all just go across.

But from your point of view, you don't see that. You just see, this thing is up, this thing is, um, upgrading. Here's a new version of the federation. Um, are you happy with those guardians? If not, you've got a week or a month to just transfer it out to someone else. Um, otherwise just click okay. And then you just wait hourglass and done.

You're, you've upgraded. You know, so it, we, we, that's how the, that's the, that's our Northstar aim. And we're not there yet, but we've got an incredible team who are, who are working around the clock to make the experience magical, as I'd like to put it.

[00:48:50] Achieving Perfection

Knut: And when can we expect the Fede chewing gum, like perfect branding with frosty mints and Fede mints and like...

Obi: Oh, then the [00:49:00] answer for that is, um, there's never going to be perfect. So the vision that we have in our mind of the system is never going to be perfect because... The Bitcoin ecosystem is constantly coming up with new ideas. And so, um, you know, Frost was one. Um, if there was an opcode update to support certain things like Covenants, then, you know, we could add all of that to, uh, Federimint.

Um, and, um, there's things like, um, ideas like ARK, which could be implemented. So a federated ARK, anything that works well, single server works better federated because, like. Federations are better than no federations. Um, um, simple setup is better than complex setup. Yeah. Um, um, redundancy is better than no redundancy, you know?

Um, so, um, that's what you get with, with running something in a federated manner. So if it's useful to run in a non federated manner, then [00:50:00] I mean, anything that we deal with in the Bitcoin space anyway, I mean, I don't think all of it, cause there's an overhead to running a federation versus running it on a single machine.

So if you're, as I said, if you're running a game of Pac Man, you probably don't need it to be federated. If, if the machine fails, you just start the game again, you know, it's like, it's not the end of the world. So, but for, for money, for communication and for certain sensitive data, it makes sense. And even some of the latest goings on in the Bitcoin space, some of the new ideas that have come out, um, again, we're keeping a close eye on because if they, they bear fruit.

Anything in the space, we will look to implement it to make the system better. Um, and FediMint will benefit from these new ideas and these new ideas will benefit from FediMint because FediMint is a mechanism to federate any idea. And you'll hear when people are looking at these new ideas, how to make them better.

They will suggest, okay, well, for example, ARK, what happens if the ARK [00:51:00] service provider goes offline? Well, the solution is we just federate it. But it's like... A database is a very useful, um, um, thing to have. And it's like, well, what I'm going to do with all this data, the solution is a database. Now, to begin with, I'm showing my age, but back in the nineties.

Every time you'll say we need a database or a web server, you'll literally roll your own database or you'll roll your own web server. Now, you would just use one of the standard established web servers and you'd use one of the established databases. You would focus on your business logic and you won't write your own database.

Luke: You could even take that one step further and click a button to launch a cloud server that has

Obi: all the features on it for you. Yeah, exactly. But the point is that... These are things that are widely useful for multiple things. So it makes sense for someone just to focus on, on doing that really, really well.

So then you can focus on. Or you can focus on whatever, BVM, or you can focus on, um, whatever system you want to do. Um, coin pools and stuff like [00:52:00] that, all these, all these different things, but the actual bit of federating it, handling redundancy, handling failure, all that sort of stuff. You just thought, well, why don't I just make it a module on a fediment?

And then I just have to focus on the business logic. And all of the effort from this incredible team to make it federated and redundant and fully recovering, um, you get for free. You

Knut: said, you said coin pools. I was thinking about coin joints before, like, if, uh, is there, is there a, a bridge between the two technologies where you use?

You do a federated coin joint where you trust the other people to not have flagged coins

Obi: go into the transaction. I mean, anything, anything could be, anything could be done. So you, you could do that. But uh, uh, within a federation, ash is actually cryptographically indistinguishable one ish from another.

Uh, so you already. You, you sort of get a level of privacy for free. All right. All right. Yeah.

[00:52:58] Fedi and E-Cash

Luke: I think, I think we haven't [00:53:00] actually dug into the e cash concept quite as, as much in, in this conversation. That, that is kind of the, the killer feature. And originally

Obi: the, the, the other stuff, yeah, the original idea was e cash and it is.

Uh, a incredibly important and killer feature, but there are, but what we realize more and more is that there are multiple killer features and it's, um, it's important to understand that you get best in class e cash because it's federated, so you remove the single point of trust. So that's, that's incredible.

And that was, that was the thing that was new, but, um, you also get. Um, a very simple to set up multi sig, um, system. You also get redundant lightning as well. So you can, the benefit of having that is that you can have multiple people providing you, um, lightning provision, for example, as opposed to one LSP.

But you don't need to lock up different Bitcoin [00:54:00] with each one. So that means it's costless for me to have free, um, lightning connections going out from my, um, Federation. Uh, means which is available for everybody in that, um, community as opposed to one. So let's say one, like one of your LSPs works 99 times out of a hundred, one of you payments wise.

Well, if you have one, that means one in, if you have one, that means one in a hundred of your transactions fails. If you're free. It's one in a hundred, times by one in a hundred, times by one in a hundred. That's like, so you're now talking about one in a million, one in a million, I think, will, will, will, will fail.

Yeah, because, because you have redundancy. Also, the, the costs of using Bitcoin and Lightning Network, like channel rebalancing now is. It's shared across, instead of one person, it's shared across, um, you know, a community, a family of 10, 20, or a company [00:55:00] of 50 to 100, or a community of 10, 000, so on, making it much more affordable for some of the people who need it the most, you know?

So it, so it actually, um, has multiple benefits if you federate. Um, Bitcoin usage, if you federate lightning usage and share that. So, um, and then the general concept that is built on the idea of federations and making them really easy, more and more. And you'll, once you start hearing it, you'll realize that all lots of things that are, are being looked at in the space, they will talk about to make them more redundant, to make them easier, we just have a federation, but it's like, well, okay, we should build our own database.

It's like, well, do you want to do that? Or would you just want to use. We focus on making federations really, really easy and powerful, and also giving you the primitives that you're all going to want. You're all going to want Bitcoin. You're all going to want Lightning. You're all likely going to want e cash because the more you use it, you realize it's a really, really powerful tool.[00:56:00]

And then you'll add your own business logic for the specific thing that you want to do. So, uh, so I just want to make sure people understand the bigger picture. This is like. This is really powerful. Ash is incredibly powerful. But, but the whole thing together, the, the, the combination of them leads to something even more powerful.

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[00:58:09] What Layer is Fedi?

Obi: So would you

Knut: call ment a layer three technology or a layer zero technology?

Obi: Um, I, I used to say different things, but, um, I don't think now a layer, I, I think. What would you call a database? What would you call a load balancer or web server? It's a tool which, um, they all like, it's almost like Jerry Maguire.

They complete each other. You want, you want lightning. It's a complimentary tool. So. Um, they all solve different problems. Um, well first of all, the base layer is Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Well, I'd

Knut: say Bitcoin is layer one, but the people in Bitcoin are layer zero. Yeah. Wanna, because we love

Obi: them. There's not layer one you wanna say.

If we go with that terminology. Bitcoin is the people are layer [00:59:00] zero. Um, that's the human community layer. Yeah. Um, the, uh, Bitcoin is layer one. Um, lightning, you might say is layer two. Yeah. Then I would say federations are things that can complement all of those. It's almost like, I would say it's like the shield.

It's like the armament for all of them. So it's, it allows, it takes the layer zero, who, which are individual people right now. It allows them to organize as, as in, in communities, which they naturally do and, and, and allows them to do that more efficiently. It takes layer one of Bitcoin and makes it easy to do that in a federated manner.

And it takes layer two of Lightning. And again, it makes it easy to do that in a shared manner as well. So it's, it's. It augments each one of those layers, oh, is

Knut: layer 0.1, 1.1, and 2.1 all at the same time. ,

Obi: uh, it's, I would say it's a multiplier versus an addi add addition. Okay. So it takes, so it's like [01:00:00] Tony Stark is great.

The Iron Ironman suit, it augments him, but the Ironman suit, uh, except for if you take the la ignore the later, uh, movies where it was self running and so on. Ignore all that. But the, the general idea is that, Um, or you can think, um, Captain America and his shield, you know, Captain America is very powerful by himself, but the shield augments him, multiplies what he can do.

And, and that's what I would say at Ferryman is it allows you to, to do what you currently do. But in a way where it's federated, you have redundancy. Wait a minute, it's

Knut: like, uh, I'd say Captain America would be Bitcoin and Iron Man would be the Lightning Network. And of course, Feddy is the Avengers.

Obi: I'm, I, I, well, I'm, I'm into my comic books as well, but I'm not sure, you're just trying to get the Avengers into the conversation because the analogy doesn't, I'm not sure the analogy fits there, but maybe.

Smash, I'm the Hulk. Yeah, exactly. Well, Iron Man. And the [01:01:00] Hulk and Captain America are all layer zero. They're all people. Yeah. And, um, and, um, Craig Wright is Dr. Doom, by the way.

But, and they all individually can use, I would say actually, um, if you're really going to take this example, um, we're going to torture this analogy, but the individual, like the shields and the, you know, the gamma rays, And the IMOs are actually probably closer to the idea of a really good, um, individual wallet, because they're designed, so for example, I don't want to name one because I'll be not naming others, but there are lots of really good wallets out there that can take what you do and, and give you superpowers, um, Bitcoin wallets and lightning wallets.

But then, um, to your analogy, the Avengers, sometimes, um, people want to get together and work together as [01:02:00] a group and coordinate together as a group, and that allows them to be even stronger. So, um, and that's what, um, FeddyMint allows you to do. It takes Your individuals and you can, it allows you to coordinate and work as a group.

Uh, uh, now a better example would be mighty morphing power rangers. There you go. Oh, or how they form individually. They're great. And they can, but then when they combine together to make one of these sort of mega type things. That's, that's that a fed a 30 minute allows you to do that. There you go. Yeah.

So, so

Knut: Fedie is really Nick Fury, the guy with the eye patch. Oh, Fe or Fe. Oh no. Fe Mint. Who puts the team together? Or maybe you are Nick Fury, like you, the guy who puts

Obi: the team together. . I don't, if I grew a beard then and, and I, and you poked out one of my eyes, maybe I could just use a patch with iron. P I, I mean I do like his color, sense of clothing.

'cause I always just wear black and Nick Fury if. Pretty much only seen him wearing black. So, so all right, we have that in [01:03:00] common plus the great hairstyle as well. But, um, Will you

Knut: curse less than Samuel L. Jackson?

Obi: On, on interview. Yes. Yeah. No, no. In generally I do. Yeah. But, um, yeah. Which is interesting because that brings you on, because you mentioned something, Feddy.

Um, and FediMint.

[01:03:18] Fedi vs Fedimint

Obi: So FediMint, we've been talking about this whole thing is the protocol and Fedi is a company that was set up to, um, increase adoption of FediMint originally, but our objectives and ambitions expanded and our focus is on driving adoption of Bitcoin, of Lightning, of FediMint and all freedom technologies like that, um, to, um, communities.

Around the world. So we're focused on taking this really, this community focused approach of growth and really, really driving hard on that. Um, and so obviously Bitcoin's part of that, Lightning's part of that, but, and clearly we think FediMint is part of that as well. But there, there will be other [01:04:00] technologies out there as well.

When we see them, we're looking at Nostr, we're looking at lots of different things. If we think that they can support, um, what we do is two things, there's two halves, the human and the tech. So the tech, you understand, we, we create, we work with these technologies and we analyze them and work with them.

And then we, we build a software, we call it, the software is also called Feddy, um, which is like a super app for communities, um, which takes us all together, provides you this really simple experience where you can manage all this stuff in one place. Um, so it's. Your, your conversations and chats, your money and data all available from one app.

So it's like a, like a super app. Um, and behind the scenes, it's using all of this technology, Lightning, Bitcoin, um, um, FediMint, potentially things like Nostr and so on. And it's just seamless. So that's one, but the other side, the human side is really important. Um, in fact, [01:05:00] over time, the majority of the team will be focused on this, which Finding and locating and then hiring people on the ground around the world in parts of the world where they need Bitcoin, lightning, and other freedom technologies the most, and then providing almost like, um, you know, The Apple stores and you have the genius bar, but it's like a decentralized genius bar to go with the app so that from the app and then also there'll be remote service as well, but it's on the ground and remote combined together so that if you have an issue or if you have a question, um, you're having, you want to set this up for a community.

We're there to help you set it up. But beyond that, we're there to help you understand and set up Bitcoin lightning, but it's all available starting from the app. All the way through to someone on the ground, if needed. And then any questions you may have, whether it be all the questions that you think that someone when they're starting, um, has.

We're there to answer it, but in your language, understanding your [01:06:00] local context, um, potentially meeting you in person, that's, that's a really, really powerful thing. And that's going to not just drive it because our system is effectively this window onto the, to the freedom technology ecosystem. It, it, our, the federation itself takes something else and federates it and makes it more redundant and so on.

But it isn't the thing itself. We aren't Bitcoin, we aren't lightning, we aren't Nosto or whatever it may be. So by rolling one of these out into a community, alongside this sort of human support network, we actually call it the Fedi order actually, or the Fedi Order . Um, and they're called Fed Nights, as you can imagine.

Um, but um, Um, by having this, we effectively locate, educate. Um, and inculcates effectively people on all these freedom technologies. And if there are aligned services, a lot of time people will say, I've got Bitcoin, I've received it. Now what I do with it? Well, you can buy stuff. [01:07:00] Maybe you can buy with Bitrefill from within the app.

Click, you're off to Bitrefill, but it's seamlessly integrated so that when you click and buy, the experience is very, very simple. Or it might be you need to, you can use Bolts or you want to donate to charity, Giza or whatever. So we. Every rollout of a FediMint is actually this education around all these other things where people don't even, they're using them, but they're not, but we are effectively the outsource business development arm for all the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem as well.

[01:07:31] What Countries are Fedi In?

Knut: So, so what countries, um, are you working on?

Obi: We're, we're global first business. So all our employees are all over the world in every, we have people in every continent already. Um, but. Um, um, we go where, um, initially we're focused on a few markets and going really, really deep to that are some of the most complex markets.

We want to start with the most complex markets because one, there's less people operating there. There's lots of people in less complex [01:08:00] markets. Um, and two, what we're finding is we have to sort of, every day we have it handed to ourselves in our, and after all of our, uh, understandings of how to build an app are sort of challenged, we have to go back to the drawing board, re architect so many different things, which is amazing because that means you're building something where you're, that people really, really need.

And because the feedback they're getting, and you're getting this uncommon knowledge, you know, of what you thought was required and what's actually required are very, very different things. So the end app is going to look and be different from everything else you've seen, because it's starting from this human centered approach to design.

It's like, we started off with something. This is what we thought. Give it to users. And then in terms of locations, we have a few locations in Africa, a few locations in Latin America. We're starting to look for locations in, there will be locations in, in, in all over the world, but, but we started these cause these are some of the most complex markets.[01:09:00]

Um, and, um, we've run these trials and then this torrent of feedback came back and this didn't work, this didn't work, this didn't work, this didn't work, but there's something there, but you need to rearchitect or rethink so many different things. So we went back. Re architected and now, okay, it works a lot better and there's still something there.

And we're getting more excited about this, but you still need to do this, these changes. And so, um, we're in that iteration point. We, there's a noticeable excitement, but we really want to build something that is starting from a point of. Listening to people who need it really, really badly, whether they realize it or not and say, well, what do we need to do to make it work in your context?

So we're now, we're now, I would say we're about 70 percent away through that process to the point where we can have a version that we can say, okay, this. It's an MVP for solving, there was an [01:10:00] MVP that we showed to people that it can use, but now this is the MVP that's been human centered, it's been re architected for, for actual use on the ground in very, very tough environments.

And the idea is if it works in those environments. Then it works everywhere, you know, if you start it. So that's, that's why it will, it will, it will just be way easier and better in, in the easy environments. But so it's, so it's always good to sort of try to work on the hardest first. And so that's what we're doing.

All right.

Luke: No, I'm only gonna jump in here because Because we've, I'm conscious of the time. We've already kind of overshot our target a little bit here. So I don't want to keep you too much longer. And that's what I was going to say. I've monopolized the conversation this time from our side. So, so back to Knut.

[01:10:49] Obi's Prior Career Ventures

Knut: What was the name of the MMO that you mentioned at the beginning of the interview that you were working on?

Obi: Oh, oh, a long, long time ago. There were, there were two. So, [01:11:00] um. Just out of university, I worked for News International. Um, actually I started while I was in university and... Uh, they owned, News International is this huge company that owns the Times, the Sun, uh, lots of different things.

And, uh, um, and they had a internet service provider. This was very early days, this was in the nineties, um, called, um, Delphi Internet, and they were competing with AOL and CompuServe and so on and so forth. Way back, if you remember these names. Um. And I was in customer service, and then I noticed that they had a programming language in the customer service system, um, and it would normally take, you know, 30 minutes to deal with one customer because of all the manual screens you had to go through.

I automated that, so the target was to be able to do 10 customers a day, and all of a sudden I was doing 20 customers coming in, they were playing basketball, and I was beating all the targets, and they asked me why, and I explained that I'd [01:12:00] automated the system, if you give me a team, And the team was from my university, um, we couldn't automate it further.

And within a month, basically, we only had to work an hour a day to do all of our targets. So they got some new, um, students in to do that and go, well, what do you want to do in Certicles? Well, there's this internet thing that's starting to become very popular. Can we, um, and you're in news, let's be... Let's become digital journalists.

We didn't call them bloggers then. It was just digital before the name of bloggers. So we started doing that. But I wasn't really interested in digital journalism. I was still interested in code. And I was interested in games like SimCity at the time. It was a single player game. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could play against Other people, like real time and I, um, and also like SimCity, but a little bit more interesting.

So you couldn't just build houses and so on, but you could also like firebomb other people's houses or produce, do smear campaigns in them, in the local press [01:13:00] and stuff like that. And so we made this sort of like dark version of SimCity, which was multiplayer and we called it Netropolis. And, uh, and, um, built the first version and it was like, literally I built the, um, myself, um, another member from my university, I built the backend sort of.

logic, the server for it. And he built the front end interface and, um, and it was launched on our site. Um, not much marketing, but it built a sort of like a cult following at one point. It had, I still, people are playing it today. I think, I don't know. I, unfortunately I was like early twenties and I was not commercially, um, focused.

I don't have any rights to the game, but it had over a million users and people were playing it for the last 20 years. Um, after that, so that was the, um, later on, um, in my career, I worked, um, a CTO for various sort of multinational companies. Um, um, [01:14:00] online auctions, one of the, eventually sold for 2 billion to NASPERS, um, was competing with, with eBay and so on at the time.

Um, and then I went on to work for a company that made a. Um, a character called, they were called weemies, like these little characters on Microsoft avatar things prior to NFTs, but basically they're like the similar sort of idea. And, um, um, but without a token, obviously this was, this was like 15 years ago.

Um, No, not 20 years, no, 17, 18 years ago, maybe, but, um, these, um, characters, um, they had originally been popular on Facebook and Microsoft and they had, we had about three, three or 4 million Weemees, but then we decided, let's make a home for the Weemees. So we built this massive multiplayer virtual world called Weeworld and, um, and, and then you needed this sort of, and it was competing, it was aimed at sort of.[01:15:00]

Teenagers, mainly female audience, uh, mainly American. So if you're an American teenager around that time, you would, you would know it, or a young teenager. The competition with people like Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin was for a bit younger than us, Second Life was for a lot older, 18 plus, and we were sort of in this sort of teenage middle point.

And yeah, we grew from these 3 million, we were bootstrapped from these 3 million sort of individual users, they now had a place to go and they could travel around and there were rooms and you could create your own room and decorate it and we did partnerships with special branded stuff with Nike and And then Justin Bieber, when he was early on in his career, we could, you could have a Justin Bieber sort of we me in your room, say that your, your, your boyfriend was Justin Bieber, you know, and then it grew, we ended up with about 30 million, 30 million active users.

Oh, so that was a lot. That was, uh, so yeah, first phase for me was, was AI. I was studying in university, um, and I, I was really a big fan for [01:16:00] neural networks, but I didn't progress with that because I just thought the, the processing power requirements were just way above what was needed at that time. So you can only do very simple things.

Now we've got to a point where we've reached this inflection point where processing power is powerful enough. The actual code is not really that much different from 20 years ago. It's the processing power is caught up and all of a sudden you have this emergent behavior. Then the next phase was dot com and they worked for various dot com startups and auctions and online travel and so on that all had teams of hundreds of people working for me across the world.

Then, then it was back to massively multiplayer online games with games up to 30 million users. And then I became my own boss and I had first company, um, which was sold and, uh, it's an interesting connection to superheroes in that one, but I won't bore you. That's another story. And the second company, and[01:17:00]

the second company was, uh, Um, I tried to get into physical hardware, big mistake, cause it's like, you know, money, many trips to Shenzhen in China and realizing that should stick to my, my game, which is like software. And then the third one was a Bitcoin exchange. And that's where I learned, you know, eight years, um, 2013 to 2021, learned a ton, made a lot of connections.

Try to stick to the, as much as possible, to the right path and that all fed together to, uh, to help me with, with Feddy, the knowledge from all of those different backgrounds have just come together in one place. And I, and I really feel grateful that all of that knowledge I can now apply to something which is helping communities around the world.

Um. To, to become, to be connected with freedom technology so we can basically level up humanity.

Knut: Excellent. Obi, good luck with everything and thanks so [01:18:00] much for

Obi: coming on this show. Good to see you. Good to see you. We did it. Yeah. Okay.

Luke: Thanks a lot, Obi. Yeah. Have a good one, mate. Yes. Likewise. It's like, it's

Obi: like, it's like the Arnie, it's like the Arnie, uh, the Predator, the Predator.

It's like, we can do it. I mean, almost like exactly like, uh, the guys from Predator, it's like the same size. It will take a few millimetres. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Luke: yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a soft stop. We're done now. Have you seen this

Knut: one? White

Obi: man, black man.

Batman.