LET’S TALK BITCOINEpisode 90 – Not About Gox

Participants:

Adam B. Levine (ABL) – HostStephanie Murphy (SM) – Co-hostJonathan Mohan (JM) – LTB CorrespondentLamar Wilson (LW) – Founder of Will Love LLC, Cycle of Goodness cooperative & Pheeva walletLafe Taylor (LT) – Founder of Will Love LLC, Cycle of Goodness cooperative & Pheeva walletMatt Corallo (MC) – Bitcoin developerMichael W. Dean (MD) – Host of Freedom Feens radio show and podcast & FreeSpeechMe promoterJeremy Rand (JR) – FreeSpeechMe developer

Today is March 8th 2014 and this is Episode 90.

This program is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Cryptocurrency is a new field of study. Consult your local futurist, lawyer, broker, investment advisor and bank before making any investment decisions for yourself.

ABL: Welcome to Let’s Talk Bitcoin, a twice weekly show about the ideas, people and projects building the digital economy and the future of money. My name is Adam B. Levine and today, we’re back in the flow.

Ever want to change that one little annoying thing about Bitcoin without having to start your own altcoin. Jonathan Mohan caught up with Matt Corallo, an enthusiast who took his very own Bitcoin improvement proposal from ideation to integration. Now you can follow his lead for the good of the land

Then, Namecoin was a good start but Stephanie’s got a line on an active crowd-funding campaign that aims to put the privacy back in domain names with the plug-in designed for your browser. We end today’s show with Michael and Jeremy from FreeSpeechMe.org

But first, in the wake of Gox, everyone should know what a hot wallet is. One whose funds are easily usable but conversely, much more easily stolen should you be targeted. Scary Bitcoin (??) reality aside, hot wallets are a necessary tool for daily use and today, Lafe and Lamar join us to kick off Episode 90 with their Pheeva wallet. Incidentally, if you’d like to send any tips via the Pheevacoin D system, simply direct donations to user name LTB. On a related note, we nearing the launch of LTBcoin. If you want to learn more and be part of the pre-launch community distribution, you can get involved over at LTBcoin.com

Enjoy the show! [1:44]

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Adam B Levine interview with Lamar Wilson and Lafe Taylor

ABL: Lamar Wilson and Lafe Taylor are founders of Love Will LLC and the Cycle of Goodness cooperative out of Lexington, Kentucky. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us today on Let’s Talk Bitcoin. [1:59]

LW: Hey, what’s going on Adam? [2:01]

LT: Yeah, thanks for inviting us. [2:02]

ABL: Absolutely. You guys have a couple of projects but the one that we’re here to talk about today is a wallet application that has some kind of unique features. Can you tell me a little bit about Pheeva? [2:11]

LW: When we made Pheeva, we thought about having a dedicated hot wallet. We are users of Coinbase and we realized that when you use Coinbase’s wallet, you tend to have all of your bitcoins there or you’d have them offline on a piece of paper somewhere and it’s not really easy to get to them and you don’t want to be walking around with all of your Bitcoin if you use Coinbase to keep all of them there. We thought we need a hot wallet that is your go to, kind of like a debit card of the Bitcoin space. We were trying to formulate this hot wallet that was really, really easy for my mom to use, or my grandmother to use, or whoever and make it really easy for them to get into the game and be able to use something on a daily basis, instead of using your whole entire Coinbase wallet for everything. [2:56]

ABL: What’s different about a hot wallet from a not hot wallet? What are the other options? If you’re specifying this is a hot wallet. [3:03]

LW: This is a hot wallet so what we were envisioning is that you don’t keep a lot of Bitcoin in there ever. We are going to make it to where you can quickly get your Bitcoin out of there and put it into cold storage. Just say you get paid on the street or something, say you trade with someone on the street and you don’t want to keep all of them in that wallet, we are trying to keep the risk down as far as holding a lot of Bitcoin in that wallet. It becomes more of a transactional wallet than it does a storage wallet. That’s what we would consider a hot wallet is. It’s more for just every day, all the time transactions which are what most people use their phone wallets for. We are just coming out and saying this is your dedicated hot wallet. [3:38]

LT: Yeah, think of it as checking as opposed to a savings account. [3:41]

ABL: This is kind of a solution you’re creating for yourself and for people who you know who aren’t as technically savvy, maybe, who are using things like Coinbase which is a fairly secure web solution that should be fairly resistant to any sort of tampering. I’m wondering, there are options out in desktop wallet clients. Do you guys use any of those or do you find them to be useful at all? [4:00]

LW: Yeah, I use the standard client, the Bitcoin QT client. I use that and I’ve used Mycelium – I’ve used that. I’ve tried a lot of them. The thing is that, I think, the learning curve on those are a little steep for my mom and so that’s what we thought about when we were making it. We wanted to make it more of a consumer application and more about just loading it and being able to send quickly. A big part of those, as well, is that you still have to wrestle with those huge Bitcoin addresses. I gave my mom some Bitcoin for Christmas and the Bitcoin address is something that doesn’t feel like it’s great for her to deal with and have to mess with and maybe copy and paste and all of that. We came up with what we call ‘coin IDs’ that try to make that easier, as well. [4:44]

ABL: Let’s talk about coin IDs for a second because is an idea that we’ve seen before. It’s kind of like DNS system, dynamic name system, for Bitcoin addresses where instead of having to remember that long alpha-numeric capitals count string, instead you just have to remember something that’s human readable and on the back-end, that gets attached to your Bitcoin address. Is that what you’re doing here? [5:06]

LW: Yeah, that’s correct. When we thought about it, we were thinking about early Hotmail, Gmail, and those types of things... Gmail wasn’t that early but Hotmail, Yahoo, and those things that made it easier for people to use email. We were thinking if, even within just our application, we had these coin IDs to allow people to send Bitcoin to those coin IDs, instead of an address, we eliminate people having to have the address. Of course, right now we have to have the address because if you want to load a lot of the wallets that people already use, have QR codes scanners and they only take addresses. Hopefully, moving forward, the more people we get on, we can go ahead and open that up and allow more people to make coin IDs. [5:43]

ABL: If I am not using your wallet and you are using the wallet, can I still send to your name through that system, or would I need to install the client, load the Pheeva wallet software onto mine in order to access that? [5:56]

LW: Right now, like I was saying, it just like kind of being in AOL, or something like that. You almost have to have our wallet but we’re going to open that up later on. We’re just testing it to see if people like it and because it’s a hot wallet, it doesn’t really bother anyone to just have a quick wallet. Like, Let’s Talk Bitcoin could have a wallet that you guys just download and that’s the one that people who have the Pheeva wallet can quickly send you coins to. Hopefully, that becomes a lot easier for people so it makes it easier for you to just say, and if you have a Pheeva wallet, send to Let’s Talk Bitcoin on the Pheeva wallet... tips. They don’t have to come to your site and figure out what the addresses are and those things. [6:35]

ABL: Right, absolutely. That has been a huge problem, not just for Let’s Talk Bitcoin, but with Bitcoin addresses and non-visual formats in general. Even with video, it’s still hard because most of the time, the code on the video isn’t selectable or anything. You just have to write it down real quick or pause it or something like that. There hasn’t really been, outside of QR codes, a good way to do this. Even with QR codes, you don’t really know that it’s going to the right person, you just know that it’s going to whatever that QR code is telling it to go to. Talking about this coin ID service for a second; with the coin ID thing, you said that it’s kind of a walled garden, at the moment, just like the early AOL was when you were on AOL in the beginning; you didn’t interface with other different walled gardens. That

happened at a later point. I agree with you. I think that we’re not really there yet so there is room for these closed and experimental eco-systems where you’re trying to figure this stuff out. Are there any centralization issues through this mechanism that you’ve created for the names? [7:26]

LW: There are some centralization issues but the thing is if you have our wallet and you trust us anyway, it’s kind of like AOL; it’s like getting the emails. The coin ID doesn’t stop you from using your standard address. It doesn’t stop you at all because, in the wallet, you can still load to the address, or to a QR code, the same way you always know. It doesn’t stop you from being able to use a regular address; it just adds a little piece of convenience for people who don’t want to deal with it. [7:53]

ABL: It’s a value add and again, it sounds like you have a bigger plan here with what you’re doing with these things. [7:58]

LW: Yeah, we do. We want to make it decentralized later on. We’re just trying to see if people want it first. [8:03]

ABL: Right. [8:04]

LW: It’s kind of the whole... I hate using lean start-up but yeah, like the lean start-up method of just let’s see if people want it and see if it makes it easier for people to use. Even within our testing within the people that we’ve given the wallet to, we intend to not use addresses at all. We just type in Lafe or type in Lamar and then send Bitcoin that way, quickly. [8:21]

ABL: For people who are interested in trying this out right now or let’s say we want to set up LTB as our donation address, is the wallet available and can we start using this now? [8:31]

LW: Here’s the thing. We have Love Will LLC which is a company and then we have the Cycle of Goodness cooperative that will own a piece of Love Will LLC. That’s the other part of this whole thing. The Pheeva hot wallet is just the first application of Love Will. It’s, basically, Love Will works for the Cycle of Goodness. When you come to the site, you can buy a membership to the Cycle of Goodness cooperative and with that membership, you get to, basically, personalize your coin ID and you also get access to all of the applications that Love Will creates. With that, what happens is Love Will creates the applications for the Cycle of Goodness and then the Cycle of Goodness goes out and markets Love Will’s applications. What happens is you get this cycle where Love Will is creating applications and the Cycle of Goodness is bringing in the marketing. What happens is those people who are in the Cycle of Goodness grow larger and larger and larger which allows the Cycle of Goodness to have, what we call, ad space which is what, you know, guys in media like yourself understand. The more people we have in the Cycle of Goodness, in that network, the more advertising space we have for advertisers. Most of that, what we’re going to do is most of that ad revenue will go directly back to the Cycle of Goodness. Let’s say if Overstock or TigerDirect wants to advertise inside of the Cycle of Goodness, they’ll come to Love Will, we’ll place the ad and then we’ll give most of the money back to the people in the Cycle of Goodness. If everybody knows how a cooperative works, everybody who’s in the cooperative gets a piece of that ad revenue. [10:01]

ABL: That sounds interesting and it sounds pretty equitable and it also sounds a little bit complicated. How did you come to this as a business model? How did that arise? [10:12]

LW: The philosophy behind it, basically, came from number one, the fact that we always think about this whole 99% versus the 1% and how a lot of times, the 99% would just cry like... I’m not into 1%. We talk about the inequality and this is like giving the 99% a chance to add the equality or bring the gap a little bit closer. We came to... we were like – OK, how can we do this because number one, in the same country where they allow the poorest people to be advertise the lottery, which is awful, right? In that same country, in this very country, we can’t advertise small businesses or early stage start-ups to those same poor people to allow them to get in early. I think that is unjust. I just really do think that if you’re not an accredited investor, that’s the only way you can get a piece of a company. You know what I mean? [11:10]

ABL: Yeah. [11:10]

LW: To me, that’s completely unjust so we said – OK, how can we do this? If we give back through a cooperative, what we can do is allow the people in the cooperative to benefit from all of the same early stage benefits and valuation that a corporation would get or a company would get in the early stages. That’s why we have the name Love Will because it’s just the whole thing of us being able to give back to the people that helped us to get to where we are. [11:37]

LT: We’re going to have a Chrome extension, as well. That will, for the most part, be free and if you are part of the membership, the coop membership, then you can log in with the Chrome wallet as well and use your ID related to that. [11:53]

LW: Yeah. The Chrome extension – you don’t have to pay for but you also don’t get a clear coin ID, so if you use the Chrome extension, you’ll get a suffix on the end like .phb. It would be like Adam.phb and that will be the Chrome extension so you could go ahead and use it. Our Chrome extension - it allows us to pay quickly. I don’t know if you’ve seen the videos for that yet but it allows you to pay quickly on sites like yours, like if you want to leave tips. On Coinbase and all of that, it finds the addresses on the page and it fills the wallet so it makes it real easy to roll around the internet. It’s kind of like with Kryptokit as well. [12:28]

ABL: Let’s talk about that for a second. The wallet space has been a problem for years and this is really not a new problem and yet, you guys and Kryptokit and there are a couple of others who are all sort of attacking these various usability problems. It seems to all be happening right now. As someone who’s kind of in the trenches on this, where do you think we’re going to be as an eco-system in six months or a year? [12:49]

LW: I think that with adding things like the Kryptokit (I like the Kryptokit a lot), I think adding things like that and our wallet, of course, it allows people to quickly transact. I’m not saying that’s the only thing that Bitcoin should be used for but I think if we want to gain a lot of new people, like my mom like I said, we want to gain a lot of these people out here who are not necessarily early adopters of technology, we have to make it extremely easy for them to come onto the system. That’s another thing like right now, I’m not sure if there’s any wallets that, basically, allow you to fill up when you get the wallet but because you’re getting the membership to the Cycle of Goodness cooperative, what Love Will’s going to do is once you pay the $10 for early membership, we’re going to give you half of that back in Bitcoin into your wallet, so you’ll have Bitcoin as soon as you start. [13:38]

ABL: That sounds really interesting to me. You said this is going to be out next week. Will this be available? Will I be able to have... [13:44]

LW: Yeah, we’ll get you one quick. We’re working on all of that to make sure the memberships and the licences, and all of that, go back and forth but once we get that, we’ll send it to you first to make sure you can secure your coin ID. That’s it but, other than that, we have everything going. We were going to secure you one anyway. You guys have been very, very good for me as far as my education of it. That’s another thing – we educate, we go around the state talking to people about it. [14:08]

ABL: Yeah. [14:09]

LW: We’re just going to build more and more apps for the Cycle of Goodness. Right now, what you can do is, you can go to Pheeva.com and register. Put your email in and when we get the cooperative site up and running, we will send you an email so that you can join early and secure your coin ID. Also, the Chrome extension is out right now. If you go to the Chrome store, you can go there and find the Pheeva wallet, Pheeva hot wallet Chrome extension and use it immediately without having to buy a membership. It’s free but you don’t get that wonderful, custom coin ID. You have to add .phb onto the end of it but you can get it right now. [14:44]

ABL: That’s Pheeva.com, right? [14:48]

LW: Yeah, Pheeva.com is Pheeva. I got a Pheeva and I can’t let it go. (Laughter) What’s his name? Christopher Walken... so that’s Pheeva, Pheeva, Pheeva, Pheeva. (Laughter) [15:04]

ABL: Lamar Wilson and Lafe Taylor, founders of Love Will LLC and Cycle of Goodness cooperative, thanks very much for your time. [15:10]

LW: Man, thank you very much Adam. [15:13]

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ADVERT:

This is Chris Joseph bringing you news on Nxt, the first true second generation cryptocurrency for March 8th 2014. It’s been a busy week of new releases for Nxt. Wesley H’s web-based interface for the Nxt software has been included in the software distribution and a new client, Nxt Freerider has been released. Several other Nxt clients, Nexus, Nxt Solaris and Offspring have also released new versions this week. Nxt is now also available for trade on Cryptsy and, in addition to that, it is supported by coinreporting.com, bitcoinwisdom.com and altcoinsmarket.info. Finally, now that Nxt is fully open source, we’re looking to expand the Nxt development team. If you’re a strong Java coder, have testing experience or have a deep love of cryptographic algorithms, swing by the forums and let us know. For more general information on Nxt, head to NxtCrypto.org or MyNxt.org and stay tuned for more news on Nxt in the next Let’s Talk Bitcoin broadcast. [16:10]

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Jonathan Mohan interview with Matt Corallo

JM: I’m here with Matt Corallo at the Bitcoin Miami conference. You have the great distinction of being one of the chosen few who actually got a BIP passed in Bitcoin... aaahhh! (Laughter) A BIP, for those who don’t know, is essentially a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. [16:30]

MC: Yeah. [16:31]

JM: Essentially, it’s the way in which programming changes to Bitcoin... essentially, the changes to Bitcoin itself are made. [16:37]

MC: Not just Bitcoin... everything in the space of Bitcoin, whether it’s directly in the protocol which means Bitcoin D changes or something much higher level, just kind of in random wallets, maybe this is how they should do things or this is a way to do things. [16:50]

JM: Can you explain a little more about what a BIP is then? [16:53]

MC: Yeah. I mean, the process is modelled after the Python Improvement Proposals which are a bit more technical and those are generally fairly focused on specific things to change to the language, whereas Bitcoin’s a bit more general. A lot of the BIPs are specific changes to the language; things like pay to script hash which is a change to the scripting language in Bitcoin. Some of them are kind of in the middle, which is something that I did, which was the Bitcoin URI spec, so that’s the Bitcoin links where you put an address in a link and then it opens Bitcoin. There are some things that are way more away from the protocol which is like wallet things, where say your wallet... how your wallet should store keys, how your wallet should manage transactions which is far removed from the low level Bitcoin protocol and more into the implementation of what other people are doing. [17:37]

JM: I just wanted, for my own edification, to understand how the heck changes in Bitcoin occur because we talk about centralization in Bitcoin. We had that whole scare with GHash and all the other mining operations that come out there... Oh my god, they’re getting to a point to which they can affect the consensus. [17:55]

MC: Yeah. [17:55]

JM: Then, when it comes to the most important thing... when it comes to decentralizing Bitcoin which is who can implement code changes into what we call Bitcoin. I don’t feel like there’s enough decentralization in it. [18:07]

MC: Yeah. [18:07]

JM: I kind of wanted to know... like, lift the veil. [18:10]

MC: I agree. There should be as much decentralization as possible there. At the end of the day, it takes time and it takes people to volunteer their time to look at these things and review them and make good, useful comments and then decide when, maybe, it’s ready to move forward on things. At the end of the day, there are a lot of people in Bitcoin and a lot of people doing really interesting things which are taking up all their time so they don’t necessarily have time to join a mailing list that has way too many posts to read them all. [18:36]

JM: How many people are on the mailing list? We’re talking about how consensus is derived. It’s derived by the voices in the mailing list. [18:41]

MC: Yeah, I mean, it’s derived by the voices of anyone who’s going to end up implementing the BIPs which, because they’re usually proposed on the mailing list by people... most of the client developers who are going to be implementing this are on the mailing list, at the end of day, it becomes the people on the mailing list form the consensus around the BIPs, which are then implemented. [18:59]

JM: Can you explain the two BIPs that you were able to get through? What were they about? [19:03]

MC: I haven’t done a BIP in a while, mostly because I haven’t worked on Bitcoin as much recently. I did the Bitcoin URI spec which means, at the time, Luke had a proposal which had a lot of details that were kind of over the top and not necessarily worth implementing that I thought and a lot of people agreed, so I redid his BIP and suggested that it’s basically simple... just Bitcoin:address?amount= whatever. A fairly simple proposal which then got implemented and now, if you click on a Bitcoin link, it magically opens your client and it says – Hey, do you want to send money to wherever? That was kind of pushed through because it was seen as a great idea and there wasn’t too much discussion because it was kind of fairly simple. [19:45]

JM: If I joined the mailing list, I can have a voice in what’s going on with Bitcoin? [19:49]

MC: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. We encourage anyone who wants to have a voice to join the mailing list; anyone who is willing to spend the time to write well reasoned arguments as to why they agree or disagree with something. [19:58]

JM: Where would I go in order to join the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal mailing list? [20:03]

MC: Most of the discussion happens just on the general Bitcoin development mailing list. That means, Google Bitcoin development mailing list on SourceForge. I don’t know the URL off-hand because it’s long and... [20:15]

JM: No one in the past five years has made a tiny URL for it? [20:18]

MC: No, of course not. [20:19]

JM: (Laughter) No, that’s way too hard, right? [20:21]

MC: Yeah, of course. [20:22]

JM: Tiny URL/BIP Improvement Proposals. [20:24]

MC: Someone listening should do that and put it in the comments somewhere and post it everywhere. [20:27]

JM: Maybe we should put it on the mailing list and get consensus on it? [20:30]

MC: There we go. We should do a BIP about the tiny URL for mailing list URL. [20:34]

JM: I think that’s really important and should totally take up everyone’s time. Congress started talking about baseball and I thought that was the perfect use of their time. [20:40]

MC: Absolutely. No, no question, especially with the huge amount of development resources that Bitcoin has today. [20:45]

JM: (Laughter) If anyone wants to take on that as their crucible in the BIP forums, please, please do that. [20:51]

MC: There we go. Please do it. (Laughter) [20:53]

JM: There’s one thing to be transparent and open and there’s another to be inclusive and accessible. I feel like the BIP forums are transparent but that they’re not getting the word out... they’re not proselytizing people to join them or making it easier... making the onboarding process easier for people to come onboard. [21:11]

MC: Yeah. I mean, most of the developers, most of the people who are working on these things have very limited time and are working on ten other projects – five projects in Bitcoin and probably have some Bitcoin start-up, or something. There’s not much time to do that and, at the same time, there is some kind of perverse incentive that the more people we have, the longer these things take to get pushed through because everyone always has an opinion and you have to read all the opinions and eventually, decide whether or not there’s a consensus for them to make all the changes. We encourage everyone who wants to write good opinions to come join but I don’t think there’s really ever going to be some kind of outreach to get more. [21:50]

JM: Right. I guess my problem with that... you know, Andreas Antonopoulos, who’s on Let’s Talk Bitcoin, always talks about the other six and a half billion. Now, if we’re trying to make Bitcoin be the pre-eminent, global, apolitical currency, what we’re really talking about is the other six and a half billion. When we’re deriving consensus from what hard core cryptographers are doing on a mailing list, which are probably trending towards one type of space, there’s kind of this unspoken cultural bias that just gets formed in what Bitcoin is, just because they don’t have the same background. [22:20]

MC: Yes and no. The development mailing list has gone, in the past maybe six months, has grown a lot and it’s grown out of just developers, although it is still very primarily developers, there are a lot of BIPs and general Bitcoin improvement stuff is very generally self-serving in the sense that if someone has an idea for how to get a bunch of people in South Sudan into Bitcoin that requires some minor change, they’re going to go write a BIP for it and submit it and say – I have this idea and I think this is what’s required to make it

happen and they’re going to make it happen, which is something that’s great about the Bitcoin community is there are so many people who have so many great ideas and are working so hard to make things happen and I think it’s open in the sense that anyone can submit and thus, the people who have good ideas and who need a BIP to make something happen, will do it. [23:08]

JM: How would I determine if I need a BIP to make something happen? Do I just put it out there? [23:13]

MC: There are guidelines for what defines a BIP, what kind of category it should be in – there are a few categories. As to whether or not you need a BIP for something, generally the answer is you don’t need one except unless you want every wallet to include it or you want a major protocol change. [23:30]

JM: Unless you’re trying to pass an amendment, then you really don’t need to try to modify the constitution. [23:35]

MC: Yeah, you don’t necessarily need one but it is also a very good idea to do one if you’re looking at, say, how should my wallet encrypt keys or... there’s a recent one about how to encrypt keys for wallets. If you’re trying to figure out a way to do that and you want other wallets to do it the same way, so that things are inter-operable, a BIP process is a good way to go through that and say – Look, let’s get some comments, let’s get everyone together thinking about this problem and figure out how to do this the best way. [24:00]

JM: If I wanted to get involved on a BIP, what would I do right now? I would go to the... I would just Google Bitcoin BIPs and I would submit one? What would be that process? Is there someone I contact? [24:11]

MC: The BIPs are now on GitHub. They were living on the Wiki forever but now there is a BIPs GitHub that should be GitHub.com/Bitcoin/BIPs, I believe. [24:21]

JM: There you go. They got a URL. [24:22]

MC: That one’s not bad. [24:23]

JM: That only took five and a half years. [24:24]

MC: Yeah, yeah, you know. A lot of discussion has moved there as well but there is also always a lot of discussion, good discussion on the development mailing list. The Bitcoin development mailing list is a good place to go to discuss BIPs and other things in Bitcoin. [24:36]

JM: I think the thing to mention is that BIPs aren’t just software, it’s not just code. [24:40]

MC: Oh no, most of the BIPs, in terms of change to just Bitcoin code stuff, a lot of the BIPs aren’t that, especially kind of proposals for how Bitcoin things should happen, how wallets should function, how Bitcoin should work, in terms of UI. [24:57]

JM: It could be as meta as you’d like it to be. If there is some evil, evil human being out there who doesn’t like the color orange, and they really think that they could make that case... (laughter) [25:05]

MC: Ultimately, if you think nothing in Bitcoin should ever use the color orange, you can make a BIP for it. It’ll probably get rejected and kind of laughed away pretty quickly but hey, if you want to try, go for it. [25:18]

JM: Right, right. [25:18]

MC: We try to be as open as possible. Just get involved and, hey, if you think you can help, if you have the time to think critically about things in Bitcoin and how they should be done. [25:29]

JM: You just lost like two thirds of the internet; the critical thinking part alone. [25:31]

MC: Critical thinking is hard; time is also hard. If you do, for some strange reason, fall into these categories and want to get involved, absolutely. [25:40]

JM: I, actually, have a BIP. My own little agenda which is as it relates to the language of Bitcoin. I think it’s really silly that four things or three things all have the word Bitcoin associated with it. [25:53]

MC: Yeah, there’s no question. [25:55]

JM: In the Zeitgeist, it is the cryptocurrency – the field is called Bitcoin, the Bitcoin blockchain is called Bitcoin and the currency is called Bitcoin. [26:04]

MC: Oh yeah. No, I mean, it makes perfect sense. [26:06]

JM: It makes perfect sense. (Laughter) [26:07]

MC: Perfect sense. [26:08]

JM: When you explain it to a layman, they’re like...what?... you have to explain – this is the Bitcoin I’m talking about now and then, this is the Bitcoin I’m talking about now... and this is... [26:16]

MC: Oh yeah. The duplication of naming in Bitcoin is hilarious. You have the coinbase, which is a transaction and then you have a company called Coinbase and then you have Bitcoin which refers to three or four different things in the space. [26:25]

JM: You have Blockchain.info which created the blockchain apparently. [26:27]

MC: Then you have Blockchain.info which apparently runs the blockchain. This is a funny story about that. A paper by a very famous researcher, one of his first Bitcoin papers, I won’t name names, was... referred to the blockchain as an HTML dump that he was analysing because it was an HTML thing and was analysing the blockchain via HTML, by a very famous cryptographer. Kind of embarrassing. [26:50]

JM: There’s a lot of confusion. [26:51]

MC: There’s a lot of confusion. [26:52]

JM: It’s like when that RSA did was like – Yeah, Satoshi Nakamoto totally invested into Dread Pirate Roberts. [26:58]

MC: Oh yeah. [26:58]

JM: He just didn’t do any analysis whatsoever. He was like – Yeah, this is totally true. [27:01]

MC: What was it, like a month later, a few weeks later, someone was like – Nah, that was me. [27:04]

JM: I don’t know if I would have admitted that if I were him. [27:06]

MC: Yeah. There was some longer story to it, I don’t quite remember but anyway. [27:10]

JM: This discussion of language and this problem with Bitcoin and language and mBits and nBits and uBits and whatever the heck we’re going to be like, I really feel like this needs to be discussed and driven through consensus in the BIP format. How would I go about doing that? [27:23]

MC: Go on the GitHub BIPs site, look at some of the existing BIPs. There’s BIP 1 – is the format for BIPs and how to format them and how to submit them and all this stuff. Generally, just write up something for the mailing list, propose it on the mailing list, get some discussion and then write it formally as a BIP and get it submitted to the GitHub after you have a lot of discussion and people agree kind of this is how it should function. [27:50]

JM: Right. [27:51]

MC: It will generate a lot of discussion and it will be months of work but you’ll get there. [27:55]

JM: (Laughter) OK. [27:55]

MC: It’ll get there. [27:56]

JM: Alright. Well, I look forward to taking that cross on and seeing if I can make it work. [28:00]

MC: Hey, if you want to improve Bitcoin, that’s a good way to do it. [28:03]

JM: Right. Thanks a lot man. [28:04]

MC: Absolutely. [28:05]

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Stephanie Murphy interview with Michael W. Dean and Jeremy Rand

SM: This is Stephanie Murphy for Let’s Talk Bitcoin. I’m here today talking with Michael W. Dean and Jeremy Rand. They are two people behind the project called FreeSpeechMe. FreeSpeechMe is something that I think is really going to change a lot. It’s got a lot of potential here. I’ll let them explain what it is but first of all, gentleman, welcome to Let’s Talk Bitcoin. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. [29:53]

MD: Thanks. [29:54]

JR: Thanks. [29:55]

SM: Tell me what is FreeSpeechMe. What is the elevator pitch? [29:59]

MD: I’ll give the exciting ‘this is going to change the world’ one and then Jeremy can tell you the technical reasons of why it’ll actually change the world because everybody always says – My thing will change the world. First of all, there are several people who did the work behind this, that Jeremy is standing on the shoulders of. He’s connected with the Namecoin team. Namecoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency, kind of like Bitcoin. It’s probably the only currency that’s not a threat to Bitcoin and people who are heavily invested in Bitcoin should know this. It’s not a competition; it complements Bitcoin because it’s barely a currency. The thing that would change the world and what people should be working at the most is commerce sites located anywhere that take Bitcoin only and run a Namecoin. They’d

have their DNS served on Namecoin because they can’t be shut down and hacked and taken away by governments nearly as easily as .com or dot whatever. [30:56]

SM: For anybody who’s totally unfamiliar with this, Namecoin is a spinoff of Bitcoin. It’s an altcoin and its main function is really not as a currency, it’s as a distributed domain name system or DNS system. [31:10]

MD: Until recently, it was difficult and unsecure to serve .bit domains. It’s really easy to set them up but it was hard to surf them and not secure. Jeremy’s come up with this plug-in called FreeSpeechMe that makes it really easy. I’m going to let Jeremy take over from here. [31:29]

JR: Namecoin offers DNS, that’s decentralized and is difficult to censor, hijack or surveil. It’s an advantage over standard DNS but when Namecoin was originally set up, and up until I got involved with it, there really wasn’t a good, easy to use way that was still secure. There were some people who were changing their DNS settings on their computer to point to a DNS server that would treat stuff from the blockchain and that kind of defeats the security point of Namecoin’s DNS because then you still have all the security issues that someone can hijack your connection. If they’re on your network, they can just change what you see from that DNS server. The DNS server you configure also has the ability to hijack your requests and send you whatever they want for whatever malicious purposes they want. That’s really not a secure way to use it; it defeats the point. There were some other methods of using .bit which is the DNS system that Namecoin sets up. There were things like nmControl and nmcSocks, things like that but, in general, they were very difficult to set up, especially for novices. There really weren’t many people using things like that and if, when I was hanging around in the Namecoin IRC chat, it was very frequent to see people in there advising – Oh yeah, you just use this DNS server and everything will be fine. People didn’t seem to be aware that this was a really insecure way of using it. I thought Namecoin seems like a really good way of preventing censorship, improving security, improving privacy by some – maybe we should be using it for that, rather than just having it either for security for the elite or insecurity for everyone else. [33:27]

SM: You’ve got a plug-in here, the FreeSpeechMe plug-in, that’s going to allow people to easily view .bit domains without changing their DNS settings or doing any of this complicated sounding stuff that most people probably don’t know how to do. [33:42]

JR: That’s right. [33:43]

SM: Why would somebody want to view websites that are .bit websites? What’s the advantage of having .bit domains that are not registered through a central registry like ICANN? [33:56]

JR: When you make a DNS request for a website, or for any internet service for that matter, sender DNS is really, really insecure. It’s also not private and it can be easily censored. When I want to access Google.com, or something like that, any website, my computer has to send a request to a DNS server. Anyone who’s on my network, as well as anyone who’s on the DNS server’s network and the DNS server themselves, they can see that my IP address went to Google.com and so that’s a privacy issue. The DNS server, or anyone between me and the DNS server can then either falsely say – Google.com doesn’t exist, there’s nothing here or it can redirect me to a false website which might be either a phishing site of some

kind or it might be a site that just installs malware on anyone who views it. It’s, generally, not a secure system. [34:57]

SM: Can you tell me some examples of, basically, problems with the standard DNS system? Before, I know you’ve got some on your KickStarter page but tell the listeners about that. [35:06]

MD: Well, Jeremy could give better examples than I. I know one is that, recently, Facebook was redirected to a fake Facebook site. It’s one thing if they redirect it to a site that says – You’ve been pwned! Owned! Haha! You’re an idiot, we took your website! That’s bad. Worse is if it goes to a website that works exactly like your website and you’re like – Oh, I’m on Facebook, OK, well I’ll entire my password... BAM! They’ve got your password. Oh, I’ll buy some little credits to play Angry Squirrels. Oh BAM! They’ve got your credit card number. That’s a big issue right there. Also, governments and corporations take down websites all the time without any due process. They say – Oh, we saw the word pirate on here and it turns out you’re like Tarrin Lupo, writing about stories about the days of old and pirates on the high seas. They’re like – This is a piracy site and just take it and when people go to it, it’ll say – This has been seized by the Department of Decency and Morality and Good Things that Obama Likes and George Bush Likes. (Laughter). They do that. This can’t be done nearly as easily with that. I don’t want to say can’t because it’s a challenge. You tell a safe cracker – This safe cannot be cracked. Then, they want to crack it. [36:25]

JR: Yeah, we’re very careful to say it’s resistant to some of these attacks. We don’t say it’s completely immune from them. There is a threat model, just like any other kind of security software. One of the other things that’s interesting about FreeSpeechMe, in particular, is it doesn’t just get DNS data from the Namecoin blockchain, like most Namecoin software does. It also gets HTTPS fingerprints from the blockchain and the reason why this is useful – if I want to visit a website that uses HTTPS, there are two main components in HTTPS. One of them is the encryption, which most people are aware of. There is also authentication, verifying that the website that you go to is the website that it should be. HTTPS is often touted as the way to deal with hijacked DNS because people will say – Oh, if you’re redirected to a false website, then the HTTPS will show an error and so you’ll be safe. As it turns out, HTTPS is really not that hard to do bad things to, particularly if you’re a large corporation or a decently sized government. As an example of that...[37:34]

MD: Or a decently funded gang of criminals like a mafia. [37:39]

JR: ...In July 2011 actually, which is quite recently, the HTTPS certificate authority DigiNotar, was compromised. There were reports that the person who did it was affiliated with the Iranian government, although we don’t really know. The attackers, whoever they were, were able to retrieve false certificates from this certificate authority that allowed them to securely impersonate the CIA, MI6, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, Twitter, WordPress, Mozilla and hundreds of other targets. What’s really scary is DigiNotar didn’t even notice that this had happened for over a month. [38:14]

MD: The CIA, think about that. Like, the CIA and the FBI. The people who claim they should be uncrackable. They were owned, basically. [38:27]

SM: Mmm. Wow! I would say that’s a pretty big security breach. [38:32]

JR: Yeah. There are some proposals that have been made to try to improve the HTTPS system. One of those proposals is something called Perspective Verification, popularized by Moxie Marlinspike, who wrote the Convergence plug-in for Firefox. What that tries to do is you chose some trusted third party and every time you visit a HTTPS website, your browser takes the certificate from them and sends it to the third party and, basically, that third party checks the website themselves and says – Hey, do I see the same thing? If it sees something different, then it can tell you – Oh, you’re being attacked, don’t trust this website. The problem is what happens if that trusted third party is also attacked. If something is being attacked on the server end or the attack is widespread enough and it affects some of those trusted third parties, then you’re no better off, whereas what FreeSpeechMe does is it stores the fingerprints in the Namecoin blockchain which is backed by proof-of-work, since it’s a blockchain. Basically, to be able to feed false data into FreeSpeechMe, you would have to do a 51% attack on Namecoin which we think is probably a lot harder than doing a man in the middle attack on one or two of those trusted third parties, especially if those trusted third parties are well known and are targets for someone who wants to attack stuff. [39:57]

MD: What Jeremy has done is kind of the difference between what Linux used to be like... I mean GNU/Linux used to be like when it was mostly command line to when they got a GUI for it and now, it’s almost like using Windows in ease. That’s one thing and the other thing is like I’m approaching everybody I can about this... like all kinds of people, like tech people, liberty people, cryptocurrency people and some people are getting it and there are some first adopters jumping on it and some people have given money to our Indigogo campaign and it’s great. Yesterday, a mind-blowing thing happened – a total stranger came out of the woods and said – This is going to change the world. I’ve got some Bitcoin. I want to buy ads for you, radio ads on FreeTalk Live and this guy... worked it out at FreeTalk Live. He bought 50 days of ads for FreeSpeechMe on FreeTalk Live. [40:50]

SM: Wow! [40:50]

MD: They’re reasonable but that’s not cheap. That’s an investment from a stranger. [40:53]

SM: I heard your ad tonight and I was wondering how you got that. That’s a cool story. [40:56]

MD: He paid for 50 days on the radio show and on the podcast. There are people like that but then there are also people like... I’m not going to name any names but I called one of the biggest tech blogs in the world. I called it on the phone... I know them, I’ve worked for them, they’ve been... like paid me as editors before, back in the day... at book publishing stuff. I called them up and told them about it and they were like – Oh, I don’t know. That sounds interesting but I have to go put up these pictures of squirrels in the snow with the new iPhone. I’m like – You guys used to be cutting edge man. What happened? I’m trying to call this other (I won’t say any names) but it’s a radio show that’s huge, it’s liberty-oriented and it’s like, I know people at it and it’s something they would love and their listeners would love. They were like... it’s like trying to get the Pope to talk to a peasant, man. Really, what this really, really needs is people to go check out FreeSpeechMe.org and look at it and realize that this is what’s going to save the internet and without this, your internet in five years, the way things are going, is going to be President Hilary’s Facebook page is all you’re going to be able to get to or President Chris Christie’s Facebook page. That’s all that you’re going to be able to do on the internet if everyone doesn’t start adopting .bit Namecoin DNS and using FreeSpeechMe. What Jeremy is planning on doing – you can go to the Indigogo site or to

FreeSpeechMe.org – he has a list of 30 or 40 improvements. We’re not saying – We have this idea, give us money and we’ll make this thing. We’re saying – We have the thing, we have a beta, it works today, you can set up a .bit website for $0.10 and get your viewers to share this thing and they will be able to build it and help with it and look at it. Jeremy has plans to improve this to the point where like it is going to become how the internet works. It’s not just – Oh, we have a cool plug-in. It’s like this could be the underlying foundation of internet 4.0. Jeremy, go ahead and tell what some of those improvements are. [42:51]

JR: Obviously, one of the first things we want to do is make it a little bit cleaner looking, in terms of just the user interface. Right now, for example, if you’re on Windows, you’ll see a couple of terminal windows pop up when we launch the Namecoin software on Firefox. Obviously, that’s not user-friendly. It will scare some people. We want to fix that and that’s pretty easy. There is lots of just simple user interface stuff like that which we want to improve. There are also security related things we want to improve. For example, right now if you have an incomplete blockchain in Namecoin, FreeSpeechMe will use whatever beta you have up to that point which a) means lots of upsides won’t work but, more importantly for me at least from a security standpoint, whoever used to control a domain may have retained some level of control after they sell it to someone else while you’re still updating the blockchain. That’s kind of dangerous. [43:51]

MD: I want to interject two quick things right there. One is that when you install FreeSpeechMe, you have to wait five hours or so for the blockchain to download. It doesn’t work until that happens. We’ve been getting tons of emails from people who are so excited to install it. They don’t read that and they’re like – I’ve had it in for ten minutes and it’s not working. You’ve got to wait five hours. The other thing is, currently, it won’t play well with the Namecoin wallet. They won’t hurt each other but you can’t use one while the other is open but Jeremy’s going to fix that. It plays well with other wallets – with Bitcoin, with Litecoin and I tried it with Phoenixcoin, I’m afraid to even admit I have a Phoenixcoin wallet but I got some as a joke. Let it download the five hours and then it will do it automatically in the background. Also, don’t use it while running your Namecoin wallet. [44:40]

SM: Wait a minute. This is only for Firefox, right now but it works in Windows? [44:44]

MD: That’s correct. [44:44]

SM: In Linux and maybe Mac? Is that right? [44:46]

JR: We’ve gotten some reports that it does not work on Mac. [44:50]

SM: OK. [44:51]

JR: That doesn’t surprise me that much because it hasn’t been tested on Mac. I think some of the code from Convergence, which is what FreeSpeechMe is based on, has not been tested on Mac either, so that doesn’t surprise me a lot. Obviously, we’d like to make it work on Mac and if we can’t do that ourselves, we’ll happily contract that out to someone who does Mac Firefox extension development, something like that. [45:12]

SM: Right and that’s why people should contribute to your Indigogo campaign? [45:15]

JR: Yes. [45:16]

MD: Yeah. Jeremy is a full time college student of computer sciences at the University of Oklahoma. He’s doing all of this around a more than full time school load, although summer’s coming up, so eventually. [45:28]

SM: Yeah but this is great because you’ve got here a working plug-in that will enable people to easily view .bit domains. You’ve also got some marketing behind it and you’ve got a campaign to let people know about it. I think this is a great combination because not only is it a killer app, but it’s also how to translate that to the not quite so nerdy among us out there, that may not know how to use it but they do know how to download a plug-in and then you can possibly save the internet from that. [46:00]

JR: Some other things we want to do are some improvements for privacy. One of the things I didn’t mention yet is one other feature FreeSpeechMe has, which is almost entirely new, is a .bit domain which is what Namecoin uses for its DNS. A .bit domain can point to either a TOR hidden service or an I2P service which are anonymously hosted websites. We think this is really important because if you have a website which someone wants to take out, basically, then even though they can’t seize your DNS, then can just shut down the server and then your website goes down anyway. If you host it anonymously using TOR or I2P or, going to add Freenet as well in the future, you can have your .bit domain point to that and that basically gives you anonymously hosted websites that have full DNS. The thing is, since Namecoin is blockchain based, it has anonymity issues. Just like Bitcoin is not really anonymous but pseudonymous, Namecoin is also pseudonymous and so we would like to make some improvements so that either people who are browsing websites using FreeSpeechMe or people who are hosting .bit domains using TOR or I2P, so that they can have a little bit more anonymity rather than just pseudonymity. Some of that, we can work on, some of that might take collaboration with other people but again, anything that we can’t do, if we get enough money through Indigogo, we will happily contract that out. [47:43]

MD: There is a guy named John Gilmore who is a computer scientist who said something that’s been quoted a lot and it was – The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. That’s absolutely true but the weak point in that, the weak chain in that is DNS controlled through things like ICANN, which I call... it stands for something long and silly and computer-related and scientific... one of them scientific... one of them book learning things (laughter) but I say it stands for ICANN take your website because the government controls me. They have similar things in other countries and pretty much any .whatever, if it’s not .bit and it’s not through the blockchain, pretty much any other domain name, your domain can be taken by a government agency or by a big corporation demanding a government do it, with a letter. They could write a letter – a lawyer can send an email and some department of something can write, any three letter agency can write to ICANN and they’ll take it down. There is no due process. They’ve stolen your property and... [48:49]

SM: They should call it I CANN has your website. (Laughter) [48:52]

MD: I CANN has your website, yeah, yeah. [48:55]

SM: I understand and please go ahead if you have more. [49:00]

MD: I was just going to say one of the things we’re doing to promote this – we have a three minute video we made and it’s up on YouTube. It’s linked at FreeSpeechMe.org. I’m getting

people to do language translations of it to translate it text and then also, the same person or a different person read it and do a decent recording of it. I’m going to make different language version of this video because I really think we can’t have a US-centric view with a program like this. It has to be worldwide. So far, we’ve got people working on that right now. I say that my job is I’m the FreeSpeechMe cat herder, that’s my official job explanation. I’ve done a lot today just going back and forth to people answering their questions – What does this mean? What does this mean? and getting people to work on translations in French, German, Greek, Farsi (you know, for Iran), Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Spanish and Catalan (I don’t know how it’s pronounced) but it’s a version of Spanish, a variety of Spanish – a derivation that’s actually kind of like a separatist language. There are like 7 million native speakers in the world but I’m like – Oh, it’s people who are rebels? Yeah, we want it in that. The guy who did the Spanish could do it too. We need translators in any other language but, in particular, we trying to get it in Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Italian and Chinese. [50:22]

SM: Wow! [50:23]

MD: If anyone speaks those languages, drop us a line. Go to FreeSpeechMe.org, click on ‘Meet the Team’ or ‘Contact’, our email address is at both places. We can’t pay a lot for it because we haven’t made a lot yet but we’ll pay one Namecoin for translating it and another Namecoin for recording it. I’ll also give you a little bit of tech help in setting up FreeSpeechMe or, especially, a .bit domain. That’s another thing we need is people to set up .bit versions of their .com or whatever and give it out to their users. Also set up, if you want, this is kind of cool – I actually set up a couple of .bit only domains and one is a kitty cat picture site called .bitkittypics.bit. If you have FreeSpeechMe... yeah, because it’s like kitty cats drive the .com internet and I figure they really should also drive the .bit internet. [51:21]

SM: That’s how you know it’s made it, right? [51:22]

MD: Yeah. [51:23]

SM: What is the process for registering a .bit domain and what do you do after you register a .bit domain? How do you host it and how do you set it all up? [51:33]

JR: First, you need to obtain some namecoins which is a currency, just like Bitcoin. You can obtain it at an exchange, some people mine it if they have mining hardware, you could probably sell a product for Namecoin, if you really wanted to since it’s technically a currency although, most people wouldn’t do that. Once you’ve obtained some namecoins, you need the Namecoin wallet software. [51:55]

SM: How much Namecoin do you need? [51:56]

JR: To register one domain requires destroying one namecent, so .01 namecoins and then you also have to pay around another half of a namecent as a transaction fee. [52:10]

SM: Just to give people an idea, right now the price of one namecoin is about around $4 or about 6mBits? We’re talking about $0.50 to register a domain? [52:23]

JR: Yeah, I think it’s a little bit less than that. It’s cheap. It’s cheap, yeah. Once you’ve done that and you’ve entered either the IP address, or DNS name server address, or whatever and you can also enter an HTTPS fingerprint, at this point, in case you want to use HTTPS which is actually secured by the blockchain. Once you do that, the Namecoin QT client will wait for 12 blocks while that first transaction gets confirmed and it has to wait 12 blocks so that someone else can’t see that you’re destroying a certain domain and then take it from you by paying a higher transaction fee because that would obviously suck. After this 12 blocks, it sends in another transaction which confirms that yes, this is my name and I actually want it to point to this and it points to that from then on. After you’ve done that, you can either right click on the name in Namecoin QT and hit update and you can type in the new IP address or something like that or you can use a command line application if you want to script something. If you want to automatically have it update with dynamic DNS or something, there is actually a tool which I’ve written which can do that for you and so programmers can have lots of fun making their names automatically update based on the outside world. You have to issue, at least, one update every 36,000 blocks, otherwise your name will expire and that’s, basically, so that if someone loses their keys to their wallet, eventually, the domain will get released back into the world so that someone else can use it or the same user can get it again with a different wallet. [53:59]

MD: Right now, that’s about every eight months. When I first went on, a bunch of months ago, to check this out and register some domain names, FreedomFeens.bit had been cyber-squatted. [54:11]

SM: Freedom Feens is your podcast, by the way. [54:14]

MD: Yeah, it’s my radio show and it had been taken and unless somebody puts a note in the blockchain with their email address or they point it to a site that says – Contact me and give me $50,000 or contact me and I’ll give this to you free because I’m your fan. There’s no way to figure it out that I know of but I just kept checking and looking at the blockchain counting down and just waited for it to expire and grabbed it the minute it was available. I did the same thing for Bad Quaker, Ben Stone’s podcast, badquaker.com. I grabbed badquaker.bit. The really cool thing is now that we’ve been doing this, Jeremy and I have sort of turned into an unofficial ICANN, libertarian ICANN, or free market ICANN because all these people that have been first adopters of this have seen what Jeremy’s done and are so excited about it, they’re contacting us and they’re saying – Hey, I have stuff on Molyneux.bit, would you like to offer it to him? I’m like – Yes, send it to me. He sends it to me and then I have it and then I contact Stefan and he doesn’t get back to me. When he does, I’ll have it for him for free. (Laughter) [55:21]

SM: If you have a .bit domain, how does the hosting work? You still have to have hosting for it, right? [55:27]

JR: There are a few answers to that. Right now, your web server either has to have a dedicated IP address, in which case there is no other configuration you have to do or if it’s not a dedicated IP address, you’re going to have to make sure that there is a virtual host set up on that server so that it knows that when it gets a request for something.bit, that it points it to the same folder on the server that the .com is pointing to. In the future, there is actually a proposal, which I wrote, which I think we can implement it in the future which would actually have the FreeSpeechMe plug-in handle that conversion. The way that would work is, in the future, you can register a .bit domain in Namecoin and you can put a note in the

blockchain that, basically, says – I want this .bit domain to point to a .com domain that already exists but I don’t want to have this server know that it’s .bit and the server can think it’s still .com and FreeSpeechMe will just sort of magically change the HTTP headers so that it just works. [56:36]

MD: Wow! I didn’t know about that one. [56:37]

JR: That’s not implemented yet but that is planned. [56:39]

MD: Awesome. Jeremy, when Jeremy says – I’m planning on implementing this or that he’s written this, it’s not like some guy. He’s actually... are you on the Namecoin development team technically? I know that you’ve done some work with that and put some things that are being implemented, right? [56:57]

JR: Yeah. I don’t know that there is one specific definition of a Namecoin development team but I am on some of the internal mailing lists. If that counts, then yeah. [57:07]

MD: You’ve also written some things that are probably going to be implemented in Namecoin, right? [57:14]

JR: Right. Several of the specifications that have been proposed for Namecoin which either have been or will soon be implemented were written or co-written by me. [57:23]

MD: Cool. [57:25]

SM: Yeah, cool. I think you’ve given people a pretty good overview of what they might need to set up a .bit domain if they’re somebody who makes websites or to register .bit domains and, maybe, give them to other people or to install the FreeSpeechMe plug-in. I think we’ve painted a picture for people of why they might want to start using .bit domains and what the benefits might be of doing that. You’ve got an Indigogo campaign going right now and what you want, basically, what you’re asking for is to raise some money to be able to improve the FreeSpeechMe plug-in and implement some new features and, I have to say, your T-shirts are really cool. If you donate to their Indigogo campaign, you will get a T-shirt that says – I saved the internet and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. (Laughter) [58:15]

MD: Glad you like it. [58:17]

SM: I love it. I love it. I’m going to have to send you a... [58:19]

JR: If I can briefly elaborate on that. [58:23]

SM: Yes. [58:23]

JR: The funds we’re raising are not just for FreeSpeechMe itself, we’re also looking to improve other related Namecoin software. For example, right now we’re bundling the Namecoin D client which is, basically, the command numbers of Namecoin QT. There’s lots of software that FreeSpeechMe relies on and we want to make sure that that software gets improvements where it needs it as well. About half of the things we’ve listed and things we want to do are for FreeSpeechMe itself and the other half are for related software which,

basically, has the same goals but which FreeSpeechMe needs that software to work and FreeSpeechMe benefits that software. [59:03]

MD: It’s kind of one eco-system. It’s hard to explain as... you know, most people think of a plug-in like – Well, you want to improve the plug-in but you want to improve some cryptocurrency? I don’t get it. The way I put it is that what’s good for Namecoin is good for FreeSpeechMe and what’s good for FreeSpeechMe is good for Namecoin. [59:20]

SM: Yeah. [59:21]

MD: I’ll stress this again. This isn’t just – Oh, we have a plug-in. Somebody came out with a plug-in a few years ago that was kind of neat. It was a Firefox add-in that had a continually updating list of blocked websites and then you could go to the blocked websites through their DNS but the people doing it had to maintain it and it wasn’t always accurate. They actually got a threatening letter from the government for that. We haven’t gotten anything like that yet but we’ll see. That wasn’t like this. That was just a trick. This is a whole new eco-system of how to run the internet. It’s very bold to say that but it’s true. If you’re technical, go check out what Jeremy’s got written down for what he wants to do and you’ll get it. If you’re not, install the plug-in and you’ll go – Man, this is neat. I get it. [1:00:08]

SM: Yes and go to FreeSpeechMe.org and you’re going to find out, not only about the plug-in, but you can download it right now. It’s available right now. It’s not just something that they’re going to build. You can also learn how to set up a .bit version of your website. They’ve got a tutorial there, they’ve got a video which, of course, is being translated into different languages and, of course, they’ve got the Indigogo campaign and some reasons why you might want to support this. I really encourage everybody to go there. I think it’s a really cool project and I’d love to have you guys back on to see how it develops. I think this is going to be really big. People can find you, of course, at FreeSpeechMe.org but, Jeremy, do you have a personal way that people can get in touch with you like Twitter or anything like that that you want to give out? [1:00:51]

JR: I have a personal website veclabs.net and that’s, basically, for pretty much all of the programming projects I’ve done over the past few years. It’s not updated very often. I’ll warn you of that but if people are curious what the FreeSpeechMe programmer does in his spare time, you can see some other stuff I’ve done. [1:01:14]

MD: He builds robots. He builds robots. [1:01:16]

SM: That is so cool. Somebody is going to scoop you up and hire you right out of college, I think. (Laughter) [1:01:22]

MD: I think they already have. Don’t you have like a robot building summer job coming up or something? [1:01:27]

JR: I’ve had some robotics internships in the past. I don’t know about this summer. We’ll see how that goes. [1:01:34]

SM: Sweet. Alright so, your website veclabs.net and Michael W. Dean is the host of the Freedom Feens radio show and podcast. People can find that at FreedomFeens.bit, right? (Laughter) [1:01:47]

MD: .bit and .com. [1:01:49]

SM: Yeah. [1:01:50]

MD: .bit if you have the FreeSpeechMe plug-in and .com if you don’t. [1:01:53]

JR: Yeah and Veclabs is also available at .bit, although for Veclabs’ .bit, you need HTTPS because I’m like that. [1:02:00]

SM: OK guys, thank you so much. This has been awesome. [1:02:03]

__________________________________________

CREDITS:

Thanks for listening to Episode 90 of Let’s Talk Bitcoin.

Content for today’s show was provided by Lafe Taylor, Lamar Wilson, Jonathan Mohan, Matt Corallo, Stephanie Murphy, Michael W. Dean, Jeremy Rand and Adam B. Levine. This episode was produced by Adam B. Levine with additional production by Stephanie Murphy and Jonathan Mohan. This episode was edited by Denise Levine, Matthew Zipkin and Adam B. Levine

Music for today’s episode was provided by Jared Rubens and General Fuzz

Any questions or comments? Email adam@letstalkbitcoin.com.

Have a good one and I’ll see you at LTBcoin.com! [1:02:38]