Roger Ver on Bitcoin Cash and economic freedom

0:00I'm Ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Roger ver CEO of Bitcoin comm Roger welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you on today Thank You Ashton you're very welcome let's kick it off by talking about Bitcoin cash could you please start by giving us the 30-second pitch on why

0:21they coin cash brings benefit to the people and it empowers people sure Bitcoin cash allows anyone anywhere in the world to send and receive any amount of money with anyone anywhere else instantly basically for free and there's nothing that anyone can do to stop it and that's the same exact pitch that I started giving to people about Bitcoin back in 2011 sadly if that pitch is no

0:43longer true about the thing everyone's calling Bitcoin but it's still true about Bitcoin cash today so I'm excited about Bitcoin cash today for all the same reasons I got excited about Bitcoin back in 2011 and became the very first person in the entire world to start investing in this ecosystem that's amazing Roger and yeah I read that they coin cash touts that it maintains the

1:01original properties of Bitcoin more so than Bitcoin or Bitcoin core what are those properties and why doesn't Bitcoin core maintain those properties as well as Bitcoin cash sure so Bitcoin cash has fast cheap reliable transactions the thing that everybody's calling Bitcoin today has been hijacked by a bunch of people that don't even want it to be usable as a

1:22peer-to-peer electronic cash system even though that was the very title of the original white paper to describe Bitcoin in fact the software developers that are maintaining their the name core repo for what everyone's calling Bitcoin they openly say that they want the fees to be high they want the transactions to be slow and unreliable because they've instituted this

1:41artificial block size limit on the blockchain of what everyone's calling Bitcoin so the thing that everyone's calling Bitcoin today yeah it has the Bitcoin name but it's not the Bitcoin that became popular to begin with and it doesn't have any of the fundamental characteristics that made it worldwide phenomenon that it is today whereas Bitcoin cash still has all those

1:58things I'm much much more bullish about Bitcoin cash today than I am about the thing that everyone's calling Bitcoin in the media that's very interesting and yeah I've always seen it as a trade-off between decentralization and scalability or at least so it seems that there's been this political turmoil where if we try to increase the scalability we lose

2:16that decentralization is that true there can be an argument made about that but I think a lot of people are missing the the whole point this decentralization isn't to the goal decentralization is the tool that we use to achieve you know control over our own money without having to get permission from a corporation or a bank or a government to use that money so where

2:37the goal isn't an infinite amount of decentralization the goal is an infinite amount of censorship censorship resistance and making the best money we possibly can for the world and BTC with you know high fees and slow unreliable transactions that's not good money whereas Bitcoin cash transactions are light and fast super cheap and super reliable so that's that's great money

2:57for the world and that's why I've started using the clean cash for all of my own business dealings that makes sense but as well money is only as useful or it is really useful if people use it right there's a lot of people who know about cryptocurrencies who don't actively own it or use it because they think nobody else is using it or nobody is accepting it in terms of Bitcoin cash

3:16do you have any idea of how many people are using it to pay for things and how many people are accepting Bitcoin cash as a currency well because of its decentralized nature there's no official company or no official website there's no official way to track any but we don't actually know how many people are using it or what they're using it for but one of my own favorite use cases is

3:34a website called / Co where anyone can save 20 or 25 percent off every single purchase from Amazon by using Bitcoin cash and I know you know everyone around me in my own life is using that website because it's such a substantial savings on on Amazon so that's a great way for people to use Bitcoin cash right now today to make their lives better that's an interesting tip one thing

3:55that's also very important about that coin cryptocurrencies is using mining to secure the integrity of the network there's tons of Bitcoin miners around the world that are mining Bitcoin and securing the network now what is the comparison to Bitcoin cash what does the mining look like and is it as secure as the people that are securing the Bitcoin network right now

4:15so again a lot of people get confused and think that you need an infinite level of security you just need enough security so that nobody can mess with the system and so a Bitcoin cache and the thing that everyone's calling Bitcoin today BTC use the exact same mining algorithm and the exact same mining hardware and the people that are mining one coin actually

4:33switch back and forth often from one coin to the other depending on which one is more profitable to mine at that particular day so the the method of securing both Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin core is exactly the same today yeah I agree with you that you don't need infinite levels of security I guess enough to prevent a 51% attack or enough to you know not have somebody take over

4:54the network or produce their own fake blocks or fake money that are an example of this if you have a thousand dollars you want to store in a safe you don't need the safe to require a million dollars worth of effort to open it you just needed to require something more than a thousand dollars worth of effort and then it won't be people won't break the safe open so you just need enough

5:13security you don't need an amount of security true and I guess with the increase in value of the coin as the market cap increases more people start mining it because of the profitability and that increases the security as well right exactly there's a fantastic self-reinforcing feedback mechanism the more value that's being transacted on the chain the more secure the chain

5:32becomes I've heard rumors with Bitcoin mining that there is you know three or four different groups that really control nearly the majority of the mining and have the potential to change you know have more than 51% of the value is that the cent is that true do you know of and is that similar in Bitcoin cash yeah I don't think that that's true any more than that there's three or four

5:56groups that control the whole world and there behind the scenes pulling strings like there's Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin core miners all over the world thousands and thousands of them all over the place with you know hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment busy securing the network so there's there's no single place or single group of people that you

6:13can go to to control who's doing what with their their mining equipment that's great it really is a global effort and speaking of that there's a lot of people that are interested in learning more about Bitcoin cash and crypto currencies where are the Bitcoin cash community events and a lot of people when they're looking to find out more information they want to go in person and talk to

6:32somebody and not just read so is there a place where there's Bitcoin cash community events held regularly and where can people go to find that out so here in Tokyo we have Bitcoin cash meetups every single Wednesday with a fantastic turnout and there's more places accepting Bitcoin cash in Japan than there are accepting Bitcoin core so I would say the two maybe three main

6:52websites for people to find out more about Bitcoin cash sure of course Bitcoin calm and then there's meetup groups all over the world so the legacy website for that is meetup calm but a new and upcoming website to help organize that is it then chain dot IO that I hear lots of people are using to organize Bitcoin cash meetups around the world and if there isn't one already in

7:09your town I invite you to start one because you'll get to meet all sorts of super interesting smart people that live near you that are interested in the same sort of things you are and it's a great way to make new friends and talk to interesting people so go enjoying your local meet up today or start one if there's not one already where you're at amazing thank you Roger and yes

7:25eventually it's part to help grow the community and speaking of that you know in a decentralized nature anybody really has the ability to go create a Bitcoin cash meetup and become an organizer and bring people together and bring awareness of you know empowering currency and bringing the power back to the people that's right so I don't waste time life is short get started today

7:45especially when cryptocurrency markets around 24 hours a day unlike the stock market it's always going right and most people that are in cryptocurrency they they don't sleep too much because they're not only is it because the markets running all the time is that they're just super excited about this technology and how revolutionary it is and the progress that's made in the

8:05first 10 years of it we're really just at the very beginning right now and would you say we're sort of in the inception or wave 1 of this revolution and this movement or have we progressed far enough to call it you know getting close to mainstream adoption we're still nowhere near close to mainstream adoption but we're starting to get close to having mainstream attention and

8:24that's the step towards adoption so I'm old enough to remember when the internet really became popular and I think we're seeing the exact same sort of thing happened here with cryptocurrencies there more people in businesses and industries are starting to pay attention and figure out how they can use this technology to improve their lives and the the customer experience and

8:41everything that they're up to just like in the earliest days of the internet people were doing the same thing with that so I'm not sure if he's right but a friend of mine was claimed that the reason the Internet is so important is because it enabled the blockchain and I don't know if that's accurate but it certainly was an interesting way of looking at it yeah I guess time will

8:57tell on that one and for you know the catalyst of this movement do you see specific events coming a lot of people in terms of crypto currencies getting the traditional stock market in and traditional investors they see Bitcoin ETFs and other traditional financial derivatives as an accelerator towards cryptocurrency adoption do you see that as true or do you think by word of mouth

9:21people just learn more about cryptocurrencies and eventually see the benefits and start using them yes I think the cryptocurrencies have to have an underlying use case and you shouldn't just be speculators speculating on other speculators and so the reason people buy stocks is because they think that the company that that stock you know as it is Sharron is gonna be producing some

9:41sort of useful service to the world and be able to earn money and be able to eventually pay dividends or something with the stock there so that's why people buy stock they don't just buy it just speculate on on absolutely nothing there's an underlying economic use case taking place behind that stock and so I think the same is true of all these different cryptocurrencies they have to

9:58actually be useful for something in order for them to have a long-term value and if there's no underlying economic use case then the the long-term price is gonna head toward zero I think so but the Bitcoin cash in any cryptocurrency that's actually being used as a currency or used for something I'm incredibly bullish on so I'm a fan of anything that

10:16works and if it's useful to people they're gonna use it and so Bitcoin cash is one of many that are on my list of useful cryptocurrencies around the world that's awesome and what do you see the future of Bitcoin cash especially in 2019 the rest of it it's a very important year as there seems to be some recovery from the last drop and the mainstream attention has sort of been

10:38put into the background as the prices went down and then as they go up this next time do you see what you see as the catalyst for Bitcoin cash is there development that's happening that's going to accelerate it further or is it really just focused on user adoption well the user adoption is driven by the usefulness and so Bitcoin cash has super fast super cheap super reliable

11:00transactions anywhere in the world plus there's this giant token ecosystem being built on top of Bitcoin cash where people can organize anything they want and Bitcoin cash is token system is much much more scalable than other coins out there so it's a fantastic combination of you know fantastic peer-to-peer cash and fantastic peer-to-peer tokens and we

11:19have almost 4 million wallets created in our Bitcoin calm wallet we're about to roll out full token support to all those four million wallets as well as a you know the Bitcoin cash support that they already have so we're adding about 10,000 new users a day to our Bitcoin comm wallet so it's a substantial growth pace there and we're looking forward to that

11:36increasing even more this year so short answers and things are useful people are going to use it in Bitcoin cash is incredibly useful that is a substantial amount of users so congratulations so far to that team that's growing that now for the people that are just getting into cryptocurrencies could you make the comparison that these Bitcoin cash tokens are sort of like ëthere ium

11:55tokens and would they be used as a fundraising mechanism to do an IC o—- or is it more just a subsidiary of Bitcoin cash so there's already been a number of IC o tokens based on Bitcoin cash and I'm a big fan of aetherium I don't have anything bad to say about aetherium aetherium was amazing and in vitalik was an amazing guy for having created that but Bitcoin cash

12:17transactions are about a hundred times cheaper than the etherium transactions are looking like a twentieth of a cent for Bitcoin cash transactions versus they'd be ten cents for aetherium at the moment and they're about ten times faster to about a second and a half versus about 10 seconds for aetherium so ten times faster and a hundred times cheaper that makes for a really

12:35compelling use case plus we're going to be rolled out to the Bitcoin comm wallet for everybody so that'll be by far the most popular biggest mobile token wallet in the entire world so we've already seen businesses like a Alliance car go direct which is a sub company or of a a group which is the biggest airline in all of Japan we have central bank's looking at doing their tokens on top of

12:54Bitcoin cash we have rewards loyalty companies doing their tokens on top of Bitcoin cash we have all sorts of groups doing tokens on top of Bitcoin cash all of the world because uh and another thing so like etherium is great but every single etherium node has to validate every single token transaction on the etherion network so if you get a crypto kiddies

13:12or some really popular token on etherium the entire etherium network clogs up and kind of grinds to a halt and the fees skyrocket i'm on cash your Bitcoin cash note only has to validate the transactions that your node cares about when it comes to the tokens so even if there's an incredibly popular crypto kitty's or something like that on Bitcoin cash the network doesn't

13:31slow down the fees don't skyrocket that never keeps right on going super fast super cheaply and super reliably and so that's a really really big benefit that Bitcoin cash has going forward it definitely sounds beneficial and for the people that have been cryptocurrency for a few years they followed along with the scalability issues of aetherium and I experienced crypto Katie's

13:51firsthand as well and saw that the network broke the fees get really high but one of the advantages to etherium over Bitcoin that people know about is that the utilization of smart contracts and decentralized autonomous autonomous organizations and things like that does Bitcoin cash have the ability to do those smart contracts that aetherium can do and if not is it going to have that

14:14ability in the future yeah it has most the same ability to do smart contracts and it has a full scripting language there that you could do all sorts of fancy things on top of Bitcoin cash that even BTC can't do at the moment so it's really exciting to see the amount of infrastructure being built on top of Bitcoin cash that's amazing now what would you say is the biggest challenge

14:32in growing Bitcoin cash right now is it user adoption political turmoil need more development resources or we're simply just waiting for the bull market what challenges do you foresee as growth occurs I think the biggest challenges are building the software tools to make Bitcoin cash more useful than Bank of America or JPMorgan Chase or all the PayPal or all the traditional financial

14:57systems that people are using right now and it doesn't have to be just a little bit better it has to be significantly better in order to get people to switch so maybe an order of magnitude better and so we're working on building all the tools with our Bitcoin comm wallet and the tokens and all this other stuff to make it significantly faster better cheaper more reliable than your visa

15:15your paypal your MasterCard your your wire transfer whatever it is that people are using currently we want to make Bitcoin cash much faster cheaper and more reliable so that people are incentivized to switch because it's more useful to them in their lives and that's what we're busy doing and we're having good success of that already and we're gonna have even more success in the

15:32future I agree and in this world of exponential growth and disruption you really do need a product that is 10 times better than the last four people to make that switch and see the significant difference in that value so when do you foresee you know through the development that bitcoin cash team is working on when are we going to see that 10 times better

15:51product is it going to be this year or is it throughout the next coming years well I think it's already 10 times better than you know the Bank of America account I had a decade ago but you know the banks aren't standing still either they're working to improve their product and that's the beauty of the market is everybody's competing to cooperate better so all this competition leads to

16:13a better quality product to us the consumers and we get to have you know better products at a cheaper price so this is a great thing and I want everyone else to step up their game to use that the entire world becomes a better place faster and faster than it otherwise would have been without this competition so if you haven't tried it already go to Bitcoin comm download the

16:29wallet if you order free Bitcoin calm we're giving out free Bitcoin cash to everybody and you can see firsthand this is an amazing super fast super cheap reliable form of money and then you can save 25% off every purchase on Amazon using the first out I oh that's a pretty compelling use case right now today amazing Roger ver CEO of Bitcoin comm it's been a pleasure speaking to you

16:49today I'm looking forward to seeing the growth of Bitcoin comm and I thank you for your time and I look forward to speaking you in the future see you next time