Ask me anything

On May 14, Bitcoin.com Executive Chairman Roger Ver sat down with Digifinex cofounder, Kiana Shek, for an ask-me-anything (AMA) session about the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Ver explained what he thinks about the central banks printing unlimited money, the government-induced lockdowns, and his opinions about certain cryptocurrencies like BTC, BCH, XRP, ETH, and more.

Bitcoin.com Executive Chairman Roger Ver Discusses the Crypto Ecosystem on Digifinex Live

On Thursday, Digifinex cofounder Kiana Shek during an AMA at 8 a.m. ET, asked Ver about the economic crisis and massive amounts if stimulus central banks have created during the last two months.

Bitcoin.com Executive Chairman Roger Ver: The pandemic is a real disease and a real problem. But the reaction to it so far, seems to be much much worse than the disease itself. You see governments all over the world doing these economic stimulus packages. If printing money and just giving everybody some of it will make it so people never have to work again, why didn’t we do that for the last 100 years?

The fact of the matter is we need production, printing money, and giving people a bunch of checks doesn’t do anything. That’s not real economic progress. You actually have to have people building the businesses and building the goods and supplying the goods that people actually need in their lives. It’s not going to take long to realize that if you pay everyone to stay home and not work we are going to start running out of the things people need. So if anything, the exact opposite needs to be done. We need to have people go back to work and start producing the things the world needs.

Bitcoin.com Executive Chairman Roger Ver (left) and Digifinex cofounder, Kiana Shek.

The Digifinex cofounder then asked Ver about his stance toward supporting Bitcoin Cash and why his position had changed.

Roger Ver: To be clear, I didn’t change anything and I’ve been promoting the exact same thing for almost ten years now and that’s peer-to-peer electronic cash for the entire world. And sadly what everyone is calling bitcoin (BTC) today, that project got hijacked. It’s goal is no longer to be peer-to-peer cash for the world, which is the very title of the white paper. In fact, it got hijacked so badly that the people who run Bitcoin.org were talking about how to get rid of the white paper altogether because it was confusing people. Individuals who read the Bitcoin white paper and it’s clearly not talking about what everyone is calling Bitcoin. The Bitcoin white paper is talking about something much closer to Bitcoin Cash.

I am a fan of anything that works and puts people in charge of their own money. So they can send and receive money with anyone, anywhere, anytime without needing permission from anyone.

Are you interested in reading the Bitcoin white paper? Check it out here.

I think the cryptocurrency that has the best chance of doing that, for the most people is bitcoin cash. So from my point of view, I didn’t change anything at all, the original bitcoin project now just happens to be called Bitcoin Cash. The thing that everyone is calling bitcoin today in the media, it doesn’t have a white paper, it doesn’t have the same roadmap. They managed to hijack the bitcoin brand name, recognition, and network effect and all of the infrastructure built in the early days by people like myself. If you look at it before that split happened, pretty much every single business that was supporting people actually using bitcoin as money, supported bitcoin being able to scale so it could be money for the whole world. We had businesses like Coinbase, Blockchain.com, Bitpay, and on and on. The problem became so big that even Bitcoin.com could no longer support the thing called bitcoin.

The short answer is I didn’t change anything and what people are calling bitcoin today changed.

Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash for the Entire World

Kiana Shek then asked Ver about his thoughts on a price target for BCH in the future.

Roger Ver: If you look at it, Bitcoin Cash is trying to be money for the whole world. To have people using it all across the globe and even if it is a little bit successful in that, the price of bitcoin cash could easily go up 1000X where it is today. $230 dollars per coin could easily go up to $230,000 dollars. BTC is never going up a 1,000X more than it is today. It’s $10,000 already it’s not going to go up 1,000X, it’s just not going to happen. Because it’s not trying to be money for the world, and if it continued on the path of trying to be money for the world then it could have done that.

BTC transaction fees for May 14, 2020, are between $3.37 to $3.61.

In order for someone to use something it has to be useful and bitcoin with its slow transaction times, high network fees, and unreliable payments is not something that is useful. The reason it is still going up right now is because it has the bitcoin brand name and recognition. And everyone sees that the price is almost $10K and if they try and use it for anything other than speculation, they’re gonna have a bad user experience.

There’s a whole bunch of other cryptocurrencies that have a much better user experience.

Kiana Shek also asked about some of the infrastructure Ver was excited about.

Roger Ver: There’s actually more physical shops accepting bitcoin cash than those accepting bitcoin at this point. We have this fantastic tool called the Bitcoin Cash Register app that anyone can download for an iPhone or Android device and anyone can accept BCH at their business in like 30 seconds. You don’t have to give your name, you don’t have to give an email address, you don’t have to give a tax ID number, it just works and works in every country in the world. That’s something that used to be possible with bitcoin but its not with the high fees and network congestion. So if you haven’t seen the Bitcoin Cash Register app yet, check that out.

Check out the Bitcoin Cash Register app here. Start accepting BCH today in as little as thirty seconds.

We are seeing a lot of activity in China with our peer-to-peer marketplace Local.Bitcoin.com where people can buy or sell bitcoin cash using any payment method from any country. We’re seeing a significant amount of Chinese buying and selling bitcoin cash using the platform with a noncustodial escrow system. Another thing that is not possible using bitcoin (BTC) today, so its really great to see all the innovation happening within the BCH ecosystem. And tokens too and in fact, if we have time for it we can even make a Kiana Shek token this morning. It would take about 30 seconds. You can put your face as the image of the token and you can send and receive those tokens with anyone all over the world.

The Digifinex cofounder told Ver he would be welcomed to visit Asia soon to discuss his opinions again.

Roger Ver: I would love to get back to Asia soon but I am currently in St Kitts in the Caribbean and because of the coronavirus here there not allowing any flights in or out of the country. So I’ll be here for the foreseeable future.

Kiana Shek also asked Ver to name a few projects he was most proud of.

Roger Ver: There’s quite a few like a lot of people who don’t realize it but I was actually the second person ever involved in Ripple (XRP). XRP is one of the biggest cryptocurrencies in the world. I put in some seed money to start that and obviously it was incredibly successful. Also Blockchain.com, I was the second person ever involved in that project and I contacted the founder and offered to help. There’s been a bunch of different things like that where I was basically one of the very first people to get involved. Those are probably two of the most well known; Blockchain.com and Ripple. And of course, Bitcoin.com has been a huge success too. We’ve seen over 11 million wallets created on that platform now and users can spread peer-to-peer cash all over the world.

Kiana Shek asked what types of future projects Ver is looking forward to seeing developed as well.

Roger Ver: I think that you have to look at projects that are useful and if it’s not useful no one is going to want to use it. Something that I like is going to be different than something that some else likes so we have to look at what everyone wants to use. An example of that is the app Tik Tok. I don’t have any interest in Tik Tok whatsoever, but other people love Tik Tok. So Tik Tok is very successful because of that even though I personally don’t have any interest in Tik Tok.

Interested in minting your own Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) tokens, check out Mint.Bitcoin.com here.

The same thing is true for cryptocurrency apps, like Crypto Kitties. I had zero interest in Crypto Kitties myself but other people seemed to love that sort of thing. I think people are going to love making their own token, with their own picture and they’ll be able to swap the tokens. And that’s so easy to do at Mint.Bitcoin.com.

People interested in watching the remainder of the interview can join the Digifinex AMA chat room on Telegram and a full version of the video will soon be published, according to Digifinex. During the rest of the conversation, Ver discusses being a smart investor, his thoughts on USDT and stablecoins, and SLP-based tokenization as well.

What do you think about the AMA with Bitcoin.com’s Executive Chairman Roger Ver? Let us know in the comments below.

The post Digifinex Live AMA Hosts Bitcoin.com Chairman – Roger Ver Talks Stimulus, Useful Cryptocurrencies, Coronavirus appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Former Core Developer Mike Hearn Returns for Some Bitcoin Cash Q&A

On April 5 the former bitcoin core developer Mike Hearn came back to do an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) on the Reddit forum /r/btc. It’s been a while since Hearn has chatted with the bitcoin community, and one could say he left the development scene a few years ago due to the vitriolic strife over the scaling debate. Hearn explains ever since the birth of the Bitcoin Cash network he’s been getting a lot of emails asking him to return and help develop the nascent BCH blockchain.

Also read: New Karate Combat League Arena Features Bitcoin Symbol

Mike Hearn Discusses Bitcoin Cash and His Project Corda With the Community

Mike Hearn is a well-known figure within the bitcoin community, as he was the first developer to author the Bitcoinj client a library that uses Java and connects with the bitcoin network. Further, Hearn has talked with Satoshi Nakamoto numerous times over email communications. The developer was also a contributor to the bitcoin core development team and he left in January 2016 due to the scaling debate, and rising network fees. Since then Hearn has joined the banked-backed R3 Cev project, and he’s been building a distributed ledger project called ‘Corda.’

Hearn has a lot to say about Corda throughout his AMA and says the project “scales a lot better than bitcoin, even though bitcoin could have scaled to the levels needed for large payment networks with enough work and time.” Hearn explains that this is possible because Corda doesn’t use the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism. Corda doesn’t have a native cryptocurrency as Hearn says the protocol is an app platform much like ethereum so coins can be created on top of the Corda ledger.

‘Worth Considering How Frequently You Want to Hard Fork’

Hearn then discusses what he thinks about the past hard forks and even the latest May 15 fork slated to bump the block size up to 32 MB.

“Hard forking is an implementation mechanism, not a governance mechanism. Governance is a process, and often an institution, for arriving at a decision — A hard fork is just the software event that makes it real,” Hearn states during his scheduled AMA. “I note with some alarm that bitcoin cash is planning a timed hard fork in just one month, with no attempt to measure support or whether people are ready or even agree — The content is not going to be controversial in this community now, but a lot of organisations would find it hard to schedule and test a software upgrade on one month’s notice,” he adds.

There’s a risk that miners who do upgrade will be split onto a minority chain by accident even if everyone intends to upgrade, and have to roll back, making them even more conservative than they already are.

Bitcoin Cash Strongly Resembles the Bitcoin Community of 2014

Hearn then goes on to respond to another question and reveals that he thinks the bitcoin cash ecosystem strongly resembles the BTC community back in 2014. He tells the /r/btc AMA participants to “liberate themselves from just proceeding along the path Satoshi imagined and be willing to think radical, even heretical thoughts.”

“That experiment [Bitcoin] was tried and it didn’t work. It’s tempting to think that what happened was a freak one-off occurrence, but I don’t think it was,” the former core developer states. “I think it was inevitable given the structure and psychological profile of the community at the time. So just trying to ‘get back on track’ as I see it, is nowhere near radical enough.”

The developer says the bitcoin cash community does need to address methods to deal with certain conflicts. Hearn states the conflicts as being:

Bitter, enduring conflicts between two opposing camps of roughly equal size who can never make up.
Very different attitudes towards perceived experts, intellectuals, towards academic qualifications etc.
A win-at-any-cost mentality by one of the camps.
Different views on the validity of the preferences of the majority / “will of the people” etc.

These conflicts cannot be avoided but they can be contained and channeled. If the bitcoin community doesn’t establish systems for containing this conflict it will arise again over some issue that appears superficially different to the block size debate, but underneath looks much the same.

Hearn further states he won’t be joining the current developers working on bitcoin cash network and plans to continue exploring his Corda project.

“I don’t plan on returning to bitcoin but if you’d like to know what sort of things I’d have been researching or doing, ask about these things. I do not own any BCH,” Hearn adds.

What do you think about Mike Hearn’s /r/btc forum AMA? Let us know what you think about Hearn’s responses in the comments below.

Images via Pixabay, and Youtube.

At news.Bitcoin.com all comments containing links are automatically held up for moderation in the Disqus system. That means an editor has to take a look at the comment to approve it. This is due to the many, repetitive, spam and scam links people post under our articles. We do not censor any comment content based on politics or personal opinions. So, please be patient. Your comment will be published.

The post Former Core Developer Mike Hearn Returns for Some Bitcoin Cash Q&A appeared first on Bitcoin News.