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Episode 73 · 1 year ago
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Episode 73 · 1 year ago
Hashing It Out #73-Logan Brutsche of DAIHard
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Entering work. Welcome to hashing it out, a podcast where we talked to the tech innovators behind blocked in infrastructure and decentralized networks. We dive into the weeds to get at why and how people build this technology the problems they face along the way. Come listen and learn from the best in the business so you can join their ranks. Welcome back to hashing out everyone. As always, I'm your host, Dark Corey Petty, with my triest to go host, Colin Cucher. It's up calling. I don't stop calling. How you doing, core you broke broke it. I broke it. Transaction. Deny, but what? Rejected? No, do it again. Do it again, do against right. Say Hello Everyone. Calling. Hello Everyone, Colin, I go. I did not have that voice inflection. So you broke it. Anyway. Today we're we're bringing back Logan. Brusche is a Brusche brush. How do you say your last name? Forget it's well, it's Brugie, but probably Brugie. That's what it wasn't a German Bro I knew it was wrong. Yes, bring you back on. We had you on a while ago talking about kind of crypto economic primitives and the and the stuff you were doing there, and since then you've been quite busy building quite a bit and trying to apply that stuff to ruled applications. So, for the uninitiated audience, why don't you give them a quick introduction to kind of who you are and will then we'll start talking about what you're doing. Sure. So, my origin story with Crypto is that when I went to depcon three, I think it was, I wrote a contract called a burnable payment, which we can get into in a bit, but that was sort of my intro into smart contracts and Game Theory and and then our last episode we talked about a little bit about crypto economic primitives and the academy I was trying to set up, and now I'm working on well, I'm in a team called team toast and we're working on basically trying to bring the burnable payments game theory to market, to make an unkillable exchange between feat currency any theat currency, and well and die. Specifically, of course, the hard part is getting into crypto. Once you're into Crypto, you can get into any other crypto. So and that you know, that's kind of the the the Achilles heel of Crypto as we see it, and so we think we can solve the problem with these vernable pay payments as the fundamental sort of engine underneath what we're calling dial right, and that's the AI hard. You know pretty I can play words. They're quality on yeah, and then our yes, that's right, and what we're currently focused on right now is getting a down up with, of course, a token sale, which all boundary. And then another sort of three big contect here. One die hard when they can talk about which I think the Game Theory there is interesting by itself. The other thing is foundry, which is the Doo that was sort of want to house die hard in. So we aren't personally targetable anymore for the maintenance, if you catch my drift. And then the third concept is Zim die, which was basically the culmination of two months of market research in Zimbabwe to look at well, basically two questions. The first one is, you know, can die adoption in Zimbabwe actually help the people? They're like, like we would like to believe, being crypto Zellous ourselves. And secondly, if it can, how can you realistically bootstrap that, given that cryptocurrency is extremely complicated and nobody seems to know about it, especially in the Bobwe so that's sort of the overview and there's there's a lot to talk about. What what? I'll just ask what piks your interest. Where should we go first? I'd say let's just start from beginning. What's The vernable payment? How does that tie into what die hard is sure? Okay, so burnable payment and the simplest version, which is the contract I wrote before I went to that first depcom, is basically you have a pair and a recipient and those are decided upon advance and pay or puts money into this burnable payment and the burnable payment will only ever release money to the receipient. But there's an option as well for the pair to just burn the entire amount. So it's sort of you can think of it as a last resort to punish any attempted scams. So, like you know, if I want to, I don't know, sell anything, but I don't trust the person that I'm selling to. They could open up a burnable payment and put the money inside of that burnable payment and then I...
...can know that they for sure are committed to spending the money, because there's no way they're going to get it back. There's no reef fund polity. The only choice to have is or burn, meaning destroy the currency, or release it to me, so that that allows me to trust them now and and then when I when I'm because I now in the payment, the payer actually can trust me because they know that if I try to screw them, they're just going to burn the payment and they know that I know that as well. So it's just a very simple way to solve trust without involving a third party. So it's you could also think of it as a an alternative to scrow, where you don't need to solve the problem of how do you find the that third party and sort of guarantee they're not on the side of, you know, one party or the other semakes. Yeah, so how is that tied into die hard? What did you do different to make to make die hard a thing? Like? What is exactly die hard and how does it bring in burnable payments? Sure so, die hard is is one of many, many attempts you could do to bring the burnable payment game theory to a market and actually solve who will problem, and the problem we're trying to solve is, I mean, ultimately it's just entering and exiting crypto. And the way we do that is if a okay, the the person who puts the money into this this burnable payment, which you could now call it trade, they put their die into this spurnable payment and they once you do this now with this version of the burnable payment, the payer or the person who puts the money and is decided. But anybody else can come to the payment if they want, as long as they also put down a some die themselves. It's currently set to one third of the payment amount. So and then that gets listed on our marketplace. So anybody can can join that payment and when that second person joins the payment and they become the buyer of this cryptocurrency. And there's a few phases to this burnable payment. That's sort of it just makes the basic concept of a vernable payment a little bit safer and a little bit more tailored to currency trade. And and you end up facilitating a crypto to feet trade between two people without a third party and because it's all based on smart contracts, it can, you know, this can be used throughout the world and even if it's illegal. And so just to sort of go over that again with the particular use case of a currency trade. So I want to sell ten die, let's and let's say I've landed actually in a new country. I don't have any other exchanges set up and I really just want cash to pay for my hostile night. So once I land the airport, I could go to die hard put my ten die, let's say, fifty die, because I just landed somewhere. So I want to have a bit of spending money. So I put my fifty die in there and I say, look, I'm at the airport. Meet me at the airport and give me, you know, fifty dollars worth of whatever the local currency is, and maybe I would include a little bit extract me, because I am asking them to meet me at the airport and it is up to me what I'm actually selling this die for. You know how much and and which currency as well. And and the way the burnable payment game theory actually sort of works is that for somebody else to pick up that offer. You know, I'm trying to sell die. So if they want to come buy my fifty die, they have to put a third of that amount of die into the payments they would have to put in. I don't know what is that? Something like thirteen die or something like that into the payment. Once they do that, they are irrevocably part of they are the buyer of Crypto and there's no going back. I can't now get my fifty die out and they can't get their thirteen point whenever die out. And if they then do meet me at the airport and give me the fifty dollars of local currency, then it is expected in a game theoretical sense, that I would release the payment or or just never come back, in which case the payment would automatically release. They would get to fifty die plus they're thirteen die deposit back and then I would have the local currency if they that they gave to me. Alternatively, if they are trying to scam me or they're lazier or whatever and they never show up, now I have the option to burn the fifty die plus the thirteen die so that's sixty three die in payment. And the idea here is that, because you can always punish a scam, scams should never actually show up in the market place in the first place. So that's sort of the whole runthrough of a life cycle of a diehard trade at its core is really just a burnable payment with some tweaks. Explain to me how it doesn't just shift the scam to the other side of the equation. So instead of the person who accepts to offer the service, you could actually have people who are just straight up malicious, you know, and don't want that service, you know, just literally just burn as soon as they can, because because some people just want to see the world burn. Like what? What is doesn't like to shift the equation, doesn't actually balance a because not zero sum here. It's like it's it seems like it just changes who is actually the malicious actor. Yeah, well, so it's not zero sums, it's...
...mutually assured destruction. And it's interesting you brought up some people just want to watch the world burn. That's a very common criticism we have. I'm not sure it's actually very true. I mean there are a forse movies that portray that, but but I think most people are are not so evil that they'll because because to punish this you'd actually have to spend your own money. So if I put, and we can express this in both sides of the Equal Asians, let's say I'm the honest guy. I put fifty died down for someone else to come online and burn that. Now they have to actually burn, you know, forfeit, thirteen dollars of their own. And if I'm just some anonymous guy on the Internet, I it really seems like, and we've done some experimental testing on this, that people just don't come to to just ruin. You know, it's not actually that fun to just go burn a stranger's money, especially if you have to spend your own money. Similarly with me, so let's say I'm the dishonest one and I'm selling, well, I'm saying I'm going to sell fifty die and the guy does mean me at the airport and it gives me the fifty of local currency. It's actually well, first there's a couple things. First of all, it's easier for me to just never come back to the burnable payment and have it automatically release. And second of all, I've met this guy facetoface. It's just seems extremely unlikely that I would then go pin burn it just just for for fun. I don't think many people are like that. And then, sort of on top of all of that, the the application we built has a reputation system as well. So, besides all of the game theoretical concerns, when you're looking at an offer on the market place to buy or sell Crypto, you can actually see how many times they've burned or released or aboarded, which is a which is a different, different end to the payment. But but yeah, so we have this sort of pre solid game theory which makes the assumption that people are rational actors, which of course is an idealistic assumption. But then also we have the reputation system to where if you if you want to look at this platform him as a way to actually make money, you can go there, build a solid reputation and begin serving customers and making some small profit to do so. Now, do you do some kit that, by the way, that makes perfect sense. Absolutely correct. I kind of agree with what you're saying. It just needed to play devil's advocate there. I don't think I would burn fifty to screw somebody over. Thirteen. Right, makes sense. And if the if the numbers were right, you know, they could measure somebody who's going to engage with your system can measure their risk more. You know. Basically, look, I'm going to get like a huge ri out of this he's going to get exactly what he wants and I'm going to get what I want in like Crypto plus, you know whatever. All I need to do is say, I'm going to take a little bit of risk, leave this other human being is in a total douchebag and willing to like burn like his tremendous amount for my little amount. And if, as long as that kind of the quate quation kind of like balances it makes sense. There, where the risk is worth the reward, I think people will participate because if even if you're like only one percent of people are like weird and will literally burn their own money just to gleefully, you know, Giggle as somebody else has pissed off. Right, you know, I even if one percent, and that's a high I think that's a tremendously high amount to expect. But just one percent of those people are like that, you still get a huge Roi from the other ninety nine percent. Right, so that makes sense to me. So I think. I think you're just a kind of does work and balances out. So yeah, no, I think this is a great how are you using it in the wild right now? Well, unfortunately, we don't have any liquidity. So if you go, I mean the thing is live, you can you can go to diehard dot ioh or diehard doot exchange and you can see it. You can try it out either on Covan or on mainnet. But there's no users right now. So the main thing we need to now or sort of strategizing about, is marketing. So where do we go market this thing? And and that sort of connects to the hole Zimbabwe market and Zimbi thing. But but yeah, so, I mean the answer is we really aren't using it anywhere and we're trying to decide where we're going to push it. So what's your minute? That's obvious a great way to transition into the next part of this. But what's your ideal audience? What is it? What like? Who needs this and why would they use this? Suppose, above like other situations? Yeah, I think the ideal user is somebody who has no other options to get into and out of Crypto and and you can interpret that different way. So my example of me landing in a new country I've never been in. I actually have no other options, so I don't know anybody there. It's going to take me weeks to get it a bank account and then hook up to an exchange, if it's even possible, which it you know, likely is not. So that would be, you know, a traveler with crypto landing in a new place. That would be one customer, because they have options. Another example is Zimbabweans. They, you know, the Zimbabwe used to have an exchange called Glics, but that got shut down by the government. So this could be something that could be long unch in Zimbabwe, or I should say marketed in Zimbabwe, because it's sort of live everywhere, and the Nice thing is that it can't be shut dowwn because it's there's no server...
...and where that and there's no legal entity that can be pressured. So I mean, again, just in short, anybody who doesn't have any other option. I mean the Game Theory is a little scary. You have to do with the risk of burning your currency, and I think what that means is that the first users will be people who are serious, may be quite technical and also maybe with an entrepreneurship kind of bent, because they, as you said, I think it was it was corey that said this. You you can, you can factor in the risk and charge any premium for whatever the risk is and of course, one of the things that we will find out is what exactly that risk is as we get liquidity and users. That will be interesting in itself, I think, to see how you know what percentage of payments actually burn. But yeah, anyway, back to your original question, just anybody who has no other option. You know it like so. I'm a US citizen. I have coined base. As much as I love die hard, obviously it's my baby, I don't have much need of it because I have an easy way in and out and I'm not too concerned with, you know, Super Supreme Levels of privacy and which I guess brings me to another whole sector that we could easily target, and that is to people who don't want to do ky see, because diehard does not require any ky see at all. It's just a set of smart contracts and the money's down and and people can join win and if they want. Why is it Babwe? What's wrong with them? A quick but why? Why are they a group of people that need something that offers this type of service? Why can't they do it? There should so. So I wrote a Zimdi paper which maybe in the show notes you can put a link to a page. It'll just be die hard dot info slash or sorry, die how die hard dotal Info on. There there will be a link to a Zimdi paper which I wrote after my two months in Zimbabwe. So the larger answers in that paper. But for an answer for here and now. They they suffer under extreme inflation. It's the first thing. And then that's just coupled with an incredible abuse of anti will be by the government. People will wait for hours in line at a bank, get there early before the bank opens to wait in hours or sorry, to wait in line for hours and just to get up about three dollars equivalent of currency every day. And that's if they're lucky. They get there too late, they actually don't get any money because the bank is out of money. The ATMs didn't work. In Zimbabwe they have they have this mobile payment system called ego cash, but but that is well faces the inflation. So there's that's just one big thing is that their current financial system just doesn't work. Work and and die, combined with defy today, actually gives a pretty solid alternative to a first world banking system. You know you it's a hard cell to a first world person because they already have savings accounts that they can earn are an interest in. But to is Zimbabwe and that is it's not a reality they can access at all. They first of all there, if they just hold their money at devalues incredibly rapidly and they can't put it into any banking system that that allows them to accrue interest, let alone, you know, keep its value. So, you know, crypto is building this parallel banking system. Of course, that's been a pitch of it, of Crypto for a long time, but lately, with with die and with defy, it's really, I think, made a lot of strides towards being able to make that, you know, sell that claim to regular people. And so it seems to me like Zimbabwe could be an incredible market to get people to jump, you know, leap frog towards crypto and use die as a banking system and then so to tie it all back to die hard. Die Hard is a way that people could enter and exit that system without the government really being able to stop it. So, okay, without the government, what about? All right, so first off, actually there's a couple things that I really want to get into here. You're not you're talking about going into third world countries, but there's a ton of first world applications and I'm kind of curious why you decided to go why I decided to ignore them. Is it a user experience issue? Is it a what is what is the concern here? And, by the way, what is the overall user experience? How quickly can these payments subtle and how confident are you in their settling? Yeah, so there's two questions there. Why don't we talk at the first world in the second is what is the user experience? I'll enter the second first because it's a pretty quick answer and it depends on liquidity. But let's assume that there are people using this in your area. You could complete a trade in five minutes if both users are paying attention, because you it's there are essentially three etherium transactions you have to make.
The first is great the offer. The second is well for the other person to enter the offer. Sorry, there's four. The fourth one is to confirm that the payment has been made and then the fourth is to burn or release the currency, or you could never come back and the other person could reclaim it. So there's four etherium transactions and the rest of the time really depends on what what method of payment you you're demanding. You, who ever creates the offer defined and what the payment method is. So I could say, you know, meet me at this coffee shop between you know, in working hours or whatever, or I could say, why are it to my bank account, whatever it is. That is the main determinant of how long it will take. And so if you are in a dense area with lots of users and and and you could say meet me, get starbucks and give me the twenty and they could show up there in twenty minutes. In the trade could really be completed in, let's say, twenty two minutes, if you want to add in the the sort of the time of actually making the transactions. So it can go very fast. And I'll even say a bit more on that, which is I think that as people learn how to use this, and especially as people learn how to make money on this, it will start to feel a little bit like Uber, where you you come to this system, you put in your request and it's not an Uber Car that shows you up to drive somewhere. It's a guy that brings you cash and he is acting as as a service provider, because you have included a bonus, let's say a dollar or two dollars or whatever you need to pay to have him come find you and to do so fast and because, see, people can make money on this system. I think that, with enough adoption, that's that's what the experience would be like. You actually feel like you're dealing with service providers or you are the service provider, or some mixture of the two. So your first question, you know, why don't? Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, that's that's kind of what I'm looking for is it seems like there is like a more it's more on demand, like service provider, at hoc service thing, and I'm thinking, okay, who would use this? And I hate to be this guy, I don't even know if I should say this on the podcast, but like people like prostitutes, you know, would probably keeps the of this because isn't just you know, it's just something that you know, it lowers their risk, it lowers your risk, and you know it's kind of got a little bit of a discovery mechanism in there. I probably should have said that out loud, but you know, it's like it's exactly the kind of scenario that this mitigates. And so I'm kind of like, you know this, this could be used for some untoward, untoward services as well. You know, could I pay someone to kill my wife using this service? Like is this something that done? You know, it also can like, for instance, the FBI and trap me with the service somehow, like is there like there's a lot of interesting implications to this kind of thing. I don't know, just just sets just speaking out loud. What's your reaction? Yeah, well, I mean maybe I'm a bit too honest here, but I think that when you look at the burnable payments themselves, you have an engine for market places that really can't be shut down and can't be policed. I've thought a lot about this. I think. Well, I mean I think you're not wrong, you know, but I but something I've realized in the past year or so is that you can't actually use it to do immoral things quite so easily, because when with a burnable payment, you run the risk that somebody will pick up the payment just to just to foil your plans. So the more disagreeable you're a burnable payment is, the more risk somebody will will actually put that one third up just to say, okay, I'm going to do it and then not do it and then you're forced to read rent the currency. So if you you know, that's not that's interesting that you get like the Christian right season is being used and they've got like pep you can and money hanging around. So they decided they're going to troll a particular area or spot, spot troll. You don't even have to like do it very often. You have to increase at one percent to ten percent and it would become right, very risky. You know, the one percent, you know, who just want to see the world burn, to the ten percent who just want to see the world bird. And now social consequences balance out the untoward behavior. So you know, drug deliveries, prostitution, these kind of things. They could literally just put down the money and stop stop it from happening, but there's no stopping the person from maybe reposting. But now their risk is gone up and so they're they're, they're there. Their collateral will have to drop and there and they're asking him out. Would probably have to increase. So the point, I might make the purpose itself untenable. That makes sense. My question. My question here based on this conversation is how much of all of that Metadata is capturable within the system? If I were, if I were to...
...be, will call myself like a global observer, I can somehow capture as much information is available. How much could I know and how much, how much analytics could I do to figure out, like what persidage, burn will payments are being used for just type of thing? How many things are being burned because of some specific entity trying to stop a particular type of behavior in an area? Is that stuff even capturable within the current system? Yes, so. Well, to some degree it is so. The when you put a one of these, whether it's a burnable payment or a die hard trade, when you put it out there, you have some I guess you could almost call it at advertisement data or like a title which says like okay, I want to buy fifty die for fifty US dollars or whatever it is. That's in clear text on etherium. But then when you when somebody can then commits to that payment, there's an encrypted chat function which does use etheroreum actually carry the data, but the data itself is encrypted, so only those two people can read it. But you can still see what you know, what the smart contract did. You can see how long it was in each phase. There's there's three phases, the first one being the open phase, where nobody has committed to it, second one being a committed phase, and the third one what we call judgment, which is where the other, you know, one person is claimed that the thing has been done in the other person now has to judge whether it has been done anyway. You can see, you know, you can see how long they were, how long they took. You can also see how many messages they sent and, of course, you could see in the end whether it was burned or released, which is how we build the reputation data. But the the the chatting between the two people is encrypted. So what is the primary point of the tree for this? Like, is this a website? Are Mean City centralized application, but this is running through website. Is there mobile options, like you know, most of my experience would be through a mobile phone for something like this, because it probably would use it for the currency exchange value. Yeah, so, yeah, we have. So if you go to diehard, dial or die here or dot exchange that. Well, diehard, die, I just redirected diehardt to change the APPs right there. It does work on mobile. Course, on mobile, you saw on desktop you would be bet a mask or nifty wallet, some kind of whip through wallet, and then on mobile you would need one of these mobile web three wallets, which alphole wallet is one of my it's right now. But yeah, you can use boats and the you know, again, the only thing you run into is that you'll go there and there's not any other users. So that's what we're going to try to solve next. But but yeah, it's just a website you go to and then of course you need a Web three provider. And how do you solve that? Of course, like had you. How do you? How do you drum up? Go On podcast? Going on a podcast certainly helps, but, like, I don't I been looking at our geographical data from podcast Sambabwe is not a large market for us. You need you need thriving local markets for, I think, this to really thrive, because it's similar to like a local exorium, local bitcoin, stuff like that. But there's the mechanics are slightly different so that your you don't rely on third party arbitrators. The incentives themselves kind of push their potential correct behavior. It's a lot of stuff and so I think you need thriving local markets, which is very hard to do globally. So, like I'd like, I think you said, like your goal is to try and push it in a certain market that needs it most. That makes sense there and then and then eventually like spread out from that. What do you do? How do you do that? How do you start that? Yeah, it's a good question and it's the one we're focusing and now. So I mean to some degree. Well, there's a bunch of answers to the question. One answer to the question is get a marketing budget and market it and then, while you doing that, ACTU pivot the product, because probably you know, our product itself needs to pivot to the markets. We need to find that product market fit with both of those changing. So that's one answer. Another way to sort of refine the question is, I mean, well, as you imply to you said that you can't just we didn't really say this, but part of, I think, what you implied is you can't just target the world. You actually need to focus and target a particular space. And the way we've now rephrase that question is it's not even really about targeting a particular city or country. It's actually about targeting a particular payment network. So do you guys know the APPs transfer wise or revolute? I don't. revolute. Okay, so it's yeah, granser wise. Never, never heard about it. It's based good like a mobile bank. I mean it's a bank that is built to be easily used by travelers. So you don't never need to call a bank. It's all on your phone and it's extremely easy to get paid and to pay out with these, with these APPs. They're just, you know, totally. They're not into Crypto at all. They're just they're, you know,...
...a fairly modern that's modern financial technology. Yes, exactly. So that is a that's an example of a payment work, because if we target that and can saturate that to some degree, than anybody with transfer wise or revolute can come, can come to die hard and find the trades they want and then, you know, that's not about a country or particular type of person, aside from maybe travelers. But I think that's the key question. Is what payment network do we target? And in Zimbabwe, for example, even that has several different payment network so you know when is cash of local currency and other one is US dollars, which people use quite a bit there, even though it's illegal. And then another one is this eagle cash digital payment system that they have. So you could you could target any of those. And so, yeah, I think the answers you choose one of those and then you get a marketing budget and you go after it and you try to get critical mass and then, as the users come in, you use Google analytics and and just try to figure out, you know, what is the most painful part of the user experience and what to people wish that you know, that was there, that isn't there, and then and then target those. So, like ebay started as basically a series of links through I mean, sorry to Ebay. Apologize. PAYPAL started as a series of link shares through Ebay in order to get people to start paying for their you know, there're stuff. They didn't really have a they were originally trying to attack the US dollar, but they really came up the good system for just basic payments from xcom merging with feels company looking on right now, and then they got payer. They form paypal. All they did was just like take these links and just people could embed them in their Ebay ads and accept payment through those links, and that went kind of viral because nobody else offered that service. There's a lot of services sections available on places like Angie's list, which, by the way, has its own payment system. More I guess a better example be craigslist. Is there a thought to an approach where you can make this a one link? Here's my trade, here's how you get to die even you know like payment mechanisms, that you can literally acquire the die and and pay for the system, pay for the service with your burnable payment, all on one step? Well, unfortunately, well, okay, not directly. I think what you would need to do that is you'd have to get die hard itself to be successful to some subset of users and then have people build on top of it, because with diehard itself and with runable payments in general, it is actually crucial that the user gets that final burn release decision, because if they never see that and it's just assumed that everything went well, then your game theory breaks down and suddenly the scams come rushing in. So I think the way that you would get to that sort of any kind of much more simpler one click type of thing, is you would have a service that was built on top of diehard and that relied on diehards game theory. They provided to the some end user one click solution and then they, as the company, take a small commission and for that commission they monitor the you know, the actual underlying payment and punish any scams that do come along, which gets back to the whole idea of like, you know, charging more to offstep the risk of punishing scammers. Think it's going to be kind of hard to get people to especially in places that have kind of terrible financial infrastructure already that are typically rought with scams the kind of take advantage of that terrible financial market place to put up money to get me. Yes, that's how. How do you have you overcome with yeah. So, basically, and again I would I would say there's Zimdi paper as a fuller answer to this, but a big part of the answer, and and I think this applies to just getting cryptocurrency adoption anywhere, is the obstacle is it is complicated to use and there's lots of scary things, like if we just put aside burnable payments for a second and just talk about cryptocurrency, the reality is that if you want own crypto currency now, you either have to trust in exchange, which has risks, or you have to handle your keys yourself, which has its risks, and you could, in either of those circumstances, suddenly wake up and find out all your money's gone, and that's that's really intense. So that's that's one of the obstacles and the solution that we come that we came to, was that you essentially need ambassadors to create that that link regular people to Crypto, and these ambassadors know how to use and they know how to expose the value to the users and in the case of Zimdi, we call them Zimdie agents. So these agents would be offering not just cryptocurrency and they wouldn't be trying to sell the ideological dream of Crypto. They would literally be s saying things like look, if you bring me a hundred US...
...dollars, I can send that to somebody in South Africa, which, by the way, there is no competition for because it's illegal and extremely difficult. Well, the competition is that people could drive over the border with, you know, literal physical cash in their car and then risk confiscation. That's one service you can offer. You could also offer remitten services, where the money's coming in from outside and they can, and this is Zimdie agent would receive the Crypto and then dispersed local currency. You'd also offer savings accounts. Again, these AMBAB blings don't have they don't have stable current. Well, okay, they have the US dollar, which is stable currency, and they have banks, which doesn't use the US dollars. So they always have to choose between the stable currency or banking services. And die can can offer them both at once. And so this agent could basically say like look, let me help you handle this crypto side. They probably don't even need to mention the crypto thing though. Just say, look, I have a way where, if you give me any kind of currency, I can put it into a savings account for you and sort of be the custodian or a bank manager to some degree for you, and you will have. What you could basically pitch is like this is an international bank account with US dollars that nobody can nobody can take from you. That's the promise of die which these agents, which know how to use crypto and know the risks, can then offer to regular people who don't need to know anything about crypto. So that's how we would overcome that issue. Obvious text question. The obvious next question of that is how do you keep those agents honest and how do you keep people from posing as these agents, offering the same services but not providing it? Yeah, so well, in Zimbabwe there is a big emphasis on trust and reputation. I think that's partially because their currencies so unreliable, so they have to fall back on trust. So I think it would naturally be that the only people who end up making money as agents are people who are trustworthy. I think that's already how they gage different business engagements. For example, when I was in Zimbabwe, I knew this guy who would buy my bitcoin and give me ego cash and which is this mobile dismobile payment system, and and we were talking over coffee one day and he was saying that, because trust is so important, if he is selling, if he's sort of facilitating a trade between two people. One person wants Bitcoin, other one wants cash and he's the guy in the middle and when one guy does not pay up, he will then, out of his own pocket, pay up. You know, the guy that was being honest just to maintain his own trust and reputation so that's how valuable that kind of thing is in Zimbabwe and I think that, you know, just in terms of our strategy, we would just try to find those people who already have a network that trusts them. But just more generally, if we can get enough momentum to the zimdi thing, people will sort of naturally come online spontaneously enter this network and they would only be able to do so much business as as the trust they can you know, they can garner from their local network. Part of part of this, which should we referred to earlier before you start of this podcast, email, is like the the one of the weaknesses that does exist and set all of the system, which is the development and governance and iterations on all of this and whether or not that can be shut down and modern impression. You're trying to like dalify that process, but what does that look like and how are you to in that? Yeah, so I'm glad you asked. So, basically that that's what our main focuses right now. We have a doll that we want to build called foundry, and there's a lot to that I would love to talk about. With that, maybe the first thing to mention is our approach to building foundry is, well, I I don't think it's completely novel, but maybe we're the first ones to put a name to it and to highly value it specifically. And that is this approach that we're calling a piece wise, you know, way of building a doubt, which is you don't build a whole set of smart contracts out of them all at once and then put it out there and then hope, you know, that it works. That's what I would call the monolithic approach and I would also say that that's what the doll, the original Dou did, and I think that is what you could lay a lot of the disaster that followed from that approach. There was just this huge system, incredibly interdependent, and they you just can't reason about something that big. So, in contrast, we're building different pieces and then hooking them up in different ways. And so the first thing we're building is the sale. That's almost done. It's being audited right now, and there are there are three total pieces that we see as necessary to a for profit DOUB and well, I'll just talk about that first, because there's only one for...
...profit doubt as far as I'm aware, that successful at all on that is maker down. They they provide stability and they have their ways of extracting that fee and then the maker holders actually, you know, get gain from that. At our Moloch as a part of that group too. Well, but Moloch does not have a profit model. So I do like Moloch and I like the the fork. Keep forgetting the name Meta cartel. And actually they we've done a lot of thinking about those two it and and certainly, don't get me wrong, they are they are valuable explorations and and they do what they do well and I think they prove a lot about dows and about the viability of doubs. That's quite encouraging. However, I wouldn't really call those two for profit. Okay, they they get investments and they spend the investments wisely, which which itself is an accomplishment that I'm I'm very encouraged by, but they don't they haven't really at built anything that makes them profit. Now, with foundry, what we're building, we already have a smart contract system that extracts a fee and that's die hard. Die Hard takes to one percent fee of everything. And and so now sort of the question we approached was how do we dullify that because, as you say, we don't really want to be managing this directly because it's is does get big. We don't want to be the pilots of this, of this thing, because that would just bring a lot of unwanted pressure. And so so we thought a lot about this and we see there's three main pieces to a for profit down. The first one is, of course, the sale. I mean the sale brings in funding, but it also decentralizes the control, which both. I mean it's almost the second one that's more important to us, or at least that was the original motivation. We need that decentralized control because we want to honestly say, look, we don't control this thing anymore. But then obviously the funding is nice to and they go hand in hand, you know. The people come in with their money, they become token holders and now we have decentralized control over a large pile of funding. So that's great. That's the first piece. The second piece is the buyback mechanism. Well, that's what we're calling it, but more generally you could say it's the profit exit mechanism and it kind of operates in the reverse as the token sale. So with the token sale. With any token sale, people come in with money, whether it's ether or, in our case, die and then they they they give the money and what they get is tokens. In our case that it's we're calling the tokens FRY FRY, which is a shortening of foundry. So they get fry. The byback mechanism does the reverse, where people can bring their fry to this by back mechanism. They burn the FRY and what they get in return is any they get a proportion of the accumulated profit of the products that foundry is running and by I think by the time you guys release this podcast, we will have a schematic on that on that link the diehard dial INFO which visualizes a lot of this. So hopefully that will make it a little easier to follow. But anyways, that's the first two. There's the the bucket sale. Sorry, we're calling it the bucket sale because it's well, we don't need to get into that right now. We can come back to it. There's the sale. There's the buyback or the profit exit mechanism. So that means the token holders can actually capture some of the profit that they are do because of their decisionmaking. And then that brings us to the third thing, which is governance. And so those are the three pieces that we see as being necessary and we can talk about those in detail. But my first point that I want to make is that there's no reason actually to develop them all at once and release them all at once and help it works. So instead we're going to launch the bucket sale as it is, and then we have sort of placeholders for the buy back and for the governance. The governance, for example, is just a multising right now. And then the key here is that the relationships between these contracts can be switched first of all, and then and then, second of all, when everything seems stable, that power to switch the relationships can be burned. And so, just to give a concrete example to that, as I said, diehard makes a profit when that, when it makes a profit, it sends it to what we call a redirector contract. That redirector contract can reassign who is going to get that contract, but it can also, at any moment sort of irrevocably cement itself to send the profit to a particular contract. So at any time in the future we can actually say, you know what, the diehard profit mechanism. Pointing to this other contract which in the current formulation is the buyback mechanism, we could say that look solid enough. So we're going to cement that now and you know, irrevocably say that all dion profit now goes to this buyback mechanism, which which is really just saying goes to be FRY token holders. So yeah, I went over quite a bit there, but the main thing I want to talk about is just that piecewise way of building...
Dallas, because it seems to us that it's much safer. You can go much quicker than the the auditing is far less immense. Those are all reasonable ways of approaching this. There are certainly ways in which that can go wrong, but you've built in the ability to be able to handle things when they go wrong, which others might misconstrue as centralized power to something, but that's I guess that's one of those kind of arguments that most people have. Now we're trying to build something is release control over time as things show that they work through use case and experience and and and a plant I'd like to make is that in it so today, everything it is centralized because we are building the thing. We are the centralized component. So it I think it makes much more sense to iterate towards decentralization then to try to make that jump. I mean in the you can make this huge jump which just as small, which uncertainty in it and with smart couples that it greenly theory, or you can make these small iterations and make sure everything works before you try to improve upon it. Sill. And the other thing I'll say also is that the token sale we're doing will run over a year. So over that year not only we will be sort of, you know, putting a piece down and putting other piece down and maybe switching something out and moving slowly towards decentralization in that way, but also our tokens are token to share, will start at one hundred percent and then it will dilute over a year to thirty percent. So it's sort of what I my point there is in two separate ways we will be gradually approaching the decentralized ideal. A lot can happen in the year. Which choose a year? That's a good question. Well, you know, we have yet to actually release any documentation about this, so a lot of it has yet to be cemented, but the year. You know, it's just something we sort of threw a data and we said that sounds good and we haven't really had any reason to doubt it. I mean, I I would not be comfortable making it happen in a month or two much, just to give an extreme example, because there are so many unsolved problems with governance and I any longer than that would be much well, it'd be too long for me. I don't want to wait that long afore this thing to be, you know, out of my control, where I'm not the leader anymore. Yeah, I have. I am also like curious that hot I. You need users. You have to have users for any of us to work, and right now getting users is difficult across the board for anything in cryptocurrency. Yes, yeah, I don't even own die. Like, I don't. I never owned. I. I've never owned a single die. A lot of people on a theoium do. You're not. I don't think you're agreeing. Well, the thing is, like there's not a lot of people in the theorium. You can generally yeah, like the the the adoption for your system is completely coupled with the adoption for atherium and and a theorem is just one cryptocurrency of many. Yes, it is number two, and so the the the adoption of cryptocurrency is essential for what you're trying to prove as a concept. And I think I'm wondering, if I'm in my head, I'm kind of wondering, you know, whether or whether or not a themium takes off, you know, with this concept, survive in another ecosystem, and I think it might. So I'm curious to see how this plays out and hope that we could build it in something that might be more long term. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess just just speak to etherium. You know, I'm not entirely a hundred percent convidates. Well, in fact, I'm sure that it won't last. In some sense. You know, etherium, but, but, but today is by far the best concentration of not just developers, but you know, and you could say that the developers are the users of etherium and that etherium has done a lot of real iteration because it has those real users. I know they're not end users and obviously that's to be you know that's unfortunate. But but you know the way that they have iterated solidity and all of the problems that have come up and solve a smart contracts. I I don't know. I don't know what my point is here exactly, but I do think we will move on from etherium. But I also think it's almost a no brainer to work on etherium today, and I've also suspect that question. It's real. The values locked up and I think, I think what you do is great. What I'm trying to think say what I've sorry to cut you off, by the way. That's a that's generally an interviewer football, but is what I just to...
...clarify is that I'm not I'm not hating on atherium and in anyway. It's just that right now everything in this space, be a Bitcoin, be it etherium, be it she's, I don't care, like coin. They're all kind of in this still in this really early proof of concept stage, and the user experience on all of these systems is just abysmal and it can't handle the volume in Yada, Yada, Yeada. So I'm looking forward to the time when things get better, and that's the hopefulness and I'm really glad that people like you are doing the work now to show what works later and how those things at work now can benefit by upgrades, perhaps youth to point out, perhaps some other system, perhaps the cosmos network, and perhaps Alva, and when there it is. But you know, I'm looking forward to see how it all kind of like plays out in long run and I think, I think, that this has teeth. I'm not sure what that those teeth will bite into, but this has teeth and I want to see where it kind of plays out. Some grateful that you're doing this work. To add on to that, because we have, all of us uncertainty, all of us do. It's important to build in the ability to port if you need to trans the transfer of value to a different network is going to be, I think, an important quality and projects over the next five to ten years, because you need to go where the users are, regardless of whatever that's on. It doesn't matter, like you can't choose where you build stuff based on your ideology of a specific technology. That's not that's not going to work for for servicing Indo users who really need something. And so if you build something that's stuck on, stuck on a particular platform, you may be locked into a bad decision of a specific platform, but if you built in such a way where you can port to where you need to port when you need to do it, then you're never locked in that way, but you can take advantage of whatever specific, I guess, the dominance that thing has at at any given time. Yeah, well, well, it's interesting you bring that up now. Actually touches on it. A lot of interesting connections there. So so one thing is I was going to say earlier that one of the other use cases we might target is actually cryptotocrypto traits, because you can use diehard to go from diet any any currency, and that could include other cryptocurrency. So that could include any other block chain that comes up. And another connection that occurred to me is well, to some degree what you're talking about is the importance of being able to exit and and I think you may be meant this more at a protocol level, but I think it also applies to just to the more general idea of being able to exit. And so in Zimbabwe, for example, if we want this thing to work, we have to ensure that people can exit the system because if you you know, if I come up to some Zimbabwe and I send them to die and I say it's two dollars, it's not really two dollars unless they can actually get it out quickly and easily. Then it is. Then it's real, then they know it's real. And and I I think that in general with Crypto, you know, we were talking about getting to those end users. I mean that's really that's really a we need to make crypto useful right, and one of the things that that detracts from cryptos utility is is the difficulty in exiting. You know, like when I put my two hundred US dollars into two hundred die one of the consequences that I cannot go to the store and buy bread. But it's actually worse than that, because I can't even then go to an ATM and get cash out to buy bread. And if we could make it to where people can actually just exit crypto more easily, that would almost paradoxically improve the utility of crypto because it's it would then it would feel almost like an international bank account. And so so it is. So that's what we hope to solve with die hard. And you know, it's whenever I get most excited of art, whenever I miss like sometimes I'll be I'll be doing my regular life stuff and I'll think like fuck, you know, if if die hard had used today, I could use it right now. It's ninety percent of the time it's actually to exit. It's like, I said, I'm landing in the airport and I want to get local currency, or it's like I want to buy a steam game but on my bank accounts are empty, but I have the cryptocurrency. And so if die hard or something like die hard was available, that just allowed people to exit quickly. That I argue strongly that that would directly increase the utility of crypto because it would feel more like a bank account. You could spend it, maybe not directly, but, if indirectly, at least very quickly. Yeah, yeah, it's a cool idea. So you know you because, mother fuck, a good job doing this. Appreciate you making this. I'm really I'm...
...really looking forward to seeing where this all kind of plays out. I really do feel like these these and I don't want to like say it's purely an experiment, but I do feel as though at this stage everything is kind of purely an experiment. Well, even even make it out, which is wildly successful, is still very much in the global scheme of things in experiment and their profitable experiments, which is fantastic. The economic experiment, it's which needs some skin in the game and I love watching salt play out and I think you have a very interesting project that, if it can gain traction in any way, I would actually prefer the first world over the Third World, to be frank with you. HMM, and I think that. Well, I sorry, I already went up transfer wise stuff, but they's to go ahead. Yeah, because I want to use this. I want to see a reason for me to use this and I don't live in Zababwe. I think there's a lot of interesting features to what you're doing that could they could excite some industries that normally don't. Don't you know. I mean I gave all these untoward examples, but I'm sure there's I don't use any of those, by the way, just full disclosure. But the you know, I think there's interesting ways to engage with people and services that would cut out the intermediary and that's kind of been the end goal for being most of these easy decentralization parts is cut out that middleman, and I see things like craigslist services being like possibly useful here. And so no, I think it's great. I want to see where it plays out. So I really I'm really grateful that you're building this. I think it's very much more developed than when we first heard about it, for sure, about your system this this is much clear and I think you're doing a great job. So thank you. Cool. Well, thanks for the interview. Guys. It's been arguing opportunity. Dad. Well, like will definitely link the the website is there. Is there any other place people should go to reach out, learn more and potentially contribute or start participating? No, just just that one, just that one link, which it's just die Hardo Info that that has all the links on and actually built it knowing that I would have this interview. So I wanted a place where people could go and see everything. So that has a link to the zimdie paper, which, if I could direct anyone to any particular thing, I would say go there, because it's it really seems like a viable plan to spark something of a financial revolution. Only the only missing pieces funding and leadership, which well, which which maybe foundry can do if it gets enough funding. But but I would say that's the most exciting well, it's the most humanitarian exciting part of it, but there's lots of lots of cool stuff there, so feel free to take a look. Correct. Thanks. I'll going to we'll keep our eye out for it. Cool already, I.
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