Kemal Yaşar: Open-Source Bitcoin Innovation and Community-Driven Success

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Ever wondered how open-source software can transform the world of Bitcoin banking? On today’s episode, I spoke with Kamal Yasar, the marketing mastermind behind Galoy and Adopting Bitcoin. Kamal unveils his journey from open-source enthusiast to a key player in organizing the Adopting Bitcoin conference in Cape Town. We dive into the rebranding of the Bitcoin Beach wallet to Blink and explore the innovative Galoy stack that empowers sovereign open-source Bitcoin banking. Join us for an eye-opening discussion on the challenges and triumphs of Bitcoin adoption in South Africa.

The barriers to accessing cultural products and the power of sharing information are at the forefront of our conversation. We weigh the implications of intellectual property on digital versus physical goods and spotlight the transformative potential of open-source software. Hear a compelling case study from South Africa, where a marijuana business uses BTCpay Server and Blink to seamlessly transition to Bitcoin payments after traditional gateways failed them. Kamal shares how these open-source tools are empowering entrepreneurs in even the most challenging environments.

Our final segment introduces Nicolas Burtey, an industry leader who shifted from video production to cryptocurrency. Nicolas' journey from exploring Ethereum to championing Bitcoin's financial revolution is nothing short of fascinating. We discuss Bitcoin regulation in El Salvador, the critical role of proof of reserves, and the need for transparent custodians. Kemal and Ricki reflect on their collaborative efforts and look forward to future engagements, including Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town 2025, which is taking place in January. Don't miss this enriching episode filled with insights on Bitcoin, open-source innovation, and community-driven initiatives.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

Hello and welcome to another episode of by the Horns. Today I sat down with Kamal Yasar, marketing manager for Galoi and Adopting Bitcoin. We got into his role with Adopting Bitcoin and how he helped us create an awesome Bitcoin conference in Cape Town earlier this year. We spoke about his background in open source software and how he ended up working for Galoi, the good people who brought you the Bitcoin Beach wallet, which has since rebranded to Blink, a Lightning wallet you might be familiar with. We chatted about the open source Galoi stack and how that's driving sovereign Bitcoin banking and a whole lot more.

Speaker 1: 0:42

This episode of by the the horns is brought to you by bitcoin only, the number one spot in south africa to get white glove bitcoin consulting services and high quality bitcoin hardware. If you need help setting up your bitcoin security or managing your stack so your family can access it in the event of your death, then reach out to bitcoin only so they can set you up for the bitcoin will. Nobody wants to die and leave their stats lost for good. Set up your bitcoin will today so your family can enjoy those precious stats even when you are gone head over to bitcoinonlyio to find out more. All right, with that, over to the interview with kamal. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of by the Horns, a Bitcoin podcast about South Africa. Today, I'm joined by a how would I say this? Not quite South African, but South African adjacent, kamal Yassar. Great to have you on the show. Good to see you again, man.

Speaker 2: 1:51

Thanks, ricky, thanks for having me. Good to see you again.

Speaker 1: 1:54

Yeah, man. So you and I met at Adopting Bitcoin, cape Town, where you were on the organizing committee with me, and you spent some time out here in South Africa in the beginning of the year, where you were on the organizing committee with me, and you spent some time out here in South Africa in the beginning of the year. And, yeah, from what I can tell you, you had a good time, so much so that you're happy to help us organize a second one.

Speaker 2: 2:13

Absolutely. I loved my 10 days that I spent in Cape Town earlier this year and met fantastic Bitcoiners from the South African Bitcoin community and enjoy very much working with you guys and bringing the first adopting Bitcoin to the African continent and looking forward to more definitely, definitely want to come back, going to bring my family uh to next time I visit um. So it was a great experience to be in south africa. I was very, very much impressed and um yeah, it was my first time in africa and I had no idea how how amazing um things in the bitcoin community are progressing and how many diligent people are working on it.

Speaker 1: 3:10

Yeah, you definitely had a soft landing into Africa, though coming to Cape Town first. It's definitely the beginner's intro to Africa, but it's a good start. It's nice and comfortable. Back then we still had load shedding. That's kind of slowed down a bit now. We've got permanent power for the last two months.

Speaker 2: 3:28

Oh wow, Congrats.

Speaker 1: 3:30

Good to hear. Yeah, thank you. I think it's because elections are coming up in a few days, so the ruling party has just been burning diesel to keep the lights on, to make people forget that they messed up the power grid. But we'll take it.

Speaker 2: 3:48

Well, I remember that they messed up the power grid, but we'll take it. Well, I I remember fondly when I was at the two oceans aquarium and the power uh turned off at 2 pm in the afternoon, right when all the kids were assembling in front of the shark tank and um to watch the shark feeding, and the power went out and everybody's like, oh, fucking government can't get a thing right. So this, basically, moment of thinking of the government in the best way and most accurate way was something that I will always remember. But, yeah, I'm happy to hear that load shedding has been decreasing. I hope it's a sustainable end, because electricity is, of course, very important.

Speaker 1: 4:34

You know like I often hear Americans talking about this when they made payroll tax a thing so that people could just have their tax taken off their payroll. People kind of forget that government's taxing you because previously you had to submit your tax return and pay it over manually every year, and that's what everyone's like. Once a year they're like oh, I hate the government, I gotta pay them all this money. Load shedding in south africa is kind of like that, except it happened like four times a day. But four times a day people were like fuck, I hate the government. You know they can't do anything properly.

Speaker 1: 5:02

So it's kind of good, you know it made people realize just how shit they are and like how incompetent they are at their job. But they'll, you know, keep taking money from you. So it's been the biggest red pulling factor in south africa, I think. Um towards government incompetency and like why monopolies are bad and why states and enterprises are bad is just like it hits you. You know, every time the power goes out because you can't do anything, that makes people really, really realize how government overreach is terrible yeah, it's a.

Speaker 2: 5:33

It's a good reminder and it makes sense for the government to get rid of it, uh, if they want to stay in power or be re-elected, I guess yeah, stay in power.

Speaker 1: 5:43

Excuse the pun, um kamal, before we get sidetracked by government incompetence. Um, do you mind giving the viewers a bit of an intro as to who you are and and the background about yourself?

Speaker 2: 5:55

yeah, sure, so my name is kamal and I'm 42 years old. Um was born and raised in Germany, in Munich, the capital of beer, in the heart of Bavaria, in the most Catholic conservative part of the city of Munich. And, yeah, I started working there at an early age, distributing newspapers at the age of 14, filling the shelves at a drugstore at the age of 16. And then, yeah, during my studies of political science, which I studied extensively, alongside with a lot of history and some media law a lot of history and some media law I was earning basically some money by working in a on a social media platform which was the first one in germany. So had a keen interest in computers from an early age. At 11 years I got my first basic computer, was playing with dos and and then windows later and, yeah, playing games and and stuff. So my uncle helped me a lot um understanding software. At that time it was shareware that you could pass around I I was ripping CDs, buying CDs and copying them with my CD writer and selling them at school and basically, yeah, like started thinking about the nature of information and accessibility to information and art and culture and movies and games and stuff very early on. So came basically from a Turkish immigrant family in Turkey, so we had everything that we needed, but also nothing in abundance, so we had to make the little things that we had work. And, yeah, like this quest for understanding the nature of information also accompanied me through my studies of political science. So I wrote my bachelor thesis about copyrights and hacker ethics, during which my research I basically found a lot of the thinkers. Also, my first touchpoint with the Austrian School of Economics, through Stefan Kinsella, who wrote the seminal work Against Intellectual Property. I found Aaron Swartz, the founder of Reddit, who was suicided by the FBI because he hacked the JSTOR database to distribute freely scientific articles. And, yeah, just was also in like the scene like distributing Napster, ring around on file sharing and stuff like that. And so that's my angle how I found Bitcoin actually, and ever since I found Bitcoin, yeah, it was like a big red pill for me.

Speaker 2: 9:21

And, yes, as soon as you get Bitcoin, I think everybody really understands how important it is and how big of a paradigm shift it is, and also that it's a decentralized movement and there is no central management to coordinate the movement. And there is no central management to coordinate the movement, so everybody has to be a good steward of the movement themselves and contribute back. So we need active participants in Bitcoin, not just buying Bitcoin and holding it and running a note and verifying, but, um, yeah, contributing back in the form of software, education, organization whatever needs to be done. So a lot of situational awareness is necessary for individual bitcoiners to be able to contribute back to the movement in a meaningful way. And. But the beautiful thing is also, like, anybody can do what they think is right, and so there are no limits, basically what you can do, and so, yeah, I started to do what I can.

Speaker 2: 10:37

I joined the Bitcoin Munich meetup, which is one of the oldest um running bitcoin meetups. Um, I think it started in 2010, uh, and has been continuously running. So I was, I met a lot of really cool bitcoiners there and and learned basically the value of meeting bitcoiners in, in meat space, as opposed to just getting your information from sources on the web, which may be quite chaotic there is a lot of noise that you have to sift through, but when you go to a Bitcoin meetup, you meet the real people and you have the real conversations, so that helped me a lot to accelerate my journey. So that helped me a lot to accelerate my journey and I met fantastic people there, like Moritz from Spectre Wallet, like Jeff from Fulmo, who was doing Lightning Hack Days at that time and I was, yeah, and through the Lightning Hack Days, I met like the developers and I listened to them how they think about problems, how they are not always selling bitcoin but are always cautious, like that's when it really clicked for me, I think in 2018, 2019, and luckily, el salvador adopted bitcoin as a legal tender in 2021.

Speaker 2: 12:06

And Galoy, the company that I'm working with at the moment, was the first Bitcoin company on the ground in El Salvador before the law, because they were doing the Bitcoin Beach wallet at that time for the community in el zonte and they needed someone to take care of all the non-technical things, especially marketing. And, yeah, I have a background in digital marketing and advertising. Um, have been on many sides of the advertising ecosystem and, uh, got pretty tired of just doing, you know, like this big mass programmatic advertising to for big corporations. Um, and managing big clients, like I was managing like big airlines, like swiss airlines and and stuff like that, doing programmatic ads. Yeah, so it was a great time just when I moved out of Europe to Turkey, where I am right now with my family.

Speaker 2: 13:09

And yeah, ever since, I've been rolling with the team at Galoi and we're developing free and open source Bitcoin banking infrastructure, and one instance of that is the Blink wallet that was now rebranded from Bitcoin Beach Wallet to Blink. And yeah, since we were already in El Salvador, we also thought, hey, like this country really needs Bitcoin conference If this whole Bitcoin adoption thing is going to succeed. So the first thing that I did basically when I joined Galoi was start organizing adopting Bitcoin and yeah, this year it's going to be the fourth year we're doing it in El Salvador. We also have now, in January, the first one in Africa in Cape Town, with you and Herman and Kodatsu from Machankura and Max. And yeah, awesome, awesome Bitcoin community in South Africa, and next week there's going to be one in Europe the first one. And yeah, that's me basically in a nutshell. It was quite a long ride so far, but it's fun and I'm looking forward to what's coming.

Speaker 1: 14:29

Yeah, man, that's a super interesting history you've got. It's almost as if you were destined to work in open source. Is there anything more open source than a kid ripping a CD and sharing it with his mates? Remember the pushback that the record labels had, so much they had used to those, especially for DVDs, like when you'd rent a DVD from Blockbuster or whatever. They'd have that ad in the beginning, which is like you wouldn't steal a car, you know. And then it's like but like, stealing a DVD or ripping music is a crime and we were all like we're watching, we're literally watching this on rip dvds and whatever. Um, yeah, but yeah, it's interesting how that, how that has always been your interest. And now you're working for galoy, which is a fully open source, like bitcoin banking infrastructure yeah, I think, yeah, you, it.

Speaker 2: 15:16

It looks like this is really the theme of my life so far. Like from a very early age I'm. We were on the, you know, when we had a break in school, in elementary school, um, kids were singing songs, you know, like michael jackson, or german songs like and. Um, I couldn't sing along because I didn't know the songs, I didn't have the cd, and the cds were like 30 deutsch at that time, which is approximately 30 euros. So how does a six year old, seven year old kid, afford like a CD like that? Like it's not possible, right. But I thought it was super unfair that I could not sing along just because I didn't have the money to buy the CD and yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:11

So I think like it's really weird, like this intellectual property right thing, like trying to restrict or apply, I mean, property rights is so important it's I would say it's the basis of, of civilization, but it's important to have for physical goods. You know that you can't copy in a lossless way and share with for the benefit of others. You can't just replicate and duplicate a piece of bread, you know, like it's a physical thing. But you can do it with an audio file or with a movie file or with a software. And these thoughts also like, for example, thomas Jefferson, the founding father of the United States, one of the most interesting founding father of the United States, one of the most interesting founding fathers of the United States had a nice simile your taper and the fire jumps over to your taper. I'm giving you light, but my light is not diminishing. Right, and this is the nature of ideas and of information you can share it for the benefit of others without having less, and this is the right way to think about. Um, yeah, all immaterial goods. Um, I think, um, like, sharing is caring, and this is how we level up humanity. And, um, and it is also our biggest asset for bitcoin adoption.

Speaker 2: 18:01

Um, because if you think like, if you look around the ecosystem, there are very successful companies that are basically running software, like exchanges, and but all of them are closed source. So if an entrepreneur, for example, I don't know in Tanzania wants to run a Bitcoin exchange, they have to do everything from scratch, because there is no open source software that they could run and just be an entrepreneur who runs a Bitcoin exchange. They first have to be a software developer and have a huge upfront cost to get to a place where they can basically do this business. And so this is a little criticism on the existing ecosystem, and I think this is also where basically, the software that we're developing with Galois comes in, because it basically is moving open source up the Bitcoin stack. Right, like, there are many reasons why Bitcoin is open source.

Speaker 2: 19:14

Many people say I mean Satoshi himself said it wouldn't work if it wasn't open source right, like you have to be able to verify the software from a security standpoint, like, is this software really doing what it's supposed to do, what it's saying it is going to do? But there's more to it. I think if we can develop software on top of that, like Lightning, which is also open source and there are multiple implementations and even a layer further on top, then this software will proliferate and it's actually the only way that the software really proliferates. So I think, from an adoption standpoint, ecosystem adoption standpoint, it's really important that open source moves up the stack so that not everybody has to do and start from zero if they want to get started. So I think, yeah, that thinking around that helps a lot and it aligns very nicely with what we're developing at Galloway.

Speaker 1: 20:28

You know I'm a prime example of this right. So, as you know, I run a business here in South Africa, a Bitcoin business, and I run. One of the things I do is Bitcoin payments for companies and I run my entire stack on open source. So I run BDC pay server and then for wallets, I'm using blue wallets for customers. For hardware wallets, I'm using seed signer and Jade both are open source. For lightning wallets, I'm using the Galois stack and blink.

Speaker 1: 20:56

So the the beauty of this is that me as a, as a startup entrepreneur, one man operation can like integrate all these systems very easily and I'm not a developer, right integrate all these systems and then roll them out to my customers. And I had a beautiful example now I mean, you saw this yesterday, um of a client of mine who got unbanked by his payment traditional payment gateway because he's in the marijuana industry our marijuana industry is totally legal in south africa, um, but his payment gateway literally just unbanked him at a moment's notice. They said they've been serving for two years. They turned around and said listen, we don't like what you're doing, we don't support your industry anymore and, sorry, you're done, shut him down. So all of his payments just went away literally overnight and he came to me and within 24 hours of him picking up the phone and us having our first conversation, his website was live, accepting payments in Bitcoin on his store and that's using the full open source stack the whole way through. So that is a complete game changer for the for the African entrepreneur. Like I didn't have to go and build any of this stuff myself. I didn't even really have to have the technical know-how of how to how to like connect them all Because, like what you guys have done with the bdc pay server integration of blink, it's literally a two minutes if that depends, I'll slow you type, but like two minutes to have your blink wallet hooked up to your bdc pay server. Um, which is amazing. So now you know this guy's running an online store. Uh, it's on woocommerce. So bdc pay server integrates beautifully into wo, bdc Pay Server integrates beautifully into WooCommerce, blink integrates beautifully into BDC Pay Server. All of a sudden, this guy can accept on-chain and Lightning payments literally in the blink of an eye. In the same time it would take for a customer support agent from a payment gateway to get back to you about your query. Best case scenario you know he was already accepting Bitcoin payments and now his business can carry on. So that's only possible because of open source tech, you know, and very, very cheap for him to integrate as well. So it is a complete win and you know.

Speaker 1: 23:00

Just to go back to the, you know the analogy of the of the cd and copying music. It's crazy easy to think that a bunch of pre-teen kids brought the music empire down because it was just kids like writing and copying cds, especially back in those days, in the early 2000s. It wasn't adults copying cds, you know, it was kids at school copying cds and like dishing them out and selling them for cheap to each other. That literally, like now, music is basically free, you know, look at, look at where we are now. Like a shopify, a spotify subscription, it's like 100 grand a month. That's like five dollars a month. You have the world's music at your disposal. That's only possible because kids was like exercising civil disobedience, to like the big music companies who were based in in the us and couldn't do jack shit about kids in munich and cape town and istanbul who were just copying cds and distributing them, you know, and they lost the fight against a bunch of teenagers.

Speaker 2: 23:59

It's hilarious I think kids get a lot of things right intuitively. So I have two kids and one of the big mantras that my wife and I have, or directives, is like our kids are pure the way humans are from birth and we have to be careful not to put our shit onto them, right Like we're trying to let our kids guide us. And I think kids don't really didn't think I mean I like your framing as well that they're like these little rebellious fuckers that went against the music industry. But I don't think I did that. I also didn't charge money. I basically I only charged for the CD, empty CD, so I didn't have to pay it out of my pocket, or I gave them the option to bring an empty CD and the CD that they want. So I would just put it into my CD burner and make one copy for them, make one copy for me to discover new music. Uh, you know, and uh, just help a brother out, um, um, because why not, you know, like um, I mean it opens, um, I mean we don't have to dive into it. But obviously, like there is um, it's a whole big of can of worms and interesting philosophical, philosophical discussion as well. Um, like, okay, like if we like, why would anybody produce something? Then? Like, right this, why? How will artists live? And stuff like that, and like this whole monetization debate.

Speaker 2: 25:38

I think I have a lot of thoughts about this, but maybe this is a little bit too much of a tangent because it could go for hours. But I think in general, yeah, it's wild how? Yeah, generations, new generations are adopting technology, growing up with it and understanding the true nature of things better than many legislators want. And we see that also now with this whole thing that's going on in the Bitcoin ecosystem and all of these attacks that are happening right now on open source software, right On just a service passing around messages, just passing around messages. I mean, bitcoin isn't even money, it's just a little bit of math and messages being passed around, stored in an immutable ledger, yep. So, and if you value free speech, which is in the United States, it's protected under the First Amendment and speech is just information and code is just information. This is like the homologous nature of information. You can represent any information in ones and zeros, basically, and pass it around in a message and the only thing that matters is whether it's a secret or it's a public information. Right, like this is how cypherpunks think about things, like you have to keep a secret, or if you publish it, it's public, and this is basically the assumptions that you operate in, that you operate in.

Speaker 2: 27:25

But yeah, to bring it back to where we started, I think open source is like our biggest weapon. It's a mindset that's brought us here that has a long tradition before Bitcoin that helped bring, like it's crazy, like 40 years ago there was no internet. Very long tradition. There was no internet. Very long tradition, there was no computers. The reason why computers were developed so fast is because the hackers that were developing them were freely sharing all the information and the research they did and letting others build on it and hack on it and not start from zero.

Speaker 2: 28:07

This not starting from zero, this removing this upfront cost for people to build on the achievements that you have unlocked is the key ingredient and um, and and we need, we need this. It's a huge lever if you use it right, if you have the right mind state, and we need it to win against this huge fiat empire that has basically established its tentacles uh, everywhere, right? Uh, in such an important domain like money, which is half of every human interaction, right, um, well, not every interaction. There are things, things that we don't ask for payment, but all of the yeah, all of the trade, I would say, like half of every trade is money and they have, and in order to fight that network effect, like we need to leverage open source, like this is crystal clear to me there is no other way that Bitcoin wins if not with open source.

Speaker 1: 29:18

Yeah, man, and this goes back to the Gutenberg press, this goes back to the printing press and then, a little bit further on from that, goes back to martin luther, um, you know, separating from the catholic church, because really, what it was about the printing press is about is about democratizing access to information, um, and this is what the enemies of open source like, want to stop. They want to stop the democratization of access to information because they want to control the information, because knowledge is power, and if you can control information, you have power. This is what it's all about. And so the attack on open source is really an attack on those, the incumbents, who are in power, who are trying to maintain their grip on power, because they want to be the sole distributors of knowledge. And this is why they've infiltrated the mass media, they've controlled the mass media and this is why they hate the alternative media and why they try to, you know, shut down twitter, um, and why there's such, you know, with the twitter files, we could see what they were up to there um, this is why the attacks on on bitcoin are going to come and how and it's quite easy to understand how they're going to come they're going to attack open source. Um, so this is really you know what the what the war comes down to.

Speaker 1: 30:27

And, like you said, like bitcoin, if it wasn't open source, it wouldn't be alive today. Absolutely not, because there would have been a neck to choke, there would have been a company, there would have been a ceo, there would have been someone to go after to co-opt and stop, and this is why I believe shit coins are absolutely useless and destined for failure, because there's a neck to choke and, especially in the case of ital Vitalik, a very thin neck which will be broken very easily. So it's not, you know, you need to have, you need to have a open source system with no leaders and no neck to choke, as it were. So this brings me to what you guys are doing at Galois. And was this the kind of decision-making process at Galois when the decision was made to go open source rather than a company with its own intellectual property, like, keep everything open because you can, you know the chance of it surviving is much greater.

Speaker 2: 31:18

I can't speak too much about the original thinking there. I can tell you so much that our CEO, nicola Berti, basically he was working on Ethereum in 2017, 2018, after he had a successful career in the video industry. So then he came to Ethereum and he made a very successful thing there. I'm not very familiar with it, but he was basically economically illiterate at that time, so he was coming from a pure tech angle and Ethereum seemed like the more interesting thing if you're coming as a developer from a tech angle, because you have so many more opportunities to develop things right and. But then he dug into money and economics and it was a very quick and strong walk through the rabbit hole and he understood that Bitcoin is the real thing and so he wanted to build a Lightning wallet and he first tried to. Actually, lightning Labs had a Lightning mobile wallet that hardly anybody used, but he used that as a starting point to first develop a self custodial lightning wallet and quickly realized that self custodial lightning for end users who are non-technical, not technical, is going to be a with the current situation, with the current Disappointing experience. With the current situation, with the current disappointing experience, yeah, even maybe it's with the current tech. It's almost at that end, I think, and that's why we have all of these software discussions and enhancing Bitcoin with more script capabilities. So software discussions and enhancing Bitcoin with more script capabilities. So he likes to build in a way where he iterates quickly and gets feedback from people who actually use it.

Speaker 2: 33:55

He understood very early on that, basically, lightning is going to be this settlement system between mints or banks, and so he opted to go for the custodial solution and he was looking for users, basically users basically. And that's how he discovered mike peterson and the bitcoin beach community. And, yeah, traveled to el salvador in 2019 and studied the people that, at the time, were using like on-chain payments and and wallet of satoshi and and it worked well, but they were missing critical features. So he basically analyzed and studied and interviewed people and started to develop the Bitcoin Beach wallet. But, yeah, just doing a custodial Lightning wallet seemed like a good start, but I think there is more to it, because if you and that thinking, you know like, okay, if you make a successful custodial Lightning wallet, it's also not good If all the world uses one custodian.

Speaker 2: 35:04

That's not good. So you need actually many, many, many different community banks, ideally. And how do you get there if everybody has upfront costs and needs to start developing where he started? Well, you don't. Unless he makes the software and Galloway makes the software open source so they can easily bootstrap it Right, and and and. That's basically the thinking behind it, I think. And you know the name. Galois is also like coming from, he's French and he's been a big fan of Asterix and Obelix. If you, if you know the goals, great, great series, yeah.

Speaker 2: 35:53

So, they were basically fighting against the Roman Empire, the intransigent minority, and open source is basically the way how this model can proliferate. And, yeah, this is basically the origin and, yeah, I mean it was hugely successful. What started out as a community bank project in El Zonte quickly went with the want of the global Bitcoin community, with the inspiration that Mike Peterson put out there. He showed that it's possible to live on Bitcoin right and especially like with non-technical people, and that inspired a lot of people and they came to El Salvador and saw and wanted to replicate what happened in El Salvador in their own community. Because all you have to do, all you need, is a Lightning Wallet, a good tool that works, and you need to go out and talk to people, to your peers, and start living on Bitcoin Like. This is hyper bitcoinization. You can already choose to live on a bitcoin standard today. You just stop using fiat and switch to bitcoin and try to do as many of your payments with as many people as possible with bitcoin. And we saw that there is a lot of demand for the bitcoin beach wallet at that time a lot of demand for the Bitcoin Beach wallet at that time, but there were a lot of things missing. So we made a rebrand to Blink. Basically, we added a lot of display currencies like the South African Rand, the Turkish Lira. We added more languages than just English and Spanish so other communities could use it.

Speaker 2: 37:55

Because, again here, the thinking is that in order to be able to get to a point where you can run your own Bitcoin bank, you need a little bit of some traction first, to test the waters, to test the market. Is this worthwhile investing and spending more time on where I'm at right now? Is this like something that I want to start? And and and. Blink is like the best weapon to to do that and to quickly get to a point. At least that's what we, how we like to think about it. And once people get to a point where, yeah, they have a lot of traction and they might be, it might be easier to solicit investments, to stand up a Bitcoin bank with Galloway, you know, like to run their own instance.

Speaker 2: 38:48

But yeah, I mean this whole thing is there's so many different use cases also not just bottom-up adoption for the galloy stack, um, like it's also a way for organizations, um, to be sovereign, like we're thinking a lot about how individuals are sovereign and when they hold their own keys. But how can an organization that wants to live on a bitcoin standard be sovereign, right, like, which stack do they use? How do they run their payroll? How can they be sovereign in an adversarial environment with capital controls, where they do not have access to the banking system, for example, to the banking system, for example? And also, if they have Bitcoin, like, okay, bitcoin is volatile, that's difficult for a business to manage. How can you have dollar access without access to the banking system? Right, and that's where StableSats comes in, for example, like, you can create your own synthetic dollar just with free and open source software and markets. And so I think, yeah, this is what Galloway is trying to build and it's all open source because, yeah, it's removing this upfront cost, but it's also helping to, yeah, just by being out there in the open, like being tested, being and attacked, like, um, it's, it matures and becomes more secure. And and, yeah, there's many factors, uh, why open source and why galois is doing the things that we're doing? But, um, yeah, there's definitely a lot of thinking going into this and it's not a coincidence that we do things the way we do. And, yeah, but yeah, let's see.

Speaker 2: 40:48

I mean there's a lot of institutional adoption coming now, but they're not sovereign yet. Like we're envisioning a future, for example, where an airline is a sovereign organization with Bitcoin and can accept Bitcoin payments. Imagine just if you could pay Emirates or Lufthansa with a Lightning payment and you wouldn't have to go through all that hassle of finding the right payment method. Oftentimes you're screwed if you don't have a credit card, which a lot of people don't have. I didn't have a credit card myself for many years. Only when I came to Turkey did I get myself a credit card card myself. For many years, only when I came to Turkey did I get myself a credit card. And there's like so many things that can go wrong if you just for payments, if you don't have Bitcoin and Lightning right. Like for a traveler who is moving around the world a lot, bitcoin and Lightning is a huge benefit because they don't have to currency exchange all the time, they can hold their keys, they can carry the cross borders, they can pay. So, yeah, this is a little bit like our vision for where this goes.

Speaker 2: 42:16

The market is still early. A little bit like our vision for where this goes. The market is still early, I think for what Galloway is developing for. But we're slowly seeing that there are now with the approval of the ETFs, now with all of these consultancy companies like KPMG, deloitte and the Big Five and stuff like starting to look into Bitcoin, like talking about digital transformation and the digital transformation of money right, like that was a big buzzword in the agency scene For the last 20 years I think digital transformation. Now Michael Saylor is talking about the digital transformation of money and all the consultants are listening right, and so we also need to develop the software and the tools for these companies to be able to adopt Bitcoin in a secure way, in a sovereign way. So I would say Blink is a manifestation of the Galois software that is very close to the Bitcoin movement and for our adoption goals, but it's also like a very long-term mission, building for the future, with a long time horizon for things to come that are not there yet.

Speaker 2: 43:40

Right.

Speaker 1: 43:42

Anyway, I'll stop here, man. Yeah, it's amazing what you guys are doing, I think, for the Global South, particularly for entrepreneurs in the Global South, who are often working in adversarial environments. The reason why the Global South is the Global South is because it's a not a conducive environment for entrepreneurs and that's why it's poor. Um in in you know not just my opinion, but mcgath wade, who has um spoke at the adopting bitcoin cape town conference, makes this point over and over. Like africa is poor because it's not a conducive environment for entrepreneurs, and so you're inherently behind because of that. But now, if you've got access to open source tools, like a completely formed Bitcoin bank, there's a whole stack that you can just go and use. You don't have to build this yourself. This is worth millions and millions of rands. You know in development costs that you can now just go and get for free and build on it and, like you say, having access to stable sets gives you access to synthetic US dollars without having to go to a shitcoin, stablecoin like chain. This changes the game. It's all built on top of Lightning. It makes it much more usable and within the Maxi community there's a strong debate between custodial and non-custodial.

Speaker 1: 44:54

Obviously, you know, we hear this every single day between custodial and non-custodial. Obviously, you know we hear this every single day, um, but the point you made earlier about like onboarding users into a custodial solution is we need to onboard users. That's the important part. We need to get users into bitcoin using bitcoin, using using the tools available, and then, uh, we can decentralize and get the self-custodial aspect. You know, after that, um, you know this is a strong, a strong debate that people have all the time, but the point I want to get to is like has the decision galoy has made to be in el salvador and host blink, a custodial lightning wallet out of el salvador? Do you think that gives people some certainty and a bit more security in a custodial wallet that's based out of El Salvador, rather than a custodial wallet being based out of the USA, for example? Do you think there's some protections there because of Bitcoin being legal tender in El Salvador?

Speaker 2: 45:50

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. From my short answer, I think yes. From my, like short answer, I think yes. Long answer I think so. Blink is regulated, incorporated in El Salvador. El Salvador prides itself to be Bitcoin country. They're not a financial center. They don't yet right, they don't. They're not like the Cayman Islands or Dial of man or whatever. They don't have this long financial expertise, history and banking history like these, like other places have, like BVI and whatever. So there's a lot of there's a learning curve there for the regulator as well.

Speaker 2: 46:37

Now, the good thing is that the regulator is in touch with the Bitcoin ecosystem and they're soliciting our feedback for many things, and it's also part of our job to educate the regulator. And El Salvador wants to do things right. They've done a lot of things right, but we're only seeing when they don't do things exactly perfectly like they could have done, and they get a lot of shit for that. But El Salvador is doing a lot of things right and you can only do so many things and have so many breaking changes to how things used to be done. There are also strong forces that are opposed to Bitcoin in El Salvador, like the banking industry. There is also an elite in El Salvador that's controlling big parts of the economy and has a lot of influence, so there's some headwinds there. But I think El Salvador is a great place to incorporate the Bitcoin company because of this close dialogue with the regulator and um. Obviously the regulator. There are also out for outside forces, um that are being that they have to deal with right, like el sauro doesn't want to get onto a fat half gray list either. So there are certain things that are a no-go, even if they want it, even if they understand, like you can only do so, even if they want it, even if they understand like you can only do so much if you want to keep your relationships with the correspondence banks that your economy relies on, right. So I think so.

Speaker 2: 48:30

Blink is regulated by three different authorities. It's regulated by the Banco Central de El Salvador, the central bank. It's regulated by the Attorney General's Office and the Financial Investigation Unit, and also by the Superintendencia de la Sistema Financiera, which is the supervisor of the financial system, and there are audits happening, which is good, I think. I mean, in the end, really, like when you trust a custodian, sure, like there is legal recourse and it's good that if you're, if you're custodian is in a jurisdiction where you have legal recourse.

Speaker 2: 49:15

But I would say like there are two things that are more important than that. The first one is the integrity of the team that is running the bank. Right. Like in the past, banks used to be like this, this family, bohemian institutions, where a family would put their name on and have their reputation on the line and they would be trusted to deal with these things. Like, if you put your money into a custodian, you're trusting the custodian, so that custodian better have integrity Right. So it's really important to have integral people that you're trusting your money with. Important to have integral people that you're trusting your money with like if if your custodian has a track record like Jamie Dimon has, well, I wouldn't trust my money to someone like that. You know Epstein's banker right. Or Christine Lagarde? You know like convicted criminal for money laundering.

Speaker 1: 50:16

I don't know, you know like like these are like red flags.

Speaker 2: 50:20

So integrity is really important if you trust your money to somebody because you don't want that person to run away with your money. I think the second thing is that's really important is competency, and here again is something where open source helps, because an open source custodian which we unfortunately don't have too many in the ecosystem, I think actually like we might be the only one. Maybe also there is like what Francis Puglio is developing with Bitcoin, with the cipher node, but if you have, if you're, if you're using an open source custodian, you don't really have to trust the competency of the team because the code is out there to be studied and audited by independent auditors. So that's another factor I would say. But, yeah, I think those are the important points. Obviously, there's things to be improved here.

Speaker 2: 51:20

Um, uh, like, a big risk with custodians is obviously also like paper bitcoin risk. Uh, rehypothecation risk. Uh, thankfully, bitcoin can be cryptographically verified. It's not like gold, where you have to trust the government's word or the bank's word that the gold is in the world. The bank can actually prove that the Bitcoin is in that address, right, and so, like we saw it with FTX, right, like they were just selling paper Bitcoin, suppressing the Bitcoin price, inflating the Bitcoin supply these are all things that are dangerous and are systemic risk, but I think I'm confident that we will find we have, with Bitcoin, the ability to mitigate these problems in a way that was not possible with any other technology before that we use for money. And so, yeah, it would be good to have proof of reserves, proof of liabilities, as much as possible.

Speaker 2: 52:27

We're already seeing like some of the ETFs are showing, like Bitwise is now Hoseki verified, for example. Now Hoseki verified, for example, their Bitcoin address is public and people can go onto the blockchain and verify that they actually have the Bitcoin that they say that they have. El Salvador the government of El Salvador has a mempoolspace explorer of their own, a customized one, where they are also like you can follow along how they're adding one bitcoin every day, as they promised, which is amazing, like this is such a big win for transparency and and also for, um, how do you call it? Not responsibility, but, um, um, yeah, accountability. You know, like holding your public officials accountable. I think if you're a public official, you shouldn't have privacy, you should be transparent. I totally agree, totally agree, like right privacy is for citizens.

Speaker 2: 53:31

Citizens should have privacy for private citizens. If you, if you go out there and you want to tell citizens how they should behave and make laws, you should be transparent as a piece of glass Like this is important. Unfortunately, currently it seems to be the other way around, the opposite. But yeah, that's about Bl and and and the security of blink.

Speaker 2: 54:01

Obviously, uh, if you can hold your own keys, uh, self-custody there are fantastic um tools for self-custody, um, but I I think, from everything that I've seen, self-custody is the best practice and not the best starting point to start the journey, because I believe that for people to develop the intrinsic motivation to learn about Bitcoin, bitcoin needs to be useful to them, and if they have to go through too many hoops and have upfront costs of studying and investing into the right equipment, then that's just the turn off for many people, and we should meet the people where they are and then encourage them to learn the best practices and hold available the tools and resources for them to learn how to progress on their Bitcoin journey to becoming a full Bitcoin citizen that holds their own keys and verifies their own transactions and does not have to rely on outside parties, and I think that's really important, because network effect is super important and we need to create the network effect, because network effect is what makes Bitcoin useful and more useful Like, every participant that we add to the network makes my Bitcoin more useful and because it increases the amount of places where I can spend my Bitcoin, and that means I have to use less fiat.

Speaker 2: 55:36

And this is exactly the dynamic that we need to get going, in my opinion.

Speaker 1: 55:41

Yeah, man, totally agree. And Kamal, thank you for that nuanced answer, because there's not like a right way or a wrong way. We're usually writing the manual as we go along. So I really applaud what you guys are doing over at Galoi and the approach you've taken, engaging with the regulator and El Salvador, trying to set up as best you can in a jurisdiction that is friendly to Bitcoin, but then acknowledging that there's trade-offs and there's problems. You know like it's not a perfect solution out there, but it is good to know that at least someone like Elizabeth Warren is in president of El Salvador and you've got a pro-Bitcoin president at least running the show.

Speaker 2: 56:15

Definitely helps. I think, yeah, naip Kele is. Yeah, I think. I don't know, I can read his mind, but from everything that I've seen he seems to be a real one. His shortcomings are probably not because he's malicious or because he's stupid, but probably I attribute it to outside forces that he has to deal with, like the IMF or the FATF and things like that. So I think, of course, the United Fruit Company.

Speaker 2: 56:53

I mean all those things. I mean there's a lot of precedent for intervention in Central and South America by outside forces. Let's put it like that yeah, absolutely, kamal.

Speaker 1: 57:10

Unfortunately, we've run out of time. We've actually gone over time. So thank you very much for indulging me in this discussion, but before we wrap up, um, do you mind just telling us where we can, we can find you online, where you we've got a presence and and how people can find out more about, about galoy and the work you do for them?

Speaker 2: 57:27

yeah, sure. So, um, we have a website. Um, you can find it at galoy, g-a-l-o-y dot I-O. That's basically where we developed the free and open source software, and Blink you can find at Blink dot S-V. S-v for Salvador, and yeah, myself I'm pretty flakko on Twitter, so it's underscore P-R-E-T-Y-F-L-A-C-O and, yeah, I'm hanging out there. I also have a master, but I'm still waiting for UX to improve a little bit. I'm still having a little bit of issues getting started, getting used to it. But, yeah, following that as well, I think if you look for El Flaco on Nozri, you should be able to find me as well.

Speaker 2: 58:25

And I'll be making some efforts to increase my presence there.

Speaker 1: 58:31

And lastly, we can't forget this adopting Bitcoin. How can people find out more about the adopting Bitcoin conference series and and where to find out about the upcoming conferences?

Speaker 2: 58:41

Yeah, yeah, good point. Adopting Bitcoin is also on Twitter. It's adopting BTC for the main account. There's also, yeah, we're retweeting also the stuff from the Cape town conference and from the Arnhem conference in the Netherlands. Uh, we also have a website adopting bitcoinorg and, yeah, you can find the individual websites of the different conferences on the on the various continents um, in Africa, america's, in Europe, uh, there as well. Awesome, kamal, once again thank you.

Speaker 1: 59:16

So Europe there as well. Awesome, kamal. Once again, thank you so much for your time. This has been a great discussion and I look forward to seeing you again in January next year in Cape Town hopefully for a bit longer this time. Yeah, all the best with Galoia and Blink man. You guys are doing amazing work. Love it. Keep it up. I use it every day. It's a phenomenal, phenomenal service. Thank you ricky.

Speaker 2: 59:37

Um, it was a great pleasure. Um, and yeah, looking forward to meet you in person soon to have a brai looking forward to it, man.

Speaker 1: 59:46

Good chat soon. Take care, thank you.