Centbee’s Lorien Gamaroff: Bitcoin SV alone is committed to sound money

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In this interview with CoinGeek’s Becky Liggero, CEO Lorien Gamaroff explains why Centbee chooses Bitcoin SV to power the company’s products.

Lorien Gamaroff, co-founder and CEO of wallet provider Centbee, is unequivocal in the selection of the cryptocurrency for the numerous products his company is developing. For him, only Bitcoin SV is poised for long-term stability, in keeping with the original Bitcoin whitepaper.

“One of the most important things about sound money is that it can’t change. As soon as you have a group of people, a committee, developers, or something like that thinking that they can know better about how the system should work, it’s by definition not sound,” Gamaroff said, by way of critiquing centralized financial institutions.

“One of the great things about SV is that they’re committed to that idea [of sound money]. And if you think about Satoshi Nakamoto when he said that the protocol should be set in stone, I think that he thought it was so obvious that it was self-evident, and didn’t spend enough time trying to show people that one of the things that makes something sound money is its stability,” he explained. “And none of the blockchains have demonstrated that they are willing to commit to something and make it sound, even though they have this idea and they pay lip service to the notion of sound money. So I’m very excited, as a wallet developer and a Bitcoin company, that I finally have a blockchain that I know is not going to change from under me.”

Centbee started out merely as the wallet app known for its minimalist design, which makes for its ease of use. “It doesn’t have any of the complex jargon around what Bitcoin is. It doesn’t talk about addresses and confirmations and so on. So we’re trying to strip it down to its barest, barest minimum where you have a balance and you can connect to your friends. So if you have contacts that are also using Centbee, they automatically come up in the wallet. Then you can easily go and make payments to them,” Gamaroff said.

Soon enough, he said, there will be added “social elements” to make the app handier. “What you can do is not only just send money to your friends, you can also chat to them, you can chat-pay. Now that’s a product that we’re going to be releasing soon,” he said.

Centbee has made it as easy and safe as possible for anybody to acquire cryptocurrencies. Gamaroff explained, “We have nothing to do with exchanges, but what we do have is, we allow people to buy Bitcoin, but instead of going to an exchange, what they can do is they can go to any brick-and-mortar retailer. They can purchase a Bitcoin voucher, so much like you would buy an iTunes gift card or something like that, and then easily scan that and then load your wallet with Bitcoin.”

The vouchers, according to Gamaroff, render exchanges unnecessary. “We really don’t like the idea of exchanges. We want people to think that there is only one Bitcoin because that’s the only thing long term, and we want to make it so it’s as easy as buying a bottle of milk,” he said.

He also spoke of a new product for merchants, called Scanpay, intended for maximum utility whether as a retailer or someone developing with the open-source software. “It’s a BIP70 payment point of sale [protocol], but this one is going to be an open-source payment system so anybody can go and take it, and integrate their own payment process into it and earn fees by providing that service to their merchants,” he said.

Gamaroff said that Scanpay also includes “management tools, administration tools, and merchant portals, so it’s very easy for those merchants to be able to retrieve accounting and submit that to the right tax authorities, but also just function as a business on Bitcoin.”