It’s the fifth episode of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream with host Kurt Wuckert Jr., and it’s not one to miss!
This 90-minute action-packed episode is loaded with information and personal insights from Bitcoin industry expert and Money Button founder, Ryan X. Charles. Kurt and Ryan’s dialogue spans a variety of topics ranging from Ethereum, Money Button, Fabriik, plus a shocking revelation pertaining to Ryan’s thoughts on Twetch and its co-founder and CEO, Josh Petty.
On the program, Ryan opens up to Kurt about his careers highs and lows, the reason for his departure from Fabriik, and the lessons he learned from past experiences which he employs to advice entrepreneurs.
The show begins with an eye-opening discussion on Bitcoin versus Ethereum, with Ryan comparing Bitcoin’s UTXO model to Ethereum’s account base model.
“In Ethereum, there’s a fundamental flaw introduced from the idea of global state, the fundamental flaw is that the order in which you validate transactions matter. There’s no way to know what a script does in Ethereum until you run it because it can modify global state.”
Despite it being flawed, Kurt alludes to the fact that developers are attracted to Ethereum’s state model thus further asking—is Ethereum’s tooling better?
Ryan admits that programming in Bitcoin is challenging, “With Ethereum’s state model, things are easier to understand,” he explains. “Ethereum’s tooling is also far better than Bitcoin.”
Even so, this doesn’t mean Ethereum is better, he reaffirms. “There are reasons Bitcoin works the way it does, we can improve the tooling but we cannot change the fundamentals. The fundamentals are the way they are because it scales. Bitcoin is a scalable secure model.”
The conversation shifts gradually to a discussion focused on the importance of understanding Bitcoin the way Satoshi Nakamoto had envisioned it. As Ryan points out, there is a great deal of ignorance and malice plaguing the industry today.
“They still don’t understand Bitcoin. There is no scale ceiling on Bitcoin. When you understand it can be parallelized just like any infrastructure, it has no theoretical problem. In Ethereum, they have a theoretical problem, they don’t even know how to scale it.”
From here, the discussion deviates to Ryan’s thoughts on the cryptocurrency industry—which he believes is a massive bubble and a giant scam. He advises people to ignore “cryptocurrency” and create a business with real value that people can use.
“The cryptocurrency industry is a massive scam, it’s going to go bust, forget about those people. Get real customers, real financial businesses, companies and governments and solve their problems.”
Ryan echoes nChain Chief Scientist and Bitcoin creator Craig Wright’s interpretation of what Bitcoin is and isn’t. “Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency, crypto means secret writing and currency means money used by government,” he emphasizes. “Bitcoin is not secret writing but rather it is completely transparent and public on the blockchain.”
Questions about his journey from Money Button to Fabriik swirled in the comments section with some asking the reason why he sold Money Button. Ryan was quick to answer that, simply saying, the company wasn’t earning enough money.
He also came forward to disclose the reason behind his departure from Fabriik, stating his plan to pursue other interests.
“I am drawn to advanced ideas, I’m drawn to things like a market for competition on Bitcoin, replacing TCP layer of the internet with Bitcoin. I’m drawn to the idea that there’s a lot of value we can create for Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is a great market.”
What followed is a brief discussion on Ryan’s new company, Coasian, to which he says will focus on solving Silicon Valley’s problems in the next five years.
https://twitter.com/coasian_inc/status/1361003235071336448?s=20
Next, Kurt refers to the comments section box where one viewer points out, developers on Ethereum have managed to acquire millions of dollars for creating non-working prototypes. Ryan reacts to this with sound advice for developers.
“Don’t be jealous of people who raise money on Ethereum, they are screwed wasting years building something that is pointless. Instead, focus on how to make money right away building products and services that can be used by people, don’t worry about raising money.”
Ryan recaps his own experience with raising money back in 2016 and 2017, to which he admits didn’t help. He suggests to anyone looking to start a blockchain based business, to take a different route.
“This might be helpful to entrepreneurs, raising money creates issues, beholden partially to your investor. I will only raise money when I’m ready to dump $30 million on Facebook ads.”
Another question from a viewer opened up a whole other discussion, this time about Ryan’s nonparticipation on Twetch. Ryan makes a startling statement explaining why he is not an active user on the social media platform.
“To be blunt, I don’t like those guys very much, they obviously have different values than I have. Elon Moist has adopted a strategy making false and absurd statements on social media. He is part of the problem, they are using the same tactics that cryptocurrency scammers use to scam people, I don’t share values with those guys. I don’t want anything to do with those tactics.”
As the episode comes to a close, Ryan gives a shout to the Money Button and Fabriik team for a job well done.
Kurt likewise adds a few last words as a take away for his audience to which he says, “There is an incalculable amount of opportunity in Bitcoin, but you have to pursue that opportunity… every time you see a weakness in Bitcoin, that is a business opportunity, take the challenge.”
Watch episode 5 of Kurt’s CoinGeek Weekly Livestream here:
Check out previous episodes of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream on YouTube.
New to blockchain? Check out CoinGeek’s Blockchain for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about blockchain technology.
