YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Barhydt

lines on the record: 71
first: 2021-09-01
most recent: 2021-09-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I wonder if Moses had as much feedback when he came down the mountain. I mean, it's crazy what's been going on for these four lines of text.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's possible, right? It's possible we become a pretty front end on a lot of different things today. We're not there. You need a custodian. You need, I know a lot of people don't agree with me, but you need the custodian. You need the service provider. You need liquidity management because we have an existing banking system and you need the hardline into the matrix, as I call it, to make these things work. We may not in 25 years. That may be great. I don't know. But we do today. And so that's how I look at it is how can we facilitate democratization of access to all financial services on the assumption that they're all going to be crypto-based in the coming decades.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money transfer, and displace the middleman. The way I've looked at it is that from the earliest days of Netscape where I watched businesses get disintermediated from the inside out by software and the internet, that has not happened in banking, right? We have the nice, sorry, glipstick on a peg kind of model of banking software where the web apps or the mobile apps look cool, but it's the same core, it's the same fed, it's the same repo markets, it's the same interbanking markets, it's the same BIS we've had, same BS we've had for 100 years. It has not been disintermediated from the inside out. This is our opportunity. That's our mission, is to help facilitate that. Now we may put ourselves out of business over time, right? Because over time it may turn out that all of this can become trustless and you don't need a company like Abra to facilitate any of the services that we're facilitating.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way we're doing it, certainly today, but it was. I mean, my mission remains the same, and that is to build a global bank that democratizes access to anything that we do. I want to offer services Every single person on this planet. Now, that's not realistic for every feature we launch out of the gate on day one, but that's the end game for me. I want to build a global bank with crypto and Bitcoin at its core, smart contracts, Bitcoin, all of it, and enable all forms of lending, wealth management.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Print button. It's not that simple, but that's more or less what's happening. And so both of those things are happening at the same time with the same monetary system. And different people have different perspectives on why that matters to them without thinking about the other person's perspective at all.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's access as well, right? So there's two parts to a monetary system. There's what is the store of value and what preserves that store of value. For a lot of people, they don't care about that. For example, if you say reminiscent system, Mexico, most of that money is spent before it's received. They're not overly concerned with the pesos purchasing power over time, at least not intuitively. It wouldn't be intuitively obvious they should be. What they're concerned is can they get the money? Is it cheap? How much money did they have to lose in sending the money they got? How easy was it to get? And if the banks or ATM machines are offline, am I screwed? That's what kind of goes through the mind of certain people in certain segments of the population. But then there's, of course, our segment of the population, which is we're getting screwed because we simply have, again, the proverbial finger on.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And could that become the basis for a new monetary system? And that was simply the question that I asked back then. And it was only a result of the fact that I'd had this gnawing idea in the back of my mind, but why do we simply outsource money to the government automatically? And we just blindly accept it. It makes no sense to me. It doesn't true. It does make sense to me why many people blindly accept it. But we shouldn't. We should question it at least and then maybe accept it or not. I obviously come out on the or not side of it, but we should at least question it.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And could it end up being a trustless currency like this? Now, I just said in two sentences way better what I could have said in 2012 because we didn't have any Lingo for any of this, by the way. Things have changed a lot. And so I was just flying by the seat of my pants to try to make a point that this trustless system that no one had ever seen before, in theory, with no off switch already, which was super powerful already, even in 2012, it was the most powerful supercomputer in the world, right? If you just looked at its collective hash power back then.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got to make banking and lending accessible and capitalism accessible to everyone because that's the rising tide that lifts all boats to me having watched it in firsthand in time I spent in Asia and other places and so good Bitcoin facilitate this I was researching for a short TED talk I did for a closed session at Ted on Bitcoin when it was I think it was training about a dollar And I came up with this crazy concept of marrying these two ideas I had. One, could it basically be the basis for money transfer payments and banking? And two, I had just recently read comments that a group at the UN had decided that the dollar wasn't a viable reserve currency anymore. And this was basically in 2011. And so in 2012, I gave this talk and I merged the ideas and said, hey, is it possible that you could end up with a non-government actor creating a reserve currency?”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had two kind of competing perspectives, which still didn't really involve pure speculation from a business perspective. I'm a hardcore libertarian, right? I always had this perspective pre-Bitcoin that the Federal Reserve should have competition. And I had written an outline for a book on this that I think I've ever talked about, actually. I think it was in the late 90s I wrote this outline that there should be multiple feds. You wouldn't call it that. You would just have competition. And this was even before I read a lot of the Austrian economists' ideas on the topic about private money. And they did a way better job of explaining it than I ever could. And I give those papers to people all the time now. But I had this innate idea that the government shouldn't have a monopoly on money, right? Without knowing full tilt that there was this whole Austrian school about it and Ron Paul's ideas about it. And then I had this second idea that we've got to solve this money transfer problem. We've got to solve this remittance problem.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To store customer funds is another story, but certainly to pay employees. But it was a lot of heavy lifting to figure out what could you really do with crypto that is useful in the early days of Bitcoin. I mean, nobody said crypto. It was Bitcoin, right? In the early days of Bitcoin, could it be useful for anything? And that was really tough. And I'm a very skeptical person by nature. But I also knew the magnitude of the problems and the holes left in the banking system for these kind of bottom half of the pyramid, not just the destitute, but the entire bottom half of the pyramid.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think FinCEN had already issued their guidance around prepaid access, which basically points to money transfer rules and whatnot. And so, and also you could Google me and find out that I used to run a remittance company. You put two and two together, and that was it. And it was nothing nefarious. Like I said, I didn't need a bank account to run the business except to pay employees. So finally, I was able to work that out. And, you know, it's all good. But it's a little different today. You can get a bank account to pay employees if you're in the crypto.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wish I had in hindsight, but I didn't. So the idea of using Bitcoin as the basis for banking was really the original idea. And I would say I was really all in by early 15, maybe mid-15 at the latest, trying to figure out how to do this. You couldn't hire people. Most investors weren't interested. What the hell is Bitcoin? Banks won't talk to you. I had three bank accounts shut down. I was lying to banks about what we were doing to get a bank account. Just playing whack-a-mole with banks, you know, as they were shutting me off. I didn't even have, I had no employees. We had no software. They were still shutting my accounts down.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had the idea really to go all in and ABRA probably 2014 or 13, maybe late 13, 14, I really didn't fully commit probably until late 14, early 15. I had some other stuff going on. And again, to use Bitcoin for banking beyond just speculation, right? I mean, I remember meeting with Brian and Fred in the early days before, actually before they even started the company, I think, in some of my friends' house NSF. And I thought it was really interesting. But speculation wasn't really like a driving interest for me.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read them. Read them. I didn't know enough. I was out of date already on the crypto and the hashing algorithms and all that stuff to ask intelligent questions. You know, there was a lot of questions in the early days like civil attacks and stuff like this. And I was already like I understood the questions, but I didn't know enough to figure out how to ask the questions. So I'm like this guy. I've studied computer science, but it was a long time ago. And Netscape, I wrote a little code. And as time went on, I wrote less and less code. Now I can read the code, but you wouldn't want me to write it. So I'm at a point now where I'm kind of really annoying for our tech guys because like I'll get involved, even though I probably have no right to be involved. But because of where I came from, I understood the implications of what he was trying to do.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to understand it honestly, but that wasn't when I say right away. I wasn't mining yet. This was literally weeks after it was released, the white paper. I don't even think you could at that point. I don't think the software was released. So it took me a while to come around to say, okay, there's something here, right? And then it was a few months later, then I basically tried to get the software to run and I couldn't get it to run. And it was really buggy. And the makefiles didn't work and all this other stuff. And finally, I figured out how to get it to run. Actually, there was an engineer at my last company that helped me to get it running. Yeah, I don't even remember all the details, but I think it was built on Windows originally. And I wasn't even using Windows at that point. So I don't remember what he did, but he did something to help me get it to run. I just remember it was like the fans started spinning on this Windows laptop when we got it to run finally.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just enamored with the idea that you could have a trustless solution to the double spend problem. And that was pure tech perspective, which is what most of us had in the early days. Could this even work?”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We all knew that the Holy Grail was solving the double spend problem. And when I first read it the first time, I was like, I think this guy thinks he's solved the double spend problem. And I looked at it and I said, I think I understand what he's saying. Now I read the by paper and he can kind of, I almost understand every sentence, but I've read it 600 times. The first time I read it, it's like, I think this guy's full of crap because he or she thinks that they're going to use every single computer in the world to solve this problem. And I don't think that's realistic. So I kind of brushed it aside. And then a couple of other people in the mailing list mentioned it to me and asked me. I said, hey, Bill, I know you're interested in this kind of digital currency banking stuff. Have you really dig dug in on this paper? Do you have an opinion? And I went back to it again and again. And I said, man, there's something here. I mean, the audacity to think that you can do this to solve the double spend problem just was just annoying at me. And again, I wasn't thinking digital gold, wasn't thinking this would be a monetary system yet.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could you build a bank replacement using Bitcoin to facilitate financial inclusion? Obviously today that means also speculation, but at the time it was, could I do it for payments? Could I do it for money transfer, other forms of financial inclusion potentially lending small dollar lending, cross-border lending, all things that are super interesting to me today where I immediately saw the opportunity evolve for Bitcoin and to help a lot of people.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is powerful was much worse because it was right in the capital. And remittances couldn't get in the island, the Western Union outlets were literally buried under rubble. And so anyway, this became super interesting to me. And immediately I said, wow, this could really solve a lot of problems if you could eliminate a lot of these regulated intermediaries, lower the costs, some challenges, but from a kind of a middleware perspective at the time, I wasn't thinking digital gold yet because it wasn't worth anything. This is really interesting. And then as the months went by, I really dug in more and I said, wow, this is incredible. Personally, I started to get into it, started mining a little bit once I could figure out how to install the software. And then over a couple of years, infrastructure started to develop. We had Mt. Gox. You could actually get liquid, which actually started to show me, hey, you could actually use this as a middleware layer because you can get money in and out on both sides. And anyway, so that really pushed me down the rabbit hole of trying to see if.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin was almost like a long time coming for me. I've been working in internet and payments and tech and capital markets and just the intersection of all of that for really 25 plus years and worked on a lot of certificate authority deployments and SSL deployments for banking during my Netscape days. We actually partnered with DigiCash, if anybody remembers that company didn't go very well, but we did. And so I had the long hair, the earring, cypherpunk days going back to the early 90s, believe it or not. But look, when I read the white paper, it couldn't have been more than three months after he posted it. I was working on a remittance project in Haiti at the time. The timing was incredible because it was just one frustration after another on dealing with cross-border money transfer regulation, people trying to stop me, and we just had an earthquake now in Haiti and the damage and the devastation from the last one, even though it was.”
2021-09-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC041: Bitcoin Banking & Infrastructure w/ Bill Barhydt (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT