YouSaid · the spoken record
Obi Nwosu
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- 2022-07-20
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- 2022-07-20
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“Is not a situation of a policy implemented by FADEF that hasn't been implemented. So knowing this, I realize that as we're getting close to this timeline, that we needed to get more people off exchanges. We as an exchange, and again as an exchange, you generally not incentivize to do this, but again, an exchange who's concerned about their customers would be one that's constantly trying to get them to self-custody. If they're not trying to do that, or they're trying to explain why it's better to custody with them, again, you need to be careful if your objective is to save. For example, it's a trade. Very smart switched on but not super technical. So, okay, OB, I get it. I understand what you're saying and I understand I should self-custody. But the problem is I trust you more than I trust myself.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How significant this was going to be. The FADF is this unelected body who advises regulators around the world on appropriate regulation. But that's just advice. But throughout the history of FATF, there's no piece of advice they've ever given that hasn't been unanimously implemented by the different countries who have signed up to the FAD policies. Almost every country in the world has signed up to the FATF policies. Even if they're warring with each other and so on, they've all signed up. Now, the only question is how long it takes to implement. The quickest, smallest, agile countries do it in about three years. The less agile will take five, six years. But they all do it eventually. So 2019 was when the clock started. And in 2022, we're now at the period where you're starting to see the countries implemented. And many people think, well, this was not going to be implemented, but they're”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But at the time, I didn't. As I mentioned last year in the sort of the final few months of negotiating sale of Coinflow, I decided to visit Hackers Congress. And I was going there for two reasons. One, I've always wanted to go, but I just felt as the CEO of a regulated exchange, it wasn't appropriate for me to go to certain events at the time, but this time I thought, well, you know what, now I can go. It doesn't matter and I've always wanted to go. But there was another reason. In 2019, it seems that there's a segue that's related. The financial action task force, FATE, approved something called the travel rule. At that time, people who were in the industry, especially what was happening with regulation, realized”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we need is a solution which is much simpler to use and also can be rolled out anywhere. It's decentralized. It's censorship resistant, which is not the case for regulated exchange. And it allows you to custody safely and securely. And ideally, just like Lightning bakes in privacy into the standard because everybody needs it, but they don't actively do stuff for it. Your custody solution should also do that. You shouldn't have to go up and do extra things to get privacy. It should be just baked in and you shouldn't even think about it. So that is missing and Fedimint provides that. I can go into how I discovered it and discovered that the person who invented it.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wants to talk to you, and you're the social career, but in the bull period, everybody comes back and goes, you're the one who always goes on about Bitcoin. Can I actually, can you tell me, well, first of all, ask you for financial advice. They say, where can I buy it from? And whatever you say, because they trust you, they're going to do. But you really have two choices. You can either tell you take a view. Are these people technically proficient enough? then maybe you suggest to go with a hardware wallet approach. But for nine times out of ten, you don't think they are, especially early on. So then your only choice is to tell them to go to a regulator to change, even though you know that's not a good thing to do, that's literally the only. And that's not centralized and you're basically telling them to store their money with a stranger effectively. Is stranger custodies by definition third-party custody?”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The next pillar is decentralized censorship resistance payments, and that has been provided through Lightning. And that allows you to, if you're set up correctly and the network is architected correctly from a scaling and congestion point of view, allows you to settle between parties at the speed of lightning and at incredibly low cost. So that allows you to scale the payments aspect, but it's built on top of the first layer. And then the third pillar, which is missing, is decentralized censorship resistant custody. And at the moment, if you think about it, we've really got two choices. You come along and you're someone who's passionate about Bitcoin and knowledge about Bitcoin. It's invariably friends of family when they're the right phase in the bear period.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you end up with something like terror, you know, and so on. What would you store money on something that's insecure? It's eventually going to be lost. It makes no sense either. So you kind of compromise on those two.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first one, the central pillar is Bitcoin Core itself, Bitcoin. So this is decentralized censorship resistance, store of value of money. That's the base that everything else is built across. Fixed supply, immutable, decentralized, and also very, very secure. In terms of extra function, the sacrifice it makes is not got very much functionality and so on. And that's where other technologies can add to it over time. But it needs to be as a base, very, very, very secure and very, very decentralized. And what you don't want to have is compromise those two for bells and whistles in the core protocol. Because if you're compromising on centralization, then what's the point of using a blockchain? It's a massive overhead. You might as well use the database. If you're compromising on security,”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we have a number of principles that we put on our site and one is I'm very careful not to spring up 30 minutes in B-Trust meetings. Other people have And sometimes candidates that we talk to have brought it up. Which is really good because there's so much just natural excitement for it. So that's actually, but what I don't want to do is be seen to be promoting something that I'm working on. And that's one of the policies as board members to not try to promote our own bags, as it were. Even though this is an open source project, but I do fundamentally”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business was pure coincidence. It was finally announced that I was going to be one of the four board members. We had our board meeting with Jack and Jay on the call and all these other incredible people who'd helped and given donated their time from spiral, from chain code, from Brink, from just everywhere. And yeah, the four board members met each other for the first time on that call as well. We introduced ourselves to everybody. And so it began. I mean, it was formally announced on the same day as I stepped down as a director of CoinFlow just by pure coincidence the same day. I don't think my other board members know that happened. So one life ended and then you like began.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before I just ignore them, but starting to look seriously at office to acquire the company, we went from 7,000 people, I applied, and then a few months later, I went to the next round, the next round, and at some point around just before adopting Bitcoin in San Salvador, which I was planning to go to, because at that point it was getting close to us finding buyers, we were in the last negotiation phase. And I had finally opportunity to do things like to go to hackers congress for the first time in Prague. As the CEO of a regulated exchange, it's not a good look to go to Hackest Congress, but now I know I'm selling it, I can finally do that and to go to San Salvador, I got down to the last few hundred, I believe. And then I thought, okay, then maybe there's a chance here. And yeah, we kept on going through and then you got some final interviews. And just a few days before I was about to sell the...”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“they're going to then contribute to something that is of global importance so the global south is supporting the world as opposed to the west supporting the global south so love the idea i applied with 7 000 plus other people because it was an open invitation i didn't want to have these things where there was back rooms you know old boys club type um application and i know many people from from the bitcoin space applied but many people from outside it applied as well and so began 10 month process This also began in the same year that I was already looking to move on from Cornford. And there's a reason why when that was all because I started to realize that we needed to get a lot of people off exchanges, but that's something we'll talk about in a bit. So over that 10 months, while I was still working on Coinflow but looking at starting to look at offers,”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“hopefully become the next generation of Bitcoin protocol engineers because there are only a few people who actively work on some of these vital globally vital technologies so lightning bitcoin core and other core protocols so the idea is great the impact was also great because if you take bitcoin core it's talking to the two main bitcoin core maintainers in oslo a month and a half ago and they're saying actually right now although there's a few hundred people who contribute the people who actively contribute to bitcoin core for example it's about 10 right now and you can see peter willer um just announced stepping down so it could be even less so even if you add one or two or three people to that you're making a significant increase in and this is a point where the global south is not only you're helping increase the education of the global south but”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trust and it's B is the Bitcoin B and B trust. It's always difficult to type to find that symbol. We need to make it a permanent character on the keyboard. So it was originally a year, over a year ago, Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z tweeted this idea that they were putting 500 Bitcoin towards a trust to promote the development of Bitcoin protocol engineers in the global south starting in Africa and India, but ultimately all across the global South. And so they were on the lookout for board members, three to four board members, to take this 500 Bitcoin, form this trust, and locate, educate and remunerate talented Bitcoin engineers so they could become”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“reviewing it every month and it was only Bitcoin and in fact with further decisions by other cryptocurrencies they further and further gone away from being able to fit those criteria so for example if Ethereum you might think it fits three of those criteria but in terms of technical readiness the Ethereum developers decided and announced publicly that Ethereum 2 was coming out because Ethereum was never going to meet the original objectives of Ethereum community of the Ethereum developers so if the developers of Ethereum say it's not good enough objectively it's not good enough at that stage so at that point it was very obvious that we list ethereum after only listing it for six months it was only ensure coded and so we delisted it at that point because the developers of Ethereum themselves are telling you it's not good enough”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Case which was around storing value and money. Because if it wasn't, then it wasn't a thing to store your value. And then if you're thinking of customers you want to save, that didn't make sense. Now, when you take those four criteria and we thought there were four very sensible criteria for if you're focusing on customers trying to save and dollar cost average or sensibly invest and hold for the long run, we only found one currency that actually fit host ball criteria, which was Bitcoin. When I say that I'm a Bitcoin maximist, I just think it's actually from a very rational position. If I found something else that fed those four criteria, I would have listed it, but I've never found anything that came close to those four, which is why, and Bitcoin only just meets those four, by the way. Even Bitcoin only just meets those four. Otherwise, if it didn't, then we would just shut up shop and say, well, there's nothing to offer people. But Bitcoin does meet the criteria.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is just very sensible, we thought. One, we would only list items which were technically mature because if you're asking people to have money with something which is not technically mature, there's a high risk it could explode and that's not good for your customer. It can make a lot of money for you, but it's not good for the customer. Two, it would list something which had very good community support because if it didn't, it could fluctuate a lot, it could disappear in money has network effects, you need strong community support. So again, seems a very sensible criteria. Small cap tokens and so on didn't make sense there. Three, there needed to be regulatory clarity because we were regulating exchange. You need to have regulatory clarity around the token. And for ultimately you want these ones to be store of value money. So it needs to have a core use.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Based on the safety of their users, or is the criteria based on how much money they can make from their users? If it's the prime first, then this is probably the biggest indicator. If it's the first, then that's a good sign. If it's the second that is a sign that they're probably the place to go if you want to speculate. Now, if they don't clearly communicate their criteria or they communicate it but don't follow it, those are both you should assume in that scenario that they're in the latter camp. Unfortunately, the vast majority of exchanges are in that latter camp. What we found”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the long run you are not you'll you see this as a savings technology as opposed to a speculation technology Then you should have a very different set of criteria. It isn't about who's the biggest name. It's about who has a consistent commitment to focus on social capital over financial capital, i.e. it's more important for them to maintain honor and dignity and a good reputation and their actions have shown that over the shorter money. They want to make money, of course, because they have to be to be profitable, but they want to make sure that they may maintain their own social credibility. And that's a high value for them. The first thing you do now, how do you do that? Well, you look for signs and symbols. So one, how they speak, what they talk about, what they prioritize, do they have a clear set of criteria for what they list? And is there criteria?”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think I guess you start off deciding what is your reason for wanting to use an exchange. Are you someone who wants to speculate, is comfortable with the risk of speculating effectively somewhere between the spectrum of trader to gambler? That's the spectrum. Some people consider them all the same thing. Some people consider them different, but if that's where your mindset is, you should be open and truth to yourself, in which case everything is about risk and you should be focused on who has the most features, who has the most liquidity, and just accept that there's a risk that they could blow up as a business. But that's just one more risk you're taking along with the trading risk. If you're someone who is interested in using this as a custodian for holding your value in”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than two, and everybody could then go the direction that they wanted to go in and they could have the future that they were destined to have.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a schism and that was sold off. We retained a small equity stake which we eventually sold last year, but that became CoinFlex, which you now see in the news. And they went their own way, which was very much a Bitcoin cash multi-crypto 200x leverage approach. And we went to the Bitcoin only spot focused for retail, dollar cost averaging approach, which was closer to my philosophical view. But these things by themselves, and you focus on them are different business models, and it doesn't really matter what you think of each one. There is a way where they can flourish. But when you have two philosophies and where to go with a business, and they're so different, you know, you end up in this sort of no man's land. So in the end, it was actually a really good decision for us.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether it's partnering organizations or people within your organization or so on and so forth. So that would be the second, I think, or who invests in you, all of this sort of stuff. If I look back, although everybody had their own perspective, I don't wish anybody any ill will, I do think that there was a lot of differences of perspective in all those regards in terms of the direction of the organization. And that caused us a lot of challenges. I was very focused on going a Bitcoin only wrote. Some people came round to that, but it took several years. Some people never came round to that. And then it led us to just like a fork in Bitcoin. They led to a forking coin floor where we eventually split ways and recreated the world's first busy delivered futures exchange, Bitcoin Futures Exchange, but that was eventually”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have immediate thoughts to mind. Let me just not. No, I think there's two things. One, you have to realize that you need to avoid regulation if you can, even though we got it. I think that the innovation for Bitcoin is to be able to be regulation-proof. So I'm using all that learning to build systems which are just Don't need to be in, if you really want to do something of global impact for what we're doing, you want to build systems that are a cognizance of how the world works, but don't wait for the world to catch up for you. I just don't. So that's the first learning. And the second is to be very, very, very careful of who you partner with and who you, you know.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I won't name names, but they will always seem to go down. But we would keep on ticking. And people like that, even they knew that we just made sure we kept people happy. We made sure we were reliable. We're a very conservative, so philosophically, we were always aligned to the ideals of Bitcoin. So it was like it was TikTok next block and it was also the same for our exchange. And that's, I think, because we were first and foremost engineers. And second, commercially minded traders in fact we were zero in that in that regard”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredibly reliably. We were never hacked. We never had these issues which seem to play exchanges, orders of magnitude larger than us. We were a medium-sized exchange. We were a good-sized exchange, but exchanges that were much larger than us when there were these massive moves in the market and people really needed to trade, they all seemed to just go down. I know. I know.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a regulated Bitcoin exchange, we were the first exchange to be regulated in Gibraltar, one of the first jurisdictions to provide regulation in Europe. We were one of the earliest in Europe and many different things. And in fact, actually not coming from the traditional markets was a boon for us because a lot of people who run exchanges come from the market where they were traders themselves. And it's always, we found with certain customers, there's always a slight concern when the person running exchange has the same mindset as the traders. There's always a worry, are they trading against you? Are they doing all these different things? Whereas with us, my background was that of a technologist. So I just wanted to make the system work as well as possible. And I'm not a good trader. So we have no interest in doing anything other than making sure the systems work.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I've had ups and downs and so anybody has a startup for eight years. And there were many, many, many times that I wished I'd had a start of the business. It was eight years, but I probably lost 20 years of my life expected. I've had some of the worst health days in my life, some of the most stressful periods. Now I've gone through it. And because of what I've learned from it, I'm grateful for it because it's prepared me for what I'm doing now, which I cannot feel happy and excited and passionate I am about what I'm doing now. And if I didn't have those skills applied to this, then it wouldn't have been the same thing. But yeah, I didn't have any experience of running exchange at the time. We were very naive. Eight years is a long time now. So I've got not only experience running exchange, but running a Bitcoin exchange in”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little did I know that actually that was led you from one problem into another, but I discovered that over the next 10 years.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was the way to do it because at the end of the day, we're a third party, we are effectively a stranger to our customer. And we're incentivized to earn money. And you're asking us to look after your money. So there is a perverse incentive there, where in most cases, if you're incentivized to make money, that leads to competition, innovation, and so on. Because to earn money, you have to provide an incredibly, the most efficient way to earn money is providing incredibly good service to your customers. But in the case where you're custodying money, then the most efficient way to earn money can be just to take the money. And especially some entrepreneurs who walk the line might start, as we've seen recently, start doing things like gambling with your money or they might abscond with your money or it might just disappear, etc. And so we felt that the way to bring that trust back is to go for regulation.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, the impetus was to solve the problem of helping people go from fiat to Bitcoin. We saw ourselves as this Robin Hood like, or I saw myself as Robin Hood-like character, sort of rescuing people from this world of this regulated inflationary money and allowing them to move over to this regulation-free inflation free money. And as part of that, you had to provide them a custody solution that was safe and reliable, etc. And so we decided that we wanted to be as transparent as possible because we're holding people's money on their behalf. And also to bring back trust, especially in the wake of Mt, we felt that we would go down this road of regulation.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This sort of Segwit 2x sort of compromise, and we said, Look, whatever the use to be Bitcoin, or is Bitcoin, we educated everyone ranging from the intelligence services to the police to politicians. I gave evidence in front of the UK Parliament Treasury Select Committee, which is a bit like the Senate committee hearings. We did everything to try and educate people and educate the regulators. We started at a position when it took us talking to nearly 200 banks across Europe to get a bank account at that time. Now for this new project we're working on, I've talked to four banks and four banks listen to me and are interested in opening bank accounts. It's still tough. You still have to fill in 70-page forms, but it's much better than when I had to travel to Estonia to get the”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coinbase blockchain.info at the time, now it's blockchain.com, BTC China. Now it's defunct. And I think this stamp as well, they also made these public statements that they would also implement proof reserves. Unfortunately, we're the only ones who actually did it. I think Kraken did one and stopped. All of them removed the public statement off their websites after six months. But you can go back in the way back when Machin find the original promise to do this. You can leave it for the readers or the listeners to determine why they decided not to do proof of reserves. But we did it every month for eight years. And this is something in fact Nick Carter talked about continuously. And yeah, many other things. Bitcoin cash wars, we were one of the few exchanges to be not a fan.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been in the Bickerspace for eight years and that's about 80 years of When we started, we applied, in fact, before we started, we applied to the FSA at the time. Now it's the FCA. And I believe FSA was the financial standards authority. I can't remember because it changed that. Now it's the financial conduct authority. And we said, look, we're staying on this company. We want to be regulated. And here's what we're doing. And they came back very politely saying thank you very much. But what we believe you're doing is not a regulative activity. So go ahead and do it so that we're not going to regulate you. And so with that letter, we started. But that was where we began, but we still wanted to be incredibly transparent. There was a Bitcoin core engineer who suggested this idea called provable solvency or proof of provable reserves. And we decided to implement that. I think a number of exchanges, Kraken,”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The exchange in the UK where we focus came about. And so I decided to, with my co-founders, co-found CoinDraw, which was the UK's at that time a young exchange, but eight years later we sold it was the longest running Bitcoin only exchange in the UK. And yeah, that was the story. I started off as a CTO within nine months. I was the CTO and CEO of Coinflow. We had multiple ups and downs, but ultimately more ups than downs. And I sold at the end of last year. So that was real.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The technology is great, but I have concerns on the long term viability. So I focus on my business two years later. A company I had Angel invested in, the founder approached me again. The company didn't succeed, but I thought the founders were really clever guys. And they said, look, while running this other business, we came across, because there was this sort of voucher token reward system. They came across this thing called Bitcoin. And I thought, well, that's still around. They checked it again, 2013. And lo and behold, it was now worth a few hundred. And so I thought, okay, this is great technology. The mission is great, making meritocratic money as the way I would put it. And it had staying power. And there was a clear problem that the exchanges around at the time were Mt. Gox was in the middle of failing and they weren't trusted. So there's a simple idea of making a trust.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and as a background, I was always interested in just the disparities in the world. You know, my family was from Nigeria. I could see the difference between the global south and the global and the Western world. And I was really into technology. So when some friends of mine heard about Bitcoin in 2011, they just thought this is going to be right up OB Street. And they informed me about it. lo and behold, I found it very interesting. I looked at it intensely for about three months, but I was running my own business at the time. So other than buying a very small amount, I didn't, I found the technology very interesting, but I didn't sort of dive in because I was focused on life. And then two years later, well, the price crashed, actually, from my perspective. I think it went from $100 down to like $20. And I thought, okay.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Originally, well, by background, a geek, I studied computer science and cognitive science in University College London. And so I was trying to make our new robot overlords. And it seems like they've been doing fine without me. And then I went into the tech industry in the European space. I was involved with massively multiplayer role-playing games, 30 million users, all this sort of stuff.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, well, I needed to probably do the same level of preparation and I haven't for my sins, so you're probably going to outsmart me on.”
2022-07-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC087: Bitcoin Fedimint - A Decentralized Custody Protocol w/ Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT