Brian hoffman bitcoin

Sunny: Yeah. I remember that was actually a very interesting hackathon because Amir Taaki started Dark Market at that hackathon, he placed first place and then Ethan Buchman and Vlad Zamfir, this is when those two actually first got into blockchain and they actually came in second place at that hackathon.

So a very eventful hackathon that day in Toronto. Brought a lot of people into the space. It was all centralized. And so that was the impetus for for Dark Market. Sebastien: Do you have anything to add there Washington? Washington: Yeah, I mean it was it was quite a short hackathon but extremely impactful. I know there was a very very strong response in the Bitcoin Community too, I think everybody understood the idea of what this could accomplish if it was created. But yeah, I mean from what was created in that hackathon to you know, what we started with and what OpenBazaar has become today has been quite a significant technical journey.

Sunny: So Brian, how did you pick up the Dark Market project from that? Were you at the hackathon and you heard about it there or did you hear about it afterwards? And at what point did you realize that the Dark wallet team? And so what inspired you to step up and take over this project essentially. Brian: Yeah, I mean as I mentioned before I was kind of looking for something that I could get in on and, like many others I saw the coverage of them winning the award and I saw the video of them showing the product off and I thought it was super fascinating.

I mean not just the idea of creating a silk road so to speak but just the idea that this was actually something beyond a wallet, you know up until that time most of the things that people were doing with Bitcoin were just wallets.

The idea is that this is a truly open marketplace, not just for illicit goods. I believe if you go to their their GitHub repo for Dark Market, it just links to us. But slowly and surely I started getting more and more people contributing patches because they were going to the Dark Market repository and getting linked over to mine and they just started following it and joining it.

They were contributing really good ideas and Washington was actually one of the best early contributors not from a code perspective, but he had come with a bunch of already thought out ideas of how we could improve the marketplace. I mean originally it was a very basic, you know escrow type marketplace idea, but he brought along these ideas of like doing more contract-based transactions that had state and you know, it was more involved and and several other really interesting ideas about where we could take OpenBazaar that made it much more than just a simple hackathon project.

So, those early contributions were massive in terms of getting brand awareness and interest in what we were doing. It was kind of crazy. Sunny: So before we go any further, maybe the first thing we should do is, you know, some people might not be aware, what exactly is OpenBazaar? What are the goals here? I think maybe many people have heard this tagline or decentralized marketplace.

But what does that mean and maybe a good way to do it is maybe you could explain or a walk through a user story in how a user would be using OpenBazaar. Brian: Sure, so decentralized marketplace. What does that even mean? I mean a marketplace itself is kind of centralized right? We have these consensus protocols and things that allow us to do that without people intervening. So you can expand upon it forever and ever and ever but the core idea is really just free trade over the internet.

But I would like you to walk us through the history and the timeline, what has happened since then in these four years. What are the major milestones and major achievements that have come? But I think not only has our work changed and our organization changed but the whole crypto ecosystem has changed dramatically.

I mean it was just an open source side project that we were working on at nights and weekends and whenever we had spare time, by the end of that in early when we podcast with you guys it was starting to morph into more of a business, we were hoping to build this company around it so that we could do it full-time. So we kind of had this like hacked version of Dark Market code and tried to morph it into something good but we realized that just had to scrap most of it.

So we rewrote the whole product through to and I guess the beginning of we released OpenBazaar Version 1. That was the first complete version that we felt was as close to the vision as possible. And when we release that we had truly decentralized search, it was the first complete product.

It had dispute resolution so people could use escrow services to figure out if they had problems and things like that and create more trust, but one of the things that we learned quickly is that the technology is really nascent. And the search was really really bad. And so And so we went back to the drawing board and we rewrote all of it over again on top of IPFS.

And that was probably one of our best decisions ever because it opened up the doors to do so much more with the way that OpenBazaar worked in terms of user experience. IPFS for instance allowed us to introduce offline orders. And so that was a huge benefit of moving to IPFS for instance and there were a lot more than that, but so 2.

I think we were beta baiting at the end of We were a free trade project. We just happen to use Bitcoin as our payment mechanism. And so even though we were really well-known in the space, we wanted to do commerce, we wanted to do payments, we wanted to do this peer-to-peer communication, all these things that we thought Bitcoin could do really early on that even Satoshi thought about early on.

And it was starting to morph into this whole store value kind of conversation and narrative at that time. And so the fees were going really up and all we did was allow people to use Bitcoin, no other payment mechanisms and people were selling t-shirts and stickers and books, things that were like sub 50 dollars in the fees were almost getting to the same prices the products.

So our users were getting very frustrated. They were complaining to us with support tickets all this stuff. And so we realized very quickly we had to do something about that. And so we changed our thinking and said look what if we were a marketplace that was agnostic to payment mechanisms. What would we look like? And so we had to design what we call the multi wallet, which is allowing us to accept and use multiple different coins and plug-in more as we go and so we became more of a neutral in terms of which coins we support platform and in right now we only support a handful but the flexibility is there for us to expand as needed in to others to accommodate different types of approaches.

How have users been reacting to the actual idea of using Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for payments, especially given the high volatility of last year. So one of the things that happened last year was the fees made it harder for people to spend Bitcoin, but then also the changes in price made it hard and so what was the UX like around that last year then also any plans to support more like stable coin like mechanisms like Dai and whatnot. So the volatility. And so we got a massive influx of people interested in using OpenBazaar and learning about it and stuff.

Washington: Yeah, I mean, I think something that especially people who have just joined this crazy circus in the past two years are not aware of is just how significantly the mentality to spending cryptocurrency has changed in just a few years. Sunny: Another question around how the UX of OpenBazaar works is why are there only a certain number of supported coins?

What does it mean to support a currency in OpenBazaar? Brian: Yeah, sure. So if you can create a listing within OpenBazaar marketplace to sell crypto and you can actually list for sale over coins, all the ones from coin market. And yeah that can be done. Why do we not do that for the for the primary purchases?

So we had to build the smart contract to do multisig for OpenBazaar. Washington: And even the wallet itself has been a bit of a technical journey. I mean when we moved here from Bazaar 2. Where does this third moderator come in? Who decides it and is there a public listing of trusted moderators or how does this work? Washington: The moderator role can be fulfilled by any node on the network. So if you want to join OpenBazaar and you just want to do dispute resolution, you can set yourself up as a moderator.

OB1, the company, has a list of what we call verified moderators. These are people who we know are moderators on the network. So they have to have key-based profiles. We say alright we need you to state very clearly what your fees are, what your dispute resolution policy is, a whole bunch of criteria.

And we get a lot of suggestions from the community. In fact, we funded an effort called Trust is Risk, which is a research project based out of a university in Greece and we helped fund that project so that they could look at ways of using web of trust in order to create trust graphs and make better decisions without having to rely on someone like OB1 blessing certain moderators as being verified so to speak.

So we mentioned IPFS already and some of the underlying structure there. So can you describe the tech stack? I think a lot of people listening to the show will be familiar with smart contracts and maybe the way other applications and dapps were built on this on this maybe like a dow principal or some kind of a structure similar to a dow but OpenBazaar. Is it really built this way? Brian: Yeah, so when you hear the word dapp, you usually just assume Ethereum dapp and most of them kind of have this same kind of stack which is that you have the blockchain and all the code and data is residing in the blockchain and then you have this thin client dapp layer, which is just a bunch of interface code really that interacts with the blockchain through MetaMask or whatever through the web3.

So the logic that drives OpenBazaar does not reside in a blockchain. We really only use blockchain for the payment mechanism in the escrow scenario. And so for us our tech stack looks more like, we use libp2p at the networking layer, which allows us to do peer-to-peer networking and and every device connects to the OpenBazaar network independently and then on top of that IPFS, which is like the data storage layer which talks on top of libp2p, so this allows us to store data into the network.

The whole Idea behind this is, so early on when we were building OpenBazaar We were like, okay, how do we do Bitcoin scripting or like how do we use Opera turns and all this stuff. I remember very early on we went into the Bitcoin Wizards IRC chat and one of our guys was asking questions about how we could store data on Bitcoin blockchain and I think it was like Greg Maxwell was like, you guys are fucking idiots you got to get out of here, and wanted to boot us out of the IRC chat.

So very early on we realized, okay data is not going into blockchain. How do we get around that and IPFS was like a perfect marriage of solving that problem. So we keep all of the non-payment data out of that into the IPFS network, which is great. How do I buy it?

How do I dispute it? Sebastien: Interesting. So when one opens the OpenBazaar app, and I encourage you listeners to download it and try it out. I mean there might be other listings on other marketplaces or maybe perhaps even not even on marketplaces people might be even just sharing OpenBazaar end points on social media or forums, this sort of thing.

Can you explain how that works and why you do this? I think Washington will have some ideas on this as well. But I think this is a prime example of what has served us to last so long too, is this constant battle of pragmatism versus ideology. Not just mainstream casual users.

It just was a very bad UX and so one of the one of the compromises that we made when we moved to 2. So that was the approach we adopt. But people could have different approaches to the way that they curate or sensor or whatever control search results. The network itself is unstoppable, but the view that you have of the network is your choice because when you think about it, how was your mom or dad ever going to use this if the first thing they see when they open up the app is drugs and guns.

Their view of the internet is through Google. Brian counsels audit firms, individual auditors, public companies, investment management firms, and individuals in: federal and state government enforcement, self-regulatory organization, and white-collar matters; corporate internal investigations; addressing internal whistleblower reports and defending entities against whistleblower retaliation claims asserted under the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank Acts; and shareholder and commercial litigation.

He also has tried more than twenty cases to verdict and has achieved favorable pre-trial outcomes in multiple matters. Brian has led the resolution of matters involving accounting and auditing issues, public company financial reporting and disclosure concerns, alleged insider trading, potential FCPA issues, and cybersecurity and cryptocurrency issues.

Client Results Selected Enforcement and Investigation Matters Defend large accounting firm in multiple different SEC and DOJ investigations involving various financial reporting, auditing, and disclosure matters, as well as provide counsel in 10A situations. Defend former accounting executive of public company in SEC investigation of financial reporting matters, including revenue recognition and perquisites. Defend sales executive of multi-national public company in DOJ and SEC investigation of disclosures concerning product sales.

Defend former executive of public company in SEC investigation of disclosures concerning expected sales and business operations. Defend former technology executive of public company in SEC investigation involving alleged whistleblower retaliation claims under Rule 21F a of the Securities Exchange Act. Defend investment professional and entity in SEC investigation involving public disclosures about special purpose acquisition company SPAC and its proposed merger target.

Defend investment advisor and private fund complex in SEC and multiple different state securities division and AG investigations. Defend investment advisor and its personnel in SEC examination and investigation involving 12b-1 fees. Defend executive of adviser to mutual fund complex in SEC investigation of disclosure and other concerns.

Represent Audit Committee of a public company to conduct internal investigation of certain accounting and disclosure issues. Conduct internal investigation for public company in connection with internal report and defend public company against SOX whistleblower retaliation claims asserted by former employee in OSHA investigation.

Represented international high-tech equipment manufacturer in its internal investigation concerning potential FCPA issues in Korea, China, and other countries, as well as other potential financial reporting, accounting, and disclosure issues.

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Notably, despite the suggestions by show hosts that such industries as wearable technology, healthcare and home automation were areas that investors should be considering for investment over the next three-to-five years, Hoffman suggested he is increasingly focused on bitcoin. Indicating that the ecosystem has piqued his interest in the last six to 12 months, Hoffman lauded bitcoin, saying: "I think it's an incredible system that's created a ledger that is across — a distributed ledger across the whole world for it can be money but it can also be other things.

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In the past, Julian served as a consultant and researcher of public policies with a background in public economics, the framing of which he finds very useful for understanding decentralised systems. Tezos is a blockchain-based smart contract platform with an on-chain governance mechanism to coordinate and push upgrades to its network.

You can follow Tezos through their website at www. Prior to Tezos, Kathleen was a senior strategy associate for R3, a blockchain consortium of more than 70 financial firms. She holds a degree from Cornell University. Fred is married with three children and lives in New York City. He has advised several blockchain startups in New York and London, helping them understand the technology, their niche and market opportunity.

He has a background in finance and technology. He has a M. Arthur is also a technical advisor to the ZCash project. He blogs regularly about the present and future of blockchains at Startup Management. Previously, he worked on business development and marketing at Coinbase.

Jake has 9 years of experience in pure and financial technology, a background in computer and mathematical sciences, and an avid interest in blockchain and financial technology. Ned is also an advisor to startups, including the cryptocurrency project for dating and matchmaking, MatchPool. Ned has been immersed in cryptocurrencies since when he discovered Bitcoin in a Yahoo! Finance article. His drive for building the future comes from his passion for understanding motivation and incentives, which he first discovered studying psychology and economics at Bates.

Marco focuses his practice on structuring innovative products into existing regulations, as well as crafting new regulations where required. He counsels on compliance with and disputes over money services, securities and derivatives laws, with both high-growth fintech companies and international financial institutions.

He is a multidisciplinary thinker with a special interest in social and technological innovation. He has 13 years of experience in developing pricing, risk management, and high-frequency trading software at Goldman Sachs. He advises finance and telecom enterprises on digital strategy. In he was part of the of the UBS crypto 2. Olaf was the Head of Risk and first employee at Coinbase, the first multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency company.

He has received a civilian award from Homeland Security for technical analysis of the blockchain, and conducted agent training on cryptocurrency for the FBI. Olaf has a patent pending for the Bitcoin Host Computer System, a multi-authorization bitcoin storage mechanism. He first entered the blockchain market in when he wrote is senior thesis on Bitcoin at Vassar College, where he received his BA. After receiving a B. He discovered bitcoin in , studied it through , then began working full time as a blockchain engineer.

Prior to that, he co-founded the Mozilla project and foundation. While at Mozilla, Eich helped launch the award-winning Firefox web browser. CLOSE Brock Pierce Brock Pierce is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur with an extensive track record of founding, advising and investing in disruptive businesses.

Blockchain Capital is the first sector-focused venture fund that invests solely in Blockchain technology companies and the Bitcoin ecosystem. The firm has made more than 70 investments in the sector. He is a graduate of NYU Law, as well as a self-taught designer and coder. He has briefed policymakers and regulatory staff around the world on the subject of Bitcoin regulation.

Previously, he was a Google Policy Fellow and collaborated with various digital rights organizations on projects related to privacy, surveillance, and digital copyright law. Previously she was a product manager at Coinbase which she joined in June At Coinbase, Linda has worked with regulators and law enforcement on compliance for digital assets.

Prior to Coinbase, she was a portfolio risk analyst at AIG.