This is an interview with founder Rob Andrews of BiblePay.
Q: First of all, please make a simple self-introduction, let everyone know about the founder of BBP before listening to BBP’s charity story.
Greetings — I am Rob Andrews, founder of BiblePay. I’m a 47 year old Christian living in Central Texas, USA. After my corporate programming career, I started a database consulting company specializing in business process automation and we had an internal hedge fund. After observing my personality change to selfish and greedy, I decided to deepen my relationship with Jesus and start BiblePay and pause the other businesses.
Q: What is your understanding of charity and blockchain?
I personally think that naturally speaking, blockchain projects that give away the entire money supply to charity will not be successful. I feel that an investor who receives nothing in return has other options for charity. That’s why we chose a deflationary model: Our money supply decreases by 19.5% per year, and we only give 10% directly to the most efficient charities. In this way, BiblePay can still be considered a long term investment.
Q: Please tell us about the original intention of creating BBP. What kind of opportunity is it for you to combine charity and blockchain?
BiblePay was launched primarily to spread the gospel to IT geeks, but also to fulfill James 1:27, to do our part in funding orphans and widows. This will theoretically make our investors feel good about what they invest in and hold.
The method in which we spread the gospel includes compiling the entire KJV bible in the source code, allowing one another to pray for each other from transactions, allow letters to be written to orphans in IPFS attached to blocks, sharing gospel links and listing gospel link lists from the core wallet and our pool, and for our future — we want to add Christian Video uploads and voting, and P2P preaching and tithing.
Q: BBP’s creation and growth, have you experienced those joys and frustrations? What are the happiest and most sad things in these experiences?
I think our happiest state was July 2018, at that time we had not only reached a higher market cap, but we had received an anonymous donation propelling us to 329 monthly orphans. This orphan collage was quite impressive and we all made the assumption that we would grow from that point.
Our worst experience happened shortly after the HODL crash of 2018 (approx. the end of July 2018), and as you know we are a DASH based crypto, and with this crash affecting many of the governance based (masternode type) cryptos leaving an average crash of 90% in the wake. In response we had to decrease our monthly sponsorships down to 100.
Q: We know that since you created BBP, you have put all your energy into the development of BBP. What is the current development status of BBP? What are the plans for the future?
BiblePay’s development is succeeding. We have fulfilled phase 1 of our long term objective on-time, and we are committed to reaching our roadmap objectives and becoming a long term contender in the crypto space by providing a high quality service with a unique and advanced feature set. At this point in time, we have established the ability to send-receive money, we have a governance budget for our monthly charity expenses with voting, one-click sanctuaries, and have a scaling orphanage sponsorship system working in prod.
In the future we will work on ways to spend BiblePay in the real world; that includes a project for storefront integration, PR for biblepay, and a BiblePay debit card.
Some of the innovative technologies we are working on currently in R&D include: IPFS document hosting, deterministic masternodes, DASH Evolution features, and YouTube Christian video uploads.
In the future, we plan on integrating features for a Christian Content Economy, and although I can’t give away the details at this point, one of the features includes the ability for users to upload Christian videos from youtube, and another includes the ability to watch Rapture videos from within BiblePay.
Q: Many people are very concerned about the price of Bitcoin. What do you think about this bitcoin plunging? What do you think is the hope of the whole market?
In my personal opinion, I feel we had a good model when Bitcoin was one single entity and with its deflation, it was a good investment. We now have a federated and decentralized flowering of wealth effect, with the risk of forks over many projects and powerful developer groups who feel their models can be an improvement if they fork, adding an additional investment risk. On one hand, I feel cryptocurrencies are here to stay, and they are not a fad. They provide a useful service — the transfer of value globally and instantly with low fees. I do feel the cryptospace will give the stock market a true level of competition and will carve out a certain % of asset allocation (in competition to equities and bonds). In summary, I feel that the heads of cryptocurrency governance committees must get together and define controls that limit the effect of unlimited development forks and provide a new model that addresses the risk.
Overall, I give the market a positive and bullish rating.
Q: What are your thoughts and feelings about the various statements made by Buffett to attack Bitcoin?
Buffet said Bitcoin is Rat-Poison squared, it’s a gamble, it will come to a bad-ending, because its creating nothing, it’s a non productive asset, so you are counting on the next persons excitedness to pay you for your exit.
My take on Buffet is that he isn’t assessing the true nature of the market, he is making an assumption that it is an empty piece of code. However some real world examples of successful use-cases include: market-making, replacing international wires, completing international currency conversions, storing value in civil unrest (Venezuela), digital cash, speed of transactions (instant send), digital ledgers for private orgs, blockchain file pointers (IPFS), decentralized community projects, decentralized governance and decision support systems, recurring bill payments, storefront integration, decentralized versions of centralized services (social media, file sharing), grid computing, and all the third generation (unreleased features) being worked on now.
Therefore, it’s clear that the cryptosphere does provide new value in business and appears it is not a fad. Some assets may be overpriced, but this new domain is attracting capital that appears to be competing with traditional assets.
Q: Tell me about your understanding of China and China blockchain? In addition, what do you want to say to BBP’s Chinese fans?
I feel the blockchain is an entirely different animal to the Asian community in a very positive way. I say this because it is like the wild west in that it has untapped potential from every direction. In my opinion, Chinese investors are willing to take more risks and I think is partially because of the desire to put money to work because of historical inflation and the swoons of the Chinese stock market, and this is very positive because they want something they believe in — in contrast to a small list of stocks. Plus the high number of IT engineers graduating in China, the new blockchain patents, and new unique business applications available gives China the 9.0 rating. I think China will help pull this industry up to maturity.
