Team Spotlight: DASH, Austrian Economics, and Doctor Who with an Exodus Developer (PART 1)
This is part one of a two-part interview series with Exodus Developer Doug Barbieri. You can read part 2 here- or find the full interview now on our Steemit Page!
The following is a transcript of a recorded interview that took place on May 1, 2018.
Welcome to Exodus Movement, easing you into the new economy. I’m Davey, and today, I am joined by one of Exodus’ superhero developers, Doug Barbieri.
Doug, it’s so awesome to have you here today.
Thanks, Davey. Thanks for having me on, I appreciate it.
For all of you storing your EOS inside of Exodus, Doug is the knight in shining armor who championed the one-click EOS registration feature, saving thousands of us from the complexities of the EOS registration process.
I want to share an email we received from an Exodus customer.
Our customer writes:
“I have just registered my EOS via Exodus. This may sound dumb, but it was too easy. Is that it? If I followed your instructions on the website, and I am now registered for EOS, do I need to do anything else? It just seemed way too simple.”
I love hearing things like that. It always warms my heart. And you know, that’s part of the reason why I do software, I want to make peoples’ lives better. So, it’s a lot of fun when you hear that. I always put myself in the shoes of the end user anyway. When you have a bad design, or some painful experience, it just sucks. And EOS, the way we had it before, where you go off to MyEtherWallet, I mean it sucked. That was terrible.
And, in fact, I was actually doing customer support for a while, and I would have to give people this set of raw instructions. I remember one woman wrote in and said “How do I register my EOS?” And I said, “Well, it’s really complicated, but here’s the link if you want to try it. I have a hard time recommending that you do it, because you have to export your private key, and that opens you up to some vulnerabilities if you’re not careful with your key. You have to make sure that when you go to MyEtherWallet that you’re not going to a hack site,” which happens to people, they call them phishing sites, where it looks like the real thing. You punch in your private key, paste it in and send it to them, and then they drain your wallet, even though it looked legitimate. So, you have to be really careful with that.
That lady wrote back and went “This is so complicated!” And I went, “You know, I’ll tell you what, we’re probably going to be adding support for a registration feature in EOS at some point down the road, and we’ve got time.” The [end of the] distribution was many months away. And she says, “You know, I think I’ll just do that. I think I’ll just wait.”
And it’s just funny because I transferred into development and I got to put that feature in. I did it in some ways for her.
Are you personally a fan of EOS?
It’s got a lot of potential. I think just from the standpoint of competition, Ethereum definitely deserves to have some competition. I know that’s kind of what they want to do, they want to be able to have smart contracts and give Ethereum a run for its money, and I wish them the best of luck. I hope that they’re successful.
There’s certainly a lot of excitement over EOS and its potential as a competitor to Ethereum, but occasionally this excitement is tempered by the prospect of government regulation. We see this not only with EOS, but also with a whole host of digital assets. There’s currently restrictions in Washington State and New York, and of course there’s concern that this could spread to the rest of the United States. In your opinion, is government regulation necessary to take crypto mainstream?
I’m really radical on this one, but I don’t even think there should be an SEC. I don’t think that the government should be regulating any of that. I think it should be sink or swim, invest at your own risk, because when you think that you’ve got this benevolent organization out there that’s keeping you safe from the bad guys, you see a company come online and say, “Hey, we have a stock offering,” [and people think,] “They couldn’t lie. The government wouldn’t let them do that.” There’s plenty of examples of regulated entities out there, they’ve gone through all the motions and then it turns out they’re crap, and they’re crooks. So, it’s no guarantee of safety. I think it gives more of a false sense of security to people.
I would just prefer to see a free market in all that. And then maybe institutions might spring up that could offer certification. A little like UL does today, you know, Underwriter Laboratories. They certify electric appliances, electronics, all kinds of stuff for safety, and it’s a third party you have to send your equipment to them and they test it, and if you don’t get a good rating, you can’t put the UL sticker on your product. I mean, you could probably still sell it, but who the heck’s going to take it?
And it’s that kind of thing, you know, where it’s like “I want to invest …” I mean, that’s what I’d like to see for ICOs and I don’t . That’s an opportunity, a marketing opportunity, I think, that somebody should come up with a service that says “Okay, we’re going to regulate these ICOs, if they’re willing. Well not regulate, but we’ll certify,” which is a form of regulation. “If you see an ICO and it doesn’t have our stamp on it, you might think twice before you participate in it.”
And it might be nice having competing organizations that can do this and say, “Hey, this has got a stamp of approval.” I know it’s food related, but imagine the kosher label, for example. That is a form of regulation. If you go to buy a kosher product, and it’s got the kosher stamp on it, you at least have some assurance of quality. You know that a Rabbi was there and he blessed the pickles, and you know that it was processed in a certain way, and you know you have a reasonable assurance that what you’ll be getting into, what you’ll be buying, is going to be of high quality.
And same thing for any of these things, I think. That’s my diatribe.
What is it that ultimately drew you to Exodus?
Well, I mean, what brought me to Exodus was what brought me to cryptocurrencies in general.
With money, a really good book to read is “What Has the Government Done to Our Money?” by Murray Rothbard. It’s a pretty short read, but it walks you through the history of money in general. We’re talking about the 10,000 years of human history that we know about. How long money, the concept of money has been with us, and what has typically been sort of bid up in the marketplace as money.
And one of the things that he fingers is gold, and there’s good reasons for gold to be money. Gold has kind of been bid up in the marketplace as the best money, because of certain principles. You’ve got fungibility and you’ve got divisibility. And it actually has value outside of being a currency. It never spoils. It lasts forever. They opened up King Tut’s tomb, and you’ve got gold that didn’t even need polishing; it’s still in pristine condition.
But the thing is, governments over time have provided their own units of gold. So, it used to be that the dollar, for example, the US dollar was regulated to be 1/20th an ounce of gold. So, every dollar was worth 1/20th an ounce of gold, and that was a fixed gold standard. The British pound was, I believe, 1/8th. Although the pound sterling used to mean one pound of sterling silver, that used to be what a pound stood for, and then they moved it to gold.
And then, during the Bretton Woods issue post World War II, Europe got decimated, most of the world had all these problems, and so they found that with all the war problems they had depleted their gold, but the US still had lots of gold. So we said, “Hey, look, tell you what. Instead of pegging your money to gold, why don’t you peg it to the US dollar and we’ll keep the gold.” That was the Bretton Woods agreement. And of course, that broke down in the ’70s, when France demanded to the US, “Here’s our US dollars, we want the gold.” Nixon knew that it would wipe out Fort Knox, so he took us off the gold standard. That’s when you get this runaway inflation in the 70s and we’ve been inflationary ever since.
So, along comes Satoshi Nakamoto with his ideas. His White Paper is the White Paper that changed the world, and they came out with bitcoin. I remember when I first saw it, I was like “What the heck is this? I can generate ones and zeros on my computer all day long, this just doesn’t seem like anything that actually works.” Until I read his White Paper and understood what it was that he was doing. And he’s actually doing math. You can’t fake math. When you mine a bitcoin, you’re actually doing an equation. You’re actually coming up with an answer, and the answer has to be right, and you have to be the first one to come to it if you’re a miner, and if you reach the conclusions first before everybody else, you get the block.
And so, the idea is that this is an inflation-resistant money that’s not controlled by anyone, you don’t need a central bank. And I was really intrigued by this, and so I started playing around with it. I was like, wow, this really has potential. And so I started buying it and selling it, doing fun things with it. I actually wanted to use it as a currency. I wanted to really play with it and just see how viable it was. And after a few times of using it to buy what little things I could find back in those days, I was really impressed. I was like, “yeah, I’m hooked on this” and so I became a fan of bitcoin.
I was using the Core wallet chiefly to hold my bitcoin, and I found it to be clunky, difficult to use, and it never gave you any fiat prices. It never gave you the bitcoin in fiat prices. The other thing was that my old computer, since you have to download the entire blockchain with the Core wallet, would overheat when it was trying to catch up with the blockchain, and so I said, “I gotta find something better.” Started looking around, and I found the Exodus wallet.
And as soon as I downloaded it, I fell in love it. Because, well, first of all, it’s like “Oh, look. My bitcoin has a dollar value next to it.” That right there was a selling feature. But then, you know, aside from the fact that it’s just this beautiful wallet, gorgeously designed, that’s really what got me hooked.
But I’ll tell you what, the biggest thing was the support. When I interacted with the support, I realized, geez, there are real people behind this wallet that really want to make sure that your user experience is the best that it can possibly be, that you have complete control of your own money, and that your experience is awesome.
And that’s kind of how it happened. And then I saw that they were hiring on their site. I mean, really that’s kind of how it worked. That’s how it got me there.
I had a very similar experience. I was first a user of the wallet, fell in love with it, and it wasn’t until a short time later that I joined the team.
