Team Spotlight: DASH, Austrian Economics, and Doctor Who with an Exodus Developer (PART 2)

This is part two of a two-part interview series with Exodus Developer Doug Barbieri. You can find part one of the interview 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.

Other than bitcoin, are there any other projects that you’re a big fan of?
I’m a big fan of Dash. I liked originally how they were trying to do purely anonymous transactions. Right now, for those people that don’t know, bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous. In other words, you don’t have your name attached to anything on the blockchain, but it is all public. And if you use the same address to do all your transactions, if somebody finds out that’s your address, they can see what you’re doing. Right? They can see, oh, you’ve moved this bitcoin to that address, and with investigative work could put together what you’re doing. So, it’s not completely anonymous.

Dash wanted to change that with DarkSend, they wanted to have it so where you couldn’t trace currency being sent from Point A to Point B. In fact, Dash I think used to be called Darkcoin, and then they rebranded their product and focused instead on fast confirmations. The thing is, when you want to move a bitcoin from one place to another, from one address to another, you’ve got to get miners to do that for you. Basically you fill a block up, and then the miner has to accept it, and you have to pay a fee, and you have to wait for a confirmation. You have to wait for at least one confirmation to say, well, yeah, this is legitimate. The shorthand or the rule of thumb of the industry is six confirmations. When you have six confirmations, that’s a pretty good bet that your transaction is going to be good.

That could take ten minutes, and so if I’m sending you money, maybe that’s not that big of a deal. But say I’m standing in a café, and I want to order some coffee, and I beep my QR code, I have to wait ten minutes before you’re assured that my transaction is confirmed.

So, Dash wanted to get around that and make it fast. I definitely appreciated that. They’re focusing on what I think is, to me, the killer feature of any cryptocurrency, and that is it’s a currency. To use a currency, not as an asset, not as an investment scheme, but as a currency. To me, that was the killer feature.

And that’s why I like Dash, and I like the way they rebranded their currency, they’re trying to make it attractive. It’s kind of not really caught on like I would have liked, but that was the other coin that I remember getting into, shortly after bitcoin.

I think Ethereum has a lot of potential as well. I know that there’s problems with smart contracts. I know that sometimes there’s security problems, and this is a problem, I think, with any coding and any software that you write. It’s really hard to have it completely secure. In fact, it’s impossible that it’s completely secure software. There’s always going to be some vulnerability that you never thought of. And so a smart contract that’s revolving around money, oh boy. That’s kind of scary. But I do like the idea and what they’ve been able to produce. Even just like how EOS works, where you can register your address for later use, I mean, it’s a pretty neat feature.

So, I thought that those two projects were really neat to see, and I liked being involved with them. But probably I’m more of a bitcoin fan than I am Ethereum.

If you had a crystal ball, what would you see in it in the context of blockchain evolution or decentralization?
It’s like Buckminster Fuller said, if there’s a system that’s broken, you don’t join that organization or whatever and try to change it from within. What you do is, you create something that works better, that solves whatever problem they’re trying to do, and then you replace it by making it obsolete. My apologies to Buckminster Fuller, he said it much more eloquently than I, but that’s the gist of it.

The idea is that in order to fix the banking system, you don’t fix it, because it’s unfixable. We replace it. I see the future of banking as cryptocurrencies. I really do. I think that they’re going to really clean the clocks of the big banks, and the big banks are going to either adapt and figure it out, or they’re going to fold.

I think that was Nakamoto’s idea, his vision was to give people a way out of this trap. Because it is a trap, I mean, it’s a debt based system. The whole thing is. I mean, if you think about it, the Federal Reserve is — you know how new money is created is the Federal Reserve types it out on their computers and says, “Here. Here’s 900 billion dollars,” and they lend it to the US Treasury. That’s how they make money. So, just by using one of these Federal Reserve notes, you’re contributing to government debt, and it can never be paid back. It’s perpetual debt slavery.

So, the only way out of that system is not going to be reform. We’re going to have to replace it, and I think that cryptos have got the best shot at the replacement. We have to weather a lot of regulatory problems coming down the pike. What you’re hoping for is that we’ve got a big enough market in cryptos by the time they get around to regulating, that they can’t ignore it and they can’t just outlaw it. Which I think is the reason why a lot of markets have persisted in the US today, because, well, there’s so much money behind it that the people with a lot of interest will go and lobby and make sure the government doesn’t interfere in it.

So I’m hoping cryptos will catch on and get to the point where, well, you can’t outlaw them. You can’t legalize, legislate this away. You can’t outlaw it. It’s here to stay.

What you’re really talking about here, Doug, is financial revolution. I really believe that developers like yourself play a vital role in creating and equipping the rest of us with the tools necessary to fight this fight for financial freedom and independence.
Well, I appreciate that. I’m very, very grateful and humbled to be a part of this organization. I mean, you call me a superstar developer, but I have to admit, I didn’t do EOS single-handedly. I had a lot of support and a lot of help, from other developers and also from the CSE team, the fantastic CSE team that we have at Exodus, which is just second to none. We have a fantastic reputation at this company for support for a reason. Because it’s good, and we have real people that really care about your experience, you know?

We all play a part in this organization. I mean, I mentioned that to JP (Exodus co-founder), I said, “You know, you’ve really created something amazing here.” He says, “It would be nothing without the people that are running it, that are here in this company.” He says “I couldn’t do this alone.” And it’s true. We can’t do it alone.

It shows that it can be done. So, we’re a company that cares about you. We’re not out to scam you, we’re not out to be underhanded. We’re honest. We even put a little heart in the help section of the wallet, you know, made with love. And it is. Everything we do here really, it comes from love.

What else occupies your time, Doug? I know you do a bit of acting, and I mean, your bow ties are always fire. You love bow ties.
I do. I have a bow tie fetish. I have a goal that I want to have a closet stocked with enough bow ties that I could wear one every day, a unique one, for at least a month.

I like bow ties because they’re kind of a throwback, you know, like a gentleman’s holdover from a different era. They’re something that has unfortunately kind of fallen out of fashion a little bit.

But I think Doctor Who helped to bring it back. When Matt Smith was the Doctor, his tagline was “Bow ties are cool.” It was inspirational to me. I’d like to bring them back. I don’t think I could do it single-handedly, but they’re awesome.

You mention Doctor Who and I know this is a drama you’re quite intimately involved with. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Certainly!

I got involved with the Doctor Who audio dramas back in 2010. 2009 I was officially cast as the Doctor, but I started recording audio for actual productions in 2010.

They are probably the longest running fan fiction audio drama that we know of. They started doing everything in about 1982, and it was all obviously pre-Internet, and they were doing things with audio tape, and they would do everything in their house. So, everybody would get together and they would read the script, and they would add sound effects and music, and then they would produce these plays, and of course they were all on cassette tape. But eventually, they put it up on the Internet, and they started kind of putting the casting net out. It’s a lot like Exodus, you know, there are people participating from all over the world. It’s a lot of fun.

Doug, thank you so much for taking some time to share a bit about yourself today.
You bet, Davey. It was my pleasure.

Ladies and gentleman, for your listening pleasure, Doug as the doctor:
http://www.dwad.net/index.php/2017/07/11/takamagahara-dalek-oblivion/