WBD030 Audio Transcription

Teaching C# Developers to Integrate Bitcoin within their Applications with Vortex

Interview date: Friday 17th August

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Vortex. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk with Vortex, founder of the Crypto Cast Network and Programming With Bitcoin. We talk about how he is teaching C# developers to integrate Bitcoin within their applications, ICE/NYSE and Bakkt, and fractional reserve Bitcoin.

“We’re going towards this central, totalitarian, surveillance, police state with the central banking system we have.”

— Vortex

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Morning, Vortex, how are you?

Vortex: Hey, how are you doing, Peter?  Really excited to be on this podcast, I think we've got a lot of stuff to talk about, so I'm really excited to get to it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and thanks for coming on.  As you know with my podcast, I tend to ask some of the dumber questions, because I'm not from a technical background, but want to learn as much as I can and I think, obviously you're quite a technical person, you've got a history of software development, so I think it would be good to explore some of these subjects, but I might ask some questions that might seem a bit silly.

But just for those who don't know you, because you're actually my first essentially anon guest, but if you can let people know a little bit about your background, the things you do, and where your experience lies?

Vortex: Sure.  So, yeah, really just want to say one more time, really excited to be on the podcast, Peter, I'm a big fan.  You interview a lot of people that are in the space that I care about and that I listen to and look up to, so I really just want to say one more time, thanks for having me on the podcast.

But really, my background is just mostly software development, so I really did start specifically web development, web application development.  So, I started way back in the late 1990s and started with classic ASP, then went into a little bit of PHP, and finally I found .NET, and that's where I found my favourite, my calling right there, my favourite software development language.

From there is where I built my career in software development over the past 15 years.  It's been bouncing around from smaller projects to larger projects, small companies, large companies.  I've kind of run the gamut at this point.  And then, of course, I found Bitcoin and that has just led me to a whole other world.

Peter McCormack: And, from my background, because I used to have a web agency, but I was the sales guy and I had developers and we had PHP and .NET.  And from my understanding, PHP is obviously open source; .NET is Microsoft, right?

Vortex: So, .NET is Microsoft, however .NET has been open-sourced, along with the C# language.  Microsoft, about five years ago or so, open-sourced it and since then, it's actually been growing really exponentially as things tend to do when you open-source them.  Anybody in the world can become passionate about it and put all of their mind to it, all of their passion and their mind and their knowledge right to it. 

So, that's what we've seen with .NET, particularly C#; it's just getting a ton of commits from the community, people are really excited about it, and of course now, it's completely cross-platform, so that's another thing they did when they open-sourced it.  Now, it works on every platform: Mac, Windows, Linux, and so there are a lot of Linux C# developers out there nowadays.  So, it's really exciting to see this platform grow and year after year, it continues to be in the top five most loved and used languages across the world.

Peter McCormack: And interestingly, I think the reason the majority of our clients were on websites built using PHP as opposed to .NET is that, one client I remember that we had on .NET, there were really high server costs.  You would probably have to explain it to me, but the installation of the software on the server, or the licence for the server, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was very expensive, and most clients who were having a small website built just could not afford the cost of .NET.

Vortex: Yes, absolutely so.  Back in the day, in the early 2000s, Microsoft still had their monopoly, their control on software, and really they were charging those prices.  But really, about five to seven years ago, Microsoft got a new CEO, they got a new direction, they realised that you can't monopolise software anymore, thanks to that beautiful thing that we all love and know, called the internet.  This has really levelled the playing field for people who want to bring software to bear on the world.  This is now the future, both the future and the current world that we're living in; anybody in their garage can put any large company out of business now, right, as we've seen. 

So, this is the ethos now, so Microsoft has made all of their tools free, all of their main tools free to start out with.  You still have to do licensing for large amounts of users, and things like that, but for the most part, it is just entirely free.  They've open-sourced and freed all of their main tools, all of their main stack, from ISS, the server processor, to Visual Studio, the actual development IDE that you write the code in.  At this point, yeah, most of everything is free and really welcoming to developers with the amount of documentation that they really provide these days.

Peter McCormack: And C#, so is that the language the Bitcoin software is written in?

Vortex: No, so let's clarify this a little bit too, because people get Jimmy Song's course and my course a little bit mixed up.  So, what I really focus on is, I'm an application developer, so I'm not a protocol developer.  So, protocol developers are, oh my gosh, very few and far between.  This is a very specialised niche field that only a select number of people on the planet even pursue.  So, this is another reason that keeps Bitcoin so amazing, so innovative and so secure, is some of these developers that are working on Bitcoin.

So, I am by no means going to be working on Bitcoin itself anytime soon, as a protocol developer.  However, what I am is an application developer, so I write specifically web applications; that's what I've done throughout my career.  So now, there is a library called NBitcoin, an open-source library created by a gentleman named Nicolas Dorier, over there in Japan right now, and he created this open-source library, called NBitcoin, that allowed any C# developer to be able to integrate Bitcoin into their applications.

So now, with this library, now we can start working with Bitcoin, not on Bitcoin, but with Bitcoin or over Bitcoin.  What I'm saying is, we can start sending transactions, we can create wallets, we can integrate software with Bitcoin, for example storefronts, so we can start having stores accept Bitcoin.  And even having the back end, start verifying with Bitcoin.  So for example, you can use it as a verification system to verify that this document actually existed with a cryptographic hash on the Bitcoin blockchain directly with this software.

So, the workshop is teaching application developers how to work with Bitcoin, and that's what I really like to do, is work with Bitcoin.  So, that's the difference there between an application developer and a protocol developer.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but what language is the protocol itself written in?

Vortex: So, the protocol itself is written in C.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so what's the difference between C and C#, just out of interest really?

Vortex: Sure.  It's interesting, because the protocol itself was written in C, and that's great, we need it, because C's a very low-level language, and that's great; we need a protocol which is a very low level to be written in these lower-level languages.  But application developers, they need stuff to be a little bit easy, because they need to be able to do a lot more things.  They need to be above that layer and be able to do a lot more exotic things a lot easier, and without having to worry about the bottom stack working, without having to worry about the protocol working or not.  We just assume that it's always going to work, so we build our applications on top.

Similar to how the web works with the internet, we built the web, the World Wide Web, over the top of the internet, over the top of the HTTP protocol.  We built JavaScript, and we built PHP and we built ASP, all of these languages, over the top of the protocol, so that's the big difference.  So, Bitcoin itself was written in C, the protocol, but then there's these libraries, like NBitcoin that's written in C#, that application developers can use.  Then there's implementations, like Bitcoin Core, that are written in different languages; there's Bitcoinj that's written in Java; there's a Go implementation.  So, there are all these different implementations, but the protocol itself is C.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, your objective with this is to increase the number of people who programme in C#, but also expose other C# developers to programming and interface with Bitcoin, to therefore spread Bitcoin out, so it integrates with more live web applications?

Vortex: Absolutely, and not just web applications, because C# is not just for web applications.  With C#, you can actually build regular Windows and Linux applications as well.  So, you hit the nail on the head; the main goal is to get more people working with Bitcoin, more developers aware of and working with Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and where do these workshops run?

Vortex: So right now, the workshop is like Jamie's workshop; we're trying to take it around the country and see if we can get feedback there, and see if we can come to people's local backyard and really get them interested in Bitcoin.  So right now, the next three scheduled cities are for Las Vegas, San Francisco and Seattle.

But in addition to that, we're going to start doing an online course next month as well, so hopefully we'll be able to get people a lot easier that way; it will make it a lot easier for them to join the course so they don't have to actually go anywhere.  We'll just hopefully be able to do it over YouTube, so that will be great too, because I think we can get a lot more developers that way as well.

Peter McCormack: And I assume these courses are for people who have some kind of programming experience; it wouldn't be for somebody like me who has no idea at all?

Vortex: I'm sorry, Peter, but that's correct.  This is specifically for C# developers.  In fact, we do ask that you be an intermediate C# developer, which means between one and two years of C# development.  But really, all of the ability to be a C# developer is completely available online.  Like I say, all the education you ever need at this point is online.  There are so many tutorials, there are so many videos, that if you really want to take control of your own destiny, you can learn C# relatively easy from all of these free tutorials and then take the course, and then work with Bitcoin.  So, it really is all up to the end person.

Peter McCormack: You're obviously a very passionate Bitcoin person.  I've been following you on Twitter for a while.  I love your commentary on other people's posts as well.  Why is it so important to you; what's the big deal for you with Bitcoin?

Vortex: So it's interesting, there are a couple of big angles to that, but essentially I guess, to put it most simply, I saw where the world was going.  People who were paying attention to economics, people who were paying attention to finance, we see where the world was going.  We really were going to this central totalitarian surveillance police state; that's where finance was headed with the central banking system that we currently have.

So, I kind of saw no way out.  There was really no other path until I found Bitcoin.  And with Bitcoin, we really did invent digital scarcity, we really did steal fire from the Gods, we really did have the ability to create our own money, the money for people, the people's money, that we can control and not inflate and just completely print away.  So, this became a great passion for me in that way, because I saw a way out for humanity, I saw an ability to reboot our global financial system a better way.  Maybe it's not perfect, nothing's perfect, but we have to at least try to move away from the system that we currently have, the fiat system. 

So, that's what gets me up every day, is trying to educate people about Bitcoin and trying to tell them that, "Hey, guess what?  We found a way.  After thousands of years, we have found a way out of the central banking system, we have found a way out of the need to trust a third party, we have found a way out of censorship, we have found a way to actually have digital scarcity and permissionless innovation that nobody can stop across the planet", and this is the promise of Bitcoin and this is what I try to share with my audience.

Peter McCormack: I went through your Twitter and I thought it was quite funny; you only follow the Federal Reserve!  I assume that's some kind of subtle trolling.  But then I notice you split your -- you actually have two lists.  So, you have your Bitcoin list, which I assume is basically most people's follow feed; then you have your positivity list, which I thought was really cool.  But, is your Federal Reserve as your only follow, is that some subtle trolling?

Vortex: Yeah, so absolutely, because I saw Snowden, right, and he's only following the CIA!  So, what that was is it's not necessarily trolling; what it really is in my opinion, maybe it's some level of trolling, but my personal opinion is it's really bringing awareness to the fact of what the actual message is.  He's bringing awareness to the fact that, look, he's keeping an eye on the CIA, because he's trying to tell you guys that there's something wrong with the CIA.  He's only following one person to try and bring attention to this, to try to raise awareness that there's something wrong here.

That's what I try to do with my account, is only follow the Federal Reserve to show people that, "Look, this right here, this is what I'm fighting against.  This right here is the problem, this is what we need to change, and I want to bring awareness to why we're all here in the first place, because without Bitcoin, nobody would be here".  I got into Bitcoin because of people printing money in the wrong way.  And now, look where we are today, with ICOs and all this craziness.

So somebody, in my opinion, had to bring attention back to the original reason why we're here, to create a sound money, to create something outside of the state, to create something outside of the current financial system, something new, something that everybody can use, so that's a big part of that.  And of course, I do have my other lists.  Positivity, I am pretty spiritual, so I try to bring some of that education that I've come to really learn over many years of studying this kind of thing, so I try to bring that to people as well.  And in addition to that, I've even recently started to try to do one-hour DM AMAs, where people can just ask me anything they want for an hour, and hopefully I can help them in that way.

Peter McCormack: That's really great, and obviously it's worked, because I saw it and I'm now asking you the question.  And now that question is going to go out on this podcast, and my listeners are going to hear it.  So I guess strategically, it works.  I don't know who my one follow would be, I don't know, I'd have to think about that.  I also notice you follow someone who's become one of my most favourite people on Twitter, Beautyon.

Vortex: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: And I think he is a real -- I assume it's a he, but I think he is a real hidden gem on Twitter.  I don't agree with everything he says, but his tweets, more than anyone else, make me sit back and almost think, and I try and digest them.  I mean, I don't know if you've ever spoken to him; I'd love to have him on the podcast.  But I just notice you converse with him a bit.

Vortex: Absolutely.  So, I have a whole bunch of stuff to say about that amazing gentleman!

Peter McCormack: He is pretty incredible!

Vortex: He's absolutely incredible.  I mean, he really is a scholar, he's this person and if you looked at his office, it would look just like you think it does, just stacks and stacks of books of knowledge.  This guy is well versed in history, politics, economics, finance.  In my opinion, this is really a renaissance man, in every sense of the word.  This man has understood where we are, so this man can definitely understand where we're going, and that's really, really cool, because he does tweet out a lot of stuff, he really, really does, and it's hard to keep up.

Because of that, we actually started working together recently.  I just started a new YouTube channel, called Crypto Cast and the Crypto Cast Network.  You can find that at cryptocast.network.  And I'm trying to bring Beautyon himself on to create a podcast.  So, he's agreed to come on, maybe I shouldn't spoil it yet, but maybe on your show, Peter, for you, man, I'll let you know.  I wasn't going to say anything yet, but for you, I'll let you know. 

Beautyon is trying to do a show on my network.  I think we're going to call it Bitcoin Matters.  And what he's going to do is, he's going to take his tweetstorms, his amazing tweetstorms, that can almost go on for what seems like forever, his amazing tweetstorms, and he's going to try to create little audio bits, little bitesize versions of that, in the form of a podcast and try to give some more colour, try to give a bit more description, maybe hold people's hands a little bit more to try to understand where we're going, because he does do some of these advanced techniques, some of these advanced topics, and some of these advanced ideas and concepts. 

He's going to try to bring it down a little bit to earth, and in this audio format for everybody to be able to really understand and grasp.  I think we're going to try to start doing that within the next couple of weeks.

Peter McCormack: That would be great.  I occasionally actually have the odd private DM with him and put to him things that I'm confused about, because I'm from a traditional background where we have left-wing politics, right-wing politics, centre politics, and there's nothing outside the box, and I've just lived a very traditional life, right.

I went to school and then I got a job and I earned money and I went to the pub on the weekend and I wasn't exposed to any libertarian politics, I wasn't exposed to any libertarian economics, none of this.  It's all new and it's quite a seismic shift when you start thinking about new things.  I can't even remember why he and I started talking, but I occasionally put things to him and questions to him.  I certainly test his patience, but at the same time, he's recommended a couple of books for me now.  So, I've got a couple of books which I'm reading because of him.  But that's a great idea for a show.  Yeah, I mean I would look forward to that and, yeah, really interesting.

Okay, so let me ask you, and I know some people say it doesn't even exist as a term, but are you a maximalist, because it seems like I would say you're like a 95% maximalist?

Vortex: Yeah, it's really interesting.  Bitcoiners get this term posed to them all the time, they get this question asked all the time, "Are you an actual maximalist?"  Just a real quick history.  This term was coined by Vitalik.

Peter McCormack: Oh yeah, of course.

Vortex: Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum.  It was coined by him, because he saw these bitcoiners with this extreme focus on sound money and he was like, "You know what, if you're only focused on this one thing, then I guess you're a Bitcoin maximalist; and everybody else who's trying to do something different, we're not a maximalist". 

So, the term itself never really made a whole lot of sense to me, because there's people that are focused on creating this new money, creating this sound money, creating this new financial system, and then there's people that are working on other interesting experiments, maybe smart contracts -- well there's not a whole lot of other stuff interesting to me that's outside of Bitcoin right now, but there are some things that are interesting to other people, like smart contracts and things with Ethereum, and of course ICOs.  That was a big thing, Ethereum's big claim to fame, even though, of course, they were originally supposed to be a world computer.  But now, that seems to be their focus.

So for me personally, I try to champion innovation on my show, I try to encourage people to explore, to try to figure out new things, because we are all on this ride together.  There's never going to be only one answer to any problem.  However, what we can do is we can try to build something together, we can try to find a common language that we can then build things on top of.  So, that's sort of what we did with the internet.  We decided to come together and say, "You know what, TCP/IP, that's the winner.  TCP is the winner, the open-source version is the winner, that's what people want, and now we can build an entire thing on top of it", and we built the World Wide Web on top of it.

So, I think that's something similar to the path that we're going to find with Bitcoin where we're going to have all these other experiments and that's great, but we're going to need a common language to all speak together to be able to exchange value, and especially exchange value in a permissionless, censorship resistant way.  So, in that way, I think that especially with the Lightning Network now being private by default, completely encrypted by default, I think that once you just connect to the Lightning Network and connect to Bitcoin, once you do that, then you can do whatever you want.  You can have other coins, you can have other derivatives, you can have other features and things like that, whatever you want to do.

So, I try to almost discourage that term, and I try to just encourage innovation and I try to encourage experimentation, but I really try to encourage focus.  Whatever you're going to do, make sure you put focus on it, because the people, for example, what we call Bitcoin maximalists, most of them are just focused on this single thing, which is sound money; on this single thing that we can try to end the central banking cartel that's been completely havoc on society and killing millions of people and stealing millions of dollars and billions of dollars of people's savings, and all of this craziness; we try to build something alternative to that.

If you're trying to build an alternative to that, then that's great, that's what we're trying to do.  But the people that are most focused on that, that are most focused on this sound money, are what we call Bitcoin maximalists, these people that are focused on Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and that makes sense.  I think that's the kind of conclusion that I've come to, because obviously I interviewed Pierre recently, and I tried to explain to him that, I think if you come into the market when there was really only Bitcoin, it's very easy to stay on the Bitcoin journey and be a Bitcoin maximalist. 

It's very hard when you come late and the first time you log into Coinbase, there's two things or three things or four things; and then, trying to get your head around why Bitcoin Cash exists, and get your head around -- it just takes a bit of time.  I think I'm getting there and I certainly wouldn't say I would, or ever would be, a Bitcoin maximalist, because I think it's interesting to see other projects.  But I do understand Bitcoin maximalism in terms of sound money, I totally get that. 

So, outside of Bitcoin, what other projects are you interested in?

Vortex: So, right now, there's just really not a whole lot of stuff outside of Bitcoin that actually peaks my interest to the point where I want to pay attention to newsletters, Twitter accounts, mailing lists.  There's so much information coming from Bitcoin that if you really are into Bitcoin and really are focused on sound money, there's just so much coming out of there that you almost don't have time to pay attention to anything else.

Bitcoin is my full-time job; I work pretty much for Bitcoin.  I like to say that I work for Bitcoin now instead of companies.  So, when you do that, when you actually try to dig deep into this stuff, you can see that there's just a never-ending amount of innovation that comes out of this space, just never-ending.  And when you pay attention, like I said, to all the different social mediums, the mailing lists and the Twitter accounts, you can find that there's always somebody working on something interesting in Bitcoin, and again, with that end goal of a focus on sound money, not breaking that first layer; and with that focus of having a layered approach, where we can have millions and millions of transactions per second with Lightning on top of Bitcoin.

So, you see these projects with that in mind, with that idea in mind, execute and build these scalable actual applications.  There was something real quick called Satoshi's Place.  Satoshi's Place was this drawing application, where you would pay 1 satoshi over the Lightning Network per pixel.  It ended up actually scaling really, really well.  There were just tens and tens of thousands of transactions, this thing was going viral, insane, and we were wondering, "Is this going to break Bitcoin?"  This is the experiment, right, because CryptoKitties broke Ethereum, and all the ICOs broke Ethereum; would this break Bitcoin, would Satoshi's Place break Bitcoin?

Sure enough, it did not break Bitcoin, not even close, didn't have any effect on the network at all entirely, and people were actually getting feedback and helping fix any sort of issues that were happening in real time.  So, not only did this one site get more activity just as a test bed, more activity than all of the top ten dapps in Ethereum, this thing actually scaled.  It didn't slow down, it didn't break, it actually worked.

So, this is the type of stuff that I focus on, on a day-to-day basis, applications with this type of things in mind, this layered approach, the scalability, the focus on sound money.  You can find a whole lot of things, and maybe we'll talk about it later, but people like this Bitcoin Optech that was started, they're trying to tell people about this, they're trying to get the word out about it.  And of course, with my show, I try to educate people as well on Bitcoin and all the new things that are happening at Bitcoin.

Right now, most of the big things that are happening with Bitcoin are happening within Lightning, so Lightning is what I'm really focused on right now and all of the innovation that's going around in that.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so that's an interesting place to move to then, because Lightning itself also can be a very difficult thing to understand and get your head around, and I've discussed it with a few people in detail, with Samson and Jameson Lopp; and originally one of the things I struggled with with Lightning is it felt like we were creating two layers for Bitcoin, and your ability to use each layer would be dependent on the affordability, because the base layer could end up being quite expensive in the future if there are millions of transactions going through the Lightning Network; actually closing out on the mainchain could be quite expensive.  So, that's something I've been exploring.

But I also noticed a tweet from you when you talked about, I think you shared an image of a water droplet, talking about the different layers in Bitcoin and the speed they move.  And then I couldn't help but compare the layers of Bitcoin almost to Inception; you've seen Inception, right?

Vortex: Yes, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: It almost felt like the different layers move at different speeds, but it's obviously all one connected network.  So, moving onto Lightning, what are the biggest myths around the Lightning Network?

Vortex: So, one of the biggest ones you've already touched on when I read it.  You were like, "Very, very expensive transactions", and of course that's not what we're seeing right now, now that the network has further evolved.  We're seeing things like companies batching their transactions, we're seeing techniques like that; we're seeing SegWit being in play over 40% of the network, so we're seeing much cheaper transactions that way.

We're also seeing the companies themselves scale because remember, during the last runup with these huge, costly transactions, Bitcoin kept working.  But most of these companies, these exchanges, they all went down.  Coinbase went down, these things went right down.  All of the centralised companies that were in the space went right down; they were not prepared for this type of traffic, this inflow that happened during the last big bull run in December.

So now, the ecosystem is much more aware, is much more ready.  Like I said, we have SegWit, we're batching transactions, we have more things that are in the place that can create more privacy and more optimisation.  So, Bitcoin is getting more and more optimised as the years go on.  So, yes, we had that bit of an influx of price transactions, but that wasn't really Bitcoin's fault; that was how the network was being used, that was how the actual participants were using the network.

So, if we used the network more intelligently, if we continue to optimise the software the blocks use, we can continue to keep the transactions' prices relatively low on-chain.  And that's important, because that's a bit of a myth that I want to get across, is that people think that Bitcoin transactions are going to be expensive forever, or one day be millions of dollars for a single transaction, or something like that.  That's just not the case, because we are scaling Bitcoin.  We are scaling both Bitcoin in every way and sense of the form, for transactions, for transaction speed, for transaction propagation, for synching with the actual blockchain itself, and everything you can think of we are scaling and optimising.

So, I don't believe we are going to have super expensive transactions on-chain in the future.  I do believe that they definitely will be more expensive than Lightning transactions, absolutely, transitioning to the Lightning.  So, with Lightning, the transactions there are going to be really, really small.  It's enforced almost; not really enforced, but encouraged, because it's almost free to run a Lightning node.  So, people are going to set their transactions low in order to compete with other Lightning node.  Since the cost is low already, then you're already competing with a very thin margin there. 

But there is an opportunity, as Lightning grows, and grows exponentially, which it seems to have been doing so far, and we expect it to be, in my opinion, completely saturated throughout the entire ecosystem by the end of next year, I think that it will continue to grow exponentially, and there might be an opportunity for people to actually make some money, some Bitcoin, or earn interest on their Bitcoin, by putting it in the Lightning Network.  So, that's an interesting thing we can talk about later as well.

But I think another myth, one of the biggest myths, is that Lightning is like an altcoin, the actual coin inside of Lightning is an altcoin.  So, I'd like to disparage that myth a little bit, because Lightning is definitely another layer, but it's not an altcoin.  The big difference is, it is real Bitcoin, completely attached to Bitcoin in every way.  It is real Bitcoin in the Lightning Network.  A good analogy I like to do is, if you sign a Bitcoin transaction, for example, if you take your Electrum wallet and you sign a transaction, but you don't broadcast it yet, that transaction right there, that's basically a Lightning transaction.

So, the Lightning Network itself is just a bunch of unsigned Bitcoin transactions that have not yet been broadcast to the network, to the mainchain.  So, it's real Bitcoin, it's signed by real Bitcoin addresses that are really existing in the network, it's just that they haven't been broadcast yet, and they don't broadcast until they're ready.  And that's what we call settlement, so we settle eventually to the mainchain. 

So, that's what we're seeing, we're seeing this evolution of Bitcoin.  We're seeing that Lightning is going to be the actual transaction layer where we're going to do most of the medium of exchange; and then Bitcoin, the base layer, will be more of a store of value where we settle back, like a savings account.  So, it's like a chequing and a savings almost.  I think that's where we're going to probably evolve next within the actual user interfaces.

But if you look at some of the work that's been done by, for example, Jack Mallers on the Lightning Zap wallet, we can see that the integration is so seamless, it's so beautiful, only differentiated by a colour, something really simple.  But it still very much makes you understand that this is Bitcoin, you're sending Bitcoin now, it's just going to get there a lot faster and a lot cheaper.  But again, there's some of these trade-offs, right. 

So, you have to understand channels right now, Lightning channels, and that's another myth, "The users are going to have to deal with channels, they're going to have to completely all have to open a channel, have an open channel, we're going to have channel problems with too much liquidity in a central place", and things like that.  The reality is, all of this is going to happen in the back end, and it's already starting to disappear off the UI.  It still has to exist in the UI and the UX right now, these channels, users are going to have to be aware of them; but eventually, they will completely disappear and it will just be seamless, you'll just send a transaction, just like Bitcoin.

Then, I guess the final myth I'll go on is that these Lightning nodes are going to get centralised, we're going to get another, what do you call it, Federal Reserve-like situation, fractional reserve-type situation with Bitcoin, fractional reserve.  And of course, that's not even close to the case, because what we're seeing is on live, we're seeing -- remember, guys, this is a live experiment.  Bitcoin is live, Lightning is live, you can see all these statistics.  And what we're seeing live right now on the network is that it is a completely decentralised situation; it is not a hub-and-spoke centralised situation. 

Anybody can hop on the network at any time and start funding liquidity, then the channels will route.  We haven't even completely finished the routing capabilities of Lightning; it's actually going on something that we call "autopilot" right now, which does its best job to get you from point A to point B, and does a good job.  But when the actual finished part of the routing gets done, it will be completely seamless and the channels can be completely disappeared from the background, and it really will be just seamless, instant Bitcoin transactions.  And from the users' perspective, there'll almost be no difference at all.

Peter McCormack: And routing, is it the biggest challenge right now facing the Lightning Network, where a lot of the focus is?  I've read a bit about routing that it's essentially new tech that needs to be developed; help me understand that.

Vortex: Yeah, and that's an interesting myth, I guess, as well is that people think that routing isn't figured out for Lightning.  It's completely figured out, it's just not finished coding yet.

Peter McCormack: Oh, okay.

Vortex: This is how early we are, guys.  That's almost the final block for Lightning, is this routing part, and it's literally already written up, figured out, by the smartest people, like Laolu from the Lightning Labs and other people, they've already finished this up.  So, at this point, it just has to be coded up and that's going to be happening within the next six months or so.  So what we're looking at, like I said in my opinion, by the end of next year, just complete penetration of the ecosystem.  You're going to have to get on Lightning. 

If you're not on Lightning, it's like you're not on the World Wide Web, you're just on the internet, which means you maybe just have email.  But of course, we know with the web, we can have all sorts of things.  We can have all these other different messengers and we can have entire applications built in the browser, and all of this other stuff built on top of the internet.

Peter McCormack: So, we're still in beta for Lightning.  When is it expected for it to come out of beta and it to be fully rolled out; is that what you mean by the end of next year?

Vortex: So basically, what we're looking at now is Lightning is fully launched on livenet.  It is in beta form, but it is in beta form on livenet, so just so you know, for you and your viewers, that's an important distinction, because it actually first started out on testnet.  We have to test stuff first, and it was on testnet for a long time to make sure that all this stuff was working before we ever put it on mainnet.   

In fact, there were some people in the Lightning community that did not want it to go live as early as it did, so now we have the hashtag "reckless" in the Lightning community!  But it has been a complete success so far, again only in beta, but they did launch on livenet, I think in February or March of this year.

Peter McCormack: Okay, wow.  And so, when it starts to roll out, what would we expect to see?  Would we expect to see consistent interfaces, a consistent experience; and, how similar is it to a Bitcoin transaction?

Vortex: Again, there's some great videos out there that you can check from people that are working on wallets, like Jack Mallers, and you can see that it's very, very simple.  The UX and the UI looks exactly like Bitcoin; the only difference is that people try to differentiate with a colour, for example blue or purple for Lightning, or yellow for Lightning, and then orange for Bitcoin.  So, that's really the only difference.  And for example, in BTCPay Server, an open-source alternative to BitPay that allows anybody to be their own merchant processor, for that it's a very simple dropdown to Bitcoin or Bitcoin Lightning, and so choose which you want to pay with.

So, it's not consistent.  The UI's absolutely really the opposite of consistent right now across the Lightning ecosystem, but that is something that I believe will be figured out over the next 6 to 12 months.  But like I say, by 18 months from now, it will be consistent, like you say, just consistent across the ecosystem, everybody will be using it.  Because it will be used so much, if your wallet doesn't support it, it will be like not being on the World Wide Web.

Peter McCormack: And do you expect therefore, across the majority of ecommerce websites, we'll start to see a rollout of, you know, you used to pay with debit or credit, then it was pay with PayPal; do you expect then a pay with Lightning to expand pretty quickly, because it feels like you used to be able to play with Bitcoin in a lot of places, and then places have removed it because of the scaling issues.  Do you expect therefore to see quite a rapid rollout of Lightning within ecommerce websites?

Vortex: Yeah, great question.  So first, let me just say this, when I say, "By the end of next year", I mean within our own ecosystem, so I mean exchanges, I mean wallets, I mean everybody within the Bitcoin ecosystem, you've got to be supporting this.  Now, when you're talking about mainstream adoption, that's something different, right.  However, with Lightning, there is a whole lot of work, again being done by many people like Jack Mallers on the Zap wallet, for merchants specifically to be able to reinvigorate the merchant space again; because as you say, merchants a little bit went away when the transaction fees got too high. 

They had unfortunately a misrepresented expectation.  There were people like Roger out there that was like, "This is going to be free forever, no problem, on-chain.  We'll put every single bubble gum transaction and coffee transaction on the chain forever, and that will be great, mirrored across millions of computers for all of eternity", and it's like "No".  We want to optimise something better than that, and so now with Lightning, people are starting to build out merchant software, again just amazing, beautiful merchant interfaces that allow people to just, as easy as tapping to pay with Visa or Apple Pay, just as easy as that, just tap, bam, done; it's that simple.

There are videos out there that you can go look.  I encourage you and your listeners to go out there and look at some of these demonstrations, some of these proofs of concept that are working right now on livenet that you can actually go look at and see people pay a coffee transaction, because some of these merchants are running some of this beta software.  You can see people paying with real Bitcoin over real Lightning livenet network, paying for their coffee with the wallet on their phone, and it's working right now. 

So, I think there will be a big push.  And I believe that after next year, towards the end of 2020, 2021, is where we're going to start seeing the big merchant adoption again, because Bitcoin will be in the news again from the price.  So, between 2021 and 2022, we're going to see another big influx of merchant adoption, absolutely, with Lightning.

Peter McCormack: And Lightning pretty much kills of the use case, I think, for Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.  I mean, Bitcoin Cash, the team will obviously have their arguments about the vulnerabilities of the Lightning Network, which over time will hopefully prove to be FUD.  But it's going to kill off the use case for many other cryptocurrencies.

Vortex: Yeah, and that's interesting, because a lot of these cryptocurrencies, they're not taking the most important part of a medium of exchange into account, which is the store of value.  You cannot have economically, physically, in reality, have a medium of exchange unless the item is a store of value first.  You can say it's backed by everything like that, but if you can't take it to somebody to get X, and then take that money and hold it for a while for a little bit, maybe to pay for X a week later, if that doesn't work then you don't have a real money.

So, there's all this talk in the BCH sphere about how medium of exchange, transfers, that's value, that's what makes it a store of value, medium of exchange.  No, if that was true then I could just take some seashells, transfer it to you, and now you believe it has a store of value.  No, no, that's not how it works.  The money that you're using to exchange value has to have a store of value; that's what you're doing, you're exchanging value and human capital. 

Now with Bitcoin, we have the ability to store human capital, like Trace Mayer likes to say, "There's only two things that are scarce in this universe, and that is time and Bitcoin".  So now, we have the ability to store time in our Bitcoin; we have the ability to store human capital in a real store of value that can be used across time and not deflated.  So, that's a really important value.

But BCH, it's really interesting the community that they're trying to build, it's really crazy.  You asked me how is BCH going to happen in the future?  Well, which one.  They've already recently just split.  BCH has fired the recent developer, Datalink, and now hired a new team that was just announced today, called Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision.  They're forking the Bitcoin ABC implementation that was previously used for Bitcoin Cash, maintained by Datalink, into this new implementation, that is maintained by a developer, I forget his name now, some developer at nChain, who was all over Twitter this morning talking about how they've got hundreds of developers that they're going to build stuff with, but it's all in secret, not open source, so we can't see the code, so we've just got to take their word for it.  Just got to take their word for it, guys; BCH is going to be okay, we've got to take their word for it!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so Craig Wright's involved in this, right?  I've seen him tweet it out.

Vortex: Absolutely, that's nChain.  nChain is Craig Wright's company.

Peter McCormack: So it's just another nonsense, pointless Bitcoin which no one's going to care about?

Vortex: It's another implementation that nobody's going to care about.  And they've already started the rhetoric, the thought leaders in BCH have already started saying, "Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin SV; BCH is Bitcoin SV.  ABC is the altcoin".  What?!  ABC is the altcoin, BCH is the real Bitcoin!  You get so lost and if you look at some of these "about" pages on some of these guys' BCH websites that are trying to explain Bitcoin Cash, the "about" page, or the "history", it's just like four or five pages of all of this ridiculous drama, craziness.  You think a regular person is going to ever read any of that?  No, they're not going to understand any of that; they're not supposed to understand any of that. 

All of this is supposed to be in the background.  The only people that are supposed to understand this stuff is the technical people, the developers, the CEOs and the investors that are building these companies.  Because, let me tell you something right now, Peter.  In the future, when Bitcoin is everywhere, we're not going to be talking so much about it.  It will be like talking about the dollar.  It's just going to be not interesting.

But right now, it's interesting, because this is new, this is a brand-new, world-changing technology, and so we're going to talk about it.  BCH is not talked about, not used and now they apparently have another developer and another implementation that they think might win.

Peter McCormack: Well, that could be their own civil war then, which would be fine.

Vortex: Really, some of the big things happening in Bitcoin is around privacy, because at this point, we've sort of solved the scaling issue with Bitcoin; we have Lightning.  People are working on Lightning, it's very, very promising, the technology's working.  All we need to do now is finish that last mile.  So, scaling is essentially solved, it's no longer interesting to some of the smartest developers in the world, so they're working on the next big opportunity in Bitcoin, the next big problem in Bitcoin, and that is privacy.

So, we're trying to -- there's many people out there that are working on various different implementations of cryptography that allow for just a whole bunch more privacy.  One of those implementations is a hidden wallet.  Hidden wallet is a wallet that's trying to do something called a Chaumian CoinJoin on the network.  What this means is that it uses other people's transactions to be able to obfuscate where the transactions came from.

When you do this CoinJoin transaction and combine your transaction with all these other people, the actual people that are trying to scan the chain for analysis can't tell where the transaction came from, or even what the balance was originally.  So, it really does obfuscate a lot and create a lot of privacy.  So, these Chaumian CoinJoins, the first one was actually done on livenet just a couple of weeks ago, by the developer, nopara73.  You can google this and check out the open-source software project, it's great, and of course written in C#!  But check that out. 

The first live mainnet CoinJoin transaction was done, and it was successful.  It was only around seven people, but the software's designed to be able to scale to hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands and then millions of people, eventually creating this really great option, if people want privacy on Bitcoin, to be able to have, so that's a big thing, that's one of the big things.

Peter McCormack: And would that be optional privacy?

Vortex: Yeah, so that's essentially optional, you do have to opt into that right now.  But the idea would be for it to be so robust and successful that software developers would want to build that into their wallets by default, and that would be the great end goal.  It's a slow process, of course, we have to have it working and ready; but over time, the idea is to make privacy by default in Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: So interestingly, I think privacy is obviously good for the user in Bitcoin, but will possibly be very bad for the price, in that I can't see Coinbase -- well, Coinbase are going to have some KYC AML issues if Bitcoin is a private coin.  So interestingly, do you see what I mean; it's good for Bitcoin, but bad for the price?

Vortex: Well, that's not entirely true at all, because again it's optional.  So, Coinbase could, for example, choose not to accept transactions that appear to be CoinJoined.  They sort of already don't accept transactions that are coming from certain things like gambling sites, they're already doing their blacklisting thing.  And I think that the open, free market will win out again.  I think somebody will come along with something better that will allow these transactions, that will have more liquidity, that will have more users and will have more activity and eventually will be more successful.

So, it's just a competition, but it's just so early right now in the Bitcoin game, let alone the Bitcoin privacy game, to be able to tell how that's going to play out.  But in my opinion, yeah, it doesn't affect the price at all, because the market demands this, the market wants this.  I guarantee you that privacy is one of the number one killer apps for Bitcoin; censorship resistance, the ability to route around these crazy controls that we've had in place for hundreds of years.  This permissionless innovation is, I believe, going to win out over these centralised KYC solutions like Coinbase.

Remember, Coinbase looks a lot like a bank, it looks a lot like what we already have.  And that's always true with new world-changing technologies.  We build on this new amazing, great, amazing opportunity, the new amazing technology.  What do we do?  We build an emulation of the old, we do it every time, with roads, with electricity and now, with money, we're doing this with banks.  So, I think that over time, these better solutions with more privacy will win out.

Peter McCormack: Okay, interesting.  So, do you think that then will end up killing off the use case for Zcash and Zcoin and Monero; do you think those coins will end up having no use case?

Vortex: Well, it's interesting, because Lightning is already privacy by default, so that already kills their main use case.  Now, do coins ever go to zero?  Rarely, they rarely ever go to zero, there's always going to be somebody mining it.  But again, this is the protocol wars.  We've had a similar protocol war with the early days of the internet with TCP/IP and X.25 and these other protocols that these large institutions were trying to compete with, and we saw the open source win out every time, because it was better.  There were more smart people working on it, it was being updated more, it was evolving quicker, and that's what we're going to see with these other projects as well. 

It's only going to drive the price higher, it's not going to affect the price lower, because this fear that you're trying to instantiate, that we'll have to fear KYC, "If it's not KYCd it's not going to get market adoption", that is the thinking of the current market; that is the thinking of how things currently work.  But if you look five to ten years down the road, that is not how things are going to work.  We're going to live in a world with crypto, with private crypto, with truly private money, with truly free trade; and in that world, we can build so much more, so much bigger society, almost like a golden age, so much more better things for society than what we're building with these fiat ideas.

These fiat ways, the central banking ways, these older methodologies are just going to crumble, so they will not be able to compete with what's coming out.

Peter McCormack: And it reminds me then of that quote, I think you shared it out, from Simon Dixon, where he was saying, "The cold, hard reality is that Bitcoin is either worth zero, or it's sound money.  If it's sound money, it's worth a hell of a lot more than it is today", it's kind of interesting.

Vortex: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so what other interesting developments are there, the most important developments you think are happening in Bitcoin?

Vortex: So, another one is something on the development side called Schnorr signatures, and this is really, really cool, because this allows us to achieve a couple of things.  This allows us to achieve further scalability, but also further privacy.  This allows us to really scale out multisig transactions, it allows us to create more complex multisig transactions, more complex smart contracts on Bitcoin, and in a very, very private scalable way. 

So, we can now, for example, combine thousands and thousands of transactions into one single signature with something like Schnorr, and it will be private, and that increases privacy as well, because now you can't tell where the addresses are sending to, because it's all part of this one single signature.  So, it ends up both being good for scaling and good for privacy.  So, I think Gregory Maxwell is the one that's currently working on that right now, and that is going to be a huge development for Bitcoin. 

That's going to allow the next evolution of smart contracts, a next evolution of scalability, or privacy, a next evolution of further programming on Bitcoin.  Because right now, people think that Bitcoin is limited, and it is limited in a sense, but it's limited on purpose.  The amount of things that you can do with Bitcoin is actually pretty extensive, if you really understand the cryptographic perimeters and you combine them in such a way.  That's the key, is the combination of them and what you can do.  Now, with Schnorr, that's another block, another building block that we can use to build even more powerful and important things.

Peter McCormack: Well, the level of complexity of what is being created seems insane.  The way I can explain how complicated this is, I went onto Peter Todd's blog and I didn't even understand what the articles about, let alone understanding the topic!

Vortex: Absolutely, it really is a whole other rabbit hole.  And it's like this in anything, right.  If you try to talk to somebody who runs a nuclear power plant, you go to these guys, you don't want the whole world weighing in on how these people are running a nuclear power plant, you want intelligent people, people that are suited for the job, people that have done this their whole life, people that have studied this technology.  You want those guys running the nuclear power plant, you don't want just anybody.

That's just really important, that people think that we put Core developers on pedestals, or things like that.  No, we just respect that they are experts in their field, this is what they've done their entire life, this is what they're passionate about, this is what they're going to do until the day they die.  So, if we're going to trust anybody with this nuclear power plant that is Bitcoin, we've got to trust the people that are passionate about it, the people that are working on it and these types of people, the people that will make sure that when you go to sleep at night, the nuclear power plant is not going to explode.

Peter McCormack: That's a really good way of putting it!  Okay, and then on the finance side, obviously there's lots of chatter about ETFs.  I wish it hadn't become such a hopium thing.  I like the idea of ETFs expanding Bitcoin out into wider communities, but I also watched Andreas' video today where he's against it, and again that all makes sense.  And we've also got ICE launching Bakkt.  So, I'd love to hear your views on both of those.

Vortex: Yeah, absolutely.  There is a bunch of financialisation that's happening with Bitcoin.  What's happening is Wall Street is waking up, the older institutions, they're figuring out that this thing's not going away, they're figuring out the opportunity that they can have from playing with Bitcoin instead of playing against Bitcoin, and that is again testament to the game theory of Bitcoin that incentivises you to be a good actor within the system, instead of against it, because if you go against it, the economics will crush you, as many altcoins and many businesses have seen.

As Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, likes to say, "Bitcoin broke my heart".  What that really means is that he could not have control over it.  He tried his very best to actually have control over it and Bitcoin said no.  He tried to make Bitcoin the way he wanted it and Bitcoin said no, Bitcoin refused.  So, it's really hard to understand, but that's what Bitcoin is; it really is this unstoppable force.  So, these people on Wall Street that are understanding this, they're trying to build tools around it.

Now, an ETF, we've already built a bunch of things, right.  We have the options market, we have futures market now on Wall Street, so we have different people doing these things with the CBOE and the CME.  But now, we need more advanced tools, we need more trading desks, we need more ETFs, we need the ability for 401(k)s and regular people and high net worth individuals to be able to invest into Bitcoin.  So, this is what these things are doing.

Now, it's an important thing to keep in mind that this new Bakkt start-up is physically delivered Bitcoin; that is huge.  What that does is that prevents people from creating fractional reserves, that prevents people from gaming the market too much.  Because, if you have something like just cash settled, that does end up being manipulated a little bit easier.  But when you're talking about physically settled to Bitcoin, you'd better be there, you'd better have the Bitcoin. 

So, what this does is this creates a more safe market for investors, this creates a safer base for people to be able to build applications on top of it.  This is something like a Starbucks, or a big company, a Starbucks can go and say, "Hey, old man, this is a real liquid market, there are real people investing in this, the security is there.  I guess we can start maybe partnering with you to be able to integrate this into our payment systems", and things like that.  So, this is just another stepping stone for Bitcoin, another step in Bitcoin taking over the world.

It was inevitable, of course it was going to take over Wall Street.  This was the plan, guys, this was the plan to bring Bitcoin to the world, to bring Bitcoin to Wall Street.  And they can try as they might to manipulate; they have their tricks, they have their games, we know this, guys.  We know they have high-frequency trading, we know they have manipulations, we know they have people with large amounts of money.  But the thing is, you can only manipulate it so far, because Bitcoin is decentralised, it is global.  There are hundreds of exchanges, the liquidity is everywhere, and you can't actually manipulate it too much.

So, in my opinion, because there are people like Tone Vays that thinks people can just manipulate Bitcoin to the ground, and in my opinion, it's just not possible.  There are too many people in the system at this point, the ecosystem is too large, there are too many hodlers of last resort, there's so much liquidity.  Right now, Bitcoin is actually transacting more than gold on a day-to-day basis.  Bitcoin's now transacting more than gold.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I saw that.

Vortex: So, at this point, you just can't manipulate it too much.  Of course, it's still an illiquid market compared to something like gold, it still really small; but at the same time, boy it is resilient, it is strong, it is robust and it has been tested 24/7 every single day for the past ten years, and still we are here, still it is here, following its supply curve from the very beginning, from the bottom to the top, this nice, beautiful arc.  The price is still following that. 

Sure, it goes up and down a little bit, but it still follows it all the way from beginning to end.  Its actual supply curve from zero, from all the Bitcoin that it does per day, to zero Bitcoin ever being able to be reproduced again in the year 2140, it's continuing to follow that curve, and I don't see it swaying from that curve any time soon, despite it eventually taking over Wall Street.

Peter McCormack: Caitlin Long would disagree with you on creating fractional Bitcoins, and I completely disagreed with her when I originally saw it.  But actually then, I started reading into -- I read her blog post on it, I'm not sure if you've read about this, the two topics, I've never heard of them, I might even pronounce them wrong: commingling and rehypothecation, the two subjects she talks about and the way Wall Street works, and if Bitcoin wants to become part of Wall Street, it will have to be part of it.

So, there is in theory the ability -- but this appears to be not a problem with Bitcoin, this appears to be a problem with the way Wall Street works, in that they will be selling paper contracts essentially to Bitcoin that maybe they don't even have.

Vortex: Well, like I said, remember the Bakkt is physically settled, so that's not just paper.

Peter McCormack: But I think there is a time delay on it.  So, the two things she talks about, so the commingling thing is that the custodian will hold the client collateral, this is the Bitcoin, rather than have them in segregated wallets.  But she says, "Today's obligations can be settled with collateral received yesterday, so it reduces the possibility of a shortfall, but there are different types of collateral that can substitute for each other".

Then, when she talks about rehypothecation, she says, "In simple terms, results in multiple parties reporting on their financial statements can own the same asset".  So, I don't fully understand it, but she has outlined a risk there, and she was saying that Bitcoin needs to change for Wall Street, which I obviously think is terrible, and I think you obviously think is terrible.  So, I don't know if you've looked into that, it went over my head quite a bit.

Vortex: Yeah, so I've seen the article and I've skimmed through it, and I think you really did hit the nail on the head again, Peter, when you said that she thinks that Bitcoin needs to change for Wall Street.  So, let's be very, very clear here.  Wall Street wants to be a part of Bitcoin, Bitcoin doesn't need to be a part of Wall Street.  I'll say it one more time: Wall Street wants to be a part of Bitcoin, Bitcoin doesn't need to be a part of Wall Street.  Bitcoin is economics asserting itself.  You cannot stop this economic force that is a limited supply that will absolutely suck in all other value in the planet like a black hole.

So, what you can do is you can put up articles like this and say that, "Bitcoin needs to change in order to play with us", and what it is, of course, is a power play.  They're trying to say that, "Bitcoin can't play with us unless it changes".  Now, of course, there's all sorts of interesting science behind this, and of course they're going to use all sorts of large financialisation terms, they're going to use all sorts of big economic terms from Wall Street that's going to confuse people into thinking that maybe this is true, but at the end of the day, they've been doing this for years. 

They've been trying to tell us for years that it's going to die in the halving, it's going to die from the futures, it's going to die from the options, now it's going to die from the ETFs.  In fact, Bitcoin just keeps coming, and that's because you can't stop it.  Again, there are enough people in the system right now that want to see it succeed that it will succeed.  Now, it's just a matter of time; now, it's just a matter of when, not if.

So, in my personal opinion, with all of this said, Wall Street will change, they will alter, they will modify regulations and software in order to be able to accept Bitcoin, because the demand will be so great that they will not be able to turn it away, they will not be able to have their way, they will not be able to use as much of their tricks and they will not be able to hide behind regulation.  The demand will just be too great.  People will want to hold this asset, and if they don't allow them to hold this asset, they will find a way to hold this asset somewhere else.

Peter McCormack: And a fork would expose any fractional lending anyway, so I don't think we have to worry too much about that.

Vortex: Absolutely!

Peter McCormack: Listen, we've done an hour and ten now, I could probably talk to you for hours.  I think we're just going to have to do this again sometime.  So, look, before we close out, I think you should just remind people of the projects you're working on, where they can find out about them, and who you want to hear from and where they can find you yourself.

Vortex: Yeah, Peter, it's been great, man, we really, really could talk for hours, man.  You are a very knowledgeable person, you bring on very knowledgeable people, so again I just wanted to say, I really, really enjoy your content, everybody needs to check out all of your episodes.  You've been going for a while now, so I think there's a whole lot of educational content that's really valuable there for people. 

And, yeah, I myself do try to educate people.  I do have a YouTube channel out there, that people can find all my content for me.  That is the Crypto Cast Network.  You can just search for that on YouTube, or Google, of course, you'll find it.  We just try to educate people about Bitcoin, like yourself, try to bring on guests, investors, developers, people that are actually working in the system itself, within the space, not so much just talking heads, not so much just people with ideals.  We try to bring people that are actually trying to effect change and build things on this show, so we really are proud of that and we hope that people learn something from that.  So people again can check that out at Crypto Cast Network.

Then, of course, the workshop.  Me and the creator of the NBitcoin C# Library, Nicolas Dorier, we are travelling the world, right now the West Coast of the United States, trying to teach more application developers about Bitcoin, trying to raise awareness about Bitcoin to developers, so that we can really get them interested in this and in this space, and try to create a whole new wave of people working with Bitcoin.  Because again, it's so early, people don't know that this library is available for free right now, and we can teach you how to use it. 

We're also going to be making all of the information, tutorials and stuff like that for free, available on the website itself as well, because we're going to be creating a website called Bitcoinc#.org, where we're going to curate all of the articles that you would ever need to be able to learn it yourself.  We're going to include all of the material that the workshop was based off of and everything, so that if you're a programmer and you are a pretty smart guy, you don't actually need to use our workshop, you can just check out all the material for yourself.

So, that's about it for me.  I really appreciate you having me on, Peter, and I hope that your audience can find us and more Bitcoin content.  This is really the future and the revolution that gets me up every day.

Peter McCormack: And thank you for coming on.  I will obviously share out all those links in the show notes and out on Twitter so people can find them, and continue your good work and I'm really glad we did this, but I think we're probably going to have to do this again sometime in the future.

Vortex: Absolutely.  Thank you so much, Peter, for having me on.

Peter McCormack: Okay, take care, man.