I built a lot of bitcoin and lightning proof of concepts with Visa and the research team.

But you have to remember, visa serves the banks, and banks don’t really love bitcoin. When a major player starts to accept bitcoin as an alternative to paying merchant processing fees, I’d imagine a snowball effect begins and visa starts really moving on this front.

Until then, they’ve got a good thing going and game theoretically are not incentivized to change much.

Bonus: maybe an oracle? Visa is one of the most trusted brands in the world. Maybe custody services? They deal a lot with public private keys today and are well equipped with this. Maybe infrastructure? They have some of the highest uptime and reliability out of any company in the world.

But honestly, probably a CBDC platform for central and commercial banks.

We’re all bens. We’re all a part of this.

We have put a ton of time and effort 1) to build a ton of features 2) to make a beautiful design that doesn’t get too complicated

My goal has always been building an app my mom can use. Sharon is a meme at TBC (love you mom).

I hope you’re there with us as we layer in more features and watch the evolution from rewards app to bitcoin banking app

I’ll come on to tell Skeef how I feel.

I’m not sure where I’ll be the week after next tbh. Hopefully tho. Sounds fun.

Literally no maintenance whatsoever lol

PS: we fucking love the guys at fold (except Skeef)... Will Reeves has been so damn helpful to me over the past week alone, helping me understand the challenges we will face moving forward. So much love and respect for those guys...

.... except skeef

That's what it is today. --> so we had to start by offering better rewards, more brands, and a better referral program that allows you invite your friends to boost your rewards rates until we literally make nothing on you, and you earn sats every time someone else buys a card.

Next week --> we will look a little something like pay with moon + bitrefill

Next month --> we will look a little something like moon + fold + idk... something with card-linked-offers

--> banking services --> bitcoin exchange --> bitcoin rewards Visa card ------> we got a lot coming ya'll

withdrawals from our future exchange to your non-custodial wallet :)

Right now... we're in the most critical phase of our business... we have to scrap and fight and work our asses off to survive and grow.

We have a reasearch wing that has given away 8M+ sats for research and try to be smart about how we do it... often attending hackathons and giving bounties to cool projects we'd like to see brought to completion, usually asking for a blog post after they're done. See here and here... we also put out an awesome learning portal that takes a lot of time to create and keep updated with newsletters, etc, but are hopeful that we can provide the community with resources for now.

Our long term goal is to create a profitable business which can give back enormously in the future.

PS: I also founded OpenSats, a 501c3 to support free and open source bitcoin contributors which will be going live at the conference (shhh). We will continue to find clever ways to ask and incentivize our users to give back to the people creating, maintaining, and improving bitcoin moving forward and hope other companies will do the same.

1a.tldr: It really all became real in a pool in Guadalajara, Mexico with Benthecarman and Katie the Russian.

I have been thinking about starting a company my whole life, but never quite knew what it would be, I just knew that I would take one big stab at it and that I should really have a solid understanding and conviction of what it was when it all began. After bouncing around aimlessly in a fiat world looking for purpose, I found Bitcoin. I've always loved game theory, economics, psychology, math, and always knew something was "off" with the wolrd... especially after learning Keynesian macroeconomics in college... so Bitcoin really clicked for me and changed my perspective on life... gave me hope for doing something with a purpose.

I left to take any job I could find in the space and landed as the first PM @ Visa Crypto where I build out a ton of proof of concept bitcoin payment stuff with them... but eventually grew very tired of constantly being asked to focus on stablecoin and CBDC stuff, when all I wanted to do was Bitcoin. When COVID hit, I left to start nomading around the world to places that let me live my life (not San Francisco) and ended up in Guadalajara, Mexico sharing an apartment with Katie the Russian. We invited carman down to come live with us. And we we're in the pool on the top floor when I told him the idea for The Bitcoin Company, and asked if he would join if I left Visa to get it started. He said yes... and from that point on... it was going to happen.

The Bitcoin Company is here to bring Bitcoin to as many people in the world as possible. We are a bunch of bitcoiners sick of the way the world works today and think that the best way to help people (who we believe are really fucked otherwise) is to provide them a reasonable alternative to the traditional banking system... a way to opt out and get the same traditional banking services, and bitcoin services in one place.

I'm not sure why Carman is doing it... but I love the guy.

honey?

i will get you back for this... someday. still not as bad as Marty doxxing ben's cowboy hat at bitdevs last month

how you gonna doxx me right away? I'm @abitcoinperson

lft... congrats