I thank you so much for uh kinda Chicago
to speak but shouldn't all the points
now million with someone like overstock
who's a major corporation they're just
starting off their own coin isn't going
to be a little much to to manage it for
the average user I think they need a
coin to buy things from overstock to buy
things over to buy things from you know
let's say yes an average user buy
something from the 50 different brands
so I think it's important to realize
that as part of the transition towards
fully programmable digital money one of
the things you are changing is this idea
of having very high switching costs so
switching costs an economic sense and in
as a term used in economic switching
cost is the cost to switch to a
different competing system right I'm
with Comcast I want to be with oh wait
they bought all of them I'm with I can't
find a single example of competition so
the theory in economics is that when you
have to substitute goods and you try to
switch between them one of the
considerations is the switching cost
right now so what is the switching cost
with traditional currencies is actually
quite high if you want to switch from
you know USD to euro from euro to yen
there's some significant switching costs
in fact and for many people around the
world the switching costs are equivalent
to infinity because it is illegal or
highly controlled as to who can use
multiple currencies so what happens in a
world of digital programmable money is
that the switching costs drop to zero
and if you have liquid systems that can
be swapped so one of the technologies
that I'm really excited about now is the
application of payment channels and
simple smart contracts to do what are
called atomic cross chain swamps who's
heard of that term before okay so an
atomic cross chain swap is when you take
two chains and you nuke one of them no
atomic comes from computer science and
it means indivisible so an atomic cross
chain swamp is a transaction that occurs
effectively in a coupled way on both
block chains where I'm selling my
Bitcoin and buying light coin from
another individual and we do two
transactions I do a transaction on the
Bitcoin network that gives them my
Bitcoin and they do a transaction on the
litecoin network that gives me an
agreed-upon exchange rate amount of
light coin we both lock those in with
multi-sig and then we have secrets that
we can exchange in such a way that they
can't cheat me by taking the Bitcoin and
not giving me the like one and I can't
cheat them by taking the light coin and
not giving them the Bitcoin and that's
why it's called atomic either both of
those happen or neither of them happens
and that way you don't have to trust the
other person you can put up the money
worst case they disappear in three days
later you just get a refund transaction
but if all goes well you can do it swap
between so what happens when that
becomes completely and fully automated
when essentially your currency can
transmogrify itself into another
currency instantaneously fluidly
liquidly the other technology that's
really exciting is the possibility of
Lightning Network which is routed
payment channels to have multi currency
capabilities meaning that you have a
lightening channel with some node and
you transmit Bitcoin down that lightning
channel and at the other end that gets
converted and pops out as litecoin so
effectively the Chan
itself in between house anatomic
cross-chain swap is one of its functions
and so now you have a multi currency
micro payments network that allows you
to move any amount even tiny tiny
amounts with near zero fees between two
currencies at that point what I hope to
see is that wallets take over that and
you never see it the wallet simply says
okay I want to buy something from
overstock.com the example you gave query
the overstock server what currencies
does it take here's the list
what currencies do I have here's a list
which one can I do the fastest lowest
cost transaction between the two or
maybe in my wallet
I've actually set it to optimize privacy
which is the currency is going to use
it's going to optimize currency or
minimize transaction fees or maximize
cross-border activity or maximize mixing
why not and then my wallet will execute
an optimal strategy will convert what it
needs to convert into whatever it needs
to execute that strategy with a set of
payment channels and lightning network
channels it has so eventually all of
that disappears into the background one
of my thoughts is that maybe we start
seeing a currency that only exists as a
unit of account it's only hues for
pricing and it's not used for the actual
transaction you price everything in that
and that just translates on to
everything else so who knows if you want
to see a world like that go invent it
you know that's basically how open
source works anybody who wants to build
a wall at like vats is gonna be pretty
useful
go forth and build
you