Chris Bates Interview Part 2

 

Do You Think Governments Understand Bitcoin?

The irony is politicians make a lot of decisions on a host of pressing issues. The system doesn’t allow them to become specialists and they’re forced to make quick decisions. Things like blockchain are being heavily investigated by governments but the problem is some of the government officials are going to people who don’t have objective information and this causes them to be skeptical about what is being presented.

To me it is for the community to stop trying to hype these projects and become more pragmatic in their approach to getting the information on blockchain across, or else the window on getting it out will close.

Realistically, no government has any interest in giving up sovereignty over their currency for Bitcoin, especially if they have no forum to represent themselves. One of the upsetting things that I see in the crypto community is when a particular country’s currency begins failing and people rejoice thinking people in certain countries are going to flock to Bitcoin. I find this disturbing because you have to think about what are the motivations behind the groups that are advocating for those types of practices.

What Are Your Thoughts on Failing Currencies, the Unbanked, the Unbankable; and How Bitcoin is Being Marketed Toward These Constituencies?

I think it’s a problem for a couple of reasons number one, no one knows who controls Bitcoin. As much as it’s supposed to be agnostic the trade gets heavily concentrated towards certain exchanges that can move from country to country. So we’re talking about at a currency that is controlled by different parties that may dump the currency on a whim because of a personal interest. When this happens you see a lot of wild swings in the price. Some countries actually try to control Bitcoin in order to not destroy their own currency.

I don’t think that the Federal Reserve is ever going to replace the US dollar by a government order for Bitcoin and I’m not sure why people try to convince me of this. There is no country whether it’s the United States, Russia, or China that would ever consider replacing their currency with Bitcoin.

In the case of countries where currencies are actually failing and you see people who are cheering that kind of news, it is disturbing because they are doing so in order to profit from it and that is just not ethical.  However, this is what some of the people in the Bitcoin community are turning into.

If this is the sentiment among some in the Bitcoin community, what makes them any different from the bankers or the 1%?  How is that decentralization?

 

It Is Great to Hear an Alternative to the Common Narrative.  In Your Opinion What Else Needs to Be Done to Close the Knowledge Gap?

People need to get engaged in more discussions and debates around these issues and have them tested.  We should not allow all of the important discussions to take place behind closed doors.

That way if we take the debate back to the public square people will get to see how the big ideas are tested and allow certain viewpoints to be vulnerable to being wrong when someone doesn’t have the proper information.  This is the way people will be able to accelerate the conversation.

What Are The Latest Developments in The Project?

We have just finished our alpha build and we have our first client in Mauritius at the Avalon golf club and working to get video surveys of their properties thereby attaching a digital registry with video footage of all of their properties. Once they start transacting it will be attached to the blockchain and this is where we are also trying to take our progress from this project and pitch to developers that are working in Mauritius on the Smart City. We are basically getting the proposals ready and asking and asking if we can be the blockchain backing their projects.

The relationship with the Avalon golf course came about when I presented to government agencies and other private organizations at a blockchain conference in September. After showing them what the software could do, they wanted to know more. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t overnight, but once we showed them the value of our product and how it could help them they were happy to sign on.

 

How Would You Describe The Process of How You Think Your Crowdsale Went? 

Our crowd sale took place last May and we rose close to $40,000.  By crowd sale standards it would be considered negligible in terms of the amount of money that we were able to gather.  Most of the money went to securing lawyers and business facilities but what we were able to do with that money was pretty good compared to what Etherium has done with 18 million.  I’m much more proud of the impact we’ve made with what we were able to raise, which was much greater. My thing is it’s not a matter of how much money you have, it’s what you do with it.  Hype-trains sooner or later get derailed and with the money that we received, we are headed in a direction that nobody’s going to see coming.

 

I Was Disappointed [Now Really Regretting] That I Was Unable To Participate In The Crowd Sale Because I Had Trouble Obtaining Tokens.

That is what happened to a lot of people because the interface that we used to raise funds was a little obtuse. I had arguments with the people who designed the interface in the terms of why they needed to redesign it.  Ultimately, it impacted our crowd because it wasn’t intuitive and people got deterred by the by the learning curve associated with obtaining digital currency.  It’s great to raise $40,000 in revenue and be contacted by various governments to use our software, but if we had anywhere near what other projects have been able to raise there’s no telling where we would be right now.

A lot of people are skeptical about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology because some of the projects out there don’t have normal software development life cycles and are not following normal protocols. This describes why so many of these projects are seeing so many forks taking place on their blockchains because every piece of software needs an upgrade, patch, or an update at some point in order for the software to work properly.  It happened with Etherium and now it is happening with Bitcoin, even though many said it wouldn’t happen but now they have to change their rhetoric.

 

How Do You See the Bitcoin Fork Working Out?

It comes down to whether people want to continue to delude themselves.  The code is inherently flawed and the community is going to need to make the choice of whether or not they want to upgrade or continue to patch. The community is backtracking towards regular software development life cycles instead of taking the decentralized approach. Ultimately comes down to the development community needing a leader. The community will make the choice in the end because you can’t do shit without a leader.