0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ziggamon OP 28 Jun 2022 \ parent \ on: I'm Sergej Kotliar, CEO of Bitrefill. AMA. bitcoin
Mainly ETH, USDT, Binance Pay and Litecoin
You should of course pay taxes on purchases on Bitrefill if that's the requirement in your country, in many cases it is. There's no automatic mechanism in which e-commerce merchants report to "the tax man" or anyone else who their customers are but one can imagine that that could theoretically happen.
You're right, it's not bitcoin, it's rewards denominated in btc. If it were BTC we would have to require verification of all customers.
It depends really. In some cases we can, depends on whether we are able to buy the products locally and transfer money into the country with BTC. We did that a lot in the past, a bit less so today as it requires a lot of work, so only doing that when we actively focus on a particular country.
The Book of Satoshi of course. As well as the early writings in the mailing lists. And while not a book the early writings of the Nakamoto Institute. There's also good technical books, not least the ones by Andreas Antonopoulos and Kalle Rosenbaum. And I guess Sovereign Individual should be mentioned but I guess you've already read it.
Non-bitcoin: So many tbh. Peaceful warrior is great (also a great movie). Robert Greene's series are interesting. The Fountainhead. I dunno, so many really.
Well, I'm a guy who likes hard problems, so I'd tackle a hard part of the circular economy, probably some kind of marketplace for people to earn money in bitcoin. And not in small/gimmicky ways, on uber or upwork type scale. I'm actually surprised nothing has achieved massive traction in that field yet, maybe bits of financial infrastructure missing. I think stakwork.com are doing great work in that regard but there are also other angles or avenues that should be explored.
Or maybe I'd just do open source work. Lots of opportunities in the Lightning ecosystem, not least once Taro comes out I think it will unleash a massive wave of innovation with plenty of opportunities.
Yes. We just want to get it right on the first try and have had a lot of other things in our pipeline.
Just a matter of priorities, we'll get to it for sure, just need to get it right from a legal and biz and pricing perspectives
I came up with an even better answer:
If you think about how an enthusiast of a particular shitcoin is marketing their shitcoin, that's largely how the world perceives bitcoin and bitcoiners too. We need to make our marketing different from the shitcoin world, and unfortunately we've regressed a lot in that regard in the past couple years.
Great question! But a tough one :)
Marketing is to a large extent about listening in towards people needs and offering them legit advice. Pushing stuff down people's throats doesn't usually work.
Some thoughts off the top of my head:
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We need to talk more about financial freedom and why that's important for someone.
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Talk more about what [the listener] can do with bitcoin that they couldn't do otherwise.
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We need to make bitcoin cool. As in really cool, and exciting. Something that people would have as a print on a t-shirt and go to a nightclub. Currently bitcoin is cool among a nerdy techy audience, and the gold-buggy type "sound money" enthusiasts, but those groups are a minority in the world. How to do that tho? That's the trillion dollar question.
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I think we need to talk less about all the "belief system" stuff that bitcoiners associate with bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't conservative values. Bitcoin doesn't care what you eat or how you work out. It has no views on abortion or on covid vaccines. Bitcoin is a thing, and it's super amazing as it is. We need to market bitcoin as bitcoin and not as part of any specific belief system. It's money for enemies, you can use it however the hell you want, and your ideological opponents can use it too, and that's a good thing. It's just money.
Need is relative, but given that we're one of the top destinations for lightning coins it's advisable to open channels to us ;)
This is our main node: https://1ml.com/node/03d607f3e69fd032524a867b288216bfab263b6eaee4e07783799a6fe69bb84fac
Lots of things. Even simple stuff as picking up on when someone's not feeling well is trivial to do in an office but much harder when you only see someone once a week on a group call.
But there are lots of benefits, much less drama and more focus on work. And when people actually get to meet in person after having collaborated remotely for months or even years that's a really magical feeling that creates a beautiful vibe.
Meeting in person has a lot of value and we spend a lot of time thinking around how to enable more of that.
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Alby the browser extension. We need better wallets and better ways for people to use their coins. Alby is following in the steps of Metamask which AFAIK is the most successful crypto wallet out there, and we desperately need something like this in bitcoin.
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LNURL and all the tinkering that is going on in that community
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Taro - It's not well understood by everyone yet, and still in conceptual phases. But if it works as I imagine it doing it could disrupt massive parts of the crypto industry and solve many of the problems that we currently have.
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Chaumian vaults sounds really interesting too as a model that offers interesting tradeoffs between usability and decentralisation.
🤷♂️ Offering services for which there is already a demand from users is easy. Building tech is easy. The hard problems are all on the marketing side.
What are the typical volumes of bitcoin that run through Bitrefill on any given day?
We don't currently share our top-level metrics, so I need to pass on that. We will though in the near future.
Are there patterns relating to how he market is doing or is it independent of that
A bit of both. Obviously when market goes up lots of people have coins to spend, and less so when it's down. But a large chunk of our volume is from people who have a steady income in crypto, or live on crypto, and they still come in because people have to live. So we're down much less in volume than say an exchange would.
What are the most difficult parts of creating a circular bitcoin economy?
Copying from above:
Lots of things. We can be at most half of the circle - there also needs to be ways for people to get "coins to spend".
Marketing wise it's challenging because the freedomy arguments of using your own wallet and all of that gets drowned out by all the speculative stuff in the crypto space. In bitcoin the speculative stuff is just "hodl" or leverage, in broader crypto it's "shitcoins, defi, yield" and so on. We don't offer customers a way to get rich. So during bull markets it's hard for us to get attention outside of all the places where "you can get rich here", during bear markets customers are poorer so spend a bit less. That said we've weathered the current decline with only a minor drop in volumes, and are still firmly above break-even.
What makes you happy about the bitcoin world at the moment
It's a great community with lots of people optimistic for building a better world
what makes you upset or angry?
In the past few years thought leadership moved from "builders" to "talkers", and narratives in the space end up really limited to just "things that make you bullish" and stuff like that. I wish there was more focus on building the future, we've had enough "macro-economic analysis about why bitcoin is a good investment"
Do you believe shitcoins will play a big role in bitrefill's future
That remains to be seen. The history of the world has a lot of examples where one tech wins over the other for reasons other than technical. Stablecoins really killed bitcoin maximalism, and there are tons of stuff that the ethereum community is actually doing better than the bitcoin one - the main such thing is simply use of wallets. Also I think that a bitcoin world will be a world in which people create tokens, not least that which we today call "unregistered securities". The goal should not be to call every token other than bitcoin a shitcoin, but rather focusing the energy on calling out the projects that are scamming their investors (which today is the vast majority of them, but it's already not 100%)
Lastly, where did you get the name ziggamon from
It's been my internet handle since the teenage years. It's a play on my first name and nickname in Swedish, from a drunken conversation about digimon.
We're doing the best things for us to do given our resources. With more resources there's a never-ending list of things I'd like for us to be building. As we grow we get to do more and more of them.
In terms of big things we're not doing (yet) would maybe be more lightning infrastructure and core development, a better wallet, more ways for people to be able to earn bitcoin, lots of stuff that falls under "regulated" territory, etc.
Yes I think it would be more productive. But all else is not equal. Hiring globally gets us to hire people with rare skills and even more importantly an intense passion for the mission we're on.