Adam B Levine: Hi and welcome to episode 47 of lets talk Bitcoin for October 6th 2013. Visit us at letstalkbitcoin.

com for our daily guest blog all our past episodes and of course tipping address. We are at Atlanta for the cryptocurrency conference. For those of you unable to attend, video conference passes are available now from bitcoinvideopass.com. And of course streaming passes and DVD sets are cheaper when you buy with Bitcoin. My name is Adam B Levine and today we are spending the whole episode with Rob Banagale. In this wide ranging interview I recently sat down with the founder and CEO of www.gli.ph at the San Jose Convention Centre to discuss Bitcoin, secure messaging, identity, growth strategies, life as a funded start-up, the open source question, the password paradox, if biometrics can fix it and a bunch more. If you'd like to talk to me on Gliph, I'm Controller-Tree-Pencil-Heart. Rob Banagale : It is great to be on lets talk Bitcoin again. I am so happy to be with you again. It is rad. A.L. : Let's just go with that. Rob Banagle , founder and CEO of gliph , which is a secure messaging platform. The last time we spoke , we were also not too far from where we are now in the city of San Jose. Not where either of us usually reside. It seems to be the place where we do these interviews. R.B. : Yeah , we were just blocks from here. I guess it was not long ago. A.L. : It was about 4 months I think. R.B. : That is a long time in the bitcoin world. A.L : It has been a long time for you too certainly. The last time we talked to you , you had just been accepted into Boost V.C's bitcoin program , basically , with your messaging program. At that time you were fairly new , you had just integrated into your messaging platform. So , for those who did not catch that interview a few months back , why don't you give a brief overview of what gliph is. R.B : Sure , yeah. It is awesome to be back on the show , let me begin there. Very happy to be invited back , it is awesome , so thank you very much. The last time I was on was episode 11 , in case anyone wants to go back and check the archive because I know that is online. Let me just talk about gliph briefly. Gliph is a secure messaging app for iphone and android and you can use the web. But with integrated bitcoin payments in it , which makes sending bitcoin really easy. That is kinda what gliph is in a nutshell. A.L. : You just completed this , it was a two month program right ? R.B : Three.

A.L. : Three month program with Boost VC and there was some seed funding involved and you have successfully levered up that funding and now you are into the next round. As we were talking , but you said that you could keep painting. R.B. : Yeah A.L. : When we talk to people a lot , we find that people are interested in startups rather than a particular startup they want to start. A lot of times people are getting into startups because that seems like it is getting into tact , 10 years ago , right ? R.B : Uh Huh A.L : Because you moved down from portman , oregon . You were in incubator space , working alongside other projects that were in the same space . How did that work , what type of enviroment is this like ? R.B : It is incredible. Boost VC is different from a lot of different startup accelerators. They have set up a hotel that you live on floor , you got a room in a floor . The living situation is taken care of , which is living in the valley is a challenging thing , especcially for entreupreneurs . That is a big detail , which is taken care of right away. You have this small room , with these executive style bunk beds. It has these really nice bunk beds , but my co-founder and I were literally sleeping on each other for the past three months in a small room , so that is the startup life , if anybody was wondering how glamorous it is. So , we would go down , descend 8 stories , go across the street and there was an incubator space that was under construction for a portion of the time we were there , but now it is just beautiful , it is a wide open layout with desks all over the place and other startups in our class , clustered right near us. You go in , you work until you are done working for the day and then you go back to your hotel room and get up and do that the next day. A.L : So ,entirely focused on just working on the project. R.B. : Yes , I mean it is San Mateo , I do not know if the listeners have been to San Mateo , but it is a nice small town , but it is the somewhat forgotten point between San Francisco and palo alto , where San Francisco is the tech startup place and Palo Alto is where the money is at , that is where the Sand hill road , if you don't know it is the big VC road that is in palo alto , menlo park . So , San Mateo is this little place in between that , so it is a interesting spot. A.L : So , it sounds like it was a very positive experience , going through this program. R.B : Talk about the focus you just mentioned , because it is not in San Francisco , it is a small place , there is not much to do. We found this interesting thing you can do at San Mateo , we are cat people , my co- founder and I , and we are doing something cat related with bitcoin . Anyhow , riding our bikes , we go to the edge of town , and head up the bike path. There is a feral cat colony , which are taken care of by local cat organizations. There are like 70-80 domestic cats living in the wild , so we are stressed out and then we go like " Do you want to go see the cats ? " . We do

not have our cats , because they are at our parents houses , both of our parents are looking after our respected cats. We'd just go and see the cats just walk around , and occasionaly someone would come by , a feeder , who would feed the cat. That's how glamorous and fun it is to be in San Mateo now. You can look at cats. A.L : So , work , sleep and Feral cats. R.B. : I think feral is not appropriate to these cats. They seem nice A.L. : They are homeless cats. R.B.: They are homeless , I guess , they have a colony. I don't know if a colony counts as a cat home. I did not think of talking about this here . I hope they are some cat lovers listening to this. A.L. : Again , as I said I think the startup space is something a lot of people are interested in. These incubators are popping up more and more , not all incubators are created equally. But I think the experience is relevent. How did the product deveolop and mature ? Did you make any changes that you did not think you would make or did you come accross anything that made you re-evaluate anything ? R.B. : I would rewind , and back up briefly to when we last talked. If you listened episode 11 , later in the podcast , you ask what would we do next. I said we would do some user experience changes and some other wallets. At that time we had only coinbase. We did exactly what I said on that podcast. If you go back and listen and you look at our blog and the updates in the app store , then we fixed a few things then we did wallet after wallet. A.L : We are talking about the bitcoin integration has , it's like an instant messaging application basically , but you have other options that give you things like delaying delivery of a message to days later , or a certain date. You can set it so that a message is going to expire after a certain time , if you do not want it to be on record for a long time. Then there is a send bitcoin option , where you can basically through this instant messaging interface ,send bitcoin in whatever amount is available on your wallet , from meteu or whatever. R.B. : You do a great job explaining my product , I should eb doing a better job doing this. Gliph has very sophisticated text messaging capabilities , it is a hosted secure messaging tool , where when I send a message to you , it goes into the cloud , it is encrypted in route via SSL , it is encrypted in the server , it is held between you and I in a public private key fashion in a secure state and it can be accessed in any time with any device that supports the web. It has a lot of cool addons. Because the system is so sophisticated , you can do the thing he mentioned , the delay , you can actually delete a message instead of marking them as deleted , by removing it from the server and the other persons device when they refresh the view. The bitcoin is a killer aspect of it. You can take a coinbase account , so if you are on coinbase , you can attach it to your gliph account and from there on , anyone connected to you , so , you and I are connected , that's how we coordinated met here this morning . Then you can say attach bitcoins and hit send , it essentially handles all the details of sending bitcoin , including wallet addresses to be used.

A.L. : I cannot think of anything before gliph that did this sort of aliasing of bitcoin address where you can send to an alias and not worry about generating addresses or anything like that. Now we are starting to see more options like that pop up in other services and it seems like that is a direction we are going to move in , just because it is annoying to deal with incredibly length addresses , but this aliases are quite helpful , but I want to take you to a question of identity. The last time we spoke , we did not have the revelations about NSA and that all our communication methods have been infilitrated. And a lot of this is prescribed to the fact that these are companies that are pressured by secret laws and secret applications of laws. Is that something that concerns you ? R.B. : This is an amazing thing that has happened , but not in a good way. This happened since we talked , and these revelations are disturbing in the most basic level. The concern I think is that basically when you are talking about entreupreneurship and bitcoin startups is starting a company where you want to offer communication with privacy , while based in the united states , you would be compelled to create a backdoor into your system. I am happy to open up and discuss this right here on letstalkbitcoin. This has been a real challenge for a service like Gliph , we have been offering a secure and private system since before the General Petraeus scandal hit , before people were thinking of private communication , here in the united states , as important. Yes , this is a challenging system because we are based in the united states. I was born in the united states.I was born in dimoyn , Iowa , which is where John Wayne is from. He is from Iowa. Here , to create a company in the united states , you can be compelled. I can go on record and say that we have not been contacted by any government agencies , I think some executives have said this and have been lying , but I am not. We offer something to protect people and their communications from any person, wheter it be a hacker , an unauthorized person from obtaining encrypted data , including this lockdown privacy feature which is under setting on the web app and the iphone app. This is a similar feature to what lavabit offered. Your data is encrypted by your password and you cannot reset your password after this , but your data is protected and no one can see your data. A.L. : And this is different because normally when you have something like a password recovery , that inherently requires that your password be reset by someone but you. R.B. : This is confusing , especially with the encryption stuff , so lets walk through this briefly. You have encrypted data on a service , but you have the ability to reset your password with the service. How can they reset your password unless they can first decrypt your data ? That means there must be a higher level password. You must be somewhat suspicious , maybe somewhat concerned that somebody would have access to this higher level key. We offer this thing. Now that doesn't neccesarily mean from the next question from sophisticated crypto-people who unquestionably listening to this now , which is why is your encryption not open source. This is a common question that comes on the support gliph , where we talk to people who use gliph regularly , which is how come this is not open source or how can I feel comfortable using this when it is not open source. I completely empatise with that

statement and I'd say that some of this where gliph is today is that you need to trust Rob Banagale , Nick Asch , James Lawton , Joakim Fernstad , the team members of Gliph that we have implemented encryption correctly and we are not doing anything to route data unencrypted in any way. There is a person trust at this level . That is obviously not enough for many people , so for those folks , the first thing to say is that this is not for extremely high security situations , you need to be directly in control of the encryption in those situations , so we reccomend open source like PGP or cryptocat in its evolved state , where you can personally inspect the code and ensure that is running on a computer that you control. A.L. : You know , I actually did not know that your encryption methods were not open source. R.B. : Well , the methods that we use are standard encryption libraries. So the encryption methods we are using are standard libraries like AES256 , for all the data we are not using custom encryption. But the implementation is what people are curious about , they want to see specific areas of code where the encryption is done. A.L. : I see , so you are talking about why isn't gliph as a product fully open source. R.B. : Yeah , the question is why isn't it. The reason would be , something going back to your previous podcast , in your last podcast you were talking about entreupreneurship , idealism versus execution kind of thing. It is very hard to execute a startup. I described the cat getting up in the hotel room scenario. It is not a glamarous social pool in the back yard , rags to riches kind of thing. It is more like a grind , to be good at creating a company. Before we were at Boost , we were living in my mom's basement , I don't know if I said that in the previous podcast. We lived for a year with those two cats. It was tough and at times we weren't sure if we were going to make it. I have got a pretty solid education at this point , I am very fortunate in this way , I have worked with a fair amount of tech , I could be out earning solid dough working in tech , Nick as well. But we decided not to do that , to work on this company. I am getting back to why this product is not open source yet , in order to move very quickly , in order to evolve a product as quickly as we have while having the public accountability of having the system being open to the point at which you can please open source folk , is challenging . It is hard to move forward at all , to move forward as well as having your code open to inspection is really tough. Now does that mean that we can't get there ? No , I feel that we should get to a point where we have decentralized the encryption of the content and have done it in a way where people can control how data is encrypted as it is flowing through our service . We have been thinking very , very hard about this problem ,we don't have the solution yet , but we acknowledge that this exists for some people and may stop them from using gliph until then. But what I want to say is that often people want to communicate in a secure manner to everyone they know , so they will try to get their friends to use crypto-cat or PGP , but if their experience is anything like mine , they will find that it is hard to get people to consistently use these solutions , because the user experience is so challenging. That is where we differentiate , we have taken a high security system and made it accessible , such that anyone can pick up and start using anyway. That is the optimization point , to take an amazing user experience and secure it with a private system and deliver it together.

A.L. : I think that the focus on usability is absolutely right , your experience with PGP pretty much mirrors mine , I am a tech savvy guy , but inherently lazy as a security , you know. I like sneak's law , it states that most users either cannot or will not securely manage their keys. Is open source a medium you see gliph going in the long term ? I mean , is that a goal for you with this product ? R.B. : The number one thing is that I do not think that the entire gliph system needs to be open source. I truly do not think that that is neccesary. I only think it is viable as a startup to try and open source it. A.L. : Let's talk about that for a second , I think I agree with you . It is harder to monetize something that is open source , because you are inviting in competition , like here it is , we have done several hard years of work , compete with us . R.B. : Especcially at the ios level. The ios is an extremely hard platform to do a good job on. You have seen it because there has not been a lot of competition on the app store to send or receive bitcoin , to deliver our conversation view , which is tens of thousands of lines of codes , just to do show a message , sent status or progress of a picture message. These are actually really hard challenges which we spent a year and a half for just that portion of the app work. To give that out would be uhh.. A.L. : Right now to give that out would be a diservice to your investors. R.B. : It would ruin our investors. In our talk last podcast , there was this idea to deliver something like a 2-3 year in and out vision or a 25 year vision. I now want to make it clear that we are not a 2-3 year entreupreneurship . With gliph our goal is really beyond bitcoin. Bitcoin is really exciting to what we are doing , but we are more focused on the idea of identity. A.L. : We are here at the C2SV convergence conference , pretty much all the talks yesterday except the bitcoin panel which I participated in was really focused on identity and being able to take small chunks of personalised data which is recovered by a myriad of services and about the sensors in everything and how they are going to become extremely pervasiv in the next 18 months. The data is nearly useless unless you can tie it to someone who you can then sell things to , so this question of identity on the internet is going to get important. Bitcoin is different from these technologies , because it does not require the connection between your identity with your birth certificate and how you talk on the internet. Gliph also has granular control of your identity and what you release from it. Why is that a direction you chose to take , in a market which is increasingly about ways to not charge your customers and instead market their data. R.B. : I think first is , I would get as far away from a customer to be sold to someone as a use of identity. I would say identity is more about you and me and your team , or people I do not know on the street. What we have , I think is a really cool thing. When you see a guy on the street and wonder who a person is , there is some stranger danger. In the united states we have signs with a neighbourhood watch guy with the black silhouette and a sneaky look to the side . I feel that the inherent fear of

strangers is put into society . Increasingly we are finding that there are a lot of people on the internet out there who think a lot like us , care about the same things like obscure payment technology and they are united as a community. But in the real world as you walk around on the street , there is no where to assess if the people are of great value. Not for selling , but just to know , to learn from , maybe they could lend you a lawn mower. I believe that identity and digital identity will become flexible allowing you to interact with one another in ways that we just don't have. There is a bridge betwen the offline and online world. It is the spark that allows conversations to occur. Something that seperates that might be as simple as being able to see that a person has a reputation or trust of some time. You might not see much more than a blip that someone here has some significance. This digital layer over the people who are nearby would allow you to interact in innumerable ways , maybe even with a payment , handled via bitcoin. A.L. : I definitely buy what you are saying. It definitely applies with me , it is very difficult to meet people in real life , it is easier to first interact at an intellectual level before at a personal level , before at a physical level. So , how does gliph solve that ? R.B.: It doesn't. Right now it does not . I believe in it , that's why I say that we are not in short term. I believe that this is a long term problem that we can work towards. I think it is very important to begin by allowing anonymity as a level of privacy , which is what we do. Which is taking that all the way towards verified identity , where I do not want to wear a veil . There is already a great example of it , take Airbnb . Airbnb , when you look at a house , the person has their phone number and address verified. It does not tell you the phone number , but just shows that it has been verified. It is hard to tell , but I think that it impacts the person , that this person has some reasonable reputation or trust of some sort. Not that having a phone number is much reputation , but we are still looking for anything in the current context , from the life that we have lived from the 90s to now. If you have a verified phone number and home address , you must have some level of trust. I don't think that it is a complete encapsulation of how reputation should be dealt , just as obviously as a credit score should not be a encapsulation of your trust. But I do believe that there will be more ways to assemble reputation that can be used to meet and interact with people , making more people wanting to interact , with bitcoin powering the payment portion of it. A.L. : Yeah , and you take that and combine it with the google glass , Augmented reality , like that. R.B. : This needs to be something that you can selectively reveal , instead of being on all the time. A.L. : The reason we do not trust people on the street as a culture is because we don't know if they are good or bad , by effectively identifying the good people , we can identify the bad people. This would disenfranchise the bad people group. R.B. : This is something that my co-founder Nick is very concerned about. He plays the side of the shoulder for this discussion. He says would a system that offers reputation , disenfranchise some people . Is it a participatory system ? That is a

compelling , large question which I do not have an answer to , yet. But that is only what you have right now, a credit score. So we decided to lease a house. We are going to stay in San Mateo , we are relocating from Portman , Oregon . So we will stay near the cats. Our real cats are going to come here so we would not need to see the feral cats anymore. But to get the house , I need to check my credit score again. I had not done that in a while , I was a bit scared about it and breathed a sigh of relief when I finally saw it because it was probably enough to get the rental. Goodness that I had been doing credit stuff in my life. If not , I would not have been able to get a home to rent. So , right now the system is very much set in participation and linked to fiat currency , the banking system , the use of credit cards . I think we can do better than that. But the question you are asking is if we are doing something better , how can we do something inclusive and allows people who want to estabilish reputation do so . The funny thing is I shouldn't really be talking about this and be drilling on what we've done this summer , where glyph is. This is more fun , because your last show was about people who are in it for short term and people who are in it to change the world. I think that is used pretty liberally. There is a big opportunity to combine entreupreneurship around technology and bitcoin to do something big , and this is a big thing. ***AD*** Jeffrey Tucker : Hello , I am Jeffrey Tucker , host of the Crypto currency conference in Atlanta , Georgia on October 5th. We have got a marvelously libertarian infused day of discussion about what is the future of money , and you are invited. For those who can't attend , we have partnered with lets talk bitcoin to offer video conference passes available for government currency and of course bitcoin. For more information - bitcoinvideopass.com Bitcoinstore.com : If I showed you a website where you could easily purchase electronics from the largest supplier with bitcoins , with 0 % markup , would you think it was too good to be true ? Good news , it is real , at bitcoinstore.com . Choose from over half a million products , save money over Amazon and Newegg and convert your bitcoins to real world items. You can even buy with privacy , all they need is a shipping address. But don't take my word for it , see at bitcoinstore.com ***AD*** A.L. : Let's change gears here and circle back around . R.B. : Wait , before I change gears. The last time I was on , I brought a little thing for you , a fun meter. I have got something different this time. I was going to bring a 3d printed piece of plastic , but realised it is not bitcoin related. So , we got something from bitcoin 2013. I have a bitcoin embroidered hoodie. Now it is a medium , I was going to email Crystal and ask her if it was the right fit for you. A.L : Thank you. You are the only person I interview who routinely brings me gifts. R.B. : Atleast I know I would come back if I do that. Thanks for the show , I really apreciate it. It is awesome , keep doing it.

A.L. : I am sure that it is flattering that you listen . R.B. : I do listen. So , it's awesome , keep it up. A.L : Thank you very much. R.B. : So , yeah , switching gears. A.L :So , the last time we were on , episode 11 , one of the other areas that I think we kinda left where there wasn't really an answer was , firstly the password problem and secondly the gliphs as a username. So lets talk about the passwords first. Now with the new iPhone come out , fingerprint with big air quotes technology is being integrated into mobile devices. So, it took 4-5 days before the system had been broken using low tech off the shelf means. Do you think that these biometric systems have a future ? Do you think there is a solution here to the password problem that we talked about ? R.B : I am not an expert at biometric technology , that caught me by surprise. I think when it goes under a lot of security , it is about deterrents , its about trying to deal the best attempt at people doing the wrong thing. End point security is the point at which the user is accessing and can ensure that no one had a telescope lens and was capturing your pin and used it to get it onto your phone and used it to access your information is a challenging thing to take control of. The fingerprint thing , I think is another step at it , yeah you could get the high resolution fingerprint and use the means that they show on the hack to do it , but still it is not an easy thing. I mean if I want to get your fingerprints , how am I going to do that ? How am I going to get your fingerprints Adam ? A.L. : Well , I mean , there are ways , anything that you touch has your fingerprints. R.B. :I could , but I would need to be very determined. If you wanted to get mine , I would be very surprised if you got them. Even off this , I am going to leave some right here. And I don't have the 5S so you are going to be more troubled. A.L. : That's okay , I don't need it. But the problem about passwords is that , the easier they are to remember and use as passwords , the worse they are as passwords. That is my interest in biometrics. Is that the solution , or is it only about passwords ? R.B. : I don't know. I do know that my solution to passwords is that I use one password when I want use a service. A.L. : When you say one password you mean one password app or a single password ? R.B. : Yes , I do not use one password , I use a lot of unique password with extreme length and letters and numbers , so good luck. You shouldn't even challenge people to do that. I use the app to get my passwords , and it is hard to even do that. It is high security and a huge pain. I don't think the password thing has been solved yet ,

even with fingerprints , because when it comes down to it you can only use it to unlock a phone , you can use it to buy stuff at the app store. They have hinted at the idea of it being used elsewhere , but they are still working on it. A.L. : Oh , i did not realise that it was not available as an accessible API. R.B. : Oh no , it is not accesible to app developers. If it was , it would be worth considering. People would demand it. This goes down to the cracks in security. Security is only good as long as you can get people to use it .If you cannot get people to use , I think Marrisa Mayer got up on stage , 4 weeks ago and said that she does not have a pin on her phone because it takes too much time. " Mike was making fun of me because I do not have a passcode on my phone , Mike was like are you crazy and I was like , I cannot do this password thing 15 times a day. When I saw the fingerprint thing , I was like now I do not have to " . An executive of a fortune company is not using a pin on their phone which is getting ________ now , could change the market. It is kinda a big deal. I think fingerprints , as long as they cannot be broken can be better if it means more people would use lock. That gets us back to where I think the argument for what the pattern we built so far is. It is that yeah , it does not pass the extreme secure checks of open source and peer review , but it does a heck of a lot more than what groupme , whatsapp and system that are storing your data in plaintext are doing and you can get people to use gliph. A.L. : It has been an interesting experience for me too , since I added my Gliph to my email signature , I have around 50 people who I talk to periodically on gliph. Some use it a lot more than others do. That is really a problem that we talked about earlier , the onboarding , getting people to sign up and use it. Did you do anything about that in this period ? R.B. : So far there have been two things , there is onboarding and the gliphs themselves. I have a whole rant about the gliphs thing. I have made some changes to the onboarding . When I say onboarding it is generally a startup-y term , which means how do you get someone who has not heard of your system to use it and continue to use it so they are retained. A.L. : Because just getting a person to sign up isn't that useful. R.B. : It isn't that helpful. It is like saying , we have a bunch of users. It is more important that people love your service and you know they love your service because they use it. I think an interview of Tim Cook was published that included this . I think the Bloomberg. It is worth checking it out. But the idea is that when you are onboarding people to gliph , it should be easy to get started. Previously we had this thing where on iphone , android and the web , you had to choose your gliph first. I don't think I have mentioned it in this episode , but a gliph is made up of symbols instead of letters or numbers. So instead of being Firebird54 , you are bird-lightningdice. There are 20 of these symbols to choose from. For some people this is a totally wacky offputting experience to choose symbols for your username , we get this feedback occasionally. A.L. : And it has to be unique

R.B : And it has to be unique , it is my own and no one else can take it at this point. That is tough to say. So lets roll off onboarding into the gliph. Some people think it is so novel to pick out there gliph and tell people what their gliph is. They can personalise their identity , more of expressing themselves through the gliphs they choose. It can be told to other people literally by text , like my gliph is dice-heartlighting or they can get the pin and put it in a mail. If they are sitting opposite to someone they can tell them , hey here is my gliph and then they can put it into their keyboard. It is too hard to do , so we are working very hard to improve this in a variety of different ways. One way to express who you are is to give a link that connects to you. The connection is not back and forth , but just instantaneous. That is one thing that we are doing. The other thing is in person , so there is some really cool stuff happening right now. It is a little early to say what it is , but I can say that we are trying to solve the in person problem , exchanging and connecting gliph , for member lookup , it is a very manual process. The very least I can say , we are very very acutely aware that some people do not like the gliphs and some people do not like remembering the gliphs and we are trying to solve them. A.L : From my experience , a lot of it , is that I am not used to it. I have been using gliph for four or five months now , and more often than not when someone sends me a gliph invitation and I know the person is or I get to know who the person is , then over a pretty short amount of time , I am like oh that's a cool gliph , because I can connect to how the person sees themselves. It was not like that when I started using the system. I did not remember what my gliph was , but now I remember what it is , most of the time. It is counter-intuitive. But once you get past the learning curve , some of it is gets a lot easier. Some of it is just new. It is just like a new alphabet. R.B. : It is like a new alphabet. I like to think of its strangeness as similar to what you feel when you experience twitter for the first time. If you've never treid twitter and are trying to understand what it is and why it is viable , it takes weeks , to understand how to use it , why it is viable and how you can join a conversation , to speak when someone replies to you , how you should behave. When you think of it , twitter is a pretty complicated tool. But when you can get your hands positioned on the machine to turn the dials at the right time , it is an amazing phenomenal network. I think that what we have done already has so few dials , which can be moved closer together and changed to make it a better system still. Especially , when you are building a product , you see cooler things you can do. Like , group messaging. This is one of the most requested things. A.L. : I was just going to ask. R.B. : Yeah , this is the most requested thing , for the longest time. The trick with integrating group messaging is that it should be done in a way that respects security and privacy that we have built into the system and that the user experience is done properly and how it affects the application. So , I have to take two views on it. You can go the facebook route , not about the privacy , but about the motto which is , move quickly , break stuff or something. If you work at facebook , it is okay to write something and have it break something. If you use facebook , you would notice that they break stuff fairly often. One way to do group messaging is to just hack this in and see what happens. The other way would be to face a more apple type way.

Where , you only release something after inspecting every detail of it and have it as close to perfect , if not perfect in the eyes of the creator of the product. When you have enough money and traction , being the largest tech company in the world , you can generally afford to tell the entire market to wait. You can do it when you are ready and in a way that leapfrogs competition and astounds you with it. If you are a more scrappy startup , you hack it on. If you do that you may risk rough edges on the other parts. For example , the bitcoin integration on the wallets so far , there are a bit of rough edges on some services. If you use two factor SMS on coinbase , it does not work with gliph. But if you use two factor google authenticator on coinbase , it works just fine. But we do not even say in the app that the SMS does not work. We could go back and try to write language or change the experience so that we can warn the user that this particular thing does not work. Every time you go back to fix a previous thing , you are not working on group messaging. You are not pushing the product ahead. As a small team , I mentioned the four people that work on gliph , they cannot do everything at once as well as managing an open source system . A.L. : So , what's the priority ? I mean is the priority right , now , for the next 3 months. R.B : Well , the next three months , first thing is getting relocated , getting our cats down here , getting happy in San Mateo. A.L. : You just got your next round of funding. How long is that going to take you through ? R.B. : We are in the middle of the round. The rounds start with an accelerator , which is a couple of tens of thousands of dollars , you graduate to type 2 , then you raise hundreds of thousands of dollars of range , if you do well then you get to graduate to series A or series C , in the 2-5 million dollar range. So , we are currently in type 2. What you usually focus on is growth and on the concept and to show that there is revenue and monetization. And then you graduate to the A. We are focusing on growth , making it easier to get onto gliph and get started connected. And making networks in gliph. It is a one to one relationship. If you did not have 50 people , which amazes me , if someone does not send you a message , you do not have a reason to use gliph today . We need to have networks built , like group messaging , I know I have brought up cats hundreds of times , but I like to send cat pictures to my friends and cat gifs. I can make a network with people who do that. If I had a group of people who did that , I would be checking the app more often than I do now. A.L. : Well , that turns it into a mini social network R.B. : In some sense it kinda does , it could be a super private secure way to communicate , that is just not text messaging. In the next few months we are focusing on something that networks and growth can be built around. A.L. : We are almost out of time here , how do you plan to monetize it , because it is a free product. I know there was a value add where you had email addresses that were anonymous , and you got one or two for free but then had to pay for more at a nominal fee. But they were pretty inexpensive. So has monetization been something you have been looking at or has it just been the growth side ?

R.B. : It is absolutely something a business should be focused on , which is making money. Not many businesses get to do what instagram did which is , we are never going to come up with something , we are just making something big. There is something to be said for building growth for growth sake , but that is not really solid. I do not think that is a good idea for a business. A.L. : Well , it is especially hard when you don't have that identity data and cannot generate those strings. R.B. : Right , I do not think you have to monetise personal data in order to make money , but that is moving in the wrong way to be thinking about that. That is not the way in which we are thinking about doing it. We do not want to sell peoples personal data so that is off the shelf. Here are a lot of ideas. There are a lot of features people ask for that are pro level things , basically things offered in other services like I want my messages to be continually deleted. Not many people delete messages , few people delete them religously. So , we believe between that , video messaging and other pro features , it is a free thing right now. We have put two years into this and not charged except for the optional email thing. We would love to hear people say , I like what you have done , I would like to support by subscribing. So we would like to offer them some additional pro features and also ask people to support us by giving us money. A.L.: So a freemium model ? R.B.: Yes , a freemium model. We believe that there is oppurtunity there and bitcoin specifically. I am going to talk about two things , one is sophisticated and one is obvious. So , gliph is now integrated with coinbase , BIPS , and blockchain. You can on coinbase and blockchain , exchange fiat for bitcoin. They are like retail currency exchanges. It is really easy using coinbase , achn , bitcoinow . One of the easiest in the united states atleast. Since we talked , we created the instant wallet creation which allowed anybody new to gliph to create a wallet. We believe that a large number of those are new to people. We are not only introducing them to bitcoin , but showing them how easy bitcoin can be. So , we are teaching them about the new way of using bitcoin. When we create a wallet on coinbase or BIPS , we are getting them a way of getting people to buy bitcoin. When they do that , they take fees and there is an oppurtunity by which we are creating customers for the services . And already , if you refer someone to coinbase , you get paid out and they convert money into bitcoin , you get paid out a small thank you for the referral. There is an oppurtunity for gliph to receive compensation for the referral whenever they refer a person to a big wallet provider. I got a different monetisation , for the advanced listeners. I mentioned that we started with coinbase , went to bips and the blockchain . If adam here is on BIPS and I am on coinbase and we are connected on gliph and I want to send you half a bitcoin , I send it to you and it is taken care of. Now lets say I want to send you half a dollar worth of bitcoin. So , I don't know what that is , but it is a small amount. It would be subject to network fees . Microtransactions in bitcoin. Now , I would say that the bigger wallets are offering free instant microtransactions within their wallets , because it is offchain. If we are sending it cross wallet is that it would not be offchain. Now the cool part of what we have built so far is that since gliph integrates using the

APIs , you want to send me half a dollar worth of bitcoin , lets say 0.005 bitcoin. What we can do is instead send it to a gliph controlled account on that service , so it is still within the free microtransaction network. Then on coinbase , a gliph account sends the recipient the 0.005 bitcoin, so it is fee free. A.L. : So what could happen is that you have got two offchain services , so gliph maintains accounts and both sides and essentially does arbitrage between the two , doing instant free transactions. R.B.: Theoretically , we can eliminate inter-wallet fees by doing that. A.L. : This is crazy , nobody else is doing this. R.B.: This is because we are uniquely positioned as a third party to this wallets , to do this. What we have to do is set up the book , so we can later move the coin, but we can do it. It can be done on a large amount , not subject to network fees. I do not think anyone has even considered this. A.L.: We are out of time , but that is a very interesting approach , so I want to continue to see your approach , because it is free. R.B.:Listeners keep an eye on what we are doing , if you do not think it is at the place it should be yet , I agree with you , we need a lot of cool work to do. There is a lot of encouragement from the bitcoin community , I love to get feedback.I run the support gliph so if you are trying gliph for the first time today , send me a message , say hello , say you heard about it on lets talk bitcoin , I will reply to you as soon as I can , probably in a few hours. Thank you guys for having meon again , I hope that I come one again , it is very cool. A.L : I am sure you will and keep up the good work.Thanks for listening to episode 47 of lets talk bitcoin. The topic was provided by Rob Benagale with on site engineering by Crystal Levine.The music was provided by Jerv Reubens and Jazz Town