Wally F

As much as I want to know, no one knows about Satoshi Nakamoto or how he was able to disappear so well. Developers don’t look into it or care about who he is or where he is. It's really easy to prove who he is if he wanted to do that, and he can do it with just a couple of messages online, but he is not and is also gone now. At this point, it’s been so long so even if he would come back again and claim that Bitcoin is his invention, make it official by signs some papers, no one will listen to him or follow him. If he would say “let’s change Bitcoin this way”, everyone will say “no”. It's like the Lightning Network I wrote and development together with Joseph Poon, and now no one listens to me. Even if I suggest something to be done in a certain way, there are so many others who are working on it now, and much more than me that it doesn't matter who invented it or developed it in the beginning. The same goes for Satoshi and Bitcoin.

Almost every year has its moment. The most memorable in the crypto space for everyone has to be 2017 because of the huge price appreciation in Bitcoin. Although, 2013 was the year that I finally got into Bitcoin, so for me personally it was 2013. There were 2 bubbles during that year. The first was when Bitcoin when from 10 dollars up to 250, and I finally started taking it seriously at the end of the 250 dollar bubble. at the end of the same year, it went up to 1300 which is when the Mt.Gox collapsed. Also, crowd software was shut down that year as well, and even the Cyprus event which made me get into Bitcoin happened that year. 2013 was the year of the first Bitcoin halving to place, and there was an incident that caused a little bit of a fork in Bitcoin which was actually the last incident when Bitcoin was down for a few minutes. There were so many things that happened in 2013 that were very critical.

MintGox is a gaming platform and new style of esports tournament created by Simon Cowell, CEO, and Co-Founder of ZEBEDEE; game developer Jack Everitt, CEO of THNDR GAMES; Christian Moss, Co-founder of ZEBEDEE; André Neves, CTO and Co-Founder of Zebedee; and, Desiree Dickerson, VP Business Operations at Lightning Labs. MintGox, a play-off of “Magic Internet Gathering”, is a socio-economic movement for experimenting with the future of virtual interactions and digital currency. In its current iteration, MintGox hosts monthly events that showcase games built on bitcoin and the Lightning Network. The event typically features one main esports tournament with multiple rounds of gameplay, and then several “side events” that showcase games built on bitcoin.

The people who truly believe in crypto think this is a generational change that will be with us in the future, and I agree with them. There is a fundamental case to be made, don’t just be involved in fiat currency, but be involved in edgier bets like gold, silver, and cryptocurrencies. When I hear people say Bitcoin will go to 0, I am skeptical about that. I don’t think that is going to happen. Is it possible that it may happen? Yes, it is, but it is very likely. Eventually, governments will find a way to live with Bitcoin rather than getting rid of it.

I think anybody should have the right to data privacy. Companies or governments should not be allowed to collect private data by default. The users and the people should have the right to decide who is allowed to see and use what part of our data. People living in poverty struck regions they do not care about privacy measures because they need the services. They cannot afford the luxury to put in extra work to care for their privacy personally. They do not have any other options either. For example, 99% of all digital payments in Zimbabwe are done with EcoCash simply because it is the only other option to pay for anything besides cash.

I do not think there are people in the market that could influence the market because they have power. People think that they do but even if they do it is only temporary. I do not think anyone person has that kind of effect. Again, we have to separate the Bitcoin from the rest of the crypto coins.　In the world of Bitcoin, I don't think there is anyone that has such kind of an effect influencing anything in the market. Now, if someone has a lot of Bitcoin and they actually sell that Bitcoin or they have a lot of money and they are going to buy Bitcoin, they will move the price.

The next phase is the transfer of value through social networks and interactions. As of now, you can buy things directly on Facebook or Instagram in the app, by just clicking an ad directly. This type of buy and sell options within the social networks is the direction in which we are heading. Also, micropayments are a powerful use-case. If you are in a game, no denomination is smaller than a cent. The denominations only go so far in every fiat currency, but with bitcoin you receive satoshis; a satoshi is so small, so paying 10 satoshis for a task you have accomplished in a game is not that much. For players, however, it really builds up after some time. And even though it is worth so little, it is much more than others in game currencies.

The attitude towards data privacy for developing countries is biased. The wealthier people need data privacy, but poor people do not need data privacy is what they think when you talk with many people from the developed world. They express this when they say: "we need to observe the poor people in developing areas to reduce their poverty, that is why we need data about them”. Many people to like this want to have these kinds of data so they can write a paper and mark themselves as a professional. I think this is absurd, and in fact, the people unsafe and developing areas do need even more privacy than us as there is ethnic violence going on, or there are dictators in power.

In the bachelor's degree within the IT department, we go deeply into the mechanics of how blockchain or consensus algorithms work, and everything else that comes with decentralization, distributed ledgers, and computation. This is not the only university teaching such material, other universities started implementing such courses as well a couple of years ago. They look at this subject more from a business perspective.

I support a universal basic income. A libertarian version of that is based on taking federal land of the 200 trillion dollars of untouched federal land of forests, mining facilities, etc. that America has. We have preserved it for preserving nature but in California 25 % of everybody is right at the poverty line. This means that millions of children are hungry at night. you wouldn’t think America has hungry children, but we have 10 to 15 million hungry children every night. I want to take some of our natural resources and distribute them to people so we can take care of poverty. I wouldn't mind doing that in payments through cryptocurrency or anything similar that facilitates and also makes the operation completely transparent.

Snowden gave up his life for us. He had a really nice life in Hawaii with his girlfriend, earning a lot of money, and he had the world's information at his fingertips. However, he gave it all up because he thought that letting the world know about what was going on was more important than his own personal comfort.

In my opinion, the current monetary system sort of works. People complain about inflation, but inflation is not really that high. I don’t think that it is a huge problem at the moment. Other people say that it is not fair, and I can understand it because I experienced it first-hand. Before moving back from Japan to America, and I had saved quite an amount of money. However, sending money between countries is very hard and pretty expensive.

In this economic crisis right now, the crazy printing that the central banks are executing will have a good effect on crypto. We are quickly moving to a situation globally where the world's major economies don't work anymore, and there will be a meltdown. I don't think we are quite there yet, and I think that is some years away. However, this current crisis has underlined once again how deeply sick the economy is. Nothing was fixed after 2008 and no one went to jail. No one really got into trouble for crashing the economy. In fact, a lot of the people who were responsible for 2008 got rewarded and got bonuses for this.

Crypto Art is the term used to describe cryptocurrency and art coming together. Vesa Kivinen was a filmmaker and visual artist but now is a full-time Crypto artist from Finland. In this interview, he ...

People living in African countries have to suffer very high inflation. I talked to Tim Akimbo, who is a Bitcoin core developer, he did research and found out that, all the national currencies of the African countries, on average, lose 50% of the value every five years. Moreover, in Zimbabwe, the inflation rate is much higher. Now, Zimbabwe is a kleptocracy, meaning that the government has been extracting value from the country since independence, for the last 30~40 years. It is a cruel system, and the human right situation is very bad.