Hello, This is Matt with Start nine, and this is Gary Leland and
you're listening to episode one forty one of the Crypto Cousins podcast. Feed your
interest in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies by joining Hall of Fame podcaster Gary Leland on the
Crypto Cousins podcast. And remember we are all cousins in the world of crypto.
This week's price of bitcoin nine thousand, four hundred and forty four dollars.
This down three hundred and thirty seven dollars a three point five percent over
the last seven days. How how do you, howdy? Matt, Welcome
to the show. I said that every week, how do Howdy, howdy
and welcome to the show. I'm gonna have to come up with something new.
How are you doing, dude, how how howdy? I'm doing good?
Gary, how are you? It's good to see. It's nice to
see you. We met at tone Vay's un Confiscatable conference in Vegas. You
know, he barely got that in before everything got shut down. I think
that had been three weeks later. He'd have been shut down one week one
week later. It was already out at the time, but it hadn't quite
hit the tipping point of fear. But the virus definitely was an issue during
that conference, just not a big one. Yeah, I wasn't even thinking
about it at that conference. I was seeing that it was and yeah,
it's funny. My wife and I talked all the time because I was showing
her posts on YouTube that I was seeing videos in China and stuff of this
post. But I didn't even dawn on me that it would be coming over
here, you know. I just knew it was happening and badly over there,
you know, But I didn't even think about it because she keeps going.
I can't believe we weren't any more prepared than that, not that I
know how prepared we could have been. It was very disruptive, but yeah,
we snuck that conference and right at the last second. So and you
had a booth there for your Start nine. But before we get into start
nine, howbould just give us a little background on yourself? So prior to
Start nine, I was the CT at Salt Lending. Salt Lending is a
cryptocurrency backed lending platform, so essentially a bank that will lend you Fiat currency
while holding a cryptocurrency predominantly Bitcoin, as collateral. I joined that company just
post their utility token Ico as their first developer hire, and from there hired
Keegan McClelland, who is now one of my partners, whose then younger brother
Adan McClelland came on to Salt, who's also now one of my partners,
and together we built Salt's engineering stack along with many others. But you know,
from an architectural standpoint, Keegan and I took care of a lot of
that earlier work and Salt ended up with a very nice technological stack, and
I think that they're doing plenty of loans these days as well. We later
brought on Aaron Greenspan, who's also now one of my partners, so that
rounds out the four of us, and he was working at Salt as well.
Eventually all four of us moved on to do what we're doing now,
which is Start nine. Prior to st I have experience in a variety of
industries. Actually, I grew up in a bagel bakery doing wholesale bread and
bagels, and then after that I was in plastics recycling. Founded a company
in Colorado with my brother to do industrial plastics recycling, which I eventually moved
on from and he has continued to do and is now the largest recycler plastics
materials in the Mid Continent on a monthly basis. Does I think about a
million pounds of plastics a month? This is shredding, grinding, melting.
So my background is quite diversified, but only recently more in the detailed cryptography
space. It sounds like you took a lot of the people who worked for
you are with you from Salt with you when you yeah, I wouldn't say
I took them with me. It's that we all moved on right Salt,
you know, I was doing its thing and we had built some nice technology
there and ultimately, you know, it wasn't for us, and you know,
we were really wanting to do what we're doing now. You know,
Salt is a centralized institution, right, It's essentially a bank, and while
the technology the underpins it was very interesting to us, the idea of being
a bank was not. We very much are in the business of, you
know, fighting the banks and implementing a decentralized financial system and communications infrastructure.
Well, you've come out with the Start nine, which is basically, well,
I guess that's the company. Is the device called a start nine.
No, the device is now called the Embassy Embassy. Yeah, I knew
that. I knew I was calling it the wrong thing. When you bought
it, it was called the S zero Personal Server, the zero being the
prototype version, right, But no, we've rebranded where it's the Embassy and
the Embassy runs our operating system, which we call Ambassador, right, and
Ambassador lives in an embassy, So that made sense to us. And we
think it's pretty cool. And it's basically a Raspberry pie. That's the Corman.
I guess that's the board perhaps. Yeah, we um we're not particularly
hardware people. I mean we're not. We're not dummies either. Our launch
as a company has keep the hardware boring. Stupid hardware doesn't need you know,
ovation right now. I mean I shouldn't say that hardware needs innovation,
but we are not innovating and hardware right. We're trying to be as commoditized
and boring on the hardware front as possible. Our value proposition comes in with
Ambassador OS, our application offerings, and really mostly the way that we pull
it all together into a seamless user experience. Right. We are bringing decentralized
applications and platforms and protocols and technologies to the average person. Right, my
mother is running an embassy that runs a bitcoin full node and cup's messenger,
and she couldn't tell you what a command line is. Well, I'm writing
all that, and I can't tell you what a command line hardly is either.
So it works. Yeah, so it works. So tell us about
the home concept of what we're doing here with the embassy, in the ambassador
software and the cups. We've got a lot of stuff to go through here.
Where do you want to start? Well, I could just do the
embassy elevator pitch. Yeah, let's do that real quick. I've set up
the Costa node, I've set up the hot No, this is the easiest
thing I've said up yet, by far. I mean, not by a
little bit, by a mile. I mean, I plugged it in it
beat, I hooked it up to my router, downloaded an app on iTunes
or on the app store, put in the number that was printed on the
bottom of my embassy, and I updated the app, updated the embassy,
and I was in business. I mean, this was the easiest thing,
by far, I've ever said up. Yeah, that was our goal,
that's our value. Proposition. Again, it's not the hardware. Some people
see what we're selling and they go, oh, I could put a raspberry
pie in a box and sell it too, And I said, you haven't
really looked right. Eight months of four developers cranking on something, I mean,
night and day and we're decent too, does not result in a Raspberry
pie in a box. We built a computing platform, so the Embassy Elevator
pitch right. So the Embassy is a plug in play personal server that is
geared towards the non technical individual. What it does is you plug it into
your all, you claim it, right, and this is a cryptographic key
exchange process where your phone is locally spinning up cryptographic keypair in the form of
a mnemonic phrase, just like you would a bitcoint wallet. Right, it's
going to spit up twelve words. In fact, you could bring your own
twelve words. Right. As long as you are BIP thirty nine compliant,
you can bring your twenty four words seed phrase or twelve word seed phrase to
our products. You don't need to trust us to even generate these seed phrases.
But anyway, once you've generated this phrase, you can now claim your
physical and the seed device over the local area network of your home, so
the device plugs into your router. You can now discover it in the same
way that you would discover a wireless printer and claim it. And by claiming
it, you're registering a public key onto the device, private key words on
your phone and is backed up by a mnemonic phrase which you go shop in
some safe somewhere. So now you are the sole owner, a master of
this hardware device that's sitting in your home. Great. So now you have
a Raspberry Pie running on your home network that is claimed by you your phone,
and what are you going to do with it? So what you do
is you can go to our hosted appropository. And this is the sort of
singular point of trust in our entire infrastructure right now, but it is not
a critical one and will be decentralized and trustless in the near future. We're
working towards that right Another one of our mantras is that you do not need
to trust us. We are not trying to be the trusted company. We're
trying to make it so that you don't have to trust any companies. Now
that you have claimed this device, you go to the host of Appropository and
you can browse and install apps. Apps in the sense we're actually starting to
call them mods now because apps has got a little bit of a conceptual collision
with things that you put on your phone, and it's not what these things
are, right. These are server apps modules, things that you install onto
a server. And the first three apps that we put on the app store
or mods are Bitcoin and Bitcoin Core. Full Node Warden, which is a
self hosted password manager similar to last pass, except you are running your own
server such that all your passwords are not stored on somebody else's third party server.
You're posting them all on your physical device. And lastly, Cup's Messenger,
which is our own messaging protocol that utilizes the Tour network. We utilize
Tour for a lot of things to relay messages from person to person. So
if I want to message you, instead of that message being encrypted on my
device, sent to some central server and then relayed to you and then decrypted,
right, which is what most encrypted messaging apps offered today, where you
are trusting that middleman to not only you know not have a backdoor, but
also you know they are persisting those messages indefinitely, so you are trusting them
with both the data and the access to that data, whereas with cups.
You know, it encrypts it on my device. My device sends it to
my embassy, my device meeting my phone. My phone sends it to my
embassy. My embassy is what or is it so that I can view it
later and from all my other devices. My embassy sends it to your embassy,
where it also gets storage that you can do it from all your devices
in the future. And then your embassy sends it to your phone. Right,
So it's me to my embassy, my embassy to your bassy, your
emassy to your phone. You and I are now talking. There's no middlemen
involved, and everything is relayed over the tour network and encrypted end to end.
There are also no exit nodes involved in this process, which means you
are not subject to the vulnerability that the tour network has regarding exit nodes.
All traffic stays on tour, nothing leaves. You also tell me though,
because the scenario you just gave me is we both are using cuts and we
both have embassies. But if I remember correctly, you told me in Vegas
that I could be talking to someone who didn't have an embassy or cut.
It's just that only my end would be encrypted, where their end would be
unencrypted. Right. I remember that that was regarding email. So if you
wanted to send an email, right, your end would be all sort of
private. But if you're sending that to someone who has a Gmail address,
and that end of the communication line is still subject to the inspection of the
Google email bots. So that was cups, wasn't cups. I was confusing
it, correct, Yeah, that was just a general conversation about email.
Emails hard right. Email we will be able to do, but there are
concerns and challenges with email that are unique to that protocol. It's very old.
It predates most of the Internet infrastructure today, and so it's very hard
to adapt to things like tour. Cups, however, to address your point,
will be in the near future, usable by people who do not have
an embassy in a couple of ways. So first of all, anyone can
run cups. It's open source software. You don't need an embassy from start
nine to run cups. You can go get the code from get compile it
from source. It's not easy, right, it requires technical expertise and run
it on your own MacBook or vps hosted on Digital Ocean or whatever you want,
whatever degree of trust you're willing to do. Cups is just a messaging
protocol. However, we are implementing a feature called guest accounts on cups where
if you say you have an embassy and you want to chat with your friend
who does not have an embassy and is also not technical enough to go set
up cups on their own and doesn't want to buy an embassy because they don't
see the value, but you still want to talk to them using cups.
You will be able to give them your cups address, just like you'd give
them your cups address if you wanted to chat with them, right, So
you give them your cups address, and then you give them an invite code,
right, a one time password invite code. Now they can actually log
in to your embassy using this guest password. Obviously they don't have full access
to the embassy, just and create a cups account that is only capable of
talking to you, I think, right. So, now you can just
fill up your contact list with all your friends, send out these little invite
codes. They go get the Cups app from the app Store or Google Play
Store. Or just the tour browser right, put in your address, put
in their OTP, and then change their password to whatever they want. And
now you can talk to all your friends over cups and not one of them
loans in embassy except for you. However, they are all trusting you.
Now you have all the data. You are the server now, right,
so they're all logging in with you. So if your embassy goes down,
goes offline, or you just decide to take all those chats and publish them
everywhere, all these people are trusting you. You are now the trusted third
party. Okay, okay, but that's not available yet. No, okay,
but cups is your newest that's the newest thing you've released. Yeah,
I mean, that's your new thing that's out. So y'all are still cups.
The server has been around for a while, but like most things with
the Embassy, it was very hard to use these apps. Right. So
phase one of Start nine as a company was to make running a personal server
and installing open, decentralized protocols and applications easy for the average person. We
did that. We had that done back in February. You saw it,
Yeah, you plugged it in. You hit install and boom, You're running
a full Bitcoin note over tour. Didn't require any expertise at all. No,
no, noll, I mean take me, I said, take minutes.
I mean yeah. The problem then was what do I do now?
That was the question people put out to us. Say, Okay, I
got bitcoin running on my own embassy, in my own living room. How
do I use it? I got cups running right on my embassy in my
living room. How do I use it? Will? Phase two of start
line is to make all of the applications running on your embassy. These background
processes usable from clients applications. These are apps that you could put on your
iPhone or Android phone and more. More predominantly PWA's progressive Web applications, meaning
that you can use the cup's instance on your server. You can use the
engine right the Cup's engine simply by going to a Tour browser or Firefox browser
and plugging in the Onion URL of your cups instance. So you don't need
to go to the Google play Store the App store to use our apps.
It's convenient. It's nice to have those icons on your phone, but all
you really need is a Tour browser, so there's no way to stop this.
Even if Apple is just like screw you're not allowed to have cups on
the app store. We go, okay, just go use the tour browser.
Right. So, cups will be improving, and that's y'all's new project.
That's what y'all working on a lot. There's a lot of things that
are going to happen to make that easier and better and more useful. Yeah,
it's going to get better. It's not our focus. Our primary kind
of initial trajectory as a company, as a niche computer company, is bitcoin
and bitcoin related technologies. Right, So, coming soon is going to be
an electrom personal server. That one quick install. Now you're running an electron
personal server on your embassy. Next is coming Lightning, right Sea Lightning will
be shortly after that. Do you have any timelines estimated for those? No,
we do internally, but I don't like to communicate this. That's fine.
I didn't know if you're going, yeah, we're definitely going to have
it by this data we like to build, launch and then announce. Cups
is important to us, though not because we think everyone's going to be using
cups in the future as their primary messaging app. Cups is important to us
because it is a demonstration. It was a sandbox source. Right that we
are not a bitcoin node. Right, We too often get confused as something
like a mind node, btcre or a COSA node which is no longer in
production, but right, which are great products. But they are Bitcoin nodes
and lightning nodes. Right. They are designed to be plug and play.
You plug it into the wall and boom, you have a Bitcoin node running.
Right. We are a computer company. We are a computing platform,
right for all sorts of applications and decentralized protocols that have been traditionally very difficult
to run. Right, everything from I mean take bitwarden, just a password
manager, right, you can't do bitwarden on your plug and play Bitcoin node.
Right. Those are very bespoke products to bitcoin. Bitcoin is at the
center of our culture, of our ethos, and our product roadmap. But
we are a generalized computer company and a demonstration of that. So let's go
over real quick. Now. When you say bitcoin corn, we talk about
that that's a pruned version a Bitcoin Core. I guess that's why an uploads
so quickly or update so quickly. Yeah, I mean we buy default set
pruning quite high, Right, because our physical devices that we're selling don't have
a lot of storage. Right, We're selling devices with one hundred and twenty
eight gigabytes of storage that can't even fit the whole blockchain. But it's not
like we prune just to accommodate the storage. It's that we prune because there's
very few reasons to run a full archival bitcoin mode. Right. The average
person does not need every block in every transaction that has ever happened. They
just need to validate them. Right, we start at genesis. It sinks
the entire blockchain, but as it goes, it throws out the data that
it doesn't care about. Right, which a full bitcoin node. It's still
a full bitcoin node, it's just not a full archival node. That's the
difference. A full Bitcoin noode can be very heavily pruned. And what it
does is it allows you to process and relay transactions. It allows you to
validate transactions, It allows you to validate blocks, It allows you to broadcast
your own transactions. It allows you to do all of this in privacy.
The average person will never notice the difference between a pruned Bitcoin note and an
unpruned Bitcoin note. They don't write and it's it's more scalable too. Well,
sure uploads a hell of a lot faster than a full note that's the
name show. The sync process is still going to take a while, right,
It didn't seem to take very long to me, not to what it
was like calling the cost. And we don't do precinct either, right,
we don't believe in shipping somebody a precinct blockchain for the sake of convenience.
It's like, if you can't wait, you know, a few days for
your node to sync, you got a patient's problem, Like this is real
privacy and you got to be a little patient. So right now we have
the core, we have a bit warden, we have cuts yeah, planned
um Lightning Lightnings coming, yeah, and then Electron electrom is coming, Lightning's
coming. BTC pay server is on our roadmap. And then we have a
whole suite of sort of non Bitcoin related applications, including messaging protocol calls.
So Matrix is one that's front and center on our radar. Matrix is a
messaging protocol that allows for group chats, video conferencing, peer to peer chats,
and it's very robust. We use it internally, we use the synaps
implementation of Matrix and the front end clients. I think we use Riot to
communicate internally as a team, and it's all self hosted, right, So
we try to walk our walk and not use posted services whenever it is practical
to do so. Obviously we are currently using hosted services. We shopify to
sell embassies, and that's not something that we like or are going to be
doing for very long, but it was expedient, right. It allows us
to ship product very quickly without having to take the time to set up our
own payment rails and infrastructure. However, we are setting up currently our own
BTC payer. For instance, you'll be able to buy embassies with bitcoin in
the coming days. So since we're going there, how are they selling?
Are you happy? Are you? Are you sad? Or about what you
expected? Or it's about what we expected actually, so the numbers, there's
you know, full transparency here. We launched a prototype, right, which
are engraved an inaugural edition of the prototype. I think mine has that it
has the number on it. Or we're pretty low too. You were one
of the very first five thirty or something, I think, yeah, and
so we we did one through one hundred of the initial prototype, and those
are almost gone. We have I think a couple dozen left, so twenty
twenty five of those are left, and so we've sold what seventy seventy five
units so far? Are those at two hundred a piece, So we're significantly
under the market for a full bitpoint node. Right. I'm not sure exactly
what the prices are out there, but I know they get as high as
like six seven hundred dollars some of them, and so we're very under the
market. And we do the same thing and ten times more. Yea hear
you say you have a lot more features for a lot less money. Yes,
So the price point is it is not going to stay that well.
We came in low because people were taking a risk on an unknown product,
which we further incentivized by doing the numbered addition, because if we do our
job and things go well, who knows, maybe they'll be worth something something.
So we wanted to incentivize our early users are alpha users really to buy
one of these, So we put the price point really low. We don't
make a dime on them, and we engraved them, and we asked for
honest feedback and a gentle hand, right, and we got that, and
we have been very very happy with this sort of initial rollout of a very
radical product that has almost no comparison in the world. And so now we're
sort of entering phase two. Right following the sellout of the initial one hundred
units will be a new device that we have yet to unveil. It is
not our sort of flagship product that will be coming next year, which will
be a much bigger and cooler unbail way do you see what that looks like?
But the sort of we'll call it the V one point five is coming
very soon. We'll be selling that in the meantime before the major product flagship
comes out next year. Price points will be a lot higher, by the
way than what you have right now with a flagship one. Yes, yeah,
well it does a lot more. Where would people go to see?
Would they just start nine dot com if they want to see these or inches,
then minees start nine labs dot com starting in labs dot com. So
y'all ship them right now? I mean you have them in stock. Yeah,
we have the remaining you know, inaugural editions one ready to roll.
We usually ship them within an hour or two of an order, so you
got like fifteen left or something like twenty twenty five. Okay, so yeah,
if you get twenty five orders in the next month, you had a
business. Though. Now one comes out. Oh no, no, no,
no, we're ready to ship the one point five right now too.
Okay, okay, yeah, no again, but we're boring hardware right The
one point five is all commodity stuff, nothing custom made. The V two
is going to be the real flagship product, and that's a twenty twenty one
launch date right sometime next year. Now you're gonna be showing these that You've
got a table a bit block Boom, so people come into bit block Boom
will be able to see these. And for those who are not aware,
a bit block Boom is a bitcoin conference I put on in Dallas. This
will be our third year. It's going to be really great. Gosh,
we probably would have been sold out already if it hadn't been for those two
months A ticket stop selling because people didn't know what was going on. But
now they started selling like crazy again. Because I think that everybody realizes down
here in Texas where like I think, our restaurants started seventy five percent occupancy
starting Friday, so we're pretty much back on track, but we're fifty for
a while. But that's if you're interested. Anyone's interested in bit block boom.
It's a bitcoin conference, it's not an apcoin conference. All we talk
about is a bitcoin and bitcoin applications. You can find out more about it
at bitblock boom dot com. Check it out. But also, like I
said, you'll be able to Matt and his crew will be there. They'll
have a table set up showing the well you have to start nine and the
new one there by then or at the one point five will be there.
For sure. We're going to sell out of the prototypes that, yeah,
you'll be out of the I didn't mean to start nine the embassy. Yeah,
we're starting to get some recognition right now. And again by design,
we weren't hiding. Like we understand. I've had enough startups, this is
my fifth startup and experience to know that you don't just We're not a marketing
company, right. We want sales to scale with the quality of the product
and not any faster, not any slower either. It's starting to curve a
little bit, so we're gonna sell out. We'll be selling the one point
five at bit block boom. The inaugural editions will be gone, and we
are really looking forward to this conference. Scare. I mean, everyone's been
cooped up and there is a hunger to get after it. And I think
you're you are going to be the first major bitcoin conference. You're gonna hockey
stick. Yeah. I think we'll be the first one for sure. That's
in person. We've got to start platinum sponsor this year. We've got another
sponsor I was talking to today, So all of a sudden people are contacting
me. Where last year, our second year, I couldn't get a platinum
sponsor. I hardly get anyone to talk to me. But we did real
good last year and everybody was real excited about it this year. Now,
I still think it's funny Meadowdell Post Segary is going to look like a genius
posting a conference and in the August and then hot as hell Texas. But
it turns out to be the greatest timing of all times. Maybe yeah,
No, I think this is going to be the conference. This is gonna
be the one you're gonna hockey stick towards in the last month leading up to
it. Yeah. The thing about it is if you're really into mick coin.
You're around people who are into what you're into. I mean, you
know, you don't have you know, these sections that are in the one
thing or sections in the other thing, and you know, maybe there And
it's not a gigantic conference of two thousand people where it's just such a nightmare
to go to. You know, it's a nice size conference. Everybody is
sounds corny to say, top notch, but they really are. They're good
people that are there. Everybody's into the same thing at a high level.
And we have a great group of speakers that like coming to our event.
You know so, But I don't want to get on my event. That
wasn't the goal there. I just wanted to do a little mention there.
So tell me what else we want to talk about with Start nine, because
this is your chance to tell me stuff about it. I want to make
sure I get out everything about the embassy Start nine. I mean, I
want to tell people what they need to know. I think it's a great
idea to make a personal server instead of just a node that runs a Bitcoin
node. There is still a lack of understanding as to the magnitude of the
technological transformation taking place on Earth right now, that was started by bitcoin.
Right. Even bitcoiners do not fully understand the depth of the change here.
And I use that lightly because some do, but nobody, Nobody fully grasps
the magnitude of the tectonic shift that's taking place here. We believe that what
we are doing is a natural extension of the movement started and that continues to
be led by Bitcoin and will always be by the way Bitcoin is the beating
heart, is the battlecry of this revolution. But it needs help, right,
even heroes needs support. We're building that infrastructure right. Start nine is
not a node company. We are not a chat company or a computer company.
Right. We are building personal devices, not one per home, one
per person. Everyone has a phone in their own pocket. Families don't share
phones, right. They don't share phones because everyone wants to be on it.
At the same time, everyone wants the sort of privacy that comes along
with having your own chat history. You don't want your parents going through your
stuff, right. So these are a personal device and it is your gateway.
Two and sovereign territory in the Internet, the new Internet, right,
And it's necessary for Bitcoin to survive if we don't have full node operators in
abundance. Bitcoin is vulnerable. The full user and economic modes are critical to
the health of the network. Take messaging, for instance, Bitcoin is vulnerable
if you and I are messaging on I message and I say, hey,
send me some bitcoin, and you go, okay, I'll send you some
bitcoin. Bitcoin can be as private as it wants to be, but if
that message is not private, then we are still subject to the physical dangers
associated with you know, interrogation or right like the whole thing is private or
none of it is private. Any crack or vulnerability in the communications and digital
infrastructure is a vulnerability to not just bitcoin, but to human liberty, right
to freedom, which of which privacy is a necessary prerequisite. So we are
a computer company who with privacy as an uncompromising core principle. You will not
need to trust us for this to work. Currently there's a little bit of
trust. There won't be. Well, let's go five years in the future.
What do we see coming from you guys, and where will you all
be in this space? What do you foresee as start nine's place in five
years? Do you have security cameras in your home? Do you have a
smart doorbell? And a smart thermostat. No, not a smart stormostatt.
But I do I have a camera at the door, but not a smart
doorbell. How about like an Alexa or a Google Home Speak. Yes,
definitely is Alexa listening? And Gary, yeah, well not now not in
my office here, but sure as shit is at home because it comes on
sometimes it says I didn't understand what you said. No one was talking to
you, bitch, right, And the cameras is nest watching. Right.
So here's here's the danger that we're getting ourselves into right now as a world,
as the Internet of Things comes into play, as hardware devices become more
prominent in our lives, the data that is right, the censors on those
things, and the data that is collected are dangerous, potentially dangerous. Right.
I know a lot of people who don't have cameras in their owns or
own an Alexa simply because it feels like an invasion of privacy. The idea
that there's a hardware device in my home that has a direct connection to Google
servers and is listening to everything that I say is quite frankly unacceptable, right,
It's scary, and most people don't recognize the repercussions of that, because
it hasn't been leveraged against us in a severe manner yet. Right, But
go ask some people you know in less fortunate regimes than America, if you
know, if they're afraid of their corporations or governments spying on them in their
homes, and it's much more of a concern. And who knows what America
is going to look like in the next few decades. Right, We don't
want to take that risk. We want to build technology and infrastructure that protects
the individual, regardless of the political future. And so that's the direction that
we are going in. Right. There will come a day in the next
five years where you will be able to buy a camera, either a open
source hardware camera off the shelf or directly from start nine. You'll be able
to put it up on your ceiling. You'll be able to walk up to
that camera with the same phone that you use to register your embassy and tap
it to the camera. That's the setup process. You will walk up to
the camera, you will tap your phone to it. The phone will give
a little vibration, and the camera will wake up, recognize you as its
master, and immediately find all of its brothers and sisters on the distributed Internet
using their tour addresses, because that information was passed using the public keys from
which we derive the public addresses. Okay, so I tap my camera with
my phone and suddenly the camera knows that it has a sibling in the other
room which is monitoring that room, that it has a doorbell outside, that
it has a little drone flying around the house, that the embassy is the
sort of brain of the whole operation, which is storing the majority of the
data. However, it's also sharing that data with other embassies around the world
and encrypted charts right using Lightning network for micropayments. Okay, we envision the
future where human beings individuals have entire fleets of IoT devices, drones and otherwise
serving them on a very personal level, with no third parties or trust involved
whatsoever. If I buy a little vacuum cleaner, that little vacuum cleaner should
not be uploading data to Google. It should be uploading data to my embassy
in my living room, which then stores backups on my mom's embassy, totally
encrypted and broken up by the way, all serving my needs. Well,
that sounds pretty interesting. So no longer will anyone have your information, the
size of your house, inside, where your furniture is, what you're saying,
what you're doing, where you've been. It'll be just on your personal
server. And guess what, you don't need a blockchain for it. Yeah,
yeah, you don't need a blockchain for a lot of things. Personal
army, robot armies of the future will not need a blockchain. All they
will need is bitcoin and the Lightning network for micro pants. Very good,
the short and the long of it. Right, the short term, we're
a plug and play Bitcoin full node. Push a button, you're running a
full bitcoin node, pruned and overtour. Push another button. You're running a
private messaging protocol without any third parties. That's the short term, right.
The long term, tap your phone to a security camera and get your home
monitored without trusting a single person on Earth. And this is at start nine
labs dot com. Yeah, yea. So take a look at it,
and it was pretty impressively display at tones confiscatable. It was pretty impressed with
it. And like I said, I picked one up and set it up.
Took me a while to get around to setting it up, and I
did, but it takes me a while to do any damn thing. It
seems like I can find the time. Also, like I said, you
can find them at bit block. When where can be people follow you at
or follow Starting nine Labs and they want to keep up with what you guys
are doing. Twitter. Twitter is the main access point. We also have
a mailing list which you can subscribe to the main website. But yeah,
I mean Twitter at Start nine Labs is where you're going to get the conversations
and the announcements. It's a very new Twitter handle. We don't have a
lot of followers. Like I said, we have not been a marketing first
company, but it's coming time. We're starting to get out there. I
appreciate what you said in the pre talk we were having. If you ought
to sold five thousand of these earlier near you'd had four thousand, nine hundred
and fifty people who wouldn't like what they had, Yeah, because you weren't
ready for those kind of numbers. No, No, we want to deliver.
Our customers are happy. We want to keep them that way, right.
I mean, this is where in the hardware business that's not easy.
Hardware is hard, which is why we want to be boring on the hardware
front at least for now, and ship software. We're a software company.
But this isn't your first rodeo either though, so I mean as far as
creating a company from scratch. So that helps you too, just that you
have that experience. I'm going through this before. Yeah, we're being prudent,
measured steps, slow growth, and you know what we will if it
starts to curb on us, we'll handle it. Okay. Well, Matt,
thanks for coming on the show. I look forward to seeing you again
at bit block Boom follow Matt follow Start nine Labs. Check out the start
nine labs dot com. Thanks Matt, I appreciate it. Can't wait for
the conference, scary. I hope you've enjoyed today's show, and I want
to give a big thank you to all my cousins out there for listening and
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