You Can’t Make Money Out of Releasing Protocols.

This is a tweet storm condensed from a post on Crypto Insider. Bitcoin’s influence has spread everywhere, and people are using its concepts for all sorts of experiments. Some of them, like Civic, are instantly recognisable as a bad idea on the practical and ethical levels. Some take a little more thought to unpick. It is possible to unpick bad thinking, and absolutely necessary.

Tweet Storms are chains of one or two sentences to help convey complex ideas by delivering them in small chunks. You can step through the parts of an idea and guide the reader very painlessly. Tweet Storms are to Medium posts as Assembly is to PHP.

You can’t make money out of releasing protocols. You build businesses on _top_ of protocols. Like BitTorrent.

Red Hat Linux made money not out of selling an Open Source operating system, but by selling services to users of their flavour of Linux.

You can “invest in a protocol”, if you are willing to give that work away for free and then make money on the services built on it.

Its like the Nautilus Corporation that spent $11,000,000 writing a file browser for Linux. There is no profit in that whatsoever.

To make money in Bitcoin you either buy and save it directly or you invest in companies selling access. You can’t, “invest in the protocol”.

Its exactly the same as email. If someone said, “We are investing in the email protocol”, you would be (rightly) laughed out of the room.

If on the other hand, you said you were investing in Hotmail, which uses the email protocols, then you would be on to something. Big.

And if that company said, “We are going to take everyone’s name, government id and KYC/AML all Hotmail users” you’d say they were insane.

But that is _exactly_ what is happening with Coinbase and other people selling access to the Bitcoin rails, which are no different to email.

Imagine saying, “We have 400k users in line waiting to be verified to send and receive email.” It is so absurd its barely thinkable.

The Token Frenzy is full of similar problematic thinking. Etherium tokens are indistinguishable from Bitcoin in nature and yet, no KYC/AML.

No one can explain why Etherium tokens are treated differently to Bitcoin. They are both software, and there is no essential difference.

Similarly, no one can explain why Linden Dollars are treated differently to Bitcoin and “Etherieum crowdsale Tokens” Note the double quotes.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say special rules apply to BTC, but not Lindens or ETH “Tokens”. Logic is an absolute requirement.

All disruptive companies are doing something that only becomes clear _after_ the context is laid out. That means having insight and facts.

You can’t say you’re in vesting in protocols. You cant claim that every business will have its own token. You must embrace how things work.

Understanding Bitcoin is hard. It means having a firm grasp on economics (Austrian School), cryptography and what a protocol is. Hard stuff!

Now that the soundness of Bitcoin is taken for granted, the next hurdle is economic illiteracy. Everyone _cannot have their own currency_.

In order for money to work, you need to have a single unit of account. You cant spend the Indian Rupee in New York. Same with Tokens.

Getting Bitcoin into people’s hands is a pain point waiting to be solved. On a global basis, a lowest common denominator method is needed.

By reducing the process of getting Bitcoin down to a string of numbers, we’ve reduced the process to almost nothing. We can serve everyone.

Strings of numbers can be printed, read over the phone, and used in many contexts, and I am talking about 16 digits, NOT Bitcoin addresses.

Imagine buying Bitcoin over the phone with your credit card, and having 16 digits read out to you, redeemable for Bitcoin to any address.

This process is universally understood on a global basis. We do not have custodial accounts. There is no need for them. We supply Bitcoin.

We address the market by its nature, with a format that is not only understandable, but which is incredibly adaptable to any scenario.

Whether printed on paper slips, read out over the phone by a man or a machine, there is no simpler way to get Bitcoin. Period.

The part of the circle where Bitcoin is easy to get is about to be closed. Then services like SatoshiPay will benefit greatly.

Mobile phones are universal because everyone is on GSM. WhatsApp is viable because everyone is on HTTPS. Bitcoin is no different.

Bitcoin is the money of the net. Supplying it in an easily consumable form, without friction is what we’ve done: “The Uber of Bitcoin.”

_A croissant with jam and a double espresso_↴