Recently Alex Winter – in his main role as CTO of BitcoinVN – made some headlines with his side project Satoshiwall.cash.
He talked to us about how he found his way into Bitcoin, why he chose to build his application on Bitcoin Cash and his future plans for Satoshiwall.cash as well as if he is working on other BCH/SLP-related initiatives in his role as CTO of BitcoinVN.
BVN: Hi Alex! First of all our almost standard question: When and how did you get attracted to Bitcoin in the first place and what was it that drew you in to make a career out of it?
Alex: It was in late 2012 when a friend from university showed me this magical internet money that can be used to buy illicit items on a website called Silk Road. I remember buying a bunch of them and sending them to my “Blockchain.info” wallet. The interface looked like a bank account of sorts, but I realized it was real peer-to-peer cash and I was being my own bank. I could send any amount to anyone in the world virtually for free without trusted third party. I was blown away.
As a consequence I dropped out of university to become a software developer. I knew I wanted to build my career around this new type of money I hope someday will bring financial freedom to the entire world.
BVN: Recently you launched Satoshiwall.cash which received a pretty positive feedback from the BCH community. What gave you the inspiration to build this product and what problem are you trying to solve?
Alex: In a time where content creators struggle to maintain their income due to rampant deplatforming and demonetization, it’s ever more important to have a truly peer to peer alternative of generating passive income.
Satoshiwall enables you to get paid for your content directly by other users. It’s fully non-custodial, which means I do not touch anyone’s money at any point. All payments go directly from the user to the content creator.
BVN: It is known that most of the leadership at BitcoinVN are pretty staunch sympathisants of “Bitcoin maximalism”; you seem to be an exception there. Why did you decide to build the application on Bitcoin Cash instead of Bitcoin or even other seemingly popular platforms like Ethereum?
Alex: Satoshiwall relies on cheap and reliable transactions in order to facilitate micropayments. Some content is sold for less than a cent.
Neither Bitcoin (BTC) nor Ethereum (ETH) are suitable for this model. Unfortunately, the leadership and community of BTC refuses to keep up with demand which results in the network being very slow, unpredictable and expensive at times. As a consequence, BTC does not fulfill its purpose as peer-to-peer electronic cash as outlined in the Bitcoin whitepaper anymore.
Thankfully, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) serves as a great alternative with reliably cheap transactions which is exactly what I need and what fascinated me about Bitcoin in the first place.
BVN: How do you see Satoshiwall.cash evolving further in the short-, mid- and long-term? What features are planned next – and what ideas do you have to make the tool to gain more widespread adoption across the wider publishing community on the web?
Alex: I need to make it even easier to get paid. Currently you need to go to the website, post your content and spread the link on other platforms like Facebook or Twitter. But most traction will probably come with third party integrations (think of WordPress plug-ins etc) and maybe even support for SLP tokens (lots of stuff happening in the space). Imagine users paying for content without knowing they’re dealing with Satoshiwall or even BCH at all. This is what ultimately needs to happen.
BVN: We discussed already before that most of the BitcoinVN leadership tends to be very supportive towards the cause of Bitcoin. Given your sympathies and expertise you have built up working with Bitcoin Cash – can we expect that BitcoinVN itself also in the future will possibly provide additional support to the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem e.g. in the form of SLP tokens and similar?
Alex: Given the elegance and simplicity of SLP, I expect its popularity to continuously increase. The Bitcoin Cash space is very enthusiastic about it with new developments being announced almost on a daily basis. Recently, Vin Armani revealed a mechanism called “Postage Protocol” which will allow SLP tokens to be sent without the need to own any BCH. This is a great UX improvement which could potentially one-up established token standards like ERC-20. I’m thrilled to see how the SLP ecosystem will develop.
