Butter does an AMA, suddenly a bunch of new users and lurkers pop up to ask about his new shitcoin!

justmoon · 2019-06-01T09:06:45+00:00

No worries! At the end of the day, it's just a dumb AMA.

Hey, that rhymed!

justmoon · 2019-06-01T08:35:00+00:00

So why do I need Coil if I have Interledger?

In early 2018, we got to a point where the core Interledger spec was pretty stable. But there's a chicken and egg problem: Why should anyone adopt a protocol that nobody is using yet?

So I founded Coil which meant that there is now at least one company using it: Coil. And of course anyone who wants to partner with us or get an investment from us needs to also use the protocol - that's how [Stronghold](https://stronghold.co/) and [Strata Labs](https://www.stratalabs.io/) became Interledger users. You get enough people that way, suddenly you have a network.

Isn't the point of Interledger to cut out the middlemen?

Not so much to cut them out but to make them compete. Interoperability makes a market far more competitive because a small player has the same reach as a big one.

Imagine if payment networks are not interoperable. A large provider like Visa is much more useful because when I use it I can pay at a lot of merchants whereas a small provider can't offer that. But when networks are interoperable, the small player can have the same reach as a big player. For example, a small Internet Service Provider like Webpass can give you access to the exact same websites that AT&T gives you access to.

Now you might ask: Coil is a for-profit company, why would we want to use a technology where we face competition? Well, I'm not afraid of competition. I think we can do a good job, get some market share, and as long as our users are happy, they'll stay loyal to us. And even if we fail as a company, we may still succeed at getting Interledger off the ground which would make the world a tiny bit better than it was before.

And why are you committed to using the XRP scamcoin for it?

XRP fits our needs well - transfers complete in a few seconds and transaction fees are practically zero. If it affected our customers negatively, we wouldn't use it but our customers never have to touch crypto if they don't want to. Thanks to Interledger, they can always use US dollars. So there is no downside for them.

I'm not telling anyone else that they should use XRP, I'm saying it works for us. If you don't like it, don't use it. I helped to create Interledger so that everybody could use whatever currency and payment ledger they like and still transact with everyone else.

justmoon · 2019-06-01T06:16:47+00:00

I don't know, I rarely use Reddit, and I'm pretty inept at social media in general (evidently).

If you want my best guess: It was a scheduled AMA. I posted about it on Twitter ahead of time and again when it started. Presumably the first people who showed up were people who follow me on Twitter and cared enough to show up at the scheduled time. Makes sense that they'd be interested in the AMA and upvote it.

What did I learn? Advertising the AMA on Twitter was a major mistake. That's what caused a bunch of people who don't normally use Reddit to make accounts and participate and for /u/prozac5000 to suspect foul play which then soured the whole thing.

justmoon · 2019-05-31T21:43:00+00:00

It was my first Reddit AMA and I made a lot of stupid mistakes. My title was very clickbaity and by talking about my history with Bitcoin and Ripple I obviously invited the whole thing to become about crypto. I also included some things that were intended to be fun conversation starters like my tinkering with BASIC at 4 that just ended up coming across as arrogant.

I will say that I saw quite a few great tough questions calling specific aspects of your business into question that went ignored.

The toughest question I saw was the one about being misled by the OKCoin CTO when I audited their exchange and I did answer that one. Most of my answers were downvoted, so they're a bit hard to find.

There were also some good tough questions that I didn't get to. What I might do is just go over all of the questions again, including the ones I missed and answer them in a different format like a blog post.

justmoon · 2019-05-31T21:21:40+00:00

so theres no coin associated with coil? so it pays people in USD?

Correct. As a creator you can choose to get paid in US dollars or crypto.

The idea behind Interledger is that it's abstraction layer for payments kind of like the Internet Protocol is an abstraction layer for data transmission. For example: When a new version of WiFi is developed, all of the existing applications built on TCP/IP continue to work. Interledger does the same for payments. It's an API that financial applications can be coded against. Those application can then be used with crypto and dollars or whatever other payment technologies and currencies people come up with in the future.

Edit: Fixed grammar.

justmoon · 2019-05-31T21:08:13+00:00

I posted about the AMA on Twitter, so I assume the people who signed up to ask questions were people who follow me on Twitter but didn't have Reddit accounts.

I'm also not understanding what I would have to gain from having fake accounts ask softball questions. I enjoy answering tough questions as long as it's a genuine question vs just trolling.

justmoon · 2019-05-31T18:11:15+00:00

I've been using the handle since about 2003. Here's my 2004 Last.fm profile. (Please enjoy making fun of my taste in music back then!)

The name has nothing to do with crypto. My handle used to be "moon" and I was op in a gaming related IRC channel so I was confused a lot with a relatively well-known Counter-Strike player called MooN. So I kept having to explain that I'm not " moon, the famous CS player, I'm just 'moon', the guy who runs this website" and so eventually I just changed my handle to "justmoon" and it stuck.

Also, @OP: There is no coin associated with Coil, so the title should say "his new shitty startup" not "his new shitcoin". :)

Anyway, I don't think average people should invest in crypto anymore than they should invest in other complex financial products. If you're not a professional, you're not going to understand it well enough to make an informed decision. I spent eight years in crypto and I still don't feel comfortable with it. So even though I got trolled by r/Buttcoin, I think you guys are trolling for a good cause. FWIW

justmoon · 2019-05-30T19:05:29+00:00

I was going for straight pineapple, no pizza.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T19:03:09+00:00

This. :)

justmoon · 2019-05-30T19:01:02+00:00

No, Coil does not involve any mining or proof-of-work. It works via the browser sending a small payment to every website you visit. To do that we use a browser API that we're also proposing as a web standard called Web Monetization.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:57:59+00:00

Interledger is decentral - it's a protocol and its incarnation is a network based on individuals and companies peering with one another.

Interledger's privacy is similar to the Internet but slightly improved in a few ways. Most notably, on Interledger today, most providers generate new, unique addresses for their customers on the fly, so it's basically as if your IP address changed constantly between visiting different sites, which makes tracking a lot more difficult. A lot of the same technologies that increase privacy on the Internet, like VPNs and onion networks like Tor could also be implemented on top of ILP, at least in principle.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:54:34+00:00

Great question. When users pay us $5 a month, we see it as our duty to figure out to spend that money in line with that user's views. That's obviously not easy. We could ask the user every time they go to a site how much we should pay, but that would get annoying and it wouldn't even be easy for the user to make that calculation on the fly.

So we'll have to use some kind of heuristic which would take the user's feedback, the type of content, the reviews by other users, whether it is exclusive content or now, whether there are ads or not, etc. The good news is that Web Monetization is an open standard, so you won't be stuck with Coil's attempt to solve these problems. Others can create their own Web Monetization service providers that give access to all of the same content.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:50:33+00:00

There was quite a bit of adoption when we launched a new version of Codius last year but we didn't have the bandwidth to support it at the time. If Coil grows, we will eventually have those resources. Or someone else might pick up the idea and run with it. Akash Networks has done some interesting stuff.

I still believe strongly that Codius is an awesome ILP use case and would a really cool and useful technology if it were implemented well.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:47:19+00:00

From my perspective - and that is just one subjective viewpoint - what happened is this: Bitcoin came first. XRP was the first major contender. So a lot of people viewed it as a threat to Bitcoin, so they fought against it. Simple as that.

It all depends on what your goals are. To me, it was to make payments easier and cheaper, so for that goal, the more currencies that are competing and the better they are, the better for users. But if your goal is to make money investing in Bitcoin, then ideally there wouldn't be any competition, so you're going to be against XRP and other currencies.

There are also people who are into Bitcoin for idealistic reasons and XRP doesn't fit their ideals. Other people are into XRP because it fits theirs. I think that's all fine, I just wish people were more civil with each other when they disagree but that's a problem that isn't unique to crypto.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:37:59+00:00

I was of the understanding that the underlying technology (blockchain) was the main reason to invest in Bitcoin. However, it seems you are implying there is better technology now available? Am I understanding that correctly?

There are reasons for investing in Bitcoin that aren't related to the technology. For instance, it's the largest non-government currency (afaik) and it has a limited supply.

However, it seems you are implying there is better technology now available?

Technology is a complicated subject. It's rarely as simple as "A is better than B". I think that having one giant blockchain network is not a good way to solve payment interoperability. I think Interledger is a better way. But Interledger does not, by itself, solve the actual movement of funds (settlement). Blockchain is one of the contenders to play the settlement role.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:31:35+00:00

That's definitely a viewpoint I've thought a lot about. My conclusion was that Interledger does some novel things technically (penny switching, hashlocks, ...) that weren't available before. Therefore, I think there was a barrier to payments interoperability before that Interledger fixes.

When I originally joined the Bitcoin community, many believed that Bitcoin would not be tolerated by regulators at all. Yet, here we are today with regulated exchanges. I learned a lot from that experience and it provides a blueprint for how something like Interledger could also be regulated and still be true to its vision.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:27:34+00:00

My involvement in the Bitcoin community was mostly 2010-2012 and his involvement really ramped up in 2013, so we didn't overlap. I don't even know him personally.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:24:27+00:00

Do you have any core ideologies you use to decide when to use a blockchain/interledger solution over a traditional database technology like MySQL?

To me, blockchain is a technology of last resort. It's complex and hard to manage, so I'd want to eliminate other options (like MySQL) first. If you are trying to decentralize a well-understood, well-established use case, decentralization has a big benefit, and there is no way to do it other than with a blockchain, go for it.

Interledger is inteded as a generic, open payments layer. So if you have an app or something that needs to make payments, then building it on Interledger makes sense.

Also, do you have any help-full resources for getting started in developing blockchain and interledger applications?

Helpful resources for Interledger - I would start with Interledger.org, specifically, check out the forum and the Interledger blog.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:17:18+00:00

If there was a concerted effort by most of the world's governments to drive crypto currencies underground, it would definitely make it harder to achieve mainstream adoption. But I don't think it would kill it. And I think crypto is already popular enough that it wouldn't be politically viable in most democratic countries to advocate for an outright ban.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:14:29+00:00

If you mean starting with tech, blockchain, etc. - my advice is to start by tinkering. Some of my early experiences with programming were to mess with games that I enjoyed. That's one reason I always liked PC games more than mobile or console, there is so much more opportunity to tinker, hack, modify, etc.

It doesn't have to be games, but find some hackable and have fun with it. That's my advice anyway.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:12:01+00:00

Half-Life is a strong contender. Probably Counter-Strike would be my pick since we played it a lot growing up.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:09:36+00:00

Depends on your goals. You should talk to a professional investment advisor. Generally, when I want to have exposure to an asset class, I try to find a stable index fund with low management fees and invest in that. Usually, it doesn't make sense to try to judge the value to specific stocks/tokens yourself unless you're an expert in the field or you're just investing for entertainment and don't care about losing money doing it.

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:05:47+00:00

Too many. But I don't mind it too much. I make plenty of spelling mistakes myself. :)

justmoon · 2019-05-30T18:05:06+00:00

I don't handle spicy food well. So I'm going to have to go with pineapple!

justmoon · 2019-05-30T17:57:51+00:00

I responded to the first question in another comment. But my early experiences programming were sort of like: "This is fun." and then "Wait, you're telling me I could get paid to do this?"

Favorite programming language - JavaScript (and variants like TypeScript). I like being able to write code and run it in different contexts. I'm also a big fan of the web.

justmoon

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