Fedimint & the Future of Bitcoin Custody with Obi Nwosu - WBD551
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2022
⏱️ 112 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Obi Nwosu is a co-founder of Fedimint and a board member for Jack Dorsey's and Jay-Z's ₿trust. In this interview, we discuss how Fedimint builds upon various innovations to create community Bitcoin banks, with the aim of fully realising Bitcoin's potential to bank the unbanked.
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In 2018, Bitcoin Magazine asked Andreas Antonopoulos to reflect on 10 years of Bitcoin. He remarked that not everybody needs Bitcoin; "the real impact of this technology is on the other 6 billion: the unbanked, the underbanked, the politically oppressed." Whilst Bitcoin has the utility to help those living outside of the financial system, in its current form it still lacks the functionality and scalability to adopt the majority of people who, as Andreas stated, really need it.
Bitcoin has multiple constraints, but a principal issue is expecting the unbanked to be able to self-custody. The answer to this problem lay in work undertaken by one of the original cypherpunks. In 1989 David Chaum created Digicash. Despite the venture eventually failing, decades later it helped pave the way for Bitcoin, and, now it is the basis for Fedimint.
Chaum's innovation was to create blind mints: digital banks where communities can deposit and utilise digital dollars, and where the custodians have no access to any of the user data. But it was a chance meeting between Obi Nwosu and Eric Sirion at a hackers congress in Prague last year that dusted off Chaum's work and give it new life, with the aim of opening up Bitcoin to the masses. As a result, Fedimint was born in 2021. It attracted the sponsorship of Blockstream.
Fedimint operates outside of the Bitcoin blockchain, and the idea is that the custody will be managed by trusted members of a community. Custodial risk is reduced through the ability to have such mints federated, where the operation operates as a multi-sig. Obi believes that after the provision of decentralised censorship-resistant money and payments, Fedimint is the third pillar of Bitcoin. It offers the real opportunity to scale Bitcoin into a global currency.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Most of the solutions that I've seen around custody take us from A to B to C so they're better custody they improve upon where we are. |
| 0:16.7 | What we did is look at what does the world look like when everybody's using Bitcoin, |
| 0:22.0 | when there are billions of people using |
| 0:23.5 | Bitcoin. Hello there, how are you all? Welcome to the What Bitcoin did |
| 0:27.6 | podcast, which is brought to you by Gemini, the only place to find me using |
| 0:31.0 | buying Bitcoin. I'm your host, Peter Peter McCormack and today I've got an awesome |
| 0:34.4 | interview with Obie Noosu, the co-founder of Fettie Mint and board member for Jack |
| 0:38.9 | Dorsey and Jay-Z's a B-Trust organisation. Now I first met Obie a couple of years ago when he was the |
| 0:45.1 | CEO of the UK Exchange coin floor but that seems like a lifetime ago now because since |
| 0:49.6 | then he left coin floor and co-founded one of the most talked about projects in Bitcoin. |
| 0:54.8 | Anita Posh first made me aware of Fettie Mintz when I spoke to her in November last year. |
| 0:59.3 | And Matt O'Dell has talked to me a lot about the privacy implications so I knew I had to ask |
| 1:03.2 | obi to come on the show and give me an explainer. So I hope you enjoy this if you got |
| 1:07.5 | any questions about this or anything else then feel free to drop me an email on |
| 1:10.7 | hello at what Bitcoin did dot com. |
| 1:17.2 | Why is we always have |
| 1:18.6 | we had 60 people at the beat up the first one in Bedford 60 people at the meet-up, the first one in Bedford. |
| 1:23.2 | 60 people at the meet-up. |
| 1:25.2 | Wow. |
| 1:26.2 | Yeah. PTC Gandoff was there, I think. |
| 1:28.2 | He came down. |
| 1:29.2 | He drove down the night. |
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