Fighting Regulation with Decentralisation with Erik Voorhees & Udi Wertheimer - WBD383

Mr Obnoxious

Peter McCormack

Technology, News, Politics, Money, Investing, Finance, Bitcoin

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2021

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Location: Remotely
Date: Tuesday 3rd August
Company: ShapeShift / Independent
Role: CEO, Founder / Developer, Consultant, Bitcoin Activist

Erik Vorhees was a very early bitcoiner, drawn to it because of its alignment with his Libertarian beliefs. Erik created one of the first widely used applications on Bitcoin, Satoshi Dice. A ‘provably fair’ betting game that at one time made up around 50% of all bitcoin transactions.

In 2014, in the wake of the Mt.Gox collapse, Erik built ShapeShift, a trading platform that allowed the user to trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies without KYC or counterparty risk, which again aligned with both Erik’s and Bitcoin’s Libertarian ethos.

However, in 2018 regulation pushed ShapeShift to KYC every customer and comply with various surveillance and reporting requirements. Erik decided the best way to push back against this would be to dismantle the legal company and move instead to a protocol, forming a Decentralised Autonomous Organization (DAO).

In this interview, I talk to Shapeshift Founder & CEO Erik Voorhees and Developer & Consultant Udi Wertheimer. We discuss the increasing regulatory pressure, decentralising a company and whether tokens have merit.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Regulators are not going to be happy that there are unregulatable systems out there.
0:10.0	Bitcoin has shown that if you get to a degree of decentralization you cannot be stopped.
0:15.0	Hello there from Bedford in the United Kingdom. How are you all doing? All eyes on the
0:19.6	Infrastructure Bill over the weekend. I assume most of you've been watching what is going on.
0:24.0	Bill is being rushed through at the moment containing some pretty broad language that could
0:27.4	impact our industry. So before we get into the show there's a couple of things I just
0:31.0	wanted to talk about. Firstly, just amazing work everyone, just seeing
0:34.5	all the different leaders within this industry coming together trying to develop ideas
0:38.7	to put the pressure back on these regulators to not include such dumb language.
0:43.1	But secondly, we are very lucky to have the amazing team over at Coin Center.
0:47.4	People like Peter Van Valkenburg and Jerry Brito
0:50.0	on the front line fighting this bill.
0:51.9	You know, these guys rely on donations so if you've
0:54.8	made a lot of money over the last few years or even in this ball run and you want to
0:58.6	support them please do head over to Coin Center and make a donation they are
1:01.8	very very important to us all.
1:04.0	Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast, which is brought to you by Gemini, the only place I am
1:08.8	using for buying Bitcoin.
1:09.8	I'm your host Peter McCormack, and today I've got an interview that is definitely going to trigger some of the more hardcore Bitcoiners but I think is highly relevant right now.
1:17.6	So today I'm joined by Eric Voorhees and Udi Verthheimer to discuss Eric's plans to decentralize shape shift and create a Dow.
1:25.2	But before I get into this I do have a message from my show sponsors and today we're going to
1:29.5	kick off with Ledger the world's most popular hardware wallet.
	...

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