Team Spotlight: DASH, Austrian Economics, and Doctor Who with an Exodus Developer

This blog post originally appeared on Steemit but was also published on the official Exodus Movement Medium page.

At Exodus, we love to share insight into some of the amazing team members responsible for delivering our product to you all. In this post, you'll find a transcript of an interview between CSE Davey and Developer Doug. 

The following is a transcript of a recorded interview that took place on May 1, 2018.

Welcome to Exodus Movement, easing you into the new economy. I’m Davey, and today, I am joined by one of Exodus’ superhero developers, Doug Barbieri.Doug, it’s so awesome to have you here today.
Thanks, Davey. Thanks for having me on, I appreciate it.

For all of you storing your EOS inside of Exodus, Doug is the knight in shining armor who championed the one-click EOS registration feature, saving thousands of us from the complexities of the EOS registration process. I want to share an email we received from an Exodus customer. Our customer writes:

“I have just registered my EOS via Exodus. This may sound dumb, but it was too easy. Is that it? If I followed your instructions on the website, and I am now registered for EOS, do I need to do anything else? It just seemed way too simple.”

I love hearing things like that. It always warms my heart. And you know, that’s part of the reason why I do software, I want to make peoples’ lives better. So, it’s a lot of fun when you hear that. I always put myself in the shoes of the end user anyway. When you have a bad design, or some painful experience, it just sucks. And EOS, the way we had it before, where you go off to MyEtherWallet, I mean it sucked. That was terrible.

And, in fact, I was actually doing customer support for a while, and I would have to give people this set of raw instructions. I remember one woman wrote in and said “How do I register my EOS?” And I said, “Well, it’s really complicated, but here’s the link if you want to try it. I have a hard time recommending that you do it, because you have to export your private key, and that opens you up to some vulnerabilities if you’re not careful with your key. You have to make sure that when you go to MyEtherWallet that you’re not going to a hack site,” which happens to people, they call them phishing sites, where it looks like the real thing. You punch in your private key, paste it in and send it to them, and then they drain your wallet, even though it looked legitimate. So, you have to be really careful with that.

That lady wrote back and went “This is so complicated!” And I went, “You know, I’ll tell you what, we’re probably going to be adding support for a registration feature in EOS at some point down the road, and we’ve got time.” The [end of the] distribution was many months away. And she says, “You know, I think I’ll just do that. I think I’ll just wait.”

And it’s just funny because I transferred into development and I got to put that feature in. I did it in some ways for her.

Are you personally a fan of EOS?
It’s got a lot of potential. I think just from the standpoint of competition, Ethereum definitely deserves to have some competition. I know that’s kind of what they want to do, they want to be able to have smart contracts and give Ethereum a run for its money, and I wish them the best of luck. I hope that they’re successful.

There’s certainly a lot of excitement over EOS and its potential as a competitor to Ethereum, but occasionally this excitement is tempered by the prospect of government regulation. We see this not only with EOS, but also with a whole host of digital assets. There’s currently restrictions in Washington State and New York, and of course there’s concern that this could spread to the rest of the United States. In your opinion, is government regulation necessary to take crypto mainstream?
I’m really radical on this one, but I don’t even think there should be an SEC. I don’t think that the government should be regulating any of that. I think it should be sink or swim, invest at your own risk, because when you think that you’ve got this benevolent organization out there that’s keeping you safe from the bad guys, you see a company come online and say, “Hey, we have a stock offering,” [and people think,] “They couldn’t lie. The government wouldn’t let them do that.” There’s plenty of examples of regulated entities out there, they’ve gone through all the motions and then it turns out they’re crap, and they’re crooks. So, it’s no guarantee of safety. I think it gives more of a false sense of security to people.

I would just prefer to see a free market in all that. And then maybe institutions might spring up that could offer certification. A little like UL does today, you know, Underwriter Laboratories. They certify electric appliances, electronics, all kinds of stuff for safety, and it’s a third party you have to send your equipment to them and they test it, and if you don’t get a good rating, you can’t put the UL sticker on your product. I mean, you could probably still sell it, but who the heck’s going to take it?

And it’s that kind of thing, you know, where it’s like “I want to invest …” I mean, that’s what I’d like to see for ICOs and I don’t . That’s an opportunity, a marketing opportunity, I think, that somebody should come up with a service that says “Okay, we’re going to regulate these ICOs, if they’re willing. Well not regulate, but we’ll certify,” which is a form of regulation. “If you see an ICO and it doesn’t have our stamp on it, you might think twice before you participate in it.”

And it might be nice having competing organizations that can do this and say, “Hey, this has got a stamp of approval.” I know it’s food related, but imagine the kosher label, for example. That is a form of regulation. If you go to buy a kosher product, and it’s got the kosher stamp on it, you at least have some assurance of quality. You know that a Rabbi was there and he blessed the pickles, and you know that it was processed in a certain way, and you know you have a reasonable assurance that what you’ll be getting into, what you’ll be buying, is going to be of high quality.

And same thing for any of these things, I think. That’s my diatribe.

What is it that ultimately drew you to Exodus?
Well, I mean, what brought me to Exodus was what brought me to cryptocurrencies in general. 

With money, a really good book to read is “What Has the Government Done to Our Money?” by Murray Rothbard. It’s a pretty short read, but it walks you through the history of money in general. We’re talking about the 10,000 years of human history that we know about. How long money, the concept of money has been with us, and what has typically been sort of bid up in the marketplace as money.

And one of the things that he fingers is gold, and there’s good reasons for gold to be money. Gold has kind of been bid up in the marketplace as the best money, because of certain principles. You’ve got fungibility and you’ve got divisibility. And it actually has value outside of being a currency. It never spoils. It lasts forever. They opened up King Tut’s tomb, and you’ve got gold that didn’t even need polishing; it’s still in pristine condition.

But the thing is, governments over time have provided their own units of gold. So, it used to be that the dollar, for example, the US dollar was regulated to be 1/20th an ounce of gold. So, every dollar was worth 1/20th an ounce of gold, and that was a fixed gold standard. The British pound was, I believe, 1/8th. Although the pound sterling used to mean one pound of sterling silver, that used to be what a pound stood for, and then they moved it to gold.

And then, during the Bretton Woods issue post World War II, Europe got decimated, most of the world had all these problems, and so they found that with all the war problems they had depleted their gold, but the US still had lots of gold. So we said, “Hey, look, tell you what. Instead of pegging your money to gold, why don’t you peg it to the US dollar and we’ll keep the gold.” That was the Bretton Woods agreement. And of course, that broke down in the ’70s, when France demanded to the US, “Here’s our US dollars, we want the gold.” Nixon knew that it would wipe out Fort Knox, so he took us off the gold standard. That’s when you get this runaway inflation in the 70s and we’ve been inflationary ever since.

So, along comes Satoshi Nakamoto with his ideas. His White Paper is the White Paper that changed the world, and they came out with bitcoin. I remember when I first saw it, I was like “What the heck is this? I can generate ones and zeros on my computer all day long, this just doesn’t seem like anything that actually works.” Until I read his White Paper and understood what it was that he was doing. And he’s actually doing math. You can’t fake math. When you mine a bitcoin, you’re actually doing an equation. You’re actually coming up with an answer, and the answer has to be right, and you have to be the first one to come to it if you’re a miner, and if you reach the conclusions first before everybody else, you get the block.

And so, the idea is that this is an inflation-resistant money that’s not controlled by anyone, you don’t need a central bank. And I was really intrigued by this, and so I started playing around with it. I was like, wow, this really has potential. And so I started buying it and selling it, doing fun things with it. I actually wanted to use it as a currency. I wanted to really play with it and just see how viable it was. And after a few times of using it to buy what little things I could find back in those days, I was really impressed. I was like, “yeah, I’m hooked on this” and so I became a fan of bitcoin.

I was using the Core wallet chiefly to hold my bitcoin, and I found it to be clunky, difficult to use, and it never gave you any fiat prices. It never gave you the bitcoin in fiat prices. The other thing was that my old computer, since you have to download the entire blockchain with the Core wallet, would overheat when it was trying to catch up with the blockchain, and so I said, “I gotta find something better.” Started looking around, and I found the Exodus wallet.

And as soon as I downloaded it, I fell in love it. Because, well, first of all, it’s like “Oh, look. My bitcoin has a dollar value next to it.” That right there was a selling feature. But then, you know, aside from the fact that it’s just this beautiful wallet, gorgeously designed, that’s really what got me hooked.

But I’ll tell you what, the biggest thing was the support. When I interacted with the support, I realized, geez, there are real people behind this wallet that really want to make sure that your user experience is the best that it can possibly be, that you have complete control of your own money, and that your experience is awesome.

And that’s kind of how it happened. And then I saw that they were hiring on their site. I mean, really that’s kind of how it worked. That’s how it got me there.

I had a very similar experience. I was first a user of the wallet, fell in love with it, and it wasn’t until a short time later that I joined the team.Other than bitcoin, are there any other projects that you’re a big fan of?
I’m a big fan of Dash. I liked originally how they were trying to do purely anonymous transactions. Right now, for those people that don’t know, bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous. In other words, you don’t have your name attached to anything on the blockchain, but it is all public. And if you use the same address to do all your transactions, if somebody finds out that’s your address, they can see what you’re doing. Right? They can see, oh, you’ve moved this bitcoin to that address, and with investigative work could put together what you’re doing. So, it’s not completely anonymous.

Dash wanted to change that with DarkSend, they wanted to have it so where you couldn’t trace currency being sent from Point A to Point B. In fact, Dash I think used to be called Darkcoin, and then they rebranded their product and focused instead on fast confirmations. The thing is, when you want to move a bitcoin from one place to another, from one address to another, you’ve got to get miners to do that for you. Basically you fill a block up, and then the miner has to accept it, and you have to pay a fee, and you have to wait for a confirmation. You have to wait for at least one confirmation to say, well, yeah, this is legitimate. The shorthand or the rule of thumb of the industry is six confirmations. When you have six confirmations, that’s a pretty good bet that your transaction is going to be good.

That could take ten minutes, and so if I’m sending you money, maybe that’s not that big of a deal. But say I’m standing in a café, and I want to order some coffee, and I beep my QR code, I have to wait ten minutes before you’re assured that my transaction is confirmed.

So, Dash wanted to get around that and make it fast. I definitely appreciated that. They’re focusing on what I think is, to me, the killer feature of any cryptocurrency, and that is it’s a currency. To use a currency, not as an asset, not as an investment scheme, but as a currency. To me, that was the killer feature.

And that’s why I like Dash, and I like the way they rebranded their currency, they’re trying to make it attractive. It’s kind of not really caught on like I would have liked, but that was the other coin that I remember getting into, shortly after bitcoin.

I think Ethereum has a lot of potential as well. I know that there’s problems with smart contracts. I know that sometimes there’s security problems, and this is a problem, I think, with any coding and any software that you write. It’s really hard to have it completely secure. In fact, it’s impossible that it’s completely secure software. There’s always going to be some vulnerability that you never thought of. And so a smart contract that’s revolving around money, oh boy. That’s kind of scary. But I do like the idea and what they’ve been able to produce. Even just like how EOS works, where you can register your address for later use, I mean, it’s a pretty neat feature.

So, I thought that those two projects were really neat to see, and I liked being involved with them. But probably I’m more of a bitcoin fan than I am Ethereum.

If you had a crystal ball, what would you see in it in the context of blockchain evolution or decentralization?
It’s like Buckminster Fuller said, if there’s a system that’s broken, you don’t join that organization or whatever and try to change it from within. What you do is, you create something that works better, that solves whatever problem they’re trying to do, and then you replace it by making it obsolete. My apologies to Buckminster Fuller, he said it much more eloquently than I, but that’s the gist of it.

The idea is that in order to fix the banking system, you don’t fix it, because it’s unfixable. We replace it. I see the future of banking as cryptocurrencies. I really do. I think that they’re going to really clean the clocks of the big banks, and the big banks are going to either adapt and figure it out, or they’re going to fold.

I think that was Nakamoto’s idea, his vision was to give people a way out of this trap. Because it is a trap, I mean, it’s a debt based system. The whole thing is. I mean, if you think about it, the Federal Reserve is — you know how new money is created is the Federal Reserve types it out on their computers and says, “Here. Here’s 900 billion dollars,” and they lend it to the US Treasury. That’s how they make money. So, just by using one of these Federal Reserve notes, you’re contributing to government debt, and it can never be paid back. It’s perpetual debt slavery.

So, the only way out of that system is not going to be reform. We’re going to have to replace it, and I think that cryptos have got the best shot at the replacement. We have to weather a lot of regulatory problems coming down the pike. What you’re hoping for is that we’ve got a big enough market in cryptos by the time they get around to regulating, that they can’t ignore it and they can’t just outlaw it. Which I think is the reason why a lot of markets have persisted in the US today, because, well, there’s so much money behind it that the people with a lot of interest will go and lobby and make sure the government doesn’t interfere in it.

So I’m hoping cryptos will catch on and get to the point where, well, you can’t outlaw them. You can’t legalize, legislate this away. You can’t outlaw it. It’s here to stay.

What you’re really talking about here, Doug, is financial revolution. I really believe that developers like yourself play a vital role in creating and equipping the rest of us with the tools necessary to fight this fight for financial freedom and independence.
Well, I appreciate that. I’m very, very grateful and humbled to be a part of this organization. I mean, you call me a superstar developer, but I have to admit, I didn’t do EOS single-handedly. I had a lot of support and a lot of help, from other developers and also from the CSE team, the fantastic CSE team that we have at Exodus, which is just second to none. We have a fantastic reputation at this company for support for a reason. Because it’s good, and we have real people that really care about your experience, you know?

We all play a part in this organization. I mean, I mentioned that to JP (Exodus co-founder), I said, “You know, you’ve really created something amazing here.” He says, “It would be nothing without the people that are running it, that are here in this company.” He says “I couldn’t do this alone.” And it’s true. We can’t do it alone.

It shows that it can be done. So, we’re a company that cares about you. We’re not out to scam you, we’re not out to be underhanded. We’re honest. We even put a little heart in the help section of the wallet, you know, made with love. And it is. Everything we do here really, it comes from love.

What else occupies your time, Doug? I know you do a bit of acting, and I mean, your bow ties are always fire. You love bow ties.
I do. I have a bow tie fetish. I have a goal that I want to have a closet stocked with enough bow ties that I could wear one every day, a unique one, for at least a month.

I like bow ties because they’re kind of a throwback, you know, like a gentleman’s holdover from a different era. They’re something that has unfortunately kind of fallen out of fashion a little bit.

But I think Doctor Who helped to bring it back. When Matt Smith was the Doctor, his tagline was “Bow ties are cool.” It was inspirational to me. I’d like to bring them back. I don’t think I could do it single-handedly, but they’re awesome.

You mention Doctor Who and I know this is a drama you’re quite intimately involved with. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Certainly!

I got involved with the Doctor Who audio dramas back in 2010. 2009 I was officially cast as the Doctor, but I started recording audio for actual productions in 2010.

They are probably the longest running fan fiction audio drama that we know of. They started doing everything in about 1982, and it was all obviously pre-Internet, and they were doing things with audio tape, and they would do everything in their house. So, everybody would get together and they would read the script, and they would add sound effects and music, and then they would produce these plays, and of course they were all on cassette tape. But eventually, they put it up on the Internet, and they started kind of putting the casting net out. It’s a lot like Exodus, you know, there are people participating from all over the world. It’s a lot of fun.

Doug, thank you so much for taking some time to share a bit about yourself today.
You bet, Davey. It was my pleasure.

Ladies and gentleman, for your listening pleasure, Doug as the doctor: 
http://www.dwad.net/index.php/2017/07/11/takamagahara-dalek-oblivion/