Hello fellow Steemians and PIVians! Welcome to our "PIVX Steemit Original: Meet a PIVian interview series".

At PIVX, we're all about our community and with our Meet a PIVian interview series we want to put PIVians in the spotlight. Make sure to check in often for a new one!

This time we interviewed a PIVian known as “Bouilla”.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Hi there! :) Thanks for inviting me to do this interview! I am honored by your request and even though I have been into PIVX for a bit less than a year, I will do my best to present myself and my involvement in the PIVX community! My name is Elias, my last name has been zPIV’ed in October so no traceability on that…

I’m 26 years old and I live in Montpellier, France. I'm a location sound recordist and audio postproduction mixer/sound designer. Basically, I record sound on movie sets and/or tweak audio in the studio, add sound effects, atmospheres and restore bad audio. I usually work on TV commercials, but I work on documentaries and fiction as well. I am also a sound teacher in some audiovisual faculties.

To listen to some of my work you check out the website of the company I founded which is called EMTEX Studio: https://emtex-studio.com/

Fun fact: We accept PIVX! :)

What is your screen name, avatar and how did you get them?

My screen name “Bouilla” doesn’t mean anything at all, I guess it comes from the name of my first rock band “The Bouillades” that I was in when I was a teenager. One day I needed a screen name, so it became Bouilla!

My avatar is me working on the sound of a series at night in the woods. You can see a boom microphone on a boom pole with a windjammer and a spotlight behind me.

There is a debate about this picture between PIVian Buer and me, somehow when he looks at it he sees a dog’s face… but I guess that’s what you see when you’re a paranoid cat (inside joke)! Couldn’t see a dog in it even when he tried to point it out to me in person!

When and why did you get into cryptocurrency?

To be clear, when compared to many PIVians, I am still a noob in the crypto sphere! But I am an enthusiast and I learn new stuff each day, there is some very interesting tech out there!

I guess I first heard about crypto in 2015 but didn’t care too much until early 2017 when I got really interested in the concept of Proof of Stake. A friend and I started a project to mine crypto using only the power of a Raspberry Pi. We had some fun with it, but it was mainly for our own research, curiosity and fun tryouts!

When and why did you get into PIVX?

Ok, funny story! One day, July 21st 2017 to be exact, I found out about PIVX. It's a day engraved in my mind!

I was in the USA, more precisely in Lancaster, PA with my colleague Kevin working on different projects. Kevin asked me if I was interested in recording audio on an interview he was going to do with Bryan Doreian aka Snappy about a “company” called PIVX which was in fact a cryptocurrency (Later we learned later that PIVX isn’t a company but a DAO). So on July 21st, Kevin did this podcast and I was recording the audio with the equipment Kevin had at his office. Here’s the result:

I was really amazed about what I was hearing. That’s where I learned all about the DAO that PIVX is, the governance system, how staking rewards are distributed and how PIVX stands out in terms of privacy when compared to other coins. I was really moved by all this and I immediately knew I wanted to learn more about PIVX. I had a chat with Snappy after the interview and he told me I could join the community on Slack (PIVX is on Discord now). That’s exactly what I did when I got back in France late August. I was amazed to discover the community behind PIVX, how involved everyone is and to see the support for newcomers. I’ll always remember the first tip I got on Slack which was 5 PIV from Rhubarbarian!

I guess I have always been a bit shy on the net, so I have never been super active on channels, but Slack and later Discord became my reading source while commuting to work, so this way I stayed informed and would chime in from time to time.

What is your favorite thing about PIVX?

Well, difficult question as PIVX has so many awesome features! I love the fact that it is fully Proof of Stake, I guess that’s the first thing that got me interested and how rewards are distributed, and budget funded. Also, I’m always amazed when I receive a transaction on how FAST it is! Each time I receive some PIV I’m like WHAAT?! INSTANT!

But the most interesting for me would definitely be the privacy aspect of PIVX. I think we live in a time in which having our personal information kept private is really hard. I also think financial privacy is nonexistent in our world and that it is a right that should be exercised without the control of financial institutions. The power they have just doesn’t seem right to me… So yeah, zPIV! Completely private transactions. That’s a feature I want to use more and more!

As an active community member many people surely see you around a lot in our Discord, but perhaps not many people know how you help support the cause. Can you tell us about what you do, and do you think that our community culture is what drives you to be such an active community member?

Well, I try as best as I can to give advice to the marketing team on how to improve the audio in their videos. A bit over 10 episodes ago I started helping Fused_Helios with the audio of his “PIVX Class” video series. It is quite tricky as the location where he is recording in has a lot of noise and reverb and the levels of the recording is quite low, but I am helping by doing some remote audio cleaning on his voice. The steps I take are: reducing hum, ambient noise, room reverb, adjust levels, EQ, dynamics etc… I also add sound to the cute animations he adds! I am not fully satisfied with the audio result and intensive cleaning means alteration of his voice, but I believe we are getting better all the time by adapting his equipment and location! I have always really enjoyed Fused_Helios’ PIVX Class videos as I learn tons of stuff about PIVX and crypto in general from watching his videos. I think he does it in a very talented way and he is very determined to push the project forward, so hats off to Fused_Helios!

More recently I traveled to Amsterdam in early May for the PIVX meetup and Chainges conference. I was glad to meet wonderful PIVians like @valderrama, Gets, Buer, Rhubarbarian, Warrows, Furszy, @thetimminator and many others! It was such a good feeling to finally put a human face on all these avatars and meet some of my purple family in person! At the Chainges conference, I was able to record sound of a couple of interviews and talks from the PIVX team. I also tried to raise awareness and present PIVX to attendees. I was happy to see that a lot of them already knew about PIVX and some were already big fans!

As you know we have recently released zPoS which enables PIVX users to stake privately. What do you think about this feature and are you using this feature already?

I think zPoS is one of the main things that makes PIVX unique! As I said earlier I think financial privacy is a right that is often not exercised, and it is a bit scary to know one can find out how much you have and are staking! I think private staking is a very important technological achievement and I am proud it was accomplished by the PIVX developers!

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to use zPoS yet as I am staking on a Raspberry Pi and I heard staking zPIV requires more computing power than the Raspberry Pi offers. I'm looking for a more powerful energy efficient single board computer to go full zPIV on my staking!

Knowing about all the exciting things on our roadmap and community projects, what is it that you’re most excited about?

Like a lot of people, I am really looking forward to the release of zDEX! I think 2018 will be the year of decentralized exchanges and I am really glad that PIVX has plans for its own in-wallet decentralized exchange! I'm not really comfortable with all the KYC you need to go through if you want to exchange crypto these days… so yeah! Can’t wait to exchange BTC to PIV on zDEX!

What is your favorite color?

Even if 2018 is the year of purple, I’d say brown is my favorite color. Why? Not sure! I’m very much into vintage electronics and brown is often the color of the build in my mind! Is this a psychological test? :p

Do you have a crypto dream?

My dream would be a world where everything runs on blockchain and crypto! In this dream everyone on the planet would truly be in possession of their money and have full financial freedom & privacy. In this dream world, I can easily do my company billing in crypto from anywhere in the world with no middlemen involved, earn my salary in crypto, pay my taxes, groceries and my rent in crypto! No KYC, no big corporate financial institutions making profit on me, charging fees for nothing and deciding if I can or can’t have an account with them. Hopefully this dream will come true in my lifetime!

Last question: Do you have a prediction for PIVX at the end of this year and can you elaborate on that?

Well, I got into PIVX last year and the “ROI” was already very good, I’m very happy about that and still holding tight to my coins! When the $ value is down, I always see it as a great opportunity to buy more PIV with a discount! I don’t really have a prediction in terms of value, but I do hope PIVX will gain more and more usage as a currency around the world and make it to mass adoption in 2019 or hopefully before that! I’m glad to see more and more merchants accepting PIVX and making the world a more purple place!

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Would you like to have a chat with Bouilla? Would you like to know more about PIVX? Join our Discord! (you can find the link below)

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ALL PIVX community members, feel free to RESTEEM this article! Let’s keep spreading the word of our amazing community focused privacy centric global cryptocurrency.

Keep it purple people!