2013-2015 - A band of former Bitinstanters set off to explore new ideas and do research under the banner of CoinApex. We had fun, built a lot of software, took public flak for thinking/talking about the "wrong kind of idea", and mostly learned a lot.

There's been a ton of side-quests and I loved meeting all the smart interesting bitcoin people.

Bitcoinland has wizards, pirates, rogues, belles of the ball, priests, magic, angry anarchist mobs, artists, philosopher economists, lawmen fighting for justice, humble workers, and of course heroes and villains. It has politicians arguing on the floor of the forum while Chinese masterminds hold the pursestrings. Passion, adventure, riches, piracy - I witnessed it all in the land of Bitcoin.

In my time attempting to disrupt global finance with a technology called Bitcoin I have learned these things:

-Bitcoin is a remarkable experiment and probably our first really substantial internet civilization. I say this because the bitcoin society has monetary policy, group-decision making (voting), and its basis is to serve as a public work. Tell me something else that has those properties and I'll call it Civ 1 of the internet.

-Disrupting finance is hard. It is prohibitively expensive, risky, and mind-dullingly frustrating to play in the sandbox of the US banking system. Here's a brief summary in the form of a quote from a figment banker making decisions about technology

"New tech? gah assemble the boys club. Our 1970s cobol architecture has worked for 40 years -- why fix it if it ain't broken. Look at all the money we're making. Ok fine pay the guys in Washington to make those scrappy entrepreneurs get bank charters with impossible to appease regulatory requirements. We'll let them call it Paypal or Bitcoin-lite but throw out their work and make it use our old systems."

My real experience with it is literally this:



CoinApex: Bitinstant had so many regulatory hurdles, let's build something so innocuous that it doesn't have to deal with financial regulation - merchant payment processing.



The Government: We see that you've spent 6 months building something to disrupt finance that we previously didn't care about. Now we care about it so please take our hint -- stop building stuff.



CoinApex: But those other companies have been doing merchant payment processing for decades, why don't you stop them?



The Government: They've been doing it for years and can afford to lobby us. We've made an exception for them so that only you and two other Bitcoin schmucks are regulated.

My advice if you are looking to start a fintech startup: don't. Go build another picture sharing app. Your sanity is worth much more than fixing finance. Even bankers don't want to fix banks.

-The people I worked with are the best part of it all. Companies always disappoint, but working with good people makes it tolerable.

-All current versions of Bitcoin are not ready for the mainstream and it is futile to attempt to bring them to mainstream until the bugs are fixed. (oh yeah I said it)

In my role as former Bitcoin QA guy I still feel responsible for pointing out major bugs in Bitcoin. Many are apparent and Bitcoin is in fact badly broken right now.

Here's why proof of work (PoW) doesn't work for bitcoin consensus:

Bitcoin PoW is setup to create a game theory situation where miners have to expend energy and compute time (which cost real money) in order to capture a profit from the mining reward and fees. If they do something wrong like allow a double spend -- they can't collect the reward and thus lose the money they spent on compute time and energy during the PoW phase.

This game theory is what facilitates consensus on the Bitcoin network. The miners are incentivized to maintain the same bitcoin ledger as each other (have consensus). If one of the miners breaks the rules or diverges from the majority, they get cut off and lose the money they spent on compute time and energy for PoW.

(Read the following paragraph if you're a pain in my ass)

Sometimes I've said that Bitcoin uses "Proof of Work consensus" to which some Bitcoin experts have scoffed and said "you don't understand Bitcoin". OK to be technical -- Bitcoin uses hashed PoW to power the time-stamping server. If we can get past the jargon we can see that the engine in the car is responsible for the car moving. Yes the drivetrain, wheels, chases, etc. are all important too - but I'm here pointing out that the engine is knocking and that's why the car needs repair.

PoW is the spark plugs that are causing the consensus engine to freak out. This is why we have to switch to laser igniters instead of spark plugs.

I always hear that bitcoin is decentralized, but it's clearly not and PoW is the reason. Miners spend real money on mining equipment and electricity to run complex math problems (double sha256). Electricity and electronic manufacturing is cheap in China. Thus, it is easier for people in China to do PoW. Furthermore, Bitcoin is centralized as it is controlled in practice by miners in China.

One ASIC may equal one vote, but people in China can buy and run more ASICs than other people. That's not decentralization. Some special citizens get most of the votes. That's an oligarchy. It also happens to result in a lot of pollution.

Bitcoinland is so focused on how to make the spark plugs get less clogged that it's not focusing on replacing the spark plugs entirely. Even finding laser igniters is not enough. In my mind, the only interesting pursuits in Bitcoin are in the fields of identity and trust networks. Take PoW out of the consensus engine.

Right now Bitcoin expends energy and time which results in carbon emissions. It also results in a game of whoever has the cheapest electricity and computer manufacturing gets to make decisions for the public. The definition of an oligarchy. Sure Bitcoin has some checks and balances left (which is why I classify it in its entirety as a democracy) - but the power in democracies historically ends up in the hands of the rising oligarchy.

My economist friends might remind me that in order for us to create value in a virtual system we need to expend value. The laws of thermodynamics yadda yadda.

My proposal is that we explore using pseudonymous identity and web of trust to create a system where social capital: reputation - is the resource we expend to create digital value.

If we can quantize reputation as concretely expendable social capital, we can derive a system to transfer that value and use it as a medium of exchange.