Title: S10 E3: Christian Moss, Shaban Shaame & Koji Higashi on Legendary Bitcoin NFTs
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Christian Moss (MandelDuck, Bitcoin game developer, SaruTobi, co-founder of Zebedee), Shaban Shaame (founder of EverdreamSoft, Spells of Genesis) & Koji Higashi (IndieSquare/Book of Orbs, Memorychain, Diamond Hands)
Published: 2022-01-08
Duration: 2:05:13
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2022-01-08_s10_e3_bitcoin_nft_art_with_christian_moss__shaban_shaame__and_koji_higashi.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2022-01-08_s10_e3_bitcoin_nft_art_with_christian_moss__shaban_shaame__and_koji_higashi.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic diarization, reconciled against an independent local distil-small.en transcript and a full local small.en re-transcription with word timestamps (word-level diffs), with 42 doubtful, dropped, truncated or looping stretches re-transcribed locally from short audio clips (small.en, because free RAM was too low for medium.en; 12 of them re-run with small.en plus VAD, 10 with tighter clip boundaries and 2 sponsor-read checks). Speaker labels fixed using local speaker-embedding similarity scores and by hand (Vlad Costea, Christian Moss, Shaban Shaame, Koji Higashi; the pre-recorded sponsor reads are labeled Ad voiceover). Names and jargon checked against the title, the show notes and the web (Counterparty, XCP, proof-of-burn, Counterwallet, FreeWallet, Freeport, XChain, DEX, OP_RETURN, Rare Pepe, Rare Pepe Directory, Nakamoto Card, Fake Rares, JScrilla, Dan Darkpill, Spells of Genesis/SoG, EverdreamSoft, Gox the Fallen Mountain Lord, WHEREBYCARD, DAO Colossus, Battle for Blocksize, Alejandro Hurtado, Equilibrium, Book of Orbs, Memorychain, Oasis Mining, Badger Capsule, Diamond Hands, PlebNet, Zebedee, MandelDuck, Ninja Suit, J-Dog, John Villar, Pieter Wuille/sipa, MikeInSpace, Theo Goodman, BlockCypher, Etherscan, OpenSea, CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, Flow, Solana, Liquid, Satoshi's Games/Lightnite, Giacomo Zucco, Spectrum, RGB, Ruben Somsen's statechains, Adam Back, SatoshiDice, ERC-20/ERC-721, Imgur, IPFS, Sotheby's, Vaultoro/Glass Books, Wasabi Wallet, Max Hillebrand, Bitcoin Reserve). Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken. Intro music and the sung sponsor jingles are omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:47] Vlad Costea: Welcome to Season 10, Episode 3 of the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I am Vlad, and this is the first ever four-way interview with three guests. And they are all Bitcoin artists who have published NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain with Counterparty. And they have been around for a long time. And if you listen to the previous interview with Theo Goodman, he has mentioned Christian Moss, who is here today. And he has mentioned Christian Moss in the context that he is the OG who created some sort of cards that can be used in a mobile video game.

[00:01:25] But as I was speaking with Christian, he mentioned that Koji, who is also here, is more OG than him and was the one who introduced him. And there's also Shaban, who is also an OG just like them. And I feel like I'm such a rookie in this field. I got interested at the beginning of the year. I think I received my first Rare Pepe like three months ago. And as I tweeted, it turns out that I can actually buy a Tesla with the Pepes that I have, which is strange because I got them for free.

[00:01:56] So hello, gentlemen. And also, before I let you introduce yourselves, I just want to say that before we started recording, I've minted an NFT on Counterparty, and it contains the Season 10 graphics. And every participant to this dialogue is going to receive maybe 10 out of 100. So that's like 10% of the supply. And let's see what they can do with it, if they can [unclear: hodl] it for a long time, so it gains value in time. I also sent you the link in the chat. Cool.

[00:02:32] Okay, so introduce yourselves in turn. So, you know, the listeners can tell who is who.

[00:02:40] Christian Moss: Okay, I guess I'll go first. Yeah, cool. Yeah, so I'm Christian Moss, also known as MandelDuck. I've been kind of doing I would say Bitcoin and gaming since around 2013. I originally started with like a simple iOS app that would tip you Bitcoin as you played. And that kind of evolved into experimenting with other technologies that were around at the time around 2014. So I kind of played around with Counterparty, which I'm sure we will get into. And we didn't call them NFTs then, but we started to experiment with tokens in gaming.

[00:03:25] And yeah, I've been basically experimenting with Bitcoin gaming tokens since well, a long time ago in Bitcoin terms. And now I co-founded a startup called Zebedee, where we're actually focusing on Lightning Network payments in gaming.

[00:03:45] Shaban Shaame: Cool. I am Shaban Shaame, based in Geneva, Switzerland. I got interested in Bitcoin in around 2012. First, it was really only speculative. I read an article, and it was mentioned that Bitcoin went from $50 to $100. And I said, Oh, I should get some then I forgot. Then I saw a new article saying it went from 100 to 200. And I thought, Yeah, I missed that. This time, I really need to buy some. And I went to buy some Bitcoin, and then I learned what it is exactly, what it does.

[00:04:38] And the more I learn about it, the more I found it fascinating, really fascinating. I was at the time, and I'm still, the founder of a game company called EverdreamSoft. We were doing games, mobile games. And I thought Bitcoin can be used for payment. But what if we could have a character, a game character that have the same properties as Bitcoin, meaning decentralized giving ownership to the user full control, everything that works with Bitcoin, but not for a monetary unit, but for a game item.

[00:05:25] And I went digging into Counterparty, as it was [unclear: mentioned as a] colored coin. And that's where I started Spells of Genesis. In 2015, the first game card was released on our site, and that's how it started. It was before Ethereum's mainnet even launched. And it was the first gaming item on chain. That was the thing that I was interested in: really put art or something non monetary on chain with the same property as as Bitcoin.

[00:06:09] Vlad Costea: Okay, so Spells of Genesis, that's kind of legendary, more OG than Rare Pepes. So we're gonna have to talk about that. Also Koji, sorry for cutting you off.

[00:06:21] Koji Higashi: So I'm Koji Higashi. So I started researching about Bitcoin in early 2014, around the Mt. Gox fiasco, which took place in Japan, where I'm from. And so I was at the time, there are not many people who paid attention to Bitcoin in Japan. So I was one of early Bitcoin adopters in Japan. And also I was probably the earliest adopter. Or the first person to issue a token on Counterparty in Japan in 2014. And I felt it was cool. And later in 2014, I met Shaban in Japan. And he explained to me about the concept of tokenizing game assets on the Bitcoin blockchain on Counterparty.

[00:07:10] And I felt, oh, this is a very cool idea. I didn't think of it myself. So since then, we started working on Counterparty and tokenizing game assets, blockchain games, etc., including Chris, since 2015. So that's when we did a lot of now called NFT things. And now I'm actually working on mostly Lightning Network related projects. My main thing right now is called Diamond Hands. It's basically a PlebNet of Japan. So I'm trying to create an active community, Lightning Network community in Japan. And maybe I can talk about it a little bit later as well.

[00:07:53] So that's me.

[00:07:56] Vlad Costea: Guys, this is really impressive. And, you know, you are artists who figured out that you can put stuff in the Bitcoin blockchain, and you can transact it, and you can tokenize it. And you have done this before it was even like a big movement, or a meme. Like in 2017, there was that whole movement to tokenize everything, and have a token for everything. But you did it in 2014, 2015. And it was all on Bitcoin. So to everyone listening, because this is a Bitcoin maximalist show, right?

[00:08:30] But my thesis of Bitcoin maximalism is that we should scale Bitcoin and expand it so that it incorporates every use case that we see today in every shitcoin or altcoin that is out there. Every interesting one for which there is a market, that is. So the fact that you did this so early on, is just fascinating. And it just proves that we need this to actually return to Bitcoin. And it actually makes sense that Counterparty NFTs, which became very sought after in recent months, have become so valuable, because most likely, the Bitcoin blockchain is going to outlive us.

[00:09:11] So this kind of art, which is an expression of a momentary, I don't know, anguish or feeling of the artist, is just going to be there and outlive the artist. And people are going to see it and appreciate it and maybe put it in the context of their time. Long after we're not here anymore.

[00:09:31] Christian Moss: I think one of the nice things about the early days of Counterparty and I think it's important to state, like there were people doing Counterparty before us, but Counterparty was kind of meant as like a DeFi thing. It was kind of designed for institutions and companies to use. I think the original founders, that's the vision they had. Then, you know, kind of people like Shaban and the guys from Rare Pepe decided to, you know, fill it full of green frogs and fantasy items. So it kind of pivoted in a way.

[00:10:04] But the nice thing about it was that like, there was no, it wasn't like a bandwagon that people jumped on. Like, none of these things were worth anything when we were trading them, you know, they were like worth like a dollar or few at most, right. And it's what we kind of saw is that when it kind of became, it's like the Rare Pepe and the Memorychain, which is like a Japanese similar kind of art, kind of collectible movement, people were really just doing it for artistic reasons.

[00:10:38] And people were buying and selling cards based on the images they liked. And I just think it's nice that, you know, a lot of those early adopters who were really doing it for a passion project and not for the monetary reason at all are kind of now making some money off of it, which, you know, it's kind of, it just feels a little bit more genuine and legitimate rather than like, now you're not sure if somebody is issuing a token because they, you know, are really into it or they just want to, you know, make a quick buck.

[00:11:12] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's a valid point, because in the early days, you're giving away your art to everyone else, just mostly as a means to express yourself, and just because you thought it was cool. But yeah, it hasn't had an actual monetary value until, I guess, [unclear: Ethereum and OpenSea popularized it].

[00:11:33] Shaban Shaame: Yeah, I will just change this a little bit. Spells of Genesis cards used to have monetary value and they were actively traded, but for numbers that sit around $20, $50, and $100 for a very rare card, which is kind of in line with what we would expect of a price of a game item. Rare Pepes as well were traded, not for a big number, depending on the Rare Pepe. But there was already a small market, or I mean, a normal market.

[00:12:20] Now we are in a crazy market, and the price, 100k, is completely different to $100. But there was a market, and recently we got a lot of new people in the field, and the prices were overinflated.

[00:12:43] Christian Moss: Yeah, for sure. I remember this story that Shaban and I have, where I had like an NFT geocaching app where people could drop Counterparty tokens around the world for others to kind of find and collect. And somebody like dropped a Rare Pepe, the Nakamoto Card, in the middle of Shibuya just as a gift, right. And I was meant to go and get it. But Shaban beat me to it, kind of thing. But like that card now, you know, I think I saw on Sotheby's, there was a bid for like $2.4 million or something like that.

[00:13:21] You know, but in the day, it was just it was low enough that people were happy just to give it away, you know, on a kind of geocaching app. So I always find that quite funny, because like, I would have got it, but my wife was busy getting ready. So we were late out the door, and Shaban beat me to it. So that's my excuse. [unclear: Don't let my wife know.]

[00:13:40] Shaban Shaame: You like to mention this story. Yeah, I think it's funny.

[00:13:46] Christian Moss: Yeah, you know, I just like these kind of, like, you know, tragic, you know, comedic tragedies in life, right? You know, that's like very English humor. English comedy is all about somebody not quite making it.

[00:14:00] Koji Higashi: There's a lot of stories like that in early days, right? When we think about it now, why would I give away this card or something like that? Or, you know, maybe I'm on the receiving end sometimes. But

[00:14:11] Christian Moss: Yeah, yeah, I've technically made my family members quite rich over the years, if any of them had bothered to keep the recovery phrase I told them to keep, but they've lost so many, like NFTs and bitcoins, I've gifted to them all over the years. And yeah, kind of funny and sad in a way.

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[00:18:14] Shaban Shaame: Yeah, the thing is, all these cards and NFTs were purchasable at that time, the market. But when you had a Rare Pepe for $10, you would find it expensive. But now the price is just incredible. But it was so simple to get them. Some we received for free, and others we could pay a little bit on the DEX, decentralized exchange, to get them. So when we think back, of course, everybody think, why didn't I buy more of those Rare Pepes, more of those cards, even though we were really into it, building tools, wallets, and everything. We should all have had like a full collection of everything, but it takes time, of course. So

[00:19:08] Christian Moss: I kind of think, and kind of feel free to disagree, the kind of thing that I would say, not killed it, but kind of stopped the momentum when the Rare Pepes were taking off, is the Counterparty DEX. So you had to make an on-chain transaction to kind of place a buy or sell order. And there's no guarantee that that order would be fulfilled. When the fees started to get expensive on Bitcoin, it could cost like a dollar or two dollars to attempt to buy something that you might not [get].

[00:19:36] And I think that kind of stopped the momentum. And I remember specifically thinking like, oh, I want this card, I'll bid on it, but it's going to cost me $2 to make a bid, and the card is only worth $10. So I think in a way, that's what kind of stopped it, you know. Which, yeah, which, you know, is just an unfortunate thing, but it's just how blockchains work, you know, on chain and decentralized.

[00:20:00] Koji Higashi: For sure. In 2017, when there was a fork war, so to speak... And we started building on Counterparty in 2015 or so. And when we started, the transaction fee for token was a cent or maybe a few cents max, or something like that, very cheap. And we could trade freely and we could trade tokens or Spells of Genesis cards on the Counterparty DEX with ease, well, kind of, at least at a cheap price. And then 2017 came and the transaction fee went up and it did a lot of things.

[00:20:39] And for Bitcoin, UASF and others were more important, obviously, but it kind of drove away the NFT use case because of the rising fee at the time. And people migrated to Ethereum and different chains. I remember they were saying Ethereum was way cheaper, you should move to Ethereum because of, you know, cheap fee. But at the time we already knew, because of our experience, that on-chain fees will rise, even if it's Bitcoin or Ethereum, you know. If there's a lot of users, on-chain fees won't be suitable for this type of use case.

[00:21:22] We already kind of knew from our personal experience, but that was kind of what happened in 2017. So that's why people kind of left Counterparty and there are no kind of new projects built on Counterparty since then. And I think Spells of Genesis also moved partly to Ethereum and now other chains as well.

[00:21:44] Shaban Shaame: Yes, so the approach we got, and you're correct, is the people were migrating to Ethereum and people wanted us to migrate to Ethereum, but I said, no, we don't migrate, like, move all our cards to Ethereum. But we saw these more as markets. If we talk in business terms, Counterparty is a market, Ethereum is another market, and people who are in one usually are not in the other. So I said we stay on Bitcoin because we have a fan base and we have a market. We have people who are attached to Bitcoin and Bitcoin only.

[00:22:33] And if we go to Ethereum, we're going to address a new market. But we don't move from Bitcoin to Ethereum. We just issue new cards or move only a part of the card on the new chain. And at that moment, the pressure was really big. A lot of people were saying, you should just leave Counterparty, just leave. And it was true, Counterparty was not really dynamic. And fortunately, we didn't leave Counterparty because now it's super trendy. But yes, and also every time there's a new chain and new technology, there's a new market opening.

[00:23:23] So it's, they say, cheaper and faster than the previous chain or the previous protocol. From a business perspective for us, it's a new market, a new pool of users that we want to address. And that's the strategy behind Spells of Genesis, is to go to several different markets.

[00:23:49] Vlad Costea: Okay, so something that I want to mention right now is that when I first got interested in Counterparty, I discovered that basically it's like a ghost town. The wallets are not really maintained. They look as if they haven't been, they have been abandoned maybe since 2016 or something. Nobody put any effort into making them more user friendly. So it's kind of difficult to navigate as a beginner to figure out what's going on. An easier one to use that I discovered is Freeport, which is easy for collecting and for minting.

[00:24:25] But there's also Counterwallet, and there's also FreeWallet, which I think is the one that's getting most updates these days. But how would you recommend someone who's listening and wants to maybe get his first NFT on Counterparty to start their journey?

[00:24:45] Christian Moss: Yeah, I kind of agree with kind of the state of Counterparty. But before I kind of recommend like ways into it, I just probably like to talk about why I think that is. I think one of the reasons is Counterparty, it didn't do like a massive ICO. So none of the developers got rich. It did a proof-of-burn, which means you had to actually like burn Bitcoin to get the XCP token, which means, you know, it kind of didn't start off with like a billion dollars.

[00:25:16] And another thing is, yeah, a lot of people got attacked during the scaling debate. And, you know, this kind of happens a lot in like, I think, Bitcoin and blockchain. Like a lot of developers are kind of working for free and they get a lot of attack and hate and then they just, you know, think life's too short for this. I'm just going to, you know, I don't need this stuff. I'm just going to leave and work on something else. A lot of the time the developers just need to get a real job to pay for things.

[00:25:42] And unfortunately, one of the greatest Counterparty developers who was kind of doing a lot of cool stuff, he passed away recently, which, that's John Villar. So, yeah, I would say like, yeah, the Counterparty in a way, it's kind of been from a kind of development point of view, it's always been hanging on by a thread, I think. But because it's on Bitcoin, it can kind of just survive and sit there and get picked up at a later stage, you know, because, you know, everything's in the Bitcoin blockchain.

[00:26:15] At the moment, most of the development seems to be really going on via FreeWallet.io. So that's J-Dog, and he's like the Counterparty legend. He's been there from the early days. And he's like the one consistent thing through Counterparty from a development point of view. And he has gotten funded. So because of the recent price rise of all these tokens, they did like a raise, you know, asking for donations to help fund him at least, you know, to quit his job and work on it full time.

[00:26:48] So I believe that has happened. I think, you know, a lot more people are getting into it now that, you know, the assets have increased in valuation. But I would say, you know, speaking honestly, that is a little bit of a concern. You know, the Counterparty protocol itself is quite decentralized because it's on Bitcoin, but the tools around it in a way, they're quite centralized. You know, there's a few key people that if they got hit by a bus, it could really hurt the ecosystem. But hopefully that's kind of changing going forward with the recent price rise.

[00:27:18] Shaban Shaame: I would say also something I felt a lot during the time is, first of all, the companies that were building on Counterparty were underfunded. So many of them closed or disappeared or changed their market, their business. A thing is also, Counterparty was not really loved. It was not really loved by, it was hated by Ethereum people. And it was not really loved by Bitcoin people. Because some people were thinking it's bloating the main chain, Bitcoin main chain with crap and it makes everything slower and more expensive.

[00:28:16] So Counterparty is really a niche, and people who loved Counterparty are Bitcoiners, and so a very small sub-segment of Bitcoiners.

[00:28:31] Christian Moss: Yeah. So I did actually speak to sipa, Pieter Wuille, kind of casually once in a bar in the early days and a few other core devs to kind of see what is the issue with Counterparty. And obviously the obvious one is that, like, you know, if you have a protocol that lets people fill the blocks full of like, you know, Rare Pepes, and that bloats the blockchain and it's harder for people to, you know, run a node, et cetera. I don't think that's really the main issue because in a way that's somewhat curtailed by fees, you know, and that's why in a way a lot of people left Bitcoin because the fees got too high.

[00:29:06] But in a way that kind of limited the amount of data that went into a block. I think the other bigger issue, though, is actually one people don't talk about. It's the idea that the security of a network can be compromised if you have an asset on that network, which isn't native to the network, but could have a different value. So, for example, Bitcoin is kind of secured by Bitcoin, the mining to a large extent. But if you have like, say you have a Bitcoin transaction in a block and that block to the miner, you know, in Bitcoin, it's worth something like, let's just say, like 20 Bitcoin of fees and, you know, reward.

[00:29:42] But you have an asset on there which is like worth a billion dollars or something like that, then you kind of have incentives for the miners to start to like undo blocks, you know, in order to steal the asset. And then you basically have two different incentives. One is like, you know, you've got this kind of foreign asset, which kind of perverts the incentives. So and that's also that issue is also raised about sidechains as well, why some people don't like the idea of having two-way pegs on sidechains.

[00:30:13] That was kind of one of the concerns as well. It wasn't just bloat. Yeah, but, you know, that's kind of a nuanced argument. And, you know, there are arguments against it and arguments for it. But I just wanted to play devil's advocate and kind of say that's why a lot of kind of Bitcoin people didn't like it. And there were active attempts to kind of stop Counterparty. So, for example, they made the OP_RETURN data shorter. And I think if it weren't for the, like, there were, I think, Counterparty almost got kind of, you know, that there were moves to kind of stop things like Counterparty being built at all by updating, like, mempool policy.

[00:31:02] So yeah, it kind of got hate on both sides, I suppose, is what I'm saying.

[00:31:08] Koji Higashi: Yeah. I want to add a kind of different perspective. Vlad said that when you joined the Counterparty ecosystem, or Rare Pepe ecosystem, I felt like a ghost town, and there's no good wallets and not many tools. And currently, I agree. But back in the days, when Ethereum barely existed and this type of use case was very niche, actually, Counterparty was the ecosystem where there were the best tools, wallets, and best assets, with SoG and Rare Pepe. So that's something you should probably or the audience should probably know as well. Because my, probably my biggest contribution to early NFT history was to, along with Shaban and Chris, build a mobile Counterparty wallet optimized for collectibles, such as Spells of Genesis and Rare Pepe, called Book of Orbs.

[00:32:11] And that was, still to this day, we still get some like, hey, do you guys get Book of Orbs back on Google Play or, you know, it's discontinued, unfortunately, after I was in charge of Book of Orbs development in 2017. But for, you know, different reasons I left in the ecosystem, I left the project later. But at the time, it was ahead of the time, and you had a decent interface for now-called NFTs, with decentralized exchange built in on a mobile wallet.

[00:32:49] So we had those early days. And that's something I want to add as well.

[00:32:55] Shaban Shaame: Yeah, yeah, definitely. The ecosystem at the time was really the most developed compared to other chains. Collecting things was much easier. But I think with the 2017 bubble burst, crypto bubble burst, the company who were maintaining them got a bit challenged, like ours, as well. We had to reduce the team and the efforts on those, unfortunately. So that's why now it's a little bit of a ghost town. And the focus went a lot over to the NFTs, over CryptoKitties and what's happening on Ethereum, and the funding, the money to develop those wallets and things, was diverted from, I would say, NFTs on Bitcoin. And a lot of people didn't know, either Bitcoiners or people outside, didn't know that there was a protocol token layer.

[00:34:07] Christian Moss: Yeah, so I kind of think, I was gonna say, I think one of the main things was the ERC-20 standard came out. And like, we kind of said that people went to Ethereum because the fees were lower, that is true. I think another thing they went through was the ERC-20 token, it had something which Counterparty didn't, it had an inbuilt vending machine. So you could send ETH to an address, and it would return the tokens back to you. Counterparty, it was always a bit more cumbersome to try and get some tokens. Like, there were like swap bots that people made and stuff.

[00:34:42] But like, it was a bit harder, you know, for anybody just to kind of mint, you know, issue, mint a token and just get it out there. And the ERC-20 really had that. And I think that itself kind of led to the, you know, the whole ICO boom, because anybody could just copy and paste his contract, paste an address and kind of, you know, do an ICO in a few clicks of code, and then all the money kind of went into that market. But it was very hard to do like ICOs on Counterparty, just putting all the other issues around ICOs to one side.

[00:35:16] And then I think, yeah, the whole idea on Ethereum that, you know, you could actually build whatever functionality you wanted, because it had a smart contracting language, where with Counterparty, the features were set in stone. And if you wanted a new feature, you'd have to convince the Counterparty devs to add it. And obviously, adding new features is a slow process. I guess the flip side on that is that, you know, I think we've seen like a billion dollars lost in like smart contract bugs and hacks this last year.

[00:35:44] So you get a less secure platform. And I always wonder one day, will people wake up and all the ERC-20 tokens or ERC-721, [unclear: or whatever they call tokens], are either just like all gone or something with like a, you know, a kind of massive exploit in the smart contract somewhere. But yeah, so I think that was also part of it, which would kind of hurt the ecosystem. And as Shaban said, I'm actually quite amazed that EverdreamSoft, which is Shaban's company, has remained as long as it has, because a few of the other companies, ones I worked for as well, kind of ran out of money.

[00:36:21] And you know, yeah, unfortunately, kind of dev had to stop.

[00:36:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so there are two points there that I want to make. But first of all, I want to start with Equilibrium, who is the guy who connected us and made this interview happen. He sent me my first card from the Spells of Genesis collection, which is called Gox, the Fallen Mountain Lord. And it's a representation that is quite artistic of the moment when Mark Karpeles of Mt. Gox was questioned by an angry customer outside of the Mt. Gox HQ. And this just made me realize, so I'm not sure how much this card is worth.

[00:37:05] But thank you, Equilibrium. It's made by Alejandro Hurtado. So it's a nice card. Yeah. So it's called WHEREBYCARD.

[00:37:21] Koji Higashi: What's the market price for WHEREBYCARD?

[00:37:25] Shaban Shaame: I don't have it in my head, but it's probably around $1,000. So on the card, on Spells of Genesis cards, as you mentioned, we illustrated blockchain history and events.

[00:37:46] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah, that's where I was getting at, because it seems like both Rare Pepes and Spells of Genesis have represented events from Bitcoin history.

[00:37:58] Shaban Shaame: Yeah, because the bet is, as you say, the Bitcoin blockchain will outlive us. And the cards, the asset, the token will outlive the games and the products, the company. So they will be here even in many years in the future. And we wanted to illustrate, we wanted that those cards will be present in museums when they will talk about the beginning of Bitcoin and how all this got started. So that's why, in general, we like, whether it's SoG, Rare Pepe, Memorychain, we like to embed events that happen during that time.

[00:38:46] Koji Higashi: I mean, that's a great point, actually, and which is very interesting. And it's different from how NFTs on other blockchains are different from Counterparty, in my opinion. So Spells of Genesis kind of influenced other tokens on Counterparty as well. And Rare Pepe, Memorychain and other series as well often kind of describe what happened in the crypto industry in the Bitcoin space, etc. So it has context and you have to understand the context, right? It's not just about the art. You have to appreciate what happened and you have to understand what this means, right?

[00:39:25] So I think this is kind of the fun part of the Counterparty collectibles. And I think SoG influenced a lot of them, in my opinion.

[00:39:34] Christian Moss: My favorite story on that, and we talked about it in the Spaces the other day, Shaban, is Spells of Genesis. They issued an Ethereum DAO card and it's like called the DAO Colossus. That was cool. They issued it like, maybe the same day, like the DAO got hacked.

[00:39:53] Koji Higashi: Yeah, I was actually in Switzerland with Shaban when the DAO hack happened. And we were like, you know, we just released the [unclear: DAO] something card, right? Like some strong creature or something like that. And we're like, oh, this is a cool card. And like, we checked the computer and like, oh, the DAO got hacked. That was crazy. Yeah, I still remember. It's my favorite card because of that reason.

[00:40:22] Shaban Shaame: Yeah, it's also one of my favorites, [unclear: the] favorite card, I would say. Yeah, that was crazy. There is also the Battle for Blocksize. I was shadowbanned on Twitter, because at that time, there was the debate, block size debate was really hot on Twitter. And I posted the image and I got shadowbanned because a keyword or I don't know. But it illustrates, like, people discussing and debating block size. And those are really key moments that were shaking the whole industry, the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. And we tend to forget that. And looking at the card, I kind of remember those times.

[00:41:19] Vlad Costea: Yeah, there's something poetic in a way, that you have the history of Bitcoin existing in Bitcoin blocks through Counterparty, just because some artist has created a card to mark a moment. And we can look back and we can discover that this was some sort of creation of history. It's a lot like journalism, except that it's not expressed in words, it's expressed in something graphic.

[00:41:48] Christian Moss: I should probably point out, just to be clear, that the actual images themselves on Counterparty are not in Bitcoin blocks. So just the kind of token name and the properties of the token are, but the images themselves are just like, you know, on servers on the internet. So it's kind of a point of confusion around NFTs in general, and specifically on Counterparty because I think more modern-day NFTs tried to do something with IPFS and like put a hash in the transaction. But yeah, so it's kind of open to interpretation and you know, how much you would say the history is actually in the blockchain if the images themselves aren't.

[00:42:24] Koji Higashi: Yeah, but I still think it's interesting that we did that and kind of the images itself describe what's happened, right. And although it's the image itself is not on the blockchain itself, I still think it has, it's playing kind of an interesting role of telling the story of what happened, because, you know, it's very easy to forget what happened. And we also forget what we were doing back then as well. So we look at those cards, SoG, Rare Pepe, and like, oh, yeah, we were doing this. Oh, this happened. And this is kind of a cool thing, in my opinion.

[00:43:01] Christian Moss: Yeah, somebody just needs to make sure they have backups of the images.

[00:43:07] Koji Higashi: Yeah, that's true.

[00:43:08] Christian Moss: Which I'm sure, you know, there are enough of them out there.

[00:43:11] Koji Higashi: Yeah. For example, Memorychain cards. And like, someone asked me the other day, like, do you have images for all the, you know, list of images for Memorychain cards? And I was like, wait, do I have them? Like, I'm not sure if I have them. But I checked, I did actually. But I'm kind of... Sometimes people still kind of keep those images and like, try to tell stories and like, you know, interviewing people like us. And that's, that's pretty cool, actually. Yeah. A lot of love and passion.

[00:43:52] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And something else, which I wanted to mention from Christian's statement previously, like he mentioned ERC-20 tokens and the fact that you could do ICOs with them. And I think right now we find ourselves in some sort of bubble, at least in terms of valuation. And sometimes, you know, NFTs get compared to the ICOs of the previous cycle. But I think that's unfair for the simple reason that ICOs were built on promise. And you would invest in something like that because you thought it would fulfill some sort of vision.

[00:44:28] And it would become a bigger company if you gave the money, which turned out to be, you know, a bad idea. But in the case of NFTs, what you see is what you get. There is no expectation from the future. You just get a piece of art because you like it.

[00:44:45] Christian Moss: So I agree with you. So I think a lot of people in the space kind of know, obviously there are people who are buying them to trade and, you know, to try and get a profit. But there are definitely people, I think MikeInSpace posted this as well. He kind of said, like, look, you know, I know what I'm buying and I'm buying it because I want to complete a collection. It's basically collecting. People didn't collect ICOs really, did they? But, yeah, I still think it is kind of like a buyer beware thing.

[00:45:16] I know like some people have reached out to me to do some OTC trades of like some old NFTs. And I always kind of say, like, you know, always my thing is like, you're buying this as a collectible. It's not an investment. And most people are like, oh, yeah, of course. You know, I'm just missing one card and I just want to complete my collection. That seems to be the motivation around it this time. Having said that, you know, there are like some, you know, bubbles and kind of, you know, like anything.

[00:45:46] There's the kind of, like, the dangerous, and there's a side of it I don't like, you know. Yeah, Koji will probably speak more on this.

[00:45:55] Koji Higashi: Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, I don't like the current bubble too much. I mean, it's good that people find the concept of NFT interesting and collectibles on blockchain in general, I'd say. But the current NFT mania is mostly based on speculation and it's completely different from what we were doing in 2017, where people are mostly collecting for fun or for, you know, using Spells of Genesis cards in the game. Right. At the time, the valuation of tokens were more or less reasonable. Like if we want to use it in the game, you can buy some or collect some.

[00:46:39] So but currently it's way out of control and mostly of speculation. So that's one part I don't really like personally, but some people might disagree and which is fine. But that's at least my view. So someone might want to add something.

[00:46:56] Shaban Shaame: I agree. I agree with you. There is a bubble which is a bit similar to the ICO mania on my view. I think we have a new vehicle and I'm a big believer in blockchain, Bitcoin and many different, also other innovation. So I think these things are really going to change the world over time. That's why I focused my company to work on NFTs for five years. But we see hyper cycles. Same for Bitcoin. It goes up, up, up. Everybody goes crazy. Then it crashes.

[00:47:43] It corrects. It's not really a crash. It corrects to a normal price compared to the current utility. And then everybody forget about it. I mean, the mainstream media and everyone goes to something else. Then it continues. And over time, it gains then value again because it's a growth that is normal. And it's changing things. But there are some manias. And when there is mania, there is a lot of speculation. So NFT, I love them, of course. I think collectibles on chain are a great thing. But I think a lot of things are overvalued.

[00:48:29] You can draw any crap and sell it for several thousand or more. This is a mania and there are collectors and those are the real customer, the real users. And there's also people who are buying with the expectation it will go up. And those are speculation. And this eventually will be corrected when it doesn't go continuously up. Then people will lose money. And then at that time, there will be a consolidation. The NFT art that really makes sense will stand out and the value will be high.

[00:49:12] And a lot of overvalued crap will be eliminated naturally. So in my opinion, we are in a bubble cycle, but it's something that will continue long term.

[00:49:30] Christian Moss: I just also want to say I have an opinion. I'm not sure if it's controversial, but I kind of think that Counterparty assets need to be high value. You can't really have cheap Counterparty assets. They kind of need to be worth like in the thousands just because Counterparty is completely on chain. And if something is low value, like it's worth a few dollars or tens of dollars, you can't use it on Bitcoin because the fees are high. And hopefully, in order to subsidize the miners, the fees need to be higher.

[00:50:07] So I kind of see that Counterparty in its current iteration, it needs to really just kind of be the chain for high value, rare, collectible NFTs. And the, you know, the more low-value NFTs, which wouldn't be seen as a bubble, perhaps they'd just be seen as like a more legitimate price. People trading game items for like, you know, 10, 20 bucks max. They, you know, they really need to happen on some other protocol or some other chain. The problem is, like from a technical point of view, and I've looked into this, it is very hard to kind of scale NFTs the same way you can do with something like Bitcoin.

[00:50:52] There's technical limitations there, which make it hard to do it in a decentralized way. It's easy to do it in a centralized way, of course. But yeah, I just wanted to mention that. I'm kind of like, even though we're in a bubble and the prices are inflated, this is kind of, these prices for me are the only prices that really make sense for tokens on Counterparty, given the scaling issues and the high fees we will need to have in the future.

[00:51:20] Koji Higashi: I want to add on that. Chris mentioned kind of an interesting point that Counterparty tokens or vintage NFTs, so-called, needs to be somewhat expensive to make sense. And it's kind of interesting, in 2017, when we were struggling with increasing fees on the Bitcoin blockchain, trading on the DEX and giving tokens to many, distributing tokens to many people didn't make sense anymore. At the time, it didn't, because the token value was too low to do something like this. But now after a few years, those vintage tokens are now considered collectibles with some kind of value, high value.

[00:52:07] Now it kind of makes sense even with a higher fee on the Bitcoin blockchain that people are still willing to trade or get some Counterparty tokens now. So maybe that's something that changed these past few years. And Counterparty tokens kind of aged well. And as you guys said, Bitcoin blockchain will live for a long time and they're not going to go anywhere. And it's kind of recorded on the blockchain itself. So that's an interesting perspective. And maybe that's something that sets Counterparty tokens apart from any other NFTs on different blockchains, because they predate most NFTs, even though most NFT people don't really know about them yet.

[00:52:55] Christian Moss: Yeah, sorry to kind of hog the mic, but something I find quite interesting, like, I'm pretty sure nobody who has an NFT on Ethereum or something actually verifies they have the NFT. Like, I don't think they run a node or run their own wallet software. I'm not saying they should. I'm not kind of trying to be like a purist here and say like, Oh, if you don't run a full node, you shouldn't have it. But I just find it interesting that, you know, it's probably gonna get to a point or something like Ethereum that if like, Etherscan or OpenSea goes down, like nobody knows what to do, right?

[00:53:30] Well, on Counterparty, if XChain goes down, you can just, oh, damn, I'll just have to, you know, run it myself, you know, give me a day or two, you know, I've got them back kind of thing. So I just kind of think it's interesting that given that, like, on Bitcoin, there's, not, obviously most people don't do it. But there's, there's enough of an emphasis of, if you have Bitcoin, Bitcoin is valuable, you want to run your own node and make sure you have that Bitcoin. And this is for people who just have like a Bitcoin or something, right, or even less.

[00:53:58] But in the NFT world, people have like millions of dollars worth of NFTs, but there seems to be no kind of movement to try and hold them in a trustless way and verify that you have them and not rely on like a third party API that could ultimately could trick you and, you know, tell you you don't have them or trick you to sending to another address. I just find that quite interesting.

[00:54:25] Koji Higashi: Yeah, maybe because they are mostly trading for the art or illustration itself, but like those vintage tokens on Counterparty, we're kind of trading the history on the blockchain.

[00:54:38] Christian Moss: It's easy to hodl them. But on Ethereum, I kind of like I wouldn't feel too comfortable like holding long-term collectibles on other chains, because I did a tweet the other day, I'm trying to find the answer to, like, how many people actually have a full archival node. And as I understand it, there's a bit of a chunk of the early day transactions on Ethereum, which kind of just got lost because nobody archived them. So ultimately, if that kind of blockchain expands, then maybe like, if there's like a failure, and then like, your NFTs could just be lost, right?

[00:55:09] Say, if you only know you have your NFT, because you're using like a third party wallet. And you know, this has happened to Ethereum companies before, like BlockCypher. If that node goes down, or there's an issue, or there's a contentious hard fork, and like nobody can resync the early past state anymore. And like, does those NFTs just disappear? You know, I guess we'll find out. But yeah, I just find that quite interesting. No one's talking about it.

[00:55:37] Shaban Shaame: [unclear: I think what we are working on], and I think it brings a lot of confusion to people, is there is two things. There is the governance of the token, and there is the governance of the asset. So a token on-chain is like a property title, and an asset, image, sound, music, is the asset.

[00:56:01] Just like a house. When you buy a house, basically you have a paper and you buy the paper and the paper represents the house. So there is a link between the token and an asset that is made by someone. Someone can be a wallet, an interface, everything, and people agree on that. But there is problem in the governance. So the governance of the token is made on chain, so non-duplicable, verifiable, transparent, everything. But the governance of the asset is something else. Who guarantees you that I didn't issue the same image, same art on another blockchain?

[00:56:46] Exactly the same. And who guarantees that I'm the correct author, the IP owner of the image. So I think a lot of people think the NFT token is intrinsically linked to the asset, the image. But basically it's just a mental link that we do. We say, okay, this token with this property equals owning my art that I have created. But this link can be broken. If, for example, I'm stealing someone's art, then the ownership of this art, once it goes out, when people discover that, then the link is broken.

[00:57:31] No, I don't own this art anymore because there is a claim on that piece of art.

[00:57:40] Christian Moss: Yeah, I think that kind of just goes to a general misunderstanding of NFTs. I think us people who've been in the know, we never really assumed that the NFT is the asset. But I think a lot of people who read about NFTs for the first time in like casual media, they kind of think, oh, well, they're trying to put assets on the blockchain themselves, which obviously doesn't make sense. Because, for example, if you have an NFT that represents a house, if you lose an NFT, or if your NFT gets stolen, does the thief have your house?

[00:58:06] Well, obviously not. Right. So as you said, it's more like a title deed, or like a certificate of ownership that can be interpreted as ownership under a given institution. And I think like, changing gears a bit, I think this actually kind of makes sense for, like, you know, the quote-unquote metaverse, right? If you want a token to represent a game item, then a single token could represent different game items in different games, which is obviously what myself and Shaban did when I added Spells of Genesis tokens into my game, but they were different things in each of those respective games.

[00:58:49] Vlad Costea: You know, I'm proud of you guys, because I could get NFT shills who would be like, oh, so I just minted this new one. And you should look it up and buy it while it's still cheap. Because you know, we are in this bubble. And there's a high chance that it's going to be worth a lot more in a short amount of time. But you presented everything quite objectively and critically. And that's why this conversation was very much required. And I don't know, there's just so much happening in this space.

[00:59:21] And it's so hard to keep up. I remember a few months ago when people were trading NFTs on OpenSea, just like they used to trade shitcoins and ICO tokens back in 2017. And it was scary. And something that I want to ask you right now, and maybe that, you know, you find yourselves in a position in which you wouldn't want to give a clear answer, but you think that there's going to be a big crash in terms of NFT valuation? And would it make sense for someone who, for example, I hold this Spells of Genesis card, which is worth like $1,000.

[00:59:57] Would it make sense for me to sell it right now and wait for that collapse and buy it maybe for $10?

[01:00:06] Shaban Shaame: It's very hard to say exactly what will happen, if someone can predict exactly. The thing is, I cannot speak for Spells of Genesis because I'm the owner of the project, so I cannot speak objectively. But if I talk about other NFTs, Rare Pepe, I think there will be a collapse because there is too many different projects that are producing things that are copy of copy and they don't have a lot of intrinsic value. But when this will correct, the NFTs that have intrinsic value will go even potentially higher.

[01:00:58] So a lot of low value NFTs will leave the market and the ones who really have a historic significance or great art or something great in it will keep their value. So for Spells of Genesis, we have a shop where we have our own cards and we're selling them on the first-party market. And we set a price that is not too high, not too inflated. A lot of people in our community, the ones who already own the cards, want us to buy them, so to reduce the supply.

[01:01:47] So then the cards go higher. But I think these effects are bubble effects. So it pushes things on short term and short period. So the price that we set, we try to find the right price for what the token is, the supply, of course, the story behind. So I would say it's important to really try to understand what's the intrinsic value of the NFT and is the price overinflated for what it is. Which is not an easy task, but I think it's the key to not lose money and to evaluate your assets.

[01:02:39] Koji Higashi: Yeah, I mostly agree with Shaban and the current NFT bubble. It's inevitable to crash or at least the general price level will go down significantly. I don't know when and I don't know how much, but that's for sure. And we've experienced it already with Spells of Genesis and Rare Pepe, et cetera, as well. Now we are kind of looking back on early days, but in 2018-19, very few people cared about it, or, you know, Shaban and Chris probably have gone through it as well to some degree. So we've already seen it, experienced it ourselves, and that's going to happen with most NFTs as well.

[01:03:24] I agree with Shaban and also agree that with that said, these early Counterparty tokens, such as Spells of Genesis, vintage NFTs, those tokens will likely age well and might even go the other direction because you cannot replicate what's happened in the past. And people, like including you, Vlad, started recognizing what's happened in early days and they find value in those historical significance. But for example, most of the NFTs issued this year, three years from now, we probably won't talk about them, but we likely will still be talking about Spells of Genesis or Rare Pepe, at least to some degree.

[01:04:13] So that's something I learned that people kind of came back to Counterparty tokens, which is an encouraging sign for people like us who are involved in early days.

[01:04:28] Christian Moss: Yeah, it's kind of hard to be kind of objective on this because obviously we were like some of the issuers of like early historical NFTs or something.

[01:04:37] Koji Higashi: Maybe we're just trying to pump it. It sounds like we're trying to pump them.

[01:04:40] Christian Moss: But I would say that it's like looking at like outside the NFT market and other kind of collectibles. So I'm kind of a big fan of like single malts and Scotch whisky. And you kind of see there's been actually a bubble in whisky, funnily enough, and you kind of see like what a lot of the distillers come out [with]. I see like the same behavior in the NFT market where they'll come out with like, oh, we've released this like 2021 distiller's edition, which is super rare. And they kind of do that like each year, each year.

[01:05:16] It's like they're just trying to kind of make artificial scarcity and eventually kind of the price of those like whiskies that, you know, kind of obviously just trying to jump on the bandwagon, like trying to be like, you know, Game of Thrones edition whisky. Like they all kind of crashed. But the historical old whiskies always pretty much kept the price because obviously, you know, you can't really fake it. So I kind of think a similar thing would probably happen with NFTs. You know, there's a lot of like people just issuing NFTs to see if they can kind of, you know, jump on the bandwagon.

[01:05:52] I remember I was at an NFT meetup a few months ago and like it's all about with NFTs. It's all about trying to be the first of something. So this guy had a presentation and he said like, well, we are issuing the first NFT that represents wine, like this wine bottle. And someone in the audience said, no, actually, somebody already issued an NFT for wine in California or somewhere. And then the guy said, oh, and he kind of thought on the spot and he said, OK, well, we have the first NFT for Austrian wine or something like that.

[01:06:20] And it kind of really feels like they're clutching at straws to try and kind of find the story which will value it to collectors. And I think obviously there are going to be some things that come out that, you know, will still be valued by collectors. But, yeah, 99% will just be like... Like, I have my coworker, he often says, if everything's an NFT, then nothing is an NFT. And I think there's some truth to that.

[01:06:47] Vlad Costea: OK, so Shaban just mentioned in the message that he has to go and I don't want to hold him for much longer. But at the same time, I have like two or three more questions. So would it be fine with you, Shaban, if you have to leave? I would ask Christian and Koji.

[01:07:06] Shaban Shaame: Sure, sure. Sure. Please, please go ahead. I might be there for one last question and then I will go.

[01:07:15] Vlad Costea: OK, because I really want to know. Christian has mentioned something interesting about fakes. And right now we have a movement with Fake Rares. And this seems to be very divisive. It started by DJ Pepe, JScrilla. And he at some point decided that he wants to create more Pepes that are not going to be part of the Rare Pepe Directory and are going to be possibly mock-ups or remixes of existing Pepe cards. And people like Dan Darkpill are very much against the idea and think that it's inflation for the Pepes, and it's very much akin to printing shitcoins.

[01:07:54] What do you think about this movement?

[01:07:58] Shaban Shaame: So there is a huge market for NFTs and everyone wants a share of it. It's, of course, impossible to recreate 2016 NFTs because it's past. So people now need to create new, and to have some story around it. And the Rare Pepe collection was decided to be closed in order to keep some scarcity. But the production continues. So I would say, as long as it brings some value, artistic value, historic value, whatever it is, I think there is space for anybody to create something as long as they are not stealing other people's art or other people's IP.

[01:08:58] So as long as it stays fair, why not? People want to create new content. Maybe this content will be valuable also in a few years. So I'm not against it as long as it's clear that it's a new breed and we cannot prevent people from creating new NFTs. So new NFTs will come. And as long as people understand where they come from and what's the story, that's the most important part.

[01:09:33] Koji Higashi: Yeah, I agree. But I think it's an interesting point. It can be considered inflation. So actually I'm also organizing a new series called Badger Capsule in Japan. So basically it's for older Memorychain, previous Memorychain artists, who want to still produce some new art on a similar theme, on Counterparty and on other chains. So people always want to produce new art. That's one. So I just wanted to provide a place where they can do that. Otherwise, all these vintage tokens, they are already issued, but there's no other way to create new art.

[01:10:14] So that's one. The other is I'm just trying to do that to promote older, previous series, such as Memorychain and Oasis Mining, to raise awareness. And maybe, you know, some Memorychain cards, some artists are willing to trade their Memorychain cards with newer series cards, so that distribution will be more diverse and fair. So that's why I'm kind of doing it until the end of this year. So I believe Fake Rare has a similar intention. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad intention. So I think it's fine, as long as it's meant to be kind of a cheaper, [unclear: bad] version of Rare Pepe.

[01:10:58] And also it's a good entry point for newer people who cannot afford to buy Nakamoto Pepe, Satoshi Pepe, Satoshi cards, those cards, right? I mean, even I cannot afford to buy Nakamoto card anymore. It's like too expensive. People, some newer collectors always want something cheaper to kind of get started. So I think it plays some role there.

[01:11:25] Vlad Costea: So you're saying that it's some sort of gateway drug?

[01:11:27] Koji Higashi: Gateway, yeah. At least that's my hope, personally, for the new series. And I believe, I don't know, but I believe that's what Fake Rare is supposed to be.

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[01:15:22] Vlad Costea: You know, something else that bugs me sometimes is that the most popular series this year, before Rare Pepes got discovered again and before Spells of Genesis also became popular, was the CryptoPunks. And those are computer generated, so there is nothing really artistic about them. It's just some algorithm creating a different character with different characteristics. Like if you asked the character creator from The Sims, the video game, to create different avatars based on all the features available, it's pretty much the same. But for some reason, there was a lot of speculation on that one.

[01:16:00] And this begs the question, what really makes an NFT valuable? You think it's just the hype around it? Is it something like the time that has passed? So if it's older, it's more valuable by default? Or is it like the identity of the artist that makes it also valuable?

[01:16:22] Christian Moss: So for me in the early days of Rare Pepe, it was 100% the images. I remember on the Book of Orbs, I just basically, I didn't even look at how rare they were. I just would buy the Rare Pepe, which had the image I liked. And I know obviously people could say if it's the image and you could just literally, you didn't have to buy it, you just had to right-click and save it. But I think what they don't understand is that when you kind of, if you have art, part of it is you kind of want to show it off.

[01:16:51] And we were integrating kind of tokens into games and things. So you kind of had to have the token as a proof of ownership for the game to let you kind of use it in the game. But yeah, it was for me, it was completely, I just like the image and the art. But generally, yeah, what makes an NFT valuable? I guess it's not one thing per se, but generally, I guess it's the story, you know, and that story can be, you know, because a certain person issued it.

[01:17:27] Or it was issued under certain circumstances. Yeah, so I guess it's quite hard to say per se. But yeah, it's ultimately the story and what the community decides is interesting or valuable. Yeah, but then again, like one man's treasure is another man's junk or vice versa, right? So, you know, there's some NFTs which are valuable, which I don't really, I'm not attracted to at all. And, you know, same is true for NFTs I like, other people don't value at all. So yes, it's quite a subjective thing.

[01:18:10] Koji Higashi: Oh, Shaban left already. So let me comment on that as well. Yeah, I actually wanted to hear Shaban's opinion on this, because I'm not a big fan of CryptoPunks myself. I don't own any and I'm not too interested. But it's like Chris said, it's kind of subjective. But I don't know. Like I said, Counterparty tokens, a lot of those NFT themes are based on the history of this industry. And you have to understand the context. And that part is more interesting to me personally. So I don't like computer generated images.

[01:18:49] They look all the same, like you said. That's my personal view. And I understand some people find them cool or beautiful or worth collecting. And that's fine. NFT is very subjective, and that's fine. But the other issue I see is a lot of, including CryptoPunks, a lot of it is based on kind of misconceptions that it's the first NFT or something like that. Sure, CryptoPunks can be a first NFT series with that computer generated images approach or something like that. You can say that. But a lot of it is kind of based on sometimes based on misconceptions and misunderstanding sometimes.

[01:19:31] So I don't know if there are CryptoPunks collectors. I would love to know why they think CryptoPunks are, for example, very cool and worth collecting or worth that money value. It's not for me, at least.

[01:19:46] Christian Moss: Yeah, I think [what] I like about Rare Pepes as well, it's kind of satire, you know what I mean? That's what I found quite appealing. A lot of the Rare Pepe artworks were satirical takes on Bitcoin events at the time and also geopolitical events at the time. And also it was a little bit forbidden because coincidentally, like at the time they came out is when the time like, you know, the whole Hillary-Trump campaign, [unclear: it was kind of deemed] as like a right-wing frog, which is crazy.

[01:20:22] Koji Higashi: Yeah, but, you know, Pepe kind of makes fun of everything, including itself, and it kind of fits the Bitcoin culture better. [unclear: That's my view.]

[01:20:32] Christian Moss: I heard Jordan Peterson, he kind of made an interesting take on this, which is kind of like, the frog itself kind of has, kind of like, an archetypal historical place in history, in the psychology. If you even look at Egypt, like the frog has been personified and like on, you know, old kind of tablets. And it's basically like the frog. It symbolizes kind of chaos. It's kind of, you know, it's not really, it's not like a water animal. It's not a land animal. It's kind of a bit weird.

[01:21:03] And it's, you know, in biblical times, it's represented kind of chaos and plague. And I kind of see that the Rare Pepe is kind of doing the same thing. It's kind of like the Joker or the, you know, in the kind of, you know, monetary revolution or whatever you want to call this thing we're going through. So that's kind of why I found it quite appealing.

[01:21:22] Koji Higashi: It kind of got me. It just reminded me of something. In 2017, when there was Rare Pepe on Counterparty, on the Bitcoin blockchain, and the fee went up, and some people said, hey, we should try to migrate the Rare Pepe project to Ethereum, where it's cheaper. And then they started doing, I don't know what it was called, Rare Pepe something on Ethereum, basically a copy version of Rare Pepe on Ethereum. Right. But they didn't have the similar type of culture or the quality of art. So I think this different culture of different blockchain actually plays an important role in [unclear: Bitcoin trolls].

[01:22:05] I'm glad Rare Pepe exists on Bitcoin in that way, because it kind of, some people might disagree, but it represents at least some value in the Bitcoin community, like kind of poking fun and making fun of everything sort of. It's kind of punk, isn't it? Right? Well, CryptoPunks, which is more about visuals, yeah, and it's more popular on Ethereum, is maybe because of the difference in culture on those platforms. So, yeah.

[01:22:37] Christian Moss: I think a lot of people just don't know about Counterparty, and they see CryptoPunks as like one of the first NFTs, which, you know, it was on Ethereum. And you can kind of, you can probably accurately say that if it weren't for Ethereum, we wouldn't be talking about NFTs. They probably wouldn't be called NFTs. They'd be called, well, we call them tokens. NFT came from, you know, the fact that with a CryptoKitty, you'd only issue one, right? It was just unique. It wasn't fungible at all. And now NFTs just mean any token, depending on how fungible it is, as long as it's got some scarcity to it. Yeah.

[01:23:16] Vlad Costea: It's actually interesting to see different cultures expressing themselves differently. Like on Ethereum, you have something that is automated and is the most popular one around. Whereas in Bitcoin and Counterparty, you have these frogs that are mostly hand-drawn or at least, you know, copied and cropped from pieces and put together in a way that expresses something else. And if you look at the whole Rare Pepe collection, you see that it's not entirely based on politics or on history. It's also like pop culture. You see that there is Beatles Pepe.

[01:23:59] There's like Pulp Fiction Pepe with the [unclear: cookies].

[01:24:03] Christian Moss: Yeah, exactly. I like that. I kind of think that maybe that say that like, so Bitcoin NFTs have this kind of trolling kind of pop culture thing. Ethereum has this kind of clean machine, you know, automation kind of thing. I wonder if Ripple will start to do, like, business card NFTs, you know, like American Psycho, so, like, the business people using Ripple can kind of, like, compare their NFTs, you know. That'd be interesting. That's an interesting point you made there, Vlad. It will be because I'm sure like we do see NFTs on other protocols.

[01:24:39] So that's, you know, I'm kind of involved in gaming, and we see a lot of game studios are choosing, they're not choosing Ethereum, they're choosing like other... Well, I won't go as far as [unclear: calling them] blockchains, but other platforms to issue game NFTs. So stuff like Flow, which is, the CryptoKitties creators made their own chain. And yeah, so yeah, it's maybe like different NFTs use different blockchains and platforms, you know, because the market is all a bit different and it's suited towards that use case. I don't know.

[01:25:13] Vlad Costea: I also noticed that Satoshi's Games, so the studio behind Lightnite, is issuing NFTs on the Liquid sidechain, and they are actually members, Federation members, in the Liquid sidechain.

[01:25:26] Christian Moss: Well, they're kind of expanding now. So they're actually accepting other chains now because, you know, I guess the momentum for NFTs isn't really on Liquid at the moment. But yeah, they did choose Liquid, which is, you know, it's perfectly reasonable, I guess. But yeah, I don't know. I've actually done a lot of, like, research. So like when I was like more involved in Counterparty, one of the things I was kind of paid to do, not by Counterparty directly, but by a company that was using Counterparty was to try and find scaling solutions.

[01:26:02] How can we scale NFTs and stuff? So I kind of examined Liquid as well and these other chains. And it's really kind of a catch-22 at the moment with like choosing the right platform to build your NFT company on, because I kind of think we're quite early in the NFT tech stack. So whatever you choose now is probably going to be the wrong choice just down the line. Yeah, but it's interesting that like, for example, you know, that Solana took off, but Liquid didn't. I don't know.

[01:26:35] Maybe it's just like Bitcoin is bad at marketing. I'm not sure.

[01:26:41] Vlad Costea: I think it has to do with Bitcoiners themselves and the way Bitcoin is distributed. Because I'm going to call them shitcoins straight out because they have that pre-mine. They have large whales who are able to basically launder money. And it's likely that they do this sometimes with NFTs so that they draw attention to their chain. They have these ridiculously large bids because they know that they're going to get a lot of media attention. And when there is media attention, there's going to be like a large inflow of new users who are going to try to become the next lucky ones who are going to sell for 1000 ETH or I don't know how much Solana.

[01:27:25] So the fact that you have these whales who basically most likely were part of, you know, the first investors or even part of the pre-mine. So they kind of got their free money and now it's worth a lot. They can play with it and they can play with it in a way that's strategic and can attract users who are clueless about how any of this works. But in the case of Bitcoin, everyone is conservative. Everyone is trying to accumulate. So the incentives are very different there. There is no whale who's trying to get more traction for Counterparty or for Liquid or for anything else.

[01:28:04] But something else that I wanted to mention because you said something about exploring different platforms. I remember in 2019, I think it was during the summer, I interviewed Giacomo Zucco, and at the time he was working on Spectrum, RGB, which is a layer 3 on top of the Lightning Network. And it was supposed to do exactly colored coins and Counterparty, Rare Pepes. He even mentioned it. And I thought it was a cool idea at the time, but it never took off.

[01:28:37] Christian Moss: Yeah, I can talk into that. So I did do some research on that. And I think there's a general, you know, people have been in Bitcoin for long enough will kind of be wise to this. But there's a general thing that like people think that Lightning is a kind of silver bullet that will solve all scaling issues. And I think, and maybe I might be misunderstanding this, so, you know, feel free to kind of [have me] be corrected on a Twitter thread or something. But when I looked into RGB from a protocol point of view, there's a lot of stuff that makes sense about it.

[01:29:10] But I think the misunderstanding was that it would be a Lightning Network for NFTs and it wouldn't. It would allow you to do a Lightning Network for, I guess, for like a very fungible coin. So it's probably best to explain with an example, say I have a game, and in the game, the game has like a currency. You know, let's call this, you know, let's just say it's Mario Coin, you know, it's like very liquid currency. You could use RGB to build a Lightning Network for that very liquid currency because the Lightning Network, in order to work efficiently, you need lots of liquidity.

[01:29:47] You need people to lock stuff up and make channels. So you can do that technically if you have a currency that lots of users have and it's liquid. You can't do that with an NFT because an NFT like let's just say that there's an NFT of like one, you know, or in the extreme case, you can't make a channel with just one because you know, there's no liquidity there. So what my understanding of RGB is that it would let you make a Lightning Network for the kind of fungible-style token.

[01:30:19] But if you wanted to do NFTs, you could issue an NFT style on it, but it would still be an on-chain transaction. The NFT side of it wouldn't be like the Lightning Network scalability. It'd be more similar to Counterparty where you'd have to make on-chain transactions. Having said that, the way they do it is probably better than Counterparty because Counterparty uses kind of an old fashioned like OP_RETURN style. So the way they kind of do these on-chain NFTs is probably more elegant than the way the Counterparty does it.

[01:30:53] But I think the confusion was that we'd be able to kind of, I could issue on the Lightning Network a rare token of one, and I could send that to Koji like for no fee. No, that's not what it does because you can't do that with NFTs because the whole Lightning Network works, it works based on liquidity and people locking things up to make channels. Having said that, I could have completely misunderstood it. So I really hope I'm wrong and I can be corrected. But that's why I kind of lost a little bit of interest in it.

[01:31:23] I have heard rumors about other devs in the ecosystem coming out with similar approaches, something which is better than RGB. But that person is going to... He's well known, but he's going to, I heard he's going to release some information on that soon. So maybe, like, maybe there's like... I spoke to Adam Back about this, actually, over dinner, and we were saying, well, how can you scale an NFT of one because, you know, you can't have the liquidity and he couldn't really think of an answer himself really over, you know, just the burger that we were eating.

[01:31:59] But I kind of think maybe somebody so much smarter than me, some of those, you know, kind of cryptographic wizards could think of something and that will enable it. But as of at the moment, the only technology I find interesting for scaling an NFT of one is Ruben Somsen's statechains. And I think that's the only contender, or a sidechain, but with a sidechain, you're getting scalability through centralization. But statechains, I don't want to go into technical aspects of that, but that seems to be the interesting technology.

[01:32:31] And I'm surprised people aren't really jumping on that to kind of make that a reality, probably because it needs like L2 to make it work. So I think, to make it work well... So once L2 is out, that's probably something I would probably like to look at, to try and make like an NFT Bitcoin scalable thing using statechains. But yeah, but anyway, there could be some caveats I haven't thought out because, you know, there always is with Bitcoin. There's always caveats and trade-offs you don't realize.

[01:33:01] Koji Higashi: Yeah, Chris covered a lot of things and I'll just make my comments on them as well. I think in general, trying to issue tokens on Lightning Network or second layers in general is a good thing or is a better approach myself, in my opinion, because that's one of the reasons why I left the Counterparty token ecosystem, on-chain token ecosystem in 2017 and started working more on Lightning Network and second layer. It's because it was already very difficult to build applications directly on the Bitcoin blockchain and it will likely become harder in the future as well.

[01:33:47] So it was natural for me to work on developing second layer, such as Lightning Network, then on Lightning or maybe on even third layer, you can build applications on top of Bitcoin. So that was one of the main reasons I decided to put my focus on Lightning instead of NFTs or tokens at the time. Yeah, so from that perspective, I think it makes a lot of sense. I don't know how RGB works technically. I don't understand its technology too well, but I hope it can do NFT like just issuance of one or different things.

[01:34:33] With that said, I think one technology doesn't have to address all the use cases. And I think for vintage NFTs and kind of high-value NFTs, Counterparty works fine, and I think it will continue to be that way. And the other thing I wanted to mention was that Vlad mentioned in the beginning, he said he wants to bring all the use case to Bitcoin as a Bitcoin maximalist or something like that. And that's kind of my personal view is similar to that as well. So that's why I'm working on Lightning as well.

[01:35:15] And some people don't like Counterparty because it pollutes the on-chain. But I think it's cool that there's proof that we were working on all those tokens and all those NFT things before most people recognized it. And a lot of the ideas that are in the space now, actually, we've already done it on the Bitcoin blockchain or we've talked about it on Bitcointalk. And that's part of the reason I think it's really great that people recognize and appreciate what we were doing on Counterparty.

[01:35:54] Christian Moss: I'll just make a small correction there. So a lot of people argue that Counterparty doesn't pollute the chain, because actually all the token information is stored in OP_RETURN, which is prunable. And that's kind of a decision. I think Counterparty didn't do that in the beginning, but they moved to doing that to kind of, you know, keep the Bitcoiners on board. So you can run like a fully validating node and ignore all the Counterparty stuff and like still be trustless. So that's kind of one win for Counterparty that I would say.

[01:36:21] Koji Higashi: Yeah, pollution, meaning congestion, for example.

[01:36:25] Christian Moss: Pollution is the mempool in the blocks. Yeah, the mempool for sure. And like block propagation. But once you've got it, you can choose to disregard the data. So it's not taking up, like, [unclear: storage], technically. Right.

[01:36:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but this goes back to the SatoshiDice argument. Is it really spamming or pollution if you're paying the right fees and the miners are getting paid?

[01:36:46] Christian Moss: Yeah. Yeah. And as you alluded to with your conversation with Theo, you know, in a way that, like, maybe, like, I guess, you know, to use a dirty word, the DeFi of people trading NFTs on Counterparty can help, you know, subsidize the miners. We'll see.

[01:37:07] Koji Higashi: And to be fair, I think those criticisms were right, correct. And that's what's happening on Ethereum now. The fee is ridiculous, right? Because there are too many people trying to issue NFTs or trade NFTs on-chain, that results in really ridiculous high fee. So we've got to build all those use cases on second layer. At least that's my personal opinion.

[01:37:35] Vlad Costea: So do you think that the collections that exist are going to move to second layers or sidechains or whatever? Or do you believe that they're here to stay? They're going to get traded for the on-chain prices. So whoever wants to purchase something is going to have to also deal with whatever the on-chain fees are. And for future NFTs, we're going to issue them on sidechains and second layers.

[01:38:04] Christian Moss: Well, I could probably talk to this because this is actually stuff I am working on actively. So I'm a game developer. We currently develop games on the Lightning Network and make SDKs for other game developers too. I had games back in like 2013, 2014, 2015, which I issued Counterparty tokens for. You know, initially I issued them as utility tokens, so they weren't collectibles. So one of my tokens that the community has deemed valuable at the moment is one called Ninja Suit. And initially I issued like, I think it was unlocked, and issued like 21 million of them, because I wanted every player to have one and people could kind of trade it.

[01:38:44] And it would basically be like, you know, a kind of metaverse-style game asset. And obviously that doesn't work because of the scaling issue and fees we've mentioned. And I've said before that I think at the moment Counterparty really only makes sense as this kind of high value collectible kind of platform. So I actually burnt it to like an issuance of, I can't remember, maybe 200 or something, you know, because, you know, I think it makes more sense there. However, I do want to be able to use like NFTs and tokens as kind of game items in a way that is completely scalable.

[01:39:17] So obviously I can't do that on Bitcoin at the moment. The holy grail is that there's some tech that comes out which lets you basically issue an NFT on Bitcoin trustlessly and kind of trade it for no fees without, you know, polluting the blockchain, et cetera. That's the holy grail. But realistically, what I'm doing going forward is we basically kind of have layers of centralization. So ultimately a game itself is centralized. Right. You know, so, you know, if you play a game, you know, you're in a universe that the game dev completely controls.

[01:39:51] You know, there are people who are trying to make completely decentralized games on the blockchain, but that's another thing. So I kind of see it that probably what I will be doing is, we'll have a more very user-friendly, centralized kind of blockchain. It's maybe not even a blockchain. Maybe it's like, pretty much, we could just call it a database plus, where you could get NFT-like things, and you can trade them like in the game or in the ecosystem. And once it gets valuable, you can then maybe mint it on a public chain.

[01:40:27] I think that's what Shaban actually did with Spells of Genesis. He kind of saw this quite early that you couldn't really use these as game items in the game. So with Spells of Genesis, you would actually get a digital, kind of [unclear: general] database version of the card in the game. And once you got to a certain level, you could then mint that card into, like, you know, an NFT version on the blockchain. So I think in absence of any amazing technology that's going to come out, which will let us really scale NFTs, I think the way it's going to go is you basically have these layers of centralization going from a database to like a federated sidechain or something, or, you know, then going to like something like Counterparty on Bitcoin.

[01:41:11] And depending on the value and use case of the token, you'll kind of use it in one of those areas. But they'll probably, you know, they'll probably be like bridges between them. So you can kind of go back and forth a bit. But that's kind of how I see it evolving in absence of any new tech, which I hope will come. But yeah, who knows?

[01:41:35] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I very much appreciate your insights and the fact that you're so honest about this whole space. And you call it centralized when it is. And you don't try to sell anything, which is part of the reason why I think this interview is so informative and useful for people who most likely have not paid much attention to this space have not had any kind of involvement. But they want to understand what's going on. And they want to understand whether or not getting involved into this sort of art has any benefits on the long term.

[01:42:09] And let me ask you something else. On Ethereum and also on Liquid, there is this, how should I call it, like a recurring payment that is made to the creator of the art. So for example, let's say that I have a painting that I put on the blockchain, not necessarily, you know, I don't upload the JPEG, I upload the information, the hash, and the information relating to the Imgur or whatever website holds the actual picture. And I upload it there. And I lost my train of thought. Sorry.

[01:42:49] Christian Moss: Yeah, I know what you're saying. It's basically, and this has kind of been like, even before Ethereum came out, people were talking about this basically doing royalties, right? So artists can kind of...

[01:43:00] Vlad Costea: Exactly.

[01:43:01] Christian Moss: Yeah, yeah. I think that's actually quite cool. The caveat is, I wonder if it's completely gameable, will people find a way to sell and buy art and kind of try to cut the person out? I'm not sure. But yeah, I think that's quite interesting. And I can't like say too much, but some of this stuff that I'm kind of researching on would kind of allow that to still happen in a more centralized... Like, I don't necessarily see why that, you know, that can't work on like a more centralized NFT platform.

[01:43:29] You know, like, say, for example, technically, let's just say Google, or, well, Facebook themselves, you know, or Meta now, they are probably going to come out with a very centralized NFT platform. And everybody who builds with the SDK can like share the NFT between the games, and they could easily build royalties into that, obviously, it's not going to be completely decentralized. But, you know, maybe if you're an artist, and you know, it costs you nothing to kind of mint it, you don't have to pay the exorbitant kind of ETH fee.

[01:44:00] So maybe you just, like, mint a bit of art for that for free, you know, you might have to KYC at some point, which is not great, but, you know, and then in the Facebook platform, if that is traded, you know, you get some like, Facebook points that you can like cash out, you know, I think that's something that's really going to take off. And it's really a good idea. There's no reason why we necessarily shouldn't see it on the more decentralized layers, as well as the centralized ones.

[01:44:27] And then, yeah, I think ultimately, people will find ways to bridge between them, you know, so yeah, but this just comes from speaking to game developers. So I speak to a lot of game studios with my role at Zebedee, and they, you know, they all say they want NFTs, but they all really want centralized NFT platforms, because game devs, they like, you know, a lot of the larger studios, they can't really use the decentralized platforms. So I think we're going to see NFT-like features that people like on decentralized chains, but we'll probably see them on more centralized ones, which is arguably what like Solana and Flow are doing anyway, they just call themselves decentralized.

[01:45:06] But there's going to be ways to bridge between it to the more decentralized chain, you know, if you wish to do so.

[01:45:14] Koji Higashi: Yeah. I think giving royalties back to the original artists, when the secondhand sale happened, or some stuff like that is, I think is a cool idea. And the idea itself has always been around for a long time, but now some people are implementing it. So I think that's a cool experiment, I would say. But with that said, I saw some people talking about it. And some people misunderstand that all the NFTs have this feature built in or something like that, which is a complete misunderstanding, right? And in reality, very few NFTs have this feature, and it's not really working yet, at least.

[01:45:58] So I think it's not a very good thing that people misunderstand about NFTs. And, you know, some people are intentionally using it to sell their shitty NFTs or something like that.

[01:46:13] Christian Moss: So that's how it would work, though. Like, if someone just has like an NFT, and I assume if you trade it, like, by the terms of the smart contract or something, [unclear: a fee] is taken, but if you just kind of like, secretly sell the private key to a wallet, you know, obviously, there's risk there, because you don't know if the other person has kept a copy of their private key. But yeah, I'm sure, it'd be interesting, people will try and find a way to kind of game it or undercut it or to cut the middleman out, just as human nature.

[01:46:42] Koji Higashi: Yeah, or you can write a very complex contract, maybe. I don't know how exactly it works. But that puts more pressure on the on-chain fee as well. So it's not that easy. And technically, it's very difficult to do properly. The other thing is, it sounds good, but there's a lot of things in the industry that sound good. But if we try, they don't work, right. So, for example, it sounds good that every time people resell, the artist gets some fee. And that's cool.

[01:47:14] But from a user perspective, or owner perspective, you don't want to give [it] to the artist, right? It's like a tax. And the other thing is, for example, if you buy a book, and then you resell it on the internet, you don't have to pay that fee to the original publisher. So it's an experiment. And I think it's cool, but I don't know if it's going to really work. And that's yet to be seen. Maybe it's like...

[01:47:40] Christian Moss: Sorry, go on. I was gonna say, maybe you get like a race to the bottom, like... Yeah, exactly. Artists who kind of set their, cut their fee too low, are the ones that the tokens will be traded more, and then eventually they end up getting nothing again.

[01:47:54] Koji Higashi: Yeah, exactly. So we don't know how the economics of that type of scheme work out. So we cannot really expect too much. And that's one thing, people use these, "oh, you can do this and that," and try to pump the bubble, right, trying to sell their tokens at a higher price or something, which is not very good. They have to be kind of honest that it's still an experiment. At least that's my view. And the other thing is, Chris mentioned Ninja Suit, which was maybe the first asset on the blockchain to do interoperable game items, you know, cross-game game items, right?

[01:48:36] And that was cool.

[01:48:38] Christian Moss: Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say they were the SoG cards that were the first ones. I think Ninja Suit, people have hailed it, it's like one of the first skins or something like that.

[01:48:47] Koji Higashi: One of the first for sure, right? We were working on that. And we thought we were, you know, we thought what we were doing was cool, but we were not sure that would work out. Right. That was just an experiment. And it ended up, although it's possible for multiple games to use the same NFT or game item, my understanding is that not many game publishers or game developers are doing it yet, because game companies want to control their own game items or assets, and they don't have a strong incentive to use other games' assets or stuff like that.

[01:49:25] So it's an interesting concept and experiment. But it might take more time for people to understand that we need to build better tools for that. Or it might not work at all. So it's a cool experiment. But I don't like people kind of over-exaggerating the potential, because a lot of those things won't work. That's my experience, our experience as well. We did a lot of cool new experiments and some things worked and a lot of others didn't. So...

[01:50:02] Christian Moss: I mean, maybe Shaban, who seems to be back, can chime in on this, but I kind of spoke to a game developer the other day, and they were looking for like an NFT solution. And they wanted to issue NFTs in a way that could not be used in any other project. Well, you basically just want a game item. "But we want it to be called an NFT." But you basically want it to only be usable in your database. But this kind of makes sense. So I can imagine a company like Nintendo, like issuing a rare Mario NFT and like say they won't do it, but say technically they issued that on a public blockchain, let's just say Counterparty.

[01:50:46] And then somebody goes, okay, well, there's a Mario NFT. Okay, if you have the Mario NFT, you can use it in my game as well. And then they get like a cease and desist from Nintendo or something, you know, it's kind of interesting to see. Yeah. But maybe that's just like a big company thing. Maybe these kind of innovative things take off from like indie companies who want to get an edge, and they kind of know that if they share these game items... maybe I'm kind of a bit more optimistic on that. But...

[01:51:15] Koji Higashi: Steam seems to hate NFTs, interestingly. Yeah, yeah, like they banned NFT game titles or something I saw.

[01:51:24] Christian Moss: Epic Games are like a lot more open to it. Epic Games, you know, they made a statement saying, we're not banning it. They're not fully supporting it, they're more sitting on the sidelines. But, you know, they're happy to, you know, as long as it, you know, doesn't, you know, break the terms and conditions.

[01:51:41] Koji Higashi: I'm not saying it won't work. It just sometimes takes a lot of time, a lot longer than you imagine, or may not work at all. So that's we'll see.

[01:51:52] Christian Moss: There are games who do collaboration. So I remember my wife plays Final Fantasy and Monster Hunter and the two different studios. One is Capcom, one is like Square Enix. And they did, like, it didn't use blockchain at all, but they did it, like, if you got a game item in Monster Hunter, you link your account, you can also have the same one in Final Fantasy. There is kind of and that kind of obviously helped both games grow because they got like interesting marketing around it. The users were happy, you know, so I kind of think, yeah, doing that on an NFT standard makes it easier because obviously they probably have to do a lot of work to try and get the interoperability to work.

[01:52:30] But if, like, NFTs lead to more open protocols that make it easier, I think, yeah, we could still probably see more interoperable kind of game items via a kind of NFT standard, whatever, if that's decentralized, centralized or a bit of both. See, I don't think that NFTs, and even Lightning itself, it's not necessarily the fact that it's decentralized, which is interesting to app developers. It's the fact that it's like an open protocol that everyone speaks the same language. I think NFTs, we might see the same thing.

[01:53:01] Vlad Costea: You know, it's actually interesting that...

[01:53:04] Christian Moss: Is Shaban here, or does he just...?

[01:53:06] Vlad Costea: He logged back in, because at the end of this call, he's going to have to upload his track. [unclear: Oh, I got it. So it's not here.] It's mostly technical. I told him to come back. So what I was about to say is that I noticed that video gamers tend to be, in quite a large... I'm not sure if it's the vocal minority or it's a vocal majority, but they seem to be against NFTs for ideological reasons, because they have been told that they boil the oceans and they're not environmentally friendly. And I remember when John Romero, the creator of Doom and Wolfenstein and Quake announced that he wants to create a series of NFTs.

[01:53:44] They basically ganged up on him and made him come back on his decision and say, no, I'm not going to do anything anymore. I'm really sorry. I did not mean to offend you guys. And I've seen something similar with the voice of Pikachu from the Pokémon series who launched some NFTs for whatever reason.

[01:54:06] Christian Moss: She died a few years ago. Maybe it was the Western version, perhaps.

[01:54:09] Vlad Costea: Yeah, the Western version. OK. Yeah, you're in Japan. OK.

[01:54:16] Christian Moss: She died in a car crash on Rainbow Bridge, actually.

[01:54:21] Vlad Costea: That's unfortunate.

[01:54:23] Christian Moss: It's cool. Suddenly I'm sad. Anyway, [unclear: Discord, just] yesterday, they did the same thing for that as well, FYI.

[01:54:31] Vlad Costea: Who?

[01:54:32] Christian Moss: Discord announced they were going to integrate NFTs, and then the CEO tweeted, and then a few days later he tweeted, we've decided not to do it because of the angry tweets underneath it. So, Discord, yeah.

[01:54:42] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's insane, right? Yeah, it's not like these people do any kind of research to figure out, OK, it's just a transaction on a blockchain. So how is it different from sending money with Bitcoin? It's not.

[01:54:55] Christian Moss: I think on Discord, some of the comments I read are actually not... I expected it all to be about climate, but it actually seemed to be about more Ponzi schemes and scams. But just to address the climate thing. Yeah, I often kind of say, like, you know, I kind of tell my friends, you know, who asked me about Bitcoin mining. I said, oh, Bitcoin miners run on electricity like Teslas do, you know, so it's the way I see it is, you know, it's, you know, if the whole world goes green, then so will Bitcoin go green because the miners will just use a different power source, you know.

[01:55:31] Koji Higashi: Most of the environmental concerns about Bitcoin or NFTs are ridiculous. So I don't know, there's nothing to comment, to be honest.

[01:55:41] Christian Moss: There's that quote that they say that Bitcoin mining uses more energy than like the country of Denmark. But then, like somebody said, like pick any like electrical appliance, like TVs use more energy than the, you know, whole output of X country. I think it's just, you know, it's just, if you think it's useless, then you would think that it's a waste of energy, you know, [that's what it] boils down to. But yeah, but this is something I come up with, because I was actually at a gaming, a non-Bitcoin gaming conference, a developer conference, and we were like showcasing Lightning.

[01:56:15] You know, so we kind of have to have an answer to this because we have a lot of game studios who want to integrate Bitcoin, but they are concerned about the backlash from the users. You know, so it's something that we kind of, you know, have to, yeah, I'm not sure, like, you know, because sometimes if you argue with them, you've already lost the argument. If you know what I mean, it's like the argument isn't based on logic and reason. So you can't like logically reason them out of it.

[01:56:46] So part of me is just kind of waiting for it just to kind of die down. And in a few years, there'll be another boogeyman, perhaps. Another thing I like to say is, well, Lightning is a very efficient way to use Bitcoin. So "it's kind of a green way to use Bitcoin" is kind of a thing I often use. But yeah, I'm not really sure. Maybe it's just best to, you know, just take the heat and just soldier on through it. Sometimes unpopular decisions are the right ones long term, even if, you know, you get some hate for it now. Yeah, I don't know.

[01:57:20] Vlad Costea: Yeah, this interview has been going for almost two hours, and I feel like I should reward the brave ones who have been listening up to this point. So if you are listening to this and if you send me a DM on Twitter with a GIF with your favorite Pokémon, I'm going to send you a unique NFT on Counterparty. So you heard that right, send me a GIF of your favorite Pokémon on Twitter, and I'm going to send you back a free NFT. And I would like to thank you guys.

[01:57:51] And I would like to reward you because nowadays I'm doing a physical NFT, which is a magazine which I number, and each edition has a different cover and a different foreword and is numbered accordingly. And I want to send you each, including Shaban, who is not around anymore, but I'm going to talk with him afterwards. I want to send you a copy of my magazine. I hope you're going to like it. You know, it's designed to be a collectible. It's high quality print, glossy paper. It looks like one of these fashion catalogs, but it's like with Bitcoin content.

[01:58:25] I'm going to send you the digital version so you can see what's inside. And if you want to keep the paper version as a collectible, I would be honored.

[01:58:33] Christian Moss: I actually have a collectible magazine. My brother gifted me as well. So it is definitely a thing, like people collecting issues of magazines. Well, I guess the Bitcoin one is like that Times newspaper, right? You know, the Chancellor bails out banks. So that is kind of a physical NFT in itself, right?

[01:58:51] Vlad Costea: Oh, that one. And also, I think the first number of Bitcoin Magazine is also sold for like $1,000 nowadays.

[01:58:57] Christian Moss: Yeah, [unclear: the NFT one] would have sold for more, though, probably. I guess it's getting more scarce.

[01:59:04] Vlad Costea: Oh, true. Yeah. So I want to send you that. And I'm also going to release a Christmas edition of the magazine.

[01:59:10] Christian Moss: Christmas edition. Cool.

[01:59:12] Vlad Costea: Yeah, with a Rare Pepe. So let me show you the picture. Are you in the Twitter chat that we used? I want to record your reactions just for the record. So if you're looking at it, I've just sent it and you should see it right now.

[01:59:30] Christian Moss: OK. Love it. Yeah, it's very scary.

[01:59:38] Vlad Costea: And this one is going to have different articles, which I'm still writing. The plan is to finish within one month and deliver this.

[01:59:46] Christian Moss: It's very South Park, I think. It reminds me of like a South Park vibe to it.

[01:59:52] Vlad Costea: OK, I haven't considered South Park, but I thought, OK, what is popular nowadays? Rare Pepes, laser eyes, Christmas.

[02:00:02] Christian Moss: We're doing lots of things that are popular, I guess, like memes.

[02:00:09] Vlad Costea: I'm going to print like a hundred of these and it's going to be a limited edition. Maybe some people get upset about it.

[02:00:16] Koji Higashi: It's quite rare.

[02:00:19] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah, I'm going to get called out for that, but it's not on Counterparty. And if it is, if it gets added, maybe. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it, what I'm going to do with it. But yeah, I'm going to send you a copy of the first one, which I already have. And if you also want this one, which looks rare, let me know. And thank you very much for your time. And I also want to send you an NFT with this season's graphics. There is a lot that's going on.

[02:00:47] So send me your Counterparty addresses and I'm going to reward you for your time here.

[02:00:52] Christian Moss: No, no, it's been a pleasure talking to you.

[02:00:55] Koji Higashi: Yeah, likewise.

[02:00:56] Vlad Costea: Christian, Koji, and Shaban, who's no longer here, thank you very much. And I don't know, NFTs to the moon or whatever. What should I say?

[02:01:06] Christian Moss: Yeah, what's the NFT term? I don't know. [unclear: Looks rare.] Yeah, I'd love to think about that. NFTs to Mars, I don't know, because Elon's going to...

[02:01:17] Koji Higashi: No, they're not going to Mars. I just want to keep it honest. It's just what it is.

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