#70: Joshua Goldbard on Mobile Coin

Joshua Goldbard is the Founder and CEO of MobileCoin -- a fast, safe, and easy-to-use payment technology that gives everyone the ability to digitally transact from nearly anywhere around the world.

In this conversation, we discuss:
- MobileCoin's growth story
- Signal Messenger 
- Series B announcement
- Partnership with SBF
- Daily routines and rituals
- $MOB
- MobileCoin privacy
- Carbon-negative crypto

MobileCoin
Website: mobilecoin.com
Twitter: @mobilecoin
Facebook: @MobileCoinOfficial
Instagram: @mobilecoincompany

Joshua Goldbard
Twitter: @ThePBXGuy
LinkedIn: Joshua Goldbard

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Transcript

Matt Zahab: 0:06

Ladies and gentlemen, it's your host Matt Ahab and I am incredibly fired up for today's episode. Our guest is Joshua Goldberg, he founder and CEO of mobile coin. Josh has spent the last four years developing mobile coin a fast, safe and easy to use payment technology that gives everyone the ability to transact from nearly anywhere in the world digitally. Mobile coin has raised over $70 million from leading investors and is considered one of the fastest growing crypto currencies worldwide. Working in telecom for much of his life, Joshua developed, managed and implemented networks of significant complexity. He was an early investor in Aetherium. And prior to mobile coins, he managed a crypto hedge fund. Josh is a true lover of the creative process, whether it is a computer coding or art or music. Josh is committed to supporting thinkers and creators and those that bring new concepts to life, as he also serves as a board member of the mobile coin foundation. Josh does it all and be having here in front of us. Without further ado, I'm very pleased to welcome to the crypto news podcast, Josh Goldberg. Josh, welcome to the show.

Joshua Goldbard: 1:12

Thank you, Matt, I'm really delighted to be here. Just a couple things. I've actually really never written a line of code. One of the things that I really love about mobile coin is that we have a lot of amazing engineers who work here. And there are a lot of really smart people who helped me to figure out how to make mobile coin. I think the biggest contribution that I had to the project was just trying to align the aesthetic of what we were doing, and give a narrative of the product we wanted to make. For us. That meant we wanted to make a cryptocurrency that was fast, easy to use, and worked on a cell phone specifically in chat apps. Because that's where you live and work every day. We want to make something that anybody could use to send money anywhere in the world in seconds. And that's what we've achieved.

Matt Zahab: 1:53

It seems like the obvious question to start out with, I listen to a couple pods that you appeared on. And the story of you and your team, creating mobile coin is a great one. And I'd love for you to kick off with that.

Joshua Goldbard: 2:06

Oh, yeah. One of the biggest things that's I think, kind of crazy about the mobile game project is that we worked for about three and a half years in basically total silence building this technology. I think that was probably the hardest thing. In the beginning, it wasn't clear that we were even going to be able to build this project because of how technically complicated it is. There's a whole bunch of new cryptography and technology at the heart of mobile coin that we basically invented with the help of amazing people. My I would be remiss to not mention Moxie as a technical adviser to mobile coin. But there's so many talented people that work on this project. I get a numerate all the engineers, but there's, you know, about 60 people working at Mobile coin now. And every one of them has contribute to the project in very meaningful ways. The process of building technology, you know, we stand on the shoulders of giants. There's so many cryptographers in the world and so many projects in cryptocurrency and cryptography, that have allowed us to get to where we are, just to name a few. You know, obviously Bitcoin is a major contributor to the entire cryptocurrency world, mobile quit wouldn't be possible. Without that, I think that's kind of the base layer is that sort of blockchain scheme, and the ability to have signatures that are in the user's hands that are validated by servers. That's like the core thing that I think all cryptocurrencies kind of build on. Then there's consensus algorithms, Bitcoin started with proof of work. And we actually use a modified version of the stellar consensus algorithm. It's called the federated Byzantine agreement algorithm by David Maziarz. And so we rewrote that from scratch in rust, and that was one of our major contributions to the space. Then we use the crypto note ledger, which is used by a number of privacy focused cryptocurrencies that allowed us to get to a place where we had fast private transactions. And then we took all of that technology and wrapped it inside of a Secure Enclave. And what that gave us is the ability for node operators to run the network without being able to see what transactions they were validating, which means that censorship is not possible at the node level. So this combination of technologies gets us to a place where you have fast, easy to use transactions that are also privacy protecting for consumers. And that set of experiences hasn't really been possible, particularly the fast private, easy to use combination. There's lots of fast cryptocurrencies that aren't private. There's lots of private cryptocurrencies that aren't fast. And there are very few cryptocurrencies that are easy to use. So when you combine all three of those things, you get something really special and that's what we think consumers want what people want to use every day.

Matt Zahab: 4:36

That's a great point there. Well, yeah, my head's been in so many different avenues we can take that. You mentioned Moxie, I know he's your boy. For those at home. Moxie is the he's the creator of signal is he creator for

Joshua Goldbard: 4:51

moss is the author of the signal protocol. I think if you asked Moxie, he would tell you that there are lots of people helped to make that possible. I would say he was sort of The initial impetus on the project, but you know there's a lot of people work in signal there's a lot of people have contributed a signal. Moxie is certainly I think the person who is sort of, you know, driving the project forward all the time. But there's so many talented people work at signal. It's an incredible project. I just want to say that, you know, our relationship with moxie is that Moxie is a technical advisor to the mobile Chrome project. He's a very private person. So I think if you have questions for Moxie about his involvement with a project, those are best directed to him. We really respect his right to privacy. And you know, he's a fantastic contributor. But above all, Moxie is very private person,

Matt Zahab: 5:34

if you don't mind me asking how do you become boys with them?

Joshua Goldbard: 5:37

So, you know, I don't want to overstate my relationship with moxie, I just want to say that I've known him for about 10 years. And I'm a huge fan of his work. And I feel very lucky that he is given any time for a project.

Matt Zahab: 5:50

And is that one of the bigger reasons why you chose signal on top of the fact that it is the most secure and private messaging app out there.

Joshua Goldbard: 5:57

So I don't want to say that I chose signal signal chose to implement mobile coin. When we started working on mobile coin, we had no idea who was going to implement it, we have no idea who's gonna take the protocol. Obviously, you know, Moxie was a technical advisor. But there was no indication at any time that this was actually going to go into any particular messaging app, the messaging apps that decided to use mobile going did it on their own, we don't have any control over these third party messaging apps. They all just saw our technology, saw what we were building saw the technical advantages in the in the consumer facing advantages that we had over every other protocol, and made the choice themselves.

Matt Zahab: 6:35

Wow, that's humble. I love that. But you know, I feel like every single cryptocurrency would kill to be on a top five messaging app in the world. And it seems like, you know, partnership just found itself.

Joshua Goldbard: 6:49

Well, no, no, I want to be clear about this, like signal has been really clear about this. And I don't wanna speak for them, they spoke to this on their blog. If people want to make a fast privacy protecting cryptocurrency that works on a cell phone, I think signal will consider implementing it. I don't want to speak for them. But you know, that's what they said on their blog. Yeah, I just think that combination of features is really hard. It took us three and a half years to get there. So again, you know, they said this on their blog, this isn't me talking for them. This is right on their blog posts. If you make a fast, private, easy to use cryptocurrency you can get into there, it's just or you have the chance to get into there. I just think that set of features is really hard to make for us just doing the stuff that worked on mobile. So you could do recovery of transactions in a way where the service provider doesn't know what transactions are helping users to recover. That alone was a year of engineering, and involve the implementation of a new technology or an old technology that nobody's really ever done a Production Production implementation of called O RAM, which is oblivious RAM. This essentially means that the operator of the server doesn't know what is being loaded into memory. And so they can serve transactions to users that are recovering their transaction history without knowing what transactions are serving. That's all thing that has never been in production anywhere else in the world. And that is a brand new production of limitation. I think we're first in the world at it.

Matt Zahab: 8:11

That's, that's incredible. Another thing I just learned today, wow, you've we're not even 10 minutes in, you've taught me about 100 things so far, might be record breaking. I do want to I do want to congratulate you on the recent series B announcement that has rounded up your funding to a very nice as I believe 70 mil over 70 mil which is incredible. What is the plan for the series B? Where's that funding gonna go?

Joshua Goldbard: 8:37

Oh, man. The Series B is all about getting the scale worldwide, getting to scale internationally. A huge part of that is people we're hiring like crazy. mobile crane is an amazing place to work. We have extremely high performance team. But it's also I think, the healthiest working environment that I've ever worked in, which is kind of a crazy thing to say about a startup. People really care about each other. They really want to do great work, but your health and your family and your relationships, they come before your work at Mobile coin. And we've tried to honor that as we've scaled that our startup. So we're now roughly 60 People will hopefully be about 100 people by the end of q1 next year, hopefully by the end of next year in total will be somewhere in the 150 to 200 range. Mobile coin wants to scale to be able to serve global commerce. So there's several elements of that one is people another's international expansion, and just making it really easy to use mobile coin. So there are on ramps off ramps, there are the ability to convert other cryptocurrencies into mobile coin to be able to get in and out of mobile coin quickly to be able to have stable coins, to have the ability to use mobile print for web payments to be able to purchase, you know directly inside of messaging apps to do sales for goods and services. All these things are necessary for us to hit the kind of scale that we want. What we're trying to build is the last payment rail. That's what we want to make And in order to do that there's a set of technologies and implementations that need to happen. So we worked very hard at that.

Matt Zahab: 10:05

And I guess a good step to creating that last payment rail would be to become friends and partner with probably the biggest crypto gangster in a good way a good OG, and that is SBF, from FTX. And I know he was one of the big ones I made a research jumped in on the on the last round of funding, I absolutely love to see that I hope you had a chance to meet him. And if so, what was SBF? Like?

Joshua Goldbard: 10:28

Yeah, so I wouldn't call him a gangster, I would say that, you know, if anything is a spiritual gangster,

Matt Zahab: 10:34

that's what I think. Yeah, it was okay, I'm just I'm giving a cloud of a gangster because he's the man you don't want to mess with.

Joshua Goldbard: 10:40

I, you know, I think that Sam is just one of the kindest, smartest people that I've met in the space and in life, the fact that he wants to give so much to Effective Altruism is such a meaningful thing. That is one of the first things that we aligned on is just wanting to give back to the world wanting to help heal the world. I think that that's something that Sam really takes seriously. And I think he wears the sort of mantle of being a leader in the cryptocurrency space, which is one of the sort of ascended financial spaces in the world, he takes that really seriously. And there are a lot of people in this industry that I think aren't as serious. And Sam really just understands that he's making financial infrastructure for the 21st century, he's making sort of the bedrock of a new financial system. And he really gets that, if you want to make that world come about, it's not just about making the tech, it's not just about delivering that customer experience is also about giving back to society. And so that's something that I just that resonated really deeply with me. I also think that he's just fast. Well, FTX, as a company implemented the mobile QUIC protocol into their exchange in 48 hours. That is, like we're different, like our chain is a brand new chain. It's not an ERC 20. You know, there are a lot of things about that integration that make it tedious. I think they, they basically took our, you know, our technical guide, ask this one question, and then it was online. And that's the fastest anybody's ever integrated our tech,

Matt Zahab: 12:06

that's one of the big reasons why they're so successful, because they move at a lightning speed, you know, the classic crypto joke a day in Kryptos, a week or a month in traditional markets, like SPF and FTX are a perfect example that it's crazy.

Joshua Goldbard: 12:19

Well, you have to move fast, you know, because if you're not moving faster than people will move fast. This is something that we think about a lot. Mobile coin is just, you know, there's a window of time where we have a, you know, first mover advantage in the space that we're attacking. But at some point, people realize what you're doing, and they realize why you're doing it. And if you're not moving fast, other people are gonna move faster. So for us, it's about keeping up the pace of delivering great experiences with an evolving product all the time

Matt Zahab: 12:45

in, I want to say an arena within an industry like yours attacking the the literal, you know, mobile payment system, how do you sort of create a moat against competitors? Because it's, it's a trillion dollar idea that you have that you're going after? And everyone's going to be in it soon. But how do you create that moat, besides the first mover advantage that you have?

Joshua Goldbard: 13:06

Yeah. Okay, so some thoughts here, it's really hard to make a cryptocurrency and in particular, a compliant cryptocurrency and then you add privacy onto that. And that's sort of features of compliance, you know, easy to use, privacy, protecting all these things together, it's really hard to figure out how to do that it took us years to figure out a set of strategies that we felt good about, and a way to test mobile coin in a way that we could launch it into the market and feel good about the way that we're releasing it to the world. So doing that very carefully, and making clear forward progress all the time, has been a battle. I think that when I first started out working on mobile coin, if I had known how hard it was going to be, I don't know, if I would have taken on the project. I'm really glad that I did now. But given how difficult this has been, there are so many places where, you know, if people want to come and compete with us, I encourage them to do it, because it legitimizes the space exact but I just want everyone to understand that making a cryptocurrency payment system is hard work. It is not easy. And if you do that with privacy, and try to deliver the same payment experience as Visa or Ali pay, but with respecting consumer privacy. You know, if you can do it in four years, hats off.

Matt Zahab: 14:25

Yeah, that's that's opening a hefty jar of nightmare fuel right there you boy,

Joshua Goldbard: 14:29

you know, our code is open source. You want to rip the code? Go ahead. I think that's just the beginning. That's the beginning of the battle. The tip of the iceberg, like having the code is just part of what's happening. And that's what I love about cryptocurrency is that everything's open source. You know, there's no advantage of you have better code than somebody else. Because everybody can see your code. If it's great. People will just use it. And that's a sort of, like, the only thing that rises to the top and cryptocurrency is the stuff that's the The best. And it's such a pure, beautiful competitive market actually love it. I think the fact that everything's open source so you can see what transparency what's happening, so that you can understand the trade offs that are people are making. So you can see the system's design is all just laid bare. That's crazy. And it's beautiful. And I think it's one of the things that really separates cryptocurrency from traditional financial markets. A lot of the problems in 2008, were due to people hiding things behind closed doors. Well, so there aren't secrets in cryptocurrency, you can see everything on the ledger, you can see the choices that everybody's made, you can see the rate at which things are growing, you understand all the metrics, they're all public. And so it's a lot harder for people to hide stuff, even in the context of mobile coin. You know, you can't see the individual transactions in the ledger. But you can see how many transactions are roughly in the ledger. So you know, the rate at which we're growing, right?

Matt Zahab: 15:48

Can you if you ever pictured or imagine not being in crypto, because I asked myself that, you know, oh, yeah, every couple of weeks, I'm like, I couldn't even imagine but not crypto life would be like,

Joshua Goldbard: 15:58

oh, man, I don't know, I've done so many things in my life. You know, when I was younger, I flipped cars. After that I worked in telecom, and I started a hedge fund. I love cryptocurrency. It's a beautiful thing. I think that I can imagine doing lots of things. But right now I'm incredibly excited about mobile coding. I like to spend another 10 years on this project. I really love it. And I think it's got a lot of legs. But you know, life is long. And I think that it's important to keep an open mind about what you can do in life.

Matt Zahab: 16:28

But just from your body language seems like you definitely don't need an alarm clock, you're waking up every morning. But,

Joshua Goldbard: 16:36

you know, there's something about working on things that you're really excited about that gets you out of bed. And I think having purpose in life. For me, I want to be able to give back to society. Again, this is something that really resonated for me was Sam. Being able to give back to society is really important. Society has given me so much in so many different ways community has given me so much that I want to be able to give back my wife and I started a series of nonprofits to help with the arts around the Bay Area during the COVID-19 crisis. We started the safety net fund which gave over a million dollars to artists at the beginning of COVID-19. My wife also started paint the void. So you see behind me, these are her paintings. But paint the Void is a mural project that took boarded up restaurants and shops all over the Bay Area, and paid artists to put murals on them. And they put over 130 murals up in the bay area in the course of last year are so

Matt Zahab: 17:26

incredible kudos to you and your wife, well done there. We're definitely to get into more mobile coin, but I want to take a break and just sort of to crack open Josh and I want to want to get to know you a little better here. As a successful founder who's growing a company that's growing at just absolutely exponential rate, you must have some morning routine, some nighttime routine, some productivity or efficiency hacks that come with that hat and love you love if you could share any of those.

Joshua Goldbard: 17:55

Yeah, you know, showing up is half the battle. Like showing up every day. And just being willing to put work in even when even when you'll feel good even when things are hard. Man, I have a friend who's one he like trains UFC fighters. And he's like a amazing, amazing person. And he told me about going to Thailand and training once. And he's he had a day where he was just, you know, not feeling well, I was feeling kind of sick. And he showed up to class. And he just put his effort in. And the teacher came up to him and said, You look great today, you're doing great today. And he's like, I look great, I feel awful, I'm tear, I'm doing terrible. Today I'm sick. And his teacher said, oh, you should be sick more often. And there's just this moment of, you know, showing up is half the battle. Like you don't I'm not telling anybody to go to work sick. Obviously, I think there it's important to take put your health put your family ahead of work, just full stop. But there are days when you're tired. There are days when you you know maybe don't want to come to work. And putting even an hour in the most days, it makes a big difference. People see it, they get it. And so I've described myself as the janitor and mobile coin, because I really believe in servant leadership. If there aren't enough chairs in the meeting, I'll sit on the floor. After events at Mobile coin, I will clean out the trash. And I try to clean up the food at lunch just to show that like what makes you a leader in our organization is being willing to tackle messes, being willing to go willing to go in and really just find the things that need to get fixed and work on them. And the people that rise in our organization are people that are willing to tackle the hard problems. And you know, try even when things are hard. There's so many places where you just don't know what to do in a start up. Yeah, and you just sit with the problem long enough and eventually you'll figure it out. And if you can't figure it out, you ask people for help. So another thing is really important for me is the way in which we gain wisdom in life. Confucius says that there are three ways to gain wisdom. One is imitation which is easiest. The second is meditation, which is noblest. And the third is experience, which is bitterest. And so I try to, you know, imitate people until I think I understand what they're saying. And then I meditate about what is actually happening to try to have my own hypotheses once I feel like I'm kind of at the edges of understanding. And then you got to experience it. And you often learn in the process of experiencing it, that you didn't actually understand it. And you go back and you meditate and imitate some more, and you just kind of do this annealing process until you understand kind of what's going on. And it takes a while, but you really can learn, you know, almost anything there. There are certainly some limits that people have on what they can learn. But if you're really honest about what you don't know, and you're willing to try, you can learn a lot more than you think you can.

Matt Zahab: 20:47

She's got my head spin again there, and you got me all fired up, ready to run through a wall? Yes, Josh, let's go. I love

Joshua Goldbard: 20:56

on the subject of running through walls. The way one of the ways that Mr. T got famous was that there was a bodyguard competition in his town. And as part of being a bodyguard you had to there was a bouncer competition, but you had to basically open a series of like 10 doors as quickly as possible and then run through them. And Mr. T was the last person to go and he just ran through all the doors. And so I thought about that as like, what is a shortcut in life is it running through the doors are opening them up? You know, you never know depends on the circumstance.

Matt Zahab: 21:23

I love that. Incredible. That is good stuff. Folks. I want to take a quick break from the show with Josh and give a huge shout out to our sponsor prime x BT you know, I absolutely love the team at prime x BT they've been partners and friends of crypto news for many, many years, and we are always excited about new products they have to offer. Personally, I still use prime x BT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders doesn't matter if you're a rookie or a vet. They give you highly reliable market data and performance and you can also easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style primax VT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the pod after making your first deposit 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions. This promotion is available for a month after activation. And the promo code is crypto news 50. That is crypto news five zero all one word crypto news 50. To take advantage of this offer, do a check them out at prime x bt.com. Now back to the show with Josh and mobile coin. Josh, you've already had me sold on mobile coin. Actually, I was sold on it before I do have a little myself. Not a lot. But I do have a little and was a bit of a pain for me as a Canadian had to jump through a couple hoops and use some VPN, which I'm fine with. But can you tell our listeners where they can find mobile coin? Where do you use it? How to purchase it?

Joshua Goldbard: 22:54

Does FTX work in Canada? Do they not service Canadian users?

Matt Zahab: 22:57

No, they're not anymore. There was a

Joshua Goldbard: 22:59

fascinating

Matt Zahab: 22:59

Yeah.

Joshua Goldbard: 23:00

Okay. So if you're not American or Canadian, you can log on to ftx.com and buy mobile coin. It is just openly traded on FTX. It's openly traded on BitFenix. There's a couple other exchanges, including big one that hosts mobile porn. If you are not on those, you know in those locations, if you're in Canada or the US you can actually log on to mixin messenger and my ex i n and they actually have a Dex inside of there that has mobile corn on it. So you can swap any cryptocurrency for mobile coin trivially using that system. So again, that's mixing messenger Am I Xin

Matt Zahab: 23:33

and Josh is probably not allowed to tell you this but I am or Snyder VPN folks VPNs can be your best friend, especially if you're in the crypto verse two great way to to work some magic if you know what I mean. The ticker is MLB that's got to be one of the best tickers and all of crypto the mob coin. I know it's not, you know, mobile mob less

Joshua Goldbard: 23:53

pronounced MOBE because it's not a mobile phone. It's a mobile phone.

Matt Zahab: 23:57

I gotcha. Okay. It seemed it seemed like the obvious, you know, choice. I do love it. But was there any backstory? Or is there anything else to the text?

Joshua Goldbard: 24:05

Yeah. So I really love when you can create these sort of dynamics of like, sort of insiders and people who kind of don't know the aesthetic. And so we want it to be something where if you're an insider, if you if you're part of the mobile coin culture, you call it MOBE. God and people who are sort of new to the space, they call it mob, and it's an opportunity to educate people about why it's not the mob coin. It's the MOBE coin. It rhymes with globe, because it's the global payment system.

Matt Zahab: 24:35

You're playing chess while we're all playing checkers here.

Joshua Goldbard: 24:37

You know, I think it's really exciting to you know, have this opportunity to educate people because there's a there's an aesthetic in cryptocurrency, where people I think, like having an outsider narrative that it's sort of something that's, you know, dangerous or exciting in that way. And I think mobile Quinn's exciting because it is a chance for us to have privacy In the context of society, and that's something that I think is really special is having the ability to maintain financial privacy within the 21st century. Right now, there's so many payment systems that exists in the world that are just destroying consumer privacy. You look at the ideas behind Libra and DM, and you look at, you know, Alipay, and even visa and PayPal and things like that, like, they have zero privacy whatsoever. It's like negative privacy, in fact, and we just want to be able to give consumers some semblance of financial privacy in the 21st century. Mobile green adheres to all the regulations, all the laws, we make sure that we follow we've you know, we know every single person that we've ever sold a mobile coin to any regulated institution that interacts with mobile coin does KYC AML. But for peer to peer transactions, those are privacy protecting and I think that's really special and important to maintain. In particularly when you think about the first fourth and fifth amendment, there's a lot of interesting stuff around, can you be compelled to say how much money you have in your pocket. In general, in the United States, those the that compelling is around taxation. And it's around sort of, you know, making sure that you're abiding with the laws and not doing tax evasion. But that's separate from having to disclose how much money you actually have at any given moment. And I think it's really important, you know, obviously, if you're, if you are using a bank account using a custodial service, all those things are monitored. And there's this unique opportunity right now to have non custodial wallets that allow you to have some financial privacy in the 21st century. And I think it's something really special that's happening right now. And it's this moment in time where this is possible. And I think it's really important for us to try to bring this world about, because if we don't, everything is going to look like Libra DM and Alipay. You're not gonna have any financial privacy in the 21st century. So we believe in this possibility for an alternative future, where maybe just maybe if enough people believe in this, we can have financial privacy.

Matt Zahab: 27:00

How many years away? Are we from seeing mobile coin takeover some massive payment platform like Venmo? or PayPal? I would love to see that happen. That would I would wake up with the biggest smile on my face. But realistically speaking, I know this is, you know, most likely heartache. You would be more, you know, qualified for this heartache than 99.999% of people. But how many years away? Are we from seeing this?

Joshua Goldbard: 27:25

So I'm not in the business of predicting the future, I am in the business of accurately modeling the present. And so whilst I think, I think that if I were to make any predictions around mobile cord, I would say that they have to do with the rate at which we can get distribution, and adoption. And that stems from one or partnerships with major messaging applications and other applications that choose to integrate mobile coin, our partners are extremely important. I think the second thing is really important is the ease of use the on ramps and off ramps and the ability to have those directly integrated into the payment experiences. So if we get to a world where you can get to a stable coin, during the mobile coin transaction, and that that takes one second or less, then people can choose what stability means to them in any given transaction. And that's a really powerful world, you could actually make something that feels like an international worldwide Cash App. And a global Cash App has just never been possible before. Because of technology that didn't exist. There's a whole bunch of new cryptography and new decentralized protocols that make this possible for the first time. And so I think that's really kind of at the heart of what we're trying to make, is using this new technology to give people the same experiences they have now in a new context, and think of are successful, not the sky's the limit. And we are working day in and day out every day to deliver that future.

Matt Zahab: 28:49

I absolutely love that vision and idea but the global Cash App what that entails a current mobile coin, or would it be a mobile coin stable coin,

Joshua Goldbard: 28:58

I think all transactions in our network should clear using mobile coin, because that is the privacy protecting rail. But once you have mobile coins, you can decide whether you want to retain mobile coins because you believe mobile coin is your sense of stability. Or you can switch to $1 back stable coin or you can switch to Bitcoin or Aetherium. It's up to you what what stability means you I think for a lot of people mobile coin is stability. Mobile going is the asset that they want to hold. For other people. It's US dollar coin for other people. It's Bitcoin, you know, it's really up to you, right? And I don't want to dictate to anyone what they should believe in, I just want to help them get the payment experience that they want. Over the long term. I think that what we're building is really special and people will see value in it. But I don't I want to enable payments. And I think that doing that requires us to give people the choice of what they want. I believe that consumers are empowered when they're empowered to make choices, do the best thing for them. And that's what encourages them to use your technology.

Matt Zahab: 29:58

Well said we As they're spinning in my head right now you Wow, I love this having so much fun. Another point that I did not know about mobile coin until I was doing research for this show environmentally friendly, maybe the first coin ever to make this happen. Can you explain the carbon negative aspect of mobile coins for

Joshua Goldbard: 30:19

me? Yeah, so there are other cryptocurrencies that have claimed carbon negativity. But if you dive into what they're actually saying, it's actually only part of their ecosystem, that's carbon negative mobile coin, the entire ecosystem is carbon negative. So essentially, we did some math to figure out what the energy output of our servers was. And we told this to our community, and our community said, Oh, we're gonna buy carbon credits to offset this. It wasn't actually something that mobile going did was just one day, our users woke up and said, Hey, we bought 10 times the carbon credits, 10 times renewable energy, offsetting the energy output of mobile coin, this makes you carbon negative. And it wasn't something driven by us. It wasn't driven by the mobile coin foundation, it wasn't driven by mobile coin Inc. It was driven by users of the protocol because they want they believed in the future, this is what they wanted. And so they bought 10 times the renewable energy that we were using. And by the way, most of our servers are already running on renewable energy. But this just even adds a layer that makes this the most renewable project by any measure in cryptocurrency. And that's something we're incredibly proud of

Matt Zahab: 31:22

that that's crazy. We've talked so much about present day mobile coin, tell me about the future. What kind of plans do you and the team have cooking up on the backburner?

Joshua Goldbard: 31:30

You know, it's really simple, actually, we just want to get easier to use mobile coin, we want you to be able to go to a website and scan a QR code or click a link and pay

Matt Zahab: 31:39

that that will just take down take down all the bridges, all the walls,

Joshua Goldbard: 31:43

you know, I think a lot of projects try to boil the ocean. Yeah, I try to just do everything. And we are laser focused on what we're trying to deliver, which is this amazing payment experience. Until we hit that I don't want to think about anything else, because it's all a distraction. We have to nail this payment experience, we have to give people the ability to pay for the things that they want in the world using mobile coin, so that anywhere you see the mobile Quint logo, you know, your payment is going to go through and go through in seconds in the coin that matters to you and your sense of stability. When that works, then we'll think about other products. But until that time, that's what we're laser focused on. I think that will take us quite a bit of time. You know, we're making a lot of progress on that. I think that you know, and the q4, you know, middle of next year, I think you'll see a lot of movement on those things. But it's really tricky to set all those things up, particularly when you want to retain privacy. If we were willing to compromise on a lot of the values that we have, I think we could move faster. But then it wouldn't be the same project. You know, signal wouldn't be signal if it wasn't private, mobile coin wouldn't be mobile coin. If it wasn't private,

Matt Zahab: 32:51

is there? What do you think the next catalyst for the privacy growth narrative will be? I know, the whole you know, for the last four years, there's been quite a bit in regards to the politics and then the whole Facebook thing, or a couple days ago, it may have been yesterday, Facebook, 1.5 billion users get hacked, no one knows what's happening with all that data. But do you think the next sort of Black Swan or just massive event will be where people will be like, You know what, I actually need to start giving a shit about my privacy,

Joshua Goldbard: 33:19

I want to give a huge shout out to Francis Francis hugging, Francis is a dear friend of mine, and seeing this process and watching her have this kind of bravery and being willing to speak truth to power. That's one of our core values and mobile coin. And so I'm just incredibly impressing her, go and do this hard work in public. And I just I'm very humbled to be able to see that and to see her execution delivering that vision.

Matt Zahab: 33:45

Can you can you give a little context on Francis?

Joshua Goldbard: 33:49

Yeah, so Francis is the whistleblower in the Facebook, you know, sort of thing that's happening now in the Wall Street Journal. And she testified in front of Congress yesterday. Francis is an incredible human being who works very hard. I think the thing that is really special about her is her dedication to getting the data, right. And just making sure the data is on point. She's a data scientist by training data PM, She works really hard at just evaluating data and making sure that what she's saying is backed up by information. And so I think that she's done an incredible job telling a very complicated story about what is happening in the world. So I just want to say that I'm incredibly impressed at her bravery, going speaking truth to power, Jr. can you restate the question?

Matt Zahab: 34:33

I was just asking, What do you think the next sort of black swan event or mass

Joshua Goldbard: 34:37

Oh, man, yeah,

Matt Zahab: 34:38

no privacy event that will that needs to happen in order for the general public to really start giving that extra shit about the privacy.

Joshua Goldbard: 34:45

So I'm a little bit of an interesting opinion on this. I think that it mobile coin isn't as easy to use as Ali pay, and visa and PayPal are even easier than those things. If it doesn't happen. The trust and speed and convenience of those products, no one's gonna use mobile coin over them. So this privacy thing is a nice to have. It's a thing where if mobile coin is as easy to use as Alipay, and visa and privacy, because you know, the reason we went, Yeah, that's that's where we have to get right. And we're, we're getting closer every day to that experience, the day when you can open mobile and you can pay, and it goes through in one second or last and you can settle into the currency that you want. And if you want a bank wire, you can get a bank wire, that is going to be the Holy Grail. And we're not that far away from that experience. So once that's online, I think it's really hard for anybody to try to compete with what we're building. So I think it's important to recognize that privacy is something that is important to people if they don't have to make a convenience and trust trade off a convenience, trust and speed trade off. So we don't want them we don't want anyone to compromise when they use mobile coin. We want them to choose mobile going because it is the best payment experience in the world. And privacy is a component of that experience, but not necessarily the defining factor. The defining factor is trust speed and convenience. And the privacy is the kicker that pushes us over the top,

Matt Zahab: 36:13

there's going to be a crypto payment infrastructure, Mount Rushmore and you and Jack Mahler's are going to be sitting there side by side. Who else would you fill that two spots with?

Joshua Goldbard: 36:24

Well, I mean, you have an anonymous picture of Satoshi just kind of as a blank face, vaguely androgynous face, I don't know. I think that I don't think too much about, you know, honorifics or you know, those sorts of things. I just want to make beautiful technology. And they let other people decide kind of where it sits in the pantheon, where it sits in the world. Our focus at Mobile coin is to deliver the best payment experience in the world. And there's a whole lot of work to get there. And we are putting that work in every day. So as far as you know, thinking about who's the best. That's not my concern. My concern is making the products that people want.

Matt Zahab: 37:04

Josh has been incredible. Your focus is second to none. I've met very few people who literally have laser eyes in real life and you are one of them. So kudos to you. Before we wrap up, do you have any questions for myself?

Joshua Goldbard: 37:18

Yeah, what excites you about cryptocurrency

Matt Zahab: 37:20

Oh, man, that's I could probably get full eight today? hour episode with this. Just everything. It's so much fun, how quick it moves, how much fun it is like NF T's my loyal listeners of the pod have heard me beat the NFT drum for a couple months now. I don't know if you're an NF T guy but joining communities on open sea falling in love with the art you've talked about the art many times you know my not analogy per se, but just sort of parallel would be regular coins. The NFT is you buy a regular coin, what do you have to show for it? Yeah, you can go your bag. That's awesome. You can say you're part of a community but with an NFT you're still buying that coin at the end of the day. It's just a beautiful piece of art. And now you have you know a massive community join with I absolutely love that. It's just so much fun. Every single day I wake up and fired up I got a fire lit under my you know what, I absolutely love it crypto as a whole, just seeing it take down these legacy industries that like that have just screwed us over for so long. I'm not some rebel like oh, it's crypto against the government. It's just no one's ever had the Kahunas to actually go take them down. And every single day, it seems like another one of those legacy walls get taken down. And again, I'm not some like, you know, the people against or the the men and women against government. I'm not some kind of person like that I understand government's place in our society. But it's just nice to see a new wave and a new industry just really works magic. And another thing I love is it seems like everyone's having so much fun. Everyone's also getting rich, everyone's happy. You know, people rarely beat each other down in the industry. It feels like everyone, like you said, when we first started in regards to open source, we show our secrets, everyone. And it seems like everyone in the space that's right wants each other to get better. And that is just so rare. Nowadays. It's extremely rare. And to be a part of it. It's just incredible. Like, heck, I get to interview people like you. You know, that's my job. Like, how much fun is that? It's incredible. So I have two short statements and then two questions. So Steven, number one, art is incredibly important to mobile coin. We have a program around a radio station that we produce every week where we compensate artists to make amazing music most clearly calm. Yeah, if you check it out, like the broadcasts are incredible. The sound is amazing. This week, we have just a bunch of incredible artists live in our studio just playing amazing music. We have an artist in residence program that does designs and beautiful imagery every week, we take the arts really seriously and we love to compensate artists all the time. My second statement is that on December 10, this is actually the first time I've spoken about this. But on December 10. We will be hosting a conference in San Francisco on the coming crypto Renaissance. And we'll be posting a website about that very shortly. So I'll make sure to send that information over to two questions. Question number One, is privacy important to you? Yes, but I'm a hypocrite because I still use an iPhone. I know that these mega corporations and the government is tracking probably most of my moves, I do use signal, I do have protonmail email account that besides those two things, and the odd time of me, you know, if I remember and just because I do this to make my parents happy, but I'll scratch out my name on an Amazon box because I live in a condo with my girlfriend. And if anyone wanted to, they can learn a lot about me, but like otherwise, yes, I do understand the importance of privacy. It matters to me, but I'm a hypocrite because I don't do anything about it. And I feel like I'm using the first step right? I know, but there's so many other ways I could go about it. And I just I don't care because things like you know, all my best friends have I messaged and I just love the interface of Apple, it talks with my computer and everything in everything.

Joshua Goldbard: 40:54

I messages and then encrypted, you know, that's at least a better stuff than using SMS. My second question is, when did you first realize the privacy was important to you?

Matt Zahab: 41:03

That is, honestly that I have to give a shout out to one of my profs well, really two of my profs, but one would be Dr. Christy Spence in university, she beat the privacy drum for quite some time. I took sport management in school, funnily enough, and she taught, I forget the name of the class, but I want to say like professional development in sport, she had us make LinkedIn accounts in our first year university getting ahead, you know, we already had a network graduating university, which is pretty cool. And she really beat the privacy drum, too. And so I got it, I got to give a shout out to her because that's my first learned about it.

Joshua Goldbard: 41:36

Wonderful, Matt, this has been a sincere pleasure. Thank you so much. Just to restate the status of mobile code. What we're building is the last payment real. It's fast, easy to use, and built into the world's leading chat app so that you can pay for what you want anywhere in the world. Everywhere you live and work.

Matt Zahab: 41:54

Incredible. Josh had so much fun to talk to you for years. Really appreciate it before I let you go. Can you please let our guests know where they can find you and mobile coin online and on socials?

Joshua Goldbard: 42:02

Yeah, so you can find us at Mobile coin on Twitter. You can find us on moquin.com You can check out the radio show at Mobile coin radio. And you can find us on Reddit as well as on our forum. So if you go to reddit.com/mobile coin, that's probably the best forum for talking to mobile coin. We also have a signal group which he posts in there where you can talk directly with the team.

Matt Zahab: 42:21

Amazing Josh, thank you so much for coming on. Definitely 100% having you on for round two whenever you have some new news or probably raising that gazillion dollar series see in the next couple months. So looking forward to that appreciate you coming on

Joshua Goldbard: 42:32

Thanks, man. It's been a blast. Take care

Matt Zahab: 42:34

folks. This was Josh gold barred from mobile coin incredible man incredible company so grateful to have mine learned a crazy amount and had my head spinning for 40 minutes straight. Hope you enjoyed this episode. I certainly did. As always, we're dropping on Mondays and Thursday mornings. I appreciate you all listening so much. It means the world if you'd subscribe, stay safe out there. Keep growing those bags and we'll keep in touch bye for now.