The most decentralised blockchain called MINIMA with Spartacusrex

In this episode, I talk with Paddy (aka Spartacusrex), and he introduces my long-time favorite blockchain called Minima Network. Blockchain that runs on your phone or any edge device. Of course, we also talk about his journey into crypto/blockchain world, the early adoption of Bitcoin, and the appeal of decentralization.

Paddy explains how Minima Network was started and the importance of decentralization in their project. We talk about the business model of Minima and the launch of the network, the supply cap of Minima and the minimum number of users needed for the successful decentralisation of Minima Network, including the full decentralization of Minima's servers, which happened in Jan2024, and the use of Minima in cars or writing MiniDapps on top of the network.

Takeaways
- The success of a blockchain project depends on the number of users and the level of decentralization achieved.
- Minima Network aims to provide a user-friendly experience and make blockchain technology accessible to everyone.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Minima Network
02:24 Paddy's Journey into Blockchain
04:07 Early Bitcoin Adoption
06:23 The Appeal of Decentralization
08:33 Starting Minima Network
12:36 The Importance of Decentralization
14:41 The Business Model of Minima
21:29 The Obviousness of Minima's Approach
23:36 The Launch of Minima
26:11 The Supply Cap of Minima
27:30 The Minimum Number of Users for Success
28:18 The Importance of User Experience
29:40 The Decentralization of Minima's Servers
30:47 The Use of Minima in Cars
34:14 Working with Car Companies
35:48 The Future of Minima
39:26 Anyone Can Write MiniDapps
41:13 The Importance of Community
42:26 Closing Remarks

My Guest Links

Minima on X: https://twitter.com/Minima_Global
Minima web: https://www.minima.global/
Minima TG: https://t.co/qtV1il8DuS

Transcript

BFG (00:00.866)
Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Web Stream Magic Podcast. Today I'm here with Paddy and he is from the project which I already bumped into probably a year ago. And since then I wanted to learn more and I wanted to try it. And I thought you should all know about it. And the project is called Minima. Minima Network, Minima Global, whatever you want. But it's pretty cool. And Paddy is gonna...

Tell us all about it. Welcome, baby. So I'll start with the obvious question. How do you get to blockchain? Where do you start? Why it attracted you?

spartacusrex (00:32.202)
Hi there.

spartacusrex (00:42.173)
Yeah, no, absolutely. So hi, thanks for having me on the show. So I'm a techie. I'm an old school techie been coding my whole life and 2012, you know, good. Well, over a decade ago now I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And as many of us did, we started on Bitcoin talk, just a wonderful forum with lots of interesting people talking about stuff. And the minute you sort of see Bitcoin, it

strikes you and it's sort of for many of us it's love at first sight and this is what happened to me and so I fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole and I have been falling since then and actually when you start in the bitcoin world you know it's all about the money and you think it's about that but when you scratch the surface and you look deeper you realize it affects and it talks about

almost everything that happens in our lives. And you sort of ask yourselves the question, why do we need Bitcoin? Why do we need this? Isn't don't I live in a world where I can do the things that Bitcoin purports to do? And then you look deeper and you start saying that there are powers that be, you know, the TPTB, the people out there who are in charge, and they have a control that you didn't even realize they had. And

this pervades all of our lives. And this is the attractive quality of it, because frankly, the point of Bitcoin is freedom. And freedom is the most powerful concept in the world. And once you realize this, you can't think of doing anything else because you wanna fight for that team. You wanna be one of the goodies. You wanna fight for that. And so I got into Bitcoin. I loved it. I saw the freedom aspect. And I would say that we had our first argument.

BFG (02:24.386)
right.

spartacusrex (02:32.737)
during the Segwit wars and not to get technical, but when I started using Bitcoin, this is way back when, everybody was the same. Everybody was running the network. We were all running the software on our computers and it was a very sort of egalitarian thing. We were all doing it. We were all making the chain. We were all using Bitcoin. And actually, there came a point where it became apparent that I was no longer that important.

there came a point where there was this argument and there was one side of the argument was saying, look, we want bigger blocks on Bitcoin. And another set of people saying, well, we don't want bigger blocks. And the point was that I was not going to be the deciding factor in that discussion because we had lost the ability. I had lost the ability to influence the network by being a miner. Yeah. So what happens when you run these blockchain systems is that there is this

duopoly between the people who run the network and the people who use the network. And in the beginning, that wasn't very apparent. In the beginning, we all did everything. So you didn't think about it. But then there came a point where it became obvious that there were those who ran the network and there were those who, you know, use the network. And that sort of, you know, that, that grinded at me. That didn't make me happy. I suddenly realized that I wasn't running the network anymore. I was just using the network. And that was really the birth of minima. And that was where.

the concepts for minima, which is the blockchain that I work on first rows.

BFG (04:07.574)
Awesome. Would you put it into a time point? Like you started 2015. Alright.

spartacusrex (04:11.969)
Maybe 2015, maybe 2014, 2015, that sort of time. I mean, I was thinking about it for a long time before, we've all got jobs and bills and kids and things we have to pay for so we can't just abandon everything. So even though it started clicking over in my mind, it was probably about 2018, 2019, before I actually started sitting down at a computer and writing code, where I could actually verbalize and describe correctly what it was that we were trying to do with Minima.

BFG (04:40.706)
Nice. It's actually a pretty common theme I hear from friends. So I'm originally Czech. And Czechs were pretty early in the Bitcoin scene with Trezor and Parallel Police and all the other guys. And a lot of them actually stayed Bitcoin Maxis. I think for their detriment, but it's another discussion.

spartacusrex (05:03.617)
I mean, I have to say just on that singular point, because Bitcoin Maxis are a very interesting group and the truth is that I'm kind of a Bitcoin Maxi. And actually, what the Maxi means, if you ask me, what Maxi means is that when it comes to money, when it comes to this thing that we're mucking about with, there can be only one. Money is winner take all. There is no point for second place. And so when we say we're a Bitcoin Maxi, what you're saying is, look,

BFG (05:12.085)
Are you?

spartacusrex (05:33.781)
The winner is going to win. They're going to beat everybody. And there isn't going to be room for a second place because when we find something that we are going to be able to use as our store of value, as our medium of exchange, when everybody decides what that is, everybody will use that one. You won't want to use the second best one. And an example of this, and this is particularly true in decentralized technologies, yeah, for centralized systems, we've got Apple, we've got Google. Fine. You know what I mean? There are two there.

But for decentralized systems where you don't have a leader, we always gravitate towards the singular solution. And I suppose that the best example of that is the internet. So the internet, you know, the technology is available. Anybody could actually, if they wanted to start their own internet. But why would I want to be on your little internet, which doesn't have all the websites, doesn't have YouTube, doesn't have Netflix, doesn't have all of this. Yeah. Everybody uses the same internet because that's where the liquidity is. That's where all the users are. That's where all the action is.

BFG (06:23.181)
Yeah.

spartacusrex (06:29.673)
And money, when it wins, is the same thing. And so I'm totally with the Bitcoin maxis. I understand what they're saying. Yeah, it's like Bitcoin's gonna win, blah, and that's fine. And I agree with them that there's only going to be one winner and all the other coins are not going to win. That doesn't mean they're useless. Yeah, there's a lot of useful technologies being coming out, but you don't have to be harsh. You don't have to be this toxic maxi. That's a different thing. That's just something that techies do.

BFG (06:29.888)
Right.

BFG (06:38.471)
Yeah.

BFG (06:46.187)
Yep.

BFG (06:56.184)
Right, right. That's very techy.

spartacusrex (06:58.581)
but that's why the maxis are important. And just to expound on that point, you know, when you're a coder, I'm a coder, and when you're a techie and you see beautiful technology like this, you see something like this, how can you not want to touch in and play with it? And you know, this idea that you shouldn't be allowed to write another version, you shouldn't even think about writing another version. This is preposterous. This is like waving a red rag to a bull. It's like, what do you mean? I can't have a go at writing a better version of Bitcoin.

BFG (07:07.662)
apparently.

spartacusrex (07:27.973)
you can go to where you should be going and I will do what I want because that's what techies do. That's what coders do and frankly I'd be remiss in my duties as a coder if I didn't try to write a better version of Bitcoin. Whether I do or not, we'll find out in the long run but the lure is too great to a true techie.

BFG (07:49.234)
I like the way you said it. And yeah, I should probably say originally that I hear it mostly from, I would say maybe the maxis on the toxic side, like nothing else matters and you guys shouldn't work on anything else and you shouldn't use anything else. And that's kind of, you know, wrong.

spartacusrex (08:06.065)
Yeah, this is wrong. This is wrong. We've clearly learned lots and lots of things from other chains. They're wonderful testbeds, lots of experimentation, so much great stuff and work is going on that can be cherry picked, you know, and all the good stuff's being ported over to the winner. We share all my code is open source, all their code is open source, you know, we're helping each other, you know, to simply dismiss them out of hand is wrong, frankly. Now, whether they're going to win and whether they're not, that's a different discussion, but their work they're doing is valuable.

BFG (08:26.638)
Absolutely.

BFG (08:33.076)
that. Sure.

spartacusrex (08:35.529)
Yeah, it's not nothing.

BFG (08:37.294)
Yeah, agreed. Okay, so let's jump forward to the time when you actually had opportunity to sit down and start Minima. So how did you guys get together with the team and how it all started?

spartacusrex (08:54.605)
So originally it was just yours truly sitting in a coffee shop with a laptop, pixel book, lovely, best keyboard, best keyboard of any laptop I've ever had. Just writing the white paper and trying to, yeah, beautiful, beautiful laptop. Trying to decide what it is that we're trying to do. So I'm just going to give a very quick explanation of what the point of a blockchain is. Yeah, because not a lot of people seem to understand this. So as I said earlier, what we're here trying to do, what we're fighting for, what big

BFG (08:57.692)
Alright.

BFG (09:04.302)
Oh yeah, it was really good.

BFG (09:18.926)
Please.

spartacusrex (09:23.053)
coin is here to do is freedom. Yeah. And freedom is just important for everything. Yeah. And we're sort of losing it. You know, everybody's everybody realizes now that the that our freedoms are being taken away from us. And the argument is very simple. And it goes like this. If you have if you want freedom, yeah, if you want freedom of speech, freedom of thought, yeah, freedom of money. Yeah. So let's start with the freedom of speech. You know, think of it like that way, then you must have a censorship resistant network.

You know, I cannot stop you speaking to someone if I want you to have freedom of speech. Freedom of speech requires censorship resistance. OK, this is the first thing that you sort of realize. It's like, well, look, if you can stop me from saying something or if you can stop me from thinking something, then I'm not really free. Yeah. So freedom of speech, so freedom requires censorship resistance. And now the thing is that censorship resistance requires.

because we have no other way of doing it. There's no other system for doing this decentralization. So what that means is that when the different, what we're saying here is that when you have a centralized system, as in there's a system where there's somebody in the middle or a server in the middle or some company in the middle, they're very easy to attack. Now it's very easy for me to censor what you're saying or what you're thinking or who you're sending money to if there's one person that I have to coerce.

or bribe or talk to. And if it were possible to have censorship resistance in a centralized system, we'd have done it by now. Bitcoin wouldn't have done anything special. And the point is that we don't have censorship resistance because we can't do it in a centralized system. So then you go, okay, so I need freedom, I want freedom. So I need censorship resistance. And if I want censorship resistance, then it has to be decentralized because centralized systems are so easy to attack. And here's the point.

For a decentralized system, this is the thing that Satoshi gave us. This is what Bitcoin showed us. If you want to have a system that operates in a decentralized environment, you need a blockchain. That's what blockchain does. What blockchain allows us to do is to operate and to coordinate and to come to a consensus on the nearest bit to the minuscule level. I know exactly me and somebody else can agree.

spartacusrex (11:45.973)
in a decentralized way exactly the order of events. And before Satoshi, we couldn't do that. We simply didn't have the tech to do that. So, blockchain works in decentralized systems, gives me anti-censorship, means we have freedom. And this is the point, that if you're going to use a blockchain, it must be decentralized. And if you're not going to be decentralized, there is no point using a blockchain. This is the other thing that people don't understand.

Blockchains themselves are a complete nightmare. Yeah, they're terrible, terrible databases. They're really slow, they're really clunky, they're very expensive, they're very complicated. You know what I mean? You wouldn't use a blockchain for anything other than to get this decentralized consensus system going. I see this all the time, everywhere. I see lots of blockchains, yeah. Solana, Ethereum, blah, blah. Centralized, and the point is they're like, no, don't worry, we're using blockchain. And it's like, look, if you're not gonna be decentralized, don't use a blockchain. It's a total nightmare.

BFG (12:36.214)
centralized.

spartacusrex (12:45.557)
And so this is where minima comes in. So what I realized I wanted for minima, the only thing that matters for minima is that it is completely decentralized. That is the only reason. Once you've got your decentralized system working, once you've got your blockchain and it's decentralized, then we can worry about the scripting language, the block size, you know, how cool the transactions are, I can do what I can do on it, but that is secondary.

Yeah, that comes in after you have your original system that is decentralized. And importantly, if any of the things you're going to add to this system are going to impact the decentralization, you're not allowed to have them. They're no good. They have to go. Yeah, because that's the only thing that matters. OK, everything else is the bonus. But the thing that we're doing here is a decentralized system. So then you're sitting there and you're thinking, OK, so I want a completely decentralized block chain. And you look at.

all the other chains out there and minima is different to every single other blockchain out there which I'm quite happy about and what I mean by that is that every other blockchain out there has this thing where you have the users and you have the miners where you have those who use the network and you have those who run the network and so the users rely on someone else the users need someone else and in a in a truly decentralized system you should never need anybody else I should

BFG (13:49.673)
Agreed?

spartacusrex (14:11.625)
you should be enough. If you want to do this with your friend, you should be, you don't need me. And so Minima comes in and it goes, okay, so we need a system that is perfectly decentralized, that will never centralize. Yeah. Because when you're looking at this mining, when you're looking at these people who are running the network, there's only one way this goes. Yeah. You can see it happening clear as day in front of us. And what I mean by that is that mining is an industry now. Yeah. It's big business.

BFG (14:17.624)
Got you.

BFG (14:41.144)
business.

spartacusrex (14:41.217)
We've seen what happens to businesses thousands and thousands of times for thousands and thousands of years. We know exactly how this ends. Yeah. All businesses always converge to a monopoly because that's what business does. It's very efficient at doing that. Yeah. There's always going to be a winner. And as soon as you get the monopoly, as soon as you get one person in charge, Bitcoin is broken. Blockchain is broken. It means you've got one person in charge of making the blocks. Yeah. So we can never allow that to happen. We cannot have a business.

running the construction of the chain. We cannot have people in charge of the chain. Because that's what's going to happen. Otherwise, it wouldn't work if the business didn't make money. However cool Bitcoin mining is, and Solana mining, and ETH mining, and all of that, it's still a business, even though it uses cool technical digital stuff. So what do we have to do? So you say to yourself, okay, so I need to come up with a system that every user can run in the same way, exactly the same.

There's no difference between users. I'm not a user in your own. Everybody's the same. And so the first thing you think about is, well, look, what can I run this on? And you say, well, like I can't run it on laptops because half the planet doesn't have a laptop and I certainly can't run it on servers. And so what's the only device that I can reasonably expect people to have access to? And you say, well, they've got a mobile phone. Okay, so I've got to run this in full.

BFG (16:05.131)
Okay.

spartacusrex (16:06.357)
Yeah, not a light client, not a weird thing, not just like a wallet. The whole thing needs to run on a mobile phone. And you're like, ooh, okay, fine. And then you think to yourself, okay, well, these are my requirements. Yeah, these are the boundaries I'm putting onto my project. And then you think to yourself, okay, what else do I need? And you're like, well, I need some way of storing this enormous amount of data on your phone. Yeah, and you think, okay, well, let's have a look.

And we have a huge advantage here because I have the luxury of looking back through all the past blockchain battles and cherry picking all the stuff that has been made. Yeah, this is the point. We're all working together here. This is an open source system. We're all building off each other, standing on each other's shoulders. And actually, with the benefit of hindsight, there have been beautiful inventions that have been made in this field that allow you to do things like

Instead of having a database that stores all the data, I can have a database where you store the data that is relevant to you and I store just the data that is relevant to me. And we can still agree on what is the complete amount of data. This is called a proof database, which was actually created after Bitcoin, which you can't crowbar into these things later. So you're like, oh, OK, cool, that can happen. And then you think to yourself, all right, so there's technology that I can use.

Another thing you have to think about is developers, people like me, people who will never stop playing if you let me play. So you have to get rid of me. How do you get rid of me? You have to have the protocol has to be finished. It can't be a protocol which is like, and then we're doing this epoch and then there's another thing that we're doing and then we're going to be adding this. No, that can't happen. I have to remove myself from the equation. So the protocol had to be finished completely and utterly. This is what you get. This is this is it. This is all you're ever going to get.

BFG (17:43.433)
I'm sorry.

BFG (18:04.851)
Okay.

spartacusrex (18:05.005)
So that's another thing that you're thinking, okay. And then the final one is, well, look, now let's do that, but how are we gonna get rid of this business element? How are we gonna get rid of the miners? How are we gonna make it so that every user is the same? And actually, it's actually quite easy. And what you do is you flip it. And so not to get technical, but the way that all the other chains work is that they play a competitive game, yeah, where the miners...

the stakers, whatever you want to call it, they fight with each other. And it's called a win-lose game. Yeah. One of them wins, one of them loses. One of them wins. I got the block. You didn't get it. I got the reward. You didn't get it. Yeah. This is where the business element comes in. This is where the money making comes in. And so you say to yourself, well, what if I got rid of that? What if instead of having a competitive game, which is win-lose at the base layer, we have a cooperative game where me and you work on the same team.

where all of us work on the same team. And so that's what Minima does. And what Minima does is it says, look, instead of some of us grinding away, Minima is a proof of work chain, blah, blah. Instead of one of us grinding away or using our funds or whatever to build the chain, we don't do that. We say that you all, everybody, has to do a little bit of work. And then we get all of that work and we put it together and that's what we use to secure the chain. And importantly,

You're not rewarded financially for that work. That work is something you do to be allowed on the network. So the utility of the network is the reward you get for the work you do. So it allows you to have access. And when I say work, I mean like 1%. I mean a very small amount. And what's nice about this is you say, OK, so in the old paradigm, you have 10 really big, powerful miners. But in the minimum paradigm, you have 10 million.

really small, you know, really tiny people who each do a little bit of work. And what's good is that 10 times a really big number is equal to 10 million times a really small number. So everybody on the minimum web network works together in a cooperative game where what is good for you is good for me. This is called a win-win scenario. Yeah. Well, we either both win or we both lose. Yeah. So when I do something, it helps you. And when you do something, it helps me. Yeah. We're cooperating at the base level.

spartacusrex (20:30.493)
And you take all these pieces, you stick them in, you start coding, you get away with it. And you know what? At the end of it, you do it. You pop out with Minima and that's what Minima does. We've now got a blockchain that runs on your phone, that doesn't use up terabytes of data because everybody only stores what matters to them, where we have no incentive, no financial incentive to work more than somebody else. I do the minimum amount of work that I'm required to do to access the network.

BFG (20:48.759)
Hmm.

spartacusrex (20:59.041)
And we now have a completely decentralized blockchain where everybody's mucking about with everybody and there's no, but this is an interesting one. Yeah. Because the larger any blockchain gets, this is objectively true when you look at every single other blockchain out there, the larger a blockchain gets, the more centralized it becomes, the larger minima gets, the more decentralized it becomes. Now that sounds like a decentralized system to me. Yeah. That's what I want from my system. And that's what we're working on here at minimum.

BFG (21:29.25)
So that was an awesome story. It sounds a little bit like a fairy tale because it seems so obvious, right?

spartacusrex (21:35.381)
I know! And yet it's true! That's what's so amazing. It's like, oh, so it did, so you can do these things. Yeah, mathematically it is possible to do that, yeah.

BFG (21:41.106)
Yeah. And you know, it just seems so obvious, right? That you would assume that if you remove the financial incentive and you ask people for some work to actually use the network.

spartacusrex (21:52.044)
Yeah.

small amount like an insignificant amount of work like running WhatsApp in the background. You run WhatsApp on your phone, everybody's got WhatsApp, it's doing something. You don't care because you get the utility of people being able to send messages to you like, yeah, I don't mind it's running in the background doing whatever it does. I don't notice. Well, let's take that concept and stick it on a blockchain.

BFG (22:16.734)
Awesome. Yeah, I remember when I was in Barcelona, when I met Adam, there was a small meetup of your fan base, local fan base. And they were like, you know, freedom of speech maxis. I loved it. They were like, yo, we have your last minimap because, you know, I run it on three phones and I run it on one. And yeah. Yeah.

spartacusrex (22:28.388)
Oh, yeah.

spartacusrex (22:35.063)
Yeah.

Yeah.

spartacusrex (22:42.069)
Yeah, and it runs on everything. And what you want, I mean, it's a compact, it's known as a compact chain because it's very, very tiny and it runs on everything. You know, you want to put it on a chip. You want to put it on your toaster. You know, the goal eventually is for your toaster to pay for the electricity it uses in real time when it, you know, makes your toast. And it's got a little chip in it and it does minima and it pays for transactions over lightning and blah, blah. You know, so yeah, that's the goal.

BFG (23:05.03)
Right. Okay. Yeah. So there is a lot of, I would say there is a number of interesting questions, which all smell a little bit technical. So I'll store it for later. But so you guys brought it to life in around 2019, 2018. What's that?

spartacusrex (23:11.021)
There's a lot to unpack there, sorry.

spartacusrex (23:19.958)
Uh.

spartacusrex (23:29.965)
Testnet for a couple of years to 2020. Yeah, we've been live now with Mainnet for about a year. Yeah, so that's, it's taken us, yeah. And that's when we went live Mainnet boom. I mean, can I, sorry, I'm gonna have to give you another little point here, Pete, which you're gonna like, yeah. So for me, you know, the strongest meme in crypto is 21 million. Everyone loves 21 million. There's a fixed amount.

BFG (23:36.307)
Right. Okay. So that was last year. Yeah.

BFG (23:42.578)
All right.

Sure, sure.

spartacusrex (23:57.261)
bitcoins. It's like that's what we love. I want to know that this is how much money there is and you're never going to muck about with that. And if you ask me, this is the difference between the fundamental difference between the Bitcoiners and the Ethereum. And when you saw Bitcoin, you have 21 million, but you have to pay the miners. And this causes a problem because it means, well, look, if we have to pay the miners and we can't print more money, the fees have to be enough to do the security. This means that the fees

BFG (23:58.532)
Yeah.

spartacusrex (24:27.409)
have to be stratospheric. They have to be high, really high, because otherwise my security is really low. So I can't have low fees on Bitcoin. I must have very high fees to pay the miners so that they can secure the network. Because if I don't pay them, my security on Bitcoin is dependent on the fees. This could be a problem. This could price out the whole planet, frankly, eventually. That's where this is going. That's how much you're going to have to pay them.

Now, then you've got the Ethereum boys and they're like, we understand this, yeah? And so we think that instead of having a fixed amount of money, we're gonna have a, we're gonna print money. Yeah, we're gonna print money that pays the miners. Okay, cool, that's fine. So you never gonna have to worry about being able to have the security because you're always gonna be paying your miners, but you've now got rid of the totally cool thing that everybody loves, which is the fixed cap. Yeah, Ethereum doesn't have a fixed cap. You know, they've tried to do EIP 1559, which I hate.

most complicated solution to a simple answer. It's fine. So they have this thing where they print money. Yeah. So they can pay their miners, but they lost the 21 million. Well, if you use a cooperative network like minima. So the security of minima is not dependent on fees because the fee we do have a burn because that is what prioritizes your transaction. Yeah. So if you want to, if you want your transfer, a burn can be thought of as a fee that you pay to everybody.

Because when I burn some coins, this means the total amount goes down a little bit. So everybody's is worth a little bit more. So you can think of a burn as a fee that you pay everybody. And we do have that on the network as a way of restricting flow. Yeah. Otherwise you'd have a million transactions on the chain. Yeah. But with a cooperative like ours, we have a fixed cap. Yeah. We have the fixed cap. There's 1 billion minimum coins. You can have any amount we picked a billion because people want to own more than one coin. But I wanted to have 21 million, but it doesn't matter.

BFG (26:11.739)
Mm-hmm.

spartacusrex (26:19.945)
I was overruled. Exactly. But anyway, we've got a fixed amount, but our security is not dependent on fees. The security of Minama is only dependent on the number of users. And so that means we don't have this issue in the future of thinking, are we going to be able to pay for security? And in fact, when you said, is this a fairy tale, what I will admit to you is that you can't get

BFG (26:20.302)
I should have 21 billion.

spartacusrex (26:44.829)
everything for nothing. There's nothing for nothing in this world. And so what is the sacrifice that Minima has had to make to achieve what it has? Minima only works at scale. So Minima will only be a functional secure chain if a lot of people use it. We need a lot of users because our security is based on all the little bits of work that all of our users do. You know, you can't have a hundred people running Minima.

BFG (27:07.534)
Do you have the number? So what's the minimum number so you guys will feel like it's okay?

spartacusrex (27:14.689)
I mean, once you start reaching in the tens to 20 million, I mean, you know, these are, I mean, frankly, compared to TikTok, compared to Snapchat, these are still small numbers. Yeah. But either, as I said earlier at the beginning of the conversation, either this works and everybody uses it because there's only going to be one P. Yeah, that's how this goes, or it's not going to work. So as soon as you, what I'd like, what Minima wants is 1%, 1% of the world, as in 1% of your processing power, 1% of your hard drive. I want 1% of your RAM.

BFG (27:30.254)
Sure.

spartacusrex (27:44.085)
Yeah, one percent of your battery. But if you gave us one percent, we could have the network forever. Undefeatable. No one is going to be able to get that level of, you know, one percent in a mining scenario, isn't that much. Yeah. Because there's going to be really big miners out there who could come together. When you look at the, the distribution of the hash rate or the distribution of the stake on any of the other chains, it's always a problem. It's always these two together could outdo the.

Whereas when you've got 100 million tiny little flecks, they're never gonna be able to come together in consensus to do it. So we get that, yeah? So Minima has that. We don't have that issue, which is really nice, frankly.

BFG (28:18.442)
Hmm, totally.

BFG (28:25.483)
Nice. I know that you guys had the, I think you called it the Sentra Day or something, when you guys turned off your own servers. Do you want to talk about it?

spartacusrex (28:31.281)
Yes, yeah, so this is another thing. Yeah, so this is another thing that you yeah. It's not often. In fact, I can't think of an example where a business for instance, tries to remove itself from an environment. Yeah, because you want to be there you if you're a business, you want to be right in the middle because everything goes through you and you're making money and everyone's you know, you don't want to cut yourself out of the action. That is exactly the problem.

I have to be cut out from the action. You have to get rid of me. We have to get rid of Minima. And so not to get technical again, when you turn one of these block, when you run this software, when you run any of this software, yeah, like you're running Solana, you're running Ethereum, whatever, in the code, it says, okay, you're trying to connect to the network. This is an issue with networks. Yeah, this is a network topology thing. Who do I speak to? How do, where's the party? How do I get to the party? In the software, they say, here's the address.

Here are the addresses of some people at the party. That sounds centralized to me. Yeah, what does that mean? There's 10 addresses in the code. I could DOS them. I could denial of service. I could attack them. I'm the US government. I can do anything. I've got an army. I can do whatever I want. I look at the 10 addresses. I take them down. Yeah, I attack them. I arrest them. I send them all to jail. Now when you turn your software on, it goes, hey, I'm trying to get to the party, but all the people that you told me were there aren't there anymore. So what do you do?

BFG (29:40.458)
Yeah, pretty much.

spartacusrex (29:55.933)
what Minima does, we've removed all of that. So actually, when you turn Minima on the first time, only the first time, yeah, you're standing there and you're like, look, I want to go to the Minima party, where is it? You need to know someone at the party. That's the only way. I need to say to someone, hey, you're at the party, what's the address? And they say, oh, the address is here. Yeah, 123.75. You type it in, then you go to the party, then you meet lots of people at the party, and then you know loads of people. And then that's it. You're there, you're connected to the network, the peer-to-peer network goes.

BFG (30:08.963)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

spartacusrex (30:25.441)
So on decent today, we turned off all of our infra. We don't run any of the network at all. It is just the users running the network. So importantly, if something were to happen, if we were to disappear tomorrow, aliens take us away. The whole of the Minima Global disappears tomorrow. The network is unaffected. That's so cool, yeah? It's like, we're not important. We matter in that we are here to help you when we write code. And when you think of the...

BFG (30:47.231)
Nice, that's so cool.

spartacusrex (30:55.201)
When you, you know, getting excited now, Pete, you're getting me excited. When you think of email, yeah? When you think of your email protocol, yeah? Email was finished, the protocol, 40 years ago. Yeah, they haven't touched email, POP3, IMAP, it's just, it's done. They're still spending $100 million a year writing Outlook. So the client that interfaces with the protocol, that you can constantly upgrade and make cooler, and now the wallet does this, and oh, I've got a little picture of you, and blah, blah. But the protocol itself,

BFG (30:58.575)
I can see.

That's good.

spartacusrex (31:23.893)
It's finished. It doesn't change. That's how minima is now. We have a protocol. It's finished. We're not used in that. And we're writing the client. We're writing the best client. And we update that. And we upgrade that. And hopefully, that'll go on for as long as possible. But should we disappear tomorrow, the network is unaffected. And that makes me happy. That sounds decentralized to me. There you go. Yeah, that's Decentra Day. Yeah, they came up with the name.

BFG (31:28.528)
I see.

BFG (31:42.798)
You know, that's, that sounds definitely decentralized. And I like how you got excited. That's cool.

BFG (31:53.791)
Okay, so typical question is how big is the team? And so what keeps you alive guys? What's the business model because you removed yourself? Sure, you can work with clients, you can work with commercial clients, other stuff.

spartacusrex (32:06.613)
Yep. So originally, unfortunately, there's no other way of doing this. You have to get money from investors. You have to sell them coins. You know, we only had a billion coins and we have no, there's no mechanism on minima to distribute coins to miners because we don't have any mining. So we had the coins at the beginning. We had to go to, you know, people and say, look, we'll give you the coins cheap. If you give us some money so that we can write the client and blah, blah. But actually what was quite interesting is that when we first launched minima, you know, we want to give you,

You want to distribute these coins to as many people as possible. You want as many people on the network as possible. So when we started the network, we had a test net phase where if you ran the software, we gave you one minima a day. And actually we managed to get like, you know, 250,000 people on that. Yeah. A quarter of a million people were running it and they've all got hundreds, you know, maybe a thousand, you know, a thousand minima each. Woohoo. Exactly. And so we try to give away 51% of the coins to the community.

BFG (32:57.216)
Definitely those I met in Barcelona.

spartacusrex (33:04.445)
Yeah, we wanted to give away as many coins as we could for running the software, for helping us debug it, blah, blah. So we have money that we got from the beginning. We have a few coins left that we can still sell, you know, that we're doing it, but the distribution is good. Yeah. We don't, we are, we, you know, we use the coins we have to try and make, you know, whatever we can make. And so that's how we keep ourselves going. But as you say, it's not going to last forever, sir. No.

You want to run a business. Yeah, you want to actually, you know, the point about this stuff is that you can buy and sell stuff. And so eventually what you want to do is you want to actually run, you know, profitable business, you know, that accepts minima. Cool. You know, that, and we're the best and, you know, we're in discussions with telcos, telecommunications and vehicle things, whatever. And they like minima because, you know, they don't have to spend any money on the infrastructure because the phone network is the infrastructure.

and they have to hire us because we're the best at writing this code and they pay us to write their code and all of the value trickles down to minimum of the base asset. So I guess we're a tech house now that works with large businesses who pay us to write them software and etc.

BFG (34:14.006)
It's actually very nice because I have to say that I was surprised by the car announcement that you guys work on cars. Because the first announcement I expected was from Telcos. This is obvious, right? You are using their networks, you run on the phones.

spartacusrex (34:21.91)
Huh.

spartacusrex (34:30.761)
Pete, let me tell you, those telcos, they are so slow. And they're just like, they have systems and they don't want to touch anything. And you're telling them, look, we can give you a system but you're gonna have to think outside of the box. And they're like, I don't like thinking outside of the box. I just want my normal, too slow, too, I agree. You know, telcos.

BFG (34:47.418)
Yeah, well, you know, if the car company can be faster than a telco, that's a disaster, I think.

spartacusrex (34:53.721)
Yeah, they're all, I mean, I have to say they're all going out of business. Yeah, they're not going to be able to keep up with it. This is what this it's interesting because at the moment we're seeing that play out in real time with the Bitcoin ETFs. Yeah. As the TradFi world tries to integrate with crypto and where crypto, yeah. We're like, look, where's the smart contract, which is BlackRock ETF. And I'm just sending the tokens to the grayscale ETF. And it's like, that's not how it works in TradFi. Yeah. I have to do a request to Coinbase that does a short and sells.

BFG (34:57.954)
You

BFG (35:04.594)
Mm-hmm.

BFG (35:14.85)
Hmm.

spartacusrex (35:20.673)
They buy a futures to hedge and then four hours later, I'm like, what? So when do I find out how much they bought? And it's like, three or four days later, I'm like, three or four days, Luna went down in two hours. Come on, man. We operate a hundred times faster than these businesses. They're all going down. Anybody who doesn't get on this train is being left behind. Yeah, and we're seeing that. It's like, you guys are so slow. You know, we're so, we don't even realize how fast we're moving in this space. Yeah.

BFG (35:48.051)
Ok, look, I've already taken a pretty big chunk of your time, but I definitely have one more question. So obviously, what's up for Minima in 2024-2025? What should people look out for?

spartacusrex (36:03.425)
So I mean, I guess the truth is that Minima, I mean, I'm excited about Minima. I love using Minima. It's the chain that I want. Yeah, I hate to say this, but whether you all like it, that's fine. But frankly, this is the one I want. This is my baby. This is I love it. Yeah, this is the one I want. I wish Bitcoin was like this. I wish this is how it was, and that's why I love it. But in the next couple of years, we need to break through. We need to break through to the other side. We need to.

BFG (36:06.346)
What are you excited about? It doesn't have to be a big announcement.

BFG (36:18.974)
You love it.

spartacusrex (36:32.481)
you know, get our message out there. You know, if you ask one person in a million, whether they know about Minima, yeah, one person in a million knows about Minima. We need that to become 10, 100. You know, we need to have the Twitter space. We need the Twitter-arty. We need crypto Twitter to start realizing, you know, that we're different. We're not like the other chains, like none of them. Every single other chain operates in this competitive, minor user basis, and Minima is the only one. And frankly, that's enough. That's a lot. That's not nothing.

just the fact that we're so different to the way the other chains work. Yeah, we're a blockchain, you can do this. Can you do all the other stuff, NFTs and all that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do all of that. But unless you break through, unless we become recognized by the wider community, it's not gonna happen. And so that's what we've got to try to do now. And actually I will say, it's taken a year to get to where we are now and we weren't ready a year ago. Yeah, the bugs, the this, the breaks, he's done that, something's happened, blah, blah. We're stable now.

BFG (37:11.094)
Yeah.

spartacusrex (37:30.989)
We've got a good network, the software works. You know, we've got lots of, you can run on your computer, you can run on your phone, you can run it. We've got a nice like, for instance, you know what we were mentioning earlier about, you know, other chains not doing useful stuff. I totally disagree with that. And so for instance, what has been a great success of the crypto world? Now, whether or not you like Ethereum, MetaMask, huge success, gotta say brilliant. And the reason it was so brilliant is because it suddenly allowed web developers

BFG (37:52.203)
I like.

spartacusrex (38:00.105)
Millions and hundreds of millions of web developers. Yeah. And now they can write software in a sort of HTML way and integrate with blockchain. And it's like, okay, so we're going to open up this space to all of these developers and objectively, huge success, massive amounts of development, lots of people writing these apps just because of Minima. Just because they did a plugin in the browser so that I can now write a website that sends and receives NFTs or Ethereum. Beautiful, really, really like it. So what do we do at Minima?

So we have this thing called MiniDapps. Now, when I say to someone, they say to me, hey, have you used this new decentralized application? I'm like, cool, send it to me. And they're like, no, you have to go to www.uniswap.com. And I'm like, well, it doesn't sound very decentralized to me. What if they take the website down? So actually the way Minima does it is that every single phone, every single instance of Minima runs a little web server and runs a little version of Minima mask. Yeah, we run our own version.

BFG (38:55.868)
Okay.

spartacusrex (38:57.353)
and you can then write applications as websites. Yeah, we call them mini dApps. You zip them up and I send it to you and then you can use it. And it's the same as Metamask. You get a nice big, you know, it looks, it's a webpage, just like a normal webpage and all the things, but you can do stuff on minima. And this is the important bit. Unlike Metamask, which is totally centralized because all of your transactions go through Infora, you know, if they turned off Infora tomorrow, 99.9% of people will be totally screwed. There's nothing you can do about it.

BFG (39:22.018)
Okay.

BFG (39:26.187)
me included.

spartacusrex (39:26.853)
They say, oh, you just have to run your own eth node. And it's like, I can't even run my own eth node. And I'm a tech genius. You know what I mean? It's like, forget about it. That's it. You've lost everybody. Totally centralized. Whereas on Minima, your Minidap talks to your server because everybody runs everything. Everybody processes every transaction. Everybody's involved with the construction of the chain. And so a Minidap runs through you. You're the only thing. And so when two people are using a Minidap, that's it. They're off.

Nobody can get in touch, nobody can interfere with that. I can't switch it off. I can't turn it off. I like that. Yeah. It's like you're free. So that's a great success, Metamask. And we copied that and we do mini dApps, which are the same sort of thing. Web applications that interface with your node. Beautiful. Love it.

BFG (39:59.086)
I'm sorry.

BFG (40:10.54)
So I assume anyone can write mini-dabs, right?

spartacusrex (40:12.893)
Yes! Yeah, anybody? Distribute them, send them, do whatever they want with them.

BFG (40:18.958)
be interesting. The initial distribution is like, oh yeah, here are my 10 friends. Let's see how it works.

spartacusrex (40:25.033)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And once you've got a mini-dap, I can't take it off you. I can't turn it off. I was a big ether delta man back in the day. Do you remember ether delta? You say I'm a bit techie, actually, P? Yeah, right. But that was where we all started swapping ERC 20s. And we loved it, yeah. And then they changed it. They sold the website to some Chinese people, ba-ba-ba, and they ruined it. They broke it. And it was like, oh my God, you totally ruined the site. So I thought to myself, all right, this is decentralized. I can do this. I understand this stuff. I'll set up my own version.

BFG (40:34.866)
Yeah, a little bit, but yeah.

spartacusrex (40:53.825)
Total nightmare. Couldn't do it. You know, this, that, if I can't do it, no one can do it, no offense. Yeah, I couldn't do it. And I never want that to happen again. So if you're running a mini-dap, I'd never want, you know, when they change, when Uniswap said, right, we're not allowing transactions to Iran, you know, whether that's apolitical, I'm apolitical. Yeah, blockchain must be agnostic to all of that stuff. Freedom, you know, is a two-way street, sir. Yeah.

BFG (41:13.944)
Yeah.

spartacusrex (41:19.541)
And when they start changing that stuff, you're like, well, look, I'm, you know, and they say on Twitter, we'll just run your own version. It's like, no way. It's no way you're going to be able to do that. So, you know, you need to have your own copy of it and nobody can ever interfere with us. That's freedom.

BFG (41:29.146)
Yeah, I like that.

BFG (41:35.062)
Right. That sounds super cool. So, you know, I got all I hoped for today because, you know, it was not only exciting conversation, but a lot of information, which I believe will put a lot of things people hear daily on Twitter spaces into a different perspective. And hopefully we'll make some of them think about, you know, what decentralization really means or what, what do they want? If somebody says, Oh, we are.

spartacusrex (41:39.969)
Right.

spartacusrex (42:02.689)
Why do we need it? Yeah.

BFG (42:04.458)
Why do we need it? And when somebody says we are decentralized, what questions you can ask? It's like, is it really true? And obviously, I hope there is gonna be a number of people tempted to go and try Minima and maybe even do some dApps, which we could.

spartacusrex (42:21.877)
Thanks so much. It's minima.global. Yeah, if you want to go to the website minima.global. Nobody uses.com anymore. Yeah, that's dead. It's minima.global now.

BFG (42:26.506)
Minimatter. No, that's not. Yeah, and I'll put, of course, all the links to show notes. So if there are any other links you want me to share, no problem. I will.

spartacusrex (42:39.486)
Okay, cool. That's the one. Go there.

BFG (42:42.094)
All right. Well, thank you very much, Pelle. It was awesome to have you. And I'm looking forward to what's coming up with Minima in 2024.

spartacusrex (42:52.949)
Thank you so much, Pete. It was a real pleasure. Thanks so much.

BFG (42:56.099)
Thank you.