MoneroTalk Podcast - Keeping Bitcoin's Cypherpunk Dream Alive

An in-depth conversation with Doug from MoneroTalk about my Forbes article “Monero: Keeping Bitcoin’s Cypherpunk Dream Alive” and the real-world applications of privacy-focused cryptocurrencies. Topics include crypto adoption in Cuba, the resilience of Monero through delistings, and the future of digital cash.

Video

Full Interview Transcript

Host (Doug): What’s going on man, how do you pronounce the name? Just Boaz?

Boaz: Boaz, yeah. It’s a name of biblical origin - Boaz is in the Bible and he’s mostly famous for being Ruth’s husband.

Host: Where are you from? What’s your background if you don’t mind me asking?

Boaz: I was born in Budapest, Hungary. I’ve lived in quite a few places around the world and I’m currently based in London.

Host: You’re a man of the globe, well traveled. That gives you good perspective, right?

Boaz: Yeah, and I think part of what gives me a particularly good perspective on issues around crypto and real-world crypto is that I’ve spent a good amount of time in places like Cuba and places like Burma where it’s a little bit beyond the theory and it’s part of the practice. Crypto tries to solve a very practical problem for many people in these countries, and I’ve been there, seen it firsthand.

Host: Obviously I brought you on today because you’re the guy who wrote the Monero article in Forbes. A lot of people in Monero are like “all right, finally we’re getting some well-written articles that are getting to the meat of it.” The title is “Monero: Keeping Bitcoin’s Cypherpunk Dream Alive.” I think that’s the question - if it is, that’s where its value comes from, that’s what’s giving it its utility. Why don’t you tell us more about your background and how you got into crypto?

Boaz’s Crypto Origin Story

Boaz: I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2013. I very distinctly remember being sat in my kitchen talking to a friend and I was convinced that we had missed the whole Bitcoin boat and it was too late to get involved because everyone knew of it by then. I’m happy to admit that I was at some point a customer of Silk Road and was transacting on it - spent more Bitcoin on it than I wish I did, but that’s what you do when you’re in university.

I more or less forgot about it for a good few years until early 2017-2016 when it started hitting the headlines again. I was in an interesting situation because I was trying to set up a business in Cuba. Back then, Obama had gone to Cuba, there was all this talk about Cuba reopening to the world, and American companies like Stripe and Airbnb all went to Cuba. I was in my early 20s and said if they’re going to find business opportunities there, I’m going to try to do the same.

I went to Cuba and tried to set up this online e-commerce business - very simple, sell stuff online to people that were going to visit there. I very quickly discovered that it’s not that easy to send money to a place like Cuba. Every single financial transaction in terms of sending money, receiving money, doing any sort of business online, even though it was totally legal and in accordance to US policy at the time, was very hard because of compliance costs. Banks’ compliance departments said yes to Stripe, yes to Airbnb, but I heard no all the time.

Then I discovered that crypto, which had served me very well in my university days on Silk Road, was also useful for the day-to-day operation of my business. I was basically buying and selling crypto to pay my suppliers there - taxi drivers, people that had hotel rooms. I was doing business with Airbnb, with Booking.com, these very established American companies and getting paid in Europe, and then I would pay suppliers in Cuba using cash, with crypto as the bridge, mostly Bitcoin at the time.

Host: You were buying Bitcoin in Europe, selling it for cash in Cuba and giving it to suppliers in cash?

Boaz: Exactly. There was nothing there - no established infrastructure. You meet people in WhatsApp groups and chat with people. Local Bitcoin wasn’t even available. I was one of the first ones there - pretty sure for a while I was one of the biggest people selling Bitcoin in Cuba.

The story got really crazy when John McAfee showed up because then he had a lot of crypto to sell and I helped him a few times because he had to pay for his massive yacht in the Hemingway Marina.

Host: That’s awesome, man.

Boaz: The whole vision of Cuba opening up to American tourism didn’t really materialize. Trump got elected, Cuba started getting shut down, I got deplatformed from Stripe. It was a super complicated situation. I ended up doing payment processing with some Argentinian company that later turned out to be money launderers and got sanctioned themselves. The whole thing was a mess.

The company was growing slowly - I was making money but basically like a lifestyle business that afforded me enough money to spend time in Havana and have fun and drink rum, but it wasn’t really where I wanted it to go. At some point I ended up getting a job in London, and then the business kept growing until it all went to zero during COVID.

During COVID, I no longer had to spend time on the business because it went to zero, so I started writing about the experience I had in Cuba and how that all worked out, and about what I’d seen in terms of the actual philosophy of crypto and how it worked in practice. That’s what basically kickstarted my career as a writer and crypto commentator, which remains a side gig for me - I’m fully employed in fintech otherwise.

Writing Career and Monero Coverage

Host: Where else are you writing articles, where are they getting published?

Boaz: I’m a Forbes contributor - I’m not an actual Forbes employee, it’s just a contributor contract. In addition to that, I’ve written for Decrypt, for CoinDesk back in the day, I’ve had stuff appear in Wired, given comments to Fortune, CNBC - all sorts of publications that are broadly interested in crypto and fintech.

Host: I think this is probably one of the best Monero articles in Forbes thus far. I don’t think there’s really been any big writeups with regards to Monero in Forbes, right?

Boaz: I think probably not. I think Monero is flying under the radar for many people for many reasons. Crypto is an industry where people love two things: they love shiny new objects and they love get-rich-quick. They love gambling, and crypto has made gambling so accessible to everyone.

Monero is, as of right now, neither of those. It’s not a shiny new object - it’s been around for a while. And it’s also not necessarily one of these get-rich-quick coins that you’re guaranteed a 100x pump tomorrow. It’s very much a mission-driven, utility-driven protocol which, despite being around for a long time, seems to keep chugging along.

I don’t log on to dark net markets as often as I once did, but every time I do, I see Monero is everywhere. I actually wrote an article for CoinDesk a few years ago that got me a lot of hate on Twitter saying DeFi - this was in 2020 when the whole DeFi bubble was popping up - I said DeFi needs a Silk Road moment. When is DeFi actually going to be serving people that need censorship-resistant technology like the sort of people that were on Silk Road? Well, that never happened, but Monero is there and Monero is increasingly exclusively there. It’s one of the main players in dark net markets, and I think that tells us a lot about where things are going.

Host: It feels like Monero has been crowned the king of digital cash. Whether it holds onto that title is to be seen, but right now I feel like Monero is the most used for digital cash purposes. Given how these things tend to work - network effects, first-mover advantage - I would say it’s likely that Monero will continue to grow in usage for those purposes. Is that your overall thesis as well?

Boaz: To be honest with you, one of the biggest things that surprised me is that Monero is not dead. Monero had this huge wave of delistings last year where it basically got delisted from everywhere, and it didn’t die. It was resilient - it would always come back to its $150 number. No matter how hard it got delisted, that basically tells you something. When you make it really hard for people to buy a crypto asset and nevertheless the price goes up, that tells you there’s a lot of underlying latent demand for it.

My intuition is that this demand is more utility-driven than speculative-driven because it is very widely used across a vast variety of platforms for digital cash purposes. The resilience of Monero did stand out to me, and the fact that a pretty comprehensive attempt at state censorship didn’t really seem to impact it much. I think regulators have probably taken notice and thought to themselves, if we couldn’t make one of the smaller ones go away and die, we’re going to look like complete idiots if we try to do the same to one of the bigger ones.

The Four Pillars of Crypto

Host: People in the Monero community were almost rooting for the delistings at some point because we started to see it work and realized it can’t be killed and it only gets stronger. I think now is a good time to strike with Trump being in office and the executive order he recently passed with regards to crypto, where he very clearly describes Monero as a tool that he thinks United States citizens and businesses should have access to.

Boaz: I think the tides are definitely turning with regards to regulation. I wrote an article saying that crypto has basically four fundamental pillars: one is the casino - the get-rich-quick, gamble, make money quickly aspect. The casino has been firmly unleashed now. The SEC under the Biden administration was trying to keep the lid on it, but now under the Trump administration, the casino is ready to pop. He launched Trump coin before he even stepped into office, saying people can now launch their own coins without approval.

The reason why crypto doesn’t die every time there’s a bear market is because there are three other pillars that are fundamental: the movement, the product, and the tech. There’s a lot to say about the movement, particularly for Monero, because a lot of Monero enthusiasts were actually rooting for the delisting. If you’re rooting for the delisting, that means your primary goal is not the number going up, but rather you have a very strong ideological point to make. You believe in peer-to-peer digital cash and censorship-resistant technology, and you want the state to fight you. It’s a very subversive way of thinking about it.

This movement, which began with Satoshi, has been one of the most successful new political movements of the 21st century. Crypto has in many ways won the battle. What I hadn’t foreseen 10 years ago is that a lot of winning actually looks like Bitcoin becoming a fully established financial asset. Now Bitcoin is trading on Wall Street, there’s a Bitcoin ETF, and Bitcoin ETFs and MicroStrategy and Coinbase hold a huge chunk of the outstanding Bitcoin. This isn’t quite the future that everyone had in mind 10 years ago in Bitcoin, but it’s nevertheless a big success. Some of that original anti-government spark has been lost, but I argue it’s found in other communities, and I think one of the communities it’s found strongest in is Monero.

Article Genesis and Bitcoin vs Monero

Host: What was the impetus for this article? Did you see the writing on the wall, or were you asked to write this?

Boaz: I was a Monero user and holder many years ago, and I decided to check up and see what had happened. I looked at a chart and said, “Oh wow, it’s really recovered after the delistings.” I started looking at some stats around peer-to-peer usage and dark net markets.

If you look at Chainalysis’s report every year on crypto crime and dark net market crypto usage, you have these very prominent omissions - they’ll mention Bitcoin, stablecoins, but you don’t see Monero in Chainalysis reports. Then you actually log on to whatever the Silk Road is called these days, and many of these places are Monero-exclusive. You start wondering about the methodology and how accurate Chainalysis is with regards to this.

One thing that surprised me this last year is how quickly Bitcoin got close to the state and to being state ideology in the US. It happened very fast - it was unthinkable a year ago. So I decided to write about how in my head it’s not necessarily Bitcoin versus Monero - I see it as a branching tree, the same kind of movement but heading in very different directions.

Host: What is the thesis of your article?

Boaz: The main point is that Bitcoin has transformed from being this subversive instrument 10 years ago to a very mainstream financial asset. This has started some soul-searching in some parts of the Bitcoin community. I argue that in many ways, Monero represents a lot of what Bitcoin did back then.

I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing - I don’t see Bitcoin’s evolution and transparency as flawed. I see it more as digital property than digital cash now. Bitcoin has become very much digital gold, a very traceable, ETF-friendly asset that Wall Street is happy to trade, whereas Monero went the opposite direction. Monero got delisted everywhere, and it recovered nevertheless.

This shows two things: one, the censorship resistance property of cryptocurrencies like Monero is actually a very real thing, not just theoretical. Two, it shows there is very much demand for this sort of digital cash, anonymous currency type of product, beyond the Wall Street casino get-rich-quick speculative digital gold narrative. People are actually using it.

Real-World Crypto Impact

Boaz: I’m half Costa Rican, and I spent a lot of time in Costa Rica. The Costa Rican government got hit by a ransomware attack where they were demanding some sort of cryptocurrency, and the government actually shut down for a good chunk of time. Think about it - 10 years ago, if I had told you that a sovereign state would be held at ransom for crypto, you’d laugh at me. We’re very much living in a very cyberpunk world from that respect. Crypto has flattened the power playing field with regards to financial instruments.

The very real demand exists precisely because it is useful to circumvent all sorts of rules about what you can do with your money. Obviously, if you’re an evil hacker trying to run ransomware, that’s one use case, but if you’re someone in Cuba like me trying to pay a supplier without having to pay 5% credit card withdrawal fees from an ATM, or if you’re someone in Nigeria that wants to pay for their son’s tuition, then it’s very useful for that.

Media Coverage and Adoption

Host: Do you see that message going out further? We saw a bunch of articles that came out in Mexico after we did Monetopia, and we ended up doing a good job with media coverage. Do you see this growing - it being adopted for these purposes and talked about on a larger level?

Boaz: There’s always this feeling that somehow they were dampening this meme from spreading - nobody wants to say the M word. I think there is definitely a reason why it’s hard to talk about Monero.

For the movement side of crypto - the people that are ideologically driven, the people that have an understanding of what crypto as a product does, who have the ability to evaluate crypto as a technology - I think Monero is very interesting. It’s not very interesting from a casino perspective because everyone wants meme coins and Trump coins.

I think there is a lot of potential for Monero to become more widely discussed amongst the crypto-native, crypto-savvy people because of the very real-world incident with regards to the censorship resistance that Monero experienced. What matters more is that crypto-aware and crypto-savvy people comprehend that Monero has managed to be a successful project despite all the setbacks, and only then will it pervade the wider groups of people that got attracted to Coinbase to buy Trump coin.

It’s pretty incredible that people can more easily access Trump coin within a day of it launching than they’re able to access Monero, which has been around since 2014. You still can’t get it on Coinbase, but you could go onto Coinbase the day that Trump coin launched and ape into it with a million dollars.

The Privacy Paradox

Boaz: Part of the reason why it’s very hard to talk about Monero is that people that talk about crypto, people that attend crypto conferences, are generally not people that need to use crypto. Monero’s user base is almost unique in the fact that it is people that need privacy. If you’re the user for a privacy coin, the last thing you’re going to do is stand on the rooftop and start shouting about how you use a privacy coin and it satisfies all your needs.

It has this counter-intuitive property: if it works well, then people shut up about it and don’t talk about it. That’s why you don’t get as many loud celebrity advocates.

We saw what happened with the Ledger founder just a few weeks ago where he got kidnapped and got a few fingers chopped off. The incentive to be loud about your crypto holdings is increasingly low.

There’s another added element - I know that internally at Kraken, when Monero was delisted, Jesse Powell, the founder, was not very happy when this happened. He’s very much a movement and ideology-driven person. Nevertheless, there is strong regulatory pressure to delist privacy coins. If you own a crypto exchange, most of your revenue basically comes from gambling, and then there’s a small amount of revenue that comes from a coin that’s going to give you potentially most of your compliance headache. Are you really going to talk about it even if you list it? Probably not.

At the end of the day, the exchanges have no incentive to talk about Monero, the users have definitely no incentive to talk about it. That leaves very strange weirdos like you and me.

Regulatory Outlook and Bank Secrecy Act

Host: My approach from day one has always been that Monero aligns with the founding principles of this country. I ran for Congress in 2020 as a pro-Monero candidate - Free Speech money. I’m out there talking about it as a tool that should be considered perfectly legal to use. We have the right to privacy, we should have the right to transact peer-to-peer, we should have the right to access and use Free Speech protocols.

Boaz: I agree 100%. I think the moment might be coming where this is actually going to be part of the conversation. First of all, there’s the whole freedom and liberty and philosophical questions of cash and digital cash and the freedom to transact, which very strongly aligns with American ideals.

But secondly, just from a government efficiency point of view, you’ve got the Bank Secrecy Act and this whole barrage of AML/BSA regulations which aim to stop crime on paper but in practice do very little but cause banks to spend billions of dollars on compliance departments and cost the government a tremendous amount of money.

There’s this $10,000 reporting limit which was basically instituted in 1970. $10,000 in 1970 money is closer to $100,000 today. If there is this true desire in the Trump administration to get rid of useless regulation that causes a lot of damage and is insanely expensive, I think looking at financial regulation is a very good place to start.

Host: That would be the most based thing that Trump could possibly do - move forward with somehow eliminating the Bank Secrecy Act. It’s very much a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and how they’ve gotten away with it this long, I don’t know.

Boaz: It’s also increasingly not in the US government’s state interests. You’ve got a growing amount of US dollar debt, and someone needs to hold this US dollar debt. China is not buying it anymore. Maybe stablecoins are a very powerful answer to it - maybe you can replace the entire multi-trillion dollar eurodollar market with stablecoins. That way you get a bunch of foreigners holding US debt for free, you get to inflate your debt away on the entire world, you retain dollar hegemony, and the only thing stopping you is some antiquated regulation from the 1970s whereby you have to KYC someone in Nigeria using a stablecoin to spend $5 on a meal. It’s not worth it for the government either.

Monero’s Technical Future

Host: Do you think we see a Michael Saylor of Monero at some point - somebody with some clout?

Boaz: I think Monero doesn’t necessarily lend itself as well to that. I think all the Monero enthusiasts are very much anti-strong leadership - that’s the sort of vibe that I get.

It would be hilarious to see Peter Schiff start to mention it. He mentioned it the other day in a space. His basic argument is that if there’s any utility that crypto offers, it’s the ability for you to send money privately like cash over the internet, and he’s like Bitcoin doesn’t even do that well. So now he’s saying you might as well use Monero for that, which is interesting. If he were to get into crypto, this could be his avenue because he’s never going to say he’s now okay with Bitcoin - he’s fully invested in his “crypto is useless, Bitcoin is useless” stance. But digital cash might be interesting to him.

I think Peter Schiff got radicalized a little bit by the fact that his bank in Puerto Rico was shut down. There’s this whole story around international banks in Puerto Rico being filtered out by the New York Fed. That was his debanking moment, but he’s not going to swallow his pride and talk about Bitcoin now because his whole brand is being against Bitcoin. But Monero might be an alternative.

Platforms and Exchanges

Host: Let me ask about current platforms. What are people using these days to swap in and out from Monero to cash or other cryptocurrencies?

Boaz: Right now, Haveno is the big one that’s new. Local Monero was very popular and they shut down - nobody really knows why. From a regulatory perspective, it’s very hard to run these businesses.

Host: I’m currently the guy behind XMR Bazaar. What we’ve done is we don’t take any fees, we don’t profit off any of the transactions that are taking place on the platform. I think that’s a very good, safe way to run these things. People can post like “looking to sell Monero for cash” as long as it’s legal in their jurisdiction. Even Local Monero - there was nothing illegal about it. Where they really ran into problems was people using it for purposes of running a business.

Boaz: I’ve lost so many bank accounts doing peer-to-peer trading because the banks absolutely hate it when you do it, even when I didn’t do it as a business - I was just trying to test out different platforms.

[Host shows XMR Bazaar listing for Ward’s Ace and Country Store in Idaho]

Host: This guy just posted today - it’s a general store that is now accepting Monero in Idaho. They sell guns, ammunition, hardware, clothing, greenhouse plants, paint - basically like a hardware store. To me, that’s super exciting because this is where we start to see the circular economy really work. If I could buy my eggs with Monero, my raw milk with Monero, my guns with Monero, my ammunition with Monero, it really starts to have value and become a currency that people can live off peer-to-peer when they can buy essential items with it.

Boaz: That’s very interesting. I’m quite interested in these marketplaces and there appears to be real volume going through XMR Bazaar.

Host: It’s completely peer-to-peer Monero-based, no fees are taken, no fees to list. It’s basically like a Craigslist but Monero-based. All the transactions go straight from buyer to seller. We have Monero escrow built into it for larger payments if you don’t trust the vendor. It’s a trustless escrow - XMR Bazaar never holds any of the Monero. It uses mediators and multisig, so it’s completely peer-to-peer in that respect.

The big things being used right now for exchange: Haveno recently launched and it’s gaining traction. It’s a Monero-based Bisq, uses the same tech, same concepts, same type escrow system with mediators. We’re waiting for what should be a grand solution - Serai DEX will be launching soon, and that’s like Thorchain.

Serai DEX and Luke Parker

Host: Luke Parker is the phenom of Monero. He’s a young, very talented, gifted developer. He’s building Serai DEX, which is basically like Thorchain, probably better architected than Thorchain given Luke’s abilities, and it’s going to be Monero-based.

In addition to that, he’s also the person who made the breakthrough in figuring out how to add full chain membership proofs to Monero. The one argument thrown at Monero from a technical level is that there’s a weakness in Monero’s ring signatures that could potentially be exploited with enough resources if you’re a state actor working with exchanges trying to surveil somebody. You could probabilistically figure out who the true sender/signer of a transaction is. This attack vector goes away with the implementation of full chain membership proofs, which is similar to what Zcash uses. That’s been developed by Luke Parker and should be implemented within the next year.

Boaz: I think it’s very interesting. I know Chainalysis has been whispering behind closed doors for many years that they claim to crack Monero. I’m not sure to what extent I believe this - I’m sometimes skeptical of the methodology of the papers they release. Nevertheless, whatever work can be done in the privacy space is always welcome.

With Serai DEX, I think it would be very interesting if it manages to get good product-market fit because there is huge demand for this type of product - the sort that Thorchain was, that ShapeShift was back in 2017, where you just send some crypto and get back other crypto without having to mess around with uploading a picture of your driver’s license anywhere. There’s huge demand for that, and people like the convenience of it.

Price Predictions and Market Outlook

Host: Give me your thoughts on big picture where you see Monero potentially headed - your predictions of where you see it, what role you see it playing in the crypto sphere, balanced against Bitcoin, and potentially what it could become.

Boaz: I’m not some sort of infallible clairvoyant, but I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen a few things happen, and these sorts of things happen again and again. Generally, when it becomes incredibly hard to buy something and nevertheless the price keeps grinding up, that’s generally a very positive sign because it means there’s a lot of latent demand. If you reduce friction to actually being able to buy it, that can be a potentially huge catalyst on the price.

In terms of Monero, what this would look like is some sort of comprehensive legislation that makes it easier for people to just buy Monero on Coinbase, on Kraken, on exchanges that are not offshore, hard-to-reach exchanges. Overall, I think that’s a pretty positive potential trigger for Monero.

This price action we’re seeing where it’s slowly grinding up and you can basically not buy it anywhere means to me that there is possibly a lot of latent demand if it were to be easily available somewhere else.

Host: A crazy thing to realize is there’s never been a time where you were able to buy Monero on a central exchange in New York state. In the early days of Bitcoin, a lot of the money that went into Bitcoin was coming out of New York. There was never an opportunity for New Yorkers in 2014, 15, 16 when Litecoin was getting added to Coinbase. New Yorkers have been completely cut off from buying Monero on centralized exchanges because of the BitLicense.

That’s something I’m working on - eliminating the BitLicense in New York. I think now is the time we could maybe make that happen, and just getting regulatory clarity given Trump’s executive order and essentially getting Monero listed on Coinbase and other centralized exchanges.

My feeling is that I want to give as many people as possible access to Monero so that we can build up the network effect and strengthen Monero by having more people access it. Once they access it, they pull it off the exchange. My thinking is there is no better crypto to buy on a centralized exchange if you’re going to use one. For normies, if you have to buy any crypto on a centralized exchange, the best one to buy would be Monero. You pull it off that exchange just like taking cash out of a bank, and then you could even go do your other crypto stuff - go trade it for meme coins and whatnot, but do all that off the grid after pulling Monero off. It’s like taking cash out of a bank - now you’re in a black hole, you’re in crypto wonderland, you’ve brought money in there in the most anonymous and private way possible.

Privacy as Security

Boaz: The Ledger co-founder kidnapping where the poor guy’s fingers got chopped off very much reminds people that privacy is important - privacy is security. With all of these transparent blockchains becoming ever more popular, there’s an increasingly large target on people’s backs.

Here in London where I’m based, there’s a lot of phone snatchings - people on electric bikes go past you, snatch your phone, and the first thing they check for are crypto apps. People are going to slowly learn that it’s probably quite prudent to have some level of privacy and not keep all of your assets on an open ledger.

Crypto Startups and the Casino Problem

Host: Did you ever consider working on any crypto-related startups yourself?

Boaz: I did consider it. I think the difficult part of working on crypto is that the casino part of crypto is so shiny and noisy that it crowds out a lot of the other legitimate use cases. That’s a very tough situation to be in because you’re basically competing for attention, competing for talent, and competing for money with get-rich-quick, which is a very tough competition to be in.

But it’s always been in the back of my mind because ultimately it’s a very fast-growth industry. Companies like Binance have effectively become international global neo-banks that give financial services to millions of people around the world. The only difference is that Binance also has a casino attached to it. If you’re happy to make that compromise, then that’s a compromise you have to make.

Conclusion

Host: Any other info you want to get out there - things you’re working on, projects, places to find you?

Boaz: You can find me on Twitter - @bsobrado. Thank you very much for having me. I’m looking forward to finding out more about how things keep going. I think the Monero community has some good days ahead of itself, and I’m very curious to find out more about these peer-to-peer Serai DEX exchanges because I think this is one of the biggest use cases and biggest sources of demand that Monero has. If it can satisfy that need, then the crypto world will be so much richer.

Host: Thank you so much for writing the article. I thought you did a great job. It’s nice to see people starting to get the word out on Monero beyond just our inner circle here. Really appreciate talking to you, man.

Boaz: It’s been great chatting with you. Thank you very much for the invite.