Jay Addison Technical and Media Advisor for CryptoBiz Magazine interviews Nathan Lands, CEO & Co-Founder of QuickCoin. Nathan Lands is a technology and gaming entrepreneur, having coined the term “Gamify”, created and sold Gamification.org to Badgeville, as well as building several other technology companies such as GameStreamer which raised over $10 million and competed with Gaikai and OnLive. Nathan now believes that the most impactful technology of the next 10 years is Bitcoin, and is focused on building beautiful software to take bitcoin to the mainstream.
Transcript
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this is jay edison live from inside bitcoins in las vegas with nathan lands the ceo and co-founder of quickcoin nathan how you doing today doing well i just got off the panel the new ideas with bitcoin and it's a pretty good talk pretty constructive talking about some of the new ways that people could be using bitcoin that's exciting uh what brought you to the decision to focus on a facebook centric wallet uh well for us facebook was just a step one you know i i'm of the opinion and it's a somewhat contrarian opinion in the community that um bitcoin isn't all about being anonymous that's just you know if you if you want to be anonymous you can do that and in general you don't even need software to do that right bitcoin does that by default well you could just someone give someone cash and be anonymous exactly exactly and so i didn't really understand that that point of view and so when we started the company it's a step one i mean because we're definitely looking five years out and what we want to build because this is all very long term it's all um you know it's like the wild west it's really early um and so we wanted to you know test the hypothesis and my hypothesis was that you know bitcoin uh there's actually some value in it being social and uh and showing people bitcoin making it easier for people to get started and so uh there's been a somewhat of a misconception that we are a facebook bitcoin wallet which i kind of allow people to think that's all we're doing uh but for us that was it's a first experiment we uh we launched it about three months ago um i had you know a lot of uh you know support from the community which we were we were told originally that we wouldn't get that the people were going to hate it um by many many people in in the community at a pretty high level um and then when we launched it we had over 150 000 was sent the first 10 days uh using the facebook api that's fantastic um yeah and for us it was it was a great sign to like okay move forward with like the five-year plan yeah you've been um and so that's you know we're not just a facebook wallet for us that's just a very small first experiment that gives us the confidence to continue to move forward with our bigger vision well what what other platforms do you plan on uh spreading out to well the way we're using facebook and we're definitely gonna have twitter and our also our own login system so the way we use facebook is not how i don't have any good examples but there's some companies have used facebook login as a way to actually have their that's the identity on that service is facebook yes we use it more like how instagram or quora uses it where you don't you still have an identity on that service you have an identity on quora you have an identity on instagram facebook and twitter is just a simpler way to log in as well as you can leverage those contacts right on there to make it a better user experience for people so we're not you know it's not your your data is not on facebook or something they you know if if even even if facebook shut us down which they made one statement that was like not a 100 thing but it was like we're probably not going to do anything because it's not a facebook app you know they're using the api um but it appears that even if they did shut us down users would not lose their money there's nothing like that right right it's secure yeah in the western world people have very little direct need for bitcoin in their lives do you think easy access to coins through your wallet will be enough to get people to use it no that's uh you know i i do think it is a uh a positive step forward towards that though uh so like the two biggest problems i see with bitcoin right now and and i'm kind of quite surprised i didn't hear people talk to about them much like for example bobby lee from bbc china he was talking about why the price is down all this and he had some possibly valid points um but also i think he came from the agenda of wanting people to be speculating on the price of bitcoin so his uh his points were maybe skewed towards that a bit um i think that the two reasons are number one there's too many speculators so actually what he's promoting is actually one of the problems um so there's too many speculators in bitcoin specular speculators are okay but there's way too many right now they're like they're actually controlling the market they're controlling the community um and that's you know i love the community but the same time you need a more diverse community yes supporting bitcoin you can't just have speculators controlling it because obviously they're they're all going to support their own agenda of making money off trading that's as a company we we don't trade we don't make any we don't do anything like that to make money on the side or something we've made a point of it that we don't do that um it's basically like a rule of our company um so so to clarify the two big problems too many speculators not enough non-speculators on bitcoin yes that's a major major problem uh and number two there's not enough innovative ways to use bitcoin that cash doesn't do better people are getting a bit excited about like all the sales that happen on overstock and other places i do think those are those are great it's a good step in the right direction but there but the reality is for a lot of those things it's i think those things are going to be successful as a side effect like if people have bitcoin for other reasons things that cash can't do then also they're gonna have bitcoin to use for those things but people got a little bit confused or they purposely hyped it up that you know there's a million dollars in transactions well the price of bitcoin was up um the price of bitcoin was down well you're not going to see that as much you may not see any at all um that's what we've seen at my wife's restaurant in san francisco is that the price is down we we don't see any transactions at all like zero it's back to the speculation we went from like two or three i mean we were having a ton but we went from like two or three weeks to like zero wow absolutely zero wow it's amazing yeah and then that's back to speculation right they don't want to they don't want to trade them in there too many speculators not enough innovative ideas i think too many people are taking the old thing and applying it to the new thing kind of like in the early days of the internet where you go a pet store and i'm gonna put a pet store on the internet yeah yeah and like well you need to take a few steps beyond that also imagine like what's the new landscape what's the new technology what how does this work that's different than the real world same thing with bitcoin there's not enough innovative ideas um so the way we're trying to address that and help is that uh we're trying to make a product that makes it extremely easy to share bitcoin and for people who are speculators or people in the community that they need to be giving back a bit and actually getting people started with bitcoin sharing the passion show them how easy it is and taking away some of the conceptions of it's such a scary thing you know like with the next version we're rolling out when you go if you send bitcoin to someone it's going to be a pretty cool fun social experience for the video game industry so we're trying to make it you know make it more fun and accessible for people um and then of course long term we have some some ideas that we're working towards that i it's not gonna be the the holy grail the only solution but i think it what we're working on is one step in the direction of something unique that could actually have people using bitcoin very cool you've got a history of starting gaming related companies yeah do you have any future plans to involve bitcoin gaming integration well actually we uh um are our advisors we have we have i think 10 advisors now and i went through the it's a concept from tony conrad a pretty pretty famous entrepreneur in the valley and uh his idea was of creating luck so instead of having like one or two advisors that you give a bunch of stock to instead you have more who are basically like their extended extended family of the company and you give them a pretty small amount but it's just to have them involved and kind of create luck and they're they're mostly my friends anyway so we have a few people we have uh kevin the ceo of kabam which is the number two social game company in the world i think they're actually more profitable than zynga these days wow um and a few other people um as well as kai hwang the creator guitar hero and a few other advisors um there's there's several others as well some guys from riot games and some other people you guys have got a cool company yeah so uh thank you i was actually saying yeah there's something else i wasn't saying i was actually thinking i was thinking about something else um but but yeah we're definitely looking at that and i've even had conversations with like rob perdow the top guy at blizzard and some other people just like bounce around ideas um one of the big challenges with that and i think it's it's interesting it's definitely interesting um especially if you start to think about like a a global virtual currency for these games or the fact that you just take the transaction cost down or the fact that you can keep people in flow more because you can have a really cool user experience with bitcoin where you just press a button it's kind of done these things are interesting one of the main problems was a lot of gaming's moved to uh to mobile and you don't see that many companies doing uh things outside of mobile because the money's not there except for a handful of companies so if you're like your blizzard or your activision or one of the big guys sure you can make money because you've got it's like a movie you've got a user base already it's almost like a movie business you can go and put a ton of money you got you got the you got a franchise and occasionally you experiment with a new franchise very rarely maybe once uh you know once every three years and besides that you just copy the you know the franchises technology all this stuff and so it's really there's been a gigantic transition from uh you know console games all these kind of things to like mobile and so with that being said uh the problem there is that you run into a lot of gatekeepers like apple and play like that and so that's that makes some challenges for for using bitcoin uh in gaming but we're definitely looking at it and i mean i think if it was to happen i'm probably in the best position of any bitcoin company to to make it happen and so and we're we're in constant conversation with game companies and friends of mine who are ceos of pretty big game companies to explore what's possible i'm really interested in it but i i don't see any clear path to that yet it's coming hopefully so how many users does your facebook wallet have today and what do the daily transaction volumes look like uh so the daily transaction volumes went down quite a lot it it boomed when we first launched and i i still think this is a an indicator of what i've been seeing elsewhere is that people aren't actually using bitcoin it's mostly speculation and uh so i think that's one of the reasons that it went down quite a bit but we have a little over 16 000 users and as i said before uh we're we're nearing almost 200 000 and transactions have happened that's fantastic yeah and the daily it's kind of hard to report the daily because it's so all over the place you'll have one day where there's not much at all one day where there's pretty large some pretty large transactions do you have access to the private keys of your users coins no we do not no is there a way for users to recover their funds if something happens we we are going to have um a way to and what do you mean by something happens like for a shutdown or something yeah yeah exactly so we don't have that yet we're definitely gonna have it i mean it's uh when we when we launched we launched with a bunch of things that people would expect that we would have and we didn't have but for us it's like the typical silicon valley startup it's like before we even start the company we want to have an idea that's like we're going to take out five or ten years and then test to see if if we're going in the right direction to see if like what we're thinking has some signs of maybe being true and so that's what we did with the wallet and so instead of building all these