Episode Notes

On 29 May 2022 In this episode of the podcast I interview Alex one of the lead developers in the Navcoin project. We discuss what Navcoin is, some problems with cryptocurrencies and some of the future plans for Navcoin. This episode answers a number of questions asked on Discord and the telegram channel. Check out the Navcoin project at https://www.navcoin.org/

Transcript:

E24 Introduction to Navcoin: I interview the lead developer. Kerry: Welcome to conversations with Kerry, a series of audio interactions with people and things in my world that I find interesting. If you have any comments, questions, or feedback, you can find me at @khoath on Twitter or e-mail me at [email protected]. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Kerry: This episode of conversations with Kerry contains information on the cryptocurrency Navcoin. You can find out about Navcoin by visiting www.navcoin.org. Please note that this information is provided for educational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. If you require investment advice, please consult a financial advisor. Please enjoy this content and I hope you find it educational and entertaining.

Kerry: Welcome everybody to this episode of conversations with Kerry and as a special treat on the podcast this week, this will be distributed through various other channels, we are very honoured to have the lead developer of the Navcoin project with us which I'll introduce in a moment and Alex has come on the podcast with us. Now if you've never heard of Navcoin before don't worry a lot of people haven't and hopefully this podcast will fix that for you and tell you about this exciting project so hello Alex and thank you for coming on the podcast, I really appreciate it.

Alex: Hello, Kerry thank you for having me it's a complete pleasure.

Kerry: I’ll say a few words about cryptocurrency now. Everybody heard about Bitcoin, and everybody heard about cryptocurrency now in case you've been living under a rock for the last 12 years or so. In simple terms, cryptocurrency is a method of exchange that is calculated and stored on computers, that is thought to be worth actual money by a lot of people. That is probably the simplest definition of cryptocurrency I can give. The reason it's called cryptocurrency is the original project in this space that was hugely popular Bitcoin which came out in the late nineties, was the first cash system to be widely successful in this digital space, although when Bitcoin started, it wasn't worth much at all and we can talk about that a little later. Now when you talk about cryptocurrency, you'll get the term “blockchain” and I don't want to get too geeky because we're trying to keep the podcast general but in very simple terms when you put money in your bank and your bank takes your money, the bank says you have $3.57 or whatever your currency is and you believe them and hopefully all of the other banks believe them and this will sort of butterfly across into a topic that we're getting on to in a second here. But if you ask the bank how much you've got the bank says $3.57 and if somebody says, “person X has bought a chocolate bar which is $3.56, do you have $3.56?” the bank “says yes, yes they do”, and you end up with one cent left in your account and a chocolate bar. Now, this all sounds pretty simple and straightforward, except there are a couple of underlying problems with this system which we'll get into. First of all, you have to trust the bank and that seems as though it would be, pretty simple right? Nothing to hide, nothing to worry about? But if you've been following the news, the Canadian truck drivers would tell you all sorts of things about how the bank wouldn't let go of their funds and they were up doing a protest and went to buy a chocolate bar or whatever else they needed, not possible. So, we'll get to that in a minute, very soon actually.

Kerry: So cryptocurrency used to be seen as a bit of a joke and everyone went “Bitcoin it's like the Dutch Tulip craze, it's not worth anything, don't worry about it” and then as time progressed and the technologies advanced and an incredible amount of intellectual power in the community, it became popular and the price went up, and then the price went up, and then the price went up. In 2013, bitcoins were $100 apiece, in 2022 Bitcoin is around $29,000. Let me have a look now… $29,062 yeah that's right. So first of all, one of the things that were taught about Bitcoin, and this leads to the first question.

Kerry: I mean everybody heard about Bitcoin and people thought Bitcoin was anonymous, and I think we're gonna talk about this a little bit because Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Or pseudonymous I think the term is, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. But what's the problem if everybody knows what money you've got, and everybody knows what you're doing? What’s the problem with that? and probably what I wanna prove, that Bitcoin isn't anonymous very quickly and then we'll get to talking about it. Kerry: There was a big online marketplace called Silk Road and Silk Road was a place where you could buy drugs and all sorts of other unsavoury things. And law enforcement shut Silk Road down in 2013 and they did that by tracing Bitcoin transactions, so not so much. Have you got anything to say on that Alex? That whole situation, because there are some very powerful companies that track stuff so I'll let you talk about that if you like a little bit.

Alex: Yeah thank you Kerry for the introduction. I think you were completely right with your description of Bitcoin, especially in the beginning, there were the general concepts of seeing Bitcoin, or something that was private or pseudonymous, as you said. But time has proven that especially when you put into the equation centralized exchanges with KYC, as soon as you put your currency in exchange they are tied to your identity. So it's very easy to connect an address to your identity but also the previous history because Bitcoin has been very successful as a system to transfer value as you said, but it's with the price of public order probably the ability with the price of having all the transactions public and viewable by anyone so anyone can download the blockchain and verify the transaction and this is the way that we can remove a centralized entity as the trusted individual that we need to consider these transactions valid. I think it's not a matter of opinion, but it's a verified part, something that everyone should agree about, that Bitcoin is currently not private. I really like the example that you gave, with the Canadian trucks. This is a very good example of how censorship can really be a problem when we are talking about access to the financial system and how it can become very, very dangerous as a censorship tool from governments and corporations Kerry: Well probably more recently, I think it would be even more realistic to talk about the fact that, and not in great detail, but given the war between Russia and Ukraine the world financial markets have put sanctions on Russia, which has effectively devalued the ruble. So we're looking at an entire country's national currency being devalued by people who decide they don't like them so much, and that's kind of a dangerous situation in my opinion, that a government, or a powerful group of people or a well-positioned group of people can actually control the money supply and I'm assuming that concept concerns you as well?

Alex: Completely. I think we are in a very dangerous position because then what's going to come next no? Now they are going, well not now but like a few months ago, they went against protesters, you know, they were protesting against COVID measures. You can agree you can disagree with it, but protesting having like an opinion against something should be part of the basic human rights, you know? So, what's going to be next? And this opens like a very dangerous window to start removing people from their financial system in a very discriminated way and when you remove someone from the financial system you remove them completely from society you cannot do anything.

Kerry: Yeah, because they cannot acquire food, they cannot acquire resources, they have trouble acquiring the things that they need to exist. Now that sort of dovetails into a different question or at least a different aspect of this. I mean the actual financial banking system says that this blockchain thing is a good idea. All of these blocks that are connected together by this very complicated mathematics and distributed all over the world, multiple locations, you know? Multiple copies of the database for accountability banks are looking at using a version of this technology and they're looking at doing central bank currencies, but that doesn't sound very private to me, if the banks are building this. How do you feel about these central bank currencies? Some of the research I saw said that if the banks decided that you shouldn't have any money, or the government decided that you shouldn't have any money, depending on how the system was designed, it would be theoretically possible to make sure you don't have any tokens or money.

Alex: Yeah that's completely right, and I don't know exactly how the final design is going to be. I think it's not completely decided by the possibility that you just mentioned. It's completely feasible you know some people consider central bank digital currencies, as a version of cryptocurrencies. But for me, at least for my understanding of cryptocurrencies, they are quite far from where the cryptocurrency is, and they are not going to be very different from what we already have right now with the digital bank accounts that we have, you know? But the real danger comes when cash is outlawed, and I think this is something that is coming, and then the only way that you have to access your money is through those central bank digital currencies because then they have the complete power to censor your access to money.

Kerry: And that's absolutely right, and I think the other big problem is… Look at the Chinese Yuan. It's very obvious that the government controls the money supply, and that's fine, provided you trust the government. Now, I don't want to get into whether you should or shouldn't trust the Chinese government, but should you trust any government when it comes to your medium of exchange and the things that are valuable? And my understanding is that the reason that regulations are being looked at very seriously in many countries, is that the governments of those countries wish to wear practical control of cryptocurrency because they're scared of it. They're concerned about having an alternative money supply that is not within the government or Reserve Bank or financial people's control.

Alex: I think governments are always hungry for control. It’s kind of part of their DNA so to say, and the biggest problem here with governments having so much power is when people are enforced, you know, to follow some rules where they don’t really have anything to say. The beauty of cryptocurrency is if you don't like the rules of Bitcoin you are completely free to sell your Bitcoin switch to another altcoin, and if you don't like this altcoin, you have some control over which rules affect you, which is completely the opposite of what's happening in the current design of the financial system.

Kerry: Absolutely, although I would certainly also point out, you mentioned KYC earlier. Just in case people don't know what that acronym is, it stands for “know your customer”, so when you want to set up, say an account on a cryptocurrency exchange, you have to provide various pieces of identifying information, and many of those exchanges have what we call a custodial wallet. And that means that: the exchange looks after your money for you, thank you very much. And the problem with that, for most people who care about these sorts of things, is that not your keys, not your crypto. Which means that you don't have the final say on that money and in fact, Coinbase has terms of service which came out recently. Basically saying, that in the event that Coinbase goes bankrupt, which we hope never happens, they actually hold on to all of your funds and you'll be one of their unsecured creditors, so it just depends on how much you get back after everything, you know? The smoke clears sounds a bit like Mt. Gox in 2013. All sounds a bit, you know, uncertain and unsure, not having the keys to your own crypto.

Alex: Yeah, they probably just included it because they were advised by their legal team. I'm not sure if this conveys like in a dangerous situation as Mt. Gox was, but of course KYC is opening a door for the kind of censorship that we were talking about before. I mean private property is private property. It shouldn't matter who owns something and access to the financial system shouldn't be restricted. From my point of view, I understand if some of people disagree with me, but from my own point of view access to the financial system should be a basic human right and shouldn't be forbidden in any case.

Kerry: So essentially what we're saying here, is that depending on the cryptocurrency, and they've all got different rules, but essentially, I know for example if you decide to run your own Bitcoin wallet or you run your own Ethereum wallets, or you run any of the other cryptocurrencies, and especially as we're talking about here this morning Navcoin, you can basically download the software, install it on your computer, run it put in the necessary pieces of information, which would be: create a new wallet and an optional password (which I'd strongly recommend but we can talk about that later) and you have a wallet, where you can store coins. No “your customer”, no passports, no driver’s licenses, ID documents, the government passes. You can have a free wallet, obviously with no funds in it, with multiple free wallets if you want to. And there's no government overseeing the creation of those wallets provided you keep those wallets safe.

Alex: Yeah, that's completely right. And what is still a pending task for us, you know, for the development teams that are creating this kind of technologies, the trading of those coins, this is when the centralized exchanges come into play, we still need to improve the current technology in order to allow people to exchange those tokens in a completely trustless and decentralized way and also like efficient that is cheap and that is fast. there are already some solutions, for example, you have finance decks, the decentralized exchange, that works quite well and works without KYC, but then the structure of the network is kind of centralized and you need to trust them. You also have centralized exchanges, like when you swap only the token , but then the system that they use, they don't have like an order book. You cannot really decide at what price you want to leave an order, so this is kind of part of the industry that has a bit of room for improvement to really create an open system for trading.

Kerry: Absolutely and I would agree with that 100%. Now the next question we've got here is sort of a bit of a general one, and for people who aren't financially minded. Everybody talks about how cryptocurrency is going to take over the world in a bull market. Now for those who don't know what a bull market is; when everybody's excited and the prices are high, everybody's interested and everybody's got lots of optimism however it dies down in a bear market which is essentially when people don't have a lot to spend, they don't have a lot of financial leverage, which is the ability to pay for goods and services and things. In fact, the exact situation we find ourselves in now with the supply chain meltdown and increased inflation and all those sorts of things. How do you feel about the adoption of cryptocurrencies? You've been in the space for quite a while. Do you have a more sobering view of whether this is great technology or not, whether this is the way we should go, or whether this is the way we should eventually go? What keeps you in this space, given that you've seen a couple of market cycles and obviously big ups and big downs?

Alex: Over the years in the financial markets psychology plays a very important role, so people get very maniac when things go up and they think that they are going to go up forever; and in the same way when they start going down, they think that they are going to go to zero. But at the end, the reality is always like that. The balance between both extremes is kind of the average and because crypto has a real use case, especially in the situations that we talked about before, where governments are every time more and more participants in this censorship. Crypto has a very valid use case to overcome all those unfair limitations that the government is probably very likely to impose. So, imagine this scenario that we were talking about before, where situations, like with the Canadian trucks , become something more general, you know? And people start getting censored in a broader way. What people are going to do? People need to eat, and they need to use money, so we need to rely on centralized and transparent tools, like crypto. There's a real utility for crypto, that is going to make it survive, you know, because we are not talking about something speculative. We are talking about something that really has use and added value for people.

Kerry: So two things that come up here. First of all, the cryptocurrency markets, or the crypto, or the blockchains, they run 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 and 1/4 days per year. They don't stop running unless something bad happens to the blockchain. See Terra Luna, but generally, the blockchains run all the time and the ability to move tokens very cheaply, or currency very cheaply means you can basically bypass those middlemen in the banks. For example, let's say I wanted to buy you a pizza, just because it's a basic example from Al Finy and whatever in 2010, if I wanted to send you the money for a pizza, I would lose quite a large fee sending that money to you, and I'd have to go through banks, and it would be quite slow, but for example if I converted the price of the pizza into Navcoin, and sent it to you, it's quite probable you would have the funds in well depending on how things go under about two minutes and a very small fee, much more efficient and convenient and trustless compared to the bank.

Alex: Yeah, it's funny because yesterday I had a friend from Amsterdam visiting me and this shocked me when he told me. He's running like a fashion agency, and he had to send a payment to Singapore. It was like 750 and he had to pay like a fee of €70. It's almost 10%. I was completely shocked when he told me, you know? And he knows a little bit about crypto and he told me: “When I had to pay this fee it made me more of a believer in the future of crypto”

Kerry: Yeah, I'm not having looked at the face recently, but I think it's .1 of a NAV or it's less than that. It's not much to send a transaction on Navcoin for example the fees are quite low at the moment.

Alex: Yeah, it's fractions of dollars and this is very low.

Kerry: Yeah no, absolutely. So, you know, the move of assets across borders without the restrictions of governments. Let's come back to the previous part of that question. So you're saying that somebody's currency should be their own business, and if you have, you know, 700 squibbles or 700 Navcoins or 700 whatever, that should be your business and in fact, if you go back to… I think it was the 30s–20s, America actually outlawed regular users holding gold without a license and that stopped people from essentially stockpiling wealth. Now there is a push towards privacy, and I see that Navcoin is often listed among the privacy coins. Can you explain a little bit about how that works? Or at least what the idea is there? How would we achieve this potential in simple terms, you know, if I have 1000 NAV, how do I stop everybody else from knowing that you know my address has 1000 NAV or whatever…? Or that I sent, you know, you money for a pizza?

Alex: Now this is a very interesting question and first of all, I would like to explain that privacy is a spectrum. Even if you could use the perfect privacy protocol, which doesn't exist because nothing is perfect in life, there are many factors that could still leak some details of your transaction; for example, doesn't matter if you are using Monero, or whatever privacy protocol, but then, for example, you use a centralized exchange, which has your data because you did KYC. If your information for some reason leaks, then your privacy is completely gone, you know? Every privacy protocol has its weak points, so if you are not aware of those weak points or the compromises of using this specific protocol, you can get like your data leaked. So at the end the difference between one privacy protocol like Navcoin and the other privacy protocols, Monero, Zcash; is the compromises that you have to be able to assume in order to transact privately for example as we've seen Zcash do. You have to be aware that the cryptographic protocol of cash requires a trusted setup, so that means that you have to kind of trust the developers who started the coin, so there is the open question. What's going to happen and also the complexity of the protocol, because it's a cryptographic protocol, that not everyone understands. So things could fail, and maybe some flow could be discovered in the protocol, which could destroy your privacy. Then you have monero, which uses more basic cryptographic primitives, but then the privacy is kind of limited. When you make a transaction, your details are hidden in a group of 10 different people, so the heuristics consist of is ok. You are one of 10, but we don't know which one of those ten. So your private kind of can be denominated as 10% of the transaction and in the account. What we do, we use a method that we developed ourselves called “blsCT”. We hide the amount that is sending the transaction and would be fewer signatures, which is the first part of the name. What we do is we are able to aggregate different transactions in an immediate way. We are not restricted to the number of 10 as monero has, but we can aggregate all the transactions that are happening at the same time in the network, so if we achieve a very high transaction volume, we are able to provide a much higher level of privacy. Now our challenge is to increase the transaction volume in order to increase the level of privacy that we can offer. That's why we are about to introduce private tokens and private and NFTs that are out somewhere utility to Navcoin. So, our goal is to increase the transaction volume to eventually increase also the privacy level.

Kerry: Ok, now for anybody who hasn't been paying attention, an NFT stands for a “non-fungible token”, and a fungible token is a token that is… Essentially, they're all the same so, one Bitcoin is like every other Bitcoin, one monero is like every other monero, and one Navcoin is like any other Navcoin. So essentially, you can spend any Navcoins from any source that you own, to buy whatever it is. It doesn't have to be a special sort, and it doesn't have to be a special sort of Bitcoin or a special sort of monero. That's what fungible means, and non-fungible is where you are creating something unique, and you are storing the ownership rights to that unique object in a hopefully fairly tamper-proof distributed database so that you can prove that you have an ownership or intellectual property on whatever the NFT is. How does that sound like a reasonable sum up of that?

Alex: Yeah, that's an accurate description of what NFT's are. People are using it right now to store some art. What they call art on the blockchain I see that's probably. They are just playing with things that are not very valuable, to kind of prove that this is (24.47) what works, and this will probably evolve to have very interesting use cases in the future. I think there's a lot of potential in NFTS.

Kerry: Absolutely, and it's certainly a burgeoning industry at the moment. Alright, let's step back and get a bit sort of more human for a second here, cause covered some pretty heavy financial topics. How do you find managing a project like Navcoin? How do you manage all that especially with the pandemic, you know? Managing your time and communicating with the necessary people that you need to talk to, and that sort of stuff? How do you manage that as a developer of a project, and just to sort of butterfly another question you know on top of this, you have a coin I mean there are 15,000 cryptocurrencies? So, what keeps you focused on this one and how do you manage that generally speaking, do you think?

Alex: I mean, first of all, I feel very connected with the identity of the project. Now the heavy fall Q some privacy is the biggest thing that connects me with the project. I mean when I was a kid, my mom used to open my bag or like read into my notes. Something that I completely hated. No privacy. Something that I really value. What makes the strongest connection to the project, also the fact that I'm being involved enough since 2016, which is already quite a few years; and during this time I've been able to create very strong connections with some people in the community. Those are people whom I know that I can really trust. So in general, it feels very comfortable you know to work on a project that really motivates me because I feel like I'm working towards our goal, which I feel it's very important in the future as in the way that it's getting shaped. And also, I feel very lucky to work with amazing humans that make everything very easy and make me feel valued.

Kerry: Yeah, and I think that's one of the big powerful things about the blockchain community, when it works well, which it very often does, there is this incredible pool of intellectual property and very talented individuals that are working in this space. And in some cases very high-profile individuals that are putting some quite heavy work into these protocols. This is not just some hobby project, these are worldwide, quite large, quite world-changing projects that are coming into being (30.17)

Alex: Yeah, and the kind of people that you can find in projects like Navcoin, are people that really believe in the mission that we are part of. It's a kind of individual that you can find easily like on the street or like in your daily life and is a very particular subset of the population.

Kerry: Yep, now the question here basically talks about, so how do you manage your time management and your daily life and stuff when you work on the project, how do you manage your attitudes and stuff towards the project? given that you know there are people in this industry who have burnt out, how do you manage that for yourself personally?

Alex: I spent a lot of time in front of the computer, and especially in the last maybe 2 years I have started to put a lot of focus on improving my performance of being aware of very small things, but even if they are small, they are very important, like taking care of my sleep, taking care of physical exercise, taking care of my diet. Even if I spend, I don't know how many hours… well… probably more than 12 hours per day in front of the computer, I learned to have like a routine. Before I was used to staying by the computer until late, but I realized that it was not really being the most efficient way, but now, I'm able to cut being by the computer at a relatively early time, then go to bed, have my 7-8 hours of sleep, wake up in the morning, have my coffee, or even lately I'm also experimenting with Java mate, which works really well to kind of push my mind into a state of clearness.

Kerry: Now that makes perfect sense. I, personally have ADHD, and my previous podcast to this one, which is why I mentioned it on this one, is I have actually been legally prescribed dexamphetamine, which I'm allowed to have, because I have ADHD, and I can tell you that for me that works exceedingly well. For me, my attention is far more focused, my hyper-productivity is far more focused. Now, this is a bit of a hobby horseman, we won't stick to this for too long, but if you also discovered with all this sort of discipline and ability to control your time and spend time on the things that you find important and put value in the areas that you wish to put value in, have you discovered that focus is important and that minimizing multitasking where it makes sense to do so makes you more productive and better at the things that you'd like to achieve? if you can focus on tasks.

Alex: Yeah completely, and as I was saying before, I feel like sleeping habits, proper sleep, really helps me to have a more focused mind when I work. Lately, like from 2 weeks ago, I started trying magnesium before going to sleep. I take it like 1-2 hours before going to sleep and I have much deeper sleep. I feel way more rested when I wake up, and this is being a huge change that I can feel in terms of my focus and concentration level when I work.

Kerry: Excellent. So anybody who's listening to this that is in the cryptocurrency space, TLDR: take care of yourself, get sleep, look after yourself, make sure that you are in peak operating performance that in a way makes sense for you, so that you can be your best and do your best work as practically as that is, and to make sure that if you are going to show up for something that you are going to show up as completely and authentically as you can. I think that would be a fair enough statement.

Alex: Yeah, I think this is a piece of very good advice. Especially in the cryptocurrency industry a lot of people spend too much time in front of the computer, and we cannot forget that there is also a life outside. In order to give the best of ourselves, it's also important to connect with our surroundings.

Kerry: Absolutely. Well, that actually leads down to the next bit of the question. Other than crypto, do you get up to anything exciting? Do you have any other hobbies? What do you do when you're not staring at your computer screen? For example that you know you are happy to share with us on the podcast of course.

Alex: Yes of course I mean I have quite normal hobbies. I mean, of course, spending some time with my friends and travelling as much as I can, but probably my second biggest interest after coding and technology is music. I mean, I have a background in coding and with technology since I was very young because my mom runs a software company in Spain. So from what she tells me, because I don't remember it, but when I was five or six, I was already coding, and I remember when I was eighteen that I made to myself the question “hey Alex, is this what you want to do the rest of your life?”, and for me codding in that moment, our computers in general, just meant I like to spend your time like going to this store, sitting In a database and all these guys calling you, because the computer is not working, then you have to format it so they set it up again. It sounded like something boring. So when I was eighteen, I made this question to myself and I say no. This is something that I don't want to do, and I started to get it involved in music production. I spent some time of my life working as a DJ, event promoter, producing some music, and running a music lab, and I was doing this for a few years until 2016. Then I discovered crypto again and I had the feeling that I could bring something with meaning to the world through coding, and then I reconnected again. But I still have like a full set of the machinery of synthesizers, drum machines and I try to spend some time still playing with them and doing some music, when I have some free time and I'm not coding. Also, most of my friends are kind of related to the music industry. They are artists, and I really enjoy going to see them perform or just sharing some new music and going to exhibitions. Art in general is something that kind of complements in an opposite way, no? Because coding is very logical, very cold. why are artists more involved in the opposite side of the of the humanity?

Kerry: I find it fascinating that many people I come across in IT have some other creative outlet, for example, martial arts for inner circles I operate in hypnosis, or in the circles that you've talked about, music. And! I'm also a musician, just as an interesting case in point, and I do my own audio editing in Reaper, and have been involved in sort of sound and music for quite a number of years. Not quite in the sort of more visible way that you are, but it's fascinating to see that you know a lot of people do have an alternate thing that they do, to be able to sort of tickle the other side of their brain. To sort of balance things up. I'm assuming that having those sorts of interests allows you to balance out your time allocation and stuff to allow you to be more balanced and be a better you in the things that you do in these spaces.

Alex: Yeah completely! And also, I mean the kind of music that I, especially like electronic music. It’s kind of a blend between both worlds, no? Because you are able to create music with the computer if you go through the hardware part. You have like a different set of machines to connect them and they interact with each other. If you let them speak, they are able to create music by themselves, so there is something also kind of esoteric, knowing yes, electronic music when machines are able to express themselves it's a very interesting topic.

Kerry: Absolutely. Well, I actually do have an unplanned question for you so I'll be curious to see what the answer to this one is. So you're looking at doing NFTs with Navcoin. When it comes to doing NFT, are you looking at storing say arbitrary blocks of data say, a JPEG, song, or some sort of file, or are you only looking at storing picture data in the NFT implementation that could be coming out soon?

Alex: In order to not spend too many resources on the blockchain because the space is limited, well yes actually, it's done without NFT you stored on the blockchain like a hash normally an IP FS hash which can later be used to fetch the content. It's not like you are storing the full image or the full music on the blockchain, because this would take a lot of resources. But you are referring to it should have only like 32 bytes, and this is used to download the content from the wallet for example.

Kerry: What you are saying is that because a hash of the object that's being stored on the blockchain, not the actual object itself, the object could be stored in say ipfs, which is the interplanetary file system for anybody who doesn't know. It's a distributed storage system we won't necessarily go down that rabbit hole and then once you have the hash of that object you can then retrieve it from ipfs with whatever methods are there and the object doesn't come off the blockchain just the hash of the object. So if you composed an electronic song and you wanted to prove that you had ownership of it and it's your big hit and whatever else, you could absolutely create an NFT of that song and prove that you have intellectual property to it. Once the infrastructure is in place and be able to exchange, say you know copies of this song for so much currency or whatever, which is generally how NFT's work. A general question; what do you think, what's good and bad about the blockchain community? As far as the community is concerned, you've been in it for quite a while. So, what are the ups and downs of the blockchain community in your opinion? Bits you like, bits you don't I like. I have a list but you're the one being interviewed so I won't get into my list, except to say it certainly polarizes people one way or the other, fear uncertainty and doubt are definitely a thing and crazy market psychology brings it on. But what are your pros and cons, and your thoughts on the blockchain community from where you exist in it?

Alex: I think it is for let's just say, that the more that the market grows and the industry grows, the most similar that it looks, like the whole population. I mean it kind of inherits like the good and the bad things from society, you know? And then we are starting to see more, read more motivation to be inside of it. Ask for speculative reasons, and just you see a lot of people who just want to know about crypto because they see it as an easy way to get rich, while at the beginning it was more people really involved with the course. With really creating value and something that is useful for people. This is maybe something that I miss a little bit, but I don't want to say that I miss it because it's still there. It is less visible, and this is the part of crypto that I really like, and the kind of individuals that I like. Connecting with people who really believe in crypto as a way to empower people and to bring freedom to individuals.

Kerry: Absolutely, so let's take a project like Navcoin and let's be real. At the moment Navcoin is… Let's just say, it's a fair way down the list of cryptocurrencies if you look at, you know, popularity. Now, all of that said, everything can change. How can we get Navcoin more out there? How can we get more people into this space? Because in my experience it's not necessarily the best and most technically stable projects, that make it. Sadly, it is the projects that everybody knows about. In the very long term so can people help with this; or how do we get this out there? How do we get other than, of course this podcast which I'll put everywhere I can think, how else do we get people into this ecosystem and show them that this is something that's worth looking at and getting into?

Alex: I think the most important thing is not to not lose awareness of why are we doing it, and because we are doing it with the goal of providing privacy with people, and because we assume that there are hypotheses that people will really need privacy. Because of the changing conditions that we were talking about, people will be kind of forced to use privacy-enhancing tools because it would be their only way to have, or experiment, a little bit of freedom when freedom will be at their minimum. And I think because we are not a speculative project, we don't want people on board, because they want to see the price going higher, even if it is nice when it goes higher. But the only way of growing the project is by not forgetting why we are here, and by keeping building the right tools in the best way that we can, to build the best technologies so it is ready for use whenever people need it. It is a matter of how you measure success I mean if you measure success as the position in coin market cap, where you have like thousands of tokens and their valuations are inflated because they are not real then this is very hard to get successful, but if successful means to be able to develop a product that helps people and has some real value, then I think it's more easy, you know, we just have to do everything which is to keep writing code and to keep creating the right tools for people.

Kerry: And I think it's also worth mentioning, that when you look at all these projects, there is a lot of pipe in the cryptocurrency space and it's important to have projects that are actually solving problems that people have. Whatever those problems are not just projects that have got pure hype and speculation and stuff around them, and I'm assuming that because Navcoin is trying to solve real-world problems of privacy and stuff like that. Now there is another question further on down that I'll pull up here because it sort of fits in here. There is a risk that there is a proposal I believe to make Navcoin completely private. I don't think it's been voted or agreed on yet I'm not sure of the status on that, but if Navcoin were to become a private coin, it's potentially that could be delisted from central exchanges. How do you feel about that? That's certainly a big consideration that you'd have to look into, because if you're not listed on central exchanges, it's gonna be much harder to get hold of the tokens for example.

Alex: Yeah I mean of course being on centralized exchanges and because changes like binance have some benefits, like having more exposure and having a better reputation. For some people giving it, some people do not really look at this, and this is something that I really value. But at the end, there is already a risk at the moment, being partially private there is a threat from regulators that could force them to their distance. So it's not something that is going to be created new. If we go fully privat and as I was saying before, all the value of the project is going to come from really creating the best technology that we can, and it's very hard to offer good enough privacy if we are not fully private because people tend to be lazy and people tend to use only the public transactions if they have the option, you know? Because they will always do whatever it has less support for them and then when you start moving from public to private, then you are losing a lot of privacy and it's not the best way to achieve privacy. So if we have to make a decision, we have to think what are the factors affecting those decisions, do we want to make decisions based on our regulated exchange or do we want to make decisions based on creating the best product that offers the best privacy? And I think the second way to try to create a better product with better privacy is the right way for Navcoin. In order to create value and also to attract individuals who also value privacy, you know? Because if we will make decisions based only on being on a centralized exchange, then the people who really value privacy are going to choose other, different projects, and we are going to be left. If people whose motivation is purely speculative, you know, they just want to treat that's with the hope that is going to be higher tomorrow, and then sell it. But this is not what not going is about or at least the image that I have of Navcoin.

Kerry: Yes, and now I was poking through the command line options and bits and pieces of stuff, and apparently, I don't think it's in prime time use yet, but apparently you guys have some of the underlying frameworks to mint tokens, so you can actually mint other tokens on your blockchain. Is that correct or am I misreading something in the documentation? And things sort of one of the sorts of more hidden features. It's not sort of “in your face”. Is that a valid thing to mention you guys are looking at that sort of framework in the long term?

Alex: Yeah, in the long term it's already enabled on the test net; I think it will be proposed to be activated on the main net very soon. If it will be a matter of days, weeks the latest and yeah it's something that we are going to implement, and we are also going to expand the current bridge that we have so people are going to be able to grab tokens from the violence smart chai. Let it be USDT BTC or BNB or any talking as a private, talking inside of Navcoin. And the final goal of this is, besides creating some value, giving the people the opportunity to hold those working in a private way. So to increase the utility of now, Jim creates the transaction volume, as I said before, because if we increase the transaction volume then we can also increase the privacy we have.

Kerry: Absolutely. The more people you've got operating in the network, the more anonymity and privacy that you can manage. That's very interesting. I did see something though… Navcoin was forked from the Bitcoin codebase, and if I think about this for about 15 seconds, and you can tell me if there was a different reason. If you wanna build a better mouse trap, then you'd better start with a good mouse trap and make modifications to that mouse trap to make it better. Is that why Navcoin was fought from the Bitcoin codebase? Because Bitcoin was tested and proven to work in a real environment and that was a good base to start from originally?

Alex: Yeah exactly. In 2014, when Navcoin started, there were not many options to choose, when you had to make the decision of what to fork so a Bitcoin was even more obvious reason now but for example now we are planning to move to be a fully private chain and for this we are going to fork the last version of Bitcoin when we started to think about it we thought maybe we should use something different than Bitcoin because the ecosystem has evolved quite a lot and we consider different options, but at the end, I think it's better to be conservative with these kind of decisions because it has been around for already many years and it has proven to be very secure, very stable. Something that I learned with time being a developer is; like you never know how things can go wrong and it's better to pick the safest option, the most secure because even if something looks very, very hyped or very nice functionality or they are promising to give you very high transaction throughput, that means to be able to send many transactions per block, or very low fees, or the smart contract capabilities et cetera et cetera. At the end, there are some compromises and all those new technologies have not been proven enough and there is those are the factor that our team is quite familiar with the Bitcoin codebase. Yes, this is a reason to keep using it. We don't have to learn…

Kerry: … A new system and a new framework. And then, in a certain way better the devil you know than the devil you don't know. Now, that means that, and I assume you've got some very good people working on this but, if you're looking at starting to deploy bridges to move tokens between various blockchains, those are very high targets for attack because they are a bridge, so that means you have to make sure that your teams put as much due diligence and work into those code projects, as they can; because a bridge is certainly an attack target. There have been plenty of bridges that have had funds drained from them in the past, and whilst that is always a possibility you'd like to do everything you can to prevent that from happening.

Alex: Yeah precisely. Our bridge is the sun in a way. Very conservative; and that's why sometimes you see some people complaining: “Oh my deposit over my withdrawal is taking a bit longer”, but because it is designed in a way that if there is like the minimum conflict, instead of the system taking an automated decision, it requires human intervention in order to continue. We are prioritizing security over, for example, this speed because as you said bridges are very desirable targets for attackers, and we have to be careful because they are storing people's money.

Kerry: Exactly, and they're processing a lot of perceived value, and they're moving a lot of perceived value. And in fact, I saw, I think it may have been on discord or something, somebody was complaining about the speed of your bridge. We won't go into the specifics, and what was actually said at the time was; yeah we've actually got some checks and stuff in place and sometimes if it sees something that it's not sure about at this stage we get somebody to go in and check to make sure that it's not doing something unusual.

Alex: Exactly, that's the point. So the course of the system is kind of improved over time, you know? And now it's working way better. It's going faster, but those checks are still in place and in case something goes a bit out of what is initially planned, then it requires manual intervention. Also, the wallets are protected by the signature. It requires the signature of four different servers which are managed by different individuals, and they have completely spread away around the world in order to increase security. So sometimes, it's me who has to make some manual intervention, and maybe sometimes we need to wait for one of those individuals who control part of the multi-signature. So that's why it can get a bit slower, but we prefer as I said to have those manual steps, instead of having everything automatize and create like a bigger attack surface.

Kerry: That absolutely makes sense, and also the way that Navcoin is built, from what I've researched and what I've read, there wasn't an initial mean of coins for the creator so to speak. Like there was with Bitcoin and Z cash and whatever else, and in fact, from what I can tell most of the things that go on with Navcoin as far as decisions for how the project is going to proceed, are actually voted on in a DAO. Do you find that that is a far fairer system so that the community can decide what things are important?

Alex: I mean that’s a complicated question, because initially when we create this governance system, I was maybe more agreeing like this was the right way of governing the project because theoretically, it sounded good but probably over time it has proven to show itself a bit inefficient. And also, when you have like a governance system that is permissionless which means that everyone is ready to join, to buy coins and then vote, how do you prevent someone that is completely random? Who does is not aligned with the values of the project. Some vote and demand things so it's a bit of a controversial topic, but it's something that I think there is not also a better solution. I think it is fair to give to the coin holders on voice in the decisions of the project. I completely agree with this, but I think it's kind of an open question for the whole community not only for Navcoin to develop better government systems.

Kerry: Absolutely and one of the problems with the DIO systems as far as I see them is if you are a while and you have lots of tokens depending on how the system is designed it's possible for you to actually in some cases swing a vote which could not necessarily be what the project needs which is why you're looking at you know all the possible systems and things you can use to do that. Alex: I mean coming in this case, you have like a big whale. Someone who holds a lot of coins. I think it is fair to say that this individual who holds a lot of coins also has a lot of exposure to the effects of whatever is being involved. Now, so they have like a motivation to vote in the right direction because otherwise their own investment would be affected. But I see more of a problem when the system is completely open and is fully democratized, which can, on the paper, be something good but at the other end, in practice, it can turn into be into something problematic from my point of view.

Kerry: Absolutely. No, I can understand that completely. Ok, so in short terms, there are lots of privacy coins out there. There's Secret, there's Z cash, there's Navcoin, there's Monero… What is Navcoin doing differently than these other systems? And you know a lot, of people when you say private coin, they think that the criminals are gonna stock up with this stuff. So even though the statistics show that criminals don't tend to use that much cryptocurrency if you actually look into the figures, how do you feel about all of that, and how's Navcoin positioned in that particular way? Why is it different? I know you talked about how Z cash was shared earlier. What sets Navcoin apart from those other projects would you say now, for you?

Alex: I would explain anything else similar way as I did before. For example, you mentioned Secret. Now, for me, Secret is not really a privacy project, even if you give some fake feeling of privacy. Secret works in a way that privacy is created by encrypting the transaction information and then sending to the validator to the node, and then those nodes have like a trusted chip. It's called and then this node is decrypting your information, and you have to trust the node hardware, so they are not looking into the information that they create. So there are a lot of trust assumptions, which can fall tomorrow. And actually, this chip that I was talking about, is manufactured by Intel which has I think a fair history of having back doors on the systems that they design, so I wouldn't consider this secure enough system to consider it private. So a big difference here would be the cryptographic primitives and the trust assumptions that are needed to consider not going private and to consider secret private which are way different. Also, since the system of Navcoin that we are proof of stake said snap going apart from other projects like for example Z cash, that is proof of work. I think they want to move into proof of stake, but at the moment they are proof of work and Monero is also proof of work so that's a big difference between Navcoin and other projects.

Kerry: Especially because the energy use of Bitcoin and Etherium are highly debated in environmental terms and things like that, so proof of work is seen as very unpopular these days. So proof of stake is certainly what people are looking at at the moment. And Navcoin is positioned to take that position amongst those coins. If people want to help with Navcoin, what can they do? How can people get on board with this? How would they do that? What sort of things are you guys looking for, how could people be useful to the project if that was something they were interested in doing?

Alex: There are many parts of the project which would benefit of some help. I mean on the technical side, that's a developer but also on the content creation; creating technical documentation and non-technical documentation, like articles, videos, and explainers. I mean all those are areas where the project would benefit and yeah the best way to help is the answer might sound very simple but it's very simple you just do it, because we are an open-source project, where a community-based project you don't need permission to help. You will get a lot of support and help from other community members. If you have any questions, if you don't know how to start but here it shows the real spirit of crypto; which is to have your own initiative to collaborate and everything should emanate from this, you know? You shouldn't be waiting for someone to tell you what to do, but instead, have their own initiative and then start doing things. And if you show yourself having intentions of helping, everything will be very easy for you those would be open for everyone who wants to collaborate.

Kerry: Absolutely, so for example that was a piece of the help screen that was confusing. This is just an example. If I was to submit a suggested fix to that wording or that particular section, because the project is an open source project that could be considered for inclusion in the project and that's true for whatever other people might be doing as well.

Alex: Exactly. You or anyone is completely free to create like the suggestion, to create what is called a pull request on GitHub. You suggest some modification to the source code and then it will get commended, it will get eventually approved and incorporated to the next release. It's quite a straightforward process.

Kerry: Oh yes I'm familiar with GitHub. I doubt the listeners are, but I know how to do pull requests. It means that you then have the ability to look over those contributions or the project gets the ability to look over those contributions and say “yes”, “no”, “we need to talk about this”, “oh that's not a bad idea but let's think on this a bit”, “yeah you know what that's actually pretty cool” Finally accessibility… A lot of the crypto projects aren't very accessible and a lot of the tools that are used to transact aren't accessible. Is it possible that some sort of dialogue could be opened on accessibility with the project in a view to having some of this improved? Because I think that if Navcoin was more accessible, it would be taken up by a more diverse range of people. So for example we have a lot of people in the blind community that have trouble moving Bitcoin around; that have trouble moving those tokens around, because of the inaccessibility of tools such as Electrum and such. Is that something that you know could be possibly looked into? Because I think it would certainly be a big plus for the project, you know, in the long term.

Alex: Yeah, it completely could, and I'm very grateful that you bring this topic. This is something that probably hasn't been considered before because none of us is in a position where really need those accessibility tools. But I'm really curious to hear your advice and to hear what are the weakest points of our current interface and how we can improve it. Maybe you can tell me about what kind of techniques are used, and what techniques we can implement in our wallets in order to make accessible. That I agree completely with you. It will be very very valuable in order to show ourself as an inclusive community that is one of our targets.

Kerry: Absolutely, and that's certainly a discussion we can have, and I'm sure there are people who will be interested in involving themselves to make sure that this accessibility and stuff does improve. And I'll be looking at some of the utilities and I'll provide feedback and stuff on that from my part. That's how I'll help out and yeah, certainly other people may look into this and if we can sort of make sure that when things like web wallets and things are designed that the underlying elements are actually accessible, then you'll get accessibility sort of along with the project rather than having to bolt it on a long time after, and I think that will make the implementation much easier.

Alex: Yeah that's very interesting and I will definitely have a look because it's something that I'm not familiar with; kind of techniques can be used in order to improve this, but I'm looking forward to having a conversation about this and maybe you can point me to some resources so some of our new products like, for example, Whisper Wallet that are kind of on an early stage maybe now as you said it's the right moment to start introducing those changes.

Kerry: Yes and whisper while it's the one for iOS it's not that's the iOS application.

Alex: Right now it's for IOS we have the Android version almost ready so we can release the beta very soon.

Kerry: Well, I'm absolutely going to have a look at that. I will certainly provide feedback and I'll be encouraging other people that I know to look at these things as well, and sort of get that moving towards a sort of more accessible space because it would be very sad to have this amazing cryptocurrency whichever it is and, you know, to wanna be able to transact it on the mobile phone and only to find out that if you're using voiceover or Talkback you can't. And that would be a terrible letdown for any crypto project and I think that if we do get the accessibility discussions into Navcoin, and there are improvements in accessibility that could really be a differentiating factor for a lot of people and that's one of my hobby horses. After seeing so much of this stuff over the years there are billions of dollars in the industry and no to minimal accessibility which is quite sad.

Alex: I completely agree with you.

Kerry: Yeah absolutely. All right, well, thank you for taking this time. I've really found this discussion fascinating and now if we've got listeners who are looking at how to, you know, learn about Navcoin would you suggest navcoin.org or should they Google for Navcoin or how do you think they should get started if they want to know more?

Alex: I think the first stop should be our website navcoin.org and from there you can easily find some links to our discord, that is where most of the conversation is happening. If you or any of our listeners are interested more on the technical side, you will also find a link to our GitHub profile where you can find all our source code and you are welcome to contribute to it, comment to provide any feedback, then we would be very happy to receive new community members and to see the community growing.

Kerry: Absolutely, and you know many hands make light work and all that sort of stuff but the more people we can get to get involved in this and see this as a good initiative and especially an initiative that can uphold privacy that can uphold freedom of exchange and can move this technology forward is certainly a project that I think more people could be interested in. Potentially exciting times ahead. Well, thank you very much and it's been an absolutely wonderful discussion and thank you for being on the podcast. It's honestly been a pleasure and I've learned a lot and I'm sure that our listeners have learned a lot, so thank you very much.

Alex: Thank you Kerry for having me and setting up everything for making this possible and I wish you continue creating those beautiful podcasts that which I find very interesting. I had a listing on a few of them and I encourage you to continue.

Kerry: Absolutely and I appreciate that. Thank you. I'm looking forward to editing this down, producing it up and then sharing this out openly so that you guys can hand it around and slice it up and do whatever you want with it and distribute it wherever it happens to need to go, and it can also end up as obviously on my podcast feed and wherever you guys want to put sections of it if there are certain sections you'd like to take out of it. So happy to share that with the community so thank you very much. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Alex: Thank you very much, Kerry. It was a pleasure.

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