Paul Puey

Mark:Free Talk Live, it is Mark Edge with you. I have with me today Paul Puey from Edge Wallet.

Paul Puey:Thanks for having me again, Mark.

Mark:Thank you. And for those that don't know you, and there's probably quite a few at this point, what is Edge Wallet and how did it get its name?

Paul Puey:Oh my gosh, how did it get its name? It definitely came after I learned about Mark Edge and had met you years ago. And so Edge is, I won't call it a rebrand, it's actually the second iteration of our company, which is Airbitz Inc. So Airbitz was a Bitcoin-only, payments-focused wallet, founded in 2014, launched in late 2014, early 2015. Really wanted to make Bitcoin a usable currency. We wanted to be able to pay people with it, find merchants that accepted it. It even had a built-in merchant directory, which people loved, to find places where you can spend your Bitcoin.

Paul Puey:Fast forward to 2017, block-size wars, Bitcoin's not scaling or people don't want it to scale. Everyone said, well, just hold off until Lightning. Ethereum had also come into the scene with programmability. Now we can replace not just payments, but other traditional financial tools like loans and exchange. And we saw basically other assets taking the throne from this other type of utility than Bitcoin, including payments. With Bitcoin Cash becoming much more usable, Dash, Monero, privacy as well, which never really entered the Bitcoin space.

Paul Puey:And so we rebranded and rebuilt the app from scratch into Edge and launched in 2018 with a concept that a lot of people are like, where'd you get this name? There might have been a little bit of inspiration from your host here. But the concept is that there's centralized computing where all the data and all the processing power is at the center of a network. And then there's what some people call edge computing. In the same sense, there's also security that's centralized, like your bank, your centralized exchange, keys being held by a Coinbase or a Kraken. And then there's security at the edges of the network where us, each individual, holds the keys, holds the computing power to sign, holds the funds.

Paul Puey:And that concept of empowering the edges of the network, everyone kind of at the periphery, is where we came up with the name. Edge security is a concept that we had taken hold of during that transition, securing data at the edges. And then we're powering the edges, and at the edges are people. In the center are usually the big companies, the behemoths, big servers. And then you have more network topology, some of the intermediaries. But at the very far edges of this network are people and individuals and our own devices.

Mark:So Bitcoin was the start of it all. And then people were telling you to wait on Lightning. And for those that don't know, Lightning generally has to be a custodial wallet. I hear there are non-custodial Lightning wallets. I don't entirely understand them, but there's a lot in cryptocurrency I don't entirely understand. Paul does understand them.

Paul Puey:I do my best. But it definitely grows faster than I can learn it.

Mark:Does Edge have Lightning capability? Because it sounds like it's antithetical to what you guys do.

Paul Puey:I won't necessarily call it antithetical, but no, we don't have Lightning support. Granted, the Lightning Network as a technology is fascinating and it is compelling from a tech perspective. The concern about it is that in order for it to be used at scale, it has a notable centralization trend. It trends towards it. It's not cheap unless you centralize it. And that could be custodial Lightning wallets, but there are non-custodial that have improved the experience. But the nodes on the network, in order to achieve reliability and cost, you really need to centralize it a lot. And so that is the challenge. It financially trends towards that. And that is its biggest risk.

Paul Puey:Does it kind of work? Sure, but not as a peer-to-peer mechanism. It's a great use case from edge of the network, us individuals, to the center of the network, such as a merchant, a payment processor. I've used it to pay merchants through the Square terminal interface. I mean, Jack Dorsey is a big Bitcoin maxi. He only put Lightning into Square payment terminals. And in that case, it works because they're a behemoth. Square is massive. They can have a Lightning node with a ton of money in it that connects to everyone else. But paying a friend next to you that might be on a different wallet than you has a much higher likelihood of failing in those scenarios, like a true peer-to-peer.

Paul Puey:The more peer-to-peer you are, the higher the likelihood that the payment doesn't get through, especially if you send a larger amount, which is very different from Core Bitcoin, Monero. The amount is irrelevant. There's no, it doesn't matter how much you're sending. Here, the amount is very relevant. You send a large amount of funds to someone with a different wallet, the likelihood of failure can become pretty high. But buy a $5 coffee, a $20 burger, which I have bought with Lightning, at a merchant with a Square terminal. That'll work just fine.

Mark:I don't think I've ever made a Lightning transaction. I'd like to someday. I don't have a problem with it. And I hope that the technology gets better. However, I have used the Edge wallet for transactions as small as buying a soda water to moving big sums of money, at least big ones for me. And as a matter of fact, and I probably shouldn't advocate this to people, but I've used it as a cold storage wallet insofar as I put it on an old phone and I had stuff on it and I just turned the phone off. And everything was fine. I did that for years.

Paul Puey:A lot of people, they'll say, well, what's my key? What's securing it? If you put a long, strong password, near the equivalent of a master private key, 12 random words, you have the cryptographic security of a hardware wallet, especially on a phone that's turned off and sitting in a glove box. There's not much different in that regard. There's subtle differences at that point. But yeah, you're right. At that point, it's very close to, but I'd say more usable than a typical hardware wallet.

Mark:Indeed. So one thing that's certainly worth mentioning here for those that don't entirely understand the things that we've said is, with the Edge wallet, you keep your private keys. You keep control of your money. Edge isn't controlling your money. It's not like a bank account where you give your money to a bank and the bank then controls your money. This is you keeping your money. Edge just provides you the lock and key to do so.

Mark:And it's also worth pointing out that Edge is superior, in my opinion, to other wallets insofar as you can hold just about any form of cryptocurrency on there. The major ones, the midrange ones, some of the minor ones.

Paul Puey:A lot of the minor ones.

Mark:And I say the major privacy ones are on there, which is a big feat. That's where I want to go next, is that Edge has solved the problem of being able to send and receive cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash. And help me out with some of these other ones.

Paul Puey:Pirate Chain, Xano, tokens on Xano. Those are the primary ones that we support in the privacy realm. And you can send and receive these privately using the Edge wallet. You can do it easily insofar as Edge is also a username and password situation as opposed to everything else out there, which is a long mnemonic, these private words and stuff. I'm not saying those are bad. I'm just saying that I love my Edge wallet because it's so easy to use.

Mark:And I have used it for, God, it's got to be a decade now. And I just don't want to use anything else. I have used other things and the experience is inferior.

Paul Puey:Well, you know something, Mark, I'm glad you still use other things because I want to hear anything that you like out of them. If there's every nugget, we want to consider it. Like, hey, there's this thing that I like about this other one. I'm like, all right, we'd love to consider it, possibly implement it. And so we want to make sure we're keeping our ears open and hearing that feedback.

Mark:Major thing for me is I like the privacy coins. And so long as I can transact privately in these currencies. By the way, Dash has a new privacy aspect that's coming out. And I imagine you have not yet implemented it because I don't think it's yet out.

Paul Puey:It's barely out, I believe. I'm not sure if it's out or if it's announced. I don't think there's anything. None of the tooling is in place for us to integrate it, but it is definitely of interest to us to do so.

Mark:Indeed. So I'm of the opinion, and I think you are too, that privacy allows one to live more free. Because privacy is this cloak that allows you to sort of do what you want to do. I don't like the idea that I go to a coffee shop, I swipe my card, and the coffee shop can then see everything that's in my checking account. And that's kind of the way it is with cryptocurrency, these non-private cryptocurrencies.

Mark:Add to that, and probably worse, is that the government can freeze your accounts at a bank because they own the bank, effectively. The bank is a franchise of the Federal Reserve, which is a quasi-governmental agency. Any government agency that wants to can freeze your bank account. I've had my bank account frozen, or at least 90% of it withdrawn without my permission, without notice. And so this absolutely can happen.

Paul Puey:Right. So if you want to have more privacy, using privacy coins adds to that. And as more people do it, then the privacy increases. At some point, the government just throws up its hands and says, oh well, I guess it's not worth looking into people's day-to-day transactions. Believe me, they want to know everything.

Paul Puey:Because if you think back to when we were kids, I don't know, let's pick a random year, 1992. In 1992, they might have known that you had a car. They might have known that you had a house. They would have known that you had a bank account. And they would have known what was in that bank account. That's a lot to sort of know what your net worth is. But it isn't everything.

Paul Puey:Now, especially with cryptocurrencies that are regular blockchain cryptocurrencies, with AI, they can piece together every transaction you're making. They can figure out every wallet that you have. And maybe you're secure to some extent through obfuscation. But they can, at the very least, if they can't figure out it's you, they can figure out, well, it's one of these five people in this network. And they can get really close to you. And I suspect that over time, they'll really be able to zero in. AI isn't going to get less powerful.

Mark:Without a doubt. I mean, I've kind of doubled down on experiencing AI over the past month and a half, two months, to really experience just how powerful it is. And it is quite amazing and scary at the same time. And I see why governments are a big fan of it and why they, generally speaking, especially in the early days of Bitcoin when they didn't know how transparent it was, why they were not a fan of Bitcoin and why they're still not a fan of Monero.

Paul Puey:There was a saying someone put out there. I won't take credit, but I can't recall who said it. From the viewpoint of political alignment, you can think, obviously, Bitcoin and crypto is pretty libertarian. It kind of has libertarian roots. AI is pretty communist. It's about... it's the technology that's perfect for mass data collection and surveillance. It is the perfect technology for that. So it is hardly liberating in most facets of the technology, with a few nuggets where it can feel liberating. Like, I can do this myself. I don't need to hire someone. There's an aspect of liberation to that.

Paul Puey:But I think its net effect is very much not that because the largest entities in our world, I don't even call them governments or companies because to me the two are kind of the same. Government is a gigantic company. And so the largest entities are the ones that are going to be able to maximize and utilize AI to its fullest because they can afford it. It's actually quite expensive to use the most powerful AI. But that was one of the epiphanies I got when I kind of doubled down and used it to its extent just the past couple of months.

Paul Puey:So, yes, with that advent, as you're mentioning, privacy is key. And keeping things private is not about a promise anymore. Where it's, this company promises not to do this, this, and that. It really is, you rely on cryptography. And there's one good thing about the cryptocurrency space is that we're based on cryptography. And AI is really bad at breaking cryptography. It has no utility. You can't even write a word, let alone guess a bunch of numbers.

Mark:Yeah, there's no way. You're going to just burn the ocean trying to guess private keys. What is the private key to a public key? Oh my God. No point. It might accelerate, I don't even want to go down the whole quantum computing. It might help accelerate that. But that's so far down the line that I don't think AI is really relevant to that.

Paul Puey:But yes, I think privacy is key in order to achieve that level of financial freedom that this technology was really built for. But had kind of slipped up along the way.

Mark:So how can one use Edge and cryptocurrency to make yourself more free?

Paul Puey:Yeah. So Edge obviously is a way for people to hold, send, receive, and also exchange different cryptocurrencies. And a lot of people use it for speculation. I get it. You think you've got a favorite coin that you believe in, you buy it, you hold it. I've done this. I bought some Monero, traded in some BTC for some Monero. That's entirely great. And if you are successful in doing that and you know aspects of when to buy, when to sell, and to hold, you might be able to achieve some level of, I won't call it necessarily financial freedom, but financial comfort that helps give you some level of freedom. That's not what I'm generally going to propose as a way to achieve freedom with Edge, but it's what a lot of people do.

Paul Puey:What I generally push and what I advocate for is the utility of crypto and escaping what is not financially free, which is a traditional financial system. First of all, do you have the permission? Now, fortunately, I think me and you, Mark, we've had the fortune of having access to, fortune or misfortune, however you want to frame it, access to the traditional financial system, which is necessary to be able to do basic things in at least this country, the U.S.

Paul Puey:Now, granted, do you interface with someone else outside of this jurisdiction? We do at Edge. So we interface with people in other countries. We have ambassadors all over the world where paying them $50 is near impossible. And they're literally like, oh, 50 bucks, right? That's it. That might be a small amount to us. That's a huge amount in other parts of the world. But getting them that $50 in the traditional banking system is impossible. It's near impossible. You can't just write a check. It just doesn't work that way. And many of them wouldn't even have a way to cash a check.

Mark:I think mailing cash in the mail might be the closest thing if they would even take the cash that we could mail. But mail, even in Mexico, you get a letter delivered in Mexico...

Paul Puey:Yeah, exactly. And so we now have the freedom to bring on who we want, anywhere in the world, these pools of ambassadors to cover different regions and different languages. And that's something we just didn't have the luxury of before cryptocurrency.

Mark:Now, how does Edge uniquely enable that?

Paul Puey:Obviously, it holds a lot of different cryptocurrencies. And we have ambassadors that love different assets. They're promoting Zcash. We have some that are huge Monero fans. We have some that are huge fans of Xano, especially in Africa. Xano has a ton of fans in Africa, small little towns in Africa. And so we would absolutely not have the freedom to be able to pay those people, compensate them for the work that they do for us without cryptocurrency. And multiple different cryptocurrencies, which we then use to convert whatever we hold into those assets to be able to pay them.

Paul Puey:And we are very, what do you call it, eat your own dog food. This app. All of our staff is paid in crypto. All of our contractors, ancillary ambassadors and whatnot are all paid in crypto. And so we're using it on a day to day. And while it is for now in a way a little bit harder than using the traditional financial system for people in the U.S., because there's a lot of systems in play to pay an employee in the U.S., on the grander scheme of all of the people we compensate, it makes it from can't do it to can, regardless of how difficult it might be. It's just simply we couldn't do it. Now we actually can.

Mark:I know that there's a system within Edge, I haven't used it much but I've used it a little, where you can sort of set somebody up on a payment system where you just put an at symbol and then their name. Really, it's just the first letter because how many people are you really going to have hooked up this way? And then you can send it to them. How does that work?

Paul Puey:Yeah, so that's a protocol I'm a huge fan of called FIO. It's its own blockchain. It's based on the old EOSIO technology blockchain from like 2017. But it's a fork of it. It has nothing to do with EOS. It just uses the technology. It allows people to register domains and handles on the chain. So Edge has the domain Edge registered. And everyone in our app can register a handle on Edge for a very low cost or free. And once you register that handle, you can register your addresses on that handle.

Paul Puey:That's one thing. You don't have to. You can. That does compromise a little bit of privacy. It actually compromises almost no privacy if it's a privacy chain like Monero that you're registering. It notably compromises privacy if it's like Bitcoin, especially Ethereum. Because now you have this public handle. Here's the Ethereum address. Anyone can forever see all the transactions on that Ethereum address associated to your handle. So I'm not a huge fan of registering transparent chains to it. And if I did, I would register a completely different wallet than the one I normally do my regular transactions with. So that way people can pay me in that wallet. But then at some point I might swap it into something else or move it over into a different wallet so it's not publicly associated to it.

Mark:I think to get the app, you go to Edge.app or it's in all the app stores. Just type in Edge, right?

Paul Puey:Edge.app for you de-Googled phone folks. Go right to Edge.app and you'll get a link to download the APK directly. But yeah, it's also in the stores, Apple Store, Google Play Store. So that's a great way to just kind of take hold and give it a try. So definitely invite people to do that and send us any feedback you might have.

Mark:Very good. Other methods for being free? Is it mostly just about obfuscating your transactions?

Paul Puey:Obfuscating and also just being able to do these transactions. That's one aspect of it. I can go down a whole other rabbit hole on how to be free that I felt very strongly about before getting into crypto. And I'm happy the crypto world is aligned with it, which is how do you free yourself from the most corrupt companies in our world? Obviously, crypto is the financial companies. But then how do you free yourself from the chemical and the drug companies is a piece that I've been very passionate about because they have a stranglehold on us. Creating a narrative that's very misleading. You don't even know it. It's amazing how much of a stranglehold they have on us. They control the narrative on what we do, what we wear, what we eat.

Mark:List off the names that you're concerned with.

Paul Puey:I think every big pharma company, Pfizer, Moderna, all of them, the big chemical companies, Dow, and the big food companies. Conagra. There's a ton of them. How do you free yourself from those companies? Because by freeing yourself from one aspect of those companies, you free yourself from another. You avoid some of these large companies that make the food, you avoid the pharma companies as well.

Mark:Edge.app, Paul Puey, thank you for being on Free Talk Live.

Paul Puey:All right. Thanks for having me.

Mark:It's Mark Edge with you. I want to tell you about Salt Lending. If you have cryptocurrency, you want to access the value of that cryptocurrency without selling it, you go to Salt Lending. They have cold storage vaults, and you can put your crypto in there and take a loan out against it. And you don't have to pay tax on it. That's a little tax loophole that the billionaires use. And you can use it too. I've worked with them for years, and I recommend them heartily. Email me at salt at markedge.org. And I'll start you in the process. If you want to access the value in your Bitcoin, in your cryptocurrency, you can email me first, and we'll get you started.