New technologies that protect online freedom & help creators | Stefan Thomas Interview
Channel: Open Index Protocol
Date: 2021-08-19

Stefan Thomas is a very well known figure in the Bitcoin industry. He was an early bitcoin developer, the CTO of Ripple, the co-inventor of the Interledger Protocol, the inventor of the Web Monetization Standard, and now the founder and CEO of Coil the first Web Monetization Service provider. He also He not only has tremendous technical knowledge, but is also a deep thinker who is able to hold two contradictory ideas at once and navigate the difficult path of reconciling seemingly conflicting priorities like self sovereignty and regulation.

You may have heard about how he lost the password to a Bitcoin wallet worth hundreds of millions of dollars which was widely covered by the media, but what you may not know is that he earned those bitcoins for producing one of the earliest and most widely seen explainer videos about Bitcoin (https://youtu.be/Um63OQz3bjo) 

Plus, our conversation was really fun - I learned that Ripple was named after the Grateful Dead! And he mentioned that he designs his own furniture! I love interior design but we didn’t have time to talk much about that because we had so much technical ground to cover. Hopefully he will come back on so we can chat more about it!

Research & Attribution
https://dev.to/hammertoe/brief-history-of-web-monetization-5ech
https://webmonetization.org/specification.html
https://discourse.wicg.io/
https://youtu.be/lBPVAC0H8kU
https://youtu.be/ZMHYElTbMeo
https://youtu.be/D-_L8qR78vU
https://youtu.be/mglJoVAGkuE
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mglJoVAGkuE
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/09/26/77-of-adblocker-users-feel-guilty-about-it/
https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/#sources