‘You’ve Done The Impossible!’ Declares Bitcoin.com Host to Richard Heart, Founder of HEX
By: Taylor Kennedy
Tags: Business, Startup, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Entrepreneurship

‘You’ve Done The Impossible!’ Declares Bitcoin.com Host to Richard Heart, Founder of HEX

Highly Informative, Stimulating: Bitcoin.com Podcast Host Dustin Plantholt Sits Down With Richard Heart, Founder of HEX

The following are excerpts in their original context. For the full interview please check out Bitcoin.com Podcast Network.

Plantholt:

How did this idea come to you, and what is HEX?

Heart:

Well I’ve been in Bitcoin since early 2011; I’ve mined full blocks on my own, which had 50 Bitcoin block rewards at the time. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I retired in 2003; started traveling the world; had 150 employees; I’m a self made man who’s done a lot of things successfully, and HEX is another one of those things.

If you want to replace banks you’ve got to replace all of their products. And what’s the most popular product, or one of them: The time deposit. There’s $7.2 Trillion in time deposits in the United States and China; there’s only $5 Trillion of printed money. So it’s a 50% larger market than cash, which is what Bitcoin was designed to replace. HEX addresses a larger market, and then by accident also does the cash part better than Bitcoin.

If you want to replace banks you’ve got to replace all of their products, and what’s the most popular product, or one of them: The time deposit.

HEX can do 2,000 transactions per second through zkSync.io; you can do anonymity through t.me/HEXnado, Zero Knowledge proofs; you also have 13 second blocks which means you can do a transaction in 13 seconds instead of the 10 minutes it takes Bitcoin — everything’s better.

So it’s faster, more secure, cheaper, higher throughput, and has better price performance. HEX is up in 2020 right now like 70 or 80x versus Bitcoin. And it’s been as high as I believe 140x [vs. Bitcoin] this year.

If you had bought on January 5th and held until now, you could have bought back 50 times the Bitcoin you started with and still have a sizeable amount of HEX left. It’s just a vastly superior product.

Plantholt:

What do you attribute that to? Is that pure speculation, or is that utility?

Heart:

The reason that HEX has superior properties is: 1) It was invented 10 years after Bitcoin, so we had the advantage of all that learning and saw the mistakes that they made; and 2) It’s just more ambitious to start.

People don’t realize how simple the Bitcoin network is. It only has 2 functions. You can either mine inflation by doing hashing of things, which burns electricity; or you can send coins that you bought from some guy that mined the inflation. That’s it. There’s 2 buttons: Mine and Send. There isn’t any other button.

When the miners get their Bitcoin rewards what do you think they do with them? They sell them and dump the price. In Bitcoin the miners take the rewards, pollute the environment, and sell the price down.

Plantholt:

So you’d also assume there’d be a lot of incentive for miners to just keep holding?

Heart:

Well, they don’t have a choice. The economic model behind mining is that it should not be profitable because it’s a commodity. In economics the cost to extract a resource trends towards the value of the resource as margins decrease. So when Bitcoin goes up in value, miners waste more money trying to acquire it; when Bitcoin goes down in value miners shut off their machines because they don’t want to lose money. So as long as it’s an efficient, commoditized system it shouldn’t be that profitable. And historically it hasn’t been. Anyone that just held coins has outperformed miners. Miners go bankrupt left and right, and always have.

Plantholt:

Are you still bullish though on Bitcoin long term?

Heart:

Sure! I’m bullish on the price. I think the price is going to go up, but the technology’s garbage. It’s not even secure. People think Bitcoin’s secure because it has a high hash rate, but they’re dumb and I can educate them: the bugs that cryptocurrencies have primarily are software bugs; the minority of bugs in cryptocurrency are hash rate bugs, and by the way it’s a protection racket as well.

Who do you think you’re protecting yourself from when you pay a miner a fee? You’re protecting yourself from him and his buddies because they’re the only people that will attack you. Just like if you have a restaurant in a bad area, and some strong thugs come in and say, “It’d be a terrible thing if there was a fire here tonight. You should pay us to protect you.” It’s the same thing. The people that you’re paying are the people that would attack you. There’s no other party that’s sitting on a bunch of SHA-256 hash rate that you’re protecting yourself from. It’s a protection racket, and it’s gross.

So in HEX we don’t pay miners block rewards. We don’t pay miners to pollute the environment. You open 1 transaction when you start your stake; 1 transaction when you end your stake. There’s no overhead in the meantime, and it costs pennies to a dollar.

Plantholt:

So it sounds like these were the problems you were looking to solve when you created HEX.

Heart:

Some of them. I wanted to design the world’s quickest appreciating asset. In order to do that I had to find an untapped market that no one else was addressing. We’re the world’s first [blockchain] time deposit. Is anyone else doing time deposits? Nope. It’s just us. How’s that worked out? The price in fiat is up 263x this year. Let me know when Bitcoin will show you a 263x return. It’s not happening. Not in your lifetime. Well, we did that. This year. And we’re set to do more.

I wanted to design the world’s quickest appreciating asset. In order to do that I had to find an untapped market that no one else was addressing.

People don’t realize how high cryptocurrencies can go. Bitcoin’s up 2,000,000x from 1 penny to $20,000. Ethereum went up from $0.15 to $1,500 — that’s a 10,000x in 2 ½ years. So Bitcoin did 2,000,000x, Ethereum did 10,000x, and now HEX is only up 263x. These are real numbers.

Let me know when Bitcoin will show you a 263x return. It’s not happening… Well, we did that. This year. And we’re set to do more.

This is the reality, and people are happy and hoping for some new all time high in Bitcoin when it’s up like ten percent. Who cares? Are you in crypto for ten percent? I’m in crypto for hundreds of percent, just like the good old days. Just like when I bought Bitcoin back when it was $30, held it down to $2. That sucked. But then it went up to $1,300. So lucky me right?

Plantholt:

So what’s this run been like for you? I mean, you were in it from the early days. You’re one of the OG’s. What has it been like for you to see that all of a sudden from carpenters to plumbers people start to talk, “Do you own many Bitcoin?” From around the world people now talk about it but in the early days it was just a couple hundred or couple thousand.

Heart:

Well it’s entirely different now. Back then we were deciding what the [Bitcoin] logo would look like. We were deciding what the ISO code for the Bitcoin symbol should be; should it tilt left, should it tilt right? And those were all people that cared about privacy.

Today it’s entirely different. I believe 2% of all Bitcoin is owned by a company that only takes money from accredited investors in the United States, so what do you actually have?

Plantholt:

Why do you think that is? When they make an announcement like that, but then they put on limitations, why is that?

Heart:

They have no interest in you having control over your money; they have no interest in you having the freedom to do what you want to do with your own money. The powers that be have no interest in that. They want to entrench themselves, and stay in the middle, and rent-seek. It’s what they’re used to doing for decades.

The Bitcoin that I knew and loved was the one that’s supposed to replace these guys, not empower them. You know, now when you buy Bitcoin the bankers own a lot more of it than you do; which is part of the reason I love HEX, the bankers don’t own it. The people own it. And maybe one day that will change, but today it’s beautiful.

Plantholt:

Going forward for HEX, what are you guys working on in the near-term, long-term, that you believe will ultimately keep driving the price?

Heart:

Well, you see, HEX is an interesting animal. When you talk to founders of other projects they beat you up with buzzwords and word salad, hopes and dreams, and partnerships, and all this other garbage. It’s not real. In HEX we do the opposite of that. We do not expect profit from the work of others. There is no roadmap. There is no central entity.

The good things that have happened in HEX I can tell you about in hindsight.

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I don’t make forward looking statements about what will happen. So I can tell you what has happened, and maybe that gives you some indication of what might continue to happen.

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When you talk to founders of other projects they beat you up with buzzwords and word salad, hopes and dreams, and partnerships, and all this other garbage. It’s not real. In HEX we do the opposite of that. We do not expect profit from the work of others.

Right now there’s an app on the phone, iOS and Android, called Staker.app. You can real time see who’s buying, who’s selling, who’s staking, for how long, who’s making money, who’s losing money, who’s emergency end staking, where you rank versus other stakers, it’s got Leagues in it. That just came out a couple weeks ago.

Staker.app for iOS and Android

Two-thousand transactions per second using Layer 2: we’re the first in the world that had a 250,000 person airdrop on Layer 2. No one else has ever done that. It’s called zkSync.io if you’d like to use that. We’ve got anonymity with t.me/hexnado if you want to more privatize your coins; they’re already pseudo-anonymous from the start, but if you want real privacy in addition to anonymity — you can Google what the difference is between those two words, privacy is just stronger.

We’ve got a 3 letter dictionary word dot com that you can’t misspell; we’ve got the best logo; the best brand name; there’s ads all over the United Kingdom; taxi’s, busses, billboards, magazines, The Economist magazine has had HEX ads, Car and Driver has had HEX ads, currently I believe Card Player magazine ads. What else? Price performance 263x in 301 days.

Plantholt:

You’re building something that ultimately becomes sustainable, does it not?

Heart:

It’s got superior features so we’ve got higher engagement; better game theory; more metrics that you can watch. In Bitcoin the only 2 things you can watch are hash rate and price. And that’s it. What else? Nothing, that’s it. Pretty boring for people if you want them to stay engaged.

In HEX we’ve got average stake length; emergency end stakes — when someone ejects and doesn’t do what they said they’d do and pulls out their money early — all of the stakers who were honest and did what they said they were going to do they get rewarded for that. We had a referral program [during Launch Phase]; we gave free coins to Bitcoin holders, and over $5 Billion worth of Bitcoin has minted their HEX. That’s a lot: over 300,000 Bitcoin.

Plantholt:

You’ve done the impossible! In a very short time period when you’re competing against goliath and then six-thousand-some [cryptos] out there, I mean that’s remarkable! Did that surprise you at all or did you think you’d be much further?