Interview with Jordan Tuwiner

Jordan Tuwiner is the creator of Bitcoin Obituaries and the founder of No Third Party, a website with information about wallets. Check out what this Bitcoin Believer has to say.

What caused you to become a Bitcoin believer?

Jordan: A family friend told me about Bitcoin in the summer of 2013. I brushed it off, and it all sounded kind of weird to me. A few months later, another friend told me he had bought bitcoin and made $5,000 buying and selling them within the span of a few days during Bitcoin’s run up to $1,200. A month after that, a cousin mentioned Bitcoin again. I knew I had to take a deeper look. It took me about a month to fully understand the technology and its implications.

I made a test Bitcoin transaction and everything clicked. Everything is on the internet, and it made sense to me that this is how internet money should work. I then realized that money could only work this way if there were no central companies or institutions involved. This lead me to read more about economics and how money works, which convinced me even further that Bitcoin is the perfect form of money.

With Bitcoin starting to become mainstream, which Bitcoin site(s) do you find yourself spending the most time on?

Jordan: My favorite Bitcoin website is the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. I follow a lot of Bitcoin people on Twitter and check in on /r/bitcoin a few times a day for the latest news.

How did Bitcoin Obituaries get started?

Jordan: I noticed a handful of articles which claimed Bitcoin was dead, failed, or over. Bitcoin’s price had been in a long downtrend, and I wanted to use its history to help show people that the same claim’s of Bitcoin’s death were made all the way back in 2010 and 2011 when each bitcoin was worth only a few dollars.

How has the acceptance of Bitcoin changed since you first got involved?

Jordan: There’s definitely a more places to spend bitcoin. In the USA I think I could use it for most of my purchases. Merchant adoption isn’t that important. Only more holders will cause the price to rise, and merchant adoption will follow.

What can you tell us about No Third Party?

Jordan: Bitcoin requires financial responsibility. If a new Bitcoin user downloads a wallet, it needs to be easy to understand the potential risks. One wallet may have servers which can log IP addresses and connect it to the wallet’s addresses and balance. Another wallet may have had a history of RNG problems resulting in a loss of funds.

It needs to be clear what level of privacy each wallet provides, and how it secures funds. Most users don’t know how or simply won’t check the open source code of each wallet. My goal with No Third Party is to profile each Bitcoin wallet and explain—without bias—important privacy and security information users must know before trusting wallets with any money.

On top of the wallet profiles, No Third Party will also cover peer-to-peer applications, like OpenBazaar and Counterparty. The NTP knowledge base helps you take advantage of all of Bitcoin’s features, and offers detailed how-to’s.

How difficult is it to break into the Bitcoin wallet space?

Jordan:  It’s still not clear what Bitcoin wallets will look like a few years from now. Bitcoin’s killer app is that it’s a decentralized currency that can’t be inflated. It’s a store of value. It’s hard cap of 21 million bitcoin is one of the reasons most people buy bitcoin and hold—because they know exactly how much of the supply they own.

I think we will see a split in what kind of wallets people use. Americans and people in countries with better banking systems will lean towards wallets like Circle and Coinbase. These people will use Bitcoin for payments, maybe without even knowing they are using Bitcoin. Wallets like Coinbase & Circle work with the Bitcoin network, but, in most cases, don’t give users access to their own private keys.

 In places like Argentina, Russia and Greece, we will see people using the more hardcore wallets–paper wallets,Mycelium, Electrum, and Bitcoin Core. These people better understand why the world needs Bitcoin and will keep their coins in wallets which are secure, private, and require no third parties.

Users have different needs, and there is room for many wallets with different features.

Where do you see Bitcoin in 5 years from now?

Jordan: Bitcoin will continue to grow. Bitcoin works for me today, and it’s only going to get better as more is built on top of the network. Bitcoin might challenge PayPal and credit cards, and microtransactions may change the way we consume content. But we can’t forget Bitcoin’s true killer app: a censorship resistant, decentralized store of value. This is where Bitcoin will shine in the next 5 years.