Text | Edited by Zheng Yi | Produced by Bi Tongtong | PANews

Text | Edited by Zheng Yi | Produced by Bi Tongtong | PANews

Bitcoin benefits at the end of the article, do you want it?

The annual technology exhibition CES is very lively in Las Vegas. On January 9, Li Qiyuan (Bobby Lee) accepted an exclusive interview with PANews after a busy day at the booth. Although his voice was a little tired, he talked about Bitcoin. He was still in good spirits and talking.

For newcomers in the industry, Li Qiyuan's name may be unfamiliar, but for those who have been in the industry for more than 3 years, it must be very familiar. The "94 Ban" in 2017 was a watershed in the development of China's digital currency world. As the co-founder and CEO of Bitcoin China, one of China's largest exchanges, Li Qiyuan responded to the call and closed down the Bitcoin China exchange.

Banning ICOs, shutting down exchanges, and blocking all digital currency trading channels is a clean-up and rectification for the regulators; for the digital currency industry, it is the collapse of the old world and the beginning of the new world. Intersection is the best and worst of times for entrepreneurs.

Bid farewell to the exchange, but Li Qiyuan did not leave the industry. At the same time, as the co-founder of the earliest and largest Bitcoin evangelism organization "Bitcoin Foundation", he continued to "preach" Bitcoin around the world. And on August 8, 2019, he officially returned to the "battlefield" and launched the Bitcoin hardware wallet Ballet.

1. Bitcoin super fan

As a true veteran preacher in the industry, Li Qiyuan has been a super fan of Bitcoin in the nine years since he entered the industry. When asked who made the greatest contribution to the entire digital currency industry, he said three words to PANews without hesitation: Satoshi Nakamoto.

In many public occasions, Li Qiyuan continued to spread the potential of Bitcoin. He has repeatedly stated that the total market value of Bitcoin will exceed that of gold, and he also called on currency holders to be patient. A hundredfold increase.

At the London Blockchain and AI Investment CC Forum in 2019, Professor Roubini, an American Kellspian economist known as "Doctor Doom", slammed Bitcoin badly. Roubini said that almost all digital currencies do not have Stability, completely unable to be used as a store of value, then Li Qiyuan fought back, took out a $100 bill from his pocket, and said that in the past 100 years, the purchasing power of the US dollar has dropped by 96%.

On October 29, 2019, after the Litecoin 2019 Summit, Li Qiyuan had lunch with the famous American politician Ron Paul. During the meal, Li Qiyuan introduced Bitcoin to him and presented him with a Ballet wallet containing 0.01BTC. Li Qiyuan At the same time, it is also mentioned that this is the first bitcoin in Ron Paul's life.

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Lunch with Ron Paul Image via Twitter

On November 2, 2019, on the flight from Las Vegas to Shanghai, Li Qiyuan ran into the famous movie star Bruce Willis. A Ballet wallet containing 0.01BTC was presented as a Christmas gift.

2. Lang Xianping, who wants to save face, will never accept Bitcoin

What is even more well-known is that Li Qiyuan gave Lang Xianping bitcoins.

"The value of a bitcoin is 5,000 yuan today. If someone gives you 100, do you want it?" In the 2014 Caijing Langyan program, Li Qiyuan questioned the opponent of bitcoin, the economist Lang Xianping. And Lang Xianping also gave the famous answer "I won't take bitcoin if you give me it".

At the time, 100 bitcoins were worth about $65,000, but today they are worth more than $700,000. If calculated according to the highest point, 100 bitcoins even reached an astonishing $1.7 million, equivalent to over ten million yuan in RMB.

And five years later, in 2019, the blockchain is booming, the digital currency industry is developing rapidly, and even the central banks of various countries are preparing to launch their own sovereign digital currencies. In the Caijing Langyan program, Lang Xianping was asked again whether he would accept the 100 bitcoins now. He still gave a negative answer, insisting that bitcoins are worthless.

"He will never accept Bitcoin." Li Qiyuan told PANews. In his view, Lang Xianping is a very "face-saving" person, and after making a lot of denials of Bitcoin in public, Lang Xianping has no steps to go down and can only continue to insist on his own point of view. Li Qiyuan concluded: "His life has already embarked on the road of not accepting Bitcoin. He has said too many remarks against Bitcoin. Because of face, he cannot overturn his previous judgment."

But today, Li Qiyuan has become more and more insisting that his path is correct, and he is not afraid to confront Lang Xianping on the same stage again, "You ask him if he dares to invite me to go on stage and PK with him again?"

3. CSW is most likely to have the private key of Satoshi Nakamoto among the "living people"

For the upcoming halving market, Li Qiyuan also reported a very optimistic attitude. "At least 5 to 10 times the increase, if the peak value is included, it may exceed 20 times." Li Qiyuan said to PANews, but he also said that the big bull market of Bitcoin will not appear immediately after the halving is completed, and the market will be in the Fermentation starts after about half a year.

Although there is an almost fanatical admiration for Bitcoin, Li Qiyuan is unexpectedly rational in his attitude towards Bitcoin hard forks, and does not reject the development of these Bitcoin competitors. In his opinion, the market is the most important thing. Good referee.

"All of my forked coins are not sold, because my cycle of holding coins is not just three to five years, I will hold them for ten or even twenty or thirty years, and I let the market decide the development of Bitcoin." Li Qiyuan said. Although all the forked coins are kept, he believes that these "imitators" of Bitcoin are in a worrying situation under the current situation. BCH has been going downhill and no longer has strong competitiveness, and BSV's large block expansion route is also Not the direction he approved of.

Li Qiyuan and his younger brother, Litecoin founder Li Qiwei have completely different views on whether CSW (Aoben Satoshi) is Nakamoto. Before the opening of the CC Forum on Blockchain and AI Investment in London, Li Qiwei said on Twitter that "all the guests who are on the same stage with CSW should feel ashamed", and called him a liar on social media many times. However, Li Qiyuan has reservations. He believes that although CSW claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and there is currently no strong evidence to prove his identity, he does not rule out showing some key evidence in the future. "He is the most likely living person to have the private key of Satoshi Nakamoto." Li Qiyuan said.

4. "Ballet" Dance

Although in the process of preaching, more and more people showed interest in Bitcoin, but Li Qiyuan found that what restricts people from entering the market is not the obscure concept of Bitcoin in the fields of economy, finance and technology, nor the funds to buy Bitcoin threshold, but will not generate and keep Bitcoin mnemonics, and cannot manage their own assets.

Regardless of the cumbersome mnemonic creation process of the Bitcoin wallet or the private key storage scheme, it is enough to discourage a large number of new users. "Some people like to take screenshots and save them in their photo albums, and some people like to copy their mnemonic words on paper and put them in a drawer, and they disappear in the end." Li Qiyuan said with a little regret. He said that there are not a few people who have lost a large amount of digital assets due to their own "operational errors".

"I hope to create a wallet where anyone in the world can easily, safely and reliably deposit and withdraw assets without knowing digital currency, so there is Ballet." Li Qiyuan said.

Li Qiyuan's speech at CES

In fact, I had a lot of ideas when I named the wallet, and I finally thought of Ballet. The Chinese translation happens to be "ballet", which can give people a light, low-key and artistic beauty, and ordinary users can easily identify the brand.

Tiptoe ballet performances require extra security, as do bitcoin storage.

Cell phones come and go, and paper is fragile and can break for a variety of reasons. Therefore, making the Ballet wallet in the form of a metal plate can be preserved for a long time in the real environment. Due to its physical characteristics, the Ballet wallet has become a completely independent product outside the field of technology, which means that even if the Ballet production company is gone, users can easily import the private key engraved on the wallet to the Bitcoin network, completely Master your own digital assets, and you will not suffer from problems such as chip information cannot be read, firmware system cannot be upgraded, etc. "My vision is that in ten or even twenty years, this product will be available."

5. Questioned? Frankly speaking, personal reputation is more valuable

Since the Ballet wallet has a preset private key, some people have questioned from time to time on social media that "the preset private key can easily steal coins in the future." Li Qiyuan retorted: "Bitcoin China used to be one of the largest exchanges in the world. At that time, we had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins in our wallets. If I had the intention to do evil, I would have transferred the money away. Why wait until now?" Now coveting the coins in the user's wallet?" Obviously, as a nine-year veteran practitioner in the digital currency industry, he believes that his accumulated industry reputation and personal brand are no longer measurable by money.

Li Qiyuan admitted that in order to achieve the purpose of making digital currency "at your fingertips" for beginner users, Ballet wallet does preset private keys for users, but the generation process of private keys strictly follows the process of separating passwords and encrypted private keys in different places. Two groups of staff run the generation program in Las Vegas, USA and Shanghai, China, and finally use laser engraving and anti-counterfeiting stickers to map onto the Ballet physical medium at the same time.

For a hardware wallet that uses a random private key generator, you need to trust that the software will not record your generation results; you need to trust that the wallet will not upload your data to the server when you import the private key after downloading the mobile wallet; you update the firmware of the hardware wallet When you need to trust that it does not leave a back door to steal the private key...

In his view, there is no absolute security in the current wallet field of the entire industry. Any decision made by the user is actually a multiple-choice question of trust. "So it's really unfair that Ballet has been maliciously slandered on social media. They haven't objectively viewed the real situation of the industry." Li Qiyuan told PANews.

According to PANews, digital currency hardware wallets with electronic components do have frequent risks and accidents. In February 2018, an anonymous security researcher confirmed that the Ledger hardware wallet, which had just completed a $75 million B round of financing, was exposed to a loophole. Hackers could use this loophole to show wallet users a false receiving address, causing users to lose their assets when depositing coins. will be transferred to the hacker's account. In July 2019, a researcher broke the news that hackers can use the vulnerability to extract seeds from the TREZOR digital currency hardware wallet within 5 minutes, and the cost of the equipment to launch the attack is only $100. Its competitor Ledger even demonstrated five attack methods against TREZOR at the MIT conference, and disclosed the details of the vulnerabilities on its official website.

Although some people's doubts made Li Qiyuan slightly disappointed, he is actually very satisfied with the sales of the Ballet physical wallet after it went online. "The sales are very hot, and there is no time for production." Li Qiyuan bluntly said that due to the separation of the generation of passwords and encrypted private keys, each Ballet physical wallet needs to be processed in factories in Shanghai and Las Vegas, resulting in slower production speed. Without the hot market demand, users are queuing up to buy.

In order to attract professional users in the digital currency industry, Li Qiyuan also plans to launch a Pro version of the Ballet physical wallet, which allows users to customize their own private keys and passwords. Just submit an "intermediate code" through open source software, and the Ballet wallet production factory will The private key and password are engraved on the Ballet physical wallet for free customization.

As the new year is approaching, the Bellet team also launched a new year promotion. Users who order the special version of the Ballet Year of the Rat red envelope will receive a 0.001 bitcoin red envelope benefit from Li Qiyuan on New Year’s Eve.

PANews joins forces with Ballet to reward readers with Spring Festival benefits, including a luxurious gift worth 1,000 yuan