Max Freeman / Epic Cash

Epic Cash founder explains how it differs from Bitcoin

InterviewOctober 20, 202322:34

In this episode

In this interview we discuss Epic Cash and the Epic protocol, how EPIC was designed to embody the principles of Bitcoin, How Bitcoin and Epic Cash differ in Mining and Supply, the decentralized nature of EPIC, and more.

Key takeaways
  • Epic Cash uses polyphasic proof of work with multiple algorithms to enable mining on ordinary laptops, GPUs, and desktop computers rather than specialized hardware.
  • Epic has a fixed supply of 21 million coins like Bitcoin, reaching 20.3 million by October 2028, with no fractional reserve risk from exchanges.
  • Epic's blockchain is under 3 gigabytes, allowing users to run full nodes in 130 countries, compared to Bitcoin's 500 gigabyte chain in 89 countries.
  • Epic processes transactions for free and near-instantly with capacity to scale to billions of transactions daily without requiring secondary layers that sacrifice decentralization.
  • Epic was fair-launched without ICO, premine, or controlling company, adhering to original Bitcoin principles using 2019 technology.

Chapters

Transcript

Read the full transcript 3,872 words, auto-generated and lightly edited

I'm Ashton Addison from blockwest capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have back with us Max Freeman the creator of the Epic blockchain protocol epic cash Max welcome back to the show it is great to hear from you again it's wonderful to be back thanks for having me you're very welcome I'm excited to dive into epic cash our video from 10 months ago was

one of the most popular videos we had in recent times it seems that the Epic cash Community are really embracing there strong nit Community from what I've seen in the blockchain space and there's probably a reason because of the underlying fundamentals of Epic cache which we're going to dive into today and the latest updates from our last

video so let's kick it off from the top for those who aren't familiar with epic who haven't seen our last video on what exactly is epic cash and then we'll dive into all the latest details sounds like a plan so epic stands for epic private internet cache we call it epic or epic cash epic is a cryptocurrency that's used for making frictionless peer-to-peer payments

like Bitcoin was in the early days so payments are basically free and near instant the original Bitcoin design can do only 350,000 transactions a day without needing other layers and the problem with other layers is that they sacrifice decentralization which adds friction especially with regard to regulatory issues epic has no issues because there are no layers and users

can run their own nodes because the chain is less than 3 gigs another reason it has no regulatory issues is because it was fair launched without any Ico premine or company in control so essentially what we did is we took we took the original Bitcoin idea and figured out what was possible using 2019 Tech when we launched it and we created

something that was as close as possible to the original Satoshi ideal with the best of available technology to us at the time and then over the past four years we've continued to evolve and Advance the network so big daddy Bitcoin the OG of the space can do a certain amount of transactions and when people want to do more they can they get slow and they

get expensive epic has the capacity to scale to billions of transactions a day and still stay free and it gets faster over time so we basically took the idea of 21 million limited Supply proof of work all that good stuff that makes Bitcoin Bitcoin and did a doover on it and people said we were crazy it's impossible never going to never going to get anywhere just forget

it or you know anything good that you could do Bitcoin will do it well turns out no it hasn't been that way we've outperformed Bitcoin by a considerable margin and in dollar terms over the past three years we've gone from under a half a cent to about 50 cents now and if you took your Bitcoin and put it in Epic you would end up with a lot more

Bitcoin than you started with so we've succeeded in creating a harder form of money that's also fluid as a currency based on the original Satoshi ideas wow that's incredible and you know I remember from our last discussion that you thoroughly have looked into the Bitcoin white paper and the principles being upheld of sound money in Bitcoin and it seems that in the world of

cryptocurrencies it is one of the hardest crypto monies that exists today I'm curious if you know obviously building epic cash off of those principles is probably the strongest thing you can do do you see Bitcoin has strayed off of its path from when it was created in 2009 whether it's the decentralization or trying to scale it out in different ways that maybe it's

not as hard as it used to be well there's a number of aspects to that question so Satoshi created a monetary system concept where wherein there's only 21 million units of coins that people can buy but what we've seen because people don't use the actual blockchain they have an account with coinbase or binance or somebody like that is that these financial

intermediaries fractionally reserve their Holdings so that even though there's only 20 million BTC coins out on the network those have been fractionally reserved to the extent of probably as high as 50 million that's the current best guess so if you added up how many coins are on people's account statements the net amount of coins that are out there in the market is 50

million and of course those forces of financialization are in place and that's likely going to be more in the future not less because Wall Street is very clever so the there's been a dilution of that soundness of the money that is so important and has been so crucial in getting the value from nothing to tens of thousands of dollars a coin now with epic the supply of Epic and the

supply of BTC end up in the same place at 21 million in October 28 at the singularity there will both be 20.3 million epic and 20.3 million BTC I think I may have misspoken earlier I think there might be 19 million on the chain right now but it will be 20.3 million in five years for both chains so because of the design of Epic not just the chain but the ecosystem

around it we focused on dexes and peer-to-peer trading opportunities that don't present the opportunity for fractionally reserving the asset so there's 50 million of the competitor 21 million Satoshi idea coins designed to the original bit Bitcoin concept and each one of them cost 25 26 grand there's only 17 million epic coins and

that's the actual number and each one is under a buck so that's why people are slowly recognizing the value of Epic as a store of value based on just that fundamental scarcity principle there are only 17 million out there and that's a hard number the network creates 2,880 coins a day currently through the mining process and that's spread out

across three algorithms targeting many different Hardware types you can mine Epic on an ordinary laptop or desktop computer you can mine it with your GPU gaming rig and we've got the flexibility to add more algorithms so however many miners that there are they're only sharing those 2,880 coins and then of course with the sorry the audio got cut there so I guess

we've had three three Bitcoin they see okay it's 21 million you can't print more but they're sort

of printing more in a in a back door way through the exchanges and if there truly are 50 million you know once coins go into an exchange and then the number that you see in your exchange website is not a direct you know link to the blockchain they can put whatever they want on inside of your exchange they may not actually have those they're probably lending it out to make money

like Banks do you know and they actually have a very small percentage so what happens if everybody wants to withdraw their Bitcoin at the same time it might not be there I think we've seen that before and you've also so you've also introduced risk into the equation when you own private keys to a decentralized censorship resistant proof of work blockchain with limited Supply like

Bitcoin and epic then you have something that's very an asset that's very hard to take away or lose the value of but when you have when all you have is an IOU from a financial institution that depends on the credit worthiness of the counterparty to pay so there's been all kinds of risks that have been introduced into the way that people are using the Bitcoin Network

that haven't really manifested yet but as and when they do good thing there's epic standing in the wings as a as an alternative that doesn't have those challenges and you mentioned about the mining being able to just do it on graphics cards or other computers I felt like that was something that was very appealing to Bitcoin in the beginning that you know people were mining it in

their garage or on their computer but as the competitiveness grew of that all a sudden you have warehouses that have millions of dollars of capital expenditure put into them and no longer can you sort of help mine or you know confirm transactions essentially of what you're doing on bitcoin from your computer it doesn't seem as decentralized as it used to

be yeah yeah those are very accurate points so there are there are nodes a node is a full copy of the blockchain in Bitcoin core it's 500 gigabytes rchain is three so there are full nodes for that Network in 89 countries there are nodes for ours in 130 so we've already achieved a greater degree of decentralization at a node level at

least according to that measure and a big part of that is because epic is mined on ordinary Hardware we developed this concept called polyphasic proof of work where instead of just one algorithm that's running all the time with mining there's any number currently there's three and they take turns producing blocks so when the laptops and desktops

those are the ones that use the CPU algorithm random X when those are mining the gpus are are on idling idle waiting not really consuming much power until it's their turn to go mine a block so we've actually created something that's not just more decentralized but it's also more secure because an attacker needs 51 % of all three algorithms not just one to 51% attack the

chain and it gets Greener and cheaper to operate as as time goes on so yeah the technology advantages are where the monetary aspects are the same at least at the 21 million we don't have the fractional Reserve problem but where epic really shines long term is based on the fundamental ability of the technology to move payments between people right now it's

It's low market cap it's it's not very liquid it's hard to buy and use and or not not hard to use not as hard as it was anyway but there's still quite a quite a gap there before it is a true competitor in all senses to bitcoin but we'll but we'll get there we've made tremendous progress more than anybody thought we could in a short amount of

time with no Ico or pre-mine there's no Venture Capital behind us we're all just volunteers so I'm very bullish about the future MH definitely and I've seen a lot of bullishness in the community from our last video it was like exploding over the course of web 3 the ecosystem can you touch a little bit on you know just I feel like this is

a very Grassroots initiative where people just see the principles of decentralization and you know there's not some CEO and CMO that's out there marketing the protocol it's just people understand that this is true entral nature of decentralized cash yeah we what we're trying to be is the people's money so anyone can get involved there's nobody in control

there's a lot of social groups online t.me epic is a great place to start there's a very active Community there's about 3,000 people in there's hundreds of different telegram groups and people working on different stuff so yeah EP epic is special in many ways and one of them is that it's something that anything or anyone can be a part of you can't

really be a part of Bitcoin in the way that you could in the early days because the development has become very corporate and if you want to run a business that's that's very corporate too and there's a lot of a lot of friction everywhere and it's very it's very entrenched epic is a wide blue ocean for people a lot of our community our original early Bitcoin people

that kind of lost interest as it lost its way and they're they're getting getting involved because they say wow this is what Bitcoin was meant to be mhm very cool and I'm curious on the you know the Privacy aspect of epic you know I feel like a lot of people with the increased you know sort of surveillance states that are happening or just people are being more conscious

of their privacy do you think that has a factor with epic and getting more adoption people realizing hey you know we should probably we're already looking at controlling our own funds we should probably be more conscious of our privacy and security a little bit but not as much as you would think I think we're in the very early days of the Awakening on that

Just to touch on that for people who are new to Epic if you if you and I do a transaction on bitcoin once I know your address you and I know everything about each other's money and anyone else who cares to know can see every detail of the money movements as well in Epic everything is confidential so just because we do a transaction doesn't mean anyone else can see that

transaction in fact they can't so when you go to the block Explorer all you can see is the cryptographic residue of transactions you can't actually see who did what so I think over time that will end up being very profound but so far it's it's just one of those nice to have features and there's so many other good features that's actually not the main one that

people focus on yeah I feel like that's a it's a good sort of future proofing as I think people are going to be waking up to that in the next 5 to 10 years it's good to have that sort of built into the protocol but right now yeah I think just the you know as you said the early Bitcoin adopters and the people that understand the true decentralized nature of capital they

put a little bit of value in that but I feel like that's a good function to have for down the road yeah describing it as future proofing is very interesting I've never thought of it that way it when I real realize that third parties can arbitrarily decide whether they're going to choose to take my certain BTC coins that I have or not based on the address

in other words they can censor transactions by saying these coins are bad and these coins are good because they lacked fungibility that's when I realized that there was a real problem and also a real a real opportunity I think fungibility is the big issue over the next 5 10 years mhm and what do you think is the keys to the next part of adoption you

know is it just people waking up to the nature of how these currencies work for more people to say hey I you know maybe I should look into epic and start adopting that or are there some functions or the way that the ecosystem is growing in a decentralized nature for epic that will attract more people to start wanting to use it's not one thing it's everything it's

it's it's a lot of little things incrementing in incrementally force multiplying and adding up what you and I are doing here the talk we had last time your involvement with the Epic cash Community to support the videos anyone can can do their part to make epic go and as more people do more things it all kinds kind of be Builds on

itself yeah I feel like it's sort of the same as as Bitcoins like there wasn't you know people just saw the value and just started picking it up and then you know I guess eventually part of the new asset class and the price and just attracted more people but really there was no as you said just like epic there was no pre-mine there was no CEO there

was no CMO to like go put out marketing details about what is bitcoin yeah yeah it relies on the community of holders to do everything Grassroots advocacy so it's a little it's a little slower to build a lot of crypto is here today gone tomorrow 15 minutes of fame flash in the pan it comes in it goes up people make their 10x or whatever cash

out and then it dies and on to the next epic has been more of a slow burn every year we keep growing we keep developing we keep getting bigger and better so success is like rust it accumulates over time especially if you keep at it love it and I agree and I think it's really it was the same for Bitcoin as well you know Bitcoin was from from

2009 to 2013 took four years of just not really going anywhere for people to understand you know the first cycle up and then down and even then it took six seven years for a more mainstream crowd to start adopting it and you know these currencies aren't designed just to last for 10 or 20 years this is hopefully something that is centuries

long it is we really we really put a lot of thought into where will this thing be in 10 20 years and Beyond and it's it's it's difficult to look that far ahead in certain ways but also in some ways it's not because people want free money they want money that they can do whatever they want with and as the world moves to cbdc you have a situation

where there's restrictions that are baked into the money so even if people don't necessarily see the value today they will see it when those restraints on their other forms of money come in and I think we showed a lot of wisdom in the design by if it ain't broke don't fix it going with what works we took about 98% of the DNA of Bitcoin and only

addressed those things like fungibility like scalability like privacy where better Solutions were available so for instance Monero as an example is a great project but with their emissions they chose to try and make an enhancement there they thought they could do better and in a lot of ways what they have is better but it's different than what people

understand with the one that got them in the crypto and the one they understand best so there's an additional cognitive investment there to make to understand the structure of Monero and why it's better so by going with what is proven we can have a level of certainty about the far future that we wouldn't have with something that's

more experimental so for example nobody knows how the ethereum merg to proof of stake is going to play out but because the Bitcoin core network has been running for 14 years now in a in a certain way we can have a higher confidence than that 5 seven 21 years from now whatever that it's it's also going to run based on that look back view so we benefit from the look back

view into Bitcoin as as well not just epic because we followed their same design principles very interesting Max and moving forward with the industry sort of growing more into decentralized exchanges defi just decentralized finance and trading do you think that will also bring more tradability usability liquidity for epic being

more of decentralized currency and how do you sort of see the industry playing out yeah I think Dex infrastructure is crucial that's been probably our main barrier to increased adoption is that epic has been more challenging to buy it's not on binance it's not on coinbase it's not on all the major exchanges that are out there it required jumping

through a few more Hoops to figure out how to work with the blockchainbased apps for the decentralized exchange vex than it would be to have a familiar coinbase account so as as that Tech gets better and the ecosystem gets more evolved that definitely will be a major positive Catalyst for growth awesome and what is the best way for people to like

step their foot in to Epic cash whether it's the wallet or mining or just joining the community so bu epic.com if you want to pick some up there's also if you want to demo the software there's also a faucet atger of epic.com where you can get a free bit of coins to play with the Epic pay wallet also the telegram Community is great t.me epic and there's

tons of info online very cool I didn't know that I will leave the link to the wallet the socials the platform everything in the notes below is there anything else that you want to mention about so the future of Epic cash or decentralized currencies as we move forward before we go I think epic is the best form of money that's ever been created and

people are going to be kicking themselves if they don't check it out great thank you so much Max I appreciate taking the time teaching us about epic cash I will leave all those links for the audience below and all the best in the future with decentralized currencies and let's definitely follow up in the near future great to be here thanks for

having me Ashton

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