Valerian Bennett on The Protocol.tv and television production

0:01foreign we are live in Las Vegas at inside Bitcoins with Valerian Bennett the founder of the protocol dot TV tell us about the protocol.tv excellent well I live and work in Los Angeles as a film and video producer and as I got into Bitcoin it took me I think like most people a little while to sort of wrap my head around it and I thought to

0:28myself that you know if everyday average people have to spend this much time to kind of understand everything that goes on with it you know this is never going to work but I really felt like this technology is so important and so massive and potentially has the capacity to change so many things in our society I thought well I'm not a programmer I'm not a technical person

0:49but I'm a Storyteller that's what I do for a living so I figured if I could start to go around and tell stories about regular people using this technology to solve real problems then I would hope that other people can kind of intuitively learn about everything that's going on and that would be a good Avenue and for a lot of people that's fantastic now even

1:10with the great need for Bitcoin in places like Argentina do you think bitcoin's still too technical for the average person absolutely absolutely yeah it is but you know it's it's it's really early in the in the life cycle of things I think maybe last year everyone got a little too excited with the price run up you know everyone kind of quotes this

1:30price we were at you know 1200 1100 something like that but if you really look back at it considering all the black hole that mount gox was at the time worry really at 1200 so it's a question of you know kind of slowing things down letting some of the air and some of the Steam and some of the hype sort of Fade Out well you know at some point find what

1:52quote-unquote normal is but even so as as all that's going on you're seeing a lot of things being built you're seeing a lot of the infrastructure the railroads if you will the actual things that are going to move everything along that energy hasn't stopped and in fact I think we just heard recently with the blockchain blockchain.info they just got what like

2:15a 30 million dollar investment so incredible the really really smart people with a lot of money are not slowing down on this at all the price may go up the price may go down so it may take a little while but if you're in it for the long haul I think this is a really exciting time it sure is so do you must have more plans on creating more Bitcoin content in the future yeah

2:34absolutely and that's what we hope the protocol dot TV ultimately will grow into this the short documentary that we did Bitcoin Buenos Aires so that's kind of what we're considering a feature presentation where it's easily digestible it's something that we hope we can do things like that every few months different Bitcoin hot spots around the world and tell the

2:55story of the people who are using Bitcoin in real life at the same time we also want to have more consistent content so we've done a lot of interviews with some notables in the industry for example at this conference we had a good sit down with Patrick Byrne from Overstock Bobby Lee from BTC China and hopefully we'll start to be able to Output those kinds of things

3:16on a weekly basis and ultimately if we're if we're taking it to the next level we'll have daily content where it's a more short form informational news content where it's very bite-sized something you can put on your podcast listen to for three minutes in the morning get the basic idea of what's going on and then go about your day so that's our short medium and long-term

3:38plans for new content that's cool now how do you what do you feel the best way for artists to monetize their content with Bitcoin is well with Bitcoin Buenos Aires we looked at it as an experiment in a lot of different ways so we tried a lot of different monetization techniques just to see what's working what's not working we initially started with a

3:57crowdfunding campaign people could join us by paying with their credit card PayPal or of course they could join by Payne and Bitcoin and a lot of people chose to get rewards for that but at the same time we also opened it up that people could anonymously contribute to our campaign and a lot of people did that we ultimately put the finished product on our website the protocol.tv

4:22and we gave people the option to pay two dollars in Bitcoin pay three dollars if they wanted to use credit card or PayPal just to prove a point about good one third party but we also did a name your own price and put it on BitTorrent with the reality is something like this it's going to be on BitTorrent anyway yeah so we took the initiative to try to include

4:43our QR code make sure that all the metadata everything that we could do to create an Avenue for people who could watch it and then pay whatever it is that they wanted to pay and ultimately what we're finding so far is that the average contribution from people who are paying their choosing their own price is actually higher than the for sale price so well I'm curious to see if that's

5:04going to be the same with the next thing that we do or if this is a one-off or if it's just a matter of excitement but ultimately I don't think anyone really knows what's going to work that's why we're trying as many different things as possible but the important thing is that we're trying to make use of the technology to allow us to do things that just weren't possible before that makes

5:24sense I mean the fact that you can do micro payments as an example right yeah and you know we had we had a bunch of meetups one one fantastic at different places around the world are up to 30 cities right now around the world and just the idea of people watching it and someone's sending you a couple of dollars two dollars through and you can

5:44you know of course it's all on the blockchain so you can kind of see it happening in real time and get a sense of the feedback that you're that you're getting so we're just trying to find as as many different ways to use the technology to help create a base for us to continue to create new content very cool the documentary was shorter than a lot of people expected is there

6:04plans for a longer version are you moving to on to other things other than that documentary there's there's two ways that we're we're going about it one which is we wanted to try this format just because it's it's shorter and you can turn it around quicker I think one of the pitfalls that I wanted to avoid that I think you've seen in a couple of

6:25different projects around the community that are great projects but they just take so long to produce that by the time they're out that's the whole universe has changed ten times over so this was something we shot a first week of July we had our first screening kind of a test screening at kryptalina which is a Bitcoin conference in Raleigh that was about six weeks

6:47later we did a couple weeks of tweaks and edits and then basically within two months we had it out to out to the public so I think it's it's important to tell these stories in a way that when you see them they still make sense that there's still an excitement about them that they're still fresh hopefully as we get into I guess longer form content that we'll be able to have the

7:11resources to make something bigger but make it still make it fast enough that it still feels relevant by the time it gets what you mean this industry moves so fast yeah that it's it's unlike any other industry right I mean you try and produce content and you know as you just mentioned I mean everything changes so quickly it's it's hard to you

7:29produce a one-hour video and everything's out of date by the time you're finished editing right and there's this next project that we're working on this next sort of feature project that we're working on exactly the same thing where it's like we interviewed these two people who were part of the company and by the time we start editing it they've changed the

7:46company name they've changed the focus of the kind it's just things moved so fast and it's that's the excitement but as a filmmaker that's also a challenge yeah so you founded the protocol dot TV what's your long-term hopes for the project well we called it the protocol.tv because I think obviously everyone's concerned about right now Bitcoin because that's just the most

8:07popular thing everyone's concerned about the currency because that's the thing that has the most Sizzle But ultimately there's a much bigger picture a much broader picture and it's about using the protocol right so whatever that's going to turn into whether that's the decentralized storage it's the Bitcoin 2.0 it's you know so many other things that people are starting to open bizarre

8:29and swarm and as we saw with Patrick Byrne and Overstock this whole decentralized crypto equity there's so many things that if it if it doesn't work it's not going to work just none of it's going to work but that's right it does work it's going to change everything so that's why we try to keep it Broad and make that our Focus you know what you're doing is very exciting

8:50that's for sure let me ask you a question January 1st 2015 what do you think the price of Bitcoin is going to be see I've answered this question once like two weeks ago and I'm already wildly off so we've got guesses that are all over the place so I feel comfortable a couple of weeks ago I thought 350 it's never going to go Below 350. on the drive here from Los Angeles just saw

9:10it run through that and just Barrel South from there you know as I've as I've actually listened to a lot of the presentations here with some of the different downward pressures on bitcoin on the price in terms of Mining and just really the industrial the phenomenon of industrial mining where basically it's a simple cash flow business mine sell that's it

9:35yeah so and tell that Dynamic changes it seems like there's going to be just a basic downward pressure too much dilution every day it and then you add into or getting into the end of the year and there's generally that selling pressure people sort of have their minds go into the holidays and I don't know other than I mean we've had PayPal Come Aboard we've had this

9:58announcement from Overstock so I'm not sure how much more good news is yes on board right yeah and it doesn't really seem to be changing too yeah I mean the PayPal gave us a little bit of a blip but that was it yeah and then right back down the next couple days so giving you a number I was trying to avoid answering the question but you're actually going

10:15to make me answer it I could see around 200 maybe even sub 200 from from there into the beginning of the year and see what happens in 2015. incredible Valerian Bennett founder of the protocol.tv thanks kinda for joining us today excellent thanks for having me I appreciate it this is Jay Addison from crypto Biz magazine live from meckler media's inside Bitcoins conference in Las Vegas

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