In the fourth episode of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, host Kurt Wuckert Jr. talks to our gaming industry reporter Rebecca Liggero-Fontana and Gorilla DAO founder and community manager Patrick Thompson.
Becky, also known as ‘Bitcoin Becky,’ is a bona fide expert in the gambling industry and has over a decade of work experience with Calvin Ayre, a gambling industry pioneer. After years of interviewing senior professionals across the space, she says she’s acquired a ‘birds eye view’ of the industry.
As always, Kurt was outright open off the bat, uttering a remark about the Bitcoin gaming industry—“it has a long history of not working very well.”
This led to an exchange of stories about Bitcoin’s rough beginning within the gaming industry. “Bitcoin started as black market,” Becky says. “Most people used Bitcoin for reasons like, they couldn’t wire money to play or they wanted to remain anonymous.”
With online gaming platforms like Peergame and BitBoss, Becky believes there are new opportunities to be explored and to be excited about.
“What I love about Peergame is the Peerjoin that they just launched which is an opportunity for people to launch their own white label which I think is exactly the type of solutions that need to be offered to the gaming industry today.”
Becky spoke highly of BitBoss as well, and its cashless casinos system and hopes the company would make progress despite tough regulators. “That [cashless casinos system] has been really exciting for land base,” she says. “It’s a bit of challenge because the regulator in the land base space especially in the U.S. are really old school, slow movers.”
Becky makes a strong point saying BitBoss’ cashless casinos system would do really well in a pandemic. “With COVID, you have people who are afraid of touching cash, they don’t want to touch casino chips, so BitBoss has a great solution for this,” she says.
Kurt agrees, saying, “There is a global opportunity for casinos on the Internet and on Blockchain.”
Becky replies with an idea she thinks would work well with operators to come into the gaming space. “A good opportunity too would be to build some sort of big affiliate tracking software for operators in the gaming space that are not really into putting everything into Bitcoin or the blockchain, they can start with this.”
A question from a viewer then led to a somewhat contentious discussion. @Thrills came up with an analogy between the online gaming industry and Uber. He asks, “Do we think that the ‘Uber’ of gaming industry will succeed, predating regulators or will the compliant people succeed?”
Becky makes a good argument mentioning Bodog as an example. “Bodog was in a gray market but they were the most trustworthy brand, they never missed a pay out, so they never did anything bad.”
Kurt agrees to a certain degree affirming that a good entrepreneur who breaks the envelope is fine, as long as they serve their customers well. “If you‘re going to push the envelope like Uber did, they didn’t wait for regulators, they went out and said—we’re going to show the world could be innovative.”
Next up on the show, Kurt talks to the creator, founder and acting community manager of the Gorilla DAO, Patrick Thompson, who some might refer to as the ‘great ape.’
To start, Kurt asks, “What is the DAO?”
Patrick explains, DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. “It was originally an idea that started on Ethereum, it’s an organization, an entity governed by its members.” The idea is everybody within the DAO is able to create a proposal that other members can vote on, ultimately directing the DAO on what it should do.
Kurt recalls the DAO hack as the cause of the Ethereum split. “It launched as a smart contract, got a bug and people got robbed.” What ensued after was controversial, he says. “They did a roll back, that was super contentious given that blockchain’s are not immutable.”
This brings Kurt to question—“What makes the Gorilla DAO different from the original DAO, fundamentally?” Patrick points out, everything on Gorilla DAO will eventually run on smart contracts but for now, it’s a work in progress.
In addition, Patrick emphasized the significance of the Gorilla DAO on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. “With BSV, we say anything Ethereum can do, we can do better,” he explains. “However from time to time, there’s not much to show for. I think one reason that inspired the DAO to be created, is to push the boundaries of what Bitcoin can do.”
So, what’s with the name and the reference to gorillas and apes? One might ask. “I see a lot of synergy with blockchain and digital currency,” Patrick explains. “When people buy, I hear them say, I’m going to APE in,’ thus the reference.”
As of Tuesday March 2, Patrick says the total supply of APE is at 2.1 million APE tokens with a little over 15,000 tokens in circulation. Each APE token is US$1 and there are approximately 83 BSV in the Gorilla treasury. Well, this got Kurt’s attention. “The nerd in me is buzzing,” he quips, adding all the possibilities of where the BSVs can be used.
But the pessimist in Kurt comes right back asking, “How do we stop the DAO from getting lost in minutiae?”
“Gorilla has a lot of gravity,” Patrick explains. “It’s never been done on BSV before, I think the smartest minds in the world are on Bitcoin, and for that reason that skill set are able to solve crucial problems not only in Bitcoin but in the greater blockchain industry.”
Some quirky remarks on the comments section box are too good to pass up on and worth a mention. One says, “Let’s go bananas for Gorilla DAO,” while another said, “I want to be an Ape!”
Well, to be an Ape, Patrick says, “Go to Ape.Capital/transact, get your Money Button wallet ready, type in an amount of APE token you want, you’ll then get your APE token, and BOOM you’re a member.”
Watch episode 4 of Kurt’s CoinGeek Weekly Livestream here:
Check out previous episodes of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream on YouTube.
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