Hi! I’m Josh, the new COO of decentral.tv. I’m excited to be joining the team here at Decentral, and want to take a minute to tell you a little about what we have planned in the coming months.
First, a little about me. Before coming to Decentral I worked at a legal consultancy, and before that, I articled at a full-service law firm in downtown Toronto. My JD is from U of T, and my Bachelors’ was from McGill, in International Development Studies & Philosophy.
I first heard about Bitcoin during law school (from the now-infamous Gawker article about Silk Road). Like many at the time, I mostly dismissed it. The price surge of 2013 obviously caught my eye, but it wasn’t until this past December that I started to understand why so many people are passionate about it.
After spending 3 months consuming everything about Bitcoin and blockchain that I could get my hands on, I started hanging around meetings at Decentral, and eventually, volunteering and helping out with events. When Anthony offered me an opportunity to join the team, I jumped on it. After a whirlwind trip to the Texas Bitcoin Conference in Austin, I’m back in the office building the new decentral.tv.
decentral.tv, 2.0
The goal of decentral.tv is simple: get interesting people in front of a camera and learn as much as possible from them. There are three ways I want to do this better:
1) Panels & debates. The Bitcoin community likes to argue. About a lot of things. Should Bitcoin companies partner with traditional financial institutions, or is the whole point of the technology to work around them? What’s the best way to increase mainstream adoption? Should we increase the block size? What role should organizations like the Bitcoin Foundation play?
These debates are important. This is a young technology, and we’re a young industry. The people building both are making difficult decisions every day, and the answers they come to on the questions above will play a part in determining the future direction of the industry. We want to play a role in that conversation.
We’re going to pick big issues the community cares about, find notable people with strong opinions about those issues, and let them have that debate on camera. The point isn’t to create conflict. The point of a debate is to get smart people to hash out the flaws in each other’s arguments, and through that process, present the best version of each side of an issue to our viewers. It’s also something I know a little about.
2) Interviews relevant to the news of the day. We’re a small team juggling a lot of other responsibilities, so it isn’t always easy to get content up the same day we film it. But we’re going to try and do this more often. We want you to be able to come to decentral.tv and watch people in the industry giving their views on the news of today, not news from last week.
3) Guests from outside the community. We want to have more people on the show from outside the Bitcoin community. A lot of the Bitcoin media is focused on a small number of people at a small number of companies. We want to broaden our reach to include more people from outside the industry who have a valuable perspective to add. Economists, policy wonks, lawyers, consultants, merchants, and activists all have valuable perspectives that aren’t always present in the (still relatively small) Bitcoin community.
We have a lot more planned, but that should give you a good idea of the direction we’re taking. More to come as our plans take shape.
Made in Canada