Payments company Money Button founder and Engineering Head of tokenization entity smart wallet at The Bayesian Group Ryan X. Charles is one of the Bitcoin ambassadors representing the West Coast in the United States. Charles’ story is a very interesting one as he left behind a Ph.D. in Physics in 2013—he was already working on his dissertation about high-energy astrophysics and Bayesian probability theory—just to become a part of the Bitcoin community.
“I’m a lifelong engineer [and] I’m also a former physicist, so I have been very involved in technology and engineering and things like that for my whole life. And as I was drawn to Bitcoin originally in 2011. It just seemed like a really interesting new technology that looked like it had the ability to change the world. Bitcoin is a remarkable technical innovation that makes a lot of new things possible. So it struck me as being analogous to the Internet,” Charles told Bitcoin Association, a global industry organization that is striving to advance the development of the Bitcoin SV blockchain.
Charles then started working for BitPay as a software engineer and then became the first cryptocurrency engineer for social media giant Reddit. After working for others, he decided to put up his own company called “Yours,” a decentralized social network. This is what would, later on, become Money Button.
“I think Bitcoin is actually even bigger than the Internet. It has a lot of the same features the Internet has when it comes to communication, but it also includes money and contracts in a way that enables us to really ultimately base the entire world economy on top of Bitcoin with Bitcoin at the base,” Charles said.
Money Button and Bitcoin SV
Bitcoin SV (BSV), the rebirth of the original Bitcoin, was founded in 2018; and it was not around yet when Charles started Yours in 2015. So he ended up having to switch blockchains time and again in search of the one that can give him the stability, security, scalability, transparency and cost-efficiency that he needed.
“We originally used Bitcoin Core until the fees got too high, which meant that we had to switch at that time from Bitcoin Core to Litecoin. This is how we got involved in the block size debate around Bitcoin. It was very clear to us that the correct path forward was to have large blocks and use the original protocol,” Charles explained.
“We’re actually the first company to switch our application from Bitcoin Cash to Bitcoin SV. There is a difference in visions of the two sides. And Bitcoin Cash was focused on innovative new features at a protocol level, whereas Bitcoin SV was focused on fixed protocol and scaling on chain so that all the innovations happen at the application layer…. From a business perspective, you can build your application on BSV and you can know that it’s going to continue to function forever. That’s much better for our business,” Charles added.
And Charles never looked back. His perseverance paid off, and he is now one of the most successful Bitcoin ambassadors who continuously works alongside Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, known in the real world as nChain Chief Scientist Dr. Craig Wright.
“Since moving to Bitcoin SV, we have had about 1.3 million button swipes—that is to say, 1.3 million times people have used Money Button to make a payment. We have had more than $10 million in payments go through Money Button, with volumes growing exponentially, so the numbers are certainly looking good,” Charles said.
