Interview with Andy, creator of Satoshihost.com and clickforcharity.org
What problem does satoshihost solve, and why does it matter now more than ever?
We solve the unfairness of “plans.” For example, in mobile plans, you get an amount of calls per month for X dollars. 99.9% of the time you will either go over or under that. If you go over you get punished by excessive overage charges, and if you go under, you are paying for resources you don’t use. We use new Bitcoin technology to make it possible to meter your usage so that instead of paying eg. 5 dollars a month, you pay 5 dollars and then see how long it lasts, topping up only when you need to.
The importance of this has not changed, but our abilities have, now that we have a sensible money system like Bitcoin.
What was the ‘aha moment’ that led you to start satoshihost?
When I completed my first bitcoin faucet back in 2016. I hit a button, solved a captcha, and then someone I did not know, who doesn’t know me, automatically sent me 1000 satoshi. Back then it was about .002 cents, but it went directly to my microwallet, where I was able to withdraw it. At that moment I saw how all the banker nonsense, the stupid forms, the hoops they make us jump through, and the insane fees they charge could be totally bypassed and replaced.
That removal of an entire class of parasites enables us to achieve almost anything we want to; all we need is to imagine it and put in the work. Bitcoin removes the old, insurmountable obstacles. I chose to imagine a simple, transparent hosting system that supported a fully peer-to-peer charity system.
What’s a counterintuitive insight that shaped satoshihost’s strategy?
Size doesn’t matter!
If you design a system for a specific purpose without reference to what has gone before, to “how it is done,” you have a chance to make something different. Everything we see and read advises against this, but it’s the only way to find anything new. As Leonard Cohen said, “They sentenced me to 30 years of boredom for trying to change the system from within.”
Or Pink Floyd, “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”
These are not just words; their authors thought them for a reason, and they apply in our lives.
As Creator of satoshihost, how do you build and maintain company culture as you scale?
We keep it small. More developers means more waste, more bloat, and more complexity. AI had made it possible for a small team to develop a platform. Most of our systems, frameworks, and even the tools themselves are designed to suit a corporate structure.
We could see this coming with the way Microsoft Office made all office work everywhere and in every company exactly the same. Someone can be chairman of a cosmetics company one day and the next be running a shipping company. Some probably do both, because they are exactly the same. The soul had been stripped out of our trading with each other and been replaced with a stultifying, robotic sameness. We no longer have communities, and even our humanity is being eroded.
So I have no intention of imposing one culture on this entity. Most pay lip service to diversity, equity, and inclusion while doing the opposite, but we will actually do it. Diversity means different people do things differently.
What emerging technology are you most excited about for satoshihost’s industry?
TL;DR: AI
AI has enormous potential. It will enable us to do things that previously required many different skills and make a lot of things unachievable by ordinary people. You needed a rich family to be able to produce and distribute music; now you don’t. AI will apply that same principle to pretty much everything else. People fear that it will take over and kill us all, but our rulers are more likely to do that already, and yet ost think that’s a conspiracy theory! Which is really more likely to dominate and control us? Which one is already doing it?
AI could be used to further enslave us if we let others use it, or we can use it ourselves to throw off the nonsense illusions that our rulers use to hold us back. It’s our choice.
What’s a feature or product satoshihost built that didn’t work out, and what did you learn?
I tried initially to make directsponsor.org using banker money. Stupid, that was like trying to clean the kitchen with snot.
How did you fund satoshihost, and what advice would you give to founders raising capital?
I designed it to able to be built without funding that I could not afford. Back in the 1950s people would save up for things and then buy them. Somehow the banks managed to fool us into believing that it was “smarter” to borrow the money off them and then pay it back slowly with interest, often in the end paying twice as much. They took advantage of the fact that most humans cannot get their heads around what happens with compound interest.
Business id the same. We’re bombarded with propaganda to borrow money to start a business. We’re urged to believe that its impossible without funding, but one huge international chain store started as a barrow boy in a London market. It’s a lie. Its even more enslaved than working for a salary. So design small, start small. Unless you have a rich family willing to fund you through all kinds of failures, that will be for the best.
How does satoshihost differentiate from competitors, and what’s your moat?
Not sure what a moat is, but we are a pay-as-you-go hosting provider. We say, why pay for someone else’s hosting, because that is what 95% of “plan” users are doing. We will remove the 5% of heavy users. We are of no use to them. Our market is the 95% who have sites that are severely underutilizing their paid for resources.
What do you think competitors misunderstand about satoshihost’s market?
They think that people prefer to have a regular amount to “budget” for. Plans suit them because they profit from the users who don’t use all the resources. In effect, they are believing their own bullshit.
I think that sers put up with plans because that’s all they are offered. The 5 dollar a month plan is too much for 95% of the users on one box. They are paying more than they should. They could pay in 5 dollars a month if they like to have a regular commitment, and over time their balance would build up instead of disappearing every month.
The other 5% will not like it, and that’s fine, they can go elsewhere. 95% of the market is enough!
Andy, what would success look like for you personally and for satoshihost?
If we can disrupt the charity business and the hosting business, that will be a success. If others start to copy, I will use them instead and not have to do the work.
What do you want readers to know about satoshihost that we haven’t covered?
I can’t think of anything. Oh, it’s all in beta at the moment but it works.
This interview was conducted via Lightning.news
