Speaking Of Crypto

Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, Co-founder of Ledn, shares his perspective of growing up in Venezuela. We talk about what the culture, and economic and political sentiment was like when Hugo Chavez became president  rewrote the constitution, renamed the country, changed the flag and and changed the entire economic landscape that ultimately created the devastating state of hyperinflation that there is today, which, in 2019, is estimated to be 10 million per cent. We talk about the oil boom instigating outrageous government spending, Chavez’s marathon Sunday propaganda broadcasts of Aló Presidente and his power moves like expropriating property live on national TV under the guise of making life better for the people of Venezuela. “Authoritarian regimes have been incredibly successful when they place capital controls, in pushing this narrative that it doesn't affect the common person, that it only affects the rich people because they travel. And because they get to buy things from abroad, but that these currency control

The crypto space often asks what is the killer app? What is it that’s going to catapult crypto into the mainstream?   The killer app might be gaming.   Gaming is huge. Worldwide, it’s expected to be a 152 Billion Dollar market in 2019. And it’s only getting bigger… fast.   “Fortnight is registering half a million users per day… and that's exactly 20 times the total amount of wallets with dai on them.”   Matias Nisenson and his co-founder Luciano Bertenascotook a leap of faith, 18 months ago, that the technology they knew they would need would be there, when they were ready to launch and it is. So they’re using the Loom Network’s sidechain technology on the Ethereum Blockchain.   Their game Crypto Wars is revolutionizing the gaming model. Instead of players buying skins or guns or other assets that only they can use, the whole game being built on a blockchain using NFTs allows users to purchase, unique, valuable, tradeable assets.   Because these assets are unique, and therefore scarce, they will go up in valu

Everything changed for Eric Tippets when he went to China about 10 years ago. He started to see what business looked like in a country with 1.3 billion people.  And he could see how technology increased efficiency, scaling and opportunity.   “In China, the velocity of things just moves extremely quick, but their technology… it's funny how the culture was behind, but the technology was way advanced. And they were way, way ahead of us.”   Eric talked about how processes were so streamlined that whether he was seeing huge numbers of people go through the airport or walk through a café to grab a bagel, everything ran smoothly and efficiently, with the help of technology.   In January of 2015 Eric and a partner launched a microlending platform that facilitated crowd-funding for entrepreneurs, and they learned very quickly what running a business on a massive scale looked like.   “Within six months, we had 3.5 million people, and $3 billion USD come through that platform. People talk about doing big numbers. It's a

Open Source Technology and Blockchain Technology have created these base layer technologies with billions of dollars’ worth of value. Like what happened open source and the internet, now with blockchain, a few large players with buckets of money are going after only a small segment of developers to maximize profits for their investors. But what about developers? Shouldn’t they be able to capture some of that value – whether they’re building on open source or blockchain platforms? “Open source software creates billions of dollars a year in economic value for the world, and software developers don't have the opportunity to capture the value that they've created in the world because of because of open source… and in a lot of ways, it's a tragedy of the commons.” Kevin Owocki, founded Gitcoin, which brings together funders and developers in a peer to peer job network.  We talk about what Gitcoin is all about and how to get started. I asked him about how it would work if I wanted to hire a developer to create an o

Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of The Hyperledger Project at The Linux Foundation, previously worked at the White House under the Obama Administration and also as CTO for the World Economic Forum. When he read the Bitcoin White Paper and saw what some people were doing in the crypto and blockchain space, he recognized that open source technology was a way out of the top down hierarchical structure that he’d been a part of. “I saw a lot of determined technologists trying to answer this question of -how can we build systems that are as trustworthy and scalable as the centralized systems we know about today, but don't have that concentration of power and concentration of risk and concentration of wealth that the traditional client server model seems to inevitably lead to?" We talk about Hyperledger, some of what’s being built on top of it, open source technology as a concept, and Blockchain for Social Good (he uses the example of tracking where a diamond has come from and sites the United Nations SDGs.) We

I talk with Riccardo Spagni also known as FluffyPony about concerns over Monero’s privacy model and why financial privacy is something healthy, rather than something that should be looked at as deceitful or nefarious. Our society believes in privacy, but it’s interesting to see where it’s accepted and where it’s challenged. Riccardo uses the analogy of going to a public restroom. We don’t argue with someone who wants to close the door when they’re going to the bathroom in a public place. “When you go to a public restroom, you go to the restroom, you close the door, and you don't go like oh, you know, that's a privacy enhancement. That's just natural. So like, a tool like Monero or any privacy enhancing tool really, is just about that same thing, being able to close the door when you're doing something private, like using the bathroom.” Some people think that if you want to hide your financial transactions, you must be doing something illegal. Isn’t financial privacy a right? If we flip things around and say t

Paul Puey, Co-founder and CEO at Edge, and I sat down for a live podcast at Consensus 2019 in NYC last week and one of the first things we talk about is the Facebook Coin. Today in crypto news we learned the Facebook coin is going to be called GlobalCoin and that this cryptocurrency will be coming out in early 2020. Facebook is so huge, with billions of users, about a third of the population of the entire planet, so what will this mean for crypto? And what will in mean for the value of the Facebook coin, GlobalCoin? Reports have been saying that the GlobalCoin will be a stablecoin and Paul believes that this will have everything to do with its value as a coin. “How valuable can a coin be that's already pegged to something else? So how do you equate the value? Maybe it's the most used stable coin, but if you talk about pure value, well, it can't go up and down in price because it's stable, right? That's the whole point. So, what you then become is you become the most valuable payment network. “It potentially i

Alex Mashinksy, Founder and CEO at Celsius Network, and I sat down for a live podcast at Consensus 2019 in NYC last week. This is a short episode, but meaty. Mashinsky always comes prepared with some killer ideas that help to clarify why crypto is important, what’s wrong with the way things are and where the markets are headed. And this conversation is no exception. Bitcoin’s been going up, steadily and easily, Mashinsky says “like butter” in the last few weeks. Find out why he thinks Bitcoin will climb to $14,000 or $15,000 by the end of 2019. He’s got a prediction for what will happen beyond 2019 and tells me what will happen to the price of Bitcoin in a doomsday-like scenario if the stock market were to crash 30 or 40%. He does believe that doomsday is on the horizon. He adds to the conversation we had last time on the podcast about children in the United States being into debt, effectively, given that the country’s exploding deficit. See episode 049. More Profit to the People with VoIP to MoIP w/Alex Mash

I attended Elev8 in Los Angeles and talked with a few presenters from the event. Some of these will be featured in our documentary project The New Internet that will be released in 2020. Today's conversation features Michael Terpin, CEO of Transform Group. Michael is an early crypto investor, advisor, and thought leader who has built companies, sold companies and advised both companies and investors. He understands crypto markets and we have a great conversation about getting hacked for $24 million, how tokenization can work best, and opportunity zones in Puerto Rico. https://transformgroup.com https://coinagenda.com   Dr. Mitesh Rao, Co-Founder and CEO at OMNY and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford, shares his perspective on healthcare as it is in America today and where blockchain can make waves now in the areas of supply chain, clinical trials and in some simpler cases where user data is concerned. He sees solving healthcare data issues that are HIPPA compliant as being much a bigger iss

When Paul Puey, CEO at Edge, first learned about Bitcoin, what got him hooked was our ability to use a phone, without any personal information to “create, basically what amounts to a bank account” and send any amount of currency to anyone anywhere in the world. “You start digging further you realize that there's actually an economic policy behind Bitcoin and it actually has a certain issuance curve that is drastically different than what other currencies typically have or have had in the past” and that’s what triggered his ah-ha moment when he knew it would be revolutionary. He explained that he’d already been becoming disillusioned by “the establishment” and what we were being taught in society. And one of those area’s we dive into is big pharma vs personal wellness. In the healthcare, pharmaceutical industry, there’s “more money going into what will sell than what will cure.” Similarly, society seems to be trying to patch up a financial system that’s not working, rather than fixing it altogether. In regard

What motivates us to change?  Often, it’s failing or falling down or experiencing a loss or going through something unexpected. In Misha’s case, it was learning about Bitcoin, making a lot of money quickly and then losing it just as fast. He had no experience trading, but after the fact, joined a community of online investors where he learned from experienced investors about how they made decisions and what their motivations were. He listened and learned and experimented. Then he blogged about his learnings through his experiences, gathered a whole bunch of feedback and complied what he came up with into a comprehensive book called, Bullish on Bitcoin. https://mishayurchenko.me/mybooks/ When it comes to writing, Misha wants to make sure he sticks to two key points. 1 – Does he have experience in the thing he’s writing about? 2 – Does he want to say something new that hasn’t been said? He’s someone who is always learning and he just got back from a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Interesting timing. I’d just

Max Keiser has some opinions. He has some very valuable, educated, and probably controversial ideas on what’s wrong with the economy, but there’s no disputing the facts. Our financial system right now is completely messed up.  “The central banks were created to be a backstop to the banking system. When a bank when was in trouble, the central bank could protect deposits. So it was a lender of last resort. And so over the past 40 years now, due to political corruption, the central banks have become a huge hedge fund. And that hedge fund is where people go to make speculative investments.” On central banks colluding, he says “It's not a business model, they’re not engaged in a model that's sustainable, that makes economic sense. They're involved in corruption, and bailouts, and destabilizing the economy by practicing of counterfeiting. So it's not a sustainable model.” He basically said it’s all a game and that “what would destroy the game is if one of the central banks breaks ranks and raises interest rates or

Mark Jeffrey’s been in the space since 2013 and his perspective on what makes Bitcoin so revolutionary is very clear. “Peer to peer digital scarcity… doing digital scarcity with a centralized database, super easy… doing something like a Napster or a Bit Torrent like environment where there is no center, and yet objects are digitally scarce, and only one person can have ownership over one object at one time. That's totally new.” He shares what he was thinking, in 2013, when he first heard about Bitcoin and started realizing it was going to be bigger than the internet. “I must be insane, because I'm thinking super insane things right now.” He also realized that he was one of the few people in the world, in 2013 who understood Bitcoin, and had experience as a published author, so he wrote the book Bitcoin Explained Simply https://www.amazon.ca/Bitcoin-Explained-Simply-Basics-Understand-ebook/dp/B00HY4WPSA Recently, he also published an informational video called Crypto Explained Simply https://vimeo.com/ondeman

Want to earn Bitcoin doing things we do now for free? Check out our Earn Crypto page. Watch a video and earn crypto, deposit crypto to earn interest in crypto, shop online and earn Bitcoin back. Anyone can get into crypto now. https://speakingofcrypto.com/earncrypto/ This is the second podcast for Speaking of Crypto that we’ve recorded with Susan Oh. Episode #32 was recorded in September 2018. https://speakingofcrypto.com/032-susan-oh/ Susan shares how the crypto community was started by anarchists and libertarians and she quotes the VC Andrew Romans by saying, “Every person you meet in crypto is the most interesting person you'll meet in your life.” She explains that “it attracts people who separate ethics from law.” We get into the idea of globalization. “Globalization failed largely because it failed to keep money in the hands of those communities that created it. In fact, it just siphoned all the value up to the few large global institutions. And if globalization two point O were to fail, where people hav

Matt Senter, Co-founder and CTO at Lolli is an experienced founder who’s learned a lot of lessons along the way that he’s bringing to his current role. Lolli’s is an e-commerce shopping platform where instead of shoppers getting cash back, they get Bitcoin back. So essentially you can get free Bitcoin for shopping online. Matt and his Co-founder Alex Adelman have joined the crypto community and are helping to grow Bitcoin adoption and bring it to people who are brand new to Bitcoin. “We're disrupting money or helping to disrupt money. We're not the pioneers of Bitcoin, but we are a channel for it, a growth channel.” Matt believes that the value of Bitcoin will ultimately go up. “Right now we have so few people in the world that actually own it. There's so many more people that could buy into it. So there's a huge market there that just hasn't been tapped yet for people who want to own it. And then there's a limited amount so there's going to be a point where you can't actually buy into it anymore or earn into

Alon Muroch, CEO at Blox, shares with me the fact that one great thing about crypto is that there is no barrier to entry. Anyone with a computer can start using it. This, he explains is opposite to the traditional financial world where the cost or barrier to entry keeps rising. We have a thought-provoking conversation around stablecoins, crypto assets and security tokens. In comparing Bitcoin to Ethereum, he notes advantages and disadvantages of each. Bitcoin is more decentralized and not dependent on a CEO or founder. Whereas, Ethereum is the leading smart contract platform and the public identifies the project with Vitalik Buterin who is seen as a “driving force behind the scenes” and we’re still used to identifying projects with their founder. Would we have seen Apple in the same with without learning about Steve Jobs? What about Amazon without Jeff Bezos or Tesla without Elon Musk? When we get into the idea of stablecoins, Alon has some very strong opinions.  “I think that stablecoins are probably the big

Galia Benartzi is Co-Founder of Bancor. She’s a forward-thinking entrepreneur who grew up in Silicon Valley and is currently based Israel, which is one of the largest tech hubs in the world and even referred to as StartUp Nation. We talk about Bancor’s pilot programs – one in Israel and another in Kenya that fuel a community with exchangeable tokens and allow users to trade an interact with a community currency. Bitcoin had challenged the idea of what money is, how we use it and why we choose to use the currency we do. “A lot of people when you ask them ‘what is money?’ will say it's a store of value, it's a means of exchange. And, those things are true in the sense that they are what money does. But, they’re not what money is. What money is ,is an agreement. Nothing more and nothing less. It's an agreement between the people who use that money and between the people who accept that money. It is an agreement to be in collaboration according to the rules of that system.” So the fact that Bitcoin has given us a

Sunny Ray’s company Unocoin, along with the Internet + Mobile Association of India, is in a legal battle with the Reserve Bank of India. The RBI is India’s national central bank. Almost a year ago, the RBI banned all banks in the country from working with crypto or with crypto companies. What does this lawsuit mean for India? What does it mean for the banks andthe crypto companies? And, what does it mean for crypto around the world? This case will set a precedent. Sunny shares a few details on how the law suit’s going and that their expecting a decision in the next few days. Sunny is a veteran in this space, having been in Bitcoin for  around 6 years, and I asked him what it’s like to run a company that based on Bitcoin in a volatile market where the value of Bticoin itself has changed so dramatically. His response was that not only do the highs and lows come in cycles, he also believes that they’re highly predictable. He explains the predictability and his thoughts around where the value of Bticoin is headed

I attended the Women 4 Blockchain Hackathon and Learning Hub in Nashville, Tennessee and talked with a few of the presenters who were there as well. Anna Vladi, COO of Everex Global and the Founder of Women 4 Blockchain talks to me about centralization, the crypto community, her hackathon event in Nashville, and what’s going on in the payments space. https://www.everex.io https://www.women4blockchain.com Stuart Lackey, Co-Founder and CEO at Solaster, shares his perspective on the state of health in America, wearables and monetizing health data, and credits for good health to be used for lower insurance rates. https://solaster.io Kristen Johns, Blockchain attorney at Waller, talks to me about Tokenize Tennessee that helps promote emerging technologies in the state. https://www.tokenizetn.com Mike Quintanilla, FinTech Strategist at First Tennessee Bank, talks blockchain facilitating efficient payments. https://www.firsttennessee.com Stuart Lackey              1:55 Kristen Johns               18:05 Anna Vladi   

What happens when Bitcoin startups are in the same space as big businesses creating enterprise Blockchain solutions? Trent Lapinski, host of the HackerNoon podcast, believes in the visionaries and the vision of those who are on the leading edge of this technology, but he’s worried about what might come of that vision as big businesses enter the space. “These are some of the most forward thinking like visionary people in the world that are working on these things. The problem is, I'm afraid of what I've seen with every other technological innovation is the visionaries come in, they build and push forward into a new space and then the powers that be whatever you want to call them come in and figure out how to screw it all up and make it mainstream and take those good intentions and ruin it.” This Speaking of Crypto podcast interview with Trent Lapinski is also available as a YouTube video here -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI6IgOfORHM Trent is a former tech startup CEO and founder, based in San Francisco a