Speaking Of Crypto

Sandra is the CEO of Global Blockchain Business Council and throughout this conversation it becomes apparent two of the things that I believe are extremely important to her are: leveling the playing field by being able to provide financial opportunity for all a desire to bring people together toward a common goal, in part through education and for the purpose of empowerment This is the second podcast Sandra has done with Speaking of Crypto. The first one was recorded in August 2018. It’s episode #24. Please see the link below. This time around we only touch on her time at CME group and how she paved the way for the launch of Bitcoin futures at the end of 2017. More so we talk about blockchain enabling shared economy models and more opportunity through this next evolution of the internet. She shares some of the ideas that I’m personally excited about like tipping or monetization of things we do now for free, and passive income streams that are becoming more available. “So you've done a piece of work, you've

*Special thank yous to StationHead radio in Brooklyn, New York for hosting Jeff Pulver and me for this very deep conversation.*  Although we didn’t get into blockchain technology or crypto, we did talk a lot about technology and the early days of the internet. And I think that if you want to know where you’re going, it’s important to know where you’ve been. Jeff creates an amazing picture of what life was like in those early days… when he was experimenting with Voice over the internet. His experimentation and his passion and ultimately his action led to what the FCC called the Pulver order, which kept Voice over IP out of the domain of the telecom companies and in the hands of the public. It’s why we can connect with people around the globe using FaceTime or What’s App or any calling service over the internet for free. Jeff says that the Killer App has been Voice. And based on our conversation it makes sense. Transcribing the written word just isn’t the same. It can’t capture emotion or all of the information

I saw Parul Gujral at a talk he gave at Go Block Con in Los Angeles last October where he shared an amazing story about his uncle Sarwan’s journey and how it has shaped his life and inspired him in all that he does. Sarwan, the oldest of 13 children, comes from a farming family in India. Not knowing how he would pay for it he applied to Berkeley University in California, and to much of his surprise was accepted. A thousand villagers came together to pull their money to make his dream come true and send him to university. Their investment paid off. Parul’s uncle was able to graduate from university and pay the villagers back with interest. Parul and I talk about his project, Snowball, the first Smart Crypto Investment Automation platform that enables access to curated index style portfolios. They have raised money through seed funding and have decided not to do an ICO based on sound advice. Their advisors include Reese Jones, Associate Founder at Singularity University, John Dillon, CEO of Salesforce, and Rich

Ameer Rosic knows technology and what’s even more apparent throughout this conversation is that he really knows learning. He knows how to learn. He knows how to retain knowledge and he knows how to use it to keep growing and learning and challenging himself to do better. Ameer is the Co-founder of Blockgeeks, an online learning hub for developers and non-developers wanting to acquire and update their skills and knowledge around crypto and blockchain technology. He also hosts a popular YouTube channel with around 170 thousand subscribers that features videos like one that starts like this: “ Honestly, straight up, I think motivation is the biggest scam ever!” If that doesn’t get you to want to watch more, I don’t know what will? He talks to me about why staying up to date with emerging technology, like blockchain, is so important. “If you want to stay relevant. And if you want to stay ahead of the curve. And if you want to both benefit you as an individual, whether you're an entrepreneur or just a citizen, you

When the internet was in its infancy, Alex Mashinsky anticipated that one day, our voice, through phone calls at the time, would become an application on the internet – and now it is. Alex is one of the original creators of Voice over IP or VoIP.  These days he’s forecasting that the internet we use today will become application on a blockchain. So now Alex has moved from VoIP to MoIP from Voice over IP to Money over IP. He founded a company called Celsius Network that is reinventing financial services and moving money over a blockchain. He’s reinventing how banking works, bringing back high interest savings accounts to people who want to earn interest on their crypto and giving out loans to people who HODL crypto as collateral. Alex is an award-winning entrepreneur and has been working in technology throughout his career. One of the stories he humbly shares with me is when he heard about Bitcoin from a co-worker in 2010 and didn’t see its potential until years later.  But, he helped bring VIoP to the world,

Larry Sanger is one of the Co-Founders of Wikipedia  He came up with the idea. He named it. And it was his concept to turn wikis into an online encyclopedia that blossomed into what Wikipedia is today. But how do you make Wikipedia better? How about joining the guys who are already doing it! Now Larry works as the Chief Information Officer for Everipedia -- the world’s largest encyclopedia on a blockchain where you get paid to contribute. Some have called it the Fork of Wikipedia or Wikipedia 2.0.  Larry has a PhD in Philosophy from Ohio State University and I was fortunate to meet up with him in person in Cleveland at the Blockland Solutions conference in December. Larry values the accumulation of knowledge as something that helps us make decisions and process events and understandings from the past so we can do things better as we move forward.  And he believes that putting information on a blockchain is a step forward. “The great thing about blockchain is that it makes the network credibly decentralized an

David Moss, recently worked as the Senior Vice President of Tech Operations at Block.one. He has experience as a CEO and entrepreneur as well at CTO for several technology companies and currently his is Founder of StrongBlock, and shares in this podcast the basic idea around what he and his team are creating now. In a talk he gave at a conference last year David had shared a story of telling Dan Larimer that he didn’t like the White Paper for EOS. Dan Larimer is the creator of some of the biggest projects in crypto, including BitShares, Steemit and EOS. And at the time, David wasn’t working with him, but he wanted to get across his ideas on how it could be improved. But I don’t know that just anyone could approach someone with that kind of a successful track record to just come right out and say, somethings wrong. David explained that what it takes is respect and the ability to be bold. And he goes on to share how much respect David has for him by saying “If I could have been offered an opportunity to work wi

Anthony Di Iorio is co-founder of Ethereum, an award-winning entrepreneur, and CEO of Decentral. He was named one of Toronto Life’s 50 Most Influential People in 2018.  He is an advisor to 15 different companies and was the Chief Digital Officer for the TMX Group, the parent company of the TSX, the 12th largest stock exchange in the world. Anthony shares the story of how he found out about Bitcoin. It all started with a podcast called Free Talk Live that talked a lot about freedom and liberty and the Free State Project. He called it “an important time in his life”, that time when he was absorbing all that knowledge and looking at new ways of thinking on freedom and liberty and individuality. “With a number of other things that are emerging, it's progressing based on what Bitcoin brought, and it's having applications now in in many, many different sectors, with Bitcoin -- the money aspect, finance side, with Ethereum and smart contracts, you now open the doors to decentralized democratized venture capital. And

Elizabeth Renieris earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, she attended law school at Vanderbilt University, and then did her master’s in law at the London School of Economics. Although many high school graduates are opting out of college or traditional post-secondary education, we talk about the benefits of getting this kind of formal education. One of the ideas that she believes is important around getting a university education is the ability to “cross pollinate with people who are in different disciplines studying different things, perhaps in different graduate schools.”   Elizabeth specializes in the area of identity and data privacy in the crypto and blockchain space. The conversation around data privacy has been focussed on the viewpoints of the consumer or big business, but Elizabeth talks to me about data privacy from the perspective of a lawyer.   “We're very quick to blame tech, big tech, big data for a lot of the breaches of trust that we've seen from the large online intermediarie

The best of the best – 2! Blockchain experts share their ideas, their big picture thinking around what’s going on in the blockchain ecosystem.  This show covers some of the most thought-provoking moments from the past year on Speaking of Crypto. If you haven’t heard it yet, please take a listen to the first of this two part, end of year, wrap up!  This second episode of compilation of clips contains some of the best content of the podcast from all of 2018. Part Two of this end of year wrap up features the following guests: 1:40    Sandra Ro, Global Blockchain Business Council Social impact and education Giving people around the world financial options 5:36    Matthew Spoke, AION Foundation Decentralized infrastructure The monetary value of the internet 8:56    Hartej Sawhney, Hosho What Fortune 500 companies are up to with blockchain the future of wearable tech and data collection 11:55  Bruce Silcoff, Shyft Network digital IDs people around the world with no official formal identification 14:20  Mich

The best of the best. Blockchain experts share their ideas, their big picture thinking around what’s going on in the blockchain ecosystem. This show covers some of the best moments from the past year on Speaking of Crypto …and things we talk about include everything from -- some discussions around what Bitcoin is and what blockchain is useful for… to why the technology is revolutionary and what’s exciting about where it’s going from here. Listening back to these interviews and taking another listen to these incredible front-runners, I have so much gratitude.  I’m still learning from and continue to be inspired by these incredible people paving the way in blockchain--- who are heads down focussed on building and sharing this technology that really is changing the world. This show features the following guests. Next week’s show will be SPEAKING OF CRYPTO 2018 – PART TWO featuring many more of our favourite interviews. 2:16    Sunny Ray, Unocoin   5:19    Yoni Assia, eToro   8:08    Diego Guitiérrez Zaldívar, RS

The potential that Satoshi Nakamoto introduced to the world, through the Bitcoin Whitepaper https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/  has motivated a community of people who are working to make the world a better place, who are looking at a broader perspective and who see the world for all of its potential. “I think it's going to take some great visionaries. It will require governments to create this new consensus. The irony of that is that we already agreed to some consensus on the blockchain in order to prove proof of work, proof of stake or whatever, but government leaders, big organizations, who are running the world as we know it will need to generically agree on some consensus, if we are going to work towards this.” Mann Matharu was inspired, after reading the Whitepaper, by the core principles of Bitcoin and blockchain technology -- decentralization, trustlessness and transacting peer to peer. He saw it as a technology in line with human nature. Creating a system of transparency and immutability breeds a

“Most social networks, big ones, are highly centralized, totally closed source and those two things are pretty dangerous because the community, the user base, isn’t able to understand the code, understand what they’re interacting with, not able to see the algorithms, not able to see if it’s spying on them, and also there’s a censorship issue with the centralized structure.” If Facebook is spying on us and apps are tracking our location data, devices are probably listening in to our conversations too. Bill Ottman created Minds, as an alternative. Minds is a social network, that uses open source technology and is powered by crypto where you earn tokens for your contributions. Bill talks to me about a Princeton study that was experimenting with people’s moods by injecting positive or negative content into their social network feed, and what they found out is that they can in fact alter someone’s mood! So, he realized that the next big social network would be decentralized. His network doesn’t or will not ever sp

“Google and Facebook, those are two companies that we all use a lot. We love using them, but we don’t love the fact that they have an incredible amount of data on us that they sell to other people and are unaccountable. They’re too big. So blockchain is the tech people saying ‘no’ we don’t like that status quo. We want a decentralized internet that’s fairer and more transparent and more secure. That’s what attracts a lot of people to the movement.” Bernie Moreno Developers and big businesses have come together for a collaborative purpose --to learn, to find ways to work together and to be a part of this rapidly growing blockchain movement. Bernie Moreno and about thirty executives from the city of Cleveland and the State of Ohio have put together a blockchain conference in just a couple of months featuring some of the biggest names in crypto and in business all together under one roof. Featured speakers included: Joseph Lubin, CEO and Co-founder of ConsenSys Nick Szabo, Creator of Bit Gold and Smart Contrac

“The requirements for skills are changing so quickly that the only real characteristic you can have is a desire to constantly be learning and constantly be upgrading your skills. Anybody who thinks that they’re going to come into their career with the same skills that they’re going to leave their career in this generation, they’re going to be caught off guard. So, it’s adaptability and a willingness to constantly evolve as a person.” – Matthew Spoke In this compilation podcast, I talk to Susan Oh, Matthew Spoke, Anu Bhardwaj, Betsabe Botaitis, and Eman Pulis. Aside from all things blockchain and crypto related, what else makes these forward-thinking, big-picture seeing, crypto dynamos tick? How do they look at the world and what’s some advice that they can give the rest of us who are trying to grow or do better or learn some insights? I got to ask these five successful thought-leaders about things like: challenges they’ve overcome, an important character trait that would be helpful for someone entering the wo

“Most people can't keep showing up to anything. I think that your ability to show up and keep showing up and, and outwork, everybody else is everything. I also want to comment that I think for young people listening to this podcast in their 20s and they're getting going, there’s this horrible pressure that I did not have that they have that you have to be part of a startup be crazy successful, have a non-profit, intern at the White House… stop it. Slow down. Do one thing well.”   – Michael Hyatt What if I could get five of the coolest, forward-thinking, big-picture seeing, crypto dynamos together in one place and pick their brain about things that are blockchain related, and not? I’d want to ask them about some challenges that they’ve overcome. I’d ask if someone’s new to crypto, where should they start to wrap their head around Bitcoin, blockchain and this whole new crypto world. And I’d want to know what’s most important, from their perspective -- Love, Money or Influence. Well, in this compilation podcast,

“When we talk about securities tokens, that you openly can talk about a financial return because you’re investing in a product or a business with the expectation of financial return. When we talk about utility tokens and utility token sales, we’re talking about purchasing tokens in order to access or use a product or service so there shouldn’t be any expectation for financial return.” Richard McBeath, VP of Marketing for Masterworks shares his story and the innovative project he’s working on involving tokenizing securities, specifically artwork, on a blockchain. Have you ever wondered what’s it must be like to own a Picasso or a Monet or an Andy Warhol painting? Up till now, only the wealthiest people in the world have been able to afford the kind of artworks created by the masters. But with blockchain technology taking the securities world by storm, all that’s about to change. Masterworks is tokenizing artworks. So, if you’ve ever dreamed of owning a piece of history, a famous work of art or a painting by a

“I think the Wild West of non-compliant token sales is over, thankfully. I think from a securities law perspective, it’s very exciting actually because it’ll make the capital markets more accessible. We talk a lot about financial inclusion in the blockchain industry, and I think this is actually it. With a caveat that it still has to be compliant with securities laws.”  Alexandra Levin Kramer has three degrees, which is probably a huge help since she’s working on three different enterprises in the blockchain space right now. She’s a practicing lawyer and partner at CKR law in NYC and the Founding Chair of its Blockchain Technology + Digital Currency practice group. She also co-founded Women On the Block, which hosts blockchain conferences around the world. And, she’s Co-founder of Womin.io that uses blockchain technology to enable freelancers and employers to interact peer to peer through its decentralized platform. Women on the Block Alexandra has been in the space for a few years now, but this past January

“I think that this space, particularly Blockchain generates a lot of actual prosperity by bringing markets to things that weren’t possible before. We’re building an encyclopedia that’s not owned by anyone… other people have a stake in collectively owning the governance and the profit and the value that’s generated out of this and before blockchain that literally wasn’t possible.” Sam Kazemian is one of the co-founders of Everipedia, which is basically like Wikipedia, decentralized. Wikipedia, like most things on the internet, is becoming outdated because people like Sam are recognizing that there’s way more value to the internet than what we’ve been accessing up till now. So Everipedia is tokenizing the value of their encyclopedia of information. IQ tokens are earned by anyone who wants to generate or curate the information on this new monetized digital encyclopedia. Why not be paid for creating content, approving edits or for selling services on the network? It’s the Proof of Stake model. When someone wants

 “There’s lots of evidence today that online and in our digital lives, which is increasingly most of our lives these days, there’s just a whole bunch of things that are broken. Things that we’ve accepted as normal. Things that we’ve come to see as the status quo. And, nobody’s questioned is it ok that I have to make the trade-off of free online services for personal private data.” Matthew Spoke, Co-Founder of Aion, talks to me about the original intentions of the internet. It started off as a peer to peer and it became centralized. But, blockchain technology is levelling the playing field and anyone can have the opportunity to sell a successful product or service and Matt says we can all collectively can own the next version of the internet. What does it mean now that the internet can become decentralized? What will it mean when greater financial democracy is accessible around the world. What will it mean for government policy as the technology that crosses borders becomes mainstream? “Decentralized networks