Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Dean Masley & Jacob Sears: College Crypto – Jacob Sears and Dean Masley Talk About Bitcoin Education

Episode Date: October 20, 2014

The College Cryptocurrency Network is a non-profit organization which aims to provide students, academics, and faculty with the guidance and resources required to start independent Bitcoin clubs on college campuses and in schools. Since being founded in early 2014, the CCN has grown to well over 100 chapters, on every continent, from middle schools to PhD programs. Director of Student Outreach, Jacob Sears, and Creative Director, Dean Masley, join us to talk about the CCN’s work and their personal experiences with starting clubs in their respective universities. We also talked about how the concept of Bitcoin is received by students and the potential for blockchain innovation and adoption on university campuses. Episode links: College Cryptocurrency Network This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/047

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My name is Sibas Sankwuchu, and I am joined today by two gentlemen of the College Cryptocurrency Network, Jacob Sears and Dean Masley. Hi, guys. Hey. Hey, how you doing? Thank you both for coming on. So for our listeners, Brian is not here today. While we were getting ready for the show, he sent me an email or a text message

telling me that he went for a hike in the country and there's no trains because there's some sort of a train strike in Germany. And so he's stuck in the German countryside. He may join us at some point during the show, but I haven't been able to get a hold of him. So, Brian, I hope you all right. And for those of you not living in Europe, you can consider yourself as lucky that you don't have to go through things like train strikes, which happen on a regular basis here. So, perhaps you can start by introducing yourself. Jacob, could you introduce yourself? Yeah, so as mentioned, I'm Jacob.

I'm the director of student outreach for college cryptocurrency, but most of my time is taking up being a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, studying political science in my third year. I actually just finished up my thesis. and yeah, that's most of my life is academia right now. The student life, got to love it. And Dean? Yeah, so I'm Dean Maisley.

I'm the creative director for here at the CCN, help them with all like the flyers, media logo, and help all those schools make sure they're all nice and spiffy. But also I'm a student at the University of Delaware. I'm a marketing and German student, and I'm also the president of the Cryptocurrency Club at UD, we just found it a few weeks ago. Awesome.

Now, so I think this is probably the show where we've had the widest difference in time zones. Jacob, you're in Alaska. It's like 10 a.m. and Dean, you're in Delaware. So basically there's like on each side of the world right now.

The power of podcasting. Yeah. So, I mean, I just found out about the crypto college cryptocurrency network. Actually, this week, I was a BTC2B in Brussels, and I met the executive director, Jeremy Gardner, and we did a panel together on Bitcoin Marketing, which will be released later this week.

And I thought that it would be interesting to have you guys on to talk about what you do, because I think it's really interesting in terms of being able to reach a lot of people and frankly, people that have a potential of being really interested in this technology because they're not old enough to be sort of the old world, traditional sense,

financial banking kind of thing. And also not young enough to not give a damn about their future. And so I was really interested in what the college cryptocurrency network does. And immediately told Jeremy, we should have someone on and unfortunately he's taking a flight and a few hours couldn't be on but it's great to have you guys on to talk about all that so can you sort of introduce the

cryptocurrency network what it is how it got started just in a general sense yeah so um i guess just to preface everything to cover our own asses here um you know we're speaking as individuals not for the organization but uh everything we'll be talking about will be our experiences with the organization and as students in the cryptocurrency world. But as far as the College Cryptocurrency Network goes, what we call it is an advocacy and outreach group. Basically, students reach out to us, and they say, hey, we want to form a club somewhere.

Then we say, okay, we give more resources because that's what we are with the College Cryptocurrency Network. We let them have access to all our resources, which includes media flyers. You know, we've got a design team that we just formed. I'll go on about later. We've got draft documentation to help them form their clubs. We've got our professional networks.

We've got our network of companies that can help sponsor events for them and things like that. We have a lot of things that we have to offer to help them move along and help get people involved to their colleges. And that's really what we want to, What we want to help encourage is the education, innovation, and advocacy of blockchain technologies, primarily on college campuses, but everywhere.

Because, you know, collegiate campuses are where we've, A, got the young people, B, also where all the research is being done, where we've gotten a lot of innovation coming out of. So as far as when it was founded and goes all the way back to, oh so long ago, about seven and a half months. It was University of Michigan, Stanford and MIT, if I remember correctly. Jeremy Gardner and Daniel Block are co-founders, and they're both hailing from the University of Michigan. And basically, they formed their club.

Then they got the crazy idea that there might be other clubs out there besides them. And they started looking around. They finally found MIT and Stanford. And they hooked up with them and decided that maybe, hey, this is a good idea, and we should try and spread this around more. And so the college cryptocurrency network was formed. I guess, funny story, I'm actually, I can't say fourth, but I think like fifth or sixth on the line of people that was contacted,

just from the sheer fact that I did some blog writing back in the day. And back in the day, if you search Bitcoin, Alaska, my name would come up primarily in the Google research, Google search results, and our co-founder, Daniel, just happened to be going through the list of states in alphabetical order

looking for Bitcoin clubs. So, when you started your first club in Alaska, were there any other clubs in Alaska? Were you the only one at that time? Funny story about that. I'm actually still working on my paperwork.

It's been kind of overwhelming with the trying to get my thesis work done, but it's been from the faculty and whatnot I've reached out to as far as sponsorship for that sort of thing. It's been real nice. We're definitely going to be the only club up here in Alaska

because there's only three colleges primarily, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juno. And they're all and neither the other two have a cryptocurrency club, but I'm hoping to establish a real strong network in Alaska where we can reliably, I guess, connect and work on projects together,

considering Alaska is so far apart that it's going to be pretty small projects otherwise. So tell us about the types of projects that come out of these cryptocurrency groups. What do you call them? Clubs? You call them clubs? Yeah, I mean, they're clubs. So as far as like how they operate, every, every club is, it is a completely separate entity from the network. We just kind of, I mean, if you want to think about it this way, we're kind of like a side chain that operates on top of the blockchain. So they're all the independent clubs that actually make things run, but we just kind of help connect things together, you know, add a little additional information, bring people together in different ways.

I actually could give my experience to elaborate on that on like how the C-Denects. CCN helps the students directly. I mean, when I was sitting up the chapter here at the University of Delaware, it's completely independent of the CCN. But what the CCN was able to do is I could go on there, find some sample constitutions, reference it with my school materials to make sure I covered all the bases. Obviously, the topics of cryptocurrency and the news,

like there's some negative viewpoints of it. And if people have only heard the negatives, they want to have a lot more information on the topic. If your students saying, hey, I want to use this cryptocurrency and they've only heard it with drug money, they want you to have a lot of extra, you know, reasoning, what you're going to do with it, how you're going to explain things. And so to be able to balance those ideas with the rest of the network, it would give me materials

like other colleges that have already set up the different clubs, and they've gave me resources so you can easily research it. So just kind of streamline the entire process. So my focus was entirely with the organization, and they kind of helped me get all the resources together in the back end. Okay. So it kind of reminds me a couple years ago I was involved with an organization called Toastmasters, or basically you create these clubs and you learn how to do public.

speaking and leadership skills and things like that. And they, although it's not decentralized, it's a very central organization that has a lot of money and a lot of resources, what they provide is, you know, the kit, basically the, all the tools and resources which allow anybody just to create a club. And it sounds to me like this is sort of a similar model where the college cryptocurrency network will offer the tools and resources to the universities. And then it is up to them really, perhaps where it differs from those master model. is they really have the freedom and the liberty to kind of operate their club how they wish.

Yeah, I mean, you've basically got it spot on there. I mean, we're just going to provide any extra resources to help smooth things over. If they need, you know, some extra opinions on stuff, we're always here to help with that. We're trying to, we're kind of launching a design movement. So we've got a design team going to help design logos and stuff that Dean and I are helping head up that are going to help clean up, you know, school. logos because, you know, to be honest, not everyone's a graphic designer. I know I'm not. So, you know, to have, to have that sort of help when needed is absolutely great. We always offer to, at least I always offer to contact administration and stuff like that if need be to talk to them

to kind of help a sage interferes about, you know, Bitcoin being, you know, horrible stuff and all that. you know because like dean said there is that kind of negative perception with a lot of people and we just got to do what we can to kind of fight against that show that hey we're out there just trying to educate people and get people involved we're not trying to you know get people to sell drugs it's just good old education yeah i suppose that might come up on a university campus is the crypto cryptocurrency club is going to be using those bitcoins of laundromani and sell drugs to freshmen's students so you have to make a clear effort to distinguish yourself from the sensationalized news type lines.

Sure. So let me ask you, what's the landscape like now? How many clubs are there in the U.S. and in other places around the world? So the number kind of is a little hazy just with how many people we were waiting to get response back from, but it's about 100. And it grows like every week. Yeah. It's about 115 chapters right now all over the globe. Every continent that's inhabited from Hong Kong to Australia, to,

to tons of clubs here in the U.S. to South America, quite a few over in Germany. We're going to send an ATM to Antarctica to hopefully get that last continent as well. But yeah, I mean, we've got the chapters everywhere, and they've been a lot, some of them have been really nice and active. I know that some of the German students over at the,

and I'm not, I'm not going to try and pronounce the name just because I know I will butcher it. But one of our journal in universities is been doing just absolutely phenomenal stuff. A lot of them are writing research articles on their own topics or cryptocurrency topics. And one of them helps with the Dogecoin Foundation and stuff like that. I mean, just super active individuals that are just really great to see be involved and really great to actually be able to hang out and get to know these people. It's good ideas from everyone. When someone else is doing something cool,

it's nice to see if you can adopt that model and bring it somewhere locally. So once someone kind of breaks the ice, it's kind of easier for everyone else to copy and do the same thing too, which is what we want to encourage. Okay. So how do you, so I guess you learn from what certain clubs are doing, and then you'll use that.

That'll kind of trick back up to the top, and then you'll use that again to update the, the resource material that you provide to new clubs. It's very easy to sell an idea when it's already been done and there's tons of resources on it. And you can just link to a bunch of things and say, look how amazing it worked out for that campus. We could do something similar to on our campus.

And it just kind of gets the ball rolling. Yeah. So, I mean, like, I assume you've seen, and I assume that some of your followers have seen the Georgia Tech branded Bitcoin wallet that's been talked about lately. I haven't. I think that... Oh, you haven't?

No, okay, well... Please tell me about it. There is Georgia Tech is... Do you know if they're working on it? I think they're working on it still. I think what they have, they haven't implemented with their point system. So they're in school kind of like payment systems.

Like, I know at my school there's like a system called flex. You load dollars into your card and you can use it up the gift shops and any of the school-related places on campus. And I think they have a similar system set up where you can deposit bitcoins and it comes out as the US dollar amount onto your card. It doesn't like float. I mean, it's kind of like bit pay, I think. You just put it in and then it comes out as a dollar amount.

Yeah, and they're working on integrating that right now, and I think it's absolutely phenomenal. It's probably one of my favorite projects I've seen coming out of a school in a long time just because that sets the precedent for having so many other schools get involved like that and say, hey, you know, why not? If we can just convert it over dollars, but students put on their card, I mean, it's already going to be the university's money anyway. I mean, they're really not losing anything.

So why not give them the option if they so choose to put other money in? It's just a great way to experiment with the technology in a realistic way. So that students, they say, oh, what's Bitcoin? Let me just give it a test run. Little things like that make all the difference. So can you give me an idea of what these clubs look like? I mean, I guess they're probably all very different, but can kind of give me a general idea? Yeah, they actually, they are very different between different clubs.

Some of them are more really casual, just meetups mostly. And so they just kind of agree, a bunch of people agreed to meet up at a certain location and just talk Bitcoin for a few hours, I guess. I don't even know it that long. But in other clubs, I know at Penn State University, Patrick Science is heading that up. And they do a lot of cool things like they do nice lectures to explain the technology, but also they have interviews, I think, with people coming around. And they want to do like charity events with like their big thon. agenda. And they're using that to kind of integrate Bitcoin

with more school stuff by kind of going in that charity focus. And Pat always comes up with details every day, so I'm sure I'm already outdated. But little things like that, you can go as small as really casual meetups to try and change the university with Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. And what's the

largest club? Do you have any idea? The largest club? I don't know. Is that a MIT? I think it's MIT. Penn State Stanford's pretty big Yeah

Those are probably our biggest ones Michigan's pretty big Yeah I don't know any accurate Number I don't want to leave anyone out Don't don't yeah I don't I don't leave anyone out who's big and It's something or anything Yeah

But everyone's doing great stuff regardless how big or small Yeah I know at least a couple of the clubs have Like a hundred student plus mailing lists I can say that much with relative confidence So it's nice to see that kind of support on the campuses at least, although it could be much better than that. I need to get some updates from people.

And tell me what kind of projects have you seen come out of these clubs? I mean, have there been any startups that actually were born from these clubs? Yeah, too many startups. Really? Yeah. I know of at least a couple of our members that regularly participate. that have their own startups. I know there's at least a few more that I don't know of,

and I'm pretty sure at least half of our club heads probably have some sort of crazy idea they want to make into a startup still. But as I guess some concrete, just for that you can search on the news. I mean, MIT has done stuff with their bit competitions, and I think like the three top winners have each created their own solutions, their own startups,

they're going to pursue. Right, right. all the New Jersey going after Rubin, I think, at MIT for his project earlier, so that was another thing related in the news. But I think people at Stanford are all, I mean, obviously the Stanford community is really into startups.

Yeah, but the thing is with the startups, it's not necessarily part of the CCN, but we help them kind of with the education on campus. But we love when students do that because that's the whole point, getting them to build their own skills and see what they can do and contribute to society. And can you give some examples of these startups?

well one of them was the decentralized identity I think so they were trying to make like an avatar service so you can have the same avatar across the web that's like under your control I know another one was helping you deal with like taxes to help go through that I should have looked them a little bit more closely before I came on here again but that was over I think the summer and they had two competitions yeah and of course I mean there's the MIT Bitcoin project we've got some a question a few hackathons we've got going on. Texas just, Texas just had a hackathon, a huge turnout, I think, in Austin.

Yeah, I think it just finished up this morning or it's going to finish up this afternoon, depending on I'm getting my time zones mixed up. But sometime today it'll finish up. And everything I've heard coming out of there has just been phenomenal. There's a huge turnout. The pictures look great. So I'd like to kind of go, because I mean, since you're here and perhaps a lot of people listening, some of the people listening might be students.

and they might want to create a club. Can you walk us through, sort of, you know, how do you go about creating a club with the cryptocurrency network? Yeah. So this is my field of expertise. As the director of student outreach,

my day-day activities primarily consist of, you know, communicating with our new clubs, helping any new members get involved with us, get them the resources need and whatnot. But I kind of went into it a little bit when doing an introduction just because that's how second nature it is to me now. Basically, we have students reach out to us.

When they reach out to us, we say, you know, we have a little discussion with them. Usually we try and have a video conference call. We chat with them. We get to know them. He gets to know what they want to do. Get to know what they need from us. And we share with them all of our resources we can give them. If there are any projects right off the bat that they have going on or want to get going on,

We see what we can put them in contact with. But then we just try and check up every once in a while. Make sure if they're still forming a club, everything's going well. If they need us to call anybody, speak to anyone, Skype into any meetings or anything like that, whatever we can do to help. And then they get officially recognized as a club. The university then can give them funding if they need funding for projects,

allows them to get officially recognized for marketing and stuff like that on campus to reach out to the students better, to get more people involved, to get more people educated, to get bigger projects going and so on and so forth. And then they can just roll however they want to and do their own thing. And are there any requirements? I mean, does it cost anything? Are there any membership fees? No, all free.

All free. Yeah, it's all free. we, I mean, of course, we want to avoid that just because, I mean, I think, you know, I can't speak for, you know, why there's not. But, I mean, A, I think it'd be a bad taste. I mean, especially with all the scams and whatnot, we've had in the cryptocurrency sphere, I think charging money for something like this that can be done free pretty easily is, you know, would be a little sour. And also, in that kind of same light, the point is also focusing on what the students are doing. So the college cryptocurrency network is nothing without the students who are doing the stuff involved. So students who are creating content who are doing cool hackathons, well, they get the full credit

and the college cryptocurrency just makes everyone else aware of it and say, hey, look what they're doing. A little more than that. So that's also part of that. I mean, it would be ridiculous to charge anyone because it's nothing without everyone involved. Yeah. I mean, I'll be honest, I don't feel like I do a terrible amount day to day. but some of these people that were involved with and some of the clubs you've got going on are just phenomenal, just doing stuff every day that just blows my mind as far as how active they are on campus

and what kind of support they're getting. That I'm honestly quite jealous of considering the, you know, I guess the Bitcoin economy up here in Alaska. So, you know, I good on them and I just want to do what I can to help support them. I guess perhaps since we have you on, can you tell us about, the Bitcoin ecosystem in Alaska? We've never had anybody from Alaska before, so we must have Alaska. Yeah, that's because it's basically non-existent. You're running the show, right?

Just about, I guess, to go into a little bit more detail about my story really about how they found me, apparently Daniel found an article that was written by the Anchorage Daily News, which is our state newspaper about Bitcoin in Alaska. and I was one of the three people interviewed. There was a guy who, I think, runs the meetup. There was a guy who had six figures in mining equipment up there, and then there was me who just wrote blogs and was trying to get a club going up in Fairbanks.

Yeah, I guess if you want to do mining in Alaska, I mean, your heating bill, I mean, it's twofold because you'd get free heating, and then also you can cool your machines for free. Yeah, that's definitely, something people have tried. I can't comment on their successfulness, but you know, that yet again,

successfulness in mining as a whole is kind of questionable. So, at least nowadays. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I think it's pretty generous to say that there's not much going on up here. Unfortunately, it's not a very computer savvy, generally,

state. I mean, we don't really have any major, you know, computer science schools or anything like that. University of Alaska Fairbanks is a engineering school, which is about as close as we get. And it's a pretty conservative state. It doesn't particularly like technology. And with the spread in population, it makes it kind of an uphill battle all around. But I'm trying to see what I can do.

I actually, I guess to have another little story, I was going to be on a Bitcoin panel down at the University of Alaska Anchorage Bookstore. that was going to go on last, Jesus, last spring, I think. And on the way over, my girlfriend's car broke down. So we ended up missing the panel completely. Did not get to participate on that. They still had the professor from the University of Alaska Anchorage College, who I think was kind of proposing some counterpoints, talk a little bit.

And then, and still got to be. to Anchorage eventually. Unfortunately, that was a nice six-hour drive, but I missed the panel completely. So hopefully we'll be able to try and schedule one of those again soon that I can actually participate in. I know what that's like, you know, I'm from Canada where it's cold and also lots, you know, long, long distances. We've all, I think we've all had that kind of that kind of thing happen. So I'd like to talk maybe about, you know, really how how Bitcoin is received on campus. So, you know, the people, in these clubs are young people.

I think they're, well, generally young people are quite open to change and open to new ideas and disruptive technologies and whatnot. So how, aside from the people actually in the clubs that are into Bitcoin, you know, and they understand it, how is Bitcoin received by young people on college students? You know, it's kind of, it's that kind of a dichotomy. You know, you got on one side of people that, you know, have been screwed over by the education finance system, I guess how you can put it.

With student loans, just being near predatory, you know, how much insane amount of money we have to take out every year to, you know, finance this stuff. Working with banks just is always a hassle. And so you show them this and like, hey, this is a kind of cool alternative. We don't have to deal with the bank anymore. that's always sucked. And being able to get involved that way and seeing there's this different part that allows them to avoid that involvement.

And then there's the other side where just every day is in the dollar, why would I use anything else? Why would I want to be involved with anything that's not the dollar? That's just going to make things complicated or this doesn't make sense. Why would I want this?

And then those are the ones that you really have to sell on the concept to say like, no, like, trust me, this is actually a lot simpler than a lot of this stuff, you know, it would be really beneficial. I know, Dean, do you want to say anything? Yeah, so, I mean, I think with the students on campus is exactly what you said. Some of them who know what it is, I mean, they love it, but they're eating it up. And there's another group that I think is a large percentage of students who still don't

really know what it is. They've heard this in the news. But if you explain the concepts and you show them demonstrations, I think a lot of them just get it. I mean, like, we, I've been using a bank account far less than I've been using Bitcoin. I mean, it's just, and it's more familiar to me. I mean, it's on my, it's on my phone. It's very relatable technology-wise instead of going to like a bank office and talking with someone about kind of policies I'm not really familiar with. And the more I do global work. I mean, with the CCN, it's a global community. I mean, doing that kind of work without

this kind of global currency, this wouldn't work as well. There'd be much more friction, much more obstacle points. I think our generation, we use, you know, video, chat, talk with our friends across the entire world. We do a lot of things, the social networking, just keep up with each other wherever we are. And a money that kind of follows that same motive is much more familiar than, you know, what our policies and governments are doing right now. I think they don't really represent the interests of the youth right now. And Bitcoin is something where you can kind of express that, like a different paradigm shift

that we're more familiar with. That's my opinion on that. Right. So the idea of paradigm shift, I think, is really interesting. And this is something that we discussed at the conference. Brussels on Friday is, you know, there is a paradigm shift in the technology, but there's also a paradigm shift, I think, in mentalities, right? So the idea that you'd want to build this sort of centralized corporation with like tentacles everywhere and really with lots of

control and monopoly and with unethical practices, I think, I mean, I'd like to think that there's some sort of a paradigm shift in the way that people think. I think that's brought on in a lot of ways by the proximity that the internet has provided. Like we can now see and be empathetic to other people around the world, whereas before it was a lot harder to be empathetic and to have direct communication with other people, especially from far away. So can you comment on how Bitcoin and decentralized technologies and cryptocurrencies and young people in their 20s, you know, just in the, you know, just in.

informative years, how they can adopt that technology and then really take it forward? Well, like, as you just said, I mean, it makes us more pathetic to the people around us. And I think that's a very important point because I don't think it's ever going to happen again in history where one nation can wage war against another propaganda to paint the other people of some kind of in human sticks. I mean, I'm more connected with the kids in Hong Kong and the Arab Spring and what they're doing than what my government's doing. And I feel like I'm more connected with their efforts because I can communicate.

communicate with them directly. I can read their posts on social media on a live feed. And you can kind of feel if that were to happen in my proximity, I would probably want their support as well. And it just kind of brings on a global consensus of students or young people together that aren't really separated by borders. I don't feel separated from someone from around the world just because, you know, they were born there. I feel like we can all work together in this kind of global community now that we have something like the Internet to do so and Bitcoin. So I think that's kind of continuing on that paradigm shift. I mean, we don't really need this structure where we're from to define what we're allowed to do and what we can do. And we're much more independent as a, I think our generation is much more independent because of the tools we have now.

We can do much more than anything before with our phones. So it's amazing. Yeah. I mean, my, my major is political science. So I can go on for days about the state and, you know, how arbitrary country lines are and stuff like that. But I think really what the best thing is is that the internet. I mean, young people today are so integrated with the internet now. You know, like, everything we have to do is on the internet.

I know half the stuff I have to do for college, even with interacting with the college, is online now. I know just about everything I do to communicate with a lot of my close friends is on the internet now. And really, to introduce a currency that exists only online, I think really makes sense for, you know, for young people like us that do operate so much on the internet that, you know, even, you know, it's an internet money, but it's also super easy to use in person, in public. It's a natural progression. It's backed by concepts that we understand. I mean, probability, math,

all those things aren't as convoluted or opaque as something like the government monetary systems and something that's more transparent and allows more involvement in it. So on those basic concepts, when you're explaining this to young people, when you're explaining this to students that are not necessarily in the Bitcoin-eastern system,

but they're just college students and they're maybe curious about it. What are the type of questions that they have? Are they more interested in technical aspects, in the practical aspects, in the political or societal aspects? I don't know. As far as the questions I usually get,

I think 98% of them are usually practical. Like, why should I use this? What can I use this with? You know, what kind of usage they can get out of it? You know, what are the pros and cons to them using it versus actually trying to understand the technical aspects, because I can, you know, we can go on all day about, you know, how it works and how the encryption algorithms and all this work together

to help form secure network with the mining algorithms and how the blocks come together to, you know, help hold the transactions and all this stuff. But to be honest, most people don't give a shit. Like, most people, they're perfectly fine with going, yeah, the nerds say it work. and it's real, and it's real easy to use. If you give a demonstration, the demonstration is all you need.

I mean, like, people ask, like, what can you use it for? And then I whip up my phone and then I say, like, sometimes I'll even use Twitter. I'll use a service to send Bitcoin over Twitter. And that always blows away too. I mean, just giving simple demonstrations to show, like, how programmable money can be used practically. I mean, with, like, storage coming out with, like, selling out your hard drive space, open bazaars coming out. We can maybe sell textbooks or tickets to concerts on, you know, remove scalp.

Little things like that just kind of like come into mind when you reveal these technologies are already being built. I think it's a lot easier for people R.H. to get their heads around that. And once they kind of see this new applications coming out, they're much more receptive to it. And they don't really ask the questions like, oh, what is money? I mean, they're not really concerned about that if they can let them do what they want to do, like interact on the web in a social way. Yeah, I was going to say you'll probably see a little bit of my political alignment come out here. but, you know, I just, I take a lot of issue with just how

inefficient the banks are as far as, you know, how much of a central part in our lives they are versus, you know, how much power they have over us as far as controlling our money, how fast it gets to where it needs to go, all this stuff versus Bitcoin, which just works because you help participate and works because the people say it should, not because you've got some big, greedy, you know, fat cat CEO sitting at the top saying, yeah, well, you know, it's like two days to process. You know, it works because it works as fast as it can and we're constantly trying to work to improve it. There's nothing better than that, knowing there's improvement trying to be done than having the banks and whatnot sit there and go, yeah, it's getting there as fast as we can when, you know, everyone knows good and well that it could easily be there in five seconds. I mean, to expand on that, I mean, we use technologies that grow every year. I mean, like, I think Snapchat didn't exist a few years ago, and yet people use it all the time now, Instagram, Facebook,

all these things we use, like every single year look dramatically different. So why should our money systems look like they did from the 1950s? I mean, credit cards, you can't send it over the Internet without it becoming insecure. That's inherently silly. I mean, why would we use a technology that's not built for it? Instead of building a technology that's meant for the Internet, instead, what we've done is made an insurance system to make it not affect people. But then we just end up paying a premium on an insurance,

but it's just like an unlimited band-aid fix. I think it's time to kind of make this globally compatible instead of trying to have these band-aid solutions of insurance companies trying to back up a credit card system that's just not meant for the Internet anymore. And how receptive are college students to that, to the idea that the banking system is broken? Because, I mean, when I was in university a couple of years ago, I mean, I had no idea how the banking system worked.

I mean, I just used it. So are they sensitive to that? Yeah, I think the 2008 financial crisis definitely struck a tone where people are now very much aware of how our system is set up and how there's not really any fixes done to change what's going to happen. I mean, so what happened in 2008? We haven't done much changes to make sure that won't happen again. And a lot of people are kind of aware and want to have a different approach now because if it happened to 2008, what's the same? kind of stop it from happening again. After all the horrible things that happened,

all the students are very aware, we have like drive-out looks that aren't as great as our parents had. And we have to kind of see how we can do that for ourselves now. Instead of just trying to patch up a system that is not catering to us. I mean, it's not like the banks are evolving to make mobile apps or doing things to make our lives easier or make it cheaper to send money across the world.

No, I mean, I have to pay like minimum amounts if I hold a basic balance to my bank account. If I have to use an ATM, it costs $250, all these little things to use my money, like nickeling and diming me over, technology, I can have a video chat with someone across the world for free. And I mean, we're doing that right now. I mean, it's just a totally different paradigm what we use every single day.

And it's totally different from the way we use money. So it's just like, for me, it's just not even a new concept. It's just kind of like upgrading what we should already be using. I was just going to say, I think as far as how receptive they are to, you know, at least the banking industry being broken, and it kind of depends on how well it's been working for them. You know, I mean, most people go, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if it's working for them, then it ain't broke. So it just kind of depends on what they've been involved in.

Like, I know I've had struggles with getting collegiate loans and things like that. I'm a self-funded collegiate career. I haven't really been able to get any money so far from my parents, not that they haven't tried, but it's all been me trying to get money from the banks and through scholarships and stuff like that. It's just been a pain. I mean, it's always just been a hassle and things like that. And, you know, dealing with the bank accounts and stuff like that, trying to transfer money between them, being unnecessarily complicated, trying to send money anywhere. It's just ridiculously weird. It's just too complicated. And you always have to give

out your identity to do anything. It's really weird in a time of of, you know, a time of technology where you can just go make burner accounts for any website you go on to basically anonymize where you're from and be just about completely anonymous with what you're doing on the internet, except for when you have to purchase things, because, of course, you have to get out every single detail of your information then. Right. So I'm curious, how are the universities taken to this? If the students are quite open to it, and the students understand the concepts, and the students are sensitive to the concepts which supports sort of Bitcoin ideologically,

how are the universities responding to it? All over. They have reactions all over. I mean, we see at MIT, MIT and also at PSU, they're really taking it on board. They're really happy to see what the students are doing. My school, they're pretty neutral, if not a bit tentative.

They're not against it, and they're happy to see what we can do with it. I've talked to faculty, and they're happy with it. But, I mean, they're not really on board as university, but they're totally happy that we're doing it as a campus group. And then also on the far other end of the spectrum in New Jersey, they have problems with them completely not letting them do it at all. So it's really all over. And I think so, yeah, I think that's having problems with that.

And so there's problems all over, not problems all over, but there's a spectrum all over of how university responding to it. And I think it really just depends on the individual administration. Right. And perhaps even like, I mean, the state where it's in and. Right. Well, I mean, even in Delaware, we have Senator Tom Carper and he's been leading the efforts on digital current. and I've reached out to him a few times, but even still at the university

has been pretty neutrally tentative, which I mean is understandable, considering if they're not dealing with cryptocurrency, they don't want to aware. I'm not aware of all the opportunities they can present. So, well, we're here to change that. So perhaps this is a good segue into a partnership that you recently, I guess a few months ago,

sealed with Korn Academy. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, so that's actually a pretty recent development, as far as when we announced it. I think it was about two, two and a half weeks ago now. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. And, yeah, it's just a real solid partnership because Coinacademy.com is basically internet-based lectures.

They try and get those out there on basic concepts of Bitcoin, some of the more advanced concepts trying to educate people in simple lecture-style format, you know, and try and put that out there for people to just use. and so, you know, that lines up with our ideas about Bitcoin education and advocacy perfectly. So I think it was a real good idea on our part. It plays into what we want to do, which is, you know, get lectures set up that people can play off of or use for their own needs or whatever it is. Or even using to build their own lectures at their own clubs and build workshops. And so, Coin Academy, for those who don't know, can you describe what it is?

Oh, yeah. Well, go ahead, Jacob. Well, Coin Academy is, it's a series, well, not a series. It's a site that has a bunch of different lecture styles. It's got collections of courses. It's got on all sorts of Bitcoin-related topics. looking at the page right now. I guess it's probably a bit like Coursera or a Con Academy or something like that. Yeah, kind of similar to that.

So it's got a collection of lectures on digital currencies and social activism. It's got a lecture on the introduction to digital currencies, digital currency ownership, Bitcoin for merchants. It's got all these lectures on all sorts of topics. and they're all done by their team trying to help educate people. It's all free, and it's that same sort of general idea that this information should just be out there. We don't want to charge money for it. We just want to have it out there, educate people, and, you know, the making money can come later however it happens. Like, that's not the important part.

The important part is getting people involved because that's what we need for this to be successful. Because honestly, the technology isn't too difficult to understand once you kind of start using a little bit. I think the practical workshops that show how the technology works, kind of take away the mystery from it, and people feel a lot more comfortable investigating it. Instead of just hearing about this cryptocurrency, it sounds much more techy that way. When you have these videos, it helps you realize it's just another computer application, something you're familiar with already. So what's the long-term, where do you see this partnership going in the future? I mean, we can't comment on anything specific because, honestly, I don't know.

But, I mean, I just love to see us continue to foster these lectures to try and make sure that we help them grow to get this information out there. And hopefully we can see, I mean, I think it's no secret that we want to see, you know, Bitcoin academia become, you know, an actual subject around. a lot of these colleges. Which it already is. That a few, I think. Yeah. The few colleges already have this going on. I'm more of these colleges.

So I think, I don't know if they'd be able to help or, you know, if we want to, if it'd be our own doing, but just being able to make sure we can establish networks to, to help foster Bitcoin academia. Would just be phenomenal just because that,

that's one of our end goals, is to make sure that Bitcoin research and whatnot can go on. The Bitcoin studies can go on an average college environment because that's our system's way of fostering knowledge is by going to the collegiate atmosphere and studying in those ways. Right. Do you think that perhaps universities and colleges where people are, I guess,

mentalities are usually quite open and liberal in that sense. A, do you think that this is an environment that can foster some sort of mass adoption of Bitcoin, whatever that means, kind of throw away this term mass adoption. And if it is, what is the kind of key to, what do you think is holding it back? Or what is the key to sort of spreading Bitcoin through universities and colleges? I mean, I guess we'll see with a little bit with the MIT Bitcoin drop coming up. I mean, that'll be kind of a big foray into that. As far as college is being kind of the push for mass adoption,

I mean, I think it very well could be. It just kind of depends on the responsiveness of the students to the technology, them recognizing the opportunities it holds, and then them creating ways to create value for themselves because ultimately it kind of seems obvious to me right because you've got a place with with really creative people okay with who are kind of open and you know opening their minds and everything and then also use money and need money and exchange money between among each other and also receive money from like their parents or something like that and it's this very small kind of closed ecosystem.

So it seems to me like it's sort of the ideal place for for Bitcoin mass adoption to occur or at least to cede from. Yeah. I mean, like as you see, yeah, like it's a very, the technology itself, I don't think anyone would really hear the concepts of it and say, oh, that's wrong. Like the government should be controlled the money. I mean, I don't think when you explain how it works and it being math-based and all the individual concepts, no one's really against it.

So if we only have, if we only have to do education to kind of reveal what this technology is, I mean, that's an awesome opportunity for us to kind of be just talking about it. And then in that kind of makes people more attentive to it because the actual technology is at the selling point. We're just kind of revealing what it is through education and academic insight and little projects here and there to show it being used in application and not just theoretical. So Jacob, you said earlier that you wanted to talk about some of your experiences of conferences lately. Can you dive into that? Yeah, I mean, I know college cryptocurrency network has really allowed me to actually get to a lot of these. I just went to Coins in the Kingdom, which was put on by Sean's outposts not long ago with Dean here and a couple of the other guys.

And it was a phenomenal time. I mean, it was really what received conference. It was at Disney World. And it was a lot of fun. It really kind of showed what you can do with a... kind of a small setup for a conference while still making it really effective by having a lot of good talks and having a having a lot of fun there. I mean, Jason.

Getting to go to Disney was awesome. I mean, going to Disney hanging out with developers, just standing in line with like people who are really into Bitcoin talking about it on the wait. It's just incredible. I mean. And at Disneyland. Was it Disneyland?

Yeah, exactly. Disney World. Disney World. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we got to do a, there was a charity poker tournament.

the first night to benefit Sean's outpost, and that was a ton of fun. Everyone had a great time. Everyone just cheering each other on, having fun, discussing some Bitcoin and their own projects on the side while playing. I mean, it's really, really, really nice to see that sort of environment come together. And it's cool because you have big business partners and big businessy people with other community members and college students. And like, no matter what you're from, as long as you're kind of in this ecosystem,

Everyone's just kind of willing to help each other out, see what you're up to and see if there's any possibility for everyone to get involved. And it's just like, it's so energizing to see that kind of support. Yeah, I mean, that's been my experience in conferences as well. I always come out of it sort of with such enthusiasm, you know. Exactly. One day event. You meet all these people that are all very interesting and all doing very interesting things. And you come back out of it with so many ideas and everything.

So even though I find. conferences to be somewhat repetitive in terms of talks and the speakers and things like that. I'm always, yeah, I always come back with a whole lot of ideas and sort of a renewed optimism. It makes you kind of realize everything's possible almost. Like the projects that you think you might work on, you see other people doing other things, you're like, oh, well, that's no big deal. I can just start launching this now. Go ahead, Dick, if I cut you off.

Oh, no, that's fine. I was just going to say, it's hard to come out of that sort of environment with that sort of people and not feel excited for everything and to be, you know, not be like, oh, you know, just sitting there chatting with them and all of a sudden you start vamping about an idea. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, no, we could totally do that. We just use, you know, so-and-so's product. And then we develop a little bit on our end. We make sure we, you know, try and integrate this. And, you know, the system would be pretty simple to set up. And, you know, all of a sudden you've got a half a business plan going.

And, you know, it's impossible for some of the. stuff not to happen. And it's just, it's so, so exciting to be a part of that, you know, sit there and see that happen. And, you know, even if you're not involved, it's hard not to be happy for them, be like, yeah, that's a cool product. I want to get involved or, you know, I want to help you out or however you want to do it. So we're going to wrap up here in a few minutes. But before we do, I'd like to sort of get your long, your vision of what the long term objective is here with the College Cryptocurrency Network. Where would you like, how would you like to see evolve? And I guess the other question I have is, as students are in college and then they come out of college,

what sort of experience and what kind of knowledge and what will they be able to bring to the Bitcoin community and how will they be able to affect the growth of the ecosystem coming out of college? Yeah. So, I mean, as far as my view goes, I really like our mantra, the education. innovation, innovation, and advocacy. I mean, long-term goal, of course, is to educate people. We just want to get people in the know about this stuff. Even if they don't want to use it, even if they think it's kind of silly, just get in their head and say, hey, this is the thing.

We think it's really great. You don't have to think it's really great. But it's a thing. It's always an option, and it's out there, and we're making it better every day. And, of course, to foster innovation, I love seeing these new products. like these new products and projects like I it makes me just insanely excited to see some of this stuff happening that we do have just because it's uh I mean of course it's not actually out there but in the context of you know our you know what today today is like it's so crazy to

think like five years ago like you would have said this and people would go what there's no way that that is ever going to happen like that that's just insane like I I regularly send money over like Reddit and Twitter you using change tip, little things like that. And I'm excited to start using storage to, like, have better cloud storage and stuff like that. Use open bazaar to see what the possibility of that for like magic cards. It's like there's literally like an endless ability of things you can do.

It's just so exciting having Bitcoin, even if you don't have Bitcoin, just being involved in the news and seeing what's going to be available in like a month. It's like, oh, that's never existed before. Next month we can try it out. And it happens like constantly. There's new products being released all the time. So it's just so much fun. And as far as, you know, as students leave college, what they can bring and, you know, what we can give to them, I mean, we're currently trying to get up a system where these companies, you know, our partners and whatnot can communicate with these students and say, hey, we've got positions available.

Like, we want a source from the Bitcoin community, especially the young ones that are actively being educated, actively learning, and really, really want to be a partner. to all this stuff and encourage that because, I mean, A, that's the best for the companies. B, that's the best for us. And C, that's the best for the guys that want to be involved. I mean, that. And for everyone involved. Yeah. If kids are getting involved in Bitcoin startups and Bitcoin companies and they're going to be able to lead the way. And hopefully someone will be the lucky few that become the next big companies. Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong here, the big Bitcoin companies would have nothing but an interest to fund you guys, right, to support you guys financially

because you guys are creating the new, having the future entrepreneurs, developers, and economists that are going to be working in this field. Yeah, I mean, that's right. And we just want to,

we just want to encourage these students to get out there and get involved. And, I mean, if we can kind of, I don't want to say reward, but that's the only word to come to mind. If we can reward their activity and participation, with, you know, like, hey, there's some job opportunities.

Hey, there's this internship. You know, great. Like, we've given them more opportunities. We reward their participation with reputation. What was that, Dean? I said, we reward their participation with, like, reputation. You know, and if you make yourself known, and then obviously they're going to start contacting me if you're the person doing amazing things.

Yeah. Well, it was really interesting to talk to you guys. I mean, I think it's the first time that we had a nonprofit on. and also I think we often talk to entrepreneurs and people building things, but the education part doesn't get talked about a lot. And I think Bitcoin education is something that I think is quite important. I mean, obviously this podcast is part of my desire to educate people about Bitcoin. I also run a Bitcoin meetup here indeed.

Brian runs the Bitcoin meetup in Berlin. So education is something that's close to me. And I think that taking it to a very large scale like you guys are trying to do and really targeting the people that the right people, you know, these are the people that are going to be working in an industry in our economy tomorrow. So, you know, good job. And kudos to you guys for doing that. Where can we find you?

How can people get involved? How can people get involved with the College Cryptocurrency Network? So you want to go to, if you want to check out College Crypto on the web, you go to college crypto.org. There you'll find our website. It's got our membership form. If you're an interested student, if you know an interested student, please direct them there. I'll see that they've signed up and get in contact with them as soon as possible.

You can reach me if you want to send them. me an email about anything. Jacob at college crypto.org. Obviously, you can find me on Twitter at totally geeky if you want to message me that way. Yeah, and at college crypto on

Twitter is our official Twitter handle. And so just on the website, I create an account and I'm logging here. There's a forum. There's some resources and there's even a job center, powered by criminality, but so there are all the resources there, and then there's

calendar where I suppose people will be able to post meetups and things like that, I guess. Yeah, yeah. And also, once you get involved, there's, like, other things we do. Like, we send out the weekly newsletter. And as we said earlier, we do, like, the design. We got a bunch of students from different colleges who are interested in putting out some social media. We had a group hang out with them.

And we kind of see how people want to get involved. So it's a lot of all the above. Right. If you're interested also just at all at College Crypto, there's a sign-up for our news which I put together weekly on our website on college crypto.org. So if you go to college crypto.org and you go down, you'll see there, click here to sign up for the newsletter. And you can sign up. Well, thanks a lot, guys. And by the way, Brian just came on midway through, didn't want to get on because he didn't have his mic equipment with him,

but had some questions. And so you answer some of them. And he says, Kate, with a great work. So thanks a lot for coming on. Thanks for listening. If you want to follow us on Twitter, we're at Epicenter BTC. You can also support the show by giving us a review on iTunes. So you go to iTunes, look for Epicenter Bitcoin. That helps us in finding new listeners and being ranked in iTunes. And you can also support the show by sending us a tip at episodeofbitcoin.com slash tips. And don't forget to sign up for the newsletter.

Brian sends it every Friday. And it's always very, very informative. It's a great way to keep up with the latest stories and the most important stories that happen every week. And you can do that at eBitkenurbitcoin.com slash newsletter. So thanks again for listening. And we'll look forward to being back later this week. And in fact, on Thursday we'll have we posting a panel discussion that I did with Richard Katano and Jeremy Gardner, the executive director of college crypto at Epicenter BTC.

And it was really interesting to talk to us guys about the types of the types of products that we should. be focusing on building and then how we can market that to the masses in order to create a mass adoption. So that'll be on Thursday. And we'll be looking, we'll be back next Sunday with a new Google Hangout. Very awesome. Thanks for having us on, man. This was great. Looking forward to being back next week.