Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Jeremy Garder & Richard Caetano: BTC2B Conference – Bitcoin Marketing Panel

Episode Date: October 23, 2014

BTC2B Brussels conference on October 16 & 17, 2014 This episode features two parts of a session on Bitcoin marketing. First, Richard Caetano, founder of Handshake and btcReport, talks about the importance of sharing stories to create user engagement. Then, you’ll hear a panel discussion moderated by Richard with Jeremy Garder, Executive Directory of the College Cryptocurrency Network, and Sebastien Couture, as panelists. They talk about how the Bitcoin industry can grow adoption though integrated product & marketing strategies. This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/048

Hi, welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency revolution. My name is Sebastankwutuio, and thanks so much for joining me on this very special episode, all about Bitcoin Marketing. So I recently attended an event called BTC2B, which was a conference happening in Brussels. Actually, it was happening in a suburb of Brussels called Uch, which is a very posh neighborhood with golf courses and country clubs and tennis courts and castles. and things like that. So it was a very impressive place to have a conference. And since I was

invited for a panel there, and since it's only about 30 minutes away from where I live, I thought, hey, I might as well go to this event. So the idea of this event was for it to be a Bitcoin networking event, sort of a business to business conference where entrepreneurs and investors could meet and network and things like that. And originally I thought, how are they going to differentiate themselves from other conferences, because that's really what conferences are, networking events. But when I got there, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the whole organization was really centered around networking. You had sort of a big lobby area where people could come in and meet, and there was ample time between sessions, sort of networking sessions

to mingle and have a coffee and things like that. So, you know, it was really well put on that way. And although it was a very small event, when I was there, there was only about 50 or 60 people, in attendance plus about a handful of speakers, they really managed to attract some interesting speakers. People like Nicola Courtois, who's a cryptographer and has some very controversial views about the security of the blockchain, and Vittadik Poutaren of Ethereum, of course, and Adam Viziri, who's a lawyer and head of a company called Diakle in the UK. So it was very interesting to see those guys speak and to meet everybody there. And I want to say congratulations to the organizing committee for putting on such a great event.

So this episode features two parts of the same session on Bitcoin marketing. The first part is a talk by Richard Catano, who is developing a product called Handshake, which will be coming out in the next few weeks, I believe, and we'll definitely have them on the show to talk about it when it does get released. And Richard also developed an app called BTC Report, which some of you might have used before. It's an iPhone ticker app with alerts and news and things like that, and a lot of nice features, and really a really beautiful UI. And Richard talks about the importance of sharing a story to create user engagement.

And he has some very interesting things to say about that. The second part of this session is a panel discussion on Bitcoin marketing. It's moderated by Richard with Jeremy Gardner, who's the executive director of the college cryptocurrency network, which we talked about extensively in other recent episodes, and myself as panelists. And we talked about building products which cater to specific user needs and brings value to the regular user, to the masses. And I think it's obvious, but it's often overlooked because we lose ourselves in the technical and ideological aspects of Bitcoin. And so I think it's also important to recognize that products and marketing are part of a broader product strategy in

which the user needs to be at the center always. Just think about Uber. For anyone who's used Uber, that first experience is magical. You come out of it, just wanting to tell. your friends how great the service is. And they've really utilized that by creating an ambassador model by which you can send your friends, your specific affiliate code, and they get 10 bucks off their next ride, and you get 10 bucks off your next ride. And that creates ripples. And that brings more people in who also want to talk about you Uber and use Uber.

Airbnb, similar model. When you come back from vacation that first time after you used Airbnb, and you tell your friends, you know, you don't use Airbnb, wow, you need to get on. this is so awesome. You know, you get to stay in these great locations with these really cool people and it's really affordable. So I think we need to learn from the successes of these companies outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem and recognize that if we want to get to this mass adoption, which we all talk about, we have to build products which appeal to the masses, plain and simple. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode all about Bitcoin marketing. I think it's a very important

topic and I hope we'll get to talk about it more in the future on the show. And so without further ado, here's Richard Gittano. Hi, all. So we've got Richard here who's going to speak about marketing for about 10 minutes and then we're going to have a panel discussion and then it'll be lunch break, guys. So I'll go on to him to Richard. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And welcome. We're going to talk a little bit about marketing within the Bitcoin space and specifically we talk about some real world experiences that we're gained through development some applications. We'll look at some real product numbers. Like I said, from that general marketing tips that we can use and carry in our own.

So, just to get familiar with the crowd, how many developers do we have? Okay. And how about designers? designers? Who are designers? Okay. What? And how about marketing? Who is marketing? Okay.

Well, I'm a developer. I've been developing since 1990s, worked on different kinds of systems, databases, and things like that. And then since the mid-2000s been more user-focused with developing user experience and building products with that in line.

products with that in mind. And since 2011, I converted a Bitcoin convertee and adopted it and changed my world and had that great Bitcoin moment of my life like most of you, I'd imagine. So, and since that time, I've been focusing on building different kinds of apps. And in the beginning, I kind of did this shotgun approach where I took all these ideas and I just threw it against the wall and just looked in and see what would stick. And so that involved a lot of just research and development, talking to a lot of people, testing a lot of ideas, experimenting, a lot of failures, etc. But your typical product approach where you invest a lot of R&E and you see what comes out.

Of course, the other side of that is the marketing site. And typically, you know, you develop a product, try to find out what market you're going to go after, and then you send the marketing folks and try and sell it and meet some numbers and things like that. However, I didn't have that luxury. So I had to approach it from an agile perspective. Like, what can we do with limited resources and a very fast-moving beginning space? So what I approach was to combine the two.

So the product strategy was to take the product and the marketing and see how I can bring them together and work it from that perspective. And so the first point that I'd like to start with is that product and marketing has no separation. That maybe we can actually build our products with marketing already built in and not necessarily see it as two separate forces within a rollout like that. So for a use case for this presentation, I'd like to talk about one of the apps I wrote and developed, well, I should say we wrote and developed,

and give you some real. world numbers and show you how that turned out. So the app is called BTC Report, and it's a very simple app, the ticker. It was launched in 2011, and it's been kind of on the top of the app store for most of that time, and they're very happy with it.

It's been one of those apps that when we go to conferences who talk to people, they kind of recognize it, and it's getting to the other kinds of discussions. Basically, it supports 27 currencies, 35 different marketplace. It's just a very simple app. But we ended up having 40,000 downloads. We didn't expect that.

We have no marketing budget. And so, looking back, we wanted to pull out what were the lessons learned and the experiences that could be useful going forward. And so if you look at some interesting data, this is what the download chart looks like. You know, we've got

these twin peaks here, and we're like, okay, this is interesting. This is really cool. It's very exciting times. And it looked even more interesting when you overlay the Bitcoin price. So you can see that like when people get excited about Bitcoin, they start looking at what's available in the market space. And what kind of apps can they use? What kind of tools can they work with? People just start exploring. So there's definitely some opportunity when things start shaking in the Bitcoin world, indicated by the price in this case. And so, of course, I mean, we're at the beginning of the Bitcoin Revolution. We all

kind of know that. And in that respect, how can we position like our marketing strategy? What can we think about to make a better use and efficient rollout of our product? So I've simplified an adoption curve here. Basically, it broke down a Vell curve, looking at early adopters, mainstream, and the laggards. And really, we're at the beginning. And so looking at this curve, we can kind of get an idea of who we're working with and what kind of messaging we wanted to use within our applications, our marking materials, our app store descriptions,

and things like that. And so if you look at the first two types of adoptees, you have the early adopters who are mostly driven by the cool effect, you know, there's a scarcity, like, oh, I'm the only one using this, nobody really has this yet. I'm ahead of the curve.

And so they're driven by things that may like sound more like, you know, it's cool and hip to be a part of this. Whereas the mainstream might have a different, like, they may respond differently to the messaging where they might be more like, well, my friend is using this, so I want to be part of that. So I would say like right now, we can, in our messaging and our approach to marketing, we can say, well, let's target the early adopters because that's who's using it right now. And so they're turned on more by scarcity. they want to

have things that others don't have or don't know about. Some of the messaging can be like be one of the first to have this. For a BTC report, we used the message in the beginning, join the crypto revolution. That was kind of our thing. But as I said, eventually,

and we don't know how soon this could happen, we should start preparing for the mainstream, which we would change the messaging, more about joining, you know, joining, the group being more interactive with your friends and peers. So the next thing I want to talk about is one of the features that we built into the app that helps to engage the user base more into the app. And most apps today have the typical sharing features where you can tweet and email things.

But we took that and we spun it around with a little bit more of a marketing approach. we can share the story. And that was one of the things that we talked about building this app around is telling the Bitcoin story from a very user-friendly and simple way. And so what we actually did is

we just take the app and we just include a screenshot of it with the chart because it's just valuable information we thought and we could just share it. And what we found was we had a great response. People would tweet the chart

and provide some commentary and suddenly we realized that they're all telling the story. It's all part of the story. And so this is an example of combining product and marketing together. This is just one idea, but you can explore the ways of doing that as well. Telling stories seems to be something that people connect to very well. So it's been kind of a main theme for approach. So a great takeaway from here is just encourage sharing

and try to develop that within the two. As far as numbers go, we kind of stumbled on something that was interesting. More than half of our users open the app more than once a day. And so what we found was this is a high usage of the app. I mean, if we think about how I use my iPhone, it's the SMS. I open multiple times a day. It's maybe the browser, my email client, Twitter, and VTC report. It's kind of weird.

So we felt responsible to not make ticker junkies out of our... out of our users. And what that means is we don't want people to be constantly like obsessed with this data, obsessed with the app. And so what we did is, this is actually the second revision to our design. The first revision,

or the first design was more of like your traditional stock to your app where a lot of information was included. But for the second design, we actually simplified it. We took a lot of information out and focused more on the essentials. And additionally, we, early on, we provided meaningful interaction points.

such as price alert so that people weren't always like going back to the app. And our motivation was to promote good behavior with our applications and not to create the chigger junkie. And so eventually, I mean, what we're trying to do is really create happy users because the more happy they are using our app and the less disruptive to their lives, the more they would promote our app. And so as far as combining product and marketing again, we're trying to leverage our user's interaction and have them share.

And that's what we found. A lot of people were always showing the app to their friends. So it's a really short presentation, but to review the opportunities, think about the product strategy, how we can combine product and marketing together. Mind the adoption curve, know where you're at, know where you're speaking with, know where it's going. There's several different levels in that curve that we can dive into further. Enricher user's world. So the more happy we make our users, the more they're going to tell other people about it. That's the best marketing you can ever do, I believe.

Good design is really important. The high correlation to good design and increase engagement with the product. And most importantly, try to build good impressions, leave your users with good impressions of your product, because that will go a long way. So, thank you. Any questions? I love your app. I love it.

Thank you. I try to, I do a little bit of mobile. I was wondering, how did you settle on the text that people are supposed to tweet and how many people do it actually meet? Because it's always hard, you know, what do you suggest people tweet? So going back to this screen right here?

Yeah, yeah. So how did you decide that you should just tweet this, not anything more? I guess in your case it may have been obvious, right? Yeah, so for the default, for the default message, we wanted to create a hashtag for the exchange because a lot of what we're trying to do here,

the work we're trying to do is promote the exchanges. All right. So Coinbase, USD is the hashtag that we would create from the exchange. Of course, the prize, and then, yeah, BTC report. Yeah. But we try to, like, make it, you know, where people can tell the story

from their perspective and what's going on. Can you share the numbers and how many people actually share use that function ID? Or was it just those for? Yeah, I don't have the numbers, but we can definitely search on. Yeah, there's, that would be misleading, right?

But, yeah, you can do a search for BTC report. At BigC report on Twitter, you can see. I just pulled like some, the four I pulled were kind of interesting. You know, price still wobbly, but we're gone ho, a few spikes before another run, rally hard. I want it to drop more in order to get it again. Like, these are all just great points, I thought. So I use these as examples.

And do you have any for us for other kinds of marketing, or are you just hoping for the next spike? there are an end marketer time to know. Well, I mean, we kind of feel that there's a spike coming. So we've been doing some work. Yeah, to get ready for it. A lot of people are asking us, is this available on Android, you know, other devices? And so as an, this kind of started as an experiment, and we're in this really weird, like, gray area where we either need to, like, invest more into it or we need to sell it to someone who will do that. And so we don't know which way we're going to go yet. We've got other projects that we're focusing on. So, yeah, that's

You're nothing to money of that, right? Aside for promoting someone like this. Yeah, so the strategy for that was all information on the app should be free. And if you pay for anything, it's just for enhancements. Yeah, so if you, yeah, so like we offer

like colors and, you know, just kind of things that make people happy. You know, if you want to buy that. But yeah, all information from the beginning was always free. Great. So, um, maybe we can start. with the introduction. I know that you just recently and that's just a couple hours ago. So for those of you who are not my speech, my name is Jeremy Gardner and I'm the executive director of the College of Cryptocurrency Network. We're an international network of student groups

and academics dedicated to blockchain, innovation, advocacy, and development. Hi, I'm Sebastian Pichu. I am a podcaster. I'm one of the co-hosts of 10% of Bitcoin, where we'd be a podcast where we interview some of the brightest minds in the decentralization cryptocurrency space, and we're going to record a 50th episode in a few weeks. And we're not doing Google Hangouts, which I'm super

excited about it. So you can come on and interact with the guests through a chat room. It's creating some really interesting conversations. Great. So we have a... We're down some questions that we can talk about.

The first one is So when we look at the early adopters of Bitcoin, we find a wide range that span from crypto anarchists geeks all the way to mom-and-pop business owners. And so what would be some perspectives that we can use to engage with this wide range? And how would we approach this? Well, the early adopters, I mean, all those folks, they tend to adopt Bitcoin, not because it's a great consumer-facing or merchant technology, but really

because for ideological reasons, although the mom-and-pop shops actually do see the merchant advantages. What we have to do now, though, is now that we have this technology that makes a lot of sense to people, is building an ecosystem around it that facilitates ease of use. One of my other startups, along with the nonprofit, is actually a point of sales system. And that point of sales system,

isn't just for Bitcoin. It makes Bitcoin transactions incredibly easy. It uses Bluetooth low energy. Let's pretty much just open up your wallet and make a payment just by having a point of sale terminal nearby. Also, let's use NFC and QR. But what we also do, because you want to make this as simple for the merchants as possible,

we also accept NFC payments, so Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and then credit cards, so EMV and swipe. And that way, you've kind of got these trifective technologies. You don't have to use them all. You can just use it for Bitcoin. The device costs us $100. And there's really nothing to lose.

You're getting all the gains of Bitcoin without the pain of using a QR, because I don't know how many people here try going into a business and paying with Bitcoin right now. And it's a nightmare. It doesn't work in a very straightforward manner in store. And you've got to go over that hump. in order for any hope of everyone starting to begin to adopt. What do you find as some of the resistance points in getting that deployed,

getting that into the stores? Therefore. I mean, you're talking about an entrenched point-of-sale terminal monopoly. You know, we actually had a bunch of people in the Bitcoin space offer us a lot of money. For a while, we were going to go into a tech accelerator, and then for a little while we were actually in negotiations with PayPal talking about doing an acquisition. But, you know, PayPal's kind of evil.

Not a huge fan of the company. Both my developer and I, this kid's a genius. We also have another project that we're working on that's funded. And so we decided that what we're going to do is we're going to build this project out. We're going to market it more as a Bitcoin point of sale terminal, because that is the biggest pain point. That's what drove us to make it. And then we'll then send it out to Bitcoin accepting merchant.

purchase, test it, and then see if we can gain adoption. But the thing is, is that people are very comfortable with the terminals they use now. But you have to show them, and this is what we need is use cases, and show them this is easier, this is cheaper, and this is better. Also, I mean, if you want to do a large-scale implementation, you're talking about manufacturing millions of devices. They're 6.5 million in-store consumer retailers in the United States. So it's a massive market you have to tap into it.

And just even knowing where to start can be very difficult. If I can think just have a new question, I think that there's a difference in incentive for the Guteranicus and the merchant also. So you have to align. Very true. So you have to align the, I guess, the incentive and the value at for different people that you're targeting. So whether you're targeting a pop store, like you said, you have to try to find ways to solve some of the issues that.

they have, which is high cost of operating a payment card terminal, for instance, or consumers. So you have to find ways to help people to solve some problems that they're having with paying in stores. So recognizing the different pain points that the different people in this chain have is key to producing, creating products that will appeal to them. I think we'll probably get to talk about that more in Spain. but that's, I think, one of the key things that needs to be identified before you start to be products trying to target different people.

Just add on to that. Don't worry about marketing to the crypto anarchists and to the libertarians. They've already latched on, and if they haven't, the second they discover Bitcoin, they will latch on because it's right in line with their ideals. The real challenge is marketing this individual's, that ideologically may not be in line with those sort of values, but still have a tremendous amount of value from this technology.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, along the same lines, you know, BTC is to some, to many, actually, is still considered this mysterious magical money, this Internet money. So a big question we could present is how, what are some ways that we can better educate the people, explaining what it is, but not necessarily like in a technological, perspective, but more like how can this help you? How can this help us?

You know, we have these messages where we say, oh, you know, Bitcoin's not bombs, you know, things like that. Like really, these are massive changes to how society functions. And that's a hard message to get across. I don't think when it comes down to it, I think so education is a work, obviously, and so I think that you're doing is great, and I also run the heat up. And I think that having, sorry, having a venue where, people can come and learn about Bitcoin, the technology is great. I think that if we're going to kind of research, mass adoption,

which we talked about in your talk, educating people about Bitcoin and technology is not necessarily where we need to be focused in our energy. It's illustrating how the technology can solve some of these pain points that they're having, really extracting the technology from the whole thing. We want to build products. Just look at, we can look at some examples. When you take an Uber, you don't care what service you're using

or if you have to use a taxi or whatnot, although you may have some, you may be somewhat out of risk to using a taxi because you've had bad experience or what happened. If you're using Uber, it's because you've heard good things and you've had good experiences with them. And you've kind of become an ambassador. I mean, when I first used Uber, I mean, the first thing I did afterwards is tell my friends about how great it was, and I use it all the time.

And I use my referral code to get free rides to my friends, right? I think this is the type of thing that we need to try to move towards is letting the users be ambassadors. They're not the technology, but the products that are built on top of the technology. And of course, we need to make those products easy to use and accessible and for people to get into the ecosystem. but talking about the technology to your mom and pop store or to your college kid or whoever is not what we need to be focused on. Our energy?

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. Absolutely. I mean, my life these days is really explaining Bitcoin to people and it's something I can do now, but it's something I don't want to have to do. I was in Orlando at Coins in the Kingdom and this was a cryptocurrency conference at Disney, world and I kept on taking

Uber's actually. It was great by the way. It was an awesome little event. But I kept on having these Uber drives with these Haitian taxi drivers or Uber drivers. And I was explaining Bitcoin to them. They were like, oh my God, this is going to change

my life. I'm like, yeah, it is. But the problem was, there wasn't an app I could direct them to that will allow them to remit money back home. And so when I'm explaining Bitcoin to people, I don't want to explain the underlying technology and what a blockchain is and a 10-minute cab drive with a Haitian taxi driver, I want to send them to an application that lets them send money over the blockchain

to their family back home easily. I'm not really concerned about how the actual technology works because they're not going to start hacking away at and developing a program on top of it. I mean, no offense to a Haitian taxi driver is just, it's not within the realm of what they do. But what I think is important, though, is communicating what the blockchain is to assertive demographics. I mean, it's about identifying your audience. For the College cryptocurrency network, I mean, we're hosting hackathons on every, on four continents next month. And we're going to, once in, like, Argentina and Buenos Aires. And there are 3,000 to 4,000 people hackathons.

It's pretty much an entire nation of hackers all come together for one hackathon. And we're bringing Bitcoin to it. bringing Bitcoin companies into this space. And those are the guys that you want to learn what Bitcoin is and how it works. Because they're the guys that are going to build the applications that change the lives of people in their countries. You know, we have a hackathon in Kenya. And you want hackers there learning what Bitcoin in the blockchain are because they can

really benefit from it. But I don't think we need to worry so much about talking to consumers about this technology. Obviously, people like you and I, I mean, we have to talk about this because it's our job. jobs. But that shouldn't be the angle. The angle should be having applications that speak for the technology and say, look at what you can do with this awesome map. You can say, oh, by the way, it uses Bitcoin. But we will never reach mainstream adoption until people don't know that they're using the technology. Other people improvements is great. I mean, this really illustrates where we need to kind of close that gap between the technology and the usage, right, is the story. So sharing the story that you mentioned in one of the things. When you show the story, you create an ambassador, which is that meeting to talk about that product. So that Asian taxi driver's going to tell his Asian taxi driver friend, hey, by the way, I just sent money to my family.

It cost me a thing. It took five minutes. Right. And that's a $550 billion industry. Extortion an industry that has no need to exist anymore with Bitcoin. Yet there's just no good killer apps for that. Because, you know, when you're trying to introduce someone to this tech, I actually told all these Haitian tax drivers, I was like, look up Bitcoin now.

They all did. I mean, they love the idea. But don't plan to use it for a few months. Like just wait until there's some good applications for you to use this. Because what happens is, and I've seen this, and I just recently moved to San Francisco, there are probably 300 stores in stores that once accepted Bitcoin. They're now like 60 left. Because it's not an intuitive in-store process.

You don't want to introduce people to technology and tell them to use it before the applications are built for them to be ready to use it. That's why we've built this point of sales system. That's why there are several companies that are really trying to figure out remittances that are getting very close. But, yeah, when I pitch Bitcoin, I talk more about what I'm doing and how it's going to affect people. I don't tell people to go use it right now or go buy it right now because at the end of the day, I'm not really sure that's really going to benefit them. And I want this technology to benefit people. So it's triggering it out then. In a lot of ways, you can compare it.

I like to compare it when speaking with people about Bitcoin. Comparing it to email in 1992, email is a protocol. In 1992, we logged into a console and we wrote some commands and we sent email. Today, we open our iPhone and put a password and username and password, and we have email. And so the concept of what an email is today is much different than what it was back then. In the same regards, Bitcoin is a protocol. And the apps that people identify with don't exist. Or they do in very underdeveloped ways.

So I think it's a really good point to mention that. Where we're going is what we can talk about, not necessarily what you can do now because we're still underdeveloped. Right. It's like the advent of the fax machine. You know, the first fax machine came out. It was a great idea. It's like, wow, you can send documents anywhere instantly.

But, oh, wait, nobody else has a fax machine. You can't really use it yet. But it's about finding the initial adopters, which is where we're getting to. I don't think we've even fully finished getting the initial adopters. And then it's building those applications and making those applications prevalent. And then everything begins to flourish. But it's a systematic process, although it might seem kind of anarchal, which it is. Yeah.

often when I speak to people about Bitcoin the issue of drugs money laundering criminal activity all the bad press comes to mind all the questions come out in terms of marketing our applications and working with people how can we overcome this

is there anything that we can do to help positive experiences positive reinforcement we were discussing this morning though I'm old enough to remember internet in 1990s and being a young teenager and hearing my, telling my parents and grandparents about the internet and how I use it.

Oh, yeah, I chatted with the person outside the world. And, oh, but he needs to be careful because I heard this thing in the news that some kid got abducted or some kid went to meet this person that got with a kid and was in fact an old bit of all. So through, you know, that still exists, but that's not the first thing that comes to mind now

when we talk about the internet or the world like, But how would that change? Well, through positive experiences and one, at some point, you know, the positive experiences and the good things that we have to say about the technology kind of overcome the bad things. And that becomes what was, you know,

front of mind. I'm thinking of the French, right? Yeah, that becomes the things you think about, right? You think about, oh yeah, my friend did this thing. So they had a positive experience and the other some kind of falls to the wayside. So I think having good stories to tell, again, coming back to your analysis of sharing the story, will help to kind of, but you know, it's all propaganda, right? The drugs and the trafficking and the money laundering is propaganda from the media.

Once the media starts wisening up to how this technology is beneficial and their corporate advertisers also do, I think their discourse will probably change. I don't understand about that. Yeah, I mean, there's a hilarious editorial from 1994 and 1996 was published in the New York Times by the editorial board talking about how the Internet was this wild west for the black market and how it was fueling all this illegal activity and, you know, hindsight. Who now says, oh, the Internet's just used for bad things? Obviously, it has a lot more applications than that.

Bitcoin's an exact one way. The difference is, however, that... Bitcoin is, in terms of like real bad things in the world, if we talk about the real systems plaguing society, it's like the lack of transparency in finance. It's the big banks having too much power, not knowing where their money is going. It's not knowing where political campaigns or contributions are coming from.

Super PACs. Like, these things are terrible. And guess what? Bitcoin actually solves that. Bitcoin, in fact, is the most transparent financial technology created in human history. It is the blockchain is a, distributed, gigantic, public ledger of every transaction that's ever occurred. Now, if you think about that for a moment, yes, it's going to make it difficult when someone's

selling a dime bag of weed to their friend. I don't know if that's the right slang in over here, but selling a small amount of drugs to someone, yes, it benefits them. It can be anonymous. You know, no one's ever going to track that. But when HSBC wants to go and laundering money for Mexican drug cartels or terrorists, as they've been found out of the past, and who knows what other banks, when they're trying to launder $10 million over the blockchain, everyone's going to see that. That's transparency. That's financial accountability. You know, there are things like dark wallet and coin scramblers, and those actually aren't proven to work very well. And, you know, there are coins like dark coin that actually are very anonymous,

and those are concerns. But Bitcoin, and this is what you have to highlight, because this is what most people use is the most transparent financial technology that's ever existed. This is what I tell people, because I come from a very liberal background. Dad's an academic. I think the city I was born in is called the most liberal city in America. And, you know, that's a very unique perspective in Bitcoin. It's a lot of techno-libertarian, anarcho-capitalists. And so the message that's been conveyed is not just that, okay, sure, you can buy drugs off the internet. Most of the people in this space is like, oh, I don't care.

Like, that's good. That's a free market. Like, who cares? But if you want a market to everyone, you have to appeal to a different rationale. And that rationale is that the blockchain is actually a good thing. And that the more we adopt it and the more we put it into our financial system, the more society benefits. Because, yes, on a small level, it creates personal financial freedom, which I'm not opposed to. Like, if someone wants to sell a bag of weed, fine.

But if you want to launder money for drug cartels, people should be able to see that. And that's what the blockchain affords. That's a very good point. Kind of switching gears here a little bit. So as we see in today's world, a lot of marketing is done through social networking and different online services. And there's a lot of this share and share, you know, I share what I've just done. I've shared how many miles I ran. You know, all this kind of information that we find a company.

up. From a financial perspective, how can we engage in similar ways, but also respect the privacy and the sensitivity of the data that we're working with? Maybe a little bit more difficult of a question, isn't it? When you talk about sharing the stories or using social media to share experiences, there's probably different ways that we can do that. So we think about merchant transactions, I just saved so much on this transaction. I use Bitcoin, I didn't use my credit card, and so therefore I'd have to be one way. If anybody in the audience has any idea

that I'd love to do. Yeah, I mean, this is not so much about, like, sharing as being your own bank. It's the idea that you can now have Venmo without two days to withdraw money, or three days to withdraw money. This can be an incredibly social experience because I can have my wallet on my phone,

My friend can have his wallet on his phone. And just anyway, my developer, we're working with the guys from AirBits to put out a BIP for BLE wallets, and all of your wallets soon will have this. Bluetooth Low Energy is amazing. I can say our dinner tab, I paid with my credit card, and our dinner tab was $140. I can split it eight ways, and each of my friends at the dinner table without moving can pay my phone immediately. It's a game changer.

that money instantly. It's Bitcoin, but it's money. And that's huge. It's the idea that you can send money instantly. And I think that's sharing inherently. It's the instantaneous nature of the technology. Along those same lines, how would you see ourselves marketing ourselves, or I should say the Bitcoin community, in relation to traditional banking services? I mean, I know there's many advantages and cost savings and instant payments and such. But there's also this, you know, the banking industry is not a very popular industry. I think there's been some stats published showing how unpopular the industry actually is. Do we want to, I mean, do we want to kind of absorb into that, or we want to really break away from the traditional? So for a hundred years,

200 years. Actually, all of human history really, the average Joe never had an opportunity to create any sort of innovation within the financial services industry. It just wasn't possible. Maybe the super brilliant guys came up with all new systems, but I'm

not aware of them. Satoshi Nakamoto released his white paper. All of a sudden, people had a tool, just code, lines of code, math. It wasn't a system, it wasn't a set of laws. It was pure mathematics that were, that allowed people to be their own banks and to build their own financial technology. So that inherently threatens an entrenched institution like banks,

but we have to recognize that they still have a role in the world. Now, they may not be the banks of today, but you still need people that are providing loans. You still need institutions that protect people's life savings. Those institutions are going to continue to exist. So what I think is really important is that we don't anticipate. antagonize the banks, while as little as we're going to, people like Jamie Morgan, Jamie Diamond at JP Morgan are inherently threatened and just dislike Bitcoin.

But if you look at some of the other banks, they're taking more intuitive, intelligent, approaches to the technology. My greatest concern is that federal regulators are actually going to make it so that banks end up using their own blockchain so that that transparency I was talking about before won't exist. The best thing we use, can do is to have a system in which everyone's using Bitcoin where there is a blockchain system where there's transparency. I mean, the banks don't like that. And that's what threatens them most. It's not... Well, that makes an interesting marketing point. Right. I mean, blockchain should be public. Right. I don't think you would trust a blockchain that's private. Right. But it will

still benefit of bank. So what we have to do is have a system where they're expect... I mean, in my ideal world, and now this will appall maybe half the people in the room, and it definitely pulse people at most conferences, and is that if the Fed adopted a cryptocurrency and adopted a blockchain, because then all of a sudden you eliminate volatility, you have a system that's completely transparent, and it's a system that everyone uses. That would be revolutionary. I mean, I know that the Fed's thinking about it. We have a couple of advisors from the Fed, including the Vice President of the St. Louis Fed, and you can look up his presentation on Bitcoin. He loves it. I mean, I think it would be a dangerous.

dangerous thing, sort of. I mean, some of those individual liberties that Bitcoin now affords would be lost. But at the same time, you would have a transparent global financial system. And to me, that's the greatest possible thing you could ask for. I'd like to see a world in which, I think we'd all like to see, this is a world in which the financial institution, the banks are completely disrupted by Bitcoin and don't know how to react to it, much like the taxis are not. There's like to have in taxis and hotels. They're all announced about these new startups coming into the market

and just completely disrupting them. I'd like to see all of these regulated. I think I'm much better. All right. So I'd like to see all of these regulated professions and industries be completely disrupted and not know how to react. And the smart ones will. The smart ones will react and adjust their business model

and see far enough ahead in the future to know that this is not the time, these are not old times, you know, these are new times, and they need to adapt to that in order to survive, and the ones that don't, won't, and they'll die off, hopefully, and we'll have, you know, new companies coming in with a vision that is, you know, focus on the future and where things are going,

and, you know, not trying to hold back their existing business models, which occur up and all the bad things that we'd say with the national market. Just to come back to what we're talking about this earlier, I think that within, so with regards to the question about drug cartels and money laundering, there's lots of hypocrisy in the discourse that, okay, Bitcoin can be used for money laundering and drugs and things like that, when in fact, like you mentioned, the banks are all doing the same thing. So once that also becomes apparent to people, and I think young people, especially,

and the types of people that are involved in college crypto, like you say, no, not old enough, enough to be in the old system, but not be involved and not think that they have some say and some power to change things. Once those people become wise to, and they are, to the reality of our world, they'll build things that will completely disrupt existing industries. You've got to get to them while they're still hopeful. My parents, I mean, it's true, though. I mean, I talk to my parents who are very intelligent individuals,

but they just can't imagine a world with Bitcoin because it's so different from what they know. And you have to be speaking to people that can imagine a world without the big banks. And for our generation, it's just so easy to do because we hate them, you know. But don't get me wrong. I mean, Golden & Sex is called the Vampire Squid

because it's got its tentacles everywhere. We're trying to chop off some of those tentacles, but some of them are always going to exist. And we can't be so hopeful. I think companies like J.P. Morgan, that's questionable because they're taking an approach that's saying, oh, screw Bitcoin, we're going to compete against it. Don't compete with it.

Adopt it. Be smart about it. And companies like Goldman Sachs, in fact, are really thinking about that. I'll leave and give you an anecdote. My aunt was the first female vice president of the National Bank. She was over at Citibank. And when I told her, I got into her Bitcoin, I mean, she reads Wall Street Journal front to back every day. And she came back to me a couple months later,

and she was like, Jeremy, you'll be damned if you don't think every single big bank is figuring out how to adopt this technology right now. And I think some of them might be dumb enough not to, and arrogant enough not to. But the smart guys, the smartest guys in the rooms, they're all thinking about this. If they're not thinking about Bitcoin, they're thinking about the blockchain. You know, banks are not taxi drivers. I mean, not to discredit taxi drivers.

Like I said, awesome Haitian taxi drivers. I love my Uber guys. But you're talking about some of the smartest people in the world working at these banks, believe it or not. And so they're thinking about this technology and it's just whether they will adopt fast enough to keep up with the coin basis to circles blockchain to the world.

So I hope you enjoyed this session on Bitcoin Marketing from BTC2B in Brussels. I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you want to support the show, there are multiple ways you can do that. You can start by leaving us a review on iTunes. That greatly helps us in attracting new listeners. And you can also leave us a tip at epicenterbitcoin.com slash tips. More and more of you have been signing up for that $5 a month donation.

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