TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #44: Alan Silbert

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Alan Silbert, Executive Managing Director of INX Limited, to chat about the old days and his experience starting Bitpremier.com, a site where people could spend BTC to buy luxury goods. Alan explains how he got into Bitcoin, how his side hustle pushed him to leave his main hustle and what it's like to get a call from Homeland Security. Follow Alan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alansilbert Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Check out INX Limited: https://www.inx.co Thank you to our sponsors: Cash App, download the app here - https://cash.app/ HoneyMiner, enter to win a GPU here - https://twitter.com/gethoneyminer/status/1052200242781786112 Download Honeyminer here - https://honeyminer.com/referred/59rtk

Well, hey there, freaks. I hope all is well. It's your boy Marty here doing a little pre-episode recording to introduce our sponsors. Before I get into our sponsors, a little bit about today's episode. It's been a while since I hopped in the studio for a face-to-face long form conversation. I was very excited for this one. Sat down with Alan Silbert from INX in Maryland and we had a really cool conversation. He's been around for a while. I've been a fan of his on twitter for for a bit and and we just talked about the old days and and some other stuff pertaining to bitcoin um but before we get into the interview i'd like to thank our sponsors for a sponsor today is the cash app you already know the cash app is the number one finance app

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to cash app for sponsoring the pod my favorite place to buy bitcoin right now and then our second sponsor i've got them back got them back in the sponsor spot uh is honey miner honey miner they actually want you to go check out their their twitter page at get honey miner uh they're doing a gpu uh giveaway right now so head over to to the honey miner twitter page and and get in that race to get some free gpus it's pretty cool will help you especially if you're looking to experiment with mining and are interested to see how mining works in particular uh it's maybe your chance to get in for free gpu mine some shit coins liquidate them to bitcoin uh so definitely go check out honey miner uh and if you don't know about honey miner already it is the one click stop to earning

bitcoin right away basically you go to honeyminer.com uh download their software i believe it's only for windows right now they are expanding into linux and ios or excuse me mac os soon um and uh basically what you do is you download their software turn it on let your computer uh mine shit coins contribute to a pool that is mining the most profitable uh altcoin chain at a certain point in time and you get bitcoin in your account that you can then send to a uh a cold storage solution so definitely check out honey miner hop in that gpu giveaway today on their twitter page and i hope you guys enjoy my conversation with alan what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here

for an interview for the first time in a while i feel like it's been since my interview with caitlin long where i really sat down had like a face-to-face in-depth conversation with somebody So I'm very excited. I think you freaks are going to be excited to speak with this guest. I don't think I've ever heard you on a podcast before, so I think this is a rare pod get here. I want to introduce you freaks to Alan Silbert. Alan, welcome to the pod. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Thanks for coming on. So for you freaks that don't know, Alan is Executive Managing Director, is that correct? At INX, which is a crypto exchange and derivatives company building a bridge between crypto and institutional clients.

formerly uh co-founder of bit premiere where you wanted to buy your lambos or your houses with bitcoin but uh can you still do it now is this still around or no no no sadly yeah it went by the wayside ahead of its time and before that you were at capital one correct capital one capital yeah middle market debt yep yep um this is how we start off with tales from the crypt how the hell did you get into bitcoin so um my brother introduced me to bitcoin i think it was late 2012 early 2013 um i think i think barry came across it in 2012 and then you know it's the same story that you hear from everybody you know he first came and told me about it this is amazing whatever and I was like okay you know whatever it's internet money you know you know I just I kind

of took a pass um kind of ignored his emails for a while um you know I can remember one specific I was on a ski trip I think in Utah and I can remember him texting me and calling me like you watching this it's like eight bucks nine bucks ten bucks I was like all right I guess I better take a look and you know I'll finally delve into it see what it's about so uh you know started started diving in and uh you know went through the same process everybody does of you know denial and that you know this is bullshit the government's gonna shut down you know you start throwing everything you can at it and then everybody kind of comes to this light bulb moment where you're like holy shit like whatever you throw at it like there really is a defense for

it you know because of the disease centralization or the incentives lining up or um you know or or the immutability or something and you know and then the light bulb went off and you know it was all over and uh um you know i was in my traditional life job of uh banking and it was never very exciting to me um did since 1996 and yeah bitcoin took over kind of more and more of my my life and my daily and nightly thoughts and yeah, so that's kind of how we started. That's one thing that's common. Us ex-finance

guys, it was just like we're sitting at a job that we didn't like. At least, I mean I was only there for three years but I viscerally, I got like visceral like hatred feelings in the cube some days. Like people walking by and I was just like, I can't do this anymore. I actually quit

my finance job on my birthday because nobody said happy birthday to me. um at the same time i had that burning bitcoin passion as well like do you think there is something about bitcoin that's just like draws this type of person obviously is uh this is one thing i've been thinking on more is like bitcoin is like a mission and almost like a call to action and it's feeling more so that way especially in the bear market i don't know if we're getting too preachy here but yeah i mean it's you know i was in like commercial banking and yeah it's just the more you know we're not traditionally taught like how money

works you know this is a big this is a big pet peeve of mine you know you're not in school you're not taught how money works you're not taught how to handle money you know they don't really delve into fractional reserve banking or you know how money just kind of arrives out of thin air and I don't know you just get you know more and more years in banking you just realize that you know the system is so antiquated it's such a there's so many parties that are immersed uh you know that are kind of dug in that make their their money out of you know being one of the many county counterparties in the system and um yeah it just gets frustrating when you're around

it for a while and um you know my in the office at the bank so every every single millennial in the office is like you know they still come in and be like you know i heard about this bit connect thing like you know should we get into it like you know you know like brendan over there is making like one percent a day you know this every day it was something like that so it's i mean all the millennials and everything are totally you know interested and probably a little less so than late last year when you know it's going freaking nuts but a big in barstool's office story that was uh was a sight to be seen i was there trying to uh bring bring some peace to the chaos they were buying tron ripple neo cardano name it name it they were buying it everything except for bitcoin

actually probably a good decision in that particular month because bitcoin was above like ten thousand dollars for like 30 days and has subsequently fallen obviously but it's funny uh those type of environments where the uh where they get the shit coin fever i mean that happened to me in like 2013 so did you have that problem at all when you first got in was barry like a bitcoin maximalist and described to you in that way or were you like open to to all coins and do you fall for that at all yeah i mean i've always i've one of my favorite things about bitcoin really is that um you know and part of the reason why i i kind of always back default to the the core developer team and the infrastructure is that like i believe um that is money it really

it has to have the confidence of of people so um i just think that's a a main foundation of money so and i believe you like you need the infrastructure you need all the investment dollars you need the mining infrastructure although i wish it was more decentralized um so i i and bitcoin is such a first place position like there's it's so ingrained with you know such a first starter advantage and so much money behind it and i don't know i just i never got very interested i you know i tell i dabbled in some other shit coins and stuff here and there but um yeah i really i think uh one of the most important things is really just the the infrastructure the confidence is 99.9 uptime it's um you know so that's kind of why i always

stuck with it yeah and it seems like the infrastructure in particular i mean this week huge news for infrastructure fidelity has announced me yesterday um and then last like so there's infrastructure multiple layers and then last week gotenna and the samurai guys showing that we can do transactions via mesh net via network i saw that that's that adds to the infrastructure in a different way um probably not making it too much more robust but it is just like another fail safe if you're in an area yeah there's freaking zombie apocalypse right you know the grid goes down i know nothing about gotenna do you have you bought a gotenna yet i see people are buying gotennas now yeah my uh co-host of a weekly show i do a rabbit hole rehab recap matt

odell he he's a big gotenna freak and he's got like eight of them and uh but he brought one over to my apartment the other night was showing me um actually gonna have the ceo of gotenna come on soon oh really they're in brooklyn they're not uh oh really yeah they're based out of brooklyn so they're right around the corner let's look into it yeah um it seems like a cool idea though mesh networks is really something i've never dove into but uh the idea i mean you say now we have obviously the internet uh mesh network satellites maybe if nick zabo and elaine you come out with what they're thinking of doing like short short short radio waves off the ionosphere maybe we'll have like four ways of relaying transactions soon yeah hey it all helps yeah the redundancy

of the network and everything you got open open dime and uh other options as well so it's just getting more robust and I imagine this is the type of products you're working on an INX to you guys are working a more secondary market stuff correct yeah so we we took a bunch of people from the traditional finance world that just know how to talk to regulators and and just know how institutions get comfortable with an exchange and so we're trying to bring regulated exchange to the US market um i can't get too much into the token aspect of it but we did we did submit a prospectus to the sec back in january which is a full full you know 200 page prospectus a token that would

get marketed to the general public um so uh so that's went through the process i can't talk a ton about that but um but yeah and you know in general trying to regulate an exchange to list bitcoin and some of the top coins and security tokens um you know we built an awesome team of people from the traditional world uh formerly from nasdaq and ameritrade and tmx group and a bunch of advisors that are well known in the crypto space and uh so yeah so uh we're uh yeah we're on our treacherous regulatory journey with the sec and finra and some other regulators and Yeah. What's that journey been like?

How hard has it been? I mean, yeah, it's tough. I mean, it's just, you know, the U.S. is tough. It's just nonsensical. You have federal laws. You have, you know, 50 states and three, I think, three territories to deal with if you want to go all in. And, you know, it's just grueling. And, you know, you can't do it for cheap.

And, you know, the SEC has actually been a pretty positive experience, actually, dealing with the SEC so far. So I think, in general, they want to create an infrastructure, a regulated infrastructure, because otherwise people will go overseas or they'll do things the wrong way. But I think, you know, as far as, like, ICOs in this country, they're pretty much, you know, dead. um you know i think at this point you either you know you have to either be a security token and go the route that we're going and take on regulators you know full steam ahead you have to go to another jurisdiction overseas somewhere where it's friendlier or you have to somehow say you're a utility token not a security which is which is you know just a precarious place to be

in and yeah so um and uh a lot of people relied on like legal opinion letters and stuff over the last 12 24 months and now they're you know scurrying back to their attorneys to to figure out what to do next after the subpoenas went out there yeah yeah a lot of subpoenas that went out recently i don't think that's gonna yeah it's probably not gonna stop anytime soon i'm i'm sure no that was uh what's uh most interesting what was it um one broker that uh that exchange i was allowing people to trade equities with bitcoin and uh the s i don't know if it's the fbi or sec agent who bought their first security on one broker did it like the middle of 2016 and they just shut down and seized the site like two weeks ago so that took two years a year and a

half. Yeah. Yeah. I saw that. Um, yeah, I, I didn't have, I had a visit from the government back in the, in the bid premiere days. So what was it like starting? So what was the idea behind it? Like how easy was it? Was it easy? So, uh, you know, after I went down the rabbit hole and, you know, speaking to my brother and, you know, and he was like, You have to get into the space and do something. We decided there wasn't a luxury marketplace. So we're like, all right, let's do it. Let's give this a try.

So I mean, really, the whole bit premiere was just me. I basically handled it in my spare time. It was like I had my day job, and then I had my night job. And my day job kind of got less and less of my attention to my boss's dismay. Um, so, you know, yeah, you know, it was, it was a lot of fun. Um, listings kind of constantly poured in. Uh, but it's, you know, it just, it was kind of ahead of its time. I think, uh, you know, people, first of all, they don't really want a middleman involved with, with these kind of purchases. They just want to deal with

it themselves head on. Um, you know, two, there's just always the risk of, you know, Um, they're going to somehow end up in some regulators queue somewhere, you know, or, or FinCEN or something. Um, and you know, and there's just people that were all hodling and, you know, not many purchases like went through really. So, and if, and there was a ton of volume of email traffic and everything, um, which just not much ever converted, you know, we did like a, a villa in Bali was like the big thing that happened.

I was going to say, it was like 700K, right? Yeah, you know, that was like in the Wall Street Journal. That was like, you know, that was the apex of BitPremier fame. You know, it was an early Bitcoin adopter. It was one of the first five guys in Bitcoin who was the buyer. Yeah, so, you know, so I was doing it in my spare time. I forgot how they contacted me. I think it was an email, Homeland Security.

Like, I got like some random communication from them. And they were like, hey, we'd like to come up to, you know, to your office and meet you and just have you chat for a few minutes. How scared were you? So I, you know, so I was, and I forget, I forgot the email. It wasn't anything scary at the time, but I was like, you know, I'm not going to be one to say no to Homeland Security. So I was like, I guess I'll meet them for coffee. so um you know and then when they call you it's totally freaky like your phone says like united states and the phone number is like zero zero zero zero you know it's like so um so i met them

for coffee it was like three guys it was like good cop bad cop and then like a guy that had like a deck that they presented to me like what they were doing um with enforcing you know money laundering and stuff in the bitcoin space they were focused on local bitcoins um and then they brought a bit premiere and they were like yeah by the way like yeah we saw this villa you sold this villa and you know you have to do this this this and this and you know i was trying to play above board with bit premiere and i was licensed with finn uh you know registered with finn cent as a money services business and but um you know they were like you know you should have brought this to our attention this and this um so they're like you know going forward just keep an eye out for us

and you know let us know if you see anything you know it's not above board and interesting and uh you know like here's some pamphlets and uh i think at the time they were going around from from business to business and you basically like help you know you help us out help us do our jobs yeah so anyway so i was like yeah sure uh yeah i'll help yeah you know i just said whatever would make them happy that was the end of that and then um you know bit premiere had you know i was working capital one at the time bit premiere had our bank accounts at capital one and within like 24 hours they called capital one and they were like by the way one of your employees is running a bitcoin business no um snitches damn you know i just thought we'd let you know whatever

so within like 24 hours you know compliance was in touch with me at the bank and was like you know yeah we have to shut down your business accounts you can't you know it's we had a policy against that or whatever um yeah so that was my fun running with the law so needless to say i didn't return their calls anymore i didn't know i was bringing a badass on tonight when i invited you it yeah alan the most badass guy we're drinking monkey gin here not a big gin guy myself gin's gin's a drink for hard men monkey 47 german gin i i'm yeah i'm i'm a quasi salesman for monkey 47 this is uh i came across it and um in miami and it's it's it's great it's like no other gin really but you know i have i have some food allergies and stuff and i remember from when i got diagnosed

my food allergies i'm seeing some of the same patterns with monkey 47 so it's kind of funny when you have food allergies what you realize after you figure out your food allergies are is you realize that the things that you're the most allergic to are things that you like crave like like like heroin like like after the fact i like i used to go through like a box of devil dogs like every day almost you know devil dogs like the chocolate like devil food cake with cream in the middle i used to shovel like down like a box a day and after i like i started getting sick and stuff so i'm going to the doctor realized i had like some different food allergies and i went back i looked at the devil dogs box like the first like one and two ingredients was like i was

like definitely allergic to them so i'm not poisoning you right now am i well so i was gonna say i'm starting to have this kind of weird reaction like it seems like it's tied to the monkey that like the next day like i have like my lip will swell up and stuff i have like random like weird freaking symptoms so i might tweet at you tomorrow and be like look what you freaking did and also i kind of like crave it which is really weird which i've never done any kind of alcohol before it's like if i run out of like my my stash is running low in the house and i tell my wife like oh shit i gotta go i'm like more monkey because the stuff it's hard to find so these all point in a very bad direction that i might have to might have to cut the monkey off yeah

I'm sorry to hear that Hendrix or something but anyway it's great stuff traveled far and wide to Bedford Ave to get it I'm telling you it's hard to find this stuff

we originally spoke in February I can't believe you remembered this is value add podcast service I aim to please you know that's uh if i'm gonna bring you into this janky studio with the speakers or excuse me a microphone set up on chairs the least i can do is indulge you with your favorite alcohol beverage

it's it's it's much appreciated i hope it doesn't uh lead to allergic reactions yeah but we'll see do you have an epi pen in the room not on me okay i'm sure there's one here we work is definitely checking all the box there so there's definitely somewhere something somewhere um so yeah so that It was, yeah, so BitPremier, you know, after the Homeland Security meeting, I kind of made a conscious effort to kind of keep transactions, I mean, I kind of kept under $10,000 at that point, because that was kind of the FinCEN threshold for reporting things. I didn't want to get into trouble for something that I was doing in my spare time. And then that, so that ran its course, I sold it last year, I sold the domain off last year

uh there's somebody i know and um and so then after that um i it was the jamie diamond thing came out with bitcoins a scam whatever and i i made some kind of tweet in reference to jamie diamond thing and they like plopped my tweet right in the middle of the like a fortune article jamie diamond like alan silbert like senior vice president said this so you know like 24 hours later you know the bank's like you know we need to uh we have a meeting with you know human resources in public relation we need to we need to talk to you and like a true badass they were i mean i i didn't you know i didn't think i did anything wrong but i yeah they they were like you know you could be seen as a spokesperson for the bank you can't a lot of speaker mind you can't

like they were like you know we see that this morning at 6 50 you were you were still tweeting about bitcoin i was like i was like in my pajamas like having coffee like what you know they're like you just you can't any no more public statements 24 hours a day ever again so um i kind of took that as my hint that it was time to move on to to pivot into what i what i really loved so how's it feel to have be free of the shackles uh i mean it's i would i mean i know it's i'm working my ass off for sure um it's definitely startup life you know i brush my teeth like you know 4 p.m some days i'm sorry to say but um yeah i wouldn't go back for all the money in the world really yeah so that's uh again like i said once you're red pilled there's no

turning back um yeah really uh it's like like you said like that's a big theme here on the podcast is don't think people truly understand what money is and once you do finally it takes time too it took me years really you gotta read history you gotta read economics you gotta try to put our current situation context of like a historical timeline and it takes time to come to realization she's like oh we we fucked up money and um once you figure that out and then you see bitcoin it's like all right there's this is like obviously better there's i can't believe everybody doesn't realize this yet but um there's there's like no going back to i can never see myself going back to like crunching pnl sheets for a futures fund or anything like that yeah it's you know and then

money is one thing that i think you know 90 of people don't really fully understand you know there's and then there's bitcoin which really you know unfortunately has a very large technical hurdle so um yeah it's it's hard and um and it's uh it's kind of a barrier to entry and it's you really you know like i feel like i'm fair fairly well versed in bitcoin but it's like you're always there's always more to learn and um you know grandma's never gonna understand it really so it's gonna have to get to the point where you know it's like you use Bitcoin we don't even really realize it right you know just like much like you don't really know about the innards of the wire transfer and how it goes

anywhere yeah and I think you might have an interesting perspective on like bitcoins usage since you ran bit premier like like you're saying like people like the hodl it use it as a store value and people transact most likely if the price is very high they're like all right we'll transact now it's like what was that running like a like a a website that took bitcoin payments like did you notice any trends and and like the amount of transactions that were happening at certain points of time like do you think bitcoin is a transactional currency now or i mean it took a while i i remember thinking that um like i i think i think the i think the the villa in bali i think bitcoin was around 600 and something dollars then

um but but i do i do remember thinking like and it was kind of very isolated it was kind of an anomaly it was a big deal though um but after that it was very slow and i remember thinking like bitcoin will get to a thousand people start spending them and that didn't happen then it was like all right maybe a bitcoin will get to like 2500 people start and you know it kept going going going um and i was like yeah people definitely just want to like hoard these things or they just transactions like this they want to do on their own or or whatever but you know i mean i mean you know it's all it's all like psychology i mean i i spent a good amount of bitcoins on you know expedia and i used to go to bitcoin atms

i think i think i my buddies a trip to vegas and it's like i don't even want to know what the exchange rate was then and what you know what that would be now you know about myself and ice watch which now is you know would be like a lambo so you know i personally i got to the point where i was like all right i like you know i i did my my fair share for the ecosystem and i just i can't can't spend anymore it's kind of like what you feel like you know but right now you're at 64 33 and um you know i feel like you know it's we're going up from here and you know are hodlers good people is are they necessary do you think it's okay to hodl or you think they're doing the network yeah i don't think that's like i mean what are you gonna you can't like uh lambast people

for wanting to you know save money it's it's just like you know that's it so i don't i don't uh i just don't understand a lot of like the the b cash argument but it's it's you know we all we all want like bitcoin in a perfect world bitcoin to be everything right you know we want it to be everything we wanted to help poor people in sub-saharan africa they're getting gouged by western union and you wanted to you know people to send back home to the relatives you wanted to buy coffee whatever if you guys what you want you know in a perfect world it'd be everything but um you know i also personally don't believe in like the move fast and break things and i believe you know you build off of a solid foundation you like i said before you kind of

you know maintain the confidence in the system and um you know so some things are just gonna have to take time and come later that's one of them's not not coffee really so exactly no that's one thing i read about yesterday in the newsletter is like that's another theme on this pocket we're meshing well here i got a badass we're meshing well because that's the other theme is patience like you're like you said like everybody wants everything out of the box they want a world computer out of the box like right away like this should be working right now it should be able to do instant transactions at fee lists and be completely distributed right out the box but It's like, fuck you.

That's not going to happen. It's going to take time. We're like 10 years into this. So yesterday, what I wrote about in particular was, I don't know if you saw some dude in Germany. His name was Matthias. He did a demo of renting a bike with a lightning transaction and basically walked up to the bike and unlocked it using a lightning transaction and would have paid a microtransaction for as long as he wrote it. He would get charged or whatever. uh that was like the first company that was going to get spun out of the dow when the dow was coming

together slocket was the company that ran the dow and they were going to run something very similar and they were going to create like a whole new token and create like a whole new ecosystem to do that it's like no if you were patient and waited three years you'd realize that bitcoin infrastructure was getting to a point where base layer is secure enough probably not secure enough for the long run but secure enough for this point in time to enable segwit and then start uh experimenting with lightning network which is enabling these use cases that people wanted out of the box it just so happens that it took 10 years to get to this point to make it possible and so that's what we try to try to beat into the freaks on this podcast is low time preference

it's going to take time yeah it's uh i don't know that just these days people just have a need for instant gratification and they're just they don't have the patience and but yeah it's gonna take time i mean this is the whole the con it's an amazing concept it's very complex you have to do it right and secure and um yeah i mean you know i can remember having a prodigy dial-up account in like the early 90s or whatever and it was yeah a total piece of crap and there was no you know no kind of clean interface or anything it was like a message boards i think were the first things that came across like this on prodigy and um you know it'll get there but yeah it just it's we're in early innings still it drives me crazy the people that like treated

like it's a finished product like like like bitcoin has failed it has officially failed you know it just hasn't made it you know it's ridiculous it's just you know it's really it's really still in early innings um surprising it's gotten this far this quickly i would say actually yeah i mean i remember when i first started uh you know learning about and stuff i used to go to like meetups in the dc area and i and i and i think our i think our main concern then was like the government's just gonna come in and just shut down it'll be just done with you know before we fully understood kind of everything that's decentralized nature and everything it's kind and possibly coming to shut down.

But in that respect, in this country, it's right out that bad. I mean, it's a grueling process, but I think we'll get there. Other countries will be easier than the U.S. for sure, but we're definitely past the point of no return. Some maximalists and stuff will totally shun any kind of institutional involvement and it kind of depends where you are in the maximalist spectrum you know I like it because it just kind of further entrenches us into the you know there's no turning back whatsoever right yeah

it's inevitable to write like the system is supposed to be used by all yeah I mean you know unless institutions don't like making money right I mean they're good they're gonna get involved it's just this what you know they're in the business to make money um so they'll find some way to to leverage it so um so yeah it's uh it's come a long way it has it might be the first time the that retail is able to front run the banks so as they're waiting for their custody solutions and institutional uh caliber products i guess you could say yeah it's a time for the little guy to get in so if you freaks are are still dollar cost averaging in keep it up actually i don't know this is not investment advice we're

not investment advisors that's right um tales from the crypt is not an investment advisor what uh what are you most excited about these days i mean i think that definitely not the price yeah although this kind of feels like that that bull market when it you know went went to 1100 or whatever it was and then we i remember wallowing around you know $200 for a while and yeah it was pretty grueling so you know and who knows things can change quickly um you know what i'm excited most excited about now i think is just uh with the price relatively quiet um you know it's just everybody's building stuff but you know which is good uh it's uh there's less distraction with the price and people can build um and you know and more and

more infrastructure and more and more you know there's more developers that are getting involved which I think is awesome. You definitely need a huge bullpen of developers to get involved here. I don't think a lot of these companies have not done enough to get involved with code development. But like complaining about how things

aren't going their way. It's a problem. If you don't like it, then get involved. Invest and put some developers into the process. Yeah I'm sure that companies like chink block stream that are paying paying for development and it seems like other people are getting into it I don't know The brochure subject let's just do it abruptly like last summer your brother obviously was in the middle of the whole

Fork Wars with Segway 2x New York agreement hold on time for more monkey alan's making himself get the happy pen ready uh i'm totally joking um and it seemed like a little bit it was a house divided a little bit last summer it seemed like you were in the main like laissez-faire like let's stay out of it let let everything take its course and your brother it seemed like your brother barry seemed like he there was a an impetus needed to move things forward and went for it and didn't play out as he saw fit over the summer but yeah i think um You know, he definitely, you know, I think he went into it with the best of intentions, you know, and I know, and I spoke to him, you know, before that time period. And I think his attitude then was, you know, let's just get Segwit activated no matter what.

And I think things kind of just like went off the rails. um uh you know personally i think that you know but you know first of all you know at the time you know i just i was just a monday morning quarterback i mean whatever i was just doing my day job and just you know being an asshole on twitter you know i don't i don't need to manage a portfolio of 100 companies um like he does um you know and i think you know dcg has been pretty crucial in the space with investing money into the space and everything so um you know a few a few different ceos of well-known companies who all decline to name i think or um i just think are a negative energy in the space and um

uh i think kind of forced uh like an ultimatum like we have to have a you know round table agreement and move on or we're gonna you know force a hard fork or something and you know meanwhile said people here we are a year later and after you know things were so awful we needed to move forward you need to do something your customers are ailing you know they're they haven't activated segwit still so that just tells you you have an ongoing uh twitter twitter tweet quote tweet quote thread going on uh calling out the specific somebody i'm not going to call them out either you can go find them on allen's yeah i know i i i sucked my jihad for a while yeah i know just some yeah that's uh that's the way bitcoin sign guy described uh bitcoin it's a

it's a called a digital jihad what's that guy doing these days is he in the space like working in the space bitcoin sign guy he's in the background he's uh he's he's working on on some sovereignty enabling projects i don't like i don't know if i'm allowed to disclose like bitcoin sign guy is very he's on he's you're he's on like your twitter like background right yeah on tales from the crypt yeah yeah yeah he's the banner yeah he's a very uh very eloquent 23 year old one of the most famous memes of all bitcoin time uh i would i would argue probably the most famous just because of the juxtaposition of buy bitcoin janet yellen and the ticker being uh fed as a yeah yeah i think you can't time that much better than that he didn't even know

like the ticker was going to be there it was just so it was serendipitous and incredible for it's pretty it's pretty ballsy yeah very ballsy and 23 years old right 22 at the time i would assume yeah um but yeah thank you for doing that bitcoin sign guy uh we can't wait yeah that's amazing yeah it's kind of like top three memes like that like hodl which is this if you when i go back and read it i still just like laugh my ass off it's so funny they're like good story dude it's just like hodlbottle.com wasted you can find that o-h-d-l-b-o-d-l.com you can find the original bitcointalk.org post where hodl was started um shout out andrew de santos for that that redirect uh url there um no it's funny there's more memes pop the npc meme have you

been following that at all what's that it's uh it's a new meme that's popping up it's basically calling out pc culture and uh vapid mainstream media news and it's basically just like a blank face uh that is used to basically ridicule somebody saying they don't have any individual thoughts and they just follow the the tropes that are that are given to them um that's been blowing up on regular twitter and is seeping into crypto twitter this week and it's just hilarious how memes propagate and how they actually do affect the conversation like last summer like no 2x uh like that was a meme for a while uh uasf was a meme for a while like yeah yeah uh people think memes are running the world right now yeah absolutely and uh i think it's only going

to get crazier from here i think i saw somebody tweet something like what if like the meme revolution just leads us to the singularity quicker than quicker than we expect it's going to rip a hole in the universe uh another huge topic around here memes um oh you know i mean mainstream media it's really amazing to me like you know bitcoin however many years in we are eight that was almost 10 yeah it's um 10 and 15 days will be the white paper 10 year anniversary really oh my god um yeah it's a it was 10 years in and it's like mainstream media really hasn't learn that much it's really it's really quite amazing um yeah just like the the the clicks for views and the rush to post something shock it's just it's totally ruined the news it's that's

it's absolutely awful um i don't i can't even watch it anymore i don't i can't tell you the last time i watched cnn msnbc fox news any of them don't you love it is cnbc fast money counter counter indicator it's a great one as soon as they short or as soon as they teach you how to buy an all coin then you know it's the absolute all-time high probably so we're gonna be sitting on 95 losses at some point and jeb mccaleb's gonna be laughing at you it's it's just i mean it's just like an uphill battle it's just you know yeah it's it's like there's a bitcoin already has like a technical hurdle then you gotta deal with all all these like numbskulls that you know that information that you know the the populace believes that this is the energy nbc it

must be right the energy means uh that's like a big one to overcome yeah yeah yeah i know it's there's a lot of misunderstanding around that and people literally cannot get the concept of this energy would otherwise just go untapped or unused and you can liquidate it into self-sovereign money when there is value in that and it's not wasted energy and it's not really a burden on climate change in the long run unless you're using coal but you're finding most people are using hydroelectric or geothermal for these these operations and remote areas specifically yeah and um yeah it's uh it's a constant battle fighting the fun in the mainstream and it's i don't know i think things are are shifting to like an online narrative i think

people are starting to just from i don't want to say apathy yeah apathy like they've been been through the ringer so many times i think with the election cycles particularly now it's every two years you're just focused on election after election it's just like i'm fucking tired when are things going to change yeah just wait for wait for a month from now you're gonna want to like poke your eyes out oh my god right what is it november 8th midterms yeah i'm getting close here yeah it's uh i don't vote i get i get yelled at for not voting it's your civic duty uh uh yeah i mean it's it's it's frustrating south park said it best it's voting you're always voting between a douchebag and a turd sandwich totally i don't know who was who in the last election or i had a

right turd sandwich yeah you know but the um the the first time i got out of college um was for it was like a 20 person company at the time it was health care lending the the ceo of that company is actually running he's my congressman now um in maryland he's actually running for president 2020 um but and he and he's absolutely incredible a very smart guy blue collar roots uh you know self-made uh self-made you know multi-millionaire but he's he's like too middle of the road which i which i'm i'm totally like um i'm pretty middle of the road kind of guy but he just hold have no success because he's just not polarized enough and that's just not you know what wins elections in this country so right you literally have to drive your narrative to one side of the

of the poll yeah and you got you have to be crazier than moderate it doesn't work so yeah which which uh mc you know he's it's john delaney i mean he's he's awesome i would you know i'll i'll try to vote for him but i don't think he doesn't he doesn't have a chance is what is what i hear so we'll just end up with uh you know a turd sandwich or a douchebag it's you know as um yeah right it's the time you know but it's it just seems like it's getting to a point with politics in particular um we're just not fast enough for the world we live in you know and it doesn't represent at a granular level at least uh it doesn't do a good job of representing the people at this point um i would argue i'm complete like i'm gonna admit i'm 27 years old i'm

completely disenchanted by the whole process yeah i was a senior in high school in 2008 and literally that's when my consciousness flipped on to like paying attention to that shit and literally watching everything unfold the last 10 years i'm like how could i ever put any confidence into this type of system yeah i thought your generation was like the we definitely have to vote generation and now it's like why the fuck would we even participate in this that's at least my mindset is so that's why i focus on bitcoin so much i'm like this you could literally build a better system around this sound money potentially in the future it might take a while it might take decades but let's start doing it right well it's yeah it's it's very aligned with the times and that uh

you know people want to have power over their own money have control um and um yeah it's it goes well with the current narrative and internet international economics which you know and god knows like nothing was learned with Lehman Brothers so we might be in a much worse situation than we were 10 years ago pretty soon nothing learned whatsoever and I think you could probably speak speak to the condition of the the financial system with your experience at Capital One in particular so I worked for a valuation firm that did third-party valuations for private equity and private equity and venture firms but we only we only worked with middle market companies so I did a lot of job doing like DCF analysis for middle market debt and it's just

like you're just working to get that EBITDA ratio to a certain point and you're just working with the bound sheet at a certain point to try and manipulate that EBITDA ratio to a certain and And the EBITDA ratio, it's creeped back up, right? This is what happens. And it's, you know, I mean, everything cycles, you know, and I think we're kind of coming to, you know, I think the credit cycle is, again, kind of exhausting itself. And you kind of see things kind of starting to stretch out. The EBITDA multiples, Covlight loans, I was seeing start coming back into the picture

again um you know we're basically you know you just have less triggers with which to like uh you know call default or or you know call a loan or something so it's um yeah it's just you know the same shit over again and you know we're same position we're pre-layman except for that you know now global debt is twice what it was then so you know it's it has potential to be ridiculously ugly you know what do you think happens if it is ridiculously ugly do you think the traditional financial system rises from the ashes this time or do you think there is a no they just they like print their way out of it i guess but do you think they can get like how long can they keep printing i know that's the big question is it's like it's like the only way out

of it it's like you know it literally like that's how you you know they cannot raise that's how you make your debt less onerous is just you know print more currency and um can you do that forever yeah i don't know what the tipping point is for like the u.s dollar i don't know uh i mean i don't know i think if like the u.s dollar turns into if it turns into like hyper inflation like venezuela or something we're like in mad max like things are pretty fucked up yeah it's the world reserve currency you know yeah well that's another theme here we've been following the uh the uh story of china beginning to to value their oil futures contracts and renminbi and guan uh to try to under undercut the u.s dollar as a reserve currency so if you look

at it russia china uh and even some european countries been stockpiling gold for the last decade and then they're starting to negotiate these oil contracts which will erode the dollars dominance is the petro reserve basically and so those those themes are slowly but surely happening and um you know reserve currencies only have a finite uh lifespan usually yeah like 100 years or yeah 70 to 100 and they shift so you know so then you know then it also points to bitcoin being you know just like this non-correlated asset class um where you know we'll have some gold all right take some of your gold allocation put into bitcoin um you know it really doesn't move like anything else uh you know five percent of gold gets allocated into bitcoin and you're like

bitcoin 25 000 or something so who knows um but yeah that's uh well there's like this there's like this there's this fine line you know you know bitcoin i think will excel when like global misery kind of increases and like things are falling apart but then if you go if you move to like Mad Max level catastrophe then you know it's a crap shit. People have to

like liquidate everything for like food you know canned goods ammo and water you know we'll be like siphoning gas out of cars and shit like that. See I don't think we'll ever get Mad Max bad just because I think

i just think we're smart enough as a species to be like all right we can we can figure this out i just think they're neat there is i just think the world filled with seven billion people right now would gander to say that 6.999 billion are just completely complacent right now and just going through life accepting the system in which they're born to into and most of them most of us don't realize that uh the system is incredibly fragile right now and uh i think that's why we're in bitcoin is at least why i'm and i said this earlier but i do think we can transition this will be a better system and that's why i tend to focus my energy on this as opposed to the quote-unquote traditional world i feel like bitcoin is a bit like the matrix where you're just

living in this parallel universe that nobody understands or even knows is like going on yeah i mean it has this effect of really like drawing you in and getting like so excited um and i guess i don't know it's just uh it's it i don't know if it's because it's so genius in its concept that it really just like casts off most things that get attacked you get you that attack it um you know it's cutting edge like thin tech so it's exciting you know and like i said before just like you know people like to have control your money is just like it's surprisingly like unique like in today's world there's always somebody involved yeah you know the money you know the money your cash isn't sitting in the bank vault it's it's it's gone it's elsewhere yeah

um you know and if there's like a national bank run like you know we're like all all screwed all your money is going to be gone so um so yeah all right so you and your brother are very ambitious very just don't call us the winkle vi or the silbi or something they're uh the winkle vi speaking of the winkle vi the gemini usd uh stable coin quote-unquote stable coin it was 20 off its peg at some point earlier today so that's interesting the stable coin phenomenon right now is blowing my mind um that's a subject for for another day i'm personally of the opinion that all this tether it's all it's all just fun and bullshit i you know it doesn't like number one stable coins are only stable until they're not stable so they're like susceptible

to black swan events like just know that going in and if you're going to do a stable coin do it the way tether's doing one dollar equals one tether yeah dollar is the u.s is the reserve currency the world excuse me and if you're gonna create a stable coin might as well just keep it simple stupid hey one tether equals one dollar i'll try to create these algorithmic central banks that are now you're gonna you'll have like there's like gemini coin goldman coin jp circles coming out with one you know that's the other thing like what these stable coins don't realize is i mean the the urge to launch them is obviously so strong right now that we're seeing i think seven have been launched in the last six months but you idiots don't realize that you're

going to eat away at the stableness of your stable coin like adding more stable coins makes the stable coins before inherently more instable unstable excuse me um and as more stable coins come in to the market it's going to make the whole concept of a stable coin unstable just because you're not going to be able to keep a peg across that many quote-unquote stable coins yes and i hear that more more are coming indeed well gird your loins for more more stable coins they're coming it's the next ico craze oh man uh it's uh it's crazy the space it's never boring even during the depths of the yeah absolutely absolutely absolutely no it's always something there's always something if we're just you know lulled into boredom by the price then well there's probably some kind of meme

or jim btc jim btc that's a good reference well now what we're seeing with this bear mark is you're having uh bitcoiners go after each other there's uh people calling out maximalists people right that's right everybody's so freaking bored they have to attack each other each other's i That's why Nouriel Roubini was great. Everybody just attacked him and forced all together. It was so unifying. What are your thoughts on Nouriel? He's got a book coming out, I'm telling you.

He's got a freaking book. It's got to be... I think he likes being the contra crypto crazy expert. He doesn't even know what he's talking about. He was referencing

immeasurable Gideon coefficients and he was totally wrong about he conflated mining pools with individual money yeah he does yeah he definitely doesn't understand a lot of the economics of mining and everything i think that uh you know i'll give him like you know okay shit coins yeah okay i'll agree with them you know not 90 of them are just total trash um private blockchains yeah he was he i thought he was pumping private blockchain i'm sorry he was wrong about that too oh i thought he was saying that blockchain not bitcoin is a joke no you're saying it can create actual efficiencies uh yeah uh and then uh van volkenberg had to call him out and say

you could do that with a mysql database like you don't need that yeah well he you know peter's he's he's a good person to have up there as as the uh as the rebuttal witness yeah he was not thank god he's smart as shit yeah well that goes yeah i'm telling you he's a book well that goes book announcement it goes back to my disdain with the government earlier like they're not even capable of finding somebody who actually knows what they're talking about to come testify to them about a subject that's very important well professor bitcoin has been a you know he's been a quote expert witness for a long time so that kind of shows you what does he consider himself like in the traditional doom professor doom or something like that no no robini is

professor yeah he's oh you're talking about professor bitcoin is uh mark williams who called for ten dollar bitcoin so he's you know 65 000 out of the money or whatever so yeah there's been so many detractors over the year it's hard to keep count uh yeah i know there's there's a few a few have you know have been implanted into our our memories forever yeah and it's uh it's important to have people like pierre rochard and michael goldstein keeping track of these guys with bitcoin obituaries and uh the skeptics list things like that um yeah it's been a fascinating uh 10 years um yeah it's come a long way how much more time do you have as much time as you have i got plenty of time what uh what are you into outside of bitcoin uh you know kids traveling

not spending bitcoins anymore that's that's uh i probably should be spending some but um so so yeah you know i spent a lot of time with my current venture with inx um you know being a fully regulated exchange definitely you know it takes a lot of time so this is something we could probably dive in like what would you change with the regulatory structure to make it easier and practical uh for easier for businesses and practical from like a regulator's perspective or like you're sort of checking every box and yeah you know i mean with that without a doubt you need some kind of uniform regulations in the in the u.s so you know and i that's what like people you know like coin center has been fighting for and people like that it's

uh you know it's you know why not go to the eu and you know dealing with them is so much easier you have like one universal license and you know you're done um you know here you deal with you know federal laws and like 50 states and three territories and whatever and um you know and then it's interesting it's you know there's a wide disparity of like kind of comments you get back from each state some states would be you know if with if you know we have to go through a blue sky process because uh you know if you want to you want to sell a token into into each state you register in each state so you know some states are like yep we're good and some states you know just bring up the most like we're just ridiculous questions whatsoever so um

Um, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a Democrat. I'm registered Democrat. And these times are trying for me as a Democrat that I'm, cause yeah, I just like the Democratic states are the worst. It's just, it's just really tough. So, so Democrats out there. Yeah. If you want to keep me, just start, got to be more reasonable.

start ripping off the red tape you know no it is uh it's it's all right so it's so that's that's the main thing as you know yeah yeah it's you just need a uniform construct in this country to to deal with regulations so um and it's such a shit show is it a commodity is it a currency is it uh yeah you need you need a lot of regulatory clarity and then we're getting we're getting there i i think we're getting there um you know and it's hard for bitcoin businesses or crypto businesses in this country all the ancillary businesses are also kind of sitting and waiting for regulatory clarity so you know dealing with banks dealing with insurance everything moves like very very slow um uh you know we we have a couple banking relationships in the states you know it took

months to set up you know in between they change their banking applications what they needed and that um you know insurance uh is a total pain it's it'll get there but it's just very painful right now and um unfortunately like regulatory clarity will kind of you know lead things so we have to wait for regulators yeah it's like that's the other thing i worry about though like are the regular like after seeing like the testimonies last week like hopefully they're capable of making reasonable regulations and you know it's funny to me like these like the hearings like the um the government officials are just like all over the place and you know of course they have to be knowledgeable on like a thousand different topics you know next week they'll have

a hearing on like you know farming or you know biofuels you know god knows what but you know it's like it's funny because like the the hearings like half of them will like kind of bounce like another hearing next door you know they kind of balance out bounce back you know it's just like um it's all road it's like a it's optics i would say it's it's it's just it's not you know not a way to get anything done quickly no um yeah so it's i guess a necessary evil i don't know some would say that you just you know bitcoin could survive that any of this crap and you just you know yeah that's what sometimes i wish i just went in like a 15 year coma and just woke up and didn't have to worry about all the noise between now and then um we're just we're all very anxious

to see bitcoin succeed and well that's a that's a funny thing just take time and you know that's a funny thing we're all anxious to see it succeed it is succeeding that's what we have to like remind ourselves of like it is still producing blocks every 10 roughly 10 minutes and giving out 12 and a half bitcoin right now and people are transacting on it yes it might not be uh where it was from a price perspective actually it's higher than it was this time last year that's a funny thing like it was only above ten thousand dollars for like 40 days maybe but like that is what is stuck in our mind for something that's been around for 10 years for 3500 days almost i just i just remember i remember that time it was just like total elation but you

were like this is gonna come crashing the hell down at the same time there was like moments store in the run where i was like maybe this is it maybe like it never goes back down maybe we go straight to like 10 million dollars it's such a fun time everybody on twitter is like 10 000 12 000 15 000 to the moon but uh no that's that's actually been a funny not funny it's actually been a interesting thing dealing with as we've been coming down is and maybe something we could talk about in length is like i was i've been the bitcoin advocate to all my friends and family and obviously at barstool i was the bitcoin uh connoisseur if you will and during these like euphoric moments like yeah i'm like bitcoin i'm like i think bitcoin's gonna be successful

but at the same time i was like do not go all in bitcoin like buy a little bit at a time like do not buy a bunch right now it's like like 10 to 12 000 and tell them to stay away from shit coins and during that 40 days they all 10 20 100 x uh they were like you're telling us to bitcoin and like it's all failing so like the fallout of of being an advocate during times of euphoria and then still being an advocate after the crash and trying to convince the people that you're convincing during uh high times that it's still worthwhile it's been an arduous task but there are some people as there always have been throughout the cycles of bitcoin that stick around and and i think the uh the people that stuck through that got into bitcoin and crypto

sort of in the mania last year and i've stuck through are in a better position than we were in like 2013 2014 i would say because there's a lot more access to information than quality information yeah um yeah i've been uh my high school friends is like nine of us we actually all still keep in touch we have like a perpetual text stream i've been telling these idiots to buy since like 35 bucks i think between the eight of them they've probably bought like a couple bitcoins you know i told them like you know 30 bucks 40 50 100 you know 500 you know they're like no it's gone too much 600 it's gone too much you know a thousand no it's done you know um but yeah you know i've always told people just you know you put in just put what you can afford to put in don't

freaking second mortgage your house that's asinine um but um yeah at least people you know but people are looking at me like a total alien like five years ago now it's like you're slightly less of a crazy person less but what i've been getting more recently is like ha you must have lost a bunch of money like are you okay how's bitcoin doing are you okay well you know we're we're so like immersed in everything like my friends are all like i like it seems like crypto is dead like i i haven't even heard about it in like a year is there you know is bitcoin still like you know doing okay you know what's going you know that's what people are like that aren't connected and we're just so like you know immersed in the space and stuff so and i'm like yeah it's

like as strong as it's ever been really i mean to be honest like i'm pretty much any metric it's it's doing great you know it's the best it's ever been except for price but like even with price though like it was above where it is now for maybe 50 days yeah out of a out of a 6 6500 day lifespan like 50 of like less than one less than one percent that's not a tenth of a percent where it was above i can't do math right now this gin is getting all drunk yeah it's uh you gotta be careful for the monkey you know yeah it's actually funny uh the monkey not make me an angry drum very happy right now very happy it's all those botanicals it's like the same thing that you know that i'll need an epi pen for makes it taste good

um yeah it's it's i i think it's i feel that things have gone in a upward trajectory a positive place ever since inception really um you know with some you know notable speed bumps in the way like mount gox and stuff but you know i mean money keeps coming to the space and so i like to i like to see the more more developers coming in the more developer activity and um and you just you have like the wall street brain drain what's happening keeps continuing you're seeing like a crypto brain drain now like wall street like taking crypto people and bring them into their firm like dude from coinbase just went to backed and is working for them now yeah yeah you're you're seeing the war for the talent you just gave up on the on the crypto kitties

you want something more serious to work on i had a friend send me i haven't been on coinbase in a while we are we uh we deleted all the other apps we're on cash app now official sponsor of the pod i'm a big fan of cash app absolutely big fan of cash app as well um tonight's sponsor uh we we did an ad read for them in the beginning uh pre-recorded but uh they uh somebody sent me screenshots of coinbase's interface now it's a complete shitcoin casino they have literally like any like you can get price charts on any coin you want they're not offering any coin but they just they just added zero x today yeah yeah i saw that which is a token that does not have any value like literally i'm pretty sure the creators came out and said this will never accrue value it is a token

that has the highest velocity ever so it really should not have value um but yeah i they i don't know they make some curious decisions over there but um you know i mean what i mean what i'll give to them is that they were absolutely the on-ramp of choice for you know many many uh individuals you know retail people that's where i bought most of my bitcoin yeah i don't know if i should say that whatever the gin's got me feeling feeling confident right now but i mean you know i mean you know they they made it uh you know an easy digestible way to invest in it yeah you know that's that's where they where they excelled and then you know kind of along the way they've kind of all the ripple people are up in arms because they're like never gonna get added but um you

know i bought my first bitcoin it was it was a total shit show it was uh you know 2013 i used to have to and at first i was very tentative so i was buying like little tiny amounts of it at a time so i used to go walk from work to the cvs drugstore pick up the red money gram phone and And they're like, you talk to an operator. You know, this is a total, it's so funny. You talk to the operator and be like, I want to send, you know, $200. And they'd be like, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they'd be like, okay, go to the cashier.

So you hang up the red phone. You walk to the cashier. You give them $200 in cash. So then MoneyGram would send the money to BitInstant, which was the Shrem for years. It might have been Roger Ver in Enterprise. and then bit instant would send it to gox and then i'd buy the bitcoins on gox and then i would transfer it to i don't remember what wallet i used at the time it might have been blockchain sorry to say and then um you know that was the whole process it was like the red phone cashier

bit instant gox it was it was like a total catastrophe so so yeah so coinbase was a ginormous improvement over that right people don't think bitcoin's successful it met like that's how hard it was to get only five years ago five six years the red phone the red red phone going to a cvs hey maybe that's a market what hey i bought my bitcoin at cvs i mean it's crazy and you know i was like there's no way this fucking money's gonna go anywhere i was like it's definitely money graham's gonna send it i'll never see this money again but but um yeah i still have my gox yubikey and uh my you know true og true og badass we got sitting across from me right now um no it's crazy uh it's crazy reminiscing on those days like what

what else about the early days was like crazy to you um well i mean there's i remember the first conference i went to was in san jose i think it was 2013 um you know in like a shitty conference center the winklevi or the key keynote speakers uh i can remember i think it was butterfly labs coinbase uh shit i hate there's a lot of them aren't aren't even in existence anymore you know it was like 99.999 white you know 20 or 30 year olds um so you know we've come a long way since then um you know and now the conferences are just totally like overwhelming they're not even worth it anymore you know there's a million just like icos just like throwing their shit up against the wall see if it sticks um you know like the conferences are of of limited you know

limited value i mean you go because you you talk to people that's why you go yeah that's what uh the uh oh you're at uh hodl hodl that was at hodl hodl that was some of my my inx peeps were there oh yeah yeah yeah so they and they they they love the content there that was it's really quality yeah i've been to two conferences my life that being one of them that was very high quality and i went just because i wanted it was like one work was going to pay for it and then two uh i just wanted to meet like eastern european bitcoiners that i've been talking to like european bitcoiners in general i've been talking to online for years and yeah i was sorry to actually i was sorry to miss that one i had to be so i think i'd be in israel like the next day

or something but um but yeah they've done a good i mean what's up why why latvia why latvia i don't know huddle huddle the host of the uh the conference that's where they're that's where they're located but not easy to get to latvia from the dc area not easy from new york either it was like a 16 hour travel day it was pretty terrible you like pack up all your microphones and shit in the suitcase yeah i traveled light i brought one duffel bag it was like three days brought like one pair of pants three different shirts that's all a little crypto attire no i can't i can't spend my hodl stash on clothes yeah i got two pairs of pants a few t-shirts that's all you need i have my cash app bitcoin sweatshirt from the inaugural

girl yeah they definitely it was a real thing they went out i got one sponsor cash app this is a side to you i'm gonna need one of those sweatshirts i didn't hop on it early enough but i'll sell i'll sell you mine they definitely it's limited edition they don't exist anymore that's like a supreme drop yeah you're gonna be able to resell that uh on a second market for yeah for for quite sell that in my gox uh yubikey on ebay yeah cash apps you know yeah quality quality very high quality and i'm interested to see what they and they're in like a unique position with square like imagine they could form fit bitcoin functionalities onto their their entire pos system community like anybody that's using their pos system you can i mean i'm completely imagining this right now but

I imagine one day in the future with a software update of Square Software, you can just get complete Bitcoin functionalities. Maybe, hopefully they're experimenting with Lightning Network or Liquid Sidechains or something like that. And we'll slowly but surely build the things that make Bitcoin ubiquitous and actually useful. Yeah, we'll get there. You'll be using it, you won't even know it. Right? Square is... At some point, that'll be the case.

I'm very bullish on Square and Bitcoin. Square is getting totally punished in the stock market. I don't know what the hell I've been... I bought it the second that they announced the cash app, and yeah. A CFO left. A CFO, I know. Unannounced this week. I know.

Anytime a CFO leaves, it's like people run for the freaking hills. Yeah, what's going on? Like it must be, you know, accounting scandals and shit. Hope not to see that. No, it seems really overdone. Yeah. but then again i you know i bought i bought some square stock today actually i don't know if it's a conflict of interest since they're a sponsor but whatever we're a startup podcast here well

you're not privy to any you know insider information no yeah so this you know there's no there's no conflicts here no yeah i think i think that it's been overdone well it's come for like 100 down to like in the 70s it's crazy i bought it like 75 today yeah yeah uh yeah i i'm a i'm a square stockholder it was a little hot it was a little hot this year too it was a nice little correction yeah yeah maybe that's some fun um where are we at here 15 i think about 15 minutes left uh so is there anything so you said you're a democrat like with i'm not trying to get political or anything but like is there anything like ideologically like you're describing sound money earlier like that that you think attracts you to bitcoin other than like sound money or you

about like disrupting the state are you obviously you're a little disgruntled with the regulations they get to jump through for for imx but do you fall in line with like the anna anarchy capitalist like mentality at all or um you know i think i i i think first and foremost i think that people should you know have the ability to be independent and have control over their own money really um you know i think you know as soon as people go off any kind of you know gold standard or peg with fiat currency it just you know it's the the pull to print more money is just um you know governments can't resist and so for individuals to be able to opt out of that and have some kind of predictable math-based non-inflationary currency

is just very important. I think the global finance system has made it easy for Bitcoin because the systems are so antiquated and ridiculous that it shouldn't take you multiple days to be sending money to international countries. You shouldn't be getting gouged 15 to 20 percent. You shouldn't, you know, it's you shouldn't be at the whim of a company to censor you based on just like where you live. So, so, you know, I'm not like a crazy, you know, anarchist, super maximalist.

But, you know, I think all these things are important. You're a fan of self-sovereignty and individuality at the end of the day. Yeah, yeah. no it's no it's weird it's something like growing up in philly probably one of the most liberal cities in the world uh yeah i'm in a very liberal bubble in the dc area for sure so it's coming up i definitely definitely had those left-leaning tendencies like throughout high school and college i went to college in chicago which is another left-leaning city but then uh i don't know there is there is something about bitcoin that makes you inherently at least from a monetary

perspective conservative where it's like yeah sound money makes sense but again going back to what you said like transitioning from a system where the central bankers are just throwing darts at the wall with interest rates and monetary policy to one where it's math based that's why i think people don't understand the beauty of bitcoin is like you can literally predict what's going to happen on a block by block basis and you have that certainty of knowing the supply schedule and knowing what the float supply of Bitcoin at any point in time is going to be. And that lets you plan ahead in the future

with a certain amount of certainty that does not exist right now. And I think, so how do we help people come to this realization that this is important? That's sort of my biggest question that I'm trying to crack with the podcast and the newsletter. That's what I try to do every day. it's just introduce these ideas little by little with less than 250 words or an hour and a half

podcast but it seems like more work needs to be done like we need to get through to people on a on a bigger scale cast a bigger net if you will you know yeah it's um yeah and you know it's like i said before it's it's like there's a big the technical hurdle is hard you really have to like dumb it down it's not because people are dumb but it's just because you know people people have like a limited attention span and um you know once you get into some of the granularities of bitcoin with the hash power mining and um you know nonces and this and that it's just it just people just can't digest it so um and that's why i think it's like it's it's really positive that it's just in the in the end it'll

It'll just be the rails that people like operate on and they don't necessarily need to, to, to know the, the dirty, the nitty gritty about it and how it works. Um, but, but yeah, you know, it's, uh, I don't know. The next, the next few years will be interesting. Right. We'll see how the global government's kind of worked their way out of this one. I don't really know. It's, uh, yeah, it's going to be interesting. things are flaring up on the geopolitical stage that's stuff with the saudi uh journalist um yeah

it's like a world war one kind of um like a franz fernand who knows uh you know i'm definitely getting more and more conspiracy theorists and skeptical and cynical as i get older that you know we'll run to the end of we'll get to the end of our economic cycle and then governments will be like okay it's time for a war you know it's really i i yeah i just get more and more cynical as i get older about you know governments and then you know their inner dealings and how they deal this kind of stuff i mean they're incentivized to do it right they only keep power if i mean our government in particular keeps power if it keeps the petrodollar as strong as it is and that's why this saudi journalist situation puts us in a very precarious situation it's like yeah you can't

really defend that it's like one of these things that you could you could really imagine could spin out into like a total like a total nightmare right like overnight like a total like you know geopolitical nightmare i think in like two seconds i think it's happening yeah the last thing i saw is that someone said that they chopped his body up and you know some turkish uh officials of that that was the last thing well that's the big thing like turkey turkey was spying on saudi arabia but can't admit it they know everything that happened they just can't they can't like say exactly what happened they're like yeah we were spying on these guys and they chopped him up and put him in like his body parts in like separate suitcases and carried him out like

in parts he walked into that building as a whole living being and walked out and didn't walk out he was carried out in separate parts and suitcases like with this what so this guy he was was he like a saudi like detractor like loud mouth in the journalism about i'm not positive i would imagine he was very i would imagine he's at least semi-critical of the government and they weren't happy um that's not saudi i don't know meanwhile we you know yeah it's like we have all these allies for our own you know we have our own motivations in this country whether it's for oil or for you know it's just like it's completely hypocritical you have like the me too movement going on and then saudi arabia is our biggest ally and right women can like finally drive there

yeah you know it's like that's the that's the large accomplishment when we can drive a car now right and people don't get that nuance either it's like hey like the u.s is rah rah we're perfect but it's like we have many we have many questionable alliances and yeah it's yeah it's it's crazy um yeah so we'll see how that plays out um that's an ongoing story i was actually i was on the bike today listening and watching a youtube video on my phone and had msnbc was on the tv in the background i saw they they literally talked about that for like two hours straight and i did not pay attention to any of it but uh uh the the reddit and 4chan news is saying this dude like walked in there they torched him cut him up and walked out with him in separate bags yeah

um are you still on reddit you still on our bitcoin no i don't go on our bitcoin or or any of that i go on parcel reddit actually that's like my favorite page for some reason and then uh uh a couple others i'm a big twitter twitter is my matrix yeah yeah i pump into my same i i pop into this tweet deck and i feel like i i mean you gotta love tweet you gotta love tweet deck i mean if again i i mean you freaks know this out there it's my favorite app if you're consuming information especially in crypto uh create list create a tweet deck and get it up there yeah i mean they you know then you can just create a new list that's like you know if you want to know about you want to know about square stock right now

right there what's it there you go maybe that's yourself shares the square i don't know about that that's not good we got a donald trump doing a 2020 election exclusive right now uh the flyers i mean come on yeah you just won a cup how's it feel i i was literally i was literally crying i'll take the flyers a closer club i'll take the super bowl i mean philly so i'll take the eagles won the super bowl i'll take that yeah i mean you know which was incredible i was actually happy for i'm a big ob fan it's just it's it's been you know i've been um in my 40s it's been it's been

a long run in dc in sports and it's the same story every year it's just like you know you get to the first round you know rah rah and then you look like you know you just totally shit the bed so yeah this was just absolutely absolutely incredible i i just like and it's like funny like ask me a year ago i'd be like you know it's just it's just a freaking game you know whatever just sports but i don't know it just it's magical it was absolutely unbelievable you know my son's like so into it and like you know just every game is like so exciting so it's uh yeah it's it's it's a crazy thing it was very exciting oh we had himself a summer after getting that after getting that cup he uh summer of no shirt for uh for obi he followed in the the footsteps i mean that was

the how was the best stanley cup celebration right week i feel like they definitely had to dry out they definitely went to like the betty ford clinic i mean is it like that every city that has the cup i mean they were they were like off the hook it was crazy i can't imagine i actually lived in chicago they won the cup three times when i lived there i lived there for five years they won the cup three times they had some pretty crazy celebrations i think i wasn't there for the cubs win last year but i think or two years ago but i think that was an epic celebration If the Flyers ever win another cup Philly

People think like the Eagles Super Bowl celebration was big Like Flyers are actually low-key Like the biggest Philly sport Like the biggest hardcore Philly fan sport in Philly If they ever win another cup It's going to be pretty epic I don't think it's going to happen this year

Yeah, the NFC East is pretty pathetic With the Redskins The Redskins are in first place The Eagles game I'm talking about the Flyers The Flyers ever win another Stanley Cup The city will burn down You never know

If a Washington team can win a championship Anything is possible What are your thoughts on Dan Snyder Big fan Holy shit god He is the freaking worst He's the problem He is the problem

I'm very happy he's still there We'll be happy until i'll be very sad when he leaves yeah it's a funny phenomenon in dc it's like as soon as you leave the team and go elsewhere you just you suddenly flourish and become a good athlete that's it it's uh um like kirk cousins is like kirk cousins in minnesota you know um yeah it's yeah i haven't been to a game in years it's totally hideous in dc you gotta fucking go on the beltway and all this traffic it's a little mess like parking is like 50 bucks if you don't want to like walk like two miles and you know and then dan snyder gouges you for you know whatever he can so yeah

it's it's my couch is so much better right yeah with beers that aren't 15 bucks so we're actually hosting an eagles watch party this week so i gotta prepare for that who they playing the panthers should be a good game oh yeah i think we put a dallas yeah um man we're like an hour and a half in here it's been it you know it's been fun man it's been fun it's great to meet people in person in the bitcoins but you know i i meet people at like conferences and stuff they're like dude i'm like you know xyz crypto uh you know i'm like holy shit so i still put a face to it name wasn't expecting you to be so ugly it's it's funny this existence you know my wife thinks it's crazy because like uh you know i just interact with people that i've never met before that i'm like

tight with it's beautiful though right that's the one thing that was like riga i met people in eastern europe i talked to it was like we've been friends forever and you immediately get it or not get it but you have this immediate connection i think that's that's the one thing is like you don't have to there's no like ice breakers you both know that you have a common yeah it's exciting to all me it's like it's like hanging with the eagles fans you know you're right exactly all the same team here being very uh civil um before we hop out of here is there anything like any parting note you want to imbue to the freaks out there and like from your experience uh whether it be building inx building bit premiere being in the space for five years

like any advice for the freaks out there um you know just learn as much as you can um not for mainstream media for sure um you know there's a lot of good resources out there in the space there's a lot of good journalists like aaron von wordham bitcoin magazine generally has quality stuff um so i would you know if you're a noob just stay away from mainstream media because their accuracy rate is just like absolutely awful and um you know reach out to people like me i'm happy to respond to people on twitter and stuff you want dm me and you know ask me any questions or anything there's a lot of good resources out there and um yeah just like learn as much as you can um you know it's early days we have a long way to go that's i think that's a good reminder

is it is still early days so people it's too expensive now it's binary people it's either worth zero or a lot of money and it's not a lot of money yet maybe in some people's mind it is but not as much as it can be um alan thank you for coming through it's great being here man It's great to meet you. It's great to meet you as well. I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation and the monkey 47 gin. Thank you. I'm not angry.

I appreciate it. I'm not angry. This is good. I'm telling you, this is good. This is the magic gin, man. Yeah.

You freaks. It's great to be back in the studio doing interviews. We've got rabbit hole recap, obviously every week. I think we're gonna do that Monday nights. Now, if you're liking this, please subscribe,

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