TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #83: Aleks Svetski

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Aleksander Svetski, founder of Amber, to discuss his journey to Bitcoin, lessons from trading, lessons from being a door to door salesman, why Bitcoin not Blockchain, putting up with scammers, and much more. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Liking the show and want to contribute? You can do so by going to https://tftc.io/contribute/

Hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. It's brought to you by, who other than the Cash App. The Cash App, they've been the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years. The first P2P finance app, excuse me, payments app to allow its users to buy Bitcoin. Then they let their users withdraw Bitcoin to a wallet of their choice. And hey, the last few weeks they've roll it out, deposits onto the app. So now if you want to send Bitcoin to the Cash App, you can produce an address and send Bitcoin to your Cash App,

sell it if you need to, hopefully you don't, or send it to somebody else. On top of that, they have their Boost program. We've been talking about it for a while. I use it every day. You get a Boost card, you put your signature on it, you go to the merchants they're partnered with, whether it be Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, Whole Foods,

local coffee shops, DoorDash, the list goes on. You put your boost on, you use the cash card when you go to that merchant and you save some money and you can stack sats with that. So go to the app store today and download the cash app using the promo code stacking sats. We got a promo code freaks. And if you haven't downloaded it yet and you download it for the first time using this promo code stacking sats, you're going to get $5 and $5 will also go to a charity uh of our choice where we've got it down to three or four right now and we're going to decide within the week but uh if you're even if you download it now that money will still go to the charity let's uh let's raise some money for some good causes here freaks download the cash

app today promo code stacking sats enjoy this episode with alex from amber we had an incredible time alex spetsky his last name uh we had an incredible time matt and i uh recorded this at Bitcoin 2019 conference. Alex is a hell of a character. We just had a fun time shooting the shit about Bitcoin and the hell that is blockchain consulting and blockchain, not Bitcoin world. Enjoy. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, marty bent here at the bitcoin 2019 conference in a podcasting studio joined by matt odell fuck yeah let's go let's go big day here also joined by alexander svetsky from the ceo of amber a hairless chimp who's interested in philosophy history economics and bitcoin he

also writes about bitcoin too i was gonna be like this guy's fucking teasing the fact that i'm balding oh i'm balding as well as a fellow man is balding uh i have sympathy one day you know the pain right bro fuck it's it's it's depressing man i know the pain uh but one day i'm already mentally preparing for the day that i'm gonna bick my head and just grow a beard i'm gonna be a beard man it's way better to be bald than a no-coiner it's true yeah all right that just made me feel better yeah speaking of no-coiners they got to be angry this week with the price rise wait i um i put up a tweet just a little bit earlier saying um i was like old season's already here it's um it's just a fucking dark cold lonely depressing

place because i mean fuck yeah they thought it was gonna be spring but it's just winter yeah exactly it's a yeah winter is coming and winter ain't going fucking that's what i'm interested in like we talked about this last week on the pod the last rabbit hole recap like i don't know i don't think altcoin death watch i think altcoin death watch is on right now i'm not sure i don't want to call i don't want to be called too early but i feel like we think this every cycle we do take every cycle but you look at there's a lot of people focusing on the uh the u.s dollar value of the altcoins but if you look at like the bitcoin charts it's not looking good it's a disaster man it's everything's trending towards zero which is i mean the only direction they're going to go but

yeah i don't know something feels funny so so i don't know i wasn't around in the bitcoin space in 2013 or 2014 so everyone that i seem to talk to here today or yesterday is like this this event feels like the events from back then yeah yeah and and just just the air seems different like because you know i sort of got in around 2016 and um and in and in 2016 it was just the the level of stupidity was so much higher like it just doesn't i don't know i think the big difference between this cycle and last one is last cycle, Ethereum hadn't happened yet. And Ethereum was the first

time that anyone tried to say that an alt was going to flip in Bitcoin. Before that it was always, there's just going to be thousands of coins and they're like live along Bitcoin. There's people that think the flipping is still going to happen within a year. I think that's, I think now

that it's kind of proven that you take a run for the king you're not going to be able to do it. Maybe be we'll see who knows eth 2.0 apparently they figured out scaling shark pos is the way we'll see uh i thought okay well this is a good segue you're talking about earlier you got in 2016 what what drew you to bitcoin what drew me to bitcoin um hmm uh it was actually fuck i don't know if i'm gonna get i don't know if i should say this but i'm gonna say it fuck it i had a

friend of mine who was um how can i say he had some interesting uh addictions and he was sort of uh talking about how him and his dumb friends were making like buying this bitcoin stuff and um and and i'd heard about it in the past right and um i just i was one of those classic uh back in the days of gerald salente and i don't know if you do you remember gerald salente no is that okay this was sort of when max kaiser and all the guys became really big like this was sort of 2010 2011 so that's sort of when i got into the whole austrian economics and everything and i went down that rabbit hole and and i bought a shitload of silver and gold in 2010 11 and i rode that bull market all the way up and then i dumped all my bags of silver at like 49 and shorted that

bitch all the way down so i i killed it during that period and um so were you a trader before you got into bitcoin or uh yeah so i mean i've been trading since probably 2007 um but i hate fucking trading so i avoid it now so if i look at the all of the time that i've spent trading throughout my life i could have worked at fucking mcdonald's and had you know alpha on my trading because it's just it's it's a fucking degenerate addiction like and especially in a marketplace like like bitcoin um so so like the first thing i did my first foray into trading was um oh i i got a scholarship into uni um and i picked the university so we've um down the east coast of australia you've got about south of sydney uh you've got this place called woolingong which is

it's a beautiful beach area it's it's it's gorgeous and you know that that was the university giving the lowest uh scholarship but it had the most chicks and had a beach so i was like fuck it this sounds good boss yeah right so solid priorities yeah exactly i was thinking about my future um so so i went down there and um and i felt like uh you know this was very humble of me I felt like everyone was a dumb motherfucker. So I was like, I'm going to put my scholarship money on the market. And I taught myself to trade derivatives, options, warrants, and all this sort of stuff. This is sort of early 2007, late 2006, early 2007.

And I rode up. I turned like less than $5,000 into like $60,000 inside six months. And I thought I was king shit. You were a genius. I was the man. I was the man. And walking around and talking to all my friends, I was like, I'm going to be a millionaire by the time I'm 20.

you know it was like and i still remember the day august the 16th 2007 it was like a week before my birthday i levered the fuck up on all of these trades and i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna make a quarter of a million bucks you know i'm gonna be sweet by next week and i woke up that morning on august the 16th and it was like a major trial and i can't remember if it was layman brothers or whoever the fuck it was yeah it sounds around like burn bare stairs it was around that time exactly and then like the entire market was red and and at that point i had this like it was still the computer screens you know the big white computers like the fucking the what are they before the flat screens whatever they were called the big fat monitors i had one of those yeah like

a desktop monitor yeah like one of those classic old computers and i turned it on and i was like fucking the whole screen's red i'm like what's wrong with this thing like and like i just couldn't fathom what the fuck is going on and i looked at my account and i'm like i was down 80 percent in one day and i was like in this state of shock and i like i walked around and i kicked the hole in my kitchen i was like fuck no i need to pay for that and um and that was like my first that's classic to kick the hole in the wall yeah yeah that never solves the problem well i thought it would until i kicked the hole in the wall and then um and yes so that that was um that was my first spanking and then um from there i thought i know how to fix this so i borrowed more money and about four

months later i was a quarter of a million in debt holy shit so i was like i'm gonna be a millionaire by the time i'm 20 i turned 20 i was a quarter of a million in debt so i was like going the wrong way so what uh so you obviously learned some lessons there yeah man well so so that uh i had to drop out of uni so i had to pay the banks like about 1500 bucks a week before i could even eat so my my life turned into i moved into this dude's um into this dude's flat and i i lived on his lounge room uh on the fucking floor like this piece of shit mattress on the floor and my day consisted of i'd knock on doors selling pay television um i didn't even know what the fuck was on the tv i had no idea what was on the channels but it was the only thing i could get on short notice

so i'd sell sell pay tv all day and i would um read about markets economics and all that sort of shit at night and that was literally my life for the next six months and and i actually became the top the top what was i probably the third best salesperson for pay television in the country um and again i had no idea what the fuck was on tv boss and um i just learned how to communicate that that was my thing so and it's it's funny necessity is like the mother of um it's the mother of invention it's the mother of skill it's the mother of drive it's all of that sort of shit and and that that's sort of what took me um that that was like my foray into you know trading and markets and economics and all of that and and i mean i i had you know that period allowed me to

then be successful during the you know the the gold and silver boom you know so so i did make money during that period and then there's been periods and where i've come back into the market and i've traded for a period of time and i've just like fucking burnt a bunch of money and then i come back i'm like fucking hate this shit i'm never coming back to it again two years later the fucking gambling addiction comes back and start trading my way up again and but if but if i guess this was a long version of the story of um what i've learned over the last what's it been now decade almost yeah it's been over a decade yeah fuck 12 years of messing around with markets that it's a zero-sum game at the end of it like unless you dedicate your life to trading and

that's what you're going to fucking do um don't bother and this is why you know why i'm doing what i'm doing today with amber is i want to get people the fuck away from trading particularly when it comes to because i i've traded derivatives all my life i've never touched stocks like i've just traded derivatives so bitcoin came really natural to me because i was like oh 30 a day that's that's normal so it was like it was it was a good fit for me in that sense but um yeah like i i just think trading is madness. Yeah, so let's jump into Amber. When did you start it? Let's talk about the mechanics of how it works and sort of your ethos and mission behind it. Cool, man. So getting into Bitcoin in 2016, I'd stepped down from being a CEO in a previous business that I

was in, and that was building some recruitment automation software. So during part of my journey throughout life I did a real deep dive on psychology on people on behavioral science and all this sort of stuff and trying to understand how what makes people tick and we built this recruitment automation software which would place people in roles based on who they are not just what they do and anyway I had a dispute with the board on that business and we sort of I stepped down and those dumb motherfuckers ran the company into the ground and shut it down after five months after I left so I was like well there goes two years of my life so what the fuck i'm gonna do now and it was around that time when that friend was um talking about bitcoin again i'm

like fuck is this thing still around because i'd heard about it in the gold days right and i was like haha internet funny money i'll stick with my gold dumbass chuck the peter schiff i feel like that happens a lot you know you hear about it once and then when you hear about the second time you're like oh fuck it's still around is it still here yeah exactly that's exactly the thought that i had and and i started going down the rabbit hole a little bit right and i must credit andreas was sort of like he watching a couple of his talks and i think a lot of people have that similar story you know they heard him yeah in 2013 i would just watch his videos and then i'd close my eyes and mark it by that was like basically basically my strategy titanic fucking

faith um well dude it was yeah so a lot of credit to that guy um he you know what he was saying just made so much sense to me and it just it just aligned with so many values and principles that i'd sort of built up over the years because you know the the experience that i had in the markets the you know the um the austraeconomic sort of deep dive that i did in 2011 and stuff then i got also like i built another business after that period so after i dug myself out of that initial debt i built this uh company in sort of renewable energy and then i got the government fucked up some shit when they were giving out rebates and stuff so i lost the government owed me about two million um yeah and so that that was a real sort of wake-up call of government mismanagement of

money so then so i had all these really interesting pillars along the way did you get that two mil back no none of none of us did yeah we all just basically had to like eat the loss um because they mismanaged how they were paying out the rebates to everyone for the systems people were installing so um so yeah so when i went down that rabbit hole in 2016 i was like fuck this makes so many sense i love the game theory i love the the math the probability the this the that then you know all the reasons why we're here right and yeah i just went on this path you know evangelizing and telling everyone to buy bitcoin and the the particularly in australia the the most common thing i heard was it's too hard it's too risky i don't know what to do the fuck's a wallet why

should i sign up on exchange why do i need to hold up my license next to my face and take a photo of myself blah blah blah all this sort of shit now what's ethereum what's this what's that and yeah man i was like i gotta do something about this and i uh i had heard about acorns in the past um so that so that was a bit of an inspiration for the product and i was like why isn't somebody doing this and they were american company right yeah they're an american company yeah yeah and um and i looked into what it would take to do it um and it wasn't easy like the ability to connect to somebody's bank bank account so so the the original vision for amber was to round up spare change into bitcoin so as people are spending you know they're sort of stacking stats in the

background you spend like 95 cents and then five cents goes goes into bitcoin correct exactly right and um and and that that was sort of the the the vision the premise the the idea that i wanted to make this as easy as download the app link your bank account and forget about it and and um it when was that i think that was around probably mid 2017 when i decided that's what i'm gonna do so shit was going crazy shit was going crazy exactly and and everyone around me was like oh fuck it's such a cool idea you're gonna do an ico and i'm like fuck no but before i said fuck no though i actually considered it so was i telling you this the other day i think i was telling that yeah so so i went away i was like all right this ico shit sounds like too good to

be true i was like people are just selling stuff and like i sort of looked into the mechanics like from afar and i was like fuck they're they're selling tokens they're not selling any equity so they're keeping all the money and they're keeping the tokens that you know a portion of the tokens that they're issuing so they're getting some money for that and they're keeping the company i was like it's a fucking no brainer i'm gonna do this shit so anyway like i was almost an ico guy and um so i grabbed i printed out 20 white papers and i said all right i'm gonna print out a white paper from everyone who's raised from 1 million 5 million 10 million 20 million 50 million up to 100 million and i went away for a weekend in byron bay and i read this shit and i swear to

god by the time i finished reading that stuff like i barely could get like the last fucking 10 was so painful um i walked out of there feeling like about 20 iq points dumber i was like i've just lost some brain cells man this is the dumbest shit i've ever read i walked out of there thinking i ain't fucking doing this this is like a train wreck waiting to happen like when we had to raise money for i recruit the prior business the the shit and the hoops we had to jump through and the due diligence and the level of granularity we had to go through and the level of sense we needed to make to an investor like just to raise a million dollars these fuckers were raising 50 million dollars of some fucking pipe dream on a fucking parallax static site yeah yeah exactly

and i was like what's going on here man i was like man i can't do this shit like i want to be in this industry for a long time like and for me like i don't know if you guys have seen that jeff bezos video where he talks about the the analogy between the internet and electricity i don't think i've seen that one commencement speech no no no i'll send it to you guys commencement speech yeah he does a really good commencement speech but this one like i i first watched this in um yeah in 2017 and he taught he he does this talk at a tedx right in in the really early days of ted and this is still when he's like bald and scrawny and shit right when people thought he was a fucking joker and it's right after the dot-com bubble you could almost not almost you could replace the word

internet with the word bitcoin during that talk and it would have sounded like he was doing it in 2018 like it literally there's an apple keynote that's very similar to that too if you just replaced apple with bitcoin and it was like right after the dot com yeah correct bubble yeah so i remember watching that and i was like man this guy stuck to his guns stuck to what they were doing and amazon evolved into something so much more than a fucking bookstore right because at that time they could only fathom a bookstore i mean here we are today in 2019 whatever you were in right we can only fathom with bitcoin like exchanges wallets lightning you want to put a bookstore on the internet what are you a fucking idiot yeah exactly right yeah it's like these

days oh you wanted to do payments we've already got payments what are you a fucking idiot like you know and that's sort of how we get viewed in australia right there's australia's big for fintech but you say bitcoin it's like oh that's not fintech that's gambling well it's a funny thing about fintech fintech's like some buzzword where there's not really any new fintech bitcoin is new fintech the other fintech is buzzwords that are basically ux it's lipstick on a fucking pig right that's what i call it it's literally they've taken the old shit they've taken that crap and they've just like whacked the new ui on it and they're like oh we're neobank no you're fucking not like revolut i don't know if you guys have revolut here i know about revolut okay yeah

but it's not here yet okay revolut just launched in australia but get this they they're using like one of our big banks down there is called anz which is kind of like equivalent to i don't know call it bank of america here right revolut is just the anz bank account in a revolut app it's neo-banking yeah new banking welcome to the future new fintech quote unquote yeah i mean icos are like the ultimate high time preference right like you could make a shit ton doing your ico but ultimately burn your reputation not only your reputation but you end up in like a legal fucking quagmire yeah well yeah and that's the thing that for me in particular coming from the fund space and i worked for a fund of funds so most of my job was due diligence on the funds that we would

index and just having that experience of the the thoroughness of due diligence we needed just to invest in a fund and then seeing what the icos are doing i was like this doesn't make any sense these guys are gonna get fucked the due diligence was a fucking a paper written over a weekend and there was nothing to do diligence on right yeah exactly yeah you sit down to do due diligence and it's like all right uh 10 pages white paper fucking what else is there oh we don't have anything else oh we've got we're decentralized we've got an engineer who used to work at amax yeah yeah that's it right the network's launching in 10 months it's gonna be revolutionary it's ai powered well that's the discussion we had last week do you think we have like

another alt run like we did you think the markets learn from from the ico boom i don't think we have another ico boom i'm still i don't know man like me and murad had a really good chat about this and he was like there's definitely going to be another couple alt runs and traditionally I've agreed with him but like I mean just watching this shit this last couple weeks or this last month or two like where are we at now we dropped to 11.8

fuck we're going to zero bitcoin's dead alright guys we gotta go I'm doing an ICO one of my favorite memes of the bear market is when you turn to a fellow bitcoiner and it's like a little bit quiet and you turn to him and you go what if we were wrong yeah i ask myself that every fucking day yeah no no but it's uh no but

talking about like all cycles i don't know if they they come back as as viciously if they had in the past maybe i'm naive but again like a lot of people we had this conversation in the group chat matt and i did like earlier this morning about like people were bringing up the google search trends for bitcoin and buy bitcoin yep and they like with this price run like if you're just looking at google searches doesn't look like any retail is coming but then it's like bitcoin's probably like already on the top of people's minds like yeah yeah yeah they it's already has a brand associated with it and those metrics may not be as important going forward but then you look at like china and their google baidu the the searches for bitcoin have been going like up

the roof through the roof i kind of feel like we're at like the position with bitcoin now where we have um enough determined uh accumulators and you know holders who want to accumulate as much bitcoin as possible and combined with the fact that the the block reward keeps going lower that we're like kind of at the point where i feel like we can just incestually pump it ourselves yeah but obviously new retail will come in as well and that will accelerate it but even without the new retail if we got like not a single another bitcoiner just the 30 million of us could probably pump this thing you know so that's kind of where we are now we haven't really seen new retail come so it makes sense to me that of course bitcoin is going to get the majority of of this money because

these are mostly educated uh people that are more experienced in the space when that new retail comes in that's the real question yeah and like my biggest counter to alts being completely dead is like just look at the ripple volume numbers on coinbase and they keep going up right so do they keep going up yeah that's why we stack stats on the number one ripple exchange now is coinbase and like what they added it what like two months ago or something i think in the beginning of the year yeah but still right like so as long as coinbase continues to be like that token casino it should be i don't know but i would love if i would love if alts are dead but no i would too i think it could be wishful thinking yeah i think i think it is i are on the side of wishful thinking

as well i i just wonder where it's i just don't think it's going to come back at the same fervor as the icos because you could go from zero to a billion percent return on investment in six days yeah you know from from a fucking ico and i think there may be too many people banking on that type of uh those type of returns in another cycle yeah and it is probably and it is probably harder these days as well because you know that there's been a bunch that have been delisted and you know it's it's not as easy to get on all like there's not as many shit coin exchanges as well like most of them go on bust like i think a lot of those big pumps as well happen on things like cryptopia i don't know if you guys ever like finance yeah yeah who's now

like kicking out americans forcing kyc yeah r.i.p cryptopia who cryptopia oh yeah they were new zealand based yeah they're actually gone gone now they got hacked i know they got hacked i thought they had to shut down they got hacked declared bankruptcy reported it to the new zealand authorities and like the police don't even know how to send emails right so yeah it's just a clusterfuck yeah cryptopia was one of those weird exchange where you buy things like cat coin and stuff yeah dude you buy anything on there dude i remember being at a um i got asked to get up on a panel and and the dude next to me was this crypto trader who like you know was famous in australia and he's sitting there shilling everyone saying look you know what you want to do is you want to

buy some um bitcoin then you want to put it on cryptopia and you want to trade this this this then you want to set up he had all these like fucking weird masternodes of shit that you'd like fucking fence coin or you know like sidewalk coin or whatever and he's like running all these masternodes it's like this is how i'm gonna set myself up i'm looking at this guy i'm like i was like yeah i remember like during the craze like specifically masternodes oh i need some passive income yeah yeah that's right how's your passive income going down it's like they've made they've made their 100 passive income but they lost 99 of it on the way down how much were people paying for dash masternodes at the height well it was 1500 was

the top for dash and you need a thousand right so what is that 1.5 million yeah ridiculous dude passive income bro bro bro i had i had a bunch of the dash guys come and hit us up like to to list dash on amber so when we were when we were building amber like i had eos come after me dash ethereum all these guys being like oh you know we want to fiat on ramp direct to the consumer bypass having people to go through bitcoin to get to us and all that sort of stuff and you know like oh you know these dash masternode guys walking around like they're king shit right like oh yeah you know i hold 10 dash masternodes and all this sort of stuff i'm like fucking that's a lot of money thinking in my head i was like holy crap and then when the

bear market started to come in you know these guys just all disappeared like just gone you know the fucking ballers one day and just back to kfc the next well that's why i think it's a good example of why you got to think long term in this game and and a lot of these shit coin marketing schemes are ephemeral and just quick bursts dude i was saying it to someone yesterday I was like, it's funny that I think a lot of the reason why we're seeing Bitcoin, you know, such strength, such comparative strength in Bitcoin at the moment in the market is just the the fervency and the call it loyalty, call it, you know, belief around Bitcoin. it's just people give a shit and believe about bitcoin and the people in the bitcoin ecosystem give a shit about it in everything else they were just there for the fucking money and for the quick buck and as soon as that wasn't there they're all fucking gone there's no loyalty exactly it's all

like it's their ghost towns even the ethereum crew i feel like they're all just ready for the next best thing yeah well they're all ready to fucking partner with libra now it's gonna be fucking vitalik and zuck in bed together some of them are libra the standard there's some toxicity uh leaking from the ethereum community right now i'm very worried there's there's another fork coming man it's gonna be ethereum ethereum 2.0 ethereum classic and ethereum libra the standard that's gonna be the new one but um but that's i mean we're the only guys who haven't left right like everything else is a ghost town we're still here and that's why fucking bitcoin's pumping nobody else is here so but on that logic that probably does mean that we will probably see

another altcoin pump because they haven't pumped just because no one's here yeah you know as soon as those green candles start coming back people are gonna be like all right there's some money to be made but the important thing is they can't buy it through amber correct this is true so back to the story of amber um just a little tangent there yeah just a touch um so yeah so we didn't do an ico um and we we we went ahead and we it was actually the original name of amber so i haven't said this on any podcast it was actually originally going to be called stash that was the original name and that's what we're going forward with and the idea was to you know stash your cash and um and you know move small amounts but then then we're gonna have a trademark

issue i think there's a stash here yeah that's what i was gonna say there is a stash yeah only a stash wallet even right yeah i think so so um so one of one of the guys uh you know who's a friend of mine and he's sort of been in fintech for a while he's like dude you don't want to have trademark battle particularly with a company that's just raised 130 million dollars and that has a trademark in the us canada europe and everything i was like fuck those guys we're doing bitcoin i'm gonna take them out and basically everyone ganged up on me they're like motherfucker we're not using stash otherwise we're all leaving i was like fuck okay but and then we went through this whole process of like trying to select a name and dude we went through i think

about 1200 names like because when you these days like every dickhead is sitting on a dot com i don't care what it is even if it's just looking at one of the biggest dickheads right here yeah i have so many one of those assholes so we just were like what has what has a domain that we can actually get um what are the trademarks around the world what has some meaning you know all this sort of shit like what's actually available went through all these we ended up on four names it was um it was dorado which sort of like gold yeah city of gold um we had sort of so one of the other themes we're exploring was this idea of exploring new frontiers so we had rover and you know kind of like mars rover and you know new things um we had amber which you know that sort of came up as

like an early form of money um it's still you know it builds up slowly and accumulates correct exactly it's something that layers um strengthens over time correct and um and then the fourth one was um just salmon like fish and that has no fucking meaning you know people like what is it Because salmon swim upstream. I'm like, well, salmon swim upstream to die. So I was like, that wasn't the meaning. But we, you know, that was just like, it came out of one of the guys was like saying a stupid name.

I was like, I'll slap you with a fucking fish. And then I was like, I'll slap you with a salmon. I kind of like salmon. It was the second pick. That's what Bitcoiners are. We're just swimming upstream. That's what we're doing. But we're not going to die.

It's not what we're here to do. So, yeah, we obviously settled on the most sensible one, Amber. And we picked that. We went through the whole process. And yeah, we went ahead to build this thing. And like I said, the first iteration was this spare change roundup app to put your spare change into Bitcoin and slowly accumulate. And in the early days, like we had a lot of people in the initial testing that wanted us to help them accumulate Bitcoin and actually wanted Ethereum. So I'm going to raise my hand here and say that I was almost going to list Ethereum in the early days.

It was on the original banner that we had. we had and our original branding was actually orange okay get it out of the fucking studio sorry this interview's ever it's been a great time all right but um yeah and um we we as things progressed um i just went further and further down you know the thing and i was like man i it was just it was grinding my gears like i was already a bitcoiner i was always shit talking ethereum but people are like oh you know we need to let people swap between it because that's what the market once and i was like you know what fuck with the market once i'm gonna give them bitcoin and if they want something else they can go to shitcoin over there and you go take their bitcoin from

amber and go to cryptopia and they can go and fucking do whatever they want and they can set up masternodes they can do whatever the fuck they want right so um so yeah so we became probably what i'd almost say is like bitcoins australia's one of australia's only bitcoin only companies and and sort of we we we stood for that and we we had some challenges building the bill uh the banking integration so so one of the things you need to do with the spare change app is you need to have people connect their bank account and in doing so and i think it's probably similar here in australia sorry in america you need to log in with your bank so give you yep yep so you need to see every transaction correct and um and fundamentally i think that was um kind of

compatible with most bitcoiners and stuff like that i don't want to log in with my bank account so we we had a fair bit of a drop off of people so we had a bunch of signups but people like i don't want to link my bank account you know can you just do recurring so you know we've sort of re-engineered the product over the last few months and just really optimized it more so for if if people want to do the spare change stuff go ahead you can um but we've we've re-optimized it for really just to focus on you know stealing your hashtag stacking sats

that's it thank you sir there we go I'm gonna like do you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna can I get a recording of that so when people land on the Amber website

it just says you two guys come up and you're stacking sats that's it with Amber stack sats today with Amber that's it fucking

that's perfect there you go download Amber stack sats I really like your stacking sats explainer on Amber too thank you on the website

thank you very good it was um the whole team was asking me they're like what the fuck are you talking about and it like it's an american thing yeah i was like these two dudes in america i was like they came up with it like no one's gonna understand this shit it was all this guy was it and he

started the hashtag i mean i was i was talking to someone about it uh yesterday and you know the bitcoin space is so incestuous i must have heard it from somewhere yeah yeah but uh yeah i started it on twitter and you know popular popular popularized it yeah i didn't say it right either there you go made it popular showed the shit out of it and it's fucking beautiful i mean during the 2017 run i was trying to get everyone to dollar cost average i would do there'd be like a 10 point thread on twitter about why dollar cost averaging is like the responsible thing to do and it would get no engagement no one wanted to hear fuck all about it now you're a fucking celebrity yeah you tell them stacking sats and they're like i'm fucking

down let's fucking stack this shit i love that shit so yeah so we put it on the website and now that the whole business is optimized around that stack sats make it easy the the idea is to get the to get a noob from hearing about bitcoin to actually stacking sats i want i want to make that as short as one minute so so we're not that short yet it takes takes a little bit of time to like sort of get the shit sorted out we're probably at about two or three minutes now but if you're in australia you can basically set up in in close to a minute and be dollar cost averaging without even thinking about it uh in the background um and accumulating bitcoin so how's it work with not linking your bank account so we've just got a straight direct debit um for

people who don't want to link their bank account for the spare change they just set up a direct debit okay um it's a bit clunkier and it means they need to there's a couple uh there's a there's a few days delay for the clearance of the funds at the moment so we've got a little workaround that we're going to be introducing over the next month or two so that when um when the direct debit does happen we can instantly purchase the bitcoin on their behalf um but at the moment we've got to wait for the fucking funds to clear so you know but but again when your dollar cost averaging it doesn't matter right because you're not trying to pick the fucking spot price especially if it's recurring exactly that's that's that's the whole point so um so yeah man so that's where we're at

and and really like i wrote an article i don't know if you guys seen it but about um a couple months ago where i said where amber is a bitcoin business not a crypto company and and i i really like i i smashed a bunch of points in there about uh first this myth about diversification in crypto it doesn't exist like diversification in cryptos is you cannot diversify with a basket of correlated assets right and i mean whilst right now they're not right now they're not um if you if you diversified right now you'd feel like a real fucking idiot but yeah traditionally Crypto Man Ran told everyone to do 70 to 90

different assets at the top of the market and that really did well that dude's running around here somewhere I was impressed he didn't delete it so I stamped it today boss I woke up this morning I was like wait did he delete that tweet let's put it up again next year

what are you thinking about in your sleep you're just waking up like I was stewing because our boy Brendan did an interview with him yesterday Oh, yeah, that's true. Which Brendan? Brendan Bernstein. He had that bull juice presentation yesterday.

I missed it. I was on, like, all the macro trends and how Bitcoin is just going to go to the moon. Yeah, it was a live Brendan's Fire Threads on stage. There you go. Getting more bullish, huh? Yeah. But then he went on fucking Rand's show, so now he's dead to us. RIP.

Rip in peace, Brendan. um but what i want to shift here right now is it seems like you have an inspiring story because you have never settled for something like job wise career wise until you found what seems to be your passion in bitcoin and i feel like that's a big theme on this podcast is a lot of people that's actually not a big theme on this podcast but it's something i think about and write about a lot it's like a lot of people have this existential dread they're working nine to fives or they have the the american dream career layout idea of how they should go about their life and um a lot of people

are becoming unhappy with with they get a job they wake up 15 later it's like what the fuck have i been doing with my life and you seem like somebody who's never settled so what's your sort of mentality um or what has your mentality been or what is what sort of drives the decisions be like i don't fucking like this anymore i'm getting out yeah yeah um good question man um i i don't know my dad was like um i've got daddy issues now no my my dad was like uh do you guys have the the term like wog here i don't think so yeah okay so it's kind of like um so it's a term in australia so it's if like if your parents came off the boat particularly in europe sort of like in the 60s and 70s like there were wogs they were sort of like um i can't remember what the fuck it stands for

but um it's kind of like um have you ever seen like my big fat greek wedding yeah yeah so that's sort of that's the definition of wogs you know they're like sort of europeans who come to like a western country and do weird shit right so that was my dad right and um he was really tough on me and my brother like you know he he you know his nickname for me and my brother was scum and dirt jesus he was a motherfucker right i swear to god and um and like so so he instilled in us this this idea of like you can never be a number you have to do something with your life and and as much as like me and my dad don't talk too much these days you know what i mean like we don't really see eye to eye and like you know he's off doing his thing i'm doing my thing and all that sort of stuff and

i was definitely a black sheep in the family you know i've always sort of gone my own way i moved out of home when i was young and all this sort of stuff but like being a little bit more mature now i can sort of look back and see how a lot of that sort of early stuff shaped me into being um some form of overachiever and um and yeah man like i don't know like the same way as bitcoin is a complex thing which we don't really understand how has gotten to today like we can all speculate on oh it was the decentralization it was this it was that but it was fucking everything like life and human beings have those same sort of journeys right we have all of these things that sort of impact us along the way and you know it molds us into being particular types

of character and um and you know my character has evolved into one of being uh a kind of a never settled guy and i was in the podcast yesterday with um with brady from citizen bitcoin and um guy swan i was sort of saying i have all of the experiences in my life have led me to this thing called bitcoin which just fits like a fucking glove like i i cannot like when people ask me if you build up amber into a billion dollar company and get bought by coinbase i was like fuck you i ain't selling a coinbase you heard it here first freaks yeah i was like i ain't fucking taking no money from them but um i said even if we exit i said they're like what are you gonna do i was like well start another bitcoin business bitcoin yeah that's it i i found what

i'm gonna do i think that i'm not gonna do something else i'm not gonna you know i'm not doing this so that tomorrow i can go and fucking i don't know like retire yeah or if i retire i'll be reading i'll be writing these fucking things that's a good pivot let's talk about your anti anti shit coin uh bitcoin times i i feel like in general and you've made it a mission of yours in australia to uh combat the the crypto people the blockchain people right yeah well i mean it was combating the crypto people in 2017 and then in 2018 it was combating the blockchain people and in 2019 it's look at me i'm looking yeah yeah that's right finally i have some significance after being booed off stage for the last few years being like you know i remember the first

time i gave a talk it was in um it was in november of um it wasn't the first time i gave a talk but it was the first time i really got on stage in front of a decent audience and i bashed the shit out of um i bashed the shit out of uh altcoins and it was in november like right when shit was going nuts and i'm like you know remember 2017 yeah 2017 yeah exactly and the guy who got up before me did you guys ever heard of one called sentiment or some shit like that they were trying to build like the bloomberg yeah yeah bloomberg a fucking crypto yeah that's right yeah the ico yeah correct and and this dickhead gets up before me and he's like for he's a university professor and you know there's three people on the team and they raised like you know 10 million dollars in

30 minutes and i'm listening to this guy what the fuck so i got up and i bashed the shit out of you know everything that they were saying and i remember at the end of it was like quiet stairs exactly i walked off the stage i was like fucking hell and i just like slowly went to the back of the room packed my shit up and got the fuck out of there before i got bashed or something and i was like fucking oh man this is my career ain't gonna go anywhere like this and it was it was a rough start but you know i i just kept at it let's write articles one thing that lacks in the overarching quote-unquote crypto landscape is principle right yeah and that's what i think that's what this week's so beautiful too it's like we were talking earlier like bitcoiners

stay around and like here these last two days like it's just been a huge conversation with everybody that you've conversed with online and everybody seems very principled here it's it's like it's almost like a little it's like like an extended family as as sort of gay as that sounds but it's like it's weird and you know you you meet people on twitter and stuff like that and you sort of talk back and forth and you meet him in real life it's like i remember when i was first talking to you the other day i was like i feel like i'm listening to a podcast that's what stefan said to me when i met him yeah and i'm like stefan that's how i feel it's like two podcasts and then there was like a guy standing next to us he's like you don't even know how i feel

and then marty rocks up that's the weirdest thing is like people walking up to you be like i i just i just know who you are from your voice i'm like whoa he's like i hear you in my head like three times a week it's like i'm excited for the deep fakes when you know me and marty are endorsing all this crap yeah it's all fake there's plenty of material online to deep fake for us yeah the podcasters will be the first and talking about podcasts you have a great podcast too in australia it's something that i started with this dude who wanted to start interviewing shit coiners and then i sort of was like fuck it i'm gonna just continue with amber so but but whenever i get a chance i'll do i'll do a podcast with yeah i mean the way i got intro to you was because you did one with

mirad mirad yeah okay cool all right what's the name of your podcast uh decentralized podcast decentralized yeah so we've got it's not decentralized at all not at all no no extremely centralized well the idea was that we were gonna let anybody do a podcast that was sort of why we called it that and we're gonna like let anyone do shit and then um you know all the requests we got Or people want to fucking interview, you know, Walton Chain or this. I was like, fuck this shit. I remember when I first listened to your pod, I feel like I was more comfortable with it because I listened to every Stefan Levera podcast.

So just like a big coiner that has an Aussie accent is like more comfortable for me. Really? I love the Aussie accent. Really? Very pleasant on the ears. I feel like it's really awkward. Like I was, who's the chick who's doing the... Naomi Brockwell?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. so i've never heard of her before anyway so like i was talking to some dude earlier and she was standing next to me and she starts talking like you sound fucking weird and she's like so do you where you from she's like i'm i'm from perth and i was like like i don't like the australian accent i think it's disgusting but anyway why i don't know it just sounds so like i don't know i never even noticed she had an australian accent i was just mine's not too australian yeah you're like a lighter stefan yeah that's why it was nice and comfortable for me what country in europe did your family come from macedonia macedonia

okay so eastern europe so like um basically a history of war war and a little bit more war it's like everyone there is just fucking fiery all we do is fight people and some but yeah i had a friend i had a buddy who was macedonian in school and he just hated everyone yeah the fucking lunatics we're angry especially the greeks yeah exactly yeah that's it we're always going to war with the fucking greeks and the albanians he didn't really like the albanians well i'll tell you what the albanians are like and this is gonna probably get me a lot of hate fucking oh here we go um it's like they came into the country they took over and it's like this is our country now it's like we like walked past we walked past uh like an albanian in the bronx

this is like 10 years ago or something and he just like mutters something under his breath like my buddy and i was like what was that about he's like he's like an albanian stabbed my dad 35 years ago and he was like a cop in macedonia and phil doesn't really it's like passed down from generation to generation macedonians are known for holding on to shit so we'll hold on to like it's like we had a fight with some fucking village 3 000 years ago it's like those pieces of shit killed my great great great great great great great great fucking grandfather but um how much time do we have so we can i think we got five minutes left okay so um i'll finish the thing that i was saying before about um finding you know what i'm passionate

about and then we'll hit bitcoin times and then we'll fucking finish up cool sounds good yeah so um so yeah finding finding bitcoin for me and um and never settling uh the thing that i said to that's what i was gonna say the thing that i said to guy and brady yesterday was you know when i when i'm building amber as a business um like i i feel so confident in what we're doing even if other people are doing similar businesses like there's a couple there's a couple shit coin projects like there's this one called fuck them they're called bamboo and um and they they did an ico and now like they've ripped off all that shit off their website pretending like they never did an ico and they're doing a roundup app into crypto and you know they've got their bamboo token which is

supposed to you know pay for fees on whatever like way they've tried to like jam it in there and try to like make it make sense like tokenomics yeah exactly right and then you know they've tried to take their white paper down off the internet all this shit like so i don't care who i compete with whether it's coinbase or whether it's shit coiners like that like i have found what i'm doing and i'm not here for the money and i will work in this thing for free you don't have to fucking pay me like i'm okay financially now and you know i mean i lost all my bitcoin on a boating accident but it's still you know as we all do yeah we all did but um i feel like bitcoiners need to take boating lessons yeah i know anyway um so i am finding what it is that you want to do for

the rest of your life is like it's an empowering feeling and um and i feel like people who have come to bitcoin that there's just such a broad sense of that in this industry you don't you rarely find that because i've been across like multiple industries i did solar i've you know i've done general tech payroll tech recruitment tech like all sorts of different things and you don't find people who are so fervently like passionate or give a fuck about what they want to do like we've got a whole fucking cottage industry of podcasts man right like show me like the 50 podcasts that are built around how to hire people better like you know that doesn't exist right so like this is such a really shitty if they do exist yeah exactly right yeah they got like three

listeners so this is different man so so that's one thing and that sort of ties back into why you know when i get a chance i do these side projects so i really want to do something with bitcoin time so uh you know if people want to hear the full story of that they can listen to brady or guy swan's podcast from yesterday and i sort of talk about the story about why i wrote that but i was presenting at this uh blockchain conference and they wanted me to get up and talk about you know how where is the company using blockchain and i was like but we're not and they're like well what are you doing then and i was like well we're helping people buy bitcoin and they're like well isn't that on the blockchain i was no so i was like look i'll tell people how

we're not using the blockchain and how we're doing it different and they're like oh that's interesting okay come and talk about that so and i got up and i didn't tell them what the the title of the fucking talk was going to be um or sorry no i did tell them um but they asked me to tone it down and then when i got up um i was like the organizer asked me to call it how um lightning is delivering on what blockchain promised i said well here's the real name of the title the talk it's blockchain is dead the future is on lightning and the organizer in the back just sort of went white he was like fuck he's done it to us again and um and yeah so like that whole talk when i when i sat down to write my talk it turned into this fucking 15 000 word like manifesto which i've

turned into this bitcoin times thing which is just a a siren call to people to say here's what blockchain has promised it delivers none of that shit outside of the context of bitcoin um in fact bitcoin is not even a blockchain it's a time chain but you know let's save that for something else and then i've just sort of driven home the the idea of you know the promise of immutability the promise of digital scarcity which is sort of the the two key things like immutability is this idea that you can go forward in time and you can't go back and that that's what we've actually got in the real world and this is why i think bitcoin's so profound is that in the real world like you do something you can't just reverse time like you've done it that'd be great though

it would be great but that would mean we live in a shitcoin world that's true and we don't be cool if i could just if no one else could but just me well you're not vitalik so that's all right moving along um but see bitcoin has given us a digital uh version of something that moves forward without going back and that has never fucking existed before so we've managed to apply the concept of time in a digital sense by anchoring it to energy which is the only thing in the universe that we can't replicate duplicate forge or anything like that and so it's taken the two most important concepts of you know without sounding fucking foo-foo here like i'm one of those personal development guys but it's taken two most important elements in the universe energy

and time and transformed them into something that we can use for um a a a commons via which we can cooperate and and that's profound yeah no it's incredible and that's i love that explanation of it that's when i've said this before as well like i just view bitcoin like when you're trying to visualize that i close my eyes i view it as like a pillar of light that goes up into the air it's like in the town center the virtual depth town center anybody can anchor information into that and it's just everybody can access it correct uh like you said like the the combination of time and energy is people don't grasp the gravity of time is money i mean go listen goes back for however i don't a long fucking time yeah now go listen to this year mamadav podcast that we

recorded earlier if you haven't listened to it yet like he really drove that point home yeah and for even being a bitcoin for as long as i have that conversation with this year in particular was like oh shit i haven't like said it this clearly ever or heard it said this clearly um a couple parting notes before we end here we got to wrap up uh i love what you're doing the product and i love your mindset like what you're saying like i don't care what coinbase is doing i don't care what the other shit coin apps are doing and reminding me of one of my favorite quotes that really sort of drives what I do at the Benton here at TFTC is like uh the Dr. Dre Jimmy Iovine uh documentary from HBO the documentary series from HBO a couple years ago there's one line

in particular that Jimmy Iovine said uh like that he the mentality that he had when they were producing records and stuff and it's just like I'm a racehorse with blinders on you're not even looking at the people next to you you're just getting your shit done you have your vision and you're just working on that and don't focus on anything else and I think you're personifying that with amber and what you're doing with bitcoin times thanks man really appreciate it thanks for coming and joining us yeah thank you guys i've um i was so glad i actually came up for this it was like last minute it's fucking awesome yeah originally you weren't going to yeah and then here i am fucking it's been a it's been a pleasure to finally meet you in person i think it's so cool

how bitcoiners we like just have soldiers around the world yeah just fighting the good fight so if you're uh an australian soldier looking to stack sats download the amber app thank you check out bitcoin times alex thank you for coming in bro thank you boys appreciate it stay humble stack sets peace and love ciao