The Breakdown - ‘A Fight Worth Having’: A Conversation With Jesse Powell

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io, Circle and Kraken. On today’s episode of “Grateful for Bitcoin,” NLW is joined by Kraken cofounder and former CEO Jesse Powell. They discuss the fallout from FTX, philosophy, regulations, non-fungible tokens and how the industry can move on in a positive direction.  - Nexo Pro allows you to trade on the spot and futures markets with a 50% discount on fees. You always get the best possible prices from all the available liquidity sources and can earn interest or borrow funds as you wait for your next trade. Get started today on pro.nexo.io. - Circle, the sole issuer of the trusted and reliable stablecoin USDC, is our sponsor for today’s show. USDC is a fast, cost-effective solution for global payments at internet speeds. Learn how businesses are taking advantage of these opportunities at Circle’s USDC Hub for Businesses. - Kraken, the secure, trusted digital asset exchange, is our sponsor for today’s show. Kraken makes it easy to instantly buy 185+ cryptocurrencies with fast, flexible funding options. You’re covered by industry-leading security and award-winning Client Engagement, available 24/7. Sign up and trade today at kraken.com. - “The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Michele Musso and research by Scott Hill. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. Music behind our sponsors today is "Back To The End" by Strength To Last. Image credit:  Malte Mueller /Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.  

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by nexus.com, and crack it, and produced and distributed by CoinDes. What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, November 22nd, and today we are back for another edition of Grateful for Bitcoin. Before we dive in, if you were enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation. Come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friendos, well, here we are day two of Grateful for Bitcoin, and this is a conversation I'm really excited for. As I mentioned yesterday, Cracken stepped up to be a

partner for the Back to Basics theme throughout the year, which this grateful for Bitcoin series is one of the kickoffs of. Today, I'm thrilled then to be joined by Jesse Powell, CEO and co-founder of Cracken. Jesse has seen more of this industry than just about anyone, even before Bitcoin was created, he was working in orthogonal digital currency spaces related to online games and in-game currencies. Jesse began developing Cracken after visiting Mount Gawks in the wake of its 2011 security breach and launched Cracken in 2013. The exchange has long been a stalwart defender of key values in the space, for example being early to proof of reserves. But they've also done so well evolving with the new landscape. For example, in 2020, the company became the first digital

asset company to receive a U.S. bank charter. They've integrated lightning and so much more. So with that, join me in welcoming to the show, Jesse Powell. All right, Jesse, welcome to the breakdown. It's great to have you, sir. Hey, thanks for having me. I am so excited that after all of this chaos, you agreed to come and do a show entirely about late 1990s Magic the Gathering and not talk about crypto at all. I'm really excited for this.

I think the listeners are going to appreciate it as well. I'm here for it. I'm ready to talk about the Power Nine, Legends, Arabian Nights, antiquities, whatever you want. Oh, man. I wish. It is really great to have you here. Obviously, this has been a really interesting, reflective moment for the crypto industry, for a lot of subparts of the crypto industry, for a lot of other orthogonal spaces from Chadfied to DC politics to philanthropy that have been affected by this as

well. And one of the things that you have that most don't in this space is a really long duration historical perspective on it. You've lived through a lot of the crises that people thought were existential. And so maybe just to start there, you know, how have what we've seen transpire in 2022 compared to some of the challenges or moments that people thought were kind of existential crises in Bitcoin or crypto's past? Yeah, well, this is the biggest blow up in crypto history, for sure, in terms of the dollar amount. And I think the number of people affected, you know, Mount Cox when it blew up in 2014. It's about $400 million. And I think there are only about 20,000-something and creditors that actually filed claims there. But that case is still ongoing. People have still

yet to get their money back. So that wound is still open and definitely another major blow for the industry. You know, not so much because FTCS was critical infrastructure or anything. You know, I think Mount Gox was much more critical back in 2014 than FTX was today by a long shot. But politicians have been looking for an excuse to hassle us in the crypto industry. And unfortunately, here we are the victims, and this blowup is somehow going to be pinned on us and be used as a lever to kind of squeeze more juice out of the crypto orange, unfortunately. And we're going to have to fight with everything we can to make sure that, you know, the narrative stays on point, which is that FTX was a scam, a Ponzi, not unlike Bernie Madoff, not unlike Theranos,

just like Bernie Madoff was not an indictment of the stock market or equities, and Theranos was not an indictment of the medical profession. FTX is not an indictment of crypto whatsoever. We just happen to be the victims in this case. He could have used anything. And I hope that we all stay on message with that and make sure that this doesn't get used as an excuse to shut us down. One optimistic thing about that is this is a case where this isn't sort of like

effective post-PR spin where you need a bunch of consultants to tell you what to say. It's just the actual truth. The question is whether the actual truth will be able to rise above what is an extremely convenient sort of priors-confirming sort of moment for a lot of people who already didn't like the space. For sure. Yeah, it's going to be spun that way. There have fortunately been a few mainstream media articles already kind of elucidating

the fact that this was a Ponzi scheme and it wasn't really a crypto thing. I hope we'll see more of that. You know, I hope that people don't lose sight of all the great things that crypto is here to do. You know, I think when the market's up and down, people are focused on the speculation use case. But really the whole reason this movement got started was for all the great good that it could do for the world. You know, this should be something that politicians really want to embrace as, you know, part of their platform. And, you know, for all of us to rally around is something that

that we can really do, you know, it's really once in, in maybe far more than once in a lifetime shot to really do something great for the world, you know, on the scale of what the internet has done for information. You know, we can do that for money and free people from the slave money that we have. and separate money in state and bring about, you know, a new era of human flourishing, you know, that's a war worth fighting and we shouldn't back down from it. So one of the things that's always been super interesting about you and about Cracken is you've never been the Rebel Rouser from outside the system throwing stones at Tradfire or anything. You've been willing to do participate in that system to try to play by its rules as long as

you're kind of advancing what you wanted to advance. And I'm thinking specifically about things like, you know, the SPDR, trying to kind of get that bank charter and things like that. But at the same time, I've always had the perception that you, at least personally, had a wariness born from experience of how cozy close to get with sort of the existing players, the existing establishment. I don't know how much your experience in New York was a part of that. Or how have you kind of in any organization tried to navigate that line? Yeah, it's a tough line. You know, you want to work with regulators and lawmakers to the extent that they are supportive and they want to, you know, if they're just seeking to kind of build some guardrails

and make sure that everything's safe and cool, then that's great. If they're trying to shut down the industry, you know, and that's, I think, what we saw in New York and what we've seen in several GOs around the world where they come up with this new legislation and they install something that looks very authoritarian, that removes a lot of choice and a lot of options for people. I mean, the people of New York have probably missed out on billions of dollars of wealth, creation over the last decade because of the BIT license. You know, while Lasky walked out of there and started a consulting firm to help people get the very license that he created.

So, I mean, it's a total racket, and that's not the kind of the lawmaking that we want to work with, which is this cronyism. We're happy to work with regulators where they really have the best interest of people at heart, where they're really looking out for consumers, where they care about the people who are not served by the banks and they want to provide that rail of last resort for people. we're happy to work with them all day long. We're happy to get every license under the sun to be fully supervised in every jurisdiction. You know, if that means that we're better able to bring Bitcoin and crypto to the world

and help more people get across that bridge and onboarded to the world of crypto, where hopefully, you know, with a little more education and a little more time, people will not need centralized venues anymore. And they'll move into the complete world of defy and in non-custodial services where they can whatever they want without a middleman, they can stop paying those fees, they can stop worry about getting robbed, they can stop worrying about the FTXs of the world, stealing their money when they're supposed to be safekeeping it. These problems that exist in TradFi that are exemplified by FTX are solved by crypto, you know, and so, you know, the FTX blow up, if anything,

is an indictment of centralized finance, this model of no transparency, this black box, this centralized custody system. You know, contrast that. with blockchain and Bitcoin where you have full transparency in everything that's there. You can see something the second it moves. People control their own keys and their own coins. Someone can't move your coins for you. Someone can't misappropriate your funds for you. There's not a middleman there to steal from you.

So, you know, if anything, I think this whole case just kind of highlights maybe the need for more supervision of centralized exchanges around the world. You know, maybe more support of defy to help people get across and get into defy where these problems don't exist. Want to keep more profits when trading? Get the best possible prices and trade with 50% lower fees on NXO Pro. The new Spot and Futures trading platform uses aggregated liquidity of over 3,000 order books collected from multiple sources.

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This is one of the things that I think that the people are most worried about in terms of the Washington response. Clearly, the failure of a centralized institution. And even more specific to that, the failure of opaque leadership and accounting practices within a centralized institution. And yet it seems highly likely that the blasts, radius is going to include the exact types of things that actually provide a technological solution to a lot of the problems of that opacity and that sort of centralization. It seems more likely that we'll see a reconstruction of the Tradfai system in terms of massive fragmentation of every different kind of part of the system being controlled by some other intermediary, you know,

in an endless chain so that all of a sudden crypto transactions have to go through six different parties as well. Two questions, and I'll start with one because they're very different. As a centralized exchange, it seems like you kind of understand there's a necessity to the role that those sort of centralized institutions play, both in terms of onboarding and getting people comfortable and likely forever with a certain type of customer who doesn't want the responsibility of the obligation. But within that framework, especially kind of building off of what you said about Defi, how do you view Cracken's role as being that bridge, as helping people get deeper into the opportunities they have that aren't just Cracken.

Certainly from a standard kind of business practice perspective, you would think the opposite, what we saw with Sam and Defi legislation, where you want to use tools to capture people once they're there. And it seems to give kind of the opposite attitude. So what does that look like in practice for an exchange like Cracken? Yeah, well, I think just philosophically, I came into the space with anything a very different mindset than Sam. You know, he clearly saw crypto as a means to an end.

You know, that being to make a bunch of money in order to donate that to some other cause that he felt was worthy. You know, I personally got into the space because I think crypto and Bitcoin are that end. You know, they are that ultimate good that we can do for the world. And, you know, everything else is sort of running cracking. You know, it's not a fun job, to be honest. It's a lot of work. There's a lot of BS. There's a lot of bureaucracy.

There's a lot of dealing with people that, you know, are unsavory characters. You know, I do it because of my passion for bringing Bitcoin to the world. I feel like that's a tremendous good that we can do with Cracken. And I think that goes, you know, for some of the other centralized players as well, you know, like you said, I think these venues are going to continue to exist for a long time to come because, first of all, we've got the vast majority of the world still doesn't own any crypto. We've got to fix that. And those people are generally not coming in already having crypto that they earn from their job or something like that.

They are coming in with fiat currencies. And so we got to help them either trade their fiat currencies for crypto. We got to help them earn Bitcoin at their jobs. We got to help them transact in Bitcoin. So we got to make it easier to use and we got to help improve the use cases and we got to spread awareness and education. I think that's something that, you know, a profit-motivated, centralized business, you know, can do, really, right? We have a profit incentive to go out and educate people and onboard people. to the ecosystem and we get paid for that. So, you know, I think our interests are are well aligned

with that of the Bitcoin movement. Yeah, I think some people think that Defi is somehow competitive with the centralized exchanges. I mean, you know, I think there's a problem of like long-termism in general is that, you know, we're thinking about battles that are like 100 years down the road, you know, when all of us are gone. I'm thinking about, you know, how do I just deliver Bitcoin and DeFi to the world. And if DeFi ends up eating Crackens lunch 50 years from now, you know, fine, great. I'll die a happy man because that was the mission in the end. And so I think that we can't be worried about that. I mean, that has to be the objective. The objective can't be, we just came to recreate PayPal and make as much money as possible.

I do think people will continue to use centralized exchanges, even, you know, probably even 50 years from now, maybe hopefully not but you know there might always be that person who just for whatever reason wants to trust somebody else with their stuff i could be stuffing all my cash under my mattress you know or in my attic or in my basement but i choose to use a bank even though i have that option because of convenience and maybe that'll be the case for for centralized crypto exchanges you know 50 years from now maybe there'll still be some stuff that we can do that's it's useful but we're also working on defy stuff. You know, we want to expose people more to that. We've got a non-custodial wallet in development. We've got an NFT marketplace that'll be launching soon. So we're hoping to also expose

people to more defy stuff through the centralized platform that we have, through an easy user interface. And when people are ready, you know, they realize the power of it and what they can do with defy through the simple interface that Cracken offers. And when they're ready, they can just go do it themselves. You know, I mean, that's the beauty of defy. It's like, you don't really need Cracken to participate in paroching auctions or to stake your coins or to trade. You know, you can use the decks. And so, you know, we kind of think about it like, we're here to help people kind of get halfway across the bridge, you know, and get comfortable. And when they're ready, they can take the next step all the way off to the other side to the promised land of

defy. The rub of it is right where you said right at the beginning that for you, there is not a separation between the mission and the business activity, as there clearly was in this other case, right? And so what behaviors that leads you towards are just naturally different? And I think that that's particularly important in this case. And I actually want to bridge off into the philosophical for a moment because it has felt like a big part of what has been revealed kind of post-FTX crash is almost the opposite of what you just said, where everything was, ends just to the means. And this sort of, we were talking about this a little bit before the recording, but the sort of freshman seminar style philosophy of, you know, I have this thing that I'm trying

to do and I've learned just enough to realize that all the rules are bullshit and don't apply to me. And if other people don't kind of get that that's the game that we're all really playing, that's on them, it feels like it's being proven clearly untrue in this moment. But, you know, I know that you've thought a lot about the philosophical perspective on what we've learned right now. And You know, are there any key takeaways, I guess, as you've been reflecting, not just on FDX, but kind of where the space has come to in general. Yeah, I mean, I think effective altruism's reputation is totally on fire right now, you know, maybe with good reason.

You know, I don't know if you ever train like Jiu-Jitsu or, you know, martial arts, but they say that the white belts are the most dangerous to train with because they're just like, they use all their power, they know a few moves, they go crazy, you know, they're not controlled. I kind of feel like that was maybe how Sam was as well, you know, like you don't want to just take one philosophy class and then like make up your mind about the whole world, you know, and I kind of feel like he had a very superficial, naive understanding of ethics and I think utilitarianism, which effective altruism mostly is, is, you know, largely debunked, I think, I mean, at least from my perspective, as something that's justifiable, right? I mean, it's like the classic guy walks into a hospital and the doctor has to decide if he's going to harvest all this dude's organs, this healthy man, you know, to save like five other patients that need transplants. And, you know, the utilitarian would say, yeah, of course, you're going to sacrifice that healthy guy to save five lives. There's very dangerous thinking there that can lead to all sorts of horrible consequences and atrocities. It's always interesting,

I think, from a history of philosophy perspective. I mean, you see, like, you know, the guys that are committing, you know, mass mass murders and Holocaust and like the most horrible things are all very They're true believers, you know, they're very ideologically driven by something that is just like fundamentally flawed for some reason. And they use that to justify anything, you know, like murdering millions of people because it's going to create some better world for whatever, the billions of people that are going to exist after that. So I think that kind of super long-termism where like we're just going to commit any atrocities now because of some thing that, you know, some imaginary world that's going to come after that is just a whole.

approach to life and into doing things because you just don't know what's going to happen along the way. And also, you know, my personal philosophy is that criticism of effect of altruism is that basically, you know, you can somehow like quantify happiness or like the value of like a human or something like that and that it's basically just like a numbers game and it boils down to this like math problems. Like sacrifice a million people now to make two million people happy later. You know, I don't think you can really compare like that.

I think it's all totally apples and oranges and everyone's different. And, you know, when you make value judgments for people like, oh, this money, I can do more good with this money than you can do with it, you know, we even saw that like one of the articles about someone who had received some grant money from Sam said, we're not going to return the grant money because it's, it wouldn't be fair to fire the employees that we hired with the grant money. So, I mean, those guys are making the judgment that it's better to, you know, it's better to keep those employees than it is to return the money to the people that it's been stolen from.

And who knows what they were going to do with it, right? They might have been using that money to, like, pay for their cancer treatment or something. Like, you just don't know. So, anyway, I'm like going down like a crazy rabbit hole in rambling now. No, I think it's important. And just to kind of the listeners understand why I, you know, particularly wanted to talk with you about this is I actually do think that this is not just the shit on say I'm an FTX show. And certainly, like, although I have been, had a front row seat to this and have talked extensively about it, I'm not setting out to sort of be like the voice of anti-that or anything. I do, however, believe it is incredibly important to discuss this dimension, which is not

going to be a part of the New York Times articles or the Wall Street Journal articles or anything else, which is the philosophical underpinnings that made this seem reasonable. Listen, if this industry rises back from the ashes as it has so many times and people acquire and accumulate wealth and influence again, there will be decisions made about how to deploy that wealth and influence. And taking the time to actually dig into how this particular philosophy has proven itself to be extraordinarily problematic, either the genesis from which this fraud was justified or just a convenient way to justify it, you know, sort of after the fact, either is a pretty terrible indictment of it. And so, again, it's not to rag on people who

are excited about effective altruism, although it's a part of the conversation that we need to have. I wonder how much we can hold effective altruism accountable for this because clearly the stated objective is to do max good, basically, right? And Sam just did $10 billion of damage to a million people, you know, if not more if you count the broader crypto ecosystem, kind of the brand damage that and the cleanup cost that he's created, you know, is just tremendous. So he certainly failed at, you know, helping people. So, you know, I don't know how much we can hold them. You know, like, is he a true effect of altruist? You know, do we have to hold veganism accountable here as well? Because, you know, he's also a vegan and it just happens to also be a scammer.

I think that's a super reasonable question. And my guess is that a lot of people in the effective altruism movement are very comfortable engaging deeply with the sort of complicated questions that you bring up. We're sitting here understanding that Sam used this space that we care about. so it's not at all inconceivable that he did the same thing with his other thing. I think actually something that you said that I've, at the risk of going too far down the rabbit hole of trying to psychoanalyse someone, the idea that he could spend people's money better than them seems to have been at the heart of a lot of this in multiple dimensions. And that is a personal assessment, right?

That doesn't come from a wellspring of a philosophical movement. That comes from a certain arrogance that is entirely personal. whatever else gets wrapped around it ultimately. Yeah, absolutely. I can only speculate as to how much his philosophy actually played into his actions. But we have those text messages that he, he shared with the reporter, where he basically says, I basically did whatever I thought was going to get me what I wanted in the moment. And none of it was real. And, you know, I'm just sort of like playing this character or two to get what I want. You know, my question is like, all right, well, were you lying then or are you lying now? And like, who's the real sense?

Sam Bankman-Fried. I don't think we're going to know that. I think it's an important discussion. But while I have you, I want to shift it now a little bit and look forward. As we head into 2023, we're obviously doing a lot of reevaluating, returning to fundamentals, getting back to basics. What do you think as an industry are some of the most important steps forward? And that can be on kind of multiple dimensions.

It could be in terms of how we think about ourselves. It can be in terms of how we kind of define our objectives. be about how we engage with lawmakers, you know, but what do you think are some of the most important next steps? Well, I think we really got to ramp up our lobbying effort and get even more engaged in D.C. and with the lawmakers around the world who are, you know, surely feeling like they need to do something right now. You know, we've already gotten a ton of inquiries. I think everybody is feeling like they need to be seen to be doing something now, you know, even if they don't know what it is. They know they should be sending out questionnaires to all the exchanges or whatever,

whatever, you know, whatever's within their power to do, they're trying to do. So we have a ton of work to do there. Fortunately, you know, we do have some very good longstanding actors in the space, who I think are, you know, good representatives of the industry, who I think can speak intelligently and show that, you know, it's not all bad actors here. Certainly not crypto's problem that there are bad actors. So that for sure, we got to get on top of, and I think we have to be fully aligned. and on the same team as the broader crypto industry, you know, there's been some infighting in D.C.

between various coins, trying to throw each other under the bus, you know, to try to gain favor or, you know, they feel like it's a zero-sum game where if Bitcoin dies, then proof of stake wins and therefore their coin's going to win and stuff like that. And, you know, I think at least in the short term, we can't be fighting those types of fights, you know, which I think are just a side show. and, you know, when they come in to wreck us, we're just going to get slaughtered for fighting amongst each other. So I think we've got to solve that. I think the industry can do better at vetting out these bad actors. And, you know, I think that can start with, like, the ratings sites, the ranking sites, who historically just sort of like rank on volume numbers, you know, which FTX also heavily gamed, you know, like super inflated numbers to get to the top of the rankings.

You know, we should start looking at other fundamentals of these businesses, you know, how long have they been around? What licenses do they hold? What is the experience level of their executive team? Have they undergone a proof of reserves audit? Have they undergone any other kind of audits, you know, SOC2 or anything else that would show that they actually have something beneath the surface? I mean, Crack and I probably speak for the other large exchanges as well that have been around for a while. I was like, the business is like an iceberg. I mean, you go to the website and it looks like a fairly simple website, but what's happening behind the scenes is like tremendous. You know, there's just a ton of infrastructure that's there to custody the funds, to reconcile

everything, to do the accounting systems, to make sure we're not getting hacked, to make sure we can file our taxes, all of that stuff, you know, seem to have been missing at FTX. And so if you were just looking at the surface, like apparently a bunch of VCs did, the businesses might not look that different, you know, but you really need somebody who has that access and who knows what to look for to do that analysis, to ask those questions, and to develop some kind of scoring system that people can look at who aren't that informed to make some kind of decision about, you know, when a new exchange emerges six weeks from now, you know, and suddenly acquires $10 billion in client deposits that people like have some questions to ask or, you know,

they have a score of an F on the ranking site. I think we can do better at that kind of stuff because there were a ton of red flags with FTCS and there have been red flags with other venues in the past as well. And for whatever reason, people ignore those flags and then they forget that these trading venues aren't just for trading. They're also doubling as your custodian. You know, no matter how much money you make trading, if you lose everything you've got deposited there, you're probably still quite a bit down in the end. So, you know, I think thinking about these guys as custodians, first and foremost, would help a lot of people to not risk so much in one place. What makes you sort of looking out over the next phase, however long it

last the most optimistic. And that can be on a micro level in terms of things that you guys are doing a cracket. It can be on a macro level in terms of changes you see sort of observing or can be both. Well, you know, the good thing about this hack with FTX is that I think the rest of the industry didn't really miss a beat. I mean, obviously we've got all this tremendous amount of contagion with the lenders. But the other exchanges just kept on running. No problems. You know, it's not like we lost anything that was like critically important to a price discovery or to facilitating trade. or transactions. So that's great. I mean, that's, we're in a completely different place than we were when Gox went down in 2014. So that's fantastic. More people are coming into crypto than ever

through stuff that I would not have predicted, like NFTs, which I think we need to find more things like that, which are sort of this gateway use case for people, you know, who, who asked, like, you know, why would I need Ethereum? What am I going to do with it? Well, if now the Reddit collectible avatars have been a massive success and they've onboarded millions of people into crypto just through the avatar system. You know, people want to trade and have and customize these avatars, which are also NFTs. So I'm excited about stuff like that. NFTs in general, I think there are a lot of like real world use cases for NFTs that are really like tangible and practical ticket sales for concerts, you know, for example, and the secondary markets for those

NFTs, I think can hugely improve that pretty easily. You know, that could be like another major gateway where, you know, if it's now suddenly like, you know, ticket master starts using NFTs for everything, or there's a competitor to Ticketmaster it's using NFTs, that could be another huge onboarding event for us. So I think besides just telling people in the developed world, you know, like in the states, you know, we have tons of financial services available to us. And I think the use case for Bitcoin specifically, you know,

it makes sense that people focus on the speculation use case because most adults in the U.S. you know, have access to bank accounts. But it's obviously not the same all over the world. And the actual functional use case of Bitcoin for payments and a store of value and a hedge against inflation and all that is much more pronounced internationally. You know, I think that the NFTs, I feel like have a lot of potential to really like

penetrate the U.S. in a way that just speculating on Bitcoin as another asset inside your brokerage account, you know, hasn't really been able to do. So I'm really excited about NFTs. I hope that we get to see more of those use cases emerge, which I think will sort of be the backdoor to onboarding the next billion people. Yeah, it must be at least a little bit full circle for you watching sort of the rise of NFTs given some of the things that you were working on, you know, 20 years ago now. So yeah, prior to this business, I had a company selling virtual items and currencies for

online games like World of Warcraft Gold. And I was a magic player before that and, you know, Pokemon Trader. I had a small e-commerce business selling magic and Pokemon cards back in the day as well. So, you know, I've been in in the collectibles and digital goods, you know, more than two decades now. And so, yeah, it's really interesting to see it come back around. I also had an art gallery for a while. It's weird how all these things just like, you know, come back together in NFTs now. And I think there's just so much potential for all that stuff, these collectibles, you know,

there's constantly these problems with magic cards, you know, any card that's worth, you know, $10,000 plus, you have to worry about fakes and you got to send the thing off to get authenticated. You can't really do these trades, people getting scammed all the time with just like amazingly good fakes. So NFTs solved that problem. And even if not fully tokenized, you can sort of have proof of authenticity that goes on with the card itself, you know, that you can transfer. I think there's just so many great use cases. And back in the day, part of what got me into Bitcoin was that, you know, I knew that people were trading items in World of Workcraft for real world money. You know, that was part of the business. And kids who didn't have, who were too young to have a bank account,

had their World Warcraft account, you know, where they had their goal. their virtual gold and they had their virtual items that were basically like their stores of wealth. And that was like, you know, they had all of their net worth tied up in their World of Warcraft account, you know, when they're like 12 years old. You know, some of these accounts were worth thousands of dollars. And these kids were using that stuff because they didn't have a PayPal account. They couldn't get a bank account. They needed some way to pay for things digitally.

And so, you know, I knew from that that this was like going to be the future. We just kind of needed that generation to grow up, demand that. And I think they are now. And it's just thinking back 10 years ago where we were with Bitcoin, you know, you go to a meetup and there'd be like, you know, 20 people there. And these days you get these conferences with like 5,000 plus people. It's just insane. And there's like one every week. So that's really heartening. It's really amazing how big the space has grown. And it's super cool to see all the amazing stuff that people are working on. At the beginning of the show, you called whatever we have to do next a fight worth having. And I think that's dead on. It's the right attitude for what's coming next. Jesse was awesome to have you on the show. excited to do this again. Excited for you to continue to provide leadership in the space. And yeah, appreciate you hanging out.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. All right, guys, back to NLW here. I brought this up at the end of the conversation, and I'm almost for sure going to name the podcast after it. But I love that line. This is a fight worth having. There has been so much over this year that has felt frustrating,

interminable, exhausting, disheartening, enraging, depressing. But the core mission of giving people access to an alternative monetary system than the one they didn't even realize they had a choice about is a profoundly important mission. I'm glad to be on this journey still with all of you guys who care about that mission as well. And I do believe that when all of the dust settles, despite the pain and agony of this year, what we will have learned and how it will change us, our behaviors, our attitudes, our mindsets going forward will be to our rest of this space is benefits. For now, I want to say thanks again to Jesse for coming on the show. Thanks again to my sponsors, nexus.com.I.O. Circle and Crackin for supporting the show. And thanks, as always, to you guys for listening. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other.

Peace.