The Breakdown - The Satoshi-fication of Social Media: Why The Future Is Pseudoanonymous, Feat. The Crypto Dog

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

On the Brief: Big tech vs. the American political right and left Why TikTok users are pretending to love China for clout Decentralizing venture capital  Our main conversation: The Crypto Dog is one of crypto Twitter’s best known characters. In this conversation, he and NLW discuss: Mining bitcoin in 2011 The difficulty of hodling across a decade The emergence of the crypto trader in the Ethereum era Trader agnosticism  Pseudo-anonymity and social media  Developing the character behind the avatar  Global nomadism and the acceleration of “work from anywhere”  The vibe and feel of Hong Kong today Find our guest online:Twitter: @TheCryptoDog

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, Crypto, and Beyond. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and CipherTrace. The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. And now, here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Wednesday, June 17th, and today's featured conversation is with the Crypto dog. That's coming up in a minute, but first, the brief. First up on the brief, the big tech debacle. Right now, there are really only two things that the left and the right can agree on in

America. The first is being against China, and the second is being against big tech. Two leading stories on the Wall Street Journal today are about assaults on tech from the right and the left respectively. The first, and focused on from the right, is that the Department of Justice is proposing to limit internet firm's protections. This goes back to the back to the back. that Trump and Twitter are having and this important Section 230 of this 1996 law that limits the liability of platforms for what their users do and say on them. This is something that is now part of the political discourse. This is a political football. And frankly, this law or this push has support from some on the left as well who have wanted to be able to go after

platforms for particularly egregious uses like child porn. Also coming from the left, though, is a notice that civil rights groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the NWACP, are encouraging advertisers to pull sponsorships from Facebook over the fact that the company hasn't done enough to make Facebook a less hostile place. Why does this matter? I think that in some ways we don't really appreciate the degree to which these platforms and, frankly, our rights to access these platforms have become a part of the essential fabric of society. There's a really tough balance in trying to shape them and influence their direction in a way that fulfills their uses as pseudo-public commons without getting into issues of political capture. I think that political capture of platforms would be a

really bad thing. The risk here is, of course, that while your preferred party or political persuasion may like the control of government when the people in power are doing the things that you want, as soon as the other party or the other group is in power and they have that right or that precedent established to exert their will on these sort of pseudo-public spaces, they might do it in ways that are the opposite of what you want, that are anathema to what you want. So I think it's a dangerous place, but of course this is a really complicated issue. Again, for me, it really comes back to a fear of political capture regardless of party. Which brings us to our second topic on the brief, TikTok and China. Boy howdy, speaking of political capture of a platform, how is this for a

headline. TikTok users gush about China, hoping to boost views. Basically, the story goes that some users are using the hashtag on TikTok of I Love China or Notice Me Shi and have China-related imagery as well as a way to try to boost their numbers. Here's the case study they gave, and I'm just going to read it directly. This is from the Wall Street Journal again. It wasn't dancing or music that powered Texas songwriter T.J. Asaday towards TikTok start-dom. He believes it was a video about his love for China. The 13-second video posted in April shows Mr. Asaday in front of the Chinese flag while the country's national anthem blairs, pointing to a photo of President Xi, the 23-year-old calls the Chinese leader, My President. By mid-May, his account skyrocketed from 2,000 fans

to over 90,000. I'd never seen any type of growth on my page until I made that joking video, he said. Glorifying China with a wink is emerging as an unexpected new trend on TikTok, the short video app, whose already high popularity has soared during the coronavirus. pandemic. Why does this matter? Well, TikTok is effectively ground zero for the debate that we were just having in terms of political capture and social media. Last year, the U.S. launched a national security review of the app around concerns that it censors things based on the political will of Beijing. Media have alleged that it removes politically sensitive videos that would be perceived as anti-China in some way, such as pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. And more recently, we've seen that

posts that were tagged Black Lives Matter and George Floyd were displayed as having zero views. And this was something that the company later had to go back and apologize for and claimed was a technical glitch. Again, the why it matters is that these apps, these social experiences are such a part of the fabric of how we communicate, how we interact, and how we distribute information, that being wary and fearful, frankly, of political capture is a rational thing, in my mind, at least. Last up on the brief, the emergence of decentralized venture capital. So what happened? The Lao made its first VC investment into Tornado cash.

And what is the Lao? Well, the Lao is a for-profit, limited liability, autonomous organization. So kind of like the Dow, but in a slightly different way. It's a for-profit. It's organized to make investments. It's an experiment from the folks at Open Law, which is part of consensus, to actually create a totally different type of infrastructure for venture capital. And why it's interesting, well, Amin from SpankChain points this out.

He says this is actually a huge deal, being the second Dow investment ever. It's like the Dow, but we're doing it right this time. I think that one of the things that ICO showed was that there is a clear pent-up demand from retail buyers to get into early-stage projects, to be able to make bets on things that they believe will be interesting in the future. That is really limited right now by accredited investor laws and a variety of other things. And so that energy gets dissipated into things that maybe aren't as good to do or gamble with, such as the Robin Hood Rally, where people are buying Hertz and other bankrupt stock.

So I think that we can have some pretty serious debates around how we've designed our laws to protect people and what the actual impacts are. But either way, I do think that there is something interesting about these approaches to venture capital that are sort of decentralizing the process. And I know that word decentralized has a lot of baggage over the last couple years or coming off of the last couple years. But I think this is a case where there could be something interesting here. So more than anything else, it's just something that I'm watching and kind of waiting to see what happens next. With that, let's turn to our main discussion with the crypto dog. I wanted to invite the dog on because in some ways, I think that he is the

human embodiment of a number of the different trends that we sometimes look at on the breakdown. One is geographical nomadism, right, or digital nomadism. He's based in Hong Kong and works remotely entirely and has moved around a huge amount. A second is the idea of pseudo-anonymity and even more than just disguising his quote-unquote real identity, creating a character with which to engage with people and with which to engage in market. and these types of conversations. Another trend is, of course, this trend, which we've been talking about a lot in the context of the Robin Hood rally and certainly was something that we could apply to the ICO boom as well

of someone figuring out how to trade, learning on the fly, learning how to get into technicals, and doing it around some emerging asset class or some mania. That was part of the dog's story. So altogether, I thought it would be an interesting, almost human or I guess K-9 in this case, case study of these megatrends that are going to shape our world in one way or another. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. And a final note, as always, long interview means lightly edited. Let's dive in. All right. I am here with the dog himself, the crypto dog. What's going on, man? Good morning. Not too much. Just waking up here around 9 p.m. in Hong Kong. I'm ready to record a

podcast. So when did you move to Hong Kong and what was the interest or motivation for that? Sure. So I actually wasn't, I wasn't sure if I was going to ever move full time or just kind of bounce around for a little bit. But, you know, with everything going on with COVID, I realized my, my opportunity for travel is going to be very, very limited. I need to pick a place that I wanted to stay in long term for a little bit. And over the last six to nine months, I ended up traveling to almost, I want to say it was almost a dozen different cities. And I just fell in love with Hong Kong the most. I really enjoyed it here. It has a very vibrant crypto scene. And just in general, Asia is like one of the best places you can be for crypto. And so I just really wanted to

be able to take advantage of that. So let's actually talk. Let's go back. I know that you've recently shared more about your story, but take us back to how you actually got into Bitcoin, because you have almost a decade now under your belt or nine years at least, right? Sure. Yeah, yeah. It's been quite a journey. So I got into Bitcoin pretty early on. It was, I don't remember exactly where I found it.

I want to say it was on Tom's hardware. It was in 2011 or late 2010. I was just researching how to build, you know, really, really badass desktop computer because I was poor and I wanted to play Crisis on Max Settings. So I scrounged up every last dollar and I was trying to figure out the cheapest way I could do this, the most efficient graphics card for, you know, bank for my buck. And along the way, I found out, oh, hey, there's all these nerds making money by using their graphics cards and pointing it at Bitcoin. So I thought, okay, cool. I'll, you know, I'll subsidize my mining, or my gaming rig with a little bit of Bitcoin mining.

And that's exactly what I did. I had fun with it. It was cool. You know, I would mind. I think I was on a few different pools. I remember doing slush pool for a little bit and some other just random pools that I'm sure are dead these days. I never got myself my own 50 Bitcoin block. But I stacked up a little bit.

I sold a lot of that Bitcoin for $10 or less, I remember. And I held on to a little bit that ended up getting goxed later on. In retrospect, of course, it's so frustrating. But at the same time, you know, shit happens. and who knows, I probably would have sold that Bitcoin long before, you know, 1K or 20K or what have you. So at the time, in 2013, it didn't really bum me out too much. I didn't have too much Bitcoin to really be that mindful of it.

And I just kind of was focused on my studies, my real life at the time, which was science, medicine, biochemistry. I continued, you know, focusing on my career up through 2017. I ended up going on to do a doctorate program in pharmacy with a special interest in pharmaceuticals. I really enjoyed it, but as you know, as you know, this whole crypto thing kind of took over in 2017. I discovered, a rediscovered crypto, really,

in late 2016, early 2017. I had bought some Bitcoin back in 2014, 2015. Nothing too crazy, but just enough to get invested. I held on to that, just waited, you know, didn't trade it. It just was holding. And then, you know, Bitcoin started to go towards all-time highs in late 2016. I remember we were about to break $1,000.

And that was kind of the trigger for me that said, wow, okay, this is going to go to new highs. And this is going to be a really, really big thing. So I started paying a lot more close attention. I ended up hearing from a friend of mine, he said, look, man, you got to get into Ethereum. At first, I was like, I don't know. but he kept, you know, bugging me about it. I kept reading more and I figured, okay, all right. So I moved a pretty good amount of my Bitcoin stack in early 2017 into Eath.

And then within three months, I think I hit a 3X. And so I just, I was blown away. I was astounded. And I wanted to know more. I had to know everything about crypto because, wow, I mean, it just tripled my money. This is ridiculous. So that summer of 2017, I ended up just kind of pouring into, literally everything about crypto trading that I could, which naturally led me to crypto Twitter.

I ended up finding this wonderfully awesome community and I decided, okay, I want to be a part of this. I created the crypto dog that summer. Towards the end of the summer, I didn't have too much time to get started on it, but just wanted to get involved. I started posting and, you know, meeting some friends and the account just grew. It grew and grew and I realized that, wow, okay, I have a pretty cool opportunity here. I don't know how this is going to play out, but I know that there's something special here with both crypto and just with my position,

it sounds so silly, but my position in crypto Twitter, it gave me access to a lot of information, a lot of people. And I thought, okay, I just want to see where this goes. So I decided to take a year off from my doctorate program,

just a little hiatus in 2018, you know, decided if I want to go back, I'll go back. But, yeah, I figured, okay, I'm going to spend one year, just focus on crypto and see how that goes. It ended up going great, and I decided, okay, yep, I'm not going to go back to school. I am going to pursue entrepreneurship and just, you know, take crypto to the next level. So that's, yeah, that's the story.

Sorry, that was a little bit windy, a little long. No, it's interesting. You are like the embodiment of, like, you are in some ways, like the thing that people think that they can become with crypto trading, which so often ends poorly for them. But it is really interesting to hear your story. And a couple of things that I was thinking about. So one thing I was thinking about when you were talking, I often think about, so my first kind of glimpse of an interaction with Bitcoin was a little bit later than that. But I was advising a company in Silicon Valley who went through I combinated the same class as Coinbase. And so I remember the day that

they all got like their Bitcoin on a thumb drive or whatever it was, right? Like they all were handed out like a Bitcoin in some special presentation and, you know, and this was like, you know, this 2012. So it was still really early. And I remember kind of being like, oh, that's interesting, but not really digging into it. And there's a variety of reasons why. But it's funny, like when you think about the counterfactual, you know, which is obviously even more painful for you having actually mine Bitcoin and been there.

But I do think that it's the idea that, you know, you could have just helped. between, like with all of these price ups and downs is just totally nuts to me. It's why I've always respected the people who have been long-term huddlers and kind of rejected the idea that people who got in early were just lucky, you know, like the conviction or... I completely do that, yeah. Yeah, it's such a hard thing, especially because, like, most people, at your point, you know, like you're living your life all around-sided. It's only been in the last few years that there's really been for most people a viable industry

to come into other than that, you know, the, total pioneers at O'Gs, who just kind of forged, forged one from nothing. But I guess, you know, so a couple of follow-up questions. So I want to talk about, I talk about the account and social media. But first, let's talk about how, so you got into this, when you were, when you were mining Bitcoin, I guess, in 2011, how much of it for you was just, hey, there's cool thing versus like, were you spending time on the Bitcoin talk forums? Were you, like, getting into the ethos of it?

Or was it really just this interesting thing going on in the background? So I wouldn't say there was as much ethos back then. I was definitely spending a lot of time on the Bitcoin Talk forums. But I don't know. The community didn't feel like it was so religious like it is today. From what I remember, it was a lot more technical. It was a lot more just about, I don't know. I mostly paid attention to the mining stuff.

I don't remember there being too many big thought leaders or people preaching, you know, long-term Bitcoin holding or anything. I mean, there might have been a couple out there, I'm sure. But for the most part, I don't know, the discussions I, you know, stuck to had to do with, you know, hash rate and that sort of thing. Well, it's interesting. There's this whole new area of technology that's super interesting and immersive and fascinating if you're interested in that.

So, you know, even to the extent, I think to your point, if there were those people who were starting to think in those terms, like, it doesn't surprise me that the majority of it was just fascination with this new technological process, right? You know, we've come to kind of understand it. It's commonplace isn't the right word, but it is so embedded as a part of the system, which is now a decade old, that we don't appreciate how kind of revolutionary it was at that time, right? I think the long-standingness of Bitcoin is what has made it revolutionary.

So I think at the time, it just hadn't been around long enough. It hadn't been battle tested that no one could really point to it and say, hey, yeah, this is amazing. It just hadn't proven itself yet. I think that might have had a lot to do with it. Because now you can say, you can look back and say, wow, Bitcoin survived. It's just only gotten stronger and stronger. At the time, you know, we didn't have the track record to believe in yet.

That's interesting. Okay. So your first kind of foray into this industry is in the context of mining, which makes sense. I mean, that's kind of like the available option back then. And then you go off, you do your life for a little while, and you come back in and you shift. And it sounds like an experience again that I've heard over and over again where you see these crazy gains and you're hooked, right? And you want to learn more. But did you had you spent any time like trading stocks or anything before you kind of started to do this more intentionally in 2017, 2018?

Or was that something that it was like, okay, cool, this is a new area to learn. and I'm going to dive in. Completely new area. I had no experience actually trading stocks. I'm sure it was interesting to me at some point. I'd read an article or two, but yeah, totally new to trading, totally new to markets in general. I think part of what makes it such an interesting question to me is we had this phase of people who came in in 2017, 2018, especially 2017, really, but if you're coming in to 2018, you're

probably late to the party. But like, 2017, there was so much this raw energy flooding into the space. And I think there's understandably a lot of frustration with that period because it was a bubble. It was a mania. But at the same time, I'm always interested in the underlying, right? And I think it's particularly contextual now as you have so many people in Wall Street Betts community and the Robin Hood community who I think there's some similarities in the sense of, I mean, one, you can dismiss it as people just wanting cheap and easy money, which is totally true in a part of motivations. Let's be clear. But there's this other part that's like hunger for kind of financial freedom that markets theoretically provide and a feeling that there's these kind of flash in the pan moments that you might be able to get access to.

I mean, do you, did you feel like that when you were doing it? Did you feel like this might be a once in a lifetime moment to actually kind of, you know, assert myself on these markets? 100%. Yeah. It was so obvious that this could not exist for too long. I remember I think it was probably July or June. I think, yeah, it was June 2017. And I was just glued to my screen almost 24-7.

I remember just telling my friends and family like, look, guys, this isn't going to ever happen again. I need to sit in front of my computer right now and trade these stupid coins because this is so ridiculous. It can't possibly last. Yeah. And you were correct. It did not. I mean, so one of the things, one of the reasons that I am like the farthest thing away from a trader as you can be is that I am probably to a fault, have a difficult time divorcing myself between kind of like the big picture and the fundamentals of things and sort of smaller, like, you know, both technicals in terms of markets, but also just, you know, what might happen in the short term. I mean, it's why I'm a good macro and geopolitical and Bitcoin podcaster and would be a horrible trader.

But how did you get into that mindset? I mean, well, one, do you think that you have to have a basically like agnostic mindset going into trading that frankly doesn't care about, well, if not fundamentals, at least kind of have a position vis-a-vis the long-term value of these assets and really focus on that short-term? And if that's the case, how do you get into that mindset? Sure. So I don't think having a strong fundamental mindset is necessarily a bad thing.

You know, a strong fundamental mindset would tell you, hey, you know, over time, odds are longs are going to be better than shorts on Bitcoin. That's not a bad piece of information to have and to be using. So, yeah, I don't think you necessarily have to divorce the two. But when you are trading on, you know, the hourly or, you know, daily versus years, you know, you do maybe have to kind of let go of your bias and you're, okay, well, I know Bitcoin is bullish long term, but, well, it could totally go down for six months. and you have to be cognizant and okay with that. Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's interesting. You have, you know, all of the best traders throughout history, obviously, I'm not talking crypto.

The common thread is that they can, they can kind of, you know, trade what the market is telling them and separate themselves enough from what they would like to see or what they think is good for the world and where the opportunity to make money is. Right. Yeah, it's so easy to get caught up in, you know, it should happen. This is the path that makes sense. and then just building that roadmap in your head and getting too attached to it.

You have to be able to kind of let go of your notions very, very quickly. If something new comes up where you just realize, hey, I was flat out wrong here. So let's talk about the crypto dog account and how that came to be. So initially it was just like a way to kind of engage with the community. What was the decision point to do the pseudo-anonymous thing? So from the very beginning, I, you know, yeah, I guess from the very beginning of my life, getting on the internet. I started, you know, just hanging out, I want to say, you know, in like online game websites and that sort of thing, probably back when I was about

like seven years old or so, I started getting more involved with the internet. I didn't really, you know, I couldn't really read and type that well. I'd have my, my older sisters helped me read a lot of different things. But I just had a fascination with being able to connect with others. I I remember my sisters, they had friends from college that they were able to interact with over AIM. And I thought, wow, this is so cool. And I wanted to get on. And I started learning how to read and write largely from technology. I just wanted to talk to and, you know, connect with other people on the computer.

They were so cool. So from the very beginning, you know, my mom told me, look, you need to, you can't, you know, give out any personal information. And you just have to be anonymous. And so she taught me really, really good OPSEC, operational security for a seven, eight-year-old. And I took that with me my whole life. I never signed up for any website with my real name, never put any real information or anything. It just feels wrong. Like, why would I give a company my real information?

That's weird to me. So any kind of website, anything I ever sign up for, I always create a new name. I always create a new pseudonymous character. It's not necessarily that I'm trying to play a character. The crypto dog just kind of happened in a funny way. But yeah, that's totally natural and normal to me. For me, it's almost weird that someone would put their name and face forward on something. No offense, I'm sure, for you, that's kind of the other way around.

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my first AOL username was Kurt C-Freek, because I really liked Kurt Cobain. And so that was kind of like normal. And then the social period hit and the Web 2 that convinced you or that was about your real identity and presenting your identity. And there were some reasons for that in terms of the explosion of user-generated content, right, and putting your real name on things. But in some ways, I think that we are headed back, it seems to me, likely to be something where more and more people are going to choose, you know, pseudonyms and just avatars and characters. And you can see it now. Even, you know, sometimes you'll see debates in crypto or Bitcoin Twitter where someone throws the fact that someone's an avatar in their face, right, as sort of a moral point. And it almost always

just gets kind of laughed, you know, it's like it doesn't really hold water in an industry that was founded by a pseudo-anonymous founder who, you know, like it's just not going to work. And I think it's, to me, it's highly likely that it's a leading rather than a lagging indicator. And it's, it's interesting to me that your mom was so ahead of the curve on that, frankly. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm very appreciative of here. Now, I have an internet history, but it's all under different names and None of them are connected. So I don't have anything too embarrassing or anything dumb. I said when I was a little kid to someone pull up.

There's another interesting dimension of it, too, which is actually the character aspect of this. And I don't know if you think about this explicitly with the Cryptodog account. But, you know, there is really interesting precedent for the idea that, like, we are as a species super responsive to stories and characters. And one recent example. So I used to spend a lot of time around the music industry. And a manager friend was telling me once about the story of how marshmallow came to be.

And apparently, and this is all just here today, so I could be wrong. But effectively, the story goes that this kid was a totally fine DJ. And he was good, but he was not having any success. He wasn't breaking out, doing things under his own name. And his manager was like, screw it, let's create a character and created the marshmallow character. And obviously, we've seen what has happened since that. I mean, it's total dominance and crossover into every other industry. And, you know, the first Fortnite concert, all these things, you know, come out of that, like, building a character.

Now, certainly he wasn't the first one, right? You had Dead Mouse who, you know, did the thing and Daft Punk, and there's a long history of that. But I think that the difference is that, like, Dead Mouse was always, he wasn't kind of, like, hiding who he was. It's just a kind of an, an, an, an R.L avatar, you know? Right. But anyways, I wonder, like, do you find yourself feeling like you have a character, who you have to kind of live up to or is it not not so much like that no for sure that's that's exactly what it is um yeah they you know in creating the account and and growing in everything and building kind of

this i don't know it sounds weird to say community but um there are people that follow me every day and end up commenting and such and so um yeah they have expectations they've built over this time over who the crypto dog is what this you know this represents and all that kind of stuff and so um i try to you know stay true to that um I have personal beliefs and thoughts and things that just, you know, I don't think people are going to care about. People don't want to hear. And, you know, they don't necessarily align with the dog, you know, crypto character. And so I leave that out. I, it's not that I necessarily try to censor myself. It's just that I understand that some things are more appropriate for this audience and some things certainly aren't. And I, you know, it's funny, you know, how you mentioned that they ended up finding a lot more success after creating this character. I definitely do not think that I would have had the growth that I had without being a character. I know just the other day someone mentioned, hey, I doxed and this is why and such.

And I thought to myself, you know, if I was the docks, it would definitely cease my growth. People at the end of the day, they don't know me that much. They probably don't care about me that much. But they do know the dog and they enjoy the dog. And so I have no reason or want to show my face and name. I mean, I don't mind if you look me up. You'll probably just find an old article where I did some research back in the day or a couple of years ago. So at this point, it's not so much that I have something to hide or it's that I really, really don't want someone to find out who I am.

It's perfectly fine. But I feel like it kind of kills the magic just a little bit. You know, people love this dog with sunglasses. Yeah, it's interesting because it's effectively like, you know, there's a lot of conversation about media entrepreneurship and basically like publications of one. And obviously, you know, again, coming back to the immediate context, like you have Dave Portnoy right now just absolutely running rampant over financial media, you know, like, I mean, this is a whole conversation we can have, but I think,

I think financial media is totally doomed in its current incarnation. It's so old and stodgy compared to where most people are. And, you know, the only, the only thing that Bridges kind of legacy financial media now that I think has a chance of survival long term is a real vision. But you have Portnoy, right, who is just absolutely crushing this and as a character. It's just it turns out that Portnoy's character is himself. And that's what he's like forever. Actually, my wife knew him back in Boston and was like, that dude was always exactly like that. Whereas, like, you have, because you chose to kind of do things under this avatar, you almost became a, like a publication of one, right? And it doesn't surprise me that your instinct is like, people don't care about my perspective on this, this or that.

Not because some portion of them wouldn't care, but because what they signed up for was this set of things embodied in the story, right? It's like if you go to a publication that doesn't cover one thing and all of a sudden it's starting to cover that thing, you're like, what the heck is going on? Right, right. I, of course, this year I came into a little bit of conflict where I did start to wander a little bit outside of my character. I got a little bit serious about masks on Twitter and tried telling everybody, hey, guys, you know, wear masks with this whole COVID thing going on and got some, you know, some backlash there. So, yeah, it's very tangible that if I kind of, if I don't stay in my lane, I can feel it. My, you know, my followers will let me know, hey, hey, this isn't what we're. signed up for. So it's helpful. It's interesting, too. I mean, I do think that this year has been a real

challenge for, it's been a real challenge for figuring out how people and, you know, and brands and platforms use the platform that they have to advocate for things that they want or not. You know, like these lines are very blurry and very difficult, I think, for people right now. Yeah, it's, it's definitely strange times. That's for sure. When it comes to kind of this, your content for the dog, you know, where have you seen the biggest uptake, the biggest growth? I'm like looking at your growth chart on Twitter from Social Blade. And obviously, you had a huge, you know, it took off, you know, in the glory days of December, December 17 and January 2018. But it looks like there's a big spike in like May of 2019.

Like when do people respond the most to what you're doing? Is it just kind of correlated with Barbarrow? and bull markets? Sure. It's not exactly correlated to bare markets of bull markets. It's directly correlated to volatility, though. And it is something to do with me and my content. It just happens to do or it happens to be how many people are online at that time.

So, yeah, when Bitcoin's volatile, when it's moving very much up or very much down, people go online to social media to figure out what the hell is happening. When it's going sideways, they get bored, they go back to their other lives outside of crypto, and they don't log on to crypto Twitter. It's really that simple. So, yeah, so in May, May 2019, well, we had that massive upthrust where Bitcoin went from 3,000 earlier in the year all the way to, I think, 14,000 in June. So that was kind of right then during that parabolic run.

I posted a tweet that went semi-viral. I was able to get a hashtag trending on Twitter during that month. It was hashtag Bitcoin is back. I think we broke 10,000. in that month. Interesting. Yeah. It totally resonates with me, you know, as a content creator.

Volatility is when, when things move in the space, whether it's up volatility or bad volatility. I always think it's funny how listless and bored we all get, or like, especially Bitcoin Twitter gets, when Bitcoin has hovered at the same price for a while, even if it was like up significantly from what it was before, you know? Like three weeks ago, everyone was like, everyone was like, look at how resilient this thing is, you know, we bounce back from 3,800 on Black Thursday. Like, hell yeah. Now everyone's like, oh, my God, I'm so sick. It's still 9, 900? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just think it's a funny,

it's a funny dynamic of the space. It's one of the things that I think is really interesting about about Bitcoin is that it's such a self-contained microcosm of all of these things that happen in larger markets as well, you know, like these battles between fundamentals and technicals and kind of like how you approach the market, the different ways that people bring their values and interest to the market and projected on it, the dynamics of kind of short-termism versus long-termism and how those play out. It plays out in this like kind of hyper-aggressive Petri dish on Twitter. Right, right. You can see it all happen almost like a seven-time speed. It's incredible. All right, so let's shift gears for a little bit. You know, you're in Hong Kong now.

You've kind of chosen this sort of slightly nomadic lifestyle, it sounds like. And I know that you basically live on the internet, but how did you, you know, effectively, like I said at the beginning, you are kind of this interesting representation of so many trends right now. You know, the pseudo-anonymous thing, the kind of person who is self-learning and then applying that self-learning to markets. And then another one is the work from anywhere kind of geography doesn't matter as much trend. How did you kind of find your way into that? And how have you structured your life to make that work? And I guess lastly, obviously right now, I think a lot of people are talking about this more in the wake of COVID, but it seems to me that there might be actually like kind of two different forces at work.

On the one hand, there's the push to work from anywhere kind of thing. But then on the other hand, there is a growing kind of, you know, regionalism or a discussion of a de-globalization that may make it harder for people to have the sort of mobility that we've had before. So I guess, you know, both, both from your personal perspective, but then also kind of thinking about these larger trends, how are you thinking about the kind of geography of the world? Yeah. So I started traveling a whole lot more beginning kind of late last year for business and just also, I just wanted to. I'd always wanted to travel the world and kind of get out there. It made sense for me to be in different cities to learn more about different aspects of crypto communities and trading and just connect with different. people. Along that journey, my team, I work with an accelerator where at the time everybody was, you know, we had an office and everybody, you know, went into work every single day and that was just

normal. But while I was out there, we started talking more and more and everybody kind of got on the same page where we realized, hey, you know, dog, I'll just say that. They don't call me dog, by the way. You know, dog can be out and doing all this stuff and we're still getting stuff done. In fact, It's going even better than before. You know, why don't we just let him kind of be on the road, live wherever, kind of do whatever, as long as it all works out. And so I was like, yeah, let's take this and run with it. I was enjoying it. And things were going well.

Fast forward a few months. And I'm now in Hong Kong and the team is dealing with COVID. And so everyone is now working from home. And so everyone is kind of syncing up just the exact same way I was. And we just kind of reuse those same methods to keep me in the loop. We're now keeping everyone in the loop. And it's been, what, three, three, four months now when we loved it. We have loved it.

It's worked out beautifully. Everyone so far has been more productive. We're getting more things done faster. Everyone's happy. And, you know, frankly, not everyone wants to live in the same city. So we're now kind of seeing a little bit of a diaspora of the team. Everyone's kind of moving to different sections of the world, at least as soon as borders. start to open up. So that kind of touches, you know, that segues into your second part.

Yeah, I think, you know, 2017, 2018 was kind of the top for globalization for a little bit. We are going to start to, or at least it sure seems like we're starting to see a lot of countries be, you know, right now political tensions are rising and countries are wanting to become more self-reliant because of that. I think I'll leave it that. I try it to get too much into politics. I do in my personal life, I guess as the crypto dog, I try to be a little bit more apolitical. But yeah, it does seem like there's a lot of reasons to expect, at least probably for the next couple of years, kind of a backing away from globalization, both with COVID and other political tensions, you know, leading to that.

I won't ask you about kind of the politics of Hong Kong, but what's your sense of just the vibe there and how people feel? Does it feel in between things? Does it feel unresolved? Does it feel like things are shifting or does it feel kind of like business as usual? It definitely does not feel business as usual. I would say it feels like a mixture of kind of like, you know, how it would probably feel at the Alamo and then also desperation. It's a little bit of both. It's the people here have kind of accepted that the Hong Kong they've known and loved for

so many years is over. And we're now seeing the transition into something different. No one knows exactly what that's going to look like. But at the same time, everyone is still so determined to not give up, to not let go. So you see these two contrasting forces where it's really, really sad and really, really kind of heartbreaking and then also very motivating and very confidence building almost. You see so much energy here. It's crazy.

I've never seen people so passionate about something before. Yeah, that's the impression that I've gotten from everyone who spent time there. who spent time around protesters and advocates as well. In fact, it's kind of part of the tragedy is the depth of emotion as compared to the feeling occasionally of helplessness. For sure. And yeah, it hasn't picked up too much recently. I know if you were aware, right after the national security law was announced, we had a pretty big protest that happened right around my neighborhood, actually. It was really crazy.

I woke up to, you know, sirens and people shouting and everything downstairs. but it's been a little bit more quiet recently. And so I don't know. I don't know what the near future holds, but I'm going to be trying to pay close attention. Let's talk about your market outlook by way of kind of closing this out. How are you seeing where we are right now? And you can talk about either, you know, I mean, one, I guess as you're trading crypto,

how much do you look at what's going on in the macro environment versus just what's happening inside crypto? And within that context, what's your impression of where we are right now? Sure. So right now, the macro environment is extremely important to crypto. We're seeing crazy correlation to the S&P. It's not even funny anymore. You watch the S&P go up, Bitcoin goes up in lockstep. So definitely paying attention to the global trends is really, really important right now. Paying attention to the Fed printer is important right now. It seems like every time J-Powell, you know, says, hey, we're going to start buying this, buying that. Bitcoin stocks go up. How long is that going to work? I don't know. I don't think it works

forever. But so far, there's just been more and more dollars. You see investors and traders buying on that. Speaking of which, have you been tempted to kind of dabble in the regular stock markets, or have you decided to keep yourself strict within crypto? No, I've been tempted for sure. It looks like a lot of fun. But the thing is, I just have so many things going on right now. And to pick up a whole new skill. Yeah, it's just not in my wheelhouse.

I'm sure there's a lot of similarities. I was looking at the Hertz chart. And I was like, wow, okay, that's, that's, when you look at the very beginning of it, it's so obvious that it's just a bullish continuation pattern after another bullish continuation pattern. It looks like a shit coin that, you know, is getting pumped. It's crazy. I mean, literally the, I feel like every, I feel like every,

everyone in the crypto industry when these bankrupt companies started pumping was like, oh my God, it's the shit coin waterfall. But like we know this. We know this story. You know, unfortunately, like, you know, the advice, of course, is get out while you can because it's still always someone, some part of retail who gets left holding the bag. But. Yep. Yep. Well, hey, I'll give you, I'll give you somewhat of a price prediction or at least some price, some price thoughts. So right now we're sitting around $9,400 of Bitcoin, I would love to be so, so bullish and say this is just going to go straight up. And I'm not sure that the past few months have been distribution. They totally could have been. But right now, if you're a savvy investor, I would wait until we break 10,500. Once we break that resistance, we're going to start seeing some real fireworks. Until then, we're just kind of in a range.

We're just kind of preparing for the next steps, whether that be up or down. So for all the people out there looking to try and, you know, size into Bitcoin, maybe wait a bit. You're going to have a much higher risk to reward ratio or sorry, reward to risk ratio. If you wait until we break that 10.5 key resistance and trigger a new bold trend. There you go. Not financial advice at all. Not financial advice. Not financial advice, but just some random thoughts.

Well, listen, man, I, you know, I wanted to have you on again because I think, it's a, your life, like I said, is really this interesting embodiment of so many of the trends that I feel like I talk about. You're like a human case study, but you're also a human and a dog too, who we appreciate on their own terms. But no, I appreciate you hanging out and sharing kind of your perspective on some of these things. I think it's, you know, when the world is changing as fast that it is, it's interesting for people to hear from people who are kind of leaning all the way into those changes. And I think, you know, certainly no one can accuse you of doing anything other than leaning into a lot of these big changes.

For sure, yeah. I mean, I want to take that as a compliment, so I'll say I appreciate that. No, it absolutely is. It definitely is meant as one. Well, thank you. Yeah, it's been fun. I've always, I don't know, growing up, I always felt like the traditional world, I don't know, it didn't fit me.

And so as things got more weird, I got more happy. Well, I think that that energy is something that hopefully we can all take into the coming years. But thank you for hanging out. and I will catch you on Twitter. Thank you so much. Have a good one. I keep coming back to this larger secular trend of shifting away from exposing and sharing

our real identities to instead creating characters and avatars. I think that this is something that we are at the very beginning of, and there's going to be increasing incentives to do more of this. And in that way, I think Bitcoin, Twitter, and Bitcoin as a whole, obviously with Satoshi being the founder, will be kind of an early mark. in that shift. And I don't think that this means that everyone will all of a sudden just be a pseudonym or anything like that. It's more that I think that whether it's because of OPSEC reasons having to do with a rise in digital crime or simply a fear of reprisal for stating

political opinions, I think there's going to be a larger and growing motivation for people to consider this sort of avatar path rather than the use your real name path. And I think that what will really break this out is when people have some amount of professional success and get recognized for it within the context of their avatar. If an avatar or a pseudonym writes a bestselling trading book or something or becomes a famous trader, that could break things open a little bit more. So people start to think about it more viably. But either way, I think it's a really interesting trend and something that's worth watching and part of kind of the fabric of the society we're going into. So hopefully you enjoy this show and I appreciate you listening. Until tomorrow, guys,

be safe and take care of each other. Peace.