The Wolf Of All Streets - Preventing an Orwellian Future: Samson Mow on Bitcoin

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

Samson Mow entered the crypto space in late 2014, developing one of the first major Bitcoin exchanges. He went on to head two unique companies, Blockstream and Pixelmatic, both heavily involved in Bitcoin and the Blockchain. Samson is well known for his perma-bull stance and passion for Bitcoin and its potential. Scott Melker and Samson Mow further discuss Bitcoin preventing an Orwellian future, managing two companies at once, Fidelity leading the adoption charge, Zeus Capital and INX controversy, getting Grandma to buy Bitcoin, ETH 2.0, the Lightning Network, CBDCs, raising 3 million in capital for an upcoming game, 60% of Bitcoin mining being in China, the dangers of DeFi, securing your crypto and more. --- ROUNDLYX RoundlyX allows you to dollar-cost-average into crypto with our spare change "Roundup" investing tool, manage multiple crypto exchange accounts in one dashboard and access curated digital asset content and services. Visit RoundlyX and use promo code "WOLF" to learn more about accumulating your favorite digital assets when making everyday purchases and earn $4 in free Bitcoin. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

I'd like to thank my sponsors, Round the X and Voyager, for making today's episode possible. We'll hear much more about them later on in the episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, sports, music, politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. The show is powered by Blockworks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. Check them out at blockworksgroup.io. Now, if you like the podcast and you follow me on Twitter, you absolutely need to check out my website, join my newsletter, where I share all my trades, charts, analysis, market thoughts,

and lessons on improving your trading and investing. You can check that out at thewolfofallstreets.io. And now on to what's actually important. Today's guest has been an integral part of the blockchain and Bitcoin community since the early years. As the Chief Strategy Officer at Blockstream and CEO of Pixelmatic, a well-known gaming company, Samson Mo has extensive experience in gaming and tech. Just recently, he was given the opportunity to represent Bitcoin in a discussion with Vitalik Buterin and Peter McCormick.

Today's episode is an opportunity to better hear Samson's side and learn more about where his ideas come from. Samson, man, glad to have you on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for having me, Scott. It's great to be here. Awesome. So I want to start, obviously, with your Bitcoin story. How did you discover Bitcoin? How did you find yourself falling down the rabbit hole and, you know, pursuing a career in this space? Yeah. So my story is not that exciting. I read about it on TechCrunch. I thought this is really interesting. And I started tinkering around with it a bit. I tried to mine on my laptop, but it was like 2013 or so. So it was already too late to do that. But I had it all set up, but I couldn't mind anything.

And then I kind of put it to the side. And I think that's similar to what a lot of other people have done. You kind of discover it, and then you're busy with your life, and you put it aside, and then you regret it because you should have dove headfirst in. So I kind of really got into it in late 2014 when I decided to start advising an exchange called BTC China. It's one of the largest exchanges in the world. And later on, we had one of the largest mining pools in the world. And I joined them in 2015 as a COO. And yeah, the rest is history. So were you already

a tech guy? I mean, what were you doing at the time when you discovered Bitcoin? Was it a major shift to a completely different career or was it in line with what you were already doing? It's kind of a shift, but then also kind of in line. So I've been in the game industry for a long time. And when I first discovered Bitcoin, I was actually starting Pixelmatic out. And I guess before that I was doing online games like MMOs and web strategy games, but they all have an economy component to it. And building games with these economies, they're almost like, in a way, they're like Bitcoin, except for they're controlled by a game company. Whereas Bitcoin kind of can live on its own, independent of anything. I think there's some articles that say Bitcoin is like a living organism. So that was why I was interested because typically a currency is

bound to some entity, but Bitcoin is unique because it's decentralized and nobody controls it. So you understood it better than probably your average person who would have read the white paper for the first time or read about it in TechCrunch would. Because I think most people who heard about it at that time, as you said, even more so than you, just completely blew it off. I remember somebody actually offered to pay me in Bitcoin for a DJ gig in like 2012 or something.

And I was like, no, I want money. The same regret that you're probably experiencing. It was probably thousands of Bitcoin or something. And I was like, no, I want money. The same regret that you're probably experiencing. It was probably thousands of Bitcoin or something. Probably. But I think gamers have an inclination towards virtual currencies because they've been dealing with them since the beginning of MMO games

like EverQuest and everything like that. So they're familiar with it and they're okay with it. And to them, it's just like another currency to use, except for this time, it's decentralized and immutable. So where did you get your entrepreneurial spirit? Because obviously already we're talking about six, seven years ago, you were starting your own company. Were you always entrepreneurial? Did you kind of work for someone and go, I never want to have a boss again. So forget it. I'm doing this myself. What was it that spurred that on? Well, I'm fortunate to have had a lot of bosses before that taught me a lot. And I think they were pretty good bosses,

but I just like being my own boss and to be able to do things my way. I've worked in a lot of big companies. So one of the first gaming companies I worked at was THQ, which is a public company. Yeah, you probably know them. They were in the US. But, you know, there are massive bureaucracies and a lot of times decisions don't make a lot of sense. And I prefer just to do things quickly, efficiently,

and just make money and do business. So have you struggled with scaling your existing businesses because you want to stay lean and fast? And have you ever gotten to a scale in your own businesses where that's become a problem? Not really. I think a lot of it has to do with management theory and how you operate the company. So for Pixomatic, we stay pretty efficient. It's not so much that I want to be in control of everything. It's just I want to have a direct impact on the direction things go

rather than not being able to react quickly. And I think Blockstream is also quite similar. We're pretty lean at 60, 70 people. And we operate, I would say, on a very bare bones team considering the amount of things that we do. Yeah, I thought you I would have assumed you had far more employees than that. Yeah, we have a ton of products. So if you like split up the number of people amongst the products, then we're actually very, very lean. But I think both companies can operate very effectively because we don't have a lot of management overhead and bureaucracy.

So, you know, we've got like Jack Dorsey, who's running Twitter and Square and people. It like explodes your brain to think about how much work that is and how he must balance those. So you're doing something very similar. How do you balance those two jobs, which for your average person would be probably a full-time job plus to do either, I would assume? Well, the reason I can do it is the teams are great. So I put together really solid teams that can function at a very high level and are very effective. If I had to spend a lot of time fixing things and micromanaging, then it probably wouldn't work. So the way it works now is I can just give a lot of high level direction and then

they can execute on a lot of things. The other part is, as long as there's no fire burning at both at the same time, it's decently manageable. And I think also building a game for me is almost like a hobby or something I enjoy doing. So I review art, set some art direction with Wayne. He's our director of art. And I review the storylines and direct the stories. But it's like something that you might do on the weekend

or on the evening when you're off work, right? Right. So Blockstream is a lot of BD and, you know, more commercial type work, whereas Pixomatic is more creative. So it's kind of like you do your job and then you have your time to paint. Yeah, that's really cool. Most people do not get to a place where they can, you know, have those two things married so well and actually monetize them both. So it's pretty impressive. So can you talk for people who might not know, and you touched on the fact that Blockstream has a lot of products, a lot of verticals there.

Can you talk about exactly the beginnings of Blockstream, what it is, and what you guys do now? Adam Back founded Blockstream in 2014 with several Bitcoin developers. The goal was to build off of the sidechains white paper, orchains the idea of sidechains and that's kind of augmenting bitcoin so you could say what blockstream is doing is augmenting bitcoin we have a lot of services around bitcoin so as you may know we have liquid it's an inter-exchange settlement network that lets you move bitcoin quickly from exchange to exchange but it also lets you do other things like tokenized assets we have liquid it also lets you do other things like tokenized assets. We have liquid securities, which lets you do security tokens on top of the liquid network. And we have a Bitcoin wallet, Blockstream Green. We do mining of Bitcoin. We host other people

with Blockstream mining. So some of our clients include Fidelity, Reid Hoffman, and a lot of big players. And we have Blockstream S blockchain satellite. People love blockchain satellite. So this is a free service that broadcasts Bitcoin blocks through geosynchronous satellites in orbit around the earth. And you can set up a dish and get the whole Bitcoin blockchain anywhere for free. And we have the ice data feed, which is a partnership with, um, uh, ice data services that's owned that's owned by ICE. So that's the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. So I think I'm missing something. I'm probably missing

something. How could you possibly miss one when there's so few? Yeah. I mean, it's really impressive. You actually, so you just touched on Fidelity with, and you know, this will obviously come out not today, but they were in the news massively today, as they have been in general for their bullishness on the space. And I think they're just sort of leading the institutional charge, it would seem, into the crypto space. So what do you make of their huge involvement and now their commitment even greater to allowing investors to, you know, through Fidelity, be a part of the Bitcoin and crypto ecosystem?

I think it's always been inevitable. If you look at the trends, we're seeing more and more companies, institutions coming to Bitcoin, right? We had MicroStrategy buy up a large chunk of Bitcoin a couple of weeks ago. Now you see Fidelity doing this, but that shouldn't come as a surprise because they've been mining Bitcoin with block stream mining, which is also huge. Like not many large companies are getting involved in mining,

but they took that step. So I wouldn't be surprised at the latest announcement. You also have record volumes on back now. It's increasing. A lot of people were very negative when they first launched and said, oh, there's not much trading going on. But I think a lot of these things take time and you have to lay the foundational pieces out, such as establishing that venue where institutional players can go and trade. And then it takes time for them to move on there, move their funds and get used to it. So it's all coming. And I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg. It's going to be a torrent of adoption for Bitcoin soon.

Which is amazing to hear because in 2017, I think it's pretty clear at this point that it was led by retail. You know, we had just that incredible FOMO. Every person was talking about Bitcoin. Google searches were parabolic, but it felt like the real money wasn't really there. And to me, this time it feels the opposite. It's like the price is the same, but retail doesn't kind of care, right? Your average person, maybe they're starting to, but like you said, sort of the tip of the iceberg. So do you think that now, based on what you're talking about, that we are being driven by the bigger money, the real money, institutional money? Oh, definitely. I think it's been coming along all along, but it's just that you can't see, except for when there's a big announcement.

I think the smart players are going to just buy up quietly so as not to drive the price up. And they're all coming. And I think we're just going to see more of that. And why do you think that they're all interested now? What is it about Bitcoin? Is it that finally we're seeing the store of value in digital gold or the fact that it's idiosyncratic and it is good for a well-managed risk portfolio? Is it because of quantitative easing and infinite money printing? What is it that they're all of a sudden so interested now in buying? It's hard to say. I would like to think it's a lot of those factors.

Probably the economy is the biggest thing. Because if you really give it a lot of thought, what is a safe haven to store your money right now? If you put in dollars, then those will become more worthless over time. You can buy real estate, but it's hard in an economic downturn. It's hard to deploy real estate and keep it paying for itself or even generating income on it because no one's going to rent. Or to know you can get out of it if you really needed money in a pinch.

Exactly. The liquidity is not there. It'll take you time to get your money liquid again. You could put it in gold. And I think some people are putting in gold. Isn't Warren Buffett starting to buy gold? He's invested in gold miners for sure. And of course, they're with dividends and yield. But yes, he is exposed now. Yeah. But that's like buying Bitcoin miners, right? So I think overall, there's just no better place to put your money than Bitcoin.

So that's why everyone's making that rush. So you obviously, I mean, fall in the, I would say, maximalist camp. Is that a fair assessment? I don't know. If you look at Twitter right now, then I should hand back my maximus card but i've never actually called myself a maximus people like to refer to me as a maximus

but you know i do a show with uh charlie and ricardo and will panda and they two of them have their own coin so i don't know the definition of maximus is not really well defined, I think. I think so too. And I think that it's a stigma more than it is to any degree accurate. So you just touched on the fact that you're getting roasted right now on Twitter to have your card pulled. Can you talk about why that is? Right. So a lot of us invested in INX. It's a security token exchange, which is launching its own security token. So it just became effective. And I think they're taking in money now for their IPO. So it is an IPO, not an ICO.

Right. And I think there's a couple of reasons why people are trying to cancel us. And the biggest one probably is that it's on Ethereum. And the other one is that there's a token involved. And I think maybe the last one is that some of us got advisory shares, which were valued at one cent each. Right. But this is years in the making, right? Yeah. But it seems like it's an eternal September. So when the news first broke in 2019, I think it was a Coindesk article, everyone got riled up and we got canceled already for supporting an Ethereum token.

And then people forgot or they're new. And then now when they're effective and taking in money, the news resurfaced and people are angry again. So this is the second time we're getting canceled over the same thing. But yeah, you're right. We invested in 2018. They started their filing in 2017. And yeah, it's just entertaining.

It's entertaining, but it's a drain. I know that from my own personal experience, when you get to a certain point, I guess, on Twitter, and it's much worse for you than it is for me from what I've noticed, but the negative voices become extremely loud. And especially if you put yourself out there as a passionate advocate of this side or that side or any specific community. I mean, you kind of just laughed it off. But, you know, does the trolling and negativity ever bother you? Or is it really so par for the course at this point that it's laughable? Well, it's kind of par for the course. It's difficult to have a lot of following on Twitter and not get bashed for things every month or so. Yeah, once a month. Yeah, it's a clockwork.

So you kind of get used to it. And I think the best thing to do is just to block people and then that's done, right? It's a small investment because you have to press a button, but it pays off in the long run because you get rid of the noise and sometimes there's like stuff that uh doesn't even involve me and i'll try i'll get canceled over that too so zeus capital started advertising to uh short link and link is a scam and i think they retweeted a tweet of mine from same 2018 or something when I when when I said

this is a scam and then you know you know if his notifications blow up and everyone's saying you know screw you and uh go die I didn't know that you went down that road as well so I had posted a chart as a link chart a day before the whole Zeus capital thing, terrible timing, but clearly a day before. And it said, listen, I think this is going to go down a little more, but I'm really looking to buy. It wasn't like a bearish thing at all. It was like, I want to buy a link. I just want to get it a little cheaper. The Zeus capital thing came the next day, a random account retweeted my link chart and just said, Scott Milker got paid by Zeus Capital to say something about it. Which of course I immediately like showed proof, but you can't show proof. Once

somebody puts it out there and it goes viral, those thousands of people see it, believe it, and assume it's true forever. Right? Yeah. Well, nobody does any research or reading. They just see something and they just pile on. So we have a lot of people calling the INX IPO an ICO. And I've seen some Bitcoin developers say that too, but you just have to read the prospectus. It's not an ICO. It's approved by the SEC. It's an IPO. And you may not like it, but it's just malicious to misrepresent it like that. And the thing is, you have to wonder if it's a malicious misrepresentation or literally just a lack of understanding.

And you know, I think people love to talk about things that they have no knowledge about in any space. But you know, I mean, that's the whole world now, but certainly in this space, right? And you must see it all the time because you literally understand the tech and most people don't. Yeah, but it is what it is. There's no way to get rid of that noise. You just have to tune it out and ignore it. So I talked to Pomp recently and we had sort

of the like Bitcoin maximalist conversation and he sort of was of the opinion that there's nothing wrong with these altcoin projects. I'm sure some of them will succeed. I'm sure some of them are great, but he sort of sees Bitcoin as like our one chance, right? It has the recognition. It's the first one there. It has the liquidity. It has the interest. So everybody should be focused on that. Is that sort of your take on why you focus primarily on Bitcoin? Yeah, I think Bitcoin is the only way to prevent an Orwellian future. I think money has become a system of control and Bitcoin is the best bet to break that system of control because if your money supply can be controlled, every transaction can be monitored, then you really have no freedom in the world. You might have the right

to assemble and protest, but you can be monitored and that's not really good, right? Then you'll get taken out after. I don't know if I agree fully with Pomp that every altcoin has a chance. I think there's very few altcoins that make sense. If anything, I'm a proof of work maximalist. So if anything is not proof of work, I don't really think it's very good or useful. And even the proof of work coins, most of them are insecure. So there are not that

many projects that I would say are good or not a scam. Are they insecure because you think that they've rushed to do other things to be faster, to be, you know, basically like to be the first and biggest of this. And they sort of ignored the security aspect, which is inherent in Bitcoin? Well, I'm talking just about security of the transaction. So you remember ETC, they had a couple attacks, actually, a couple. Very recently, yeah. Yeah, the deposit times are now two weeks, I think. But it's not that they rushed it.

It's just that nobody's mining it, and they don't have uh dominance in their their hashing algo so they're just open for attack um you could even say ethereum is open for attack because their cpu mind someone could just get a lot of uh sorry gpu mind someone could just get a lot of gpus and attack them technically whereas bitcoin is uh tied to bitcoin asics so right either you make them or you buy them, but that's not easy to attack. So we've obviously seen massive interest in Ethereum of late, largely on this, you know, DeFi boom, which, you know, sometimes I don't even know

where this, what the DeFi boom really is. Is it just like a bunch of coins nobody's ever heard of that have like a sub 500k market cap on Uniswap? Or is it like, you know, crypto banks like BlockFi and Celsius and things like that? DeFi has become this just sort of all encompassing term for everything that's happening. But I mean, what does that mean for the future of Ethereum? I know that you obviously aren't the biggest proponent of Ethereum, but it's got a pretty compelling use case, at least right now. Yeah, but I don't think DeFi works when the transaction fees are that high. Oh yeah, the gas fees. So it's only like a small subset of people that can actually access and trade it. And I think,

I don't even understand what DeFi is. That definition is even more poor. It seems like everything is DeFi. And to that end, it doesn't make any sense. But if I had to nail down definition, I would say DeFi is supposed to be like Uniswap type stuff, not BlockFi and lending and all that. It should be some kind of permissionless way to issue and create assets and trade it. But yeah, I'm not a fan of most of those projects because they seem like Ponzi's to me.

The last one in is going to lose. Yeah, I mean, they're popping up by the day. day certainly it seems like a lot of people are getting wealthy but like you said at the end of the day someone's always holding the bag unfortunately and it's you know usually the person who can't afford it and that's reminiscent I think of 2017 in this space certainly with the ICO boom if you want to call it a boom and all of that. So why are, I mean, for someone who doesn't understand, why are the transaction fees, why are the gas fees so incredibly high?

Because Ethereum is the world computer, so it's actually computing everything. You're not just making a transaction, but you're storing data and computing the data. And I think that's why. And it just goes to why Bitcoin development has kind of worked its way into layers, because you can't stuff everything into the base layer. It just doesn't work. There is no blockchain big enough that would still be decentralized to accommodate every single transaction, including coffee or buying whatever

small thing. So that's why you have Lightning Network. But for Ethereum, everything is on the main chain. But as you can see, it's getting very expensive and it doesn't work in long term. And that's why they need to dump it and go to ETH2. Which has clearly been delayed. And it seems to me like ETH2 is essential, but to my understanding

every day that uh the d5 boom continues and there's more pressure on the system the more difficult will be to implement and and change uh ethereum is that true i don't know it seems like they could change it but i don't think the code is even ready. It's just in early testing stages. And yeah, I don't really know. I'm not an expert on Ethereum. Nor do I want to be. So what improvements does Bitcoin need to scale? I think we have most of the pieces of the pie already.

We have the Bitcoin main chain. We have side chains. So Liquid is a particular side chain of Bitcoin, but that tech is all open source. So anyone can take it. I believe Commerce Block also uses Elements. That's the name of the project. And they create their own side chains too. And then you have the Lightning Network on top of that. So you can have a Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin, but you can also have a lightning network on top of a liquid asset. So that means you can have liquid USDT and set up a lightning network on top of liquid USDT. And those would be perfect for retail payments. There's no need for waiting for confirmation or paying high fees.

So basically, I mean, in your opinion, everything that all of these other projects are doing can basically be built as layers on Bitcoin. Yes. And so what is the status of the Lightning Network now? It's been out for a few years and there's a lot of people using it. And I think adoption is growing.

We had private channels, I think a year ago. And with the advent of private channels, then you can't really accurately track how much money is being locked up in Lightning. But I would say it's still growing based on our estimates. But the other thing too, is it's difficult to quantify what is the growth of Lightning Network because it's primarily used by merchants. And the merchants don't want to keep their channels open all the time because that's hot wallet risk. They want to take the coins out and move them to cold storage after some period.

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like the imminent sort of threats of being targeted? And how should the, and even maybe after that, how should the average person, you know, really approach security? Yeah, that's a complex topic. I think for me, things are better now, actually, when I was working at BTC China, I got attacked a lot more and people tried to sim swap me a lot more back then. But nowadays, it's only once in a while. But the key is really just to... So cavalier. It can be sometimes.

Like, yeah, I don't know. The key is really just not to tie anything to your phone. Use Google Auth or something like that to do your two-factor. That's what saved me the most. Yeah, and then just don't open or click on any links that look suspicious. That's usually how they get you. And I think also it's useful to set up a system with the people that you do have to keep in contact with

about how you would process sensitive information. You tell them ahead of time, this is what I would do if I'm asking for something. And that will also add a layer of protection. It's like really basic stuff, but effective. I tried that with T-Mobile and they still allowed me to get SIM swapped like it was no problem. But I know that we're not talking about the phone company necessarily, but the phone companies obviously have no incentive to protect you no matter how many times it happened. I think Charlie Schramm, when we talked, he said he had been swapped about three times, no matter how many

levels of protection he put on Verizon. Of course, like then you have your second layers of protection and nobody actually gets into your exchange accounts and things like that. It seems to me like the exchanges are doing a much better job now of securing people's assets, certainly than they were in years past. How secure do you feel? I mean, are you fully, you know, not your keys, not your Bitcoin, or do you believe that it's okay to leave some on exchange if you're trading or investing? It really depends on what you want to do if you just want to hodl and that's your risk profile then yeah don't put anything on an exchange but you know right uh if you're a trader it's kind of hard to trade and not put your coins on the

exchange or yeah you know i think liquid helps in a way for this like you can move your bitcoins on and off really quickly with the one minute confirmation time. So if you're done trading, you could technically, technically take it off, but it's really what you want to do. There's all sorts of people, right? Like you can't tell people never to trade. There's always going to be people that want to trade and try to make a return on their, on their coins. But I think to your other point, the exchanges are doing a better job now and they're taking more measures to protect people's accounts.

And I think a lot of them have a pretty decent security systems in place. So I would say it's better now than it was five years ago, for sure. It seems like it's like an evolution, you know, you get into Bitcoin, you buy on exchange, you leave it there. And then somewhere eventually you hear about a hack or someone tries and then you're like, I need to get a wallet. And then you get your wallet and then you're kind of terrified you're going to lose your keys and you have no idea how to self-custody.

And then eventually you get enough and maybe you end up with multisig. I mean, is that right now? Do you think is that the end game pretty much for security if you're holding quite a bit? Yeah, I think multisig is great. It's a security mechanism, but the key is really just to have offline coins, preferably with a metal backup that's carved so it doesn't burn. And that's pretty good right there. Yeah, I haven't heard stories yet of those being hacked, but it seems like the hackers continue to get more creative by the day. Hopefully, it's the end of them. So, I actually recently had Simon Dixon on the show, who's the CEO of Bank of the Future, for those who don't know. And I know that

you recently used his platform to raise money for something that you're working on. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So, Pixelmatic is building a game called Infinite Fleet. So Infinite Fleet is actually raising capital through a security token offering. I don't know if people realize that, but yeah, it's also a security token. And we just did the last bit of the seed round on their platform. And we finished off at 3.1 million. Yeah, it is a security token. We're doing another round on Stalker. It's based in Europe, in Luxembourg. And we plan to raise the next round to a bigger audience.

Why did you choose to go with a platform like Bank to the Future instead of classic VC or raising funds from friends or something like that? Well, I think because Infinite Fleet is using a dual token model, so there's one token for capital raising, and there's another token, which is the in-game currency. So we're basically replacing WoW Gold. And I think it's a bit ambitious. And I don't believe like a traditional VC would back some project like this, right? They'll back something more conventional. That's why a lot of our backers are from the crypto space. We have Max Keiser, Charlie Lee,

Phil Potter, and they can see the potential and the benefits of using a crypto asset as a game currency. So I think they're more inclined to support it. And I believe Bank2Future has that similar investor profile, and they're more accepting of projects that want to use a crypto asset. So that's why we picked them. And Simon's great. I was just going to say, Simon's awesome. And he was definitely one that blew my mind

because we got pretty deep into what what money is and, you know, why he sort of believes in Bitcoin. It's interesting. I've heard you touch on it as well. Like, and that's largely the importance of Bitcoin. I mean, do you talk about, at least to you, like what your definition of what is money? What is the problem with money as it exists and how is that solved in some degree by bitcoin well money is kind of um a way for you to uh store your efforts and time and exchange that with others it's a way to kind of efficiently match different things in the market because if i produce something and i need to do it for you at a certain point in time it's very difficult to match that up or if I

grow some food and I want to sell it that can degrade and I if I wait to sell that to a hundred people then maybe it's no longer any good but money solves that because it's a way to essentially trade it for some other medium that can withstand the test of time. And then you can go and exchange that for other goods and services. But traditionally, money has always been controlled by somebody, right? There's somebody issuing the money. If it's gold coins, then typically it was like the king that would issue the coins. And there's a temptation

there to shit coin too, and debase the currency and mix in other metals into the gold coins. You're also prone to counterfeiting, but Bitcoin solves all those problems because everyone can run their own node. And that's why Bitcoiners are so adamant. You have to run a full node because if you offload verification onto someone else, then you're just putting yourself back into that position where some king can dictate what the money is. But yeah, Bitcoin is a self-sovereign money that is not controlled by anyone. And it takes away a lot of power from the state too. And I think it's kind of a balancing effect on the power of the state and removing the money aspect of what they can control into something that the people actually control. So separation of money and state, that catchphrase.

And do you think that what we're seeing now with money printing and, I mean, just the absolute insanity of the global economy is really putting the spotlight very bright on those issues? Yeah, definitely. I mean, a lot of Bitcoin memes are going viral, right? Money printer go brr is now a mainstream thing. Yeah, it is. Right. And I think a lot of people are starting to question what is money. It's just been a gradual process. Back when I was a kid, nobody talked about what money is. You go to school and money is important. World Bank is good. IMF is good. Go and study old history and math. But nowadays, people are talking about money. It's a very

pertinent topic. And I think that shift is a good thing because people are no longer just blindly plugged into the matrix. They're waking up and questioning what money is and how it affects them and their lives. So what happens when Facebook shows up with Libra and central banks start making digital currencies and they, I guess, quote unquote, compete with cryptocurrencies? I mean, I think we can all accept that the future of money is digital, right? Well, central bank digital currencies are not really an improvement. I would say they're the opposite actually, but yeah.

Well, it's better than the paper money, but it's also worse in the fact that, well, it depends how they implement it. I don't think- Privacy is the issue that I would say makes it worse, but yeah. Yeah. We haven't really seen one come out and in production, we've seen the Chinese one, the DCEP in testing, and I'm pretty sure it's going to not be very private, but you know, there's talks of the US government or the Fed looking into creating their own, but we'll just see what comes out and what the end result is. But there's always a chance, however small, that it could be privacy preserving and they build it so it acts as if it was digital cash. Maybe the Fed will use liquid with confidential transactions and that's privacy preserving and that would be a good thing.

But I think it's too early to say if it's fully good or fully bad, but it's an evolution, I think, of money, and it's kind of neutral in my view. You already have digital money. Like, everyone in China already uses Alipay and WeChat Pay for using digital RMB. Now it's just a crypto token. But the question is,

is it going to be freely transportable or is it locked? Because there are capital controls. If you can transport your DCEP RMB freely across borders, then the capital controls no longer exist, which I don't know if that's going to happen. And that's one of the huge benefits of Bitcoin, right?

Memorize your private keys and go wherever you want and nobody can take it from you. Yeah. In theory. Yeah, in theory. But yeah, let's see. I'm interested to see how they'll play out over time. It's kind of a competition. You know, the freest money will be the money people want and it'll win.

The less free the money is, then the less people would want to use it. That's why people still like cash and US dollars. Right. That's based on the assumption that people actually understand. There is this grand awakening and people understand what their money is. Because like you said, I think your average person just doesn't care or doesn't get it. So maybe what's happening now will open people's eyes. But I'm curious, do you, I mean, you've been in Bitcoin and down the rabbit hole for a long time. Do you believe

that we could really see that environment with super hyperinflation of the US dollar and that the deflationary aspects of Bitcoin would become so important to the globe that everybody would understand and want it? Or do you think that we see that in countries like Venezuela and Lebanon, but maybe that won't happen with the world's reserve currency? Yeah. It's not impossible for the US dollar to hyperinflate. It just depends on how everything goes with the economy, if the economy still still matters but it's a lot harder for that reserve currency because it's used so widely around the world so many currencies are pegged to the u.s dollar like the hong kong dollar is pegged to the u.s dollar everything it kind of

offsets that hyperinflation whereas you see that with like venezuela because no one uses that right it's easy for it to hyperinflate when it's just this very small subset of the world using that currency. But I think hyper-Bitcoinization will be driven less because of hyperinflation and more because of demand from what we talked about before, companies buying up Bitcoin to replace their cash reserves. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because in the past, like if you got one piece of bullish news in like six months, the Bitcoin price would jump and everybody would talk about it. And now we get news like that, like on a daily basis, right?

And it seems to pass. Banks in the United States being able to custody Bitcoin, which I have mixed feelings about, but still very bullish for the space and mainstream adoption. But the biggest news that kind of seems to have passed was the PayPal and Venmo news. I mean, you're talking about 320 million people being able to buy Bitcoin on a source that they trust, which obviously is a huge barrier for people who don't want to jump to exchanges or because I mean, there's only 21 million Bitcoin ever going to be mined. And we're talking about 320 million more people who will likely have access to it on top of the institutional adoption you're talking about. So is that partially also the path? Yeah. I mean, access to, uh, access

for, for the average Joe is definitely part of that, that path to hyper-Bitcoinization. Uh, I don't know if this is PayPal and Venmo supporting it already, or they just announced support, but not now. So obviously, based on Square Cash, the Cash app doing most of their business in Bitcoin now, that's basically the driver of their revenue. I think it was sort of they forced the hand, in my opinion, of the PayPals and Venues, which I mean, the irony of that should not be lost. Bitcoin's a better version of PayPal

and Venmo. So it's like, it's like basically adopting your competitor because you have to. Yeah. But if you look at Cash App's performance, it's very, very impressive. I don't see why. It's amazing. Yeah. I don't see why PayPal wouldn't see that kind of adoption too. And revenue is deriving from this if they do it well. Yeah. So, I mean, it's coming and there's not going to be more Bitcoin, right? I mean, that's always been the big case.

So, the question is then, I guess, where does that drive price in the future? I mean, it seems to me, and I hate to sound so bullish, but it seems inevitable that we see these higher, crazy prices that people have predicted. It doesn't seem like a dream anymore. It seems like sort of an inevitability to me. Well, it's hard to believe that right now we're above 10K because, you know, Bitcoin was it. It used to be cool that Bitcoin was hovering around 1K and now 10K is the new norm. So, you know, in a couple of years, people will say, yeah, 100K is the norm. And it's such a shitty bear market because it hasn't gone up to 200K yet.

Yeah. And then they'll say that it's going to zero when it hits 95. Yeah, exactly. It's dead. Yeah. Which is the biggest meme in the world that no matter any drop and all of a sudden all of the naysayers come back and you get all the hate and all the criticism. I mean, I just think it's an amazing time to be in this space. You've been in it for a very long time. Do you think that this right now, you've been through every kind of phase and you've been, I should say, through every major drop and all of the major FUD. So maybe a better question is, was there ever a time when you questioned it? When you were worried, when you were like, maybe this is a

failed experiment? I don't think so. I'm very bullish on Bitcoin. I think you could say I'm a permable, but I just can't see it failing at this point. There's just so much infrastructure built around it. Some of what you talked about earlier, like the market today is so different from the 2017 market. There's just a lot more base level infrastructure and venues for people to get Bitcoin. And the liquidity is so much higher now that it's just like a spring that's been coiled up and ready to go. So for a new person that is hearing about it for the very first time now, and they hear all these scams and there's so many projects and there's so much noise. What would you say to someone who's brand new to this space, how they should approach it? I know you can't give financial advice, so to speak, but how should they approach the space?

What's the first thing they should do and where should they be focused? I think first, buy a little bit of Bitcoin and experiment with it and see how it works. Put it in a wallet, test out sending it to another wallet and get a feel for it and experience the level of freedom that it provides and then read about it. And from reputable sources, I think Jameson Lopp has a good site, lopp.net. And he has like a lot of beginner guides and materials. I think those are really great for getting people into it. But yeah, there's a lot of scams to avoid and to watch out for. And I think the best caveat is if it sounds too good to be true,

it probably is. So common sense. So what barriers do you think still exist to mainstream adoption? You know, to your average person feeling very comfortable. I mean, I can still tell you every once in a while I send a crypto transaction, I get nervous in that little gap between when I hit send and see if it arrives. So that's got to be terrifying to like their average person who's not, who doesn't have a bank to tell them that their money made it. I think, you know, I might get hung for this,

but I think having better custodial services to handle Bitcoin transactions for, you know, the less techie generation, the older generation, is going to be an important piece of the puzzle. Like people, your grandma might just want to like go to her bank website and do it there in all familiarity. And that's a useful thing. I think there's a lot of different segments of the market that can be served. It's not really, you know, you have to run your own full node. This is not realistic for the greater population of the world.

It's great for the early adopters and the very technical people, but there's always going to be a very un-tech savvy segment of the population that needs help. The majority, the great, I mean, the great majority. If you want mainstream adoption, you can't expect those people to understand what a full node is or how anything works, you know, and they don't understand how any of the technology they use works, including their money. So I don't

know how PayPal necessarily works, but I'll use PayPal to pay someone. So I don't think it's different for an average person. For someone who might not even understand, speaking of people who aren't techie, can you explain what a full node is and why that's important? So a Bitcoin full node is essentially a node with the full history, which you can validate against. You can have a prune node, which gets rid of some of the data, but it's also been fully validated. So basically, you can check for sure if you've got a transaction and it's been confirmed.

Whereas with a lot of other services, you're relying on them. If you're running a light node, you're relying on someone else's node to confirm for you. So basically a full node is your way to protect your self-sovereignty and see things for yourself. It kind of ties into don't trust verify. So this is the way you verify. And so that brings, I guess, when we talk about verifying with all blockchain technology, there is that issue. I mean, I guess that Oracle solved someone's say about verifying with all blockchain technology, there is that issue. I mean, I guess that Oracle solved, some would say, about verifying information and making sure that information is true. So are those things that can still also just be solved on Bitcoin? I mean, by Bitcoin or, you know, as blockchain solutions become more universal, are there going to have to be other

technologies around the blockchain, you know, to make sure that they operate properly. Well, I think everything can be done on Bitcoin. So maybe you're talking like about smart contracts? Yeah, like a chain link or, you know, a band protocol or something. So we're working on a language at Blockstream called Simplicity to do smart contracts. And that will make it more reliable in the long run for people to construct these smart contracts. But any smart contract will need to take data from some source. I don't know if that source needs to be decentralized or you could just take data from several sources, but it's all possible to be done on Bitcoin. You don't need a new coin or token to do a smart

contract. So, I mean, people are so passionate about all these other projects, right? Why do you think, and it all started with Bitcoin. So why do you think that there is such like a crazy tribalism and passion in, I mean, it's in the world in general, let's be honest, but in the crypto space? Well, I think it's because Bitcoin is money. So people are very passionate about money, right? If you have some of your net worth in Bitcoin, then of course you want to defend it very aggressively. And people that start these other projects, I think they're also very invested and there's an economic benefit. So that may be why they're defending their projects. So you think it all comes down to greed and profit and money to some degree. I mean, it's all about protecting your investments.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's the whole point of Bitcoin, that you can protect your own investment. There's no third party. There's no trusted party that can hold it for you. Well, people do that, but you can have it, have all your money in your own custody and not be affected by anyone. So that does kind of attract people that want to defend their own turf. Right?

So are these other coins, Ethereum included, are they money in your opinion? I don't think Ethereum is money. Well, I don't, I think Vitalik has also said that he doesn't think it's money, but you know, some people in Ethereum probably think it is. And for me, definitely not like to be money, you have to have a good grasp of the supply at any given time. And I think to be a good good money you have to have very low inflation or zero inflation so it needs to be very predictable and stable to aetherium is not stable either they're always changing the issuance they're tweaking it and for me that's the same as any central bank they can just tweak it and adjust it on the fly and you have no say. Is Craig Wright Satoshi?

No. I think he's the only one we know for sure is not Satoshi. It still blows my mind that he's still holding to it and fighting. Do you know him? I mean, I'm assuming that you've probably crossed his path many times. Yeah, I've run into him. I mean, if you believe he's Satoshi, then good for you. do you know him i mean i'm assuming that you've probably crossed his path many times and yeah i've run into him i mean if you believe he's satoshi then good for you go buy some vsv yeah do you have any idea or ideas on who it actually might be no i i think it's no one that uh satoshi is not hovering around and i even posting uh soon anonymously i think he's just disappeared because his object is really really good i don't think he would risk it by hovering around on twitter and arguing with people for the sake of uh being right on the internet so you don't think he's

like a anonymous farm animal on twitter that's posting uh pepe memes probably not but i do think that there's a chance that Satoshi is actually a group and not an individual? I don't think so. I've heard that theory a few times, but if you look at everything he's put out there, it's very, very consistent and it'd be very, very difficult to have that level of consistency in a group. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's true. It's clear. It seems like it's clearly one voice at least. So what are, what are your big plans for the future? I mean, I guess both from Blockstream and in the gaming space, what, what are you obviously we've, we've talked about what you're doing thanks to the future, but what do you have coming that you're excited about?

Well, for Blockstream, our, our, our big part of our focus right now is expanding the liquid network. We pulled in a lot of new members and we're focused on getting them integrated. I think it's great if more exchanges start and finish their liquid integrations before the next bull run because fees will spike and people won't be able to move their coins around. We're also expanding Blockstream mining all the time, bringing on new customers, bringing more miners online. And for Pixelmatic and Infinite Fleet, it's really just around. We're also expanding Blockstream mining all the time, bringing on new customers, bringing more miners online. And for Pixelmatic and Infinite Fleet, it's really just finishing the next round of the token raise. Why does a company like, going back to it, why does a company like Fidelity

want to be in mining? You know, why aren't they just buying a ton of Bitcoin from miners? Like, you know, that seems like a lot of foresight and a lot of risk for a company like that. I don't know. I can't really speak to their motivations, but I think they're very good for taking that plunge into mining and learning about it. I think every company should be mining a bit.

It's kind of like running a full node. If you're not mining, then you're offloading the responsibility of security of the network to someone else. And we've seen that that can be an attack vector back in the Segwit2x and UASF days, where the mining pools and some of the miners like Bitmain were threatening the network and saying, we're going to attack it and force this change through. Because a lot of people just hosted their miners and let them run everything, hosted the miners, and they had to keep their miners in the Bitmain pools too. And that, I think, is a risk.

If every company was mining, then you basically decentralized the mining pools and it's far better. How centralized are the mining pools now? I mean, I think it's actually a lot better. I mean, you hear these crazy memes like 90% of mining is controlled by China well the China split I think is probably somewhere 60 40 60 China 40 elsewhere I think coin shares put out a study about that this year but it's it's shifting a lot because people want reliability, right?

And there is some risk in China of mining being banned or blacklisted because it's been on various blacklists. Yeah, it's been on blacklists from time to time. But I would say overall, the situation now is a lot better. There's a lot more mining pools in the world. I think several exchanges have their own mining pools too. And I'm happy that I was the first to do that. But, you know, having more pools and more geographically dispersed mining operations is a good thing for Bitcoin. I mean, still 60% is a lot in China. And I guess that like touches on the risk, I guess.

What if a government shuts down miners? or what if a government, you know, I know they can't stop Bitcoin per se, but what if they make it illegal to take your cash in and out or they make, you know, the on and off ramps basically illegal or impossible to use? I mean, how much of a threat are governments and regulation to Bitcoin? Well, there's like a doomsday scenario, which is they seize the miners and attack the network. But I just don't see that happening because the miners are not subsidized by the government. They're private individuals or companies. So if you're going to do that, then that's the end of private enterprise in the country.

There's no way that anyone will set up a company or build a factory or do anything because then there's no rule of law um there you technically already have capital control so you can't technically can't move money freely in and out of china there's like a limit you can do uh every year but uh ownership of bitcoin is not illegal there have been um case law instances where they've said you you know, someone stole some Bitcoin and you can't steal that because it's owned by the other guy. So I don't think it's really a big deal that there is a lot of mining in China because China is a very big country. If you think all the, all Chinese are the same, then maybe it's an issue. But if you think there are different people in different companies, it's an okay thing. Yeah. I just worry, you know, being an American, it's funny. I remember like in the 2016, 2017,

when I was getting into it, it was like this wild west where everyone was like, the government doesn't care. They don't know about it. We don't even have to pay taxes. And then all of a sudden, like the hammer kind of came down in 2018, really, where all of a sudden, the tax law was terrible. I mean, every transit, you buy coffee at Starbucks and you're selling Bitcoin and now that's taxable transaction. Right. So it just is always on my radar that the United States is going to do

something completely stupid or irrational. That's going to make it extremely difficult here, but maybe, um, you know, maybe that's an overreaction or just, uh, you know,

too, too much fear, but I definitely worry that governments could make it difficult. They're not going to stop it, but that they can certainly make it difficult. Yeah, that's a fair assessment. Yeah, so where can everybody follow you

and keep up with you after this? My Twitter is at Excelion, Excel Lion. And yeah, that's the best place to find me. Oh, it's Excel Lion? I thought Excelion. What does Excel Lion mean? Okay, but Excel Lion. That's the best place to find me. Oh, it's Excel Lion? I thought Excelion. What does Excel Lion mean? Excel Lion. People can't spell Excel Lion.

People can't spell Excelion, so I just say it's Excel Lion. What does Excelion mean? It's just a name I picked when I was playing Lineage 2. I think the server was called Leona, and I just riffed off of that. Oh, very cool. Well, thank you, man, so much. I appreciate you taking the time to speak and, uh, we'll definitely have to catch up in the future and see what all, all the progress is, uh, of everything we discussed today. So thank you very much.

It's been fun. Thanks, Scott. All right, man. Speak soon.