Bitcoin is More Than a Financial System with Zac Prince & Jeremy Welch

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“That’s our biggest pitch, to any investors. Bitcoin is not just a financial system. It’s a computing system, it’s a time system, it’s all these other things.”
— Jeremy Welch

Location: New York
Date: Thursday 11th July, 2019
Company: Casa & BlockFi
Role: Founder & Founder/CEO

The hype of the previous bull run led to an influx of companies using Bitcoin or 'blockchain' to inflate value and attract investment. Many of these were questionable projects, and some were outright scams. Even legitimate companies struggled with the difficulty of creating value with Bitcoin, as companies failed two thrived: Casa and BlockFi.

BlockFi is building financial products for Bitcoin holders which allow them to use their crypto as collateral for taking out a loan or lend out their Bitcoin to earn interest. Casa is improving security by simplifying multisig. 

So why have BlockFi and Casa been able to grow and thrive during the bear market while so many others have failed?

In this interview, I speak with Casa Founder Jeremy Welch and BlockFi Founder Zac Prince, we discuss Bitcoin utility, non-financial and sometimes unexpected applications and why Bitcoin is more than a financial system.

TIMESTAMPS

00:05:25: Introductions 
00:05:36: Discussing the recent partnership between Casa and BlockFi
00:12:05: Zac’s thoughts on the growth of the financial product sector in crypto
00:17:48: Exploring the increase in conversations around Bitcoin amongst the media and general public
00:23:02: Discussing the potential future surrounding financial services with Bitcoin
00:30:26: Delving into Libra and why it benefits Bitcoin
00:36:10: Discussing what is missing in the industry, including education, adoption and integration
00:40:44: Exploring the concept of exchanges pricing in sats, rather than Bitcoin
00:43:45: Touching on alts and whether their recent capitulation is likely to continue
00:46:52: Discussing hyperbitcoinisation and whether this is a realistic possibility in the future
00:52:21: Touching on the upcoming Bitcoin halvening
00:53:03: Exploring how we are still very early in Bitcoin’s journey
00:58:52: Discussing Bitcoin time in comparison to Newtonian time
01:02:25: Delving into why Bitcoin is not only a financial system and its various potential utilities 
01:04:42: Discussing the trend away from people owning alts, focusing back towards Bitcoin
01:08:56: What do Zac and Jeremy think is going to be important in the next year?
01:10:33: Final comments and how to stay in touch

 

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THANKS

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TRANSCRIPTION

Peter McCormack: All right guys! Jeremy, how are you?

Jeremy Welch: All good!

Peter McCormack: You alright Zac?

Zac Prince: All good!

Peter McCormack: So me and Jeremy did a show, what was it, like three weeks ago, wasn't it?

Jeremy Welch: In London.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it was a good one, people liked it, so we should try and avoid the same subjects. You've got an announcement! Who's going to tell about the announcement first?

Zac Prince: I think Jeremy should!

Jeremy Welch: Throwing it to me!

Zac Prince: No, I'm happy to do it! So the announcement is that we're excited to officially announce that Block Fi and Casa have entered into a partnership. Today, the partnership basically means that we're sharing benefits on our respective platforms with clients of the other platforms. So if you're an existing client at Block Fi, you can sign up for a Casa's leading self-sovereign custody products at a discounted rate.

Similarly, if you're a client of Casa, you can access BlockFi's products on the interest side, with a bit of an interest boost and on the loan side with a bit of a discount on some of the fees associated with borrowing capital. So we're starting there and I think there's going to be a lot more interesting things that we can do with each other down the road.

Jeremy Welch: Yeah, and we looked for a while. We had a lot of customers asking us about financial products with their Bitcoin. There are a lot of people that HODL. I'm a huge HODLer, I don't trade any and I'm obsessive about it and that's why we founded the company. But we have a lot of customers that were asking us like, "look, I want to use some financial products. I've been thinking about loans. I have a new home or I have something else that I'm buying, but I don't want to sell my Bitcoin."

So we've been looking for a partner for quite a while, found Zac, Flori and team and it was just very fast sync! It took us actually a little longer than probably we'd planned, because we really tried to vet out and think about the privacy model, think about the security model around the set up too. There's no data exchange. Neither company is making any money whatsoever from this.

We're passing all the savings off to the customer and it's really designed in that way. We kind of vetted Block Fi, we knew that there'd be a big wall between us in terms of, again, like no data sharing, we were obsessive about data privacy. So people that don't use this, are fully protected, there's no difference for them. Then people that do decide to use it, they get a little bit of a boost and likewise from the other side.

Zac Prince: I don't know if we want to go back a little bit in time, but Jeremy and I learned after meeting in the crypto world that we actually basically crossed paths at Google back in the day. We were both working at companies that worked with each other, that both ended up getting acquired by Google.

Peter McCormack: Really?

Jeremy Welch: Yeah, he was in ad tech too! So you and I have talked about ad tech stuff and part of the spark for the last one we recorded was around ad tech, but this guy was in ad tech as well. In the technical spectrum, we built products that were kind of on the exact opposite sides of the same market. So we were all on the buy side and he was kind of on the publisher sales side.

Zac Prince: Yep and our companies partnered with each other and then they both got acquired by Google. The company I was at was called Admeld and we were one of the first, what was called a sell-side platforms. So it was basically like, you're a publisher on the Internet, you need to figure out how to sell more of your ads at better prices and there were companies like Invite Media where Jeremy was, who had models and targeting strategies that enabled them to buy the ads in real time, targeted towards certain segments or demographics or whatever.

So Invite was a large buyer of media through Admeld. Invite got acquired by Google first and then Admeld maybe a year, year and a half afterwards. So we might've even been at Google at the same time. I don't think either one of us lasted long!

Peter McCormack: We didn't actually end up doing that full ad show, like we planned. We went right down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, didn't we?

Jeremy Welch: Yeah, I mean there's a whole discussion there around privacy and data. Part of our partnership is we're both aware of the ad tech side and so that was part of the thing that we even discussed going into this partnership is just being very careful about that. But it was a very real thing, because we've both been in that world.

Peter McCormack: I think it's a natural fit. When I heard about it, it was a natural fit between the two companies, knowing both companies quite well, I obviously know you guys. It was a real natural fit and obviously now when I buy my Casa nodes, I can get $50 off because I'm a customer of Block Fi.

Zac Prince: There you go, done!

Peter McCormack: I forgot to tell you. Do you know what happens in Uber with Block Fi?

Zac Prince: It shows up?

Peter McCormack: No, so you put it in. But when it turns up, it calls you Block Fee.

Zac Prince: It says that, verbally?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it came on the thing whatever I was in, whether it was Uber or the Google Map, it said you've arrived at "Block Fee".

Zac Prince: I don't even know how that happens!

Jeremy Welch: Was it just Google maps?

Peter McCormack: I don't know, because the reason I brought this up, is when I did my first ad read or my second ad read for you…

Zac Prince: Yeah, you used to call us Block Fee!

Peter McCormack: So what is the background? When did this all start? When was all the planning? How long have you guys been working on this?

Jeremy Welch: I mean we synced up earlier in the year. It was actually through another person from our team, I think Michael saw one of your guys at an event?

Zac Prince: Yeah he met Christian somewhere.

Jeremy Welch: Yeah and they're the real masterminds! We're just in here, doing their bidding. But they definitely synced up and they talked a bunch about how we should collaborate. Then a few weeks later, we got together and just kind of hashed it out. Then we went through several months of just thinking through both... At the time, we were building out this full privacy policy, the full Privacy and Open Data policy.

Then we talked a bunch about the data side, about the privacy side, about how to structure it legally and regulatory risk because we're very careful and on our side, we're obsessive about staying in this very clear zone. We don't want to get into a grey zone. We hold one key out of the total five keys with a lot of our clients, but we are very clearly in this space, where we're unregulated and the clients own their money, they hold their money and we support them and we don't want to get over that hurdle or get into a grey area.

So it was important that we structured this the right way, because Zac's in the opposite case, right? Where they're very clearly trying to be very close to regulators, making sure they're complying on each thing, which is important and that kind of wall is actually really important because you don't want, your long-term funds, if you're not putting them into a financial product, to be affected by anything on that side.

Peter McCormack: The financial product side has grown quite quickly, right? I mean you've got competitors as well, but it seems to be, as a category has grown, people are accepting it more. I think the initial kind of bluster around the interest accounts has now blown over. I certainly love my interest! At the end of each month, I kind of look forward to it. It's not a small amount that I've made so far, it's significant. So are you finding this? Are you finding that this is a real growth sector?

Zac Prince: Absolutely. I mean look, I feel like there's a lot of things going on right now that are generating a sense of validation for us. One is, the first slide that we had in our presentation before we raised our first round of capital two years ago, basically said that "financial markets for cryptocurrencies were nascent and incomplete, and that you had the ability to exchange between one asset into another.

You had the ability to kind of raise funds via a pseudo IPO, but it was an ICO. But things like lending, insurance and savings accounts were just non-existent." That was our thesis in starting to build the company. The other thing that's validating, is that we're now out of crypto winter, anybody who maybe a year ago was telling us like, "well, I just don't know if this market is even going to continue to be around" is clearly wrong. So it feels great to be operating the business with market tailwinds instead of market headwinds.

Jeremy Welch: The Federal Reserve Chairman today, was talking about Bitcoin as gold and as a store of value, it's crazy!

Zac Prince: Yeah, it's a really, really exciting time and on our roadmap at BlockFi, we still have multiple incremental products, that we want to bring to the market. But it's been awesome! Everything that we build, I kind of wanted for myself and so I'm using all of our products and we're getting feedback from clients regularly that prices go up, now their loan is over collateralized and they're moving Bitcoin out from their loan and into the interest account. Or we get sentiment like what you just described Peter, that it just feels great to make money and it's not an insubstantial amount of money.

Jeremy Welch: That's actually a really important thing. On the side of, definitely, it's still very immature on the financial products side in this space and part of the reason is because so many of the regulated-side bankers, they don't want to take the risk.

Zac Prince: Well, they can't touch it. They're not allowed too.

Jeremy Welch: Well the traditional banks can't touch it.

Zac Prince: Correct.

Jeremy Welch: But beyond that, there are a lot of people that even spin out. They've got plenty of money, they could go start a company and they could do whatever, but they're uncertain about this space. So you guys are filling this nexus of understanding both the Bitcoin side and the financial product side, which is interesting.

Peter McCormack: It's funny because operating my podcast, which is essentially now a business, I often come across people, they're like, "well yeah Bitcoin is only used for speculation" and "there's no real use cases" and I'm sitting there thinking, well I invoice with Bitcoin, I get paid with Bitcoin, I pay people with Bitcoin, I have my Bitcoin stored in my interest account with BlockFi where I get my interest, I've got my DropBit app, which I now take Bitcoin away with me and I use that now when I'm away.

Sometimes when people want paying, I give them Bitcoin, I'm using Kraken when I get paid in Bitcoin, I want Dollars into my bank account, because I run the business on Dollars, so I use that. So when these people are saying, "yeah it's just speculation", I'm like, "no, there is a whole economy here. It is becoming more circular and there's a lot of companies provide a utility", which is why I like both of your companies, because you're actually doing something that people are using.

Zac Prince: Yeah and you heard this a lot for a while, that there would be a little bit of a washout during the bear market. I think that was the right sentiment to have. I think it's something that's absolutely started to play out, but you see people like Jeremy and the team at Casa, like you with your business, like Block Fi, there's this camp of individuals who have started things over the last 1-3 years, that are really good at what they do and they work really hard and they didn't stop building things throughout that entire time and all of that helps the sector.

It's all very, very real. It's the opposite of death by a thousand cuts. All these things just add up together over time to help fuel the industry forward.

Jeremy Welch: What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger!

Peter McCormack: Yeah and I don't have a huge valuation or an investment from a venture capital, but my thing is still a thing. We've all grown during a bear market. Can you imagine what it's going to be like over the next year in a real bull market!

Jeremy Welch: By the way, I am convinced that, we're talking about the Fed Chair, the Bitcoin sign guy, he brought the bull to the Magical Crypto Conference, he brought a bull! So we have Bitcoin sign guy to thank for bringing the bull back!

Peter McCormack: Do you know we have Bitcoin bad guy as well now? Did you not see the Deutsche Bank meme yesterday?

Jeremy Welch: Oh yes! His name is Bitcoin bad guy? He's getting famous!

Peter McCormack: He doesn't even work for Deutsche Bank!

Jeremy Welch: No, he's a tailor!

Zac Prince: I didn't know this, holy shit!

Peter McCormack: So I messaged him and I tweeted him, saying "you need to hang out with Bitcoin sign guy."

Zac Prince: He needs to come on the podcast!

Peter McCormack: He is going to hang out with Bitcoin sign guy, they're going to hang out!

Jeremy Welch: What do you call that podcast?

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin and memes?

Zac Prince: You also have Joe Scarborough or somebody on CNBC, who was talking about how Libra was not a real crypto currency and then all of a sudden, everybody on crypto Twitter is just sending him great memes and he gets all pumped about that!

Jeremy Welch: You could see him like thinking through it on air. He was like, "I'm just kind of thinking that this is not right. This doesn't feel any different than what we already have" and he's just slowly working through the logic and you could see it on air!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's great. Then obviously we've got sports guys get an involved. Everyone knows Russell Okung getting involved, Tony Hawk the other day? Tony Hawk's riding it up! I think next year's going to be big.

Zac Prince: It's going to be crazy. Paris Hilton has a book! She has the Bitcoin Rabbi's book, shout out to the Bitcoin kid's book.

Peter McCormack: Have you seen that book?

Zac Prince: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: Did you see the picture of me and my daughter? I've got a picture of me and her together, I'm reading the kid's book and she's reading Mastering Bitcoin.

Jeremy Welch: Of course!

Peter McCormack: My kids get Bitcoin now, they ask about it. My son wrote about it for a school project. My son came to me and he said, "Dad, I've got to do a presentation for school, I've got to do a speech and I want to do on Bitcoin." I was like, "sounds cool. What do you want to do on it?" He said, "well, can you give me some ideas?"

I said, "well, why don't you do the human rights side and freedom?" So he did and went and researched it. He wrote about how people are using Bitcoin in Venezuela. He's really into it! So yeah, I think that next year is going to be big. It's going to be big for both of you guys!

Zac Prince: It's also really good that when you see the Bitcoin community affecting this positive change or really calling out the positive impact that this can have on the world, because there's an angle to it where it's a hedge against macro economic uncertainty, it's a hedge against fiat instability. I just find that for myself, when I'm talking about it, when I'm convincing other people that Bitcoin's here to stay and it's a great investment and all these other things, people get way more attracted to the positive part.

If I go down the path of like, "oh, well do you even know how messed up central banking is?!" Everyone's like, "now you're scaring me and I don't like!" But if you're talking about the Bitcoin children's book and all these cool things that you can actually do with it now and where it's being used for...

Jeremy Welch: People start to understand money more and they understand what it actually is.

Zac Prince: Sometimes, I found that part to be really challenging. Once I'd go into that part...

Jeremy Welch: They will at least ask some questions about it?

Zac Prince: They will ask questions about it.

Jeremy Welch: I think that if you even go 2 years ago, 1 year ago and definitely 5 or 10 years ago, people weren't asking questions. I mean the last financial crisis, I was in New York City, this is around the time I was doing ad tech and I just remember walking around, it was like tumbleweeds through New York City, it was crazy. But you talk to people, I'd even talk to some of my friends who were working in banking and they weren't even asking the major questions. Where now I feel like many more people are asking the questions.

Peter McCormack: Well, Trump helped us out recently, what was that tweet he was saying about, well if Europe and China are going to print more money, we'll have to print more money!

Jeremy Welch: I didn't see that one! Wow. Buy Bitcoin!

Zac Prince: He was like, "if they're going to play the currency games, we will too. We'll play them better than you."

Peter McCormack: We'll print more than you! So I'm like, "let's get some more Bitcoin!" But look, there's some scary stuff happening! We've got the negative interest rates come in, I think is it Germany?

Zac Prince: Junk bonds have negative yield in Europe now, some of them.

Peter McCormack: Like -1.6%! I mean is that a more bullish case for Bitcoin, right?

Zac Prince: Absolutely!

Peter McCormack: It's hard also though to sometimes get excited about it, because you think, "oh this is going to be great for Bitcoin" and then you realize a whole bunch of people going to get fucked over.

Jeremy Welch: Yeah, that sucks about it. I was just talking with someone earlier today, a friend about how there's an analogy to a seatbelt in the car and you put it on every day and you don't even think about it. The one day you need it, is the one day it counts, but you put it on every day.

There's something about Bitcoin and there's something about, just monetary systems, but that one time that we need it, it's going to be super important and all these other use cases that we're building, they're great, but there is going to be that one time and there are these cases in Venezuela and elsewhere, I think the thing that a lot of people here aren't thinking about, a lot of people in the US or a lot of people in developed countries aren't thinking about, is that our countries have been through really bumpy financial crises, but people forget about them.

So when those hit in the future and there's no doubt that they will hit, it's just a question of when, not if, you're going to have that seatbelt, you're going to have a little bit more control over what's happening and a little more confidence.

Peter McCormack: We had it 11 years ago. That was the quote in the start of Bitcoin, 2008 financial crisis. It was when I bought my house, right at the peak! But yeah look, I care about companies that are providing utility. I find that really interesting. You talked earlier about that the banks can't really do this, but I have a banking service now with BlockFi, like it's a useful banking service. 

I kind of want the next step now. I want the fiat deposit next to my Bitcoin deposits, that's what I really want and I want to be to be able to just move between the two of them fluidly and I want my Bitcoin part of it to be held in my Casa node, but linked to my account. This is the future and this is where I'm starting to see, this is what I want for the future, so I'm obviously doing it quite late up here.

Jeremy Welch: We just started Sats App, so like Sats App is merging, in one view you have the key, the single mobile key, the Lightning wallet and then our sats back rewards. We're kind of condensing a lot of the layers on the tech side and the edge of sovereignty side that we're building. It's just a very simple Bitcoin wallet app.

It's supposed to be the most simple, but it's providing you a connection into both direct Lightning node, that full node Lightning capability and having a direct non-custodial key and having some rewards tied in. So the goal there is...

Zac Prince: Is the reward for the Lightning network?

Jeremy Welch: We actually haven't announced where all the rewards are going to come from, but we have a bunch of cool shit and one of the earliest ones that we announced is just by connecting your nodes. So we're just thinking about incentives around, by connecting a Tor node, you're helping out the network, you're improving the network, you're also improving yourself and so we're going to try to incentivize that.

We're thinking about some other types, but the general point there, to your point of trying to just build this super simplified fluid experience between fiat and Bitcoin, we're simplifying on the side of Bitcoin on the extreme case and there will be this day whenever it finally is kind of more fluid on the other side too.

Zac Prince: I mean on our end, we're going down the path already, so we have one stable coin available in BlockFi now. We'll have all the major ones available soon. We'll have the ability to have your interest converted. So if, for example, at some point you're holding a lot of Dollars in a Block Fi account, but you actually don't want to earn your interest in more Dollars, you'd like to just be stacking sats or earning more Bitcoin, you'll be able to have that option.

Peter McCormack: What, so you can flip your GUSD interest into Bitcoin?

Zac Prince: Exactly!

Peter McCormack: Hell yeah!

Zac Prince: So whatever the interest rate is on GUSD, as that gets paid out each month, we'll just convert it into Bitcoin if you want us to, and then it'll grow your Bitcoin balance or vice versa. Some people have asked us to let them use their Bitcoin as a passive Dollar income stream.

Jeremy Welch: Interesting.

Zac Prince: So you have a lot of Bitcoin, you're happy with your Bitcoin exposure, but if your Bitcoin could generate a passive income stream in Dollars for you, that's attractive. We should have the banking layer connected by Q1 and then next year, probably like back half in Q2, maybe early Q3, we'll have a credit card where you can earn Bitcoin cash-back instead of airline miles or normal cash-back. So we're going deeper down the path of additional licenses, additional fiat connectivity, additional functionality beyond just debt and credit.

What we're really excited about is that today if you want to use... Well the only people that can use BlockFi's products today are people who already own Bitcoin. Once we add the ability to convert between assets, the fiat on/off ramp and certainly the credit card, we're going to be able to market to people that don't own any yet and convert non-Bitcoin owners into Bitcoin owners, in an environment where they've got things like earning interest and getting low cost loans all in one spot.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I think that's going to be really useful. I like that actually as well, because it goes into the whole stacking sats thing, which has been really kind of popular recently.

Jeremy Welch: Well, it's popular cause it's fucking awesome!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, makes sense. I can show you here on my laptop, I have a spreadsheet now where I've got Bitcoin in different places, I've got BlockFi, my wallet and I've got my total. I'm conscious now, every month, I don't want it to drop! So every month I want it to go up.

So if I spend it, I've got to make sure I buy some more. I'm not on a Lolli yet cause it's mainly US, but I get my interest from you guys say, I'm always thinking of ways, "how do I get more". Do you know the other thing I've done? When I get paid in Bitcoins, I always transfer it to dollar, well actually pounds, because I run my business on pounds mainly and now I've changed it to 80%. So I convert 80% and I leave 20% in Bitcoin.

Zac Prince: Compare this to where you're actually getting more Bitcoin out of all of this and compare this, to the fiat bank accounts, to where it's the reverse. Inflation's 3% and your savings account yields 2% or 0%.

Jeremy Welch: It's absurd! You just play out the linear line from what's happening on both cases. That's one thing, we got a ton of criticism from a small group. We got a lot of enthusiasm around the partnership, but we also got a slice of criticism and people asking about interest accounts and how all this stuff works. One of my arguments has always been, people will take the risks that they're going to take and everyone... The terms are clear around all this stuff.

But in terms of hyperbitcoinization, in terms of accelerating hyperbitcoinization, this entire structure of having financial products, integrating the two, creating better on ramps, all of the steps, doing even Sats App, we're creating all of these ways that it's getting faster. It's accelerating the rate at which, again, if you compare your holding your fiat funds and you're just losing money, you put something, you have Bitcoin funds, if you just hold them or if you put them in some financial account, take out a loan whatever, you accelerate!

You get a Sats account, you get sats back rewards, you're accelerating. Those continue to diverge and then what's going to happen? Everybody's going to pool into this!

Zac Prince: I can't wait to advertise the credit card. It's going to be so fun! I just want to show a chart of the value of your airline miles year over year versus the value of Bitcoin! We'll launch the card in 2020, so it's going to be like, "last year, if you would've been earning your rewards in Bitcoin, guess what would have happened?"

Jeremy Welch: Especially if the bull run continues, it'll be nuts.

Zac Prince: Even if it doesn't, if we just stopped right now, it's already crazy! Incredible performance for the year.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we're at a good price now. It seems like 10k's kind of safe. It might dip slightly under, but if it dips, it's going to get bought out. We did get helped by the guy, what did he say about Libra?

Zac Prince: It was the Fed chair, yeah.

Peter McCormack: What do you make of the Libra thing?

Zac Prince: You're already seeing it, the question mark there is going to be regulation. Any country that got queasy about Bitcoin, is going to get extra queasy about Libra and even the United States is queasy about Libra. So it's going to be interesting to see how they navigate that.

Jeremy Welch: Yeah I mean Libra's biggest threat or Libra is the biggest threat to just more traditional fiat, not not to Bitcoin or not to kind of these extreme cases and to some of these smart contract platforms.

Zac Prince: Libra is great for Bitcoin. I think it's going to drive another wave of people going into Bitcoin. Initially, the mainstream or whatever people that aren't that deep into the sector are going, "oh, Facebook is launching a cryptocurrency, that's good for Bitcoin. Then it's going to run into regulatory problems and then people are going to go away. But Bitcoin's still okay, what's the difference?" Or it's going to actually get in market.

So unless they can convince the IRS or the US government to change the way the tax code works here, it's going to get treated like a security, where you have a gain or a loss on every transaction and you're never going to be able to use it for payments, because the reporting burden that comes along with that is a total nightmare. One of the things we thought about a lot, when we were launching the interest account was, should we pay people interest once a month, once a week, once an hour, every block?

Once a month is fast enough and the only thing that's actually somewhat tenable from a tax reporting perspective, because otherwise you're going to have, hundreds or thousands of transactions and each one of them is a cost basis. So unless Facebook gets the IRS to change those rules, you're not going to be able to use the thing, the way that it's intended to be used. Whereas Bitcoin, you have this price appreciation component, that Libra is not going to have whatsoever, because it's backed by a basket of fiat currencies that go down in value!

Peter McCormack: Brad Stephens put it pretty well to me. I was in San Francisco, I saw you up there of course. He put it really well. He said, "it's a win-win for Bitcoin because if Libra goes ahead, we're exposing billions of people to the term cryptocurrency. Naturally, some of them are going to learn about how to migrate to Bitcoin.

Zac Prince: It's a conversion funnel.

Peter McCormack: Yeah and any denial of that is just ridiculous!

Jeremy Welch: Especially if Powell's already calling it gold.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but then he also said, "but if Libra doesn't go ahead, if the Fed say it can't happen, they stop it and it doesn't go ahead. It's also a win for Bitcoin, because it proves why Bitcoin is so important, because you can't close it down. You can't call Bitcoin for a Senate testimony hearing."

Jeremy Welch: Wait, isn't the CEO of Bitcoin in Florida?

Peter McCormack: Who's that? I don't know the reference! I was in Florida recently. It's kind of a weird place.

Zac Prince: Was this your court case thing?

Peter McCormack: No, I was hanging out with Charlie Shrem for a couple of days.

Zac Prince: I listened to that one actually, it was really good.

Peter McCormack: It's a weird place Florida though! All right, so utility is important, you guys are doing some good stuff, so what else is missing? What else have we missing in the industry? What do we need to happen? Like personally, I'm still on the education front.

The bridge from a no-coiner, disinterested to having some interest, that's the hardest bit. Once you've sparked an interest, I don't find anyone, who's got that first first spark, who isn't constantly asking questions still. It's that bridge from, like when I put something up on Facebook.

I put something up recently about, trying to explain how your money decreases in value, due to inflation, blah blah blah, Bitcoin can't blah blah blah and there's no interest. I can't seem to get people to flip from nothing to something, that's the hardest bridge. How do we do that?

Zac Prince: Yeah, I think education is certainly part of it and I think that we, as stewards of the industry and other people that that have a voice, would be served well to talk about the positive things and not the scary things that make Bitcoin likely to go up in price. The other thing is, integration into places where people already are. So we can keep acquiring new customers, we can launch new products to do that.

Other cryptocurrency companies can as well. But if you see more things like Square, Robinhood, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, bringing Bitcoin to where people already have their money or where they already have their investments, is a big trend and something that helps a lot. Rakuten in Japan, all of that is massive and super helpful and that has to continue. There will still be some regulatory stuff. 

If we play this thing out, the countries that are hostile to Bitcoin now, flipping them to being pro Bitcoin at some point along the way and I'm mainly thinking about India and China, is also going to be massive. So if you can start to, as adoption grows, have people in those countries caring enough about this to say, "we don't want it to be banned here anymore and that matters a lot to us", then you just unlocked so much.

Peter McCormack: Well I mean India and China you're talking about, what's that, like about a fifth of the world's population?

Jeremy Welch: Yeah I think part of it, is that you can't swim unless you're actually in the water. So in some sense you either have got to throw people into the deep end or got to throw them into the kiddy pool, but you got to throw them in some water at some point. We think a lot about, with the new Sats Back thing and with Sats app, we're trying to think about really simple, easy adoption cases, ways people can even have just a little bit of sats, I think that's going to be useful.

You've got cases like Lightning pizza, the Fold guys just are making it easy to send some Lightning and now pay out in a bunch of different retailers. A lot of those use cases, people might get their first exposure by just paying for something in Bitcoin and then later on, they might have a Bitcoin pizza moment and they realize, "holy shit, if I had saved that" and then they start to understand some of the economics behind it.

So I think that again, you got to throw people in the water before they're going to understand and no amount of education in total is going to... Again, you can study this shit all day long, but until you're actually in the water swimming or actually out there sailing, you're not going to really get it.

Zac Prince: Companies like Lolli, like I'm really curious to see Lolli at some point release the stat from a survey or otherwise where they explained the distribution of their customers between already owned Bitcoin and didn't already own Bitcoin. I know that every day, people create an account at Block Fi, go through our KYC process and then get stuck on the depositing Bitcoin part of it, because they were attracted to being able to earn interest at a 6% rate.

But then they got all the way through and they're like, "oh well I don't have any Bitcoin yet. I was assuming that you were going to let me buy some and then I was going to get the 6% interest." So it's little things like this and everyone understands what an interest rate is.

Jeremy Welch: And they're not getting an interest rate from their regular savings accounts.

Zac Prince: If you've used Ebates online, you understand the process of getting rewarded for going through a certain link into another site where you're about to buy something. Obviously everybody who's ever had a credit card understands the concept of cash-back and credit card rewards. So if you give people those ramps that they're used to, I think that's going to be massive. That's why stacking sats has attracted so much attention, because it's really, really powerful.

Peter McCormack: What do you think about the idea of exchanges migrating to pricing in sats, rather than Bitcoin?

Zac Prince: I think there's going to have to be a conversation at some point around doing that, the number is too big. We're in Dollars and at $12,000 or whatever the exact price is right now, that's already a big number. Imagine if you're pricing it in a different currency. Imagine if you're pricing it in Rupees.

Peter McCormack: Well I did that. What did I do that in? The Vietnamese Dong, it was like 200 million or something, but it was a lot, it was ridiculous.

Zac Prince: Not being able to do head math makes things challenging.

Jeremy Welch: As the price of Bitcoin rises, it's going to have to happen. But people are already, I mean there's two jumps, right? The one jump is instead of denominating in dollars and thinking about your conversion back into dollars, just thinking of it purely in Bitcoin and we already have people doing that. We have tons of... I mean, all of our clients think of their houses in Bitcoin and their trades in Bitcoin. It's definitely jumped that curve.

But the second thing too is that, as the price of Bitcoin rises, thinking about sats or thinking about smaller units and people still don't know that you don't have to buy a whole Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah! So I remember when I first got back in and Bitcoin was like $600/$700, so I bought one and then I put like five grand in my Coinbase account and I bought a few. But I know people now, it's going to come back on their radar, we're going to have a new all time high, the mainstream press is going to go, "Bitcoin is at a record price!"

All my friends to be like, "shit, I missed out again." They're going to come speak to me and blah, blah, blah. Even if you get them on to like a Coinbase or a Kraken, they're going to be like, "ah, I can't get one." But if it's priced in sats, they're like, "all right, for like $200, I can get like whatever thousand sats. I'm in! Give me some of this." I think that's going to be a better experience for them, but yeah, it's a shift for everyone else.

Zac Prince: Agreed 100%.

Jeremy Welch: I don't think it's that much of a shift for the Bitcoiners?

Peter McCormack: No, but what I'm saying is that we're the ones who have to actually make the change, because the new people coming in, it won't mean anything different. But do you call them sats? Or do you call them...

Jeremy Welch: Well we just launched Sats app. So we're pushing!

Zac Prince: I haven't decided. I don't know if we've called them sats in any of our marketing materials yet. I mean I think that's the most logical thing probably. The only other thing I've even seen is nBTC.

Peter McCormack: I think it becomes too confusing, because there's millisats and then, I can't remember, there's so many. I think it's too confusing. I think you have pounds and pence, dollars and cents, Bitcoin and sats. I think that's enough. I don't think you want to have like three or four different things for different decimals.

Zac Prince: Alright it's settled then, sats!

Peter McCormack: So we need to do a campaign for the exchanges. Another thing that I think has been super helpful actually, is the way all the alts, in terms of Bitcoin price, they're just going down and down. It's like a never ending bear market for the alts. I know you can look at something like Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum, "oh it's up $300", but it's not, it's down. If you're holding anything else, you're losing Bitcoin and it just won't stop.

Zac Prince: I think that trend is going to continue. Absent mass adoption for something that's running on the Ethereum network, I don't see anything. Maybe some of the exchange tokens could be unique as well, just because they have so much money that they can shove into those things if they want to. But outside of those two use cases…

Jeremy Welch: But Libra is playing a factor in this too. Libra, if you can build on top of it and they're talking about having a full SDK and smart contracts etc, I mean that's going to factor in. Everybody's known, or not everyone, but people should know, that we've already been through one of these cycles before, where a majority of the coins died and it's going to happen again. So it's just a matter of time and the more kind of bull work we have, of other potentially dominant coins, some of the lesser coins are going to die faster.

Peter McCormack: It's still something you come across with trying to explain things to people. A guy gave me a call, I'm not going to throw him under the bus, but he was like, "oh, I saw Bitcoin is on the rise again, I thought it was dead." You now, the standard questions. He said, "oh but it's a bit overpriced now, it's too expensive. So I was thinking of getting some of the other ones, like some Litecoin and some Bitcoin cash, what do you think?" I was like, "oh, okay, here we go. Time to explain it again!" But we still got those areas.

Zac Prince: My answer to that is always, split the difference. So you think it's too expensive right now? Do you think you could be wrong? People are always like, "yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about!" It's like, "okay, how much were you planning on doing?" Then they say some number, you're like, "all right, take half of it and buy it now in case you're wrong."

Jeremy Welch: Yeah, that's a good method. I mean just dollar cost averaging in. So weekly stacking sats! Just buy in Square cash or wherever. I would definitely advise a few people and for certain people, I would not advise that they dump a ton in, but most people throwing $10, $25 or $50 a week is like no big deal. So it's a lot easier way as the price fluctuates, as they feel better about it overall.

Peter McCormack: I think Pomp was saying recently, he's gone 50% of his net worth into Bitcoin.

Zac Prince: Pomp? Nice!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I wish I'd put my house into it! I could have paid my mortgage off by now.

Zac Prince: I don't know what the exact number is, but I do know that if any respectable financial advisor looked at how much I have in Bitcoin relative to how much money I have in total, they would tell me I have some serious problems! They would say, "you're insane!"

Jeremy Welch: You got to remember that all these financial advisors that came from the old world, the fiat at world.

Peter McCormack: The dead fiat world! Do you really think we can have a hyperbitcoinization or do you think it's more likely just to be a commodity like gold?

Zac Prince: I've thought about this a lot and I think that the concept of hyperbitcoinization being something that happens quickly is really scary and honestly not something that I think is ideal. I think the integration of it potentially as a blanket or band aid around the existing system, for me a better path would be central banks start adding it to their balance sheets, you get adoption that way and I think the concept of Bitcoin taking down the dollar as the currency of the world is so incredibly unlikely at this point. But if you see Bitcoin start to knock out some crappy currencies, then maybe I change my opinion, but that's what I'd like to see happen.

Peter McCormack: I think sometimes possibly, I don't see hyperbitcoinization in the short term, maybe not even my lifetime. I think there'll be a lot of resistance from government. I think it could be quite bloody. I think we talked about this when we did our last show.

Jeremy Welch: There will be battles and there will be tanks over Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I would also be surprised if there is no government out there at the moment, doing their own form of stacking sats.

Jeremy Welch: Well we've already seen this though. Venezuela has definitely been stacking sats. We've seen the North Korean government stacking sats, Iran has been stacking sats, it's happening!

Zac Prince: We need some better countries stacking sats.

Jeremy Welch: This is a joke, but partially serious. You want to talk about extreme scenarios and people hate on Trump or they hate on whoever has the presidency, but for any corporation in the country that is potentially holding keys, if you're like a massive organization, you have keys and they could nationalize, crazier things have happened.

So you have to kind of roll out to... Yes, I do believe that there is a potential for a real hyperbitcoinization event and you have to kind of think through what the extreme cases would be in that. That's why we talk a lot about sovereignty side and holding your keys and in some cases. Use financial products, but think about the risks and think about the balance here, but I do think that it's not only possible, I think it's likely, but I think the timeline is unknown and that's the real risk, is that the timeline is unknown.

Peter McCormack: All right. You said the extreme cases, I want to know what you're thinking about?

Jeremy Welch: Think about this. There have been extreme government cases to where, whether it's gold confiscation or other asset confiscation and all you have to do is, knock knock, you're a US corporation and you hold keys to x number of Bitcoin and now it's nationalized. So from the side of non-custodial usage of Bitcoin, it is important to add that counterbalance.

Peter McCormack: Do you think that would happen again though? I think we're in a very different time from...

Jeremy Welch: No, it definitely could happen. People, people far underweight extreme events kind of in both cases, both in cases that can hurt them and in cases that can help them. The other thing is with technology events, we see this over and over and over again, and it's repeated over and over and over again, it always happens slower than people expect. But when it happens, it happens faster.

You're unprepared when it does actually happen and when the adoption really pushes through. You can literally track those waves and so you can play out in your head the case of where one country you just mentioned, secretly buys up some Bitcoin. We know of some cases where countries are not so secretly getting Bitcoin, but if countries secretly buy Bitcoin and then it just sets off a wheel where every other country tries to buy Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Well, so I always thought, if I was the US government, I mean I can print money at will. So let's print $1 billion and let's buy $1 billion of Bitcoin, let's do it in the background. Let's announce it, the price of Bitcoin is going to skyrocket. You can pay off the national debt then.

Jeremy Welch: And there's no cap. That's the crazy thing about the economics around Bitcoin, is that as long as there's demand, it will keep going up.

Peter McCormack: Well on a long enough timescale, it's always going to go up if people use it.

Jeremy Welch: That's right.

Peter McCormack: Because decreasing supply, I mean we've got a halvening event coming next year. So I was with Juthica at LedgerX and they've got a futures product based on the halvening, because there's a lot of uncertainty for the miners. So the block subsidy is going to drop in half, say June, 2020, they've actually got a futures product based on what date it will happen, because you can't actually pinpoint the date, but also what's going to happen with price.

Jeremy Welch: Well then we got to get into questions of time, Bitcoin time versus Newtonian time [Inaudible]

Peter McCormack: Well the really interesting thing here, is the block subsidy is going to drop in the halvening. But because of the halvening and the restricted supply, going from 1800 to 900 Bitcoin a day dropping on the market, because of that, the price might go up. So whilst the subsidy drops, the miners might still make the same amount of money. They might also make more, because the price has gone up so much.

Jeremy Welch: Yeah, if the demand says the same...

Peter McCormack: But then the ASIC manufacturers will start increasing supply and people will be buying mining equipment like they did in 2017. So you have all these different factors coming into play, it's going to get a bit kind of screwy!

Jeremy Welch: Not to mention the election next year and all the political chaos going on, so it's going to be a crazy year.

Zac Prince: Do you ever feel like you're part of this club that somehow found out the good stuff that was going to happen, before most other people?

Peter McCormack: Yeah I just wish I'd got into the club a couple of years earlier!

Jeremy Welch: I don't so much call it a club. I mean it's kind of like, you're trying to get out of the asylum, as you're stuck inside! Either way, you're damned if you do, you're damned you don't. So I think all of us, we're basically building our way out. It's interesting, I think a lot of early Bitcoiners didn't really think it would move as fast as it moved and so whenever they, all of a sudden, are sitting around with a balance of thousands of Bitcoin or hundreds of Bitcoin or even tens of Bitcoin, one Bitcoin at this point, all of a sudden now you have a massive amount of money that you have to protect.

That's where we came in, why we started, but for a lot of our clients, it was unexpected. So then they have to make a choice, do you cash out or do you really believe in the thing? From that perspective, you're just kind of thrown into it and if you sell, you've got to pay capital gains tax. Now, if it goes up, then you're going to be kicking yourself. But if you really believe in it and you hold onto it and it keeps going, so you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

Zac Prince: I made a deal with my wife that I would sell a percentage of the amount of Bitcoin that I have, when we crossed $10,000 and I reneged on that! I was like, "I just can't, sorry!"

Peter McCormack: So as somebody who blew most of my Bitcoin being a moron and getting into mining, I've made a decision that I'm going to go through three halvenings. So I said in 10 years time, I'll have gone through three halvenings, so the supply would have gone from 1800 to 900 to 450 to 225 a day. I'm not selling anything till then. I can survive for 10 years.

As long as I'm alive, I can survive for 10 years and that's it. I'm going through three halvenings before I sell any! Then I think it might've been Dan Held who said to me, he said, "you will get to the point where you won't need to sell it, because it will just work for you." You'll be with a company like BlockFi, it just works for you. So you don't actually have to do anything, you can live off it, which is obviously the hopeful situation that some of us might be fortunate enough to get into!

Jeremy Welch: But it's not going to be easy. That's the other thing, is that the flip side of that from Dan Hedl, is that it's not going to be easy. There's that Reddit graphic to where it's like, what you think HODLing is going to be like and then the actual dips and everything. I think that one, just HODLing itself is an emotional experience, but now they're going to be all these security risks that come up and we're already starting to see those.

We've seen people that have been held at gunpoint and we're barely on the edge of the game to where you're getting nation state actors and everybody's watching Game of Thrones. They're pissed because of the way the ending worked and we won't do any spoilers, but either way, everybody enjoyed Game of Thrones because there's all these crazy politics and dragons fighting each other and wars and whatever. That stuff's real!

Nation states do play out the state craft and they are trying to stab each other in the back all the time and eventually, we're going to get to the level to where it's not person to person. We already see the case where there's organized crime involved in trying to steal this from people and it's going to level up to the point to where it's corporate craft and then its state craft and then where do we go from there? It's going to get dicey.

Peter McCormack: I liked the end of the Game of Thrones. I didn't have any problem with it.

Zac Prince: I've never seen it.

Peter McCormack: What?

Zac Prince: I know it's sad!

Peter McCormack: How have you not seen Game of Thrones?

Zac Prince: I'm not cool man.

Jeremy Welch: I should also mention too, that I watched the first two episodes and then I watched the one last episode. I don't watch anything in between!

Peter McCormack: That's terrible!

Jeremy Welch: It was great! There is actually a trick, if you ever don't want to watch a full movie or ever get hooked on a show, then just read the Wikipedia article, because your mind will get hooked on the linear narrative and then you just read the Wikipedia article, you get the plot points.

Peter McCormack: You just want to inject stuff into your brain right? You want to get the, "I want to learn Spanish", just inject it in.

Jeremy Welch: Yeah, nam-shubs.

Peter McCormack: What is that?

Jeremy Welch: That's from Neil Stephenson's term in Snow Crash. It's like these mental viruses or memes.

Peter McCormack: You need some entertainment! What is the Bitcoin time thing you were talking about a moment ago?

Jeremy Welch: You don't have 24 hours in the day, you have a number of blocks. There was a big breakthrough for me around Bitcoin and I did have a tweet storm about this, but it's gone because I wiped my tweets.

Peter McCormack: You know I've changed mine? So I did the same as you.

Zac Prince: What is this?

Jeremy Welch: It's freeing, it's different!

Peter McCormack: So Tweet Deleter and you can set it on a certain number of days or certain number of tweets and it just deletes your old tweets. So I'm glad I did it. I had a couple of people have a pop at me and I've had conversations, explaining why I've done it, but also it actually got rid of some good stuff. I'm like, "ah, where's that?!"

Jeremy Welch: But you just got to put the disclaimer there. I feel also, it pushes you to continue to create in a sense. As long as you put the disclaimer and as long as you think about it... The ideas that are still relevant, they'll persist in some capacity.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean they don't really matter that much, the old ones. I think more of it, is just a relief to get... You post smart stuff, I suppose moronic bullshit. You're an educator and maybe I'm an entertainer? So I've got myself away from it. But then also it deleted a bunch of stuff that... Actually I can't talk about this, I'll tell you afterwards! It's a legal thing.

Jeremy Welch: We'll go back to Bitcoin time thing! So the breakdown is, Newtonian time is our current time system and the way we co-ordinate the world. There was a period to where timekeeping and the way that we coordinate all of our calendars and meetings etc, the reason you have clock towers at train stations and at city centers, is because everybody would look to that clock and then they would set their local clock, they would set their watch on their wrist. Their wristwatch would be off by X number of minutes or hours every year and they just reset it when they come in and they stay on track.

Eventually you get to atomic clocks, but we're still bound by this kind of linear time narrative and you actually can build an entirely different system, if you break down that Newtonian time narrative, because actually, Newtonian time is a crock of shit, it's total bullshit. We know that the edges of relativity, we know that, just based on and I'm not a physicist, so I don't know all the details and I can't dig into the exact reasons of the differences in time, but I do know that just even your elevation.

If you live in a tall mountain, you age actually at a faster rate, than if you live at a very low elevation and it may be tied to gravity, it may be tied to other things. So there are all these effects of time that are just... Newtonian time is not totally accurate and we do this reconciliation, all of our systems do it. But there are alternative systems and other civilizations historically have used totally different calendars, totally different time systems, different religions today also use very different calendars, different time systems.

So there is this concept of Bitcoin time, in the sense that from block to block, you just watch the next block and it actually doesn't matter when the block arrives, in the same sense that, we think of a sunrise and a sunset, it doesn't necessarily matter when the sun rises. We tie it more to the time on our clocks. Where in a previous civilization, your entire day was actually structured by when the sun rose and when it went down.

But now that we're using this Newtonian time system with atomic clocks, it's actually tied to a different set of time, to where we're watching the decay of atoms and your rise and fall is not based on the rise and fall of the sun. It's based on this decay and so there's also an alternative, to where you actually base that on the blocks that come out, right.

Peter McCormack: So you can make a dinner reservation at block...

Jeremy Welch: Exactly! There's a weird game to where people are already doing this in a sense, because you do have time locks. So people are already saying, "actually, I'm going to wait until X block and I'm going to lock up my funds until x block" So it's interesting that LedgerX is doing this futures market around when it's going to arrive, because what they're basically arbitraging, is the difference between our current time system and the Bitcoin time system.

There's bound to be, eventually someone will break out of our current times system and they'll do some totally crazy shit, because they'll just be bound to the Bitcoin time system and whatever rules that brings up.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I like all this other weird shit that starts up with Bitcoin. So obviously we have Bitcoin as a store of wealth, transfer of value, blah blah blah. But now we have Bitcoin time, we have timestamps or we have identity built in the Blockchain, which Daniel Buchner is doing at Microsoft or all these other things, where it takes Bitcoin beyond...

Jeremy Welch: It's not a financial system. That's our biggest pitch to any investors. Bitcoin is not just a financial system, it's a computing system, it's a time system, it's like all these other things. There was a point where they called it timechain, not Blockchain.

Peter McCormack: So is it a trust system?

Jeremy Welch: Well it's a communication system, but trust is a function of communication. So we send signals back and forth and I have to be able to trust that the signal you send me is real and the signal I'm sending you is real and it has to arrive and Bitcoin provides a more reliable way of doing that.

Peter McCormack: And also is something that never gets hacked. You as an individual do, but the system itself.

Jeremy Welch: Yeah, exchanges get hacked, people get hacked, Bitcoin doesn't get hacked.

Peter McCormack: The Blockchain itself doesn't get hacked. But what other uses are there that we're not thinking about or you're thinking about, that it can be used for?

Jeremy Welch: Oh, there's a ton. We don't even know exactly. I think we're just on the edge of this thing. That's what's exciting too and this is one of the things that we're talking about, we're kind of locked in the asylum in a sense. Anybody that's in the Bitcoin world, you already get... It's not even just Bitcoin.

People go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and then maybe they get sucked into Ethereum or they get sucked into these other areas. Even within, there's a weird thing where even within just cryptocurrencies period, everybody's like, "well, you're an idiot! You're an idiot!" But at least everybody's recognizing that, okay, cryptographic money is a real thing and everybody's looking at the no coiners and being like, "okay, these guys? What the hell is going on with these guys?"

So there's something weird going on, where everybody that's in that world, is kind of going down the rabbit hole together and is moving faster and is like figuring things out as they go along. Where everybody that is left behind, they're totally oblivious.

Peter McCormack: I'm finding more people are going from multicoin into Bitcoin now, I'm really starting to see that. On Twitter, people I'm talking to, I mean my own sense of self relief was when, I transferred everything to Bitcoin far too late, but I did it.

Zac Prince: You made a good call on that though. We were talking about it, I remember.

Peter McCormack: Well not the show, I'm talking about my own portfolio. I just put it all into Bitcoin and it was because I didn't want to trade anymore, it was going down and whatever. But now I barely check the price anymore. I hear about it when people talk about it. Blockfolio gets looked at like once every couple of weeks. 

All I do, is every month I check my sats and I'm always increasing, that's all I care about. So that's been super helpful. The show is a separate thing, entirely Bitcoin just for focus, which has been cool and then I can trigger the ETH heads for a bit of fun! But I'm finding a lot of people are starting to have that light bulb moment, that like, "yeah, it is Bitcoin". I mean most of your business is Bitcoin, right?

Zac Prince: Yeah, I mean over over 90% of our business is Bitcoin.

Jeremy Welch: I'm actually surprised by that, that's insane. I actually thought it would be like comparable. 90% that is actually awesome, wow. I mean we find a similar thing. We went down this initial path where we had people asking us and we got a lot of shit for it, but we had customers asking us, paying customers, they're paying you for a business and we have to stay in business! So paying customers are coming in and saying, "hey, I have some Litecoin or have some Ethereum or have some Zcash. I want to apply the same security principles."

So we tried to get on that path, but it was just too expensive. What we found though is that majority cases, it was 90/95% Bitcoin and then just 5% whatever else. The payoff around doing whatever else, different businesses will make their decisions on what they support, but it's interesting that now the dominance index is 60% plus.

Peter McCormack: That's also misleading though, it's so misleading because you create something like Bitcoin SV and it's suddenly worth billions.

Jeremy Welch: Yeah, so it's more. What you're saying is it's actually more?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because no-ones even fucking using Bitcoin SV, apart from putting weather reports in whatever. No one's using this shit. No one's using Bitcoin Cash, but they've got a percentage of the value. I guess it's market makers that are kind of keeping a value in it, but no one's using this bullshit. So I think that market dominance thing is misleading as well

Zac Prince: I still love the fact that no one's in charge and as a result, you can't really fuck with Bitcoin. I always loved that honey badger video way back in the day and I feel like when I started hearing the Bitcoin/honey badger references, I was already in it a little bit, but now I'm like, "they call it the honey badger? Let's go! This is so fucking good!" You can't mess with it. Every other cryptocurrency has attack factors or people or corporations, in the case of Libra and Bitcoin stands on its own. I think they're good, but nothing else has that unique component.

Peter McCormack: No, and you're absolutely right. But a lot of them don't even make sense. I like Charlie Lee, I think he's a great guy. Litecoin, I don't see a need anymore. I like Monero because I like Ricardo, but again, am I trying to do private transactions? I'm not, so I don't need it. I don't get Ethereum, I don't get the point. But with Bitcoin, I'm just like, this makes sense because I'm using it and I'm using it, I wouldn't say daily, but I'm using it weekly. Every time I do an interview with Jeremy, it always ends up like this. Mind blown!

Jeremy Welch: Sorry dude! Sats and timechain, those are the two term changes we got to get to.

Peter McCormack: All right, well listen, what's going to happen over the next year, five years, both time frames, what are we going to see? What's important?

Zac Prince: I mean price is going to be higher. I think it's just going to be more of the same. My personal view is that we're not going to have the crazy paradigm shift on that time frame, but we are going to continue to see this march towards greater adoption, greater understanding, higher prices, better integration into existing parts of the financial system, more success from people like us who are like working their butts off to build real companies, delivering real value to people that own these assets and that's exciting. It's probably going to go faster than it has.

Jeremy Welch: Chaos, balkanization and Bitcoin clarity. That's how it's going to go, the next year.

Zac Prince: What is balkanization?

Jeremy Welch: It's just like separation fracturing of a system, the Balkans.

Peter McCormack: I need a little desktop Jeremy, who just sits on my shampoo! Well you've got two really fucking cool businesses, I love them both, you know that. But tell people how to get hold of you. How to find out more about the product. If they haven't got a Cases node, tell them why the fuck they need one. Tell me about Block Fi, tell them how they find out about you, come on, here's your moment.

Zac Prince: Yeah, I feel like you do it every week.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I did it with Casa too, they got a shout out. You should ask Jeremy for a few bucks for that!

Zac Prince: You know where to find us. My Twitter handle is @blockfizac, my DMs are open if anybody wants to chat with me. One thing I really have enjoyed is every time your podcast or others, sometimes people just reach out and they either say something nice or say something mean or ask me a question and I'm like, "all right, cool." We just sat in a room and talk for an hour, some people were paying attention. So yeah, just ping me. So my Twitter handle is @blockfizac.

Jeremy Welch: Any energy is good energy, even haters. I love it, because you always learn and honestly, if someone is taking the time to reach out to you because they think that you're shit, you should listen because people are passionate, you want the energy, you want to understand what their perspective is and you learn from it. So keys.casa, you can check us out there, get a Casa node, reclaim your sovereignty.

We've also been talking a bunch about cyberspace recently. We have this concept that we're kind of setting the new frontier out in cyberspace again and Bitcoin is a part of that and the Internet has been colonized. So we've been talking about that internally. But yeah, I mean, you can reclaim your space, you can start running a Bitcoin node, Lightning node and you can secure all of that stuff using our multisig.

So keys.casa and then, you can check out @casahodl for Twitter and @jeremyrwelch for Twitter too. We have the new Sats app, which is like the easiest way to get started with this stuff. So it's not widely available yet. We're still testing with a bunch of our existing clients, but as that comes online, we're hoping to get Sats into not just millions, but billions of hands.

Peter McCormack: As ever Jeremy, you've got me super hyped! I'm going to go sell my children and get some more Bitcoin. Zac, as always a pleasure, you always give me beer when I come over! I love being here, man. All right guys, thanks for coming on.

Jeremy Welch: Thanks man.

Zac Prince: Thanks!

PodcastPeter McCormackComment