WBD014 Audio Transcription
Crypto Collusion and Conspiracies with Crypto Bobby
Interview date: Friday 27th April
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Crypto Bobby. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
In this interview, I talk to Crypto Bobby about the recent article released on steemit by @CryptoMedicated, highlighting a case of collusion and conspiracy to manipulate the price action of Crypto assets by some prominent Twitter traders. We also discuss a number of things such as Crypto platforms, Vitalik Buterin's boycott of the Consensus conference and Robert's plans for the future.
“I do think it goes to show that there definitely is some level of manipulation or people trying to manipulate the markets for their own benefit, and a lot of times at detriment to you as an individual. It is definitely something you want to think about if you are investing in the Crypto markets. ”
— Robert Paone
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: So am I going to call you Rob, Robbie, Bobby, Robert?
Crypto Bobby: You can call me Rob. We can go with Rob; that works.
Peter McCormack: Great to meet you. Thanks for having me here in Brooklyn and taking me out for dinner last night.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, appreciate you coming.
Peter McCormack: Cool. So we had a lot of drama last night and yesterday with a story exposed of market manipulation.
Crypto Bobby: A little bit. Yeah.
Peter McCormack: What do you make of this? What are your thoughts?
Crypto Bobby: So, I think that it's something that a lot of people obviously got angry about. It went pretty viral on Twitter pretty quick and there was a ton of outrage on it which is, I think, understandable. I do think that it goes on and it's much more prevalent than probably just a group of ten people and probably goes on on a much larger level.
If anything, maybe it just kind of goes to show that not everybody -- I don't know, I haven't done enough research to know if those individuals who were kind of accused of it were truly involved, or the extent of their involvement; but I do think it goes to show that there definitely is some level of manipulation or people trying to manipulate the markets for their own benefit, and in a lot of times in detriment to you as an individual.
So definitely something that you want to think about if you are trading in the crypto markets or investing in the crypto markets.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I agree. I mean, when I wrote my training course recently, I put in there that you have to be aware that manipulation happens and I think we're all aware there's lots of pump and dump groups. Have you been invited to some?
Crypto Bobby: I have not. Actually, they might be in my Twitter mentions, but typically anybody that puts a telegram pump and dump group, I'll just block so I never see them again.
Peter McCormack: Okay. So I've had it in my DMs, "Do you want to join?" and I would be the biggest idiot to join one, but I think we're all aware it's going on and it's clearly going on, but I don't think that should be a reason to validate it. It feels like some of the responses were, "Well, it's going on so much, so you just have to accept it", and that's almost like some approval.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. No, I definitely don't think anybody should be happy about it or approve it or kind of put a blessing on it and say, "This is fine". I do think the one interesting thing though is a lot of people -- at least, I posted a little bit about it and kind of joked around and said that I was absolutely shocked. Obviously, I'm not shocked just because I figured that it's been going on for a while.
I think it's not the first time; there have been major articles in major publications about these pump and dump groups and things like that. Maybe I think the reason this caught fire was because there were crypto influencers behind it specifically that people followed or people trusted or thought they trusted, and I think that made it take off a lot more than something like just seeing an article with some random person that you don't necessarily have any interaction with, and then you hear about a pump and dump behind that.
Peter McCormack: And I guess the bad thing about it is that they've built a following of people who trust them and if they are going to operate a pump and dump, they essentially have to dump on their followers, because if you look at --
Crypto Bobby: There dumping on somebody!
Peter McCormack: Well yeah, dumping on somebody.
Crypto Bobby: And it's most likely your followers potentially.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and if you look into the conversations, a lot of the discussion was around who's got the followers, how we can shill this to the most people, and I think some people think of this as like a victimless crime sometimes. They seem to forget actually, not everybody can make money in the market.
Crypto Bobby: No. I think there's, in a lot of cases, a winner and loser on every trade and there's somebody there, the person pumping, and it's usually the person that's probably going to be winning and somebody else is going to buying that at an elevated valuation and probably not going to breaking even any time in the near future, which is sad to see, especially for the people that are new in the space that don't get it.
I would say though that it's interesting too, because a lot of times you'll see these crazy moves that people celebrate where something goes up 50% in an hour, 80% or 100% or whatever it might be; crazy moves. Obviously, there's something going on behind the scenes or some level of manipulation there, and it's funny that it took a Steemit article that had a couple of different people for that to generate this conversation.
If anything, regardless I guess of the people behind it, I do think it's good to have the conversation on how, in a lot of cases, it's bad for the space and how you should be aware of it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I agree. I mean it's clearly been going on and I think we're all aware when the prices go up, and as one person said, "You should be thanking these pumpers; they're the people making you money", but I don't think it's right to validate it. If this market is going to grow up and be taken more seriously, I don't think we should be celebrating things like this.
Crypto Bobby; No and I saw a lot of people calling for regulation too where it's, "This is why we need regulation". I do think it also brings up an interesting point, because there are a lot of people that are very much anti-regulation in the space until they find something that they don't necessarily like and then it's, "Where's the regulation? Where's the regulator? Save us".
So I think that's kind of funny to see the people that may or may not be anti-regulator or regulation and then something like this happens where there's accusations of pump and dumps and things like that, and then people are begging regulators to come in the space and stop it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's funny because there's almost like a different drama every week that kicks off.
Crypto Bobby: It's like every day!
Peter McCormack: Yeah! Every day something new kicks off and when you think about that this is a potentially multi-trillion industry, it seems quite amateur at times and immature.
Crypto Bobby: It's still highly immature, I think. The maturity of the space, in my opinion, is only going to increase, and it's increasing rapidly on literally a daily basis. I mean there are massive investors moving into the space.
I think one of the biggest plays is the infrastructure behind the crypto markets. I don't know if you saw yesterday, but I think it was the CEO of Nasdaq coming out saying, "We'd be interested in essentially operating as a crypto currency exchange in the future if the regulation is straightened out", and things like that. Like there are larger players that I think are interested in providing the infrastructure behind the scenes, but some things need to get straightened out and I think some people are going to take those risks and move quicker, like the CME and the CBOE move pretty quick and some people are saying, "Hey, you shouldn't do that", but I do think that people understand that there's probably a lot of money to be made from a corporate perspective and they're ready to do that.
Peter McCormack: And I guess it's their own version of FOMO right. They don't want to miss out on this. I saw that thing; it's like one to two years they expect, but I guess they'll be eyeing up other exchanges they can buy rather than do it themselves.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, and you've even seen it too with some of, I think, the M&A going on in the exchanges. That seems to be the one area and I'm maybe a little bit surprised by that. I thought maybe there might be more regulatory concerns like with Circle acquiring Poloniex, and then I think it was, was it --
Peter McCormack: I think that deal is going to look pretty cheap in a couple of years at $400 million.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, it's certainly possible. And then Coincheck in Japan, the one that got hacked for a bunch of NEM, they got acquired. Then there's another rumour, I think it's a Korean or Japanese exchange, I forget off the top of my head who it is, but there's talks about them getting acquired for $400 million recently, so that might come to fruition, who knows? But it seems like the mergers and acquisitions in the exchange space by traditional companies that want exposure to this market is something that's definitely heating up.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. It feels like we're approaching that tipping point. There's a couple of other things that came out. I'm pretty sure I saw was it a minister of South Korea, who came out and said that he expects cryptocurrencies to replace fiat and I think we've also had a16z, Andreessen Horowitz have announced a crypto fund now, $80 million?
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, they've been pretty active in investing in ICO, Initial Coin Offerings, in a venture capital, traditional VC, and are funding for crypto companies as well. So they seem to be the most or one of the most active traditional VC firms. So I think that's a pretty interesting sign to see them creating a crypto-only fund, and I do think it's something that there are a lot of larger investors that want some level of exposure.
I've gone to a lot of these conferences recently and that's been the one panel I always want to sit in on, is hearing about the institutional investors and what they're thinking, and that seems to me like there's a certain progression where the ones that are most comfortable with risk are moving, whether it's family offices or prop trading units, and then pension funds are very, very far out in terms of actually adopting, but having some level of exposure to their portfolio, be it 1% or 2% to the crypto markets, is something that they want to take on.
Peter McCormack: I guess the challenge as well is, what is it they're investing in? You can either be investing in infrastructure businesses who have some kind of enterprise value, but you also can be investing in token-based businesses where it's a token economy and the enterprise has no value, and I think that's a whole new world for this level investment.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. It's really interesting to see that develop. Are you in investing in Coinbase that has probably traditional business metrics and an actual way to apply valuation; or are you investing in Ethereum or an ERC-20 token that nobody knows how to value either of those things? Nobody knows how to value Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Well it's valued at what $8,800 now.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah!
Peter McCormack: How did you survive the crash of 2018?
Crypto Bobby: It definitely hasn't been fun. I did buy a little bit more in the, I think it was the sub-$7,000 range around $6,800. I didn't time it perfectly in the bottom, but I did try to increase my stack there; that was one thing. For the most part, I'm not an incredibly active trader, so I've kind of taken things as they've come and then tried to rebalance my portfolio into certain assets that I thought were a little bit higher quality than maybe I was in previously.
Back in December and January, I think you could've just thrown your money into anything and it seemed like, "Oh, I'm going to double, triple, quadruple this and this is going to be great", and then once the correction happened -- correction, it's much more than a correction -- but once that correction happened in late January into February when a lot of those assets lost 70%, 80% of their value, looking at that and thinking, "Okay, I don't want to be in this. I'm going to move to something that I just feel like has a little bit more maybe long-term value".
So I adjusted my portfolio pretty heavily to Bitcoin, to Monero, to Ethereum, to other things that I thought maybe I felt a little bit more comfortable holding than a random ERC-20 token or something like that.
Peter McCormack: So what's your background, Rob? What was your first exposure to crypto and Bitcoin and when did it really grab you?
Crypto Bobby: Sure. So my first entry into the crypto markets in general was December 2013. I had heard about Bitcoin a little bit. I was working in IT recruiting at the time and I hated my job, but working in IT recruiting at the time, and I was getting a Master's in information systems. So I thought I was just trying to experiment with as much tech as I could, and somebody sent me an article about Dogecoin and --
Peter McCormack: You're another Dogecoin? Do you know what, this keeps coming up?
Crypto Bobby: Dogecoin was what got me interested into crypto. I mean, now it's completely different, but back then it was in December 2013, that was kind of when Dogecoin blew up, monetarily speaking, and also I mean there was a point in time when the community was like 80,000 people on their subreddit; it was super active. They sponsored the Jamaican bobsled team; they had a Dogecoin logo on a NASCAR driver; they had all this crazy stuff.
It was just super fun, because the Bitcoin, and I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist but I'm a big fan of Bitcoin in general, but the Bitcoin community was very intellectual and libertarian and was much more hardcore than even now, just because it was so much smaller back then, and the Dogecoin community was just memes and Such Moon and stupid things like that, which was kind of funny to me.
I didn't have much money at the time because I was fairly new out of college at that point, so I started trying to mine and I initially tried to mine on my laptop, because you could actually mine Dogecoin on a GPU back then.
Peter McCormack: Wow.
Crypto Bobby: I guess you still can now, but you could pretty effectively do that simply on a laptop, so I was mining there. And then I ended up buying a couple of the Bitcoin USBA6 that they used to have, until those became basically worthless once the other A6 started getting developed. So it was fun to experiment with some of the mining too and get a feel for that.
Peter McCormack: So you were involved then. So you traded a bit through 2014?
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, a little bit, but late 2013/14, I basically bought at the top. I think Bitcoin and the crypto markets went from $1 billion to $15 billion. I probably bought it when it was at $13 billion, $14 billion and bought a little bit on the way up and started just trying to mine. I guess I didn't have a ton of money, so the ability to print money on my computer, on my laptop or whatever, I thought was the coolest thing in the world. So I thought that was pretty interesting.
I just got lightly involved then, and then I think interest for me waned a little bit just like a lot of people kind of felt that as the price continued to drop and drop, a lot of the activity and interest in 2014 I think left for a lot of people, and that's kind of what I think has happened similarly this year which is kind of why I've told people in some respects, like I'm never one to be, "Oh, it's going to go back up. It's going to be perfect. You're going to go best all-time highs", but you can see a similar pattern where the interest has died off in 2018 and that's exactly how I felt personally in 2014 until it's like, "Man, this sucks".
Peter McCormack: Well everything correlates. We talked about this last night. You said with your YouTube videos, the viewership has dropped. I know with my Facebook group, the comments and interest has dropped. You know, when the market is going up, everyone's interested and when the markets drop then they're not. But actually one of the things I said to you and people I talk to is actually, this is a time to be learning and accumulating. I think you almost have to go through a cycle to realise that.
Crypto Bobby; Yeah. It's been a lot easier for me this time, and granted I'm not somebody who's just hodl and don't do anything. I don't think that's the best strategy for everybody, but for some people it's okay, but it's been a lot easier for me to take some of the losses that I have. I've recovered quite a bit, but it's been a lot easier for me to take some of the losses, just because I feel like I've gone through this before and I'll probably go through it again, and when you've had some experience in these -- they're crazy markets cycles, it's ridiculous, but when you've gone through it once or twice before, it makes it a lot easier to stomach it the next time.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well hopefully your total portfolio value is higher as well and you kind of know what's happening. Although I'll say, do you know even this time, was it maybe middle of March, I was like, "Oh no, I really think I'm done". I did have that almost kind of like moment, "I want to leave the market", but it has recovered.
So when did you start creating the content then? When did you start thinking -- because you're a bit like me; you know you're not the best trader, you know you're not going to day trade, but you like making content? When did that start happening?
Crypto Bobby: Sure. So I started in early August. I started to play around in a lot more ICOs. I was doing better professionally speaking, outside of crypto, so I had more money to put in the market and I'd made money in 2017, so I was just bored one day and threw up a video. I did that a couple of days in a row and it just kind of snowballed. I really liked doing it and got good feedback from people for the most part.
I tried to make my videos not super crazy in-depth and understand that I'm definitely not the smartest person in the world, not try to portray myself as an expert and just be a relatable dude. Hopefully that has resonated with some people. So I started in August and just continued ever since.
Peter McCormack: How many followers are you up to now on YouTube?
Crypto Bobby: It's like 140,000 or something like that, but it's definitely slowed down a lot recently.
Peter McCormack: But that's still a significant amount, right?
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. There're certainly people with more, but it's probably like I guess top five or top ten in terms of crypto-specific YouTubers.
Peter McCormack: Does that bring any pressure?
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. I think it definitely does. There's pressure on, I don't know, it's like I'm kind of competitive too; but at the same point in time, I don't have any -- I don't know. It's always interesting to see certain people and you can kind of see the ebb and flow of how some people have really strong success really quickly and maybe they fall off, or just kind of the ebb and flow of how they'll be. I'd say it's more entertainment than just kind of specific advice or anything like that.
Peter McCormack: But you know there's certain content that's going to get you more viewers and you're not always going to go for that, right?
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. So I mean that's the thing that I struggle with a lot of times, and I think it's probably hurt me recently at least. I think it's really easy to cater to a certain type of audience that wants the five coins that are going to the Moon today and the four best whatever. The thing that I think is difficult is I like talking about what is happening; just generally speaking about what's happening in the market, what's happening with regulation, what are some of the new advancements that are going on.
I don't really like talking about, "Okay, these are the five coins that I think are going to crush it", because if I recommend five coins -- first of all it's not supposed to be financial advice in the first place -- and two of them go down 80%. If I say it, somebody's probably going to put money into it, which is not good in and of itself, but I'm going to feel pretty crappy if somebody out there is shooting me a message on Twitter commenting and saying, "Hey, I put money in this because you told me it was going to go up".
I've seen that happen with other people too and a lot of times they'll just brush it off and pretend it doesn't happen, but that's the type of -- everybody wants to be told, "All right, this is what you should do. This is where you should put your money", and that's the type of content that can do very well, but I don't really have. I'd rather get half the viewership and not make, "This coin is going to go up 100%", like just the click-baiting shit.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and you know what, it's very hard to predict over a short timeframe what will happen. I think like over a long timeframe we can look at Bitcoin and go, you know it's probably of all of them the most healthy investment, Monero looks pretty good; but when you start looking at shorter timeframes, Monero really hasn't done anything right now, but I think it's got more chance of existing in five years than a number of the tokens that have moved.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. I totally agree.
Peter McCormack: So, you said to me that when you are looking at things, you're more into fundamental analysis and technical.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. I like reading through whitepapers. My background has been in technology for the most part. Prior to joining the industry full time, I worked in software sales or enterprise software and that was fairly technical in nature. One of the things that really drew me into the space was I thought the mining itself was really interesting, but now there's a lot more than just mining transactional crypto currency. There's a lot of different platforms and things like that. So, yeah, I like the fundamental analysis portion of it.
Peter McCormack: Okay and so based on that, "What five coins are going to…", no I'm only joking! What things are you looking at now --?
Crypto Bobby: Dogecoin, Dogecoin, Dogecoin!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Dogecoin! What assets are you looking at and what projects do you find interesting?
Crypto Bobby: So for me, I think one of the things that's probably one of the more interesting things to evaluate is the platforms. Ethereum versus EOS versus Cardona versus Neo versus whatever.
Peter McCormack: Dragon. There's so many.
Crypto Bobby: There's so many platforms and it's interesting because number one, they're super highly valued. I was taking to somebody recently and just talking about the utility of these platforms versus the valuation, and the valuation is just massively beyond the utility. Some of them nobody even uses, but they're worth billions of dollars market cap wise, which is not a great metric in and of itself but --
Peter McCormack: But is that not also possibly a reflection of there's so many people that are able to trade in this market now.
Crypto Bobby: Oh yeah.
Peter McCormack: Globally, anyone can get on board and start investing.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, I think that's definitely the case and I also think the platform plays are interesting, because if you go through some of the whitepapers, a lot of them are trying to look at Ethereum and see what Ethereum is doing and say, "Okay, Ethereum doesn't have good transaction scalability; they're never going to scale. They're at whateve, seven, ten transactions per second now and Ethereum is trying to add in sharding and proof of stake and all these different things. We're going to do that from the outset and we're trying implement that. We're trying to get to mainnet. We're trying to have people develop on top of us, etc".
But can Ethereum move quick enough to basically nullify the advancements that these other platforms are trying to make? I think that's going to be an interesting -- I'm almost viewing it like a race. Who's going to get to the finish line? I mean the finish line is always going to be moving, but who's going to get to the finish line first? Who's going to complete the first lap?
Then I also think too, watching where the developers are, because you can have the coolest platform on the planet, you could have the best scalability out there, but at the same point in time, if your platform is supposed to be a decentralised application platform or people are supposed to build on top of it and nobody's building on top of it, is it actually valuable? Maybe it is now, but at some point in time if the market will look at it and say, "It's not super valuable".
Peter McCormack: So based on the platforms that you've looked at, what are the ones you are interested in specifically? Where do you think the biggest threats to Ethereum are?
Crypto Bobby: I think a lot of people are pointing to EOS now. Hashgraph is another one that is coming out. So the interesting thing I think about a lot of these platforms that are maybe competitive to Ethereum, is that for the most part there's a trade-off; they're all maybe more scalable in nature than Ethereum is, because they've had an opportunity to see what Ethereum has done and where it's weaknesses are and have baked that into their system
But a lot of times, it seems like there's an element of centralisation that is, it's more scalable because it's more centralised. Whether it's the governance layer is specifically focussed on 30-something entities that are designated as such or -- I don't know, I feel like there's a big trade-off with centralisation of who's actually running it and the companies behind it, or the people behind it and the actual scalability of the system.
But I think EOS is going to be interesting to watch; some people love it, some people hate it. Cardano is another one that I think is fairly interesting too. Both have pretty significant valuations. Neo is another one and then there's smaller ones that have different components. You have ICON, you have Dragonchain; Zilliqa's another one that's implementing sharding and some other components to maybe help from a scalability perspective, but it will be interesting to watch.
Peter McCormack: I guess what I'm interested in is when we start seeing some things built on top of them that are actually being widely used. I'm still yet to see that.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah and that's interesting, because the killer app right now for Ethereum has been number one ICOs; that's really been the killer app, is raising money on Ethereum, but outside of that it's been CryptoKitties and so there's not that much there. But I think also, from looking at how some of these systems are being set up, there are so many developers that are, I think, building a knowledgebase with Solidity and some of these platforms are either developing with Solidity in mind, using Solidity as their programming language, or allowing developers to port over Solidity-based apps which will be…
I think like I was saying before, if you have such an awesome platform, but at the same point of time if nobody knows the language that you're using or whatever it might be or there's no easy way for them to move an application from Ethereum to Cardano or something like that, are they actually going to do that, who knows?
Peter McCormack: Yeah. One of the things I read yesterday was an attack against Ethereum in that a Turing-complete language itself is a threat, because why would large companies risk breaking smart contracts being executed which essentially lock up funds, like what's happened with Parity. There's too much risk associated with this, especially if they're going to be operated with immutable blockchains. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Crypto Bobby: I mean I think it definitely makes sense. I think there's a case for immutability in some respects for some use cases, and in some use cases it doesn't make sense. I think even if you look at banking or something like that, where if somebody goes out and steals my ATM card information and they go and take $3,000 out of an ATM, and I've had that happen to me before where I've put my card in an ATM to add some chip in it, and then somebody stole a bunch of money from me; I called my bank and said, "Hey, that wasn't me", that I obviously didn't take out a bunch of cash and they're like, "Okay, we'll refund you", and that's not immutable, but that's advantageous to me.
On the other hand, if that was a blockchain-based solution, it would be, "Hey, too bad, sorry".
Peter McCormack: And sometimes almost like celebrating the hacker in this weird kind of way that they've exposed a flaw in a contract, or they've exposed a flaw in the system, but they should be able to keep the funds because of coder's law.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, and going to the Parity thing too; so maybe I'm of the belief that it's bad code and Ethereum is supposed to be immutable. You can make the argument that it's not, but Ethereum is supposed to be immutable and kind of, "Too bad". But at the same point in time, I didn't have any money in a Parity multisig wallet, so it's easy for me to say, "It's too bad". If you have a couple of million dollars in a Parity multisig wallet, then you might be thinking otherwise and thinking, "Hey, please save me", or something like that.
Peter McCormack: And nobody's harmed by returning the funds. It's not sat with anybody else, but at the same time it sets a precedent which in the future is where do you draw the line?
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, totally.
Peter McCormack: Which future smart contract which locks up money in a different way, you know Ethereum in a different way, will we need to have another hard fork for?
Crypto Bobby: Yeah!
Peter McCormack: There are rumours and there are things I've read that have discussed potentially, there will be a hard fork of Ethereum and we will have a third Ethereum chain, based on this and based on those disagreeing with this.
Crypto Bobby: I've seen that as well. I haven't done the full research into it so… and I think that's been prominently coming out in the past 24 to 48 hours with people talking about that, but that would be not great. I'm not a big fan of -- so I get the purpose behind forks and a lot of that, and even Bitcoin, I get the argument for Bitcoin Cash, I get a lot of the things around it; but in a lot of respects, it is hijacking the name of -- you're taking a lot of the brand value.
Then also, from a market cap perspective, I think it's kind of funny too, because I was thinking about this. I saw somebody writing about Bitcoin Private recently, that was the ZCL Bitcoin fork, and Bitcoin Private's market cap, I think, was either higher than Monero or higher than Zcash.
Peter McCormack: Zcash. Yeah.
Crypto Bobby: Higher than zcash. So yeah, their market cap was higher than Zcash but out of the people that actually -- you know, that market cap -- how many people actually have access to that Bitcoin Private? It's only had $2 million worth of 24-hour volume, it's super small. Just the economic metrics behind a fork are just so jumbled because if you have your stuff on Ledger, is Ledger going to support that? Is it not going to support that? If it doesn't, then does that actually exist that's not calculated into a market cap? I think it just goes to show that the metrics there can be kind of crappy.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. It's a really tough one with the forks, because sometimes people will be like, "Oh, I've got free money". That was the big thing around Bitcoin Cash and then --
Crypto Bobby: It's a dividend!
Peter McCormack: Well it's a dividend, but it kicked off this trend of future forks but nothing really -- the only other one that had a little value was Bitcoin, was it Gold?
Crypto Bobby: Gold which, going back to that point, is still multi-billion dollar. Has anybody ever used Bitcoin Gold?
Peter McCormack: Will anyone use Bitcoin Gold?
Crypto Bobby: Multi-billion dollars though!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but then I think who's buying this when you're selling into the market and why? It just seems insane. It's another thing which is kind of amateurish and strange within this industry we work in --
Crypto Bobby: Totally.
Peter McCormack: -- and trying to then explain it to somebody. You know if you try and explain it to somebody new coming in and say, "Well we have this virtual currency, it's called Bitcoin, but if anyone wants to create their own version, they can just fork in and give it a similar name, have a miner support it and it will have value". You start trying to explain it and it just sounds insane.
Also before we started, I don't know, I think I said to you that Vitalik Buterin has put out there, he's going to boycott Consensus and he's asking others to do the same. Also, this is following him calling out Craig Wright a fraud and he won't be attending any --
Crypto Bobby: -- conferences with him.
Peter McCormack: -- or that might have been Charlie Lee. Why is he there? He seems to be getting quite a name for himself out there.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: What do you think of this Consensus thing?
Crypto Bobby: For me personally, there are so many things to worry about. There's so much shit going on in the space that there's only so many things I can really concern myself with and get mad about.
Peter McCormack: Otherwise you'd boycott everything.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. Otherwise you'd just get literally -- but that's Twitter and that's the crypto world right now. It's literally just getting mad about every single thing that goes on and I just don't care enough at this point in time too. I mean honestly, if there's anything to boycott, it's the fact that the tickets are $3,000! Outside of that, that's what I would boycott is $3,000 conference tickets and not necessarily the fact that --
Peter McCormack: I didn't realise they were $3,000 now!
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, the final tickets. I think they were $2,500 and then they just upped them recently; I got an email.
Peter McCormack: Wow!
Crypto Bobby: I was thinking about attending since it's in New York and we're in New York, but that's a pretty hefty price tag.
Peter McCormack: I don't think I've ever been to a conference at $3,000 a ticket.
Crypto Bobby: I think it's a three-day conference and to their credit, the speaker line-up does look pretty solid, but also if I'm not mistaken, I think that they stream the entire event. I feel like I saw the last Consensus and they basically streamed the entire thing live. So pay $3,000 or stream the exact same content live, and yeah you can make a lot of connections there in person and there's a lot of kind of important, powerful people, etc, but at the same point in time, who knows? That's a lot.
Peter McCormack: I'm not sure that calling for a boycott really achieves anything or solves anything. I don't think that's the way to deal with the debate.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I don't think that's helpful for the industry either. I'm not really sure what he's trying to achieve with that. I think he starts with pointing out that there's a scam. I don't think that's CoinDesk actively that promotes this, that's probably someone else's mistake, but then moves onto their incorrect reporting of Ethereum. So it felt a bit more personal.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, I mean CoinDesk I think does do some -- I mean, I don't know if it's necessarily like Bitconnect, but they do a lot of image-based advertisements and things like that and you can pretty often see different advertisements for maybe shady ICOs or things like that that are going on, on the actual website itself.
I don't know if that's maybe what he was referring too, but I've seen criticism for that, and I think Ryan Selkis, who used to be at CoinDesk, I've seen people give him crap even just saying, "Hey, wish you were still at CoinDesk because…", I don't know, etc. So I think there's something to be said there from a journalism perspective, I guess, as far as where they're monetising and who they take money from, but if it's like an ad network, maybe they don't have as much control over it, who knows?
Peter McCormack: But he made it over three points, so that was point one; point two was that statements that are made off the record don't stay off the record; and the third one was incorrect reporting of Ethereum. I just wonder whether if he'd have called for the boycott on the scams alone or that was his leading point.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. I mean I don't know. Out of the people that probably are attending or are thinking about attending, who knows how many people are going to be like, "Okay, Vitalik boycotted this so I'm not going to go"? I kind of doubt that's going to happen that much, but at the same point in time, maybe it's just going to make some people think twice about visiting the CoinDesk website, who knows? It seems like that might have more of an effect, rather than ticket sales at Consensus.
Peter McCormack: Are you going?
Crypto Bobby: I'm probably not. I'm still thinking about it, but if I can stream the entire thing, I might just try to meet up with some people before, meet up with some people afterwards and try to network in that way, rather than go to the conference.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I was thinking of coming into New York for it, but I--
Crypto Bobby: It's part of the Blockchain week as a whole, which will be interesting.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. You can meet up with a whole bunch of people and I think some of the networking is more important than the actual conference itself.
Crypto Bobby: Oh definitely!
Peter McCormack: And like you say, look if they're streaming it for free… yeah. Anyway, so what else is going on with you at the moment?
Crypto Bobby: So just kind of continuing with the content and I mean right now we're in AirSwap's office. I started here a month, a month and a half ago and the company just launched the AirSwap token trader platform yesterday. So that's been pretty cool to see and pretty fun to just be a part of as far as seeing a platform.
I've always worked at large companies. I've always basically pretty much worked at two Fortune 500 companies and I never had any impact on product whatsoever. So even just getting a chance to see developers and engineers actually building this stuff and testing it out; it's pretty fascinating to watch in comparison to what I used to have an impact on from just a product standpoint, because it was nothing.
Peter McCormack: It's a pretty cool product as well, right?
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, I think it's going to be really interesting to see how it gets adoption in the space. I mean I'm biased, but I'm pretty impressed by the product.
Peter McCormack: Well, I think like I said to you before, sometimes I use ShapeShift because I'm lazy and I can't be bothered to log in to my exchange with my authenticator code and my password and IP protection and every other thing I have in place, and also I don't like to create market orders, I like to just buy from the order book.
Crypto Bobby: Sure.
Peter McCormack: Also, another thing I really like about what they've done is that it looks great. There seems to be a big issue with usability and UX within crypto. Something like MyEtherWallet for me is fucking terrible; it's just so horrible to use. They seem to have done a lot of work on the UX.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah, I think Don, one of the co-founders who I think you've spoken to earlier, his background I think is on the UX side of the house. I do completely agree with you, I mean that's something from a crypto standpoint that I've seen a lot of people talk about this, but there's a far way to go in terms of actually generating usability for the products or the platforms that people are leveraging, outside of the hardcore crypto nerds that can just figure something out. Even if it looks ugly or if it's not easy to use, they'll figure it out. They'll leverage it, but for the average person, there has to be some level of a nice user experience, a nice interface for that to go down.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I've seen a lot of excuses made for it like, "We're figuring out how this technology works and UX can come later", but I always feel that UX and UI should be baked in from the start.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah totally.
Peter McCormack: Because otherwise you're just going to be re-engineering your product in the future for that. So the other thing you talked to me about is you've got an interest in the regulatory side of things?
Crypto Bobby: So, I think that's just crazy. It's developing like crazy right now and one of the more interesting things I think happening right now is, there's a big argument about Ethereum being potentially a security and there's a lot of the Bitcoin maximalists are saying, "Hey, it's a security. You guys are all screwed".
Peter McCormack: Of course they are.
Crypto Bobby: And obviously if ETH is a security, then all of the tokens built on the ERC-20 standard are basically securities as well, and I think personally that would be a negative for the industry as a whole and even for Bitcoin, because I do think that there's a lot of people that buy Bitcoin or hold Bitcoin to access other crypto assets or to gain access to those. So I to think it would be the negative in a lot of respects, I don't know.
That's one thing; there's just so many conflicting -- there's a lot of people that go back and forth. I think Preston Byrne, I don't know if you follow him on Twitter, he's a lawyer that has a ton of opinions on the subject; and then I think it's Peter Van Valkenburg from CoinDesk was providing some other kind of insights as far as he's saying, "Hey, it's absolutely not", and Preston is like, "Yeah, it is". So there's a lot of back and forth.
I'm not a lawyer, so I have no idea one way or another, but I try to read up on those things and somewhat keep an understanding of kind of where things are moving. But I do think that a regulatory framework is going to move pretty quickly in the near future.
Peter McCormack: Okay, cool and then just to wrap things up. What's coming up for you? How can people stay in touch? How do people get hold of you?
Crypto Bobby: Sure, yeah absolutely. So, trying to do my daily videos as much as possible on the channel, so if you need to find that I have a website, it's just cryptobobby.com.
Peter McCormack: I'll share that.
Crypto Bobby: Yeah. It has links to everything there; and then if you want to follow me on Twitter, it's @crypto_bobby there. Yeah, just kind of continuing for me working on and contributing at AirSwap; trying to make sure that the token trader goes as smoothly as possible and working with some other external projects on that as well, and then just looking forward to interacting with as many people as possible, be at some events in the near future. So just follow me on Twitter and I'll let you know when I'm going to those events.
Peter McCormack: Good man. Listen, great to meet you. Thanks for dinner last night; it was cool.
Crypto Bobby: Awesome man. Nice to meet you as well.
