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Ruben Merre – NGRAVE Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey folks, Rob McNealy here and today I’m talking to Ruben Mira. He is the CEO of engrave, and they got a really interesting product coming out a new type of hardware wallet, which I think all my crypto listeners are really going to be excited about. So Reuben, welcome to the show. How are you today?
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
I’m feeling sunny. Oh, good.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, very good. I’m excited to hear about what your new product is about. So today where where are we talking to you from?
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Belgium and more specifically, a very tiny village in the countryside. Where I’m hiding from movies?
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I can understand, I think that’s a good thing. I’ve only been, I only landed in the airport in Brussels. I’ve only been about through Belgium. I’ve never really been in Belgium. But it’s on my bucket. It’s on my bucket list they used to, I used to live in Ireland. And then I’ve been to Switzerland and a bunch of other places in Europe over the years, but I actually have never really spent any time in Belgium. And it’s something I regret. But I think after all, this COVID stuff is kind of behind us. I’m going to probably take some time and do some traveling again, because I’m having that itch to go and get out of town, so to speak. So for my my listeners are a lot of entrepreneurs and not just crypto people. So we always like to talk about the the business piece the the entrepreneurial piece. So tell us a little bit about your background and how did you get started and what did you do before you did engrave?
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Yeah, so I started off studying business engineering. It’s something that doesn’t really exist, I think the other side of the of the world, but you can see it as a combination of basically during an engineering degree. And you add all of these business school classes on top. So, you know, like an MBA this they call an MBA Master’s in business engineering. So I did that for five years, got my masters, and then I started working. And I started working at Deloitte. So probably it’s a company you might still know, in the US. So I worked there as a strategy consultant for two years. And I also realized that during the, during my job, I could actually keep studying. So I’m kind of the lifelong learning tab, where I basically tried to do it an additional postgraduate degree every year. And I did that, I would say, up until the moment that I started in grief, because when I started in grief, that was really the moment that I just couldn’t combine it anymore. Nevertheless, I tried to read one book a week so that 50 books a year or so is still within my goals and I’m still achieving that. So yeah, I would say after after Deloitte, which was strategy consulting, like for CXO level in companies, I liked it, but for me it was most it was a bit too. But the organization was a bit too big and I didn’t feel that entrepreneurial vibe. So I joined a smaller management consulting company. Basically, it started at the time, I was one of the first 10 people. And eventually it made me I had a lot of liberty and freedom to help the company grow. So I went to Italy, I set up the Italian branch, I went to Germany set up the German branch, and I actually lived in different countries during my life also during my studies, so for example, in Spain and Mexico, so I basically mastered six languages professionally, and I could actually leverage that to help the company expand in all of these different countries. And let’s say a couple of years later and being a business in several countries, we kind of sold the business to cognizance, also all of those big behemoths. And I myself, actually, so I was a management consultant and innovation consultant. But I was in a unique seat, let’s say to choose a bit my projects. And I like to do those that were more like entrepreneurial. So in the beginning. So basically in parallel with my job, I launched the first automated investment platform in Belgium. It’s something that in the US is known as Robo advisory I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about that basically, basically means that you fill in sort of a questionnaire to determine what your risk versus adversities. And then based on that there are all these algorithms that work for you every day and they kind of rebalance your portfolio continuously to make sure you have the best portfolio that taking care of your risk and at the same time maximizing the return even that risk. So I built the first platform like that in Belgium. Then I also scaled it to A couple of other countries, and eventually one of the big financial players. They hired me to set a bollock a whole new business unit that was totally dedicated to algorithmic trading, automated investment platforms. And I did that for two year, two years. So I let the whole program there. And that was just before I started in grief. And I was supposed to become, let’s say, the piano leader of that, of that block. But the moment that we were starting to engrave I realized that the potential is so huge that I basically decided to completely shift everything. So I was actually not not really in the blockchain space before. I started in grief, just a little bit. And but nowadays, obviously, it’s the exact opposite. Now I live and breathe blockchain and crypto and the security some really excited that we can announce that in less than a month we will actually be launching this beautiful product.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So how long have you been in the crypto space?
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
I’ve been in the crypto space Since the top of the market, so I joined when I think Bitcoin was just around floating around $19,000.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So fairly new, we actually I got into crypto probably not that much before that either, as well. So I’m not going to give anybody a hard time. We jumped right in with launching our project, right? Like literally New Year’s Day of 2018 is when we launched our test project. So it’s like, yeah, I can understand anything in there that that, so to speak. So I’m telling you about engrave. What do you what are you doing with engrave?
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Yeah, so I had to say, for example, my founders have been in the space way longer than me, gave you, for example, has been in the space since 2013. And so he was also one of those victims of Mount Gox where they lost 850 thousand bitcoins in total, a lot less.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
That’s expensive.
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Yeah. And the thing is that in 2016, he did an ICO which is projects. The risk 76,000 ether, so respectable amount I would say. And in 2017, they, he opened up the smart contract balance of his company, and everything was gone. So everything was stolen, hacked, empty balance. And you can imagine that the moment you do that in front of your computer, you’re extremely shocked. And they beat me it was 44,000 aetherium that they lost. And it wasn’t a parity hack. It’s one of those more famous hacks in the crypto history. And basically, he got his head together with a couple of other white hat hackers. And what they did is they automated the heck, they attacked themselves 500 other projects, and they stole $200 million from these projects. And obviously, they did that with all the best intentions, basically, to protect these guys from the bad hackers. And so eventually they gave back this $200 million worth of crypto obviously with the let’s say, the welder side note that if the Police would have gotten before they gave it back here they would they would probably be in prison right now. And that’s also a bit like Genesis story of engrave. So Xavier eventually became CTO of that project. He became extremely passionate about security. And when I joined the space, which was actually fairly later, so in 2018, I did realize quite quickly that there were some really big issues going on in the in the industry. And so the three of us basically brainstorms on Okay, let’s assume that we have our very first or very last Bitcoin, let’s say we have 100 Bitcoin each, and we have to put it somewhere where we would completely trust that it would still be there in the next day, we opened up the wallet, and we just couldn’t find an answer to that. So what we decided to do at that very moment in April 2018, was let’s build that solution that’s built the best security solution in the world for crypto. Have you understood, obviously That just the three of us, we would never be able to do that, or pull that off just by ourselves. So we Ghana went looking for the best players in the world for their specific niche. And we took two months to build our own prototype, we built it on the Raspberry Pi, we took the time as well to, let’s say, make a business pitch and so on. And we went knocking on the door of the world’s leading research and development Institute’s I make and they are so the r&d leader there for nano electronics. And to just give you like one, one example, in 2018, the tape the first atom size chip to the first chip in the world size of an atom three nanometers big they made it and so we went knocking on their door and we said hey, we are looking for a good partner to build this with. And they also have happened to have a tech acceleration program, one of the top five in the world and so they said Okay, let’s let’s, let’s go for it. Let’s put you in the program. Let’s see how it goes. And after a couple of months, they also realized that actually, we were really not kidding around. And the the approached us with the ask, can we co develop this with you guys. And as from that moment, so let’s see, Summer 2018, we basically have been in a code Development Partnership with ionic. Whereas the IP, the intellectual property still remains fully. There are sort of three of us. That’s just a, let’s say, the start of the story that I guess you have any questions for me?
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I got a few. So how are you funding this? Did you did you go and do a raise somewhere VC funded or did you sell fund in bootstrap?
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Yeah, so we are really, really conscious of the fact that dilution is the last thing you wanna you want to have in the company. So what we did today, and we’re actually pretty proud of that is we were able to raise all the money. We needed to do this without having to go to VC. So what did we do, we got a little bit of an investment in from the very beginning from ionic itself, then we basically got a bank to bank us up, let’s say in that, simply put, we got a small Angel round in the beginning with a couple of business angels. And eventually, we also got European Commission backing this, the Belgian government backing us, and even the web three foundation. And right now we have, let’s say, a modest amount of convertible notes running, we have raised quite a bit of money and more than a million, let’s say to keep it simple and still a bit enigmatic, but So our idea was we have to first do a sales round. And after that sales round, we can basically validate the demands. That’s when we want to do around and right now we are three weeks away from the start of that sales round. So we will be launching on Indiegogo, the 20 Sixth of May. And there you will be able to buy our engraves yogurt and Griffin combo solution at 50% discount on the very first day. And after that Thursday then obviously the discount will decrease gradually or the price will increase gradually. And for us it has been quite the roller coaster, let’s say to get to this point to build something so secure that is in hardware and security and crypto. It’s like the worst three niches in the world put together for an entrepreneur. But we so we basically made it this far and now it’s about getting those sales and then after that we already have a crowdfunding in place. So we will likely do that first. So get a bit more debt and then we will go for a round. So Alright, these to do a first big round by the end of 2020.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So I definitely see that ease of use and crypto security are pretty vital, especially for mass adoption and and I’m not just talking Kaster. I’m a co founder of a community crypto project. So I’m always, you know, trying to figure out what would make it easier for the artists, our community to, you know, get pushed out to the mainstream, and how do we protect those people? So, tell me about the product. What makes the engrave wallet better than other options that are on the market now?
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Yes, well, there are actually many, many different innovations that we bring and retract, we’re going to try to spoon feed these to the markets. Because what we did and I think it’s also something that is different from all the other players is we don’t consider security as similar as all the others do. So if you think about it, in our opinion, security is not a secure crypto exchange. Security is not a secure hardware wallet. Security is a end to end approach where you think of what’s the first step until what’s the very last step and the first step is how do I create a private key or let’s say, a crypto wallet in a completely secure way. The last step is what if tomorrow I pass away? How can my family get access to my crypto in a secure way? and everything in between? So what we did is we we thought initially about, okay, how are keys generated? And we understood that actually already there, there were a couple of issues. So we resolve those issues with a couple of innovations. One of them is called the engrave perfectly. So we actually step away from the mnemonic seed phrases, we support them, so you can still use them, you can still make one but we actually introduce a whole new key, and we use that key throughout the entire lifecycle of let’s say, your cryptocurrencies. So, if we if we start at the very beginning, we have three products. The first one is the angry zero hardware wallets. So what is it it is a touchscreen device, it is one for example. And we build it from scratch together with amongst others I’m McKesson, world leader in nanotechnology, to make sure that every single detail about security user’s experience was thought about and was integrated in the in the circuitry of the chip of the electronic circuitry boards and everything else. But so I would say if he would summarize it, so we are an end to end solution, we have a offline hardware wallet. And we have something to replace paper wallets in case you lose your hardware wallet. And we also have an app to take care of the last mile communication with the blockchain. But if we start with this beautiful thing here, so first of all, it is 100% offline, meaning you will never need to connect it to a computer to transactions or anything else. So there is no USB required, there is no 4g Wi Fi, Bluetooth, anything like that. There simply is a simple on and off button on the side. You turn it on, and you can do your thing. And if you need to do, let’s say a transaction or sync and accounts, you just create the QR codes on the screen. And you can scan that with your app. QR codes, the ones we make will never contain any information on the private keys. So obviously, the private key is the most important thing of your wallets. We make it offline, we never expose it. So there are basically zero remote attack vectors. Nobody can attack this device because there simply is no way to make a connection to it. For us, that was the first thing we needed to do bring everything offline. The second thing we did was we made this device physically tamper proof, because one of the questions is what if somebody finds my device? We military grade tamper proof does they say I find it a bit not I don’t find it very nice words military grade. So I would say we have put in place several cumulative layers of anti tampering to make sure that if even at some points you get that far the device will know it’s under attack, it will bite the keys. And just to be sure, we introduce something entirely new as well, which is the high security certification. Any of these wallets has ever gotten, Ill said. So, to put that a bit in contrast, banks and governments have on average five or six out of the seven levels, there are a ledger nano x, for example has five on a secure element. We have seven on this on the secure firmware. So if you try to attack this device, it is one of the most difficult things you will probably have to do in your life. And this thing is is the only one that has this L seven certification in the whole blockchain world. So that’s how serious we take your security. And obviously then we have the ease of use parts that comes to mind.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So tell me about how I would physically use that. So you have this. It looks like a slick little device. I got some pictures ahead of time and, and I think the interface looks really, really good. So do I need to For instance, if I’m going to go shopping and I want to go to a retailer, do I need to take this device with me every time everywhere I go?
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Well, the use case of a hardware wallet is basically for your huddle part of your portfolio. So if you think about you, let’s say your traditional wallet, your traditional fiat money, you have a current accounts, let’s say 10, maybe 20% of your money. And then 80% or more of all your money is actually somebody in a savings account or an investment account. And hardware wallets were invented to take care of the parts that is long term. So basically, what you normally do is you put in a USB stick in your computer, which has which specific security protocols, and you can send your crypto to the accounts on the device. By doing so, you basically put them offline and you put them away for a longer period. And anything you need to do transactions with you can keep that on your exchange account, or let’s say on a software wallet app that you take with you into a shop. So you wouldn’t need the hardware wallets, per se. And so let’s say that for us, obviously the use case is exactly the same. So the ID or the intention of a hardware wallet is not to take it with you. But because it is so variable, basically, it’s a pocket size. You could have, for example, two of these wallets one year to keep at home, and one that you can have with you and with which you could, in fact, go and purchase stuff in the shop. It is not our intended use case. But you can always you can always do so. But we don’t really recommend it. I think the best thing you can do with your current account is just have it on your app or have the money in your portfolio, in cash, and just be that way. The only thing is you will be risking, let’s say a small portion of your money, because it can be hacked. It is online.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I couldn’t agree more. So you say you’re going to be launching this in three weeks. Oh, where will it be launched? Is it going to be in Europe first or will be able to be purchased by say Americans or what’s the first target markets that you’re going to be launching.
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Yep, no, everybody will be able to purchase it. Because we’re actually doing it through Indiegogo. So you know, Kickstarter is one of those big crowdfunding platforms. Indiegogo is more or less the same size, or at least in the same year. But they’re mostly focused on not just hardware, like, let’s say, backpacks with more like hardware technology. So basically exactly the niche we are in. It’s a huge platform, it’s worldwide. So it doesn’t really matter from where you are buying. You can buy from wherever you want. And for us, it’s it gives this extra interesting dimension. Because if there is, let’s say, in the Philippines, a huge number of people who actually love waterfalls, it’s something we might not know today. They can, they can reveal themselves. And we have some sort of a pull strategy where the customer can tell us, hey, you exist, we want one of these we want them to and if you would say apart from that Indiegogo strategy, our main goal would be in the first place to go for Europe and Northern America and then expand from there from there.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, very cool. Ruben, where can people find out more about your new engrave wallet?
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Well, you have the website, which is very straightforward. Engrish mg R a v.io. If you add slash like a backslash and then subscribe, you can subscribe right now to the waiting list to select your shirt you can get 50% off on the day that we launched on the 26th of May. And we actually also have a competition going on right now a giveaway, where if you enter it you have you will be able to win one of 10 potential combos so the hardware wallets and also our backup solution. That will be you can you can enter the competition until somewhere like the week of the 20th.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Wonderful, Ruben, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I think our listeners are going to have to take a look at what you’re doing with the engrave wallet. And I really do appreciate all your time. I think you’ve been very informative and I’m always active To see about new technology and solutions for safe storage of crypto assets and, and it looks like this is going to be a winner. I can’t wait to get my hands on one myself.
Ruben Merre – NGRAVE
Yeah, definitely buy one or read one if you can. Right now is really the time for all of that.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I will try my hand. All right, thank you so much Ruben. This is Rob McNealy. Thank you for listening. Folks check sent to the web at RobMcNealy.com and we’ll catch you next time.
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Pascal Hügli – Ignore At Your Own Risk Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
This podcast is sponsored by Tusk, an open source non Ico crypto project powered by community. Check them out on the web at task dot network. That’s TUSC dot network. The Rob McNealy program is the nexus of cryptocurrency blockchain technology and entrepreneurship. Now, welcome to the program. Today, I am talking to Pascoe higly. He is a Swiss author and we’re going to talk a little bit about the book that he put out recently called ignore at your own risk, the new decentralized world of Bitcoin and blockchain. So Pascal, how are you today?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, I’m good. Thanks for being here for taking me on. It’s a great pleasure. And yeah, I’m good despite the virus and the lockdown we have in Switzerland, but everything’s good.
Rob McNealy
So I think your book is actually fairly timely. So before we jump into kind of what you wrote about in the book, tell us a little bit about you. What’s your background?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, yeah, I’m, as I already said, on a scale from Switzerland. I work as a journalist and analyst and also just writer. I do it for a company called financial media. That’s what I work for. And then I also do some research for another company, which is called Schlossberg and co it’s a company where we manage like a portfolio for other people. And yeah, where we especially have a vision for the future, and we want to help people protect for what might be coming along our way. And yeah, I mean, I studied economics and politics at University of Zurich and then quickly at university when I started my master’s I actually came across Bitcoin, you know, which I really liked. And yeah, I found it really interesting, like also theoretical endeavor, you know, to dig ever more deeper into and I did this And then I actually dropped off from from school, you know, because I actually canceled my Masters because I didn’t see any more. Yeah, real value in doing it and it just tried to be I spent my time researching on Bitcoin and other things. So I got evermore deeper into the topic and that’s why I also Then, finally 2019 it was last year when all my friends told me you, you have to write a book on the topic. You know, it’s, you know, so much. And I mean, there’s already lots of literature in English, but not in German, or not that much. And that’s why I was convinced writing the book and yes, so that’s why I did it then. Exactly.
Rob McNealy
So what part of Switzerland do you live in?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
In Zurich. Well, I mean, switch lenses so small, so I don’t live in the city, but I live close to the city. I mean, it’s 20 minutes and then I’m in the center of Zurich, but it’s still not civic anymore. So that shows you like kind of like the proportions of how small Our country is
Rob McNealy
very nice. I’ve been only been to Switzerland once, but I really, really liked it. And back in my past, I worked for a Swiss company for a few years. So kind of an endearing affinity for the Swiss culture. So you wrote a book about Bitcoin when you started researching Bitcoin Did you come at it from the standpoint that you thought you were suspicious of it? Or did you come at it from the point of view that you think it’s a good thing and you want it invested in it?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, I thought it was a good thing, but I didn’t want to invest you know, hey, it was like it was at university maybe because I studied economics you know, was really hit by all the the mainstream economic theory, you know, Keynesianism neoclassical ism, you know, and I found this very interesting, but I still always thought that can’t be the end of the line. You know, there must be more so, back in university I started researching the whole Austrian economics thing you know, that might be familiar with that, you know, because I also lived Indiana For quite some time and there, then I like met like some other people who really are still standing the tradition of all these, you know, real Austrians living from me says hi Eric and like many more that actually lived in Ghana and around Austria as well. So then I kind of familiarized myself with these topics, you know, found it very interesting because I never heard about that university. I also went up to my teacher one time and asked him Do you know who looked big for me? He says, isn’t he didn’t so I was kind of like, Okay, if he doesn’t know, there must be something to it, you know, so I started looking into it. So I already came from this very theoretical background studying Austrian economics because I just found it to be a more realistic way of approaching economics, you know, to see it as a social science, not that much of a of a science where you can get yourself a good job and earn a lot of money. It was literally like trying to understand the real world, you know, and And also the epistemological questions, philosophical questions that these guys really touched on. So I really liked it. And there I kind of then bumped into bitcoin. So for me, it was theoretical, really interesting. Like, then or was really interesting going down this route, but still it was more theoretical. I was like, wow, there’s something happening in the real world. And it really didn’t really came. I didn’t really come to my mind to start investing, you know, I only did this, like two years later, so I got to know Bitcoin back in 2014 and then only invested like, after two years of more research, maybe 2016. So yeah, but it was still okay. Yeah. And then I didn’t have any money anyways, you know,
Rob McNealy
What about now?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, I still like mean, yeah, still interested. And, but I mean, I’m not one of these really crypto builders. Aires I have some friends in Switzerland because actually, you might have heard of it the krypto Valley, it’s a space where we kind of we framed it, it’s around Zurich and Zurich, you know, like in, in opposition to Silicon Valley, if you will. And that’s it’s well known actually for being the krypto Valley. And there we have like lots of friends even which are younger or that are my age that actually are really well off now, because they just had some money invested even earlier. And I’m around these people. So it’s kind of cool. But still, I myself I always, yeah, I mean, I I have it with Ludwig von Mises, actually, one time said, or like his wife, he called his wife confronted him and was like, well, you study money so closely, but you probably won’t ever have that much money. And it’s probably the same with me. You know, I’m just too interested in all the theoretical stuff. I forget everything around me and then I don’t even invest but
Rob McNealy
Yeah, sure. Well, in your book, you talked a little bit about how we left the Industrial Revolution. But yet our money is still kind of in the industrial revolution. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, when I started, like writing the book, or even like really like trying to understand Bitcoin I saw that it’s all about money as well. You know, as with Austrian economics, man watch is about money. And at university I never really studied money because it’s to me money as well as a social phenomenon. So it doesn’t really have to do anything or like also like normal, like mainstream economic economists, they don’t really look at that, you know, because they say everything needs to be in equilibrium. And we’re so many times we’re not there, but the economic or like economies strives towards the equilibrium. So something that’s really a phenomenon that’s that is emerging And that might be out of equilibrium is not something worth to be studied. So that’s why at university you never really studied it, you know? And with Bitcoin I found it really interesting that it not only before, if you want to understand and if you want to understand what money is you have to go into psycho psychology, you know, you have to go into history, you have to go in all these other goal and go down all these other routes, you know, and that’s what I did. And then, especially history was something very interesting for me, you know, where I actually found Well, you can maybe say that you’re you. That’s what my view is, you can try to say that our world is kind of can be divided up into these arrows, you know, and then I kind of found that there might be an era called the Industrial Revolution, you know, or industrial era that started back in the 19th century, going out of Holland and then especially Britain, you know, wherever grew ever bigger. And that’s where also like society as we know it today maybe started to scale up, you know, because we had all these big banks, you know, that started to finance industry and then like railways came along and all these things. And finally, also then European people went over to the United States and built up the same big Empire over there, you know, but there we are, really was the beginning of bigger institutions of corporations. You know, the joint stock Corporation, as you can, might be able to call it and all these institutions we have now also the state maybe then started to really grow and take over more responsibilities. So we’ve all these institutions, and I would argue we are still in this age, you know, that’s what I figured out with the book. And that’s what I tried to write. But now with with the internet that’s been emerging in the last 20 to 30 years, there’s been a new force that’s coming up you know, that can be kind of or can be seen in somehow in in line with This whole thing because like normal economies to state, you know, and like corporations, they also use the internet. But there’s a whole new world that seems to be kind of in juxtaposition to that, you know, and Bitcoin is a new iteration of that, you know, that’s also pushing in another direction, if you will, you know, and that’s what I found really interesting that we might see new institutions enabled through the internet emerge that could be really saw institutions that challenge our older institutions that I would call the industrial age institutions. And as I said, the internet and Bitcoin and maybe blockchain as a institutional technology could really do a lot of in the future, you know, when it comes to changing how our society works, and that’s what I kind of try to expand in the book as well.
Rob McNealy
So how did that so how do you envision the future look as far as money goes, What does The future of money.
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, the future of money? Well, I would say I mean, there’s so much because again, as I said, money is a social phenomenon. So there’s probably not this one money will be like the thing dominating in the future, you know, but also due to this Industrial Age, or we could call it you know, we had paper money emerge, you know, national stage currencies emerge, and they used to be tied to gold, you know, as we know, because otherwise, states probably couldn’t have really like bootstrap these state national currencies, you know, but as we also know, 1971, like the gold window was closed, like, permanently. And, yeah, I mean, we have these monies, they’re still really prevalent today. But I think with Bitcoin, I mean, we really see that there’s been a new competitor out on the field, you know, and that’s what I find find really interesting, you know, because when when gold was delivered From from the state currencies you actually had like gold competing against national currencies. But gold is money might not be a really good medium of exchange, but it’s still economic economically speaking money. So we always had like, gold competing against national currencies. We always saw it when les crisises were happening or when people didn’t even trust their government anymore people, they would buy up money like gold and silver, you know, and now with Bitcoin, you have a new kid on the block, if you will, you know, that could be a potential competitor, and then also maybe crypto assets in general, you know, that might be spawned out of this whole new phenomenon that Bitcoin actually lived in. So we don’t really know where we’re going there, you know, but in my book, I especially concentrated on Bitcoin, you know, because it’s just the first thing that’s here and that at the moment is also the most prevalent one, you know, but then I think you have this competition, you know, in the future, and I think Think Bitcoin will gain ever more in popularity also because of things that we’re in maybe right now even though when you look at the price in the last two weeks Bitcoin also went down so the people came along and said Bitcoin is no safe haven and you can forget about it again but I mean, I don’t have this really like short timeframe, I look into the future and I say well, this whole crisis that might be upon us now you know, could also bring like markets down we talked about it before you know, it could bring supply chains down and all these things so it will bring the system down and people might then go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and I’m really excited for also curious how many people will be pushed because of that towards Bitcoin and then they will also go down the rabbit hole. It might not be that many people after all, because the system maybe is going to, you know, somehow stabilize itself again, but I think many others Like a couple of people will try to contemplate things and then maybe adopt Bitcoin for themselves, you know, and the more people will do it, the more interesting it will become. Because Bitcoin I see is really a competitor to national state currencies, not only when it comes to medium of exchange and all these things that we’re still not really in the know where Bitcoin will actually take us but also when it comes to store of value and just have money that’s uncomfy scalable, you know, that you yourself can own that you can as a crypto asset with Bitcoin, you can what I call in the book also you can do crypto secession, you you can crypto succeed, you know if your money. So I find this a very interesting idea, actually.
Rob McNealy
Do you think that crypto currencies will actually undermine the sovereignties of governments in the future?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, it’s also very interesting question. I mean when you look at the whole history and how it was designed it’s probably it was designed as an alternative to our day to day system you know, and it was designed the way that you can really get a hold of it and you control it yourself you know you don’t have to put it into an institution again where the institution has the keys and you don’t really own the thing you know with Bitcoin as we always hear you can be your own bank you can be your own bank CEO if you will, because you are in control of the keys and nobody can take it from you even or executor like unless it holds a gun to your head and then he can always force you know, but I mean and states can obviously do this because they have the force the monopoly on force. So there I don’t really know how things are actually really going to develop you know, I would expect that with Bitcoin gaining traction, you know, with the money, like the the old industrial money system, showing everybody cracks you know, and we’re seeing some of it happening right now again with the Khurana thing you know that it might be Corona is really bad thing but it might also be the thing that really pops the, the the bubble, you know, which was like built up way before Corona because the system itself was just really brittle because of like institutionalized money creation, you know, banks that can create money out of thin air central banks that have bloated their like balance sheets and everything always to also, like fight the last recession we had in 2008. And it wasn’t really like a lasting sustainable fight against the recession. He was just papering over old old cracks you know, with with new money and that’s not the goal, you know. So there I think the more our old system will show all these cracks, you know, and those really let people down and fail people, these people then we’ll we’ll we’ll probably move towards something else. And I think I’m not really sure how many people that that will be, you know, will it be a critical mass that he can actually really challenge the money monopoly of the state in its home? Or will it always be a little fringe movement that just takes their own individual sovereignty, which is already something very cool because nowadays, if you run a full node, if you have your own Bitcoin, you can be your individual sovereign, you know, but as a whole, because only a couple of people do this, it might not really challenge the state after all, and I don’t really know which route we’re actually going down, you know, I see that more individuality is happening. I have friends that come up to me, but oftentimes, it’s just because they want to Make Money With Bitcoin, you know, and they’re in to sell it afterwards again, for dollars for Swiss francs for state national currencies. So you see, they’re not really here to challenge the system, you know, so and I mean, Bitcoin as a tool is only as good as We people really use it, you know, if we just use it as a tool to make more national currencies in the end, we’re not really challenging it. But I mean, there is a possibility that people could really long term stay with Bitcoin and stick with Bitcoin because the old system is just letting them down, you know, also speaking of potential pensions crisis in Europe, you know, like, like the population that’s aging ever more, and then all these cracks that the state is kind of try is kind of trying to fight now. And I don’t know how long he can still put up a good fight, and maybe he can’t and that’s what I’m also trying to explore in the book, you know, but I’m really I don’t have a definite answer. Probably nobody has but yeah, we’ll see how it’s all gonna unravel.
Rob McNealy
And as it unravels, which I think you talk a little bit about in your book is what happens or how is the state going to react when it feels threatened by cryptocurrencies,
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
huh. Yeah, I mean, we’ve already seen states react against it maybe now not so hostile hostile yet, you know, because they think it’s still this fringe phenomenon that you don’t have to you don’t have to take care of. And well, I think probably, that will be going on like this, like on a global scale a little longer, until maybe crypto is really a force to be reckoned with. And then they will probably try to crack down even harder. But but by die by, by this time, it might already be too late. So, from a crypto perspective or a Bitcoin perspective, you would have to hope that it would be too late, you know, but then at the same time, so I can imagine many people you also see it in states that are called failed governments, you know, Ecuador, Venezuela, all these countries. There you can already see that. I mean, they’re cracking down on things. Sometimes. Even they don’t do it. You know, because many Well, I was told by a friend, even the government tried to like, use use cryptocurrencies, you know, start mining cryptocurrency because they found it to be something interesting they can profit themselves from also when you think that other countries like the US and bigger countries, you know, are trying to sanction states like North Korea and other roof states, you know, and they could have an interest in adopting even though they are themselves challenged by crypto, you know, so you have these really paradoxical situations, you know, where you also I can’t imagine that like world governments could come along and shut it down, you know, because we don’t have a world government. And I don’t think in our geopolitical situation today, all the states would magically gather up together and would unified or have a unified or Woods be a unified force to shut crypto down you know, and as long as you don’t have that I mean Bitcoin and all these crypto assets they are decentralized they can be spawned up somebody somewhere else in the country when they are shut down at some place you know, it’s really hard to kill him you know I got a got an example as time told where people are like they compared Bitcoin and all these currencies to starfish, you know, and I didn’t know that when you cut off a starfish leg, you know, like a new one immediately like grows again and I think it’s really good analogy to say that’s exactly how these crypto things work you know, so I think states will react like hostile and and some will do it some will try it. Some will see it as a benefit also maybe like so far the state of Switzerland, you know, where I think like regulators, they’re really open. You can also talk to them, we do it on a regular basis, you know, that they and they seem to be very open to it. And there’s not going to be like a unified force against these kryptos, at least, so far, I wouldn’t tell and I don’t think they can pull it off because they can’t even combat climate change, if you will. So they won’t be able to come back to crypto as well. So, yeah.
Rob McNealy
So, um, how do you see crypto is empowering individuals?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, I mean, as I already said, I find it very interesting thing, you know, that. I mean, there’s so many ways it can empower you, you know, you can, like I have a practical example from my book, you know, we had a person that was proofreading our English book, you know, and I also had a designer that was before the book as well, who did some covers for me, you know, out of Pakistan. So then I sent money to him, you know, I tried to send dollars to the guy in Pakistan and it didn’t work, you know, it just didn’t get there. You know. So then I chose, it was like, okay, Pakistan, it’s a country. I can imagine that things Don’t work because my Swiss banks or my Swiss bank actually don’t might not be liking to touch Pakistani things. So I was kind of okay and then I sent Bitcoin and that all works, you know, but I mean then I also wanted to pay our proofreader out of Canada and I mean Canada is a Western nation as well you know, I would compare it to Switzerland I don’t want to wouldn’t call it a shady state or something, you know, and even there we tried to use like the normal banking system and it didn’t work we paid it and afterwards money came back and it came less came back you know, like $50 was just gone You know, for something that didn’t work. So the customer experience was really bad. So we also opted for Bitcoin and there I saw, that’s really cool. You know, that then with Bitcoin at all, where it empowered me it empowered the proofreader we had, you know, that’s just a practical example of using it as a Like a means of payment and stuff, you know, but then I also find it really interesting to have a non sovereign store of value that I myself can own, you know, on my little hard drive a hard wallet, and nobody can take it from me, you know, especially now with stock markets going down. You know, in the last few days, you heard like stock markets closing or just being terminated for a couple of minutes, you know, you never know maybe they’re going to close stock markets down permanently or like for more than a few days, you know, and also with banks, maybe we already saw it in Greece and Cyprus, you know, where they actually rationed the money and you couldn’t take money off your bank, you know, and there you might be in a really tricky situation and again, you have crypto it empowers you, you might be able to still have it, whether you can use it to buy like bread at your, your Baker I don’t know yet if he’s aware of Bitcoin and if he would even take it But still, like, psychologically It just really helps me to know I have something on my key drive. I even have it maybe memorized you know, the the seed phrase, the words I have memorized it in my in my head, and nobody else knows that I have that money, you know, or that I have that crypto. And that’s something I really like personally because I think financial privacy is still something which is very important. And when I talked to a guy last week, we had a course when I talked to a person who deals with regulation, financial regulation, AML know your customer and all the things and the things she told me it just clearly showed me like financial privacy is that you know, it’s it’s completely dead. And going into the future it will be it won’t get better, I think and Dave, I find it really important that at least we have something like Bitcoin and other kryptos which are maybe even more private You know, but that you yourself can old and that you yourself maybe can see for yourself that you have some financial privacy left. So that’s maybe a couple of ways I see it empowering them individually, you know?
Rob McNealy
So in all your research about Bitcoin, have you drawn any conclusions on why Bitcoin has not been adopted yet?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, yeah, I mean, for one thing, I would argue maybe and it comes back to the point before maybe because I am not so sure whether Bitcoin will well, whether they will be really just hyper Bitcoin ization, and they will really, really challenge the state in a significant way. Maybe Bitcoin wasn’t really made for mass adoption. You know, maybe it was always made for a couple of people who really have problem with the government who maybe have problem that everyone is trying to spy on them. who are maybe some type of people, you know, maybe these so called libertarians, you know, I myself have like, a great sympathy for this way of thinking. So maybe it was made for these kind of people, you know, and this is why at the moment our world I mean, when I talk to my mom and to my friends, especially here in Switzerland, also everything runs smoothly, you know, and they don’t need that, you know, because they say, yeah, the state might be texting me and and things might become more expensive, but still, I can go on vacation. I have enough money all this good, you know, what are you complaining about? You know, and I it might be, from their perspective a little bit too, too. Yeah. Thinking about things that are not so imminent, you know, paranoid, one could call it but still at the same time, I also try to explain these people, you know, you might be one day you might be happy and really Lucky that you have something like Bitcoin, you know, we never know, I just have to stay humble because I don’t know what’s going to be here in 10 years time, you know, maybe the world has completely changed. Maybe we’re leaving the industrial age and we’re leaving into a whole new age of techno panopticon where we all are controlled. We we don’t know, maybe we move into a state where we don’t need crypto either, you know, because it’s still a free and open world. I just don’t know. And I would say I have to own it out of humility. But many people don’t see that argument yet. You know, and also it doesn’t really yeah, it doesn’t resonate with these people, you know, because they don’t, yeah, they have their job all this fine, and they don’t need it. But maybe again, you know, we had it back in 2018. When when we saw this crisis, or this financial repression, you know, with the problem that emerged out of the US, I mean, there many people suddenly started asking questions, you know, and they many of my friends then back then also discovered Austrian economics, you know, back then Bitcoin wasn’t there yet. So they discovered the theoretical thing. They were asking a couple of questions. Some of them read a book, but then took two to three years later, everything was fine again, and nobody knew again now back then I read a book by Mrs. But now Who is he? So there you also saw kind of people actually got they have had a lot of questions when things were imminent. But then when things all were good again, they didn’t ask the questions anymore. And that’s also something maybe with with with a new crisis happening, which states really letting them down because the pension systems doesn’t really work anymore. Also with millennials who are asking themselves the question, will I be able to buy myself a good house over here because in Switzerland, especially housing prices are Huge, you know, maybe in other cities in the US, it’s the same, you know, but in Switzerland, like really especially, I mean, and and many of the millennials seeing Bitcoin also as a revenge, you know, against the boomers and that’s maybe why they will stick to Bitcoin. So it’s just gonna be these, you know, these faiths this these individual faiths that will determine whether Bitcoin will be adopted more and more. And I when I look forward, I see some more potential that Bitcoin will be more adopted. But right now so far, there weren’t really these these reasons, you know, and that’s maybe why it wasn’t really mass adopted yet, you know,
Rob McNealy
I think it makes sense. Pascal. Where can people find out more about you and where can people get your book?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, the book itself is available on Amazon. Yeah, you can find it through Amazon. You can get it there. Yeah, it’s all about as I already said. Money. So we talked about aetherium. You know, the whole smart contract thing. You know, that might be interesting that I, myself are also a little skeptical on, but it was I thought it’s worth exploring and really see where we might be going with this maybe even in a more long term view. And then yeah, I mean, you can find me on Twitter, you know, my Twitter handle is ke H, you eg pa hc. And that’s where I will be at and I love to talk to people. So yeah, sure, hit me up would be great.
Rob McNealy
Thank you so much past cold. I appreciate you coming on the show today, folks. I will have all his information linked up at Rob McNealy calm and make sure you take care yourself out there. Thank you.
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Thank you, man. Bye You too. Bye, guys.
Rob McNealy
Thank you for listening to the Rob McNealy program. Make sure you check us out on the web at Rob McNealy calm and subscribe to our podcast at YouTube, iTunes and on the Google Play Store.
Episode Links
Pascal Hügli – Ignore At Your Own Risk
Pascal Hügli, author of Ignore At Your Own Risk, talks with Rob McNealy about Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency monetary revolution.
Joe Vezzani – LunarCRUSH Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy 0:01
Okay, today we’re talking to Jove a Zani. He is the CEO and founder of lunar crush, which is right now the app that I have the biggest crush on for the crypto world. I’m really, really excited to talk to him about that. So, welcome to the show. Joe, how are you today?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 0:18
I’m doing well. Rob, thank you so much for having me.
Rob McNealy 0:22
Well, I appreciate taking time. You know, as someone who’s been in the crypto space for a little while, I always like to see the people doing something different in the space. And the other thing that’s really interesting about what I what you’re doing here is that you kind of care about UI and UX, which seems to be the wall in the crypto sphere. So before we jump in, why don’t we just go and you know, let’s learn a little bit about you. How Who are you? How’d you get into this space?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 0:51
Yeah, for sure. You know, got started pretty similarly. I feel like to a lot of other people that I hear you You know, talk about crypto is, you know, at some point, you know, someone that you know, or, you know, you kind of just run across Bitcoin. And, you know, I was at the time it was, you know, probably like late 2014, early 2015, and my now co founder, john, as he just kind of came up to me and we were working together at the time, he’s like, hey, do you know what Bitcoin is? And I was like, I don’t know. And it was like, his eyes lit up, like he got to tell someone new and learned a little bit about Bitcoin. And, you know, for me, you know, kind of coming out of school with a finance degree, worked in technology and startups before it was kind of this intersection of finance and tech that I was just like, I need to be a part of this somehow. And then, you know, started looking a little bit more at everything else, and you start to kind of go down the ladder a little bit and you’re like, you know, at the time, it was just mostly just Bitcoin. That was some other stuff. But you start to figure out like, what’s this ethereal thing and Litecoin and you start to learn a little bit more and you’re like, Wow, there. There is a lot down this rabbit hole, and I need to learn more about it. And so, at that time, we were just kind of going back and forth. And you know, we were the people that everyone was like, you know, hey, what do I buy? What’s the next hot tip? And what do I do next? And, you know, just kind of got deeper and deeper from there.
Rob McNealy 2:17
Well, I think that’s a lot how a lot of us kind of get started with this. I actually haven’t been in crypto that long. And people always like how long you been in here? Like two years, two and a half years or like, well, how long is your old your project? Two years. So we kind of just like jumped right in. But one of the things that I kind of interesting is your app. And I have been like glued to this thing, like every day, like I used to go to like coin market cap and coin Gecko and keep hitting refresh and refresh. And I don’t even go there anymore. I go to lunar crush. So let’s talk about lunar crash. What is lunar crash and why am I personally so addicted to it?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 3:01
Well, first off, thank you, that’s a huge compliment. I appreciate that. And you know that, you know, the kind of the addictiveness a little bit is is the way we kind of design this and the way we think about, you know, experience and people coming onto our site and looking at everything is we’re very focused on that design and, and getting people to understand what’s happening very easily, even for people that aren’t into the crypto space yet, but are kind of, you know, like, we’d like to say crypto curious. And they’re starting to dive in, we wanted it to be simple. And inherently the market is our market in this space is very community driven. And a lot of these projects that, you know, especially in the all coin, they’re very, it’s kind of tribal, and people out there posting and they’re talking about what’s happening in the community. And, you know, we capture that, you know, and we’re looking at across the entire market, we’re looking at things like Twitter, Reddit, any sort of news URL that’s out there any link and we’re pulling all that together, and so your You’re really feeling what’s happening in real time when you’re when you’re on our site and you’re in your understanding, not just Bitcoin but everything else and what the community is saying at this exact moment. And so it’s a really amazing kind of feeling to get out there and really kind of see the heart and the pulse of the market. And I think it’s what people have kind of been waiting for it for a while.
Rob McNealy 4:21
Well, I agree with that. And not only do you have like, you know, normal, you know, statistics about and, you know, measurements about what a coin might be doing from a price perspective and things like that. But you’re pulling in all these measurements about in metrics about what the community is saying almost like sentiment and engagement, that kind of monitoring and And to me, that’s pretty fascinating. What what what made you think to do that, no one else is doing it that I’m seeing out there. So yeah, why go there?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 4:54
Well, you know, we look at when you look at kind of the stock markets, and you look at equities, and you Look at what drives value and the prices of these of these things. It’s it’s really earnings. You know, obviously there’s speculative, you know, you can look at Tesla and what’s happening right now. And, you know, as we record this February 4 2020, it’s kind of parabolic right now, and it’s moving. And that’s, that’s speculation, and it’s, it’s about the future growth of that company. And that’s what’s driving the value. And, but when you’re looking at the broader when we’re talking stock market, its earnings. I mean, it’s literally earnings beats over time is really what pushes these stocks up over time. And that’s why those big companies are so focused on that, where crypto is, is not like that. Its supply and demand driven. What is the social discourse that’s happening? Who’s talking about it? How are the communities being grown, it’s very different. And so you know, when we’re, we wanted to look at what the community is saying we wanted to see it in real time, and we wanted to put it, you know, over time, and you kind of see it on our site as more of a graphical time series representation and so you’re really seen it One place, you know, how is how did the, you know, the tehsils community do over the last two months? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? You know, when you’re looking at maybe some projects that are a little bit smaller that are up and coming, and you get a tip from a friend and you’re like, hey, check this project out, you know, you’re going to know real fast, whether or not that’s kind of a viable project? Or is it kind of the beginning or the end of it? By looking at our site?
Rob McNealy 6:24
So how did you come up with some of these algorithms are the best guests or did you benchmark against something? Because you got some interesting, you know, analysis that you have that, you know, these algorithms that are built into it? Where did that come from?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 6:38
Which ones are you talking about specifically?
Rob McNealy 6:42
I don’t have it up in front of me now. See, now you’re catching me off guard. I’m gonna have to like look it up. Like…
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 6:48
Like, so we have a couple of proprietary metrics that we’ve designed. One’s called the galaxy score, and the other one’s called vault rank.
Rob McNealy 6:54
That’s it right there. See you called it that was the one I didn’t know the name of it. So yes, that’s The Galaxy score that was it was on the top of my, my, my tongue there.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 7:05
Yeah, we’ve got a very space themed over here. But so galaxy score I can start with first and, you know, we wanted to kind of create a metric and it’s it’s a real time metric and we’re looking at things that are coming in constantly we’re not, you know, we’re not Moody’s you know, or s&p out here and saying that, you know, it’s a by rating or, you know, it’s a, you know, from a B to A B plus, or whatever it is, and, you know, over the next couple of months, this is what’s going to happen, we, you know, crypto moves too quick for that. And so, with galaxy score, we’re looking at each individual project, and we’re looking at it’s a performance against itself over time. And so we’re looking at things like we’re doing some technical analysis and some price, you know, analysis on each project, but then we’re also incorporating that projects community and the social that has happened around that project and how quickly it’s happening. And so, galaxy score, you know, like, I like to say it’s kind of like coffee. More advanced traders only where, you know, that’s going to move pretty rapidly. And so we’ve got people like, you know, bot traders, and we’ve got, you know, professional traders and people that are using that to look in real time at what’s happening. And so it’s, you know, zero to 100 score and you know, 100 would be the best. And so it means that there’s a lot of kind of social that’s happening at that moment, along with Bryce. And then the other one is called alt rank. And so alt rank is looking at a project’s performance against the rest of the market. And so it’s ranking everything from a one to you know, I think, right now, we’ve got about 1700 that we’re looking at across the entire market. And so we’re pulling in and saying, hey, what is, you know, a theory of price versus something like Bitcoin over time? And is it beating that is it losing against that? And then what is the kind of the social that’s happening at the same time, and so when you kind of put all that in correlate it together, you really get this kind of cool understanding of the market and so at any given time, time if you’re looking at lunar crash and you go to our markets page, and you’re seeing things, you know, ranked one to 25 that means that something’s happening right now. Prices moving, socialist moving, things are happening, volume is high market volume is high. And it’s somewhere as a trader or someone that’s looking at the market, you should really be paying attention to that.
Rob McNealy 9:18
So I’m looking at the you know, I’m bias. I’m looking at the Tusk page on lunar crash. So my Galaxy score for our project went down since yesterday. It was in the 50s yesterday, which said neutral but now it’s down and it says bearish. So what did we do that went from neutral yesterday to bearish today on the galaxy’s score for task.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 9:38
I’m not looking at it right here. But, you know, my guess would be that, you know, if there was a decline in market volume, or if there was a decline in price, correlated with also some social volume that’s going down then, at least at this moment, you know, in the galaxy scores updating continuously, that it’s a little bit lower now. You know, if there’s some buys that come through at the Some social action that happens if things start to kind of move, that galaxy score is going to jump pretty quickly. And so, you know, a move from something like in the 40s to something in the 80s, per se is gonna, that should be a blip on the radar to say that something’s happening with with Tusk.
Rob McNealy 10:15
Gotcha. So and I know, we didn’t have any volume yesterday, because we’re still new, and we’re only on one exchange, and, but I’m just curious on how, you know, I’m looking at my own stuff. So, but are all drank here says we’re 864 out of 2046. So, it’s got a little trophy thing, what does that mean?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 10:33
So 864 I mean, you know, again, this is this is looking at test performance against Bitcoin. So if it’s underperforming against something like Bitcoin, and then also, you know, maybe social volume or social engagement is is lower than the alt rank is going to kind of rank there but, you know, hey, 864 to 2000 you know, you’re still better than than 50%. But, you know, if if test starts to outperform bit coin and there starts to be some social that’s happening in real time, then you would see that rank move up really quickly. And, you know, I just want to caveat that we also put we as also assign an alt rank to Bitcoin. And the way that you could kind of look at that, look at that is if Bitcoin is rallying and is the number one all coin, our alt rank and lunar garage, it means that you know, you you might want to be in Bitcoin right now, because there’s rally happening, things are moving.
Rob McNealy 11:27
So there’s another section that says about the task. It’s over on the right side where it’s about the Messari. The Messari section, sorry.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 11:39
Yep.
Rob McNealy 11:40
So with is that section, we don’t have anything there. How would I get stuff there?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 11:44
So we, you know, we’re focused at Luna crush on all the social and the real time data, and then we’re partnering and we utilize miscarries data for some of the more about section I think mizar does an amazing job of kind of aggregating kind of the you know, more long Form kind of project oriented data around the why and what’s happening. And so, you know, they we pull in some of their data to kind of showcase on our site, if people want to kind of dive more into the, you know, who are the some of the founders of the project, you know, what is the, you know, what’s the blockchain? Like? What’s the out of their algorithm? Like, how is it working? And so they’re, they’re kind of focused on that. And so we pull in the data from there to, to kind of showcase on our site because they do such a good job.
Rob McNealy 12:27
So we need to get on their radar, if we want that box filled. So it also says here that our social sentiment is 60% of 3.3%, then bullish, so that’s a good thing right? Under the alt right box.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 12:43
Social sentiment, you’re saying?
Rob McNealy 12:45
Yeah, that’s right under the alt rank box,
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 12:48
Yep. Yep. So social sentiment, anything that is, you know, probably over 50%, we start to kind of categorize as more of a bullish and so we’re looking at some of the some of the data that’s out there, and You know, we’ve actually trained our own machine learning to look at, specifically crypto language out there in the web. And so, you know, when people talk about different projects in our space, you know, they, they speak about it differently, you know, when someone says, whether they’re right or wrong, that you know, monero is going to the moon. That’s a bullish sentiment. But, you know, a traditionally trained library is not going to pick that up. And so we’ve actually gone in and as the data comes in, we’re training it and we’re looking at it specifically and kind of hand tailoring all the data to understand, you know, what is the sentiment across some of this?
Rob McNealy 13:37
So it’s not just hashtags, you’re looking at the whole key words and different terms and how they’re used in conjunction with other maybe adjectives or things like that.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 13:47
Yeah, I mean, we’re looking at you know, any news that’s out there or any, any social that’s out there, and if there’s links that are posted within that, we’re kind of going in spidering that and looking at the different articles and trying to figure out, you know, was this was this meant to be Something that was a more positive or more as more of a negative occurrence.
Rob McNealy 14:05
So where do you see this would apply to other assets? Perhaps even like So you mentioned earlier with like Tesla, it seems like it’d be really interesting now to see some of the sentiment around Tesla, because everybody seems to be phone via phone going around it right now. Do you think this would apply in the same way to traditional assets like that?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 14:26
Man, I mean, the FOMO is so high in Tesla, I don’t think you even need ludicrous to identify the sentiment on that one. But yes, I mean, in in a short answer would be that, yes, absolutely. We can take in and pull in kind of traditional asset classes and look at it, our focus has, you know, we’re passionate about the crypto space and we want it to grow and we’re very focused on it. And so our, you know, our roadmap right now, at least for the foreseeable future is focused on cryptocurrency and we want to see this space grow and we want to see the you know, the people and the projects and the company’s growing So we’re completely focused on growing and, and maintain our space here.
Rob McNealy 15:05
So how are you guys funded? How did you guys? Are you bootstrapping this? Or did you get some VC money?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 15:11
We we originally bootstrapped this thing from the beginning. You know, we were, you know, like, like anyone else you want to build something from scratch and you want it, want it to be yours, and so we bootstrapped it. We did. In 2019. We joined a tech stars program, so I’m not sure if any of your listeners know but tech stars is, you know, one of the you know, best accelerator startup accelerator.
Rob McNealy 15:36
David Cohen.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 15:37
Yep, absolutely. Yeah. So tech stars. We joined the LA program here and did that from July to October. And then we have, you know, some other some other partnerships with some local venture capitalists here in in Los Angeles. One is Draper Goran home. So they just founded new venture firm called Jake record home, which is Tim Draper, along Goran and Joseph home here who are kind of local, well known kind of entrepreneurs in the blockchain space.
Rob McNealy 16:11
So what is your revenue model? How you gonna make money with this?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 16:16
Well, right now we’re just growing our business and getting as many people to use it as humanly possible. We’re focused on user growth and and getting this out to the community. Right now. It’s free to get into lunar crash login and kind of see what’s happening on there. We also have an API and and we’re very shortly going to be coming out with a real time API. So anyone that’s, you know, a traitor, anyone that’s a little bit more advanced quant funds that are out there. We’re excited to partner with them and see kind of how they want to utilize some of the data. And so we’re just trying to understand the marketplace right now and kind of be out there and see where we have the where we have the best fit.
Rob McNealy 16:55
I think that’s really good, the way you’re kind of pulling the data together in a very visual way. And I think with crypto, that’s been such a problem. And I think it’s, I think it’s part of the the fact that so much of crypto is just developer LED and which is, you know, a hardcore command line kind of community, right. And so I think a lot of these guys out there and what as far as the developers go, they just don’t really think of UI and graphical user interfaces of things that important sometimes, or at least they, you know, underscore or plug down play. You know how important that is. But the one thing that I like what you’re doing, because I’m a very visual person, but visual representations of data can present patterns, that in trends that you cannot see with just normal tablature type of data scenarios. And I think that’s why you’re going to be successful with this because you’re lightyears ahead on your UI UX, compared to anything else that I’m seeing in crypto right now. And I’m excited It about where this is going. Because to me, this is how you get to adoption in because you’re recognizing, at least it seems like you’re recognizing how the design element is important here.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 18:12
Appreciate that, yeah, we spend a lot of time and, you know, a lot of thought and strategy and, you know, just going through and trying to put ourselves in our users shoes. And, you know, we, you know, I think it’s like when we went to one of those kind of first block stack summits at like, the Computer History Museum a couple years ago, and, you know, we were looking around at some of the different projects and we just kind of said to ourselves, it was like, you know, we need to focus on design and we need to focus on usability. You know, and it’s such a, you know, a slight usability change in any industry can have a profound effect. You know, look at look at Uber, you know, taxis existed, and, you know, people didn’t take them and it was because they didn’t want to call didn’t know who to call, they didn’t want to pay, they didn’t have cash. And so they felt bad to get into a cab and not pay and they get yelled at. And, you know, the simple, you know, design change of, you know, now I just put my credit card in and it shows up and I can, it’s really cool, I see it coming on this little map. That’s a, that’s an extremely, you know, amazing design disruption. And it’s simple. And so I think with the crypto, it’s the same thing where, you know, you’ve got these, these blockchains, and you’ve got these projects out there. And, you know, I think coin base has done an amazing job, you know, kind of building that first kind of use use case out and that on ramp that she had on ramp especially in the US. And now it’s kind of opening the door to these other tools that are out there and getting people deeper. And now it’s not just a professional trader that’s going to be on here. It’s going to be people that are a little bit more novice that don’t want to be intimidated. And so if you’re not focused on you know, helping people understand very simply how some of this stuff works, then it’s Not gonna it’s not going to work. And, you know, even when we originally started, it was, you know, we had 40 different charts on a page. And it was, you know, infinite scroll, and it just kept going and going, and it wasn’t working. And it’s not until you kind of simplify things and make it make it easy it is to where people start actually using it and understanding.
Rob McNealy 20:19
Well, it’s kind of funny the way even web design has changed over the past, you know, five years, 10 years ago, you’re trying to keep everything above the fold. And then I don’t know what happened because I stopped doing web development A long time ago, and then all of a sudden, now everything’s infinite scroll. And I’m like, didn’t we try to keep everything above the fold for a reason where people didn’t have to scroll for usability. So I don’t know what changed there. But it seems to me that usability is still important and you want to make people have to work the least amount when they’re using your site to get around. And I think you do that and I really do like the fact that you spent so much time in design and I think that is going to make this very Very useful. And it can’t believe that, you know, some of the big players as far as the trackers go, how awful their UI czar or how primitive they are. From the design standpoint, considering how much some of these trackers are bringing in revenue, you think they could bring in some design folks and fix that, but maybe they need to bring you in to fix it for them. Joe, where can people find out more about your project?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 21:28
Linda crush calm is the easiest way. You can also find us on Twitter, we’re really active on Twitter. It’s just at Luna crush. We’re posting you know, all sorts of insights all day, we have a coin of the day that we post on each day. And that’s kind of our way to get people in and get people understanding the data for free. So that I would say go to Luna crush calm or just follow us at at Luna crush.
Rob McNealy 21:52
So thank you so much. And I do appreciate you coming on the show today. And I wish you all the luck in the future.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 21:58
And thank you my man. Appreciate it.
Episode Links
Paul McNeal – The Crypto Curator Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Today I am talking to Paul McNeal. He is The Crypto Curator and an evangelist about Bitcoin. We’ve been connected on social media for some time now and I find his tweets are very interesting and sometimes even a little bit controversial. So I’d like to welcome the show. How are you today, Paul?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
I’m doing well. How are you?
Rob McNealy
Good. What’s going on today?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yeah, you know, it’s just another wonderful day in the world of Bitcoin.
Rob McNealy
Seems like every day something’s happening in Bitcoin and crypto in general. So for kind of jump into all that stuff. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into crypto
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Sure, um, well, I won’t go back too far but I served in the military for 10 years, served onboard submarines, three of them enjoyed that left that and then I went to work for the government as a government contractor did that for a little bit left that went and started a business with a friend of mine. That’s what got me into the world of entrepreneurship. built that with him for a little while, then made an exit out of that and then started selling it consulting and it was during IT consulting where I learned about Bitcoin Of course it was across Twitter believe it was trace Mayor that I came across and after hearing about it I was just fascinated and so I kept following kept following it and the more you follow it The deeper the down the rabbit hole you go. And so after that I was hooked.
Rob McNealy
So did you when you were working in submarines did you work with cryptography in any way?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Actually, I did. I was a submarine radium and onboard three nuclear power subs and as a radium in our communications person we encrypted All of our communication so little different than the crypto most people here today in Bitcoin but as these little strips of pieces of paper that we would pull through devices that would encrypt the communication. And so I was familiar with encryption from that perspective when I was in the military.
Rob McNealy
So would you say the most interesting thing about crypto is for you personally?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yeah, the most interesting thing I found about it is and I had come across this actually didn’t realize it back in the day when PGP first came around and understanding how to do the PGP on email and things like that. But what I’ve come to find out and learn about and that I appreciate is that it allows us to have control over our information and our communication, which in today’s world, because it is so much of it is done online. There’s a need a deep need for that type of encryption privacy. So I’ve learned that you know, it allows me to take control back over my information.
Rob McNealy
And you know, you’ve been doing some interesting experiments with that recently yourself. And you and I talked about this a little bit before, you know, off the air. But you’ve recently done something very interesting that I can’t fathom how you’re doing it. So tell us a little bit about that.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yes. So it happened late, late last year, a couple months before the year ended, I got to paying attention to just my normal activities online and things and I was noticing that I was communicating more on messaging platforms than I was email, I would check in on emails and I have like three or four email accounts and I’ve logged in and I was delete, delete, delete, delete, and I was like, why am I even logging an email anymore? And then it dawned on me and it’s probably some back subliminal messaging I Alex machine ski is voices in my head. And he was talking about doing for money, what he did for voice Voice over IP money becoming money over IP, and then he used the term streaming money and then I got to thinking, wow, streaming communication. And I was like, why are we still using email when we could be using messaging. And so I’ve made the decision to stop using email. And then at 2020. I said, I don’t want to use email at all I really want to check in. I just want to use messaging. So I’ve been in that process right now.
Rob McNealy
So how’s it going so far?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
So far, there are bumps, I learned a big bump, and I found it interesting. And again, this is what really sets off the spidey senses for you can’t have a mobile device without an email. I tried deleting my Gmail off my Android phone and it went berserk and I was like, whoa, wait a minute. So I’m starting to find out now same thing goes for iPhone. I’m certain if you were to pull your Apple ID your which is your email address away from your phone. I think your phone would not allow you to do certain things. So I’m starting to find that that’s going to be a major hurdle in completely disconnecting those accounts, so I can’t complain. Disconnect mom to check them, but I can’t disconnect them for that reason.
Rob McNealy
Well, I can tell you the one Apple device that I currently still have when I don’t have that user ID and and it freaks out. So yeah, I think you’re right on that. There is a new phone supposedly coming out, I think pretty soon Have you heard of it called the Libra phone. And it’s a new, completely supposedly privacy oriented type of hardware device that’s supposed to be coming out on the market. And I’m actually very interested in some of that new technology where people are allowing people to, you know, create devices that are taking away that power back from you know, basically it’s Google and Apple at this point. And so it’s something I’m very interested in. And though I don’t understand how you can completely delete yourself from email because I would have a very difficult time with it. I can tell you I’ve recently gone through this purging process. process where I noticed just in the last six weeks or so I started paying attention to my ad my own, you know mailboxes in some of my accounts. And I had over 50,000 emails that I deleted out of my various email accounts. And now I’m going through this process where I’m unsubscribing to every single mailing list that I’m on and my inbox is away quiet or now, and not as annoying because I was getting I was getting about 100 different messages a day that weren’t spam. But they were updates from this mailing list to that mailing list, and it did start becoming overwhelming to me. And so I can understand where you’re coming from with this wanting to delete email altogether, because I swear if I think I could get rid of that I would.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yeah, I think a lot of people would have talked to a lot of people and they’ve told me the same thing, and I do you know, I’m I’m not trying to pretend like this is going to be an easy process because this is going to be difficult. Because I was talking to a friend of mine, he has a system that he uses emails and it follows emails, high retrieves information, his whole workflow is built around and I get it, right, mine is a little bit easier because I’m an independent guy work for myself, I don’t have to, and I don’t per se have clients. So I found that most people that I interact with, are open to interacting on these messaging platforms via email. So I found though a lot of people when I tell them not using email, and can you use one of the messaging platforms, most people have them already. So it’s not a big stretch for me to ask them to communicate via telegram or a messenger or, you know, whatever the platform is.
Rob McNealy
Have you found one particular messaging app that at least gives you more control over your privacy than say over something offered by Facebook or Google?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yeah, there’s three of them in particular, the fourth ones, you have to do a trick. So key based IO, which A lot of people, they check it out. I know it’s another platform, but it’s it’s a cross between like a slack, a telegram and a Venmo. That messaging app allows me to do text, voice or even video and I began to use that platform a lot. And that’s a blockchain based platform, completely decentralized. It does have a central authority that built the platform, but it is private and all the information is yours. signal is another great one. That one is actually endorsed by Edward Snowden. And that one doesn’t have any back doors to the NSA. It’s actually not based in the US is based in Sweden, I believe are Switzerland, sorry that Sweden, Switzerland. And then wire is another and then telegram and of course telegram is private has encryption, but you have to do a secret chat in order for it to be completely encrypted from NSA.
Rob McNealy
Well, I’m on multiple of the platforms that you just mentioned before and I am kind of looking at some of the other different platforms that I’m not using right now what I find the problem is, is that is not just me, if I move over, I got to take a whole lot of other people with me to get on one platform and, and you know, running, you know, or at least helping run now, a crypto project, you kind of have to be in the same place, you got to get kind of a critical mass of people and you gotta like, hey, drive them here and say, Hey, we’re all on five different platforms. Now you gotta sign up for all five of these platforms, it kind of gets a little unruly. So I’m not sure the best way at this point to like, deal with all of that. But we are kind of looking at different options that are a little more secure.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
I agree. And that is going to be one of the headaches as we move forward. And I’m wondering if someone’s going to build some type of a standard that allows you to have a unified platform that allows you to do and pull in all the other ones. I’m trying to think back. I remember back in the day with the web and when the web first started, people would build these platforms that you could plug several different things into one and eight pulls it all into one. So I don’t know if we’re going to see that with communication, but it is going to be an issue with some people been on so many different platforms.
Rob McNealy
Well, there was one called I think back in the day from the social media side of things called friendfeed. And what ultimately happened they got bought out and they kind of killed it. But one of the things that it was the point of it was that it was trying to consolidate all the feeds from the different social media accounts in one place. Because everybody’s got multiple footprints right? But what ultimately killed that I think that concept of these you know, social media aggregators is that all the platforms didn’t want to give API access the the platforms want people on their platform, they want to hold those eyeballs because their their revenue models are dependent on those eyeballs staying on their platforms. So in one thing and or one perspective, it’s a really great idea to maybe open those API’s up and allow people to, you know, be off your platform, but On the other hand, they don’t want to give up that power. So I think it’s interesting going forward where these things will end up panning out. You know, in social media, at least network effects are real thing. There’s all sorts of alternative meet, you know, there’s all sorts of alternative platforms out there for all the different social media platforms. But none of them are really getting any traction, just from the standpoint is that the eyeballs aren’t there? And what do you think about that? Where do you think the future is going to be with these different platforms and the way the social media world and tech world has treated privacy and free speech? issues like that?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yeah, you know, I definitely agree with you. That’s part of the challenge. Everybody wants access. Now, what I think could change that is if we do shift to platforms, and unfortunately I mentioned this earlier in the periscope, the idea on Twitter, free has really damaged us because things are free. We Use them. And we don’t realize free doesn’t mean free free means free for you to use, but you’re doing it at a price. And that price that you’re paying currently is much higher than it would be if you paid dollars for it. So unfortunately, I think these platforms will have to monetize by charging people to use them. And I think that’s going to help with some of the consolidation of which platforms people choose to use. But in addition to that, I think once we do that, then hopefully we can get strong enough encryption put in place that if you’re interacting with these platforms, those platforms really don’t care if you stay on their platform, because you’re either paying for it, but they’re really not getting access to any of your information. Anyway, the only reason people want you on their platform so they can monetize it, by your being free. But if it’s not free, and they’re paying and you’re paying to use it, it really doesn’t matter at that point, I’m assuming.
Rob McNealy
I think there’s going to be a tipping point probably in the next five years. About people wanting to either have more control over their data, their privacy, but I think there’s going to be more of a push, especially from social media content creators about getting bigger revenue shares. And I think that’s going to open up. I think it’s going to open up an opportunity, as the big tech giants keep basically cutting out and ostracizing and alienating certain communities on their platforms, and D monetizing people that will start putting pushing more and more people to other platforms. And I think there’s going to be a point where the tech industry in Silicon Valley basically makes itself irrelevant. If they keep going in the direction they’re going right now, what do you think?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yeah, exactly. And, and I think we’re going to see and I’m early on this, but I think that Facebook has done a good job at putting its tentacles in several areas, and it’s smart for them because that means that they have a better chance of surviving. Facebook, I’ve noticed I’m moving myself off of Facebook, I sent out messages to my entire network at about like 1400. Folks, most of those people I hadn’t really interacted with in a long time. And I told him I had several criteria for people that I would unfriend and get rid of people that have I hadn’t spoken to you in over a year, right. And that means literally haven’t spoken to you on the phone in person a message I like or something, then you were gone because it didn’t make any sense. And I kept whittling that down. Once I got down to the core, I sent them all a message says, Hey, listen, I’m going to stop using Facebook in 2020. But here’s how you can get in contact with me. Here’s my phone number. And I’ll be on these other platforms if you like to communicate. I think you’re going to see these large platforms like a Google like Facebook slowly dwindle down and usage because people will wake up hopefully more to privacy and that or they will have to try to try and shift their models and trying to shift that model from where they are now can be very hard to So it’s going to be interesting. I don’t have any definitive, but I know for myself and I know many others are slowly making that transition off of some of these platforms. And if that continues, it’ll be a slow progression, but I think they’ll have to change.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, I don’t think it’s going to be abrupt. Just because the networking effect and the inertia that they have, it’s going to take time. What I do think, though, is that when they get they’re so locked into having that power, that centralized control, and I view it a lot like government, these big massive corporations, once they go down a path, they won’t stop even though they know what they’re doing isn’t going to last they can see the handwriting on the wall, but because of their inertia, and they’re kind of blinded almost by it, that they won’t adapt. And and I believe over time, it will be the downfall of a lot of those large mega corporations and it won’t be overnight. It They’ll be, you know, they’ll lose a different community here in another community there. And, and, and they’ll just kind of kind of dwindled down to my space at some point. You know, it’s just I don’t think it’s going to be abrupt. It but I do think it’s going to happen. And I think it’s like this. You know, you’ve seen recently, you know, jack Dorsey from Twitter talking about how he wants to create, you know, some kind of standard, and he wants to pick and choose who’s on this little, you know, basically, committee project. And I tell people look, if he wanted to make Twitter for a bastion of free space or free speech, he would do it in a minute. He could he has the power to do that. Now, the problem is, he has no incentive to do it. And in fact, I don’t believe that people give up power willingly, typically. And I think for things like Twitter or some of these other platforms for them to adapt, they have to give up power. But I think ultimately, if they are not willing to give up our they’re not going to survive.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Correct, and I think jack Dorsey is a great example. Because what he’s currently doing and if he is successful, and I think he’s forward thinking enough that he created his square crypto group, and that they want to work on Bitcoin, and he’s trying to move into the decentralized realm, he will definitely be ahead of the pack. And I think we’re going to see the rest of these big behemoths have to make the same type of a shift. It is definitely going to be tricky for them to do so. And what you said is true. Are people willing to give up power? That’s something that spans across everything, and I agree with you, people are not willing to give up power. But I think that, unfortunately, the more they try to hold on to that power, the more they’re going to lose it. The way you keep power is that you got to give it away. If you don’t give it away, you will lose it.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, I think that’s going to be an issue and it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out and it’ll be also in Interesting to see how the crypto space pans out long term. You know, I’m not a maximalist on any project. I’m a maximalist on my project, from the standpoint that I really believe in what I’m working on. But I think it’s going to be interesting how things shift out in crypto over the next couple of years. I think that the big players in crypto, there’s a good shot that a lot of the big players currently are going to lose their standing over the next couple of years because I think how people are going to evaluate crypto products is going to change dramatically.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yeah, you know, that’s interesting. I haven’t done it. I probably should have done it before this call but I think it was maybe last year middle of last year. I was curious, I said, I want to know and I’m sure you might have heard this website is called wayback machine. You go back in time. So I did that with coin market cap and I was shocked to find four assets remain at the top. That’s 10 years for assets remain the top some of these projects I agree with Few they won’t but I’m seeing that even through time and that’s years upon years upon years they remain. bitcoins remain number one a theorem for the most part remains number two repple remains number three there was one point where ripple flipped a theorem, but it was briefly and then number four of course now it’s be cash or at the time and be cash wasn’t in existence I forget, which was like the main one that stayed number four, but the Litecoin
Rob McNealy
Hmm, I think it was like Litecoin.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
I thank you. Thank you. You’re absolutely right. It was like when Litecoin has now shifted because of tether and because of the cash those two supplanted like coin into like coins. But But yeah, I mean, it’s so some of these other projects. And even if we look at the top 10 and I might even do that after this call. Go back and look at the top 10 take a screenshot and see where those assets are. I tell somebody if the project’s have a pretty solid team, if they have a good development of the actual product. And they’ve started to get adoption, I think those projects will remain. But if you have zero adoption, your product is not really even built out and your team is feres, you’re not going to stay.
Rob McNealy
I think going forward, what we’re going to find is the kryptos that actually have customers. And what I mean by customers is not what most people mean when they say users. I’m a heretic when it comes to crypto because I don’t believe that investors are users. And most of the people in the big project say, well, we have this many users and I’m like, No, you don’t you have investors, you have speculators. And guess what, right now? No, kryptos actually have people really in any large amounts, people using their crypto for buying and selling goods or services, any of them not Bitcoin, Litecoin none of them. And to me, whoever cracks that nut, whoever gets it, their crypto actually being used for buying and selling goods and services will unleash on massive change in how crypto products are evaluated. And I believe when that happens, the kryptos that actually have customers are the ones are going to be winning.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
I agree. I can’t I can’t. I was like you said, No, no mass adoption. But there are several projects where people do use them here in the US, probably not much around the world in developing countries. I think they do dash has got a very user user user base down in Venezuela. I think they’ve done some projects there. I know the Iota project is working. And I know some big auto manufacturers are beginning to use Iota with their cars. And I think we’re going to see the automobile industry become one of the leading adopters of digital assets because they’re going to use it for car to car payment. And that’s being built out and I think we’re going to start to see some adoption in that going forward. So but I agree with you, until you get actual customers using it paying with it. You can forget it. It’s not
Rob McNealy
Yeah, yeah, that’s what’s going to happen and and i look at projects not even because of their market cap, though most people look at market cap is the number one indicator of how successful project is. And unfortunately, market cap can change very rapidly, because it’s all based on emotion. It’s not being based on fundamentals. And I think things are going to change a lot in the next two years in crypto. That’s what I take. So that’s my take. And I think what you’re going to see is a lot of these crypto products, we still that we’re part of that Ico kind of nonsense from two years ago, there’s still a lot of those Ico tokens that are dead that are still on the top 100 coin market cap. And you start going down the list of these projects, there’s still a lot of dead tokens, essentially, are dead projects still all over the trackers that still have large market caps, but they’re completely dead. And I think what’s going to end up happening is at some point, someone’s going to have to stick a fork in and say it’s done, get it off the list. And that’s going to happened at some point. But I think the projects that customers that are actually using buying and selling goods or services are going to, they’re going to shatter and skyrocket when people start going, Hey, you know what? having actual people using this for its intended purpose is kind of a big deal and kind of important, why we look at that. And I, you know, I was looking down the list of some big projects recently, I do a lot of research and other projects. Because I want to know, what makes them tick. Why are they considered popular when they don’t even have customers? And it’s interesting, if you go look at almost every major project out there, they don’t have anybody in a way on the team that can get out there project and they’re not even structured to sales, marketing or business development. None of them. There’s pretty much none of you look at any of the team pages on the top 100 Top 200 a queen market cap or queen Gecko and look at the team pages for the projects and show me how many people are on that team. have sales, marketing, business development, not even authority, but that’s their, that’s their task. And they don’t have it. So tell me this, I don’t believe as as an entrepreneur and someone who’s done a lot of sales and business development marketing, I don’t believe you’re going to get mass adoption of any crypto unless you have a marketing business development strategy to put your crypto in the hands of end users.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yep. Again, I would I would agree with you the only thing that I think that might change that might alter that is the geopolitical area and the economy, the global economy. I think those two things if things heat up and we saw a little bit of it with Bitcoin, but again, it’s still speculation. It’s not anything about adoption. But I think that if there comes a point to where privacy is really again, being hampered and people are looking for a way out and they’re looking for escape out, they will adopt these techniques. Jeez to help them and I watched to their watched one interview and listen to another one. The CEO of beam with Jeffrey from uptrend and bad crypto with fluffy pony. And again, they’re talking about privacy in these privacy coins. Is there a true application for them other than nefarious reasons? And right now today, like I said, No, but if you let things blow up on the geopolitical stage, or you let the economy begin to really tank hard, that I think we might see some adoption.
Rob McNealy
Well, I would say that privacy is a very big deal. And it will be a very big deal when people start realizing that it’s easy to figure out how much someone how much money someone has, or if you’re a retailer how much money your competitor and your competitor has. So I absolutely think that privacy coins will be an issue and they’re not an issue now, because no one’s actually using them. And or using crypto and I would say the same thing goes for taxes. I think the Number one objective retailers will have when it comes to accepting crypto will be the tax implications and the accounting nightmare associated with the currently under US law. However, you don’t hear that objection really being brought up very much because no one’s accepting crypto. Yet it’s not happening. And I can tell you, I used to own brick and mortar store, I’ve set up my own point of sale. And I can tell you, I understand the accounting and the tax nightmare of dealing with it. And I can tell you, that will be one of the biggest objectives or objections that retailers have, but you don’t hear that complaint out there because people aren’t using crypto yet. And and I know that’s a heretic, or heretical statement that I’m making, but it’s a fact. And I think once the retailer’s start getting wind of understanding how much of a pain in the ass it is, they’re not going to want to use it unless crypto solves a really, really big problem. For them, and for most retailers, right now crypto does not solve a problem for them, it actually gives them a lot of problems.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Right? Now what will change the game, it’ll be interesting to see will be backed, right. So backed has a very robust roadmap that they are going to implement the first they’ve already implemented, which was the warehousing of digital assets. The next one, of course, there’s the options and the futures and the ETF features. And then after that, I think we will see them begin to shift their attention toward commerce, and that’s where the Starbucks and Microsoft their partnerships are going to be key. And what are they working on that they’re going to roll out? And I told people listen back was under the radar for 15 months. No one brings a word of that project. No one knew they were working on no one had been out of the blue. They came out and they said, we’re working on a platform that’s going to do XYZ and everyone was caught off guard by the people. been working on this for months, probably over a year now, on this Starbucks, Microsoft, whatever platform they’re going to roll out, we will hear an announcement come out soon, indicating that they’re going to roll out a actual product that will accept digital assets at Starbucks, and that I think will be a game changer.
Rob McNealy
I think it will, I think it will be too I think it’s going to be someone who’s actually engaging with retailers and create a situation or product or, you know, present crypto in a way to those retailers that it solves a problem for them, or they think they can make more money from it to overcome the problems associated with implementing crypto right now. And there’s very few projects out there that do that the way we structured today, we structured tossed around that principle to understand that if you’re going to onboard people for mass adoption, you’re going to have to have a sales component marketing component and a customer service component to help bring these people onto the platform. And you got to present crypto to the people where crypto solves a big problem for them. That’s the only place you’re going to get adoption. I don’t think it’s an accident or coincidence that mass adoption hasn’t happened. And the The fact is most crypto products are run by developers that hate sales, marketing, business development. And so to me, if your project is instruction to do those activities and embracing doing those activities, you’re not going to be successful even if your market cap has a lot of investors. I think that’s going to change over the next few years is that once some crypto star King actual customers, whatever those projects are going to quickly upset the apple cart when it comes to market cap.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yep. And you know, the news that they add, I found it interesting and and I think it was in Lw on the value that Daniel Whitmore that posted a tweet about Kelly lafleur. I find it very interesting. She’s now in Congress, and she’s now going to be head of the committee that actually deals with the CFTC and he Asked if that was a conflict of interest. Is that good for the crypto space or all of the above? I find it very interesting that they’ve allowed her Nick Kelly lafleur was the CEO of backed, and she gave up that title and gave it over to and I forgot the gentleman’s name that that replaced her. I know Adam White is going to become, I think President or CEO. But Adam white came from Coinbase. But the reality is, you’re putting some of that stature at the head of the committee that oversees the CFTC. Come on, seriously. I don’t know. I smell something cooking. I don’t know what’s cooking, but something’s cooking.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting in the United States, especially with the regulatory stuff that’s coming out. The good thing is where we’re going to be falling out in the as far as I can tell, by definition and the way we launch we’re got we’re going to be a commodity we’re not actually going to be considered and regulated as a crypto under what the CFTC and the SEC are coming up with four definitions and they’re defining the city. Based on basically how they were launched if something security or commodity or what have you. So it’ll it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out from a regulatory perspective. Right now, though, I think the IRS is a much bigger issue than the securities exchange commission when it comes to crypto. And again, that goes back to I don’t believe people are complaining about the head because it’s not creating the problem for most people, because most retailers don’t accept crypto yet. But I do believe that the IRS rules are a worse fit for digital assets than the SEC rules are.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
I agree, and that’s why the token taxonomy act is moving to Congress right now. And I think that once that gets moved to Congress, if it gets approved, and I think it has a good shot at getting approved, because I think there’s members of Congress that have an interest to make sure it gets approved, because they’re part of it as well. That has a de minimis rule that says that, hey, listen, you can spend six 700 bucks of crypto a day and you don’t have to report that as taxes. You can use it as Currency when that happens, like I actually had an interview last week, and I told them the exact same thing. They were like, why don’t you use crypto in your daily life? I’m like, because I’m not gonna pay the taxes on spending crypto makes no sense. But the moment that rule comes out and I can now use it, heck, I’ll use crypto to spend for everything. I’ll pay utilities with it, how buy things in the store with that I’ll do everything with it, because I can without getting taxed. But right now, you’re not going to tax me. You know, capital gains tax on crypto, my use on purposes doesn’t make sense.
Rob McNealy
Absolutely. And I think that’s something needs to be addressed. And what bothers me a little bit is that the organization’s these crypto projects that did illegal Icos and got a slap on the wrist, the ones that have the tremendous amount of money in the bank, right now, are not hiring the lobbyists to make this happen.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Right.
Rob McNealy
And that doesn’t make any sense to me if they really believe in the crypto future and they really believe that these things will happen. Do they can spend a few minutes bucks in get every vote, they need to pass some legislation, like the token taxonomy act, but you’re not seeing that. And that, to me is surprising, because those projects, the ones that have a lot to benefit, you know, if people, you know, can get the regulations change there, it will absolutely help adoption. But if you go look at even the biggest projects, they don’t have sales and marketing people, you know, go look at a theorem, who’s their sales and marketing people, they don’t have them. So, you know, they’re not really thinking about it. But the problem is, they’re not talking to customers. And ultimately, if you talk to customers like I do, where I go talk to retailers, because I view the retailer’s as our customer, and you go talk to those retailers about their pain points and the things that they are interested in or the things that they’re not interested in, you have a very clear picture of what you need to do with crypto to make it so those retailers will adopt it. And I don’t see any of that happening from the big major products out there like a theory of EOS or blockstream or any of those organizations.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yeah, the only organization I think that might be putting the lobbying arm in place is the digital Chamber of Commerce. I think they published something maybe middle of last year, maybe early last year talking about putting in a lobbying arm and I don’t know if Queen center teamed them with them and coin base or whatever. But I know for a fact i think i think they did. I’ll look that up. But I think that the digital Chamber of Commerce has put in place a lobbying arm to work with Congress on this, but I’m not. I don’t know that for certain I think they’re, well.
Rob McNealy
I hope they do and I hope they deal with the IRS thing more so than the SEC thing. Because if you look at so far, all the people that are talking about crypto and the regulations, everything stemmed around securities offerings, rather than taxing and to me the taxing issues more important and far more important, and I’m, I’m not a securities attorney, but I’ve looked at a lot of securities laws and a lot of rules and regulations. And to me, the security last mostly fit, to be honest. And that’s why we launched the way we did. We didn’t Do an Ico we didn’t do a token sale. We never sold tokens or coins. We didn’t collect personal information when when people went to our faucets and got our supply, and we did so so we weren’t a security. And you know what, it only took me a couple weeks of reading up on things and talking to a few attorneys to figure out that the utility token thing was nonsense. And so, but the IRS, that’s a bigger problem, because I know a lot about taxes too, because I do a lot of my own bookkeeping and stuff. And so yeah, I think the tax thing is the much bigger problem. And I can tell you this, I’m reading right now. taxation and I don’t even understand how the miners deal with it, you know, we just set up block producers for task, and it gets it pays out, like every day a little bit, you know, and it’s like, oh, I don’t even want to deal with the taxes. I’m dealing with this because it’s a big thing. It’s a big pain and and then you get into retailers, and then trying to figure out all that kind of stuff with how the retailers have to track this stuff. That’s a big pain too. And so if you We’re not going and trying to hold the hand of a retailer and you want them to use your project. I just don’t see a doubt. I don’t see any desire for retailers to go through all the headache, because there’s no really no upside for, because for the most part, there’s not that many people that want to pay in crypto at this point, either.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
No, there’s not. And that is chicken with chicken in the egg situation. You know, I think if there are more places that they would and it was an tax on it, then you would be there. But at the same time, I think that if you know, if the users really there, then the retailers would be motivated to do it and the users not there. So chicken take
Rob McNealy
that. Absolutely. So what do you think’s going to happen by the end of 2020? What would be your big predictions for the industry going forward this year?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Yeah, couple of them. So of course price and everybody’s, you know, wondering what’s going to happen with price I think this having coming up in April of May. It’s going to have an impact and I think that impact will be like the two previous Things that we had, I think we will see a surge in the price of digital assets across the board. I think there will be an old season that will happen. And I think that that’s going to also push up. And I think bitcoins dominance, of course, is approaching 70%. But I think that we will see that equalize out. And I think it will lose dominance to some of the old coins moving up as this old season happens. So direct prices on it, who knows? I mean, I’ve seen now I’ll tell you because I collect all the news. And I look at all the news all the time, both technical analysis, price analysis, I think most people who are fair minded trying to look at this right, you know, getting back to all time highs 20 K, by the end of the year, reasonable. You know, maybe we’ll get to 4050 K, maybe Maybe, maybe not. Anything above that out of the out of the question, if you asked me. When you look at the technology itself, blockchain technology, I think you’re going to see a lot of development happen with a lot of the projects and the ones that I’m seeing again in the news all the time, they’re always there. And I even said, I know it will shoot me for your brain and stuff first. But Tron I’m telling you, it’s in the news every day. It’s not a day goes by my brief goes out that runs and I mentioned, tron chain link cardano I Oda. These projects are Ethereum is constantly changing. There was an article the other day about a theorem. Some of your largest enterprises are using a theorem. And actually one of them was talking about using the public chain instead of a private chain for a project. And so that goes again to show that I think it’s going to be like the internet and the internet. When they first came out. Everyone was all we’ve got to be having an intranet, and eventually that just dispelled and everybody was on the internet. I think the same things that happened with the public private within the Digital Asset space, I think you’re going to see a lot of people try to do these private chains, but eventually going to find out it’s nothing more than a glorified database. Less Move it all to the public chain, where there’s real security and yada, yada. Now you will need something like z k snarks for changing privacy and things like that. But I think that’s going to get solved. So projects will continue to develop, I think, to innovate and move toward the end of 2020. I think we’re going to be surprised at which projects take off.
Rob McNealy
Very cool. Paul, where can people find out more about you since they can’t email you?
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Well, my website, the crypto curator is the easiest way. And once you’re on the crypto curator, you have links to all the places whether I’m on Twitter or telegram, or YouTube or action on YouTube, key base, things like that. But yeah, if they get to my website, they can contact me all over the place.
Rob McNealy
Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show D I’ve enjoyed our chat.
Paul McNeal -The Crypto Curator
Hey, thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me on.
Episode Links
Paul McNeal – The Crypto Curator
Paul McNeal, The Crypto Curator, talks with Rob McNealy about the future of crypto and his experiment in not using email.
Michael Hiles – CEO of 10XTS Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Okay, I am excited today. So today I’m talking to Michael Hiles. He is the CEO of 10XTS, which is a company out of Ohio that is in the regulatory FinTech space. And he’s also a second amendment guy. So I’ve been real excited to want to get on the show here so we can talk about some things. So, Michael, how are you today? Hey, how are you?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Thanks for having me.
Rob McNealy
Oh, well, I appreciate it. You know, it’s funny when we were kind of connecting on this, I thought it was interesting that you and I have been connected on social media going back to 2011 at this point. So you and I are both old school social media guys way before crypto even existed. And I think that’s kind of cool.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yes, sir. I actually predate the internet. I ran like bulletin boards on dial up modems, some old old dude here. So
Rob McNealy
I wasn’t I didn’t I wasn’t fortunate enough because I didn’t have family that was very technologically savvy. So I didn’t really get into computers much in any way till I was probably in college. Back in the 90s. So yeah, I wasn’t fortunate enough to have exposure to computers at a young age. So I really wish I did at this point, because, you know, I ended up in this space and using it my whole life, but it’s kind of interesting. You know, I’m here now. So that’s all.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I was blessed. I got so lucky. My dad worked in sales for a software company in the 70s. So in 79, I started programming on mainframes. I was literally that kid. I was like eight years old.
Rob McNealy
You and Bill Gates,
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Mmm, yeah, but I don’t have Bill Gates his balance sheet. I made some bad decisions somewhere.
Rob McNealy
I think I think that’s the you didn’t pick the right parents, I think.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah, I hear you. So, so.
Rob McNealy
Well, good. Well, good. Tell me about 10XTS. Yes. What do you What are you doing?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
So, 10XTS is a startup early stage tech company is kind of the product of my background. round my career progression, having been a tech guy my whole life and then seeing the emergence of the technology and from the nascent you know, hobbyist phase like all tech does into, like the enterprise usefulness, that hey, there’s something here I knew, you know, Bitcoin payments, those are all early stage use cases, you know, kind of the pioneer, but being an information architect and a data guy, I recognize the usefulness of being able to use the underlying technology for things like, you know, record keeping notary, you know, other functions that right now require intermediaries and third parties to, you know, give you an assertion that somebody is presenting a claim or a proof and you’ve got some way to validate that from a record standpoint. So my team back before 10 x Ts in the early 2000s we won a Smithsonian laureate award when they were still giving those out for being the first to connect a judicial management system, a case search system, like you go to your county clerk of courts. And we got an award for being the first to connect an old school legacy court clerk system to the web. So being able to go to a browser and do a search. And so I’ve worked with public record for a big chunk of my career and understand the nuances of the workflow of data getting onto the blockchain, which is probably as or more important than the data on the blockchain. So tenex ts really, you know, fast forward. Yeah, we recognize the opportunity to not necessarily be the blockchain, but to be the record keepers that connect real world documents and data to the blockchain for single source of truth efficacy of the data model. So little bit different approach them I’m a crypto guy in the sense that I love cryptocurrency and the emergence and evolution of technology, but we see ways to then, you know, build on top of that core underlying promise. How do we go in? And how do we bring capital efficiency in particular, because our underlying vision is economic inclusion, you know, rising tide lifts all boats. And I think if we can solve a few problems related to that across our population, we can start to break down some of these social barriers and some of these political barriers that has everybody literally ready to, you know, start throwing fast rocks at people from the tree tops, and that’s not going to be the solution.
Rob McNealy
Well, I agree with you. And I think it’s interesting out there, at least in the social media world, when you’re talking about crypto and blockchain kind of things, that people on the left, and I’m not a writer either, but the people on the left seem to be really adamantly opposed to anything that decentralizes yet they still complain that the political process is really corrupt. And so to me, it’s really confusing to me Ultimately why certain that certain kind of politically it’s it’s weird because it comes down to I think that ultimately certain individuals do want the control of government over certain things they absolutely want to control you. And when you say we want to cut government out of this to get get rid of political corruption and corporate corruption, they can’t understand the connection between the two. And they don’t understand the fact that technology can enslave or liberate depending on who’s running it and who, how its applied. And, you know, it’s interesting, I thought of all things that the people on the left would be the ones that would embrace this type of technology that is decentralization, enabling and what..
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I don’t understand it, I you know, I, so I’m in Ohio 8 district so I’m fortunate to have congressman Warren Davidson is my congressman. And so Warren has led some of the charge in DC with the finance Services Committee. And in fact, I’ve been to DC I’ve, you know, testified and participated in congressional roundtable from a policy standpoint on all of this. And, you know, David and I, we’ve talked back and forth about, you know, just the function of automating government, you know, the blockchain out of it, but just, you know, how do you automate things that are human powered processes today? In the past, I’ve had left elected officials, Democrats Tell me, because I actually talked to them, you know, like, I’m not like so polarizing. It’s like, gosh, I probably got as many democrat friends as a Republican friends, it’s like, but in terms of the discussion around the function of government, I’ve had elected officials tell me in the past that government as a social function employs a segment of the population that would deem to be otherwise functionally unemployable. I don’t know if that’s true. I mean, I get it, it’s like, well, if you’re going to give them things, at least make them productive in some capacity from a community standpoint. Now, I don’t know if other of my many government employee friends would agree with that. But I’m sure you know, they would be fairly incensed by it. Because I know on the other side of the equation, PhDs and really brilliant people that are also part of the government and work for the government or have government contracts. And so I don’t know what that dividing line is. Rob, I really don’t. It’s certainly interesting when it comes really down to transparency. I think that’s the big threshold of well, we can get away with things the way it works. Now. We won’t necessarily be able to do that if we’re subject to some other reporting and transparency regime.
Rob McNealy
I think people are very libertarian, when it comes to themselves, and very statist when it comes to other people.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Do as I say, not as I do.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, I kind of think that’s how people are. I think they’re wired that way. I think that they want the maximum amount of freedom for themselves, but they certainly want to create rules for other people. Maybe as a form of self defense. Maybe that’s why that is that way.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Emotional intelligence? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what it is safety in numbers? Fight or flight?
Rob McNealy
I don’t know cuz I, I don’t want to control other people. So honestly, I know, I don’t want the response of I don’t want the responsibility to control other people. But there’s a lot of people that do think not only that they should do that, but they’re entitled to tell other people what to do. My mother is a great example of that. She cared. Yeah, my mom would totally be a Karen totally. You know, it’s all about the rules and you know.
My parents. It’s funny because my parents, I grew up in the Detroit area, and we were, my dad was a conservative, like they were conservative. So they were huge rule followers. That was their mindset. But they also didn’t understand that a lot of the rules were designed, they didn’t see how rules screwed them. And I remember this one time, and it was one of the first times I kind of had an understanding of that maybe things aren’t always what I thought they were like when I was 10. And I remember maybe nine, and my neighbor’s dad, across the street, ran a construction company and my dad needed a load of dirt. He had a dump truck kind of thing in the neighborhood. And my dad, and I was really good friends with the sun. And my dad says, one day, you know, your buddy’s dad’s a tax cheat. And I’m like, What are you talking about? He’s like, well, he made me pay him in cash. He didn’t want me to give him a check. So he doesn’t want to pay taxes on that. I’m like, that sounds like a good deal. I was like, and I’m like, why would you want to be deck? And it was?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
It’s call “none ya.” None ya business.
Rob McNealy
But I left it. I mean, I’m 48 this year, you know, and I’d like that left an impact on me because I saw like, Well, why should he have to pay taxes on that? Like I was just a kid, right? But my dad who was like this, basically it was a teacher. He was a he was a rule follower. He was locked in there was an employee miserable in his job. And the neighbor was self employed, had his own business. And it was just interesting to me how I remember what I remember about this. My dad was incensed by it. Like he felt it was unfair, that this other guy didn’t want to pay whatever the taxes were, or whatever, you know, and it’s interesting because I remember that to this day, and I left an impact. But I also see you know, my dad, if you ever read the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, my dad was the poor daughter had that mindset. It was very, this this mentality that if someone else gets ahead, they’re getting screwed in some way. And but I look back now and even then, when I was growing up, I saw that my My parents made their own decisions that made their own lives miserable. And it’s funny because even as a kid, I remember going into therapy now, but I remember as a kid, you know?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
We’re Gen X guys, man. I mean, we’re getting to that point, right? We got to confront these things.
Rob McNealy
Dude, no, no crap. But I remember when I was a kid, like I was telling my parents when I was like, in my teens, because I was working, and I was a busboy of all things at one point, making like really good money in a high, you know, high class hotel and stuff. And I was making more money than my mom. Like literally. And I said, Mom, why are you doing this job that makes you miserable? I have security. I’m like, No, you don’t? Yes, I do know you know, you don’t have any security like a fire you tomorrow. You have no control over and I recognize that as a kid. And my and it was interesting how like it made us clash and and so when it comes back around and like, Why do certain people want to control the people and why they reject these kind of decentralized technologies. I always think back to my parents because they’re that quintessential Karen kind of person that wants to do that. And that’s like, Wow, you guys are brainwashed. That’s all I can think of. They’re just brainwashed.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah, I mean, it’s a tough thing when you live your whole life with filters and predispositions and social norms. And, you know, it blows my mind though, because and I, you know, I don’t want to get off on the tangent from a boomer versus younger people thing. But you’ve got folks that are like, counterculture in like, the hippie generation, like, we want to change this, we want to construct a new, you know, way of doing things, which Alright, cool. You know, there were certainly problems that were carried over from before. Then now, like, what happened, guys, I mean, it’s so funny, because when I was a teenager, I saw Peter Paul and Marian concert and their very last tour. And so it was like 87 and I’m thinking, hey, it’s hippie stuff. Let’s dress up like hippies. Well, so I got tickets to this concert, not realizing it looks at Memorial Hall, which is very nice upscale, you know, venue in Cincinnati and You know, I go in there and it’s like literally all these yuppies who were, you know, in their 30s at the time, but they’ve got like their sweaters wrapped around their polo shirts. And if you remember when they drink sweaters down their backs kind of a thing and, and here we are me, my girlfriend dress like hippies and it’s like, a something happened. Come on guys. Anyway, sorry. I didn’t mean to digress off into it people.
Rob McNealy
Well, you know, what happened to the hippies is that they were born at a time where the United States was the only manufacturing power left on the planet. And anybody can throw rock and make a ton of money. So and and you know what, at that point, you know, people like well, I really liked the Mad Men house and I really liked the nice cars and having two cars and, and I think that’s what happened ultimately, is that, you know, life was life was pretty good. Let’s just put in perspective, life was pretty good. And they grew up in a time where you didn’t have to even go to college to make good money, and you didn’t even have to Have a college loan and you could still, you know, because there wasn’t student loans like there are now that you could afford to pay for college and not come out as come out of college with no debt and work your way through. They can’t do that anymore. And, and so I think that, you know, they were launched just from the facet of when they were born, they were able to grow up in their young as young adults in a time when the United States very prosperous and, and I definitely think that skewed their vision and I think that’s also the opposite of what’s I think it’s the same opposite effect happening now millennials and Gen Xers. I mean, I was caught in student loan prep, too, because I was given bad advice from boomers. You know, just invest in any major regardless, you’ll it’ll pay off and, you know, you’ll make 10 times the amount of money that you invest in, like, that’s worship. But you know, you learn, live and learn, but I think that definitely is, you know, made some impacts in society on how we’re viewing these kind of things.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah. Then I did the inevitable. This is what I look at as an entrepreneur. I’m looking down the road You know, from CEO and my crystal ball lens of having several decades of technology experience and multiple, you know, product life cycles and technology cycles and saying, okay, that regardless of what happens, my entire career was built on how do I make things more efficient? How do I create tools? And how do I, you know, deconstruct the silos that drove power bases inside of corporate organizations, for example, you know, when you look at the baby boomer way of management and operation, you bring up Mad Men, all human powered political process. I call that fixed overhead. And so if you want to be relevant in the current market place, as technology people, and I’ve always viewed technology shifts as the opportunity to do a couple of different things first, you can certainly go in and be the Absolute disrupter be Jeff Bezos right? I mean, be the guy. Of course it fully the magnitude of the disruption didn’t fully materialize for a couple decades for Amazon. But you know, His goal was to just go and slaughter it. Hence the saying your margin is my opportunity. The other side of the coin as well, there’s already entrenched channel partners and people that are in these industries. Will they pay you to catch the wave and become more efficient, more competitive, without you having to become that business? I don’t have to be Whole Foods and be in the grocery business to go and help say Kroger be more efficient. They’re already in the grocery business. I don’t start a new grocery. And so back to the crypto space is one of the things that we’ve looked at. From a blockchain standpoint. Well, you know, we’re good. We’re experts in the technology, software and data. How do we then identify the opportunities to go to existing markets, whereas a lot of people are saying, Oh, no, we want to be Come on broker dealer, we want to become an exchange. I’m like, heck with that, you know, that comes with a lot of regulatory overhead responsibility, compliance things that, you know, that’s not what we do. Right? We could, but I would rather be the guy that says, I’m the expert at the tool. I know your problem, probably better than you know, your problem at the technology level. So you go out there and you’d be the bank, you go out there, you be the broker dealer, but recognize that your model is going to have to shift in order to stay competitive in the marketplace. Because if you don’t buy my stuff, your competitors going to, and it’s just a function of knocking on doors, and it’s a numbers game for me and for my company, to go out and find the use cases that are going to onboard and say, Yep, I get it. I get what you’re trying to do. This is a cost cutting measure opens up new markets.
Rob McNealy
Well, I definitely think that blockchain technology has a lot of interesting uses in business. And I definitely think that you can gain some really interesting efficiencies with blockchain technology that maybe smaller to mid tier companies could use them to take some of that market share away from the big entrenched holders. I’m sorry, you know, companies that are in that space, because the bigger the company, the less risk adverse they are, you know, you know, you know, GM, and you see how it is right now, right, GM and all these companies now are deciding they’re going to go into electric vehicles, like a decade after Elon Musk decided to start, you know, do the innovation and now they’re like, okay, there’s a market. We’re going to go in there and try to crush it now. But I think that this, these technologies, whether it’s just for payments with blockchain stuff, I think there’s amazing opportunity now that business people are starting to look at it. I think what was happening before is that most of these crypto projects were led not even by entrepreneurs, but just straight developers that maybe never even ran like their own business before. But they had an interesting idea of how technology could evolve. They created it but they didn’t really understand how to actually get people to use it. Get it out there absolutely adoption standpoint?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yep, absolutely. I mean, you look at the fact that the iPhone was released a year before the white which is basically around the same time as Bitcoin white paper came out and look at the contrast and adoption between, you know, the first smartphone versus this really nascent weird hobbyist technology that involves all these layers tantamount to you know, having to fire up your modem and change your dialing string and get your command line interpreter to telnet and you know, some other computer network. And then you look at the that transition that inflection point of well, when AOL started putting out CD ROM installers with an awesome user interface in every shrink wrap, plastic bag, partnership deal. You know, they could Steve Case could possibly go and sign up at the time right now, and pushing out millions and millions and millions of this really awesome user experience. So that’s where I think that a lot of the disconnect is at for really any technology but in you know, particularly adoption of blockchain cryptocurrency technologies, nobody wants to see how the sausage is made, just bring me a plate of bratwurst right, I’m ready to eat it. And I think that’s where the technologists get so enamored with their own, you know, source code and their GitHub repos that, you know, they forget that the average person can’t even change the windows settings of their, you know, basic visual device on their laptop, right? We’re not that far along, guys, after all these years.
Rob McNealy
Well, well, I can tell a lot because you know, and I love developers, don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti developer. They just have a very different set of skills and a different view.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Oh, of course. Yeah. I lead a bad merry band of developers, you know, I mean, I am a developer. So it’s really interesting. You know, I like in work in development, working with developers as really like managing a rock band. Right. So it really is. It’s the parallels are so you know, you got it somewhere between being your psychologist and, you know, the communicator, the spouse, dad when it’s necessary. It’s this weird dynamic to get true r&d developers, people that know how to create something out of nothing, because it’s all function of motivation. Right is how do I get Stephen King to go into his dungeon and come out with the next best seller? Right? And that’s, that’s really how do you guide that as a CEO of a tech company as it gets interesting.
Rob McNealy
But to use your analogy, right, there is no, no person in their right mind would let the band determine the marketing and promotion strategy for their album either.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
No, no, no, they have no idea. They’re out there on the street corner, just, you know, doing the, you know, minstrel for free with the hat, you know?
Rob McNealy
Busking in busking in the subway. Right?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Exactly.
Rob McNealy
And so that and that’s part of the problem with a lot of developers and engineers. This is just an engineering mindset. I’ve worked in a lot of engineering companies, big companies, and this is pretty consistent is that the build that they will come mindset? Is what it comes down to. And unfortunately build it, they will come doesn’t usually work. That’s right. It’s a myth. And, and it doesn’t matter if you have the best technology. Doesn’t it med the best marketing technologies are the ones that win. And what that means is, even if you have the best technology, if you don’t have a way in a strategy to put that solution in the hands of the people that it solves their problem, it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to get adopted. And and it’s funny because I’ll have this discussion with engineers and a lot of them. They think they’re smarter than everybody else. And that’s okay, because they need to be smart. But if I said, an engineer has to have a certain skill set and intelligence level, and it’s a trained career path, that they’re professional, they would all agree with that. But then I said, you know salespeople and marketers are also a skill set that go through training and experience. Absolutely. And it’s like no, no, that doesn’t matter. Anybody can market I’m like, that’s horseshit. That’s absolutely nonsense.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
The disconnect that I’ve identified is this magical little thing called empathy. Right? It’s like engineers a very rational construct logic, a plus b equals C. And as we know, human beings are also very emotional. And we all share 11 of the same emotions. And you’ve got the, you know, want to be Spock engineers over here. Well, that just doesn’t make sense. So like, Well, of course, it doesn’t make sense because people don’t make decisions particularly make decisions to buy things based on making sense. No, they’re going to absolutely make an emotional decision. And then when the logic comes into play, it is rationalizing their emotional decision and supporting their confirmation bias that we all have to a massive degree. The older I get, the more I realized that, you know, Hey, you know what I thought about the world. I don’t I’m not the smartest guy in the room. In fact, as a CEO, that’s my mantra is I want to be the dumbest guy. And I want to surround myself by awesome people that are hell smarter than I am. Right? And then how do you be the manager of the band and get them to work together and get over their petty bullshit, because when teams on stage and they’re jamming it out, and you got 70,000 people in the stadium audience cheering, and here’s my money, take my money. That’s when you know that things are actually working out. That’s, that’s my metric.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, I agree. And I can always tell when a developer is in over their head when it comes to understanding how to promote their solution or their project is one. I’ll use the Linux analogy, and they’ll say, look, Linux is great. It’s an amazing software. It’s open source. It’s kind of decentralized in a lot of ways, but Linux never made Any market share never got market share on desktop. And Linux servers, which are amazing, are still are very niche because the only people that care about them are developers. So, so so Linux is never like I’ve had developers literally Michael, tell me that Linux is mass adopted. And I’m like out of your minds, you’re absolutely out of your mind.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I mean, you can argue that because it’s embedded in the bowels of the apple lap, you know, the Apple device that, you know, the core OS is a Linux variant. So they’re technically not wrong, but they’re not wrong for all the wrong reasons.
Rob McNealy
Well, you know, I think the I think the block chains that win are going to be the same way no one the average person on the street and by the way, I spend my time as an entrepreneur talking to potential customers, before I ever decide to build a business or code a project now, and and to me, you should have a customer first and then build the solution for that individual customer. That’s how you build a business at least my 20 years of being out entrepreneur, that’s what I’ve come up with at least. And the customers in the world right now do not care about the centralization. And so if your big thing in development is decentralization, most people don’t give a shit about it. People want their problem solved. And if decentralization solves that problem, they still don’t care how the problem is solved. They just want it solved. And and I think that’s where a lot of people miss out. And they don’t understand that. I think a lot of developing lead crypto product teams are out there. And they’re trying to basically want to educate you on why you should be mad and only like decentralization. And I’m like, that doesn’t make any sense because I don’t care. It’s like, you’re not going to get anywhere with that kind of methodology of marketing come up with a solution that makes sense for them and just make it work in the background.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, I mean, the problem I found that the furthest throughout it, particularly as an entrepreneur, and this is where you cross over into the VC world where you know, who’s crystal ball and what’s the what’s the time horizon of the crystal ball that you’re looking at in terms of market emergence and development, right? You have to sort of be at that point, which means and what’s the old saying that if Henry Ford would have been completely customer lead, that they would ask him for a faster horse or something to that particular effect. And I think that there’s, there’s an interesting balance in technology cycles. As I’ve studied in my whole career right now, I’ve been front and center watching the emergence of, you know, every technology literally since the mainframe, and seeing how it goes from the hobbyist. And, you know, really the guy that wrote the book on its Geoffrey Moore, I don’t know if you ever read Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore, but I don’t know. I know. I haven’t read it. It’s an amazing read. And if you’re into technology into technology markets and understanding technology businesses, it really is the Zay of the bell curve of the adoption cycle for the stuff. And where do you hit that inflection point, timing the money timing the product, being able to To hit the ground running, that’s our big gamble as entrepreneurs is like, I know all my ideas are good, right? I know that there’s market. It’s a function of living and surviving until you hit that inflection point, right? The cash burn is the cash burn. So, can you stay ahead of the cash burn? Don’t run out of money, right? And then if you’re right there, when the lightning is ready to strike, bam, you know, there comes the bolt. And you know, that’s where the it really is a lightning strike function for a unicorn billion dollar tech company.
Rob McNealy
Well, I think that’s where the entrepreneurs come in. And I and I really think that entrepreneurs are able to see all the pieces like that and but still be able to jump down into the details and the nitty gritty stuff. And I think timing is a hugely important and that’s one factor. We don’t control necessarily when something is ready. But to understand that timing and being able to mitigate the risk and say, Look, I you know, You’re Henry Ford example about trying to listen to, you know, customers and say they’ve come up with a better horse. Well, I think the reality is he’s not right or not wrong there. And I think this is why is that a good entrepreneur can see, okay, I see this new technology, but how to apply that technology to solving a problem. And then figuring out, again, goes back to market segmentation, and then strategy for you know, putting that solution in front of those people. You know, Steve Jobs was amazing at this, like he understood that there was this friction with music distribution, and technology could solve that. Right now, a lot of people went out sit there and complain, oh, a lot, I think in a modern example of music as people would like, I would like, you know, ice cream trucks to have music records going around streets. That would be maybe what people would say would be easier than thinking in terms of digitizing music and distributing music a different way. And I think you’re right. A good entrepreneur, though, will solve that and figure out that thing and tell people look, yeah, your idea might work. But I got a better solution for that problem. And that’s this way, this is the solution. And that’s why i think that i think crypto so far in a lot of ways has been held back by the fact that you haven’t you don’t really have enough entrepreneurs involved with these projects yet. And it’s changing. It’s changed a lot just in the last two years. But so much of it right now has been led by developers who are build it and they will come and I think that that’s changing and..
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Well the definitely don’t know securities laws because unfortunately fun funding and financing a project on a purely decentralized basis and how it was funded, it certainly run afoul of the regulatory regime and you know, that’s why we just filed a Delaware C Corp and sold equity. Like everybody else’s like guys see how it goes. We’ll get there.
Rob McNealy
Well, it wasn’t that complicated to sort out like when we launched right after the height of the bull run in 2018. Everybody told just do an Ico you can raise money. Money. And that’s why we looked at doing a token project is that we were interested ourselves personally, of doing a startup and we wanted to learn what the Ico process was about. That’s why we were looking at that. And then when we said, hey, let’s launch a project, and we were originally gonna do an Ico because I had an idea for another business. And I thought, wow, as an entrepreneur, the idea that you could raise a whole lot of money. You don’t have to go through VCs and you don’t give away equity as an entrepreneur like hell. Yeah, that’s amazing, right? But through our diligence process realized we realized pretty quick that that’s that’s got to be illegal. What I said, Where did I go? There’s no way we can do this. And we still had lawyers, I was coming and this is ridiculous. I’m not a lawyer, but I worked for a lot of lawyers and my day job. And I was talking to lawyers and like I tell utility took I go, where does the where does the SEC recognize the term utility token they don’t, that’s not even a term that’s just made up. And that’s why we launched Originally the way we did so we’re not a security but it’s interesting like pretty much every IC on the United States was in security. And you and I were talking a little bit about that online about, you know, the securities and the Icos and and where that is right now, what do you think’s going to happen with the Ico world? I mean, going forward, it’s amazing idea that you can raise money this way. But I also think there’s a lot of problems with that, which.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
There really is, and I’ve been fairly prolific about my opinions. And, you know, it’s created a bit of a barrier between me and the traditional anarcho capitalist crypto guys, because they’re all about, you know, all the way up to and including, you know, disrupting government. You know, they see government as an quote unquote, intermediary, I don’t know that I agree with them. And I don’t want to go there necessarily in this conversation, but, you know, in terms of needing new laws that define things that don’t need be find is problematic. We don’t need To change securities laws, the United States of America already recognizes literally a jelly doughnut as an investment contract based on the way I sell it to you, if I promise you a rate of return, that if you buy this jelly doughnut from me today for 100 bucks and a week from now you can sell it for 1000 get in on it now. FOMO, right, that that, in that instance, created a de facto security that’s a problem for people out there on YouTube with you know, their unregistered broker dealer status of pimping a particular quote unquote, opportunity. Right. And that’s where the SEC very adamant and I agree with it, because when you remove particularly in finance, a certain amount of regulation, the bad actors immediately move in. Yes, he doesn’t care, right. The only thing they care about is protecting the actual individual from fraud and inflammation disparity is what creates fraud. And you know, that that’s the reason we have this robust set of rules that is transformed America’s financial market into probably the most stable equity market in the world, consistently over time. So a certain amount of that regulatory framework is certainly necessary based on case precedent and enforcement, which is driven largely by complaint, not because, you know, sec commissioners are sitting around like, hey, how do we screw with the little guys today? Right? I mean, it’s literally, it’s almost exclusively complaint driven. So I don’t know that we need to change it. And then when you look at the other side of the equation when it comes to regulatory crowdfunding, for example, that’s not been adopted since the title three jobs act of 2012. Right. I don’t even think that regulatory crowdfunding was raised a billion dollars combined since it was enacted. So.
Rob McNealy
I think My take is and having not been originally a securities guy, but when we launched two years ago, I took a deep dive and learned as much as I could about securities offerings and at the state level federal level. I took like a deep dive for six weeks and I felt very comfortable at that point of my own opinion that every Ico was illegal under US law at the time. And what I did, but I do think the the area of regulation that no one’s really talking about so much that I think actually is an impediment to adoption is the IRS treatment of cryptocurrencies as property. I think those regulations do not fit. Currently, I do believe that even if the IRS just decided to elect to treat cryptocurrency for instance, as a foreign currency I think would do a lot to speed up adoption. And I think because I think the the accounting, basically requirements that businesses and even individuals have to do What from the crypto side of things to actually use it as a buying, you know, something that’s being used for buying and selling goods and services? I believe the IRS is going to be the biggest part of it not the SEC rules.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah, I mean, right now we pay taxes if we make a profit because we bought, you know, a Beanie Baby at a garage sale and sold it on, you know, eBay for you know, profit margin. Right. Right. We’re supposed to report that as income. It gets really complicated when you get into high volume transactional stuff. And that’s that’s really what the technology enables that the current intermediary status of the market is not prepared to handle right when we change hands for equity ownership. I have a token, for example, that represents shares of stock. There’s no such thing as a bear stock certificate, right? I mean, we, we register our names and our contact information, the DTC handles, the transferor etc. It’s got to be done through a transfer agent. There’s, you know, a very well defined process and be in that’s just simply the validation part of the market right where that trust and those trust layers have had to be abstracted out and human powered process. Once again, this guy says that the sky is a true and valid owner of the stock and he’s truly in validly, you know, transferring it selling it to this other person will write it down and keep the third party record and how the blockchain can do that, right. I mean, but the law is not there yet to support that layer of automation, and it requires somebody to hold a license for whatever reason. It’s like I laugh about custody, you know, everybody argues about custody and custody of digital assets of like, you know, wonderful lights went out. There would be no custody, right? The blockchain has the custody so you banks can go away now, do you need a license to have this particular type of an account to hold something on behalf of somebody else? Because it’s the blend of the existing, you know, laws. I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. I get invited to lawyer conferences, but you know, it’s like this..
Rob McNealy
This, but I think that’s an interesting thing about the custody piece, right? Everybody’s like, Oh, you should just not your keys, not your crypto and the unforgiving nature, I think of crypto is also problem. And as I said, in our conference last, this last March, we hit we do an annual off chain conference, which is kind of a mix of crypto and prepping and preparedness and self defense and things like that. We’re doing the next one in February. And we talked, we talked a lot about this, because what you know, and I think it’s because the typical anarchist is broke, they don’t understand that, you know, if you take away banks, and third party, or third, you know, trusted parties that are holding your 401k funds and things like that. Now, what you’re, what you’re suggesting is people now have the equivalent of their life savings on a little device in their house. And now before you might have had a bank, supporting that with like armed guards and vaults and, you know, backup generators and all that and and now you’re saying the average person is in charge of all that stuff now to at their house. And man, that’s that’s just that’s a reach for me. I think that you know if crypto is going to be adopted, there absolutely needs to be, you know, third party custodians available, because I don’t think the average person can handle it and maybe I’m maybe I’m a jerk. But I just can’t imagine like, for instance, my Karen type mother, being able to handle like her social security, you know, on a blockchain and crypto and and I just don’t think that’s I don’t think it’s realistic to have that expectation that the average person can manage that at this point without like a big cultural and educational shift.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Now, I mean, it gets back to self sovereign identity, which you get a lot of people are working on that particular problem, that particular aspect of connecting to blockchain, right. How do I, how do I assert that the person who’s touching this device that’s conducting this transaction that’s going to be recorded on the blockchain? Because that’s really what I care about is how data gets To the blockchain, not what’s on the blockchain, right? So how do we assert and validate that this particular individual is actually who they say that they are? And so there’s a lot of that self sovereign trust, and how do we create those applications and identity verification? The problem that I see though, is that at scale, it gets pretty draconian pretty quick, because the real ultimate solution is, you know, binding your genome to hash value on a network something that scares the shit out of me.
Rob McNealy
Right? What could possibly could go wrong with that?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I saw the movie Gatica. I mean, I am I am clearly about bioethics. And, you know, this is where I, I think that we have to assert that’s true self sovereign part of the status. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that means in the future. I’m as equally excited for my kids as I am frightened for my kids. And that’s why I’m out for that’s why I’m trying to do what I do. At least with what I know how to With and, and, you know, hopefully we can push back against, you know, the the Karen’s of the world who want to enslave and entrap and, you know, and subjugate and and I don’t I’m not here to fight and argue over policy ever it’s just a function of, you know, can we create technology solutions to stupid human problems because we’re really only like a couple of levels above chimpanzees don’t crap at each other, you know, the trees.
Rob McNealy
I go like this, you know, I don’t you see this a lot in the crypto world and I think there’s a lot of I think there’s a lot of immaturity out there is that when people are like they cheerlead like China getting involved in embracing blockchain, I’m like, dude, you really don’t understand that a government like that embracing blockchain is going to be absolutely leverage to enslave those people. No, it’s not going to be it’s not going to be used to liberate the I mean, all right, that we got the government of Saudi Arabia, right. They’re still chopping people’s heads off publicly, right. I mean, I mean, Still, like Bronze Age kind of shit, and or like Dark Ages kind of stuff. And now you’re going to give them these tools that can, you know, I think could enslave.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah, and the dichotomy with this is that I firmly believe the next global reserve currency will be a programmable digital currency format. Right? You’re basically saying a government accepts the risk of however long of transporting value from point A to point B, using this particular, you know, normalizing thing, you know, whether that’s conch shells, whether that’s the United States dollar or whether that’s, you know, the digital renminbi and, and it’s going to it’s going to happen and it needs to happen because, you know, the, the idea that I can actually carry money in my QuickBooks account, for example, as my actual Treasury or my wallet, that I can just simply pay vendors by transmitting not dollars, but US dollar currency. It’s through a government settlement system. Right. And we know that the US, you know, the Federal Trade. So the Fed is actually working on this, but they claim that their platform is not going to be ready until 2025. So, and I forget the name of the system. I wrote about it in my newsletter a few weeks ago, but they’ve been working on it. But now we got China piloting the digital Yuan, in a couple of provinces. They’re ahead of us, right, from a nation state standpoint. We’re so far behind in the United States. It’s frightening based on where our reserve status of currency is going to go back to France, right. There’s they’re studying it now.
Rob McNealy
Well, I do believe that at some point, the US dollar will no longer be the reserve currency and what that how that plays out for the average American I don’t think it’s going to be positive, to be honest. But, I mean, that brings us into the next phase. Right? We I think you and I both agree that technology is useful, but it can be used for good or bad. I think it’s just it’s just like any tool, right? But just like guns, right guns can be used for events, or they can be used to commit crimes. That doesn’t mean that the tool is bad. It just means that it’s better to have more guns in the hands of good people than in the bad. And I think that’s where we kind of also says, you know, you and I are kind of overlap there politically. So recently, you’ve been leading a little campaign in Ohio, tell me about that.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Well, it’s really an accident. So I’ve got political campaign management experience. I’m a marketing guy, you know, how to, you know, organize things. And so it’s carried me in it a lot of interesting places throughout my career. And so I saw what was going on in particular Virginia, but then Kentucky and Pennsylvania and some other states. Around the, you know, this idea of red flag laws and, you know the the ability for the government to suspend your rights without due process and come in and confiscate anything that you own out of your home, particularly one that has been enumerated in the Constitution, United States of America and defended multiple times through multiple Supreme Court cases. And here, we’ve got people, you know, saying, nope, we’re going to come in and we’re going to take away your gun. And I guess that was really a wake up point for me to see how they’re scrambling in Virginia, for example, to solve the problem, and recognizing that when the argument or the claim that the conservatives don’t know how to organize, right, it’s true to a certain degree, right. And if you believe that all Government is local. And you look at the approach that Virginia is taking, you’ve got the states that are these counties in the state of Virginia that said, okay, based on our government structure, we have a way to push back at a local level, we can have our county pass a resolution that essentially D funds enforcement activities of infringing enforcement is what it’s called. That’s directed by the state. Now, I’m not a constitutional scholar by any stretch of the imagination. So I can’t get into the, you know, is this largely just a symbolic thing? You know, there are other things to take into consideration, consideration, I don’t know, but I know that when I go down to my polling precinct to vote on everything, it starts with local, right. I mean, I have local bond issues. I have local candidates that are being elected to county offices and we don’t have the kinds of networks and communication frameworks, particularly in the state of Ohio, to rapidly organize and coordinate across the state teams that are essentially decentralized, right? You’re talking about a decentralization. But how do you get teams of committed volunteers citizens to work in their county? We have 88 counties in Ohio. And how do we get them to coordinate and work together to also pass model resolutions around this particular second amendment issue of red flag laws? Not just for these things, but then also in the future when somebody comes along and says, oh, we’re going to take this other right. How do we organize and structure and construct our our response in particular, and it goes back if you do a little homework in the war for independence, how the colonial You know, the colonials, the in the individual colonies in the cities and the towns and the villages operated for nearly a decade leading up to the actual war, was they created a de facto shadow government coalition of people and they call it a, they call it a community, or I’m sorry, a committee of safety. So there was a committee, there were several iterations of committees, and it was just regular people, regular prominent citizens in the community, that operated in a fashion to be communicators, to network with each other, and then ultimately to take action at the local level when necessary. But then how do I coordinate around with the other folks? Right? And so it’s the same communication distribution model, right? It’s how do you decentralize a organizational structure and target a particular issue in the Case passing red flag model ordinance line or a model resolution language at the county level, and then leaving the framework and in place, and particularly the state of Ohio, we are a state that enjoys the opportunity to put a signature campaign initiative onto a statewide ballot to even modify our constitution as a state, but that requires all the draconian regulations that they put in front of us, you know, we have to gather so many signatures within a certain amount of time and, and have so many counties represented, etc, etc. So, so I started this little group on Sunday, literally five days ago, just a sort of, you know, trial balloon and I created a Facebook group, it’s private, it’s hidden. You have to know somebody so there’s a velvet rope. We don’t take all comers. You have to literally be invited, invited in, and it’s still this phenomenal chaos but we went from zero to like to Well, thousand members of this group in five days, just people blowing this thing up because it really is a hot issue. It’s a big thing.
Rob McNealy
And I think that’s something you definitely need to work on because that’s that’s amazing that people are that concerned. And here in Utah, we are seeing something very similar happening to getting a lot of the gun rights groups are getting out ahead of some of the RPO stuff that’s coming out of our own state legislature. And you would think a state like Utah, which is, you know, definitely conservative in nature. That gun control bills wouldn’t be something that you would come up but I think they’re later I was told that there’s going to be multiple gun control related bills coming on and state legislature at least coming out of committee that, you know, we’re going to have to face here. And I think that’s what’s going to happen. I mean, in this country, we definitely have multiple cultures in this country from the coast. in the Midwest and the mountain states, where literally, people are very anti gun have never seen a gun before, you know, they’ve never actually shot a gun or been around a gun. But they definitely want to tell the other states what they can and can’t do. And I think Unfortunately, that’s going to change because, you know, we are culturally very different. And I think in the future, and I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think in the future, if there’s a time of crisis where say, you know, maybe it’s an economic collapse, or the US dollar, you know, kind of tanks or whatever, I believe the United States will break up, because I think we’re too culturally different. Now. In many parts of the country, what do you think?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I mean, I don’t want to see my nation balkanized. Because what that means is, is that the power centers and the resource centers are all going to be concentrated in urban areas. And and I don’t want it to turn into Judge Dredd, right with the mega trop Ulises. And then wasteland in between. If that’s what happens then obviously if we’re in the wasteland in between we are far more suited to take care of ourselves and restore a certain amount of functional self governance and you know community alignment at the localized level. My town has literally my county seat is my town. Now I’m wedged between a couple of bigger bigger metros, but I live north of Cincinnati and my town has 8000 people in a county of like 45,000 right on the border of Ohio and Indiana. And I think that we can probably figure out how to put some seeds in the ground and work together to you know, restore a certain amount of community. But we are at risk we’ve lost a lot of mercantile ability. At the local level, we’ve lost a lot of trade skills that are going to be necessary in order to maintain standard of living and we’ve lost a lot of access to, you know, other knowledge resources. And I don’t want it to be a choice where if you don’t want to live in a mega trop list that you relegated to some sort of feudal, agrarian sort of surf Lord the keep kind of a scenario and I don’t know I just let’s work together Let’s all work together right now to keep these kinds of things from happening. You know, I,
Rob McNealy
I, you know, I agree with you and it’s kind of weird I live it because I even though I have an MBA, last June, I graduated from welding school full year and a half program or two full time school at night for a year and a half just to be a hobby welder, because I wanted to learn an actual skill. And I think that going forward, you know, we’re going to have to go back and be willing to learn things that maybe we forgot, and to be more self sufficient. And I think that’s kind of the ethos of the whole decentralization mantra, but Michael, we’re running out of time here. Yeah, man can people where can people find out more about you?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Well, um, so the company side is 10 x Ts one zero x ts.com. We’re pretty narrow. So it’s not very exciting. If you go there, we talked about, you know, like FinTech and reg tech, you know, enterprise stuff. And then of course, I’m on social at Michael Hiles on Twitter. Hit me up on LinkedIn on a professional basis. I’m around a pretty easy to find. I’ve enjoyed it. Great conversation, man. I love Love, love the discussion.
Rob McNealy
Absolutely. And you know what, I’m going to hold you to that because we’re going to have more of these in the future. But Michael, thank you so much con today.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Thanks, Rob. I appreciate it. See y’all
Rob McNealy
have a great day.