And I think this is another insight that's well I have been missing generally is
that bitcoin is software. It's not a form of money. It's just software
like any other software, and so you can write tools entirely in software to
address these business needs and also the needs of the merchants. So we have
a set of distributors that we're available basically all over the world now in one
hundred and ninety countries. This content is brought to you by Uphold, which
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learn more about Uphold, please visit the link in the description. Welcome to
the Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews with me.
Today's Akin Fernandez, who's the founder and CEO of s Teco. A Kin,
great to have you on. Thanks for having Mekin. I'm excited to
speak with you because you and the folks at s teco are doing something really
cool where you're helping to bring bitcoin to billions of people around the world,
many who don't have easy access to crypto exchanges and things along those lines.
But before we get to that, tell us about yourself, your background,
your professional background as well. Well. I'm originally from Brooklyn, New York,
believe it or not, and my professional background is mostly in software and
before that publishing needs to run a very infamous culture publishing company back in the
nineteen nineties, and then I moved into software, which is my actually true
passion. And then when bitcoin came along, I you know, took my
long term interest in what money is and how it actually works and then decided
to dedicate my full time and the rest of my career to bitcoin. So
that's that the long, the long version of that story. And do you
remember what was your first encounter with bitcoin? Did a friend tell you about
it? Did you see that in a forum? And you know, sometimes
people need to hear about it and see it a few times before it clicks
for them and they have their Aha moment. What was that journey like for
you? Well, I read about bitcoin from a forum, actually, somebody
mentioned this new thing called bitcoin, and I already have an interest in synthetic
money, and so when I read about this, this this so called bitcoin,
I was skeptical what most people are, but I had different reasons for
being skeptical because the problem that bitcoin was claiming to solve was a very hard
one in computer science, and so obviously I had to find out what this
bitcoin is all about. Having had a background in using BitTorrent and other types
of well, other attempts to solve this problem, I knew that if this
problem had actually been solved, a double spending problem and also the problem having
a single centralized server, that this could be something super important. So I
immediately downloaded the bitcoin client, which is a very familiar thing for anybody who
uses BitTorrent and things like that, and I started to use bitcoin. What
started to mine bitcoin actually myself on a single machine, and it appeared to
work exactly as described, and so I decided then, when I was already
a software developer working on an SMS project to stop working on an SMS project
and start working on bitcoin. And the first implementation I did with bitcoin was
to accept bitcoin payments for SMS credits. Now, back then this is abound
twenty twelve, nobody was using bitcoin like that for anything, but it was
a proof of concept. It proved to me that I could actually use the
bitcoin server to write an application. And then it occurred to me that there's
no easy way to get bitcoin. Back then, there was an exchange called
inter Sango, and you had to send a bank transferred to Amir Talki,
who ran it, and then three days later, after you've given it your
bitcoin address, you would receive bitcoin in your wallet. Now, three days
for something like this is just absurd, And because of my background, I
knew that there actually is a more easy way to do this transaction because bitcoin,
when you think about it as software and not as a kind of money,
it's exactly the same as top ups for SMS calls and GSM. So
by marrying these two these two ideas together, I came up with the idea
of as teco, where you can buy bitcoin in the same way that you
buy airtime, based all over the world. Most people in the world don't
have pay after pay in arrears, so the telefolk accounts they pay for this
to be a telephone service in advance through vouchers. This is true even in
twenty twenty four all over the world. So it's just an easy step for
me having this understanding and background to go from one thing to another and forming
the idea of as Teco. Then it was just a problem of writing the
software. So I have so many questions around that and to your point,
and I want to make sure the audience listening and viewing this that they understand.
You know, if they're in the United States, this is not necessarily
an issue for them, but there are billions of people in other countries.
It's not as easy to go log into a coinbase or cracking or whatever it
is and be able to buy an access bitcoin and even transact with it.
So your service and solution is critical to help them get exposure to the assets.
So let's say I'm in I don't know, some country in South America
right and I want to access bitcoin. Walk us through if you can,
to step by step process, and maybe I just have a flip phone right
to getting access to bitcoin. It's exactly the same as topping up your phone,
your flip phone. If you want to make calls to anybody on Earth.
You go to a point of sale. It could be a pharmacy or
a news agent or whatever it is, or even a wooden shack at the
side of the road that they have in places in the continent of Africa,
and then you pay that person ten dollars, five dollars or whatever it is
in the local currency, and then they give you a paper slip, and
that paper slip looks exactly like this. It looks exactly like this piece of
paper here with a QR code on it, and then you scan that QR
code with your phone or put in the sixteen digit code manually, and then
three seconds later you get that bitcoin topped up to your account in your bitcoin
walt and that can be Samurai wallet or wallet Satoshi or any bitcoin wallet where
you can be assigned and address that you can then put into a form and
that's it. It's as simple as that. There are no other steps,
and there don't need to be any other steps. The other steps that people
have to go through to get bitcoin in the first world are a product of
the misunderstanding and the miscategorization of bitcoin as money. As soon as you don't
think of it as money, but think of it as a kind of top
up or phone credit, then you can build a service based only on that
and remove all the complex and that's how you're going to reach billions of people.
Billions of people are not going to log into cracking, a service that
I love, by the way, Packing, or any of these other exchanges,
even if they could, even if they could pass the identity requirements,
which billions of people actually can't. Those are only tools, essentially for businesses
and for traders. They're not for the common man who just wants to get
something very very simple done, like sending money abroad or receiving money or that
kind of thing. It's all very simple for most people, and so you
wouldn't expect people to build a phone charger for themselves if they want to charge
their telephones, and that asking the ordinary consumer to go to an exchange to
buy bitcoin is a similar kind of thing. What we do is we bring
bitcoin into the consumer fold, where the consumer bitcoin company, and that means
we have to address people and serve them where they are and not pull them
into where we think they should be. We have to think of them as
the guiding like the north Star, and make sure that we serve them in
a way that's very very simple to understand, and we've actually proven it now
because our service is hugely, wildly popular. Now, you mentioned the different
wallets that could be any major bigcoin wallet, and as techo, I'm assuming
you're the one bridging the gap in the relationship with the pharmacy or the business
right to set them up to be able to do this. Is that correct,
that's right. We have a series of distributors that allow us to sell
our vouchers worldwide and output them to a common point of sale system, so
we don't have to actually write any software or do any bespoke integrations in order
for our vouchers to come out of those points of sale. And I think
this is another insight that's has been missing generally, is that bitcoin is software.
It's not a form of money. It's just software like any other software,
and so you can write tools entirely in software to address these business needs
and also the needs of the merchants. So we have a set of distributors
and we're available basically all over the world now in one hundred and ninety countries
through a different set of the distributors. And so when somebody in Venezuela or
something wants to sell one of our vouchers, they don't have to actually interact
with us. They use their existing relationships with distributors to sell other top up
products. To just add as Teco as one of the top up products that
are available only in our case, the top up product being delivered is bitcoin,
and bitcoin has a global reach, it has global utility, and so
it's not like a telephone top up that only worked inside one network. Bitcoin
works in the entire world. Is that the entire world were the network?
Yeah? Absolutely, And I love that structure and concept of how it's like
you said, software and you're integrating it into point of sale software and the
infrastructure that exists there. So it makes it easy, like there's not too
much heavy lifting there. I am curious about and you probably have this POV
dealing with different consumers globally. You know those who are let's say in a
country in Africa or South America, when they buy that big one, what
are they doing? Are they holding it? Are they viewing it as a
reserve asset, you know, something that keep the store of value or are
they sending it to people transacting? But what is the use case you're seeing
the most of Well, this is a very interesting question to make get it
quite a lot, and I think the best way to think about it is
to think about what is the use case for money? There is no single
answer for that. And bitcoin, because it's a money simulation as well as
being a communications network, you can pay for anything or use it for any
context and scenario where you're using money, And because money is half of all
transactions, it is something that's universal. And so as bitcoin grows. Right
now, there are a lot of speculators in bitcoin, and it's being used
for a small number in comparing in comparison to the number of uses that veil
is used for a small number of uses. But at its root, bitcoin
has the same utility as money. Now, for the people who are buying
as techo of vouchers, they're buying it for every conceivable purpose. What they're
doing when they buy these vouchers is if you have a lot of money,
you're using it for the storage and speculation utility. But as you go down
in the size of the voucher. The lower you get, the more it's
being used for spending. And as techo, we talk about the three use
cases of bitcoin, which is saving, spending, and sending, and so
those are the blanket that we used to describe how as technico vouchers are used.
And I think it's very useful to boil it down to those things because
actually that's what money is for, is for saving, spending or sending.
And as people certainly in the so called Third world, start to understand how
powerful bitcoin is, the sending aspect for them is probably going to be the
number one use case because most people in the world don't have a lot of
savings. Savings is a fun game for the rich, and so money still
has the same ut. But if you have a small amount of money,
you have to live day to day, you have to get things done,
and so saving is something that you can do almost as a luxury. But
bigcoin is obviously good for that, and anybody who started saving bitcoin five years
ago, judging by day prices, is a very happy person. Yeah.
Absolutely, Now can I, for example, if I have a friend,
and once again, in certain parts of the world and it's a developing country,
they're not able to get access to a crack in exchange and so forth.
Can I gift a voucher? Can I say, hey, I'm going
to send you one hundred dollars or something, and so that they can then
put it into the wall. Well, you know, let's say they haven't
fully sent set it up on their wallet and so forth. But I'm going
to get you the voucher and then you can then take care of the resk.
Can I do that? Absolutely one percent. Our vouchers, when they're
a piece of paper or if they're in the form of an image on the
screen, work exactly the same way. And people do give up away as
techo vouchers as gifts, and so that's absolutely perfectly possible and encouraged. Now,
you guys had got a found of excuse me, a funding round and
I believe Jack Dorsey participated. Can you tell us about that funding round and
how are you working with Jack and so forth. Well, Ja's been actually
very useful for us. He's with the lead in our seed round where we
raised six million dollars and this has allowed us to do a lot of the
things that we've been dreaming of for many years. First of all, refining
the user experience of our website. So now it's a world class, very
unique, unique to bitcoin user experience. And it's very important to have a
user experience that differentiates bitcoin from fintech. Fintech has a graphic design language that's
instantly recognizable as fintech, and I think that's a mistake if you're a bitcoin
company, because we don't want to be categorized, certainly in as Techo's case,
as another fintech. We are a different kind of company. We're a
bitcoin company, it's much less a fintech and more like a telecoms company.
So we need to have an interface in the public facing design that's not frightening,
that's not fintechy, that doesn't drive ordinary people away with all kinds of
symbols and languages in language that they don't understand. And so that investment that
that that round that we had has been very very useful for us, and
also it's allowed us to take on some world class employees for one of a
better description, including an eleven year Apple product product manager. It's not a
product ruct. He's the It escapes me because I'm in an interview, but
this guy is from Apple and he's absolutely wonderful and he has changed the way
we do things internally so that all of our systems are more prepared for the
deluge of users that have been coming, and so that's where that money is
being used. And we're very, very grateful to Jack for having the vision
of understanding that we're trying to do something that nobody else is really trying to
do, and that Bitcoin, in order for it to take over the entire
world, has to reach those people about two billion people who are unbanked and
everybody else, and the only way we can do that is by coming to
them with something that's of an apple quality in terms of the usability, the
language, and the framing of what bitcoin is. Because if it continues to
be framed as only an asset, only a speculative thing that only the rich
can be involved in, that it is never going to get anywhere and it's
not going to fulfill its promise. Are you planning to expand to other crypto
assets such as stable coins which like they tether, for example, which a
complimentary to Bitcoin that they're usually used as on and off rams for bitcoin,
or you know you're specifically sticking with Bitcoin for now, Hi, everyone part
in the interruption. I'm Tony Edward, the founder and host of the Thinking
Crypto podcast. I have a you favor to ask you. If you haven't
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great quality content to you. Thank you for your support, and I'll let
you get back to the content. Well, this is an inside a techo.
This is a very well inside bitcoin. This is a very controversial subject,
and why it's a controversial subject is down. It's time to what a
stable coin is now. Being a libertarian, I'm not averse to people experimenting
with software, experimenting with models, and doing whatever they think they can do
to serve the public and make a profit, and not against that at all.
But Bitcoin is conceved was conceived as a replacement for the feop system,
which teats people by design, and so what some people are doing is believing
that a stable coin which has backing by the US dollar is somehow complementary to
the Bitcoin. Stealing is not complementary to bitcoin. If you have a token
that has at its backing the US dollar, even if those dollars in that
tool are counted one for one under a strict audit, the value of the
dollar is still being debased by the Federal Reserve. And so what you're doing
is you're bringing these Federal Reserve dollars to millions of people in a pretty package,
a nifty looking package, in an app, when it's actually still stealing
from them. The nature of the dollar doesn't change because you've put it into
a different box. The nature the dollar is the problem. The fee up
problem is the problem, and that's what bitcoin has been given to us to
solve. So mixing these two things together is problematic. And also there's an
attitude of some people that the third world people are not smart enough to understand
bitcoin. They need dollars because it's something they understand it x y z Well
I tend not to look down on people like that. People in the so
called third world are more than capable of understanding bitcoin, understanding the proposition,
and just like everybody else, including people in the West, they're is a
small learning curve that has to be endured so that people can understand the proposition
of bitcoin. And it's the same for people in the third world as it
is for people in the first world. And I think twenty years from now,
when we're talking about bitcoin, maybe not me, but other people talking
about bitcoin, they're going to understand this is actually what happened. It took
time for people to understand the field problem. Nobody understood it when bitcoin was
released. But now when you can put away a tenth of a bitcoin in
your wallet and it's worth exactly the same, if not more, ten years
from now, saving all of a sudden becomes something that makes sense because now,
if you have any understanding of money, that the devaluation of the dollars
through the federals that are printing and everything else makes your savings lose value over
time by design. And so this theft, which is exactly what it is,
is intolerable to anybody who understands what's going on, especially you have a
huge amount of money, and so you need a tool to save your money
in where the supply cannot be debased on demand. And that's what bigcoin gives
to everybody for sure as well as rich. So you know, you mentioned
the educational aspect, and that's, like you said, true for everybody,
whether you're in the first world country or a third world country, everybody has
to go through that learning experience. What initiatives or campaigns do you have going
on to help educate folks and to learn about this technology. And you know,
and many of them may not understand blockchain initially like all of us,
but you know, to understand how the blockchain works and the underlying technology and
a proof of work concept and all these great principles. A big point,
how do you how does the educational aspect come into play? Well, this
is once again it's a very interesting topic and there certainly is some value you
knowunderstanding the field problem, which Savadine has done very very well with his book
The Upstandards. It's change the minds of many, many people. But at
the same time, if we think about the number of people that have to
be brought on board onto bitcoin, which measures in the billions, it is
not sensible. It's not rational to expect all of those people to understand how
the tools that they use work. Nobody expects anybody who the billions of people
who use SSL in a browser to understand how SSL works, or how SMS
works, or how iOS or Android works. They just need to be given
to them something that actually does work, that's understandable in a way that if
I press this button here, my cousin Yinka in Jos will receive the equivalent
of one hundred dollars and then he can spend that wherever he wants. That's
all they need to understand. So this idea of bitcoin education, whilst it's
very very useful and sometimes even entertaining, it's not going to help us reach
a billion people. We've got to go to people with a proposition that doesn't
require training. And of course Apple do this absolutely brilliantly. It's why their
MacBook pros don't get shipped with an instruction book, because you open it and
it teaches you by its operation how to use it. And so what we
need is actually consumer grade wallets like wallets Toshi, like Breeze, like Samurai
Wallet, that when you open them up, you get the experience of bitcoin
out of the box. And so I'll give you a good example of how
to be anti consumer. There's some wallets that used to do this where they
built anymore I'm not going to take responsibility that a lord i'd like to.
They used to demand that a user would write down their mnemonic and then prove
that they'd written it down before they would allow you to receive your first transaction
in bitcoin. Now, this might appear on the surface to be an attempt
to take care of the user so that they don't if their wallet goes down
with their phone gets tole they can recover their bitcoin. But actually what it
does it presents a barrier to the ordinary person, and it also makes them
very frightened about this strange thing called bitcoin, which actually is not so dangerous
and doesn't require this kind of stuff. So the sensible people like Walla Satoshi
have removed that requirement entirely and it just works straight out of the box.
As soon as you download it and run it for the first time, you're
ready to receive bitcoin. And so education is important, but it has to
be done in the appropriate way. It doesn't make sense to ask ordinary people
dyo or do your research, read a whole bunch of books about it,
understand economics, understand the blockchain and all this business, because first of all,
nobody cares, and secondly, to really understand these things. You have
to have a high degree of training one way or another in software, and
so if bigcoins to become a consumer service all over the world, you've got
to use the same methodology that Apple, Samsung and all these other companies use
to get their complicated tools and services into the hands of people. And that's
by removing the complexity and giving people something that just works out of the box.
For sure. What else is on your roadmap for twenty twenty four,
Well, on twenty twenty four, we have some very very secret integrations coming
up. Well they're very secret, and they're very interesting, and they're going
to put us into put us on the global stage. That's all I can
say about it. And this is going to transform how not only people get
a hold of bitcoin, but it's going to transform how people think about bitcoin.
I think that those two problems are closely related and they can be solved
both at the same time. We have to get the simple proposition and essentially
the truth about bitcoin in front of as many people as possible. So in
our Brokemac for this year, that's going to be the case. Everybody's going
to be very surprised about how bitcoin actually can work if you take away the
complexity and think about it correctly. Many people when they use as Teco for
the first time, whether they've used other services or not, they say,
why isn't everything this easy? Well, it's not that easy because the people
who designed those services misconstrued bitcoin. We didn't make that mistake, and so
it's going to be a flood, a global flood of people who understand bitcoin
and who now think about it the way that we think about it, which
we obviously think is the correct way. And so that's the most important thing
in our roadmap exponential growth. And I wouldn't say proselytizing, but spreading the
message of how simple bitcoin can be, what it can actually be used for
for the vast majority of people on Earth, and things like that, And
I think it's very exciting. That's awesome. Now you had brought up just
a couple of questions ago. You know, the debatement of fiat currency,
and this is a problem we see globally, right, this is the system
we live on, the fiatic debt based system, and they continue to print
us into oblivion. Do you think though, bitcoin will be adopted by different
countries and central banks where it could help solve this currency problem because the debt
can keep going on forever. At some point they're going to have to do
some sort of reset or change this system. But is bitcoin part of the
solution. Well, they can choose to accept Bitcoin's offer or not. And
if they choose not to accept bitcoins offer, that means they're going to have
to do, as you say, a reset and relaunch another fiat with a
smaller amount of well a small amount of coins in circulation, of notes in
circulation, and then the cycle will start again, and it'll be another fifty
Actually, the average life of the field currencies over the thorieth century was sixteen
years. Another of you knew that, But so it'll be another set of
pushing the problem back into the future. Elf, what Kaine said, it
doesn't matter that we do this because in the end we're all dead. Well,
anybody who have children knows that your children are going to inherit this system,
whether it's the Euro or the dollar, and so thinking about the future
means that you don't want to have the currency to go kaboom with all your
savings that just evaporated. So these countries are going to have to choose between
the free offer of bitcoin, which brings with it a whole bunch of disciplines
or fear. And there are a couple of countries now that the most famous
were being the El Salvador, which has made bitcoin legal tender, which is
a sage move. And now with the bitcoin price going through the ceiling as
we predict it's going to happen, they're going to benefit tremendously from using bitcoin
as legal tender, and then there'll be many other side effects of that.
If they allow businesses to come into Salvador and to incorporate and do business without
interference, then that country could be the global center of all bitcoin businesses.
And since they'll be taxed in El Salvador instead of New York, then El
Salvador will read the benefits of all of that. Just imagine all the world's
money as bitcoin flowing through businesses in El Salvador. They'll be able to pave
the roads with gold there if they do this. Obviously, there's just like
moving away from Fiat, there's a price for governments in doing this kind of
thing. They're going to have to relinquish the idea that they have to control
everything. And if they're able to do that, the benefits will come.
It's like the Lafe for curve. Actually, if you tax less, it's
an optimum amount of regulation, just as an optimum amount of taxation, beyond
which if you tax more, the returns are increasingly diminished. So they have
to get the regulation right. They can't regulate everything. And if they get
that right, everybody will flood to El Salvador wherever it is and incorporate there,
and the benefits compare and contrast with New York with its bit license,
with the most un American anti just absolutely just unconstitutionalist, appalling, and of
course nobody wants to incorporate in New York. They're all fleeing from New York.
And what benefits are going to have to the United States and to New
York. It's going to be very negative. And so that's the complete situation.
These countries will move to bitcoin, but they have to understand that it
means giving up something. It means giving up as the control, it means
giving up the control over the supply of money, which they've been using to
do all kinds of vanity projects, distribute money money amongst themselves and their friends,
and that has to go away. They're going to have to find some
other way to have a grift, but that's another story. But if they
do that, everybody's going to benefit, and in fact, they might just
have to do it by default, because if everybody on Earth with the celluar
telephone can receive bitcoin, that means it will become the de facto money of
the entire world, and people will stop using the FiOS because it's obviously bad
for them since the value is going down. And then we'll have a new
kind of money all over the world, which nobody actually put in place through
law, but economics and the market put it in place. And once that
happens, just like the end to end conscription of WhatsApp and things like that,
once that happens, it's irretical. It cannot be removed, and you'll
find, just like with WhatsApp, these governments and their employees like WhatsApp because
they know it's private, and they're just the same as everybody else. They
want privacy, they want sound money. It's a question with them of whether
they can make that money quickly or over time, and so that giving them
that choice I think is probably not a good idea, which is what bitcoins
should spread, just like what's happened all the other things, and BitTorrent without
any party permission, without asking anybody should be or should we not do that's
they should It should just happen, and then bitcoins everywhere, and then this
is the force of nature, right. And what we are seeing though,
is that these governments are using the underlying technology of bigcoins, underlying technology of
blockchain and trying to build what's called central bank digital currency CBDCs and tokenizing fiach
currencies. Now I'm concerned about that. I understand what they're trying to do,
but a lot of people are worried about privacy and control, you know,
how they will control people's money and it'll probably, I don't know if
it's going to make the fiat currency problem even worse. Right, what are
your thoughts on that? Absolutely? Well, And first of all, there's
the problem here is that they using the term blockchain technology. These cdbcs are
not really anything to do with bitcoin at all. Technically, they're just essentially
databases. And these databases be under total control of the Federal Reserve or whoever
it is. And by the way, Ted Cruz and some others have sponsored
a bill banning these things for the United States, which is a very good
thing. So what the what they're doing is they're trying to bring in a
system where they have absolute control over everyone's money. Every single wart that you
use under these CDPC systems will be known by the state. They'll be able
to cut off your money and your ability to use it whenever they like.
And even worse, they'll be able to stop you from buying, say a
cant of bud Light when you want to, because you'll have only a certain
amount of money a month that's allowable to be spent on things that you like,
like bud so And along with this will have to come some kind of
national idea register so that when you go and spend this money, they know
who it is who's spending the money. On two sides. So this is
a super super anti American idea. It's a very bad idea. It's turning
FIAT into not just a way to steal money from the American people, but
to steal their freedom as well as their money. And the way to beat
these cdbcs first of all, for people like Ted Cruz and the Holy and
all these people to bring in legislation forbidding the Federal Reserve from launching such a
monstrosity, and also the people who are sovereigns in America switching to a form
of money, a form of synthetic money that cannot be controlled by any state,
not just the American state, and that's bitcoin. And so anybody who's
really against this CDBC abomination from coming to pass is spreading Bitcoin like their lives
dependent on it, and actually it does. So that's actually the answer,
not worrying about cdbc's, but spreading bitcoin through tools and services that anybody can
use instantaneously once. Let's just think about it this way. If every single
person in the United States had a copy of wallet Asatoshi, that's three hundred
and forty million people. If they all had watch, they were all using
bitcoin, it'll be much harder to roll out a CDBC with all the other
opposing courses. Also, it'd be much harder because everybody's on bitcoin, just
like everybody's on WhatsApp. You can't ban WhatsApp, you can't ban signal now
because so many people are using it. That's the way to kill the cdbc's.
And of course that Carstairs character says explicitly that they want to have the
fine grain control over every dollar that's spent. No American should be for that
and think that he should be called an American. I'm sorry, that's just
the way it is. Yeah, for sure. Now we've got bitcoin getting
a adopted by financial institutions with the launch of the Bitcoin's POTTYTF. Love to
get your thoughts on that and how what impact do you think that's going to
have on the adoption of bitcoin. I think, well, it's interesting if
we think of bitcoin in the same way that we think about email and the
and the web. The web was adopted first by you know, your geeks
and software developers and people like that, and then it grew that way and
there's only much later that the big corporates got onto the Internet that had their
own websites and their own web services and even email. And so this ETF
is very good symbolically because what it does is it shows that these institutions that
previously were with a classic institution which would previously very skeptical about bitcoin, are
now warm have now warmed up to it totally. They're hot for it now.
That's something they've warmed up for it and they're they're making a fortune on
bitcoin, and they've proved also that it is legitimate. Nobody says now that
bitcoin isn't legitimate. It's only for these bad use cases. And I think
that's the most important effect that these ETFs are imposing on the West. These
ETFs are only for a small number of accredited investors. It's not for everybody,
and so this is more symbolic than it is practical. And in so
far as it's driving up the price at bitcoin, that's also good because what
it's going to do is tract more people into bitcoin at the lower levels who
are running their own wallets, buying us techo vouchers to fill them up,
and that kind of thing. So all in all, I think it's a
good thing. I think it's a very positive thing, and it may lead
eventually to the United States government actually recognizing bitcoin in some legal form, just
like El Salvador does. Was probably a light version of that, and that
will further erase people's doubts about it, make it easier for bitcoin startups to
raise money when it comes to any service that handles it, and means it
will mean that nobody's laughing at bitcoin anymore. For many years, people will
laugh at it and market and even though it's been sound all the way through
from the beginning, Bitcoin hasn't changed. It's the people who have changed.
I think this ETF is a key moment in people changing their minds about bitcoin.
It's now okay to like bitcoin, it's now okay to put your money
in bitcoin because the ETFs are here, and so the landscape has changed,
and I think it's a very good thing. Yeah, you know, you
brought up a great point that I didn't think about, and that is these
big institutions, which are well known. People are familiar with the brands and
so forth, your fidelities, your black Rocks, they building these bitcoin products.
It's hard for the government to go fight against them because, look,
let's be honest, the political system. The black Rock and Fidelity make campaign
donations of politicians and influence the lawmakers. So to your point, if the
US federal government could could pivot and embrace it and change laws because the biggest
institutions in the world, especially in the United States, are adopting it,
that's exactly right. And also on an individual level, that senators and congressmen
are all investing in bitcoin. More or less in secret, although it's not
secret they are now. And I've always said this that the journalists and the
politicians must become peers in the network in some capacity when it's not in their
interest for the bitcoin price to cook down when they're invested in it, when
they're going to lose personally if anybody disparages bitcoin. They're going to make sure
that if somebody is found arging bitcoin in any journal, counter articles will be
released saying this is not since bitcoin is absolutely sound, because they're going to
benefit from it personally. No government official is going to put restrictions on bitcoin
that will hamper its growth because if bitcoin grows into the market is accepted by
everybody, their value of their investment is going to go up. So they're
incentivized to do their jobs properly and not get involved with the commerce of ordinary
American people. So that's another reason why these ETFs are a very good thing.
It gives exposure to bitcoin to people who would not normally get exposure.
And you're not going to get Congress banness, senators downloading a wallet and then
you know, getting onto coin based and stuff. They're too busy to do
that kind of stuff. But their account managers can get exposure to bitcoin through
these ETFs, and then all of a sudden, they're incentivized. They're incent
advised in theory and in fact, and they're going to do everything they can
to make those investments go up. And in the case of bitcoin, that
means backing off. Let the market grow exponentially and naturally, just as the
Internet grew exponentially naturally, and then they'll benefit. That has to happen.
Yeah, absolutely, I want to get your thoughts and we're running up in
time. But the Bigcoin Lightening Network, there are many different apps and folks
working on the Lightning Network to improve the transactibility, so to speak of bigcoin,
to make things faster and so forth. What are your thoughts on on
the Lightning network and the development's happening there well. As Teco started as an
on chain only company, is selling a vouchers that were redealable on chain,
and we knew that, as everybody else knows who's will gain bitcoin, that
the fees have to go up if the Bitcoin network grows and adoption continues,
and we've seen that recently with the cooin fees for one transaction going up to
like twenty five dollars, and so it's not feasible for somebody who needs ten
dollars a bitcoin to pay a twenty five dollars transaction fee. And so the
idea of Lightning is a godsend. It's an absolutely wonderful thing. It not
only removes the impediment and the problem of the Bitcoin fees, but it's also
super fast. It's super fast. You can send very very very small amounts
of bitcoin, just as you could in the original, super early days of
bitcoin when the fees were fantastically low. The Lightning network is essentially given Bitcoin
back to itself. It's the promise of Bitcoin fulfilled through this new layer.
Layer one. That was a layer two, it's layer two, and it's
been an absolutely wonderful invention. I think it is absolutely fantastic, and Lightning
Labs is one of the most important companies ever to start in bitcoin, and
we're very grateful to them for doing this super innovative, super difficult, actually
dangerous work and they've pulled it off. They've pulled it off. I think
it's fair to say that the Lightning Labs saved Bitcoin. That certainly saved the
use case of small amounts of bitcoin going to and fro all over the world,
and in our concept, in our conception and our framing of bitcoin,
that's an absolute prerequisite to world domination. And so you know, thanks a
lot, Elizabeth Dark And yeah, for sure. Now I've got some wrap
up questions here for you. First, because the metaverse is being created,
if you could create your own metaverse, will the theme be the theme for
our own metaverse? Well, yeah, if we If I could start my
own metaverse, the theme and all the rules would come from one book,
which is Murray Rothbard's for a New liber Team, and all the rules in
that metaphorse will be based on the libertarian principles of non aggression. And I
think that would be a very very interesting place to to exist, although in
a digital place you can't really aggress against people in real life, but just
as an idea, as a way of training people to understand libertarianism, I
think that would be very very cool. Mm hmmm. And you got some
rapid fire questions here for you. Favorite food, my favorite food, any
kind of hate cuisine, favorite musician or band. I'm partial to musicians.
I'm partial to the group Wire. I think that a wonderful group and I
also like any any recording by Gustav b and Heart of box Work, which
are always superb. Favorite movie, uh had a guess out of the Box
two thousand and one Space Obnestly it's quite a good one for sure, back
too, Yeah, one of my favorite favorite book. Favorite book, what
I would be the King James Bible. And when you're not working at Asteco,
what are you doing for fun? I fly Wado Control models, gliders
actually the Discus Gliders discussed launch gliders and what else. Ride a bicycle around,
try and keep thick because most of the time I've sat down in the
office the writing software barking over this this camera, and so I try and
get out and do some cycling so I stay fit. Awesome. Yeah,
that's great man. Again, pleasure chatting with you, and I'm excited to
see future updates around as DECO and I absolutely believe in the mission that you're
doing and support you as much as you can. And folks, I'll have
links to the website and so forth, so you can go check out at
steco's website. Again, Like I said, pleasure, Thank you so much
for joining me. Thanks for having me. Tony