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I think it's important to understand the long-term implications of cryptocurrency, whether it's a way to change or get countries to think about how the central bank has to figure out an alternative way for current monetary systems; a way to develop a less politically affected monetary system. Thus, I think the way that cryptocurrency is being perceived around the world is also a reflection of how societies are being perceived. Meaning, every country has its own narrative, and due to their differences in their narratives, they are treating cryptocurrencies and blockchains differently.

I have this idea that you design society the way you tax it. You determine the destiny of a society by the way that you tax it; how prosperous or poor the people will be, how free or subordinated people will be, etc. It's not just the amount but also the way that you tax the people. For example, today we rely very heavily on taxing labor even though we didn't always tax labor so much. I think there's a relationship between taxation and freedom. A slave owns none of his own labor like someone in a totalitarian state, but someone in an anarchic state with no government has 100% ownership of his own body and labor. At the moment where 40~50%of our money goes on taxes, so we own about 50~60% of ourselves. This needs to be a lower number.

The last book was called The Biggest Crash of All Times, but the new book is called The Biggest Chance of All Times because every crisis is also a chance. I wanted to give people some perspective and positive things for the future to look forward to. I started thinking about the positive things in this COVID-19 crisis, like what people can achieve, and where the possibilities and opportunities lie in this crisis. I think it is the biggest chance in our lifetime to invest during this crisis because our current monetary system is wholly disordered, and our political system is completely broken. Politicians don’t seem to have any other decisions than to put people in lockdowns. Everything has become corrupt and our system is not human anymore.

Well, technology is deflationary. Technology provides so much efficiency that it creates deflation. If you look at your cellphone or just about anything technology-driven that you use, you get more for less on an exponential scale. That technology is moving into every single part of our world. So, you would expect prices to be falling as a natural by-product of that while saving our time. We should be getting more for less and have our time expanding, but it doesn't feel like that's happening.

IntoTheBlock (ITB) is the result of a macro thesis formulated by our founder and CEO Jesus Rodriguez. Jesus has a long career in technology and finance. Having been a distinguished engineer at Microsoft and later built quant systems for major hedge funds on Wall Street, he has a deep understanding of the intersection of financial markets and tech. His main thesis was (and still is) that crypto products should be intelligent-first products, that is, powered by artificial intelligence. If traditional financial markets are evolving towards AI-first products, why shouldn’t crypto, the first natively digital asset class, do the same?

All of us were born into a society that has its norms around how you express value. The final distillation of those norms is our currency. As we grow up, we're conditioned to assess the relative price of things like for example a gallon of milk, groceries, a car, a home, etc. in our native currency. We take that expression or conditioning for granted and don't think that there's anything else to it until occasionally we get a glimpse of it when we go to another country. When you spend some time there, you struggle to understand whether what you're paying for is really worth it because the value proposition isn’t intuitively clear. And, it's that uncomfortableness that offers a little glimpse into what I think is really going on. I wasn't as interested in Bitcoin because I didn't see it as relevant for me being in the United States as we have a very mature payment structure. Those problems are largely solved for us, so we don't often find a need for entering into another money network. It wasn’t until much later that I started exploring the monetary system that it became clear what the latest narrative of Bitcoin was attempting to solve for, namely the unaccountability of central banking on our collective purchasing power.

A lot of young people think this FinTech is very revolutionary, but this revolution is just a part of an ongoing evolution in database management systems. When I first went to Italy with my mother in 1971, I was 10 years old. I remember before we went on this trip from Vancouver to Italy, we had to get a telephone book and look for Thomas Cook or American Express (offices). We needed to obtain a traveler’s cheque to be able to exchange Canadian dollars for Italian Lira.

I know a lot about the recent Robinhood incident. I have been on Wall Street for 33 years, so one of the first things I learned at Goldman Sachs is how trades settle, what the margin requirements are for, etc. There is a regulatory body called the DTC, Depository Trust Corporation, which handles the flow of trading and the clearing of trades for the international marketplace, but specifically Wall Street. When trades were going on in GameStop around the last week of January 2021, this was what happened: let’s say I buy the stock for 50 dollars, and after a while, the stock price goes to 75 dollars, so I ask Robinhood for a margin to buy more stock with it. Then the stock price goes up even more, and I buy even more stock with that margin, and you could be in a situation where Robinhood is lending 250 dollars per share on GameStop.

I started by giving a presentation to synagogues, youth groups and college students called Bitcoin and Judaism. In a presentation session, I go through the Jewish Bible, the Torah, and talk about what the religious, legal, ethical perspectives of money are, and connect that to how bitcoin can be the next step for further evolution. In the Bible, animals, silver, gold, jewelry, etc. are described as different forms of money at a certain period in ancient history. In recent years, this has developed as fiat currency, and now is further developing again with digital currencies. Everybody has a general idea of what they think money is, but most haven't put it all together: they don't know why credit cards are money.