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Everybody in the world is taught to spell the word “Hope” if they learn English. Thus, the value of a domain is a function of which language it's in. The language that has most business on is English, and the most traffic on the internet is also in English with the dotcom domains. If you own a word that is easy to spell and remember with positive connotations, like Apple, Amazon, etc., it will be very useful. If you own such a word, you can put a business on it. The logic of this is if a billion people see the name and they can remember and spell it, surely, they will be able to type it. If I have a company name that has a difficult name with no positive connotation, people will have a harder time remembering it. Thus, you much rather have it called something simple like “hope” or “wisdom”.

I think that 99.9 % of the people on the planet should be investing. When investing, one should not think about their investment constantly. Investments should be checked a couple of times every year to make sure if re-balancing is needed or not. Investors have become insanely wealthy since the beginning of markets. That is how people accumulate wealth; the way to get rich is through putting away money early. In other words, put away the money you do not need when young, and do not touch it until the last possible moment. I only trade with about only 15 % of my portfolio. I have 70% in investments, 15 % in cash, and 15 % in trading. I think some of the best traders in the world are probably trading with only a small part of their total capital. Nobody should trade with their entire portfolio on a day-to-day basis. If you do, you are guaranteed to lose all your money.

Digital currency in the general sense, cryptocurrency in the general sense, does not solve the problem of inflation and hidden taxes in that way. Bitcoin, in a large way, makes it more predictable, in that it has a predictable low rate of inflation, which is constantly decreasing. But as you say, the problem when we talk about everybody moving to digital currencies, we know the bitcoin network doesn't support throughput. Unfortunately, the bitcoin network, as it exists, does not provide the privacy and protections really necessary for these kinds of transactions at scale.

The single most important feature of Bitcoin is the fact that it is thermodynamically sound. Bitcoin is a closed thermodynamic system with no more than 21 million coins. You can't add or remove coins other than losing them. It's a deflationary system, and all you can do is add energy to it or take energy away from it. So, you can either heat it or cool it down. What is compelling about Bitcoin is that it is the first sound monetary network invented in the history of the world. I view it as a monetary energy network that can collect, store, and channel monetary energy and space over time without power loss. Energy means you could put money in it and hold it for a decade or 100 years. Over space means it's 1:1000 to 1:10 000 of the energy required to move gold or other sources of monetary energy. Therefore, it is a highly efficient monetary network. That's what's compelling.

In the game industry, you have 3 traditional business models for monetization strategy developers use to drive revenue. One is you purchase the full game right away; you buy a game in a box or online and download it to play it without any additional purchase. Thus, you get the full game straight away. That used to be console games you would buy for around 60 dollars. You would play it, finish it, and that was it.

Working for a media platform in the Crypto space has been an interesting experience. I have been with Bitcoin Magazine for 5 years, and we have had some exciting years so far. We have seen a couple of price surges, all the scaling wars, and many phases more. Now, I have also drifted into the role of a historian, becoming a little bit of a Bitcoin historian. Thus, I would say I have changed and grown as a person and a writer. It's nice that I can drift into different types of areas. In that sense, the Bitcoin Magazine team has given me a lot of freedom to follow and write about my interests.

Hacking has become a trend online. There are a lot of forums and platforms, especially a very big Russian forum where you can do a course on how to hack an individual. Thus, a lot of 14~15-year-old children do those courses, and after a couple of months, they start hacking and attacking people online. Unfortunately, it is reality. Today, you can find anything on the internet. In the Russian language, such online sites and such promotions are not banned. There are ways to ban such websites, but no one is doing anything about it. Then authorities do not consider such issues, similar incidents will happen in all countries around the world.

NFT, Non-Fungible Token, is a token standard. The main feature of an NFT is that it has a unique ID. If you mint an NFT, you will have a unique ID for a given set of data. You will be able to see specifically who is using the specific token, and where it is. If I sent it to you, you will also be able to track that it has been transferred. Thus, the unique ID of the NFT is why it is interesting for art and the art world. NFT’s provide provenance, meaning it makes it possible to track its history. You can see who has ever owned the art piece, when it was created, is it the real piece or not, etc. By confirming that, we can reduce the amount of forgery which is pretty prevalent in art.

Historically, there has been currency devaluation where governments have printed a massive amount of money, or they have a prolonged period of interest rates being below the inflation rate. So, they slowly chip away your wealth over time. In those periods, those scarcer assets tend to do very well. Thus, whether it is gold, silver, equities. real estate or in this case Bitcoin, I think going back to the history of fiat devaluation and why they tend to happen, why they don’t happen in some periods but do in other time frames is important.

I started on Wall Street in the 1980s as a stockbroker. I was in Los Angeles in the 1990s, and I invented a technology for digital scarcity as part of a currency that I invented for an exchange I launched. The exchange was for trading mediate derivatives that I also invented as part of what became known as the prediction market industry. So, I did all that in the 1990s. Then, we sold out to a bank in 2001, and later I started Bitcoin in 2011 at a dollar, and we have been talking about it now for almost 11 years. I saw it as a more perfect technological solution for digital scarcity.

Back in 2011, Strule Sunde, who is like a legend in the crypto community in Norway, started to sell bitcoin through local bitcoins and his homepage and communicated with the buyers through IRC chats. IRC's are the old chatting apps, and he has been serving Norway with bitcoin liquidity, exchanging between Norwegian Krone and BTC ever since. He has been in a big court case, suing Nordea, which is the biggest bank in Norden, for shutting down his account only because he was dealing with bitcoin. So, he was helping a lot of people get on board with it. Many people that were tech-enthusiasts also started to mine as soon as they read about it on e.g. Reddit. Many of them tested out some mining strategies using a GPU, or just an ordinary CPU on their computers.

I stumbled upon Bitcoin 6 years ago. I had heard about it, and even bought and sold a little bit, but I didn’t really understand it. At that time, I used to work in the advertising industry in London. I decided to take a year off because I needed some time for myself. I had spent my whole life working, and needed a break. That was 3 years ago, and during that time how I fell into the rabbit hole and got serious about it. Besides being a podcaster today, I have a very ordinary life as a single dad with two kids, and most of my time is spent looking after them. I do school-runs, get their lunch ready, iron their school clothes, and so on. We are big Liverpool fans, so the three of us usually watch football together. I also like horrible heavy metal, like the worst screaming kind that nobody likes.

The first thing you need to understand about the Russian crypto community is that it is not only Russia. When we refer to the Russian crypto community, we are talking about Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, which are the main countries, as well as other Russian speaking regions like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. These countries have a lot of historical connections. Sometimes, a reference to “Similarity” may harm or trigger some people due to political reasons. So, the Russian crypto community includes the countries that in any way are affected or involved with Russian culture.