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India is a nation of youngsters, and we are probably one of the youngest Nations. Comparing the culture of Indian job hunting to that of present-day Japan, many new university graduates are in search of a job at various companies and try to create a stable life. In contrast, young Indians prefer to become entrepreneurs. They prefer to make a living by themselves and are more willing to take risks and take a chance of creating a business of their own, even if it is a small company. The Japanese perspective of becoming stable by finding a job at a company was the scenario in which I grew up back in the day.

In Switzerland, the government was always open-minded. In 2018, president Johann Schneider-Amman publicly stated that Switzerland should be a crypto nation. Governments are big bodies that take time for things to get done, but it moves here and that is a good thing.When I joined, Prof. Dr. Georges Grivas was the one who initiated the first course within Switzerland. He has a great recognition of technologies that are becoming popular and relevant for the future. He decided to implement it rather early, and therefore was the first one. It was one of my major decision to join this university even though I had the opportunity to join many others. However,The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts was the first to implement blockchain and Crypto courses and is the longest-running university with such programs.

Before the DCI, there was a foundation named the Bitcoin Foundation that was funding development of Bitcoin core. However, it fell apart, but many of the people from the Bitcoin Foundation such as Joi Ito, Jeremy Rubin, and many others decided to make a place that would fund the development of Bitcoin technology. Thus, the DCI was born from there. A little while after that, Neha Narula got her Ph.D. at MIT and when she finished, she joined the DCI. The main mission initially was to fund Bitcoin developers, but after a while that mission became bigger and also became more integrated with MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). By the time I started there, they were working with students as well. We have something called the UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program) different undergraduate students come and do research projects with us, and they would help out with research software.

I went out in public about Bitcoin at the end of 2016. I wrote a long article for a big German magazine. This is a magazine where I always give a prediction about the economy for the following year. So, at the end of 2016, I predicted the following year would be the year of Bitcoin, and you all have to invest! That was the first time I said it to the public. This was not to our customers, because we already introduced Bitcoin to our customers and invested in it since 2013.

There are two sides to the crypto industry in Bulgaria. On one side when I came back to Bulgaria from Japan, I was positively surprised by the vibrant crypto culture existing in Bulgaria. I was also very happy to learn that quite many substantial and very important blockchain projects were started by Bulgarian entrepreneurs, and some of them were even developed in Bulgaria. Projects such as Aeternity which at one point was one of the top 30 projects. It did not have as much support as Ethereum of course, but it was a great project. It helped grow the blockchain ecosystem in Bulgaria, including delivering capital, facilitate crypto meetups, and building protocol infrastructure.

It is interesting because I don't watch many cryptocurrency youtube videos. It may sound kind of funny because I do it myself, but I don't watch them partially for the reason that I don't want to get influenced by other people's contents, I want my ideas to be fresh and kind of coming from me. There are a lot of guys that I do respect and that makes fantastic content like Crypto Zombie, Carl from The Moon, Nugget’s News. These all are great channels with fantastic information. They all have their unique way of presenting information and news while encouraging their communities.

On May 11th, for the third time in Bitcoin’s history, the amount of new coins issued per block was cut in half. This event, known as the halving, occurs every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years, until issuance is eventually rounded down to zero.In the most recent halving, the block reward was reduced from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC. The period leading up to the halving was marked by pronounced market volatility, which has somewhat subsided since the reduction occurred. The impacts of the event on the network’s security are nuanced.

Crypto Art is a new and rare type of digital artworks. Associated with unique tokens that exist on a certain blockchain, this new concept is based on the idea of “digital scarcity”. This allows artist to buy, sell and trade digital artworks as if they were physical art pieces. This is able to function on the same basis as Bitcoin or Ethereum and other crypto currencies are; Crypto Art exists in limited quantities.

There are all kinds of digital currencies. Not all of them are useful or good. A digital currency created and controlled by the government, for example, would be no different to the system we already have. Most of our money already exists as 1’s and 0’s and can be manipulated at the click of a button. Any system capable of being controlled by a selected few people is not what we should strive towards.

Most transhumanists support crypto, and when I ran in 2016 in my presidential campaign for the Transhumanist Party , I was one of the very first presidential candidates to ever take Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. I think it is a fascinating thing, it is awesome and I do own some myself. However, for me what is even more important than cryptocurrency is blockchain technology.

It's very hard to predict what will happen in the next coming years in the crypto industry, because it moves really quickly, and I think from what we have found in is that; every 6 month the narrative shifts completely in crypto, and something new comes out that creates some kind of change. 1.5 years ago it was NFT that was in the focus, now it has taken off and will probably stay low for the next couple of years. Maybe in a few years of time, it will get hot again. At another incident, everybody was talking about the lightning network on Bitcoin.

At the Supreme Court, we actually cited that Malta has a very comprehensive law on setting up crypto exchanges and ICOs etc. Two other laws which we cited at the supreme court were the New York Law and the Wisconsin Law. Apart from this we showed that most democratic and free countries have a regulatory and not a prohibitory approach to cryptocurrency. We explained to the court that ”We are not saying that you should copy these laws, but we are just showing you that countries around the world don't treat cryptocurrency as an untouchable or pernicious commodity, they treat it as something that you deal with as a normal economic activity”.

The most important feature that we have added is the multi-signature. Instead of one key, we are using multiple keys to enhance security. In December 2019, we carried out a launch on a SpaceX rocket to send our blockchain hardware wallet technology (our version of a bitcoin wallet) which was later installed in the International Space Station (ISS) which demonstrates how users can perform space-based multi-signature transactions, increasing the security of the operation.

I have heard a crypto evangelist talk about how your entire life can run without a footprint in the real world. You may claim all of this, but at the end of the day, each of us as human beings who are dabbling in technology are anchored to the real world. As much as we want to say that we don't live in this world, and we don't need regulation, but when you shut your computer and step out on the road, don't you need your government to protect you physically? If the same anarchy that you want online were to exist offline, where would you as a human being be? I wonder why we are averse to regulation, and so averse to central authority when it is the same authority or regulation that we turn to when it comes to protecting our physical self.

Many banks said that we need new income streams. They are losing income streams because they have negative income rates, so we have to pay the European Central Bank (ECB). People go to online banks and everything is cheaper there, so the regional banks and the big banks need new income streams.

ETH2.0 is offering an alternative consensus mechanism called staking; if you are a holder of Ethereum you can stake that Ethereum in order to protect the system and in order to validate the transaction. If you have any bad intentions, you will be penalized because you have staked that Ethereum.

Cryptocurrency YouTubers do have an influence on the price of bitcoin, however I believe that it depends on how engaged the community is. It can be quite a significant influence, especially if we start taking about smaller market cap coins. For instance, so if you are a crypto Youtuber with a large audience, and you start promoting a smaller market cap coin, there is a chance that the price of the coin actually might move because the volumes are quite small. Likewise, companies who are looking to do fundraising can see investments return from having content creators promote their products. So there definitely is influence there.

If someone claims that their coin has the biggest community, they can easily back it up by saying ”look we have xx number of people liking us on Facebook, on twitter” or “ we have so many posts and comments, communities and activities on Reddit”.

The crypto industry is not a “see and wait” kind of situation. “See and wait” would only apply if it is not affecting you. If it’s affecting you it would be a “sit, see, wait and bear”. Bear what? You will have to bear the consequences, and part of that would be that the reaction to a situation especially in such a market might be too late.

If I was to be a little philosophical about it, I think fundamentally the new generation will bring a new element of fearlessness and innovation to this country. These are young people who have much less to lose, and they live life differently from the previous generations.