Interview

MintGox is a gaming platform and new style of esports tournament created by Simon Cowell, CEO, and Co-Founder of ZEBEDEE; game developer Jack Everitt, CEO of THNDR GAMES; Christian Moss, Co-founder of ZEBEDEE; André Neves, CTO and Co-Founder of Zebedee; and, Desiree Dickerson, VP Business Operations at Lightning Labs. MintGox, a play-off of “Magic Internet Gathering”, is a socio-economic movement for experimenting with the future of virtual interactions and digital currency. In its current iteration, MintGox hosts monthly events that showcase games built on bitcoin and the Lightning Network. The event typically features one main esports tournament with multiple rounds of gameplay, and then several “side events” that showcase games built on bitcoin.

I entered the crypto space around the same time I quit my job to start my career as a full-time trader. I always wanted to be a full-time trader. I was only a part-time trader while I was working on Wall Street, but I was enjoying following up with the crypto space. I had heard about Bitcoin 2 years before I got into the crypto space. However, it did not resonate with me until the Cyprus banking confiscation crisis hit. The people of Cyprus lost their savings in the banks beyond thousands of Euros, and that really scared me. It made me think it could happen to my savings in the banks as well. That is how I realized Bitcoin is the first unconfiscatable asset we have ever owned, and that got me into it. I was following up with the crypto space in 2013, quit my job in very early 2015, and started writing articles about Bitcoin. I also started being interviewed about Bitcoin because of the articles I wrote. I continued with public speaking, and all that as I was a full-time trader. Now, the situation has turned around. I am back to being a part-time trader, but have evolved to become a full-time Bitcoin “evangelist”.

There are 1000s of ways in even those countries and use it to get liquidity. For example, amazon gift cards are used in Nigeria. People from Canada or the US send the amazon gift card code to people in Nigeria. Then, the Nigerians sell the amazon gift cards code for BTC globally, or in the local market. If they can afford it, they will save it. However, for poor people saving money is hard. Following this, they take the BTC and exchange it with the local currency. It is a very clever way around the system, and get away with it.

One of the books that I would recommend for learning how to read charts and for trading is Japanese Candlestick charting Techniques by Steve Nison. You do not need to know every single Japanese candlestick pattern method. The ones that I use the most are Hammer, Shooting Star, Bullish engulfing patterns, and the bearish engulfing patterns. So that is a great book to start with.One of my favorite traders is Linda Raschke, and she has published a book named Trading Sardines. I also like Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas is a great book for those who want to understand the psychology of trading. I stand by that book, it's fantastic.

The next phase is the transfer of value through social networks and interactions. As of now, you can buy things directly on Facebook or Instagram in the app, by just clicking an ad directly. This type of buy and sell options within the social networks is the direction in which we are heading. Also, micropayments are a powerful use-case. If you are in a game, no denomination is smaller than a cent. The denominations only go so far in every fiat currency, but with bitcoin you receive satoshis; a satoshi is so small, so paying 10 satoshis for a task you have accomplished in a game is not that much. For players, however, it really builds up after some time. And even though it is worth so little, it is much more than others in game currencies.

Using a local blockchain company in developing countries might cost a lot for its adaptation. Nevertheless, blockchain developers who are experts in blockchain technology charge thousands of dollars, and that is a lot of money. Thus, we have to educate more people about this technology and its development. There more and more institutions, universities, and schools that teach classes covering this technology and this industry.If they can create and invent this technology domestically with no help from other countries and foreign developers, then this would reduce the costs of installations and implementing it into infrastructure. Presuming that you are not able to do it domestically, even so, if you invest 1 million dollars into this technology that in the future will save you 1 billion dollars of corruption in your country, I would say that would be something good to invest. For a private person, the costs for implementing blockchain might be extremely high, but not for a government. The main reason why many governments in developing countries are not installing this technology is that they are not motivated to do so.

In my opinion, the current monetary system sort of works. People complain about inflation, but inflation is not really that high. I don’t think that it is a huge problem at the moment. Other people say that it is not fair, and I can understand it because I experienced it first-hand. Before moving back from Japan to America, and I had saved quite an amount of money. However, sending money between countries is very hard and pretty expensive. So, I thought that I would do that as the last thing right before moving back to America. But in 2013, the head of the Bank of Japan wanted to change the exchange rate because there was a very high appreciation of the yen in 2012. For me the appreciation of the yen was good, I liked it everything was cheaper and my salary is worth more and I was happy, but I people didn't like the high appreciation of Yen in Japan. So, the exchange rate went from 80 yen to 100 yen to 1 dollar, and it happened very fast. That was like the loss of thousands of dollars and that made me realize that only a couple of people get to decide how much our money is going to be worth. That did make me think about Bitcoin. We all know that Bitcoin has very high volatility and goes up and down way more than the fiat currencies in countries the USA or Japan, but at least it is not one guy who gets to decide that would be the argument here.

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. Blockchain technology is going to revolutionize how the world operates. That can be anything from marriage licenses, passports, real estate transactions to the way we deal with money.

I first started hearing about crypto in about 2012. Many of my friends were into it. I was living in New York at the time, and my friends were computer programmers, mathematicians, and really into cryptocurrency. I was very much interested in economics and the Hayekian idea of competing currencies, and so when I heard about Bitcoin it really piqued my interest. I liked the idea that there might be alternative money that wasn’t created by the government. I liked that Bitcoin was created anonymously, and no one is in control.

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.

The future of crypto art is going to be absolutely beautiful. Right now we are definitely entering a stage where we are waiting for the bull run. I do think that there is a disproportion of a number of artists in the space in conjunction with a number of collectors. The collectors are slowly coming in the NFT world and are starting to understand many problems with physical art pieces of what crypto solves here. Nevertheless, there is a big cognitive dissonance where many people have in crypto which is that they might be full-on in Ethereum and no other platform.

The crypto community on Youtube is absolutely huge! It is hard to say how big, but I have 115000 subscribers which is cool, but there is at least a million people go to youtube and get some variety of cryptocurrency related content as there is a lot of different potential content. I focus more on news and a little about trading as well, but then there are channels that focus just on news, just on trading, or just reviews so they appeal to different audiences. Different content creators will also appeal to different audiences. I am a character, and I am a bit weird and that's OK! I just try to be me but I may not be for everybody. Maybe somebody who thinks “this guy is a bit too weird for me”, maybe that person likes DataDash more because he is a bit more serious and he also has great content. You also have a great choice of content as a consumer on youtube from many of different perspectives, different points of views, personalities and focuses. So, you are really spoiled as somebody who is watching on youtube as you have got lots of great options out there.

All the countries that have tried to use this printing press like Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Argentina, Germany have failed. I imagine Japan also collapses soon. Japan's government debt to GDP ratio sits at around 240% which is just crazy. I just saw the new figures from the Bank of Japan ETF; they print like crazy, and they own around 50 % of the domestic index funds, National Treasuries. I believe it is 5.5 trillion USD that they have on their insane balance sheet. This is by all means not only Japan, but Germany and other countries like this that are in a similar situation, and with America having more than 13 trillion USD in debt is impossible to pay back. They will never pay it back.

ConsenSys was found in 2014 by Joseph Lubin only a few months after the foundation of Ethereum. Today, it is the world’s largest blockchain technology company for enterprises and governments. While Ethereum is managed by the Ethereum foundation, Joseph Lubin who is one of the co-founders of Ethereum, started ConsenSys with the mission to build the tools and develop the ecosystem of Ethereum. The Ethereum protocol was managed by the foundation, and there was a for-profit-organization ConsenSys which was managing, creating, building the infrastructure and the tools that would help them build the ecosystem.Today we are a little around 700+ people of experts, entrepreneurs, computer scientists, designers etc. We are represented in many different places around the world such as the US to Asia, Europe to Africa and Australia. We started off as a venture production studio, meaning investing in a lot of new businesses where we saw huge potentials. We were helping to develop these businesses to a certain point in their development. At that point, we start using our connections from the infrastructure we have build to support use-cases in larger enterprises and governments. We provide capital to companies that are in need of that, especially infrastructure solutions, which most of them are making the base of most widely used enterprise blockchain solutions today.

In the next century, we could move to Mars and colonize it, and I wonder what form of currency we would be using. Mars is an entirely new entity, and separate from the world economy, so world currencies like the Japanese Yen or the US dollar will simply not cut it. I think bitcoin or a virtual equivalent will be an attractive option as the currency of choice for such hypotheticals. Carrying paper money on Mars would be questionable, while bitcoin will fare much better as the currency of the future.

There was no ban on cryptocurrency in India. What happened was, in 2013 there were circulars issued by the Reserve bank of India (“RBI”), which is the Indian central bank, that cautioned people about dabbling in cryptocurrency. The circulars moved from its usage of cryptocurrency to virtual currencies sometime in 2017. On 6th April 2018, RBI issued a circular that was only a restriction on banks and payment systems from transacting on cryptocurrency. If you were involved in the field of cryptocurrency, you could no longer use banking systems or payment systems to dabble in it. That was what RBI did.

I don’t think that any lawyer in India is a crypto specialist. I was approached to lead the case in the Supreme Court by a lawyer called Jaideep Reddy from a law firm called Nishith Desai Associates. He knew that I specialize in Supreme Court cases, and also that I had interest in technology related work. He came to me, and explained that they have clients who are cryptocurrency exchanges, and they would like to challenge the RBI, the Reserve Bank of India, whose circular had brought cryptocurrency (especially exchanges) to a standstill in India. The Circular ordered all banks in India to withdraw bank accounts from anyone trading or otherwise dealing with cryptocurrency.

We do believe that ATM numbers will continue to grow over the years. At the moment, the cryptocurrency world is still very isolated and there is no circular economy; this means that users who own cryptocurrency need to exchange it first to fiat in order to make everyday transactions. Speaking about the scope of exchanging cash with cryptocurrencies, ATMs play one of the biggest role. Also there are many large scale operators who do this as a profitable business and plan to install hundreds or even thousands of new machines. Today we have a little more than 7000 crypto ATMs worldwide, so we are still at the very beginning. Looking at the past history of installations chart,it is seen that growth is not linear, and so we expect this trend to continue.