Interview

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.

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.

Back in 2017, people were keeping their assets on a hardware wallet. There was one individual who faced a massive hack and lost around 60 million dollars’ worth of assets on his hardware wallet. The attacker knew that this guy was using that kind of wallet, and targeted his attack by delivering a fake software update for the wallet. The holder didn't see that the message wasn’t from the official wallet administrators and when he opened the software it didn't go to the official homepage for the update either. Still, he didn't think much of it and clicked “yes” to the update. Seconds after, the fake uploader started to install the fake wallet and stole everything on the wallet. The poor guy lost 60 million in a few minutes by just installing the wrong software update. So, what I am trying to say is that you should never install anything that is not from licensed stores.

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.

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.

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.

Hong Kong seemed like a superb place to study in 2011. There are many reputable universities where the primary medium of exchange and academic teachings is in English. It is an international city that seemed to be quite welcoming and interesting to me. It is a place where you can focus on studying statistics rather than a place where you first have to figure out how to navigate public life and how to even get groceries. So, I think Hong Kong still somewhat is a very accessible place, even for people who plan on staying only for 1 year or 2. This is not easy to say about every place in the world.

The giveaways have been the main scams of this year. Before the massive hack of Twitter accounts of famous and influential people, like Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Vitalik Buterin, etc. There were several giveaway scams where scammers pretend to be famous people and promise to double the return of whatever money or BTC you would send to them. If you think about the scheme of the operation and discard the connections to famous people, you would think that it is a scam without a doubt.

Cointelegraph has 8 million views per month. We have hundreds of employees and hundreds of freelancers, so it's a massive team. The organization is very decentralized, which is what I love about it. We have small groups that make decisions for a specific area they work in. We have Cointelegraph Espanol, Cointelegraph Portuguese, Cointelegraph English, and we also have Cointelegraph YouTube, Twitter, SNS, and many more. I am the Director of the research team, and I have 7 people in my group. We interact and discuss our tasks every day, but it's all remote. There are many employees at New York and Hong Kong hubs, so they do meet up at coworking spaces to work together as if it were an office. However, most of us are working remotely.

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.

We have launched a new podcast that premiered on the 16th of August called The Orange Pill Podcast. The concept of the Orange Pill Podcast is to uncover what happens after you have had the red-pilled. Many people say “they took the Red Pill” or “I am woke”. But now what? After you take the red pill, you have to take the orange pill. The orange pill is really the Bitcoin pill, and everything that encompasses Bitcoin financially, monetarily, religiously, economically, spiritually, sociologically, psychologically, cosmically, universally, etc. So, you have to make sure you don’t miss it.

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.