Interview

The customer is involved mostly in the initial stages of the recovery, providing me the wallet information and their password ideas. There are some wallets where only the owner can approve certain actions, so I need the cooperation of the customer. That is a nice feature of wallets such as blockchain.com and others with 2FA, where users will receive an email or text asking them “do you approve of this recent activity?”. For the password ideas, some customers have made their own lists of attempts they’ve made, and this can be a very helpful starting point. For some more esoteric wallet formats I’ve had customers do their own research into how I can add support for that wallet type, which has been quite helpful in more than a few cases.

We haven’t seen inflation, at least not yet. Some people complain that the government statistics are bogus. But the privately-operated Billion Prices Project shows inflation that is consistent with government measures. Whether inflation becomes a problem in the future, we’ll have to wait and see. Certainly, the forecast is for a transitory increase in the rate of inflation as the economy re-opens from the pandemic. 

If we allow those to change, we have to figure out who changes them, who has the power, and what's to stop us from changing it depending on the political or philosophical winds that are blowing at any given time. No, Bitcoin’s fundamental propositions are meant to be an absolute constant which is something we've never had in the field of economics. We've never had an absolute constant for measuring value, but now we have one, and we should not fail to understand or recognize the importance of that.

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.

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 credit default swap market is default insurance on any reference asset. It is like an insurance policy that you purchase to protect yourself if the reference asset defaults. Purchasing the insurance costs you a certain premium each year, much like an insurance premium for house insurance, fire insurance, etc. There's default insurance where you pay a certain premium that is set by the market and by the riskiness of the borrower. For example, Canada is a sovereign borrower and the insurance market for Canada is charging 37 basis points per year over a 5-year term to ensure Canada against default. This means the purchaser has to pay $37000 a year to ensure about $10 million worth of debt. The seller of the insurance collects the premium; however, they are on the hook for any payout in the event of default.

I consider myself lucky to have a healthy skepticism of authority in general, but I have also read a great variety of books that have sharpened my skeptical mind. I would recommend “The Law'' written by Frederic Bastiat. It's an approximately 60-page book and is a good simple short classic. Bastiat thoroughly decimates the social theories supporting government plunder, and it is very relevant to what we are experiencing in the US today. For example, the US government announced they would print 900 billion dollars and they will send everyone a 600-dollar check for financial aid.

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.

With respect to consumer price inflation, there is a question of people's demand for money. People do demand more money because they want to hoard more money when they are nervous about their prospects. Amidst a pandemic, when there's a good chance you're going to lose, it's more likely you're going to hold on to your cash because you can't be as confident about collecting a paycheck. However, if the money you are holding is losing value, people start to realize they are losing purchasing power so they will cease to want to hold it at some point. Because humans are herd animals and pay attention to what their neighbors are doing, they will replicate their neighbor’s actions. So, when the government creates massive amounts of money, and suddenly people stop hoarding that money and try to dump it at the same time, it will be a problem the government cannot clean up.

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.

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.

Gold and silver have been used as money by human beings for thousands of years, but in the 13th century, some city republics in northern Italy, such as Florence and Venice, issued a gold coin by their mint that had been changed to purity. This was unprecedented and such an event had never happened before where a coin had such stability and a government didn't devalue the currency like it had done in the past, such as during the Roman Empire and the Greek city-states. Because of the stability of the Gold Florin, the coin of Florence, and also the gold Ducat in Venice, this new class of merchant bankers started to issue promises to pay Florin and Ducat.

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.

We have many unique indicators using or on-chain data. For example, the Estimated Leverage Ratio shows all the derivatives exchanges' open interest divided by their BTC reserve on that exchange. The value of this graph goes down, which is an indication that people are trading with low leverage. As you can see from the graph below, the estimated leverage ratio has decreased, meaning that people have opened their positions with low leverage. Leveraged trading is the use of borrowed funds with a contractually determined return to increase the ability of a business to invest and earn an expected higher return. A lower ratio of leverage means that companies operating or traders are generating enough revenue to grow their assets through profits.

I think that on-chain data is something completely new. it's a new kind of exotic data that does not exist in traditional markets. Now we have open ledgers (blockchains) that have millions of recorded transactions. And there's a lot of information and a lot of value in that data with respect to fundamentales and the market. From on-chain data, we can know how to time the cycles of these markets. I think this is something anyone involved in this industry would want to have an eye on. You will get a grip of what is going on under the hood, how network participants and investors are behaving.

I got into Bitcoin in my senior year at University in 2013. A group of friends discovered Bitcoin, and us being a little libertarian-minded, we thought it was very interesting. After college, I took a job at FedEx, an American multinational delivery services company, and worked in a revenue strategy group developing alternative payment options for countries around the world. Thanks to that position, I spent some time in Asia. Together with the team back then, we onboarded Alipay and WeChat pay. Spending some time especially in China blew me away by how far ahead Asia was getting in terms of digital payments.