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Non-Fungible tokens are interesting assets and similar to baseball cards on the blockchain. The idea of having a unique non-fungible and limited asset is intriguing. You cannot duplicate the NFT, and if enough people value it, it becomes valuable. Its theory is similar to Bitcoin only being valuable if people value it. The same applies to NFTs; there is limited supply and if you value it, it becomes valuable. Conversely, there will be no value in an asset if there is unlimited supply regardless of how much you value it. I think the NFT concept is cool but I am not sure if it will work out. I think about who and why there is value in a certain NFT token in the first place, and if the value does come from the asset itself or not. The value of Bitcoin and Litecoin comes from the inside of the coins. It is valuable because the network is secure, and you can easily move value around. Besides, you can send value easily, cheaply, securely, and fast to someone on the side of the world.

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.

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.

A lot of young people think this FinTech is very revolutionary, but this revolution is just a part of an ongoing evolution in database management systems. When I first went to Italy with my mother in 1971, I was 10 years old. I remember before we went on this trip from Vancouver to Italy, we had to get a telephone book and look for Thomas Cook or American Express (offices). We needed to obtain a traveler’s cheque to be able to exchange Canadian dollars for Italian Lira.

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 wouldn't say it is “not ethical” to hold your coins, but when people complain saying “ You don’t have skin in the game”, the reality of the matter is that it is my creation and I am tied to the success of Litecoin. Now, if Litecoin succeeds, that is good for me. I don’t need to additionally tie my financial interest in the coin. It actually could be a misalignment of interest for the creator to hold the coin. For example, one could be releasing fake news, and making announcements to pump the price to profit off of. That’s not good for the success of the coin. That said, I don’t think it would be an ethical issue to hold your coin, but it depends on what you do and what your actions are as a coin creator. If you are working on your coin and your goal is to make it successful, the price will follow that.

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.

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.

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.

Sale of Crypto Assets. 1BTC purchased for 500,000 Yen and sold for 1 million Yen = 500,00Yen profit. Purchasing Goods with Crypto Assets. 1BTC purchased at a rate of 1BTC=500,000 Yen, and buying a TV for 1 million Yen when the rate 1BTC is 1 million Yen, means a profit of 500,000 Yen has been generated. Exchanges between Crypto Assets. Purchasing 1 BTC for 500,000Yen, and exchange it for 50ETH when the rate of 1ETH is 20,000Yen (In total 1 million Yen) = 500,000 Yen profit generated. Crypto Assets Split (Forking). The purchasing cost of the newly acquired crypto asset shall be 0 Yen at the time of purchase. Profit generation will incur at the time of sale or use. Crypto Asset Mining etc., Earnings will be generated at the market value at the time of acquisition of crypto assets acquired through mining, and this amount shall be the cost of acquisition. In case you sold the acquired crypto assets through mining afterwards, profit or loss will be generated by the balance of price of the crypto assets value at time of sale and the cost of acquisition when the sale is made.