EB48 – BTC2B Conference: Bitcoin Marketing with Richard Caetano, Jeremy Gardner & Sébastien Couture

Transcript

[Music] hi welcome to epicenter Bitcoin the show which talks about the Technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is seban and thanks so much for joining me on this very special episode all about Bitcoin marketing so I recently attended an event called BTC 2B which was a conference happening in Brussels actually it was happening in a suburb of Brussel called UT which is a very Posh neighborhood with golf courses and country clubs and tennis courts and and castles and things like that so it was a very impressive place to have a conference and since I was invited for a panel there and since it's only about 30

minutes away from where I live you I thought what the hey I might as well go to this event so the idea of this event was for it to be a Bitcoin networking event sort of a businessto business conference where entrepreneurs and investors could could meet and network and things like that and originally I thought like how are they going to differentiate themselves from other conferences cuz that's really what conferences are networking events but when I got there I was uh pleasantly surprised to see that the whole organization was really centered around networking you had sort of a big lobby area where people could come in and meet and there was ample time between sessions sort of networking sessions to mingle and have a coffee and things like that so you know it was really well put

on that way and um although it was a very small event when I was was there there was only about 50 or 60 people in attendance plus about a handful of speakers they really managed to attract some interesting speakers people like Nicola CA who's a cryptographer and has some very controversial views about the security of the blockchain and vadik pteran of ethereum of course and Adam vizeri who's a lawyer and head of a company called Dio in the UK so it was very interesting to see those guys speak and to meet everybody there and I want to say congratulations to the organizing in committee for putting on such a great event so this episode features two parts of the same session on bitcoin marketing

the first part is a talk by Richard katano who is developing a product called handshake which will be coming out in the next few weeks I believe and we'll definitely have him on the show to talk about it when it does get released and Richard also developed an app called BTC report which some of you might have used before it's an iPhone ticker app with alerts and news and things like that and a lot of nice features and really a really beautiful UI and Richard talks about the importance of sharing a story to create user engagement and he has some very interesting things to say about that the second part of this session is a panel discussion on bitcoin marketing it's moderated by Richard with Jeremy Gardner who's the executive

director of the college cryptocurrency network which we talked about extensively in one of our recent episodes and myself as panelists and we talked about building products which cater to specific specific user needs and brings value to the regular user to the masses and I think it's obvious but it's often overlooked because we lose ourselves in the technical and ideological aspects of Bitcoin and so I think it's also important to recognize that products and marketing are part of a broader product strategy in which the user needs to be at the center always just think about Uber for anyone who's used Uber that first experience is magical you come out of it just wanting to tell your friends

how great this service is and they've really utilized that by creating an an ambassador model by which you can send your friends your specific uh affiliate code and they get 10 bucks off their next ride and you get 10 bucks off your next ride and that creates Ripples and that brings more people in who also want to talk about you Uber and use Uber Airbnb similar model when you come back from vacation that first time after you used Airbnb and you tell your friends you know you don't use Airbnb wow you need to get on this it's so awesome you know you get to stay in these great locations with these really cool people and it's really affordable so I think we need to learn from the successes of these companies outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem and recognize that if we want

to get to this Mass adoption which we all talk about we have to build products which appeal to the masses plain and simple so I hope you all enjoy this episode all about Bitcoin marketing I think it's a very important topic and I hope we'll we'll get to talk about it more in the future on the show and so without further Ado here's Richard [Music] katano hi all um so we've got Richard here he's going to speak about marketing for about 10 minutes and then we're going to have a panel discussion um and then it'll be lunch break but so rich

thank you great thank you and uh welcome we're going to talk a little bit about marketing within the Bitcoin space and specifically talk about some real world uh experiences that we gained uh through development some some applications uh we'll look at some real product numbers and like I said from that General marketing tip that we can use and carry away from here use it in our own so just to get familiar with the crowd how many how many developers do we have okay and how about designers designers designers

okay and uh how about marketing who's marke okay well um I'm a developer uh been developing since the 1990s worked on different kinds of systems databases and things like that and then since the since the mid 2000s been more user focused developing user experience and building products with that in mind and since 2011 converted a with a Bitcoin convert and adopted it and changed my world and had that great Bitcoin moment of my life like most of you imagine uh so and since that time I've been focusing on building different kinds of apps and in the

beginning I kind of did this shotgun approach where I took all these ideas and I just threw it against the wall and just looked in and see what would stick and so that involved a lot of just research and development talking to a lot of people testing a lot of ideas experimenting a lot of failures Etc but your typical product approach where you invest a lot of R&D and you see what comes out um of course the other side of that is the marketing side and typically you know you develop a product try to find out Market you're going to go after and then you send the marketing folks and try and sell it and meet some numbers and things like that however I didn't have that luxury so had to like approach it from an agile perspective

like what can we do with limited resources and a very fast moving um beginning space and so what I approach was is to combine the two so the product strategy was to take the product and the marketing and see how I can bring them together and work it from that persp perspective and so the first point that I'd like to start with is that product and marketing has no separation that maybe we can actually build our products with marketing already built in and not necessarily see it as two separate uh forces within a a roll out like that so for a use case for this presentation I'd like to talk about one of the apps I

wrote and develop um well should say we wrote and develop and um give you some real world numbers and show you how that turned out so the app is called BTC report and uh it's a very simple apps ticker it was launched in uh 2011 and it's been kind of on the top of the app store for most of that time and um been very happy with it in one of those apps that when we go to conferences and talk to people they kind of recognize it and ends up getting to the other kinds of discussions um basically it supports 27 currency 35 different marketplaces just a very simple app um but we ended up having 40,000 downloads um we didn't expect that we have no marketing budget and so

looking back we wanted to pull out what were the lessons learned and the experiences that uh could be useful going forward and so if you look at some interesting data this is what the the download chart looks like you know we got these Twin Peaks here and we're like okay this is interesting this is really cool it's very exciting times and it looks even more interesting when you overlay the Bitcoin price so you can see that like when people get excited about Bitcoin they start looking at what's available on in the market space you know what kind of apps can they use what kind of uh tools can they work with uh people just start exploring so there's definitely some opportunity when things start shaking in the Bitcoin World indicated by the price

in this case and so of course I mean we're at the beginning of the Bitcoin Revolution we all kind of know that and in that respect what can we um how can we position like our marketing strategy what can we think about um to make a better use and efficient uh roll out of our products so um I've simplified an adoption curve here um basically I broke down a bell curve looking at early adopters mainstream and the lards and really we're at the beginning and so looking at this curve we can kind of get an idea of who we're who we're working with um and what kind of messaging we wanted to use within our applications uh our markting materials

our app store descriptions and things like that and so if you look at the first two types of uh of adoptees you have the early adopters who are mostly driven by the like cool effect you know there's a scarcity like oh I'm the only one using this nobody really has this yet I'm ahead of the curve um and so they're driven by things that may like sound more like um you know it's cool and hip to be a part of this whereas the mainstream might have a different um like they might respond differently to the messaging where they might be more like well my friend's using this so I want to be part of that um so I would say like right now we can in our messaging in our approach to marketing

we can say well let's target the early adopters because that's who's using it right now and so they're turned on more by scarcity they they want to um they want to have things that others don't have or don't know about um some of messaging can be like be one of the first to have this um for BTC report we we used the the the message in the beginning join the crypto Revolution that was kind of our thing um but as I said eventually and we don't know how soon this could happen we should start preparing for the mainstream which we would change the messaging more about you know joining the group uh being more interactive with your your friends and peers um so the next thing I want to talk

about is one of the features that we built into the app that helps to engage the user base more um more into the app and we you know most apps today have the typical sharing features where we can tweet and email things but we took that and we spun it around with a little bit more of a marketing approach um we can share the story and that was one of the things that we talked about about building this app around is telling the Bitcoin story from a very like userfriendly and uh simple way and so what we actually did is just we just take the app and we just include a screenshot of it with the chart because it's just valuable information we thought and we could just share it and what we found was we had a great response people would

tweet the chart and provide some commentary and suddenly we realize that they're all telling the story it's all part of the story and so uh this is an example of combining product and marketing together um this is just one idea but we can explore other ways of doing that as well um telling stories seems to be something that people connect to very well so it's it's been a kind of a main theme for approach so a great takeaway from here is just encourage sharing and try to develop that within the ch um as far as numbers go we kind of stumbled on something that was interesting more than half of our users open the app more than once a day and so we found was this a high high usage of the app I mean if we think

about how I use my iPhone it's the SMS I've open multiple times a day it's uh maybe the browser my email client Twitter and BTC report it's kind of weird so we felt responsible to um to not make uh ticker junkies out of our out of our users and what that means we don't want people to be constantly like obsessed with this data obsessed with the app and so what we did is um this is actually the second revision to our design the first the first revision or the first design was more of like your traditional stock ticker app where a lot of information was included but for the second design we actually simplified it we took a lot of information out and um

focus more on the essentials and additionally we early on we provided meaningful interaction points such as price alerts so that people weren't always like going back to the app and the uh our motivation was to promote good good behavior with our applications and not to create the chck or junky and So eventually I mean what we're trying to do is really create happy users because the more happy they are using our app and the less disruptive to their lives the more they would promote our app and so as far as combining product and marketing again we're trying to leverage our users interaction and um and have them share and that's what we found a lot of people were always like showing the app to their friends um so it's really short presentation but to

review the opportunities um think about the product strategy how we can combine product and marketing together um mind the adoption curve know where you're at know who you're speaking with know where it's going there's several different levels in that curve that we can dive into further um enricher users world so the more happy we make our users the more they're going to tell other people about it and that's the best marketing you can ever do I believe uh good design is really important um the high correlation to like good design and increased engagement with the with the product and most importantly um try to build good Impressions leave your users with good

impressions of your product because that will go a long way so thank you any [Music] questions I love your app I I love it it's great I wonder thank you uh I tried I doob I was wondering uh how did you set up on the text that people are supposed to TW and how many people actually TW um because it's always hard you know what do you suggest people TW what so going back to this screen right here yeah yeah so how did you decide that you should just with this not not anything more I guess in your case it may be may have been obvious right yeah so for the default uh for the default

message we wanted to create a hashtag for the exchange because a lot of we're trying to do here the work we're trying to do is promote the exchanges all right so coinbase USD is the hashtag that we would create from the exchange of course the priz and then BC report but we try to like make it you know where people can tell the story from their perspective and what's going on can you sh the numbers of how many people actually share use that functionality or was it just those for um yeah I don't have the numbers but we can you can definitely search on oh yeah there's that would be misleading right but uh yeah you can do a search for BTC report BTC report on Twitter you can see I just pulled like some the four I

pulled or kind of interesting you know price still wobbly but we're going ho few spikes before another run rallying hard I want I wanted to drop more in order to get it again like these are all just great points I thought so I Ed these as examples and do you have any plans for for other kinds of marketing or are you just hoping for the next five or is there marketing that you to um well I mean we kind of feel that there's a spike coming so we've been doing some work yeah to get ready for it um a lot of people are asking us is this available on Android you know other other devices and so as an this kind of started as an experiment and we're in this really weird like gray area where we either need to like invest more into it or we need to sell it to someone who

who will do that and so we don't know which way we're going to go yet we've got other projects that we're focusing on so um yeah that's you're another of right aside from promoting yeah so the so the strategy for that was all information on the app should be free and if you pay for anything it's just for enhancements right have yeah so if you yeah so like we offer like colors and you know just kind of things that make people happy you know if you want to buy that so but yeah all information from the beginning was always free great so um maybe we can start with the

introduction I know met you just recently couple hours ago so for those of you who are't at my speech my name is Jeremy Gardner and I'm the executive director of the college cryptocurrency network or an international network of uh student groups and academics dedicated to blockchain innovation advocacy and development uh hi I'm Sebastian P I am a podcaster I one of the co-hosts of epicenter Bitcoin where weekly podcast where we interview some of the brightest Minds in the decentralization cryptocurrency space and uh we're going to record our 50th episode in a few

weeks and we're now doing Google Hangouts which I'm super excited about so you can come on and uh and interact with the guests uh through a chat room and uh it's creating some really interesting conversations great so we have uh so wrot down some questions that we can talk about um the first one is um so when we look at the early adopters of Bitcoin we find a wide range that span from crypto Anarchist Geeks all the way to Mom and Pop business owners and so what would be some perspectives that we can use to engage with this uh wide range and how how would we approach

this well to the early adopters I mean all those folks they they tend to adopt Bitcoin not because it's a great consumer facing or Merchant technology but really because for ideological reason reasons although the mom and pop shops actually do see the merchant advantages what what we have to do now though is now that we have this technology that makes a lot of sense to people is building a an ecosystem around it that facilitates ease of use uh one of my other startups along with the nonprofit is actually a point of sales system and that point of sales system isn't just for Bitcoin it makes Bitcoin transactions incredibly easy it uses

Bluetooth low energy lets you to pretty much just open up your wallet and make a payment just by having a a point of sale terminal nearby also lets you use NFC and QR but what we also do because you want you want to make this as simple for the merchants as possible we also accept NFC payments so Apple pay uh uh uh Google wallet and then credit cards so EMV and swipe and that way you've kind of got these Tri Tri effective Technologies you don't have to use them all you can just use it for Bitcoin the device cost less than $100 and there's really nothing to lose you you know you're getting all the the gains of Bitcoin without the pain of like using a QR because I don't know how many people

here try going into a business and paying with Bitcoin right now and it's a nightmare it doesn't work in a very straightforward manner um in store and you you've got to go over that hump in order for any hope of everyone sort starting to begin to adopt what do you find as some of the resistance points in getting that deployed getting that into the stores verone I mean you're talking about an entrenched point of sale terminal Monopoly um you know we actually had a bunch of people the Bitcoin space offer us a lot of money for a while we were going to go into a tech accelerator or and then for a little while we were actually uh in in negotiations with PayPal talking about doing an acquisition but you know PayPal's kind of evil um not a huge fan

of the company uh both my developer and I this kid's a genius um we we also have another project that we're working on that's funded and so we decided that what we're going to do is we're going to build this project out um we're going to Market it um more as a Bitcoin point of sale terminal because that is the biggest pain Point that's what drove us to make it and then we'll we'll then send it out to bitcoin accepting Merchants test it and then see if we can gain adoption but the thing is is that people are very comfortable with the terminals they use now um but you have to show them and this is what we need is uh use cases and show them this is easier this is cheaper and this is better um also I mean if you want to do

a large scale implementation you're talking about manufacturing millions of devices they're 6.5 million inore uh consumer retailers in the United States so it's a massive Market you have to tap into and just even knowing where to start can be very difficult if I can take your question I think that there is there's a a difference in incentive for the quranist and the merchant also so you have to align very true so you have to align the I guess the incentive and the value ad for you know different people that you're targeting so whether you're targeting Mom Pop store like you said you have to try to find ways to solve some of the issues that they have which is high cost of operating a a payment

card teral for instance or consumer so you have to find ways to uh be able to solve some of the problems that they're having with pain in uh in store so um recognizing the different pain points that different people in this chain have is key to producing creating products that will appeal to them uh I probably get to talk about that more this panel um but that's I think one of the key things that needs to be identified before you even start making products and trying to Target different people just just add on to that um don't worry about marketing to the crypto Anarchist and to the Libertarians they've already latched on and if they haven't the

second they discover Bitcoin they will at on because it's right in line with their ideals the the the real the real challenge is marketing that this individuals that ideologically may not be in line with those sort of values but still have a tremendous amount of value from this technology yeah yeah I mean along the same lines you know BTC is to some to many actually is still considered this mysterious magical money this internet money um so big question I or big question we can present is how what are some ways that we can better educate people um explaining what it is but not necessarily like in a technological perspective but more like

how can this help you how can this help us you know we have these messages where we say oh you know uh bitcoin's not bombs you know things like that like really these are massive changes to how Society functions and that's a hard message to get across I don't think when it comes down to it I think so education is important obviously and some things that you're doing is great and I also run meat up and I think that having sorry having a a a venue where people can come and and learn about Bitcoin uh the technology is is is great I think that if we're going to kind of reach just Mass adoption what you talked about in your in your talk um educating people about Bitcoin and

technology is not necessarily where we need to be focusing our energy it's illustrating how the technology can uh solve some of these pain points that Happ having really extracting the technology from the whole thing right we want to build products um just look at we can look at some some examples uh when you take an Uber you don't care you know what service you're using or if you have to use a taxi or whatnot although you may have some um you may be somewhat out of RIS to using a taxi because you've had bad experience or what have if you're using Uber is because you've heard good things and you've had good experiences with them and and you kind of become an

ambassador I mean when I first used Uber I mean the first thing I did afterwards is tell my friends about how great it was now I use all the time and I use my my um referral code to get free rides for my friends right I think this is the type of thing that we need to try to move towards is letting the users be ambassadors not the technology but the products that are built on F the technology and of course we to make that those products easy to use and accessible and for for people to get into the the ecosystem um but talking about the technology to your mom and pop store or to your college kid or whoever is is not what we need to be focus on our energies yeah I mean I I I couldn't

agree more AB absolutely I mean my my life these days is really explaining Bitcoin to people and there something I can do now but it's something I don't want to have to do I was in Orlando at coins in the kingdom and this was a cryptocurrency conference at Disney World and I kept on taking Ubers actually great by the way yeah it was it was an awesome little event uh but I I kept on having these uh Uber drives with these Haitian taxi drivers or or Uber drivers and I was explaining Bitcoin to them they were like oh my God this is going to change my life and I'm like yeah it is but the problem was there wasn't an app I could direct them to that will allow them to remit money back

home and so when I'm explaining Bitcoin to people I don't want to explain the underlying technology and what a blockchain is and a 10-minute cab drive with a Haitian taxi driver I want to I send them to an application that lets them send money over the blockchain to their family back home easily I'm not I'm not really concerned about how the actual technology works because they're not going to start hacking away at and developing a program on top of it I mean no offense to the Haitian taxi drivers just is not within the realm of what they do but what what I think is important though is communicating what the blockchain is to certain demographics I mean it's about identifying your audience for the college crypto currency Network I mean we're hosting hackathons on every on

four no on four continents next month and we're we're going to ones in like Argentina and Buenos arees and there 3,000 to 4,000 people hackathons it's pretty much an entire nation of hackers all come together for one hackathon and we're bringing Bitcoin to it we're bringing Bitcoin uh companies into this space and those are the guys that you want to learn what Bitcoin is and how it works because they're the guys that are going to build the applications that change the lives of people in their countries you know we have a hackathon in Kenya and you want hackers there learning what Bitcoin and the blockchain are because they can really benefit from it but I don't think we need to worry so much about talking to Consumers about this technology obviously people like

you and I I mean we have to talk about this because it's our jobs but it should it should that shouldn't be the Engle the Engle should be having applications that speak for the technology and and say look at what you can do with this awesome app you can say oh by the way use this Bitcoin but uh we will never reach mainstream adoption until people don't know that they're using the technology under remittance is great I mean this really illustrates uh where we need to kind of close that gap between the technology and the usage right is the story so sharing story like you mentioned a while ago that when you showare the story you create an ambassador which is then talk about that product you know so that Asian taxi

driver is going to tell his taex a friend hey by the way I just sent money to my family it didn't cost me a thing it took five minutes right so and that's a550 billion doll industry extortionate industry that has no need to exist anymore in the bitco with Bitcoin yet it's still there there just no good killer apps for that because you know when you're trying to introduce someone to this Tech I actually told all these tax drivers that's like look up Bitcoin now they all did they I mean they love the idea but don't plan to use it for a few months like just wait till there's some good applications for you to use this because what happens is and I've seen this and I I just recently moved to San Francisco there probably 300 stores in stores that that that once accepted

Bitcoin they're now like 60 left because it's not an intuitive inore process you don't want to introduce people to a technology and them to use it before the applications are built that for them to be ready to use it that's why we build this point of sales system that's why there are several companies that are really trying to figure out remittances that are getting very close but uh yeah when I when I pitch Bitcoin I I talk more about what I'm doing and how it's going to affect people I don't tell people to go use it right now or go buy it right now because at the end of the day I'm not really sure that's really going to benefit them and I want this technology to benefit people so it's it's figuring out that right in a lot of ways you can compare it I like to

compare it when speaking with people about Bitcoin uh comparing it to email in 1992 email is a protocol in 1992 we logged into a console and we wrote some commands and we sent email today we open our iPhone put a password in username and password and we have email and so the concept of what an email is today is much different than what it was back then in the same regards Bitcoin is a protocol and the apps that that people identify with don't exist or they do in very underdeveloped ways so I think it's a really good point to mention that you know where where we're going is what we can talk about not necessarily what you can do now because we we're still devel underdeveloped right it's like the

Advent of the fax machine you know the first fax machine came out it was a great idea it's like wow you can send documents anywhere instantly but oh wait nobody else has a fax machine you can't really you can't really use it yet uh but it's about finding the initial adopters which is where we're getting to I don't think we've even fully finished getting the initial adopters and then it's building those applications and making those applications prevalent and then then everything begins to flourish but but it's a systematic process although it might seem kind of anarchical which it is yeah um often when I speak to people about Bitcoin the issue of drugs money laundering criminal activity all the bad

press comes to mind all the questions come out um in terms of marketing our applications and working with people what um how can we overcome this is there anything that we can do to help positive experiences positive experiences positive reinforcement we were discussing this this morning though I'm old enough to remember internet mid 1990s and being a young teenager and and hearing my you know telling my parents and grandparents about the internet and you know how I use it oh yeah I chatted with a person outside the world and oh but you be careful because I heard this thing in the news that you some kid got abducted or you know some kid went to meet this person they D was a kid and was in fact an old P um so through you know that still exists but that's not

the first thing that comes to mind now when when we talk about the internet or you know the worldwide web and how did that change well through positive experiences and one at some point you know the positive experiences and the good things that we have to say about the technology kind of overcome the bad things and uh and that becomes what what's you know uh front of mine I'm thinking in French right uh yeah that becomes you know the things that you think about right you think about oh yeah my friend did this thing and so uh they had a pos positive experience and the other sub falls to the Wayside so I think uh having good stories to tell again coming back to

your anal sharing the story will help to kind of but you know it's all propaganda right you know the the drugs and the trafficking and and the money laundering is propaganda from the media once the media starts wising up to how this technology is beneficial and their corporate um advertisers also do I think their discourse will probably change I don't know what you think about that yeah I mean there there's a hilarious editorial from 1994 1996 was published in the New York Times by The editorial board talking about how the internet was this wild west for the black market and how it was fueling all this illegal activity and you know hindsight who who who now says oh the internet's just used

for bad things like obviously it has a lot more applications than that Bitcoin is the exact same way um the difference is however that Bitcoin is in terms of like real bad things in the world if we talk about the real systems plaguing Society is like the lack of transparency in finance it's the big Banks having too much power not knowing where their money is going it's not knowing where political campaigns uh contributions are coming from Super packs like these things are terrible and guess what Bitcoin actually solves that Bitcoin in fact is the most transparent Financial technology created in human history it is the blockchain is a distributed gigantic public Ledger of every

transaction that's ever occurred now if you think about that for a moment yes it's going to make it difficult when someone's selling a bag of weed to their friend I don't know if that's the right slang in over here but selling a small amount of drug to someone yes it benefits them it can be anonymous you know no one's ever going to track that but when HSBC wants to go and launder money for Mexican drug cartels or terrorists as they've been found to have done in the past and who knows what other Banks when they're trying to launder $10 million over the blockchain everyone's going to see that that that's transparency that's Financial accountability um you know there are things like dark wallet and coin scramblers and those

those actually aren't proven to work very well and you know there are coins like darkcoin that actually are very Anonymous and those are concerns but Bitcoin and this is what you have to highlight because this is what most people use is the most transparent Financial technology that's ever existed this is what I tell people because I come from a very liberal background dad's an academic my I think the city I was born in is called the most liberal city in America and you know that's that that's a very unique perspective in Bitcoin it's a lot of techno libertarian AR anarcho capitalists and so the message that's been conveyed is not just that okay sure you can buy drugs off the internet most of the most of the people in this space is like oh I don't care

like that's good that's a free market like who who cares but if you want to Market to everyone you have you have to appeal to a different rationale and that rationale is is that the BL blockchain is actually a good thing and that the more we adopt it and the more we put it into our financial system the more Society benefits cuz yes on a small level it it creates personal financial Freedom which I'm not opposed to like if someone wants to sell a bag of weed fine but if you want to launder money for drug cartels people should be able to see that and that's what the blockchain affords that's very good point yeah um kind of Switching gears here a little bit um so as we're as we uh as we see in today's World a lot of marketing is done

through social networking and different online services and there's a lot of this share and share you know I share what I've just done I've shared how many miles I ran you know all this kind of information that we we um we find it coming up from a financial perspective how can we engage in similar ways but also respect the privacy and the sensitivity of the data that we're working with maybe it's a little bit more difficult of a question isn't it well when you talk about sharing sharing the stories or using social media to share experiences I think there's probably different ways that we can we can do that um so when you think about Merchant transactions uh I just saved so much on this transaction because I use

Bitcoin I didn't use my credit card and so that before I have to pay fees that could be one way if anybody in the audience hasn't yeah I mean this is not so much about like sharing as being your own bank it's the idea that you can now have venmo without two days to withdraw money or 3 days withdraw money this can be an incredibly social experience because I can have my wallet on my phone my friend can have his wallet on his phone and just you uh uh my developer we're working with the guys from airbits to put out a bit for B wallets and all of your wallet soon will have this Bluetooth low energy is amazing I can

say our our dinner tab I I I paid with my credit card and my our dinner tab was $140 I can split it eight ways and each of my friends at the dinner table without moving can pay can pay my phone immediately it's it's a game changer and I have that money instantly it's Bitcoin but it's money you know and uh that that's huge it's the idea that you can send money instantly and I think that's sharing inherently it's the instantaneous nature of the technology along those same lines how do you how would you see ourselves um marketing ourselves or I should say the Bitcoin Community um in relation to traditional banking services I mean I know there's

there's many advantages and cost savings and instant payments and such but there's also this you know uh the banking industry is not a very um popular industry I think there's been some stats published showing how unpopular the industry actually is um do we want I mean do we want to kind of absorb into that or we want to really break away from from the traditional so so for a 100 years 200 years actually all of human history really the average Joe never had an opportunity to create any sort of innovation within the financial services industry it just wasn't possible maybe the super brilliant guys came up with

all new systems but I'm not aware of them um Satoshi Nakamoto released his white paper all of a sudden sudden people had a tool just code lines of code math it wasn't a system wasn't a set of laws it was pure mathematics that worked that allowed people to be their own Banks and to build their own Financial technology um so that inherently threatens an entrenched institution like Banks but we have to recognize that they still have a role in the world now they may not be the banks of today but you still need people that are providing loans you still need institutions that protect people's life savings you know those institutions are going to continue to exist so what I think is really important is that we

don't antagonize the banks while as little as we're going to people like Jamie uh Morgan J Jamie Diamond at JP Morgan are inherently threatened and just dislike Bitcoin but if you look at some of the other Banks they're taking more intuitive intelligent approaches to the technology my greatest concern is that Federal Regulators are actually going to make it so that Banks end up using their own blockchain so that that that transparency I was talking about before won't exist the best thing we can do is to have a system in which everyone's using Bitcoin where there is a blockchain system where there's transparency I mean the banks don't like that and that's what threatens them most

it's not that makes an interesting marketing point I mean blockchain should be public I don't think you would trust a blockchain that's private right but it will still benefit a bank so what we have to do is have a system where they're expect I mean in my ideal world and now this will appall maybe half the people in the room and it definitely appalls people at most conferences and is that if the FED adopted a cryptocurrency and adopted a blockchain because then all of a sudden you eliminate volatility you have a system that's completely transparent and it's a system that everyone uses that that would be revolutionary I mean I know that the fed's thinking about it um we have a couple of advisers from the FED including the vice president of uh the

St Louis fed and you can look up his presentation on bitcoin he loves it I mean I think it would be a dangerous thing sort of I mean some of those individual liberties that Bitcoin now affords uh would be lost but at the same time you would have a transparent Global Financial system and to me that's the greatest possible thing you could ask for I'd like to see a world in which I think we' all like to see this is World in which the the financial institution the banks are completely disrupted by by Bitcoin don't know how to react to it much like the taxis are not much like Happ taxis and and uh and and hotels they're all up and arms about about these new uh these new stars coming into the market and just completely disrupting them um I'd like to see all

of these reg I think I'm all right so I'd like to see all of these regulated uh professions and and industries be completely uh disrupted and not how to not know how to react and the Smart Ones Will the Smart Ones will react and adjust their business model to and see far enough enough ahead in the future to to know that this is not the time uh these are not old times you know these are new times and they they need to adapt to that in order to survive and the ones that don't won't and they'll die off hopefully and we'll have you know new companies coming in with a vision that is you know uh focused on the future and where things are going and you know not trying to hold back uh their existing business models which are

corrupt and all the bad things that we say that just to come back to we talking about earlier um I think that within so with regards to your question about drug cartels money laundering there's lots of hypocrisy in the discourse that okay uh Bitcoin can be used for money laundering and drugs and things like that when in fact like you mentioned the banks are all uh they're all doing the same thing so um once that also becomes apparent to people and I think young people especially uh and the types of people that are involved College crypto like you said know not old enough to be in the old system but not young enough to to uh to not be involved and not think that they have some some say and some

power to change things um yeah once those people become wise to uh and they are uh to the reality of of our world uh they'll build things that will completely disrupt existing yeah you you you got to help you got to get to them while they're still hopeful you know my I mean it's true though I mean I I talk to my parents who are very intelligent individuals but they just can't imagine a world with Bitcoin because it's so different from what they know and you have you have to be speaking to people that can imagine a world without the big Banks and for our generation it's just so easy to do because we we hate them you know uh but but don't get me wrong I mean Goldman

sex is called the vampire squid cuz it's got its tentacles everywhere we're trying to chop off some of those Pentacles but some of them are always going to exist and we and we can't be so hopeful I think companies like JP Morgan that's questionable because they're taking an approach that that's saying oh screw Bitcoin we're going to compete against it don't compete with it adopt it be smart about it and companies like B Goldman Sachs in fact are really thinking about that uh I'll I'll even give you an anecdote my aunt was the first fight uh female vice president of the National Bank she was over at uh City Bank and when I told her I got into her Bitcoin she I mean she reads Wall Street Journal front to back every day and she came back to me a couple months later and she was like Jeremy you'll be

damned if you don't think every single big bank is figuring out how to adopt this technology right now um and I I think some of them might be dumb enough not to AR enough not to but the Smart Guys the smartest guys in the room they're all thinking about this they're all if they're not thinking about Bitcoin they're thinking about the blockchain um you you know banks are not taxi drivers um I mean not to discredit taxi drivers like I said awesome Haitian taxi drivers weekend I love my Uber guys but you're talking about some of the smartest people in the world working at these Banks believe it or not um and so they're they're thinking about this technology and it's just whether they will adopt fast enough to keep up with the coin bases to circles blockchain the

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