From the Front Page - What Bitcoin Did
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What Bitcoin Did #54 VanEck's Gabor Gurbacs on Bringing a Bitcoin ETF to Market
December 7th, 2018 by
DSholla **“It should be less burdensome to get an innovative asset to market. The world is moving fast and we need regulatory support to keep newer technologies in the US.”** **— Gabor Gurbacs** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Sunday 2nd Dec, 2018 Project: VanEck/MVIS Role: Director, Digital Assets Strategy The crypto bear market has been felt by many. From traders to miners, the fall in prices has led many to lose a significant amount of money. The fall in prices h... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #53 Grin's Michael Cordner aka Yeastplume on Implementing Mimblewimble
December 4th, 2018 by DSholla **“There may be a few people who genuinely think a deflationary currency is the way to go, nobody on the Grin team does.”** **— Michael Corder (Yeastplume)** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Friday 30th Nov, 2018 Project: Grin Role: Developer Outside of the most hardcore Bitcoin maximalists, there are some who respect a minimal number of alternative cryptocurrency projects. My experience in creating this podcast is that you find some who say they are maximali... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #52 Exploring Crypto Narratives With Nathaniel Whittemore
November 30th, 2018 by DSholla **“The business model for surveillance, which can be used for ill, is advertising.”** **— Nathaniel Whittemore** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Wednesday 28th Nov, 2018 Company: NLW & CO Role: Lead The crypto industry is blessed with many smart thinkers and content producers. Across Twitter, Medium, news sites and blogs there is a regular supply of thought pieces and analysis where contributors speculate on the future of the industry. There are often opp... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #51 The Future of Banking with Zac Prince
November 27th, 2018 by DSholla **“I think the term bank won’t be used so much when we are talking about banking services 20 years from now.”** **— Zac Prince** Interview location: New York Interview date: Wednesday 21st Nov, 2018 Company: BlockFi Role: Founder and CEO A sign of the maturing market is the growth of traditional financial products built for cryptocurrencies. Both the corporate and retail financial sectors understand the benefits of crypto, and thus a range of companies and instituti... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #50 Crypto Regulations With The SEC's Hester Peirce
November 24th, 2018 by DSholla **“Just because you are calling something Crypto does not mean you can ignore the rules we have had in place for years, but I do think we also need to be willing to open the doors a little bit wider for innovation.”** **— Hester Peirce** Interview location: Washington Interview date: Tuesday 20th Nov, 2018 Organization: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Role: Commissioner As the market for cryptocurrencies has grown, so has the oversight from the various regulat... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #49 The Freedom To Innovate With Peter Van Valkenburgh
November 23rd, 2018 by DSholla **“A system of money that can move millions of dollars across borders are going to have some uses which are unsavory, it is also going to make the world freer, better and a buttress for human dignity.”** **— Peter Van Valkenburgh** Interview location: Washington Interview date: Tuesday 20th Nov, 2018 Company: Coin Center Role: Research Director In the age of financial surveillance, cryptocurrencies have created a headache for regulators. The ability to move value, acr... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #48 Jesse Powell is Building a Culture of Crypto Values at Kraken
November 16th, 2018 by DSholla **“It is not just about making money. We didn’t start this company to make PayPal 2.0.”** **— Jesse Powell** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Tuesday 13th Nov, 2018 Company: Kraken Role: CEO Volatility in crypto is reflected in the businesses which have been built upon it. Only recently have we seen this volatility with Bitmain, where during the bull run of 2017 the business was generated $billions in revenue and profit, but as the market has corrected, bot... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #47 Adam Back on a Decade of Bitcoin
November 13th, 2018 by DSholla **“There are only going to be 21 million coins, there are billions of people in the world, some reasonable percentage of who might find it interesting to own a piece of Bitcoin.”** **— Adam Back** Interview location: London Interview date: Friday 9th Nov, 2018 Company: Blockstream Role: CEO The Bitcoin whitepaper has eight references for eight projects and technologies which enabled and inspired Satoshi Nakamoto to create Bitcoin. One of those references is for Adam B... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #46 Francis Pouliot on the Network Effect of Money and Why Tokens Are Scams
November 9th, 2018 by DSholla **“Humanity needed to discover what is the best form of money.”** **— Francis Pouliot** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Wednesday 7th Nov, 2018 Company: Satoshi Portal & Bylls.com Role: CEO Crypto tokens have come under increasing scrutiny over a range of issues: - Are they unregistered securities? - Do they hold any intrinsic value? - Can they be a medium of exchange when prices are volatile? - Are they scams? Francis Pouliet, CEO of Satoshi ... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #45 Fixing Online Advertising With Brendan Eich
November 6th, 2018 by DSholla **“The system is so lacking in integrity, at least 20% of $100bn is going to fraud.”** **— Brendan Eich** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Friday 2nd November Company: Brave & Basic Attention Token Role: CEO/President The online advertising model is broken all parties are hurting: Users encounter a degraded experience as web pages take longer to load - leading to an increase in mobile data charges Publishers are losing revenue to fraud, and ad blockers ... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #44 Debunking Economics and Why Bitcoin Will Fail With Steve Keen
November 5th, 2018 by DSholla **“One of the great weaknesses of the human species is we have this belief of a perfect world.”** **— Steve Keen** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Monday 29th October Project: Debunking Economics Steve Keen is challenging modern economic theory which led us into the 2008 crisis. With his two books: Debunking Economics and Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis, Steve outlines the inherent flaws in the capitalist system which are required to make them work. Bi... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #42 Crypto Custody With Jeremy Welch & Alena Vranova
October 30th, 2018 by DSholla **“Bitcoin does form the dominant position, it has the most hash power, it is the currency in terms of design, decentralisation, or ability for governments or corporate actors to control it, it is the strongest, therefor everything relies on Bitcoin’s survival.”** **— Jeremy Welch** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Saturday 27th October Company: Casa Role: Founder (Jeremy Welch), Strategy (Alena Vranova) As the value of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies increase... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #41 Bitmain's IPO With Samson Mow & Katherine Wu
October 27th, 2018 by DSholla **“I think that they don’t want to IPO right now, but they have no choice because they raised with the expectation that they would IPO, so they had to file and it had to look good, or as good as they could make it look.”** **— Samson Mow** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Thursday 18th October Company: Blockstream (Samson Mow), Messari (Katherine Wu) Role: Chief Strategy Office (Samson Mow), Director of Business Development (Katherine Wu) The Bitmain IPO wa... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #40 An Interview with Jameson Lopp
October 23rd, 2018 by DSholla **“If you want to protect yourself from this over arching legal system then you will want to hide as much of your activity as possible.”** **— Jameson Lopp** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Thursday 18th October In his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, George Orwell wrote about a dystopian future where the government subjects the population to omnipresent surveillance. That day is here, but the surveillance isn’t just that it's operated by the gover... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #39 An Interview with Giacomo Zucco
October 19th, 2018 by DSholla **“Ethereum itself is not an experiment in something new, because they tried to implement any bad idea that was already discussed with Bitcoin in 2013.”** **— Giacomo Zucco** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Tuesday 16th October 2018 Giacomo Zucco is a proud Bitcoin Maximalist, and his presentation on the subject at the Honey Badger conference in Riga led to mixed reactions. Some called out the stupidity of Bitcoin Maximalism specifically concerning his slide: The ... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #38 An Interview with Nic Carter
October 12th, 2018 by DSholla **“Money might be the only case where you desperately need to radically decentralise the set of people who can create and have influence over the creation schedule.”** **— Nic Carter** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Wednesday 10th October 2018 Union Square Ventures posted a blog post this week titled The Myth of the Infrastructure Phase, shining a light on the imbalance between infrastructure work in crypto and DApp usage. There is an abundance of blockchain scal... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #37 An Interview with Jimmy Song
October 5th, 2018 by DSholla **“This is why proof of work needs to be expensive, if it is cheap you can roll back things easily. You want it to be very difficult to change history. The only way to make it difficult to change history is to make the process of writing the current history very expensive.”** **— Jimmy Song** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Monday 1st October 2018 The recent Bitcoin protocol bug, CVE-2018-1744, received considerable amounts of alarmist press, “For less than $80,... Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #36 An Interview with Caitlin Long & Saifedean Ammous
September 28th, 2018 by DSholla **“Negative interest rates are purely a construct of the artificiality of the monetary system. There is going to a major bond crash - the challenge is that this could be years if not decades away, or it could be tomorrow.”** **— Caitlin Long** Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #35 An Interview with Jake Chervinsky
September 21st, 2018 by DSholla **“I am skeptical about this concept of doing a securities issuance and then trying to escape liability by converting the token you used for that issuance into something else, this is not how liability works. If you violate the securities law you are liable no matter what you do afterwards.”** **— Jake Chervinsky** Read More -
What Bitcoin Did #34 An Interview with Riccardo “FluffyPony” Spagni from Monero & Tari
September 14th, 2018 by DSholla **“Over the last 10 to 15 years there has been an uprising of people who value privacy, not because they are weird and want to go and hide in the woods, ordinary citizens who are not happy with how much data they are handing over.”** **— Riccardo "FluffyPony" Spagni** Interview location: Skype Interview date: Thu 13th September 2018 Company: Tari (and Monero core team member) Role: Co-founder David Chaum said that “Privacy is tied to human potential, an important as... Read More
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