 And we are live. What's up guys? I got a special show for you today because we're gonna be discussing this brand new book that I've been paying attention to. It's co-authored by one of the two leading individuals in this ecosystem. And the book is Crypto Acids. If you guys haven't heard about it, check it out. It's out on Amazon. Jack, it's on Amazon today, right? That's correct. Awesome. It is on Amazon. Beautiful. So Jack, let me read Jack's bio. Jack is an angel investor and advisor to startups in the crypto asset community and speaks and writes frequently on the topic. With over two decades of experience in financial services, he's one of the first financial professionals to receive certification from the Digital Currency Council. He's a co-author of one of the earliest books on Bitcoin. What's the deal with Bitcoin? Jack, welcome to show, brother. Thank you, Amir. Thanks for having me. It's good to see you again. Likewise. So I'm gonna ask you the first question. What was the initial reasoning for actually creating this book? Well, it was very interesting. I've been writing on Bitcoin for a number of years, including doing some writing on marketwatch.com. And at consensus last year, I was fortunate enough to go to lunch and sit next to Chris Briniski, who I think you know Chris and many people do know of Chris. And Chris and I sat next to each other at lunch. We started chatting. He knew about my writings. I knew about his work. He was very friendly and knowledgeable of some people that I had known in this company I had invested in. So we really hit it off. And we both kind of agreed at this discussion that there was a need for a book about at the time we were calling a blockchain assets, Bitcoin and whatnot. And it was a need for a book that discussed these assets in terms of investing, how people could use them for investment purposes and things along that line. And Chris was doing some work around valuation of these types of assets. And we decided at that point that we were gonna write this book together. And that's what we did. And now it's coming out. What's interesting is we finished the book back in March. So you can only imagine the way the crypto space has changed from March to today. And honestly, we were constantly in there tweaking things, changing things as it went. But it's probably the fastest moving marketplace out there. So it was very interesting to keep up to date. And as I mentioned, we initially were gonna call it blockchain assets. And during that time, we decided to move away from that and go to call it crypto assets. Because we were finding among some things that the whole blockchain terminology wasn't really keeping up with what was going on. And Chris and I came up with a taxonomy around crypto assets, breaking it into three different categories. And we thought that was more appropriate. So that's the title crypto assets. And it's out, we're pretty proud about it. So what's the main talking features that you have in the book? Well, what we do in the book is we do, we tried to balance a book for people who are new to the space as well as people who are knowledgeable of the space. Obviously Chris and I write a lot for people who are very knowledgeable about the space. But we wanted it to still be something for people to enter into who weren't that familiar with it. So we talk a little bit about what Bitcoin is and what blockchain is and all of that. But we don't get into really basics and all of those types of things. But what we do spend a lot of time on is taking a look at Bitcoin as an investment and crypto assets as investments. And we put it in the context of some financial tools like modern portfolio theory, asset allocation. Because what we wanted to do with this book was to balance the technology and what we see for where this is going in the future with allowing people to invest in this. And not just investing in their own investment portfolio but investing from the perspective of ICOs, venture capital and those types of things. And so there's a lot in there about valuation, how you can evaluate Bitcoin and these crypto assets. And also when you're going out there and taking a look at ICOs, how you should consider ICOs. And so that's really the balance of the book. It's not just a book about crypto assets. Although we do have some chapters in there that significantly talk about the history of crypto assets, which I think was one of the most interesting things that we did in the book. But then we also have chapters that talk about modern portfolio theory and how people should put this into their investment portfolio. We actually broke the book up into three sections. What, why and how, what it is, why you should be investing in it and how to invest it. So a lot of it is around the investment aspects of it and the valuation of these assets. Talking about investments on that note, what's your current opinion about the ecosystem with all these, it seems like there's like 100 ICOs coming out on a day-to-day basis. I think there's just too many ICOs. I think that when you get emails from people who want you to be involved with their ICO and I'm sure you probably see this, when you get emails with misspellings and bad word, wrong terminology and everything else and you're getting 30 of them a day, you start to say, there are way too many ICOs out there. So what I've started to do and I've been an investor in this space for a number of years and I always view this as a business opportunity for the people looking to raise the money and when people come to me with an ICO, share a story with you recently, I was talking to somebody, I said, give me a pitch just a week ago, give me a pitch on your ICO and give me a pitch on it, it was like, okay. And I said, why are you going with an ICO versus just an equity raise? And he didn't know how to answer that and finally he stumbled and said, well, I like big planes. And we're seeing too many of these offerings coming out there that are just trying to cash in on the ICO craze and what we need to be seeing is we need to see legitimate business opportunities that integrate the token into their business model and that's why they're doing an ICO rather than just doing an ICO to just take advantage of this opportunity that's out there. So I think what you may also see, Amir, I think you're gonna start to see a slowdown of the ICOs. Obviously some regulations that have gone on out there with accredited investors, a lot of ICOs aren't available for US investors, people are starting to, it's getting tougher and tougher to get in on these ICOs. I think what you're gonna see is you're gonna see a little bit more movement to more equity types of raises where companies are gonna say, instead of just doing an ICO, we have a legitimate business here. We do an equity raise. Ultimately we will be in a token space but we'll do an equity raise and rather than going out to the marketplace with ICOs, maybe they do an airdrop of those tokens to the equity investors. And I think you're gonna start to see more and more of that as we go through this because there's gonna be a big shake out with the ICOs that have come along. People are gonna get frustrated. I think we're starting to see some ICO fatigue right now. I mean, take a look at your portfolio. Look at the ICOs you've been in over the last couple of months and many of them haven't done a thing. So- Majority of them haven't done a thing. Anyway, I think we're in an ICO saturation at the moment and quite have the equity deal. So I'm very keen to have equity and you can have liquidity on a tokenized equity. So imagine this in the future. Like as an angel investor you can relate. You know, we put $25,000 in 10 companies. We pray to God that one of these companies has an exit in 10 years. Like please have an exit. So for our liquidity options is really, it's difficult. Like we have one option. We might sell our shares to the existing founders but the paperwork for that sometimes it's more expensive to do paperwork for that than just wait around. So imagine having a token that represents equity in like a miniature smart contract for this business and let's say in the future the performance of this company is directly correlated to the performance of the token. And let's say in five years I wanna sell my token which represents equity. You guys as my partners as investors in this startup our contract have automatic say. You can buy it for that price at that point. So A, I don't wanna sell my token. I have equity. I'm gonna keep it for a very, very long time. I'm your partner now. I'm gonna do whatever I can to help the company. It's Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger talks about value investing a long period of time investing. So I'm very happy you brought that up and I think you're right. I think we're gonna slowly see the space evolve into that formulation as a way to see today. Yes, I totally agree with you on that. And we're seeing that already with the SAFs that are going out to the SAFTs that are going out there. And what I thought was very nice initially with the ICOs it demodicized the system. I mean, it was a democratic way. It could let individuals get in there and take advantage of almost like the IPO craze that we saw years ago. And it was a way of funding companies. But then that got kind of out of hand at some point in time regulations needed to step in. And I think the reality is, and you know this and as an angel investor, we like to step into companies and become a partner. And we play the role as an advisor. So when I see companies coming along and they're saying, well, Jack, we want you to just be an advisor and we just wanna put your name on the team. And we don't really, you know, you don't need to be involved. That to me is not something I wanna be involved in. I wanna be involved like you say, for a number of years help the company to grow because to me that's a legitimate business. They're reaching out to someone saying, we want you to help this company to grow. So those quick, we've got too many ideas out there that are get rich quick and no one's gonna win with that except the people that raise the money. But I do think that there are some very legitimate use cases, very legitimate applications and very legitimate business models out there that like you said, should be more long-term and whether or not an innovation comes along, like you said, with a token that plays into the equity, those are the types of things that we need to have out there. You know, this is all still an experiment. We're all still trying to find our way around here and what's right. So that kind of thinking I think is a good way but it needs a little bit more long-term thinking with some of these startups rather than I'm ready to come out, I'm gonna sell an ICO and there we go. And you know, well, let me ask you about this. What's your take on the exchanges? Because from an anti-fragile point of view, I find it quite scary that maybe four or five main exchanges in the world control the value of my token and any given day, if it's something to say, hey, take up whatever, my token price crashes. So where do you see exchanges playing a role in the future when it comes to you as a portfolio manager deciding on what tokens you wanna have in your portfolio? Well, I think that we're gonna see some consolidation with these exchanges. And I think certainly in the US, you're gonna see more KYC and AML types of obligations come along and they're gonna start opening these accounts and they're gonna require much more documentation from you. And I think that that's okay. I think that's legitimizing this and that's appropriate. That being said, if they're going to do that type of thing, then they also have to basically be regulated on all the standpoints that you're saying as well, that they just can't go in and it can't be the Wild West and they can't manipulate the markets. So it's a give and take. If you're gonna go in and you're gonna play KYC and AML and start to play around with all of these regulations, then accordingly, you have to make sure that you are playing ball with an efficient market. And so I think that's good. And I also think some of these smaller exchanges, that's where I really get concerned because what's happening with these ICOs, the ICOs come out and then they get on the Joe Blow exchange or something that some guys created out in the middle of East Oshkosh or something. And you don't know what they're doing with the markets that they're utilizing. I'm still not sure that we have the efficient markets with all of these different types of exchanges. But that being said, I do think there's an opportunity for some of these smaller exchanges to start showing how well they run, how well they operate, how well their infrastructure is and how well they can handle regulation and some of these criterias for jurisdictions of KYC and AML so that they can potentially grow to become some of these bigger exchanges. But I do think we're gonna see a consolidation of these exchanges, but there also has to be something in place to ensure that we're working with efficient markets out there. And it's still a bit of the wild west. There's a lot of transparency with these exchanges, but I think we just need to have some better feel that we're working within efficient markets. Do you think that the new forms that these centralized exchanges will transform how we actually view crypto or access crypto for portfolio? Because right now everything centralized on these exchanges, but what happens with projects like XeroX or Cyber Network actually get network effect and we have millions of people trading as individuals from a peer to peer aspect? Well, I think that's good. I think because like I said, it's still an experiment. There's still some things out there. No one should say it needs to be this way or it needs to be that way. So if we can get some of these to come out there and really show proper innovation and show ways of helping the investor and to be efficient. So that everyone's playing in an equal playing ground. As long as they have those types of things, I think that's good. I don't think we should say an exchange should be this way or it should be that way. I still think we're feeling our way around, but I think you're going to see in the next year or two, you're gonna see a lot of these exchanges go by the wayside. So I think people have to be very careful where they're putting their money, where they're trading, where they're using their tokens and to pay attention to some of these other new technologies out there. For me, it comes back to the basics of understand that this is still an environment where you don't wanna put all of your tokens up on a system. You've gotta still play around with the hardware wallets. You've gotta still play ball and be prudent and understand that you need to control your assets and you may go in and trade them, but at some point, storing them and keeping them is really up to you and you have to be diligent with that until we start to understand. Well, on that note, I'm curious then for, say, the venture funds that do invest in ICOs and do trading and do all forms of allocation, security models are, because they're at the most, too, if they have their clients' money on, let's say, Bitrex or Poloniax, then something happens with the bot or something happens with the massive DDS attack and they lose your client's money. Now, I'm just wondering from that aspect, do these new funds, these new full-service crypto funds have a contingency plans and B, what's your security measures? Well, they have to, they have to and what we're seeing right now, Amir, and you know this, you're seeing some massive amounts of money going into crypto funds, going into venture funds, going into hedge funds and the institutions are starting to get involved in this and they need to have some best practices out there for what they're doing with their money. So do they wanna have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting out there in Bitrex? Do they wanna have millions of dollars sitting in Coinbase? I think there's an opportunity here for people to come up with an idea or come up with a business model that addresses this type of thing because I think it's okay when you're dealing with your portfolio and maybe it's in five figures or something like that, but when you get to six and seven figures out there, you not only are putting yourself at risk with all of these exchanges, I think you start becoming a target for hackers and whatnot and there's so many stories. In fact, my co-author Chris a number of months ago and this was written up into New York Times was hacked at a time where they were hacking people in the Bitcoin community. And so there's gonna have to be something that's gonna be done there. So I think you're gonna start to see some innovations from some of the hardware wallet people and some things where potentially maybe Coinbase steps up. I mean, Coinbase has their vaults and things like that. They have GDAX, they have their institutional trading platform. Something has to happen where they provide a platform for people to do this in a much more secure manner. And I know that there's some business models out there right now thinking of that, but I think that's still an opportunity. Coinbase also have a quarter million in the insurance policy. They do. They do. So they do have some sort of a protection there. And in fact, I remember over the last year or so, I've been advising people with Coinbase, you've got your online wallet you've got your vault and you view your vault almost as a savings account. So if you're just gonna hold something, put it into the vault and then what you're gonna use Bitcoin as a currency or for trading, whatever, then keep it outside of that because they have a 48 hour window, those types of things. So I think Coinbase is doing some good things there. However, that being said, I'm also not that secure with keeping a lot of money in the vault. I still think there's gonna be, there's still gonna be a need for people to use hardware wallets and those types of things when we start to get into some of the major money that's being out there. And that's why I also think, that's why I also think you're gonna see more equity types of positions happening with some of these startups because the millions are gonna come pouring in from institutions. They're not all gonna wanna be in tokens. They're gonna be wanna be in equity which is nowhere online. It could be in a SAFT, it could be in something else but it doesn't have to be online. So you're basically investing in something that's off chain but still within a business that's on the blockchain. I was focusing on, you mentioned hardware wallets. Like I like to use a ledger and there's other ones out there but even having like a multi-sake hard wallet. Yeah, I mean, I think they're great. I use ledger, Tresors out there as well I think if you are someone who is involved in this space today and you don't have a hardware wallet or you're not knowledgeable about these hardware wallets you need to start doing that today. And you need to start putting them in a safe place. You need to start going back to some of these routes of the 12, 10 word phases, phrases that we have and putting things on paper wallets and things like that because you have to be secure. We're not in an environment where even with two factor authentication and with so many things that can go on from hackers you've got to play ball with some of more of these hardware wallets and utilize these for your investment purposes. Here's the amount of times. Do you have like, what's your personal philosophy when it comes to viewing an ICO? Let's say someone sends you a white paper and it actually does catch your eye. Do you have like a seven step checklist that you go through to determine does this even have some validity to even investigate? Yeah, we do actually. We actually have a, in the book we talk about this and there is a process that we go through and evaluation but the very first thing you need to do is you need to read that white paper, okay? Now, I was one of those people too that I'm sure we all have invested in ICOs without reading the white paper, okay? But that's step one, you've got to read the white paper. Additionally, you have to basically understand what the business is doing. And one of the things that Chris and I say in the book is if you can't explain that business to someone else or explain what they're doing, then don't invest in it. Now additionally, you have to be very knowledgeable about the advisors that they have, pay attention to the team that they have, pay attention to the community that they have. We also think that you should be going out there and making sure that their software that they're using is open source. So get familiar with what they're doing on Reddit, get familiar with what they're doing on GitHub, take a look at what their underlying systems are out there. So be knowledgeable with those types of things. And then we have a kind of a minor valuation process that we outlined in the book for how to look at ICOs and see where the price is. I've encountered too many ICOs recently who say, well, we're gonna do this many ICOs and we need to pick a number out of the air. So we went with a dollar, a coin. And we have, and Chris has done some work on valuation models and recently he released a paper on Medium about this. And we are right now, when we saw working with ICOs, we put him through this valuation model that Chris has outlined to make sure that where they're pricing it has a basis in the science of valuation in terms of what we have. So I would say, you take a look at what we've got in the book, we've got a valuation model there, but additionally, Chris does a great job of open source research and he's done some valuation papers up on Medium that I think people should look at as well. And it's still evolving as he goes through it as well. So there's some processes that we employ. And this works for us, but other people may do something else. But the key thing is to have some mechanism and some strategy out there for evaluating these ICOs. What's your take on all these pre-ICOs? Cause I find it kind of, I don't know. I find it disturbing to see some people are getting discounts of 90%. And then they go to the public and the public sees that these pre-investors got a discount of 90%. So for me, I don't think so. That's really a good model or format to copy. Well, it's a model that I'm not sure, I always wonder why they're doing these types of things. Are they doing it out there to raise as much money as possible and get money early on? Or are they doing it to bring in some strategic investors? I mean, I think if you're doing some pre-ICOs and the reason you're doing that is to bring in some strategic investors who are either gonna help you with advisory roles or to help you to fund this or to bring in some expertise. Then I think there's some value there. What ends up happening there is a lot of times when they do the pre-ICOs people may step up and they may be able to subscribe to the whole ICO. And then ultimately when it comes to the crowd, the crowd sale, there's nothing out there for people. So I think that's where a lot of these pre-ICOs were thinking that we'll do this and we'll try and get some interest from larger investors to bring in some expertise. But unfortunately, if they're not doing it right, then you get into situations where you get these white lists or people can do two ethers of an ICO and they get little scraps of what the original ICO was. So I think it's still evolving. I think people are still taking a look at it. But it is a way for some of the larger investors to come in and help out and for the companies to bring in some of that expertise. But I think, like you say, a lot of it doesn't seem fair for people. And you wonder why they're doing that discounting. If there's a reason for it- Especially if there's a reasoning, sure, but especially though for the fact, a lot of them state that the reason where our token exists in the first place is the utility for the network effect. I'm like, okay, if it's a network effect, therefore you need more users. Why are you literally giving out 50% of your tokens for maybe three groups of people? Right, and that's a great point. Right, that's a great point because the value of the coin, a big part of it is in the network effect and is in the community that you're building. So you should be building a community of people who are gonna be using this coin not just about funding this for their purposes. So I think there's a balancing act. I think you've had a couple of ICOs that have done it right, but many of them have just not done it right. And I think they're still learning. But see, this is the problem where we've been throwing so many ICOs at this system and we're trying to see what's working and what's not working. And there hasn't really been a lot of expertise or a lot of discipline put to this market to say, here's the best practice for it. And I think we're starting to see that, but while we're seeing that, we're getting an ICO every five or six ICOs an hour coming along. So I think it would be great if we could just kind of slow this down, get some best practices, understand how to do this properly to benefit everybody. But it's just the nature of the environment we're in. I mean, it's fortunately, it's a distributed decentralized network where we can have these types of things. So we've got to learn from them and we've got to take a look and we've got to do our own due diligence when we're looking at putting our money into them. I agree. I think you said it well. I think we are in the beginning phases. We have a long way to go. I'm a firm believer in the ecosystem can self-regulate it and we can figure out where we need to go. Like anything, this is no different than what happened with the dot-com boom and bust, even though now this is I think more hyper escalated and more people have access to this as opposed to back in the day when it does look on Valley. But I'm quite excited for the future. I'm excited for the growth and the evolution of this technology and to see it adapt in different nations around the world. So I'm quite bullish and I'm excited to see where we go. Jack, if people want to buy this book today, what is the best place to get it? Well, right now it is available on Amazon and as we were saying earlier, as long as it's on Amazon, I guess everybody can get it. So it is on Amazon. I think it's coming out to bookstores in about another week or so and we've had good success with it on Amazon. We've had people who have reached out to us and have said good things about it and give us some good feedback on it. So it is on Amazon. I would say that's probably the best place to go get it. You'll probably see it turning up in your bookstores over the next week or so. So we're coming on and everybody I highly recommend you get this book. I think it's one of the best out there and I'll see you guys soon. Yeah, thanks. Cheers.