 Anyone, regardless of your place of birth, has equal rights to participate in these markets and has equal opportunity. The people that are using cryptocurrency the most are the people that have the least voice because most of them are in developing nations. When these people send money back home, they end up getting ripped off. So we're talking about robbing some of the poorest people in the world. If that doesn't piss you off, then well, we're probably not going to be friends. We design our systems properly, we get up tremendous wealth. In fact, wealthier than anyone is today and at the same time wipe out poverty. The only question now is who's going to participate and at what level? So what's up everyone? It's Giovanni. Welcome to another Cointelegraph AMA. Today I have the pleasure to be joined by Edward Deon, Crypt Economist, early Bitcoin investor and the CEO and founder of Anata.io, a mission-driven blockchain technology company. How are you doing, Edward? Doing great. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. So today we are going to talk about FUD, so common misconceptions around cryptocurrency. And I know that you, Edward, have a lot of experience addressing those issues. So before we start, I would like to remind our audience that this is an interactive show, so please write your questions in the chat. And if you have any questions regarding FUD, regarding misconceptions towards crypto that you want to address, we're going to ask Edward to address them. So let's get into it, Ed. So first of all, nice to meet you. And so I know that you have a lot of experience in addressing common misconceptions around crypto and the so-called FUD. So would you like to explain what is your usual approach in addressing crypto-related FUD? Well, I've been dealing with this problem for a long time now. Close to a decade, I've been kind of stuck in rooms answering questions around people's concerns or misconceptions about cryptocurrency. And so I'm a bit of a seasoned vet on this topic. And what you'll discover is that people who've been in the industry long enough, they start to develop a thick skin about this because what you really realize is that this is a very powerful idea and crypto is not going away. And when something is that robust and that immutable, it tends to have some value in the market. Now, most people's misconceptions about crypto stem from them viewing crypto from the old world, right? They look at crypto and say, how do I make more money? And what they don't realize is that crypto is a new form of money and you shouldn't be entering into it thinking that, how do I make more US dollars? It would be a bit like inventing a light bulb and saying, wow, this light bulb was so amazing that I could use oil burning lamps more. You're trying to look at new technology from the perspective of the old. So that's one of the biggest mistakes I see people make. And I also think that FUD is perfectly natural around something as exotic and weird as cryptocurrency. This idea that you could have non-national digital money on an unstoppable network that no one owns. It's a bit weird. It's a bit exotic. And unless you've taken the time to really learn about it, it's not only natural to fear it or not understand it. I was one of those people in the early days. But thankfully, I figured out how to explain this stuff in a way where people will understand it. And I built my career on that. Most of my early career was going into rooms with investors and explaining to them why this technology was so important and why it was going to change the world. The nature of what we were talking about back then was a little bit different than what people talk about today. Mostly back then it was about banking in bank and creating sound money, which I still think is the core of the industry. But that's of course shifted over the years. Now people are more concerned with whether or not Bitcoin in particular is a green technology. And I would argue that it is for a number of reasons, specifically because it moves us away from the petrodollar, which is probably the least economically or ecologically friendly thing on the planet is the fact that we have a global reserve currency pegged to the burning of fossil fuels. And what cryptocurrency allows us to do is get away from that and start to use technologies or currency that isn't pegged to the burning of fossil fuels, but perhaps is backed by something else. So dealing with FUD has been a big part of my career. It's probably the most important part of my career because I do it internally for my own company but also externally for my strategic partners, for future investors, for anyone really. That's just what I do for my community. So if anyone has any questions, what specific types of FUD they'd like me to address, I'm more than happy to do so because that's basically what I do full time. Yeah, for sure. And I believe that the mission that you have is also very similar to the one that Cointelegraph is bringing forward, which is informing, telling people what cryptocurrency really are and basically bringing knowledge, educating people about crypto so that they don't fall victim to some misconceptions or unmotivated sort of beliefs around this technology. Of course we know that cryptocurrency, since it's very relatively new technology, relatively new asset, there are certainly risks involved in it but those risks need to be, I would say, carefully addressed and not overblown as many people tend to do. So for sure we have different types of FUD, so different types of misconceptions that, yeah, I would also like to hear from the audience what is the misconception that you are more worried about and Ed is going to address it, so please write your questions in the chat. But first, I would say that one of the biggest misconceptions is actually the one that you already mentioned. I mean, one of the main problems that people are worried about is the problem related to the environment. So it's something that came up last year, one year ago. This problem exploded in the media, the mainstream media started addressing it, especially after Elon Musk stopped accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment for his Tesla car so there was a lot of discussion going on about this issue and for sure there is some problems to be addressed in terms of environment and crypto but there is also a lot of misconceptions so please Ed, can you explain us? Well, I think if you take the time to actually read the reports on where the energy for proof of work mining on the Bitcoin network and on the Ethereum network are mostly coming from, it was mostly coming from electricity that was being wasted. Most people don't realize this is that for most of the lifespan of Bitcoin in particular, most of the mining was happening in China and in China in a lot of places they don't have an electrical grid. That is to say is they build a power plant out in the middle of nowhere and under the auspices that someday they'll build a grid and they'll attach it to the rest of the country but during that time they're producing more electricity than they could use and so they were literally dumping the electricity into the ground and what would happen is young entrepreneurs would go out to these places and say wow, you're wasting all this electricity, why don't you instead invest it in the network and I think that's a really important concept that people forget is that they look at how much energy is used in proof of work mining and say wow, that's going to waste which is a bit of a misconception because it's actually being invested. When you invest electricity into a network it makes it more secure, therefore more valuable and your reward for that is in the form of cryptocurrency specifically Bitcoin which becomes more valuable so it's a bit weird. It's a bit like someone buying a house and saying wow, this house is doing really well and now I could sell it for more money later on and someone else coming around and saying hey, that's a waste. Is it a waste or was it a smart investment? I think it's ultimately a smart investment. Now we could argue about whether or not it increases our footprint as a civilization but the truth is over 60% of the electricity that was invested in Bitcoin for most of its lifetime was being wasted already was just being dumped into the ground and then if you look at what percentage is coming from renewables it's actually really reassuring. The number moves around from year to year but it was upwards of like over 50% of the electricity that was being invested that wasn't coming from sources that were being wasted was coming from renewables such as solar and wind. So I think that makes Bitcoin in particular a really amazing technology and really green especially when you factor in the fact that it moves us away from the petrodollar. In truth anything that moves us away from the petrodollar would be ecologically friendly. So Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as a whole are helping us transition from old technologies and old currencies which are fossil fuels and the US dollar into new technologies which is cryptocurrency and new currencies that are backed not by the burning of fossil fuels but are backed oftentimes by information-based services and information-based goods which is another topic. This is one of the classic things I see and I even see experts in the industry say this is that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. I saw the CEO of FTX recently said it pretty audaciously that he thinks that Bitcoin is just a box that you put money into and then you get more money out later and I think that is a wild misconception because it is an open permissionless borderless transaction network that has a currency that is on a set inflation model that cannot change. It's literally an economics wet dream for most of history. We would dream of having a currency that was on a set inflation model and Bitcoin gives us that to turn around and say that that has no intrinsic value is wildly ignorant and it just suggests that these people weren't part of the industry in the beginning because that's all we talked about in the early days when Bitcoin was first bursting on the scene. We were like, wow, sound money on a set inflation model, cross-border transactions, open and permissionless because it means people from anywhere in the world, regardless of their place of birth, whether they have a birth certificate, a driver's license, or any of the things that most of us in the West tape are granted, they can still access and use these systems. That is a tremendous boon to humanity and to say that that has no intrinsic value is wildly insular. I think that's just what happens. It's very common when people from privileged backgrounds don't understand how important it is to give people access to basic financial tools. It is a life-changing technology. The other things that are worth addressing is that most crypto does not use proof-of-work mining. We're talking about one crypto, Bitcoin, uses a lot of proof-of-work mining and it's very energy intensive and that's on purpose. That is a feature not above because the more electricity you invest in a network, the harder it is to attack it. Therefore, this really robust network that exists, that could do cross-border transactions, has intrinsic value as reflected by its market cap. I think focusing on Bitcoin too much is a mistake, but it's important to know that even if we only had Bitcoin, it would still be better than the fiat technology that we've been using for most of our lives. Yeah, you made a few good points. Actually, I would say that one important point that you for sure made is that basically, you spend a lot of electricity to maintain a Bitcoin network, but everything should be taken proportionally to the good that you are obtaining from that energy consumption. It all comes down on whether you think that the Bitcoin network is valuable to justify the amount of energy consumption. Well, it doesn't have to be valuable to us. It's clearly valuable to other people. That's important enough. The market has already spoken it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, close to over a trillion at some point. That is an investment. The electricity is not being wasted. It's creating a tremendous amount of value. I would also like to point out one of the other misconceptions I think we're probably going to get to this. We're talking about crypto grows and all that stuff. Most cryptocurrency users are black and brown people by a wide margin living in developing nations. I think it's really important when we talk about this stuff, we have to talk about it from their perspective too. Is it being wasted if it's saving lives? I have personally helped save lives in Venezuela during periods of hyperinflation by sending Bitcoin to my friends there who then use it to buy food, have that food shipped to a neighboring nation and then go cross-border grab that food and bring it back. It's literally life-saving for them. More recently, I've used cryptocurrency, specifically Ethereum, to make people in Ukraine. Ethereum also uses a lot of electricity. The banking system in Ukraine shut down. My friends needed money to get out, so I sent them cryptocurrency, which they used to escape into Poland. Do you think they think it's using too much electricity or was it just the right amount to save their lives? It's all relative. It's very easy to sit in a fully developed nation with a stable banking system and a bank account that has never been shut down or seized because I don't really see the point in crypto and I think it uses too much electricity. If it's saving your lives or if it's saving 20% of your paycheck, which is what most people lose when they try to send money from a developed nation into developing nations, is it too much electricity for that person too? I think it's really important for people to break out of their own narrow perspective and try to look at a more broad scope and say, how is this serving humanity? It's allowing us to bank the unbanked. The question that I think is the most important is the fact that the amount of electricity is coherent at that point. People say it uses as much electricity as a nation state and I say that's exactly right because it's a new form of a nation state. The modern definition of a nation state is a group of people that use the same money. So if we're all using Bitcoin, welcome to the Bitcoin nation. And in that nation, we have as many users as a major nation state and market cap that is similar to the GDP of a major nation state and it's coherent that it would take that much electricity to be secure and to function. And I think people who say it uses too much electricity, most of the people I've seen who claim that are not crypto insiders, they're crypto outsiders. And they're people that are looking for reasons to attack the industry because they have a financial benefit to themselves for doing so. It's people from banking or people from politics. And I think it's really important to know that politicians take 10 times as much money, sometimes 20 times as much money from the banking lobby as they do from the crypto lobby. So of course their opinions are going to be colored by that. And so anytime you see a politician come out and have an opinion about cryptocurrency, it really is important to take a step back and ask them who's funding their campaigns? Who finances the DNC? When Elizabeth Warren comes out and has negative things to say about cryptocurrency, she's not doing so because she actually has that opinion. She's doing so because her financiers have that opinion and she's voicing that. And I think it's really important for us to recognize the difference between actual factual reality and a shape narrative. And so I think that's part of what our job is. And I think CoinTelegraph does a great job of doing that. Yeah, and you made a good point that recently we saw happening very difficult situations for people like in Ukraine where people are really cut off from the traditional financial system and they really need the cryptocurrency to survive in those situations. And in those situations, crypto becomes extremely useful. So now we have some questions from the audience especially I want to address one question from Cristina Korner who is asking which arguments would you use with those crypto skeptics who do not want to educate themselves and just keep saying crypto is bad to make them change their mind? Well, first off, it's a really important concept. Advice that is not asked for is not advice. So if there are people in your life who are saying like, I don't really believe in this stuff. I don't want anything to do with it. You should not be rushing headlong into that and trying to force them to change their mind. Instead, you should feel sorry for them. We're talking about the top performing asset class in the world for the past decade. It's a bit like someone saying I don't believe in the Chicago Bulls when they're on a, you know, a six championship run, right? It's the most winning this asset class in the world for the past decade. If you think it's bad or disagrees with it it's simply missing the boat. It's a bit like, say, I don't believe in personal computing or the internet, right? Or mobile phones. It doesn't matter what they believe. This stuff is going to continue to grow. It's going to continue to prosper. We're going to continue to innovate. People who have misgivings about it you should feel sorry for them because they're technologically backwards and they're not paying attention. This is one of the most important and powerful industries on the planet in terms of the amount of good it could do. It's created more millennial millionaires than any business sector ever, period. So if people have misgivings about that, if they don't like it well, honestly, I just laugh at them at the stage of my life. Forget what it's done for me personally. It's made me tremendously wealthy and I will never have to worry about money again. So that's like the root of my confidence. But the truth is I've seen it transform entire communities and I've seen it save lives. I could get defensive about crypto in that if someone is outright attacking it from a position of power, say a politician or a major banking institution I get defensive because they're attacking a life-saving technology. I personally use it to save lives and I know for a fact it's saving far more lives than I have even seen myself. So when people come out against it I could get defensive, but if it's people in my personal life or someone I see online and they have a bad thing to say about crypto I tend to just make fun of them so the truth is they're sitting outside of the top performing asset class in the world. If you had $1 to invest and you invested it in any stock, any bond, any derivative, any real estate or most likely a crypto a major blue chip crypto like Bitcoin or Ethereum and then you waited 10 years and then you said, which one was going to give me the most spending power? Without a doubt, 100% sure Bitcoin or Ethereum outperformed anything else you chose almost every year. So for someone to say that I don't believe in it or I have a problem with that that's their problem really. This is like saying you have a problem with the most winning esteem in sports. It's not important what people think about it necessarily what is important is what it could do and what it does is it transforms lives. Christina, I want to say I'm not trying to be evangelical to people who don't want to hear it. I don't trust it or I don't want it. You should not try to force through that unless someone actively comes to you and asks for advice and says, hey, I don't know about this crypto thing what is it? If that's what you're saying then there's a lot I could say. Everything I just said it's the top performing asset class in the world it's transforming lives. It creates sound money. The idea that you have a global transaction ledger that no one owns that is completely auditable and completely trustless is immensely powerful. What I'm saying is a lot of times you have crypto naysayers and they're not interested in being onboarded and those people you should onboard and those are the people I laugh at and those are the people I legitimately feel sorry for them because they're going to miss out and they have missed out. I have dozens of people who I've known who in 2013 to 2016 who I was onboarding actively and a lot of them laughed at me they laughed me out of rooms and said like this will never work you're crazy. I'm going to stop me from being actively participating in crypto and now I'm wealthier than all of them more successful than all of them and I finance an entire community of ideas so they missed out on that and make a mistake people who are crypto naysayers today are going to mix out on what happens next epoch and they're going to miss out on what happens to epoch after that so every four years cryptocurrency goes through a major surge and people who miss out on those surges I legitimately feel sorry for them they're missing out on the best investment you can make in the market and it's not just life saving but also transforming it maybe you don't need to have your life saved but would you like to have more spending power would you like to make smart investments that benefit you and your family and your community I certainly do and so if people are resistant to that why wrestle with it just let them have it and like I said I genuinely feel sorry for them I would say that probably people that are still skeptic today they might change their mind in the future when the success of cryptocurrency will be evident to them and they will realize they didn't make as much money as they could but probably crypto will benefit them anyway in the future too I should also say that most of the crypto naysayers are the result of a big gap in our generation the last generation and the current generation aren't simply a generation apart but they're an entire age apart that is to say the boomers were born in the atomic age millennials and after are born in the information age and that's not simply hyperbolic to say that they were born in a different age and we're literally going to have to wait for an entire generation of people to die off before the information age can really bear fruit so I think it's really important to recognize that but you shouldn't be trying to change people's positions anyway I don't try to change people's minds what I try to do is help people who come to me with questions and people who actively come to me seeking help those are the only people I really work with but it's really important to also be sensitive to the fact that the people who aren't getting crypto may never get crypto and it's not because of a default of their own it's simply they were born in a different generation and they have a different perspective about the way the world is and a different perspective about what's possible and what's not possible and oftentimes you have to wait for people to die before civilization can move on from those old ideas and I think cryptocurrency as well as it's done will do much better as the boomers power or stranglehold over our politics and over our economy starts to wane and you start to see children of the information age start to come to the forefront yeah the generation problem is definitely a big issue so I would like to remind our audience that if you are liking what you're listening there is a partnership between Cointelegraph and Anata the company at this the co-off which this partnership is aimed at fighting FUD in the crypto space so you should check out the website anata.cointelegraph.com and there you will find a number of videos each one will address a specific type of FUD and I'm sure that if you have any concern around cryptocurrency any misconception that you want to address you just go to the website and you'll find the video where ad is going to address that specific misconception so just to give you an example we can run one of those videos address to the so called crypto shady figures so if Andy wants to run there are no shadowy figures on a cryptocurrency network everyone is transparent everyone is visible I may not know who they are personally but that's not a prerequisite of being able to participate safely in a cryptocurrency environment I know the rules of the game and if anyone tries to break the rules of the system then the system is designed to reject that player so cryptocurrency networks are trustless and that I don't need to know who everyone in the system is in order to trust what's going on in the system what about the shadowy figures behind central banking what about the shadowy figures who control the flow and monetary policy of the United States what about the shadowy figures who finance campaigns and who finance wars what about the shadowy figures who control most of the wealth in the world I think it's an unfair characterization to look at an open source transparent permission system and suggest that somehow because somewhere some participants are unknown that somehow this makes it wrong or illegal or illicit if you have something bad to say about an industry that is disintermediating another industry that happens to be paying for your campaigns obviously that is going to color your opinion and we should take everything you say with a grain of salt and I would just invite you to keep your hands off cryptocurrency while it's in its infancy let it grow and become what it needs to become so that it could service humanity in a meaningful way and that any effort to get in the way of cryptocurrency is essentially saying you want to stop all the good it could do and I think that is a dangerous proposition and not something that the cryptocurrency industry is going to allow anyway we're not going to lay down and simply let you dictate the flow of innovation we're going to fight you tooth and nail and I think on a long enough timeline we're going to win cool so that was one an example of the videos that you can find on our website anata.coincelebrity.com so go check it out now I have another question for you Ed so it's around the state of leadership in the crypto industry what do you feel about the current state of leadership in the crypto industry and in the crypto community well I think there's been a shift over the past two years specifically in the early days all the crypto leaders were talking about were banking beyond banks creating sound money protecting everyday people from hyperinflation and from runaway central banking and I still think that is the core of the industry I just think that that part of the industry has gotten less vocal and what we now have is a completely other segment of the industry that is wielding an all size portion of at least the voice of cryptocurrency I mentioned it earlier one of the things I found this main was the CEO FTX who seems like an intelligent person and it seems like his heart's in the right place but he didn't seem to understand the intrinsic value of Bitcoin which is disconcerting to me and it's something that I've encountered often is that we have leaders in the crypto industry people who are running big projects who raise hundreds of billions if not billions of dollars who don't understand the basic fundamentals of crypto in my world we understood the intrinsic value of Bitcoin as a part of our like first session it was like crypto 101 a borderless transaction network has tremendous value so now to see that there's leaders in the space who maybe it's just because the old garden is are the one backing most of these projects it's legacy financial money but they seem more like the old world right they seem more concerned with just driving shareholder profit and the talks about banking young bank or creating sound money have sort of died down but I think what we'll go through are researchers I think as the market shakes up or as the market matures we'll start to realize that we need to start focusing on true cryptocurrency things that are truly decentralized and powered by decentralized autonomous organizations but right now most of what we're seeing are information age versions of what we already have right we're looking at centralized exchanges for crypto currency that still require you to pass through KYC AML compliance at CX is one of them for example and I think that's problematic I think what we're doing is building shinier faster versions of the totalitarian world that we came from when instead we could be building these open format where anyone from anywhere in the world can participate on your platform and still have equal footing and that's not something that is entirely possible on a centralized exchange most people don't have access to the documentation required to pass through KYC AML compliance there's only about 1.7 billion households that can the rest of the world cannot so I think it's really important that we we get in the fight people who have my perspective and there are many I'm not alone in this we need to get in the fight and recognize that cryptocurrency can be a tremendous force for good but it could also be a tremendous force for bad it's just like any other tool it could be used to harm us or it could be used to hurt us and most of my life's work is going to be around focusing on finding ways to help us right finding ways to uplift us or specifically to help solve poverty which is the thing I'm most focused on so I see that there are a lot of questions coming from the audience so I mentioned the tattoo stuff it's actually the eye of Providence it's not the lucifer it's the what do you see on my hand it's specifically because I have a knack for predicting the future that's how I made most of my money I was accurately predicting the future between 2013 up to the present so you know most people would argue that I have the eye of Providence and yeah I don't have a relationship with the World Economic Forum except that I don't like them I've been asked to speak there multiple occasions but and I've talked to some people who do go there and speak but for me that would be a bit like going into the belly of the beast these are people who I'm trying to disrupt their entire livelihoods so you know I don't really have a relationship with them other than it's combative perhaps. Okay and so talking about other participants in the industry so we we know that another misconception around the participants of the crypto industry is that it's dominated by a type of people called the crypto bro so it's a sort of specific culture dominated by white men white privileged men that are using crypto and so this is something that turns off a lot of people what would you say to them well I would just say that those are the people that have the loudest voice in the market because of their position of privilege right if you're already kind of doing okay and then you get involved in cryptocurrency you can make a lot of money really fast and as a result a lot of people from that niche did make a lot of money really fast and they have an off-size portion of control of at least the larger voice in the market than others so you know I get why people feel that way and it's no different than say gaming culture which cryptocurrency is an offshoot of or most of the early internet was mostly like a male dominated space and cryptocurrency certainly has suffered from that from the early early part of its you know inception but that's changing and the truth is most cryptocurrency users live in developing nations most of are in India of all places and those are black and brown people who are not crypto pros who are not chads and who are not born to a privileged background and they just don't have a voice in the market because they're mostly focused on using it as a life-saving technology right they're not going around touting the the latest coin that they've created and I want to sell to you instead they're focused on using it which I think is another important differentiator a lot of times I meet people in the cryptocurrency industry people who are going to who are pretending to be experts who don't actually use the stuff which I always found amazing right I know people lead entire projects who barely ever use cryptocurrency they perhaps bought some like they bought Bitcoin or Ethereum and then it just sits somewhere for a long period of time versus I consider myself a crypto power user I interact with everything that cryptocurrency will allow us to use so you know I operated DeFi I buy you know I work with NFTs all the time and I use it to pay for goods and services that's I think that's the the biggest use case is I actually use it to finance my life so you know one of the big misconceptions about cryptocurrency being mostly just the white Anglo Saxon Protestant crypto bros it's a mistake and what you really need to recognize is that those are just the people who have the loudest voice at least in the western world and if you look out to the wider market though you'll see that most cryptocurrency users are black and brown people and they're using it as a life-saving technology and they're not really even focused on onboarding you to anything they're just happy that it exists yeah that's a fair point so I would like to remind our audience that to write questions anything that you come that comes to your mind regarding common misconceptions related to crypto please write your question we're going to ask the expert here to address it so while you when you think about questions I have another one for you Ed which is related to probably one of the most the biggest fear that people have when they put when they put before they put money into crypto which is volatility so many people think crypto is too volatile is volatility so bad for you no I mean volatility is an opportunity right if you had no volatility it would mean that market had no opportunity that is to say is it would just be running sideways and I think this idea of stable currencies is a mistake there is no such thing as stability in the natural world everything is eroding entropy affects everything the US dollar is worth less today than it was yesterday and that statement has been true every day of your life there is no such thing as stability now the question is can you navigate the volatility and I think that's the real real important thing is to start to track the market in such a way where if you have the wherewithal the time and the capacity to understand that there are macro trends that happen by design the macro trends that happen in cryptocurrency are by design they're not an accident and if you understand that then you could write the volatility in such a way where it benefits you so I mean for me volatility is great if I see a market that's going up and down and up and down I see opportunity but does that mean that everyone should operate in that market no in a lot of ways it's similar to the ocean the ocean is a dangerous place and it's really volatile right and a big wage crashing it goes up and it goes down that does not mean that you should just swim out into it haphazardly it means you need to treat it with respect and the same way a seller who was sailing out into the ocean hundreds you know and you had a very high risk of losing everything but you also had a lot of opportunity it's very similar to that so there's a tremendous amount of opportunity in crypto volatility but it is not for everyone and you should not participate if you are not prepared to lose everything right and if you're not also willing to give it the the amount of respect it deserves if you if you try to dabble in the cryptocurrency markets and you try to time things and you try to be like an active trader and try to actively manage your money and try to be in trouble right I've seen that fail most people inside from like hyper sophisticated people who have the time and energy to do it however even if you're not very sophisticated there is a tremendous amount of opportunity in all this as long as you could take a long enough perspective you know the thing that most people do and is very reliable is they simply dollar cost average their way into a major blue trip crypto like Bitcoin or Ethereum and they take a long perspective in that they don't worry about these up to month fluctuations and instead they're thinking it's my cryptocurrency worth more four or five years from now than it is today as long as that is true then I'm fine the problem with that of course as many people can't afford to just lock their money up for four to five years so if there's if you're talking about money that you need access to like tomorrow then you shouldn't have it in the market anyway but if you can afford to take a long perspective and make small investments over a long period of time you'll usually find that that in crypto there are so many different levels of volatility and risk you can take the safest crypto which is as you said blue chip, Bitcoin or Ethereum and you have a certain amount of risk and then you take like some small coins some small cap coins in DeFi and that's a totally different level of risk so it's all depends on what level of risk you're at I thought the question about what to say to people when they say Bitcoin is not tangible you say that that's a feature not a bug money has always been an abstraction we tried to give it some kind of physical component like US dollar has a physical piece of paper or gold but really money is an abstraction something in the human mind value is something that we determine as a society or as a collective so once people say that Bitcoin is not tangible the network itself is tangible there are physical components to our physical network is a tangibility but the fact that it's not tangible is a feature it means it's easily a transport I could send it anywhere in the world as easily as I send an email right that's a bit like saying like my email is intangible does that mean it's not valuable does that mean it's not useful right it has email has a tremendous amount of utility but it doesn't have a physical component so Bitcoin is much in the same way it allows us to transfer value anywhere in the world at any time as easily as we send an email and that's an easy tool so yeah people are worried about it not having tangibility and I understand that perspective I hear all the time usually from older market participants and that they want a physical component I would just say that they're thinking backwards right it's a bit like looking at a car and saying where's the horse right it doesn't really make sense it's the whole point is that it didn't need a horse and the whole point about Bitcoin is that it doesn't require a physical component so that's what makes it valuable that's what makes it easy to transport makes it extremely fungible right how do you divide a US dollar down to one one millionth of itself right with Bitcoin you can do that new problem so I would just tell them that it's a feature not a problem and so another question I have for you is for people wanting to get into crypto to make money what do you say to them well that's a problematic perspective right I think if you if you are entering the crypto market specifically and only to make money and not just money but make the old kind of money it's a bit like saying I save so much time at my automobile that I could afford to have more horses it's like no you need to move on from the old technology and into the new technology and I get that that right now that's difficult for most people right navigating cryptocurrencies payment systems alone is not something the average user is comfortable with and that's something that mostly only power users can do but if your only goal is to make money then prepare to be burned and it's been my experience that if you look at the market from that perspective that it will get in the way of what's truly valuable if you could get involved in crypto it's okay to make money but if you could get involved in crypto for more meaningful reasons for something around purpose and mine is specifically around banking the unbanked and helping to solve poverty because it's an issue that's near and dear to my heart I grew up very poor and my mother was literally asleep at one point in her life so knowing that there are people out there that still live like that there are people that are still trapped in indentured servitude or living at $2 or less a day that gets me up in the morning and so that's why I got involved in crypto and that made all the difference because I stopped caring about market volatility I don't care if bitcoin's price goes up or down it's still valuable because it still allows me to help people all over the world and because of that I was more willing to hold during rough periods right I was buying bitcoin when it was crashing it went from 1400 all the way down to like $300 at one point and I bought it the whole way down because I didn't care about how much money I made I cared about how important the technology was and how many people it was going to help so I don't know what your perspective is or what good you want to do in the world but if you focus on that instead chances are you'll have a lot more success and if you can focus on crypto as a tool and not simply as this money making machine I think you'll have much more success as well if you start to actually use it in your day to day life and you start to think about all the good it can do and focus on that instead you'll have a much better time and you you won't feel the pain of the market fluctuations as much right I don't care if it coins a dollar or $100,000 it's still useful and that's true of every cryptocurrency that has some of the same properties if it's open, borderless permissionless and I could do transactions to anyone in the world without them having to pass through KYC AML compliance that's useful to me and so that's what gets me up in the morning and that's why what I've always tried to focus on in cryptocurrency. Let's talk a bit more about what you are dealing with lately so you have been involved in a lot of projects can you give us maybe some exclusive scoop about something that you haven't talked about about so far yeah you know I have a couple cool ones I think the one that most people like is I'm working with the Indonesian government to do one of the largest carbon credit programs in the world right we talked about crypto currency being bad for the environment imagine a world in which the global reserve currency could be a crypto currency that was backed by carbon credits which is to say in order for the new units of account to be created you have to capture carbon so it's the exact opposite of the petrodollar and I think that's what makes it perfect and this idea that we can have currencies that are a way of expressing value that is important to us right I don't agree with burning fossil fuels as being what backs our global reserve currency I think that's bad for the environment I think that's why we're in the position we're in right now but if we could invert that and make the global reserve currency something that is backed by carbon sequestration then I think we're on to something really interesting and so I put a fair amount of energy into carbon credits and tokenizing carbon credits to make a fungible currency that could be used anywhere in the world so I'm working with the Indonesian government to do exactly that and that's a really exciting project that I've been working on for a number of years that I'm expecting to bear fruit sometime in the next 12 to 24 months another one I have is I've been talking to people in central banking for a number of years trying to onboard them to this idea of creating open permission with systems and I have a few European nations that are on the hook for that and so hopefully within the next 12 to 24 months that will emerge as well and we'll see not what I would call a central bank with currency but a central bank that is willing to use open permission with systems as part of its business model so that it can onboard users from anywhere in the world and that's something that I think more and more developed nations are going to be into because they realize it's a tremendous opportunity here and it's not just about us individually making money but it's us as a civilization creating more efficiency which creates more value for everyone and I think more and more as the cryptocurrency industry matures it's getting a lot easier for me to close deals like that so I have a number of deals like that that are coming through and I also have some cool stuff like I'm working with the former owner of Deaf Row Records to launch an NFT platform another really cool one NFTs are not my specialty but I do have people come to me often asking how do we deploy them, how do we make use of them so I'm seeing a lot of really cool stuff coming around that one of the ones we're working on right now is something called NF ticketing where we can kind of go after Ticketmaster and you can have big events that sell tickets and the tickets themselves are an NFT I think that's really cool and it could crack down on scalping where people selling fake tickets so yeah that's the kind of stuff I'm working on these days so it seems that you have been dealing with very different sort of projects can you maybe tell us what are the attributes the three attributes that you look at before you actually take on a specific project how do you choose them yeah I mean almost always it's about people right and you know we could talk about technology we could talk about market opportunity and those are great but really it's about people when you deal with a project when you take on a strategic partner or a new client you have to work with these people so they have to have the right temperament they have to have the right approach in order for things to work so that's one of the first things I look for but more importantly I look for alignment it's a lot easier to get things done if everyone's rowing in the same direction and so I ask why do you want to be in crypto why do you want to watch a crypto platform and unless there's some kind of social good that's going to come out of it unless they're trying to help people with their system then I usually won't work with them but thankfully at this point in my career there's a lot of people that are looking to do good for example one of the NFT platforms on launching is specifically focused on helping black and brown creators that's called N-Lite you guys will want to keep an eye out for that one soon so N-Lite is going to be an NFT platform that is used to finance black and brown creators so they can create you know all the things that the world consumes right but black and brown creativity is a potent force in humanity and I think you know helping to service that by giving them access to capital so that we can see more movies more artwork from that community is really potent so you know that's about alignment though right because they're showing up saying I want to help my community I want to help people that I know or people that I've seen suffer and I think this technology can do that those are the kind of people I like to work with and so that's the most important thing I look for is alignment but then of course you have to make sure that it's viable right you might want to help people but if your project isn't self-sustaining if it isn't going to make enough money to perpetuate itself into the future then it's not a good idea either I think crypto is a pretty straightforward way of monetizing a platform so it usually opens up a lot of opportunities to make things profitable that wouldn't otherwise be profitable so you know alignment viability and of course market size right like you know who are you helping if you're helping just the people around you that's fine but maybe there's not a reason for us to be working together on that but if you're talking about helping the entire world like the carbon credits program it's going to help every person alive if that success that's successful that if any carbon credit program became the global de facto global reserve currency I mean we would all benefit from that so that's the kind of projects I get excited about because it can help a lot of people at scale so but the most important one the one I always look for is alignment as long as they're good people trying to do good in the world and chances are we're going to get along just fine and it'll be great to work with them awesome so I think that we have time for addressing one more one last question from the audience I see one here the volatility is done so it's finished then should we understand all the opportunities seized so yeah what's all about yeah well look let's look at traditional markets right if you look at traditional asset classes like real estate or precious metals they get into equilibrium with each other right when real estate goes down one of the other classic asset classes go up and vice versa right and so that there is some macro volatility in all markets right there is no I've never seen a market that is completely stable and perfect but theoretically if you had one then there's no opportunity so as volatility drops down opportunity drops down as well you're absolutely right and but that doesn't mean that there won't be something else to move on to right what will most likely happen is we'll start to have markets perhaps bitcoin or the other major cryptocurrencies at some point in our lifetime not anytime soon but at some point in our lifetime might become relatively stable compared to where they are now and at that point if you're looking for tremendous opportunity if you're looking for ways to make like offside gains you would have to look elsewhere but I don't foresee that happening anytime soon and I think we're about two to three market cycles which is like 10 to 12 years away from seeing anything plateau right so I think we're in for a lot of rides I think one of the tricks though one of the things I would implore all of you to do is find ways to make money when the market goes up and find ways to make money when the market goes down so you're okay either way right make sure that you're hedging against volatility if like you put 100% of your money into one asset you're going to be completely subject to the volatility but if you were perhaps using DeFi tools to create yield and then also investing that yield into the market well then the volatility matters a lot less right because you're using essentially found money and that's one of my favorite strategies is I'll whatever money I make I will park into something that's boring that puts out a certain amount of yield every day and I take that yield and that's what I use to play the market because if I lose all of that it doesn't matter right it's my money makes me money which I then put into the market to make me more money and I've used that strategy for a number of years now and it's been very successful for me my company and for everyone around me so yeah I think volatility is not a bad thing we shouldn't run away from it but we should treat it with respect and you're right if volatility dies down and you have to look elsewhere but I don't see that happening anytime soon yeah let's hope that volatility sticks around for a while so I want to just ask you if you if you want to give some final remarks to our audience before we wrap things up no you know hopefully I've given people a sense for you know what I think is important in the market which I think is ultimately doing good with these tools crypto currency is a tool it's just like a hammer you could use it to build a house or you could use it to hurt people and all I'm suggesting is that we look at it to the market and we start putting our money or where with all our time and energy in the things that are actually focused on helping people and I believe most crypto currencies at least most of the ones that have had some success are capable of doing that the ultimate question is when will you guys you know what ones will you guys support and I think each of you will probably support different ones right like I think Bitcoin is great I think a theorem is great but you guys might have a different opinion all I ask is that you focus on projects that are trying to create outcomes in the world that you want to see happen what most likely happens will live in a better world as a result awesome so that's a Stargate's on the way so Stargate's under testing right now it's been a pain in the butt to upgrade our network to be Stargate compatible but it is looking good we're getting to a few bugs in the testing environment before we launch we have to make sure it's perfect because if it launches and it's not perfect it will break everything so it is looking good though so hopefully soon yeah and also I want to remind our audience to check out the website anata.cointelegraph.com where you can find a lot of answers to all the concerns that you might have about misconceptions around crypto and Bitcoin and it's gonna be there with you with these videos and addressing each one of those concerns so thanks a lot to everyone listening to this AMA I'm Giovanni your host but that was Edward De Leon and yeah see you next time hello everyone thanks Giovanni thanks guys have a good one