 You're watching the Daily Decrypt. It's all currency competition all of the time. I am your host Amanda B Johnson and today's episode is brought to you by Bank to the Future. Today I spoke with MMA superstar John Fitch. There's not enough education out there for people about cryptocurrency. It's not like mainstream media is really pushing anything and being like, hey, this is a great thing. There's a lot of people embedded in power and the current systems and they don't want people going outside of those systems. So you kind of have to do the grassroots approach and you're going to have to find people who are kind of outliers and find them to help promote and get the message out to people. And if you have somebody like me who's got the ear of some fans, you know, they're going to listen to me and be like, hey, at least check it out. Just like some football fans first learned about Bitcoin from the Bitcoin Bowl sponsorship and some NASCAR fans first learned about Dogecoin from the NASCAR sponsorship. Some MMA fans have begun to learn about cryptocurrency from various sponsorships that John Fitch has taken on. So when I fought Dennis Holman a couple years ago, I had Nautilus Coin sponsorship and then I had a Bitcoin direct as a Bitcoin umbrella company that sponsored me for a different fight later on. They're responsible for setting up the Mike Tyson Bitcoin ATM and some Bitcoin ATMs here in Las Vegas. Coming up this weekend, yes, I have a I have a hyper crypto sponsorship. It's a altcoin sponsorship. It's also more importantly, I think is is the website and the community because it's a gaming community. It's not just a coin. As you may recall, earlier this month, we spoke with Jeremiah Nickel, marketing director for Hyper, who went into detail about the gaming communities that use hyper for play and for payouts. John emphasized that it was the community aspect that ultimately convinced him to take on the hyper sponsorship. There's a use case and as long as the developers are staying working hard on it and people are playing video games, which I don't think people are going to ever stop playing video games. There's a use case and I think there's a community built in for success there. What is John's story? Did he become interested in cryptocurrency only when people started asking to pay him to put the names of their cryptos on his shorts? I've always been into history and current events and what's going on around the world. I'm always trying to keep up to date with that stuff. I started following David Seaman back when he was running for government in Florida a long time ago. He was the one that picked up on this cryptocurrency and I started following it then. He was mentioning it at $5 or $10 a coin and I didn't have the guts to get into it at that point. I think entry into it was a little bit harder because I'm not a big technical guy. It wasn't like that and you could just buy someone with your credit card. It was a lot harder. I followed it all the way up until $1,200 a coin and then it crashed and then I started buying it at like $600 and then playing around with all the coin markets and stuff like that. Just having fun with it. Never putting in more than I could lose but just the best way to learn anything is to dive in and try it out. I'm interested with the technology. I think it's much better. My mother was a part of the credit card hack of Target a long time ago and that sparked my interest in it too because if she would have used bitcoins she wouldn't have gotten hacked and her wouldn't have had to go through all the steps of getting her card redone and all this other crap. It's better technology than what we have right now. John then went into detail on what he thinks of cryptocurrency technology as compared to older technologies. If I had to get money to you or whatever I would have to use something like PayPal or one of the credit union money transfer places or I had to write and send you a check. Those are the use cases of getting the fiat to you. They're bulky, they're heavy, somebody could steal the envelope and take the check and defraud the check and the money. The credit places that send money, they take a crap load of money off the top. I think there is kind of a use case there. It's bulky, cash is bulky. John says he has spent cryptocurrency before, namely Bitcoin at places like Overstock.com. He says he also talks to his friends about cryptocurrency in general and has for years. I've been arguing with people for a while about oh, this is a great thing and arguing the points of decentralization with the money and I get feedback from my friends and stuff. That's the reason it's bad is because it's decentralized and there's no authority and I have differing opinions. I think that's what's good about it. The only advice for it is buying and selling it. I've given it to people with the Nautilus coin we were doing just like with the Hypercoin, we did a crowdfunding to get a spot on the shorts. I told the people, hey, the price is cheap, buy a little bit now, put some into the crowdfunding, hold on until a fight of time, you probably get your money back and most of them did. I held on to mine from the sponsorship the whole time because I was leaving in the coin and the use case. I thought it was really genius. John told me that for him, market capitalization is important in cryptocurrency. The larger the market cap, he says the less impact any one trader can have to cause swings one way or another, hence achieving more price stability. What I found is that a lot of it's just hype because people are always talking about what they're going to do rather than telling you what they're actually doing. The prices would go up and down based on what these people said they were going to do, but you never have any idea of what their real intentions are or if they just have the ability to carry through and finish what they say they're going to do. With technology, things happen faster. A lot of these coins rise and fall very quickly, but the ones that have, I think, three big things. Use case, functionality, how well do they actually work, and then their community, I think those three things are going to be the indicators of whether or not the coin's going to bust or not. I then asked John if he is open to taking more cryptocurrency-related sponsorships and he said he's willing to take on sponsorship from any organization that he believes in and left off with this message. I don't think of people as fans. I think it's my community. I'm building a community that supports me and my athleticism and what I'm doing in athletics and other social things that I'm doing. I'm a medical marijuana activist. I believe that that's part of my community also. I'm not just here to take from people. I think we need to all kind of stick together and work together and make things better. I'm trying to coin the term. I'm a decentralized. I believe that the future is a decentralized one. I think with technology, we no longer need representatives to make decisions for us. We can make the decisions ourselves through our own communities. So yeah, I think we just need to stick together, have each other's backs, so we don't have to rely on these oligarchs or other people to do things for us. John will be fighting for the welterweight title this weekend in Las Vegas at the World Series of Fighting. Today's episode is brought to you by Bank to the Future, the online investment platform that invests in the future of finance. One of their investments was Bitcoin Group, and below you can find a video link that explains the impact Bank to the Future could have had if regulators would have let the IPO happen. You can learn more about that at banktothefuture.com. And I don't know who'd done it, but someone has begun creating MP3 files of all of the daily decrypts episodes. It's like the podcast we never had but always wanted. Hell, I don't know how long it'll last, but it sure works for now. That link is in the description if you want it. Have a good day. Wow. How have you been? Very, very good. I've not seen a patient yet that wants to pay with Bitcoin, though, since you guys. We got a lot of press, but I've not had anybody offer me Bitcoin since you all were here. All right. Well, maybe this interview can change that.