Around The Block With Jeff And Dave With Special Guest Andy Bryant (bitFlyer COO)

Around The Block With Jeff And Dave With Special Guest Andy Bryant (bitFlyer COO)

In this episode, we celebrate Bitcoin over 23k! it is a bubble or do you think it’s going to keep going? what’s next for us in 2021? What are the state and the future of medical care globally? Mass adoption of crypto & healthcare revolution and more! Join us!

Jefferson: Live from BTC Manager World Headquarters at around the block with Jeff and Dave. And I’m Jeff.

Dave: And I’m Dave.

Jefferson: And holly cow, what another exciting start to the year it’s been. Bitcoin at now at $56,000. It’s unbelievable. And there are reports that are probably going to end the year at $100,000. What do you think about that, Dave?

I mean, it just seems to be going to the moon.

Dave: Yes, it is.

The growth, I can see in last eight months is going exponentially. It’s going like a rocket, it’s going on to the moon. It’s like, “Boom.”

And I’m really surprised Initially, I was thinking it’s a bubble, the water bubble, but now it doesn’t look like a water bubble. It looks like something is like It’s going great. And it’s good opportunity for people to understand and invest in this.

Jefferson: Right, which is really interesting, because crypto adoption is now on the rise. There’s more than 100 million active users. And then we hear Twitter suspending accounts of major crypto influencers. These are people just saying just buy bitcoin just because these are people that are talking about Bitcoin and what’s going on.

What do you think about that Dave?

Dave: Well, I don’t know what kind of policies this Twitter is having. But if that is a platform for people to discuss, they should not block it, people can go and discuss anything that is not for any National Security, but for any investment, anything of social things. They should discuss, they should not block it. So, I am surprised with that, the Twitter?

Jefferson: Yes, it seems like, they’re just gagging people. I considering this is coming from the United States, we value freedom of speech. And here all these people are just being taken off of Twitter for no real good reason. It’s shocking. I hope Twitter reverses their policy on that. Meanwhile, Bloomberg is coming out with a very interesting statistic and trend, stating that now major companies, institutions, businesses are now preferring Bitcoin over gold and other exchange traded funds. So, with major companies adopting Bitcoin, what do you think Dave?

Are you going to be seeing companies in India starting to pay you in Bitcoin?

Dave: Yes, that I’m dreaming off. Definitely.

But currently, government policy is really not good. And they have not made a pride decision yet. They were thinking they were suspicious at this moment. But I’m hoping that one day they will realize that they did mistake of accepting it, like with a lot of delay. So, I love to accept money in the form of Bitcoin, because going great, and it is giving you return more than more than anything at this moment.

Jefferson: Yes, that’s the thing. It’s really interesting, especially considering what’s going to happen with Ethereum now, and April just coming up in just four weeks, there’s going to be a pretty major Ethereum upgrade called, “The Berlin Hard Fork”. And that’s on right behind that there’s going to be a very major upgrade to Ethereum in July, with the IP 1559 being implemented and not the one that will say there will be no new Ethereum printed, which means that Ethereum will follow Bitcoin and being a deflationary currency. And miners are against this, because it means they make less.

So, what do you think that would mean for Ethereum adoption?

Dave: Well, I think Ethereum is following very strictly this crypto and they are also going great. They are going great. So, I think it will be good move for Ethereum. And if it’s doesn’t get more printed, then the value of it will be going up and people will have more trust on it.

Jefferson: Yes, so Bitcoin and Ethereum adoption seem to be rising. And with that, we bought onto the show today, Andy Bryant, he is the Chief Operating Officer of the number one Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange in Japan, and they’re growing worldwide and we’re the first to get a Bit license. This a bitFlyer COO, Andy Bryant, welcome to the show.

How you doing, man?

Andy: Great, guys.

Thanks for having me.

Jefferson: So, what do you think about all this just craziness that’s just going on in the market? It’s just seems so turbulent. What do you think about all that?

Andy: Yes, it’s pretty exciting times. It kind of reminds me of late 2017, 2018 sort of price action. Although somehow it doesn’t feel quite the same. I don’t think we’ve seen quite the same kind of retail sort of FOMO is just seems to be more driven by institutions this time. Although the NFT blow up is definitely starting to feel a bit frothy now. But yes, it’s very exciting. I think we’re definitely in a bull market. Whether we’re at the beginning of the bull market or near the end, it’s too early to tell, but a lot of people paying attention now.

Jefferson: Right.

And so for bitFlyer, with all of this major adoption with all of this stuff going on with DeFi and now [unintelligible 00:06:04]. How is bitFlyer been helping customers to guide them through this market? How has that been?

Andy: Yes, it’s been good. I mean, bitFlyer is, the number one exchange in Japan, and we sort of were founded in 2014, we’re still the only exchange I believe that’s regulated in Japan, the US and the EU combined. So, we’re pretty proud of that. And also, as you mentioned, we’re the first non-US company to get the New York bit license a few years back, and only the fourth overall. bitFlyer is kind of a Fiat on ramp, right. So, we are often the first entry point for many new users to the space, especially in Japan with is quite a large retail market. So, we’re just trying to build products to make it easier to buy, sell and store your Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. And, we’re always looking to add new pairs and new options to make that the best experience possible.

Jefferson: Which is really interesting, because now India where they’re on again, off again, on again, adoption. One wonders if they can adopt a similar stance that they’ve done in Japan just licensed and regulated right, David?

Dave: Yes.

I think it would be a good move if the government do that. And I’m hoping, because recently there was a news, they were saying that they’re going to ban and have their own currency in crypto. And now, they also wants to be a bit softer for the new startups, because a lot of startup companies is here. And they were doing things with the cryptocurrencies and they are making a platform for the crypto. So, I’m hoping that in the coming years, or maybe next few months government will make some right decision and accept this.

Andy: Yes, feels like Central Banks always. This again, like you mentioned, it reminds me of sort of the China banning and unbanning Bitcoin several times like a few years ago. It’s a fine balance, isn’t it? I guess these governments around the world they realized that this Bitcoin thing isn’t going away in crypto as a whole is growing extremely fast, not to mention DeFi which is growing right now 45% compounding monthly growth. So, there’s a lot of potential opportunity there for the startup ecosystem and for new entrepreneurial ventures. And I guess nobody wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater as such. But meanwhile, they also don’t want to lose sort of sovereignty and control over monetary supply. And tax payers are not denomination. So, I guess that’s kind of why I mean, I can’t speak for the Indian government, but I guess it’s a balance between the two, isn’t it?

Dave: Yes, that’s right.

And that’s why they are taking a bit more time to have right regulation and to understand that in the future, it’s not going to create some issues and some national security, because many times they just relate the things with the national security. So, I’m hoping here, it is not going to do anything but national security, but still, the government knows better than me on this.

Jefferson: Yes, hopefully over time, the government there understand more about what’s happening. And you compare that to what’s going on in Dubai. I mean, early indications are that somebody over there invested at least a billion dollars worth into cryptocurrency over the last few months and look at where that’s going and along with MicroStrategy. I think they’re dumping anything and everything they can into Bitcoin, and there are close to 100,000 Bitcoins that they’ve accumulated over the years. So, what do you see in Japan Andy, are people accumulating there.

Andy: Yes, I think it’s the same across many jurisdictions. We’re definitely in an accumulation phase. I mean, not to mention Michael Saylor, CEO of Microsoft. He just had a big conference the other day where thousand different CEOs are present, and he’s giving them their playbook about how to kind of invest in a space. I think the difference between now and a few years back is that the career risk of investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has dramatically reduced.

So, if you’re like an investor, or like a fund manager, or Portfolio Manager, one of these funds is no longer know something that’d be quite risky for you to recommend in terms of the portfolio and it may be there in the future. In the near future, it’s not a case of who has crypto on their Treasury or on their balance sheet, but it’ll be increasingly be a case of who hasn’t. And do you want to be the guy who’s on it whether it’s on your watch where crypto just continues to go up, and you fail to put even like, 1% of the funds portfolio into crypto as a hedge.

Probably not.

So, I think the institutional interest will continue to build as institutions, whether they agree or not increasingly see crypto as a hedge against various things. And I’d expect that trend to continue.

Jefferson: Well, as reported, and not just by a few, but Bloomberg and a lot of other major crypto is really a hedge against inflation. And considering that the United States just printed another $1.9 trillion, and the last week, and I think the majority of the money printing happened over the last couple of years, actually the M2 I think increased by 10 trillion overnight one night. I mean, all of these just seem to indicate that crypto wouldn’t be that great hedge against inflation.

Would you agree, Andy?

Andy: There’s plenty of things to say about that.

I think it’s quite telling that recently M2 money they’ve stopped publishing it, they’ve actually stopped updating official statistics on M2, I mean, talk about pulling the wool over your eyes, I think that’s quite suspicious move. But things like inflation is that, there are various different ways to measure it. You give me control of how I measure inflation, and I can make it do whatever you want. So, the general RPI and CPI, they ignore all sorts of things that are going up in price with like education and health care and things like that. So, on paper, governments around the world are saying, “hey, look, inflation is still kind of low,” it’s not really going anywhere, all this money printing is not causing inflation. But then you ask the general, like, average Joe public, and they say, “Well, I don’t feel any richer. In fact, I feel a lot poorer. All my bills seem to be going up. Like I don’t quite believe that inflation is like less than 2%, it doesn’t feel like that to me, I have less take home pay every month.”

So that’s one thing. And then the other thing is like, “okay, the printing was money. It’s going into onto central bank balance sheets as a reserve, it doesn’t necessarily dry. So, I’m taking the CounterPoint here, it doesn’t necessarily drive-up inflation. Everyone says, “oh, money printing equals inflation coming around the corner.” But actually, it does rely on the bank strategy, lend money. Government’s printing money like and quantitative easing by itself does not generate inflation, contrary to popular belief, it’s actually like the velocity of money. And the psychology of the economy and the sentiment, and the willingness of banks to lend money to Main Street. That’s what drives inflation. And that’s still not really happening. All the money is it’s finding its way into financial assets and pushing up asset prices. And that’s what’s creating this sort of K-Shaped recovery, which is leading people to have assets to do pretty well, and the people that are living paycheck to paycheck to not do so well at all. So that’s kind of what’s driving the Game Stop Phenomenon.

Jefferson: Fascinating.

Yes, I was really surprised to see that M2 jumped by such a dramatic number, going from for that, I don’t know, 15 or some random number, like that trillion. I mean, these aren’t little numbers. So obviously, there’s some shenanigans going on somewhere there on the peer side.

Andy: I read the one month in the last year, in one month, they created more money supply than in the entire history of the United States so far.

Jefferson: Correct.

That was that day, that was between I think, March and April of last year. So, it’s shocking to any anybody that believer, if you will, and I use that term the right way of Keynesian economics. I mean, you would just look at that on the face. How can you even justify it. None of it can be justified especially-so to go back at least a little bit, not too far.

Money is energy, right. So, if we think of money as energy, and we’re virtualizing money, you’re virtualizing the work actions, or the work product of any group of people, right. That’s what you’re doing when you trade that activity for $1 bill. But then, you have these people over here stealing

[laughs]

practically stealing. And not just a little bit a whole lot from that work in it.

So, how can cryptocurrency make a difference in this regard? Can you think of ways Andy that cryptocurrency would be different over this usual Viet, Shenanigan?

Andy: Well, yes, of course. I mean, it’s no secret that one of the things that attracts people to Bitcoin is the fact that its suppliers, in fact limited to in the case of Bitcoin 21 million units, and in the case of Ethereum if this EIP 1559 passes, then it’ll become a deflationary asset as well. I think with the backdrop of all this money printing, people increasingly see sort of Bitcoin as a hedge against no rising prices. In the most bullish case, it’ll be a lifeboat to the current monetary system, which in some ways seems to be near the end of its useful life. It could be-this is the beginning of the most like, surprising and explosive wealth transfer that we’ve seen in three to four centuries since the last asset class was invented. Like Bitcoin is not an asset, it’s an asset class. Cryptocurrency is a whole new thing. And the more people I speak to, the more people believe, well, I don’t really understand it. But I still want a little bit because it seems to be the only thing that’s not correlated to the current financial system that we’re in. And if I’m wrong, so bear, but if I’m right, I’d like to have a bit of upside in this cool option on the future.

Jefferson: Right, exactly.

It’s just been just an amazing thing to watch, The Evolution of Cryptocurrency, the evolution of Ethereum which is now programmatic, or programmable money, as we can see now with NFT, DeFi, and all these other amazing inventions that are coming out. So on that basis, just looking five years into the future, which I know is a pretty far time, right.

What do you think is going to happen over the next five years with it adoption?

Andy: Five years is a long time in the crypto sphere.

[laughs]

But yes, I mean, I’m very excited about the future. I feel like, you know, crypto as a whole is about 10 years old. It’s a decade since or just over a decade since the white paper for Bitcoin first was released. And I generally feel that the last 10 years have been sort of the opening act, if you like, it’s been like the adolescence of the crypto field. For me, when I read the white paper, I could always sort of see that this was the way things are going with the advent of smart contracts and things like that. And it’s taken like 10 years for the lowest layers to kind of settle down and for people to actually now agree that there is an effective mechanism for peer to peer value transfer across an untrusted medium, which is basically what the first 10 years of crypto have been all about it’s been store of value. It’s been peer to peer sort of payments and sort of digital gold 2.0. But the next five years is going to be absolutely dramatic, it’s going to be explosive, it’s going to be so interesting. I mean, what’s happening in DeFi, it’s so it’s so exciting. Just to sort of give your listeners a bit of context. So, the main innovations, it’s driving this defined movement is smart contracts. Smart contracts came about with the birth of the Ethereum, basically. But there are many other smart contracts now, other platforms.

DeFi has grown from less than $100 million of sort of deployed capital in January 2022, it’s sort of over $40, $45 billion now. That’s like incredible, incredible growth. What’s basically happening is we’re seeing the reinvention of the financial system, all of it’s primitives on a decentralized network, right now Ethereum, but I generally believe that it’ll be a multi chain future for DeFi, I’m not an Eighth Maxie. And these smart contracts are being developed by a sort of fragmented teams all over the world. And just like how the internet was the reason it grew and blew up so quickly, is because people could just build stuff on it without asking the permissionless innovation at the fringes is what drove the dramatic explosion of the internet, away from the kind of decentralized keyholders of publishing houses and so on. And the same thing is going to happen in finance, like no longer do you have to sort of join a big financial institution and wait a few years and maybe kind of innovate something like a credit card, which is probably the last Financial Innovation resolve and traditional finance in recent decades.

Now, some kid in his underpants can sit in their bedroom, write a smart contract protocol, which three weeks later could be transacting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of economic activity. And meanwhile somebody else is writing complicated strategies that talks to a smart contract developed in Australia. And then a smart contract developed in the US and in a Silicon Valley and in China. And you can compose all of this exotic financial stuff, all from the comfort of your bedroom. And I think it’s a really, really, really big deal. Because right now what we’re seeing is the reinvention of all the traditional financial primitives such as lending, trading, asset generation, tokenization, derivatives, things like that yield generating assets, which is kind of what we’ve come to be used to in the current financial system. But then where it really gets interesting is that as well as the traditional primitives, which is just kind of catching up with the old finance, we’re seeing a whole new generation of new financial instruments coming to be things like flash loans or flash minted, non-fungible tokens and things like that.

All of my friends in trade fi when they learn about flatlands, it just totally blows their mind, like what you can borrow, like unlimited amounts of capital with no collateral, just to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. It starts like massively amplifying the power of individuals to take advantage of economic opportunities, you no longer have to have a massive bank or hedge fund behind you to take advantage of arbitrage and other things like that. So, I think we can’t expect the unexpected. There’s no predicting just like in 1995, it is hard to predict, or impossible to predict Amazon, Facebook, Google.

Right now and DeFi, we’re in a stage where we are starting to get a clue that there are new things possible, there are new recipes that we can do. But it’s just impossible to predict how it’s going to play out. Or we know for sure that this is going to be very, very interesting. And it’s going to grow really, really fast. So that’s what’s exciting me the most at the moment, I think DeFi is the fringe of a fringe technology right now, but I’m pretty sure give it a year everyone is going to be paying attention to this stuff.

Jefferson: Awesome. Yes, I agree.

The pace of innovation seems it’s increasing, especially in this space. And the other thing you mentioned, where anybody can just jump in and do something. One of the things I’ve noticed over the last even couple years, is that anybody that’s super smart with a PhD or whatever computer science and economics and that sort of thing, graduating, a lot of those people are gravitating towards the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry, as opposed to the mainstream, like Charles Schwab, and so on. And then Mac, the people at the mainstream are having a very hard time getting smart people to join their company, they’re having to buy those companies, as opposed to trying to hire from within.

So, do you think that mainstream companies such as PayPal will ever be able to catch up?

Andy: It’s a good question. And I can verify what you just said. I mean, anecdotally, a lot of my smart friends who are in IB or also investment banking, or traditional finance, they’re leaving in droves to get into the space. I’ve been in the space since 2013. But now, like, if you look at sort of the sort of people that devoting their career to crypto finance now, a lot of them are sort of XJP Morgan, X Goldman, X hedge fund, Charles Schwab, whatever. The young people, they know that this is the future. And there’s a mass exodus happening from track five to this space. I wouldn’t be surprised that the larger kind of more incumbent companies would find it hard to retain talent, I think they’re only one of their strategies will be just to make sure that they really double down on innovation within.

Of course, there are benefits to working for big finance, and don’t get me wrong. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see like this trend continue of like very bright people, especially from mathematical income backgrounds, going into crypto straight out the gate.

Jefferson: Fascinating.

So David, based on this, do you think positioning your company to build and innovate within the cryptocurrency space might be an excellent way to get started and just to experiment with working in crypto before you adopt crypto personally?

Dave: Yes, definitely. And I feel that with the way Andy has mentioned, in last seven years he has made billions now and now a lot from last year for like one month or two months he is like exponentially growing. So, it is very fascinating. And I feel that yes, I should be doing something maybe small part very small, start investing and start making something in this. Making some kind of things in this to see at least a future if it’s not big, but even small, because definitely if it start, like baby steps definitely will make something back. So yes, I am really very much fascinated with this one.

Andy: The whole generation of young people who have found that they were able to buy cryptocurrencies and access venture level returns, we’re not talking about plus or minus 5% across a year, for the first time, people can actually buy and get exposure to things that can go up like 1,000% in a year. And it’s sort of indoctrinated a whole generation of people to like, this is really cool, I really want to get more involved in this. I think most people that do work full time in crypto, before they start their first job, they’ve already been trading on investing for several months or years beforehand, it’s just that they finally, had the guts to sort of dive in headfirst.

Dave: Yes, and I also did the similar like, six, seven months back, I have spent some money on it, and I got a very good return. But when I saw the government is planning to ban it, I pull out all the money from it. But still, my growth was approximately 400% in six months.

Andy: That presume that the top 1% of hedge fund performance globally.

Dave: Yes.

I was really very unhappy with the government when I saw that news that they are planning to ban. So, some of my friend says to him, it’s better to pull out money as if it’s bad, then your money will be stuck. So, if you made money, just pull out. And I did that, but I am very much interested to invest and to make something in this using this platform.

Jefferson: Yes, it’s really interesting.

On the financial side, that be it versus Bitcoin exchange rate seems to still take the majority of the focus of the news and everything else. Whereas a lot of the other innovations that are underlying that, and what’s really driving the performance of it if you will. Just hadn’t really made that much news. When I really look, you mentioned flash loans, right. That’s actually an incredible, incredible innovation. Previously, you would have to find capital, get it in a bank, do a lot of manual action to do an arbitrage. Here, you can just write an algorithm and away it goes, you’re done.

And I really think that the key difference, similarly like, there’s companies like Solve.care that innovating in the healthcare space, there’s a potential insurance company that has talked about coming around for tracking insurance. So, there’s a lot of just innovations, but I think we’re yet to see.

So a question for you, Andy.

How can an exchange, which is traditionally just putting on ran, how do you think an exchange might be able to help drive that innovation forward as well?

Andy: I think the primary channel is to education, right.

There’s so many opportunities in this space, but it’s still like you said, like for most, retail for most beginners, or even for most institutions, they’re just getting started in a space, everyone’s paying attention to the price. And the price is just one of many, many things. That’s very exciting about what’s going on. So, the best we can do is just help people understand about what opportunities are out there. What’s the difference between a stable coin and a Fiat. Where can you generate sort of these 6% to 8% or 10% plus yields on your US dollars and why is it so much better than the traditional banking? Like, what is staking, what are staking rewards.

All of these different things, just interesting opportunities and investment opportunities for the general user. And as the sort of main touch point for the first time, Bitcoin and crypto traders, there’s a lot we can do there in terms of education.

Jefferson: Yes, I’d agree.

I think it just came with the early days of the internet, right. People would, a lot of times get locked up on bit rates and everything else when the major action was on I should see with Facebook and Amazon and so forth, the innovations. Along with that. AI, I think is one of the next things that are coming, right.

So, how do you think AI and other technologies might change the landscape or crypto?

Andy: It’s a good question.

To be honest, 90% of things you read about AI on the blockchain, I feel like it’s a bit of meme now just people have taken two words, that sound interesting, and they’ve sort of shoved them together. Nevertheless, The future of blockchain, of course, is that we’re going to have a programmatic economy. So, it starts with programmatic money. Then it goes through things like decentralized finance, where you can do all sorts of new cool stuff, and you can have transactions to interact with multiple blockchains. But it’s still basically initiated by humans or traders like smart people. But, they’re still calling the shots, I see a future where the whole economy becomes like a hyper parameterised system of sort of machine to machine interactions, where you basically get algorithms, surfing this kind of cyberspace, self-sovereign investment entities that are sort of bidding and calling out tenders for certain type of tokenized assets. And there’ll be some other algorithm which will respond to that with a new investment opportunity, which has been bespoke and custom designed for this particular transaction. Algorithms talking to each other trading, arbitraging, moving funds around, like it’s going to transcend the understanding of humans I think. And we’re going to end up with an economy 2.0 or economy 3.0, whatever you like to call it, I see a future where the economy starts to become increasingly opaque and like a black box to us mere mortals, and all that economic activity is being transacted by AI, if you like. And then it starts to become a question of like, who is the ultimate beneficiary? And how do you make sure that our interests are still in the running?

Jefferson: Yes, that’s a fascinating concept.

And that’s one of the things I’ve been wondering about and thinking about, I mean, to it they’re the rock out there orbiting just past Mars, or whatever that’s worth more than everything on this planet, right. Which is kind of the thing if that rock were outside of Los Angeles let’s say, the world economy would collapse, which doesn’t make sense, right. There is no way that an event like that should cause a secondary event like that. But that’s in fact, how the economy is based, it’s based on the fact or the idea that there’s limited amount of resources. We’re, in fact actually, within the solar system, there’s a lot of resources, which kind of leads to the next thing do you think with what Elon Musk is doing, you know, trying to get us onto Mars with the next step or human evolution. Do you think that cryptocurrency is definitely going to be the pathway to get us there?

Andy: That’s like a super interesting topic.

And I think when you were talking about the rock, you mean sort of the asteroid that was full of gold and like other precious metals.

Jefferson: Yes.

Andy: I mean, it’s kind of a cool concept to think about, because, yes, like, the whole point about gold is that it’s in scarce quantities in the Earth’s crust, and it costs a lot of money to get it out nowadays. And that’s one of the things that gives us value. And when that asteroid that was like chock full of gold was discovered, everyone said, “Oh, well, the gold price has to collapse now,” because we have like more gold that’s accessible. But then of course, you need to take into account what is the extraction price? How much would it actually cost to stand up a rocket full of heavy mining equipment to actually drill the gold and then get it all the way back to earth and not get itself destroyed In the process?

The answer is still quite a lot.

So, I don’t see in the immediate future that the price of extraction of asteroid gold is going to get so low that it’s going to cause a gold market collapse on Earth. However, once as the technology does improve, and as we do seriously think about sort of space mining, it creates a whole different question. And the question becomes, like, well, where does the gold actually have to be for us to consider it to be within our economy, that is stories of ancient forms of money and as rice stones, which are like giant rocks that people used to ancient civilizations used to say, well, this was a robust store of value and these rocks were so heavy that you just couldn’t move them. And yet people still all agreed verbally who owned which rock right and that became like, almost like one of the first primitive Ledger’s describing value and keeping track of value these rice stones. And at one point, there was a rice stone that was being transported on a boat and it fell off the boat and like fell to the bottom of the sea. And yet, like even though it was completely on retrievable, the value of this rice stone was still included on the sort of the in the monetary supply, people still counted it and said, well, just because we can’t get through it, we’re not going to forget about it, and we’ll still transact with it and pass it around and we’re still transfer ownership of the rice stone as if it was in the circulating economy.

Now, like take that example and apply it to this space mining like how accessible does gold have to be before we like include it in the countable money supply, does it need to be in near orbit? Or does it need to be on the end of a large sort of space elevator? Or does it need to be retrievable using a mining rig, which is now like very cheap to send out to space and bring back? There all these questions, we will on answer questions about like how those are going to affect the value proposition of gold. But I think a much more superior form of store value will of course be cryptocurrencies where you can do away with all of this stuff, and you can just have a guaranteed digital scarcity a store of value, which everyone kind of agrees, and there’s like a social consensus that that’s what has value. And it’s just so much more suitable for this machine-to-machine economy that I just described, like algorithmically based economy that I can see it completely supporting precious metals.

Now, doesn’t mean I’m going to sell my gold anytime soon, I have a bit of gold and silver. But in tomorrow’s world, I see the place for precious metals starting to dwindle.

Jefferson: Yes, and that’s one of the I think fascinating, fascinating topics to think about because something like cryptocurrency, I think it’s a lot easier to program transactions within it, that would include the concept of gold in another location, and even the cost to get to it as a part of a larger equation. Like how do we manufacture something that needs resources, right.

Today, we have a lot of random people trying to do a lot of random things on spreadsheets and whatnot, and banks and whatnot. And I think all of that is almost like an impediment to innovation. Whereas if you were to do have a team of people writing a computer algorithm if you will, around the cryptocurrency and all these other concepts, AI, how do we get from here to there, how do we solve some of these very real-world problems, right using all of the available resources that are around us. I can see, cryptocurrency would definitely be very useful over the next 10 years, right.

Andy: Yeah, but you’re right about the physical tie. I mean, until we as humanity sort of transcend into the cloud and move up, leave our biological bodies and moving into cyberspace. We will ultimately still need to make stuff and build stuff. And that will require like iron and steel and copper and all these things. So absolutely, absolutely we will have like a natural resource constraint. And it does kind of saddened me sometimes they’re like, so much economic activity is like just built around, sort of financial, sort of moving paper around and sort of all these different financial assets and transactions and all the best and brightest minds and are no longer one, but not all of them at least going into sort of science and technology, topics, they’re all sort of moving into finance. But I think actually with crypto, we can see like a renascence of new economic activity moving back into sort of towards technology and away from just, paper pushing.

And, yes, I’m kind of excited about that. And I think we’re going to see a manufacturing renascence as well in the near future. We’re going to move into sort of micro manufacturing and sort of all these sort of rapid prototyping and 3D printing innovations, which still haven’t quite materialized, but I don’t think they’re far off. That’s a whole different topic.

Jefferson: Alright.

Well, it’s been an incredible interview with you, Andy. And are there any final thoughts?

Let’s start with you, David. Any final thoughts with everything that we’ve talked about today?

Dave: Well, I’m really amazed with the things that Andy has explained. And I have one last question for him, is. We see there’s a very good future of the crypto. What is the future in that case of our the conventional currencies?

Andy: That’s the million dollar question quite literally.

I’m not a necessarily a maximalist, I don’t actually believe myself, that crypto is just going to completely wipe out all of traditional finance as we know it. I think we’re going to have both systems coexisting for a while. There’ll be some countries that sort of leapfrog straight to kind of a crypto system just in the same way that in Africa, they kind of leapfrog landlines and went straight to mobile. Crypto will be like a compelling monetary and financial system for many countries that don’t enjoy the benefits that we have in sort of Western developed economies where we can access things like credit in finance and investment opportunities, there are like the other 5, 6 billion people in the world can’t do that. And for them, it makes total sense to sort of go straight into a crypto world. So, we will see some demographic and some geographic separation. But now I don’t think that crypto is sort of going to completely wipe out the financial system as we know it, I think there’s going to be a period of parallel kind of symbiosis. But yes, long term, who knows, it could. I think CBDCs will and sort of digital dollars will see the migration of traditional systems into this new space for all of its benefits. And apart from that, I think we can we can expect the unexpected.

Dave: Okay.

Thank you. And I think that’s all from my side.

Jefferson: Yes, thank you, Andy. It’s been incredible.

Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share?

Andy: None, except just to say thank you for having me on the show. It’s quite fun just to have an open chat and talk about the future and a bit of a futurist, as you might have guessed from this chat. And it’s nice to just have a freeform conversation.

So, thanks and keep up the good work.

Jefferson: Sure. And if you don’t mind, I’d love to, six months a year out if I’m thinking have you back on the show, just say hey, check in see how things are by that time. And, again, thank you so much for joining us. And this has been Around The Block with Jeff and Dave. And I’m Jeff.

Dave: And I’m Dave.

Jefferson: Glad to have you.

Take care man.

Dave: Thank you.

Andy: Thanks.