{ "episodeId": "SLP44", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "aleks_svetski": { "name": "Aleks Svetski", "role": "guest", "tag": "ALEKS" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 9.37, "text": "You're listening to the Stephan Livera podcast, interviews with the best and brightest in Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Listen in as I interview some of the sharpest minds, ranging from business leaders, software developers, investors, and analysts. Hey guys, it is your host Stephan Livera, and today my guest is Alex Svetski. Alex is the CEO of Amber, an Australian Bitcoin business. They are a digital currency exchange, wallet, and micro-investment app, and he's also a technology entrepreneur, having previously built several businesses, and he has been featured in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, which, for my international listeners, are some of the big newspapers here in Australia. Alex has also written a number of nice pieces on sites Such as Hacker Noon, and I recently actually met Alex at a Jimmy Song Bitcoin carnivore dinner when he was down here in Sydney. So, yeah, I had the chance to meet Alex, and I thought it'd be great to get him on for an episode. So, Alex, first of all, welcome to the show. Dude, thank" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "01:07", "start": 66.87, "text": "you for that, for that" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08", "start": 68.07, "text": "intro. Awesome. Let's, as we always do with these Bitcoin podcasts, we love to start with your story in Bitcoin. What brought you here?" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "01:16", "start": 75.98, "text": "Jesus. mate, classic heard about Bitcoin in the I can't now remember whether it was Max Kaiser or someone like that, because I was one of the, the tin foil hat gold silver bugs, back in the day. and I, I'm sure a lot of us sort of got into it from that sort of, angle in the early days at least, sort of viewing it as something else. And to be honest though, I, I didn't actually get involved at that stage. I, I heard about it, I was like, \"Oh yeah,\" I, I didn't really understand the concept, I I didn't even bother to spend any time sort of playing discovery or anything. I ended up going down the, the rabbit hole with other, you know, quote unquote, traditional tech businesses. So built some software companies in sort of payroll automation and recruitment automation The, the recruitment one particularly was heavily involved with, psychology, behavioral science, and all that, just understanding human beings better and being able to build an algorithm that'd be able to place them better and all that sort of stuff. So I sort of spent the, the few years after the first time I'd heard about Bitcoin going down that sort of path. And I stepped down as CEO of the previous company I recruit in, 2016, and part of the reason I'd stepped down was one, that the culture was sort of moving away from where I wanted it to, but at the same time, earlier in 2016, I, I'd- I read an article, I read, now I'm forgetting his bloody, the blog's name, Unenumerated, I think it is," }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "02:57", "start": 177.11, "text": "Nick Szabo's blog. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I, I read a blog there and I was like, \"Hm, maybe, maybe there's something more here.\" And it was around that time, I think Trump had just gotten into presidency again, I had re-opened my trading account, I was like, \"Okay, maybe it's time to sort of get involved in money markets again.\" And, you know, along the way, started reading a bit about Bitcoin again, started slowly going down the rabbit hole, and it was sort of at the end of 2016 that I really thought," }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "03:29", "start": 208.8, "text": "You know, jump back in, and here I am today. I think 2017 was a crazy year. I, I, I mean, I think a lot of us also got caught up in the hype. you know, earlier on in the year, I was like, \"Holy crap, look at this ICO thing, look at Ethereum, look at all this.\" at one stage, I was even mining Ethereum. There was a lot happening, and I," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:53", "start": 233.15, "text": "yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. So before we move on, what was it about To you. Man," }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "04:00", "start": 240.18, "text": "first of all, there's-- I'm a contrarian at heart, you know, when, when I've, whenever I've traded markets, I've always been on the short side, like, ev-everything I do is contrarian. Like, so for example, over New Year's and the Christmas holiday break, that's generally when I fast, most people eat. you know, I go to sleep early on New Year's, I don't care about this, I always do the opposite. And for me, Bitcoin seemed like this really interesting" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "04:29", "start": 268.52, "text": "First of all, for me, you know, ha-having been a previous gold sort of silver person as well, I understood, you know, the, the ideas around Austrian economics and all of this sort of hard money concepts, stock to flow ratios and all this sort of stuff, so, so I understood that, inherently. So, so that sort of came after the Contrarian piece, then the piece that sort of tied it off for me was this concept of how at a mass scale We can achieve, social consensus. So I, I've always been a big reader and a big, you know, student of anthropology, of how societies evolved, you know, I was one of the first people to sort of run around tell everyone to download or to listen to, Yuval Harari's book, Sapiens, and what, what I, what I saw in Bitcoin was this grassroots movement, not so much a technology, but this idea that we can agree on something or collaborate or co-cooperate on something, which is essentially what separates humans from every other species on the face of the planet is our ability to cooperate in numbers and with people we don't know intimately. And it was this new method of cooperation, and money being the ultimate tool of cooperation or the ultimate tool of, you know, social consensus, You know, as, as I delved into it more, that was the thing that sort of really hooked me and drew me in further. so, you know, everything else obviously still stands, but just this, this study of, hey, we've got a new way for us as a species to cooperate, to collaborate, to communicate, to, transfer value, to do all that sort of stuff, I find that extremely, extremely fascinating." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:19", "start": 378.96, "text": "Yeah, exactly. I think, I have some similar views there, especially when you think about articles, and this is a very classic one, which is Nick Szabo's, Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability. I'm sure that one was quite influential for you, wasn't it?" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "06:34", "start": 393.97, "text": "believe it or not, I actually haven't read that one yet." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:36", "start": 396.33, "text": "Oh, really? I'm very surprised by that, because, I," }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "06:39", "start": 398.97, "text": "I should definitely read it. D-dude, I've got this, to-do list on my, on my 86 of them that I haven't caught up with yet." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:52", "start": 412.0, "text": "there's never enough time. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the last year or two. We've had this insane ICO craze, and actually one of the articles you recently wrote, which is titled \"A World Full of Blind Excesses,\" talk a little bit about that." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "07:07", "start": 426.62, "text": "Well, geez, where do I start on that? A world full of blind excesses. I mean, I wrote that when I was-- There was a couple of things that triggered me actually when I wrote that, and, and it's related to the crypto space, it's related to the world in general, And one of them was the whole thing about Kylie Jenner being a self-made billionaire. I was like, \"This is ridiculous.\" the other thing that triggered it for me was people complaining about, you know, bloody Donald Trump And everything that he does, and, you know, e-everyone's just lost their damn minds and just complaining about everything. And then looking at that, looking at the crypto sort of space, in the lens of just the world gone mad, that we've got nothing better to do but to complain about everything and to make everything bigger than it is and building, you know, flaky shit on top of flaky shit and- For me, the ICO craze, like, I got swept up in it in the beginning. I thought, holy crap, it's a new way to raise money, you know, this is gonna change the way-- You know, the, the whole narrative that was around it, right? It was gonna change the way people raise capital and, you know, everyone's getting involved. And I bought into the narrative initially, I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. But then I, I remember what, what changed it for me was I started seeing all of these crazy-ass ideas, and I'd, I'd started a little bit of the, the, the dot com sort of boom-bust cycle, and when I looked at that, and I thought, holy crap, there's got to be similarities here, except this seems extraordinarily more stupid. So I sat down and I took a weekend out, and I read twenty white papers. And having been involved in tech before and running proper businesses and raising capital through sophisticated investors, through angel investors, through VCs, through all of that Sort of stuff. Reading the white paper, I thought, holy crap, not, not only did-- By the end of the weekend, I felt like I'd lost, you know, twenty points of IQ. I couldn't fathom how people were raising that much money on a piece of, can-- I don't know if I can swear here, but a piece of crap. Yeah, yeah, go for it. a piece of shit, then. You know, concept which the, the, the grammar wasn't even correct, the ideas were complete fluff, there was no business model, no And I sat there reading this stuff thinking, \"All right, the world's gone absolutely fucking mad, and this is, this is an example of people don't know where to put their money anymore, they don't know what to do with it, everything's overinflated, we've been running around and we've reached the peak.\" Of, you know, human stupidity where we've decided to create, you know, drone-powered AI blockchains that wash your clothes and make money for you in the middle of the night without you having to do anything, and god knows what other fucking ridiculousness was coming out there, and, man, Looking at it, it's just, it's an example of when people say, \"Oh, you know, the, the world's gone mad in terms of political correctness, where everyone's now getting offended by friends and getting offended by whatever other old TV show from the nineties and all this sort of stuff.\" I, I, I say that this is all a subset of-" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "10:23", "start": 623.38, "text": "capital excess in the world where people no longer have real problems to worry about, they have these superficial, flaky, surface-level problems and crap to deal with that they, they end up creating more and more of that shit. And, you know, the ICO craze was an example of that in, ap-applied to technology and applied to just blind- Zero substance ideologies that, occur at periods of time in society where we've, we've overinflated Whether it's expectations, whether it's capital, whether it's, assets, whether it's anything, i-i-it's just we live in a world that's been completely inflated in every way, shape, or form. and, I mean, that, that was the premise of the article, and, you know, if anyone wants to look at it, I just go on a massive rant and I pick out fifty things which I think are completely insane. I'm looking at it now, like, you know- Property porn shows, and, you know, everyone's a startup person now, and, you know, everyone's also apparently an investor now, you know, stay-at-home traders. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:31", "start": 690.87, "text": "let's, let's dig into some of these. I think, definitely around this whole ICO craze, we saw this whole idea of everyone's being a fund manager now. Do you wanna talk a little bit about what you saw during that two thousand and seventeen crazy ICO run? Well," }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "11:45", "start": 704.52, "text": "people, people who've never been in markets before, people who don't understand anything about- About economics or fun, any fundamentals about markets or companies or, you know, how money functions and how society functions or anything, all of a sudden became, you know, fund managers because they tripped over and either fell on top of Bitcoin or fell on top of Ethereum or popped their money into some bullshit shitcoin that went up ten thousand percent because it could, you know? The, these people all of a sudden became fund managers because their track record was six months long or twelve months long and they made ten thousand percent return. And in a world where capital is looking for somewhere to make a better yield, because everything is skyrocketing like crazy, it's gonna go to, hey, look, there's this new stupid area which is making, you know, tens of thousands of percent, we'll go into there. And then all of these idiots who shouldn't be anywhere near money or anywhere near funds raised money from people looking to get, you know- A better alpha, somewhere else. And I mean, it was like, we, we will never, until the next You know, dot com type or ICO type bubble comes along, and maybe that's gonna be another ten or twenty years, I don't know. But I, I don't think, we're gonna see like, p-people keep talking about what the next wave of crypto is gonna be. It's not gonna be like this ICO round, unless- Unless we have, some type of new, you know, similar type asset class that's created that's not tied to the underlying asset where you can completely overinflate it, I don't know, m-maybe I could be wrong, but I mean, it was, it was nuts. I don't really know what else to say there, man. Like, there's-- most of these fund managers are not fund managers. They're a bunch of kids who got lucky or a bunch of idiots who think they know what they're doing. So they're all-- and, and I mean, how many of them are under? Like, that most of them are under, right? I think there's only like a couple of the fund managers that are still up after all of this, after the bloodbath, and they think, you know, it's not gonna get worse. Oh, yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:50", "start": 829.66, "text": "exactly. yeah, a couple thoughts there. So one thing people are saying now, and I don't, I don't know The security, token offering." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "14:06", "start": 845.96, "text": "I, I was on a panel with, a guy called Kevin O'Hara a couple months ago, and it was just when, it was, it was in July, right? And it was when people were first starting to feel the burn of, you know, ICOs crashing and everything coming down, and they were like, \"Oh, you know what? ICOs are stupid, so the, the narrative started to change then, right? So all these idiots who'd previously been involved in ICOs were now sort of starting to say, \"Oh, look, well, we're not doing an ICO, we're doing an STO.\" And I'm sort of sitting there thinking, I was on the panel, I'm like Why the fuck you doing an STO? What, what, why do you need extra liquidity at your stage, in the business? So, so I've got a couple issues with this whole STO thing, and so if we, if we break 'em up into buckets, number one is the liquidity problem. I don't think people understand liquidity well enough. When you're an early stage company, there's a reason why companies like Uber, Airbnb, and all this sort of shit, remained private for as long as they possibly can, is because they need to build, innovate, and play into an entity or into an organization before it's needed, because the problem with liquidity is that, and this, this is exacerbated in markets where you've got information asymmetry, is that liquidity is a double-edged sword. If you are a small business that decides to go, somehow, let's assume that they figure out how to make STOs practical, let's say you're a small business and you go, create liquidity in the stock in your company and you sell it out You, in, in a small business or a small organization, you're so busy fucking around running the company, hiring staff, firing staff, losing people, it's fucking chaos in the early days. I don't give a shit what anybody says. Your ability to report on what's actually going on and being able to report honestly would send the price of your tokens, you know, up and down on a daily basis so much so that you wouldn't be able to run the actual company effectively, you'd lose your fucking mind, number one. Number two, the average small business or small organization, and when I say small, I mean anyone from, you know, really five hundred employees down, can't, Can't deliver or execute on the, the compliance and that's required in order to be what's effectively what an STO represents is a, a listed company, in effect. Like, you know, f-f-in order to give the information out there to the public to make decisions That can value the token that is, you know, tied to the security in, you know, whether it's your company, whether it's equity or whatever they've done. So, so you, you've got all of these input problems that means the perception of the value is gonna be so distorted by the market and then further exacerbate the information asymmetry, therefore further compound the problem of liquidity in that sort of market. So, so I think that is one area where it's a complete disaster. And number two is that it's not solving the underlying problem of allowing more people. So I, I like the, the, the narrative of the ICOs was that anybody can invest in early stage companies. Now that's a nice narrative, but just because you've created an STO, so let's say, again, we've solved the problem, we've somehow created an STO, non-sophisticated investors, it can't, still can't invest in this, Early stage or, you know, pre-seed or seed stage companies anyway, because, and depending on obviously the jurisdiction that you're in, but it's very difficult to invest in these companies from a legislative, and compliance standpoint. So where the innovation needs to happen isn't in, you know, digitizing or tokenizing the security in, you know, companies that are too early to go and list effectively, is we need to change the laws around sophisticated investors and all that sort of stuff. So that was sort of the point point that I bring up at the, when I was a panelist over at that, crypto investment summit in, in Sydney was that the problem we need to solve there is more a legislative access pro-problem than it is a technological problem. The technological piece, we, we've got, yeah, I mean, that would be probably the third pillar or the third area that I think STOs have a real problem is that what are we actually doing? Are we creating synthetic tokens that represent equity, or, you know, some other right or debt or obligation? And it's company, or are we actually going to digitize a corporate constitution, break that up, turn, you know, what's currently listed on an ASIC register, for example, you know, the shares that are listed on ASIC register, are we gonna transform those into some form of token that people can then share, swap, and trade? You know, so, so I think there's so much gray area, and there's a lot of people running around thinking that they've solved it, but they're not really thinking deeply, particularly on the liquidity problem. I think the liquidity and the information asymmetry is All we're gonna do is create bubbles in areas that we don't need them, then the, the technical problem, and then you've got the legal problem. So I don't know, I, I think it's a very messy area. Although in saying that, I think there's gonna be progress made towards, making the process of creating liquidity in businesses that require liquidity and have the capacity and capability to, you know, report and remain compliant, I think it's gonna potentially make it e- Easier for them to effectively list. But anyway, that, that's, that's my long answer on STOs." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:33", "start": 1173.1, "text": "Yeah, no, I, I think, there's some very, you know, great insights that you've offered there. Let's unpack that liquidity problem a little bit, because some of the problem with that is essentially that these tokens, when they first issue, there might be a fair amount of liquidity for people who want to buy in, but then six months down the line, two years down the line, what kind of liquidity will there be?" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "19:56", "start": 1196.2, "text": "when you say, okay, so where, where are you referring to as the source of liquidity in this, in this" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:02", "start": 1202.15, "text": "question?" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "20:02", "start": 1202.49, "text": "I'm" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:03", "start": 1202.85, "text": "referring here more to things like the amount of buy support. How many people are there who actually want to hold that token?" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "20:08", "start": 1208.46, "text": "Yeah, well, we don't know exactly. So th-this is the problem. So the reason why, for example, BHP is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and not the, you know, National Stock Exchange or some other alternative stock exchanges because the, the liquidity- See, thing, things like liquidity work best when you've got, networks or marketplaces that are large. That, that this is why Uber, for example, works much better than- I don't know, GoCatch or whatever one of the other smaller competitors are, because they've got liquidity of drivers and liquidity of riders. It's, it's almost like buyers and sellers, right? So, you know, it, it's- BHP is listed on one of these because of that, you know, buy sell side liquidity, but they can also list enough shares or enough stock because they're a high valued company. Now, if you're a extremely low valued business that's, you know, small, that's looking to get some cheap capital by somehow securitizing your tokens and listing them somewhere. First of all, you need to worry about who the hell is gonna find you, how the hell you're gonna get enough information out there for people to actually have enough context to be able to, you know? Buy your stock or support your stock, and that sort of translating into, and a market building around your company or around your, entity. So it's, I, I think a lot more thought needs to be, going into this. Now, if we can't- So, so if we assume that those challenges are real, what's all this STO thing is gonna represent is probably- Some sort of layer that sits just beneath where traditional markets, public markets sit at the moment, right? So, this SDO thing might actually be reserved for businesses that have done a seed, a Series A, a Series B. They might not wanna go public on a market the size of the ASX or say the Nasdaq or something like that, they might not wanna go to the Russell or the, you know, National Stock Exchange, for example, in Australia, they might wanna go to something intermediate that, That is run by a more sort of private, smaller scale exchange, and that might give them access to some sort of liquidity, but again, that kind of company isn't gonna be your average You know, figured it out last week, startup that wrote a white paper and is gonna raise all this capital overnight. You know, the, the, the, it's gonna be very different, to do an STO, and I just think the analogies that people draw between the ICO craze and the STO craze are two completely different things, and it's- Yeah, it's, it's not gonna be as free, open, liquid, and, you know, to the moon as people are imagining. it's gonna be, you know, a lot more complex, and there's gonna be-- if it's gonna function, the barrier to entry is gonna be a hell of a lot higher, which by default is gonna mean that less companies get through, and it's not gonna be the same type of craze. So, I don't know, that, that sort of my thoughts." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:18", "start": 1398.45, "text": "Well said. Okay, and Now is this whole phenomenon of crypto traders that we saw, you know, these guys who just, you know, started trading yesterday and are trying to become professionals. What are these guys?" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "23:36", "start": 1415.73, "text": "Well, I mean, they-- what were they doing before crypto? They were probably trading, you know, doing forex fucking courses, because that was the craze. Or was it binaries? I don't know. There, there was binary options or some shit before crypto. So, look, it's-- these guys are always gonna exist, that-- you've got two parts of the problem there. You've got people who think that they should, you know, make money for doing nothing or, or sitting at home and looking at charts, And, you know, it's been proven time and time again, like, there's, there's arguments for and against this that charting and technical analysis actually works or whether it doesn't work. I mean Some of the greatest mathematicians out there will tell you that the shit's all random, you can't get an edge anymore from TA, like all the quants and all of that sort of stuff. The real hedge funds, like the people like Ray Dalio and, Jim Simons and all of those guys who actually run proper hedge funds with proper quants and all that sort of stuff, those guys have arbed out all of the edge that you'll ever get from TA. and, you know, they're, they're running Complex mathematical, statistical arbitrage models and all of that sort of stuff that actually consistently makes money, not some stupid chart patterns. And, and the argument, you know, on that side is that you could basically draw a chart pattern out of anything, and convince yourself, that it means something because we as humans all have cognitive biases that we, you know, that dictate, you know, how we operate in life. So, you know, I, I, I think it's pretty foolish To, to think that, you know, you can become some sort of professional trader at home. Now, in saying that, there's obviously people out there who are trading, who are making money, you know, and- You know, all credit to them, but I think what they should be careful of is, you know, that there might be some sort of convergence around TA in crypto at least at the moment, because it's such a nascent market, and because of the high saturation of, retail noobs, you know, there may be, you know, technical analysis consensus points or, you know, shelling points on charts that actually function, But over time, and this being a natively digital asset, I don't know how well that's gonna, work, and I don't think it's a good long-term strategy to, you know, really make money in this space. But again, I think a lot of these people are Studying crap that, everybody else can access freely on the internet, that's not how you get an edge. I can guarantee you that's not how the best hedge funds in the world work. They, they don't get an edge by, you know, studying a five wave Elliott pattern and thinking that that's how you make money. So, you know, it's, it's a hell of a lot more complex than it's made out to be, and then, you know, the people who just wanna make money easily are willing to pay, you know- Moron traders who became traders last week, you know, selling courses, and they'll buy courses off these guys just to, to, you know, for the promise that they'll, you know, hopefully make money for free sitting at home trading on BitMEX." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:48", "start": 1608.38, "text": "Yeah, precisely. And I think it, it might be similar to the phenomenon, like even with things like poker, where it's really only like the very top few percent who actually consistently make a decent amount of money, and pretty much everyone below that is either, if they're lucky Okay, they're trading water and otherwise they're losing." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "27:05", "start": 1624.73, "text": "Yeah, absolutely, man. Like, it's, it's just trading is such a zero sum game, man. And it's also one of those things, like, I do know, know a couple traders who, who genuinely are good, but guess what they do? They spend twelve hours in front of a fucking screen every day. they study, they read, they, they have a pulse on the market, they know what the fuck's going on, and that's what they do. If you think you are gonna make millions of dollars Because you, you know, paid for some douchebag's course, you know, costed a thousand dollars, and he taught you how to read an Elliott wave or what the hell a candlestick is and what an RSI or a stochastic is. If you think that's how you're gonna make money in your part time, you're kidding yourself. Like, it's, it's a joke. It's pissed me off since the days of all the guys running around shilling, you know, forex courses, to binary options courses, to now crypto trading courses, to god knows what else they're That, you know, my, my suggestion to all those people buying this stuff is, go do something productive, and you'll have a much better chance of making money long term. Or, here's something even better, is buy some Bitcoin, put it in a fucking ledger, and forget about it. Come back to it ten years from now, you'll have saved a hell of a lot of your hair from falling out, and, you know, more than likely, it's Bitcoin being an asymmetric long term bet, it's- Gonna still be around and be worth a hell of a lot more, and yeah, it, it's a much better strategy than all this other crap." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:41", "start": 1720.61, "text": "Right. Yeah. And so with that, we're seeing really over the last few years, well, now ten years that Bitcoin has been around, and, you know, in the last few years, we've, we've seen sort of the good and the bad, and the bad could, you know, could be some of these people who are selling you this false promise of, you know, you can get rich quick and overnight experts, arm" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:02", "start": 1741.82, "text": "You want to talk a little bit about some of that? Some of the good stuff." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "29:05", "start": 1745.23, "text": "Mate, I would say that the thing, like, in the last year and a bit, we've seen, like, Andreas Antonopoulos has always been someone that I look up to, and, you know, I've always listened to his stuff, and I think he's one of the most important people in the entire space because he brings a voice of reason, a voice of trust, which is what you need when you're dealing with something that is effectively gonna be a, a new form of money or a new form of" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "29:32", "start": 1771.98, "text": "This feeling of trust, and you build trust through communicating things that make rational fucking sense, and that's what, what's his name, Andreas Antonopoulos does. What I, what I've, what I've been, I guess really happy to see over the last year and a bit is, you know, people like Safet Inamovic who came and wrote Bitcoin Standard and all of these sort of-- there's, there's been a couple good new players that have come out, and when I say new players, I mean they've probably been involved for a little while, but their work sort of come to the fore recently, like Murad, Makhmudov. his, his stuff is brilliant as well. Yeah. you know, there's more good stuff coming to the fore where there Why, you know, what, what the best chance or what the best opportunity for something like Bitcoin is? And they're starting to explain it, and it seems like, and I don't know if you've sensed this in the last probably couple months, is that there seems to be a movement back toward Bitcoin now from a lot of the community?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:38", "start": 1838.49, "text": "Yeah, that's definitely what I've seen. I think we've seen as the, well, a lot of the traders kind of explain that as, \"Oh, well, look, the alt's are crashing,\" but then, you know, Bitcoin- Dominance rises, which, I mean, I disagree with the use of the Bitcoin dominance index, but you can sort of colloquially understand that's what's happening." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "30:55", "start": 1854.53, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, I think the good is that aside from, yeah Good new minds coming into it and sort of putting, putting more resources out there and more content out there that makes sense. I mean, you know, your podcast is a great example, you know, Jimmy Song's stuff is brilliant as well. So there's, there's a lot of good content that Really makes the space feel more trusted, so that's sort of coming. One thing as well is I did a presentation, at a, at a pitch event when I was talking about, you know, when we're raising some money for Amber, and I, I talked about, you know, why crypto and why now, and one of the things I talked about was how the- The size of the marketplace or the size of the cohort of people getting involved in this space is growing, by an order of magnitude, you know, every couple years. So it started off with, you know, the crypto anarchists and the, you know, all the freaks and geeks in the beginning. Then it's sort of the next cohort of people was the, you know, early libertarians, you know, your gold, silver people, your people, you know, understood, you know, money and all that sort of stuff. Then the next cohort was probably the, Years, and that was sort of an order of magnitude larger than the previous one. And then the next cohort was sort of the cohort that just went past, which is the, you know, the speculators, the get-rich-quickers, and, you know, the scammers and all that sort of shit, which, you know, despite all the bagging out I give them, they're all just part of the process anyway. you know, and what I'm, what I'm envisioning is that the next cohort is gonna be a lot larger, and it's gonna be far more sort It's, you know, this is the Lindy effect in action, right? Is that each time a new cohort of people get involved, it's, it's Making Bitcoin in particular, it's making its existence, you know, more, what's the word I'm looking for? more substantive. it's, it's a recursive, it's a, it's a positive recursive loop. And, you know, for me Seeing things like, you know, I mean, I'm obviously biased toward what I'm doing with Amber, but I mean, there's, there's a hell of a lot of cool new projects out there, companies that are trying to make- You know, the holding some Bitcoin or accessing the space easier and, you know, more seamless to do. And, and that's sort of like, I remember watching a video from Andreas a couple months ago, and he sort of talked, people were like, \"Oh, you know, what's next in blockchain? What's next in Bitcoin?\" And he said, \"Look, I'd love to tell you that it's gonna be some new AI drone-powered super blockchain, blah, blah, blah.\" He goes, \"But it's not.\" He said, \"There's three things that are important" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "33:48", "start": 2027.89, "text": "Easier, better, infrastructure, i.e. wallet, so that you can send, swap, receive, you can do things, you know, so, so it allows you to do things more seamlessly once you're inside. And you said better education. So when I, when I, and I remember watching that video, and when that was sort of around the time when we, you know, had first started building Amber and doing all that sort of stuff, and I said, \"Holy shit, that's the three things that I wanna nail with Amber.\" Better on-ramp, you know, better Those are the sort of things that I see coming up. And then the third thing that I wanna sort of touch on as a major positive as well is Lightning. And, and I think, I, I'm doing a talk right now that I'm sort of starting to put together which is gonna be probably the highlight talk for twenty nineteen for me. It is called, Blockchain is dead, long live Lightning. And I think what we're gonna see, and again, I'm, I'm a massive Lightning bull, I, I think all the complexity that we have in society today is gonna be abstracted out into different layers that anchor back into the, the core Bitcoin network. So all of these crazy ideas and all the stupid shit that we saw sort of, you know, last year and this year with ICOs and different blockchains and all that sort of stuff. Somewhere in those crazy stupid concepts, there's actually some good ideas that don't require their own blockchain or their own token or any of that sort of shit, that will be applications that are built With, you know, some level of complexity and abstraction, either on Lightning, through Lightning, or something to do with fucking Lightning, that get the benefit of a, immutable ledger, i.e. Bitcoin, through being able to be anchored to it. And I think this is where the future's going. And, you know, I was looking at a talk by, Elizabeth Stark with, with Sooner from, Token Daily, and that was like a really good talk listening to her talking about what they're doing with Lightning and all that sort of stuff, man. I, The next major, major opportunity is in this space, and I think over the next five, ten years, we're gonna see the next co-- the next cohort or the next two, three cohorts of people being Be- being Lightning users and less, you know, core, you know, Bitcoin chain users, and I think that's sort of where, where I think, you know, the future is, and I think that's one of the biggest positive- Things that are gonna happen to Bitcoin, because what, what it's gonna do is it's gonna create another network effect that makes Bitcoin more important, more secure, more entrenched, and more central to this whole thing. And, Yeah, the, the more I look into it, the more, the more bullish and the more positive I get on, Bitcoin overall." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:42", "start": 2201.54, "text": "Excellent insights, Alex, I very much agree. let's talk a little bit about what we can expect for the next, say, two thousand and nineteen and two thousand and twenty. Now, you mentioned, you touched on this a little bit earlier around what might, you know, we've, we've got this sort of phenomenon of people coming in waves, as each different wave kind of comes in, they get, so to speak, mentally captured, as" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:04", "start": 2224.5, "text": "And you, you touched on this idea of maybe the savvy millennial. So what might drive some more Bitcoin investment, for example, the disillusioned millennials who can't afford a property here in Australia, would they then, you know, go and buy Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "37:19", "start": 2238.67, "text": "Look, I, I don't know whether the, the first thing they're gonna jump at is Bitcoin. you know, I think i-in down markets, people generally run to cash, right? Because when people are scared, you know, they sell shit, they run to cash. When people are euphoric, they buy shit" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "37:34", "start": 2254.02, "text": "And then wonder why it, you know, fell down in price later. So, you know, hu-human psychology is a funny thing, but, what, what will drive them toward Bitcoin, I think, is this narrative around it being an asymmetric bet. I'm literally, before you called me, I was just writing an article, that I'm calling Bezos and Bitcoin, which is, a-and the idea is what, what's similar about Jeff Bezos and Bitcoin, and, and it's a bit of a, you know, clickbaity title, but the idea is The internet was this fringe outlier asymmetric bet that we, we-- I don't think we could even quantify how much of a economic impact it's had on the world, and, you know, Bitcoin is also this fringe outlier, you know, technology movement, communication medium, whatever you wanna label it as, that, that we, for the first time in history, have a, you know, the ability to hold a piece of, and I think the narrative for the millennials and the narrative, or at least what I'm trying to push, you know, with Amber and with everything that I talk about, is that Bitcoin is One of those things where it's either gonna be worth nothing or it's gonna be worth orders of magnitude more than it is now. It's not gonna fall somewhere in lukewarm middle. It's just, that's just not what's gonna happen with something like this. because the only way for it to function is if it's worth trillions of dollars, otherwise it's just gonna be worth zero. It's, it's just, it's, it's an all or nothing game. And if I-- There's, you know, I'm sure you've heard of Nass Daily life. He sort of, he, he made a very interesting point in there, which is all of these, you know, new age moron fund managers who, you know, think they're fund managers, who've been in the game for a couple years, and, you know, create all these complex, you know, fragile ways to try and get yield. He goes, if all of them just pissed off and you just take eighty-five percent of your money and just put it in treasuries so that it's safe and you're earning two or three percent, and you take fifteen percent A thousand X, because that's your best portfolio structure. You don't need anything fancy. So if we look at Bitcoin with that lens and say, \"Alright, Mr. Everyday Person, you know, Millennial, whatever, you've lost, you know, a bit of money or whatever, here, hold most of your wealth in, you know, cash for the time being. but here's this interesting asset. It's fringe, it's out there, it's weird, but hey, it's got a chance, not to double, but to go up a thousand times. Take percent, you know, fifteen percent, whatever, it's an option on, you know, a future that could be a hell of a lot better. Take an amount that you're willing to lose potentially, but that, you know, would make a difference if it, you know, went up a hundred times or thousand times, and allocate some capital there, and I think that narrative is what's gonna drive a bit of the next wave of, way of adoption into Bitcoin particularly. Now, I could be wrong, this could be a real bias view from me, because this is probably one of my cognitive biases, but it's definitely the narrative and the message that I wanna push forward with everybody that I'm talking with, you know, moving forward. I, I honestly think that everybody should hold a little bit of Bitcoin, simple as that. I don't think, I think it should be a non-negotiable, everybody should hold some Bitcoin," }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "41:01", "start": 2461.0, "text": "and, you know, again, it's, it's the whole To hold a little bit. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:06", "start": 2465.58, "text": "yeah, no, that's great. Let's, let's now go into Amber. So, I mean, you were touching on it just now, but why did you start Amber?" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "41:12", "start": 2472.37, "text": "I mean, that, that was it. So the, the, the story was really around, I was trying to, like, over 2017, like, I, I bought a big chunk of, Bitcoin at the beginning of the year and, you know, I was very happy about that, you know, especially when it hit three thousand, I sold fifty percent of it, thinking that this doubled my money, I'm a genius." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "41:38", "start": 2497.93, "text": "you know, the, the prudent ones didn't fare too well last year. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:42", "start": 2502.07, "text": "yeah. Underperformed during the crazy bull run, yeah." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "41:45", "start": 2504.83, "text": "Correct. But, you know, one of the things I was doing was trying to convince everyone, friends, family, and everyone to just go buy some. And, you know, they're like, \"Oh, fuck, you know, what's this? I gotta take photos of myself and this and that and all this other bullshit.\" And everyone was just finding it too hard. And then they, they didn't know how much, or" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "42:06", "start": 2526.06, "text": "I was like, \"Man, there's got to be an easier way to do this.\" And, you know, looking at the, the traditional markets, Acorns had obviously done it for, traditional markets, like, you know, being able to put your spare change into, into a traditional managed fund. And I thought, \"Man, why, why hasn't nobody done that in crypto?\" I said, \"You know, the, the, the concept seems so simple.\" And as I delved a little bit deeper, I realized why nobody had done it in crypto is that, you know, This sort of stuff, which is all great, and that's how they make their money. Whereas, can't really do that in the Bitcoin space without running a fund, but I didn't wanna get, you know, go down the path of running a fund and then have to build a technology layer to, you know, acquire the capital effectively to run that fund. I thought, \"No, this is all bullshit.\" I said, \"I wanna run this like an exchange.\" Now, to run an exchange, you need to make a small percentage, right? So, you're gonna give me ten bucks worth" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "43:06", "start": 2586.46, "text": "I, as an exchange, subsist. So in order to make that type of, business model functional, like the, the, the, the math needs to stack up, and where the whole thing broke down was the cost of, processing transactions and aggregating the financial data from the banks in order to work out the spare change amounts and all of that was too high. Like if you wanted to do small transaction amounts and work out, you know, the roundups and do all that sort of stuff, by the time you moved Two bucks, it ended up costing like sixty or seventy cents. It was ridiculous. So there's no way you could, you know, make money as a business, and if you just passed that cust-cost onto the customer, it was a mess. So, anyway, long story short was, I got together with a couple, tech guys from here in, Brizzy. In Br-Brisbane, sorry. and they, they built a piece of, fintech software. It was financial data aggregation and payments and all that sort of stuff rolled into one, and it was the, the link, the missing link that would make something like Amber commercially viable so that A, I could run it as a business, and B, we could provide that service into the market for people to use. And that's sort of where it all spawned, and my whole- MO on that was that I wanted to just pure and simply make acquiring some Bitcoin as simple as possible. And the more I delved into it, the more I realized that dollar cost averaging is the most-- and, and this is where, you know, when people, the, the original message for Amber was, you know, making digital currencies easy, like making the purchase easy. And, and what I'm sort of evolving the message in Amber to now is making, you know, investing or dollar cost averaging Easier, because by far, Steve, like, I, I think, oh, sorry, Stefan, I, I think the, the only way that ninety-nine point nine percent of people should invest is through dollar cost averaging. If they wanna be involved in an asset class that they believe is going to increase in value over a period of time, they should definitely not be traders, 'cause that is a, basically a zero-sum game. they should try not to be, you know, shorted Term investors, they should just, over time, purchase a small amount, in, you know, periods of time that are, you know, equidistant apart so they can take the emotion out of investing and trading, and slowly accumulate the asset that they want to hold. Whether that's Amazon, whether that's Netflix, whether that's Apple, whether that's the Nasdaq fund, you know, the index fund, whether that's Bitcoin or whatever the hell else they believe in, that's what all people should do Do over a long enough period. And again, tying it back to, Bitcoin itself is I see Bitcoin as the most asymmetric bet of our generation. And You know, if, if somebody can dollar cost average in with money that's low risk, it's an absolute, absolute no-brainer. Like when I, when I did my first, Market studies really, all, all I did was I walked up and down Queen Street Mall in, Brisbane, and I'd just ask people, I, I would say, \"Have you heard about Bitcoin?\" \"Uh, yeah.\" \"Um, do you have any?\" \"Uh, no, I don't.\" \"Uh, do you know where to buy it from?\" \"Mm, not really.\" \"Do you know how much to buy?\" \"Uh, no idea.\" \"Um, do you know what to do with it?\" \"Uh, not really.\" \"Can I pay for things with Would you swap, you know, your spare change for a daily and just accumulate slowly? The answer bar none from everybody was, \"Yeah, I'd do that. That's no problem.\" So we're solving, like, w-with one app, we're solving multiple problems. We're solving the ability to acquire it, we're solving the, the, the investment problem and the problem with human beings and, you know, Inherently," }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "47:07", "start": 2826.95, "text": "buying high and selling low, which we, we did backwards, we're solving that, and we're solving the, the asymmetry problem by investing your spare change or by investing, you know, a small amount, whether it's twenty, fifty bucks a week or a hundred bucks a week, i-it's inherently not taking all of your money. It's not the eighty-five percent of the barbell, it's the fifteen percent of the barbell, right? It's the option. So it's solving those three problems, and it's- Setting it aside and, you know, at Amber we manage it, we-- all, all the funds are in cold storage, so there's no risk of hacks, there's no risk of losing the funds and all that sort of stuff. So it's, it's sitting there for you, nice and safe, through a mechanism that takes all the stupidity out of, you know, your potential actions, and lets you accumulate into this new asset class automatically. It's like, I don't know, I, I just feel like it's the, it's the, it's the application that To get this into more people's hands." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:01", "start": 2881.06, "text": "Right, I see it as, you know, any hardcore Bitcoiners, they know how to go and get it themselves. This is really more for the, you know, not so hardcore people who just want some exposure to Bitcoin, but they don't necessarily wanna, you know, go and do all the work and do all the reading and research, they just want some small exposure. Could you talk a little bit about how the app works and kind of the mechanics of how you set up? Look, the, the app." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "48:25", "start": 2905.17, "text": "I'll, I'll touch on two things quickly there. First is around the hardcore users. So, a- originally when I first started building this, I, I would publicly say, \"Okay, this isn't for your existing Bitcoin people. The people who already have Bitcoin, know Bitcoin, know where to buy it, and they know what they're doing, and I go, they're, they're definitely not gonna use Amber.\" We, we launched a beta version, which is sort of live to a couple people plus us in the office. Since I've downloaded it, I, I've been actively, you know, trying to buy odd amounts when I'm in the store just so I can accumulate more, And I'm, I'm like about as hardcore Bitcoin as you can get, and what I found myself doing is, you know, using the app myself to accumulate, because it just, you know, and again, I could be biased here, being, you know, being the founder of this thing, but it feels like this is actually a cool tool for even the hardcore Bitcoiners, because this is sort of the amount that they can, th-th-this is the, the Bitcoin stash that they can build up without noticing, whilst they're going, you know, obviously build up their primary stash They're doing, but, and that, that's just the funny thing that I've sort of encountered in the last couple weeks as, you know, I've launched it amongst myself and a couple other friends who are also hardcore Bitcoiners, so, so it was a really interesting, you know, finding. But I'm com-come, yeah, coming back to how the app itself works is The first version, so we'll roll it out in versions, but effectively there's four functionalities that you'll have in the app. You'll have the, what's called the roundups, and what that means is you'll download the app, you'll link a bank account to it, through this fabric service, then every time you go and spend money in a shop, whether you go buy a coffee for three fifty or you go buy a sandwich for seven dollars twenty or whatever, at the end of the day, Amber sees, you know, your transactions throughout the day, amounts, and it just does some math. It rounds up each transaction to the nearest dollar, so that three dollar fifty coffee will, you know, will, that's, you know, up to four dollars and fifty cents, then the seven twenty is, you know, eighty cents there, and whatever other transaction throughout the day, it'll add those up together, it'll say, \"All right, two dollars twenty-six for the day.\" it'll then direct debit two dollars twenty-six from your bank account, and we'll do that across, you know, say, ten thousand users, Such as that Bitcoin, chuck it in cold storage, and then we attribute that Bitcoin across to, everybody's, Amber, Amber wallets basically. Now That's, so I'm gonna explain this a couple levels. So that's, that's sort of purchase modality number one. Purchase modality number two is, recurring investments. So that's where you can say, \"Look, I don't give a shit about roundups, I just want, you know, ten bucks, twenty bucks, fifty bucks, you know, a week or a day or a month just coming out of my account, and buying Bitcoin at whatever price it is, doesn't matter.\" So that's the recurring investment that you set up. You don't really need Use Fabric is, use a smart direct debit, so it'll only debit your account if you've got enough money in there, so avoid dishonors and all that sort of stuff. But, effectively that's just another, that's like an automation strategy. Then there's this thing called the boost function, and what that allows you to do is that allows you to sort of, accelerate that savings process. So you can add a dollar, two dollar, or five dollar boost, and that basically means to every transaction. So if we go back to that coffee transaction, you" }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "52:00", "start": 3120.26, "text": "You've also got a dollar boost, it'll add a dollar to that. So that means for that transaction, we, you know, we calculate a dollar fifty, then the sandwich seven twenty, we'll round it up to a dollar plus add a dollar to that, so that's a dollar eighty. So it's a way for you to sort of fast track the, accumulation. Yeah, the accumulation. And then number four will be just one-off top-ups, and that's literally just like a exchange buy sell. So, you know, you'll just be able to go in there," }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "52:30", "start": 3150.3, "text": "The account straight away. So it'll be, it'll actually be one of the fastest ways to buy crypto, so l-longer term, I, I really wanna put some focus into being able, you know, to allow people to, you know, perform that function as, easy as possible. So we wanna introduce some, you know, voice activation stuff where you'll be able to say, \"Hey, Amber, what's the price of Bitcoin?\" \"Hey, Amber, you know, if the price is under this much, you know, can you please buy some But that's sort of the feature set in terms of accumulation. Then when we talk about the wallet layer and things like that, the, the first version, the early version of, Ample will be pretty, pretty strict in the sense that we're gonna manage the custodianship for people, because the, the market again that we're after is people that aren't worried about private keys and seeds and don't know what the fuck any of that stuff means. and to be honest, even if they did, custodianship isn't their forte. so Because we are a, you know, effectively a buy-side exchange, we have the luxury of being able to allocate 100% of the funds into cold storage. So we, we have different levels of cold storage. We have like deep, deep cold storage, which has, you know, sharded private keys across the country and all that sort of stuff, and that's where we hold 80% of our funds, that's never touched. we have 15% of the cold storage, which is in, you know, local vaults, and then 5% Should customers wish to, you know, withdraw or sell, you know, perform that sort of function. But, again, that first version of Amber is about more about accumulating. In a subsequent version, which will, I don't know whether it'll be ready for Q1 or Q2 next year, is we're gonna release a, a more Amber, a unique Amber wallet so that each user of Amber can actually, the, the Bitcoin that they've accumulated, they'll be able to send, receive, and actually have a, a hosted type wallet functionality. And then longer- term, which will probably be later half of next year, we'll build what's called the Amber Vault, and the Amber Vault will allow people to move the crypto from their just normal Amber wallet to, their own Amber effectively wallet, which is their own custody solution, i.e., their own private key, their own seed and all that sort of stuff, which we anticipate only a small proportion of customers are really gonna use because, you know, I don't see mass adoption from the next cohort of users coming Coming from people that want to hold it for, you know, the same reasons as a lot of us early people want to hold it for. Right, I see. So, yeah, yeah, go on. I was just gonna say that, that's sort of the, the key trajectory between those two things, and, and, and the wallet functionality for me opens the door for us to then move into how we're gonna build sort of the Lightning functionality into it long term, where we're gonna look at opening up, r-reverse opening channels for people, so that way they have a pre-funded in their hand through Amber and the ability to, you know, we'll, we'll manage those channels from our end and all the-- so there's a lot of things that I wanna do, particularly in Lightning space longer term. again, I don't- It's on the roadmap for later, I don't exactly know how it looks at the moment, but, it's the, the trajectory within-- through which I wanna take, Amber." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:53", "start": 3353.15, "text": "Yeah, definitely interesting, that idea of having the same thing that you buy it on then also help you get onto Lightning." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "56:01", "start": 3361.16, "text": "A hundred percent, yeah. That, that's sort of my, I don't, I'm gonna say this and probably get shot somewhere, but that's my Trojan horse, right? Is that I wanna get, if, if I can help a hundred Bitcoin, and then I can, you know, reverse engineer their access to Lightning and make it, you know, such that they don't have to do anything for it. I've put a hundred thousand people onto Lightning And that's sort of my, you know, one of my, I'm not gonna call it my the end game, but that is one of the big drivers for me is because that's gonna then start to activate that Lightning Network, which is what I think we need to do for Bitcoin long term." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:39", "start": 3398.97, "text": "Yeah, that's fantastic, and I know in Brisbane there's a whole scene there, and there's the whole thing around Brisbane Airport accepting Bitcoin, and there's, that town, I forgot the name, is it seventeen? I forgot the name of it." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "56:50", "start": 3410.44, "text": "yeah, it's," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:52", "start": 3412.36, "text": "I forgot it, but yeah, bas-basically there's a town in, Queensland where pretty much every vendor takes Bitcoin, so that'll be cool to see." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "57:01", "start": 3420.61, "text": "It, it will be amazing to see, exactly. But, I mean, look, mer-merchant That's important, but it's still early days on that. So, and this is why, like, part of me, you know, wants to jump on top of, you know, Lightning and get involved and start, you know, allowing people to process transactions of Lightning and do all that sort of stuff, but I, I always sort of temper that and sort of pull myself back and say, \"Fuck, hold on, Alex, we still haven't got a poofteenth of a percent of people in the world actually holding the shit. So first things first, let's get some people holding some Exchange and all, Lightning and all that sort of shit later, but let's first get people into the damn thing. So, a-and that's why, you know, I always need to remain strict on my, You know, goal and focus, which is let's just make this the easiest on-ramp in the world for anybody to buy Bitcoin and do it inside, you know, un-un-under sixty seconds from first downloading the app to linking their account to being able to purchase. We wanna do that in under sixty seconds." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:07", "start": 3486.84, "text": "Yeah, fantastic. I think you've got to walk before you run, so that makes a lot of sense to me. Look, we're coming close to the hour now, so maybe, we'll just start wrapping up. If you've got any closing thoughts, Alex, and also just Just tell the listeners, well at least the Australian based ones, how they can find Amber and how they can get in touch with you." }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "58:25", "start": 3504.87, "text": "Sure, man. Well, I'll, I'll start with the Amber piece there and then I'll add some closing thoughts. So with Amber, it's, You know, dot coms have all been taken and everyone's squatting them. So you need to, you need to look up, get amba, so g e t amba dot i o. hopefully at some stage I'll be able to get amba dot io, or get amba dot com, but, that's a work in progress. otherwise you'll be able to find us, on Facebook, I think it's getamber dot io, on Facebook. We're on Twitter, Amber Exchange. Not, not really too big on Twitter, but that, that's, you know, an area that will sort of build up. but yeah, if, if you jump on the website, that's obviously the easiest place to find us. as at the date of this recording, we are still in a private type beta, looking to have a more public beta out in July. Sorry, January, so that's sort of around the corner that we'll be working hard on that from next week on. so that's how people can find out about Amber. I, I do a lot of writing on Hacker Noon and Medium, and I'm always talking about dollar cost averaging and, you know, asymmetric bets and outliers and, you know, why Bitcoin and all that sort of stuff, and always sort of looping what we're doing with Amber there. So there's definitely information people can find out there. and then for me, I mean, closing thoughts. Look, Stephan, I think there's-- I, I'm, like I said before, I'm really optimistic about people in the space coming around and we're all sort of converging back toward Bitcoin. I think next year's, oh, sorry, this year now is gonna be an incredible year for Bitcoin, for Lightning, for all that sort of stuff to build out. You know, I'm in two minds about the whole ICO and altcoin thing. I, I don't think we're gonna have another ICO type craze, but I definitely think we're gonna have another altcoin boom, purely because, you know, the, the speculators aren't all gone yet, and we're, we're likely to have another wave of, stupidity, but I don't know if it'll happen in the same way as last time. I think it'll be more sort of altcoin, cheap coin driven than it will be," }, { "speaker": "aleks_svetski", "time": "01:00:38", "start": 3638.57, "text": "ICO stuff, One Ripple is worth twenty cents, and hey, maybe Ripple will get to five grand. You know, so I think that's sort of, you know, that, that, that's just gonna be inevitable. So I think we're gonna have an interesting twenty nineteen. I don't think, you know, we've hit the bottom in terms of price yet. I still think we've got quite a way to go, but at the same time, I think from now and over the next six to twelve months is the best time to start dollar cost averaging, and whether people use an application like Amber or Like Amber removes the need for you to have to discipline yourself to do it, it just automatically accumulates the shit for you. So, but if you are disciplined enough to it, I think now is the time to slowly start purchasing Bitcoin and every time it gets a little bit lower, keep going, 'cause I think it, as I said, it's the best asymmetric bet, of our generation. And yeah, I think we need to see more content like this, more conversations like this, more podcasts like yours, and more conversation around what makes, sense in this space. And yeah, man, that's what I'm-- that's sort of what I'm looking forward to in the year ahead and in the years ahead, and definitely looking forward to doing, you know, another one of these catch-ups maybe six or twelve months from now to see how things have actually evolved. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:00", "start": 3720.12, "text": "sure, definitely. Alright, look, I think that's a great way to finish it off. I think it's, it's a message of dollar cost averaging. And, look, thanks very much for the chat and thanks for coming on, Alex. Really appreciate the fun. Thanks, buddy. Check out the show notes for this episode on my website stephanelivera dot com. If you enjoyed it, remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on the next episode, and please share the podcast with your friends. You can also follow me on Twitter, my handle is at stephanelivera. Thanks for listening!" } ] }