Ukraine, Bitcoin, and The Future of Crypto

Today I’m bringing back a guest that I had many, many months ago last year because it’s so pertinent, and she is just a badass in crypto. Erica Stanford. Welcome back.

 

Hey, Rick! Thank you so much.

 

I like that you got your background for the crypto curry club. Behind you. I think it was just playing last time and this time, you’re like going all all branded? I like it.

 

Okay, well, thank you for having me back. I like being called a badass. That’s cool. Yeah, well, I’ve had that before.

 

Really? Well, no joke. Cuz I mean, when it comes to what, you know, you are an absolute badass, and just even in our conversations that we’ve had, you know, just recently, I’m talking like, literally minutes ago before we hit record. We were talking about Ukraine, which is so pertinent right now because of what they’ve just done with Bitcoin, and could you give us a little bit of background on that because President Zelenskyy just did that yesterday, so this was maybe like a week or two after he legalized it? It’s when this is published right now. But yeah, he just legalized it.

 

Right. Yeah, exactly. What’s interesting there they’d set everything in motion to get it legalized a month ago. So, what’s interesting in Ukraine has now received over $100 million dollars in crypto donations towards relief efforts which is amazing and you know, from the crypto community that’s super cool. But what is interesting with his legalizing it, they did it before they knew that Russia was even going to invade this was done a month ago, and you know, the way these processes work there, they get things in motion. So he literally just signed it. But yeah, so fantastic. So what it means is that crypto companies that will have to now register to be able to to be able to operate legally but of course it will help with facilitating getting donations and so forth in crypto.

 

Yeah. When you say crypto companies will have to register you’re talking exchanges within Ukraine,

 

Right like exchanges like wallets like service providers, like digital asset companies that deal with with crypto, which is you know that that’s that’s not a bad thing that that just means that it’s a way to sort of ideally if it works, keep the good ones in and and the the bad scam actors out.

 

Yeah, no kidding, I can’t remember who it was even this morning. But I mean, this is just like the proliferation of crypto that’s taking place now because I was reading an article this morning about Shiba, and it was, you know, here’s how analysts expected to to get to one penny, you know, which is 1,000%, your 100 whatever it is percentage increase a lot. It’s a lot on where it is right now. That can’t do the math in my head right now. Sorry. It’s early what we’re talking about. It’s, but there’s a lot of organizations that are looking at accepting that as a possible way of payment which is the same as Bitcoin and everything else. What do you see the path being for major adoption of coins or tokens in that nature towards everyday life? You know, and I’ll stop, because I’ll give you a little tag on that, too. I know, I’m talking a lot, but you’re the expert. This is the one thing and even like, why Warren Buffett I’ve Warren Buffett that I’ve seen has not really jumped into this so hardcores because it’s like the real life use cases for something like this. You know, like everyday purchases, like gas stations or whatever. You know, so where do you see this going for everyday adoption of everyday life stuff?

 

I only see it going up, and you mentioned Shiba Inu which is sort of a joke sort of meme coin name, type of dog which is the same use as his other joke. Meme coin, Dogecoin and Elon Musk famously got a Shiba Inu puppy and you know the guy holds a lot of Doge and you know, presumably holds a lot of this Shiba Inu  coin and you know tweeting about buying a Shiba puppy only made prices of those coins go up. So go figure, somebody’s got the money of their puppy back, I’m guessing, probably a bit more than that. So what you know, what is interesting, like, there’s two things bitcoin is: it’s the first cryptocurrency, it’s the safest, it’s the best store of value, it’s the best in many ways. It’s what most people hold, it’s seen as a store of value, it isn’t because of transaction costs, but because of energy use cases, and the time it takes to process transactions, in most cases, isn’t as fast as one would like to be able to just tap something to be able to buy a coffee, a bag of Pastor what whatever that is, or to do those micro transactions, which is maybe just, you know, paying 20 P to get a lemon, whatever that is, whereas you’ve now got newer cryptocurrencies that are far less energy intensive, that you can just send almost instantly, effectively in lifetime and basically for free that you can do these microtransactions in so you’ve got this whole sort of new Well, what Well, four of these newer cryptocurrencies that have less, I don’t know securities status or prestige, then Bitcoin, but in terms of doing frequent high volume microtransactions, so more of a purpose in that. 

 

So you do have companies now looking at the likes of accepting Dogecoin, because they do help with these microtransactions. But it with crypto use cases and the way crypto was designed, and what it sort of really is about it wasn’t necessarily designed for people who are happy, having a central bank account and trusting the banks and trusting their governments and using their iPhone to tap things every time we want to pay for things. Actually, the main users of crypto have been quite often people in, in Venezuela, people in Ukraine, and you know, we’re talking before the Russian invasion. Even people in Russia, people in South African countries where you’ve got populations that have learned that you can’t just trust a central bank that you certainly can’t trust a government that, you know, money can go into hyperinflation just like that, where, you know, in some cases where you go into a supermarket and the price of goods has changed, because inflation is just run so Havoc or wherever you keep money, that it’s not necessarily safe, and you know, there’s numerous countries like that as we’re learning more and more.

 

So you do have entire populations that haven’t been able to just trust the central banking system or to trust their local national currency for various reasons that have turned to Bitcoin, either as a store of value or as a way to send money abroad. To family that’s maybe based in another country or so forth, not because they think, “Oh, this is cool,” or this is modern, or this is new technology, or, Hey, this is going to go up in value if we keep it, but literally because they have no alternatives, you know, in countries where it simply isn’t safe to keep money in a bank account, or where the sanctions are, where there’s barriers put in place, or where, you know, people don’t have bank accounts, you’ve got a third of the world’s population don’t have access to bank accounts, because banks just don’t deem it economically viable to create banking facilities to the world’s third poorest people, and that these people can you all you need as a smartphone or access to the internet, you can have a digital wallet, and then you can store money digitally, you can send money abroad or anywhere to family, basically, for free and instantly, and that’s a whole world better than not being able to send money digitally or not being able to store money safely, and you know, you’re actually in charge of your own money. So there’s a whole big sort of argument behind crypto which is way beyond and so much more important than that, oh look, the price of Bitcoin or the price of whatever, whatever, whatever it has gone up or down or whatever. It’s a way of sending money around the world that doesn’t rely on central banks or corrupt governments or, you know, skewed financial systems that work for some people but don’t by definition work for a lot of people around the world.

 

Wow, absolutely incredible. I’m thinking like I needed like some things to take notes because there’s three things that if I can remember all of them here that you that stuck out with me and the first was the speed of the transactions and how they take a while with some of the the major the majorly proliferated coins right now like a Bitcoin Aetherium and I’ve noticed this too, because even when I bought my ens name, you know, it’s Rick Jordan dot eth, it’s not lifetime. Yeah, yeah, it’s not exactly a lifetime. But I remember even the process of the transaction, and I’ve seen that because I have custodial wallets, I’ve non custodial wallets, you know, there’s certain coins that I’m invested in. When I went to do that, you know, it really, and even like doing things on pancake swap, you know, to, to purchase cat coin, which I did, which was another great meme coin, right? 

 

I don’t know if you’ve looked at that. But it’s called the Shiba killer. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, because in a matter of a day, 24 hours, my three grand that I invested, went up to 60k. Yeah. And it was that next day that the first missile strike hit Ukraine, and it crashed again, because, like, it was like, immediate, right, but now it’s starting to go back up, you know, so I’m still up by about 400%. Right now, it’s interesting. You know, there’s a lot of decentralized apps that they’re looking to create, anyways, they’ve all got stories, they’ve all got projections, plans, but the speed of the transactions, you know, on a Pancake Swap or on even when I purchased through ens, for my Rick Jordan, eth name, the speed of the transaction was not speedy. At all. It wasn’t instant, and in the IT consulting space, one of my clients is a franchise owner of Buffalo Wild Wingsand I remember when the chip started going into credit cards, you know, and before they were always swiping with the mag stripe, and during the Christmas season, they would actually process so many gift card transactions, like a line of 20 people, and just here’s $25, she was $25, she was $25, and then the chip slowed the transaction process down by like a factor of eight. Because it just took longer to process that and I couldn’t I couldn’t fathom, you know, if this is how long crypto transactions take in order to actually process and even on pancake swap, you can choose the speed of your transaction, but you pay higher gas fees, you pay accordingly. Exactly. Yeah. So the speed of the transit, I can see that I’ve never even thought about that until you said this, but that that would be absolutely necessary for everyday things like fuel or a restaurant or something like that, where the transaction has to be processed almost instantaneously.

 

And there are these cryptocurrencies coming out and you know, one of the other accusations leveled often at Bitcoin and crypto is that it uses so much energy Well, in everything. Digital uses energy by being on zoom here, we’re using energy. If your whatsapp message, we’re using energy, if you send me an email, we’re using energy by sending an online banking transaction, we’re using energy. So everything we do, digitally uses energy, we can’t get away from that. But there are now cryptocurrencies that use effectively that are super light that that they’re reacting lifetime that are super fast and cheap to set and you’re talking effectively free to send but that use no more energy than if I send you a WhatsApp message or, or whatever, whatever digital action we’re taking. 

 

So it’s evolving super fast, and it’s a fascinating space to be in because you’ve got so many of the smartest and most successful people from pretty much every walk of life, and I see this every day like pretty much every day we’ll get, I’ll get a message on LinkedIn or by email be introduced to somebody who has left a senior position in banking, retail, whatever, you know, high flying career super, super senior position, founder of amazing company, and they want to work in a crypto startup because it’s more exciting, and it’s faster moving, and they’re fed up with how slow the rest of the world moves, and they just want to make a change now, so it’s like a brain drain like a sort of suction pump, absorbing all of these super, super smart people into it. So the more that happens, the faster the technology is evolving. So it’s changing super fast.

 

That’s so cool. And on the evolution of this, because this was one of the second points during your amazing monologue that you were making about these countries like Venezuela and Ukraine. I love how we have fun by the way, it’s like Ukraine in Venezuela , you know, it’s it’s not smaller populations, but they’re not exactly I mean, they’re definitely not superpowers in the world, from, you know, typically superpower equates to military strength or whatever. But I’m not even talking like economic strength yet, because those countries are not, you know, it could it be because the United States as a whole, you know, or even Australia, or the UK, or even Russia, for that matter has, or China even so, all of these major, like real superpowers is at least at least have they been how they’ve been traditionally classified as such, have not adopted crypto as something that’s real, you know, that’s the, the most simplest way I can put it is something that’s real legitimate, you know, there’s still a lot of stigma around it, you know, especially when it comes to my field in cybersecurity. It’s like, that’s how ransomware is paid is crypto, you know, so there’s been this crypto bad, because that’s how we pay the bad guys. Yeah. So is it possible, you know, because it’s going to take some major countries to adopt this? In order to push it along, I think to the next phase, when do you see and how do you see these smaller, less economically mature countries being able to tip the scales with the larger ones to really start that downhill snowball momentum?

 

So what I think is, we will see is not necessarily that Venezuela is, you know, a lot of people in Venezuela are using Bitcoin. And I think that’s going to massively change the American or British or whatever stance towards crypto, I think, where I would see governments acting, I mean, Facebook had their own digital currency, a stable coin called DM, and they just canceled the project, because they just came up against too many regulatory hurdles, and recently, some of their guys have have left Facebook and now raise $200 million to, sort of to start afresh. So you know, we’ll see where that goes. But you know, that they didn’t get anywhere because there’s so much regulatory pressure from all countries against what they wanted to do, which was effectively acting like a central bank. 

 

Right, and that scared the banks, it scared the governments and, you know, also Facebook doesn’t have an unblemished track record when it comes to people’s data and nothing at all. Apparently, according to this view, according to the newspaper, and so, you know, as has been quoted by pretty much everybody, so if there was a certain, I guess, massive sort of tsunami of pressure going against Facebook to be the ones to, to launch that. But that saying the fact of them doing it, Facebook has a third of the world’s population using their products every day, they’ve got a huge number of people bigger and bigger than China, bigger than any country. So that was enough to scare a lot of companies into taking on crypto and digital assets teams to look at, hey, we’ve got this challenge. Like if Facebook does do this, what does that mean? That means we’ll be losing payment, or we’ll be losing transactions for elsewhere or that so it scared a lot of companies into forming crypto and digital assets taskforce team looking into what they should be doing in the space

 

You’re talking about Facebook’s coin project that has now been scrapped. 

 

But it still had an impact. I’d say the main one would be China, which is you know, it’s a scary project by any definition of the word and it’s by far the most advanced so they’ve been working on this for about seven or eight years now.

 

Yeah, it’s a digital currency in essence, right? Y

 

Yeah, right, cryptocurrency in any sense of the decentralized you know, freedom of movement where it is, it’s the opposite of.

 

Of course not, it’s China.

 

It’s terrifying that they are watching trials and rolling up, but it’s linked to Social Security, sort of like a social credit score. So not only like an economic score as we might have in the West, but it’s a social score, which, you know, is not necessarily bad in some ways. If you do good deeds for charities, you earn bonus points, there are some things that you can earn good deeds for, but it’s, it’s it’s the way it’s been done. You get points deducted for things like being off the wrong religion being off the wrong sexual orientation, being off the wrong ethnic minority, voting certain ways, being an outspoken journalist having too many opinions. Yeah, exactly. If you’re the wrong religion, slash any religion, buy the wrong products, you’re buying too much alcohol associating with the wrong people. So, you know, the one could argue that that is the suppression of freedom, that if you happen to be a certain religion, or a certain sexual orientation, that shouldn’t happen to effect, if your digital wallet which controls all of your money gets frozen by the government, one could make that argument I would personally be of that belief.

 

I’m with you. Because he had so many things that crypto is non traceable, right, and I think like even with CatCoin that I brought up, you know, one of the biggest stats that I’ve been monitoring to stay in it to see if I’ll stay in it for now, and again, I’m still up like 400% on it. But one of the biggest things that I continuously see increase is the number of holders, you can easily do a wallet scan, and find out exactly how many wallets actually hold this specific coin. You can’t exactly see how much is in there. But you can see the types of transactions that go in and out of wallets, which is exactly what you’re saying, you know, if they’re buying too much alcohol, or they’re, you know, where they’re there, you can see everything. 

 

Everything with the Chinese is linked to their digital identity. That could be used by more and then take it one step further, the government has literally got the power to stop you making any transactions, they’re trying to get it to the point that if you’ve got a low enough, well, they’ve got it to the point, if you’ve got a low enough social score, you can’t book train tickets, you can’t get your kids into certain schools, they’re trying to make it that you can’t leave your flat. \

 

What’s the next level? 3.0. Yeah,

 

It’s terrifying, and you’ve got ethnic minorities, you’ve got religious groups, you’ve got, you know, all sorts of people just because they’ve spoken against the government or whatever thing that they’ve done that, you know, in, in our societies, or our views are not bad things. But that means that they’re taking away financial freedom from people. So they’re really advanced in this digital currency. And it gives a huge, like, unprecedented amount of data and power to the Chinese government. And then, you know, due to partnerships the Chinese government has, they’re looking to roll that out to other countries, which is super, super scary, because then you’ve got governments in the US are like, Hey, we’re totally behind. We’ve been lagging behind in technology and in advancements and in regulation, we don’t have any of this data power control. 

 

What do we need to do to keep up and leave the states to it’s not just China to even the United States, and this is legitimate, they’re looking at the US Treasury Department is looking at digitizing the dollar. But this is also on the heels of the Biden administration, trying to pass legislation to have access to people’s bank accounts for the IRS for taxation purposes, you know, and it’s the same thing, because if you do a wallet, scan, and you can see the transactions that go in and out, you can take you can put some data together, one plus one equals two when it comes to this and see where the money’s going, how much it is, you know, for any individual once that dollar is digitized. And this isn’t a conspiracy. I mean, this is just what’s happening right now, is that there’s been legislation proposed for the IRS to access your bank accounts, and then the Biden administration is actively now looking at digitizing the dollar. They go hand in hand.

 

Yeah, yeah, and they’re doing the same here that they’re looking at bringing out a digital pound and it’s one of the things there are arguments for having a digital currency. You know, the the tax thing is one, it reduces fraud. It reduces the ability to sort of make make counterfeit or fake banknotes, for example, that there are arguments for it. I think what is sure, yeah. What is really scary is that even if it is sort of brought about by the most benign, nicest political leader that there ever was, some imaginary figure who’s just an angel, who brings about This technology, it’s still a huge amount of power in the hands of a government, and once you’ve got the technology there is not going to go away you can own is a sliding slope, and you know what, what scares me is even if it’s brought about by a country with good intentions or you know, by a good government, you’re only ever one action away from bringing in a total psychopath who’s bent on destroying everything, you know, as we’ve all seen, far too often in in many countries. So, you know that, that that is the scary thing, you’re bringing in a lot of power where the government can go, Hey, you just bought this voted that way? Whatever it is that you did. So therefore, we’re just going to freeze all of your access to your money, because you voted for the wrong party, or whatever it is.

 

Yeah, that’s it. There’s a lot of pros and a lot of cons to all these, and we can go back and forth. And all of those, I think forever, I would think. 

 

I think that the con slightly outweigh the pros they do at the moment, correct?

 

No, I’m with you on that, because that’s what we’re starting to see right now. I mean, even with Russia, you know, they were trying to bypass a lot of the sanctions in order and use crypto in order to get money in and out of the country in some certain way. Yeah, and here’s another thing, and this was like, Okay, we’re gonna we just did like crypto one on one, right? As far as we’re things, right. This is something I was at a show the other day, and this is what I was talking about, because I keep up with this, and it’s interesting, because even with the Chinese project, right to digitize their currency and make their own coin, it’s still true in this way, now we’re going into the advanced class. For everybody listening right now, it’s still true that something like 60% of the world’s currency reserves are still held in the US dollar.

 

Okay, and sometimes when it is very interesting, and when you lose what try and try and is trying to, yeah.

 

I know, and that’s exactly it, and this was one of the ways that we’re trying to tackle that, but it’s not going to gain much momentum, this was the speculation anyways, it’s not going to gain much momentum worldwide, because it’s not just China, but it’s 60% of the whole world still has their currency reserves in the US dollar. So it’s one way to try to make a dent at it. And at the same time, it also speaks to the relationship between crypto, you know, even if it’s the major ones like Bitcoin or Aetherium, and the value of the US dollar, because the question that I was posing in my head is it’s is it that much different right now is cryptocurrency that much different right now than a standard fiat currency? Or is it just a different quarter, a different pound?

 

There are a few differences. I mean, you know, krypter krypter is is still one time and it’s the thing we’ve we’ve crypt, her and there are privacy currencies, there are things like Manero or you do have things like Bitcoin mixers, and so forth, which scramble up bitcoins and then make it harder to trace. But in general, if you just look at, say, Bitcoin or Aetherium, or, you know, the most used cryptocurrencies are actually far more traceable, then dollars or, you know, the pound or whatever, and when you speak to people in like, you know, fraud investigations, and so forth, they always say they’re happiest when they get a crypto case, because it’s so much easier to track because we’ve pounds you can put it into art or resources or offshore islands or whatever, and it just goes on, and if you want to buy drugs, you know it, okay, we’re based in different places, but if you know, a common example, if, if you and I lived close enough, and you wanted to buy drugs with me, or I wanted to buy drugs, a few whatever, sending Bitcoin would be the stupidest way to go about. Because it can be traced, you can see exactly you sent this transaction to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which currently it can be traced, because reminders to process the transaction. 

 

So, it’s still on the network and you’ve still got an address, you can see that at this time I send X amount of bitcoin from x address to you at my address and you know, and that you’ve now got these incredibly powerful software’s that just keep growing and sort of gaining in power that that can not only track that transaction, but link that back to your wallet and track that to other transactions, that mobile wallets and so forth, and they’ve got this whole load of data and it’s one of those interesting things when you know, when Silk Road when the website came about, I mean, I’ve been reading about it lately and at the time, you know, this was early on in Bitcoin people really thought that they could send bitcoin anonymously and you know, they could buy drugs in Bitcoin and, you know, most of the time, Bitcoin arrived at destination drugs arrived at a destination, you know, or was fine and they sort of thought, well, you know, Bitcoin is anonymous. 

 

So therefore, this is anonymous, and, you know, you’re not finding that the software sort of is able to see everything and go back to those times and see exactly who sent what to what. So, you know, the differences are that crypto is a lot more traceable. By definition, every transaction is stored on blockchain, there’s no button where you can just erase the fact that you sent this amount of money to me or vice versa, it can’t be done, you’ve got all of that information stored in a definite sort of timestamp manner on blockchain. So you’ve got a lot more sort of data there. But what what I suppose what the differences are, is that we’ve we’ve crypto with with Blockchain, and you don’t rely on a third party, you know, if you buy bitcoin, but then you can hold it offline, in your own sort of hard drive wallet, like sort of USB stick type things, and then you’re not really dependent on anybody, you’re not dependent on that money.

 

It’s equivalent.

 

So when I lived in one as ours in Argentia, for a while, during the economic crash, sort of back when I was a student, just doing work experience at an NGO there, and this was 2008. You know, that the economy wasn’t good in Argentina, arguably, still isn’t, you know, fantastic. But the economy wasn’t good in Argentina, and you had a whole load of people that have basically just lost their whole life savings, a whole livelihoods. You know, we’re pretty much poor overnight, and, you know, frequent protests in the streets, and people didn’t trust banks and had learned that you can’t trust you can’t trust the government, you can’t trust banks. 

 

So pretty much the first lesson I got taught there was like, Well, you know, don’t pay for a bank account, and, you know, people will literally this was before Bitcoin, got paid, got paid and pestles and Argentinian money, converted that into dollars and euros and for currencies, took that out in cash and kept the physical cash notes in a safe in the houses, and that was banking. That is, that was the safest way to do banking, you know, and if they had to send money abroad, so the sort of the crypto wallets are more like that, it’s more like keeping it seen as keeping digital gold in a hard wallet, that you control that you don’t have to rely on a bank, which may or may not shut down stop you from being able to access your money, you know, all of those things, which we’ve all seen happen. 

 

So in many ways, it’s much safer, it does rely on you then not losing that device. Or either that or keeping the passwords remembering the password. So even if you lose the device, you can access another one, and a few people have problems with that. But for many people that is a lot safer than keeping money in a bank where you know, bank, whatever is caught up in sanctions or has made a mess up their accounts or whatever it is, and then you lose all your money. That’s a scary thought. And it’s happened to a lot of people in a lot of countries.

 

Yeah, no doubt. 

 

It will happen again, I have no doubt about that.

 

Well, yeah, I mean, even with all the traditional bank accounts in Ukraine right now is the cyber attacks you know, for moments there those bank accounts of the fiat currencies within the traditional banking system registered as zero for a lot of civilians, for lack of Ukrainians that existed and hopefully there’s ways to avoid something like that with this but at the same time, there’s going to be cyber concerns and hacking concerns with crypto wallets do even going back

 

Sure, and there are some that sound like they have really good security measures in place and you know, with crypto, the user experience infrastructure is getting better. You do not have things like institutional grade storage, you do not have insurance, there are other things that make it safer. Typically, if you store your crypto offline like off off the internet sort of in cold storage that’s unhackable providing you don’t lose it the price isn’t you know that that have you meant that cryptos used and ransom payments you know, I hear that a lot and from you know, I know a few guys insurance who are like what so it’s all that Bitcoin that gets paid out.

 

That’s up to the insurance side of it, you know, if it gets locked Well, I don’t know if you ever saw the story. This was maybe two years ago of the dude who had a hard drive, you know, from 12 years ago with 40,000 Bitcoin on it and just threw it away because he’s like, Well, this is worth this is a stupid, you know, I mean, Bitcoin was like pennies at the time or whatever it was bought it. But now it’s worth something like, you know, $3 billion, and he’s trying to offer a reward at this dump for a company like up to $20 million to go and pick this thing up and find it.

 

In Wales. I think he’s offering a quarter of the potential value. He’s you You know I don’t know the guy but because it’s in the UK it’s quite you know that the story quite often comes up at ease up to either quarter or half of the reward to the council, and then there’s been so many cases like that like just so many there was a guy who he was like a cannabis dealer installed all his like private keys or passwords to his Bitcoin in a fishing rod and then he got arrested and somebody went through his flat I think the landlord went through the flat and you know, Chuck toward stuff out or got rid of all his stuff, including the fishing rod containing like, all of the Bitcoin which the whatever it was that American, FBI or CIA or whatever we’re trying to get their hands on. There’s been loads of cases like that and you know, Bitcoin has been used in these sort of rounds and payouts you know, that insurance companies have got caught up in I guess my feeling is there’s been hackers and and you know, crime since way before Bitcoin was invented and they found perfectly good ways to get money out of companies and people that and and, you know, Bitcoin or crypto is is a currency if if that were to go away, hackers would find perfectly good ways to get money out of people like that is not the risk. So yeah, amazing points.

 

Could you give everyone a quick refresher on Crypto Curry Club?

 

Right the cryptocurrency to some subjects so the crypto carry club it’s been less curry recently since lockdown sadly it’s grown into what I believe is the biggest or the main crypto community in the UK we started it in 2018 a couple years before the fall lockdown and and you know that at the time there was really limited sort of community and so forth and space I wanted to meet more people find get people together so we had a whole bunch of events networking events, always over carry to carry for for those of you who aren’t from the UK carries the national British food it’s the food that we like the most it’s the food that we eat the most commonly it’s the most widely available food in the UK. I am not entirely sure of the reasons why but I’m assuming it’s because most British food is so incredibly awful that we have to have a national culinary economy. Yeah, and curry is better than British food. 

 

So curry is the national British food cryptocaryon Sounded good so we started doing these these events and you know fought once a month or put on a curry you know people pay their own way and you know get people together and I just thought would be this you know on the side once a month to get to meet some people and grow the community and you know by the time locked down I had just spiraled into this big thing you know, having loads of events and and the main community and you know everything people from the world’s biggest companies coming along to learn about crypto or to geek out or because you know they’re secretly interested or because they’re looking at what they should be doing through to founders of these super cool startups through to you know, some students that were doing PhDs on the ecosystem or you know investors and that now just a whole mix of of amazing amazing people so that grew and you know, super fun with that one carry back since since lockdown that it was filled out in a in a day was a super fun event. We also did a cryptic character Gen making experience just getting people together and everyone will make their own product in such super fun and you know just a bit of fun to get people back together so yeah, hopefully that will now come back. What we have locked down, albeit Karina cases, are spiraling currently.

 

You’re inspiring me here. I think I need to do something like the cyber Scotch club or something like that.

 

That doesn’t sound bad. I’ve come to that cyber with making club

 

I like it. Oh my goodness. Well the last one so some rapid fire here for you real quick right with all the emergence of all the new coins right? How can people know when to invest?

 

I hate that question, and yet it is not my subject expertise. I crypto is crazy Oh in a crazy risky be crazy volatile. C highly manipulated, like there’s no order to it. There’s no you know, some people try and you know, track the charts and say well but the price of Bitcoin is going to do this or it’s expected to this and you know, every logical reason might suggest that the price of Bitcoin might do this or that or whatever, and then you know, some famous billionaire will put out a tweet and crash that entire market or send it up by 30% or send everything on a panic buy or you know, some some what might be a relatively minor world event we’re not talking Russia invaded Ukraine sighs world event, you know, some some minor things might just totally spook the market, you know. 

It’s like someone buys a dog and tweets about it. 

 

Exactly, it’s certainly right. There was a rumor that Vitalik, the founder of Aetherium, had died, and it was a rumor, it was fake news, the guy’s still alive, and you know, that question mark is out of it, there’s so many things that can affect the markets that no logical thing could predict, presumably, unless you’re friends with the people that might be buying dogs. So there’s no real way to predict that. So, you know, I wouldn’t even want to suggest anything, because there’s no logical audit to it, and, you know, in some ways Bitcoin, there’s only ever 21 million going to be produced, that there’s quite a lot of demand for bitcoins, the trend since 2008 2009 has been that it goes up, you know, albeit by lots of ups and downs, but the trend has been that it’s going up because there’s more and more demand for it, and there’s less and less in circulation, and, you know, also we’re in a society where more and more people are becoming aware of the fact that one can’t trust governments pretty much by definition, with a few exceptions. 

 

One can’t trust that sort of the traditional banking system, in a lot of cases, that, you know, just because you’ve earned money, and you put it in a bank doesn’t mean it’s safe, you know, that there might be the economy might collapse, there might be sanctions, there might be anything, you know, a bank run, or Just the way inflation is going, you know, if you save money now, it will be worthless, you know, not too far in the future. So people are becoming aware of that. And I think from you know, especially when you talk to students and you know, switched on younger people who all seem to be so much more switched on than I was as a student is that they’re really becoming more aware that they’ve got to be responsible for themselves and can’t really have trust anyone have to fend for themselves. So, you know, I think you know, that there’s again, no monologue of why people are going into Bitcoin and why I wouldn’t expect the price to actually collapse and why it seems that the trend is going up. But when to invest. Don’t ask me, I don’t know follow certain people on Twitter, I, I would stick there and as far as Oh,

 

I love that, and crypto is volatile, risky and highly manipulated, and yeah, right. That’s awesome. So everyone listening taps in the show notes for the cryptocurrency club to connect with Erica Stanford because she is just a badass. I will say that to close it out. Erica, thank you for coming on. Again. This has been so much fun.

 

No, thank you so much for having me, and if I can just take advantage and possibly do a quick shout out for my big crypto was say crypto was fake death, knitting billions in industry disruption. It’s out. It’s about all the biggest tax scams in crypto. I love anyone who buys it, so please do that. 

 

Yes. So cool. Thanks, Erica.

 

Thanks for having me on, Rick. 

 

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