EP29 Bitcoin podcast with Obi Nwosu the CEO of Coinfloor.

Welcome back to BitByBit. Today's episode was recorded a few weeks ago. It's with OB the CEO of Coin Floor. It's taken me a few weeks to get this one out because I had some technical difficulties. We had connection issues and I had to move all my equipment into another room closer to the Wi-Fi halfway through the

interview. So thank you, OB for bearing with me and also thank you very much for sponsoring the show. We had a long conversation before the show and afterwards kept in contact and I was really really impressed with what Coin Floor have to offer. OB has offered to sponsor the podcast and I'm very happy about

that because I have somewhere I feel comfortable sending friends, family and listeners. So for anyone who is looking for an exchange to onboard, have a listen to this show and I think you'll find out that Coin Floor are doing things properly. Firstly, thanks for coming on. Like I said to you, when we had the

conversation the other day, I had your my list to come on anyway after listening to Stefan Lavera's pod with you and I've just been today looking through your website and looking at what everything you've got on Coin Floor and it's looking really good. It's what I've been saying for a long time. We need in the space. We

need people who are more Bitcoin-focused. We need less shitcoinery. I saw a little bit down there where you had education on there as well so that's nice to see. No BS education. No BS education.

I'm also, by the way, very importantly, when we did it, it's important to just have fun. So there's a lot of little humor. There's a lot of in-jokes in there. I don't even care if people get the in-jokes as long as we get the in-jokes.

That's it. You've got to have fun. This is a fun industry. You're a change in the world, but anyway. It is. I think it's the most exciting and most fun industry work certainly that I've ever been involved in. You definitely don't have the snob factor. You don't have to really watch what you say. As long as you're

being a decent person. I mean, there are the baits and arguments. Let's be honest. Yeah. But it is definitely a much more pure industry. It's less sort of sugar-coated and so on. There's a raw element. I can just tell from looking at you, me, I've been around the block a little bit longer than you.

You're much more fresh-based and I can tell you that going back throughout my entire career, there's just nothing. There's just nothing like this. This industry is and so I doubt there'll be another industry that has this combination of so many different people, so many different viewpoints, all coming

together around this shared concept. I can't imagine that happening again for a long time. It's crazy. So what brought you in? We all sort of have, I don't know, about one aha moment, but maybe a few. What was it that brought you into this industry and what were you doing before? So high level, I think there were

multiple aha moments. So beforehand, I was a geek. So I was a CTO of a number of successful UK.com companies. So I graduated in the late 1990s and I went straight into .com one for an online auction company, Pure Ecommerce. That's definitely .com one. It went on to be one of the largest e-commerce companies in

Europe. After that I was involved in .com two. That's the social web and I was involved with a company making massively multiplayer role-playing game. So a bit like World of Warcraft or Club Penguin or Haber Hotel, we had a company with 30 million users. That's where I actually exposed the idea of digital money. It was

in a war garden, but just like Lyndon Dulles in Second Life, we had our own wheels. We world was a company we were dealing with. And these people, mainly 16-year-olds, American girls, was the biggest demographic for our site, but they would be spending hours trying to earn points by doing different

activities just so they can get a just to be t-shirt or it may be. And they have somebody to spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week to earn these virtual points, which you could only use of in this world. And at that point it became clear that the concept of money was a shared belief because this is a very very limited

money. And then in 2011, another techy friend of mine pointed me to this article about Bitcoin. I spent a number of months looking at it there. I played around with a little bit and then I decided to drop it when I saw the price plummet from almost a hundred dollars right down to the single digits. And I

forgot about it. And I was actually working on my own tech startup at the time. So I continued to, you're pretty busy when you're working on a startup. But that was my first beginning of in our home. I did think the technology was really interesting, but I thought this

is probably not going to work. Especially with the way it dropped. It's just too volatile, et cetera. Two years later, when my previous business was basically running down, my soon-to-be co-found came to me with the idea of doing something in Bitcoin again. And I looked at it. And in that time, it had

gone from 10 dollars to, it was now in the hundreds of dollars. And I thought, okay, there's something happening here. Let's do something. Let's create an exchange. But unlike many of the exchange at the time, we would be transparent. We would be reliable using our experience

for the past. And we would make sure we tried to be secure because using our experience for the past. And so we got involved. And over the next six years, the rest is history. But what I was basically aware of the economic aspect of Bitcoin, which is arguably more important or as important as the technical aspects. I mean, effectively,

the technical aspects give an excuse to believe in the economic aspects of our foundation for the economic aspects of Bitcoin. That's a sort of censorship-resistant zero inflation, ultimately zero inflation money.

And that was the ultimate armament when I realized it was actually about this sort of economic revolution. And the technology opinions just to help to enable that. That's when I realized, okay, this is something that we have to really just make a mission to happen.

Once you understand that bit, then it also makes you understand that a lot of the shitcoins that are sort of searching to find a solution for a problem that doesn't necessarily exist when actually Bitcoin is solving one of the biggest problems on the planet, probably the biggest problem on the planet. So it doesn't need to search for

that. Once that clicks, it's like, well, I mean, again, I have to thank our board for that, in that case. So when we very early on, you go through rounds of funding and we're going through putting together our, well, our second deck, because we'd already got funding

for the second deck early on. And even, even in early, this was back in 2014 or so, you have all of these different use cases potential. They weren't actually realized, but people are talking about bill of lading, identity on the blockchain and smart contracts.

This was pre-Aferium though, but just the potential of these ideas. And obviously remittance, and then finally as a store of value use case, we had all these listed, because cooling is going to change the world and it has all these use cases, because it's going to be all about Bitcoin.

And now, well, I am as much more chairman, I have to thank. We said, look, this is also interesting. I hear about this, because he was coming in every month or so to just review what we're doing.

But could you just help me understand what's the different market size of all of these different use cases? They're all massive, okay? But can you just put a number on each one? And okay, we'll go up and do that. I think it's a bit of a waste of time, but let's do it. It was not a waste of time.

We checked. Most of them were, this is like a half a billion dollar use case. This is a two billion dollar use case. This is a three billion dollar use case. This is a 10 billion dollar use case. Then you come to store a value.

That's a trillion dollar use case. And then once you saw that, it's like, why are we wasting our time with anything other than the trillion dollar use case? It's like always the time. Yeah, because it sounds big.

If you say, oh, it's a five billion dollar industry or something, but then when you actually look at store of value and you go, okay, right, in comparison, this is just, yeah. I mean, maybe in 50 years time when that market's fully mature, but 0.1% of this market will still be bigger than the

entire market or something else. What about you? When did you get that home? I just fell down the rabbit hole really hard. So it's been about two and a half years, something like that, that I've been sniffing around. And a friend of mine came to me and he said,

look, I was working as an artist at the time. I still do, but this has kind of just taken all my time since I got that moment. So he calls me up and he just says, look, you need to understand Bitcoin. I know you well enough that you will love this.

Like this is so, because I'm always the one who is, I'm quite sort of, I wouldn't say full out anarchy, but I'm not really somebody who believes in our political systems and that kind of stuff too much. And I have a few issues with the way things are set up. And I was, alongside my art, I was working in the property

business and I was saying, you know, this is, it was great when I first got in, but we're getting more and more regulation. It's getting more and more of a pain in the arse and the juice is not worth the squeeze for me, any more in property.

So anyway, I sat with him and he explained to me about tracking wine on the blockchain and the Ethereum and all this, all this stuff. And I was like, well, it sounds cool, mate. Like, I don't understand it, but it sounds cool. Can I give you some money and you just

invest it for me? And he went, no, I'm not going to do that. You need to learn, because I know you will understand this. And I was like, all right, so I chucked a bit of money in. And then absolutely did. And I thank him.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I thank him all the time for it, because most people wouldn't have done that. Anyway, so I watched all the YouTube videos, a load of idiots talking about EOS and all this sort of stuff. And it took about six months before I got on to, like, Bitcoin,

Twitter. Yeah, sorted through. I sorted through, like, okay, this guy has made 10 calls. They've all been wrong. He seems like a bit of a dick that I wouldn't trust in real life. And I finally got to, like, a little group where I had people that I trusted and that were making

sense. And they were all Bitcoin only. So then I went, just, okay, right, let's just focus on this one thing, that all the smartest people I'm speaking to all believe is the only thing that's important.

And I dug a little bit deeper. And then, yeah, so it took about probably seven months, I think it was until I was just like, right, everything else is just bullshit. And I went, just, and it's not, I mean, I don't, I mean, well, I think you've got a lot of smart people in Bitcoin,

especially in a sort of developer. But it's also much easier to make sense when what you're talking about is sensible. Yeah, if there are some logical flaws in your trying to put forward, that's when you actually, the more you try to dig into it, you more you come from contradictions.

And that's the case of basically everything other than Bitcoin. So anyway, that's what they did to your story. So that's how you go to, yeah, I think people who tell you, no, I'm not going to do this for you. I'm going to try it, because the main learning here is monetary, well, there's many,

many learnings, but one of them is monetary reeducation. We want to learn like learning the wrong way to do with money and the wrong way is thinking about money. And there's a lot of it has to be sort of unlearning that and rewinding and stop beginning it. If you don't do that, you're still, no matter

how much you're exposed to this gift horse, you're going to keep looking at it in the mouth or just, it would just be parallel universe invisible to you. Yeah, just can't say it, which is amazing.

And a lot of really smart people, just a few of my friends who very, very bright, it's taken them, it's taken them a year of me absolutely just every time I see them, I bang on to them. And I'm like, look, you're one of my best mates. I know you don't want to listen to this, but I'm doing,

I'm telling you, because you need to, it's taken them about a year. And now it's clicked and they've gone, oh, right, I get it. But it's, it's always like, so some of these guys, they'll go, oh, yeah, well, you, you didn't tell me that it's got a cap, you didn't tell me there's only 21 million,

I didn't know it was digital scarcity. I mean, yeah. You know, Thomas Edison is like, I didn't tell you a 1,000 times, I told you only 99, you're right, my bad. Yeah. But it just took that much time to click because it's so weird, isn't it? I mean, like digital scarcity is weird. If you say

to someone, digital scarcity. There are some weird bits, there are some weird bits. But overall, if you look at the existing financial system, there are other weird bits, like some groups and dudes and do that, decide on an interest rate. And then the economies of the world sort of weight

on baited, baited with baited breath to hear the announcement. And then all of a sudden, there's a poor activity. I mean, that's just, that's even saying to me, it's crazy. When you really think about it, it's mental. That is something with Bitcoin that like, once you understand it,

I think it makes you feel comfortable and secure. And you just, you know, you know, where you stand with fear, money, like you're saying, you don't know where you stand. And a few people make a decision that affects everyone. And you've got no say in it. And you don't know what's coming. So

how can you prepare? How can you plan in business? How do you, you don't know what's happening with interest rates? And you don't know what's going to happen with the economy? Then how do you make a plan? And you're constantly just playing catch up all the time. I do think that, I think that's

true, but I was just, just over there, I was looking at how I feel to my level of comfort would be going today, then compared as compared to how I felt five, six years ago. And five, six years ago, I was basically shit scared. It was, it was much more scary. There were many unknowns,

there were multiple attack vectors or ways in which Bitcoin could be destroyed or the perception of that, that it could be destroyed. And there was some sort of theoretical debate saying, this shouldn't be an issue, but you never know, or you never knew. But then what happened is,

over the following four or five years, the majority, the vast majority of those risk scenarios actually happened. So for example, back in 2014, people would say, oh, even 20, 30 people would be saying, you know, if China, all the mining is in China, if China

banned Bitcoin, Bitcoin's dead. China's banned it a couple of times, they were this, and Bitcoin's been fine. Or if miners tried to collude to take over Bitcoin, it's dead. Well, that happened, and Bitcoin's surviving got stronger. And another example was if Bitcoin forked,

that's it. It's game over. It has Bitcoin cash, Bitcoin estate, Bitcoin gold, Bitcoin diamond, Bitcoin super, it survived. And each time it survived, it didn't just survive, it got stronger, because a risk that many people put forward as a concern actually materialized, and it was fine.

So I'm actually now have the view, what are the remaining concern areas? I'm just looking forward to actually happening. And for us, realizing that Bitcoin gets further, that's the only thing that stops it from that slight and even concern, not in my mind, because of mine from reaching its ultimate.

It's interesting. But and that's where the level of passion and belief is so much higher now, because of all those things that have happened. What do you see now, if anything, that concerns you in Bitcoin? Or so, yeah, because I mean, if we're dealing with other cryptocurrencies,

there are a multitude of concerns. But for Bitcoin itself, if you think, I think it's first of all, why objectively do we list Bitcoin? Because to be clear, my view is that Bitcoin is amazing, and it has a lot of potential, but it's only just good enough to offer to, especially to

pure retail as a cryptocurrency, and as a new form of money. And that's after being a decade old, and having a huge amount of development, and a lot of the bigger risks that appeared in the past, like the risk of a fork and what that would do, or risk of China banning it, or whatever it may be,

have materialized. And we know it can, it's been able to handle those and get stronger. It's basically being a nasty, entirely good, say, anti-fragile. And by looking at it, you can think there's four properties that you want to see from any cryptocurrency worth its thought.

One is that it should be value-based. And what I mean by that is, it seems like an obvious thing, but the cryptocurrency should actually try to be being a money. If it's saying that its value doesn't matter, then why the hell am I investing in it? If the only say that you shouldn't worry

about its value, and you'll be surprised. There's a number of cryptocurrencies that have said that, most notably Ethereum, for a long time of saying that the value of Ethereum shouldn't really matter, in which case, you shouldn't be on any range. And that only changed, there became this movement

that Ethereum is money movement when they realized that that wasn't a good idea. The next thing is that it should be technically mature. So I have a certain amount of technical maturity. And that's sort of always to explain. The third should be that there's a strong community

around it. There's a lot of people who believe in it, who are developing it, who are owning it, it's huddling it, and so on and so forth. And finally, there should be, because it has to operate in a world where regulation is there, there should be regulatory clarity. The negative

cases in general have said, you know, what this one, for whatever reason, it is what it is and we're comfortable with it. Now, when you take those four criteria, the kind of long story short, only Bitcoin fits those four criteria. Most regulators around the world basically say,

there's other stuff that might be securities, but Bitcoin, Bitcoin is what it is. Some of them have the same view around Ethereum, and some of the same view around a few others like Litecoin. But generally, that's quite a strong one. In terms of value-based, there are a lot of current cryptocurrencies

that believe it's value-based. But the real sticking point is technical maturity. If you take what's perceived as the second most popular cryptocurrency, which is a distant second, which is Ethereum, the actual core developers of Ethereum publicly came out the middle of last year, saying that

Ethereum 1 isn't good enough, and we're going to create a completely new cryptocurrency called Ethereum 2, completely new blockchain, every aspect of difference. The only thing that has in kind is that it's got Ethereum in the name, and that's literally it. And when the actual

founder of crypto over Ethereum and their core developers say that Ethereum is not good enough, I cannot objectively disagree with them. They're just telling me that it's not technically mature enough. And at that point, we knew we had to delist, and we don't think there's any argument

for anyone in there reasonably to list it after that point. And maybe in five years when Ethereum twos out, and it manages to succeed in performing the technical equivalent of landing on the moon while cooking a souffle and levitating. If it manages to do all of that, and I think,

you know, I don't think it's going to manage to do all that. But if it does, we'll consider listening. If only just a congratulations for a manager to achieve the impossible. But what are the things that then remain for Bitcoin? I mean, one concern is that it could be banned by governments,

like a major Western government. I think that's probably the biggest risk for Bitcoin, and that risk is relatively small right now, because almost every major Western government is regulating, or has regulated it. But if it continues to be more and more powerful in 10 years time,

it could be that they might change their mind. There's always, if somebody decides to put in a law, they can change the law. Again, I said that there is a risk. But I think what would be interesting to see happen is that people attempt that one major Western jurisdiction attempts it. And then

the large holders of the cryptocurrency who are in that jurisdiction respond either by leaving the country or by lobbying the government or whatever it may be. And we need to see that happen. Because then if it turns out to be a cautionary tale, and people see that if you try to do this, it doesn't

end up well for you as a governing body. We now know that that test has been passed. The other remaining tests, as there could be some sort of severe technical bug in Bitcoin, because it is software, there have been actually minor bugs that have been corrected. But you haven't really had

a very severe one that hasn't been corrected early on. Again, I feel at the risk of that is very, very low at this stage. But if it does happen, we've seen this is where the other altcoins and some of them might be considered shitcoins actually serve a very useful purpose.

They allow us to sort of see what would happen if types of questions could be answered. So we've seen Ethereum, which is the second largest, have a number of major issues. And it hasn't really affected Ethereum. If Bitcoin has one major issue in its long track record of not having any

significant major issues that haven't been resolved quickly, then I think it's reasonable to assume based on seeing what's happened and played out for Ethereum that it would just be corrected and people would just move on. And if I list probably the third and last major one in my mind would be

that a large number of miners or some state actor or conglomerate of miners form together and try to perform a 51% attack, more likely state actor, just from an economic point, economic incentive point of view. Again, I feel at risk of that is very low. And also this has been a concern from day

one, at least from day one from my time in the space. And there's been so much game theoretic discussion around how to handle it that if it did happen, there'll be multiple contingency plans put in place and they'll be dealt with very, very quickly. But that being the case, until these

things actually happen and we see that Bitcoin just blast through them and moves on, it's always going to be a niggling argument in some contrarians mind. Yeah, I definitely agree with what you're saying in terms of the mining is something I've discussed with people a lot, actually, is that

it would have to, in my mind anyway, would have to be nation state. Because the incentive structure is set up in such a way that if you've invested all of that money into your equipment and all that time and you believe in Bitcoin, which you would have to do to set that up,

then why would you attack the one thing that earns you money? It just doesn't make sense. So it'd have to be nation state. And if it is nation state, the amount of money they would have to throw at this, I mean, they could just print it anyway. I suppose matter. It's not their money,

so that's why it has to be nation state. It has to be something where you're not using your own money. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I kind of think that I think it's almost in my mind at that stage now where no, it's not mainstream, but I'm pretty sure that there's enough savvy, wealthy, powerful

people who keep quiet about what they hold and they have a lot of influence. And I think for that reason, it's less likely as well, because it's not in their interest to see this thing go away.

Certainly now, maybe in the future, if it really takes hold, they might get a little bit scared. But I'm sure we've got people with some power in power who hold and keep quiet. And puts it to me a number of times. I have to admit, I have a slight problem with that argument,

because it's sort of an argument of there will be powerful people who protect us type arguments. And that doesn't protect themselves. We have to be your own bank self-sovereign and so on, if I have to rely on these other powerful people to protect us. And that's why I prefer the approach,

which is if 95% of people on the planet decide to take Bitcoin one way, it doesn't matter, because Bitcoin to me is the one that I share with the 5%. And if I have that mindset, then it does, it literally, anybody can go off and do whatever they wanted. I still have my Bitcoin.

And obviously, you want enough people to still have the same mindset as you to accept your currency. But as long as you have enough, a critical mass of people who want to accept your version of it, that hasn't been subsumed by some state actor, then that's all you need. You don't need everybody

in the world accepting it. And the argument is that Bitcoin's not money, because I can't just go into a shop and buy whatever I want. By that argument, then, if I'm from a small island and they have their own currency, that's not money, because I can't go with that money to America

and buy something. And therefore, if I can't buy in America, therefore it's not money. It's ridiculous on its face type argument. It's one of the first ones people come up with. It's that, and you can't buy a coffee with it and all these sort of things. And it's crazy. It's probably a coffee round

where you live, but you can buy a coffee somewhere else. And that's the point. Yeah, it's interesting. What's your thoughts on privacy? Do you see that as an issue? Or are you sort of fairly comfortable the way things are going? Or maybe you can't say? Because I run an

exchange and we have to... This is a really interesting one. And so, we run an exchange and we're a fiat, it's a crypto exchange. And therefore, part of us, our side, is fiat. And as such, we have to do KYCML. So, if you're using exchange, you won't have privacy from the exchange. And

exchange is regulated. Now, in the West, it's regulated. So, therefore, there will be some right for the government to, if necessary, request information from the exchange. And that is just the way it is. That being case, I also understand that if you look at the properties of Bitcoin,

you want to make it, over time, you want to make it the best form of money that exists. And what makes something a good for social money? I was actually having this discussion earlier today. Ultimately, money is just a shared illusion, a shared... Well, it's not a illusion,

but a shared belief. And there are two types of people in the world. There are people who are will trust based on an emotional sense of what the community believes is the money, when it comes to money that is. And as people who want to understand from first principles,

they'll try to come up with a theory of why do I logically think this is the correct money? Actually, this is one of the scenarios where the people who want to come up with a logical scenario reason, like myself, or in my opinion, wrong, is actually the people who just trust

actually have understood the fundamentals of money, which is if most people that are important to me or interact with believe it's money, then it's money. Even if it's actually a very bad money from a technical point of view, a bad money from a technical point of view

that everybody believes is a better money than a good money from a technical point of view that no one believes in the short term. So the belief part of it is very important. However, the people who want the technical arguments are a significant part of the community. Let's say

40, 50%. So 40% look at it from first principles that have come up in their own logical way to determine that it's money, then the other side who don't really care, they just want to know what the majority believe is money will agree with them. So when you look at that and the

properties that you want from money, one of the ones that Bitcoin is not as strong as we would like it to be is fungibility, i.e. one Bitcoin is the same as another Bitcoin. And privacy and fungibility are highly related concepts because you can't have privacy over coin if it's not

fungible. But I feel that that's the thing that I like to focus on, the need for fungibility, which means that, and if you look at the developments that are happening in the Bitcoin space, a massive percentage of you related to fungibility and making that better and better and better.

At some point, that's going to come to a head where you're going to get to a level of fungibility where it starts to affect the ability for different organizations to perform their regulatory functions. That might be in 50 years. I'm hoping it's slightly longer than the point

where we exit on our cryptocurrency exchange. But that is a desire in the community to make the best money. But the desire is not necessarily about privacy directly. A lot of it is just technically I want to make the best money possible. And the best money possible will be a private

money. It's just a product of it making the best. So I do think at some point in the future, that's going to come to a head where state actors and purists who have focused on making the best money, which is a very, very good aim to focus on, will come into conflict around that concept.

But that's my view. It's a competent new ones for you. What's yours? It's just privacy 100%. I would very much like it to be private. But I understand why it's not currently. And obviously having that verifiable supply is more important in, I believe it's more important than having

perfectly private money right now. We have to be able to verify supply, otherwise it kind of doesn't one of the major things. You don't have that well so useful, but it's nowhere near as good as it is currently. So in an ideal world, I'd like to maybe see these privacy solutions be on

second layers or things like Samurai World Pool or Join Market. And these kind of things are quite interesting to me. But they are too complex for most people at the moment. I couldn't just say to a friend, here we are. Here's Bitcoin by this. And you want to use it privately and you don't

want to be tracked. Okay, well, you've got to download this. You've got to build this on a Raspberry Pi. It's just too much for them. So once it gets to a stage where it can just be simple wallet and it just does it all in the background, then great. I just think it's a while away. I think it's going

to be a few years personally. Yeah. I mean, it just be interesting to see, I mean, especially for the store of value use case, fixed supply, first of all, you said a really interesting thing.

The jury is out on, can you maintain the level of confidence we have in the fact that there is no unintended inflation of the currency and the supply issuance rules are being kept to religiously, which is key to fixed supply, which is something that only Bitcoin does in it,

and it takes this as of all assets. There's no other asset, which is also some sort of commoditized type of money could be used as a money, which is a mathematically fixed supply. So is there a way of keeping that and also having perfect privacy? Is it even possible? And yeah, the jury is definitely

out on that. But then the second point, which is valid. I think it comes to the question of if we believe that store of value is the most powerful use case, at what point would you spend your Bitcoin on a cup of coffee? I would personally never, when I say never, I mean, maybe when I'm in a wheelchair

or got a walking stick, that sort of age, then, yeah, then maybe I will. But certainly for now, because I see so much upside, why wouldn't I spend fiat, which I know is devaluing? And it's pretty good. I mean, I think there's a fundamental thing where people look about the technical aspects of

making bitcoins better for spending, et cetera. But what we don't understand is, oh, I'm sure people do understand that's wrong to say. But what people sometimes overlook is that just like my revelation that the economic aspects of Bitcoin are far more important than the technical. The economic aspects

of what makes a really good medium of exchange are far more important than the technical. So, if I have two monies, and one is inflationary, and the other one is disinflationary, and eventually will be fixed apply, which one am I going to spend first? I'm going to spend the one that's going

down in value first. So the fact that fiat currency is almost by design inflationary will mean that it will always be a better medium of exchange than Bitcoin, because I'm not going to have to spend all my fear before I'm going to be crazy enough to spend my Bitcoin. And the only

time I will start playing my experience with Bitcoin is when I've run out of fear. But fear is printed out of the nest. So you never run out of fear. So you literally only spend your Bitcoin when you have no option. And so that's only going to happen. Why would you ever have no option?

Either because you've literally you've spent all of your and you have this large lump sum requirement to spend and you could you have to dip into your Bitcoin. So you will do it then. Or because you have no other option, you have no fears. Or the merchant insists on taking money

only in Bitcoin. But then they have to be providing a product that is in so compelling that you need so much that you have that you're willing to sell your Bitcoin to get it. And so that tends to be things like potentially addictive. For example, which no one else will sell, you have no choice.

And then you will spend your Bitcoin to buy it. If you're buying it with Bitcoin in any of a circumstances and you haven't yet fully understood the real value proposition of Bitcoin yet, because once you do, then you wouldn't be doing it. And so that scenario where Bitcoin is being

spent is the endgame scenario. That's like your Avengers endgame Bitcoin endgame. And that's when everybody understands that it is a true truly powerful store of value, better than anything else.

And then all of a sudden it's probably going to happen very quickly. People would just say, "Sorry, I'm not accepting anything other than Bitcoin." But it has to be a number of people. Because if you find 50 people and 20 will say they only accept Bitcoin and 30 won't,

you're still going to use, you're going to still use the 30 who won't. So you'll have to have this wholesale realization, no one watching anything other than Bitcoin. And at that point also, if that ever happens, you come back to the concerns around governments trying to start into band

going that stage. Because they'll be uncomfortable with no one willing to accept their currency. Is that how you sort of see things playing out? Do you believe in this sort of gradually then suddenly idea of that things are just going to, we're not going to see a lot of adoption,

and then it will suddenly- We're not not in these cases, yeah. I mean, for like normal buying cups of coffee. I mean, if it's something that you cannot buy any other way, you can do that right now. But if it's something that you can buy another way, then I don't really see the sense of buying

something and immediately buying Bitcoin. Because one, you didn't have a tax implication, you'd have to do a tax return on that. Why don't you just buy it with fiat as opposed to buy Bitcoin and so on?

It's not really helping in my mind the economy because it's sort of like a false help. It's not, it's an unnecessary transaction. Real help is where your performance transaction that really is actually is made useful because of Bitcoin, because of demand. So I see for mass market adoption,

there's going to need to be a lot of work done on building up the technical infrastructure. Great work is happening on liquid, on lightning, on a state chains, so much stuff. So that needs to happen. That's several years worth of work. And then in the interim, more and more people

need to see that Bitcoin doesn't die because people just ask this question, which comes first, medium of exchange, store of value, medium exchange, store of value. And it's like the cruising the name, guys, store of value tells you which one of the two is more valuable, you know?

Yes. In the way value is more valuable than holding on to value. Yeah, I really don't understand why it's a really big argument. So the store of value concept around Bitcoin will become more and more understood by more and more people. And at some point, people will realize that our

property compared to Bitcoin, no, equities compared to Bitcoin, no, fear compared to Bitcoin, no, then everything else is not really a question about, you know, fine wines or wine or fine arts, et cetera. That's not even a discussion. And at that point, when that realization becomes wholesale,

you're going to start seeing people saying they may not say, I insist on Bitcoin, but they'll say, if you buy with Bitcoin, the price is 5%, less, 10% less. They'll just push it as far as they can go because they would want it and they'd want it to get it in the easiest way possible.

And that's how they would do it. At that point, people start seeing that more switch work, of course, but you're going to have this sort of flood of transition. And then you will only use fear for paying your taxes, you know, at that stage because of the and which and I think I think taxes

will almost all other than small, small jurisdictions. I think taxes will always be in fear because the government will insist on that. But for everything else, you'll be forced to spend your Bitcoin.

At that point, by the way, the price will stabilize as well. Because if people, the flows in and out are started to equalize, you won't see at that point, the people who are currently detracting on Twitter or so on about investing in Bitcoin and so on, that's when they come in. When there's no more

upside, you know, when it's no longer volatile, they will stop preventing their friends from coming in as well when there's when they've basically forced them to not take part in this revolution and get any of the benefit. Yeah, a lot of people with that volatility argument, it's like, well,

I don't see the problem with volatility to the upside. I just I don't see where their argument is there. I mean, I guess it's if you're looking at it over a month or two months, or you know, if you're looking at over five years or four years or even three years, it's pretty much it's always

the direction you want it to go. So yeah, I mean, there is at the end of the day, it's an investment thesis is speculation. It could be wrong. It could go to zero. You buy a house, it could go to zero.

And anything where you're making a call that you feel that this is going to hold its value or not lose too much value or increasing value, you're speculating. So someone just the other day was suggesting to me, they're giving all these problems with Bitcoin and why shouldn't be

used as a hedge. And I said, they were even 10 pounds, even as little as 10 pounds. No, you shouldn't put only in it. And it's not it's not it's not in people's interest to do that. I go, well, at what point would you be willing to to suggest to use Bitcoin? And they were saying,

well, when it's a fact, when it's an absolute fact is when I would be doing it. I go, so what basically thing is, when it's actually, when it's actually absolutely no risk and it's actually, it's in the past, would be when you invest, which we would mean what you're saying is,

people should, by extension, shouldn't ever invest in anything. And they should never invest in a house, they should never invest in, they should only buy liabilities, never buy anything.

But you're, by argument, and you think that that's better advice to give to someone to just always, or never speculate to any group, even to 10 pounds. I think that's pretty, pretty bad advice.

Yeah, that's, that's interesting advice for sure. It's not interesting by definition. No interest on that advice. Coming up to now, we're coming up to the hardening. We have got a pretty crazy world out there and the backdrop is mad. Are you seeing an uptick with people with interest? Are you seeing a lot

of change with your exchange? What's happening? Because obviously, you're seeing things from a very different perspective to, to what my listeners and I would say. Do you have any insight there of, you know, I mean, I think we have a lot of insight, but I think the insight that we're having,

is relatively aligned with the insight that you're seeing now. And that's when I know that we're heading into a new bull run. When you're in a more of a bearish market, behind the scenes, there are a lot of people sort of shuffling for position. There's still a lot of

capital entering the market. There's still a lot of very, very interesting development happening. But the mass market sees us because they're the view of the mass market and the view of people who are inside are somewhere between diametrically opposed or at least divergent. When you know you're

heading back into a bull run is when your view and the general market's view are highly aligned. And right now, it's, and that's what I look for, the level of alignment. And when it's got to a view where I'm like, I'm like, we're the most conservative people in the room. That's when you know that

you're about to head into the next bear run. And it's about to fail. So that's when everybody, that's when last time we had like, you had like the Long Island iced tea company renamed to the Long Island and blockchain company. It went too far. And it was like, okay, we're sort of, so the

hodlers, and I would suggest even it doesn't really matter how long you've been in the space, it's a mindset. So I definitely think mindset why it's you in the hodler category. But there's by definition, it's about being consistent, you know, not getting

too excited when it goes up, but also not losing belief when it goes down. It's about consistency. And so right now, what we're seeing is the general market is aligning and they're roughly, they're coming into line with the view of the hodler mindset, which is to buy and buy regularly if you can,

etc. And at some point in the future, I'm guessing each iteration will take longer and longer with the first halving. The halving is almost like the firing gun for the beginning of the race. But just like the beginning of the race, you build up speed and it's not until you're way down after

you've started that you have full speed. So you probably won't see that much happening right now. And a few people even trip up and then get up and carry around and cherish the fire like.

But the first halving, I think we from the point of the halving to the peak of market was like about a year. It was the second time from the halving to the peak of market was 18 months. And I don't know whether it's 18 months, 24 months, 36 months, but it does make sense that

each time round, it requires far more capital to come into the space for it to reach its peak price. And as a result, and that just takes time, it just physically takes time to move that much money for people to this time round, people are eyeing trillion dollar market cap numbers or more. And

that's just a lot of money to sort of enter the space. Obviously, you don't need all of that into the space for it to go up to a trillion dollars in market cap. Notional market, but still, you need a significant amount more money than was needed than the last bull run for us to reach

the projected and anticipated highest. Lucky we've got a lot sloshing around then, isn't it? Lucky we've got enough printers burrowing away.

And we're seeing that and it's not just Bitcoin. Even with all of the sort of devastation in terms of companies of coronavirus and the pandemic, you're seeing these record growth levels in the stock market. I mean, it's just, as you say, there's a prediction at the property market.

Again, we're remote working and people's need for living close to work and so on, fundamentally changing, there's still predictions of these massive growths in in real estate price. Why? Because there's going to be a lot of people who are going to have a

lot of capital and they need somewhere to put it. This time round though, those choices that are people invested in, even though they were bad choice, they didn't really make sense. They now have a choice that does make sense in the form of Bitcoin. So, this is going to be an interesting 24 months. Super is going to be super interesting.

Yeah. And I noticed you had on your website, so you're doing weekly buys and dollar cost averaging. Now, that is something that so for me personally, you'd like, I'm known in my circles as like the annoying Bitcoin guy, but when people get interested, they will contact me. And the advice I'll always give is buy a little bit every week.

I hate them much as you're willing to lose because I actually see this as like, I'm very, very confident on it. But I always say, just buy a little bit every week and just learn, listen to a couple of podcasts, dig in, I send them a few articles, but don't just pile your

money in because if you do that and then it dips 30%, then you're going to get scared, you're going to jump out and then it's all going to be over for you. So, I really like that dollar cost averaging. Have you seen a lot of people taking it or what's there? In a word,

absolutely. But it's the same four processes that we went through. It's like, we think there's a lot of BS in the space. There's a lot of amazing companies just to be, there is a lot of BS in the space. And we, that's one of the reasons why we decided to enter the

retail exchange market. And the fourth process is this, we've gone for a journey, we've looked at other cryptocurrencies, we've made mistakes as a lot of people in the space. And what we wished was that at the time, we're that Bitcoin guy, Mr. Bitcoin in the community

or a group of friends, and most of the time people are ignoring you, sort of pretending they're not around. At some point, the market turns. And people then say, you know what, I want to learn about Bitcoin. And there's two types of people, again, in this respect. There's some people who

would just sort of see an advert and just give it a go blindly. But there's a large number of people who say, well, let me just do a little bit of research first. And who am I going to go?

Well, I'll start with people around me who I trust as friends, who have my best interests at heart, and who have been going on about this for a long time. Now, hopefully, they meet someone who's who's a Bitcoiner, and it hasn't sort of sort of on this sort of evolutionary

rut end up in an evolutionary rut, and got confused and they say, no, it's all about DLT or whatever it may be. Yeah. And they're a Bitcoiner. And so if they meet that person, that person will convince them about all these other use cases, by the way, again, I don't want

to cast asperges about these other use cases if that's what you're interested in fine. But in terms of if you're thinking about it as an investment, then it really is Bitcoin. And so you then explain that you explain why it's such a powerful concept. And however you want to explain

it, whatever makes you comfortable, the technology, the issuance, fixed supply. And then they say, okay, I've got it. To some degree, I mean, they're never going to be an expert after one conversation or two, but they now want to invest. And where do you point them to? Because every

place you point them to what will happen is you're pointing them to sunset. I'm not going to say the names of competing sites. I am going to say Coinbase. I will not send anyone there, or any of these other shitcoin factories, I will say it. And that's why I really wanted you on here,

because I want somewhere to point people to that doesn't confuse them and make them buy a load of nonsense that's going to go to zero so that the founders can make a load of money. I think it's wrong. So you didn't say that I did. So then I will move swiftly on. But I think that was the

frustration for me in terms of the problem we're trying to solve. It seems like an obvious thing, but I am trying to serve our customers. And that means that I want to try and align my interest with the customer's interests. And if someone's coming in new, their interest is to find a way of getting

as safely as possible, considering the whole area is a high risk area by definition, because it's in such a new technology, as safe as possible, having an in. They're coming in as a baby. I don't want to give them this rocket ship day one. You need to give them this little tomy toy truck to

be played with. And something that's reliable, sturdy, can be thrown off a building, and they'll still keep playing. And it's well understood. And what I don't want to have a scenario, and I've seen it many times before, is you'd recommend something. When we didn't, when we're really

courting retail customers, we were dealing with, for many years, institution has sophisticated, we're pointing them towards other sites, and then explain Bitcoin, and then they go away, and they'll come back. And, and, and timing again, I'll talk to a friend, because thanks very much. I went to

that site, great. And did, and what, and did you get your Bitcoin? No, no, no, I didn't get a Bitcoin. I got Whibblecoin or Whibblecoin, because there's only XP or so on. And it was being highlighted. There was a special, maybe I could earn money for learning about it or whatever. And

I was like, Oh my God, no, go away, buy the Bitcoin again. But it doesn't matter, because the sites often present, present Bitcoin in the same breakfast they'll be presenting something else, with 100 of the market cap, with 1000 of the community before, with one million for the technical,

technical, the maturity. But as a newbie coming in, there's no way you could know that what you've got here is SpaceX's, you know, BFR, a rocket, and next to it is a paper plane. And you've got, no, but it literally is sometimes laughable how incomparable these things that are being

compared each other are. And so, and so for someone coming in new, they buy the wrong thing. That generates more trading revenue for the customer, because these other things are far more volatile.

So they end up buying, selling, buying, selling, they're incentivized to trade as well. Again, after this, I didn't come from the financial services space. I came from the technology space.

So I'm not a trader, which I think makes me very good as an exchange operator, because I'm not equipped to think about trading and so on. I'm just equipped to think about building technical systems are reliable and stable. And you probably don't want as a trader to have

the owner of the exchange being another trader. It's probably not good. You want them to have no interest in trading, you know, because all you want to do is provide a service. But as someone who's been running this exchange lab for six years, you observe a few things for these people have

been trading for many years and multiple times. And often they've come from the city or Wall Street or wherever, and they trade. And many of them do well, but a number, a significant number, don't do well so well, or only do marginally well. And these are people who are at the top of their

game. So if that's the results of people at the top of their game, who with lots of skill and effort have learned to make a small pennies on the pound type profit consistently, how in the hell are you going to expect somebody's coming in new to be good at trading and make a profit from it? It's an

unreasonable expectation that everyone thinks they are easy to do at all. Or it's just it's just disingenuous. So what you need to do is like one, here comes one, only off a Bitcoin. You don't want to confuse people with other options. You need an exchange of only off as Bitcoin. Two, only off

as dollar cost averaging, because that is something that we know. One of the biggest concerns is volatility. Dollar cost averaging effectively allows you to reduce the volatility by yourself without having to rely on anybody else. It's again, it's self-sovereign, it's getting into the mindset

of, let me fix my own problems. Let me just not give it to someone else to fix it for me, who's trying to guarantee a return, because you cannot guarantee a return in the market, expected assets.

I will take my own action. The only risk that if I use dollar cost averaging, I reduce my short-term risk. I only now have the long-term risk. And the way I deal with that is I have to take a view, it's a speculative product, like any other, if I buy a house, I'm taking a view in this long-term

value. And the way I deal with that is education. So we have free things. Education, nobody at B.S. education, but we're not saying we know everything. We give you a high level, put it in simple terms, but it points to multiple different sources of research, because decentralize all the things,

decentralize money, decentralize education, don't look for one oracle of Omaha type person, or the sage of Omaha. You should try and find multiple sources and form your own view. And all of those things together on one site is what we wanted to exist. It didn't exist,

so we made it. We were forced to make it. And now that we've made it, we're going to make damn sure we push it again and again and again, until every other exchange changes to do the same thing, or we take their customers and provide them a service that is aligned to their interests

one way or another. This is enough is enough. We have to move forward. It's time for a change. It's time for a world where people realize, exchange operators, like miners were forced to realize they serve the customer, not the other way round. Sorry, this gets me going.

I'm glad it does, because it pisses me off as well. And I've seen a lot of friends lose a lot of money because of exactly what you're talking about. And they go on there and a lot of the time, it's unit bias that gets them. They'll say, oh, well, I can get 500 of this coin for the price of

one-tenth of a Bitcoin. And I'll go, yeah, because it's shit. And it doesn't matter for the unit bias, it's unit bias. And it doesn't, it doesn't matter because you're not looking at the supply. And then, but it gets them every time. It's like, oh, there's only a couple of pennies. So if that goes up,

if that goes up to two pounds or three pounds, then I'm going to be a trillionaire. And you're like, oh, you do an idea, like just going by Bitcoin. But I did it when I got involved. So they're not an idiot. It's just, I went on there. I bought a load of crap. You were a creator as well.

I was an idiot, by the way. We all were. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, and also, by the way, you can be a award-winning maxiofacial plastic surgeon and also make bad economic decisions. Of course.

And you can be incredible economic genius, but not nice type of shoelaces. So yeah, it is the ingenious or whatever you want to call it, have domains and dimensions. And at any given time, I am an idiot at multiple things, like cooking. I'm probably like, gradually, you need to call

someone and give me help because I'm really bad. And there's certain other things that I probably want to admit of, just to admit from embarrassment, I'm really, really bad at. So it's just a nature.

I think it's exposure and time. But in terms of unit bias, we also have to expect that's the way the world is. Actually, it's a funny thing. On our site, one of the Easter eggs is on the home page.

It says the mountain BTC and underneath it, it says Sats. It's a little thing. Little thing is a Sats because I would have liked to lead on Sats, but the reality is most people still see BTC.

But then there's a unit bias thing. So I showed in the Sats number, but the Sats has got a little subtle underlining. And when you click, it actually has a little thing that pops up that I don't really care if some people see it. It's just a little Easter egg, but it goes up and explains

that a Sats or Satoshi is the smallest. And this is a point, the original unit of Bitcoin. And the reason I wanted to say that was actually in the code is numbers are in Sats. And what I was trying to say was, okay, Sats are actually, I'm trying to give them call. So people think,

you know, this was the original. You should say Sats is actually it's all about the founder when you're talking about Sats, you know, and so I'm finding a different way of, probably I was excited, but a different way of getting people to think about that. And that's why

people talk about stacking Sats is to get people, because then from a unit bias point of view, you'll beat everything else, basically, because now I've got 3000 Sats, great. Yeah, and it's not quite at that stage yet where you can, you couldn't just put it in Sats,

because like you say, people would go on, they'll be like, Oh, well, I was here to buy Bitcoin, because no one knows it yet. But I like that that you've done that because it just introduces them slowly to these things. And there's a lot of things that they're just slowly introducing

these concepts. But, and it's not just us. I mean, so there are so many other companies. There's swan Bitcoin, there's Vinbar, there's other people now, you're seeing this movement, river financial. Until recently, unfortunately, there was bitter in Europe. But people who are,

more and more people are going Bitcoin only, who are focusing as well on simple ways for people to earn, or buy or invest in Bitcoin. And it's an incredible superpower, because if we once really started to go Bitcoin on it, in fact, when we announced that in December that we're going Bitcoin

only, and we did listen to fear, and we had it for less than a year, but we did listen to it. It was one of the most retweeted stories on Coinbase for the year, more retweeted than the Libra story at the time, you know, and all of these other Facebook, all these other stories,

which showed that we struck a nerve. But, you know, we, when we did this, and we're in this announcement, just everything else clicked into place, because we can have an offering now that is fundamentally simpler, because you just come in and the same, the swans offering or all these

other offerings, they're incredibly simple. You come in, you sign up, you buy, you're done. As it was always intended to be, as opposed to, then I need to figure out, am I going to trade, am I going to try and get interest, am I going to try and do all these other things,

it gets more and more complicated. And down the line, you can do that. But the first experience should be simple, because this is fundamentally a simple concept. I actually haven't been on your exchange to buy. So, if I'm coming on, I'm a new user,

I come on and I say, look, I want to buy a small amount every week. Well, I send a friend to you, for example, I say, right, don't go to the ones I've mentioned, I want you to just buy a little bit every week. How does that look for them, that they come on, they obviously have to do KYC,

and all the rest of it, then then... Yeah, so there's two parts to experience. One, first of all, you would probably give them a link, and you're probably, because you would set up your own account first. You don't have to, but you would set up an account because it's very, very easy to set up,

and you'd immediately get an affiliate link. And the reason why is because we believe in various in numerous, and we call it our various in numerous affiliate schemes, strength in numbers.

So, for a period of time, they affiliate, unlike, we believe it's one of... They feel it gets more of a percentage than we do. They get 51%, i.e. in a 51% attack. They get 51% for three months, and then after it reduces down for three years to 21%, because 21 million are baby,

quick. So, for 39 months, over three years, you're getting a share. The reason why we do that is because we believe in low time preference, and we think that education is an important aspect of this, and it doesn't take a week to educate someone. It takes months as you've found. So, we want them

to be incentivized across the whole journey to continually educate them, people, and help them through that process. So, they'll click your link, and they'll sign up. But the sign up process is really easy. You come along, you put your email and password, and then once that's confirmed,

you put your name, address, date of birth, and nationality. And that's it. In fact, initially, you don't have to put in your proof of ID to start using the system. And that's different to most other systems. And the reason why we've done that is, again, as a new user, a lot of people

are uncomfortable with giving their proof of ID over, not because they're focused on privacy or so on, but it's more that they don't like the idea of that organization being hacked, and they having their proof of ID with them, etc. For a period of time, you're able to use a system just

with the stuff that you can remember off the top of your head. So, you can be walking down the street, and you put your email, okay, I think I can remember my email. My name, yeah, I know my name off of my head. My address, I only need to put the postcode in and click a button, and you'll find

the address you press. And then, date of birth, it's like three fields, and done. And you'll sign up quicker than any other system, because no matter how much people try to show you on videos, how easy it is to scan your proof of ID or so on, we will know we have to find a table,

to find your proof of ID, then get the right lighting and doesn't burn. It's not easy to do it, even if they try and make it, it's just not easy to do. So, that's something that once you've actually been using it for a while, and you're like, okay, then maybe I'll now upgrade to another

level where I have higher limits or so on, and then I add that. So, that's the key. It's super easy to set up. And once you set up, the first page you go to is the Autobi page, because for retail, we only offer Autobi. There is no offering for like trading or so on, you have to upgrade the

next level to access that. Again, so we just simplify it. So, you come to the site, there's only one button Autobi. The trade button, if you click on it, it just goes to the My Accounts page, and says, you know, you'll have to upgrade to that feature. Other than that, it's the Autobi feature.

And you do your balance, you see there's a few like three or four lines of simple, important information you need to tell you. And once you're clear on that, you click a button, and you see your deposit details and reference code. And then that's it. You take that, you go

into your banking app, and you set up a standing order using those details. Okay. And once you set up clean monthly daily, well, you can do it. It's a standing order. You can set up any frequency you want from your banking app. So, you go into your banking app that you already

have, you already used to, you already trust that already has all your details. And you just use those details, you set them up. You set them up to the frequency that you control. You're not going, you're not, again, this was a conscious choice, because the alternative is you go to us,

and then you give us the rights to enter your account and take the money from your account. Again, this is wrong headed thinking, because it's like people, say, trust us that we're auditing, great that you're self auditing. But give me tools to verify in myself as well.

We've proof of custody and stuff. It's the same. Trust us that we're going to take the money at the schedule, you say, or just give me the details of where I send the money. And I will, for my bank, set up the schedule. Because if I want to stop it, I just need to go into the

banking app and stop it. I don't have to go to yours, we're app, and then ask you to stop the direct debit. But maybe you don't stop the direct debit. You know, it's like teach people that they should be in control of their money. They should be in control of the schedule. I put in, I do a

daily order buy. Some people do weekly, and some people do monthly. I would, you know, the more frequently you do it, the more granularity you have in terms of effect, reducing the effect of volatility and price. But all of those are possible from your banking app. And once that's set up,

so you sign up in minutes, then you set up the standing order, you're done. You can log into the site if you wish to. But from then on, every time a payment goes in, you would get an email from us saying congratulations. You've just got a slightly larger share of the 21 million total

bitcoins. This is your new amount of bitcoins you have. This is the amount you deposited. This is the amount that you bought. And this is your new balance. So in that email, you receive all the information you would get that you would get if you logged in. Now, if you log in, you can. But

fundamentally, after that three minutes experience of two minutes signing up, one minute sitting in a standing order, you never need to sign into the site again, if you don't wish to. That's interesting. Happy for people to sign in. But why do exchanges want you to constantly open

their app and possibly sign in? Because they want you to trade. You have to understand they want you to do stuff, which is not in your interest, because you do not want to sell your Bitcoin.

Every time you sell, you potentially open yourself up to a taxable event, or accounting overhead and headaches, and the risk of losing. Because what you're trying to do is trade your Bitcoin for a shitcoin, whether it's fiat or another alt or coin, with the hope that the price will change

above and beyond the spread and above and beyond the taxes you're going to pay. And then you'll buy back in. That's a very risky scenario. And most people end up on the wrong side of that bit.

But as you know, I personally, you have no tax implication until you sell. So just never sell. And it's simple. And I don't even need to log in. It's just happening automatically. If I want to do a one off buy, I can then also go into my banking app and just do a one off transfer

to the same details. And I'll still get the same mail. I know automatically auto buy. So I can still use it for automatic purchasing without downloading another app without an exit. Obviously, your account works differently in terms of you can verify which you can't with any other

exchange. So you have proof of reserves, basically, which is a massive thing. And I'd like to get into that in a minute, if we can, just to explain to anyone who's not aware what that means. Because to me, that was the one thing that really pricks my ears up. If however, they say, well, you know what,

although there's this proof of reserves, I've got an amount of Bitcoin on the exchange now that I would prefer to custody myself because I've learned enough about it and not your keys, not your coins. And you know, I want to store it myself. Is the process as simple as any other

exchange that I can just go on and send it off in a lump sum or how does that work? Yeah. So to your draw Bitcoin, you do have to upgrade to provide a proof ID. So fine. Okay. Yeah. All Bitcoin without your proof of ID, you can withdraw back into fiat. So if you want to,

you've been auto buying for a bit and you're comfortable with the process, the prices Bitcoin has gone up in your favor or whatever, and you decide to sell, you can always sell back interfere to withdraw, but you do have to add your proof of ID to upgrade. But once that's done,

then you can withdraw lump sum small amounts to your own wallet. Right now, the function is not there, but down the line, we will add an ability to set up a auto sweep. So basically, you on something, it's just that we wanted to get functionality out as

quickly as possible. But we, but the fact is we're getting lots of feedback from different people, which shows you that something's happening if people have spent the time to give us feedback.

But this was already something on our schedule. So on our list of things to do, as soon as we can, but just bandwidth is an auto sweep functionality, we didn't do it to begin with because we think that that's sort of step one, that's step, that's the step two. First,

you need to get people regularly buying and get out of the mindset of trying to trade all coins and understanding the value of Bitcoin. Once you've got that, then you want to get people into the idea of holding us account by providing, by checking proof of solvency orders. So they

learn to self don't trust verify. And that's an important thing about that we can come on later. And the third, once the amount that they're holding is an amount where it makes sense, learning to self custody. Again, many exchanges will say, don't worry about self custody,

just hold it all with us. No, the whole point of this is to be your own bank. And there's a phase, first of all, start understanding Bitcoin, then understanding the idea of self verification, then being your own, almost like your own regional bank. And that's having your own, I would say,

if you have your own hardware wallet, your own regional bank, you're still relying often on someone else to prove that your currency is not being inflated. And then at the final stage, where you're really your own central bank, that's when you have your own node. So that's the

difference. Having your own node is your own, your own central bank. Having your own hardware wallet is your own regional bank. So one is your Nat West, the other one is your bank of England.

So for that person who's running their own node, they've got my node, BTC, or one of these ones that's popular at the moment, they've got their cold card or ledger, Trezor, whatever. What I think you're hinting at is that down the line, there may be a way that, yeah, so that's right on and verified.

It was something we've already had on the list. And it's also something that many people have asked for. But it's invariably that people are more sophisticated. And we're trying to, we're trying to launch, having for several years being an organization dealing with sophisticated

and institutional, we're offering a retail offering. And so we retail the first product they had. And if you look at our product section, we have education as a product, custody as a product, and autobiography product. So before we launched Autobi, for three months, the only product I was

live was the education. And the custody is just there by virtue of us being us. So custody's been around since we launched the company, the exchange six years ago, more than six years ago. Education was the first thing we launched in January, or early February. And for a number of months,

we would just provide the education offering where people could just learn about Bitcoin, understand it, et cetera. Because that is a product as well, correct monetary reeducation, and correcting a lot of the sort of misinformation in the space. Then we have Autobi. And so that's

now out. It's only been out for, and we haven't even started promoting it, and it's only been out for just over a month now. And then we added the affiliate scheme, because we want to have, we want to win by helping other people win. Most people say, here's a fiber for getting you to join.

No, if you're helping someone, get into Bitcoin, and you're educating them, and being that person who's there to ask their questions for years to come, you should benefit from that. So that was an important thing for what we did as well. Now that those key elements are in place,

now's the next run. So we were looking at going into Europe, but with all the things that have happened recently, and all of the demand we're seeing, we're going to be looking expanding into Europe, or at least offering the euro, we'll do it step by step. So expanding further into Europe

ourselves will take a lot longer, but offering euro for dollar for dollar cost averaging would still be something that we look in the shorter term. The other thing that's there is the automated sweep, and then for a long narrow economy, we have to look at things at the lightning network. We

have to look at definitely look at things like liquid and stuff like that. All of these things will be looking at as well. There's a lot to do. But now that we've given birth to the actual retail or to buy a baby and a no BS education, we can start looking at those things. In the

background as well, UK as there's a whole, we're now in a regulated world, in the UK space, so there's constant work that needs to be done in that space. And also there's a little thing called the coronavirus. And also another little thing called the halving. And all these things take up

a lot of bandwidth right now. So it's pretty intense. We've been doing like 20 hours days, seven days a week right now. It's sneaking up that halving. It really is sneaking up. I'm watching it on my mind though, because they've added a little block at the top. And it's got the block

count. Yeah, yeah. So it's just like integrated in there. They've just added it like a week ago. And I went on there and I was like, Oh, that's cool. So it's just as every time it's ticking away.

And I'm like, Oh, it's not long now. Yeah. So it's, I think it's, it's set to be Monday night UK time now, Monday night or well, it depends on where you look, Monday night or Tuesday morning. Unfortunately, it's the variability is just on either side of midnight. So it does

really feel it does really feel like a, like New Year's Eve celebrations, because it's gonna happen around. Yeah. We need some fireworks from, from our windows of our self isolation book.

There will be some fireworks afterwards, I'd imagine. Just a different kind. So I'm interested to hear about this proof of reserves. If you can just explain anyone who's, who's been in the space for long enough, we'll probably know a little bit about it. But you are, I believe the only

exchange who's doing it at the moment. I think more are going to start. And there's even services that are coming out that will help people perform proof of reserves. But yeah, we call them Bitcoin audits because it's a bit like dollar cost averaging or sterling cost averaging. It's a complex concept

and not, and so we've just had auto buy instead of dollar cost averaging. And because it's effectively, it's an attestation or a check to verify our point in time that we are holding more Bitcoin than the amount of Bitcoin we're supposed to be holding. As I say, we are effectively

service providers. We're providing service and our customers are honoring us with using our service. And we try as best as we can to not take that for granted. And that includes offering them products which are aligned with their interests and not trying to just make as much profit from

them as possible. But another part of it is understanding that they've got to do two things, provide them mechanisms so as best as we can, allow them to self verify that we are doing what we say we did. When we started every exchange, and they still do a thing, we're really reliable,

we're really trustworthy, really secure until they get hacked. And we had to say the same thing. And the question in our mind was, what could we do to not just say it, but provide some sort of evidence of it that the person can check themselves? And I didn't think it was acceptable to get

an external auditor to be that check. And the reason why is very simple. I mean, the whole reason that Bitcoin came about was because auditors didn't do their job in checking banks in the past. So now to say, oh, yeah, by relying on auditors again, hey, use auditors. But sure,

with the Bitcoin blockchain and Bitcoin smart contracting language and its capabilities, we can't do something better. And I also get people into the mindset of verifying themselves. So the way it works is really simple. We once a month do two things. We get all of our customers

who have balances and create a report showing customer balance, customer balance, customer balance. We then obfuscate the report. We changes to it such that any given line can only be decoded by that customer. So even though the document is public, only the customer who's

the line relates to can check their line. It's very similar to the Bitcoin blockchain in the sense that the ledger is public, but only the owner of a particular address effectively or the private keys relates to that particular address can action decode and be aware of the fact that they're the

owner. Unless they've given that information to someone else, like an exchange, no one else would be aware of the fact that they own that particular address with a thousand Bitcoin in them. And this ledger effectively of people's balances, we put somewhere public outside on a machine

at a URL that anybody can see. And what we'll say is that a point in time, here are the balances that we held for all our customers. We'll mix it up with obfuscated and so on. And then we provide instructions to people, to any one of our customers, and we've spent over the last six years, we've

perfected these instructions to make them. We believe if you're reasonably technical, but you don't have to be that, it's all point and click, you can go through and verify, decode your given line, and then you will know your balance. We assume you know the amount of Bitcoin that you're supposed

to have. And you can verify the amount that we say you have in this public record is the amount that you you expected to have. So that actually takes most of the time, because that is actually where we are showing our accounts. Then the other thing we do is we bring together all the capital

that we're holding for customers, and we perform a transaction on the blockchain, where we'll send, and there's many ways of doing this. We don't have to perform a transaction, but that's how we started, and we like that process. We like the sort of history of it and to be inconsistent and so on.

So we send a transaction from ourselves to ourselves for all the Bitcoin that we're supposed to be holding on behalf of our customers. As part of that Bitcoin, you can include an extra piece of information with a transaction. And what we do is we take the file that we store online, the hash

of that file, which is basically almost simple terms as we've taken that file, and we've created a fingerprint, which is a string of numbers and letters, which we can say directly links up to this file. If you change the file in any way, the fingerprint will change. And we include that

fingerprint with this transaction from ourselves to ourselves. Now, at that point, we published this transaction, the transaction on the blockchain, and we've done our provable server. See why?

Because people will be able to see the transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain is now acting as judge and jury and keeper of that information. So what that means is at that point in time, we had that amount of Bitcoin. Also, at that point in time, we linked to this file. And when

you go and find that file and confirm that that's the file we were linking to, you can check the balances that we say we had in that file. Add them all up. And what you should expect to see is that when you add them all up, they are less than the amount that we sent to ourselves. If they are more

than the amount we sent to ourselves, then we've got some explaining to do. Because the whole point of this is to show that we are solvent, i.e., we have more than we're supposed to have. And if it's less, then we're not solvent. So that's the first part of the solvency check. It shows that

the amount we say we have is less than the amount that we actually have or equal to a less than. Then separately, as a customer of ours, you can verify your given line in that document. And you can verify that what we said for you is accurate. And then you can take

us two pieces of information. You can say, well, there's no way you're going to know which customers are going to go off and check. And in fact, the more customers you check, the harder it is for you to know that. So that's why it's important that every customer should go

out of ours and self-verify and hold us to account if we're not doing what it's supposed to be doing. So if that's the case, then you have to assume that we have to make the decision to show everybody's balance. Because it's memorializing the blockchain. Even now, if someone went back to five years ago

and tried to do a check against our records, and those banks are out, we're still, you still can call us our lives. It's forevermore we're held to account by that line. So it leads to this radical level of transparency. Now, why did we start doing this? Two words. Mount Gox is actually

an acronym for Imagine the Gathering Online Exchange, but which was its original purpose for swapping Imagine Gathering cards, but it became empty Gox, Mount Gox. Mount Gox, at the time, the largest exchange got hacked for in today's terms, a huge amount of money. And what it turned

out was apparently they could be lying, but apparently it was insolvent for several months. Now, if that was the case and they'd been doing proof of solvency every month, they would have found out the fact that it was solved to a month, directed the issue, and limited the damage.

So this happened in this whole process and drama happened in 2013. In 2014, a Bitcoin core developer, I believe, suggested a mechanism by which exchanges could basically self audit to some degree and provide their customers a tool to verify their transactions.

And this became known as proof of reserves, proof of custody. In March 2013, Kraken, Coinbase, BitStamp, BTC China, and blockchain.info, now blockchain.com issued a joint statement saying that we will issue and perform proof of custody,

proof of reserve audits every month going forward because of this thing with Mount Gox. I think Kraken did one. The others never even started and never continued. The following month, we launched our programmatic exchange in April, and we issued our first

proof of solvency order, then our second, then our third, then our fourth. And in, I think it was February or March, no, March of this year, we had our 72nd proof of solvency audit. So that was six years running. And now we're at 73rd. This month will be our 74th.

Now, we think... Very excused for it. What's the... I mean, I assume there must be some sort of semi-reasonable excuse that they come up with that doesn't really happen. Well, they don't know who it was. So first of all, it's very hard, and I welcome the

community to lobby for us to all have a nice little conversation about proof of custody. I don't think you're ever, ever going to get the CEOs of these companies to come around the roundtable and discuss it. But there are... The sort of excuses that I've heard are that

we perform audits by auditors and so on. So effectively, you just need to just trust us because these amazing auditors are doing it. That's the general... That's the probably the most reasonable excuse that I've heard. And then the other argument, the other second argument,

to be fair, is that proof of custody or proof of reserves isn't a full audit. Because yes, you're saying that you have... It proves that at this given point in time, you have this much Bitcoin. And at the same given point in time, you had these balances. The balance is fine,

I agree with that. But who's to say that that Bitcoin wasn't borrowed from someone just before and you're actually still in Sullivan? Right, okay. And there are... So there's... All you're saying is that at this particular time, you're a Sullivan, but how do I know that you are actually

on an ongoing basis in Sullivan? And that is true. That is a weakness of it. However, the response to that is that... Well, there's a couple of responses. The most important... The technical response is that if you were massively insolvent, you would have to be moving in and out

Bitcoin just before and after you perform your proof of custody audit every single time. And that will leave a trail on the blockchain. The fact that it isn't fully fungible actually works against you in that rigged garage. So it'd be very hard to play that off on an ongoing basis. And no one

to know about it, it starts becoming harder and harder to persist with that con. It's easier just to be solvent. It'd be very hard to consistently keep up the mascara rate. That's the technical argument, but the more important argument is this. No system's perfect. Also, auditors give a review

saying that you feel confident, but it doesn't guarantee that you aren't cooking the books or so on. But just because something is not perfect is no argument not to do it. And that's the important argument that you go off. Also, just because you do audits through a third party auditor is also

not an argument to provide your customers with some mechanism to self-verify. And these two arguments are correct and powerful no matter what they say. And so because of that, they avoid the discussion.

They avoid having this conversation. Because the reality is, is from a trust point of view, if you promise to do something and you don't do it, that already causes a question. Now, I would tell you in my mind why, because these are not really that these are the excuses

given, because they're the ones that diplomatically make sense to give. And they seem to make sense until you analyze them. Now, they could be, have been hacked. They could be insolvent. And I do think there are a number of exchanges out there who are insolvent. But I think the

most likely reason is this, that proof of custody, there's no way to get around it. It provides radical transparency. Just like the Bitcoin blockchain, you're effectively saying how much you're holding for customers. And also, how many customers are balances with you?

That doesn't affect your customers' privacy as much but it affects your privacy as a business. And how many businesses do you know who will tell you how many customers they have and how much business they're actually doing? It's very, very rare. But my view of this, we're in a new economy.

And this whole economy is about being your own bank and educating people to don't trust verify. Because of the nature of how fiat crypto exchange works, you have to, you're forced to trust the exchange for a short period of time.

Even though it's antithetical to the concepts of the cryptocurrency, the exchange is beholden to exchange to everything possible to provide you tools to minimize that trust. So in this industry, given what we're doing, we need to be radically

transparent, to compensate for the fact that we're forcing people to do something that's antithetical to the philosophy behind Bitcoin. That makes complete sense. And yeah, I can't see from that a logical reason to other than what you're saying and moving forward, it makes you say

don't trust verify. And if you can't verify, then probably don't trust. Yeah, I really hope more and more people start asking that question to exchanges, start asking them why and how you're not doing it. You know, I've heard its resources. I mean,

we've got very clever guys and girls in our company. But we are one fifth to one tenth the size of many of these other exchanges. If we can do it for six years, I don't think it's a resource issue. Interesting to see, it would be interesting to see what happens. But I think what we can get

from that is that your exchange is doing what it can to be as open as possible. And I like that. I like that a lot. I would definitely be checking it out, having a look through also all the education stuff on there, because that sounds interesting. Yeah, yeah, I'd be interesting.

Well, so we put a lot of fun putting it together. And so I'm actually excited to hear your feedback on the education side. Yeah, I'm going to have a dig through and have a look, because like I said you heard earlier, I do need somewhere to send people, because I do think it's important that

they go and they buy Bitcoin and they average in and all the things we've talked about. And you're the first person I was spoken to, who seems to have that Bitcoin ethos and the whole companies built around it. So I like it a lot. I think that's great. I think there's a lot of

people in the space behind the scenes have that ethos. When we announced we're going Bitcoin only, a number of people working in other exchanges called or contacted me privately and said, you know, that was I really, really applaud you guys for making that move. It took a lot of guts. We really

wish our exchange of the same thing. So there are people out there whispering in the corridors and trying to influence people. And my hope higher more than anything is that other exchanges start to make this transition. And if they do allow you to invest in all coins fine, but then

label them clearly, it's like Bitcoin and then shick on casino, you know, whatever. But you need to be clear that this is something that you need to think very carefully and you'll most likely lose money at which point then fine. But if you're trying to make it seem like they're similar,

I don't have that mean, nobody's got time for that. I know we're going to get time for that. Well, listen, it's been really, really good catching up with you. And like I say, I'll be checking out all the education stuff. I'll let you know once I've had the look through that. But

is there anything else that you wanted to cover that we haven't? Or is there any anything upcoming on the exchange that we haven't talked about? Or if you want anyone to contact you, where do they go and all that sort of stuff? Well, we covered a lot of things. I'm going to be troubled from the

stuff. And also, in terms of upcoming, I've already said, you know, at some point, we want to, where it makes sense, and it doesn't complicate the offering, we want to add to this functionality.

But we made a conscious choice that it's all about focus. So functionality wise, you're not going to see a lot. It's more about depth. I wouldn't consider auto scooping or taking Bitcoin and depositing it to a hardware wallet as a new feature. That's just an enhancement to the same

feature. And that's what we plan for the next. For the foreseeable, we just enhance and perfect this offering because Bitcoin DCA, that's it. But where do you hear about us? Well, coin floor, C-O-I-N-F-L-O-O-R, coinfloor.com or coinfloor.co.uk. And the offering to get you started

is auto buy. And for me personally, I'm lucky enough to be very early into Twitter. So my Twitter handle is OBI, just my name. Oh, I didn't notice that. I didn't notice that. It's like Jack's four letters. But I think who's another three letter? Is N-L-W a three letter name? I don't know. There's

not many three letters. Twitter name. Awesome, mate. I didn't notice that. You must have been really early then. I got in very early. This is, I don't know, but I'm showing my age here, but I got in very early into Twitter. So yeah, you'll hear my views and wanderings around crypto and decentralizing

all the things and monetary budget education. Don't just verify on all this sort of stuff. Ferris in numerous and just understanding this technology will take a lot of people who have a sense of importance down a number of pigs. And that's frightening to some people,

and it's liberating to others. And I think, so I talk about that and hopefully some people find it interesting. Awesome. Well, again, thank you for coming on the podcast and thank you for what you're doing as finally someone that I can send people to. It looks like you're focused on the

right things and you want to disrupt not just do lip service. So thanks for doing that. Thank you very much for having me on. Really enjoyed it, Max. Awesome. I love those five bits. Yeah, well, the idea is a bit by bit changed the world, but to do that, you've got to buy a bit of

Bitcoin. Yeah, no, it's very, very good. I like it. I like it. But yeah, very good. Thanks very much, mate. See you for having me. It's been great. And like I say, I'll reach out and let you know once I've gone through all the videos and bits and pieces. Perfect. All right. Nice to speak to you.

We'll speak soon. Speak to you later. Bye, mate.