What happens when you start to understand Bitcoin's implications? : Interview with John Vallis ① This does 2 things. One, when you realize the extent to which the monetary system has become corrupted and how Bitcoin fixes it, you start to distrust a lot of other things. You will look a little bit more critically at all the other things in your life whether it be healthcare, education, government, etc., thinking, “if I misunderstood the truth of the monetary system so much, maybe I should look a little bit more critically at other areas.” So, you become intoxicated on sovereignty and you wan ..read more

The Biggest Chance of All Times : Interview with Marc Friedrich ① The last book was called The Biggest Crash of All Times, but the new book is called The Biggest Chance of All Times because every crisis is also a chance. I wanted to give people some perspective and positive things for the future to look forward to. I started thinking about the positive things in this COVID-19 crisis, like what people can achieve, and where the possibilities and opportunities lie in this crisis. I think it is the biggest chance in our lifetime to invest during this crisis because our current monetary system ..read more

What is the credit swap market? : Interview with Greg Foss ① The credit default swap market is default insurance on any reference asset. It is like an insurance policy that you purchase to protect yourself if the reference asset defaults. Purchasing the insurance costs you a certain premium each year, much like an insurance premium for house insurance, fire insurance, etc. There's default insurance where you pay a certain premium that is set by the market and by the riskiness of the borrower. For example, Canada is a sovereign borrower and the insurance market for Canada is charging 37 basi ..read more

How are our societies and tax systems related? : Interview with Dominic Frisby ① I have this idea that you design society the way you tax it. You determine the destiny of a society by the way that you tax it; how prosperous or poor the people will be, how free or subordinated people will be, etc. It's not just the amount but also the way that you tax the people. For example, today we rely very heavily on taxing labor even though we didn't always tax labor so much. I think there's a relationship between taxation and freedom. A slave owns none of his own labor like someone in a totalitarian s ..read more

Why Deflation is Key to an Abundant Future : Interview with Jeff Booth ① Well, technology is deflationary. Technology provides so much efficiency that it creates deflation. If you look at your cellphone or just about anything technology-driven that you use, you get more for less on an exponential scale. That technology is moving into every single part of our world. So, you would expect prices to be falling as a natural by-product of that while saving our time. We should be getting more for less and have our time expanding, but it doesn't feel like that's happening. blog.btcbox.jp 2021 ..read more

The Norm of Expressing Value : Interview with Santiago Velez Block Digital Corporation ① All of us were born into a society that has its norms around how you express value. The final distillation of those norms is our currency. As we grow up, we're conditioned to assess the relative price of things like for example a gallon of milk, groceries, a car, a home, etc. in our native currency. We take that expression or conditioning for granted and don't think that there's anything else to it until occasionally we get a glimpse of it when we go to another country. When you spend some time there, y ..read more

Layered Structure of the Monetary System : Interview with Nik Bhatia ① Gold and silver have been used as money by human beings for thousands of years, but in the 13th century, some city republics in northern Italy, such as Florence and Venice, issued a gold coin by their mint that had been changed to purity. This was unprecedented and such an event had never happened before where a coin had such stability and a government didn't devalue the currency like it had done in the past, such as during the Roman Empire and the Greek city-states. Because of the stability of the Gold Florin, the coin ..read more

What determines the price? : Interview with Ki Young Ju CryptoQuant CEO ① We have many unique indicators using or on-chain data. For example, the Estimated Leverage Ratio shows all the derivatives exchanges' open interest divided by their BTC reserve on that exchange. The value of this graph goes down, which is an indication that people are trading with low leverage. As you can see from the graph below, the estimated leverage ratio has decreased, meaning that people have opened their positions with low leverage. Leveraged trading is the use of borrowed funds with a contractually determined ..read more

How did Bitcoin Magazine start? : Interview with John Riggins Bitcoin Magazine ① I got into Bitcoin in my senior year at University in 2013. A group of friends discovered Bitcoin, and us being a little libertarian-minded, we thought it was very interesting. After college, I took a job at FedEx, an American multinational delivery services company, and worked in a revenue strategy group developing alternative payment options for countries around the world. Thanks to that position, I spent some time in Asia. Together with the team back then, we onboarded Alipay and WeChat pay. Spending some ti ..read more

Ethical Issues in Generating a Coin : Interview with Charlie Lee ① I wouldn't say it is “not ethical” to hold your coins, but when people complain saying “ You don’t have skin in the game”, the reality of the matter is that it is my creation and I am tied to the success of Litecoin. Now, if Litecoin succeeds, that is good for me. I don’t need to additionally tie my financial interest in the coin. It actually could be a misalignment of interest for the creator to hold the coin. For example, one could be releasing fake news, and making announcements to pump the price to profit off of. That’s ..read more