As week (one million, it seems) of the COVID-19 lockdown plods on, many are wondering what the economy will look like on the other side.
Ryan Selkis is the CEO and founder of Messari. He was one of the earliest voices in crypto to sound the alarm on the potential impact of COVID-19 not only on the health system but on the economy.
In this episode of The Breakdown, Ryan joins @NLW to discuss:
Why the markets right now represent an economic and psychological relief rally
What it takes to reopen the economy
Why voluntary, privacy preserving contact tracing is part of the solution
Telegram, the popular messaging app, has big plans for its blockchain Telegram Open Network, or TON. It also had one of the biggest token sales in history, followed by a huge legal fight over it.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) sued the company to stop its $1.7 billion private token sale, saying the future tokens for TON, called grams, are unregistered securities. Telegram argued grams were a commodity. A federal court judge in New York issued a preliminary injunction agreeing with the SEC, blocking Telegram from issuing tokens.
The court battle has been an interesting one, as is the ruling of the judge. Together with two experienced attorneys, Gabriel Shapiro of BSV Law and Phillip Moustakis of Seward & Kissel, we’re unpacking this process, which is likely to set a precedent for other token sales structured as SAFT, or simple agreement for future tokens – starting with Kik and potentially followed by many more.
SAFTs used to be a popular form of fundraising in crypto – What went wrong for Telegram?
How are bitcoin (BTC) miners strategizing for the upcoming halving event in which block reward subsidies will be cut by 50 percent? On this week’s episode of “Bitcoin Halving 2020: Miner Perspectives,” Kristy-Leigh Minehan and Pavel Moravec give an in-depth explanation of what miners are doing to maximize profits and increase operational efficiency.
Since October, Minehan explains, bitcoin mining farms have been getting on “the upgrade train” and purchasing state-of-the-art ASIC machines such as the Antminer S17 and S19. Moravec says bitcoin miners have also been looking at creative ways to cut electricity costs by leveraging surplus energy from certain cities’ power grids.
What started primarily as a hobby in 2009 has flourished over the years, gained broader adoption and ultimately evolved into a new, professional industry.
“We’ve gotten to a point in bitcoin’s history where the government is paying attention and has started to realize bitcoin isn’t going away. Mining is not going away. And it’s in their best interest to start working with ... miners,” Minehan said.
Teaming up with local governments and utility providers is another miner strategy both Minehan and Moravec have seen on the increase in recent years. This is why Minehan believes even the geographic distribution of miners, which was discussed in depth in an earlier podcast episode, may further diversify in future to regions such as North America and Europe.
For more information about the bitcoin halving, CoinDesk Research recently published a 30-page explainer report on these events, which features additional commentary from Minehan, Moravec and other mining industry experts. The report is free to download on the CoinDesk website.
As we wrap up another crazy week - 6.6m more jobless claims, $2.3T more in stimulus - this episode offers a few key themes and questions for bitcoiners and the crypto-minded to think about over the long Easter weekend:
Crypto-dollarization: why money is pouring into USD stablecoins and how it could create a future onramp to bitcoin
‘Quantitative Tightening’: why a new brand for the bitcoin halving could help us better capture a unique narrative moment
What it takes to get the economy back to work: beyong the political hemming and hawking, how can we force the real, nuanced conversation of turning the economy back on?
What it takes to rebuild as a Resilience Economy - and how can bottoms-up networks get started now?
Moments of transition are moments of leverage: what opportunities can each of us take advantage of?
As host of the Pomp Podcast, author of the daily Off The Chain newsletter, and founder partner at Morgan Creek Digital Assets, Anthony Pompliano is one of the best known media personalities and investors in the crypto industry.
In this episode, he and @NLW discuss:
The Fed’s just announced $2.3 trillion stimulus package - including the authorization to buy junk bonds
Why media and trust have desiccated to their lowest levels ever
The lack of a plan to restart the economy
Why Bitcoin was sold in last months larger market sell off
Why smart institutional investors are looking to bitcoin as a hedge when the deflationary environment turns inflationary
Why companies have to be allowed to fail to increase resilience
Why the best way to build a resilience economy is to put money in the hands of entrepreneurs and small businesses
In part 4 of this six-part documentary podcast series about Bitcoin in Africa we'll join Anita as she speaks with a young woman from Harare, Zimbabwe. She calls herself a 'Digipreneur' and also works as a teacher. Working with her organization, they focus on the digitalization of Africa and aim to improve outcomes in Zimbabwe. With the use of Bitcoin outlawed and the state of human rights and free speech being rather poor in Zimbabwe, Anita and the guest agreed to not mention her name. In this episode they discuss:
The opportunities for Bitcoin adoption
The shutdown of Golix, the only Zimbabwean crypto exchange
The philosophy of Ubuntu and how it relates to Bitcoin
Hyper-inflation
The future of Bitcoin in Africa
How cryptocurrency feels like luxury in Zimbabwe
How to design Bitcoin for use in Africa
How Libra is a game changer
The most used social media tools
The need for even more accessibility and ease of use
"If I have a Bitcoin, I can send money to my relatives, who are in Malawi or in Namibia or in Ghana. Currently I can't with our own currency. I can't send money out freely and quickly, but if we can sit down as a community and say okay, we need to buy a new borehole and we can do that just by using our phone. That's an amazing thing. You know, if we look at it from a place of development, if you look at it from a place of helping the community and taking care of each other, if it allows us to take care of each other without having to create so many barriers and so much red tape to get stuff done with money, I feel like when you change that narrative, you speak to something very deep within an African." - Teacher and Digipreneur, Zimbabwe
"Cryptocurrency feels almost like luxury. It's sad because I don't think that's what it's supposed to be, but it was also bearing in mind cryptocurrency was designed in a functioning environment. It was designed by people who maybe haven't spent 12 hours in a fuel queue?" - Teacher and Digipreneur, Zimbabwe
"We need to start having more conversations about the future with the people who are actually affected by the future. Hold workshops under a tree in Binga and have someone who is there who can translate into the local language and have a conversation." - Teacher and Digipreneur, Zimbabwe
This podcast special and my trip to Africa would not have been possible without my sponsors and supporters. I want to thank my sponsors first: Thank you: LocalBitcoins.com a person-to-person bitcoin trading site, Peter McCormack and the whatbitcoindid podcast, Coinfinity and the Card Wallet, SHIFT Cryptosecurity, manufacturer of the hardware wallet BitBox02 and many thanks to several unknown private donors, who sent me Satoshis over the Lightning Network.
This special is edited by CoinDesk’s Podcasts Editor Adam B. Levine and published first on the CoinDesk Podcast Network. Thank you very much for supporting the Bitcoin in Africa series with your work.
Thanks goes also out to stakwork.com - stakwork is a great project that brings bitcoin into the world through earning. One can do microjobs on stakwork, earning Satoshis and cash them out without even having an understanding about the lightning network or bitcoin. I think we need more projects like that to spread the usage of bitcoin around the world.
Thank you also to GoTenna, for donating several GoTenna devices to set up a mesh network in Zimbabwe and to Team Satoshi, the decentralized sports team for supporting my work. This special is also brought to you by the Let's Talk Bitcoin Network.
Credits:
Edited by CoinDesk’s Podcasts Editor: Adam B. Levine
Epsilon Theory’s Ben Hunt joins for a follow up to our pre-lockdown Covid-19 conversation in early March. In the month since, the markets finally started to take Covid-19 seriously, elected officials stopped calling it just the flu, and big chunks of the world economy shut down.
Now, as markets rally on early evidence the curve may be flattening, the question is: is this premature?
In this episode, Ben & NLW discuss:
How the markets have moved from “denial” to “bargaining”
Why this rally has all the hallmarks of a type of bear market rally we’ve seen over the last month
Why the predictability of corporate bailouts doesn’t make them any less detestable
Why we should be buoyed by an explosion of ground-up, grassroots citizen action
How Frontline Heroes is creating a p2p PPE purchasing network that gets essential gear into the hands of health professionals without causing additional price pressure for state-led negotiations
Second order effects are things that happen as unexpected outcomes of something else happening. These effects can create surprising causal chains.
Take this for example: A pandemic makes everyone need to work from home leads to an increase in video calling leads to Walmart reporting that people are buying more shirts, but not pants.
Emerson Spartz is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on virality and the internet. He founded Mugglenet - the world’s biggest Harry Potter fan site - as a middle school drop out, and would later found and raise tens of millions for Dose.
In the past weeks, Emerson started an open crowdsourced document on the Coronavirus’ second order effects that has, itself, gone viral, especially among venture capitals and other investor circles trying to understand what the world looks like on the other side of this.
Emerson brings a surprisingly optimistic perspective on where this could lead a generation of people who are now more fully plugged in to the internet than ever before.
