Comments
Transcript
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JFBrilliant overview. Listened to this conversation several times and walked away smarter. I have to say though, the millennial, valley-girl accent kept throwing me off again and again - made me chuckle.
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DBI think I'm In love
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jyshe talks millennial for sure, does not stick to the topics, so much time not used properly
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AKI would say that the rollback of the chain was never discussed in any meaningful way at all. I think the wonderful Meltem is a bit of a prisoner of her professional circumstances. The idea that the full nodes and the holders of last resort would have accepted the rollback is non realistic. All it would have lead to is a hard fork, and the chain that was immutable would have won on the open market since it has immutability as a value proposition. The fact that some with all due respect sh*tcoin promoters like CZ proposed such an idea was just met with laughter by the holders. Barry Silbert, CZ, The Winklevoss twins etc are non significant to the hodlers, as a matter of fact we the hodlers kind of despise them. This due to the fact that they are wall streeters with a small touch of Bitcoin in them. They reek of corporate America and Bitcoiners have a rather good sense of smell.
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WBWhy is she here this is weak. The way she talks and her whole ideas seem to be based on some lectures or story she read. She studied Keynes but doesn't seem to realize government spending didn't mean print money. Bitcoin is ultimately going to fail it has no intrinsic value and is something that can only happen in such a late stage bull market. All this talk about bitcoin halving is ludicrous as well. Just because the supply is low doesn't mean it automatically has value. Even if the bitcoin bulls are right answer me this what happens when the FED takes it over and seizes all your bitcoin by sending in FBI or insert agency. Crypto currency will stay but the FED in the end will run it making bitcoin fiat money. I will keep my gold 6,000 year track record of holding and maintaining its value.
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JFBTC/USD -500.55 -6.29% Oct 23/19. HODL, LOL.
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MCMD a few steps ahead (per usual!) "Will we get rich or get free?" then she says something like "Millennials are desperate to triple their net worth".....did she just answer her own question? :-( I hope not. A perspective worth sharing, regardless. thanks!
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CSPresentation style more apt for touting pot stocks than currencies
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IRI didn't find anything objectionable in this interview, but the way she speaks with all the positive spin about all the good that can come from crypto reminds me of the Zuckerberg spin about social media -technological nirvana and utopia where everyone can communicate and exchange ideas and live happily ever after. Social media in reality is a bulletin board for bullies and is in general a cesspit. Hasn't turned out anything like what was envisaged. Id like to know what her plan is to ensure that crypto doesn't turn out the same way. Everything was about what 'we want' and 'we' have intended etc. I admire her positive approach to it all but I find that there is limited discussion about the possibilities of the positives not coming to fruition. Alexander the Great was always one for having an exit strategy before going to war-question is what is their exit strategy especially given her use of the word 'revolution'?
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jy13 tons of gold were confiscated next to 37 billions in cash/assets from a former mayor, it was confiscated during a corruption investigation. these incidents happened a lot all around china.
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MPWhat has she achieved? Not sure her record warrants allocating weight to what she says
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AWBitcoin isn't decentralized. Created by 10 people. One person today owns 40% of lightning network. One person. Five companies (all Chinese and Russian) own 80% of hashpower. The sole named successor by Satoshi, Gavin Andresen, has literally called in rich and given up. Decentralization is a myth. Marketing.
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GCMeltem, incredible discussion. You briefly mentioned the issue of consensus: would be interested in your thoughts on the Hedera Hashgraph, from my standpoint, it looks as enticing as my bitcoin investment years ago.
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RMThanks for posting the sci fi reading list on your website. I’ll be checking that out.
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MSFuture of BTC: Napster
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RWI hate these repeated arguments that try to compare physical gold to crypto pass phrases when the electronic account of gold holdings, are just as protected whether in a physically backed ETF or private vault. I still travel the world with my password protected gold holdings, convertible at any time, which is REAL gold and it is just as convenient and secure and transportable as my crypto. What's more, I have the luxury of personally holding or carrying around the world a little gold in my pocket, and in some unusual emergency, my coins means something to everyone on the planet including the wife, kids, and farmer down the road. PS got something against kittens?
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RWXRP
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CWMeltem always manages to surprise me with her well-rounded take on Bitcoin and the crypto asset space. We belong to the same generation and I do agree with her: real estate is outpriced for most of my generation, but almost all of my peers are bitcoiners, precoiners or shitcoiners, with the latter usually being the first step to becoming a bitcoiner. This interview alone was worth my yearly Real Vision subscription.
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cpBitcoin and other cryptos are for flight capital, illegal transactions and speculation. Period. It does not own anything (e.g. blockchain) it has no intrinsic value but costs lot in terms of energy at all time and forever. The rest is just blah blah blah.
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wjDoes she get her news from CNBC? I heard democrates dont have the votes and the whistle blower is a fake.
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FFIs she married ?
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BKI could only stand about 15 minutes of this. It’s like watching a high school kid who is making it up as she goes and thinks giggles, side looks, and up talking will make up for it.
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AWGreat talk except for the bit about no recession for 10 years. Is she qualified to make this assessment? I pay for Macro Insiders for that part. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/
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THMeltem is probably onto something here. There's a risk, that people consider the Bitcoin as The Innovation, and try to place it into the existing world. That's what the whole Bitcoin vs. Gold conversation is about. Should I jump into a digital world by investing into a new digital asset without really thinking about what's the real promise of the digital world? The bitcoiner thinking basically leads to what we have today. We have a new digital asset, which is managed in the traditional manner. You trade bitcoin in 3rd party operated exchanges and you store them in 3rd party operated custody services. Where's the talk about making 3rd parties obsolete? Wasn't that supposed to be THE great promise of crypto? If you have a proper look under the hood of the Bitcoin technology, you can extract from there some great ideas about how to really disrupt the world. What about just digitalizing existing assets, like real estate, shares, commodities etc. and changing everything else around them? It actually IS possible today to trade in the network without any third parties, i.e. without stock exchanges, custody services or clearing services. It just requires you to accept, that the real innovations are a couple of steps further from the Bitcoin innovation. The punch line is, that you don't need any cryptocurrencies in this redesigned world. Any digitalizeable asset considered as money-good can be used as the means of settlement there. Creating a new digital asset class (cryptocurrencies) and fitting it into the current structures of the economy vs. Digitalising an existing asset and rebuilding the world around it using the innovations first demonstrated in Bitcoin. Which approach is more disruptive? Both are possible today.
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RMInteresting interview, but not sure I am buying the story that someone is holding $624 million of gold in their basement in China. Not sure she appreciates how much 13 tons of gold equates too.
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MCfirst minute was spew of lies. people are now aware of abuses of power? they have been aware since way way back in the imperalist days. markets are in turmoil? which one?
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CTOK talk. The part about rolling back the BTC chain is a waste of time - the idea was not "rejected" - it wasn't viable at all and could not be done technically even if they had agreed to do it. BTC isn't Ethereum. There are no Undos. No rollbacks. No chargebacks. Vitalik can't pull a few strings to wipe out losses. Meltem has some interesting views but is still way too interested in shitcoinery. Should focus 100% on BTC as that is the inevitable standard. It's the TCP/IP of this market.
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MMIsnt the halving priced in?
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THExcellent! Demirors gave me new directions of thought which is one of the main things I come to Real Vision for. I look forward to seeing how her ideas evolve over time.
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wwA good presentation. One serious mis-statement: America, aka The United States, is not (yet), and was not founded as, a "Democracy"! It was established as, and still remains to some extent, a Republic. Remember what Ben Franklin said, when the 1787 Convention that wrote the Constitution had finished, to someone who asked him what they (the Convention) had done: He remarked that they had established "a REPUBLIC -- IF you can keep it!" Of course, it's now largely corrupted, but it remains important to distinguish between a Democracy and a Republic. Two wolves and a Sheep, voting on what to have for dinner, meet the definition of 'Democracy'...
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CBAlso on the one hand, she believes that there shall be no recession and the market will scream to new highs never seen but are investing in supposed safe haven bitcoin, gold and treasuries in that order. Contradict much?
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MFGreat interview!
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MMMeltem is an insightful thinker and important contributor to the crypto ecosystem. Please have her back to talk about the lightning network.
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SGI wish Meltem could elaborate more on why she sees low chances of a recession. Otherwise, it was a good observation that bitcoin is getting more bank-like. Unfortunately, it's inevitable for mass adoption. People, especially the older generations, still find it too difficult to manage their bitcoins not saying about setting up nodes.
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PDThe Panama Papers were leaked in 2015, i.e. 4 years ago (not 2)
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SPEveryone will be connected by machine and IP address. We already are, but transactions don’t clear through your cousin 4K miles away while someone elsewhere earns some coin to lend that cousin some GPU processing power to stream his art work. Etc etc etc. it’s a major human neural network. That’s the point - connect personalities / people via IP and reward good behaviors.
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SPThis woman’s a genius. Her thoughts are even triggering insecure tyrants in the comments section. When crypto takes over , digital and private identities will conflate. 90TB all you need for billions of identities. China has that. Or 900? I forget. Click click click! Attention and focused changed , click!
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JMi don't think there was much originality in anything she said.
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CBYou're buying and hoping not holding.
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JSVery enyoble
MELTEM DEMIRORS: If we don't understand the history of banking, I feel that we are doomed to repeat many of the same mistakes just with a different asset, and perhaps in a slightly more theatrical and entertaining way.
While I appreciate that the arc of time is long, and there is an evolutionary component to what we're doing, if we don't stay honest with ourselves about what we're building here, then what we're building is going to be no different than what we've had for the last 500 years. That's not why I'm here.
Do we all want to get rich or do we want to get free?
Hi, my name is Meltem Demirors and I'm a Chief Strategy Officer at a digital asset management firm called CoinShares. Before CoinShares, I built a business called Digital Currency Group that was also an investor in the digital currency space, where we invested in companies, we built companies, we also invest in digital currencies. Prior to all of that, I was doing something very different. I was in the oil and gas space primarily focused on oil and gas exploration production and M&A activity. I lived a very different life, where instead of operating in this digital realm, I was on oil rigs, I'm in refineries, looking at pipelines and thinking about how to finance very expensive, very ugly infrastructure projects. Very different.
The world is such an interesting place right now. There's so many different things happening but what I think we're really seeing is the beginnings of a revolution. Trust is at an all-time low, people no longer trust institutions. I think over the last 10 years with Wikileaks, with revelations made by Edward Snowden, with the leak of the Panama Papers just two years ago, people are becoming increasingly aware of abuses of power at the highest levels of government, at the highest level of institutions, but it's happening not just at that high level, but at local levels as well.
I think generally, the ability for people to access information anytime, anywhere through the internet, the rise of social media, the rise of the democratization of information, but also the increasing balkanization of the internet and how people aggregate and congregate in the way they think has led to some really interesting tensions. We're seeing those tensions now boil over.
We saw Brexit happen. That was an event I think no one would have anticipated five years ago. We see what's happening in Hong Kong today. We just had the first protestor fatally shot in that ongoing escalation of tension. That's been an interesting thing to watch. We see what's happening in Venezuela, with the Maduro regime being toppled and some of the tensions there. Here, in this country, our sitting president is about to be brought to trial as at the start of an impeachment hearing.
The world we knew five years ago is not the world we live in now. I think for a lot of people, the question is, what next, and we see this in global markets. Markets are in turmoil. There's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of fear and there's a lot of doubt which we call FUD my industry-- so fear, uncertainty, doubt for FUD, and I think anytime you have a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt, you see really strange things start to happen.
How are past civilizations the prologue to Bitcoin?
Before we talk about the history of money, it's just interesting to think about the history of human society and human organization. When human society started, we were nomadic, we were tribal, and you would only really have contact with a small group of people that were in your nomadic tribe. Then people started to intersect with other nomadic tribes as their world started to expand and become bigger and bigger.
When that started to happen, you started to see the emergence of trade, bartering, then you need to trade. When you trade, you need a universal medium of exchange. You saw people using different things for money or to exchange value, salt, shells, other different assets, things that were valuable, things that were useful and had utility at that time.
Then as he started to see the rise of more agrarian society, as you started to see new means of production emerged that allowed larger populations to exist in the same physical footprint, you started to see the emergence of monarchies or kingdoms and really the first form of social organization. I think an interesting thing for me to always go back to because I think history is such a great guide for us, and unfortunately what little we have to study is fairly limited, but it gives us great insights.
There's this great idea called the Kyklos cycle or the Polybius cycle. It's basically this concept of these iterations of human organization that we go through. It starts with monarchies. You see a ruler or a leader emerge. Typically, they assert their leadership by printing their face on a gold coin, or some form of exchange. Then that monarchy continues to grow and grow in lineage, pass the monarchy from the parent monarch to the child and historically in our world, and those have all been patriarchal monarchies.
We see this monarchy in this lineage. Then the children and the children's children start to lose the original ideas of the republic, or whatever this civilization was all about and some of those principles, and we can talk about growth and principles. Then you start to see it go into more of a tyrannical leadership. Then all of the oligarchs or the wealthy merchants or the people of the ruling class, just right below the monarchy rise over and overthrow these tyrannical despots, the children who have gotten lazy and spoiled, and they take over and then you see the rise of an oligarchy.
Then that descends into tyranny again, then you see the rise of yet the lower rung or the middle class in the form of a democracy. That's really what America was at its beginnings. It was this idea of, hey, we want to overthrow the monarchy and these wealthy oligarchs and create this new country that has different values and you live in a democracy for some time. Then the democracy starts to become more and more fragmented as different special interests take over. Then you get to the stage called ochlocracy or ruled by mob, which is about the loudest voices are really ruling and that's the age I think we're in now with Twitter and social media and the way information spreads and the facts that most information is like factually incorrect, or based on assumptions rather than corroborated fact or throws these ideals out the window.
The ochlocracy eventually descends into just absolute anarchy, complete chaos. This is where we go from an ordered system to completely disordered system. When you have chaos, there's a natural tendency for things to tend towards order again, and typically what you is reaggregation of power and the rise again of another monarch. The idea of this cycle is as we as human civilizations repeat the cycle, and each iteration, we may do few things differently, we may have different tools.
The world we live in now, we have very different tools than the world we lived in 3000 years ago. It'll be interesting to see what that looks like. Generally, I think a lot of the history of money is predicated by the needs of human society as we grow, as we expand, as we become more interconnected. It's been interesting to watch Bitcoin in the context of what's happening in our world. I think when you start to think about it through that lens of how humans organize and the tools we need to enable these different phases of human social organization, what Bitcoin means, because it started with libertarians and anarchists.
It's like money for the revolution, which was really fringing out there. As more and more people started getting into Bitcoin, the message became more socially acceptable, it became broader, became more appealing. In the 10 years that Bitcoin's been around and in the seven years that I've been in the Bitcoin community, it's been really interesting to watch the messaging and the principles of Bitcoin evolve and change, as it needed to become more appealing to a wider and wider group of individuals.
How is central banking relevant to crypto?
I studied math and economics in university and I was fortunate to spend a year studying in Cambridge in the UK studying Keynesian economics and the history of the banking system and all of these things, but if you work in capital markets, you know. That's part of what you need to know. What's so funny is crypto and Bitcoin has basically made it cool and sexy for an entire generation of entrepreneurs and technologists to learn about central banking, which is so hilarious to me. I think all of these textbooks but nobody ever wanted to read about like the structure of the modern banking system, or market microstructure, people are now starting to understand.
In a way, crypto has forced an entire generation, my generation, millennials, to learn about how banks work. In a way, it's been really funny just to watch over the last 10 years, like the things I would talk about and think were fun and interesting have become topics of conversation we talked about online. I think that's fascinating, really funny. If nothing else, an entire generation now understands banking and Basel, hopefully Basel III, like that's the next step. I want to teach everyone about Basel III regulation and liquidity, but we'll get there eventually. People are like, shut up, Meltem. Go back in your box. Weirdo.
Is crypto replicating the traditional banking system?
One of the things we like to say in crypto is down with the banks or some people say short the bankers and there are variations on this. Look, the world is changing. That's something I think we all sense and feel. It goes back to the earlier comment on fear, uncertainty and doubt. We've gone from 9 trillion of negative yielding debt, now 15, what, six months later. It's pretty scary. Helicopter money doesn't feel like a pipe dream anymore. It actually feels like a reality.
We have presidential candidates who are campaigning on a platform of helicopter money, which is fascinating. It goes back to Keynesian economics. Now, let them dig holes, so entertaining, but what I think is really deeply troubling, maybe troubling is the wrong word-- what I think is one of these ideological traps, one of these deep idiosyncrasies that we need to resolve is in the act of building tools and products and services that allow people to interact with Bitcoin. What we have effectively done is rebuild things.
What I think is so deeply disturbing to me is the level of cognitive dissonance in the Bitcoin community when it comes to the reality of what we're building. The premise was that we wanted to disintermediate central banking and remove the power of banks. What we've actually done is just rebuilt banks in our asset class.
We recently did an analysis of all Bitcoin in the world that's been mined today, it's about 18 million Bitcoin. Where are these Bitcoin now? About 20% have been lost, we presume. About 7% are in custody with Zappo and/or Coinbase, which are now one entity because Coinbase acquired Zappo's institutional custody business. About 1% is in the GBTC product, about half a percent is in our product, XBT provider. We have about three to 4% in exchange hot wallets as far as we know, about 1% is in the