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You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Karl Messer and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio.
David Gura here with Jess Meant and filling in for Krol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg BusinessWeek on Bloomberg Radio. And back in twenty twenty one, like a lot of people, Nathaniel Eliason got into crypto and amassed a small fortune doing so, but also, like a lot of people, ran into some trouble. He got hacked. He has chronicled his journey through the wild world of crypto in the book Crypto Confidential, winning and losing millions in the New Frontier of finance, and that joins us.
Now.
Now great to have you with us, and let's go back to the origin story. I'm always curious about this, especially with all investors, but especially with with crypto investors. What was it that drew you to it back then? And described the promise as you saw it then of that new frontier of finance.
To lean and thank you so much for having me on. I felt what a lot of people I think felt in twenty twenty one that there was all of this money being made in this strangey, mysterious world, and I kept seeing it pop up on Twitter. I had so many friends who had gotten into that world, and I had just enough hubris to think that if there were these other people online making money doing some combination of
investing and gambling, then maybe I could too. And I've been fortunate in that I'd seen crypto pop up a couple of times and twenty thirteen and twenty seventeen, and it felt like, Okay, we've seen this story happen a couple of times, and maybe it's going to happen again, and maybe I can successfully ride.
At this time, you also are a new father, So how do you bridge that gap whenever it comes to the vautal world of crypto and those types of decisions, and then balancing that with your personal life.
I had a few forces happening at the same time back in twenty twenty one, which I think most parents can relate to. My first child was on the way, and I didn't know what my financial life was going to look like once she was here. And on top of that, I had just stepped out of doing the marketing work i'd been doing before and trying to figure
out a new career. So I had this strong, at least internal sense of pressure that I needed to figure out how to make more money as quickly as possible, and I just didn't know what life was going to be like on the other side, And that, combined with how crazy so many markets were in twenty twenty one and going into twenty twenty two, created this perfect storm for me to end up in some of the wild situations that led to getting to write this book.
Going back to those earlier days, it did feel like and I had friends were the same boat as yours, I think, who just seemed to be making a ton of money, at least on paper, doing this, and there was this like overarching fear of fomo that I was
definitely perceiving. What did you I mean? I also think that there was a moment at which there was an awareness that there were individual investors doing this buying crypto, but there was this other kind of like above that, which was a more commercial, more institutional hand if that was entering this space. Talk about when you started to recognize that that there were these other companies that you know, were wielding a lot of power in this in this world.
Yeah, and it's so true. And you see people making all of this money on Twitter, or at least you think they're making all of this money. People don't post their losses nearly as much, which was something I learned once I thought it right.
They brought about their wins.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, they talk about how they made a crazy return on this investment and then of course they rolled it into three more coins and lost all of it. And so you stumble on a lot more of those stories once you get in there. But the other thing I started to realize was that there were these these people, and back then it was the ftx's and the Three Arrows and companies that a number of
them are gone. Now, they they had so much money to throw around that they could just completely move these
smaller markets where the liquidity was a lot lower. So you might have one of these new cryptotokens that on paper is worth one hundred million dollars or even a billion dollars, but there's only five or ten million dollars of trading liquidity backing it up, and somebody like a Three Arrows can come in and just completely manipulate that market based on their insider knowledge of when news might be coming out, when you know changes might be happening,
fundraisers might be happening, and it just becomes extremely hard to win as a retail investor or speculator.
So walk us through some of your biggest wins versus the mistakes you also made along the way.
Yeah, so you know, the book started where I was trying to do what a lot of people were trying to do. In twenty twenty one. I was day trading doge coin on my phone because I saw Elon Musk talking about it on SNL, and that seemed like where
everybody was making all of the money. And then I started to get into more of the group chats and started to get to know more people who were deeper in the space, and realized that there were levels and levels and levels to this game, and the deep or you got, the more adversarial it got, and the more your success relied partially on secret knowledge and then partially on your ability to actually contribute to projects and actually
work on things. Something I realized pretty early on was that purely speculating was kind of a loser's game because you were always at the whims of the market and you might have these big wins that you see, but you also have these pretty devastating losses. And so I early on decided, Okay, I'm going to try to learn programming.
I'm going to try to work on a crypto company that's actually doing something, not just launching another meme coin, and joined up with this game and ended up getting paid in that game's token because they didn't have the
actual money to pay me for the work. And then the token ended up taking off in just this incredible way where when we launched it, we thought we were going to launch it for one cent, and then we ended up having to launch it at ten cents, and then six months later it was suddenly trading at thirteen dollars and ended up creating this incredibly euphoric and stressful and terrifying just every emotion imaginable seeing my net worth on paper, you know, not necessarily accessible, go to these
insane numbers and just bounce around day to day.
Because of that, we had our colleague in here a few minutes ago talk we were looking at a bitcoin chart. She was saying, you can do technical analysis because there really isn't any fundamental analysis to do when it comes to it when it comes to a bitcoin and others. When was that moment for you when you know what you're describing, the kind of exuberance and effervescence, and wow, this thing created out of whole cloth is now worth x amount of dollars at least on paper. Why didn't
you begin to sort of think differently about that? Was it when these companies were collapsing and you saw the industry sort of starting to reconfigure itself. Was there a moment at which you thought, this is pretty bubblicious, this is too good to be true.
I unfortunately didn't start to realize how bubblicious it was until a little bit too late. The only reason that I got out the money that I did was that I just set a rule for myself that I was going to sell a small amount every day and not try to time the market, And that was kind of
my saving grace through that period. Really, what I think made me feel like it was getting too hot and too crazy was I was deep in the gaming world, and I still think that there's this incredible potential for crypto and gaming to have a neat relationship in the future. People are spending billions of dollars a year on Fortnite in roadblocks, and there are already these gray markets, these gray economies that build around those games, and crypto is
an interesting way to make them accessible. But you had these games that were suddenly being worth hundreds of millions of dollars more than very professional, well developed gaming studios, purely for speculative reasons, when there was not much of an actual game there that people were playing, or many people playing whatever game there was, And that's when it
became pretty clear that, Okay, there is something here. There probably will be some very interesting things in crypto gaming in the future, but right now it's just crazy speculation and people are getting way ahead of themselves on it.
You mentioned learning programming in a way to build your skills set beyond just trading crypto. How exactly did that help you? What methods when you're talking about programming, because I've heard this from other traders as well. Was this something you did online? Was there a particular course you did through a university.
Yeah, that was actually a really big challenge back then because I wasn't building trading algorithms, I wasn't trying to become a quant I was trying to learn how to write code to build applications on the blockchain, so specifically building applications on ethereum, so learning how to actually launch a cryptocurrency, or how to build a very basic decentralized finance application for lending and borrowing with your assets, things
like that. And the interesting thing was it was such a novel technology at the time, back in twenty twenty one that there were no boot camps. There was one one not great online course that you could go through that somebody had put on you to me a couple of years earlier, but there was no chat GPT, so you didn't have that that you could ask questions too. There were very few stack overflow answers for how to do these things, and so you kind of had to
hack together the education on your own. And that's partially why the first time that I built anything on ethereum, I made a mistake and somebody stole thirty five thousand dollars from me. So a pretty painful way to learn probably ended up costing about the same as if I had gotten a little university education in it.
For those sticking with us Jessman and David Gura here, of course, the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Carol and Tim are off today Bloomberg Business. We continues on radio, YouTube and originals. Of course, we're back with Nett alias in
joining us on Zoom from Austin, Texas. Thanks so much for sticking with us and that we've been discussing his book Crypto Confidential, Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance, and of course we want to talk with you more about what the crypto looks like today, regulation hurdles, and then of course draw more from your book.
So there's currently legislation in Congress that would create a regulatory framework for the crypto industry, but of course it's sorely needed, but there's a lot of issues that is holding up that type of regulation. How do you view this issue when it comes to regulation in crypto, it's.
A fascinating problem because the industry clearly needs appropriate regulation. We don't want anyone to be able to do just anything. Scammers, bad actors. Everybody knows some of those stories in the space, and they also are hearing more and more of the good stories in the space, and so there do need to be proper guidelines for the industry to thrive, and it has the opportunity for America to be where it thrives,
for America to be kind of the crypto center. And I'd say that in the last month or two, it's there's been a lot more optimistic, positive talk around creating that great set of guidelines for it here instead of just trying to ban everything, which had kind of been the way that we were seeing the SEC and other bodies act for the last few years, just up until this real change in the energy around crypto in the last month or two.
Let me take your story as an example. You mentioned before the break you got hacked, lost about thirty thousand dollars. Was your impulse in that moment to think, who do I contact to help me out here? I'll get that money back and go to the regulators, go to law enforcement, go to government. Or were you still then of the frame of mind like this is, as Gary Gensler says
so often, the wild West. This is a frontier that is not for better or worse, one where the government and regulators plays at this point in time, a very big role.
I knew that what I was doing, trying to build something new on this fringe technology and give in some of the privacy and anonymous nature of crypto. There was nothing anybody could do to get that money back. It was gone, and those hackers they know how to obviouscate the funds, maybe try to withdraw them in other banks
outside the US. It would not have been worth my time to to go after it, and I kind of knew I was taking that risk by building there, And hopefully when people are building in the future, they have some better safety systems in place so that they don't run the same kinds of risks that I was running back then.
So after going through a situation like that, I mean, most people I would imagine be really terrified when it comes to those types of hacking or deals, why did you decide to sort of stick with crypto after that?
So after it happened, I was obviously feeling pretty terrible, and one of my first instincts was to try to make sure it didn't happen to anybody else, And so I wrote a Twitter thread explaining what had happened, explaining the mistake I had made, in the hopes that somebody else would see it and maybe wouldn't make the same mistake when they were trying to learn how to do this kind of programming, and really within hours, I was getting inundated with messages from other people in crypto who
were much further along in their programming journey, who were working at these huge influential companies, were really successful engineers who had made the exact same kinds of mistakes when they started. So many people had a similar story to
tell that. What I ended up taking away from it was that this is kind of the gauntlet you have to go through if you want to learn how to build something in this new world as it was back then, and it was honestly kind of inspiring to see how much people rallied around somebody else making a similar mistake.
We've talked about your genesis as a crypto investor in somebody playing in this space. Talk to us, if you would, about your genesis as an author. When did you decide to chronicle this in a book, your personal journey to weigh in on what's happened here in crypto and who's this book for? Who are you writing for, and what's the takeaway that you want people to have.
While I was going through this whole period, I was writing articles to try to explain some of the interesting and crazy things that were happening in crypto to non crypto folks. I'm definitely not the most experienced, most expert crypto person out there, but I am quite good at explaining some of these interesting and technical topics to more
of a lay audience. And as the market was quieting down and I was looking at how crypto is being talked about, it became pretty obvious that there wasn't somebody trying to explain what it was like to be living and working in that mania from the inside. There were some wonderful books and explainers from the outside from journalists, from people who were observing it, but nobody who had really lived and worked through it was sharing that story.
And so I thought that this would be a really neat opportunity to capture that point in time to talk about what it was really like in the mailstream and try to sneak in some of that crypto education along the way, because I think there are a lot of people who have seen all these things happening with crypto, who know there's some good, who know there's some bad, who wants somebody to show them here's how you tell the two apart and do it in a really fun way,
And that's what I tried to do with the book.
What do you think is the biggest issue currently in the crypto industry that isn't getting discussed enough about? Because we talked so much about regulatory hurdle and the risk and the volatility, but other things happening underneath the surface.
I think the biggest problem is that the really useful technologies that are being built are just not very sexy
to talk about. Everybody wants to talk about the new coin that's going to the moon, or the new scammer who's getting caught, or the new mistake that's happened, or you know, Germany is selling billions of dollars of bitcoin, Like those stories are a lot more exciting than Hey, we designed this new way to very rapidly transfer US dollars anywhere in the world for basically no fees, and that could dramatically change international commerce and all these other things.
Like those stories just aren't as exciting to people, So a lot of people miss the cool stuff that is being built, and a lot of people who are building it don't have the same crazy, bombacious personalities that get those stories out there, So you have to dig a little bit to find the cool things that are happening because they don't always make the headlines.
Now we've got about a minute left. You know, I covered the Sam Bankman freed trial. I think a lot of people thought that was going to be this pivotal moment. I think there were a lot of kind of naysayers who thought that this is it popular peel of this is going to vanish. Were you surprised that hasn't been the case. Of course, we've seen the ETF authorization on
the heels of all of that. But what you mentioned sort of the CD scammers who are getting caught, Has that changed anything as you see it?
I think the good thing about all of that is that every year crypto continues to receive investment, that people continue to work on it, people continue to get involved, The tolerance for those types of actors goes down, the skepticism towards these new profits as they often portray themselves goes up, and we develop a better collective immune system
towards that behavior. So when I saw the SBF stuff blowing up, or the Three Arrow stuff before that, or Terra Luna, I didn't think that was going to be the end of crypto. I knew it was going to put a dent in things for a while. It was going to naturally increase people's skepticism. But it was also a good thing. It was like a forest fire. It was clearing out some of the bad chaffs so that we could have this much healthier ecosystem in the long run.
And unfortunately, sometimes some of these bad things do have to happen for the system to get stronger in the way that it really needs to to be successful. In twenty thirty, forty fifty years.
Clearing out the brush, the under rush, the undergrowth. Nathaniel Iison joining us from Austin, Texas via zoom. His book is Crypto Confidential, Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance, a terrific and fast read, and focusing on his journey through the world of crypto, overlaid with what we've seen in its recent history. S Bloomber Business Week on Bloombergradio David Grow with Jess Manton in for Tim Stenebek and Carol Masser.
We're going to have an interesting conversation coming up right now and switching gears on the importance of training workers on sustainable technology. And who better to talk to us about this than Hillary do chief Growth officer for the State of Michigan, Who's going to walk us through us joining us on zoom. Thanks so much for making time
for us on this Tuesday here. Now walk us through when people are talking about training workers sustainable technology, what exactly does this all mean and what's the most important thing about this for those listening.
Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. And you know what we just managed to do and what we won't came here to chat with you all about today as it relates to
this topic. We actually just put a national poll in the field and surveyed, you know, one thousand folks US adults across the country, and what we found was that people nationwide really overwhelmingly want to see additional investment in things like sustainable technology, clean energy, and ev infrastructure, and really importantly, alongside that investment, they really want training in order to ensure that those technologies can be developed and
manufactured right here in their communities and right here in the US. And one of the most overwhelming statistics from that survey was that eighty seven percent of folks surveyed, just a huge number said that they'd be willing to pay even more for those sustainable technologies if they were
indeed developed and manufactured right here in the US. So Americans are actually willing, you know, to help facilitate, you know, getting that done and getting those sustainable technologies manufactured right here in the US. And if they're able to participate in you know, that economic opportunity.
Hillary, let's pick up on that if we could. So they're willing to go that route. What are their expectations for the role that the government is going to play in making this happen? I imagine there are a lot of people who might suspect these technologies are more expensive, there's going to be higher capital costs. How eager are they or willing are they to sort of shoulder the cost of that, either through taxes or just through the way that this is allocated in state budgets.
Yeah, well, you know, folks have identified in the survey again in really overwhelming majorities that was sort of the theme of the results here. But they do think that these are good investments. You know, seventy one percent of folks in the survey said that they believe that investments in these sustainable technologies, even really sizeable investments, will pay off. That held you know across generations, whether we're talking about Gen Z or millennials all the way to Baby boomers.
So folks you know, are really supportive of investments in these sustainable technologies. And I think it's a reflection of, you know, a belief that folks realize, you know, we've got to tackle and be in the fight against the climate crisis. We've seen these extreme weather events across the US.
We've seen some of the devastation just in the last week here in Houston, and you know, I think it's all just a reflection of how important it is that we have all and that means having you know, a workforce across the US that's trained and prepared to help our industries really succeed in you know, showing up and being leaders and these clean energy and sustainable technologies talk.
To us about government incentives and why they are necessary for businesses to make those significant changes.
Absolutely. Yeah, that was another really interesting, you know piece of feedback. And again eighty eight percent of folks in the survey, you know, said that they wanted businesses to help with training in order to be able to participate. In eighty six percent that they supported incentives in order to help businesses make the transition to clean energy adoption. And I think they're so important or that folks in the survey responded in such high numbers one because it's
really critical. Are They recognized that it was critical that the US does manufacture these technologies here. You know, we saw with Chips and the IRA, these federal programs did successfully help incentivize, you know, more industry in these areas, and we want to be global leaders and be globally
competitive in these industries. But I think also because of the pace at which you know, folks want us to be able to adopt these technologies and want business to be able to move in order for us to respond to the climate crisis. So, you know, I think for those reasons pace and the desire for global leadership, you know, folks are in again large majorities, really supportive of the incentives required to develop and manufacture those technologies.
Here, Heil, we're talking to you from Michigan, and I'm very curious with what the landscape looks like there. So you have this comprehensive survey looking at attitudes toward this, How is that transition going in your state, and what do you see as the challenges to sort of wider adoption of this or wider growth of sustainable technologies.
Yeah.
Absolutely, you know, so part of the reason that we did the survey is that Michigan has really leaned in with sharp elbows into the clean energy transition. Michigan set a really ambitious climate goal for one hundred percent renewable energy by twenty fifty as part of my Healthy Climate Plan, and you know, we really see par economic growth in our economic future as inextrictly linked to our leadership in
the fight against the climate crisis. You know, Michigan is the leader, of course in future mobility, and that also means in the electric vehicle transition. We know that nearly thirty percent of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, and so the electric vehicle transition is going to be
critical to decarbonization. But we're also number one in clean energy investments here in Michigan, number one in clean energy backed projects, and so you know, we really leaned into making sure that we have the programs here for our businesses to be able to adapt like renewable energy credits and the workforce programs, to be able to connect even our students through programs like the Michigan or Scholar Program to fast roaring industries here in Michigan, like semiconductors and
electric vehicles. So you know, we're all land in Michigan and really want to encourage other folks to join up.
You talk about this twenty fifty goal, what realistically needs to be done and accomplished to actually get there between now and then, because it might seem far off, but really we're roughly, you know, about twenty five twenty six years off from that.
Yeah.
Absolutely, there's no there's no time to waste, and you know, I did think that there was. The survey was so interesting in part because again these large majorities of Americans, and when you're talking about eighty plus percent of folks, that means it cuts across political lines, it cuts across regional divisions. I think Americans wreckanize that we all have to be all in together too, and that there's no
time to waste. And I think that they recognized in the survey exactly you know what we think here in Michigan. Then in order to get this done, it's going to require the government to be you know, all in, and survey respondents recognized that it's going to take you know, government incentives in order to help facilitate this transition. It's
going to take business. And again, survey respondents said they expect, you know, eighty eight percent of folks expect businesses will need to provide training in order to have the workforce necessary to be able to lead in these industries. And it's going to take consumers helping us get there and supporting these industries to build a market. And again, you know, Americans in this survey said, yep, we're willing to pay more for these technologies that they're built in, manufactured, designed
right here in the US. So I think it's going to take all of us, and you know, all of us in the fight.
Have about a minute left, and I just want to ask you about the degree to which there's a knowledge deficit here and when we talk about sustainable technologies, do people know what we're talking about. I don't mean to talk to to anyone here, but this is new novel territory, and is there's still just a curve that industry needs to industry and state government needs to sort of mount to get more people aware of what all of this is.
Yeah, you know, I think there is. I think there continues to be a lot more that we all can learn, and in terms of you know, a call to action, I think even for consumers, you know, we can all do more to continue to educate ourselves on some of these fast growing technologies like Sunday conductors, for example, as we continue to try to divine and manufacture them right here in the US. And we can see that in
survey results as well across generations. So for example, on electric vehicles, we can see that, you know, adoption rates and interest in electric vehicles also does seem to track you know, maybe public knowledge and education on electric vehicles. So maybe Gen Z and millennials have have more knowledge on some of these technologies relative to some of the
older generations. And you know, it's not all of us to continue to educate ourselves as we lean in and do the work to help adopt these clean energy technologies.
At Hillary Does, she's the chief Growth Officer at the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, talking to us about the importance of investing in and the growth of sustainable technologies. She based in Michigan, giving us a preview of a comprehensive survey on sustainable technologies that I think is coming out tomorrow.
Jess, that's right, and looking at this, seventy one percent believe that sustainable tech investments are paying off, with eighty six percent urging for more business incentives.
David.
This is Bloomberg BusinessWeek on Bloomberg Radio. David Gerrow with Jess Menton, filling in for Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek, both of whom are at the Bloomberg Koreen Festival this week. This is Bloomberg