Hi, This is Jan Pritzker and this is Gary Leland, and you're listening to the episode one forty of the Crypto Cousins podcast. Beat your interest in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies by joining Hall of Fame podcaster Gary Leland on the Crypto Cousins Podcast. And remember we are all cousins in the world of crypto. This week's price of bitcoin nine thousand, four hundred and seventy seven dollars. That's up six hundred and eighty two dollars, are seven point seven percent over the
past seven days. Howdy, Howdy, howdy, Yan, Welcome to the show. Thanks, thanks for having me here. Gary real excited. Yeah. I just finished your book recently, and I know you sent me copies like a year ago. It took me a long time to get to it, but I got to it and I went right through it. That's a great book. And casehall aren't familiar. Jan wrote the book inventing bit Coin, and we got a lot to talk about that. Before we get into that, though, tell us a little bit about your background, a short
bio if you would. Yeah, my bio is kind of complicated. I don't know if we can keep it short, but I'll try. I've been a technology person and a startup person for the last twenty years. I've been doing a lot of startups. But I'm also a former immigrant from the former Soviet Union, So I came over to the United States in nineteen eighty nine.
I was just seven years old. Came with my parents and my sister, and I grew up doing you know, computer stuff, and eventually ended up doing startups and went through about six different startups over the last twenty years.
The last one was called Reverb. Reverb was co founded in twenty twelve along with David Colt, who was the founder, and him and I built out Reverb to be the best place for musicians to buy and sell gear, and pretty much over the next you know, six years, we went from just the two of us to about one hundred and fifty employees doing about five hundred million dollars in sales, and it just became this huge thing. And meantime, as I was, you know, doing the Reverb thing is kind
of my full time gig, I was getting really interested in bitcoin. Got kind of fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole in twenty sixteen and spent a couple of years just you know podcasts, books, youtubees, and by the twenty eighteen I just felt like that was the most important thing I could work on. So I ended up leaving Reverb in twenty eighteen in order to be a part of the bitcoin space, not really knowing what I was going to do,
but that's kind of how I started my journey. So you got in in sixteen, so you got into the well at a really good price. I guess it. Well, technically I got in in twenty eleven, except for in twenty eleven I bought bitcoin at the top, which was thirty bucks, and my god, you got ripped off, I know. And you know what else happened afterwards? I sold the bottom two dollars, so I did the classic I did the classic move of buying the top and selling the
bottom. I didn't know the first thing about trading. I wasn't even trading stocks at that point. I think I had just do I had some Apple shares or something, but pretty much bought the top, sold the bottom. Didn't know what what I got into. And twenty thirteen, same thing happened to me. Because it was in the media again and again, I remembered bitcoin was interesting. I didn't know what it was. So I'm very embarrassed about this because, you know, being a technology person, I should have
at least researched it and understood it and read the white paper. I did none of those things. I didn't even know there was a white paper. I literally just heard there are some people building a payment system. I thought it was a payment system, which it turned out not to be, and then I bought some just in case. But it turned out that I didn't invest my time until really twenty sixteen came around. Hopefully in twenty sixteen,
you held on to it. This time I did. Was the first time I actually actually stuck because I had more conviction around what it was after having understood it. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Now, you said you immigrated from Russia, but you were very young when your family to move here from Russia. Do you remember anything about the mother land there? Yeah? It was seven and uh, you know, I I remember a little bit. I remember, you know, I was a kid, So I
remember my childhood as most kids do, pretty fondly. I didn't have any real issues other than maybe than some some bullying anti Semitism, which is you
know, common in Russia. Um, but you know, my childhood was normal, and it wasn't really until we got to America and experienced what it looks like in a capitalist country with like actual abundance and grocery stores and stuff like that, that we finally understood like what we had been like basically that we had been lied to around you know, what life is supposed to be like, because in Russia, you know, in Soviet Union, you hear
about it. There was there's food shortages, there's readlines, um, there was shortages of basic goods and obviously like nobody made any money. And uh, the only you know that it was interesting about that experience after I got
into bitcoin is I finally understood what the purpose of dick. And it was after I talked to my parents about our experience, because it turns out that when we left the Soviet Union, we weren't able to keep our money because there were capital controls, so you couldn't own us dollars, and the government allowed us to take one hundred dollars per person, and that's what they exchanged for us, you know, from Soviet rubles to dollars. So we left
the country with four hundred dollars in our pocket. So on the leaving with the four hundred dollars? Is that because well, I know it's because it was the law, But is that because you had to You can't exchange rubles anywhere else and you couldn't sneak them out right, so you could exchange them on the street. But the street exchange rate was different from the government exchange rate, similar to what you might hear about in Venezuela or Argentina or other
countries that have capital controls. Usually the government has this official exchange rate, right, so it might be like ten to one, but on the street it might be one hundred to one. So that means our rubles are basically
worthless, like nobody actually wanted them. Why would you exchange rubles which were basically currency for the US dollar, which is something that everybody wanted, right The US dollars wasn't high demand in Russia even though it was actually illegal to own, so people use it for bribes, people use it to store value because that was the only currency they could get their hands on that held any
value. So nobody wanted the Soviet currency because it was completely government control, so there was obviously the price of it is not real if no one wants their currency, which you know, I realized no one wants. I'm not doubting that. I'm not arguing that point. Why do they care if you take it? No, No, they don't care. I mean, I'm just saying they wouldn't. It's not that they were trying to take it. Is that we wanted dollars the government. Yeah, no, the government.
We wanted dollars to leave the country, right, we wanted to go to America. With dollars. You could take all the rubles what you wanted. Yeah, but they would well, you just weren't really good. We had to cash him in. It's like in Russia for nothing. Yeah, basically they were usefully you know, worthless. So and I don't know if it's
true if we could take the rubles with us or not. I'm not sure what the actual policy on that was, but I do know that US dollar ownership was illegal other than you know, through official channels right when you first got here or your parents. I guess you've talked to them about this now
that you're kind of into money. You know, when once you get into bigcoin, you start exploring money and what money is and the history of money there's a lot of information about money that we just don't know, yep, because we just spend it and don't know what it is or what it's backed
by or anything like that. So I assume once you started getting into bigcoin of money, you started asking them a lot of questions about what it was like under a socialist economy, and they've told you stories about their lives here. You know, I see now a big move in the United States towards my young people towards socialism. Being an old guy sixty five years old, you know, I was always taught that socialism, communism was the worst thing
that could happen to the world, you know, as a kid. I mean, we were just told that over and over and over, and so I still probably have a lot of that in my thought patterns when I think about things. But I'm curious, how did your parents someone who fled socialism, who knew exactly what it was and then came and if who lived here for a long time, probably lived here for a long time before you talk to him about money. Oh yeah, what were their thoughts on socialism versus
or communism or whatever versus a free market? Yeah, I mean, obviously you know, when you leave an environment like the Soviet Union where there's basically shortages and scarcity of goods, and it's not like there were scarcity of resources. It was all because they were badly allocated. You know, people were doing things because the prices were fixed that they didn't know if they were to produce more of something or less of something. So it was not a good
situation. And when we got to America, it was very abundant. You know a lot of Russian immigrants will tell you that their first memory of America is like walking into a grocery store and seeing, you know, twenty varieties of bread, Like that's an unimaginable idea in a socialist economy. So you see that kind of variety and abundance, and you know, you're pretty much instantly sold. So you know, obviously my parents have a pretty strong aversion
to the idea of socialism communism. Are they still alive, Yeah, Yeah, they're alive and wall and h they're very they're very active for their age. My my dad actually client mom on Everest just ten years ago. It was fifty three at the time, so I'm sixty five. Your dad, yeah, he's your age. Yeah, exactly, and my mom is just a few years younger. But um, you know, they they obviously, I think a lot of Russian immigrants will tell you, like they don't like
where this country is headed. They're very concerned about the socialist tendencies that are arising. You know, I kind of my circle of friends is pretty liberal. I would say so in my circle of friends, you know, there's certain there's always certain like well meaning things that people want, you know, like we should take care of our our fellow man and all that kind of
stuff. Um, there's a line that gets crossed when you go from let's take care of our fellow man to like, let's have the government use guns to force us to take care of our fellow man, which is a difficult it's a difficult thing to understand that that's where this goes eventually, and you know it doesn't always have to go there, right, there are countries out
there that have some socialist policies. I mean America has tons of social policies, social security, I mean lots of medicare, right, I like Medicare, don't get me wrong. That's like a hell of a deal. And of course it's there's a certain element to you know, public education, all these kinds of things. You know, my wife works in public education. We live in a great neighborhood with a very good public school. Some public schools aren't very good, but ours is great. So the question is,
like, you know, there's always socialist policies. There's also socialism on the corporate level, as we know, with the allowing corporations to get very cheap loans that we probably call that corporate socialism and causing a lot of wealth inequality here. There's no perfect system, but there's definitely a place where. You know, I think if my parents, if you ask them about this, they would much prefer a system of free market and freedom in general, because
when markets aren't free, then then really nothing is free. That the flow of information has to also not be free, The flow of currency is stopped, everything is locked down. Because once if you live in socialist Russia, you either live in that socialist bubble and you think everything's okay, or you see the outside world and all of a sudden you're like, oh wait, this is not right. Like, you know, there's no breadlines in America. Why are there breadlines here? Yeah, they can't expose you to the
real information out there or you'll get pissed off exactly. So Russia was heavily censored. You know, all information was heavily censored. There was only State TV, there was like three channels, and letters you know, were presumed to be read going out to America, you know, we had to like, it's just it's a bad situation, and I don't think anybody wants to live in that kind of world. Who's who's seen the other side. I don't think anybody would want to live in that world at all, whether they've
seen on the other side or not. So that's that's that's interesting. I was curious what your parents thoughts would be on, you know, especially since they're my age on. Seeing how many people are wanting socialism nowadays just surprises me. The amount of people I see that are in favor of that. I say, because I've just always been I don't know, to me, it always just made sense that if you work hard, you can be rich. If you don't want to work, you're not going to be rich.
I don't think it's as black and white as that. There's also elements of like, you know, luck of the draw, where are you born, what's your community, like and there's a lot of other stuff that goes into it. But I think you can work past that if you work now. You know, like I may not I may not be the President of the United States rich, but yeah, I grew up on an island, for an example, as a white dude, So I was I did get a break there. I would admit that's a break. There are systemic things that
happen. I mean, if you will grow up in a neighborhood where there's just like you, you're fighting for your life to survive. I mean, that's a systemic thing. Your bar to get out of that area is way higher than you know, somebody was born even in poverty as a white dude or whatever. I don't want to get into that necessarily. No, I admit I got a hell of it right being a white dude compared to a
lot of people. There's no doubt about that. I used to when I heard that statement white privilege, I was like, what the hell has happening? Right now, I've come to understand that is a true thing. And you're right. If I grew up in a neighborhood where someone was being shot every week, and I was just trying to stay alive. And my whole goal was just to get to stay alive, rather than going, hey,
no one's no one's trying to kill man. If your only way of making money, like enough money, is to sell drugs and that was the only and then on top of that, you were threatened with violence if you didn't, I mean, right, you know, that's a big difference. You're correct. It's so much different bart to get over than where I'm going down to the golf course, which we weren't rich enough to be a member, but I could go to the eighteenth hole and tell cokes to those golfers for
fifty cents each or something. I mean, we came to this country with nothing, and a lot of times people are like, oh, look, I came to this country with nothing, and I bought this life. But my dad was an engineer, my mom was a teacher. They had education, like world class education. I mean, say what you will about the Soviet Union, but the education system was very good and they produce some of
the best engineers. And we came to this country with all that and all this culture and the background, and of course we were able to build a back up. You know, it took a long time, but we were able to do it. It's not equal for everybody in that sense. No, I agree with you completely. You made a good point there, But
again it's like, what do you do, right? I mean you you you want to try to help other people, you can do that voluntarily or you can say, okay, well we're gonna like ask the government to you know, take everybody half of everybody's to paycheck and pay for these other people.
And for me, like I would happily do that for my local community, I'm not so sure I should be paying for somebody that lives halfway across the world or to fight wars or other things, which is you know where federal taxes end up going, right, and then you have to go you know, they're able to print as much money as they want, won't we just set at here everything sprint money and take care everybody here. Yeah, I agree with you on all of that. So what where did y'all move
when you moved here? We ended up in a suburb of Chicago, because in order to move to the United States at the time, you basically had to have somebody here that would essentially vouch for you and say they'd take care of you like they would they would request your immigration and say they would be
your caretaker and all that. So we had like my grandpa's you know, cousin that was living here, so we were able to use him to fish us out of there, right, And yeah, So I grew up in suburbs of Chicago and went to school downstate in Illinois at the urbanis Champagne and then came back to the city. And I guess, and you benefited from having educated parents that new education was important, so they probably made that a high priority. I mean, my dad bought me a computer like a year
after we moved here. And again keep in mind, he was doing odd jobs earning like five ten dollars an hour at the time, so he knew that was so important that you know, that was one of the first purchases that they made Commodore sixty four used. Obviously it was a junker, but at the time it must have cost a couple hundred dollars, so it wasn't a small amount of money compared to their salary, but it was something that you know, my dad saw the future and computers and made sure that I
got into that real early. Well, that's really it was really smart of him. I wish I wish there were computers around when I was in high school, even that would have been nice for sure. Let's get off that for a second and go into your book, Inventing Bitcoin, which you can find at inventing bitcoin dot com. You know, I think this is a
good book as a star her book, you know, for somebody. I think I used to tell people who were interested in bitcoin to get safety Dean's book, you know, the Bitcoin Standard, which I think is a great book, great book, without a doubt, But I think this is a better starting book, your book. And then you know, when you get him to read that, then they go, wow, that bitcoin sounds interesting. What should I read next? Then set him into something a little heavier.
I don't like the Bitcoin Standard. That's just my thoughts. I heard it in reversal order, but that was my thoughts. Tell us about your book. What made you write the book? Yeah, I agree with your assessment. The reason I wrote the book, and it's very short, it's about one hundred pages long, and they wrote it because they wanted to have something that was friendly for beginners. And when I started writing it, which was probably in the early twenty eighteen, there wasn't a lot in the market.
I don't remember if Safe Book was out yet or not, but pretty much everything that was out there was substantial. Like there was Mastering Bitcoin by Andrea Sanntonopolis, which was like, you know, three or four hundred pages and it was yeah, code, and it's like, it's not it's meant
for developers, it's not meant for the everyday person. And I felt like the resources out there weren't good enough to give people a short understanding of bitcoin, but that was enough for them to be able to go and explain to somebody else. That's that was really My goal was to have something that somebody could read, understand and feel like they know bitcoin well enough to defend the ideas of bitcoin, like why why is it limited in supply? Why is
mining? How does minning work? These are the ideas that we cover in the book so that people have a strong understanding. And I started writing the book because I was giving talks at high schools. Actually, I was giving a bunch of lectures to high school students and math classes and for career days because a lot of my friends and my wife as a teacher, so I would just go around to their high schools and basically showed bitcoin to high schoolers.
But as part of that I started I was taking notes and writing outlines and kind of turned into essays, and that was the beginning of the book. So the book was really meant to be at a high school level. I didn't want anybody to have, you know, a computer science degree or advanced math or nothing like that. It was going to be at a high school level where I could actually give this book to high schooler and have them understand it and ask questions. And that's that's what I came up with,
is you know, the process of inventing bitcoin? How how would you go about inventing bitcoin? Because I think when you walk through the process of inventing something, then you have a really good understanding of all the pieces that comprise it and you can actually explain to somebody else from your experience of going out talking about bitcoin and taking your notes and basically your outline, I guess of what you were talking about. You just decided to put that into a book.
Yeah, And it was almost like a reaction to people's questions because I think the biggest two biggest questions are you know, how does bitcoin work and
why does it need to exist? And the why. I cover it by looking at some of the Satoshi's quotes and looking at what his motivations were, what was he really trying to achieve, And then once we understand what he is trying to achieve, like he wanted to have you know, scarcity, he wanted to have an animity, he wanted to have you know, these are different ideas around uh, you know, trustlessness, like anybody could join
the system it was permissionless. And then looking at those motivations and then saying, okay, well, how do we actually get that done? How do we implement that in code? And solving those problems one one after another? Uh and um, you know in the book, I talk about it from very high level. I don't actually get into the computer code, but I do give people enough of an understanding of computer science at a very like, you know, not even one on one level, just how do computers work
in a bitcoin system and how do they keep each other in check? Yeah, it's you don't have to be able to write code to understand what you're talking about in code in this book. Like I said, this book's very well done and I was very impressed. Now you had Guy Swan Yes to narrate this on the audio book version available, and he does a great job. I mean, you know, I think he did a great rebranding job on a site going to the big one audible. Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah,
guy does a great job. And I think the way that he reads is the way that I imagine writing, like kind of I'm a fast talker, so I would never want to narrate my own book, but the way that he speaks is very clear, and I think it helps sell the ideas in the book, you know, more clearly and un like people digest what's going on. Yeah, I think that's the problem with the for minute crypto shows. I talk really fast, the formaute bitcoin show, every brand it
is, I talk really fast. I had a friends say, yeah, I listen to all my podcasts at one and a half speed. But that's the slowers down because you're already one and a half speed. Yeah, that's what people say about me too, So I try to make a conscious effort to talk slower, but it's hard. Now people can find that at your site. But that's also at inventing Bitcoin dot com. But that's also on like it Audible, Audible Amazon, you can get in pretty much all the
standard channels. And last year you gave us like well ten of those that you signed and numbered to give away a bit block boom when we had drawings in between speakers, and it's amazing how excited people were. My wife said, they were really excited when they came down and got to their prize, so that was really pretty. And then we had some at the table you'd provided that we sold for you, So that was a really productive prize that
people seem to have liked. Then, if anyone's out there, if you're not for me with bit block Boom, that's a bitcoin conference I put on every year here in Dallas, Texas, and this is our third year. Coming up for the conference is twenty ninth of August. Like I said, in Dallas, Texas and at bit block Boom, we just talk about bitcoin, not all coins, not blockchain, just bitcoin. So if you're interested in bitcoin, go to bitblock boom dot com and check it out. It
is starting to turn into a week long event. I think our first events now are on Thursday night. I would be a surprised is someone that add a satellite event for Wednesday at the way things are going. But check out our lineup see what you think. And if you decide to go, use the code cousins CUSI NS at checkout and you will receive thirty percent off the price of your ticket. So check that out. I hope I get to see you this year in Dallas. Everybody that vent really seems to be growing
this year. That's awesome. Yeah, I think because people haven't had anywhere to go. Oh for sure. Yeah, this this lockdown is not fun. Yeah, we had Stephan laver Is coming from Australia, but he sent me a message this morning that he's not sure that they're going to unlock I guess is he in New Zealand or Australia. I'm not sure actually probably. He said that it looks like they're going to be at the travel there locally by August, but it might be September the tint before they can leave the
country, and that's kind of weird. So he's like keeping us updated so we can figure out if he's still going to be at the com or not. So if not, we may have to get a sub for him and have him in next year. So you also, though, are with Swan Bitcoin and give Bitcoin. I mean that's both by the same There are two different things, but they're by the same entity. I guess, yes, Yes, we're one united entity. Yeah, tell us about Swan. How's that going. Swan is doing great. You know, we launched Swan.
For those of you who don't know, Swanna is a bitcoin auto stacking service, so we withdraw automatically from your bank account. We buy bitcoin automatically on a weekly basis, and then we withdraw it back to your bitcoin wallet, also automatically if you choose to set up automatic withdrawals, which is pretty cool and I'm at sure that anybody else is doing that part. So, you know, lowest fees for for that particular service. And you know, Swanna
was launched on the eve of the COVID disaster. We I think we released it on the week of March twenty third, which is probably the week around the time when the markets were crashing, or right after that happened. It was really just a time of despair and doom and gloom. And yet a lot of people are very excited about Swan, and there was so much noise on Twitter, and a lot of people joined up and you know, now it's been what is it two months or so two and a half months,
and we're growing very quickly. We're on boarding you people all the time, and we're getting, um, you know, we're getting people who aren't your typical I don't know your Bitcoin Twitter people. They're not those people. We're getting boomers. We're getting people of all ages, all sex, gender. Surprise. No, I'm not surprised. I love it, and you know, I think that's really important because I wanted this service that I could send you know, my parents too. That was really what we wanted to Swan
to be was a It was a mainstream service for bitcoin. And it's interesting because the people who you know on bitcoin Twitter, who I have a certain set of requirements, are very different from your typical person buying bitcoin for the first time because they, for example, they don't understand while it's they haven't heard of a wallet, what does that mean? How do they do that?
So Swan is not just a place to buy a bitcoin. We also couple that with bitcoin education through our series of blog articles at swan bitcoin dot com, slash Signal swan Signal, and then we also have the live show which we do on Twitter and other channels every week as well as swan Signal podcast dot com, where we basically capture that knowledge and turn it into pods and we have awesome guests on all the time. We just had Adam back and Preston pish On. It was a lot of a lot of fun.
So these are the kinds of things that we do because we want to educate people on bitcoin, not just you know, they bought a number, which is most people they want to coin based, they bought a number. We don't want that for our next million ten million bitcoiners. We want to have people understand what they bought, why is it important, how does money work? And all of that is stuff that we do through our ongoing education efforts.
Well, when you're saying stacking a platform in case someone has been under a rock and they don't know what stacking SATs are, you're basically saying this site is set up for someone to say, I want to get into bitcoin, and I'm going to buy just gonna make a number one hundred dollars worth a bitcoin every payday, every Friday or every other Friday, and this service
will go ahead and automatically buy and whatever the rate is that day. One hundred dollars worth a bitcoin form so slowly they're able to say, say bitcoin, and they can sit back and they're not like, you know, looking at it all the time, trying to remember missing it out because I think everybody agrees that if you just stack on us dollar cost averaging over the long run, you're going to do better than trying to buy on the lows or
buy all ones. I think, yeah, a lot of people who get into bitcoin and then all of a sudden are kind of called into trading. And you know, if you've never traded stocks or stock options, you know you probably shouldn't be day trading bitcoin either. It's not really it's a very volatile market. It's not really friendly to new traders. And most people aren't traders. They shouldn't be traders, you know. I think as a society
we push people into trading. We have apps like robin Hood and all that that offer free trading and try to get people hooked on the idea of gambling. But we've really lost the art of saving as a society. We don't remember how to save our money. Obviously is not good for saving, because if you save it, it loses value at least two percent, they're happy if it only loses two. That's the goal is two, So it does it meet goal? Yeah, we believe that bitcoin is the best money ever
invented. It's it's definitely better than than if you have money that loses money value all the time, and so you should be saving some of it all the time. And that's what swan is about. It's about regular saving of bitcoin so that you don't have to think about it and just accumulates for you. So does that sync up? I know I'm involved, but the things I don't know about. Does that sync up to your bank account or to a credit card or are ty either? It sinks No, no credit cards,
bank accounts only. And you probably shouldn't be buying bitcoin and a credit card. Well, you might buy it to get to miles. You might have the money. You might Yeah, if you're going to pay it off. Sure, but you know there's a lot of most credit cards and sort of you know in the industry they have enough charge for bitcoin related purchases and we're just not going to support credit cards for the foreseeable future. But banking,
yes, and then we have wires coming in pretty soon. We're gonna have a wire support, so you can just wire in money and it'll clear right away instead of having to wait for the sche clearance period. So is that going as expected, better than expected, a little behind because of the COVID didn't expect. I think it's going better in the sense that the amounts
that people are saving are way more than we ever thought. When we model this business, we were conservatively looking at one hundred, one hundred and fifty dollars per customers as their monthly amount. It turns out that the most people like the most common amounts or fifty one hundred dollars a week, and it
could be even higher than that. So you know, people are stacking more than we thought, which is awesome, especially in a time like this where you know finances might be sure or people might might be losing their paychecks. And we've had a couple of folks put their plans on pause because they lost their job. But the nice thing is that they can always resume when they're ready to go again, and we always try to lower that limit, so you know, if it's five dollars a month is all you can afford,
then that's what you can do. It's fine. So when you buy that does stay in the swan wallet or when you buy it as an automatically transfer using your key to your wallet, so we have both options. What we find is a lot of people who are new to bitcoin are not comfortable setting
up wallets yet. So we obviously when you buy it, it's it's bought on our side, it's bought through our custodial partner, and we partner with a licensed and regulated Nevada chartered trust company called Prime Trust, and so all of that happens on their side and is held in offline cold storage, so that if people are new to bitcoin, then essentially their coins are safe. But we're trying to of course, you know, with as bitcoiners, we
want to promote not your keys, not your coins. We want to promote for people to take custody of their own assets. So what we do to encourage that is we create an auto withdrawal plan for people so once they are ready to set up a wallet, and we just put together a great article about all the wallets that are out there and recommend different kinds of wallets for
different different amounts that you might be storing. And once you have set up a wallet, you can just create an auto withdrawal plan, and so every time you buy bitcoin, it will withdraw. You can even set it up so that it has thresholds so that you don't withdraw every five dollars, you will draw every one hundred dollars or every five hundred dollars or every certain amount of bitcoin, because yeah, we want to encourage batching because this is something
again a lot of newbies don't know. But if your coins are all split up into small pieces, then later when you want to use them, it will cost you more to spend them because of the way that transaction fees work based on the amount of data. A lot of people new to bitcoin don't understand transaction fees. Now swan actually has free withdrawals. We don't charge you for withdrawals at all. So it's to your benefit to use that for batching.
So go ahead, and you know, batch up a bunch of them and withdraw once and then you have this nice chunk and then you can spend the night. I know that it had free withdrawals, free withdrawals. We're doing it. We haven't been super vocal about it. We're trying to get
it more and more places. We're just not you know, we're not at a point where the site design is where we want it in terms of advertising all the different bits and pieces, and that's because it's challenging to balance all the exciting features that are good for people who understand what they're looking for versus you know, making a really simple experience for newbs. And so we've aired on the side of having it just kind of minimal, and then over time
we'll be adding more more stuff in. Well, it's going to give bitcoin real quick quick, because that gotten kind of put on the back burner for Swan. Give bitcoin was the first product before Swan came out, and give Bitcoin was a you know, essentially envisioned as an on ramp to bitcoiners, and it also had a purchasing feature to it, but we never did a
good job marketing it. And I think that when we realized what the landscape was that people were so much more excited about, you know, automatic purchases of bitcoin, we just decided to pursue that fully and give bitcoins if it got kind of like said on the sideburn Yeah, it works, exists, it's uh, you know, it's attracting users every day kind of by itself.
But we definitely don't spend a lot of time marketing it. And the reason for that is we eventually envisioned Swan becoming the umbrella brand for all of this. So you'll have a Swan app. It'll do the Swan auto stacking, but it will also allow you to give gifts to people, so it kind of would be incorporated into the Swan. Yeah, we'll fold it back in. Yeah, but since you know, we're a small company, it kind of benefits us to put all of our efforts on one thing and really
grow that thing, and then we can fold more features. But get Bitcoin is a good way to give bitcoin. It is. I mean, if you want to give someone a Christmas press, to give bitcoin, it's a pretty good way to do it. Yeah, And give Bitcoin is also designed for you know, your average kind of you be a bitcoin where you know, a kid asks their uncle for a bitcoin present, Well then uncle doesn't
have to understand bitcoin in order to give them the present. You can just go on to give bitcoin, plug in their bank account and we do all the conversion automatically. Yeah, it's good. Fin Now what is bitcoiner VC bitcoiner Ventures? Yeah, so bitcointer Ventures is a partnership between myself and Corey and Stefan Lavera and Louis lou And it's a it's a way for us to raise money for bitcoin friendly companies. Company companies that you know are good for
bitcoin. That's our that's our litmus test, is it good for bitcoin. It's an angelist syndicate and we don't take any fees. There are angelists fees, but we as as the partners, we don't actually take any carry or what you might find a regular hedge fund where people take fees on the investments. So it's kind of like a pro bono good faith thing that we're doing in order to UM invest in bitcoin companies. And we commit our own money
just alongside everybody else. It's not we're never going to ask somebody for money where we don't commit. UM. And we just did our first deal which was for Unchained Capital and UM, that's that's live. So UM what was that? That's that's closed. Well, we we raised we raised about one hundred thousand dollars for runtchain Capital. Yeah. Yeah, now there are platinum sponsor a bitlock moon this year. Kind of excited to have them involved.
Awesome. Yeah, Unchained is great fantastic team UM and we were very excited to help them because, you know, we really believe in their mission and also just the way that they execute you know, they're very very smart and how they treat funds on chain and obviously their vaulting products are very excellent. So we believe that these products have to exist for bitcoin to succeed. And
so that's the kind of companies you want to fund. So that was your first Your first adventure or venture was friend chain Capital, Let's go out. I found that by accident. I didn't even know that bitcoin or VC existed. I kind of by accident. Yeah, And if anybody wants to join up, it's you can just join the angelist syndicate. It's called Bitcoin or Ventures. You can find that an angelist and there's no commitment or any obligation
to invest. You'll just be able to essentially see all the deals that are coming across and then if you're interested in any particular deal, you can sign up to do that. But any deals that you guys do promote, you're basically putting your own money in. Yes, yeah, we won't. We won't promote anything that we're not funding ourselves. So I made deals. Do you have in the works right now or do you have any in the works. We have a few, but we are not allowed to talk about any
deals. Can't promote anything if you're not a you know, a partner in the syndicates. So I can't talk about it publicly. That's fine, that's fine. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't know the scoop. So okay, so you're interesting. If you want to find out, go join Bitcoin of BC. Yeah, and again that's there's an obligation. Just go ahead. And is there any kind of tests you got to pass or anything. I mean, if anyone can, well, you have to pass an accreditation
test on Angelists. They take care of all that for us. So we're just you know, we're basically just helping find deals. Yeah. I was looking at that last week. What is that angel investor, angel list? Angel list, So it's at angel dot co if if you guys don't know, Yeah, I was surprised I found I was a member of that or something. I didn't even know. I guess. I don't know when I signed that or when that happened. They have like a network of stuff they
have. You can create your own profile if you're even just like a developer or entrepreneur. So they did a lot of stuff to act essentially the whole venture capital and startup community. So a lot of people have angelists accounts that they don't remember because they signed up as a as a developer or something a long time ago. Stephen Cole told me about it. I had him on last week, and so I was looking at the site last week because he was telling me about it. Okay, so now I got to scoop on
the VC. Hey, what do you think of the happening? Was that? Were you kind of let down or were you is that what you were expecting or I mean I expected bitcoin not to change this monetary policy, and it held up phenomenally well as far as price. You know, I don't really look at day to day price movements. I don't think it's that important. I'm into bitcoin for a very long time, and I think of it as money for my children and grandchildren. So this having having happening whatever,
it's the third out of many, probably many more to come. There will be two more of this decade. I was looking for a little bit more excitement, a little more oh maybe some online parties or something, you know, there was some yeah, I mean there was some zoom chats. I think because of the COVID everybody's like, you know, you get a party in the zoom chat or something, but I was looking I think maybe a
drunken chat wherebody had a mottle line or bottles. I think it's awesome that the whole mining deut spiral narrative is getting destroyed right now because there's all these you know, people saying that mining was going to be over, it's not gonna be profitable, and I think people don't understand how mining works and keep writing articles about it, which is sad. They need to research. Do you think Pace said that the same thing about miners during the second Havening.
I think they did. I mean, as far as I know, there are form posts going back to like twenty eleven where they were talking about the mining dot spiral, you know, going into the first having So this has been going on. This narrative has been going out for a long time,
and I think it fundamentally misunderstands how mining works. I mean, it's an insensive, aligned system and if people are unprofitable, yeah they're going to unplug, but that makes other people more profitable, right, and so all it does is shifts the energy usage to places where there's more efficient, cheaper energy. So yeah, some some guys you know in their garages are no longer profitable. Mining adjusts itself. It's the beauty of the whole thing is that
it's a self regulating system. The difficulty adjustment happens every two weeks according to what's going before it, so exactly, Hey, um, you listen to podcasts. I used to listen to a lot, now less because I don't drive anymore, which is unfortunately, you know, I think that's affected the podcast industry as a whole. I bet it that no one's in their cars or buses their trains, and that's when people listen to most podcasts. What
are a couple of your favorite podcasts. I like stuff on Lavera's pod, m Marty Bent Tales from the Crypt. I like I listened to the What's hev Any podcasts with Cassie. I listened to a few episodes of that. I was pretty impressed. Ben I stopped because I stopped triving, right right. Yeah, that's killed a lot of podcasts. Yeah, so sad. You know, I'm trying to figure out a routine where I will actually find time to listen to pods. Yeah, but also the other one I've been
actually listening to more. I almost stopped listening to bitcoin podcasts in favor of listening to macro Voices, which I love so much. Now. It's it's a podcast just about macro economics and you know, various trends, and they've been really interesting because they talked about the virus and how that was going to impact things and deflation inflation, like the stuff has become more interesting to me
almost a bitcoin. I mean, obviously bitcoin is the number one thing in my life and I talk about it all the time, but you have to have interests outside of bitcoin, and I think macrow is kind of a very nice adjacent thing to expand your mind on when you're looking at bitcoin. I think, what's hurt me with podcasts? All of a sudden I started listening to audio books? Oh yeah, you know, and like you know, I was listening to one book recently which was like twenty hours and I drive
five minutes to work, so it took me a long time. You know, a lot of episodes of podcast came out, but I think listen to the audiobooks is hurt my podcast listening habits, you know. So, hey, before we get out of here, is there anything you want to tell people that we might not have gone over that you wanted to make sure and let people know, or that you were trying to promote or want to make
sure you know, come on here, we miss something. Sure, we have a new um new concept on swan, which is you can have your own vanity landing page with a welcome bar. It's got your face on it and a quote. And this is for people who want to drive more traffic to the site. So you can go to swan bitcoin dot com slash enlist to enlist in the Swan force and become a promoter of bitcoin. Really,
it's all about promoting bitcoin and help and using Swans onboard new bitcoiners. And we're gonna be providing a library of memes you can use on Twitter and other places um to promote bitcoin and get more people on board. So if you're interested in that kind of thing and you have an audience, go to swan bitcoin dot com slash enlist and become one of our you know, one of our promoters, and you know, just get more bitcoiners on board. Yeah, I mean to do that. I guess I send people. I just
send people. I don't know where. I don't even know what I'm sending. We gave you one. Let's see here. H don't we have slash gary for you? I don't know? Do we? We do have slash gary for you? Oh? I didn't even know. There you go. Yes, I didn't go to swan bitcoin dot com slash Gary. Okay, yeah, so you're listening to this bitcoin I didn't even know. Okay, we're gonna sell Yours doesn't have a face on it, but we're gonna fix that up right after this interview. I think we can. We can do
that if you're interested in well, I'll start using that. I usually use a short link because I can't ever remember, you know what. Affiliate links aren't stuff, But I can remember that one. I can remember. So you're when you whenever you send somebody there and you have a profile, they're gonna get a bonus. They're gonna get a sign a bonus, and then you get you know, as a promoter, if you're part of the Swan force, you're gonna get a percentage of their future purchases as well as an
initial referral fee, So definitely check that out. Swanforce dot com or swander cooin dot com, slash and list. We need to get swanforce dot com. But yeah, and I'm gonna and I'm gonna like, look at Gary because I didn't even know I was there. You go to slash Gary. We're gonna talk about getting you a bar after the show. Sounds good, Well, I appreciate you. Coming of time. Where can people follow you at? Where's the best place for him to follow? You? Find me
on Twitter? Skwp pronounced scoop skwp? What does that mean? What is that? Why do you have skwp? It's something that it's a name I chosen. I was fourteen years old and it's stuck since then. And it's actually a care are from an Isaac Asimov book, who was an alien scribe spoke, you know, hundreds of languages, which you know, I'm an linguistics nerd. So how's that pronounced? Then, linguistic nerd, let's pronounce scoop. Oh, that's pronounce scoop. Okay, that's kWp. Yeah,
and that's the pronunciation they gave them the book. So I don't know, Okay, well, I didn't know I figured I figured there was a way to read it if it was in the book. I mean, you know, so there was something if someone's name in the book. Yeah, Scoop. Okay, Scoop. So is that your nickname? Is that what everybody called you when you were a kid? No, just online, just my online handle, you know, from back from I R C Days and BBSs and whatnot. Okay, it's funny. Mine was p Dilley after the PI
backed in the dayson I hated pickles. You must really love pickles. Pickles. I don't know why, everybuddy, So well, I'm gonna let you go. I appreciate you coming on the show and just let you know you're officially now a Crypto cousin. So welcome, Welcome to the Badge. I hope you've enjoyed today's show, and I want to give a big thank you know all my cousins out there from listening and subscribe. If you haven't subscribed yet, just go to cryptocusins dot com and you'll see the links for all
the places you can subscribe. You want to take a second, leave a great review or four star rating even while you're at it, I also recommend you go to crypto podcast dot com and see all my other podcasts and websites for the world of bitcoin. There's a lot of no look at. Thanks for listening to the Cryptocusins podcast. Please share the show with your friends.
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