The Time One Of Our Co-Hosts Launched His Own Cryptocurrency

That's down from a record high of I think it was eighteen thousand dollars back in January, and of course lots of people scratching their heads trying to figure out what to make of the recent price movement, and lots of people trying to figure out still what to make of cryptocurrencies in general. So today we have a treat for you, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to be talking with two people who set up their own crypto currency, and one of them happens to be my co host,

Joe Wisenthal. Joe Say, Hi, Hi Tracy, thanks for having me on on launch today. Yes, a little bit of a role reversal for you there and your partner in this cryptocurrency endeavor is also a previous guest on The Odd Lots Podcast. It's Gwan Yang. He is a data scientist edit tech startup Hi Kwan Hi Tracy. So in that brief intro I mentioned that you had set up your own cryptocurrency. Do either of you want to sort of set the stage for when you did this and why you decided to do it, well on what year

was that it was in in Januar. It was a time when it felt like everyone was setting up there on cryptocurrency, and a lot of these were vanity currencies. There was do you recall Coigny a West, which didn't really gets actually launch. And as I remember the story, I was on vacation Arizona and you d n me and and said, there's all these people setting up their own cryptocurrency, and there are journalists doing it, and you know this is a big problem because you wanted to

be the first. Yeah, I don't remember. I remember like over over over New Year's vacation, around the end of beginning, I had this idea, is like, oh, I should launch a cryptocurrency. And then I thought, you know who would be really interested because he's really fun and he has a great sense of humor and a say yes to new projects. Jouis Devive would be guant. So I message Guan, I said, Guan, let's launch our own cryptocurrency, and we

did it. We did yeah, and I think we got ahead of at least the other other cryptocurrencies and in media at least go on. As soon as you said that Joe needed to be first, Uh, I started laughing, because that's the Joe that I recognize. Okay, So you make this decision to do it, but it can't be that easy, right You have to actually figure out how your cryptocurrency is going to work. So how did you go about doing that? So at the time in Janu

there were actually people trying to make it easier. I found this paid service and actually paid them amount of bitcoin that would probably be worth thousands today. Uh, I'm sorry. And it was like a cryptocurrency as a service, you know, you paid them some bitcoin, you put in the name of your cryptocurrency and the way they would work, and they would create it for you. It turned out that

it didn't work that well. So, you know, like like any good artist, I decided to steal something that already existed, and the most obvious choice was the scryptocurrency that was quite popular back then and it's still pretty popular I think, called dogecoin. That how you would pronounce it change. Yeah. Dog Coin is um based on a meme of of this particular sheep. But you knew that's kind of a

fox like Japanese dog breed. That's like the Instagram version of a Corgi becoming more coin in the US, by the way, and there was a particular Japanese sepa named Kabosa who became a meme. They were all these captions like wow and such something very something moon exactly. Yeah, And obviously when that happened in someone had to create

a cryptocurrency based on this poor dog. Well, and the other thing is you mentioned stealing, But like all these currencies, the code is open for the most part, so Bitcoin, light Coin, doge Coin, which I think is based on light Coin. All you have to do in a way is copy and paste the code and then change a few parameters, maybe change the name, and essentially they were everyone's kind of copy off of them. Yeah, and until a couple of years ago, all of these cryptocurrencies were

almost all basically copies of Bitcoin. Dots Coin is Space, and something called light Coin which changed some some key details, but the basic architecture, if you open up the software on your computer, they all sort of looked the same, and in the case of dos coin, changed a lot of the menus and the branding to be more mimi.

Of course, the Stalwart Books was a clone of doge coin, which was a clone of light Coin, which was a clone of Big Yeah, we would say a fork right, and Stalwart Bucks for those who don't know, Joe's handle on Twitter is of course the Stalwart So you named it after yourself, even though Guan was doing all the work. Of course, have you ever told this the origin story of that name? Oh? Yeah, I don't know. I feel like I might be an unreliable narrator on this. What's

your recollective of the origin story? I don't really know. You had a some kind of stock tips blog with this name or I don't. I don't know what the reasoning was. It sounded pretty goofy, like Stalwart Bucks, like maybe like some sort of like fake courtesy you would get in an arcade or something like that, like that you would only be able to use to play video games or something. I think, in retrospect, though it may have been our first error is not giving it more

august and serious sounding there. And I think that that right off the bat may have said a song the wrong the wrong fund. Yeah, you know, it was that like many startups, it was like that rushed to launch. Yeah, it's not always a good idea. Okay, so we have a little bit of foreshadowing there of what's to come. But you know, you mentioned star wart Bucks is a clone of doge coin, which is a clone of light coin.

And this is a question I always have about cryptocurrencies, which is that anyone can launch these things, and so in order to be successful you kind of have to focus on either first mover or advantage or adoption. So what was your big plan to get people on board with star war Books. Well, so this was actually the one idea that I think we were pretty legitimately ahead

of our time on. So obviously the trend in was initial coin offerings, and the premise would be that of many of these coin offerings that the token has some sort of redeemable value. So for example, some projects are we've seen like, oh, you could use this token to buy storage space on people's computer for data or something

like that. And we are the idea that every month, Guan and I would host a dinner among journalists or among people, and we would like get together and talk about economics or cryptocurrencies, and that to come to the dinner, you would have to pay install wart books and that that would sort of set a floor for the currency. So if it was really desirable to come to this dinner, then people would have to bid up for the currency

to get it. One of the first currencies I think to attempt to underpin the currency with real world value. You did have to pay for the food separately, right, So it didn't get the currency, didn't even get you the food. It just got you the ability to come to the dinner the honor of being there. Okay, so how many of these dinners did you actually hold and

what was adoption? Like, I think we've had about ten, ten or eleven so far over the course of we've had we've had I think we've had more than that. I bet we've had close to twenty and we still have them. But even starting from the first one, I think we were never actually able to convince people to

actually use the currency to come. So we insist that you and I think at the first dinner, maybe about half the people at the dinner actually paid the required fee in stalwart books and and lately it's been a lot less than that zero. Wait, so how did people actually go about acquiring stal Wart books? So there were basically two ways, and one is that you could buy Stalwart Bucks from someone who already had them, or you could get them and I would often just give them

out free just for for fun. And and like most cryptocurrencies, the other way that you could get them is by mining them by solving this this computational problem, this math problem basically, and the blockchain, the software would then award you some Stalwart bucks as as a reward for for spending some you know, some time on your computer and some electricity to solve this problem for us. And people were mining them, right, people, you were probably the biggest miner.

But what's the history of the mining. I think that you and I only control that ten or fifteen percent of all the star wart Bucks in existence, So I would say the vast majority of the star wart Bucks were mined by other people who who are not sitting in this room. Right, So how many star wart Bucks are in existence? Now? This is a good Yeah, there's a lot to this. So if you you know, if you if I check in the database, it's uh it's it's it's about ten or fifteen ten and fifteen billion.

But then also another error that we may have made in terms of serious adoption is didn't we make it so that they were mined and increments of one or like that each coin, each allocation was then from the moment you started, you were everyone the moment they acquired anything was a stalwart boxing billionaire. Do you want to explain that? Yes, so that that was the original goal, that you know, you would be mining increments of a billion or maybe ten or or a large multiple of

a billion. Unfortunately, the bitcoin Slash light Coin slash dosecoins software that we used, the field that they used to store how many coins you have was not big enough to both be mining and increments of a billion and

and have a reasonable amount in existence. Right, So this was like the really where the user experience in my recollection broke down because you would instantly when you would first get them, you would immediately get like a billion or actually several bills, but we would just label them as a billion stalwart bucks in the software, so when you looked at it, it would look it would say you know, and then we would wrote write b sp x, so was was getting those? Sorry, was mining those? And

increments of a billion? Was that supposed to be a gimmick just to get more people on board so that they can say that they're star wart Bucks billionaires. Yeah, I think you could say that that was a gimmick. Okay. And the amount of Stalwart Bucks in existence, I mean crypto proposed. It's often talk about how bitcoin is sort of self limiting, there's a limited supply um in existence and in essence the thing is kind of deflationary. Was that the same idea for Stalwart Books as well? No,

we decided not to limit the amount of listens. No, it just keeps going. But it's growing very slowly now and now it's a thousand per per mining. So it does as it does decline on a predictable schedule. It's just there's no hard limit, there's no limiting. It'll go on forever, unlike say Bitcoin, where eventually you're gonna keep mining, but there no new bitcoin will be created. At some point in fact, bitcoin will be destroyed as people lose

their their passwords and so forth. So do you have any idea of who else was mining or even buying

Stalwart Books? So? I think most of the miners sort of in in headcount, or people who knew about it from the finance Twitter community, like a few though, like on Twitter, who from crypto I think the early crypto Twitter from back then, I think we would see people tweeted about mining it from time to Yeah, but yeah, they're also people just sort of from the broader crypto community who already had a big mining rig and who um, I don't know if anyone really took it that seriously,

but who took their big mining rig and said, you know, for the next couple of hours, I'm just gonna mind stalwart bucks. Why not? I think at the time. These days, I don't think anyone who actually had any significant hash power or mining rig would waste their time on something

like that. But it's still in twenty In early it was still like mostly weirdos and hobbyists, and even judging by the seriousness with which we took this project, no one knew that crypto is going to be as big then as it is now obviously, so I think maybe it was a little bit more of a tolerance or interest and sort of quirky projects like this just for the fun of it, wouldn't you say, yeah, I think none of the cryptocurrencies that people talk about now are

or even mean based at all. That's really sad, right. So, one of the pervasive problems in many parts of crypto land right now is this idea of crypto whales, or people who own big proportions of a certain coin, notably Bitcoin for instance. Do you have any suspicions that there's someone out there who, given possibly the limited participation that

you had in stalt Wart Bucks. Forgive me for saying so, do you have any suspicion that there's one or two people out there who are holding a big chunk of the market besides Guan, Yeah, besides squad and yourself. I don't think there's anyone who's both a Stalwart Bucks whale and remembers that they have Stalwart Bucks. But didn't you say that one point you're surprised to see that there was one other, like pretty significant minor in this space. There was. Yeah. I don't think we ever figured out

who that was. It was traded at one point, there was an exchange the story with that, do you remember, I don't really know the backstory. We didn't have any contact with them back then. There were lots of crypto exchanges. Mount Cox was still in existence in the but there were tons of other exchanges that were trading all these weird cryptocurrencies like black coin and dochecoin, kitty coin and all these others. And the one that we got listed on was called cryptocode dot i N So cryptocin end

is India, but it's not necessarily in Indiana. Yeah, I don't think they're actually based in India. Yeah, but if I recall, the only it was traded on this one site, and the only pair was stalwart bucks to dogecoins exactly, so there was at one point on an exchange you could trade the doge sp x pair. And so to figure out how much is stalwart bucks we're actually worth, you had to figure out the stalwart bux doze exchange rate on just one exchange, and then the doge to

bitcoin exchange rate, and then of course the bitcoin to dollars. Yeah, and as I recall, the maximum market cap and dollars was about fifty dollars. Is that incredible that at one point in theory, all of the stllar bucks that existence on this very thinly traded exchange, And it's very tenduous exchange technically was worth about fifty dollars. You got, you guys created a fifty thou out of thin air. That's pretty amazing thin air and some electricity. Yeah, that's true.

So you mentioned price discovery there, Joe. So with without the exchange, would there have been any way to figure out what a star wart book is actually equivalent to in fiat currency or other cryptocurrency? I mean, I guess you could the only other way to do it if

you don't have exchanged b OTC trades. In other words, someone sends Gland a dollar for ten billion starward Bucks whatever, and those exist in cryptocracies today, those kind of trade, but there would be no transparency or real like market price discovery. Back back in there was actually a pretty

active bitcoin occ market. There were these internet chat rooms on on I r C where you could say, you know, I'm based in New York, I would like some bitcoin at this price, and then you would you you would either pay Pal them some money, which PayPal wasn't happy about. You might meet them at Starbucks and in exchange dollar bills and they would transfer some some bitcoin to you. I kind of feel like that's gonna be the future of that. Eventually the crypto market might go back to that.

It's totally plausible to me to see one day regulators be like, you know, we don't want banks to be dealing with cryptocurrency exchanges in the future for whatever reason, And it's totally plausible to me that the crypto market could once again return to people trading bitcoins for cash on Starbucks is again. Yeah, they even had this complicated reputation system where if you'd completed a successful transaction, there

was a bot would keep track of your reputation. And there were some scams on on that channel too, as I recall scams with crypto shocking. So, you know, you mentioned that you were acting a little bit like a sort of tech startup at the beginning. Were there any disagreements that you two had along the way in terms of how you were actually constructing or deploying stal Wart Books.

I don't think so. I think the biggest regret is rushing to market, because I think we got the whole project done in like three days, and I think that if we had waited even like six days, we could have made a lot of user experience tweaks that might not have saved stalwart Bucks, but at least given it a slightly better shot like we used. I think we just used the existing dogecoin wallet, and that had a lot of like the doge memes, like the dog pop

print on it and stuff like that. Probably that would have been a tweak. Rethinking about how conversion it would be to denominate everything in billions might have been helpful, So a few things like that. I don't think rushing out that fast was probably the best move for market adopted. And the person they were rushing to beat was Alex Hearn of The Guardian, and I don't think he the hern coin ever really took off he used, didn't he use the third party service? I don't remember. I think

he did. I think I we were so focused on beating other people, and of course our project went further than everyone else's because I think those were just like one day jokes. But if we had put any sort of serious planning into it, who knows what's gonna happen.

There was a coin that launched a couple of months later in Marchen called arts Coin from from the Arts Technical Fox, and they put in more than more of an effort to create tools for it to be useful to to a normal user, so they had instead of having to download this complicated software, you could have an account on a website sort of like a bank and store your art coin there. But it hasn't thrived, has it? Well?

That I guess that makes me feel good because it means no matter what we did, ore Is probably wasn't gonna thrive either. Yea. And what's the big takeaway that both of you learned about either cryptocurrencies or normal fiat currencies based off your experience. I'll be honest, I'm still kind of upset that we were like launching a currency

and are not insanely rich. Like I kind of feel like if we had taken it a little bit more seriously or a lot actually a lot more seriously, and you never know, like it could have been the next light cone coin or even like doge coin. I think at one point this year had like a total market cap like close to a billion dollars. So if you have like ten or five or even one percent of that, that is really an extraordinary amount of money. And does

coin has really outlift the doself? Yeah, it has so in retrospect, I think like you have to be pretty impressed with anyone who is into crypto and launching their own coins who is not now like incredibly loaded and necessarly weird to think about. Yeah, I would agree. I'm also very upset that Joe and I are not insanely rich.

I think one another sort of sad aspect of this is that the so the original concept was that all these dinners would be at Korean barbecue restaurants, and the one that we always went to, Kang sue On Street, is now closed in all of Korea. Town is you know, still thriving, but in a very different form with with

no more mom and pop restaurants. Yeah, but I will say on the plus side, you know, we continue to have these dinners and if there are any odd lots listeners who want to come to the next one, they should shoot me a message. We've met a lot of people get those dinners, and we've made like some good friends and we always have a good time, and we usually I think we have like like four or five a year something like that. We've probably had about four or five a year since early So something lasting and

good came out of the project. And one thing that I strongly feel about all cryptocurrencies is they are sort of like de facto social networks. They only have value because people decide they have value, and the ones that more people decide have value tend to accumulate more value. So we sort of got the social networking aspect right, just on an incredibly uh micro scale, right, You just need a bigger social network there, Joe, Yeah, exactly. Well,

that has really been a fascinating discussion. I'm going to bring Joe back in as a co host because I feel very uncomfortable doing it on my own up. But Kwan Yin, thank you so much for joining us again on the All Thoughts Podcasts. Really fun episode. Thank you for having me uh so show. I know you were just talking about this, but one thing that I probably am taking away from your experience is the importance of the crypto exchanges when it comes to price discovery for

crypto and sort of legitimizing these things. And to your point, I do think the exchanges are really really important to what we've seen over the past year or so when Bitcoin and other coins were really going gangbusters, reaching eighteen dollars, and I wonder what that market looks like if you don't have those functioning exchanges. Oh, I I think there's no question that the professionalization and security of the exchanges the idea that I mean, first of all, a lot

of these exchanges are most of them. At that time, you couldn't even buy bitcoin with fat currency, So the idea that you can even use dollars to buy cryptocurrency these days is kind of extraordinary. And I think a lot about like these exchanges as being the pipes in for money, and back then the pipes were incredibly thin, and these days the pipes in have gotten a lot thicker.

But of course we know from the efforts to have e t fs and to have futures and all other sort of cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin traded on more traditional exchanges. Within the community, there's still a huge effort to just make it as easy as buying anything else, and that's very important I think for sort of financial adoption. Yeah, and as much as people complain about the difficulty of buying or selling crypto using various services, it has come

a long way in a relatively short amount of time. Uh, Joe, I have one more question for you. Yeah, can I have a star Wart book? I'm gonna you'll have to give one from Guan because I never I have to admit that I had my wallet only on some computer at my old job, which I left like four years ago. So I am a I'm broke in Starbucks. I have zero stalwart Bucks. But Guan actually does still have his

functioning wallets. And I have a feeling that next time you're in town, maybe we'll have a star wart Bucks dinner and if you want to properly pay, he would be glad to give you some so that you can pay your entry faith. All right, another valuable lesson about keeping your wallets safe. Yeah, this has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway, and I'm Joe Wisenthal.

You could follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart and you should follow Guan on Twitter at Juan And you should follow our producer on Twitter to for Foreheads. He's at foreheads T, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesco Levie at Francesca Today. Thanks for listening. The year e