Tone Vays on Why Altcoins Are a Bad Investment

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“If you are intending to be around for the next 5 or 10 years, you need to really think about what you are going to say.”
— Tone Vays

Interview location: Skype
Interview date: Friday 11th Jan, 2019
Role: Bitcoin/Blockchain Researcher, Consultant Content Creator & Derivatives Trader

Trading is hard, and crypto trading is even harder. There are significant disagreements around the value of all cryptocurrencies, especially altcoins. While maximalists believe that Bitcoin is a valid long-term investment in sound money, they also think that all altcoins and tokens are worthless.

Tone Vays does not believe in trading altcoins as he thinks they are not viable long-term, as such you are only trading hype and market cycles. Tone also believes many of these altcoins and tokens are scams, where the creators have printed money.

In this interview, I talk about trading with Tone, why he only trades Bitcoin and the skills which new traders need to master. We also discuss his upcoming conference, Unconfiscatable, why he is putting it on and why Bitcoin only conferences are essential.

TIMESTAMPS

00.03.27: Intro and welcome
00.04.50: Tone’s background and why he is a Bitcoin maximalist
00.10.40: Why are altcoins are a bad investment
00.16.54: Does crypto need rules?
00.19.15: The altcoin addiction and why people won’t let go
00.24.20: Why nobody admits they are wrong?
00.28.31: Roger Ver, Bitcoin Cash and why people can’t change their mind
00.43.29: Tone’s Unconfiscatable conference
00.54.18: What is going on in the market
00.58.57: Why most people should not be trading
01.02.52: What skills do new traders need to master
01.06.36: What Tone wants to see for Bitcoin
01.10.16: How to follow the conference and how to stay in touch with Tone

 

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TRANSCRIPTION

Peter McCormack: Hi Tone, how you doing?

Tone Vays: I’m great. Thanks for having me on the show.

Peter McCormack: Hey, thanks for coming on. It’s been a long time coming. I’ve had you as a target for quite a while but I haven’t been able to find you or get that way of reaching out to you, and then over the last few weeks we’ve started talking and here we are. So, thanks for coming on. Also, you gave a mention to my show in your show the other day which was pretty cool, so thank you.

Tone Vays: Yeah. No, I’ve been hearing a lot of good things, What Bitcoin Did, slowly becoming one of the more popular audio podcasts. It’s great, congratulations, mean.

Peter McCormack: Thank you. Yeah, a lot of hard work. But how have you been, are you all right? I like the new look.

Tone Vays: Yeah. Everyone seems to really like the new look. I’m digging it as well. So, doing good, back to travelling. Took about two and a half weeks off, relatively speaking, took two and a half weeks off from travelling. Can’t remember the last time I didn’t do some kind of a video or an interview. So, other than that, Bitcoin doesn’t sleep so neither do we.

Peter McCormack: All right, man. Well, listen, look, we’ve got a lot to cover. Do you know what, funnily enough, Tone, I seem to know a lot about you yet know nothing about you. So, I kind of know everything about you in the Bitcoin world but I don’t know anything else about you. I don’t even know where your accent’s from. So, give me the background man, but not like something you might have told everyone. Just tell me where you’re from, what your childhood was like, what made you such a Bitcoin maximalist.

Tone Vays: Oh man. Yeah, that’s actually kind of a good thing, that a lot of people don’t know a lot of the details. I was born in Soviet Russia and my family emigrated over to the US when I was about 10 years old. I grew up in Brooklyn and all of these weird accents, half-Russian, half-Brooklyn, and went to American universities and ended up working on Wall Street eventually and now here we are.

Trading was always a passion of mine, even though that wasn’t what I did on Wall Street. On Wall Street, I was part of a team that was building risk models and I worked at several companies but in a similar style. And, yeah, eventually got into the whole libertarian aspect of things, the Austrian economics aspect of things, led me to Bitcoin. Heard about it from Max Geyser on RT and that led me into Bitcoin. I started to understand it more and more, had about, I don’t know …

I think the love of Altcoins lasted maybe about three months and then I realised how silly they are, maybe as long as six months. This was back in 2014 days back when Altcoins were becoming popular the first time. I realised how stupid that was and I’ve been trying to explain that ever since. That’s my main goal, to try and make this space more legitimate, make this space more stable going into the future. Because to be honest with, I’m sure we might get into it a little later, if we really want the crypto space to compete on a global scale, with the Dollar, with the Euro, with gold, you can’t have the crazy Doge people or the Ripple people, that’s just insanity.

Peter McCormack: So, do you feel like an American or a Russian or a hybrid of the two?

Tone Vays: I’m really stuck in the middle here, complete hybrid of the two. Also, politically I’m completely in … I have my own ways of doing pretty much everything all of my life. I was a decent athlete as well, played on some teams. Even right before I got into Bitcoin and it took over my life, I was still playing competitive volleyball on some like Division A club teams. Like with a lot of things, I’m not a very good follower but I wouldn’t call myself a great leader because I like to do my own thing and I don’t like people blindly following me either.

I always want people to make their own decisions. That’s why I was also not a great high school teacher but I’m not going to babysit you and baby you. Trading is a lot better for me because I teach you how to do it right but then it’s not my problem whether you do it right or not, you’re on your own. It’s another reason why I don’t like subscription services. I don’t like to hold people’s hand.

So, even with diet and exercise, I don’t like to follow. I like to read a bunch of stuff, I like to look at what the experts are doing, but I also know that nothing works for everyone and you have to make it your own. Everything has to be unique to you. I’ve lived that way without even realising it, that any time I try to follow something or someone it just doesn’t work. But if you’re smart, if you continue learning, you’ll find something that works for you. That’s what I currently do with my diet, that’s what I somewhat do with my exercise. I found things that work for me and it’s great and it’s the same philosophy I bring to my audience as well, try to find something that works for you but I’ll help you understand my side of it.

Peter McCormack: All right. So, tell me, have you got any friends back in Russia and know if they’re buying Bitcoin? ’Cause we’ve heard the Russians are buying the Bitcoin.

Tone Vays: I really don’t know. I try to stay away from insider information. For a couple of reasons. One is I don’t know if it’s accurate or not, I don’t know if it’s trusted or not. And I don’t trade on insider information for two reasons. One, it depends on the insider information. Some of it could be illegal and it’s just not worth it. But in crypto space there is no such thing as insider information being illegal so you can trade on it, but I don’t really have time to vet it, I don’t have time to trade on it. So, I try not to pay attention too much to insider information and I view it as noise. I try to analyse the public information and identify what it means for the intermediate and long-term future.

Peter McCormack: All right, cool. Well, listen, look, there’s a bunch of stuff I want to get into. I do want to talk about your conference. I’m coming out to it, looking very much forward to that. I do want to talk about the market and trading and Bitcoin. But let’s start with shit coins and Altcoins because you’re a big voice.

I guess myself, I feel like I’m becoming more of a voice because when I started this podcast, Tone, I was trading everything. And I’m not in a position where, and you’ll laugh ’cause it matches one of your tweets, I only hold Bitcoin and I’ve still got some Monero, right? And I hold a certain amount of interest in a theory which I’ll explain in a minute, but it’s very small and very limited.

But you’re like, “Everything outside of Bitcoin is a shit coin.” But is everything outside of Bitcoin a scam?

Tone Vays: No, absolutely not. It’s not a serious scam. Also, we have to define the word scam. Is it something that the creator of the idea or the project knows that it’s a scam? Or, is it something like we know it’s a scam and we’re trying to explain to the creator how he’s running a Ponzi but the creator just doesn’t see it. So, there are things like that, you’d be surprised. It like happens when you talk to children. I’m sure you have nieces and nephews where they’re like, “Hey, I’m gonna this, I have a really great way to print money in my printer. I just learned Photoshop.” If you have an eight or a nine-year-old and parents are giving them paper money and they go to a store, it doesn’t happen as often these days, “I’m gonna go to the store and spend that money.”

So, for example, if you have a seven or an eight-year-old child or you have a niece or a nephew. I don’t know if you do or not, it doesn’t matter.

Peter McCormack: Tone, I’ve got two kids. I’ve got a 14-year-old and an eight-year-old.

Tone Vays: An eight-year-old. So, imagine this situation. I’m sure your eight-year-old’s smart, so maybe about two years ago when your eight-year-old was six, and your eight-year-old’s like, “Dad, I learned Photoshop, I’m excellent, look what I’ve done.” And he showed you on a piece of paper that he printed out British Pounds. I’m assuming you’re in the UK. And he’s like, “I’m gonna go and spend these and I’m gonna buy whatever I want.” Imagine the conversation you have to have with that six-year-old. “It’s not actually the same money and even if you can buy something with it you’re scamming the other person because you just printed your own money.” He’s gonna look at you like, “Well, I don’t understand. I’m giving him a piece of paper and he’s giving me something.” Right?

So, this is the kind of thing you might have to explain someone that comes into this space. A lot of these people who are started these ICO projects, some of them barely graduated high school, assuming they’ve graduated high school. They think they know everything there is to know about securities and they think Wall Street’s a scam. And they’re like, “Well, how come this company gets to do whatever they like on Wall Street but I can’t sell this digital asset?”

It’s hard to explain to these people because I think some of them genuinely don’t understand that what they’re doing is scamming.

So, outside of those minor differences, there are some projects that aren’t a scam. I wouldn’t exactly call Litecoin a scam, I wouldn’t even call Monero a scam because I remember when these things were up and coming. I wasn’t around in 2011 when Litecoin. I think Monero launched in early 2013 or 2012. So, for them, there’s no scamminess to it, but they don’t have to be scammy for me to ignore them. I always compare these things to penny stocks. There are hundreds of Google competitors and they’re worth about five cents a share and I’m just not interested in those companies ’cause I know they’re not gonna take over Google. I don’t care if there are people trading these five-cent stocks that are claiming to be Google competitors to make more dollars. That’s great.

My problem is when that person that’s holding a five-cent price stock Google competitor and he is all over social media trying to convince the uneducated public that this is gonna be the Google killer and they need to invest in it. That’s where I start to draw the line.

So, while not every single Altcoin or ICO is a scam, I just don’t see any of them as a long-term, viable investment. And that’s a lot of things people don’t either want to understand about me or just don’t understand about me. There is about 5 to 10% of the crypto space that’s not a scam but I would not invest in it. If I had the time to trade it, would I trade Monero or Ethereum or Litecoin? Probably not for other reasons, because I like my regulated market, I like knowing that I can have all the money I want sitting in a brokerage account and it’s not at risk of getting hacked. I like knowing that there is regulation that isn’t gonna treat my Apple stock as a pump and dump and I like the fact that Apple stock as a market cap that prevents it from being a pump and dump.

So, I like to trade things that are more regulated and more liquidity. Trading illiquid assets are not my speciality.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but you trade Litecoin, right? And trading Litecoin is, and Monero has a similar risk to Bitcoin, they’re similar exchanges, right?

Tone Vays: Well, sure, but there’s a couple of differences there. It’s time. The biggest constraint is time. The only reason I even trade Bitcoin a little bit today is because I look at the price of Bitcoin every day. I can go a week or two weeks without looking at the price of Litecoin. So, if I am to start trading Litecoin, I would need to start looking at the price of Litecoin not only every day but even intra-day and I just don’t have that kind of time. Which is another reason why I’m currently almost not trading anything. Normally I will trade traditional markets as well during earnings season, which is one my specialities and I tend to get busy during that time sometimes and I end up missing an entire earning season and now I gotta wait three more months to attempt to do another trade.

Peter McCormack: All right. Also, you said that you like your regulated markets, so did you quite like the work by the Winklevoss this week, the Crypto Needs Rules? What did you make of that?

Tone Vays: So, that’s a very general, broad statement, and I don’t understand what that means. Crypto needs rules? It’s like saying humans need rules, right, but what does that mean? No one is gonna rule what you can and can’t do in the privacy of your home, you then kind of try but it’s not enforceable. So, there are some things that Bitcoin needs rules for, but not Bitcoin itself. There are some things that you do with Bitcoin that requires rules, trading is one of them.

Look, I’m sorry, but if you are running an exchange, that exchange needs to be regulated. I wanna make sure that the people running that exchange are not gonna run away with my money that is sitting at the exchange. I wanna make sure that they are running an honest order book. I wanna make sure that they’re not giving preferential treatment to certain traders over others. And I wanna make sure that everything there is legitimate so that I am trading on an even playing field with other traders.

It’s not different than when you go to a casino, you anticipate there to be some kind of regulation, that the games that you play at a casino are not rigged so that the guarantee that you are going to lose.

So, yeah, I’m all for that type of regulation. On the other hand, I’m very against KYC AML regulation. I think that a person should be able to put their money wherever they like. But the person that is soliciting that money from them needs to be even significantly more regulated than they are today.

Peter McCormack: All right man. I got over the Altcoin addiction. Took me a bit longer. It’s a combination of addiction and gambling, but like most addictions, it doesn’t go until you let it go. So, I got to the point where I was doing more and more interviews, learning more about Bitcoin and just realising there was little long-term value in these things. But it was only at the point I sold the lot and said, “I’m done,” I let it go, then I had the clarity. Do you feel like that’s a big problem for a lot of people, they just can’t let go of these Altcoins?

Tone Vays: You know what it is? I don’t think it took you longer. How long did it take you after you decided to start your podcast and becoming a public personality that people started listening to?

Peter McCormack: D’you know what I reckon-

Tone Vays: Because I have a feeling the main difference between you and I is that I became a public personality sooner after I got into the crypto space.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I don’t even like that public personality thing. It makes me feel a little bit awkward because none of this was by design, it’s just it has happened. But yeah, I guess I started to feel more responsible for the things I say. I put out a tweet once saying I think-

Tone Vays: Exactly, that’s the difference.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so what happening was, I can’t remember the exact time, maybe it was four or five months, somebody liked a tweet and I saw it and I was like, “God, did I say that? ’Cause I don’t believe that anymore.” So, what happened was I deleted all my tweets, I got rid of the whole history ’cause I tried to edit them and it just takes so long when you’ve sent thousands.

So, I just got rid of the fucking lot and said, “I’m done.” Then I started to feel a bit more responsible for what I was saying, you know, “Do I actually believe this?” Then what’s happened is like, there’s no specific one point but over time I’ve gradually felt the gravity of Bitcoin and gradually started surrounding myself with people who I trust the opinion of.

Like I say, the final straw was just selling them all off. I knew what I believed before I sold them off but I was holding onto them thinking, “Oh, maybe they’ll go up.” In the end, I was like, “This is done.” So, Tone, yeah, I just sold the lot and let it go. But I feel like a lot of people just can’t let them go.

Tone Vays: Yeah. No, a lot of it has to do with personality. Once people started paying attention more to you and you start interacting with some of these people and you realise what happens. This is where people like me have to be extra careful because the one thing everyone keeps asking is the price of Bitcoin. “Where is the price of Bitcoin going?” I have to answer that very, very responsibly.

The one thing that I will not do is have people hold any kind of a coin ’cause I know how much backlash I get just from simply trying to predict the price of Bitcoin that I find investment grade that I expect to go up over time. So, I can only imagine almost everybody else that at one point or another were recommending an Ethereum and a Litecoin, a Monero, or something that no longer exists. And these people literally have to leave the space. So many YouTubers have disappeared. Maybe they’ll be back if the old Altcoins come back, but if the Altcoins don’t come back they’re probably not gonna reappear, right?

I didn’t wanna take that chance. I did not ever wanna go back and delete my Twitter history, I didn’t wanna have to go edit everything. Everything I’ve ever done, I think there have only been one or two videos that I’ve taken. Probably one of them was immediately after I live-streamed a video because it was just inappropriate so I took that down. I’m not gonna talk about what it is but oh man, and someone else was live-recording it while I was doing it and the video still ended up somewhere else on the Internet, but yeah, I’m not gonna talk about what it is.

I think another one or two I took down because I interviewed some people and their legal team didn’t like one or two things, but being busy and lazy I didn’t wanna edit so I just, “You know what, I’ll just take it down.”

Other than that I try not to do that. So, I have to think way into the future. I have to think multiple years into the future, if not a decade because I want what I say to permanently be there on the Internet and not have to regret it. And when you realise that if you are intending to be around for the next five or 10 years, you really have to think about what you’re going to say and they have to last long-term. I think more people, once they get into this public space, they either realise how wrong they are and they disappear or they wise-up and they turn Bitcoin maximalist.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. It’s funny you should say that as well. I think it was maybe Dan Held who said it to me. He was like, “Listen, in four, five, six years when all this junk’s gone away and there’s only Bitcoin left, the work you’ve done over those five or six years is gonna become really important and it’s gonna help you in your future career by having the right opinion now.” ’Cause there is a load of podcasters out there at the moment, and that kind of really stuck with me.

Tone Vays: Yeah. No, that was great. I met Dan Held long ago just as he designed the app, one of the first Bitcoin apps to track the price of Bitcoin. I think it got bought by somebody, I already forgot. But yeah, Dan did good work back then.

Peter McCormack: I also think there’s something else that’s missing. It’s not happened yet, well, I think maybe it’s happened once, Stablecoin did it recently, but nobody’s come out and said, “Yeah, d’you know what? I was wrong.” Could you imagine a Charlie Lee coming out and saying, “D’you know what? I was wrong.”

Tone Vays: That’s the one, that’s the one. That’s the one I’m waiting for. Charlie had a chance and he seems to be doubling-down. Charlie was the one that could have said … I always give Charlie a pass. I think he missed it, I think he had his chance probably last year where he said, “Hey guys, I’m realising that Litecoin will not have a viable future. There’s really no need for Litecoin to exist. Back when I invented it, we all thought differently.” I would have given him pass, even I thought Litecoin had a viable future back then, back in 2013/2014, but eventually, it doesn’t. How long do you hold onto these things? You’re right, no one has, almost no one has come out and said that they made a mistake and they were wrong.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I think the thing with Charlie is that one of the most difficult things is if he did come out and say that there’s gonna be a whole bunch of people who are gonna say, “Well, you created this and then you promoted it and then you sold the top and you’ve made all your money and now you’re actually killing it by saying it’s got no future.” So, he has a whole bunch of profile and credibility risk by doing that, but I would just love someone to do it.

Tone Vays: I have one example actually. I don’t know my interview with Ronnie Moas?

Peter McCormack: No.

Tone Vays: So, Ronnie came into the space as a Wall Street analysts predicting stocks, came and learned about Bitcoin in June of 2017. By July and August of 2017 he’s putting out reports on crypto coins, which is way too early, and immediately one of these shit coins contacted him, called DIG, wanted him to write a full report for their internal use, which he did. He then sat on this report for a while as the price of that DIG Coin went up and they paid him in some DIG Coin.

Then he started promoting DIG because he actually thought it was a viable coin. Then it went up for a little bit, it pumped all the way to 28 cents and it’s currently at a half a cent. And he has a lot of paid subscribers. So, you can imagine the backlash when you recommend a token trading at 20-plus cents, it pumps to 28 but then falls to sub-penny. We’re talking about a 99.5% drop, so gigantic.

Now, he’s on this crusade DIG as a scam, which I told him back in 2017 that it was without even looking at it because I’ve seen enough of these things and I knew how this would end.

This is the unfortunate part, he’s now dealing with two problems. One, DIG is actually suing him that they’re not a scam. I don’t know how they’re gonna pull that off. A lot of his subscribers are very mad at him and potentially trying to sue him for recommending this thing that fell 99% in value. And all of the people that are still holding onto DIG, that believe that it is a very good token, are mad at him for trying to take down DIG by going to the FBI and other sources.

So, admitting that you’re wrong is not necessarily ideal for your health and a financial career either. There is no good thing. The smartest thing to do is to just be smart before you say something publicly.

Peter McCormack: Okay. Before we move onto your conference, I do wanna talk about two people with you. You’ve probably got quite different opinions on both of them. But first I wanna talk to you about Roger. I went out earlier in the year and interviewed Roger, and I will interview again. I got a lot of crap for it and I know you’ve had your run-ins with him. Tell me about this tweet where you did the 10 most influencers in 2018 and you’ve got Roger in the list. I can’t understand if it was a joke or serious.

Tone Vays: No, it was serious. ’Cause we all saw that CoinDesk list of most influential of 2018 and it was just ridiculous. So, I decided to look ahead and I wanted to pick out who do I expect to be most influential in 2019, for next year. Look, I have a huge bias towards Bitcoin and I do believe that Bitcoin will start to separate away from Altcoins in 2019. But what if I’m off by a year or what if I’m off by two years?

My trends, ideas, I’m very early. My first trading portfolio, when I was a trader for the first time, I started trading in 2005 and in mid 2006 I think or early 2006 I realised that there was a housing bubble and I started shorting real estate and home-builders and I ended up running out of money and blowing up the portfolio in early 2007. And I said, “Well, now I have to go get a job,” and that job was at Bear Stearns that nine months later went down because of the housing bubble. Irony really has no bounds.

Look, I wanted to pick the most influential person in the world of Altcoins because he is pretty influential. I don’t have to agree with him, but he still owns bitcoin.com. We also suspect he owns the Bitcoin Twitter handle. He still has a lot of money, sponsoring a lot of conferences and he’s pretty influential. I’m starting to slowly step away from the Altcoin ICO conference scene. They are starting to die down. I like going there because I felt like someone had to stand on stage and talk about how bad that stuff is, and if a conference sponsored by a bunch of ICOs and scams is gonna put me on stage without the ability to censor what I have to say, and because I don’t take any money from them they can’t exactly tell me what to say or what not to say. Once they invite me on stage I’m free to say whatever.

So, I felt that it was at least one Bitcoin maximalist’s duty to go to these events and try to educate people not to invest in any of the sponsors that are all over the venue. But those are starting to cut back and I think Roger is still at the forefront of that. So, the only reason why he’s there is because I think that he is the most influential person in the crypto space that’s not a Bitcoiner, but because Bitcoin will ultimately prevail over all the others everybody decides Roger was not on the side of Bitcoin. Other than I think I have the SCC and one of them, and Bakkt’s that’s gonna come out. I don’t think Bark is gonna be that big a deal, the exchange out of New York, but I think they’re relevant and I think the hype around them is very relevant. So, I think they are an influencer in the space.

Peter McCormack: See, based on the history of, and I looked at one of your tweets where you listed all previous coins and scams, and they all die in the end, right? So, based on history there’s a very good chance at some point in the next one, two, three, maybe five years, Bitcoin cash will fundamentally die. There will be no usage, the mining will die off, maybe we’ll get attacked, who knows. But at some point, there’s a good chance that it will die. And what would be interesting, or I’m intrigued to see is, what Roger’s response will be at that point. Will he keep fighting? Will he go down with his ship? Or will he turn round one point and say, like we talked about Charlie, and say, “Look, I got this wrong.” I’m really intrigued to see how that plays out.

Tone Vays: I think he will. I think he will. I think Roger is too much into this space. But, again, the longer the time goes the harder it is. The longer you don’t admit the mistake, the harder it’s going to be. We know this with our lives as well. The longer you defend the wrong position, the harder it is for you to admit you’ve made a mistake. The sooner you do it, the better.

I think Roger will eventually do it and here’s why; because when I had my debate with Roger he pretty much admitted that he’s not committed to Bitcoin cash. He’s willing to switch to a better alternative. The problem is I don’t think there will be a better alternative. So right now he likes Dash, he may or may not like Monero but I know he’s a big fan of Dash, maybe it’ll be another Altcoin. But Bitcoin cash is one of the best alternatives to Bitcoin because it still has Bitcoin’s fundamental. It has Bitcoin’s initial layer which is more stable than most of the other shit coins, Altcoins.

So, the coin cash is a top-10 coin. It’s legitimately in the top-10. Certainly, Ripple isn’t. So, he’s already on one of the best alternatives and when that alternative fails I just don’t see another alternative for him to cling to. The only option he will have is to come back to Bitcoin if he still believes in censorship-resistant, unconfiscatable, government-uncontrollable value transfer. What I threw out there, I’ve been meaning to tweet this out where people are like, “Will you welcome Roger back to Bitcoin?” Well, the beauty is-

Peter McCormack: You don’t have to.

Tone Vays: Bitcoin doesn’t have to. We’re free to come in and out of Bitcoin as you like but obviously, the question was geared towards the people that remained loyal to Bitcoin, which is the majority of the people. Would the people welcome Roger back to Bitcoin? And the majority of these polls always say no. It comes in like 75-, 80%, “No, we would not welcome Roger back to Bitcoin.”

I always wanted to tweet out my poll where I would add a little disclaimer, “Would you welcome Roger back to Bitcoin if he donates bitcoin.com and the Bitcoin Twitter handle to other Bitcoin community?” In some way or form.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I would hope he would do it anyway, like he would realise that’s the right thing to do. I don’t know, I saw those polls and I thought, “He doesn’t matter, he can come back if he wants, that’s the beauty of it.” And I think there’s a lot of people who just, yeah, fundamentally can’t stand the guy anymore. I’ve met him and I’ve had conversations that are non-Bitcoin with him. We’ve discussed a lot of things to do with say Ross Ulbricht. And there’s a lot I like about him. I find him off-camera very different from the guy you see on-camera.

The other person I wanted to talk to you about, I’ve noticed you tweet a lot, and it’s someone I’ve come to really appreciate a lot over the last six months is Luke Dash Junior. You’re a big fan, right?

Tone Vays: I’m a fan. I’m a fan of Luke Dash Junior because he is one of the smartest guys in the world, but certainly in Bitcoin or in crypto space. He really is one of the smarter guys in the crypto space. When you talk to him you realise that he thinks at a different level. Sometimes it’s hard to talk to him because his brain processes information differently. Even when other developers, I heard stories from other developers, like sitting with Adam Bach and listening to Adam Bach talk about Luke Dash Jr, there are just things that Luke Dash Jr, in a roomful of smart developers there are things that Luke Dash Jr assumes is common sense and other people are like, “No, Luke, can you please explain.”

He really is one of those people that can look at something and it’s totally obvious to him, that other people completely miss. Other very, very smart people. Luke Dash Jr was the guy that to him it was very simple to convert Segwit into a soft fork versus a hard folk when even the smartest people that came up with Segwit didn’t see a path for that. And Luke Dash was like, “Oh, this is not hard, this is simple. Here you go.”

Understanding Luke Dash Junior, or the whole dynamic between developers and innovation in general, is that it’s not always the smartest person in the room that has that little breakthrough, that’s gonna be able to take that breakthrough further. And this is the problem that I have with people that are godifying Satoshi. Satoshi created proof of work, he solved the double-spend problem. It doesn’t mean that Satoshi is the right person to solve every single computer problem known to man going forward. And guys like Luke Dash and guys like Greg Maxwell and guys like Peter Wuille are probably much better suited to make that code more stable and more efficient. And that’s where we’ve been going.

And Luke Dash is one of those people, he’s probably one of the top-10 brightest minds programming on Bitcoin, probably even in the top five. And his opinion matters. His opinion could be out there sometimes, he wants to make the block significantly smaller in size, he wanted to do that proof of work chase to destroy Bitmain but thank God didn’t do that because Bitmain seems to have destroyed themselves just fine. Which is what we were trying to explain to Luke because he saw it more black and white. And some people are very good at some things, not necessarily ideal for others. This is where you gotta take multiple opinions in line.

I was with Luke on the user-activated soft fork and not with Greg Maxwell who didn’t really like the idea of a user-activated soft fork because he saw it as a little bit dangerous. I sided with Luke on that one. Meanwhile, in the small block debate, or the normal block versus smaller block and we need to do a proof of work change to get rid of Bitmain, I didn’t side with Luke, I sided with the other core developers. So, you just gotta think it through, but you have to make your decisions based on the smart people in the right room, not based on some crazy people you never heard of that aren’t even in that room.

That’s how Altcoins come about. Most Altcoins come about because someone proposes an idea to the Bitcoin core developers, they glance at that idea and they go, “No, this is crazy, this is not gonna work, it has all these problems,” and the person says, “Well, I’ll prove you wrong, I’m gonna go ahead and do it on my own.” This is how we get Zcash, this is how we get Bcash, this is how we get a lot of these coins. It’s how we get Decred, this is how we get a lot of the Altcoins where a developer just doesn’t wanna work within the consensus rules, doesn’t wanna listen to his peers and they wanna go off on their own and create a failed project. That’s fine, and then it’s just hard for that person to make a mistake and you lose a somewhat component person that could have helped going forward but instead decided to go off on his own.

I sent out one of these tweets as well where I said, “Hey, Luke Dash Junior has some of these crazy ideas, but here’s what he’s not gonna do, he’s not gonna take those ideas and create an Altcoin with it. He’s gonna just work within the rules and fight for them or help in other ways.”

Peter McCormack: Yeah. All right, man. Well, listen look, that was my intro and we’ve done 40 minutes. I knew this would happen. Okay, listen, I wanna talk to you about your conference.

Tone Vays: Sure.

Peter McCormack: For a couple of reasons. I’m coming and I can’t wait. I think the line-up is pretty epic. I’m hoping to get a few interviews out there. I’m looking forward to the poker. I’m just looking forward to all of it. So, I’ve got a few questions about it and especially as you’re probably somebody who’s probably been to the most conferences, you might have been to more conferences than anyone else potentially, you’re definitely gonna be up there. So, tell me why you decided you wanna do your own conference and give yourself your own stress with that.

Tone Vays: Yeah, clearly I don’t have enough to do and clearly I don’t have enough stress. I just wanted people that I like and respect to get together in one room and I just wanted a little bit more control over that room. I wanted to make the speaker line-up. I wanted to have a final say on the speakers and I wanted to put the right people on stage. And I want this documented. I want this documented for the future. And every single one of the speakers has been hand-selected by me. There was probably another 20 I would have loved to speak at that conference, but it’s the first one and in the future, I’m hoping I can do this as an annual thing and make it fun, make it interesting.

We have a couple of Bitcoin similar conferences to this one. The Honey Badger conference in Riga is very good. The Hackers’ Congress in Prague. It’s not exactly a Bitcoin conference, it’s a little more general, but that’s a good conference. We used to have the Scaling Bitcoin conference, that kind of fragmented and that one was a little more technical. And now we have the Breaking and Building on Bitcoin conferences which are also Bitcoin-related. There’s a conference out in Texas now called Bit Block Boom that is very similar to what I’m doing.

Because of these Altcoins fests, it was just too many of them. And I wanna focus a little more on the Bitcoin side and in the future, we’re hoping that some government officials will come to understand it. I’m not expecting Bitcoin and the Bitcoin ecosystem to necessarily cooperate with the government, but I am expecting the government to properly understand it. My hope for the people of the crypto space is the same for all people, to properly understand Bitcoin. And I just wanted to put the right people on stage to do that, to understand Bitcoin.

The poker tournament is just more for fun. All my years in Bitcoin I see all of these Bitcoin people that claim they’re great poker players, well, you know what, let’s find out. Let’s find out who’s really good. We got the tournament going, it’s a hundred people, point-one Bitcoin buy-in, professionally organised, professional dealers, tables, the works. And it’s gonna only take about four hours, we’ll narrow down the hundred people to the last one standing at the final table.

Peter McCormack: What, is it gonna be one winner, or are you gonna have final table winners?

Tone Vays: Well, the final table will split the winnings, in a scalable way. I’m trying to make sure the 10th person gets their money back at point-one and then you scale it up to the front person. So, yeah, it is gonna go down to the wire, to the last person. And it’ll be fun, Doug Polke is gonna play. We have at least one fully-professional player. I think there’s a couple more that snuck in there that don’t really wanna be public about it.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, look, if I come up against Doug Polk, I’ve already decided I’m gonna play each hand against him blind because I don’t wanna try and outthink him. So, I think my best chance is just to make it a gamble against him, so … Okay, so-

Tone Vays: I can’t think to sit at … I think the only way me and Doug Polke are gonna be at the same table is if we both make the final table. Because I’m trying to spread this, and it’s not even because I wanna avoid it, it’s because I wanna spread the celebrities around so that the people that are paying to play in the game also have fun sitting with people that they recognise. So, that’s the main purpose of it, but I would love to play against him. Hopefully, I’ll make the final table with-

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I hope I will. I used to play a lot of poker when I was younger, online, but I haven’t it for a while but you don’t forget the rules. So, I’m looking forward to it. Okay, look, back to the conference. So, tell me, are you just doing this yourself or have you got an experienced conference organiser helping you, or are you just figuring this out?

Tone Vays: Oh God no, we’re figuring it out. It’s basically a team of four people. It’s myself, it’s my web developer that designed the website, my graphic designer that designed all of the logos and all of my thumbnails, he’s helping out with registrations but he’s on the other side of the world. And most of the work is done by my manager, the guy that helps me, manages my email. He’s a great guy. I try not to be public so I try not to say his name, he’s not public in the space.

And understand Bitcoin really well and he organises my venues as I travel around the world, helps me with my schedule, my speaker schedule, tells me to go eff myself when I say or do something stupid, and is a lot of help. He’s the one that’s working with the venue, working with the food catering, organising everything, getting the insurance, getting the professional dealers, working, basically organising the whole thing on the ground. And we’ll have a few volunteers helping us at the venue itself.

This is one of the reasons why I wanted to keep it small. The maximum ticket sales I was gonna sell was gonna be, I was gonna sell 300 tickets because the room only fits 400 people. So figure speakers, press like yourself, and some of the others, we sold about 150 tickets so far. We’re probably gone about 50 people on press passes or something like that and some close friends of ours. And the rest is speakers. It’s great. It’s gonna be nice and small, hopefully manageable. And we’ll see how we scale.

We’re trying to put together a live stream, we have a couple of product sponsors. Shout out to Cold Card, Open Dime, Hodl hats. I bought a bunch of Saifedean’s books, The Bitcoin Standard, gonna give people away. Huge shout out to the VIPs that paid a little extra, we’re gonna give you nice gift bags with the stuff I just mentioned. Yeah, lots of people sent in their designed tee shirts and stuff like that.

So, it really is a grassroots movement and we’ll see what happens going into next year.

Peter McCormack: I think it looks great. I’ll give it a massive shout out, I’ll push it at the start of this show when it goes out and, you know what, I’ll probably even push it on Tuesday’s show when that goes out ’cause I think it looks like a very cool and different conference. Yeah, and obviously I appreciate the fact that you’ve given me a pass to come ’cause I think it looks cool. I just think it looks like a really cool event.

I was gonna ask you one thing, and I know that you’ve got something to add, but how long has this been in the planning and during it what have you learned that you didn’t expect? What’s been the things you’re like, “Oh shit, I never even thought about that.”

Tone Vays: Okay. So, I kind of wanted to do it probably a year before, maybe a year earlier I wanted to do it. Like when Bitcoin was reaching the high prices we all went, “Oh, I can easily afford this, even if it flops.” So, I wanted to do it a year earlier.

So, a couple of things. It took a lot longer to launch the website than expected, which makes sense. The other thing I learned is it’s really hard, I don’t know how they do it, it’s really hard to get good speakers because everyone harasses good speakers. It’s amazing, the other day my channel I debated the Book, The Bitcoin Standard, with a couple of people. And everyone in the comments was like, “Oh, why didn’t you just get Saifedean?” My answer to that was, “Why don’t I just get Donald Trump on my YouTube channel to talk about the economy?” People think it’s so easy. People think it’s so easy to get whoever you like at a time that you like and they will just cater to you, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Tone Vays: So-

Peter McCormack: I mean, I know that, right? Like, listen, Tone, I’m doing a twice-weekly show and I’ve managed to maintain a very high standard of guest but you’ve got to constantly maintain that. Especially when I first started, the first few months every 10 to 15 people I asked I got one yes. I’m now getting to the point where most people, I would say most people will say yes and they will give me a time in the future. But it’s hard, it’s a hustle.

Tone Vays: Right. I knew that was gonna be a little … I thought I could have an easier time getting developers, and this transitions really well to what I was gonna say. So, the main focus of my conference, I wanted to make it more developer-focused and I wanted to make it less technical development but more layman’s development. Hey, I wanna get maybe two full panels of Bitcoin developers, like a Luke Dash Junior and a Gregory Maxwell and a couple of people from Blockstream because Maxwell isn’t there anymore, and get some Lightning people on there to talk about what’s going on, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t get the developers. So, now it became a little more financially-focused than the developer-focused.

So, now we’re working on another one, what my original vision. Already have bought the domain the other day, talking to Adam Bach and Giacomo Zucco. Now, I’m not gonna give too many details. It’s gonna come out sooner than later, but we’re trying to do something in Europe. Now, if I can get Adam Bach and some of the other people involved in the conference then we can do it. And that’s gonna be a little more explaining Bitcoin development and the technology of Bitcoin to the non-developer.

So, like a cross between scaling Bitcoin and the Honey Badger conference, or a cross between scaling Bitcoin and my conference, where we explain this kind of stuff to a layman person. That’s what I want. I want people to understand Bitcoin and to cut out all of this Altcoin nonsense.

I also know that me travelling around the world eventually is gonna come to an end, so I’m putting in the seeds now so that people can come to see me two, three times a year, en masse, as opposed to me going around 30 times a year to see them.

Peter McCormack: All right, man. Well, listen, look, I wanna talk a bit about the market as well and trading, ’cause that’s your gig, that’s been your gig for a long time. That’s where I first became aware of you. I’ve retired as a trader ’cause I’ve realised I’m terrible at it and I’m better at making podcasts. But I’ve been aware of your stuff and you do the courses.

Based on your experience, you’ve been in Bitcoin a while but you’ve traded a while, what’s gonna on at the moment, what do you make of the market? I don’t wanna any price predictions, but what do you generally make of the market?

Tone Vays: I still think the market is overall in a bearish posture, so I continue to expect lower prices sometime this year. It’s really hard to predict when the lower prices are gonna come and I’ve been trying to anticipate a bump in the prices before going lower. But the price action over the last few days, here and early to mid-January, is already pushing prices lower.

It’s not even because I think Bitcoin is overvalued. Personally, I think Bitcoin is slightly undervalued and I think the price of Bitcoin right now is great. I think Bitcoin is fairly valued at approximately $5,000. But because we went up all the way to 20 for no reason at all, any time you overshoot you generally undershoot. The challenge is gonna be finding that bottom in price. I’m loving the technological improvements under the hood of Bitcoin. I think it’s never been stronger.

Are they investing in Bitcoin for speculation, or are they investing in Bitcoin because they actually believe in Bitcoin as the future of value transfer? If it’s the latter then any time is good to start putting some money into Bitcoin at these prices below 5,000. If you actually want to time the market or think you have the ability to time the market, I think there is time to wait. So, it depends on why you’re getting in and what you’re doing but I do think that there’s going to be more pain. I think that the market is very illiquid and I think that once again our exchanges are potentially doing shady things and people can profit by dumping the price of Bitcoin and picking it up on the cheap.

I said a while ago when the price of Bitcoin was high, “Man, if you have a few hundred million dollars looking to go into Bitcoin, spend 50 million now, buy a bunch of Bitcoin, use most of it to dump on the exchanges and crash the price, use the rest of the money to buy up on the cheap.” People need to realise that, that people with bigger money can move the table, and just like a poker player with a bigger chip stack, can push people around.

The same thing happens here. I do think prices will bottom sometime in 2019 and we’ll start a new uptrend because I think the fundamentals of Bitcoin are just too strong. I can’t say this about any other coin beside Bitcoin but I’m very confident in saying that about Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: How much of your trading work is fundamental, how much is technical, and then how much of it just comes down to gut instinct?

Tone Vays: Back in the day I had a gut instinct. Lately, I’m trying to take gut instinct out of it. My fundamental work has been done, it was completed years ago. People seem to confuse the fundamentals with news events. I’m done with my fundamental work, Bitcoin is investment grade and everything else isn’t. Now that you’ve identified which assets are tradable for the intermediate and long-term and which aren’t, at which point you focus on the technicals.

Trying to time the price of Bitcoin based on code changes of Bitcoin is probably not a good idea unless you have internal knowledge of them. And like we saw with Segwit, crazy things can happen. I just know that at this point I’m not interested in investing in any Altcoins because fundamentally they fail. Bitcoin passes fundamentally, so the only way to time it at this point is to either dollar-cost average for the long-term or use technicals to try and pick a reasonable time to buy and a reasonable time to sell.

Peter McCormack: Do you think most people really shouldn’t be trading though? I remember the very first podcast I interviewed, do you know Luke Martin, Venture Coinist?

Tone Vays: I know of him from Twitter but I believe he’s coming to play poker as well.

Peter McCormack: He is coming, he is coming. He’s a great guy. He said in my very first interview, “Most people should not be trading this stuff. They want to ’cause they wanna make money but most people shouldn’t. It’s too hard. Most people should just buy and sit on it and hold it for a number of years.” How do you feel about that?

Tone Vays: He’s correct. Trading for a living is no different than playing poker for a living. Those that take the time, learn, continue to study, continue to grow, learn patience, understand statistics, did a lot of work, a lot of homework, and most importantly survived the early days of the career can continue to have success until they get bored or find something they would rather do or find something more lucrative and more profitable.

But when a person says, “Hey, I wanna be a trader,” I’m like, “Well, do you wanna be a professional poker player?” And a lot of people are but the majority aren’t. But a lot of people tried and most people realised that it’s really not for them. Eventually, same thing here. We’re seeing it disproportionately. We’re looking at it in the crypto space that dropped the barrier to entry to becoming a trader. You no longer needed a certain amount of money, you no longer needed to fill out any paperwork, and you no longer need any kind of a geographical restriction and you no longer have an age restriction. So, this huge influx of new traders showed up and eventually, it will go away.

In some of my presentations, I equate it to the large number of new traders that came on the scene in the late 1990s with the dot-com bubble. And one of the main reasons why so many new traders came on the scene in the dot-com bubble was because of dotcom brokers. Because you can now be a trader from the comfort of your own home with very minimal requirements. You still needed to have a bank account, you still needed to be of 18 years old, you still needed to have X amount of money unless you wanted to trade penny stocks.

I remember I was, I’m gonna age myself here, I was still in my university in the late 90s when I was 19 years old and one of my dorm mates borrowed a thousand dollars from his brother and was trading penny stocks from the dorm. If we were in college three or four years later this would not have been happening. But he had access of the Internet, because of E-Trade and Ameritrade and because he was 18 and because he borrowed a thousand bucks, he was able to do it.

The same barriers that would have prevented him from trading in 1995, those barriers were gone and he was able to trade in 1998.

Now, that generation went through the housing bubble, went through the dot com bubble and it levelled itself out where most people were no longer traders. And now we’re just having a new influx of people and when the majority of this crypto trading influx of people loses their shirts we’re gonna go back to what it was before.

Peter McCormack: See, I missed the end ’cause I’m trying to do the math. So, I’m putting you at near 50.

Tone Vays: Oh God no, drop 10.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you’re 40. Hold on, so in the late 90s, you were 19. Oh the late 90s, yeah, yeah. You’re 40?

Tone Vays: Not yet. I’m still in my 30s.

Peter McCormack: You’re younger than me man.

Tone Vays: Oh, you look better than me. Look at the hair difference.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t know man, recently Tone you’ve become a sex-symbol with this new look.

Tone Vays: The look’s great. Let’s find out how far it takes me in Vegas.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, we’ll grab a drink there. Okay, last couple of questions. I’ve got three things to ask you. So, firstly, still on the trading. If someone’s listened to this and they wanna become a trader and they’re decided they’re gonna do it, what are the key skills they need to master, what are the things they need to focus their attention on?

Tone Vays: I’m big on technical analysis. You have to learn it. If you’re gonna be a trader, take technical analysis seriously. I believe that it helps. Other than that, you gotta do your research on fundamental analysis to invest in things. The other thing is somebody wants to be a trader, what are you gonna trade? There are lots of things you can trade, you can trade currencies, you can trade stocks, you can trade futures, commodities, you can trade the crypto space. There are lots of things you can trade and there are lots of timeframes you can trade. Some people are a longer-term trader, some people like to be day traders. There are all these variations between assets and trading styles. The number of combinations is almost infinite.

I advise people to find something that works for them. If you can survive your first couple of years of trading, find something that works, find something you’re comfortable with and stick with that and learn. There are two analogies that I make to becoming a professional trader, either poker players or race car drivers. If you just go out onto a track, you’re probably going to die.

You have to learn from people that have succeeded before you and actual success, not a bunch of people doing videos. Sure, I do videos and I try to tell people what I think about the price of Bitcoin, then I travel the world and I teach the basics of technical analysis. But from there you’re on your own. What I teach people is only the first 5%. You gotta put in the other work. If people only saw how much work I put into my first trading strategies back in the early to mid-2000s when I and my college roommate went to learn how to trade. Took the same courses that I’m teaching to people, we learned options, we spent an entire year just coming up with …

We took one of the hundred things we learned. I recognised it and I’m like, “Hey, I think we should focus on this because it gives us the best odds.” This one particular strategy in the options space during a specific time in the market. Then I spent months just on that one little strategy, perfecting it so that we had an advantage against everybody else in the world trading this one niche. We learned that one niche so well that … I mean, when I got my finance job and I got busy, he stopped as well but we’re back. Well, he’s mostly back, I’m busy again. All the work that we did in the early 2000s is still applicable today and he’s back to trading it today and is being profitable today.

So, you have to put in the work. If you think there’s easy money in this world, you’re gonna find out that you’re wrong. And the illusion of easy money is even worse. If you’ve found something that’s making easy money and you don’t adjust and you don’t understand why it’s easy money, you’re gonna learn real quick how all of that reverses. As we’re watching right now with Bitmain and the easy money that they made in dominating mining for a few years and they’re about to just go bankrupt.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think you might be right on that. Okay, the second question is, could be a big year for Bitcoin, there’s been a number of important things happen over the last two years, also I’ve always felt like this bear market’s been helpful, but 2019 what do you wanna see happen for Bitcoin, what do you think are the most important things coming up?

Tone Vays: Oh man, you’re gonna get me in trouble here.

Peter McCormack: No, go for it, man.

Tone Vays: I think the price is important. I think the bear market needs to end in 2019. I think it’s gonna be very, very painful and could set the adoption of Bitcoin a lot longer if the bear market continues into 2020. So, I really want to see the bear market end. We don’t have to go up fast, we can go up slowly but we have to stop going down. So, I think the biggest thing that we need in 2019 is for the price to finally make a low. I don’t know where that low is gonna be, really need that low to stay above 1,000. I think a Bitcoin price below a thousand puts everything in danger.

I know people say price doesn’t matter but that’s bullshit, price matters, price matters a lot. Even the developers that are coding Bitcoin, it matters to them too, because a lot of them are early Bitcoin adopters, a lot of them have their wealth in Bitcoin and a lot of them are programming Bitcoin because they want it to be the future of value transfer. And if the value of one Bitcoin goes back to $10 then a lot of them are probably gonna stop because what are they programming it for, it would be considered failure. So, that’s the most important thing. The other-

Peter McCormack: That’s not gonna get you in trouble.

Tone Vays: Yeah, it’ll get me in trouble with some of the developers that say price doesn’t matter who are friends of mine.

Peter McCormack: All right, all right.

Tone Vays: But everything that I see happened with Bitcoin’s code, with Bitcoin’s development, with Bitcoin upgrades, I am happier than I expected. I think Lightning is scaling very well, I think the privacy features coming in are really, really well, everything is going great. The other thing that’s missing I think from Bitcoin to actually take over, we gotta lose the dead weight. We gotta lose a lot of this garbage. Maybe a few of the top-10 Altcoins will still hang around going into 2020, but the majority has to go away. Until I see Bitcoin going up in price and Altcoins not going up in price, I’m other gonna declare the end to this bear market.

I think one of the things that is holding us back is people’s misunderstanding of a blockchain, people’s misunderstanding of Bitcoin, people thinking that these Altcoins are viable, things like Ripple are viable, even Ethereum is viable. I think the implosion of Ethereum is a huge boost to Bitcoin because then people will get back to the fundamentals of Bitcoin, understand what it is and not dilute themselves by putting money into something that’s actually gonna lose it to zero.

So, I am looking forward to those three things. And the underlying technology of Bitcoin is progressing great. I would like to see the end of the bear market and the more Altcoins start to disappear the better it will be, that’s another thing I’m looking forward to.

Peter McCormack: Awesome. I’ve asked a few people about what they wanna see for this year and nobody’s really talked about the bear market like that so I think that’s a cool thing. Okay, finally to finish off Tone, like I say, I’m really looking forward to the conference, I’m looking forward to meeting you in person. But go on, give a shout out to the conference, tell people why they should care, why they should attend, how they can get a ticket and also how people can stay in touch with you and who you wanna hear from.

Tone Vays: Sure. Well, people can follow on twitter as Tone Vays and also the Tone Vays YouTube channel where I do pretty much at least daily videos, sometimes multiple times a day, keeping people up to date on the news surrounding the crypto space, the price of Bitcoin, sometimes we do a law show, I have a bunch of lawyers that show up. Which is important ’cause you do wanna know if you’re breaking or not, which hopefully the ICO people are watching. And the conference is called Unconfiscatable. You can find it on unconfiscatable.com.

The reason why it’s called Unconfiscatable is because that is the property of Bitcoin that I value the most. That is my most valued property of Bitcoin, Unconfiscatable, I was so happy to get the domain.

The other two properties of Bitcoin that are crucial is the fact that it’s uncensorable, censorship-resistant value transfer, and the fact that it is unprintable, its monetary policy was pretty much set in stone when Satoshi created it. And my presentation revolves around these three properties to try and explain how Bitcoin is competing with the US Dollar, the Euro, gold, and everything else.

So for those that really wanna learn about Bitcoin and why it’s so important to the world, this is definitely the conference you want to be at. We’re additionally joined by other financial experts with 20, 30 years of trading experience that talk about markets and economics. We do have a few very credible lawyers that will help understand it from a legal perspective. We have some developers. And awesome personalities like Max Geyser and Saifedean, again a PhD professor of economics, wrote one of my favourite books in the crypto space. So, it’s really a great collection of people that understand Bitcoin and can explain to you what a blockchain is. I wouldn’t want my definition of a blockchain from somebody that is not attending this conference.

Peter McCormack: All right man. Well, listen, look, I really can’t wait. I love Vegas anyway. I’m looking forward to meeting you. There are a few other people I’ve not met and I’m looking forward to. Also, getting a chance to meet some people who I’ve had on the podcast but haven’t actually met. Also, I’ve seen a little influx of people I know like Luke and Junior Lancaster who’ve said they’re coming now so I think it’s gonna be great.

It’s been great to have you on the podcast. This was an awesome episode, it’s gonna go out next Friday. If there’s anything I can do to help promote the event just let me know and, yeah, hopefully, we’ll do this again in a few months.

Tone Vays: Hey, the greatest promotion you did for me was the fact that you’re coming and playing at the tournament and gonna take some interviews with people. That’s more than I can ask for.

Peter McCormack: All right, man. Well, listen, thanks for this and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

Tone Vays: Thank you.

PodcastPeter McCormackPodcast, Interview, Roger Ver, Tone Vays, Trading, Bitcoin Cash, Unconfiscatable, Altcoins, Scams4 Comments