Full transcript: Ivan Mazour on London Real
1:03 Check that out at lon.tv. But today we’re here to talk Tech. My co-host is serial entrepreneur and investor Ivan Mazour who is the CEO and founder of Ometria, which makes, I think, big data of e-commerce nice and simple for retailers. Spot on. That’s right, that’s exactly right.
1:18 You like that? You can use that if you want. I will. You were our guest 5 months ago. You were one of like our most popular shows ever.
1:26 You’re rocking at like four or 5,000 views. Thanks so much for being here and being co-host, man. Listen, thank you for having me back it was awesome. Last time I couldn’t stay away. Yeah, right.
1:35 And it’s perfect too, because I know Bitcoin is right up your street. You just posted an article on your blog about Bitcoin because you had so many people asking you about it. You thought you would just give the basics, right? Exactly. I’ve been into Bitcoin for a long time.
1:46 I was on a panel about Bitcoin a few months ago. I’m judging the Bitcoin hackathon in a few weeks. It’s all about Bitcoin right now. Fantastic. Good.
1:53 Well, London Real has always been about Bitcoin. We had Max Keiser from Russia Today on here about a year ago. He came on after I was like battling with him over Twitter, and I was just like Max isn’t the guy for Bitcoin. I was like, will The Real Slim Shady please stand up and Max was like, the London Real guys wouldn’t know a Bitcoin from a whatever. And then finally Max came in here, I honestly thought it might be a fight.
2:14 I didn’t know, but Max was cool. He was yelling crazy on the microphone, still one of our biggest episodes ever, like 100,000 views or something. So we’re all about the Bitcoin, so let’s get to our guest today. It’s Mr Hugh Halford Thompson. You’re the founder of Quick Bitcoin, which allows people to quickly buy Bitcoins online, sometimes in large size.
2:32 We’ll get to that later. You also manage a Bitcoin ATM right here in Shoreditch at The Vape Room, The Vape Lab. Yeah, The Vape Lab, sorry, on Shoreditch High Street. I just saw this ATM. I just went and checked it out.
2:44 I met Hugh and I was like, okay, you got to come over for Silicon Real, so we’re bringing it to you from the streets today, just to show that we are the real deal here right? Are you feeling me here? This is proper London Real, Silicon Real, like that, right? So it’s fantastic. Hugh welcome to Silicon Real.
2:58 Hi, thank you very much. Yes, so we run the ATM in The Vape Lab as you said. You can buy and sell Bitcoins very quickly, very easily. We do a beginners workshop every Tuesday, so you’re feel free to come, 4 to late every week. Then we also run Quick Bitcoin.
3:17 You can buy online at cointrader.net. We’re partnered with, it’s an exchange in Canada with a UK branch, so you can trade on the market there. And then, as you mentioned, we do a brokerage for larger trades. So cool, you guys, the only ATM in the UK right now. I wish I could claim that title, but no, there was a couple who beat us to it.
3:38 There’s a Lamassu, the old children station, and another Robocoin more in central London, in Russell Square. I’ve never seen one before, but I was pretty impressed. It’s quite a big machine. What really put me off, like right away, is it had a little video camera on there, and I was like, wait a second, I can’t sneak up with my roll of 20s and get my Bitcoins and go. But it’s got actually a place for a camera.
3:58 It’s got an ID piece, it’s got a palm, it’s got space for a palm reader, an ID scanner, everything like that. We’re at the moment, that’s not all switched on, so it does take a photo of you when you order. Oh, it does. And then if we, if you want to do larger orders, we need your ID, so we may switch that on, or if we ever have issues from as you said, shady people with rolls of 20s, and we need to turn on the ID checks. How much can you do, how many 20s can you put in one?
4:26 So you can do £500. So what’s that, 25 20s? Yeah, yeah And you can do, yeah, £500 a trade if you want to do more. I’m there most days, if not, one of my colleagues will be there, or just call us up. EMA in, you can do yeah £500 a trade if you want to do more.
4:43 I’m there most days, if not one of my colleagues will be there. We can do trades sometimes into six figures. As it gets larger, we have to match. He’s like, I got you covered, man. That’s a lot of 20s.
4:53 I might need to bring 50s for that. We’re doing six figures I haven’t done it cash. If you rock up with a suitcase, I’m not quite sure what I’d do to be honest. I might well, yeah. We have a term in the city, like the trading term, and it used to be like the bigger the trader, the bigger trade you do, and there used to be a thing where you’d say to the guy, your size is my size.
5:14 So that’s what you just basically said. Just, you can take it, right? The one thing that was interesting about that ATM is you can sell Bitcoins there as well, which I know all ATMs aren’t set up for buying most. Well, the first ATMs I think to hit London, the first one was L to ATM where you can only buy. So that’s really good for introducing people, but you can’t sell back.
5:36 So the Robocoin ATM that we have, the advantage there, as you said, you can sell Bitcoins just wait for one confirmation, grab a coffee. Soon as that’s come through, you can get your cash out. You come in, do you type in your alphanumeric for the Bitcoin, or can you log into a wallet, scan your wallet. So if you’re buying, you scan your wallet and insert the cash, or if you don’t have a wallet, you can generate a paper wallet, which you can then scan in later at home onto if your phone or your computer.
6:06 Okay. And yeah, insert the cash and it’ll send the Bitcoins across. If you’re selling, the process is sort of the reverse. It will show you a Bitcoin address to send the Bitcoins to. Print out a receipt for you with a QR code on it.
6:21 So send the Bitcoins over. As soon as that’s gone through with one confirmation, come back to the machines, scan the QR codes, you get the cash. Nice, sounds pretty simple. You know, for people that have no idea what’s going on with Bitcoin. Ivan, can you bring us up to, you know, up to the current state of affairs?
6:37 Like when you get your grandma that says, what is a Bitcoin? Do you give her a different answer than if you get a startup person? What do you tell? Definitely, definitely. Straight up, I mean, it’s really difficult to try and explain the kind of reality of Bitcoin, which is just one giant document where every single transaction’s been recorded, cuz that’s the blockchain.
6:54 This is the blockchain, exactly to explain that to anyone. Yeah, nobody listens to that. So you just talk about Bitcoins, and you talk about the fact there’s 21 million of them at some point, by the time they’ve all been mined, and you talk about the fact that they get mined by computers, but you know you don’t really explain the whole specific nature of what it is, cuz that hurt Bitcoin in the beginning. It was too much information, right? I actually tried to avoid the mining discussion, so for complete beginners.
7:15 Like, how much do you know about this Federal Reserve or the UK Central Bank, how they do quantitative easing? That’s the, that is what mining is, as the Bitcoin equivalent. So an 8-year-old doesn’t need to know about to make change. They need to know how much on their phone, or how much they’ve got in their wallet, how to spend it, how to earn it. That’s it.
7:34 All right. So then what do you do with the history and everything? Well, how do you break it down for people? So with the history, yeah, Bitcoin, I mean, basically the history, the interesting part about it is the fact that some guy, you know, spent 10,000 Bitcoins on a pizza what, a couple of years ago, yesterday in fact. Yesterday was pizza day, right?
7:48 Yesterday was pizza day, two years ago, yeah exactly. About 10,000 Bitcoins, and what is that, like, under 10 million? Just, just under 10 million at the peak of the last bubble. So that’s a lot of money. Exactly.
8:01 I mean, that’s the history. Right now it shows how much that currency has appreciated since then, so I’ll take that with a pinch of salt. That hindsight is none. Yeah, hindsight’s really easy to regret. You didn’t buy in, of course.
8:14 None of us brought in at start. That’s the market going up but do you, when you explain it to people, do you try to explain to them that it’s really ultimately a technology the fact that you know it’s checked by everyone. It’s an open ledger. You don’t have to trust someone like a bank or a Fed. I mean, you explain it that way?
8:28 Absolutely. So you know, cuz I invest in quite a few companies, right? So, and I often come across kind of money transfer, money remittance companies, people who are trying to solve this problem, and you kind of think, all right, so you’ve got, you know, a million pounds in funding and a team and then you’ve got Bitcoin, which has got a worldwide following, hundreds of millions being put in by VCs and all the kind of ecosystem, the infrastructure. And right now you can take a mobile phone, you can put money on, turn into Bitcoin, send it to someone else, on the other side they can take it out.
8:56 So that infrastructure exists right there, right now. So it’s almost crazy not to believe that Bitcoin is going to be there from now on. It’s not going anywhere, and we’re not talking about just the currency, we’re talking about the mechanism by which you can make very easy transactions. And you’re saying Bitcoin is going to be there, or is it going to be some other cryptocurrency? It’s blockchain-based So I actually, I’m a big believer in a couple.
9:18 So I like Bitcoin a lot. I like Ripple a lot. So I like the centralized nature of Ripple. A lot of Libertarians like the whole kind of open nature of Bitcoin, but in reality, if you’ve got a company and that’s directly guiding a currency, then it’s got quite a lot of chance to succeed and take over the world, is used to a bank or a government running things Ripple is controlled by one company. By one company.
9:41 Exactly, exactly, exactly. So you like that nature? I like that a lot, because Google Ventures have invested. Andreessen Horowitz have invested. These are very smart guys.
9:48 They know what they’re doing. They’ve put in a lot of cash. It’s going to take over. So, okay, what about Litecoin? Dogecoin?
9:54 So I mine Litecoin right now I’ve got my rig going on as we speak in the living room. So my fiancée is away for the weekend, otherwise she’d hate it, because I’ve got this thing. It’s in the corner of the living room, makes a lot of noise, a lot of heat. It’s like 29° in the living room right now. It’s, yeah, it’s Terri, a proper piece of hardware.
10:09 It’s a proper piece of hardware. Yeah, I’ve had it running for about maybe 7, 8 months. It’s good, it’s kind of had a positive ROI in terms of the Bitcoins I spend on it and got it back. Yeah, but not a major one, like, it’s not given the hassle that I’ve gone through. Probably not that one good experience, but the half-life of this hardware is like months, right, before it becomes redundant, and it can’t pay if you don’t make it back in like four, 5, 6 months.
10:31 It’s not making the money back, so you got to be one of the first ones. So why Litecoin works, and there’s a few other algorithms coming through. So there’s coins based on a completely different algorithm, X11. There’s some of these new things coming out, so it’s similar but different. Exactly, so every time a piece of hardware goes kind of out of date, some guys will create a new currency to make it be back in date, to allow them to continue using it, and that’s what happened with Bitcoin, moving to old coin, cuz now you can’t mine Bitcoin with anything other than an ASIC.
10:56 You can’t do it with your old GPUs, but you can with Litecoin, and now it’s getting to the point you can’t mine Litecoin or any of those altcoins with the GPUs, so they’re making new ones. Generation 3, basically. You employ, there’s two sides of that, though. One side, you’ve got, there is a centralized problem in Bitcoin mining with the ASICs, but on the other side, when you create a new altcoin, the mining network’s tiny. You’ve got nowhere near the security that you’ve got on some of the bigger coins.
11:23 A lot of the altcoins get, well, not hacked, but 51% is attacked, right? And not to get too much into mining, but you need the miners there to quickly verify transactions, right? So the bigger the mining network, the more secure the network is They verify transactions and try and keep it simple. I say people, I tell people, they just get paid transaction fees for that. There is obviously the block rewards and the mining fees for that.
11:47 Okay, you talked about Google Ventures, Kevin Rose, who does the Foundation series, who works for Google Ventures, he recently had one of the brains behind Dogecoin on his show, and he was just asking him, you know, why Dogecoin has has made some progress, and he said that with Dogecoin, it was always about the community, it was always about building something whereas Bitcoin people try to sell it as a speculative investment, and he thinks that’s where Bitcoin made a mistake. You’re telling people, buy Bitcoin now, cuz it’s going to be worth a lot more pizzas in the future, but he said it’s better to think of it just as you said, a technology that’s going to be around, because it streamlines payments and centralizes that kind of thing. Well, I guess nobody meant for that to happen with Bitcoin.
12:27 I don’t know if you feel the same, right? It just kind of, I think it needs a better marketing campaign, and obviously there’s no, the equivalent marketing campaign for a normal currency would be T paid before by taxes. So who pays for it? Dogecoin has done a great marketing campaign. From my point of view, I feel like one of the currencies is going to really take over at the moment.
12:49 That’s Bitcoin. Whether it’s Dogecoin in future, I don’t know. But it needs to a better marketing campaign to go mainstream. At the moment it’s not ready for everybody. Street what, Doge, Doge, I’d say, cryptocurrencies in general.
13:03 So it’s getting there. And if you’ve, it’s getting to the point where you can ensure your Bitcoin deposits, where you can keep them with more reputable companies where it’s getting easier to deal with them. But there’s still, if you want to go beyond a certain investment, there’s still a lot of people getting hacked, losing their passwords. And very much, people on their own, sometimes with Bitcoin. Right, so that brings me to Mt. Gox.
13:29 What happened there? A few months ago, one of the biggest exchanges that had been there for a few years. I mean, I stayed away from them. I went to Bitstamp when I bought my Bitcoins, because it just felt weird. It was in Japan.
13:39 There was a lot of controversy, and then what happened? Well, so you know what, I actually saw at the top of the last bubble. I felt like this couldn’t go any higher so I cashed out my entire stash on Mt. Gox. So it was about April, so it was just under that it was in, I was measuring in pounds. It was about £550 per Bitcoin at the time.
13:56 About a year ago, just before they blocked. Exactly. So then I got really scared again, because it carried on going up, so it got to about 800 in pound, right at the top peak. So it went from about 500 to 550. I was like, it’s still going up, and luckily I took all the kind of fake cash, the Mt. Gox cash, put it back into Bitcoin and managed to withdraw it on time, because otherwise I would have been, like, right there.
14:18 I would have been burnt with it. That would have been the end of cash. You had dollar balances in Mt. Gox for a couple of days, and luckily I realized that I wanted to get back in. I did. Overall, to me it was about 20% waste of my Bitcoin.
14:30 So actually I, 20% of my total stash, I just lost through that transaction, but at least I got the Bitcoins back. And in hindsight, looking back, that way, exactly. Ex, I mean, I only got into Bitcoin just over a year ago. So April, Bitcoin, sorry, April, in April, Mt. Gox sort of started to look a bit fishy. You know, the market was $100 more expensive on Mt. Gox.
14:52 Why is that? Cuz you couldn’t arbitrage it, cuz you couldn’t get your money out of Mt. Gox. That just didn’t make sense. Yeah, I told everybody to keep clear of it. I’m glad I did.
15:03 What would you do? Let’s see, let’s say you had a lot of Bitcoins you wanted to cash out, what would you do to be absolutely sure that something like that doesn’t, brokerage really? No, but like, so you can do deals more in person, obviously. If you’re doing larger amounts, you do need to find a good broker. We offer that service.
15:22 There’s a few services offering, companies offering escrow services but you just need to make sure you’re dealing with somebody. If you’re doing large amounts and there’s trust issues, make sure you can meet them, make sure you know who they are. You make sure they’ve got time for you to actually deal with the trades. Mt. Gox was very hard to contact, very hard to get anything from them. Some people flew to Japan and waited outside the building to get out the office, and they couldn’t get anything but they ultimately had a tech issue, right?
15:51 Their tech wasn’t good enough, and it got hacked, and but everyone knew that it wasn’t that great. I mean, it wasn’t. Was it a Bitcoin issue, but it was also specific to Mt. Gox. In reality they had way too much interest for a company that wasn’t ready to handle it, right? like, it’s difficult for trading magic cards.
16:06 Exactly, exactly, exactly, which is how it started. Now, what about cold storage? that’s where you can actually store your Bitcoins, numbered and in a safe and offline, right? So yeah, there’s a company in London called Elliptic Vault, who does insured cold storage, backed by Lords of London. So there’s if you want to put a large amount of money in Bitcoin, I always say put it on paper.
16:29 If you’re technical enough to do it yourself, that’s always great. If you’re not, go with an insured cold storage super smart guys. Like three guys, X banking, computer scientists, mathematicians. These guys are going to take over. Yeah, yeah, definitely, and they’re guarantee your deposits.
16:45 Exactly. They were the first insured, like insured-backed, basically called storage company here in the UK. Okay, when when are the banks going to get involved? In your opinion, or have they started? I mean, Lloyd’s is a bank that’s the Lloyd’s insurance, the underwriter, right?
16:59 Yeah, yeah. So I mean, in reality, they’re not going to offer like a consumer-facing Bitcoin product for, you know, 5 years, maybe a decade. I don’t. Do you reckon a bank, FAL Bank and so in the UK it’s, you know, it’s different around the world, but I think it’s FAL Bank in Germany where one of German banks is looking at doing a, but a major financial institution. It just hurts themselves, right?
17:22 They’re just cannibalizing own market, even if they take baby steps. So much, if they’re first in on the market then all the Bitcoin companies go to them. They get the business. Everybody else, I worked in banking for 10 years, trust me, last thing they want to do. The thing is that they’re making so much money by not having that payment system in place.
17:38 Yeah, you dealt with a foreign exchange broker today for one of your trades, and he took out what a percent or something, or a lot, for a foreign exchange trade. I mean, like 6, 6%. You know, he can make that transaction for probably 0.006%. So I’m just saying that they have a reason, you know, not to adopt this technology, right is that the way you see it? So the way I see the first step the banks are going to take towards this is when they’re doing the big deals, because some of their financial clients, some of the really big players are like, we want a piece of Bitcoin.
18:07 We want to allocate some of our portfolio to that, and we don’t want to go externally, right? Exactly. So that’s coming, undoubtedly. But on the consumer-facing one, I’m still a little bit doubtful that they’re going to take that jump, because it’s a big reputational risk. You screw it up, you know?
18:22 They’ve seen what’s happened with Mt. Gox, with everything else that’s gone wrong. And for a bank, you know, like Barclays, unless somebody comes up with a brand new bank, something like Metro Bank. You know, they’re awesome, but something like that happening again a brand new one from scratch with a kind of CEO that understands Bitcoin. Unless that happens, I think it’s going to take a little bit of time. Who stayed away from it?
18:43 Apple’s banning all banks. They can’t take a 30% cut when you make payments in apps. So yeah, I think they have lots of reasons. I think they’re scared of it. I don’t think they want to get burned on it right now.
18:54 Who else isn’t touching it. PayPal’s not touching it. PayPal’s coming close, you know. So the news recent is that they’re having a look, and it might happen, and this is actual. So before that was all speculation, but this is now the CEO actually talking and saying, look, we are looking at it right now.
19:07 Okay, what about Stripe? The, you know, cisin company that’s here in the UK. They’ve done it, or they’re talking about it. They’ve done it, done. They’ve actually done it right now.
19:14 Yeah, a Stripe integration, the Stripe Bitcoin integration that was announced a couple of months ago. There’s a lot of, you know, we do software for e-commerce, right? So Shopify, anyone on Shopify? We got quite a few clients actually on Shopify using our software. They can take Bitcoin payment right now.
19:30 It’s all inbuilt within the platform They don’t even need to worry about it. They plug in one week before they launched that. I wrote a plug-in started. Selling it as a consultant to you, to get people accepting Bitcoin. Yeah, a week later BitPay integrated.
19:45 Yeah, that was that idea gone. But so it’s brilliant for, you know, Coinbase. Coinbase is the huge US, you know, effort. It’s probably, I guess, the Bitstamp of the US. They got like 25 million maybe even a dreon.
19:58 Not a horrible, it’s a big VC fund. I think it’s the biggest check that VC has written in Silicon Valley for a company. They’ve got big, big parts of market share. They just announced something with Budweiser where Budweiser gives you $10 in Bitcoins when you go to concerts. On your wallet when you sign up, so it’s like kind of sticking a toe in, I believe.
20:16 So yeah, that’s, they’re giving $10 to every user, or every student. Yeah, I think it’s, I think, when you buy the ticket you can opt in, and then you have to get a wallet. Okay. yeah, we see what they’re doing. Then you get 10 bucks you can spend on merch.
20:28 Think it’s got to be a Coinbase. Yeah, it’s got to be Coinbase, but I mean, like, that’s a big, those are big steps. You know, Budweiser have you seen the MIT thing? Have you guys seen this? The air drop, that don’t get, exactly, proper air drop, every single student starting an MIT next term is going to get, like, I think it’s 100, is it?
20:43 It’s $100 in Bitcoin, and yeah, it’s going to really kick-start the Bitcoin economy. And it’s like a big ass donor, right? Like a guy who made a lot of money on finance, and he’s just said, you know what, I want to make this happen, so let’s turn the MIT campus, cuz he’s like an alumnus, right? So he literally went to MIT crazy. He’s like, let me give them like a lot of money, have a much, a couple of million in dollars, and give everyone $100 worth of Bitcoin and make sure all of the kind of campus shops and cafes and everything start taking it, and there’s a couple of guys set up an ATM there now as well.
21:13 I suspect they’ll be, is that legal, just to give all the students that money. So when I started at MIT in 1989, they gave me an email address. Okay, it was called project alumni and it was this big deal, and it was this long ass email address, you know, at mit.edu, and like, but at the time I didn’t have anybody to send an email to. It was really just academics’ email and academics, so that’s really trippy, this, because actually if you look at everyone, what people are saying, how Bitcoin is the internet of our generation or whatever it is.
21:43 Right, this is what’s happening. I remember the first emails. I remember this was before AOL, CompuServe, right? Logging in with a 44 modem, trying to get it to work, nobody accepting emails, but I was you know, I was young. I had no idea how to leverage that.
21:56 You know, I was an entrepreneur back then. Right now it’s like imagine being back in that position when websites didn’t exist. So many things you can do. Well, I mean, you’re doing them. Right, exactly.
22:06 We’re doing it. So I mean, there’s such a wider scope as well. So we’re doing it as a, we’re using Bitcoin as a currency, obviously. We’re trading it. There’s so many other applications, be that contracts, be that proof of, proof that you have assets.
22:19 You can prove every trade you’ve done. I know that there’s a couple of banks looking at using blockchain technology, not for using Bitcoin as a currency but using the technology to back some of their trades. Right, yeah, can we talk about that? Because it isn’t just a currency, it is a technology, right? I mean, can you talk about what else you could use that in?
22:38 Yeah, well, so you know what, I have one of the previous companies I’ve done was in real estate and property, right? So actually, when you start allocating, kind of, when you start understanding how to allocate bits of the blockchain to real life assets, and when you consider the complexity of some of the transactions that take place, when you’ve got like a chain of houses being sold, and all of the people, and everyone’s terrified about, you know, being gazumped, and all of that, all of these things can be solved, right? Like, you can have direct computer-controlled ownership of assets where it’s not some scan document you know, at the land registry, and in the UK at least we have the land registry, so you can, like, Google and see who owns countries.
23:12 It’s worse, like, they just changed land registry, like that. At least if it was in the blockchain then you’d know that they’ve changed it, and you’d be able to, you know, set it right. I think that’s important for people to understand. It’s not just about, well, first of all, it’s not about speculation, right? It’s not just about making payments It’s like a whole another way, having that public ledger and that whole blockchain where everyone checks everybody else.
23:32 Right, yeah, it’s the first time ever that you can have a whole group of people, millions of people, who can distrust each other, hate each other as much as what they want, that you can all be in it for yourself. Like, you know, what’s stopping you trying to print a billion dollars for yourself? But using the blockchain technology, we can all agree on something, and that For the currency, that’s effectively account balances in each wallet and transactions that have happened.
23:55 For the land registry, it’s who owns what. For contract, you can prove that contracts happened without having to coign it with a lawyer. For all sorts of regulated activities, you could just make everything public, so you don’t even need a regulator to overlook it. there’s so many things you can, so many possibilities. So there’s a Bitcoin expert we talked about today, his name is Andreas Antonopoulos.
24:15 We were supposed to have him on the show. He’s been through London a couple times. He’s one of the best spokesperson I’ve seen on Bitcoins, but what he does is when he travels anywhere, goes to Berlin, goes somewhere else takes a taxi ride, he offers to pay the guy in Bitcoin, and he’s like, look, you can download a wallet, right now. What’s the price of the fare? I’ll give you a tip, I’ll give you Bitcoin, and he’s trying to pay his rent in Bitcoin.
24:36 So it’s like this MIT guy. The more you get, or your ATM, the more you get people to use it, then I guess it just builds, right? Yeah, yeah. There’s a Forbes article by, by North. I can’t remember her name, but it’s a woman.
24:46 She’s done this every couple of years now, or every year, I think, about trying to live a week on Bitcoin, and it just came out a couple of weeks ago, and it was, right? Did you see that? It was so much better than the year before. She was like, this time it was easy. She, yeah I think so.
24:59 Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s not in London, it’s not in Europe, so obviously it’s a little bit more advanced there, but she was saying, you know, before I couldn’t pay for anything, now actually I could find food, I could find shelter. Remember reading it last year? It was literally like every day she went to the same shop, same food it was, it wasn’t great. Now the pictures are brilliant, all sorts of different stuff.
25:17 What about in London right now? What can you actually buy in Bitcoin? You know, what can you go and do? You can buy e-cigarettes at the Vape Lab. You can buy, I think very soon you’ll be able to buy burritos at Box Park, and we’re going to try and plug in all the Box Park merchants into it.
25:34 Yeah. So if enough people ask them get out there and ask them, then they’ll start accepting it. I want to blitz Spitalfields Market Brick Lane, just get you anyone who shops in the East End of London will see Bitcoin accepted here. Right? If you’re not from London, these are kind of like, you know, the cool and the tech centers of London where we’re located, and Box Park is like this whole pop-up network with all sorts of new cool shops.
25:57 So great way to get it adopted. You’re the e-commerce king. Box Park, you use Ometria. They do, they just, they just went on a free trial, right now. The Shir shirt, the logo, but you deal with e-commerce, that’s your business.
26:09 Are these companies slow to adopt do they want to adopt? Does it depend on the retailer? Got to be honest, the ones that we work with they’re advanced, but they’re not quite ready for Bitcoin. Some of the really cool ones, so Box Park, you know, very tech focused in terms of location, terms of the audience, right? The people, the customers that come through.
26:25 So for them it’ll be hip, it’ll be an awesome press release, you know, there’s lots coming from it. But the other guys, I mean, they’re very cunning edge, but they probably won’t see a benefit immediately from offering Bitcoin. You know, we’ve got a couple on on Shopify right now that can already take Bitcoin. They’ve never actually processed a Bitcoin payment, so it’s still kind of early days for the e-commerce side, right? I mean, obviously BitPay have done really well, so there must be some traction.
26:48 People must be. I found there’s a mixed thing as well, when you tell everybody that you accept Bitcoin on your Shopify store, immediately you get a whole load of extra hits. So even if at the start people aren’t paying with it, which you takes, you need to build both sides. You need merchant adoption for customer adoption as well. But as soon as you start accepting Bitcoin, people will come and see.
27:12 So two years from now, what percentage of e-commerce transactions will be in Nice. Nice, still small. Still, I reckon even under a percent. I genuinely think, under, fair, 5 years, 5 years, it’ll come up, but it’ll still be like, definitely under 10% for a decade. I’d say it’ll come, it’ll come, definitely, definitely, but slowly.
27:31 I mean, if you look at Overstock, right, quite a lot of money going through, but not that much, like millions, single-digit millions since they released, and they’re a giant store over. Overstock, American store, was one of the first big names to start adopting accepting Bitcoin. Okay. In the UK though, electronics will be the first leaders, right? So, scan, right now, go, you can pay in Bitcoin for everything, and as a nerd, you know, I build computers.
27:55 I buy all sorts of random crap. This is computer hardware company, exactly yeah, it’s a computer, so they go to where the audience is. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So it’s coming, definitely, and I reckon it will be led by the electronics guys, because that’s the kind of most obvious market. That’s where the customers, I think the other side of it is remittances and charities.
28:12 So you can, if you show your QR code on TV, if I showed a QR code now, all the audience could donate Bitcoins to whatever the cause is. Can we make that happen? we could make that happen, feel like we should make that happen. Got big enough code. So Andreas was on The Joe Rogan Experience, which is a podcast in the States.
28:31 We were their guests about a year ago, and he basically they just, on live on the show, they created a Bitcoin address for Joe, and he started getting donations, and he gave him to a charity in Africa, and they racked up a few thousand dollars right away. And another thing that’s good for is third world countries making payments when there’s no payment option, right? Or Western Union clipping you for 5% I’ve just signed up a charity in Tanzania. It’s called Teach Times Empower Children, and they accept Bitcoin donations directly to directly to ground in Tanzania.
29:02 That’s pretty intense, but I guess they have to also be able, I should really can with that QR code. Yeah, you can do that. Well, you tweet us to it, tweet us later, but I mean for something like that, I guess they have to be able to spend it locally as well, right? Or, yes, so they’ve got, they run partly in the UK, partly in Tanzania, so I don’t know which side they’re going to cash out on. But certainly it’s a great way of getting donations.
29:24 All right, let’s talk dark wallets. Darkcoin. Okay, I don’t know much about this dark coin. The dark wallet, I think, was created by this guy Cody Wilson, who’s busy making, you’re a 3D printer guy, you know. Cody Wilson’s this crazy kid in the US, and what he’s doing is he’s using 3D printers to make guns, and he thinks it’s a Freedom of Information issue, and he thinks it should be out there.
29:44 He actually just makes one piece of the gun, I think, one of the pieces that’s hard to buy, the ones with the serial number on it. And he thinks it’s a Freedom of Information thing, everyone should have that technology, and he’s coming out with a dark wallet, because, I know, Bitcoins with the blockchain, you can track them, right? What’s going on here, guys? What are your thoughts? You know, there’s a guy in Japan who just got arrested for printing these, these plastic 3D printed guns.
30:05 A big story. Yeah, the guy, the guy, it’s game over for the guy. Like, this is literally today, basically. So Japan’s no joke. They don’t play.
30:13 Exactly. That’s not somewhere where you want to go to jail. Like, hell no. So that’s, first of all, let’s stay away from. I’ve never seen a Japanese prison movie, though, like a recent one.
30:21 But you’re saying you’re going to be locked away for a long time? Yeah, I reckon it’s going to be definitely no Bitcoin in there. Right, all right, so okay, fair enough on that. What about the darkcoin, the dark wallet. You know, I know when you make Bitcoin payments now, to some sites, there’s a, is there a fog thing you can do, or split your payments up?
30:37 You can tumble coins, if you want to. It’s the Bitcoin equivalent of money laundering. Is putting it through a tumbler? So you mix it to a bunch of other accounts yeah, you can mix it to another, a bunch of other accounts. There are, I’ve got to say, there’s a few people who did it.
30:50 There’s a load of people who did it a couple of years ago with Silk Road, where that, the system they used for tumbling, has now been found out, that you actually, you know, statistically model it and work out exactly where it all went. So tumbling coins, you know, I’m sure there’s ways of doing it, but I would say it doesn’t always work. The blockchain, there is a legacy of all trades forever. Yeah, so the blockchain Ledger gives you every trade that’s ever happened.
31:13 It gives you the public address of each payment, where it went from and to. Not necessarily the name behind it, but you can run forensic analysis. Yeah, you can run, you can see exactly how many trades made that day. It might be people paying themselves, just moving money around, but yeah, you can certainly see all the, you can see a live feed of every trade that’s happen. So don’t trust any tumbler is what you’re saying?
31:36 I don’t. I don’t use them, but I know there’s, so the issue with Bitcoin there, one side is people want to be anonymous, and you say, and the other side is Bitcoin can be very transparent. Now there’s, there’s obviously with Silk Road, well, the ex-Silk Road now, there’s other ones out there still. There’s a lot of people trying to pay anonymously, on the other side you’ve got companies showing that they can be very transparent, but if you think a, if a bar is accepting Bitcoin, you make a payment to them, and then you can see, you then know which address they have.
32:13 You can see that they’ve taken 50 grand this evening. That’s not data that should be public to the customer. So everyone can be anonymous in certain situations. It’s great to opt in, being completely traceable, transparent, but I think it needs to be anonymous in some ways. So let’s talk Silk Road real quick here.
32:32 If you don’t know what the Silk Road was, it has had many iterations. I think the first one was around a couple years ago, but it was primarily a place to buy drugs. I mean, that, for a little while they had, like, some hitmen and some other stuff, but I think it, they actually police their community, and it was kind of like the Amazon for that. You would, they would use the mail to post it to you. You would use Bitcoins to buy it.
32:52 It was shut down in different iterations. The CIA grabbed that guy in the St. They accused him of having hits taken out on other people. I personally don’t believe that, but whatever, believe what you want. What’s the story with Silk Road? Has it given, has it hurt has it hurt cryptocurrencies?
33:07 I actually think it’s enabled it to go more into the mainstream. So, at Silk Road, it’s died down. It got, you know, got stopped by the FBI. There’s Silk Road 2, maybe 3 or 4 now, and there’s a whole load of other ones out there. It’s probably bigger than ever.
33:22 But on the other side, it’s not all over the press now, so you’ve got people, there are a lot of people, call him out before saying, I want to buy Bitcoins, but isn’t it a bit dodgy? You know, is this legal? so moving away from Silk Road, I think has helped the Bitcoin community, and if you look at the Bitcoin price as well, the day Silk Road got shut down, the price dipped immediately by a couple of percent, and then went up by the end of the day. It was up 10%.
33:48 Yeah, I remember that. I remember that news. All PR is good PR, right? Like from that kind of point of view. So for Bitcoin especially, you just want more people talking about it, right?
33:56 If people like, oh my God, what is this Bitcoin thing? It’s terrible, and they read about it, and they realize, oh no, that’s just the kind of, the Silk Road, that’s all completely separate from what the Bitcoin’s really about, and then they realize it’s just a way of paying, then it probably did really move the whole Bitcoin ecosystem forward, especially the big crash and the FBI closure. Let’s talk about money laundering rules. You know, I know you got, you’re taking pictures of people at your ATMs.
34:21 You know, when I first bought Bitcoins, I think like 9 months ago, or a year ago, all I had to do was transfer money in when I opened my Bitstamp account. I had to send in my ID, my passport, all this stuff. I mean, I used to work in banking. They’re really sensitive about what is it, know your client, that whole thing, know your customer, and like, know, you know who you’re dealing with, make sure you’re not dealing with money laundering. Does this hurt your business?
34:43 Does this make it difficult, is this fair, or should people be able to trade anonymously? I, it’s sort of a bit mixed. It depends, so I don’t. I think the law is very, I guess, hard to ment sometimes. It’s firstly around Bitcoin, it’s unclear, and I think they ask too much.
35:03 So from what we do on the ATM, it’s for small trades under 500 at a time. Is that by law they take a picture, or is that just a feature they put on there to keep people? Well, so basically the law is very unclear at the moment. So we’re trying to keep a couple of steps ahead, so that if the cops do come around, we’ve got a good defense. They, you we, there is no, there is no concrete law.
35:25 I thought law was black and white. I was naive about then. So yeah, it’s a big gray area, and we just need to be on the right side of it. So yeah, for small trades we take a picture. For anything over, anything going after about ,000, couple, we need passport, proof of address, and then if we’re going up into six-figure trades, we need source of funds.
35:45 There’s a lot more, there’s a lot more demand on there, source of funds. Yes, so if you’re sending somebody $100,000, you need to ask them, so somebody sending you $100,000, you need to ask them where they got the money, make sure it sounds legit. There’s anything that smells a bit fishy, is that just confirmation in writing? I mean, they just, getting back to you saying, look, I sold a house, and are you at that point saying, show me the proof that you sold the, like, how far?
36:08 We look at the last one I put for, ask my law. I’m still getting used to that process on bigger trades, but we look at an invoice from where their invoice, where they got the funds. Just make sure that story stacks out. It’s interesting how they’re giving, they’re letting you do, do you know that, be a unit of a bank. So, but it’s good you’re doing it.
36:31 Let’s talk that’s actually the issue. At the moment, the due diligence is set up for compliance departments in banks, right, and it is, there’s massive demands, massive fines or jail sentences if you get it wrong. It’s not set up for the little guy. So you’re being careful? Yeah, we got to be careful.
36:48 Let’s talk about some of your offline trades. How big do they get? So we’ve got some customers looking to buy or sell, 500500 000 Bitcoins sometimes what’s the value of that then? That’s 5,000 Bitcoins, just over a couple of million dollars. Okay, probably two and a half, but the price has gone up today.
37:08 So they’re transferring you hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of pounds, so that, that’s in dollars. But yeah, so we act as a trusted center. So we run the CoinTrader exchange, which has a big brand and a lot of money on it. So we got to make sure basically whoever we’re doing the trade with, we use a trust system that everyone’s happy with. So there’s some deals we do for a third-party escrow that we both trust.
37:37 Some deals, they’ll just pay the money into our business account here. Okay, so sometimes you broker the trades, and then sometimes you buy them yourself? Will you just go onto all the exchanges and take a look at the liquidity pool and make a guess? I, that’s what we do in the city. You can tell, you, the trade is still there.
37:54 That’s what a foreign exchange trader would do. He would be like, all right, this is where I think the market is. I’ll make you pay a percent or two, I’ll take the risk. Is that what you’re doing? So yeah, I mean, the foreign exchange market.
38:03 I don’t know how much it scales, but if somebody asks for a trillion dollars, obviously there’s liquidity issues at some point. So in Bitcoin, the liquidity is much earlier on. If somebody’s buying $100,000, we’ll put that through on the exchanges. If somebody’s buying a couple of million, we need to find a matching buyer, because it’ll spook the exchange, right? It’ll move the market, it’ll move the price.
38:25 So there’s two ways of doing it. Either you feed it through, or you find a matching buyer and seller, fix a percentage that’s hard to do without giving your hand up. Without, you know, spilling, you know, if you let someone, if you’re looking for buyers, the buyer and the seller don’t trust each other. So they both trust us. Yeah, I know that, but it’s hard.
38:44 It’s hard to find the right seller, you know? If you, because you give them all the information, you know, they might take that information and back off their price a bit, you know, on both sides. I kind of feel like I need two phones to negotiate, knowing the people as well, right? Because there must be players in the space, right? people who’ve got the cash and the Bitcoin and the big amounts, right?
39:04 And it’s knowing all of them and keeping on top of all of them, so that you put, there’s a whole mix as well. Like, I mean, there’s financial companies, institutions who want to buy and sell large amounts. There’s also, I had a guy ring up who, he obviously brought some Bitcoins early on as a punt, didn’t really know what he was doing. He’s got 10,000 Bitcoins oh my God. And eventually took some legal advice.
39:28 I assume he’s got a penthouse somewhere now. I don’t know, that’s $5 million worth of Bitcoins, right? That’s a lot of money. At the time it was double that. So yeah, we didn’t process that, but there’s, we get requests from all sorts of different people.
39:43 It’s a crazy market, man. Like, in Wall Street, guys will screw around, cuz if they have a broker like this, it’s anonymous. He’ll come and say, look, I want to buy, you know, $1010 million worth of Bitcoins. Tell me where the price is. I want to buy it fast, you know, and he asks around, he tells the wrong person, the market moves, and he comes in and sells 10 million with a Bitcoin, so there’s all sorts of crazy G, yeah, yeah, the, cuz it’s not regulated, there’s probably a lot of that going on.
40:06 Interesting times. We just try and match them. All right, we’ve had a recent rally in Bitcoin, where’s the price going? And you’ve got your app ready to app, that it’s the only thing on my phone, so I always have it off. I’ve even got a blog post about this.
40:18 I don’t take any incoming phone calls. There’s only two things that can happen. One is if my mom calls, so she’s, you know, really important, don’t mess around with that. But two is if Bitcoin moves up or down by 10% within a day, and so as soon as that happens, I’ve been woken up at night before I’ve run over to the screen to see what’s going on, because it can move quick, right? You can lose 40, 50% in one go and you got to be ready to cash out if that’s something that you’re looking to do.
40:42 So if you’re, if you’re sitting on something that you might want to turn into Fiat, then it’s something you want to be ready for. So the apps in my pocket has buzzed twice in the last couple of days, so we’re 20% up compared to the beginning of the week last November. You got no sleep? Yeah, exactly. It was insane.
40:57 It was buzzing several times a day. Do you remember that? It was, I had a full-time job at the time I was running Bitcoin on the side back then, and yeah, I took a week off work. Well, you couldn’t think about anything else, right? Like, in your mind it was just like, it was not only that, I had such a long list of emails, you know, I want to buy 5,000, 10,000.
41:16 I couldn’t, we didn’t have the liquidity at the time. Like now we’ve got liquidity to much larger orders. At the time I was sold out in what, 10 minutes every day. The high of Bitcoin was, what, about $1,100? That, right, briefly.
41:30 That was a year ago, November, November, November Okay, the Senate committee meeting on Bitcoin. Okay, it’s at $550 right now, about dollars. I’m going to ask both of you separately. Start with you, where is it in a year? In a year, 3,000 maybe?
41:45 That’s dollars? Yeah, yeah, okay you, Hugh. I’d say within 2 to 3 years, over 10K, 50 maybe. You know what the real answer is, I’m going to give you, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because Bitcoin should be used for transacting.
42:00 Ah, exactly, who cares. It’s not about speculation. Yeah, true. Bitcoin, the spec, SC? I’m not actually judging that on speculation though, so if enough people are using it to transact, it needs to have enough value to be stable as well, so we need the market to be, I’d say, 10 times bigger than it is now to be stable.
42:19 So we need a market cap of one. Nuance about Bitcoin that I was fixated on at first, and then I stopped. Is that there is a finite number, once they’re all mined, of what, a million or something, and then I realized that, since they’re infinitely indivisible or fairly infinitely, that it doesn’t matter how many they are. It really doesn’t matter. It just matters what the market cap is.
42:36 It matters a little bit. Right, so there’s some new tech coming out. So consider a few things. So you’ve got Bitcoin, it’s going to slowly keep going and going up and going up. So there’s a few interesting things, such as then, when the reward halves, right?
42:47 So in a few years time, 2016, miners are going to start making a lot more, because suddenly you get half as much as you used to get, so the value of the actual coin, basically the price of the coin is going to have to go, because the energy put in was the same as it was before. Then on the flip side you’ve got Ethereum. Now Ethereum is coming out with a whole new model where they’re going to keep releasing more coins. Like, if you consider the kind of, the cryptocurrency 2.0 space, Ripple is a cool player, and I have total faith in them.
43:13 And Ethereum is the kind of new kid on the block that could be totally revolutionary and completely crazy, but their plan is, they’re going to open up like an IPO, so people can sort of buy in ahead of time, so they can say, yeah, I’ll give you some cash. This is a new coin this is a new coin. Yeah, but it’s a new technology as well, built on the blockchain. It’s not, it’s not copy like a lot of them. It’s like three stages, going from coin to, like, a blockchain and a protocol, to also, like, a programming language specifically built for that protocol and that coin.
43:41 There, just I, TR I think the simplest way to explain it is, Bitcoin is a trustless store of value and trustless transactions. Ethereum enables trustless computation. What that actually means, what you can do with it, can get very complicated. Totally. I don’t think I understand, but it sounds pretty awesome.
44:01 But the key, the thing that gets me from a kind of currency point of view, like the whole kind of quantitative easing, monetary policy point of view, is that these guys aren’t restricting it to a certain amount. What they’re saying is how much gets bought in at the beginning, in the IPO a certain proportion of that is going to then be released every year, right? So they’re going to kind of run it as a completely different style of cryptocurrency to anything in the market today, cuz everything in the market today is fixed, and so it’d be interesting to see how that plays out.
44:26 Not only that, there’s a few other coins where the developers have promised to do that, and they’ve, some of them have done it, some of them haven’t. With Ethereum it will be in a distributed contract. It can’t be broken. Okay, so it will just, it will happen, it will happen. I want to finish on Mr Satoshi Nakamoto, the possibly fictional creator of the Bitcoin.
44:46 They, to Satoshi, he was giv him a toast, you know. They thought they found him in California, some Japanese guy. They stormed him. The news did, they exposed him. Everyone felt bad about this guy.
44:56 Actually, they, on that, on that Rogan show where Andreas was there they actually were donating money for his cause, because he was, like, harassed and everything. Was that Satoshi? Is Satoshi still out there, or does it even matter? Ivan, I don’t think it was Satoshi. I think it had to be multiple people I still, I’m a big believer of that.
45:15 I don’t think anybody’s really going to ever find out, but I am hoping that sometime in the next couple of years some guy just going to walk out, and it’s going to be like it’s me. Like, how cool, how cool would that be? Right? And he will become, I don’t know, Iron Man, right? Going to be Tony Stark.
45:27 He’s going to be like, I’ve got 100,000. But does he own them, by definition or not? Well, he’ll have the largest wallet. I mean, it will be ridiculous if a guy developed this currency and did not have the largest, because he would have been mining by definition. Yeah, he’s got, what is it, 10% of the, is that right?
45:43 Is there a wallet with 10%? You can see wallet. I don’t know if it’s one wallet or more, but yeah, you can see it. It’s just sitting dormant. Just go back to the start of the blockchain, look at the Gen and it’s 10% of the market cap.
45:54 I mean, I don’t know if it’s 10% or 1%, but it’s a large chance. The Winklevoss twins have got 1%, so if they’ve got 1%, he’s got more. Exactly. But I think there’s, there’s a lot of reasons he’s anonymous. If you look at what Bitcoin can do, it can, there’s central banks around the world, some of which are good, some of which are bad, some of which are absolutely terrible For The Bad and The Terrible ones, Bitcoin provides a way that they can’t basically screw over their people.
46:22 They can’t print money and do what Zimbabwe did, do what Argentina seems to be doing. Right? Yeah, big in Argentina right? People are talking about it. It’s a threat to these massive powers, right?
46:32 Argentina lies about their inflation numbers, basically yeah, some Max Keiser says the UK lies about their inflation numbers. So that’s where the UK one, I’d say is really a really good central bank, but that’s only in comparison to worldwide central banks. I still think there’s massive issues with that. Okay, is Satoshi real or not? Satoshi, well, some somebody built it.
46:54 Somebody made it. He’s real. I reckon he’s still around. I doubt he’ll come out, because of exactly those issues. I doubt he’ll come out in public until perhaps his deathbed.
47:04 That’ll be brilliant. Honestly, though, it doesn’t matter. Yeah, that’s back to my answer. It doesn’t matter who invented shoes. We use shoes every day.
47:11 Yeah, who invented shoes? I haven’t heard that one, that’s good. Before we end, you mentioned the Winklevoss. They came out the other day and said, of course they would say this. Bitcoin’s going to be bigger than Facebook.
47:22 They really need to get over the Facebook thing you need to just, you need to move on. Yeah. You go to love. Do you reckon that was an accident, like literally a Freudian slip, where they were like, why did I just say that? Right?
47:33 Yeah. Well, I think those guys don’t, it’s very like no chance. Like, that’s still hung up. So what’s their take? They have a, what have 1% of the market, 1%.
47:41 They have a, what are they? Are they in BitPay? They have a bit payment company don’t they? They just invested into that. I’m pretty sure they came into the BitPay, one, that’s right, one of the two.
47:51 They’re trying to get a fund where you can invest in Bitcoins. I don’t know if it’s, if it’s ready yet. I’m not sure it’s gone through, few the stages that people weren’t sure it was going to get through. So actually it’s looking promising by the end of the year. The ETF should be live.
48:03 There’s a couple of others going live as well. Are you bullish on the Winklevoss? Am I bullish on the ETF? No, on them, on them in general you know what, yeah, I’ve thought about that. I first of all, major ratings for anyone who does, like, Harvard Olympic rowing and then also just gets 1% of all Bitcoin.
48:19 Like, just, I got to say, on Facebook, right, and takes on Facebook. So respect to them for that. Like, the whole court case was a bit dubious. All I’ve seen is the movie I got to say, I know neither them nor Mark Zuckerberg, so I’ve got no real take on it. What was what did they end up with a percentage of Facebook?
48:34 They ended up with a chunky amount. It’s just under 100 million. Is that cash? I’m I’m same as you, just looking at the movie. But the percentage wasn’t that big.
48:41 They went for cash, cuz it was like how much they were owed at the time, and so on, but it was like $100 million thereabout. So they’re cool all right. So, but based on the movie, you’re okay with them? So based on the movie, that’s the only bit that I know about the whole kind of court case with Facebook. So because I don’t know anything about it, I’m parking it.
48:57 I just, I respect the fact that these guys, everything they put their mind to, they do it properly. They didn’t have a bit of Bitcoin, they’ve got 1% of all Bitcoin. Like, that’s, that’s cool. I like that. Yeah, they put some decent money in.
49:07 I think the movie makes them look a bit mean, but evil. But yeah, as you said, I don’t know in real life. Certainly, I agree with their view anyway. I think it will be bigger than Facebook. So I know people that met ofan and they said that they are exactly like the guys in the movie.
49:24 I mean, you know, they’re characteristics, but both of you guys, they are both welcome to come on the show when they’re in London. But yeah, they keep fighting, right? I mean, they could cow away but they’re out there swinging. So, and let’s be honest, Zuckerberg didn’t look great in the movie either. So that’s true anyways there you go.
49:39 Guys, thanks so much for being here. This has been one of my favorite episodes ever, cuz we’re just talking and talking about this stuff. Let’s just get some details. Hugh, if people want to get in touch with you and buy a million dollars with the Bitcoins or sell, how do they do that? Drop me an email at Hugh, that’s hga at cointrader.net.
49:58 Okay, and what’s your preferred, I mean, besides yourself, but what’s your preferred applications in the UK for buying and selling coins? I mean, I use Bitstamp, but maybe I don’t know. So we run, we run the ATM and The Brokerage. We also run our own exchange, so cointrader.net as our exchange check it out. You can register an account and get trading straight away.
50:16 Okay, and if you want to buy Bitcoins on the sly, wear a mustache and some glasses and go down to the Vape Lab on Shoreditch High Street, and just, or you can call you the camera. Watch out for camera. I’ll be there. I’ll be there most time as well, so if you want to come and say hi, we’ll be there, and you do those Tuesday nights, where you, so every Tuesday night we do a beginners intro to Bitcoin. It’s 4 till 8, 4:00 till 8:00, and then we got a whole mix from complete beginners to Bitcoin, and then throughout the evening it turns into a networking event.
50:48 Ready? Okay, fantastic Ivan, how do people get a hold of you? ian.com, ivanor, you know, any way they want. If you’re selling stuff online right now, if you need a piece of software to make you more money, get you better customers, than Ometria, Doom right there Big Data. You’re the man. Data, big data for retail, and your blog is chock full of information, including a rather long article on Bitcoin.
51:08 It’s a good article. If anybody’s still got some time after watching this, definitely go and check it out. i.com, search for Bitcoin on the blog. It’s a good article, right? You said everyone, you said that the number of requests had picked up recently for explanation, so you decided just to bust out. Absolutely.
51:22 People just kept on emailing me they were like, what is Bitcoin? Can you tell me more about it? Cuz then you, I was quite vocal. I just wrote a giant blog post. Just thought was the easiest way of doing it.
51:29 Awesome, check that out. I tweeted out earlier read that post, you know, just to hopefully, by the time this is out there, you’ll be able to get burritos and Box Park for Bitcoin, for Bitcoins, that’d be cool, and people can just download a wallet, you can carry it on your phone, and you can go ahead and transact that way. So there’s, if you’re on iOS, by the way, Google for Fever, that’s P heva. It’s third-party wallet, so put, you then, you put a certain amount, but Apple can’t block it, from what I understand, right?
51:53 So if you got an iPhone, you can walk around with an app but it’s third-party, they hold the coins ultimately. Yeah, so you have to trust them a certain amount. I keep about $100 on there, so that I can, you know, I can pay for burritos, I can pay for drinks. I you know, put your main account somewhere else, but it certainly means you can get around the Apple block. Fantastic.
52:11 All right. Good to know. Awesome. As we say on Silicon Real, it’s about the people. Thanks so much, guys.
52:16 I’m really glad we got to hash this out about Bitcoin. If you don’t own some Bitcoins, go buy some, because that’s the only way you’re ultimately going to know how to use the technology. So go do that if you want to hit us up. It’s hello silicon.com. We’re on Twitter, etc, etc.
52:29 Guys, thanks so much for being here. Thank you, thank you very much all the best, be great. All right. I mean, I love it, obviously. I mean, I have a [expletive] day and I go downstairs, and I put my light on my bike, and I cycle home, and I’m grinning by the time I get home, and it’s a funny thing, because people, a lot of the comments were how they’ve noticed people seeing them obviously more, and like thumbs up from other cyclists and taxi drivers and bus drivers, and a few interesting insights that I hadn’t thought of when I was designing it.
53:00 They realized a lot of people commented about how when drivers overtake them, they take longer to cut back in than they would otherwise. They wait till they’ve gone past the projection and then cut back in a few yards ahead rather than just nipping straight in
