106. Why Are We Even in Crypto in the First Place?

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout, a batter of Collective Shift, alongside me as Bergs, your favorite MBA and COO of Collective Shift, Australia's leading crypto portfolio insights company, providing professional analysis and portfolio strategies for crypto investors. Like you, we are a unique blend of the established and the self made. And we're here to break down crypto business and personal growth. But we're not here just to talk crap. We're giving you the insights you need to make better investments, build successful businesses and level up your life. And the question we have been asking ourselves at the moment, because there's a bit of strategy we're doing internally here at Collective Shift is why are we even in crypto in the first place? You know, if we really think I've been in crypto now for similar to you burgs, six, seven years now and this has been one of the longest, I think it is the longest crypto bear market on record, prices are down, no one's making money. You know, people are carrying on about why crypto has no purpose, there's no real use cases. Crypto doesn't even do anything. You know, I went and spoke at PER in Perth the other day at a conference and we spoke at a group business event. I was supposed to speak on crypto but the feedback from the business owners is what's, what's even the relevance of crypto right now? Like, you know, and after the talk, a lot of people ask me why, why are we even in crypto? Like, why put all your effort into a business and into an industry that seemingly not going anywhere? And that's the common, I think, misconception for a lot of people. They see price as the indicator of progress.

Yeah, the general population. And they've said it to me, it's like crypto's dead. They're like, oh, it was a flash in the pan, it was a thing that happened, now it's gone away. It was all a huge scam and it doesn't exist. And they don't really understand what crypto represents and the possibilities that are there and what people are actually building. And we're going to go through some of that today.

So today we really just move price aside and talk about, you know, why we have been in crypto. And it's important to remember crypto is such a broad topic. It's like, why do you work in finance? It's like, well, for part of finance.

It'S like, why do you work on the Internet. You're like, whoa, what a big question.

Yeah, yeah. So like, for me, you know what got me into crypto or bitcoin to begin with seven years ago was I was at a cafe with an old friend of mine and he made me download the Coinbase app and he sent me $100 of Bitcoin over lunch. And the transaction happened instantly and I didn't need to use my bank and I was just completely honestly blown away. And for the. A lot of people in crypto, that first, that first realization of like, something just happening is like mind boggling. It's like, what the fuck just happened then? What was your first entry to crypto, mate? What? How did you.

I don't think I've even told this story. So it was a bloke who both know Ben N and mate. He was just messaging me. It was early 2017 and it was about. I can't even remember what this token was. It was some betting token, first thing I've ever seen. And he's like, oh, bro, these guys are in. They're going to create a two sided betting market. You'll be able to use this token and you can bet on stuff that perhaps isn't, you know, is legal in one jurisdiction but not the other. Whatever, it's on the Internet. I was like, okay, cool. I read through it. I'm like, this is amazing. How do I get some? He's like, oh, cool. You know, you just need, you need bitcoin, you need this, you need that. And I'm like, oh my God. Like, it's way too hard. I have to buy bitcoin, I have to convert it. Then I buy this other thing and there's all these wallets and I don't understand. This is just dumb. So I left it. But then I started listening to bitcoin podcasts. A few of them with Andreas Antonopoulos, a few other people. And I was so dumb back then. I was like, this bitcoin actually starts to make sense, the things they're doing. You can move it around on the Internet. And I was like, I need to support these bitcoin people. I should buy some.

And I was like, all right. So I went on an exchange, I bought some. And I was able to, I think around that time I came across a crypto group and you had to pay for it via crypto. So I sent them some crypto. I was like, whoa. And then the person in the group was like going on decentralized exchanges and buying tokens that were in Malta and I sent my money across on this hokey like exchange bought another token. My money was when went from Australia to Malta within a few minutes and then came back as another thing and I was like wow, this is pretty powerful. And from there I went down the rabbit hole and then really went into you know, the economics more about inflation. I actually was studying economics. I had just finished studying economics at the time I think 2016 and this was 2017. So all of it and the technology aspect I already understood. So it started to make a lot more sense to me. I was like wow, this is going to level the playing field. This is incredibly powerful where I can start to invest in things that I'm not allowed to invest in today because I'm not a sophisticated investor.

Yeah. And you mentioned this before that, that access to assets or companies that in the non crypto world, you know, for those people listening home that hasn't. Haven't invested in private companies. It's actually, you actually can't unless you're a sophisticated investor. You have to have more than I think 300 or 250,000 might, might be more than that. $500,000 of liquid assets plus you have to earn way more come for three years is a way.

So it's, it's 2 million liquid assets. Oh and yeah right. And you have to, it's like and or you have to earn 250k per year for the last 2 years. So the criteria is are you rich, not smart, are you qualified? Can you do this? It is are you rich? That's the criteria to invest in the spicy and non sanitized investments.

Yeah. Which are usually the best opportunities. Right? Yes, they're higher risk. But like you're basically saying that capitalism or not capitalism but like society is built towards only allowing the best opportunities from an investment perspective to the people that already have money. So everyone that doesn't have money, you're not allowed. Which is completely backwards because in some way shape or form they've regulated that because they believe that people without money can't make the decisions themselves. So they've restricted that based off.

Trying to protect people that have less amounts of money because they don't have the IQ or ability to make those choices themselves. So they get themselves into trouble. That's why they restricted to high net worth people. It's fucking ridiculous.

Isn't it just. And one of my main things that, that really drives me is I hate it when people get bullied when there's either power distance, informational distance, when the strong pick on the weak. I absolutely hate that. And I see it all the time, particularly in businesses, technology and finance and within tech. I've upskilled and helped a lot of people, especially in business as well, especially in management, just giving the tools and techniques. And I really saw and still see crypto as that opportunity to level the playing field where people can leapfrog these decades and decades of sanitized investments and build their wealth at a much faster rate. It is an amazing vehicle. It really. And if we look wider, it is giving a lot of power back to the people, their financial freedom. It's a system that works for you, that is designed by you.

Yeah, I love that. So it's interesting. You came sort of side. You sort of came in through this, like, this betting token, sort of more into, like, probably was probably good on Ethereum, I assume, you know, sort of blockchain, ICO days, right? That was like, 2017. That was a amazing time. It was so exciting. I remember those days. Just so much crazy happened. I sort of came more into the bitcoin realm, and I was like, okay, that's amazing. What on earth does bitcoin do? And then I started digging deeper around, like, okay, what? Like, how does what even is? I started to question, like, what is? And I was 17 at the time, what, you know, what is money? What does that even mean? Like, why. Why is the dollars that we have in our bank account worth what they're worth? And then I went and started reading about the history of money, and I learned about the gold standard, and I learned about how we're not on the gold standard. And then I went through the whole, like, history of how we used to, you know, trade eggs for sheep and cattle for, you know, wood and all this sort of stuff. And then we went into, you know, trading metals. And then what happened was people realized you could actually melt copper and gold together so you have more volume. So then they just started melting more coins together to have more coins. And then people realized they weren't worth as much. And then they went to the banking system where you could trade gold for cash because cash was easier to denominate. And then they've gone, well, I don't mean it. Do we actually need to even back this money? Why don't we just spend the gold and then just say that it's worth what it is? So then they completely fucked off the gold standard, and now it's just cash because we all believe and trust it's worth something. And then they're going well, what, what happens if we, we just print more money? What will happen then? So then they just started printing money and that just hasn't stopped. And now the US government is an all time high number of debt, up to $33 trillion of debt in the U.S. and they just keep on printing. So what does that mean? It means inflation occurs. It means the prices of everything, goods, services, houses, property go up. It means what you can purchase with that cash goes down. And 95% of the population had no fucking idea what's actually going on. They don't have investments, they don't understand how inflation works. They don't understand what's actually going on. And that's when I was like, oh my God. Bitcoin, limited supply blockchain, you know, divisible, can send it anywhere in the world and I control it. And it's, it's based by math and science, not government and people. Oh my God.

So this is so interesting. So 2016, I studied economics at a master's level and then 2017 got into Bitcoin. So I understood everything you just said, including fractional reserve banking, commingling, hypothecation, all that kind of stuff. And I went, okay, I'll buy some of that. And I just threw that to the side. And I was more interested on the technical innovation that was happening on ethereum and the ICOs.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Well, like for me, like I, you know, I didn't, I didn't go to university and I didn't, I didn't really know much about money nor was I really interested in technology. I'd say like, you know, I was a big computer guy in it, but I was more into business and processes and marketing and like social media, those sorts of things. You're much more of a tech, tech guy than I am. So that makes sense that you went, what's this Ethereum thing?

This is shiny thing.

And I'm like, fuck. My mom and dad have earned a wage their whole life. They rent, they mom and dad, do you understand what's going in the world? I'm just learning this. Do you understand this? And like then what really opened up to me was that more, more importantly, the fact that no one really understands what's going on. And that was like, oh my goodness.

Okay, so people work their entire lives for money and over 90% don't understand how money works, they don't understand how it's produced, they don't understand inflation, they don't understand investment and also how to, how to build a strategy to get wealthy, like, the majority. You talk to your mom and dad, they'll have no idea. They'll be like, oh, I go to work, I get some money I put into my house, I buy my groceries. That's it. Yeah, right. And when you start to see that, you're like, they don't even understand the financial system they work their whole lives in. How are they going to understand the next level with crypto? You know what I mean? Like, we're getting them to go out really far. So it's a type of person that is interested, wants to do better, and actually wants to leapfrog the existing system and really accelerate their journey and their wealth.

And this isn't taught in school, mate. Like, this is. This is the craziest thing. Like, I was just. I just left school at this point when I sort of discovered Bitcoin and then money. And I'm like, what? Like, the fuck is going on? Like, it was such a period of time when I was like, the world. Like, I just started understanding how the world worked and, like, how much of this information was just, like, not accessible to people and it wasn't taught in schools. And. And that was really the driver and I think the real why for me and the mission of Collective Shift and what we're doing here is trying to educate and teach people about the why, like, about what's actually going on here. You got to be left behind unless you open your eyes up to how you're getting screwed and the rich are getting richer and you're just going to get poorer unless you. I can do something about it.

Yeah. There was a cracking article. We'll link in the show notes written by Gemma Green from Power Ledger. I'm not sure if she's still with them. She has a lot in government. Couple of quotes from this, mate. And this was just really. This really resonated with me. She said, no one has woken up saying, I need a blockchain. And that is so true. Like, no business is reliant on a blockchain, right? But the ability to replace existing solutions should never be the benchmark of a new piece of technology. And she goes on to say, after all, before the electric light, there was a kerosene lamp, the candle. No one ever complained about having to use those. Of course, people started fires, explosions, accidentally, because kerosene lamps, you know, catch fire. But that was put down to fire safety, not lacking electric lamps. And she said, in fact, it was a while before people connected generating electricity to a means of generating light for the first hundred years I'm thinking about motors, telegraphs, even treating gout like which is just so wild rather than replacing the kerosene lamp. So people won't necessarily see the problems blockchain is going to solve because they don't necessarily see the problems. That is critical because in Australia and in the majority of the western world we have sophisticated banking and we don't see the problems every day. We don't even think to the future about how we will want to transact, how seamless we will want things to be. We just don't live in that world. We wait for someone else to create it, capture all the value and deliver it through the app. Through an app, just like we did with social media and everything else. Something just appears on your phone. Great. Today I can use it. Chat GPT comes out of nowhere. Great. I can now use this. Even though people have been building companies in the background for years and years, There was about 15 years of research and effort that went into chat GPT and you only see the end result. We're right at the front end where we are the people that are creating this, we're involved in it. This is where the value capture is before everyone starts using that app on their phone.

Yeah mate, you've now, you've now that and that sort of bleeds into around the adoption of cryptocurrency is actually a lot higher in these lower to middle income countries. Stablecoins is a big one. So USDC, I think it's the biggest stablecoin. 70% of USDC adoption comes from outside the United States.

Yeah.

Which is fascinating.

And think about that. Why, why would you do that? Right. So because the US is a superpower, USD is strong. If you need your money within the next two years, the majority of people would recommend that you have it in USD because it's, it is one, it's like, it's like the global benchmark. Right. Even things that denominated in USD like oil and gold and if you're in any other country, you want to hold that USD, how do you hold it? Well generally banks don't do that kind of thing. You can have institutions that charge you lots of money or you can hold the actual cash yourself, which you're going to get absolutely ripped when you go to try and exchange that. Or you can hold a stablecoin where you hold it within a wallet, you control it and you can transfer it anywhere in the world. You want that liquidity and that freedom.

There's a new app that was launched there's a. There's a company out of Australia, it's called Stables and it's a. It's a mobile phone app where you can transfer your stablecoins onto the app and it just works as a Visa or MasterCard. So you can go anywhere to any, doesn't matter where merchant, as long as they accept debit card. And it like when you make the payment, it switches it from Stables into. Into the fiat currency for the retailer to accept.

Think about this. If I asked you a question. What is a stronger currency? AUD or USD?

USD.

Exactly. All day, every day. Now I've got a bunch of AUD sitting in my bank account that's slowly getting eroded away and I see the AUD to USD pair and I'm constantly getting less money. I should put a chunk of that into stablecoins and then just use that debit card. I would be better off.

You'd be better off. And guess what? When you go to Japan and you achieve your bucket list and you take the family over make take Stable coins and then you could just use the.

Use the.

The card to pay. So much easier because versus you're taking a travel card getting railed on the trans. Trans. The transfer fee of like Australian to exchange fee. Yeah, yeah. The. The time it'd take. The bank would take money, there'd be fees. It'd just be a nightmare, mate. Like what a disaster.

Yeah. And you think about this. It literally just works at spot rate, it's market rate and it's a piece of software that runs. It doesn't require all the people, all the offices, all the insurance, all the electricity. Although it is just so smooth and simple. It's literally just a swap.

Yeah, yeah. And we pay some of our contractors in stablecoins and overseas because it's just far easier now. Oh yeah, but all this is. Oh, you go.

Yeah, you're exactly right. Where Think about this. You go on the Internet, it's global. You find someone on Fiverr or you find them on upwork, whatever it is and you want to pay them. I'm in Lebanon. Oh. I mean like Antarctica. Who knows? Like somewhere weird. You don't care. I just want the work. How do I pay you? I don't know what your local jurisdiction is. My bank doesn't deal with your bank. Or I have to pay you $100 per transfer or 50 bucks and I'm only paying you 50 bucks. That doesn't make sense. Great, just send it to me in Bitcoin or Stables instant. You get paid immediately. Done.

And you can verify on a ledger. Like I sent it and it didn't arrive by the bank. Now I have to call the bank and now this has to happen. No, it's on the ledger. I can show it to you. We could both see the same ledger.

What happened recently? I sent my brother, like a thousand bucks. Just you needed some money and it didn't show up. And it was like a week, just. It just disappeared. James rang out the bank. Hey, like my, you know, my brother sent me. Money has arrived. Oh, we can't see it. You need to send the receipt from the sender's bank. I rang out my bank. Oh, no, it's gone from our. And you need to chase out the receivers. Bank finally got. Found them. It got stuck in some sort of scam filter. Then we had to go through this whole process of like applying to get it out. Took another like 12 days. No, we had two options. One was to reverse a transaction which would take 60 days. Or they.

60 days?

Yeah, or, or they could keep the transaction going and just, just wait and hopefully comes out in the next like two to four weeks. That was their options.

Could you imagine if that was like your rent money or money you actually, you really needed to send to someone?

Like $100,000 for something? Like it was, you know what I mean? Like, oh, it's got to wait 60 days for it to return. What do you mean, 60 days? You know what I mean? What sort of, hey, system is he back there? Windows 98.

Oh, mate. What are they going to, like, the back of the bank and, like, picking up every dollar and walking it to another bank on the other side of the country?

Literally.

What about that video even, like, so this is the other thing, like, control of your money. That video we saw recently about the guy that was, it was, it was a, it was a piss take. It was a comedy thing. But he was going into the bank wanting to get $10,000 out. And all the questions the bank teller was asking him and he was just like, he was just like, he's made some funny stuff up. What? You know, he's like, oh, yeah, buying drugs or, you know, like, you know, paying for my pay. Pay for someone. I don't know. He was being like, stupid. But the point was, like, it doesn't matter what I'm using the money for. It's my money. Give me the money. You know what I mean? Like, it's weird as well.

Like, even when I, when I set up my, my trust with my bank, I had to go down there and get a bank account. They're like, oh, you know, do you own your house? It's none of your business. This is to do with the trust. I'm a trustee of the trust. Like, go away, you've got all the paperwork. It's a bank account. All it is is a debit bank account. I can't get credit, I can't get loans, I can't do anything. I can put money in and take money out. You got the trustee, you've got the document, that is all you need. And then they start asking me all these crazy questions like, oh, I see you've got this money. You know, what are you doing with this? I'm like, no, that's my personal stuff. You don't go into that. Separate this out. Why are you asking me all these questions? I'm like, this is none of your business.

Nonsense. Absolutely nonsense.

Oh yeah, don't get me started, man.

So look, you know, that's a couple of big reasons. There's a bunch of other stuff that, you know, other use cases of wiring, crypto, you know, you know, even blockchain is an infrastructure. We saw NFTs really come out and you know, sort of had a massive boom and bust. But you take prices aside, you know, it's really empowering creators and a new digital evolution of ownership and the ability to take ownership of different characters and assets and currency from games, virtual worlds into different worlds. I think that's really exciting. You've also got, you know, infrastructure layers like Helium, which is a crypto based network on Solana. They have a ongoing partnership with T Mobile where you can basically Helium is like a decentralized network to utilize getting reception and use data on your phone through a decentralized world. So you can actually be like one of those antennas basically to get much cheaper.

Downloads and mobile services through the networks that's built on Blockchain and Solana. Then you've got things like reward assets, so tokenizing reward assets which is continuing to grow. Recently the market cap of on chain reward assets hit a market cap top of $3 billion. So basically looking to move, you know, property, gold, equities, carbon offsets, treasuries, real estate, things of that onto the blockchain to actually tokenize. I think that's a big space as well, which we've spoken about, which is pretty exciting.

Absolutely. And I think the way that I really look at this is.

The currency that we have today and banking we have today was all built before the Internet. It is not native to The Internet. And we need a way to transact value, send things around, share ownership that is native to the Internet. That is what cryptocurrency is. The Internet is designed to be peer to peer with no middleman. And now we've got a currency that is trustless, that we can transact and send value to anyone near instantly. That is incredible. And the use cases are going to come out of this. And you think about it, we've got, it's now the dawn of AI. We've got all these AI agents. How are they going to transact value? They're not going to go out and get a bank account. They're not a natural person, they can't do that. And every single transaction that goes through, 2 cents, 5 cents, whatever, will not work. But you're able to do that with crypto, even with the Internet of Things. And just the way we interact, like tipping or know badges, all this kind of stuff, being a part of a group and access ownership, these are the things that are starting to emerge. And they're all using that Internet of Money layer that is either Bitcoin or Ethereum or a bunch of other cryptocurrencies. And we're already just starting to see that. Come on. And we will soon start to see those apps on your phone and those ways to just really just go hell for leather. People are wanting, look, let's, let's really upframe this. What do people want? They want a better deal. They want to do things faster, they want to do things more efficiently, more effectively. Is a fiat money system. And what you can do with that going to be the way. No, that's already capped out. You're maxed out there. You can't program that money, you know, you can't program in, you know, ownership, distributions, access. You can do that with cryptocurrency. And if we just look at humans that want to do better, they want to improve everything we do, if people didn't want to get better, we wouldn't have building skyscrapers, all this kind of stuff, right? But people always want to build on what the previous generation has done. Where do we build the majority of stuff? We build it on the Internet. It's how we're connected. We're connected to it all day, every day with our computers, our phones, our laptops, even our little headphones are connected to something. Even our smart, Our homes. And our smart homes are filled with everything on the Internet. All of that is going to need an underlying layer in order to operate, transact value and do all those amazing things that we just said then and that is cryptocurrency. And if you honestly, if you don't believe in that, it's almost like you're saying humans don't want progress. That is literally what you're saying.

Yeah. Now I couldn't set it better myself. And there's so, there's so many use cases underlying blockchain like we've just been speaking about, which Burg spoke about. You know, like you can go as deep as you want, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's Ethereum, whether it's the NFTs, whether it's DeFi, gaming, storage, mobile networks, like there's so much. Right? Yeah. But I guess the point of this episode was to reiterate that, you know, the idea that crypto is useless, it has no, you know, use cases is absolutely nonsense and misguided. There are so many use cases out there right now. They continue to, to grow and there's a lot of other solutions that haven't been discovered yet, you know, and as time goes on, regardless of price, those solutions will come to fruition. And we don't even know obviously.

Yeah, yeah, we don't even know the things we want to do. Even with like chat, GPTs bring out new features. Now you connect to Internet, now you can do images, now people are building in their apps. We didn't see all of that progression. Right. That happened quite quickly. But that's what's going to happen in the future. And if you think about this, if you're a technical person, you had Web one, Web two, this is now Web three. Right. And it's more about peer to peer ownership. And really the protocols we got from the web were like SMTP, HTTP, POP3, they're all the things that underlie, you know, your email, how websites and web pages work. They are standards. They're standards that help engineers build with ready made formats. So the, these are what are being developed right now. And a new standard protocol will emerge for information and value exchange and people will just adopt that into their tech stack and start using it. That's what I'm really excited about. Web3 is not something that was made up by crypto. Web3 was defined a long time ago about what was actually going to happen in web infrastructure and the progression. Crypto is what has emerged that fits into what the Web3 category is.

I love that. Let's end on that. I think that's, that's a great, great ending point. It's a natural progression. So come up with this idea to make a bunch of money in crypto.

It is, it's. It is human progress. This is the natural evolution of the Internet and people innovating.

Amazing. Drop the mic. Let's wrap it up there, everyone. I really, I really enjoyed that episode. Hopefully you guys did too. Listening There is a bigger world out there outside of price, and the price doesn't reflect, you know, where the space is going and the progress it's making. We're on an upwards trajectory and we're not going anywhere. So thank you, everyone that continues to listen to the podcast. If you like this episode and you have someone that you think would find value in listening to this, we would absolutely, absolutely appreciate it if you could send it to them. You can share it on WhatsApp, share it on Messenger, Snapchat, whatever you want to do. We'd love for you to share it around how we grow the podcast and spread the message of why people need to be paying attention to this space to take control of their actual finances and build the future that they want to build without getting left behind. If you want to tweet at us, you can let us know what your thoughts are. The podcast en and burgs on Twitter and you've got bergs at Babybackburg and myself at bensimpsonau. And we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks for listening, champions.