Ben Simpson (founder of Collective Shift) argues that Bitcoin and broader crypto technologies should be judged beyond short-term price movements. He explains his personal motivation—distrust of inflationary fiat and desire for a deflationary, trustless alternative—and surveys concrete use-cases: banking the unbanked, decentralized finance (loans/yield without intermediaries), stablecoins for fast cross-border payments, NFTs empowering creators, tokenizing real-world assets, Web3 gaming economies, decentralized storage, and infrastructure projects. He acknowledges past centralized failures (e.g., Celsius, BlockFi) but sees them as cleansing the space and enabling durable business models. He ends by reaffirming conviction in holding crypto regardless of price and invites viewer responses.
Questions this video answers
Bitcoin went from $19,000 to nearly $30,000.
Bitcoin started with about 90% market share and is at 43% now.
He says Argentina's inflation rates are more than 90%.
He claims there are over $120 billion of stablecoins in value.
He cites over $1.9 billion of revenue generated from NFTs, according to A16Z.
Screw the crypto price. Bitcoin went from 19,000 to nearly 30,000. Price and value are two completely separate things.
You start to see inflation picking up.
And I'm so sick of people telling me in bear markets that crypto has no purpose. Price is down. Why are you even in. It's not going back up.
Bitcoin and a range of other cryptocurrencies, where crypto's going and what's happening here.
It'S the same thing from the same people that say this about crypto in every single bear market.
Bitcoin started with about 90 of market share and it's at 43% now. Are we at the bottom? Could this be the bottom?
I was reading a tweet, you know, last night about why are we even in crypto? So many people are here to make money. I'm definitely here to make money. But it's more than that. Where crypto is and why I got so drawn to this space purely to begin with was bitcoin. A world where I started to realize that we're run by governments and central banks that were able to print money out of thin air at any point in time to fill the coffers of their own bank accounts and the stocks that they're invested in. And yet the everyday person that doesn' those assets continues to be pushed out of society, and the gap of wealth across the world continues to be separated, made my blood boil. And this idea of a alternative currency that is deflationary instead of inflationary, that is trustless, that we control, that are not controlled by the few that make all the decisions, made so much sense to me, but yet nobody understood what it was. And 99% of people still don't understand what it is. And this at a core, is why I got into cryptocurrencies, why I got into Bitcoin. And I think we forget that sometimes. We forget that there is a real technological change that's coming across the world right now that is actually genuinely helping so many people. It's banking the unbanked. So many people across the world don't even have access to banks. So many countries in the world, their local currency and fiat, the fiat currency is inflated so much that it's actually unusable. They can't use the money that they're getting paid to do the job, to utilize, to buy goods and services for themselves. In Argentina, I think the inflation rates are more than 90%. That is extraordinary. Be it for developed countries, we don't see this, and then we have this viewpoint, this uneducated viewpoint that it doesn't do anything or it doesn't like there's no purpose because you can't see it and it's just nonsense. So in this video, I really wanted to share, I guess, those reasons why I'm so passionate about this space regardless of the price. Beyond Bitcoin, you've got things like Ethereum, right? And the idea of decentralized finance, I believe, is groundbreaking. And taking aside, again, all of the investment side of things, of, you know, the SEC and legislation and all this stuff, the current legislation doesn't fit within decentralized apps. It's never been built before. So this is a whole new dimension. And yes, we're going to get government oversight, but these apps will continue to be used in some way, shape or form. And the idea of being able to take a loan out and earn yield or interest on your savings without the need of a middle person is groundbreaking. You know, in the future, I see a world where you don't need to go to a bank to get a loan. There's companies in Australia where I have my cryptocurrency right now, I can use as collateral and take out a loan from owning that crypto. And yes, there's been so many instances previously of like centralized applications like Celsius and blockfi that have gone belly up. But these are the things that have needed to happen, in my opinion, to get us to a point where we can actually get to business models that we know that work, that we know that people can utilize. Because without that stuff being washed away, we just get more and more people trying to steal and scam people in this space. So with that being behind us, we can actually wash that stuff out and move forward as an industry. Another one is stablecoins. There's over $120 billion of stablecoins in value out there today. It is a killer app. I saw today on Twitter someone that was in the US Getting paid from a client from Switzerland in US dollars and then he had to buy another currency to pay his employees. This transaction took multiple weeks and he lost thousands of dollars in the conversion rates because of the different currency switching and the banks he had to go through and the approval we had to go through. With stablecoins, you can do this instantly with little to no fees, and you can switch this into any currency that's available in stablecoin. It's an absolutely unbelievable technological advancement and I fundamentally see more and more banks picking up on this and utilizing them over time. And predominantly a lot of these stablecoins are being built on Ethereum. And that's why I'm so excited. More creators are empowered through NFTs. Over $1.9 billion of revenue was generated according to A16Z from NFTs since they've been created. And yes, we've gone through this huge boom and bust cycle of NFTs, but it's opened up a whole new value proposition and business model for creators that in the past have never been able to get access to that. Now, yes, I do fundamentally believe a lot of it is crap, but the technology itself is going to allow a whole new range of access for fans, for customers, for businesses to interact with their audience one on one within again without the need of a middle person to be able to derive that value and to be interoperable not only across blockchains, but in games and different entertainment apps and real life and virtual world lives. This is so exciting space that we are moving into or crypto as an infrastructure level. A project called Helium built on Solana is doing work with T Mobile to distribute satellites and antennas and the ability for mobile phones to get reception and networks through this decentralized application that users and those nodes get paid for, which is super, super exciting. Or another one that I love which is tokenizing real world assets. So using those real world assets on chain and tokenizing them, I think this is a huge game changer. It's been something that's been tried to be done for so long, long, especially in property, to be able to put that on the blockchain. They made that super easy and make that confirmation of transactions and that record keeping immutable and fast again is another game changer, another real world utilization of crypto and blockchain. Then we have gaming. We've seen so much money being poured into gaming and again, I still think we're very early in this Web3 gaming space. But the ability to have these in world economies where you can earn tokens, you can earn rewards, you can distribute them and take them outside of the games, I think is super exciting. You know, for so long these games, the value has been held within the the ecosystem itself. Once the game turns off, it's all over. But with these new Web3 games, those tokens and the values can be interoperable. You can change it, you can send it between different players. Super exciting future or storage. Another one like Arweave allows anyone to store their content, their information safely in a decentralized way. And there's a lot of other alternative storage options. There as well. But again, this idea of decentralization, you know, taking out a middle person and bringing people together, you know, I used in my TEDx talk last year utorrent as an example, right. The ability to have this peer to peer network of people to add value without the need of a middle person. Right. And now we're just actually creating that in tokens and blockchains at a global scale where we can do that with music, applications, content, currency value, whatever it might be. This is a whole new wave of technological revolution that is going to happen regardless of price. Yes, we speculate, yes, we invest. But moving all that aside, this space is going to make the world better. So those comments of crypto is useless. The market's down, why are we investing? I'm getting out. I'm sick of it. In the end of it doesn't really matter. You know, for me, I see crypto, bitcoin, making the world a better place. And it already is making the world a better place. So regardless of price, it's why I remain so passionate and have so much conviction and it's why I won't sell my coins. And it's probably why I'm going to make so much money. And those that of you that are also passionate about this space will make that money because we're going to be here regardless of the ups and downs. We ride those cycles high and low and that's why we're going to get out at the other end. And that's why I'm so passionate about crypto. I'd love to hear from you why you like crypto. Leave me a comment in the comments below. Let me know what the one thing is, the reason why you got into crypto and why you like it. My name is Ben. I'm the founder of Collective Shift. I hope you like this video and I'll see you on the next episode.
