Ameer Rosic: ‘Everyone is Smart Enough to Lose or Make Money’ in Crypto

The whole market cap is only about less $400 billion. It's nothing. The whole point of blockchain is to democratize investing. Everyone is smart enough to lose money or make money.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Block Show Europe 2018. We're here today with Amir and we're going to be talking a bit about blockchain. So I'd first like to ask you to introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your contribution to the crypto and blockchain space.

Foreign. My name is Amir Rosik. I've been a serial entrepreneur for my whole life. Actually been involved in the blockchain space way before any of this ICO craze for the last four or five years. In the last two years I've been focusing on building block geeks. And what block geeks does is we train developers online, so we're agnostic platform, so we do solidity training, C training, we'll do Cosmos, we'll do rootstock, we'll do eos, we'll do everything. And pretty much we help you as a developer get onboarded in the blockchain space. As a developer. Great.

So blockchain is becoming a bit of a buzzword recently. So I wanted to ask you, how do you think you can keep blockchain mainstream without it becoming too much of an overused phrase that's just thrown around? How do you keep it real and keep the development going forward?

I don't think so. An individual can keep it real or stop where it's going to go, Right? There's a Buddhist saying, it is how it should be. Right. There is no right or wrong. There's actually three different worlds in here. You have the open source ethos, the cypherpunks, the original ones who care about cryptography, who care about actually creating something that's truly decentralized. And then you have maybe the Ethereum crowd, where they're still cypherpunks and they care about decentralization, but they're more quicker to break things and experiment. And then you have all the above, where you have the ICOs, then you have the private chains. So these are permissioned blockchains, whether it's used for enterprise, for supply chain, etc. So for us, saying this is good or bad, I think it is how it is. I think the more people involved creates more entropy, more feedback loop systems. And through this process we'll figure out what works, what doesn't work, and who knows where we'll be in the next couple of years.

So blockchain may be affected now by the recent passing of the EU privacy bill, the gdpr. So what are your thoughts on that? How do you think the two.

I think if you are a private DAPP that you control, the code affects you. But if you're an open source, decentralized platform, it's not applicable to you because there's no ownership there. There's nobody staking claim that I'm the CEO of Bitcoin or I'm the CEO of Monero. But if you are an ICO and you say I'm the founder of this project, you're liable.

That makes sense. So do you think that going forward with crypto regulation, blockchain regulation, some cryptocurrencies are going to be classified as securities now? Because there is that ico, that founder, that centralized aspect of it.

Yeah, the sec, they've been coming out with their statements, you know, their statements and there's legislation. Those are two different things. And so far since the last meeting was actually quite positive. Note, they left off where it's like it's not that black and white where it's going to be securities or non securities. It could be variable, where at one point it is a security, then it turns into a non security or vice versa. I think they're trying to figure out a new hybrid variation of the Howey test. Right. The original security test, because this isn't applicable in today's model. But I think we will see or we will get a real legal ruling within the next year. I think the SEC will actually come out and state like this is their final judgment on what they deem a token to be or not to be.

So since you said you've been in this space for a long time, how do you feel like the public has been reacting to it from the beginning and now what are the differences you see in the. In the main players?

Well, pre. Circa 2017, it was very focused on real businesses like there was focus on cryptography technologies, focus on the true ethos of blockchain. After the ICE or during the ICO craze that kind of like fell through because everyone's building on top of these platforms and they're assuming people are building on these platforms, which is a big assumption, which is not the case. Right. There's very limited people building these big protocols. And so I think right now, you know, greed is a hell of a thing. And a lot of people see an opportunity to raise money that they couldn't raise money before. My stance on ICOs is short term. I'm Not a big fan of them. Long term, I am a fan of them. Right. You have a technology hurdle you gotta solve. You have the legal hurdle you gotta solve. And what I mean by legal is like, the whole point of blockchain is to democratize investing. I hate it. I hate this fact that my mother can go spend millions of dollars at a casino, which is original token, right? You know, you have cash, you get a token. She can go buy the lottery ticket, and she can buy a million dollars worth of lottery ticket, but God forbid they're saying she's too dumb to invest in a company, right? And so when these securitized tokens come out again, or they want to create this, they want to take the blockchain and make it securitized, it defeats the whole purpose of it. It's like, once again, only I'm a credit investor and I hate that rule. I absolutely hate it that I'm only allowed to invest. Everyone is smart enough to lose money or make money. And so what we see in the next two, three years is still focusing on the technology. You can have all the regulations up here, but the fundamental issue is the technology is still naive. Right. It's very new. We have a couple of years to build out the protocols, whether it's Ethereum, EOS, Rootstock, Cosmos, Polkadot coming out next year, etc. These are all big theories and theories that haven't been shipped out to the market yet. And they haven't been under stress tests yet to a big degree. Because think about it, the whole market cap is only about less $400 billion. It's nothing. What happens when we have trillions of dollars and multiple smart contracts and actual people's pension plans on this? That's a serious deal. So we have a long way to go before we actually see legitimate use cases of this technology for the broader audiences.

And what concrete steps need to be taken in order for that to happen? Does it involve regulation on a global scale? Not global scale.

I think this has nothing to do with regulation. This has to do purely with the technology thinking, like, baby steps. We have to. Okay, you're an ico, let's say hypothetically, your token does make sense. Like one of the rare ones out of like millions. Right? Okay, cool. There are some that make sense. Right. You can do 14, 15 transactions a second. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So you can't even feasibly build a scalable company. You're at the mercy of the protocol, regardless of if you go here or there. All these different platforms currently today. And so I think a lot of the people who want to build these startups, they need to focus on the reality of like the technology is still not here yet.

So you mean like second layer solutions, like lightning Network?

Yeah, second layer is needed. Whether it's lightning network, whether it's plasma, whether it's proof of stake, whether it's delegated proof of stake for eos, whatever it may be, it doesn't really matter. I think the more the better to see what works, what doesn't work. But these scaling solutions are needed. And even though there's people out there that stayed on paper, hey, on paper it works. Well, I can point to a lot of things on paper that works, but in reality, the marketplace, it doesn't work. Communism on paper is perfect. We all know where that hits. I think we need to really still focus on building actual technology. And once a factor is foundations there, then you can actually scale.

All right, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on blockchain and crypto and for coming to Block Show Europe.

My pleasure. Thank you so much.

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