Michael Taggart — What You Should Know About Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrencies

Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys Mount Wolf and Joe Fear.

What's up, everyone? Yo, yo, yo, what's. Welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Catch you off guard, huh?

With your hosts, Joe Fear and Matt Wolf.

Oh, he pointed at himself when he said Joe Fear. That's very weird.

Anyway, no, this. This episode is freaking amazing. If you've ever wondered about blockchain, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, all that kind of stuff, this episode is going to break that down for you, and you're just gonna. You're gonna completely understand the power of it and why so many people are talking about it.

Yeah. If you haven't heard of blockchain or know what the hell that is or don't know what the hell that is, it's weird, but it's not weird. It's basically this technology that's just blowing the hell up right in front of your eyes. If you don't know about it, keep listening, even if you do. But I think I'm just so damn excited because after we finish talking with Mike, Mike Taggart, you're gonna meet him in just a moment here. You're gonna get a full understanding from A to Z what a blockchain is, why it's important. If you don't know what blockchain is, what bitcoin is, and that's the more popular thing, but definitely, this is going to be probably the most beneficial hour you've taken in a while. I know we've said that before.

This is no lie. Like, my head's still buzzing, and it's been about an hour since we finished the call, and this basically, Mike does it. He lays everything out there for you.

Yep. Let's go ahead and dive right in with Mr. Michael Taggart.

Let's go. All right, Mr. Michael. Or do I call you Michael X. What's your name now?

Call me anything that's not four letters.

All right, I can do that. Thanks for coming on, man. I think this was actually one of our most exciting, exciting. Matt and I just talking about cryptocurrency things, just the blockchain in general. So we're stoked on, and that's seeding something in the future that you'll say, I'm sure, to have you on. So thanks for coming on, but let's get into it. Let's talk about this blockchain stuff. Crypto, what it is, why it's important.

Yeah, sure. Well, thanks for having me on here, guys. The blockchain and crypto thing is very interesting new technology that's come out in the last little while. Anybody that has been on Facebook or any sort of social media has probably seen or heard some sort of rumblings about bitcoin lately because of the huge run up in price and stuff like that. Again, so bitcoin is kind of the first iteration of the blockchain. The blockchain in and of itself is just a distributed ledger. So it's just a database of data that is distributed all around the world to all of these different separate people who are taking part of it. So think of it as somewhat like a BitTorrent, how people all jump onto a BitTorrent to download some sort of information. And the more people that are on that torrent, the more faster the torrent is for everybody who's downloading and uploading stuff. Right. Similar to that is this where it's a decentralized distributed ledger and nobody can technically control it. So let's say you have some sort of, let's say that you, Matt, owed Joe money and Joe says, hey, you owe me money. And you say, great, here's my bank account and I'm going to go ahead and deduct $100 off of here and I'm going to carry the one, put the two here, blah, blah, and here's my new amount. And you send that over to Joe. Joe looks at it and you've taken the 100 out of your account, put it into his account. They're both showing up on that line item ledger. Both of you agree to that. You guys both then put it into a three ring binder. That three ring binder is then sent everywhere in the planet all at the same time. Does that make sense?

Yeah. So now, now nobody can go and say that transaction didn't happen because there's proof. And I can't delete it off my computer because that proof is now on everybody's computer everywhere.

Yeah, right. And the second somebody does maybe doctor some evidence or proof or anything like that, the second it happens, it's checked against all those other ledgers, they're able to find that out. And then that ledger is no longer part of that system because it's been corrupted or it's been alter.

Right. Now here's my question pertaining to that. Now we hear that this sort of blockchain and things like bitcoin are anonymous. I mean you've obviously heard of people using them on, you know, to do illegal activities.

Through the Internet.

But it, to me it seems like if it's in this blockchain and there's a reference to every transaction that's ever happened on the blockchain, how is that anonymous if. If it's there and everybody can see it?

That's a really good question, mostly because you're absolutely right. It is actually a forensic accountant's dream. It would be what a blockchain is. The most anonymous thing on the planet really is a face to face transaction using cash that's facilitated more crimes or anything like that than anything on the blockchain. On the blockchain, every single transaction is indeed recorded and is a part of the chain and is always available for anybody to go look at forever and ever. And so from the standpoint of it being something that is anonymous, it's not, it's completely transparent. It's just that there's no requirement for usage. Like there may not have been any your customer, KYC or AML involved when the person got their asset or that coin or whatever. And so they may not have a name associated with it, but that doesn't matter. In the era of big data and stuff like that, people can now look at all the databases and all of the transactions and cross match it across some database and be able to create some sort of digital fingerprint for almost every single account that's out there or wallet that's out there. It's not anonymous. That's kind of just some misinformation, whether it was intentional or not, that has just ended up being repeated over and over and over in the media and other places so that people believe it to be true when it's really just the opposite.

Right, that's what I thought. It's funny because a lot of what I've read in just history and there's a lot of documentaries on bitcoin and the rise of it all. But it's like a lot of the regulators, they'll go after, oh, you can do illegal things, activities with this. It's like, have you ever heard of cash in a baggy alley in the dark?

I'm pretty sure that I may or may not have done some things with cash that I'm pretty sure, you know.

What I mean, that were illegal.

Yeah. Way more anonymous than anything that's recorded online forever and unalterable. It's crazy, right?

And another I think common misconception with, you know, blockchain and cryptocurrencies and all that kind of stuff is, oh shoot, what was I going to say?

I don't know. I literally just lost my train of thought of where I was going to go with that. Oh, that. It's not backed by anything, right? Like it's just a digital. Like there's nothing there. Like there's nothing backing it. How is that secure? Somebody could just go turn off a website somewhere and all of a sudden everybody loses their money. There's no backing behind it. Which is kind of a funny argument when you look at the US dollar. But do you want to speak into that for a second?

Well, yeah, I would tell everybody that's listening if you have never read the book or the audiobook in case you don't want to lug this big fat thing around, which I did for a couple of years. It's actually visited close to 50, 60 countries with me. It's a book called the Creature from Jekyll Island. It's a really great book about the history of the Federal Reserve, the history of dollar, fiat currency, central banking and all of that. And it's a very, very factual book. There's tons of signings in the book, a lot of different information in there, particularly about that subject. So people will understand on a basis about what money and currency is and how it's made and all of that. That being said, as you just alluded to, the US dollar is worth less than 2 cents from when the Federal Reserve was created. When the Federal Reserve was created, $1 was worth a dollar. It's worth less today than 2 cents of that original dollar. You'd be able to buy a brand new Corvette today for about $800 of those $1913. Wow. That's how far inflation has got us. So inflation is a hidden tax. And the dollar is being devalued at about 5% per year since 1913. Right now, United States dollar from 1913, I actually had the calculation right here. I can tell you how much it's actually worth, but it's about almost $158 today.

Wow.

That's insane, right? Wow.

Everybody's been robbed of that. Now here's the thing. Whether you bury it in your backyard or you put it in the bank, it doesn't matter that 5% is happening no matter what. So that's a pretty big amount on just carrying money. So actually having cash, you know you're being devalued faster than any sort of savings rate, which is national average for savings accounts is about 0.22% interest. If you're losing 5%, I don't know a lot of math, but I know that you're still negative four and a half, almost 4.75%. Right?

Yeah.

Right. And if you put it into a CD or something, then you're locked into it and you got all these other things, you have penalties and this, that and the other. And a CD may not be able to even yield that much. Right. When now there's these people who've got tokens like this. You've got, you know, 5% returns, there's no penalization if you cash it in early and you know it's going to go up by 5% per year. There's all of this sort of stuff is now possible using digital currencies.

Right, right.

And I know one of the sort of benefits of bitcoin is, okay, so with the US dollar, what happens when the government goes deeper into debt or they need money for something and they can just literally go to someone and say, let's print some more of it and put it into circulation. And that's essentially what causes inflation, is they just go and add more into the circulation. It dilutes what's already there and shit hits the fan. With Bitcoin there's literally, I mean, this is bitcoin specifically. I know different coins have different things, but with bitcoin specifically there is a limit to how many coins will ever be in circulation. And so nobody can just go say, let's go make more bitcoin. And so I know that's sort of one of the benefits is that you can't really get the inflation factor from. Let's just go make more.

Correct. It's more of a deflationary type currency. And as you said, there's other currencies that will actually delete or remove or burn some of their supply on a fixed ratio basis. Some of them will do it based on some other factors. But the fact is that a majority of these currencies, some of them you can actually create a currency that can be deflated and inflated. There's actually ways to do that. So there's some people who go in there and start messing, as I'd say playing with fire. Again. No central banking system has really ever worked a fractional reserve system, specifically those. But it just comes down to whether or not you want to continue to participate in a structure, in a construct. Really. The current money system, which is the money system is just based off of debt, really. That's all it is. The system of cryptocurrencies, digital currencies, bitcoin, blockchain based mediums of exchange or or stores of value is literally as far as I'm concerned. And there's lots of different use cases for this. It is backed by value. So bitcoin, they assert that they're backed by the value of their network, which is the mining in the network, the cost for all of the energy it takes to create a bitcoin, and the hardware and all that sort of stuff. There are definite philosophical and existential arguments between bitcoin and other types of blockchains, but there's pretty much three types of technologies that are all blockchain based. Bitcoin is one of them. It's called proof of work. There's other kinds called proof of stake. And then there's another kind which is the one I'm mostly developing and working in, which is delegated proof of stake. It's a slightly different system than the original proof of stake type system. So there's three different ways of doing this and securing the networks. There's three different ways of being able to say that their assets on those networks are backed by something, whether it's through work, whether it's through.

Like some other store of value, like stock in another company, whether it's something like that. Yeah.

And I know you could do a lot of contracts, smart contracts, things like that. So I guess talk about the applications of it. So the blockchain, you're kind of hinting to it now, but just rattle off some of these just common things that you're starting to see in blockchain use. People using that in everyday business now.

Yeah, there's quite a few of them. First it was bitcoin, which was supposed to be a store of value, a currency. What most people need to understand is a lot of these digital currencies are not just a unit of value on a network. It's actually its own payment network as well. So it's similar to like Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and all that sort of stuff. So think of it again as a payment network. So it's a network that's independent of the traditional or legacy type networks like Sepa, Swift and where you wire money to and from and all that sort of stuff and all that traditional banking with that. These applications for blockchain are everything from financial technology, banking sectors, medical, like storing of records, like medical records, HIPAA compliant records. You know, all of these companies that get hacked, like Target, Capital One, Home Depot, you know who else?

Equifax.

Equifax. That's a little timely.

Yeah, I just wrote two stories about that recently for Huffington Post. And a bunch of other places specifically about that. They store customer data. Customer data being sensitive information, like, I don't know, your Social Security number, credit card, you know, addresses where you work, blah, blah, blah. All sorts of amazing stuff. Right? So those are honey pots for hackers to get into. And what seems to be sad is that these companies that are trusted, they know they're storing some highly sensitive data. This is banks and people who have to have. I mean, it's just crazy the fact that they have it and then they still, these hackers get into them for a year, two years, three years, who knows how long they have no idea they're in there and they take everybody's data. And that doesn't have to happen if it's stored via the blockchain or if it's stored in a manner using the blockchain. All of these hacking attempts will go to near 0% because they would have to then hack every single individual user. So they would have to go hack 160 million different accounts versus just hacking into one database. There's a big difference. Right.

Well, that's it. I just watched, what was it banking on Bitcoin on Netflix and highly recommend watching that to listeners. But they did have some visuals kind of explaining exactly what you're saying right there. They're like, just visualize a hacker going after a bank and it's like, yeah, they have like one takedown or maybe a group of computers or servers and it's like, yeah, bitcoin or blockchain, it's literally millions. And it's going to keep growing as this keeps getting bigger, I'd imagine.

Right? So you can store medical records and super sensitive data like that. You can also go after other types of industries like Ticketmaster, for instance. What if an artist was selling their tickets in tokens instead? Well now, as soon as somebody sells it on a secondary market, meaning scalping, right now, they don't get shit from it. But if they're out there right now selling it in a secondary market and they were using tokens, the artist would still still benefit from that sale, number one. So that helps artists. Number two, the artists could then also start working on the sales, meaning they could sell at a velocity, meaning the closer it gets to the store, or I'm sorry, to the concert date, the lower the ticket prices go. So they can fill the audience or fill. The worst thing in the world is have a stadium that's half full for an artist. Not just for the artist, but for the people that are at the show. The popularity factor and all those other things. So perception is everything. You guys are marketers, you understand, right?

Yeah.

An industry like that, insurance type industries, we've done things with using our blockchain, which is the Bitshares graphene chain. The world's first social media site called Steemit was built. Steemit is a social media based block. It's the world's first blockchain based, entirely blockchain based website. It allows people to just go and post anything they would be posting on regular social media, whether it's videos, stories, articles about whatever, pictures, whatever. And people will upvote, downvote, curate, comment and whatnot. And you get paid for the content that you provide the network and everybody votes on it. So it's a really great integration of just showing how a blockchain is so versatile. It's not just bitcoin. It's not just trading a token around that has a value similar to how the stock market works or anything like that.

BitShares itself, what's really cool about this one is that it is a unit of currency on the network, it's a payment network. And it's also a completely decentralized exchange that trades everything from commodities to these shares or stocks to currencies and things like that. 24,7 real time never goes to sleep. And it's all run on a blockchain. If anybody's listened or been in the bitcoin industry or cryptocurrency industry in the last couple of years and have seen some of these exchanges have come and gone and some people have lost money because the exchange went insolvent and stuff like that. The reason why BitShare's decentralized exchange was created was so a blockchain, a robot, robotically honest software or exchange could just run everything without any human interaction or employees. So there's no chance of fraud, there's no chance of human error or anything like that. And the software can just ensure that everything happens so people don't lose their money and have somewhere actually safe to store it. Wow. Yeah.

And I know that scared off a lot of people. Things like Coinbase, you know, or what was it?

Coinbase got hacked. Mount Gox got nailed.

Mount Knox, Yeah.

Just the bitcoin that I had in Mount Gox alone is well worth over, you know, I think close to $6 million now today.

Well, I know they what their total was 750 mil or something.

It was. Well, and that was a couple of years ago when bitcoin was only worth and I. And listen to what I'm saying right now. When bitcoin was only worth 400 and something dollars. So if you guys like math real quick, do quick calculation.

I don't want to. I don't want to.

At one point, one coin was less worth. Was worth less than a penny. It was like 0.08 of a penny back in like, oh, seven or whatever. I don't remember the.

But we're talking 2012. Yeah.

Okay. So not even that far back.

Oh, dude. Well, funny. I don't know if you remember this dude, but I don't know if it was tnc, you know, traffic conversion or maybe it was a. I remember.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's cool.

Go ahead.

Yeah, you, me, Matt and one of your buddies. I forgot his name, but that's okay. Younger guy. And that was the first time we heard about blockchain and bitcoin. It was like, I don't know, two in the morning or three in the morning. We were out, stupidly. We were at a diner somewhere in Austin.

Yeah, I specifically remember that. Yes.

We were having chicken and waffles.

Yeah, I wouldn't doubt it. It's probably the first time I had chicken and waffles.

So that was chicken and waffles in Austin. Yeah, we were talking about that specifically and I believe it was. I can't remember if it's 2013 or 2014, but yeah, somewhere in there early on.

Yeah, back at that time, Joe and I, we went back, we were kind of excited about the concept. We looked online and bitcoin was trading for $200 a coin. And we're like, huh. I mean, it's a cool idea, but is it going to take off? Is there anything, you know, I don't know about this? Let's just wait on it and see how it plays out. That was when the coins were $200 a coin.

It's about $4,000, you know, give or take. And I think everybody's still asking me, should I get in?

Well, yeah. Well, I mean, I think the big thing, I didn't realize until, and I hate to say it, but literally only just like a month or two ago, the implications of the whole blockchain, I think that was the bigger thing. Obviously you can make some money with bitcoin, but dear God, the blockchain was like blowing my mind.

It's highly disruptive and it's going to actually do a couple of things. Number one, it's going to put a lot of linear thinking companies out of business, such as Western Union. Moneygram, places like that. I've been publicly saying my goal is to take Western Union out immediately. I've been seeing that for four years now. And I'm not joking about it. Sure, we've got that now. I mean we've created now stable cryptocurrencies that are price stable. You can trade them in less than 1 second anywhere on the planet at any time. You can send them for less than a penny, any amount. I could send a million dollars or $10 and it still costs less than a penny to send.

What's Western Union charge, for example?

Western union charge is 15% of the total amount.

Jesus Christ.

Can we spell out rape? Like that's not cool.

Yeah. And the people that use it again are the unbanked, in the underbanked. The most poor people in the world are those that are most vulnerable or those that are going through the worst times of their life anyway.

Sure, sure.

And so you might as well kick them while they're down, you know, suck them dry. You know, it's kind of the motto for those kinds of businesses. It does not serve them longer to go and use them. So all of these types of businesses from remittance, that's a huge industry that's got huge, huge, huge amount of business every single year. We're talking trillions and trillions of dollars just sent cross border by people who are sending it to some other family member because they're working somewhere. You've got like I said, the music industry, you got the insurance industry, medical records where you could do drug interactions that would probably save millions upon millions of lives every single year just off of having a blockchain system to cross check against the doctors and the pharmacies. Because there's so many times where people just miss that, where you have a specific token that you just, the pharmacist can scan on your phone every time you show up. And it would make sure and the doctor would scan before they even prescribed you anything.

Well, isn't that one of the biggest leading cause of deaths is just error? And if we can eliminate that, that's like one or two leading causes of death in the world.

Yeah. So I want, I actually want to Talk about like ICOs for a second because it's actually something that personally I still don't understand. You know, it stands for initial coin offering and it's kind of like similar to an ipo, right, when, when they release a stock. But what I think my impression, you know, six months ago of an ICO was somebody went cool, I'M going to go put a coin out into the market, and I am going to hope that a whole bunch of people buy this coin, and then I'm going to put a bunch of money in my pocket. And now this coin is in circulation. And it seemed like this sort of scammy concept to me. That was kind of my impression of it six months ago.

The.

The more I learned and the more I studied, the more I realized that most of these coins that are being released through ICOs, there's actually new technologies behind them and new things that they're. They're attached to. And that's part of the thing that I don't totally understand is I know Joe and I were talking about an ICO that was attached to, like, a new Internet browser technology. And, you know, there's ICOs that are attached to various technologies that aren't related to coins. And that's where there's sort of a gray area in my mind that I don't totally understand. How an ICO and releasing a coin relates to the release of a new Internet browser, for instance.

Well, this is an interesting subject right now that a lot of people are watching, some have been hearing about. And yeah, so you've seen probably several ICOs raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the last six months, and people are starting to be interested what's going on here. Big ICO craze. ICOs are initial coin offerings. I think you're going to hear the phrases initial iteo, which is initial token offering coming soon, as well as ISO, which is initial security offering, which you're going to be hearing about, too. There's been a landmark bulletin ruling by the SEC a couple of months ago in relation to a ICO called the dao dao, in which they said that the DAO they deemed to be an unregulated or unregistered security. So all sorts of things can happen from that. So we'll kind of back up for a minute, though, and say people were launching ICOs, let's say, in my opinion, because I've been in this industry for a very long time, if you guys don't actually know it, our company BitShares, actually launched what I would consider to be the world's first ICO. And this is many years ago. This is pre2014, even. This is, I believe, in 2013, maybe even 2012, on another raise. But so we actually did this and raised $6 million, which back then was more than anybody ever thought of being able to raise or anything like that from A token offering or a coin offering. So I've seen a lot of this. I'd say about a quarter of the projects are actually worth taking a look at and or potentially investing in. I'm not licensed to give financial advice or legal advice. I'm not a lawyer, financial advisor. But when I look at these things, it's the same thing that I look at when people ask me, would you invest in this? I look at who's a team. Do they have a solid technology?

Is their white paper written in a way where I can understand it? Is the technology that they're building on going to be scalable for their particular projects? Is it going to be, do they have funding, do they have backing, all sorts of stuff like that, then if it is. So then a lot of these projects are really, really exciting to get involved in on the ground floor. And you can potentially make thousands of percent return on investment and stuff like that. There are other projects where people just put up a fancy webpage and a white paper you guys can actually go look at. Let me actually find it for you, just in case.

There's actually one called Jesus Coin. If you actually look at the Jesus Coin, it's a very interesting1. It's jesuscoin.network.

Okay.

And I believe they're trying to just, you know, kind of spoof a little bit on the overall ICO craze that's going on there. But, you know, people on their team are like Jesus Christ, founder and CEO Judas Iscariot, one of the trustees, decentralizing Jesus.

I love it.

And so I think they're kind of trying. They've got a really great video. But yeah, it's time to decentralize Jesus is what they're saying. Oh, yeah, there it is. Too many churches have a monopoly on Jesus and they're going to take Jesus back to the people and all sorts of interesting stuff. It's been featured in Bloomberg, though.

Yeah, I saw that.

It's worth a look. It's kind of interesting. But there's people who are just doing fundraisers and then running with the money, stuff like that. That's why the SEC is looking at it, getting involved a little bit. It is kind of like, well, request, which is exciting. You can make a lot of money. You can also lose a lot of money because you hear, hey, this looks good. And you just put money into it. And little do you know, they're gone. It's vaporware, so a lot of that's going on. But it's really exciting, too. You can Raise a lot of money for a project, you can do this in a legal manner. I'm working on several different projects like the TS XRB which is token exchange self regulating body. I'm working on Stokens Co, which is, we're working with several SEC firms, people who wrote the JOBS act, things like that, who are advising us on it. And we've come up with legal methods for people to raise token sales ITOs and security sales securities in a manner that's legal and compliant with different jurisdictions and regulatory needs as well as. What's really great is allowing these companies to still not stifle the technology or the innovation, be able to use the funds to build their business. So as you said, somebody was doing an ICO on a browser, chances are they hadn't built that browser yet. So if they're raising money to build something and it's a common enterprise because people are putting money into it and they have any sort of expectation whatsoever of a financial gain, then they're selling a security. And if they haven't registered it with different like let's say if they're selling it at all and a US citizen buys it, they have to be registered with the SEC and otherwise they can't even let a US citizen buy it, even procure it on the secondary market because then they're still liable. So there's a lot of different things here. Again, this is such a new environment because there's, there's been no regulatory oversight or any sort of direction or anybody saying anything. So we're taking it upon ourselves. Actually me and some of my partners and some of the industry leaders in blockchain to form a self regulating organization to ensure that the technology is not stifled, the innovation isn't stifled. That regulators who don't have any idea what's going on in the industry don't just come in here and wreck our toys that we're able to drive our own Ferrari instead of letting them drive it into a wall. As far as I'm concerned, that's kind of the way I put it to people because I think we all, we all see what happens whenever government oversight comes jumping into things that they don't understand. Right. You know, they just, they grab it and want to do all sorts of stuff to it when, when it comes down to it. I don't know if you guys know this. The SEC is actually a self regulating organization. So FINRA and all these other guys, they're not governmental.

Wow, I did not know.

Yeah, we figured if they can do it, why can't we?

Hell yeah. I mean, it's just like the Fed.

You know, I decided, you know, that I'm going to jump into that role with some of my other partners and we're going to see what happens.

That's awesome. I mean, I think that's the biggest thing. Legally, you know, has always been my question mark. And I guess I was even thinking small, I was just thinking purely for trading purposes, like, okay, if I wanted to invest in bitcoin today, you know what happens legally? Like, do I have to make that like a note? Do I have to tell my bookkeeper or, you know, how does it work? Do I report it to the irs? You know, when I make a lot more money or lose money even?

Yeah. Is it like a stock where if I take my gains out, you know, how do I report on that kind of stuff? Yeah, I mean, like, that's where there's still gray areas on how to actually handle that type of stuff. At least in my mind.

That's exactly right. Like, I mean, current guidance is really, really murky. IRS says that bitcoin is a treated like an asset. So if you have short term and long term capital gains that you have to claim on it, but only if and when you take it out of digital. So what if you leave it in there? Well, you don't really have any until then. But the Department of Justice has actually gone out there and tried a couple of cases against some people who they've actually said that, no, it's actually currency. So you've got two now, governmental organizations, big ones too, by the way, that are at odds with even trying to decide what it is. And then you got the SEC going. Well, wait a minute, I think they're securities. Well, geez, guys, you know. Yeah, I mean, kind of making it tough for us. So instead of doing all of that, I figure we'll just go in there, we'll classify what is a coin, what is a token, what is a security, what is what we would call almost like a Krypton, like a coupon. And what is not seen as a security and will follow existing guidelines for different industries that are out there right now. But we sure aren't gonna and don't want to let them just come in there and start making regulations, laws, rules, or anything else like that when there's no need for them to actually do that. And we can be compliant with stuff that's already currently out there and be okay with it. And so that's what we're really working to do. Because we see this industry as being the future of so many different changes in technology, in human abundance too. Like, sure, you know, giving 15% back to people who are sending money, you know, to Indonesia or the Philippines, giving them $15 on the hundred dollars they send back can help them change their life and stuff, actualize. And actually maybe not have to be searching for clean food and water all day long or be able to send their kids to a better school or buy them clothing or anything for that matter. You know, all of that's monstrous. Taking these companies out of business and actually having something that's much more streamlined, being able to safeguard people's data and all of their personal stuff, you know, all of that is huge. The implications of this type of technology.

I mean, it's so interesting too, because, you know, you were saying a second ago, like, they sort of consider it a security. So if you have your money in there and then you pull that money out than you, you know, you owe on that capital gain. But we're quickly getting to a point where you don't pull the money out. You know, there's more and more companies that accept things like Bitcoin, but then there's also, you know, they're starting to have like credit cards now where you can just go and swipe. It's like a normal visa that you'd swipe anywhere, but it just pulls straight from your bitcoin account, you know. So, like, is that considered money that I pulled out and is capital gain because I only pulled out a tiny fraction to buy a coffee, you know.

Like, as of right now, that would be.

Yeah, yeah. It's bizarre.

You know, it is bizarre. So it makes it really difficult. So, I mean, that's one reason, one reason among many, that we created price stable cryptocurrencies. So you could put it in as a dollar and you could exit as a dollar and there's no cap gains. So you can actually transact and use it as a medium of exchange versus a store of value. Like Bitcoin, in my opinion, is a great store of value, but it's a poor medium of exchange because it's a lot slower than a lot of the other newer blockchains that can transact faster. It has extreme price volatility. But some people like to store their assets in gold and whatnot too. But some people don't. Some people want it to be worth the same the next day and not ride that casino wave. And it could be worth more or less as a store of value. Bitcoin's Pretty good for that sort of thing. But if you want to exchange it somewhere, send it across the world. Last thing you want is to send $2,000 to your grandma and it'd be worth $1,500 in 10 minutes when it gets there to her. Oh, yeah.

And that's what people are just so used to, or they're just blind to now, where they just take it for granted. They're like, okay, sure. So what would you say, like, and this is kind of a selfish question, when someone wants to invest in, say, an ICO or maybe a variety of them, or maybe they want to get out of one, what would, like, a simple strategy look like? Do they first start with Bitcoin and then trade into that?

Typically, yeah, you would go and you would either get Bitcoin or Ethereum. Most ICOs accept Bitcoin, Ethereum. Some of them accept some other things. I think you're going to see some ICOs coming out in the next little while, ISOs coming out the next little while that are accepting Bitcoin, Ethereum, probably BitShares or some of the other stable currencies. We're working specifically very hard with Stokens, the project that we're doing there, to create, which we have a very legal way for people to do their security tokens. And we will be accepting those sorts of items. Typically, what happens is you will go and you'll find, let's say an ICO or ISO or something like that you want to invest some money in or donate to. You will go, they will have an address for you to donate money to. You'll donate your Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever to it. And then sometimes you can claim it. Usually you got to claim it later on once they launch and they release their tokens, they release them to you, and then you can trade them on the open market. That's essentially it. And once they're trading, live trading, you can also just go and buy them from an exchange versus the ico. Typically, buying them in the ICO phase or the donation phase, the tokens are worth quite a bit less. So you're getting them at a much cheaper price. When they launch, typically they shoot through the roof. And that's where you see people making 12, 13,000% on their money. Sometimes when it's got that big hype phase and people are all over it and jumping on it, and these people maybe bought in early on the ico, so they launch out for a day or two and they sell and they make a bunch of money and Whatnot. It's very similar to IPOs where you'll see the IPOs launch and they'll go up for a little while, then they crash and burn, or they go down halfway or whatever, and they correct themselves just like anything else. People just get it a little crazy when they, when money gets involved.

Oh, yeah.

Now with, with ICOs, can, can anybody get involved? Obviously with IPOs, you know, not everybody can just go get involved in every single IPO that comes out. With, with cryptocurrency and ICOs, is there a way that anybody can get involved or is it still very like there's certain rules to who can actually get involved in an ico?

Well, that's the thing. There are rules to that sort of thing already, depending on whether or not it's a security or not. And that's the problem. There's people who have not been following the already set aside rules. They said, well, it's not an ipo, so we don't have to worry about securities because it's an ico, you know, and they're trying to use linguistics and all sorts of subterfuge and legal loopholes and stuff like that. But I think those loopholes are in shapes of nooses, as I've told people already. And I said, you're gonna hang yourself if you keep on doing it. Because point blank, right now, anybody and everybody can just go and buy into ICOs. For the most part, it's not too difficult to do it. But just because you can buy it doesn't mean you should be. Or whether it's legal for you to do it. If somebody's selling you an unregistered security and you're, let's say, a US citizen, not only did you violate the securities laws, but they violated securities laws. Not only did they violate the securities laws, if you bought it off of any exchange, the exchange also violated a security law by allowing it to happen. Plus, if they charged a fee and they don't have a broker dealer's license, which I'm going to tell you right now, all of them don't, then they also broke that law as well. Right. And so there's a lot of things going on. Now, again, not saying all this to scare people, it's just that when an industry is so new and it's so murky and nobody seems to understand what any, if any, regulations are even out there, and then when the regulations are conflicting, it makes things really difficult to get business done. And unfortunately, when it comes to tech, sometimes people don't Wait around, right, for regulation to catch up. They blow it up, they make some really cool stuff, and then they figure out how to, you know, figure it out later.

Legally. Yeah.

So what's. That's it, I guess.

What? Yeah. Saying all this now, I'm just thinking like, holy crap, stuff changes so fast. Is there a place that you go to or maybe a place of your own that you could share that have all these resources or at least a decent amount to keep people's fingers on the pulse?

Because it's hard as hell, it seems like.

I would say just. Just be me for a day. Because you should see my Skype channel, my Telegram channel, my text messages. That alone, I mean, I've got a lot of inside access to what's going on myself, so I usually know before it even hits the news sources what's coming down the pipeline. Sometimes it catches me a little bit here and there, but can be everywhere.

At once, I guess, for the general public is. Yeah, you are an anomaly, that's for sure.

Like I said, I firmly stuck myself right in the middle of all this craziness. And so I got like the best front row seats possible. But there's, you know, there's some news sources out there. There's CoinDesk, there's Coin Telegraph, there's a few places like that, news.bitcoin.com, there's some podcasts out there. Joel Calm's got a great podcast, Bad Crypto show. I've been on there a couple of times with him. Cool. Yeah. So, you know, just stuff like that. The big thing is just like anything else. I know when money gets involved, people start, you know, really digging. Sometimes they make decisions they wouldn't otherwise normally make. Right. So I would just say before you make a decision, just really do your research and take a look at what you're actually getting involved in. You know, think about what would Michael do? Michael will just take a look at the team, see who's on it. Look at them. LinkedIn. Look at them in a few other places. See what the white paper says. Is it feasible what they're building? Do they already have something built? Yeah. Are they already an existing company? I've got a couple of companies that are coming over to our chain right now that are. They've gotten VC money in the past. They're public companies. They've been in business for a couple of years minimum. They're doing technologies like augmented reality type technologies or Internet of Things type technologies, or we've got one that's.

A mobile application for your cell phone to do. I can't say all of it's a mobile application for your cell phone to do some really, really cool stuff for mainstream. It has nothing really to do finance or anything. It has to do with more like exploration. Cool, amazing stuff that I think that mainstream people will really take hold of. Like, all of this stuff is coming down the pipeline and it's totally doable. If you take a look at the project, which I'm hoping to be able to announce it here in the next few days, you'll see the white paper and stuff, and you'll see who's involved in it. You'll see what kind of assets they already have. They're going to business for years. You know, like governmental organizations, like, rent time from them, like, stuff like that. When you see that, then you can say, you know, is that. Is that something in the stock market that you would maybe invest in? Yeah. Okay, then, you know, but if it's something like, you know, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna decentralize Jesus, you know, and basically, depending on how many sins you've got and how many tokens you give us, your sins are. You know what I mean? Like, that may not be the best ICO to go in, but you may want to hedge your bets.

Unless you got money to burn, you.

May want to hedge your bets on heaven, right? You may just want to buy some Jesus coin and give a little bit away, and that way you're covered.

Yeah, you got your back cover. All right, we're good.

Oh, man.

I actually want to go very. I want to actually kind of go back to basics for a second. Let's just say, actually two scenarios. Let's just say somebody wanted to just invest in Bitcoin, you know, just own some bitcoin and sit on it because they believe it's going to appreciate in value. So that's sort of a scenario one. And then scenario two, maybe they're interested in some of the, like the altcoins, some of the coins that are, you know, in place to sort of help fund some of these technologies and things like that. You know, what would be sort of like the steps somebody would take to get involved in either one, because I know they're not the same process. You can't necessarily get them from the same sites, that kind of thing. So what sort of like, steps would somebody just wanting to get involved do?

Well, there's a lot of sites to get some Bitcoins or Ethereum or other stuff at. Typically, if you get yourself Some bitcoin. All the other tokens are traded against that pair. So you can say, well I've got bitcoin, so now I can go buy anything else. That's the easiest thing to do. So you know, American citizens. Coinbase is usually the easiest place to go and get it. Gdax, Coinbase, one of those two places. There's a lot of other places for the non US citizens. Kraken. You guys, I think you guys know Kevin Bombino.

He's a. I know the name, I know Kraken.

Yeah, well Kevin did, he did press advantage with me. He's one of the co founders there and stuff, our PR platform that we have. But he also co founded Kraken and some other stuff. So it's European based exchange. So Europeans can go there. Open Ledger is another place that Europeans can go to for a fiat gateway to get into the Bitshares network. So you can actually go from fiat to bitcoin on our network and Bitshares and all sorts of stuff. I'm with bitshares.org I use that specific exchange and wallet because our wallets have built in decentralized exchange in there, which means that I don't have to worry about that exchange going down in flames and losing all my money. Like it's happened before with other exchanges. People can go to Coinbase, so usually like I said, or one of those places, get some Bitcoin and then you can go to any type of exchange out there. Polonix is an exchange. Bittrex or Bitfinex, those are all exchanges that you can go and grab different tokens at. You can go to coinmarketcap.com which is a great resource for finding different coins that are out there. Or worldcoinindex.com I like both of those. Both of those I usually go to. And then you can click on any coin that's on there. So let's say you just click on like Bitcoin or click on any number of them, EOS or Steam or something like that. You can click on it and then next to it in the little charting tabs there'll be a thing that says markets. You can click on markets. It'll tell you every single exchange that those tokens are traded on, what the volume is on those exchanges, what the price is on those exchanges, stuff like that. Typically we'll say if there's a website, if there's a block explorer, if there's a forum for that site, if there's a news channel for that site or announcement board or Anything like that. So you can kind of keep track of your favorite assets, your favorite currencies that are out there in the world. Cool.

That's amazing. Yeah, because I've been on that. I forget what the resource was, but where it lists all the coins, that's where my mind. I think that's when I finally realized how big this opportunity is of being of blockchains.

It's nuts, man. We've got tens of thousands of coins traded just on the bitshares decentralized exchange alone. Any of you guys, I can walk you through creating your own token in less than five minutes.

We built a smart factory, we built a WYSIWYG editor for you to create your own tokens.

That's insane.

And they're literally trading globally against the specific, like bitcoin pairing, bts, Ethereum stock like that within five minutes.

So what is the difference between a coin and a token? I'm not sure we actually made that distinction yet.

It's kind of the same thing. But a token can be a utility token. Let's say something like it just denotes some sort of value. But I see a coin being worth more of an asset or something financial where a token, let's say, is like a ticket to a show or something like that. So you can sell pre sell tickets or tokens or similar to like when you guys go to the arcade and you put a dollar and it gives you tokens or the car wash tokens.

Right.

Those are all tokens. They don't really have any money value after that except to be redeemed from one source or a small group of sources. Right. When you've got a coin, that's something that you could redeem against multiple sources or somebody else will exchange another item for you.

It's more of a bitcoin currency type thing. Right, Right. You still have my mind going even from that old. You made the analogy of the artists, you know, like selling tickets and then there's stuff on, you know, Craigslist that are getting hawked and they're not getting the money.

Yeah. I mean all of that's all. That's huge. I mean even in the Internet marketing industry alone or anything like that. Like, I mean, I was shouting about this four or five years ago. I was like, guys, you know, I said you guys could do crowdfunding right now. Yeah. On the projects. Like let's. I said you can pre sell your Internet marketing info, products or software, SaaS, services or whatever you want to like pre sell them. I said a lot of you guys sometimes do that anyways, I said, but the difference is that now you guys can actually give them a token that denotes a value. You can pay them out dividends and let them crowdfund your project. Now you didn't have to do anything. I said. You said the thing about. And I'll get on my soapbox for half a second. The thing about the Internet marketing industry though is that we know that there's a lot of people who just aren't going to do anything with it. It's not our fault. It can be as inspiring as possible, but it doesn't matter. Some people just buy it and they don't do anything with it. It's not that we're terrible people for continuing to sell products like that when we know people are always going to use them. It's that how do we return the value to them and still get the value we're looking for and everything else in between? You could do that by just selling them the product, maybe letting them share in some of the equity of that product or the dividends of that product because they helped you away all your costs for development for it. You guys know how to run businesses, Matt. Joe, you guys do, but not all these people that we teach all day long, they don't know how to run businesses. So instead, instead of anything else, the only reason they're buying products from you is because of your reputation. Because they know like trust you or you guys are just so damn good looking they can't resist it. Right.

I like to think it's the second one. Yeah.

You know, but that's the whole point is you're. Everything that they're buying from you is just merely based off your reputation anyways. It really is. Yep. Right. So by doing so you're, you're continuing to put out products, goods, services and everything like that. They're going to continue buying based off your reputation if they can share in that and even if they use that product or service or anything, or whether they don't, they're still making their monetary value off of that. They're going to buy more from you. They're going to shout more about your stuff. They're going to be more active opponents of it and you're going to be more successful too. And guess what? You can go to sleep at night knowing that no matter what move those people made, you still returned the maximum amount of value that you could to them. And that's a big thing.

That was what I was trying to tell people about four years ago. And Now I see some folks in the industry starting to catch on, like, wait a minute.

Yeah. I mean, I think when it comes to the blockchain technology and the coin technology and all that type of stuff, I think it really took a while for people to grasp the implications. And I mean, Joe and I fall into that group. I mean, obviously, you were telling us about it probably five, six years ago, and we went, oh, that sounds interesting. We'll look into that more. And we did absolutely nothing with it because we didn't totally get it. We kind of. We got the concept, but. But it didn't totally sink in. And now I think it's kind of getting to a point where it's much more mainstream and people are kind of going, oh, now it's starting to click. Now there's so many coins, and we're seeing what people are doing with it, and it's like it's finally clicking for a lot of people. So, you know, I think, you know, there's some really exciting things happening.

So, you guys, I'll put it into context one last time for you and your listeners. This is an easy one for me to do. Yeah. Let's just say, for instance, I decided to sit down with you guys later on and make a hustle and flow coin. Bam. Basically, we make a billion of these coins. You can give them away to people. You can hand them out on your show. You can do whatever you want to do to start getting them distributed amongst the population. You can actually just go share drop. You can create a billion of them and go share drop. Everybody on a network, if you want to. Everybody that owns a bitcoin, whatever you want to. Now, what can happen with those coins? Well, now you can just say, well, those coins are good for redemption of one free interview on our show. Or is it redemption of three minutes of airtime for a commercial on our segment or something like that. Right. You guys have an audience. You got a user base, you guys, something worth value of others. So maybe somebody wants to sell their newest SaaS product to your crowd, who happens to be a bunch of small businesses that are listening to this right now that's valuable to them. Right.

Right.

You can start assessing a value for those particular projects or those coins, and then people will start fighting over them or buying them or whatever because they want to be on your show and they want to redeem it for some commercials.

Yeah, it's like we can create almost like a menu of items that, you know, and attach a value to each menu item. Yeah. Attached to the Business. That's interesting. Yeah. My mind is literally like, oh my God. So many things. This is good, man. Okay, we're almost to an hour. I don't want to go forever, but I kind of do.

What, should we start wrapping it up, Matt?

Well, we do have another call after this one, but there were a couple of things that we did want to try to get into as well.

Well, let's see here. Cryptonomics, I don't think you really know named that so much. Do you want to chat briefly about that? I know that's another one of your projects.

Yeah. So Cryptonomics is a custom blockchain development company that has been around for several years. We have created more custom blockchains than anybody else on the planet. We're responsible for about anywhere, depending on the market cap day, close to $2 billion worth of companies that have built upon the blockchain that we have right now, which is the graphene blockchain. That blockchain is the fastest blockchain in the world. It's the longest blockchain in the world and it has processed more transactions per day than any other blockchain actually out there. It actually processes more transactions per day than all the other blockchains in the world combined. And it is possible to do 180,000 transactions per second on that particular chain right now, which is more than NASDAQ, Visa, MasterCard combined.

Wow.

Yeah, it's a monster, man. Wow. How are we talking to you?

That was a huge advance.

That's how we've been able to create social media networks that are ran on the blockchain right now versus the old chains, which would never be able to handle something like Facebook. Facebook gets like 50, 60,000 just likes per second. So that's a lot of operations and transactions per second to go through. So we've been able to do that. And then the new iteration of technology that's being built off of graphene is called eos, which is eos. It's going to be the world's first blockchain based operating system that will allow all of these different blockchains, which if you want to just look at the blockchains, just look at each blockchain as its own kind of application. Kind of like how you have a tablet and you just download an app. Think of each blockchain as it being its own app almost. And then all these apps would then be talking together or compatible or be able to reside on the same operating system, which is your tablet's operating system. Same difference.

Eos is clocking, you know, millions and millions and millions of transactions per second right now. There's claims now that they've been able to on their testnet go over a couple billion per second.

So it's going to be. What they're trying to scale to is pretty much infinity transactions. So it's just seamless.

Wow.

Yeah. So really exciting stuff, guys.

Oh my God. This is. I think I'm going to re listen to this episode like five times and then research everything you said because I.

Mean, we need to do a part two with you if you're open to it. Because there was actually we probably only got to about 50% of the stuff that we wanted to get to with you.

So if you're open to it anytime guys. Because, you know, I pretty much do this all day long. I'm knee deep in it where we're on the cutting edge of everything from regulation to the technology itself, the blockchain stuff itself, all of it really. I have my own separate remittance type business that I've been running for a while to help people out. I advise on so many different projects and ICOs and everything else right now that are all coming on that are. It's just a really exciting time.

Yeah, I mean, you've always been the best resource we know of in this whole space. So I think it'd be cool for part two. Maybe we'll field questions to our audience and figure out what the common things are and we'll just ask those.

Yeah, that'd be awesome. And I want to, I want to. I mean, we didn't even get into if somebody was looking to do, you know, short term trading and you know, capitalizing on short term games and gains and you know, getting in and out of coins. We didn't really get into various ways to store your coins. I mean, there's actually like hardware storage tools that you can get to pull them off of the Internet. You know, we didn't even get into a lot of that stuff. So I definitely think we should do a round two and I think that's a great idea. We should, you know, field questions from our audience and bring those questions back to you if you're open for it.

All right, definitely guys, I'm more than happy to do that.

So where should people go find you or at least maybe get knee deep into some of this stuff? I know you dropped a lot of URLs a lot of places.

I did. You know, you guys can always find me on LinkedIn. You guys can find me. Michael Taggart on there. I'm the good looking Michael Taggart. There's a few other ones out there.

You'll also notice that there's some blockchain related stuff on there. But feel free there. I'm on bitshares.org as well. You know, you can go check that out. BitShares TV, which explains a lot of the really cool, cutting edge stuff that we've done in the industry.

And then you know, really just go out there and start researching and take with a grain of salt with, with everything that you read out there. Because there's going to be a lot of people on both sides of the industry that are biased about banking and about finance and about oh, this is a scam and oh, this isn't stuff like that because you know, people are starting to, you know, move things around and take people's toys away from each other and disruption scares people. Yeah, they don't necessarily like all that all the time. So just like anything else, you know, just put your, your hat on and just be discerning about what you're looking at and if anything, you know, listen to this broadcast again, ask some questions. You know, feel free to get involved. You know, if you guys want to pull your audience, I think that would be fantastic. Yeah, but just, just jump on their news.bitcoin.com is a good, good little spot on there. And there's, there's a lot of other places obviously I can go all day long, but those are some good sources of information. And just if anything, just realize this, this technology is as big as the advent of the Internet. It's probably even bigger than that. The impact it will have on society as a whole, not just in finance, but in all these other industries is on par with the advent of agriculture and things like that in terms of what it's going to do for humanity. It is up to you as a business owner or somebody who's interested in, in any way, shape or form in seeking knowledge or anything like that to know what it is you're dealing with with this, why it's exciting and some things that maybe could be potentially detrimental to people too if it just falls into the wrong hands. The big thing is just know and understand it because if you don't, it's going to come back around later on. You're going to be like, man, Michael and Joe and Matt told me that I should have done this.

It's already bit us once, I'm not.

Going to let it bite us again. I'm saying that right now. Dude, thanks for being so. I mean, this is sage advice. And thank you for being super freaking open, because I don't think most people ever would be. You always have been. So totally appreciate that. And, yeah, we'll do it again. And do your homework, people. Get involved. Do it. It's big. Thank you.

Thanks, guys.

Hey, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to this podcast. Now, if you want to learn more and hear from us every single month, which a lot of people do, it's pretty fun. We actually write this thing called the Evergreen Profits Letter, and that is a printed newsletter that we actually send to hundreds of people every single month to your doorstep. So you actually get it in the mail. You can read this sucker. You can highlight it, you can dog ear. You can scratch some stuff out. If you don't like that one, you say no. Joe and Matt, that's not good. Cool for me. But you can take a lot of different strategies, about 15 or so from every single single issue, and it's really cool. So basically, these are actionable strategies that you can use in your business right away to test out and pretty much build on what you already have going on. So check it out. It's at www.egpletter.com. it's pretty amazing, and you should go check it out, see what it's all about.

Boom.