Cryptocurrency | Jack Saba

When do you think that this, in a year measure, is going to start to catch on in the mainstream?

So I think— yeah, it's a really good question. It's something that if I had a glass ball, I'd love. I think everyone would love that. No one really has a true answer for it, but I think at a high level, it's going to happen at different times for different use cases, right? B2B is going to be something that can happen right away because Small private companies with a large budget and a need for this can just implement. So B2B I think is gonna happen very soon. B2C, business to consumer, is gonna take more time because people don't know about it, they don't trust it, and there's a lot of volatility in the network. So I think we're probably 4 years out from being able to walk into a given coffee shop and purchase a coffee. Which I would love to see.

Using a cryptocurrency.

Using a cryptocurrency, using Bitcoin or one of the other cryptocurrencies. For example, I walked into a taco place the other day, and they were cash only, right? And they're cash only because they don't want to deal with the hassle of credit cards, the fees, the recording, et cetera. So they only accept cash. That's a huge hassle. I can't wait till the day that I can walk in and pay with my phone to them.

You still carry cash?

In general, I don't. And that's not to say I don't carry cash, I only carry cryptocurrencies. I just use cards. Like, I use cards and phones and different things. I don't use cards. Yeah, so I think we're 3 to 5 years out from it being so mainstream that you can walk into a given coffee shop or restaurant and be able to use it. Part of it's because of the infrastructure. So they need to have— people need to know about it, and people need to be able to have a payment system at the location to be able to pay, which people are working on.

That was gonna be my question, is when it does hit mainstream, what is it gonna look like? Will it be our phone? Will we scan something with the Will we swipe the phone? Will it be a card? What will it look like? A chip underneath our finger?

I think it's going to be on the phone. Everyone's got a phone. Smartphone adoption is really great. I think that's going to be the— let's not add more headaches to the process.

Or surgeries, for that matter.

Or surgeries, for that matter. We don't need it under the finger. But I think that it's going to be either phone-to-phone or phone-to-payment system right there for the company. It's gonna reduce the cost of transaction fees. Right now if I use a credit card, they charge 2.5% to the business, so it's gonna reduce that. Not to say that there won't be transaction fees, as someone's gonna be providing the service for these people to use, but it's gonna be undercut. And it's gonna— one of the really exciting things is when we get to the point where companies are doing that, it's gonna create stability for the value of the currency. 'Cause right now it's supply and demand. As more people are using it, it's gonna create more supply and demand, so the price will always be closer to where it should be. That's one of the big hurdles right now from it being mainstream is the volatility. Like, I want to be able to use my cryptocurrency, but if you as a business receive it and hold it, you don't know if it's going to be worth more or less a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, and you don't know what it's going to be valued at. If we use the dollar, there's very consistent understanding of what it's going to be worth and what you can purchase with it. So I think we need to see widespread adoption in a peer-to-peer way or a local jurisdiction using it to create the stability that's needed for people to really take to it.

Would that be kind of viewed as a chicken before the egg situation, whereas as the market adopts it, it would kind of stabilize that value?

Yes.

But it needs to adopt it first for that stabilization to happen.

Yeah.

And everyone doesn't want to adopt it because it's volatile. So which one?

So it's very much a chicken and the egg problem. But if we look at it from the United States, we would say, why would I Forgo using the US dollar, which is really stable, for something that is volatile. And I don't think that the chicken and the egg is going to play out here. What I think is going to happen is emerging markets are going to take to this technology. So right now—

Is there an emerging market that's already kind of—

No one's really widespread, but I think we're going to see it soon because in, say, Venezuela, for example, when you go in to buy a milk, when you go to buy a carton of milk, they're no longer counting bills. Their currency has been so devalued that they weigh the bills in boxes. That's how little their value is worth. So if you look at that versus Bitcoin instead of the US dollar versus Bitcoin, that's an instance where enough people could take to it that it helps with the stability. You get a few markets like that, then it becomes stable, and then people in developed countries will be able to use it. So to that point, one of my really— one of the theses of this technology is that it's truly disruptive. We hear that word all the time in Silicon Valley. This technology is disruptive, this is disruptive, that's disruptive. And it's misused because a lot of times they're alluding to disruption theory, but what they're saying is, we're gonna take a market share of what's going on. But true disruption theory says that a large incumbent has a target market that they focus their product on. That's who they work on. And they ignore the smaller markets along the way, the smaller submarkets along the way. And disruption happens when someone creates a new value or a new product, a new value network or a new product, Targeted to the long tail, the other ignored target markets, the other markets, and it eats its way through and then eventually provides a better service to the original target market than the incumbent can provide. So to that, I think that this technology is going to take off in the emerging markets. It's going to eat up the long tail of markets and then come into the United States and EU and Japan and Asia.