Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

Today, let’s talk about “Bubble Tokens”, a very dangerous kind of crypto token that has brought down many crypto companies. Never heard of those? That’s because we coined the term - pun intended!

Why invent a new word? Because nobody wants to talk about these tokens, yet they are the elephant in the room and we need to have a conversation about them. But let’s dig in!

Bubble tokens are crypto tokens that are artificially inflated in value. And when they pop, they can bring down entire ecosystems. A great example is the role of FTX’s bubble token, called FTT, in the collapse of the popular exchange.

Let’s say your local sandwich shop creates a new incentive: For every sandwich you buy, you get 1 point. 10 points can be redeemed for a $10 discount on your next purchase. So far, so good, we’ve all seen this before.

But let’s say this store becomes very successful. The owner buys every business in your town and allows you to use the discount everywhere. Now, the points have real value to people, they become a sort of currency.

And this is where things go wrong: The owner gets greedy. He decides: I’ll just sell the points for cash - points are now everywhere in your small town. And he buys more businesses, but instead of paying for them with cash, he convinces the bank to give him a loan that he can pay off with his own points.

You probably see it coming: The owner keeps printing points until someone realizes what’s going on. Everyone rushes to exchange their points at his stores and the whole system collapses.

That’s what happened with FTX. They created that kind of bubble token, hyped it, borrowed against it, and ultimately had nothing left to show for when people started questioning the system. Whenever a company or ecosystem builds on an asset that is already inflated, it is easy to pop the bubble.

So how do we avoid those? We’ll talk about it in the next episode!

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt jam, where we spend one minute ...

… actually, today we are breaking with the format and will dig deep into what happened with FTX, and the nuclear bomb it set off in crypto land. But as always: In plain English.

You've certainly heard it in the news: One of the largest crypto exchanges, called FTX, went insolvent literally over night. Shortly after, their competitor Binance entered into a takeover agreement to save FTX, only to back out of the deal in the most spectacular way: By accusing FTX of mishandling customer funds and being under investigation by regulators.

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This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn crypto. This masterpiece was written by my co-Founder Arndt Voges, like almost all of the 292 episodes we produced to date, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am - just the voice - and your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

Today, a bomb of nuclear proportions went off in crypto land, and you probably saw the result all over the news: Crypto exchange Binance has agreed to buy competitor FTX. Crypto prices tanked like we haven’t seen in a while, and the internet was buzzing.

So - what makes this event so special? Let’s dig in over the next three days. Today: A quick recap of what happened.

In case you are not familiar with either one: Both Binance and FTX are large centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. They bring buyers and sellers together to make a transaction happen, in return for a fee. They are basically the online versions of the New York Stock Exchange, just for crypto.

The founders of both exchanges are somewhat famous among enthusiasts and come close to Elon Musk in Twitter fame. Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, founded Binance. Sam Bankman-Fried, known as SBF, started FTX. Although Binance was the first investor in FTX years ago, the two of them have often gotten into public arguments on Twitter.

Just like they did the day before the big news dropped. Everything seemed fine, until it became clear that FTX was unable to process customer withdrawals, a problem called liquidity crunch. FTX simply didn’t have enough money to pay users who wanted out. Within a short amount of time, Binance’s CZ announced on Twitter that they entered into an agreement to buy FTX to help save customers’ deposits.

And if you think that seems sudden, we are right with you. Very few people saw this coming. And because of that, a ripple effect kicked in: FTX’s own token started to tank, and soon after the entire crypto market followed.

Sounds like a true crime story to you? To us it does. That’s why we’ll do some good old detective work and return tomorrow to explain what happened behind the scenes!

So, don’t forget to subscribe so you do not miss this series!

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

We talk about crypto all day, but have you ever wondered what exactly it has to do with cryptography, if anything?

Cryptography, of course, means to hide and conceal a secret by writing it down in a way that only a trusted receiver can decipher it.

And yet, every transaction anyone has ever done on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is visible to the public. So, where does the crypto come in?

Well, let’s take your good old checkbook as an example. When you write a check, only you should be allowed to sign it. And any receiver should be able to verify that you, and not a scammer, has signed the check.

That’s actually cryptography at work. You have a public signature, which is yours on a check. Everyone can read and verify it. And you have your hand, which is the only hand that is allowed to sign a check. In crypto, your hand is a private key.

Cryptography uses complex math to ensure that it always works like this in both directions, but nobody can steal your private key just by observing your handwriting.

And that’s why you can’t just unlock an old Bitcoin wallet whose key you lost, and why you should never share a private signature with another person. Because cryptography is only as good as the weakest link in this chain: Us humans.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

Today, we take a short look at Gitcoin, which aims to solve the problem of funding opensource projects.

If you are not familiar with opensource: It is when developers write computer programs and make their code available for anyone else to use for free. This is so common, in fact, that every device you use and every single website you browse would not work without code that was opensourced.

There is just one problem: Those developers don’t make any money. That’s where Gitcoin comes in. It creates a marketplace, where donors can reach developers and pay them for contributions to opensource. The idea is to create more common goods, meaning things that help a large number of people. By its very definition, opensource does just that because anyone can reuse it for free.

But it goes even further: Gitcoin also has a grants program handing money to those opensource projects that the community feels are worth funding.

But who decides what is getting a grant, and how much? In true Web3 fashion, this is done by a vote of the community. But there is an interesting, important twist: The votes are counted differently, in a process called “Quadratic Funding”.

Votes on Gitcoin are cast in the form of individual donations to a project. The grant matches those donations, meaning that for every dollar donated, the grant puts something on top. The trick is that the formula favors individual donations. So a project that got $100 from one donor will get less grant money than a project that got $1 each from 100 individual donors.

So - why make it more complicated in the first place? Well, think about it this way: Gitcoins goal is to create moore public goods. By making sure that the projects with the most contributing people, and not with the richest donors get more funding, it strikes that balance.

We like the idea. Hope you got inspired as well – this is one of those examples where blockchains have a real-world impact by programming the flow of money.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

Have you ever looked around and noticed all these economical problems that society seems to face? We are sure you did, and you likely even started to think about solutions.

Let's take inequality as an example, the gap in distribution of wealth between the rich and the poor.

Your intuition would probably be to say: We have let free markets go way too far. Governments should regulate them and redistribute wealth. We could impose fairer taxes and new laws.

It may come as a surprise to you then, as much as it did to us, that there are people who suggest the exact opposite: Truly free markets, so-called Radical Markets.

Think that makes no sense? Because free markets have pushed us to where we are? Let’s explore the idea together then!

The idea is that we have a simple set of rules that govern our market, but within those, participants can all make equal decisions without restrictions.

Let's take the example of property. Inequality exists, because some people have a lot, and some people have almost nothing. One idea of radical markets is to force property to always be for sale to the highest bidder, and those who own it, to pay taxes on it. Let's say you own land, you'd have to sell it to anyone who's offering you more than you are willing to pay tax on. And when property can pass hands freely, it will most likely be utilized to be productive - someone may build a factory on the land they bought from you for example.

So: Radical Markets are not about creating unfair markets, they are about creating rules that force everyone to always be IN the market.

So – what does that have to do with crypto? Well, for the first time in a very long time, blockchains are a technology that allows new experiments like Radical Markets to be implemented. This is because blockchains are not controlled by governments and companies, who have little interest in those idea, and thus are a great way to try more radical ideas. In fact, blockchains have attracted a lot of free thinkers that constantly ask themselves: Now that we can program the way money flows, how can we use that power to create a better society?

And on Monday, we'll continue this topic with the related idea of quadratic voting, but bring it back into reality a notch by looking at a project called Gitcoin.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

We’ve talked a lot about government’s basic role in our economic system, and how it affects crypto prices. But what does the US government actually think about crypto as a payment system?

Quite a lot it turns out. In September 2022, Presiden Biden signed an executive order asking key government agencies to write reports on various blockchain-related topics. The goal was to recognize that crypto is here, and that the government will have to have an official reaction to it.

A lot of the order was focused on keeping people safe from bad investment decisions and fraud - because let’s be honest with each other, crypto isn’t a safe place yet.

But one particular part of the order instructed the Federal Reserve to publish their thoughts on a Central Bank Digital Currency, which could replace the Dollar as we know it, with something crypto-like.

So, what was in that report? Mostly an assessment of pros and cons to digital money that teach us quite a bit about the worries of Fed officials.

On one hand, they acknowledge that the traditional payments system is somewhat inefficient and unsafe. Read between the lines, and you’ll see they are talking about the high credit card fees we pay to Visa and MasterCard for example, fraud, money laundry, and generally limited payment options that are controlled by closed conglomerates. Something like a blockchain could eliminate many of those.

On the other hand though, it’s all about control. The government has an interest in executing monetary policy, which they could not do if we just switched to Bitcoin and co, which are decentralized. Another issue is privacy, which many blockchains have no good solution for.

So, what’s the takeaway? The US government is clearly seeing the wave of a new financial technology from far away and worries about not reacting quickly enough. But we’ll likely never see a truly decentralized system replace the Dollar. Makes sense to us: The government will still want to at least try to do it’s job to serve and protect us.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

When the economy cools down, crypto prices usually drop, so it’s important to get an understanding of the forces at work here. In the last two episodes we explained what money actually is, and how inflation works.

Today, let’s talk about what central banks do to bring inflation back down and why it’s hurting crypto so much right now.

You’ve probably heard this a million times: central banks are raising interest rates to reduce inflation. But how does that work… and does it actually work?

Think of central banks like these really big lenders and borrowers. They lend commercial banks incredibly large sums of money, and those pass them on to you. And because central banks control the money, they can set their own interest rates it charges to your bank.

When the central bank decides to raise those, your bank passes that increase on to you as well. Borrowing money is getting more expensive. And not just for you, for everyone - people and companies. Take the housing market for example: Mortgage rates increase, less people buy houses, real estate agents make less money, and go out for dinner less. Now the waiters are getting less tips. Everyone is becoming a little poorer.

And that suffering is by design: Because when people buy less, demand drops, and so do prices. In theory, at least, inflation falls.

You will have noticed though: That’s not working right now. Strange right? Well, remember from last episode: Demand isn’t the only thing affecting prices. We are also having large issues with the cost of goods, caused by the energy crisis and pandemic supply chain issues. Manufacturers simply can’t sell them for much less.

And so it seems, at least for now, that central banks are causing pain to fix the wrong side of the problem. Well intended, but ineffective, because that’s all they can do. But what they are certainly achieving: Getting people to pull investments out of crypto, making those prices come down along with the markets.

And that’s how it’s all connected. And tomorrow, we’ll take a look at what the central bank thinks about crypto… because they have thought about it a lot recently.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

Inflation is a hot topic these days, but do you actually know what causes it? And did you know that crypto's birth story is deeply linked with inflation?

Well then, let's dig in!

Inflation it the rising cost of goods and services in an economy. It's quite simple - if a loaf of bread costs $5 today and $6 next week, then that is inflation.

And as scary as that sounds, mild inflation is quite normal. When grandpa tries to give you 25c to buy an ice cream cone, he's not trying to be stingy. That's just what it cost back then and he hasn't adjusted. Economies grow, people make a little more money every year, so they can afford higher prices. The US Central Bank has a stated goal of keeping inflation around 2% per year for example.

But other things than economic growth can cause inflation, and often too much of it. The prices of things you buy are also affected by material costs. Like during Covid when things couldn't be made, their prices shot up.

Another is governments printing money. Many governments around the world created massive amounts of money just during the pandemic - and where there is more of something, people value it less.

But have governments taken it too far, with inflation reaching double-digits? Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, likely thought so even way back in 2008. Bitcoin is widely thought to be a reaction to governments' power to control their currencies, which is why blockchains were invented to be decentralized.

And now you know what blockchains and inflation have to do with each other... Think about it next time you get gas or go grocery shopping. And tomorrow, we’ll dig into the opposite: How governments intend to get us out of this mess by raising interest rates.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

We talk a lot about money, cryptocurrencies, tokens, and all that: But have you ever asked yourself what money actually is?

Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where we spend one minute a day to explain crypto. In plain English.

Money is a genius invention. Intuitively you fully understand WHAT you can do with it, but what is behind the idea may sound surprising.

Because money is really nothing more than a promise.

Let’s take a step back to understand. Imagine a world where there is no money. There, people will have to barter - which means exchanging items for each other. You may have a jug of milk and exchange it for a loaf of bread from someone else.

The problem is pretty obvious: It’s impractical. You may not have the right item to exchange on hand. What if you have beautiful flowers, but they don’t want them? No deal.

And this is a really big problem for any economy because markets can't be efficient - you both WANT to make a deal, but can’t do it.

So someone invented money, which is like a contract written on a piece of paper: I will always exchange this paper for a jug of milk for example. Or a loaf of bread. Now you can swap your milk into a paper, and the paper into that bread you wanted.

Usually, governments promise the value of this magic paper. They are huge economic players that can make or break markets with their promises. In crypto, governments have no say, and that is partially why crypto prices fluctuate so much: Instead of a guaranteed means of payment, they become an investment speculation.

And that is money: Just the promise of a really powerful entity, our government. And tomorrow we’ll talk about when that promise breaks, and why inflation happens.

This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it the easiest place to learn crypto. Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, Design is done by Carmen Rincon and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.

Disclaimer: This podcast references our opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Do your own research and seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.