The Crypto Conversation

Mark Yusko is the CEO of Morgan Creek Capital. Mark is one of the most insightful investors and most articulate Bitcoin bulls on the planet. Mark's investment thesis is that the greatest wealth is created by being an early investor in innovation. Making that investment requires believing in something before the majority of people understand it.

Why you should listen:

Mark says that Bitcoin is the most elegant savings technology ever invented. In a world where consumption is emphasized you become a slave to money. In a world where money is working for you, like with Bitcoin, your savings power is strengthened. With Bitcoin back at high prices, anyone who bought Bitcoin any day across the last 11 years, except for 5 days in December 2017, is now in profit. Marks says "What that tells me is that if you're a fiduciary, family office or individual, you don't need to pick a day to buy. It might be easier and less stressful to adopt a dollar cost average strategy. Buy some every day. Or every week. Or every month. Think of Bitcoin as savings technology, so instead of putting all of your money in the bank, put some in the bank, and some into Bitcoin.

Key takeaway:

Mark says it is not too late for people who have not already taken a position in Bitcoin. "Like Churchill said, this is not the end, this is not the beginning of the end, it may perhaps be the end of the beginning," says Mark. "But people haven't missed anything. The fact that we went from 0.003 cents in 2009 to where we are today, at $18k that's not the miracle. The miracle is that we went from 0.003 cents to one dollar and that Bitcoin survived all the attempts to kill it in those early years. The miracle is that Bitcoin found critical mass and it was elegantly constructed so that it could reach critical mass and then the network effects kicked in from there.

Mark says that with prices now close to all time highs, it's important for new investors not to FOMO. "A better idea is to dollar cost average in overtime, have some discipline to it. Allocate some % of your portfolio to Bitcoin over time. The younger you are, the higher that % can be. Just remember that concentration makes you rich and diversification keeps you rich. And Bitcoin is one of the great diversifying assets on the planet so adding a small amount to a portfolio can pay great dividends. You have to embrace technological innovation, and that's what Bitcoin is, and that is why it is time to #GetOffZero."

Supporting links:

Morgan Creek

Mark on Twitter

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

Leverj

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Decred is a hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake store of value crypto asset for the digital age. It has strong governance, good security, privacy, and an innovative incentive alignment. If Bitcoin is about being your own bank, Decred is about being your own bank and having a say in bank policy. Decred has launched a new DEX with no trading fees.

Guest:

Jake Yocom-Piatt

Why you should listen:

Decred is an experimental project to redefine governance using blockchain technology. Instead of electing officials, Decred uses a rolling opt-in lottery to make policy decisions. Decred aims to create a fairer financial system driven by sound money, where the community makes decisions and every decision-maker has skin-in-the-game.

Decred has just launched the DCRDEX, a decentralized crypto exchange. DCRDEX does not collect trading fees and utilizes an order matching system to level the playing field between retail and professional traders. The DCRDEX is permissionless and non-custodial. The first assets available to trade are Decred, Bitcoin, and Litecoin. However, DCRDEX plans to allow all crypto assets, putting projects on an equal footing by not charging a listing fee. Projects can get their crypto asset supported by adding support for atomic swaps.

Key takeaway:

Jake says "The goal with DCRDEX is to bring the same principles that we support in Decred, like sound money and strong governance, and create a fairer system for trading crypto. We want to make sure that the DCRDEX is true to the spirit and ethos of the cryptocurrency movement. That's why it is non-custodial, there is no KYC, and it is secure. Instead of turning DCRDEX into a business that is driven by fees and rent-seeking, we aim to create an email-like user experience for the exchange process, where anyone can operate a server and exchange any crypto they want."

Supporting links:

Decred

DCRDEX

Decred on Twitter

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

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Jed McCaleb is the co-founder and Chief Architect of the Stellar Development Foundation, an open network working to connect the world's financial infrastructure. In 2014, Jed created Stellar, an open-source blockchain network designed to democratize economic participation by making money more fluid, markets more open, and people more empowered.

Why you should listen:

Jed's history is the story of crypto itself. An early pioneer of decentralized systems, he created eDonkey2000 one of the first file-sharing networks.

In July 2010, after reading about Bitcoin on Slashdot he became fascinated and founded the mtgox.com Bitcoin exchange.

"I wanted to get some Bitcoin and the only way you could do that at the time was to mine it or go on internet forums. So I started the Gox exchange so I could learn more about Bitcoin as a system, and buy bitcoins. It was something that was needed by the community at the time and I knew it could build it so I did. I didn't run it for very long before Mark Karpeles took over and everyone knows what happened after that."

In 2011 McCaleb founded the crypto asset company Ripple and served as CTO until 2013. McCaleb then parted ways with Ripple but as part of a settlement, he was granted a large amount of XRP tokens. At the height of the January 2018 altcoin boom, McCaleb was briefly the 40th wealthiest person on the planet based on the value of his XRP tokens.

McCaleb founded Ripple and then Stellar to try and improve on the promise of Bitcoin. "Bitcoin is an awesome idea," says McCaleb, "But software is iterative and can always be improved. One of the things that bothered me about Bitcoin is the mining aspect. There are literally billions of dollars spent on mining which is a shame. I thought if there is another way we can solve the consensus problem, then we should explore it. So with Ripple and now Stellar, this is a way to solve consensus without the proof-of-work mining process so transactions can be sent in a much cheaper, faster, more energy-efficient way."

Key takeaway:

McCaleb says the current financial system is clunky and inefficient. "The problem with the way that money moves around the planet, is that the rails were built pre-internet so none of it was designed to interoperate. And the beauty of the internet is that with email, for example, it doesn't matter who runs your email server, they all speak the same language so you can seamlessly and instantly send an email to anyone in the world. There is really no reason why money can't work the same way. That's what Stellar is, it is an interoperable payment protocol between payment networks.

McCaleb says that Stellar is intended to enhance rather than replace the existing financial system. Whereas, say, the Bitcoin network was made for trading only bitcoins, Stellar is a decentralized system that's built for trading any kind of money in a transparent and efficient way. "Stellar is designed as an upgrade to the existing financial structure," says McCaleb. "It will be a long time, if ever before everyone is using one cryptocurrency. So instead, the better route is to build something that makes the current system easier, cheaper, reduces friction, and enables value transfer between people that wasn't possible before. Once we connect these networks of information in a frictionless way that will allow people to build all these interesting things on top of the network. Once you can send 10 cents from the U.S. to Vietnam, with no problem, that's when innovation happens. Right now we're building the plumbing for everything to be built on top of."

Supporting links:

Stellar

Stellar Meridian Conference

The Three-Body Problem

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

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Rekt Capital, a Forbes featured crypto technical analyst and trader returns for his second appearance on the Crypto Conversation. As Bitcoin surges through $15,000 to hit its highest price since January 2018, Rekt Capital says this bull cycle is just getting started.

Guest:

Rekt Capital

Why you should listen:

Rekt Capital is an astute analyst who specializes in technical analysis and trading psychology. He has written three recent research articles, analyzing the effect of the Bitcoin Halving on price, dissecting Bitcoin's Four Year Cycle to better understand Bitcoin's price trajectory, and the Crypto Money Flow Cycle to track the movement of capital from Bitcoin to mid-caps to small-caps and back.

Key takeaway:

Rekt Capital says that if we assume the rate of diminishing Post-Halving returns remain constant, Bitcoin could rally exponentially to a relatively conservative new all-time-high of ~$90,000 in 2021. However, this conservative extrapolation of current Post-Halving bull trends by the standards of Bitcoin's price history doesn't account for upside wicks past key resistances. This means Bitcoin could overextend past $90,000 and even beyond the psychological level of $100,000 before finally rejecting.

Want to get $50 OFF Rekt Capital's Technical Analysis course? Simply follow this link and use the discount code "cryptoconversation" in the Discount Code field.

Supporting links:

Bitcoin After The Halving

Bitcoin's Four Year Cycle

Crypto Money Flow Cycle

Rekt Capital Newsletter

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

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Trality is building a marketplace where creators can publish crypto trading bots and get paid rent by anyone wanting to piggyback on their trades. The creator's algorithmic secret sauce remains top secret. Guests:

Moritz Putzhammer and Christopher Helf

Why you should listen:

While working as an assistant professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Moritiz Putzhammer was trading crypto on the side and working on a PHD. He realized that any individual actively trading crypto would at some point lose sleep, and money. Wanting to devise a system that would allow him to trade without having to be in front of the screen he reached out to his friend Christopher Helf, who has a background in computer science. After reaching his limit as a trader with an economics background, Putzhammer worked with Helf to automate his trading.

The pair began by writing basic utility scripts that soon evolved into a useful set of automated trading tools. The pair realized that they had a product that could help other traders and decided to build a product.

Key takeaway:

Trality is a platform for anyone to create and invest through algorithmic trading bots. The platform is aimed at two groups. The first group are "creators" who have access to state of the art tools to build the best possible bots and the data to test and improve them. Creators can deploy their bots on the Trality cloud platform and on the Trality marketplace. The second group, called "followers" can access the marketplace and choose what bot they want to use, and copy trade that bot.

The Trality team believes that in the near future everything will be automated, from your car to your home, to work and investment tools. Trality wants to be the platform for automated private investments.

Trality has launched a trading bot competition. It has a submission period of 30 days and then a competition period that runs for 45 days. Bots are simulated in a live environment where the best performing bots will win a cash price. Got to trality.com

Supporting links:

Trality

Trality on Twitter

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

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Bruce Pon is the founder of Ocean Protocol. Ocean helps developers build marketplaces so that organizations can privately and securely publish, exchange, and consume data. Ocean protocol is building the new data economy. Guest:

Bruce Pon

Why you should listen:

Ocean protocol enables the monetization and tokenization of data. This gives power back to data owners, enabling them to gain value from their data and allow it to be used in ways that benefit the world.

Pon says the data economy already exists but there are powerful gatekeepers such as the FAANG companies in the West, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China, and data publishers such as Bloomberg and Reuters. "The data economy is any economic value that can be created from the use of data," says Pon. "It's all around us and it is potentially worth trillions. Data can be reused, optimized and improved over time. Data can be used in countless different ways for different purposes. So as the world goes digital, the potential to turn this data into something truly valuable is immense."

Key takeaway:

There is a growing understanding that from a macro world level to an industry sector level, to the government and institutional level, to the city, to company, and the individual - all are data producing machines. We now have the tools to collect and analyze this data and there are huge learnings and breakthroughs that can be teased out of the data. This is what makes data incredibly valuable.

Pon says that Ocean Protocol Version 3 is the culmination of all of the learnings from version 1 and 2. "The space has advanced a lot since we began building in 2017," he explained. "The architecture that we designed early on can now be simplified and optimized to integrate with the current state of the art. So with a light weight model we can integrate with the web 3.0 infrastructure and make full use of AMMs like Balancer and Uniswap to create data tokens. We always talked about turning data streams into value streams and it is now possible. We have the ability to create ERC20 tokens that represent data streams. The tokens can be used to access the data, and they can also be traded or speculated on. We can even create mutual data funds that can track various types of health data or automotive data for example. That's what Ocean enables."

Supporting links:

Ocean Protocol

Ocean Protocol on Twitter

Bruce on Twitter

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

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Josh Olszewicz is a professional crypto trader and analyst. In this episode Josh explains why he thinks a Bitcoin price target of $20K by January is reasonable. Plus Josh gives his views on DeFi, Monero, and announces his new crypto analysis YouTube channel for Brave New Coin.

Guest:

Josh Olszewicz

Why you should listen:

As we close out a volatile year, Bitcoin is looking extremely bullish. Josh says it is very possible that Bitcoin reaches a new all time high in the near future. "The way I look at it is to ask what is the rate of change in the current trend? That gives us a timeline for price expectation. This suggests that if the current rate of change continues we can expect that by January price should be somewhere around $18-$20k. Those numbers sound insane but as long as the trend remains intact, there aren't many reasons to be bearish right now."

Bitcoin has only a short history of the price being in five figures. The time it has spent above $12k is even shorter, just 61 days or so. To put this in context Josh says it's important to note that "the biggest thing we're doing now is normalizing five digits versus four digits. In 2017 it was more of a parabolic rise, there were simply more buyers than sellers and price didn't really matter. When they aren't enough sellers to meet the demand the price just keeps going up. When you have a bull trend you have to let a runner run. If this goes to 20K people will feel euphoric, but it's just a number, it could go much higher."

Key takeaway:

Josh has started a series of four new weekly videos for the Brave New Coin YouTube channel. Monday features Josh's trading set-up for the week, Tuesday is trading tip Tuesday with a weekly trading tool breakdown, Wednesday is a DeFi roundup focusing on chart action for the leading DeFi tokens, and Thursday sees Josh look at the legacy charts such as equities and precious metals.

Supporting links:

Brave New Coin on YouTube

Josh on Twitter

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

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Fernando Martinelli is the founder and CEO of Balancer, an automated asset management platform for programmable liquidity. Balancer allows anyone to create public or private liquidity pools for up to 8 assets with customizable weighting.

Guest:

Fernando Martinelli

Why you should listen:

Balancer began as a research project in 2018. By exploring multidimensional invariant surfaces, Fernando and his team came up with a powerful mathematical framework that enables continuous portfolio rebalancing while also generating fees. Fernando says "the formula itself is quite simple and easy to express mathematically. The way it works and the way it proves self-balancing in liquidity pools is the trickier part. It's a function of mathematical expression whose value cannot change when trades are done. The same way Uniswap relies on X x Y = K, we have something similar but slightly more complex. And if you think of each of the balances as a dimension and then if you have a pool with three balances, then you have a 3-dimensional surface, which is actually in the fourth dimension because the surface itself is the energy value of this function that has three inputs and one output."

Balancer is similar to Uniswap. However Fernando says that one of the main differences is that "our main focus is on the asset management side of things where Uniswap's focus is more on the decentralized exchange. So our focus is to make sure we meet the needs of liquidity providers so they will come to Balancer to put their crypto to work, and rebalance their portfolios. We want to be a flexible primitive where people can be as creative as they want."

Asked about one of the key Defi themes in 2020, Fernando said, "Liquidity mining is a mechanism to get a platform to a decentralized stage. Balancer started with investors, advisors, founders, and this was at a time when there wasn't really an idea of a fair launch. It's just the way it worked out. There are pros and cons but ultimately you need capital to bootstrap but we don't want to be a VC coin we want to be decentralized and that's our goal."

Key takeaway:

Balancer is a financial primitive that serves as a fundamental building block in decentralized finance. However, it is also an asset management platform, and it is an automated market maker (AMM) providing programmable liquidity. This in turn makes other features such as decentralized asset exchange, automated portfolio management, DAO-governed treasuries, and fair token distributions possible. Fernando says this is an important point, and that as a permissionless platform, Balancer allows any developer to leverage its infrastructure to build financial products and services.

"Balancer wouldn't work if there wasn't the other side of the market. So you have the liquidity providers who want to have their index funds rebalanced, and make some money with fees. And that's up to them to decide. And the other side of the equation is the DEX. So all the pools on Balancer allow anyone to trade in any direction on any pair that that pool contains. The fact that we have a two sided market means we need both actors for the system to work."

Balancer Smart Pools are private pools controlled by a smart contract. These pools can be made of two to eight token constants, and customized with configurable weights that represent the desired ratio of each token in a pool. The smart contract acts as a controller for the liquidity in that pool. Fernando describes smart pools as "Uber for liquidity pools, whereas what we've had to date has been taxis. It's about matching demand to supply."

For example, the RealT smart pool – essentially a real estate index fund building on all their tokenized real-estate – where the smart pool ERC20 tokens represent ownership of the whole index.

Finally Fernando says "DeFi is a revolution that is just getting started. It will have cycles and some serious ups and downs but it is going to keep growing I believe."

Supporting links:

Balancer

Balancer on Twitter

Fernando on Twitter

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

The Three-Body Problem

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Anton Bukov is the co-founder and CTO of the 1inch exchange. 1inch is a DEX aggregator that executes a swap of tokens at the best price in one single transaction. Anton is a software developer with more than 15 years experience.

Why you should listen:

The 1inch exchange began life as a hackathon project which was presented at ETHNewYork in 2019. 1inch was created and developed by Sergej Kunz (co-founder & CEO) and Anton Bukov (co-founder & CTO). After receiving positive feedback, Kunz and Bukov kept working to improve the project to the point that it became their primary work focus.

Bukov says "1inch is a DEX aggregator that executes a swap of tokens at the best price in one single transaction. With some DEXes there has been a lack of liquidity, and the more liquidity there is, the better it is for everyone. So 1inch addresses the liquidity problem through an optimizing algorithm that splits up the trade across different exchanges. We see 1inch as unifying all of the layer one DEXes into one single highly liquid DEX, so the purpose of 1inch is to create one super DEX with the highest possible amount of liquidity and best possible fees on layer one."

Key takeaway:

Bukov revealed that 1inch is working on a 1inch token that will arrive this year. "In 2017 users paid money to get ICO tokens and after three years we see that most of those projects have failed. Now, projects start with the opposite model. They are not selling tokens, they give tokens away to the users of the platforms. So users who provide liquidity to the platform are rewarded with the token. You can see this as payment for market making. This idea of a far launch is nice because it means that the supply that exists is fairer, there is no pre-mine and it is less likely that someone can dump a large amount of tokens. Yes we are considering a 1inch token - we have worked on the tokenomics and the token will do some interesting things, it's not just a governance token. But for it to work, there is a new product we need to launch that we are building now. We are trying to deliver this token and product this year."

Bukov says "the most interesting thing about DeFi is the way the protocols work with each other - composability - anyone can build an amazing product on a protocol. The creativity that this allows is amazing and you don't have to ask anyone permission. This is a very powerful idea."

Bukov says that he believes that "crypto is the missing piece of the puzzle for how money should work. Visa, Mastercard and the current banking system is the wrong idea. We are building a new system and every banking system on the planet will eventually use it. It won't happen overnight, it might take up to 20 years."

Supporting links:

1inch

1inch on Twitter

Anton on Twitter

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

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Shayne Coplan is the founder of Polymarket, an information markets platform. Speculators can bet on the world's most highly-debated topics like the upcoming US elections, COVID-19, DeFi, cryptocurrencies, and more.

Guest:

Shayne Coplan

Why you should listen:

In 2014 Coplan was a teenager interested in music, technology, and the peer-to-peer file sharing scene. He had started mining crypto assets like Litecoin using the early GPU miners. When the website for the Ethereum presale went live he became inspired by the Ethereum vision and at 16 years old, Coplan was one of the youngest participants in the Ethereum presale. "It seemed really cool to me. I didn't have a lot of capital to put into it but it was really exciting and it has been fantastic to be part of the journey so far."

Prediction markets are exchange-traded markets created for the purpose of trading the outcome of events. They date back to the 1500s and started as simple bets. Some forms of information markets such as dead pools or assassination markets are part of the Cyberpunk literature.

Polymarket is an Information Markets platform built on Ethereum. Speculators can harness the power of free markets to bet on the outcome of real world events. Coplan says, "I've always loved markets. I'm a fan of liquid markets and I'm fascinated by shadow economies and different market structures. I'm a believer in markets as the most effective mechanism for aggregating information. I have a tough time believing everything I read in the media. I think a market is a much more reliable aggregator of truth. If you have a lot of different participants acting on their beliefs, a market is the best way we can distill that information into one equilibrium or signal."

Key takeaway:

One of the problems with social media is a lack of accountability. Everyone has an opinion to share and there's not much downside to being wrong. This makes it hard for regular people to find out what's fact and what's fiction. 2020 has showcased just how bad the consequences can be.

Ploymarket thinks that one part of the solution is to let people bet on current events. Free markets are the best method of aggregating disparate information in real time (see: Hayek, stock market, EMH).

Coplan says "one of the best use-cases for a blockchain and a generalized smart contract platform is the ability to create markets on arbitrary topics that can be easily created, traded, and resolved. For a couple of dollars you can create a market on anything and avoid the bureaucratic risk that is inherent to creating these markets in the legacy financial system.

On Polymarket, speculators bet on future event outcomes and profit from accuracy. With all the conflicting 'expert' opinions on social media, Polymarket lets people put their money where their mouth is, have skin in the game, and profit from being correct.

Supporting links:

Polymarket

Polymarket on Twitter

Shayne on Twitter

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

Mind Game

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