On Today's Episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin... In our first segment, we'll join Andreas Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan, and Adam B. Levine for a look at the varied approaches being used to connect your Bitcoin to credit card style ease-of-use. After the break, guest host Alex Gladstein and Adam B. Levine sit down for another installment of LTB Global Voices. This time we talk with Aparna Krishnan about the unique situation brewing in India today. Today's episode was sponsored by Edge.app and BlockchainTraining.org Highlights and Selected Excerpts Courtesy of @ProfessorMeow HIGHLIGHTS (More excerpts below credits) 'œIt's almost as if the entire mechanism is designed to put you into debt, hopefully, to get you to a point where you end up racking up fees to enrich some group of bankers..as if the entire system is designed to not only make you a debt slave, but make sure that you work for a wage salaried position to a giant corporation.' - Andreas Antonopoulos 'œ..if anyone represents themselves as insured, you have to really look into what they mean. I feel like a lot of people are conflating one type of insurance with the other when they're making financial decisions about where they put their money. So when it comes to collateralized lending and engaging in margin, that's the whole point that crypto was trying to escape is that type of understanding of finance' - Jonathan Mohan 'œ..when you say something like 'œbanking the unbanked,' it's important to understand why people are unbanked in the first place. One thing that I found really interesting in India was that a large number of these people who are unbanked don't know how to use the existing financial system. It's not that they don't have access to financial systems.' - Aparna Krishnan CREDITS Episode 404 featured content from Andreas Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan, Adam B. Levine, Alex Gladstein, and Aparna Krishnan. This episode featured music by Jared Rubens and General Fuzz, with editing by Steven and Adam. Any questions or comments? You can either email [email protected], or now leave a voice message directly through your anchor.fm app, or on the new show page at ltbshow.com Image credit: CC-SA http://www.picpedia.org/credit-cards/credit-cards09.html More selected excerpts Crypto Credit Cards: Adam B. Levine: I wanted to have a brief conversation about some of the different options that are out there as far as crypto credit cards. We're talking about this in the context of how these things work rather than endorsing them. I don't use any, I don't intend to use any, but I think it's an interesting development in the space. Andreas Antonopoulos: I've used one. I used 2, actually. I used the shift card from Coinbase back in 2015, and I also used the Bitpay card that same year, and regretted using both of those. Adam B. Levine: the Bitpay prepaid credit card is the simplest possible way that you could do this, Essentially you buy this debit card from them and it costs 10 bucks or 15 bucks as a one-time fee. Then you get an address that you can make payments to, and whenever you send Bitcoin to the payment address, it sells it and turns it into dollars and then puts that balance onto your card as a prepaid balance. So when you go to a store you can use it and it's basically the equivalent of a gift card more than it is a credit card but, the advantage is that you hold all your cryptocurrency until you actually want to top-up the card. Stephanie Murphy: I'm curious, I want to know why Andreas regretted using it? Andreas Antonopoulos: Once my accountant understood the accounting nightmare and then billed me for it, it was obvious that it was not worth using. Inside the United States with the capital gains accounting rules, it's just too much hassle. The other reason was foreign transaction fees and the exchange rate being applied which in both cases was way too expensive Stephanie Murphy: Wow, okay so the costs add u
