[00:00:00] John Riggins: as we kick off this, bitcoin halving live stream, we have a good bit of time for this first panel. and it's a topic that's interesting to everyone watching, cause it has a lot to do with that bitcoin's growth and of course, number go up. So we have really the perfect set of panelists to weigh in.

On the topic of mass adoption of Bitcoin post halving. and I guess to start off let's, have everyone just give a one sentence introduction of yourself and company, and we'll know, we'll get right into the, to the discussion. Toby, if you want to go first.

Toby Hoenisch: Hey, John. And Hey everybody. My name is Toby I'm, CEO and cofounder here at Tenex.

And with the topic you just kicks it off, kicked it off with the mass adoption is exactly where Tenex is at home. we're trying to help people get in and out and we're best  known forthe tenex card to basically make Bitcoin spendable.

John Riggins: Thanks, Dominic?

Dominik Stroukal: Yeah. hi and thank you for inviting me. I'm here with  Satoshi Labs mostly, even though I'm an, I'm an [00:01:00] academic, economics.

I'm usually a teacher at the university, but I also am an economic advisor to satoshi labs. You all know for having, Trezor, the first hardware wallet. So yeah, mass adoption is what we do every day.

John Riggins: Perfect, Bach?

Bach Nguyen: Good morning, everyone. My name is Bach. I'm here. I'm responsible for partnerships and integrations at Invity IO, which is the new subsidiary of satoshilabs and satoshilabs group. And Dominic basically just explains what satoshiabs does. And our main product is Trezor. But Invity is a new onboarding site where we are actually looking into onboarding the next hundred million users.

So hopefully it's gonna work out

John Riggins: great, flex?

Flex Yang: Hey, thanks, John. Thanks Bitcoin magazine. as a, I'm flex from Bitcoin from, from now, from Bitcoin, from babelfinance. babel Finance is actually a, [00:02:00] centralized financial services platform for Bitcoin and, major to bitcoin. And, yes. What are we trying to do is actually, bring kind of financial products to, Bitcoin, it also tries to.

bring the traditional financial guys into this industry to make it, make this industry a better one.

John Riggins: Perfect, Molly?

Molly: Hi everyone. my name is Molly and, head of  marketing and PR for hashkey Hub. Hashkey Hub Is the first consumer facing product developed by, hashkey group. Before Hash key, I was the strategic partnership manager for wanxiang blockchain labs and China  operations for bitcoin magazine.

John Riggins: And Lixin?

Lixin Liu: Hey John, thanks for having me and hello everyone. I'm Lixin, head of power from Kobo. And what my, what my team is working on is Cobo [00:03:00] vault. And we have just released our second generation product and, for mentioning mass adoption, we're working on the most fundamental part for mass adoption, which is security and the way we do we're building the most secure hardware, wallet currently in the world.

And, it has opensource source se and also it is QR code, air gapped for better isolation for your private keys. Yup.

John Riggins: Awesome. And our Moderator, Sally.

Sally Wang: Hello everyone. I'm today's host , Sally consultant at Blockbrid ge. Thanks, John,

John Riggins: great collection of, of, of talent here, I guess, to set the stage, w kinda give us a sense of what the environment is for Bitcoin adoption. Now that you're seeing, and kind of your specific region, your specific, kind of target customer demographic. just set the stage for us. I'm gonna start with Toby and kind of go down through whoever has a comment.

Toby Hoenisch: Thanks. So thanks John, for the question. So tenex is now five years old and we went through the last, like 2017 bubble. And I'm really excited. Like [00:04:00] I would say, probably could say formal for the next wave of adoption, because we really built this company to cater to the mass market.

and what we're seeing now is that during the last wave and those people that are here today, I would say probably in the audience, we call them crypto masters. They have been here, they really technically savvy. and I think what the next wave is all about, is like you're an early mainstream audience.

So we call them crypto curious. they have heard about it in 2017 or maybe in the last few years, but for some reason they didn't come into our industry. and. Our industry. And just as much as Tenex as well is really catering to the problems that they're facing on why they have them come into that.

Like this goes from user experience where people don't quite trust themselves yet in how to handle Bitcoin handle the security that I really trust finances. On themselves and not, delegating it to someone else like a bank. And I think this is really the next big group and it's about 20, 30% of the [00:05:00] population.

This is like millennials and younger, digital first, they know how to use digital products, and we're seeing them come in. we, at Tenex, we made the switch about one year ago. Really focused on this new audience, while supporting of course, our, our core customers that have been with us over the years, with our core products, but really, being able to fulfill our vision, of being that bridge from the crypto world, and connecting it with the real world, with our, like right now, the focus is still the card, but also then increasingly buying crypto and in the future of possibly other products to cater to the needs of those new users.

Sally Wang: okay. Thanks for the input  Toby. So maybe specifically can Dominik indicate how he views the macro economy environment in this context.

Dominik Stroukal: Thank you for the question. you know, I would, I would look at it with two different point of views. one is historically, we saw [00:06:00] some, we saw something in 2012. This is like the first time I ever bought a beer with Bitcoin.

And if you compare it, that's time to

John Riggins: dating yourself.

Dominik Stroukal: we spent a lot of money back then. if you look at that, we wouldn't even be able to foresee what's what's happening today. what, what we are doing right now, that would be unimaginable. So, so we are way further than we thought. so, so historically the mass adoption, I think the growth was higher than we expected back then.

And there were some milestones. So, so we, we all know them. you can even look at the past halving. So we didn't, we didn't have hardware walletsbefore the first one. we didn't have things we, we all like to use before the second one, et cetera. So something will happen even macroeconomically second thing, economically, strictly economically.

If you look at the consumption basket of goods, people buy with Bitcoin. This is something where we need to change it or [00:07:00] just wait, for it to change. But, if you look at it, you'll see that most. People in the real world spend most money for things like housing, energy foods. And we don't see it in the Bitcoin economy.

So the consumption basket is really different. Much of it is for electronics and charity. So, so these things should converge. We don't see it there yet, according to some statistics. So this is something where I, where I would like to see the mass adoption people buying houses or food with for Bitcoin are still like.

Just a couple of them in the whole world still, so they are curiosities.

Sally Wang: Okay. Thanks Dominic. So, move on to the next one. So I know a lot of you, how been involved in  rolling out new technologies previously. So starting with Lxin Liu from Cobo. So can you share some insights into your  approach and how you are bringing that experience into Bitcoin?

Lixin Liu: okay. Thanks Sally for asking [00:08:00] this, again, I'm from Cobo and we're making hardware wallets.

And, actually when we were, when we were designing the product, we had like three design principles, which are, which are the ultimate principles that were obeyed for designing the product, again thanks to Trezor and Trezor is. currently Trezor is the number one, hardware wallet in the market.

And we also learned a lot from Trezor. we should stand together again, we just think together to educate the market rather than just fighting each other. Right. This is what I want to pitch to Dominic. Yup. And also when work designer, when we were designing the product, we had three design principles.

The first is maximizing the attack cost. This is super important because, the ultimate goal of using a hardware wallet is isolating your private key. So how are your hardware is connected to the companion app or is connected to the blockchain? That's really important. And that's the first thing we want to do, [00:09:00] which is maximizing the.

cost of attack. And then we come to the solution of QR code and air gap., I know very, for the main players in the market are not using QR code and airgap. Mostly are using a USB ports and USB ports and Bluetooth, which are very huge attacks surfaces. but they're not unsafe. They're just.

Bigger attack surface. So we just shrink the attack surface  with QR code interaction. and also we put them into some very mature tactics from traditional banking, equipments, such as a self destruct mechanism, which means if someone, if a hacker stole your device and he wants to falsly open the device and the device can self destruct, all the private keys and other sensitive information in the device.

So the first thing is maximizing the cost of attack. The second thing is we want to minimizing the trust of the product. I know that people have talking about the secure admin thing for a long time. A Trezor is the [00:10:00] supporter for general purpose, MCU and open source. Everything. And the ledger is the main supporter for secure admin, but the controversy part  is secure

admin, mostly works as a black box. So what we were doing is trying, we open source the firmware of the secure element, which makes people can see how the secure admin works and the, to verify the code there. And also later we will allow people to upload their own form firmware. Into the secure element to make their own hardware wallet.

So the second thing we do is minimizing the trust and also like ledger ledger is a good teacher to us. We were also open source, the hardware design and open source as much as possible we can do for the community to verify the product. Yeah, I think the third thing we did, the third design principle was, we put user experience into consideration very much because if we check all the history about crypto [00:11:00] loss, we can see that a lot of crypto loss happens.

Not because of the design of the hardware or some flaws on the hardware, but because of the people's human error. So we took that into consideration. And the biggest thing we did is we implemented a big touch screen into the hardware wallet, so you can just use it as your mobile phone as tthe hardware wallet, that's a big advantage to lower the possibility for human error.

And also currently we're implementing the we're currently we're implementing the pro wh....  we're integrating the product into electrum. And when we were doing that, we found that to the bigger screen really helps a lot because for example, if you set up any transaction from your Electrum and send it to your Cobo walletand then with the big touch screen, you can see that from the Cobo vault, you can see that the Cobo Vault [00:12:00] can tell you which address of the output address is your exchange address. And this significantly eliminates some attacks surface like hacker can change your exchange address. So this kind of thing can really helps for user experience to avoid the human error, then to bring a better security situation for the community.

Yeah, that's what we're doing. Many, three things, a maximizing attack attack, attack costs, cost, and the minimizing, the trust. And also. taking user experiencing to consideration to lower the possibility of human error.

John Riggins: Anybody else?

Bach?

Bach Nguyen: Yeah,  I would like to say, thanks for the friend friendly words at the beginning of the session. I think that  the cryptocurrency hardware wallets, like ours should actually cooperate and we have the same intention, right?

We want to onboard as many customers as possible into a secure wallet, when it comes to. Philosophical [00:13:00] differences. I don't think we have to talk about it here since we're more focusing on the mass adoption than discussing hardware right now 

John Riggins: so, that's so that's kinda thoughts on, kind of past experience as relates to onboarding users in a Bitcoin, those new users kind of that next a hundred million next billion, no next 7 billion people, as we look to those, kind of future Bitcoiners, let's kind of hear your thoughts on it, who those people are, how you're thinking about onboarding and specifically, toby, if you wanna take a first stab at it.

Toby Hoenisch: Sure. so I mentioned before that we were focused on this like next 20, 30%. That's probably a hundred to 500 million users globally, rough calculation. and, I think what's interesting for me is like on one side, the users are like early in mainstream, mobile first in many countries they're digital savvy, but also, I'm interested in like, what.

What everybody thinks, what the narrative is going to be. And what's the, which parts of our industry going to be adopted first. [00:14:00] And then, as a priority, like one for me that is really clear is like the concept of Bitcoin as an asset class. That's really quite common in the existing, users. and I think that's definitely one, one that I'm really interested in is like how far you can push a usability further.

Like, I call bitcoin as like programmable money, because what. You can build stuff with yourself, like DIY finance, like things that we see, even simple products like our, our card is a Bitcoin card. You can spend Bitcoin, but people build their own solutions such as where we saw early users. Send money across borders to their kids so they can, can spend it, which is kinda like your own DIY remittance product.

and I, I think we're going to see a lot more of that. and it, because I think it see it evolve on an individual basis. You might not be able to pinpoint, okay. This is the one thing that everybody is doing, because precisely when you look at traditional finance, you'd have a problem. If it affects millions or [00:15:00] tens of millions of users, then, well, banks are quite okay in solving problems for huge parts of the population.

But when you are the only one then nobody cares about you, but  with bitcoint or other solutions in our industry, you can do it yourself. and I think that's an interesting one. So going. Back to this main, the big topics. I think you can roughly break it down into markets. So you have the developed world, which is like  on the financial side.

Quite set up. I, in terms of, let's say payments, peer to peer and others where it's really about inflation hedge as an investment, perserving capital. and I'm curious, what else, other use cases we're going to see. I mean, it's then once you have your money in bitcoin, how do you use it? Of course, you have to solve that and

how do you create loan market credit markets? There's going to be a lot of that. And then you can look at the emerging markets where financial problems are different in nature. where yes, they also have problems with inflation and trying to hedge, but sometimes they [00:16:00] don't have access to other things.

Like that's why we see , let's say bitcoin based remittance businesses, gain traction in those markets. But I can also see like, just peer-to-peer payments and other products take traction, like the friendly, buy market.

 as, kind of we onboard new users into Bitcoin, is there any thoughts on kind of ideologically, but kind of ideological priorities, education, what kind of first principles should we be thinking about?

maybe Dominic, if you want to take a first stab at that one, interested in satoshilabs' thoughts.

Dominik Stroukal: yeah, I remember back in 2015, I guess there was a first demographic study. I remember having a lecture body, then I even had some numbers. I wasn't prepared for the question. I even remember that, that there was a pie chart where you saw different groups, different ideological backgrounds of people who came into Bitcoin.

And I remember that there were. the, capital is the one side, there were the anarcho communists, there were [00:17:00] green. I think that we lost that was them, on the way. unfortunately there was, it was interesting if you ask them, what were the reasons behind them adopting Bitcoin? it was awesome that everyone loves it for, for something.

Totally different. the libertarians, like, because it was against the central banking. So obviously the, the, the, the left,a archistsn loved it because it was against the system, whatever it means then, then the greens loved it because it was against the banks. Ah, so, that was totally different.

And at the end of the day, we all used it together. I think that we love the greens and there is something we should focus more on, with, with, within the adoption because, I think that we. Failed to explain the, the energetical problem of, of Bitcoin. And if it really is Bitcoin and halving is the best place to do it because we will, we can show to the world that, that it's not profitable that much for.

for the [00:18:00] miners to, to spend that much energy, spend that much on energy, after the halving, if the price is not going up. So, so, so here we can explain some principles and explain that how it will look like in the future with energy. So, so we lost these, but other than that, it was still, the groups were ideologically extreme.

Even though I think that some of them are right, but, but still extreme. So here we can go to the, to, to the mainstream. It's not only as Toby said, not only the developed versus developing countries, emerging markets, which we also, so we, we, we have the coin map.org, just look at the map and you will see that it's North, where's its established it's Europe, except France.

I don't know what the hell happened there, but it's all over Europe. and United States, but that's it basically. So, so we have to move geographically, but also ideologically, it has to be something which is normal for people to use. We are not there yet, which is optimistic because we, we have a place [00:19:00] to move and also pessimistic.

It goes, we don't know how to do it clearly after 10 years.

John Riggins: Lixin, how about you?

Lixin Liu: Yup. Yeah, actually, because I make hardware wallets. So what I focus on is the, hardware wallets and the security part. previously we were thinking that most of our customers are in the States and are in China, you know, in those most developed countries for Bitcoin concept and other stuff.

but recently we. It's very interesting that we, we received a lot of queries or interests from emerging countries like Vietnam, and even like countries like Cameroon, these other countries countries. And some companies, they are very interested in helping us to do localization for our product in those countries.

So also I want to add. Something to Dominic's answer about the ideological priorities. I think because hardware wallets is the, I think, compared to other companies [00:20:00] here, hardware walletrs, has the most, like. Deep learning curve for people to adopt the product. So I think, education first is very, very important.

Not only I think the job of the education should not be done only by media, like, Bitcoin magazine and also like podcasts like Stephan Livera, but we, companies, we also need to get involved into those, to tell people what other things like, what are the, how to use those kinds of things to get your financial sovereignty.

and apart from education. I totallyagree with, Dominic, that user experience plays a huge role here because we still cannot say that bitcoin is easy to use. It's easy to gain this financial sovereignty. So we really need to help people to, and also part of this is the problem of localization because Bitcoin is something about.

Oh, because if you wanted to promote Bitcoin to emerging countries, so you need to get trust from them. That's [00:21:00] really, really important. And if you talking a different language and they can only understand 10% of you, only 50% of you that's really. Bad for mass adoption. So, I think everyone knows everyone.

Every company here should work with local companies and the I'm glad to seeing that more and more companies are coming together are coming to us to how parcel localization do the localization part and to do the local education part for the emerging countries. I think that's a big, positive thing I can see  for the next a hundred million users in Bitcoin.

Bach Nguyen:  If I can add to what Dominic and Lixin have said. I definitely agree that the, education is very important and onboarding users more. So if it's a hardware wallet, at the beginning, like, you know, doing 2016, 15, 16, 17, we saw those cryptocurrency . Experts or the people that actually knew how Bitcoin works getting in.

And over the years, you've seen a [00:22:00] more like when, like Toby said the crypto curious, coming in and we had to adapt to that. We have to focus more on user experience on putting elements that guide everybody in the user user interface. We're actually working now on the new, companion application to the Trezor.

Which is, you know, the user experience comes first and it's not a, we had to, or we want it to, of the last version. So we can start on a green, green field. I was talking about a new project that I was working on and that's invity.io And, we decided to start something new because, when a user comes into the Bitcoin cryptocurrency or into this environment, they have to go or they need to go to something first, instead of, you know, they're not going to buy a hardware wallet immediately because there's a upfront costs.

So with Invity.io, we are trying to, be the buddy, be the guy through the cryptocurrency world and through [00:23:00] education, explain everything so that the user understands.

John Riggins: Alright. Education focused on making it easy for the users. Allmake sense.

All right. anybody else have a comment on a, on that

Dominik Stroukal: I have just one, one thing in my, in my head when, when I'm talking about, because I'm, I'm still, no, I'm not mainstream. I was also educated in the Austrian economics, but, but I have a PhD from mainstream economics and I'm a lot of conferences when we talk about money and the monetary world and all the things that are happening right now, quantitative easing and things like that.

And. People do note, even people who are at the top in the banks and central banks, some of them, some of them are, not understanding money. they don't know how money is created and what all the things we are now. experiencing happen, and words. And, the, the, the point is that's still Mo people at least think the money is easy to understand, even though it's not.

And Bitcoin is for generation of my [00:24:00] mother. She's. 59. So she's not old, but you know, you have a QR code there for her is it's some super duper science, a QR code.

John Riggins: So maybe a different experience for 59 year olds in China, though. Yeah, back to the geographic.

Lixin Liu: my mom can easily use QR codes. Yeah. She pays, she pays the vegetables she bought with QR codes.

Dominik Stroukal: Maybe it's like. She is not educationable at the moment. She didn't even want to learn it. so, so, so maybe even. Before the education a little bit, there has to be just the user interface just to be the UX. And still it is true. We say it all the time, but it's true. Bitcoin was created by it guys. for IT guys.

and now maybe, maybe there are projects here in Prague and around the world. I saw plenty of them who tried to [00:25:00] onboard artists or people who. kNow how to talk to a general population without trying to educate them as, as we economics or it tech savvy guys do it. So, so maybe we should, we should experiment in that a little.

And I, I saw it here and there, with, with great success. So some very open to, like, as I said, artists explaining Bitcoin, why not?

Lixin Liu: Can I, can I have a quick question for Dominic? Dominic, how, how would you explain Bitcoin to your mom? I'm curious about this because I'm planning to ask my mom to buy some Bitcoin.

John Riggins: This is mother's day, by the way, too.

Dominic Stroukal: I really try to, I even bought, I even wrote a book, and, it was, it was really good selling here in,the Czech Republic I specifically dedicated it to my mother. She read it and still do not understand it. So maybe I'm doing it wrong. and it's really hard. And then, and I [00:26:00] failed, in the task.

So it's really hard to explain because, because for, for, for the best part, Bitcoin is a plan B it's it's, it's a, it's a huge monetary phenomenon. It's something we are hedging against the system. And, and here there is, I have to explain a lot of small particle things. so if you really want to say.

Okay. You can send the digital money from person a to person B. She would understand it, but why. Why should I use it? That's that's the, that's the tricky part. And there you have some use cases. I have colleagues and students from countries where it, where it's really usable, useful, cheaper, faster, whatever, more secure, but here in Prague, we're kind of, okay.

We will fight deflation probably here now as so. So we will try to fight the people that money will be, will be more valuable every year. So. It's hard to explain why then we should use something like Bitcoin and explain the big thing about, behind it. So that's, [00:27:00] that's the task I'm failing at. Yeah.

Lixin Liu: I also found this extremely hard to describe why for people in China, because in their mind that a bank cannot be bankrupted. That's the thing of mine, my country. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really hard to explain to them.

Flex Yang: But, yeah, I think, Stroukal just mentioned  something thatnot  just happens to like normal people, but also happened to be institutional players around a word.

Cause you know, currnetly, as long as we have seen the, the signal that, even fatter will get, go to next on the interest rate. So they have plenty of money on hand, but the money has no where to go. But a Bitcoin is a good story with, the, the concept of stock stock of money and, against the depreciation of a currency.

And that will be quite helpful for the institutional uses to actually join this market by [00:28:00] pumping in, U S dollar. from, from our perspective, because we're doing the banking business and, we provide Bitcoin as collateral to them, to institutional players. They accept it. Right. They don't cause like, it's not like two years ago that, they will ask you, they saw that currently there are more and more funds, institutional funds like a Renaissance, like tudor fund.

They come in. So, for the Asia Pacific institutions with lots of money, I handle, they, they think this market is good. One cause there's lots of hybrid opportunity and they kind of get. you can, how's the year to compel to the, traditional financial words. Yield is quite attractive for them. So I think it's good to, you know, and, others like a traditional financial, I will go with traditional high net worth individuals.

They have, lots of property you've seen in that equity in  like your normal banks, financial products. they are thinking to move pop portion of their [00:29:00] assets into this, this, this new equivalent area, Because I think there's a reason that, constantly there are lots, there are lots of things happening, like between U.S., China, between a West and the East and the, they have read the history book, they know something's going to happen.

And the, when there's something happening those assets or those properties that you need to have the authority from government to, to, to show that you own the, it. It will be valueless. So they are thinking to move something to. Like crypto currencies, especially Bitcoin. but from their point of view that maybe they just allocate like one to 5% of the assets to this area.

But, it's not some more cause the traditional high net worth individuals. So they, they, they put only a little bit money into this market and it will be a huge one for this market currently. So yeah. the I'm thinking mostly, mostly just lost. [00:30:00] Like one to 5% of the assets, but maybe it will become half of the assets allocation in the future.

Like two years later when Bitcoin's price, we've reached like a 100K, which we, most of us really expected. And then yeah, they will enjoy the ride. Right. So yeah. Why, why not? Why not? Yeah. So it's from financial perspective.

Lixin Liu: So I think Flex

is

suggesting it's not telling people that Bitcoin is taking over the whole thing, but you should allocate

some money in Bitcoin, too, as a hedge.

Molly:  I think it's not possible to tell people that Bitcoin is taking over everything cause, or why people, I think why people, invest in Bitcoin, like most of them is because they saying, the price going go out and they think he may can deflect. Like hedging on the risk tfrom fiat.

So if we want to move a user to adopt Bitcoin, I think the best way to [00:31:00] just make everything, easier for them. I think. How we are a little bit like too technical for them as well. And then the overall environment in Asia for Bitcoin is actually pretty interesting. like for China as instance, the li the Bitcoin is legal virtual assets, but it's illegal to trade bitoins.

So, and also the main mainstream media, they actually pay quite a lot of attention on Bitcoin. And so. When the bitcoin price pumps that they go and report, in a very attractive way. So I think they need nature. When people saw the news like this, they are going to be, interested to buy Bitcoin, but But because most of like, relatively, legit exchange, there, there are not. I think they are just pretend they're not in China, so well, I've done, it's pretty complicated for the [00:32:00] retail user to find those, relatively legit exchange. So, so scammer, they get to take advantage on that. So you can see a lot of news.

And also scammers, we need to pay more money, spend more money is to promote the platform. So they, they are able to reach more people than people are in the crypto. They exchanges the crypto. So you can see a lot of news reports in China that a lot of scammer and Ponzi scam, they using Bitcoin to scam people's money and run away from it.

Bach Nguyen: I think that if I can join, I think that Molly said an interesting thing in there, that most of people buy Bitcoin because they expect the value to go up. So my, when I was thinking about these questions, my main questions was like, so what kind of mass adoptions do we actually want? Do we want a mass adoption that where the new decrypted carriers are coming in because of the expect the promise of the ink value value increase, [00:33:00] or do we actually have want a mass adoption of the people that can be done more knowledgeable, they can educate themselves and realize the actual value of Bitcoin and then being a non-governmental a self sufficient self independent currency that they can use.

I'm actually be very curious about other peoples opinions on here, yeah.

Lixin Liu:  

Yeah, I think from, I think that's a very great crushing from my perspective. I think a mess adoption should happen not only chasing for price up and down, but also chasing for financial sovereignty. And that's what I'm tanning also my team, what, what our work value, where our work's value is.

Toby Hoenisch: Yeah, I want to add something here.

and I think it's like, we were all aware that we need to get our products and services easier to use. the thing we shouldn't forget is, if we take, let's say the next four years as a timeframe is the, like, what is the world doing in this timeframe? And, [00:34:00] I think this financial sovereignity that you just mentioned, or the ideologies, a macro economic environment that we have is, is like it's changing everything really fast.

people have been used to that. Our financial markets work, they do, for forever that our pensions are secured, that banks are always solvent. but I think we're going into an environment now, and it started only a few months ago of very high volatility. and. This is I think, where it becomes important or increasingly important to really help people understand why this world exists and why it's actually important because we have build up our financial system by removing risks here and there and bailing out banks.

And now we're bailing out all kinds of other organizations. And the point is we're trying to make it secure for people. we're trying to make it safe, but the result is that we're just hiding. volatility, we're hiding these events that people haven't seen in a lifetime, and we will increasingly see different types of these events.

I mean, [00:35:00] unemployment in the U S is one of them where people are just not prepared. and I think it is already leading on many technologies and like massive speed up of adoption. Just take a video conferencing, all the tooling they use. Like it's, it's, it's accelerating VR. All these technologies are going faster.

And I think, I mean, one of them is of course digital money. Well, cause my cash in my wallet is useless when I'm sitting at home. and then you go next steps, right? From digital money to maybe the central bank money. So your own silver and own money. And I think this is going to be the frame or the, the.

The landscape that we're going to be navigating. And I think you guys are completely right, that we need to educate and help people understand that on one side they can avoid scammers on the other side that they actually can, can leverage this the way they want, because you don't want to risk too much.

You want to really use it the way you intend. And that is a lot about education.

Sally Wang: Okay. So I also want to add a bit on that. [00:36:00] So I think we're still in the early stage of Bitcoin and that most of people in the industry are speculating, let's be honest. And then maybe small number of investors are institutions.

So to go there, actually, I remember a crypto trader said that, you know, If warren buffet, it has the money. He could have buysthe whole bitcoinindustry. Right. So imagine if that happens and that's scary, really, that's scary. You know, one person has the wealth that can buy the whole Bitcoins industry

so what wdo you think. Because you know, it seems t far away from ggetting to the mainstream so a lot of people be saying that like he wasted, like it.  I'm really curious to know what's their take on this?

John Riggins:   let's keep the answers to one minute because we have only a couple of minutes left of time.

Flex Yang: I think I just want to add one thing. It's like when British people just go to [00:37:00] Oh, North America. Well, Europe, European people go to North America. It's kind of wild and the, you need to build everything.

And after that, you can, you can get more people there. So, as early adopters, which is spirit, lots of infrastructures for the, for the new commers. And I think after just, it's just the time, it's just an issue of time being up to two or three years, everything will be ready maybe. And, as long as the technology has being advanced on the way we see more smart cars, smart devices, macro payments may maybe a reality, right?

So yeah, lots of adoption will be there, but currently it's still early stage, early adopters. So yeah, I think yeah, speculative is, is okay. Cause. when, when, when the first, first batch of European goes to North America, they, they go go there just for speculation. I think. I just wonder are money right. For your interest.

And I'm not just going to be able to like idea country that, will be the most strongest country in the world. [00:38:00] USA, Hey, they have no vision when, when they just step on the North America. But, Well, creating something together. And the finally we found the vision. We're fine. Finally provide a service to the mass.

Massive for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's that's my point. Yeah, sure.

Toby Hoenisch: I love that picture. You just made about going to America in like pre industrialization where it's really about the assets per se. So having land and like. Putting it down and, or finding maybe even gold. It's like a very, how do you say low tier, like a very basic economy.

Right. and I think the interesting question that we should also ask is like, what are the next things we need? so yes, speculation comes with the fact that it's really about money and assets and investment and speculation right now. but we don't want to be just agriculture comparing it to the U S right.

We want industrialization. We want a real true digital economy, powered by hard money. and then you need everything else on top, [00:39:00] right? You need, you need. Trustless contracts. You need to find a way to work together. You need to find a way to, maybe you can build the businesses that don't rely on, like our outdated systems that actually already quite difficult.

You start to start up the five people in five countries, and then you try to follow five different kinds of tax regimes. That's hard. So how do we evolve all of that to support the growth and like all the products that we see in the future. I think that's going to be a bit longer than the next. Four years.

but I think we are all as early adopters excited by that. And then it goes all the way back to the beginning where you said, yeah, it's speculation because we want to, we want to build this future. We want to see this future, but in the end we don't know how to do it yet. So we're just working day by day.

getting one step closer at a time.

I think that's a, I think that's a, a, a good thought to end on, Working day by day. Appreciate all of you joining. we're gonna have to, end here, but keep, keep the discussion going on Twitter. When you can, you can find everyone tagged in the tweet [00:40:00] for this panel.

So stay in touch. Thanks you all for joining.