Episode 92: Bitcoin and the Future of Digital and Cryptocurrencies with William Mougayar

Hi everyone, John Prine for the Georgian impact podcast. When I talked to entrepreneur blockchain expert William move. They are few months ago. We focus our conversation on the use of digital tokens as mediums of exchange importance of trust that had to establish it on the blockchain neither like cryptokitties. That's truly digital assets are important to understand. We also talked about the future of the blockchain the kinds of businesses that are most likely to bring it to the mainstream and the role that regulation my playing all this sounds like a lot but if you haven't heard it in one of my most popular the date today, I wanted to bring you a bit more of that conversation when we dug into Bitcoin didn't make it the original podcast was a different subject but it's less than 7 minutes and it's a fascinating discussion which William talks about the roller coaster ride that Bitcoin has been on in recent months as well as the future of digital in cryptocurrencies. I hope you enjoy it. Here it is.

So will you just a pivot a bit from our earlier conversation by the blockchain? I would like to spend a few minutes with you and get your thoughts about Bitcoin all the hype about it in the media earlier this year and a roller coaster ride. It has been on what do you think of the environment is part of it? And if you look at the history of prices over the last six years as it has been ups and downs of the same scale as the ones we are seeing today and down by 40% to 70% over a period of a month. So it sounds like it's crazy. It's not in the space that it is something that will continue to exist but right now and still until we get more maturity in the space. That's what happened when the currencies that have more potential.

Moving concert with everybody else right now. The whole Market is moving at the same time together there. There's no differentiation between quality and then let's call and then I see who I see right now that when you start to see certain currencies move more than others at others being left behind. That's when the smart money would be more into the system right now. There was a lot of speculative money that's in the system and they either move it up or down altogether and they speculate on it all together at the same time. I don't think that's going to be sustainable over the long-term and it shouldn't really get to the point that I'm speculating on a car and see I'm speculating on the value that the currency delivers. So if it isn't either that can enable dozens and dozens of applications Allah cryptocurrency or the Ripple coin with Jessica get are near you without does a single transaction, but it is value and what they're enabling.

Then there's value in the token right today is how to quantify and how to measure this value and how to link it to the price of a particular token particular cryptocurrency. So what is the actual metric? What are the what is the set of matches at transactions? Is it the velocity of money? Is it the number of users? Is it the usage all of this is new territory in the traditional Finance earnings per share. We have sales at weather today. We have all these known types of measures and metrics about the end of cryptocurrency space and all of this is New Territory and we're trying to put some qualified measures on top of it and right now and they quite early it is almost being driven by speculation and then less by by real objectivity.

I love the fact that you're coming back to the real business measures Eva. Or he knows of the measures that matter and we don't know necessarily what the measure is going to be for these but I think that obviously we'll come the answer this question and then some of the writings you did we talked about wireless phone is help third world countries because they didn't have to build a wired infrastructure and it was a leapfrog of technology to place her couldn't be there before what's your sense on how this could actually also change it when I was young. My son was in the Peace Corps in Senegal and they were moving money around with their with their kickspace wireless phones. They had it was value that you bought on the phone and you could transfer your value to another fun day with almost doing banking without even a bank until me. That was a very first example of a kind of a decentralized example, we do you think this can go both in kind of the traditional 1st world countries and you think it's different in third world countries. That's a good analogy and the situation

If you think I'm the blockchain as something that's going to to replace it with we have by I just attacking yet and it's it's not going to happen. It's just think of it as an alternative alternative system in the same way that consisted of a new infrastructure and then the gym is in this new infrastructure. We want to bring into the block change users that could not get into the existing systems today. And that's how to think about was 0-0 customers and you have to build something as a final question in this kind of monetary space. So my daughter is sending me cash now via venmo

I had to get on and learn how to use that. That's not obviously a Bitcoin yet in New York City. There are a couple of Bitcoin ATMs. Let's just kind of look at a few years. What what should a consumer that wants to just kind of stay current begin to think about where where we going to go in terms of digital currency vs. Cryptocurrency? What would it would it weigh to the future is going to land one of the future we're all going to have wallets in our smartphones and those wallets will not just contain a fiat currency like dollars or Euros or Pounds or francs, but they will contain the cryptocurrency weekend send and receive as easily as sending an email to be by the interaction that we have with these applications. So every application in the future that will have a wallet built-in wear when you interact with it you maybe

Laura Ingalls spending creating value and replenishing your wallet and then that's going to be the future and the key here in comparing it to venmo venmo has the same as you sending it from one person to another there is somebody in the middle account without having a bank account at whereas with a crypto wallet. You can have a crypto wallet without a bank account just like war in Africa with the phone's exact of the same model. Yes. Yes.