#196 with Dan Held - Who Really Created Bitcoin & Other Crypto Startup Ideas

if you told me that it makes him personally thirty million dollars spread evenly over the next ten years i wouldn't be surprised yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from my all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back alright what up sean here we got sam and then we got special guests dan held v dan held from the bitcoin space and on twitter you probably seen him around i told my brother law that you were on the pod he was very excited i've told him about every guest so far and you got one of the biggest reactions he was a i think he's a paid subscriber to your newsletter or something like that so he's he's very into you and on the other hand i think sam has no conclude who you are so i it's been perfect mix i know some stuff about you sam knows nothing about you and i think it'll be fun to that accent i only know that sean says that you're cool and you're at the bitcoin i know nothing about you no we got an hour to figure it out we whenever we whatever one of us proposes a guest it's like you put that guest it's like you you have to go take the stand and have it oath that this person's is gonna be good and then you better be able to lawyer up and defend why this person's a guest and so he'll every time anytime he mentions the names me i'm why the fuck we have that person on and then he'll like defend it and then same here i was like no no this is gonna be gonna be interesting because couple i couple reasons we should talk about crypto and then we should talk about i think like kind of like building your personal brand because you've done a really good job of that and so we'll we'll do both of those during this during this con but i wanna start with like give people the like what's the one minute story of who the heck you are and yeah you know i i don't know like give us the one day story of dan held yeah the elevator pitch yeah so i from texas originally a grew up in dallas twenty five years in dallas i studied finance in undergrad stumbled and bum my way into tech i didn't know what i was doing when i first built my my first software product in the space it was successful from there learned how to formal some of my skills around product management and marketing worked at a couple different early stage crypto companies so i was at some of the first crypto companies i worked at like blockchain dot com i've had two exits in the crypto space so i've sold two of my products and then i've also worked at uber where i was on writer growth led by andrew chen so it was one of his directs in the growth marketing team so i've had big company classic tech experience but also a lot of kind of that startup hustle in early stage crypto which early stage crypto is kinda wild west yeah which i guess fits my my texas attitude so and so tell tell people source you got into crypto bitcoin bitcoin specifically you're you're a bitcoin guy i should i shouldn't keep saying crypto too much bitcoin back in i think twenty twelve or so bitcoin is maybe ten bucks back then what you know what caught your interest how did you hear about it what's the origin story for you yeah so i got back in twenty twelve my buddy paid me back for a beer with something called a c coin a c coin are those gold coins that you see in all those news articles where they talk about bitcoin there they were physical bitcoins essentially and that was a good time in in that twenty twelve era bitcoin is so new weird and and different that that was like a good bridge from the physical fiat paper money world to the to the digital bitcoin world from there my background is in finance i really dug the twenty one million hard cap as a solution to bad central banking policies i i mean i was in undergrad during the two thousand and eight financial crisis studying in finance and i'm like my professors don't know shit right neither do the people on tv and you neither to do these books that i'm reading and that's what kinda kinda shook my foundational trust and belief in the existing financial system and that's when bitcoin came around when i saw that i was like this is a good new way to be rebuild the financial system without having to trust these institutions and sam i don't know if you know this sam do you know when so satoshi signed the first block he put a you put a message in there do you do you have you ever heard what this is no but i i love that guys stories i mean i the the myth or if it's real i don't know what the truth is but i love the story behind it and then i know if you know it off top your head but but do you know what it is yeah so so satoshi was a really crazy character in terms of his i mean he understood like human games he to game theory encryption all sorts of different other topics and move this together to build bitcoin bitcoin isn't just software it it it wraps itself around understanding human levers to press like greed of how the price cycles as the price goes up people become more aware of it and by an expectation of the price going higher so satoshi you know really understood humans intimately and and part of this that he woven into the first block was the genesis block message and it said uk chancellor on the verge of second bailout for banks so that's the only message that sent satoshi ever put into the bitcoin blockchain and so it's a very clear signal that bitcoin wasn't here to disrupt a visa or paypal bitcoin is here to disrupt the existing financial system in central banking right and so there's like a the the mission the mission was sort of like i don't know cleverly baked in which i just i just love i'm i'm like you said saying where i'm like the more i learn about the origins the more this shit seems like it's out of a movie it doesn't seem like real life it's like oh this anonymous creators like how's anything anonymous nowadays right like there's there's like way you know like the the way they caught the silk road guy was like his the way he was typing or whatever match some review he left on a movie message board or know there's always something's like that there's always a bread crumb trail is actually is it still anonymous i mean obviously know one's about what could have been the the the guy who had als and died i mean what what's what do you what is smart people who know what's stands what's dan's theory oh the the everyone's got their own favorite satoshi tail two so one is health the one that you just described he had als and died i think in twenty twelve or twenty thirteen a health and is a a classic favorite because he goes through a pg encryption and bitcoin proof of work system is based on his early reusable proof of work system that he created earlier bitcoin wasn't a new innovation it just kind of frankenstein all these other innovations together and that's how satoshi built bitcoin health has the demeanor of bitcoin he was also the first recipient of a bitcoin transaction or he was sending it to himself right which is what by way if you ever worked with developers that's what they do they've been there testing shit out the first thing they do is they send it to my account a to my account does it to sean sean sends a sean's test but the ghost writing pg encryption back in that era with phil zimmerman pg encryption was considered a weapon by the defense by by the the department of defense so when he goes to a pg he knew that he was essentially gonna be convicted for like illegal arms trafficking wow so he understood what it meant to take on a government at the scale and so he and and when he when i say ghost wrote he goes through it because with his name isn't officially on it so same with bitcoin he was one of the few people to a there would have built bitcoin in that fashion you know hiding behind the pseudo of satoshi and using that because that was critical that the project had no face to it had no central weak point because you could find satoshi and and he's sort of a weak point in the governance structure and in the ownership structure that could undermine that you know in long term success of the protocol so yeah how's is a classic favorite calls around the same time that satoshi stopped doing anything we haven't seen a a mess a flare from satoshi since right that's right satoshi hasn't signed a message with this private key which would concrete determine that that is satoshi or give us a strong determination that that satoshi and so that timeline makes sense that's theory one what's theory two thirty two is the nsa so theory two is that it's the nsa because the nsa build weapons and bitcoin is a financial weapon it could destabilize countries and destabilize their currencies and so and this is just a more fun i mean totally off the wall for thinking but so let's say a group of could talk crypto photographers were some of the best in the world work at the nsa come up with bitcoin because they're tasked with building a weapon and after they build it they go wait a second maybe just release this into the wild because we do believe that this is good for humankind right and they release it as kinda of like it's like a frankenstein experiment led out of the lab so i think that one's kinda fun i mean there's no there's no facts behind that at where that you have a lab hypothesis for for the pandemic basically that's that's what you're saying i think one more realistic than the other baby what what would you bet your money on one of those dan probably more the health anyone i i feel that it's an individual so so that's always a question to too is it an individual or a group of people i skew more individual designed by committee is really hard to do with something as niche and like incredible like an incredible breakthrough like bitcoin right so i think that one person just had that genius to to take all these elements and put them together to create bitcoin versus a group of developer trying to figure out how to build this thing and and what there's also the other thing which is like it's just somebody else so if you were gonna apply your percentages what percent is health nsa or other i've this is super tough but maybe like fifty percent health thirty percent next and twenty percent nsa that alright i like that okay so you discover bitcoin because some guy gives you a coin and you you don't you're not just like dude what is this like can i have my ten bucks please and and so you go you read about it what happens that night so you go and you you you read the white paper you join the forums you just start reading about it online and then like i guess like take us through the thought process of you going from where you were then to like where you are now or bitcoin is like you know a a pretty major part of your life yeah and i can kinda weave in my early entrepreneurship like in tech part of that too because it's all kind of intertwined together so i start to read about it the twenty one million hard got the monetary policy i see this as a huge breakthrough through because if you remove the subject of of choosing what an appropriate rate of inflation is you solved the problem of monetary theory so like satoshi solved the problem of like going hey we shouldn't constantly figure out what the rate of inflation should be we should fix it in the economy you can re orient around that genius breakthrough so that got we really hooked i worked with a small investment firm in dallas it not then nothing anyone who would know it's a really tiny one wasn't prestigious or anything like that they relocated me to san francisco to open up their west coast portfolio out in san francisco i during the it was the april bitcoin run up from ten dollars to two sixty back down to a hundred i was going to the bitcoin meet in san francisco this is where like brian and fred from coinbase we're hanging out and same with jared ken from trade hill and and jesse powell from kraken and my the company working now i mean this is like what really i was like because we were just in miami when the bitcoin conference was happening and it was kind of like a like a bunch of fools act in the fool i thought i didn't attend but just through what you what what was coming out on social media i guess and and everything every community changes from like when it's the outsiders and you know just the true believers to like you know ten years later eleven years later what it what it looks like is is very very different every community changes all of my friend my roommate was by i was mining in eleven and twelve and they were just hardcore devs and nerds so more of those meetings like so i remember i was still working at a small investment firm so i'm rolling up in fucking business casual to a developer to developer coin meet up know like what the hell are you doing here there's only a dozen of us i mean it was tiny and actually i put pictures on twitter where you can see pictures from the old meetup i mean it's just a cool it's a cooler of pb and a bunch of people kinda geek out on this thing called bitcoin right now march april twenty thirteen hit price goes to two sixty boom you've got like vs sling out business cards everyone's excited there's a hundred and fifty people that come to the meetup up you know there's this energy that's pal energy and then the may twenty thirteen conference happens the wink buy announced they've been they've been they've bought bitcoin they're involved the the conference had like a few hundred people which was kinda wild if you see coinbase booth from videos from back then they printed out like an eight eight and a half by eleven that just had coinbase on it like they it just printed it off computer in the office or their printer printer in the office and taped down their booth and brian and fred where the guy manning the booth so like that's how early it was super super early in this space and during that moment that's when i found a problem a problem that needed to be solved which was finding the real time price of bitcoin on your mobile device at that time there was no app in the app store that gave you real time market data which is crazy because bitcoin fluctuates a lot people you know were constantly open up their phone to check the price of bitcoin all the other developers before then just refresh the price every fifteen minutes or so so me and a buddy put it together now i didn't know what i was doing i was a finance guy you know trying to figure out how to make a product and so i just became really obsessed with solving this problem and so i knew enough in photoshop where i could design the app so i just looked at apps that i liked took elements from that to design zero block which was this product and designed it and we designed it really really simply because i couldn't design anything more complex back in that day q morph was the popular of their design aesthetic yep and we did flat ui because i couldn't design bevel and stuff so just became obsessed with solving this problem for myself turns out a lot of other people had that problem too and that's where kind of like stumbled my way into some product fundamentals of like it's all about solving a problem for your customer and then i got into a ting of growth marketing where i found how to hack my way to the number two spot for the word bitcoin in the app store so we got most of our installs you know well what was the hack yeah so apple at the time when they really originally built the app store they fork it from itunes and so there's an old character limit that they had for titles of songs which is two hundred and fifty five characters but they also allowed that character limit for app titles it was t located after sixty were basically you can fill shit ton shits in words in the the in the core title old school keyword stuffing yeah other old school growth that technique could just keyword stuffing but it worked now you're sort of a crap to see if the app store reviewers would approve it but one out of five would and if you did he could cli that spot right so that kinda started my fascination with both products and with growth marketing kinda on the more hack side of things and yeah that was my that was my initial foray into tech and then we sold cereal block at the end the year to blockchain dot com so blockchain the comp still around today it's a really popular wallet i was the first product manager there and so kinda that's what i mean i stumbled and bum my way into tech is yeah i didn't having formal background around it i just kind of was really empathetic with solving a problem from a customer wanted to propagate the the message of my products and that's how i learn those two skills alright let's talk about some ideas sean shall we yeah so dan i don't know you know this is the ideas podcast where we basically say okay that like i'm interested in the past but to the extent that i learned cool things and then i'm like alright let's get to the future what's the future like so so idea so i think there's really like i guess like let's start in the bitcoin crypto space what problems do you see today that you think somebody needs to solve like back then there was no real time price data that was a problem that needed solving sure what are you seeing today as a problem that need solving yeah there's one idea that's particularly fascinating but it's not very sexy now there's a lot of really good intersections there where you find value and like there's no idea because not a lot of people are looking at it it's around private wealth management for crypto holders imagine a current crypto billionaire walks into a family office multi family office and they're like hey i'd like you to help manage my portfolio and they sit down five suits in front of this guy with a hoodie and they say hey well first of all we'd like to take you know a two percent management fee of all your holdings and they're like well i so i self custody my coin right and they'd like i even know what that means right you know and then they would go well how much well how much of your net worth is in crypto and they would say ninety percent and then the first thing they would say is diversify right the existing private wealth managers in multi family offices have no idea of how to service crypto wealthy crypto folks i mean you i can't even you can i i told micah guy at the bank today let's buy some ethereum and they were like oh we we're we can't it's ridiculous i mean it's absolutely ridiculous it's it's so antiquated they just don't talk don't even talk the same language as all these crypto books right like i'm a more bitcoin guy but if you go to like the ethereum rabbit hold there's a i mean there's so much complexity and and how those defy and and smart contracts work it's to where you need like a full tax team to solve that problem too but these you mean i've been in this space for almost nine years i know more billionaires on this planet than probably anyone else because of because of crypto because crypto has created so many in that that institutions but individuals who have billions to where be probably bitcoin is probably bitcoin plus ethereum has probably created more individual billionaires than any other project right exactly i i think that's gotta be true which is kind of insane like more than microsoft more than amazon more of a more than any of those projects how many crypto billionaires do you know how many billionaires do you know i would say off the top of my head at least at least ten ten how many crypto how about a hundred million on up oh man i mean i would assume my at least know a hundred or so folks that probably have that launched out look bitcoin people don't tell you how much they have but but you can kind of assume based on how long they've been in this space and what companies they worked at and how much they're net worth would back then and probably really yeah i mean it's a general assumption but how much of your personal money were you putting into this before your bitcoin started like making sense like were you putting like a hundred grand into this in two thousand twelve when it was like who the fuck knows of this is gonna because a hundred grand you at your like i wish what we could do i wish yeah you're really young that's i would've been a lot of money yeah i i didn't have that much money man i mean look i was like twenty five twenty six just out of and i wasn't i you know my first job was in dallas i was making forty five k a year wasn't like ton of money yeah and then i got into tech eventually and of course that went up quite a bit but thousand twenty thirteen twenty fourteen now my average cost basis was ten dollars to a hundred but there's a bunch of coins that got from in the hundreds to thousands right yeah so i think a lot of people look at like crypto og like myself and they assume we had like a a million dollars in ran that we all dumped in at five dollars a bitcoin and also i wasn't a perfect toddler i'd traded i traded a litecoin coin i traded a bunch of other stuff just for fun i even mined prime coin so i'm not you know on my bitcoin journey i've touched a bunch of other coins as well so no one's a perfect toddler are you able to buy the dip when the dip is like thirty thousand and it's like well my cost basis is one hundred and ninety two and you know like whatever it's five even even if it's three thousand even my cost base is three thousand buying at thirty like by the dip great so are you able to psychologically do that or are you just like hey my position is set i hope rest of you suckers by the dips so that you know we keep use his upper momentum yeah so technically i'm over one hundred percent of my net worth in bitcoin because i took a small lever position back when bitcoin of seven thousand dollars at the bottom of the cycle because i believe that bitcoin you know in a bull run obviously appreciates it so right i technically over a hundred percent my net worth is in bitcoin also i do something where i lend out my bitcoin or earn a yield yeah that yield is like kind of a day to day stacking mechanism to add more stats to add more at a coin and you're using what like kraken and block file who would you use them so kraken doesn't out you were you're at kraken and alpha i i put the first but i don't think they offer this as a service i appreciate the shout but no we don't offer that yet yeah so we've got like block let in and genesis trading just is trading you have to have like a minimum of twenty bitcoin to be a customer right by the way i bought some secondary in kraken so i'm i'm with you on on the grocery train let's we'll go we'll go all the way the dude how the hell when you so kraken how many people at kraken do you think have more than fifteen million dollars how do you employ people when they're all fucking that's that's what i wanna know like how often did they tell you like you know what they dan had go fuck yourself how about and then like next week it's like dan board got a spot for me yeah it's you know it's a particular challenge for crypto i mean crypto it's the hardest industry to build a business and think about it this way to too like you've got monsoon season the bull run and you wanna capture all of that revenue potential but if you start to spend and deploy capital through hiring and building offices and whatnot by the time that the bull runs over like when do you turn off this spigot like when you turn off all that cash flow going out and then how much do you cut back and i think that's really really tricky like how do you predict these cycles no one knows if we did if we'd all be millionaires and so i think like that's the most difficult part of this is like how do you build a business with those fluctuations in demand and how do you match expenses to meet that but yeah i mean you know in in terms of in terms of employee churn it's super tricky i actually put in my job descriptions for my growth marketing team no crypto experience required i first to find it really refreshing when folks come in and challenge language that we use in our ads homepage app or page etcetera on how we describe crypto because i'm i've been in too long it's hard for you to zoom all the way out and see what it looks like from a newbie right and so one i like that perspective and two to the motivational issue i think no folks who are new to crypto are much hung than ones who haven't been there okay so so let's do this private wealth matter so what would you actually build here would it be a services company would it be a software company what would be the i how would you attack this problem yeah it's a services company and you can't take bp on au that's like an old way to do it you have to figure out some sort of new model that's maybe more subscription or something like that the first and foremost problems you're tackling taxes taxes are incredibly complicated for crypto trades especially if you can to defy things yep one of be taxes too so pet taxes not only cover trades but also covers future tax mini immunization strategies for example there's a trust called a grant a grant is a great way to pass on your crypto to your sun daughter etcetera a partner without any taxable events ukraine so right there's all sorts of very advanced structures that exist for very wealthy folks that most crypto people have no idea you know the there this wasn't institutional wealth they didn't they didn't work at goldman they were in their basement mining bitcoin or mining ethereum you know like it it's a whole different world right right and that's we're gonna trust different things in fact i think yeah what you did were you built your brand and you're like build a big audience i think you have a few hundred thousand followers on twitter for bitcoin i think that's what you would do if you come out and you're like hey i'm the bitcoin tax guy and i'm gonna talk every day about how to like deal with the tax problem of bitcoin and wealth management for wealthy bitcoin and i'm gonna my sales is all all gonna happen through content and then whoever and then you'll probably get billionaires coming inbound saying hey well you manage my stuff that's how you would do this i've in these billionaires personally for eight years so i actually dm a bunch of them and asked them if they used multi family offices and i did right i already know that it's a problem that they're not currently solving they went they went to some traditional financial folks and they talked to me about their experiences and i was like wow that sounds terrible right so for me i'm very happy at crack and i i love the team i'm working with i love the team i've built also they acquired my company so i'm very incentivized to around but i couldn't be more excited in terms of a rocket chip in this space kraken a great spot to be and i'm a growth guy so it's all about that like hyper growth and kraken it's like a perfect perfect spot but this is more for fun on the side of thinking like what we're all we're all you have to tinker tinker with stuff and think through stuff and this is kinda of my recent fascination so sam do you know about the like the t question mark have you heard this sam no okay so i'll i'll ask dan to kind of explain it dan i'm gonna ask you to to do two things one is explain what people are what some people are afraid of with t and why that might be like you know people call it oh is this the black swan that's gonna crash all of crypto etcetera etcetera and then how you sleep at night being a hundred percent of your net worth in bitcoin knowing that this potential question mark exists with t so so explain the the potential problem and then how you think about it sure so t is called a stable coin a stable coin as a representation of a fiat currency so t represents us dollars it's called usd so usd is created by companies wiring money in to a cayman island entity and they wired in there and then t are mint and created and those are put on blockchain t has existed on the bitcoin blockchain ethereum blockchain and tron blockchain amongst others i think as well so what that t represents is a one to one backing of a dollar now the company that issues these which is like t united i it's like t limited plus bit which is an exchange there were concerns over if they were truly backed one to one and there were moments when it wasn't but they've recently reached a settlement with they believe the new york district attorney i think is who i forget exactly who they settled with the attorney general attorney general i think there's so many regulators i forget who who settled with who but yeah they essentially settled and agreed to do audited the to perform audits and come out with exactly how much they had in reserve so the controversy and the worry is that t are i so there's a couple worries one is that t you know first and foremost aren't back that could lead to a kind of like a classic run on the bank situation where more people try to redeem t and that they're done of t there's done of dollars in the bank to be able to redeem to be able to be redeemed and that would cause structural problems at the crypto ecosystem number two i think is like the idea that usd is being used in smart contracts and d defy and it's completely centralized because usd like usd these stable coins that are centrally issued by companies like t and circle they can be reversed or or or frozen or paused and that truly decentralized in a lot of this a lot of the def defy space i think a lot of the contracts for example like maker dow so so maker out is like a like a algorithm stable coin well almost fifty percent of its collateral is centralized stable coins so it it represents a systemic risk to defy and centralized finance aka the exchange base so so the fear is basically if the t people are not being on the up and up so you have to trust people which is like kind of the anti crypto way if they're just they could just be printing t or be holding not one to one dollar asset so they could be like a bank fractional reserving saying oh for every dollar we have we have five t and basically using that to and then that's being used to buy bitcoin so it's like artificially it's not that bitcoin has any issue with it but it that's what's driving up run ups in price is there's a huge amount of bitcoin that's bought with t and so that's the question concern now how legitimate is the concern right so if we dig into it i wrote about this and the hell report my my newsletter if you dig into this there it isn't as bad as people say there's all sorts of moments when said to t wasn't fully collateral as and there wasn't enough t to be redeemed to dollars in the industry was fine also we're talking about exchanges don't hold t the users hold t so t is just like any other crypto asset so there's been tons of times when multi billion dollar crypto assets have gone to zero and the structural problems in the space have been okay we've also suffered much more egregious moments in the crypto space like mount cox mount go represented ninety percent of trading volume this would be like bin coinbase and crack and all going down at the same time you know these are hugely stressful moments for the for the marketplace and so bitcoin has been through a lot worse bitcoin inherently doesn't need t t is being used by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but for example like different other government fiat currencies are used to buy bitcoin but that doesn't mean that bitcoin is dependent on the dollar it's not dependent on us and then i think you know another concern that forgot to bring up earlier people hypo like t is being used to pump bitcoin i think that's completely un founded it was based on a university of texas research report which i don't even know if you could call it fucking research but it was like a research report where they basically said that correlation is c asian right which is absurd it's like saying that like you know umbrellas cause rain because they're correlated so it's really ridiculous that's where the core root of of some of the concerns that like ot t being used to pump bitcoin come from completely un confounded there's no data that supports that and also there's moments when t are printed with bitcoin goes down but of course the people who buy into this theory ignore those moments right and okay so so that's it's a great answer so you i wanna switch to basically talking about other bitcoin or other other let's say crypto ideas that you see that the average person is either not knowing about you know it's interesting idea that you're not that that's not as well known yet or you see the opportunity for somebody to go build do you see any the other opportunities besides the private wealth management space the private wealth management one for me is one that's just really sticky that one's like super interesting other ones that would be good as well i just think simplicity is the ultimate way to go build product it means that folks find value in your product much more quickly you can convey the value prop people discover the value prop they could activate it at a higher rate so i think like simplest a very very simple very very simple mobile experience for wallets i think is still like very underappreciated i think the wallet space still has h user experience like for example let's say when you send a bitcoin transaction bitcoin transactions have two states un confirmed and confirmed and to a a la a lay person like what does that even mean yeah you know and all wallets default to this language and i would disagree that they should even default to that language i mean you should add a a layer in the the layer above that in the gui of something much more understandable wallets are kind of fundamental the core ethos of the system and there's a lot of things you can do now where you layer in trading capabilities built in there etcetera so i think the the space still doesn't have great great to use wallets i think like exodus wallet is really good but other than them i haven't seen like an experience around the core experience of holding your crypto that was just mind blowing amazing do you have a security team like a physical security team do we like my cards and shit no you well i'm in texas so obviously i own a few guns so it's a come and take a sort of attitude at conferences i do have security who do you hire it's it's you know provided to me by out through the company how much do they spend each year on on these sec on security guys you know i'm not sure but but kraken is constantly focused about security they're they're kinda not when it comes to security at kraken and it's in terms of like how you control like where your laptop is and everything else if they're in exchange right kraken been around for ten years and has never been hacked so for us like the constantly paranoid about that and the human attack vector is the weak pointing in in the tech system so they're very conscious about like different executives and high profile individuals like where they are you know if they're at events with a lot of people they gotta think about physical security so it's something that they think they think about all the time i have no idea how much that cost though i would be curious to hear about that because whenever i see i mean i i don't have i i'm i am in a different friend group as you maybe i've got a few friends that have tens of millions of bitcoin but i am always curious as to how like the the actual security because i would think that when it comes to hacking i would think it would be just like stealing like kidnapping someone stealing stealing the person as opposed to kinda like break into the thing totally yeah and that's actually classically called the wrench attack in the bitcoin world is that someone can come to you and just slack you over the head with the wrench right now at the same time you know sam you've done very well and and say sean like you guys have built done very well and we see you guys know billionaires that walk around the streets to san francisco mh and they're not getting mug and and and kidnapped for ransom so in and with bitcoin yeah bitcoin is easily transferable but let's say that let's say this person is not into bitcoin at all but can easily take their liquid assets by bitcoin and then transfer it to the kid so whether or not you hold bitcoin that makes you more or less susceptible to getting an attacked i don't think it does well doesn't necessarily seem fair like but that said i'm not i'm not entirely educated on so i'm not stamped sticking by this quite hardly or i'm not sticking to this entirely but like when i when i have money in a variety of different places there's a a a pretty large amount of checks and balances that go into transferring it so i just tried to transfer money to a another bank today and there was like a hard cut off whereas with a lot of crypto stuff you can literally have it in a in like a stored like some type of store like physical i could i could fat finger the number i'm putting in and i could transfer you know instead of five i could transfer five thousand you know and i also get and there's no getting it back and like credit cards do a pretty good job of doing fraud protection usually is it what's it called what's the the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of checking accounts are our insurance yeah yeah a big problem of like death right so so i think there's a startup up opportunity here too which is how what happens to your bitcoin when you die and and and and how do you how do you manage that so on one hand you can leave instructions to your spouse or whatever which is like hey to get all to get access to all of our private keys here's what you do but now you have instructions to get all your private keys that's you know somewhere so so you have to protect that so you have to have multiple layers starting to go down the rabbit hole you're starting to yeah it's you you kinda get in the circular logic loop of like well i can't trust anyone else with my money so i need to manage my private key and it's like well if i wanna pass it on i have to trust with them yeah exactly and and then you also have the like i the problem of like actually like property you know property transfer when you dies like it goes through either probate or you have a will and i just think that there's probably a lot there that if you if you look at this group of crypto wealthy as just a new customer that exists and they're gonna it's i have this framework this two by two which is like you know either is it an old problem or a new problem and then is there an old solution or new solution right and so this is a case where it's it's a bunch of old problems but we need a new solution because it's a new type of customer goes back to the private wealth management exactly there's actually a way to solve this too it's called multi signature yep which means that your bitcoin isn't controlled by one key that opens up the vault there's three keys and you need two out of three keys to open up the vault and there's all sorts of like there's three out of five key structures so those would be how you do this through time as you give like your your your cpa one your wife wife or husband one you'll yeah and then you give the other two to whom whomever else or you keep three on your own so there there's a lot of elegant ways to do that multi sig i think is the only way that's like but the thing is now you have to educate your there's no cpa in the world that knows private key management well right that's where this entity which for example be one of the key holders they would know a very good private key management practices and only sign as for under certain certain conditions which would also help against the not be vector and they would have like of a velocity limit you've dm me before about stuff that's in the creator kinda like audience space i don't know where you wanna go with that i'll kinda leave it open but you seem to have like a theory or a framework of like where the puck is going when it comes to this creator thing or like i don't know you've successfully built your personal brand and you know like i don't know how many years ago nobody knew who the fuck dan is and today you're known by a bunch of you know crypto nerds so like what is the what is you you give me your thought process around either one of those two like generally where it's going or for you specifically how you think about it yeah so i'm like a i'm a growth product growth marketing guy so when i find like a vein of gold where i find like engagement or i find user acquisition it just fa me right so the creator economy is about you know for the or most folks on the show i'd say up to speed with creator economist stuff okay cool so you know i built an audience in the crypto space in the bitcoin space my my main message is just bitcoin so i'm i'm straight to the bitcoin ethos i've been in a long time so and my last name is a pawn on the favorite meme hud right so my last name actually is real though my last name truly is hell it's actually a german last name which and so with that i decided to lean into that and i just started to write i wrote long form articles i started to tweet and that those got got traction and i found over time that there's a certain way that these gain traction it's it's not it's not by random circumstance there are ways to understand the engagement algorithm and use that to propagate your message for me i really love an example well it's an example of a of something you saw that that i was working sure well you can do twitter advanced search and search for the most popular tweets from any account filter though but filter those by the most popular and then actually take a format of what they've tweeted and just take an iteration of that right you already know it's probably gonna work and you just take a small tweak and that's that almost always works yep now you could also do a quote tweet we're like let's say let's say like an naval all tweet you can just copy paste naval vol quote with quotes and tag naval ball and you'll get almost much gig them my ball yeah like even if you're a really tiny account so little little things like that there's a whole bunch of those that who's discovered because yeah again a growth marketing so i'm digging them i'm like oh man this this engagement tactic really worked i've done some things like if you see auto plane videos you can build those in the media center in twitter which you have to have an ads account to do those but they're not an ad it's organic so little little tips and tricks like that consistency i think is the number one the thing that people forget i have not missed it tweeting a day in three years if you do you lose your spot in the relevancy engine with twitter so twitter every day there's there's like ninety percent of consumers and ten percent of us creators well the creators create content for the board consumers the consumer session in the product and twitter needs to figure out how to hook them immediately and so twitter goes to all their previous engaged content and they go well who do they engage with every day and if they've built up an habit of engaging with myself then they're like walt's give them a dan health tweet but if i don't tweet that day then there may be like oh let's give them a chris tweet or someone else's tweet because they need to go hook them immediately and then if that engagement loop gets built with them over time then also slowly start to lose relevancy with them so consistency is absolutely the most important thing on twitter and most of these channels i think that was like the really big breakthroughs for me it's not quality it's quantity it's about always having content there for them to consume and building that habit and then you over time you focus on quality where i think i've gotten a little bit more high quality over time especially like i set up a youtube channel got twenty five thousand subs in in six months and i just shoot one continue a shot i don't i don't even edit it just do one continuous shot even if i like sneeze or something i just kinda like like keep going because i don't have enough time to spend in post production and doing cuts and you guys have great video content i just don't have time to go do that yeah the do all that does my audience there's my audience like will they engage with the content will it's an mvp right it's an mvp if people like it then you go spend time you you pay for an editor or something to go help out but yeah it's been a it's been an incredible journey going down this rabbit hole and then you know monetization wise too just seeing all the different ways that folks you know tipping on on twitch you've got like tipping on twitter now you've got subscription products you've got swag so three years from now audience keeps growing and the the monetization things get more baked out for you how much do you think an individual creator in your niche like how much do you think you can make three years from now just on the personal brand side of things forget the job and investing and other stuff have you guys talked to pump yet yeah we a couple times yeah and we both know them well i don't we i'm asking ask him back but that question but if i if i we i but let we can guess i before k how are you all guess okay so out not let's not include investment revenue which i think investment revenue in the next so we're talking about like paid newsletter sponsorships yeah recurring board i think we should throw in there because that's kind of like part of the personal brand stuff our courses now courses just say that his his investment revenue if you told me that it makes him personally thirty million dollars spread evenly over the next ten years i wouldn't be surprised is that crazy sean are you talking about thirty total sorry thirty total spread out evenly over ten years yeah i don't know how big his fund is so i'm just gonna take that out for a second i think yeah just a personal branch here which is two and a half two and half i would say three and a half what would you guessed dan two to four million is my best guess as of how much revenue he's making and and that's based on like my best knowledge right maybe five people on staff so maybe half a million in costs yeah got very very little overhead so very high margins right these are all value acc too like if someone gets gets a job through pop and might be really inclined to sign up to his newsletter right he's aren't like mutually exclusive sales right but by far i think like so he he's got so pop is the biggest pom so this is our upper bound limit and that's why i chose pump right is pom biggest what about in the bitcoin in the crypto space you're talking what about a micah guy ra powell or is that the name named ra paul yeah ra powell yeah he's more of like macro fine i mean i guess we could call them crypto because he's like like there are these even though like let's say like a guy who's kind of a troll even though i love like a james dalton like a james alt i bet you makes thirty million dollars a year in crypto newsletters too i i don't i don't think james alt teach true that the guys from like twenty seventeen era he's a friend of mine dude he sold this new knew his crypto newsletter for sixty million dollars wow wow yes so should i didn't even know that you know motley ref fool yeah motley fool does close to a hundred million a month in revenue wow so i i think that pump is the popular poppy one but i think they're i bet i i guarantee you there's guys who have newsletters that they charge twenty thousand a year but you guys have you guys did the breakdown of ago go right that like crazy newsletter thing dave bought james yeah oh okay yeah i mean i got the i got the you know after you guys did the breakdown of it i actually talked to someone who worked there yeah and got the breakdown so like that back end newsletter the one that's a really high markup like a thousand dollars a month that's where they make all the money yeah it's like you got your twenty thirty dollar a month upfront one and you get the thousand dollar back at end one i couldn't personally do it i just feel kinda weird doing it personally were we wrong by the way were we wrong on our guesses for ago go in terms of like the revenue i didn't do any revenue back to the envelope revenue stuff i just wanna know tactically like how do they yank with you dan there there is something to that like oh this like weird slippery slope where you end up with these like you know this small one percent of these like whales who you've just milk their whole life savings because they think they're getting this that no no thanks i longer term i've rather build longer term value to like deliver something i think is truly worth that amount of money so that's where i've experimented with courses so i've got my newsletter family only newsletter i've got ads which world the the best combination of like effort fun and money like if you combine those right want a low effort high fund high money like what is the best one so far you've experimented it as a as a creator of these tools in your tool belt probably youtube because i it's kind of fun showing a product that you really so i only represent products that i personally use right it's an ethical standard that i have for myself so which means that i have eliminated a lot of the potential advertisers that would pay me a lot more right for me is the only way that i feel like it'd be appropriate for me to you know represent this product then the youtube is fun because i get like have like a little skit with it right like i bring it up i talk about it i represent it the newsletter it's a lot of work that i mean writing in an article a week doesn't sound lot yeah it's a lot fuck yeah that's a lot it it's it's a ton of work and you take pride in it's paid there's a bar of at these people paid for this information so the information that better be different and unique and awesome every globally and now i'm a i'm a you know classic growth guys so i a survey at the end of each one to get like a raw and ps score i good feedback on want the next article they want written that way i write the best most relevant content which means that they're satisfied but it's tough you know like it it it's really hard to work i i don't know how pumped as a daily i most i think he's got a guy i i would mention that he's got about two young guys he started he does it he says he sits down he writes it in one take i i went out to me and my wife and him and his all went out to lunch one day and just hung out and paul his wife would was teasing i'm like like she was like it takes me forever to wipe right my weekly thing he just sits down and he does it in fifteen minutes and he's done i mean i've i've had some that have like cruise through like a straight like stream of consciousness but it's tough some of them i do a lot of research for like i were wrote one on bitcoin defy and that was a ton of like actually i tried to try out a couple different apps it was a lot of work so fun and roi would be a youtube channel where like i do these pre roll middle roll ads they're kinda of fun to do i can visually show off the product in a more fun compelling way like the products are representing versus like newsletter which i have to sit down really think through hard and it's something that you know i'm i wanna make sure i represent really really well by the way you're growth guy i've have said that this bitcoin laser eyes thing is one of the most genius kinda like decentralized marketing tactics i've ever seen i what is the origin story is there an origin where two people behind it no no i i don't know if i'm saying you know he knows more people than i do where did this come from and who are the geniuses that came up with this yeah so i wrote about bitcoin decentralized marketing team before where like bitcoin has no central marketing in org there's no propaganda arm at bitcoin it's like me and pom and and everyone else who talks about bitcoin i don't know who originated it it's like the origin of memes i mean sometimes you can find where a meme came from but sometimes it just kinda like it came from nowhere i'm not sure who the first person was in the one i know it claimed it which is insane because it's somebody should and and you could you could be the first person who did this right that's not like it's not like a wild thing and it put it's genius it is like bitcoin in so many ways is a religion and and this is just yet another like you know religious mark basically you know this is the yam this is this is the very aware that that says hey i'm a part of this religion and and you know putting it in the profile picture having it be slightly mysterious so people don't know what it's for then they ask and then making it meme where we could all do it i think is it was just brilliant brilliant brilliant brilliant yeah this space is i mean memes are such an incredible part of how stuff is communicated nowadays right like i mean we saw like elections can people can be elected based on memes like memes aren't just these funny things on like or reddit anymore like memes are the memes are like the main trend like my mom uses memes now she does it on like facebook but right you know it's it's crazy like it's narrative compression at it's finest it's taking a whole narrative and compressing it into one image i see that's why it's so powerful as a transmission it's the most shareable viral thing you can do right on the internet so it's like what you know memes are the packaging for ideas if you wanna most efficiently package an idea i mean is the best way so i've joked about we saw this thing called i think it was called like mean university or ll university or something like that and basically they took the website of lambda school and they just remade it for of a school that would teach you how to do memes and it was a it was a joke website that was it's not like a real course behind it but i was like you know if there really should be a course that somebody should take this is it people what people the if you could learn this it's learning you know the native tongue of the internet and and you know it's pretty important to be fluent in internet nowadays and so i think i think that's one where i'm like if somebody really should create this i have this slack channel that me and ben do where we basically put out a challenge where we said every day for fifty days we're gonna make a new meme because you know it's easy to spread these but it's in a the act of actually making one is hard it's telling a you know telling a story or telling a joke in the most efficient form and it's been so challenging to just do this every day for fifty days well what's kinda of fun is my buddy's is over at to et toro brad mitch really really smart marketing guy him and buddies and what they did is they started to create gifts on so on gi and gi like that that's that gets pulled into like facebook messenger search quarter gifts so i started to make i i saw their strategy for et toro and i made that for myself so i took like the most popular bitcoin memes and then wrapped it in my own black and white design so where you could search like dan held and you'd see a bunch of black and white gifts and have my my logo watermark on there so like you can kinda create mean factories is what i learned from that like you can create like a mean factory to use that to propagate content and if was a really great way of doing it because it's plugged in into so many different platforms versus like if you you know each one individually like trying to create like an emoji with each social platform but would be tough but like gif gets pulled to all of them yeah that's smart i like that alright we're about at the top of the hour do we wanna go over one more idea or what sean i don't know if you have if you have one that's burning you could do it otherwise i think we should wrap it up cool well yeah i mean just my i think like closing thought on like the creator economy stuff i've been a bitcoin for nine years and that has been a huge fascination for me i would say the creator economy is not an equal fascination but quickly becoming something very interesting i think about it as like the monetization of all in human information right like creators are just taking whatever knowledge they have locally putting that on the internet distributing and then monetizing that and what is the value of all of that combined i mean it's tens of trillions the hundred trillion i don't know what it's worth but like for me i just kinda see this huge i mean there's so many niche things that someone could write about like the there's a million things and it's very low a very low effort to find your mvp versus before you had to go buy a warehouse and start producing things you just produce content and if that content resonates and people click and wanna figure out what products you'd recommend for them then you can go build your own products so i see kind of like a whole your economy kind re orient around content marketing and that would being the top of funnel in in like idea generation for all future products great well what do you think sean where we do yeah let's wrap it up i i like that one that that's i like the way you explain that because i think it it aligns with something i believe which is when when there's never been more information it's all about who actually has attention and the person who's gonna have attention is whoever is putting out great content consistently so great content once we'll get your attention once and then great content consistently we'll build trust which just says look it's too noisy i'm just gonna go to my sources i like and and then those people then hold the keys and you know up till now that's been captured by the platform so that's been true but youtube still captured way more value and twitch captured way more value and twitter captured way more value than the people on it and that seems to be flipping where where either new platforms are gonna come out where the creators own it or the the value is gonna accrue off platform in a bigger way than it did originally when it was like i think the value accrued like ninety nine one ninety nine percent to the platform one percent to the creators and i think that's that's gonna flip closer to fifty fifty over time meaning twitter is recognized this right with the super follows can have like subscription followers where people subscribed to like a premium set of we you have i mean twitter i think sees this commonly they see the exodus of folks building an audience on twitter and then the exodus of all that monetization going to to subs trying bring that back in yeah i think that's sort of just trading one master for another though in in a way where it's like as long it twitter will put super follows there and then they'll take the cut they want and then as long as they're that they're the button to pay for stuff they get they'll just inch that cut from ten percent to fifteen percent to twenty percent to fifty percent over time and and so i think you know the real answer here is is how do you build this independently and i think basically that that's the part of crypto that i'm most excited about is people who are building you know a social network that is open source that if it can get adoption and this why i was interested in bit cloud is if it can get adoption then that ratio will flip the the all the value will accrue to the creators and not to the core platform or protocol underneath so so that's what i'm excited about is like that's the real disruption there well we appreciate you coming on dan it's i've been following you on twitter now for a couple weeks since sean been talking about you and he's been saying that you were the guy to speak to and and we appreciate it yeah so go we'll him a follow he's at at dan held on twitter and yeah alright we'll see you we'll see you later yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back