Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss: Cryptocurrency and the Future of Money

all right before we get started I was gonna do this and now I realize with the lights I'm not gonna be able to tell at all but I want to take a quick survey how many people own Bitcoin I know I can see at least one yeah you guys if you don't know there's gonna be a panic Yuval Vickie liquidated so you have to raise your hands hey that's great thank you how many people hold Bitcoin right now okay pretty good grab how many people know what bitcoin is Hey look this is getting easier over the years so just to define the terms quickly either Cameron or Tyler whichever well just tell us what bitcoin is sure we think a Bitcoin has a digital gold so gold 2.0 but its money the first of the money that was ever built purposely for the internet so it's sort of like what your email did to snail mail cryptocurrency or Bitcoin does for money I agree so look I want to talk about a lot of things I'm gonna try to structure this in a way I think makes sense but if we go off-topic but that's fine you guys will rein us all in Ben I wanted to ask you first obviously you wrote accidental billionaires social network I mean you had covered Cameron and Tyler but what led you from that to to this book to billionaires like what was the evolution of your interest in it and the point where you got where you decided there's another book here yeah so when I wrote accidental billionaires this was like a decade ago I had no idea that I would be revisiting any of the characters and I probably could not have guessed that it would have been the Winklevoss twins they were a very big source for me in that book I had met them through Facebook actually right after Eduardo Eduardo had come to me and I went from that and found these guys and they were very helpful in writing it but that movie didn't portray them necessarily in the best light and I take responsibility for that to some extent when I first met them in New York they walked into the room and you know let's be fair they look like something I'd agree mythology and I immediately remembered every 80s movie I'd ever seen and they were the bad guys chasing the Karate Kid around the gym and so unfairly I think I wrote it to some extent in an Aaron Sorkin took it to a whole nother level as he does and the movie was wonderful and Armie Hammer was incredible but that was I thought it and about a year and a half ago I saw in the New York Times a headline that said though they were the first Bitcoin billionaires and over the years people have been pitching me stories about Bitcoin and I had no interest in it because the word blockchain makes my eyes glaze over it's the most horrible word in the world and it just sounded like something that wasn't exciting but that blew my mind because people don't have second acts like that you don't have characters who are part of one revolution Facebook and then suddenly part of another revolution it's not lightning doesn't strike like that you know by accident so I came to New York and they were gracious enough to talk to me after the movie and this story just wasn't unbelievably compelling to me and that made me want to revisit them and realize how much we got wrong about them was there any how much did the Bitcoin aspect of it play into it in other words if Tyler and Cameron had decided after all that Mischa gosh with with Facebook you know we're gonna do a healthcare startup right no would you still have written the book of course no so when I sat down with them but see that's the thing I try and choose stories that are about the next big thing that's gonna affect all of our lives previous to meeting them I did not know anything about Bitcoin I thought it was a scam I thought it was you know which some of you might still think that but I thought this is not you know anything that important once I sat down and started hearing about what it really was and how it could change the world I realized this really was the cusp of something enormous so that's what drew me to a plus there's exciting characters the story takes place in the Wild West of Bitcoin so you know it's this crazy battle between philosophies and all of this kind of stuff that really turned me on yeah yeah I have to say honestly my first reaction to Bitcoin - was this is a scam and I didn't want to write about it either I was very much against it so in writing this book and spending however much time you spent with Cameron Tyler how did your impression of them evolve and change and yet what led you to think that these guys are not the Karate Kid right you know movie villains you know honestly I got to know them a lot more and and these are guys you know who speak multiple languages who are Latin scholars who you know we think they come from this privileged background but the reality is they're from a line of coal miners and their their mothers father was a cop they come from a very background of hard work and they were not the people that I thought they were these are guys who could computer code and you know bringing Mark Zuckerburg into their world was something they did because they trusted him it wasn't because you know he was needed it was because they trusted that he would do the job they want him to do and then in the end he screwed them and I think I getting to know them more I realized that they had been painted not just by me but by the press afterwards because they were Olympic rowers so every shot of them was in a boat and and every sort of article about them was was was somewhat jokey but the reality was these are guys really were transforming the world not because they needed money it wasn't about money it was about they wanted to build something great and and there's this whole I see them as American icons of there's something 1950s about them but there's something that's heroic and America needs mythology and as much as I think Zuckerberg is now flipped and become something much darker these guys represent something yeah his family isn't here and I listen very smart very smart successful guy but I think that they represent something really important entrepreneurialship and you see this in this second data 'then they've built a business yeah and if it feels weird for you and i to be asking these questions it's talking about two guys right we're sitting right there hey fellas but I did want to ask you one more question do you feel like was there is there a kernel of what exists within these two gentlemen that was another aspect in convincing you to write this book yeah oh I don't know what you're getting at specifically but I would say one is about as open-ended a question I would say what really intrigued me is Bitcoin came from a world of these crazy libertarian anarchists and drug dealers and criminals and it was this kind of thing that was used originally on something called Silk Road which was a drug Bazaar on the dark web all of these things that you know would immediately make my dad want to turn off the computer right but I would say he's right here so I can say that but then the Winklevoss twins come in and these guys are the men of Harvard the guys in suits what intrigued them about Bitcoin and that fascinated me because they're trying to take Bitcoin out of this cowboy Wild West and there's a real division there are people in Bitcoin who don't like the idea of regulation or the idea of it becoming a part of the financial system they want to use it to take down the world and the fact that they were interested in it really intrigued me because you would think that guys like this would have shied away from it but they saw something in it and I think that was interesting yeah Cameron and Tyler let's pretend Ben's not here now okay how did you feel about your portrayal I mean I look rather than trying to be academic about it I mean what is it like to open up a book and read about yourself to see someone describe you and talk about what you are like and not just once but now twice what is that what does that feel like I mean it's it's very surreal but I don't see myself when I look at Cameron even though we look identical so when I read this book and it's about me I don't really you know at least the first you know saw the movie I really enjoyed the movie but I wasn't like oh that's me but it's portrayal so it wasn't that weird because people think I'm him too [Laughter] nobody thinks their stories that interesting and then we were talking to Benny started pulling it out of us and we're like there might be something here for for a book but we didn't think it was actually that interesting because we kind of lived in and swam in it for years and it was just normal for us did you when and what was the whole process of you deciding to write the book you telling them they're going to write a book did you want another book written about you I mean you can't stop him from writing another book right how did that whole how did that whole dance take place you know I think we didn't know there was necessarily story I think when you're living your life it's like you're swimming you can't see the color of the water right you're in crypto and it's exciting but you don't really see that larger perspective that someone else sees but Ben was like hey I want to hear what you guys are up to about Bitcoin and we started talking and then we're like actually that was really interesting and there's a story here and it bended his genius ability to sort of draw that story arc and tell her story through Bitcoin or Bitcoin the story of Bitcoin through us and some other characters and sort of really humanized it and the tensions and the different philosophies that come to a head in the book of should this thing be regulated should it not is that it for anarchist libertarians or is there something in the middle so kind of through talking he convinced us that it was a really interesting story and and of course it it is but I think when it's your life I don't think anyone wakes up and it's like my life is like a movie or a book every day even though it might be even though it was whoa someone said well was that Ben's father how closely did you guys all collaborate and I'm very interested now that you said that the the Nathaniel popper piece and The Times was the thing that kind of popular that was I think it was about December 2017 is right towards the it's a height of mania so you wrote this pretty fast I do write very quickly too yeah yeah so how closely did you all collaborate and the problem which really was once I met with Tom and I said I want to do this and they agreed to allow me to try and do it i sat with them enough times to get them to tell me stories and I have them tell me story after story then I find the other characters in the story so there's a guy named Charlie Shrem who was kind of the first guy to go to jail for Bitcoin you know he was an 18 year old kid in his mother's basement who created a company where you could buy and well with them they funded it to buy and sell Bitcoin unfortunately he allowed people to buy Bitcoin and then buy drugs with it didn't just allow it but kind of was excited about it which is a big no-no so he went to jail came out and so I spent time with him spent time with in speaking to the other care of Roger ver who's this crazy anarchist who gave up his citizenship after going to jail for a year for selling his clothes over the Internet you know there's an interesting group of people in the story um so I everybody and then I just wrote as quickly as I could but they know this subject so much better than I do that I they were gracious enough to go through and make sure I was doing it correctly you know I write very fast I write a book in three months so that's that's then the process of making sure it's accurate longer than that that's super fast by the way that's extremely fast right but I'm different than you or a lot of journalists I won't go after a story if the main characters aren't willing to tell me the story so I'm not one of those journalists who tries to you know get inside something where people don't want you um I want to be the fly on the wall that that you don't squash well let's talk a little bit about the story now I mean we seem to be we're getting towards that anyhow so Cameron and Tyler I don't do you want to just kind of tell us how you got introduced to Bitcoin so we were on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Ibiza and you're in your totally non film cinematic story now very bright on a beach right not looking for the next big thing in the sky from Brooklyn recognizes from the social network and said have you thought about Bitcoin or virtual currency I said no and he started telling us about it at first it sounded really weird and then after some tequila it started to make a lot of sense see if you had tequila the first time you heard about Bitcoin yeah it might have been different so you you you it's interesting actually cuz you guys pretty quickly tequila aside saw the potential of this and you wanted to get involved and he started out by just buying some and then he decided to become investors in in Charlie's company bitinstant let's talk a little bit and this becomes a major point in the book Ben obviously is is the tension between those two visions from the very start you guys had a certain vision of how you thought this industry should grow and there are others who had a different vision of how this industry should grow and what it should be and what this technology even represents and that that tract that that friction that schism is still there but let's talk a little bit about what you wanted Bitcoin and cryptocurrency to be and that tension between your other partners and Penn State right so we very much live the Wild West days a Bitcoin in a lot of our early Bitcoin that we bought we had to buy on this exchange called mal Cox and mal Cox is probably the best pivot in the world it's actually acronym for Magic the Gathering online exchange it was a magic card game exchange that went into two crypto and it was run by two frenchmen who had cats in Tokyo so we had to apostille documents to onboard to this exchange why are our money overseas it was completely unregulated go through through hoops of fire to actually buy this stuff and the technology was really poor and as we know is famously hacked or they lost the private key user it was either their incompetence or hackers but they lost almost a billion dollars at the time which by today's price is probably a lot more so we love this technology and when we first saw it like you like why is this different than PayPal why is this not a Ponzi scheme why is it not airline miles but it was really money that went over internet protocols the same way voice now goes over the Internet so Skype you can video someone for free anywhere before there is long do since phone charges and was expensive to call someone from New York - you know California now no one even thinks about Millennials don't know about long-distance phone charges so this is what was happening with money with Bitcoin so we saw the promise and when you talk to a Bitcoin back bitcoiners what we call people in Bitcoin the passion you know these are people that are putting every penny of their lives into this thing and you just look them in the eyes and if great answers for every question but it was such a wild west so we thought that like for this to really grow he would have to change and then investing a bit instant and Charlie taught us exactly sort of what not to do if you're running a financial services company and we ended up founding our own company called Gemini that's regulated in the state of New York to solve our own problems effectively how hard was it to get that regulation to go through that whole process we're there I mean how many doors got closed in your face I mean you walk in and say hey we got a Bitcoin business we want to join the world how hard was that to come at it from to come at the legitimate world from the Wild West it took us a year and a half to get our trust company license in New York so we were building the platform while we were getting that license but we couldn't get a banking account a bank account a simple thing like that to hold customer funds took about a year to get yeah because they're lucky banks wanted nothing to do with they didn't want to touch the word minute coin like the cannabis industry like I think was really hard for any other startup it's really easy to get a bank account for a crypto startup even one with a New York trust company license that's the same license that Bank of New York State Street the two oldest companies in the country started out with you know still wasn't enough and even to this day it's hard to you know get new relationships it's we have State Street now that banks are Gemini dollar or stable coin but that was actually the hardest part of it it took a year to onboard with them they come in due diligence for six months and that process should probably take like a week if you're a hegemon and you need a cash Treasury account so we don't deal with the Fiat portion we deal with everything else at GM and I so we rely on bank partners to take wires and things like that into our omnibus account so that's still challenging to this day and even banks who want to get involved encrypt are like Goldman Sachs hasn't got approval from the Fed to actually handle the Bitcoin so they do synthetic products that give you a Bitcoin exposure but even they have trouble so the regulatory a lot of things have thought out with the regulate when we first got it it was like is this gonna be illegal kind of thing that was like the question right so we're past that but there are still it's still sort of slow-moving in certain areas right I mean there still there's a tremendous amount of friction because you have some companies that are absolutely determined to operate outside of the delaine's the regulatory lanes and you have others that are trying to build within that how does that how does that affect you how does that affect it as you're building the company because I mean look like I you look at Bitcoin volume most of it is coming from these unregulated exchanges domiciled wherever they can find so how do you deal with the fact that that is not going away necessarily and you're trying to build you're trying to use the same technology to build a slightly different business how do you deal with that friction yeah we're playing the same game but very differently and we're playing the long game so we think in the future the customers the big macro hedge funds and stuff will want to work at places like Gemini that are regulated that asked for permission not forgiveness we think the offshore game is a limited time only but there's a lot of people going after that and definitely making money in the meantime our mantra is that we want to be the fastest tortoise in the race but it's still been it's still been challenging because even if you scream from the rooftops hey we want to do this right way if there's still not a fast path in the u.s. at least right now at the SEC or CFTC so that would be my criticism or my fear about the u.s. is that even if you want to do things the right way there isn't a clear path in certain areas so I think it's a big disadvantage for us compared to the rest of the world where people are just building and innovating at the speed of innovation not at the speed of government and it's not a us-centric technology it's global asset anybody in this room but anybody in the world with an internet connection can buy Bitcoin so they're not gonna wait around for the u.s. to catch up or take its time and do the right thing and this is the first time retails actually driven that led the charge usually its Sandhill Road VC's accredited investors things go IPO and it gets dumped on retail after it goes to public markets a decade after the companies founded this is actually retail driven in Wall Street's asleep at the wheel and then when they woke up they couldn't figure out how to get their compliance departments to sign off or the regulators to get comfortable with them as a regulated Bank touching Bitcoin or cussing Bitcoin or equipped their currencies so it's the first time where the little guy actually is is there and you know has an advantage structurally because they don't have the compliance the legal departments holding them back yeah you know it's interesting so free for you guys that sort of friction between a regulated and unregulated world I mean that's that's just part of the your real life for you that was an angle in a story yeah and it's interesting too it was interested in teresting to me in reading the book is that yes it's about Tyler and Cameron but Charlie ends up becoming a major character yes book almost as important as these guys are in terms of a story narrative Lee and you have him sitting between these two worlds they're pulling at him yeah whoo he's definitely excited by the Roger Tver of the world who are these anarchists who think Bitcoin should be - no taxes and nobody knows who you are and you can buy drugs and no one will ever know and everything should be legal and free and then these guys who say you know you've got to be a good CEO you have to be a your your CEO and compliance officer that's not a good thing right you got to figure yourselves out and there's a you know a great story where Charlie ended up moving out of his house and living above a club and they're trying to bring him to these important meetings with very important hedge funds and people that and Charlie shows up and looks like he's a disaster I mean he's a disaster and it's it's um it's poison disaster cuz he got rich quick he's a young kid and we can living the life right but he got pulled in the wrong direction and I have a lot of sympathy for Charlie Charlie's a very macho person I knew you guys had a falling out sorry he read the book and he called me up and he said it made him cry and I think that that Holy Week that's crap you know it was a terrifying thing he was arrested at JFK right they dragged him into a cell and they've saves facing 20 years in prison for selling Bitcoin you know he ended up doing two years because he took an agreement he's got his feet back under him at this point but it's a very compelling so but I am compelled by the drama of it similar to the social network Facebook I don't care about Facebook I care about this battle between people trying to create something that changes the world and it's that internal drama of people that really gets a story going one thing I wanted to ask you about is is the you do spend a lot of time talking about be an instant and Charlie and those guys and that timeframe of 2013-2014 which I thought was interesting because 2017 is when your main characters actually become the title of this story billionaires you know so was there a conscious decision to focus on those earlier days rather than because 2017 I don't know how many of you guys were around for the 2017 run that was just as crazy a bit crying ran to 20,000 yeah so these guys to put into perspective in 2012 when they heard about Bitcoin they bought into Bitcoin at seven dollars a coin and you know the numbers that I believe are accurate is they bought one percent of all Bitcoin so ended up turning yeah dollars into billions of dollars which is incredible the origin story is what attracts me similar to how the social network is about that first year of Facebook so 0 users to 500 million users now Facebook is many billions of users and has become something totally different this book is about zero to 10,000 because that was the moment that they became billionaires but that tells you the origin of Bitcoin and 20 years from now if Bitcoin really is the thing that one thinks it might be this will be the book hopefully people look at and say okay that was the origins of it and I think it's a they are a great vehicle to tell the origins of this story because they were there from the early days but they were also there from that transformation from the Wild West of Bitcoin to Bitcoin being something that might come out of ATM machines yeah and does come out of ATM machines in some places let's talk a little bit about the I know if someone's gonna get me some questions from the audience - right so I was gonna hand me those cards I'm not forgetting but I want to talk to you guys about this sort of the state of crypto right now if you would just kind of spend a couple of minutes just where do you think it is what do you think it is doing well what does it need to do I have my own opinions about all that but you know I hear what you guys have to say where do you think Bitcoin and crypto is right now it's still very early institutions everybody knows about it everyone's heard about it and there's some very sophisticated people in even these banks who know about cryptocurrency but they're still not really in the game yet it's still very much a retail driven market very much a lot of the actions out in Asia so we we still think it's the bottom of the first inning it's if you read this book you understand how we got here and how far it's come but it's also just sort of the beginning in a lot of ways so I don't know I mean the price peaked about 18 months ago about 20,000 it went down to about 3,000 it's recovered to about 12,000 but we're still far off that peak but so much has happened Gemini we have about 230 employees today almost everybody's from financial services or Google Airbnb big-name companies that you use that are part of your everyday life and these folks have all decided they need to be in crypto and they weren't in crypto two or three years ago when we started five you know Gemini five years ago was a core team of ten people and these were like really early people but today people you know are moving into this space as a rapid rate and so if you when I look around our office at the intellectual capital and these smart brilliant people working in crypto I talked to somebody who's a senior at Dartmouth she grew up on my Road earlier today and she's trying to figure out where she wants to go and and she's like a computer engineer she's at Dartmouth she's probably gonna come into crypto or somewhere around it so all these young brilliant people are moving into the space which is super exciting so we made a lot of progress but there's still a lot a lot to go and I think if we were to look back to the dot-com era you know maybe we're post-2000 you know boom and bust maybe we're in 2001 and Facebook launches you know within two or three years of that Amazon still a small company relatively speaking but what's so exciting about this revolution as opposed to the internet revolution is back then there might have been a hundred million homes in America with you know broadband connections today everybody in this room has a more powerful computer in their pocket right they've got faster internet connections anywhere they walk in this city even in the subway so there's so you know they're all on boarded in and ready to basically be part of this there's nothing stopping them from buying a piece of Bitcoin in that future but in the late 90s pre Amazon IPO stock you had to be invested in angel investor in the valley valley and that club might have been 50 people or something or in one of those funds on Sand Hill Road that invested in one of those rounds and by the time Amazon got to the street that's when retail the the little guys could get into it and it still would have been a good investment but you don't have to wait for an IPO Bitcoin IPO ten years ago it's sitting out in the open and it's just a matter of whether you want to make that decision and if you decide that this is the software version of gold and if you agree with that thesis then you know why wait yeah right in the the gold market gap is seven trillion bitcoins 250 billion so there's maybe a 30x and that's just digital gold version right there's so many other things and problem space the use case is still buy sell invest the decentralized web 3.0 the whole new Internet hasn't even it really arrived right but there will be things that are we call crypto native that couldn't exist without crypto like Facebook couldn't exist without the Internet Twitter couldn't exist with their internet native there's nothing you can point to that's that they're like offline and that will happen in crypto we don't know exactly what that will be but there'll be use cases that you know a crypto native couldn't happen before that everybody uses and sort of command you know speaking of Facebook there there's a character in that book yeah it's a it's a little online site you know there's a character in this book who appears who shows up at the very beginning shows up at the very end again some of you may have heard of him named Mark Zuckerberg and as I was reading one thing I wanted ask you guys was did you ever think and I have to preface this a in case anyone doesn't know Facebook announced a couple of weeks ago that they are going to launch their own cryptocurrency with a bunch of corporate partners and I hear some skittering so you guys heard about that okay good they called it Libra coincidentally after they launched Gemini Mark Zuckerberg launches Libra coincidentally I'm just pointing that out it is it is almost amazing to me the degree to which your lives and Mark Zuckerberg life seemed to be intertwining did you ever think that this guy would end up becoming such a big but was such a recurring part of your life I mean he's really not like I don't wake up sort of thinking about it although I get the perception of like yeah in the in popular culture in that sort of parallel universe it's like yes it's the twins and Zuckerberg again yes you writers like that yeah but we actually grew up 20 miles away from each other we grew up in Greenwich Connecticut he grew up in Dobbs Ferry so this has been happening since you know yeah for 30 38 years now he at Exeter I think on the crew team we rode I just want to say that I wrote this book a year before Zuckerberg launched Libre and the book ends with Zuckerberg launching Libre or writing about the writing launching about launching about yeah cryptocurrency and in my book I believe it's all personal right I know but I feel like I am the book like The Count of Monte Cristo because I think there's this really cool theme where these guys were wronged and they went away and then they reappear riding back into town as the crypto billionaires and Zuckerberg now has to face that fact and then launches his own Libre which might just be a coincidence it seems a little odd to me but I do think that there is somewhat of an engine not that you wake up every day thinking about Mark Zuckerberg but that him the what you went through with Facebook which was in a lot of ways had a lot of similarities to what you guys were doing you brought him in he looked at your stuff and then he launched Facebook and then there's a settlement and then you find Bitcoin and then you build Bitcoin and then he comes back into Bitcoin it does seem like it's a part of your life right I mean there's this dramatic arc there that's intriguing for sure but it's also true that kind of everybody is coming in to crypto and I think you know in the next two years everything you know Facebook Apple Netflix Amazon are probably gonna have their own coins or projects and they're probably watching Libra closely to see how it fares you know there's gonna be some hearings later this month down and you know the capital around this project and they're all probably watching very closely to see how that goes another cool thing if you think about it in the social network Mark Zuckerberg is the rebel and you guys represent the establishment and now Mark Zuckerberg represents the establishment and you guys are rebelling with a new form of money so it's really interesting how it all flipped upside down well and and has flipped even again because now you look at you know these these guys are regulated they're well respected right and it's Facebook that's getting hauled off in front of Congress seemingly every other month in about books about biology let your next book but nobody I mean really like you know it seems like you're certainly not your financial fortunes but maybe you're your social fortunes that have flipped again right now it's Zuckerberg on the defensive and answering questions about what he's done and it's you guys who are out there trying to build a company and now Zuckerberg coming in to do what you yeah I mean there's a lot of intertwining there fellas you have to admit what do you think of Libra it's a very interesting project you know we're definitely gonna look at it you know Gemini is a marketplace so we trade assets we don't try and pick assets for you we're not your financial adviser you know it's very interesting it's like a currency right it's tied to a basket so it has a stability to it unlike Bitcoin which is a good story valid value and there's a lot of volatility so you don't want to really spend it because you don't know if you're overspending the Bitcoin pizza was the first transaction it was at the time time with today's prices it would be an 80 million dollar 12 120 million dollar piece yeah I think so you don't this is a very good date coin because you might be really overspending or under spending but things that are tied to real world currencies I think it's a very interesting project I think you know it's been very good for crypto it's been very good for Bitcoin look at the price a company of the stature of Facebook talking about the word crypto demystifies it takes out some fear for some people it might add other fear for different reasons maybe privacy or whatnot but the fact that a publicly traded company that's a huge part of our economy actually is doing something really serious in crypto very much mainstream's it's i think it's a big win for our space if they weren't here would your answer have been the same I think so yeah okay one other question I'm gonna get to your questions but I know it's also an extension because right money is the ultimate social network in the world and so we've always thought of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as this Internet of money so for them to add payments and I think they've been thinking about this for a while is kind of a logical progression you know whether or not this will be the thing that actually works and it whether it will look like you know what we think it will look like is a very different matter but I think it's a very smart move and like Cameron said every major tech company has to be thinking about crypt right now it has to be working a project our bet is everyone will Amazon someone will announce in you know this is the era of private money right it started that way it got regulated out 150 years or 200 years ago in the US and then banking and the Fed system controlled the money and now we're seeing companies saying hey we don't think the government is doing that good of a job we'll do it just as well people believe in us if we're GE twenty years ago as much as right now the government and then there's you know engineers who are just launching currencies like Bitcoin that aren't a company's so you've got these completely decentralized cryptocurrencies you've got private cryptocurrencies like libra Gemini dollar and then you've got you know government currencies and it's really cool to have that menu for people to pick from because governments have traditionally at least outside of America let people down that's the next panel because that's an entire other discussion about private money but you're right about it I think we're on the sort of cusp of a sea change in that but you give me the name as a little suspect Gemini so I want to ask you there's a scene towards the end you're two protagonists who have this entirely completely non cinematic life are at the Burning Man festival right and great scene you are around Zuckerberg because he's there also but you end up not you've come very close to meeting to meet you comes in helicopter I think yeah I mean Ben as a writer yeah how much did you want them to actually be in the room with yeah yeah I mean right that ended up running into Dustin Moskovitz right yeah who is was the second-in-command of Facebook and they had a Burning Man moment hug it out Burning Man moment and he invited them to go back to his what did they call them in Burning Man I don't know a camp camp ground and that's where Zuckerberg was handing out grilled cheese sandwiches so they didn't go he left that part out if it said that I would have showed up it was a moment it wasn't interesting yeah yeah but but as a writer were you dying for it to be like no you do fill in some blanks so I mean there was there a temptation there's a you kill that too far with that I I think that I had to stay true to the story there right and could not bring exec over again yeah and you'll save it for the night so when you guys do run into mark someday at a Bitcoin conference what will you say to him at a Bitcoin conference welcome to the party what took you so long every day it's cookies all right on that note let's do some questions some of you gave names some of you didn't but I thought this one was pretty humorous question would one of you and I'm sorry Ben I don't think they're actually asking already would one of you run for president and have your brother be your vice president and then the follow-up question is who's running for who's at the top of the ticket well Tyler's the CEO and I'm the president of Gemini so I work for him he was gracious enough to hire me five years ago so the next time I'm gonna flip it around yeah but if we won for eight years and then flipped it it would be 16 years right do you wouldn't really know so huh get out for a twinkle boss Oh what do you make of Facebook's cryptocurrency we ask that one already here okay it's good what crypto assets do you think will still be around in 15 years I think Bitcoin a coin in aetherium or something like it yeah in that design space like creating a decentralized computer for the Internet it'll be aetherium or maybe there'll be a few you think of like iOS Microsoft Android there's a few of those operating systems so there'll be something like that Z cache is pretty interesting because it's basically Bitcoin with privacy and there's a couple other exciting projects out there but well you know I guess the interesting question the interesting aspect of that question is how entrenched do you think this market is already that you could pick the survivors in 15 years now I think I think Bitcoin has a very likely possibility because if you think gold has been around for 3,000 years so you know if it is the digital gold and it doesn't you know screw it up it'll be here for thousands of years I think right I think first mover advantage for networks and that's ultimately what these are their networks is is very strong you won't have to be perfect but if you're first the network affects the people who build infrastructure Gemini supports that coin it's not trivial to support another coin necessarily and people start building applications on top of it so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy you know bitcoins been the leaders for the last decade there's been a ton of challengers ethers been around since there are theorems 2013 I think you know it's there so lose they can they can fumble it but generally the things that are earlier if they're good enough stick around I just want for people who don't really on no Bitcoin that well the idea of Bitcoin and gold simplify it I think the idea is you invest in gold it goes up in value because people perceive it to be valuable and rare and so it's a store of value so when economies go bad or government's war happens the value of gold goes up because you don't trust dollars anymore similarly you buy Bitcoin and think of it it's worth whatever we all agree it's worth but it's a store of value that you can carry around on your phone or got to to your arm or whatever that little number you get is your Bitcoin so it's like carrying your vault of gold around with you but you can also transfer it instantly so when they say that it's gold but better that's essentially what they mean right because gold is scarce bitcoins fixed at 21 right there's only gonna be 21 million bitcoins there can never be more that's guaranteed by math behind Bitcoin well the supply of gold changes when you find a new mine or one day we'll get an asteroid full of gold I mean that's what people write back on right now so the amount of gold can change but the amount of Bitcoin Clint can't write and it's far more portable right then a lot of people say oh but gold is useful the reality is no gold isn't used for very much except for jewelry and it's only useful in jewelry because it's valuable right it's not the other way around it's not valuable because it's jewelry it's just shiny and these projects are constantly evolving they have communities of developers who update them upgrade them so when Bitcoin first launched like it looks so much different today like the code base the founder of Satoshi Nakamoto no one knows who they are but their fingerprints his her fingerprints are on less than like a few percent of the code so it's a living organism that is growing and evolving it's not just like stationary so that's why I think it can continue to stay in the lead as long as there's a need for a fixed digital gold type product I think it's you know bitcoins to lose another question how do you see Gemini and other exchanges solving the problem of the bank list population in the US and overseas Facebook it's a great question there's you know like millions of under banked people in this country alone and probably a billion plus unbanked people around the world and crypto is really the only technology that we've seen that could help solve that problem and potentially Bank these people bringing them into the system bank branches are not gonna be built in those parts of the world if they were they'd already be there for now so we have a mobile app so you can download it on any smartphone Google Android or Apple and start there right if you download if you have a data connection an internet connection and you can download an app then you can store your Bitcoin and that is your bank account that's your on the Gemini mobile app so all of a sudden you have a bank account when JP Morgan's never gonna build a branch in wherever you are in the developing world it's too expensive right and micro payments can't happen because the current system is too expensive but bitcoin is like email you can send ten cents to someone from here to Sri Lanka right now instantly it's 24/7 and 365 so it never never closes it doesn't work on banking hours imagine if your email was open 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday be great we never weekend's back in our lives back but our money who actually works like that in the digital internet age and that's insane if you want to get money from New York to London on a Friday night you go to JFK I'm gonna play with the bag of cash you get it there quicker because if you wire it gets there Monday if there's a bank holiday Tuesday and you play pay a clip and that's how money works and that it's actually broken so that was the aha moment for us this is money that works like your email like either yeah there they get to their Villa and haven't paid for their Villa right because the money is slower than the plane yeah so he jumped on a plane went back he didn't do that oh here's another one this is a little bit of a manifest too it seems like from Adam P the weight of economic sanctions wielded by the United States have proven to be one of its most powerful weapons in its arsenal enforceable through a centralized banking system how will the development and adoption of decentralized cryptocurrency affect I guess it affect it in this regard it's a great question to shut down Bitcoin you have to shut down the internet you basically have to become North Korea and no country is going to well some countries will do that like North Korea no country wants to be North Korea they don't aspire to that right so you really have to opt in and so Bitcoin can actually get through the Great Firewall of China it can get to these places with regimes that are oppressive and and that's overall we think a good thing currencies are usually used to manipulate populations by governments so that may go away but I don't know that that's necessarily a negative thing but the price to be left out of this revolution is too great no country is going to risk letting this go somewhere else so you know that was what we thought originally like how does how do we kill this idea how does Bitcoin not work and you have to snip the internet cables for cotton so we yeah that was our game of chicken that this is going to work they're gonna have to play with it what services do exchanges need to offer in the future to stay competitive what kind of crypto exchanges yeah oh they don't specify the UH name I guess the coins that people want to trade right yeah what our customers want but you know we see a world where there's Bitcoin but also private securities will start trading on blockchain so if you want to buy a share in the Dunkin Donuts on the corner you'll be able to trade that or buy that on Gemini because the compliance will be baked into the blockchain currently now it's too hard lawyers to trade too much red lines it's expensive it's like snail mail if you want to trade like your share of a Dunkin Donuts with someone else or your share and a hedge fund or a P fund but that can all be put onto the blockchain and computers can do that logic so that all of a sudden this secondary of private capital formation can be online and guess what that amount of capital is bigger than the capital in the public market so put Facebook Apple you know Dow Jones into all that money it's actually bigger on the private thing and we think that will come on line with blockchain in crypto currency technology so one day at Gemini you might be trading Bitcoin but also a share of Apple but also a share and your local barista what is the biggest problem or problems facing crypto today what are your current problems Aman Aman Aman be or Aaron be one or the other same question yeah I think education honestly has been one of the biggest challenges when we got into crypto is all about Silk Road and you'll read about that in Bitcoin billionaires people thought it was only used for drugs and bad illicit activity the US dollar has never been used for bad stuff right and and technology's more crimes than anything like terrorists actually use email does ooh you know we don't have email right yeah exactly technology has been co-opted by bad actors it's not bad technology it's agnostic and so there's there's these false narratives and this idea that bitcoin is truly anonymous is also incorrect in fact it's probably too open and not private enough in some senses and that's maybe one of the challenges that it'll come up against in the future so I think it's always been an education thing and once people understand it oh there's actually a safe way to engage in this technology there's regulated places like Gemini I can go and buy it that changes the narrative yeah and if it's it's also like an age gap no offense but talk to a millennial they live you could look this way when you say oh I can't see anyone the lights but Millennials live online you know they are always on my used to be like I'm going online now it's like I'm going offline for a second or for thirty minutes break and I'm going back on they play fortnight they play games Digital credits like when you tell them about Bitcoin they're like of course they don't go to these festivals they go to music festivals on fortnight to watch DJ marshmallow spin electronic music inside this electronic world and so they understand crypto it's so pieces of paper in a wallet are crazy then likes final records you know why would anybody use that so that's not a hard sell and crypto enables like microtransactions right fast lightweight payments so the internet of things all these devices are all of a sudden going to trade crypto self-driving cars that pick you up will trade another car with crypto to get out of the way if you're in a rush that can't happen with ACH in Fedwire those machines can plug into protocols they can't get bank accounts unless it's maybe Wells Fargo but like it enables it's it's it's not it's not competing with the current system it's a new color right it allows us to do things that the current system can't contemplate because it's money credit cards ACH wire built by bankers before the internet ever existed so it's really square peg round hole that's why money on the internet is sucked forever yeah cuz it's been like oh how do we get this banking system of wires and whatever onto the internet and bitcoins the first money that's built by the same people who built the internet so it's purpose-built for it and it works like your email and that's gonna enable things that the current system can't even think so cryptocurrencies good for humans but it's really meant for machines this could be a whole nother whole other panel but I'll ask it anyhow let's try to answer it quickly as econ majors and I assume they're talking to you guys are unique on me I am NOT okay so this is not addressed us as econ majors why do you think the criticisms of Bitcoin by economists such as Nouriel Roubini and Joseph Stiglitz is it are is whatever misguided I think Nouriel is a no coin er he just doesn't have any Bitcoin yeah he's got FOMO really missed out you know Silicon Valley but also a lot of economic journalists not you know other than you and popper and a couple other people nobody was covering this and it kind of exploded out of nowhere and the only people who knew about it were crazy libertarian anarchists and drug dealers and these guys and it was pretty much it was a secret thing so I write that these guys now are coming to it late and saying oh this must be tulips this must be a bubble this must be scam and they're looking worse and worse every year and people want to take a snapshot in time now and it's not over it's still evolving so when one Tesla lights on fire on the road it's like front-page news 50,000 GM cars burn and fires every year it's not even doesn't make the paper yeah but new technologies held to an unfair standard and I also think that macro economists that field has really kind of veered into the culture wars so it becomes this political thing and people pick sides or want to be you know want to be a contrarian but I think you know it's still really early no one's saying bitcoins perfect you know LeBron James was in high school wasn't LeBron James today still in high school you know it's teething and Bitcoin very much is is like that it's only ten years old you know so it's not where it is now it's sort of like you know where's the puck going right and can you picture army hammer now talking like this because I think that would be really cool are you announcing something there oh yeah we're work there will there I think there will be a Bitcoin billionaires movie I do I think it's the next step and there's a really great situation so it's gonna be really really cool and hopefully our army will come back and play these guys and it would be really neat to see all right well on that note since it's 8:30 and since you have a book signing after this gentlemen thank you very much everyone thank you very much for coming out today you you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 9,560

Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, cryptocurrency, bitcoin, Ben Mezrich, Paul Vigna, btc, litecoin

Id: 7lAEuLqFWKs

Length: 54min 13sec (3253 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/slvbtc]

Ben Mezrich the writer of "accidental billionaires" that was turned into the movie the social network says in the last minute of this video that there WILL be a movie made based on this last book of his "bitcoin billionaires". Holy shit I cannot wait for that!

[u/eleven8ster]

Definitely thought it said "Paul Vagina" at first glance.