Jeremy Britton and Carolyn Crawford dive deep into the evolving landscape of Bitcoin in this lively chat moderated by Jennifer Robertson. The duo explores the fascinating journey of Bitcoin from its grassroots beginnings as the "people's currency" to becoming a hot commodity for big institutions, and the implications of that shift. They tackle the nitty-gritty of Bitcoin's legitimacy in today's market and how it’s being adopted differently across the globe, especially in regions facing economic turmoil. With humor and insight, Carolyn and Jeremy share their thoughts on how Bitcoin remains a beacon of hope for financial independence in emerging markets while also pondering its role in the Western financial narrative. This episode is packed with engaging anecdotes and valuable perspectives that make you rethink the future of money and the potential of cryptocurrencies!

A lively exploration of Bitcoin's evolution kicks off with Jeremy Britton and Carolyn Crawford, moderated by Jennifer Robertson. The trio dives deep into the metamorphosis of Bitcoin from a grassroots currency designed for the people into an asset class coveted by institutions. Jeremy and Carolyn share their unique backgrounds, with Carolyn recounting her shift from the corporate world to Bitcoin Treasury Solutions after stumbling upon the cryptocurrency during the COVID era. The conversation takes a vibrant turn as they discuss the legitimacy Bitcoin has gained through institutional adoption, while also contemplating its implications for the idea of 'people's money.' They highlight the contrasting experiences of Bitcoin's utility in emerging markets compared to its speculative nature in the West, emphasizing how regions facing economic instability are increasingly turning to Bitcoin as a reliable store of value. With playful banter and insightful analogies, the hosts keep the vibe light yet informative, making complex financial concepts accessible to all listeners.

Takeaways:

• Jeremy Britton and Carolyn Crawford dive deep into the transformative journey of Bitcoin, exploring its evolution from a peer-to-peer currency to an institutional asset.
• Carolyn emphasizes that while Bitcoin's growth has given it legitimacy, the original vision of it being the people's money remains vital and alive.
• The podcast highlights the stark differences in Bitcoin's adoption across various regions, noting significant use in places facing currency devaluation like Nigeria and Venezuela.
• Both speakers agree that regulatory frameworks are lagging behind the rapid development of cryptocurrency, posing risks for average investors and the need for stronger protections.
• They discuss the growing interest among women in Bitcoin, particularly highlighting the increasing number of women participating in workshops and networks within the crypto space.
• Jeremy points out the unique qualities of Bitcoin as a finite resource, contrasting it with other cryptocurrencies that can be inflated, making it a reliable store of value.

Links referenced in this episode:

• www.bitcointreasurysolutions.com.au
• www.bostontrading.co

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Bitcoin Treasury Solutions
• Boston Trading

Foreign.

Welcome to a fireside chat between founders today.

Today we are meeting with Carrie from Bitcoin Treasury Solutions and Jeremy from Boston Trading.

My name's Jenny and I'm going to be essentially the moderator for today and really pumping on the questions for these two to, to kind of have a good conversation about bitcoin altcoins and maybe some things in between.

But after a little while, not surprisingly, she moved on.

You'll figure it out.

It's not really her vibe.

And so she spent decades doing corporate presentation training and business communications and, and through Covid discovered Bitcoin and decided to move into the world of bitcoin, becoming a co founder of Bitcoin Treasury Solutions.

Jeremy Britton is the co founder of Boston Trading.

He spent a number of decades in the financial services markets as well, more as a financial planner and Advisor and about 15 years ago discovered this thing called Bitcoin and after that developed the world's first crypto mutual fund called Boston Trading and the Boston Coin.

So today we're going to be talking about all things Boston and bitcoin.

So I guess just to kick off, just wondering, kind of throwing it out there with a bit of a detailed question.

Bitcoin did actually start as more people's money, a way to transfer small amounts of money between peers without banks.

Now it's being accumulated by large institutions.

What are the thoughts from the two founders on that growth of Bitcoin over the last 15 years or so?

It's a mixed bag, this institutional uptake.

On the one hand, what it's done is given Bitcoin enormous legitimacy.

We've got an extremely crypto friendly administration in the US at the moment who are supporting bitcoin and crypto.

They want to see innovation onshore in America and they've put in legislation and regulation around the crypto industry and that has given traditional hedge fund managers and asset managers and fund managers confidence to be able to move ahead.

It's also grown.

Bitcoin and the crypto industry have grown of their own volition without, without any central business or any central bank or government pushing for their growth over the last 15 years, starting with Bitcoin and then broadening out into the rest of the crypto industry.

And now you've got this surge.

So perhaps it got to a space of substance as an asset class before governments and asset managers felt confident enough to be able to jump in.

So the good news is, of course, for all those people who are in this, who are in this investment for number go up, this pushes number go up.

Increased demand, fixed supply, when it comes to Bitcoin, at least is going to end up in increased gains and increased value for the underlying asset.

The downside, as you've just said, is that what does that mean for this idea of the people's currency?

That it was meant to be the.

And I would suggest that that actually hasn't gone away.

And to the degree that now governments and financial institutions have endorsed this investment, it gives everyday people confidence to also buy, to know that the regulation is in place, to get involved.

So whilst it started as something that everyday people could front run the financial institutions in a way that we've never seen for any investment previously, it's always the financial institutions who get access first.

It may well be that there's lots of people who haven't come on board yet, but can still do so at what is still a relatively early stage of the game.

So the other thing that I think needs to be taken into account here is that it is in fact being used as people's money, but less so in the West.

But in Africa and South America and Asia and India, this is being used.

The uptake is enormous in places like Nigeria where the local currency has been devalued enormously.

The uptake by local people, by people in Vietnam avoiding the Western Union fees and sending money back to their families in regional Vietnam.

And same with India and same with South Korea.

And so you've got.

And then again in Venezuela.

So anyone who's seen serious debasement of their currency, who sees exorbitant like 20%, 30%, 50% fees by a Western Union trying to transfer their funds, this is where we're seeing a major uptake of Bitcoin as a currency being used by merchants, being used by families, being used by individuals.

The billion, billion, more than a billion people who are unbanked are also using this currency.

So whilst we're not seeing that yet in the west, that's becoming the infrastructure to do that has grown enormously and is supporting that.

And we can get into a conversation later about why that might become more popular in the west in the future.

But I've just dominated that answer.

No, no, that's, it's so.

It's really interesting, Carrie, because I was reflecting the other day that I feel like at least in the west, the use case for Bitcoin has gone from Novelty to straight into store of value.

And that idea of being used as a currency has kind of been skipped.

So it's a really interesting observation about, you know, in other countries.

Jeremy, do you have any reflections on the idea of Bitcoin being the people's money?

However, now it's being absorbed a lot by and accumulated by institutions.

Yeah, I think I like to look for analogies and different things.

So, you know, in Australia, living in Australia, we, we kind of went from phone was something that was plugged into the wall and then there was bag phones for about three months that were these big heavy things.

And then we went straight to sort of these big brick style sort of cell phones, as the Americans call them, mobile phones.

But in America they went to beepers first and pagers.

And that was a long time before they actually got onto the cell phone market.

But Australia sort of skipped that.

We didn't have beepers, we didn't have pagers, something.

And I also look at the adoption of the Internet, which the adoption of cryptocurrency and the adoption of mobile phones is mirroring the adoption of the Internet, the S curve.

And at first it was geeks and weirdos and people like me who wanted to communicate with my sister who moved to the US in the early 90s and there was no sort of corporate types on there.

And then when the corporations came, they started to take over things.

But there's still a space and as Carolyn says, there's still a space for people to use other systems.

I mean, when we first started using Bitcoin for payments, yeah, it took 20, 30 minutes, but I could send $1,000 and it would cost only 50 cents.

Whereas as you say, Western Union, we've got contractors in emerging nations, some of them don't have bank accounts and it costs $79 to send $1,000.

Whereas with Bitcoin we could do it for 50 cents.

So those smaller payments were great.

Now the institutions are hoarding the bitcoin.

It's like when the institutions hoard the gold, there's still gold for people on the street to use.

And we can make micropayments, things like the Lightning Network, obviously we can make very rapid payments because if you're buying a coffee, you don't want to wait for 20 minute completion of the bitcoin block size if you're buying a pizza or something like that.

So the Lightning Network is a great, great function that I think a lot of people in the west aren't using maybe because they're not aware of it, maybe because it's not essential to them, but it will be more and more adopted.

And we're looking at ways to get those into restaurants and cafes and things like that to move the money around.

I think there's a great system.

It's just that people grab it for whatever they say.

As Carolyn said, in some emerging countries, where Turkey and Nigeria, where the inflation rates have been 50% and higher, people are grabbing onto Bitcoin as a store of value as well as being able to transfer funds.

You know, there's more people in the west who are excited by number go up because we've been using the stock market, whereas people in emerging nations never touch the stock market because they couldn't get into the stock market.

Now there's innovations such as Robinhood and Raise and Acorns where you can buy stocks for as little as a dollar.

So I think people will grab onto whatever they're using it for.

As I say, I use the Internet only to communicate with my sister.

In the early days, I didn't realize you could shop online and do all those other things or advertise online.

There's people who'll grab it for whatever they do.

And as long as it's fulfilling for them, that's fine.

I mean, for some people, the people's money is transferring USDC or BUSD or something like that.

And you can transfer a million dollars or even as a business, you might be limited to 50,000 or 100,000 per day, but you literally transfer a million dollars instantly to another country, to another business, whether it's six o' clock on a Sunday morning and you'll use it for whatever you use it for.

And as long as everybody's happy and everybody's playing fair, I think that's great.

Okay, sorry, Jenny, can I just pick up on something that Jeremy said?

There is that.

Okay, just this point about the hyperinflation that you referred to and greater than 50% inflation, I think think we often feel like in the west that could never really happen here or for a lot of people.

I think obviously Bitcoin is kind of across this, but there's, there's this sense that, oh, that happens in Venezuela or Argentina or Peru or Ethiopia or Nigeria or, you know, somewhere on the African continent or South America.

But we've had, well, Argentina and Turkey, they're G20 countries.

These are enormous economies and we've had it happen there.

And you could Go.

Okay, well, you know, we're very much.

Australia is very much linked to the US and the US is the global reserve currency.

So it's not going to happen to the US But I love the analogy that Greg Foss used to use, which is, okay, the US dollar might be the fastest horse in the glue factory, but it's going downhill fast.

Like there's no sky's the limit.

Right.

And since 20 in particular with COVID the M2 money supply curve looks like.

Sorry, what was that?

What was the percentage?

That sounds familiar to me as well.

It's absolutely nuts.

And that becomes exponential and that's undermining its debasement.

You know, it's debasement of the currency, of the purchasing power.

And this is, this is what JP Morgan is now referring to as the debasement trade.

This is why these institutions are getting in, which is.

It's the debasement trade.

Where do we go when the US dollar, the global reserve currency, you've got China working out ways to trade or insisting that trade is done in the Chinese Yuan.

So BHP is now trading with China in Chinese Yuan.

So the trade in US Dollars, our supposed global reserve currency, is coming off at the rate of something like 15% a year.

It's just enormous.

The search for alternative trading currency as well as the search for something that represents something more stable, that might just maintain purchasing power and everyday folk in.

Because it's so incremental, our inflation, it looks so small.

So we'll complain about it and we'll blame the, the supermarkets for corporate price gouging.

Right.

Without acknowledging.

Because our, you know, that's a useful story for the media to tell, but, but reality is that it's government.

You know, we're being diverted from the reality of what's causing that inflation, which is government money printing.

And so we see prices going up at the market.

But in reality that's the, that's the cost of our.

Or that's the value of our purchasing power going down.

And because it feels relatively small, it's not 50% a day or A month.

We just kind of whinge about it, but we put up with it.

But there's so many downstream effects from this in terms of the degree to which two parents have to work now to maintain a mortgage, to maintain mortgage payments, to bring up their children, to give them a shot at education and future success.

Everything is downstream of this broken money system.

So this whole thing of, you know, even the culture wars and I mean, and hot wars, leave aside these kind of the human level, social kind of wars that we've got going on.

Hot wars are financed by money printing that can't be done when you've got hard money.

So everything from 7% real inflation in our world that we see in our utility bills and our grocery bills, that is misrepresented by the CPI, which ostensibly is still 2 to 3%, but it's wankled through to hot wars that see thousands of civilians and soldiers killed.

What is it, 7,000 soldiers and civilians are being killed in the Ukraine every week.

These are human lives devastated because of the broken money.

So I don't want to underestimate.

Yeah, I know.

I'm going to have to bring us around at the questions.

Part of what I'm going to do is actually kind of call time as we move because there's a couple of questions that we do want to have answered.

And Carolyn's going to get into the.

Fall of Rome there.

I love it.

That's totally where I'm headed.

That's all good, but I'm going to get the questions out.

So let's see if we can kind of keep the.

I'm going to see if this question is going to be one that we can have a nice, shorter kind of response.

But let's see.

So I'm just wondering, when Satoshi decided on this idea of bitcoin, was it the first digital currency or has, you know, were there actually some forays into or early experiments in the digital currency world before bitcoin?

As Bitcoin experts, Carolyn will know where bitcoin's DNA came from.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So look, I think ever since the dawn of the Internet, people have been looking for ways to transfer value over the Internet without the interference of a third party, without requiring a bank or a financial institution to mediate that transaction.

Because when I buy from you at a market stall, as per the history of mankind, peer to peer, I hand over cash and there's no bank.

Moderating or facilitating that.

I mean, you could argue that they're keeping track of the ledger that goes from your bank account to my bank account, if that's an electronic bank transfer, but cash, if I've taken 1,000 bucks out of the bank and I'm paying you 20 bucks, that's peer to peer.

And so what's been looked for and sought after and dug into by cryptographers and the cypherpunks since the beginning of the Internet is a way to exchange electronic peer to peer value.

And there's been a whole evolution of that from digicash with Baum.

Was it David?

David Baum.

Have I got the name right there?

This is kind of before my time.

And everything from the cryptography that brings in anonymity through to Adam back and his hash cash, which brought in the first proof of work, which was used to filter out spam, email spam.

So there was a tiny transaction amount that had to go with each.

With each email, such that it made it unattractive to spam.

And so, and then you've got Nick Szabo, who brought in, who brought in real proof of work.

We needed to go with decentralized.

One of the reasons digicash didn't work was it wasn't decentralized enough and therefore it could be cracked down on and was cracked down on by central authorities.

And so each one has taught us a lesson in it needs to be more centralized or it needs to be more or less anonymous or, you know, or we need to include proof of work to minimize the spam.

And so what.

What Satoshi Nakamoto did, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, was to pick the best of all, to stand on the shoulders of giants and to bring together something that became uncensorable, unbreakable, immutable, that offered the right reward system, that made it attractive to mine it to put in the proof of work, to use the energy to spend the money that linked bitcoin to the physical world and made it costly, but made it attractive to mine and to create and to bring into the world.

Right?

And I think bitcoin's one of those things that's got like 15 different fathers and that's great.

As you say, it's made it a better tool.

And so, you know, with the rise of bitcoin in the public's knowledge and mind, the language of blockchain cryptocurrency has come to the fore.

A lot of people that I know I speak to say, well, I don't understand the blockchain, so I don't think I'm going to invest.

So how important is it for new Investors to actually understand the technology that sits there behind the blockchain that supports currencies like Bitcoin.

I'm wondering Carrie, whether we go to you and then Jeremy can add it.

There's some questions for Jeremy later on.

I think like any investment there's an element of do your own research.

Most definitely.

I think to really understand Bitcoin's use case it's important not necessarily to understand the elliptical curve of mathematics and cryptography and, but to understand the broken money system and what this has emerged from, why it came to be and how it works enough that you trust what's going on and you without just trusting individuals but being able to trust for yourself.

Doing enough research that you understand why it's unbreakable, why it's immutable, why it's uncensorable and convince yourself or otherwise test this theory and don't trust, verify.

Look into why does this thing have value and can it hold up and check these, you know, frequently asked questions.

Check all the myths for yourself whether they are myths or not about is it used for crime versus cash, which is used more for crime?

Is it backed by anything?

Well, it's not backed by governments.

What is it backed by?

It's backed by energy.

What does that mean?

Is it a Ponzi?

Does it meet the criteria of a Ponzi?

You know, do you need new investors constantly coming in to give it value?

Does it meet the criteria of something like a tulip mania, one of those bubbles?

Does it meet those criteria?

Look into those answers for yourself.

I think investing in Bitcoin is a very different proposition to then looking into other cryptocurrencies.

I do think that Bitcoin is an absolutely unique asset class.

It is, you know, it's entirely decentralized.

There is no business, there is no leadership team.

Their tokenomics are entirely unchangeable.

And setting the protocol from, from the get go, from the start of this thing in a way that isn't true for any other cryptocurrency or only a couple.

And you know, they really can't challenge or compete with Bitcoin.

And as far as other crypto go, I think they're a little bit more like investing in the share market.

You need to understand the business, you need to understand the individual use cases, whether that's smart contracts or whether that's tokenization of real world assets or you know, what's the actual use case, what's the business like?

Has it stood the test of time?

What's its tokenomics, how does that work?

So that's a little bit more like, I would say a traditional investment.

Whereas bitcoin to me is a brand new investment proposition.

And so it requires a different form of research to crypto, which I think is more like a traditional investment research process.

Well, that's a wonderful segue I think to you Jeremy, around the fact that there are actually tens of thousands of cryptocurrencies out there.

And so if bitcoin's the gold standard or Gold 2.0 as it's known, well, how do you actually identify useless from the useful?

Yeah, I got into the stock market in the early 90s, 91, 92.

But I was one of those ones who actually wanted to broaden my horizon because obviously you go to the real estate agent, they're going to recommend properties.

You go to the stockbroker, they're going to recommend stocks.

And you go to the bullion dealer, they're going to recommend precious metals.

I like to look at all the asset classes and see how they behaved at different times.

As Carolyn said, when there's a financial crisis and we have financial crises echoing every seven to 12 years throughout the last, you know, 6,000 years of written history and you can see where, you know, gold has jumped by 50% in some scenarios.

And Bitcoin.

Yeah, is gold 2.0.

I mean, I'm not as smart as Carolyn.

I don't understand how my car engine works.

But I think, you know, if we have a scenario where the Internet goes down or the US government is supplanted by an emerging nation such as China or India, or one of these, then maybe we're going to have the self driving cars that don't actually self drive, we're going to have the navigation systems that don't work for a period of time if there's a change of power.

And so your Mad max old fashioned 30 year old car with no computer chips in it is still going to function.

And there's even people looking at these scenarios like what if we lose power, what if there is one of these global blackouts, what if there's a comet or a meteor or a volcano or something like that?

A lot of people have got generators as emergency generators for hospitals and banks and things like that.

So we'd have our power back up and running within a couple of days.

And bitcoin is still a finite asset, as Carolyn said.

Whereas the other cryptos can often be printed.

Like, Apple can always print more stock certificates.

Tesla can always print more stock certificates.

They can inflate their own supply.

Whereas Bitcoin is very unique in its fixed supply.

It's even more fixed than gold.

Because Elon said a couple of years ago, oh, we discovered this asteroid floating around in space, that's like 50% gold.

We're going to send a rocket up there, bring back $4 trillion worth of gold.

We'll all be rich.

And like, no, you increase the amount of gold, gold becomes as valuable as concrete.

That scenario doesn't work.

It's like the Germans or the Zimbabweans printing more cash and going, we'll all be rich.

But it didn't work out that way.

And that's why we've got the inflation that is creeping up on us slowly.

At 10% per year, you don't really notice that you're boiling the frog.

At 300% per year, people really start to notice.

But Carolyn, Carolyn is not old enough to remember.

I am back in.

Back in the 90s.

And for those kids who weren't born in the 90s, you can watch old episodes of season one of the Simpsons, and you see Homer has got a job.

Marge stays at home with the kids, and he's got a house and he's got two cars.

And you go, that was normal in the 90s.

That wasn't science fiction.

That was just what normal life was like.

One wage would actually get you a house.

Ask your parents and grandparents about it, because most of them had one income and they still managed to get their house.

But as Carolyn said before, these days you need two wages, and sometimes you can't even get a house.

So we're starting to get into problems with the monetary system.

And we've got all these people who are rising up.

Not from the government.

You know, this is people power who are rising up and saying, I want to do something about this.

I want to bring a store of value.

I want to bring a way for the ordinary people to get wealthy.

Because again, Carolyn said before, you know, when new investments come out, when they invented bonds and when they invented these sort of collateralized debt obligations and these complicated financial systems that, again, I don't understand is usually the financial institutions had access to them.

The normal retail investors didn't.

But any kid who's 13 years old with a smartphone can jump in and they can buy fart coin or Melania coin or something.

Hopefully it's better than that.

As we saw an example In Australia, the 24 year old tradie who bought a meme coin and showed his face and put his name in the paper, which I think was insane.

It's like publishing your name when you're a lottery winner.

But anyway, he made a lot of money on meme coins and then used that to buy a house.

So I think the great equalizer is brilliant.

Again, crypto is different to bitcoin, but you can use crypto gains to get more bitcoin or to buy gold, or to buy property or real world assets.

These are all tools that the average people have been building.

Because somewhere in the back of our brains, whilst we say, yes, all hail the usa, who's been the dominant superpower and financial power for the last 70, 80 years, at least since World War II, somewhere in the back of our DNA, we all know there was the fall of Egypt, there was the fall of Greece, there was the fall of Rome, there was the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

And that is the language which is going to require me to wind you back up into the question.

So the question was, how do you actually sift the wheat from the ch?

How do we sort the good ones from the bad ones?

So now that we've gone to the fall of Rome, I'm going to have to bring us back into quickly.

How do you sort the wheat from the chaff?

Yeah, I use a modified system of my stock picking system that I developed from many, many years in financial planning.

Obviously there's good companies and there's bad companies.

It's not always number go up because obviously Tesla and Airbnb and some of these companies had wild rides, Theranos, WorldCom, you know, some of these ones that crashed and burned.

But looking at projects that can actually be sustainable, projects that can make money somewhat, I think it was.

Jamie Dimon came out the other day and said that he doesn't see Tesla actually being in business in another 15 years because there's so many competitors and they've got so many problems inside of that business.

But there'll be new emerging technologies, there'll be other companies taking over.

And I think, you know, bitcoin is always going to be there as the gold standard because it is finite supply, it's literally stored energy.

It's gold that you can email to another person even if the Internet's down.

You can use Bluetooth and radio signal, Morse code.

They've even tried using Morse code to send Bitcoin to people.

But the other ones will be just in this state of flux where some companies will be the new Apple or the new, you know, dot com companies, some will fail, some will rise.

And it's using your common sense and using some other resources because again, crypto has only been around for 15 years, but the stock market's been around for 400.

So if you study the stock market and use that as your tool, as your slide rule, then you can choose the best crypto projects.

Well, 15 years is a long period of time to be around, but it's certainly the adoption of Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrencies is on the rise and has the opportunity to continue to rise.

What about the regulatory environment?

Because the law is often, regulation is often slow to catch up.

So, you know, what about, you know, how to, how does, how have the regulations tied up, tightened up to get cowboys out and scammers out of the industry?

And, you know, is there, is there a guess on how many projects might actually live to tell the tale around regulation?

Do you want me to take that one first, Carol?

I was going to go to Carrie first, particularly the bitcoin side of things, I guess.

Look, I think we're certainly behind in Australia relative to the U.S. the U.S. is really going forward.

As I said before, we've got this extremely crypto and bitcoin friendly administration in America.

You've got at least a dozen people in America who on the administration close in, who are deep down the bitcoin rabbit hole.

Absolutely get the proposition.

And then you've got someone like David Sachs who comes from this kind of entrepreneurial background who understands what the industry needs in order to thrive and in order to, in order to make America.

They want to be that sort of number one bitcoin and crypto industry in the world.

They want to dominate and they want the jobs onshore and they want the talent onshore.

They want the entrepreneurs, they want the engineers, they want the smart people.

Australia seems to be less excited about creating that and is still very much in the space of we're behind on regulation.

They are wanting to, There seems to be, you know, they're very aware of scams and people really getting.

There are loads of scams.

I mean, the, did you hear about the, what do they call it, the pig butchering scam in the last two weeks where this guy, Chen Si, half Cambodian, half Vietnamese and massive, like international organized crime, they're using, I want to say, slave labor like they've got these giant call centers where they're using people who have been trafficked and they threaten their families and they, you know, they're getting them on the phones and email and build up this long term relationship online with people and you know, building a romantic relationship or a friendship or whatever it might be and then introducing them to investments and then, and then of course, you know, slaughtering the pig and taking the lot.

And so that happens.

And I mean as a result of that, America has just seized something like 25,000 Bitcoin or something.

It was a few billion dollars worth of bitcoin.

Anyway, my point being that Australia is the way Australia is cracking down on that is to create as much regulatory red tape and KYC link know your customer and you know, you would know that if you try and get your money out of the bank at the moment, they ask you questions about how you're going to use your money, your money.

If you want to take out more than, I don't know, a grand or two grand you've got at my bank, I need to make an appointment with the bank in order to get my own money out.

So I have to give them 24 hours notice to have that money in the bank because we all know there is no money in the bank.

And so I.

And so ostensibly my own money is almost impossible to get out.

So that's how Australia is different from America.

The way we are cracking down is through privacy choking.

Perhaps the over regulation will push people towards those sorts of areas.

Jeremy, any thoughts on how regulations are tightening up to get rid of scammers and cowboys?

Not quickly enough in my opinion.

When I first started in financial planning there was no superannuation.

It was sort of a club for the very, very wealthy who used financial planners.

The ordinary people didn't.

They brought in compulsory superannuation about six months after I joined and we all went fantastic.

Now we get to talk to all of the ordinary people as well as the mega wealthy.

But once the cowboys, not myself obviously had been unleashed on the general public, there was a lot of people who were getting ripped off and the legislation came in, we had three floors, there's probably about 60 or 100 financial planners on each floor in my building.

And when the legislation came in that you had to disclose your commission and you had to disclose conflicts of interest to your client in writing, it was only one page document.

I came to work a month later and there was like one floor of about 20 guys because all these guys didn't want to disclose that they were actually, you know, disadvantaging the clients for their own financial gain.

Now over time that one page document became a four page customer advice record.

But there's been increasing legislation, at least in Australia, to protect investors.

There's still people who get through the cracks.

So there's still rip off mergents, there's still cowboys in the stock market, as I said before with Enron and Theranos and some of these companies in the last few years, but there's significantly less.

And right now crypto is still back in the dark ages of like the snake oil salesman said, you know, try this, it'll cure your rheumatism, make your hair grow back and you know, resurrect your dead grandma, that sort of stuff.

Anybody can make any claims and there's legislation in place in the US which is for stablecoins, but it's not really addressing the broader crypto market.

All these scams, all these rug pulls, the pig butchering, that sort of stuff.

I think the legislation is still not strong enough.

I want to see greater legislation, greater transparency because I think that'll protect people.

You know, I want my mum to be able to invest into cryptocurrency.

People who don't really understand how the car engine works are still happy enough to get behind the wheel and go down to the corner shop.

And that's the future I see for the crypto industry is where it's more like the financial services industry.

Like I don't understand the stock market.

I'll say that openly.

After 33 years in the stock market, most people don't understand how government bonds work, but they're still happy to go and buy one or they'll invest through their superannuation or through their 401k or whatever.

So you've got to understand enough to get in there and then you trust that the right people are doing the right things.

But at the moment I believe the laws are not strong enough.

They don't have enough teeth.

There's been a couple of people prosecuted.

Cz, who is the CEO of Binance, he went to jail for four months.

But there's still thousands and thousands of scammers, rip off artists and rug pullers who have not been caught and who have not been punished.

And I think once we have that legislation then you'll see this 23,000 cryptocurrencies reduced down to Maybe a couple of hundred.

And it'll be more like the stock market.

Higher barrier to entry.

So not everybody can list a stock, not everybody can list a coin.

At the moment we've got 13 year old kids who can just list a coin and sell it and make millions, but then they don't have the customer's best interest at heart.

I think that really, really needs to change.

And it needed to change about four years ago is when we petitioned some of the senators in Australia to change the legislation and basically copy and paste from the stock market regulations across to crypto.

Just find, you know, control H, find the word stocks, replace it with the word crypto, bang, there's your legislation.

But governments move very, very slowly.

And while they're doing that, there's thousands of people, as Karen said, being ripped off and losing their life savings.

So I want the legislation yesterday.

If anybody knows a politician, write to your politician, tell them you support crypto.

But it needs to have some walls around it.

Well, I think that's probably cracking into a whole other conversation around regulation.

And so that might be for another, another day.

Last question is going to be around crypto and the composition of people in the crypto market.

And unlike the screen that we have here, in fact over 85% of people engaged in the crypto market are men.

So Carrie, how do we bring more women in?

I think loads of women are coming in.

I understand that it's still fairly heavily dominated by men.

Traditionally you've got basically what bitcoin is or crypto is, technology and finance.

And if you look at the brain makeup of men versus women, 75% of men are more left brain, which is kind of a little bit more technical analysis, structured, break things down.

And 75% of women are a little bit more right brain, which is big picture, strategic, conceptual, bring things together, people oriented, you know, interactive, social, et cetera, which is as you'd expect given our kind of biological and evolutionary routes.

So, but what's happening is certainly in terms of the uptake in we were talking about, we've come full circle to the uptake of, in the developing countries in South America and Africa and India, it's really women who are doing the uptake.

So single moms and small merchants and really wanting to get that independence and also that freedom and that privacy.

So to be able to, as a woman, be able to trade in Bitcoin or be paid for your services in Bitcoin and to be able to receive that anonymously and to be, be able to hold that securely and privately and potentially be able to get out of the country if you have to without anything being kind of watched or traced, et cetera.

That's the way to do that.

In terms of women in the West, I think we're seeing huge uptake and I'll start with broadly, but then I want to get into something much more personal that I've observed.

So people like you've got a lot of women only bitcoin or women friendly bitcoin podcasts now from obviously Nat Brunel, who's amazing and has been in the space for a long time, through to Access tribe in the uk, Tali Lindbergh, who does Orange Hatters.

So there's a lot of education going on for women and we do it through networks and through chatting in small groups and talking to one another about how it's going to help you in your small business or in your personal life.

So that's the way it's sort of growing.

But I'll tell you something really interesting from a personal level with our Bitcoin Treasury Solutions business is the people who are most interested in coming to our public workshops.

So we do workshops for accountants and financial advisors and businesses who want to onboard their onboard business into the onboard bitcoin into their treasury reserves.

But we're getting more interest in our public workshops from women and women over 40 than we are from anybody else.

And I think that's because women are curious, they want to set up their financial future.

We've got an epidemic of homeless, over 55 women in Australia.

It's beyond appalling.

And so women are interested, they're curious and they're more willing to ask for help and guidance and direction and education then perhaps men and I'm broad gross generalization here that many male men would rather figure it out for themselves and feel like, no, I want to do this for me.

I don't necessarily want to need somebody else to guide me through this.

Whereas I think women by our brain structure are more social creatures and like to do that in a group with other people, trust the person that they're dealing with and be made to feel comfortable.

So I'm really enthusiastic about women in this space.

And when I show up to a bitcoin event these days, like Bitcoin Bush Bash or the Bitcoin Alive, our big annual conference, I feel like the women in the room are easily 30, 40, 50% now, not so much.

Still.

I have gone to like a bit dev meetup recently, which is more for supposedly bitcoin developers and People interested in the tech side and that was still very male dominated.

But in general, everyday interactions, there's a lot of women coming on board and showing interest and we've got a lot of women only telegram and signal groups and the support structures are really coming into place for women.

I like that, I like that.

I mean, I'm not a woman, obviously, but my mum was a woman, my four sisters are women and you know, I've got daughters, so I, I've learned to speak woman as a second language.

I'm not fluent by any means, but I love the fact that it's increasing.

Even a couple of years ago we went to Coin Fest in Asia and they say there was about 8,000 people.

I spotted six women.

That was like two or three years ago and then this year going back again and the numbers would have been maybe about 10% women, which is a massive, massive increase from less than 1% but still not quite enough.

And I think what you're saying there about the networks, men tend to be loners, particularly men over in their 40s who say they've got no close friends and things like that.

And maybe men, because of that, they're more likely to become victim of a scam, whether it's pig butchering or whether it's just buying the wrong, wrong coin that they saw on YouTube.

So I fully support for the women out there, get into a network.

If you've got 10 friends that you can talk to about crypto even if they don't know much about it, you're less likely to fall for a scam because you're going to bounce the idea off a few friends.

And again, using the car analogy, I've got some friends of mine who are males and they know how many pistons and cylinders and things go on under their turbos.

I just like the one that's red and curvy, that's me.

I keep it very, very simple.

But I'll talk to five women before I actually buy that car or before I actually pay that bill from the mechanic and say, hang on, is that real?

Is that legit?

And someone will say to me, no, no, no, you're getting ripped off, you need to go and see my friend Barry or whatever.

The other thing for women, I think, and you touched on this before, 50% of all marriages end in divorce.

And that's just the ones who are married.

There's plenty of people who are living together and, and split up the nan on those records.

And in the olden days, you know, women used to have their Little go bag where they'd keep a pile of cash under the bed if they needed to run quickly, that sort of stuff.

Which, depending on how much money you've got and how much assets you've got, that can be more problematic at the airports.

You can't fly out of the country with more than $10,000.

You see, the sniffer dogs, they're not actually sniffing for cat, for drugs.

A lot of the time, they're sniffing for cash.

It's difficult to smuggle a million dollars worth of gold out of the country, but you can literally fly on a plane with a million dollars on bitcoin or crypto on a little device that big.

So I think for women, if we don't even refer to crypto, we just call it the alternative financial system, because, as you said, the banks can lock you out of your own accounts if they don't like you.

And if you've got a partner or significant other that is financially controlling you or emotionally controlling you, they can shut down the bank accounts like that.

But all you need to do is have your seed phrase in your purse or your, you know, USB device in your wallet.

You can skip the country, literally, with a million dollars, and nobody can stop you.

No banks, no anyone.

So, yeah, networks, keep it simple.

Get a go bag.

And for God's sake, girls, learn a little something.

Even if it's just enough to know that you like the red curvy one and you don't know how many pistons it's got, but talk to your friends.

I think that's.

That's really great, Carolyn.

And I think that that is all we have time for today.

If people want to reach out to Harry, you can find her on www.bitcointreasurysolutions.com.

and if people are interested in reaching out to Jeremy, it's www.bostontrading.co.

so thanks for the two of you for your time today.

And if there's any questions, I'm sure that people reach out directly.

I think we could have some questions sent in by the audience, and that'll be a lot of fun for next time because obviously we both like to talk.

I'm gonna have to get a signal.

Like, if I do this with my hair, I want you to wind it up in 15 seconds, like, get you the question, the two of you.

We promise we'll be better next time.

Bad as each other.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you, Jeremy.

Thank you, Jenny.

Really gorgeous to be involved, Sam.