If you're building something that is going to change the way that money moves in a profound way, you have to do it on top of something that's truly decentralized, unassailable, doesn't have a CEO, a foundation, an association, and the only thing that fits the bill is Bitcoin.
You tell everybody you know to own some Bitcoin.
It's my favorite bar mitzvah gift. It's better than the bonds I got from my bar mitzvah. Yes, definitely better.
Is there anything negative about going to college today?
I mean, there's so much. I built pretty successful companies by just sheer force of will and persistence. I was the only guy on that leadership team that really didn't want the top job and of course I ended up getting it, which was really weird because I had never managed more than 200 people and suddenly I inherited 15,000 people. Life's too short to just be coy and not fight for the things you believe are existential.
I am thrilled to welcome my friend David Marcus to Invested. Welcome, David.
Thanks for having me, Michael. Great to see you.
Likewise. David and I know each other for a fairly long time and operate in reasonably similar circles. So, I hope this is going to be a super fun conversation, but I actually want to start with something that's become somewhat of a topic in modern circles. And there's been a couple of news items on this in the last 48 hours. And that is you have an illustrious career. You sold your first company to PayPal. You then ran Venmo. You're now doing another startup. But before all that, you were a college dropout. And that is certainly a kind of topic of conversation right now given, you know, where AI is at and what skills are going to be needed. So I'd love for you just tell everyone about your journey from college dropout, why you dropped out of college, would you make the same decision today, how you think about that in the era of AI and then we'll get on to all the business stuff.
Yeah, for sure. Look, I mean I dropped out of college mainly not by choice but mainly because I was in a situation where my father basically lost everything and I had to drop out of college to go work to try to support the family and myself. And so this kind of forced my hand a little bit. Not that I was kind of excited to stay in college anyways. I was kind of itching for getting into active life. But you know, that's what pushed me into the workforce early and then I worked at a bank for a year because that's what you do when you're in Switzerland. I was in Switzerland at the time and a year or so in I'm like okay this is really too virtual for me and I started my first company which was an ISP and telco company at a time where the market was opening up for competition in Switzerland which feels like ages ago.
And tell me about the decision to drop out. It was just like hey my family needs money. I need to go do this and need to do this right now.
Do you have any regrets about it?
No, no, no, zero regrets. And it's kind of interesting because you know we have three kids and one of our three kids is actually Ethan, our son, is actually a dropout as well but like he didn't drop out because he needed to but he dropped out because he was itching to go build a company and he successfully fundraised and is off to the races. So two generations of dropouts, not the other two so far. I mean one for sure and one is too young but like you know there's a story here when you think about the modern workforce and modern AI. What in your view are the differences between people who drop out to pursue kind of agency, let's just call it that, starting their life earlier versus those who sit down and study in a college environment?
I think it really depends. I feel like right now the college experience is as much for building a network and the social aspects of things than anything else. I think you know if you're really really curious and you want to learn about something we have tools at our disposal to learn that no previous generation had. In ours we kind of were like even on the tail end of the Google access to all of the world's information revolution. Prior to that you had to actually physically go to a library find a book etc. There was so much friction between you and knowledge. Google reduced that friction significantly and now LLMs have radically shifted that to the next level. So I think in terms of learning I think you can learn pretty much anything without going to college right now and it's more the credentialing and the social life. And so I think the game has changed in a really significant way. And so for this next generation the real question is do you need the credentialing, the networking, the social life or do you want to learn by yourself and go do.
Let's invert the question. Is there anything negative about going to college today?
I mean there's so much. You know, I mean look I think the problem is like a lot of the elite colleges in the west have been weaponized and radicalized in such a way that not everyone has a fantastic experience right now to say the least. And some others enter college with kind of a normal neutral view of the world and get spat out on the other side totally radicalized. So yes, there's definitely a downside to that. Hopefully we can collectively work to address this but there's definitely a downside.
One of the things I started to think about recently is, you know, startups are all about pace and I think learning today builds on itself, right? And I've started to wonder whether the pace of learning in college actually slows people down versus the pace they can, you know, via a lot of the self-learning you talked about before, whether it's YouTube or LLM or just reading online. Do you have a view of that?
Yeah, I mean, definitely. I mean look an AI, an LLM can be the ever-patient tutor that will never get agitated when you don't get something that will be ever patient and take the time you need to actually learn at your speed. And so I think that's definitely going to be a thing. Look I think hopefully we can address some of the shortcomings of colleges and some of the best institutions will learn how to actually use AI as a tool for their students to learn faster, better and actually to just raise the level for everyone. I hope this is where we end up being. But like if we're in a world where basically people just accumulate college debt to be around people who are being radicalized and are falling behind compared to people who actually learn on their own like you basically get the worst of all worlds.
Can I just ask you one more question on dropping out of college before we move on to the business stuff. So you dropped out for family reasons. You need to support the family. Has that had any kind of long-term impact on you that experience?
Oh yeah, for sure. But you know positive impact like not at the time where I was living it but certainly like this idea that I was in a pretty comfortable environment, a pretty comfortable family environment and not have to really think about how to put food on the table or any of these things by far. And then I got basically projected into this reality of having to do whatever it takes to win and to earn money and support my family and myself at a very very early stage of my life was definitely very formative for me and I'm really thankful actually in hindsight that all of this happened to me.
Anything you would tell your younger self today about that experience?
No, I feel like, you know, I don't know, maybe it's me just idealizing that stage of my life, but I feel like I never took it really hard. It's like, you know, it was just what I had to do and I just went and did it. It was not like I felt like things were going to go bad or I was always optimistic about my chances. So, you know, I guess maybe more useful for people listening to this is like, you know, actually if life throws stuff at you, if you internalize those things as it happens to you for a reason, you have something to learn from it and something good will happen make you better and stronger. I think if you approach challenges and hurdles in your life with that mindset, then you're fine no matter what happens.
Amazing. All right, let's take us through the career now. All right. So, start us at the startup that gets sold to PayPal, then going to run Venmo. And let's do the career thumbnail.
Yeah. So, I mean like so I dropped out of college. I went to a bank. I didn't like it. Started my first company. I'm sorry.
Oh, it was a small Swiss bank called Hundles Finance. You know that since then got acquired by HSBC, etc. But so, you know, phenomenal group of people, really enjoyed my time, but like it wasn't for me.
What was your first job there?
Oh, I was in a back office like doing like... Yeah. I mean, this was really funny because actually, you know, this was like I'm going to date myself big time, but like this was at the time where we had an AS400 mainframe and no PCs, zero PCs in the whole bank and everything was basically client mainframe. And I'm like, this is insane. I was already a super geek at the time. So, you know, I had access to computers since I was like eight years old. And so, I was like really deep into it. And so, my actual day job was being in a back office and like filing like FX market orders in the back end and doing all kinds of things. And I'm like, 'Okay, this is ridiculous. We need PCs.' And I actually convinced people in every department that I went in because I started in the back office. Then I went to like trading and FX where I spent most of my time actually at the FX trading desk. But every department I went in I added a PC and I had little programs or even basic Excel stuff that actually made life of everyone easier. And by the time I had left a year later, there were PCs everywhere. And I was not part of the IT department, which is kind of really a funny anecdote of my time there. And that's what I enjoyed doing. I enjoyed actually finding ways to make people's lives easier with technology and it was really clear that this is what I needed to go do. And so when the market opened up for competition on the telecommunications market in Switzerland, I was 23 and I decided I'm going to go build a company to compete with Swisscom, the monopoly in Switzerland. And I knew nothing about telecoms, but built a pretty successful company by just sheer force of will and persistence. And then sold the company in 2000. And straight up started the next company which was a mobile entertainment company like you know it was premium SMS time and I knew telecoms really well and I felt like there was something to be built on top of SMS and text messaging. And so built this company that ended up becoming a payments company because we had connectivity into all of the mobile operators around the world and we could actually bill you on your mobile bill. And then the iPhone came out in 2007 and I'm like, okay, like no one's going to download ringtones and wallpapers on a small phone anymore. And this is when I convinced it was hard actually my investors that this was the time for me to leave Europe, come to Silicon Valley and try to make something bigger of that company. And we built it into a very successful mobile payments company that was called Zong. Like we pivoted into that with all the connectivity we had with the mobile operators for payments and then that company got acquired by PayPal/eBay in 2011. And I started working on mobile payments there and 5 months in the then CEO president of the company left to go run Yahoo. And I'm like great I'm just going to go leave and do another startup because this is the guy who bought my company and this is the guy I had loyalty to. And I was the only guy on that leadership team that really didn't want the top job. And of course, I ended up getting it. Which was really weird because I had never managed more than 200 people and suddenly I inherited 15,000 people. And I was very frustrated with the culture. It was very very corporate, lots of consultants everywhere. And so I decided to do the brash thing of trying to completely revamp the culture there, which we did very successfully. We bought Braintree and Venmo. And then it was still part of eBay. Carl Icahn was in the eBay stock wanting to split the company. I of course thought it was the right thing to do, but out of loyalty for all of the good people that gave me the chance to lead the company. I didn't say that publicly, but it was very frustrating. And I wanted to go back to building things. And so I was ready to kind of jump out when basically Mark Zuckerberg intercepted me and convinced me to join him to do something different which is to build messaging products at Meta which was a kind of sabbatical from payments and regulated businesses for a while which was wonderful. And then Libra so you know went back to payments because I was frustrated in the fact that money didn't move around the world in a seamless way many years later and that was a whole crazy crazy journey that we can talk about but that resulted in Janet Yellen pulling the plug on this thing on the morning of June 21 and me leaving December of 21 and starting Lightspark a few months later.
You decided after the Libra experience which is a crypto experience we'll come back to in a bit to go build plumbing for Bitcoin. So despite Janet Yellen pulling the plug on Libra, you double down on I guess which is the founding mother of crypto which is Bitcoin. Weren't you spooked?
No. I was kind of emboldened. So look, I mean, so first of all, like when we started the Libra journey, the whole point was the internet needs a protocol for money, like an open way to move money on the internet, like any other type of content, and that thing didn't exist. We looked into Bitcoin early on because I've been a Bitcoiner since 2012. And late 2011, 2012.
You still hold your whole position?
No comment. But so yeah, I've been in Bitcoin since late 2011 2012 thanks to a good friend. We can talk about that. But so we started looking into Bitcoin early on in the Libra journey. And we quickly realized at the time in 2018, early 2018, that like the Lightning Network and the technology supporting Bitcoin wouldn't scale to real-time transactions for billions of people on WhatsApp and beyond. And so we went on and built our own proprietary blockchain with a very early ahead of its time stablecoin concept. And the fact that it came from Facebook which at the time was really not a well-liked company to say the least. It's probably the understatement of the year there at the time. And the fact that we reached three plus billion people every month across our products like really made it a systemic threat to the system instantly like even before we launched. And so for once, all of the central bankers of the world actually agreed that this thing needed to die. And we fought it for, you know, another two and a half years until that morning when Jake Powell went to have breakfast with Janet Yellen, which they do every other Thursday. And she was and he was actually ready to let it go within a controlled environment. And she was like, 'This is political suicide. I won't have your back.' The next day, the general counsel of the Fed started calling all of the banks and participants telling them, 'Look, we can't prevent you from going forward with this. But we're very uncomfortable about you doing so.' And that was it basically.
So it was kind of a Soprano shakedown.
Yeah. I was going to say it sounds like a political shakedown.
What do you think about that in retrospect?
Oh, I was like very angry. Like I came to America as an immigrant and I was like this is it. This is the country of leveled playing field and equal chances and opportunities. If you build something great people will let you do it etc. And this is kind of Banana Republic shakedown style. And so look the learning there was deep right back to the earlier point around the philosophy of if stuff happens to you there's a reason and there's a learning. The learning there is if you're trying to change the way that money moves first of all you've got a lot of incumbents and players that will want to stop you because they have a lot of entrenched interest in keeping the inefficiencies alive. And the few things that we did wrong was actually like one is if you're trying to supplant the unit of account of a country that a government controls with a stablecoin in this case and the threat is real then you will be shut down. If you're building a network that is centralized, even though we tried to devolve power with 28 other phenomenal companies that joined that consortium, all of these companies can be pressured into dropping out and they were because there are humans and CEOs and they have shareholders and there's all kinds of different ways to actually pressure people. And so the big insight is if you're building something that is going to change the way that money moves in a profound way, you have to do it on top of something that's truly decentralized, unassailable, doesn't have a CEO, a foundation, an association, a consortium. And the only thing that fits the bill is Bitcoin. And so that was the insight. And so that's why a number of us left and started Lightspark in late April of 22 to go build an open money grid on top of Bitcoin basically.
Why do you believe in Bitcoin other than the fact that it's decentralized and obviously is not domiciled anywhere?
It's kind of a unique thing. It's pretty crazy to think about this. Like last week we celebrated the 17th anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper and so 17 years ago a guy or people or group of people or a woman no one knows and that's part of the appeal wrote a white paper and encoded in that white paper a series of incentives that created the most successful form of neutral money ever created in the history of mankind. And it's a fascinating thing. And I'm particularly fascinated with how visionary the incentives were and the way that it created an incentive for miners to actually use energy and convert that energy into value secured cryptographically. The way that it created an incentive for people to care because of the appreciating value and the fact that we had finite supply, a deflationary asset by design in a market that's basically plagued with inescapable runaway inflation. And really had all of this built in in a way that you could actually just let the code and the incentives do its things for 17 years and magical things will happen and survive all of the attacks of modern finance and world trying to kill it. And that's a truly unique thing and no other digital asset has that property. None. Like every other thing like think about any other asset or network. You can name a person who has outsized influence. You can name a group of people. You can name a foundation or company that actually has some influence. This is the only one that is truly neutral, decentralized, secured, that has that depth of liquidity with all of the other currencies, which is actually super important for payments. And that's why we basically convinced ourselves and reached this unshakable conviction that this is the only thing that will actually behave like an internet for money. That you can build a set of technologies and products on to facilitate real-time global payments and make money like any other type of content on the internet.
Ironically though, it hasn't happened yet, right? We're 17 years into Bitcoin. I think it's fair to say even though the stories or the lures of, you know, people who paid for their pizza with too many Bitcoin 15 years ago, you know, it's not exactly not even the world's bottom 10% payment system right now. And so I guess it begs the question, right? And to be candid, if it's digital gold, and I'm a Bitcoin holder also, if it's digital gold, most people don't pay for things with gold either. So, why do you think that this actually will become a payment system and why will Lightspark be successful at it?
Yeah, I mean, look, I think I'm so glad you asked that question. Like so first of all a couple of things like one I mean more than a couple actually but like the first one is like if Bitcoin didn't take the time it took to actually be as secure as prominent as valuable with the depth of liquidity it has in trading with all of the regular currencies that people want to pay with and use. Then it wouldn't be as valuable as a settlement asset as it is. And so it needed to take the time to survive all of the assaults like first it was oh this thing is for criminals and drugs and what have you where it turns out that actually 99% of financial crime is happening on the old good old stack that's actually way easier to... Yeah. Exactly. And then the second one it was oh it's going to consume all of the energy of the earth and it's terrible for the environment. Turns out no actually it's like the greatest accelerant to renewable energy. Great. Okay. So I mean we had so many of these attacks and it had to actually go and survive all these attacks. It had to actually get into the hands of the largest financial institutions in the form of ETFs, the most successful ETFs in the history of ETFs. It had to do all of these things and go through all of these series of events all driven through this beautiful incentive system invented 17 years ago to actually get to the point where it is today to become like the greatest settlement asset for payments. Okay, so that's like one. Two is if you're trying to make payments with Bitcoin layer 1, good luck, right? It's not meant for that, right? It's like a black hole like slow super secure network but it's not meant for everyday payments and so you need to make it fast and you need to make it cheap and you need to make it scalable and that's where Lightning and Spark, a Bitcoin L2 that we invented and pushed out in the world 6 months ago, are meant to do. So you have to build a set of technologies to make Bitcoin move fast and cheaply. And then third is the insight which is the one that is really important that actually fast cheap real time bitcoin movement is actually like TCP/IP packets for money. It's not like when you send an email or a photo you're not you're basically sending a series of zeros and ones on TCP/IP that arrives on the other side and gets reassembled into a photo. The same is true for the way that we're using the Bitcoin network for payments. You're sending dollars to someone in Mexico receiving Mexican peso on the other side. You're not seeing that you're using Bitcoin. You don't even know you're using Bitcoin. You're not spending Bitcoin. And this is for instance what we have live now with SoFi which is a large US bank, with Nubank in Brazil, with a bunch of other large scale banks in Europe and other parts of the world where you can replace old really dusty like Swift and correspondent banking that takes 3 to 5 days to clear doesn't work Friday after 5:00 p.m. cost $50 a pop with a real-time transaction that costs a cent to send cross-border on top of Bitcoin from one fiat currency to another fiat currency. So, all of these things had to come together for Bitcoin to actually become the winning open neutral settlement network for all of the world's payments and money and this is why we're here now and it's really starting to work at large scale for the first time in 17 years since its invention.
Is it fair to say though that the early instantiation of these payments and the payments rails has happened through stablecoins mostly built on Ethereum which the point you made earlier does have a choke point it's not obviously as stateless or distributed as Bitcoin and so early adoption even other blockchains, Paxos doing and others, have created the payments rail that are 24/7. So they answer criteria three. Somehow they matured faster. Although many of them on the stablecoins are backed by US treasuries right now, which I think the United States government's certainly in favor of even if they won't say it publicly. And so like why should Lightspark catch up to what's going on in the stablecoin world? Now obviously Stripe just acquired a big stablecoin company and stablecoins are taking off big time.
Yeah. I mean to me like the two are not mutually exclusive, right? It's like for me a stablecoin is just another asset type and as far as we're concerned we support stablecoins on our network. So it's like you can send dollars to someone in Mexico receiving Mexican peso or to Europe or to Israel someone receiving shekels. It's fine. And but you can also send dollars to someone in Argentina receiving a stablecoin, a dollar stablecoin, and that works fine too. And so for me, I think people conflate the stablecoin, like the digital form of dollar, that is fully centralized, fully controlled by a corporation that has to run the reserve. And the rails that are Bitcoin basically fully decentralized, fully neutral and stablecoins can be just another asset type running on Bitcoin. And this is one of the reasons we built really easy issuance capabilities on top of Spark that exists on top of Bitcoin. And so like you can use the products and capabilities we built. You know, a few weeks ago, we had our big partner summit here in LA and we announced this new product called LightSpark Grid where you can open an account and then use the network to send or receive transactions in 65 countries that go straight into a recipient's bank account in real time 24/7 powered by Bitcoin at a very low cost and or spin up wallets in real time and send either Bitcoin or stablecoins to these wallets anywhere in the world and that's available for clients that are business clients that are merchants that are wallets that are banks that can actually plug into the network and enable global money movement like never available before and stablecoins are just one of the other ways to do it. The problem is stablecoins run on Ethereum today, right? And so...
I mean Ethereum, Solana like Ethereum L2s and Solana and a bunch of others. Yes. If you were making a case why Bitcoin would it go back to the fact that just not centrally controlled by anybody which whereas Ethereum is.
I mean all the ETH L2s are definitely more centralized than Bitcoin is for sure or that Spark is for that matter. Or Lightning. And so like I think the question is really not like whether you should use stablecoins or not. Like there's definitely a use case for stablecoins and there are different networks that you can use it on. Our view is basically that by offering an ability for our partners to send money in the way that they want everywhere and it so happens that stablecoins in our case run on top of Bitcoin is just a superior way to do this because we're just a service provider on top of an open network that no one controls and everything else is just more centralized in nature and there's kind of a rise of what I call corp chains which is basically I mean I did like the first corp chain which was Libra and it was killed for a reason. And I think that if you're approaching a country like say Europe or a country like Brazil or Mexico and you're starting to intermediate like say 20% or 25% of the in-n-out flows of payments into the country with a centralized US dollar stablecoin on top of a centralized network. Then you're going to know the same fate Libra had and basically you're not going to be able to do it. Whereas here you have the opportunity to deliver the currency of the country if that's what people want in their bank accounts on top of a network that is neutral doesn't fly a flag is not controlled by a person you can find and that's actually better for many people like if you talk to the Europeans they resent the fact that all the payments network are American payment networks they are very worried about US dollar stablecoins taking over etc. Our solution enables people in Europe to receive euros, that's fine. Like, you can do that. But if you want stablecoins for a specific use case of moving liquidity in dollars between businesses or between people at a certain point in time, you can do that on the network, too.
Perfect segue. So, is Lightspark and Bitcoin a gateway to de-dollarization of the economy in the world?
Well, I think I mean we're not that like we're kind of like, you know, this is the stablecoins thing, right? It's like, if you are a country and your currency is crap and basically people who work really hard to earn money earn money and then the second it hits their account or pockets, it's basically melting away. Then yes, you deserve to have better alternatives being offered to your people, I think. And that's something stablecoins are doing really really well in a number of different regions.
Well, sure. That's true. Like in Iran and in Turkey and in places like that, but your rails which get people off the dollar rails like you said before the Europeans are not that happy that it's all happening in dollars, that's a stablecoin side, but it's also the infrastructure side, right? Whether it's Swift or other ways, for example, you're supposed to sanctions using the dollar. Are you accelerating, let's call it a de-dollarization of the global economy?
Oh, I see you're sorry. I heard the question the other way around. Yeah. I mean, no, I don't think so. I think you know the reality is...
Like the institutions, if you're talking about the dollar or the US hegemony on top of financial systems around the world, and this country's ability to actually be involved in that, the settlement rails don't really matter. Because if you're a regulated entity at either edge of the network, you still have to comply with whatever law is actually in place, and whatever compliance and OFAC sanction screening and all of these things that are actually required of you. If you're a regulated entity, you still have to do that. And so the fact that this network is neutral enables us to have an open internet for money that is tolerated by everyone in the world because it's not coming from a specific country. And I think that's the key thing. The key thing for me is when I look at what I would be happy to have contributed to is a world where every human and every business can move money however they see fit, whenever they need it, however they need it, in real time at a very low cost, just the same way that you would send a text message or an email, no matter what the amount is, no matter what time of day it is. And I think if your goal is that, if your goal is financial freedom of money movement and enabling people to do that at that scale, then you have to do it on top of a neutral network because a centrally controlled network or corp chain or any of these concepts will never work for the reasons that we talked about. So I was never terribly bothered by the kind of, you know, Bitcoin is used for drugs and pornography and a bunch of other things in the early days of it. But if you've got an easy to move uncontrolled network, how do I think about Iran or finance guys in Turkey or wherever it is financing Hamas via Lightspark? These are non-regulated entities in the normative sense of the world. We're obviously not doing much KYC or paying attention to OFAC for that matter. And this would open that world to them, and they use crypto for things like this already.
I don't, I mean look, I think the reality is if you look at what's happening right now, just take Lightspark out of the equation for a second, you look at crypto in general, crypto rails in general versus traditional financial rails, and you look at the amount of illicit financing, money laundering, sanctions evasion, and all of these things, and you look at the rate at which this currently happens on those crypto networks using stablecoins and other networks versus the traditional financial system. And the reality is the traditional financial system supports still like 90 plus percent of the financial crime and abuse. And the reason for that is actually not trivial to fully internalize unless you've been in payments for a long time. And the way that this works is basically that the systems that are basically used by many financial institutions and banks are not real time. They're all batch processed. And so a lot of the fraud happens and then people realize it after the fact. And then you have to file what is called a SAR with a financial authority or regulator. And by the time you do all of these things, the funds are already long gone and washed and all of that. So, you know, I think if you talk to any AML specialist on traditional financial networks, they'll say that the efficiency rate of these systems is 1% or below, which is crazy, right? And when you look at the reality of what happens on blockchains, on crypto networks, it's like, if you're a criminal and you want to use that to move money around or to evade things, you're a dumb criminal, which is often the case, by the way. And it's just like you get caught much faster because all of these things are real time and they're much more modern systems that enable you to detect those things much faster. Like in the case, for instance, we bring banks onto the network and before the transaction actually happens, there's exchange of information that happens between the sending institution and receiving institution about the account holders on both sides, whether they're KYCed or not KYCed, they run their OFAC sanction screening and all these things before the transaction actually gets settled in real time. And so that's actually a much better way to prevent that from happening. And then of course, if you're sending to a self-custody wallet and all these things, then there's a question of incompatibility of the network because many of these regulated financial institutions are actually pretty uncomfortable sending to unknown endpoints. And so that's a different problem that we collectively need to solve in a way that enables people to actually have really great self-custody wallet experiences while actually being able to participate in the financial system.
Who first introduced you to Bitcoin?
So, my very, very dear friend Wences Casares, who is kind of known as patient zero in Silicon Valley for having grown up in Argentina, in Patagonia, on a sheep ranch, and having seen his family lose everything again and again, and being one of the most curious persons and friends I've ever known. And so yeah, in late 2011 he was like, 'You should spend more time.' I stumbled upon Bitcoin in '09, actually, the first time, and I was like, 'This is way too dorky for me. Like, it'll never work. It's too complicated.' And by my standards, that means like really dorky. And so then in 2011, Wences went deep into the rabbit hole and was like, 'Oh, you need to really spend time really understanding this.' And it took me months at the time to really fully understand it. Months, and you know, I think it's still like if you truly want to understand all of the incentive systems and the way that it's baked and everything, it takes a while. And I never came out of that rabbit hole.
Amazing. And do you tell everybody, you know, to own some Bitcoin?
It's my favorite bar mitzvah gift. I have those metal cards that I can load Bitcoin on. Also something that I saw Wences do for all kinds of different things and I'm like, oh this is great for bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah. So, I actually load up the cards with Bitcoin and I give them and it's like a fabulous anthropological study to see what people do over years with Bitcoin. And it's just a fascinating thing, actually owning even a small amount of Bitcoin completely changes people's outlook on everything. It's fascinating.
You can actually track what they do with it or you ask them?
Yeah. No, I mean it's a public key, so you can, if you have the public key of the thing, you can see whether people are actually over the years spending it, keeping it. It's fascinating.
It's better than the bonds I got from my bar mitzvah I guess.
The returns have definitely been better.
