Original subtitles

Crypto and blockchain are changing the world. It's been called the biggest

revolution since the internet.

It's really undoing the last 20 years of technology.

But just what the is crypto?

This is much bigger than a currency.

Bitcoin is by the people, for the people.

From Bitcoin to shitcoins, altcoins to NFT, the crypto world can seem mind

-numbingly complex.

It can be a bit confronting.

Crypto hasn't really been demystified by many. So over the next six episodes,

we're going to break it down to find out where it all started and why.

Part of the inspiration for Bitcoin was from the financial crisis in 2008.

Taking your money out of the hands of the government, of the institutions.

We'll hear from the major players who helped pioneer the crypto industry in

Zealand. The people who kind of got it, it was very exciting and revolutionary.

Were there some lows?

Oh, yeah.

To sell some of the biggest crypto myths.

I think the idea of crypto just being a scam overall is only said by those above

the age of 40.

Crypto is really pretty poorly organised for drug dealing.

We'll talk to local experts and tell the story of some of New Zealand's biggest

crypto successes.

We've done over 200 million, which is not incredible.

Sit there, we can.

Bam, it's done.

We'll meet the innovators bringing Te Ao Māori into the metaverse.

Can this be a way to help open up the playing field for indigenous

The disruptors smashing the crypto bro stereotype.

If I want it to change, I have to be part of that change?

We'll talk to the local company making millions creating any team.

I think we're up $15 million in sales the very first day alone.

And collaborating with international superstars. I got to hang with the DOWG.

There's only one Keanu.

We'll find out how crypto could save the planet.

Bitcoin mining could revolutionize the energy industry.

And explore just what the future might look like.

It provides us an opportunity to remake the world that we have today and remake

it differently.

So what then is crypto?

Greedy banks and risky loans.

To understand how crypto became a thing, we need to go back to 2008.

It's over. In two words, a senior Lehman Brothers executive said it all.

The investment bank filed the biggest bankruptcy in US history.

There's no doubt that part of the inspiration for Bitcoin was from the

crisis in 2008.

Wall Street had effectively built this bomb that was waiting to go off.

Retirements were wiped out, savings wiped out, because these traders had

been basically playing roulette.

People lost their homes. People lost their livelihoods. It had far -reaching

impacts. Central bankers came in and they printed money.

And they printed a lot of it. They made decisions that served certain groups and

individuals. Banks were bailed out, but the people were not. They were hung out

to dry.

People had been through the harrowing experience and that created a lot of

mistrust. Everyone was panicking, everything was on fire.

And then out of the ashes like a phoenix came Bitcoin.

In 2008, somebody under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto released a Bitcoin

white paper.

which describes a way to transmit value anonymously in a peer -to -peer way.

The Bitcoin white paper, it was transformative.

So what exactly was this vision?

Satoshi basically said, here's a way we can exchange digital money without

needing a bank. I'm calling it Bitcoin. It's going to be decentralized.

So instead of being controlled by mega -powerful banks in the middle, It'll be

run by any of you who are part of the Bitcoin network.

It was groundbreaking.

But this wasn't the first time digital money had been given a go.

There had been attempts to create digital currencies, and they never quite

cracked it.

Normally, digital things are really easy to copy. When finances come into play,

this is a problem.

If we think about a photo, you can send the same one to a million of your

friends. Then a million different people have that photo and it has no scarcity.

This is a big problem when you're talking about digital money because it

it can be counterfeited.

There were decades of work in cryptography looking at digital e

Bitcoin, this problem is finally solved.

For the first time in history, somebody figured out how to create scarcity.

How do you prevent a digital currency from being copied and pasted if it's

essentially just code? That was one of the key things that Satoshi solved.

What Satoshi did was to bring together some clever cryptography and various

technologies, put them together in a way that nobody had thought of before.

So how did Satoshi crack the puzzle?

The answer is blockchain.

Think of it as a digital ledger or record book that keeps track of all

transactions.

Computers on the global Bitcoin network work together to record and verify the

transactions. These transactions are packaged up as blocks and added to the

chain. And once a block is added, it's almost impossible to change, making it

super secure.

Every time a Bitcoin transaction happens, it goes into this giant

The clever bit that Satoshi did was to work out a way to replicate this ledger

onto all the different machines around the world. A bit of each of those.

Parties trusting one hub, they trust each other and validate each other. And

that is the huge and remarkable innovation of the blockchain behind

Because all of a sudden you can have instant validation and radical

on money. And what that allows for is to ensure that nobody can cheat.

If someone tries to...

Fortunately, in just one, the rest of them will correct it. And that's all a

blockchain is.

Enough computers agreeing on who owns what to be impossible to hack.

Need a recap?

So we've got Bitcoin, which is a digital currency you can use without needing a

bank. And we've got blockchain, which is the system that verifies the

transactions and keeps a record of who owns what. Pretty clever, huh?

Such an incredible story that no one knows who created... the technology.

The big question is who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

It could be a person, it could be a group of people. It's almost like who's

Magdalene and how did the immaculate conception really happen? There isn't a

king of Bitcoin, there isn't a messiah of Bitcoin, there's just the protocol.

Considering they had the skills to engineer a whole new financial system, I

think they probably will remain anonymous forever.

With the 2008 crisis, there was a worry that people would lose all of their

money if it was in bank accounts. So here there was a thing that you could

actually keep it. No one could take it from you.

The potential of no longer being reliant on banks to hold and store our money is

significant. You effectively are your own bank.

That's quite a breakthrough.

To understand why Bitcoin was so groundbreaking, it might be helpful to

through just how money works.

On the back of a very long history of how the nature of money was changing in

the first place.

Up until 1971, we essentially ran a system called the gold standard.

So every dollar was backed by a bit of gold that the government kept in a big

treasury.

Nixon in 1971 broke the gold standard, which means it didn't have to be backed

by anything.

As soon as we moved away from the gold standard, money basically became men's.

That $20 note in your pocket, it's just a very thin piece of polymer. It doesn't

have any value in and of itself.

It has value because we have a social contract. You and I each believe that

has value.

And then we entered the era of quantitative easing, basically money

And according to the experts, since we've had a paper -based monetary

the values of our currencies have dropped dramatically.

With the ability for central banks to simply print away the problem, it also

created less and less trust.

It's like, what do you mean you can just make a trillion dollars out of thin

air? Like, how is that a good thing?

If you look at every single empire that's ever existed, Roman Empire, the

Empire, the British Empire, it always ends when people start printing more

or doing the equivalent. So the currency no longer had any value.

So what makes Bitcoin different then?

The thing that Satoshi did, which was pretty clever, was to build in scarcity.

So in the Bitcoin code, it says only 21 million Bitcoin can ever be mined.

Unlike central banks that can print an infinite amount, there's only going to

21 million. There is a finite amount of Bitcoin that will ever exist. So people

know that their money is not going to be eroded.

To the people who kind of got it, it was very exciting and revolutionary.

Everyone was like, yep, this is plan B, it's going to change the world.

A lot of people assumed that it would quickly evolve into the global medium of

exchange and disrupt the whole system.

But in reality, the main impact was you could buy a bit, you could sit on it,

you could send it to your friends.

Very few people knew about it, very few people used it, but it really felt like

it had so much potential.

In the beginning, Bitcoin wasn't known by many people. It was very much

underground. People really just wanted to try this out. There was no question

they'd be worth anything.

There was no value to them at all. And the people that were interested wasn't

for money.

There was a few very passionate people who could see this exciting future, but

it was quite a hard concept to get.

It used to be you could only get it if you mined it yourself.

Mine it? Even with a pick and shovel? Not quite.

While there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, they weren't all released at

once. Satoshi came up with a clever way to release them slowly and entice people

to run the Bitcoin network.

Mining. The purpose of mining is to verify and record all Bitcoin

And it's done by solving tricky cryptographic puzzles.

Computers all over the world are in a race to solve these puzzles.

When the solution is found, another block gets added to the blockchain and

miner who solved the puzzle gets rewarded with newly minted Bitcoin.

When I first discovered Bitcoin in 2010, I'm at a barbecue and a friend of mine

is like running across the room with his laptop screaming, Fran, Fran, I found

the block.

He's like knocking beer bottles over.

And he's like, I put this program on my computer and it created magical infinite

money. And so he installed the software on my computer and I started mining some

blocks.

The early days were fun. Looking back on it now, you talk to people and they're

like, oh, wow, you found Bitcoin at 10 cents apiece? Like, yeah, but could you

eat it? Could you pay for everyday services? You couldn't do anything with

back then, so it was quite theoretical.

So what changed?

When did this magical internet money get used for a real -world purchase?

The first time that Bitcoin moved from being this digital concept to an actual

real transaction with real world impacts was on the 22nd of May 2010.

A guy on a website managed to convince someone to buy him two pizzas and he

them 10 ,000.

If you send two pizzas to my door, I'll send you 10 ,000 Bitcoin.

So 10 ,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas gives you an idea of the value exchange at

that time.

Now 10 ,000 Bitcoin at its all -time high was around 650 million US dollars.

around a billion New Zealand dollars for those two pizzas.

I met him at a conference in New York. It was just a brief encounter.

You know, I just wanted to ask him, like, hey, do you feel bad about this?

He's like, no. I mean, somebody had to be first, right?

He didn't have a crystal ball to say, hey, this will be worth generational

wealth in the future.

That was really important as a milestone.

It was an amazing point to say, you know, this thing can be used in the real

world. It has value.

And he was forever chiseled into history for being brave enough to take this

magical internet money and actually go and buy something real world for the

first time. So every year we celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day.

Bitcoin proved a model.

Cryptocurrency can exist and you can have this pair -to -pair transaction

system. So very early on, we saw a lot of what we're calling altcoins,

alternatives to Bitcoin.

And hundreds of folks sprung up to prove a different model or to try to expand

technologically what was possible with the blockchain.

With Bitcoin, the innovation was this ledger, this record of transactions that

was immutable, unstoppable.

But Bitcoin, sort of out of the box, couldn't do much else.

So the real innovation came a few years later with Ethereum.

Ethereum is the next biggest thing to happen to crypto after Bitcoin.

Bitcoin gave rise to blockchain technology and Ethereum really adapted

that.

Ethereum definitely changed the industry because it allowed more programmability

in the way that blockchain technology works.

Ethereum built on Bitcoin's innovation with some big differences.

Ethereum is a programmable blockchain, which means you can do things like build

decentralized apps on its network and create your own currency or token with

It's meant innovators can create projects like decentralized gaming and

financial platforms as well as NFTs, which anyone in the world can engage

through crypto and tokens.

These projects are all outside of the centralized banking system.

It was a total game changer.

Ethereum made it much easier for the space to expand.

It was very exciting. It created this new paradigm, this new way to build.

It took the whole industry a huge step forward.

There's over 20 ,000 different cryptocurrencies now, and one of the

about this industry is there are no barriers to entry. Anyone can create a

cryptocurrency.

But that freedom can also mean sometimes cryptocurrencies and tokens are created

without the best intentions.

There's this thing called shitcoins.

And these coins, there's no real meaning other than I created this.

If you like it, buy it. And then you'd have this thing called a rug.

So you could choose to invest in a project and then they would turn the

off and take the money and you'd never know who they are.

Like any new thing, there's a lot of stuff that is crap.

or poorly formed or doesn't work out.

You had all kinds of crazy gravitate towards this industry and it created a

of an explosion of radical experimentation.

So we saw everything that you could imagine sort of come out of it. A lot of

didn't work, but that's how it should be. You shake the tree and then

left is the duck you want to keep.

You have to be able to thwart the wheat from the chaff and say, OK, well,

there's a lot of...

shitty stuff that happens in that space but also there's this really great stuff

that's happening like any industry that's growing fast you're going to get

spectrum of people but the majority of people are genuinely trying to make a

difference in the world in the heart of the space is trying to build a better

future given the intense boom cycle that crypto has gone through should

we be bearish on bitcoin from here

In the early days with the massive increases, the massive price drops, like

was quite a white knuckle ride.

The media tends to jump in when everything's going well.

21 year olds becoming billionaires overnight.

And then invariably the moment anything starts to go wrong, they then claim that

it's over.

Bitcoin has been dead five times already at least.

Top 10 reasons Bitcoin is dead. You won't believe number seven.

It's just clickbait.

If you zoom out and look at the big picture, each sort of boom -bust is

by the next boom -bust.

The cycles in Bitcoin in particular, they're really predictable. The industry

kind of naturally washes itself every four years, and it gets overvalued and

overhyped, and then the whole thing collapses or washes out, and what's left

like hardcore utility and infrastructure that is disrupting industries and

changing the world slowly for the better.

The media is generally a few sparkles behind the truth when it comes to

technology. And so I think if people really took the time to understand it, a

lot of the statements that have been made about crypto are very easy to cut

down.

So what are some of the biggest myths around crypto?

I'm always hearing people say crypto is just a scam.

I think the idea of crypto just being a scam overall is only said by those above

the age of 40.

We've had scams on the internet for a long time. Pre -crypto, there were lots

scams through email.

And no one says email is bad because it's spam.

People can use technology for good or bad. It doesn't make the technology bad.

It just happens to be another way people can run scams.

Cryptocurrency by itself is not a scam.

It's things that are surrounding it for people using it to scam other people.

But

isn't crypto

mining bad for the environment?

Bitcoin consumes less electricity than all hair dryers on the planet.

The Bitcoin network uses around 60 % renewable energy and that number is

every year.

And that's because we have this motivation for the sector to change.

It's actually encouraging people to find better, cleaner, cheaper ways to

extract energy.

As an industry, it's managed to reduce its emissions footprint faster.

than any other industry in the world. Ethereum has reduced their energy

consumption by 99%. If people are really worried about the environment, do not

use social media. Certainly don't send a tweet, because that's using far more

electricity than most cryptocurrency transactions.

Isn't crypto just used for drug dealing, though?

Yes, crypto is used for drug dealing, so is the internet, so is cash.

Crypto is really pretty poorly organised for drug dealing because everything's

transparent. It's the worst way to sell drugs. It's an immutable ledger that

tracks back to you.

If you're a criminal, that's probably not the right choice to use.

You're going to get caught.

Don't be silly.

Stick to cash.

Also, get out of crime.

Your parents want to be proud of you. Stop it.

It is really easy to sit in New Zealand and say, we don't really need this.

But financial inclusion is the most important thing.

For a developing nation, it's much easier to understand the value of

In countries where they don't have stable governments, where their

are in trouble, this technology can represent a whole new way of engaging

society. People, even in very disadvantaged situations, have phones

have internet access.

Now they can interact financially with the entire world. They can start to

participate in the global economy.

That brings a lot of people dignity and self -respect.

It gives a lot of people freedom in terms of accessing their wealth.

People using it in real ways to create real differences to their lives.

Bitcoin is giving financial sovereignty to people, to humanity. It's

tremendously important.

It's hard to put in words the magnitude of what Bitcoin enabled with that white

paper back in 2008.

There is this true belief that more of the benefits are to come, that there is

more positive future that can come out of this.

Crypto and blockchain are already changing the world. So people that are

going to ignore it, you're ignoring something that's incredibly important.

it is a part of the future you can either choose to participate and join

ride because we're still quite early or you could keep bad mouthing it and just

watch yourself become that guy that said the internet will never work

so

now we know why crypto is such a big deal but if you want to join the ride

do you get on

Cryptocurrency is absolutely for everyone, but I can fully appreciate how

daunting it is to get started.

We meet the family behind Easy Crypto, one of New Zealand's biggest crypto

success stories.

We all start knowing nothing.

And get some insight from our experts.

It's much easier to understand once you've tried it.

Make that first step and see where the journey takes you.