The North American Bitcoin Conference 2022 Day 1

Spotify Podcast Episode: The North American Bitcoin Conference 2022 Day 1

In this episode of Freedom with NFT’s we will have a mash up episode of The North American Bitcoin Conference 2022 Day 1 Interview featuring:

• Astronaut
• Copper.co
• Luxury Bazaar
• Distributed Ledger
• Digital Shovel — Scot Johnson — scot
• Alan — the Goldstar firm

They will share with us:

• What’s astronaut all about?
• How to get involved in what Astronaut is doing.
• Overview effect in Space
• What does Copper do?
• How to get involved in what Copper is doing.
• Why would you build your treasury?
• Copper’s — Ray advice to people who are entering the crypto space.
• What is Luxury Bazaar all about?
• How does the luxury goods market tie into crypto?
• Luxury bazaars goal or objective in the Bitcoin and crypto space in 2022
• What is distributed ledger?
• Breaking down bitcoin mining

– Consensus algorithm

• For someone who might be interested in mining, what is the next step that they would take?
• Distributed ledger goals in 2022
• What does a digital shovel do?
• Describing a modular data center for housing bitcoin.
• Why is Scot Johnson from Digital Shovel passionate about mining?
• Who is Alan of the Goldstar firm

– Why is he interested in NFT?

• Is NFT copywritten?
• Law aspect of NFTs
• Projects that Alan is excited about.

– Delorean drop

– Automotive industry

[00:00:00] Lauren Turton: I’m Lauren Turton with freedom with NFTs and I’m at Bitcoin Miami conference. And I’m here with Shannon from astronauts. Shannon, how are you today? I’m doing well. How are you? I’m really excited to be here. And I’m really curious what’s astronaut all about?

[00:00:14] Astronaut: Well, Astronaut is the world’s first space travel, space training and NFT and crypto company.

[00:00:23] Lauren Turton: That sounds absolutely incredible. So get a little bit deeper with me. Tell us a little bit of the backstory and how this came about?

[00:00:29] Astronaut: Yeah, well, I’ve always been a little bit of a space nerd. And last year, 2021 was a really big year for space. Bayzos went to space. Branson went to space. William Shatner went to space and for the first time ever, four civilians went to space.

So I see over the next, maybe 15 to 20 years face democratizing and becoming something where more and more people have access to. So we want to craft the narrative for what it means to go to space. So we want to make it more than just tourism. We want to make it about transformation.

[00:01:06] Lauren Turton: That sounds incredible. So how can I, as a regular person get involved in what astronaut is doing?

[00:01:13] Astronaut: Well, at this time we have a number of different experiences to space that we’re offering through NFTs. So our goal is to work with people who not only want to go to spacebut want to make the world a better place. So what happens is they would go to space and have this amazing what’s called overview effect where you see the planet without borders and you see it as this one human family.

And so to take that perspective and then bring that down to earth and use it in some way to make the world a better place.

[00:01:48] Lauren Turton: Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing Shannon. And last question. How do we find astronauts? How do we get a hold of you?

[00:01:54] Astronaut: Astronaut.space

[00:01:57] Lauren Turton: Astronaut.space. Awesome. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful time at the north American Bitcoin conference, and I wish you the best of luck.
I’m here with Ray from copper Ray. How are you today?

[00:02:07] Ray: I’m doing great.

[00:02:09] Lauren Turton: Tell me what does copper do?

[00:02:11] Ray: Yeah, so we do institutional grade digital asset custody. Kind of prime brokerage, light services built on top of that.

[00:02:19] Lauren Turton: And how can I, as a regular person get involved in what it is you’re doing?

[00:02:23] Ray: What you’d have to do is set up a legal entity and then probably start a crypto funds, where you’re either using your own capital or you’re getting outside, investor money. And yeah, you’re trading on exchanges, your deploying assets and to defy your staking, you know, you’re trying to build your treasury essentially.

[00:02:42] Lauren Turton: Why would I want to build my treasury?

[00:02:43] Ray: To make more money. If you have outside investor money, you obviously want to make your investors happy. But yeah, that’s why we’re in crypto, right, for the money, for the yields. So, yeah, and I think that’s kind of the big reason why we’re starting to see, you know, a lot of people in the traditional finance space, traditional funds start to get involved in crypto because you know, they’re seeing a return and you know, they want to make that kind of money as well.

[00:03:06] Lauren Turton: And as we wrap up this interview, what’s some advice that you would give people who are just entering the crypto space.

[00:03:13] Ray: Yeah. So if you’re just entering crypto and not to say that I’m nascent, but you know, I’ve only kind of been in crypto for the last maybe year, year and a half, whereas, you know, other more like cemented or long-term people in this space have been here for a couple of years.

But I would definitely say, you know, research the projects, research blockchain technology. And then play around with it, open up an exchange account or a wallet you know, start buying some crypto and maybe that’ll ultimately lead you into wanting to trade. And I would say do as much research as possible.

I mean, that’s the most important thing you want to know? You know, what assets you’re investing into before you invest in them. So I think it’s important and I think it’s a big oversight in the community is, you know, people kind of just put money into these assets. They don’t even really know what they do or these projects, but the biggest thing is to really kind of do your diligence and know what you’re getting yourself into

[00:04:05] Lauren Turton: Thank you and how do we find copper?

[00:04:08] Ray: Yeah. So you can go to our website, which is https://copper.co/ or you Google us copper digital asset custody for institutions. Or you could look up clear loop, which is our OPIC Shane settlement functionality. But you can find us in a lot of different places, or you could check out our new commercial with Rebecca Ferguson from doom as well, which you may be familiar with as well.

[00:04:31] Lauren Turton: Thank you for your time, Ray.

I’m with Roman from Luxury Bazaar. So Roman, tell me what Luxury Bazaar is all about?

[00:04:37] Luxury Bazaar: We’re been in the business of selling watches and high-end jewelry for about 20 years now with thought that a bitcoin conference was a good fit. A lot of our clients, the owner as well as some of the key figures here are our clients. They like to buy our expensive toys as we like to call them. So they’ve asked me to come out to display, they ask me to come out here and speak in regards to how the luxury goods market ties into the crypto world.

[00:04:59] Lauren Turton: So tell me, how does the luxury goods market tie into the crypto?

[00:05:02] Luxury Bazaar: Well, personally, I’ll tell you right off the bat my knowledge of this world is not as great as pretty much every other person that walks in here. But I will tell you this. I found personally that a lot of my clients that play in the crypto world and a few world, they tend to not have the utmost competence in what they do or in the product itself.
There’s always back fear because it’s just so new that it can backfire and whatever paper profits that have on a table tend to disappear up, their life is a market so volatile. So what a lot of them tend to do is to take those profits, to take some of that virtual and put it into something tangible, like a luxury watch.

[00:05:34] Lauren Turton: How has it been so far day one of this conference?

[00:05:38] Luxury Bazaar: It’s pretty amazing. Mark Cuban speech was pretty inspiring. Interesting how, you know, with someone on a negative end, then, you know, there was a lot of oohs and aahs in the room when he mentioned things like, well, this is not a hedge for inflation, and this is not really that big of an investment considering that, you know, as long as people are willing to buy and trade that’s where the market is.

So some people where taken him back. I feel like, but he did mention the fact that he believes in this stuff, he does believe it to the future. He also believes that maybe a lot of the people that are starting out today may not be around for a little while, but most of those survive, like in any other business. This has been great.

We’ve been meeting people, networking, plus it’s more of an exposure thing rather than anything else. We are selling watches just the same with the show. So it’s also great, but it’s sunny, Miami, how can you beat it? Im from Philadelphia it’s 20 degrees back home.

[00:06:21] Lauren Turton: Absolutely. And so one last question for you, what is luxury bazaars goal or objective in the Bitcoin and crypto space in 2022?

[00:06:31] Luxury Bazaar: You have to keep up with the times if you will
right. When PayPal came out and it was a novelty and nobody wanted to take PayPal online, we did because it was a new thing, a up and coming, and guess what? Now it’s become part of the norm, same game with Venmo and Zelle and other payment types. Bitcoin is a major currency, right? Or any other coin for that matter.

So company like bitbay. We were one of the first ones to restaff them because we recognize that we can reach out and touch a bigger, broader market or another market by bringing in cryptocurrency as a payment form for our product.

[00:07:00] Lauren Turton: Amazing. And how do we find Luxury Bazaar?

[00:07:04] Luxury Bazaar: https://www.luxurybazaar.com/

[00:07:04] Lauren Turton: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time Roman. I am with Mathias from distributed ledger. Mathias how are you today?

[00:07:10] Distributed Ledger: I’m doing awesome. Thanks for asking.

[00:07:12] Lauren Turton: Of course. So tell me what is distributed ledger.

[00:07:15] Distributed Ledger: Yeah. So we’re a blockchain services company.
You know, we offer a variety of services, but our bread and butter is a mining broker. So, you know, if you need any need to source any miners in north America, we’re definitely the guys to go to. We additionally offer a validator nodes and any other proof of stake system that you want.

If you want to have direct access to the protocol, but you don’t want to host the node yourself, you can hire us. And we’ll help you do it, give you the keys to the node. And additionally, we have a repair business that we’re starting out. So if your miner’s broke you can send it to us. We’ll diagnose it, tested and repair for you if you wish. Additionally, we’re now bootstrapping our mining as a service. So if you want to get into mining, you know, you don’t want to deal with the headaches. You can just pay us and we’ll do everything for you. We’ll host a miner, your miner and give you a cut of the fees, a cut of the profits. So yeah, I would say that’s really what the ally does.

[00:08:08] Lauren Turton: Incredible. So let’s go back a little bit. A lot of my audience members are newer to this space. And so can you break down what mining actually is?

[00:08:17] Distributed Ledger: Yeah. So mining is essentially the way that the network secures itself. What’s the Satoshi did, is he figured out an ingenious way to actually make it so that people were incentivized to want to mined because if you just assume that everybody is a greedy person and just wants to profit, you can actually come up with a system that, where the people are incentivized to secure the network for their own profit seeking motives.

And this is essentially what Bitcoin mining does in a nutshell. It incentivizes people that want to make money to secure the network for everybody else to use. And the way it does that is through the proof of work algorithm. Now, proof of work is what’s called a consensus algorithm and there are now many, I mean, this is an entire field of research onto itself, proof of stake, you have proof of history, proof of work, obviously there’s proof of transfer. I’ve heard there’s a variety of these. And I mean, this is something that researchers have been trying to crack the code for for decades, but it was really hard to get distributed consensus among a dataset.

And it wasn’t until Satoshi figured it out, that he basically figured out that the proof of work algorithms solves probabilistic distributed consensus for everybody. So what does that all mean? Okay. What that means is you need to get a miner you need to get some electricity and you need a place to host it.
And if you do that, you can actually earn bitcoin from the network without any middlemen. There’s nobody, there’s nothing to sign up or you don’t have to get permission to anybody. All you need is access to electricity and this machine, and that lets you provide security for the network in exchange for new Bitcoin and the reason why this was designed this way is because Satoshi in 2008 was so tired of all the middlemen and all the corruption that was happening in the financial industry that he realized it would be so much better if we could just cut out the middleman. And that’s basically what he did.
So now instead of requiring central banks and all these other financial institutions to manage and custody, our money, we actually now have the power to do it for ourselves. And really it was Bitcoin that bootstrapped all of this, you know, this whole industry, you know, it really is base off of Bitcoin.

A lot of the reasons why these other systems exist are, you know, people that made money off of Bitcoin and just wanted to see other potential possibilities and other alternatives. So I would say, yeah, in a nutshell, without getting too technical, that’s really what Bitcoin mining is about it’s about helping to secure a value network, so that it can hold value in a way that’s a win-win for everybody in the party.
So a win for the users, a win for the miners, and then basically everybody benefits.

[00:11:07] Lauren Turton: Thank you and for someone who might be interested in this, what is the next step that they would take?

[00:11:12] Distributed Ledger: So currently right now there’s like two ways you can go about it.
You’re either like a huge player. You raise a bunch of capital on wall street, like a billion dollars and you set up a huge farm or you want to do home mining. Now this is up to the person to decide, but the truth is that like, doing it in the middle of right now, it just doesn’t really work that well.
So you can’t be like a medium sized miner. I don’t want to be huge or you just want to do it personally at home. Now, if you want to do personally at home, you need the space and you need to figure out a way to shut the miner up cause it’s super loud. I mean it’s like 70 to 80 decibels per machine.
So once you have a bunch of them, he got super loud. So if you have a partner or you have kids or neighbors, like they’re going to be super annoyed. So there’s ways to like cut out the noise. You can put it in for like to an acoustic box, which like will dampen the noise make it less intense.

But you basically, what you end up doing at that point is you’re doing, it’s like dollar cost averaging, but with your utility bill, you know, where you convert your electricity, that your power or utility gets to you into Bitcoin through your bitcoin mining rig. And so that can be as effective as, you know, going to Coinbase, you know, and instead of giving them a hundred bucks a month you just give your utility a hundred bucks a month and then you just get Bitcoin directly from the machine instead of from Coinbase. So that’s probably what most of your listeners are, unless they’re like mega millionaires.

[00:12:33] Lauren Turton: Let’s get back to distributed ledger. What is one of your goals as we go into 2022?

[00:12:38] Distributed Ledger: Yeah. So our goal is to basically educate and onboard as many people as possible. Right now, we recognize that there’s a large gap in understanding of how these systems work and, you know, for these to be really effective, you want the user base to be knowledgeable about how to use these. That that’s sort of unfortunate, you know, because our society, it’s so technologically advanced that we love to abstract away complexities and make it easy for the user to just use. Unfortunately, when it comes to, you know, like you don’t have to know how an engine works to make your car drive, you just get in, turn the key and step on the pedal and you can definitely do that with Bitcoin. Right? You can just give your Bitcoin to a bank and like, they’ll just manage it for you.
But with just a small amount of education, you can just cut out the middleman and do it yourself. And that is to me, incredibly powering because the internet is available to everyone. put in the time, you can learn how to self custody, these things yourself. And that to me is really where this technology is going to have an impact, is hundreds of millions of people, all over the world, self custody, their own assets, instead of relying on centralized intermediaries.

And once that happens, like who knows what the outcome will be, but I think it will be a resoundingly positive outcome and it will just make everybody better off and more secure. So yeah, we definitely want to get education out there. Let people know that these systems are out there. They work. They are effective and help them use it.
And additionally, we want to grow our business and we’re expanding into several facilities and starting to mined. So hopefully we can offer a service that’s easy for people to use and they’ll be happy to do business with us.

[00:14:20] Lauren Turton: Thank you so much. And one final question, how do we fine distributed ledger?

[00:14:24] Distributed Ledger: So you can go to our website at https://distributedledgerinc.com/. And that’s probably the best way to to get into contact with us. Yeah. Or you can come to the North American bitcoin conference and talk to us.

[00:14:35] Lauren Turton: Thank you so much for your time.
I’m here with Scott from digital shovel. Hi Scott, how are you today?

[00:14:40] Scot Johnson: I’m fantastic. your self?

[00:14:42] Lauren Turton: I’m doing well. Thank you. I’m curious, what does digital shovel do?

[00:14:46] Scot Johnson: So we build modular data centers for housing Bitcoin miners.

[00:14:51] Lauren Turton: I’m sitting outside of the unit right now. I see what you’re all about, since my audience members are not here physically. Can you describe to them what it is I’m looking at?

[00:15:02] Scot Johnson: So this is a steel box that is designed to house a bunch of miners, and it has all the ventilation, power management, and more importantly, what makes me special is it’s fully smart.
So we try to design our pots with the autonomous so once you deploy your miners in it, a lot of the stuff that a human being needs to do in terms of miner management and stuff is done automatically by the smart automation in our system. Put that in perspective, this smaller unit you see here, it sells for 30 grand, but it costs a million dollars to fill up with miners and that’s our smallest unit. And that’s because the economies of scale needed to be really profitable with mining right now, require you to be really large. We’ll have clients that will buy a hundred of these units and fill them with a hundred million dollars where the minors. If you’re going to do it on a smaller entry-level scale, spend time and do your research. So, you know, it’ll be a lot cheaper to do that and wait, rather than it makes very costly mistakes at the gate.

[00:15:57] Lauren Turton: And why are you so passionate about mining?

[00:16:01] Scot Johnson: Pays my rent. But I got into it in 20 16, 20 17. And our business is more building the mining part, rather than operating them. We do have minors that we operate ourselves, but our business isn’t really operating them for their clients.
So I very much enjoy building and inventing things and coming up with new technologies to help accelerate the industry. So I’ve kind of a geek inventor at heart, and this lets me live that dream.

[00:16:26] Lauren Turton: Thank you. And one final question for you, how do we get a hold of digital shovel?

[00:16:30] Scot Johnson: Digital seminar telegram, digital underscore a shovel Twitter but I don’t go on Twitter very often. I maybe you can increase my 200 followers that I have. But yeah, that’s also Digital_shovel.

[00:16:40] Lauren Turton: Thank you so much for your time. Right now I’m with Allen, who is an NFT broker and producer. Alan, how are you today?

[00:16:47] Alan: Good. I’m very good. It’s really exciting to be here. Just, you know, Miami’s become this epicenter for crypto and now NFTs and there’s various NFT platforms, operating out of Miami or here often. Obviously, we just had BZL a couple of weeks ago, which we knew it was going to happen. He was saying it even over a year ago that our basil this year, or that you could want to just pass, it’s going to be huge with NFTs. And it’s just obviously, and if he’s at just blown up in the last couple of months.
And it’s just exciting to be part of it, you know? And I’ve been involved in a piece for about a year and a half and it’s just really exciting. Yeah.

[00:17:22] Lauren Turton: I’m curious to know, before you pivoted into NFTs about a year and a half ago, what were you doing before?

[00:17:27] Alan: Well, I’m an attorney. I do intellectual property law.
So copyright, trademark, trade secrets, et cetera. And, you know, with NFTs people were like, well, as a lawyer, why are you so interested NFTs, because you know, with smart contract, Blockchain and art, it’s the perfect infusion of a lot of the elements that embody and are part of intellectual property, you know, copyright trademark all rolled into one in many ways. And you know, and obviously NFTs are non fungible token, is changing how copyright is done, you know, and or how copyright is going to take place and how you can do copyright. And you know, there’s a lot of, obviously people ask me every day is an NFT automatically copywritten.

It depends some aren’t, some are, so you know, right off the bat, you know, one for the NFT artist to still own their copyright to their NFT. But the NFT is going to allow them to be able to control how it’s distributed and make royalties from that for sure.

[00:18:25] Lauren Turton: Since we’re on the topic of law, this is your wheel house.
Are there any other tips that you can give the freedom with NFTs audience who are in the NFT space? And they’re curious about the law aspect of NFTs?

[00:18:40] Alan: Well, I would say much like a lot of people are talking about it’s important to do your research and educate yourself. See what’s going on with the USPTO, which is United States patent and trademark office.

See what they’re seeing and what’s a safe way, or what’s the best way to like look into NFTs, invests into NFTs,and buy NFTs, you know, I would say if you’re an artist who’s looking to make NFTs, it’s very important to educate yourself on the cost because you may mint an NFT.
It may cost you more than what you sell it for. Not everybody off the bat is people or one NFT artists or another, you know, a lot of artists are new for one opinion of his space. It’s going to cost a little bit of money, you know, I mean, the gas prices, the gas fees right out to mint an NFT can cost several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on what NFT you’re going to make.
And, you know, anybody can get on OpenSea, which is fine. I say that to a lot of artists go on OpenSea you know, look at the rates, see if you can, you know, mint your work of art. Digital work where that photograph or JPEG or a render or CGI effect. Great, but, you know, do your research, know what you’re going to pay?

Because you may only sell your NFT for a couple of dollars, a couple of hundred dollars, and it might not be worth minting it and having it as an NFT. So you definitely want to be well-informed and research that. And it’s also important to know, like everything artist’s objective. NFT’s are also very subjective in a lot of ways, you know, you may go on opensea and you may become, you hit, you know?
And then there’s other things, you know, look at Superrare, look at Rarible, look at eternity, look at these top NFT platforms and see what they’re doing. And it’s also important to see. Also, if you’re buying NFTs, you want to go on these main platforms cause they’re safer you know, you’re buying a minted NFTs, that are in a way regulated or, you know, the source that they’re coming from with certain platforms, like superrare, Rarible, OpenSea and eternity. And, you know, that’s just one way to go about it.

[00:20:40] Lauren Turton: What it is that you’re working on right now that you’re really excited about?

[00:20:44] Alan: Well, we did the DeLorean drop on eternity which went pretty well with two NFT artists that we work with. And it was a very cool automotive NFT. So I’m very curious, we’re working on various automotive entity projects, whichI don’t have liberty to discuss, but I think it’s very interesting to see how for me, how the entity space is going to not only change how art and copyright is done but it’s going to change the automotive industry. You know, whether you’re buying a BMW or a Porsche, it’s going to come with an NFT. What that NFT is going to be like at the fence, you know, is it gonna be an augmented, is it going to be an actual 3d rendered real time of your car that you’re gonna be able to put in the metaverse maybe, or just show off most likely.

So it’s interesting to see with the automotive community, these big major automotive brands, what’s going to happen to the future of the automotive industry. It’s going to add another layer of obviously what they’re seeing, which is you’re going to have element of the real world good. And then you’re going to have the digital good.

The NFT good. And it’s going to pair up, so there’s going to be a lot of pairing in the automotive world with NFTs, you know, and I think the question is, are they gonna do it with platforms? Are they going to do it in-house? How’s that going to be? You know right now we’re working in talking to several automotive companies about pairings and licensing with well-known NFT artist.
And a lot of the work that goes into it is, for the artists is, whether they’re rendering a certain car, you know, they have to work with the motor company and how they want it done. And certainly right now there’s not that many automotive companies that are doing it, but it’s going to be in house.
It’s going to be part of their system, their, you know, when you buy a car, it’s going to have NFT in it. You may be even in a dashboard. You know that you’re going to be able to pair up with a lot of devices, et cetera.

[00:22:38] Lauren Turton: And one last question, before we wrap this interview up, Alan, how do we get ahold of you?

[00:22:43] Alan: The best way to get ahold of me is my email, which is agoldstraj like John, agoldstraj@gmail.com.

[00:22:54] Lauren Turton: Are you in twitter or any of the platform?

[00:22:56] Alan: Oh yeah, on actually on Instagram @mrpopculture, which is with @mrpopculture under dash on Instagram.

[00:23:04] Lauren Turton: We’ll make sure to link that in the show notes.

Freedom with NFTs audience, you know, the drill, you know what to do ,as always get informed and get involved.

Connect with The North American Bitcoin Conference 2022 Interviewee:

Astronaut: https://astronaut.to/

Copper website: https://copper.co/

Luxury Bazaar website: https://www.luxurybazaar.com/

Distributed Ledger website: https://distributedledgerinc.com/

Digital Shovel Twitter and Telegram: @Digital_shovel

The Goldstar firm email: agoldstraj@gmail.com

Alan the Gold star firm Instagram: @mrpopculture

Connect with your host, Lauren Turton:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LaurenTurton_

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thelaurenturton

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenturton/

Website: Freedomwithnfts.com