“Push yourself during bad times”

Chris MMCrypto talks about money and what to do in the darkest market times.

We recorded this conversation last summer (2018), and now it sounds more like a survival guide. But — no financial advice obviously.

— We heard that your father thought you’ve become a member of a sect. Is that true?

— It was definitely a lot of fun. We had a great time with the United Traders in Moscow. The [SECTA] show itself was very funny and entertaining, to be honest. My father actually really reached out to me, and he was a little bit concerned about this thing you asked me to wear for a few seconds (SECTA mantle). He sees it, and he asks me if I am in fact in some kind of a sect. But, of course, I am not, I will never be, so he calmed down.

Russia was amazing, Moscow was amazing! Davinci and I, we had a really cool time there representing MMCrypto and Davincij15. The hospitality was amazing, the food was amazing. We can actually say nothing bad about it. It was definitely one of the best weeks in crypto space.

Be free, add value to others

Chris Jaszczynski is a co-founder of MMCrypto project. The team developed their own set of criteria for ICO evaluation and grew into one of the most active crypto communities on YouTube and in Telegram.

— «MM» means «mastermind». We created a group of people who had the same goals, who wanted to achieve financial freedom and create something of value for other people. And then we started this mastermind thing and MMCrypto was a subsidiary of that — «mastermind crypto».

So combining common knowledge and creating something bigger out of there synergies, the participants of that mastermind have, and then adding value to other people were the common values which brought us to founding MMСrypto. These values we still have as you can see, we are creating free content for everyone.

Our goal is to be the biggest influencer in crypto in the whole world, that’s 100%. We want to reach, I don’t even want to say «influence», but reach as many people as possible. We are trying to push objective content, value-adding content.

We just saw that not only we can help people, it also helps us a lot to have a lot of influence. In this way it is also easier to network and you get to know very important people. We have collaborated with Eric Crown, Davincij15 joined our team, and that’s all of the spill of all spillover effects from the network effects we have developed. Аnd that’s why we want to be the biggest influencer in the space.

Push yourself during bad times

We posted videos also during the worst time of the bear market. And I think it was one of the major key points of our success. Many YouTubers just gave up, but we continuously pushed content because when everyone is giving up, this is the exact moment you should increase your human capital, your portfolio within the space. And that was what we understood. It wasn’t fun to do this, because also the views declined, the feedback declined, we got no money out of it.

Of course, we made losses in our portfolio but we kept on pushing ourselves and we definitely increased our network fivefold during the bear market. It was very easy to do that because there’s basically no competition at all.

And I would like to give that as advice for every reader of this interview.

During bad times it is very easy to network, it is very easy to expand your network and also to set the foundation for expanding your net worth.

Once the parabolic boom markup market comes, it will be definitely too late because you will have a full space of con artists and very dumb people and dumb money flowing into the space. Then you will not know what is left and right, and there will be basically no probability to grow.

Value time (and bitcoins)

I think about money being something like a voucher for value. And money being something like the lowest form value can take. I try to accumulate money to exchange it for time and also to have something like a measurement of how much value I’m adding.

I think the biggest thing money gave me and our team was freedom and time. And these are the most desirable things among beautiful things like family, friends and so on. You need time to enjoy the family. You need time to enjoy your friends. Аnd you need time and freedom, financial freedom to do what you like.

So in this regard I am saying that Bitcoin is the best form of money.

There are actually only two things in the whole universe that are very scarce. Time and bitcoins.

Once time has passed, you will never get it back. The only way would be to move faster than light, and this is not possible as far as I’m concerned. The only other thing which is also limited is Bitcoin. Because even gold can be mined, and once you have mined all the gold in the oceans, you can go into space and mine gold from asteroids. And this is the reason why I think Bitcoin is the best form of money. The best, the most scarce, the hardest and the most sound form of money.

This is a coin I will never sell. The reason for that is if it succeeds, it has at least the small probability of becoming the world’s reserve currency. And in this case you don’t even have to sell it. It will not matter how much Bitcoin is valued in US dollars because you can buy your goods and services with Bitcoin. This is definitely the best-case scenario, but if you are a true Bitcoin believer and you are young, then this could be an approach you can take. Also, during very bad times this could help you to hold your bitcoin and not sell it.

The winner takes it all

During my [economics] studies I knew how the financial system is flawed. I knew how it cannot sustain itself as it is right now with its quantitative easing. With all the debt I mean.

At least, if you only look at the student debt, that’s crazy. Or how money is generated day by day and by debt. It started this huge expansion of the monetary supply in 2008. It really started in 1971 when the Bretton Woods system collapsed and then in 2008 it really started like to expand crazily.

And I knew all these problems, but I didn’t know the solution. Once I heard about Bitcoin, and I dug a little bit into it, like one-two-three days after digging into it, I immediately understood that even though I didn’t grasp the whole picture at that point of time, I understood that this is the solution to all the problems I have learned during my self-study and also during my institutional studies. So that was I think it was a huge «aha!» moment within like the first one, two or three days of studying what Bitcoin is.

We think that only a very few selected cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or some altcoins will win in the long term. It’s something like what some people would refer to as «the winner takes it all» principle. We think that it might be maybe a small basket of cryptocurrencies taking the whole part.

Bitcoin has by far the highest probability of winning, in my opinion. The reason for this are the network effects. You also have network effects on a theory. For example, if you take the Metcalfe’s Law and you have a network, for example, of telephones, then the more telephones you have in the network, [the more people use them], the more value the whole network has. And in fact, exponentially.

As Bitcoin was the first mover, it had all the programmers, the brains juices of people contributing to the code. And then you’ll have the highest security in the Bitcoin blockchain and then the most merchants and so on. That’s network effects. And it’s very hard for newcomers to circumvent it and get more market share than Bitcoin.

For Ethereum the same. It was the first smart contract platform, so you have by far the most developers working on it. Even more than on Bitcoin because of all the debts and so on.

And that’s why Bitcoin and Ethereum, for example, have the biggest network effects. And those cryptocurrencies, even though they are already the highest capitalized ones, definitely have by far the highest chance of succeeding.

— Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash?

— The answer is Bitcoin. For Bitcoin Cash they have lower fees, bigger blocks, you can accommodate more transactions in a block. But the reason for this is only that it’s not used at all! And so if Bitcoin wouldn’t be used at all, the transactions would be dirt cheap also. So Bitcoin is by far the better choice when you want to go for long-term holdings. No financial advice obviously.

— Your attitude towards security tokens?

— We think it is important not to confuse STOs with cryptocurrencies, just as with most of the ICOs also. STOs are more or less something like an improvement of shares, of stocks, of equity of a company, for example. Or, I don’t know, something like shares which grants you a revenue share of the company’s success. And in this regard you have the pros of the liquidity, of the divisibility, and of the borderlessness of the tokens and at the same time you have the pros of the shares of the stock.

So we would rather call STOs an improvement of stocks rather than ICOs. We think it’s a nice thing, but it is definitely something completely different to ICOs and definitely something completely different to things like Bitcoin.

Where to store cryptocurrency?

The safest way would be the brain wallet where you just remember it with a twelve- or twenty-four word phrase. If you have a reliable brain, this is a very safe way to store it. Because Bitcoin is the first ever unconfiscatable asset. If you have a paper wallet, the police can come and they can confiscate it. If you have it in your brain, they can’t.

The second safest way would be a paper wallet offline generated and offline printed out. Through entropy, but you have to do it offline. There are several different sites you can do it. You go offline, then you move your mouse and with moving your mouse you can create an asset or a private key. And then you can print it out, and you have an offline generated offline printed out paper wallet that’s very safe.

And the third safest way which is the most convenient one would be a hardware wallet like a Ledger or the Trezor. But they are not open source so there are still some people who doubt their security. But there have been no cases up until now when there have been any crazy breaches except for the Trezor maybe a little bit. So this might be also a very convenient and comparably safe way to store your cryptocurrencies.

Favorite stories about Satoshi

About Satoshi, his true identity, I would like to mention two different stories.

So the first one is definitely about Davincij15 who is a part of our team. There’s this very viral Reddit post where people showed that he was talking about Bitcoin on YouTube already in 2011, that he started talking about gold in 2008, that his first video came out when the White Paper was released and things like that. Then he predicted the Mt.Gox crash and the all-time high for Bitcoin in 2017. Like all these different crazy kinds of things.

And then many people thought he’s Satoshi. And he’s still up until now saying also to me that he’s not Satoshi Nakamoto. So we believe him but that’s actually a very, very crazy story. And yeah, in our opinion, of course, he’s just a very great guy, very knowledgeable, very successful, but probably not Satoshi Nakamoto just as he also says it.

The second story is actually not a really crazy one. On the 28th which is yesterday* Hal Finney died four years ago. And that is a very good moment to talk about him because he was one of the very early adopters for Bitcoin.

On the 11th of January 2009, two days after the genesis block of Bitcoin, he tweeted out that he’s running Bitcoin. He was supporting it since the early days! Some people say how Finney was Satoshi Nakamoto. He was a part of the Satoshi Nakamoto group. And now it’s been four years for him since that, that’s a very great time to think about him, think about his true mission and sometimes forget about the prices. Because, yeah, maybe he was Satoshi. Even if he wasn’t, he was a true Bitcoin believer, and that’s a very great story.

*We recorded our conversation with Chris on August 29, 2019

About life

— Your global message not related to crypto?

— The most important message, which is not related to cryptocurrency, could be something like «Love your next one like yourself».

— If it was your last day, what would you be doing?

— I would visit my family. 100 percent.

— What else would you want to learn doing?

— The limiting factor is always time, and that’s the only reason why I’m not doing it. Maybe I will do it one day, and these things are learning Chinese, learning Russian and also being able to program things. It is important for me but I think that would take way too much time. For now I just want to get better in where I am right now. So I want to do better content, I want to reach more people with my team.

— What else do you enjoy in your life besides your main line of work?

— I don’t even call it work. I think my life, my free time, and what other people would consider work is exactly the same, it’s the exact same amount of joy. So I just enjoy every single second, no matter what I do: sleep, record a video, or I’m on Telegram chatting with our community, in a restaurant, or in any country traveling for what other people call work.

— Your super skill the world doesn’t know about yet?

— I think my biggest super skill is a very unconventional one. I think it is not being able to concentrate on things I don’t really enjoy. Some people call that ADHD. I just call it a super skill, and I think that’s what, what really gave me a lot of power. Because I wasn’t able to concentrate on anything that wasn’t serving my purpose.

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