Technical and Media Advisor Jay Addison with Steven Michaels of the Digital Currency Institute & Founding Member of the San Diego Bitcoin Assocation. Steven Michaels is a Bitcoin consultant, investor and entrepreneur. He has been the president of the Digital Currency Institute, founding member of the San Diego Bitcoin Association, and co-organizer of the San Diego and Orange County Bitcoin Meetup Groups. Steven is a strong advocate for technologies that enable the protection of individual property rights.
Transcript
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this is jay addison from crypto biz magazine we are live in las vegas at inside bitcoins with stephen michaels president of the digital currency institute and founding member of the san diego bitcoin association how you doing today stephen fantastic thank you for having me here remittance market is often cited as one of the best uses for bitcoin why do you think we haven't seen it take off yet and what needs to be done to make it happen sure absolutely number one problem in the remittance world is the the old chicken and the egg problem is um having exchange points at uh each end of the transmission so uh give you a quick example uh some folks has been documented in in different videos how they sent money to africa uh in the form of bitcoin and they can't find a local exchange partner there's no liquidity on that other end yes so uh so that's the big challenge is finding uh exchange points on each end of the transaction that makes sense what countries do you see bitcoin remittances making a big impact on first uh first i would see uh you know every you know anything south america south of the border south of the equator we go into um places like uh developing world ethiopia ethiopia philippines uh you know you get into the south african areas where you have m-pesa which is a currency built off of cell phone minutes oh yeah i've heard about that so these are all areas that are ripe for uh opportunity to go in with bitcoin and uh but again it's still very early days and uh developing the infrastructure is going to be key it is in the future do you see altcoins with any additional features over bitcoin staying around um i i i i think they will be around i don't know how significant of an impact they will play other than niche communities and niche markets uh i prefer to use the term uh as far as future coins that will have the most impact uh i would call them extended coins and what i mean by that is coins that are leveraged off of the bitcoin blockchain and uh extend the usability of bitcoin itself so what in the current generation of let's call them extended coins or all coins excites you sure right now there's a couple of things that uh a couple of currencies that that sound very interesting one is uh counterparty which was uh created uh based by uh the the the funders by burning bitcoin and exchanging it for counterparty the xcp currency and interesting things are happening there another thing i'm anxiously waiting for is a currency system called open transactions and i believe that'll bring a whole lot of usability that just may uh make a lot of the others mostly irrelevant sounds good you're an organizer of the san diego bitcoin meetup how's the growth of your meetup being this year and with the consistently declining price what do you expect in the next year yeah so it's interesting uh we get more activity when price is up and less one down but each time we end up with more than when we started so we started the meetup group about two years ago with uh maybe one or two people showing up on a weekly basis and uh of course we peaked in uh you know this last early january with uh 50 60 people coming to a meeting fantastic and but we've held on to a big chunk of them even with the price decline we're in the 30 plus regular attendees and uh and we have a very strong core group of bitcoin fans that's exciting how many certifications has your company issued so the digital currency institute is one of our projects that we launched as a proof of concept a few months ago and uh and so with that we've certified probably about half a dozen or so consultants the goal being to help the average bitcoin enthusiast or technology person have a third party accreditation or third party certification that they actually uh know a little bit about what they're talking about and they can monetize that when they go out and consult for their clients we recently turned over the day-to-day development now that we've proved the concept and we've seen a demand uh we've turned it over to a very capable individual by the name of alex burkhart who will be the new president as of yesterday and he's already fast at work putting these systems into place lots of experience with leadership certification programs and security expert as well he's a longtime bitcoin miner so he brings a lot to the to the digital currency institute fantastic so what's the pass and fail rate of the test so pass and fail right it just depends on who's taking it obviously so um if you've been anywhere in the bitcoin space for the last couple of years the test would be a breeze for you um and uh but if you're brand new and you don't understand some of the core concepts you're going to have a hard time with it but with that said if you're in a someone who's passionate about bitcoin this is going to be a fairly easy easy exam right now now we're we're you know that was our proof of concept so we'll be uh changing up the format as we go forward so other than your code of ethics do you have any anything in place that prevents someone cheating on the test like you know getting my mom to write the test as an example sure absolutely so uh the test itself is uh in its current form is basically an open book test so the questions are there they can go research them they can take them uh retake the test as many times as they want and the purpose there was not to disqualify but to qualify people so we let them see what they don't know then they can go study what they don't know and and and uh see the areas that we feel are important and uh bring themselves up to a competent level to where they can now qualify as a certified consultant is there any time limit on these tests uh no time limit so um very open-ended and uh and it's designed again to help educate you know that format will probably change as we go forward though and we will offer different types of certifications starting with a very basic one and then specializations thereafter fantastic let me ask you a question that we ask everyone january 1st 2015 just guessing what do you think the price of bitcoin is going to be uh a lot higher than it is now if i had to pick a number i would say we'd be close to the all-time highs which 1100 range fantastic people are going to love you for that one if somebody wants to get a hold of you get a hold of the digital currency institute or even come to the san diego bitcoin meetup that one's pretty straightforward how would they get ahold of you stephen sure the easiest way is visit our website at digital currency digitalcurrencyinstitute.org and and any submissions there will come across my desk and they'll make it to me great thanks kindly for your time today absolutely thanks for having me magazine live from mechler media's inside bitcoins conference in las vegas remember to subscribe to crypto biz magazine at cryptobizmag.com follow us on twitter at cryptobizmag thanks for joining us and learn more at 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