Making blockchain real: Interview with Jeremy Gardner

As I said in my previous article, I managed to catch Jeremy Gardner on the Startup Battle. Preparing for the interview, I read a huge number of articles, watched gigabytes of video with him, found all his social networks. Especially Instagram. Going through the feed I saw photos from Kiev and decided to write a comment “See you at the Startup Battle.”

A few hours later … you should’ve seen my surprised face … I got a personal message from him! … And so we started to talk.

In such an informal way of communication, Jeremy was even more open, than I expected.

After a little talk, I said I would be very grateful if we could talk in person and we agreed for an interview.

So meet Jeremy Gardner — occasional founder (@AugurProject, @BlockchainEDU), frequent adventurer, perpetual strategist. Building and investing at @BlockchainCap as an EIR/Associate.’

I heard you didn’t believe in bitcoin and someday you just invested in it. What the reason for that?

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in bitcoin. First I heard about the Silk Road and I thought it was much more interesting than bitcoin was, bitcoin was just a means to use the Silk Road. I didn’t learn about the technology. This was 2012.

And then I revisited bitcoin in 2013 as the price, all of a sudden, was at $100 or $200. I looked at it, when it was only $10 and I was like ‘this was an interesting opportunity’, so I bought some bitcoin then and, I thought it was a good investment for the time being and then it went up to $1000 and I sold it off.

Bitcoin just seemed like a bubble, it didn’t seem like something that could last. This took me moving in with a young bitcoin entrepreneur who lived and breathed for Bitcoin. He convinced me to learn about the technology, and I realized it had staying power. So, it took a long time for me to go from believing that bitcoin was good for buying drugs and good for speculations, to acknowledging it was a world changing technology. Only then I began to believe in the technology as a whole.

Did you learn about bitcoin or blockchain first?

This was in early 2014, nobody was talking about blockchain technology yet. It was still all about cryptocurrency. What I identified was the ability to frictionlessly exchange values which is so much more interesting to me than an unstoppable currency. And so yeah, that’s when I caught the blockchain bug but I wouldn’t start using the term “blockchain” for another year.

After this you’ve built The Blockchain Education Network. How do you see it in ten years?

I am the chairman of the board and I work with the students so my hope is that it is something that provides a grassroots foundation for young students to get involved in this industry, whether they’re in high school or in college. It gives them internship opportunities to learn about this technology in a real way.

Because even at schools where they may have one or two classes on bitcoin/blockchain tech, that’s not going to be the immersive sort of experience you need to enter this industry when you leave school. The hope is it can be sort of a launching pad for young people to get involved in this industry full time.

So in ten years from now I hope there will be multiple generations of students that have started and then gone into industry and later on brought new students in. I mean, we’ve seen a tremendous number of startups come out of the nonprofit including Augur which I started, and I would love to see more similar projects begin that way.

Well, I think BEN has a big potential to grow fast. What do you think about the financial system of different countries? Do you think the system will switch to blockchain technology soon?

You know, in the United States I can go to almost any major store, tap my phone against the payment system and pay with ApplePay. Bitcoin is not going to touch that for a long time. But then again, I was just in Munich, Germany where — it’s a developed country with fairly advanced payment systems — I couldn’t pay with my credit card anywhere. I mean every place required cash and I was walking around with a pounding change after paying for everything in cash there.

I understand why merchants don’t want to accept credit cards or charge backs hurt your bottom end, there are payment processing fees, none of that exist with bitcoin. So if you’re in a developed country and you understand what bitcoin is and you don’t want charge backs and you don’t want to accept credit cards, at least accept my bitcoin. I actually think there’s a use case in the developed world that I didn’t really previously appreciate until this trip over the past couple days. You know, even Ukraine has much better payment systems than I experienced in Germany.

In places like Africa, Latin America and South Asia — they’ve experienced hyperinflation, there’s a corruption, where you can’t trust your banks or the government, where they have pretty much skipped over credit cards and already have mobile money systems, that are run by the telecoms /IBM/large banks, those mobile money systems have a real opportunity to be replaced by bitcoin.

There will be exceptions, like I said, where merchants don’t want to accept credit cards but for the most part, the opportunity really lies where payment systems are less developed. You know they’re probably ten currencies in the world that are very reliable; the pound, the euro, the dollar, a handful of others and I think those currencies will probably exist in 50, 60, 70 or 100 years but whether other 170–180 currencies in the world exist in 50 to 100 years, is much less likely, bitcoin or some other international financial system might replace them.

Have you heard about Digital nomads?

I have now, yes.

What do you think about them and the digital nomad lifestyle?

It’s great. Actually I personally would never want to be a digital nomad. I like having a home where I leave all my things and I can go back to and I know I can always throw parties I’m in charge. But as a host of so many digital nomads, say come and live in my house for a week or a month or two months, it’s a very cool lifestyle and I really appreciate it and I do really respect the kind of Zen-like existence that it entails.

For me personally, I like having a home where I decorate, I have all the appliances exactly how I want it to be. But for those that don’t mind — the nomadic kind of lifestyle — I think it’s a great business model and I have dozens of people that I can send your way because my house is only so big.

How can you describe your living in Crypto Castle in one word?

Tumultuous. Crazy. It’s just incredibly unique.

I think you know how it gets portrayed in the media, it’s probably crazier.

Oh well….it’s more than just one word..haha

I think it’s impossible to use just 1 word for description.😅

It’s however somebody wants to envision it but it’s really just a bunch of people living together, which is always crazy, you know. I’ve lived on my own before. I’ve had my own homes where I’ve had a bunch of people living in and it’s always madness but there’s something particularly crazy and exciting about the fact that you have a bunch of people working on the technology that’s now getting validated.

Everybody knows that Vitalik Buterin sometimes visits the Crypto Castle. What do you think about the Ethereum and Buterin’s personality?

Vitalik is one of the smartest people in the world, I would bet on him any day of the week, I’m a huge fan of him as an individual and as an entrepreneur and as a leader. He’s incredibly young and very honest about the mistakes he makes and he’s very realistic about what he can and can’t accomplish. I will always be in his corner.

We did the first ICO on top of the Ethereum and Vitalik was an advisor to our project and he encouraged us to give building on Ethereum shot, and we did it and it ended up working out in a huge way. Vitalik became a very good friend of mine, I traveled China with him, he usually stays with me in San Francisco when he’s there.

Ethereum and the value proposition of it is so much different than what bitcoin is. But it is a remarkable technology and it’s one of the blockchain I’m most bullish on.

Who are that people who inspire you?

People like Vitalik, or my co-founder of Augur, Joey Crew — those are the guys who inspire me. I guess they are remarkable young people, I mean younger than me and yet building these technologies that are changing the world .

Elon Musk… you know these guys who have just built everything and do everything, people that try to do the masterful generalist, people that do a little bit of everything, that excites me more than anything. Because that’s what I like to do, I don’t like to focus singularly on just one thing. People that are able to accomplish a lot and focus on a lot of different things, I find to be really remarkable and probably the greatest inspiration.

Wow, my skin has crawled with excitement just now. Can I ask you for the advice for the Coliving Club team?

Sure. I think the biggest thing you’re going to have to figure out is if you’re going to issue your own token and you’re going to have people paying rent in that token, how do you make that token easy to buy and easy to make those payments with and something that people can reliably own and then transfer. It can be super difficult with the volatility of a floating cryptocurrency and so, you’ll have to figure that out.

You’re going to have to figure out the token economics, you know definitely, diversify outside of San Francisco real estate because San Francisco’s or Silicon Valley real estate is not going to appreciate very much in the next five to ten years, whereas there are all these emerging sort of markets like in Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, Phoenix. Obviously all over the world where there are burgeoning markets for entrepreneurs, for digital nomads that have as underlying businesses real estate for you guys, owning real estate that actually will appreciate in value and will be hugely beneficial long term.

Thanks, we appreciate this so much.

And recently I read the phrase on your LinkedIn account that you want to “change the world”. What’s the plan? =)

You know, I wrote that when I was 18 years old, I was starting a summer internship.

But you still went with it...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s kind of been my motto since I was 12 years old and when I was about 19 or 20 I came to this realization. I have to feel like I’m changing the world in a big way and I have to have fun — as long as I do those two things, I’ll always be happy.

And so my life has always been this kind of struggle to balance those two desires and obviously getting into the blockchain space was a real catalyst for change. The second I understood what bitcoin was, I understood the opportunity that it provided, I realized that this was my chance to change it. That if I can help make the blockchain technology work real, that could be a lasting impact that I’ll have.

Is this your main goal — reality of blockchain?

You know, that’s all I’m focused on, so whether it’s my magazine, my nonprofit, my venture capital, my entrepreneurship, everything I do is aimed towards making blockchain technology real. So as long as I can do that, I’ll feel like I can accomplish my goal but if you get back to me in ten years, who knows, blockchains may have already changed the world and I’ll have to do something different.

My backup plan if blockchain fails or if it becomes wildly successful is to help institute a universal basic income first in the United States. Once you’re done I’ll have to get back to it, we still have a lot of work to do in terms of blockchain technology.

Jeremy, I was so excited to meet with you. Hope your ideas become true. Keep in touch and thanks for your time.

My pleasure.

Thank you so much for taking some time to read this story!

Digital Nomad Magazine is a Coliving Club project with an aim to bring fresh and interesting stories to the #travelers #doers #hustlers #founders #destinycrafters

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