Becca:

[0:02] Welcome to Vaginance! This week we are doing our updates and we’re going to do a nice little dive into cryptocurrency. What it is, why we love it or are interested in it or are not interested in it, and kind of opening Pandora’s box there by getting an intro into why it’s a part of our lives in any capacity. Yeah, I’m Becca.

Taylor:
[0:26] I’m Taylor.

Jewels:

[0:26] I’m Jewels.

Maggie:
[0:27] And Maggie!

Becca:
[0:28] Yeah, and we’re happy to be your vaginancial advisors today. Trust us with your life, but don’t trust us with financial decisions because we are not financial advisors, we’re vaginancial advisors. Yeah. So should we, let’s start with some financial updates? Should we? Should we, should we, should we?

Jewels:
[0:47] Sort of on topic for today, we’ve had quite a substantial investment in cryptocurrency and it’s been a fun quarter. Oh boy.

Becca:
[0:55] Yeah.

Jewels:
[0:57] So we’ve made a fair amount of money paper gains because it’s still in the market. But the one that I’m most excited about is, I think I mentioned this to y’all before, but I bought like $700 of data back around Halloween for about 68 cents per token.

Becca:
[1:04] Mm. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jewels:
[1:15] It is now at like 10.71 – like $10.71.

Becca:
[1:17] Oh holy shit!

Taylor:
[1:20] Holy fuck, wait, can you tell us what’s that gain? Can you tell us?

Jewels:
[1:24] And it’s going to bounce around. Of course it might go way back down. But – that means like my $700 was worth like 11.5 grand.

Becca:
[1:31] Oh my God! Are you going to sell? What you gonna do?

Taylor:
[1:31] Holy fuck!

Jewels:
[1:34] No, I’m holding it. I think it’s got a long way to go because it’s not even available on all of the exchanges yet. So it will probably go live on Coinbase later this year and have another big jump. So, I’m not in any rush on that, it was just a lot more growth than I expected for the time frame.

Becca:
[1:42] Julie!

Taylor:
[1:43] Holy fuck, that’s amazing! Oh my God, it’s so exciting. You’re like ooh – what should I buy?!

Becca:
[1:46] Oh that gave me the adrenaline rush of making gains! Okay – what platform did you buy that one on?

Jewels:
[1:59] So that’s a little bit more complicated because it wasn’t on any exchanges that I had access to. So what I had to do was buy a different cryptocurrency. I think I bought Ethereum, and then I used a platform called SimpleSwap where I can send Ethereum to somebody who has data to sell. So it’s a marketplace, but not one of the main exchanges. So simpleswap.io I think is the site, but sometimes you can get access to tokens that aren’t available in other places if you use that or if you use something like Uniswap, which is another one.

Becca:

[2:31] So what made you trust data enough to put $700 in at 68 cents a token.

Jewels:
[2:39] I wish I trusted it so much more because I would have put a lot more than $700 in and that was purely speculative on a hot tip from my older brother.

Becca:
[2:43] No, that’s a lot!

Jewels:

[2:45] Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor:
[2:48] But okay, so I want to know a little bit more about cryptocurrency. I’ve been super jealous about how much you all know. Becca has been diving deep into it with her new man and I’m kind of jealous of y’all’s weird crypto love.

Becca:
[3:00] We’re in deep baby.

Taylor:
[3:03] So I want to know more!

Jewels:
[3:03] Can you tell us what your pillow talk is like? Is it just all finances right now?

Taylor:

[3:08] Yeah, give us the crypto…. like crypto sexy talk.

Becca:
[3:09] That’s pretty much it, mostly our sexual discussions are around crypto.

Taylor:
[3:19] Yeah.

Becca:
[3:20] Um, we just kind of like list different tokens like in each other’s ear like ‘What if flow tokens were available in the US?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh my God!’

Taylor:
[3:33] Would you bite my bitcoin? I don’t know what the bitcoin seems to be in this scenario? I don’t know.

Jewels:
[3:36] It’s definitely a nipple.

Becca:
[3:42] Yeah.

Maggie:
[3:43] Maybe a breast.

Taylor:
[3:43] Yeah. Yeah.

Becca:
[3:45] Yeah. The answer’s yes.

Taylor:
[3:47] Yeah. Cool, cool.

Jewels:
[3:49] Okay, I’m sorry, Taylor, you were asking a real question.

Taylor:
[3:53] No, I mean who cares? No, I just want to know, so like I’ve listened to a couple of podcasts about it just in general, but give me like kind of like a pitch like what’s the overview, what’s cryptocurrency, why does it matter?

Becca:
[4:15] Um, I feel like Julie can do this much more succinctly and eloquently.

Taylor:
[4:18] No, you know so much!

Jewels:
[4:20] Becca, I was really going to lean on you because I feel like because I’m a software engineer, I get so… I either get like way deep in the weeds or I don’t say anything of use. I’m missing the middle part, which is useful.

Becca:
[4:24] That has literally never been true of you. Um, but yeah so the appeal of cryptocurrency is several things. But one is you can track over the history of the US Dollar, it’s loss of value right, due to inflation and so cryptocurrency is an online non fiat currency that’s available through blockchain systems. That is entirely non what’s the word when you can’t copy something? Non-counterfeitable. That’s what we’ll call it. Because of blockchain technology, it’s a checks and balances system that actually works on like the government checks and balances system. Yeah, so cryptocurrency, it’s a broad concept, there’s lots of different coins. It’s not just bitcoin but I think that’s what we hear the most about.

Taylor:
[5:23] And anyone can make them right? Usually it’s like people that are in blockchains.

Becca:
[5:26] Yeah, I mean basically anyone could make one. That’s kind of the beauty of it because it’s entirely decentralized and that’s what people are going for, right? Like, rather than the fed printing out money, this is a decentralized version of finance that is not currently subject to a ton of government regulation, though Coinbase is one of the platforms. That’s an exception of that.

Taylor:
[5:57] It’s so interesting to me because the little that I understand about it, what’s really fascinating is how, like, the government doesn’t have a say, like, they don’t get to decide this is what we’re like, this is what we’re putting out, and this is what it’s worth, and whatever, whatever, it’s completely regulated kind of by the people and whoever wants to participate in it, which is kind of really cool, but Becca had also sent me this video which still haunts my dreams about… we should really share it because it’s so good.

Becca:
[6:27] It’s such a good one, we need to. We need to add it in the links.

Taylor:
[6:31] It’s just basically an overview of the Federal Reserve, because once we start talking about cryptocurrency, I always go back to that question of like, what is even money?
Like, what is it even, what is it? And it’s fucking nonsense it turns out. Money is a shared delusion, just like government and culture in society.

Maggie:
[6:51] To bring back our favorite book, but isn’t that like one of the first chapters of ‘ Your Money or Your Life’? They’re like, ‘What is money?’ And they’re like, ‘it’s nothing’

Taylor:
[6:58] Yes, it’s nothing and that’s what’s crazy is like, you always think, you know, if you don’t really know anything about money, you just assume it is a government regulated, government created thing and it’s not. Like, money is literally printed by the Federal Reserve, which is not part of the government, it’s just a group of fucking old white dudes who back in the 1930s decided we’re going to trick people into allowing us to print and manage money and that is exactly what they did. And they lend money to the government and then they print money, lend it to the government and then charge them interest on that money that is lended out and they basically control all of inflation, all of the interest rates. Like, it’s fucking crazy when you actually learn what it is, you’re like why do we all just agree to this?

Becca:
[7:49] Yeah. It’s bananas.

Taylor:
[7:50] It’s bananas. Yeah, money means nothing. It’s all just fucking white dudes like controlling everything, which we already knew. But when you really learn it, you’re like, wow, this is fucked up.

Becca:
[8:01] Yeah, so crypto is theoretically a way out, right? There’s… you could listen to endless podcasts and read endless articles about which tokens are going to take us into the new age and and how crypto is gonna affect society. But I don’t know, at this point I’m really convinced it’s an inevitability. Um, but I don’t know shit about shit, so I’m just putting a little money in. The best advice I got from some random fucking podcast was that if you think, maybe, like two percent of you believes that cryptocurrency is a reasonable investment and cryptocurrency might be the future of our financial systems, then maybe put two percent of your money into cryptocurrency. If, you know, four percent of you believes that, then maybe put four percent in. And I thought that was a really helpful way to see it. So that’s kind of how I’m moving forward with my investment thing.

Taylor:
[9:04] And how did you get kind of started when you started getting… like what interested you about it that really hooked you and then how did you get going?

Maggie:
[9:12] So, you have 75% of your money in crypto right now?

Becca:
[9:14] Oh no, I’ve 89%. No, I have a very small number.

Taylor:
[9:17] Okay.

Becca:
[9:19] Well, I’ve been interested for a while. I have a friend in Houston who has been mining Ethereum in his backyard for a while. But what made me actually put….

Taylor:
[9:26] Make him sound like a psychopath! Oh, I’m sorry real quick to interject, every time you mention it makes me think of ‘A Beautiful Mind’ where he’s like in the shed scribbling on the walls.

Becca:
[9:37] No, you need to see his bedroom. He’s got like a white board behind his door. He’s like, ‘Look! It’s like all those children.`’ No, but what made me put like rubber to the road? Is that the right phrase? Put rubber to the road? Boots to the ground? I don’t know – was I believe I was tipsy on the porch, tipsy on the porch with Zach and Julie and I was like, all right, I need cryptocurrency. Is there any way ya’ll can help me set up an account right now? And they’re like, like right now right now? I was like, yeah right now like I don’t want to not do it right now and Zach and Julie were like, yeah, I mean we can do that and I was like, yeah, just whatever y’all have, set me up with that, just do that for me, thank you. And they very kindly, (I believe Zach at least was also tipsy) were kind enough to do it and it took what, like 18 minutes. It didn’t take any time at all. And now I’ve been introduced to a sweet, beautiful volatile 24/7 market that I can check on at any moment of the day and it’s going to be different.

Taylor:
[10:36] Oh yeah that’s the other big difference right between that and like the stock market, it’s like those 24, it’s like 24 hour casino.

Becca:
[10:38] Oh, it’s so sexy, right? Yes. Like any moment you’re like, oh let’s just look at my crypto.
So yeah, I have a account through Coinbase that I filter through a program that Zach and Julie use called Shrimpy that auto rebalances your accounts. And then I have another account through Kraken where right now I’m like buying and holding exclusively Ethereum, but I’m using my friend, my you know, psychopath and Houston’s friend. He’s not a psychopath, he’s extremely normal and lovely. He’s got an algorithm that he developed that I am trying to incorporate in my investments because I think it’s fun to do something that he’s passionate about.

Maggie:
[11:23] I would like to take the last three minutes of what you said and show it to Becca… two years ago Becca? Six months ago Becca? And be like ‘Who do you think saying this right now?

Taylor:
[11:37] I think you would be convinced that like an alien had infiltrated your body.

Becca:
[11:41] She’s dating who?

Taylor:
[11:42] And she sold her Jeep? And she’s buying Ethereum?!

Jewels:
[11:51] On a platform called Kraken?!

Becca:
[11:54] Yeah, man my life is amazing. Yeah. Yeah, that would be cool.

Maggie:
[11:54] I remember very specifically sitting in Zach and Julie’s living room when Bitcoin was about $200 and Zach was like Maggie, I think you should spend some money on this bitcoin thing. And I was like, well I have about $1,000 to burn but that sounds dumb as shit. And, I didn’t and it went up to… what’s it at? $30,000 right now.

Taylor:
[12:21] For one bitcoin? So what was the one thing that like really hooked you? Do you remember like.. did you read an article or like what really got your fucking juices going about crypto? What got you hot and heavy?

Becca:

[12:34] Um I don’t know, I mean I talked to Julie about it and I think I just started hearing… like the more you dive into finance, the more you hear all these new words and I think I’ve just been reading and hearing more and more about cryptocurrency to where I was like, oh it feels really silly that I’m like not even remotely involved in crypto. And so I just wanted to… I’d like, opened the Coinbase account a few days before I talked to Zach and Julie. Uh, and then I hadn’t done shit with it because I was so intimidated so I just like needed their help.

Taylor:
[13:03] Is Coinbase… Do they have an app? Is it easy to use?

Becca:
[13:05] Yeah it’s fairly easy to use as far as cryptocurrency apps go, I’m not entirely… and maybe Julie can speak otherwise. I’m not wildly impressed with the cryptocurrency app that I’ve come across. Um, I think you have to know about cryptocurrency to be able to use it well, but after a quick Google and reading tutorials, you can do it.

Taylor:
[13:21] Okay. It is interesting. I’ve only been like very lightly reading about it. But I’ve noticed that it’s coming up more and more in just regular financial news, like I’m not even seeking it out, I’m just seeing it. You know, I shared that one article with ya’ll which was about designing for crypto and we need to make more usable crypto apps and websites because more people… that’s when you know it’s like really getting out there when they’re talking about creating more websites and apps for it. But also, I’ve been reading that, banks and all these different financial institutions are starting to buy up crypto like crazy and even though on, you know socially they’re saying like oh crypto fuck that it’s not important because you know they’re all like most of their money is in US currency and other currencies but kind of behind the doors they’re all buying crypto right now because they also believe it’s going to be huge really, even if it might like… they want to get in on it. So it’s not just like individuals, it’s corporations and companies and banks that are starting to buy crypto and invest in it. Which is really interesting.

Jewels:
[14:35] Yes, there’s been a lot of institutional money and private and publicly held companies moving into that market this year.

Taylor:

[14:42] Yeah.

Jewels:
[14:42] And I think that a big part of that is we we should probably take a step back and talk about the technology that cryptocurrencies are built on because that’s so much of why this is a big thing.

Taylor:
[14:45] Yeah, I was just going to ask why crypto over normal U. S. currency despite like… outside of the regulations government regulations, what’s so great about crypto?

Becca:
[15:03] Yeah, walk us through blockchain Julie.

Jewels:
[15:04] Let’s talk about blockchain for a moment. So this is basically the actual software that is being used to track these currencies. But the software is built with all the rules about the currency. So where Taylor was talking about the Federal Reserve managing the US money, that means that they can change how much money exists which then causes inflation or deflation and other things, they control the interest rates, all of that. Whereas with blockchain, when they create a cryptocurrency like bitcoin, they set a fixed amount of bitcoin that was ever going to exist in all of time and it’s slowly coming to market. So once all of it’s in the market that’s it. Which means that that’s a fixed asset and there will never be any more of it. So at that point the value starts going up as opposed to the U. S. Dollar this year where we’re seeing they made a lot more money so we’re having inflation so the value’s going down, and that’s controlled by humans so they can keep changing it. When you invest in bitcoin, you know there’s only ever going to be so much. So that’s a really big difference and it’s run all by the software. There’s a small team that develops the software but they’re really just there to make sure that if there’s like a bug in the software it gets addressed. But the principles of how the currency is going to operate for the entirety of time is already built in at the start and it’s managed by the software, not by humans. So there’s a lot more trust base in the system. And the way that blockchain itself works is basically, instead of having a bank that keeps track of everyone’s transactions, like one place, what happens is the log of transactions gets actually stored on different computers all over the world, so if I want to make a transaction, like I want to send Taylor money, I can send that up as a request and then a bunch of these different computers record that transaction and add it to the chain and then when Taylor goes to get the money and she goes ‘Yeah I should have some money in there’, it goes and checks all of these different ledgers that are copies of the exact same transaction on a bunch of different computers and basically validates – at least 10 of our computers said that that is true and then releases the money to Taylor. So it’s a trust list system where you’re not relying on a bank who could be corrupt or a government who could be corrupt, it’s all tracked in a decentralized fashion by a lot of different people.

Taylor:

[17:25] And isn’t the fee really really low compared to bank fees?

Jewels:
[17:30] It can be. This is this is something that’s kind of dynamic and it depends on the different cryptocurrencies.

Taylor:
[17:33] Mhm. Yes.

Jewels:
[17:37] But there are also a lot of them are working like Ethereum, their team is working really hard on a new version of Ethereum that sort of brings the transaction costs down because some of their transaction costs have actually gotten quite high. But the general principle is that yes, because you’re removing a middleman and replacing it with a software based middleman, you can get really, really small margins on transaction costs.

Taylor:
[17:57] Right. Yeah. I think I was reading an article that was talking about bitcoin specifically and how you know, theoretically if you bought a house and used bitcoin, all of the you know fees associated with buying a house could potentially be much lower because you’re not going through a bank or you know, traditional means.

Jewels:
[18:28] Yeah, you’re not paying escrow officers to maintain to be the middleman were like, I give you the money and they give you the papers for the house, and then you, once you have both give them to the other parties instead, the software can do that itself.

Taylor:
[18:29] Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I love I love the idea of a software that replaces, banks, you know, because you know how so many jobs are being automated right now and it’s kind of, I mean we’ve talked about this before and I know Julie especially talks about a lot is how especially the working class and a lot, so many jobs are just all going to automation, and it’s usually affecting poorer people. I love the idea of a like automating jobs that affect rich people.

Jewels:
[19:13] It’s going to be an interesting world.

Becca:

[19:16] Julie, do you have any thoughts on like… one thought I had about cryptocurrency is since the amount of tokens is finite. Not for all tokens. I guess. I think dogecoin is not necessarily finite. But if it’s finite and I think with bitcoin there’s going to be what? 21 million tokens total and I think 19 million already mined, something along those lines. So how do you build an equitable economy when the people who are early adopters have access to these coins? And if cryptocurrency becomes the future and if bitcoin is a major player, how can there be any sort of equitable distribution of funds if people who bought it at $10, you know, 10 years ago have the bulk of the volume. Does that make sense?

Jewels:
[20:11] Yeah, it’s a very, very powerful and important question and I don’t think there’s necessarily a perfect answer, but I think there are definitely going to be some early adopters, we already have seen it, who have made a ton of money from this. There’s also a lot of people who were early adopters who lost their access to their bitcoin because they didn’t know wallet technology, Coinbase necessarily exist back then. All of those types of things. So there aren’t as many of those people as… we are still technically in the early adoption cycle, which is why I think it’s so important for more women and people of color and not just your tech bros to actually be getting into the market, sooner rather than later because we’re still in the early adoption cycle. But there’s definitely going to be some inequities in one way replacing our current system with a new set of oligarchs.

Becca:

[21:03] Yeah right, they’re just tech bro oligarchs. But it is interesting and one thing that Zach and Julie have brought up multiple times, but also that if you read any kind of intro stuff to crypto, they’ll bring up that developing countries that have more unstable currencies are starting to turn their gaze towards crypto because it’s a stable currency where they can put their money. So that was something that I thought was really alluring about it was that it gives the opportunity for a stable place to hold your money. I think I read today that the lira looks like it’s collapsing or certainly losing value very rapidly in Turkey. So there’s a big purchasing of cryptocurrency going on in Turkey. So it makes me wonder if it’s going to be, you know, upper class or whatever tech folks who have access, but then it’s going to be developing nations who out of necessity and not speculation, like us, right out of necessity or buying cryptocurrency, and the last adopters are going to be the people who are comfortable but not rich in fiat currency, who finally start to purchase crypto. I don’t know. I think it might be interesting.

Taylor:
[22:19] Fiat is like physical money, right? Like the traditional US… like US dollar government.

Becca:
[22:20] Yeah, fiat is, yeah, exactly. Government backed.

Jewels:

[22:24] Well, it may still be digital currency if it’s fiat because in the US, most of our transactions are done electronically, but it’s government managed.

Taylor:
[22:30] Right. Right, okay. That is a really interesting dynamic because you do wonder, the people that are creating these currencies just like the people who create anything ,you’re going to have, you know, natural bias when it comes to that. And also they’re going to be the first adopters. So, for example you create a currency that you believe is going to make a lot of money. You are the one that has first access to that, right? So is that how these engineers, software engineers are kind of paying themselves back is, ‘Okay, I create 100,000, you know, coins of this, my currency, I’m going to keep…you know, how does that work? Like, they keep 10% and then release the rest, or they decide how much they want to keep for themselves. Like, how do you pay yourself as an engineer who creates blockchain?

Jewels:
[23:25] It varies from currency to currency and that has been a big PR issue for some of them. But most people are very up front with like, this is how we’re compensating our team. Often, times like a lot of the new ones, they might get a stake at the beginning, like a certain amount, but very similar to stock options, they may not be able to exercise them so they just have to stick them in storage and leave them there for five or 10 years. So they have to believe in the long term viability of that cryptocurrency, which is really… that gives the trust to the cryptocurrency.

Maggie:
[24:01] One thing I was going to say and I want to preface it by saying that I’m not an economist, so there’s a good chance that I have a vast misunderstanding of this article that I read, but it had nothing with cryptocurrency. It was about this group that was kind of like a babysitting group where they created a currency system that was like $1 equals one night of babysitting, essentially. And then this parent group shared it, and the system crashed multiple times because they couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working, and it’s because they had a finite amount of money in there.
And so once people got it, human behavior, they started hoarding it and no one was spending it. So the system crashed. And I wonder if that could potentially happen with finite cryptocurrency.

Becca:
[24:56] Mm.

Jewels:
[24:57] So that sort of has to do with the rate at which it comes to market increases the market supply. So you can go on any of the coin market tracking websites and see not only the price, but notice the market cap, and that tells you how much supply is basically in circulation. And because you can show these things fractionally, the value per a smaller amount of bitcoin just goes up. But there’s still enough liquidity in the market to facilitate that because of the rate that they set.

Maggie:
[25:28] Right, But what about in 100 years when, you know, you’ve had 21 million, you said, bitcoin in the market and that’s all that’s been in there for X amount of time. Like, I feel like over time that could become an issue.

Jewels:
[25:43] Okay so yes, but I think the biggest difference is that in the babysitting marketplace there was one service being provided and one good being purchased. So if there weren’t enough transactions, people weren’t sharing the currency back and forth. But if bitcoin or another cryptocurrency becomes a predominant currency that we actually use to buy our groceries, pay for houses, that type of stuff. Those transactions are going to be happening so there’s enough transaction volume to create an exchange of currency.

Taylor:
[26:15] Especially if there is incentive, right? Like, say they could incentivize you to use bitcoin instead of US currency by saying, you know, our fees are lower, our.. you know whatever else to incentivize people… I don’t know.

Jewels:
[26:31] Yeah so the biggest difference there is that like there’s one currency in each of those markets but the babysitting market only has one thing happening. And if the transaction volume’s not there then money is not changing hands.

Jewels:
[26:41] But the US dollar, people don’t just hoard it and keep it in savings because they actually have to spend it because it’s the predominant way to facilitate all of these different transactions.

Taylor:
[26:47] Right. Yeah. And the Nomad.. what is the podcast? The nomad podcast, the one that you were in?

Jewels:
[26:57] Nomad & Spice.

Taylor:
[26:58] Nomad & Spice – highly recommended. We should definitely share that link because it’s really great. The woman that they interviewed who was kind of their expert on cryptocurrency said that she actually pays for her rent in bitcoin because her landlord accepts it. So I thought that was really cool because it’s a direct transaction of paying a bill and you don’t have to go through a middleman to do it.

Maggie:
[27:22] I do love the story of early bitcoin investors buying things like a cup of coffee for four bitcoin. It’s like it’s like $100,000 now.

Taylor:
[27:33] Oh my God. Really? That’s a thing. Really?

Maggie:
[27:35] Yeah, because bitcoin you said was worth like, a penny, or less than a penny and so people would have a bunch of bitcoin and then you could, there’s… when we were in college, there were restaurants on the drag that you could pay for your food in bitcoin.

Taylor:
[27:40] Really? I didn’t know that.

Maggie:
[27:52] Yeah, there’s a gas station down the street that has a bitcoin ATM.

Taylor:
[27:57] I’ve never even noticed them. honestly.

Becca:
[28:00] I think they’re new, and even the Lost Well has a bitcoin, or crypto ATM. Isn’t that bizarro?

Taylor:
[28:05] Really?

Taylor:
[28:08] Let me just take out $46,000 or one bitcoin.

Becca:

[28:09] Just one little bitcoin.

Taylor:
[28:09] That’s crazy. That’s really cool. I should start trying to notice that more.

Maggie:
[28:13] There are some businesses that will have a little sign outside of the front door that says we accept bitcoin, we accept Visa, Mastercard, cash and bitcoin.

Taylor:

[28:28] Wow, that’s crazy. So I guess if you’re a business, are there special equipment or machines you have to buy that will like translate like the amount of bitcoin?

Maggie:
[28:40] I don’t know much about it. I’m assuming you have to have a different account.

Taylor:
[28:43] Right? So, like if you’re a coffee shop and you accept bitcoin and someone wants to pay with bitcoin, how do they do that at a coffee shop? Is there like an app and you scan it like Apple Pay? Like how do you actually buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin?

Jewels:
[28:57] So the way that transactions actually work is that you have a wallet which has basically your user name and password. It’s not called that but – username and password and then they also have a wallet and they give you the address of the wallet and you send it. So it’s very similar actually to how your debit card works. Your debit card has an address on it, a number and you swipe it and when you swipe it it goes to their merchant account’s address. So whatever you’re using, like Coinbase, you can send it through that. You just put in their wallet address.

Taylor:
[29:27] So if we wanted to, for example, sell merchandise on our store and we wanted to accept bitcoin, which we should. How… I guess there’s programs that will just, if you put in like this is a $20 T-shirt, it’ll tell you how much that’s worth in bitcoin.

Jewels:
[29:49] Yeah you could either price it separately or have it go through the market price where it’ll calculate like, okay it’s $20 So it’s X bitcoin right now. There are tools and technologies that have been built around this, like shopping cards, right? When you want to pay with a credit card,
you go to a website and they use a shopping cart software that actually does the connection between your account and the other account. So there are shopping cart softwares that are built to connect your wallet for cryptocurrency with the merchant’s wallet.

Taylor:

[30:19] I love it. That was a good overview. I think.

Becca:
[30:22] Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s super fucking fascinating.

Taylor:
[30:25] I think we should definitely accept delirium… is it delirium? Ethereum. We should definitely be accepting Ethereum and bitcoin at our online shop.

Maggie:
[30:33] We could make a coin called delirium, though.

Becca:
[30:36] Oh we should. I want to make a coin before I die.

Taylor:
[30:36] Ooh, that would be cool. You absolutely should. We should also have a badge for anyone that invests in cryptocurrency called delirium.

Becca:
[30:42] Fuck yes! Called delirium. Congrats on your delirium.

Jewels:
[30:52] So I think that there… I would love to hear why you’re so interested in Ethereum, but I do think it’s it’s an interesting cryptocurrency because of the software it’s built on which is Ethereum. The software was actually designed as a platform for other software applications to be built on it. So if you think about something like WordPress, a basic software for building websites, but any software engineer can build more complex features, like a shopping cart that builds on top of WordPress, and Ethereum is the same way where it is this transaction ledger that is available for other software engineers to build other tools on top of it. So for example, smart contracts is a really big thing on Ethereum, and basically what that is, let’s say Carvana, instead of having to use banks as a middleman or escrow accounts for buying houses, you could just write a software that says okay, when Becca’s car gets picked up, that gets recorded in the transaction log and then Carvana puts money into this wallet that’s run by the smart contract. When both of those things have happened, then send the money to Becca and send the car to Carvana. But it’s all done by the software, so that could be a software application that Carvana builds that uses the Ethereum ledger and records a transaction on Ethereum.

Becca:

[32:15] Well, so I think that’s pretty much like you hit the nail on the head there. So, okay, the reason I’m like very hot on Ethereum is A.) I am easily influenced by those around me and because Travis is a big old bowl of Ethereum he certainly wooed me with it. But it’s beyond that. I mean, Ethereum is the program on which they build NFTs, right? And NFTs are the new hotness, the new hot commodity, non fungible tokens. The new way to buy and sell digital art, among other things. I think there’s a big future in NFTs. However you personally feel about buying an NFT or a digital collectors basketball card.

Taylor:
[33:02] We should totally talk about that because that’s a huge thing that’s come up lately.

Becca:
[33:03] Yeah, huge. It is huge and it’s tied to Ethereum. So I think that it’s because… unless I’m wrong, please correct me if I am. I think that’s a big reason to kind of go hard on Ethereum right now because I think there’s a big future in that and there’s a big present in that, Jesus Christ.

Taylor:
[33:19] Real quick, explain what NFTs are.

Becca:
[33:22] Non-fungible tokens are basically a digital piece of work, and that could be a visual art or it could be an audible art or whatever. And it’s basically you’re getting a unique genuine artifact, right? But it’s digital.

Taylor:

[33:42] Right, that has like a serial number essentially tied to it.

Becca:
[33:44] Yeah. Exactly. Right. So you can’t counterfeit it. So yeah, it’s just got all the appeal of a collector’s item but it’s digital and can be traded.

Taylor:
[33:53] Without having a bunch of junk around your house. Yeah. Who needs more crap.

Becca:
[33:55] Yeah. You don’t want that fucking shit. You want that junk in your phone.

Taylor:
[33:58] Exactly. I just love… this past two weeks when NFTs have really blown up because of the basketball cards, every sentence basically in our household now ends with ‘We should make that into an NFT.’

Becca:
[34:10] We should make that an NFT. We’ve had a lot of really good ideas. We need to make our podcast episodes into NFTs. We need to make pictures of our boobs into NFTs. We keep hovering around the nudes, shockingly.

Taylor:
[34:16] Yeah. Mostly nude art is what we’ve been discussing.

Maggie:
[34:27] You could probably sell some of this. If you did create something like that, you could just market it to Onlyfans.

Taylor:
[34:31] Our tokens should be NFTs. Like, when you earn a token, it should be your token.

Becca:
[34:33] That’s a great idea, like our little badges. That’s a great idea.

Taylor:
[34:39] Yeah, that’s I meant, our badges. Our badges should be NFTs.

Becca:
[34:45] Badge NFTs.

Taylor:
[34:45] Uh, someone figure out how to make an NFT.

Becca:
[34:48] On it. Absolutely. Well, which… I forget, which one of us is the software engineer?

Taylor:
[34:50] Oh, I can’t remember.

Jewels:
[34:58] Done. Done, consider it done. Okay, so the NFTs are really interesting because obviously what we’re seeing, the initial batch of NFTs is a lot of digital art and a lot of collector, digital collector items like the NBA basketball videos and stuff like that. But the real killer use case for these things is NFTs that represent physical assets in the real world. So that could be your house. Instead of having to go to a title company and have them verify that the person selling the house actually owns the rights to sell it and that you can actually buy it, you get rid of the title company and you have an NFT that has recorded on the ledger that this house belongs to so and so, or this group of people and so when there’s going to be a transaction to sell it, those people sign off on the token being sold to the other person in exchange for money.

Becca:
[35:49] Okay, See that makes so much more sense than having like a fucking physical Social Security card, which I still think is the most archaic thing in the history of time. Why can you not lose your Social Security card? That’s crazy.

Taylor:

[36:03] That is insane, hold on to this tiny slip of paper for your entire life, and if you lose it, you’re fucked.

Becca:
[36:03] Yeah, and like why do you need your driver’s license with you? Like you need your driver’s license present even though we have infinite records of this existing. This is crazy. That’s all I’m saying.

Jewels:
[36:18] Right, so you could have an NFT that stores the data for your driver’s license. So if you get pulled over you tap your little phone with your NFT driver’s license wallet on the officers tablet and it transfers and gives access and is like, ‘Oh yeah this is Becca.’ So I think the physical assets being represented by tokens is actually a much bigger impact on the broader society but what we’re seeing in the initial use cases is very art focused or collector’s item focused.

Becca:
[36:44] Yeah, which makes sense from like an initial initiative.

Jewels:

[36:51] Yeah, because it’s very low stakes, right?

Taylor:
[36:52] Initially.

Becca:
[36:54] From the legal standard.

Jewels:
[36:54] Some of them have actually gone for a ton of money. But in general a lot of them, especially the earliest ones that were sold, were very low stakes, low cost items to prove the concept that we could start transferring things like car titles and house titles and those types of things on to a blockchain ledger.

Maggie:
[37:14] Becca, I heard something funny on the news that you just reminded me of. It was about a serious topic, but, this lady was like, ‘It’s been going on for a long time, and you know what? Even before that!’ I was like, that’s hilarious. She was talking about a really serious topic though and it was just like, do I laugh? Do I not laugh? It was funny though.

Becca:
[37:34] That’s an incredible line. I’m going to write that out right now.

Taylor:
[37:41] Going on for a really long time, and even before that. It’s funnier the more I think about it.

Jewels:

[37:58] Come lose some money in crypto with me.

Becca:
[37:58] It seems like you’re being pretty successful.

Taylor:
[38:01] That is the most, like appealing line. That needs to be like a marketing campaign for bitcoin.

Maggie:

[38:02] Your sexy lace socks Julie. Stop it.

Becca:
[38:15] Go to our website vaginance.com, you can leave us a voice message that we might even play on an episode in the future. So if you ever want to hear yourself on Vaginance, you should go to our website and leave us a message with your love for us or with any questions you have, whatever you want. You can also go to our instagram @vaginancepodcast and check out what we’ve been posting. We’ve been trying to post some educational stuff. We try to post a good book we’ve been reading regularly.

Taylor:
[38:47] Becca has been killing it on Instagram.

Becca:

[38:49] Becca’s been trying her best.

Taylor:

[38:50] No, I honestly, it’s funny because I’ll look at the Vaginance Instagram and I’ll be screenshotting stuff that I need to look up later because I’m like, oh, that’s really good information. All the memes make me chuckle. It’s very good. And I really do deeply appreciate you taking that on.

Becca:
[39:09] Thank you.

Taylor:
[39:10] It means a lot to me because I’m really glad I don’t have to do it because I know how hard it is.

Becca:
[39:13] I kind of love it. I enjoy it a lot.

Taylor:
[39:19] I’m really glad you do because it would only cause me stress if I had to do it.

Becca:

[39:22] Yeah. And then what else do we want people to do? Send us a message over anything, we want to hear about your life.

Taylor:
[39:25] Yeah, please just tell us you exist. I feel like we’re kind of talking to a void sometimes where I’m like, I want people, if anyone is listening, please let us know.

Becca:
[39:31] Yeah. We want to hear about your financial accomplishments or the thoughts you’ve had about maybe moving forward with potential financial accomplishments. We want to send you postcards.

Taylor:
[39:38] One of the biggest things that I have really, really loved doing is just hearing from our friends who feel obligated to listen to our podcast, suckers. But a lot of them have made huge financial improvements in their lives, like our opening up, you know, investing accounts and paying attention to their 401K and it’s incredible just within our circle of friends how many people have started really seriously looking at their finances.

Becca:
[40:13] Yeah.