Hello Mac, thanks for coming on! You’re with Diversity in Blockchain at our Philadelphia Chapter and I have a feeling you’re going to have some great insight for us. How you doing?

I hope so! I’m doing well!

Good good. So on our ChainChat series as you know, we ask each guest to leave a question for the next guest. The last question was from our very own Urvi Guglani, who’s going to be opening up our Singapore Chapter. Her question is, for you: What is the craziest thing that could happen in the Metaverse?

Good or bad? Honestly, I wouldn’t call this crazy, but I think the interpolarity between the metaverses is going to be fixed soon. And, you know, we don’t want to have everything in the same box, if you’re buying NFTs or whatever, right now, they’re specific for that world, but now I know Unity is creating a driver that’s allowing you to basically morph those into whatever world you go into, which should be really cool. I don’t know if it’s crazy or not, but there’s still a lot of fragmentation in Metaverses and even in the Blockchains themselves. I think once those walls are taken down, and there’s not so much friction between them, that’s really going to help with mass adoption. It’s on the cusp, but still new for some people. Not everybody wants to wear the VR headsets. Once it’s not like Oh, now I have to learn this over here, it becomes a bit more of a fluid experience. I don’t know if that’s crazy but I think it’s something I’m looking forward to. 

Listen on Spotify or continue reading below.

We need the Romans to come and build the roads between villages. 

Yeah like now we need a pass to get around while we think about how to be more strategic about it.

Aha! Tell us about your Blockchain, NFTs or Crypto background, whichever one you’re in!

I’m in all of them! I’ve been involved in crypto for almost nine years now, long before it all got popular and crazy. A bit of background on how I got into it: maybe nine years ago, my buddy said: What do you think about this thing, Bitcoin? I want to get into it.  I was like What are you talking about you’re crazy! But I looked into it and was like, OK, we can mine and maybe get into this. I’m a very technical person. I’ve built a lot of stuff, I share how to build this stuff, and I’m like the real-life MacGyver. I’ve honestly been taking things apart my whole entire life. I’ve worked for others and always liked doing stuff others didn’t do. So that’s what attracted me. My buddy and I, we bought one of these two miners off of eBay at a crazy price, paid a premium for them, and I took them apart. This is doable. Because I would take on and modify these things and get about 20-30% more out of each of them. These are ASIC miners, like the cylinder things if you’ve ever seen those, so this was the 2015/16 time. The next thing you know, I’ve bought US$600,000 worth of equipment, and my buddy did the same from Hong Kong, from the manufacturer BitMe, and we had to wait a few months for this to come over, and in the meantime, my bank was screaming What are you doing sending all this money to China? And I was like, I’m just going to do it. And I went for it. And then, I set up industrial mining centers. At one point, we were burning US$10,000 in electricity a month.

Wow! 

Wow, so that’s what US$1.2 million worth of equipment will get you! Along with the electricity costs, I really learned a ton there! I didn’t take them as they were, I was able to modify them and get more out of them, and I really understood them down to the low level. So really, what I’ve been doing is facilitating Layer 1 Blockchains for 8-9 years and understanding that level. Now fast forward to a few years ago, coming close to where we are now. I got more into the software space. We just recently launched MacNerd, our new Blockchain-only brand, solely focussed on Blockchain projects. Within the last year, we’ve done at least nine or ten Blockchain projects, ranging from an NFT project which we built on Cardano, a handful of stuff on BSC, and some on Ethereum, Polygonmatic, we’re currently building one of the largest NFT collections on the planet, and that ends with serious engineering challenges so we’re just looking to push the limits of what Blockchain can do and be facilitators and builders on the networks. 

Amazing, so you’re one of the original miners who like solving these maths problems?

Well, I would say somebody already solved the math problem, but I figure out how to make it better. I’ve always had the skillset of understanding, looking at something, and knowing how to tweak and change things to improve it. Maybe due to my ADHD, you know. My superpower is that I can hyper-focus and do stuff that others usually don’t think about. I like that creativity. A little history on why that comes to be: I’m also a published musician, I’ve got 20 songs, but I used to be a semi-famous DJ, DJ MacGuyver, going around the world making this music and also doing some bigger events and that’s where my creative side comes from. I like to be creative and analytical, and you know, the Blockchain is great because it’s combining creatives for the first time with technology and really shortening the gap, I think, from where the artist is to where the community is, whereas before we always had record labels in between things trying to make their money too. Even things like Spotify make all the money, and the end artist usually makes next to nothing. They don’t even have any direct communication with those, so I think the whole NFT space and the creator economy thing about this is really cool. I’m too old to DJing in clubs, I guess. My wife would never stand for it, I have a six-year-old and am happily married, and it’s in my past, but I still understand the struggles that they go through. We’re just building stuff there. As I said, we’re actually working on a large NFT collection and basically selling them to Walmart, Target, and Barnes and Noble. I’m working with publicly traded companies and facilitating the tech side. They have all the distribution and everything in place, and what we’re doing is combining physical and digital assets with, like, imagine a 12” vinyl record now there’s a way to get a digital record, a digital version of that you can play. Basically a Spotify on the Blockchain. That was just the first step. We’re building a whole community, this is a multi-year endeavor, and we’re just building out the first legs of it that allow us right now because of the holidays, we’re doing 16 classic songs and basically, now you have a 16-song NFT playlist. It’s on the blockchain, and if you want the record, you can have it too. That’s going to be launched in a few weeks, my dev team has really been cranking hard to get that out the door. But really, what we’re trying to do is make these systems so that it’s repeatable and also at scale. We already got Walmart and Target committed to this. We’re working with some of the biggest names. Like that Christmas thing is nothing, we’re working on a Black History thing next, which is all like Tupac’s estate involved, and Biggie Smalls, unreleased music that we’re going to put on the Blockchain, so it’s kind of cool. We’re just excited to be part of this creator economy that’s coming up and doing the tech.

Cool! Do you keep up with the news?

CZ Binance follows me on Twitter, this whole FTX thing…

What is going on?

Right now, down to the minute. FTX is insolvent, they backed their whole entire value with a token that they created that is basically vaporware, and they lost everybody’s money. So the thing is, Binance is about to buy them, but now they might not because he’s looking further into their financials, and it’s not looking good. (Interview held before we knew what we now know).

And FTX US is separate from the rest of the world, right?

There are stadiums named after FTX, this is a big deal; the whole market is really falling to the floor, there’s so much liquidity going on and people dumping to get out of FTX, and FTX has halted any withdrawals as well, as an ethical hacker I try and get people informed about what’s going on, especially in a fair way, I feel bad for a lot of people that got stuck in FTX and can’t get their money out. This further cements my ideas on avoiding centralized exchanges and using decentralized exchanges, and don’t trust anybody. If it’s not your private keys, it’s not your crypto. They’re learning that lesson now.

Can you tell me the name of a couple of decentralized exchanges that you’d use?

Any, I mean you can use UNISWAP, don’t use one where you have to go into the exchange and sign in, do it in a decentralized manner, use hardware wallets, use Blockchain as it was meant to be used. Peer-to-peer, there doesn’t have to be an intermediary. These exchanges can go out of business, or they can do something that’s unsavory. These are companies bound by an organization. You’d want to get into something that’s not bound by a company or organization. Honestly, it’s still in infancy, but DAOs, I see that coming up a little bit more where there’s some governance where rules can be set, but they’re all driven by the community, not by a single person. It’s still kind of new. We actually worked on a couple of DAOs. It’s a unique space to be in. 

Tell me a bit more about the ethical hacking!

We’re part of some organizations to do with law enforcement. We basically try… Let me give you an example. Because of my background, we have people who come at us and may have lost crypto. Like right now, I’m helping a former law enforcement guy in Brooklyn. He had US$100,000 stolen in crypto. He basically had a Coinbase account, and he bought a hardware wallet. I really commend him on that. But then he took a picture of his private key and sent it to his iCloud, and in three days, that US$100,000 was drained from his account. 

Who could have taken that then, someone at Apple?

I had to find out where that money went. I’ve worked with many cybersecurity companies who just don’t really get into the forensics of Blockchain, they hired me for that. I found out where it went. I contacted the exchange. I got correspondence, but you need someone to deal with AML or anti-money laundering, so I had to refer that up to my partners, that could deal with it. We’re not a cybersecurity company, we’re a security-conscious cyber development company. 

Are there laws in place in the US to prosecute cases like these?

It’s a gray area at the moment. The law is having a hard time catching up with the tech. The tech is ahead of the law. We’re moving at such a voracious pace, some metrics that people might not know; the fastest-growing technology before the Blockchain was the internet, which grew at about 66% yearly. Pretty good. Blockchain is 113% year over year. Double in gross speed. So it’s hard to even keep up even for me as someone who lives and breathes the blockchain. I’m just treading water. It’s so fast, you can imagine, these governments are still four, five, six years behind where the technology is. And it’s the whole world competing, it’s not like it’s just one country anymore. We’ve never seen something so voracious in its pace. It’s something that just trying to keep up is hard enough. So the law is antiquated. Especially here in America, we tend to have more of a draconian financial system compared to some other parts of the world, which are driven by banks and central organizations that just want to make more profit. We’re starting to see cracks in that with inflation now. I think inflation is going not just in the US but worldwide. Crypto is the equalizer in that area. I think once the big boys start realizing that, that will be a game changer, a paradigm shift. It’s already starting to happen, you got Google cloud which we built some stuff on top of, and we had to build a whole node structure just to support this big NFT project we had, we no longer have to do that because Google is going to be offering Blockchain nodes as a service with Solana and I think Matic, so these companies are basically adopting. Instagram three or four days ago announced they’re going to use Polygonmatic to mint NFTs on their App. 

I read something about that.

It’s interesting because they’ve been building on the cryptocurrency Libra for about five years, and it’s going nowhere, so they thought of adopting a public Blockchain. It’s pretty cool. I see the adoption getting there, obviously, crypto is falling through the floor now, but it’s very cyclical. These are panic-button people. The people that are smart enough are not selling. The last thing you want to do is sell now because you’ll take a double tax. You’ll take a loss, and the transaction fees are through the roof now because everybody is using the network to sell. So why would you waste your money? This is not going to last, everybody is afraid, and they’re running out the doors, but this technology is not going anywhere. So, I can tell you another topic here. Recently, there has been a huge uptick in malicious smart contracts. Have you heard that you know what I’m talking about?

Yeah, like smart contracts execute a transaction automatically, right?

Yeah, so like, I go to UNISWAP, and I say, Hey, Seth connected his wallet. When you accept all those things that Smart Contract can do, good or bad, most people are not technical and will not go and read the smart contract and understand it, even if they can read it. OpenSea was really vulnerable to this for a while. They had the whole transfer thing where you’d go to a free mint, and there’d be clones of those mints kind of thing, you’d connect to the wrong one, you’d allow that smart contract to do whatever they want now, and the next thing you know they’re just draining your wallet of your NFTs and also your crypto. So you know, once you get to that, how do you get unbound from it? A smart contract is bound to your address. What do you do? So there are a couple of sites you can go to out there, ones like unrekt.io and a couple of others, to connect your smart wallet to unbind that smart contract, but here’s the thing: you have to do it so quickly because as soon as that money comes in, they’re automatically trying to take it out. So you have to either write code to do it, or you have to have both windows open simultaneously, throw the money in there, and boom! So you have to do it quickly to get ahead of the guys trying to take the money from you. 

For the average person, that’s not going to be…

They’re not going to figure that out. Unfortunately, I have friends who have lost hundreds and thousands of dollars in this area.

How would you recommend for a ‘normal’ person to know… like any Blockchain website or what to look for to help with all this?

So, first of all, you want to create a layer between you and your normal work habits. So the first thing to do is, you know, have your computer and use Metamask on your computer that you use for everyday work. I say that because if you get hit with malware or a virus, and somebody takes over your computer, they have access to your Metamask. And you can get drained that way. I create a burner wallet or a layer between me and my real wallet or where my stuff is stored. Even have an airgap laptop that does nothing but crypto. Nothing else. Create some separation and layers and think about, you know, if you’re going to go and do an NFT mint, have a wallet that you send that money for the mint to, and you mint from that wallet, and that’s your exposed wallet to the internet, so if something happens to that, you don’t lose everything in your stockpile. It’s creating a separation line.

For you, it’s probably the most simple question, but you should have two wallets then? One that is like a transitional kind of wallet and another one where you store everything? 

Absolutely, I have a couple like that, Metamask, and then on my phone, I have a trust wallet. I send what I need to that trust wallet when I’m going to do things. 

What’s the difference between a trust wallet and…?

A trust wallet is an open-source wallet that supports multiple blockchains on your iPhone or Android. It’s one of the easiest ones to use because most of these wallets have this Hey, I’m Polygon, or Hey, I’m Ethereum etcetera. These allow you to have one centralized wallet that you can have your stuff on, but once you buy something, do not keep it on that. You want to move it, transition it. Think of it like one wallet is the reserve and the other you’re giving a budget to do things with. 

Like when you go on vacation, you keep $20 in your pocket in case you get robbed and your wallet in another pocket.

Same concept. Mitigating risk.

So just to be clear, this burner wallet would be your Metamask?

Yeah, but if you want to separate your computer or whatever it is, don’t have all your eggs in one basket. You then move your eggs to these burner wallets, do your business with them, interact with the public blockchain in different ways, and then move it back to the other one. And it gives you that safety net and leaves something in between. So if that got compromised, there’s minimal impact on what you’ve got to lose. 

So insightful. Thank you. You could be here for hours repeating yourself to me XD

What about diversity then? What made you interested in joining Diversity in Blockchain’s Philadelphia Chapter?

I’m all about diversification, even in my own company. I think it’s really important to have different perspectives from different people, and there’s not as much diversification in Blockchain and the computer and software industry as a whole. Mostly, they tend to be a little immature in some areas, and you want to have different perspectives on some things from women and all other backgrounds. I embrace that and think it’s an important aspect. So I was attracted to the organization and thought it was a good fit for who I am as a person. 

Great to have you in the gang! What barriers do you think there are to entry for most people?

The complexity. The problem is a classic problem in software or anything. Security always. These are the most secure systems and networks on the planet, and they start with really high encryption levels and enforce people to deal with things that we probably never even had to think about before. So I think education, and getting people to understand what the real value of this is, and understand that fiat currencies suffer something that’s — people used to think of the dollar as something solid, and was never going to change and was backed by something of value. Still, I think people realize now, with all this inflation, that’s actually not true, and these systems are backed by transparency and fairness, and I’m all about that. I believe Blockchain is a source of truth, so I’m attracted to this space. I believe it’s the next evolution of the internet. And I’ve been building the internet for decades. I think the people that don’t get it think that everybody that’s into crypto is a little bit crazy. Most people think crypto and Bitcoin is like another technology. It’s a paradigm shift, it’s just such a self-aware network that can do things that others can never do, and I’ve seen every country on the planet try to stop this, and every bank and company in the world try to stop this, but it’s anti-fragile. That alone is attractive property. To get rid of bitcoin or any of these cryptocurrencies, you would have to get rid of all internet and power simultaneously. And that’s never going to happen. It’s almost like a virus, but a good one! Our world is corrupt and run by evil people only looking to take advantage of others, and I think that kind of time has passed. We’re no longer dealing with kingdoms and these kinds of organizations that are top-down. This is a bit more of an equalizer, which attracts me too. I love the CyberPunk era, and being a hacker, these things are attractive to me. Not about taking advantage of things but understanding how things can be fair. 

Completely agree. It’s more like a social movement, isn’t it?

It really is, I think it is a social movement more than anything else, and it’s the natural progression of where we’re meant to be. Are we really meant to be fighting each other, taking advantage of each other? I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel right. I think there’s more to this. I’m happy it’s gotten this far because when I got involved in this, none of this whole — I helped promote the first NFT day on Twitter before it was even a thing. And seeing where that’s going is pretty amazing, so it’s cool to see these things get their own life. And I’ve been here since pretty early, since it was a laughable thing. I’d get up and talk about Bitcoin and hear sniggers, and people laugh at it, and you don’t hear that so much anymore. You’re hearing people ask how to get involved and ask how to learn. I always stuck to my guns and did my thing, and that’s who I am. Somebody has got to do it!

Nice, thank you for teaching us because I’m sure many people will find a lot of value in everything you’ve been saying, I certainly have.

If I got one person to understand how important this technology is compared to everything else out there, I did my job.

Alright, would you leave me with a question for the next guest?

I knew this was coming! I’ve been trying to think of something this whole time! 

It doesn’t have to be even remotely tech!

I’m on the spot here! Who is my next audience?

I don’t even know yet! Steer away from the technical, just in case.

Hmm. I guess ask them: What impact do they think this Blockchain technology could have in their lives? 

From their perspective. What can this technology really do for me? I see it not only from a financial perspective. I see my driver’s license as an NFT, the keys to my house! NFTs are not valued on the little cool image, the value is the box that encapsulates that image. It’s like a rubber stamp or a validator. Honestly, I think there will be a massive pushback in the political world, but countries and organizations, because these are communities, that’s really what this Blockchain thing is, a community-driven technology, and I think that’s going to get into every aspect of our lives in the future. It really is just the next evolution of the internet. 

The more people involved in it, the more we can push for that political and legislative support. 

If I’d had a bit more time, I could have come up with a better question!

I think it’s perfect because people might know it can do this and it can do that, but whether people actually think about what it can do for them, I don’t know if people are aware. 

Thank you so much for such an insightful chat, I am really grateful for your time, and we’ll be in touch! I’ll let you know when we are ready to publish.

Absolutely, I appreciate your time, too, and enjoyed the conversation.

Me too! Speak to you soon.