Anything out of the box? You just want to go for it.
Hey everybody, welcome to another one of hashing it out's personal episodes.
And today we're actually going to get personal with Steven Pear from BitPay.
How you doing, Steven?
Good. How you doing, baby?
I'm, I'm plenty good, you know.
It's pretty good Monday here in the state.
You know, we just lost an hour of sleep, but I'm okay with it.
You know, I'm, I'm going, I'm having a good start to the week.
So if you could, either brief or long winded, however you want to tell stories you can,
because you reintroduce yourself to our audience here at hashing it out.
Sure. Well, my name is Steven Pear and I'm the co-founder and CEO of BitPay.
BitPay is a company that's been around since 2011
and processing crypto payments, starting with Bitcoin only.
It was the only crypto in those days, but we now support about 14 or so
different cryptocurrencies on the platform.
And yeah, been doing this for a little while now.
Absolutely.
You're, you're what they call in crypto and OG, right?
Or do you call yourself an OG or you can't now?
It's too, you know, it's not.
I guess so.
There's probably like at the first conference in 20, actually, 2011,
I think there was one in New York about 50 people showed up to that one.
So I guess that qualifies.
Nice.
Do you, well, have you personally found that it's, it's getting, is it getting harder
to, to run a company in crypto that kind of aligns with some of those original tenants
at crypto or is it just a welcome to challenge of how we had to adapt for
to cross that chasm into like, you know, mass adoption?
I don't, I don't think the challenge is any different than it was a decade ago
or so in that regard.
You know, it, you know, for me, at least it's just, you know, really always
been about, you know, this new technology we have and how, how it can be
applied to make, make, make things better for people.
Awesome.
I think it was like right around last year, the year before we're in crypto,
we started throwing around this phrase, custodial wallet, self custody,
third party custody.
I for one think those terms are a little too technical for the everyday
user, but we, we're, we've now embraced them.
We're going full tilt with them.
How does BitPay kind of allow users to maintain some of their custody of
their funds that they use with the BitPay wallet?
Yeah, we've always, you know, our wallet, we've always taken a self custodial
approach.
So, and part of that was really just mitigating our risk as a company.
You know, it was very unclear a decade or so ago, whether, you know,
a company like ours would be allowed to custody Bitcoin for somebody, you know,
and still be in compliance with regulations and whatnot.
And so, you know, for that reason, we didn't build a custodial service and
and also just, and part of it was just on principle, you know, we felt like, you
know, people should have possession of their own.
And then, yeah, so
we've always been in that sort of self custodial camp.
Also, we, you know, in those days, you had mountain gox and others that
were getting hacked and, you know, money stolen out of these accounts and
just for our own, not wanting to be like a target and wanting it to, you
know, take, take it really kind of a step at a time with our company and
what we were comfortable with doing.
We elected, you know, not to take, you know, custody of people's Bitcoin
because we felt like it would make us a target and, you know, it's a big
responsibility to take on that amount of, you know, a lot, a large
amount of deposits from people and manage that well from a cybersecurity
and also just, you know, as we see with what happened with the banks
we can just a, you know, investment perspective and making sure those
deposits are covered.
So sorry, my dogs are losing it right now.
I'm trying to keep them calm.
I'm not podcasting.
Okay.
All right.
So I'm so sorry about that.
So let's run it back just a little bit.
My dogs were going bananas are the very last part that you said
referencing what happened just this past weekend with a Silicon
Valley bank.
So I'm going to try to patch us in with another question and
hopefully Christian, you're going to be able to smooth this out.
My next question was going to be, do you, what was it that initially
pushed you to like, okay, you've learned about Bitcoin.
You fully understand it.
What was it that pushed you to like, okay, well, now I need to be the
founder of the largest Bitcoin processing company on the like, well,
I don't think that's what you thought.
Well, you first started, but like, why was it?
Why did you see such a need or okay, there needs to be bit more
Bitcoin payment processing that makes it easier for users,
but easy for the, you know, every day?
Yeah.
So my co-founder and I, Tony, he and I were, so we went to college
together.
I, you know, I'm a computer scientist, you know, study computer
science at Georgia Tech and was a big fan of something called
DigiCache back in the day.
That was like early 1990s and it was a cryptographic payment
system, the first cryptographic payment system.
And, but it was centralized and when DigiCache went bankrupt,
that payment system went away.
And, you know, that I got really intrigued by that notion.
And back in those days, there wasn't really a money for the
internet.
I mean, people were just starting to kind of use actually, they
weren't using credit card yet on the internet.
So there wasn't really a money for the payment system native
to the internet.
And I just got fascinated by that topic and then started
just studying money in general and central banking, the history
of central banking, all that kind of stuff and just, just
became very, you know, interested in the topic and, and, you
know, I had been sort of watching projects or seeking out
projects that were trying to do something in the aftermath of
DigiCache going bankrupt.
You know, I was just seeking out other projects that were kind
of trying to do something like that.
And even with DigiCache, it was one of these cryptography to
secure the payment system.
It was still centralized.
So they didn't really, DigiCache didn't really solve that
problem of centralization.
But when it went bankrupt, I think a lot of people started
thinking, well, how could you really build a payment system
for the internet that what didn't require like one company
to process all the payments?
And, and so, yeah, I just got fascinated with that and, you
know, by the time Bitcoin came around, you know, say fast
forward from early 1990s to now late 2010, you know, 2000s
and 2009 when the blockchain launched, I heard about Bitcoin.
I kind of dismissed it early on.
I think actually studying a lot about money and banking,
but, you know, I kind of thought in those with those
early headlines around Bitcoin, I was like running algorithm
and generating money.
And I was like, well, what's the constraint on that?
And, you know, I just didn't think much of it at the time.
And so it wasn't until late 2010 that really started studying.
I read the Satoshi white paper and then I realized what mining
was all about and securing the payment system and, and that's
when the light bulbs went off.
I was like, this could be really huge in it.
And it also coincided with, you know, with a point in time
where I was ready to get back into a small company.
I had the most fun in my career working in a small company
and, and so even prior to starting BitPay, I've been
and unrelated to Bitcoin.
I've been trying to think of, you know, different things,
like different small, you know, companies that I could start
different products I could build, you know, just started
had been thinking in that direction already.
And then in the aftermath of OA, I reconnected with Tony.
We knew we went to college together, knew each other from
college.
I reconnected with him around the aftermath of OA.
He and I were both trading options and different things
like that and just kind of reconnected.
Actually, we can bank Facebook for that.
And, and so, you know, I, I told him about, you know, Bitcoin
and probably early 2011 and, you know, he was kind of
dismissive of it at first as well.
And I started trying to, I was mining, you know, about all
the graphics cards in Atlanta and built up mining
rigs and that was a lot of fun.
But yeah, so one thing led to another, he and I started
talking about this.
I'm like, this, this is really, there's something here.
I want to figure out a company around this, a way that I can
do something and get back into a small company.
I didn't even necessarily need to start a company, but just
wanted to get back into a small company.
And this was a technology that was really exciting to me.
And, and so, you know, I tried a couple of different things
and Tony and I started talking a little bit more about it
and, you know, there are already quite a few exchanges.
There's Mt.
Gox and others at that time.
And we, we felt like we wanted to build something, a platform
that enabled people to, you know, utilize the technology for
what, what it was built for and derive, you know, real value
out of it as opposed to the exchanges at the time, which
are providing a valuable service, but they were catering
to people that were investing and speculating on the future
rather than, than actually creating that future.
And, and so that, that was Genesis of the idea.
Tony actually, you know, wrote me an email, you know, talking
about let's start a company called BitPay and,
actually I'm not sure you had thought of the name yet, but he
wrote an email, long email about the concept and, and I
replied back, sure, you know, let's do it.
And that was the start of the company.
Nice.
You know, May, April or May 2011.
Man, this is wild out time flies.
I have a few BitPay wallets since then.
Have you, I have a question for you.
You said that Tony was dismissive.
Now we're, you know, fast forward, what 12 years from 2011
or 13, come on, Math, do me right 12 years.
Yeah.
So do you, do you still find even with like, you know, you
all have had a min success at BitPay.
Do you still find people are dismissive when you first
introduced them to crypto to Bitcoin?
Oh, yeah.
Of course.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't, you know, back in the day, I used
to spend a lot of time, you know, explaining why this is,
you know, a big thing and an important thing.
But I do less and less of that.
There's a lot of people out there that do that and do it
well.
But yes, absolutely today, you know, it still, it still
happens, you know, different friends and different circles
or coins as I come across and, you know, that don't really
know a lot about it.
But actually it's just successful people and, I mean,
some of them like absolutely hate Bitcoin.
They're like, you know, they, they hate the concept of crypto
and they think it should be made illegal and banned and
what is crazy.
But these are otherwise intelligent people.
But, you know, they just don't have a really thought.
I don't, I don't think enough about it.
You know, there's a lot of tons of misconceptions out there
even still today.
Absolutely.
I found like the less friction that people have in, you know,
the traditional system, the more likely they are to be very
apprehensive and just some, like you said, dismissive.
Yeah, they're like, yeah, no, that's not.
And I have no problems.
I have no problems.
So, but anyways,
this was going to be outside of the box question.
Maybe you've heard it for me, Evan.
What's the most frivolous thing that you've bought with crypto
that now would be worth thousands of dollars.
And now it would be worth thousands of dollars.
Well,
I mean, I always joked in my house.
I'm sitting in right now.
It's a 20, 20 or 30 million house.
Oh my gosh.
It's my, you know,
well, yeah, I mean, but you know, I mean, you have to diversify.
You can't like, you know, as you, you know, I made an investment in Bitcoin
and it obviously grew.
And when that grows and it becomes a significant part of your, you know,
savings, you know, it'd be kind of a little bit foolish not to diversify
out of that.
And even if you do think there's a great chance it's going to go to a
million dollars one day, right?
Diversification is still a wise thing to do.
Even today, you know, it's like, I don't think about in those terms, but, but yeah,
you know, I joke it and I don't consider that's not really a frivolous purchase.
So, you know, I think a home is a good thing to own.
Oh, yeah, I'm talking about a bag of chips.
You got any thousand dollars?
You know, I just, I don't, I don't tend to be frivolous.
I don't, I don't buy the fancy cars or whatever.
And I'm just not, just not exciting in that way.
I guess.
Yeah, I'm trying to think what's what might be frivolous purchase along the way.
I mean, there are things that I've spent more money than I otherwise would have on,
of course, but maybe vacations and things like that.
We spend more on nowadays, but yeah, nothing.
Yeah.
Nothing that was just like off the floor.
See, I have some stomach churners in 2017.
I paid myself home bill and my rent and Bitcoin the whole year, just out of spite.
Really?
Like I was telling my family like, hi, you should have gone board.
Look at me now.
I told you this stuff is real and looking back on it now probably shouldn't have done that.
Well, a lot of people talk about spent since it's a really interesting topic
because everybody talks about, well, you should be a hotler and you shouldn't be spending
and all this kind of stuff.
And I always say, I always tell people you're not a true hotler unless you have nothing but Bitcoin to spend.
And if you want to eat, if you want to have lunch or dinner, you're going to have to spend Bitcoin
because it's all you have.
That's a true hotler.
Right.
So at some point you, you know, you're hunger outweighs the need to hang on to Bitcoin
and see it, see how far it will run.
So spending on that, well, if all you had was Bitcoin, then the only option you had to pay for that deal
was to use Bitcoin.
But people talk about, well, why would anybody want to spend anything when, you know,
when if the price is going to continue going up?
And the answer to that is, well, you know, you have to live your life.
You need to have a place to live.
You need to put food on the table.
You have to buy a car, transportation, vacations and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, you can't, you can't live in a house built out of Bitcoin.
You can't, you can't take vacations to, you know, Bitcoin Island.
It's like you've got to, you've got to spend it, right?
And in the case where you really wanted to hold on to the Bitcoin, you probably didn't have enough Bitcoin yet.
So you probably should have had a little more Bitcoin in your savings so that so that you would have felt good
about spending some of it, you know, when the price went up and, you know, pay that bill with Bitcoin.
So maybe you had a little too much Bitcoin that you wanted to get rid of.
Or what a lot of people do is they spend in replenish, which to me is a little silly.
If you know you're going to have a, you know, you could look out three months and you say,
I've got these bills and those bills and why not go ahead and get Bitcoin now and then use it to pay for things
and you don't necessarily need to replenish you using it to pay for things.
But even that sort of spending replenish idea is good in the sense that it forces you to go out and find places
that will accept your Bitcoin, that you can use it to buy things and it creates more activity and more,
you know, it helps the Bitcoin economy as it were.
And if you, everybody was out there trying to spend their Bitcoin on things,
even if they were spent and then replenish, you know, it might be a little extra work for you to do that replenishment
and do it that way.
But you're at least helping drive and, you know, create that Bitcoin economy.
And that's a good thing.
You know, it helps, you know, if everybody was doing that, then you'd have a lot more places that accepted Bitcoin
and, you know, it just makes it easier to live your life in crypto.
Absolutely.
It's slow moving.
I think there's two states now that even let you pay your taxes in Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Oh, was it Oklahoma and the Idaho?
Anyway, I know it's one of the northern states in the US, but anyway, I don't think I would.
But this will be while they're paying their taxes with Bitcoin.
One or two.
What?
So what?
There's thousands of tokens, right?
Like thousands of currencies, which is part of the hardest part of, you know, what I do,
podcasting everybody naturally.
My personal life comes to me.
And what should I do?
What?
How do I?
And I'm almost at a point where I'm like, don't talk to me about it.
I don't want to.
I'm not giving any advice.
You're just going to have to read the papers.
But out of the thousands of tokens and quote unquote currencies, bid pays kept kind of a lower number of ones that they process, which is a good thing.
I think like, how come you're so stringent about what you do and don't process and, you know, yeah, that's that's basically the question.
Why so stringent?
Well, I don't think we're going to see thousands of coins take off as payment methods.
And we try to look at the coins that have high market cap, a lot of interest, you know, Ethereum, you know, USDC, some of the stable coins that we support, like coin, Bitcoin cash, just ones that are sort of in the top of the list there in terms of market cap, because market cap is kind of a reflection of interest in adoption.
And then they need to also be good for actual payments.
So, but I don't think you're going to see like a thousand different payment options.
What you will see are, you know, more and more options, more and more ability to convert from one token to another.
That'll become easier and easier in either a centralized exchange or a decentralized exchange.
And what people will do is just they'll just need to convert into whichever token is accepted for payment.
And yeah, I think that's basically it.
So we kind of look at it like what do our merchants want?
What are they asking us for?
There have been a few we've added just because a profile merchant wanted it.
Not necessarily.
We had any conviction about it being, you know, being a great payment method or a great, you know, having a huge amount of adoption.
But it's kind of what are what do our customers want.
And oftentimes our customers are, you know, when we're in a competitive situation trying to win a customer.
They're looking at what we offer versus what another payment processor would offer.
And so we also have to take that into consideration that our competitors might be offering some tokens that we don't.
And that might matter to some of our customers.
And so, so yeah, that's that's kind of how we think about those things.
Nice. You know, and I think, you know, I'm definitely a proponent of Bitcoin specifically. I think.
Yeah, I think the technology there is solid. I think.
The, you know, it doesn't change very, you know, it's, it's pretty stable and how it works and well understood how it works and.
You know, and yet, you know, as bullish as I am on Bitcoin, it doesn't mean that Bitcoin is not susceptible to competition. Right. So,
mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's definitely a ossified or it's getting that way. Bitcoin is doesn't change very much.
And so for recently, this ordinal thing, which is boring, but for some reason, everyone is loving it.
And it's been a debate since forever, like, and in the blockchain.
I don't understand it. It's like, all right, we've always had this ability. We've had this ability forever. Now, they're doing a little bit more with it.
You know, having a little bit more capability to it. But you've always had this ability to stick random data into the blockchain and fill up blocks if you want to. But,
you know, but miners don't have to mind it, you know, and they can say that they can prioritize, you know, transactions, however they want to prioritize them.
And ultimately, people have to pay for that data going into the blockchain. And, you know, if they're willing to pay for, you know, you know, who can argue with that. All right.
I think you pretty much saying right now without me having to ask, I have not done. I have not participated in the ordinals Bitcoin and FT project.
That's okay. Because I haven't either. I don't see the, I don't know. NFTs are still trying to win me over, I guess.
Well, I think NFTs have, I mean, the use cases I think of are like ticketing, you buy a ticket to an event. That's an that can be represented as an NFT. You can build technology around that to, you know, issue the tickets to redeem the tickets, you know, to be able to trade them on secondary markets and things like that.
That's a, that's a very straightforward, in my opinion, use case for an NFT. What I don't get are the NFTs that are just pictures.
You know, there's what actual capability or what kind of right are you getting when you buy that NFT.
I mean, because other people can copy the image. It's not like there's any restrictions on that.
And, yeah, I think that's the question asked within a within NFT is like, what capability, what rights does this convert to me. If I own it.
What can I do with it either functionally can I make it do things to send a tea or can I, you know, I also think about like Jack Dorsey did an NFT right where he, I think auctioned off as an NFT is first tweet.
I'm like, well, everybody knows what his first tweet was, although I can't think of it off the top of head.
But what, why would you want to own that as an NFT? I mean, like, maybe, maybe if that NFT came with, and I think it, I think he sold it for like two and a half million dollars. It was crazy.
Yeah, but what so I always ask the question if, if with that NFT, you got the right to have lunch with Jack Dorsey once a year, then that's worth something. And so having that NFT would have that.
But as it is, what does it mean to own a tweet? I mean, especially when everybody knows what that tweet was.
I don't get it. Yeah. Maybe it's just that people are thinking creatively enough about that last mile. Like you mentioned, I mean, if it unlocks something or does something, it's valuable, but there's not a lot that do.
Right now. So I guess, I guess we shall see the bid pay. Can you hold the NFTs and bid pay wallet? I'm sure.
No, we are well in strictly cryptocurrencies. It's got not like not, we've not dabbled into the NFT space. We haven't discussed that though, because fundamentally what the wallet does is protect private keys.
And, you know, we did, we've thought about expanding and making it possible to do things with NFTs in the wallet.
But with our wallet, we've traditionally tried to focus on the payments use case and people that want to conduct payments and just making that whole process as painless as possible.
And a lot less painless than a credit card transaction in many ways.
Nice. There's a, you mentioned something there. We've had discussions about it.
What has been one of the hardest things you've had to say no to as CEO of the pay or, you know, like, a lot of people think it's always like, I'll make a plan.
I'm in the public. I'm giving talks, but a lot of times from the leadership standpoint is things that are hard to say no to that you have to say.
No, that's not where you know, keep things going. So what is that?
Yeah, what was it? Steve Jobs used to say that the most important decisions that they ever made or what they're not going to do.
So I don't know what do we have to say. I mean, there's a lot of things that we would like to do. We just don't have the bandwidth to do them right now.
Yeah, I'm trying to think.
You know, a lot of times it's been like the light coin community forever. You know, Charlie Lee forever was saying, you know, you need to take light coin. You need to do light coin.
And then we were like, well, we will. We want to. We've also got these other things that we've got to do. And eventually we did.
We finally added light coin. And I'll tell you to their credit. It's now like the number two payment token behind Bitcoin on the platform.
By count. They spend like coin users tend to spend less than Bitcoin users. You know, from natural issues for smaller amount.
You know, but by count, it's a solid number two behind Bitcoin.
For sure.
Yeah, when I very first started mining, I was mining light coin. And man, I was a believer. I would have like a light coin jersey if they made it.
Yeah.
Lo and behold, it's still like kicking and it's I call it like the Bitcoin test net.
But I mean, it does like coin is an amazing token. It's just like slow churning. Just doing what it exactly what it said it was going to do. So, um, it's interesting.
So it was a no unlike coin until it was like, all right, now it's a good. Now it's a good time. Okay. Yeah.
There's a lot of things like that. I mean, that we would love to do that.
And we plan to do. We just have to prioritize.
Nice. Are we going to see, you know, like sometimes I go over websites, I buy things.
And then when I'm checking out, I see, you know, all these payment processing card symbols and I see the little PayPal symbol, along until we see the proliferated bit pay symbol all over the web.
You know, that's a great question. We're working on it. That's all I think.
We have been working on for a long time. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, that's, we would love to do that, right, and make that happen.
You know, but we've been pretty successful in signing up merchants. It's the other side of the equation, those we've got to get people actually transacting with crypto and more activity on that side of it.
I think people have figured out how to buy crypto investing crypto and they do it with whatever tools, whatever platforms they use, but they don't really think most people don't think too much about using it for actual commerce.
You know, the cases where they do, it does come up is where, you know, it's people that are unbanked people international transactions where it's just too risky for the merchant to accept a traditional credit card.
You know, so cross border transactions.
You know, and then what we do a lot of our luxury guys, you know, talked about the frivolous purchases. We do sell a lot of the exotic cars, a lot of the yachts. I mean, you know, when, you know, we have a lot of yach dealers believe it or not on our platform.
When the price of crypto, you know, when the price of Bitcoin is high and it's be people want to buy things like that. And we have a lot of the private jet charger companies on our platform so people charter private jets with crypto so
I think I think the reason for that is that you do have people that made investments that those investments go up and they find they want to spend that crypto and they want to.
And we do make it a lot easier than if you were to actually move that crypto to an exchange seller withdraw it and then make the payment, you know, that's a lot of steps there and a lot of hassle.
You just use a part of what you your investment, part of your investment to make that purchase and we can make that a simple process that's a lot easier for a lot of people.
I would hope that you guys continue fighting that long term fight because I like, I'll just say this as a user.
I've used bit pays services before and it is very smooth. It's like so smooth when like the merchant takes it and you've got bit pay is like a click boom, but we try to take it takes a long time, takes a long time.
But thank you for your.
Yeah.
To that point, there are many different wallets we have to test. There are different chains many different tokens.
There's a lot of operational stuff all the tokens that we support are subject to an exchange rate and we have to be able to sell and market those, you know, take those two exchanges and sell them and liquidate them to to pay the merchants.
Yeah, we do that a lot of merchants that take crypto and sometimes we're converting from one, you know, like going to Bitcoin because a merchant wants to take Bitcoin and settlement.
And of course we support that. But operationally there's a lot going on there behind the scenes a lot of testing, you know, all the different wallets we try to support as many as we can.
And then we work constantly work on the, you know, our messaging, you know, on the invoice, you know, when, you know, maybe this wallet has a few quirks and you got to do things a certain way.
And we try to try to do our best to make it so that they don't have errors in the wallet.
Good deal. That's that's that there needs to be more efforts like that in crypto. I saw.
We got a lightning network, which was quite a bit of work for us to implement that as well.
But is that going smooth.
Yeah, it works great.
And yeah, we're going to continue building on that too.
So I found it's, I guess the mental leap that I can't get over with the lightning network is is like you can go to merchants.
And you take Bitcoin, but then you have to ask that follow up.
Do you take Bitcoin lightning and like what? And it's like, this is still some work to do there as far as messaging, but Bitcoin lightning is starting to work really.
They think that pay, you know, it's transparent to them. So the merchant takes all the tokens, all the coins, all the, all the, you know, technologies that we support. So.
If they're using that, then they automatically get that lightning support and you don't really have to ask any more questions beyond that. Right.
Yeah, yeah, lightning, where I think lightning, we have work to do with lightning is making it more self custodial, actually, most of the wallets out there in our, and the big pay wallet does not support it yet.
But it will. And, but there's not a lot of options out there as far as if you want to use the lightning network in a truly self custodial fashion.
You typically have to deposit money with like, you know, one of the strike or cash app or somebody like that so that you're, so they're holding your money and then they're using the lightning network to actually make the payment.
Well, we, that's something that we've learned recently here a few times is that's not the best option so if you're listening to the show.
Self custody is the way to go. I didn't mean, I didn't mean to plan that wrong. That just kind of happened anyways. Let's keep it moving.
This is back to kind of more personal question crypto takes a lot of heavy hits, a lot of body blows as the boxers would say, has there ever been a time where you were like, you know what, I'm just going to go on an infinite sabbatical
I mean we've had.
It was recently this year with all that that was this year so that was last year SPF nonsense. There was of course Mount Gox you're here for that. That's when I first kind of got in that Mount Gox happened a couple months after I got an
infinite crypto like it takes some severe hits. If you haven't thought of an infinity sabbatical. What is it that keeps you going.
I just have fun. I mean, I enjoyed the challenge of it and I enjoy working on it. It'd be tough for me to imagine what I would do if I wasn't doing working on this and you know, and I still believe in the in the future right if I didn't believe that eventually the world was going to be
not, you know, payments on blockchains but but practically everything else we do anywhere. There's a need for a
database, you know, it's going to be a blockchain of some kind. If I didn't believe that I would go find something else to do.
So I just enjoy that and being, you know, trying to try to be a part of some, you know, something exciting and big.
So yeah, I mean, there have been times along the way where I questioned. Yes, you mentioned it's it's taken a lot of body blows over the years.
You know, we've fortunately sidestepped a lot of those. And partially by just, you know, staying kind of small and not not trying to get too a little too big and just being erring on the conservative side of things not taking big
deposit, you know, not becoming a big depository institution, for example, is one example of that. But, you know, I think Mt. Gox was interesting. When that happened, we saw that coming a mile away.
And, you know, what was happening from our perspective was, you know, we need to take in crypto and at that time it was really just Bitcoin.
We need to take in the Bitcoin. We need to sell it. We had several exchanges we use, but Mt. Gox was one of them. And then we need to withdraw it. And then we need to pay our merchants. Most of our merchants were getting settled in dollars or euros or something other than Bitcoin.
And so, and our service, we want to pay the merchant the very next day. So they get a payment today. They are going to get it settled tomorrow or when it's on as the banks are open that day.
And what was happening there with Mt. Gox was it was just getting longer and the delays and getting a withdrawal or becoming longer and longer. We were having to flow more and more money in that process in order to keep paying our merchant immediately.
And it got to a point where it was getting to be like a couple weeks before we are withdrawals would get processed. And so at that point, we decided, you know, we can no longer use Mt. Gox, which was really unfortunate because they had the highest, you know, exchange rate.
So we could give buyers a better price when we could use Mt. Gox, but that meant we actually had to be able to sell Bitcoin on Mt. Gox and withdraw it.
And so we finally said, you know, we can't do this. I mean, this is getting to be too long and too concerning.
And so we put out a statement that where we were going to no longer incorporate Mt. Gox pricing into the into our exchange rates that we use, which meant like five or 10% less below what Mt. Gox was.
But we also thought people would read between the lines and understand there's a real problem there with Mt. Gox because we explained that is because we're at, you know, we're not getting withdrawals in a timely fashion and things like that.
But it took probably another year after that nobody, you know, for whatever reason, you know, we didn't want to come out, you know, and outright accuse Mt. Gox of not having the money backing all of their deposits.
We're having problems there. And, but we did think people would read between the lines, but it took a whole other year before Mt. Gox, you know, after that, the Mt. Gox finally, you know, it came to the reckoning.
Oh yeah. It's happened. You know, it's you kind of see the warning signs, right? Absolutely. And there was, what is it FTX? That one. That was another one that just kind of.
I mean, I think it's going to happen time and time and time again, especially like with what's happened just as of this weekend with, you know, Silicon Valley Bank. It's almost like we on that side of the finance companies, right?
Yeah, yeah, it was like we're totally okay with everybody almost knows like, oh yeah, there's no money in that bank, but it's a bank.
So anyway, I don't want to get into all that, but it's very funny how we're, we actually absolutely need the crypto exchanges. You got to have that money in there.
But because there's no bailouts coming for you guys. So, yeah.
Well, I guess we can, we can begin to wrap here. We have a couple of trademark questions that we typically ask. And these questions are trademarked audience. So don't trust you or stuff.
The first is, is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn't.
Oh, no, I don't think so.
You know, there's, I mean, I could go in for hours and talk about this stuff, but.
Oh, do we know part two. What's that with your people? Part two.
Nothing new exciting, nothing fun going out of bit pay. You know, I mean, most exciting stuff, at least this week is around all that Silicon Valley bank stuff.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know you want to talk about it. Yeah.
I'm super self custodial, especially in general.
If you are, then a lot of the stuff just didn't bother you, you weren't troubled by it, right? Yeah.
So we profess in our like community for our podcast. We tell them, you know, get a hardware wallet, learn the hard stuff. You're going to be fine.
Yeah.
Be patient. You'll be fine. The other question usually comes from our co host, Jesse, and he asks, is what you do difficult?
It's what I do difficult.
Yep.
No, no, it's not difficult.
You like the first to ever say that so congratulations.
I mean, do we have challenges? Yes, but.
But the fun challenges.
I mean, when I think difficult, I think not fun.
Yeah, they're challenges and you just work through those.
There's a lot to what we do a lot to what they does.
But what I do every day. I mean, it's so much fun. I don't even think about, you know, the other side of it.
So nice.
It's good. But usually everyone's like, yeah, absolutely. I can't sleep. I don't know how my eyes are open.
I clean my eyelashes.
Anyways, and last question is, and 10 words or less. Can you describe the pay?
Sure. The pay is the world's oldest crypto company. When we process crypto payments for merchants.
And we also have our bid pay wallet, where if you want to store your crypto in a self custodial wallet and use it for payments is a great option.
That's basically what we do. We can also do payroll. We can also do payroll.
You can do payroll. No, that's good. That's good. That's one thing I did not know about bid pay, which is actually awesome because I'm finding some of my employees.
Like, Hey, can I get paid in crypto? I was like, that's first of all, or that in a decade. So, you know, something to spin up.
But you blew the 10 words out of the water, by the way.
You were like at like 50, but it's okay. At least it was succinct. So, so we got that.
Stephen, thank you very much for coming on.
I'm sorry that your frivolous home purchase is not worth so much more. So. So much more. So.