The Next Gold Rush: How Cryptocurrency Will Change Everything | Ethan Turer, Writer (FTC ep 20)

FinTech Chat (FTC) is a series of educational & informative interviews with world professionals in the FinTech / Crypto / Blockchain communities. We aim to provide content that is digestible in multiple mediums such as video, audio (podcast), and written (blog) form!

 

FTC Episode 20

In this episode, Blockchain Wayne interviews Ethan Turer, Author of “The Next Gold Rush: How Cryptocurrency Will Change Everything”. He shares his interesting views about blockchain and crypto in his book. He also introduces the new idea: social currencies, which can help influencers, creators, celebrities… can connect better with their followers.

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos and grammatical errors may be present.

Intro: Interviews on crypto, blockchain with your host, Blockchain Wayne on FTC. 

 

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Hey everyone, welcome back and thanks for watching. Today we have special guest, Ethan Turer. Now Ethan is an author, an advocate in the cryptocurrency space, has a book coming out. I really want to get into that, but first and foremost, Ethan, man, thanks for joining us today for the show. 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be on. 

 

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Awesome, man. I… you know, I love what you’re… you’re doing. I looked a little bit into it… you know, before this… before this interview as far as information about your book and the way you’re trying to spread knowledge, so definitely gonna dive into that, but first and foremost, tell… tell everybody a little bit about your background. How did you get into the space and… and then we’ll… then we’ll kind of lead into what prompted you to write the book? 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah, so I think it was always kind of curious about bitcoin. I didn’t really know too much about it until my senior year of college. This is like back in 2017 2018. That was when like the bitcoin bubble was like in full… you know, bloom and everyone wanted to get in on it and so that was when I was like what is this. And I got an internship opportunity towards the end of my senior year. And they asked me what I wanted to focus on and I said crypto and so that was the beginning of my like rabbit hole down the space. I joined like every community I could. I just like watching all these videos, and I was… when I first started investing in bitcoin also, so that was the beginning of this experience. And since 2018 I’ve just been learning more and more. And then I came up with an idea for my own cryptocurrency which I decided to write a book about, because it’s still kind of new and doesn’t exist yet anywhere. And I’m excited to talk about that. 

 

01:52

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Oh nice nice I didn’t realize it was… it was all into that too, so that’s… that’s exciting. So tell us what’s the… tell everybody about the name of your book and kind of what it’s about? 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah so the book is called The Next Gold Rush: How Cryptocurrency Will Change Everything. I really do believe that cryptocurrency is going to be like it already is changing everything, but you know, in terms of how it can apply to every part of society, I think people don’t really contemplate the different applications. And so it’s…. it’s cool to kind of get into the weeds of like a certain use case of a cryptocurrency. NFTs are very popular right now and you know, digital art is only scratching the surface of what is possible with an NFT and so if you think about the big picture how NFTs could disrupt every part of society, that’s basically what I wrote my book about before social currencies. 

 

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Nice nice, yeah I mean I… I’ve studied NFTs for a few years. I was a collector of sports cards as a kid, so people… yeah you’re right, it’s… there’s so many use cases for non-fungible tokens that we’ll get into that later, man. So who is your book catered to? Like what… what audience are you trying to reach with your book and by the way, great title, awesome title! 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah I… you know, I wrote the book intending for anyone to be able to pick it up and read it and try and understand cryptocurrency. So basically, the first section is for the crypto curious people who are curious about bitcoin and cryptocurrency. They don’t really know what it is, but they want to learn more and then I kind of build off of that knowledge in the second section for the crypto conscious. That’s for people who know about crypto already, but they want to learn more about how it’s going to apply to their lives. And that’s where I get into like the use cases of social currencies. And then the last section is for crypto capitalists, those are like the more advanced people than the ones who already know a lot about crypto. And that’s geared towards how to invest in bitcoin but also how they can think about investing in personal coins in the future and what that investment might look like in the future. 

 

04:02

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Nice I think crypto curious is a big crowd as well because when you think about that group, most of us I don’t know about you, but when I first came into cryptocurrency, it was solely about making money, right? It was about making a profit. I’m gonna put some money in and I want it to grow. And I think once we start to realize what this really is then… you know, it’s… it’s like pandora’s box being open like there’s so many different ways to go with it, so that’s a great… you know, obviously each… each aspect you’re reaching is good, but I think the crypto curious is a lot of people… people that bought crypto and still don’t understand why, they don’t understand the importance of it. So… 

 

ETHAN TURER: I mean you can… you can still be crypto curious like I’m… I’m still learning every day. So it’s… it’s not really a… like you’re once you’re done with this section like oh now you know everything, you need to know it’s more that like I’ve now piqued your curiosity of crypto, and you’ll want to keep learning more after you read the book as well because I think that’s the interesting part of this whole ecosystem is that no one really knows everything. You really don’t… you can’t be a crypto expert, because it’s changing so quickly and so often that you really need to always be learning, always be curious, and that’s the goal. It’s like find something that you’re interested in and just keep learning until you like feel comfortable enough. Or now you want to invest and hopefully at that point, you’ll have even more questions. I want to learn even more. 

 

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Yeah yeah, that’s the thing about people, people think you have to be an expert to get in or get involved or like in your case, writing a book. You know, I did a small book back in 2018 kind of similar but it was a quick. I really punched it out in a little just basics, just in a little short period of time. But you don’t have to be an expert like what you learned and what you know now and that’s for people after they read your book, they can teach that to somebody else that… that’s not there. You just need to know a little bit more than the person before… you know, the person next to you and you can help them learn some. I think most people think they have to have it figured out before they jump in. And that’s great that you’re doing that because you’re right. This journey… I think five years from now, we could have another conversation and still be talking about how we’re still learning, because when do I… no idea how this thing’s gonna evolve and adapt over the next few years. 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah that’s… that’s the cool part about it. And you know, if you think about like 10 years in the future education is really the key to getting people into the space, right? And so we need people to have these conversations and also start to want to learn about what cryptocurrency is. And if we’re not laying the groundwork for that conversation now, then 10 years from now, we’re not going to be much better off than we are now. 

 

06:44

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Yeah yeah absolutely, absolutely. So let’s back up man, I definitely want to talk about some things you mentioned… you mentioned social currencies, so tell everybody what do you mean by social currencies? 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah so social currency is a currency that is for each and every person, so think of it this way right now, you have a digital footprint right? Everyone has like a social media account right? So let’s take facebook for instance. If you have a Facebook profile that is a centralized digital like entity that is controlled by Facebook, right? It’s basically your digital like identity but it’s Facebook’s version of it. And if you had a social currency, you would be your own currency. So your own digital identity that tracks the value of your worth online, but you own it, so it’s not Facebook or some Giant corporation that you’re creating an account on. You’re creating an account on a blockchain, where you own your own worth. I think that’s the most empowering thing that we have like still not really tapped into yet. And so that’s why I’m excited about social currencies because basically, you’re decentralizing value down to the individual person like what’s more empowering than that. 

 

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Yeah yeah absolutely absolutely. So how can social currencies be used? I mean give us an example man. Tell us… I mean, you kind of gave us some scenarios but I know, when you’re in your… your videos, you talked about celebrities, how can a celebrity create a social currency… 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah, so I have a theory that like everyone is either an influencer or a follower or both, right? So we’re all kind of in this bubble already with like I’m following people all the time on social media, but I’m also creating content from my book so in a way, I’m in this both category. But all of that value that it’s being created right now, it’s being captured by those companies where I’m posting right? They get to get the ad revenue. I don’t have like a patreon but I know like influencers, who have like patreons and subscription models like followers will pay them basically to follow their and get early content and perks like that. But I feel like that relationship between the influencer and follower, it’s not being capitalized as much as it could be. And that’s where cryptocurrency really becomes an awesome opportunity because if you had an influencer coin, right, so in my video, I said Taylor Swift as an example. She recently bucked the system by… you know, not have… she doesn’t have a record label anymore. And so she’s going on her own and so that’s like a perfect example of like you’re… you’re basically saying like I don’t want to be a part of the status quo, but you don’t really have like the infrastructure to capitalize on the relationship of your followers, right? So she’s kind of like figuring it out as she goes. But I think if she had her own coin like Taylor Swift coin and then all of her followers had coins where they could invest in her coin basically, they’re investing in her future potential right, her worth, her… her next album per se… And all those things would increase in value over time. And then what exists with cryptocurrency which wouldn’t exist, doesn’t exist today is that the followers also benefit from investing in the coin. So instead of like a patreon model where you’re just someone is paying the influencer, they don’t really benefit from like appreciation of value, but with a coin investing in the person, they benefit just like… just as much as Taylor Swift would from the… like the growth of her coin, the growth of her network and her influence. All that would be something that all everyone in that ecosystem would win from, so it’s… it’s kind of like a lot of thought experiments, because none of this really exists yet. But I think it makes sense where like if you could track someone’s value with a currency, a cryptocurrency, this is kind of how it would play out. And I’m excited to like see how that goes in the future. 

 

10:52

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: All right so yeah, you can add value by saying the token holders will get air dropped NFTs a long time like so say, they’ve got like… you mentioned Taylor Swift coin and then she decides to… to do an NFT creation only for holders. Then they can airdrop those NFTs to the wallet addresses that are holding those tokens. So it adds value… people want to get the token to be a token holder. 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah, you know, it’s… I had a conversation recently where you could actually even offer like these tokens as part of an NFT like everything is so interconnected in this ecosystem where NFTs just become another way of capturing value. And so if… if like let’s say the NFT is like access to Taylor Swift’s next concert, right, like that would be a really cool way to get value for being part of her cryptocurrency ecosystem. But I’m sure like in the future, there’ll be like way more examples, and we’re just like scratching the surface, but it’s… it’s a really cool way to just think about the future potential of cryptocurrency. 

 

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Yeah absolutely, so we… we’ve talked about NFTs a little bit, you mentioned are you… you’re incorporating NFTs into like your book launch how’s that gonna work? 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah so I… I’m excited to offer my book as an NFT. I was trying to figure out a way to like do this because I think NFTs are a really great way for people to learn about cryptocurrency, right? It’s… you’re basically just getting a unique cryptocurrency that is connected to something, usually it’s digital art, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be connected to like my ebook, right? And so you could connect that NFT to the ebook and maybe also some other interesting perks like access to… to me as an author if you like wanted to be a part of like a monthly author talk or something like that. And so that’s what I’m trying to incorporate into my book launch is a book NFT where… you know, you not only get access to my book, but you’ll have access to other things that add value. So I’m… since I’m essentially creating a secondary market for my book in the crypto space, and I don’t think many people are trying to do that outside of I don’t know many authors who have done that, but I think it’s an exciting way to teach people about cryptocurrency is actually giving them one. 

 

13:17

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Yeah, yeah. I haven’t… I haven’t really heard of any… any authors doing that for books. We’ve heard recently what kings of Leon released an album music, album as an NFT. But you’re… I think we’re gonna see that happen and more and more, because it also allows you the ability to distribute without needing to go through a centralized party. You know, I think about my book, I had to basically sell out and agree to the rights on Amazon to get it distributed… you know, which you know they definitely take their fair share, but this allows people to go out on their own and… and do their own thing, so that’s gonna be exciting to see… (ETHAN TURER: Do another launch of your book as an NFT as well) Yeah possibly possibly yeah. I’m constantly thinking of ways to… to utilize NFTs, because that it caught my attention in 2018, and I collected sports cards as a kid. So when I saw… I saw NFTs, I was standing in line actually at a crypto conference in Los Angeles the crypto invest summit. And the guy in line in front of me showed me a… a major league baseball digital bobble head. And it was an NFT and it kind of sparked me right there like this is amazing, and you know, and it took… it took a few years for it to catch on. But people are realizing all the potential… you know, that it… it could be so it makes your book tradable. But think about royalties… you know, have you thought about that like every time like you… you sell the book as an NFT as well, and when someone else sells that book down the road, have you thought about the fact that you could get a recurring commissions off of that? 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah, I did there’s like 10%… I don’t know what the standard is yet for like I don’t know the NFT industry again

 

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Yeah it’s five to ten percent… you don’t want it too low to where you don’t get anything, but you don’t want it too high where people avoid reselling it or buying it because you know, the fee is so high but it’s the standard on some of the minting platforms is about 10%. 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah yeah so that… that’s probably what I’ll do. I still… I’m still figuring it out if I’m being honest because right now, I have a pre-order campaign, and so you can buy my NFT as a perk through Indiegogo, and so it’s not exactly like buying it on a blockchain. And so I have to figure out, I’m kind of like doing it in reverse where I’ll probably launch the NFT. And then have to send it to you or wallet because you bought it. But you know, I’m that doesn’t like scare me or anything. It’s just kind of like so interesting workarounds because you know Indiegogo isn’t connected to the blockchain. I can’t really do anything through them, but yeah I’m… I’m really like passionate about this… this project. And you know, I’ve always like been interesting and like trying new things and seeing what happens. And I think this is like the perfect use case for like an NFT that I don’t think many people have even thought about doing or even they have thought about it. They haven’t had the means to do it, and so I do, because I have a hybrid publishing model or my publisher basically doesn’t tell me what to do. I own 100% of the rights to my book. And because of that, I can do whatever I want and that’s why this NFT was like oh that’s a cool way, I can incorporate my book with the crypto space. 

 

16:37

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Yeah awesome awesome, I can’t wait to see that how it works out. I mean yeah, we’re all just trying to figure this thing out, right? You’re gonna launch it this way and and maybe by the time you’re ready to do another batch there, may be like an automated system lined up. I mean that’s… that’s the great thing about the space, so many people are building infrastructure and… and interfaces within the space. It’s going to make it easier that’s going to bring in more people. That’s kind of where I was in 2018… you know, 2016 2017, we were all geniuses in the space because crypto was going up and we thought we were smart. And then 2018 when everything started crashing down in that bear market cycle… you know, I really… I got out and started hitting conferences just to see all right are people still putting money in this space, so even though prices were doing this, the amount of infrastructure I saw going in and user interfaces was really accelerating. And that’s what it’s going to take… you know, it’s so… you’re… you’re you know, right now, you’re doing a workaround and maybe by the next time someone goes to do it again or that may spawn an idea for somebody to launch a platform that automates all of that… you know. 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah exactly I think we’re kind of like… I am obviously working from the shoulders of other people who have built this stuff like I wouldn’t be able to like create an NFT from scratch. I’m just using platforms that allow you to mint NFTs. And so that’s… that’s kind of the other part of this is that as the ecosystem grows the capabilities of what we can do also grows, so that’s… that’s another cool part which is why 10 years from now, who knows what we’re going to be talking about with cryptocurrency. 

 

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Yeah yeah and you’re right. I mean these minting platforms, you don’t have to understand how to write a smart contract. They’ve already got it like pre pre-written. You just got to plug in your data points and… and mint.. you know, pay… pay whatever the gas fee is and mint, so interesting there, so tell everybody a little bit more about where they can find more information about you, about your book, where can they connect with you at? 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah so usually I have like a virtual background that has all my socials and stuff but my… my website is ethanturer.com right now that just redirects you to my book campaign. But in the future, I plan on building that out more. I’m also on Instagram and Facebook as ethan.turer.author and then Twitter ethan_turer. I think basically just look at Ethan Turer and you’ll find me on whatever platform so yeah. 

 

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Cool cool and so that they go to your… if they go to your website address now, it’ll take them straight to the Indiegogo campaign. They’ll be able to learn more about the book, watch our video and even participate, it looks like you got a decent… a decent raise so far right now. How’s it going with the with the book sales so far? 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah, it’s… it’s doing great so we’re at over 3600$ and so my goal is five thousand dollars that actually will end on May 1st, and then yeah, that’s I’m like over 70% of the way to my goal which is really exciting over 100 backers. I think it was like 108 backers so far and so that the cool part of that. That is… that all those backers join in author community and so I really hope to like create that as the beginning of this ecosystem around the book idea. So if you’re interested about social currencies like the starting place for me is this author community that has already bought the book. So I encourage you to buy the book, and then I’ll just like be as I’m learning, I will be sharing that with that community and growing that from I guess from now. 

 

20:09

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Nice nice, all right, so excited to hear those things. I can’t wait to see the book. I can’t wait to learn more about it. Hopefully, we’ll see… you know, in person events are starting to happen again, so hopefully, you’re able to get out and get to some of those and spread the word there… I’m sure you know, encourage people and I would encourage everybody don’t just get a book for you, but get… get a couple for friends, right? Because we all have people that need to know more and education is power. What you said earlier about education I feel the same way. One of the phrases I like to use quite often is… you know, education leads to adoption. Education is the road to adoption. You know, anything like that… that’s… it’s important. I think people get overconfident and when that… when we’re in a bull market cycle, because they think they just throw money at something, that always goes up so realizing what’s really happening here is important. 

 

ETHAN TURER: Yeah and also like this podcast is a great way to… you know, educate people as well, because… you know, there’s so many ways to consume content these days like I listen to audiobooks most of the time, but podcasts also are like a really powerful tool to just get information out to people. I think Clubhouse was another popular place to talk about crypto so I think like education doesn’t need to necessarily be in a book, but just having these conversations getting people curious where they want to research it and learn more and hopefully like in the future like we have like Coinbase for example, which is now like an IPO, it’s like… you know, as much credibility as you can get for a crypto company, right? (BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: yeah) and so that’s… that’s a really exciting achievement for this industry… because you know, relatively speaking, it’s still really new… right? Like not even like 15 years old yet. And like how much we’ve already accomplished, so it’s exciting I think education like you said is very important, but also just having conversation with people like why is bitcoin worth 60k 50k to 60k now like like just have that conversation. And I have it’s… it’s an interesting way because people are like yeah I actually don’t know why I cost that much like… I’m like, wait it was it started off as pennies yeah once like… so you just start there. And then you can get to like the broader big picture which is what I’m excited about (BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: yeah) which is this technology is gonna change everything like it’s already changing a lot, but just like how the internet just changed, how we interact with each other, the fact that we can communicate this way, because of the internet like no one even was really thinking about that until the internet existed. (BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: yeah) That’s… that’s cryptocurrency like everything involving money but even more than that, anything involving data and digital assets that’s all up for being disrupted. And so if you aren’t thinking the big picture about what’s going to be the next big disruption, then it’s going to happen. And you’re not going to be part of it so… 

 

23:11

BLOCKCHAIN WAYNE: Yeah right so great great points so audiobook you mentioned audiobooks earlier I love audiobooks as well is this going to be are you looking to do your book as an audio book as well yeah I’ve gotten a lot of requests to do an audio book with this campaign if I had reached like 8 000 then I would have been able to fund the audiobook that way likely what will happen is I’ll have to do it myself outside of my publisher but yeah my plan is to offer it as an audio book as well I just I’m not sure yet if I can I don’t know the details yet but I want to yeah cool well if you’re watching this go give him some support get be you know be an early investor in in his book and let’s get that audio book made whether it happens now or shortly after but I i like those because you can pop in an audio book and listen while you drive I listen while I cut grass I listen you know pretty much the audiobooks whenever I can yeah exactly I i used to like work out at the gym and listen to an audiobook and I like I think people usually listen to music but yeah I like always like having someone like talking to my ear I feel like I’m being productive even if I’m not really doing anything but yeah it’s it’s it’s cool because like audiobooks podcasts like it’s also just another way to learn but it’s also another way to like think about things so like I think when I wrap my mind about wrap my mind around cryptocurrency in the beginning like I don’t think it clicked right away right I would like read the bitcoin white paper like I don’t understand what this means and so I needed to like hear it from like multiple sources until it finally started to click and that’s why that’s the power of like podcast audiobooks is that you really get different perspectives and you get the different angles that you need to like finally understand this like groundbreaking technology yeah absolutely so Ethan man it’s been great having you on today appreciate you sharing and sharing your knowledge looking forward you know good luck on on the book launch can’t wait to follow the progress along that and hope to you know meet up with you an event sometime soon any any final words for our listeners that are watching yeah I mean thank you so much for having me I i would say my final word is that you know I’m still new right I’m still learning so my what the best thing I can say to everyone is that you don’t don’t be afraid just dive in right like no one is gonna hurt like tell you oh you don’t know enough like how dare you like start at like I don’t know an NFT and like work your way somewhere else like the fact that you’re interested at all is like that’s amazing so you’re listening to this thank you first off secondly keep learning right just google like bitcoin white paper watch a video on youtube like just start start that process and get the gears turning and then like don’t be afraid to reach out to me or anyone else in the crypto space because we all love having these conversations that’s how we you know get to adoption is you watch this you reach out to me you read the book or whatever and then now you are an advocate for cryptocurrency just like I am right now absolutely cool well thanks again Ethan for joining us thanks everybody for watching and we will see you on the next episode bye guys

 

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About Ethan Turer

Ethan Turer is an author and advocate for cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. In his book he dives into how this nascent technology will change the world and compares it to the gold rush, but this time in the digital realm.

 

Website: https://ethanturer.com

About Blockchain Wayne (Host)

Wayne has been managing, teaching, and coaching high performing teams for over 20 years. He has a passion for helping and teaching people and a passion for cryptocurrency and blockchain projects. He has created various coaching programs and partnerships with select education platforms and cryptocurrency program tools.

You can learn more on his website: https://www.blockchainwayne.com/