How Do You Use Cryptocurrency?

Tony Czajka • 2022-07-05

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Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. You're listening to Love Song by the band Frogpond. With their first new music in over 20 years, Frogpond is rewriting a story that seemingly ended long ago. What began in 1993 as an unadorned rock project between then college student, Heidi Phillips, and a handful of novice musician friends, catapulted into an all too brief staple of 90s alt and indie rock. The band's meteoric rise was initially defined by an all-girl line-up, college radio airplay, major label deals, and support for acts like Goo Goo Dolls, Toadies, and Fastfall. The band's new LP, Time Thief, is available on physical and digital platforms, via BlackSight, Kansas City's rock and roll record label cooperative. The question for this episode is how do you use cryptocurrency? You will learn in this episode the different types of cryptocurrency wallets, how cryptocurrency is used to purchase NFTs, and future applications of blockchain technology. Our guest studies computer science at the University of Kansas. He is the vice president of the KU Blockchain Institute, where they seek to apply blockchain technology to decentralized finance, supply chains, medical records, proving ownership of physical assets and the development of the metaverse. I introduce to you Tony Czajka. Thank you. All right, Tony, you're at the University of Kansas, and you're pursuing an education. Let's start with, what are you studying at KU, and what made you go to KU?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so first of all, thanks for having me on here. Really excited to talk to you about blockchain and cryptocurrency. But I'm a computer science major, second year, and I'm actually from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But I was kind of looking to get out of state, came down, visited Kansas, really loved the area. The campus was awesome. Felt like a lot of good school spirit down here, and was able to make it financially reasonable to come down here. So yeah, I've been loving my decision to come here, and computer science has been treating me well as well.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, glad to hear that, glad to hear an out-of-stater wanting to come to Kansas. That's always good to hear. Bet you the men's basketball team was good promotional material for prospective KU students.

Tony Czajka:Oh, definitely, definitely. How can it not be?

Dylan Carnahan:So you brought up the Blockchain Institute, and that's initially how I come across you, Tony. So can you explain a little bit about what does the University of Kansas Blockchain Institute do?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so the University of Kansas Blockchain Institute is basically the club for blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, which is kind of a very new found technology that's really gaining a lot of traction in the past few years. So I recently became the vice president of the club and we've been working to increase our involvement with the club here. And so a few of the things we've been trying to do is bring in some industry speakers. We have some connections through alumni that have gone on to either do pursue startups or have blockchain related jobs in the industry. So we'll bring them in, have them speak to our members. We've also started a research initiative project. So we're trying to get students involved in helping them do their own projects related to cryptocurrency blockchain and see if we can give any advice or funding where needed for that. And then finally, we're actually starting our own DAO, which stands for decentralized autonomous organization, which we can get into later, I'm sure. But basically it's a cool way where we're trying to create our own token or like cryptocurrency and restructure the organization of our club to be more decentralized and follow kind of the general nature of the space that is cryptocurrency. So we're doing a lot of cool stuff, and we're looking to make partnerships with companies and other crypto clubs out there.

Dylan Carnahan:Wow, that is a lot. That was a lot right there. Glad to hear you guys are kind of diversifying and doing all of these really cool things. Now, you had brought up cryptocurrency being relatively new, and as someone who comes out of state to seek a degree in computer science, how did you first hear of cryptocurrency, and I guess what interested you in that?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so I guess I should clarify. Technically, cryptocurrency is not new. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency which uses blockchain technology. And I can explain that in a little bit. But basically, so that's been around since 2009, and it was created by Satoshi Nakamoto, actually. But cryptocurrency didn't really get any like it had its first popularity spike, I would say, in 2017 and 2018. Now, me personally, I didn't really get into crypto and blockchain until 2020. And actually, with the pandemic, saw another increase in just general popularity and media attention with cryptocurrency. So I had originally started out just learning about financial stuff in general, you know, learning about stocks, stuff like that, wanted to start investing. And then I saw a few articles about cryptocurrency and then kind of just dove into the rabbit hole from there.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, you're certainly right, especially when you hit on the kind of those key dates. The pandemic, I think, you know, a lot of things were brought about as far as people's interest in the utilization of technology like DocuSign and all sorts of telehealth. But it did certainly pick up the interest in cryptocurrency and kind of at the bedrock of that is blockchain. And can you explain a little bit about how blockchain works?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so blockchain is the underlying technology that makes cryptocurrency and all cryptocurrency is on the blockchain. But blockchain actually has some other cool uses, which are not related to finance and cryptocurrency. But basically, blockchain is a decentralized ledger. So it keeps basically keeps a list of transactions. Right. It's created by a large collection of nodes, which in this case is like computers running certain software. And they're all basically validating transactions on this same ledger, which in turn is used to prove that you can own a digital thing. And that's like really the hardest thing to wrap your mind around. But once you can wrap your mind around like that, the whole point of blockchain is to own something that is digital and prove where it has been. That is really where you can see why blockchain technology is useful. And it kind of does this by starting out. I like to think of it like building blocks, right? Like if you have one building block of data, and then you connect it to another building block of data. So if I had just a ball and I wanted to pass you the ball, you would own the ball. The ball starts with me, and then I would give it to you. And blockchain, what that does is it connects those. It records that transaction forever. You can always go back and look at all the transactions that happen on the blockchain. And then if you wanted to give that ball to someone else, it would record that transaction as well. And theoretically, this keeps going, and you can eventually trace it all the way back to me, the origin of the ball. So it's pretty easy to get very technical, but I think that's a good, generalized, simple way, yeah, that helps me kind of visualize it.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, no, that's a great analogy. So you're kind of saying that this ledger is able to, you know, for traceability, so to speak, and also, you know, it helps with authenticity, right?

Tony Czajka:Yep. That's right. Because at the end of the day, digital items, you know, copying and pasting, you can copy and paste anything, right? So like text-wise, pictures-wise. So the whole thing is how do you prove that someone owns something? And that's why it's pretty cool with the introduction of NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens. Those are another use case of blockchain technology that can prove and really reduce the ability to counterfeit digital art.

Dylan Carnahan:Because you have that recorded.

Tony Czajka:That's right.

Dylan Carnahan:Now, you brought up earlier, kind of when we talked about the nodes and the kind of peer-to-peer portion of the ledger about software. Now, how are cryptocurrencies mined?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so there's actually two different validation methods, I would call them. So there's a lot of different blockchains out there. Bitcoin and Ethereum are by far the two most popular. And both Bitcoin and Ethereum, they're what they call proof of work blockchains. So proof of work does utilize mining, like you said. And so basically what this mining is, is that these computers are running these complex algorithms, and they're trying to solve basically really hard math problems that just have to be brute forced by some algorithm. And this requires a ton of like power and energy. And it's not just something that you have to, you basically have to put a lot of time and resources into it to mine. And whichever node is able to solve this math problem gets rewarded by, they're the ones that update the blockchain with the transaction, and then they'll get rewarded with a little bit of, if it's Bitcoin, Bitcoin or whatever the coin is. And that's what incentivizes people to run nodes. And this is theoretically supposed to deter people from faking transactions because of how much processing power is involved. It would be very impractical for you to try to run a node and put a fake transaction through, since it also has to be validated by other nodes as well. And it's much easier for them to call out your fake transaction than it is for you to try to fake one.

Dylan Carnahan:So you're saying that essentially from a hardware aspect, that this is a high barrier to entry. So that's going to deter and maintain authenticity for this ledger. And then the other aspect is that these nodes are being rewarded for their participation in the ledgering process via that currency.

Tony Czajka:That's correct. And the incentive is there because the idea is that you decentralize it, right? So that no one power has control over this entire ledger, so that it gets rid of corruption and stuff like that. So the more nodes a person owns, theoretically the more control over the chain they have. So by incentivizing people to join this, in theory it should get more new people to mine, although there is a decently high barrier to entry. But that also prevents it from being one large company or one person holding all the nodes, and then theoretically they could do whatever, they could pass through whatever type of transactions they want.

Dylan Carnahan:Now, how do cryptocurrencies get their value? We brought up the mining process, but how do they get their value?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, actually before you go, there's actually also one new type of, you could call it mining process. It's a validation process. One new thing in the field is they're trying to get away from mining, because that takes up a ton of energy. So there's this new validation process called proof of stake coming. And actually, Ethereum is going to be moving to this validation process soon. But basically, with this one, instead of mining the tokens, where you have to spend all this energy and resources to solve a math problem, you have to stake coins, meaning you put some of your coins in this other account to get the right to validate these transactions. And this one happens in a random order. So they'll give your node, they randomly pick which node gets to validate the transaction, and they still get the rewards, but there's no math problem involved. This time, you're putting your own coins on the line. So if they catch you validating a false node, or if your node goes down, they'll take your coins from you. And that's supposed to also deter foul play and proof of stake. Interesting. Yeah. So there's a lot of environmental concerns with crypto and crypto mining, but theoretically, this is supposed to help that dramatically in the future.

Dylan Carnahan:And so with this alternate validation method, how much, I mean, is it weighted the amount of cryptocurrency that you are staking? You know?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, I believe that there'll be like a minimum. You need at least a minimum of crypto to start staking. And on the chains that do currently do this, I know that often it's not one person that will put all of their own crypto in. It's almost you would you would put your crypto into a pool for the general investor. You would be putting your crypto into a staking pool because no one person theoretically would have this much amount to stake. So it is quite a lot. But then then again, if they lose that, then, you know, they're not going to want to try to do anything fishy.

Dylan Carnahan:Interesting. So you're having these people ante up, you know, and if there's any question or if things go poorly, you then you know, there's something at stake.

Tony Czajka:Yep, something at stake.

Dylan Carnahan:Now you brought up Bitcoin and Ethereum. What are the different types of cryptocurrency?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so there's really two types of cryptocurrency. There's layer one cryptocurrencies and blockchains, and then there's layer two blockchains or cryptocurrencies. And now layer one blockchains are their own separate blockchains, very separate everything. So like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano is another top 10 cryptocurrency. That's a layer one. These are all they have their own methods. They have their own validation methods, things like that. And then there's this other class called layer two. And a lot of these layer two cryptocurrencies are tokens and blockchains built on top of another blockchain. Most popular, it's the Ethereum network, is people will build blockchains using Ethereum tools on top of the Ethereum network. So they're somewhat reliant on Ethereum, but that allows many people to create their own type of cryptocurrencies and blockchains that I couldn't even give you a number of how many tokens are out there, because anyone can really create one if you really want it. It's just, does it have value or not?

Dylan Carnahan:Now, I remember now that we were speaking earlier about that last validation process, and you brought up value. He just reminded me.

Tony Czajka:I kind of skipped over your question.

Dylan Carnahan:No, you're fine. So how do we actually assign a value to cryptocurrency?

Tony Czajka:Yeah. So, you know, originally I was like, when I first heard about cryptocurrency, I thought it was kind of dumb, honestly. I didn't really understand. But then I kind of realized that it has the same value that everyone else, you know, the same value that the piece of paper that we call money really has. You know, technically money is backed by supposed to be backed by other assets, but you don't often ever see people trying to cash in their cash for gold or anything like that. So people, it's really what the people trust the technology to be the future of finance in cryptocurrencies case. And if you want to know like what they find value in between the different cryptocurrencies, is they're really looking at like the technology behind it. Are they able to how easy is it to develop? Like what kind of transactions per second can they do? Because that's really important for scalability. If it's ever going to be a big widespread thing, these crypto currencies will have to be able to handle a lot of transactions in a short amount of time. If it's ever going to go mainstream. So as far as like finding value in this, it's really a way to store value in a digital age and then going one step further which crypto and blockchain does that best.

Dylan Carnahan:So you're saying more or less that at least a portion of the value is derived based on the actual technology of that cryptocurrency.

Tony Czajka:Yeah, I would say that.

Dylan Carnahan:Which is I guess a little bit of a paradigm shift than I guess what I was accustomed to. So you're saying, hey, I think Bitcoin really has a great future as far as being how the technology works, the speed at which it works.

Tony Czajka:Yeah, I mean, as far as the economics go down, I'm not too familiar with that whole side of everything, how do currencies really, new currencies really start? And this is obviously very unprecedented because normally currencies are created by government, something like that. But I think you look at people and they're sick like across the world, right? So I think one thing that a lot of people don't think of is, I think they think of cryptocurrency in the world view of the United States a lot. But I've seen a ton of value in this when you take a wider worldwide view of cryptocurrency, where some nations don't have a currency as strong as the dollar, and they can have their currency confiscated at any time. But with cryptocurrency, no one can affect it. No one can suddenly plunge hundreds of millions of new bills into circulation without the consensus of the entire network, you know? So I think people will give it value because they don't want to trust the centralized governments that can take away their hard-earned money at any time.

Dylan Carnahan:No, that's definitely an interesting point, Tony. I mean, if you're looking at a country that may be enduring hyperinflation, and maybe they don't have a good banking system, so it's hard for companies to get backing financially, I mean, you now have this outlet, this currency that you might be able to use. And much as you're saying, I think that's something that we're not exposed to or accustomed to the United States, so we might not see that advantage.

Tony Czajka:I mean, I believe in Canada not too long ago, like people's banks, bank assets were frozen, stuff like that. And even besides that, the technology itself is poised for wide scalability. An example of this would be converting currencies. So if you wanted to send a currency from, say, Japan to Brazil, and if you had a relative or something in one of those countries and you lived in the other one, it would have to go through a long series of banks' transactions. You'd have tons of fees, and it would take a while for whoever you're sending the money to, to get their money. But cryptocurrency and this technology allows you to make cross-worldwide transactions within minutes, sometimes seconds. And for a fraction of the cost and fees, it kind of cuts out the middle man in a way for some of these transactions. So I know that's another big thing that a few cryptocurrencies are actually totally dedicated to, to that aspect of transferring money from different parts of the world.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, no, that definitely has its benefits with this kind of vehicle or currency that we're talking about. What? So I'm trying to think here. What, you know, this decentralization is a big, I guess, you know, theme with cryptocurrencies. What do you think about countries like China, where they're kind of taking their pre-existing currency and turning it into a digital format?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so the important distinction there is what China is currently doing with their digital currency isn't blockchain technology. So they're digitizing their currency, but they still have total control over it. So there's no open source, decentralized network that they're putting their money towards. They're making it digital. I'm not exactly sure how, but I do know that it's not employing blockchain technology. And honestly, sometimes centralization is for the better and can make processes more efficient. But it's definitely an important distinction to make is that not all digital currency is cryptocurrency on a blockchain.

Dylan Carnahan:Now, I know earlier we had talked a lot about cryptocurrency and the bedrock of that being blockchain. And earlier you had spoken about NFTs. Can you talk about what is an NFT?

Tony Czajka:I think in general, when I think of blockchain technology, I think of three different categories right now that are leading the pack. One of them is decentralized finance, and that has a lot to do with cryptocurrency and what we had just talked about. But the other two I would say are metaverse and real world applications using NFTs. And this is personally my kind of like wheelhouse, I guess, is where I find the most interest. I have a lot of interest in like NFTs versus tons of the decentralized finance or DeFi stuff. But an NFT is a non-fungible token. So the way I like to think about this is if you kind of can grasp the idea of a Bitcoin, you can the blockchain is proving that you own a Bitcoin to Bitcoin, whatever. An NFT is like a Bitcoin, same technology, except you can have five Bitcoin and they're all Bitcoin. They're all individual, but the same at the same time, you know what I mean? But an NFT is like if you took each individual Bitcoin and that's literally its own thing. So think of like a one of one collectible trading card, whatever you want to think of that. It's almost if you took a coin and made it completely unique. So non-fungible means non-replicable. So that's at the base. That's what an NFT is. And currently, it's really blown up in the art community.

Dylan Carnahan:So how do NFTs and cryptocurrencies work together?

Tony Czajka:So they're on the they're both on the blockchain, which means there's a lot of interoperability between them. There's a lot of cool things. There's something called smart contracts. So especially with Ethereum, there are these things called smart contracts, which basically automates transactions given it's like it automates a contract. So given a action, it'll automate a process and give you B. So maybe the possibilities with this technology are pretty limitless. But like a simple example, I guess, would be if you send me an NF. If you send me an NFT, then I send you five Ethereum. So this allows for like a marketplace to be built for NFTs. So think like an eBay for NFTs and crypto, except it's totally automated and no one will ever get kind of ripped off of their money, if that makes any sense. But currently, NFTs are bought with cryptocurrency, and NFTs can play into smart contracts, which opens up so many rabbit holes. It's kind of insane, to be honest. But yeah, they're both the same technology. So at the base form, you can make transactions between crypto and NFTs.

Dylan Carnahan:Now, you brought up a kind of third thing earlier. You brought up the metaverse. Can you talk a little bit about how that comes into play with blockchain?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so metaverse is kind of a buzzword right now. So with Facebook rebranding especially, metaverse is the idea that the world is getting ever more digital and people are going to have a digital identity soon. And also with the development of virtual reality technologies, this has become kind of a big thing as that's gotten more popular. But so the metaverse is the idea that you can own your own digital identity. So if you think of the popular ones, video games, so like if you take Fortnite, very popular video game, if you have like a skin for your weapon, so like makes it look cool or whatever, you know, you basically pay the company that owns Fortnite Epic Games for this skin. And they...

Dylan Carnahan:With some V bucks, right?

Tony Czajka:Yep, yep, with some V bucks. And then you have it. But they can lock your account. They can, you know, theoretically, they could take it away. They can do whatever they want with it because you don't truly own it. But this metaverse idea is people speculating that in the future, as people get more into digital technology as they have in the past, that you'll be able to actually own that skin maybe, and maybe sell it on a separate marketplace yourself, and they'll never be able to take that from you if you bought it. Honestly, it's kind of like buying anything in real life. It's just taking the real life terms of ownership and moving it to the new digital age of wanting to be in a VR virtual reality world or playing video games and actually owning your in-game assets, which is definitely pretty interesting in my opinion.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, no, that is an interesting application. I know I'm familiar with Fortnite or Counter-Strike skins. I know those are huge, right? And if you lose your Steam account, well, your dragon butterfly knife that's worth three grand is gone.

Tony Czajka:Yeah, I mean Counter-Strike, that's probably the most comparable example. Yeah. That's almost exactly what it would be like.

Dylan Carnahan:Okay, so it's really the sense of ownership that's important here. And you're kind of projecting that future usage as this technology grows, this will be more prevalent and important, and so the metaverse would be a good arena for further blockchain technology.

Tony Czajka:Definitely. I mean, there's a chance, right? So in the space, a lot of people are comparing where blockchain and crypto is right now, like the pre-2000s internet. There's a lot of hype right now. It's very new. No one really knows where it's going to go, and some of it might fail. And honestly, I think there is a limit to this whole metaverse idea, because I think at the end of the day, people will always want to be in person, and they want to appreciate real life things as well. But there's also definitely a huge potential for this technology to go crazy. But in my personal opinion, I think we're still very early on this, and the world won't be ready for it for another five to ten years minimum. But there's also some cool applications for NFTs in the real world as well that are starting to be explored with. So I don't know if you've heard, but medical records, they're starting to experiment with that in blockchain technology, supply chain management is starting to go to blockchain. There's ideas of potentially getting a voting system on blockchain. And also eventually, it could be cool if you could prove ownership of real life objects, such as like a house or a car, all validated on the blockchain. So personally, that's probably my favorite potential for this technology. But yeah.

Dylan Carnahan:That's a wide application, especially, you know, again, ownership being such a big theme. I mean, how could you apply that technology to this and that? I especially like applying it to actual tangible goods in the real world. Like much as you said, like real estate, you know, I could see how that would be very advantageous.

Tony Czajka:I mean, think about voting, right? Like recently, there's so much every election. Now, I feel like there's always these debates about legitimacy of elections. The blockchain, you can literally go and ensure you can go look up every single transaction. You could see with your own two eyes that your vote went through and got collected, you know? So I don't know. I think that has a ton of potential in the future.

Dylan Carnahan:Now, Tony, before we get to talking about an outlook on cryptocurrency blockchain, it would be a very big injustice if we didn't talk about this, which is how do you own a cryptocurrency? How do you obtain it? How do you have it?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so basically, first off, before we start about how you can get it, we have to talk about what you store it in. So cryptocurrency is stored in what's called a wallet. So your digital wallet. And what this is storing is called your private keys. And this is basically, your private keys is like a very long... Think of a password on steroids, like the most strong password you can kind of have, like 20 letters, just random, uppercase, lowercase, whatever. So your wallet basically holds on to your private keys, but then tells the blockchain, gives it to the blockchain, when it's time for you to make a transaction. So wallets are very important. And this is where you hear people who bought Bitcoin back in the day, but forget their password, and they have millions of dollars locked up. So wallets are very important. There's basically three types of wallets. There's hardware wallets, there's hot wallets, and then there's third-party custodial wallets. So if you're going to buy cryptocurrency, you would do that through an exchange. Technically, there's two types of exchanges. There's centralized exchanges, which are run as companies. So the most popular that I use is Coinbase. So that's a company based in the US, and you can go onto their website and trade your US dollars for cryptocurrency. And when you do that, it'll put that cryptocurrency in a wallet that they create for you, associate with your account. Your account is just a normal username and password, and they have customer service, basically. If you were to forget your password, you can reset it with Coinbase. So that wallet that they keep inside of you, that's known as a third-party wallet. And that's probably the most unsafe wallet there is out there. If Coinbase gets hacked, someone can take your coins.

Dylan Carnahan:So that's kind of like mimicking kind of what you brought about Epic Games or with Fortnite, right? Say your account at that firm, something happens, right? Then you lose accessibility to that. So that's the security. So what were the other two? You said a hardware and a hot wallet?

Tony Czajka:So there's a hot wallet. So what that is, is basically it's most popular. It's like a browser extension, like on Google Chrome or whatever. Metamask is by far the most popular. And so what that is, is there's no like, it creates your own wallet for you. You set a password and it gives you like a 16 phrase recovery phrase. And you have to write that down, keep that safe, because that's the only way you can get your account back if you forget your password, basically. So there's no like Metamask company that can, oh, if you forget your password, you can email them and they reset it. No, it's only you. You are the only one that has access to that. But it's still connected to the Internet, which makes it a little less web based. Yes, it is web based. And you have, you have an ability like, normally it comes default where you have to confirm transactions, but you can like turn that off. And there's certain benefits and cons to doing that. But so there's still a little risk with a hot wallet, because it is connected to the Internet. Now a cold wallet is, that's where you get those like USB flash drive looking things. And those have the account is associated with that. And you need to literally physically type in your PIN before you confirm any transactions on there. So those do, they get hooked up. They work with usually like your MetaMask. Your MetaMask will work in conjunction with your hardware wallet, but it's more secure because literally it's pretty much unhackable and you need the physical presence and the physical PIN before you do anything.

Dylan Carnahan:Interesting. So it's like two-part authentication mixing hardware with software, right?

Tony Czajka:Yep.

Dylan Carnahan:So you need that tangible USB thumb drive in order to actually get access to those accounts.

Tony Czajka:That's right.

Dylan Carnahan:Interesting. So these wallets, and let's talk specifically about the web-based wallets, these wallets, are they actually on the blockchain? From a technical aspect, I guess, how is this cryptocurrency, and you can also include NFTs right within these wallets, how is that technically happening?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so it is on the blockchain. It creates a wallet account on the blockchain and basically all like MetaMask, the browser extension is doing is taking it and making it all super user friendly. But there's other ways you can, like if you have coding knowledge, you can code, you can create a wallet straight from your terminal and stuff like that. So it is on the blockchain and it's basically like an account that you can transfer crypto in and out of, but it will always require your password or your recovery phrase.

Dylan Carnahan:Okay, so your wallet is just a destination that these nodes can send whatever on the blockchain to.

Tony Czajka:Yep, yep, they hold it, and most people have like multiple wallets as well, because a big thing is people like to stay kind of anonymous in the space, a little, you know, of different wallets, so you can't get tracked and theoretic. I mean, you can get tracked because everything's traceable, but if you don't associate with your wallets, then you can really make as many wallets as you want.

Dylan Carnahan:You bring up traceability. Obviously, there's this master ledger, if you will. Now, that would, it sounds like you may have visibility, other people may have visibility as to what is in a certain wallet.

Tony Czajka:You have complete visibility to everything that's in that wallet. It's just you don't know whose wallet that is. So it's anonymous, but yeah, everything's visible.

Dylan Carnahan:Now, going back to our previous conversation, now that we kind of got like the technical aspects.

Tony Czajka:There's so much with this, it's kind of hard to keep up with.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, no, and you're doing a great job of kind of giving a general picture on this, all this stuff. It's just obviously a very dynamic...

Tony Czajka:And I'm definitely learning too. I mean, I think everyone who's in this space, like that's probably the thing I would emphasize the most is everyone's learning because like this is so brand new. And that's honestly why I really enjoy it, because I think the future is insane.

Dylan Carnahan:And kind of tying into that, I mean, you're talking about the future here, I guess, what to the novice person or say someone that, you know, hey, I've really, you know, I've been hearing in the news about and NFT booms and all these oddities kind of, but I haven't looked too much into it. What makes cryptocurrency important to pay attention to?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, I would definitely come back to that. Kind of what I was talking about earlier about proving that you own something that's better proof of ownership in a way that is better than any other system that we currently have for it. So it might not be perfectly optimized yet, but I really believe that people should pay attention to this because especially as the world gets continues to digitize virtual reality, you know, video games continue to be more popular, owning digital assets and preventing corruption and centralization. I think at some point, the world is kind of going to kind of hit a point where people are going to want to put it back in the hands of the people basically. And they'll say enough is enough. And this technology is really the best shot we have for making a world like that work as of now. And some people choose to invest in that idea and hope it works out.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, you earlier, you know, you talked about voting. You talked about all these things. I guess from what you've seen in your experiences, what is the future of cryptocurrency?

Tony Czajka:Yeah. So honestly, I don't know. I don't know if cryptocurrency will ever become a super mainstream form of currency. It's very volatile right now. And that's kind of why I have always been more interested in the NFT aspects of that, because I think that is more of a use case right now. It's really hard to say. Because you're talking that is so much existing structure that's been around for a very long time. To be upended for this new way of if people were going to be paying for everyday things in Ethereum or Bitcoin or something like that. So I don't know if I can say that will ever become the mainstream form of currency. But I definitely think that the underlying technology will have a very important role in the future in some aspect. And it's good to familiarize yourself with it. I mean, if you're looking into crypto or blockchain at all right now, you're still extremely early and that's pretty awesome.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, it's a little too early to call on kind of these things and mass adoption. But as you're pointing out and kind of through our discussion, I hope the listeners have seen that it's the technology here that has created a lot of excitement. And it's the adoption of that technology in different niches and how that can enable us to do, you know, streamline and create better processes in the future.

Tony Czajka:Exactly, exactly. I mean, fighting corruption, you know, being able to prove. And it's not only that, it's just more efficient too. Once it reaches its full potential, it theoretically should be more efficient to make contracts. We had a guest speaker come in, and they talked about their startup that wanted to make smart contracts easily accessible to anyone who wanted to make one. Because, you know, contracts can get very, you got to get lawyers involved, and it's a very expensive, long process. But with the blockchain, it can really simplify that process. And that's just one example.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah. Now, Tony, how can people learn more about you and the University of Kansas Blockchain Institute?

Tony Czajka:Yeah, so if you want to visit our website, kublockchain.com, we have a newsletter that you can subscribe to, and we're putting out weekly newsletters a little bit about, we try to gather some articles about what's going on in the cryptocurrency blockchain world. Otherwise, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. If you're a KU student, we have a Discord channel. And yeah, keep up with what the Institute's doing. We're really trying to make KU kind of the blockchain hub of the Midwest. So definitely look out for us in the future.

Dylan Carnahan:Tony, thank you so much for coming on. It was a very tedious journey kind of to find someone that was credible, that could come on it and was willing to discuss about cryptocurrency. And you did a great job giving a great general overview and touching on a lot of good stuff here. So thank you for your time, sir. I greatly appreciate it.

Tony Czajka:Thanks for having me on.

Dylan Carnahan:Thank you. That wraps up our conversation with Tony. We talked about how cryptocurrencies mine, benefits of decentralized currency, and the technical elements of how cryptocurrency works. Follow Tony on social media. Check out the KU Blockchain Institute's website to see future events they have and to learn more about them. Do not forget to listen to Frogpond's latest album, Time Thief, on Apple Music or Spotify. This is their latest album in over 20 years, so please give them some love. And lastly, subscribe to the Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.