YouSaid · the spoken record

Laura Shin

lines on the record: 25
first: 2025-06-10
most recent: 2025-06-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There are so many camps. Bitcoin started with something called the Cypherpunk mailing list, which is a kind of community of people that are technologists, but also a little bit like code is more important than the government. And so that allowed Bitcoin to then catch on with more libertarian people. Now, I mean, like, yeah, there's like this group progresses for Bitcoin. And of course, the Ethereum people, they're more like just these open source developers and they want this like decentralized open system. They're maybe not as political. And in fact, they're maybe more kind of like liberal progressive. So point is, yeah, now all of crypto is just, there's all kinds of people into it.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Coinbase just entered the SP 500, the first crypto company to do so. So if you have invested in an index fund that invests in the S&P 500, you are also invested in Coinbase. Then there's this whole slew. This is the latest trend. I'm sure it's a bubble. The latest trend is what are called Bitcoin Treasury companies or crypto treasury companies. These are publicly traded companies that are trying to accumulate whether it's Bitcoin or another crypto on their balance sheet. Even Trump media is getting into it. They announced that they were going to purchase 2.4 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin to put on their balance sheet. Right now it's a gold rush season, I guess you could say. It's totally a bubble. And there's likely to be some kind of crash at some point.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then those businesses start holding digital yuan. Honestly, as a journalist, just watching this all go down, especially with the way the Biden administration was so anti-crypto, I was like, oh my God, it's just like watching Blockbuster and Netflix is coming. And Blockbuster is not changing and doesn't know what to do. And in fact, thinks that they're invincible. This is like literally watching the US deal with crypto. And it's very nerve-wracking as an American. And yeah, it hurts me to see, you know, whatever administration just being kind of anti-progress, anti-technology, anti-things that would kind of continue the US's dominance in different financial areas to benefit to all Americans. So hopefully the Trump thing will bring positive change. But like I said, his personal activities are, that's in a different category.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we are all impacted by it, I would say, because the world's changing and the government is in competition with other governments, whether or not it likes to think that or realizes it. Bitcoin and stablecoins, they're getting into this very geopolitical space. Like you see China doing all these different blockchain initiatives and they already have their digital yuan. And they probably don't like it that the US dollar is the global reserve currency. And so they would love it if like more of the yuan was the global reserve currency, right? And so the fact that they, because they did their digitally yuan a long time ago, they could use this, for instance, in their Belt and Road initiative where they are going into develop these less developed countries. And maybe they'll say like if you want to do business with us, then you have to pay us in digital you want.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, I'm sure people who were under like Napoleon's Empire thought it would be the dominant currency forever. And, you know, for a long time, people transacted with seashells, like calorie shells. Like I literally keep one at my desk. I have this little calorie shell here, you know, this is this used to be a currency for a long time. So, you know, it's just what people believe. And yeah, the younger generation probably is going to be more into this than maybe somebody who. Can't think to how the world might change.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is so easy to literally lose. Like, you no longer have access to these funds because, you know, maybe you like lose a password or maybe you get phished, meaning like a scammer sends you a link and you click on it thinking it's an okay link, but instead it just gave them the keys to snatch all of your crypto. I mean, there's so many kind of security risks here because it's a new space and people are newbies and they don't know what they're doing. And so we see these scams happening all the time, like, you know, Coinbase was just some people on their customer service team were bribed to give away customer information. So point is just like through that exercise, I feel like you would learn a lot and then it would help you kind of understand like what's out there. But, you know, like I said earlier, sometimes when I hear people who are very critical, I'm like, your privilege is showing because they just think the US dollar will be here forever.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think probably so for so for people who are interested and who don't want to fall for hype you probably would want to educate yourself before you start investing in some way that like puts real money at risk so you could you know take like 100 or 200 and just try to do different things like using the technology right so you could get a little bit of bitcoin and try to send it to yourself or someone else like you could mint an nft you could buy an nft you could buy a meme coin but the point is just that you know i feel like all of those things would help you kind of understand like you know why are people talking about this like what is the innovation here like how does this work and then even just each of those actions that you're doing you would kind of understand like what are the risks and by the way the other reason people should try this out first is because”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know all of these systems will be more mature and sophisticated, and there will be better traders that are, you know, working on keeping the price at the correct levels in all these different places. But then also just the fact that all of these things work so much faster because it's on the internet than our traditional banking rails that could also mean that perhaps”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This new block of transactions gets added to the chain of the transactions that forms the ledger. That's why they call into blockchain. So anyway, point is that like, of course, in the village, you're all doing it just because you want to keep the village financial system running. But in Bitcoin, the reason people do is because they can make money doing that. So every blockchain has its own version of this where they have like different incentives where they're trying to get, you know, the different people to do different things on their network. So there's many different functions that they could try to incentivize, but that's sort of how it works. And that's why like when you ask this question about the volatility, yeah, like all these new things are being started. Figuring out how to value all of them, I mean, that's a whole project and of itself that could take a really long time. There have been people who theorize that as crypto grows, it will become less volatile because”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you live in Brooklyn. So imagine that everybody on your block in Brooklyn all lived in one village. And the village's financial system was that you would gather in the town square every day at noon and every person would just call out verbally like these were all the transactions I had yesterday. I paid so-and-so $10 for this cab ride. And then, you know, that person might say I paid, you know, this other person for babysitting or whatever. So there's no bank, right? Because right now we rely on the bank to do it, right? You agree that the one quote unquote authoritative ledger is in the cloud and all it is is just whatever the majority of the ledgers say, that's the correct ledger. Point is this is the same as a blockchain, except that instead of people in your village, it's just all these anonymous computers all around the globe that are collecting these transactions. And every 24 hours in the example of the village or every 10 minutes in the example of Bitcoin.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a difficult question. Probably one of the reasons it is so volatile is just because it's a new market. So if you look back at like the early days of stock trading and things like that, it was very similar. I've been covering this for 10 years. I remember 10 years ago writing articles where I was asking the same exact questions. All of these assets are very different. They all have their kind of little particularities. So, you know, Bitcoin is very different from Ether and Ether is different from Solana. And there's more out there. And so each of each one of them kind of deserves its own analysis. Every blockchain has what's called its tokenomics or crypto economics. You can design a token in a way where there's incentives around it that, you know, kind of try to get people to do different things on the blockchain itself, on a network. I'm sure this is very confusing. But for listeners who don't know, like a blockchain is a ledger. And you can imagine.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were saying, hey, I have this GPTC. I'd like to put it up as collateral and take a loan. But then when the value of it kept dropping and dropping and dropping, then suddenly they would have to kind of top up the collateral in order to retain the amount of money that they had borrowed, or they'd have to pay some of it back. But they didn't have the money to pay it back, basically once you collapse, then whoever you owe money to also maybe can't pay their bills. And then whoever they owe money to can't pay their bills. And it keeps going on. So anyway, the reason I'm just mentioning this is that the industry is a little nervous about these types of loans, right? And so the fact that JP Morgan is kind of doing a similar, and obviously the Bitcoin ETFs, they literally trade pretty much in line with the value of the underlying. So you don't get those weird distortions in the market. But the point is just that the fact that they allow you to borrow money based on your Bitcoin.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a big deal, and it's a big deal for actually a few different reasons. So you're right that in a way you could say that they're finally looking at it as real money. And the reason why this is notable is because Jamie Diamond himself has been on the record many times being anti-Bitcoin, but clearly he knows that no matter what his personal views are, that there's an opportunity to make money here. So, you know, they're definitely going down that road. But the other reason why it's significant is because you may remember in 2022 there was So, there were times when it was trading at like 30 less than the value of the Bitcoins in it. And when that happened, that is partially why we saw these collapses, because people were using that as collateral to take loans. And not everyday people, but like institutions.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Main thing that I would note is that this was the first time there were literally no democratic politicians who went. Even though Bitcoin had originally started as kind of a more libertarian thing, I would say that up until 2021, it was kind of like there were both sides. And it wasn't super partisan at that point. Like you could say that maybe certain Republicans seemed more enthusiastic, but it was not as clear as now where It seems like kind of like the whole Republican Party is definitely pro and then the Democrats are mixed sort of in a generational way.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they were not happy about what he was doing. They still are happy. They voted for him just in the sense that they think that this administration is better for the industry, but I don't think they love what his family is doing. And in fact, it was reported that their company, World Liberty Financial, was doing deals with different token teams where basically they were just exchanging money, like I'll give you this amount of money if you buy the World Liberty Financial token and we'll buy this amount of your token. I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine. But people in the industry also kind of look down on that because it's not organic.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taking advantage, and so you will see, and this is very interesting, there were a number of people that were very passionately pro-Trump during the campaign. And then once the meme coin thing happened, because not only Trump, but also Melania, she also launched meme coin.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, fortuitously, when that deadline came, he announced that he was going to have a dinner. And in order to participate in the dinner, you had to be one of the top holders of this coin. So, of course, the price shot up right at that time when this unlock was happening for those insiders, you know, just note the timing there and put those two facts together and you can make your own conclusions. But, you know, let me put it this way. Trump saw that the Biden administration alienated the crypto community. He realized these people have money and they hate the Democrats. I'm going to pick up those votes. I think it's so obvious, you know, to me, he said, you know, I'm the crypto candidate and he, you know, he even went to the Bitcoin conference last year. He made all these promises to the crypto community and Bitcoin communities. And on top of that, people in his personal orbit, his family realized this industry is going to get bigger. This industry is all about money. And so they have been.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think there's a larger philosophy. I think most people probably know what Trump's MO is. Let's just say, you know, like he's president and he took like a luxury jetliner from the Qataris. So whatever it is that you think that says about him, it applies to his activities in the crypto world. What I will say, though, like aside from his personal dealings, which by and large, in my opinion, they're business dealings, things that would like help his family or him. He launches his meme point, which by the way, like to make one of these things costs almost no money. So I just want to make that clear. And you're basically like kind of printing money out of thin air, right? But then on top of that, the people who got in very early, they just had some agreement where they had to hold their coins until, you know, whatever it was, you know, 90 days or I forget what the number of days was.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One way to think about it is you know, putting something on a blockchain is just giving it a certain wrapper. There was actually an NYU professor who, a business school professor who's very kind of pro-crypto, and he will make these funny statements because the Biden administration was just anti-all of crypto no matter what it was. And he was just saying, that's like saying that you're against something because it's not in a SQL database anymore and now you're using Microsoft Excel. He was like, the technology that you use for the ledger doesn't matter, but somehow the Biden administration just said anything using Excel was bad. And he was like, that's just fundamentally doesn't make any sense. It's the type of asset should, you know, kind of provoke a different response based on what it is.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So she's a serial entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her name is Roya Mabub, and she had this microblogging platform. And I think a lot of the people writing for it were women. And they had a hard time paying them because a lot of women in Afghanistan, they don't have bank accounts. Or if they do, then their male relatives might actually take the money that they earned from them. And so they set them up with Bitcoin wallets and then taught them how to use them. One of the women was in an abusive marriage and saved at the Bitcoin and then used that to eventually divorce her husband. So, you know, that gives you some kind of agency. Like I have some close Turkish friends in, I think it was in 2018, like the Valley of the Lyro is just going down and down, you know. So it's like people in those places, they then grasp these kinds of things a lot more quickly, like the value of crypto, like having a form of money that isn't influenced by a central bank. That's stable coins.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So a stable coin is any blockchain based asset that is pegged to the value of some other asset. 99% of all stablecoins, they're pegged to the value of the US dollar. The way that stablecoins really took off initially was that on a number of crypto exchanges, people wanted to be able to buy and trade using dollars. I wrote this book called The Cryptopians and it kind of covers kind of like 2013 to till 2018. And even at that time, people, they would recite back to me the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ether in dollars no matter whether they were European or Asian or, you know, just wherever they were in the world, they always knew the price in dollars, these other places in the world that they don't have a good way to save their money. Here's a really simple example. I feature this entrepreneur on my podcast.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On top of it, you know, stablecoins are probably the first major application that has really found what the industry likes to call product market fit. We're seeing that stablecoins have a huge amount of uptake, especially in so many other jurisdictions where they don't trust their local currency. It could be like Argentina, which has seen hyperinflation multiple times, or Venezuela or Turkey or Nigeria. There's just a lot of places where people don't actually have a great way to save their money and they maybe don't also have like really great ways to send money across borders. And so stablecoins are really fulfilling that role. And Congress is probably on the cusp of finally passing legislation here in the US around stablecoins. So, you know, these are all things that kind of show how all of this has changed.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to say actively hostile. I don't know if people will love that term, but that's probably pretty accurate description. For a long time, there were a lot of entrepreneurs who were cautious about doing things in the U.S. And you would see constantly, you know, there would be these popular projects, but they would always say like, you know, you can't participate if you're from these countries. And it's like, you know, North Korea, Iran, the United States. So that's definitely shifting. The administration is kind of more not only open-minded, but even in some regards like almost a little bit too embracing of crypto, you could say, the day that we're recording is the day that the Circle IPO is happening. And that in and of itself is another sign of how this is shifting. I think there's going to be probably a decent number of crypto IPOs this year that then.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say we're probably on the cusp of more widespread adoption. The number one biggest reason is simply that the Trump administration is really embracing crypto. And that has not been true of previous administrations. And in fact, the Biden administration was probably”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Biden administration was so anti crypto. I was like, oh my god, it's just like watching Blockbuster and Netflix is coming. And Blockbuster is not changing and doesn't know what to do. And in fact, thinks that they're invincible. This is like literally watching the US deal with crypto. And it's very nerve-wracking as an American.”
2025-06-10 · Masters of Scale · Trump’s impact on crypto future and your portfolio, with Unchained’s Laura Shin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT