April 28, 2018

Darien Sloat, CEO of the Fairfield Iowa Chamber of Commerce on KMCD Radio
interviewing Rick Shaddock about Digital Currency

Transcript

Fairfield Iowa Association for Digital Currency joins the Fairfield Iowa Chamber of Commerce, featured on Radio KMCD Classic 96. We suggest each chapter of the Digital Currency Association join your local Chamber of Commerce to build your economy. We were interviewed by radio host Lee Muntz and Chairman of the Fairfield Chamber, Darien Sloat.

RICK: We are here at KMCD Radio. We'll talk about digital currency for the Fairfield Chamber of Commerce. We are a member.  We'll talk about how we give a table at the Friday Art Walk.

DARIEN: ...We're also on Facebook.  Then we will have our June 7th Blast Off Party and on June 8th our Men's and Women's Blast Off golf event.  They'll be out there the course on the course, typically. On June 22, our newest event, the Barn Yard Bash, will be coming to the Maasdam Barn's area, and that's definitely one  you want to check out.  Lots of stuff there.

LEE: I'm sure there'll be entertainment, food, and everything.

DARIEN: Yeah. So there we go and then now we move on to our guest this week Rick Shaddock who is the director of education for the Fairfield Iowa Association for Digital Currency. They're our newest member. Welcome to the show Rick. Thanks for being here.

RICK: Well, thanks for hosting us.

DARIEN: All right so tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in the concept of cryptocurrency.

Well I've lived in I got my master's in arts and education here and I'm a homeowner. And also traveled to Washington, D.C. where I went to a seminar about digital currency and felt that would be something that could be useful here in Fairfield. I've heard about Bitcoin and digital currency since about 2011 and I bought 10 of them when they were a bit over a dollar and then kind of forgot about it for a while but heard in the news that it was getting up to a dollar and a ten dollars and a hundred dollars per Bitcoin and a thousand dollars per Bitcoin and around 2013 a group of us founded the Fairfield Iowa Association for Digital Currency to bring this knowledge to Fairfield. And we now have about 100 people who have signed up on our list at the Fairfield Art Walk and we've had events at the Fairfield Library and on campus to get information about digital currency. And we also give people a little bit of Bitcoin, a couple dollars worth of Bitcoin to get started to see what it's all about. So our club doesn't have any dues, we give a little bit. to the new members. So it's an exciting topic.

DARIEN: So this is a relatively new concept, but you got interested in it very early on, it sounds like. So give us your two-minute elevator pitch to understand what digital currency is.

RICK: All right. Digital currency is a fair currency. So it can be fair money for Fairfield. Well, the reason the current dollar-based system is not fair is that in Washington, DC, they can print up as many dollars as they want. And every time they do that, they decrease the value of the dollars that we're holding. So they call it "quantitative easing", but it's not making things easier. It's making, for the population, it's making it harder. Or they call it, they have words for it, like "increasing the money supply". So that sounds good. More money, right? But when they increase the money supply, decreasing the purchasing power of the dollar. So they should really call it "we're going to decrease the purchasing power of every dollar you have."  And we would say, "no, that's not such a good thing."

So digital currency, although it is initially created through all money has to be created from nothing, and then it becomes something, the dollar now is created from nothing. It's not backed by gold anymore. But digital currency is created in a fair way, that anybody could participate, and have a mining machine. I brought one to the studio, I can't show it on the radio, but we demonstrate that at our seminars. Or people can donate unused computer time to keep the network going. Every financial system needs a computer system. And now that we have the Internet, everybody could participate in this worldwide financial network.

DARIEN: How is it people can use a computer to mine for that currency?

RICK: There is software available for Bitcoin and other currencies. There is quite a lot of competition now for running the software that keeps Bitcoin going. People could still do it, but the days of profiting, I did some mining in 2014 and 2015 and did pretty well. Now there are other coins that are later technology and actually more energy efficient. There are over a thousand coins now and our club made one in 2014 called BitRaam keeping these computers running around the world, it's making an invincible network that no one could shut down or hack all of them, all the, must be a million of these machines around the world by now, that keep the network going. It makes it decentralized. So we hear that word associated with digital currency. Centralized means you have one central computer or computer system that could be hacked running a financial network. But by being decentralized, even if 10% of them were hacked, which would be thousands of them. thousands of them at the same time. The other 90% would keep the network going and keep the accurate record. So it works by power of large numbers, strength in numbers.

DARIEN: So you said there's a thousand different digital currencies available out there right now?

RICK: Yes, yeah there are some of the major ones are Ethereum, Bitcoin of course, and there's another one called Bitcoin Cash. There's some dispute among the digital currency community, which is the real Bitcoin, the one that is most in line with the original founders' vision. It was, Bitcoin was started in 2009 by a group of programmers that went under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. So there's some speculation who they were, but they evidently want their anonymity. But one, for example, was Nick Szabo and Hal Finney. These are graduates, computer science graduates of CalTech and University of Washington, respectively. So I believe that Bitcoin was made in America, as many innovations in computers and the internet have been. And it would be good to keep the jobs associated with digital currency in the United States.

DARIEN: Okay, so we saw, we recently saw a burst of activity on Bitcoin. You know, it came out and then all of a sudden it climbed a little bit after a while and then it got wild. How volatile is digital currency's value in comparison to other types of currency?

RICK: Well, Bitcoin became very popular faster than the existing software could handle. So it started to get slow and programmers worked on it. collaboration with each other. There's not a formal organization that runs Bitcoin. It's like owned by everyone, but people can submit suggestions for the programming code and on a consensus basis the Lightning Network was developed which did restore the speed of Bitcoin. It's supposed to be within a few minutes that you can send someone Bitcoin and they receive it and that it's confirmed by the majority of the computers on the network. If there is any suspicious transaction or someone was trying to give themselves some more Bitcoin that would be quickly identified by the other 99% of the computers on the network and that transaction would be nullified. So Bitcoin has a good success record so far since 2009 no one's been able to hack it. There are some exchanges where you can convert Bitcoin to US dollars and US dollars to Bitcoin. Now there have been some that have been hacked, such as MTGOX, which is a company in Japan, which was initially keeping track of game tokens. There was a game called "Magic the Gathering Exchange", and it wasn't geared towards real valuable tokens such as And they got hacked. But there are some other companies that developed after that, such as Coinbase and Silicon Valley, which is the most popular way that you can start with Bitcoin and to store it safely online. So they haven't been hacked yet, though. You always have to say "yet". The best way to store it is a digital storage device. We have one in the studio here. One of the brands is called the Trezor device for storing "treasure", Bitcoin. It has physical buttons that have to be pressed in order to send Bitcoins. So no hacker can do that. We're presenting one to the Fairfield Chamber of Commerce so you can start to accept some donations in Bitcoin. with that as well of course.

DARIEN: Well thank you. Yeah I understand the Iowa City just last week I believe it was I saw in the news that the Iowa City Chamber of Commerce recently started accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment. So you're saying by getting one of these Trezor wallets as it's called on the cover that then I can use that to purchase things or pay bills rather than handing them money or writing a check or using a credit card.

RICK: There are many businesses that accept digital currency now and actually DISH Network, Satellite TV accepts Bitcoin and there are about ten businesses so far in Fairfield that accept Bitcoin. Really? Who are those guys? Oh, there's a place to rent accepting Bitcoin. I got a haircut giving a tip in Bitcoin, a classical cut. Uh-huh. And I've bought... Although he's not ready to take Bitcoin all the time. At Logli's I bought a pizza slice. So we're starting slowly.

DARIEN: People are starting to work their way into it a little bit. So it is a complex issue and we can't begin to do it justice on a show that's short. So if people are interested in learning more about this, what's the best way to get that information? Where do they go?

RICK: Well we have a website, f-i-a-d-c dot org, Fairfield Eye Association for Digital Currency dot org. And we put some ads in the Source, Fairfield Ledger about seminars that we have. You see the Fairfield Library's meeting room.

DARIEN: Okay, how often do you do those?

RICK: Every couple of months.

DARIEN: So we should check out the source and potentially the Chamber website. You can add that to the community calendar and also the Weekly Reader.

RICK: And every week we meet at 3 o'clock at the Golden Dome Market Cafe to help people get started get into the currency of the future.

DARIEN: Okay. Digital currency. So I'm sorry every week you said at 3 o'clock?

Yeah. And what day?

DARIEN: On Sunday. On Sunday at the Fairfield Golden or at the Golden Dome Market. Excellent. Okay, cool. Well thank you for joining us. Thanks for joining the chamber and we hope to help you spread the word on this. We definitely are not the first folks in town to be looking at it so we want to keep up with the times. We probably need to do a little more home work on this. So thank you for joining us.

RICK: Well, let's make Fairfield rich again, as it was in the 1990s, with the decentralization of the AT&T telephone network into telegroup and business like that. Decentralization of currency could restore fair currency to Fairfield.

DARIEN: Very good. Thank you. All right, so we move on now to upcoming events.  We did just...

RICK: I am presenting a Trezor device to the Fairfield Chamber of Commerce as a way to be a way of accepting donations with digital currency. As you said, another chamber is doing it.

DARIEN: Yes, Iowa City may be the first one in the country to do it. We will be second.

RICK: We want to make sure that those donations stay safe. So these devices are one of the best, plus the Ledger Nano, which is another. They compete like Coke and Pepsi, Trezor, and Ledger. They're all storage devices.  I like this one because it has a bigger screen. This one has a real tiny screen. It has a lot of space. If you send Bitcoin, then you can confirm here, you can see we're about to send such and such amount, such and such an address, and confirm. So here you have to do it line by line. So that's where we're at.

DARIEN: Alright, well thank you.

RICK: And hopefully that will bring in many donations in the future to see the way people are transacting through digital currency..

DARIEN: We have a lot to learn. Thank you.
 

Note: FIADC.org is now FIDCA.org
(easier to pronounce and remember)

Thanks to: riverside.fm/transcription

Fairfield Iowa Chamber of Commerce