Eight months later, that $250 was worth $10,000.
And having done no research, having no idea what a theorem actually does, I quickly became a theorem expert.
Not having enough work. Climate change. London finance a shortage of fresh water and transition.
Large scale social disorder. Antibiotic resistant diseases.
Education, employment or private capital for social needs quantum computing.
Today I'm having a conversation with my classmates, right wing Reza, who is going to tell us how he created his own cryptocurrency.
But before we get into that, could you give us a little bit of background about yourself,
what you did for the MBA and that will get into the conversation?
Sure. I before the MBA, I was in Philadelphia where I grew up, spent my whole life.
I was working in very legitimate finance job.
Contrary to the story, I'm about to tell you where I invested money on behalf of a family office and I was previous.
Before that I was worked and worked at a university endowment. A few years ago, I decided I wanted to get an MBA.
I kind of reached the end of that role. The only way to go hire would have been to be part of the family.
That clearly wasn't happening. So I figured it was time to get out of Dodge and see the world.
Having lived my whole life in Philadelphia, I came to Oxford to meet people that were different than just the, you know, the kids that I grew up with.
So I think probably the way I'd love to start is just letting you tell the story of how you created Wakelin, right?
And then we'll dig into a little bit more into your assets to Bitcoins in general, like some of your other items.
And I'm trying to understand kind of your view on it.
And in general, is that what you. Yeah, it's you know,
it's somewhat embarrassing being put on the spot because the process of creating weight coin took all of 5 to 10 minutes, I think.
I think what might be instructive is somewhat the story of how I got to the point where my experience with cryptocurrency started.
So. So where did you stop? It was about a year, year and a half ago now.
I was in work before I came here, and my boss walked out of his office and was like, Mike, you got to buy a Etherium.
It's the new Bitcoin.
So having just cashed out of an account that I had on this predicted dot com website which allows you to gamble on current events.
Okay. I figured I needed another good investment. So taking taking $200.
Right? I bought $250. I bought all the Etherium I could at $18 a coin.
Okay. Suffice to say, eight months later, that $250 was worth $10,000.
And having done no research, having no idea what Etherium actually does, I quickly became an Etherium expert.
Like self-proclaimed or among kind of Internet friends or amongst everyone that knew me.
It's the sort of thing where you don't tell people where you screw up and you only tell people when you make money.
So, yeah, everyone knew I had made $10,000 because I got into a theorem early.
Okay, so. So I actually did the right thing for once and I sold about two thirds of it and pocketed six seven grand.
Nice. So that left me with three or $3,000 to kind of play around with.
And now this was. This was like November, December, when when cryptocurrencies were pretty hot.
Clearly. I'm a gambler and clearly I want to do the only next reasonable thing with the remaining money.
And I tried to find the next theory, right? So that brought me to a coin called Tron.
Now, I have no idea what Tron does. I never learned what Tron does.
But there was a lot of hype. If you go on Reddit, they were all talking Tron, the founder great Twitter account.
And I think even that McAfee guy had tweeted about it a few times, okay.
So in order to buy Tron, you can't do this on Coinbase, which is the legitimate way for U.S. citizens to buy cryptocurrencies.
You have to go on to any of the other ones that host all of the range of everything, all the crap that's out there.
So I buy Tron and No Lie. Within two weeks, the $500 I put into it became $2,000.
It's amazing you couldn't even lose money. I waited an extra week.
It went back down to a thousand, but it was still a great it was a great success for me.
So and and that led to my fascination with fraud courts really.
So everything but the big one. So everything but bitcoin in the theorem I considered all coins.
Now, mind you, I'm not an expert. On what basis what how do you distinguish between the.
Well, there was a lot of people talking about a theorem in Bitcoin and they seemed legitimate based on that.
Right. So so everything else seemed like a fraud. Okay.
I mean, you know, you're talking about, you know,
there's hundreds of thousands of coins out there and they all have, you know, multimillion dollar market caps.
But everything was going up in November and December. So I bought these random coins about things like vechain iota, simple token, all this crap.
And, you know, some of them went up, some of them just kind of stayed how it was.
I even said to my cousins and my friends, you know, let's pool our money, we'll buy some more of this stuff.
So we got a nice little account going on and things were going pretty well.
And then I found out that this is where wait coin comes in, that by transferring my money from this Binance exchange to another exchange,
even less regulated and even less reputable, I could transfer some of this Etherium into my own token.
So this is the the genesis of wave coin. And very simply, I paid about $20 worth of Etherium, and I bought 101 billion Bitcoin at the initial price.
Now to create, we wanted to make it a legitimate, you know, token it had to trade trading.
So fortunately the I think it's called the Waze platform allows you to trade with yourself.
So I put in an order I try to buy one what's it called, one wig coin for the equivalent of $12.
Right. And when that transaction happened, all of a sudden, my 1 billion Litecoin was worth 12 billion U.S. dollars.
So the the story here is that, you know, it's an extraordinarily illiquid thing, and you can't trust the trades to tell you what things are worth.
But, you know, if you see it on a screen, maybe that means you're rich.
So so all of a sudden, I became one of the richest people in the world. And I was purely hooked on these these fraud coins.
I got into these things which were considered these pump forums.
So essentially it's these these telegram groups where where about a thousand people would be on these groups.
And the moderators, they would announce, hey, today we're buying crap coin five and everybody in the group would go running by that coin.
And because there was so much, so much volume in something so insignificant, the price would shoot up.
And the goal was to sell before the price crash down again. Now,
this is known in finance as a classic pump and dump scheme because the moderators had already
bought this coin before the thousand sheep before them ran in and tried to buy into it.
But, you know, again, this was like November, December when coins were doing really, really well.
So and, you know, I had already made a lot and this was kind of funny money to me.
Suffice to say, you know, me and my friends, we lost money every time we tried this because by the time we bought it was at the peak.
By the time we sold it, it crashed. And, you know, so I kept doing this crap.
I had weight coin and I kept buying these [INAUDIBLE] coins for sorry, it's a curse for the next few months.
And you know, I mean, you know, the story that happened come January, February, March, everything crashed.
So where is your friends and family portfolio of crap coins?
One, two, six. Now the friends and family portfolio, which ended up at one point being $500 from a few of my friends and then me, you know,
more than I'm happy to admit I'm getting into the gambling of it and putting in maybe like $2,000 is somewhere around 750 at this point, right?
Yeah. It it hit its peak. It hit its peak at 5000.
And I could do no wrong. I was just set it out. I was setting.
I was sending out, you know, like tips is like see it a lot of Twitter posts on it.
We should probably chop it to that right now. Oh, McAfee's over there.
He's pumping iota corn. We got we got to switch. So investing by Twitter feeds.
Investing by Twitter feed. Right. But but I want to say, throughout this whole thing, I had no illusions that this was actual investing.
Sure. And and I think that's where a lot of people's problems came.
I remember when Bitcoin fell 1 to $2000 in a day, and it was like this week where it just shed a lot of its value.
You'd go on the Reddit cryptocurrency newsfeed and at the top they had pasted to the top the suicide hotline letter, the number.
So, I mean, this is real stuff. I mean, I mean,
you could tell by the seriousness with which people in forums were dealing with these these crypto assets that they
were investing far more than they reasonably should have and far more than they probably reasonably could have lost.
Now, that's kind of when I when I left, you know, following the group.
But, you know, there were people out there that looked at this stuff as a real investment.
And I think that was a was quite dangerous at that time. So can I can we speculate bit and kind of project forward what's going to happen next?
I mean, is there going to still be these kind of hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin is ever
going to make their own little private token or is it all going to consolidate?
What's going to happen? Well, let me let me double back and remind you that I've never done any actual research into cryptocurrencies,
but basically kind of my my little darling, listen,
clearly you pick up things the and as I'm sure in conversations you've had, it is a it is a buzzword.
There are seemingly a few reasons for some cryptocurrencies to exist.
A lot of people say, you know, we do need an unregulated, you know,
a non central bank currency such as Bitcoin, a theory, empower it as a whole blockchain network.
These things will probably stick around. But you know, are we passed the time of them being, you know, a huge bubble asset.
Very possibly, but that that may be a benefit because that may have got in the, you know, the the fluff, the, you know, everything extra out of it.
And then people could kind of focus on the real use and the real the real abilities that some of these coins and more importantly,
the blockchain actually has to offer. And if you had your time again, would you do the same thing again?
Of course I do it again. I mean, I'm you know, I'm out there looking for the the next thing to gamble on.
I mean, it's just one series of crappy gamble style investment after another for me.
So if you have any ideas, you know, it's just kind of fun.
We went to, you know, an MBA and we went to the Royal Ascot.
I mean, I had a great time there. Didn't win a single bet, but man did.
I think I knew a lot about horses. I end of that, so to speak.
Thank you so much for sharing. No, it was a pleasure. I've this is one of those stories that has been kind of whispered about around the NBA.
And it's pretty it got the got the whole thing. Yeah, I have to I was able to share it.
I do want to say I made money on this one. This is a good bet for me that I can still buy with coin.
One could still buy weight coin. Before I got here, I made one final trade so the price doesn't move unless somebody trades.
Okay. Which coin is now worth? $161 trillion is a total market cap approximately three times the total liquid value of all currency.
That's that's around the world. What was what was this African trade. Well, that was the last trade.
Was it? The first one was pretty good know first of all. But the first because I found that I could buy a small decimal of it for $2.
So so we just need to keep trading it, keep existing, pushing the price up.
Exactly. I am officially the richest person in this NBA class, so by quite some way it's good.
So if anybody wants to reach out and get in touch with a very successful person,
I finally got all of my contact details will be late in the description of the podcast if you want any tips on Wall Street safety or crypto trading.
Thank you. So thank you. I really about. Thank you for listening to the ABCs of Future Business podcast presented by the Site Business School.
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