Brandon Mintz Interview - Bitcoin Depot ATMs, Going Public in 2023, Bitcoin Adoption & Bear Market

Here is my interview with Brandon Mintz who is the founder and CEO of Bitcoin Depot which is a leading Bitcoin ATM business. In this interview we talk about Bitcoin Depot’s ATMs, buying bitcoin on ATMs, plans to going public in 2023, the crypto bear market, CBDCS and more.

Transcription

• Welcome back to The Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. With me today is Brandon Mintz, who’s the founder, and CEO of Bitcoin Depot. Brandon, great to have you on.
• Likewise. Thanks for having me, Tony.
• Brendan, let’s start with your background. Where are you from and where’d you grow up?
• Originally from Woodstock, Georgia, and spent most of my life in Atlanta and now splitting time between Atlanta and Miami.
• And how did you, or I should say, what did you do before founding Bitcoin Depot?
• I was actually a college student, so just restaurant jobs and such. Nothing interesting.
• Wow, so I guess my next question would be, what was your first encounter with Bitcoin and what was your aha moment?
• Just met a friend of a friend in college and really the aha moment came from very, very deep research early on, just understanding all of the problems that Bitcoin could solve. And at that time, you know, Bitcoin was really it in existence, and I just thought it was the future and could power the economy in a lot of different ways. And then I went to go buy Bitcoin and it was extremely difficult. The only exchange at the time in the US was Coinbase, and then there was Mt. Gox internationally. This was late 2013. And I just had a lot of difficulties getting registered online with Coinbase and getting my Bitcoin. And after three weeks, I still didn’t have Bitcoin. And that led me to discover the cash to crypto part of the industry, which didn’t really exist at that time. And through that journey, it ultimately led me to want to build a better solution, and that’s how we got to Bitcoin Depot.
• Wow, so was there ever a point where you thought, okay, I can go the ATM route, but I can also go maybe some sort of peer-to-peer decentralized exchange where you could do that through? Or was it like, you know what, I’m gonna go the ATM route, that was the main idea.
• No, that’s a good question because Bitcoin Depot wasn’t the first company I started. I actually started selling initially on LocalBitcoins, which was a peer-to-peer website. And then I ended up building my own website cashtocrypto.com, which was somewhat similar to that business model, but it was just me as the counterparty on the Cash to Crypto business side versus, you know, all of the buyers of Bitcoin depositing cash to be able to make a purchase from us.
• So give us an overview of Bitcoin Depot. How many locations the setup that you have and how does it all work?
• Yeah, well, we have 7,000 Bitcoin ATMs in the US and Canada. They are nearly all cash in for Bitcoin. That’s really our focus is people entering the crypto ecosystem. We’re in 47 states in the US currently, and just a matter of time until we’re in all 50. We also have another product called BD Checkout that allows you to make a purchase through our app for Bitcoin using cash at over 8,000 retail locations, big name retailers that you would’ve heard of. You can download the app and you can see all of those locations. And that is in 22 states at the moment. And then we also have the ability to buy online with us using a debit card on our website, Bitcoindepot.com. But that’s not really our focus. Our focus is really the cash market in a retail setting.
• And so it sounds like you’re providing both the software and the hardware to achieve this. And you mentioned there’s a mobile app as well that ties to it.
• Yeah, exactly. So you can go do an entire self-service transaction on one of our kiosks, which we call BTMs. And you can just use our app and not use any hardware and just hand over cash at the register to someone working at the checkout counter.
• Interesting. Are you just primarily supporting Bitcoin or are there other coins as well, and do you have plans to add more?
• At this time it’s just Bitcoin only. Because we’re going public, it’s probably not wise in this market at this time, of all these unknowns with the SEC and what’s a security and what’s not a security. So we’ve decided to play it safe and just stick with Bitcoin, and that’s really all our customers wanted anyways. And if they do want other cryptos, they can exchange them through plenty of other methods after they buy Bitcoin from us. So it doesn’t really add a lot of friction if they want something other than Bitcoin. So we’ve just decided to continue with that route.
• Sure, yeah, that makes sense given that, as you mentioned, you’re planning to go public. Walk us through a bit, you know, if I’m the average Joe or Jane, I walk into the store, I see the sign up by Bitcoin here through your setup. What’s the process like to get that done? You mentioned some of it, but is it, you know, I can download the app right away, I give the cash and then I scan a QR code or something, or the Bitcoin sent to my wallet address. Walk us through a bit of that process.
• Yeah, well, it’s super easy. It takes about a minute or two in either method. So if you’re going to use a Bitcoin ATM, you can use any Bitcoin wallet. It does not have to be the Bitcoin Depot wallet, but we prefer, you know, our wallet and for people to use it. You would go to one of the machines, you do some identity verification, give some KYC information to us, and then you scan your QR code that your wallet generates. You enter cash and get your receipt and you’re done. And Bitcoin’s gonna be sent immediately. If the other method, BD Checkout, again, you can download our app. You actually have to use the app for BD Checkout on like the Bitcoin ATM, and you just type in, you know, “Hey, I wanna buy a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin.” You choose the location that you’re gonna go to. We have a lot of pharmacy locations, for example. You would go to one of those stores, you would’ve a barcode generated from the app. You would tell the person working at the checkout counter, “Hey, you know, I have a barcode to scan, I’m paying for something.” They would scan it. It rings up just like a prepaid card, you know, just one of those Visa cards you grab off of the gift card rack, for example. And you hand over cash and once your account is funded with that cash in just a few seconds, you just click a button that says, convert to Bitcoin and you’re done. So again, only takes about a minute. Super easy and convenient.
• Can you tell us about the security layers you have in place? So let’s say the folks use your app and your wallet. Is it a self-hosted wallet? Are you custodying with let’s say a Coinbase custody? Tell us about those security layers.
• Yeah, totally. That’s a good question considering the circumstances today. Well, we have always focused on never custodying customer funds because we knew, you know, things like FTX and other situations would happen. There’s always, you know, a possibility you could be hacked in some sort of way. We never wanted to take that risk. So it’s an entirely self custodial wallet, the Bitcoin Depot wallet. Now, if somebody wants to come use a Bitcoin ATM using the Coinbase wallet and complete a transaction, they can do that. But that’s not what we recommend. We recommend using our wallet. So you’re always in control of your own crypto. If something happens to Bitcoin Depot, we go out of business, file bankruptcy, whatever the case may be. Somebody hacks us, your Bitcoin and your Bitcoin Depot Wallet is safe as long as you never gave your username, password, and private key to somebody else.
• That’s great. I mean, I think to your point, after this whole FTX collapse, even Celsius and BlockFi and so forth, people, there was a big rush to get self-hosted wallets, even hardware wallets. And that’s, you know, it just, the mantra that was set years ago, especially by a lot of Bitcoiners, that not your keys, not your coins, I think rings true again here. And I think hopefully people learn from the situation. But it’s great that you guys are using a setup where folks control their own coins.
• Yeah, it was good timing for us.
• Now as far as, you know, when the transaction’s done, let’s say, I scanned a code and all that, I convert my cash to Bitcoin. Is that Bitcoin instantly available or is there like any lag time, where I can withdraw it if I wanted to move it or send it to somebody?
• It’s the same lag that you would have sending Bitcoin from any wallet to another wallet. So, you know, every wallet may require a confirmation, for example, on the Bitcoin network from the miners until it’s actually spendable. So it could be, you know, 10 minutes until you could go resend it, spend it somewhere else, potentially.
• A kind of weird question for you, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about for years and I’ve talked to quite a few folks about it, and that is, there are different demographics in the world, right? It goes without saying, there’s different people, different walks of life, who are familiar with different levels of technology and they trust different things, whether it be trust banks, they trust ATMs or they trust exchanges. So could you tell us a bit about the demographic that uses the Bitcoin ATMs and who are they, especially like in the United States? Are they like the older folks who are, “Hey, I know how to use an ATM, I can buy some Bitcoin on this.” Can you tell us a bit about that?
• Yeah, great question. So there’s really three different buckets I like to break it into. The first one being that cash economy bucket made up of people who just prefer to use cash. Sometimes they use it for certain transactions, sometimes they use a card for others, but also most importantly, people who are underbanked and unbanked, which is close to a quarter of the US population, actually a lot of people don’t realize that. And according to a few studies out there, those are the people who are using crypto the most. I’ve read studies that say, you know, people within that demographic have adopted crypto, owned crypto more than two times as likely as just the general population. And then the other buckets are really anyone who wants pure convenience, doesn’t mind paying a markup, goes to Travelex in the airport, buys drinks from convenience store versus having to go all the way to the grocery store, uses a cash ATM instead of going to the bank. You know, just normal convenience purchases in life. Maybe they got fed up with waiting on verification from the exchange, which exchanges still have a lot of problems getting people through even for small dollar amounts. And then lastly, as crypto has been adopted more and more, the Baby Boomer demographic has come into play as well. So you have people, who just aren’t that great with technology, they don’t want to try and figure out how to use an online exchange, and they want a familiar experience with something tangible that they can go see, touch, and feel that gives them a lot more comfort than just completing the transaction through the website. Especially with all the news that has come out the past year, a lot of people may feel you go to a website to buy Bitcoin, they could just disappear or say, “Hey, we’re not allowing withdrawals.” You go to a Bitcoin ATM you know, you’re getting your Bitcoin essentially instantly, there’s a lot less to worry about. So those are really the three buckets that make up our user base.
• Very interesting and you know, you mentioned the unbanked and to your point, there are good amount of people in the US who are unbanked, but of course more so in other countries. Are there plans and maybe this is like a 2023 roadmap thing, to expand to other countries internationally?
• Well, we are in Canada now. We have somewhere around 200 Bitcoin ATMs in Canada. As far as other countries go, we’re still looking at various data points and trying to determine where we would go. I think it’s not totally necessary for us to expand internationally to grow. There’s still a lot of opportunities for us organically in the US and Canada, but I think there is a lot of value in expanding beyond where we are today.
• For sure. Are there any plans, or maybe it’s already in place, and I apologize if I missed this. Are you planning to integrate like the Lightning Network at all or it doesn’t make sense necessarily? Any thoughts on that?
• Well Lightning, it’s a great idea. It has good use case, especially for remittance. The hard part is just the education on the customers and how to get them to buy Lightning Network Bitcoin versus regular Bitcoin and how to use it. And we’re really most focused on just ease of use and a simple experience right now. So we don’t really want to complicate the transaction process, but I think in the future and as adoption grows, then it could be something that’s valuable.
• Tell us about your plans to go public. I read that you’re planning to do this via an SPAC. Is that happening in 2023?
• Yeah, so we’ve been working with SPAC now for the past few months. We announced the transaction in August of this year in 2022. And we do plan to be a public company in 2023. So basically, you know how SPAC works, SPAC has funds in a trust account. They have 321 million dollars right now. And we essentially merge with SPAC and hopefully get a large portion of those funds onto the company’s balance sheet to allow us to grow. And it is something that we think we’ll close in, in the first few months of 2023. And Bitcoin Depot would be a public company on the Nasdaq.
• Wow, that’s exciting. And aside from that, obviously that’s a big item on your roadmap for 2023. Is there anything else that you wanna highlight that you guys are planning to do in 2023?
• Well, looking beyond that as a public company with adding cash to the balance sheet and having, you know, public currency or stock, I think there is a huge opportunity for consolidation in the Bitcoin ATM industry. A lot of people don’t realize this, but there’s close to 600 Bitcoin ATM companies in the world. But most of them are just a guy with a couple of machines trying to, you know, make it for himself. And usually it doesn’t work out for those people. There are a few dozen serious players, you know, maybe a hundred machines or more. And there’ve really only been a handful of companies like us that have truly grown and truly developed into a sophisticated operation. And so we believe with our scale currently, the economies of scale we have with vendors, the vertically integrated platform we have by owning our own software will allow us to be very successful with merging some of these smaller operators into Bitcoin Depot, and allow them to do better than they can do on their own. So I would say industry consolidation is a big goal for us next year. And just continuing to grow organically, add more Bitcoin ATM locations, add more BD Checkout locations, and acquire as many users as we can. And fortunately for us and anyone listening to this can see our public filings that we’ve done, including our financials. We recently filed Q3 of 2022, and that was a record quarter for us in terms of top line revenue and bottom line EBITDA and so was the quarter before that. So they can see that this business is pretty insulated with Celsius with Three Arrows, with Terra LUNA, with FTX, Voyager, all of these events happening that people think are the end of the world, well they aren’t for the Bitcoin ATM industry. And we’ve seen this since the beginning of the company. There’s always that announcement that everyone thinks, “Oh, you know, are Bitcoin ATMs still going to be popular? Are people still going to use them after X, Y, Z events occurs?” And usage has not slowed down through all of these events over the years.
• Yeah, it is a great point. And one thing we talked about earlier, but folks moving to self-hosted wallets, and there was just a huge migration of Bitcoin off centralized exchanges. And I think despite what I’ve noticed, despite the the price being down, there’s still a lot of people interested in Bitcoin and the technology and diversifying adding this as an asset to their portfolio. So I feel like we’ve crossed a chasm, so to speak, where it’s like, okay, it’s not so much about price, but we need this asset here and people are starting to recognize the benefits of it.
• Yeah, exactly. Well, it’s a good time to buy for anyone that’s held out over the past year and a half. I think now a lot of people who are waiting on the sidelines have seen a couple of these crypto winters and they know that, you know, it’s only a matter of time till we see that upward momentum, and that a lot of times the media makes it a lot worse than it seems. For example, Mt. Gox had something like 50 times or more the trading volume of FTX according to some posts that I’ve seen on Twitter. And the media makes it seem like FTX was the entire crypto market and without FTX, how could there be anything left that will survive? But that’s not the case.
• Yeah, I even read that Mt. Gox, there were much more Bitcoin that was lost in that collapse versus FTX. FTX, yes investors lost access to their funds, but it wasn’t like a ton of Bitcoin that was lost, but more so in Mt. Gox, which I found interesting because now obviously you have a bunch of different all coins. There was obviously the FTT token, native token to FTX but way less Bitcoin loss.
• Their own token was a large portion of the losses.
• Yeah. Tell us about how, where you’re getting the Bitcoins from when someone makes a purchase through your app or the ATM, are you sourcing that from OTC markets, exchanges, or do you guys have a stockpile of Bitcoin that you’re holding and that’s how you fund the payments and so forth?
• Well fortunately we haven’t had a stockpile of Bitcoin that we’ve held and I’m glad we didn’t ’cause we would’ve rode the price down and wrapped up quite a bit of losses. But we buy our Bitcoin primarily through an over-the-counter broker, big trading company, and nothing fancy really. We don’t hold a large portion of it. We typically hold a few hundred thousand dollars. I think all of this is disclosed in our proxy filing and people can read about it, but we’re turning over that inventory plenty of times throughout the day and buying it back in very small increments. So we’re using dollar cost averaging to protect ourselves, and we don’t play the crypto markets at all in terms of, you know, stock piling crypto and seeing if we can make a few extra bucks. All we care about is selling Bitcoin through our Bitcoin ATMs and through BD Checkout and online accepting cards and that’s it. That’s the whole business model. It’s very simple.
• Question about, you know, expansion globally. Obviously, El Salvador made Bitcoin a legal tender. I personally expect that trend to continue. I think in the next few years, we’re probably gonna see more countries do the same. I don’t know if you agree with me on that, but are you guys looking to position yourselves in countries that will have and will make Bitcoin legal tender?
• I think it’s definitely something worth paying attention to when considering international expansion, because if the country we’re going in is pushing out all of this positive media about crypto, it’s going to get people more and more curious to buy it. And potentially, you know, buy and sell. And I think internationally, depending on if it’s a country that receives a lot of remittances or not, we may have two-way machines that allow, you know, buying crypto and selling crypto for cash. Brazil’s recent announcement about legalizing the ability to use Bitcoin as a payment method was great. It’s not quite legal tender status, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. And hopefully we see a lot more of these Latin American countries do the same. And I’m kind of trying to theorize on why, you know, it’s El Salvador and countries like Brazil that are out there saying, “Hey crypto’s great, it’s legal tender, we’re approving it as a payment method.” And I think they probably want to encourage the use of it for remittance is my guess. And receive, have their citizens receive, you know, Bitcoin set of dollars.
• Yeah, I think that’s a big use case for sure in the Latin American markets. And also I feel like a lot of these Latin American countries, not all of them, but some of them do suffer from, you know, hyperinflation and fiat currency problems right? And more so than the US and other countries, I feel like there’s an actual gravitation to Bitcoin given all the great principles that it has as hard money.
• Yeah, exactly. I mean people think the inflation that we’ve had 8-9% in a year is bad, but there’s countries that have that in a week.
• Yeah it’s pretty crazy what’s happening in some of these other countries. You know, on that note though, in the United States, we’re seeing Bitcoin mining adoption happening big time, especially like in Texas and so forth. If I’m not mistaken and I believe it fluctuates from time to time and I’ve spoken to these guys Riot Blockchain and Whinstone, they have the largest mining operations I believe in Texas. Once again, it might fluctuate from time to time, and there’s just a lot of companies mining now and the US is a leading as far as control of the hash rate, you have Foundry and all these guys, you know, what are your thoughts on that? Despite the regulatory uncertainties from the government overall, there’s still a mining boom happening here.
• Well, I think it’s hard to find a safer place, and I think people would prefer to invest domestically. And a lot of the money, you know, coming into these companies has come from domestic lenders and investors versus put miners all over the across the world. But there was also very cheap power at a time in primarily 2020. And people were buying cheap land as well shortly after COVID started. And you put those two together and the miners are easy to figure out as long as there’s supply and it makes sense. And Texas specifically was very pro-mining because they have essentially an agreement of some sort with a lot of these mining companies that says, “Hey, if there’s some sort of surge in power usage and we can’t support your operations and we tell you to shut them off, you have to shut them off,” and they cooperate, which isn’t good for profitability at all, but it allows them to be in some sort of a safe haven state.
• Sure, I mean, and in fact also that they create a lot of jobs locally. I interviewed, I think it’s Chad Harris, CEO of Riot Blockchain and Whinstone, but he’s talking about, you know, how the county that you’re in booming and of course creating jobs. And I’m sure they get tax breaks and incentives as well from the local government. So it’s win-win. But yeah, sometimes to your point, grid may get overloaded. Maybe they have to mine at night time versus day, but yeah.
• The interesting thing about mining is how much money came into those companies and just how crazy Riot stock price went for a period of time and a few others. I think people didn’t realize how tied to the Bitcoin price that they are. I mean, that’s the whole business. You are relying on the Bitcoin price to increase over time to be profitable. It’s not really a whole lot different than just buying Bitcoin. You get some depreciation, I guess, in that business from buying the physical hardware. But unlike that, for Bitcoin ATMs at least, we haven’t been historically correlated to the price of Bitcoin since the beginning of the company. We’ve been through, you know, a few bull runs, a few bear markets in the crypto space. And every year, year-over-year we’ve been growing regardless, thankfully. So I think people have probably woken up and realized that now about miners. But hopefully once we’re public and they see our numbers, regardless of everything going on and regardless of where your crypto price is, people still use Bitcoin ATMs. And a lot of it comes out of necessity. A lot of people are using it for remittances. A lot of people are using it to make purchases online instead of more traditional methods.
• Well that’s great. I mean that you guys have been growing year-over-year, and so on that note, you know, the Bitcoin halving happens every four years and the price follows that right, bull and bear market. So right now we are in a bear market. We had our peak last year. Are you expecting the four year cycle to continue, you know, 2024 comes around next halving, we have another price run up. I’m not asking for a price prediction, but you know, just the cycle playing out the same way.
• Well, I sure hope so. Just for my personal holdings at least, it would be nice to see those numbers go up instead of down. But just based on history, since I’ve been in the crypto space, every time halving has come up, Bitcoin prices have started to increase right around that. I think it’s definitely possible that that happens again. I don’t know if the increase in the Bitcoin price from, you know, the previous high to the next high will be quite as much just because the market cap of Bitcoin and other cryptos have grown so much. When you have the industry at a trillion dollar market cap, which I think it’s a little bit below that today. It’s hard to hit, you know, five times that in a very short duration, but when it was a hundred billion or a couple hundred billion dollars, it’s a lot easier. So I think it’s very possible that we could see nearly or around a $100,000 Bitcoin. But I’m just a guy that’s not a financial advisor. So I don’t know, but I would like to see it. And I think it’s possible based on what’s being built in the industry right now, while things are a bit slower for a lot of companies.
• Yeah, for sure. And I feel like each cycle we’ve seen more adoption. I mean, I would not, in 2017, if you told me El Salvador was gonna make Bitcoin legal, then I would like, “Okay, whatever. I don’t believe that right?” But it happened and then, you know, just you’re seeing these big players like BlackRock and so forth enter the market. They launched a partnership with Coinbase, yada yada. And what was interesting, I think a lot of people missed, they launched a Bitcoin spot trust. And then of course, there’s been talks about a Bitcoin ETF coming along. So I feel like there’s more to come and larger institutions are gonna build, you know, maybe more sophisticated products and services around Bitcoin. And I personally think that possibly central banks may add Bitcoin as a balance sheet as a reserve asset similar to what they’re doing with gold. I don’t know what you think about that.
• Well, just seeing what’s happened over the past couple of years, and a lot of these big banks that hold a crazy amount of money as custodians have now become custodians of crypto. For example, BNY Mellon, one of the oldest banks in the country, I think is the largest just holder of assets and custody in the world. Something like 40 trillion assets based on the last time I read. And they provide custodian services for crypto now. Like there’s an insane amount of money that still hasn’t even touched the space. I’m not sure what the market cap of all the cryptocurrencies are today, but it’s something like a little under a trillion. But there’s still trillions and trillions, tens of trillions of dollars that have no exposure to crypto at all today. And as long as they haven’t been scared off too much, there is still a lot that is going to come to fruition in the next few years.
• So on that point of being scared off, how long do you think, do you think the FTX Sam Bankman-Fried situation will be forgotten maybe in six months? You know, is it like we’re going through it, it’s painful, it’s like the Mt. Gox situation, but years pass and people forget about it and look, Bitcoin was not disrupted at all, the blockchain, Bitcoin blockchain’s running fine, right? But, you know, the media headlines, the frenzy, “Oh no, this crypto’s gonna zero, this is happening, blah, blah, blah.” Does that set us back and do we forget about it sooner than later?
• Well, we’ve seen this many times before, and the best way for people to forget about it is to see more really big names enter the space and also crypto prices to go a lot higher. So they think the likelihood that that’s all crypto is is much lower in their heads. So I don’t think we’re gonna see this big turn of events here in the next couple of months or a few months, where everything’s gonna get really positive in the media, and money’s gonna be dumping in. I think it’s gonna happen very gradually over the next year and a half, once we get closer to the Bitcoin halving.
• Yeah. That makes sense. And given the macro bear market we’re into where the Fed is, you know, doing their thing and recession and all that, I feel like we need to come out from under that as well before people start thinking about investing. It’s like about capital, it’s capital preservation right now. And it’s hard all around stocks, real estate, everything.
• Yep.
• Question for you, this is a hard one. It’s not price prediction, but where do you see Bitcoin in five years? Do you have any predictions? And I know you touched a little bit on some of those items before too.
• In terms of price or just overall crypto?
• Let’s say adoption. Let’s say adoption predictions.
• Adoption. Studies in 2021 are saying around 20% of people, in the US at least have adopted crypto, have owned crypto in some way, shape, or form. Five years from now, my guess is that has to, it’s gotta be around three quarters, something like that. I think you’re always gonna have that demographic that is just too old to figure it out, you know? My grandma’s not, she’s just never gonna own Bitcoin. You kind of have to wait for that generation to die off a little bit for the numbers to go higher than three quarters. But I think a lot more of the world will be understanding its use as a remittance system as well. I think the Western Unions and the Moneygrams of the world, unless they drastically change their business model to be more crypto focused, I think they’re going to be struggling. And just a lot of more real life use cases. But I think a lot of what people don’t understand is they say, well, where is blockchain and crypto really being used, but it’s really a platform. And a lot of what it’s being used for may happen on the backend that’s not really in the consumer’s eye, but think of, you know, Shopify powering websites and the internet, you know, powering everything, including this call. It doesn’t necessarily have to be, “Oh, I am interacting with this blockchain tool that this company provided to me.” It can just be very internal within businesses. And I think that’s gonna grow rapidly over the next five years. And I think Bitcoin ATMs will continue to be used regardless of what everybody says. I think the adoption of Bitcoin ATMs is gonna get really high and pretty prevalent across the world. Over the past few years, actually, since we got in, in 2016, since I started Bitcoin Depot, the growth rate of Bitcoin ATMs has actually been similar, if not faster than cash ATMs. When the first cash ATM came out, I think in 1969, it’s very possible there could be as many Bitcoin ATMs on the streets as there are cash ATMs or close to it in five years in the US at least.
• Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could totally see that. It just as the asset gets more prevalent in society and there’s more adoption and big players come in, people are gonna wanna, you know, find it easy on-ramp to get access to it. So I think ATMs are gonna be a big part of that. Question for you on CBDCs. So central banks around the world are building CBDCs, taking the blockchain, tokenizing fiat. Eventually, you know, personally, I don’t, I’m not a fan of CBDCs. I’m concerned about privacy, the Constitution, at least here in the United States, but they’re coming, there’s nothing stopping it. But we do have an alternative, which is Bitcoin, but let’s say CBDCs are part of the economy. How would that change your business model eventually? And we’re talking maybe like 10 years from now, right? With CBDCs, would it be like, okay, in your app and so forth, you can easily update and use the CBDC to get Bitcoin, things like that.
• It’s hard to say without knowing exactly how the CBDC would work. But what I can say now is we have bank accounts, we have credit cards, debit cards, wire transfers, ACHs, all of these financial tools. But still we have around a quarter of the population who doesn’t use them essentially at all. And then you have additional people beyond that, who prefer not to use them. So even if the CBDC comes out, I still think a lot of people are not going to use it. I think most of the population is gonna be concerned about privacy. I certainly would be, and I wouldn’t want to use a CBDC, where every transaction is essentially public to the government. And even if you’re not doing anything that you wouldn’t want the government to see, it’s just a little weird. I remember when the iPhone first had touch ID, I was even weird about using that for a year or two until it became the norm. So I don’t think, you know, having the government issuing a stable coin is going to change a whole lot. There’s stable coins today. There’s always gotta be an on-ramp and an off-ramp though. And that’s what we are, we’re the on-ramp. So regardless you have to have people entering the system.
• For sure. Yeah we’ll see what they do with these CBDCs and you know, at least here in the United States. I mean, other countries look like China, they’re already using it in different ways, social credit score and all that stuff. But hopefully the United States can at least get it right if they can, but we’ll have to wait and see. This is gonna be a curve ball question for you. It’s totally off topic, but I’m really fascinated by the fact that you came outta college and then became an entrepreneur. Any tips for entrepreneurs who will look into, do something in crypto looking to launch a company or something?
• I think the tip would be is just forget about what society norms are and just work your ass off. I mean, it really took me getting to the point of where I was miserable, because I was working so much. And that’s really just the drive that it takes to start a business. With everyone having so much access now, even if you don’t have a pool of capital to start with, if you have a phone and you have social media, there’s so many businesses that you can start. So it’s harder than ever to get in early. But I think for me it was just seeing an opportunity and jumping at it immediately without hesitation and really diving all in without consulting others to see what they thought. I think really the key is once you’re onto something, you’ll know because nobody will believe in it, and they’re gonna discredit it in so many ways and that’s when you know it’s gonna work ’cause eventually they’ll turn around.
• Good tips, man. All right. I’ve got wrap-up questions here for you. They’re rapid fire. So first is favorite food.
• Burgers.
• Favorite musician or band?
• It’s a hard one wait, wait. I’m gonna say Drake with his new album.
• Favorite movie?
• Favorite movie. That is a tough one. I have always liked very action packed things. I’m gonna say “Top Gun Maverick.”
• It’s a good one. Yeah. Favorite book?
• “Zero to One.”
• And when you’re not working, you know, at Bitcoin Depot and doing your thing, what are you doing for a hobby?
• I like to get outside, play tennis, go on runs, do lot of fitness things. Get out in the water here in Miami. I’m close to the beach, so that’s always nice.
• Nice. Brendan, pleasure chatting with you. I’m looking forward to you guys going public and the future updates in 2023. Thank you so much for joining me.
• Thanks for having me, Tony.