Medtronic CTO Dr. Ken Washington joins "Forbes Talks" to discuss the transformative impact of technology in healthcare and what he learned from Amazon and Ford.
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00:00 Hi, everyone. I'm Rosemary Miller here with Stephen Ehrlich, the director of Forbes Digital
00:07 Assets, here to discuss the latest in the crypto space. Thank you so much for joining
00:12 me today, Steve. Thanks, Rosemary. So, Steve, about last week, Bitcoin approached
00:18 $45,000 for the first time in about 19 months, and it's come down since then. Could you tell
00:25 us what happened? Sure. It all really just comes down to three
00:29 simple letters, ETF, which I know we've spoken about in previous discussions. ETF really
00:37 just stands for exchange traded fund. And it's this very popular investment vehicle
00:41 that many people in the industry expect to finally be approved by the SEC early next
00:48 month and could theoretically usher in hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars into
00:55 Bitcoin specifically in the coming months and years. And I think there's a lot of posturing
01:02 right now amongst investors to try to ride this wave, get ahead of it. And just the fact
01:10 that Bitcoin markets and some other crypto markets in general are still a little shallower
01:16 than they were prior to the collapse of FTX and the bear market of 2022, which continued
01:22 into at least the first half of 2023. When there is a sharp move in either direction,
01:27 and in this case, it's usually upwards that can lead to short squeezes or basically liquidations
01:35 for investors that have bet against the price of Bitcoin, which can lead to surges higher.
01:40 And that's kind of what happened, which is why Bitcoin approached $45,000, which you
01:45 mentioned. And that date is actually pretty symbolic for the industry, because 19 months
01:50 or so ago coincides with May 2022. And that's when 3Eras Capital, one of the most prolific
01:55 and what seemed to be one of the most sophisticated investors in the entire crypto ecosystem,
02:01 collapsed. And they fell following the collapse of a stablecoin system called 3Eras, excuse
02:07 me, called Terra Luna, Terra USD. But that point is symbolic because that was kind of
02:13 the catalyst that led to all these other bankruptcies that happened beforehand.
02:18 And so you mentioned ETF at the start. How can your typical everyday investor or trader
02:23 take advantage of ETFs?
02:27 And that's the great part about this, because ETFs are available to pretty much anybody
02:32 with a brokerage account, as opposed to having to go to Coinbase or Kraken or Gemini or wherever
02:38 and deal with the headache of having to authenticate yourselves. I mean, sometimes it even comes
02:43 down to holding up a handwritten sign with a date with a picture to prove that you are
02:48 you and that you're doing this on that particular day. Now you can just go through Robinhood
02:52 or Fidelity or Schwab or Vanguard or whoever you know, and purchase one of these products
02:58 like you would buy a share of Apple. And there's a lot of balloon chip firms that are trying
03:03 to do this. I mean, those are the BlackRocks, the Fidelities, Invescos, BenX, and so on
03:09 and so forth. So it's brands with significant brand equity that are putting their names
03:13 behind this. And the other reason, too, and I think this is an important distinction to
03:17 make why this is seen as such a bullish event and not necessarily a buy the rumor, sell
03:23 the news event that we've seen in the past when a Bitcoin futures ETF started trading
03:27 in fall of 2021 or when Coinbase went public in April 2021. And that's because this will
03:34 be a spot ETF, which basically means that for every share that gets issued onto the
03:39 market, somebody actually has to go and buy that Bitcoin. People, a futures ETF, it's
03:45 a little complicated, but basically people are rolling together derivatives contracts
03:50 that sort of anticipate the price of Bitcoin. Those get rolled up into a security and no
03:54 actual Bitcoin actually has to change hands. In this case, it would be different. So that's
03:59 another reason why people are getting excited about this and think that this particular
04:04 catalyst will lead to further growth as opposed to, as opposed to, again, a buy the rumor,
04:11 sell the news event that we have seen in the past.
04:14 And also crypto has been discussed a lot with our current presidential candidate, Vivek
04:21 Ramaswamy. And what's the current state of crypto regulation right now? Are we inching
04:28 closer to getting any kind of framework or is it still kind of in the wind?
04:33 Yeah, it's it's interesting. I mean, Vivek, I mean, he's certainly been doing the crypto
04:39 conference circuit. As far as I can tell, he is the only presidential candidate with
04:44 what he would call a comprehensive crypto platform. And I'm happy to discuss some of
04:50 the key tenets right here. I think the word comprehensive might be a bit too far because
04:55 it really comes down to, I think, three key tenets. I mean, one, the idea that code is
05:00 speech and is therefore protected by the First Amendment. I mean, just like you and I are
05:04 talking and you can say whatever we want within certain boundaries, coders, his belief is
05:10 that that should be protected under the First Amendment. And the practical implementation
05:16 for this is something like sanctions that the Treasury enacted against Tornado Cash.
05:21 Tornado Cash is what's known as a mixer in the world. And that's just kind of a, I guess,
05:26 a set of smart contracts that can help kind of break the link between the sender and receiver
05:30 of a token. And the benign uses are to kind of help maintain privacy in transactions.
05:38 Obviously, the malignant ones could be theoretically it could be used for money laundering. And
05:44 so that's kind of like a case that epitomizes the debate from a Vivek point of view and
05:49 many crypto libertarians. Tornado Cash is not necessarily what should be sanctioned
05:54 and it should not be what kind of gets taken out of circulation. It should be more going
05:58 after the bad guys. And that's sometimes the push and pull that comes with living in a
06:02 democratic society. But that's that's one part of it. The second part is this idea that
06:07 people should be allowed to self custody their own assets. They should not be penalized for
06:11 this. Many people and I think we learned that lesson harshly last year. If you keep digital
06:17 assets on an exchange like FTX and you pull up your app, you see your balances, you don't
06:25 know where you put your balances. The only way to know those coins are actually there
06:31 is when you try to take them out. And then FTX this case, they were not able to. Something
06:36 similar with with Gemini. That's another exchange based here in the US that partnered with a
06:41 company to provide a yield product where they lend out customer deposits to earn yield and
06:46 then give it back to the customers. And that's currently a bankruptcy proceeding. So sometimes
06:51 to avoid that sort of counterparty risk, people like to hold their own tokens in their own
06:56 wallets where they control the private keys or the passwords. And and this has been another
07:01 rallying cry for crypto because what they want is for people to be able to transact
07:05 privately on a peer to peer basis without intervention from the government. In this
07:09 case, actually, there's another example that they point to that Canadian trucker protests
07:15 in the fall, excuse me, in the winter of twenty twenty two when the Ottawa government sort
07:19 of like superseded it in to prevent truckers from raising money through through crypto
07:23 donations. In fact, Warren Davidson, a Republican congressman from Ohio, put together a bill,
07:29 introduced a bill in February twenty twenty two called Keep Your Coins Act, which is very
07:32 similar to what the VEC is saying here. And then the third part of what the VEC is kind
07:36 of pointing out, and I think this is sort of the most amorphous part of his whole proposal
07:41 is just the idea of letting people be free to innovate. What does that mean? It's it
07:45 kind of I think in some ways it's in the eye of the beholder. Sure, we want people to be
07:50 able to innovate. I mean, the VEC is very much against sort of the the bureaucratic
07:55 state, the idea that Congress should be the one to pass laws. And he's pushing back against
08:00 what he sees as unelected bureaucrats in the form of regulators, which although they are
08:03 part of the executive branch and that's how they fit into the democratic process, perhaps
08:08 due to sort of the intransigence within Congress, these these bodies are taking on broader roles
08:14 than maybe they're supposed to. I guess at least that's his his contention. And in crypto,
08:19 the boogeyman is Gary Gensler, the SEC chair, who very famously has equivocated on saying
08:26 whether or not virtually any asset is a security or a commodity. Bitcoin is the only asset
08:31 that he's come out and said is a is a commodity. So I really think that in particular, his
08:38 VEX proposal aligns with, I think, like general themes that are pervasive throughout the crypto
08:44 industry. But there's a big difference between being a candidate and being able to kind of
08:49 stay in this world of what abouts. And although it's obviously unlikely that he will become
08:54 president, if he has to start dealing with the practical implementations of some of these
08:58 tradeoffs, I think he may need to rethink some of his proposals.
09:02 Mm hmm. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Steve.
09:06 Thanks for having me.
09:07 Thanks for having me.
09:08 Thanks for having me.
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