The following is a guest post from Christina Comben.
I first met Mark Moss at the entrance to the media center by the main stage at Bitcoin MENA in Abu Dhabi, the first official Bitcoin conference in this part of the world. We haven’t met before but from his familiar drawl, infectious personality, and volumes of insightful content (including a YouTube channel and best-selling book The Uncommunist Manifesto), I feel I know him already.
Mark has been championing the benefits of Bitcoin to anyone who will listen since 2016 and was a serial entrepreneur long before.
“I started a business in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom. That crashed. I started another business in 2001, an e-commerce business, it wasn’t easy,” he laments. “It was terrible timing. Everyone laughed at me and said, no one would ever buy anything online. I built that up and had a big exit on it.”
From Orange County to Abu Dhabi
What brings him to Bitcoin MENA in UAE’s opulent capital all the way from his home in Orange County?
“I’m an educator and content creator,” he says. “I’m also a partner at a Bitcoin Venture Capital fund, so we invest in the businesses building on and around the Bitcoin ecosystem. I also have a new company that just went public in Canada called Matador, and that’s running a Microstrategy play with Bitcoin as a balance sheet asset and investing through the Bitcoin Layer 2 space. So I’m actively educating and investing in the space to try to build the world that I want to see.”
What kind of a world is that? For Mark, it’s firmly Bitcoin, not crypto. He’s been on the altcoin rollercoaster but sees no other cryptocurrencies with “long-term” staying power. “I certainly made a lot of money,” he says, “a lot of money,” he repeats with added emphasis. I wait for him to share the usual cautionary tale of holding a stash down to zero or getting rugged at the sh**coin casino, but he says:
“In 2017 and 2018, we were competing for Layer 1s. Ethereum, Cardano, Litecoin, NEO… well, Bitcoin won that. So then the crypto narrative went to DeFi and that all fell apart, then crypto went to NFTs, and that all fell apart, and now it’s meme coins. No one’s pretending that’s world-changing technology.”
He concedes that meme coins (and altcoins in general) may serve some purpose as a “gateway drug” in bringing people over to Bitcoin. “People come for the money and they stay for the freedom,” embarking on their Bitcoin journeys…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Bitcoin (BTC) News | CryptoSlate…
