Euronews caught up with Yves Holenstein from Bitcoin Suisse AG to learn how the largest cryptocurrency is about to be part of our day-to-day lives in the next few years.
Category
đź—ž
NewsTranscript
00:00 I think Bitcoin will for many people be an alternative, a choice to exchange value, to trade, to not necessarily have to use the banking system.
00:18 That's especially important in the third world and wherever the infrastructure is not as good and as cheaply available for everybody as here in the first world.
00:27 I think it will be as normal as everything else in 10 years time.
00:30 What are the three most important things that we should know about the custodial to keep our assets safe?
00:36 First I would say Bitcoin or general crypto gives you a lot of freedom.
00:40 You can basically transact and hold value without any banks.
00:46 But with the freedom actually comes a lot of responsibility because there's no hotline you can call.
00:51 If you lose your password to your assets, the assets are gone.
00:55 No hotline, no support, no nothing.
00:57 So there's a certain risk if you actually take care of your crypto assets yourself.
01:02 Or, and that's already existing, a service provider who takes off that load and risk from you, but usually then charges you a fee and you have a certain dependency on the service provider.
01:15 Or, and that's something new coming as well, having like a social network helping you.
01:20 So there's something called social custody where you may split up your password and maybe encrypt it and give it to three different people you know.
01:31 In case you lose it, you can actually leverage them as long as two of them basically give you their part, you can recover your key, but they can never abuse your funds.
01:43 How quickly do you think it's possible that Bitcoin is going to be really part of our everyday life in light of ECB on their blog saying that Bitcoin is not suitable as a means of payment or as an investment?
01:57 I have to quote something I read yesterday on X, formerly Twitter.
02:01 They're saying Bitcoin is dead, like the same week that it has first of all a new all-time high.
02:06 I would rather look at what the industry does and first of all, there's a lot more transparency coming up and research that takes away some of this myths around crypto and Bitcoin specifically.
02:21 So there's a lot of discussions about abuse, fraud, money laundering, etc.
02:26 And there's a lot more studies now being done showing where we really are with Bitcoin regarding money laundering because that's a fraction of what you have with US dollars in relation to the US dollars being in circulation.
02:41 And you see that also in the industry, the traditional finance industry is moving more and more into Bitcoin and crypto.
02:47 There's a huge demand from the institutional investor side to just mix a little bit of crypto or a little bit of Bitcoin into a portfolio.
02:57 So I already see adoption on the market.
03:00 And for us, like as private persons, I think it's really the ease of use and the safety if every granny and every five-year-old and every person in between can use it, doesn't have to risk losing assets.
03:15 I think that's when it will become really, really normal.
03:17 What tangible economic benefit crypto or Bitcoin itself can bring to the European market or to any economy actually?
03:26 If you look first at the third world or anywhere where the financial systems don't work, that's the often quoted area of where crypto can help.
03:37 It's basically enabling access for people who don't have access.
03:40 It's protecting from corruption where currently people are victim to corruption.
03:46 And it's making especially remittances a lot cheaper and faster.
03:52 If you look at more like our first world European, North American area, I think it's really more about efficiency.
04:02 Again, cross-border payments, trade financing, etc.
04:07 So that you have the settlement of a transaction only two or three days after to going to having settlement of a transaction immediately.
04:14 And thus freeing up capital, reducing counterparty risks, making everything a lot cheaper, eliminating intermediaries who take their own cuts on everything.
04:25 So that's where we're heading to.
04:27 But then depending on which type of financial instrument, it will take between two and ten years, I think, until we're there.
04:35 What would happen if Bitcoin coupled or paired up with AI?
04:40 I think not so much Bitcoin but more the crypto market and the ability to automate things and have machines communicate with machines and also pay or transfer value to other machines.
04:54 That's where I see the benefit of or the potential of adding AI.
04:58 It already starts with adding AI to investment robots.
05:03 So that's just like the next evolution of algorithmic investments.
05:08 In the AI world currently the big hype is agent systems.
05:12 So currently if you look at the chat GPT as one example, you can ask something and you can answer.
05:19 But there's no action following it.
05:21 Agent-based systems actually do something on behalf of what you task it to do.
05:26 And if they can then, for example, pay for something in order to get something in return to then achieve a result with it, that makes the possibilities endless.
05:40 Also potentially the risks if we don't have those machines under control.
05:44 That's one of the big, big topics in AI currently.
05:47 Risks inherent with AGI, so basically artificial general intelligence, which means basically if AI systems have the standard of us humans or more and we don't have them under control, this could be quite dangerous.
06:02 That's naturally an AI-specific topic, not necessarily crypto.
06:07 But assuming in a positive sense good beneficiary AI systems having the ability to actually pay for services and consume services, that's quite an interesting enabler.
06:19 [BLANK_AUDIO]