Season 1 | Episode 3: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, and NFT’s, OH MY!
Hello Chiquis and welcome to chatty Amigas!
a podcast where two friends approach everyday problems and find practical solutions.
we are your hosts i'm Mafe and i'm Mella. and i'm here with my brand new microphone
it's official guys this is so exciting. i want to apologize to you
guys for last week's episode um this week's episode and next
week's episode because i um did not have a microphone i was not prepared i'm
so sorry but now i got one testing testing. i got one so for the this part it's gonna
sound great um and Mafe and i actually did a pre-recorded interview with somebody
which we'll get to about that in a second, um so i do apologize this week and next week our
audio is off we're trying to figure this out we're very, we're newbs at this um so we also thank
you for your patience and support nevertheless but moving forward um we
should be doing much better. yes yes and she looks very and sounds very
professional so if you guys could see her she's got a fancy microphone in front of her and it's
it's very professional very own brand puff puffs and speaking about a pre-recorded interview
i wanted to apologize in advance too because we recorded this interview a couple weeks ago
and i was having some technical difficulties so i apologize for my audio discrepancies
it kind of crops a little bit in and out but you know Mella and our fantabulous
guest speaker they sound perfectly fine so we're good in that sense but in today's, it
was not a conspiracy i promise, seriously so in today's pod, podcast oof podcast we
will be talking about bitcoin and NFT's since there is so much information out there yet
limited in a way because it's you know relatively new about cryptocurrency and bitcoin and NFT's it
can be very overwhelming to know where to begin yes so our practical solution was to actually
interview the CEO from C3 also known as creativecryptocollective to help guide us and
give us some newbie friendly tips.
That is right so we hope you enjoy our pre-recorded interview so
let's get right to it, and spill the tea on this. now for our featured guest Hiroyuki Wakabayashi!
he is also known as Hiro and is the CEO of C3 also known as creative crypto collective their
first project initiative was deep thought DJ that's an NFT, thank you so much for meeting with
us today to discuss cryptocurrency and bitcoin. hey guys thanks so much for the invite. yes of
course thanks for joining. uh absolutely we are so excited to have you as our very first guest,
bitcoin, NFT's and cryptocurrency is the future but it can be very intimidating for people
like you know Melanie and i so our practical solution was to have Hiro come and talk to us
about the basics, we feel so honored that you took the time from your very busy schedule to
tell us how it works and to give us some starts- yeah of course no doubt. well welcome Hiro. i
appreciate it you know it's always fun to you know hop on a call um with anyone really just to
kind of get people acclimated with um the space uh it's fast-growing um so it's it's definitely
has the fast-paced and it could definitely be intimidating at the start um but yeah it's
it's always good to kind of at least get your feet wet understand what's going on because
it's definitely um prevalent in the world that we live in, is it's going it's it's kind of
like uh spreading like wildfire so people are are really interested in this topic so this is
going to be a fun one.
Yes absolutely so please, so please tell us a little about yourself the
company um at C3 and what actually an NFT is. yeah for sure so um yep you guys
nailed it so you know Hiro is uh my alias name actually um there's reasons behind
that so there's folks that that know me uh very well behind the scenes we've been building um C3
for a while now since last year we had we're a group of 12 individuals it's me my partner and
quite a few folks so our company started off with NFT's as our first initiative like
Melanie mentioned but we really are going to start diversifying into the space of crypto
just like any other business there's a lot of a lot of facets to a business it could be you
know art creativity you have financial industries um and the branch goes on and on right so creative
cryptocollective is going to eventually branch out into other features of the crypto world
but for right now our very first project was creating an NFT and and just to kind of
get everybody acclimated with what NFT is i guess i guess we first have to understand what
NFT stands for um and it stands for non-fungible tokens so what a fungible token is is like the U.S
dollar so everybody knows like the U.S dollar it's taken for like a one-to-one face value so like you
know wherever you go in the world one dollar is one dollar so it's universally recognized as that
and there's multiple uh us dollars like you know the government can print multiple dollars
and it will always have that same uh value excuse me um but a non-fungible token is uh the
opposite of that so it doesn't have an intrinsic value tied to one metric so it could really
be defined to uh whatever anybody wants to put that that token to be so if we create a token on
the blockchain which we'll probably get more into detail how that works anybody could decide what
the value of that is so i could decide you know that it's worth one dollar and then somebody else
buys it and says no i want to pay ten dollars for it and if somebody says well you know what
i kind of like it more and i'll give you a hundred dollars so um yeah it gets interesting
so it could be worth over a hundred dollars just because someone decides it's a hundred i'm
going to buy it or over and it'll have that value yeah yeah it can um but the most important part
of the non-fungible token is that it's it's unique in its identity that there's only that one
item and it can't be replicated or duplicated whereas a dollar like you know you could
print a lot of dollars but uh yeah. so it's kind of like a collective item but not
really.
Yeah no that's that's the best way to uh to put it it's like you know a baseball card
exactly it's a it's a collectible. ah interesting that's really interesting very interesting,
really big right now huh digital collectible items basically yeah that can go up in value because
someone feels that it deserves it and they'll put the money into it and that attracts attention from
someone else and they'll be like you know what i want to get that for a thousand dollars so
it's gonna be worth a thousand dollars now. yeah yeah for sure digital digital art. wow
very interesting, crazy, that's amazing. so let's get into the interview then um thank
you so much for explaining a little bit of the background a little bit about you your company um
we have five burning questions that we feel uh are practical that'll help anyone that's interested
into entering the NFT world or the cryptocurrency world um so these are the five questions
that we have um one is what motivated you or essentially what what made you feel this is
it this is something i want to get into so what motivated you to get into the bitcoin industry
like why why did it attract your attention. gotcha yeah so i mean bitcoin in itself um it
was introduced uh to me through an employee uh so i i've been working in the tech industry for
a while now uh over a decade actually servicing um financial clients um things like hedge funds which
pretty much is all like investments with money um so one of our clients started to look into
blockchain technology and what blockchain is and how folks were starting to like build uh digital
currency on top of it so one of my co-workers told me hey you know you should check this out learn
about it and you know me being curious about like the new tech by nature you know i dove in and
started learning about it looking into it and there was nowhere near the amount of information
like back then that there is now about it so it was kind of vague um and it was just a lot of like
speculation on what it was and what it could be um and this was back in 2015 now so
you know this was uh some time ago but it was like an interesting concept um but
i didn't really take it too seriously at that time because you know i was prepping i was
actually prepping to get married so my focus wasn't really like uh towards cryptocurrencies
or investments i was just it was just introduced to me at that time so uh right yeah but
then fast forward um to the summer of 2017 there was a massive pop in bitcoin like it went
from like $900 to $3000 and and then there was like massive drops too like 80% drops and it
was just like the wild west out there people were throwing money left and right they were
making tons of money back, yeah it was crazy and one of my other friends that works
in the financial industry he asked me um if i had made any investments i was like yeah i
remember bitcoin in theory i remember all that but i i didn't um kind of didn't finish my research
so that kind of like rekindled my my uh my my passion to kind of go after it and see okay
something's going on here so let me kind of dig into the technology of uh you know bitcoin and
decentralization blockchain and and see what you know what was going on with that so at that time
it was actually Ethereum that was like the talk of the town along with bitcoin um because they
brought what they call uh smart contracts which is pretty all that really means is that you could
build like applications on the blockchain and people were like they would drop like a hundred
dollars and i kid you not like in a week hours maybe even like you know like seconds
they would make a hundred thousand dollars from like a hundred dollars.
Oh my gosh, what is
a blockchain i'm sorry i don't know what that is. yeah yeah no absolutely so i mean it's i guess
um web 3 is like the talk of the town that's uh so web 1.0 is like right now like the internet
that we know what it is today like you thought you say google but the the blockchain is now web3
so it's like decentralization where there's this thing called like the public ledger where somebody
writes you write like a transaction or like it's kind of oh okay and it gets solidified
and it can never be changed like ever there's nothing that you can do so once you write to the
blockchain it's stored there for indefinitely there's no way to uh break it um forever like
ever. wow no pressure to make mistakes huh. no exactly yeah and and that's that's the beauty of
it so it's it's transparent everybody can see it um if there's a mistake it's it's written there
forever so yeah it's pretty cool i like that it's transparent so people know what they're getting
into it's not like a big vague mysterious.
Ooh okay okay, right right wow that's pretty amazing
so so getting into our second question what is the biggest misconception of bitcoin cryptocurrency.
yeah um well i guess like anything you know that goes against tradition um there's always going
to be like resistance towards like a new way of doing things until it's fully understood so in
the beginning you know everybody was like oh this is just magic internet uh play money it's it's
just monopoly money you can't use it anywhere in the real world like why am i gonna invest or
buy bitcoin you know um because at the time in the beginning it was actually being used for
like money laundering and drugs etc.
Etc. but just like everything else you know the bad
folks like to kind of like use anything to cover their tracks but in the beginning
it got a really bad rapport but you know unfortunately that goes for anything really
to be honest like you know just if we take something today for example like like a chainsaw
like a physical chainsaw right like if you don't understand like the the safety precautions here if
you don't take safety precautions you could really hurt yourself right so um it's the same scenario
if you don't understand what you're getting into you could definitely burn yourself right when
it comes to your financial decisions but um that could be one of the misconceptions so the approach
that i always tell people is don't dismiss it just because it's something that you don't
fully understand like take your time to learn it understand it because with like early
opportunities that you know like this that come not so often it becomes a very great investment if
you can you know at least understand ten percent of it you know it don't don't immediately dismiss
something because you don't understand it you know like joe sam catherine made one million dollars
you know like 10 years down the line and you're like yeah i heard about it and then you decide to
jump on it and it's like you know those chances are gone because 10 years ago you could have but
again not not important because we were scared. yeah people were very scared of the unknown so if
someone's unknown or they don't know they're going to be scared i don't think so but then they
could miss such a great opportunity.
Exactly that's right you make a very good point of saying
don't dismiss it just because you don't understand i mean this and this is why we're having this
interview right because a lot of us have no idea what any of this is about so it's so
great that you're explaining it this way and you know it gives people a chance because you
talked about your story right like you were very busy at that time when when it was brought to
you but you didn't fully dismiss it, you know a couple years down the line you took time to to
learn about it and now you are making it you know part of your business so so it's really great to
hear, yeah, your story.
And knowledge is power so we want to help everyone especially because
i think it's still early on enough where people can jump on it i know that in the IT world five
years is like 20 but still it's not like it's been 15 years you know. yeah you know yeah very
true very interesting so since we're discussing knowledge is power and looking into the future
this brings us to our third question which is why does cryptocurrency or bitcoin matter and
do you feel that cryptocurrency is the future. uh yeah i mean yeah absolutely i mean in the
current world i guess that we live in today uh you know even more so with like covet
and and what's and what's going on with the the world and that that side of it um you
know we needed to work like remotely and then digital everything you know became became the new
normal, right, so we started seeing like this new shift or parent shift in the way that money was
like being exchanged everything was just digital through applications you know and the technologies
that are coming out of it you know were you know are going to be like the googles and and amazon
of the future essentially at least that's the way that i see that this technology is
going i mean it's hard to foresee like which ones are going to make it but if you take a
few minutes like just research the technology the teams that are building it doesn't hurt to drop
some investments in um again that's what i have to disclose like i'm not a financial advisor i'm
not qualified to make financial advice or anything like that so i have to disclose, like always do
your own research you know in the tech space um everybody says d-y-o-r like that's like the talk
of the town but um i guess in an example uh on the current like boom that we were talking about
um for NFT's right like in the future of crypto um so the whole non-fungible token things you
know you got i don't know if you guys heard of it or not but like have you guys heard the board ape
yacht club or crypto punks have you heard of those or.
No and now some of our listeners probably
don't so please feel free to explain. yes. yeah yeah no i mean so if you guys you guys could
google them now so crypto punks i think was one of the very first ones to really be recognized um
and board apes were i guess you could say that the second in line that were like really recognized
worldwide and and their value like really like popped off and and they made some absurd numbers
i mean like if you google it i think a crypto punk sold for like a hundred million dollars like
one.
Yeah wow that's crazy. and the board apes sold for like millions of dollars so yeah i mean
like there's a lot of craziness going on in the NFT space so this is definitely i would say is the
new wave that's happening right now that people are saying the same thing when bitcoin started i
don't understand it it's stupid it makes no sense yet like you know those that take the time to
jump in and learn about it you know massive opportunities arise um so me and my team you
know we're building we've been building this this project um it's called Deep Thought DJ you
know it has incredible art um so the crypto punks and uh board apes well the crypto the crypto punk
specifically it may be really confusing to a lot of people because the artwork is actually pixel
art pixelated art and it actually does not and a lot of people say it doesn't even look like art
like i don't understand why this image is worth 12 million dollars, a million dollars even even uh
50 dollars, some people to say but you know it's interesting just to kind of jump in there and
kind of take take a look so um yeah the future right now definitely is NFT's.
Yeah and it's it
goes with the phrase just a once a man trash can be somebody's treasure, yeah i feel like it
feels that's right it goes so well with this how many words like this that are common
that we can use for this interview but it's true it's like these little simple
proverbs that are applying so well to this. and the crazy thing is like at least for our
project in particular um we have an extremely talented artist and again you know you guys
can definitely check it out Deep Thought DJ um we're our platform we're actually marrying it
together with mental health, health charities and with the power of blockchain which you get
royalties off of every single sale we're actually going to be donating that indefinitely to mental
health charities so you know that's we launched. yeah it's actually pretty pretty cool.
The
technology that's that's out there that can be used to to actually help others as well yeah
absolutely absolutely that's great. go ahead no, go ahead sorry. uh i was just gonna say i like
your NF's i've seen them i think they're so cool yeah yeah no i mean people the cool thing
about our project is that we actually um we've done zero paid promotion it's been all
word of mouth we created seven thousand seven hundred seventy seven images we've sold over over
a thousand already um i actually haven't checked where we are right now but we're projected to
hopefully sell out you know in the next maybe a month or so maybe even sooner um a lot a lot of
folks i'm not gonna name drop but a lot of folks are watching us.
Wow i hope things go well, yes.
absolutely absolutely so for our next question speaking of this right, because a lot of us have
no knowledge and you're i mean, you know so much and it's just so great to be able to hear you but
for someone that has no knowledge of this but is interested in investing into a cryptocurrency
what are the top three tips that you feel are so important for somebody to consider. yeah i know
this is a great question and i i feel like this is the question i'm asked the most often um and again
i'm not a financial advisor you know you gotta do your own research um you know but the rules that
i personally go by and i tell folks to apply um number one i say i would say is only invest where
you can afford to lose like a hundred percent like you know don't don't take your rent money,
don't take your rent money and then try to like invest in a crypto or NFT and then try and flip it
and you know make a thousand dollars off of that or more because the honest truth is that just as
high as the value can be it can be lost the next day or that minute even so you know definitely
don't invest where you can afford to lose um another tip uh or number two i guess would be like
don't become emotionally attached to investments and i think this really applies to anything right
because once you're emotionally attached and i'll give an example let's say let's say you you didn't
listen to rule number one and then you invested um you know your rent money and you see the
number dropping five percent and you're like oh man this is like you know i'm gonna lose my
rent money this is i i need this and you pull it out and then literally right when you pull it
out you see it spikes up a hundred percent and you're like man i could have made an extra $100
so becoming emotionally attached to something or any investment takes your logic out of it and you
definitely don't want to do that um and i guess the last one is just never stop like learning
researching networking building and you know this platform is forever growing and it has so much
life-changing opportunities happening right now like imagine investing in Apple or Google Amazon
or Tesla like in their inception when they started you know yeah where would you be today so you
know it's a lot more saturated now for sure right but i think only five percent of the world still
understand it and even then like even though the five percent that do understand it are still
learning so so much um and i'll give you even one more bonus it's like the best times to start
investing are two times: yesterday and today. that's perfect thank you thank you so much.
Yeah
for sure. wow okay and my brain is just like turning a lot right now so i'm just like soaking
that all in i know um so since we're talking about a timing to invest today or to yesterday
so our last question here is what is something you wish you knew before investing into bitcoin
or NFT's since that is the thing happening now. yeah i mean um no one knows everything in
the space like i mentioned you know people are still learning every day and growing um
but i guess the one thing i wish i didn't do was dismiss it when i first heard about it um
you know when opportunities arise just like i mentioned you know make a small investment even
if it's only $10 $50, $100 you know who cares about the money honestly like it that doesn't
even matter it's the experience that's gonna go and take you much further and prime and fuel you
along the way like as you go and you make those those life decisions um i know for me like you
know and i guess for a lot of people you know that nine to five you know everybody's like oh
i hate doing this whole nine to five and and uh i want to invest you know on something
that could take me out of that right so um you know a lot of these moments uh can can
help you uh get out of that you know negative space that you're in just by learning one percent
of it and just dropping you know a little bit of if you can again like i mentioned you can afford
10 20 50 whatever it is just drop a little bit because once you immerse yourself in the space
and you actually are invested you're gonna find yourself learning a lot more than somebody who's
just outside watching waiting to get in it's like like sports like i play basketball i could watch
basketball videos on Youtube all day long but if i don't go in there and i actually start don't start
shooting the ball there's no way that i'm actually gonna become a better basketball player so if
investments is the same thing you.
I love that i love that. you could watch Youtube
videos and learn how to play um every you know every day all day but that's not
going to give you real real world experience until you actually get on the basketball court and
start you know dribbling shooting the ball playing with other people understanding you know the
mechanics of how to move around people and dribble same thing with um investments you know you have
to financially um invest in in the industry in yourself and really start learning how to move
around with blockchain cryptocurrencies NFT's and actually meet people network understand how
the space runs how it works because if you're standing on the sidelines watching it's a whole
different game and you're only going to gain that experience when you're actually out there making
financial decisions and moves and again you know i always go back to the same thing even if you
invest 10 dollars and you lose 50% that risk is much more manageable than if you drop 10, 000 and
you lose 50% so that's why i always say you know yeah so definitely that that would be um something
for sure that i would i would do.
I appreciate that you said that because when people discuss
investing in finances you think oh a million dollars a billion dollars like like no one really
thinks it can just be five dollars it could be ten dollars you know nowadays you can't even buy
coffee for like four dollars you know and if you want to put that four dollars into cryptocurrency
or an NFT you can get double back which is nice it's better than nothing. yeah for sure and that
is the space is very um yeah it's very interesting there's a lot going on and i feel like we just
only hit the surface to be honest there's just so much more to dive into but and this is why
why i love this this space is really interesting. yeah it sounds it my mind is just like, the
wheels are going, they're going. yeah. it's just it's so great thank you, thank you so much
Hiro for giving us such a great insight into cryptocurrency and NFT's, and what you're doing
we are so sure our listeners will find this super helpful and we wish you the very best and utmost
success.
If you want our listeners to to find you on on social media please feel free to say or
or your company you know feel free but we are so grateful that you were able to do this with
us. and we'll put your social media handles um on everything we have description everything
so if anybody listening wants to access C3 um feel free to do so, i didn't mean to make it
rhyme. no you're good thank you so much guys i appreciate it i had a blast yeah you can find us
on Twitter at Deep Thought DJ NFT_ you can find us on our discord as well which our community
is highly active and we're engaged daily there which is also in the Twitter if you go to our
Twitter you'll see all our link tree on everything our website our discord our Instagram our Tik
Tok we have everything on there so definitely give us a follow um and thank you guys again for
putting this together it was, it was a pleasure. thanks for joining, thank you so much we so
appreciate it, thank you, thank you bye-bye that is it for our podcast today thank you so
much for listening we sincerely hope you liked it. yes so much information our brains are turning
so exciting thank you again yeah the CEO from C3 from visiting us and interviewing with us
oh we feel so honored honestly and um we would love to know what you guys think about this
episode what you think so please please please feel free to leave us a comment dm us contact us
in any social media handle whatsoever that we have feel free to let us know what topics you would
like for us to discuss in the future and what you thought about this episode this week.
that's right
and honestly he is, he's like a walking brain he has so much information to share and we are so
happy that he explained it in a way that all of us can understand so please subscribe give us a
like and follow a rating and please like she just said let us know if you like this episode and if
you want to hear something like this in the future and everything is going to be posted on the
description down below. as you guys know our social media handles and website will
be posted on the description down below. that's right everything will be
on the description down below, so important to repeat it twice and um again thank
you so much Hiro for appearing in this interview thank you so much for listening Chiquis we
will be back every Tuesday with the tea, bye..
