Geoff from geoffmobile.com gives his Toastmasters Pathways Level 4 speech project for “Handling a Difficult Audience”. His topic is an introduction to Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies.
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Thanks for watching!
Cheers,
Geoff
Recorded in VR 180 3D using Vuze XR camera. Audio recorded on Zoom H1 with Sennheiser ME-2 lav mic. Edited with Audacity and Shotcut.
More Details about this Project:
In Toastmasters, one of the projects in the “Presentation Mastery” Pathway is the Level 4 project on “Handling a Difficult Audience”. The Toastmaster speaker is asked to prepare a 5 to 7 minute speech, and arrange with the audience in advance to have 2 or 3 people from the audience interrupt the speech in different ways, such as by arguing, interrupting, chattering, using electronic devices, or not participating in the discussions.
The goal of the project is to practice effective techniques at managing such a challenging situation which is common in some kinds of real world presentations.
For my Level 4 “Handling a Difficult Audience” speech, I chose a topic which would well suit a difficult audience, that is to discuss Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies.
Throughout the speech, I handle an audience member receiving a call on his cellphone, interrupting my speech with comments and questions, arguing with me that bitcoin is a scam, and one gentleman even walking across the stage with his chair and then storming out of the room.
This was a fun and exciting project, and the audience was very supportive in spite of their pre-arranged interruptions. A video of my speech, which was recorded using a 3D VR 180 camera, is linked above.
This video can be watched in a headset such as a Meta Quest 2 headset, in full 3D Stereoscopic, via the Quest’s native Youtube app.
Comments would be much appreciated!
Thanks and best wishes,
Geoff
Full Transcript of this speech follows below:
Thank you fellow Toastmasters and most welcome guests. I’m not sure if you know me – my name is Geoff Mobile and I am the President of HODL Crypto based in Santa Monica. I’m here visiting you today because I want to share you the opportunity of a lifetime – to invest with cryptocurrencies.
I have a wonderful audience. I know everyone is going to be so polite today and not say anything to interrupt me. Of course if you have questions please write them down on a piece of paper and share us at the Q&A at the end. So thank you in advance for being a great audience.
All right so what are cryptocurrencies? I used to be a software developer when I lived here in Vancouver – that’s why I’m back – I love the city. I really like technology and what it can mean.
With cryptocurrencies this is the money of the future – this is money that is Space Age money. This guy we don’t know who it was, named Satoshi Nakamoto, he invented this thing called Bitcoin and we don’t know who he is! It’s some mysterious person – even all the intelligence of the world, no one knows who this person is. He created some computer code that started working and no one can stop it.
Excuse me is is this some uh sort of hedge against inflation or something like that? Wow great idea, thank you Mark. Good point is this some hedge against inflation. I’ll come to that in a moment. Please yes hold on to your questions. Thank you.
So why do we need cryptocurrency and why do we consider it to be money at all? Well let’s say that we didn’t use cryptocurrencies and we used seashells for money. If you have five seashells you can buy a bag of chips if you have 100 000 seashells you can buy a house. So what would happen if we said, suddenly the government said, oh okay today we are getting rid of the dollar we’re starting to use seashells? Well what would happen is you’d have suddenly everyone running to the beach grabbing up as many seashells as possible, probably going to other countries and taking truckloads of seashells and bringing them back to Vancouver.
So this is what’s called a soft money or a weak currency.
That means that if you know that something is a currency and it’s easy to make more of that money, whether it’s the government printing it, or someone going out and mining it or collecting it.
That’s why gold is considered to be a fairly hard form of money, because gold mining is very…
thank you yes please turn off your cell phones this is a great safe space for non-electronic devices.
What I was saying about seashells is if seashells were the currency people would bring truckloads of seashells from all over the world here and buy homes.
For gold, if it was easy to make gold out of any other chemicals, alchemists would create mountains and mountains of gold and use that gold to buy things. But what would happen if everyone suddenly had as much gold as they wanted? Gold would not be very valuable because everyone could make it.
That’s why you need to have a currency that is hard money. It’s hard to make. Why is Bitcoin hard to make? Well this is where I’m going to get into the bit of the technical details.
Bitcoin has what’s called a monetary policy defined by the Bitcoin source code. That ensures that right now people can mine it a certain amount per day but in a few years all the Bitcoin that is possible to be created will have been created. That’s 21 million Bitcoin.
So how many people are there in the world – there’s billions of people in the world – but only 21 million Bitcoin. There’s not enough to go around right? So you think well it’s not going to work? Well Bitcoin is divisible into eight decimal places, so that means everyone here can afford to buy some Bitcoin. You can spend twenty dollars and get a fraction of a Bitcoin.
So that’s why I encourage you all to consider buying some, just so you can hold the piece of the future.
Oh thanks thank you for coming and for listening so far.
There’s more Bitcoin for the rest of us! Anyone else who wants to leave, just go that way. Get out of here! Thank you.
So what I was saying is, if you choose to buy Bitcoin don’t be like that guy in England who stored his private key on his hard drive in his computer and then threw his computer in the garbage. It got sent to the landfill. Over time that Bitcoin that he could have had in that hard drive is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So this poor gentleman is trying to ask the town where he lives in England to let him bring a bunch of robots into the landfill to dig up all the trash and find the little hard drive in there, where hopefully he can recover his keys.
When you own Bitcoin you have to keep your private key very secure because you’re the one that owns it and no one else has it. So if you’re lose something, if you have the habit of losing your keys or your wallet, maybe Bitcoin is not great for you. You might lose all your money.
All right so what else I have to say about it? Well I encourage you all to look into it a bit more.
Right now I would say it’s not very user friendly to buy Bitcoin. When I buy Bitcoin I have to go to this American website called Coinbase. I have to use my phone to enter a certain code into the website.
I actually had to spend an hour on the phone with my bank to convince them that I wasn’t scamming them or something. I had to talk to their fraud department and convince them yes I actually know what I’m doing can you please let me send money to this American crypto exchange. After talking with them an hour and giving them all my personal information they said yes, you know, you can buy Bitcoin.
Once I have it I have to transfer it to my own wallet. This is another thing: there’s something called the hardware wallet. It actually looks like a little USB key. If you have one of these the the private key for your Bitcoin is stored on that little device. If you lose that device then you lose your key so that’s very important don’t lose these little things. Keep them in a safe secret place. I won’t tell you where mine is, and uh yeah, so that’s another thing to learn about.
Recently Best Buy Canada started selling these wallets. They’re called Ledger wallets- you can just buy them for 50 bucks at Best Buy. If you’re going to be securing any amount of money at all I recommend investing in the hardware wallet because so many computers are hacked these days.
If you just had your private keys stored on your phone or your computer if you ever get someone breaking into your computer they could steal all your money. It would be very disappointing.
Another thing about Bitcoin is that it’s non-reversible transactions. So if you had sent some money to some address maybe you got it online and said oh I think I should send this person some money. Turns out they’re a scammer? There’s no way for you to get the money back. Once it’s sent, that is in the blockchain forever and there’s no way to get it back.
This is unlike a bank where you can go talk to the bank and maybe they’ll reverse the transaction or a credit card will refund your money. Unfortunately that’s not possible with Bitcoin.
So now I’d like to open up for questions. Everyone’s been scribbling all their questions please go ahead and ask away.
Yes. Sounds like a scam you don’t nobody can verify the identity if it goes somewhere it’s in a cyber place that only you know about and once it goes there you can’t go back where’s the reliability where’s the high risk where is there any stability in that you must be either crazy drinking the Kool-Aid or off your medication that’s definitely not an informed investor.
Yes I think John has some really good points about that. People don’t really know what a lot of digital things are. The younger generation just know how to use TikTok and WhatsApp and Instagram. The older generation like my parents barely understand how to send an email. There’s some people in the middle like myself who grew up with learning computers.
So to be literate about technology and understand what’s behind the scenes – what’s actually happening – it’s really important to invest that time and not just trust someone like me to give your money to me. Of course I’d love it but no I’m not going to take any money today.
I think the the challenge with cryptocurrencies is that it does take a lot of understanding of the underlying technology and ability to tell when you’re being scammed or not. Unfortunately with the prevalence of hacking these days it’s very easy to lose your money.
Especially if you invest in some of these Ethereum based cryptos and put it in de-fi if you heard of “Defi” – decentralized Finance? Every week I hear of a new scam where someone is able to hack a smart contract and extract millions of dollars out of the investment and transfer to their own wallet. It’s very common. I would say Bitcoin is a bit more proven technology than Ethereum, because it’s been out longer. It’s been verified and a lot of people trust it but very good point.
Any other questions? Yes. Yeah so stocks have sucked in the last six months and so have crypto so is Bitcoin why do you think it’s going to go up and when?
Interesting point, thank you Pat! Regarding my thoughts about what’s going to happen in the market – right now the US dollar is actually losing a lot of value as well and a lot of currencies around the world are starting to collapse. Bitcoin has been holding steady around 19 000 US dollars as the price.
A lot of people think in the crypto community that eventually people will gravitate towards Bitcoin because it’s harder to influence by governments. You can’t just print more Bitcoin. It’s tightly controlled by the Bitcoin algorithm, the network itself. There’s no one who can say like I own all this Ethereum, I can now say I’m going to change the monetary policy of the crypto.
Bitcoin is the only one that, because we don’t know who created it in the beginning, there’s no one we can talk to to influence what’s going to happen. It has to be a consensus of all the people who are on the network. That’s one of the things I think makes it really special that will make it last longer to the future. I think it’s the one that out of all the cryptos is the one that’s worth looking at.
All right so how are we doing for time? Okay – just coming up on 12 minutes. All right any other questions?
Yes yes.
Inflation. Yes good question. This is a common topic especially with our the new conservative leader, he’s talking a lot about how it’s called “just inflation” – talking about Justin Trudeau causing the inflation. I don’t know if we can blame it just on one person why we have inflation. Seems to be a problem all around the world, given many reasons such as the disruption of supply chains due to covid and now the war in Ukraine and climate change.
Many things could possibly cause it but another cause of inflation is of course increasing the money supply and that’s something that is being done a lot through the Covid pandemic.
Governments were making it easier for banks to loan money to people creating more money in circulation. That was causing the price of real estate to go up. If everyone has access to cheap credit then people will be able to bid higher for house prices causing the market to go up. As soon as the interest rates started rising you notice the house prices started going down significantly. So that’s interesting to note.
I think by the government policy of increasing the interest rates we will see inflation start to moderate.
The other thing about Bitcoin is that governments don’t control the monetary policy. Governments can’t change the interest rates – governments can’t change how much money is in circulation. So if you’re looking for money that is different from all the other currencies around the world – that’s why Bitcoin is special – it’s programmed into the source code. Nobody can change that code unless everyone agrees. So that’s one thing that makes it really special and a good hedge against inflation.
All right and your question? Yeah go ahead. Yeah what can I buy with my Bitcoin? How long will it take for me to be able to spend it at the grocery store?
Excellent question. Thanks. The question was, when will I be able to buy things with Bitcoin and what will I be able to buy with it? Well in El Salvador the government last year decided they were making Bitcoin a legal tender in that country. So now you can go to El Salvador you can go to a McDonald’s you can get a Bitcoin wallet and buy a hamburger. That’s been an experiment that is quite controversial I would say.
Many critics were saying that the the average people in El Salvador haven’t benefited very much from the Bitcoin. But it has caused a lot of companies to get their financial processing in place so they can accept Bitcoin for small everyday transactions.
So if we ever need to or start accepting them here it is possible to adopt it as the currency that everyone would use. I think at the moment it’s not really going to become something you can use to buy a donair at the donair shop.
But right now you can treat it as a digital gold. By digital gold it means it’s a place to store your value over time. I think that it’s going to rise from the current twenty thousand or twenty five thousand dollars Canadian per Bitcoin to a million dollars or more. That’s my prediction.
That’s why I think everyone should buy a little bit of Bitcoin just so you can have a piece of the future. That concludes my talk.
Thank you for being a wonderful audience except for the gentleman who walked out. But that’s okay we all here understand the value of what I just said. I loved to answer your questions.
Thanks again and see you next time! Thank you!
