"I Built The World's Biggest Bitcoin Exchange Then Lost Everything... So I Told The Truth" | CZ

“I didn't want to play dominoes with the other inmates. I didn't want to just do the normal things. I worked out. There's a routine. There's a very fixed schedule. You've got to wake up at a certain time. You've got to have breakfast, lunch, dinner at a certain time. There's a lot of lockdowns at a certain time. You get a few hours of free time. I just want to keep myself busy. And then I thought that might be a good time to share that experience.”

“Yeah, I think it took us about five months from starting to become the worst largest crypto exchange by trading volume. So that rise was really quick, but we were lucky that we were in what they would call the L-coin 2017 ICO year. But I think the thing that we were able to do that kept our leading position over the last eight years is how we protected users. I think Binance does a lot of things to protect users. Some of which we talk about repeatedly, some we don't talk about, but the real users know that Binance is the exchange that really protects the users, that goes above and beyond.”

“One is, I would be fine living in the UAE. Like, no, I'm financially okay. I have bitcoins. I have enough bitcoins. No, I can maintain my living standard. I'll be fine. And I can stay home, in a country for a very long time. But I thought if I didn't go, they will probably be fairly severe consequence. There can potentially be fairly severe consequences for Binance. The company may be very... They could indict me. They can indict Binance. The company will be very affected. There will be a lot of negative effects for BNB holders.”

“Well, number one is I want to say, very importantly, I'm super appreciative of the President Trump's pardon for me. I think that for me, like, no, it's a level of vindication. So I think that's really, I thought I didn't care too much about it, but after it happened, I do highly appreciate it. And I think that shows the US can go 180 degrees in that direction, which is really good for the US. I think the previous direction for US will leave US without a crypto blockchain industry.”

“I'm hoping that we don't talk about crypto as crypto in five years, just as like we don't talk about internet anymore. We don't talk about TCPIP, we don't talk about HTML5 or whatever, JavaScript, etc. We don't talk about that stuff anymore, we just use it. I think in five years, I'm hoping that we'll just use crypto. It's just money, right? It's just the new fintech money. There will be other use cases for the blockchain, for data storage, etc., etc.”

“So GIGO Academy right now, I think the meeting I had with them yesterday morning, they're reaching 240,000 students, 240,000 kids learn on the platform for free. That's 10 times bigger than many universities. So and that's like a fairly small team. That's a 50 people team working for like a year and a half, two years. So that's very impactful. That project may have no revenue, but it makes me very, very happy. So all of those things make me happy.”

“I think Bhutan has benefited hugely from Bitcoin. And it was a very smart decision for them to get into Bitcoin mining so early. They have excess hydropower, which produces electricity. And they're in the Himalayan mountains on the India side. It's very expensive and very difficult to transfer those energy from the mountains to other, export them and sell them for money to keep, etc. But when you use those extra power to buy bitcoins or to mine bitcoins, then bitcoins are permanent, durable, easy to transport, holds value.”