063. Bullish on Bitcoin with Misha Yurchenko

What motivates us to change? 

Often, it’s failing or falling down or experiencing a loss or going through something unexpected.

In Misha’s case, it was learning about Bitcoin, making a lot of money quickly and then losing it just as fast. He had no experience trading, but after the fact, joined a community of online investors where he learned from experienced investors about how they made decisions and what their motivations were. He listened and learned and experimented. Then he blogged about his learnings through his experiences, gathered a whole bunch of feedback and complied what he came up with into a comprehensive book called, Bullish on Bitcoin.

https://mishayurchenko.me/mybooks/

When it comes to writing, Misha wants to make sure he sticks to two key points.

1 – Does he have experience in the thing he’s writing about?

2 – Does he want to say something new that hasn’t been said?

He’s someone who is always learning and he just got back from a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Interesting timing. I’d just listened to one of my favourite podcasters, Rich Roll, interview Jack Dorsey about his 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat as well. Misha says, “So one thing I will say about it is, it's hard for me to recommend it to people. It is really, really tough.” He likens it to solitary confinement for 10 days.

Misha explains the recommendation to not only not talk, but also to not have any eye contact with anyone else.  He explains the technique of sitting in meditation which brings up physical pain that is associated with emotional pain. As the pain arises, they are encouraged to remember any memories associated with the pain, and it’s suggested that they let it all go.

We talk about Vipassana meditation, stagnation in Japan and how different the employment system is there compared to in North America.

Misha talks about his experience working as a recruiter for a company in Japan and their company doing business with Roger Ver. They were working with Bitcoin.com and Roger Ver insisted that they be paid by the Japanese company in Bitcoin. This was four years ago, so the company needed to look into what Bitcoin was all about and that was Misha’s earliest intro into Bitcoin.

Why is he bullish on Bitcoin?

“Bitcoin does have a first mover advantage compared to a lot of other cryptocurrencies and a 10 year plus track record. So even if it's not the best cryptocurrency, there's a lot of different technologies that may actually function better than Bitcoin in terms of privacy and transparency and transaction speed, however, just because it's got so much momentum, and so many people have written about it, and the market cap has always been the highest out of the out of all the other cryptocurrencies, you just have momentum for it.”

Why isn’t their mass adoption?

“What needs to happen is, from a consumer perspective, is really solid, UI UX, really great user interfaces. It needs to be able to compete with Instagram and Facebook in terms of usability.”

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Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, talks about the technique that Misha Yurchenko practices

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_gfIaCfRcU

 

Misha recommends Dhamma Muta Vipassana center on Lantau Island https://www.dhamma.org/en/schedules/schmutta

 

Reference to the book, The Monk of Lantau

https://mannmatharu.com/author/

 

The Monk of Lantau book is written by SOC podcast guest Mann Matharu who is featured in episode #42 https://speakingofcrypto.com/042-mann-matharu/

 

Misha’s blog and newsletter

https://mishayurchenko.me/ 

 

Reference to Julia Cameraon’s book, The Artist’s Way and Morning Pages

https://juliacameronlive.com

 

In reference to the question What Does it Take to Change the World, Misha recommends this article, How to Change the World (Moral Peril of Meritocracy) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/moral-revolution-david-brooks.html?

 

In reference to an alarm for bedtime.

Why We Sleep

https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144316