Kurt Wuckert Jr: Bitcoin needs more sellers
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Until now, the type of people attracted to Bitcoin have mainly been developers, says Kurt Wuckert Jr. But that needs to change to create real Bitcoin businesses and convert existing businesses to Bitcoin.
“If we were better at sales and marketing,” says Kurt, “we might not even be in the blockchain economy at all. We could all sell solar panels or something and make pretty good money. So I think that’s pretty much a cultural thing.”
Changing the Bitcoin culture would mean bringing in experienced sales people – and it wouldn’t matter if they came into the job knowing nothing about Bitcoin: “it’s not that hard to just hire good experienced people from sales,” says Kurt. “I mean, there are companies that have SAAS [software as a service] vendors or cloud computing vendors. These guys could pretty quickly get started selling Bitcoin SV solutions. Get them out there, get them knocking on doors, build leads, build customers, build business. It is formal. It’s not that hard to do if you put the right people to work.”
Kurt was speaking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the second part of his interview for the show. This week, he took a step back from discussing his day-to-day responsibilities as CEO of mining operation GorillaPool and spoke in his capacity as Chief Historian for CoinGeek. Taking the long-term perspective, he emphasized the importance of increasing the throughput of transactions on the blockchain to compensate for the halving every few years of the “subsidy” (the block reward payment in Bitcoin) that miners receive for adding a block to the chain:
“If you were just doing random mining in 2009, you were making 50 coins per block. And the average miner is making less than seven coins per block right now. So there’s been a—I don’t know what it is—a 90 percent drop in profitability, really, if you measure in satoshis. That’s bad. And so we have to do better. We have to have massive blocks because that’s Bitcoin’s security model at scale.”
So the mining network – and thus the continued existence of Bitcoin – is dependent for the future on more businesses creating transactions to be processed. Kurt is sure it will happen, but says “we have to hurry”.
The problem is that in recent years, too much emphasis has been placed on the extremely volatile price of coins rather than their utility: “People can’t seem to get it through their heads that there are other ways to make money. blockchain.”
If it doesn’t happen soon, it’s a doomsday scenario where the entire Bitcoin economy grinds to a halt. People will look back on this time, speculates Kurt, and think that “maybe blockchain was just a bad idea. And it’s going to be really humiliating in 10 years [when] all of us just do something different because no one actually has a real customer.”
But, ever the optimist, Kurt hopes that the current depressed market conditions will actually turn out to be just what Bitcoin needs: “This is actually what I love about bear markets,” he says. “They make people reconsider that, ‘Hey, maybe I was wrong.’ Maybe I need to rethink the profit model to be in this economy. And yeah, I mean, we just need somebody to get out there and seal the deal…or else.”
You can watch the first part of Kurt’s CoinGeek Conversations interview here.
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