November 15, 2021 • 15 mins
Chris Duffus an experienced financial technology entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of Fonbnk, Inc. an emerging mobile technology company addressing financial inequity across the developing world joins the Money Moves podcast.
As the internet continues to advance, so does the way we can make money from this new digital landscape.
He gives us a history of blockchain,bitcoin,and crypto. But, more importantly, he instills the importance that black and brown communities can embrace now to build generational wealth through this new digital currency space.
Host IG:@itstanyatime
Guest IG: @cduffus
Guest Website: https://www.fonbnk.com/
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Money Movers, Welcome back to Money Moves, the daily
podcast determined to give you the keys to the Kingdom
of financial stability, wealth and abundance Coin. Back on May
eight this year, Elon Musk, a staunch supporter of doge coin,
(00:23):
hosted Saturday Night Live during the weekend. During the weekend Update,
Michael Chay asked Elon Musk, playing a cryptocurrency expert, over
and over again, what is doge coin? And despite giving
canned easily google doble answers, Kay continue to question what
is doge coin, mirroring the greater question that most of
us have, which is what the heck is cryptocurrency and
(00:46):
why is everybody talking about this doge coin. The punch
line of the segment was when Musk character simply admitted
that doge coin was just a hustle. Now, let's remember
that SNL is a sketch comedy show. It was a joke.
But as a result of that joke, the value of
doge coin plummeted the following day. Trust me, I know,
really reinforcing the idea that most of us do not
(01:09):
understand cryptocurrency or blockchain, and so the fact that we
are weary and hesitant to get involved only makes sense,
But how do we rectify that? How do we learn
about crypto? How do we learn about investing in this
new wave of the financial future. This week on Money Moves,
we will focus on answering all the question, concerns and
(01:29):
misnomers about cryptocurrency, blockchain, and all these coins that everyone's
talking about. So to help us get what is crypto
week started, let's welcome someone who can help us learn
the A, B, c's, and one two threes of it all.
Christian duffis the founder and CEO of the blockchain based
financial technology venture Phone Bank. Chris, thank you so much
(01:49):
for joining us today. Hey, my pleasure, Thanks you for
having me. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the show. It's a
pleasure to have you here. So I'm really excited for
you to share and impart the knowledge that you have.
You've been working in this industry teaching financial literacy for
a long time now, so you are a veteran in
the space. But let's dive right into our crypto conversations.
(02:10):
And I want to start off by asking you what
is blockchain? Sure? Sure? Uh? The blockchain is really just
a list of records that is held together by a
cryptographic sort of set of hashes. Right, So maybe a
simple way to think about it is, you know, everybody
has ridden a bicycle and think about sort of that
(02:33):
chain that makes it go around. Well, the blockchain is
literally just that. And each of your transactions that are performed,
whether it's you buying selling uh into a wallet, are
that are those little sort of um rings that hope
the different links together. Oh that's actually a great analogy.
(02:55):
I hadn't heard that one before, but really simple, and
I think people can understand where did this blockchain and
cryptocurrency come from? Great question, Janya Um. Well, you know,
the legend goes that a developer by the name of
Satoshi Nakamoto back in two thousand and eight created this
(03:17):
white paper and sort of the first code of the
block chain that he got this group involved in. And
the purpose, you know was they described as a peer
to peer sort of money transfer network. And I think UM,
which has now sort of evolved into digital gold um
of sorts digital gold to day in terms of blockchain.
(03:39):
Something you said there is really interesting to me because
I feel like, um, there is a lot there was
a lot of misnomers and there's a lot of myth
and mythology that's sort of been spun around cryptocurrency that
I think, you know, kind of contributes to a little
bit of uncertainty and mistrust with it. So let's go
back to this guy Satoshi. So he invented the blockchain
which allows house for this distributed ledger of UM information
(04:04):
that is unbreakable. Let's just say, I don't know if
that's the right word. You used a mutable the other day,
but what happened to Satoshi? Where is Satoshi? And does
that matter the verdict? The verdict is stillowed on that.
It's like that where's where's Walden? You know? But may
people say that it was sort of a pseudooname or
(04:26):
you know, or fake name that he might have someone
else used, um. You know, in retrospect, it was a
pretty disruptive technology, whether from a financial regulatory and not
everybody wants to be the face of that and so
and the way it was designed, I could actually appreciate, um,
(04:47):
you know, how he might have gone about sort of
revealing it to the world. And I think that's one
of those things that for the majority of people, UM,
they find really hard to wrap their heads around because
they're like, imagine the clout this guy could have. He'd
be famous. And you know, there's a lot of people
who were just like, I want to build stuff. I
want to create out of nothing, and he built this
incredible revolutionary technology and he's like, that's enough for me. Um.
(05:10):
So a couple more questions on that, because I think
it it. Let's if we're talking about how to make
our community comfortable with this. So two thousand eight, this
wasn't invented, and you likened it to almost digital gold.
So I think some of the early use cases of
um bitcoin and some of these digital cryptocurrencies were to
be able to anonymously buy things um and purchase you know,
(05:33):
blacklisted items over the internet. And so I feel like
a lot of people held onto that thinking that it
had this you know, bad rap. But I think it's
so much more than that. So can you give us
some of the you know, everyday examples of how we
can use bitcoin in these cryptocurrencies that like my dad
and you know, my fifteen year old niece might understand. Sure, um,
(05:59):
you people are buying cars, houses, artwork, uh, saving for
college that way. There was recently even a Seattle Seahawk
player Russell Okun who took half his thirteen million dollar
salary in bitcoin, and that's worth like eleven you know,
that half is worth like eleven million in bitcoin today.
(06:22):
So that's just one type of examples of how it
can be transformative for for people's lives. You know, I
feel like I'm learning alongside with the money moves um
audience as well. So having experts like yourself come in
and sort of give us a really easy lay of
the land adds a lot of comfort level in starting
(06:43):
to invest and understand more about cryptocurrency. So can you
tell me, um, where does cryptocurrency even come from? People
have talked about mining. What does that mean? Uh? Well,
mining is one of those ways in which it sort
of validates a particular transaction that occurs on the chain, right, Um,
(07:05):
So think about it is like you know, competing for
your you know, uh like a reverse auction of sorts. Right,
So these different sort of miners compete uh to perform
that transaction, which is essentially they have to then perform
this little calculation that uh takes up this processing power,
(07:27):
which you know is one of those ways in which
you know, two is a form of security because people
don't want to spend a lot of power, which equals
money to do one little transaction and in so doing
that minor gets gets paid. Okay, so question for you now.
My dad's out here, he's a big fan, he's supporting
(07:49):
the show, and I know he's gonna ask. Wait a second.
So there's actual minds where people are mining, like how
does this work? And where is it stored? And you know,
I'll laugh when I say, you know, it's not actually
like a gold mine, but it kind of is because
people are making a lot of money in crypto. But
where is this stored? So, I mean, it's like like
(08:10):
many things in the Internet today, it's all in the cloud.
He's going to hate that answer. Technically, some of these mines,
um are literally just like server farms throughout the world, right, um,
And it could be in someone's bedroom it but it
also could be in a dedicated sort of co location
(08:33):
facility with air conditioning and power generation pipe piped in.
And in some far flung cases. I actually know of
this one sort of mining group in Scandinavia where it
literally is in an old mine. Oh that's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah,
that's awesome. Thank you for that. So, you know, we
(08:54):
had talked about earlier how you've obviously been very passionate
for a long time helping, you know, increase financial literacy
in the communities of color. What are your thoughts on
the importance of you know, black and brown people the
Latin community really UM taking advantage and understanding the importance
(09:15):
of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin right now, because I really want
our audience to not miss out on something that I
think is going to be pivotal in terms of you know,
wealth building and wealth creation. That's that's a great question. Um.
You know, one of the things that's been really impressed
upon me in the you know, half a decade or
(09:35):
so that I've been involved in in crypto is that
it's not the same cohort of participants that were in
the original tech boom. I see more women, people of color,
and frankly nobody I've seen in the traditional type of
tech space. And in many respects, it's the antithesis of
(09:55):
sort of the traditional Internet one datto um uh generation.
And so here's this great opportunity to um participate and
you kind of have to do it by owning it
to understand it, how it works. In the same way
that you know, you know, a certain generation of people
understand social media more than oh say that again. Imagine
(10:19):
our audience spent a fraction of the time they spent
scrolling social media and understanding the blockchain and cryptocurrency and
then actually understanding that this is going to create wealth
for you. Like, that's right there, that's brilliant. And this
is sort of the advice that was given to me
many years ago and why I got into the crypto.
You know, how I sort of learned to budget for
(10:41):
the crypto. He was like, look, you know we're at
we were out at a bar her and he's like, um,
you know how much you gonna spend on the bartab?
This is this is my young brother in law by
the way, So I was gonna have to pay for
it anyway. So he's like, well, how much are we
gonna spend you spend on the bartab for it? I
was like oh, and he's like, well, at least you know,
(11:03):
you might you know, the worst thing that can happen
to you at you know, with staying at the bars
that you know, you'll wake up, you might have a
hangover or something like that, but you'll definitely be out
that money you spent at least with crypto. Uh, you'll
have an asset and you never know, it could be
worth quite a bit. That is great advice. And how
(11:23):
many years ago was this? Because I think a lot
of people often ask, am I too late? Am I
too late? And I'm of the opinion it's never too
late to start saving. It's never too late to start
building wealth. And you know, as long as you do
your research and decide where you want to go with this,
I you know, I will just ask for your two
cents on is it too late for us to get
(11:45):
into cryptos? Not not at all. I mean, obviously I
got involved seven years ago, but I think we're only
at the beginning. I would still describe it as like
the first inning of nine in a baseball game. Um,
you know, while you know what, while we see a
lot of value that has been um created in bitcoin
(12:08):
or ethereum uh, there are many other currencies. There's many
even ways to get it right or to get involved,
like there's you know, there's or crypto back cards, there's
That's one of the reasons I got into defy. You
can essentially lend out your crypto and earn interest in it, right, Um,
(12:31):
obviously do your research and um around that, but uh I,
I do think there's gonna be more coins and tokens.
But ultimately, at the end of the day, like if
if you know, we revisit this, this discussion like ten
years ago, ten years from now, in the same way
people kind of look back at like early discussions about
(12:53):
what the Internet is, they're gonna be like, we're all
gonna laugh at sort of how we were describing the opportunity.
But I think it's just going to be a way
of life because it is a better technology for certain
types of applications around distributed trust and and value transfer
and so everything from how you get paid to how
(13:17):
your investments get made. And it is simply like your
loyalty points you know that we used to have at
Starbucks or whatever your favorite restaurant will be will be
denominated in some type of crypto token. Oh my goodness, well,
thank you, thank you, Chris. Those were incredibly enlightening and
wise words. And I hope that you guys all go
(13:38):
home and do your research and understand that opportunity is
knocking at your bank account door or your crypto wallet door.
So Chris, thank you so much for being on our
show today. It was a pleasure to have you. Thank
you for dropping those gems that I hope will grow
into seeds of wealth for our community. My pleasure. Thank
you so much for tuning in Money Moves audience. If
you want more or recap of this episode, please go
(14:01):
to bank Greenwood dot com and check out the Money
Moves podcast blogs. Stay tuned tomorrow and every day this
week for very special Money Versus Moves. So what I'm
reading is possibly some insecurity on his part, or possibly
her own hesitation to fully merge in this relationship, or
from our expert blockchain in token it actually has a
(14:23):
specific use case. Interesting, you're speaking my language, Chris, you're
talking ice cream. So you can build all these different
applications on it and you won't want to miss say now,
it is such a pleasure to have you here. I'll
never forget my mother came with me to this show
in Detroit when the sixth Mile it was at a
strip club, which even that would move for me. I
(14:44):
was like, Oh, I see what we was you're in comedy.
But Money Moves is an I heeart radio podcast powered
by Greenwood executive produced by Sunwise Media Inc. For more
podcast on iHeart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or where where you get your podcasts from
Hey, Money Movers, Welcome back to Money Moves, the daily
podcast determined to give you the keys to the Kingdom
of financial stability, wealth and abundance Coin. Back on May
eight this year, Elon Musk, a staunch supporter of doge coin,
(00:23):
hosted Saturday Night Live during the weekend. During the weekend Update,
Michael Chay asked Elon Musk, playing a cryptocurrency expert, over
and over again, what is doge coin? And despite giving
canned easily google doble answers, Kay continue to question what
is doge coin, mirroring the greater question that most of
us have, which is what the heck is cryptocurrency and
(00:46):
why is everybody talking about this doge coin. The punch
line of the segment was when Musk character simply admitted
that doge coin was just a hustle. Now, let's remember
that SNL is a sketch comedy show. It was a joke.
But as a result of that joke, the value of
doge coin plummeted the following day. Trust me, I know,
really reinforcing the idea that most of us do not
(01:09):
understand cryptocurrency or blockchain, and so the fact that we
are weary and hesitant to get involved only makes sense,
But how do we rectify that? How do we learn
about crypto? How do we learn about investing in this
new wave of the financial future. This week on Money Moves,
we will focus on answering all the question, concerns and
(01:29):
misnomers about cryptocurrency, blockchain, and all these coins that everyone's
talking about. So to help us get what is crypto
week started, let's welcome someone who can help us learn
the A, B, c's, and one two threes of it all.
Christian duffis the founder and CEO of the blockchain based
financial technology venture Phone Bank. Chris, thank you so much
(01:49):
for joining us today. Hey, my pleasure, Thanks you for
having me. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the show. It's a
pleasure to have you here. So I'm really excited for
you to share and impart the knowledge that you have.
You've been working in this industry teaching financial literacy for
a long time now, so you are a veteran in
the space. But let's dive right into our crypto conversations.
(02:10):
And I want to start off by asking you what
is blockchain? Sure? Sure? Uh? The blockchain is really just
a list of records that is held together by a
cryptographic sort of set of hashes. Right, So maybe a
simple way to think about it is, you know, everybody
has ridden a bicycle and think about sort of that
(02:33):
chain that makes it go around. Well, the blockchain is
literally just that. And each of your transactions that are performed,
whether it's you buying selling uh into a wallet, are
that are those little sort of um rings that hope
the different links together. Oh that's actually a great analogy.
(02:55):
I hadn't heard that one before, but really simple, and
I think people can understand where did this blockchain and
cryptocurrency come from? Great question, Janya Um. Well, you know,
the legend goes that a developer by the name of
Satoshi Nakamoto back in two thousand and eight created this
(03:17):
white paper and sort of the first code of the
block chain that he got this group involved in. And
the purpose, you know was they described as a peer
to peer sort of money transfer network. And I think UM,
which has now sort of evolved into digital gold um
of sorts digital gold to day in terms of blockchain.
(03:39):
Something you said there is really interesting to me because
I feel like, um, there is a lot there was
a lot of misnomers and there's a lot of myth
and mythology that's sort of been spun around cryptocurrency that
I think, you know, kind of contributes to a little
bit of uncertainty and mistrust with it. So let's go
back to this guy Satoshi. So he invented the blockchain
which allows house for this distributed ledger of UM information
(04:04):
that is unbreakable. Let's just say, I don't know if
that's the right word. You used a mutable the other day,
but what happened to Satoshi? Where is Satoshi? And does
that matter the verdict? The verdict is stillowed on that.
It's like that where's where's Walden? You know? But may
people say that it was sort of a pseudooname or
(04:26):
you know, or fake name that he might have someone
else used, um. You know, in retrospect, it was a
pretty disruptive technology, whether from a financial regulatory and not
everybody wants to be the face of that and so
and the way it was designed, I could actually appreciate, um,
(04:47):
you know, how he might have gone about sort of
revealing it to the world. And I think that's one
of those things that for the majority of people, UM,
they find really hard to wrap their heads around because
they're like, imagine the clout this guy could have. He'd
be famous. And you know, there's a lot of people
who were just like, I want to build stuff. I
want to create out of nothing, and he built this
incredible revolutionary technology and he's like, that's enough for me. Um.
(05:10):
So a couple more questions on that, because I think
it it. Let's if we're talking about how to make
our community comfortable with this. So two thousand eight, this
wasn't invented, and you likened it to almost digital gold.
So I think some of the early use cases of
um bitcoin and some of these digital cryptocurrencies were to
be able to anonymously buy things um and purchase you know,
(05:33):
blacklisted items over the internet. And so I feel like
a lot of people held onto that thinking that it
had this you know, bad rap. But I think it's
so much more than that. So can you give us
some of the you know, everyday examples of how we
can use bitcoin in these cryptocurrencies that like my dad
and you know, my fifteen year old niece might understand. Sure, um,
(05:59):
you people are buying cars, houses, artwork, uh, saving for
college that way. There was recently even a Seattle Seahawk
player Russell Okun who took half his thirteen million dollar
salary in bitcoin, and that's worth like eleven you know,
that half is worth like eleven million in bitcoin today.
(06:22):
So that's just one type of examples of how it
can be transformative for for people's lives. You know, I
feel like I'm learning alongside with the money moves um
audience as well. So having experts like yourself come in
and sort of give us a really easy lay of
the land adds a lot of comfort level in starting
(06:43):
to invest and understand more about cryptocurrency. So can you
tell me, um, where does cryptocurrency even come from? People
have talked about mining. What does that mean? Uh? Well,
mining is one of those ways in which it sort
of validates a particular transaction that occurs on the chain, right, Um,
(07:05):
So think about it is like you know, competing for
your you know, uh like a reverse auction of sorts. Right,
So these different sort of miners compete uh to perform
that transaction, which is essentially they have to then perform
this little calculation that uh takes up this processing power,
(07:27):
which you know is one of those ways in which
you know, two is a form of security because people
don't want to spend a lot of power, which equals
money to do one little transaction and in so doing
that minor gets gets paid. Okay, so question for you now.
My dad's out here, he's a big fan, he's supporting
(07:49):
the show, and I know he's gonna ask. Wait a second.
So there's actual minds where people are mining, like how
does this work? And where is it stored? And you know,
I'll laugh when I say, you know, it's not actually
like a gold mine, but it kind of is because
people are making a lot of money in crypto. But
where is this stored? So, I mean, it's like like
(08:10):
many things in the Internet today, it's all in the cloud.
He's going to hate that answer. Technically, some of these mines,
um are literally just like server farms throughout the world, right, um,
And it could be in someone's bedroom it but it
also could be in a dedicated sort of co location
(08:33):
facility with air conditioning and power generation pipe piped in.
And in some far flung cases. I actually know of
this one sort of mining group in Scandinavia where it
literally is in an old mine. Oh that's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah,
that's awesome. Thank you for that. So, you know, we
(08:54):
had talked about earlier how you've obviously been very passionate
for a long time helping, you know, increase financial literacy
in the communities of color. What are your thoughts on
the importance of you know, black and brown people the
Latin community really UM taking advantage and understanding the importance
(09:15):
of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin right now, because I really want
our audience to not miss out on something that I
think is going to be pivotal in terms of you know,
wealth building and wealth creation. That's that's a great question. Um.
You know, one of the things that's been really impressed
upon me in the you know, half a decade or
(09:35):
so that I've been involved in in crypto is that
it's not the same cohort of participants that were in
the original tech boom. I see more women, people of color,
and frankly nobody I've seen in the traditional type of
tech space. And in many respects, it's the antithesis of
(09:55):
sort of the traditional Internet one datto um uh generation.
And so here's this great opportunity to um participate and
you kind of have to do it by owning it
to understand it, how it works. In the same way
that you know, you know, a certain generation of people
understand social media more than oh say that again. Imagine
(10:19):
our audience spent a fraction of the time they spent
scrolling social media and understanding the blockchain and cryptocurrency and
then actually understanding that this is going to create wealth
for you. Like, that's right there, that's brilliant. And this
is sort of the advice that was given to me
many years ago and why I got into the crypto.
You know, how I sort of learned to budget for
(10:41):
the crypto. He was like, look, you know we're at
we were out at a bar her and he's like, um,
you know how much you gonna spend on the bartab?
This is this is my young brother in law by
the way, So I was gonna have to pay for
it anyway. So he's like, well, how much are we
gonna spend you spend on the bartab for it? I
was like oh, and he's like, well, at least you know,
(11:03):
you might you know, the worst thing that can happen
to you at you know, with staying at the bars
that you know, you'll wake up, you might have a
hangover or something like that, but you'll definitely be out
that money you spent at least with crypto. Uh, you'll
have an asset and you never know, it could be
worth quite a bit. That is great advice. And how
(11:23):
many years ago was this? Because I think a lot
of people often ask, am I too late? Am I
too late? And I'm of the opinion it's never too
late to start saving. It's never too late to start
building wealth. And you know, as long as you do
your research and decide where you want to go with this,
I you know, I will just ask for your two
cents on is it too late for us to get
(11:45):
into cryptos? Not not at all. I mean, obviously I
got involved seven years ago, but I think we're only
at the beginning. I would still describe it as like
the first inning of nine in a baseball game. Um,
you know, while you know what, while we see a
lot of value that has been um created in bitcoin
(12:08):
or ethereum uh, there are many other currencies. There's many
even ways to get it right or to get involved,
like there's you know, there's or crypto back cards, there's
That's one of the reasons I got into defy. You
can essentially lend out your crypto and earn interest in it, right, Um,
(12:31):
obviously do your research and um around that, but uh I,
I do think there's gonna be more coins and tokens.
But ultimately, at the end of the day, like if
if you know, we revisit this, this discussion like ten
years ago, ten years from now, in the same way
people kind of look back at like early discussions about
(12:53):
what the Internet is, they're gonna be like, we're all
gonna laugh at sort of how we were describing the opportunity.
But I think it's just going to be a way
of life because it is a better technology for certain
types of applications around distributed trust and and value transfer
and so everything from how you get paid to how
(13:17):
your investments get made. And it is simply like your
loyalty points you know that we used to have at
Starbucks or whatever your favorite restaurant will be will be
denominated in some type of crypto token. Oh my goodness, well,
thank you, thank you, Chris. Those were incredibly enlightening and
wise words. And I hope that you guys all go
(13:38):
home and do your research and understand that opportunity is
knocking at your bank account door or your crypto wallet door.
So Chris, thank you so much for being on our
show today. It was a pleasure to have you. Thank
you for dropping those gems that I hope will grow
into seeds of wealth for our community. My pleasure. Thank
you so much for tuning in Money Moves audience. If
you want more or recap of this episode, please go
(14:01):
to bank Greenwood dot com and check out the Money
Moves podcast blogs. Stay tuned tomorrow and every day this
week for very special Money Versus Moves. So what I'm
reading is possibly some insecurity on his part, or possibly
her own hesitation to fully merge in this relationship, or
from our expert blockchain in token it actually has a
(14:23):
specific use case. Interesting, you're speaking my language, Chris, you're
talking ice cream. So you can build all these different
applications on it and you won't want to miss say now,
it is such a pleasure to have you here. I'll
never forget my mother came with me to this show
in Detroit when the sixth Mile it was at a
strip club, which even that would move for me. I
(14:44):
was like, Oh, I see what we was you're in comedy.
But Money Moves is an I heeart radio podcast powered
by Greenwood executive produced by Sunwise Media Inc. For more
podcast on iHeart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or where where you get your podcasts from
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