Around the Block With Jefferson Nunn – Interview With Allen Taylor

Jefferson Nunn  0:41 

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Around the Block with Jefferson Nunn. And I’m here today with a very special guest, Allen Taylor. Hey, man, how are you doing today?

Allen Taylor  0:51 

Awesome. Hey, thanks for having me on the show.

Jefferson Nunn  0:54 

Awesome. Awesome. So I see you got a lot of newsletters and whatnot. Tell me more about what you’re doing now with Bitcoin and block chain?

Allen Taylor  1:03 

Well, you know, I’ve got a couple of clients that I work for. I’m a freelance writer been doing it for 16 years. I specialize in block chain and crypto topics. So I’ve got a couple of clients. I’m working on a new book about the top 10 cryptocurrencies, the history of the top 10 Crypto, and I write my newsletter Cryptocracy several times a week.

Jefferson Nunn  1:29 

Cool. Cool. Yeah. When your book comes out, definitely let me know, I would really like to check that out. So I put out a book, years back, and I was saying, hey, one-day Pay Pal is gonna take crypto and everybody was like, No way. Well, here we are, you know. So? Yeah. Yeah, I know, I know how hard it is to get a book out there. So definitely, we’d like to like to know when you get it out there. So in the meantime, yeah. Tell me more about the newsletter. But what do you write about?

Allen Taylor  1:59 

Well, what I do in my newsletter Cryptocracy several times a week is curate the top news of the day, and I try to make it diverse. So it isn’t all just like, you know, coin desk, and coin telegraph, the top news. I look for really deep, interesting articles that may be most people might not find on their own. And it’s pretty good and usually ends up being about 30 to 40 Links in each newsletter. So I try to dive deep and go broad.

Jefferson Nunn  2:39 

Cool, yeah, I’m looking at, you know, some of the medium content that you put out there. Yeah, it looks like you really go in-depth. And I think that’s, that’s been the challenge is if a lot of times if you’re on, for example, coin desk or whatever, sometimes they tend to be following the herd, I call it you know, somebody puts out Oh, my God, Bitcoin is falling, the sky is falling in the next thing, you know, they’re all saying it. So it’s kind of hilarious out there, that herd mentality? Have you found that?

Allen Taylor  3:16 

Yeah, there’s a lot of a lot of duplicate news out there, you know, whatever the top publications of publishing seems like everyone else is following that. And that’s kind of, I guess, to be expected in some ways. But what I tried to do is be different. So I take the top news, or the most interesting news, it’s not always the top news. But you know, interesting news, what I find interesting, what I hope my readers will find interesting. And I try to bring something out from that, that that you won’t see anywhere else, and throw in a little bit of snarky and commentary on top of it.

Jefferson Nunn  3:56 

Stark is very important. Nightline actually gets people interested in excited. It’s one thing I’ve noticed that snarky Sci-Fi usually does better than boring Sci-Fi, right. So yeah, but I’m looking here, you know, you have for example, Women are gonna leave the next Bitcoin Bull Run, Tim Draper says, so you have articles like that, right?

Allen Taylor  4:22 

Yeah. And, you know, here lately, I’ve been covering NFTs and Metaverse and web3.0 and Dow topics. And so I try not to keep it focused on any one particular topic. And so I tried to cover the bases and you know, you’re not going to read every news article in my newsletter, but you might get an overview of the most interesting news and the top news of the day.

Jefferson Nunn  4:50 

So what do you think is next? Do you think Bitcoin is still maintaining a good sizable part of the market cap Ethereum has and a major merge coming up? But what do you think is gonna be the next big thing?

Allen Taylor  5:08 

Wow, you know, it’s hard to predict what the next big thing is going to be. But I know, here’s what I know, I think I think we can judge at least the near future based on the past. And what we’ve seen with Bitcoin. And the rest of the market is every four years, we see a bull run followed by a bear run. And right now we’re kind of in that bear run mode. We’re not sure if we’ve hit the bottom yet, but I think we’re pretty close to the bottom. And when the next halving cycle comes around, in 2024, as we get closer to that, I think we’ll start seeing the market going back up again. At first, it’ll inch up a little bit at a time. And then at one critical point, I think you’ll start to see it go pretty, pretty fast.

Jefferson Nunn  6:06 

Cool. Yeah. I think you might be right, you know, with the direction at the market, it’s like, but laser eye says, you know, it’s not going to if it’s not gonna go to zero, it’s probably gonna go to a million. Right. So yeah, I really think it’s gonna be sort of like that. And of course, but the thing is, there’s all these other kind of projects like Solana and all these others. And that’s why I wonder, just kind of where things are gonna go. Because sometimes it looks like there’s too much going on. And I think that takes away from what’s gonna be next, right?

Allen Taylor  6:47 

Yeah, there’s a lot going on in crypto. And there’s a lot that gets started every day. So there are always new projects. I think that what makes it so exciting is you have these new projects like Terra Luna, for instance, we saw Terra crashing with the De-pegging of the UST. You know, some people could see that coming. A lot of people didn’t see it coming. And they lost well, those kinds of things make it an exciting space. But if you let those things get you down, then you can be overcome with fear. And uncertainty, you know, what they call FUD? Fear Uncertainty Doubt. They’re not, you know, I’m not wanting to let my emotions run, run away from me. So I expect those kinds of things to happen. And so I just keep my eye on projects that I think are interesting and have potential, rather than just following the crowd.

Jefferson Nunn 7:51

Hmm, interesting. Yeah. I think and I would tend to agree with you on that, I think, you know, that Fear Index seem to be really high. It’s packed at like, 11 or something vendor for like, a week. But oftentimes, I think that that’s a little bit overstated. You know, in that, you know, the whole market build, or develop during, you know, the downtime, not during the bull market. You know, I think if you see, three, five years ago, we had a law and I talked to a lot of people in the Agra Yeah, I got in about, you know, 2017. And five years later, I finally got it launched. I hear that from a lot of people, not just a few of these five, but started five years ago, right. So you think five years from now? Do we have to wait five years for that next big boom?

Allen Taylor  8:50 

Yeah, you know, it goes in cycles. I don’t know that we have to wait that long for the next big boom, but project getting started today will likely if it’s going to be worth anything at all, it will take years to develop, you know, Ethereum has been working on its merge for what, three, four years now? Quite a long time, actually. And so if it’s going to be worth what they say it’s going to be worth and produce the benefits that they say it’s going to produce. It’s worthwhile to take the time and do it right. So I really appreciate that about project developers when they take their time to do it right, rather than rush through trying to get it out quickly.

Jefferson Nunn  9:40 

That makes sense. Well, what about the latest? It seems like everywhere you look they talk about what they take they try to associate crypto with criminal steps. You know, do go fun, you know, with Terra. For example, there’s been a lot of news about Han You know, there’s been a lot of news about Binance, and even most recently, Binance, you know, perhaps facilitating the criminal enterprise. Do you think these all just hit pieces?

Allen Taylor  10:14 

Yeah, partly that, you know, we can’t deny the reality that there are scams, there is fraudulent activity out there. There are bad apples, you know, bad projects. And there are hackers, there are people out to get you your money and crypto is an easy target. So there is that there. But when they overstate the, when they overstate it, that’s the part that concerns me, you know, President Donald Trump when he was president, you know, he said, crypto is used for criminal activity. And that’s pretty much what it is mostly, but that’s not true. It’s not mostly criminal activity. Any more than, you know, cash is mostly criminal activity, people still commit crimes with the US dollar. But you don’t hear people trash-talking to US dollar because of criminal activity, even though there’s more criminal activity with the US dollar than the rest of the crypto.

Jefferson Nunn  11:20 

Yeah, I wrote about that. You know, most recently, and it was, it was pretty crazy. That there are billions, hundreds of billions in financial crimes, telemarketing crimes, that sort of thing. And I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard the, your if you’re in the US, you’ve gotten the auto insurance call, right?

Allen Taylor  11:45 

Yeah, every day.

Jefferson Nunn  11:47 

Right. And meantime, you know, they’re so laser-focused on the hundreds of millions of potential, whatever going through binance, a very small amount compared to all of that. So I often wondered why these actually prominent writers are so driven to write negative articles about something that they really don’t understand. And my fear is they’re going to influence legislation that’s currently going through Congress and the Senate to try to regulate these activities. Right.

Allen Taylor  12:29 

You know, I think the issue is that there, there is an element in the traditional financial structure that feels threatened by this new upstart technology. And they don’t know what to do about that. So the natural thing to do is to lash out and try to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And to get people to question, this new technology. I think that’s healthy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, if you see it for what it is, you know, they’re just trying to protect what they have known. Some people are making their living through traditional finance. So if bitcoin and Defi take over, they’re likely to lose their jobs or their way of making income is going to decline over time. And that happens with new technology. It’s happened all through history. So it’s just a natural cycle. I try not to focus on that.

Jefferson Nunn  13:43 

Yeah, good. Good response. I know there’s a couple of really, I’ve talked to his interview with him in the past a couple of really good groups that are actively trying to push good legislation, things that are compatible with what people are trying to do. So yeah, there’s a lot of good stuff. So let me ask you this. How did you get your start in crypto? Because this is such an arcane industry? How did you come across it?

Allen Taylor  14:16 

Well, I’ve been a freelance writer since 2006, writing online content. And so in 2013, I started focusing on financial technology. And I had a client around 2018, who I worked for, I was an editor for an online publication for this client and the focus was on alternative lending. Well, during the bull run, you know 2017 Everything started going crazy when Bitcoin went up to 20,000. He wanted to start a blockchain-based crypto-focused publication, a sister publication to the one he already owned. And since I was the editor of the First when he asked me if I wanted to be the editor of his next enterprise, and so I agreed until I became the editor of blockchain times. And I learned a lot about crypto doing that and took an interest in it. And dove right on into what brought me down the rabbit trail.

Jefferson Nunn  15:20 

Yeah, no, this is one of those rabbit holes once you start going down it, there’s no getting out of it. Right.

Allen Taylor  15:26 

Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Jefferson Nunn  15:29 

It was so amazing; I find is it’s basically programmable energy for the first time. It’s really interesting. And if you look at what some of the other features are talking about, it seems like, you know, this is a natural fit for all of the things that they’re talking about, you know, coming down the pike, and most immediately, the metaverse, web3.0 and all that. So have you delved into the metaverse, what do you think of the metaverse?

Allen Taylor  16:02 

Yeah, you know, I think right now, there’s a lot of hype around it. Mostly because of metas name change. You know, Facebook changed their name to meta last year. It kind of sparked an interest in the metaverse. And so there have generally been really two responses. Overall, you know, there’s the hype. There’s the, Oh, I gotta jump on this bandwagon. So now everybody is saying, oh, yeah, we’re building the metaverse or we’re jumping into the metaverse, and you hear you hear brands saying that? And then there’s the other talking point where people will say, well, we don’t even know what the metaverse is, you know, some virtual reality thing. It’s not very well defined. It’s vague. And both of those are true. So you know, I think it’s an interesting thing. But currently, I don’t see a practical application for it today. That doesn’t mean there won’t be one, five years down the road. 10 years down the road. I think that it could be very, could be a very good thing. Or it could just be a lot of smoke right now. We just don’t know.

Jefferson Nunn  17:13 

Yeah, I think that there are some practical applications further Metaverse, but I think it’s really overstated. You know, everybody thinking that it’s gonna be some like, augmented virtual reality the only thing that I really think it’s just all of the things, all the tools that we have all coming together into something that’s more usable. Plus, you know, us having more control over its data, so that, you know, you don’t get Facebook making audit dollar per person, per month. Yeah, right.

Allen Taylor  17:47 

Yeah. Yeah, I’m more intrigued by the idea of web 3.0. To me, the metaverse is still vaguely defined. And they could be synonymous terms. But you know, they’re defined a little differently. And depending on who you are, you’ll focus on one or the other. So, if you’re Facebook, for instance, you’re probably more focused on the metaverse. But if you are a Dow that wants to, you know, structure a mission around a particular initiative, then maybe you’re more focused on web 3.0. And you know, they could be it could be the same thing we just don’t know. So we’re so early on in this new development, that it’s really difficult to pin, any definition down. That’s going to make sense for everybody.

Jefferson Nunn  18:48 

Yeah, I reckon you’re right. So yeah, there are a lot of really interesting things that are going on with this. Yeah, it’s just, I don’t think it’s worth the hype. You know people I’ve hiked to somebody turn to debt. And I think you do that hype to try to scare people. Right? So is that what you do with your newsletter, you try to sort through the hype and get people the real news?

Allen Taylor  19:18 

Yeah, what I try to do is I try to highlight things that people should know about. Or maybe that I find really interesting, you know, like a deep dive article on some topic that it might be obscure. But it’s interesting. And so I’ll highlight those and give people a chance to dive into them for themselves. And then I’ll, I’ll add some comments about why I think it’s important or what’s interesting about it to me, and that kind of thing, so I’m really just facilitating a way for people to get more have more information and to, to deliver some value to them in a way that they’re not currently getting. So I hope that I hope that to do that within their inboxes just deliver something to them that is a value that helps make their day brighter. It can be good news, bad news, or just interesting.

Allen Taylor  20:33 

Well, you can reach me there at Cryptocracy.substack.com Subscribe to my newsletter there. I have an author website, authorallentaylor.com. And there, you’ll see my books, my book, CryptoSocial: How Cryptocurrencies are Changing Social Media. And it’s available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and apple and all of the bookstores and both digital and print. So, you can pick that up. And you can find me on Twitter, Allen Taylor, @Allen_Taylor. I’m also on LinkedIn and Facebook. And by my book, you can see all of the Crypto Social platforms that I play on to so I’m really diving headfirst into the CryptoSocial platforms. And I think that’s a really interesting part of web 3.0 that a lot of people are not talking about.

Jefferson Nunn  21:32 

I think that’s right. Cuz it’s gonna be I already see some of the early versions of it through, for example, Lightning Network and so forth. You know, there are some early chat pop points and things like that. But I really think that decentralized social media is really going to change how we interact with each other. I really think that that is one of the foundations of the metaverse if you will we read that CryptoSocial.

Allen Taylor  21:59 

I absolutely agree with you. If this Metaverse thing really does pan out, which I hope it does. And you know, I’m not trying to down talk it. I’m just not sure that everybody understands it really. You know, the way that the pushers you know, the Mark Zuckerberg of the world are understanding it. But yeah, I do think that you know, you add this AR and VR and AI, and you bring all these technologies together with blockchain and cryptocurrency, I do think that decentralized social media is going to be a big part of that.

Jefferson Nunn  22:36 

Very, very cool. In the meantime, I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your insights on how all this is coming together. And I hope maybe after six months or so would be great to just check in see talk about your new book and go from there.

Allen Taylor  22:56 

That’d be awesome.

Jefferson Nunn  22:58 

All right. Thank you, Allen, it was great to meet you.

Allen Taylor 23:00

Thank you.