#499: Katie Haun on the Dark Web, Gangs, Investigating Bitcoin, and The New Magic of "Nifties" (NFTs)

There is no PhD to be had in crypto—and if there were, it would be outdated the year after it was granted because this space changes so fast ... Don't let yourself just think 'Oh, it's too complex. I don't want to go dive deep in it.' You don't need to dive deep in it; just go learn something about it that you didn't know.

That's one of the reasons I've stayed in crypto—it really is so interesting to me in that it brings together so many different elements, Tim, of society and different verticals. It brings together economics, computer science, technology, but also... geopolitics, finance, and certainly law & policy. I mean, I could go on and on—and now even art.

Look, here's what I think about Bitcoin: I think it's still early days ... I think we're going to see adoption in waves ... I do think that we'll see waves of it, and we're still in the early days.

Running criminal enterprises from prison is pretty common. There's a whole system that goes into taxing criminal activity on the outside in exchange for protection on the inside. And the people who are running these gangs, frankly a lot of them could be running businesses ... They're hustlers; they're dedicated; they have a lot of passion. I'm not trying to make it sound glamorous at all because it is criminal. I'm just saying that they're very organized.

I think you're going to start seeing more and more countries creating their own versions of their own cryptocurrency pegged to their currency, so I would not be surprised to see that.

In life, there is either 'Hell yes!' or there's 'No' — and if it's not 'Hell yes!' it's 'No.'