Dominic Frisby is fed up with people who say they don’t understand cryptocurrency. He calls them “no-coiners” and accuses them of “deliberate recalcitrance”. He says they’re “just determined not to understand it, come what may.”
The problem starts when people insist on trying to get to grips with the code behind the currency, but Dominic says they don’t need to take an interest in that. With ordinary money, “nobody understands how money gets created, nobody understands quantitative easing”. Similarly, everyone is happy to use the Internet without getting stuck because couldn’t explain the finer points of HTML.
Frisby wrote his book, Bitcoin: the Future of Money, way back in 2014. It’s part history, part technology and part his personal story of exploration. Since then he’s followed the sector and appears at conferences (and the Edinburgh Festival) with his very own financial gameshow. Alongside that, he writes about money and - this is the unusual part - continues his career as a voiceover artist, which he’s been ever since leaving drama school.
His concern about the tech scene today is around how we give our personal data to the tech giants: “I just don’t think ordinary people realise how much of their privacy they have already given away.” When awareness of the problem reaches a critical stage, change will happen. Whether that hits the existing tech businesses or boosts the crypto and blockchain sector, “I’m pretty sure that the narrative that’s going to drive the next bull market in technology is privacy.”
As for his own complicated portfolio of skills and expertise, Dominic says it isn’t necessarily an advantage. In terms of marketability, “it often pays to do just one thing”.