This week, news.Bitcoin.com chatted with Kim Dotcom, the founder of the now-defunct file hosting service Megaupload and the creator of the content monetization application called K.im. The Internet entrepreneur Dotcom is a big believer when it comes to the crypto economy and during the conversation, we discussed subjects like bitcoin cash, the recent Big Tech censorship, and how cryptocurrencies will forward financial freedom.
Kim Dotcom is a well known Internet entrepreneur and political activist that believes the crypto economy will continue to swell in value. Dotcom is well known for being the former CEO of the now-defunct file hosting platform Megaupload. The site was taken down by the U.S. government in 2012, but before the takedown Megaupload served 180,000,000 registered members, and saw 50,000,000 visits per day.
Currently, Dotcom is working on a content monetization application called K.im which will meld the benefits of cryptocurrency solutions and file hosting. News.Bitcoin.com reported on the application in the summer of 2017, and the K.im platform is expected to launch in Q4 of 2021.
Moreover, Dotcom has revealed that the next-generation content monetization app will see bitcoin cash (BCH) integration. During our phone conversation, Dotcom spoke about the recent demand for digital assets, why BCH has a lot of upside potential, the recent Big Tech censorship, and how decentralized platforms will invigorate our future.
Bitcoin.com (BC): While the global economy has been extremely gloomy, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have seen significant demand. Do you think cryptocurrencies will continue to shine in 2021?
Kim Dotcom: What we’ve seen with the global economy because of the pandemic, in my mind is really just the beginning of greater global distress of the economy and currencies. Simply because governments are printing money to finance debt. In the U.S. alone in 2020, over 30% of all the U.S. dollars in existence have been created during the year. It’s just not sustainable, you cannot keep printing money to pay what is required.
I think there is a significant devaluation of the U.S. dollar going on and that is driving the demand for cryptocurrencies. Digital currencies are now seen to be more stable than fiat currencies. If that trend continues, which I think it will, it’s going to accelerate the devaluation of fiat currencies. Therefore causing significant disturbances in the markets as well.
BC: Recently you said that Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has great “upside potential” and is currently “undervalued.” Can you tell our readers why you think this is the case?
Kim Dotcom: There are a couple of factors. One factor is that bitcoin cash (BCH) already does around 10% of the transaction volume that bitcoin (BTC) does. But BCH is only valued at 1% of the current valuation of BTC. So that’s a little bit of a discrepancy there. It is a very simple way to understand why it is undervalued. Another reason is that bitcoin cash, unlike bitcoin, is electronic cash where bitcoin wants to be electronic gold. Bitcoin is not really what you use to pay for things online. If you go and buy an apple and transaction fees cost more than the fruit, that’s not a viable electronic cash solution.
Now when you look at the transaction volume potential for bitcoin cash, it is significantly higher than that of bitcoin because of the parameters of BCH. It has very low fees, currently, on txstreet.com it says that the average media fee for bitcoin cash is $0.001 per transaction.
You don’t have that with BTC, so bitcoin cash is likely to take a more significant share of daily, real-life transactional volume. That’s where the upside potential lies and that’s why I think BCH is undervalued.
BC: You also said the other day that you plan to make bitcoin cash the “leading electronic cash solution in the world” and said you plan to help “accelerate the use of BCH.” How do you plan to do that?
Kim Dotcom: So global credit card transactions are about 1.01 billion a day, I think that bitcoin cash in the next ten years will be able to compete with that. More and more vendors are accepting bitcoin cash at their point-of-sale and we are going to accelerate that with partnerships. Getting big retail chains to accept bitcoin cash like grocery markets and really anything that does big volumes of transactions. Then of course, online transactions as well because nothing works better and smoother than bitcoin cash. It’s already a proven system with over 100,000 vendors that have implemented BCH, so you can see that there is a demand for a solution that is cheaper and better than traditional credit cards.
BC: Can you tell our readers about the progress of the application K.im you have been working on?
Kim Dotcom: It’s going well and we’ve been working on it for a number of years. We’re basically turning files into shops. For example, if you are a music artist and you created an mp3 file, you can embed that into a K.im file shop and then the file becomes the shop. You can unlock the content inside the file with a crypto payment, and that’s a new way for people to basically transact. They can also have a section in the file shop for commissions, so they can have a sales force all over the Internet.
Anyone who wants to sell their content can get whatever share the artist or creator wants to have, so you can basically turn the entire Internet into a massive sales force. We expect K.im to have several hundred million users within five years of launching and a lot of that transaction volume will sit with bitcoin cash. Simply because it is the cheapest, fastest way to transact right now with crypto.
BC: How do you think the world’s governments will react to the swelling crypto economy and permissionless innovations?
Kim Dotcom: I think cryptocurrencies are going to be a target for governments, because crypto is in reality competing with the money-printing schemes. The governments want to continue to print money to pay their bills. To pay for its military, to pay for whatever the government needs. As long as crypto continues to grow, the ability of the government to do that and run these old schemes is undermined more and more. I think we will see governments creating difficulties for cryptocurrencies and I expect that.
BC: Just recently, Big Tech censored the sitting U.S. President and a number of other voices and even applications like Parler. Why do you think this is happening?
Kim Dotcom: You can see that Big Tech is getting more and more engaged in politics. One has to wonder what these companies want to get out of this. They are not doing this out of their good heart, they are doing this for a purpose and one has to wonder what that purpose is.
BC: With governments encroaching on freedoms worldwide, do you think cryptocurrency networks will help protect financial freedoms?
Kim Dotcom: Absolutely, cryptocurrencies are the game-changer. They will definitely unlock more freedoms for people around the world. It is just one of many components. What the Big Tech companies did has very little to do with crypto because they run the infrastructure we are all using. They can now basically control what we see, what we hear, and that is frightening. Blockchain is just as interesting as the Internet was and the opportunities are endless. I think that it is important that we have more decentralized, non-corporate owned networks to communicate.
We don’t really want a single entity to be able to change the way we communicate. It should be a network for the people, by the people, open source, decentralized, and I think that is the future. I think the tech giants are making a big mistake in underestimating the power of open source and the willingness of people to switch to something else.
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BC: When do you think the masses will catch on to cryptocurrency solutions?
Kim Dotcom: We will see a steady rise of people adopting cryptocurrencies. It is only roughly 3% of Internet users that have had any contact with crypto. The upside potential is enormous. The more people learn about the benefits of cryptocurrencies, the easier it becomes to use and the safer it becomes to use. With those improvements, more people will engage and that is part of my mission. We need to do a good job of marketing crypto better.
The crypto community also has to come together and work together toward that effort because the sooner we have critical mass, the better for everyone involved in the crypto space. I see a lot of infighting, I see a lot of tribal negative arguments and they are counter-productive. We should all just work together to make sure that users feel safe coming into this space. So the first thing they see is not all these arguments and bickering about what is the best cryptocurrency.
BC: Do you think applications like K.im will help fuel the crypto economy and peer-to-peer electronic cash solutions?
Kim Dotcom: Yes big time. K.im is going to have hundreds of millions of users and they are going to fuel the crypto economy no doubt. It’s going to be a part of making mass adoption happen and there will be some killer apps like K.im, that will do the same and combined, we’re going to drive more and more people toward accepting cryptocurrencies.
What do you think about our conversation with Kim Dotcom? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
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