Jon Southurst, a familiar and credible name in the Bitcoin reporting space for years, has been interviewing people from different sectors on his show—The Bitcoin Bridge. Recently, he switched sides of the table when Women of BSV interviewed him on their show to discuss his background, experience, and thoughts about Bitcoin SV, blockchain, and more.
Originally from Australia, Southurst has been based in Japan since 2002. He developed a keen interest in finance and worked at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Lehman Brothers, where he witnessed the financial crisis of 2008, which was his segue to Bitcoin.
“Initially, I didn’t understand anything; I downloaded the Qtclient and tried mining it on my Apple laptop. I was also one of the journalists working on the ground when Mt. Gox failed,” Southurst said.
Mt. Gox, which was created as acronym for “Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange,” initially functioned as a card trading platform and later converted into a digital currency exchange.
As a Bitcoin reporter, Southurst worked for many organizations, including CoinDesk, Roger Ver at Bitcoin.com, and his venture Bitsonline.com, before joining CoinGeek. He first interviewed Dr. Craig S. Wright in 2014 in Singapore. Southurst said he initially had a neutral take on the Bitcoin thing, but when the fork happened in 2018, he realized something was wrong with BTC and trusted “Bitcoin” Cash. He recalled when he felt that Dr. Wright was likely to be Satoshi Nakamoto more than anybody else because, he said, nobody refuted Dr. Wright’s claims with anything credible.
Meanwhile on NFTs, Southurst pointed out that seeing people talking of NFTs on Twitter reminds him of the ICO days. “I appreciate people making money with NFTs, but I am not into them. I might be into Metaverse, although I have mixed feelings about virtual reality—I have both dystopian and utopian take on it,” Southurst laughed.
AI merging with metanet or SBW? When asked, he told Women of BSV that any application that uses and processes a large amount of data could be built on the metanet, given the difference between that and the internet is it’s all timestamped and verifiable.
The discussion later moved to how the Bitcoin SV community is growing worldwide, although with inevitable obstacles along the way. Southurst shared that the community is growing “very slowly” in Japan. The main barrier is that people cannot buy BSV because the local financial authority (FSA) is extremely strict about allowing digital currencies.
“It allowed only eight cryptocurrencies at one point, and FSA still hasn’t approved BSV. No trading between BSV and Japanese Yen is allowed; however, people can use it without trading,” he said. Being a massive gaming market, businesses like CryptoFights could do great there, but everything needs to be translated to Japanese for any business to succeed in that country.
“If BSV gets listed on a Japanese exchange, it would be huge news for the industry. FSA only regulates when there is a huge demand by exchanges,” Southurst added.
Watch: CoinGeek Conversations episode, Women of BSV: We’re not oppressed minority, we’re just asking different questions
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