Shone Anstey brings 20 years of experience in building complex technologies and software within search, analytics, and data center operations. Engaged with cryptocurrency since 2012, Shone has acted as technology lead for an industrial Bitcoin mine and Bitcoin mining pool and is a Certified Cryptocurrency Investigator. Shone is the CEO and Co-founder of LQwD, the first publicly traded, pure-play, purpose-built bitcoin company that’s focused on solutions that power the growth of the Bitcoin Lightning Network.
What was your journey like to get where you are?
I am a third-generation Canadian of Irish and English descent born in the bible belt of the Fraser
Valley in British Columbia. As part of the church, my parents moved to Israel in the mid-80s during my formative years as a young teenager. I spent the first couple of years in an Israeli school but struggled due to language difficulties. Amazingly, I ended up in an American International school for children of diplomats. It was a small school with excellent teachers and students from 39 nationalities around the globe, a truly international environment.
During this time, my parents opted to stay in Israel and managed to take out citizenship. This meant that at the young age of 16, I received a draft notice from the Israeli military. In February 1991, I found myself in the First Gulf war. Scud missiles potentially laden with poisonous gas rained down on our military base. Assuming the worst, that the outside atmosphere was lethal, we hunkered down in a makeshift sealed room. As I sat wearing my gas mask in the middle of the night, I wondered if I would ever see Canada, the home of my birth, again.
It was a long way from the peaceful raspberry fields of my childhood in the Fraser Valley to the battlefields of the Middle East. This was a growing-up moment.
It was a period that taught me tenacity, boldness, and determination. Confronting my mortality at such a young age motivated me to live life to the fullest, be grateful for those around me, and be kind whenever possible.
It was also a time when I met some wonderful people. The father of one of them, a university professor explained to me how they communicated with their daughter in New York via a new technology called email. This was fascinating to me and stayed in my mind. When I returned to Canada in the mid-1990s, I became enamored with and eventually worked in the Internet space as a young tech entrepreneur, and I’ve never looked back since.
In a simpler phrase, what is your company exactly doing?
LQwD Fintech is a technology company focused on solutions that power the growth of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, making its utility as a digital currency more accessible to the masses. LQwD offers users a streamlined solution to set up nodes and payment channels on the Bitcoin Lightning Network, enabling a higher volume of off-chain payment transactions with greater efficiency. As the first publicly listed, pure-play, and purpose-built company focused exclusively on the Bitcoin Lightning Network, LQwD’s mission is to provide the infrastructure that enables the scalability of bitcoin and has an impact on the world of payments, remittances, solutions to the underbanked, and so much more. Built on top of the bitcoin blockchain, the Lightning Network is a Layer 2 solution that enables the scalability of bitcoin as a payment mechanism, solving previous limitations around cost per transaction, and transactions per second.
What about Bitcoin and the blockchain are you most excited about in the future?
The ability to create hard money
For the first time, we’re able to store value in the digital world. In some respects, this new way of storing value is taking over for gold. Bitcoin is divisible by eight decimal points, portable, fungible, and the native currency for the internet. With its limited supply of 21 million coins, Bitcoin has created an opportunity for the world to return to a hard money standard, where wealth cannot be inflated away. It lays the groundwork for peace to flourish in a world where corrupt governments can no longer print unlimited funds to fund endless wars with no end in sight.
Open financial system
Providing financial inclusion to anyone who can access the network. You can now participate in the global economy if you own a smartphone. Although it is still in its early stages, it will become more accessible and easier as Bitcoin matures. It will enable greater accountability and visibility by storing assets on the public blockchain, increasing tracking and transparency, and instilling trust in the financial system.
Future opportunity for innovation
We couldn’t have imagined where the internet would be today in the 1990s and 2000s when it was born and rolled out. The same is true for Bitcoin. It is an extension and continuation of the internet revolution. It cannot be stopped, turned off, or regulated away, and it will be used in ways we have not yet imagined via Lightning or other layers of technology. It has transformed and will continue to transform our digital lives.
Why should we be paying attention to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain?
We can answer a large part of this question by seeing that the large financial institutions are not only paying close attention to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, they are buying into it. Only two weeks ago, Fidelity tweeted that bitcoin is a “superior form of money” and should be treated separately from other digital assets. Goldman Sachs recently acknowledged how one-fifth of the store-of-value market has recognized bitcoin as a serious hard asset.
We should pay attention to blockchain technology as more than just a monetary network. The technology has already become a component in other areas such as digital ID, voting, and land registry. The calls for blockchain to become the record for these practices are no longer just coming from blockchain activists but from the wider industry. Here in Canada, some lawyers have proposed to Ontario province to transfer its land registry to the blockchain. There have been some calls from academia for blockchain voting. In fact, blockchain voting was trialed in the Russian parliamentary elections last year.
Branching out from Bitcoin, the debate about whether it is better to have several blockchains or one dominant blockchain will continue. But one thing that is clear is that bitcoin’s dominance has been declining over time. It is not a negative against bitcoin, it shows how the blockchain space can accommodate other blockchain networks such as Ethereum, Polkadot, and Polygon. Each of them has demonstrated its usefulness within the blockchain ecosystem. Bitcoin has led the charge but other cryptocurrencies have been gaining in reputation.
