By Adam Shiff ’24
Jackie Price ’83 is a Pine Crest School “lifer” enrolling as a kindergarten student and remaining at Pine Crest until she graduated from the Upper School. As a student, she was passionate about English, writing for the Upper School newspaper, and performing in plays under the direction her favorite teacher, Mr. Tad Harrington ’99H. She even spent time on the swim team—until 5:30 a.m. practices became mandatory!
Pine Crest was her home. “It is funny, just walking around,” she said after visiting campus this February for the first time in more than 10 years. “The cafeteria looked somewhat similar then, the building is the same. The school was smaller for sure—but when I was here, this was my home.” She also shared that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were her favorite lunch, a favorite for many students today!
While she has always been enamored with English and writing, Jackie never imagined finding herself in love with the world of communications and innovation, especially in the form of Bitcoin.
After graduating from Simmons College in Boston, Jackie’s first career move brought her into the newsroom at CBS News in New York City. She was a field producer for the local NY affiliate Channel 2 and later for Brian Williams. While finding success in the industry, she grew tired of the work. Through a friend, she ended up working as a communications advance leader for the 1992 Clinton/Gore presidential campaign, which led her to a career in marketing, working with large multinational agencies that gave her the opportunity to live abroad and work within the technology sector. “I worked for Edelman, the largest PR firm in the world, and I was in Asia for quite a few years,” she said. “Then I moved to Los Angeles, and started working in what were the early days of digital entertainment. We worked with Warner Brothers on all of their very early digital entertainment initiatives, launched Hulu, and started working with this ‘little company’ that had, at the time, 38 people in this office in Santa Monica—that was Myspace.”
Jackie went back into PR work which included a return to living in China. “So, I went back and lived in Hong Kong for four years, and that is where I learned about Bitcoin,” she said. “These students at Hong Kong University invited me to a talk about this thing called Bitcoin. I asked, ‘what is that?’ So, over the course of three weeks I learned everything I could about it and thought ‘this is it! I have to be involved with this somehow.”
After her return to the United States, Jackie continued to work in marketing with the Chamber of Digital Commerce, and then became the Chief Operating Officer for a Bitcoin mining company in Kentucky. Today, she is a marketing and communications consultant for fintech and decentralized finance companies.
Having a wealth of knowledge on the subject, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask Jackie some questions to help better understand Bitcoin, bitcoin, and cryptocurrency.
Adam Shiff (AS): How do you describe blockchain technology to people who aren’t familiar with it?
Jackie Price (JP) : There are two ways to think about it. There is bitcoin which is the value asset that you can buy. It is property you can own and store yourself—no third party has to come between you and your bitcoin. This is called no counterparty risk. Essentially, the case for bitcoin is scarcity, like gold or platinum or diamonds or anything like that. There will only be 21 million bitcoin created ever. That is a huge part of its value: scarcity. The fact that there is no counterparty risk also makes bitcoin a totally unique asset and creates its value. Right now the bitcoin value proposition is being tested as we see banks failing and the dollar collapsing in value. Bitcoin was made for environments like this because it is a “life raft” like gold, only much easier to use and transport. People are waking up to the dangers of having counterparty risk and want property they can hold themselves.
Then there is the other bitcoin use case, the blockchain protocol. It defines how bitcoin behaves and how it exists, how it’s transferred, where it’s stored and what protects it. That is the distributed layer technology where when a bitcoin is created or shared, whenever it moves at all on a network, whether it is created and put on to the network, or I send you a bitcoin, you send me a bitcoin, there is a distribution ledger. There are millions of them all over the world. Anybody that has a Bitcoin mining machine, or a node operator, can validate all these transactions.
AS: Do you think bitcoin will bounce back from its current downswing?
JP: Yes. But of course this is not financial advice! Every four years there is an event called a “halving.” Bitcoin miners, which are basically warehouses with big racks of advanced computers, work 24/7 to solve computational problems. This is called the “proof of work.” When you solve a problem, you get a reward, which is bitcoin. That proves that you have solved the equation. This is why there is scarcity in Bitcoin, as opposed to other cryptocurrencies that do not have this mining process. Every four years when the halving occurs, the reward that a miner receives is cut in half. When the reward is cut, some miners go out of business, because they can't afford it anymore. However, the halving creates more scarcity, which ultimately sends the value up. There have been three halvings so far in Bitcoin’s history and we are approaching a fourth one in Spring of 2024. In the past, bitcoin price and adoption has gone up the year before the halving and the year of the halving. We’ll see what happens in the next two years.
AS: Can you explain what is being hacked, for example, the people that are losing billions of cryptocurrency or other digital assets?
JP: What is being hacked are the exchanges like Coinbase or Kraken where digital assets are acquired or traded and where some people keep their digital assets in accounts. So, if you bought a non-fungible token (NFT) and you kept it on an exchange, you risk the exchange being hacked and the NFT being stolen. People in the industry often say “not your keys, not your coins.” This means keep on your own Bitcoin and don't leave assets on an exchange. Use a private cold storage wallet like Legder, Coldcard or Trezor so you hold the asset yourself.
AS: What is your take on Solana, DogeCoin, and other “meme” cryptocurrencies?
JP: When I was at the Chamber, we had a couple of those companies as members. Frankly, there was always a lot of concern about who is behind these coins. The reason that I'm not a big fan of them, and I'm glad my first real role in the industry was in a policy organization, is because so much of this has to do with what the policies are going to be. What is happening in our industry is the same thing that happened in the medical marijuana industry. Different states are deciding to allow it or attract the industry to move there while other states are saying “no we don't want this.” At this point in time, a lot of the work has to do with policy, and currently the Security and Exchange Commission has said, unless it's bitcoin it is a security, and if it is a security, it's being traded illegally because it's unregistered. I, and others, believe most of these meme coins are going to go to zero. They are just not going to exist anymore. That speaks to two issues in this industry that need to be sorted out. One is custody, how do you hold custody of your assets safely. The second is what the policies in the U.S.A. are going to be. We are against policies that try to target digital assets because we believe America will lose a leadership position in a huge and thriving industry if that happens. Bitcoin miners and all the companies bringing innovation to finance will just go to countries that welcome them.
AS: What is the process that differentiates a stable coin from DogeCoin, or any other kind of meme coins?
JP: Stable coins like USD Coin or Tether are pegged to the dollar. There are some companies that are trying to create stable coins that are being pegged to gold.
AS: What is the difference between bitcoin and all the other “cryptos?”
JP: Great question and one that deserves clarity. There is a very big difference between Bitcoin and everything else. Bitcoin is a commodity and it has a fixed supply of 21 million. Scarcity. It has proof of work—you have to mine (create) it, which is a complex and very competitive process. Cryptos do not have proof of work, they have no real supply limits (no scarcity), they are all securities (with the possible exception of Ethereum) and they can be printed at will, just like the dollar and all fiat currencies. Forgive me if you hear some bias in my remarks—I admit that I am a proud “Bitcoin Maxi”—a person who believes Bitcoin is the far superior asset.
AS: You are saying these cycles are going to continue. Do you think eventually it will stabilize and Bitcoin will increase its value and just stay there?
JP: Well, I don't know when that will happen, but I mean nobody knows. But what you see if you look at the charts is what are called “higher highs.” The last high was in 2017, and the value of Bitcoin was a little over $18,000. In 2020, the high was $68,000. So, the highs get higher, and the lows get higher.
Jackie shared some insights for me to consider as I look ahead to college applications and my final year at Pine Crest. She reiterated the same advice I hear from my parents—to be a good, kind human. We share the joy of being part of the Pine Crest family, and I believe that the School is instilling in me the same values that she carries today.