How Bitcoin Can Help You Become Unf*ckwithable With Adryenn Ashley

 

Some women fear investing in the crypto space for some reason. But there is a safe space that women could run into if you want to try the crypto space. Inspiring women and girls to embrace technology and cryptocurrency is the essence of the CryptoVixens ecosystem. In today’s episode, Adryenn Ashley, an award-winning author and film producer, sits with Halle Eavelyn to discuss how she started CryptoVixens. She reminds women that if you play small, it stays inside you, so you’re making the world a terrible place, so play full-out to win and be successful. Tune in to this entertaining and inspiring conversation between Adryenn and Halle as they empower women to do what they’re destined to do!

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How Bitcoin Can Help You Become Unf*ckwithable With Adryenn Ashley

I am thrilled to have with me my dear friend Adryenn Ashley. She is the Founder of CryptoVixens among many other things. Adryenn and I have been in each other’s worlds for a very long time, but now that she is officially here in Miami with me, I am super excited. Welcome, Adryenn. I’m so happy to have you on the show.

I am so happy to be here. Moving to Miami has been a blessing. I have reconnected with all of the most amazing people in my life including you. I’m super excited to be on your show.

Thank you so much. When I first connected with you over Facebook, which was ten million years ago.

It was 2007, 2008, or 2009-ish.

Neither of us had ever heard of crypto because it didn’t exist, and yet here you are, you’ve built this crazy vibrant community for women. Why don’t you share with everybody what that journey was like and what caused you to decide to do that?

I did get into Bitcoin in 2009. I didn’t know what I had. I didn’t understand the power and the impact. That didn’t come around until about 2012 when I went, “I had 2,500 Bitcoin and I don’t have that computer anymore. Even through hypnosis, I literally got the key, but you need two keys. You have a public key and a private key, and I only had one key. I don’t have 2,500 Bitcoin so that was a disappointment.

It is heartbreaking but throughout the whole thing, the biggest piece of it was the unf***withable ledger of what happened. When I started to noodle on that, I started to think about, “What can we do with that? What will that help with?” Certainly, it will eliminate fraud or if it doesn’t eliminate it, it’ll prove it. This actually happened. It makes people behave better because everything is on the public ledger. You can trace and look at it.

I was always laughing at all those people that are like, “Bitcoin is used by criminals and drug dealers.” I’m like, “That was the growth, but that’s not their highest and best interest to use something that’s so easily trackable when they could use Monero.” That always sounded like scare tactics and fear-mongering by the mainstream because they don’t understand and they’re afraid.

Monero is a privacy coin.

The big thing for me was what in our world can be optimized. I remember when I moved to Reno and I started going to 1 Million Cups and they have startups. It is by the Kauffman Foundation and it’s like a meetup in the mornings in a 2nd and 3rd tier city that doesn’t have large tech communities. I was in Reno so we’re in a small office in San Francisco Bay area and a tax-free place.

I heard this one pitch and it was awesome because it was the sensor technology using raspberry pie. With that, you could set up these smart contracts and kick things off. It’s like in a huge factory and the sensor would go, “This light bulb goes out.” “Check the inventory.” “Do we have a light bulb to replace it?” “No.” “Let’s order the light bulb to replace it.” The light bulb comes in, mail room checks in, “Now we have a light bulb. Let’s kick off the repair ticket.” The worker goes out and repairs it. The sensor goes and it’s all done. That’s all done autonomously through smart contracts.

I was like, “That’s stellar.” What else could we do to optimize things? It works best doing autonomous behavior. They’re like triggers and people go, “Smart contracts.” “They’re not exactly smart or contracts,” but that’s like the Ethereum model. Ethereum is a smart contract. Bitcoin is a store of value. There are different blockchains that do different things.

We’ve talked about this before on the show, but I want to make sure. I’ve had entire episodes that are about NFTs not being only JPEGs, but rather being smart contracts. Remember, this is a smart contract in the sense of you have a smart home, which is mostly run by a computer. The smart contract is going to live on the blockchain and it’s going to give you protections and other features that a regular written contract can’t.

It’s vice versa. A written contract can give you things a smart contract can’t do. It’s the lawyer.

I would hope that a smart contract would be like a written contract++. That’s what I’m thinking about it when I say that.

It’s not. I started writing my first smart contract design. I designed my first NFT to replace the brick in front of a hospital for fundraising. I called it Rhinestone and we had this thing called the Donor Gallery, which was a WordPress plugin, but I would’ve had to have written it on Bitcoin, which was very difficult and very expensive. It never got done. Ethereum or smart contracts came out and now we can do it because we now have the ability through the chain link, which is a protocol that allows you to take real-world verified data and import it into your smart contract. If everything isn’t hard coded, it’s basically dynamically created, which is super cool.

I was doing a dating app and putting consent on the blockchain. I met this amazing fabulous woman named Lauren Slade at Collision, she’s the smartest blockchain human I’ve ever met in my entire life. The way that she thinks about DAOs, the decentralization and power of blockchain to return the power to the people is freaking phenomenal. We basically Co-Founded the CryptoVixens, which inspires women to join founding teams as advisors or co-founders regardless of technical expertise.

This is what I want to get across to all of your readers. Just because it’s on blockchain, it doesn’t mean it’s scary and you have to know blockchain. Participate in a project or join a company. I tried to get a woman with 30 years of experience as senior vice president of healthcare into a healthcare company that happened to be on the blockchain.

 

She kept focusing on that and going, “I don’t know blockchain. I’m not a tech person.” I’m like, “This is a healthcare company. This is solving problems in healthcare. You use email every day. You don’t know how it works. They just work. That’s the point. Don’t be afraid of technology. That’s not your role. You’re not taking a job as a CTO. There are people who can do that. The whole point is if you have expertise in a particular vertical or in an industry, you need to contribute that because the internet was born by a bunch of guys in their underwear and basements, and it was smelly down there, and I was the only girl, and let’s not repeat that.” How about that?

I was there too.

Way back in the day in the ’90s, internet marketing was started and I had one of the very first public email accounts at The WELL in Sausalito.

The WELL was pre-internet and it was from the 1950s. It was all government and secret, and nobody was on The WELL. If you had a WELL account, especially one of the first public WELL accounts, you were the earliest of the earliest adopters. My hat is further off to you than it already was. That’s super impressive.

I bought my first domain name in 1998, Adryenn.com, my name, and always get your name. You want to get your name on every single social media platform that comes out and go grab your handle. I missed a couple. I’ve been salty ever since this little Chiquita, twelve-year-old fashionista got it on Polyvore, and I’ve never gotten it back. I have it almost everywhere and it makes me crazy when I don’t have it. I even have an OnlyFans, but that’s only so that the cam horror who keeps creeping up the Google ranking, doesn’t pick it because I don’t want that.

You were explaining about CryptoVixen and why you started it.

I was going back to tell you my first domain name in 1998. I was in internet marketing back then, but I had to be a boy. My name was David. I sold woodshed architectural plans to build a woodshed to get shed kits out of wood in the backyard, so I know all the internet marketers and I’ve known them for decades. They didn’t meet Adryenn until 2005, 2006, or 2007-ish. I’m going back and I’m like, “Do you remember the David guy?” They’re like, “Whatever happened to him?” I’m like, “Hi.”

I’m so glad we don’t have to hide behind pseudonyms anymore. JK Rowling when she first came out with Harry Potter was told that Joanne wouldn’t sell as many books as something that was potentially male. They encouraged her to go with a male name, but instead, she picked J.K. It’s funny because J. R. R. Tolkien was the same thing, but she like picked up on that zeitgeist in more than one way. I feel like women are now able to be at the forefront of all things.

One of the things that I’ve always admired about you is how absolutely out front in the world you are. You are the most unapologetic woman that I have ever met in my life. For those of you that are reading, go to YouTube and subscribe because Adryenn is so beautiful, but also, she is so much of a larger-than-life personality and I too fit that phrase. When I see that in you, I have admired it so much because again, you’re so unapologetic. You were talking about Bitcoin being unf***withable.

I may make that the title of this episode because I feel like women are being constantly called to be less than they are, themselves, or for a man. There’s a fun meme that’s going around right now where a man is looking at a woman, and it’s one of those things where the two faces or from the 1950s, but the man is saying, “You’re a little much.” The woman is saying, “Find somebody who’s less than I am then.” I love that because women are finally getting to the point where we can say, “We’re us.” We are showing up fully as ourselves and if the guy or whoever doesn’t like it then they’re going to need to go find somebody who is less than they are.

Ladies, everybody reading this, you have inside you some gift. I can’t tell you what it is. I could if I met you, but you have a gift. That gift belongs to the world. You were given it to give it to the world. What happens when you play small? It stays inside you. When it stays inside you, all of those people who are supposed to experience it and benefit from it, don’t. You’re making the world a terrible place by playing small. We need to play full out. It is absolutely okay to be too much, fully out there, to go for it, win, and be successful. If they don’t like it, they’re not your people. That’s all. You will find your tribe.

What happens when you play small? It stays inside you, and when it stays inside you, all those people who are supposed to experience and benefit from it don't. So we need to play full out. It is okay to be too much, win, and succeed. Click To Tweet

I found Halle. I have a tribe of the most bad*** baller unapologetic phenomenal women in the entire world because I go out and meet them. I then give them all these little necklaces. When you go around and you see a woman wearing one of these necklaces, you know she’s one of mine. I give them out. The rules are, “Don’t give it to another woman. If you can give it to your child, I’ll give you another one.” Only I give them to the women. That’s how we find each other all over the world. At conferences, I gave 1,000 out at Web Summit. It’s a great way to network. It’s a DAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. It runs itself.

We are here to inspire you, connect, open doors, and root you on because the whole thing is whatever it is you were meant to do, you have to do it. I ended up getting divorced because my husband was very traditional and he wanted me to have a traditional job. He was perfectly comfortable when I was a real estate broker then I started writing a book. He was not quite so comfortable. I then started doing motivational speaking and I was on a motivational speaking tour for several years, and he was not comfortable that I was coaching.

When he married me, I was a movie producer, which was about the edge of his comfort level because he knew what a movie producer did because he went into movies, so it made sense to him, but this whole blockchain and entrepreneurial thing and he did not get it. He’s a wonderful human, but he’s just not my human. Make sure that you surround yourself with amazing people who encourage, inspire, uplift, and root you on because you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Make sure you surround yourself with amazing people who inspire, uplift, and root you on because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Click To Tweet

Write down every day what you’re doing, look at your calendar, and who you’re with, and then do the math. That should pretty much calculate your success factor. Swap a few of those people out maybe. The best part is you can be mentored by people who don’t know you. Way back when Twitter first started, I met Tim Ferriss. We were at so many events together and we get along well. People kept asking if I was dating Tim Ferriss. I’m like, “No, I’m not dating Tim Ferriss.” If you go look at our pictures, it’s like, “They’re dating.” “No, I’m not dating Tim Ferris.” I love and adore him.

On Twitter, I used to be able to set the bell and send it to a text message. Every time I faced a challenge or whatever, all of a sudden, my text message would go off and it was a DM from Twitter because Tim posted publicly, but when he posted, it would answer my question. I’m like, “Are we psychically connected or what?” That was motivation.

You can have one of those iconic people that you look up to and you can set your technology to literally make it feel personal for you to inspire you. There are ways around it. Years later, I was facing a challenge with my kid and he’s on the shorter side because I’m a tiny human, and I have dominant genes. I could have had a baby with a Black man and they’d still look like me. My husband was wanting to do growth hormones or whatever. I texted him, and I’m like, “I’m challenged there.” He’s like, “Does he have your personality?” I said, “Yes,” and he goes, “He’ll be totally fine.”

That was sweet because I was facing a challenge. I had to make a decision and have him say, “If he’s got your personality, he’s going to be fine.” I was like, “Okay, good.” You need to surround yourself with people that lift you up and make me better. Better yet, be the stupidest person in the room. Those are my favorite rooms to be in. I’m brilliant and when I am hanging on by my fingernails, it is the most exhilarating thing. I don’t like roller coasters, but I like that.

I agree with that. I’ve had several women in a row who come on and said to me, “I’m not an expert. I learned what I learned off of YouTube.” I’m like, “It’s not like you can get a four-year degree yet in blockchain and crypto. If you can, it’s from one place.” Everybody learned everything from other people, YouTube, and reading books. You’re self-educated if you’re in this space.

What I encourage everybody to do is become a CryptoVixen because I love what Adryenn is doing if you’re called to do that. If you’re more of like an armchair investor and somebody who wants to get a little bit of education, read this which will grow the information that you get. It also grows your exposure to the idea that it’s safe for you to learn, enjoy yourself in the process, and have a good time while you are investing.

You told that story about losing 2,500 Bitcoin. I was with this incredibly high-powered amazing woman who had a very similar story. She was doing Bitcoin back in the aught and she said, “You spend it like currency. You didn’t think of it as something that you were trying to hold. She’s like, “I knew to HODL, but I didn’t think about it because I was busy paying my bills with it.” I have heard that story over and over again. There is that famous Bitcoin pizza story, which is 14,000 and they say that neither of the two guys who did that transaction own any Bitcoin now. I got this information the day that I met you in person at that expo.

The reason I’m sharing this is that it’s so important that many of the people who were there didn’t end up with any Bitcoin or eths significantly. I have members in my family who were involved with ether when the numbers are on a ship. Right now, it’s like 0.00000. There was a time that eth was like that as well and a member of my family had a bunch. When it hit a certain amount, he sold it thinking that it was not going to go any higher. It was maybe $1, $5, or something. He would’ve been rich now if he had held onto that, but we don’t think like that. You can’t see the future.

If you’ve made some financial mistake like that, your choice is either go hide your head under the covers forever or this is the theme of our thing become unf***withable and trust that you are still you. If you made it once, you could make it again. That’s so powerful for us to acknowledge that as women. We have the right to say, “We’re learning, experiencing, and growing. This is new. I did it wrong. I’ll do it right next time.” You’ve been in business for decades. How many mistakes have we made between the two of us, hundreds probably?

At some point, thousands for the entire gimmick, from minor to major. You bought eth and I was salty about eth early on. My co-founder in CryptoVixen used to mine it. She kept trying to get mine it at night, open in my ether wallet and I’d put $60 in back when it was at $1. It was $0.60, so I’d buy 100 or whatever. I’d go back in to try and find it and it would make me open a new wallet because I never stored my keys. If you DM me on Instagram, @Adryenn, with the word wallet, you will get my crypto security wallet worksheet. You will not lose those because I have bought thousands of eths in multiple wallets.

This time, I was smart. Last time, I gave away the computer that I downloaded the Bitcoin on because this was on a terminal window on a Mac. This was not a wallet. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I was being talked through it and things were happening, and then things happened. It’s on the internet. When you say terminal window, it’s not on the computer itself or it’s on the computer itself.

You may not know what you are doing. But you were being talked through. Things were happening, and things happened. Click To Tweet

A terminal window is like old-school DOS. The DOS of the computer. It’s the core base level of storing on the computer. It’s recoding the computer.

That is what I was doing to get the Bitcoin. That computer I donated to a nonprofit because it also had all my Final Cut and everything else. I was doing movies and teaching. I was giving it to the kids to learn how to program. I can’t find the nonprofit, the guy, or the computer. I’m like, “Maybe I could resurrect it if they haven’t wiped it.”

The computer that I had that I opened all those my ether wallets on, I have it. I haven’t touched it or wiped it. I did nothing to it. At some point, somebody’s going to be able to go back hopefully in the history when I opened those wallets, hopefully, there are some shards or remnants of public and private keys that we can redirect, but I don’t know. I did not get rid of the hardware.

I have the guy for you I’ll send him a message and see if this is something he wants to take on, but he is what’s known as a White Hat. He was Black Hat which means people who are dealing with dark web stuff to White Hat. He decided to help people and do like all of his stuff open source and such, but he’s brilliant and good at stuff like that. I suggest that I will hook you up with him if he is interested in taking that on. That is super fun.

One more thing, I used to break into a bank for a living. When the internet was born, I was on it. I wrote HTML for a law library before the internet was born to replace the swapping out of the pages in the law library for their subscriptions to CDs. I was writing HTML for the CDs. On top of that, I used to break into banks for a living when online banking first started. My job was to steal all the money. I did penetration tests and security testing, and I could always steal it all. They’d come in and they’d be like, “It’s perfect.” I’m like, “Give me five minutes.” I’m really good.

I’ve got a DEF CON hacker that I have access to. I got to get in the same room with them and go, “Dude, find it.” That’s why I was like, “I don’t like eths. I like Bitcoin because I have my Trezor and hardware wallet. I love my hardware wallets. I can HODL and don’t even have physical access to it so I send it there and then I can’t spend it. That’s my solution.

If the light bill needs to get paid and it’s a $300 electricity bill or going to shut off, you decide, “I’m going to use my BitPay debit card. Send my Bitcoin to BitPay and change it into debit or Fiat and then pay my light bill with it.” You get a hardware wallet, send everything to it, and have it in the safety deposit box and not your city. You have to go physically get it if you want to spend it. That’s the only way to HODL.

I agree with that. I always ask at the end of the episode, what’s one more thing that you want our women readers to know?

I’ve been trying to get more women into blockchain. This is a very selfish reason. When you have more women involved and diversity in leadership, you get better products that are better for the world. I am a Mother Teresa type. I have lots of save the world things. I want to clean the water in Flint, Michigan. I have a whole laundry list of stuff I want to get done. I cannot do it alone, so we need to get more women involved.

When you’re talking about crypto, tokenomics, this and that, a candlestick chart, and talk technical analysis, you have an eye roll in the back of the head every time that is probably why so many women are like, “Blockchain is not for me.” NFTs are different. NFTs are about building community, but the underlying technology is blockchain. The best part about it is it can be anything you can imagine that you can incorporate into it.

 

Land titles are going to be on the blockchain. They already are in Wyoming. Marriage licenses are already on the blockchain in the State of Nevada. We’re starting to see it get into the most bureaucratic governmental system. It is coming. It is the future. You have to decide how steep you want your learning curve to be. You get in now you have a nice easy on-ramp. You get in when it is the thing and there’s no other choice, then it’s a hockey stick. You don’t want to do that.

Start figuring out how you want to play. You talked about investors. I ran ten-day crypto rooms to onboard people and teach them how to get into crypto. My number one thing is you should not be investing in crypto until two things. There is a due diligence process for you to look at these projects and make sure they’re not going to rug pull or make sure the tokenomics work. It’s not a ponzinomic.

The number one thing that everybody can do is, “Who are you as an investor? How do you deal with risk? Why are you investing? Are you investing to do good? Are you investing to make fast money? Are you investing over the long haul? You have all these questions to ask yourself, and then you can go to Crypto.com, download that app, take $25 and start to hear these conversations that are in Clubhouse. There are a bunch of them and there are ten-day rooms in there.

Pick a few things that are inexpensive and then you buy those things like ten different types of tokens, and spend $25 to $50. I call it Vegas money and whatever your number is tangent. Your number for Vegas money is you’ve had a fabulous weekend in Vegas, exceptional time, concerts, dancing, restaurants, friends, and pool time, and it’s amazing. You are filled with happiness but you called Uber. You’ve checked out, got your bag, walked through the casino floor, and saw the craps table, one last bet, win or lose, and you still had a great time. What’s that number for you?

I’m $20 and I don’t gamble. I’m a builder, not a trader. I would take $20 in Crypto.com, spread it out over a bunch of tokens, and then you have to live with that and see how you handle the ups and the downs because it is volatile. If you put in $100 and see it go up to $2,000 and then it goes down to $500. You’re still in the positive, but it’s all red, you got to see how you feel.

These are all the people who made Lambo money. They bought Bitcoin at $100 and it goes up to $68,000. It goes down to $20,000 and they’re like, “I’m broke.” No, you’re not. You bought it for $100. You have to figure out how that works in your head and what are those stories. That’s why Halle is somebody you need to work with because that wealth mindset, you got to get that dialed in because it is a rodeo ride in crypto if you’re an investor.

If you’re a builder, the tech changes every single day. Every day, there is something new. There’s a better way to do what you were already working on and spent six months on. Are you going to rebuild it? It’s so fast-moving that you got to get a handle on and start to work through it. There’s no reason to not dive in right now and start assessing how you react, who you are, and where you fit in the equation because that’s something you’re going to have to do anyway and it cost nothing.

That was amazing. I have multiple episodes about the mindset of investing that you can read because that’s so important and it helps you become unf***withable. Adryenn, thank you so much for being here. I so appreciate you, our friendship, and you coming and sharing your valuable expertise with our readers. If you enjoyed this episode, please like it, comment on it, review it, and share it with your friends. I want all of the women in your life to know about it so that they can get involved with the future of money. I will see you next time.

 

Important Links

• CryptoVixens
• Monero
• Lauren Slade – LinkedIn
• YouTube – Adryenn Ashley
• @Adryenn – Instagram
• Crypto.com

 

About Adryenn Ashley

Adryenn is a social influencer with a global reach of over 100M that has mastered the art and science of going viral on social media by starting conversations that matter. She has parlayed her ability to lead difficult conversations in public forums and combined it with a background in Sex Ed to create the first blockchain consent platform to make dating safer. Loly.io matches based on sexual compatibility rather than simple geoproximity and photo and logs consent on blockchain, solving the #MeToo epidemic.

Specialties: Adryenn is a high tech priestess and big data geek (forensic accountant, asset protection specialist, and certified divorce financial analyst specializing in picking apart data and analyzing behavioral patterns). Consumer behavior, marketing, e-commerce conversion. International Blockchain/Startup/Social Media Speaker.

Adryenn is a super-connector. Whatever you need, the contact is probably already in her phone.