Digital Currency: An Evening with Spotcoin Founder Andrew Thornhill
You may have heard the terms ‘digital currency’ and ‘Bitcoin’ being used quite a lot recently, but many of us are still unsure what they mean. How will digital currency be involved in the future of transactions? Will it improve the way we exchange services? Can cashless transactions be secure?
These questions and more were answered last Friday in Tbilisi when Startup Grind hosted entrepreneur Andrew Thornhill to introduce his digital-currency trading company ‘Spotcoin’. Mr. Thornhill defined a Bitcoin during the evening as “a block of information, but a very complex block of information. Every [transaction] path that that block has taken is recorded. There is only one coin. It’s about 22GB of information and when you participate in that, it is recorded. You download it and to own a coin is to own a map.”
Andrew Thornhill is an American businessman who has been working in Georgia since 2007, here full-time since January 2016. He speaks Russian and is actively learning Georgian. His company, Spotcoin, promises to be the future platform for digital currency transactions around the world.
The event began with him speaking about how he came to Georgia and eventually ended up living here. “Yesterday, I celebrated 10 years of doing business here in Georgia. Back then, I was working for an Australian company that was hired by a bank here in Georgia to help them do all their work online, so I was flown here. All that time ago, setting foot for the first time in Tbilisi, I never thought that I’d eventually be living here! But it was a really, really good experience. This was one of the fastest deals I have ever executed and after, I had to keep flying back and forth to the United States, so I just decided to move here”.
He then told us the story of how he stumbled upon digital currency and made the move to build a business around it here in Georgia. “The company I worked for before I set off on my own here was a very large payments company that I helped to build. We were quite hesitant to get into it because there were a lot of unknowns. We decided to look at it, but not launch it right away and got the authority to not sell them, but buy them”.
Andrew believes that digital currency is the way of the future, and for a very good reason. A Bitcoin contains all records of transactions, called a blockchain, and it removes all inconsistencies between people on both sides of a transaction. “People are generally good, but they will sometimes lie about things, especially when it comes to money. The blockchain basically prevents me from telling you ‘[the money] it’s on its way!’ The block chain prevents that because it contains proof in itself. To have that technology, really nothing more than a database of information, verifying that I made this transaction and that you received it is absolutely revolutionary when it comes to payments. I’m not talking about 1-2 dollar transactions, I’m talking about paying rent, paying salaries or paying bills.”
In the fast-emerging digital currency market, it is still difficult to exchange digital currency for ‘fiat currency’ (money whose value is backed by the government that issued it), such as Dollars and Euros. Andrew went on to tell us how he was presented with this problem and how Spotcoin was founded around it. “People or organizations that have a large amount of digital currency find it very difficult to sell it. Spotcoin is basically a stock market for digital currency; on one side we have people who want to buy it and on the other, people who want to sell it. This idea was brought to me by a friend who was actively trading coin for fiat and couldn’t sell them fast enough. So, over many months, I did some looking around and by January we were handling transactions of a couple of million Euros. The demand was there. I tested the system and it responded well. I wrote a business plan, approached people in the US and raised a million dollars to launch Spotcoin.
Digital currency is really taking off and has entered into the mainstream. As its popularity continues in the months and years to come, how will Spotcoin develop? Andrew declared his plan for the coming months is to hire more team members and work towards automation. “To manage our growth, we’re currently trying to hire a lot of people. We have project needs, management needs, and I need another social media manager. We need to hire about 15 people. But, parallel to that, we’re automating our system, allowing people to engage on the market place. Spotcoin is kind of an eBay for digital currencies. We hope to go live with that in early January. We’re also running an ICO (initial coin offering) and we’re looking to hire an ICO manager in the States and a project manager here in Georgia.”
Like Andrew, many businessmen and women are coming to Georgia to establish businesses. Andrew told us his own reason. “It’s here in Georgia because I’m here in Georgia. Georgia isn’t the best place for Spotcoin, let’s be honest, but I love Georgia! I go home for Thanksgiving, but I live and work here. Georgian regulation makes it very easy to do business. I can go down to the public house and open a company for 100GEL, and sit in a café and have a cup of tea while I’m doing it. For those of you who are not familiar with how that works outside of Georgia, it doesn’t work like that anywhere [else]! Working in a place with a government so strongly into innovation is a great place to be”.
Tom Day