Born and raised in East Vancouver, Aydin Kilic
graduated with an honours degree in elec-
tronics engineering from
SFU before joining
Richmond tech giant Sierra Wireless. Around
the recession of 2008, Kilic became involved
in real estate, spending several years in that
industry before co-founding Fortress Block-
chain Corp. In 2021, he handed off
leadership of Fortress to become the
CEO of Vancouver-based Hive Tech-
nologies, one of the country's leading
cryptocurrency mining companies.
The firm and its leading executive
have a big vision for
the future of AI and
how it can impact
everything we do.
We met for coffee
at the Vancouver
Club.
by Nathan Caddell
There are still a lot
of different opinions
about cryptocurrency and
bitcoin. There have been
a lot of ups and downs.
Where is it going to go
next? You're optimistic,
I assume.
So we just went through the halving, right?
What that means is that the block reward
drops by half. Before the halving, the net-
work made 900 bitcoin. Now it makes 450
bitcoin a day. All the miners in the world
are competing for that same reward. So,
if you're 1 percent of the network, the
pie is half the size. And, typically, nine to
12 months after the halving there's a bull
market.
That happened after the big fall in
2020. Do you remember where you
were then?
Yeah, bitcoin fell to $3,500 on March 12,
2020. I was still running Fortress at the
time. It was like a scene out of a movie. I
remember swerving into a parking lot and
getting out my phone and just pacing.
How did you survive that?
You know, it bottomed out and we made it
through that fine. It was challenging: you
run your analytics and you're like, "Okay,
we can afford to run it this long and we're
going to lose that much money." Every-
thing's a calculated risk, right? But it was
crazy. And then, what happened after the
halving? In December, bitcoin started com-
ing back to $10,000. In January 2021, it hit
a new all-time high. By February, it was
surging. I think bitcoin has finally reached
critical mass. I don't want to say it's too big
to fail, because that has a negative connota-
tion. But I think now because of the wide-
spread adoption of bitcoin, the regulators
have finally wrapped their heads around it.
The bitcoin
ETFs in the U.S. and Hong Kong
have recently been approved. People can
buy it in those countries on the exchanges.
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