Canadian Bitcoin Conference Podcast: Mark E. Jeftovic

What we talked about.

In this Canadian Bitcoin Conference podcast episode, host Sunny Ray talks with Mark Jeftovic, founder of easyDNS and a longtime Bitcoin OG based in Toronto. Jeftovic traces his path from running easyDNS since 1998 through early exposure to e-gold, then instant pattern recognition when he discovered Bitcoin in 2013 and began accepting it as payment within a month. He explains that his conviction Bitcoin was here to stay crystallized in 2017 at an Ethereum Name Service meeting in England, and that his interest actually started from finance and monetary debasement concerns rather than technology. The conversation covers whether DNS needs to live on Bitcoin's base layer or a side chain, why current market sentiment and rising hash rate suggest a bottom despite MicroStrategy's recent Bitcoin sale, and how Canadian, UK, and Australian privacy and age verification bills reflect outdated linear legislative thinking applied to a networked world. Jeftovic, who sits on the board of the Canadian Internet Society, closes by comparing these bills to a technically impossible mandate rather than a simple slippery slope.

easyDNS founder Mark Jeftovic on Bitcoin conviction, DNS on chain, and why bad internet laws can't actually work.

The questions, and the answers.

Can you give us an overview of yourself, easyDNS, and your background?

I've been running easyDNS since 1998, co-founded with two other guys, and bought them out in 2005. I came across Bitcoin in 2013 and had instant pattern recognition because of my earlier experience taking e-gold as payment and hodling it. Within a month we were taking Bitcoin payments at easyDNS. I've stayed long and strong ever since, though I regret not going all in early on.

When did you realize that Bitcoin was here to stay?

It was 2017, at a meeting in England for the Ethereum Name Service deployment. Looking around the room at Trinity College, I realized this was a subcommittee of the second largest cryptocurrency in the world, with people there from all over the globe. That's when I knew this stuff wasn't going away, even though a bear market hit a few months later.

Was there a metamorphosis that took you from a technical lens into seeing Bitcoin as a store of value, or was it the other way around?

It was the other way around. I've always been a finance and economics geek who happened to work in tech. I understood monetary debasement was a cancer long before I even knew the term Cantillon effect, which I didn't learn until around 2020. I was a gold bug in the late 90s and still am today. I've never been Bitcoin versus gold, always Bitcoin and gold.

Does DNS on a blockchain need to happen on layer one, or could this work on a side chain?

Immutability is actually the blocker for doing DNS on the base layer, because you want uncensorable domain names but still need mutability to update records later. Side chains like Stacks, which pins to Bitcoin, already do this with projects like BTC domains and Orange Domains Locker. It's less about whether it's technically possible and more about whether enough people care to push it past critical mass.

Is this the end or is this the bottom for the current bear market?

I don't think it's the end, so it has to be the bottom. I look at sentiment, which is abysmal, and hash rate, which is still trending up despite a 22 percent drop in January. When Strategy recently sold Bitcoin, both Bitcoin and Strategy shares should have nuked on that news but didn't, which reminds me of when BlockFi went bankrupt in November 2022 and that turned out to be the actual bottom.

What are your thoughts on Canadian privacy and surveillance bills, and similar policies moving through the UK and Australia?

I sit on the board of the Canadian Internet Society, and colleagues like Michael Geist and David Fraser track these bills closely. This trend transcends party politics. All this legislation is crafted for a linear, top down industrial society, but we live in a nonlinear, networked world, so these rules are often technically incoherent, like an age verification law that dictates outcomes without giving providers a feasible way to implement them.

Is this similar to a slippery slope, like the UK farm inheritance tax that started narrow and later expanded?

I see the analogy, but I'd describe it differently, more like a Mobius strip or an impossible triangle. They're telling the technical community to do something that isn't actually possible within the laws of physics, like the internet kill switch idea from an earlier bill. It's less about gradual expansion and more about legislation that can't coherently be implemented at all.