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Privacy, and scaling, and narratives…oh my.
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It’s a Bitcoin podcast. The only one that’s making your money you listen to the Bitcoin market. So hold on. Listen to the Bitcoin. >> Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Bitcoin podcast. This is season 2, episode 12. I’m the host talk first. Most normally I talk first. I don’t know. My name is uh D. >> He’s a mime. >> Yeah. Is he Did he mute himself? No, you didn’t mute me, >> I didn’t mute you. >> What are you muting me? >> Muted me. >> I didn’t do >> I’m trying to talk. It just is muted me. >> I didn’t do >> Whatever. >> We need to get a link to this to go put in the put in the Discord. I keep wanting to say Slack. I said Slack. >> Someone already hitting up the comments. Look at this. >> Really? >> Live. >> It’s probably bots, dude. >> Live. >> Oh, no. It’s not a bot. >> Spike speed. >> It’s not a bot. I know. That guy. Who is that guy? >> I’m pretty sure that’s T. I don’t want to dox him. >> We’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll see. >> I think you’re right. I think you’re right. Wait, hold on. >> We have to use his Discord handle so we don’t dox him. >> Anyway, >> it’s the same as his. >> Yeah. So, if you notice, >> the title of this episode is uh privacy scaling and the crypto narrative war. Sorry. I was I was hoping that we would have some sound effects there, but our sound effects guy is not in the same time zone as us. No, >> so he doesn’t show up. >> He’s like grinding. He’s like into your grinding. So, we have no production. So, get used to it. >> This is as good as it gets. Uh, but I am going to read a monologue. I hope you guys are ready for this. >> So, we’re going to get started and I’m going to use the teleprompter because we keep >> Watch how bad De’s eyes are when he uses a teleprompter. >> Yeah. Don’t do that. Don’t judge my eyes. All right. So, this is going to be tough because it actually moves really fast. I don’t know if I can read this fast. I feel like I’m reading in front of the class. Let’s give it a shot. So, before I get started today, I want to circle back to something Corey said last episode. This idea of building resistant technology because the more crypto evolves, the more I’m convinced that this entire point of the thing, not not faster transactions, not meme coins, not price predictions. It’s about making systems where no single government, corporation, billionaire, exchange validator, whoever can grab all the power and twist the whole thing into their favor. So, and weirdly, the deeper we go into privacy, tools, scaling, wars, blobs, L2s, the more the crypto world looks like the old world that we’re trying to escape. In my opin, that’s my opinion. Uh, so today we’re asking some big questions. Why haven’t we rebuilt the Dow? Is Ethereion trying to be Salana or Zcash? Can banks ever become the good guys again? Why are influencers still out here selling XRP fantasies? I mean, we’re asking some questions. Not all those tied to each other. Uh some of them in and around privacy and scaling and narratives. But let’s get into it, guys. >> Let’s go. Yeah. That was from >> privacy tools, >> huh? >> So, I was just going to say like we we’ve always been saying like privacy tools are going to become relevant to everybody when things get really shitty and they are moving that way >> in many countries in the EU. >> Chat control is doing a thing. >> Yep. >> So, I guess >> price discrimination as well >> according to our script here. Uh it it’s it’s good if we were to try and um rephrase for the new audience here who haven’t listened to previous episodes, go back, listen to them. I go through it deeply. The idea of what resistant technology is, right? >> Um and this is why I care about crypto is because it’s an attempt to make what I call resistant technology. meaning that it’s resistant to people coming into a community and then taking it over um by whatever influence they have. Usually it’s money. It could be just being an Like like the term is a very generic one. It’s in my opinion someone who is willing to do whatever possible to better themselves in a community at the expense of others. So did he. >> Yeah. I mean like and how they do that what they do that is kind of community dependent. Uh you know and the idea of all the technology that we call blockchain and peer-to-peer decentralized networks is usually an attempt to keep people from doing that. Keep people from accumulating power and then asserting unconented influence over the rest of the people. So you either consent to it and which it’s your fault and you can leave or you’re in a system that doesn’t allow you to get do something like that. And so we try to build systems that keep you from doing that because if you can build systems that keep from taking over then whatever evolves over time should be I guess you know better for humans better for society more real >> lightning round. Bitcoin resistant. >> Most resistant. >> Ethereum resistant. >> Yeah. >> On par. >> XRP. >> Kind of kind of resistant. >> No. >> XRP. No. >> Fail. Salana. resistant. >> Better than XRP. Better than most traditional systems. Not as good as Ethereum or Bitcoin. logos resistant. >> It will be >> durability >> built yet. There’s no there’s no >> labs >> project. That’s secret resistant. >> Yeah, it has to be. >> Me and Jess are on the same page here. Like it has to be. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. >> Yeah. >> I wouldn’t be wasting my life doing this if it if it if it wasn’t that. There’s no point. >> Diddy’s probably the exact opposite of resistant to tell you the truth. given for what the evidence said. >> Slippery slope. >> Yep. >> So, that’s Cory’s definition of resistance. Jesse, do you have a definition of resistance? >> Frozen. >> Jesse’s internet actually is >> running these nodes in his basement. Yeah, >> I can’t afford it. >> He’s running He’s running NORAD Junior in his basement. >> We need to get this man >> a new router so we can do some quality control. >> At least it froze frame on a very, you know, photogenic frame. >> It wasn’t him like >> just perpetually agreeing with us. It’s fine. >> Yeah, I know. So, Jesse definitely agrees with Cory’s definition. Um my It’s not that I I don’t disagree with the definition. I don’t think anything different but I do think that the operative word is resistant >> like it’s not it’s not what’s the word like you know when you have a electronic device and it’s resistant or it’s proof you know they waterproof or they make water resistant >> right I think it’s only resistant because you know humans going to human and there’s only a matter of time before finds its way it’s kind of like in Jurassic Park when he’s like see the the the water it’s like life will find a way >> I honestly agree with to you though D like I think it’s it’s it’s it’s really important to try to build tools that remove humans as much as possible because I think humans up everything. >> They we we have a we have a bad track record. >> We have a pretty we have a pretty bad track. >> That’s why resistance like you can’t ever get proof. You can never get proof because um the like is such a broad term and it’s community specific. Like what some what one given community considers as bad behavior, a different community does not. So if you’re going to build technology that serves both of those different communities, you can’t have hard-coded rules into them. You have to give them options to make their own rules and then govern themselves and then give them the right to exit in the event there’s too many in the community because like there’s this is all based on this theory that a buddy of mine uh Tom came up with that I also came up with him so I’m going to take credit for it as well uh and that is and that is uh in every community doesn’t matter there will always be and the larger that community gets the more likely they they start to exist. And you can probably experience this in all of your lives, right? You get a friends group, everything’s going well, friend groups get bigger and bigger and bigger, start including different types of people in them, and then all of a sudden you’re like, “Ah, We haven’t had like why does Gary always ruin it?” And that’s it’s because an right? Like it it happens with every single community. And the bigger it gets, the more they are. And the more ability they have to control that community, the more they’ll assert it. And so you have to try and keep it so Garry’s can’t ruin everything all the time. >> I want to ground it in crypto examples, cryptospecific examples like maybe the the Monero proof of work or not, it wasn’t proof of work, it was the Monero economic attack or you could look at I don’t know what’s another one. >> Could we also say like no offense to any Garry’s in the audience. I’m sure you’re a great guy. >> Yeah, I’ve known some good Garry’s. First name I can come up with that was like generic enough. Are there any other good examples for the audience to understand what we’re talking about? >> Yeah, that’s a good one. >> You got to do that. >> Dows in general. >> Deep research, bro. >> 300 general. >> No, Dows in general. >> Oh, Dows in general. Yeah, Dows in general are a good one. But like it’s it’s elucidated by the Dow hack really really well. M >> um so for those that don’t know in Ethereum um we started this ICO craze back 2017 and so what just alongside of that one of the projects called Slocket decided they wanted to do an ICO but they wanted to do it differently and they wanted to create a what what they called at the time a decentralized autonomous organization DAO. It was basically a fund in which everyone put their money in and then had some commensurate token associated with it. Uh that gave them voting rights to then choose what the treasury got like participated in when it came to funding these ICO projects. And there’s a mechanism in which you could if you didn’t like what was going on, you could basically fork, you could leave. you could take your portion out and create another DAO that was the same clone of the thing but then forked off into a different direction where you can control that portion of the treasury and then from there you could take your money out if that was what you decided to do. So um what happened was uh one person found a bug in the code and kind of did an infinite loop glitch and slowly bled out a good portion of the funds in the Dow. And at that point, because there’s nothing you could do with Ethereum, it was a good portion of all of Ethereum, like all the Ether that was available. Um, and they ruined the whole experiment. And it was a really cool idea. They got ruined by a bug because someone found what’s now called a re-entry bug. And then the entire community of Ethereum decided to hard fork to refund everyone’s money. Now there’s a lot of whole discussion on why they said they could do that and why it was okay compared to something like Bitcoin. Uh but it caused a couple downstream events of like how people treated Dows became very different and the same experiment of Vow never got redone because I think they’re scared of it in some way shape or form. I could probably find someone like Griff. I think Griff bringing Griff on who was the community manager of the Dow to talk about this would be really interesting. >> Do you think he wants to talk about it still or do you think he’s like >> Yeah, he finds it like it’s fascinating. It’s like it’s a piece of culture like a piece of history that really that really altered the course of how cryptocurrencies work and how we come together and form Dows and these things are you know influential to how we manage money as a group. Then he was a part of like real history there. Um but like it’s a good example of like because of this bug the way we built the technology which was meant to be resistant in a way um someone exploited a bug and then ruined the whole experiment al together and now like it’s altered the course of how we do >> shared treasury management and the types of these types of experiments. >> So if we’re revisiting the Dow 10 years later I know you really want to do a deep dive. Um, I didn’t need to say that like that. I apologize. There’s nothing central about it actually. >> I know you wanted to get deep into the DAO, but I mean perhaps we could just like you know do we think that the Dow is trulous or that is making executive level decisions about real business logic. um on the order of you know a major corporation that is just totally automated maybe there’s you know nobody >> you had an experience D why don’t you talk about your experience trying to lead that project within the IF >> oh well my answer would be no but if you would like for me to talk to that experience um what it boiled down to is we attempted to use something called BPMN which is business process management notation uh which is a fancy way. Huh? >> Isn’t it modeling? >> No, I mean it is modeling, but that’s not what BPMN stands for. >> I thought that’s what it was. Okay. >> I thought it was business process management notation. >> Business process model notation. >> Oh, well, I was wrong. So, um, so if you got a business process, right, you got some business logic, you map it out. Um and the specific program that I was also spearheading would be able to as you map it out it creates the um Python for you, right? So you could take it take that process and drop it into another process engine and it should work like clockwork. The only thing is is that business logic and business processes are very subjective. They’re not as objective as one would think. Right? Yes. If you look in a business book, it’s got these rules, right? But when you actually work in businesses, they most normally have these little bypasses or little subtle things that they do that are very different. And getting businesses to work in an ideal form, which is what you find in the textbooks, is rarely ever a reality. So when it came to actually applying these things to automate the business at a grand scale and then being able to copy and paste those processes into a different business, well that just will never work. It barely works in corporations, massive corporations that are global that have, you know, factories and plants around the world. If you go from one plant to another, they’re operating completely differently. >> Right. >> My my experience as somebody who is subjected to the early testing of these processes, what is it? it. Like for instance, when you had to uh fill out reimbursements of invoices that you paid for that were relevant for work, it it took way more time than it should have or than the previous process took. And that was supposedly like a simple process. And if you imagine that process running on Ethereum when it was centralized, like holy that’s going to be worse. I don’t think anyone ever those who think all the stuff should run on a blockchain >> I think are a bit >> naivity >> naive >> when it comes even if you just look at like say let’s let’s take the current implementation of most Dows today which is >> for the most part run on a blockchain when it comes to voting so most dows are effectively a pool of money in which people participate in gathering that it doesn’t really matter where the money comes from it can come from some yield or whatever, it doesn’t matter. There’s a pool of money and how that money gets used is subject to people making proposals and then a vote happening and then ostensibly the people who have a have a stake whoever like participated in that pool of money have some token that represents their weight of their vote. And you can do this in a myriad of ways. So like say say you just do a one to one mapping. I put 10 into this pool of a hundred. That way that means I have 10 tokens and I and my weight is onetenth of the vote. It's like an easy way of looking at like the idea of that type of thing. Your distribute like your weight of vote is equal to how much you've put into the pool. You try to get a bunch of people to do this so that it's a nice equal vote or like like reasonably fair votes. >> Then the is the one with the big pocket. >> Then you have problem. That's why you have things like quadratic voting and stuff like this to try to mitigate >> But that's not the point, right? So the point is that like >> everyone votes on all the things usually but that's not realistic for any type of like organization and what you end up with in a situation like that and that kind of like the old ENS um governance and old getcoin governance things like this were subject to this problem and uh die was also subject to this problem for maker but like everyone voting on all the things becomes a problem because you get like information overload and also So for most decisions in an organization, the idea that everyone gets to vote on it is stupid because not everyone has appropriate information or enough information or appropriate skills to even contribute to a decision in a way that's meaningful. No. >> And so like this naive sit situation where like everyone votes on everything is dumb. >> And so >> that's not how Dows are going to work. It has to work in such a way and that that you're asking the right people for a given decision to v to to weigh in on what should happen and you can you know figure out how you want to do waiting distribution on that type of thing or selecting the right group of people such that you're inclusive but not overwhelming. Like there's like there's a lot of rules in which you can come up with to come up with quote unquote fair >> but the blanket one of everyone vote on everything is stupid. And so that's how most Dows work and they're inefficient and then you end up with like or apathy or something inefficient. >> What I think is that for a business or for-profit business, Dows are not for humans. Dows are for the robots >> maybe. But like I like the idea of having a coming up with fair ways of doing vote distribution because like humans are going to vote. We're all going to have votes. >> I get that. But I think that just because of the fact that we have to vote that breaks down the autonomy over time and also reintroduces centralization over time. And so when you do those two things automatically organization goes out the window. So is there like what's what's the appropriate amount of decentralization? uh for I mean the it's the argument we've been having for like the better half of a decade is like it depends >> well the answer is it's subjective >> like yeah it depends on what you're talking about >> right >> reintroducing centralization may not be a bad thing because like going from everyone voting on everything to the appropriate people voting on the appropriate things is reintroducing centralization >> yes it is >> that's good. >> It is good in my opinion, but like there's always going to be arbiters. Like that's whatever we call it, there's arbiters are a thing for a reason. And so like I don't know. I I just um so to ultimately answer your question, Jesse, given my experience trying to build automated business processes for an organization, um yes, you can automate one organization. It takes a painfully long time and is very difficult, but you can't copy and paste that automation from one organization into another. Um >> that was the the vision of the Dow though, right? to have some sort of pull of funds that does some sort of automated money distribution based on some business processes. And so if you can't even like where do I allocate funds and if someone wanted to exit >> I mean mini dow and then they could choose how they would like to manage that one and like if someone made an exit others could choose to join that exit which then would fork off and make a mini dow. >> Okay. But but like for instance like I I don't know too much about uh how like how Dows work in general. I know I don't really participate in that because I think it's a bit of a LAR. Um like uh Optimism has a Dow, Arbitum has a Dow, all these L2s, they had Dows, they did uh things like uh subsidize costs for ecosystem development. They had a lot of different grants that uh supported public goods in the space which was useful. I think that was a good outcome. >> I mean like like collective management of a fund >> is an interesting idea. H how when it's good that's that's a that's a that's a bunch of different options like some of those things you just mentioned are good. They've done a good job. Um, like Maker Dow is arguably one of the better Dows and successful projects out there. It depends on what you're doing. Like the like the con the Constitution Dow was a failure because it lacked privacy. There's no way it could ever have worked. >> Mhm. >> But like the idea of like collectively managing money >> is a pretty interesting one. And like and then being able to automate a good portion of it and like have different types of voting systems depending upon what you're voting on automatically executing certain types of financial transactions based on a collective vote. Interesting. >> I can think of things to try to do with that. If you if you start small, like there have been pe like experiments that people have ran like on Twitch, like uh playing uh you know, Pokemon Blue on a Game Boy and it's it's it's controlled by chat, right? >> Yeah. They just push down, left, right, and like it just does it. >> Yeah. Right. And then and then you have >> You've had seen emergent properties where like they can do it. It's shitty, but they actually get it done. >> Exactly. It's shitty, but like they can get it done, but >> Yeah. But it's it's not optimal, right? It's suboptimal. And then also when you know some dude gave, you know, Twitch stream for his channel 50K to throw at stocks on Robin Hood and they could in real time adjust positions, that also was a failure. >> Yeah, because they have no stake in it. There's no stake. They have like they don't they don't lose the 50k. >> Well, okay. Regardless, it seems like there's so many different ways for this thing to go wrong and it just seems like the suboptimal way of managing money. Like >> welcome to humans. Like, >> yeah, >> there's so many ways your company can go wrong. And guess how many companies go wrong? Most of them. >> Exactly. Yeah. >> Oh, a little bit more than most. Keep going. >> See what I mean? Like it's not like we're doing an awesome job in the real world playing with like all the all the traditional official in like infrastructure. >> Humans are going to be humans. We're just giving them better tools to like maybe hopefully do a better job. So I think that's what D is saying. He's basically saying because humans and I'm agreeing with D. If you throw humans in the loop, you it up. >> But I mean, why are we making technology? >> Because we got nothing else to do. We bore, man. >> No, because like we want to facilitate human relationships. We're trying to make it better. We're trying to make humans doing human things better. Like at the end of the day, good technology gets out of the way of the humanto human relationship. I have to think about that because I feel like there are counter examples. >> Of course there are. Nuclear bombs is a pretty good one. >> This is a good opportunity to go to the to the argument that we've had countless times over the last, you know, I don't know how many years now we've been together doing this. But um Jesse, you wanted to talk to it was in Discord when we have our we have our own little private channel on Discord. It's a private channel and we talk about stuff and we argue about stuff a lot. Um but this argument was what was it about trying to remember right now? >> Uh the the we were talking about the reasons in which why the tools that we're building like for instance Corey at the IFT and me at durability labs are important. >> Hold up. What was that? You >> what did you just do? I was just saying the the conversation that we were arguing about was about the value of building uh essentially like sovereign infrastructure for people that tries to obiate the need for any centralized provider like for instance social media without you know a Zuckerberg in the middle right that is essentially selling your data and doing all sorts of stuff with it. Uh you could think about you know in the context of like what if does you know they were trying to do endto-end encrypted chat with status uh and then other other privacy projects that they have cooking and we're just arguing that this has value this is worth pursuing and I think your your argument was not was was that what we are trying to accomplish is futile because of the humans in the loop maybe. But either way, I don't think you saw the value in it regardless of whether that was your reasoning. >> Well, I think it was like there's going to be middlemen in between what me and you build and what a consumer actually get experiences. >> Um, and D was arguing because there's a middleman, it doesn't matter because people are just going to centralize it and they won't actually get to use all the options you're giving them. Mhm. >> Um, and I wholeheartedly disagree. Um, and that I'm building like infrastructure is trying to build a thing a bunch of people can build on in a bunch of different ways. And some of those ways aren't going to be very good. They make concessions that we necessarily wouldn't care about. Say for instance if it's a privacy preserving infrastructure people will ignore all that stuff and disclose all the things that were private underneath them thus like removing the privacy guarantee that you get if you build on top of it like or centralize things such that they have full control over the assets. Coinbase is a good example of this. It's a centralizing entity on top of decentralized technology. >> That's good for some things. It helps people on get onboarded. It gives them a lot of control. over those assets and things like that. But at the end of the day, if they want to, they can exit. And that's the main thing, the ability to like opt into things and then exit when it no longer works for you >> or to progressively learn and then take on more responsibility of of the thing you're using. >> Yeah. >> If you can't do that, then you're always going to be subject to the the the tyranny of the centralization. If you can exit with your funds or your vote or your identity or whatever it is, then that platform can't control you. So, they won't try to. And that's important. Maybe a simple version is just like growing your own vegetables to at least not necessarily replace your need to go to the grocery store for vegetables, but at least you know you have some vegetables that you grew. you knew that you didn't use harmful pesticides or whatever, you know, maybe that's a simple way to explain. >> What if we could just test the theories somehow? Like I don't know, like there has to be a way to test these these theoretical um ideas that that that you're building before you go out and build it. Like can will people join a system that they can exit from? Will they even know what that means on a grand scale? they care. Like those are the things that like for me every time you add layers that someone doesn't understand, you're adding an intermediary for them, >> right? Like that just is >> that is the way that it has to be in order for the thing to scale out to the most people, right? You're you're going to add an intermediary for them. So, um, if that intermediary ever gets too powerful, then they just become the arbiters of the thing that's built and they have the control if they control the whole thing. Like you're like you that's that's that's subject to the assumption that the intermediary is ubiquitous across the whole thing. And that's not true. Coinbase does not own all of Bitcoin. I'll give you an example. I was helping manage somebody's crypto, right? Doing a doing a favor. Let's just say a favor with money attached. So, a service. >> No, >> Uncle Sam, you don't know about me. Okay. So, anyways, uh so anyways, I'm doing this, right? They I I they had the private key, right? It wasn't it wasn't great, but I knew what I was dealing with. I was dealing with a level of ignorance that was like insurmountable. So I was like, "Here's your private key. This is access to your wallet. This is everything. Cool, cool, cool." And they were still like, "Cool. I just want you to do everything." And I was like, "Yeah, but I don't have to. You can. You're smart. You got your big boy pants. You do it. This is your stuff." Like, "No, I want you to do it." And I'm like, "Okay, but no, because if something goes wrong, and anything can go wrong, especially now since I've given you the private key, you could give that to somebody else and they could steal your and then I'm culpable. like you, no, I'm not going to do that. And so finally, it just got to a point over the years where I was like, here's all your money back because I don't trust your stupidity. Like, you're putting way too much trust in me to handle this, and you're not even doing an ounce of the very minimum of what it takes to have a hardware wallet. And that person is extremely wealthy and intelligent. So, I'm thinking like, "Oh, there's no hope for this stuff." >> Okay. You're you're you're uh in of one example doesn't take into account the thousands of people that need that type of thing. You're talking about a rich person that doesn't give a >> So, it was a N of 10. >> Okay, great. That's like that's not talking about most of where this technology actually serves people today. It serves a small niche of people willing to do the the minimal amount of effort of I know how hardware wallet walks. I I know how to make a cold wallet. I know how to make a paper wallet. I know how to do these things. They're not difficult. >> Yeah, but like the people you're interacting with are trying to make a buck with extra money. >> 100%. 100%. >> They don't care because they're oppressed >> or their their their government money blows dicks. Why is caring about a thing have to Why do I have to care about that thing for it to be a part of my life? >> Because you need something you don't have. When you're government money can't hold value to anything, you're going to care about putting your value somewhere where it does hold on to some level of stability. >> Or I like to quote my good friend Jesse on this and he said quote unquote get good. So, so >> how can you like how a great something you make a bunch of money >> and you're then then the value drops out of the money you made >> and so you've done nothing. >> Yeah. Like like you you need to you need to not hold your wealth in something that is a depreciating asset. Like for instance, you wouldn't store your wealth in cars, right? Especially cars that lose value. They're not like the exotic, you know, Bugattis, right? Or like that are like one of 10. You You know what I mean, right? You would you would never invest in a I don't know, Maserati, right? And once you drive it off the lot, boom, you lose value. >> What if you had to pay your taxes in Maseratis? >> That would be awful. Exactly. So, you're just looking for a better >> a lot. >> Great. And then the moment you get one, it goes completely depreciated and you can no longer do anything with it. And all that work is worth nothing. >> Yeah. Let's talk. This is good. This reminds me of the old conversations. Think think about this one. They won't release the inflation data and they're allowing you to put twice as much away in all of your government like regulated savings accounts which means how bad was reg how bad was inflation really if they've changed the law so you can put twice as much away in your HSA twice as much away in your 401k twice as much away in everything else. I mean, maybe I mean, I'm no economist. >> If we had like a vehicle to like put our wealth somewhere else, not attached to that type of thing. That'd be that'd be really helpful. >> Yeah, it'd be crazy if there was this thing that could and one of them could buy you a very very high-end Lexus, but I don't know if this is the right show for that kind of conversation. But anyway, um >> I think it was a good rebuttal from Corey. Like you basically said, you have one data point and it's a guy who has money and wants more money and doesn't want to do any amount of leg work to learn how a technology works. It's like buying a nice set of pans because you want, you know, food cooked in a certain pan, but you don't want to cook it yourself. Well, then you didn't you don't really need the pans. Like you could it's it's a really terrible metaphor, but all the time >> I was trying. I was like Honestly, like realistically, people in like African countries, right, their their their fiat is very volatile, right? So, they want to store it in the dollar, >> but they can't get access to dollars. So, the next best thing is like a stable coin, right, for them. So, these guys like they use phone apps. They don't even custody things on like a a really secure way. They have like one phone and it's probably a shitty phone and they have a a hot wallet that is basically storing their entire wealth which is in American terms probably not a lot and they're using USDT most >> it's still better than what they got at home >> and it's still better than what they have. >> That's where my frustrations with this entire technology lie is that story that you just told has been being told for 12 years now. >> 12 years. They've been telling the story. >> They've been I know they've been telling the story. They're using it of >> the small African village, which always has to be African for some reason. There's other broke out there, but there's, you know, >> look, look at El Salvador. Like, look at South America. They love this >> Same thing. >> The exact same thing. >> I'm doing the Stewie head turn on that one. I don't know. >> What do you mean? >> I know people that have been there. Same thing. >> You need to leave the country. So you would like to defend Africans or you're mad people are using Africans as an example because it's bad. >> You need to choose. >> I've talked to these people as well and I'm that I'm not hearing the same things. So I'm just >> Americans are looking at crypto as a as an appreciating asset, right? And it's more of like a pump and dump that they just ride and they throw money at. It's like very gambling oriented. >> I've yet to come across an American ask me about this stuff. If this technology were that great and that empowering and that awesome, then those countries that you speak of that quote unquote love this would have amplified it to a point where it overshadowed all the other countries need for it or >> I have a pretty good rebuttal to this one and that is what we have built isn't good enough because it's not private. It can't provide the properties that it's set out to because it is not private. It can still be censored and the people who use it can still be censored which which is equivalently the same. >> Yeah. But people just use Monero then. >> Stuck around pretty well. >> Yes. Now that the cat's already out of the bag and everybody sees that the cat had a tether on it, >> you can't just release an untethered cat without them being like, "Oh, wait a second. That's too private. That's bad money." >> Yeah, that's going to be a difficult thing to do. But I think it's worth it. Like at this point, crypto has been around long enough and narratives have been around long enough where it will be the flip of a switch for an to say, "Oh, that crazy good private money, that digital money, that money bad, that money for terror." >> And I think that's that's worthwhile. So like you're right. >> You're very much right. They will try to do that. Yep. And this is where we get into building once again resistant technology and like the story of how Bit Torrent came to be is a really good example of this. >> Yeah. >> Uh and the beginning it was Napster >> something before Napster but like what we all remember was basically Napster and the Napster got shut down because it had centralizing aspects to it. It was a business. they just shut the business down. And so the next versions of this came in through like Limeware, Bearshare, Kazah, things like this. And then iterations of those got shut down because they also had some centralization aspects to them. And then in the end through each kind of attack vector that got leveraged and worked which shut down the networks the next iteration the next version of those networks got more resilient because they learned from their previous iterations on this is an attack vector we now have to care about. So let's redesign things such that this can't happen again. So the technology which which we today call Bit Torrent and in some cases Bit Torrent over Tour or Tribler or something like this got more and more resilient to the to the to the attacks that brought it down in the first place such that the Bit Torrent today is still a significant portion of internet traffic and can't be shut down because there's no way to shut it down. There isn't you can't turn it off. It runs over the same tubes that the internet works off of. you turn it off, you turn on the internet, turn the internet off. And there's ways to mitigate it. There's ways to track it. And that's why like the next versions of these things will deal with the problems that Bit Torrent faces today such that you really can't turn it off. Hopefully, the goal from people like us who build these things is that we end up building something so much better that is so resistant that it just replaces the internet. It's a better internet. Now, that's lofty. the the the realistic situation is that it's going to be a mixture of the two a possibility is that it gets shut down alto together but like yeah and that's that's one thing I try to so what's very funny those of you that have watched this last 40 some odd minutes and those of you that are currently watching now is that we are obviously the the the uh you know warm cup of glass kind of crypto uh podcast or crypto. We're not warm warm cup warm cup of glass, warm cup of a drink. You know what I'm trying to say. >> We do not >> hot cocoa. We're hot coco. We're hot cocoa. Okay. Damn. Come on. It's a late It's been a It's been a long day. >> Um but like this is a long journey. If you're getting into crypto and you're the 1% that actually wants to hold on to it and understand about it over a long period of time. Yeah, I know there's the 99% chance that you just want to get rich and that's cool. That can happen. It's not going to happen fast unless you're getting schemy and scammy and real swifty, right? But if you really are interested in this stuff, um, you heard what you heard Dr. Petty just said, right? We're trying to rebuild the internet. Well, I got news for you guys. The internet was like, I don't know, a 60-year project before we got to like AOL. Was it 50 years? When was it? Late 60s, right? internet BBS's homebases both >> DARPA started no DARPA laid the laid the uh fiber lines between the national laboratories in like the what the 80s >> late when did DARPA start connecting connecting separate >> thing was late 60s right the very first >> we've got >> there was something before DARPA right >> connected to another >> yeah Darpet was was one of the many and then there's a effort to connect them together >> so anyways long time before we got AOL like 30 years. 40 years before we got like AOL >> 1969. >> There we go. Late 60s. I remember it was like the same year as like some other important stuff went down in America. >> It was established in 1969, closed in 1990, but they're still using I don't know if they're using parts of that, but there's something that's new that they're using, >> but it was from the '9s. We're talking about nearly 20 years of time before we got the AOL moment which arguably caused a mileep change in how many users were using internet. And then probably before that, how many years of math and physics and network and science went into the algorithms that finally came together, the research that finally came together for that initial moment in 1969 to where one super duper smart dude and another smart dude. Hopefully it was a woman, but we all know it is the 60s. Like, you know, come on, let's >> couple other ones. A couple of other ones were women and they were ballers. >> Yeah. And so like there's what's her name? Madam Cury. She was pretty she was a baller sure >> science baby >> radiation. >> So it took a very long time for that to happen and Bitcoin was just introduced. Now granted it was on the shoulders of lots of you know research and mathematics before that but it just hit the game in like 200 what 10 2009 when Bitcoin start 2009 >> 2009 >> yeah 2008 was the white paper 2009 was the release of the of the client >> right so I you go by that math we're like 10 years away from the AOL moment but early what I'm trying to say is if you're into crypto now, you're early. There's a lot of stuff still being figured out. >> Stay in crypto. It might benefit you. I don't know. >> Benefited us. >> That takes us into our next thing. We wanted to talk about the influencer crypto culture. Let's talk about it. >> Gay. >> Jesse's a crypto influencer. >> We're all influencers. >> Yes, we are. I guess we used to be we make we make infotainment. >> I guess we used to be at some point at some point. >> We're not shillments. >> We never been shilly. We never have ever been like, "Oh, go over here, buy these unicorn pops, then you're going to get rich." But I want to talk about it, right? So, there's some simple rules for identifying when you see about crypto. All right? Simple. If anybody's giving you guaranteed price targets like, "Oh, buy this thing. It's going to be 35 by next November. They’re full of >> Yeah. I can’t think of a situation in which someone can do a accurate price prediction. >> Full of If there’s secret information that they’re like, “Hey, if you join my club, if you click on this link, if you join my email list, you >> Oh, for sure. If you’re buying a token after it’s publicly listed, you’re getting dumped on more often than not.” >> For sure. because you’re essentially funding the team’s project and the team >> can rug you or they are actually in it for the right reasons and they’re >> very few instances >> projects trying new alternative approaches to trying to mitigate that that behavior because like it is this it’s kind of a natural cycle of of startup culture and how you raise money for projects and then make the initial investors whole in some way shape or form. Yeah. >> Um but there have been attempts um of mitigating that startup funding dump cycle and then and then like kind of uh natural price action happens after that initial dump. Uh I don’t can’t name off the top of my head but I have seen some of them. There’s there’s efforts for it. I don’t know what works yet in terms of the crypto the the resistant version of doing that. >> Like not take not taking a bunch of VC money that immediately respects like expects to be made whole is a good start, but like good luck finding groups that do that. >> Yeah, most VCs depending on how sharky they are, they expect turnaround back to their LPS of profit in one to two years and the to like >> that’s insanity. the terms that they negotiate. So like standard standard Silicon Valley culture influenced the way that ICOs were done, meaning that it was usually some sort of one-year cliff where nobody gets access to any liquidity for tokens other than >> just introducing like some sort of uh public ICO event. So you give liquidity to market makers, LPS um and then the team themselves uh don’t actually personally get access to tokens immediately. It’s usually some four or five year vesting period. And you know you could do linear vesting, you could do all sorts of, you know, fun fancy things, but at the end of the day, uh what really matters is that your protocol actually has traction and that traction is dependent upon what kind of protocol you’re building. And more often than not, everybody in crypto uh cannot find real revenue in their protocol. And what ends up happening is you just see that super spike in terms of there’s really no liquidity just for market makers and then you see a token dump long term. There may be little spikes every bull run over multiple bull run cycles that happen, but generally it’s just down to the right for most. >> I’d be interested in looking at like I used to do distribution analysis of v various things to point out like who has who has actual control over price movement within a token. >> Um it was way easier back then. Contracts were easier. There wasn’t as much financial money flowing in and out. Mhm. >> Um >> you’re harder to do, but like looking at a given project and looking at how its price moves relative to where money’s going in, where going out, distribution of the tokens across individual players, all that type of thing would be interesting to do nowadays because like I’m sure it’s so much more complicated and gross than it used to be in terms of like who controls price action because like ostensibly we make tokens because they’re useful towards the network that they operate in. Like Ethereum >> um is a really good example of a utility token. It it it is the thing that fuels the network >> and it’s how you pay for pay for computation >> and >> it’s the thing that also secures the network when it comes to validation and that balance is relatively good I’d say between the two of those things. Uh and so how price action happens from there is differentiated from that utility. And it seems as though it’s less manipulated than some of the other tokens. Maybe because it’s just a bigger pool. It’s harder to manipulate or there’s no point in doing it because there are easier tokens to do it with. I don’t know the answer to that. But like most tokens don’t have like if you look at any memecoin, it literally doesn’t have any utility on purpose by definition. And so the only thing that can move its its value is hype, >> net buying pressure, >> influence, whatever. >> Yeah. It’s like it’s just rallying a group around a meme and then convincing them it’s going to be around or convincing them they’re enough in the in group that the next wave of inroup makes their token go up and they can sell it then or hold on for later if they’re stupid. Like I don’t know like the dynamics of meme tokens doesn’t make sense but it’s by definition doesn’t have utility. That’s how it like skirts the the howy test in terms of being a security. Mhm. >> So there’s price targets, >> secret information, and deflationary lie. Those are the things that I’m deeming easy ways to identify >> What are lies? >> Oh, it’s capped. So it’s deflationary. I win. >> And it’s like it’s not that easy. I know maybe mathematically I guess it might be that easy, but it’s just not that easy at this point in the game, right? deflationary equals price go up. H that’s Litecoin how that’s going. Yeah, price go up, but you got to wait a while, right? So, you need to be careful, right? So, I guess to flip that conversation on its head, what does real crypto literacy look like? Because we’re not going to be the only people that talk that good There’s lots of people out there talking that good What does real crypto literacy look like? Is it just the opposite of those things? They’re not giving price targets. There’s no secret information. They’re fully transparent. Anytime they know something, you know something. Then they’re not pitching you economic >> What do you mean by crypto literacy? >> How do you make good decisions? >> How do you know a person that you’re listen if? So, we’ve had like 80 people come in and out of here right now listening to us for various amounts of times. I’m going to make the assumption a lot of them are noobs to crypto. Just making that assumption. I don’t know that for sure. I’m going to make that assumption. How would they know to listen to us or listen to somebody like Bit Boy who’s like, “Oh, buy these kangaroo coins, baby. To the moon.” >> Yeah, but that’s what grabs people’s attention. Like, I literally followed an ex account today. >> We screwed. Are we just too old? We screwed now. We can’t get >> You asked me to define literacy. So, what So that’s what I mean by literacy. That’s not illiteracy. That’s illiterate. So let’s if we were defining literacy it’s someone who when they talk you know that they know what they’re talking about when it comes >> they’re not making promises they’re giving you education so that you can make a good decision >> and and the the the seedy thing here the insidious thing here is that when you listen to some of these influencers they use the words of education while trying to make promises. uh they’ll like they’re like I’m going to give you we’re going to go deep in the weeds. I’m going to give you inside knowledge of how this stuff works so that you can make the best decision for yourself and buy this token because it’s going to the moon. Like like they they they use the language of education while trying to provide guarantees about something as if like you’re you’re getting them in on the inside. like now you know versus what everyone else knows because you listen to me versus real education. And and if you if you if you talk to somebody who’s actively looking at the ways it can go wrong, how it can be broken, the like nuance and is trying to like actively look at the risk of something and and balance it, then you’re going to be better off than someone who never really spends that much time on how things can go wrong and how this could be a good decision under certain circumstances, but there’s still risk. It’s like everything in crypto is ultra risky. >> Yeah. >> The question on it. >> Let me let me ask you this, D. Who is the most crypto literate? >> Oh, uh, damn. What’s his name? I forgot his name. Um, Jameson Lob. >> He’s up there. >> No, he’s the tippy top. him and uh him and uh what’s >> Bitcoin? Yeah. >> Receding hair. Who’s receding hair? >> Andreas Antonopos. >> Andreas Antonopoulos. Those two are at the top. >> I think I think Jameson is is limited in the scope of the things he understands. He’s so dedicated to Bitcoin that he’s lost understanding of a lot of the things that exist and so he ignores it. >> His dedication to Bitcoin would allow him to very fluidly be literate in other cryptog though, >> but he refuses to do it. doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be literate. He >> But he is illiterate. You’re illiterate. Somebody studied their life. If somebody it’s like your intelligent person that you were helping out who’s wealthy, they are capable but they are not going to do it. Like honestly like my dad is a good example of this. He has enough money. He doesn’t care about money. So whenever he hears about crypto making people money, he doesn’t care. >> He’s not looking for money. But if I tell him privacy, your privacy is getting intruded upon. Like he he shared a video with me today about travel policies changing for travel to Europe in 2026. He’s concerned about privacy. Now, guess what? Crypto can potentially help with privacy. So, people who are capable of learning a thing will seek the thing when they absolutely need it. Yeah, that’s just the that’s the weird thing about >> some of this stuff, right? It’s like >> it benefits the early worm or case some cases like people care about privacy after their privacy has been trampled on >> and or like security. People care about securing themselves after they’ve been breached, >> right? >> And that’s a really hard thing to deal with because >> more often than not >> that’s too late. Um, >> yep. >> And getting back to square like you’re so much better off. I mean, this is the same we can we can generalize this argument to something that applies to most people and that >> data data being breached. >> No, I mean I mean more generally like spending time on delayed gratification is not something we humans are very good at. >> Oh, good. Yeah. Okay. You want to do that when Okay, fine. Sure. >> Well, like that’s the general term for all of this, right? People with the thing right now. I’ll I’ll deal I’ll deal with figuring out later, but they never do because, >> right, >> it’s hard. It takes time. >> Mhm. >> Until you have to. But right, >> my my point is that >> it’s if if when you have to, it’s not there, you’re >> Like, if there’s no way for you to figure it out or do anything about it or course correct and make it better, then you’re So, >> but you know, I had this conversation in a different context. It’s literacy rates. Uh 50 54% of Americans read at a sixth grade or below reading level. And like one in five Americans can’t even read or write. >> That’s not really that true. >> It’s very true. >> I hope that’s not true. >> What do you mean can’t read or write? Like one in five >> like one in five don’t have a literacy level that is competent enough to participate in society modern society. >> If I were to like hey read this page in a book they couldn’t do it. >> They would struggle to ingest the information and subsequently make any sort of inferences on top of that or introspect about the information at all. 79% read >> 79% of people in America can read >> I’m talking about the people that can’t read D >> 21 people who get asvab below 76 at what level right can read can’t read are two very different things the gun the right way digest anything above a certain grade level >> yeah that’s >> 54% of adults have literacy rates sixth grade and below >> sixth grade and below 54%. >> And so this is what this is what I’ve been trying >> reading level >> to you guys for the longest time that we guys can’t say on air because we’ve been recording for an hour. We need to wrap this up. I’ll say it right after air though. But I’m going to leave that in the air because we might say it on air sometime. You never know. But you got to tune in on the next episode. So anyways, um there’s some things we didn’t get to talk to, but we’re going to just continue this conversation. This this stream of consciousness conversation we’ll have for the next 400. Hm. >> Did you corroborate that the the percentage? >> No, I’m looking at what a sixth grade reading level is. I’m curious about like what >> you should just Google how many people are illiterate considered low literacy or illiterate. That’s it’s 21%. >> Hey guys, we got wrap this up. >> So, you guys can both show your projects respectively. Go. >> Oh, I’ll show it when it’s ready. >> I mean, you can jo you can join Logos now. Go to logos.co. Go learn about privacy. Why? >> You go to fergle.com and you’ll see an unfinished website, but one of those services and goods is finished. So, hit me up if you want it >> for Jesse. He’s He said, “Hey, you don’t want to release it till it’s perfect.” >> Shadow. >> Oh, >> shadow jacking hard. >> Okay. Pilot.sto. Go there. >> I’m going >> figure out the password. If you’re not a you’ll figure it out. >> We got this one. >> What? >> Pilot. Archavist.sto. >> Archivist or archavist. >> Archavist. >> You like that? >> It’s I like archivist. >> You can say it however you want. AI says archivist. >> Enter your access code. All right. >> Pilot.sto. That’s my man Jesse’s project down there. Oh, wait. For you guys on vertical, I got to do this >> password container. >> Go. You can figure it out. >> I’ll find it. >> All right. >> It’s client side. It’s not server side. >> Uh we’re going to do a shout out to old uh long neck waca. We see you, boo, as always. Shout out to my wife. I have to do that to counteract the karma. And uh shout out to Ahmad. Mhm. Miss you guys >> and congratulations to Jesse who had a big thing happen in his life and we’re going to wrap it with that cuz I don’t like docs in my man. It could be whatever you think it is audience. Use your imagination. >> All right. Play the outro station.