a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: From the Internet's Past to the Future of Crypto

Episode Date: August 29, 2019

What can we learn from the history of the internet for the future of crypto? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, general partner Katie Haun interviews a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen -- and co-founder of Netscape, which helped popularize and mainstream the internet for many -- and who also penned "Why Software is Eating the World" (in the Wall Street Journal in 2011) and "Why Bitcoin Matters" (in the New York Times in 2014). This episode is based on a fireside chat between Katie and Marc at our inaugural Crypto Regulatory Summit, which brings together leading crypto experts and builders, other technologists, academics, industry executives, and government officials -- along with forward-thinking regulators -- to foster collaboration and the exchange of ideas around this important emerging industry. Why is crypto an important evolution (or revolution) of the internet? What can entrepreneurs, corporations, and policymakers learn from the beginnings of the browser, e-commerce, and other examples about how emerging technologies move forward?

Hello, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. This episode is based on a fireside chat between Katie Hahn, Crypto General Partner, and Mark Andresen, co-founder of the firm, during our recent inaugural Crypto-regulatory Summit. Katie asked Mark to trace some of the possible parallels between the early days of the Internet and the current state of crypto, including how the browser went mainstream and its initial usability gaps, the impact of regulators and policymakers in the early days, the beginnings of commerce, and the story of the world's first online bookstore, hint, it's not named Amazon,

and the original sin, as Mark calls it, of the Internet, and how crypto could revisit that original sin and help create new economic models to drive the Internet and the broader economy forward. Mark, you had a front row seat when the Internet was kind of being developed, right? At least for consumers. How did the Internet go from being this kind of weird thing

that academics used, and by the way, the government, to a mainstream growth engine for the economy. Yeah, so to start with, I should say, to clarify, it wasn't actually a front row seat. It was the little kid's seat. It was the booster seat. You still use regular shoulder shop in the back of the internet van at the time.

I was very young. So the evolution of the internet over time has so many echoes and comparisons to what we're seeing, what I'm seeing now with cryptocurrency and blockchain. It's really quite remarkable. And so, you know, maybe the best way to think about that is kind of by actually telling the story

about how the internet actually. first became useful as a commercial medium. Yeah, that'd be great. And by the way, for those who don't know, I'm sure many know, but Mark, you co-founded Netscape and brought the first kind of internet browser to mainstream. And then even before that, a team of us at the University of Illinois created Mosaic, which was kind of the prototype for what became Netscape. And so that was in 1993. And it actually turned out in 1993 was the pivotal year. And so the internet has a very interesting backstory. So first of all, you know, the origins of the internet kind of go back even decades

before the 90s, you know, they go back to the 50s or 60s. And so there was academic research happening over multiple decades of the form of basically how to develop a decentralized network. And right, actually, decentralization was actually key to the internet early on because the original motivation for it was to have a network that could actually survive a nuclear attack. So it was sort of, it was born out of the present dangers of the Cold War. And there's this revolutionary concept. You'd have this decentralized network with no central hub. At the time, there were data networks, but all data networks ran through centralized switches run by companies like AT&T. And true to form, the senior executives and many of the top

scientists at AT&T always maintained the internet was impossible, right? It could never exist, it could never happen, it could never work, it could never scale, it could never be secure. So there's one parallel right there. Well, there's a parallel right now we could talk more about, but it did actually start to emerge, and then it started to go mainstream in academic circles, in particular in the 1980s,

and it was actually at the time funded by the National Science Foundation, so it was called the NSFNet was like the precursor to the modern internet. The thing that people forget today, because everybody now, today, you shop online and you do all the stuff online, buy airplane tickets, and all seem so natural. It was actually illegal to use the for commercial activity or commercial transactions until 1993.

And I want to stop you there, because I remember when you told me that, I thought, what? I've never heard that. It was illegal to use the internet for commercial transactions until 1993. Yeah, so it's a different circumstance. So the illegality or sort of prohibition, let's say, I don't know if they could have sent you to jail, but they definitely could kick you off the network, which is kind of the same thing, at least in modern life. So it was funded by the government, and it's funded by the taxpayer. And so the government got to set the policy. And the policy was called the acceptable use policy or AUP, it's on Wikipedia.

You can pull this up, and it's basically the acceptable use policy is you can use the internet for academic, non-profit, individual use. If you can figure out a way to connect to it, you're free to kind of play and explore and kind of do experimental things, but you specifically can't engage in commercial activity and commercial transactions. And so as an example,

companies were actually connecting to the internet prior to 1993, like a lot of defense contractors were on early, and a lot of tech companies were on early, but they literally technically could not sell something to somebody. And it was literally, it's just, taxpayer money. And so then there was this kind of turning point moment in around 92, 93, 94 that I was kind of sitting in the middle of at the time, which is sort of internet traffic was starting to really kind of take off. People kind of decided they

like this thing. And then there was sort of growing latent demand for actual commercial activity. But the government was kind of holding a firm. And then basically what happened was a set of, I would say, enlightened regulators and policymakers, you know, decided basically two things at the same time. Number one is they decided to legalize, basically revise the EUP to legalize commercial activity, but in parallel, they decided to hand off the internet backbone to the telecom companies to, at the time, AT&T Sprint and MCI. And then that solved the economic problem, right, which is we'll get companies to pay for this so it doesn't have to be the government.

But it was a very, I would say, it's a very enlightened and forward-thinking move to make this change because it wasn't consistent with internet culture at the time. It wasn't consistent with how this thing had gotten funded. It wasn't consistent with any of the governance mechanisms. But there were a set of people in Washington who said, you know, this would be a good idea for internet to exist, be a good idea for it to engage in commercial like, And in fact, you know, in crazy upside scenarios, it might be a driver of economic growth. And for those of you who are, you know, older like me, you'll remember like 1989 to 1993

in the U.S. was a severe recession, right? And it was like grim economic times. It's kind of gotten forgotten a little bit because it happened a while ago. But like it was pretty dark and pretty bad. And it turned out, I think you can trace a direct line to the economic boom of 1994 to 2000 from basically legalizing commercial use of the Internet. I just heard you call the regulators enlightened, enlightened regulators. you know. My friend Al Gore, you know, gets a tremendous amount of teasing for having claimed to invent the internet.

I will defend Al Gore's honor. Al Gore never said he invented the internet. He said he helped to create the internet. And that actually is true. He didn't write the code. But what he did do was he set many of the original policies for the funding of the NSF net, which led to the creation of the internet. And then he was involved in this process of basically privatization and having it become an engine for economic growth. And so he was integral and a whole bunch of other people in Washington as well on both sides of the aisle. But he was in the middle of that whole thing. And that AUP changed then in 1993. So in 1993, the policy change and now it was legal to do commercial activity online

and so people started to have all these really crazy, wacky ideas like, you know, what if you could buy things online? And there was immediate backlash, right, response basically was, okay, it's not legal, but it will still never work because it's not secure, right? And so that won't possibly work. And then the other thing, of course, that was immediately obvious

was it'll never work because big companies aren't hooked up to it yet. And so, right, it's all going to be these fly-by-night operations. And so that's another parallel that you're seeing in the crypto space? Yeah, so one of the things you talked about with crypto today is it's like, okay, it's like sort of where are the use cases? Yeah, I understand that there are these potential use cases. And yeah, there are specific examples of these use cases today, but like,

where's the Amazon.com of crypto, right? Or where's the Google of crypto. And it's like, okay, well, let's think about actually where Amazon.com came from. This is another kind of great analogy. So the first internet store was a bookstore. It was not Amazon. It was a cult, little tiny science fiction and fantasy bookstore on El Camino Real in Palo Alto called Future Fantasy Books. And it was kind of this legend. And if you like, if you like, if you like, science fiction at the time. It was like the place in the Bay Area you'd go to buy to science fiction books. And he was run by a guy had been running the store for whatever, 30 years in the same location. And it was just like a store. And so actually another friend of

mine, a guy named Brian Reed, I believe is his name, at a research lab in Palo Alto, unconnected to this bookstore as a company called Deck at the time. And he was in the research department. He said, boy, you know, I really like this bookstore. It might be fun to be able to buy science fiction books over the internet, right? This was a new idea at the time. So he went to the owner of this store, this is in 93. He went to the owner of the store right does this policy change happen? And he said, you know, let's put your inventory. You got all these books.

Let's put your inventory online so that anybody in the world can buy books from you on the internet. And, you know, the guy's first question was like, what's online? Right, because, like, that's just like a weird and unusual concept. And so then Brian explained, you know, my friend explained, like, okay, here's what this means. And then the guy's like, okay, that sounds great. I would love to get orders from all over the world.

I don't own a computer. And so Brian said, not a problem. I work for a big computer company. He's like, you know, if you don't have a computer, what do you have? And the guy's like, well, I have a fax machine. So my friend basically set up in the research lab in Palo Alto he set up the online web store

the site for the bookstore and then you would order a book on the website and then my friend set up a fax gateway so the order would get sent to the store in a fax and then the guy in the store would package up the book and sell it in the first two weeks of that store going on the internet that guy's business doubled and you know it's a small

absolute numbers but a huge relative boost and guess what it turned out it turned out there were like science fiction readers all over the world in particular Germany and Japan that couldn't get a lot of the English books in their domestic markets, and so they immediately started to do mail order. I hope he then got a computer. He did buy a computer, unfortunately, then Amazon came along, and he went under. It's not a totally happy story.

But, however, the whole phenomenon worked, and that actually, you know, that and sort of people who are experimenting like that kind of paved the way for what became e-commerce. But I hope that gives you a sense, like, of how, like, it was not obvious. It was not obvious that these things, it was going to make sense to these online businesses. It was not obvious that the use cases were going to have consumer demand. it was not obvious that you were going to be able to secure it. It was not obvious that there'd ever be a business model behind it. All that actually had to get invented. Well, you just mentioned secure it, and I think that's an important point.

So the government, with the help of the enlightened regulators, turns this thing over kind of to the private sector, right? This internet thing. And then you have SSL. And then for those who don't know in the audience what SSL is, it's basically very strong encryption. Did the government then kind of discourage SSL? Yes.

Tell us about that. Yeah. So then they turned around and tried to back. that. You did have a front row seat there. We did have a front receipt for this, yes. So we drove encryption into kind of public use, really, for the first time in volume at Nescape. So basically what happened. So now the internet's available for commercially used. Consumers are starting to log on. The whole thing's starting to work. But then the whole problem was, okay, all the connections were unsecured. So it's just plain text data, right,

traveling back and forth over the network, including passwords and credit card numbers and everything else. And so, right, the immediate logical conclusion is this is an unsafe place to do business. No consumer, you know, the newspapers at the time were just filled with stories, consumer guidance stories basically saying, whatever you do, never, ever, ever put your credit card number on the internet, right? Because it will instantly get stolen by hackers and your entire net worth will be wiped out. Now, that wasn't technically true, but that was the level of fear and anxiety. And, you know, true enough, like, it wasn't encrypted, so it was a bad thing. And so we did what we thought was the logical thing, which was we built SSL basically

is the secure protocol to be able to have, you know, a client and a server connect to each other, a web browser and a web server connect, and be able to exchange information securely without hackers being able to penetrate. What did the government say about that? Well, we thought this was a really good idea. brought it to market, we were about ready to launch it. And then we discovered a regulatory regime that we were previously unaware of called ITAR, which some of you may know about. It's like international trade and arms and something, something, something, bad stuff.

And so it's the regulatory structure, I don't know if it's still current, but at least the time it regulated tomahawk missiles, right, and like napalm and all kinds of fun things. Export controls. Export controls. And so it basically governed what U.S. weapons manufacturers effectively could export overseas. By the way, which, fair enough. I'm in favor of regulating Tomahawk missiles.

It turned out, encryption was on that list. Strong encryption was on that list. And so the basic deal was, at the time in the U.S., you were allowed to, we could build strong encryption into the browser. Strong encryption being encryption that was either hard or impossible, depending on your point of view to break. There's a big debate about hard versus impossible, but fundamentally difficult to break.

And therefore, safe for consumer use, let's say. So we were allowed to do that in the U.S., but we were not allowed to export it. And so that led to this very lovely compromise we came up with, which is there were two versions, an escape navigator, and it was the same product, but there were two different boxes. The sticker on one box said,

strong encryption, sticker in the other box, said, weak encryption, which is true. So the expert... What's sold better? What's that? What's sold better? Yeah, it was funny, funny, the market demand would line up maybe the way that you think it would. And so, yeah, right, here's the soft drink that taste terrible, right?

Let's see if people want to drink that. So we were allowed to sell the browser overseas, but it was deliberately weak, and now we were, and by the way, by weak, I mean, like, it was trivial, it was weak. We had to degrade the encryption to the point where basically anybody could crack it, anybody with a computer and any level of software skills would be able to crack the encryption. so basically useless. The good news is all the other American companies were under the same restrictions we were,

so it's not like any of our American competitors kind of outfox us by launching globally. The problem was, I've heard rumors, America's not the only country in the world, and so it turns out they're a bunch of other countries, and it turns out they have sharp software people also. And so then we immediately started to see this kind of cascade of international competitors.

It's the most obvious way to compete with American software companies will do the thing that they literally are not legally allowed to do. So then it became a rush of foreign competition. Well, speaking of parallels between crypto and the internet, one of the things that I hear a lot, I know you hear this too, is, well, crypto is so hard to use. Like, mainstream consumers can't possibly figure this out. It's all janky.

But I know you've talked to me about it, and I'd love to hear your take on just how easy was it to get on the internet in the early days. Yeah, super easy. You just pressed a button. No, that's not true at all. So I'm a consumer. I'm just a normal consumer,

and let's say I'm totally comfortable with computers. And so I know how to use computers. on a computer. I'm perfectly happy with computers. And it's 1992, 1993, and I read about this internet thing, I want to go on the internet. So I go to my computer, and I look for the internet button. There's no internet button. None of the computers in 1992, 1993, the consumers had

had any internet awareness at all. They didn't have the software for access to the internet. They didn't have any of that stuff. And so basically what you would do is, this was literally true. What you would do is, if you knew to do this, you would go to a bookstore, which is, they used to have these physical places where you buy books.

And you would buy a book, and the book would be how to use the internet. And there was a point when it seemed like all the bookstores were just going to be taken over by literally just internet books because this was how you got online. So you'd bring the book home and you'd read the book and tell you all this great things about the internet. And then there would be a floppy disk,

if you remember those, in the back of the book. And the floppy disk had the software that you had to load on your PC in order to get on the internet. If you're technical in the room is the TCPIP stack and like all the other kind of networking code was on that disk. And so you then had to go through a 38-step process if you took you through this in the book, of sticking the floppy.

You basically had to rebuild, essentially rebuild your operating system on the fly as an end user to add the internet support. It's very complicated process. By the way, you need to be very careful doing this because if you made a mistake, you would probably break your computer forever. It would probably totally stop working because you were mucking around in the operating system. And so you wanted to be very careful kind of through that part. So then you get all the way to the end of that process. You're like, great, I'm ready to go on the internet. And then it's sort of step 38, you know, at the end, okay, congratulations.

Now you're ready to go buy a modem. Right. And so then you're like, okay, so what's a modem? All right. And so then it's like, okay, now I have to go find a computer. store. And I have to pay whatever, 300 bucks to buy a modem, which used to be the thing that connected the computer to the network. And then you bring that home, you had to plug the modem into the computer, and then you had to configure the computer and the modem to actually work with

each other. And that was like another 38-step process that you had to do very carefully. And it was another process you didn't want to screw up because you were mucking around in your operating system. So then you get all the way through that and say, okay, got a modem. We're ready to go on the internet. And then I would say, now you need to sign up for an ISP. And then that began the process. What's an ISP? Internet service provider. You know, that's, okay, that's who your modem is going to call to go on the internet, right? And so then that began the process of like, okay, what's an ISP, who's an ISP? And these were in the days, you know, this are the days where most people who were using networks at home were using AOL, right, which was sort of a proprietary

version of all this, but it was not a full ISP at the time. So you'd have to go track down. Literally, a lot of these little local ISPs, these little local neighborhood companies, almost like the old neighborhood cable company, remember those days. So then you'd have to like call the ISP. Remember, you're not on the internet, so you can't like search for the ISP on the internet. So you've got to go in the yellow pages. You find your local ISP. you call their phone number and you sign up and you send them your, you tell them your credit card number, and they give you the code. And so basically, you know, this is like four weeks later, right? Yeah. That you're going through all this. And then, of course, hit dial,

then you get the busy signal. That's how straightforward it was. And so, so, and there was a good to be. Makes crypto seem easy. It does. It does. Crypto is easier. Now, I would say the good news is it, in the early days of the internet, you could argue, like, it applied a high bar to the people who got on the internet. Like, you had to really want to use this thing. And so, you know, the people who were on the internet early on were like incredibly enthusiastic and like just absolutely thrilled to be there because you know it was like joining the Marine Corps like it was effort right and so you know that was the goodness the bad news is it was obvious I mean this was just this was absurd like this was just absolutely patently absurd and so then a whole

series you know there were then several years of work by us and others to kind of streamline this thing to the point where you all have today on your views just come well thank you because I thank you for letting me just develop products that I can now push a button but you did talk about with the internet now get on the internet easily but what I've called something before. I think I've heard you call it the original sin. Yes. Of the internet. What is that? Okay. So then you go okay, so then you go on the internet and then you see

something that you might want to buy or pay for. Like let's say hypothetically that you wanted to have like an online newspaper or something and let's say hypothetically you wanted to like read an article in that paper and you know maybe you wanted to have an economic relationship where you were like paying for the information you're getting because then you know there's like alignment of interest between the person writing information and what you're reading. So you might think there, a logical thing to do might be

there must have been a button in the browser that was like a buy button. right it's like you actually kind of have you finally kind of have this in the form of like the apple app store with like the you know the one click buy and then the um amazon the end up payments or one click by on amazon but like one would think like it was the most obvious thing to do would be building the browser like the ability to actually spend money right and so you'll basically notice like that didn't happen and in a lot of ways it's like we don't even think it's unusual that that didn't happen because maybe that shouldn't have happened but if you think about it the reason i call it the original sin and i'll explain why but because we were unable to build

payments into the browser. And I just like flat out say, we're unable to do it at the time. I want to hear why. Yeah, well, I'll explain why. But as a consequence of being unable to do it, that is why the internet today, at least in the West and in the U.S., is predominantly based on advertising. Right? And so, and by the way, kind of downstream from advertising is kind of everything else that people are like anxious and worked up about online, right? All this stuff for privacy, user data collection, user data targeting, all these third-party ad networks that collect all this, harvest all this data, the data brokers. And then the kind

of the misalignment of incentives, you know, is the news site that you're reading, do they have the incentive to actually tell you the truth, or are they actually getting their money from the advertiser? And so they're just trying to get you all hyped up on something so that you'll click on more stories so they can generate more ad revenue. And so I think the original sin was we couldn't actually build economics, which is to say money to the core of the internet. And so therefore advertising became the primary business model. Did you try to build? We tried very hard to build payments into the browser. It was not possible. Why? Well, we made a huge mistake. We tried to work with the banks, and we tried to work with the credit card companies. Let me start by saying those

organizations have come a long way. And so I'm not talking about the banks and the credit card companies today. I'm talking about them in 1993. And so we went to, actually, it's funny, so we got embroiled early on in this kind of big fight with Microsoft. And so we ended up aligned with MasterCard. The basic thing was to get into the credit card switch to be able to do transactions, particularly micro transactions, like small transactions. So we allied with MasterCard, Microsoft allied with Visa. And I bring up the Microsoft part because it's not, because you might say, okay, Mark, like you try to do this, but like you and Netscape's a little company and maybe you guys just screwed it up. And it's like, well, Microsoft and Bill Gates also couldn't make it work

with Visa. So both of us ended up frustrating by the same thing. And so, you know, then we went, so we approached the credit card companies. We sat down with our first meeting with MasterCard in 1994. You know, they said they wanted to work with us to put money in the browser. So they said, well, who at MasterCard should we meet with? And they said, we've got this guy, and I've long since forgotten his name. We've got this guy, Joe, who's like our technology visionary. And so he's the guy. If anybody in an organization is going to understand this stuff, it's going to be Joe. and so we had Joe over to our office and sat down on Joe and sat Joe, we're going to demo, he hasn't seen any of this,

so we sat Joe down in front of a PC hooked up to the internet with the browser, and we kind of said, okay, and I kind of just said, okay, here's the browser, I said, okay, click on, click on, you know, click on this link, right? And so, you know, he does the logical thing, he takes his finger, presses it on the screen, completely ignoring the mouse, sitting on the side of the thing, and I was like, no, no, use the mouse, right? And he's like, and I was like, okay, it's 1994, it's nine years since Apple invented the Macintosh. He has never seen a mouse.

But he was the visionary. He was the technology visionary at MasterCard. And I was like, oh, God, we're just completely hosed. Like, there's just no way on Earth. And so you were host. You didn't get it both in. We were completely host. And so we went through the entire thing, and he stared at us like, you know, we had three eyes. Microsoft went through the same thing with Visa at the time.

Like, it was just a completely incomprehensible concept. And then the banks could not have been less interested. And so basically it was, you know, it was sort of the classic kind of single point of failure, bottleneck, or at least in this case, two points of failure. Visa MasterCard essentially had a duopoly at the time. And so they were just literally, you know, they just, if they did not want you to be in the switch, they did not want you to be able to do transactions, you just simply weren't going to do it. If you had had crypto then, how would that have changed the calculus?

Yeah, so this is the what if. And so, you know, so the modern, what we're all here to talk about today, like modern Bitcoin blockchain, you know, sort of a new sense, effectively since 2009. So, you know, we were kind of, what, 15, 20 years too early. If we had had had it, we would have been able to have a parallel transaction system, like completely parallel transaction system that would not have been reliant on the centralized gatekeepers, right? And so hypothetically, it would not have mattered.

you know, if Easter MasterCard had wanted to cooperate this at the time, that would have been great, we would have done it. But had they not, we still would have had a route to actually be able to build a transaction network that wasn't dependent on them. And so that to me is the great what-if. And had we done that, the internet today, like I was just like, I don't know, 80% of the things that people hate about the internet today would not be problems. And then the other kind of what-if, and this is a big part of why we're excited

about crypto and blockchain now. The other part of the what-if is it's like, okay, what if you could actually align economics, right, with user behavior and with company behavior? Like, what if you could actually have, I mean, it's kind of the way the real world works. the real world works is, how do I know that something is valuable? If somebody's willing to pay for it? Well, how valuable is it?

Well, how much are they willing to pay for it? And then by the way, any individual provider of any product or service, if they're not doing a good enough job, somebody else offers it, and then the consumer votes with their wallet, and they go buy from somebody else. And so you have market discipline on all the players. And so the big what-if is, like, what business models could have existed this entire time, right?

What drivers of economic? Because, look, the Internet generated a lot of economic growth just with the advertising model, right? And so, like, what if you had had kind of the turbocharge of a real economic model? based on money, kind of integrated into the thing from the very beginning. What kinds of services would entrepreneurs have come up with that we haven't even thought of yet?

Or what might they come up with still? It might what it's come with now. And so one of the reasons why we're so excited about crypto and blockchain is it's basically, it's the first chance I've seen. It's the chance to kind of revisit the original sin. And, you know, it's different now because it's like, you know, the Internet cat's out of the bag and, like, you know, browsers are proliferated, and it's a different game now. So it's much more already fixed and established.

On the other hand, it's at, you know, huge scale. And so you don't need that many people experimenting with something to get critical mass on a new thing these days. And so this is a chance to kind of re-examine that original sin and kind of envision, you know, for the first time, in a long time, be able to say, okay, what if we could build a different kind of system, you know, for example, a system in which, for example, advertising was not the central model and how might that be an improvement, either an improvement on what we have or just something completely different and, you know, better and potentially, you know, much bigger than what we have today. And so I think, I think that, and you know,

this is, and as we see every day, this is the wave of entrepreneurship that we're seeing now at our firm, which is entrepreneurs kind of thinking in these terms. Absolutely. Well, where are we in this crypto journey? I mean, Having seen a technology, like the internet go from something technical and obscure to now a technology used by billions of people, where do you think we are in the crypto journey? So my personal view, so it's like, you know, what are the possible points? It's like, okay, it's like the possible points are like, I don't know, 1965 or something, and Vince-Surf and Bob Conner coming up with the original idea for TCPIP.

It's like 1989 when it's present on university campuses, but like no normal person would use the stuff. 1992, and it's like a fringe activity, but it's not quite mainstream yet, and it's still kind of too hard to use. And then kind of 1994, where it kind of goes mainstream. I mean, it feels to me it's sort of 1992, like 1992, 1993, somewhere in there. Like, it clearly, like, the usability gap still has a ways to close, although it's getting closer. You know, the use cases, they now, you know, several big use cases exist. They have to be kind of more productized and provided to more people, but like, it's starting to feel really, really close. And by close, I mean, really, really close to, like, mainstream, the kind of knee and the curve. By the way,

It's also worth saying, like, it was not, I think I made the point in kind of macroways, but I make the larger macroways, I'll make the larger macro point. It was not clear in 1994 the internet was going to hit the knee in the curve. Like, that was not, if you just, like, read the press coverage

of the internet in 20194, it was like, this thing is a joke, it's a toy, it's not serious. Okay, at least it didn't have a real-time price feed, like crypto. That is true, yeah. We did not have a real-time, we didn't have a real-time price.

That would have been extremely depressing. Yeah. Well, is that a feature or a bug? It's both. It's a feature just in the sense of, like it just shows the fact you can get, you know, the system is kind of alive and running, which was, the internet was kind of an open question that a lot of people didn't think the thing was even going to last. And so it's sort of a marker of like, let's say existence.

Like it's a pulse. So it's good to have a pulse. It's bad because you see this in the stock market right all the time, which is just, there's actually, this is a long established theory in behavioral finance with stock prices, which is the more often you can measure something's price, the more manic, depressive, the behavior comes around that price. And so there's actually, you know, there are markets in which transactions happen, you know, venture capital is like this. Transactions happen every year or two or three. And so there's only price kind of measures. There's only kind of core samples of price every year or two or three. And so, you know, 365 days out of the year, nobody's paying attention to the price, nobody's talking about it.

It doesn't matter. You're just working on the underlying thing. You know, once you go public, it's this radical change where now the stock, you know, if you want, you can now see a real-time stock ticker, you know, you can see the price every five seconds. And you can get all excited when it goes up and you get all depression and it goes down. And so you definitely have this psychological manic depressive overlay that we didn't have. Yeah, absolutely. We have time for one more question. I think I'm just under the wire.

And that's a question, I think, with all the regulators here in the room and also all the crypto builders in the room, are you, and I know you're very bullish on Silicon Valley and keeping companies here, are you optimistic that the U.S. can be a center for emerging financial technologies like crypto, given the regulatory environment here? Yeah, so I think this is quite, this is very analogous to the internet,

because this could have gone the other way. Like, had the AUP not been updated by the, by the, the government 93, you know, we could have definitely strangled. We had two chances to strangle the internet and its crib here in the U.S. And we missed both of those chances, which I think is really good. And I think we got, you know, tremendous national payoff and, you know, on many, many fronts, including economic growth coming out the other side of that. I'm very optimistic.

Like, we're in kind of the same position. We have the raw materials. Like, we're in the best position. We have the critical mass of talent. You know, we've got the entrepreneurship community. We've got the venture capital. We've got the research universities where a lot of this work is happening. A lot of it's happening in the U.S., we've got, you know, this risk-taking culture.

You know, we just, we have a huge domestic market. We have experience building multinational technology companies that can operate all over the world. And so we've got, like, all the raw materials to have this be a major engine for economic growth. However, much like the Internet and also like encryption, like the cat is well and truly out of the bag, like there are crypto startups all over the world, right? This is happening today. And new kinds of fintech startups all over the world. And so it is going to be a race, I think, for sure. And I think there's a major, by the way, I think there's a major economic argument that we,

should want this to happen in the U.S. And we want the U.S. to be kind of the foundation for the global financial services industry and for the global R&D in this area. I think there's actually also a national security reason we should want that, which is, you know, it's the same reason it's good for a national security standpoint for the U.S. Internet companies to be the winning companies because, like, we want those to be American assets. I think it's good from a national security standpoint for the global financial system

to be centered in the U.S. And so, again, I think there's the opportunity here for enlightened policy, you know, that helps set the right guidelines and the right guard rails, but fundamentally enables American businesses to win these markets. And I think that would be better for us than most of the alternatives. Well, enlightened policy, enlightened regulators. And on that note,

I think we're out of time. And thank you very much. Good. Thanks, everybody.