Bankless - 100 - How to Survive in Crypto | Cobie

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

🎉 Happy 100th Episode 🎉 Cobie, fka Crypto Cobain, is a cultural staple in the crypto space. Wearing many hats as a narrative investor, thought leader, and memelord, we dive into the brain of one of our favorite crypto characters. Having been in crypto for nearly a decade, Cobie tells us his keys to surviving in crypto and what it takes to last long term. We also dive into how much decentralization matters, roles and responsibilities in shaping the world around us, and his outlook for 2022 and beyond. Cobie advises a healthy dose of skepticism and curiosity, and describes himself as a reality maximalist. He’s gone on an absolute tear recently, dropping a series of excellent thought piece articles that establish mental models for understanding narratives across the ecosystem. We also go through moral alignment charts and ask Cobie the big question… What does he think of Bankless? ------ ✨ DEBRIEF ✨ | Ryan & David's Unfiltered Thoughts on the Episode https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-cobie  ------ 📣 ONJUNO | Crypto from your Checking Account! https://bankless.cc/OnJuno  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot  🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 5:30 How Cobie Survives in Crypto 13:41 Early Discoveries 21:22 Reality Maximalism 32:38 Responsibility & Roles 43:39 Tribes, Decentralization, Utility 53:10 Profit Maximalism 1:01:31 Staking & Incentives 1:10:42 Wins and Losses 1:19:20 Crypto Brain & Culture 1:28:45 Wealth & Purpose 1:36:18 Chaotic Good & UpOnly 1:39:58 Judging Others 1:54:00 Bullish or Bearish in 2022 2:00:42 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Cobie on Twitter https://twitter.com/cobie?s=20  UpOnly https://uponly.tv/  Cobie’s Newsletter https://cobie.substack.com/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams, and I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, fantastic episode. The title is Understanding Crypto. We get inside the brain of a crypto trader. One of my favorites on crypto Twitter. This is Kobe coming at you.

We talk about a few things. Watch out for them. Five. what it takes to last in crypto, not for the short run, but for the long term. Kobe's been at this for 10 years. He goes through that. Second, does decentralization really matter? We get a conversation, perhaps a bit of a debate on that topic.

Third, what does Kobe actually think about bankless and its thesis? He puts that to the test. Fourth, we do a fun exercise like character alignment. People in the crypto space, are they lawful good? Are they chaotic evil? Are they neutral good? We talk about a few folks there. And number five, we end with outlook and predictions for 2022.

Is it going to be a bullish or bearish year? Stay tuned for a fantastic episode. David, what do you think about this one? Yeah, I think calling Kobe a traitor is underselling him. I think if you ask Kobe what he is, he would also undersell himself, too. I think that's kind of part of his character. Yeah. He's definitely a part philosopher, I think.

He's a traitor philosopher type, if you will. And there's a dynamic, a pendulum back and forth, I think, where like, oh, he's in traitor mode or philosopher mode. And I think that's one of Kobe's great strengths is he can trade on, he uses philosophy to trade, and it's definitely worked out for him. And overall, he just has very long-form answers, in-depth answers that pull in-depth answers that pull in so many different bits of knowledge from different corners of the crypto world to provide evidence for his answer.

And it's just an impressive feat of brainpower, I think. And so I just enjoyed picking Kobe's brain. as somebody that a lot of people look up to in this space for just leadership and just an example of how to how to survive in crypto. I think if there's anyone that's survived through the biggest log, it's Kobe. And he's still around kicking. Just kick an ass. And maybe he's around for another decade after this. Who knows?

I believe that, man. That's another good episode title, How to Survive in Crypto, because that's really what we went through. And you mentioned the word depth. I think that was a key insight for me, too. Kobe does have a tremendous amount of depth. And though we called him traitor, he's a traitor in the outset, he definitely, you know, narrative trades in a way that you and I don't. But he also has a long-term thesis for this space. And so it was really cool to see him push against our thesis and challenge some of our ideas.

And there's some fantastic back and forth there about the value of decentralization, how much that really matters, both from an investment perspective, but also from the future of what we're really building in crypto. So guys, stay tuned to hear all of that. Of course, as usual, if you're a bankless premium member, David and I will be talking, doing a full episode debrief of all of our thoughts on the episode. That is available on the premium podcast feed. So if you're premium member, you can tap into that as well. All right, guys, this was a really fun conversation. I think you guys are going to enjoy this one. Some people said that Kobe would never show up on bankless yet. Here he is today on the show. So let's go ahead and get right into that interview

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NFTs the way it was always meant to be fast, cheap, and friction-free. Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce our next guest. The guest you thought would never happen is now happening. We've got Kobe on the podcast, formerly known as Crypto Cobain. You probably know him from Twitter. Maybe you've read his substack. Maybe you listen to Up Only, which is his podcast. He's been in the game, the crypto game that is, since 2022. We're going to talk. about what he's done since 2022, his philosophy on things, any beefs with bankless he might have? I don't know. We're going to just laid out here, not really a strict agenda.

We're just going to talk about whatever comes to mind. Kobe, welcome bankless. How you doing, man? Hello, mate. How are you doing? I trolled you on Twitter before I joined. Sorry. I just like to create entertainment for people.

It's not a beef. Well, it is entertaining. Yeah. So Kobe before Twitter, I was like, hey, we're having Kobe record on the podcast. What questions you guys have? And Kobe's like, I'm going to be at the beach, guys. Was that actually today? And for a split second, I was like, okay, I don't know if he's coming or not, David, but

it's just Kobe. That's what you do. Yeah, I feel like the entirety of crypto Twitter has got a handshake agreement that were all continually being mean to each other as a joke. Yes. But I've recently realized some people don't realize it's a joke. They're not even joking themselves. They've been serious.

Some people are really mean. Yeah. Some people just, they see the Twitter and then it's, oh, that's just them being toxic. God damn, why are they all so toxic all the time? And then they don't realize that like, oh, we're just shitposting having a good time. I do think it, though, it's a rough game out there. I mean, surviving in crypto takes a lot, right? And you've been at this game for like, what? Is it like 10 years now, Kobe? Yeah, like a little bit less, I think, but it's getting to the point where he may as well just say 10. Okay, so a decade in crypto, what does it take to survive

in crypto? How have you made it so long? I'm talking volatility. I'm talking about like crypto, Twitter, you know, pain. I'm talking about everything that comes within this industry. Dealing with idiots. Dealing with idiots. The information flood into your mind every single day. You go, you miss an hour in crypto and it feels like you missed an entire week. All of that. How did you last so long? What's your secret? Yeah. I mean, the idiots thing, that was not a problem five years ago. I think that like the politicization of everything over the last decade has 10xed, probably three times. like Twitter used to be I'd never thought by using the block button but like now the experience is virtually unusable unless you press it a few times a day but crypto specifically I think when when people ask this question it's very easy to

to like to like use this like sort of hindsight bias and we're like oh well I did this and I thought this about the world and blah blah blah but it's it's sort of similar to that you know that photo of a plane an old war plane that they used to like try and figure out where they should reinforce the armor so that their planes would survive longer and then they were putting the armor in the wrong place because the only planes that came back were the ones that survived and they go we need to reinforce where they're getting hit survivorship bias yeah exactly and you can like think about like i can think all these things like oh what did i do differently to other people um or like what did like i have in my character that meant i could survive and i don't know if it matters too much. I think it's more useful to observe all the people I know from that time that didn't

get to this point in the market and went and did other things. Some of them very successful other things. And some just left the markets entirely. And then the people that did from my my like cohort or graduation class or whatever. And I think the first thing was that most people that survived through the markets have or had is like a healthy balance of, skepticism and like curiosity because it's really easy to poke holes in everything right you can I can tell you a million reasons why bitcoin could probably fail Ethereum's not going to do well why salinas like fucked and stuff it's really easy to come up with those things and I understand that mindset it's also really easy to turn something into like a religious sort of group and

be like I'm so convicted on this thing I'll you know this is going and then you disregard everything or criticism as like food or, you know, whatever. And I think the people that did really well and made it through multiple cycles of it going to infinity and then going to zero over and over, where they were somewhere in the middle where they were able to think really sceptically and say, okay, what could go wrong here?

What other things might invalidate why I believe in this thing? But at the same time, they were able to be optimistically curious enough to go, okay, maybe I'm a natural skeptic and these things might happen and that's all bad and yeah like these are the things that could go wrong but also on the other hand if the world changes in these ways how can it be different in the future and I think those people were the ones that saw past Mount Gox dying and the centralized exchanges blowing up and seeing okay does this matter in the bigger picture like maybe it matters today maybe it matters for the next two years but maybe

not in 10 years. And they saw Ethereum's ecosystem change from the 2017 area of like people just doing like felonious Kickstarter projects into being, okay, that's actually a type of product built on Ethereum. Yeah, maybe it's an illegal fundraising platform at the moment, but that is one product that you can build on Ethereum. And then they saw other products start to get built on Ethereum through 2019. And sometimes the new products look like the old one, but they were curious enough to understand the differences. So I think that's like one thing that like a lot of people that were able to make it through the markets had.

And the second one is like people don't like to talk about it so much because they like to think that they're smart and stuff. But it's just like luck. And not like when the lottery flipped a coin luck, but it's a sort of like cosmic right place, right time, right life circumstances kind of luck where they didn't have to become a forced seller of this thing they believed in because they had a kid. or because they had a health issue or something. Instead, they were, you know, the right age

so that they didn't need to, you know, rely on their investments to pay for a house. Or they had it, like, in my case, I was at university and the amount of money I put into crypto was so small that when I got a job, it didn't matter. I didn't need to ever cash it out to, like, do something. I could increase my lifestyle, and I could have that lifestyle bloat by getting a promotion and getting a new job.

And I was lucky enough to have a few, like, well-paying jobs in tech, which meant I didn't need to ever sell my crypto in order to fund some part of my life. And I think most people that didn't make it that back then believed became forced sellers somehow, either over-leveraging life circumstances or something like that. I think a lot of it's down to that. Just the right age, right place, right time, right, like life circumstances. circumstances, right education or whatever, that people don't like to admit so much. What about a, like a North Star or just guiding principle when you learned about crypto?

Was there anything like distant in their highs and in 2050, everything's going to be on crypto? Or was there any sort of like thing that you really resonated with you about crypto that you discovered early on? Yeah. I never thought about 2050. I still don't think about 2050. We'd probably all be underwater, not just in crypto. not just in crypto underwater, I mean like the entire world's underwater. But I was at university when I

first got into crypto. And I went to like a university in the UK called University of Bristol. It's kind of like where you go if you don't get into Oxford or Cambridge. It's like 50% or maybe more than 50% like people with trust funds and they're like very posh and they don't worry about money so much and they're having a nice time at university. And then they'll really. half of people that I knew were all very deeply in debt. The banks like hook you in by giving you the student overdraft, which in the UK, do you have overdrafts in America? Yeah, definitely. Oh yeah. That's why, you know, bankless, we hate banks, yep. Yeah. Okay. So like they give you the student overdraft, which is just like free debt. They give you like three grand. You can do whatever you want with it.

You don't pay any interest while you're a student and the first two years after you stop being student and all the people that I knew at university or my friends that didn't have like family money, they instantly said, okay, cool, I've got three thousand pounds for free. That's my money now. And like zero was no longer zero. It was minus three thousand. They just went, cool, that's my money. I can do whatever I want with that. And then they left university and all of a sudden you've got interest payments on this and everyone's like, you know, so I met those two types of people at university. And then in my family, like people in my family, they lost their pensions in the, like 2008 financial crisis and stuff like that. So I had this sentiment around banks, but also just like the financial system, which seemed to overlap with the political system in general.

And I was very like emotional about it and like maybe a little bit naive about it as well. But I was sort of locking for a way out. So seeing crypto, I was seeing Bitcoin at least as this. impartial, uh, non-state money that there was, there was no guy in a, like an office tower block in Canary Wharf or wherever in New York, I don't know, the geography of New York well enough, that was going to make decisions about their own P&L that would impact, you know, my family, and they don't give a shit about that. They just care about like unwinding their position because they fucked it. If there was a money where there wasn't a guy with that power,

I was more interested. I was interested in that and I wanted that to be like how the world worked. I wanted there to be a system where there wasn't someone dictating, you know, how much of the, how much rent they get to like cream off the like normal population. So I felt emotionally like super invested in this idea at the very beginning. And that's like what was the initial spark for me. But yeah, I didn't know how stuff was going to be in 2050. May I'll be dead by them. I think this story resonates with a lot of people because this seems to be just the system. I'm in disenfranchise. I'm not part of the system. There's no way that I can get wealthy in the system. Therefore, I might as well look elsewhere. This thing's not going to work for me. And so there's this new thing that's going on and I'm going to just gravitate my attention there.

I think a lot of people have that a similar story. The old ways of gaining wealth is not going to work. So might as well just put wealth literally anywhere else. Yeah, I think it's like two-fold. It's like partially that, right? And I think that's why you're in the rise of Robin Hood and option, like, retail options traders and why Elon was able to resonate so well with Dogecoin because that is the story of like normal people now. They don't they think the system is, it is impossible for them to break out of it and they see house prices. They're up for like four or five X in the last 30 years, but wages are stagnant and they just see their goals slipping away and becoming unachievable. But the part of it that I think was more triggering for me was that it seemed intentional.

It wasn't just like, oh, this is the system and I can't like, there's no lever I can pull to like win. It was more like, wait, the people who seem to be responsible for the like financial crisis also seem to be the ones that did the best. Like what? How does that make sense? Like they seem to, some of them made a profit. What, like, how come none of them lost their job? How come they just like doing the same shit, like five years later. So it was more that if there are central parties and there are people in charge that humanity is often corruptible in search of privatized profits. And just the fact that there was like, yeah, like sure, Satoshi, the ghost of Satoshi or whatever, maybe still around. But the lack of that was what was attractive to me, I think. Is that still a big driver

for you than Kobe, kind of like at the system? Um, I don't know, man, because like, I was early, 20s back then. I'm getting old now. So I was just in my like, you know, where I line a phase listening to rock music and stuff. But like I think a little bit, but I think also I've capitulated a little bit on how easy it is to fight back. Because like you've seen a lot of it. It's like very relevant now, not just with like the financial system, but with everything like the dissemination of information and, you know, public trust in institution, government, big tech corporations, even game publishers. I've been in arguments with people on tour about games for the last few days.

And it's like, it's at all-time lows that people really, really don't trust large, centralized power. And that sort of, F-the-system thing feels like it's been bubbling, I don't know, since like the 60s or 70s or something. And then it's reaching a point now where, their incompetence or lack of respect from the people in power is so large that it just feels like they don't care. They're like, you can't do anything anyway. Like everyone knows now that there is massive corruption. In the UK, we have like all these Tory peers, the like the government

party, the peers just like giving themselves COVID relief contracts for like hundreds of millions of pounds and stuff. It's like they just don't give a shit. It's not like they're trying to hide it. It's not like the they're like, oh no, if they find out about the cryptocurrencies, they'll take us down. They're just like, nah, we don't care. We'll just keep doing it. There's no, like, form of accountability anymore. So I think in some ways it's like it feels still important to me, but I feel like I've

capitulated a little bit on, or at least become complacent in like fighting the fight. It's like half the time you're fighting against your own people these days. Talk a little bit about that capitulation, right? Because like, I think what we really want to do in this episode to you is like, also understand how you think, how kind of a trader thinks, right? Because I think, yeah, it's somewhat David and I have discussed this before, but we sort of see, you know, Kobe and Up Only as kind of like a ying to bankless as yang, right? It's like, CryptoWorld needs both of these perspectives very much. It's sort of like narrative trader versus what we try to think of ourselves as like a bit more

fundamentals investor, right? But like we try to stay open minded and realize that we also don't have the like end all thesis on this thing. And like, no one. one actually knows what fundamentals are. But like, we really appreciate your perspective on this. But so let's get into that, into the idea of, you know, capitulating a little bit on that ideal, right? So our philosophy, like the bankless thing would be like, hey, we acknowledge and we see the nihilism, right? Shit sucks, man. Institutions totally failed us. This is worldwide. This is in the U.S. You know, the banks, baby boomer generation, they've all screwed us. And we might very well be underwater in 2015. And guess what? They don't care. They're going to be gone.

They don't give a shit about us. They don't care about the next generation. So we see that, right? And that's like, existentially, that's a hard place to be in because you're like, okay, well, nothing matters. None of this matters anymore. And so then you go and you're like, okay, how is the game played? Let me go figure out the game. And I'm going to play a game that I can actually win for a change, right?

Maybe get into crypto, maybe start figuring stuff out. But like for bankless, it's a bit more than that because we haven't yet, I feel like capitually. on the thing that we are trying to build, which is a new disintermediated financial system for the world. Right? Like, we don't believe all of the hype around Web 3. Okay? So, like, I hope we're not naive.

I don't think we're naive. Like, we know tons of ways this could go wrong. But we hold out hope that we actually have a shot in our generation to actually get this right and rebuild the system from the ground up. So I like to think, like, we haven't yet capitulated on that. Now, there's days. where I'm like, oh shit, it's over. Like, I've fully capitulated.

Like, we're never going to make it. Like, this is not going to work. What am I even doing here? There's definitely days like that. But I feel like we haven't given up. Are you still there yet? Or do you feel like, hey, this crypto thing, I don't know if it's going to work out or not.

Whatever, the institutions always win in the end. So, might as well play the game. Yeah, I feel sort of like crypto itself is inevitable. And not so much. a capitulation like, I don't care so much about what happens. It's all pointless. But more that the individual contributions are much smaller than I previously calculated. Like, I don't think the world revolves around me. I don't think the, what like we put on up only makes a difference in the world whatsoever. I think it at best can entertain a bunch of people and allow

them to remain interested in something, but I definitely don't think we should be telling people, you know, what to care about or how to think. I think that bankless site, I think is great that you're very principled about what you care about, and it's clear that you, you know, make content about what you're interested in. But I think in that there's also in another set of biases, which is like being unequally critical depending on what crypto project we're talking about, right? And in the grand scheme of things, Bitcoin people would tell you by promoting Ethereum, you're actually capitulating because Ethereum has much more of a structural similarities to the old system than the new one.

And then Bankless might tell you that by talking about Avalanche, you're capitulating. And, you know, like, I think there's a big spectrum. And in general, I think at the moment for most crypto projects, minus a subsection of, you know, the market that I think we could probably all agree on and identify pretty quickly. I think most serious intelligent builders have similar goals because it all stems from Bitcoin, right? They were all inspired by the same mission Bitcoin was or Ethereum was and they thought, oh, I can do this in a different way or I can do this better. And I think, if I'm totally honest with myself, I believe that most serious

builders and not just trying to enrich themselves. And anyone in crypto is generally on a similar type of mission. And I think crypto is probably inevitable. I think it's inevitable that there is a permissionless and trustless system that underpins how society transacts because the old system worked so poorly. And there's obviously groups of people and increasingly smarter people that can see a future that will work in this way. But I don't necessarily believe the chain that we all live on 100 years in the future even exists yet. It might not. I don't know if it will be Ethereum or Solana or Bitcoin Cash or whatever. So instead I've transitioned, I think, a little bit towards what I like to call reality maximalism,

where instead of applying my personal politics and what I want to happen or what I think is the best thing, to happen to the market or to my investments. Instead, I just like to observe what is happening and try and understand why that's happening and kind of take it from there, because if you go back to my Twitter account, not my Kobe one, my normal one, before early 2017, I think, like I was early to Ethereum because I was a bitciner, they sold to all bitcoins. We bought the ICO, and then by 2017 I was hugely disappointed with Ethereum because I was a big believer in this. decentralization. And obviously we had the Dow hack, we had the rollback the chain moment and had the fork. And then Ethereum seemed to be becoming this platform for a legal fundraising. And no one seems to

give a shit. No one seemed to care. So I had this personal and political anti-Etherium stance and a personal and political very pro privacy coin, privacy token, privacy technology type stance. And if I'd applied those things to my investment thesis more than I did, it was. it would have been a huge mistake because Ethereum did really well and Zcash went to zero. It's like slowly went to zero, right? It's on its way. But like from that point, I tried to, instead of applying like these personal politics onto my investments, instead just go, okay, what is happening? Why is it happening? And what are the underlying growth mechanisms behind what's happening? And what can I learn from what is happening, right? And that's why,

though if people were like incredibly politically motivated, by the concepts of decentralization throughout the last year, they got totally screwed versus market participants because they owned Bitcoin and Ethereum as the most decentralized assets in the whole space. I think Bitcoin may be an Ethereum too. Definitely Bitcoin. Ethereum, I think is gray area and you could argue. And I think we'd probably agree on the argument. But I think those are the two assets that only the only ones, whereas if there was a massive state attack today on censorship, they're the only two that would reasonably sort of. survive, right? Like, Solana, you have the memes. The chain goes down. I think it's down again today.

Like, there's a very central core team who are very important. If Tolly goes, who knows what happens to Solana, right? And the thing is, that's the same place Ethereum was not so long ago. Like, as crypto projects are born, they start out very centralized. Bitcoin did as well. You remember the, I don't know when you got into crypto, but there was an inflation bog in Bitcoin and a billion Bitcoin were released or something, I don't remember when it was. It was slightly before my time, but I remember reading about it. And they had to come together and fix that very quickly. And then at some point, Satoshi left, and at some point, it didn't matter so much anymore.

And at some point, it became resilient. And Ethereum's going through a similar thing in that Vitalik still has a very important political role in Ethereum, but less so over time. Now he writes, writes sort of, you know, these roadmaps for the future to inspire the people doing the real work. and it's not so much him, you know, sitting in a bedroom in his pants anymore, just doing like some blockchain coding. But I think Ethereum and Bitcoin are the only two that would survive a state attack today. In 10 years, that might not be the same.

That might not be true. There might be more things that have crossed this chasm because the people behind those chains have the same set of values as the people building Ethereum or the people building Bitcoin did. So I think into crypto capitulation on those things, things is sort of void. I mean, unless you're, you know, like, promoting, like, hard, centralized platform tokens, which is, like, sometimes good trades, but, you know, not necessarily for me. Then I don't think it matters so much, like, where you place your interest within

crypto, because decentralization as a thesis is a bet that in the future, it will be incredibly valuable for this system to be decentralized. There are also other bets within blockchain about why something might be valuable. And one of them is like usability. Ethereum for the last year has created a massive competition vector for other blockchains because people care about using blockchains more than they care about decentralization right now. And betting on decentralization suggests that you think that will change in the future.

And I think it will. I think decentralization is hugely important. But I also know that I shouldn't tell people what to think they'll make their own minds up and right now clearly it has been less important than them being able to participate in the ecosystem at all or being able to afford to. I see this big difference between your disposition and bankless disposition. I feel like our leaf on the wind, right? Like crypto will do its thing and you're just going to ride it and see how it falls. And the bankless side of things is like we kind of want to cover and talk about and discuss decentralization and decentralized related things

of that nature. We have certainly as a media entity gotten plenty of just blowback for not discussing like the rise of the alt layer ones as much as the crypto markets have turned their attention towards it where the crypto world has you know started to focus on things like salana and avalanche and you know insert your new smart contract blockchain here bank this has kind of continued to do the thing we were we were doing prior which is kind of just focus on the I think deeper fundamental technologies and the conversation of bitcoiners pointing at ethereum and being like oh it's a centralized scam chain and then Ethereum is pointing at like the next chain down the line, go, oh, it's a centralized scam chain.

Like, we're on, like, iteration number three of that right now. Like, we have all the new L-1s where all the other, the incumbents are pointing at the disruptor chains and saying the disruptor chains are a bunch of like centralized scam chains. And like, who knows, maybe there's iteration number four of that. And maybe it actually just keeps on going for the rest of time. But I think the justification for why talk about decentralization and decentralization and only things that are decentralized or related to that subjects, is that, like, crypto is supposed to be an infinite game.

We're supposed to be playing this game of crypto for hopefully the rest of time. Hopefully, our kids are playing the crypto game. Their kids are playing the crypto game. And hopefully that just becomes the new normal. And me and Ryan think that if we're just a leaf on the wind and the wind just blows us wherever we go, it might actually blow us into an outcome where the game ends because it ended up centralized.

And it's kind of like Chris Dixon has a... line where like if you ask people what they wanted in like the 1800s, they would have set a faster horse rather than a car, right? And so like we think that we have some sort of responsibility to only talk about decentralized things because then our kids can also play this game and their kids can play this game and it continues. And so like maybe the strategy here at bankless is like only talk about decentralization. And when Solana and Avalanche do cross that chasm, maybe we do talk about it then, but I think we'll continue to decline to talk about that until the day comes. And maybe that's our role in the ecosystem. Maybe if Solana wants an appearance on bankless,

like, well, they're going to have to work on their centralization. And as soon as they do, maybe we do invite them on. Yeah, I think I got like three main responses in my head while you were talking. The first one was like, imagine if like this leaf in the wind blows and lands in this centralized power world. I feel like it would be arrogant of myself to be like, if only up-only TV had covered more, being more sensitive in their coverage of decentralization, we might have ended up somewhere totally different. I'm pretending to be Kirkbane on the internet for ages,

and if it relies on me not talking about Solana, then I think we already failed, maybe. The second was what you said. It's like a spectrum, right? There's a decentralization spectrum, and people draw the line in different places. And I understand drawing the line at Ethereum because I think it's probably the only other asset,

apart from Bitcoin, that could withstand state attack. or, you know, large coordinated attacks. But, and I understand it also, because if you draw the line after Solana and Avalanche and Luna or whatever, then all of a sudden people from like Harmony and Near come knocking on the door. And then if you include them, then all of a sudden it's like further down and it's like, where does it stop? Binance chain.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It starts to get blurry for an audience. So I kind of get that perspective because you say, oh, well, they talk about Salana and this looks exactly like Salana. but there are fundamental differences that retail investors can't understand so well. So I understand drawing the line there. But my third thing is like, as we've acknowledged earlier in this podcast,

a lot of the reason people get into crypto is not necessarily because they're looking for a trustless, permissionless way to interact online. Some people do, you know, I'm sure some people in El Salvador and Cuba and Venezuela, I think they do look for that. But one of the reasons, as we said earlier, that people get into crypto is because they see this system that is rigged against them and they can't afford to buy a house. And the billionaires doubled their net worth or tripled their net worth in the pandemic. And they're looking for a way out. And if you show them Bitcoin, they just hold Bitcoin.

Like, what, it's been up 5% year today or something? Like maybe it was even higher this time last year. And if you show them Ethereum, they buy some on Coinbase and then they try and buy an NFT and they spent money. more on the gas fee than they did on the NFT, obviously not now, but like in the, you know, peak of mint season last year. And they can't really do anything. And then you sort of lose them as audience and they're good people. They're not like, you know, they're not looking around trying to like scam people or they're not trying to shill other chains. They're good people who were also just looking for a way out of the circumstances or the system that feels rigged

against them. And they end up on Solana because it's what they can afford to use. use or they end up on Avalanche because it's what they can afford to use. And if you tell them they're on a centralized scam chain, they're like, I no longer really respect you as a broadcaster because you're rejecting my experience of not being able to transact on Ethereum. Oh, I don't care it's decentralized. I can't use it. I can't afford to use it. And in their eyes, it's like, what was it like for you when you joined crypto? And for me, I, like, you know, put a couple of hundred quid into crypto, and that was my entire inflow ever. And if Ethereum was in its current state, I would not have been able to live

on chain very well. Maybe I could have used some of the L2s, which have their own UX issues and stuff. But back then, it didn't matter because we just use cryptsy and MintPal and the exchange fees were just transferring, like, which blockchain you used, and you could just use light coin, so it's fine. So I do, I totally understand it and I respect it. And I think that they probably will be podcasts for each of those blockchains too, right? Like there's a what Bitcoin did, there's a bankless. Maybe there'll be a soulless for Solana. Wait, that's a terrible name.

I was talking to Ryan earlier. Like, we get so much flack for not covering all of these L-1s. They need to just make their own podcast in that case. Like, we're leaving the door open for them. Please go forth. I think so, I guess a couple things as you were speaking, Kobe, and like things that I feel like we're probably 100% aligned on, right? 100% aligned on the fact that chain maximalism is a trap.

Like, it's a toxic, tribal trap from an investment perspective, but also from like a mind cage perspective. Like, it's just kind of dumb, okay? I would say that our thesis is different, right? It's not chain maximalism. It's decentralization maximism. And I think that is definitely an investment thesis, but it also might not be, especially short-term, the highest ROI profit maximization investment thesis. So that's one piece of it. The other

hard agree that we would have for you is like, from a user perspective, hell yeah. Users should use whatever chain they feel like using. Whatever chain is cheapest. We just had a Vitalik on the podcast and he was talking about trip to Argentina he had. And he was like, hey, what do you think was the top used blockchain. Okay, right. It ended up as Binance. Oh, yeah, I saw this. It was Binance, on it? That's fantastic. And why is it fantastic for people in Argentina? Is because Binance, as much as you have to trust one guy's database, as Vatelik said, like, it's better than the status quo, isn't it? And it's cheap. And it's better than Ethereum, obviously, for that particular use case. And this same conversation exists about

the Chinese central bank digital currency, too. Exactly. It's going to work wonders for empowering a bunch of people to be included in the financial world. Exactly. It's also going to be the Chinese central bank digital currency. Decentralization, maximalization, but like not chain maximalization, totally with you there. And like, user should use whatever chain they feel like using. And there shouldn't be some religious pressure on them from people like bankless or anybody in crypto to say, no, you shouldn't do that. Like, that's sinful to use this chain. This is a bad chain. Don't do that user. Our message is more to people who are designing these chains. and pretend to be decentralized when they're not, Kobe.

The outcome that you're talking about, the idea that decentralization is inevitable, I'm not sure that that's actually true. I'm not actually sure that things do naturally decentralized over time unless you have a layer zero, a group of individuals and people that actually fight for that decentralization. You were talking earlier in the episode about the Bitcoin inflation bug, right? At the root of things, how did that get resolved? It gets resolved at the social layer, the layer zero, like below the layer one where people are like, no, Bitcoin is 21 million fixed cap. Of course we're not going to let this inflation bug go.

We're going to fix this in code. Code is not law. It's all backed by layer zero. And that's why I actually think maybe you sell yourself short a little bit with up only when you talk about the lack of influence that you have in the crypto world. Because we are pioneers. We are early. It's kind of like saying, I'm not saying we're the founding fathers, but like somebody like Vitalik, right? We're here during the revolution. Sorry, this is an American, you know, kind of thing. But like 1780s, right? 1790s, you know, founding an entire country.

And the people that were there had a ton of relevance. Like they set the layer zero for an entire nation state. And that's why David and I in bankless feel like we have a tremendous amount of responsibility to do that because ultimately the layer zero enforces it. So the question of whether we're going to have a good disintermediated, decentralized crypto system for the world or not, what does that ultimately rest on? People. It rests on the layers there. And because we're here first, we actually have a responsibility to be like, no, these values are important to us.

We should embed them in the protocol. We should embed them in the social layer to the extent that we can so that we can have the good outcomes that we all want later. Oh, and you're new? You just joined in 2021 and you don't know these things, let's talk about why they are so important so that you can come aboard this thing. And that's how we grow a movement, I feel like. And I think the people who are here first actually do have a ton of influence in shaping the next decade. Like, I think you do. I think bankless does. I think people like Vitalik does. Satoshi definitely does. Like all of us here do. It's so early that we can have an outsized impact and it won't just naturally happen. We've got to be intentional about it. What do you think about that?

I like my two main thoughts honestly like the earlier in your in your speech very inspiring speech by the way earlier in your speech you said you don't think things like tend to decentralize naturally over time and like evidence would suggest from crypto projects at least that they they do and evidence evidence would suggest in web two world or pre crypto world that they don't like wealth centralizes power centralizes etc until there is a need to for that decentralization and then it becomes super important and people are able to much more easily quantify its importance. If there is suddenly state attacks on blockchains, that layer zero are going to react because they're human beings. They understand incentive structures. They understand what's important to the world. They're going to say, okay, we can't focus on user experience or scalability right now because the most important thing to work on is decentralization. whereas right now the most important thing in crypto is perhaps not decentralization because there are very decentralized assets in the space but they're not usable to like people that might need to use

them like you know most usDCs done on tron or something like udi told me that the old there and i was like oh god udi was shilling tron in 2019 and he's using this as a reason that he was right even though everything else fell apart even justin left it's like i was right look how much tethers on Tron, fuck's aid. But, like, so I think it does just to centralize over time. And as humans coordinate what's important using, you know, the current flaws or the current weaknesses in the ecosystem, that's what layer zero builds for, which is why no one is trying to outcompete Ethereum on decentralization because they're doing pretty well

on decentralization. But they really struggle on, like, how usable it is for retail. people. Now there's a focus, especially for the last couple of years, from builders who know that that's really important. So you see all these layer two teams now and doing really great work. But I do think the layer zero adjusts for what is important in the world. And I also believe if there is huge state attack and all the existing blockchains were somehow erased from existence, the layer zero would collaborate to create a new decentralized way to transact with each other because it would be the most important thing in the world to have.

And so I think that was one of the thoughts I had while you were talking. The other one was like personally if I believe decentralization is important, which I do. I think the best way to onboard people onto that idea is not to just continually shout at them. I think it's like if someone came to me with an idea that I didn't care about and just kept saying, you Jordan, this is the most important thing. Look at this is the most important thing. But all the evidence in the market or in like what people were interested in talking about and where the intellectual capital was being spent was not that thing. I was like, oh, can you please stop? Can I try to focus? And I think it's better to like acknowledge

reality and keep these principles over time and have them as guiding principles but not the most important thing. Like, you know, people are super interested in how to make money in crypto, what defy is. Defi on Avalanche has tons and tons and tons of users. And they're learning what DeFi is. They're learning how an AMM works. They're learning how what Uniswap is, but they don't know it's called Uniswap because the code's been copied and pasted.

But they're being onboarded to those ideas and being comfortable with self-custodying and being comfortable with trading between crypto assets while, sure, Avalanche is, maybe a bit of a smoke screen and is not maximally decentralized and they made a nice new consensus algorithm, but then they didn't really use it because it had some problems or something like all that stuff, I get it. But the net impact on real people onboarded into the ecosystem and using decentralized finance or maybe decentralized only in name because the copies of actual decentralized finance. But that embords people into an ecosystem and that helps them understand how these products work.

And I think that can have also a net positive impact over time. The same way, being guided by these principles are having these principles, but it not being the most important or only principle. And instead being more like neutral and reality maximalist, I think is probably the superior way in onboarding people over time. So the idea that a decentralized world is better, I don't care, like loads of people got into Bitcoin because of Silk Road. That's clearly not, well, I'm not going to do a podcast about how Silk Road was like

the greatest invention in human history or anything. I was like, the drug market should be decentralized and use permissionless money, but it was very good for onboarding lots of people and showing them the value of a decentralized currency. So I just think that it's a similar goal approached for in a different way. And you onboard different people, right? Like if there was only bankclos over, there was only up-only TV, people, different people, watch different ones and they go like, I don't like a pony TV because he's always drunk and he

don't take anything seriously and he like thinks everything is joke and he goes like early and now he got rich so he don't care about his principles anymore. And like more recently I got people saying I'm a trust fund kid and like just like some fiction. Like clearly he's got rich parents or something some people don't like that. Some people don't watch it because of those reasons and they maybe enjoy bankless or maybe they enjoy, you know, something else. We've got a much smaller audience new, so that we're in the long tail. But then a lot of people won't watch bankers, too, because it's a weird religious group where they got Ethereum diamonds titled on their head. And so I just think in general, in crypto, the tribalism and stuff is so silly because

isomorphically, all groups are 99% the same and inspired by the same set of principles, whether they're on, whether they're Bitcoin Maxis, Ethereum Maxis, they're the red triangle fucking people on Twitter, whether they've got the Solom. oh, like, you know, all the way down, mostly those groups are virtually the same thing, but because they've got a different ticker for their investment, they're incredibly mean to each other and hostile on the internet. And it don't make any sense to me because it's like, it's like it feels more like sports teams and like football than it does. Like in general, everyone really likes football as crypto, but because they like Manchester United instead

Man City, they're going to punch each other in a bar where the bar is Twitter. it doesn't make so much sense to me that all these people just have the exact same interests, they have the same or similar ways of viewing the world, they reject Fiat money in the same way. Sure, there's some nuance between the groups, but generally you're much more similar to each other than the no-coiners or people anti-crypto or the anti-NFT, you know, sort of people. So really, you're kind of on the same team, and instead it just becomes this weird, like, civil war over nothing, really. I know David wants to jump in here and talk about this argument over decentralization over time.

But I have one quick question. First of all, I hard agree that all of these other chains and everything else is net accretive for crypto in general. It's bringing more users like another hard agree. But I guess my question to you is like, what about all of the profit maximalists who are just here to fake decentralization, do that for a few years, and then do the just in something where by bye, bye. project. We've seen this happen every single cycle so many times where it's too easy to fire up some chain or some white paper for that matter, but for a new chain in the cycle, to talk about decentralization, to copy and paste a whole bunch of projects, and then to dump on retail, and leave VCs and alert. That's why from our perspective, too, it's like, it's also a matter of,

yes, these narratives are working now, but are there actual fundamentals behind these narratives and how is retail going to feel the next time this narrative kind of this attention from your recent blog post, this attention on this thing evaporates. They're going to be left high and dry because we've seen it play out before. And I know you've seen it play out multiple times being crypto for the last decade. What are your thoughts on that? The profit maximalism and like who's going to push back against that stuff? I think that again, the best way to push back against that stuff is to at least acknowledge

the game everyone is playing, right? Like if you tell those people who are going to fall for those things, who are going to fall for buying, you know, some project, which only real goal is to enrich the founders and early investors. And there's a lot of them now, you know, like we're late in the crypto historically boom-bust type cycle. So people who have spent the last 18 months and haven't made the amount they want start going shit. Well, all these VCs have got tons of money, so maybe I can raise, maybe I can build. a project like I didn't make the hundred million I wanted to make so there's another way which is just to steal it so that always happens and that those those projects generally launch late cycle but those projects are normally not very successful over time like in general I think the market is clued up to

those things and figures it out I think there's enough knowledge of the importance of decentralization and technological benefits that over a long enough time period it washes out sure some people will lose money along the way and they always do, but they also lose money on things that are like technically good ideas too, right? Like Zcash. Like no one's going to say that the Zcash founders were to personally enrich themselves, but that chart is the worst chart I've ever seen. It is just just a straight line down, especially when you chart it against Bitcoin or Ethereum, who themselves did not have the most remarkable year versus market average. It is terrible. But like the tech behind that was incredibly, like incredibly useful. And old Zook, I, like, I know he had the grocery

tweet. Like, people mocked him. But I don't think the point of building Zcash was so that he could personally be rich. I genuinely think he believes that, like, shielded transactions and privacy is missing from a blockchain. So there are always going to be bad investments. And retail are particularly bad analyzing the fundamentals because they don't understand, like, like, technological nuance. They're bad at analyzing charts because they don't understand complex, you know, financial primitives, nor do they understand tokenomics very well. You see people, you know, rushing into Cardano and Cardano being the biggest YouTuber, crypto YouTuber type coin. And it has like a low price and people are tricked because, oh, low price, what if Cardano goes from one, two

dollars, whatever it is today to $100 like Solana did this year? What if it does that? And they don't take into account market caps and stuff. I think there's tons of education that is needed, but those projects that fake decentralization, they don't seem to last long over time. Like, projects that have obsolete tech don't last long over time either. I don't think it remains like an enduring problem. I do think that if you're worried about people losing money, the biggest issue in crypto now is probably the regulator's lack of clarity for founders.

that there is no reasonable way to do Ethereum's launch anymore. Because when Bitcoin was launched, right, you had this sort of immaculate conception moment which can never be reproduced now because it was a thing that went to a mailing list of hobbyists who did not necessarily have a financial interest. They didn't know what was going to happen in the future. And as the information disseminated over time, people were able to see something and go, this is important to the world. and they were rewarded for that. People were able to put in some work in order to get coins in exchange.

And then when Ethereum launched, obviously crypto was 2014, the ICO won it. There were crypto had been through a couple of market cycles and people understood there was a lot of money to be made in crypto now. So offering to everybody in crypto on the same terms the ability to buy was probably fairer than launching a mining only initiative on day one because mining only initially have the same structure as an ICO anyway, and funding a team is probably useful. And as we've transitioned from those days into ICOs, ICOs mimicked that Ethereum initial distribution,

and then the SEC started to enforce against ICOs, so projects would start to raise in private. And as they raise in private, now the only people that can buy a good idea on day one is like VCs, professional investors, insiders, people that are already rich, me and you, who have podcasts who like people listen to them, so maybe they should put them in the round, you know. And retail investors, they can only buy it on market when people are already up 100x or so. And I think that dynamic is much more important to retail buying scams, because retail know they want to be early. And the only people

who have the risk tolerance to do a fair sale to retail are the people who have the risk tolerance to do a like a scam project that's enriching themselves. Like if I sell to retail, they'll buy my shit. I'll be rich. Maybe they get rich as this project as well, but I don't care. Whereas the founders who have long-term visions for their projects and may be going shit, regulation is unfortunately something that we have to contend with. Maybe we should raise from professional investors until we get it right.

And the dynamics that have been introduced by that, I think, more damaging to retail over time. At the top of a bubble now, like we have lots of people who are already rich and they can do fair launch projects again and they can accept that reg risk because they can kind of say fuck you to the regulators. They can move to, I don't know, wherever the new regab location is. But I think that is the biggest problem for retail losing money is that unfair terms of entry, of taking a risk. And you get, you know, the parental guidance of the US tells you you're not allowed. and then because of that, the projects that are launched more fairly, launched from not necessarily the best projects always, or they've taken a big risk to be able to launch in that way.

But yeah, I think it's interesting. Obviously, people losing money is bad. I just tend to ramble, sorry. The Gemini Exchange has been my exchange of choice ever since I got into crypto. I used Gemini to both buy the dips and also manage my regular automatic monthly purchases of my preferred crypto asset. On Gemini, you'll find over 50, different cryptos, including many of the top defy and Metaverse tokens like Wi-Fi and Axi Infinity.

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avalanche, finance, smart chain, and other chains. Trading on Macha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me in a single easy-to-use platform and allows me to make limit on-chain orders so you can set and forget your Defi trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. So when you're making a trade, head over to macha.xy-z slash bankless and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. First you were talking about just the users, right? And I just want to reiterate that users should just do whatever they want and they can go

and do all the things. This is not a question about what users are up to, but more of what Ryan was saying, which is like the actual designers of this system. And I totally agree with you that the regulations are getting in the way of creating fairly designed, fairly distributed projects. The concept of decentralization and regulation are oil and water. You can't have decentralization if you also have regulation. Like regulation is kind of a centralizing force anyways because then you start playing the game of who can navigate the regulatory waters better than others. and that requires expertise and expertise is centralized. And you talked about how like, well, you know, Ethereum started off centralized and

moved towards decentralization. And I think Ryan and I would say that like, well, that's also because of a very important role of decentralization in the actual culture of Ethereum. Now we have this very unfortunate reality where a lot of these newer L1s, the only way that they could have gotten started is by spreading out the capital towards VCs. The other unfortunate thing is that in order to compete in the world of, crypto, D5 smart contracts is you have to be faster than Ethereum because Ethereum's like got a monopoly, almost a guy has a monopoly on decentralization. So like your competitive edge is now

throughput. And throughput at the protocol layer, this is when some of these conversations start to get technical. Throughput is centralization. Now you are compromising on decentralization in order to exist at all. And then maybe we can decentralize later. But you have this unfortunate interaction behind how these fast chains need to be centralized in order to be fast in order to compete with Ethereum, but also in order to start up these systems, you have to sell to VCs or to centralized parties, right, because of regulation. And so we have, and especially with now all of these chains are also proof of stake, we have centralized capital allocation towards centralized parties, running centralized nodes. And yes, we have seen many, many things throughout crypto's history

tilt towards decentralization. But I think it's pretty reasonable to say that, well, this time, we haven't seen that in this specific case. We have VCs with an outsized portion of proof of stake assets where the nodes themselves are also centralized. I find it hard to see a path of that actually becoming decentralized, especially with delegated proof of stake, where so much inflation, because of how these centralized chains are operated by inflation, so much of this inflation stays in the hands of the people that already had the capital in the first place. While historically throughout crypto, we have seen things tilt towards decentralization, the specific parameters, the combination of regulation, high throughput chains, and also VC-owned

token supply, those are three big, heavy marks towards being able to tilt towards decentralization. And we haven't, I don't think we've seen that before in the crypto space. So that is a chasm that I don't think we can just take on on faith that that actually will be crossed by the dynamics of how these systems got started. And also, like, it's very unfortunate that regulation created this. this. And it's definitely not the fault of the founders that regulation exists, but it kind of doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that it's not the fault of the founders. These systems got spun up in the way that they got spun up regardless. Any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean,

I think you can look at the staking design and say like the mistakes were made. I think you can look at Deerium's staking design and equally say mistakes were made. You know, we've had a beacon chain rollout without a ton of staking diversity where the top stakers were all centralized exchanges that already have, you know, huge important roles in the ecosystem, which has been handed even more power. So the beacon chain suddenly has like these sort of horsemen of like binance and crackin and stuff where like not only are the major, like the main onramps, but now they're responsible for chain security as well. And you've seen the, you've seen the, introduction of liquid staking as a response and get like huge, huge market share, like very

quickly. I think Lido is now the second largest staker after Binance or Kreken or something. I need to do my disclaimers. It's Krakken. It's Krakken, yeah. I was a founding member of Lido Dow worked on Lido for in like 2020 to 2021, not financial advice. I don't want to go at jail. I don't work on anymore, but the like people that work out are all very handsome. But you've seen that happen with Ethereum. And a lot of the choices Ethereum made so that solo stakers can participate and the chain stays healthy can also lend itself towards centralization over time. They made it very scary to be a solo staker. You know that Kane from synthetics lost loads of Ethereum by setting up his shit wrong.

I think there are a lot of design decisions that are made in all chains that can lead to some centralization. I do think that the way current L1s are launched are completely suboptimal. And it would be much better if they were launched in the same way Ethereum was launched. And I think Ethereum being proof of work for some period of time after the sale also helps with distribution and decentralization before moving to proof of stake. But I think like, you know, node requirements for Solana over time just become a non-issue, right? Like technology is ever increasing. It's not like these are going to, like maybe they're.

a high barrier to running a node today. It's not going to be a high barrier to running a node in 20 years. So, and you have to think about how old these things are as well, right? Like Solano was 2018, 2019. I don't know when the first non-block, wherever the fuck they call a block, was mine. But I don't know when the first proof of history was printed. That's like sounds really pretentious. That's the main reason to not like Solana.

Proof of history is a pretentious name. But I don't know when that first happened. I think it was 2018, maybe 2019. But that means the two or three years into. existing and two or three years into Ethereum existing, if the ICO was Inception, it was 2014, if it was like first block mind a bit later, but the Dow hack stole, was it like a third of supply or something? There's like a third of all Ethereum. I feel like if that happened today on Solana or Avalanche or whatever, it would be absolute scenes. It would be comedy. People would be

like from the roof laughing at these centralized scamic like chains who've like totally fucked it up. Lull, one third of all supply taken in a single hack, ha ha, ha, what are you going to do? Roll back the chain. That's what the discourse would be like today. And everyone participate in it. It would be it would be fun. I'd enjoy Twitter that day. I'd have some good jokes, I'm sure. And I think that shows that the attitude over time does lend towards the centralisation. People do care about these things. Maybe it's just our sub-community, no matter. like how you participate in it. But in reality, that actually did happen to Ethereum,

which has decentralization as principles. And I just think if, like, I don't think the coverage of a similar event today would be as fair. And I definitely don't think anyone would expect a chain to be able to go from strength to strength after that. I should also disclose that, like, when that happened, I did do those same tweets.

And I was like, Ethereum Cash is the future. Ethereum Classic, I was like, it was me and Barry Silber. but that clearly Ethereum classic is the decentralized Ethereum. So, like, applying decentralization above all else as the primary principle, it, like, failed in that specific case because the primary principle was people create value and Vitalik and people around Vitalik create value. Name provenance is important.

All those kind of things were more important than decentralization in valuing. Ethereum versus Ethereum Classic, despite my political and personal bias towards Ethereum Classic, that was just wrong as an investment thesis and is historically wrong. Like Ethereum Classics are zero right now, despite Barry still trying to pump it. I actually curious to talk about that. So I think we talked about a lot of decentralization versus centralization, your thoughts on that. But you mentioned Ethereum Classic as being sort of a loss. And I'm curious to tap into kind of your brain over the last 10 years. and some of the things that you've gotten wrong over the last 10 years that you can help us with.

Because I feel like what happens is we're all humans and we all make same mistakes every cycle. So you meet someone new in crypto, like class of 2020, class of 2021. You're like, oh, I know exactly what mistakes you're about to make, right? And so maybe people listening, Kobe, can avoid those mistakes by hearing from some of yours. And then also would love to hear about some of your biggest wins. So some of the things that you've been really right about. But first let's talk about those losses. Yeah, so I've made every possible mistake you can make in crypto virtually.

Like all of them, as new ones are invented, it means they're probably invented by me. I've done virtually everything wrong. Often in crypto, you do something wrong and you get rewarded for it, so I've had those as well. I think my biggest wins and my biggest losses were all by making mistakes, because my biggest portfolio wins were making, like, throwing risk management completely out of the window and, like, doing something that now I would no longer do because I didn't understand properly then. I didn't, you know, I didn't know what I was doing or what was important. My first two trades ever, after buying Bitcoin, my first, like, investments in other things were my biggest, like, portfolio multipliers ever. I did, like, like 200, 300x in my first few months in crypto by buying some alt coins that were just like completely trash. But at the time, I didn't know why they were trash. Like I bought something called QuarkCoin, which was promoted by a YouTuber called Bill Still, who's like 150 years old. And he's like a Duma,

like finance guy. He promoted QuarkCoin and it had like seven different hashing algorithms. And I was brand new and I was like seven seems like a lot. So let's go all in that. That seems like seven times better than Bitcoin. And like, because loads of people saw this Bill Still thing and then other people started going, oh, Bill Still might be onto something. It went parabolic. And during the, like, time it went parabolic, I researched like, okay, why would you need seven hashing algorithms? And it turns out you don't. Like, it turns out that's not a useful thing. And it was just like a, like a small story someone had told, an experiment, someone had done. So I sold it. And I managed to sell like virtually at the top. And then I did the same thing again on like some something else.

And all of a sudden I'd like looked my way into massive portfolio multiples and could take the game a little bit more seriously because I'd gone from having like zero money and being in debt to having like something substantial. But I also did that on stuff where the opposite happened. And you know, I like lost like third of my portfolio in a single trade. And honestly, over time, you can just look back and at everything as like, Oh, that was a really good moment for me. That was a really good moment for me of these, like, small compounding wins. But the main thing that I would attribute to, like, attribute to at least my investment style was, like, trade things and return to value, where originally I thought the only value was Bitcoin, right?

I was played alt-kinds from as soon as I got into crypto, but my long-term thesis was Bitcoin is the only real value in this space so far. and I'll trade attention or narrative or whatever I'll participate in the waves in order to get more Bitcoin. So I need to get as much Bitcoin as I can before everyone else figures out that Bitcoin is really valuable. People don't know right now. I know. I need to get as much as I can and I don't have any money so I can't just like buy it. I'll trade my way there.

And then over time that evolves and I learned about Ethereum and I thought, okay, maybe Ethereum now has crossed its chasm into being value too. And I think maybe there's a handful of five, ten things. that fit that sort of description today of like value that you should try and own before everyone figures out how valuable it is. And by taking this sort of approach of like everything else is actually worth zero as much as you can trick yourself in real time or phoma or whatever, if you have this at the back of your head, this is all worth zero apart from these value assets. You're basically flipping penny stocks in order to like buy more Apple or Amazon or whatever.

then you're happy to take a 5x and something else and move on. You never go, oh, I got this like really great trade where I held it for a billion percent because you don't subject yourself to those things. You go, I made a profit, I get more value. I make a profit, I get more value systemically over time. And this also helped me, like, avoid the massive L's as well because you take a sort of hawkrucks approach to investing where you split your soul into like a million different pieces across everywhere

because you know the only thing you have to do is like retain this value. So you can't lose all of your Bitcoin and a hack. You can't lose all your Ethereum and, you know, like some smart contract. Is that what you still do, by the way, Cope? Do you still like denominate in Bitcoin and ether all of your gains? I denominate in Ethereum, Ethereum from 2020 onwards, basically. And you still denominate in Ethereum then. You still dominate in Eith, all your wins.

Yeah, because like the way I think about it, right, is like, wow. You've got to consider what do you think, is the most liquid asset that you could hold your entire net worth in. So in 2020, like May 2020, you go, okay, if you think crypto is going to get really hot now because the inflation narrative is becoming mainstream, that was one of the early things that I understood, like, you know, they're printing money and Bitcoin should therefore appreciate over time because the denominator gets, is worth less and less over time. If you think there's going to be a bull run, you should denominate in that asset that you think is

liquid enough for your entire net worth, but that will perform the best. So I thought in 2020, Ethereum will outperform Bitcoin. So I should put my entire net worth into Ethereum because I think that will perform the best, but it's more liquid enough for me to enter, to enter an exit in a moment if I need to. And then I should spend the bull market trying to outperform Ethereum because I should be only deploying when I think something is going to perform better than Ethereum. And I can't put my entire net worth into other things that I think are going to perform better than Ethereum because when the time comes to sell, I might slip the entire chart to zero by trying to sell. So you then position based on what you think liquidity requirements are and stuff.

So I was not as early as everyone else. I didn't buy any of the seed rounds or anything, but I was early-ish to the all L1 trades, but I miscalculated how liquid they'd become. I didn't realize that, you know, Sam was going to go full like Solana Jesus. and I didn't realize that three arrows were going to become, you know, the, you know, the legion of avalanche factions. So I didn't know that they would be so liquid. So maybe it was a mistake. Maybe in December 2020 you could have said, actually you put full net worth in Solana now because it's going to perform better than Ethereum and it will be liquid enough to exit. I actually don't know if it would have been.

I didn't check. I don't like to look at my mistakes. But, yeah, I denominate in Ethereum because I call Ethereum effectively the... like market average, like the market performance. That's the thing that you should be trying to outpace if you do this full time as an investor or trader. Because if you spent like the last 18 months actively trading and investing, and you could have just held the Ethereum. And it's like you just wasted.

It could have been outside having like a nice time with the sun, which I haven't seen in a long time. Kobe, you have your history in crypto so rich. When we ask you questions, you pull in things from so many distant corners of crypto. in order to, you know, elaborate upon why you think the things that you think. And something that I've coined in my own brain is this term I've been using crypto brain. You have like crypto brain. Just too much crypto going in the brain. You wake up, check the prices. Check Twitter. Like, you learn about, you read a white paper. Too much crypto. And like, you've been in here for almost a decade now. I'm in my fourth year and my second bull market. And oh my God, is this bull market just like kind

of draining? It's just like weighing on me. It's so exhausting. How has, you dealt with crypto brain? Because like crypto brain is like, I have like toxic levels of crypto in my brain. I think about it like 16 hours a day. All my friends are in crypto. My entertainment is crypto Twitter. When I'm done with that, I go up and pull up crypto YouTube. How have you dealt with like crypto brain? How have you managed the like depressive toxicity levels of crypto in your brain? Yeah. So I've got several answers for this. But my first observation is in a way what you're describing is not a crypto phenomenon. In fact, everyone in the world is currently experiencing the same thing, but with their hobby of choice.

And some people have chosen crypto, some people have chosen GameStop, some people have chosen video games, some people have chosen anti-NFT parading. Some people have chosen coronavirus vaccine, like opinion groups or whatever. And I think it is a result of the world coming increasingly digital and online communities, like formation, like how that's change. changed over time, plus the pandemic and people being inside quite a lot and loads of stuff that people do, socialise, being closed for a year or so. So I'm hoping it actually goes away a little bit as and if the world goes back to being a bit more normal. But for me, I tried for as long as possible to have crypto as a hobby and only a hobby. So I always tried to have another job, even if I didn't need a job.

I had like an investment portfolio and like was working on building something. And I tried to make sure that something was never in crypto, you know, always getting job offers or having like stuff I wanted to build in crypto. It was, it felt better to me to have my entire net worth and attention and like spare time in crypto. And then this hedge of real world where if this weird drug money stuff that I got involved in a while ago went to zero, I would. at least have a normal career and other interests and be like able to do other stuff.

I think it really helped. And like having a routine and having people, friends with like normal hobbies that were not related to like self-custodying internet tokens in a massive online casino. It was like it was very healthy. I gave all that up. So now I don't have any of that anymore. And yeah, I mean, I think you just got to be disciplined like all things.

The people that do best in crypto have like massive self-disciplined. discipline anyway. For me, I'm just like disciplined about spending time with family now and going to the gym and like playing video games and enjoying myself and stuff because I think that it makes me do better at the crypto stuff anyway, if I'm not like way too deep and in a in a massive hall. Especially now that like, especially crypto Twitter curates you the winners. Like your feed every day is the people that like won for the day or the person who's bored ape got stolen. That's all crypto Twitter is. There's loads of people who like just hit an, like, out of the park, 10,000 X in a day. And they're like, screenshot. Here's my gains

for the last six hours. And you're like, well, I'm doing terribly. And then there's like a dude who gave his seed phrase over because someone offered to buy it for double as long as they gave the seed phrase. Like, that's all Croxite Twitter is. So if you spend too much time on there, I think that you just, your mental gets a bit messed up. You focus on like people having the worst possible time and people having the best possible time instead of just like, what do I need to do today. I do think there is one thing that like crypto has really fucked up in my head, which is like a lot of my friends now are people I talk to and people have been doing crypto for 10 years or, you know, are all like now like Decker billionaires, right? So like, Susu messages

me sometimes to get my opinion on the market and I'm like, I don't know what his net worth is, but I'd estimate it's like 20 to 50 billion or something. Maybe I'm massively overestimating. People always do that to me. And then there's like, you know, these exchange owners and like, I'm in these like group chats of like oh geez who in the bear market were just sit and cope with each other and be like are we dead like did we believe in the wrong thing um and now they're all just so rich that in my head it fucked up the like what a lot of money is or like what the value of money is and I think that's the like weird most toxic thing and even crypto Twitter does this right like you follow these people who are all buying these like million dollar watches and like

insane houses and stuff. And I live like a much more normal life, I think, to those people. I did well in crypto. I didn't do as well, Suzu or Sam or the Alameda guys, but I don't buy like silly watches and stuff. And I find myself sometimes being completely disconnected from what a lot of money is. And like, that's the thing I try the most to like reset often because having been in the markets for 10 years and doing all right, puts you in a massive place of great privilege, but all of my friends and family did not listen to me. They thought I was weird and that this thing was like I was getting scammed in a MLM scheme or something. So the people around me in real world have really normal lives and normal associations. They know what a lot

of money is and, you know, they have like money problems and stuff. And then my friends on my phone are all like deck billionaires wondering, you know, if they're going to need to build their own, I don't know, waterfall or forest so they can. have clean air and water or something at some point. So, like, I think those two things are, like, really, like, difficult to reconcile. I don't want to become, like, a weird person. No offense to sue. I don't think he is a bit weird, but, wait. Does wealth weigh on you? I don't think so. In, in some ways, I think that it highlights how much of a scam everything is. Like, I knew it was before having any money. I did all right in crypto. People always massively overestimate my

networks. I get two things, like huge, massive, ridiculous overestimations and then like just some slight overestimations. It's like no one ever underestimates it. But I did all right. And, you know, I'm very comfortable now. But before I had money, I thought everything was a scam and it was all rigged and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now having money and being able to help my family out, for example, and seeing my parents' personalities change because they don't have to worry about certain things anymore, like making ends me or like what's going to happen when they retire or these kind of things, seeing their personalities change and getting to know them more as people because some number changed on a screen makes me, A, like everything seems like a giant scam,

but B, feel like I was also slightly robbed of experiencing that while I was growing up or while I was younger because they had these burdens and had to worry about them. So it doesn't weigh on me so much, but I do think a lot about that. Like, it feels like everything is a bit of a scam for some, like, weird numbers on a screen, and it means that people, like, live their lives in ways where they don't get to properly know the people around them because everyone's always worried about short-term stuff.

But I don't know. It's a good question, though. Well, so let me ask you, though, Kobe. So, like, where do you find your purpose after you, like, reach that point? God, we're going deep, aren't we? My purpose at the moment is to get to Diamond and League of Legends. It's been the same purpose for eight years, and I'm still in silver. But seriously, so I see lots of people.

And, you know, once you get past that post-scarcity mindset, right? And it just becomes one of the first bankless episodes we did. We were trying to talk about money. Like, what actually is money? And I remember David said something in that episode. Basically, money is just a point system. It's high score, man. We're all competing for high score.

And that's eventually what kind of the deck of billionaires get to. It's just like this big competition for high score. And so you see someone like SBF who's like, oh, once I reach my high score, whatever that number is, I'm just giving it all away. Like maybe that's become SBF's purpose in life. But it strikes me that that's a hard thing for a lot of crypto people to figure out. Once you get to the post-scarcity point, what do you do? Like what's the purpose? It's no longer, you got enough points.

You really want to compete with the Suufe on the scorecard? Or what do you do with life? Yeah, so I think it certainly is a points system at the high end. I think on the low end, it's not a point system at all. It's like whether people can like live in a comfortable and secure place and like whether they can eat and stuff. But like fortunately for me, I've always, I find it very easy to be interested in stuff. Like I find it easy to like be curious and explore things and have fun reading about

and doing different stuff. So I kind of got into crypto in the first place. I don't struggle too much with that. Like I, there's tons of stuff that I find really interesting. I'd like to explore. There's tons of things where I want to build things, or I like to know the people building those things and, like, talk to them about their challenges and stuff.

And I think there's loads of stuff in the world that, like, at the end of the day, while many of the crypto-OGs that had the sort of origin story that I described of like, oh, wow, the systems are scanned, and blah, blah, blah, they invested in Bitcoin for these reasons. And then, like, yeah, they got rich, but, like, the system didn't really change. So I think a lot of those people still have the same motives, and they're figuring out how to apply them in different ways and how to at least network and stay friends with the people

that all have those motives. I, like, a lot of my Twitter account and up only podcast stuff, it's not like, obviously, like it's just a bunch of thoughts and like it's not very sophisticated or well put together like you know you do research and stuff and your like real podcast people me and ledger don't know who the guest is going to be half the time like we just turn up and like what we're doing oh god do you know this person is no you that's like kind of what house is like but the purpose behind doing it is to have hopefully an engaging and honest way for people to keep up with what they're interested in and i write stuff on the substack because hopefully it's interesting to other people who have similar interest

to me and want to go through a similar, you know, sort of set of experiences and it might make it easier. And the stuff I'm funding not in the crypto world, stuff I'm like trying to find founders that are building or put teams together to like incubate ideas, they all have a similar kind of mission, but from a different perspective, like I'm very well exposed to crypto now and I hope that crypto can continue to do good in the world. world. But I also think that there needs to be a bunch of, like, well-funded capital and intellectual capital spent on non-crypto things that are solving the same problems. And I think over the last few years, with how Western governments have handled the pandemic and exploited the

inability for people to know what's real anymore, especially on the internet, in order to sort of plunder the current generation for like private wealth of like the mates, stuff like that is like, I'm not convinced that if it was on a blockchain, it wouldn't have happened. I think we'd be able to point to the transaction and they still go, I don't care. Yeah, so what? Sorry, we won't do it again. So I spent a ton of my time now doing stuff not in crypto. I spend like three days a week on crypto these days.

I spend a lot of time in real world other things, doing other stuff mostly. Ryan is going to pull up this alignment chart, Kobe, which I think you'll be familiar with. This is out of Dungeons and Dragons. And so people might be familiar with this. It's a three by three grid. From left to right, it goes lawful, neutral to chaotic. And then from top to bottom, it goes good, neutral to evil. Nine possible outcomes like lawful good, chaotic neutral, neutral evil, et cetera, et cetera.

So if you're listening on the podcast, you can check this out on the YouTube. but it's pretty self-explanatory. You can just Google it. Kobe, which are you? I don't think anyone's going to accept I'm anywhere in the left or the middle. We're instantly in the right. We're in the chaotic column. I would like to say chaotic good, but I will concede likely chaotic neutral. There's a guy that my old boss and my old job, I really respect,

he's had a really successful career in tech, was built some of the most important tech companies that currently exist at really pivotal moments in their sort of history. Once he told me I was chaotic good and I was like, I feel chaotic good now. And I feel on reflection, I'm actually probably chaotic neutral. But you've got the chaotic part, right?

I just liked it when I was chaotic good. So like chaotic neutral, aspiring to be chaotic good, but then there's like the other shoulder, sometimes like, just do the evil thing. I'm like, yeah, go on then. What about your podcast, go host, Ledger? Where's Ledger? Oh, he's Lawful Good, In He?

Ledger's Lawful Good. Ledger's Lawful Good. Yeah, come on. It can't be anywhere else. Kobe, is it true you've never met Ledger in person? Yeah, we're never going to meet. You do it a podcast without meaning your co-host in person. Wow, that sounds familiar, David.

Yeah, that's crazy. Who does that? Have you met? Are you two men? No. We've never met. We live in the same country, so there's absolutely no excuse. How far away in the same country?

Oh, yeah. I mean, different coes. Opposite side. Yeah, it's not like David's next city over, but yeah. Yeah, different coes. But like we started it in COVID and then if you met Ledger, would it destroy the podcast? That's why I'm worried about with David. Yeah, I think we've just agreed that would be the end.

Maybe weird. I don't know how tall is. I like to imagine he's like eight feet tall. He's like a teletubby. So if he's like short of me, I think it'd be really weird. But, yeah, again, we started COVID as well. So it was like, and we didn't really mean for it to be a podcast, actually. do you know Bitlord, the Australian guy who's like got de-platformed when he was, he was in China when COVID started happening.

And then he posted this weird video of him like smoking in a hospital after catching COVID in like January or February of 2020 before COVID was like a thing. And then he just disappeared from Twitter. Like that was it. He was gone. And for like a year or so he was gone. It was like super strange. He was in China doing these real weird videos on COVID. I think most of them were the time.

higher or like satirical commentaries on. I have no idea. It was extremely internet, like deep internet content. And they disappeared for a year. And then he DM'd me a year later, like, I'm back. And I was like, we've got to do a stream to say like what has been happening to you. No one knows where you went. Oh, my God. And then I couldn't make the stream work because I'd never done it before. So Ledja was like, I'll host it for you. And we hosted it. And loads of people watched it. And he was like, do you want to do this again? And we're like, yeah, all right. Cool. Sure, fine. I've got nothing else to do. I'm locked in my house. That's kind of how it happened.

You know, I'm not done with this grid, though. But should we name some other crypto personalities for this list? Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. All right, it'll be fun. What do you reckon, Barry Silver? I don't know Barry Silver all that well. Lawful.

I think in the lawful camp, certainly. Definitely lawful. I'm tending towards the bottom left square there, rectangle. All of his products are neutral, but I think when you combine them all together, it's too big. It's too much of an oral baron type guy. figure. Could be lawful evil. Look, he bought $80 million of Z cash

with other people's money. He goes in lawful evil. I think it's probably neutral or good, but he gets into evil just for that one away. Okay, what do you think about three arrows capital as an entity? I reckon true neutral. True neutral? Yeah. I think they watch how the world works and try and act on that, and they don't necessarily try and dictate the future. as much as people think they do.

I think probably true neutral. I think you'll have a bunch of people watching who are definitely in the evil category. How about Vitalik? Vitalik Buren. Neutral good? Interesting, neutral good. How about Anthony Sizzano?

I don't know enough about Sassano. I don't know where you would put him on the lawful chaotic stuff because I don't know enough about him, but he like makes like really, really, really, he like works really, really hard on his content. and like no one watches it. So he's like, I think. I think that I'll assume.

But I mean, he can see it. He can look at his view count. Like, it's not a secret. That no one watches it. But he does it anyway. So I think, I think that means he's like securely in good because like he has principles and he wants to share about the things that are really interesting to him.

I don't think he's chaotic. So I would go lawful or neutral. But I don't know him well enough. And I didn't mean to diss it. He's good, very good content. just people don't i think it's because of how he looks they don't like it i'm joking i'm joking it's the flat cap people don't like flat cap they don't people people don't trust people with flat caps on what do you think about um kyle samani um this is fun neutral evil

why evil we don't have to answer that neutral evil neutral evil or also true neutral maybe Maybe lawful evil? I could see it. No, he's lawful neutral. Awful neutral. Lawful neutral, yeah, because evil is like doing stuff against other people intentionally, right? Like going out of your way to harm others

and like, there's no chance he's doing that. Neutral is like just for self-benefit, right? It's just to like, like, don't care if it's good for other people, don't care if it's bad for other people, mostly just interested in self. And good is like trying to do things for the benefit of others. So I don't think you can get a VC and put them in the good category at the top

Because at best I think you can probably get neutral And multi-coin, very lawful They've bought all the seed rounds very fairly Sold them very fairly, I imagine So although they're in crypto, so shit Maybe you can't be in lawful if you're in crypto God, this is too hard Let's just stay with neutral evil

How about Michael Sailor? Sailor think Bitcoin people that watch that will argue that he goes into good as well, but I would say probably lawful neutral. Is he a convicted criminal? Is he? No idea. I don't know about that history. That would be new to me. I think he got done by the SEC in the year 2000. But I don't think it's a convicted criminal. I think that's too strong language. But I think he got in trouble for some security stuff in the dot-com bubble. So I don't know. I don't know, honestly. I think what he's trying to do now is motivated from a place of good. So I will probably say lawful or neutral good, probably for

Saylor. I think Saylor is really, really interesting in that no matter what happens, he is, like, it's a great story, right? Like, I was thinking about this the other day. I watched back his clip on, you know, mortgage your house, take all your assets, sell them, put it in Bitcoin, like, lend against all your stuff, put it in Bitcoin. And like, since he does, he, did that speech, I think Bitcoin price is basically the same. And on a long enough time horizon over time, which is, I think, what he's intending to say, I think he's probably right about that. But imagine if he'd done that speech about like Salana. It's like, Solana was like $1. Now it's $200. He'd be like an icon. It would be the most cool fucking thing on the internet.

But this dude just would like put everything and go all in now. So, yeah, no matter what happens, if Bitcoin goes to zero, what an amazing story. He, like, raised multiple billions to, like, just market buy. And if it goes, like, where I think we all believe it should be going over the next sort of 10, 20 years, again, what a legend. He's just borrowed the cheapest debt in, like, sort of history to buy something that's actually worth more than the paper he paid for it. So either way, I think it's, like, just what a legend.

And you see the picture he posts the other day when he used to work at McDonald's? Yeah. I did. It was fucking amazing. Wait, what did it say on it? It said something on the picture, like, um, doing everything it takes or something like that. Yeah, everything it takes. Something like, yes. It reminded me of those McDonald's memes, though. Like, I'm getting my McJod back because I, you know, failed in crypto. But I mean, I like that he's able to post that because I think it means he can, um, uh, he appreciates, I think some of the like self-referential humor in crypto more than I thought

he might have done. His interesting character, because he, he, he, he, he's an interesting character, because if you talk about him in a nuanced way, like what he's doing is totally insane, and it's insanely cool, but it's like, that is pretty out there, but there's obviously the people that watch your podcast book for Bitcoin,

Peter's podcast, they get, like, upset if you say nuanced stuff about him. So I find it difficult to talk about by feelings on Sailor properly because of that, but like, no matter what,

like, what a fucking legend. And especially at the start of the year when he was, like, hosting these big talks for other CFOs to, like trying expose them to the light that he has seen. Yeah, he's a legend. All right.

Two more and then we'll wrap this up. Charles Hoskinson. You know, for this you have to question, like what his intentions are, I think. And that's always really, really difficult to know. I think what I like about Charles is this sort of weird lack of self-awareness. When he has these interactions in public, they're just objectively hallucin. hilarious, but he doesn't seem to see that. Like, you know, remember the Metamask thing is really obvious now,

where he said, like, you're asking me to the founder of I-O-H-K, the CEO of I-O-H-K, the founder of Ethereum and Cardano, he's a support email. But, like, he's talking to, like, a support person at the time. Like, it's not like the CEO of Metamask was saying, please do this. It was like a support person was referring you to the correct support person. Like, I think there are a lot of things like that where there's a lack of

self-awareness that makes it objectively funny and that makes it possible to meme about. I think what he believes he is doing is for the good of the world, right? I think he believes what he's doing is to make the world a better place. He's just taking a different road to get there that takes a longer time to get there than everyone else. And maybe in doing that, ignoring wisdom from history about how to build things that interact with real people quickly and, you know, efficiently. But I don't think it would be unreasonable for people to take the opposite opinion and say,

actually, he's promoting something in a dishonest way and he's selling it as something that it's not and potentially risking both portfolios and opportunity cost of his YouTube subscribers by doing that. I think I'd lean towards the go. I like to naturally try and see the Godin people. So I think I'd like to pretend. or make myself believe that he's doing it to be good. So I'll say his neutral good, but he might be true neutral. Don't think he's chaotic.

Don't think he's lawful. Fair enough. That's a very charitable take. What do you say? I'm a little bit towards the bottom. Actually, all the way into the evil camp? Like neutral. I totally agree with that.

I don't think he's evil. I haven't seen him do any evil stuff. Flirts with it. You know my favorite Charles moment was when, someone, he posted a video because, very sad, the coffee shop you went to had like a gun attack there or something, and some people died and he used to go to that coffee shop all the time. And he posted a video on the thoughts of it. And it was titled something that made it sound like it was about Cardano.

And the first reply was like this guy being like, not going to watch, I guess it's going to be more delays or something like that. And he just went off at this guy. He like unleashed what you know it'd been brewing. Yeah, you know it'd been brewing inside him, like getting like these jabs on the internet from all these people over the years making jokes about Cardano. And he was like, I'm just going to let it all out on this one guy. And I was like, wow, I really like Charles now. Like he's just let go. And that's what I want from Charles.

I want to see the authenticity. I want to see him go like, shut the fuck up. I'm trying to build something in the way I want to build it. And I think this is the best way to build it. and you're all fucking chirping while you don't build fucking anything. That's what I want him to say, but it doesn't say that. And because it's like veiled and instead just talks about how great things are going,

that's where I struggle more to believe it's authentic. Because if I were him, I'd be like, yeah, we have missed the year of the alternative L1. Like all these platforms have had huge booms and it was a failure of ours to not be ready at the same time they were ready and not to onboard. millions of users during a year where millions of users were onboarded into crypto, like our product wasn't working. And we had a head start on all these other L-1s. But here's why it's that way. And here's how we're going to make it in the future. But instead, it's just like, you think defy's fucking easy, dude. I like to believe these people have good intentions. I agree. I do think that

humans are inherently good. So it's actually difficult to find yourself at the very bottom. Last one. Bankless. Where's bankless? Probably lawful good, like goody two shoes kind of thing. Teacher's pet. Yeah, teacher's pet, exactly. Yeah. I think what Bitcoin did, right, is probably neutral, good, lawful good. And then bankless is like lawful good, you know, going with the like big chain that everyone's allowed to use, like not the the spicy ones that where people can, you know, where there's a bit of nuance in whether you can make money there.

But that's probably where it lies. I think, op-only probably chaotic on the right again, don't know where. Cowing neutral, probably. We just get drunk. So, Kobe, this entire podcast has been a lot of fun, but we're also recording it at a time where the crypto market is not having much fun, right? It's like people are looking at their portfolios and I don't know how far prices are down at this point in time. But, you know, Jerome Powell said some things.

He sneezed and looks like crypto is headed towards a bearish start. to 2022. Do you think it ends there? Are you like up only? What do you think for the year? Like just zooming out and being like, okay, 2021 was fantastic for crypto. What do you think 2022 has in store for us? Is it overall going to be bullish or bearish? Yeah. I mean, if you look at Ethereum's chart, it looks super weird because of the last 10 weeks have been the worst price action for like three or four years, just like a slow grind downwards where like everything was just sold in. it every time it looked good, it just got sold into it, which is pretty interesting because even though you've had big dumps, you had the May dump and stuff, it didn't look as bad as

this. It was just like a correction after a parabolic move, whereas this walked its way up and then walked its way down at no point really started accelerating. So that looks pretty bad. And if it doesn't bottom, if we don't get like a washout bottom soon, I think it starts to look like pretty horrible. If you look at the Bitcoin chart though, I mean, it's had, well, the price has been up all year. It's had kind of bearish year, like comparatively to market. But that looks more normal and a bunch of all layer ones actually look okay. Like atom looks really good and NIA looks good and stuff like that, where they just don't seem to care as much about this like downturn at the moment. And I think that might be the story of this year, which is a sort of dissemination of markets or a

decorrelation within crypto. I think Bitcoin and Ethereum just don't have the adoption yet. So trading like risk assets, they're like hyper-collarated to stock market and stuff. But within crypto, you're not going to get the same. Everything moves together anymore because everything moves together when there is a net inflow into crypto, right? The crypto industry generally is growing because people are just pouring money into everything, everything goes up together. And I think throughout this year, there will not be uniform flows into everything. I think people are going to be more selective about where they put their money. I think you have tons of of unlocks happening this year in a bunch of Altlayer 1s, D5 protocols, GameFi protocols,

Metaverse tokens across the entire landscape of crypto. And they're brutal. They're like things that have $20 billion fully diluted valuations, but a market cap of a billion or something. So like the flow is super small compared to what is being unlocked over the cost of this year. And I think those assets have a very difficult time. And one thing that will be important to watch is if that has a knock-on impact on, like, stronger, stronger things. So I think there'll be a dissemination of capital.

Some things might continue to do well. Some things will literally go to zero. I don't think this, I think this is the first, the first time we've had unlocks at like the froth of a bull market, right? Like, because in 2017, everything was ICO, everyone bought in the same day, immediately unlocked. It wasn't, this is locked for several years. And when that fundraising style changed and people were buying locked coins in 2018, 2019, those are starting to come unlocked in a bull market for the first time ever. Stuff came unlocked before the bull market was frothy, before valuations were really high.

And now it's unlocks happening into retail populated markets. And that didn't happen in 2017. And in 2017, stuff was able to go minus 95%. So a lot of those tokens can go minus 95%. and the VCs will still be up 510x. So they can go 95% again and then they'll break even. So I think there's going to be a lot of pain in particular parts of the market. And when that happens,

I think there's generally a lot of people who just go, like, fuck this market, I'll sell everything. So I don't think it's going to be as exuberant as the last couple of years was. But equally, I am not willing yet to be committed to being bearish. If the cycle ended here, it would end in a really strange place. because we had a blow off top and then recovered and made new highs. And that's like never happened in history. And I like to be like an anthropological type trader just looks at what's happened before

to make financees about the future. So I think it's going to be a weird year. Like I think anyone making like up or down bets from here, they could just both get embarrassed if you get both. So do you think it all depends on like macro conditions? Like what central banks do? I don't know because I think that's a thing that people currently have convinced themselves they care about a lot, but macro conditions prior, like Bitcoin and Ethereum have like gone more

parabolic through worse macro conditions in the past. So it's just this thing that's changing and people have agreed as important, you know, as they as they do. Like everyone agreed at IP 1559 was super important. You had this massive run up to it. And then it's like, everyone was like, oh, that's over now. We need to care about something new. And then it actually starts to matter because there's a slight change in economics of the supply demand. So I think macro will be important. And I think the Fed is showing they're going to start handling inflation. They're not calling it transitory anymore and stuff. But I think there'll be, I think there's a bunch of stuff that's undervalued and there's a bunch of stuff that's overvalued that will correct throughout the year. And hopefully,

you can see recoveries in like major Bitcoin Ethereum, like the boring assets. But if they're unable to recover in the like first half of the year, then I think it's like truly going to be Goblin Town. Could be Goblin Town. Maybe not, though. Kobe, this was a lot of fun, man. This was a blast. Thanks for coming on Bankless.

Thanks for doing this with us. We had a great time. No problem. When do I come back? When are you available? Look. You want to do layer zero? I don't have a job, mate.

I just don't do anything. I've played video games and then go talk to some people who are building cooler stuff than what I've built in last. Enjoy your weekend. You know, so I actually think Kobe, like I'm going to agree with your boss on this one. I think you're a bit more chaotic good than first lets on. Maybe. It's easy to appear chaotic good when you're being curated, right? You're on a podcast so you think about what you're saying. It's much more easy to be chaotic evil when you're in like a bedroom by yourself and you're pissed off

with someone and you're like, I don't do it. It's pleasant. So I'm happy to stay with neutral. Well, either way, man. You fit in whatever corner of the box you feel like, but it's been a pleasure to have you. We really appreciate it. And, uh, For bankless listeners, of course, you got to follow Kobe on Twitter. He's a must follow from my perspective. Some other action items for you as well. Check him out on Substack. So this is cobi.substack.com.

Recently learned that Kobe is also a phenomenally talented writer. So some of the articles he's put out. And I don't know, Kobe, whether you went through some kind of like, you just punched them out over the holidays. Pounded these out. Yeah. It's like five, six articles all at once. It's fantastic. So, look, it's Christmas.

So what else you're going to do? Well, there you go. So some extra time. Go check those articles out. Also, subscribe to the Up Only podcast. Maybe Bankless's sister podcast. Maybe the Ying to Bankless's Yang. I'm not sure.

But fantastic podcast. David and I listen to it often as well. Wrists and disclaimers, of course, guys, we've got to do the lawful good thing and give you these disclaimers. ETH is risky. Defy is risky. All of crypto is risky. None of this was financial advice.

Don't think for a second it was. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we're headed west. is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.