Bankless - 19 - DeFi vs Banks | Hasu

Episode Date: June 28, 2020

Episode: #19 June 29, 2020 Hasu is a free-thinker. A truth seeker. A rare voice in crypto. He's not afraid to push back on tribal dogma. He breaks rank with Bitcoiners on some topics and Ethereans on others. Yet he still considers himself a member of both tribes and respects the mysticism (and even dogma) of these deeply social systems. In the spirit of Satoshi he's pseudonymous. We don't know his actual identity. But we know who he is from his body of writing that has influenced our thinking on many crypto topics.  What does he think about Ethereum? About crypto banks?  About DeFi?  We covered it all: Hasu's fave writers Body and Spirit of crypto networks Is Hasu an Etherean? Why Bitcoin might not survive How Maker is like a central bank Is EIP1559 bullish for ETH? The best Rick & Morty episode Join us next Monday for a fresh episode! ----- Tools from our sponsors to go bankless: Multis - bank your business without a bank (1 mon. trial!) Ramp - the fiat onramp for DeFi (mention Bankless!) Monolith - holy grail of bankless Visa cards Aave - money lego for lending & borrowing ----- Resources discussed: (Article) A Bankless Nation (Part 1) (Article) A Bankless Nation (Part 2) (Listen) The above articles read by David Hasu Articles: Analysis of EIP-1559 Why Bitcoin might not survive a Bitcoin Standard The future of money could be discretionary Unpacking Bitcoin’s Social Contract Evangelizing Bitcoin ----- Episode Actions: Read our favorite Hasu articles (see above) Listen to episode 7 on ETH scarcity for more EIP1559 Give Bankless a 5-star review on iTunes! Also...subscribe to Bankless YouTube to watch State of the Nation every Tuesday. ----- Subscribe to podcast on iTunes | Spotify | YouTube | RSS Feed Leave a review on iTunes Share the episode with someone you know! ----- Don't stop at the podcast! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program Watch Bankless shows and tutorials on YouTube Visit official Bankless website for resources Follow Bankless on Twitter Follow Ryan on Twitter Follow David on Twitter

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. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, we have a fantastic show with Hasu. Tell us about it. Hazu is one of the few people that I consider a secular thinker in the crypto space. He's very sober in his thoughts. He thinks clearly. And there have been just, he's produced a ton of content that the most incredible thing that I think about the content that he produces is that we've seen companies make choices based off of the content that hasu and the content that comes out of uncommon core. So, Hazu, we would call him a person that is the M-Zero of thought, I would say. There's just a lot of memes, a lot of ideas. is a lot of concepts that comes out of what Hazu produces. So getting Hazu onto the bankless podcast was an absolute necessity. And he did a great job walking us through how he thinks about the space.

We talk a lot about the concept of a blockchain crypto system as kind of like an organism, kind of a cohesion of stakeholders that creates some sort of that has a body and then also a spirit, right? It has the physical code and the in the, in the, physical people running their nodes, but then it also has like the social contract, right? It has the implied values of that system and how these things interact and the different ways that they cohere together. You know, it's cool. I think Hasu thinks of himself as a as a Bitcoiner, but also an Ethereum. So this is kind of a good follow up to our Nick Carter conversation because I think both Nick and he think in, they're both free thinkers, as you said. And

many of their ideas intersect and compliment one another. But what I love about Haseu is he is not afraid to sort of shake things up. So I think he originally maybe came more from the Bitcoiner community or Bitcoiner side of things, but he's not afraid to break rank and write articles like why Bitcoin might not survive the Bitcoin standard. That was the title of an article he wrote. And it was about how crypto banks might sort of infiltrate Bitcoin. and break up the decentralized social contract and value system of the network. So he's definitely not afraid to go push back on norms and to push back on ideas. And part of the reason I think he can do that is he's actually a pseudo-anonymous account.

So on Twitter and everywhere he posts, you know, there's no profile shot. We don't actually know who Hasu is. He's got sort of this Rick and Morty with an eyepatch avatar everywhere. And that's, that's, you know, what we know of Hasu. To me, he's like from Rick and Morty. He's dropping all of this wisdom. But what's so cool is that, you know, the, the crypto community is very much a merit-based social economy.

So it doesn't matter who he is, really. It's, we judge Hasu based on the quality of ideas that he presents and not based on, you know, his reputation or pedigree. have no idea who he actually is, but no, he is a fantastic thinker, just given what he's written and the way he presents himself. Every conversation that I have with Hazu, I always find immensely valuable. And I'm sure you, the listener, will too. We also talk about common topics such as EIP-1559 and the issue of the growing world of

crypto banks and how that influences this crypto industry and what it will look like into the future. So evergreen topics and coming from a guy who thinks about them a lot. So this is a fantastic interview. Before we get into that interview, let's talk about some bankless things. Both part one and part two of a bankless nation I've written are up and on the bankless website. So you guys should check them out. It's two different articles. One kind of goes into the past history of nations.

One goes into the future history of digital nations. We talk about these concepts in this episode with Hazu. And so I definitely recommend reading those. If you guys don't like to read, but instead you prefer audio content as you are a listener of a podcast, you can go to the bankless YouTube where I read these articles to you. And I also scroll through the article. So you can read it with me, but I read it aloud. Read it right into your ears.

So it makes it really easy. And then while you're there, you might as well just subscribe to the bankless YouTube. Yeah, the bankless YouTube is really catching fire. these days. We actually just released a new show that we're publishing first on YouTube. It's called State of the Nation where we talk about topical news items that are most relevant to the bankless nation. And we're releasing that on YouTube every Tuesday. We'll also publish it to this podcast stream as well on Wednesdays. So from here on out on Mondays, you're going to be getting a typical edition of the bankless podcast. And then on Wednesdays, on this podcast stream,

You can listen to you state of the nation. And you can also catch that a day early if you go to YouTube and subscribe to our channel. So to do that, just go to YouTube, type in bankless and it'll pop right up. So we are about to dig into the interview. But before we do, we should take a minute and talk about our sponsors. Maltes gives you the ability to run your business without a bank. That is the dream. It is the first ever bankless bank account for entrepreneurs who want to run their business.

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Maltis has been featured on bankless. We're huge fans of the product. They're adding Fiat on ramp soon. And as you are listening to this on June 22nd, they are launching a completely revamped app. You've got to check it out. If you're starting a business, want to run a business in crypto, check out multis.com in their revamped app. We're going to be doing a video pretty soon and publishing it on the bankless YouTube channel as well. All right.

So you need to go to mults.com. That's M-U-L-T-I-S dot co and check it out. When you mention bankless, they'll put you ahead of the queue. they'll give you better priority and let you sign up quicker. In this episode with Hazu, we talk about the influence of exchanges, crypto exchanges and how they turn into crypto banks and how that starts to dictate what these chains look like. However, getting value onto these systems doesn't always require a crypto bank.

And that's where Monolith comes in. Coming soon on Monolith is an on ramp into your Monolith smart contract wallet directly from your bank account. So you don't need to pass through any sort of crypto exchange, crypto bank to get your value into Ethereum. Monolith, for those that don't know, is a smart contract wallet that also connects to a crypto visa card. So you can go to the store, swipe your visa card, as you normally do. And instead of pulling out dollars from your bank account, it pulls out die from your smart contract wallet. So this is a way to live a bankless life without having it impact you and your daily livings with your friends and family.

And you don't have to be that weird person that only has crypto money and no real money. So it wraps your Ethereum address in a visa card. And visas accepted basically all over the world. And you still get to have access to your die earning that interest rate in DFI at the same time. So check them out at monolith.xy Z to get your bankless visa card today. All right, guys, let's go ahead and get right into the interview with Hasbro. Hey everyone, we are excited to have Hasu with us. Hasu is a crypto researcher. He is also a writer. He's read a ton of stuff you've probably already read. If not, his ideas are likely embedded in your subconscious as they are in mind. Hasu, it is fantastic to have you today. We're really excited about this. Yeah, Sam, I'm really excited to be here, guys. Okay, so when I was looking at the volume of writing that you've done over the years since, I don't know, 2017,

2018 when you started to really get active in crypto and publishing, I was just overwhelmed. Like, there are a lot of even your earlier ideas that I feel like are embedded in my own subconscious. But I want to ask you this question. You know, maybe it's not your most popular article, but what's your favorite article that you've written so far? Well, first of all, first off, that's what you said is probably the biggest compliment that you could give to me. I don't know, I just love to write stuff where people would say, or that becomes basically part of this, what everyone believes, right? It's, I don't know how to put it, yeah, but because I myself, I'm influenced by some writers very strongly. And it's just, we talked about this a little bit before the show started, but I feel like it's worth repeating here.

but we all have these kind of people who influence our own thinking in a very strong way. And for me, for example, he's not the most popular guy or like he doesn't tweet very much and so on. But a lot of my thinking, for example, is strongly influenced by reading Paul Storzer's blog, truthcoin.org, I believe. So a lot of times when I write something, and I actively wonder, okay, where does this particular thought of mine originate? Then it's like there's like a 25% chance or something that I first set the thought while reading his blog or picking up something that he said. Yeah, and there are a bunch more people like that. So James Perswitch is someone who is probably almost at the same level as Paul for me, just in terms of when he says something, then I listen so intently because just historically there's such a

large chance that when they say something, then it becomes like it permanently alters my thinking. That's so funny because so I have to check out Paul. I've read some of James's stuff. I'll have to check out Paul a bit more too because I feel like you're probably in that category for me, at least personally. And Nick Carter, who, who we had a couple episodes ago is probably another one who's in that camp for me too. But like it's it's very cool how the crypto social like contract or the social layer, I guess I should say sort of works because it very much, it's it's sort of a just a free,

open thinking society, especially among some of some crypto thinkers who haven't descended into weird, you know, maximalist kind of like narrow-minded paths. And each of us kind of build on what another says and sort of take an idea, you know, further. And it really develops this incredibly rich social layer that I haven't personally seen anywhere else. I don't know if it exists anywhere else, but I haven't personally seen it. Yeah.

And even, um, even when it comes to maximalism, that's, it's so fascinating to observe, like, in every aspect of this complex or these complex social dynamics that we have in the crypto community, there's always something to analyze and to draw an interesting takeaways from, in my opinion. So the way that just the kind of tribalism works in crypto, I mean, we've talked about this like so many times before, but they are very strong parallels to religious movements. And when I realized that it really transcended the debate for me and it made me bullish on a whole other level about cryptocurrency when I realized how religious the movement is.

And I'm generally surprised by how few people get this still or still see the religious aspects of crypto as a negative. because for me it's so massive like even though i don't participate in these kind of religious rituals and the way that i guess others do but just as an observer i look at them and i find it incredibly positive for the future if you have a movement that's that has ambitious goals and changing how the world works and you then having this this kind of religious structure is just in religious forever is just fantastic.

All right. So I'm glad you bring that up because so David and I were just talking about this yesterday on the first State of the Nation episode that we released. And we're talking talking about whether crypto is more similar to a religion or a nation state. And David, I think you made the comment that, well, to you, Bitcoin feels a bit more on the religion side, whereas maybe Ethereum is a bit more on the nation state that both sort of blend both you know, like both aspects together. What's your take, Hasse, is religion or nation state?

What's, what's crypto most like? Yeah, I read your article, actually. I thought it was good. So the way, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the way that you do, or like the main criterion that you define for the nation state was that it provides physical protection for its people, is correct? Or not even a nation state, but just a nation at large, right?

Yes. Like, so the whole idea was to expand the model of a nation into the groups of organizational schemes that have come throughout history. And religion would be one of the original schemes of a nation that one of the core features of it is that it offers protection for its own constituents. Yeah, yeah. I kind of buy into the, I guess you would, you could say like it's the Saboian way of thinking about this or also Harari, they both kind of have very similar attitude about this.

But so those both the state or the nation state and religions are both social technologies or social institutions that are that humans invent to increase their ability to cooperate with one another beyond the, the, the constant. finds of their small trusted social group. So it's always about scaling the ability to trust one another. And as a result, you can cooperate with one another. And they both operate in slightly different ways. So the punishment or like the way that I would say the state does it is where you would combine it with some kind of legal system. So you, post some rules that are, if the rules are paid, it's beneficial for everyone. It's just

like a social contract in that sense, right? But, like, you can't kill me. Or I can't kill you, but in return, I'm sure that you won't kill me. And we enforce these rules by, well, by by physical punishment in the case of the state. And in the case of religion, via some, Yeah, I guess I'm kind of more arcane threat, right? So it's the punishment in the afterlife or it's the fall from grace. I don't know what to call it. But in both, in both, it's also the threat of being rejected from your community. But that aside.

So they are both social technologies aiming to scale our ability to. to cooperate with one another by removing trust from the equation. And I don't think that there's, I don't think that's a difference between like Bitcoin and Ethereum there. To me, they, I think even in the future, I think it's already happening, but just this distinction between religion and the nation state, even in the physical world, it's just going to disappear. So, um,

The state can be a religion and the religion can be a state. And then there are other movements that have sort of the attributes of both a little bit. So I just think that the whole distinction between them is going to disappear. And Bitcoin and Ethereum definitely have attributes of both. I want to bring it back to the original question. So the Bitcoin to me is more of a religious nation, although it is. also like a nation state, but Ethereum to me is also closer to a nation state, but it is also has its religious components. Do you recognize that distinction? I guess I guess not really.

So, I mean, when you would say it's more like a religion, that that would imply to me that the properties are very strongly reliant on social norms, because that's what religion mostly does. It creates or the rules in a religious movement are upheld via the strong enforcement of social norms and values. And that's how you get these scalability benefits. But Bitcoin is just as much a technical protocol where rules are enforced by a network of computers that reject each other's messages if they don't follow or certain, well, if they don't follow the correct. protocol. So it's, do you have just as strict as an enforcement there. And in some ways, the enforcement in Bitcoin is arguably even stricter, right?

Because in Bitcoin, the, the, the Bitcoin community is more, more strongly believes in this, this notion that everyone should be able to validate the blockchain and we should reject the idea of weak subjectivity. so there should be no subjectivity at all in what is the heaviest chain. Whereas in Ethereum, the Ethereum community believes that, hey, it's okay, we can use checkpointing for validation.

And it is okay. If an attacker takes over a proof of stake network, then we can just fork them out on the social layer. So I feel like the enforcement is more strict and more physical in Bitcoin. So in that sense, in that sense, it might be like, Ethereum might even have some of these more religious aspects or more social aspects if you create religion with social enforcement. That's really interesting that you say that, Hussu. You know, one take on this.

And maybe part of the reason why David feels like Bitcoin has a bit more religious aspects to it and fervor about it is just it does feel like there is a richness in. Bitcoin that in the social layer, in sort of these enforced norms that isn't yet present in Ethereum, though Ethereum is kind of getting there, right? There are some very clear things in Bitcoin that you have to sort of subscribe to to be, you know, part to be a bitcoiner, right? And there's even you call them maximalists or you've written articles about an intolerant minority, people who go around and they enforce these norms, you know, through sort of purity tests. so-and-so is not a real bitcoiner if he was. He wouldn't say XYZ, right?

No. But possibly that's just because Bitcoin has been around for twice as long. You know, so it's had 10 years-ish and Ethereum's had five, and it's still kind of working itself out. So I think that maybe a closer comparison would be to check out Bitcoin in 2015 versus Ethereum today, where it's just starting to establish its norms. But on the topic of kind of these social coordination systems as a religion, right, I find it very interesting that when people talk about their religious affiliation, they might say, I'm a Christian or I'm a Muslim or I'm a Hindu, right? And they put a name to it. We do the same crypto. I'm a bitcoiner.

I'm an Ethereum. And I guess my question to you is the same question I asked as Nick. Are you a bitconer? And are you an Ethereum, Hatsu? Do you identify with that? Yeah, sure. I would say I'm both. For me, I would say mostly, I heard Nick's interview, and I was nodding along when he said. So I think you ask you for a definition of what it means to be a Bitcoin on an Ethereum first. It's the most Nick Carter thing to do. And it's very, it's, I also agree with it. I also agree with.

what he said that is it's easier to define what a bit quenna is because they've like the the values of what that means are much more defined but i also agree with what you said earlier that the values of what it means to be material are also becoming more strongly defined over time and it's mostly this it's mostly a process of removal um so you start with a community that has a lot of different beliefs, but those beliefs are not held very strongly. And then eventually it converges on the much smaller set of much stronger held beliefs. At least that's what it seems like to me. And then people who were like held some of these fringe views, they find themselves pushed out eventually.

So yeah, any kind of movement, I think, tends towards the. the more extreme versions of what it previously believed over time. Do you think those extreme, like people and those extreme versions, that the maximalists are useful for these proto religions? Oh, yeah. I mean, this goes back to what we talked about a few minutes ago, with just the kind of religious fervor, how I think, how valuable I think it is.

And one example would be, one example would be in terms of what I, my, my, my, the article that I wrote before the one on EIP1 559 about custodial banking. So this is, in my opinion, a great example of how it's not enough that you have a protocol, a technical protocol that can enforce a particular set of rules automatically. because the number of rules that you can enforce with a blockchain is actually quite limited. And it's not nearly enough to build a system that can become a global form of money that is very valuable and exists in a very adversarial environment. You need to pair this with social norms as well. Look at gold. Gold is a physical element and you can't alter the shape of the physical element. But everything that is built on this base layer of gold as a settlement asset is entirely shaped and molded by humans.

And it's extremely malleable in the sense. So the same is true for Bitcoin. You can have a very robust base layer. but if people are not using the base layer, but using any kind of system that is built on top of it, then that's not something that, that's A, not something that the base layer can control, and B, it can push the entire system in a state

where the rules of the base layer, they don't even matter anymore. So if everyone's transacting only on higher layers, then whoever controls these higher layers, they control the entire rules of the system. So that shows to me why the social norms are so, so important as well, if you want to build a system like that. So, Hazu, in my article, the nation article, I made some sort of claim that the protocol of the systems are their DNA, right? And as these systems grow, if you take the lens that these systems are organisms, as these

systems grow, the DNA of the protocol, the specific details of how their specific code works defines what they look like at maturity, you know, as DNA does. Like as an organism grows up, it determines the shape and structure of said organism. And I think what you just said, and something I think we want to get into in this episode is the DNA of a particular protocol, if it doesn't retain the sovereignty over its own soul, right? If it doesn't control what it looks like at maturity, then there are layers on top of the protocol that can perhaps capture and control the soul of the system and redefine what it means to use this system itself. and to make this in more concrete terms, so I'm not speaking in generalities.

This is the conversation of crypto banks, right, where the cryptocurrencies have a soul, a structure of belief systems and values that are instantiated in the code, in the DNA. But if everyone is using these crypto systems via a proxy like a crypto bank, that may or may not thwart or corrupt the spirit of the business. the spirit of this system. And so I kind of want to get your take on A, that perspective, but then also lead into the conversation of what the future of crypto banks are and how they are going to impact the spirit of these systems.

So I think it's, I agree with the take that the code of these protocols is the DNA. But I would say it's part of the DNA because part of the DNA. part of the DNA also rests in the social contract. And the social contract is not the same as the protocol itself. So they, the social contract is, to me, is really the layer zero of any of these systems. And then on top of the social contract sits the protocol. And the protocol is expressed by code. But the protocol can only enforce.

part of the social contract. So it can, for example, enforce that I'm not allowed to print money from thin air. I can only spend a coin that I have, that someone, that either I have mined or that someone has sent to me with a valid signature. But then there are things that are not possible to enforce with the protocol. And those are also important parts of the DNA. So for example, the fact that we should use or we should validate our own transactions or that we should use when possible, don't use intermediate forms of payment and custody for our keys. So we should hold our own keys.

So those are not like how would you enforce those things by the protocol? You can't. This has to be all done through social norms that are. also build on top of the social contract. And that's where I think the, I guess, whether the more strongly minded and vocal people in both communities are very important because they do the same as the protocol does. They socially enforce particular rules that are important for the long-term survival of the protocol.

Does that make sense? I mean, I think of these people as like, they're like priests, right, almost in kind of a religious context. They're like the core devs of the meme layer of the social layer. And they are important. And the weird thing about it is sometimes I see Bitcoin maximalists on that side of things. I think, geez, this is bizarre. Like you guys are not responding to like logic and reason. And yet at the same time, it kind of makes me bullish on Bitcoin, right?

It's this weird dichotomy because that level of religious fervor implies that there is a strong social contract around some of these things. And ultimately, it's that social contract that secures the Bitcoin network. And that's also why I see, like I get bullish when things like the parody multi-sig hack, there was an EIP to release funds there. right but that never went through that was sort of shot down by the ethereum social contract that to me is bullish for ethereum maintaining its minimum necessary issuance policy we're not going to you know do another doubt and intervene in the protocol at all and that's also why i don't really get worried about the move from eth one to eith two because the same social contract like from ethereum's inception is going to be preserved, you're moving the spirit, but you're moving to a new body, but the spirit is the same,

right? So I'm not as concerned as some people are. What if the ETH2 technology doesn't work out of the gate? Well, it's fine. We saw the social contract, which hasn't been disrupted. We'll fire it up again and we'll keep moving on the social contract. I don't know what your take is on that, but that's what I was thinking as you were saying that, Hatsu. Yeah, I actually have an important thought on this, I think. So it's true that the social contract, I mean, you can move, you can retain your soul, if you will, and move to a different body. And that's all good.

But I think if like the Ethereum community made one mistake with the transition from each one to each two. And that is increasing or like introducing double issuance there. because it creates so the way it works is when Ethereum 2 launches it has its own its own issuance and there are two tokens until the two systems eventually merge but it's unclear how long that's going to take and it could well be could well take five years or longer and what this does is it creates an incentive for Ethereum 1 to stay as its own network and split off from Ethereum 2

because the moment that Ethereum 1 and 2 merge there is this supply shock where all the coins that have accumulated in Ethereum 2 suddenly become merged with the coins that are in Ethereum 1.

And I see this as a very big oversight and I was very surprised to hear this because you create these disincentives in the community against merging the two together and I think I think there will be I think this will come become a bigger issue when it's actually time to merge those and the issue gets

larger the longer than the merging takes yeah so one question I've been thinking I've seen a debate in the Ethereum community on this is so so you're right so if when ETH one when ETH two fires up there's going to be additional issuance right so there's ETH one issuance plus ETH two issuance and it's going to increase total issuance of ether on an annual basis by, you know, maybe half a percent, maybe a percent or so. And some have advocated that, well, we should decrease the block reward on ETH one to compensate for the additional issuance in ETH two. So there's not like additional net issuance. But the other counter to that is any, you know, you only get a few rubs of the genie bottle, right?

and any change that you make to the issuance policy, it's human intervention, quote unquote, so it's hurting the credible neutrality of Ethereum by changing issuance. What side do you fall on with that? Do you think that in the transition to ETH II, do you think that ETH one should reduce its issuance to compensate, or do you think the net impact on the credible neutrality of the issuance of Ethereum would be impacted from that, and that would be a net negative? I'm not even sure that you could prevent this bad outcome by lowering the issuance of Eth1, because in either case, you still have the supply shock when you eventually merge the two together. So I think it's more a result of having this launch in stages.

But at the same time, I'm not really sure how you would do it better. Can you do it in a way where the two systems are? I mean, I think I guess you could, you could solve the problem by making it possible to transact both ways. So you have a B-direction transfer between ETH1 and ETH2. And the way that I see it, then there is no zero-to-one supply shock. There's only, well, any kind of coin that is created on ETH2 can immediately affect the, coin supply on eth one so it's more like um it's more like like like boiling a frog very slowly um compared to throwing it into hot water at which point it's just going to jump out again

i think that that is probably how i would have done it so i don't see the question of should we lower issuance of eth one or should we not lower it i don't see that as central the interview and tell you about two more of our sponsors. The first is Ramp. What's holding crypto back? Getting Fiat into the crypto system. In order to get Fiat into a DFI application, you have to create an account with an exchange, you have to wire funds. That's the same thing that's holding your defy app back. Users drop off in the sign up process because they don't have crypto. So what you're doing is you're limiting your market to the hardcore crypto people. But with Ramp, that no longer has to be the case. Ramp is a delightfully easy Fiat on Ramp. It lets first time crypto users get ETH die,

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They currently at 98.3 million. So they are just absolutely crushing it. Developers, you can check out their flash loan protocol, which can really help the U.X of your application. A flash loan is when you borrow assets from the protocol without any collateral. so long as you pay back those assets in the same transaction. And this can help your users move their debt positions, either a compound debt position or a Maker-Dal position. It allows you to swap out collateral instantaneously in one transaction,

which really allows for a lot more, which really is going to be a blessing for your users and their U.S. Go to AVE.com and you can deposit crypto to start earning or borrow. today any Ethereum wallet works, so check them out. I want to circle back around and finish a thought that we were talking about a second ago. Hauser, you said that the DNA of a protocol isn't completely instantiated in the code itself, but it is also part of the social contract. The social contract of a system also has the DNA of the protocol.

But I think a case can be made where that's actually a weakness, right? right? Because the whole point of the system is to relegate to code as much as possible. And so if there is a social contract in Bitcoin of, you know, run your own node, hold your own keys, you know, do all these things. The reason why those are rallying cries in Bitcoin is because the Bitcoin protocol is not comprehensive enough or strong enough to build that into the base layer, right? And so as a result, I see the social contract as compensation for the weaknesses of the code. And so we have to actually rely on, you know, crypto banks to do our services for us. And the social contract is like the force against this, reminding people about why we are here, reminding people about what our value should be.

but I think it would be more scalable and more sustainable if we didn't actually have to rely on the social contract and the values of these systems were completely part of the DNA of the protocol. And so any, I see any, and the metaphor we use, Ryan, Ryan used as a priest, right? Like a priest of the system is somebody that people go to for insight and leadership. But we saw in the heyday of the church that the priest, the priest, just claimed that they were the messengers of God when really they were just some dudes who were capturing like the audience of their local region and then extorting them for their whatever, you know, their Sunday donations, right? And priests would like lie and say like, only I can speak

to God. That's why you guys have to listen to me. And I can kind of see that similar role of Bitcoin banks, right? Where they say you don't have to actually speak to the Bitcoin blockchain. you can just speak to me when instead it's a capturing and coercive system. And I see that as a weakness of the Bitcoin blockchain. And so, you know, Ethereum tries and fixes these problems with things like smart contract wallets or, you know, sharding and all these things that allow for maximal decentralization. It's taking away the role of religion and trust and just having to have these, you these priest leaders remind ourselves what the values of the system are,

because the values of the system are more closely baked in on Ethereum. How do you feel about that take? I think we're conflating two issues there. So the first is, in my opinion, the social contract is always central. And the protocol can't take the role of the social contract, because the social, I mean, If there's no social contract, for example, against, or that says what the protocol should do, then just, it would be trivial to just change the protocol and there would change the social contract. But that's not how it works.

So there needs to be, there must be a community of people who strongly believe in the same values and the same things that the protocol should do. And that's the whole way that we uphold basically the values of the protocol. That's why we all converge on the same rules that because we all believe in the same things that the protocol should do. So that's why I think the protocol is always an implementation of the social contract. That brings us to the second part. So if you have a social contract and you have a protocol to implement it, then the question is, how well can the protocol implement the social contract? And the better it can implement it, the more robust it probably is.

Because let's say you have a social contract and it has two rules. And you can enforce only one of those with the protocol and the other you have to enforce via social norms. Social norms are much more malleable than the protocol. That's why we invented these protocols in the first place because otherwise we could just do it via traditional institutions. And so the question really is how well can the protocol implement the social contract in a way that is not malleable. And that's where I see the big strength of Ethereum, because if the protocol is more expressive, then the wish or the optimistic goal would be that we can.

automate or enforce more of the rules of the social contract via these kind of automated means of the protocol and we don't have to enforce them as much socially. So yeah, I think that mirrors exactly what you said about Bitcoin banks or Bitcoin being on a path to scale via custodial banks to a much larger degree maybe than Ethereum, although that's totally up in the erst. But I definitely see the advantage of having non-custodial smart contracts take the roles of custodial banks. So, yeah, that is definitely, or that pretty much summarizes why or what I like so

much about Ethereum in relation to Bitcoin. Can I just say, Hasi, so that is the entire thesis for the bank. bankless podcast. Like that's that's why we are on this quest to go bankless because, you know, we believe, and I think that the, you know, members of the crypto community believe some of them anyway, that the social contract of Bitcoin is peer to peer, right? You know, a peer to peer cash system was the title of the Bitcoin white paper, right? And like peer to peer means bankless, right? it's not trusting a central intermediary.

So David's point of, like, one of the problems with Bitcoin is that it requires that the members in Bitcoin kind of observe this social norm. So like at once a year, we all like withdraw all of our private keys from the exchanges to make sure that they have them, right? That's an example of that being preserved in a more flimsy way. And the Ethereum approach is basically like, don't have crypto banks, at all, have transparent open money protocols, DFI protocols, essentially, where you can always see the balance of your crypto. So their balance sheets are completely transparent to you. And

you maintain custody of your funds so you can withdraw at any time as well. So you don't have to get into these fractional reserve areas. And I think you do believe that because you wrote this fantastic article, you know, why Bitcoin might not survive a Bitcoin standard. I wonder if that raise some eyebrows in the part of the Bitcoiner community. But can you talk about that a bit more? We want to spend some time on that. So why is it bad if Bitcoin custodial banks essentially start to become the main way that users interact with Bitcoin the asset and even with Bitcoin the network?

Yeah, I feel like, so I feel like, Hasi, like, you know, there's some Bitcoiners who think It's great, right? Nick Carter might be among them. That, like, custodial crypto banks doing the majority of transactions on Bitcoin, that's a future that is appealing. What do you think about that? Is there a problem with that vision? I mean, so Nick is a realist and a pragmatist,

and I would call myself into that field as well. So there's not really a way around. the emergence of Bitcoin banks, or just banks in general, that hold Bitcoin and offer financial services for Bitcoin users. But the big risk, in my opinion, is that eventually everything just happens. Everything happens on these custodial banking layers. And then you lose this, then you lose all the advantages that made Bitcoin special in the first place. So the Bitcoin can enforce a different social contract than a non-bitcoin system could because the rules are enforced by the protocol. But when the users don't use the protocol anymore, then the system is

vulnerable to the, in the exact same way that the traditional financial system is. Because then you still use a protocol, but it's a different protocol. It's a protocol that is subject to the laws regulations of wherever it operates. So some people argue against that as long as you can withdraw to the base layer still and basically like let's say one country shuts on their Bitcoin banks and then everyone would panic and they would withdraw their money to hold their own keys and continue to operate on the base layer. But this is not possible.

Because once Bitcoin has grown to a size where, let's say, I don't know, even just 50 to 100 million people use Bitcoin via banks, if those people all wanted to withdraw their coins to the base layer, then it's already not possible because it's just the capacity of the system doesn't allow for it. So you lose this optionality. You have this optionality decay of freedom. pretty much where the users become locked into the higher systems because there are now too many users to withdraw to the lower level. I see that as a big problem

and it doesn't just exist when the fees are too high. Like I'd say there are too many users and they can't all withdraw to the base layer but you also have the opposite way. So the fees are maybe too low on the base layer and the system is just the base layer is very insecure. Then one way to, one way to, um, one way to, um, one way to still transfer money and hold funds safely is, is just beholding the same amount of BTC on the bank ledger.

So the bank ledger would then effectively replace, um, the Bitcoin, the ledger of the Bitcoin base layer. So in my mind, and maybe this is my Ethereum religiousness coming out, but the logical conclusion is what the Ethereum blockchain is trying to achieve, where an expressive base layer allows for individual banking services and for individuals to truly be their own bank. Am I right in concluding that that is the next logical step, or am I missing something?

No, I mean, that's why I like Ethereum. I think it's, I like the other approach of doing it, or taking a bit more risks with the base layer, but for the potential benefit of having more trustless additional layers. Because it's already clear that the base layer itself is not going to cut it for any kind of larger scale adoption we have today. So we know that, like we, I think we have to take a holistic view. Let's just imagine, so Bitcoin and Ethereum both have 100 million active users.

So how does the system look at that size? And if in Bitcoin the base layer plays only a very small role in serving these users, then what does it really, like what does having this very strict and very robust baselier even give you? It does not automatically mean that the whole stack is robust. So I think it's a good approach to take, or it's possible to take some tradeoffs with the robustness of the base there and allow for more expressiveness, for example, just to buy you the ability to extend more of that trust to hire theirs. So what do crypto banks look like when they're, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of users of these systems, right? And a lot of these users are using these systems through crypto banks. Like do what what they're because there's a, there's a lot of political significance to large crypto banks, right?

Like if Coinbase and Gemini go from just being an exchange to being a financial services in, you know, institution, they are domiciled in physical nations. They have a ton of data. Is it fair to say that these crypto banks at maturity, when they have millions of users, that they start to kind of look like the Web 2, gargantuan, but in the crypto Web 3 world. And then if that is true,

like what's the relationship that these systems are going to have with nation states? Like, how is a nation state going to perceive these, these, you know, new financial institutions? I think that will look exactly like the banks have today. So we would just rebuild the existing financial system. So I don't think it matters very much that, what the what the base layers do at that point so you have the banks that work like banks do today

and and then they settle amongst each other maybe once a day or something so i mean that that seems to be what the end state of the bitcoin vision is even you know saffodine in his book the bitcoin standard talks about the settlement layer bitcoin being used by you know maybe a thousand banks and maybe that's generous. I guess my question is, is that a better world? Like, was that the point of the white paper in 2009

to create a new banking system that's based on, you know, a asset with 21 million in scarcity? We don't know where we are going yet. And it's, I don't, like, people read so much into Bitcoin and the Bitcoin white paper And Satoshi never promised that Bitcoin would be a system that could be used by billions of people

and could do other things that can fulfill all these promises that the Bitcoin community invented on top of them eventually. So I'm not so sure that it is realistic within like the next 50 years that we can fulfill even 20% of these promises. You know, Bitcoin and Ethereum by extension, they might do a lot of good for the world, but I mean, they might not be everything that is promised, right? It's not like they could support billions of users, probably neither of them could. So the DFI version of a crypto bank is more or less MakerDAO, right? where it is a crypto bank, but it is a protocol. It's a crypto bank protocol. And like the governance over these systems is defined by an asset that's tradable

on the free market. And it largely offers a lot of the same services that we would expect a crypto bank to offer, right? So credit and then savings and then, you know, using many different types of collateral. And I expect there just to be even more financial services based on top of Maker Dow into the future. And you wrote this fantastic article, which I hope everyone who is listening to this will read or has read called The Future of Money could be discretionary. And so when we talk about how, you know, crypto banks, real crypto banks, you know, physical crypto banks are kind of just, you know, the same boss, or new boss, same as the old boss.

Do you see like Maker Dow and protocols like Maker Dow as the viable solution for these, for actually bringing it in? in a world that we are kind of hoping to imagine that is new and sci-fi and perhaps more fair and equitable? I wouldn't read too much yet into Maker. I think it serves one aspect, right, which is fully collateralized loans. But it does not yet serve, or it does not serve custody and it does not serve payments. So these would be, I would see, I would see those. as the three big main things that banks do.

So banks give credit or create credit or monetize debt, and they do payments and they do custody. And only one of them is currently served by Maker. But Maker is still a super interesting project, in my opinion. So your article, The Future of Money, could be discretionary. It illustrates that, you know, discretion, discretionaryness is also subjectivity, right? And part of, in my opinion, part of the DNA of all these systems, Bitcoin and Ethereum, they're supposed to do their best to remove subjectivity out of the protocol, right?

And the Zobo idea is that any amount of subjectivity is a weakness when it comes to scaling these systems out to their maximal degree. At the same time, MakerDAO is a protocol. And when you, you know, submit collateral, there is no credit scoring. There is no, you know, utility bills. There is no government ID. So to some degree, subjectivity has been removed. But to what degree do you think that, like, the subjective governance over the parameters of Maker Dow is a hindrance on its ability to scale?

Yeah, that's a very good question. So I think for a system like Maker, it's a kind of, it's a time. tight walk because of course the system is more valuable to to borrow us the more types of collateral you can use for example so including real-world type of collateral that is like let's say us DC where there's really an issue that that sits in a regulated environment whereas for the holders, it could be better that if the type of collateral is more trustless. So you can have these two streams going up against each other. But of course, they would also like liquidity.

So you kind of need to balance these different interests against each other. But I'd also like looking back at that article, I I kind of mixed up two issues that could have been maybe two articles, because it mixes up basically a discretionary or like a flexible money supply and a system that is controlled by, well, basically by humans or not by algorithms. And I think it made a very strong point that you can have, systems with a flexible money supply, like Maker.

So it is that it is possible to target the price stable money, for example. Because I feel like that's not really something that the crypto community had large beliefs in. So they think price targeting is always a scam or something, or is always something that requires um i'm not really sure what they think but in general that just the the benefit of price ability is uh doesn't get a lot of credit whereas i think when you say they think it's like fragile well also the target of the price itself requires some sort of subjective opinion as to what that target actually is right like so the cpi for them for the federal reserve is a

human generated metric that we have decided is is valuable at targeting. That's a great point. Yeah, exactly. So I think they look at the entire stack of what it takes to make a flexible money or price targeting money. And they think it can be abused in too many ways. And that might be true. But the more we learn about automating the kind of steps that it takes to keep a money price stable,

I think the more interesting these ideas become. And that's, that's why I gave the, basically, that's why I showed how you can keep the money price stable entirely by implementing positive and negative interest rates. So that, that part of the article was, was actually picked up by JP Koneg, who was a finance blogger, someone that I love to read, and he turned this into a smaller article about how central banks should, or like how people should not be afraid of negative interest rates, because they're not necessarily something like unnatural or anything. Because if you look at, if you look at derivatives exchanges today, like Deribit or BitMex or FDX, the only way that

they're perpetual swap contracts track the... spot price is via these continuous funding payments. So you always have one side of the market paying the other. That encourages more people to go long or to go short. And that is the exact same thing that happens if you have a money that you want to make price stable. So you also set a target. And then you just continually rebalance the supply, like the demand to go long. Those are the holders of the money.

So the holders of die, for example. example, and the demand to go short. Those are the borrowers, the people who draw, die against collateral. So they are the short side. And just by implementing this, you can create a price stability without any discretion. So that's, so that's, that was basically the first part that could have been abstracted out of the article. But it also looks at what Maker can maybe learn from, well, I guess both what central

banks can learn from from Maker, but also what Maker can learn from existing monetary policy options of central banks. And if you just look at, yeah, oh, okay, so if you just look at what Oh, go ahead. No. Go ahead. No. You find that they use the exact same options that central banks are also using. So they can use open market operations. So they can, they can print, they can print maker, for example, and buy back dye from the market to burn it. So that's one thing that they can do. Or they can print dye, and then they can buy ether to back the die. So those would be one way to remove die from the market and one way to push dye onto the market.

So those are those are two options. And I think, like I'm not 100% sure, but I believe those are also two things that Maker has done in the past when it was under less scrutiny than it is today. And nowadays, I think they really don't want to be labeled a bank. So I guess they stay away from that for now. But the other is a very underrated option. So what Maker does is it, it allows more types of collateral. And it changes basically the worthiness of this collateral as well. So it can say how how much money can be borrowed against this form of collateral based on its implied volatility usually. And that is one option that is super key to the central banking system or to the banking system that we have today,

but that most people never talk about is the collateral policy of central banks. So the central banks also control the amount of credit in the economy very strongly by allowing and disallowed. in different forms of collateral that banks can accept to give credit. So, So, Hasi, what's interesting to me about that article in particular is you talked about this convergence between, you know, stable coin and defy and central banking, right? You said within the next five years, we'll see a major central bank hire a stable coin designer and a stable coin system hire a famous central bank economist, right? So there's this convergence.

And it does feel to me, like even giving you, which. you said, there's sort of a fork in the road for Maker. It can either go in the direction of removing some subjectivity, right, and going in the direction of something that's more algorithmic in terms of stabilizing price. But there's some tradeoffs there. Maybe usability is a tradeoff because you have to get into, you know, negative, negative interest rates for the money. And people aren't used to that. They might not like that. There's a usability tradeoff. And then on the other, the other fork in like side of the fork is they could become a bit more central bank like and start in the inevitable conclusion of that is you know play that out and you're doing open

market operations like the Fed basically so I mean do you see it as a fork in the road for these defy protocols they either become like a bit more protocol like through their governance process or they become a bit more like a like a traditional I'm not sure if I'd see it as a fork in the road. So the one reason my makers, I think is super attractive to central bankers and to economists is the reason that crypto is such an amazing microcosm for monetary experiments and just monetary policy options. So if you work at a central bank today and like you have learned, you, you know,

you have learned all these different ways that you can potentially manipulate basically monetary policy to get one outcome or the other in terms of achieving achieving your mandate, then these are all conjecture, really. Like we don't have a ton of ways to test these. But like if I was working there, then it would be super fascinating to me to go into a space where I can, actually implement and test these things in a free market environment where people like willingly

adopt a coin and then you have competition of the best ways to manage that currency. I just think that that's probably one of the most fun things that you can do. But at the same time, central bankers are very aware of the kind of negative influence, you could say, that a lack of political independence from governments create. So there is a branch in monetary economics that is called algorithmic central banking. So that is not something that crypto invented. Because, I mean, central bankers would also like to make less, like, some of these rules They would like to invent rules, sort of like automatic trigger.

So when that happens to certain key parameters in the economy, then we do this policy. And then when the policy is such an effect, it stops, so on. So these are just algorithms. And the problem for some central banks is that they can't credibly commit to these algorithms because they always, they, they, they, they, hands are sort of tied to the political or they are tied and depend on the political moods of whoever is in charge in the country and and also you know the what the actual people think about their policy so i see crypto is like a really interesting way to experiment with commitment

devices so a commitment device is just you you commit to a something that allows you to commit to a certain algorithm or certain policy and then stick with it. And then you can credibly say, I can't change this. My hands are tied. So a smart contract without an admin key would be one way to do this. That's why I don't necessarily see it as a fork in the road. But I see it as more of a convergence. So the two will become one where I think crypto will attract.

a lot of central bankers because of the experiments that can be run here, and just because of how well their knowledge applies. But then what crypto does for central banking is like popularizing commitment devices and removing the ability for governments and the tyranny of the masses to influence central bank policy. Hasu, getting your perspective on bankless has been. super valuable. And before we let you go, we need to talk about, of course, EIP 1559. And if I could challenge you in a way, can I get you to in a concise way, in the most concise way as possible, wrap up and summarize the significance and impact of EIP 1559 upon the Ethereum Nation?

Like if you had to boil it down in its most simplistic form, how does it materially impact the Ethereum nation? Well, it's very hard to be concise about this because of how central this kind of this changes to Ethereum. It touches on so many different things. And that's just that's just the nature of how central the block size, the block space, sorry, market is for any blockchain. chain. The EP1559 is just a small handful of lines of code, but its implications would be pretty big. So for me personally, I mean, everyone sees a different thing in it, but I see four benefits of the proposal.

So the first is it implements or it creates a better UX for users when interacting with the block space market. So the way that it works right now is everyone submits a transaction together with a bit for inclusion and that bid is the transaction fee. But the problem is you don't know you don't know how much is actually needed to get into a block. So because minors just include everyone's transactions, basically they just perpetually fill blocks with transactions and then hash them to search for the golden ones. But you don't know how much

others are going to bid. So you always like if you want to get in urgently you're probably going to bid more than the people already bid and then others see that and bit even higher. And it's just like these kind of models are called first price options and they are

they are quite inefficient in terms of translating the actual preference of users to get into a block and to pay and paying like a reasonable amount of money. And the way that EAP-1559 changes this is it implements a fixed price sale. So a fixed price sale is when you go to Amazon and you see an item that has a certain price and you can just decide to buy it or not. And that's what 1-559 would do also. So you could, you would just decide on the spot if like a transaction would have a certain price and you can just decide on the spot if you want to get in or not. And the way that it, the way that it does this is by implementing a new type of fee. So instead of one fee, there

would be two types of fees. And the first is called base fee. And the second is called the tip. The base fee is set by the protocol and is burned. So it does not go to minus. And the second is the tip. The tip goes to minus. And in the next step, we have two. We don't have the single rigid block size cap anymore, but we actually have two a block size cap.

So we have the target block size, which is 10 million gas. And then we have the new maximum block size, which is twice the amount. So it's 20 million gas. And blocks are no longer, blocks no longer have to be 10 million. They can also exceed the, the previous maximum. So they can be higher than 10 million for a period of time. So it can be, if minus one, they can mine up to 20 million gas worth of blocks.

No, blocks, blocks, but blocks of gas. sorry. But it's only possible for a short period of time. Because if you look back to what we talked about with Maker and how you govern stability or how you can basically price target a money and how this is very similar to derivatives exchanges and the way that they get price stability of perpetual swap against the spot price of an asset,

they do this with these kind of continuous funding payments. And EIP-159 is actually not that different from that because you also have a target. So you have a block size, an average block size that you want to target, which is 10 million gas. And then you have this payment for transactors, which is the base fee, which the protocol can control. And the higher, like,

Like the larger the blocks are, the higher the base fee goes. And that eventually creates a downward pressure on the size of the blocks. So if you mine one block, then that's, let's say, 20 million gas. Then the base fee would increase. If you mine another, it would increase further and so on. So it always increase relative to what it was before. And so the base fee would just continue to go up. And then eventually when there are not.

more transactions that are willing to pay the price, then maybe we can mine smaller blocks again. And when you mine blocks below 10 million gas, that's when the block size, that's when the base fee starts to go down, starts to normalize. And the fact that we always target 10 million gas, but there's 20 million of capacity, that is what ensures the fixed price sale, because there is always extra capacity. available. It's just that it is the base fee that governs how frequently the access capacity is used, if that makes sense. So because there's always extra capacity, you can always be sure that you get in at the fixed price if you want to. I mean,

that's like a very thorough explanation of EIP 1559. I don't know that I've heard such a thorough expedition, right? So it's clear that you have dug deeply into it. One of the implications, I think, in your article, at least one of my takeaways was the burning of the part of ether in these transactions actually makes the Ethereum to monetary policy of minimum necessary issuance more palatable, more viable. You know, that was a huge takeaway for me. I guess, now that you dove into this so deeply, what's your takeaway on the implications for investors? Like, did it make you more or less bullish on ETH the asset? Oh, I see 1559 as super positive for Ethereum.

Like, I am super in favor of it being implemented after I reviewed it. So I think it's very hard to disentangle how well the, the different benefits. We only touched on one of them, right? So we touched on a better UX for transactors. But there's also, we briefly touched on the other one. So we now target an average block size rather than a fixed block size. And that allows more flexibility in the block size, but without creating an additional burden

for people who want to validate, which is very important. But then there's also the benefit of better security. and preventing economic abstraction. And it's very hard to say how much each of those will impact the price of ether or just the market sentiment. Just looking at, I guess looking at how the Ethereum community talks about the proposal. So very few people talk about the fixed price sale,

which is probably my favorite part. and very like a lot of people talk about the security well not even about the security aspect i guess there's also this so what for me is like it's a it's a security benefit most people just see as okay um the monetary policy of ita is going to improve um because you now have this because the base fee is burned um and it's the base fees 99% or something of all the fees that are uh going to be paid because the base fees burn, that's created deflationary pressure on the ether coin supply. And that's, I guess that is the main benefit that, that I read when I read about like other articles on EFP1559.

But I think that it's really the synthesis of all these benefits that is very, very beneficial. It was awesome to get you to take a look at EIP 1559. Thank you for doing it. Thank you for all of your work in the space, Hsu. You've written a fantastic body of knowledge. I think both David and I consider you one of the free thinkers that kind of bridges multiple communities and honestly talks common sense and rationality to each of them and is not afraid to push back on the religious conjecture. You know, another piece I'll just mention was a piece you wrote will include in the show notes about your future projections of Bitcoin's security. That was a, I think you wrote that with James Press, which. And that was another, you know, instrumental article for me in understanding Bitcoin into the future and transaction security once issuance runs out. So, guys, we will include many of Haseu's articles in the show notes. So you have access to that at the ready. I've got to ask you one last question before we go.

So you have chosen an anonymous, pseudonymous identity online. And it is this Morty with an eyepatch from Rick and Morty. So I have assumed all of this time that you are a Rick and Morty fan. Are you indeed, sir, a Rick and Morty fan? And why did you pick the Morty with the eye patch? I guess he's my favorite character from the show. my my favorite episode is the Rick Lentis mix up which is I think it's season three

it's a great storyline and the great city of just the way that it it has these different layers and different storylines that all pay off in the end in a really nice way yeah that's I think that's one of the best episodes in TV period

and of course it prominently features even Mordy. You've got me hungry for some Rick and Morty. I think I might do some binge tonight. I actually have to get caught up on season four. I've got like two more episodes left. And yeah, it's a great show. It feels like it does keep getting better.

But I'm waiting for their, like it's always, you know, sci-fi something, right? When are they going to do the sci-fi crypto? Have they touched on anything with respect to like money in some of these sci-fi civilizations? I don't think I've seen that yet. They did once. They had one episode where the empire invaded Earth. And I'm not sure what happened exactly, but someone, I think Rick hacked into their computer. Yeah.

It made every one of their... Rick made the money of the system worth one of something to worth zero of something. And then everyone started blowing, blowing, like shooting themselves. Rick was not bad. That was definitely the exact ad at Fiat money. At least I read it that way. Yeah, I recall that now that you guys are mentioning it. I worry that they'll do an episode on like crypto and you know,

Rick will find some way to like beat the Bitcoin blockchain and destroy mutability. We'll send the wrong message. On the one hand, it's always nice when shows include references to Bitcoin. They never really know. the same time. Yeah, it's never really satisfying when it actually happens. Not yet. It always makes the show, like if you like to show previously, it just makes it look. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Haseu, this has been fantastic. We appreciate you being here. Thanks for everything you do. Oh, thanks for having me, guys.

All right, guys, this has been Hasu. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Some action items. So I think, guys, the real big action item is to check out some of Hasew's body of work. We will include some of our favorite articles in the action items. So that's number one. Number two is go check out the episode that we did on Ether's scarcity. That talks about 1559. Why we're also bullish on this change in Ether's monetary policy. That's really what it is.

We'll include that as the second action item. And third, David, I haven't checked in the last week or two. How are we doing on the five-star reviews, sir? Hey, we're doing pretty good, but we still want to do better. I think we have 60 or so five-star reviews. So if you guys could push that up into the 70s and 80s, we are still not showing up when you type in crypto or Bitcoin or Ethereum into the iTunes podcast search. And so those five-star reviews are how we get there.

So thank you for those that have given us those five-star reviews. And if you are yet to do so, please do that. it really, really helps us reach more ears, reach a bigger bankless audience. Cool. And last announcement is actually, David, you and I started a video podcast, well, a videocast that we're publishing on YouTube. We're also publishing on this stream as well. Can you tell folks about that?

Yeah, we are doing the state of the nation every Tuesday. So you guys can actually look at the charts, look at the data, look at the tweets that we are talking about. So if you guys are into video content, if you guys are on YouTube, you can find the state of the nation on the bankless YouTube. And then it will also be released as a podcast version on the stream as well, because why not? But really, the substance is the video that is on YouTube. All right, guys, that's it from us. Risk and Disclaimers.

Crypto is risky, folks. Defy is risky. We talked about EIP 1559. That could cause some risk too. You could lose what you put in. This is crypto. We are headed west, though this is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey.

Thanks a lot.