Bankless - 43 - Crypto from the Outside | Demetri Kofinas

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⭐️LEDGER - BEST HARDWARE WALLET TO SECURE YOUR CRYPTOhttps://bankless.cc/ledger🚀 ARGENT - INVEST IN DEFI FROM ONE PLACE (download it now!)https://bankless.cc/argent💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDShttps://bankless.cc/monolith 🤖YEARN - YIELD-SEEKING MONEY ROBOT THAT FARMS DEFI FOR YOU http://bankless.cc/yearn ------ 43 - Crypto from the Outside | Demetri Kofinas Demetri Kofinas is the host of the Hidden Forces podcast, where he gives you an edge by teaching you to think critically about the systems of power that structure our world. Hidden Forces is about the forces of the world that impact markets, technology, culture, and our lives, which means that Demetri is astutely aware of the cryptocurrency industry and its implications. However, he is not in the ‘crypto-religion’ as many of us are. He views crypto from the outside in.  We bring Demetri onto the pod this week to get his perspective as to what crypto looks like when viewed from outside the bubble.  We take a moment to discuss a number of 2020 themes: Distrust in institutions Monetary policy in the days of COVID More government, or less government? ...and of course, how significant is the role of Crypto with regards to these things. Is it a revolution? Or destined to be domesticated by the powers of the world? Demetri is both knowledgeable AND skeptical, which is a dangerous combination to anyone who believes in the revolution.  Tune in! ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState ----- 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 we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case

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, got a banger of a show. Who do we have on? Dmitri Kofinis of Hidden Forces podcast, one of my favorite podcasts that really spans the gamut of just a number of of different topics from finance, politics, culture, really just trying to get down to the bottom of what the undercurrents of the world are. Dmitri does a fantastic job of going into conversations and topics in an extremely unbiased manner. And that's why we wanted to get him on the

bankless podcast. He understands crypto. He understands our industry, but he views it from the outside in. And he has a very balanced perception as to how the world of crypto, fits into the world around it. And so on the bankless program, we beat some of the same drums over and over and over again. But we also need to step outside of our bubble and make sure that what we are saying actually does resonate with people regardless of whether they're inside or outside of the industry. And that's why we brought on Dimitri onto the bankless podcast. So we can discuss what parts about the crypto world he resonates with and what parts he is still skeptical on. It is fantastic to bring on an informed skeptic. I think you use the word to describe Dimitri as secular.

That means sort of not in the crypto religion as you or I might be. Yet he is, he's very informed. So he's had many folks talk about crypto on his show. He's very knowledgeable about Bitcoin. He's even had some D5 folks on his show. So he brings that informed skeptic perspective that we don't often here in the crypto world. And it helps really test our assumptions. I think we had a good conversation just in general at first about how you find truth in this mess that is 2020, podcaster to podcaster. And he's a great synthesizer of all of these various economic, financial, geopolitical ideas. That was the first part. But it didn't take long, David, until we just jumped right into the heart of things and started talking about crypto and the nation state.

that's where things got, I think, a little bit fun, maybe spicy at times, but also a little bit fun because we went back and forth on his, I guess, criticisms or his skepticism about crypto, and we tried to talk about our perspective on things. In the end, I think we both opened a dialogue to future discussions like this as Dimitri learns more and as we learn more about his perspective. Dmitri is having some crypto-related guests on his podcast about the Stable Act, which something that's going around in the crypto conversation. And it's definitely one of the main conversations that we have with Dimitri about how regulation and the crypto industry will intersect. And so there's a lot of layers to peel back there. And that conversation is definitely something

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The best time to get one was yesterday, especially if you're doing something silly, like holding your crypto in a hot wallet that's always connected to the internet. If you haven't gained full control over your crypto yet, go to the link in the show notes and get your ledger today. All right, guys, here we go. Dmitry Kofinas of Hidden Forces podcast. Bankless Nation, we are so excited to introduce our next guest. Dmitri Kofinus is the host of the Hidden Forces podcast. This is one of my favorite podcast because it's a podcast that gives you an edge by teaching you not just what's going on, but how to think critically about the systems of power, that structure our world.

It's something we touch on in bankless as well, of course. Dimitri would describe himself as crypto-curious, maybe crypto-adjacent, but he really understands the nature of the industry while he's staying on the periphery. And we wanted to get his take as someone who is crypto-curious, crypto-adjacent, and who has synthesized and absorbed so much of the hidden forces that are going on in the world today. Dmitri, it's fantastic to have you. How are you doing? I'm great, guys. Thank you very much for having me on the podcast. Well, we are so excited. And this has been, I think, a really interesting year to be the host of a podcast like Hidden Forces, the type that you do. I'm going to start with this question. What's it been like to be a podcaster trying to find a podcast. truth in the chaos of the year 2020.

It has been very satisfying and exciting and fun, I must say. I think one of the great benefits of having a podcast like this is that when something strikes my curiosity, I get to, as a function of my job, investigate it and then bring on people who I would normally not have access to if I didn't have a podcast like this to speak to me, to try to help me make sense of whatever it is that's creating confusion in me and in society. Yeah, absolutely. But like, has it been a harder year to find truth, have you found? Or that's a great question. Figure out the, like, find the signal in the noise here. So that's a very complicated, interesting question on many levels. I think we are struggling

today to come to a social consensus view of what we even mean when we talk about truth. When I think about truth, I think on an ontological level, I don't think that any of us can ascertain what the truth is, you know, or what reality is at bottom, but we attempt to approximate it. We try to get close to it through things like empirical science or epistemology. And I think that these are part of the tools that I use to think critically about the systems of power that structure our world. And I do that starting with kind of questioning assumptions. And those assumptions are what most people consider to be the truth, you know, consensus thinking. So for me, it's actually been quite satisfying because when people's assumptions are suddenly being confronted as perhaps being wrong in such a

jarring way, like we've been seeing in recent years, as we're going through this radical period of change, it really, I think, opens the door of a podcast like mine to step in and really help people think critically about those issues and those problems. Dmitri, the name of your podcast is hidden forces. And so I want to talk about what that means. The through line of your podcast seems to be surrounding so many different domains of knowledge, domains of information. What are the things that really grab your attention and that you fit into the through line of hidden forces? And why did you call it hidden forces in the first place? You know, I think I understood subconsciously why I did. and I began to articulate it early on, but I've gone through a long period with the podcast

where I didn't have much time to think about all that, and I've gotten more clear on it recently. I think the idea of hidden forces, again, to go back to this idea that there are systems of power that creates structure in our world. And that structure is oftentimes in the form of a narrative. There are things that we generally come to believe. And the reason why I think it's so important to challenge those narratives, and this is something I learned from investing, which is that, you know, in order to make money, it's not enough to just be right about the future. You also need to have a view that is, you know, different from the consensus view. Dmitri, I think the way Indriessen Horowitz describes this is you have to be contrarian but right.

Yeah, well, Howard Marks says, who's also been on my podcast before, and I strongly recommend for your listeners to hear that episode. he has like, you know, all these little funny quips. And I think one of his quips is it's not enough to be a contrarian. You also have to be right. Exactly. And it's true. But in order to be right, you have to be able to think critically. And that means knowing how to ask the right questions.

It means knowing how to assess evidence. It means knowing how to evaluate arguments with the ultimate goal of coming to a conclusion and forming a judgment that you feel confident enough about that you can then rely on that judgment and that conclusion to make decisions and decisions that are materially important because oftentimes your conclusions will be contradicted or you will if you purchase Apple at, you know, I don't know what it's trading at today, but you know, you purchased it at X and it falls 20 percent. That could shake you out of your position. Likewise, if you're on a panel or you're being interviewed and your views are challenged and you don't understand why you

hold, why you believe what you believe and you don't have conviction. And that's something else that Howard Marx talks about. It isn't just to be right. It isn't just to have a different view. You have to have conviction because you'll get stopped out of your position, literally and metaphorically, if you don't have conviction. And that's the epistemic component of hidden forces. It's, you know, not only what do I know, but how do I know what I know?

How can I justify what I know to myself? Because what you'll often find is that people who hold beliefs and then have those beliefs challenged, yes, if you're investing in a market, you may very well and oftentimes will sell out of your position. But in the rest of the world, in a bigger picture, what you find is that people will tend to become more wedded to their beliefs. They will clutch the cross. And the reason that people do that is because they can't bear the uncertainty. And that's because people need certainty. They need models and frameworks to structure reality because reality is in its bare, naked essence, chaotic. Or at least it appears chaotic.

to human beings. And we spent our entire lives doing that. And then, again, that brings us back to this point about power and structure, which is that we all need structure. We all have biases. We all have stereotypes. We all have frameworks and theories that we use to make sense of the world. But when you don't think critically, you're relying on other people's structures and other people's theories and frameworks and narratives to explain the world. And so you empower others at the expense of yourself. And that's where critical thinking is so important. Because being able to think critically, and I think that's something that I try to do on Hidden Forces, and I think by extension, I try to help other people do.

When you can think critically, you can come to your own determination, and that's empowering. And I think that is, for me, ultimately why these subjects and this approach is something that I've developed over the years, because at a young age, I found it. I'm a very competitive guy. I'm competitive physically. I was a wrestler in high school. did mixed martial arts and college and afterwards. And I loved competition. I loved to know that I could hold my own. And early on in my life, I found that I had beliefs, but those beliefs were

beliefs I couldn't justify. And I didn't like the experience of having my hat handed to me in an argument because I didn't understand or didn't know why I believed what I believed. It's bad in an argument. It's even worse having your hat handed to you in a market when you had on something and you're completely wrong. Yeah, for sure. It's an awful experience. experience. And I think it really helps, even if you're wrong, and I've been wrong plenty and I'll continue to be wrong plenty of times, understanding or having some idea why I was wrong and being able to make changes so that I can be a little better next time makes all the difference for me. And I think at a network level, that is what moves society forward. That's

empiricism. That's progress. We have a lot of beliefs in the bankless podcast and the bankless program. And there's so much in there about thinking critically that I think a lot of our listeners can start to figure out like why we wanted to get you on to the bankless podcast in the first place. Because like a lot of what crypto is in its current stage and form is belief about the future version of finance and the future version of economics. And I'm reminded of a podcast we did with Ben Hunt a long time ago where he talked about and his entire newsletter, Epsilon theory, is based off of his theory of Epsilon, where, you have the alpha and the beta of markets. And that's just the raw facts, right? The raw fundamentals, the numbers on the spreadsheets, etc. But the epsilon is the perception of the masses, right?

The viewpoint of the people. And that can change. And that's one of the things that we are seeing nowadays. At least that's from the perspective of bankless and to the outside world. We're seeing so much shift right now. And some of this has to do with crypto and some of it definitely does not. We're seeing shifts in perception as to central banks in their relationship with money. We're seeing shifts in perception in our trust or distrust in institutions.

And there's just a seemingly large number of undercurrents that seem to be shifting the perceptions of everyone, right? And some of those shifts have to do with people like Paul Tudor Jones, reviewing and reorienting their perceptions about what Bitcoin is. You know, micro strategy is a big topic of conversation. And so, Dimitri, before we get into the topic of crypto and how things are shifting towards crypto, I kind of want to talk about like what you see as shifting in the world. To me, Hidden Forces as a podcast has this like stream of consciousness about it, right? Like it's a thought process. And, you know, your decisions to bring on a new guest or a new piece of content to me

represents your belief that this is a. an important piece of subject matter because it represents a shift in people's mentality. What would you ascribe to be like the big paradigm shifts of people's thoughts in 2020? Sure. So, by the way, you guys and your audience will be happy to know that I'm going to be bringing on two people who I think your audience will be very interested to hear from to speak directly about the Stable Act. And that's going to be, I think, a very exciting episode.

I'm going to be recording that next week. But, Dmitri, do you have any teases on who the guests are? Well, I want to. Let's just say that the one person is, you know, there's no one better that could speak about the Stapel Act than one of the people that's going to be on the show. And the other person is someone whose business is very well known and is going to be deeply impacted by any kind of regulation of the space and has spoken, you know, very thoughtfully about it.

So it's kind of too countervailing opinions. And I'm very excited to do that. What was your question again, Ryan or David? Yeah. So there's just a fundamental, there seems to be many different shifts in how people believe the world to be in 2020. I feel like the legacy of 2020 is like the year that it all changed. But what changed?

What are the big undercurrents of the world in 2020 from your perspective? Yeah. I mean, well, I'll just, you know, point out one that was recently on my radar and was on all of our radars, which is the 2020 election. And I actually brought on David Shore, who has been called Obama's Nate Silver. He was the guy that built his forecasting engine for the 2012 election, a brilliant kid. And we spent the balance of the two hours talking about this. And really, what did the 2016 and 2020 elections tell us about the electorate? Because there have been very, again, to bring it back to the point about narratives and Ben Hans-Epsilon, there is a conventional

narrative that has been pushed primarily by leftist media outlets and the Democratic Party about why Donald Trump got elected. But I think for a lot of us that never really felt like it told the whole picture. And I think the election in 2020 kind of bore some of that evidence out. When you look at the fact that young African American men and Hispanics actually voted in greater numbers for Donald Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016, which really doesn't make sense on the face of it. Also, why were the polls so off? And a lot of these speak to what I think is an underlying demarcation, a bifurcation in the electorate, separated by class. I think this is really the big story that has been missed, because conventional explanations either rely on identity

politics based on race, religion, sexuality, different markers of identity, or something that I've actually talked about quite a bit, which has been the wealth gap. But I think what's actually more interesting is something that David talks about and also one of my my guest, Michael Linda, talked about, and we talked about together, which is class. And I think that America is becoming a country that's increasingly breaking apart by class. You know, there are the non-working class, lower educated, more highly mistrustful people kind of living in the Midwest and other parts of the country. And then there are people like, let's say, you and me or us, who have the skills to be able to perform in a modern open economy. We tend to be perhaps more liberal. And we live in,

you know, coastal cities. And we take in this sort of progressive, larger progressive popular culture. Cryptos are really interesting case because you've got these strong strains of libertarianism, you know, in Austrian economic thought. But I mean, I think that's really one interesting subject, which is how is our country dividing, really? You know, we keep saying it, America's never been this divided, but what's dividing us really and how, what are the dividing lines and And how can we wrap our arms around that and can come to an understanding of what that means in order to make more informed decisions for ourselves, right? And I think one area where that's relevant is, I mentioned it, the Stable Act.

The Stable Act is, I think one of the reasons why it's being introduced today is because we're coming into an environment, into a decade, where we can expect to see higher levels of progressive legislation and a greater desire to regulate the economy, to regulate society, and that, I think, stems from the failures of the last 30 to 40 years, some of which are market failures, many of which are the failures of government and the failure both to regulate and to regulate properly and overregulate. So, Dimitri, what you're saying is one thing you've noticed. And by the way, we will get to the Stable Act for the bankless audience.

That is, by the way, some interesting, an interesting bill that was just put before a Congress to regulate stable coins. We want to get Dimitri's opinion on that. But while we're talking about these kind of larger trends, so I think what you're saying, Dimitri, is that we've got now two Americas, and those two Americas are divided by class. But possibly that's a symptom of something else. So you mentioned the wealth gap, so this massive wealth inequality that we haven't seen since when, the 1920s, 1930s. Is that a symptom of something else? I want to bring the topic of central banks in here. So a lot of the crypto, more consensus thought would be that part of the reason for this inequality gap has actually been the mundane printing that has gone on since,

you know, before 2008, but certainly accelerated after 2008, those closest to the money spicket, those with stocks and assets, those things inflated and just accelerated the wealth gap that was already in place. It just kind of accelerated that trend into the future. What's your take on that thought? The idea of central banks, the idea of modern monetary policy that is continuing to print more money, does that have a role in the 2020 narrative in your mind? Yes, a great question. I think it absolutely does. You know, the central banking story is a really interesting one. Because, you know, for the most part, when we look back at history, it's hard to point to one particular time or period or moment where everything changed. But I think that in the case of central banks, 2008 really was a watershed. You know, it really was unprecedented in an age where everything seems to be unprecedented and that word is so often misused. In this case, it is in fact true. Ballot sheet expansion was more or less a very gradual process for the entire lifetime of the Fed. You know, for our 100 years, almost. But 2008, we saw a dramatic expansion of the balance sheet, and I think

we also understand why that happened. It wasn't just to arrest a de-leveraging, a cataclysmic deflation that was going on in the economy that was driven by reckless decisions in the world's investment banks and large commercial banks and financial system. But it was also because our elite, our elite institutions and our elite individuals, politicians and policymakers who were evolve, use a revolving door between government and the private sector, made a very conscious decision to prioritize themselves and their own assets and their own families at our expense. And I think you can think of the 2008 financial crisis as what began as a financial crisis, quickly became an economic crisis, and has since become a political crisis.

And it's become a political crisis because of the choices made by policymakers to print their way out of the problem, to cover up the problem with more and more. paper. And in that sense, they have deferred it, right? Because what is a fiat denominated currency other than a liability? A liability of who? Of the central bank. And so the central bank credits that fiat money to the banking system in order to deal with in the short term a problem of too much debt and too much leverage. And as a result, when the chickens come home to roost, where are they going to roost? They're going to roost back at the issuing institution, which is who, the central bank because it is a liability of the central bank. So that brings us back into a larger

narrative that I think is foundational to crypto, which is that cryptocurrency solves the problem of trust in money. And we've lost faith in our institutions of money. Do you buy, do you, so a banker might say, yeah, but Dimitri, we had no other choice here. Come on. Like, this is, this is really the only way out. Do you buy that argument? Well, that's like saying, like, I had no other choice. I had to push I had to push her in front of the line because the line would have eaten me. Yeah, I mean, I get why they would answer that way, right? And I think also this is where you get into really interesting research around behavioral psychology. They believe it. You know, when Lloyd Blankfein says we're doing God's work, he believes it. He's not just saying that. You know, there is probably

some level of, but people go to great lengths to convince themselves of things. You know, someone who talks about this and I think talked about it on my show as well, is the great shortseller Jim Chanos, who famously helped really bring down Enron. When you look at people that perpetuate giant frauds, they will oftentimes come to very complex rationales to explain why they're actually not bad people. Central Banks as a religious institution is kind of an interesting concept to think about. Money as a religion is an interesting concept to think about as well. We often in the crypto space think of money as sort of a meme, this socially propagated contract between all of us where we agree certain things are money and other things are not,

which is an interesting subject, I think. I've been reading a lot of Ray Dalio lately as well, and you talked about kind of central banks and bankers and kind of the wealthy class choosing themselves over other members of society's part of this. Ray Dalio would probably argue, yeah, this is all part of the rise and decline cycle of a nation. state of an empire, right? And so recently he put out an article this week that said the U.S. is at stage five, most like, you know how cancer progresses in stages, like one through five, but we're at stage five. Well, that's comforting. Right. Well, reading Dalia these days, I don't know if you've done this much, Dmitri, but it's like very sobering because he's looking

through history and he's sort of presenting evidence or reasons why the U.S. is, is, uh, possibly in decline. And this is just kind of like monetary reserve currency is sort of the last thing to go. And the next stage is stage six, where he talks about revolution and civil war. I'm not sure that I'm ready to fully commit on Dalia's like worldview or thesis. And to be fair, I mean, it's all probabilistic for him too. But what's your thought on this? Does all of this wealth gap inequality and kind of the divide that you're talking about certainly makes for a volatile 2020s, but how does it shake out? I know you've been talking a lot about the future of the U.S. and how other geopolitical powers, you know, play into that. Is this kind of an empire

in decline in your mind? Is the nation state experiment not working out so well these days? You know, interesting question. Does Dahlio say that the nation state is in decline? Is that his thesis? Not so much. That would be a bit more of bankless philosophy seeping in there. I just wanted to check, fact check you guys. Yeah, he doesn't say that, but what he would say... Yeah, right. Well, we connect the dots there, to be fair. What Dahlia would say is possibly the America is in decline.

The empire, the Western Empire, if you will, is kind of on the end cycle of its 300-year go of things. Yeah, I have probably a complicated series of answers there, not fully thought through. One is, I don't think that the nation state is in decline. If anything, this is going to sound controversial, I think that there's never been a more bullish time for the nation state. When is it really advantageous to have a government? I don't know if you guys are familiar with Thomas Hobbs, you know, most famously wrote Leviathan. We've spoken about it quite frequently on the podcast. So Thomas Hobbs was, you know, supposedly

a very thin, frail guy. I think he wore glasses. He was scared. He was a guy that was very concerned about a world of, you know, violent anarchy, you know, of war of all against all. And for Thomas Hobbes, a strong national state, and this I think gets to another point, which is, you know, what has been the appeal of authoritarianism, a strong nation state is vital. And it is more important than individual liberties, because individual liberties, you can only have them if you have a state. And if you live in an anarchic, this is sort of the, I'm really summarizing, kind of butchering up his thesis. And so I think that we're moving into a more chaotic world. And in that type of a universe, a strong, competent national government, or the hope even,

or the need for a strong national government supersedes any sort of lack of trust and its competence and its record. So despite the fact that elites and institutions have lost a lot of trust in recent decades, that doesn't negate the fact that we're heading into a period of time where we need them more than ever. And so I think that, yeah, I would actually make the opposite point about nation states. There was one other point you made about the U.S. specifically, I'm curious. About the U.S., right. Is it declining relative to? Well, the U.S. has been declining, right? I think that part and parcel of this is the decline or the disaggregation of the American-led international order, American hegemony, American power and primacy, which was really,

the defining ethos of the rise of neoliberalism and American Empire in the 1990s. I mean, that's when I grew up. I graduated high school in 2000. So I literally went through my entire childhood and early adolescence living in a completely different world. Granted, I did live through the Cold War as in the last, you know, the first decade of my life, but, you know, I didn't fully remember it very well. I really started to become politically of age in the, maybe the George H.W. Bush administration. I had this vision. this memory of seeing a girl crying on Time magazine hugging her husband or boyfriend who was going off to fight in the Persian Gulf. But I was, you know, rudely awakened to what has now become

the second half of my life in the 2001 terrorist attacks. And the Bush administration attempted to resolve that problem, to address it by what, by doubling down an American Empire? And that went terribly wrong. And we've been living, I think the two biggest events of the 20th century have been not so much the terrorist attacks, but rather our response to them. And that primarily means our misadventure in Iraq and all of the blood and treasure that it's cost us. And the 2008 crisis and our response to it. And the 2008 crisis was in some ways a response to the 9-11 attacks and the Bush administration's war in Iraq, right? Because the Greenspan administration dropped rates in the face of the collapsing NASDAQ bubble and the subsequent terrorist attacks.

I also wonder if our response to COVID in 2020 will be another one of those defining events. I guess that remains to be seen. No, that's a really interesting. So when you say our response to COVID, do you mean our monetary response? I mean all of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it sort of gets into another question about that you made about strong national

government and like kind of authoritarianism. I don't know, David, if you have a thought on that. Yeah. Demetri, you talked about Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. And we've used the Leviathan metaphor to ascribe meaning to what's going on in the world of crypto and specifically Ethereum, where Thomas Hobbs, the belief of Leviathan is that you need a strong centralized government in order to keep the body of a nation composed. And we extend that metaphor to Ethereum, where Ethereum is a protocol, but it operates as a strong, as in you can't do anything against the rules of Ethereum by nature. And it is the thing that keeps the community, economy, ecosystem of Ethereum composed. And in a world where we are losing trust in institutions, Ethereum offers, and all the protocols on Ethereum,

offers a place for that trust to migrate to, which is something fundamentally different about the 2020 financial crisis versus the 2008 or the 08 financial crisis. It's because, you know, in 2008, we didn't really have an opportunity to opt out. And, you know, you also talked about how you are particularly bullish on the power and of the nation state. And specifically right now, as a time where the zeit guy seems to be a pro-regulation, right? because we haven't had regulation in the last 30 years, not anything meaningful, right? And so now maybe you alluded to how now might be the time to introduce, you know, stronger

regulation because we haven't been doing that. To me, and I'm pretty sure Ryan, too, when we hear that, we hear, you know, more authoritarianism because if we want to have more regulation, more control, it's not the right time to have more control when there is an option to exit out of a system. And that exiting means cryptocurrencies, right? Like using different infrastructure, different institutions, institutions run and operated by code to opt out of perhaps an authoritarian government, a government that is very happy on the trigger of regulation.

And the perception shifts, the fundamental shifts in people's outlook upon the world seems to resonate with this. At least maybe that's our bias here on the bankless program. But that's kind of like our underlying thesis that we wanted to get your gut take on. Well, when you say opt out, what do you mean? So if there's parallels to Ethereum and a nation state, right? They're not completely, right? Because their, you know, roads are not going to be built by Ethereum.

You know, taxes aren't going to be collected by Ethereum. However, there's increasingly more and more places for you to primarily deposit your capital and wealth, right? And what a nation state is in its most essence form is a system of organizing and then also taxing wealth. It's a property, a nation state is a property rights management system in addition to many other things. And that's primarily the role of Bitcoin and Ethereum. These are property rights management systems. And so it's reducing the power or responsibility of the nation state. If people perceive that Ethereum is a better property rights management system than the nation state,

people might opt into Ethereum because Ethereum doesn't overregulate them. Ethereum doesn't, you know, peer into, like doesn't ask them to download a COVID contact tracing application on their phone. It doesn't ask them to do all these things that they might not want to do. And to get even more concrete on that, things you can opt out of right now are obviously a nation state monetary policy. So you can buy Bitcoin and Ether rather than a very issue-and-happy, you know, a system. You can buy ether and stake it as a bond rather than T-Builds. You can use Ethereum as banking infrastructure rather than Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan.

You can register a capital pool on Ethereum and it's globally accessible and available and permissionless to anyone rather than registering a Delaware LLC. So it's not taking everything that the nation state does, but it is becoming an institution and unbundling possibly some of the services. that the nation state provides. And by the way, maybe the nation state isn't the most efficient way to do these things. Nation states are notoriously expensive from a security and from a tax perspective. So, you know, the idea is that some of these things could be unbundled. But the alternative view, which the world seems to be moving in, is I think exactly,

as you said, more authoritarian state control governments. It's this crypto worldview that offers kind of the alternative, at least in our minds. What are your thoughts on that? Just in general, I'm super curious. Sure. I guess a few points. Number one, I think one of the most core characteristics of a nation state is its claim to the legal use of force.

And that came to me when you, I think it was, I don't know if it was Ryan or David, we're talking about property rights management because I think that what Ethereum does is not property rights management. I think it's property rights accounting, an accounting in general. I think what's really unique and special about these open public ledgers is that they are sort of scribes of the historical record. And you can do a lot with that. That's extremely important, you know, and that speaks to the point about trust. But ultimately, it's physical force, the ability to enforce physically that is the basis of power. And even if the Ethereum ledger says that you own something, that doesn't prevent me from going

and physically taking it from you in the world because we all live in the physical world. So I think that drawing too strong of an analogy between these communities like Ethereum and Bitcoin and nation states is fundamentally wrong. I want to get to your second point in a second, but just a quick thought on that. I think you're absolutely right that violence at its core is the thing that. that we gave up to governments, right? That's the Thomas Hobbs argument, essentially. It's like we give the Leviathan, the power of violence,

and therefore we are able to socially, to collaborate better and coordinate better as human individuals. But that doesn't have to be the case. So when we graduate above violence, there are things that societies put together, like protocols, like laws, like the Constitution. So we're not cavemen running around, hitting each other and stealing our things, and we're not just, you know, war tribes, essentially.

We have protocols and structures that define how we do commerce, that define what our unit of money is. And crypto's answer to that might be a little bit. Well, in the crypto world, code is law. So we do have a law system and a set of protocols. That means we don't have to resort to violence. And there's this defensive aspect of cryptography that we've talked about before, which gives asymmetric power to the defender.

So if I have private keys, and you don't know I have a set of private keys, so assume that privacy is in the mix here, Dimitri, then there's no way for you to crack my cryptography. and steal that from me. Okay, so what I would say is that those laws are backed up by the use of force. Not on Ethereum. Right, but Ethereum exists within a legal framework. So whatever money you have on the Ethereum ledger is in a practical sense, a claim on assets

in the real world. So the claim, the ownership of property on Ethereum doesn't always have claims in real world assets. And some of the most valuable assets on Ethereum are specifically not found in the real world, notably ether itself, the native currency of Ethereum. Right. Right. But what I'm saying is that the only reason that those assets have value is because you live in

a physical world with physical things and physical needs and physical governments that can physically take those things or physically protect them. So one of those things, the ledger, exists within a physical world and governments which have physical force have primacy over those assets. And the reason that we, you know, the argument, and I understand that there are. anarchic philosophies. Anarchism is a philosophy of organization. I think anarchism, I think, works at small scale. I don't know. I don't see how it could work at a large scale. It hasn't worked historically. But the reason that we empower governments and we give them the legitimacy

to use force is in order to protect, among other things, life and property and liberty. So I don't believe that you can have a world. And this actually gets to a fundamental philosophical question, which is, can you have a world that exists solely off of math, off of a cryptographic ledger and smart contract enforcement? And I don't think that you can because that doesn't stop anyone from coming to your house and killing you or, you know, taking your house from you and squatting in it. No smart contract is going to prevent that. Hey, guys, we're going to take a quick break in the action to talk about some of these

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But just to your point, you know, there's a math-driven world doesn't employ a police force, right? It doesn't employ an army that protects from other nation states. However, there does seem to be a balance that could be stricken where, you know, in theory, a nation state could do whatever they want, right, because they have a monopoly on violence. However, we've seen nation states, you know, overreach against the will of the people. And that is inherently destabilizing to a nation state. And I would say especially a nation state like America, where we are founded on principles of freedom and self-sovereignty. The freedom and self-sovereignty of being able to transact on a permissionless ledger is seemingly completely aligned with the values of what makes an American, right?

And it seems to be that America slowly over time, not to the whole world, but to select parts, seems to be kind of exporting that values, the values of freedom and self-sovereignty. So what Ryan and I think really protect property rights management on Ethereum is the desire and will of the people, which seem to be shifting away from offering legitimacy to our legacy institutions. because we don't trust these things anymore, especially after, you know, the nation states failed us during COVID, especially and then began to perhaps also fail us by, you know, printing a bunch of money to benefit a few people rather than the many. And so people, what the thesis is is people are removing their, removing legitimacy from the nation state and offering it to trustless institutions on Ethereum.

And a nation state can only go so far against the will of the people that it, has domain over before they start to resist and fight back. And I think that the, the resistance of the people, because the people inherently are, I don't know how much the people in North Korea are resisting. You know what I mean? Like, I think that that's also, there are a lot of assumptions there baked in there that I would question, you know. And also, I think we have a lot further to fall than a lot of those other countries. And you can stay in an authoritarian, you know, totalitarian regime for quite a long time before you eventually rebel. If you ever rebel, if you ever rebel at all. That's one of the interesting things about looking at history. It's an incomplete

data set. There are a lot of assumptions baked in there that I'm not fully on board with. I think these systems, these platforms, these ledgers, these networks can be important and have been important contributors. I think Bitcoin is a classic example. Bitcoin more than any other protocol, decentralized protocol, has had a meaningful impact. impact on society, insofar as it has presented a huge challenge to fiat currencies. Not so much materially, but ideologically, in the same way that gold plays a role. And it's really caused a lot of people to begin to question the viability of fiat money. At the same time, there are strong forces that compel societies to organize around fiat money because it empowers the government.

and there are periods in time where people want and demand stronger government. And I think we are heading into one of those periods of time. And it's not the first time that we've been in this in the United States, that we've gone through a period like this. These are cyclical processes. And so I don't think that my hope for cryptocurrency and for platforms like Ethereum and Bitcoin is that they can survive, that they can survive the regulation, that they can work constructively with regulators who will regulate them.

to formulate regulations that don't cripple the industry, that allow the industry to innovate and create value and solve problems without getting overburdened. That's my hope. But I don't see it as a kind of thing where we're going to escape into Ethereum and that we're going to live on the cloud or on the decentralized cloud. I don't think that's realistic. And I think, interestingly enough, when I listen to a lot of people in the community talk about this, I think that view is partly informed by what feels like a paradigm shifting moment. I think a lot of people see how digitized the society has become. They look at the advancements made in virtual reality, in gaming, and now with the pandemic and this sort of remote work situation, and I think they over extrapolate and think

that that somehow then means that we really don't need to live in a physical world. The contours of the state are not just less relevant, but irrelevant. And I think that's fundamentally incorrect, is my view. So, Dimitri, is that what you think accounts for the major rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in terms of market cap? It's kind of this store of value, gold alternative type of thesis. Is that what you attributed to? Yeah, I think that Bitcoin has found a really good niche as a, quote, digital gold. I think that, and that's partly, I think, as a result of the failure to live up to its original vision, which was as a censorless peer-to-peer money. Because that really was an amazing, you know, story and was very compelling to people like me.

And that is one of the things that first got me attracted to crypto courage in the first place. It was the hope that really this was a way to opt out, that we would be able to opt out of Fiat money, it's obviously proven much more complicated than that. I know that there are layer two solutions that are being implemented or being developed, but to my knowledge, those are still a ways away, and it's not clear that they'll ever be really viable insofar as sustaining the kind of security promises that Bitcoin initially promised, while at the same time enabling the kind of speed and processing capability that you would need in order to operate at scale. But I think the digital gold narrative is a powerful one. But the thing with digital gold is,

like gold, for example, is a Ponzi scheme. It's a pyramid scheme. Largely, not entirely, because there are fundamental uses for gold. It can be used in electronics. It's used as jewelry, which is not really a Ponzi scheme. There's, I think, underlying attraction to that. But fundamentally, for the most part, most of gold's value is Ponzi value. It's It's based on a conviction that what I buy it at, the price I buy it at, will be lower than what I can sell it to you for, that it's going to keep going up over time, and that's why I buy. Otherwise, people wouldn't buy gold. And Bitcoin, people buy Bitcoin for the same reason, primarily.

Most people buy Bitcoin because they have an expectation or hope that its value will continue to rise. And what's interesting about the Bitcoin community, and I'm not talking about traders and sharks that come in and out that trade on volume and buy and sell. And I think it's got a strong to a point that either you or Ryan or David made earlier about religion, it's got a strong religious fervor. And one of the important sort of doctrinal forces in Bitcoin is the notion that you should hoddle. And you hold on, hold on until the rapture, until the apocalypse, until, you know, you're brought to heaven. You're given your 40 virgins.

And I think that is, again, also, for me, that's not a particularly compelling vision. And I don't know how sustainable it is. So I guess I don't know if I'm really answering the question. I might be me mandering now. But it's kind of a way of me saying that I think for Bitcoin to graduate, it's got to become more than just this, for lack of a better word, pyramid scheme. I don't know how you guys feel about that. A couple comments there.

So, you know, one is, I think that's a super interesting way of characterizing it. Your comment about this peer-to-peer cash thing being the original vision for Bitcoin, like I completely agree, right? But we also think on bankless that that vision in the wider crypto is not dead. In fact, it can live in places like Ethereum where you have layer two and you have the ability to create stable coins and this sort of thing. And you have scalability of kind of the base layer infrastructure. sure. But maybe we can get back to that. I'd love to go into more detail on your description of

Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme and as gold as a Ponzi scheme. I'm going to get so in trouble for saying. No, actually, so would you be surprised to know? So would you be surprised to know that I, and I don't want to speak for David, but like I probably agree with you. Like I wouldn't change the, I might change the word Ponzi scheme to Ponzi game. Or pyramid scheme. kind of what it is. Maybe a pyramid game type of mechanism. But I guess my counter question to you, Demetri, is like, isn't that what money is in general? Right? Peter Thiel calls money the bubble that never pops, right? The bubble, like, what is money? Uh-huh. Neval, uh, um, Evol Harari in his book, Sapiens calls money a shared myth. Yeah, that's what it is. It's a, it's a shared meme that we all,

What do we want, what do we need as money? Well, I want to have the money that you think is money and that the rest of the world thinks is money. And there are some monies that are in different stages of development and growth. There are monies that are new and have small networks and not everyone trusts. And so if you choose to buy those monies, you're kind of speculating that that money will be thought of as money by the rest of the world. Maybe that's a bit more what Bitcoin is. And then when that happens at the nation state level with something like gold, you get things called the gold standard in the 1800s, where nation states were playing the Ponzi game, if you will, of saying like, well, England has just switched to the gold standard. So we better do it. We don't want to be like China and the last one's left on the silver standard, do we? So that's my like the more fundamental question is, well, when you think about it more deeply, Dimitri, like, isn't money just a Ponzi game?

And importantly, the distinction between scheme and game. Scheme alludes to somebody is going to, like, quote unquote, like pull the rug, right? Whereas game is something that everyone chooses to opt into and to play, more or less implicitly or perhaps explicitly, understanding that this is a game to be played. And when everyone plays the game, well, that's just money. It's no longer a game. It no longer becomes a game. It graduates.

So I have a lot of interesting thoughts about this, where to start. So I've heard this discussed often in crypto. It's a really fascinating approach to trying to bootstrap money, which is basically saying, hey, look, money is just a myth. The dollar is just a myth. We just generally believe in it. It's a consensus narrative. I would argue that that's not entirely correct because I think fiat money is not entirely

a myth, right? It is actually the power of the state to enforce it as money, which makes it money. And then I think that there are myths on top of it that give it value or give it, you know, much more value than that. But let's talk about like money as a sort of communal, not enforced consensus. Yes, it is mythology. And I think what I see in the crypto community, which is interesting, is this kind of wink nod thing. Like, hey, we all know this is bullshit.

But like my bullshit is better than your bullshit. And so, like, we're all just going to, like, you know, pump our bullshit here. And then eventually, because we're so religiously fervent, we're such devotees that we're going to convert more and more people into our faith. And once we get enough people, then you're going to get the FOMO. I don't want to be left out to the gates of heaven. Right. I don't want to be, you know, on scorched earth.

And this is very much the ideology. What fascinates me about crypto, among other things, that Bitcoin actually speaks. specifically, is the extent to which this is true. I noticed recently that Seifadine, I didn't know this, he was a carnivore, which I didn't know what that was either, actually, to be honest. But I saw that he had apparently someone who was a follower of his had adopted a carnivore diet and he developed some sort of bowel disorder, which was a result of the fact that he was not getting enough fiber, which is like, duh, you know, like, you shouldn't be just eating meat. Maybe some people with experience.

extremely short, you know, intestines. But for the most part, human beings need to eat, you know, were omnivores. Anyway. And so, you know, he tweeted at Safeddin, and Safeadine was like, no, you idiot, basically. You're not doing you right. You're not eating enough meat. You weren't, you know, he found some way in which this person was not, you know, dedicated enough to this discipline. And what's interesting to me is that this carnivore diet then I discovered was actually something that was spreading generally in crypto. And I think that, you know, it might just be sort of coincidental, but I do think that there is a strong adherence. The culture adheres to very basic ideologies. I saw this in the case of a prominent podcaster who when he

first came into Bitcoin sort of adopted Austrian economics and tried to figure out how to make Austrian economic theory work with his conception of the world, and he was having difficulty doing that. And the reason he was having difficulty doing that is because Austrian economics is not a sufficient explanation for the world and for economics, which is, again, this is the point about critical thinking. But I think that what you are seeing overall in Bitcoin in order to bootstrap this mythology is you're seeing a strong adherence to ideology that feels very religious. And that's the overall mechanism in the community to get the value to a place in the event that it's just digital gold and the event that we can't really create

sufficiently robust layer two solutions to offset the need for, you know, fiat money. and if Fiat governments can't actually enforce the value of their currencies to get the value to a place where it can actually be, it can graduate from being a game to being the real thing. Well, my first question on that is, is it working? I mean, we have Paul Toir Jones, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have publicly traded companies adding to their balance sheet. We have the BlackRock CEO, $8 trillion in terms of assets under management, say there might be

something to this paragraph. Right, Larry Fink, Larry Fink. So, guys, this is actually the more interesting part of the discussion. Right. You know, I was on, I was, I did interview, I mentioned I had Jim Chanos on my show not long ago. And when we headed into the overtime, someone had texted me a tweet, had shared a tweet by Ray Dalio. And it was something like, I think I might have missed something about Bitcoin. I laughed so hard when I read that to Jim Chanos.

Well, did you read all the replies of all the people in Crypto? say, here's what you missed. Sure, sure, sure. Let me bring it down for you, Ray. And by the way, come on my podcast so we can talk about it. Yeah, sure, man. Well, Paul Tudor Jones is an interesting character, a really smart guy, open-minded guy. I would think it would be interesting to see if Stanley Druck and Miller gets converted.

Those two guys are very close. Ray Dalio is much more of an institutionalist than those two guys. I think, yeah, so to get to the larger point, I think it's fascinating to see this. This is where we go back to the question about, I said at the very top of the show, when I had Howard Mawkson, he said it's not enough just to be contrarian, you also have to be right. And you also have to have conviction. And I think that what you see in these cases for someone like Ray Dalio tweeting, I might have missed something is my convictions are shaking. And as the price goes higher, they shake more. It's like that scene. I'm a huge nerd. I used to watch among so many nerdy sci-fi things. I used to watch Star Trek. And in Star Trek six, when Sulu, Commander Sulu was now a captain, and he actually was captain of the Excelsior. I think the Excelsior was the name of the ship. I think it was the Excelsior, and he was flying into, you know, assist Captain Kirk, who was fighting the Klingons, and the ship was just rattling, and it was rattling, and it was about to come apart. And I think that's what

it feels like for people who lack conviction or whose conviction begins to get challenged, because all of our convictions become challenged, as the price moves again, against us. And I think that that's what Bitcoin has that's extremely powerful. Besides this community, which is ultimately and the platform, the network and the math behind it and the cryptography, is also the price. You know, as much as I hate the casino culture vibe that grows around Bitcoin as the price escalates, I cannot deny that the single most important thing for driving adoption and for making it really graduate is the price. The higher it goes. And eventually, if it could just reach escape velocity in the way, that price and convert enough people, then the people that are making the laws are going to

regulate it in a way that's beneficial to holders of crypto. So the pyramid game works. So I'll just say this one more thing. This is a thing that makes Bitcoin unique theoretically if it succeeds. It is the first attempt to institutionalize a Ponzi scheme. It is the first time in which the Ponzi scheme doesn't end and it just becomes the new de facto reality, the new de facto standard. This is the explicit strategy that many of like the deepest Bitcoin extremists verbalize.

They understand that number go up is Bitcoin's best marketing tool. And that also like Bitcoiners can be can be anyone and that can include people in government because there is an incentive to hop on the ship and then to regulate Bitcoin into existence, into and get Bitcoin as an infrastructure stitched into the world because they are bagholders that are incentivized to also contribute to the Ponzi. And here's the thing, right? So if that is Bitcoin's, you know, best, if price go up is its best marketing feature, you know what its second best is to me, Demetre?

I'd like your thought on this because this comes full circle to our conversation about central banks and authoritarian governments. The second best is when a friend of. Vine receives a check from the government for a few thousand dollars, right? That's, that's helicopter dropped to him, essentially. Unconditional. And he says, unconditional. And he says, wait, wait a second, where does money really come from? I thought this stuff was scarce. You mean they could just print money at any point in time. And of course, crypto has a meme for this. Money printer go bur. Money works if people, fiat money in particular, works when people don't think about it too hard.

But people are thinking about it now. Yeah, when you're air dropping thousands of dollars to them, when you have modern monetary theory, that's crypto's second best tool. Well, here's my question to you guys. When did both of you first come to this realization? And your mythology around fiat currency broke? It's a long, long process. I would say there's never any one particular aha moment. I mean, I got into crypto in the middle of 2017.

and my learning about crypto hasn't stopped. So I can't actually pin it down. But, you know, I would say sometime between 2017 and 2019, my ideas have largely formulated around this thesis. It also starts, I think for a lot of people, start for me this way is, oh, it's worth a shot. You know, it's like, probabilistically, will this thing become global money?

You know, what's the probability of that? And what's the price right now? and what's the total market cap if it succeeds? Maybe a lesser version of that is what's the total potential market cap of like the gold market or the nation state. Is it worth a bet? That's where a lot of people start, I think, Dimitri. And that's kind of where I started with things.

I think that, yeah, actually moving us away, I'm taking over the interview. I don't want to do that. We love this conversation. I don't want to do that. I'm moving us away now, if that's all right, from the initial question, which is when that you disabuse yourself of this mythology to the earlier observation about China using Bitcoin or other countries using Bitcoin and how that relates possibly to gold. I think that's where Bitcoin's opportunity to actually become digital gold is because it's not enough simply

to go up. If there's a consensus among global governments and this is why Bitcoin actually can do better, even though I said I'm bullish on governments in this world, which I am, I think also the same type of a world, a multipolar world, is actually bullish for an independent monetary standard. Totally agree. So, you get it. No one nation has the ability to impose that standard or the network effect to impose that standard.

And there are political incentives and rationales by competing nations to adopt an independent standard. Because with adopting an independent standard, what you also do is you get an influx of capital. So if the United States decides to ban Bitcoin within its borders and a lot of people own a lot of Bitcoin, they may decide, you know what, forget it. I'm just going to move to China. I don't care if it's not, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles, you know, but I'll just, I'd rather be in China and I can be rich because I've got all my capital on the blockchain. I don't have any of it here. So I think, you know, I think that's also a plus for Bitcoin and for Ethereum perhaps. Yeah, one way we've used to describe that concept is basically the world, in a world of multiple sovereign powers, it has to embrace the most credibly neutral monetary policies and monetary tools and even blockchain tools. And by credibly neutral,

it just means the ones that none of their competing rival nation states can actually control, right? So it's kind of the reason why we're very bullish on governance light type of protocols, where you can't really turn the dials and no one has complete control over it. It's kind of like TCPIP, right? That's the underlying protocol of the Internet and everybody uses it. And they use it because the U.S. doesn't have control over it. China doesn't have control over it.

It's just a dumb communication protocol. That's kind of what we need for monetary standards and even financial standards like Ethereum is something that is outside of. the nation-state apparatus can't be controlled by a single nation-state. But Ryan, you will agree that despite those standards, China has been able to exert its influence and exert complete control over the internet within its physical dominion. Totally agree. Yep.

Not complete control. Well, so there is a different, I think you'd agree with this, David. There's a Chinese internet. There's a Western internet. There's like multiple internets. Yes. But David, you know, if they want to try. turn China into North Korea, they can do it. They're allowing enough internet to suit their

interests. If they want it to ban it entirely, they could do it because it comes with costs doing that, you know? And the interesting thing about that, though, is what's the check on China for Western democracies? It's to promote a more free internet, right? That's kind of the way you can challenge the authoritarian vision of the internet. At least I hope that's going be the case or else, you know, we have multiple competing authoritarian governments and not a lot of freedom of the people. Well, I would say, what I would actually say is I kind of flip that on its head. I don't think, because the way you phrase that presumes that the goal, a non-authoritarian government's goal is to thwart an authoritarian government. But I actually think that the goal is

simply to defeat the other government, regardless of its ideology. And so I think, unfortunately, I think the opposite is true. The more totalitarian governments exist, the fewer rights that individuals have in different parts of the world, the less incentive the United States and Western liberal democracies have to uphold their previous standard of liberty. It becomes a race to the bottom. And we've already seen that. We've seen that here in the U.S. So is that where the U.S. is headed in your mind? I think, yeah. So that's like one of my primary fears. This is the double-edged sort of government. You know, when I was, you know, I've gone through multiple stages of personal development. When I was younger during the Bush years, I really adopted a strong

progressive view of the world and a progressive understanding of why we had financial crises, why we were developing, you know, large gaps in our levels of wealth inequality, et cetera, et cetera. And I pointed to deregulation in the whole period of the late 70s or 80s, 90s. But then the financial crisis happened. And I was like, wait, no, never mind. I had it backwards. It's these guys are the problem. They're stealing all our money. And our currencies are pure shit. And I adopted a lot of these other alternative ideologies. I've come to a much more middle-of-the-road approach. I think that you have to look at these things with nuance. And so there's a double-edged sword with the government. We need the government to impose, for example, I believe,

strongly in this, environmental regulations. Of course, they can go way overboard and often do or impose the wrong types of regulations. But I think we want to have national parks. We want to be able to protect the sea, the air, because these are places where companies and firms externalize costs because they don't have a price in the marketplace. But at the same time, governments can and do often act in very aggressive, dangerous ways. And Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald are well aware of that. So I do worry about that, guys. And I think that as we disassociate more and more from the physical world, that also, I feel like, becomes even more dangerous because in some ways, we kind of enter this dreamscape metaverse. And in that world, I think people can quickly find themselves enslaved without knowing it.

Yeah. There's no bill of rights yet for the metaverse is there. No. No. And the tools that operate in this world are very good. good at their coercive tools. They guide us and steer us and prod us in directions outside of our conscious awareness. That's how these tech platforms operate. That's how Facebook makes its money. And they're becoming better and better at that. And I do really worry about how our democracy can

survive, our systems of government, which depend on and assume human agency. How can they survive in such a world. And the answer is they cannot survive in such a world. And so in order for us to survive and for them to survive, before we get to that full expression or to the critical threshold, we need people to use, among other things, regulation to rein in, in this specific example, these tech companies and their use of these business models in order to protect the viability of the systems of government that can check their power in the first place. And I know that that can be a controversial opinion to take in the crypto community because so many people really are, you know, wedded to very narrow, you know, models of explaining the world. And they're not prepared to leave those models because it's scary to them.

And that's exactly why we wanted to get you on to this podcast to have that conversation because, you know, bankless, we beat the drum on a very few number of very specific theses. and getting somebody's perspective from the outside is really, really important to check ourselves, right? We want somebody to come check ourselves. And you've definitely done that on the podcast thus far. And I want to get that conversation continued into the world of Defi. You had Vance Spencer from Framework on the Hidden Forces podcast, and it was one of my favorite podcast episodes that you did. And it was insanely well researched. And I kind of want to ask about the feedback that you got from your audience about that episode.

If there was anything there that was surprising to you or just overall the nature of the response from that podcast. And then also want to turn to what your take is on defy. What is the value proposition of defy? What does defy mean to you? And how do you kind of fit it as a model into your head? Yeah. I think that there was a positive response among, there was no negative response. there was a positive response, I think, among people who primarily weren't familiar or weren't

particularly, they might have been familiar. I mean, in a lot of cases, people that own Ethereum and might own some of these different ERC20 tokens, like SNX, for example, they don't actually understand the underlying technology or they don't understand the business models or how they work. So I think in those cases, they were very happy and excited that I covered it. You know, when I wrote my, the intro that I did for that show was not my first intro. My first intro was actually pretty negative. But I felt like after I wrote it, I was like, well, this is kind of shitty. It doesn't, because I felt like it didn't accurately represent my respect for, you know, what they were trying to do. And by kind of focusing on everything I thought that was kind of incomplete and half-baked about it.

And in that sense, I thought maybe it's a little too cynical too. I often try and check my is cynicism. I think that there's promise in all of this stuff, but I think that it's the hype wakes exceeds the promise. And I think that Defi is a perfect example of that. I think that it's primarily used for gambling. I think SNX is a great example of that. It's a derivative platform. And the advantage is that you can gamble unencumbered by regulation and you can innovate unencumbered by regulation, but what is it used for? Primarily, it's used for gambling. And there are huge risks embedded in that. When I look at what's going on in Defi, I feel like people are just recreating the traditional financial system with all the same problems. I don't actually

see something. The innovation that happens in Defi is all user-based. It's all about like the consumer experience. That's what people mean when they talk about innovation in Defi. I don't see innovation in terms of making a more robust, safer financial system that can help expand. I mean, is the issue even that we don't have? I don't. I don't. I'm often confused about this because even if they could expand credit, is that the problem that we're dealing with right now that we don't have enough credit? I mean, again, I think Bitcoin solves a or potentially solves a real problem in the immediate term, despite its shortcomings as a peer-to-peer currency in that it has been a good store of

value. And in the world we're living in today, people need a place to store their money because, you know, winter is coming. And so I don't mean to like shit on Defi. And that was what I felt I was kind of doing in my initial intro to it. But I do think that it's got a long ways to go before it can prove its value. And I think a lot of the rhetoric and high-minded rhetoric around it doesn't meet the litmus test for the bullshit indicator. I have a few thoughts on that, Dimitri.

So like, one, I think you've got like a really interesting and good take in many ways on Defi as it is today. One thought I had is when you're describing kind of the speculation, I don't think David or I would deny that there is rampant speculation in Defi. There absolutely is. And there's always been rampant speculation and even something like Bitcoin and Ether, of course. The nature of the industry. It's the nature of the industry. But not just the industry of all industries as they grow up.

I mean, this is the nature of the 1990s Internet. This is the nature of settling and going out west on the frontier. Why did people move from the eastern elite coast? Because they were people without a lot of opportunity on the east coast and they wanted to go find gold. So they set off in the Oregon Trail west. You know, it's the nature of railroads. Carletta Perez is an economist who kind of talks about this. When new industries are getting born, there's this period.

rampant speculation. Everybody outside of the industry, it gives many people a bad taste in their mouth as it's being developed because they look at it and they see all the speculation. They don't see the real promise. But through a series of boom-bust cycles, that promise is slowly realized and the economy is built up. And there are some interesting things that you can do right now that aren't speculative in nature in DFI that you couldn't do previously. So I think of an Ethereum address, for instance, it's like a bad. account that no one can shut down. So how do you get a bank account in the U.S.? Or how do you get a bank account if you are in a country like Argentina or Venezuela? There's a massive amount of

unbanked people. Well, if you can just have an internet connection and create an eth address, well, now you have a bank account that's plugged into this global financial system, which is the Ethereum ledger, essentially. You can do all sorts of things. You can trade stable coins, for instance. You can move money from one place to another if you don't have access to a good money source. You can trade from like different assets. You can get exposure to the SMP 500 if you want. You can start to program against the system without asking anyone's permission. So it becomes a sort of internet of money where it's completely permissionless and open and available to the world, especially a world that doesn't have a strong, robust banking system.

So it remains to be seen. I think it's a little early. And I bet you would take that view too, that it's a little early in DeFi's cycle, but that maybe the speculation that we see that that's kind of rampant now that turns some folks off, that's not going to be the final state. In the end, the Internet produced a lot of value for the world. But there was a period of time where it was just like, oh, my God, that's like, this is what Yahoo! stock is, really? Just, you know, banner ads and, you know, very little revenue and being propelled

by these bubble companies looks like a scam, right? What's your take on that? Yeah. So, first of all, I mean, I generally agree with your framing of the boom bus cycle of the business cycle, but I don't, I would take issue with your interpretation of the internet and the railroads as being analogous to what we're seeing today in Defi because, you know, the primary use case of the railroads was not trading railroad stock. And the primary use of the railroads was not trading railroad stock. And the primary use case of the internet was certainly not trading internet stocks. There were underlying businesses that were creating real value first that people were experiencing before they began to become excited about the value of the companies that provided the services. However, one of those

industries were explicitly a recreation of money and value, which is what sets this industry apart and perhaps why there's so much outsized speculation. Yes, that is a very good point, but I guess two observations. Ethereum has graduated beyond being money. It's supposed to be a smart contract platform engine, a touring complete global computer. And I think a lot of that rhetoric, again, does not match up to what the use cases are, which is they are highly speculative. And it's not clear to me how all the money that's pouring into defy is going to, you know, maybe it's because, I'm not plugged in enough, and that's perfectly possible, right? Because I'm, although I do deep dives

when I have guys like Vance and Michael on or when I have, you know, Vitalicon, I spend most of my time on the periphery, right? And I'll circle in, I'll dive in, and I'll come back out. So maybe that's why I'm not really seeing the roadmap. And because I'm also focused, and I went through a long period of fiery baptism of trying to really understand the limitations of Ethereum, the limitations of Bitcoin. But I would also kind of ask a larger question. And this is where I've, I think, become somewhat disenchanted with the crypto ecosystem, which is that I initially came into it because I had this sort of starry-eyed view of it. And I'm a bit of a romantic in general. and I was drawn in by these sort of romantic visions and ideas.

And I adopted a lot of them early on. But what I would ask is what is the problem that cryptocurrencies, that defy, that Bitcoin fundamentally as an ecosystem, what are the fundamental problems or the fundamental problem that they seek to solve? And what are the fundamental problems that society faces? Because I don't know that those two things actually coincide. I do think that Bitcoin's initial observation that we need to have a form of money that is, you know, independent of governments or that isn't co-opted by governments who have the ability to use it towards their own ends is important. But that's just become everything.

And that's just not enough for me. Right. It wasn't enough for me either. But like how I would answer, what problem does this solve in general crypto? it's disintermediating banks, basically. It's a self-sovereign. So if Bitcoin is a self-sovereign store value,

Ether is an Ethereum is a self-sovereign store value plus banking system plus money system. But we know that that's not true because as we know now, these systems are going to require multiple layer solutions in order to operate. And so what are you doing if not creating an entirely new financial system that looks just like the old one? What's the difference between defy at scale and the modern banking system other than one settles on Ethereum and the other settles at using, you know, a system of clearing houses operated and controlled by a central bank? So and the through line here is in one of the first conversations that we had is is that there's this paradigm shift in people's perceptions in the world, right? We are distrusting institutions. We are distrusting our banks.

Like the central bank has lost its clothes. The emperor no longer wears clothes. We distrust our government. And the fundamental problem for me that defy and Ethereum and Bitcoin that they all provide for the world is a new place to deposit your trust. And so there is trust that is lost in the legacy world. And now it doesn't know where to go. But Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these defy protocols, while they may seem like speculative

of toys now, every single defy protocol that we've interviewed on the bankless podcast and even the ones that we haven't, the common problem that they're always trying to get right with their protocol is the removal of trust. And while we call Bitcoin and Ethereum as like these property rights management systems or these ledgers, what they really are are trustless institutions. They are trust coordination layers in a world where we are losing our trust. in our previous institutions because of the generalized mismanagement by messy humans, we are gaining trust in these protocols that operate by code. And to me, that is the fundamental truth of what this industry is solving, is the trust issue,

which is an issue as old as humanity itself. And that's why I think there's so much speculation and gambling going on is because, while I don't think a lot of the people participating in these markets explicitly understand this to be like a trust. revolution, people still know. People still know about the potential upside of a new money like Bitcoin or a new property rights management system, trustless institution like Ethereum. And Dimitri, if all of that sounds a bit too abstract for you, right? Here's a few things that could be interesting. One is I would encourage you at some point,

you know, maybe you get some holiday time or something, go download a mobile app called Argent, which is basically a Venmo type of experience on a decentralized finance protocols where there's no intermediary involved. That's one thing you can do. And then you DM me and I'll send you some dyes so you can play with it. Well, there you go, David. If you send me money, I'll do it. I will send you money. I'll send you money.

If you don't mind magical internet money, we call it money. I don't know. The second thing I think would really pique your interest is if at some point you get, get an opportunity to talk to Hayden Adams, no relation to Ryan Sean Adams myself, but he helped develop a protocol on Ethereum called Uniswap. And the reason I think that Uniswap was interesting is because in 18 months, you know, like, you know the Coinbase story, obviously, a large crypto bank developed on top of Ether and Bitcoin allows people to speculate, right? It allows people to trade, right? Uniswap was built on 120,000.

thousand dollars, I think even less than that on a grant by one developer, his first development project, he coded a automated market maker, embedded in code, put it in, put it on Ethereum. And recently, it started doing more volume than Coinbase. So a team of like, now it's more than one developer, it's like 10 developers, just outcompeted in a thousand plus person institutional company just with code on Ethereum. So, like, there is also a massive efficiency gain story that we, I think, will see coming to the table in crypto and Ethereum. And it's just encapsulated in that way.

All it does is match buyers and sellers in a liquidity pool through an algorithm. And it turns out that's more efficient than, you know, the 12 stories of JP Morgan building or even a coin base. That's kind of the power of defy to me. So those two things are some things to make it maybe more. concrete for you as you continue the exploration of this space. No, and I'm familiar with Uniswap. I studied it a bit in preparation from my conversation with Manson, Michael.

And I do think that decentralized exchanges are one of a number of promising use cases. Again, I don't mean to suggest that there isn't promise here, and I don't mean to suggest that crypto is not an important evolution in the progression of the internet. it. And hopefully a much bigger revolution than I even think at this very moment, because as I said, I've gone through different stages of sort of thinking about how far this can go and how big the promise is. But I do think, again, my point simply is to say that what I often find when I dig into a lot of these projects is that the hype is vastly exceeds the underlying reality. And that's been the case the entire time. You can be convinced that. You can be convinced that.

that's actually a feature, not a bug? You know, that kind of opens up another can of worms, which is that if it's a feature, then again, it brings us back to it being a Ponzi scheme. David, we almost had them. Look, Matry, David's going to send you money. So if nothing else, it'll be useful to get money from your podcaster friends. I'm very happy to do it under the guys that it is for the purposes of learning as opposed to you paying me.

for coming on your podcast, which is... Of course. You know, a funny story, I'll tell you guys real quick. I had a guest who came on the podcast, Tom Burgess, and he's a journalist for the FT, or he was a journalist for the FD. He may still be, but he's written two different books, the most recent one of which was called Cliptopia, and it was about the world of dirty money. And at the very end, he said, you know, I won't tell your listeners that, you know,

you promised to pay me a very large sum for appearing on your podcast. And we both laughed. And then I got a very long email from a listener who was very disappointed to hear that I pay my guests. Oh, no. I was like, wait, I was like, you have to be kidding. Oh, no. Was this not the most obvious thing in the world that this is a joke? Well, I mean, when there's 10,000 listeners, a few people are going to miss the joke.

Yeah, just to be clear, like, you know, we're joking here. Yeah. Absolutely. All right, Dimitri, one more subject we want to cover, which. is your take on the Stable Act itself. So maybe for folks that don't know, would you be able to summarize that and then give us your thoughts? Sure.

So I did read through it. It's highly legalistic. I'm not a lawyer. I hate contracts. They drive me nuts. So I did pull out some interesting, you know, observations. But I think the one that stuck out the most was actually not necessarily even in the agreement explicitly so much.

it was something that one of the authors of the bill said on Twitter, which was that at the end of the day, node operators are responsible for what transactions get processed on the network. And I thought that was very interesting, and I thought it was actually also accurate in the sense that if the government does want to regulate at all costs, let's say, Ethereum or Bitcoin, legally, they can make the argument, and they can make the argument to hold responsible the node operators in the same way that Napster held the government or whoever it was that was, I guess it would be the government, held responsible the computers that were doing the file sharing of music on Napster and the selective prosecution that came along with that. I thought that was one of the really interesting kind of points,

but I can't claim to be an expert on the wording of the regulation. But as I said, I am as a result of that, this is how my process works. As a result of my peaked curiosity, I have brought on, invited on just the person to speak with me for two hours on this. And I look forward to doing that next week. Yeah, and I think folks should tune into that. It's super interesting. I guess, you know, maybe I don't want to speak for the crypto community, but the take from most in the crypto community is this is a real. This is a really ill-conceived bill that is not actually even achieving its stated purpose.

And I think part of the stated purpose, of course, of this bill, and by the way, it's just a draft bill. So, you know, the chances of this actually making it through and kind of becoming law, maybe your guest could comment on that when you have them on, Demetri. But they seem kind of small to me. But the purported purpose is to is consumer protection, basically, and specifically low-income folks, modern-income folks, people who are possibly minorities. I think this has been part of the argument. Very interesting because this group of people has had trouble facing discrimination with the banking apparatus in the U.S.

But as far as like we were aware, most people who use stable coins, to be honest, Dimitri are crypto geeks like us, you know? They're not, they're not the. Yeah, I also don't think that like, quote, low income folks, whatever they mean by that, because, you know, there's a lot of like verbiage that's super popular. Yep. Within democratic circles. And I know this is being put forward by a strongly progressive Democratic congresswoman or senator. I don't think this is the primary concern of low income folks. So I think, you know, again, I'll keep an open mind. And this isn't even the primary point of the discussion that I'm going to have. But, you know, I wouldn't ascribe too much value to the claims that this is why this regulation is faster. So then the question the crypto

community is asking. So if the, if not that, then why? Like, so why? Is it, is it because lawmakers aren't quite understanding like this technology? It's because they're trying to get ahead of something? Is it because there's some, like, because part of the, part of the bill, as I understand is that anyone who issues a stable coin, be that a D5 protocol, or be that a group like Coinbase or, you know, Center Consortium that has USC, they have to become a bank. They have to have have a bank charter in which to do that, which, again, weird because the stated purpose is to get members of the vulnerable population in America outside of the yoke of banks. Weird to make any stable coin issuers be a bank. But that aside, what do you think is the purpose of this thing?

Well, I really don't. I mean, I have to be honest, I'd be purely speculating. I don't know what the purpose is. And that's a great question. It's when I want to ask my guest. But I don't, I wouldn't go so far as to say that the authors of this bill don't understand crypto. I actually think that Rohan Gray, for instance, seems to be quite knowledgeable, actually. You know, I've read some of his thoughts. He's also a strong advocate of MMT, which is a school of thought that I've investigated. I've put some level of attention to over the years. And I've struggled to really find any, I mean, I think it has an interesting descriptive component to it, but as a prescriptive ideology, I think it's deeply flawed and highly political. But in that sense, what is economics? It's a political science. It's not a physical science. So there are political objectives, you know, and I think this bill is probably part of a larger ideological effort to put strict regulations around money and finance. I don't think it's just about crypto. This bill may just be about crypto, but I think that the people working on it and the people

introducing it are interested in much larger, much broader financial regulations, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. It draws out maybe this sort of the question we could kind of end with here, is do you think that crypto and the nation state are on some sort of inevitable collision course? Interesting. Crypto and the nation state. I would say, yeah, maybe to a degree, yes, I think also crypto and people. The masses are on a collision course, guys. You know, the gold standard was deeply unpopular in the late 1800s. It was not something that the mass of people wanted. Particularly those who owed money, debt holders. Of course, people who owed money, also primarily farmers in the Midwest.

Exactly. But ultimately, what gold really was was an expression of power vested in the hands of the people who owned it and the people who trafficked in it. And I do think that as crypto becomes bigger, the value of the currency becomes greater, the price increases, and more and more of the world's value accrues to the public ledgers like Ethereum and Bitcoin, the more ire, discontent and will arise. from the masses of people who simply don't own any of it. And I think also the difficulty of governments to operate the types of programs that they will need to operate in order to assuage

the voters who are pissed off at them primarily will compel them to regulate it. And I think this is the kind of interesting nexus and complicated stew that ultimately independent crypto organizations and think tanks will have to navigate. And I think to the extent to which the Bitcoin and the Ethereum community and other cryptocurrencies will be able to be successful in this environment will depend on the richness and competence of their intellectual communities and the ways in which they can organize to lobby against this type of regulation. And I think there are a lot of really brilliant people in Bitcoin and in Ethereum. I actually think, again, this is, just my perspective from where I stand, I think there are distinctly two different cultures in Bitcoin

and Ethereum. I think that Ethereum has much more of a builder mentality. It certainly is not as ideologically right wing as Bitcoin. Certainly. And I don't think it's as philosophical as Bitcoin. And I think the Bitcoin community has a stronger strain of cultural philosophers. And I think that actually bodes well for the entire crypto industry because I think a lot of those people are best positioned to try and make the case. But I think, of course, there will be people from all different walks of life who will get involved. I think that's the best hope for the industry to be able to mount an offensive, to be able to work constructively with regulators because absent that, the industry is going to have the shit regulator out of it and it could regulate it out of existence. Demetri, it's been a fantastic time having you on the bankless podcast.

And we really value your very secular and unbiased opinions about the space. We think about a lot of the same things. And yet we think about them differently. And getting that diverse perspective onto the bankless pod is exactly what we wanted to get done today in this episode. And I think we did just that. So thank you for your time. And also, I'm just a longtime fan of the hidden. Forces podcast. It is in my regular rotation. So I can't recommend it enough to the listeners of

bankless who want to listen to similar content that we talk about here on the bankless pod, but maybe from an outside of crypto perspective, yet that is still talking about some of the very similar narratives and powers that are shaking the world around. It's one of my favorite podcast. So, Dmitri, thank you for just overall your contributions to the world of information about finance and markets and the world. And also thank you for coming and giving us some of your time here on the bankless pod. Thank you, David. I really appreciate that. It makes me happy to hear that. I always love to hear from people like you. It mean, it's great when listeners have podcasts. But, you know, I love hearing from fans and listeners of the show. It makes me so happy.

I love to know that it's having an impact on people's lives and feeding their curiosity. So thank you and thank you for having me on the program. I had a great time. Absolutely. Guys, I anticipate that Dimitri will have some crypto folks while he tracks this hidden force that is cryptocurrency on his podcast in the future. So make sure you subscribe. That would be action number one. And Dimitri, what's the best way for folks to subscribe to Hidden Forces? Yes.

So you can listen to the regular podcast just like every other podcast through any of the major podcast platforms. But in addition to that, we offer a premium subscription service that includes what I call overtimes where we keep the conversation going for up to another hour. And those are oftentimes the best part of the conversation. You also get access to the transcript of each episode, as well as to my rundowns, which are these elaborate show documents that I put together ahead of each and every episode full of notes, images, charts. They're basically my brain on a page. And you can find all of that at patreon.com slash hidden forces. And you can also subscribe

to our mailing list at hidden forces.io. And you can also write us a review on Apple Podcasts. I love reading positive reviews. Only positive reviews. I don't want to read negative reviews. So if you have a negative review, do not write one. But if you have a positive one, yes, go to Apple Podcasts and write a review of Hidden Forces. Yeah, absolutely, guys. I encourage you to do those things. And of course, Dimitri is going to have some stable act type of episodes coming up. Stay tuned for those. Number three, we should ask for the same thing. Look, if you just want to support bankless, you know what to do.

Go on Apple iTunes. Give us a five-star reviews. I think Dimitri said it best. Don't write anything negative. We just like the positive ones. Only good thing. We're going to add that to our pitch for now on, too, Deutri. Thank you so much for joining us.

As always, risks and disclaimers, none of this was financial advice. Crypto is risky. So is ether. So is Bitcoin. So is defy. lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.