Bankless - DC Investor | Layer Zero

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

DC Investor is an investor... living in Washington, DC. Makes sense. A lot makes sense about DC Investor and his practical, long-term approach to the crypto markets. He has worked hard for his money, and expects his money to work hard for him in return. With one of the best and varied NFT portfolios out there, as well as a sound thesis on ETH the asset, DC clues us in on his guiding principles and life lessons from a career as a W2 employee and crypto investor. There's a reason DC has been on Bankless five times. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ 📣 DHARMA | From Dollars to DeFi! https://bankless.cc/dharma  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​  💧LIDO | DECENTRALIZED STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lido  👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 DC Investor 9:36 Interest & Speculation 14:45 Risk Management 20:07 Conviction & Communities 26:58 The Crypto Moment 33:58 Early Internet Skills 41:53 Tech Changes Society 46:56 Investing, not Trading 53:04 Markets 1:00:30 NFTs and Signalling 1:09:58 Gaming 1:14:15 Digital Economies 1:19:16 Hobbies & Lifestyle 1:23:10 The Hoffman Personality Quiz 1:27:45 Closing ------ Resources: DCInvestor on Twitter https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor?s=20  DC's NFT Collection http://gallery.so/dcinvestor  DC's Newsletter https://dcinvestor.substack.com/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. CipherPunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because crypto is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, I'm talking with DC Investor, who lives up to his name, and he's a lot of the code. as a guy who has been in the investing world and also lives in DC. So we go through that history of what it was like to learn how to be an investor while also being a W-2 employee. And I think a lot of people in the Ethereum community in the crypto world

can definitely understand what it's like to go to work for their 9 to 5 and then really think hardly about how to make their money work for them and how to make sure that their money is working, as D.C. said, as hard for them as they worked for their money. enjoyed their framing. We talked about DC's early exploration into using the internet before the internet is what it was today, while we as a society, we're still trying to figure out what the internet is, and how those behaviors and skills that he learned while navigating the early internet was able to be translated into the world of crypto. We also, of course, go into DC's

first entrance into crypto, which involved buying Bitcoin at the top, selling it at the bottom, and what lessons he was able to learn from that expensive mistake, which is kind of turned into a right of passage for almost everyone in the world of crypto. We also, of course, talk about DC's background as it relates to NFTs and if DC famously has one of the most stellar NFT portfolios that is out there. And we also get into the world of crypto gaming and what DC likes to do in his free time. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with DC investor. But before we get into it, we have to talk for a moment about one of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure.

Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants program is now accepting applications for grants.

We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at Unigrants.org

and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think. it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you Uniswap for sponsoring Bankless. The era of Proof of Stake is upon us. Proof of Stake systems like Ethereum, Terra, and Solana allow the industry to move away from the hot, loud, and wasteful proof of work systems, and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators. And that is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized. Individuals must play their part in crypto network validation.

And that is what Lido is here to do. Lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button. By delegating your stake to Lido's network of nodes, you can access the yield offered by proof-of-sake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards. Do you have 32-Eth and want to stake it to Ethereum, but running a node sounds intimidating?

Or maybe you have less than 32-Eth, and you need to pool your Eth with others so you can access staking yields. Lido offers a solution for both. simply go to lydo.fi choose which assets you want to stake and deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is working to make sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible and is committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol. So if you want to stake your ETH, Tara, or Seoul, and get

liquidity on your stake, go to Lido.fI to get started. Hey, D.C. How's it going? Hey, David. How's it going, man? Doing well. Pretty good, pretty good. I'm over here. at NFT, NYC, bummed that the NFT guy wasn't actually able to see you this weekend. I know. I wasn't able to make it this week, but I definitely hope to be able to make it to some events in 2022. Yeah, man. I want to start with DC Investor. Where'd that name come from? So it was just a handle that I had created back in the day, because a lot of the forums I had been participating in were kind of financially oriented. I was on forums like the Bogleheads, which is like a financial investment site using like Vanguard funds.

So I've always been interested in this idea of investing. And my philosophy behind that has been pretty simple as someone who is a W2 wage earner for most of my life for 15 plus years. My philosophy was always if I'm going to work hard for my money, which I work very hard for my money, I wanted my money to work hard for me. So I always kind of had my mindset of I want to be able to invest and grow my earnings beyond just the work that I'm putting in directly. And then we're about the D.C. side of things. So the D.C., I'm actually based in D.C. area.

And I've lived up here for about 15 years now, so it's pretty much my home. I grew up in Southeast Virginia. So been in this area kind of my whole life. I'm about four and a half hours away from where I grew up. But I love the D.C. area. It's a great metropolitan area. I'm sure a lot of your listeners might even live there, but it's great because we've got kind of the hustling.

bustle of a bigger city and the culture or an arch that you expect from a city like DC. But it's also like a lot more laid back and chill than a city like NYC, which I love NYC. I love New York. It's a great city. But every time I visit there, when I come home, I'm like, oh, it's nice to be back at home too. Oh, my gosh. Everyone that I've been talking to here in NYC is saying the same exact things. This is the first week of NYC I've been learning to like pace myself.

And I've also learning like one week in New York is more than enough. It's more of the five-day thing for me. But it's fun while you're there. There's no other city that has that feeling. That's very true. Yeah, it's very much a play-hard, work-hard environment. Okay, so speaking of play-hard-work-hard, if you are, and you say you worked very hard being a W-T employee,

working hard for your money, and then obviously you want your money to work hard for you. Has this been like a work ethic that you've had, like your entire life? As in like you've always been focused on like, you know, going to work, doing your W-2 and then funneling that into, you know, actually investments. Has this been who you are for like the last 15 years that you would say? Pretty much. I mean, when I first started at working, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners can probably relate to this, I didn't have like a ton of money.

You know, you don't have a lot of disposal income when you're coming out of college. And I came out of college. I had actually started off as a chemistry and comp side double major. Then September 11th happened. And I was a senior and as a junior in college. And I switched my major on the spot to government just because I wanted to do something more involved with that. So I changed my focus completely, did the whole government major in three semesters, and then got my master's in public policy. So I was kind of like destined for this track of working on public policy

related issues here in the DC area. But when I first came out of school, it's not like I had a ton of disposable income, but I did kind of prioritize saving a little bit. And one of the piece of advice that I try to give people who are younger, just getting into this and might have like professional jobs, is try to save some of that money into your 401K. I know this is the opposite of a lot of crypto people will say. But it's like save a little bit in that because as you build up that lower risk asset pie, it allows you as you grow older to take bigger risks. That's kind of the philosophy that I approached investing with crypto investing and just stock investing. I wanted to build up that nest egg so I can take on bigger risks as I got older. Yeah. Famously people will

always say, hey, if you're young, take risks, right? Because why not? Like you have very little to lose and everything to gain. But what you're saying is, well, if you keep that steady 401k, you get to continue with that strategy for longer and into your life. Yeah. And also, like, I mean, I think a lot of people don't really understand compound interest and how powerful it really is. Like, everyone will say they get it, but like until you, like, look at the numbers and how, like, saving a little bit when you're younger, how much more valuable that is compounded over time. So I think that's one piece of it. But I wouldn't say, like, it doesn't mean, like, don't take risks while you're young. It means don't put everything into risky endeavors. Like make sure that if you

invest in something that's more speculative or risky, you still got something to fall back on. And I think that's what that's kind of been my philosophy is I always wanted to create that security because that's what's given me the confidence actually to hold on to these crypto assets because I don't really care about the volatility as much if that makes sense. Absolutely. One thing that comes to mind is like everyone in crypto is and even this is also true for the legacy stock market now with this whole like the GME ape culture that, you know, has gone outside of crypto is like, no one has enough patience for compound interest. Like I know you say like, you know, compound interest is very powerful, but also at the same

time, people are trying to like get it rich everywhere, not just crypto. Have you thought about like the implications of like what happens when like the culture around investing goes from, you know, steady, reliable, long term compound interest to like trying to catch that moon bag? So I definitely have. And I think a lot of this has become, a lot of finances become gamified. And it was happening even before crypto. And it really started, I mean, and by the way, the phenomenon that we're seeing, they're not

necessarily new. I mean, if you go back to the 30s and the roaring 20s, right, and a lot of that was fueled actually by a overheated speculative stock market, which all of a sudden allowed retail participation. And retail was buying in and they were buying into very high valuations, which kept going higher because there were always new entrants coming in, right? Well, once the new entrance and the new money, and now it fueled one of the most lavish decades in like modern history, basically, you know, that whole period. And so, but when you look back at that time period and you look at

the parallels of today and you see the same kind of like gambling mindset, a lot of it is fueled by like the apps, I mean, even if you look like the way that the Robin Hood app is structured for logging their trades versus like the Schwab app. They're different, right? They're gaming at different experiences. And Robin Hood is almost like trying to provide you like entertainment through investing is how I put it. And crypto does that too.

And there is a market for that. But I do think if you have too many people with like the get rich quick mindset, like a lot of them are going to get burned badly at some point, most likely. I mean, just the law of market dynamic says that like not everyone can make that kind of money over time. And it might happen, you know, definitely crypto has been cyclical in the past. We've seen bear markets ebb and flow. And I think we'll probably continue to see that to some degree, even if the bearish periods aren't quite as stark for some assets, they will still be very harsh on some assets. So I think that overall, that whole gambling mindset, all investing

is a form of gambling, but I think it's just about how you manage the risk, which is what differentiates it. There's a book that our mutual friend, Eric Connor, got me to read called Devil Take the Hindmost. I don't know if you've read it. Yeah. Okay, it sounds like you've read it. Yeah. It's about the... I haven't read that, but I read a similar book,

which is reminiscent of a stock market operator. So, but Eric's book is on my list as well. And yeah, that whole, both of those are just about that whole period and how valuations just went crazy. Right. Delo Take the Hindmost is about, like, financial bubbles at large, like going back to, I think, as early as, like, the 1,000s or 1,000s. And the biggest takeaway I had is that, like,

financial bubbles that happen, they are basically guaranteed. to happen because they're based in like human DNA, right? Like the tulip mania, like there was nothing about tulips that created the financial bubble. It was all in the brains of the humans, right? And so like it's kind of like programmed into our greed, right? Our greed factors. And like I think it's like when enough people start to have that sort of like ape culture, that get rich quick culture, it starts to actually become part of the fundamentals of the market, right? Like, well, because you're aping in, I'll ape in. And then because they're aping in, I'll apeen. But eventually, like somebody is the last person to ape in, right? And then they mark the top. But there's like this

somehow like something about the rubber meets the pavement and all of a sudden it changes the culture around the people that are investing in it. It's just logically rational because everyone else is doing it to also do it. And it just creates like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. And there is a rationality there because the number keeps going up. You're like, well, I want to be on board this train rather than off it. But the problem is that, you know, it's not sustainable as you pointed out. I actually wrote a tweet kind of along, touching on some of these topics earlier today, and I'll read it here because I said more than anything else, being deep in crypto has taught me basically four things. One, all valuations are a meme

and some of those memes are more durable than others. Two, there's a difference between a marketable product versus a true product market fit. And we have a lot of marketable products in crypto. We have very few products with true product market fit. The third is everything takes either much less time or much more time than you thought to happen in the world of crypto. Like there have been some things that I'm like, oh, this will happen to year and it takes like three years. There's some stuff that I was like, oh, this will take 10 years. It takes like three months.

You know, I mean, literally that's how crypto works. And then finally, the cyclical nature of human greed, which is we inevitably as humans get into these boom and bus cycles for chasing the run up and then we're chasing the run down. And, you know, you just have to acknowledge that that's how your own mind works, perhaps. And that's how others' minds are working. And you just have to adapt to that kind of environment. So, DC, when you were investing way back before crypto, again, back when you were a W-2 employee, and being an investor when you're a W-T employee is very much different than I would say,

like, anything else, right? Because you're not paying attention to the markets. You're going to work. Right. Right. And then you come back and like, it has to be in on your own time. As you learned how to invest in that world, how much of that knowledge were you able to actually carry over into the crypto world?

Or when you came into the crypto world, was it like a brand new game that you had to relearn from scratch? I think there are a lot of parallels. It is a different game in some respects. So traditionally, those other types of investment markets we're talking about, we're really talking about equities, right? And a lot of what I was investing in and still hold are diversified index funds. However, I would buy individual equities here and there.

I would actually say that the public information asymmetry around those types of corporations is actually much bigger because there are insiders who have a lot more knowledge. In crypto, actually, it's more of an even playing field because more of the information is out there in the public so that others can see it. But I think looking back on that time, a big lesson that I learned in participating in those kinds of markets is just appropriate risk management. And I've really carried that forward with me into crypto. And my philosophy with putting money into crypto is never put in money that is more than I

could afford to lose. So I don't want to be economically bankrupt or put into like a really dire situation because I invested too much in crypto. That said, I put a lot in crypto. I mean, and it's grown bigger, obviously, over time. But even my initial investments were extremely large as a percentage of my net worth. And I kind of just accepted it. I was like, okay, I had gotten to that point in my life where I was like, well, I have enough saved where I can afford to take a couple of big swings here for these higher conviction assets. And I think another big lesson that I learned from those kinds of markets is you really, there's value in playing the long game.

And I think in crypto, probably what I didn't adapt to as well is how much money can be extracted in the short term, to be honest. And not necessarily that I want to get into that game because it's a little too, it's not the type of, I don't enjoy that kind of stimulation that much. Like it's not that exciting to me to buy into something. It's like, oh, at 2x overnight, I'm going to sell it now. Like, that's just not that interesting. I would rather buy something and it goes like 10x or 100x over a few years. That's just a more interesting and feels more sustainable to me. But I think like I was not prepared for how much just pure untethered memetics kind of drives value.

It happens in financial markets, but those memes are kind of pushed on us by Wall Street. They tell us stuff like, oh yeah, price earnings matters. That's what you should be paying attention to. Or growth matters or value matters. And the narratives kind of shift over time. Shifting into a crypto mindset, it's like, okay, even assets with really strong fundamental value, like, ether, when it was like under $200, you were buying, I was buying. No, not many people were buying them. Yeah.

But like, not many people really saw the fundamentals. So I've always been like, that was, that to me was probably the biggest asymmetric bet of my life was going big on Ethereum when it was under $200 during the bear market. Just because I knew it was undervalued for the fundamentals. And it kind of ties back to that way of thinking that I just started to. You said that the crypto markets are inherently more like fair because all the information is out there. Do you think that's like a fundamental truth about how crypto works? Or do you think that's maybe just true just because we're early in the history of crypto and everyone's still learning how to figure out what the hell all this stuff is? I think part of it is fundamentally true.

And maybe more of it than people realize because even as we scale up, I think a lot of activity is going to be done in the open. It's done on the public internet and people can kind of see and browse that information. I don't, but I do think we run the risk of having more actors playing more centralizing roles in some of this. And I think that over time, and we already see that a little bit, with sometimes you see like VCs getting better deals. And are they really bringing any value to the table? In some cases, not really. They're just like, they're putting their logo. The project is putting their logo on their website and saying, oh, look, who's backing us.

What they don't tell you is they're literally like in everything, right? And for those funds, they actually make a lot of their money on the up front. buy where they get preferential terms there. And I think, like, unfortunately, the way that the ICA of mania kind of imploded in 2017, 2018, and the SEC action that resulted from that actually moved the industry more towards relying on VC funding. I think the pendulum is starting to swing back a little bit, but actually, like, ICOs, like, in their premise are a very egalitarian way of, like, raising funds, not necessarily in practice in terms of what we saw. But the idea of anyone being able to invest in anything, anywhere, without any barrier, like, if you're a project and you need to raise $10 million and maybe you want to raise it actually from users versus some VC that's going to like, you know, pay your favors and stuff like that, you know, maybe you're better off actually raising the money from 10,000 people and giving more people the opportunity to participate.

So I do hope that we swing back more towards those models, but we're going to have to fight that kind of centralization risk like any industry, in my opinion. You said the whole like buy something, watch it two, three X sell it in a day or two later. It's not interesting to you. And I think what you may mean by that is that, well, if you're making those trades, you don't care about the asset. You just care about the candle, right? Whereas if you buy something and you're holding it for a year, maybe you actually are like intrinsically curious about the nature of that asset. Like there's something to read about. There's like things to unpack and explore.

First off, would you say that that's true? And then before crypto, when you were still investing in the legacy stock market, was there an asset like that that you had a true deep conviction in? Or was that something that you more recently discovered in crypto? You know, just going back, I think that if you look at crypto assets as a whole, they're more speculative in their nature than a lot of fundamental investments, right? So when I think about like why I'm interested in crypto, I am still looking for that fundamental value personally. someone with that kind of mindset, going back to my stock training and other investments. But a lot of the value falls into that speculative bucket, right? And I don't fault anybody necessarily for like seeking that.

I get it. I mean, the money is out there. But in order, but like it's hard, it's harder for a lot of people to have an edge in that kind of activity because a lot of these traders are very sophisticated. And actually a lot of the traders that you see on crypto, Twitter, I'm convinced they're not making money. So you also need to, like, be aware of, like, the larping that goes on, which is quite. There are some traders who are very successful.

I mean, there are some traders who are very successful. A lot of them are not, like, super active trading daily candles either. They'll trade, like, shorter timeframes than what I'm trading, but they're still, like, you know, focused on more market movements that are based on reflexive price action than anything else. I didn't really get involved in that kind of investing in the stock market because in the stock market, I feel like it was even harder to have an edge there. and you have to use more exotic instruments. And I wasn't really doing that as a personal investor. There were some speculative sectors that I got into kind of early on that were very exciting. Like 3D printing.

Like I got into that when it was like hitting like the hype narrative. And I was up a lot in that. And then I watched it all decline a lot. I mean, I still I still made out more than I put in. But it was kind of one of those things where I look back and it's like, you know what? I probably should have taken some profit off the table because it's like even though the fundamentals were strong. Or like the ideas, actually I should say the ideas were good. The fundamentals were not necessarily there.

I think we have that challenge in crypto sometimes too. However, over the past like 10 plus years that that crypto's kind of existed, I feel like fundamentals have been increasing. And it makes sense now to actually look at crypto from a more fundamental basis, in my opinion. One of the things that I really like about this crypto thing, and I only started getting into investing maybe like 18 months before I went from like investing in the stock market to investing in crypto. So my stock market investing, like,

knowledge base is very, very limited. But the big difference that I noticed with crypto assets, there's communities around these things. And the one asset that I really actually cared about was AMD, which also actually had like a community. There was like a subreddit based around it. And one of the cool phenomenons, and you and I, we share some Discord channels. We share some telegrams. And a lot of them are ETH-based, like communities, right? And that's like a, for me, I'm pretty sure that's a big first in the world. And like this also started with Bitcoin, of course, where like all of a sudden, it's not just the fundamentals. It's also like the community. And so many communities in this, in the crypto world, like, it's weird that so many communities are based around financial assets.

Going from the world of, you know, stock market investing to crypto investing, how has the fact that communities are around these things, like, you know, change your mental models about how to evaluate these things? So I, and I do think communities have existed in like so traditional markets, like even some of the communities that I was like involved with mostly as a lurker like the bogul heads that I mentioned earlier they're based off like they're like acolytes of Jack Bogle who founded Vanguard and they're just people who are like talking about how to allocate among index funds and there's a community that sprung up around that and a lot of people you know you can get a lot of value just by reading and following those communities I think in crypto it definitely

becomes or runs the risk of becoming more cult like or tribal like than even with equities and there are various reasons for that but I think fundamental because a lot of the value of crypto assets is socially driven. I think a lot of people, especially a lot of developers, might not actually appreciate that. They're like more just focused on the technology and they're like, oh, this does this. But it's like at the end of the day, the value that we're creating in the space is ultimately about social legitimacy and being able to disintermediate activity trustlessly in a way that is reliable. And I think that different people have different views of what that trust means and different

people are going to prioritize different elements of that value proposition. And, you know, I obviously have my own point of view, which I think is right. But there's someone else on the other side of the fence that has an equally strong view that also thinks that they are right. I mean, the market is going to decide these things in the long term. But I do think that it's important to kind of look at the market through that lens and understand that different people, I mean, just because someone likes some other token that might be different from me doesn't necessarily make them like a bad person. I think in crypto a lot of the times people kind of turn that into like a personal argument. And it's honestly not as bad during like nice bullish periods like we're having right now,

David, you know, where everything's going up. So it's not like the end of the world. But like during more bearish periods, as you will remember from the last beer market, it gets, it can get unpleasant. And I think that is unfortunate. I mean, especially like I basically created my Twitter account because I got tired of like the misinformation that was being propagated about Ethereum. I know that was a big reason why you and Ryan really pushed bankless forward as well because the amount of disinformation, not just misinformation,

just pure disinformation was staggering and people just didn't understand what was happening in Ethereum from a fundamental basis. So that's where I felt like actually being in that tribe a little bit helped me because I was able to see through all that BS. I was able to see the true fundamentals, I was able to, like, filter out the random crypto trader who knows absolutely nothing about the technology saying Ethereum's going to zero. And I was able to hone in on what I felt was like a valuable long-term value proposition. And it turns out I was right or have been right so far. With the community aspect, aside, like removing the investment and, you know, number go upside of assets, how has the community side of things changed your life? The community has been huge.

And the Ethereum community has been in particular. And I think the crypto community overall, because even though we have things that separate us, there is a lot that unites us, right? And a lot of us have common views of the type of world we want to see from crypto, not universal, but somewhat common. For me, being involved in the Ethereum community has just been a huge positive. And I started off actually mostly participating on Reddit and back in the days of ETH trader and then on ETH finance, I would write up more longer form pieces there.

And I would just kind of share my investment thesis on why I was interested in Ether and beyond that, why I thought it was like a world changing technology. And a lot of this, we can talk about this if you're interested, but like a lot of that goes back to just my experience of growing up during the rise of the consumer internet. And I saw just so many parallels of what was happening with Ethereum. And most of it, like 90% of it was organic. It didn't feel forced. It didn't feel like it felt like this open, free collaboration trust. player. And I didn't see anything else that was doing that. And the community, being involved with the community helped me understand that better. It helped me make more connections to learn more about

what was actually happening with Ethereum. And it helped me kind of refine those theses and share them with more people. And then I kind of shifted my emphasis more to sharing that information on Twitter just because the reach is a little bit bigger than just, you know, the hundred or so people who might stumble upon one of my comments on Reddit on Twitter, it's a much bigger impression base. And for me, it was really not about like establishing a personality. It was just, I want to get this information out for people because I believe in kind of what Ethereum is trying to achieve. Yeah, talk about your transition into the world of crypto. So you spent a number of years sharpening your teeth by investing in the normal stock market. At some point, you stumble into the world of crypto.

Maybe that's where you started to get the comparisons of crypto and, you know, the rise of the consumer internet. Can you talk about just your crypto moment? Absolutely. So it was back. in 2013. And prior to that, by the way, I was aware of Bitcoin. You know, I'd heard about it. And I was like, okay, this doesn't really, the idea of digital scarcity did not make sense to a lot of us. And it still doesn't make sense to a lot of us. But especially for someone who grew up with like the 90s consumer internet, literally you could copy, paste anything. And now we're in this world where you're telling me that you can have like a digitally scarce asset on this decentralized ledger, which supposedly nobody controls. It's a huge mentally leap. Right. And so I dismissed

it for a long time. And then it was around November 2013, Bitcoin hit like $1,000. And that's when I really started paying attention. I was like, wow, I remember when this was trading for like a couple of bucks. And I was like, of course I wish I had bought that. I didn't. But like, but I was just like, well, you know, let me try to learn a little bit more about this. I didn't go like super deep, but I went deep enough to be like, okay, I'm going to start putting some money into this. So I bought a bunch like close to the top back then, okay, happens to all of this. And I kept, and of course, in my mindset, and being a W2 wage earner back then, and, you know, so I was earning my income. I was like, well, I'm just going to dollar cost average and do this.

And I don't care about the volatility. That was what I told myself, right? And then, so I kept buying from that point, and it kept going lower and lower. And I was like, okay, what's going on now? And then eventually at some point, I decided, a couple years later, I decided I wanted to buy a house or buy a condo. And I was like, well, I might as well just sell this Bitcoin. It's never going back up. So I sold it for between $400 and $200 something.

Okay, so say average sell price was around $300. And I had lost money on that. So I've got the tax right off. I was like, I guess that's cool. And then so fast forward, of course, now Bitcoin's worth over $60,000. And that was a huge like wake up moment for me of like, okay, I like, well, in hindsight from now, looking back, I was like, that was a big wake up. up moment for me because I was like, I realized in 2016, 2017, as I started to dive into

Ethereum and that's, the way I learned about Ethereum, by the way, is I heard Bitcoin had gone back above a thousand again. And I was like, damn, I sold it. And I was like, well, let me log into Coinbase and see what's going on. I saw this new coin called Ethereum on Coinbase. And I started to explore it. And I, you know, went onto the forums. I learned about it. I was like programmable blockchain. What does that really mean? And as I started to dive in, just that dynamic energy, the open source mindset, the sharing, the collaboration, the vision, it all reminded me a lot of like this early consumer internet, which like at the time, those types of things were like incredibly novel on a global scale.

Right now we almost take it for granted that those kinds of communities conform. But back then, when I saw the early consumer internet and I saw, I remember going through that probably before your time, David, but I remember going to that process of like getting on with like a 2,400 bod modem and like going up and then eventually getting to like 56K or whatever it was. And it was like, wow, that's so much faster and better. And then, you know, just the promise of different technologies that were well before their time, but eventually became viable, like on-demand video. Like I remember this conversation really well in college with a callmate of mine who was a compsci major.

And he told me he's like, I'll tell you what, the internet will never be able to support on-demand video streaming. And I was like, never is a strong statement. But he was convinced and he gave all these technical arguments for why. And I was like, I think if it's important enough, we'll adapt and we'll learn how to make it happen. And I felt like that dynamic energy has always been part of what's propelled the internet forward. And similarly, I feel that same dynamic energy with Ethereum and what's moving it forward. And, you know, obviously, you and I have probably similar views about this. But how we're using these technologies today is not necessarily how we're going to use them tomorrow.

But what's important and what you can't fake is the quality of that community and how are they bringing that energy to move things forward? And I did feel like Bitcoin was doing that at first. Like back when I bought Bitcoin in 2013, I got that same feeling, right? When I first sent Bitcoin from one address to another, I was like, that was like the same moment that I first got my first email or sent my first chat message to someone. It was like a, it was like a, oh, shit moment. It was like, wow, that's like insane that I was able to do that. And I didn't have as many moments like that with Bitcoin from that point on just because it became kind of this more ossified creation. Whereas with Ethereum, I still have the, you know, especially during the bear market, I was having those types of experiences like every few weeks.

I was like, wow, this is incredible from using defy and all of that. And I still have a lot of those experiences. And so that's that's kind of how the mindset relates, if that makes sense. As an early consumer of the internet as it was coming into fruition, even before we all knew what the internet. was or could be. What were some of the things that you're doing on the internet? Back then, I was just like online chatting with friends. I mean, just learning about stuff like the amount of knowledge and information that was on the internet. And it wasn't nicely curated. There wasn't even Google back then.

Search engines were very hit or miss, right? It was hard to use. If you got outside the AOL Wald Garden, basically, which a lot of people chose not to do in the earliest days. But that's where you really like found a lot of this information out there. And to me, it was just incredible that people could interact like this and that I could chat with someone that is halfway around the world. And now similarly with like public blockchains, you can interact with them economically halfway around the world. And I mean, so all of those things. But yeah, I was just chatting with people. I was playing a lot of games. Like I was playing, you know, a lot of those games had started to go online. And there were a lot of them were over IPX, which was like a now defunct like local

networking protocol, which is not really used much. And so there are emulators that allowed you to do that over TCP IP. So I was playing like Doom online with my friends, Warcraft, Warcraft 2. I was playing Quake. You know, I was just a huge nerd. So I was just playing all this stuff and having fun on the internet. And it was like it was, but there was nothing else that was like that at that time. It was truly like this pioneering freewheeling spirit. I was on IRC chat forum. So it's actually not that different. Like Discord. A lot of people like, wow, Discord. It's like great. It's like, this is literally exactly like IRC, except for you can have emojis and messages now, or like images and your messages now. But it's like basically

IRC, like, reinvented for like the 21st century. So you playing World of Warcraft 2 and Doom, that is where our histories over the internet will begin to overlap. One of the, the first things that I would ever do on a computer was sit on my dad's lap and press the five button, which would be the shoot button. And he's, he would do everything else for doom and he would figure everything else but i would just see the alien on the screen and i would just press five and that was my first entrance into computers and internet yeah see but that's i mean yeah a lot people had and and by the way using computers back then was not easy it was actually like really like especially from the age that i was i'm talking about so like late 80s when you turn it on your computer

you're confronted with the black screen and a command prompt okay and if you're like an eight or nine year old you're average eight or nine year old you're you're like what the heck do i do now and i never really got into it much except for one day my dad was like, oh, our hard drive, which was like, I think it's 40 megabytes at the time. It's a 40 megabyte hard drive for this 286 computer. He's like, we need to delete some files. Can you figure that out? And I was like, oh, man, this seems like it's going to be really hard. He had no idea how to do it. So I'm like reading the instruction manual. And when I figured it out, I was like, oh, wow, it's like that sense of accomplishment. I feel like using crypto like that is like very similar today.

It's like you're confronted with terrible U.X. It's really hard to use. You can't expect most people to even want to figure it out. If they do, it's often by necessity or they just have that interest naturally. And so I think that we're moving forward, though, into a more consumer-facing era. And I'm excited. I'm excited about the possibility of that. Yeah, that's actually a thread that definitely wanted to pull on because a lot of this conversation has been like, oh, DC investor. He was good. He learned how to invest in the stock market and he took those skills to crypto. But also it was like, oh, you watched computers figure out what the hell computers were and you watch the internet, learn what the hell the internet was. And so just elaborate a little bit more

on developing those early computer skills and how it's helped you navigate the world of crypto. Well, and for me, I was never as like technically adept as a lot of my friends or some of them, I should say, because there were some people who are like truly like, you know, they went on to become awesome coders and stuff like that. I'm not sure I had that level of discipline or aptitude, but I did learn how to program a little bit, and I did some of that. But like, I was kind of like a level below those folks. But as someone who is kind of immersed more in what does these technology mean for us and how can we use it versus like, how can I manipulate every aspect of it? And for me, I think that has served me well in crypto because I tend to think

more about these adoption arcs and what they are going to look like. Like I remember there's a distinct period of the consumer internet, which was focused on dial-up. And what you could do during that period was very limited, but we really pushed it to the absolute limit where they were like downloading little video clips. Even by the end of that era, there was like real player, which some people may recall, which allowed you to stream video. And that was like a huge deal. It's like, wow. But like at that time, it was hard to conceptualize that everyone would have something near like a T1 fiber connection coming into their home, right? It just didn't really occurred us that that might happen one day. But as you saw the use kind of catch up with that,

you know, you remember, and everyone's seen that kitsy clip of like Al Roker and the Today Show and Katie Kirk. And they're like, what is the internet? Is it the at symbol? Is that the internet? I mean, and I mean, that mindset was extremely prevalent back then. It was prevalent among my, some of my friends, a lot of my family. They're like, what are you doing on here? Like, my friends are like, what are you doing on the computer? Like, what are you doing? You're just tying up our phone line, but they didn't get it. And I was like, look, I'm, like, learning about all this stuff. What was really valuable for me in those early days was being able to use the internet to learn more about any top. Like, I could search about, like, how to

learn about how to do something on my computer and I could find an answer on the internet. Like, that was huge. Like, back in the day, you could not, like, do that. You had to, like, know someone who could, like, tell you something like that. So I sound like really boomer here as I reminisce on these things that people take for granted now. But that's, so I don't take anything for granted in crypto, I realize that we're on this journey where we're at the hardest to use period right now or the second hardest to use. I would say the epic of like the hardest to use is probably passed a little bit. Now with like MetaMask and hardware wallets and stuff like that, it's getting better.

But the future is really going to look dramatically different from what we're doing today. And it's not going to involve us directly interacting with these protocols most likely. It's probably going to be we're working through like a layer two. You're probably going to have some kind of multi-signature wallet. it so you want to manage your keys and it's going to be fast it's going to be cheap i mean we're still like some time away from that um but i think like it's kind of like a lot of people don't because they haven't had that experience of looking back on that internet period they only have the skepticism and they're like well we'll never get there there's no point what problem does this solve

why am i using this and the early internet didn't solve a problem the problem that it solved was actually sharing big files between DARPA facilities that was what it was to signed for. And that was reflected in how the early internet was used. The early internet was mostly going on Web 1 was like viewing static text and images. And that was still a huge value proposition, but it was more like an evolution of the printing press than of like true collaboration. Fast forward into the Web 2 era. And that's where everything got a lot more interactive, where you had apps basically in your web browser. That was like a huge thing that did not exist before.

These were not at the beginning of the internet. Fast forward to today where you have the internet basically being used as just like going back almost to that data layer where we're just streaming data of all kinds across it. And we've kind of gone back more to that infrastructure element, interestingly enough, which is where the internet started. And now it just has become embedded in almost everything we do and everything we use. And I think crypto may take a journey that's somewhat similar to that. Yeah, I think that probably, I would assume, when you got into the world of crypto and discovered Ethereum, all of those experiences and all of that experiential knowledge that you learned going through the early clunky days of the internet probably helps you become not skeptical about Ethereum.

It was like seeing the same patterns, the same writing that's on the wall. Talk a little bit about that. A lot of it just comes down to the fact that I used a lot of those early Internet products and I remember how hard they were to use at the time. And just the early personal computing in general and how unpolished it was. A lot of people today who are growing up today, they haven't really used a personal computer and like, and they never had to troubleshoot one. Right. They just have phones.

They get the software updates. They're super stable. They have almost no problems. Back in the day when you're, when you can connect to the internet or something like that, you had like some serious IRQ conflict or whatever. You had to like know a little bit about like what you were doing and you had to like dive into the innards of it and really understand it. And so I feel like with crypto, you have to do a lot of that today still.

The U.S. is definitely getting better, but it's still like not great. I mean, we could use before EIP-1559, just the idea of having to clear a transaction that got stuck. It's like, what the hell is this? And why would I have to do that? It is still like an annoyance, which, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of U.S. elements like that in crypto across the board. And I saw a lot of those things in that early Internet, early personal computing journey. And so it just gave me that perspective of, okay, this is what the technology looks like now. Here's what it's being used for.

It feels frivolous. But when you think about what it could make possible, it's like civilization changing. And that was my view on crypto. And it started with like that Bitcoin is that discrete unit of value. And it kind of progressed into that programmable world computer, which I'm not a huge fan of that kind of terminology. But like, let's just say Ethereum is that global. trust layer because that's what I really view it as. And when you think about what were the things that that could make possible, it's a lot of things. And there's going to be some bad things

to come from that. But I think like the good will outweigh the bad is kind of my feeling. Similar to similar to the kinds of challenges we went through as the internet became mainstream. I always think it's pretty funny when I don't really see these anymore because definitely after EIP 1559, a lot of these problems are fixed. But there are other things like it too where somebody will say like, oh, I've like, I made a transaction. It had the gas fees went up. It hasn't cleared. I try to make another one.

And now I have seven stuck transactions. Like this technology is never going to work. And like jumping from like, oh, I had stuck transactions to this technology is never going to work. I always think it's so funny. It's like you are missing the forest for the trees, dude. Like you just got to zoom out a little bit. Like that is a solvable problem.

Like calm down. Well, and I, you know, just from their perspective and their limited, their limited perspective. I see where they're coming from, right? Because they're just like, this technology is hard to use. And how is this going to scale so that we have millions of users? And you see this playing out now in some of the narratives of these alternative layer one blockchains as well. They're saying, like, Ethereum doesn't have the capacity we do. What they're not necessarily telling you is as soon as they hit their threshold capacity,

they're going to have the exact same problem. So we basically have to turn Ethereum more from this app and execution layer into this trust layer. And I think that is, that's what layer two is all about. And it's a very logical progression. Was Ethereum designed for it from the ground up? No. But, I mean, neither was the Internet. The Internet wasn't designed for a lot of things that it is now taken on being able

to do. And so I do imagine a world where we have multiple layers being built on Ethereum, abstracting away some of the complexity so that the end user is just basically using an app. And they may or may not even be aware that they're using Ethereum. And are there going to be other chains? they're part of that, probably. I don't know which change they'll be. There's a lot of things that I've seen in my time and the space that they seem very strong, but they end up being flashes

in the pan. I do feel like Bitcoin and Ethereum both have like some staying power and unique value propositions for other stuff. And this goes back to a lot of my training as a consultant. I'm like crucially focused on like that value proposition. So when I talk about fundamentals, that's a lot of the time what I'm talking about. Like what is the unique value that a given chain network or asset provides that no other chain asset or network can provide. And I can see that for Ethereum. I can see it for Bitcoin in just the minimally complex asset layer.

I don't necessarily see a unique value proposition for a lot of other projects in this space. And that's why I generally will choose not to invest really anything material into them. And I don't really hold any of these other layer one tokens right now. Would I ever trade one? I mean, maybe, but it's not really the type of investment that I go for typically. Let's pick up the thread of where we left. Before we went down the internet rabbit hole where you were dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin until you wanted to buy a house.

You sold it, forgot about crypto for a while. Then you saw Bitcoin reached its all-time highs. You opened up Coinbase and discovered this Ethereum thing. How did that lesson of buying Bitcoin at its all-time highs getting wrecked by it, which is like the right of passage for everyone in crypto. It's always the most expensive lesson. How did learning that lesson impact a way that you thought about the industry moving forward when you opened up Coinbase again and saw Bitcoin and Ether?

So it changed my mindset because I realized that I was wrong to sell the Bitcoin when I did. And my initial thesis was actually correct. And I did not have the fortitude or the positioning to be able to stick with that. And actually, had I not bought that house, I probably would have held it. And so it kind of goes back to, and I tell people this today, it's like, don't put money into crypto that you need in the next few years or might need, right? And at that time, like, buying a place wasn't necessarily on my radar, but I kind of fell into the peer pressure of like, oh, you're at this age, you should be buying something.

And I was like, okay, fine, I guess I'll buy a condo or something. And so I ended up selling it at a loss. And, you know, so if you need money in the next few years, don't put it into crypto. I think that's probably the lesson that I took away from it. And so the way that I approached it in 2016, 2017 was, okay, I'm going to put money into this that I truly don't need. And I had more assets that accumulated by then from working. And I was like, I'm going to take a risk here because, and especially as I started to learn

what Ethereum could do, and a lot of it was more promises of things that we see today versus stuff that had actually been delivered. I just got really excited about the potential future vision of Ethereum. And I'm Ethereum has delivered a tremendous amount of that. I don't think it gets enough credit for how much it has delivered. I pretty much like at this at that time as I got into it though, I also saw the assent of all of the ICA mania. And I mostly stayed out of that because I just kind of like stuck to my like fundamental

thesis. I'm like, okay, what's the fundamental value of this? And I did so I didn't really buy a lot of those tickets. I just bought as much ether as I could. I held most of it. Like I and I accumulated a lot more during the bear market because my view of the fundamentals hadn't changed. And having that experience in 2014, 2015 made me realize that like, I'm not going to make that mistake again. You know, I was just like, I'm buying into this because these are like

world-changing technologies, not because I'm trying to make a 2x or a 3-X. And I think I had to kind of shift my mindset out of that time and space that I kind of lost out and adapt for what was happening then. It's very clear that you have a long-term mindset with your investments, right? When you tell people's like, oh, don't put any money into crypto that you'll need in the next few years. I feel like a lot of the younger generation would be like, years. Years. That's too long. And I definitely got into crypto and started playing the token game because that was when I got into crypto, right, during 2017. Looking at Blockfolio roughly 2,000 times a day, just like feeling the emotional whiplash of tokens go up and down. And one of the biggest things that I've learned

in this bull cycle is to just like not feel the impulse, not feel like the FOMO from the tokens, because that's what lost me a lot of money in 2017 is going hopping from token to token to token on a whim just because one was pumping. And like it's not only was it actually financially a better choice for me to not get whiplash by these tokens and be more zen about the FOMO, but yeah, it was also a massive reduction in stress. Right. Right. So like not only does it actually make my portfolio overall more healthy. My tax liabilities go down, but it also makes my stress go down. Do you have similar experiences? Absolutely. And I think a lot of it, a lot of this comes down to, like, a lot of people really don't truly understand the power of compound interest. You know what I mean?

And they don't realize how much drag, like selling an asset, you know, with high capital gains taxes if you're in the U.S. or similar jurisdiction can hurt your potential earning potential. and yeah, the stress just upholding something that you don't know really believe in. Yeah, you don't know. You're just like kind of taking a guess. You're buying it because of some momentum play. It's like, you know, every day I held something like that. I wake up being like, is this the day that I need to sell this?

Because it's just like, is this going to like collapse tomorrow? And it just wasn't a mindset. And I didn't find it like mentally stimulating to like be engaging in a lot of that stuff. And so for me, and again, I understand that I entered the market probably older than a lot of current participants, but it's all relative and it scales to what your current net worth is, to what your earning potential is, right? I think that I see a lot of young people taking on what I would consider to be unreasonable amounts of risk. Like, it's never something that I would recommend to someone. It's like, look, if you can't, if you don't have that much money to invest

in crypto, then don't invest that much money in crypto. Like, you just can't, like, you know, don't take, like, don't do stuff like go and borrow a lot of money and try to, like, buy in right now. I mean, I would never suggest stuff like that to people because I've seen what happens. I mean, we saw in 2017 what happened when a lot of people piled on with credit card debt. And at that time, Coinbase allowed you to buy it with credit cards. And I bought some myself, but I was like, okay, I can pay this off in a month or two. But there are people who took on years worth of debt that they probably, you know, that they ended up defaulting on and so on. So like my philosophy always been like, I want to succeed, but I don't ever want to put myself in a position where I might face like economic ruin,

have to move in with like relatives or something. Like that to me was just like a logical like, okay, that's the amount of risk I'm willing to take. But it's worked out and being a little bit longer term has actually helped me stay in the space sustainably instead of just like, okay, I got my pound of flesh and now I'm moving on, which is what you do see with some folks. But more often you don't see are the folks who lost everything. And those people are out there. Either it's not vocal or visible. And it's definitely the time of the market, the parts of the market cycle that you're in is easier or harder. to have long-term focused, right?

Right. A constant theme that I'm talking to with people out here at NFT, NYC, specifically the people that I know. Like, I'm not here for the conference. I'm here to hang out with the friends. And the friends that I have are friends like around the same time I met you, D.C., which was in the bear market, right? Right.

And a lot of us, well, the bear market hurt. It was very demoralizing time. Now a lot of us are like, oh, the bear market, it was so quiet then. It was just us. It was just the homies. Do you have similar like bare market nostalgia? Totally. Yeah.

I missed those times because it was smaller. A lot of the people who were around back then were really committed to the longer term vision because you kind of had to be. It was like, okay, these assets are hitting like low after low after low. So it's like as long as that's happening, you kind of had to be invested in that long term vision. And so I like a lot of the people that I met during that time. And I think like we will see coming out of, you know, whatever happens with this current

market, maybe it's a bullish period. that continues for a while. Maybe it's one that's punctuated by different. There will be bearish periods of some type, right? And the people who stick around through those are the ones who I'm going to pay attention to. And I think there are a lot of, I've seen a lot of promising folks, but I kind of want to be like, well, let's see if you're still here in like a few years.

Like, you know, and I feel like a lot of them are not necessarily going to be because they never got into the value proposition or the right mindset, right? And I think we're going to see that a lot in the NFT space, unfortunately, because a lot of people have put money into NFT. NFTs are even more dangerous. And you know I talk about this stuff like all the time. Despite being a huge proponent of NFTs, a lot of NFT investors are going to get burned because they viewed them as these

fungible investments that they could just get the money out of any time. They're like storing their ETH with just like a terrible meme. And they're going to realize that like they didn't store anything because there may be periods in the market where nobody wants to buy those at basically any price. Then what? Right. I mean, I think it's like kind of like, so I hope. hope those people, I hope there aren't a ton of people like that, but just in talking with people,

there's a lot of people like that. So it's something I'm wary of. Yeah, there was a point on the weekly roll-up that I talked to with Ryan. He had a tweet where he says, he thinks over 50% of the people in crypto have never seen a bear market. And that's, and if we're talking about the NFT community, it's got to be like 85% of like the NFT community has never seen like assets meaningfully, like, go down and really like, you know, get them to feel pain for the first time. And that's also a terrible asset to have that to be true about because of the very illiquid nature of NFTs. Yeah. And a lot of the NFTs are going to be like a lot of what we saw with like ICO tokens of that era.

They're just never going to recover. You know, like whatever magic they may have had is long lost, forgotten. Some of them may make a resurgence later. You know, you never know. There are stuff that comes back from the dead. But most of them will. But you're also going to see people who hold a lot of like, let's just call them like higher under what people call like blue chip NFTs. So let's say like punks, autoglyphs, ringers,

Fidenzas, like stuff like that, right? You're going to see people who are forced to sell those. You know, like prices go down when people are forced to sell. And when you have people who might be over leveraged and they're there then at that point, they go into a survival mode and it's like, look, I'll take any price for this. It doesn't matter. As long as it's above what I paid, which might have been like a couple of ether, you know, maybe they're getting 10 ether. And they're like, okay, I'm happy with that, right? You're going to see periods like that where people are in rapid sell-off mode. And you'll see that happen a few times as people go through the psychology of like, okay, this is going to go up or no, it's not going up. I got to sell this, you know, but there will be

like tremendous buying opportunities for some NFTs. And I'm hoping to like maybe be able to take advantage of those. I mean, I hate to do that. But like, you know, if I can help someone else pay off debt that they have to pay off because they made poor decisions, you know, I'll do it. But like, It's not, again, it's not something that I would suggest that people take on a lot of, a lot of people just don't understand what they've bought. Right. And the risks associated with that. I know I definitely have in my, in the back of my head, like, hey, there's definitely going to be a time where I can finally snag a Fidenza and an autoglyph. And if I can get those two paired with my punk, like, boom.

Like, I can like check my NFT boxes and go back to Defi where I feel at home. Well, those are great NFTs to have. So if you could only, if you have the means and can afford those. But you know, David, the paradoxes, the more people that think like you, the less likely this is to happen. I don't know. There will be floors and they will be caught on the way down. I mean, I don't know. A lot of this is guessing based on previous crypto experience, but there's no doubt I think that a lot of NFTs are overhyped beyond what they should be.

And a lot of people are going to sell and then they're going to watch them go 100x again. And it's going to be very difficult for those people. And I feel for them in advance because I've been there. I sold that Bitcoin at like average $300 and it happens. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with DC thus far. There's so much more to talk about in the second half of the show. We get into the NFT conversation. We get into crypto gaming.

And then, of course, we also get into some of the lessons and guiding principles that DC has picked up along the way that makes him keep a level head on his shoulders and ride these turbulent waves of crypto without getting stressed and overall learned how to have a good time in crypto. So we're going to get into all of that and more in the second half of the show. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017, and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells.

Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide. And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot defy tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid dye markets. Gemini just launched their Earn program where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in Defi, or you don't want to worry about defy exploits, but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini Earn is the product for you. Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini Crypto Back credit card,

which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH. So whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at Gemini.com slash go bankless. The AVE protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets.

Ave version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the AVE protocol even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On Avey, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed

from the protocol if you have supplied collateral. Here, you can see me borrowing 200 USDC against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens in ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock in that interest rate in permanently. V2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets, trade them on Unswap, and then deposit them back into AVE. With AVEA, users can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of Avey at AVEA,

dot com. That's aavee.com. D.C., it's very obvious that you have this like deep history with the internet and with investing and it just carries right over into crypto. But something that's not so obvious is that you have one of the greatest NFT portfolios around as far as I can tell. So I'm yet to hear anything about your history that was like an art collector or like anything like that. So like, is this just like something that's brand new for you or like what about your background like blended itself towards NFTs. So I've always appreciated art in general. I appreciate like artistic energy. And maybe it's because I'm not like a very artistic person, but I do consider myself to be a creative person. Like I'm always like have different kinds of ideas.

I just express it in different ways. I mean, like one of the things I was known for in my 15 years of being a management consultant was creating like the prettiest PowerPoint slides like you'll ever see. I was like a PowerPoint ninja. I was really good at it. I really take pride in like doing the graphics on them and stuff like that. Obviously, I'm not going to turn any of those into NFTs. But the point is, like, I had like this creative energy and I was looking for outlets in which to, if not apply it, to stimulate it. And so I've always been like interested in art. I've never been like an art history officionado or anything like that. But I've liked art. And I've also enjoyed the idea of collecting stuff. And I didn't really collect a lot of assets,

to be honest. Like I have like some magic the gathering cards, some of which are like great and stuff like that. I used to collect baseball, basketball cards and stuff like that as a kid. You know, I had a lot of like different trading card game cards and stuff like that. And so I always thought this idea of like buy something that's going to become more important later was like something that's kind of like ingrained in me. I think it's actually like ingrained in our DNA to like want to do some of that, to be honest. And so as I kind of got into the crypto space, I wasn't initially drawn to NFTs.

I didn't really get deep into NFTs until like, January of this year. Okay. And there are a lot of people, there are actually a lot of people who have way more impressive collections than me. You may or may not know about them, but there are people with tremendous collections out there. But I like to think of mine as like my own like special little collection, which reflects my personal taste, which is, and when I bought it, like, you'll probably recall, they weren't really worth that much at the time. A lot of them. And I was still spending amounts that were a lot. Like I paid like 20K for my hoodie crypto punk, which was a lot at the time. Now it looks like a bargain of a century. People, I remember people like just denying buying

a crypto punk at $1,000. Like, why would I ever buy a crypto punk for a thousand dollars? Like, a thousand dollars is a thousand dollars. Why would I ever do that? And like, it doesn't matter what the prices are. People are just not convinced by these things very for like almost by default. Exactly. And so like, yeah, giving up 20K is something else. Right. Well, I kind of, and I, And the way by then, by January, February, I kind of started to more understand how these NFTs were transcending their art and they were becoming like store of value assets, like collectible assets, pieces of that internet history, which I know you've talked about in the past.

And when I kind of like connected those dots, it was kind of like, I need to buy some of this because I don't know if there's going to be like another chance. And if I'm wrong, then I'm out that money and whatever. But if I'm right, these are going to become, like, priceless artifacts. And right now it looks like we're leaning towards that second outcome is my guess. And so I never started with this. I don't have a lot of art experience. I more just kind of applied my artistic, inquisitive nature with that economic side of me and the

crypto economic side of me. And I just kind of decided that these were something interesting to me. I'm sure you've seen on Twitter, especially around NFT, NYC, all these people buying up the billboard space in like Times Square, putting their crypto punks, putting their Fidenzas. What do you think about that? I think it's like the way that I liken this was like, it's almost like you end up like if you're in New York and you're on Good Morning America, you like call your friends and say, hey, tune into Good Morning America and see me on there.

It's almost like this like it's like the sign of, you haven't like necessarily made it, but it's like this, hey, look at this. This is like you're seeing me in this unexpected context that that changes perhaps. your perception of me. And I think that's how people are reviewing a lot of their NFTs being displayed in these public spaces. And I've actually done a little bit of this myself with Save Art Space. I participated in one of their events where they were featuring punks all over New York City. My punk was featured in Times Square as part of that. And so I think it's kind of like this sign of like even though we're paying to do it,

it's like this juxtaposition of saying this digital thing that only we've cared about, hey, a lot more people are trying to care about it now. And you're kind of like sharing it with the world. And it does show you that like we're not in that metaverse layer completely where we want everything to be pure digital. We want to see this juxtaposition of these assets alongside real world stuff. And that somehow makes it more important in some people's minds. I think that's part of the psychology behind it, to be honest.

And I think it's, I think it's cool. I think it's great if like if some of these big collectors want to like splash their collections up in times, you know, you're going to at least see some people walk by and like, oh, what's that? And then they've got those pictures and can say, hey, this was in Times Square. So it helps, it helps increase the cultural provenance of some of these assets by bridging them more into the real world. Same dynamic applies as these items are being auctioned by Sotheby's and Christie's. It's the same kind of thinking and mindset. Even though we don't need those auction houses, even though a lot of times the prices that they fetch are lower due to KYC barriers and stuff like that,

it's still considered to be prestigious by some because it's like, hey, it's almost like it's this rationalization or justification. Let's just say it's like an acceptance of the work that has been done by crypto digital artists by these famed houses. Do you have any plans through your gallery in the future with like in real life exhibits, metaverse type exhibits? What's the future of DC's gallery going to look like? So right now I do have my collection on gallery.com slash DC investor.

That's where I kind of curate. I met one of the founders last night, by the way. Oh, you did? Okay, awesome. Yeah. I know those guys well and they're doing great work. And I think, but, but I saw I've got my gallery on there. That's the one that I curate and I kind of keep my pieces up to date.

And I'm always rearranging little things. Long term, I would like to be able to do more in terms of 3D. I think the technology is getting there, but it's still not like exactly where I want to be like on cyber has some really cool stuff. I haven't created any galleries there. But for me, it's like I don't really want to do like these stuff. 20-piece galleries. I kind of want to do like a, here's like hundreds or a thousand pieces in my own little museum or part of someone else's museum and like, you know, I've got like a wing of it or something. Like I want to be able to curate like a true experience for somebody.

And eventually one day maybe I'm confident that we're going to get there probably sooner or rather than later. I'm really interesting projects like Nifty Island for that reason. You know, I want to have, I would love to be able to like host events in my virtual space one day and have people, artists and collectors come and we can just kind of chat. So I'm kind of preparing for that VR Metaverse world to some extent. But for now, you know, well, I'm always happy if people want to exhibit some of my pieces as part of some kind of collection or something, happy to at least consider that. But that's kind of how I see it. I've also like, I would love to get, you know, I contacted the Hirshhorn. They haven't gotten back to me. I'm trying to get like,

I'm trying to like work with some artists to get more of our NFT art featured in, installations like that, because again, that's part of what brings that broader awareness and acceptance around what's being created here. One of my buddies from college who now also works with me at Bankless, he does VR children's books at PICA. Oh, nice. But I'm going to start bugging him about, like, because his pitch for this, it's like Disneyland rides, but in VR, right? So there's a bunch of like Disneyland rides you go into, you hop into the little car and then it takes you through the story of the movie, right? I'm not talking about like Splash Madden or like the roller coasters, right? just like you follow a trail and you go through the story of the book, but you're in VR, right?

And so maybe I should get a bug in his ear. It's like, hey, you guys should make like a little journeys, VR journeys to tell a story of the like the genesis of the gallery. Maybe that's an interesting proposition for them. Nice. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. The other aspect of crypto that I think we're about to go into that I know you are definitely probably paying attention to at least a little bit is gaming. And DC, I know that you're a gamer. So before we go into crypto gaming, what games do you like to play? I like to play a lot of, I play some first-person shooters, like non-competitively. Like my reflexes just start what, like, a 10-year-old kid on the Internet, sorry, or what they used to be.

But I love playing, like, you know, games like, I like Fortnite minus the building. You know, I play games like called D. I hate the building in Florida. It's such BS. I hate it. Yeah. It's kind of like turned me off to the whole game. Like, once I got to a certain skill level, I was like, okay, every.

Every end game is a build fight. I'm like I'm out. But I also like to play, like, platformers. A lot of what I like to play is actually like strategy games. And it has, like, kind of, I think it's actually, back then they're like video games are bad for you. But in my mind, like, basically they're like little simulations that train your brain to work under different situations and succeed and thrive. So a huge fan of games like civilization. The new age of empires just came out.

So I like to play a lot of games like that kind of more on my own. But I'll play some of those other games like social games. with friends. When you play these games, you also imagine a world where there's a bunch of crypto assets inside of them, or have you kind of like separated those two worlds? I think that, so a lot of the types of games that I play, I'm not necessarily sure that I will see that. But I do think with like trading card games, which I do play like some magic arena and stuff like that, like, and Harstone. I played that in the past. Like games like that will benefit from these models. I think a lot of like, I am not like a big MMO gamer,

but I have some friends like Anthony, like grew up. playing like World of Warcraft and he's like huge into that. I never got into that. Because I was like my mindset, I was like, if I get into that, I'm just going to lose my life. But I'll just be stuck in there. Although a lot of people that like, a lot of crypto people did grow up playing that stuff. And they've got a lot of economic experience doing that. You know, they like learned how to trade and stuff like that. And so I think that over time, like I could see those kinds of, those kind of games benefiting from NFT based assets. And there's going to be entirely new kinds of games that don't really fit any genre that we have today that are more like economic simulations

where people are interacting with each other. I mean, even this idea of like a VR Metaverse is going to become like a meta game where people are exchanging NFTs, they're trading crypto assets. Like there's going to be whole economies that are set up around Ether as an asset. Like that is like the meta game of like the whole thing is a game. We're in the game right now, David. Yeah. Are there any specific crypto games that you're looking forward to?

Yeah, so Godson Chained is one that I'm continuing to kind of watch as it evolves, but I think that trading card game piece is really interesting. I also think Guild of Guardians, which is going to be like an RPG, which is coming out by fuel games. That'll be another really interesting one. And then you've got kind of all the stuff from like what Axi Infinity kind of continues to do and so on. So it's not a space that I'm like super immersed in because I'll be honest, I'm not sure I see myself playing a lot of these games,

but I want to understand like the value for the people. who do, right? I think the biggest mistake that crypto investors make is look at stuff just like from what they would do versus like what others. And that's what others would do. And that's why I think a lot of people like missed NFTs because they never, they don't understand like I think as a collector of stuff, you kind of have to accept that the stuff that you value is not the same thing that everyone else is going to value. But maybe the stuff that other people value is even more valuable than the stuff that you think is interesting. So as a collector, there's always like a fine balance of like focusing on stuff that you're interested in versus what the broader market is interested in.

But I think we've scratched like barely the surface of NFT gaming, to be honest, David. And I think we're held back a lot by like various laws. We're held back a little bit by the technology, although that's changing with layer two. But we will see in five years when we have this conversation, it's going to be like a crazy discussion because you're going to be talking about how like the economy of this game just crashed and it's in a recession and it's going to come. You know what I mean? Like those are the kinds of economic.

I expect we're going to use. Oh, I 100% agree. And when we were talking to Chris Dixon, he was talking about how SLP tokens from the Axy game are actually just being used as a generalized medium of exchange in the Philippines, like, unrelated to the actual game. People are just like, say, hey, like, pay for this haircut using SLP tokens. That's so crazy. And so when it is super crazy. And like, when we have like so many, like the promise of crypto gaming is to, exactly what you said, to create economies, right? And when we have so much of like the third world that's going to be able to be financially compensated via crypto gaming. I'm kind of worried about like what happens to the local like real world economies

when half of the workforce are playing video games like online. It's a little bit dystopic. And I'm like kind of like, I'm not too worried about it, but like kind of want to know what happens. Well, we're kind of in a phase of our evolution as humans where productivity is accelerating at such a rate with like automation and AI. And there is huge amounts of like job displacement. That is a reality.

Right. We're seeing. And it's not in over time like most dynamic economies can adapt to that. What is different right now is the degree and the pace of change. It's like unabated, right? You can learn a skill today and in like 10 to 20 years it's like obsolete. Then what, right? And even like the manual labor and stuff like that that you could always like get a job like doing doing some of that.

All of that stuff is being automated first, right? So you're going to have a lot of people that might not necessarily have stuff to do, which is why you see stuff like universal basic income taking off in those discussions happening. But that's where I see like a metaverse economy actually growing out of that to actually pick up some of that economic slack. Now, is it value-adding for someone to participate in those activities? From a raw productivity sense, maybe not. But if someone else values a digital good that someone's creating, like an NFT or,

artist, then you could say that that is productive in the sense of it's creating value for someone else, even if you're not creating a distinct output. So I'm not that worried about real world productivity. I think the economic incentives will always keep us there. But I'm very bullish on this idea of these virtual global economies emerging. And they may actually evolve in ways that promote more equitable global income distribution. I don't know, because these things can be played potentially from anywhere. Anyone can play them. I mean, I don't necessarily think it's a good life for someone to spend their time like farming items in an end game, but a lot of real world jobs are also not great. I mean, to be honest. And if someone is doing that, it's because the other alternatives

available to them are so bad that this is like a better option for them. And I just think we're going to have these economies that emerge and a lot of people are going to dismiss them as fake or not real or not meaningful. But as we start to live more and more of our lives in that digital sphere, what's real and what isn't? Like, you know, at what point, if you're if you're creating value-adding services for people in that digital life, then I would argue that that is productive and it can potentially be beneficial. Yeah, the quicker that people can just get over the hump. And it's the same hump that people have to get over when they accept that crypto is real. They accept that NFTs are real. Eventually, they're going to also have to accept that in-game

economies are real. And one of the things that really allowed my conviction about defy and Ethereum to stay rock solid during the bear market when Bitcoiners were fudding, like, defy and everyone else was fighting crypto at large was that I took a loan out on maker dal and I was able to send that money to my bank account and the number in my bank account went up and I was like how can you say this isn't real? Exactly. Like the number in the bank account went up. Like of course this is real. And so I think it's a matter of like experiencing it for yourself. And hopefully crypto gaming is where actually a lot of people do get to experience a lot of the things that they previously thought were fake because gaming is one of the greatest onboarding tools that, you know,

I could really think of for crypto. I think so. And I think you're going to have that people already are ready to participate in these experiences. We've already seen that with a huge success of like different MMO games. As I said, crypto is kind of like a medic game on this. I think there is a subset of people that's not trivial that are ready to participate in stuff like this.

But beyond that, I think there's also going to be more of these outside of gaming, like truly digital economies that occur where there are digital services that we can't conceive of right now. Like, for example, one of the things. I'm thinking about doing is I would like to create a 3D gallery and like nifty island. Am I going to want to place every wall in that gallery myself and do that? Probably not. I mean, you know, it's not necessarily like a skill that I have.

But like, could I pay someone that's like young, motivated and wants to like do something like that? Yeah. And I just. A virtual construction man? Yeah, exactly. And it's just like now I'm paying someone to do something for me in that digital context. And it's adding value for me and I can pay them for that service. But you're going to see more services like that, stuff that I can't really.

imagine right now that is going to emerge over time. Totally. So zooming and getting ourselves out of the metaverse, DC, what do you do when you aren't in the metaverse? Like, do you like to ride your bike, walk around the park? What's up? I like to walk around town. And I love, I love being in the DC area because there's always like a lot of like fun stuff to do. And certainly pre-COVID, you know, post-COVID, I think we're all trying to like find our groove and like, you know, reconnect with people that we haven't seen for a while. So I really enjoy traveling. And I haven't gotten a chance to do much of that right now. But like, especially traveling overseas and getting different, like, life experiences,

seeing how different people live. That's something that I really enjoy doing. So I'm looking forward. Hopefully, 2022 is going to be a better year for that because there's still like, there's still onerous travel restrictions in some jurisdictions. But yeah, that's something I'm really just looking forward to getting back to. Will I see you at 8th, Denver, 22 in February? Fingers crossed.

Although that one's not on my calendar, actually. So I don't, I won't make it to some Ethereum events in 2022. So count on that. And hopefully Denver, we'll see. Do your in real life, D.C. friends think that what you're doing is super weird? Or have they, like, wrap their heads around it yet? I mean, I'm not too, like, vocal. Well, some of my friends definitely are pretty much fully aware of what I've focused on because they have some similar interests.

And I think some of them thought it was crazy at first. But I was like, you know, a lot of them were surprised. At the time when I quit, I had like 20,000 followers on Twitter, which seemed like a lot. People were like, what? You have 20,000 people following you. And now that number's grown further. So I, you know, but for me, it's not like, it's funny because people are like, so is that like your brand? And I was like, I don't really try to manage as a brand.

And I get like people who are like doing like with bank lists, you have to manage the brand. And you have to like do that. It is a brand. Right. I mean, like, but for me, I don't consider like DC investor a brand. It's just me, my persona, engaging with people. And in that way, it's not that different from like, I feel like I'm like 14 again in the sense of like I'm spending a lot of time on the internet talking to strangers and learning about what's going on. And I'm looking for opportunities to engage. And but I've gotten a lot of value out of like engaging with different project teams, learning what's going on in the space, helping to relay messages. Sometimes I deploy angel capital and stuff like that. And it's just it's just fun for me to be able to help grow the space and the formative period that we're in now. So I'm not ready to go. go back to being like a W-2 employee yet, maybe one day, never say never.

But for me, you know, I've also been working for 15 years straight in a pretty competitive, grueling industry. And so I'm like, you know, I can take a year off and I can just think about what I want to do next. And that's what's been kind of my philosophy. D.C., I think if you went back to being a W-2 employee, you'd be one of the few people that I knew that went, you know, quit their job, paid way more attention to crypto, and then decided to go back. Do you actually think that's a future possibility? Probably not, but it might be something, it might take a different form, you know, like, and, you know, I definitely want to, for me right now, my focus remains on crypto. Is that what I'm going to be 100% focused on forever? Maybe not in like 10 years. You know, maybe in 10 years, crypto just becomes this boring thing that's just like involved in everything. And that's what attracted me to crypto to begin with, right? That interdisciplinary nature. And I'm really, I'm a huge proponent of like interdisciplinary thinking. And I wrote a couple tweets about this a few days ago as well, where I

I just talked about the value of like, like, even a liberal arts education where like, whether you get it from college or you just learn it yourself, learn about math, learn about history, learn about biology, learn about chemistry. Like all of these things have fundamental relationships with one another. And I really view crypto as being that interdisciplinary exciting space. So as long as it remains that, it's hard to imagine that I would like get out of that, to be honest. When it becomes boring and people just accept it, then I might like be ready to move on

to something different. Sure. DC, are you an optimist or a pessimist? I would say I'm pretty much an optimist. So I think most people would say that about me. I'm pessimistic on certain things at times, but in general, I lean towards the glasses half full. What about the world makes you optimistic?

I think a lot of it actually comes down to just my experience from investing in how over hundreds of years in millennia, humans continue to become more productive, right? And so when you buy things like stocks, like a lot of people are like, oh, you're just buying shares in corporation, you're kind of betting on the fact, what you're really betting on is that humanity is going to continue to be productive and that we're going to continue to be able to take the same amount of capital assets and do more productive things with that. And I've just, I've always been amazed by human ingenuity in general and how we continue to boost the standard of living. And I know we see a lot of doom and gloom headlines, but the reality

is, like poverty is that, especially pre-COVID, to be honest, like, was that has been at lower levels than it has been ever historically. We don't necessarily see or realize that. I've traveled to a lot of these countries when I was younger, and I've seen the difference myself, where it's just like, you know, like a lot of these countries have transformed themselves. And yeah, they're not in American standards and they're not even close, to be honest, but it's still a lot better than things were. And so I am optimistic about us as a species being able to continue to improve our condition and hopefully improve the planet along with that in more sustainable ways. But I am kind of forever an eternal optimist for those reasons, I think.

If there was one wish or one thing about the crypto world that you could just snap your fingers and change or get everyone to realize, what's the thing about crypto that frustrates you that you would want to see changed? I think one of the things that frustrates me is how much short-termism there is in the space. And I find it annoying as someone who's really excited about the fundamentals of where we're headed, where you see projects that kind of spring up, they're basically designed to extract value. They either don't have a plan to deliver something useful or they're going to be incapable

of it, most likely. And a lot of people just kind of legitimize that stuff. And I'm not talking about any one project in particular, but like we've seen this dynamic play out so many times. And so I wish that there are more fundamental long-term thinkers in crypto. They're out there, but like they don't necessarily control all of the fun flow. And as long as there's a huge amount of money that's available to extract or grow, you're going to kind of continue to see that.

And it's just kind of up to others to just share a different vision. And that's really what I try to do. I'm very upfront. Look, you're not going to agree with every take you read on this account. But I'm always just going to tell you from my own life experience, how I see things playing out. And that's all I'm really interested in sharing, to be honest. I'm not interested in preserving deal flow with some project or whatever. Like those things like don't matter to me.

If you're doing good work and you're advancing the space, then I'm interested in supporting you. If I feel like you're being more value extractive, then I'm not going to be interested, probably. Is there a rule of thumb or just idiom or phrase that you wake up in the morning and say to yourself? Or maybe not that, maybe not that early in the day, but like something, just good piece of advice that you always check yourself against that you think is worthy of being shared? I don't know if I have an idiom. I'm sure I could think of some if I had like more time to think of that. But I think the one thing that I always try to focus on is the long term because I've seen the costs of being a short term thinker. And I know that underscores a lot of comments that I've made in this episode.

It's very easy to say that you're going to be like long term. It's a lot harder to say you're going to be long term after you bought something and it goes down in value a lot. Right. And so I've just kind of made it my mantra to be that longer term thinker because there's always a lot of noise around. And I do miss things sometimes, right? There are things that I thought would peter out that end up becoming huge. And it's like, okay, then long term I'm still proven right because it disappears, right? And so for me, being a long-term thinker is incredibly valuable in crypto because there's so much short-term thinking.

I would say like 75% of people in crypto tend to focus more on short-term than long-term. And even of that 25%, very few are thinking about this as like a multi-decade movement of act. I know you guys at Bankless obviously do, but a lot of people are not there yet. And they may never get there and they're going to miss out on a lot of opportunities because of that. DC, this has been a fantastic exploration into how you think and what you're up to. So thank you for coming on to Layer Zero and sharing that with the Bankless Nation. Yeah, thank you, Dave. It's been really great chatting with you.

Cheers.