Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Epicenter - 10-Year Anniversary Livestream

Episode Date: December 23, 2023

10 years ago, Adam B Levine, the host of ‘Let’s Talk Bitcoin!’, decided that it was time to encourage other voices to step onto the crypto podcast scene. Among many applicants, Sebastien and Brian were the only 2 Europeans, so Adam suggested that they teamed up in order to record the pilot episode. On December 20th 2013, Sebastien and Brian released ‘Regulation and the Future of Bitcoin’, which marked the beginning of a 10-year (and counting) long journey. The rest is history.On this anniversary episode, our hosts were joined by special guests and friends of Epicenter, to share their favourite moments and fun stories gathered during the 10 years of epicness.Topics covered in this episode:Adam B Levine - Epicenter’s godfather & the early days of EpicenterTrent McConaghy - From Ascribe to Ocean. Ahead of the NFT and inscription hypeSebastien Buergel - How he got into crypto, early ventures and Meher’s secretGriff Green & Lefteris Karapetsas - The DAO hack and Sebastien Buergel’s alleged roleSam Jernigan & Anna Rose - From TradFi to ZKJordi Baylina & Ryan Zurrer - Standing in the Epicenter of the storm and the unsung hero of the DAO hackRichard Muirhead - The future of zk proofs, privacy and AIEpisode links:Adam B Levine on TwitterTrent McConaghy on TwitterSebastian Buergel on TwitterGriff Green on TwitterLefteris Karapetsas on TwitterSam Jernigan on TwitterAnna Rose on TwitterJordi Baylina on TwitterRyan Zurrer on TwitterRichard Muirhead on TwitterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy, Felix Lutsch and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/527

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Your assets always remain in your custody, so you can have complete peace of mind, and you can start staking today at Corus. one. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. This is phenomenal. Today is Episcenter's 10th birthday, and we're very pleased to be doing this special edition live stream with lots of special guests. And as you'll see here, a special co-host who I'll introduce in just a second. but first I just want to say just how exciting this is that, you know, 10 years ago, Brian and I were releasing the very first pilot episode of Epicenter.

So throughout this live stream, we'll be bringing in people. It's sort of a call-in show. We'll have like lots of friends, listeners and former guests of the show come in, give their thoughts or share their impressions on the industry and also share something interesting. anecdotes. We've also got some epicenter trivia. We'll go back down memory lane. I've got some stuff prepped here to keep everything exciting. But first, yeah, welcome everyone. How's everybody doing? Great. Good. Ten years. Crazy stuff. Yeah. So I want to just introduce the person down on the on the on the on the bottom right here. So Adam B. Levine who um, Some, I'm sure the OGs will remember as the host of Let's Talk Bitcoin.

And people have been listening to the show long enough. We'll know the story of how Brian and I met back in 2013 through Let's Talk Bitcoin. So Adam wants to just introduce ourselves briefly here and we'll get started. Sure. Thanks, Seb. Yeah, I'm Adam B. Levine. I've been on basically both sides of like disruptive technology, journalism. and entrepreneurialism. About 11 years ago at this point, I started Let's Talk Bitcoin in the spring of 2013. And that was kind of immediately right place, right time.

Fifth Bitcoin podcast I'd started at that point, at that point, there was really no other shows around that we're talking about this stuff. And then as we came into the end of the year, we were very popular, growing very fast. And I was annoyed that there were no other shows that I could listen to outside of myself. And I do like listening to my own voice. But that led me to start a contest through the network that had about 20 submissions. And I will, I think we can confirm at this point that Epicenter is the longest lasting, greatest success that came out of that batch. But it was a pretty good batch. And a lot of those shows lasted for a few years.

So that was sort of another catalyst moment. I like to do that whenever I can. And I'm very happy that you guys have had such success. and I'm very happy that I was able to help you guys get started. So congratulations on 10 years. It's a huge accomplishment. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I got into Bitcoin,

it was basically just when you guys started Let's Start Bitcoin, maybe like a month after that. And I was like writing my master thesis at the time. So didn't have like too much time except whenever I was like cycling somewhere. I was living in Berlin at the time. You know, I was listening to Let's Start Bitcoin, right? So listen to like all of the episodes. and there was like a really, really great way to kind of get into it.

And it was super exciting. And then I was just a fan of podcasts, right? Because, like, it was for me, kind of the one of the main ways of learning about Bitcoin early on. So then when I was like, okay, I want to work fully in this area and you had this contest. And I was a fan of the sort of podcast format and felt it was such a powerful way to, to learn, you know, to build a network, to, you know, speak with interesting people. And then the chance to launch our own podcast was, you know, was exciting. And then I remember, I think he had this call out and it said like, okay, there's going to be a call for anyone interested in participating.

And it was only like maybe five, six people on this call. And I think Sebastian and I were the only ones in Europe. We didn't know each other. Yeah. at the time and they were like, okay, let's try to do this thing together. Yeah. And then, yeah, did that pilot episode. And then it was surprising actually how many people still ended up doing the pilot episode, right?

Because in that first call, you organized. There was not a lot of people in there. Yeah. But afterwards, yeah, quite a lot of episodes came through. And yeah, I'm excited we kept going. Yeah, I think it was about 20 episodes. I think we had about 20 pilots that came out of that. And I think we wanted the intent was to be like, hey, this is going to be.

the top two or three shows and I think we wound up taking on seven or eight because we're like oh well actually you know this is all pretty compelling and yeah I remember that call that we that I remember the kickoff call and I think that the way that that you guys started working on the show together was I was like well you're both in Europe

you should probably just do the pilot together because this is hard I'm pretty sure that that was that that that I said something to that extent you guys were like okay why not yeah I think I think that was basically it was just like, why don't you get these Europeans work together?

Yeah, but yeah, I also remember that call. I remember I was like in my kitchen like where I used to be living and, you know, Brian and I afterwards like had another chat and then got to know each other. And then we only actually manned in person like two or three months later actually in February of the following year at the last type of fun in Berlin. And like, you know, for me, that that whole period was such a transition period. I had been working in sort of web design and product development and web product development before that e-commerce. And it was such a whole new world.

And I remember, Brian, I don't know if you remember this, but we went to this dinner. I don't think it was at let's talk. I don't think it was inside Bitcoin's Berlin. I think it was at the Amsterdam conference in 2014. And we went to this dinner and there were all these sort of like VC, He types and it was organized by Matt Rosak and Brock Pierce. That wasn't in Berlin, right? Yeah, it was Brock Pierce and Matt Rojerk organized at dinner.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And like blockchain ventures guys were sitting next to us. And like at some point, like I remember you looked at me, you said, okay, Seb, from now on, from this point forward, we're now co-founders. Because I think before that we had sort of, you know, it business this as sort of being a a bit of a hobby and kind of a thing that we did on the side. But then at that point, you're like, okay, this is something that we're really going to pursue because, you know, this is like, you know, basically Bitcoin and blockchain are going to change the world.

And like, we want to be part of this and, and we want to sort of, you know, project ourselves as entrepreneurs in this space and not just hobbyists. And I remember that was like an important sort of, you know, mind shift for me from that point on like, okay, now, you know, I'm working in blockchain full time. And that's sort of what happened from that point on. yeah yeah and it was also very good i think like combination to us together because you you were very good and also at the whole like website figuring out the whole like technique all of the sort of you know how to actually produce a podcast put it out the audio all of these things that was like very helpless with so it was like i think we were like a great uh you know i was more like interested in the reading the white papers and preparing questions and stuff but like i think we were like

a great sort of yeah great complementary skill set so i think that you know allowed us to you know to produce this thing consistently and then of course you know we started having more hosts right i think maherr joined as the third host in i think it was like 2015 actually so this is my first trivia okay okay i've got some trivia questions here and then we'll start we'll start bringing in the the guests here. So the first, the first, the first choice

is for all of the, all the co-hosts, actually. So when, when did Meherr first join? What was Meherr's first episode? And maybe, you know, Meherr, you're also

open to, welcome to answer this question, but I don't know if you remember. But, yeah, maybe Brian, maybe you remember. I don't remember the first episode. I think it was like 2015 that he joined,

if I remember correctly, but I don't remember what episode. So was episode, 97. It was with Paul Stork. Oh, right. The drive chain stuff? Drive Chains. There you go. That's, yeah. Truth call. That's right.

Truth coin. Back then. Truth coin. Yeah. And Sonny, do you remember your first episode? Okay. Does anyone else remember? I didn't remember. I remember in Meheras, but I didn't remember yours or Felegas. I, I

should say it. I'm pretty sure it was Charles Hospital. I wish I had a I wish I had a bell like a big me I think I think Brian knew I was like really into a theorem classic at the time and so then he like asked you like hey do you want to do this one with Charles Oskinsen I think that's how I did my first episode yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I think we did that one together yeah yeah Sonia and I met uh so I was working at Tendament in uh 2017 and And then we had this retreat in the summer of 2017 in Canada.

And then Sonny was like, I don't know, like 19 at a time or something like that, you know. That was my next question. How old was Sunny when he first joined Epicenter? The correct answer was not old enough to drink. Yeah. But he depends where. Yeah, in Canada. And Frederica, do you remember your first episode?

I was going to look at that now, but I didn't. I think it's coin fund, and I think it was in 2018. And it's also super funny because Brian and I, we had actually known each other for a while. And we had worked from the same office, the ETH office in Berlin for a while. And then we actually started a co-working space together, Full Node in Berlin in 2017. but the way I actually got on the podcast the first time is when I met Meher at a dinner

and he said, oh, you should join Applecenta. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it had sort of come up as an idea and we had discussed it and then at some point I think Meher was like asked to you and then, yeah, I was super happy that that worked out and that, you know, become a key invaluable host and part of the show.

Yeah, and it's such a pleasure. And yeah, Felix isn't here yet, but his first one was with Dan Finlay of Meta Mask. He joined a bit later in 2022. Hopefully he'll join the live stream and there's just a bit. But yeah, let's get some of, we've got some people here in the green room that we wanted to bring on. So yeah, who's on first? I think Trent. I think Trent is first, right?

All right. Let's bring him in. Hey, Trent. Great to be here. Hey, how are you doing? I'm good. And first of off, congratulations. 10 years.

It's hard to believe. Wow. I was, I loved hearing these stories already from what you guys are sharing, you know, a lot of Berlin things. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think Trent was also, you know, one of the first people, right, in Bitcoin in Berlin and started, you know, a whole sequence of, uh, Startups. Was Ascribe the first one? Yeah, it was a scribe which pivoted to Big Genie B, which pivoted to Ocean.

So I've been to add Ocean for six years, I guess. Yeah, and a scribe, a lot of people will not know a scribe, but the scribe was basically doing something like NFTs, right, on the Bitcoin blockchain. So they were basically, you know, taking these artworks and sort of, you know, tracking the ownership of these artworks on chain. And I remember having lots of discussions there. And I was always like, does this make sense?

Because like, I mean, you know, sort of the image is there anyway and anyone can copy it. So you can't really protect that. But it really makes sense. It makes ownership. And I was always like at the one hand, I thought it was very cool. The other hand,

I'm like, does it really make sense? And then of course, you know, NFTs became absolutely massive. But I think that was really the first project. And you guys were doing cool things. working with, you know, interesting artists and galleries and also like, you know, way ahead of your time with that project. Yeah, it was really fun. I mean, you know, we had decent traction, but, you know, we were too early for the money side of things. So we had to pivot. And interestingly, you know, like NFTs took off in Bitcoin a year and a half ago.

And, you know, now they've been spreading the mechanism BRC20 is sort of not much different than a hash on the output transaction. And it's sort of, you know, taking advantage of the witness stuff. But then people took the idea and dumped it into the other EVM chains for basically lower transaction fees. And it's been spreading. It's called inscriptions, right? If you guys are following this, it's hilarious. And there's big complaints about dust and all the other chains and, you know, breaking chains one by one every week, it seems. But it's actually fascinating because BRC20 is actually very similar to the spill protocol we developed back in the day.

And, you know, for us, it's like we're really happy that NFTs finally to come. off. Maybe it wasn't us, but we're still playing in blockchain and building, so it's great to see. Yeah, absolutely. And then I think you've also been on the show a whole bunch of times. I think we did a scribe episode. I guess we did all of the things, you know, we did describe, Big Choney B, Ocean, I think several ocean episodes maybe and yeah. Yeah, definitely. I remember probably one funny one. It was Consensus 2017. I had just come offstage. I had an interview you lined up with Sebastian. And I randomly met Fred Erso.

I'm right at the tail end of my talk. And he's like, Trent, we need to talk. Co-founder of Coinbase, right? And I'm like, okay, I'm going to have to do an interview with Epicenter. Do you want to join me? Because I knew it had already been writing about decentralized data markets. And that interview was going to be partly on that. So I basically hijacked Sebastian with Fred.

I remember this. Yeah, I remember you came on. I think already, you know, I was sort of on edge because it was like the first time I did an episode solo. Because like usually, you know, it's always two hosts, right? And so in the early days, like, when I do an episode solo, I always just like be a little bit self-conscious about it. And then you bring on this other person randomly, right? I was like, okay. But yeah, it ended up being really good.

Yeah, it was a really lively discussion for its ball of energy. So it was really fun. Yeah, so actually, this is sort of related to the next trivia question here, which is who have been our most frequent guests? I think it's Italic. How many times has it been on? Five times. Meherst says no. Mayheris says no.

Who's our most frequent guest? Trend. Really? Wow. I mean, both could be true. Anybody else? Any other guesses? Martin's also been on a bunch of times

He has I want to throw in a guess I don't know if it's right but maybe Goon No I think So actually a lot of these answers are true So Vitalik has been on six times O' right

Goon has also been on six times And this is Trent this is your sixth time as well So you're good company. And I mean, not excluding, of course, although, you know, she was more of a host at sometimes, but Sean Jones, who was a frequent contributor to the show in their early days, who would come on to talk about, you know, regulation and the shifting regulatory landscape. Yeah. And then, but yeah, Martin's been on, Martin's been on three times. I mean, as a guess, I don't know, maybe as a host

also. He's been on as a host, once or twice. before this call I was reviewing the show of the episodes and the early episodes from Gwyn were on consensus and really fun I always loved those

but then there was the one he had with with Blad on the worries about the Dow and this was before the Dow hack so after the Dow had under a particular before the Dow hack so that was a really pivotal episode a really fun one

oh yeah and that episode actually there's also some like funny yeah how that turned out the funny story around that. So, you know, the SEC published this paper, right? The first thing they published on crypto, which was basically the DAO is a security and decided that podcast we did with GUN and Glad Samfer in that paper as evidence that it was security because they were basically talking about how,

you know, it's kind of centralized and you have these curators and they have this kind of control. and yeah, so it's funny how it ended up being, you know, cited by the SEC as a case. The U.S. government watches at the center. Yeah. So, wow. I remember actually the week that the Dowhawk was going down, I actually was in Ukraine, in Berlin at the time, and Vlad was there. It was a, and so him and I were sitting, like, watching and, like, he was having to run away to help, you know, fix things as well. And then at the same time, it was the same week as the Bitcoin happening. So there was, I forget the name, but it was one of the Bitcoin maxi guys, a really interesting dude. And, you know, he was

really excited with the Havening, but there's also this Dow and, you know, from him, it was a bit of shadow Freud as well. But overall, a highly interesting week that week, you know, Havening was 10% of the stuff. The hack was the big thing, but also the outcome, Ethereum Plastic was already mentioned all this, right? A lot of really interesting things, and that was really sort of when Ethereum started to grow up in a good way, right? You've got to have trial by fire to really be successful. So I think it's really cool how the community came through. Adam, I wanted to ask you as well. Like, I mean, like in your podcast journey, you know, what has been the most significant

or transformative chains that you've seen in the last like 11 years of doing crypto podcasts? The biggest one is definitely the move to tokens. If you remember back in, you know, when you guys were just getting started, this was right after Mastercoin had come out with the first meta token layer, which was awful. And it was right before, I think, counterparty had come out. So these are both metal layers for tokens on top of Bitcoin. And before that, the norm was, if you want to create a token, you need to figure out miners, you need to figure out distribution.

And there was just all this complexity and infrastructure that went along with it. And after that, it was not the case. It was different economics that unlocked the, that unlocked, a lot of stuff. That was a really significant one. One of my favorite things that I did there was for a couple of years, we ran it as a full kind of news desk and, you know, did investigative journalism and stuff like that. And I remember in the run-up to the final collapse of Mount Gawks, I spent, I think in a very late evening working with Charlie Shrem and Napoleon. Can't remember his last name. but basically ripping through all of the documentation around Mount

Cox and trying to figure out what it all meant, you know, in kind of the, I think it was a few weeks before the thing actually fully collapsed. Because there had been all sorts of rumors circulating and stuff like that. There are a bunch of things like that, you know, that just like those early days, there's something so fundamentally fun and interesting to me

about doing journalism in areas of really advanced technology that nobody understands. And like, that's true about technology generally, but when you're talking about something like crypto, you're really talking about really complex, you know, like multifaceted group dynamics. And, you know, leaderless systems, right? Like, leaderless systems are just wild things. And so it's, again, like, yeah, I mean, like, even outside of just crypto, like, that's probably some of the most fun journalistic experiences that I've had is just kind of trying to run that stuff down and figure out what's real and what's not. because it's so hard to tell. Yeah, and the token stuff that you guys were doing really early on let's talk.

I've told that story. I've talked about that with people, like, so many times recently. I mean, because like there's this new, I mean, I guess it is started to become more productized, like this idea of providing some sort of a token or an FTE for like doing some kind of action. So it could be like interacting with a brand or listening to a podcast or something like that. There's like, you know, lots of products kind of entering the market space. that do sort of similar things. And, you know, I always think back to like this LTV coin

and this magic word that we used to have on the podcast. Like Brian, you probably remember this, but like we used to do this magic word at every episode. So we'd say like, okay, today's magic word is pickles or whatever. Like, yeah, not pickles, but miners or like Bitcoin or, you know, transaction fees or whatever. And then if you listen to the episode, you take that magic word, pop it into the less topicon website,

and then you'd get some tokens. as like proof of listenership. And like this is such a, I mean, this was in 2014 and this was such a forward thinking idea. And I think maybe it was just too early, you know, for, for, for how the market was evolving. But like, one of the things. Very innovative. Yeah. One of the things that I've, like for better.

So I'm super experimental, as you guys know, right? Like we did all kinds of stuff that was just absolutely ridiculous. like we built a whole token powered content management platform, right, and content like expression platform that had tokens baked into it at kind of a base level in 2014. And so like that was so fun to do. But the thing about it that I think is challenging around all this stuff is that there was this really brief period of time where all of this stuff was possible, but before it became obvious that there was so much money attached to it.

And there was so much ability to do that. And, you know, we gave away that token explicitly because. I was concerned that later on it would be something that would be used against us. And so, again, like, our token had an end of life in 2017 where it was retired and changed out for another token. Like, no projects do any of this stuff even today. So, no, it's, again, like, the greatest privilege that I had in kind of all of this was being in a position where not only could I explore my ideas, but I could do so at scale with other

content creators and with a community of a couple tens of thousands of people, you know, at a time before the money came in and just muddied the water. There's nothing wrong with the money, but it does complicate things in ways that they just weren't complicated when we were working on stuff. Our problems were that we were too early, but everything else I'm pretty happy with how we got right. Yeah.

Yeah, really? Yeah, it's interesting how the tokens changed everything. Like, I mean, I remember, like, you know, being very involved in Ethereum early on. And, and I was just like, okay, so you're going to build these apps on Ethereum? and at the same time you have all these, you know, issues with user experience and scalability and all that.

And then it's like, it's going to take forever until you're actually going to be able to build sort of consumer great applications on that. And of course, that's true, right? We still basically, even today, right, just sort of on the verge of being able to do that. But of course, what I totally did not see, and I think hardly anybody saw at the time, was how tokens just kind of accrue so much value, even when there's little usage and the app isn't really there, and that it can then, you know, basically keep projects funded for years and years building all kinds of stuff, like before there's really, yeah, product market fit.

And I think that's, of course, for Ethereum was absolutely crucial, right? Otherwise, Ethereum would have died, right? Or, yeah, wouldn't have made it. And yeah, I think that was super interesting. It's a blessing in a curse, right? It's a blessing in that if you're a visionary founder who really has something to build out, it means that you have a bit more time to get product market fit before you're out of cash. And the curse is that you have a bit more time, which means that you might not have that sense of urgency, right?

And the way to resolve that is simply strive really hard to maintain that sense of urgency, even though you have the cash, right? And, you know, if you're a startup funder, I mean, you guys all know this too. Cash is K, right? There's usually a harrowing point in the time of the startup where it's really, really tough to get through. So tokens actually really help to get you past that, right? And the good news is, you know, maybe it took a few years from the time of the ICOs to the stuff that got built. But think about it from 2017 until 2020, 2022 now, a lot of the really visionary stuff did get built, right?

that took a lot of infrastructure building and took it for years. But that happened because of, you know, there was enough funding that came and there was enough runway and roadmap. And it happened. And then, of course, there was all those scams and whatnot, but a lot of really great stuff to get built precisely because of the token funding. Yeah. And of course, you also have the situation, right,

that if you have a good enough story and the token gets enough value, you can really keep this thing going of like having something you're working on that actually doesn't have any traction, any usage for like years and years. years and years, right? And even today, right, we still have projects that are like, you know, top 10, top 20 assets of billions of billions of market cap that basically have, you know, zero usage. How many devs does light chain, like coin have now? Is it half a dev still? It's amazing. Well, I'm surprised some people have it hijacked that, yeah. I think that we learned a couple of things from it all, which is one, being early is really, really valuable because anything that comes after the, earliest success point has to compete with all of the other things that want to displace it. And that's just in practice really, really, really hard to do. The other thing is

that one of the challenges with the money is that, and this was especially true early on, I think it's a little less true today, although not entirely true, is that the value of what was raised appreciated so quickly that it made it so that people who were building stuff yes, they could take their time, but they could also just do nothing. And that was fine too as far as like the deal that they had made with people. And there are many early projects that fall into that bucket. And again, like the, I was involved with some of the early Ethereum stuff and wound up getting kicked out of the, the early Skype group chats. Because when we were talking about the pre-mine and stuff like that, right?

The founder allocations and stuff, I was like, guys, this is just a bad idea. Like you're creating centralized problems, stuff like that. not well received, exited from all of that. So I mean like, you know, like I think for all the good that was done by the funding mechanism, early on we thought about it as crowdfunding. We thought about it as a pure analog to taking a crowdfunding campaign, which has this indefinite period of time after you funded the thing before you actually have something that is a thing.

And sometimes people just needed to, you know, sell that because they no longer were in a position where they could have it. Sometimes people miss the campaign. And so adding tokens made a lot of sense there. But the money, when the money just stacks up so, so high, just changes the incentive structure. And again, for every project that's out there that, you know, really deliver on something that was interesting, I would argue that there's probably a hundred projects out there that just took the money and did nothing, whether through, you know, malicious intent, naibete or whatever. Like the hit rate for that relative to money, I would constitute, I would consider almost all of it to be malinvestment that we just got lucky on a few times. So I don't know, man.

The years have really made me quite jaded as far as just kind of the incentive structure as it, as it all goes. But I am happy overall with kind of the way that the things have gone and the fact that it's still around. Again, there were lots of scenarios where this got much more aggressive, much faster. And none of those really manifested much to my pleasure. So I know you guys have many guests. And with that, I will say, thanks for having me on here.

And thanks for having me on so many episode episodes. I love this show. I listen to it all the time. And it's really great to be a part of it. And congrats again on your anniversary. Thank you, Trent. Yeah, and looking forward to many more episodes with you, Trent. Absolutely.

And we also have someone new on, Sebastian, from Harper just joined. Hi, Sebastian. Hey, for Rika and team. And I guess, happy birthday, everyone. And, yeah, thank you for being my personal educator on the journey for almost 10 years, it's been invaluable. You know, I just thought it's so weird because podcasts exist in all spaces, right? But in all spaces, you also have this competitor called universities.

Nowadays, maybe there's some university stuff out there, but back when I joined, their winner universities, there was, like, Epicenter was the only way we could learn about crypto egg not get scammed. Like, the second part was kind of important. So yeah, that's been pretty valuable from at least. When did you start listening to the show's up? Actually, for me, I was thinking about it before. It was kind of hard to tell because I was talking to Meher a lot who, you know, was, I always say, personally responsible for dragging me into this crypto rabbit hole.

And then, yeah, Meher was telling me about this epicenter thing. And I think it was in late 2014 that it became, I did kind of my weekly shopping. And my weekly shopping took exactly two hours, which was exactly the time to listen to two episodes. So that was good because I had quite some catching up to do. And yeah, that was when I started. That's a very long weekly shop.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that happens when you live in the countryside. Yeah. Maybe it was also two hours. because that's simply how long it took to listen to each other episodes. Meher, how did you guys know each other? I didn't realize that Meherra was the connection here. Yeah, he was doing a PhD in Basel.

Exactly. It was the Basel connection, the Zeran connection, and, yeah, all the funny ideas that Meera had, that many people had back in the days. All sold it kind of crazy, right? There was Bitcoin, and there was all these crazy. crazy ideas. And I also remember, like, I think Mayer was the first person who had witnessed to be,

like, properly obsessed with something. And the first thing that I saw Meher being obsessed with was actually Maker. And, like, there was this time when Meir would join all these calls and listen in about, like, what's going on at Maker. And, like, nobody could really find out what was going on because early on it was a bit obscure. It still is very obscure. Yeah.

Yeah. A few days ago, Sebastian and I were talking about how the LLMs would struggle at understanding the maker code base. Maker and orbit code bases are the hardest for LLMs. That's my claim. But so that's for humans, right? So maybe, you know, LLMs are the way to make these kind of very funny codebases available to some other minds, except for the handful of people who coded it. So I mean, you mentioned the episode that you like that was the first episode you listened to.

I guess like this was interesting. I want to ask me here and Frederica as well. What are like what's your like most memorable episode that you listen to before you joined as a host? For me, I think it was like in 2017 like the one with Jimmy Song and it just like explained like scaling wars 101. I think that was just like so helpful to just be like, okay, here's like the, you know, anyone who needed like understanding. scaling wars, I just sent them that that episode because it's like, okay, it was a one hour just like, obviously, you know, somewhat pretty biased view, but it was a good explanation of scaling wars.

I hate listening to podcasts. You had it here for us, guys. I've never listened to an FSPMIPA podcast, I think. I can't see if you waited 10 years to tell us this. It's good you didn't say that earlier, Meher. We could put an opportunity to fit it in. I go read the white paper, now I go in the code base. Last part of the episode, I remember hearing, is a medical one.

But I've never heard episode. No, you were listening to Epicenter like before you joined us, no? I think so. That's what he told you. That's when he told us. I mean, maybe I might have scouted like Episandah. Okay. You know, what's up or something.

But, you know, hi. Yeah. I'm listening. I remember the jingle that plays in the beginning because you don't hear that as a host recording it. Would you recognize it, meher? So speaking of jingles, speaking of jingles, this will lead us to the next trivia question here. Does anybody remember the title of the pilot episode? I remember you were called Epicenter Bitcoin at the time.

This is true. This is true. As I get constantly reminded by every time I go to a Bitcoin conference, like people like, People are like, you know, I still like Epicenter, but you know, you got sold out by dropping Bitcoin from the name. And I have, but our Twitter handle still says BTC in it. So, you know. So just just one thing here. So I have here the first message that Meher sent us.

And it was like, hi, Brian and Sarasia. I love your show in interviewing style. So you were listening. Or just tailoring himself to get a job. No, he was proposing himself as a, so you were working on this hyperledger. We're involved in this project called Hyperledger, which has nothing to do with the later thing called HyperLedger that ended up, you know, the centralized blockchain stuff. And it was some sort of, I mean, here, you'll be able to describe it more, but you were basically proposing us to do an episode about this. and yeah I think that was like some point in 2015

well that would have gone over better than well I've never listened to your show before but I'd like to come on and talk about the project I'm working on so good job good job that's an excellent approach so does anybody remember the name of the first the pilot episode no well why don't why don't why don't we just play it, Ben? Regulation. This is Epicenter Bitcoin, a weekly podcast about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

The pilot episode, recorded December 20th, 2013. Regulation and the future of Bitcoin. This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you in collaboration with the Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast. Who did that intro? I know that that was my attempt at a radio voice oh wow I always never recognized you yeah I didn't recognize it was you

yeah I think you start all episodes like that now yeah that's right that was that was the theme music for the first couple of episodes yeah I think I think I think when I go back and listen to myself from back then I think I think my my Canadian accent used to be a much much

stronger for some reason. But yeah, that was the first episode, the regulation of the future of Bitcoin. I have a semi-trivia question here. So at some point you started doing, doing ads in the show, but these ads are typically not very, you know, not very crypto-scammy ads like, what were the worst applicants that you got for like doing ads on the show? I mean, we got a lot of applicants for doing ads on the show. I mean, like, I think during the, the ICO kind of like, period, we were getting a lot of queries to do ads on the show. Are very, does anybody remember our, so Bogdan, who's our, who does a social, you know, our community and, and sales is commenting as they don't even ask. But, no, but our first sponsor, our first sponsor was shape shift.

And I mean, this was shape shift before Eric Vorgies was even like out. I think it's easiest putting on your slippers. I remember. I may, I may, maybe I'm wrong here, but I think the first sponsor was, was Fairleigh. That's right. Sorry, yeah, you're right. So it was Fairleigh, the first one. What is Fairly?

Yeah, yeah. Fairly was the prediction market. Yeah. That it was like by Martin and Stefan, right? Yeah. Of course, you know, founds of co-found notes. There was pre-nosis? Yeah, there was pre-nosis.

Oh, wow. Centralized site, yeah, as opposed to a protocol. So the Nosis connection goes way, way, way back then. Martin actually met Joe at a Bitcoin meetup in New York, and he was telling him about Fairleigh. And Joe said, this sounds cool. Why don't you join consensus and build the same thing on Ethereum? That's not live yet, but it's going to be live soon.

It's going to be awesome. This is how Martin and Jeffan became employees, two and three, of consensus. And Fairleigh is still running? I'm looking on the site right now. It says it has like 32 Bitcoin of volume in the last 24 hours. Yeah, it was at some point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go.

Yeah. Okay. You guys never got to. The cloud miners were always the ones that most got in my, like that was the worst advertisers, right? Because the cloud miners were almost always scams because they'd just be like, basically they would just run a Ponzi scheme. But then they would be like, no, we're putting your money into buying hardware. And then now you're going to get the sealed from the hardware. I think eventually some of them came out that were better.

But the first couple of years when everybody wanted to do mining, that was like, these were the people pre-ICO who had money to spend on marketing. because they didn't actually have a product most of the time behind it. And everybody wanted. So that was my memory of the worst. I remember we're getting some queries also like talking to some cloud mining folks. And I think Brian you were like, no, this doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I mean, the issue was even when the cloud mining thing was like honest or something, that generally, you know, you'd basically pay some amount in, you know, dollars to then buy some.

amount of hash rate over some time, like a year or two years and stuff. And then if you sort of calculate like how many bitcoins you got from that, you know, generally you were always better off just like buying the Bitcoin upfront instead of putting in this money to, you know, buy the stream of Bitcoin over time. So it was always like, this is like on the one, there's always like no scenario in which you'd have actually be better off doing this cloud mining thing. But so somehow they could still like sell it. Everybody wanted to do it.

And I remember sometimes, yeah, remember sometimes they say, well, you know, but you can, you know, you can sort of like maybe just bill it through your company and say it's like cloud expenses or and then you keep the Bitcoin out of the company or, you know, basically some kind of, you know, scammy approaches that maybe made it make sense. But yeah, so I think. I remember for me, like it wasn't the cloud mining, but I remember one of my early. exposures to Bitcoin was with like, you know, 21 or, were they called 21 back then, I think. Yeah. They were like, like, pitching like, oh, here's like this like raspberry pie that you're going to like plug in and like, you know, your toaster is going to be mining and everything. Yeah. The toaster was the craziest thing. Yeah. How many, how many hours a day does the average human use a toaster? Yeah. That was one of my, that one was one of my first moments when I was like starting to

challenge what I hear and yet it didn't make sense because there were all these very smart people right and they all were like they were speaking like very eloquently and I'm wondering how many minutes I use a toaster in an average day but yeah anyway I think that's part of the crypto education journey the water heater was always the better path yeah I like water heaters yeah one of the first big on conferences I went to was in Amsterdam in like maybe October 2013, like Vitalik was selling his Bitcoin magazine there. And then we had, I met Adam back at that conference. It was his first Bitcoin event.

I think he didn't have any Bitcoin at the time. Still, he was sort of like watching from the sidelines, but I had dinner with him. And many Rosenfeld, who's also been on the show sometimes, he was kind of the original Bitcoin guy in Israel. And during the dinner, the two of them went on and this like crazy tangent. And, but I remember that was the one thing Adam was talking a lot about that, yeah, like at some point, Bitcoin mining economics is going to be that, yeah, you're going to mine Bitcoin with your heating device at home and things like that. Yeah.

Yeah. To answer your question, Sebastian, like to come back to the sponsors, I think one thing that we always try to do is, you know, throughout the 10 years. was also always be very, very mindful of the sponsors we got on the show. And like, you know, even in the beginning, you know, like, Brian and I would talk quite a bit about, like, whether or not a sponsor was good for the show if we were using, if we would use or recommend this product. And, and, yeah, I sometimes joke about how, like, had we accepted all of the money that people were trying to throw at us during the ICO period, probably would have made, like, quite a bit of money, you know, but it just didn't feel right. And I think like it was the right decision to like just be very, very careful with sponsors, especially like in this space. No, I mean, honestly, especially over such long time. I think it did an impressive job there at

not selecting the FTXs of the world, right? It hasn't always been obvious. Let's also be honest about that, right? Like the biggest, the most painful monseys were the ones that were not obvious. Yeah. No, kudos on that. I mean, we did have one, we did have one that was like, it was this Guppies thing. I don't know if remember this, Brian.

We did this, this, these ads. I thought it's a thing that Stephen Goppy's dating app off and it's not an actual thing. We didn't have them as a sponsor, I think. We had them as a, we did have a sponsor. Yes. No, no, no, sorry, sorry. No, it wasn't the Guppies.

No, no, we did have, we had the Guppies on, but we didn't release the episode. But we did this thing. called gems, which was kind of like a social app. But it wasn't a scam, but it just, they were doing kind of a sale, ICO, and it failed. It was not the, I mean, I think I still have some. Kind of interesting idea. Yeah, it was interesting idea. Guys, I know Adam has to dash.

Adam, it's been so lovely to have you on for this. Yeah, and maybe one day we can meet in person. That's a distinct possibility. Guys, you're doing a great job. Keep up the good work. Again, you know, like, it's important. I'm happy to see that you're being so successful. So have a great next 10 years.

Thanks so much. And thanks for your role in all of this. Yeah. I'll see you in 10 years. So. Cool. And we also have two new guests. Griff and Leff Terrace.

Hang on. Let me bring you guys on. Hey, guys. GM GM. Hey, hey. Wonderful to see you. Hey, hello. Guys, I'm going to head out.

Now there's people who are funding public goods and support the privacy and local software. Before you go, I wanted to say something super juicy that I don't know if you ever knew this. And I don't know how Lifteris is even going to feel about me saying this. But back during the day, so obviously Leverteris and I were part of Slocut and the Dow and manage the Dow. hack to the white hack group but uh the two of the top or sorry there were there was the top

person that was predicted to be the Dow hacker back in the day was that we were told was actually you Sebastian and Marr and Andre Vilka back in the day this was these you guys were the top suspects I thought my hair yeah they were a question I did not know you were There was people accusing me of that. And I was like, guys, I actually wasted five eth, or like spamming the network on running this thing that Stephen Twoll was just sending this thing. You know, I'm counterattack the network. And I wasted five precious eth on it, which back then was way less money than it is nowadays, obviously.

So, yeah. It was a good cover story. Is it still a live hypothesis? is it dead because you know money hacker was yeah that's a good question but when i first met sebastian i i think that this is what you asked me right like why why the heck would uh yeah when we met in in person in in frittesign in berlin he asked me so i some people said that i'm thinking that you know uh the dow hacker was from what was even the company name validity labs validity yes yes yes from us back in a day yeah

I don't remember where the theory came from, but there was a theory. I want to say it was like it was one of the exchanges. They said that somehow some gas money was connected to validity labs. That's possible, but yeah, it's funny actually. It's really funny. Thanks for bringing it up. But you're also in the company because Alexei was also the other suspect, right? Alexei Akunov.

I remember I've heard those theories before I never had Alexi being no I think Alexi was the first to post about it on Reddit Yeah he'd posted like

something funny's going on like the contracts are being drained or something and yeah yeah and he's like you know at the time like there amount of people who like knew the EVM well enough

to find it much smaller than it is today and Alexei was definitely like in that set so awesome great anyway awesome to bring up to its stories the birth and claim to fame not the Dow hacker not the Dow hacker anyway thank you so much for having me on and uh yeah all the best for everyone involved see your arms thanks Sebastian so after accusing him of uh No, it was, yeah, that was a very nice thought in the, in the conversation. Hey, by the way.

I remember the first time I met Sebastian. It was like, it was like we were at a conference and it was me, Dori, and Levertara's, and we're all talking to him. It was like, oh, my God, we're talking to the Dow Hacker. It's so awkward. I didn't have to be, Sebastian, to kind of be the person and kind of give. gives off like this super villain vibe. But yeah. Yeah, it wasn't there.

Actually, it wasn't the Sebastian and there was no feeling kind of thing. It was another younger guy from Paradigy Labs. And it was Polonics that suggested that. I don't remember his name, but a particular guy who was talking to Stefan Toll. and yeah but it was pretty fucked up like

it's really in the Cryptopians the book that in Shanghai after the hack the guy that was suggested

as being the Dow hacker by Polonix was in DevCon 2 in Shanghai and he talked to me and I was like oh my God I'm talking to the guy that supposedly was a Tao hacker and he was saying

yeah well do you know the Dow hacker probably also is very bad for what he did because he just got into the situation it was very difficult and for him I was like oh my god it has to be him look at how he's defending the dowhager but yeah in the end it was all just stuff it was mine even though as was mentioned before who is a dowhager we just have this other theory that Laura posted in the book but well it's not possible to prove anything with a 100% certainty, right? So I guess we will always remain with this question.

When you guys mentioned Polonex, I can see why. So because the Dow hack happened and the first thing, like when I came to know of the Dow hack, I actually sold a large chunk of my ether on Polonni X. So maybe it's like that, that might have triggered them to have some. and I have hypothesis, yeah. Yeah, so the hypothesis was pretty simple, that they had taken a huge sort position that was being built over the days that the hack was happening

and that they executed it right after the hack. But let's be honest, like this is extremely weak evidence. And if I remember correctly, the price movement, it was really time to sort. I didn't know anything about trading back then, but now that I see how trading works, I mean, it had just doubled in price in a week or so.

So I guess it's a sort of paradise. So just from that saying that, okay, these guys must be it. I don't mean so. I like it better when the identity is a mystery. I feel like the Dow hacker is like, you know, it's on like Satoshi, like the Dow Hacker. Like he's like core anons of crypto history. Like it's just better for it to remain faceless. Well, the Dowhacker did prove that there's a distinction with a code.

Code is law and social consensus is law. So important distinction. Yeah, yeah, that's a very big contribution to the ecosystem. I mean, my Dowhawk story, which is I was not, I was barely involved at the time. But I was just really into Bitcoin at the time. and I was at a hackathon that summer in 2016. And then I was telling my friend, I was like,

hey, I heard about this like Ethereum thing. Like I heard you can like build applications and stuff on top of it. Like, you know, we should, we should check this out. I mean,

because we were like Bitcoiners only at that time. And so, you know, at this hackathon, we opened up Reddit and the entire like page is just talking about it, the Dow hack and like, oh, the world is burning.

Like you have to fork the chain. and we were like, yeah, this community is crazy. This like, what is this? This is some bullshit. And so we like turned it off and I didn't look at Ethereum again for like another year. Yeah, you were saying before that you were an Heath Classic guy? I was an Heath Classic guy for a while. I like the Code is Law and all that.

So yeah. My more specific stance was that I think it was unethical for the Ethereum Foundation to leverage its ownership of the Ethereum trademark to declare the fork to be Ethereum. My take was that the classic chain should have kept the name Ethereum and the ticker, and then the fork chain should have a new name. Yeah, you know, I'm surprised that more things weren't built on Ethereum Classic, like really sketchy things, like a dark market or, you know, it's like,

all of a sudden you had this chain that's like, oh, yeah, hey, this is claim, no one's going to mess with this, okay? like let's do illegal things. It never happened. I feel like crypto has in general this like really like nefarious outlook or people think that it's so bad. But the real builders, they really don't build bad things. I mean, there was a huge opportunity there.

Yeah. That was part of my thesis on ETC as well, but never panned out. Yeah. Even the criminal smart contract paper, the assassination markets, all of these. dystopian ideas that I've come across have actually never been built and yes

it's an interesting observation about actually humanity that actually most of us are either trying to build interesting things or are just trying to scam and just make a little money and just switch off none of us are trying to do like the really evil stuff like where are the

professor Moriartis of the world like there's a serious lack of Professor Moriarty's of the world on the super villains. I mean, my thesis would be here also that, you know, if you wanted to build like, I don't know, dark market, I don't know, assassination market or something like that, well, privacy really has to be like completely impenetrable.

And that's just not the case, right? And then I think, of course, you also see, you just see how hard it is to build anything anonymously and I mean Satoshi managed it which is still like astonishing that that feels like I mean obviously the intellectual achievement of Bitcoin is is like immense but like him having

having been able to do this without leaking his identity in any way is also just like incredible and you know I think people have not even even when they tried right, most of they fail, even things like that don't get the kind of attention that Bitcoin did. So I still think in the end, it will have to happen, right? We will have to see things like dark markets that are like fully decentralized and all that stuff.

But it's just, yeah, but you're right. I think it is surprising that it hasn't happened. So you're like, it's down to logistics complexity of staying anonymous. And if that is all, we'll have a lot of super villains cop up. I mean, of course, you're absolutely right that like most people don't do this kind of thing, right? Most people want to build like good things and stuff like that. But obviously, I mean, look at dark markets, right? Like they exist, right?

And they keep making new ones and stuff, right? So, but I guess, well, I mean, for dark markets, I guess also like one of the main business models of dark markets seems to be the exit scam, right? where people put in, you know, trip Bitcoin or Monero or something into something that's basically hidden, centralized website, and then, you know, they can trade drugs. And then at some point, when enough people have been using it, they just shut down the site and run away with the coins. And of course, if you decentralize it, actually, like, you can't do that. So I guess, but in the end, I, yeah, like, you would expect that thing to happen.

And then of course, also something we did episodes about, right? There was the Hackathon project called Dark Market by like Amiraki at some point. And then they even ended up getting, well, there was a project Open Bazaar, right, that kind of took this and ended up getting venture funding from like Union Square Ventures and A16C like high, you know, very reputable funds. And of course, I think the expectation was, you know, that. okay someone's probably going to like fork this and build the dark market because that's obviously the biggest use case. I mean the biggest market probably for something like that, at least in the short term. But yeah, never happened.

I do want to say though that I think we used to think that being anonymous is way easier that it actually turned out to be. So I think kind of back in the days of the Dow hack, people did assume they were anonymous to a large extent, which I think this kind of predated, like, you know, all the chain analysis like companies of the world, right? So, and then if you don't have very sophisticated block explorers and nansen and whatever, it's really difficult to actually, to actually trace everything fully on chain. So I think there was a reasonable expectation that things would be private and things still

didn't get built. So maybe something more deep-seated here. Yeah, I feel that privacy is probably the, it's really unfortunate that like we still don't have reasonable options for privacy in the space. I mean, we'll get them. So this is something that I am absolutely put it on for the next 10 years. So with ZK Proves and FHE and MPZ, I think kind of we're going to get there. Yeah. And we also have Felix on now. So Felix is the late host.

Hey, Felix. Hi, thanks. Thanks for me. And congrats to 10 years to all of you, guys. So happy that I was able to join as a host and take over some of the episodes that maybe Sunny would have done otherwise. That's a bird, if I ever heard one. So yeah, Felix, what's your, What's your most memorable episode?

I was looking earlier and it looks like you've done, you know, you haven't done as much as Sunny. So they still have some catching up to do, but you've done something like 25 episodes, maybe 29. Oh, wow. What's been your favorite so far? Yeah, I really like the DIDX episode I did with Brian.

It was like just very, yeah, a clean episode. We kind of covered everything. It was very, yeah, a good, great product, you know, big success. and we went over everything, inspiring sort of story from Anthony and sort of the journey of the YDX and really enjoyed that episode. Yeah, who would you like to get on in the next couple of months? Oh, yeah, I think Gito. I was trying to get Lucas on, actually,

but then they were way too busy with the Airdrop and everything. and yeah, I guess it's kind of me being like in this staking niche of epicenter. And I think now, I guess, yeah, many people are probably interested, you know, what's how is Gito doing? Like, it has got like much bigger, much more attention, right? And yeah, maybe like kind of a counter to this like sort of the Lido and FlashBots episode that we also had with Stefan and was a lead like then. So it could be a very cool one, excited for that one. Yeah. Griffin Lufteris, I went to ask you, because I mean, you guys are like so OG into Ethereum and, you know, like still very much into that space. Like how much, how much you pay attention do you give to like other ecosystems or like, whether it's Cosmos or Solana or like, you know, maybe some of the stuff happening over on on Polygon or some other ecosystems like do you pay any attention at all to what's going on there? Are you just like, you know, still very focused on Ethereum.

It's a theorem alignment question. I can smell it. I can smell it, yes, it's a trap. For me, it's very difficult. Like so many different stuff pop up, it's impossible to follow. But I personally try to look at all the different ecosystems, but I can't even claim to know anything as well as I do Ethereum, which is kind of sad.

Like, being honest, I look the most where I have an interesting or a bug in. So if I have lots of tokens of something, I'm interested to see

if that bug is going to be worth anything. And also because I'm doing Rotki, I am trying to focus on everything that people ask for, which besides CVM chains would be when

cosmos and substrate. So these are our two biggest tasks and then there are some people who do who want also DFINITY. And then Solana. But I don't know anything about Solana though I would love to find more time. And I guess it's also interesting.

I really like everything. But we don't know what I mean. Yeah. I'm kind of like L'EFerras. I mean, I definitely chase my bags. No, but also I follow more of like the region space. So region network, I follow relatively closely and I'm always watching what's going on.

And I'm so in Cosmos also. It was checking them out. But unless it's so I'm like Solana, I haven't seen any region projects on Salonat. There probably are, but I don't know. But actually, Giveth is going to be. one. We're going to integrate Salona so you can donate on Giveeth because I don't, I didn't, I think there's an opportunity there. So, you know, there's not a donation platform that I know of there. So, hey, why not? I, I wish I followed, I followed Pocod in the, and in that Web3

foundation space early on, but I haven't seen a whole lot developed there. So mostly I follow in the EVM space because that's where I know people who can do cool things. And that's definitely where where the Regents faces. I'm very close with Polygon, optimism and Arbitrum and public goods network and all the L2s. So I consider all of that Ethereum though, like even Polygon. I mean, if it's EVM, you know, Ethereum is the E, right? So I don't know if that should really count. You know, Latheras talked about alignment earlier. Do you think that, you know, everything will that will converge to Ethereum and basically like all of the other ecosystems will borrow security from Ethereum in one way or another, whether through restaking or or mesh security or some other sort of like

novel security mechanisms? I do not. I do think that there is going to be a power law distribution, but I don't think that there will be like everyone uses Ethereum. That would just be dumb. Like, why would we centralize around that? We need diversity in space. And I also just think there's enough incentives for challengers to always be there. That's a very good question. It's very difficult to answer. Because Ethereum has an amazing staying power.

I would not have imagined that it's so many things are built around Ethereum. And even though other ecosystems really come up with novel ideas and pretty interesting concepts, we seem to still do stuff on the AVM, though it has its flaws. And I don't know why we seem to just focus on it a lot more than anything else. About restaking, I really don't know enough to even give an informed opinion. But from the problems that we have with Ethereum Staking, somewhere suggesting that we can do something that I think both Cosmos and the summer, absurd ecosystem does, I don't remember the name, but that you are validating your stake to someone

that probably has a name, I just don't know it, which you cannot do in Ethereum. You have to either stake on your own or do the liquid-stating stuff, right? What's the name of that thing in Cosmos? That is a good name for delegating your stake, yeah. I mean the liquid-saking stuff in Cosmos or what? Or just delegation to a validator, the concept that doesn't exist in your business here. Yeah, this. So, for example, when I go to Maitia, he delegated it to Lari something, someone for staging, right?

And with substrate, it's exactly the same thing. If you don't want to run your own validator, you have to, you have this option of delegating the stake. Yeah, yeah. You made a bit of a face there while I was asking that question. Like maybe you had something to add here. I made a face? Yeah. On what?

The question about like ethelignment? Or just? Yeah. Or maybe when Griff was saying that things wouldn't align with Ethereum. Oh. I don't know. I mean, I think Ethereum, has done a good job of building this community around it.

I've just not always been a believer in like multipolar systems. I think that like, you know, Solana has built quite a bit of a cultural center. I think Cosmos has grown a cultural center. At the end of the day, I honestly just don't, I think from a cultural standpoint, I don't know,

I just find my, maybe just like by nature of when I got involved with the space. I just like in my heart, I just like feel like a bitcoiner. I don't know why. Like if I tell anyone, it's like, you know, and I feel like like part of it's like when I just go talk to like friends and stuff. It's like if I try to pitch them on a trip or people who are not like drinking the Kool-Aid, right? Like I feel like I can explain Bitcoin so easily and they like get it.

Right. Like nothing. Very else, very little else is like easy to explain. Like it's like so hard to explain like eat. Like I don't think. And you know, I think people just start asking questions that I, you know, I can explain Bitcoin really well. and I can explain like certain defy apps really well, right? I mean, obviously I can explain Osmosis really well and like what the value prop here is, right?

But like, you know, if you tried to ask me like pitch Eath to our normie, I actually don't know how to like do that. So I don't know, that's kind of I, I'm a believer in Bitcoin and I'm a believer in like applications. Yeah, I mean, and I think that's a really fair stance because Bitcoin has like a very clear application and it is its own application effectively of like he supplies money and it does it really well. But like the other like Ethereum and Solana and Cosmos, I mean, it's just, you're talking to normally about why MongoDB is better than another database framework. And it shouldn't happen. Also why MongoDB is a, you know, $500 billion product. Yeah.

Exactly. I think in the end, these different products will all exist because users don't care. Our tribalism is in the crypto space and that's like super niche. And what's going to win is the applications that are built on top of it that are useful. Yeah. I guess the problem is that you're trying to compare Bitcoin, which is more like a, you call it an application, right? It's easy to understand.

While Ethereum, EVM, et cetera, it's a platform to build up on it. So it's much harder to explain to a normie. Cool. Thank you guys for being here, Griffin, Lev Terrace. I know Left Terrace, you're joining us from the middle of nowhere as can be seen by your very blocky picture. And I can vouch for the fact that Left Terrace usually doesn't look so pixely. So thank you both for coming on. And it's been a real pleasure.

Thank you for allowing us to participate in your 10th year anniversary, birthday. Yeah, happy birthday, guys. I've enjoyed you guys since the very beginning. Thank you for giving all this work. Thanks, guys. Thanks so much, guys. Okay, time for our next guests, right? So we have Anna and Sam.

Hang on. Let me bring you guys on. Hello. Hi. Hey. Hi. So just great introductions here. So Anna Rolls, who is the host of ZK podcast,

also very popular. podcast and one of my favorites. And Sam, who I met a couple of weeks ago in Istanbul, and he had such a crazy story about, like, his experience listening to Epicenter

that I just wanted to get him on to tell that story here on our live stream. So, yeah, thanks for coming, guys. Cool. Nice to be here. The first podcast ever. Oh. Yeah. Nice.

there are so many hosts when I first joined I thought there was like a ton of guests but no it's like it's are you guys at six now seven if he counts sunny sunny is a sort of you know depending on the weather host yes yeah Sam

tell us a bit about yourself and yeah when you start this podcast I've worked in Tran 5 for about 20 years So I've just gone, I guess you would say, crypto-native. I think the only other one of you that I've met in person, maybe Sunny. We actually met you were on my flight back from ECC. We chatted in line. But I started, so I got in the space right around when Federica joined as a co-host.

I started the first macrofund that could trade liquid crypto. And my background is in TradFi. and macro trading, you know, from like the economics perspective. And I traded the first option on Ethereum back in 2018, when it was at 2019, when it was at like 120 bucks. And most recently, I ran a crypto for one of the largest and oldest global macro funds in the world. And then during that period, we invested in scroll. and I have now a joint full-time as an advisor. Congrats.

Yeah, so what's this? Yeah, tell the story about, I think it was about, I think it was, you said you were listening to the episode of E, that El Eben-Sesson. Yeah, so I was telling, so I was telling him that I oftentimes listen to podcasts when I'm in the shower. and Federica recently interviewed Ellie. And, you know, I was literally, so obviously, and I'm listening to it on my phone, which I have like, you know, put up like this.

And, you know, obviously the sound is not super loud. You've got the water and everything. And she's asking him this very delicate question, which I'm a bit of an ethmaxy, which is a disclosure. And, you know, there is some suspicion within, I think, parts of the Ethereum community about how aligned may be. start where may be. And she's asking him this question about where they're posting the data. And he goes, well, we're posting it to, you know, our, this data availability committee, blah, blah, blah. And she goes, so you have another L1. And I literally was like, I was like shampooed my hair. And I like stopped. And he goes, well, I hadn't really

thought of it that way, but I guess so. And she goes, oh, that's very interesting. And And then I was waiting for him. This is where I think it might get a little bit spicy. But I was waiting for him that didn't turn around and be, if he wanted to snite better and be like, well, don't you work for another Alt L1 as well? Nosis, is it? Noses, an alt, another L1?

But it didn't go in that direction. But it was the first time I've heard anybody really challenge him on this. And I thought it was, it was very interesting to me in our story. He thought it was funny because it was in the shower at the time. So you take, you take like a 90 minute long showers or like the full episode? Well, you know, I think this sprung out of, I think it's sprung out because I used to like to go to the sauna and the steam room and take a lot of reading. You know, there's no distractions. There's no TVs.

You can't use your phone, right? And so it's just this like, you know, this deprivation. And after COVID, you know, during COVID, obviously all the gym shut down and whatever. And, you know, we now, you know, during that COVID period and afterwards, it's like, you're just surrounded by your screens or televisions or your phone. And so I think the shower became this like deprivation place where like if I was in the shower, I'd put on somewhere I could just listen and your mind's a lot. The whole showered on thing.

So it was, I think that's where he came from, but I'm not sure. Did I get? Do you remember this episode? Do you remember this, what are you talking about? I remember. It was not so long ago, right? No, it was actually during Paris. That's when I listened to it during each season.

But you may have. It wasn't very long ago, but I don't actually remember this specific question. But kind of, I'm all for kind of putting things very plainly. So it's, yeah. But I have to say, you know, I recommend Epicenter. So I've been listening probably, maybe I started listening like 2016, 2017, but I, I mean, I'm, I listen routinely since then. And I refer new traffic people trying to learn about the space to listen to Epicenter. And to also, when they're trying to learn.

they'll ask me about a project or something. And I'll say, why don't you go find the Epicenter podcast with that project from maybe it was years ago. But it's, you guys have become almost like a reference material. And I think, by the way, I'll give credit to Anna. I listened to her show religiously as well. Thanks. Certainly in the ZK space, you play that role. But for the Tradfite people, that's a little, they, the knowledge level is extremely low in Trite.

I can't emphasize this enough. A little bit to Sonny's point, you know, the understanding of what Ethereum is, for example, should, you know, the really the level of understanding is that it's a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin with some utility. And that's really it. And so I actually think that Epicenter plays a really important role. And from an education and introduction standpoint.

And I use it personally as a kind of an encyclopedia of the space, but I refer tried by people as well to you that that way. Well, thank you. I guess if we encounter people from Troutfi that listen to the podcast, I'll ask them if they come from Sam. Cool, yeah, well, thanks for coming on and telling us story.

And yeah, thanks for, thanks for being a loyal listener. Yeah, I guess a good segue to the other podcast that was known. Yeah, yeah. When did you get started with CGA? It's been a long time as well. Oh, no. Yeah, so I was thinking about your questions of like, when did we first, when did I first hear about Epicenter? For sure, it's 2017 for me, probably before we started the show. I know that like, I mean, you guys were a lot bigger than us back then. You were like, the big. We were just like for our, you know, for our friends in the office. It was very, very small. But I know I was for sure a listener by devcon. 2017 in Cancun because Brian, that's when I voice recognized you on a bus and like weirded you out and went over and was like, are you Brian from like, I do that. Yes, I remember. I remember.

Yeah, yeah. Like, you had nowhere to go. Like, you had nowhere to go. It was like this bus taking us from a place to another place that was like not moving. Anyway, but yeah, that was for sure. So by then, obviously, I'd been listening for a long time. And I was also thinking about what. What were those guests that, like, I remember, I don't know, that I listened to that would have changed something. And I have a few that I picked out. One was for sure, like, Matter and Alex G. I think I had already had him on my show, but I think it was like a phase shift in the project that I learned about through Epicenter.

I remember the episode with Dankrad in 2021 for some reason that one stands out. And you guys have covered Erbit often. which I still don't understand. But I always listen to those ones. Brian, this is your chance. Tell us more about Irvin. I've listened to that one and I don't understand it either. I can explain it.

Okay, no, I'm Sonny explaining it. Okay, yeah, Sonny, why? What is it? Okay, okay. Do you guys know Secure Scuttlebutt? You familiar with Secure Scuttlebutt? Yes. It was a DAG-based social network

instead of a blockchain, you know, you peer-to-peer gossip with other nodes, and eventually you have this like eventually consistent view of the network. We also did an episode with them. Did you an episode. Dominic. Yeah. I did too, actually. It does not solve a double spend problem.

Episode 290. But because it's a social network, what is a double spend, right? It's just, oh, you told us one person you like to post, another person you dislike to post, like whatever, right? It doesn't really matter. Okay. put secure a shuttle button on the side for a second. Bitcoin wanted to build this like thing, like decentralized money project.

And in order to do this, invented a new decentralized data structure called a blockchain. Right. And it's like, okay, really fast finality or relatively fast finality and like solves this double spend problem. Ethereum comes along and is like, oh, cool decentralized data structure. What if we put a generalized VM on top of that? and have it run arbitrary applications. I think the best way to think of orbit is take secure a scuttle butt, the decentralized data structure that is secure a scuttle butt.

It's like, why are we only running a single social network platform on top of this? What if we actually instead slapped a generalized BM on top of this and made it so like, okay, there's a platform that people can build peer to peer applications, right? Like you have a bunch of people right now trying to build decentralized social networks, right? You have like Farcaster and, you know, Blue Sky and everyone. But right, and everyone's like building specialized P2P networking. Like most B2P DAPs don't need a blockchain, right? You don't need global state for most for a lot of social applications.

Erbit's take is like, hey, instead of building custom P2P stacks for everything and like, let's build one OS and then people can deploy applications on top of that. That is Erbit for you. And this scuttle butt, this gossip part, is that at the core of Erbitt's like architecture? This sort of a way. Yeah. It's not communicating everywhere. No global state. It's just local.

Yes. Closer. Okay. Another way I think I think of like, you know, for Cosmos people to think about it is imagine everyone had their own personal cosmolasm chain. Like I had Sunny chain. You had Anna chain. And then like, you know, we all use IBC to talk to each other.

and if I wanted to build a messaging app, I would write the Cosmosm contract for it, the smart contract for it, and I would deploy it on my chain and on your chain, and then we send messages over IBC between our chains. Okay, but only they're kind of like not. If you don't need broadcast global state everywhere. Okay.

We need Sunny back to do more episodes. I think maybe this is kind of the petition here. Yeah. Another sort of way of explaining Erbit is the idea that it's a sort of system that's where, you know, the idea is that computation is focused around the personal server, right? So that you have sort of your server and all of your data on your applications live on your server. And then it's like network with other servers, right? So like an application developer develops their app, it gets shipped to all everyone's server. And then there's like an identity system, peer messaging.

And then, and yeah, it has some of this kind of blockchain features, this server, right? In that, you know, you can prove all this, you know, it's like deterministic, right? And you can always prove the state. Yeah, if people are interested in it. So at course one, we've been, you know, we've been sort of building orbit hosting product. and you can go to redhorizon.com and then you can onboard onto orbit and we give you like an urban ID

and you can try it out. It's like super simple. You can be on there in like two minutes and then you can try it out and let us know what you think. So maybe that's the trick of orbit. You've got to try it to understand it. Yeah.

Definitely that's, yeah, that helps. Yeah. So yeah, it's redgeorrizen. dot com so r-ed and then horizon h-or-i-z-o-n dot com cool anna and sam it's been an absolute pleasure having you on with us for a quarter of an hour so it was uh yeah super nice have wonderful holidays thank you and congrats again everyone to the 10th anniversary fantastic now we're only missing AI epicenter host side soon catch up to you yeah let us know when you have your 10

when it's your 10 year coming up it's also not that far no no well we just did three I did 300th episode with a bit of a look back that just came out a few weeks ago but yeah we started I mean officially like weekly it was a beginning of 2018 so what am I at episode six years almost the first first first episode was in 27 but it was like on SoundCloud and that we re- published it elsewhere. Okay, so 2018.

Yeah, there we go. Well, I hope I can invite you guys for that. I would love to go. First five years of the harvest, you're past the hump. It's amazing that you guys stayed with it for 10 years. Yeah, thanks so much. That's the secret sauce.

It's just keep going. Don't quit. We hope we can continue providing you a shower content for another 10 years. Well, you know, I've got to break you know, I can't through a full episode. So, you know, it

scales well with the shower, you know, because I get about three showers per episodes. It's true. You do take long showers. I'm sure your water, a supply company is really happy with this. Yeah, the US, you know, the incremental water,

it's very cheap. Yeah. And I will have to do another crossover episode at some time. True. I saw, I was listening to that the other day. There was like, I don't know if people know, it was recorded. We like kind of made a thing of it. We released it on both of our channels on YouTube.

Yeah, from television. 2019. Yeah. Have a good rest of your session. Thanks. Okay. And we have Johnny. Hey.

I know, everything. Congrats, guys. Hey, Jority. Thank you. I remember when, I mean, at the beginning, very beginning when I started to be in the community in the Tao. And I mean, I think it was the first podcast that I shared about Bitcoin by the time. And it was in 2015 or something around there.

So, yeah, which is still there in the top. So that's, yeah, I think that's a good job, guys. So, Jordi, how long have you been in the space now? I mean, I was reading the Bitcoin paper in 2013, but actually I was trying to do smart contracts by the time. And you very soon, you discover that Bitcoin was not prepared, very much prepared. I mean, all the scripting language was very limited. and even on most of the codes, all the off-codes

just didn't work by the time. It was very, very, very frustrating. Everything super slow and just abandoned somehow. And it was until 2015 that I discovered Ethereum in a very strange way because I was just having a lot of job and a lot of work.

And I remember that in like in 10 minutes I was able to just create a solidity smart contract and what I was trying to do in 2013, was so easy in 2015 that I just get engaged. And from there, for me, was like a drug. Just reading, understanding, discovering, just learning what is,

just what's behind the technology, behind the, I mean, you just discover the community. Discovered by the time was the Tao and people just building around. There was a bunch of people just trying to develop things and remember talking with people from Swarm

and where all these daps start happening. From a developer perspective, I think Ethereum was incredible because it's like you had like a new toy and then you can start building a lot of decentralized things on top of that. I mean, Bitcoin was fine. I mean, it was great, but it's just

mortgage transfer. You just, okay, which is important, but it's just that. And Ethereum opens a space to these decentralized. centralized applications. And from the developer perspective, this opens a huge world, a new world, and for me, was,

I mean, this is where I enter in. I'm still here. I mean, I'm still learning. So, yeah, that's how I, how I enter. Hey, Ryan. Hey, guys. How you doing?

Good to see everybody. Hey, Ryan. We also have Ryan Zer who's talking about us now. this was actually kind of your idea like when when we had you on I think it was last year you you mentioned that we should do this I don't remember it was like on the podcast or like after the podcast but then this is like we sort of ran with it and yeah yeah it's interesting you know like I I find epicenter to be this this compelling kind of historical record of the space, right?

Where there are moments in time where, you know, the name was kind of very opportune because it was the center of the discussion in very critical moments. So, for example, like the Dow Hack, which obviously, you know, Jordy sat at the eye of the storm of and was so critical in covering the funds and all the work that he did in that as well as the other things with like parody wallet hacks and so on and so forth when people needed critical information about what was going on either prior to the Dow hack we'll think Vlad had a had like a like a warning podcast with you guys about about it and then it happened and then Jordy saved it or saved most of it and then Jority came on after and like if you want to stay up to

date with it which I did because I deployed capital into it at the center was the thing and there and And there has been these moments in time where epicenter has sat at the center of the conversation of our space, which has been really critical. And so, yeah, I'm super happy that you guys are doing this. That chapter, the thing was Blat and Eming considers talking about all the outflows and all the problems and what to do. And that didn't happen yet. I mean, it was in that moment.

That was the... There was like two weeks before. Yeah. Yeah, but for me, I mean, that was, personally, I think that that moment was the most interesting moment on the now of history. Because it's like, okay, people realized that there was like a bunch of money there. And the smart contract was, I mean, it was very primitive and it was a lot of problems. People started looking at that very seriously.

and a lot of flaws just happened. Again, this was just before the residency attack happened. I mean, this was just before that. And this episode, I mean, when they mean and Blatt, just took a little bit the leadership of the community and saying, hey, guys, this is cool, but here there is a lot of problems that we need to solve and we need to fix and we need to talk about.

I mean, I think that was one of the, the important moments from the history of the Daos at that point. I mean, at the specific chapter with blood and blood and the mean, I think is one. It was an important. It really, and the people really understands, understood at that point, how incredible could be the Taoist, but at the same time, how difficult is to be. them and I mean, we're still not there yet. That chapter makes a lot of things.

The number of re-entrancy attacks that happened in 2023 is frankly embarrassing for our industry. Like the fact that we still are not getting it right as an industry is like, come on, guys. It's 2023. We've got to get this shit sorted out here. But I will never for the rest of my life forget. I actually had fallen asleep listening to, I think, that episode. I was living in Rio de Janeiro at the time.

Woke up the next morning, which was a Saturday. I was at the beach with my girlfriend at the time. And I got this call from Alex Van Nassan and Jordi Baleena, neither of whom I knew at all. And they're like, we need your Dow tokens because we're going to do the same attack that the guy did. And this, this Catalonian has devised the attack. just from like observing the attack going on and I kind of like you know sort of uh slap my girlfriend on the butt who was laying beside me and was like hey baby we got to go home

I got to send these Spanish guys some tokens and and and I don't know where we go so I remember that is that well I mean I was the body there I mean the body news me and and and I mean I just was I deployed I mean some attack just remember the Tao attack and somebody I mean some some some some some some way just sent me I don't know like 200k

or 300k which was a huge amount of money without even knowing me and and without understanding and just to recover I mean for me was like that moment was like in a movie I mean it's like I can't believe where what what happened I mean just a random guy that

I don't even know his name and just said me some funds to recover to my address. But it was a crazy, I mean, if you think, if you put it in perspective, it was like everything crazy. But all that time,

I mean, this was just the beginning. Another guy just sent, after recovering all the phones of the Dow, just send like half a million dollars again, back to the Dow. And then just trying to record. I mean, it was like a crazy,

crazy moment. by the time. One of these things that, you know, and an epicenter is really very emblematic of this, right? When you meet people who come into the space and spend, say, like, a year in crypto, they always come back to you in their life, oh, my God, like, it's been so crazy, like, so much has happened. Like, I can't even believe, like, this is wild. And you're like, actually, no, like, it's just kind of always like this.

like it just sort of you know every year is is just as wild uh not more not last but just absolutely wild and it's all its own unique way which is why you know crypto is a strange addiction right it's it's something that you couldn't you couldn't really decouple yourself from even if you wanted to at this point uh so that's interesting you know one of the question that i've always asking so um the the the i remember the first the first episode i listened to from you guys was the predictions of 2014 because i was kind of like i was mining at the time and i was like okay like what else is out there that's like beyond just like mining this was episode one by the way what was it i mean so that was the pilot episode and then our predictions for 2014 was was the first

like, you know, numbered episode. It's like episode 0-0-1. It came out in January. But when it became a regular thing for me was actually almost a year later with the Vitalik episode. Because I was fortunate enough to see Vitalik's first ever presentation of Ethereum in Toronto at Anthony DiOrio's place. and seeing his evolution as kind of like an entrepreneur and presenter over the sort of like nine months of that moment in time where like his slides were all we're all just like code base he's like dad is an insurance contract and dad is a there's an options contract we're like what does this guy do it to the conversation that he had with you guys where you guys were able to really like kind of pull out a more human side of him and then.

shortly thereafter from the Vitalik episode, it went from episode or epicenter Bitcoin to epicenter. And it kind of felt like you guys were the defining group that hadn't realized that there was more beyond Bitcoin. And this is like, you know, this is 2014, right? Like it's still Bitcoin maximalism wasn't even a term at the time. Because everybody was Bitcoin maximalism, unless you were like really a scammer and you were in a name coin or something like that. What caused that move for you guys? What caused the opening of the door that, like, hey, there's a lot of cool things here going on in crypto, and we should embrace all of that rather than continue on this narrative around what, you know, what Bitcoin did last week. Yeah, I mean, I can answer that.

I mean, I think for me and I think Sebastian was similar in that we were just like curious about stuff happening, right? I mean, even when, you know, even when you got into Bitcoin, or I got into Bitcoin, right, you already had, you already had, you know, alternative in all chains, you know, that was, you know, there was saying, okay, can we innovate on Bitcoin a bit, you know, do we decrease in block time? Or, you know, you had things like pure coin that was trying to do some proof of stake like thing. And of course, you had the things building on top of Bitcoin that were trying to do, like, applications, right? So counterparty master coin.

Master coin. Yeah. And then the, I mean, the, if you're right paper, right, that came out in December 2013. It's basically right when we started the podcast. And we were pretty much immediately like, well, this is interesting. So I think we did our first Ethereum episode. This is like, we very start of 2014.

I mean, we got some, you know, people on that, uh, I don't remember who we got on. You would Gav on really early. Like, I remember Gavs, a Gap thing where that was the first time I was like, okay, this guy's smart. Like, like, this guy knows what he's doing and it's not just Vitalik. Yeah, but the name change is actually a bit later, right? So we, but I think, I mean, it was similar in Berlin. Name change was 2016.

I got the article here. Oh, wasn't that late? Yeah. But we were doing all kinds of podcasts like from 2014 on. I think in terms of like doing all the topics, I think you're totally right. We were there already. Yeah,

you were the launch moment I felt like for the narrative around what protocol labs had built beyond IPFS. Like, I think it was the first time that Juan Bonae discussed FilePoint publicly. Yeah, there was an amazing episode. I remember that was episode 100. We had Juan on. He talked about like, yeah, IPFest and Firecorn and stuff.

And that was really a fantastic episode. That was a big. And again, like, you know, as a capital allocator, like, these were really seminal moments for me. Like, I, I left that episode with a mission to go to DevCon 2 and just like hound Juan until he just like allowed me on the tap table. I was like, I am going to like figure something out to convince this guy that I am good to be around.

after listening after listening to that. So it's great. You know, the longevity is important. In dialectic, we talk all the time every single day. We talk about the importance of compound returns, right? The strongest force in the universe is compound interest. This is true in nature with the golden ratio. It's true in finance, with compound interest.

It's true in relationships. It's true in skill development. And it's like content. I don't even have now over a decade, which is an eternity in crypto, is really valuable. I mean, it's been pivotal to my career. You know, I happen to be skiing with my family and my favorite ski chalet here in Switzerland, which has only been enabled because of the alpha that I've been able to accrue from that. Well, there's a lot of credit, but yeah, thank you so much.

Yeah. This is a story I've heard many, many times. Oh, my whole family's in here. Jeez, my mom and my dad are both watching. Yeah. First, the first, I was also in Switzerland and in, you know, apartment in the mountains, you know, just before Christmas. It was like in the low of snow.

So if you go back to like a point in time for, for you, for you, for you guys, how has the pod changed your lives? Right? Like, obviously it's changed our lives and that we've got like a great, intelligent, open-minded, condensed information on a topic that we could like listen to, say, in the car, the shower, working out or whatever. But how has it changed your lives overall? I mean, I think it was, you know, of course, like crucial, right?

Like meeting all people in crypto. So, I mean, definitely investing in crypto as well. The first, you know, the first time I had kind of a job with a startup, you know, and it was this company areas industries. And, you know, we had them on the podcast and then applied and reach out to them. And the founder was a podcast listener, right? And then later, you know, I think sort of tendament was also kind of connected with that. And then of course, my hair was a co-host here.

And then we started course one together. And I think it's like so many. times, right? It was really also through relationships, right, and through people meeting through hosting podcasts that played a, so yeah, I played an absolutely massive role, I think, in my life in the last

10 years. Yeah, same. I mean, before this, I was building websites and writing CSS for responsive emails, right? Like, I mean, not the building websites and responsive emails is not

like something that people should pursue. But yeah, it's totally like changed my career path, change my outlook on sort of like on the world and sort of like learning about finance, learning about economics. So these are these are topics that I had very little knowledge about before starting epicenter and like just getting to talk to like incredibly smart people every week about, you know, all these topics that I thought were really, were really interesting, right? That was really passionate about. have just like totally changed my outlook.

And then, of course, you know, enabled me to like start several companies. So like, you know, a lot of people know this, but I started this company called Stratum, but five years ago that no longer exists, but, you know, was was a crypto company. And now running a fund, right? I mean, like the fund, the inter-op ventures would not exist had it not been for, you know, the time I spent like just building a massive network. network of people in the space. So, so yeah, it's been absolutely, you know, life-changing for me too. It's also humbling, right? Because kind of like every other week or so, we kind of get to

speak to someone who is super smart and super passionate about something and kind of really wants to see something through. And I think this kind of puts kind of like other things that kind of we as, I mean, for all of us, this is kind of a side gig, right? So kind of we all have day jobs. And I think kind of this puts a lot of things into perspective. And I think to me that's been, that's been a wonderful experience. By the way, is Jordy your most frequent guest? I think Jordy's had what, four, four episodes? No, we talked about it before.

The most frequent guests are. Can you guess? Can you guess? Trent McCawney, for sure. Trent, I feel like Trent's almost co-hosted. And from there, Jordie Belina and maybe. you, Vitalik? I don't know. So, so six episodes is Vitalik, Emin Guns, Err.

And then Trent, if you pound this episode, it would have been his sixth. So he did like five full episodes and, you know, it's dropping in here. So I would say kind of, yeah, Vitalik, Goon, and then Trent. That's, I mean, Vitalik Goon, Trent and Jordy, as your, as your most popular or most frequent guests like that's as good as the lineup as you're going to get like talk about a star-studded cast right just a group of legends in this game just i would like to explain before before we leave because it's so what i mean i've always been in the in the episodes as a as a interviewer i mean always when i finish the the interview with you is uh i i get with the questions i mean those guys

are doing the right questions. I mean, they are, so it's like, I didn't feel fully comfortable. I mean, it's like, okay, these guys are going to the point, are going to the, the questions that are arguable.

I mean, they're going to the values. And they're going deep to the project, to the thing that we are talking about. And this is very, very, very comfortable. And I think this is one of the secrets of this podcast. I mean, it's not, when you are there, you are not just, I mean, just, we said, just explaining random things to people that, I mean, you go to the point in all the projects. You get the feeling when you get that and that's why I think the people love to be here. Because, I mean, when you're at this, with this, with this, with this, with this, with this, the jury is like, okay, you are, you're asking, I mean, it's good.

it's where you really put your fox and what you are building or what you are doing in Greenville. They put you the things on the table and you need to explain and defend what you are doing. And this is, I think this is amazing. This means so much, Jardy, especially coming from you.

Especially coming from Jardie Bowie. Yeah. Quite a bit more, yes, indeed. That's what it is. Yeah, I think one of the things you know, coming back to your question really about like how it's changed us. I think for me one of the things that I've noticed is that doing the podcast has made me like a better, a much better listener and and just the ability to like, you know, I find myself and my wife, my wife is like the

first to complain about is like always asking questions and sometimes asking too many questions. But yeah, but I think you're going to say by my wife's. to play me that I'm a listener. I was like, why not complain about that? Of all the list of complaints that my wife has, the listener, he's not one of them. No, but like asking a lot of questions, right? Like trying to get to the bottom of everything.

And that's, I think, something that I've picked up from doing the podcast for service, like asking question over question over question to get to the bottom of, you know, what people are doing or how things work or, yeah. And trying to understand. The thing is that the point is, because, I mean, you can make questions and so on.

But it's like, you know, you are trying to understand. You're trying to get to the point. You're trying to see what's the nility that's happened here. Why this is important. This is really, it's done this way or this other way or contrast it without different ways to do things. I mean, I think this means more, means a lot. For this, for the people that's listening to this,

I mean, they are learning. They are understanding how the projects. And what's the point of the project? What's the point of what the people is building? This is value that you are adding to the community. So this is. Yeah. I've always felt that you guys ask the questions that,

like, as I was listening as a capital allocator, you guys have asked the questions that a capital allocator should ask. And it's interesting that we've watched essentially all of you in some way become capital allocators in the space. And that now in retrospect seems obvious because you've been asking the questions of a smart money capital allocator for a long time. And so you get good at it and you start to get confidence in it. And that's been why the long form of your interviews, I think, have survived and thrived versus other podcasts that have sort of fanned out. Well, my other podcast, the interop, is basically just the forcing function for me to do DD on projects.

I mean, to some extent, you know, right? I mean, more so, I mean, it's more than that. But it is, it does also serve this purpose sometimes. And also to get a feel for how, like, for how the founder expresses themselves and sort of pitches their product and their project outside of a, you know, like Zoom call setting. in a more in a more kind of like public face and setting. But yeah, Jordi did come back to what you were saying earlier? You know,

the, asking the questions and trying to understand how things work. Like, for me was not always something that came naturally. Like in the first three or four years of doing the show, I, and this changed after, after some time,

I was really coming to the podcast, like trying to over-prepare in order to give the impression that I knew more about the topic that I actually did. And it was sort of like this thing where I was trying to understand the entirety of the topic at hand in order to be asking smart questions and sort of like look smart. But then I realized at some point like this is absolutely ridiculous. Like this is stupid. I should come to this with like, you know, some amount of preparation.

but really be asking questions as they come as if I was having a conversation with someone, you know, around a dinner table or at a bar or something, right? And that's when I think my whole outlook on interviews change is like when I was just sort of like asking questions from like a real place of wanting to understand things. And also not being afraid to look stupid, right? So we just don't get something. That was the, that was the fine to ask again because kind of like, yeah. So I had the same fear. And yeah, it also took me a while to kind of shed it.

Yeah, yeah. Not looking stupid. It was a huge fear, yeah, for a long time. Did you guys ever think of shutting it down? Is there ever a moment of like, we're doing too many things? Like, let's wrap this up and do something else. Not yet.

There's never that conversation. So then that leads to the next conversation because you never, if in 10 years you haven't thought of shutting it down, that means that it's likely to survive. for the next 10 years? What do you want out of it for the next 10 years? But I think kind of what we have done is we have added more hosts, right? And we also do more solo episodes.

So I think kind of like the owners on every one of us has decreased somewhat. So because basically back in the day, we did an episode. Everyone did an episode every other week. And kind of obviously that takes, you know, preparation and so on. And now we maybe do an episode every three weeks. So I think, yeah, so I think kind of the overall workload is, at least for me, has decreased. Same for you guys, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I just want to become a better capital allocator, Ryan. That's why I keep doing it. Yeah. Ryan, in the next 10 years, I would like to have an EGI as a co-host. And I would like to have built that system. Both of you to assume none of us is AI.

So we're going to bring on our last guest. We're running a little long here, but that's great because these are a big great conversation. So we're going to bring on our last guest, which is Ryan, you're head of Fabric Ventures. And yeah, welcome. Welcome, Richard, sorry. I got to have ready to Ryan there for a second. I don't know why I called you. So, Richard Muran.

With the Brian outbreak. How are you? Yeah, I'm super good, thank you. Everybody, so I've been listening a little bit in the back, and I've been listening to the voices of my youth. Someone already said that they kind of, yeah, Brian, you got ours on a bus or whatever in Cancun. It has to be a voice.

But it is incredible how, you know, that kind of resonates. I guess not really my youth, I guess it's my early 40s, but I got recognized on the side of a mountain once. That's a real experience, yeah. Yeah, the Slihanem alarm. He's hacking strong. I was wondering if Ryan's voice should got gruffer naturally, but I can see now he's training it with with and unless you, the chat, you're just having this now is getting

give me an idea, which is like, you know, if you're, Sebastian, you're using it as a forcing function of your DD. And if voices are so important to people, they're so emotive, you'll have something like a competition where you have to do your capital allocation based on listening to somebody, you know, talk about their project and just that. And you have to kind of make the choice. You could be a fantasy capital allocation if you want. So it's kind of like a speed data, audio only.

with no prep. And no prep, actually, that's a benchmark capital thing. Nobody's allowed to get to prepare for the pitch from the founders that kind of weekly investment meeting. So there's kind of, I guess, the notion is there's a sort of level playing field and no preconceptions, they're cheating and checking stuff up and whatever. You have to come out of with an average. So you could do a little, we could spend that out and make it into a doubt, probably.

Yeah, that's an interesting point. Would it be a security? It's be a gay? Probably all. Probably all security, but whatever. If you ask Gary, yes. There's one guy I hope maybe we'll have one

someday Gary Gensler. That would be fun. For the 20th year anniversary. From jail. Elizabeth Warren, maybe. I know you get it. I know you get it. I know you've got to jump. Jody, as always, it's been such a pleasure and honor to have you on.

Thank you very much, guys. And congrats and continue moving forward. We are not there yet. Onward and upwards. Actually, one last thing on that, on that, Jory. I always take the opportunity to publicly bank Jordi for everything that he's done in this space. We have no idea just how many times Jordy has saved all of our bacon. that we're all here in part because of the benevolent,

extraordinary talent of Jory Belina. And so, and very, very sincerely, thank you for everything you do. We're incredibly grateful to you. Leave us with one thing. Where do you want to take ZKEVM and what do you want to see in ZKEVM in the next year? I want to scale Ethereum. So my goal here is, so I want to reduce the gas cost of about 50x in the next year. And that's what I'm working for.

Compression, compression, mainly compression, and faster proofs. Is that also like lower latency proofs, like proves down to a few bytes, do you think? or is it going to stay in like kilobite territory? Or like where do you think you take it? Lower latency. Low latency. It's made so may not be. So I mean, it's a good thing to have.

And if you have low latency in the proofs, that's, of course, you will get better, better composability between chains mainly. So that's a good thing. And we are working on that. But we are finding ways that you don't necessarily we need low latency. So for me,

proofs are more about proof cost and throughput that the latency because in the consensus, you can keep the consensus and you can have a lot of things in the consensus in the consensus layer, in the temporary consensus layer. So low latency is a very good to have,

an important thing to have, but for throughput and for scalability, maybe it's not what has percent required. This is what we're working on in the aggregation layer in Polygon, and this is the things that we are investigating. But yeah, I mean, regarding the ZKBM, I mean, we want to scale Ethereum and we want this to be, so people should be able to use Ethereum without having to worry about the

gas price for most applications. And this is what we're working on. So maybe this is what Ryan is getting at, but outside of scaling Ethereum, if you're looking at using ZKO on inferences from large language models, the kind of presentation layer and the user experience, then latency is important. And so it's interesting looking at the collision between the two kind of value chains on the data side and on the kind of computational, the algorithmic side between blockchain and AI. And I think in some parts of that, then latency is going to be,

know, it'd be credible. I don't know if you're looking at it. Yeah, the latency, the thing is that in the four, for usability, in general, we are talking about latencies that goes in about a second, few seconds, something that's what usability is about. I mean, blockchains, we are a little bit, I mean, having a most really of 15 seconds. We accept that in the theory of work on that. But we are talking always about a few seconds.

in the proofs right now we are in a I mean right now we are in about 100 seconds so we need to get one at least one order of magnitude better for getting to that phrase I mean it's perfectly possible I think that in the next year to years this is will be it's going to be even better especially for when the hardware acceleration starts hitting I mean it starts

being a reality there. There are some difficulties there. It's more about bandwidth and special hardware. But yeah, I mean, this is the this is the path that's this is the work that's happening right now in the in the ziki space. The other place where proof generation speed is really important is when you start like using it for privacy stuff, right? Because like when you want to actually like, you know, that actually you need to be fast, not just on like on consumer level, hardware. Exactly. I mean, it's like

in a mobile phone, especially when you want to do that in a mobile phone. That's another, that's another front. Yeah. I mean, when you don't get

the privacy proof in a mobile phone. But the cool thing is that, I mean, the SIGA technology is evolving so fast. I mean, where we were two years ago

and where we are now, it's, we did the 2X, I mean, about two orders of magnitude improvement in the proof generate in the last two years.

And this happens in the, I mean, in big servers, but this happens also in the, in the mobiles. But it has literally not been time for building the libraries for optimized for mobiles. I mean, we're building those now. And this is happening at this point. And we're seeing a point that the technology is advancing so fast that the engineering, that in generally it's going fast,

cannot, I mean, it requires its time to build all these things. And I mean, we've seen that the investigation, the research is going faster than the engineering currently, which is interesting, interesting, it's an interesting moment because this is not, in general, that doesn't use to happen. So consumer privacy on the device was kind of what I was getting at with, you know, imprints for LLMs. So I think it's a really interesting use case. But so I'm interested, Jodi, are you looking at hardware acceleration that might be necessary on the consumer device itself?

Or you're not, yeah, looking at the regulation. I mean, I think that not necessarily, maybe, I mean, here maybe in a mobile phone, maybe it would take like, I don't know, maybe if you're 30 seconds to build the proof. I mean, if you accept that, which is in most of the cases, this could be acceptable you can actually build, depending what you want to prove, but I mean

you can build a privacy privacy proof relatively easy privacy complex privacy proof on there. No, frankly, Athek is working a lot on that front and here porting all the

starks things that we're building to the mobile phones. This is our happening. Of course you have hardware acceleration that's better. But in general, the problem is that, I mean, hardware is a long process. I mean, building an ASIC, this is at least a one year, one year, two years project itself. And what happened now is that in two years in crypto, there is a new protocol that's using something different, that you have to throw it away what you have been investing. I was going to say, before crypto,

one or two years wasn't too bad, but now with crypto, it's a problem. But at some point, this will get more stable. Yeah, but not know. I mean, we're seeing here things remain two years. I mean, one month ago, two months ago, there was this binous thing. I mean, all these starch with binary fields. I mean, super interesting,

but this is already changed what we were doing now with prime fields in the starks. But, I mean, things are happening and need to check or even recovering world protocols. I mean, the linear people recovering the GDKs, the GKR's algorithms, I mean, they are putting them together. It's a lot of things happening. So, for example, here investing a lot in hardware is,

I would say it's quite risky because technology is changing a lot, so you don't know for sure what's going to be the right way to do. and I mean, the old Prover itself, I mean, was super fast, but next generation that we're building is even faster. So it's, it's, it's, um, you're discovering a lot of small tricks and a lot of things that are happening. So it's, it's going really fast and, and, and, uh, keeping up, uh, from the engineering perspective. I mean, keeping up in all the new things that are happening, uh, is, it's not easy. And even selecting them.

I mean, there are so many research and then, okay. okay, this thing is a good thing or is not a good thing. And sometimes you need to go really deep and actually implement there. And then you realize that maybe that's not as fast as it's permitted. And then you need to step back. Or then somebody just gets with a trick that, okay, but doing this, this thing this way, then this is super fast. And then you come back.

And this is the, I mean, you're going back and forth all the, Yeah, I mean, this is the crypto, this is the crypto craziness when you are developing and when you're in this space. But this is also the good thing. I mean, this is amazing. I mean, for engineering perspective, this is a heaven. So I heard Brian say that he had the prediction episode at the beginning of 2014. I don't remember listening to that one, but I did, I do remember the Tom Cruise episode. and I went back to listen to it.

And do you remember, Brian, like, you know, you actually sort of, you basically said a few things about like more, all this Ethereum thing sounds like science fiction. It's all going to become a kind of reality. And they're going to be, these agents are going to be able to transact economically on our behalf. But the real problem is that we're not able to get the accurate data to them to make sure that they, you know, they represent our needs. the right way. And I think that's, I think that was pretty, um, that showed great foresight,

I guess, in January, Danery, you're at sometime early 2014. You also said you were, you're pretty skeptical while in Ethereum. I don't know, too, remember that. About what? Investing in Ethereum. It seemed a bit, seemed a bit complex. Oh, did I say that? I got to go back and listen to these episodes. I think that was episode three. It was like, Tom Cruise fights to protect the blockchain. I don't remember why we called it that. Maybe because during the episode we like

fantasized about a Tom Cruise movie where he was protecting the blockchain or something. He was a tiny sliver with something to do with how Vitalik had pitched Ethereum. Anyway, it's like you were rather kind of bizarre contact. And so the other stuff, had too much regulatory content to me. I couldn't get into

the on let's stop Bitcoin and walking me through stuff. Yeah. We did have a lot of regulatory content at the beginning, yeah. Guys. I know you have to, yeah, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure having you guys. Thanks so much.

Bye. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, I guess this whole thing of, yeah, agents acting on the blockchain still doesn't exist quite, right, for people to have that kind of thing. But it feels like we're getting closer slowly. No, I mean, it doesn't exist yet, but I mean, there's a lot of people now kind of innovating, obviously, with LLMs to, you know, build those bots that will kind of represent your interest or you can talk to and you feel like they're, you know, having a personal conversation with you or whatever. So, I guess whether or not that's will require some intersection of AI and blockchain depends on whether, how foolhardy we are as humans. Like, I mean, whether we just start trusting these bots out there in the same way as we're trusting the big brands of Web 2.

You know, it's a kind of big general social consensus. Oh, it's a bot built by so and so. That's fine. I'll work with it, not knowing how it's been trained or whether it's doing with any of your kind of personal data. Okay, that's one of the big debates. I think of today, how are we going to make sure that we don't kind of further fuel the techno-futalism

in this next phase where the Web 3 can actually help in AI to any degree. And there's another side on the bot which is that I mean, I think any of us would say that I'd love to hear opinions on it that they kind of decentralized governance has quite got to mainstream yet.

So simple governance still pretty complex to handle. And so the other thing... Technically speaking or socially speaking? Do you think it's a technical problem or is social problem. That means definitely a social problem. Also a mechanism design problem, no?

Sorry? Yeah. Also mechanism design problem. So I think kind of like the simple Dow models that we have now basically, they all don't appreciate that attention is kind of the scarce resource here. I think this is something that Dow stack had figured out super early on.

Unfortunately they went out of business. But yeah, I look forward to kind of having those sorts of efforts back. Well, I think some of it's coming to. Ilya, you know, the co-founder at Nair, who's got a great LLN background. He talks, you know, openly now about Zazato, can build, you know, Dow presidents in bot form so that you can delegate, you know, to some intelligent agents to,

or various different descriptions to represent you. Because there's no way if we're going to have corporations as codes popping up everywhere and we're going to be interested in for some slid of our existence in the effective governance in those, you know, Dows or Dax or whatever, then, you know, it can only scare if we're going to want these twins, these interviews. Yeah, absolutely. So basically specifying your values or kind of having an AI extract your values for you and kind of your economic interests and so on,

and then kind of doing kind of like a liquid delegation to those kinds of AIs. Yeah, absolutely, totally with you here. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I mean, personally, I feel like in the cosmos space, governance working, like, pretty well, right? I mean, I think we have, like, Cosmos hubs at, like, 800 governance proposals,

osmosis, tons of governance proposals, and with, like, you know, high, participation, both in terms of, you know, state that's voting. So it's like secure from some whale coming in and like, you know, like, because often on Ethereum mapping in the dollars, right, you'd have like 3%, 5% of dollar tokens voting in the governance and then, you know, some big whale can come and scoot a vote. But you don't have that issue in the cosmos governance thing. And then we have, you know, regularly, definitely like thousands of accounts.

I mean, there's always a lot of like bought accounts voting too. I mean, Sunny probably has better idea on this. But there's definitely a lot of people with spending in these boats. And I feel that's actually working pretty well. Yeah. Ryan, I think you need to run. We're going to proper sign off.

Thanks so much for joining. Joy to ski. Thank you, a loyal listener all these years. And yeah. Well, thank you guys for everything you do for the important education, the like technically sophisticated education that you provide to this ecosystem. It is very important, more important than you know. And so I'm incredibly grateful to all of you for keeping faith and keeping with it

and just compounding on all of our knowledge. And so thanks again. I thank you, Matt. Thanks. And also by helping with all the weekly shopping trips and showers and France, getting people from your life. Thanks a lot, Ryan. Great.

Well, I think we're about ready to wrap up, wrap this party up. It's been two and a half hours. Thanks for sticking around, Richard. So, yeah, where do we go from here? What's, are we shooting for 20 years? Is that what we're doing? Yeah. Not just one AI host, but just all of you.

It's back to the previous conversations. You're just going to capture generally your values and your interest and the bot sort of sucks up everything you're reading as you go along through your glasses or contact lenses and then you can you need it you don't have to do it at all you can be doing like 10 podcasts a day each yeah that's so that you can then you can go forever well I wish I wish I could even I wish I could do three sometimes two is too much and we could actually synthesize a much better podcast host right I mean So basically we could take the good parts of all of us and synthesize them into, you know.

My hair is working on this. Yeah, exactly. The thing I do is I would, for a project, I would collect the entire sort of information about the project, white paper, website, the entire code base. I would put everything in a retrieval augmented generation pipeline. and then it's like figure out how to simulate Fideliga or how to simulate mehail. Somehow like fine-tune an LLM so that it is able to simulate me

and then it's able to ask questions from the documentation and generate an episode by itself, right? Like, and then there you are. When can I invest? When can I allocate capital? PCPB. If I'm all than us LLM Waffer, that's always a key question. It's also funny how you kind of become an LLM rapper for your co-hosts to a certain extent.

So kind of depending on who I host with, I know what they're going to ask next. So kind of I have like this LLM representation of them inside my head. And yeah. So before we end this, are there any final thoughts? Anything, especially anyone wants to share? Well, I mean, if nobody's gone to you, I do. I like the, yeah. I mean, I just want to say, like, I absolutely appreciate all of you. I've loved doing the podcast with with all of you. I mean, it's, it's always, it's, what's great about Epicenter is like, I think we all have, like, like you were saying, like, you know, we all have this sort of like dynamic, right? So there are, you know, end number of dynamics here when, when we all sort of like do podcasts together. And that's been really fun. And I really appreciate, like, yeah, getting to learn so much from, you know, being able to co-host the podcast with all your week. So, yeah, I hope I can keep doing this with you guys for the next 10 years.

Absolutely. What? How does this work? How do that work? I don't even know that it works. That's crazy. The heart. How long have I have a plus. Here we go. Here we go. You have to update your Mac.

So before I end this, it wouldn't be a 10-year anniversary episode without the obligatory Green Day Good Written's Time of Your Life photo slideshow. I had no idea this was coming. Okay. Room 77. I had to add Felix in here at the end. I saw that. There's no picture all six of us, right?

No, there is it. But there is now. I think he's like a little bit larger than the, you know, in terms of kind of like body proportions. I think kind of we have to shrink him down by like 10%. I have some here of my arm too with Sunny. Let's shrink him by, let's shrink him by 40. percent. Oh, gosh.

Yeah. Yeah, I hope you guys like that. I had a bunch of pictures from over the years. I appreciate you putting this together, Steve. Yeah, well, you can thank iOS for that. Throw a bunch of pictures into Apple photos on there. Great, guys. Well, thanks for everybody who tuned in.

There's been tons of people. here in live stream. I think we probably like hit two, three hundred people in live stream over the course of the two and a half hours. So yeah, thank you. And we'll be back next week.

As always. As every week, except for the one week that we missed. That's right. Oh, that was my last, that was my last trivia question. Oh, I know this one. You know this one. Christmas week 20

I don't know 19 I know it's definitely Christmas week yeah I was so upset I was sad I cried

well we won't miss this this Christmas week and then we reran the David Chalm episode remember that no no no

it wasn't David Chal it wasn't David Chal was it no it was Ralph Merca yeah okay okay

so some OG I remember that We're like, this is an evergreen episode. We can run it any time. Yeah, yeah. He was over then. He was over now.

No one will notice. All right. How are you going, guys? Thanks. Bye. Thanks, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released. If you want to interact with us, guests or other podcast listeners,

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