Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Epicenter – Looking Back on 10 Years of Crypto. AI Doom & Gloom? SPECIAL

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

As Epicenter hits the 500 episode milestone, our hosts look back on almost 10 years of crypto developments, analysing the good, the bad and the ugly. What projects & narratives have surprised our hosts? Has Bitcoin failed in becoming a reliable store of value? Will ZK proofs provide the much needed solution to AI’s alignment problem? Last but not least, are we still early? Get ready for a fascinating discussion, albeit gloomy for this special occasion.Thank you for being part of this amazing journey! We wouldn’t have made it so far without your continuous support! Looking forward to the next 500 episodes!Topics covered in this episode:Brian’s health updateLooking back on 10 years of Epicenter & crypto developmentAre we still early on Bitcoin or has that ship already sailed?Stores of value: Bitcoin vs. Gold vs. Market IndexesThe need for stablecoins, including algorithmic ones!Projects & narratives that took a 180 degree turnAI vs. verifiable computation via ZK proofsThe control & alignment AI problemsDecentralised identity systems (DID)Looking forward to the next 500 episodesSponsors:CoinGecko: CoinGecko API provides access to the most comprehensive data aggregator in the market, supporting more than 10,000 crypto assets from over 700 exchanges! Visit https://gcko.io/epicenterCGpromo today and use the promo code ""EPICENTER"" to unlock an additional 10% OFF!This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy, Sunny Aggarwal & Felix Lutsch.  Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/500](https://epicenter.tv/500)

Welcome to Epicenter. The show is talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastankuio and I'm here on episode 500 of Epicenter with Felix Luch, Brian Crane, Meheroi, Sunny Agriwal, and Fralike Ernst. And today we're going to be well, looking back on the last almost 10 years of Epicenter and also looking forward to the next 10 years of Epicenter. And yeah, discussing a number of things, including, you know, where we think the ecosystem is heading, things that we thought would have played out differently, but surprised us and also some exciting surprises. So let's get started. In a world, increasingly driven by cryptocurrencies having access to accurate and reliable data

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How's everybody doing? Pretty good. Excited to be back again. Yeah, Sunny. How long has it been since you've been on Epicenter? When's the last time you did one of these? Well, it's definitely only like two or three weeks because I was on one. Oh, that's right.

Yeah. At Avalent. But before that, probably, like, over six months. I mean, Sunny almost looks grown up now. I'm supposed to say it's new. I'm fine, but I feel like this is, I'm not the person who this question was intended for. Yeah, yeah, okay. I can go, yeah.

So some of you may have followed, like, you know, on Twitter I was writing a little. So I was basically went to Bucharest for, like, a few days. This is like almost a month ago now, or three weeks ago or maybe almost a month ago. And then I started having this like intense stomach pain. And I had it sort of before. So I was like, ah, this is fine. It's just going to go away. But then it didn't go away.

And so I ended up going to the hospital. And then it was like the appendix was infected. And then it burst. So then they had to do this surgery. So they basically made a big cut. like, I don't know, 30 centimeters in the, you know, the whole stomach and had to like clean out everything. And, yeah, basically... Are there pictures of this, by the way?

They are, they are. So I was based... And then I was in the hospital for a while. Yeah, I mean, I posted on Twitter. There's some... No, the pictures of you opened up. Not the pictures of open up. No, I don't have any pictures of that.

I think it was like three and a half hours. surgery or something. Yeah, and then I was basically in the hospital for around almost two weeks, I think. And yeah, and now I'm back in Portugal, so I've been kind of recovering from that. I lost like seven kilos or something. But I'm okay now, right? So now it's basically just sort of, you know, getting on the recovery, but everything's fine. But yeah, it was a bit of an intense episode, definitely.

And, yeah, so lesson here is if you have really intense stomach pain, don't ignore it. It got pretty tense for, it got pretty tense for at one moment, I think, like you were, you were tweeting, I think on the day after the episode, after the surgery that things were getting worse. And, you know, I got the sense that you started perhaps fearing for your life, like, how. How bad was it? Like how close were you to things becoming, you know, potentially quite dangerous? Yeah, it's sort of hard to tell. I mean, I think if you read about sort of the state I was in, you know, it was like 100 years ago, right?

Like 90% of the people in that thing would die, you know, because basically if you didn't have antibiotics, then I think probably would have died. So now, I guess it was kind of serious. It wasn't like, you know, I think they didn't, they did, they diagnosed it the right way and then they sort of treated it the right way. So I think it was okay. You know, definitely at some points that doctors would tell me like, oh, this is looking really bad and things like that. And of course, like, you know, how do you, it's hard to sort of interpret it? I did have a lot of pain, right?

I think the pain was actually the hardest thing to deal with, right? Because when you just have hours and hours and hours of like intense pain at some point, it gets like, you know, really wears you down. And I mean, I remember going in, I was going into surgery. I was like, okay, like maybe I die, right? Like, who knows? Like, I mean, I don't know what the chance is. But so, and I felt really, I felt actually quite the piece at the time.

And I was sort of wondering, I don't know if it was just all the painkillers I was on. I was like, okay, this is definitely slightly high on painkillers. But I felt reasonably at peace with the idea of like, okay, maybe I'll never wake up from this. So yeah, who knows? We're all super happy you woke up, right? Definitely, yeah. I'm glad we're getting all of this out because, you know, the last couple of weeks, when you go to conferences, people come up to you and say, like,

Frederica, the co-host got to be okay? And like literally, like at Edcon, I was probably asked like 15 times. And Fritrike, how do you answer that question? Yeah, the first time I was like, oh yeah, poor bride and so on. But, you know, after the third time, I was just like, yeah, he's going to be just fine. Can I tell you about no, it's a chain? Yeah. So now I'm taking a bunch of time off, which is like so nice.

So I think this is like, I mean, partially, I think I'm still recovering, but I think partially also I just like really needed a break. And so this is sort of like a nice timing too. And I think it's going to, it's also nice that, you know, things are kind of in a good place. Course one is in good place. You know, here we have like, you know, lots of great people hosting podcasts. And so I think it's, you know, it's fine at the moment for me to take a bit of time off. So I'm going to take all of June off. And it's like really, really nice to just like do nothing for a lot.

And also I had a bunch of traveling. I canceled all this traveling. And I think this whole rest is like super, super happy about it. And do you somehow, after this ordeal, did you have some kind of, you know, important life realizations or anything? like that you know that this has sort of imbued on you or well i do feel like the sort of thing of like just taking some time to like rest and chill and do nothing i think that's like something or i you know i mean i could have of course done this anyway right there could have been like okay let me take off a month or something because uh but you know i sort of didn't i didn't like

allow myself to do that you know it was only because of like then getting gilder that sort of so i do feel like that is one thing i felt like okay i should be like maybe two years from now i will maybe take off like another month or something right so i i feel like you know i think you know if you think like let's say something like okay now you're building this company then you know it kind of gets like tiring over time right and exhausting and i think a lot of people right when they build startups or they build they build things they they wanted to end because they're working because they're just kind of always so semi burned out and exhausted right and then they're like okay i need to get some sort of exit or something and you know like

and then then finally i can rest and i think that's obviously you know i mean okay maybe good in the sense that people work really hard but also sort of like problematic because then you're like you know you want the thing to end because he's so exhausted yeah just makes it sound like they want to die. They're looking for an exit and they just want some rest. I mean, I think it's so common. I think so, so many people, though you talk about running startups, they're like, okay, I'm just like, you know, pushing so hard, trying to get there, trying to get there,

you know, like, I just have to get to this finish line. I know it's completely unsustainable. Like, I'm going to like, but, like, you know, I'm going to, like, two more years and then, like, sell this thing and, like, I don't want to, like, have anything to do this anymore. and you know obviously that way you cannot you're going to do something for like a long a longer time and i think this kind of break is like super valuable for that so i was also thinking you know like let's say a course one if there's people who've been there for like years and years to like you know be great right for people to maybe encourage them to do things like that as well cool very cool

well uh yeah we're all glad you're doing better and uh i bet the employees of course one are also happy that they'll probably get a month long break at some point. Well, you heard it here. Well, we should discuss that in the way, but I think, I think that's a good idea. Cool. Well, let's let's dive into topics we had planned for today's episode. So I think the first thing we wanted to discuss is, you know, I mean, maybe before we're getting into this, like, how does it, how does it feel to everyone to be at 500 episodes? You know, It is just a number. And we kind of always have a host-only episode at every, you know, significant kind of number.

We did this at 400. I think we did the 300 as well. Yeah. How do you feel about it? I think you and Brian ought to answer this first, right? Because I'll tell you how I feel about it. We weren't here from, we weren't here from episode one, right? So basically, I think this kind of changes something, whether you kind of join an episode 280 or whether you've

always been there. Yeah. No, I mean, I'm happy to share what I, how I feel about it. You know something so like, yeah, as many people know, I, I was kind of running epicenter, you know, the company for a while and was kind of hosting a lot of episodes over over the last like 2019 to 2021 or something. And and then took a bit of a step back to focus on other things on interop ventures and NEMBULAR and NEMULEA Summit and the interoper, which is my other podcast. And, and I also, during that period, you know, like when you say like this kind of burnout feeling, I really felt kind of burned out around that time. And taking a step back from it has really made me

appreciated a lot more. And so I do appreciate like coming back and hosting episodes, you know, on a semi-regular basis. But also it's gotten me to appreciate just like the importance of epicenter sort of in in crypto culture. And it's something that when I was really in it, I was wasn't sort of fully aware or I wasn't appreciating fully just how important epicenter was to like so many people. And then it's having spoken with people about it over the last like two or three years that people like, you know, like epicenter really kind of was a part of my learning journey when I came into crypto or like I got rich because of Epicenter or I got, you know, I got this job or like I met my co-founder through Epicenter. And so yeah, I've kind of in the last couple of months

sort of the last year have got like a renewed appreciation for, you know, what we've built here, but also, you know, the, the importance that it's had on the ecosystem, I think, into a lot of people. Yeah, definitely. It's always amazing to hear those stories. I feel like, especially at like, yeah, I guess it happens a lot. Yeah, I hear this kind of stories often and it's definitely beautiful. I think the amazing thing for me is just that, like,

such a long time, right? Like almost 10 years now. And, you know, it's not like, I mean, it's just one episode at the time. It's just like every week we're trying to like, okay, we've got to do an episode, right? We've got to do an episode. You've got to do an episode.

And then, you know, you keep doing it and keep doing it. And then you get the 500 at some point, right? So, like, I think, you know, 500 episodes that would have seemed so, like, inconceivably large or 10 years. Seems like it's a crazy amount of time. But then, yeah, if you just, just keep doing it for years and years

then that's sort of how you get so that's pretty cool yeah yeah apart from brushing my teeth and like eating every day I think it's the thing that I've been doing for the longest in my life we still are at the state where we've only missed one week in the entire 500 right there's only like correct like we've actually had like wow that's that is insanely impressive

and I think this is also something that listeners don't always appreciate right that sometimes these episodes, they're recorded just in time to be released that week. I mean, sometimes we have like a couple lined up already, and we kind of have them recorded and we can just release them as we go. But, yeah, often it's a lot of juggling. Yeah, it's certainly a lot of juggling. So what's, and Meher, you, Meher and Felix,

you've been pretty quiet since the beginning here. Meher, you've been here the longest after Brian and me, so how's it feel to be here and still coming on once in a while? Yeah, I mean, it's great. I don't have any profound thoughts. I think like the crypto space has grown way faster than what I expected it to in terms of prices in the last 10 years while I've been at Epicenter. And it's grown way slower than actual usage than I thought it would.

So in some ways, I think the price to actual utility delivered is way out of whack than what I thought it would be in 2014. Yeah, so I guess like I'm happy to be in the crypto space and also like wishing that we had much better product market fit found in the last 10 years. So slightly disappointed also from the crypto space. I think I know where you're coming from. I think if you look at the amount of tooling and the amount of infrastructure and the amount of tools in the toolkit we have at our disposal now to build products, I think we're now really in a position to actually build products that are genuinely just a better user experience than their web to equivalence, right?

So I think this is kind of, that's where we kind of need to get get to kind of for crypto to actually have societal value, right? I mean, so basically you need to offer user experience that's strictly better than what was previously possible. And I think we're now starting to see like the first glimpses of what that may look like. And I think that's super exciting. I also think it's taken longer than I would have imagined at the time.

So I totally see where you're coming from. But also on the other hand, there were so many things we didn't think about that, you know, that just needed to be built and try it out. And I mean, it's not like we as an ecosystem haven't done stuff for the last 10 years. Yeah, I don't jump in here in a big place. So I can, this very much resonates with Mehera is saying. I mean, when I got into crypto, you know, this was like the 2013 time when. Bitcoin meant, you know, from like, whatever, $70 to like a thousand something dollars at the end of the year. And, you know, you started to have mainstream coverage of Bitcoin in the media, you know, and it felt like, wow, this is really happening.

People are like getting on board. And I was very sold on, you know, we are going to have, you know, this is going to go mainstream within the next like, you know, two years or something. Like I was very, it felt like that. And I think that was a pretty common view at the time. And now it's, you know, like so many years later and like, you know, how many really like active crypto users are there? It's not a lot. And then what we've had is this sort of the whole thing of, oh, you can issue a token. And the token can sort of, you know, represent the future value.

And people may not use it. but the tokens worth a lot. So like it gives you funding to invest in it. And it's fascinating how you've had basically this really substantially industry developed all based on, you know, future expectations. You know, there's basically very little, you know, real substance and usage and revenues in the entire space. And so like, oh, but we think is going to happen in the future.

Hence, we're going to value this token today. Hence, you know, you have now all these revenues and. people can raise money and all these people and all of this. But yeah, I would not have expected that. I did not see that coming. And of course, maybe it's great for all of us working here. But also, yeah, it is a bit disappointing that there's still like so little actual users. Do you think Bitcoin like is, it feels like the moment that Bitcoin was like built for, like is.

has started to come and is coming. Like, I feel like we're entering this world of like de-dollarization, at least entering this like multipolar currency world. Uh, you see like, you know, the whole brick stuff happening,

like, you know, a lot of countries moving away from dollar base commerce. And, you know, this is, even like earlier this year, you had like banking system like,

uh, shakiness and stuff. Like, it feels like all the, the problems that Bitcoiners have like pointed out are like coming true. But do you think Bitcoin is actually in a position to like capture any of this? Like China has been buying so much gold in the last like one year basically. Like if you look at the how much they've been increasing their gold supplies. But like, you know, wasn't this what Bitcoin was meant to come in and do? And like if and what is

why do you think Bitcoin has actually failed to step in and take on that role that it was designed to? Banks. Banks don't like it. Look, I mean, Bitcoin and crypto and the project of crypto is political. It's like inherently political. And it, I mean, we should always remember that. And it is threatening the power of institutions, whether that's like, government institutions, but also financial institutions that are, you know, in many places very close to government. So I think that, you know, in a nutshell, is sort of like, you know, the sort of bastardized explanation of why. But yeah, at a high level, I think that sort of covers it. In my 10 years in the crypto space, I have essentially come to the conclusion.

that the Bitcoin vision is kind of wrong. So what I mean is, yes, the dollarization will happen. Yes, major banking crisis will happen. But I don't think Bitcoin is the beneficiary of either of these trends to the extent that we think it is. Like sometimes we imagine it, you know, $5 million per coin. It won't go to go to that extent. and my realization is that the argument for why Bitcoin should be a beneficiary of,

let's say a big debt crisis or currency, people losing trust in currency, is usually that A, it's either like a store of value, something that will hold value over the long run, or B, it is like a transactional, is a transactional unit. If the transactional unit domain, Bitcoin's volatility prevents it from being a great transactional unit. Meaning, and the perfect illustration of it was in geopolitics. It happened like a few months ago when, so these days there's like the USSR, sorry, the Russia, nobody, lots of countries don't want to buy oil from Russia. India is kind of bucking the trend.

India is buying oil from Russia, converting that into products and selling it to the west again and it's pocketing a difference. And India and Russia are kind of like negotiating what currency shall India pay Russia with? India wants to pay with the Indian rupee. And Russia doesn't want to take the Indian rupee.

And the reason for Russia not wanting to take the Indian rupees is it can take a lot of Indian rupees sure but then what will it buy with Indian rupees it can only buy Indian products and it doesn't have a lot of demand for Indian products so it's like the economy that actually is the most productive you want to hold the currency of that economy for transactional purposes which is why people hold US dollars and if the US declines in power whatever is the next productive geopolitical area of the world that will work even as a transactional currency. If you think of store of value,

we will think, okay, Bitcoin is a great store of value, but I've also realized that equity indexes are the best store of value. So if you go and think of an equity index, S&P 500, it's backed by actual human productive power, great products, great business models, a mix of them

and they turn out based on what is good and what is not and that is a much more stable foundation for a long-term store of value than a crypto coin and so I think

index-based stores of value which might come from the stock market or it might even come from crypto right and index of crypto coins each of which have great business models I think there are going to be those things that are better stores of value. And so I am no longer a Bitcoin convert on either of these dimensions. But that's true that like, you know, on, yes, an index of all tokens is like actually outperforms markets generally and like, or, you know, in this current historical trend.

But gold is still the highest value market cap asset in the world. and like by like, you know, almost an order of magnitude. And so how like, so I don't think Bitcoin ever claimed to be like of a placement, like a productive asset or anything. It was always, or at least, you know, for at this point, like approaching seven, eight plus years at this point, right? Like, yeah, in the early days, I think Bitcoin was trying to find what is its purpose kind of thing. But now, you know, we've been in this world long enough where it's settled. Like,

we are trying to build digital gold. That's it. What like, the question is, why has Bitcoin failed to come close to gold? Or you can argue that it hasn't, right? You can argue that like, you know, gold is a 12 trillion dollar asset market cap. Bitcoin is a half trillion dollar market asset cap. The fact that we're within like an order of magnitude is actually come kind of impressive. But, so maybe you can argue that we haven't failed yet. But like, why have, like, do you still believe that Bitcoin will be able to replace gold as an asset one day or no? I guess two things. So first of all, like, why hasn't Bitcoin sort of taken on this role and, and, you know, the dollar and those kind of things? Well, I mean, I do, you know, with a whole

biology's argument and all of that, I do agree that there is some sort of. dollarization is going to happen. And I do agree that, you know, eventually the U.S. dollar is going to, you know, collapse, right? I think it's just like, it's obviously unsustainable with debt levels and all of that. However, when it comes to the time horizon of this, I don't believe it's very close. And I think in the end, it's still like, it's still stable enough to dollar and it's still something that is extremely useful because it's, you know, because you can, you can use it to trade. And for most people in other fiat currencies, well, like, if I can, like, put my money in the dollar, like, that's pretty good, right? So it's, like, a better store value than Bitcoin because it's, like, more useful,

and then it's more stable from a price perspective. So I think, like, when would be the time when, you know, you really see Bitcoin thrive? Well, I mean, maybe if the, dollar really struggles, but that seems far away. And, you know, maybe you have some other advantages, of course, right? Like where maybe if it's like sanctions and you're outside of banking system, you have control of your assets. So I think there are some of those advantages. But of course, a lot of people may not care that much about it, right?

Because they can get a US, like, I don't know, if you're in Argentina and you can get a dollar account somewhere else and you can access it well, then maybe that's good enough for you. you know, whether Bitcoin is going to replace gold in the longer run. I think it's possible, but I still think that, you know, Bitcoin has unique risks that, I mean, of course, maybe gold has risk with maybe like asteroid mining or something, but Bitcoin also has risks, right? Bitcoin has this whole thing about, you know, the, you know, the Bitcoin's mind, the, you know, the inflation block rewards going down with the halving and, you know, you don't really have transaction fees replacing that or like, you know, the long-term economic security to me

of Bitcoin feels a bit like, you know, I don't know, I'm not totally comfortable with it. So, and of course, so for a lot of people also just, crypto still has too negative of an image, right? It's like they see Bitcoin and they think, well, crypto, it's volatile. It's, you know, criminals, money laundering, buying rocks online, a bunch of scammers. Gary Gensler doesn't like it. You know, like is that, so does that feel like a good alternative to gold? I think a lot of people would probably not see it that way because of that.

So I think there's still a lot of obstacles that I see. So I'm with Mejah on the S&P 500 thesis. I also think, I mean, so if you look at the market cap of the S&P 500, it's several times that of gold. I think maybe like five times or so that of gold, maybe a little bit less. But to me the question is in the de-dollarization, basically not when's gold or when's Bitcoin going to replace the dollar. But when are stable coins going to, or baskets of stable coins or, you know, somewhat

stable assets devised that way through clever basketization? When is that going to come? Because that seems like closer. Do you guys agree? I gave a talk yesterday at the Gateway Conference about a Tara one year retrospective since the crash. And in that, I basically, you know, I, there was a period there where I was like, a highly convinced that like, Tara had the potential to become like a global like currency. Eventually it would like, depeg from the dollar, like, you know, follow some more floating,

uh, exchange rate kind of thing. Uh, but like after that whole system collapse and, you know, that I have all this, all this, when I talk, I talk about all the reasons that happened, but like, I don't know, I feel a little bit sad that no one's actually work. There's very little work being done on, um, these like under like, like, like, like, like, I'll go stables and stuff since that. Like, it feels like it's almost like, yeah, everyone's scared to even like talk about it. And like, I think that's not great. I think we do need to. If, if we do want to build like, decentralized money, decentralized stable coins. We do need to figure out, like, open up the conversation again about, like, you know, how do we build under collateralize alga stable systems?

Yeah, I fully agree. I think the issue with the stable coins today is just that they're basically all backed by, you know, dollars in U.S. bank accounts. And I think that's just so easy to control. So I don't think there's any way that the current type, I mean, the current type of stable coins, like hopefully they can keep existing because they're super useful. They're great, right? And, you know, they can be a great sort of transaction media. But then they're really more like payment, like payment rails than anything else. Right. And I think they can never be, you know, the U.S. financial system will never allow them to get to a threatening state. And I think they can, they can. easily prevent that because they can just freeze the assets in these banks and go after these banks. And so I think they're not, the current stable coins are not really, they're not viable, they're not building a viable alternative. And I think for a viable alternative, we do need to have really decentralized system. I mean, I like Sonny, I was, you know, I was very bullish on Terra, of course, also very wrong about it, right? But I, I, I, I,

think the idea was just enormous. And then I think that idea needs to be pursued in some way. Maybe it has, I don't know if it, if like fully collateralized, maybe, maybe that can work or maybe it needs to be under collateralized, but maybe not with the same mistakes that Thera made. I'm not totally sure. But I do think those experiments need to happen and we need like different types of stable coins.

So what have we learned from the terror collapse? Like, oh, maybe, maybe just giving an essence, uh, essence of your talk. I think that so, you know, when DORS is like really good post, like a blog post, like from 2018 or something where he talks about like the goal with a stable coin is to like build a real economy around it and like he talked about like, oh, if you like build a payment system that like drives continuous demand for it. You have to, like, get people to, like, to start denominating debts, like business debts in the, in this stable coin. That's how you get, like, you know, fiat remains stable because you have this like perpetual demand for the system, for, for the

token, the currency. And that looked like, I think Tara had started to build. Like, that's what the whole chai stuff was about, you know, obviously now in retrospect, it's unclear how much of that was fraudulent, like real or not. Like, I guess there's all these like court cases going on about that. But then like, you know, they had started building a real defy economy around it that was getting demand. But then like eventually with they just got greedy, I think, at some point. Like instead of like taking it like, having this like actual, you know, sustainable growth that

they were seeing, they like the anchor scam came along and basically told everyone to hold like UST in this pool for 20% yield. And like, it was not real yield. It was just being subsidized by like, TFL and Anchor emissions and like, uh, being propped up basically. And then what happened was as soon as things got a little shaky, everyone went running for the door. No one was there for like actual demand. They were just like everyone just exited from Anchor. There's all the issues like, first of all, like Anchor should have probably had some rate limits or something, but everyone just went running for the door. And Anchor also had the actual demand. They were just like, like, along with like having everyone hold UST for like this fake yield, they actually had this like

bad effect where it caused, it made it harder for people to build real economies around it. So, you know, there was an episode with McMars a couple of weeks ago. And like the, you know, Mars was originally on Terra. They were had their own lending protocol. But they struggled to get deposits because they had to compete with the 20% yield from anchor. And so it's like, not only was it like. creating this fake economy. It was actually parasiting the like real defy economy that was being built around UST. And so I don't know, like what did we learn that like

stable coins propped up by Ponzi algo farms don't work like don't work, but it's like no shit like obviously. So that that's the part that I find the most disappointing, right? Like we did we didn't learn anything new and it just like soured the ecosystem for everyone that it's like now the sentiment is so against Algo Staples, even though the original experiment of building a demand-driven crypto economy was never tested properly. Right. It kind of ties back to the whole infrastructure phase and real business running on the networks. I think in the end, Terra was too early because there was nothing like that.

And I guess this ultra-ponsinomics that made it scale way too quick and ended in its collapse. I think right now, I guess you... you first need these real businesses to be on chain, right? And I guess then you can have a decentralized stable coin. I don't think it's necessarily like a design flaw or like you can somehow fix this with design. You really need like economy to migrate on chain. Like purely the better stable coin design won't fix it.

So I think it's just it will take some time. And I do actually think that over collateralized stable coins, like even like maker, right, is quite nice design. it's not as scalable, but maybe it doesn't need to be. And when the demand is there, maybe when there are reward assets on chain and more, then it will be scalable enough at that point, could sort of be a theory. I'm not like super convinced if there is like some alga stable that like purely by design can fix these issues personally.

You need circles. Circles seems like the answer here. Because, I mean, so basically these mutual credit lines. that basically circles in effect is, it lets you create money locally in groups and kind of move it along relationships that exist. And I think that's super valuable. So I think I think Algo Stables with central issuance,

those were, I mean, if we will see them, my thesis would be that we will see them later. And first we will see like localized, versions. Yeah, that kind of resonates with me. I feel like, you know, one of the things that we, if you remember Fredeka, the first time we interviewed, it wasn't Doe, but it was his previous co-founder on Epicenter. Daniel.

Daniel, right. We walked out, we walked away from that episode thinking that terror was not sustainable because it relied on this hypothesis of perpetual growth. and professional demand in order to fuel its growth and stability. And I wonder if, at least currently, you're in the sort of current ecosystem, if it is even possible to create

enough demand to sustain a stable coin. But like, but I mean, what would that demand come from? You know, is it defy? And defy, if you think it's defy, then I think that's sort of inherently flawed because like defies are built on all these kind of pillars that are also a little bit, you know,

Brian was talking about, or someone was talking about this really about how sort of, you know, there is no usage behind, behind much of the activity. I feel like what circles hits at is it hits at real world economy, sort of like tangible, you know, you can sort of touch it, hold in your hands, eat it, drink it, use it to sustain you sort of economies that are, that are necessary. for a currency to exist. And maybe the algorithmic stablecoins of the future will be baskets of those types of ecosystems, right?

Like circle and something else similar to it. Yeah. I do feel like that's, I mean, if you want to be cynical about it, the saber coin that so far has found product market fit is tether and the use case is tax evasion. I think, I mean, it's a little bit, maybe it's a little bit too stark. Nah, I mean, it's not the use case of, I mean... Yeah, there's a lot of tether usage, like, globally.

But have you tried to cash out tether? No, but... Yeah, but it's really, really difficult. It's difficult to cash out. I don't know what that has to do with tax. I mean, Tether is used so much for all kinds of stuff. Like, it doesn't sound the right to me what you're saying. What's interesting is, if you look at the tether stats on the Tron blockchain, right?

Like they have like what like 50 billion dollars of tether on there like yes 80% of it is in exchange accounts but actually like 20% is like in like tail end wallets and that are like making like daily transactions. Like there is actually an entire like real like you go to Thailand. There's like street merchants accepting tether. You go to Columbia. There's like ATF like tether ATMs where people can like convert tether to cash. And it's like, as much as we like to meme on Justin Sun, he's actually been like building a real like payment rail system like globally with on Tron and Tether.

Like obviously it would be nice if it wasn't in a centralized table point. It was actually like a more decentralized thing. But like the actual like, hey, you know, what most people care about right now in the world is like, you know, like I thought who we were saying Brian maybe, but like, you know, not getting their hands on gold, but it's like getting their hands on like dollars. Like most people in the world and third world countries just want access to dollars and like tether and tron have actually been doing that pretty successfully. Why do you think it's tether and not say USCC? Because so I've talked a lot to the tether team about this and they actually like about the tail end stuff right? And their claim is that it's actually they weren't very involved with it. It's actually been mostly like the tron like team that was like leading this like effort.

And so, I don't know, just good execution skills. I think tether just happened to be on Tron, like, accidentally. Like, there was like this, like, why did it end up being tether and not USDC was just a, Tether came first. It had more liquidity. And then a lot of people were used, like, you know, the Tron team, like, spent a lot of time, like, making sure that, like, getting all exchanges to do tether transfers via Tron. and then from there they expanded into like more retail payments.

Like if USC existed at the time, like that's the whole thing. I think that that's what like finance was trying to do with BUSD. The problem with USDC is there's like not a global distribution rail for it. What finance was trying to do with BUSD was basically Tether, yes, like, you know, it is sketchier than like your, like you're actually regulated stable coins. But Binance was trying to take a regulated stable coin by Paxos and then use the Binance system to like as a global distribution rail for like how do we get this like better more secure stable coin than Tether in the hands of people globally.

And of course obviously that got like shut down basically effectively by the government. But like that is I think what they were trying to do. So we had here in the rundown that we would talk about, you know, which project had we think had the most significant pivot and I feel like this sort of covers that. I guess Tether for a lot of us, or sorry, Tara for a lot of us was that project. What about things that you were super excited about that have faded out or ceased to exist? I know Fediga you had some ideas here, of projects that you were interested in over the years that have faded out or maybe you were surprised to faded out. Any thoughts there?

Yeah, I mean, basically it's just sometimes you speak to a team and you just immediately see the value of that project and you think, oh yeah, I would totally use that and I will use that. And then you kind of, it just fades out and you never hear from it again or you, it basically, I think the example that I made was Dharma. at the time it just seemed so novel and then basically they pivoted to a multi-seek wallet and I before you recorded this episode I said I wonder what happened to them

I haven't actually thought about them for a long time and someone said they were acquired by OpenC yeah it's just sometimes sometimes it just plays out differently than you thought and I was wondering whether you had any of those moments recently. I had one

an app I was using a lot during COVID and actually they were sponsoring this show for a while was Peppo was this kind of crypto TikTok's like thing that was on the OST chain or by the OST team and they

yeah they were around for like I think two or three years of something like that and they were trying to build they were trying to build out this kind of crypto version of TikTok and there were a lot of like cool content creators there like just so very like niche people met a few folks there as well but yeah then they decided to just like shut it down and pivoted and you know

Jason Goldberg who was running that project is now doing some kind of like online gym or something like that but yeah that was one one recent example yeah I don't I'm not going to say anchor No, like I guess for me it's probably like some of the scaling solutions or some of the initial ideas like plasma or even Trubit. I was like just looking back at the episodes sort of when I started to listen to Epicenter around like 150 or something and sort of fascinated about these initial ideas of scaling and sort of how it developed into what we have today like roll-ups and this kind of designs. Obviously, like, some of the early designs sort of just faded or teams even dissolved or got to work somewhere else. I guess I would probably mention those where I was like pre-bullish on, but that specific project, for example, didn't make it like a true bit. I mean, actually, like, it kind of ended up inspiring the, like, all the optimistic roll-ups that are being built today. But, yeah, right idea, wrong time, I guess.

For me, what's really interesting is how hard it is to disrupt the TCP IP HTTP stack. And one can see that in kind of like the struggles IPFS has. Or, I mean, I think the struggles orbit will have. All of these projects that are trying to reinvent like networking and data transport around the web. they haven't done as well as I thought they would. I mean, you see IPFS being used in some DAPs, but then you'll come across a cutting-edge ecosystem and it will have nearly zero IPFS penetration

with all the wallets being traditional centralized wallets. It kind of reinforces how sticky the current web stack really is. for me, I think the one that, you know, as people might remember, I was like a huge on interledger. And I was like really excited about like the, you know, hey, let's build a generalized payments protocol that will span across all the chains. Like, you know, a lot of reasons I think the project didn't really succeed. Like I think one, it was trying to do too much at the same time. It was trying to be like a payment channel network as well as like an exchange system. as well as like a cross like a bridging kind of protocol and it was like how to do all this stuff into in in one thing at the same time and so I don't know I think like learning from that is like important like okay maybe don't try to do too much in in one stand protocol and obviously I do think that the ripple association is part of what killed it where like you know it came from out of the ripple team and like because of that it just didn't get the political will from other ecosystems to like you know I it came from out of the ripple team and like because of that it just didn't get the political will from other ecosystems to like

really put effort behind it. You know, I talked to a team recently, and they were like, we're building on, on Internet ledger. And I was like, what? That thing is still around. And yeah, I guess there's some like some usage in Latin America or something like that. Yeah. I mean, one project that came to my mind, maybe it was like radical.

So radical was like trying to do this decentralized GitHub alternative, which also seemed like, you know, such a big need. You know, I think for at one point there was a lot of discussion about this, right? Because you'd have projects that would be, you know, kind of decentralized. Like Bitcoin, for example, this was a big topic, right? Where you have like, of course, a very decentralized network.

But then the code is all run, or hosted on a centralized platform GitHub where you have, you know, a bunch of like maintainers that, you know, very busy roles controlled by GitHub. company that end up having a lot of power. So like, you know, it's, and then of course other things, right, where like GitHub will like exclude people from certain jurisdictions, you know, like if you're a Ronnie and you can't

use GitHub and stuff like that. So it did feel like, you know, that that would be a cool idea to do a sort of, you know, decentralized alternative to it. But then, and I think the team was pretty strong like that, you know, but then somehow I think it didn't manage to do it. I mean, it's still around to some extent, but I don't know. You don't hear much about it. Are you both on Gitopia?

I don't know Gitopia. No idea. Yeah, I'm just going to bring that up. Gitopia is a project that's like doing the same, like similar thing like GitHub, a decentralized version of GitHub and actually in my opinion doing it correctly. Like I was on the episode, you know, I did the episode with Radical. And I was actually always very skeptical about the approach that they were taking where arguably it was a bit too radical where like their take on like software development was that like master branches are a source of centralization. And like we have to get rid of master branches.

We have to go to a world where like back to when everyone had their own personal branches and we're all like merging patches amongst each other. It's like no, like that's not actually how like real software development it's done. And like I think like yeah, I think rival was trying to like shove this like weird. esoteric software development philosophy baked into the model of their system. And I think that was the problem. I think so what Gitopia is doing is actually doing it correctly, which is like taking the infrastructure that that GitHub has done in a very centralized way and actually just moving that onto a blockchain. So I'm personally really excited about Gitopia. I think it's radical done right. Yeah. And the other thing that's cool about Gitopia is that incorporates, or at least they want to

incorporate all this kind of like Dow tooling within the system so that you can essentially sort of have your Git repo be managed by a Dow. And what I'm really looking forward to here is like when all of this tooling is built in a kind of one click system where like if you're launching a blockchain project, you can just go to Gitopia or like some interface built on top of it. Say I'm looking for like this kind of structure. Like I want to be like Beneveta's a dictator or I want my my project to be run by a Dow or like some other model or some kind of custom multi-sig or whatever. And like within one transaction, you can start the Dow, you can distribute the tokens, you have the Git repos, you have like all the permission to access.

And it's just like, it just becomes a default for any crypto project that's starting. They're not going to go to GitHub. They're going to go to Gitopia and you sort of get started there. I think that would be really powerful. Super nice. Before we move on to another topic, could I take another thing that faded out? So one of the weird things that for me, like fitted out

but then is reborn like a phoenix in the ashes is the idea of the private corporate blockchain or the private enterprise blockchain which has this from my perspective weird story of

the bear market of 2017 and suddenly it's all the vogue their companies digital asset R3CV Ayrus Hyper Ledger has a bunch of projects, all of them trying to build blockchains for the enterprise and as far as I can see none of those applications have have really stuck and that initial idea that you can build blockchains without

a crypto coin and then those blockchains would be used by insurance companies and big banks kind of faded out and became much smaller than the noise at that point at time. What's really weird is that idea, I think, is being reborn in the end-tooth space. So when you look at like Coinbase base, well, isn't that really an enterprise blockchain? It's like built by Coinbase. Their vision is to onboard 80 million users of Coinbase onto that blockchain. is going to have a centralized sequencer.

It's an L2-2 Ethereum. So it's using these crypto-economic mechanisms. But it feels awfully like an enterprise blockchain. And I think there's going to be more of them like that. So I think that idea may again reappear with the big qualifier that those enterprise blockchains will be built by crypto-native enterprises. So that's kind of like a. a weird story that has existed in our space.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. There's also like another version of this that I've seen like one or two examples of and that is products, projects building with the Cosmos SDK with the hopes that industrials will become validators. So one example is a project that I know, of course, one you guys I think invested in sort chain. And so they're building a decentralized network for basically vehicle data. It's like a vehicle data market. And so there's like this whole industry, like this whole kind of like vertical that's emerging around vehicles sharing data with each other and with infrastructure, etc. And there

is no kind of, you know, decentralized infrastructure to incentivize that data to be shared with, with sort of like the greater network. And they're working with auto manufacturers and parts manufacturers and one of their ambitions, I think, is to have, you know, the Fords and Toyotas of the world be validators on this network. And, you know, when we at Stratom, we're working on permissionless or permission consortiums back in those states, back in 2016, 2017 and onwards, that was the idea. The idea was we're going to create these use cases that corporations will want to hop on board and become validators in these networks. But I think that, the technology wasn't quite there yet.

And maybe the understanding that crypto economics are an important aspect of maintaining incentives in a system. So I'm happy to see that those types of use cases are kind of coming back. And the nice thing about the Cosmos SDK is that it can start this kind of permissioned and become permissionless over time. And IBC enables some of that as well. So it's a network architecture that I'm quite,

quite bullish on. And I wish like, you know, the Interchained Foundation would spend a little bit more time doing business development around this kind of thing. Maybe let's change gears and talk about the converse. So every now and then, there are niches in this ecosystem that grow way fast, it become way more useful than we would have thought even a couple of months before they kind of exploded onto the scene.

So basically one thing I'm thinking about, for instance, is ZKP technology. right? So basically if you look at how much it's kind of shaped what we think the ecosystem can do over the next couple of years, it's enormous, right? Another thing is AI. So let's talk about these. The thing with AI, here's what's kind of funny about the whole AI and blockchain topic is that once again, like this is a topic that has kind of done a 360 because, or maybe a 180. because a couple of years ago in the last cycle people would talk about AI and blockchain it was just kind of this weird

cringe topic that we all thought it wasn't going to amount too much and it was just sort of like buzzwords that people would put on a pitch deck the rates funds and you know lots like teams did raise funds but now it actually starts to make sense you know like of the last three episodes we did on the interop you know the topic of AI and blockchain

was kind of central to that to those episodes and you know Sonny, we did an episode with Amin of Avalanche, and they're putting a large language model in a blockchain so that you don't have to run code anymore, you can just tell it what to do, and it will send those instructions to validators. Akash Network is working on a decentralized marketplace,

in which, you know, amongst other types of execution resources would also be the GPUs that, you know, people could use its train models. So the topic of A&Blockchain is coming back in a really big way and I think like in a really relevant way. So yeah, curious, I know Mayor, this is a topic you've sort of spending a lot of time researching. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that too. So I've kind of followed this topic for six or seven years. In fact, if you look at the classic articles for A.I. and blockchain, they are written by Trent McConaughey, where he has a series called Wild Wully AI Dows, I think 2016.

CM to Zon 17, and I'm actually cited in the blog. Shout out to Trent. Shout out to Trent. I've kind of gone to, I kind of followed a lot of these projects. And I think like the one major idea here is, okay, can you use, can you train AI models on hardware that is kind of incentivized by some crypto network? So that's one idea that is very prominent. I actually don't know how successful it is going to be.

In fact, I'm not highly convinced about it. So in general, A.I.N. Blockchain is very hard to mix. And it is so even now. I don't think GPs have changed a lot. But what I do suspect, crypto could deliver the AI, space in a very powerful fashion is when you have AI agents that end up becoming very powerful, the only way to contain them starts to be zero knowledge technology or blockchains.

So imagine you have like an AI agent that is as intelligent as a.m. as a human, right? And you want to jail that AI agent in some way. By jail meaning you want to restrict it from doing certain things. The problem is that if you as a developer are developing such an agent and there are some examples like that, then because you're fundamentally building software that is as intelligent as you, it can always escape into the broader internet and it can replicate and you can have very little control over it.

So how do you have, how do you exercise control over an agent, over a piece of software that is as intelligent as you are? This is what is called the alignment problem in the AI space. And I think the point at which AI and blockchain are going to merge on a very powerful way is the way you actually control a highly intelligent AI system is that the entire execution of that AI agent continually output some kind of zero knowledge proofs. And for example, if you want to have a kill switch on an AI agent,

so I assume that there's an AI agent that is extremely intelligent, the minimum thing I want is to install a kill switch into that AI agent, that when I say die, I can make it die with 100% guarantee. And the AI agent cannot break the kill switch itself. because if the AI agent can break the kill switch, then it can leak out into the world and replicate across the internet. So how do you implement a guaranteed kill switch?

That's a type of alignment problem. And I think the answer to it is you have to write an AI agent inside like an orbit or inside like a ZK EVM like computational platform where you can write the Kill switch as some kind of logic which has a zero knowledge proof and as the computer executes, there are guarantees that the Killswitch isn't disabled.

So when you think of this problem of extremely intelligent systems, verifiable software is going to become really important and what we are fundamentally developing via the mechanism of zero knowledge proofs is actually verifiable software fundamentally. And I think that's why I think there is an intersection in the future. I mean, this makes sense to me, but like how do you deal, like, when you have open source models and like that, you know,

how do you force things to have kill switches built in, right? Like I think that's the concern issue I have with this like idea. So you can have. have an open source model, right? The model is just code or it's the weights of a network and it is open source. The thing that is dangerous is not the model itself, but actually a running version of the model. It's somebody, something has to be executing, making calls to the model, and it has to be executing it as a process. And it's that process that is, that can be dangerous. and how do you have any kinds of limitations posed on a running computer process that is as intelligent as you are?

You want a verifiable kin switch or verifiable power limitation switch. And I think like that is fundamentally what crypto provides. But me, so to me, I mean, so the kill switch idea to me makes sense. But how do you know when to present? right? So basically, to me, the danger would be that kind of the AI just outsmarts you and it looks harmless, but in the backhand and actually makes something malicious because it knows in principle you can shut it down. So I mean, it's a cat and mouse game, no? Exactly. You're saying you want an auditable log out of the AI agent. Whatever the AI agent does,

it has to guarantee it appear into a log that you can see and analyze with a different system. that's another verifiable computation problem guaranteed printing of a log that's a crypto problem that's a ZKB problem I think this is what I suspect is going to be our value proposition to that field

do you think so basically I recently spent a lot of time also reading about AI stuff do you think this is going to be the end of all of us at some point because basically so there's so many ways it could in principle go wrong. And basically dealing with something that is just, you know, inherently more powerful than

you are yourself, it may just be, it's probably impossible to contain at least reliably. And I mean, there only has to be one hiccup, right? And it's, that may well spell the end of all of us. So do you see that danger? And if so, what do we do against it? I recently heard a couple of people say that they think our only way to kind of survive this is kind of just upgrading ourselves too with kind of a neuralink type technology. I don't buy that.

But basically the question is, as someone who's actually thought about this a lot, do you think we're in any sort of real danger? So this is essentially known in various places as the control problem and like the alignment problem. The control problem being is like how do you place restrictions on something that is smarter than you can replicate across the internet? Right. So if you're running it on some computer system and that running it, agent is kind of smarter than you are. It can always kind of jail break and go to the internet and start running on some other hardware.

So how do you place restrictions on it is one highly important problem? And then the other problem is kind of when you're not placing restrictions on it for some reasons, right, like you need to do it a certain task. it is making autonomous decisions, then how do you make sure that those autonomous decisions are kind of in alignment with what your original desires work? And kind of these are unsolved problems, right? And there are many people in the world that believe humanity won't be able to solve these problems on a, on the timescale at which we will build systems more smarter than us.

So the fundamental problem being that we will build things as intelligent as us before we know how to control or align them. And that timing mismatch is what dooms us or dooms human civilization fundamentally to end. And the end being defined in various ways. Some people who literally define it as every human human, dying, others defining it as some combination of

EIA is becoming the dictators of humanity, etc. So it's an unsolved problem. If you just look at how in the last six months, large language models have

become so prevalent, like everybody, you just chat GPT for something, right? And lots of startups are now being used, are now using chat GPT or sort of large language models and GPT models to, to create new products. None of these products are being designed with these source of containment models in mind, right? So they're being built as SaaS products and people using them and, you know,

they're in your call recorder software or they're in like, you know, tomorrow they'll be like reading your email and, you know, giving you some advice about. how you should be responding to your email or perhaps even responding to your email for you. Like these things are coming and they're coming fast. None of these products have this containment in mind. And so why would at some point like, you know, in a year from now or three or five years from now when these systems have infiltrated our lives, right? And we're using them and we're talking to Siri and like Siri is now basically like GPT, right? And why would at that point containment models start?

it would be so difficult and I think like practically impossible at that point to incorporate containment models so I think you know the odds of this going wrong are fairly high although I love GPT

you know it's great I actually I'm an optimist and I believe and I believe we will solve we will solve the control problem and I actually think crypto is already solving the control problem

by developing verifiable compute. So if you look at like an orbit planet, what's really fascinating about an orbit planet is everything that an orbit planet computes, it can create a proof

that it computed as per the code that you had put in. And so even invisibly, we are developing verifiable compute and we will be able to put some control into these systems. And on the other side, I actually think making highly capable AI open source and distributing this power across many parties is also essential

because then humanity can in a sense divide and conquer where you don't want one highly super intelligent or two highly super intelligent systems in the world that are only managed by 300 programmers each, which is the size of open AI. Because if only 600 people are going to be managing superintelligences, it's very riskier than 60,000 people managing it or 600,000 people managing it.

And fundamentally, I think we have to open source in, make sure that the world's GPU capacity is being, used for artificial intelligence by lots of parties. And we have to ensure that like designs for all of these systems are very different, want them to be heterogeneous. And then we want to use crypto to be able to put in containment measures for this technology, we have verifiable compute. And I think that is why the values of open source, white distribution, and verifiable compute. will play an essential role in this technological area. That's my belief anyway.

In the shorter term, do you think that, so in the shorter term, do you think that decentralized identity systems protect us from some of the people, some of the things that people are afraid of? So like the disinformation risk that comes with all the generated AI that is like coming to production to product, now, you know, like things like Stable Fusion, et cetera,

all the video creation algorithms that are, that exist now. Do you think that identity systems can help with, you know, proving that content was created like by a person or created by an AI, right? Yeah, so, I mean, like, this is actually, this is actually a rhyming version of the bigger problem. So the bigger problem is, once the software is as intelligent as you are or more than you are, how do you contain it inside some computational box essentially, right?

And how do you know that what the outputs you're getting from the computational box are what the system is thinking? That's the high-level problem, 10 years from now for humanity. But the short-scale problem, interestingly, is also a problem of verification and cryptography again where... When the cost of producing any piece of content goes down to a dollar, so for a dollar you could produce any 10-minute movie about anything in the world. It could be a clip of Harry Potter, it could be a clip of Donald Trump talking something. For a dollar, if you could produce that.

How do you make sure that what you are seeing has been produced by a human on the other side? That's, you see, another cryptography problem. We have to give private keys to every human. in the world. That's a problem we are working on. So in a sense, it rhymes, doesn't it? So we know how to solve this problem. We are public-private key cryptography. We are naturally as a space building that technology. Even if AI didn't exist, we would build it. But because AI exists, there's enormous incentive to adopt private-public key cryptography. And I think because AI will get stronger, there will be enormous incentive to adopt. very fireful computation.

And I think, yeah, those problems are rhyming and we even manage to solve these problems fundamentally. No one teach AI how to use public-private key cryptography then. Okay. Yeah. Be sure not to teach them how to use it. No one should give their AI a ledger or connected to an H-Sem. So barring some AI apocalypse,

where we all disappear. What are you most looking forward to in the next 500 episodes? And I guess a bigger question is like, how do we keep this going so that we could be here in the next 500 episodes? Other than Meher,

I'm the other eternal optimist. In the next, say, 100 episodes, I really want to see the stuff we're building kind of hit normal people in a big way. So I don't want to say the mainstream because it doesn't have to be mainstream. But I want to have products that are built

on blockchain technology that are just legitimately fun to use and better to use than the alternatives. And I think this is kind of, this is what I want. Same here, yeah. And I do, I'm increasingly, I'm thinking that more and more I think that like this will come from some combination of gaming slash like social file applications. I do. It's a space that I've not like, I don't have a whole lot of like visibility into, but I do hear a lot of people building infrastructure telling me that they're, that the market that they're addressing is this gaming and. and socialify use case, right?

And that has a potential to bring in a lot of young people, I think, and young people tend to use technology, sort of adopt technology faster than old people. And it also likes to play games and are very social. So I think that's it. A decent hypothesis. You're talking like we are not some of them. Only sunny.

We have sunny. We do have sunny. Yeah, I was. would say, aside from maybe like AI generated host that can take some episodes. That would be helpful, actually. On some weeks, I think that would be good if we had an AI host. Yeah, we can spice it up and then don't tell people and you have to find out which one was the AI episode. Yeah, yeah. So what are we doing for episode 1000? What kind of topics will we cover by then?

guesses, courageous guesses. We'll still be questioning mainstream adoption. Yeah. Oh no, no, don't say that, Johnny. When is it finally going to happen that people use this stuff? Yeah. Or are we going to talk with Vitalik about the Ethereum scaling roadmap? Do you guys think Bitcoin will still feature?

Yes. Yes What about gold Yes Yeah The dollar Yes Yeah

Agos tables Yes Yeah I think the I think the dollar has the Has the highest chance Of the Of being around anymore

Except Yeah Out of those three Out of those three No I would put Bitcoin above that Oh you put Bitcoin Yeah

Yeah me too Well goal will still be around For sure I would be Most chance to stay around Is gold Then a dollar Then Bitcoin

Okay Yeah I agree So my my of peak idea would be I think in 10 years this thing that will become really massive and hopefully bigger than Bitcoin

are fundamentally all of the amazing exchange technologies that are being invented in this space so when I look at when I look at what crypto has genuinely done new I think on the exchange space

we have this automated market makers one of which Sunny is building maybe the second or third most popular of which Sunny is building we have the badge auction exchange which is this

freakingly amazing exchange technology that replaces market makers with solvers open source solvers and could result in better prices man that could be amazing Sri Drica is involved with that. And then we have the invention of the perpetual

where without having a spot asset, I can go long or short with leverage without having exposure to this spot. And if you look at these three technologies, none of them exist in the stock markets, bond markets of the world. And I think the world will realize what amazing,

and maybe there will be more of these. amazing inventions and I think the world will come to realize that if you want to do cheap transactional cost exchange you have to go to a crypto network very cool I think that's a good note to end on guys this has been really fun and uh I mean I when I when I say it's been really fun I mean like the last the last 500 episodes have been really fun and also this one has really fun and I really look forward to doing more at these with all of you Me too. Thanks so much.

Thanks. Thanks, everyone. See you in five hundred episodes. 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.com.

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