Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Jackson Palmer: Dogecoin – wow! so meme. such community. very charity. much story.

Episode Date: March 27, 2019

Dogecoin was born from the association of two browser tabs: one was an article about the popularity of the doge meme, and the other, CoinMarketCap. The idea quickly gained traction on Twitter, and before long, a new cryptocurrency was born. Dogecoin gained adoption as a tipping currency, the community took part fundraising for charities and other causes, perhaps most notably sending the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Winter Olympics. We’re joined by Jackson Palmer, co-creator of Dogecoin. Though he has left the project, Jackson shares the story of how he created the most popular meme cryptocurrency as a joke. Topics covered in this episode: Jackson’s background and early interest in cryptocurrency The Dogecoin origin story The uniquely charitable nature of the community and The Dogecoin Foundation How the currency became widely used for tipping The NASCAR sponsorship and Moolah exchange scam The technological choices which went into early versions of Dogecoin Dogecoin’s unique monetary policy and economics Jackson’s thoughts on Doge Ethereum and the state of the project Why Jackson stepped away from the project and his thoughts on the crypto space Jackson’s other projects and YouTube channel Episode links: Jackson Palmer's website Dogecoin Github “Not actually capped at 100 billion?” GitHub issue Moolah, The Divisive Startup Heavily Involved In The Dogecoin Community, Is Closing Down – TechCrunch Excerpts from the Moolah Scam - YouTube Complete conversation with Mintpal/Moolah's ""Alex Green"" AKA Ryan Gentle AKA Ryan Kennedy - YouTube Epicenter episode 5 Jackson Palmer - Twitter Jackson Palmer - YouTube Thank you to our sponsors for their support: Deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchain networks that scale in just a few clicks. More at aka.ms/epicenter. Join the most interoperable ecosystem of connected blockchains. Learn more at cosmos.network/epicenter. This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/280

This is Epicenter, Episode 280 with guest, Jackson Palmer. This episode of Epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure. Do you have an idea for a blockchain app but are worried about the time and costs it will take to develop? The new Azure Blockchain DevKit is a free download that brings together the tools you need to get your first app running in less than 30 minutes. Learn more at aka.m.m.s slash Epicenter. And by Cosmos. Cosmos is building the internet of blockchains, an ecosystem where thousands of blockchains can interoperate creating the foundation for a new token economy. If you have an idea for ADAP, visit cosmos.network slash epicenter to learn more and to get

in touch with the Cosmos team. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Quichu. And my name is Sunny Underwell. Hi, Sunny. How's your trip in Europe going? It's going pretty well. You know, on the fourth leg now. I'm here in London, recording this. And, you know, we had a great time. Cosmos launched while I was in Switzerland and so that was fun and you know dealing everything's been going well on that side and it's been a very fun and exciting trip. So tell our listeners a little bit about the Cosmos launch and what has been that experience like for you working at Cosmos in the last week?

It's been very real as in that like I don't know it just feels so weird that there is this like public blockchain that I have code that I coded and it's like people are like doing stuff with like really economic value on it. It just feels very weird to me. But no, I'm very excited because, you know, the system has been running smoothly. There has been no halts of the system, no bugs found. Out of all the validators, no one has even gotten slashed yet. You know, I was worried that some validators might misconfigure something and someone will get accidentally slashed. And so, you know, Brian and Mehear's validator chorus has been doing quite well.

I have a validator called Sitka, which is also doing quite well. So, you know, overall, it's been a really good experience. Yeah, I've been staking my Adams, disclaimer. I have Adams. And yeah, it's been interesting. It's kind of cool to see the rewards accumulating there. I'm really interested in seeing like the first. proposals come through. I think there's one proposal to fix the block time, something like that.

So it would be really interesting to see that, you know, that whole process unfolding with the voting and everything. Yeah, it's, it's really, really exciting to see Cosmos finally launching. So I think you had an announcement to make about some speaking engagements you have coming up. Yeah, so I'll actually be at Edcon in Sydney at the second week of April. So if anyone, any of our, you know, I feel like, you know, I've never been, we've never given our Southern Hemisphere listeners some love. And so, you know, if anyone wants to meet up while I'm down there, let me know and happy to meet up and, you know, just meet some of you guys.

Cool. That should be exciting. And coincidentally, our guest today is from Australia. It doesn't live there, but is from Australia. So our guest today is Jackson Palmer, who is the co-founder of Dogecoin. And when we started speaking with him, it's crazy that we've never had him on before. I mean, we've talked about Dogecoin quite a bit over the years. And in fact, I was going back into early episodes.

We did an episode where we mentioned we talked quite a bit about Dogecoin on episode five of Epicenter. So this was 275 weeks ago. And back in early 2014, just as Dochecoin was launching at the same time, it was like Ethereum was also like the white paper was being released. And so if you're interested, go back and listen to episode five. If you want to get a feel for what things were going on back then, also get a good laugh because their production value was pretty low. And we were quite novice at doing a podcast. But yeah, it was a really fascinating conversation.

I think for a couple of reasons. One, because he started this thing that was kind of a joke to him. and was in his mind, he saw it as sort of a rejection of what cryptocurrencies were becoming. But what ended up happening is that Dogecoin ended up being quite successful and having a market capitalization, which at one point was upwards of $2 billion. And the other reason why it's interesting is because he doesn't work in the crypto space. I mean, he works for a software company, which doesn't operate in crypto, like a traditional software company. And so he kind of has this view of crypto from the outside world is in some ways kind of critical about where things are going.

So I thought it was really fascinating conversation and one that I think everyone will appreciate. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, Dogecoin, like he said, like he said, you started off as a joke. But, you know, I think it actually did a lot of good for the ecosystem. And, you know, I say that because personally, the first time I heard. about cryptocurrency was because of doge coin i was in one of my high school classes and one of my friends was telling me he's like hey you know there's this like digital coin called dogecoin and it's like funded the jamaican bobsled team and i i was just like what that's so weird that's like okay it was

just this weird joke and then i like you know went home and i'm like i looked up what is this dogecoin thing and then that's kind of really the first time i really heard about Bitcoin in the first place. And so, you know, in a way, Dogecoin helped push me down that path. And so I'm thankful to that, I guess. So Dogecoin is in part responsible for Cosmos coming into existence because without you, Cosmos probably wouldn't, you know, wouldn't be where it is today. It wouldn't not have existed. And interestingly, and we go into this in the episodes, Jay Kwan actually had quite a quite of an impact in the very beginning because him, and Jackson knew each other and Jay also contributed to some discussions on GitHub.

And we get into the episode. So here's our interview with Jackson Palmer. We're here today with Jackson Palmer. Jackson is the co-creator of the Dogecoin project. Hi Jackson. Hey, thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on the show. So let's start by asking the question that we typically ask people who come in the podcast. How did you first get involved in in crypto. Yeah, I read about crypto, well, specifically the Bitcoin white paper, like I would say 2011, 2012, when I saw it posted on Hack and News probably. But I kind of dismissed it because I was in Australia back then. It's where I'm born and raised. And the internet is so bad back in Australia that just downloading a blockchain, even if it's a few gigabytes, was unrealistic over a poor

ADSL connection back then. And so I dismissed it until around 2013. and then somebody that I was working with actually was really into light coin and kind of pumping light coin when it was doing its first first big pump I think you might have gotten up towards $30 or something and so I like okay I gotta check this stuff out I didn't even know there was multiple coins and that kind of led me to coinmarketcap.com which then threw me down the whole spiral of oh my gosh okay this is there's a lot going on here And so this early interest that you had in crypto, what were you interested in?

Were you interested in the technology or more of the financial aspects? Yeah, really the technology. I've always been, you know, my background is actually in kind of marketing and data and analysis. But I've always been extremely technical and developed side projects, et cetera. And so my interest was really just in, like I would evaluate any other open source. kind of software, you know, whether it had legs, whether there was people for, for, you know, that would want to use it. And I just looked at it that way, like I look at any other kind of tech startup, really. And as I kind of got into it, I started to realize that maybe it had some

interesting kind of political ramifications. And, and kind of that interested me as well, you know, regarding like financial institutions and financial crises and thing like that. So, yeah, that kind of of kept me interested for a while. But from the very beginning, I have to say, I was, I was very alarmed or skeptical of it because of the speculation. And so, you know, a lot of people, I think, like to think that one, at one point in time, I was like a huge, you know, crypto maximalist fan, but that was never really the case. I always came into it with a skeptical eye from the beginning. Were there like, you know, other interesting open source projects or decentralization kind of stuff that you were like really looking into? Like, I know, you know, I saw on your Twitter the other day you said you had some guides for like mastodon and stuff.

So was Bitcoin sort of the first like made like open source project you started looking into or was there other stuff? Yeah, not really. I've been like interested and kind of involved with BitTorrent for quite a while and obviously being a user of BitTorrent. but looking at its applications for peer-to-peer, kind of communications and things like that. Never anything that really specifically related to currency because I was like, hey,

we've already got this currency thing solved. Like, why would I think about that? So it was more about communication, file sharing, things like that. You know, a project that I'd launched, I guess, a year before Dogecoin,

I was really into memes, like from the beginning and GIFs. And so I created this site called GIFBase.com, which was rather popular. and actually kind of predated Giffy. I really should have gone and pitched it to some VCs, but I didn't think about that. So yeah, I've always been kind of involved in software development

and the memory of it all. And, you know, I guess that's kind of a nice segue into how Dogecoin came to be. So, yeah, let's talk about that. How did your love of open source software have a baby with dog meme? Yeah, so no, a lot of it kind of came, you know, that the person that I knew that was into Lightcoin that I was talking about, you know, wasn't the most technical person. And so that immediately gave me skepticism about a non-technical person shilling something that is that is highly

technical. So I was like, ah, this seems like gambling. And so I went to coinmarketcap.com, and I noticed that there was like at that point, maybe under 100 cryptocurrencies out there, like a lot of the forks, some of them aren't alive these days. And I noticed that new one was being added pretty regularly. And at the same time, the Doge meme was like kind of taking off. And Adrian Chan, a journalist over at Gorka, had written this article basically saying Dogecoin is the best meme. It is, not Doge coin, Doge is the best meme.

Because it's kind of this uncorruptible face. You cannot kind of take Doge and like, you know, you know, Doge can't become Pepe. It's just not going to happen, right? And not that Pepe was a thing back then, really. But, and so I just had those two kind of tabs open in my browser. And Doge and coin just kind of blended together. And so it started as a tweet, just like me, kind of in Australia,

we have this thing called Taking the Piss, which is really just kind of throwing shade at something or just like making fun of something. And I just, you know, did this piss take tweet. where I was like going to invest in Dogecoin. I think it's the next big thing. And that kind of sparked the whole thing. That's interesting.

And when you took this piss of a tweet, what was the reaction? The take of a tweet. Yeah, it's an Australian slang flying around here. The reaction was very much a lot of, there were a few people that were like, oh, my God, create this. And then I guess it got shared around in some like crypto circles on IRC and stuff. I very immediately, I'm one of those people that if I have an idea I'm like, I'm going to buy the domain name.

So I have like way too many domain names. Like I know there's a lot of other people that have similar addictions. Addiction to this. I had the same addiction at some point in my life. Such a waste of money, right? Anyway, so I was like, I'm going to, you know, register the domain dogecoin.com because somebody else is going to steal it.

So I may as well. And then I just put, I went into kind of Photoshop and put a, you know, 50% opacity image of the dog over a like a Google image search of a coin and just threw it up on like this static HTML page. And it just said, you know, Dogecoin is the parody cryptocurrency favored by Shiba Unus worldwide. And I didn't think much of it. I was just like it was a joke. And a lot of it was a joke between me and my friends as well because like we were all kind of making fun of crypto back then. And so we share it around like whenever anybody asked about Bitcoin, I'm like, ha ha, look, Dogecoin. And then in this hypercondense period,

period of time, that kind of got shared more and more and more and more within actual crypto circles and IOC and stuff. And then this random dude called Billy pings me on Twitter with a screenshot and is like, hey, you can change the font in the Bitcoin QT client to Comic Sands. We should make this a real thing. And so that kind of, you know, was let me down the spiral. So how did like, you know, Billy saw your tweet? or something? And so is it someone you knew or like a friend of yours? Yeah. So the website itself, I think had my Twitter handle on it and it got shared in IRC. And so he just, you know, put two and two together. And that's how he got connected. And so, yeah, he reached out to me. We added each other

on like a Google chat or something. And then very rapidly, you know, I think I made the tweet on the 27th, I think, of November in 2013, I want to say. And I think within about five or six days, there was a binary released for Dogecoin. I see. And I remember, so you mentioned to me before the show that Billy was actually, you know, an anonymous guy. Yeah. Do you, do you by any chance know at all who he is? Oh, yeah. No, I know who he is and I've met him several times in person. But it's a lot of people, it's very interesting actually he's kind of a faceless name which I think is how he prefers to keep it

and he got out of the project very early on I think he didn't really want to create a new cryptocurrency because a lot of people say I'm skeptical of cryptocurrency he's even more of a skeptic than I am of cryptocurrency and then that's what we were having a lot of these conversations

when we first met online and so yeah he is you know, it's kind of this not shadowy figure, but he doesn't, hasn't played a role in it really outside of the first couple months of the project. I see. And so, you know, he's the one who kind of like, you know, you started it as this a joke, but then he's the one who's like, oh, wait, you know, there's, here's the open source code base that's actually start playing around with it. Yeah, yeah. So basically the, the, the, what happened was that I kind of came up with a name and the, and the idea, and then we kind of brainstormed over the next few days. We're like, how do we make

this as ridiculous as possible because we even had the foresight. We were like, you know, he especially was like, we don't want to make this something that people actually care about. This should be something that people don't care about. So how do we make it as undesirable as a, as a cryptocurrency so that it doesn't become serious? And so, you know, you were asking me before the show, like, why did we just, why was their decision to fork Luckycoin, which was itself a fork of light coin, which itself is a fork of Bitcoin? And that's because Lucky Coin, had this whole notion of random block rewards built in. And so our whole thing with those kinds,

like how do we make this so that miners are going to get angry with it and not keep mining it because it can't be profitable? I know, let's put a random block reward between zero and one million for every block. So it's like totally a gamble, right? Like nobody would, nobody serious would ever actually mine that, right? And that was supposed to be a protection system so that it didn't become a thing. unfortunately it didn't really work as intended so we made some decisions still in there no so so that was eventually removed because it was causing um a variety of problems um and and people didn't like it

but uh you know and we ended up with a actual kind of block reward schedule but um we made all these kind of like wacky decisions like 100 billion coins all this stuff um and then he did the coding work so i didn't touch like for the 1.0 and I think the 1.1, I didn't touch the code to begin with. He did that work and then just shipped it up on Bitcoin Talk and GitHub. And talk about the initial release of like when this first binary came out and how did it become this thing? Because in a very condensed period of time, so you said that late November 2013 this thing emerged and then I think early December is when the network launched and I mean I was talking you about this before the show in early 2014 when epicenter was just starting on episode five we did

an episode where we talk about the Jamaican bobsled team sponsorship so within within the amount of like eight weeks already the community there was enough doche coin going around and it had sufficient value for people to be sponsoring, you know, Olympic teams with tens of thousands of dollars. Like, what happened there? How did this thing become such a hit? I think it was a right place, right time kind of thing in that, you know, that time at the end of 2013, that was kind of Bitcoin's first big run up. And, you know, I think it hit $1,000 and everybody was super excited. it was shortly followed by the Gox thing. But, you know, at that point of time, there was so much interest in crypto,

but the difference between, say, 2013 and 2017, is that all the people that were interested in it weren't just speculators. They were developers, right? And so I think when Dogecoin came out and it was on Bitcoin talk, which is obviously very popular with developers and people that are more technical in nature, there was just this community of people that were like, hey, finally here's like a thing we can play around with. I think that Dogecoin didn't have any value at that point.

It wasn't on an exchange or anything like that. And so people were like, hey, like this is a cool way that we can learn how to interface with say the Bitcoin D kind of JSON RPC. You know, we can do all this stuff with a real live main net without the worry of losing money on the Bitcoin main net, especially at the time because Bitcoin was so expensive. you know so expensive a thousand dollars but you know uh so i just think it was a right place right time thing and very quickly after it launched you know so this is a thing like billy and i we didn't even you know he had an invidia GPU that could do kuda mining i didn't have a good GPU at that time

and so he like just put his uh minor pointed his minor at it um there was no pre minor or anything uh pointed out it for like the first 24 hours after the main net launch and um within 24 hours, like the hash rate was just like, it was too much. You couldn't solo mine anymore. It was like you had to pull mine. And all these pools popped up. The tip bot on Reddit popped up, like in the space of about a week after it launched. And I think it was just because right place, right time, like the developers were there and ready to go. This episode of Epicenter is brought to by Microsoft and the Azure blockchain workbench. Getting your blockchain from the whiteboard to production can be a big undertaking. And something as simple as connecting your blockchain to IoT devices.

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To learn more and to build your first application in less than 30 minutes, visit AKA.ms. And be sure to follow them on Twitter at MSFT blockchain. We'd like to thank Microsoft and Azure for their supportive epicenter. So on the topic of community, so this community of developers came around the project and the Reddit community also blew up. And maybe in part this Reddit tip bot had a role to play with it. Those coins sort of quickly became this uniquely altruistic community within the crypto space. So we mentioned the Jamaican bobsled team, sponsorship. There was some other Olympic team, I think, which is sponsored.

Doshkoyan has been involved in funding wells in Kenya and all these other things. Did you play a role in initiating this altruistic nature in the community? Was it something that came elsewhere? Did you see that? Where did that emerge from? I think it was actually a combination of me, but also Billy, in that once we realized it was a thing, right? Like we thought that we had set the cryptocurrency up in a way that after its launch, people would, you know, get sick of it after a week and then stop caring about it, right? And that

obviously didn't happen. And so at that point, we were kind of like, oh, crap, how do we make sure that this thing doesn't just become another, you know, kind of, like a thing that people are gambling on, speculating on? Because that was like one of our biggest, you know, joint criticisms of cryptocurrency and something we hated about it. And so we thought, you know, the real way to do that is to just continue kind of sharing this message with people that the thing is lighthearted. The thing is about giving. It's not about getting rich. And so just I think through that kind of messaging, it just bubbled up to people saying, hey, we should sponsor things. Hey, we should donate these things. You know, it might not be worth a lot of money, but maybe we can help. And so there

was the Jamaican bobsled team. And as soon as that happened, you know, I had a friend back in Australia and I was like, you know, I was working a full-time job during all of this, by the way. And so I was, I said to my friend, hey, do you want to like help with the Reddit community and like, you know, organizing, you know, sponsoring the Jamaican bobsled team? And so then we did a several things like that. But it was all community driven. It was all, honestly, not me. It was the community. And I think it highlighted the power in a way. Like, this is the one thing that kind of, you know, I was, as I said, I was skeptical coming into this. The one thing that got me interested in crypto, like that Dogecoin helped further my interest was, you have a community of, say, 100,000 people

on the Dogecoin subreddit back then. That's what it was at. And, you know, if you give those, people an easy way to give 20 cents, right? Or 50 cents, let's say 50 cents in a way that there's very little to no transaction fee. It's rather instant, secure, all of that stuff. Make it easy for people. And the Reddit tip bot allowed them to do this. Then you have $50,000 there that you can give to, you know, a charitable cause or something like that. And so the power of that is actually like the one thing that kind of drew me in further with those coin or into crypto in general was kind of like the use of it for for altruism and and kind of bettering society and I thought and I had hoped that that would be the direction that it kept

going in but you know despite best efforts I think of several community leaders and the dogecoin foundation and everybody to keep it to being this charitable lighthearted thing I think the lesson we've all learned with cryptocurrency is that all roads lead back to you know, speculation, price, gambling. It's very hard to force people or force a community to not have inertia towards that. And so that's unfortunately what, you know, like all other cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin ended up descending into. So, you know, one of the other people who are, you know, I'm friends with in the crypto space, who's also really into this whole like altruistic nature of cryptocurrency is Griff Green from the, you know,

giveeth project. And so, you know, he often tells me a lot about how he's very inspired by, like, the Burning Man culture and this, like, this, like, you know, idea of, like, gift-giving culture and stuff. So what, and I've actually never been to Burning Man myself, but, you know, he, he, he seems to love that experience and that, the community that, that's built around that. Was this at all an inspiration for you? Are you, like, have you ever participated in that, or? No, honestly, I think burners are the worst, but. Oh, interesting. No, it's kind of just, not really, because, you know, I, I don't really think of,

burnerism, kind of altruism is in a way, I think, a fake altruism because it's a lot of people, you know, there's billionaires there with, like, private jets at Burning Man. So is it really an event for the people? Probably not. No, I wasn't really inspired by that. I was more inspired by just, I've always kind of believed in redistribution of wealth. of social causes. And so I think I came into it with that. And also, I just think in Australia, there is more of an emphasis on that. That was one thing that surprised me when I moved to America

is that there seems to be a lot of a less, less of a focus or an acceptance of social systems than opposed to, say, Australia or other European places and stuff like that. So definitely not inspired by Burning Man. Gotcha. And so, you know, kind of yes to delve into that a little bit more. Like, you know, I know on your Twitter, you kind of do mention sometimes, like, you know, more, I don't know if you, like, socialistic, like, you know, you have, like, a little different philosophy, political philosophy

than, you know, the prevalent Bitcoin political philosophy, we could say. And I'm not sure if you ever actually use the word communistic, but I feel maybe you've used the word socialistic. And, like, kind of like, I guess, where did you see, like, you know, was that like, you know, aversion to the Bitcoin political philosophy, what kind of led to this? And then also, how do you see, like, Ethereum's, like, community in relation to that? Yeah. Yeah, I know, that's a really good question.

I think, you know, I haven't always had the clearest kind of political thoughts. I don't think a lot of people do. I think that there's typically political beliefs or a journey that you develop over time. And I think that when you live in a country, like Australia or a place that has pretty good welfare systems, but is still very much a capitalist society. You kind of fall into this kind of like centrist liberalism where everything's comfortable, right? I like to tell people that moving to America made me a socialist because you're moving here really demonstrated to me, you know, the inequalities of capitalism, right? Which weren't as so

pronounced in a more liberal centrist community such as Australia. And so, not just America, specifically San Francisco. Well, specifically San Francisco is like the ultra, you know, version of that, right? You have people riding around on like, you know, a thousand dollar like hoverboards and scooters and they're dodging like homeless people. It's absolutely nuts. But I think Bitcoin actually did, you know, I felt early on was more aligned. with some, you know, kind of anti-capitalist, anti-institution kind of belief systems. Like, I used to know a lot of people that were in crypto. Some of the people that were in early, early Dogecoin as well, were came from the Occupy

movement in New York. And there was this person, Ben Dornberg, who was, you know, really into Dogecoin, was great and had a lot of these beliefs. And actually, I think, was helped with a chap. to have Occupy. Those people all kind of got, you know, not shouted away, but disheartened, you know, disheartened by where Bitcoin moved because there's, there's two kind of ways, I think, of looking at institutions and all of this. And I think, unfortunately, Bitcoin has trended a lot more towards being this kind of ANCAP, you know, like very hyper-capist kind of, kind

still anti-state, but also hyper-capitalist system. And I don't think a lot of people that are subscribed to that belief really realize that the big institutions are, you know, that's part of the system that they're promoting. So it's an interesting dynamic. But yeah, definitely identify as kind of socialist, a student of Marx. And yeah. I would tend to agree with you there. And I recently was discussing this with someone who comes from that side of Bitcoin and I guess like an early Bitcoiner. And this is somewhat represented, I think, sometimes in like memes between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

And I don't want to cast judgment on anyone, but where Bitcoin is seen as this very like the right wing libertarian flavor, I guess, of libertarian. where it's highly individualistic, but highly capitalistic. And maybe Ethereum is somewhere else on that spectrum. I wouldn't say totally, you know, left-wing idealistic and libertarian. But there is very much a difference there in terms of political ideology that shines through quite a bit. And Dogecoin maybe was more, I guess, on the altruistic side and less on the capitalistic side, holistic side, so maybe even not on that spectrum, but somewhere else on another axis. Sogecoin has its own like Z-axis, you know.

Right. But no, you're absolutely right. Like, I think Ethereum and the people, this is one of the reasons I really like the Ethereum community. And typically why I like communities that aren't maximalist in nature, people that are like open to any cryptocurrency, is really because they typically have a broader, more educated belief system. and I think Vitalik, I think Vlad, a lot of the people I met from the Ethereum community,

I definitely, you know, aligned with a certain degree with politically more so than I do, like the Bitcoin maximalists that only eat meat, you know, because they also, you know, there's this, there's a strange thing where all those carnivores seem to have a very certain set of political beliefs as well, which is kind of strange, that one's diet would represent their political beliefs. But yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. And it's something that I feel is only, and maybe it was always there, but I feel like it's something that's maybe being more polarized or kind of just come to light more in this kind of like whole like boom and bust cycle,

the bear market is people's kind of true colors, the factions have kind of become very clear. You mentioned the Dogecoin Foundation a few minutes ago. Tell us what, what's this all about and what's the story behind this foundation? So the Dogecoin Foundation was a loosely, extremely loosely organized group of people, this kind of community volunteers, who just tried to steer the community.

It was basically the Reddit mods, kind of saying, hey, we have a community of people that want to throw small chunks of money at good causes. How do we give it a boost? And so there was a bunch of volunteers that did that. Ben Dornburg,

who I mentioned previously, was one of them. It played a very big part in that. And then what happened after that was that there was kind of a lot of turmoil. So I said that we did a bunch of altruistic things. We did the Jamaican bobsled team. We did another thing, which is probably what I'm most proud of, which was called Doge for Kids. And that whole project was all about raising money for training dogs, assistance dogs for blind and autistic children, which is honestly, I think the best thing that Doge Queen's ever done to give back to

the world. And then we did Doge for Water, which was working with charity water to build wells in Kenya. Eric Nakagawa, who actually created ICAN has cheeseburger.com was the one that ran that. So lots of meme overlaps. And beyond that, then you probably have heard about the NASCAR, right? Like, that's the thing that, you know, I actually don't like to talk about a lot because that was when there was this, you know, we started to see this influx of more people concerned with price fluctuations, people getting greedy. And there was this third party kind of company that latched onto the Dogecoin community called Mullah. And a lot of people probably know the full story there. But in a nutshell, the whole thing was a scam. And they, unfortunately, were one of the biggest

funders of the NASCAR and kind of tried to co-op to the foundation, co-op to the community, take all that goodwill and instead try and point it towards funding their scam. And so that kind of blew up in the face of the Dogecoin community. And that's when I and many others just kind of walked away and was like, you know, we don't want involvement with this anymore. This is nuts. Especially because we'd warned the community before all of this happened, not to trust this company. But, you know, people don't listen.

Well, maybe can you talk a bit more about that? Because I'm not fully clear on what happened there. Oh, wow. Yeah. This is a, it's a story. So there was this company called Mula that kind of came out with essentially kind of a Shopify, like an e-commerce experience, very lightweight, very buggy, that accepted several cryptocurrencies, I think, but mostly Dogecoin was the market they went after.

And it had this kind of mysterious figure at its helm who went by the name Alex Green. And, you know, what a fake name, right? And he was obvious and he was very active on the Reddit community, on the IRC. several places. And back in 2014, they announced this thing called Mula Pi, which was basically, it's kind of like an ICO in a way. You would basically send them Dogecoin and you would get like a GPG signature that was then your stake, your holdings in that company, right?

So obvious scam to any rational person. But a lot of people, to the tune of about $750,000, if I remember correctly, sent money to these scammers. And at first, like, I was a little bit skeptical as I was like, oh, this is bad. And we got super skeptical when they started sponsoring events, like throwing around huge sums of money. People started saying they were getting dividends. So they would get paid back money. I'm like, oh, gosh, like classic Ponzi, right?

Like, it's clear what's going on here. But because these people were giving back dividends and they'd go into like the IRC channels and they'd shower everybody in Dogecoin tips, the community loved them. As soon as myself or anybody else was like, hey guys, maybe practice some healthy skepticism with this. They're like, how dare you? You know, leave Mular alone. They're great people, yada, yada, yada. So eventually I and others got shouted out of the community. People were just like, shut up, Jackson. You don't know what you're talking about. Mula's the best. And Mullah did the NASCAR, you know, which they also got their logo on, which a lot of people don't like to talk about. And then flash forward a few months.

This is actually a really interesting story. So Ben Dornberg and myself, as all this was going down, basically got, tried to get them on a Skype call so we could see this guy's face because nobody had ever seen this Alex Green's face, right? And so we finally convinced him to get on a Skype call and he's like threatening us, basically saying, you know, you guys should stop questioning me, because you know what typical scammers are like, right? Like the Craig Wrights of the World, they'll threaten to sue you, et cetera, et cetera.

Somebody in that call, I don't know who it was. It actually wasn't me, recorded that call and posted it on YouTube. And so everybody knew all of a sudden what this guy's face was like. Still, nobody knew who he was, unfortunately. Flash forward a few months after that call, and surprise, surprise, Mullah announces that they've gone bankrupt. They got hacked or something. The guy lost the keys, you know, the typical.

thing, sorry, all your money's gone. And they'd actually bought an exchange at the time as well called Mint Pal and run off with all the money from that exchange as well. And I didn't come back, you know, I could have come back and been like, told you so, guys, humble pie, all of that. But I didn't. I kind of waited in the wings. And so TechCrunch, surprisingly, ran a news article that was just about this Mueller going bankrupt. Because it was a pretty big deal. It was a few million dollars missing, et cetera, et cetera. And I guess because TechCrunch didn't have any other images. of this guy, they went to this YouTube video of the Skype call and screenshot at his face. Because of that, some ex-girlfriend of this scammer in the UK randomly emails me out of the blue

and is like, that's not Alex Green. His name's Ryan Kennedy and he's a serial scam artist. He had a whole encyclopedia Dramatica, you know, like page written all about him. He was running Magic the Gathering scams. like of course right you know so so on brand with bitcoin and and so there was a whole bunch of info and so this all kind of got shared out and ben and i were like hey folks maybe you should look up the name ryan kennedy and then uh muller employees started coming out and saying oh yeah we knew his name was ryan kettie i'm like how do you not know that's a scam so all of this happened and it kind of imploded the community as you would imagine um and at the same time i wasn't really

welcome back because people were like, oh, yeah, you were right, Jackson, but a lot of people don't like to admit that. So that's the history in a nutshell. What was like the time frame that this was happening? This all happened in a year. This was 2014. It was an extremely busy year. And so it was like same around time as Mount Gawks drama and yeah, I was like, I would say it happened six to eight months after the Gawks thing. Okay. So, you know, it seems that, you know, like you said, the community kind of had this like implosion for a while. But, you know, I, um, I, um, when I actually met you for the first time, it was at DogeCon, which is this like really fascinating conference I've been to, I went to. It was last year, I think in June or so, June 2018. It was held

by this co-working space in Vancouver called DeCentral or DeControl. And very fascinating community, but they held this like conference just on DogeCon. And I will say it was not the most educational conference I've been to. It was not the most academic or productive conference I've been to, but it was definitely the most fun conference I went to. Absolutely. We had these, like, decentralized dance parties

and, like, you know, scavenger hunts. It was a lot of fun. So, you know, do you know how, like, this whole decentralized community kind of, you know, and I went to their hacker space and they have, like, paintings of, like, the Doge God or,

like, on their thing. So do you know how these guys kind of like, kind of, I don't know, it seems like they are kind of trying to revive the community and kind of like the more fun-loving aspect of it? Yeah, I'm not sure if it's a revival so much as it just is a they always are into into Dogecoin. And I think that the DogeCon, although it was the name of the conference, there was a lot of stuff other than Dogecoin talked about there. Like I don't know if Dogecoin was really even talked about the most out of all the things there. It was, it's cool because I think to me, after all of those speculators, the greedy people kind of got flushed out of the doge coin community after all that drama I was talking about. I think the OGs were left, right? Like the original people that were in it for the memes, in it for the fun, were left over.

Typically a more technical group of people as well, a bit nerdy, a bit geeky. And so it was kind of nice because it was kind of a return to roots, if anything. and yeah, they reached out to me and said, hey, you want to come up to Vancouver for this conference we're running? And I honestly, I didn't think they'd have that many people, but there ended up being a lot of people there, which really surprised me. And yeah, I think it's just, you know, people like memes.

And you'll sometimes see, you know, Vitalik, for instance, often wearing a Doge shirt or something like that. He's a big fan of it as well, like the meme in general. I think Doge separately to Dogecoin but also just Dogecoin being under that umbrella

just represent the belief that there should be lightheartedness and humor and community and togetherness just within open source software and I think it's kind of used as a symbol in a way like the symbolism to represent people who are like-minded

in that belief. So to me, that conference was just bringing those people together. So yeah, that was a lot of fun. It was the weirdest and wackiest crypto conference I've ever been to, but that was cool. Yeah, I mean, like you said, like, you know, I don't know how much we actually talked about Dogecoin specifically, but like, I think what it really did was by like calling it DogeCon, it attracted a certain type of person to the conference. Just like, just these very fun people essentially and like who were there to have a good time.

And so there was a panel from memory on like the. deconstructing memes like memeology and there was a there was a party shaman there like it was just like it was just completely different to any crypto conference and it was cool because nobody was sitting around talking about icos or what what to pump you know it was it was just very much down to earth and cool people this episode of epicenter is brought you by cosmos the internet of blockchains cosmos is live and we couldn't be more excited to see so many projects already building on it Blockchain technologies are evolving fast, and development shouldn't be one-size-fits-all. As a DAP developer, you need the tools that will allow your DAP to scale, grow, and evolve over time.

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The reason I actually wanted to do this episode was we kind of, a few months ago, we did our five-year epicenter AMA episode, like anniversary episode. And one of the questions was about, like, you know, what coins maintain their value. And Brian and I kind of got into a little, like, back and forth about the value of meme coins. And that, like, and, you know, by meme coins, I don't mean it specifically just like the funny memes. like Dogecoin, but just in general, this like, Bitcoin is a meme or like, like, light coin is a meme that's like the silver to Bitcoin's gold. What does that even mean? No one knows, but it's like somehow imbuted it with like billions of dollars of value.

And same with Dogecoin at some point, not today, but like, you know, a few months ago, Dogecoin also had billions of dollars of value. And so what do you think, you know, I know you, like you said, you're, you're, you're, you're skeptical about this idea of like, you know, the speculation. But do you think that there's any value in like this concept of like memes bringing together a community and value being created from like the fact that an interesting community exists? Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of sad to me that communities like that can exist in lieu of like a market cap. And I think that is the that is the thing that I like to try and like separate is having a good community from having a good community because the price right now, you know, gets people excited, which is actually why I like the bear market in a sense, because it means that the people that are still around are somewhat genuine in their beliefs, at least. And so it's, I think that in terms of those coins existing, like, I don't really, my challenge with all cryptocurrency, currencies is that I think they're extremely overvalued. And when you say that light coin has billions of dollars at value, it has billions of dollars in nominal value,

you know, sitting on it on coin market cap.com with a whole bunch of fake volume and who knows, you know, what would happen if there was actually a, you know, a run on that price and people tried to sell off. So I don't know. Like I feel like I like to separate out the community piece from the money piece. And this is one of the biggest problems, I think, that crypto has, is that it's the first kind of software movement where you have open source software that has an intrinsic financial incentive attached to it. And most other open source projects have that, like BitTorrent or, say, you know, communities like the Rust community, like for the language Rust. they can flourish and be these really like supportive communities of cool developers.

They can have codes of conduct. They can do all this cool stuff. And there's no financial incentive attached to that necessarily, right? There's no part of that code that they could change to potentially game it in a way that they get more money. And I think that's just a huge, it just shifts the incentive schemes for all of this, right? And this is like why I have trouble with any cryptocurrency. that starts having like very corporate interest. It's why I like had some issues with block stream.

It's why, you know, I freak out a little bit when I see Jack Dorsey like saying, hey, I'm gonna fund Bitcoin core developers. I'm like, oh, interesting. Like, what's the incentive scheme look like there for how decisions are made? And so I really wish that we could get back to a point where cryptocurrency was treated more just like communities, what were run just more like traditional open source communities. hard to do though because of the financial incentive. So I don't really have a solution for that problem, but I think it's just something that everybody should be aware of because I think there's a lot of

bias in this stuff that people don't have a lot of self-reflection on. And kind of then relating a bit to financial and economic incentives, you know, one thing that I guess Dogecoin tried to do in order to make it less speculative is it takes a very different approach to monetary policy as opposed to most cryptocurrencies and you know I personally like it a lot where like it's this not hyper deflationary coin and while and you know so could you talk a little and I know actually like you know from one of my reading the monetary policy actually changed a couple of times and so could you maybe go into that and like you know like we said we started off with that whole lucky coin randomness but then what was the decision around like making it this more or maybe first could you maybe describe the

monetary policy. So the monetary policy that a lot of people like to talk about with Dogecoin is that after it was mined out to 100 billion coins, the code works in such a way that there's a static block reward of $10,000, $10,000, $10,000 per block into perpetuity, right? So it's infinite, it's inflationary, but it's deflationary inflation if you think of the rate as the total supply. And you know a lot of people like to think that this was some amazing genius decision that that i or billy made um it wasn't it's actually a bug in in in the code so when we defined the you know when you when you back in the day when you used to like just fork a coin and make an old coin there were a series of magic numbers right some like variables um in the code um which you would change like max max money i think

was the one that we changed and we just thought that putting a hundred billion there would mean that the cap of the coin was 100 billion. We didn't know. We didn't know what we were doing. And so, funny story, actually, there's a great GitHub issue thread

with literally hundreds of comments on it. Guess who it was started by? Jay Kwan, founder of Cosmos, because he pointed out, he was the first person to report this issue. He said, hey, guys,

your coin isn't actually capped. Oh, wow. I did not know this. Jay never told me about this. But then Jay, Jay suggested, Jay Kwan literally said, I don't think you should remove this bug.

I think you should leave it in and have inflation to assist with lost coins, hacks, things like that. And just, you know, inflation can sometimes be a good thing. So, you know, the genius decision to leave it to, for Dogecoin to be inflationary is actually a product of J-Quan. I never knew this.

He has never told me about this. That's so cool. Okay. I guess, and then, you know, another interesting event that came along in the, like, technical timeline of Dogecoin was this decision to start merge mining with like coin and suddenly that brought a lot of hash power to Dogecoin. And so could you maybe like talk about that? Like you know, back when that happened, merge mining wasn't a common thing. It's, I guess it's really

still not even that common today even. But you know, when you ask someone, name two merger mine coins, it's usually name coin and doge coin. Yeah. So yeah, name coin was the first coin to really do merge mining. I think Satoshi might have even been involved in that to a very early degree. And what merge mining does is it basically takes two cryptocurrency protocols or blockchains that are using the same hashing algorithm for a proof of work and basically shares that work across the two chains. So you can get a reward, you can submit proofs and secure the network for both of those coins and also receive a block reward on both as well. So it increases your chance of making money for miners, everybody wins.

In Dogecoin, what led us there is that Dogecoin being a fork of Lightcoin and using S-Script as the hashing algorithm like a lot of others do, we got to a point in, I would say, it was in 2014, where, or maybe 2015, where there was so much hashing power on the light coin network, but so little on the Dogecoin network that it became very apparent that if just one random, you know, light coin miner with some ASICs wanted to 51% attack Dogecoin, they could in a heartbeat. It would be very easy. And this is the problem with shared, you know, proof of work algorithms. Fifty one percent attacks happen. And so Charlie Lee actually, creator of Lightcoin, actually came to us to the Dogecoin community and said, you guys should consider merge mining.

It's a great idea. Like, you'll inherit our security model. You know, he's a fan of Dogecoin. coin let's protect it and at first i was actually pushing back on it quite heavily um because uh you know light coin the future of light coin wasn't super clear back then um charlie wasn't active on the project he was working at coin base um and uh you know i was worried because when you start merge mining you you have to go and convince all the miners to start doing it and then those two coins are like joined at the hip right the success of those coins and the security model is joint at the hip and I'm like if Dogecoin does this it has to everybody has to accept that if light coin fails doge coin hence fails basically or its security

model fails and so I pushed back on that for quite a while this was in a world where the price of all these cryptocurrencies were a lot lower and so the the risk was not as big as it is today but eventually the community kind of got together and I said yeah this is probably a good idea I didn't have any bearing on it because I haven't being the developer on it for like since early 2014. And so the developers that currently maintain it made the changes and organized with all the miners. And merge mining was implemented. And ever since, it's had extremely good resilience in terms of security.

On the topic of development, it seems by looking at the GitHub repo that there hasn't been a whole lot of activity in the last year. and since 2015, I guess, is when activity kind of trickled down. Can you talk a bit about that? What are your thoughts here? And how do you think this is affecting the project going forward? Yeah, yeah. So I, after Billy kind of backed away, like after the first month or two of Dogecoin, I suddenly inherited this like unwieldy C++ code base that was based off an old version

of light coin that, you know, had all sorts of known bugs. And it was it was kind of like an oh shit moment. And so I very quickly had to rebase the entire kind of code of of doge coin off I think was 0.8.6 of like coin and release the next few builds. But I was working with a team of kind of contributors, notably one called Max, who goes by the handle Langerhands. and we kind of, you know, for a few months there, we're doing most of the development work, patching, you know, pulling in updates from upstream, codebases like Bitcoin and like coin. And then over time, I just, I didn't have the time. I didn't have the time because I work a full-time job.

I'm also not a professional C++ coder, and so I probably didn't have a right to be in there fiddling with things. But also, I didn't want to have a control over this. system. I didn't want to have any kind of say in future decisions about it because those decisions can weigh on you when you're making decisions like, should we merge mine? Like that's a huge decision that I frankly don't want to have to own. And so it was like kind of a lot of back and forth. And then eventually, I think it was in the late 2014 or early 2015, I handed over full GitHub permissions to to Matt.

and two other developers, Patrick and Ross, and they took over. They became the Dogecoin full-time development team. Well, full-time, you know, it's still a hobby for them. But they become the maintainers of it. I removed myself from the GitHub repo, so I have no access, no permissions. And kind of left it to them. And then they stood up, I think, a dev fund and a whole bunch of stuff like that, like any crypto project does.

I think what happened was, you know, it's a hobby for them. And you have to remember that after 2015, there was a huge lull in crypto until about 2017 when the whole Ethereum ICO thing happened. And so there just wasn't a good reason to really update the Dogecoin source code. It had, everything was working. Like, if it ain't broke, why fix it? And then I think there was some renewed interest in 2017, 2018 around, hey, update, because there might be some critical security issues with the current code. base. But, you know, again, it's their, it's their hobby. It's not their full-time job. And so I just think they haven't gotten around to it. Now, I get a lot of flack for saying this, but there hasn't been

a non-beta release of Dogecoin since 2015, you know, since shortly after I left. And that's worrying to me. I think it should be worrying to everybody. But there are some, like, there is some progress on like some betas that I think they're releasing. I think that you have to change the branch on GitHub that Ross claims to be releasing soon. So we'll see. But in terms of the code base, I would say it's almost in maintenance mode. It's just like security patches only rather than it being a new, like any new features, development or anything like that.

But again, I'm not officially speaking for the project anyway, so people don't get cranky at me. Yeah. So I don't know exactly when this was, but I think it's within the last year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there was this announcement that there would be this side chain on Ethereum. Can you talk a bit about that? And it strikes me that maybe having an Ethereum side chain, if everybody moves their doge over to Ethereum, well, you no longer have to maintain the codebase for Dogecoin. Yeah.

So for many years, people have talked about there being a doge to Ethereum. Ethereum Bridge or a, you know, we even back in the day, Jay Kwan and I used to talk about a tendament to Doge Bridge, a lot, actually. Some people, what ended up happening is Vitalik and others actually funded a bounty program. So I think Vitalik and a few others through what ended up being, because the Ethereum price run up about $100,000 or so in bounty, just to create a working prototype of the Doge Ether Bridge, right? So that and that that that obviously fueled a whole bunch of excitement because developers are like, hey, there's 100K on the table. Hell, I'm going to do this. So a bunch of people spun up different projects to try and do it. And essentially what it would be

is a bridge where you can send your Doge coin over to Ethereum and then it exists on the Ethereum network and send it back and vice versa, right? So Dogecoin exists in two places instead of one. And you know, the reason that I don't really see a point in this. is because it would exist as essentially an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain that you would be able to push Doge into and out of. There's so much overhead to do this work, but Ethereum as a network actually has higher transaction fees than Dogecoin. So like what's the point of doing this? Dogecoin has a 60 second block time like near zero transaction fees. What's the benefit that users of that cryptocurrency get out of switching it over to the Ethereum?

blockchain very little um and so for me the way i kind of adjudicate or assess these things as i say well what's the benefit to end users how would this help cryptocurrency get mainstream adoption or actual real world usage and i don't think it would i think it's a cool pet project i think it's a cool hackathon idea um but um a lot of people you know i think because they were they had a whole bag of doge coin they were hoping it would pump the price were like therium bridge ethereum bridge and what's you know that That's crazy. Like I said, it's a hackathon idea. It's not actually something that I think people would really use on the regular. So you're saying you don't want to be able to collateralize your maker die using Dogecoin. Oh, God.

No. So, I mean, I guess that leads into the question of like, what are your, like, thoughts on how, like, the crypto space has evolved in the last five years or, and, you know, maybe the last one year. and, you know, we see this movement towards defy or, and then, you know, the year before that was the D-Web and, like, what are your thoughts on just like this general movement in the crypto space and these new ideas that are coming around? Yeah, for sure. I think it's a, it's a, it's been a game of shifting narratives. I think I remember, and you remember as well, because you've been around for a long time in this industry. Years ago, people were talking about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as an

actual medium of exchange. You know, this is going to be used to pay for, at restaurants and pay for food. And there's a lot of people that like to claim that they never said that. I need to try and dig up recordings of them from presentations where I know that they said otherwise. Like, there's probably a lot of epitherto episodes you could start digging in. Hey, great idea, great idea. But, you know, it's a shift in narratives, right? And so the, the whole medium of exchange thing didn't happen because, you know, scalability was kind of the scapegoat for that. I actually, I'm starting to question whether scalability was the real reason that Bitcoin didn't take off for real tech retail commerce.

But so then that shifted and then it moved to this whole store of value thing, right? So, oh, no, we never said that crypto is a, is a thing you should actually use as a currency. You should be using it as a place where, you know, it's akin to gold, right? It's just a thing where you store your wealth and it goes up in price over time. And then that didn't really work out because they realized that, you know, hey, gold actually exists and so do stocks. And so they're like, oh, okay, actually it's about defy. It's about, you know, rebuilding, rebuilding banks essentially and large financial institutions

in the blockchain, which, you know, we're starting to get into this comical territory where it's like, hey, guys, all those financial institutions you said you were going to completely demolish and you know all the hierarchies you said you were going to demolish and because the blockchain would make people it would give people liberty and they'd be able to be their own bank you want to recreate all that bad stuff inside the blockchain and it's like okay like you can see where this is going um i don't really see the value in that i think the that already exists um and so the value of recreating it on a blockchain um to me doesn't have a lot of benefits because it actually makes the thing less efficient.

You know, it's centralized for a reason, and that's because it can be super efficient. You know, especially when you get to like these collateralized, like, loans and things like that, I just don't see a reason for doing that in crypto. So you have that whole side of it. And then I like to think of those people as the newcomers, right? So the whole defy movement,

typically people that I see have come into crypto late to the game, probably like 2016, 2017 onwards. And so you have people like that, that pomp guy who's like, yeah, like crypto, Liberty, like, let's recreate banks inside crypto. Wait, what? And then you have the OGs, right? So you have a whole bunch of people that have been around for a long time, the Bitcoin core developers, the lightning folks. But then you look at what they're doing and they've kind of like hunkered down in a bunker and they're creating like these Rube Goldberg machines for sending, you know, transactions. And it's baffling to me. It's like, um, the

the scaling solutions that we're coming up with, like lightning and all of that, um, are so, so, so complex that, that, um, there is, you know, Bitcoin is hard enough to get an average user of, of, of Venmo of Apple pay, et cetera, to just understand the concept of public and private keys, backing up a seed phrase using a Bitcoin wallet. Then you have to layer in lightning channels and the fact that you need to have, you know, all these lightning channels established, routing needs to happen, multi-hop. Like, from a user experience perspective, I don't see a way that they can kind of hide that efficiently that works and users. And so it's a little bit sad to me because I feel like

you've got people building impossible chaos machines in a basement. And they're cool developers. They're very smart. Like, I don't want to take away from what lightning and the likes of those teams are doing. And then you have like the institution folks who are all like defy, defy, let's let's turn this blockchain into a, into a corporate capitalist thing. I really don't see a sizable enough population of people in the middle kind of saying, hey, what about using cryptocurrency to actually transact? It's gone. It's gone. It just doesn't exist anymore. And I think the fact that we're at a point, Like, I hoped that Ethereum was going to establish a lot of this and do a lot of this. But the fact Ethereum is now rebranding as Ethereum 2.0, which a lot of people don't realize is completely different to Ethereum.

This isn't like just a patch to Ethereum. No, it's like, no, guys, Ethereum was a failure. Sorry, we need to completely re-architect the whole thing. I think that speaks volumes to how challenging it's going to be to actually just buy a cup of coffee with cryptocurrency. So I don't know, that's where I stand. And as an outsider, like, I have no financial incentives for this. I have no, it's not a job that I work in. And so I like to just call it as it is.

Like, as a product right now, I don't see how cryptocurrency is going to establish market fit or adoption. Yeah, totally. I mean, we actually, so we, just a few weeks ago, we did an episode with Amari Sechak, who is one of the core developers of Bitcoin Cash. And, you know, I might get some. flag for this, but I think, like, you know, the Bitcoin Cash community seems to be kind of trying to hit that middle ground you're talking about, like, some, you know, just really focusing on

scaling basic payments. And so, you know, I'm kind of hopeful there a little bit. I am too. You know, the sad thing that, like, I absolutely agree with you there. I think that there are some good, good goals. I think the intent is right with things like Bitcoin Cash. I think, unfortunately, the ego that surrounds the characters involved in every way, every way you look is really disappointing. But if it didn't have that attached to it, I think that would be actually really compelling. Yeah. Totally. So with all that, where do you think, where do you think crypto is going? And do you see any light at the end of the tunnel, proverbially? And do you see any positive things come out of this space? Yeah. Yeah, I do. I think.

that ultimately cryptocurrency is made up of several parts, right? Like Satoshi's original invention wasn't completely net new. It was, it was, it was, Satoshi was the glue that held together, um, existing concepts such as public key cryptography, uh, you know, um, hash chains, uh, linked lists essentially, um, you know, proof of work, which had already existed. It brought together these these several components to make something that was, you know, some of all parts. And I think that some of that can be extracted and used to improve the quality of users' lives and improve society. And so I still think that, you know, one thing that we've seen a huge need for just globally

has been an increase in user security, right? People need to care more about secure passwords, authentication, you know, having some level of security over their own identity, things like that. There are so many kind of pieces of work that are going into cryptocurrency that can be used for those purposes. Does it need a blockchain? Does it need a proof of work backed or a proof of stakeback network to do that? Absolutely not. But can some of the contributing parts be extracted out and contribute back to society? yes. I like to see the the cryptocurrency networks as they currently stand like things with a token

or a huge network as really kind of like the the super forward thinking kind of like eventual point where you're just experimenting with stuff. But out of that should should develop hopefully new developments in cryptography and just the way we think about security that can benefit everybody even if it doesn't have to end up being on a blockchain. And so that that's how. how I try to like paint the silver lining with this stuff is that it's started a conversation in many cases about you know individuals having better control over their identity their security their money which I think is a good thing so I'd like to circle back to you and so you mentioned that you don't work in cryptocurrency or you don't work in the blockchain space and so you know why did

you step away from the project and you mentioned the whole NASCAR thing, but was it something greater than that? Yeah, yeah. So I've always had a job outside of crypto. And so it wasn't really a matter of me, like, leaving cryptocurrency as a job to move back into just regular tech, which is what I do. It was more just, that was always what I was doing and crypto is my side project. It's always been the case.

And what kind of made me, and the way that I work, you know, crypto has to be my only side project. I've had many side projects over the years. The way I decide to work on a side project is if it gives me personal joy to work on that or I get something out of it in terms of like I'm learning. And I think what's happened, the kind of peaks and troughs in my involvement in crypto have really correlated to how much I feel I can learn from the current industry. And so when I left and moved away from crypto in 2015, I had very little involvement in crypto in 2015 and 2016, it was because I felt that all the conversations had shifted to these kind of startups that were like pitching, it's this on a blockchain.

And it was just, I wasn't going to learn anything from them rather than how to sell snake oil. And so I moved away. When a lot of the stuff started happening in 2017 with smart contracts and a whole bunch of new concepts, I was like, I can learn something again. I'm going to go back into that. I'm going to create an educational YouTube series about it as a hobby because, you know, when I, the thing, I don't think a lot of people realize this, the YouTube videos that I create are not just for my audience, but also for me because in researching them, I am learning about that thing.

And so that's the main reason I did it. It was because I learned something. And then what happened I found is that in late 2018, after I'd been doing it for about two years, I noticed a pattern as I started reviewing these different blockchain projects. I was like they're all the damn same. And so I stopped learning anything again. And so more recently, I've kind of backed away from cryptocurrency again. You'll notice that my YouTube channel, we were talking before the show,

was shifted to mechanical keyboard reviews because, you know, I find interest in that. I'm learning about something different. Cryptocurrency doesn't have anything to offer me personally right now. And that's kind of selfish in a way, but that's fine. fine. Like I should only spend my time on things that I actually care about. Yeah, I kind of agree with you on some points there. And it was similarly, you know, when, when I started at the sender and when, what was Brian and when we met back in 2013 or something, my goal was very much to learn about the technology. I mean, I had been in this space for less than the month when the podcast started. So in that sense, I understand, but I feel that I've constantly been learning things. I mean, I've learned so many things and I continue to learn things.

And my opinions have shifted. And I think that over the years, I've had periods where I've had doubts about the technology and about its ability to, you know, bring good into the world. And then other periods where I'm quite hopeful and I see interesting things happening. Oh, yeah. I still, you know, a lot of people think I'm just a, a, negative, Nancy, pessimist about everything. I do often say things that get me excited.

I just, you know, they're few and far between. And so this YouTube channel that you've been doing now, I guess, for about a year? I did it for about, I've done it for about two years, actually, yeah. So you're doing sort of these short reviews of blockchains, or like, I mean, you've also done some reviews of, like, hardware wallets and this sort of thing. and it's also somewhat tied into gaming, I feel like, and you're reviewing these mechanical keyboards. Like, what's the goal here?

What do you see this becoming in the future? Is it just another side project? Or do you have a bigger goal here of maybe, you know, turning this into a business or an educational venture or something like that? Yeah, no, I have no, I'm definitely not going to become a full-time YouTuber because spoiler alert, it doesn't pay very well, unless you're, you know, some sort of like video game streamer or something. But no, again, like, as I said, it's a way for me to learn.

And so I will post things on there from time to time now when I'm, I have something to talk about. But I'm not going to become a professional tech YouTuber or something like that. It's really much just a hobby for me. And so I'm one of those people that I get really excited about things for about a year or so. And I'm like, okay, onto the next thing. So I wouldn't be surprised. I'm currently trying to find another side project.

I'm thinking you're doing something with decentralized social networking again because nobody's cracked that nut. Yeah, that's one thing that perpetually I think keeps coming back and that people can't really find a solution to it. Yeah, it's hard. Very few have, yeah. And so you mentioned that you don't work in crypto and it's known that you work at a big software company.

do you have any ambition to maybe work in the crypto space, come back into the crypto space? I'm sure you've gotten, you've received many job offers over the years. Is this something you've considered? Not really. I don't have strong enough belief in the future of cryptocurrency to warrant working on it full time yet. It's the same as like if somebody said, hey, do you want to go and work for a VR startup? I'd be like, no. And I just, it's, it's too cutting edge for me.

And unproven. So no real desire to, you know, I, I toyed around with the idea of like potentially going and working for one of the, the larger, kind of more established and regulated companies in cryptocurrency. But, yeah, I'm glad I didn't because I think they've kind of, what I've noticed at least is a of those bigger companies have kind of lost their heart a little bit and in the name of profit. So I'm glad that I've kind of, the other reason I'm glad about this is because it also not working in cryptocurrency reduces the bias. I think that I had I worked at cryptocurrency

companies the last five years that I've been in the space would have in some way, even if indirectly contributed to some bias in my opinions about things. And I'm glad I haven't had that. It's kept me grounded to not be involved in a day-to-day. And so, you know, we mentioned at the beginning of this up near the beginning, you know, you're one of the domain name squatters when you have an interesting idea. And so any of those domain names, like, you know, that are particularly interesting to you and, you know, anything that the viewers might find intriguing or at least amusing and anything any of those side might be turning into side projects anytime soon what's in your what's in your go daddy account

it's funny you mentioned that i i literally just went through and uh turned off order renew on all of my all of my domains i don't have a good one right now i uh okay i was working on a side project for a little bit there uh called chime which was kind of a twitter alternative uh and it was open source. I think my next thing will be getting back into that. You mentioned Mastodon earlier. I'm a big fan of Mastodon, which is a decentralized social network,

a federated social network, I should say. I kind of want to get back into that area because I think that there's an increasing, increasing demand for an alternative to say Facebook specifically. And that company is just evil at this point. And so there needs to be an alternative. I wholeheartedly agree with that statement. We're going to have to leave it there.

Jackson, thanks for coming on today. And it was great to talk to you. And hopefully we'll have you back on. At some point in the future, if you decide to come back in the crypto, maybe you'll launch the next meme coin and you'll have to come back on time. Or a decentralized social network. Thanks for having me, guys.

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