Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Looking Back on 5 Years of Epicenter

Episode Date: January 15, 2019

Epicenter turned 5 years old this month – that’s a long time in the blockchain space! When the podcast began in January 2014, the entire ecosystem was made up of only Bitcoin and a handful of altcoins. Soon after, the Ethereum white paper was published which ushered in a new era of crypto assets and decentralized applications. Since then, we have released 270 episodes and interviewed some of the leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, and engineers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. Needless to say, we have learned a lot about the blockchain industry, but also what it takes to run a successful podcast in this space. This week, we look back on the early days of Epicenter and how the podcast has evolved over the years. We also answer your questions in our first ever AMA. Finally, we take stock of 2018 and the trends that marked this past year. 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. This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/270

This episode of Epicenter is brought you by Microsoft Azure. Configure and deploy a consortium blockchain network in just a few clicks with pre-built configurations and enterprise-grade infrastructure. Spend less time on blockchain scaffolding and more time building your application. To learn more, visit aka.ms. Slashenter. Hi, and welcome to Epicenter. My name is Brian from In Krain, and we're now five years in, basically, of doing this podcast.

So we wanted to come together for kind of a special episode. with just a host. Basically, everyone, except Mayhew is still on leave. So, yeah, I look forward to a discussion. We're going to speak a little bit about the, there's some announcements. We're going to have some questions from listeners that we're going to respond to. And then we're going to speak a little bit about sort of our take about the blockchain space where we're at and where things are going.

So hopefully, you'll enjoy that. So just before we get started and into the meat of things, I do want to mention I was at the Hyperlogy Global Forum in December in Basel, Switzerland. And I was invented by the Linux Foundation to do some interviews with some people there. And I recently released those interviews. So there are five interviews that were released with Brian Bellendorf, Leon Kemp, Matthew Davy of a company called Kiva, Doug Johnson-Ponkyn, a company called Circular,

and Jesse Chenard of Moneta-Go. and you can find those on our YouTube page. So they were published by the Linux Foundation and HyperLedger, but there's a playlist on our YouTube page. And you can also read a takeaway article that I wrote on our medium.com slash Epicenter Podcasts and all the takeaways from that event are there, including the videos if you want to find them. So yeah, it was a really interesting event.

Definitely very different from the other events we had attended in the recent months, you know, the DefCon 4 and Web 3 and everything. It was a very different vibe, but nonetheless, very interesting. So I hope you'll enjoy those interviews and the content from that conference. So with that, I just want to maybe spend a few minutes on the recent announcement that we turned five. And so we mentioned the last week's episode, but maybe we remember us a little bit on the last five years of the show. I mean, for me, when I first started this, when I first got introduced to blockchain and Bitcoin, particularly back then, I was working as a user experience consultant. It was a very, very different career, I guess, trajectory that I had in front of me.

But discovering this space just totally changed my life. And I guess for the better, I learned a lot. I think that's one of the things I didn't mention last week. thinking about after listening to the episodes, that just how much I've learned in the last five years has been just tremendous. Not only about computer science and cryptography,

but also just generally about finance and economics and the way that global finance works and this sort of thing. And that's been really, really fascinating. What about you, Brian? True, yeah. I guess that's something that maybe becomes more clear.

when you look back on things. Because interviewing so many people and, you know, you always do a few hours of research and then you interview them, it is a great way to learn. I mean, that was initially one of the reasons why I wanted to do the podcast because I, you know, back then I learned about Bitcoin. I was like, oh, this is amazing. I want to do something in the Bitcoin space as it was called back then and didn't really know what to do.

But of course, I felt like, okay, learning is going to be key. Meeting people is going to be key. and interviewing them is a great way to do both. So I think it certainly succeeded in that regard. Cool. Any favorite moments during your five years at Epicenter, both of you? There's a lot of great moments. I think for me, it's not one moment in particular, but it's, you know, the five years has been punctuated by moments where I felt incredibly grateful and kind of humble. to be speaking with the person that I was speaking with.

And I remember getting that on a few occasions. And one was the first time that we had David Andolfato on the podcast three years ago, I think. Getting the opportunity to speak to a central bank economist and to be able to ask them questions in an open forum where I have no formal training in economics or finance, don't come from academia. It was just really, really a very intense experience. Also speaking with people like Brendan Ike, founded Mozilla,

and even like Brian Bellendorf. Like when I speak to, for me, the most humbling moments were those moments where I got to speak to people that founded the web and created the web. and who were there at that time. And there's a lot of other occasions, I think, when that happened. One moment, I think this sticks out the most, which is kind of a funny moment, kind of an anecdote. I was in Toronto once with a friend,

and we'd been out drinking, and we were in a taxi, and we got in this taxi, and after a few minutes in the cab, like an Uber, actually, after a few minutes in the Uber, the guy looks in the rearview mirror and although we had been speaking about nothing about blockchain or anything, he looks in the rear rear mirror and he says, hey man, do you do a blockchain podcast?

And he was actually like a blockchain consultant side job Uber driver and I remember my friend who's didn't know much about the podcast kind of looked at me and was like, wait a minute, is this guy recognizing you in a taxi?

So that was one of the funny moments I think I remember the most the last five years. Wow, that's super cool. Yeah, I think that's, I think it's, you know, speaking to people who are experts in something other than you are an expert in, that's one of the hallmarks of this, of this ecosystem, right? Because it brings together so many diverse people that in most instances, when you talk to someone interesting, they're an expert in something,

and it's usually not the thing you're an expert in. So yeah, I totally, I totally get that. What about you, Brian? What were your favorite moments? I mean, one thing that came to mind when you asked that question is, you know, years ago, the space was much smaller. And back then, some people will remember that there was the whole Bitcoin scaling debate, which started many years ago. And I just, I remember when we did an episode of Mike Hearn,

and in the episode, and at the time, it wasn't really obvious that there was so much conflict within Bitcoin development. Like I think people weren't aware of it. And then he had, he said this thing,

oh, Bitcoin development had ground to a halt. And afterwards, there was these Reddit discussions of like hundreds of responses. And, you know, it feels a little bit. I mean,

I may be wrong about this, but at least, you know, it looked like that kind of came to the public attention, like all, of these rifts that they were in the different directions, you know, that later led to the split with in to Bitcoin cash and, uh, and Bitcoin and then, you know, Gavin and Dries and Mike Kern

and others kind of leaving the community. So I felt like, you know, the podcast we did back then with, you know, these people had this kind of role in that. So I think that's kind of, you know, an interesting thing. Um, and it stands out to me. I remember that standing out to me as I mean, of course, in hindsight, but at the time thinking, wow, we're getting some attention because of this? It was just kind of surreal that this discussion that we had

of this person on a Skype call was now making all these waves and getting noticed on Reddit and all these other forums. And also what I thought was very cool or cool in some weird way was when the SEC wrote this paper about the Dow

and then quoted our episode there's like evidence that the DAO was his security. So I thought that was pretty funny. That was also fantastic. Okay, so today I learned you both like drama and causing drama and stirring up drama. We haven't caused that much drama. I think we've been pretty drama-free considering. Generally, people don't come on Epicenter to cause drama.

There are other places where they can do that. But there's definitely some cases where people have said things. where we thought, huh, this could maybe cause some drama, but then, you know, didn't that much. Cool. For last week's episode for the introduction five-year episode, you said that you didn't see this coming. So five years ago, this would have felt daunting, knowing that you would actually have to put out an episode every week consistently for the next couple of years. what was the point in time when either of you realized that you would be doing this for a while now? I think I'm still realizing it.

I mean, it might be worth mentioning that, you know, I left Stratum earlier this year, and I spent most of the year kind of traveling and not really paying attention to blockchain very much. And when I started coming out of that, like later in the year, sometime or I, on September or October. The only real thing that I felt like I wanted to do at this time was to spend more time on Epicenter and spend more time kind of like growing the business and growing the podcast and sort of generally working on the more business side of things, bringing on new hosts potentially. But yeah, until then, it really felt kind of like a side project.

you know, we were obviously had sponsors and were generating revenue, but never really paid ourselves or, or, you know, since I guess 20, maybe 14, 2015, when both Brian and I were not spending time on other projects, hadn't really felt that this was something that, you know, we could do more long term. But now, now more than ever, I think, like, I feel that, okay, there's still lots to do. when I have sort of my checklist of all of these things that I need to check off in order for Epicenter to become a great business. From the beginning, you know, I thought this is something you have to do for kind of an extended period for it to make any sense, right, in so many ways. Like, first of all, you get better over time. And then, you know, the building up an audience is a very gradual thing. I mean, you know, Sebastian mentioned a little bit, like kind of podcasting as a business.

But I think podcasting is a business still today is in its like infancy, right? You really have the first companies, you know, bigger podcasts, turning it into proper businesses in the last, you know, two years, three years. Maybe there were very few that a bit earlier. So I always felt it could be this like long-term thing. And so I mean, maybe I misremember, but I don't think it's so unexpected to. to me that we ended up, you know, doing this for such a long time. I think your reviews have changed about this, though, because I remember when we were first when we first started talking about this early on, my recollection is that, and maybe you were

right at the time is my recollection is that you felt that this wasn't really a business that you could scale that much, or at least if you were going to scale it, you had to have, like, massive audience. But it's true that that has definitely changed the last few years with the growth of podcasting in sort of the more general, you know, population, whereas before it was kind of a niche thing. Yeah. Also, one thing that I just think very strongly here is that podcasting is so limited at the moment by the technology that it's run on. So basically the delivery through RSS feeds. So I think if you didn't have that, so that has a lot of implications. right? Like we can't, like we don't know exactly how many people, you know, listen to the podcast.

We don't control the experience that you kind of use experience or the way that people consume it, right? So that is extremely limiting. And I do think, yeah, this kind of just the way podcasts are delivered, you know, which is, I guess, is historically based on Apple and iTunes and the decision they make and leveraging RSS standard. I think that's really confined podcasting enormously. And I think if it wasn't like that, you would see so much more innovation and activity around podcasts. So I'm still in the back of my mind always waiting. It's like when is an alternative going to come? And it's interesting because I recently read an article.

I don't know if this data point is true, but it wasn't this article that in the U.S., the industry size of podcasting is something like $300 million. So that's the revenues across like all the podcasts. So it's really, you know, kind of tiny industry. But that in China, it's, I think, 20 times as big, right? Even though China is a much smaller economy and, you know, much more not technologically as advanced or in some ways maybe it is. But just because there's totally different ways that podcasts are delivered and consumed there. And so, yeah, that's one of the things I'm still, you know, hopefully somebody will,

crack this, but it's, of course, extremely hard problem because people are so used to the way they consume podcasts, so creating something different. I think it is changing a little bit, and we've seen it more in the last few years, and there's a shift now towards, it kind of started with Stitcher, and where now people are consuming with Spotify, and they're consuming with Stitcher and Google Play and all these different platforms. Of course, the majority of listeners still listen through the good old fashion RSS feed, but we are, I think, seeing kind of a shift.

And what would be interesting is if really the audiences sort of flattened out across all these platforms, essentially what would happen then is that we'd have a very decentralized type of distribution, whereas if you look at sort of video distribution, if you're producing video today, the only game in town really is YouTube if you're outside of China or like any market that has kind of a specific platform. And you can get deplatformed or like lose your revenue very easily. Whereas with podcasting it, the way things are going, I think that maybe in five to 10 years, things will be much more resilient. And you'll, as a as a content creator, you'll have this multitude of platforms where you're publishing and maybe revenue streams coming from different places.

Yeah, but I don't think that's really, the point, because even something like Spotify, you actually have no control whatsoever about the experience. And, you know, in many other industries, with many other products, you can say, okay, I'm producing this and I can, like, give you this product and you give me, let's say, a dollar or something like that, right? Which is something that, for example, in podcasting is basically not possible,

really in the way it's delivered. And I do think that's a big, you know, for example, has meant that podcasting is largely advertisement driven. And for example, I think in China, the reason why this is so much bigger industry is because podcast producers can just charge people for listening to podcasts. Oh, I see what you mean.

Yeah, okay. So more on the, yeah, I agree. Yeah, on the business model side of things, it is difficult to produce stuff and charge for it. I mean, there are platforms to do it, but it's not inherent to the experience of the way that people listen to podcasts, which most people listen to podcasts today, which is the RSS feed. But yeah, this is a whole other discussion.

So we got some questions submitted from some of you. So we wanted to address some of those questions. So one of them was, okay, so looking ahead to 2019, are there any guests in particular that you really want to have on the show? Or I think it's sort of related question to this. maybe like are there any areas that you're particularly interested in doing episodes about one idea that i've honestly been like you know just like kicking around in my head for a little while now is i thought it would be really cool to have a pseudonymous guest on the show so like

you know i'm talking about like you know like you know Satoshi hasn't been like you know very public for the past few years kind of hard to get a hang out get get reach of but You know, I think it would be really cool to, like, there's some very cool, interesting pseudonymous teams working out there right now. So, for example, like the Avalanche team or a lot of the grin team. And so, or, you know, even some individual contributors, such as, like, there's a guy named Dexeran in the Ethereum Classic community or Cobra Bitcoin is that, you know, he's very popular on Twitter. So I don't know. I just thought it would be really cool and, like, a novel, interesting experience to get, uh, you know, a new, like a pseudonymous person on. And I also think it'll be just a very interesting technical

challenge for us to like figure out how to do. Like, how are we going to do this? Is it going to be like some garbled speech thing? Is it going to be a text of speech? I don't know how this is going to work. And I just think that would be a very interesting and unique experience that I don't think I've ever seen any podcast do before. Yeah, you're mentioning that in our Slack channel. I think the most interesting aspect of that is how would we actually prove that this person is who they say they are? And how do we convey that to our audience in a way that they could trust that this person is actually who they say they are? That's true. I mean, how do these people convince that anyways, like when they're just posting on message forums and stuff?

How do we know that the COBRA Bitcoin on Twitter is the same as the one on Reddit? Yeah, I mean, I guess they could just kind of. of tweet and say like, hey, I was on epicenter this week and this is actually who I am. Yeah, I guess that would be one way to do it. Yeah. And then beyond that, another thing I really liked was I like, so far this year we started doing a lot more, like, you know, spreading out a little bit from just like cryptocurrency projects.

And we've been doing a lot of book authors lately, which I actually really found fun. I don't know. Maybe it's something about like people who are really good at, like, writing their thoughts out on like, like, hundreds and hundreds of pages also really good at, like, speaking or something, but I always just thought the conversations we've had with book authors have always been really good. So I'd love to have some more of them on. Yeah, I agree.

What about you, Felica? I'm looking forward to, so basically, if you look at the cryptocurrency projects currently that have a lot of users, they're all exchanges. So what I'm looking forward is to cryptocurrency projects that build debts that have a lot of users. So basically, if you look at the usage of DAPS currently, it's at most a couple of hundred users per day for the very top

for the very top DAPS and that's mostly decentralized exchanges, so say IDEX or so. But I mean, that's bound to happen. So we're bound to see DAPS with say 50,000 daily users probably, my guess would be like sometime mid

this year. And I find that actually having users using a platform typically matures projects a lot. So if you look at the professionality of people running big exchanges, there really is a gap to people who are building gaps, just because basically you grow with your number of users and your experience grows and your problems grow,

and hopefully you find solutions. And I think that's going to be a super exciting first. having someone on with a DAP that has a ton of usage. The other thing that I really look forward to is seeing zero-knowledge applications and interviewing people who are building them, just because there's a whole different set of challenges that comes with that,

such as often ceremonies and toxic waste and things that most of us don't think about most of the time. The one thing that comes to mind that is, I've been wanting to do for quite a while, it's just more episodes on Bitcoin. I feel we, you know, Bitcoin was very, you know, one point, something we talked about a lot. And I feel we've, you know, done a really lot on Ethereum. And I think we've become sort of too overweight on Ethereum and haven't covered Bitcoin enough.

So I'd be interested in doing some episodes about, you know, what's going on in Bitcoin development, like what are some of the technical things people are working on. I would be interested in doing some lightning network episodes. I mean, we've done, I think, maybe two before. But it's been the last one was probably two years ago. And I think there's a lot of development there that, you know, seems to maybe finally be somewhere near actual usage. So yeah, I would like to do some things on that. Yeah, I echo that. And it's what I answered in one of the Reddit questions is I feel that we've been we've been commandeered by all the Web3 stuff.

And to some extent have kind of neglected Bitcoin. I actually, like, I'm honestly pretty misinformed about what's going on in that space at the moment. you know there was that whole thing with bitcoin sv a little while back and we it probably should have covered it that's not a lot of drama happening that's not what i mean that that's not what no no of course i know that's not what you mean but but still like there there are things happening in the bitcoin space and we haven't been paying particular attention to it but also like on the technical side what's the state of being able to build daps on on Bitcoin, that sort of thing.

Or, you know, what's the state of the Lightning Network? You know, what's the state of the different implementations there? Are people being able to process payments? This sort of stuff. So, yeah, maybe we should make that a goal for 2019 is to do at least five episodes about Bitcoin. If you've listened to previous episodes with Marley Gray and Matt Kerner, you know that Microsoft is committed to providing enterprise-grade tools

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and enterprise, check out AKA.m.s slash Epicenter and start building today. We'd like to thank Microsoft Azure for their support of Epicenter. Given that the question was which guests in particular, who would be maybe like, you know, let's say you could have like one dream guest on that like, oh my God, that would be such a reach. Like, it would be amazing if we could, I would love to do an episode with them. Who would that be for you guys? For me, I think early on, and maybe this was a little bit more relevant a few years ago because it was a bit more vocal about it. was getting someone like Richard Branson or his name escapes to me, but the former Greek finance minister?

Vidal Faccus? Yeah, Valfagos. And recently we kind of throw it out on the idea of maybe getting Christine Lagarde on the show, which would be just amazing to be able to speak to someone, that level of visibility. it's a political experience. And yeah, I think those would be on my list. Yeah, I second that.

So I would also have gone with real world people because it feels like people within the space they're usually super happy to come on. So there's no one really who's so far really resisted. So it's, yeah, it's it's, it is the people who are shaping the financial word out there, other, you know, aside from from cryptocurrencies that would also interest me most. For me, I guess I would have to choose either between, the first would be Peter Thiel,

because I just, you know, I love his book zero to one and I just really like how he thinks. He has like a very, you know, he's just like very, you know, pretty libertarian, but like, you know, he has his like own like little interesting take on it, which I always thought was a bit cool. And then my second choice would be Rick Falkvinch, who was the founder of the Pirate Party. I always, I was super fascinated by the Pirate Party. Once again, I read his book, which is called Swarm Wise. And I even like, so when I was a student at UC Berkeley, we had this little student government thing called the ASCC. And so I actually created a pirate party. So at Berkeley, there were, like, already political parties and stuff, like two big ones. And so I just, you know, me and

a couple of other friends. We created a new political party called the Pirate Party at Berkeley. And we ran and we actually won one of the seats on the student government, which was kind of cool. So, I don't know, Rick Falcvin just seems really interesting to me. I really like how he thinks. And I really like a lot of his work on like swarms. I think it's like a really, there's a really cool like comparison to be made on like, you know, swarms and dows to me seem like two different types of decentralized organizations. but with like very different designs. To me like DAWS are like safety favoring decentralized organizations while Swarms are liveness favoring decentralized organizations,

which I think this is like a cool concept. And I don't, you know, a lot of people are putting a lot of effort into like, you know, structuring using DAWS. I think swarms are another really cool opportunity to explore as well. So we'd love to have him on. Interesting anecdote about Rick Falphins is one time, a long time ago, I think probably in our first year, we were short a guest, and we needed a guest for the following Monday. And I don't know why Rick Falfinge came to mind.

And I went on his website, and there on his website was his mobile number. And I texted him. I was like, Rick, we're a blockchain podcast or Bitcoin podcast back then. And we'd love to have you on the show. Can you come on this week? And he never responded. Oh, no. You can find his phone number on his website.

try to get him on. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure that's possible. Yeah, we should have them on. I suspect that that won't be an issue. Yeah, a few, I guess two actual people that come to mind. One is Yuval Harari. So he wrote this book called Sapiens and Homodeos,

which basically this book about sort of human history and the future of humanity. And it's just like an incredible mind. Yeah, the amazing books. And he thinks so much about the trajectory of technology and where things are going. And actually one of the things that stood out to me in his book is like, where's blockchain? And, you know, it was kind of missing. But I heard him, an interview with him more recently where he did mention it a bit. So I think he's probably become more familiar of it since he wrote this book.

So I would love to have him on and learn a bit about sort of his thoughts about how blockchain and cryptocurrencies fit into these broader technological and societal narratives. Another person that comes to mind is, you know, Brian Armstrong. He, I think, hardly gives any interviews, right? You never see him on any podcasts or anything like that. But it's just, he's built such an incredible company with Coinbase that has such a huge influence on the space. So, you know, he would be great to have on.

And then the third one comes to mind, but I don't know a particular person here, but I would be interested in hearing from somebody who comes maybe from a kind of a military background and who has some thoughts about, you know, like cyber warfare and, you know, the role that blockchain and cryptocurrencies could play in that and how kind of, you know, these type of organizations, you know, that think a lot about, you know, geopolitical conflict and how to get advantages over, you know, other nations, how they look at blockchain and cryptocurrencies. So, yeah, he knows somebody. The Swiss guy is asking about how to, like, you know, use cryptocurrency for war.

Yeah, war or maybe defensive, right? You could potentially also use some blockchain system maybe to make your own country more resilient. But, you know, I also remember, you know, years ago I read this book called Currency Wars, where he spoke quite a bit about, you know, sort of the way people can or countries can manipulate currencies in kind of, you know, economic warfare in a way. So it would be interesting to hear how, you know, how people like that think about it, although presumably it will be very difficult to find somebody. you know, to come on to actually speak about that.

One thing that just came to mind and I think probably is worth mentioning because as listeners, you don't really get access to this, but we've been consistently putting out episodes every week for 270 weeks now, except for one week earlier, or sort of in September of 2018 when we released an episode. but there have been a lot of times where it has come down to the wire where

you know it's Monday or Tuesday and we don't have a guest or a guest cancels or something happens so just just know as a listener there's a lot of effort that's gone into making sure that every week there's an episode and there's been a lot of near misses and there's a lot of times where I'm sure I've lost hair over thinking about what we're going to do this week. But yeah, I think it's gone pretty well, but a lot of sweat has been shed from trying to get episodes every week sometimes. So we got another question about,

and I think I'll ask the question. I'll also briefly answer it. And maybe some of the other people can also weigh in. But what criteria inform our choice for guests and topics? And I think there's a few things. Of course, you know, how interesting is the idea? Is it something big and novel? And if it works, could it like fundamentally change the blockchain space or the world?

So that's certainly one thing. And then, you know, the quality of the project, you know, or they have they worked on this for a long time? Are they like serious about it? It was just showed up and wanted to do an ICU or something. And then something that has changed, at least for me, is that I now really kind of prefer projects to come on a little bit later in their life cycle. So I think in the past, we often had projects on when it was just like a white paper.

And at the time, that was necessary because projects were just much earlier on in their stage. So there were fewer projects that were more advanced. And there was just less going on in the space. but now I feel like we've gotten to a point where there's really a lot of quality projects and they tend to be further advanced. And, you know, when we have a project on, generally we have them on once. And only if they become something huge, like let's say Ethereum, we have them on again. So I feel, you know, when people come early on, often I'm like, you know, we'll be visited

in like six months or a year. And I don't think I've ever regretted that. I think it's always been good that they have some more time to actually build out something or something you can actually use and see. I mean, Dharma is an example here, right? We did the Dharma episode. I mean, I met the Dharma almost a year ago when they were just starting out. And I think Ryan Zura at the time was like, say, hey, meet these guys.

You should have one epicenter. And, you know, when I met them, it was clear, okay, at some point, probably a one that should have them on. but I think it was good to wait for them to develop and I think it was a better episode because of that. Yeah, I totally agree. And I do want to say that, Brian, you've been a really great filter for filtering out potential bad content on Epicenter.

I know myself, you know, Mayherr and all of us have suggested episodes and you've been really good at putting your foot down and saying, no, we're not going to do this because this is going to be a bad episode or I don't think this is interesting. And we sort of have to go back into or go back to the drawing board and try to suggest something else as an episode.

Thank you for that. Okay. So another question was, okay, what 10 blockchains will be around five years from now? Frederica, what are your thoughts? That's mean picking on me like that. Yeah, so there are a couple where I am fairly certain they're going to be around. So I'm pretty sure Ethereum and some shape or form is going to be around. Pretty sure Bitcoin is also going to be around. And this is a little bit where the uncertainty for me creeps in.

So there are a number of contenders. After that, things like Zcash and, yeah, then that goes downhill quickly from there. So there are a lot of, so five years, actually, you know what, let me rephrase. So I think in five years, a lot of the, a lot of the chains that we see today are going to be around. I don't think a lot of them will have died by then. I think a lot of them will have become marginal, though. So I'm pretty sure that things like Eos and Zcash and Monero and all their friends are still going to be around in some form. I just don't think their stake is going to be as big. So I've made it to five.

So maybe now Sunny can jump in. So I guess, you know, my vision is always that I think that there would be a lot of chains in a couple of years. But, you know, I would say one of the things that I definitely think is the things that have the most staying power are the things that have the most meat. power and so the things that have the strongest memes are probably what's going to stay around for a long time So I think Bitcoin has a great meme around it like this whole like digital gold thing it has going on I think like light coin has like a great meme around it

It's like you know it's the silver to Bitcoin's gold is it like any technologically better? That's a horrible meme man I don't know it's working it's been working for like years and Like explain to me why like like coin is like you know top five on coin market cap or whatever it is now. Like, but like, you know, it's,

I always found like coins so fascinating because it's just like, you know, it is providing almost nothing to the table from a technological standpoint. It is, the only thing it is bringing to the table is this pure meme.

And that somehow has been giving it value. Like, you know, if we put this question in the reverse, which coins from five years ago are still kicking it today? And light coin is one of them, right?

Like, it is one of the coins that's like, over five years old that's still in like, you know, the top five, top 10 in coin market cap. So, you know, meme power works. And so, you know, that's why I'm still long dogecoin. I think that also ties into an interesting question, which is how do blockchains die? And I think for a long time, people have this idea. Oh, blockchain's always around, right?

There's always going to be like some kind of trading or blockchains and, you know, somebody mining it, even if nobody uses it. And I think what we are seeing now, and I think what we will see a lot, is actually blockchain's dying. And I think we're seeing it a little bit with, you know, we see the process by which has happened, at least for proof of work blockchains. This may be different for proof of stake blockchains. But right, for proof of work blockchains, if they all use the kind of same mining hardware,

it becomes extremely cheap to attack it, right, and to like double spend it. So then I think you have exchanges trading these coins and easily in it attacker can go in and they can, you know, for little money, they can do a huge reorganization and basically scam the exchange. And that just happened with Ethereum Classic, which, you know, isn't even such a small chain. So, and then I think last year it happened quite a bit with smaller blockchains. But I think that's going to probably happen like, you know, at scale. And then they get delisted from exchanges. Then like, hey, you know, there's really no point anymore mining it, right? There's no revenues.

So I think you will have this kind of gradual death of many, especially smaller proof of work chains. And of course, developers abandoning the chains happens all the time, right? I think that we've had for a long time. Yeah, I mean, I've been, like, you know, relatively decently, like, you know, involved with the Ethereum Classic community for a while. And, you know, it's been very interesting to see the state of that chain in the past year. So everyone's, you know, there was a lot of hoopla around like the whole 51% attack this week.

But I think one thing that may have went under the radar for a lot of people was about a month and a half ago. Like there was a huge like, you know, kind of like split between a lot of the dev teams. And so one of the things that happened in Ethereum Classic was there was like a lot of dev teams working on it. But then like it seems that like over time, a lot of the dev teams just started splitting off and working on like other stuff. Like, you know, I-O-H-K started working on, like, you know, kind of like shifting 100% of their focus towards Cardano. You know, there was a lot of, like, conflict on, like, some of the stuff. And so, yeah, I think, to me, I think it's, like, when the developers stop caring about it

and the community is just not there ready to pick it up. That's kind of when things start to die off. Which will be the my space of blockchains in five years. It's like, to your point, Brian, is when blockchains start to die, well, what constitutes the dead blockchain? And by what metrics do you qualify a blockchain to be dead? You know, if there's still some activity on it or not. One question I think maybe is interesting is to consider what new types of

blockchains might emerge that we might find unlikely. So I was recently, like I said, at this event and there's this blockchain in Switzerland that is, that was built by like Swisscom and the Swiss Post. and it's regulated and people are building applications on top of it for trading equity, basically. So will we see this type of nationally controlled, per se, blockchain emerged in some places and some markets? And will there be some significant activity there is maybe one possibility? Oh, I actually have another interesting story about dead blockchains. So one of my coworkers and friends, Chris Goes, he works with me on Cosmos, but he has a side project called Wyvern.

It's like a decentralized exchange he's built on top of Ethereum. And for this exchange project, he wanted a token that for purposes of governance, like he wanted Dow, that kind of, controls like the upgrade of path of the chain. But, you know, he didn't want to do like an ICO or anything like that. And so what he did was he went on Bitcoin talk and like just went to like and just like flip through like super old dead threads of like dead chains. And he found this one called Wyvern of this like coin from like 2014 or something, 2013 of like a proof of work chain.

The chain's completely dead. No one's mining on it. It's like just a completely halted chain. And he just like message that Bitcoin thread for him. And he's like, Bitcoin forum thread. And he's like, hey, I'm launching this new project. I want to, I want a token distribution. Are you, if I just airdrop all my, all, all these tokens to like, you know,

the last known distribution of this chain, would you guys be like willing to jump on and, like, take over this like project? Like, you know, be the Dow holders of this Wyvern decks I'm building. And like, you know, it works somehow. like, you know, he actually has like a little community kicking around just from like reviving a dead project, which I thought was kind of like very interesting. Now that we've covered all these questions from the MA and thank you to those who ask questions, maybe spend a little bit of time on 2018 and, you know, the events of last year. So maybe to all of you, I would ask, what is the most important thing that happened in 2018? what sticks out in your mind as the most significant event?

Well, I think the most important thing certainly is the bare market, right? So the complete collapse of prices, you know, I mean, the change that's gone through is so enormous. No, you had all of these mainstream people in. I remember like Christmas last year, everybody was asking about blockchain and Bitcoin. Should it buy this year, nobody cares. So you, and then, you know, you have SEC going after project. I think just that this bare market is like a huge thing. And it's not clear exactly what are all of the second and third order consequences.

So I also remember reading some articles where people talked about, you know, for example, crypto funds, right? When crypto funds like collapse in their assets under management, like economically, it doesn't really become that meaningful anymore for the fund managers to keep going because they have to go up so much until they actually make money or they earn too little to pay for their operations, right? So what happens when all of these crypto funds shut down? So that could be sort of a second order consequence. But I'm really curious, what are these consequences that we're not seeing yet of this bear market? Yeah, I also think it's the bear market. But I see a different

a different facet as well. So now that a lot of the investors and blockchain tourists have departed, it changes the energy of the space in the way that it makes it more manageable towards people who actually build stuff and gives them time and takes off the pressure to present done projects and it just gives people to actually build a time to build solid technology. And of course, there's a flip side to that. So in the past couple of weeks, we've seen huge layoffs in many big established companies in the space.

And obviously there's a lot of hat that comes with that. But I think for the ecosystem as a whole, this has the potential to be a really good thing. So yeah, kind of like going off of that, you know, what I thought. like despite the bear market, what I thought was very, like, promising in 2018 was we saw the launch of a lot of big projects. So, you know, we saw the launch of a lot of big DAPs, like ZeroX, Auger, Maker. Maker was kind of in the tail end of 2017, but like, you know, in December. So I really, like, kicked off in 2018. And then as well as a lot of new platforms like EOS and Tezos.

So, you know, this is kind of, despite, it was, you know, it was, you know, heartening to see that, like, Despite the bare market, like people were still building stuff and launching stuff and, you know, the space is still moving forward despite the price crash. I think it will force companies to really, you know, think differently about how they're building products. I think one thing that I would say is probably a good thing is to try to solve your own problems. I think that's a very underrated aspect of like building a product is building something that's, meaningful to you and building products that normal people can use. So in this in this bear market where resources are now all of a sudden for a lot of people very scarce, you know, learning how to be frugal and experimenting with with less and being more

lean, I think it's probably a good thing for the ecosystem as a whole. And it would be interesting, it'll be interesting to see what comes out of that. So in the next, let's say this bear market continues and we sort of enter a crypto winter, much like the one of 2014 when Bitcoin was hovering around $200 to $300. If we stick into this bear market for maybe two or three years once again or more, who knows, it'll be interesting to see what people will have built during that time and how that will have affected so that the teams building things. I think if the bear market is going to last that long, and I don't think that's impossible, I think it'll impact the ecosystem in a third way, and that that's not going to make projects leaner. That's going to make a lot of projects dead. So there will be places to fill that were previously occupied by other companies that somehow didn't make it.

I mean, often it is said that there's a second mover advantage to people, just because the first mover has so much stuff to figure out. And I think that'll also mark the influx of a whole different set of new people with new ideas tackling old problems. Another question we can address here. So what are the most important things that you feel are going on today in the blockchain space or in the year ahead. So let's maybe start with you, Sybos.

If I look back on the last, you know, five years, and when Bitcoin began, you know, when I became interested in Bitcoin, I remember people telling me that one of the major barriers to entry for them as sort of a mainstream adopter was the price volatility. and to that extent, I think that stable coins, I mean, people are talking about stable coins an awful lot within the space, but outside of the space.

And in the more general population, I think has a massive potential for really making apps usable and DAPs adoptable in a sense, where someone comes in and to the ecosystem and wants use an application. Of course, there has to be products for that. And it very much ties to my my previous point about building things that people want to use. But having a stable currency that allows people to lend money or borrow money and kind of ties into the decentralized finance space. But that's kind of the base layer that the entire ecosystem needs, should it have aspirations to build communities with hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of users.

I have two things that come to my mind. It's kind of like really big impact for things going on. I mean, first of all, and, you know, Sunny, you could even speak much more about that, but I'm very excited about launch of Cosmos. And of course, you know, I've been started working on Cosmos over two years ago. And first at the Cosmos team and then independently with course one. And now it's finally like almost there with Game of Stakes and there's like a lot. live network with 200 validators and it's like super active and it's it's working really well it seems

at this point so that's that's really exciting and I think that is going to be a major major thing because you'll be able to have proxchains that are you know highly performant and highly secure and fast and it can scale so I'm excited about that and another thing that comes to mind is just the ability to earn earn money, you know, using your crypto. So staking on tasos, right, is like one example, right? You can stake you Tazis and earn some money. And in Ethereum, lots of things are emerging where you can like lend Ether and stuff like that.

And I think that's going to be also a huge thing, right? In the future, soon you'll be able to earn probably money on much of your cryptocurrencies. And there's like so many different types of infrastructure and applications that need to be built around that. So yeah, thanks for the shout out for Cosmos. Obviously, I'm very excited about Cosmos as well. Like I've been doing a lot of stuff on the proof of stake side of things. So I'm pretty excited to see Proof-Stake, hopefully, actually, like, you know, work in like a large public setting, you know, with like the full incentive systems that we've been working on. And then the other part of Cosmos that I'm actually pretty excited about, though, is the application-specific blockchains.

And that's not even like a Cosmos-specific thing. It's just a general ecosystem thing where, you know, I like this shift that I'm seeing in a lot of things, like whether it's in Cosmos or Pocod or, like, Lume, for example. A lot of projects have been like starting to shift towards like a framework of like application-specific blockchains where you're not running your app on a smart contracting system. You're instead running it on a specialized chain that's like custom designed for your use case, which I'm pretty excited about. And then the other thing.

that I'm pretty excited about that I see a good trend going on right now is a lot of development in new cryptographic primitives. So I think there was like a set of cryptographic primitives. We had access to 10 years ago when Bitcoin first came out with like, you know, we had like, you know, Merkel trees and public key cryptography and whatnot. But and I think we've kind of explored the entire design space of like putting together these like existing. in technologies in like different configurations. And like I think any like new developments at the protocol level are coming from and will have to come from newer cryptography.

And so it's really, you know, promising to see a lot of people doing a lot of work on like zero knowledge proof stuff. I think like RSA accumulators are going to change a lot of like make things a lot more efficient and like open up a new realm of possibilities. A lot of cool stuff happening right now. with like empty multi-party computation and threshold signatures. So yeah, I just, you know, hopefully seeing a lot more cooler cryptographic primitives that will enable much more interesting protocols.

Cool. So with that, we're at the end of the episode. Well, thank you all for being here today and for coming on this show to talk. I really like these episodes where we're just hosts. We don't do it often, but it is. It is nice to do it once a year and kind of wrap up and get to talk amongst ourselves, amongst each other, rather. So thank you to our listeners for tuning in, and thank you for being with us for the last five years. And hopefully you'll stay with us for the years to come.

And we'll be happy to continue bringing you epicenter every week. And, yeah, being a voice in the space. So thanks again, and we look forward to speaking next week. Thank you.