Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - New Angles on Crypto - Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.92]

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

My guests this week are Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain, both managing partners at Multicoin Capital. I’ve taken a bit of a break from crypto because I hadn’t sensed many new angles to explore in thi...s forum, from an investor’s point of view. I felt that while things keep evolving, the major investment theses have been established and explored. Kyle and Tushar are interesting because of their often divergent views. For example, Kyle has been an outspoken supporter of Ethereum relative to bitcoin. This conversation, which is meant for those still curious about crypto, offers lots of new food for thought. We discuss smart contract platforms, network effects, the coming platform wars, and why blockchains may not matter in ten years. Please enjoy my conversation with the partners of Multicoin Capital. Hash Power is presented by Fidelity Investments For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Links Referenced Paths to Tens of Trillions An (Institutional) Investor’s Take on Cryptoassets On the Network Effects of Store Value If SaaS Products Sell Themselves, Why Do We Need Sales? Money, blockchains, and social scalability Nakamoto Institute Token Economy Multicoin.capital Crypto Cannon              Show Notes 2:11 - (First Question) – What would get the entire cryptocurrencies ecosphere to 5-10 trillion dollars             2:53 – Paths to Tens of Trillions 4:37 – What will be the effective uses for crypto currencies, store value vs utility value             4:38 – An (Institutional) Investor’s Take on Cryptoassets 8:48 – Why they are negative on bitcoin and more positive on Ethereum 10:07 – Where will start to see widespread adaption of the utility value of cryptocurrencies 14:44 – What is the major breakthrough that cryptocurrencies create 21:21 – How do we gain confidence that a utility token will become a sound investment 25:16 – The different type of network effects             25:47 – On the Network Effects of Store Value 31:18 – How do you convince institutional investors to consider the crypto space 34:21 – Factors that they care about when first evaluating a crypto currency 39:21 – How does technological development and marketing factor into their decision when picking a crypto currency             40:31 – If SaaS Products Sell Themselves, Why Do We Need Sales? 41:42 – Where these two men disagree the most right now 44:07 – Why there’s a chance blockchain technology as we know it today could be irrelevant             44:25 – Money, blockchains, and social scalability 47:56 – Most compelling trends in this world today 51:51 – A favorite resource or person people can look into if they want to learn more             52:22 – Nakamoto Institute             52:57 – Token Economy             53:24 – Multicoin.capital             53:30 – Crypto Cannon          54:14 – Kindest thing anyone has done for them   Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode of Invest Like the Best is brought to you by Paxos. I have personally interviewed Paxos's CEO, Chad Kaskarilla, on this podcast before, and I'm excited about how they're changing the crypto landscape. Whether you're a small fintech or a large financial institution, with Paxos crypto brokerage, you can offer your customers crypto buying, selling, transferring, and more, all with Paxos's easy to integrate APIs. Paxos takes care of everything in the back end from licensing and compliance to custody and exchange. You can start offering crypto to your customers within months. I've gotten a no Paxos over the years and have been personally impressed with their track record.
Starting point is 00:00:36 With clients that include PayPal, Venmo, Revolute, and Bank of America, they're the most trusted infrastructure provider for crypto and blockchain. I'm excited that more fintechs and banks are starting to offer crypto features, and Paxos crypto brokerage is the best way to get to market quickly and safely. To learn more, visit Paxos.com forward slash Patrick. That's Paxos.com forward slash. Patrick. Hello and welcome, everyone.
Starting point is 00:01:04 I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfield guide.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaunicee asset management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaunacy. Asheny Ashtonement.
Starting point is 00:01:35 This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Oshonosha Asset Management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast. My guest this week are Kyle Samani and Tushar Jane, both managing partners at multi-coin capital. I've taken a bit of a break from crypto because I hadn't sensed many new angles to explore in this forum, especially from an investor's point of view.
Starting point is 00:02:10 I felt that while things kept evolving, the major investment theses had been established and explored. Kyle and Tushar are interesting because of their often divergent views. For example, Kyle has been an outspoken supporter of Ethereum relative to Bitcoin. This conversation, which is meant for those still curious about crypto, offers lots of new food for thought. We discuss smart contract platforms, network effects, the coming platform wars, and why blockchains may not matter at all in 10 years.
Starting point is 00:02:37 Like the Hashpower documentary, this episode and other Hash Power singles are brought to you by Fidelity Investments, a company that is constantly researching and experimenting with emerging technologies like crypto assets and blockchain to improve the lives of their customers. Fidelity provides a comprehensive set of products and services to individual investors, employers, and financial advisory firms. For more information, please visit Fidelity.com. Please enjoy my conversation with the partners of multi-coing capital. So we're going to approach this conversation almost like I am an LP and you guys need to
Starting point is 00:03:15 convince me of a variety of things in the crypto world. And we'll start at the very broadest level, which is this idea of what the path may be for the crypto beta, let's say, or total network value to reach five or 10 trillion dollars, something massive that would result a huge multiple invested capital for people that are putting money into the crypto world today. So maybe we could start very broadly with that idea. What might be the path from here to there and where, if I don't know how many paths there are, you tell me, along each of those paths, what kind of cryptocurrencies would represent the winners? This is Kyle. So we were to post about this a couple months ago. It's called Paths to Tens of Trillions. And in this post, I kind of lay out among the crypto people, what we kind of debate about is the fundamental hypotheses and the ways by which we think different crypto assets could become worth tens of trillions of dollars. So if you buy into the general thesis of a global digital reserve assets and things that governments can't inflate and the kind of peer-to-peer model, if you buy that there should be some global digital currency there. And the question is, well, what's the path, what I call the store value hypothesis? So one path is what I call the store value hypothesis.
Starting point is 00:04:19 This is really espoused by the Bitcoin community. And this basically says that you need very few features in this global digital reserve asset to get to that end state. You basically need just a handful of things. You need it to be very secure. You need to make sure it's self-sovereign. You want to make sure it's censorship resistant. You want to make sure that governments, no matter how hard they try, can't shut it down.
Starting point is 00:04:38 And that's kind of sort of basically all the sort of value hypothesis people say, oh, and they also mandate either fixed supply or very predictable, very low inflation schedule. And that's basically the only requirements to the store value hypothesis. And so Bitcoin really is kind of the purest representation of this hypothesis. And these folks basically say, look, just make sure it works. And any other features are fine. But if they come at the expense of any of these kind of core characteristics, then they're probably not worth having. And you can add them in layer two or some other place.
Starting point is 00:05:08 Then the other major hypothesis is what we call the utility hypothesis. And this hypothesis basically states that the cryptocurrency is that's the most useful will become the most valuable. And so this is kind of a very Silicon Valley-oriented thinking, basically saying, hey, just get people to use the thing, solve problems, get people using it. And as they use it, obviously, they'll buy it. And at some point, the market will kind of crown whatever the thing that's being the most used as the global digital reserve assets. There's some sub-hypotheses within there, but those are kind of the two large buckets. Let's talk about the second one, because I think the Bitcoin one is fairly straightforward. And it just so happens to be transparent. That's the only one that I'm not convinced of it, but it's the only one that sinks with my mind after spending a ton. of time in the crypto world. So it's fairly straightforward. The features seem to be there already. Maybe that's why it's easy to understand. The second one is very different. So let's talk about things like token velocity, things that matter for how much value will be held in the tokens themselves. And it would be helpful for you to use maybe a few examples of other cryptocurrencies that
Starting point is 00:06:08 people might be familiar with out there, some of the bigger names, and talk about what you mean by use and what the various types of use might be today, given the options we have to buy as investors. Yeah, for sure. So this is Tashar. And in order to make this debate easier, let's just abstract away some of the details. So let's just frame it as Bitcoin versus Ethereum. So Bitcoin is the store of value hypothesis. And Ethereum is this utility hypothesis. And so I don't know if you read John Fifeer's paper, institutional investors take on crypto assets, where he basically makes a claim, that the velocity of Ethereum or Ether will be extremely high, and Ethereum does not capture any value. All of the value lives in Bitcoin, even if the Ethereum ecosystem is a thriving ecosystem,
Starting point is 00:06:54 which has a large number of users and DAPs and such built on top of it. Just as a quick pause, can you just describe what velocity is and why high velocity means that? Yes. So there is a fundamental macroeconomic equation. MV equals PQ, basically monetary base times velocity equals GDP. PQ is price times quantity. And the idea is if you have a certain monetary base and it turns over the number of times every year, then that is the total amount of economic activity that has happened in your economy. So that is your PQ. So if you have a higher velocity asset, then you need less money to accomplish the same GDP, basically. So when you now, let's abstract that away from the macroeconomic view to something in crypto, let's say,
Starting point is 00:07:41 you have a tremendous amount of GDP, quote-unquote, happening in the Ethereum ecosystem. If the velocity of ether is really high, then you need ether to be less valuable in order to still facilitate that same economy. Yep. Okay, great. Keep going on. So those are really the two fundamental debating camps, Kyle, laid out. But we can't say for sure that there is one clear winner here to look at the world probabilistically,
Starting point is 00:08:08 and I think it's path-dependent. So one heuristic that I think really helps the utility side of this argument is to look at money not as a noun, but as an adjective. Look at the moniness of certain assets. Some assets are more money than other assets. It's hard for us living in the United States with a pretty stable currency, the U.S. dollar, to really consider this. But think about this in other nations or think about this pre-U.S. dollar. maybe gold is more money than silver. So what increases the moneyness of an asset? What makes something more money? Because what we're seeing right now is this free market competition in crypto for what will be money or what multiple things will become money. So when thinking about what makes things more money, there's a hypothesis that things become money by being used as money. And when you look at, you look at it. And when you look at it, you look at it. And when you look at, you look at, at the historical examples, let's just look at the US dollar again and Nixon removing it from the gold standard.
Starting point is 00:09:13 The reason why that worked, in my opinion, is because people were already used to using the US dollar as money. No one was actually really relying on the fact that it was convertible to gold to think that it had value. They were already using it. And so therefore, it was a very high moneyness asset. And so that transition was able to be pulled off. So I actually think the U.S. dollar falls into the utility hypothesis, not the store of value hypothesis, and so do other major currencies. So that's one major point in favor. When we first met, one of the things that was really interesting is that you were the first person that was, I don't want to say
Starting point is 00:09:53 use the word negative, because you're probably positive on cryptocurrencies in general, but relatively speaking negative on Bitcoin and very positive on Ethereum. This was, I don't know if it was a year ago, but it was a while back. So maybe talk through that idea as being a bit of a contrarian on that relative to the broader community? Yeah, so I am intellectually short Bitcoin. Our fund is generally long crypto. We worked for it, I think, at various points this year, but we were generally long Bitcoin. I believe with a high degree probability, Bitcoin will break 50K at some point. There's kind of the market evolves and just assets flow into the ecosystem. My reason for being intellectually short Bitcoin is basically kind of this utility hypothesis versus store value hypothesis
Starting point is 00:10:28 in which I think on a long enough time scale, at some point, the bubble will pop. And yes, But we're down 60, 70% from kind of top right now. But the market is still very much thriving. The amount of activity and energy is unprecedented. I think there will be a much larger bubble will happen at some point as the real asset flow, global asset flow is making into crypto. And at some point, when expectations are not met, at some way, people are going to look around and say, well, at least this one over here, these three are being used every single
Starting point is 00:10:56 day. And people are doing stuff with that. And I believe that will create a floor, price floor, ultimately that will kind of allow the most useful assets to capture the most long-term. value. So let's talk in some detail about uses. So this is the thing that always frustrates me is that that makes a ton of sense. But when you actually go investigate, like, who's using Ethereum or whatever other platform to do stuff, the number is very small. The number of active users is tiny. And it's been very difficult to scale any sort of interesting use case. So talk about
Starting point is 00:11:22 the challenges there. Where you see that evolving, will it be something other than Ethereum that captures that marketplace utility idea? What are your thoughts there? So Ethereum was the first smart contract platform and very much kind of represents, I think, the utility hypothesis. But what we're seeing happen right now is there's just a wave of Ethereum competitors showing up. And these competitors all have kind of fundamentally different ideas about the types of tradeoffs they should make in the design of the system. And those tradeoffs have pretty material impacts on end user usage. So today I'll talk a little bit about EOS. There are a lot of other Ethereum competitors that we are invested in, DFINITY Tezos, Cadena, Solana, a bunch of them.
Starting point is 00:11:59 We think they're all interesting for various reasons. But let's just talk about EOS because because A, it basically is launching today, and B, it kind of represents within the utility hypothesis, the extreme away from Ethereum. So Ethereum architecturally was very much constructed in the model of Bitcoin, which is to say that it's focused on being as decentralized as possible. So having as many nodes as possible recalculate the exact same computations as a guarantee that makes the system trustless. Well, this is extremely technically inefficient, and as a result, the throughput of Ethereum is quite low. It's relatively well known that Ethereum can do 15, 20-ish transactions a second today. And so if you're going to have any sort of global usable application,
Starting point is 00:12:35 like that's kind of a joke. But actually there's a second performance character stick with Ethereum that's extremely limiting. And that's latency. So in the Ethereum system today, every block is about 15 seconds, which means for all practical purposes, if you're going to have any sort of application that's dynamic and engaging and you click stuff and things move and whatever and you refresh the screen and do stuff, you have a 15 second latency right now and doing that in a meaningful way and that could be longer. And like consumers in 2018 will not accept that period. We're used to LTE and everything. And so Ethereum has some very novel ambitions, but the current architecture of the system really lend itself more towards being a store value that just happens to have the
Starting point is 00:13:09 smart contract thing on top of it. And when we look at EOS as a counterpoint, EOS is saying, look, our goal is to make applications as usable as possible. So the system is a little bit more centralized in Ethereum. That centralization allows for both more transaction throughput and reduce latency to make the system actually meaningfully usable. And on top of that, the EOS development team is really focused on a lot of other, I'd say, pragmatic features to make the system more accessible to end users. So one of the key ones is the fact that the system imposes no transaction cost on end users, which is a very cool concept. And EOS isn't the only platform that is competing with Ethereum. But to go back to, you know, why are there so many Ethereum competitors?
Starting point is 00:13:48 What is the possible utility of these? Like, what is being built? Because actually, like, if you look at Ethereum today, I think there are maybe four DAPs with over a thousand daily active users. That's nothing. A thousand daily active users is, you know, it's so small. But this brings me back to a couple of anecdotes that are just helpful. Antiquotes aren't data. It shouldn't just be used exclusively for a decision making, but helpful to think about. One is we have this huge design space that is being opened up by these smart contract platforms, by some of the features that Kyle just described, by just some of the broader things that are uniquely enabled. by crypto assets, like scarce assets, etc. And this design space is going to enable humans to
Starting point is 00:14:36 express new creative outlets and create things that other people want. So I'll give you an example. I was a kid in the 90s. And I remember growing up, we had two rules that were really important. One was, don't meet people from the internet in real life because you don't know who they could be. And two was never get in a stranger's car. And when I leave here today, I'm going to summon someone from the internet to get into their car. It's fundamentally impossible to project out how people will design in an unbounded new design space like the internet. That was uniquely enabled by the internet. It never would have been possible to have something like Uber or Lyft without the internet. But it's just impossible to think of that. Another anecdote that I'll give you is, I think there was
Starting point is 00:15:18 a quote from Paul Krugman. I forget exactly when he said this, but I said something about how the internet isn't going to be worth very much because eventually people will realize that They don't have all that much to say to each other. So once again, this enormous new design space of the internet that was created really enabled people to create things that they didn't even know they wanted yet. And I think that that is what we're going to see with these smart contract platforms. So talk more about why this is a new design space. Is it the ability to exchange value seamlessly? What is the major breakthrough that cryptocurrencies represent that create some new space that doesn't exist in just the normal internet?
Starting point is 00:15:56 So one thing that I think is really novel here is the removal of the central party. The reason why human beings are the dominant species on the planet is because we are able to coordinate in large numbers very flexibly. And what crypto assets enable is more people to coordinate in this large, flexible way than was ever possible before. We're able to coordinate flexibly in large numbers because we can believe in stories. And when you look at almost every institution out there, everything is a story. It doesn't physically exist. It's just something we tell ourselves in order to be able to coordinate. Oshanasi asset management is a story that enables all of your clients and your employees to coordinate to create value.
Starting point is 00:16:42 Same thing with multi-coin capital. It's just a story. But these stories have these middlemen like us and yourself that really are the ones driving that story forward. Here, what's opening up about this design space is that you can coordinate all of these various actors in a structured way. You can create a smart contract that actually defines a structure that can be amended, but without someone in the middle dictating those terms. So it's kind of this emergent structure in a sense. And that's something that has never existed before. And if we look back in history as to the last time this type of coordination design space was really opened up, the most recent thing that I,
Starting point is 00:17:22 I can think of is the advent of the publicly traded corporation. Because before that, businesses couldn't get all that large, right? It was people owned businesses and they were passed down in a hereditary manner. And you couldn't really give out like shares in that business to employees and have liquidity and have a whole structure around it. But as soon as they invented publicly traded corporations and had liquidity for that, it enabled this whole new design space for business, basically. where you could create new businesses that didn't exist before.
Starting point is 00:17:54 Same thing like limited liability as a concept. So here we have this new concept for businesses. I'll follow that up and give two kind of concrete examples. So there's a platform. It's called Auger. It's somewhat well known in the crypto space. It's launching in the next couple weeks here. So Auger is a prediction market.
Starting point is 00:18:09 And so the most simple example of this is thinking about Vegas, go out on a basketball game. I think tonight the Cavs and the Warriors are playing. So if you want to go bed in Vegas today, there's not really a problem with that other than the fact that Vegas takes about 10% or so for mediating. the bet. Also just regulation and accessibility and much of other problems. So Auger has created a decentralized prediction market. So the idea is, right, they have a smart contract. Basically,
Starting point is 00:18:30 you can imagine you create a little contract that says Warriors versus Cavs, two people. There's an order book somewhere that sets the odds. People commit and buy right sides of the market. And now the money is locked up in the contract. Then at some point after the game, the system needs to resolve the bet and pay out the winners. So it's a pretty simple concept. Within the world of blockchains, blockchains themselves are not able to go query outside data sources and get access to them. It's kind of a technical limitation. So the question is like, someone needs to go to NBA.com after the game, get the score and send the score to the contract. Well, let's assume you can trust the person to do that.
Starting point is 00:19:02 The problem is like, let's say NBA.com is compromised or let's say the person whose job it is is to kind of read NBA.com and send it over is compromised. You need some sort of fallback system in this model to make this system work. And how do you do this in a globally trustless way with no center party whose job it is to flip the switch after the game is over. So Auger has solved this problem. So they've created basically a way that they have their auger tokens and then bets are not denominated in Auger tokens. Betts are denominated in Ether or something else. So the idea is if there's a dispute after some event happens, the system will get some subset of Auger token holder, something like 30 or 50
Starting point is 00:19:35 of them anywhere in the world and basically say, hey, it is your job to go and mediate this dispute. Go Google the answer and like vote correctly. And it turns out if you end up voting in the minority on the losing side of the bet, then you actually get some of your tokens, get programmatically burned or taken away from you. And so the idea is basically as long as you're voting the truth and everyone else is voting the truth, you'll get to the right outcome. There's a couple levels of appeal in the system and you get to increasing the larger numbers of people. And the final kind of the Supreme Court, so to speak, is like all the augur token holders anywhere in the world. And the idea here is if you were going to lie about some sort of event,
Starting point is 00:20:05 you'd have to have global coordination among millions of people and it just wouldn't work. My point is, is coming back to your original question, what kinds of new interaction models can you enable with crypto that we're not possible for? And augur. is a very fantastic example of this, where you can now have literally let the world arbitrate what happened and then create any sort of prediction market for anything out there. I think this is going to be really, I mean, the first very simple examples are like online gambling and making that more accessible, politics, elections, whatever, but you can imagine a lot more interesting types of new prediction markets that really aren't available today.
Starting point is 00:20:34 So things like predicting flood markets and insurance things in various risk zones, kind of all around the world. The Auger team has published all kinds of really interesting research of people who've come to them and said, we want to create these kinds of interesting new, prediction markets to hedge risk and all kinds of crazy avenues. When people say, like, what's the new design space? Auger is a really good example. That's very pragmatic.
Starting point is 00:20:53 Auger's launching like in the next week or two or three. It's very, it's right around the corner. I'll give you now something that's a little bit more hypothetical. It makes a ton of sense. So basically think of a decentralized Facebook or decentralized just social stream. So if you think about Facebook today, you can upload your photos, your status, your locations, you go places, X, Y, and Z, whatever. Like all this stuff lives in Facebook.
Starting point is 00:21:13 Facebook does have some APIs. and they say within limited access and go read things, look at the news feed, and different apps can plug stuff in the Facebook. But the actual Facebook database is extremely locked down, and the number of APIs and ways that you can read or write from the database are by definition limited based on what the Facebook team says the APIs can and can't do
Starting point is 00:21:30 for both read and write access. So if you could have took this concept of basically just think of it as a social stream and you put it on a blockchain, well now there's no one controlling read and write access. Obviously, you need to kind of deal with identity and making sure it's your photos and you can control privacy.
Starting point is 00:21:44 those are complicated questions. We'll come back to those in a bit. But just think about the ability for developers to read and write to a single social stream. Well, like, imagine you could have Snapchat or you could at Instagram, we could have all these different apps reading and writing to the same set of images and then doing different kinds of filters and then different kinds of games on top of those. And you could challenge your friends to games where you draw something funny on their face. I don't really know where this goes. But I think there's a lot to be unlocked from having this concept of a shared database where you have many different applications with all kinds of crazy developers
Starting point is 00:22:14 reading and writing from the same underlying data structure. I think that's a very, very powerful concept. This has basically never existed before. And I think there's going to be all kinds of really interesting ways people leverage this for gaming and for social for certain. And we'll kind of see like where that goes from there. But there's going to be a lot of really cool emergent things. So I really like this idea of design space
Starting point is 00:22:32 and things that we kind of can't foresee and that some or one or several of these platforms that actually be curious to hear if you think it's going to be a winner-take-all scenario or not on the utility side will just create a ton of value in the world. And there's value creation, there's value capture. I've been talking about this idea a lot lately as it pertains to investing specifically. So the value capture portion of this becomes extremely important as an investor.
Starting point is 00:22:54 If I want to buy cryptocurrencies on the premise that you guys are right or that I can somehow pick, let's say EOS is the winner, and I can pick that ahead of time. Walk me through then the next step. Like how do I know that value will then accrue to, and maybe I don't know, you said probabilistically a lot. So maybe I don't know and it's just a bet. But how do I gain confidence that it's a good investing decision beyond just something that's a really neat technology and a great way to create marketplaces where the value just, it's like consumer surplus, like the value just accrues to the people selling stuff that other people want and the buyers of that thing
Starting point is 00:23:25 because it's a more seamless, you know, effective like capital coordination exercise? One of the things you're asking is, okay, great. We have this new design space. We have all these smart contract platforms. We create a bunch of stuff that people really want to use. but why is that valuable? Why does it actually deserve to be invested in? Or why will it drive a return for investors? And I think in order to answer that question, we need to zoom out and not look at just the people who are already in crypto, but look at the 99% of people in the world, or higher, that are not in crypto yet. So let's just go down a series of assumptions and agree or disagree on those or debate those. And then we'll get to a kind of final point. So the first point is that I think there will be a global
Starting point is 00:24:11 digital money or monies that are not controlled by governments that are powered using some sort of blockchain type technology. So then the second assumption there is that things become money by being used as money. The reason why this green piece of paper in my wallet right now is valuable is because I can give it to you and you would provide me a good or service in return or I can go down the street and literally anyone in this entire city or country or probably around the world would give me a good or service in return because they also believe that it is valuable. So then the final assumption is that there are economic models that are designed for these smart contract platforms to make their base layer tokens money like objects or to increase the
Starting point is 00:24:54 moneyness of their base layer tokens. So the model that Ethereum uses is that Ether is used to pay for gas on the network. So if I ever want to interact with any sort of DAP that lives on the Ethereum ecosystem, I have to use Ether to pay gas. And so therefore, I am using it as money. I'm using it to pay for a good or service effectively. And so, in my opinion, that reinforces the idea of ether being money in people as I think that most people will first interact with crypto, not through Bitcoin, but through some DAP like Auger or some social media DAP, something like that. Or EOS has another economic model that is very different from Ethereum, where your ownership of EOS tokens is a claim on the resources of the network. So if you own, let's say, 0.5% of all EOS tokens, then you have a claim on 0.5% of all transaction throughput or memory, etc. in the EOS ecosystem.
Starting point is 00:25:50 And so if you want to play a game and it's going to take up to 0.5%, you're good to go. That's another economic model. There are other economic models out there too among smart contract platforms. Those are the two best that I've seen so far. And so when you go down this list of assumptions that there will be a global digital money or monies, that things become money by being used as money because it reinforces a story, and that the developers of these smart contract platforms are specifically designing economic incentives and economic designs into the base layer protocol in order to increase the moniness of their token.
Starting point is 00:26:26 great excuse to talk about the different types of network effects that you guys have just recently written about. I think published an article fairly recently on the different, I think there are three different types of network effects and how you think about those as it pertains to the value of the underlying cryptocurrency. So this syncs kind of nicely with everything you just said. So maybe describe those three levels and how people maybe are getting network effect is one of these phrases that has become so ubiquitous as to be like almost meaningless. So maybe describe like the actual math behind this and how you think about it. Yeah. So our report was a couple of weeks ago, I think it's on the network effects of stores of value. And in the first part of the
Starting point is 00:26:59 photos, I've got to define what are network effects. And there are a few different types of effects. For the purposes of this, I'll skip the types of network effects. And let's just assume that they are, in fact, a thing. The next question is, well, how strong are those network effects? And there are a few different kinds of models for how strong those network effects are. The most commonly cited thing is a thing called the Metcalf's law. Bob Beck-Caff is a guy who invented basically Ethernet. And Bob McCaff stayed, I think, in 82 or 83 or something like that. he was referring specifically to telecommunications networks and he said the value of the network is the square of the number of participants in the network. He then very quickly caveat of that
Starting point is 00:27:32 and said that assumes that all connections of the network are worth the same amount. But that kind of has been people have forgotten about the caveat and basically run with it and said the value of all networks is n squared. And you can also think about it as maybe the defensibility characteristic of the network is n squared and being the number of users. And that is basically false in every capacity. It is theoretically an upper bound. but it's so far from reality that I think it's kind of meaningless. Basically, nothing grows quadratically forever because you get to be too big, too fast. Instead, what we see happen is in practice, you see networks that there are some
Starting point is 00:28:04 marginal benefits accruing additional users of the system, but each additional user to the system is not, in fact, worth the same amount. So more reasonable proposals that put forward by people basically state that the network effects of most types of telecommunications networks is probably something closer to N-Log-N. And so if you think about that, that curve is super linear, meaning it is always accelerating upwards faster. The rate of acceleration is always slowing down, but the curve is actually always bent upwards over time.
Starting point is 00:28:32 This is pretty good for describing the early stages of network. And this explains why it's hard for people to compete with something like let's say Facebook or with Google or Uber or whatever. But if you kind of then look a little bit further down the line, you realize, for example, will Uber and Lyft both work quite well? And the reason turns out is people don't care if the wait time is under two minutes. If you look at the global texting market where we have WhatsApp, we have telegram, we have kick, we have Ken, whatever.
Starting point is 00:28:55 There's a bunch of these, the I message, right? And like clearly there wasn't one super big winner here. There were lots of big winners, but that kind of very clearly tells you that if a curve was in fact sloping upwards in perpetuity, that you couldn't have seven substantial global players. That wouldn't happen. And so these curves have to start kind of capping out at some point. Like the value of each marginal user has to start decelerating at some point.
Starting point is 00:29:16 And so basically we kind of model that out as an S curve. I don't put any particularly strong bounds on how steep those S curves rise or how quickly the flat part is at the beginning. But basically is to realize that these things are, in fact, S curves. I think that's kind of one kind of key thing to understand about when you talk about network effects that are derived from numbers of users using the system and some sort of interaction mechanism, whether it's Uber and Lyft or Apple and apps and users or calling a car or whatever. The kind of fourth then interesting type of network effect to think about is, well, what's the network effect of liquidity? or because you think about using, let's say, gold or some of their store value asset, what does that network affect?
Starting point is 00:29:52 And so if you think about, let's say you have a bar of gold in your vault and at some point you want to go buy a house or buy a car or whatever, the kind of only thing that really matters is you need to be able to sell the bar of gold for whatever you think, whatever the market price is. And so that is basically a functional liquidity. So let's say you have, you know, 0.1% of all of the gold in the world. If you're going to go sell that on the market, the question is, well, basically, like, what's data liquidity as a percentage of, like, what percentage of gold turns over every
Starting point is 00:30:15 single day, right? And if that number is 0.1%, then like, okay, it's going to take you a little while to sell your gold without too much slippage. If that number is 5%, then you can sell your gold probably in an hour, more or less, and it's good to go. And if you get the 10 or 20%, at that point, the marginal gains are basically non-existent because it's just like there's so much liquidity in the market that like you can't, doesn't really matter. You can just market sell at that point. And so my point is, if you think about this curve from very small numbers to very large numbers, the rate of marginal utility of liquidity very quickly drops off. I mean, it doesn't even, I don't think it ever turns exponential at all.
Starting point is 00:30:48 I think this curve is actually logarithmic from inception. So it's not n log-in. I think it's just log-in. And so there's value in having some liquidity early, very clearly, but the value of each marginal dollar of liquidity very quickly falls off. And this actually makes a lot of sense. If you look at the crypto exchange market today, the current state of the market very much implies that this is true.
Starting point is 00:31:07 There are so many crypto exchanges. And the reason they all work is like a crypto exchange that does, million dollars of Bitcoin a day? Well, like, if you're only selling half a million dollars of Bitcoin, do you care if there's a hundred million dollars of volume or a billion dollars of volume? It turns out the answer doesn't really matter. And so we already see this happening quite pragmatically in the crypto exchange market. And so bringing this full circle to Bitcoin and the whole crypto ecosystem, one of our views is that if Bitcoin becomes digital gold, which is it currently is on the path to becoming digital gold, our view is that network
Starting point is 00:31:36 effect of digital gold is not very strong. It's basically a network effect is more or less log-end. and if Bitcoin becomes that the digital cash, then network effect is probably something closer to an S-curve. And, you know, having something that's exponential even for the first half of the curve is a lot more valuable than something is logarithmic from inception. And so given that still less than 1% of the world population is using crypto, if you look at the very left most part of all of these curves, they all kind of sort of look the same. But as you kind of grow out in the future, what clearly matters in the long run is having the strongest network effect. and our expectation is that something that has the model that's used as currency, where the network effect looks something more like a telecommunications network, we expect that in the long run will be the most defensible,
Starting point is 00:32:16 and ultimately engender the strongest network effect. Really interesting. So there's two layers that I'd like to get into of the story that you tell to two different groups of investors. One, let's call it institutional investors that are not convinced on crypto as a whole. And then the second layer will be people that are convinced that crypto is worth investing in, but are making a decision between you and some other asset manager, right? So the sort of differential strategy that you think is interesting. And we'll start with the highest layer. So when you're talking to
Starting point is 00:32:44 somebody that is smart and maybe, you know, familiar enough with what's been going on, but has not yet put any money into the crypto ecosystem as an investment. Beyond the path to tens of trillions that we talked about at the very beginning, what else do you talk about? What are the key points to try to convince somebody of that type that it is worth a harder look or even their dollars? I think the first thing that we share with those investors that is easiest to kind of absorb is do you think there is a market for unseasable, unsensurable wealth? And the answer is invariably yes, because it exists already. Like we saw the Panama Papers recently. We saw all, and I think over the past 10 years, like there's been a lot of crackdowns on Swiss bank accounts,
Starting point is 00:33:27 but that had existed for a very long time as an unseasable, uncensurable, a store of value or a store of wealth. And this is a analogy that I'll borrow from Ari Paul from Block Tower, where it's a Swiss bank account in your pocket. And a lot of investors kind of really click with that instantly. Then after that, we start talking about, well, what asset is going to be in that Swiss bank account? Is it going to be Bitcoin? Is it going to be ether? Is it going to be EOS? Is it going to be Monero?
Starting point is 00:33:54 even if you don't think it's certain that a crypto asset will win this use case. If you think that this use case has real demand and you think that there is some chance that it will, then it deserves that level of allocation in your portfolio if you're being entirely rational. So with Bitcoin and the thesis there of just digital gold, what ends up happening, or digital store value, what ends up is it's recursive up and recursive down. On the way up, it's a great store of value. Everyone's really happy. And it actually reinforces the idea of it being a global censorship resistant store of value that people want to buy into.
Starting point is 00:34:33 And so therefore feeds into these extremely volatile moves. But then on the way down, it's a really shitty store of value if it can't actually retain any value. So that is a bit more sensitive to the entry price. But what we really like to focus on is the utility aspect. and how many people are actually using this thing. The current prices of all these assets, just the total mark cap is so small compared to the total addressable market here, that, yes, enterprise does matter
Starting point is 00:35:03 because if you get in at 10,000 versus 20,000, let's say, your returns are half. So, yes, entry price does matter, but trying to time the market is not an easy exercise, as you're well aware. So if you think that the utility hypothesis makes sense, if you think that people will use this stuff and that the economic design of these assets will have it capture value, then averaging in over time is the best thing for an investor who's not full-time.
Starting point is 00:35:31 So I'd love now to get into the actual process of evaluating specific options for those six. You know, you own six. So getting into the reasons why those six are the six. Maybe you could begin by describing a list of or a set of dimensions that you care about when first approaching a new project, a new token, a new blockchain, and then how you sort of weigh those things as you're making investment decisions. So you mentioned some of these ideas already, things like latency or throughput or censorship resistance. Those are some examples kind of of what I mean. But what's sort of an inventory of when you're first approaching something, what you care about?
Starting point is 00:36:06 This is a new type of asset class and it has these new rules that really change how decisions should be made. One of these new rules in this asset class, is that everything's open source. And that profoundly changes investing. Because what that means is none of your features matter. Not at all. Everything can really be copied. It's not trivial to copy.
Starting point is 00:36:27 I do not mean to trivialize. It's not like, you know, command C, command V. Oh, we have all your features now. But it means that the architecture is out there. Everything is out there. And it is much easier to copy in an open source world than in a closed source world. So what we really look for are tradeoffs, where there are certain things that cannot be copied, no matter what.
Starting point is 00:36:49 So let's go back to the Ethereum EOS example, because we've been talking about that a lot here, and it's on both of our minds. So with EOS, they have chosen a different set of tradeoffs than Ethereum chose. Let's just choose one dimension of those tradeoffs for simplicity. And let's say we have centralization versus decentralization, and centralization enables scalability or more transaction throughput, versus decentralization, specifically of block production. So if you want to look at the most decentralized system, that's going to be something like Bitcoin or Manaro,
Starting point is 00:37:22 where it does very few transactions, but that's because every node on the network has to validate every block. And then you have the very centralized version of the world. This is like your visa or PayPal, et cetera, where it's really a centralized company that runs the whole thing. So we think value will definitely accrue on the very far end where you need to be totally decentralized. There will be some value accruing there.
Starting point is 00:37:43 We see that happening already. But is there somewhere else along this tradeoff space that value will also accrue? And so we see EOS taking up a spot somewhere in the middle where they have a limited number of block producers, but it's not completely centralized and the block producers can be replaced versus Ethereum where every node still needs to validate every transaction. And that is something that fundamentally cannot be copied. That is a political or a design decision, philosophical decision, that if you go to people at the Ethereum Foundation and you ask, them, they can bring over some of the features that I mentioned earlier, like the name service, so you don't have to type in a 40 character Ethereum address. That's impossible for human beings to really read. And they can bring over account recovery features that EOS has built in. That's
Starting point is 00:38:26 doable. But changing that tradeoff is not something that will really be considered seriously. So now let's add on some more complexity. It's not just this one dimension of tradeoffs between centralization and decentralization or scalability and not very scalable systems. There are many dimensions. Another dimension that can be interesting is how expressive is the language that can be used to control these assets. So you have something like Bitcoin with a very limited language. You can't really write very sophisticated smart contracts on Bitcoin. Funny story, Vitolic originally tried building Ethereum on Bitcoin and was told no because of this specific tradeoff choice where they wanted to have very limited functionality
Starting point is 00:39:11 to limit the attack surface on Bitcoin. You can't do complex things, so therefore your money is safer. Like gold works because it kind of just sits there. You can't do stuff with it. And then on the other end of that spectrum, you have a full, turn, complete language that you can build anything you want,
Starting point is 00:39:26 and it's impossible to validate how the whole system will interact. And this, once again, is not binary. There are places along the middle of this spectrum. So what we do is we have identified, about a dozen of these various tradeoffs right now that we think really matter. And then we think about where along this right now, 12, but n-dimensional trade-off space, will value really accrue. So, yes, there is some value accruing in the completely decentralized, very inflexible
Starting point is 00:39:54 programming language and extremely secure places in this trade-off space. But that's not the only place that value could accrue or will accrue. And so our model that we use is then trying to identify where in that tradeoff space does a particular asset fit. And then what do we think the probability is that that spot in that tradeoff space will capture any value? And then finally and most importantly, look at how is the market pricing this? And how is that different from how we would price it? And if there is a difference, then we will invest. It seems like a key in all of this.
Starting point is 00:40:33 if you guys are right about whatever platform it is that designs the platform, which is most attractive to people to build on top of, that two things matter. Tools that are easy for that group to use, like developer tools or just user tools, producer tools, and like just old-school marketing, somebody that's better at making the name of their cryptocurrency eos or whatever else known to people like me or just the broader community out there. So how do you think about those two ideas of producer tools and just good old-fashioned storytelling and marketing as an item that you're looking for when considering an investment. We think go-to-market is super important and generally not valued by diehards in the crypto space. Tushar and I both kind of come from the
Starting point is 00:41:13 background of enterprise app applications. So both of us previously started to companies in the enterprise software space building and selling these things to large, complex bureaucracies. My favorite blog post of all time is actually, you would think, as technical kind of given my public persona on what I like to think about. But actually my favorite blog, blog post of all time as a blog post called if SaaS sells itself why do we need sales? I'm concerned my guy named Mark Cranny. He used to work for Ben Horowitz at Opsware. And basically, there's a key line in the post. And he says the ultimate realization is that sales creates value in the mind of the customer. And when that dawned, I mean, it's kind of the
Starting point is 00:41:46 same thing as saying because perception is reality. It's kind of the other side of the same coin. But when that really dawned on me, I realized that's actually how you drive stuff in the world. And engineers like to think, well, it's like, I have to build it and they will come. But like actually, you have to get that just in front of the customer, but you have to drill it under the customer's head. Why is this thing useful? And so we spend a lot of time talking with early stage teams and understanding how do you bring this thing to market.
Starting point is 00:42:07 And depending on what you're building, there are different ways that make sense to do that and different verticals and you might want to start with different little lip pads and different areas of focus, so to speak, and then broaden kind of over time. So we think it's super important. How do you craft a story and tell a story that resonate with people? And we've got very much value teams that are more well-rounded
Starting point is 00:42:23 and not just hardcore tech people. there is a place for certain hardcore tech investments, especially if their only audience is tech people. But if your audience, especially as general purpose consumers, then you need to be thinking about how do you hire amazing sales and marketing people, et cetera. So we definitely think about that a lot, and it's certainly a key part of our investment criteria. What do you guys disagree on most, typically? Or right now? Probably Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:42:49 Can you describe how and why? I'm generally more bullish on Bitcoin, specifically lightning. Ork than Kyle is. This is actually one of the values within the firm is that when we started, we knew that our job is to make decisions. That is literally why we exist. So one of the best things for a firm that makes decisions is to be able to argue and debate well and productively. We encourage that extensively within our team. And we will consider opinions and such from everybody within the team as long as they're well backed up, et cetera. And really make sure that we are not subject to certain biases, like confirmation bias, etc.
Starting point is 00:43:30 So we will open up debates like Bitcoin over and over again. Now, specifically on Bitcoin where we have somewhat of a disagreement is where I think the Lightning Network is really compelling. And you know what? It's a really fascinating technology that enables effectively low or no-fee Bitcoin transactions. And layer two could be, there is some probability that layer two could be the solution to scaling that lets Bitcoin really become usable for the vast majority of people. Because right now it's not. The $50 transaction fees on Bitcoin that we saw in December, that is a default, it's a liveliness attack. It's a, it was unusable. It's as if the system is down. It's almost like if every time I go to Facebook, I have to wait a minute in order to use it. It's the same
Starting point is 00:44:16 kind of thing. So how do we solve that problem? And I think lightning is really compelling. There are obvious technical problems there in terms of how do you route money and how do you open channels that have enough money in them, et cetera. But I think that those are things that could be solved and we just don't necessarily know the solution yet. So I think the Bitcoin debate is generally, yeah, we disagree there. I think the other is general like biases. I'm kind of like the crazy one that's out trying to, I'm always trying to say, what is everything that we assume is correct today that is not and then try and figure out of the place those bets. So recently I've been digging into some very interesting privacy technologies and some zero knowledge proof systems. And I am
Starting point is 00:44:54 slowly coming to the conclusion that the entire concept of blockchains as we know them today could become irrelevant, relatively speaking. And I'm trying to kind of formulate these crazy hypotheses and go off and do crazy stuff. That's generally what I do in the firm. So can you say more about that? So what is that thread? That sounds interesting. Okay. So for some general context, Nick Zabbe, who's one of the patriarchs of the space, so to speak. So he wrote a post six months ago, so it's excellent, a little bit long with excellent. It's called, I think social scalability or something to that effect. Basically in the post, he talks about the fact that Bitcoin trades technical inefficiency
Starting point is 00:45:30 for social scalability. And the idea here is, right, is that the more people run Bitcoin nodes and run validations and everything, the harder it is to modify the system and it becomes more trustless because the system only will act according to the rules and no one else can modify those rules. and because those rules are well known and understood in public, that they scale socially such that 7 billion people theoretically could opt into that set of rules if they chose to transact accordingly.
Starting point is 00:45:53 And so there's kind of this very clear tradeoff that he makes of you're trading technical efficiency for social scalability. And that's been largely taken for granted in the space. The Bitcoin people certainly espoused this very strongly. They're a very focus on decentralization, decentralization. And then kind of their tagline is don't trust, verify. And so the idea is running your own Bitcoin node and like verify the transaction. actions yourself. So in the last few years, there's been a lot of really interesting technical
Starting point is 00:46:17 innovation in this area called zero knowledge proofs. And the idea of zero knowledge proofs is someone can run a computation, given some input and given some function, they can run some computation, produce an output, and then they can generate a proof that they ran that computation correctly and give you that proof without actually verifying, without you as the verifier, knowing what the input was or even what the function was. But other than to say, I can assert that this is mathematically correct. State. True.
Starting point is 00:46:44 Yeah. Cryptographically true. And this is now doable in a generalizable way for any arbitrarily large computation. It's really a mind-blowing concept that this is doable. And the math is very sophisticated.
Starting point is 00:46:55 But if you take the idea of, well, some other guy over here can take a computation or a set of computations or otherwise Bitcoin transactions, so to speak, run them correctly, and then give me a proof
Starting point is 00:47:06 that all of them were run correctly, meaning no one double spent money, no one did any broke the rules, so to speak. Then I don't have to, to trust anyone other than I have the proof and I know the thing is correct. And this proof we're talking about is on the order of a couple hundred bytes, a few hundred kilobytes, tiny amount of data. The blockchain is 200 gigs today. And you can compress any arbitrarily large computation
Starting point is 00:47:23 into a fixed, more or less fixed size proof. And I'm just thinking 10 years from now, what if we all look back and are like, yeah, man, remember when we all thought the right answer was to replicate everything 100,000 times across all these computers when you can just generate a proof that gives you the same mathematical guarantee? How does that tie back to a simple idea of like a fixed supply of a digital asset. I'm a little confused as to, because I understand Bitcoin fairly well, and the nodes and the miners and everything, the whole ecosystem makes a lot of sense. It's very kind of complete. So let's say we go that direction. Then what is the digital asset? Who fixes the supply, how does it become value? So to be clear, and everything I just described here, this is
Starting point is 00:48:00 nothing to do with supply schedule or inflation or anything else. What this would have a direct impact on is the people who maintain the network and not necessarily the supply schedule of the network. Got it. So rather than having all these miners, mining and whatever, and rather than having to have a bajillion nodes out there trying to re-verify the same transactions, the idea is you could basically have a very, very small number of people. And you could trust them because the proofs they generate are mathematically guaranteed that they did not violate the truth.
Starting point is 00:48:27 The whole point, the problem with the status quo basically is, well, Uncle Sam and the banks collude and conflate money and whatever. And there's call it 10 of them in a room and they can kind of sort of make these decisions arbitrarily. And the whole point of Bitcoin is, well, if you enforce the protocol, if you make a million people enforce the protocol, then no one can collude. And so the idea here is you get the benefits of centralization in terms of scalability and throughput. But you get a mathematical proof that no one violated the protocol and that anyone anywhere in the world can verify the proof for a trivial amount of resources. So aside from that, I'd be curious to hear from each of you what trend in this world is most compelling today.
Starting point is 00:49:01 So what is something that you've recently spent time on that you think is exciting or scary or, or, or something notable. I mean, so the thing I think intellectually that's the most interesting, and I think this will be true for the next few years, is the smart contract platform wars. I believe with a pretty high degree of confidence, this will be the most epic technology battle that we've ever witnessed. iOS versus Android was epic in terms of they were really at each other's throats.
Starting point is 00:49:21 But there was only two of them, and it was very one-on-one, more or less, and the windows was kind of on the side. The last time we have truly global, truly multi-party, multi-dimensional platform wars of material was the OS wars in the 80s, and they're into the early 90s. But those teams were just much less well funded than the teams aren't in crypto. And things weren't global.
Starting point is 00:49:41 It was basically only in the US, kind of sort of. And we didn't have the internet. And there weren't already 30 or 40 million developers across the planet. And so I just look at like the stakes of what's happening here. And look, Eos just raised four or five billion dollars. The Ethereum Foundation has over a billion dollars. These teams are extremely well capitalized.
Starting point is 00:49:57 And they all believe that these things could be worth $100 trillion. Maybe they're not worth $100 trillion, but like they think they are. And so it's totally irrational. to spend $10 billion swinging for it. And I just think it's going to be the most epic technology battles we've ever seen. How about you, too, sure? I'm really interested in the infrastructure layer here as well, but really in terms of what are the primitives that we can create today, which will enable new use cases.
Starting point is 00:50:27 Basically, how can we expand out the design space or make that design space more easily realized for developers? So I'll give a couple of examples to make that a little bit more real. One example, we talked about this a little bit earlier, is Auger. I see Auger in global prediction markets as a financial primitive, because out of those prediction markets, you can basically construct any number of securities or other derivatives, etc. And that is going to vastly expand out the utility of the underlying platform, which is Ethereum, in this case. This goes back to my thesis that things become money by being used as much.
Starting point is 00:51:03 and people will first interact with crypto, not through Bitcoin, but through some DAP, because I want to bet on the 2020 election or because I want to bet on the Cavs versus a Warriors or something like that. So I think Auger is a great example. I think another really powerful example here is tokenized securities. I see blockchain, if nothing else, is just a fundamental upgrade to the entire financial ecosystem in terms of not only things like, oh, well, faster settlement and fractional shares and easy auditability and lowering the costs of administrating large public securities in terms of dividend distributions or collecting votes, etc. That's all really easy and intuitive. But I also see it as potentially creating a whole new design space for securities
Starting point is 00:51:47 where perhaps if I own 10 shares of Apple for a year, I get a discount on the iPhone. Or if I own shares of particular reet, I get a discount on my rent is one interesting thing that I thought of. But there are other new types of financial products that can be uniquely enabled by this technology. And so these are places that I'm focusing a lot of my time on is like what are the infrastructure level plays that will enable developers to make more stuff? Because we're not there yet in terms of consumer adoption or mass adoption that we should be focusing on the top layer. I don't think that the user experience is there. I don't think that there's been enough time for the vast majority of people to get into the crypto world.
Starting point is 00:52:29 And some of these things just take time. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at it. There's another one of my favorite startup quotes is some things that are not about resources. Nine women can't make a baby in a month. It just, it takes time to like reinforce that story in people's mind, get the user experience there, like get that all there. So what I'm most excited about is the infrastructure layer that will enable that. I always like closing with some resources that people that are interested in all this stuff
Starting point is 00:52:54 can go and continue researching on their own. maybe you could each pick a person or a resource, and I'll say maybe one each that's an investing specific resource, and maybe another investor or group of investors or firm that you really respect. Then the second one would be a non-investing resource or more of just like an ecosystem. Nick Zalvo would be a perfect example of a resource. So maybe we'd love to hear from each of you on that idea. So I think if you just want general, if you want the history of the cypherpong movement and digital cash and like how all the state stuff came to be, there's a website called the Nakamoto Institute.
Starting point is 00:53:25 and it is excellent. The resources on there, I think they have like an education or literature page or something. It's probably 20, 30 hours of collective reading across all those. Actually, the books are longer. But this dives in the history of history of money,
Starting point is 00:53:37 how money has evolved, history of the cypressure movement, the history of open source technology, all the things that have kind of culminated in crypto today. It kind of covers a history of those over the last 30 or 40 years of technology, but then all the money history stuff.
Starting point is 00:53:50 So the Nakamoto Institute is excellent. And then in terms of, I'd say just general ecosystem resources. There's a website called Token Economy. It's excellent. They publish once a week on Sundays. And then if you want a little more high volume, I would check out, so I curate three Twitter lists. One is very narrow, 60 people.
Starting point is 00:54:08 One is like 600 people. It's a little bit more noisy. And then one is like traders and chartists and technical analysts. So if you go to my Twitter, there's three, go to my lists. There's three of those that are public. Do you want a little bit more noise? Well, first, I want to kind of talk about our blog. I think that's a useful resource, multi-coin.competal.
Starting point is 00:54:23 but I'll give you some others as well. A16Z recently published this list called Crypto Cannon, which is basically a curated reading list of a bunch of different really high quality resources that help kind of take you through that crypto journey. So I think that that's an extremely valuable resource, both for the investors as well as for the non-investing, like the developer community, who's more interested in building stuff than investing in stuff. And then otherwise, I think that Twitter is really where the conversations happen in crypto. It's all real time. There's a lot of noise that you have to filter out. You kind of have to be comfortable using Twitter in a sense and realize that like you are going to miss things, etc. But that's where all those conversations happen in real time. And I find that to be the most intellectually engaging place. So my closing question for everybody and I'll ask each of you is for the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you. I would say, so I recently had a mish at my apartment where there was some flooding. It was quite bad and that a bunch of my stuff was ruined, et cetera. And I wasn't home. I wasn't able to like deal with the whole situation. And so
Starting point is 00:55:35 this might just be recency bias, but the apartment manager was extremely kind. And the fact that she handled everything for me, she went way above and beyond the call of duty in order to like take care of things and help make sure that my life got back normal more quickly. Yeah, I'm pretty stuck on recency bias here as well. But the last March through May of this year was just the most hectic kind of couple months I think of my professional career just with travel and all kinds of stuff. And I was, remember my parents said about 45 minutes from where I live. So I was home for the weekend visiting them. And I just fell asleep on the couch and my mom like put a blanket on me. I remember I woke up and I was like, this was amazing. Oh, and then my mom has a little three-pound
Starting point is 00:56:14 chihuahua and her name is Twinkie. She's adorable. And Twinkie was like cuddled up on top of me on blanket. It was simple stuff. Well, this has been a lot of fun, guys. You inched me a little bit away from my pure Bitcoin idea and these developer kind of platforms. And it will be very fun to see where this goes from here. So thanks for all the insight and the knowledge. Thanks, Patrick. This was awesome. Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of InvestorField Guide.com forward slash podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com forward slash book club. after you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away, and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Oshag, OSHAG. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening.

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