Molly White's Citation Needed - Sexism in Bitcoin: an interview with Lyn Alden

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

I'm joined by investment strategist and bitcoiner Lyn Alden to continue an earlier conversation about sexism in the bitcoin world.Links we discuss in this interview:DL News article on the gender breakdown of speakers at Bitcoin 2024Association for Women in Cryptocurrency (AWIC) "State of Inclusion" survey Pantera survey on gender and pay in the industry"Understanding Bitcoin Adoption in the United States: Politics, Demographics, & Sentiment" by Andrew Perkins and Troy CrossPeter McCormack's podcast, What Bitcoin DidLetter to the DNC by Democratic Congresspeople and candidatesA Progressive's Case for BitcoinProgressive Bitcoiner podcast

All right, cool. So do you want to just start by introducing yourself and giving a little bit of background on who you are and how you got into the Bitcoin space? Sure. So I'm Lynn Alden. My background is engineering and finance initially in the aviation industry. Shifting more into financial analysis over time. And then in recent years, over the past four years or so, I got more into the Bitcoin space. And so I, you know, I'm a general partner at Ego Death Capital. I do startup work across the space while also providing public analysis on the space. Great. Cool. That's really helpful. So to provide, I guess, a little bit of background on why we're having this conversation, you know, this sort of started when there was a conversation happening, thanks to some research out of DL News,

about the gender makeup of the recent Bitcoin 2024 conference at Nashville, which found that, you know, it was approximately 87% men speaking at the conference. And then I noted, you know, there were more men speaking at the conference with the names Rob, Matt, Mike, Chris, Alex, or Brian than there were the entire pool of women speakers at the conference, which sparked a bit of a conversation on Twitter. And I noticed during that conversation, there was sort of two major categories of responses. I mean, there were more than two, but two stuck out to me. One was people saying, you know, I don't understand why more women aren't interested in Bitcoin. If only there were more interested women, then maybe the gender breakdown at these conferences

would be better, et cetera. And then there were other people who are making comments along the lines of men have higher IQs or men are biologically more suited to technology or to Bitcoin or crypto or whatever topic. Or people commenting that the 56 women speaking at the Bitcoin conference was too many or that they were DEI, things like that. And so I noted that, you know, maybe the sexist comments from that latter group would help explain to the former group part of what might be going on. And you at that point responded to what I was saying with a tweet and I can put it up

on the screen for people, but basically saying you hadn't had any notable sexist issues directed at you personally. And while it is male leaning, it has been a very welcoming ecosystem. Do you want to elaborate at all on those comments? Sure. I would say there's a big difference between anonymous people online. I mean, we're in an environment where social media in general is toxic. The algorithm kind of incites toxicity. People are communicating without any of the social cues that they normal have in real life. So the whole broad idea of toxicity on social media a thing that kind of extends beyond obviously just this industry. So I'm not excusing all the toxic comments you'll see online. That is, you know, that's a problem in its own right. But I would

separate that very much from how companies and developers in this industry actually work, which is to say that, you know, people of substance, people who their names are out there, they're doing work, they are building real things. They're, you know, they're responsible for something in their professional life related to the industry, I would say that among that group, I have personally found it to be a very rewarding space, welcoming space. And I'm always careful to separate just percentages from openness, which is to say, for example, if you look at software as a general profession, depending on what survey or analysis you look at, something like 80% male. And if you go to like a conference about Austrian economics, for example, like hard money

enthusiasts, you're generally going to see a lot of men there. It's going to be a very skewed ratio. And something like Bitcoin is somewhere adjacent to both of those in a way. It's a, you know, it's a software protocol, but it's also economic, kind of aligned more with that hard money side and people come at it from different directions. So I'm not surprised. that especially in early years, that it's more skewed toward male. I wouldn't be surprised by that. I do think that there are efforts, you know, that there are people that purposely put effort in to broaden the type of voices we hear over the years.

Some conferences maybe do it better than others. Some podcasts maybe do it better than others. Other ones kind of get into the same club over and over again, which can get stale. So I think that there's efforts that could be done. to broaden it more than it has been. But I would say that of substance, the Bitcoin industry has been, you know, very welcoming. And so when it comes to what you mentioned, you know, the social media toxicity side of things, do you feel like sort of the Bitcoin or perhaps the broader cryptocurrency sphere online, you know, on social media is more toxic than your average social

media or do you feel like it's roughly the same? I mean, compared to politics, I would say no. I've also, I've experienced anti-Bitcoin toxicity as well. Like I, you know, I publish what I consider pretty objective analysis that's read by professionals and sometimes I'll get all these trolls that are, you know, hypercritical of it, personal attacks, things like that. And it's, it's like ideological in the opposite direction. So, you know, there is, I would say, When you look at the numbers of how many people probably own Bitcoin, it's in the millions, probably multiple, like many, many multiples of millions, tens of millions, you know, some estimates go into over 100 million.

And we're talking about basically a handful, like thousands of kind of anonymous toxic accounts within that. So I would say that the vocal runs tend to rise to the top. And it is somewhat of a populist movement, I would say, basically. there's certain types of kind of pro-establishment or anti-establishment movements. And I would say that Bitcoin as a technology kind of serves as a catalyst for some of those more populist movements. I would consider that basically more rational type of populism, which is basically mostly constructive

populism, but because it has that anti-establishment element to it, it generally draws people in that are more passionate, sometimes in a good way, sometimes. in a bad way. But yeah, I've not really seen more toxicity than other kind of controversial areas, let's say. Okay. And I mostly ask about the social media side of things, because at least in my perception, a lot of people get into cryptocurrency, into Bitcoin, because they see it online. You know, that's, I think, how a lot of people enter the space. It's somewhat unusual for someone to just sort of discover it in a book or something like that. And so, you know, in my opinion, I feel like the toxicity that you see in the Bitcoin community online is more of an issue than perhaps

you feel it is. You know, you've mentioned that you feel these are just anonymous trolls or they don't have any followers. And so these comments are perhaps, you know, they just bounce right off you or whatever it might be. Would you agree, though, that these types of comments, well, I guess, first of all, do you agree that there's a perception that Bitcoin is unwelcoming to women, other gender minorities. And two, do you think that the online toxicity is a factor in that? So I, you know, when I approach the space, like when I came as an outsider into the space, there was no perception that I had that it was toxic toward women or or LGBT or anything like that. That wasn't something that I would have had on my radar. It's still not really something I have in my radar.

I would say, however, that there is an external observation by people that it's kind of toxic in general. Whether right or wrong, I would say that there is that perception. So, for example, the other group that I talk to a lot is financial professionals, traditional finance, some of which like Bitcoin and enjoy learning more about it. Other ones are critical of it in the broader space. But one thing they would generally say is that, say, Bitcoin, Twitter can be a fairly uninviting space. in general, I don't think many of them would immediately reference anything about women or LGBT, but basically that their comments in general tend to be toxic and more adversarial is kind of the perception that I think is common.

Got it. Okay. And so, you know, as far as perceptions of cryptocurrency as an industry or Bitcoin, more specifically, there was a recent report from the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency, that showed that a significantly higher proportion of women of around 82% that they surveyed, experienced the industry as not being free from harassment when compared to men's survey responses to that, which I would know is still 48%, which seems substantial. But also, you know, that men seem to also acknowledge the existence of harassment and, you know, that it affected women as well as other people. You know, do you feel like that those numbers are wrong or you just can you know, sort of express your opinions on that?

So one, I would partially separate the Bitcoin space from the crypto space. So I can't really comment on the crypto industry in a larger sense. I'm fairly critical of broader crypto in terms of like use cases, business ethics that are common in the space, basically, you know, generating a token. and then dumping it on retail before there's substantial progress in any sort of like, you know, fundamental sense, which is different than the normal venture capital. So it's it kind of attracts, even though there are, there is good cryptography work being done. There are serious developers in that broader space. It does tend to attract a lot of kind of more scammy type of entities, I would say.

So I can't really comment on the broader crypto space. I would say in the, in the Bitcoin space, it's, it's not something that people have really reached out to me in any sense to talk about. And I, you know, I know a number of women in the space. I know a number of women as founders, as executives in companies. I, you know, as someone who works in venture, I, you know, I talked to a lot of people in the space. You know, there's, there's female venture capitalists in the space as well, including arguably the first Bitcoin-only venture was founded by a woman. And so it's not really something I associate with the industry other than, of course, to observe that it is skewed very male.

I would say the vast majority of that is it's evolved that way voluntarily, that it's less about exclusion and more kind of just like the broader software industry has so far, for cultural reasons or whatever the case may be, has attracted. more men just due to the areas that it touches on. There was a recent survey by Pantara Capital on the broader crypto space that I saw that found that women were actually on average paid more than men in the space. They did note that on average in their survey, women were slightly more experienced than men. But then even when they adjusted for that, there was still a compensation divide that actually favored women. And you could hypothesize that you know, if you're a woman in the space, you probably went through a little bit more. Or there's also, for example, there are certain other sub-professions like in sales engineering,

women tend to make more than men. You know, part of that I think it might be because they're often selling two men. So there's certain industry dynamics where things can play out like that. But I think that's an interesting data point that on average, at least in the space, assuming that that's reasonably or directionally correct, that there's not really been any sort of issue with compensation across genders or things you can quantify in that sense. Right. You know, at least once women get to the point that they're working in the industry, I, you know,

I mentioned this elsewhere, but, you know, I feel like some of the exclusion issues and the harassment issues are contribute to why there are so few women in the space versus, you know, sort of in a vacuum, lack of interest in something like Bitcoin or, obviously. obviously more broadly, something like software. You know, I come from the software world too, and there's certainly, you know, fairly well-acknowledged issues with inclusion in software that affect women.

And it seems to me, at least from my perspective, that that issue translates into the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin industry, and it seems like we agree on that. And at least to my view, it appears to be worse in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industries. you know, partly as a result of these types of interactions online, as well as offline interactions, you know, these sort of encouragement by some Bitcoin enthusiasts, I guess, it's hard to call anyone a spokesperson for Bitcoin, but certainly well-known people in the space who have sort of

encouraged the kind of toxicity that happens in the Bitcoin world. And so, you know, that was sort of my perspective on a lot of the issues around, you know, why aren't women getting more interested in Bitcoin? Do you, what are your thoughts on that? Well, one thing I would start out by pointing out is there was a recent study by Troy Cross and one other, one other, he's a professor. There was another professor that was part of the study. I forget his name offhand.

They did a study. I can find it in Lincoln. Yeah, it was who owns Bitcoin. And they, you know, there's got to be more sample over time on this, but this was a good initial study that I think was well designed. And they basically, you know, analyze a broad sample of people. And then they, you know, identified the ones that own Bitcoin in that group. And they wanted to see if their characteristics are different than the broader population. And they found surprisingly not really.

So on, you know, the perception is that Bitcoin holders would be, say, more right. but they did not find that in their sample. They actually found an almost equal distribution among political beliefs of Bitcoin holders versus non-holders with a slight skewed toward the tails. So it's actually a little bit more likely to be far left or far right. But that actually was a even that was a very small element. They had similar findings for like income levels and education levels and all that. But the two data points that where the Bitcoin people were on average quite different than the non-holders. One was gender. They skewed very male. And two, they skewed a little bit younger than their broader sample. And so that's the reason I bring that

up is because that's not in the industry. That's literally just people that hold it. So they're not really being excluded in any way. There's not like pressure. I mean, maybe the public perception obviously can affect whether they choose to buy it or not. But those are just people that have chosen to buy or not buy the asset. And it just so happens that it leans pretty heavily male in what is otherwise a sample that doesn't really stick out. I mean, the only other, besides age and gender, the only other thing where they stuck out was obviously polls about Bitcoin itself, a higher, a higher level of knowledge about Bitcoin, appreciation of Bitcoin, positive views on Bitcoin. But putting that aside, the only main differences were gender and age, with gender, I think,

being the bigger one of the two. So before we even get into kind of topics, of are companies excluding or are they not welcoming spaces? I would just say we're starting from observations that for whatever reason men are just thus far, more drawn to even owning the asset, let alone joining companies or working in the space or being publicly advocating for it. So I would say that once people get to that point

where they're applying for positions, you know, any profession can have either intention or unintentional, you know, exclusion in problematic ways. But I've not really seen much evidence that this space is any worse than average in that regard. And so what would you say to the various women in the Bitcoin space who responded to this conversation, notably Margo Paias, who spoke at the Bitcoin 2024 conference and was one of those 56 women who were there, who seemed to sort of disagree with your perception of the industry? Well, I mean, people have different views.

I like the work she does. Absolutely. I think, and I would agree with her that ideally, you know, the speaker ratio would be better. I think that's an era where you can lead by, you know, per because even it's not, like, I don't think people should say we need, we need to hit certain ratios or things like that. I think the right way to approach it is to say, instead of speaking to the same crap, We want to, you know, because the people throw in these conferences like Bitcoin, they want to have Bitcoin be more popular, more widely understood, more held, more people working on it. So if you started from that perspective, you instead of just speaking to kind of the same group, you probably want to take proactive steps to say, why are we so underrepresented in this area?

How can we talk to them better so they can join our very broad tent? right so i do think i would agree that there's that there it would be better to have a little bit more attention not just not for diversity sake per se not to hit some quota but because i think it it would actually just be good for the industry and there are like podcasts that have done that like peter mccormack for example one of the biggest bitcoin podcasts uh arguably the biggest in the space and the in the bitcoin only space um he i think it was 2021 that he dedicated to featuring more progressive voices in the space. He viewed that the podcasting circuit kind of lean more right libertarian.

And he's like, let me purposely reach out to more progressive voices. He's also, you know, kind of reached out to certain groups that are just not very represented in the space and that their podcast episodes just won't get a lot of listens. and so it's but he purposely would do those offsetting them with with big names that he knows will bring in the numbers that his advertisers want to see because he thinks those voices are valuable and that that you know they might not get as many listens

but those that do listen it's very valuable so I think that's a smart way to approach it is to basically do intentional outreach to to purposely broaden your can't both speakers both attendees holders of the asset all the, that kind of stuff. Yeah, and that was something that came up. I noticed in the conversation was the topic about whether there should be more of a proactive approach to that or, you know, whether the organizers of the conference were part of the issue in terms of who they were reaching out to versus

was it more of just an organic lack of women applying and that kind of thing. And obviously, that's hard to evaluate from the outside because, you know, we can't be a fly on the wall in those conversations. But that's an interesting perspective from you. So I want to on one more thing as far as the online toxicity thing and then I was going to move to maybe a slightly broader conversation. But, you know, you had mentioned in your tweet to me that you had not had any notable sexist issues directed towards you. But then, you know, several people pointed out a recent tweet, I think it was maybe a month and a half ago or so, where a fairly large Bitcoinser account had come out with an attack on you basically saying, like this tweet,

if you think Lynn Alden is a man. And, you know, there were definitely responses to that tweet from the Bitcoin community condemning that type of behavior and that type of harassment. But the tweet also received 1,100 likes or something around that amount. You know, you mentioned sort of not feeling like there are sexist issues in the industry. And then, you know, it's hard for me to square that with these fairly prominent and instances of people making sort of bigoted comments about you, inappropriate comments about your gender and that kind of thing.

What are your feelings around that? And what are your feelings around the fact that these things seem to happen a lot in the Bitcoin world? You know, there was a similar instance with Ava Chow, who is a Bitcoin core maintainer, who came out as transgender and experienced a lot of attacks from people in the Bitcoin community and was defended also by people in the Bitcoin community. But to me, at least, it seems notable that these things keep happening and that there have to be these discussions about this sort of on a recurring basis. I would say that goes back to my point about people just being more toxic online than offline. You know, I've noticed similar comments sometimes on YouTube on macro channels that have nothing to do with Bitcoin per se.

We're talking about something related to macro finance or, you know, in like the gold community, for example, gold enthusiasts, that kind of gold macro overlap. Some of those comments will be fairly toxic. And so I put that largely in the broader camp of just online is a pretty toxic space. And when you look at that thread, for example, anybody of consequence was pushing back on that. The people that were liking that were anonymous. A handful people supporting it were anonymous largely, but nobody of consequence. A lot of people have consequence aggressively pushed back on that. same thing regarding the developer.

So I think that goes back to my prior point that there's real life and then there's online. And online in general is a fairly toxic space. And that was a particularly toxic niche where that's happened. And I would say that, you know, when I go to conferences, for example, even just aside from like the male to female kind of gender ratio, one thing I'm always surprised. by is how international the audience is or how multi, racial, multi-ethnic the audience is, which is to say that I'm always kind of blown away by the diversity of attendees across other metrics and kind of the positivity you see at a lot of those spaces, which is different than, you know, dark corners of social media and YouTube comments and, you know, Twitter and things like that.

And even, for example, there's a social media protocol called Noster. And it was created by someone in the Bitcoin space. It's, you know, is a lot of the people initially interested in it or in the Bitcoin space or kind of adjacent spaces. Bitcoin's kind of incorporated into it. And one thing a lot of people there have noticed is that's a very positive space. You know, I guess if you, if we start with the assumption that the Bitcoin space has a toxicity problem, one would think that this kind of open source, decentralized social media where you control your own keys and nobody can ban you. We would expect that to be a fairly

toxic environment, but we actually see quite the opposite. That getting outside of that kind of Twitter algorithm and, you know, kind of in some way self-selecting for people that are more interested in kind of the, you know, the cipherpunk tech that exists in that space, you actually you get a lot of positivity in there. And I think that's a really interesting data point. You know, I guess just going back a little bit, you know, you seem particularly able to sort of brush off toxic online comments and things like that. I think plenty of people find that more challenging. Even if you acknowledge that these are online faceless trolls, you know, and they have no perhaps standing in the Bitcoin community more broadly, I think a lot of people find that

wears on them over time having to deal with this kind of harassment. Would you, I mean, would you agree with that to begin? I do agree. And I think it's easy to brush things off when they're just not true. So if you just see something that's a misperception, it's easy to ignore it. I think in general, you know, people, it takes us time to adapt to things. And that can be like, even just food, for example, we're not adapted to the abundance of food we have. And so that's why partially we have health issues, for example. And social media is another one of those things where as it rose up to significant prominence over the past 15 years or so, we're not really adapted.

We don't really have all the right kind of defense mechanisms for social media. So in many ways, it brings out the worst of many of us. And it can wear on us, as you mentioned. I think that's something that over time we have to adapt to to basically realize that there's a big difference between online activity and that in-person activity. And that's also why, for example, going back to non-persexuals, Austria. That's why some of us are interested in these more decentralized things because you can then

craft your own algorithm better. You're not kind of in this central environment that you're there because network affects you there. But there's an algorithm that for advertising or other reasons is geared toward, you know, kind of negative engagement is kind of what sells or debates and polarization and things like that. So I do think that both, one, people have to adapt to it better, but then two, there are better technical directions we can go in that de-incentivize that behavior and kind of make us act a little bit more like we act in real life online. Yeah, I mean, you and I definitely agree on that as far as the sort of algorithmic end of things and improvements that could be made to social media versus, you know, trying to just sort of

deal with what exists in the Twitter algorithm or the YouTube algorithm or whatever. I lost my train of thought for a second, but. So I wanted to, I guess, ask a little bit around, you know, the sort of separation of the online versus real life. You know, there's obviously interactions that you have with people online versus conferences or, you know, if you work in the industry and you're actually going into an office or whatever it might be. But I think more than perhaps most industries, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin specifically are very online, you know, If you're, for example, a Bitcoin core maintainer, there's no requirement that you go to a conference. There's no necessarily in-person interaction that happens there. But you sort of have to be online as a part of your role where you're making GitHub commits,

where there are conversations happening. You know, if you are prominent in this space, a lot of people feel pressure to be on social media so they can be sort of a spokesperson or they can represent their company or whatever might be. So how do you, you know, it seems difficult to me at least to sort of separate the online and the real life, as you might call it, when that real life community is online. You know, Bitcoin is a technology that requires, you know, connectivity to work. So, you know, how does that square for you? I would agree that it's more online in general. I would say that online is not the same as social media per se. So for example, discussions. you know, in more software development oriented spaces. That's not really happening necessarily on Bitcoin Twitter. Obviously, there's some of it happening there, but some of the more technical work is happening in other spaces.

And it's funny. You mentioned the core maintainers. I mean, several of them are funded by Brink, and they actually do go to an office to work in person and collaborate because that's in many cases a really good work environment. Same thing for, you know, one of our investments at Ego Death is a, Lightning or Bitcoin Accelerator called Wolf, where they, you know, they bring these, these teams in to work in person together for a period of time in New York. And so I, there, there are actual physical spaces for many people that are, that are physically working and building

this stuff, going back to my prior point of kind of people of substance, people that are, are doing things. But yeah, that doesn't change the fact that, that, you know, a lot of it does happen online. There are, they do engage in social media. Many of them, get worn down by social media. I do think that's, you know, that's, it's not good. But again, I would kind of point to the broader problem of social media and it just so happens that this space is online more, which means that we have more attack surface because of that broader social media problem. Um, it's kind of my point. And again, like on, on Noster, for example, like, you know, there's obviously some negativity there, but you would, like, you would expect that to

you're the most toxic place given, given some of the things you brought up in this conversation and that you see quite the opposite. So I'm optimistic there's ways to improve it, but I'm also kind of just aware that there's currently a very broad social media toxicity problem. Gotcha. Okay. Well, not to belabor that point too much. I think so on, first of all, we're getting to about the half hour mark. I was hoping if you were interested, we could speak a little bit about sort of what seems to be kind of a political shift in the Bitcoin world. If you're willing to speak about that. Okay. So, you know, it feels certainly recently, and, you know, in the U.S. is sort of what I'm most familiar with as someone based in the U.S.

There has been quite an embrace by the cryptocurrency industry, and speaking very broadly. So obviously that goes beyond just the bitcoins. Of the sort of, the sort of, political right in the United States. And more specifically, when it comes to Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin 2024, the conference invited Donald Trump as a headline speaker, invited several others who hold fairly right-wing views. First of all, what's your thought on that? And I acknowledge that Bitcoin 2024 is obviously not a representation of every bitcoiner, but it is certainly a very prominent event in the Bitcoin space. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's the biggest conference in the Bitcoin space. So that's the one that's large enough to

reach political scale. Like if you go to many other conferences, there will be fewer or no politicians there. It's more enthusiast developers. You know, there's some that some conferences are kind of known as more techie, other ones that are kind of more finance macro and other ones that are more political now that it's gotten to that scale. So I would go back to my prior point that, According to that recent study, for example, by Troy Cross, the actual owners of Bitcoin are not particularly skewed in any political direction. I would like to see more research, more repetition to confirm that kind of thing because it's actually kind of surprising to me. I would have guessed a little bit, at least a moderate right-wing skew. So there's that kind of data point. It is clear

that in American politics, the right side of the political spectrum, the actual politicians, are embracing the industry at a higher rate. than the left side of the political spectrum. But that conference, for example, did have Democratic congresspeople and senators talking as well. And during the conference, a number of them wrote a letter to the DNC saying that their party has to embrace this space better. That basically the war and wing of the party is just not the direction to be going on this. And so I think although it's, at least in that kind of broad political side, it is more right-leaning among political embracement at the time. I don't think it's inherently that way.

I don't think it has to be permanently that way. And that conference, for example, was not excluding people from the other side. They were kind of, you know, from their perspective, if you could get literally both right and left-leading presidential candidates to speak your conference, that would be a massive win. And same thing for getting as many, you know, Democratic senators and Congresspeople to come talk at the space. So I would say that there is work. I mean, there's also there is, you know, there's the book, a progressive case for Bitcoin.

Right. There's also there's a podcast that was called, you know, progressive Bitcoin or I believe it's called. There are these areas that kind of reach out to try to fix that perception. Some of it's related to, I would consider it fairly bad early science on the environmental impacts of Bitcoin. And the way that American politics is currently skewed, the left cares about that issue more. And so that I think was initial seed against the industry. But there's other reasons too.

But yeah, I think that there is a perception that it's more right-leaning. But I would say it's so far more in the political sphere rather than the actual holders, what I've seen. Right. And yeah, in my work, I sort of try to separate the cryptocurrency industry from, you know, just the person who has cryptocurrency or Bitcoin or, you know, because I think you're right that there tends to be trends that appear in the industry that may not be reflective of just everyday people who might hold. As far as the Bitcoin conference, you know, they spoke a little bit about reaching out to Kamala Harris to speak at the conference. I haven't yet been able to confirm that outside of the Bitcoin conference organizers, but, you know, assuming that that's the case,

they did later seem to almost reject Harris and spoke very negatively about her. So it didn't seem to me that they were necessarily embracing both sides of the political spectrum. I also noted that, you know, Donald Trump was basically the headline speaker. You know, RFK Jr. and Vivek Ramoswamy were also headliners. There were Democratic politicians invited, but definitely further down the roster and not highlighted nearly as much. So it did seem to me that there was quite an embrace there of Donald Trump, you know, that did not necessarily come out in favor of other politicians. I would I would refrain that as a bit is that they're more aggressive toward an administration that it has been aggressive toward them in the sense that if a democratic politician is not against the space then they're not inherently political toward that politician. But they don't get the headline spot.

Well, but they're also not running for president and going to the conference. Neither is Vivek Ramoswami anymore. That's true. That's true. That's true. But he I mean, he's bigger on social. media than some of those Democratic congresspeople. But I mean, I personally, I highlighted the Democratic ones. I wanted to make sure it wasn't lost in the space. But basically, the broader industry, let's bring the crypto industry back into it for a little bit, they considered the current administration be fairly existential, basically not giving, and I, you know, I've been very critical of the kind of the crypto security issuance,

like the vast majority of it. But crypto as security, as you mean versus like software security. Well, yeah, yeah, as a financial security. Financial. Yeah, the financial regulations around issuing tokens and things like that. The industry has not gotten really clear guidance or kind of updates from the SEC how to monitor like modernize security laws in the fact that this new reality exists now. Right. So it's kind of like if you don't update broadcasting laws to reflect the fact that.

that podcast exists. It's peer-to-peer media exists. Now there is peer-to-peer money, peer-to-peer securities. And there's not really been a willingness from the administration to work with them on that. They've also been fairly hostile to Bitcoin mining. They've been fairly hostile toward privacy, financial privacy. So kind of across the board, either just for Bitcoin or specifically or broader crypto, this current administration and some key Democratic politicians have been fairly hostile

toward it. So I would say that they're more hostile toward politicians that have that have either actions and words been more hostile to them versus ones that just happen to be in that party, but don't agree with that trend of being hostile to the industry. And then I'm curious, and we can cut this if you don't want to answer, but what were your opinions on Donald Trump's speech at the Bitcoin conference broadly speaking? I mean, did you watch it, I guess to be in. I did watch it. I mean, it's a, it's a noteworthy event to watch, I would say.

You know, a former president and someone who's running for president that is, you know, pivoted his stance on Bitcoin. He used to be in his prior administration, he was hostile toward Bitcoin. Right. He's embraced it now. At least he always embraced. I think he, one of his skill sets is that he tracks momentum pretty well. He doesn't want to be on losing sides of certain issues.

issues. And I think he saw that basically there's there's very little votes to be gained from being anti-Bitcoin or crypto. And there are votes to be gained from being it as well as money. And so I think it's from his perspective, rational to have spoken there. I think the speech itself was rambling. It was largely more like one of his normal rallies. It just happened to have a little bit more kind of Bitcoin content put in there. And so I don't think it was a very good speech. R of K's was better researched, more put together, more of an actual keynote rather than kind of like flow of consciousness. But I still think when you have a former president and presidential candidate talking about a strategic Bitcoin reserve vowing to protect self-custody,

Those are, I think, pretty notable things to see in a speech. So I don't think it was a good speech, but I think it was a notable speech. And do you, you know, some people have said that, oh, he's just pandering to us. He has no interest in this or he's just in it for the money or whatever it might be. Do you, what is your opinion on the likelihood of, you know, if he is elected, following through on some of the promises that he made around the Bitcoin space and the cryptocurrency space? my guess is that he follows on some of them. I think it's fairly safe to assume that if that administration were to win, it'd be a less hostile administration than this current one is,

or that the next potential Democratic administration would be. As a base case, I would assume not all of the promises would be kept. Politicians do pander. They want the money. They want the votes. And then they have time until they have to do anything else. But early on in kind of Bitcoin's development, one of the big risks or concerns people had is what if the government bans it or what if they're super hostile toward it? And there are politicians out there that want to do exactly that.

And the point that some of us make is that government is not a monolith. It's made of, you know, at least if you're not an authoritarian state, it's not a monolith. There's many different people with many different incentives. And so the fact that you're starting to get a number of politicians that just openly like the industry, like the act. I think it's good for the country. You know, some of that's their genuine view. Some of it's just they know that's the momentum. You know, if something like one in seven Americans own it and if it's a pretty big funder of, you know, politicians, it's, you know, it's not great to be against it.

But I think a number of them genuinely believe it. So I think it's natural that as this industry gets fairly large, it be, it participates in government more, especially given that there have been fairly aggressive moves. against the industry. So they kind of start out on a defensive and then they move a little bit more aggressive. Quick aside, where does the one in seven number come from? I've been looking into those stats recently. That, I don't know. That was, I think that was in the letter that some of those Democrat politicians sent to the DNC. I don't know their particular data source. And I would assume so that's probably like when you look at the number of Coinbase accounts and things like that, that includes people that would literally own like $50 worth of like,

you know, dog themed money, for example, probably. So like the people that actually have a significant, like a non-trival percent of their liquid, you know, financial assets in Bitcoin, I would say is a much smaller number than that. Yeah. I've been looking into some of the numbers because Coinbase will often say 52 million Americans own cryptocurrency, which would be around 20%. So that would be two and one in five. But then there's sort of numbers out of the Fed that seem very different. And it seems like it's a challenging thing to sort of get the. I think, yeah, when you bring it down

to non-zero amounts of any cryptocurrency, I wouldn't be surprised as some of the higher end numbers are true. But it does kind of, it can be literally true, but not really true in practice, which is to say that someone, someone who has $15 worth of Dogecoin is not really a participant in the space or like an enthusiast. Yeah, I've noticed that as well as that the surveys tend to just ask about hold holdings or even like, have you ever held Bitcoin versus do you hold Bitcoin? Do you hold a significant amount of Bitcoin? Do you do things with it, et cetera? Okay. And then I guess just a final question to sort of wrap back around to the, you know, to tie back together the Bitcoin conference, the choice of Donald Trump and some of the, and some of the, you know, the other headliners and then the issue of sort of women and inclusion in this space. You know, I noted that Donald Trump headlining a Bitcoin conference was perhaps not the most appealing thing to some women, that three of the seven headliners at the Bitcoin

2024 conference have been accused of sexual assault against women. What are your feelings around that, around the embrace of Donald Trump and these various other figures by some of the prominent Bitcoin events and people in that community and the effect that that might have on women who have experienced sexual assault or who are perhaps more sensitive to that issue. So again, I think there are different conferences for different purposes. I think for the largest one, it would not make sense to turn down a former president from speaking at it, right? So there's a certain scale that they can reach for the industry as a whole that I think that's fully rational to do. Some of the other ones are just really popular media people

these days. I'm not sure how to categorize some of them. And some of the speakers I'm not thrown about myself, but I can see why they want so much big names in it because we hit critical mass, you know, it's, it gives you political cover, like in the sense that it's, if the industry is big enough, it's hard to really go after people that they own it and like the asset and want to work in the space and don't have to go to another country to work on it. And so I see, I see from their perspective, kind of that hit critical mass view. But there are plenty of other people. And I think their views are fully credible to say that's not really a conference I want to go to,

that I'd rather go to a more tech-focused conference or, you know, just a more, you know, kind of less sensationalist conference. Now, that one's so big that there's multiple stages. So there's like a legit tech conference within this broader political rally that was basically happening. So I fully get why people would be turned off by that. I think that's it's fully rational to have that view. But I do see why a conference would not turn down. such very big names and even pursue some of them. I think that's, I get why they did it. Yeah, it seems to me a bit of a trade-off, you know,

where you're sort of sacrificing, perhaps being welcoming to more people or, you know, more people who might be more willing to attend the conference if it were not quite so wholeheartedly embracing, you know, people with these types of backgrounds. And that's, I mean, that's what I try to do is it lost, lost in the chaos. I was trying to use at least my platform to fish out some of these other examples and say, look, there are also democratic politicians there of note that are speaking positive about it or things like that, things that are not part of that, you know, the headline aspect.

I've been kind of focusing on those other areas. I would like to see more people emphasize those other parts of it or to point out. Yeah, it seems like perhaps the conference could do some of that as well. but yeah i yeah i don't i don't disagree with that criticism okay well um that's kind of all i had as far as questions i had prepared is there anything you wanted to add or anything we didn't talk about that you wanted to to get into i think that mainly covers it i think i think the space as a whole is for like anyone that wants to be part of it um there are toxic elements of any industry especially one that brings in really passionate people,

especially one that happens to be more online just because online is a toxic space. When you go to conferences, it's generally very positive, even though it's generally been skewed male, it's in many ways diverse and other ways of measuring diversity, especially when you go to international conferences, right? We're talking mainly here about American conferences,

but there are increasingly conferences around the world. There's the Bitcoin Indonesia conference run by a woman. There's the Africa Bitcoin conference. They did it two years in a row. I believe they're going to do a third year. That's run by a woman. And I'd like to see more of that. There is a really big international scene.

It's not all just America. It's not all just like Donald Trump headline conferences. This is one particular massive American conference. It kind of hit a zeitgeist at the right time in a space where it just so happened to be months ago that a lot of these industry people found their business existential and kind of aggressively started supporting, say, Donald Trump and certain kind of pro-crypto candidates across the political spectrum. And this conference exists in that timeline. It basically happened to be the biggest conference hitting while that pivot has happened a number of months ago. So I wouldn't say that this is representative of conferences as a whole. But I would like to see just in general, more outreach by conference organizers to reach segments of the audience just to grow the space.

It's good for the space to reach new people. That makes sense to me. Well, again, thank you so much for agreeing to chat. I'll post this interview fairly soon. And, yeah, again, thank you so much for just agreeing to the interview. Thank you. Good, good discussion. Yeah, definitely.