Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) What Is A DAO? With @BradyDale

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

What is a DAO? How do they function? What is the history of this idea? Why have DAO's become so popular all of the sudden, and what are some examples of successful DAOs? The great Brady Dale from @DefiantNews joins Chris and Brian to explain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome, everybody, to the TechBeem Ride Home Experience for Friday, February the 11th. This is the first time we're ever doing this on a Friday. So welcome.

It'll be very interesting for us, actually, as the host, to sort of, I guess, get a sense for whether participation will be higher, lower, or whatever. But that's why we record this and share it out afterwards. So anyways, lots and lots of stuff going on. I did, Brian, just want to sort of bring up something. that's been circling the interwebs lately, because I think it's actually very, very important. It is somewhat related to what we're going to be talking about later on today. By the way, I should, I guess, say hello to Brady Dale, who's here with us, joining us from CoinDesk. He's been with us before.

No longer, The Defiant, The Defiant. Oh, my God. You know, okay. Thank you. The Defiant. It's all good. And so the thing that I wanted to start with, actually, was a number of conversations that I've been having lately, actually, about, of course, what's going on with Spotify and Joe Rogan.

I feel like this conversation has been like talked to death and so I don't want to rehash a lot of the stuff that's happened, but both as podcasters and as someone who actually I'm currently taking a course with Rob Reich about technology and ethics and AI and law. And it's, you know, there's a lot of folks who are actually like working at tech companies who are in this course and are building these systems and are thinking about how to design and architecture. architect, you know, these, I don't know, filtration surfaces for lack of a better word. And the thing that we've been talking about, and Brian, I'd love to sort of, I don't know, I guess get your take, your reaction to this, is whether we're entering into kind of a conversation about algorithmic paternalism. And essentially the concept is that these social networking platforms have gotten, you know, so big and so powerful. And they distribute so much content, so much information to so many people all over, you know, in the world and so on, that it's,

they're almost like too dangerous and that we can't actually traffic in ideas that, that, you know, ultimately can and do harm people. So I guess I wanted to get your take on, on that concept and that framing. Well, I mean, that's a, that's a whole episode. I mean, look, specifically given this moment, right? And I think the thing that I'm struggling with is here we have Spotify, which wants to be sort of an audio distribution platform. However, obviously, they have paid to make Joe Rogan other people's content exclusive. And so then the question is, to what degree are they responsible for, let's say, filtering or reviewing the content that gets placed on their platform? Right.

Like I said on the show that one day, I quoted Elizabeth Spires, Spears. yeah, about just edit him, just edit him. And then you could keep them on the platform, but, you know, yeah. But I think the question is, does that only apply to Spotify exclusive podcasts, or does it apply to all podcasts, you know, which we, of course, would fall under? And I think that's where these platforms, which are also somewhat like platishers, become a little bit, it's harder to sort of imagine whether or not there needs to be equal treatment to all or whether there is specific treatment to some,

which are sort of like, I don't know, the brand bellwethers of the platforms. Okay, this is not a perfect analogy, but one of the things from the beginning of the Internet that's always been there is porn and child porn, right? And so, I mean, maybe, in worst cases, this has happened, but the government's never going to go after a web browser. Exactly.

I think this is where it confuses me, because I've been thinking about Spotify, as a kind of browser, frankly, right? So the difference might be the way in which Spotify consumes, you know, the RSS feed of the podcast and then distributes it. But is it, you know, really that different? Like, you're not putting the RSS link in specifically like you do in iTunes. So does that make it less of a browser because it is filtering, you know, the content

and then sort of regurgitating it in the users. Yeah, please, of course. Well, just like Ashley at Hotpod pointed out that, like, if Rogan had just never gone to Spotify, Not of this would have ever been an issue. And all the platforms, to your point, all the platforms could have just added to whatever they wanted. You know, like Google Music, Spotify, Overcast, they could just all knocked out whatever episode they wanted. They could all do their individual.

This is, you know, because it's decentralized. This is decentralization. Like, they could have done, knocked out whatever they individually objected to. And then he could have still done his thing. I think most of us think it would be crazy for, like, the whole internet to try to shut something out. But, like, individual distributors can't. I think Rogan's insane that he didn't think this was going to obviously happen. But, you know, it totally was.

But yeah, like if he just had never gone on Spotify, each platform would have had, it would have been a non-issue. But so when I make the analogy of child porn and web browsers, the thing is, is that, you know, the argument would be that if you get something bad in a tool, that is, you know, versus somebody had to host it, somebody had to put it on there. Yeah, it's not a perfect analogy, right? Because you could have your porn star on OnlyFans, and then if they dip into not, like, child porn, obviously they're going to get kicked off the platform.

So there is some level of control. The next layer is that the only place that you can get Joe Rogan right now is Spotify. That's right. Spotify paid him $100 million. So there's really, as much as, as, you know, Listen, I have listened to Joe Rogan. He's one of the first podcasters I ever started listening to. To be quite honest with you.

So I am not anti-Joe Rogan. I do not have a side in this fight. Obviously, I would take a side against podcasters being the platformed or whatever. However, you can't get away from the fact that they paid them $100 million and there's only one place you can get them right now. And you and I have talked about specifically what you just said about, did he know this? You and I have talked offline about the fact that, oh, I think he did. And here's the thing. You can take the $100 million.

You can get the sort of reach and distribution of Spotify for three years, I think the contract is. And then he knows he can go do whatever he wants. It was a no lose for him because the audience will follow him. Well, there is a little lose for him, Brian, because we don't really know. what the deal is, but it sounds like the deal was performance-based. Like, I don't think you just got $100 million. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Which is probably part of why we got the apology, right? True. Probably with some provision in there that, like, if you really piss all of our listeners on, you got to like, you know, so like, you know, I don't think Grogan would have

otherwise apologized. Like, they were, like, he's got to have like a very nice kind of carrot, you know, at the end of his tenure there. I would also say, though, then he's not, he's not crying because his profile has only multiplied from being on Spotify. It's only multiplied by this controversy. So again, if Spotify next week came out and said, listen, we're cutting ties with Joe Rogan and maybe he only gets $20 million of the $100 million. It doesn't matter because he can go back to RSS and the audience is going to go with him. Totally.

Okay. Well, like I said, I mean, there's been plenty of analysis. I've been listening to you, lots of other podcasts about this and so on. I do think that this actually ties into our broader conversation about Dow's and governance, but I don't want to make that connection. We might get there, yeah. Two on the nose. So I know, Brian, you had a second topic, so let's go there.

Yeah, so the only things that I get interviewed for these days are the dot-com bubble and crypto stuff, because to the degree that my book still sells, crypto folks love my book. to try to figure out. Is history parallel repeating? Right, right, exactly. What can we learn from the first 25 years of the internet and is it applicable to? So anyway, I did an interview earlier this week about bubbles bursting.

And it was related to what we've been talking about, about the stock market going down and the technology stocks going down. So, right, exactly. And so I talked a lot of, you know, I talked a lot about it and did the bubble bursting thing. And I was like, you know, it doesn't happen all at once. And, you know, things can, like, you know, the bubble bursting, everyone always says March 2000. But it really, the bubble didn't fully burst until 9-11. So that was more than a year later. So it was a good 18 months of a slow motion, sometimes not always slow motion.

To what degree? So, so, you know, given that we have the pandemic, do you think that there's I guess I don't know what would the causation be with 9-11, right? Because that was such a shock to the psyche and then like it led into war and like all these things. But obviously the sort of dot-com bomb was, you know, ticking and it was going to explode. That's kind of the point that I want to get into is that so the 9-11 happening was sort of like the icing on the cake. But there was months and months and months of things going down, Yahoo going down, Amazon being a $5 stock and things like that. Even 2008, people forget this. Like, things happened, Bear Stearns or whatever.

What was the first one that blew up? That, like, happened in March. And it wasn't until, like, the fall that things, like, so there was a full most of a year where things were slow motion blowing up. But this is my point. The way the interviewer was asking me the questions made me realize that people's recent experiences with things happening was, oh, well, of course you knew in 2008, you know, things were going to blow up.

or you knew the pandemic happened, and so the stock market crashed. And so these were like moments in time where you had, well, you knew that things were going bad. And I was like, did you? Like at the time, you didn't know. And so this is the other thing that I had in my notes, Chris, is around that same time, like, Steven Sinovsky has been tweeting like pictures of like phones that were coming out around the launch of the iPhone. And, you know, the ha-ha thing is that, well, the iPhone happened.

and then everything, everyone knew that it was over for Nokia and Blackberry. No, they didn't. I mean, I remember that. It was barely a working phone when it first came out. It would drop calls all the time. And not only that, but like the first CES I ever went to was the one around the time when the Palm Pre came out. Yep. And I remember being people being like, well, there could be good at the time.

How many, right. And like, we don't know who's going to win. And like, there could be multiple winners in this market space. and it turns out there was only two. And like, that's the weird thing about looking back in history where it's like, well, of course, the iPhone came out, and then it was all over for everybody that didn't have a slab of glass.

No, that's not true. And even if you look at the Stevenson, like, you know, BlackBerry didn't, it's not like the iPhone came out and Blackberry crashed down to zero. It was a slow motion thing. And the point that I want to make is not only that things, the last couple crashes we've had happened in sharp periods of time,

but it can be a slow motion thing. The other thing is that you don't know in the time, you can't be sure. And this actually relates into crypto in the sense that, well, if we're talking 10 years from now and crypto has taken over the world and it will be so obvious to everyone, well, crypto was so much better. And so you had to know, no, right now, we don't know that crypto, like there's so many people that are skeptical of it. Like, people, once the history happens, and it's clear which way history is going,

people forget that in the moment, you cannot be certain. And there are tons of people that are not certain. And even, you know, Microsoft's lost decade in the 2000s. Like, I remember when the Zoom came out and everyone was like, well, this is it for the iPod because, you know, Microsoft is going to kill the iPod, you know, in the moment you can't know. And that's just kind of the point is that people that are, like retroactively looking at history and being like, well, of course the iPhone won, and it was over for Nokia and Blackberry and stuff.

In the moment, it didn't feel like that. I don't know. I don't know if that's a profound point. I agree. The fall of Rome took 300 years, similarly. Right. It's been like barely 20 for us. And the generation before the last Roman emperor,

Rome was still making a comeback. So if you were born into it, you could have still been confident that Rome would continue and you would look back and it's been around for 600 years. It's not going to be dead in my lifetime. All right. My second topic and then Brady, this will lead us into talking stuff with you more specifically. The great Bonnie and Clyde of the crypto world that got outed this week. Oh man. I love this story. Can we do this the whole time? Hey, we might. It's fun. Do you know how many times I've made the point about when people talk about regulation in crypto, but in tech and stuff, like, the fact that these guys got caught, I know they got caught because things are on the blockchain, which we can get into that too, Brady. Like, if you're going to do crime, maybe don't do it on some of the blockchain. Right.

But the point is that these people that lost their money, they're going to get it back. And so things like know your customer laws and things like that. When people in crypto are so maximalist about decentralization, I'm like, great. I'm with you philosophically. But the analogy that I made on the show one time was, you know, I'm for the environment. I'm for protecting the earth and things like that and allowing natural processes to happen. But if we came up with technology to prevent hurricanes and earthquakes, I'd be for that too. So when I say that like there is reg.

When you talk about regulation, some regulation is good because it means that if your stuff gets stolen, you can get it back. Well, the crypto answer to that, Ryan, would be what they would say is, fine, just let us have the option. You know, like let allow us to exist without it and don't force us. into it if we don't. If we want to have financial surveillance, let us have it. But if we want to have regulated institutions, people want to do that, that's cool too. You know, but like, let us have it. That would be the answer. When you, when there are people that I see that like their NFTs get stolen and they're running to, um, open C or whoever to try to get them back and they're like, you know, um, but then I've also seen quotes from people that are like, well, this is just the game. It's all in

the game, right? Um, what do you, you, you're deeper in the crypto, than either of us. Like, is that sort of a common thought that's like, look, I knew what I was getting into doing this stuff. And so if my metamask wallet got fished, that's just the way it goes. Wouldn't someone like that want some sort of a mechanism to get their NFTs back? Well, I mean, I guess. I mean, I agree that's the game. You should know better. But, you know, I think a good solution for that is insurance, you know, like either OpenC offers insurance, you have a premium program that has insurance or, you know, you buy some kind of insurance, you know, but like once you, like if you create some way that like you can someone steals a thing

and you can just go and keep it back, well, then there's no reason to have a blockchain anymore. We just have a centralized database. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, the blockchain is a really crappy way to do things unless you want censorship resistance. And then if you do, then you've got to do it that way, and you have to accept both the pros and the cons. What has been the response to the Bonnie and Clyde's story this week in the crypto space? Because I feel like a lot of – some of the circles that I run in are crypto-skeptics. So it's sort of like they're just munching popcorn being like, see, you know, crazy crypto Wild West World. This is what happens or whatever.

But like what do crypto people think about these – these two crazy kids. Well, I mean, we think it's crazy, too. I mean, I lost half a day. I'm just like, you know, like, the content of Razzlaton. You know, I mean, she's glorious. I mean, this is what,

this is a part of what I love about being a cryptojournalist. Like, nothing's ever normal, right? It's just like, it's like we, we found out who has the BitFenex money and they are insane people, you know? Like, of course they are. Like, I just, this is what I love. It's just like they weren't, it wasn't just too boring, brothers from a Russian mob ring, you know, like, who were just like, I don't know, we figured

out a hustle. No, it was Razzlecon. You know, like, this, this version of the simulation is so good. It's just, you know, endless entertainment. Well, I mean, I guarantee you that six figure things have already been signed for screenplays on this and castings already happening. I hope so. Oh, my God. But like, you know, people are really curious about what it indicates. I mean, also, because there's so many things to say about it. I kind of have an obsessed in Rosalcom for the last couple days. The big debate is, were they the thieves or do they just have it? I personally, the guy Eric Wall wrote a really great Twitter thread about this,

where he talks about how Razl Khan, Heather or whatever, Heather Morton, I think, or something like that, whatever her name was, you know, she comes off is so nutty, but actually she's probably really quite smart. And if you dig into it, like it seems like she is pretty pretty intelligent. And the more I think about it, if someone were asking me to bet $100 right now, I would bet that they are actually the thieves, just because one, what Eric pointed out in his thread, and I can hunt it down and post it in the space, but was she's done talks and stuff about social engineering. Social engineering, right? Yeah. And when you read between the lines of stuff that the Nexus said about the hack, in retrospect, it seems like they hinted that it wasn't a technical hack.

And then the other thing is like, the other thing that doesn't make sense is just like if, like, why did they have basically all of it? You know, like if there's other people involved, that's not how prime rings work. You know, you don't let one person six years later hold on into all the loot. You know, you split it up. And so can I let me let me just pause for a second here and like explain that they were charged with essentially trying to launder this crypto. but they were not specifically charged with the hack. So that would mean either somebody else hacky it done stolen goods. Right.

Here you go. Try to fence this for me, which doesn't make a ton of sense. Like, sure, we're holding for you. Yeah, right. Or whatever. And look, maybe they just. No, but Brian, that could still. They don't have any evidence that they can't prove that they did it.

All they know they have it. You know, like, and that's what I think it is. It's like they probably did it, but the cops have no proof. proof that they did it, but they know they had it. Like, they know that. And it's stolen property. It's like the Lambeaus just showed up on my lawn. I mean, I didn't put them there.

Yeah. Is it, I feel like one of the things that I've heard, and I said this week, is that I feel like law enforcement over the last few years, blockchain has become their best friend. because if they're forensic enough and patient enough, like it's literally, forget about fingerprinting and like, you know, surveilling and wiretapping. It's like just wait,

watch the ledger, and eventually you can connect the dots and find the people that did the dirt. So what's the thinking in terms of that? I know that there are, there's coins and blockchains where the whole point is anonymity. So it's, you know,

and you want to wash it. But the idea, idea. This is why you love being a crypto journalist. On the one hand, everyone's like, oh, crypto's only good for criminals and money laundering. And then at the same time, no, it's not. Right. What the heck? It's so annoying. It's like every time chain analysis puts out one of their reports on crypto crime, the story that every mainstream media does is like, you know, $2 billion in crypto crime this year. And like, and what you'll immediately see in crypto Twitter is they're all screaming at all these outlets to be like, that isn't,

actually what the report really is. I mean, it did say there was that much, but it was like, $2 billion is a part of like a trillion dollars or $2 trillion of like overall activity. It's like the crime is a very small part of the business. It's most, it's overwhelmingly, um, it's overwhelmingly, uh, you know, legitimate stuff. And this is, this is my rant on the whole environmental thing too, right? Like, look, we can have our whole conversation about proof of work and you can say that it like is environmentally destructive, but you're only able to quantify it because it's transparent. There's almost no other industry that you can you can so clearly quantify its impact on the environment. So the fact that it's giving you the data is what it's enabling you to make the

critique. To build the narrative, basically. Yeah, exactly. It's like it is, it is being open in a way that nothing else is. And so you could yell at it about this thing, but nothing else is open like that. Similarly, you can look at the blockchain and you can see that a certain amount of crime is happening, just like it is happening in every other industry, except for you can, you put the pieces together if you're good at it, like the analysis is, you can kind of quantify it. And so you can act as if that's the whole story when everyone who's really in it knows it's not even close to the whole story. It's a very small piece of the story, but like try completely getting crime out of any industry, especially one that involves money. Like, you can't. That's what I was going to ask.

Like, how much of this stuff actually goes on in the normal banking industry and yet there's no money for it? I mean, the fact that like people still use, you know, probably password one, two, three is their bank credentials is seriously a huge problem. So just because This is why crypto people get so mad about KYC, and this is why I think KYC is so bad, is because we're forcing every single person, every single entity that touches any kind of money to keep a full record of everyone who does anything. And we wonder why identity theft is up and up and up every single year. We have so many honeypots that have all of this information about people. And we can say like, oh, we're maybe preventing the next big terrorist attack.

But what we are definitely causing is several billion dollars of really normal people losing a lot of money and having real tragedies in their lives every year because there's so many copies of everybody's personal identity in so many places. It's child's play to steal. You know, so it's just like. So by the, I was going to say, by the way, KYC is know your customer and these are the laws that banks have to prevent. They were mostly put in place. They only go back to people act as if they're like something that's written in ancient stone and we've done this. The drug war, right? They only go back to 9-11.

That's when it started. K-W-C-A-ML really kicked in after 9-11. So it's only been 20 years. Somehow, Western civilization was able to exist without them before that. But now somehow it's impossible. So, you know, like I understand the justification for these things, but I also think that there's some deeper points that the crypto world makes that aren't completely crazy. I want to make one more point before we move on to the topic.

By the way, Brady, did you have a hard? out or anything tonight? No, I'm open. Sweet. Okay, give us at least another half an hour. Brian's going to be caffeinated very soon, so this could get very interesting. Oh, I'm caffeinated right now. Oh, God, okay.

The one more point that I wanted to make was... I'm drinking. I wish I were. Listen, I'll take a gummy at the top of the hour. You're mixing your uppers and your downers, Brian. What's going on here? Well, I mean... So I've continued.

these shows, I'm always buzzing, so that's why I need to take a gummy. The best, the guy with the best op-sec in history is Satoshi, because not only was he on forums for years and years and years, and we've never been able to figure out who he was.

And he's never moved those coins. Like, the minute he even looked at them, people would be like, oh my God, there was a breeze that went over that wallet or something like that. Totally. You know, if you, like, the thing

one of the most amazing things about Satoshi, aside from the fact that we never figured out who he was, and he invented the thing, and so it was the machine, the fact that we still have never figured out who he is, like, he's the smartest guy ever because there's no one that's been who was the guy that came forward trying to figure out. Like Florida man or something who claimed to be Satoshi. Yeah, we can't go too far into that because people are litigious, but right, Brady? I don't even know that. Like, I've had a lot of weird people come to me of claiming very strong evidence of someone being Satoshi. It's like, I don't even know. But until someone moves some coins or someone posts something on Bitcoin talk, we don't know.

You know? Fair. I'm Googling for the man that claims to be Satoshi, but the first result is man claims to be a time traveler, which could be the same thing, actually. Yeah, probably. In fact, that would make sense. That would solve the whole mystery. The whole thing just, yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Brady, we brought you on. on because before the Bonnie and Clyde of 2022 this week, we were talking a lot about DAOs and, what was it, the ENDS Dow and things like that. But I don't want to necessarily get into that. ENS. I keep saying ends and people don't do that. Yeah, D&S, yeah. Yeah, because it's like D&S.

You don't say DINS. Oh, right. Oh, shit. I know you say JIFs, but in this case, it's DNS. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But what it occurred to me is that we've been using D&S on-E-N-S,

sort of like the Web 3 version of DNS. Okay, continue. Yeah, right, got it. We've been using the term Dow on the show, and I had never done a piece or done a long read that explains what DOWs are, and I realize that I don't kind of know fully how they function. So this is a wide open thing, and let's start from, from the very beginning, you were saying to us offline that DOWs have been around for a long,

long time? Like, this idea is not of recent vintage. Is that right? No, it's not. It's not. But you know what? Actually, this occurred to me. I want to say something else before I say that. Okay. So crypto, I had a series that started at Coin Desk one point. I never really finished about philosophy and crypto, and there's a lot of interesting overlaps of crypto and philosophy. And crypto gets treated like it's this one monolithic culture, which I'm sure you guys know it's not really. Right. But like one of the things that is interesting about it is how like, but there are a lot of common themes. There's a lot of things a lot of people generally agree about. But one of the things I do really like is that like, I mean, I love most of the blockchain. I think most of them are great, especially the big ones. I definitely love Bitcoin. I love Ethereum. I mean, I like a lot of them. But but like one thing I do really like is that a theory. Ethereum kind of has a unique culture, which is hard to appreciate externally.

Like it just looks like it's a part of the whole crypto thing. And it is. But like, but Ethereum attracts like a different kind of breed of people. And like, and like it's very much, you know, I mean, they want to get rich. I mean, and they've done a great job at it. Like they like money, but they are like, whereas Bitcoin is very much about like myself and my personal sovereignty and like, you know, me against the world. and independence, Ethereum is much more about like doing things together and inventing something greater collectively, you know, and, and that kind of spirit. And so I think Dow's really speak to that.

And so like, so I can give a quick history of Dow, it was pretty fast. So this guy, Dan Larimer, who has a complicated history in crypto, he is the found, he was the guy who created the EOS, blockchain. He's, he also created the Steam at blockchain and he did this other one before that. His name is kind of alluding me, but he is, for whatever you think of Dan Larimer and his tendency

to jump ship on Projects that he launched, he is a smart guy. Like, nobody disagrees with that. And he invented this idea of the decentralized autonomous corporation. That is like a piece of code that does things and pays people for things that it needs. And

Bitcoin is a decentralized autonomous corporation from that standpoint. All it really needs is people to mine and it'll pay them for mining. And beyond that, Bitcoin doesn't really care, right? But so his idea was this could be a larger thing. Well, then Ethereum comes along and Ethereum says, well, we don't really care about corporations and we don't really care about kind of like pure code things. What we care about is how people work together.

So this idea of the centralized autonomous organization came along. And the thinking was, and I'm kind of a little bit telling a story, but I think it's someone accurate. The thinking was that with Ethereum and with blockchains, you can create new methods for people to coordinate. Okay. So then there was... Let me stop you right there because Ethereum is programmable

in the sense that the simplest form would be like a contract. Like I know that early things on Ethereum were like sort of prediction markets and things like that. So if the Bengals win the Super Bowl, it's something that, it's a fact that is verifiable. And once it's on the blockchain, if you bet or something like that. And so there's contracts you can do. And so you extrapolate onto that. You could do insurance and you could do actual organizations and businesses and stuff. Right.

And then a lot of the things you've heard about on Ethereum, just to sort of nail that down, they might be run by Dow's, but they oversee contracts. So for example, like Uniswap, which is a well-known thing, but if folks don't know, it's this thing on Ethereum that lets you trade different tokens. you know, readily. We could arrest and throw in jail every single person in the planet who's ever touched uniswap or ever done anything with it. Uniswap would still run until as long as Ethereum kept running.

It doesn't need any people to function, you know. And so... Wait, wait, wait. I want to understand something about what you just said, because when we talk about decentralized autonomous organizations, there's an implication of sort of organizing of humans. But what you just said is that there's essentially like a virtual machine, somewhere that's running code and the thing will just keep running whether those humans are there with the organization.

So it'll never change. Right. I see. So the sort of organization piece are the gardeners who maintain the contracts. Okay. But it will stay just as it is till the end of time if everyone is taken away, you know. But obviously the world changes and it would become pretty crappy eventually if it never updated. So you need a way to update it and shift it.

And that's what the organization is for. So Dow's were a dirty word in Ethereum for a number of years. And the reason they were a dirty word is because really early in Ethereum history in 2016, this company called Slokket came along. And they were an Internet of Things company, and they thought they could use a blockchain for Internet of Things. They weren't getting venture funding in the way they wanted to. And so they said, you know what, we're going to create our own venture funds on the blockchain,

and we're going to call it the Dow. And people will put in money and they'll get a token back. And that token will allow them to vote on how the whole Dow invest its money. And of course, they did it because they hoped the Dow would agree that they should invest in Slokkett's technology. But what happened was there was a vulnerability in the Dow's contract. I think there was like $60 million in there or something like that. And a bunch of the money was stolen. And at that time, that was like a lot.

You know, like back then. That was like most of the money on Ethereum. And most of the money was stolen. And so then a really controversial thing happened in an Ethereum history that, you know, you always hear that everything's immutable in the blockchain. But they decided to like roll it back and kind of give everyone their money back. And that's why today there is Ethereum and Ethereum Classic and, you know, controversial to say, but it's true.

Ethereum Classic is the original chain. I mean, that's the immutable chain after the hack. And Ethereum, as we know. it now is a fork, you know. And so because of that, because this, and that nearly wrecked Ethereum, you know, it was, it was a really dark moment in Ethereum history. And it also, that was the first thing that really drew the SEC's attention. They wrote a paper about it that basically said, this was clearly a security that we made,

and we're not going to go after you guys now, but don't do it again. And, and that led everyone to be like really scared of the word Dow. for several years. Well, not even several. I guess it was really, it was like 2019 when they first started coming back again until like three years. But people were like,

no one wanted to talk about Dow's for a while. And then all of a sudden, they did again. They started to be comfortable with it. And, but Ethereum was much bigger and much more robust at that point. So, so yeah,

I mean, that's important history to understand. I mean, it is ancient history, but like there was, sometimes you'll hear people talk about the Dow. And the Dow. was that back in the day.

And this is one last thought on that. You know, this is just entirely my view. But like the point of the Dow was it was, it was this thing that you joined and then you got to be a part of this venture fund. And then a year and a half or so later, the ICO boom happened. And I would argue that what everyone realized is that Ethereum itself was just the Dow. And you could just join whatever investment you wanted. on it. People would say, like, we're going to do this. We're going to give us some money, and people are like, sure. And so that is really, that was the actual, that was the actual Dow. The ICO boom

was Ethereum as a whole, just being a Dow and funding thing. People got to join the investments that they wanted. Okay. Formal doubt people on. Yeah, go ahead, Brian. Before we get to the present day, let me back up for a couple basics. So you're mentioning tokens. So the, on a base atomic level, the function of a Dow is ownership of the token because the token gives you voting rights, correct? Yeah. So the Dow, and this is one of the, I think, kind of one of the dumbest things I ever wrote. I was at the Observer at the time. And I wrote something that like, as a Dow was happening, that was like, the Dow has already worked because the tokens are worth more than the money that's been put in, you know? I think that was roughly this essay that I wrote in the whole thing fell apart and I felt kind of dumb.

But yeah, the idea was you put in money and you got this token back and the tokens were instantly tradeable. And so some people, and you know, you just had the token that represented a vote in what the overall entity did. And there was some formula you put in like one E if you got like three Dow tokens or whatever the number was. And it was entirely just you had as much power as money you put in. and because these things were tradable and people believe the Dow was going to do well, the value of them started shooting up really fast and so people just started selling off their tokens

because they made money instantly. But yeah, the core of the core, I mean, this is, like I said, there's a lot of variations in how Tao's work, but in the purest early Dow, it's like you put in money, you get tokens back, sort of pro rata to the total pool of the tokens you have in,

and that is your amount of voice. in the Dow. And again, I will cop to being an ignoramus when it comes to crypto stuff. But in the way that blockchains, you know, one of the fears is if you control more than 50% of the nodes, you can take over a blockchain or whatever. So are you saying that it's baked into a Dow that if I had enough money and the wherewithal to do it, you could buy your way into control of any Dow? there are also all sorts of levels of preventing that from happening?

Yeah, there's a ton of, there's a ton of variation here. I mean, like, the truth is there's tons of DAOs out there that, like, say their DAWs, but, like, really, like, five people honestly just execute everything, and they do generally just do what the DAO says, but they don't actually really, like, have to, you know? Like, you know, like, I was just kind of considering maybe doing a story right now. there's kind of one of the most grassrootsy projects in the history of Ethereum is this thing called Sushi Swap, which is, there's a whole very interesting story to the early history of Sushi Swap, but it was created to kind of counter uniswap, the dex, the decentralized exchange I talked about earlier, the place you could exchange.

Sort of like it looks rare to OpenC. Yeah, kind of, yeah. Ish. Yeah. And Sushi Swap, as has been the case for as long as it's been around, is going through a bit of a transition right now. and a bunch of deep pocketed people came in and said, you know, we want to take it over. We're sophisticated people.

We can run this thing well and make it all work. And we have enough sushi tokens to make it happen. But the way sushi set up, I think because they set it up because they don't want whales to just be able to take over whatever they want. The honest truth is the core team can just veto things, not let it go to the blockchain. And so they're just like, no, that you don't get to the vote.

shares. Yeah, it's like super buddy and shares. So, so like you can say that that's not really like blockchain pure, and I'm sure some people would argue that, but you can also argue that this is kind of something in the community that launched sushi swap kind of decided how they wanted things to be, because they trusted the core to be that way, precisely because they didn't want some whales to just like completely take over. So there's just all kinds of variation. Like I've been some stories, like one of the things that's going on with Dow's right now is that, you know, they're getting more and more and more more and more money.

They are having more and more complex organizations. And like it's nice to do to make decisions. Like there's a bunch of like investment dows out there. They're like people just like 20 people who have some money came together through it all together

and they just invest as they decide to. They don't they don't do everything on chain. You know, they just have a telegram group or like a signal group and it's like this thing came along. Is everyone good? And they get a bunch of thumbs up

emojis and they're like, right, we're giving them $100,000. You know, that's how they actually work. They just don't, there's no need to actually be that formal about it. But it's still, it is coming together like on Ethereum and it's, and it's functioning in this kind of like Lucy Uzi, grassroots, Dowish sort of way. So they still call themselves Dow's, but they aren't making every decision on chain.

You know, so there's just, there's a lot of, there's a lot of layers to it. Let me, well, again, if you take a gummy and you're like, does democracy really exist? or, no, there's people in the background that are really calling all the shots. But, okay, wait, can I just get a couple more basic questions out of the way? And then we take this wherever we want to go. Number one, is it sort of a plug-and-play thing? Like in the way that when the ICU boom happened, like you just have to grab some code, change it a little bit, and you can have your own coin. Is that in existence now?

Can you pull off the shelf a Dow and do it now? it's more complicated than that. But essentially, is it sort of plug and play like that right now? I think so. I mean, like, people are sorting a lot of things out, though. I mean, like, so for example, one of the things you're seeing more and more often with Dow's is, like, the pure idea originally was just like you have tokens and that's your vote. And if a decision comes up, if you've got a token, you've got a vote.

But a lot of Dow's are realizing that that isn't really a great way to do things for a variety of reasons. I mean, not to go, this is a real weird crypto rabbit hole. But like a thing that can happen is if someone just, wanted to take something over, they could just borrow a pile of tokens really quickly, vote the thing that they wanted, and then sell them off, you know, 10 minutes later. And that's not really democracy, right? And so more and more downs are starting to do structures where, like, where to actually vote,

you have to do some level of staking. So the real leader in this, and this is one of the hot things in crypto right now is, it's usually referred to as the VE model or the Vote Escrowe model, but Curve with its CRV token, They do this thing where it also leads to how much of the profit sharing you get on the platform, too. But like, you have to stake your curve and your vote is actually proportional to how long it is until it unstakes. You can stake it for a max of four years. And so if a vote happens and you just stake it and it's four years out, your token has like the maximum voting power. But if you only stake it for six months, then it doesn't have a strong of a voting power.

And the point is they want to give people who have a long, long-term skin in the game, more clout in a network. So we were seeing things more and more like that in order to prevent the, to keep things liquid, but also to prevent those sort of like hustles from rich people who just want to take things over and steal stuff, which, you know, Justin's son. Like that's just something you see a lot of times in the space. I was reading this week about like even like cooling off periods where it's like, okay, we can make this decision, but it doesn't go into effect for 90 days or something.

It's sort of like getting married in Vegas or something. Like, it's not really legal until 72 hours later when you sober up, right? Well, that's a pro is on sort of the cancellation thing. But in terms of just like for Dowell, even have like just day-to-day decisions, they just like with Kerr, they have all these decisions that they have to make. They give a bunch of rewards to different participants in the network. And those rewards are constantly getting reshifted. And that's a very important vote in crypto, like to vote on that. So they have votes like every 11 days or something like that.

And so people, so they want people to have the most. to vote who have the longest term commitment to curve. So that's... Okay, this is the last one, and then I'm going to step back, and Chris can go hog on this. You mentioned legality early on, and what we're talking about here feels like corporate governance, sounds like corporate governance, sounds like when you're doing corporate governance, then you are talking about raising, you know, what's the word I'm not thinking of right now? this is a financial instrument that you're talking about and things like that. Security? Security.

Security. Has anything changed with the legality of Dow's or they've just gotten popular again, but we still haven't really sussed out what sort of gray area we're in here? I mean, theoretically, Wyoming has this Dow law. But like Preston Byrne, who is a very colorful attorney and a well-respected attorney in the crypto space, this firm Anderson Kilt. He's a lot of fun on Twitter. He let's talk about marmots a lot.

You know, he kind of makes fun of the Wyoming law. He's just like, it's just an LLC that threw Dow on the top of it. I don't really, I'm not a lawyer, I don't get these things as well. You know, I will say that there are some big Dow's out there that are just existing on their own and they don't exist in the eyes of the law. But that does, that does make life. hard for your staff. You know, you have to have, like, you know, you have to be exclusively a bunch of really wealthy people that can make that work for themselves or just be philosophically

okay with that. It also makes it impossible for you to, like, own things in the real world. Like, the best example of that, one of my favorite Dow is this is this Dow called YERN. And YERN is basically a robo-advisor for yield. It's a place where you can just drop your money into different pools. It's like URN.D. Finance or different? Yeah, urine dot finance. Yeah. It also has a very colorful story. One of the most interesting launches in the history of crypto, but we don't need to go into all that. But the point is, urine has become an entity unto itself. And as far as I know, and I've asked a million people this, urine exists legally nowhere in the world. It has like 30 or 40 people who work for it. I think they make like a lot of money. But like it is all just on chain. Everything happens on chain. And, you know, you work for it.

you probably make great money, but you make it all on chain and you got to deal with your own taxes and insurance and all that stuff yourself and just sort it out because they are just a Dow, you know, and they only deal with crypto things. They do everything crypto ways. And that's that's how Yearn has always existed since it launched in since it became a Dow in kind of mid-2020. And so some entities do do that. But more and more as, you know, like I did a story, I think two weeks ago about this company. that is helping it, helping Dow's do payroll in a crypto-native way, in a better way, but also enabling them to do it in a way that interfaces with, you know, typical corporate structures and so they can actually give their employees benefit.

So, like, there's different stances on this kind of thing, you know. But, yeah, the law hasn't really moved other than this kind of Wyoming thing, which is, like, maybe kind of crypto-relevant or maybe it's just an LLC. I don't really know. I mean, so part of, I guess, the type of questions I would like to ask are about understanding like what's actually new and novel and different versus kind of just repackaged, you know, that sort of already exists. And Brian alluded to that. I was thinking about how, you know, like I have some shares in publicly traded stocks. And before the earnings season, I get emails that say, hey, go, you know, vote on board of directors and things like that. I'm like, oh, it's kind of like a Dow, except it's not, you know, decentralized or autonomous. And so those structures and habits and behaviors kind of, kind of, you know, already exists in the marketplace. So they're already known.

Right. And then so it seems like we're recreating some aspects of corporate governance in that sense. I think one of the big differences in what you just mentioned, and I'm trying to sort of piece this together in my mind as a picture, which is like, if yearn exists as purely a Dow that is on chain, then none of the people who actually do the work need to necessarily, like, know any of the other people involved. They can be completely anonymous.

They can have a series of tokens. that were disseminated through an ICO at some point, and there were proposals that are essentially raised, and then members of the Dow, people who own the tokens, essentially stake those tokens on the proposal being chosen or selected, and then presuming it's all code, if the vote happens, then the contract might be upgraded to reflect whatever was proposed, and then things move forward.

So it's different in the sense of the way that, as you said, like people can come together and I guess collectively and self-organize. And one of the important mechanisms of a DAO is sort of creating an internal structure where internal capital, which are the tokens, can actually be aggregated, used, traded, staked. You know, there's a bunch of sort of game dynamics that are designed that allow people to participate. So is, I guess, given that framing, what are the things that you see are being sort of uniquely novel and new and different? that, let's say, would require new laws versus actually these things are totally fine. And the legal structure that exists, you know, the sort of known one, especially in the United States,

I mean, these participants in DAOs are all over the world. So what would be the purpose or function of, I don't know, like a land-based legal system interfacing with a Dow and why wouldn't more of it just happen on chain? Well, the reason that more of it, what they care about is if they get bigger, if they want to interface the real world, they want to own land or whatever. That's where fries down. But like, but you, but you, but you, but I don't know if this is what you're asking exactly, but like, how is it different?

And this is a really interesting question. You know, sometimes I'm out in the world and I meet young people who are like, how do I get involved in crypto? You know, what can I do? And I tell, this is what I say all the time because I've heard so many stories like this. And I, I think they're true. They seem to be true. I've, I've encountered it again and again.

Where the thing about Dow's that people say all the time is if you're excited about one and you think it's interesting, you should just go join its Discord, start paying attention, learn as much as you can. And if you have a skill to offer that's useful, you can just start doing it. And if it is actually good, you'll probably start getting paid for it. And that doesn't even just mean, like, coding, right? Like there's people who will just start like doing events to promote whatever it is the Dow is doing to educate people about it in different places. And people will be like, yeah, your events are cool. You should be a part of our marketing team. We'll start paying you to do it.

You know, like, Yerne has, I don't know if they're still doing it, but they put out this code a while back that was like a part of how they distributed their money was they just gave everyone who was on the team like a certain number of votes every month to be like who's the MVP's. of the company and everyone just voted on what they thought and that allocated a bunch of their internal money just like you know who has been the most useful and um and you know obviously you can see how that could be game and there can be problems with it but the point is they just have all these interesting ways of letting people um come in you know maker dow which is on some level the granddaddy Dow in decentralized finance they they make this uh stable coin called die they're a they're kind of a bank Some people call them the central bank cryptocurrency, at least of Ethereum. You know, the story of the early days of MakerDAO, and this is a little bit legend at this point.

I wasn't there, but people say that, like, you know, a lot of the early core team just invented their own job because it was so informal early on that people just came and they started doing things. And then as it started being worth money, they just make it just started paying them for it. You know, just like people just made their job. But you see like a lot more of that happening. Dow's are so much looser and they have their this, they're able to function. that's much less formal way that people can just show up. And if they're doing good work that's valuable to the Dow and the Dow has money and many of them do, they'll just reward them for it.

And so that's why I always say to young people, it's just like if you're looking for a place in crypto, don't try to get a job. If you're in college, you've got some free time, just like find a Dow that you think is cool and look for a way to chip in and it might turn into something, you know, because I hear stories where they're happening all the time. And I think that's how it's different. Yes and no, because I think where my mind goes and maybe there's a lot. This is actually to your point.

And I think what's new is that the blockchain exists and there's more kind of awareness and just more use of internet technologies generally. But I pinned a tweet very early in the space about a diagram that I did all the way back in 2004 about the spread Firefox slash Mozilla ecosystem. And it looks very, very similar to a diagram that Andreessen Horowitz put together to describe how sort of a Dow is structured. And it looks a lot like a cell nucleus, right? And so you kind of have like these different shells of either energy or participation. And the core, of course, is the nucleus. And that's where, you know, the core contributors kind of are. And that's where the project really, you know, gets its, I don't know, spirit of life.

And then the further out you go, of course, in the other sort of electron, you know, valent shells, there's less gravitational pull to the center. And people might, you know, sort of multi-dow and go through multiple things. The thought is that when I graduated from college and I came out to Silicon Valley, I was a volunteer in the Mozilla project in a very similar way to what you're describing. And they just gave me more and more responsibilities until I ended up starting another browser project called Flock. And so what I'm kind of thinking about is that actually a lot of these ideas of governance and participation actually in some respects. And maybe there's not a direct line, but I think there might be. And Brian might have something to say about this actually comes out of.

of the open source world. That the way which... It totally does, Chris. But I think one thing you probably know of the open source world is for one problem it's had, and we don't know that crypto has solved us yet. This is true. But there is over time a maintainer

problem in the open source. Oh, 100%. You get down to like one or two maintainers because there's very little money on these very big, important projects, and no one figured out how to capture value on them. Right? And so like, and crypto might be maybe, and it's too early to say,

doing a better job with that. So you're right. There's a lot of parallels, but it doesn't quite, it didn't quite work. Yeah, totally. And I think what I would add to that is like in the beginning, a lot of people working on open source actually weren't that worried about getting paid because, one, it was relatively cheap. You know, oftentimes people had have a day job. And their open source contributions were really just kind of like passion projects. And they put it out there to the world. And this was a new way to work and to collaborate and to, you know, like the ideology of open source in the early days is so familiar and so similar in the Dow space. And I think you're right that the difference may be that we are now financializing. these contributions in a way that's public and accountable and recorded in a way that there are no takebacks and a project just doesn't cease to exist because the maintainer decides to delete the repo or something. It's all on chain. So it creates a level of persistence, a level of visibility, a level of accountability. And because of these internal structures and systems that are created, they do or they are able to, I guess, function in ways that open source projects

weren't able to, as you suggest, previously. So. Yeah, no one in crypto would claim that like they, yeah, I agree with you. No one would claim that they own nothing. Like there is, they are building, they are standing on their shoulders of giants, right? It's like that world is completely important to everything that's happened now. It's just that like getting value on the internet has enabled, has opened up some other possibilities, you know?

Right. Right. And I think like, you know, why I'm bringing it back to that, obviously, you know, like that's sort of my background in tech, but also. To Brian's point, as kind of like an internet historian, I think it is worth seeing what, like, running a diff algorithm on how things are new and novel now versus like how they were before, how we struggled before, how we failed before, because the technology wasn't there. Money was poison. Like, we ran away from those things. And now the culture has shifted.

The technology has shifted. And now there's a desire for, you know, collaboration, or at least there's always been this desire for collaboration. And now the technology actually supports it. in kind of a novel way. And one of the things that I think actually I'd love to get your feedback on this, the thing that seems to be the most different is the degree to which people are starting to become, and I say this sort of broadly, both more aware of the design of organizations and collaborative systems and autonomy and just how to design organizations that don't suck. I mean, like, in the context of the great resignation, it feels like people want to have more autonomy and to be

empowered and to do things and to not work for these lifeless corporations. that have all this bureaucracy to prevent, again, some of the things that transparency in the blockchain may enable. And at the same time, you still have interpersonal challenges and problems. And so the blockchain doesn't actually solve for that. So, like, to what degree would it make sense to replace the design of corporations as they've existed for most of the industrial revolution with something that is more, I guess, I don't know, compatible with the information environment that we, exist in. You know what I mean? It's sort of like corporations need a reboot to catch up to the way in which people are now collaborating through the internet. And Dow seemed to be the latest proposal for how to do that. Yeah. I mean, I think they're going to push the world an interesting direction. I don't want to prognosticate beyond that. I think we need more time and more, you know, everyone in crypto who does these things, nobody thinks that they've worked out governance yet. I mean, governance is one of the most talked about conversations in there. It's just like they're still working at the king. are excited about this new world, but no one thinks it's perfect yet. Yeah, I think that's kind of what I'm asking, like, in terms of your sense of how you see

the space, like, what's going really well and what's actually, like, where are things still very challenging? And I don't want to go down this, you know, rabbit hole too deeply, but I do think that would happen with Bratley Milligan and E&S over the last week where, you know, tweets, historical tweets came out that certainly did not put him in a good light. and the community, you know, mobilized and essentially voted to oust him from his position as director of operations. And that happened very quickly. And that's sort of like stuff that might have happened, you know, within a corporation with an HR department, you know, sort of, you know, behind closed doors, et cetera. And instead, this entire thing happened more or less on Twitter

in the course of like 28 or 48 hours. So that's something. And, you know, like how do we make sense of that? Yeah. I think we're going to be thinking about that one. for a long time. You know, and Brandley wasn't the only one. There was, uh, uh, Cooper. It happened to Cooper. It happened to, uh, this, Nisha. Yeah. It's super rare. And they'll probably do some more. Um, so, uh, yeah, I think we're going to see that one that we're going to see that play out for a little bit. It is an interesting thing, you know, especially to see in a, in a culture that says censorship resistance is so important. We'll see. Let me, let me come at this from a

different angle, because obviously that's a critique I mentioned on the show that, like, oh, you want to be involved in a Dow, like, have you ever served on a condo board? It's chaos and annoying. But a different critique from a different perspective would be the idea that if everything is put up to a vote, one of the critiques of, you know, democracy in general is that such a small percentage of people actually vote. even in the United States of America. So what happens is the people that are the most committed, the people have the most interest in doing things are the ones that push through the ideas. And so functionally, you don't really have a democracy because it's the ultras that get what they want done anyway. Totally.

You know what I mean? You guys don't know this, but my prior life was as a community organizer and before I became a journalist. Interesting. One of the things I realize as an organizer is the on as truth is that like political life isn't fun. It kind of sucks and most people don't enjoy it. And the truth is politics is dominated by people who like are deeply interested in this profoundly not fun thing. But most of us would rather like play softball and hang out with our friends because

that is actually more gratifying than fighting about like parking policy, you know. And so it leads to this weird tyranny of the boring. And that is like what I came away with from being a community organizer for a decade with, which is not very inspiring, but it is sort of how I saw things. And we do, we do see that voter participation across crypto is really crappy. Most people are there to make money and when number go up. And so this is why, you know, this governance question gets to be a bigger, bigger deal. And what we're starting to see is more, we're also starting to see more representative democracy.

So for example, people want to see the right thing happen, but politics is boring. And so they do things where, for example, they turn their vote over to other people that, you know, sort of protocol policy. The delegation, yeah. Yeah, you delegate people. It's kind of like crypto senators, right? And you can also see how that goes. You could go really wrong because one guy could just represent everything, you know, and then he just controls everything. So that's why I think this stuff is still working out.

But let me talk. Let me go back to a topic. I know it's hot in this world for a while, which I think also captures why I think downs are excited and interesting. coming out from a whole other direction. And we haven't really seen this yet, but I think we will seem like really tiny versions of it. But like one of the things that really hit me about what was exciting about NFTs

when this finally clicked for me is, you know, you create a set of NFTs like, you know, based turtles or whatever. And based turtles come out and they have all these different variations and stuff. But they give rights to their, to the owners that you,

You know, you can do whatever you want with your turtle, right? And so... You could stake your turtle. You can stake your turtle, but less excited than that. But more interesting than that is, this is a way in which you have this particular right to your one turtle, but you actually can also contribute to the whole. And the whole also has an incentive to be excited about whatever you do.

So, you know, briefly, as I was sort of sorting out my life between being a community organizer and being a, being a journalist, I did a webcom. for a while that no one read. But if I had done that, if I had decided to do a web comic when NFTs were a thing, I could have bought an NFT, and I could have been like,

I like my base turtle, and I think I can make jokes about the base turtle. And all they gave me was just this turtle with a picture and some properties of it. And I could have started a web comic, and I would have had this inbuilt community of, you know, say, 5,000 people who already were happy for anyone

to drive attention to their content, community, so they would be automatically interested in my base turtle webcomic. And if it was at all good, they would all kind of promote it because the truth is, if my base turtle webcomic was good, then my base turtle would become more valuable. But I'm also driving attention to the whole idea of base turtles, which is helping all of them, you know, and so everyone in that. And so there doesn't need to be a vote here. You know, no one cares.

No one need to decide that I make the base turtle webcomic, but I'm able to start driving eyeballs to base hurdles, and that's good for all base hurdles. They all go up, and so they have an incentive to promote a webcomic, which is good for me, but it's also good for all of them. And so one of the things I think we might start to see with NFTs, and like I said, not too much of this has happened, but like people start making like videos, movies, silly things, but they're particular NFTs, but that, but some of them are kind of good and popular, and that makes that NFT community do really well, and they, and that gives them

And it's like you do more stuff like that, right? And so that's kind of decentralized activity that doesn't require any kind of on-chain activity. It's just sort of the nature of this group that has some common interest together and has a reason to be encouraging of people showing initiatives, you know? Well, one of the things that I think that's interesting about that is to look at the different licensing models, right? So the Board 8 Biot Club, as far as I know, like all those things are more or less kind of, you know, the rights are transmitted to the NFT holder, and so they can make whatever derivative content they want to.

Whereas other more conventional or traditional NFTs, you know, I'm thinking, you know, Marvel, Disney, those types. Of course, you know, withhold all rights from the NFT holders. Like all you have essentially is a certificate of authenticity that you bought the certificate of authenticity. And you cannot, you know, remix, reuse or do anything except, you know, for personal, you know, pleasure, read, you know, or look at the thing that you got. So I do, I like, I like what you're talking about because there are a number of projects, whether it's like CryptoCoven or, you know, I'm my, my avatar is from the Alpha Girl Club. Like there are those, those attributes. There's also another NFT that I bought a while ago from Fiat Lux. And then there's one from biopils.

And each of these different communities are finding ways of using those attributes to create almost like narrative stories or video game content or, you know, based on rarities. of course, people are collecting for different aspects or attributes, but you could imagine staking those characters or staking those NFTs on certain types of stories or storylines. You know, one of the other NFTs that I got a while ago was for the Matrix Resurrections, and you could choose, of course, to either blue pill or red pill your NFT, and it would trans, you know, sort of, what's the word? I don't know. It would mutate your NFT, you know, from something that was, immutable to something that is mutable to its matrix, you know, versioned character. And so there are things like that that start to, I think,

it hint at different participation aspects and then character is actually being featured in pop culture, you know, contexts. So I think those things are actually super interesting. And the Dow structure allows for those who are the most, you know, active, ardent supporters to participate, to coordinate, to collaborate, and then to put their decision-making process on Jane and to actually, you know, do things that are quite new and novel relative to the way in which collaboration might have happened previously. Totally.

And we're even seeing, like, I'm going to try to share it in the chat here, but I just started a lot back. Sappy Seals is a, you know, it's an okay NFT line. I mean, they're worth like one eke apiece, which is pretty decent, but they're, you know, small. You guys probably never heard of them. But, like, they have a decent community, and, but they've raised enough money that they, have some bandwidth to do some things.

And they're trying to create this metaverse of kind of other NFT projects where there's a way that like kind of NFTs can move between kind of worlds they create for themselves and kind of this like, you know, this kind of shared reality of basically

a bunch of different cute animal NFTs. And I think it's a really interesting story of kind of a Dow of Dow's where like a bunch of kind of minor NFT DAWs that are still worth real money but, you know, aren't getting in the Wall Street Journal, kind of all team up to create a sum that is potentially greater, a hole that's greater than the potential sum of their parts. And so I just think we're seeing all kinds of interesting new ways of experiments

and in coordination that are enabled by blockchain that we just really didn't see well before, which are enabled in part, like, let's be honest, by the fact that there is, that these entities have money that they can, you know, move around and money is powerful and useful for making I mean, like the token represents some ownership stake, right? And so your influence can actually be proportionate to whatever it is that you've actually invested. And your level of investment can be represented either in time or attention or hanging out of discord or being useful and helpful. And there are ways where the, I guess, you know, sort of organizers of these groups can acknowledge those who are actually being the most creative or supportive or helpful.

Brady, I've got a question that's sort of a large one, so maybe easy to answer. What's the biggest Dow in the space? Is there one that you could point to that's like the most successful or the richest? Like I was reading about Flamingo Dow this week. It's depending on your definition of success, I understand that. But like, you know, if you had to point to one Dow that's like, well, this is the 800-pound gorilla as of right now. Is there one? Huh.

Wow. I mean, you know, I feel like I mentioned Curve. Curve is this decentralized exchange that specializes in trades between tokens that are the same price. So like it specializes in stables coin swaps or swaps of like Bitcoin derivatives or whatever. That turned up to be really powerful. And they have this CRV token that is constantly admitted that it's paid out to different people. who provide liquidity to it. And that is, you know, most people to agree that the emissions of CRV is the most powerful

source of yield in decentralized finance. And so you can be tempted to be like, and Curve is run by a Dow, this is a part of the wildness of crypto. You think I'm going to say that Curve is the most important Dow. Actually, this Dow that's on top of Curve called Convex is, I think kind of, you becoming the 800-pound gorilla because for reasons that even are hard for me to understand. I mean, I have written like 3,000-word pieces on this, but it's hard to hold on to. But with the particular way that the curve Dow is structured, it's hard for anyone who's not, like,

wildly, wildly wealthy to have any real influence in it. The only way you can really have influence is if you're a part of like a larger collective. And so convex came along, and I sort of think of it as a meta-dao. Like it's a it's it's like true weird defy like it's I mean it's clever in the sense that like square is to block as curve is to convex. Anyways, Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Right. So like convex is all it does is you is you you put your liquidity provider tokens into convex as opposed to just using them yourself and convex by CRV and then you participate in convex decide what curve does. And so because Curve is so powerful in terms of like getting yield in Defi, because Convex has become the most powerful thing in the Curve ecosystem, convex is in a weird way kind of becoming more powerful than even the Curve Dow. Like it's a crazy thing.

But like, and this is sort of an only in crypto sort of thing. And it has to do with the sort of the particular way Curve was set up, but also the people behind Curve have no problem with. the way convex is working, it seems to be working out. It seems to be very synergistic. But I guess I think those are kind of the really big ones. But yeah, I guess I don't know who, like, the biggest, most important Tao is, well, because the thing is because so many of them, it just, DAOs are just like a way of doing things, but many of them are all in competition with each other. You know, they're doing wildly different things. They just sort of have a common,

sort of semi-common structure under the hood. Do you have a sense for just like how many, like there are that are actually, I don't know, of some persistence and, you know, likelihood to stick around. I mean, like, is the, and I hate to say it this way, but like sort of like the Facebook of Dow's, does it exist right now in sort of a small shape that'll grow and expand in the next, you know, five, 10, 15 years? That was kind of what I was getting at. Yeah, right.

Well, that was kind of my prior, but it's just like it's, I mean, not to. And it may not be irrelevant. It's like, it's like, what's the, what's the Facebook of corporation? You know, it's like, it's organizational structure. You know, it's like, I don't know. I think what I mean in terms of like things that will last and grow that, you know, have some, I don't know, I think board eight yacht clubs like is in a very, you know, good position in terms of moving forward. Right. That's the, that that would be a perfect analogy.

Like who would be the board eight yacht club of Dow's? But I see what Brady you're saying. Yeah. I did you. That it's a meaningless question. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Let me come at this another way. if you're Andreson Horowitz with their new $3 billion crypto fund is there where's the room for traditional like Wall Street or VC money to get involved in Dow's

is it just about like getting involved early and making sure you have tokens when they're available or like do you know what I mean? Like are Dow's friendly to her? investment money? Well, you know, I'm sharing a couple of things in the tweets in the in the in the space right now that I think I speak to this. You know, I think one way in which traditional Wall Street firms can get involved right now is I think a lot of them run

kind of software as a service companies or they run you know sort of back in business. They have investment in business companies that do good companies. things for traditional businesses. I think if I were running, you know, quicken right now, I would be asking myself, how can we make a Dow friendly version? You know, like, these are very big companies that have a ton of money, but they do function a different way. How can we take existing expertise that we've had that's worked in the prior business world and make a version of our product that works well for this new kind of organization that has, lot of money to spend.

I mean, that's what I would, if I was in Wall Street, that's what I would be thinking about right now. Does it always work? Well, but see, what the Wall Street answer to that would be

is we're in the business of a product. Like, does it tend to work best? Is it, are we always thinking in terms of community where the community, as opposed to the users are the product, the users are the community and the owners as well?

Like, do you, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Right. Like, who, Who would have a stake or be interested in tax software or something like that, right? I don't even know if I ask a question, but maybe that's why we're having a hard time figuring this out

because it's like there are certain things that necessarily a Dow wouldn't be good for because no one would care. I mean, I think we'll see Dow's invade a lot of things. I just think it's too early for us to, I don't know, it's a tough question. What could Wall Street do? I mean, yeah, the pure thing Wall Street could do is they could just start buying a bunch of tokens and sort of making bots. That's, of course, a thing they can do. But I think they're just, we are far enough in to know that this stuff is going to work out. And so they could sort of build on successes they've already had in prior world by providing services to this space.

But, you know, who owns Dow's is a really interesting question right now, which is, I don't know, that's still getting started out. It isn't really the users. I mean, it kind of makes sense that, you know, if Wall Street and banking or whatever were to provide some, you know, services, I guess, but their risk profile would almost, I think, prohibit them from really engaging. You know, like, it would have to be sort of a new-minded bank that's doing things differently and is, you know, like, you know, you know, it feels, weird. Brady, I got one more question for you before we wrap, and then you can plug whatever you like. The question really is just what are, what's, what's the question that Brian and I didn't ask you that we should be asking to better understand what's going on with Dow's and where you think they might go in 2022? Well, I guess, you know, I mean, I think you guys asked a lot of good questions.

I think the thing, I think the thing that we're all still trying to understand and figure out is how much are Dow's, you know, they're, like, you guys shared the link of the Lao in there. Yeah, the Lao is actually pretty interesting. Yeah, they're a great group. I've known, I've known Aaron and Priyanka who are behind that for a long time, but they are kind of taking this model of like, you know, this is how you make Dow's work within sort of traditional legal structure and, and kind of, you know, kind of work with that and kind of, and accept the model that we're all given.

And there's other Dow's that are like, yearn that are being like, how can we just like completely be cypherpunk and push back against everything and kind of only exist on the internet, you know? And I think, um, I think what's interesting about Dow's is sort of like

figuring out how new ways of participating are going to, um, are going to emerge. Because you know, it's very feasible that you could be, that we could have, people who like do work for very short

periods of time. That's their whole thing and they sort of bounce from doubt-a-d-doubt because there's one thing they're good at that only takes every. It only ever takes three months. They sort of bounce around forever. They never really have jobs again. There could be people who really know how to make Dow's like so the whole um

what's it's like it's like black rock or whatever. The the venture funds that are good at like dealing with distressed companies, there could be people out there who only ever invest in Dow's when they're actually going to pieces, you know? So when they see a Dow going to pieces, they buy a ton of it, and then they get really actively involved in governance and they fix it and the token value goes up and they just sell it. And like, but they do it and they don't need to buy the whole thing. They need to buy enough to have voice. And then they do that and they do it again and again.

So there's just, there's just whole new, I think what's interesting about Dow's is there's going to be whole new ways in which for people to engage. And a lot of it could be like a lot more short term. And some of it could be like a lot more long term. And it could have a lot, it could be a lot more meaningful. There's people who their participation in a Dow, it isn't a job. It's their identity, right? And there's just going to be this whole continuum of people who specialize and doing really

quick stuff and people for whom a Dow runs much deeper than a job, right? And so I think that continuum is what's interesting about Dow's and we're going to see play out more and more. So it isn't really a question you didn't ask, but I just sort of think that is a design, that is a human design space that they open up that is, we just, who knows, it's going to be a lot of interesting stuff that happens. Let me ask you one more question. Just in terms of like getting involved in participating, you sort of said, you know, just show up,

start doing things. However, one of my thoughts and questions is like, what is the level of technical sophistication that's actually needed to participate in this space, you know, and I know that there's more and more tools that are coming out to make this possible. But it feels like the learning curve is still incredibly steep. So what's your just sense of that? Yeah. I mean, look, there's no question.

Like I said, you know, anyone can get involved. And if they are talented, you will be valued. And some doubt will find a place for you. But there's also no question that the most valuable thing out there is rock start coders. And that's always true. Right. So, you know, but there's a lot, there is, there is, I think there is a lot.

a lot of levels. So I just think people need to kind of follow their heart and figure out what speaks to them. But I think you know, like one of the things, for example, that we've seen, you don't have to be like a total rock start to start

to get a place and sort of earn some credit. You know, one of the things we've seen in Ethereum kind of through DeFi Summer and kind of the NFT kind of dawn that happened after it is a lot of coders who were, you know, they weren't a rockstar coders. but they kind of learned a little bit of how blockchains works and they learned a little bit of front end stuff.

A lot of people went out and just built websites that made different aspects of crypto more legible. They just told you what was going on here and there. And people would just do that to show that they could do some things and they had some skills. And everyone found that useful. And a lot of people who did that kind of thing ended up getting nice roles, either at companies or within Dow's. So obviously technical skills are super. valuable, but people who are good at marketing or good at driving attention to things or good at getting people excited or good community managers. You know, that's all valuable to. I think you just need to like look at what you're good at and what you're excited about and, you know, kind of come to them with an open heart and open mind and look for where things aren't getting done and what's needed and see if you can't pitch in there. And obviously, if you can, the smarter you are, the better off you'll be. But it does seem like there, it's, it. It's, When you look around crypto Twitter, like every CEO that's the second part of their name is we're hiring.

They're all hiring because they all have money. But then there's all these downs that don't even really hire. They just sort of pay people doing work. It's like boundaries. Yeah, there's so many opportunities out there. I don't think anyone should get discouraged by not having technical skills. But if you have any technical aptitude, I would say, well, maybe develop that. That might be good.

Cool. Brady, this was super helpful, very informative. Yes. Love having you here is, you know, I got it wrong in the beginning, but do you want to talk about the Defiant or anything else that you think people should check out? Sure, yeah, the Defiant. Yeah, the Defiant is the site that I work for now. It's a coin desk for a long time. I joined the Defiant July.

You know, it's decentralized finance. It's kind of decentralized finance. A lot of, we also cover NFTs a lot because, you know, NFTs are the property of the Internet and there's nothing finance loves as much as property. So if you're interested in those things, you know, we're small and screwing. app you new, but come check us out. We do a lot of deep dives and always have unique angles and the latest crypto news. And yeah, and you know,

follow, please follow me on Twitter. It's the best Twitter account. Yes, and let me, it'll be in the title of the show, but let me spell it out. It's at Brady Dale, like he just said. Brady is my go-to for crypto stuff. Like, very often when I'm working on writing

a show and something will come up and I'll DM him and I'll be like, Brady, what's this? What's going And he's also very generous. He will tip me. Hey, Brian, you might want to take a look at this. So I can't recommend more highly following Brady on Twitter and all his writings and all that great stuff. And that's the defiant.com.

Yeah, defiant. Defiant news on Twitter. Cool. Amazing. All right, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us. And we will probably be back here next week. Thanks, everybody.

Peace.