TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #11: Arjun Balaji Pt. II

Episode Date: January 23, 2018

Join Marty and crew for the second half of their conversation with Arjun Balaji. They cover Blockstack, how the Internet is broken, and why companies like Facebook and Google may actually be bad.

I'm extremely interested in Blockstack in particular because Maneeb Ali and Ryan Che have done extensive research into distributed networks and the whole ... If you don't know about Blockstack, they're basically trying to make the decentralized internet that was talked about in the last season of Silicon Valley happen to a certain extent. It was actually, yeah, it was eerily close, but it's funny. Yeah, Blockstack is super interesting. I could build, for example, a decentralized Twitter, and you could choose to store your data for my decentralized Twitter interface. You could store it on your personal computer or your external hard drive or Dropbox or somewhere else, leave it internet connected, and it'll be accessed.

and, you know, Nate here could code up a different client, you know, for decentralized Twitter and you could use his client, you could use my client. It's pretty interesting. I find, I think that it'll be, you know, interesting to see the apps that come out of this. I think they also have a pretty interesting governance model where they're, you know, putting bounties for saying, you know, hey, we want to see this app built in a decentralized way. The best person to build this app, you know, will give them a reward of some sort. Yeah, they did that with a bunch of, like, portfolio tracking apps.

Yep, yep, yep. I hacked on it for a little bit. It was pretty interesting just to try out the platform. How is it developing on top of Blockstack? It's cool. I mean, it's actually just like developing any sort of web application. Yeah, they're interacting with Node.js, right? Yeah, I used their JavaScript, you know, library.

And it was, you know, you just sort of call, like, you know, blockstack.get, you know, whatever. and you can access the data that you have in your decentralized Dropbox storage. It was cool. It was very, very cool. I was pretty impressed. Muneeb and Ryan both blow me away with how smart they are. Yeah, they're OGs. And for those of you that don't know, Muneeb and Ryan, the founders of Blockstack, they actually worked on an altcoin before Blockstack Namecoin. And they were two of the first to learn about the limitations of these blockchains,

specifically around proof-of-work and SHA-256 algorithms specifically. Yeah. So, I think that Blockstack is very interesting. They finally launched a token sale after sort of long-awaited ... We couldn't participate here in New York City. And they have some of the best venture investors in the world. I think that I would bucket them along with what I see as the protocol coins, where they're trying to create some sort of new paradigm for building applications. And, you know, I think that ultimately most of the next generation of applications that come out and get sort of mainstream adoption,

especially with a lot of the issues that we're seeing around Facebook and Google and some of these large companies around data and how much data we give them, I think that, you know, most of those will be decentralized or at least decentralized in some form. They might be optionally decentralized. So let's dive into this. How would a structure like Blockstack differ from Facebook? So right now, Facebook, Google, they hold all of our data. We are products. Yes. If you're not paying for the product, you are the product, right? Yeah. In the case of Facebook, you are using the product. You are the product. They take all of you. It's actually super creepy. Sometimes I'm just talking out loud. And Facebook has denied

this a bunch of times spotify does it i'm certain i'm a hundred percent sure that both facebook and spotify do this they're um you know the mics are on i'm talking about you know i'm talking about you know cheez-its i'm talking about cheez-its i go on my instagram feed boom out of cheez-its yeah how does that happen you know what you know i don't know if i i don't think any i don't think i've listened to one thing in the past two minutes i've been stuck like doing work shit but that's I'm in the room, but we'll listen to it. We're not. We'll get it done.

But I'm saying we've been talking about hair products here, certain hair products, and I've been getting ads served to me. I've never typed them into my computer. I've never done anything. We've just been talking about them, and I've been getting ads served to me on Instagram for these certain products. Of course. We know that already. We've known that. There was a fucking thing on Reddit a couple months ago where a guy was like, I live in an apartment building.

I don't need a washing machine. Then he went in the other room and started to talk about, like, man, I need a new washing machine. I need a new washing machine. And all these washing machines started to, like, retarget it. Like, that's 100% a thing. That's a thing. Like, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Does that creep you out at all?

What? Does that creep you out? Of course it creeps me out. But it's also, like, I look at it two ways, though. It's, like, there's a lot of times I just am lazy and don't want to sign up for shit. And I just hit the Facebook button. And I'm just, like, I'm lazy. And, like, I understand the tradeoff.

there's times where I don't want to sign up for stuff and I'm just like hit it and that's a trade off that complacency is going to lead us to Black Mirror we're going to get both of these things I think solved over time once the UX gets better you know once the user experience of like some of these decentralized identity systems gets really good and we can

actually you know do that it's going to be I don't know if it will lead to Black Mirror though because like well at least not for me like I don't even care about like I only use I use Facebook since I work in advertising to see what they're trying to target me with and to see what they're doing other than that like i use it as like okay facebook's doing x y and z how can i bring

that to the publisher world other than that i don't fucking care about instagram or snap i don't give a shit about any of that stuff like i don't use that stuff really so it's like i don't know it doesn't really do much for me it doesn't like the idea of like that like like i i've listened to the guy from social capital i'm not gonna say his name like the dopamine you get from that like that doesn't really do anything for me like I don't like ever it never really did like the

I use Twitter because Twitter's the best news source ever created like other than that like I don't know it doesn't do anything for me yeah but I'm saying

like I I I get creeped out if there's stupid people that does it for that's on them man it doesn't do it for me I don't give a shit about like

I mean we got we got motherfuckers in Barstool every day like just hit 80,000 followers never thought this would happen like who cares like I don't care

I don't care if I have 10,000 followers. I don't care if I have one follower, as long as I can use Twitter to find people like you and find people like you. Twitter, that's what it's used for to me. The Facebooks of the world are literally a useless tool. I don't know why people... By the way, that was an intense face-to-face subtweet at Nate there. What? I have 100,000, so it's cool.

Nate tweeted out earlier today that he has 100,000 followers. I don't even remember. It was you that did that? No, because you said 80,000. I have 20,000 more. So that's been like the wave at Barstool lately. Every time someone gets to a number, they're just like, I can't believe it. I mean, a lot of my life revolves around Twitter, like my entire job maybe.

Okay, okay, never mind. All right. We're getting a little off the rails here. But what Arjun and I are trying to get to is that it's probably not the best that we are products. It's probably not the best we're getting taken advantage of to a certain extent. I think the era of us being products will be over before long. I think it's such a problem that we're not seeing it yet. We're going to reflect back and be like, holy shit.

How did we not realize that we were being sort of manipulated, used in these horrible ways? And this goes back to the point I was making earlier where you're just born into the system and you just start running. You're like, this is the way it works. Nobody ever takes the time to take a step back and be like, hey, wait a second. So the internet that we have today is the first iteration of the internet. If we think this is going to be the last iteration of the internet, you're wrong. This is a visionary episode right here. This is lucid.

This is a lucid vision. I'll say this, though, about if we're going to go back to the face. I kind of want them to be able to – I don't want to go look – I like fashion and all. I don't want to go look for shit. If they want to find shit, if they want to listen to me, Facebook, find me like cool fashion and cool shoes and shit. I don't want to go look for it. Yo, listen to me. I have my phone in front of my face.

Find me this stuff. Find me this stuff. I don't want to go look for it. Find it for me and hit me with it. See, I think a lot of people are just indifferent. Like so much going on in people's lives, it's just like I don't have time to worry about if Facebook's listening to me. That indifference can get dangerous to a point, though. It can get dangerous.

It can get to a point where- That's technology, though. The more it improves- Yeah, but that indifference could lead to, if everybody's too complacent, it's been proven. Chamath, the dude you were mentioning earlier, the original Facebook guy, he came out. He actually had to backstep because Facebook yelled at him. He was like, we are manipulating your thoughts and the way you feel. Sean Parker said that as well.

He's like, we didn't- I think Zuckerberg kind of had this vision from the beginning, but he didn't share it as much with everybody else on the team where they're like, we're dangerous. We're a dangerous part of society. Chamath said that and Sean Parker said that. And I mean, at this point, Facebook, so our lives, a lot of people's lives

revolve around Facebook and Twitter and stuff like that that people just don't have time to worry about it anymore. It's just like people have kids to feed and stuff like that. They don't care if Facebook's listening to what kind of shoes they want. Exactly. I'm trying to get people to take a step back. Yeah, that's scary, man.

That's terrifying. If we want to we got to separate ourselves from these like massive corporations that then dictate our thoughts and you know What we're thinking about talking about feeling emotionally like that's uh, you know, that's that's a really scary stuff. Yeah, like and that's the one thing I love about other bitcoiner is is they're truly on a quest to become self sovereigns and they they're individualistic and and everybody Not everybody that's a Bitcoin, but the people that are hardcore about it like just really care about being their own person I think that every hardcore sort of like, you know, aspiring sovereign individual, we'll call it, is going to, their dream is to like live in a cabin in Montana that they built themselves and like chop their own firewood and like go hunting for their own steaks. And, you know, that's, you know, that's the dream, man.

Like, what can I say? And so, you know, I think that there's probably a middle ground in between that and, you know, present day. That's great for most people. But I think, you know, what we have now in terms of, you know, being beholden to these massive, like, corporations is probably not great. Yeah, it's definitely not great. I'm happy you said, like, let's meet in the middle. Like, yes, I do want to get good clothes served to me. I do want to have products that I will potentially buy put in front of me.

But at the same time, I don't want that to come at the cost of me giving my life away to these corporations to a certain extent. Exactly. And I think that, you know, the two things that we're really, really, really getting right now is, you know, one, we're building massive, hopefully successful decentralized infrastructure for things like storage, for things like computation. And, you know, I don't know if there was a serious demand for that, but, you know, I think that we're building that. We have what I see as successful, you know, in the money use case. And I think that we'll get there with applications as well. You know, that's the sort of next wave that I see. Yeah, and so let's take a step back and sort of describe how it would be different than it is today because I think that gets confusing for a lot of people.

So if we did an internet with the block stack style, you hold your data on your client or somebody else's client or server, excuse me, and you basically reveal the data you want to when necessary. Oh, I like that. Yeah, so they're not just taking all the data that face – they're not following you around the internet. and taking all this cookie data and all the metadata. Then wait, can we take a step back? We are taking a step back. No, let's take a step fucking back. Let's take a step back.

When I'm blind, like, so, like, then if that's what, well, maybe not. I don't know. If that's what Blockstack does and that's their plan or at least say what they're going to do, why the fuck are we buying, like, names of corporations on there trying to resell them to people later on? Like, we want to buy names. Like, we want to buy names names.

Like, we want to buy actual names. Like, I want to buy, like, Jay-Z's kid's name. Yeah, Lou and I have been buying up some Blockstack IDs. Nice, nice. I know a lot of people are doing that on the ID namespace. Yeah, so I think that in that future, it's going to be great. It's going to be opt-in. But I think we're seeing very, very quickly what happens when there's a whole bunch of speculators

and guys who are trying to get in early on something. And this is not that different than what the internet was. You know, in the early to mid-90s, there was a whole bunch of people who were grabbing every domain name they could, right? You know, dogs.com, you know, groceries.com, sex.com, you know. Like, they were grabbing up everything. So, I think it's the same way it's a land grab like anything else. It's a digital land grab, no doubt about it. There's actually a literal digital land grab.

There's this project called Decentraland I saw. It's the Oliver Jansons or whatever. Yeah, I'm not sure who the guy is, but they're selling literal digital plots of land. And it's kind of like one of those things, it's kind of like eSports, where I don't quite get it, but I realize that it is going to be a thing. Yeah. Right? Where I don't quite understand why people choose to watch nerds playing League of Legends or World of Warcraft. We literally have people doing a live Twitch stream right outside the studio.

They're literally on Twitch right now. Yeah, exactly. but it's uh you know it's the same way where it's uh you know hey i just bought this plot of land like you know maybe in sort of like this future crazy virtual reality um you know vision for the world where we're all on headsets like the virtual plot of land is just as good as like owning actual land i don't know yeah yeah um i'm all for like i was saying me and fuddleburg's my roommate we were talking this thing like i'm all for getting old and just like put on a headset and like going and like fighting with alexander the great like i'm all for that dude like i'm all for that

Like, when I'm old, like, I hope that shit's here. Like, I just want to, like, sit there and be like, yeah, you guys do whatever the fuck you want. I'm just going to sit here. Like, yeah, you got to do that. I'm going to go fight, like, in, like, wars and shit like that. Like, I can't die. So, like, I really hope that's a lot. I really hope that's, like, a thing.

This is actually Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. This is, you know, we're going to be plugged into this crazy entertainment game. And we're just going to be, we're going to have fun. Maybe we are. I feel like I kind of am. I feel like in the past six to eight months, I kind of am. Like I don't feel like I'm ever off the internet and it's like fucking fucking my brain up some days I'm like, I'm like, I'm never ever ever off the internet

What what is what is he doing? Marty's has got up and left his own show Marty literally just left his own three and a half hours into his own show. He just got up and like no Marty's like This is my show now. This is actually I'm a host of this podcast. I'll kick Marty out You want to come be my you want to come to my account manager? Yeah, I'll kick Marty out of the company Marty just literally left his own show With like This is like a super smart conversation And me and you were just like

Hanging out here Right I've just been like swiping over here It's like wow They talk about stuff so over my pay grade What do you guys want to You guys want to talk about sports? You guys want to talk

You guys want to talk Sports are dumb Should we just wrap the show up? Marty comes back Show's over No Marty I don't think Marty's done Marty was talking about going on

Like a marathon tonight with you Oh wow He's like if you have nothing to do Dude, it's Friday night. I hold Bitcoin. What do you think I have to do? I got nothing to do. You could just spend, I could spend my entire night.

I got to go home. I got to read. There's a new paper that came out the other day. It's probably the most important cryptography paper that's come out the last year. Okay, can you like send us the, can me and Nate, can you? I'll send it to you. We got to get on an email chain. I'll give you guys the TLDR.

Yeah, it's the Ellie, Ellie Benswassen. He's a cryptographer. He's the guy who originally came out with the paper that advanced something called a ZK-SNARK. And that's the zero-knowledge proof base that makes what was called Zerocash, like Zcash, possible. And so he came out with a new paper advancing something called ZK-STARKS. Because in Zcash, there's a whole trusted setup. And so one of my to-dos for tonight and this weekend after we wrap this up, unless we go on this crazy marathon session,

is to go try to decipher this paper. Yeah, you know what? I'm going to pass on the paper. You guys look at the paper and tell me what to do. That's on my list this weekend, too. I actually have the tab open for ZStarks. Very nice. So let's talk about the trusted setup.

The thing with Zcash's trusted setup that spooks me the fuck out is the cell phone that got hacked. There's enough people in the trusted setup that I personally look at, I'm like, yeah, those guys are probably good. But, you know, this is very, very interesting. I'm not going to pretend like I'm going to understand every other word. But, you know, hopefully, you know, this looks really, really promising. So I'm excited.

Yeah. ZStark's, so you don't need to trust the setup. The thing that geeks me out about Zcash's trust the setup is that Zuko had a journalist come and his phone visibly got hacked during the trust the setup. The Radiolab episode they did on this was kind of insane. Really? I heard it. Was it post-mortem?

No, no, no. It was sort of like as it was happening, they put together this whole hyper-produced episode of Radiolab, and it was kind of crazy with all the Steam music, and it was good. I think normies are going to go listen to Radiolab and be like, wow, cool, Zcash. This is cool. It's so private.

It's so anonymous. is it's sort of like, I think the real sort of like what I see as the cypherpunk ethos is in privacy right now. Sort of like the people who are working on privacy tech right now are, I think, you know, sort of most, you know, in my mind what I see as the real kind of ethos is still there. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, it's cool. I'm super excited. And let's talk about a couple things that Core is working on that could help fungibility

on Bitcoin and help it become more private, which is Mimblewimble, Mast. Mimblewimble is an all-coin implementation right now, but there's arguments that it could be implemented on Bitcoin. Yeah, there's a number of these. I think that fungibility has been a long-standing issue. I remember, it's not recent, but it was back in the day, Mike Hearn was like, hey, this has been an issue. A blacklist address. Yeah, this has been an issue since sort of like, maybe not day one, but sort of day 50.

Of like, you know, hey, this thing is not, and there's a whole bunch of companies, you know, there's Chainalysis in Brooklyn, like Elliptic, like there's a number of companies that make their money doing blockchain analysis for block and chain. Yeah, like the, in terms of looking for illicit transactions, looking for money laundering, drugs. And so the idea that this could be, that we could achieve something like true fungibility is fascinating. I think the super near-term thing that's happening on Bitcoin, there's another Bitcoin airdrop scheduled for something called Bitcoin Private, which you'll have. You'll have Bitcoin Private if you keep it in your ledger, keep it in your treasure. Bitcoin Private, it's this kid out of MIT who graduated from MIT, Rhett. He was working on ZClassic, which was this ...

O' He's got like five coins out there, Rhett. Rhett is, I mean, I don't trust that motherfucker as far as I can throw. He started so many shit coins and left their projects that it's like, I think he's jumping from project to project trying to make a quick buck. His big win was Z Classic, which I think was a fork or it was a clone of Zcash where they just removed the founder's reward. Because on Zcash there's a 20% founder's reward. 25% for the first two years.

25% of the block reward for the first two years. Okay. you know, I suspect that that'll go away at some point. You know, I think that there's been sort of enough backlash over the years that it'll go away. But the, yeah, the looking at Bitcoin private, they did the perfect kind of like what I see is like the altcoin crazy run-up where they said each ZClassic holder will get a Bitcoin private token and each Bitcoin holder at the time of the airdrop will get one as well. So that's why ZClassic has run up so much.

Yeah, and we're seeing that in counterparty too right now. because they're going to fork to be compatible with Bcash. Yeah, all these sort of like, you know, airdrops and forked coins now, it's like, it's crazy. People realize that they have like a distribution mechanism, that they have the ability to, you know, like if I were to go out and buy some altcoin, I'd be, you know, I'd have to really, really think hard about it. But if it's, you know, hey, I got this thing for free, it's free money, then, you know, I'm not, I'm sort of like, oh, this is awesome. Well, if you're going to launch a shitcoin, it's the best way to do it because you get an automatic network

effect for the people that claim those coins and yeah yeah yeah exactly so you know if you're a long time bitcoin holder you've never used something with a with a privacy sort of implementation that might actually be pretty interesting if they end up end up actually going through with it yeah that's uh maybe this will be the first project that red actually sticks through and sees it through to the end yeah actually bitcoin cash let's not get into bitcoin let's not get into bitcoin we've uh we've beat that dead horse too much here it's just not it's not it's not worth it i mean they're not doing anything exciting in my mind um let's figure out what else i wanted to talk about here

we do marathons here so i'll probably cut this up into like three episodes so let's talk about the trading community a little bit okay because that's one thing that fascinates me like i've got this list that i've been sharing for a while my crypto list and it's heavy on traders and i'm fascinated by trading world i like to think of myself as somebody who knows my limitations like i try not to trade as much as possible i try to i have long-term bags that i have and i believe in and i'm pretty confident we'll do well in the long term but the reason i want to touch on the trading community is because every every noob that's coming in and is is hitting up my dms in my inbox it's like how do i start trading how do i start

trading i'm like if you don't know how to trade like be careful yes yes so it's actually you it's funny you mentioned dms i get a ton of dms as well about trading um and my dm so you know the the sort of like bitcoin trader memes where everyone says like sir when moon and they're making fun of this like indian community because indians everybody everybody hits up romano asking sir when moon on v yeah everyone loves indians love saying sir they love ever calling everybody sir. And I get all of the Indian community DMs because they're like, oh, this is an Indian guy. He's on Twitter. He talks crypto. So, there's two sort of interesting trading communities. There's the one that I see offline, which is sort of traditional, institutional guys

that are trading this stuff and very, very methodical about it. Then there's crypto trading Twitter. And I'll proceed it with this, which is most crypto trader Twitters, especially all the ones that are running paid groups most of them are shit traders and they're trying to dump on their followers exactly they're running pump and dump groups if they were any good at trading they would not be running paid groups and some of them are pulling in you know 50 100 bitcoin a month running these paid groups it's absurd i'll set up a pay you want to run a pay group i'll set up the market lewis i'll set up the marketing this is a long-term reputation game we're not blowing our reputation on what i've realized though what i've realized though in the

past couple weeks in just in barcelona the internet in general everyone wants their blood one day and no one remembers anything five days later so like what is it what does that matter we could everyone would be like lewis and marty stole all this bitcoin from us five days later they'd be like i don't even remember that happened i want to i want to vote more than i want a reputation i'll tell you that much like they wouldn't even like i'm telling you the internet now it's like you don't remember what happened five days later literally five days every day there's a new end of the world story. Some of the crypto traders, there's really two camps. There's one group of what I see as similar investors to me, fundamental, long-term

oriented. There are other guys that are more technical traders that are looking at what's the head and shoulders, what's the inverse. Yeah, TA works until it doesn't. Yeah, so some of these guys, everybody, somehow if you look at the charts right now, it's like every chart looks the same you know maybe i just suck at this maybe maybe i'm a shit trader right i'd like to think i do well for myself but it's uh you know every chart looks the same it's you know every chart looks bullish you know like you sort of switch the x and y axes you know like being a weathered ultra like i want to i don't even want to call myself a trader but

somebody who has traded alts in the past like i was looking at that tron chart earlier this week like screaming at matt brown sell it now sell it now this is your prototypical pump and dump Yeah, some traders I will say are awesome. Some traders are really, really good. Some of the guys that I follow and have spoken to plenty. Other traders, they're looking at charts, they're looking at no tech. You know, so sort of where I see, you know, the charts and the fundamentals of a token align, that's where, you know, I as an investor, you know, given my background, that's what I really like. Because, you know, if the fundamentals are great and I know there's stuff that's coming out and I know it's a promising project with good devs and the chart looks pretty bullish because it's, you know, sort of like super cheap and it's, you know, falling a lot, I feel really, really good about that. This is not financial advice. We don't give out financial advice here, but the Monero chart has looked sexy as fuck lately.

It has been a slow grind up. I think it's in an accumulation phase. And I think if Ricardo and team can continue to innovate on Monero and the fundamentals are there as well. So Bitcoin is not used on the dark markets. Monero is the go-to dark market cryptocurrency. Yeah. Monero, Zcash, which has been falling for months now against Bitcoin, despite the fact that it's not fully private, I'm a fan, especially with Starks, seeing what

they'll be able to do in the next year. Because that's really the time horizon that I'm looking at, is a year. I feel good about that. Ethereum's been running up. But a lot of these traders are tossing out things that they could buy 20 Bitcoin worth and totally move the chart themselves if they wanted to. It becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, where they'll tweet about a chart and then instantly it'll move because their 10,000 followers will start buying the thing up. O' I'm continuously fascinated by the amount of followers these anonymous trading, trading accounts can accrue.

It's crazy because everybody, you know, just like everybody thinks they're a saver now, everybody's a saver because of Bitcoin, everybody's a trader because they buy alts. Exactly. And, you know, the reality is none of these guys know what they're doing. A lot of these guys will lose their shirts against Bitcoin. You know, if you're not making more Bitcoin month to month or week to week than you were, then you're actually losing money. You should just be buying and holding Bitcoin.

At a minimum, you should be outperforming Bitcoin. That's another thing that a lot of the noobs don't realize, which is, you know, they're up in U.S. dollars, but they're down in Bitcoin, hey, you should have just held Bitcoin the whole time. That's what we say all the time. There's no point in doing this. Just hold Bitcoin. Unless you're really in this world, just buy Bitcoin and hold that money. And that's the thing noob traders don't understand. It's not about profits, it's about risk management. You can look me in the eyes when you're talking about this.

People don't know how to manage risk and make position sizes and set stop losses. Exactly. take profits like this is stuff that you have to realize like i worked at a hedge fund and i can't even fucking do it let me just chime in here because there's probably a lot of people like me who are listening to this who like the excitement of the buying and selling of the alts who don't really understand pretty much any of it like i talked to you i talked to lewis you know i listened to this podcast but it's very complicated very very over my head like system and idea but i you know i read as much as i can i try to learn but it's still very complicated like

being just like careful and safe about it and just like is probably just like we should probably talk a little more about that just because it's there's so much money involved in it that idiots like me and other people out there like you know once it's like on the internet you forget that it the value that it has so it's it's been crazy this year looking at like you're making trades like 0.1 bitcoin it used to be fucking 20 bucks and then it's like holy shit yeah exactly more than a grand you know what's great here's what i will say is black swan events like exchanges getting shut down will wipe you out more than anything else it will wipe you you know 100 you will get wrecked and the thing that i will say to all these noobs is that a lot of them are

holding money on exchanges right so it's like how many of them know how to set up a you know a ripple wallet you know or tron wallet you know i don't even know if that exists it doesn't exist exactly Right. So it's, you know, where are they holding their tokens? You know, if they're even if they're making profits, you know, if you're not custodying your assets yourself, you have you're opening yourself up. Do you know how much do you know what the team of Bittrex is or Poloniex or some of these other exchanges? I have a support ticket on Poloniex. I've been trying to get answered for two months. Yeah. And, you know, the CEO of Poloniex, he was like a music major in college. What's he doing running an exchange? Right. Exactly. That's the one like remember Mimpal? Were you ever on Mimpal?

No, I got caught in that exit scam. I was I was in the I I'm actually I I was a participant in the Mt. Gox class action Marty I want everything first thing Monday before we do met before we do ads. I want everything on a wallet Yes, I have all my Bitcoin on a wallet, but I don't I just look at everything. I want everything on wallets That's a wallets on everything smart move. Yeah, that's what I've been setting Caleb up while it's all week He's he's been getting on it. And that's one thing like and That's why I wanted to come help help barstool. I was like I heard you talking about like alright Let's do this the right way.

Let's start educating people how to actually do this correctly because, like you said, you got caught up in Mt. Gox. I got caught up in Mimpel. I woke up one day and just didn't have money. The money I did have was just taken. All these exchanges right now are printing so much money. What are your thoughts on Binance? It sort of came up out of nowhere.

It's a little sketchy to me. I'll trade wherever there's liquidity, personally. I'm on Binance. If it's bad, let's know. This week it was doing $7-8 billion in volume every day. At that run rate, if they're doing 50 bps, 50 basis points, half percent of trade, they're on a run rate that's bigger than the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, annualized. That's crazy. One thing that's been interesting in late 2017, early 2018, these new exchanges that are coming out, Binance

and KuCoin, these Asian exchanges, they all have a token now. Yeah, that's what we were talking about. Caleb was asking. Bioshares up like 500 billion percent this week. Like, why? Why do you need that token? Yeah, you get like a discount on fee structures.

So smart. Huh? This is a wild world, man. It is insane. Michael Lewis is going to write a book on this. I've been thinking about writing a book about this because it is like crazy. Yeah, take good notes, man.

That's why I write the newsletter every day. Yeah, exactly. This is a crazy time. Some of these exchanges, Binance is hot now. It comes and goes with the season. Last spring, Poloniex was a hot exchange. Then Bittrex was a hot exchange for six months. And now Binance, because they have this massive Chinese support team, they're the hot exchange.

One of my favorite things is when you log into Binance, there's like a puzzle piece that you have to slide over. Get the puzzle piece. And it always says for me 99 better than 99.9%. And does it say that for all of you guys? Yeah, it says it for everyone. Yeah, I didn't think about that, boy. Exactly. And apparently, I've heard on Binance that they're forcing coins to pay them a lot of money to get on the exchange, which is a little sketchy to me.

All these guys that are running these exchanges, they're making even more money than Satoshi, dude. They're making millions a day. Yeah. And so, I think that hopefully in 2018 we'll see a lot more sort of control and regulation over these exchanges to ensure that people will have a safe place to trade, if that's what they want to do. O' You don't want to wake up to a Mt. Gox or a Mint Pell situation. Absolutely not.

Although I do have a great postcard from Japan, from Mt. Gox. O' Really? I do, yeah. It's from a Japanese court. O' I think right now, as we tape this, Kraken I think is still down. They've been down for ... O' Have they? they were down for quite some time yeah they're still uh still got the red circle next to them

on trade block so yeah they're not they're not functional right now yeah um be careful yeah and that's like again going back to the ethos of why this was created to have a swiss bank account in your in your pocket i would highly encourage anybody listening to this to to start researching how to do private key management how to take this stuff into your own custody and hold it long term. It's definitely highly technical to a certain extent. 2018 will be the year for decentralized exchanges. We saw it with, I think, Xerox will be the first trading of Ethereum and ERC-20 Ethereum-based tokens. Xerox, they were doing less than a million in volume at the end of 2017. Then, in one week, they broke a million,

they broke two million, then they broke 10 million. I think that by the end of the year, they'll be doing $100 million a day, at least, conservatively. But they're on top of Ethereum, right? Yeah. And so, all of their order books are off-chain. But I think that ultimately, we'll have a CryptoKitties-like situation where they'll clog up the Ethereum chain with their settlement transactions. That's one thing.

Their computation, rather. Yeah, that's one thing. I have a lot of love for some of the people working on Ethereum. I know them personally. I wish them the best, but I just, me personally, I cannot bring myself to put money on that protocol just because of the scaling issues they have ahead of them. And it could, like, again, like, so this is the one question I wanted to ask you earlier that we never got onto. Could Ethereum, what happens if all the Geth nodes go offline? Could Ethereum keep running? Nothing. Well, there's a lot of clients for Ethereum. I know, exactly. Geth isn't the only client.

You bring up the Geth client and they say, that's not the only client. We're pruning, we're doing other ones. But don't you need to reference the full state of the blockchain at some point? Or am I wrong in assuming that? I'm not actually sure. I think that there are actually other- Yeah, there's lightweight clients that you can load up and only take up 25 to 40 gigs of data. Yeah. But conceptually to me, like, Geth has the full state of the Ethereum blockchain. Like, you need to reference that at some point. Am I wrong in assuming that?

No, no, no. I think that's totally fair. But my understanding was that Geth wasn't the only client that was operational that way. I thought it was, I think it's the only client with the full state in history. I'm not sure. No? Yeah, I'm not sure. At this point, there's, I think, seven or eight different Ethereum clients that are being worked on.

so I'm not actually sure about that. That's what I'm actually trying to get a couple of the researchers to come on. I actually got to reach out to Lane who runs Crypto NYC in Brooklyn. He's been working closely with Carl and Vitalik on Ethereum's scaling. Nice.

I think if anyone can help figure this out, it'll be Vitalik. That guy is very, very smart. Yeah. I go back and forth with Vitalik. I think he's smart but misguided. I think he has good intentions. Definitely has good intentions, but not enough experience,

and I don't think he gets how the world works. I think he has a view of how it works and how it should work in his head, and it's the Mike Tyson quote, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. The guys that have normative views of the world are the ones that change it, though, and so that's the reason why I'm glad that people like him exist. Yeah. No, definitely we need people to push the conversation and push us to the limits.

I just think the boy genius sort of meme around him is very dangerous for Ethereum specifically because a lot of its success hinges on him being successful specifically. Yeah, that's one thing that I actively think about, although I think that it is being slowly, slowly, slowly improved upon where there's more and more minds in the room. But we even saw early last year where Vitalik had to hold up the release. Yeah, Pervy was alive. Yep, yep, exactly. You know, proof of proof of life. But I think that, you know, that's one thing with other projects like Monero, for example, you know, if, you know, Fluffy Pony, bless his soul, were to somehow get hit by a truck, you know, there's, you know, dozens of other developers that are working on Monero.

And some of my favorite projects have large teams like that, you know, Monero Decred is another one where, you know, they have some of these problems ironed out. But with Ethereum, there's a large team of researchers that are actively working on it, but it is something that I worry about. Not so much that Vitalik is the central focal point, but he's sort of what I see as the spiritual leader. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that can be dangerous. And that's why I trend towards maximalism, too.

I mean, I am a maximalist. I don't trend towards it because nobody knows who Satoshi is. And that fact alone liberates everybody to sort of build around Bitcoin and the fact that we can't point to somebody and say, what should we do, is liberating in a sense. We may not realize it completely right now, but I think that is an advantage that no other blockchain has, maybe other than Monero. This is what people who, you know, sort of complain about Bitcoin, you know, this is what they're wrong about, which is that, you know, Bitcoin being hard to change is a good thing. It's really, it's actually good, you know, because if Bitcoin had very, very few changes from now until sort of eternity, you can call it until, you know, 20,999,000, you know, whatever block it is, or rather Bitcoin amount it is. you know if bitcoin had no changes you know we'd actually still probably be in a great state yeah no oh i wholeheartedly agree with that like bitcoin as it is now i don't think it needs to be

changed at all maybe you could build on top of it like yes you can have more efficiency at the protocol level uh i think innovations like mast and and uh scriptless uh signatures would be good innovation but i don't think it's completely necessary i think bitcoin is a slow dump protocol that does what it purports it's it's going to do it it enables peer-to-peer censorship resistant transactions and that one dumb use case is all it needs like that's you just need to keep stamping out blocks every 10 minutes exactly and as long as fees don't kill the network like I think it could be successful in its current state going forward. And you can build on top of it via second, third, fourth layers.

Exactly. I think it's like I said earlier, whatever wins money will win, right? And I think that if we see money as the outsized winner here, I think that Bitcoin is farther ahead than everybody else when it comes to what is money. Yeah, and then you get into the whole Lindy effect side of it, and the fact that it's obviously the oldest blockchain. And it hasn't gone down. Its uptime is ridiculous. The uptime of every other website in the world is absolute garbage when it compares to Bitcoin. Exactly. And that's the other thing that makes me completely skeptical of other blockchains is the nature of like it's hard to create a centralized app like Barstool or a website, a centralized app where you have a team working on it and they control what happens. When you get into distributed, decentralized blockchains, the chances of making it perfect in the long run, of coordinating resources to make a distributed system as successful as Bitcoin at this point, it seems like an arduous task.

You should be very skeptical of blockchains that go down. There was a whole issue earlier last year, or in mid-2017, when the IOTA blockchain went down, or I guess the IOTA DAG went down. The IOTA network was down for a time period, and everyone was super confused. They were like, why can't we make transactions? It turns out there's a centralized coordinator. I think they literally call it a coordinator. And so, you know, you should be very, very skeptical of situations like that, because there are, you know, points of failure. Central points of failure are very, very bad. You know, if you wanted to bring down Bitcoin, there's a whole bunch of attack factors. You probably talked about

them on the show before, but... We saw a lot of attacks last year. Yeah, it's very hard. It is, but that's the beauty of it. It's like, wow, it really is. Like, last year proved that Bitcoin is a honey badger. It can get kicked in the dick over and over again and come back stronger than ever. Maybe the big attack will be 2018, now that we have a short side that we can bet on, where people can get big, big, big money on this sort of synthetic market and try to

bring down the network to capitalize on it. Yeah, that's what I'm interested in. I worked in the futures markets before. I go back and forth. Jack Mollers has talked about this as well. The fact that it's cash settled like the futures contracts themselves will not affect the bitcoin markets what i'm more worried about is those traders uh basically buying buying bitcoin on the other side of those trades uh actually i'm not even describing this perfectly what i'm more worried about is like people trying to manipulate the futures markets by buying and selling bitcoin yeah i mean are you drunk are you drunk no i'm not drunk no i'm trying to you're like three

beers in you're good i'm two beers in two beers i'm just just open my third i'm just but i'm saying no the dynamic between the cash settled futures and the physical delivery or that's like that's why that's why it's so confusing to talk about because there is no physical delivery of bitcoin already hit that jewel he had a few a few sam adams three hours into the podcast. He's losing it. But only like two more hours to go. You're starting to look good looking, Nate.

Hey, how's it going? It's getting weird in here, guys. It's getting a little too weird. Let's get back on path. I'm going to open it up to you two. What questions do you have for Arjun? All right, I'm ready. Give me the, like, in the three to four steps,

how do I get, how do I end up taking it all to the top? Yeah, turn around. Look who's here. Oh, my God. How do I know in three to four steps if someone who's very busy, someone who has like literally my team is a bozo idiot right here and then Marty Bent who knows nothing about advertising but I need him around. Literally knows nothing but I need him around because I know we're going to another level and I just need someone to sit next to me who's like, yo, just get in this, get in this. So how are we getting in the – what's your day-to-day thought process and all? It's like give me like when you get up and like you look like like like where do you go to get your most like most your information?

Twitter Twitter. Yeah, there we go. Okay, so then you go to Twitter. Then where do you go? I go to Twitter. I I check subreddits pretty aggressively. I'm a big subreddit guy. Okay subreddits telegram channels That's where you get sort of not on telegram, but Marty's big telegram guys You got it. You got to get a sense of the community see what it's like I I read a lot of sort of like what I see is primary source material So a combination of code and papers, like white papers. Okay, so my code and white paper is Andrew. That's an advantage you have over me is reading code.

Like how much code are you reading? So reading not so much, running a lot. Okay. So, for example, you know, I spent some time last year trying to get my Monero node running. It's hard. It's hard, yeah. It was surprisingly difficult. I'm sure it's a little bit easier now given that it's been six, seven months.

but um yeah so i i spend a lot of time trying to actually interact with um you know interact and get a client running myself so say you know if something has um a master node sort of mechanism i try to set up a master node myself um if someone if something has a full node implementation i try to run the full node myself um you know i i have i've mined sort of back in the day now i invest in miners. But I don't personally mine anymore, but if I have the free time, that's something that I want to do more of. At a loss, I think it's very hard to mine individually. It's almost impossible to do it at a profit now. But that's something, sort of like getting as hands-on as possible is something that I think is pretty important to me.

No, I agree. I mean, that's the only way I learned advertising, is to come in and just literally do it on my like don't know how else like so it's like that's where i get like very much like i don't know if i'll at the current rate we're going if i'll ever be able to totally understand this because it's like we're not to be in a world you have to totally dive in but this is all i'm gonna do yeah this is all i'm gonna do but i will say you know so if you're using monero for example um you making a transaction to marty or vice versa you know i think that's one way to go if you're investing in uh zero x and trying to then trying out you know hey what is a decentralized uh you know how can i make a trade that's not on a centralized exchange and go buy

some ethereum token and then sell it again maybe at a slight loss uh because i do it back to back but just to try what it's like you know i think that trying to do is use the use cases as much as possible is pretty important so that's one thing that i try to try to do a lot of i staked vericoin for a year just to figure out like what staking was like a staking as a different consensus protocol to present work is like fascinating to me yeah and just seeing that work in real time like holy shit my coins are being staked right now i'm contributing to the network and yep yeah my laptop is contributing to this global consensus network it sort of blows your mind yeah that's one of the important things when it comes to community management with projects is you know making it

easy for people who aren't technical to be able to do all of these things they should be able to uh you know ultimately if you know the the sort of like self-sovereign uh future that we articulated earlier is going to become a reality and this is the you know you know how it happens we need we need miners that are that are doubling as uh water heaters and houses and stuff like that you just turn it on and it works and that's and that's another so that's the state of where we are right now we're waiting for this ux to come yeah and it's going to take time and it's so let's do a state of the blockchain right now we're sure we're we just bitcoin just turned nine years old on january 3rd yes uh we're less than a decade in uh we're probably in our third or fourth

major bubble yes um let's compare it to the last bubble so let's compare it to 2013 2014 why would Yeah, exactly. What has changed since then? What has changed? Exactly. So, 2012-2013 was when a lot of the consumer infrastructure for buying, selling, storing Bitcoin came online. So, Coinbase went through, I think, YC 2012. Coinbase, Blockchain.com, a lot of this infrastructure for consumers was being built right around then, 2012-2013. And most of those early adopters were all technologists, so they were all pretty savvy on how Bitcoin worked, how to make transactions. They could operate things independently if they wanted to. So what we saw between 2013 and 2016 was a lot of the institutional infrastructure came online.

So in 2017, we saw a futures market by the CME, the CBOE come online. We saw a lot of the institutional custody products, so Coinbase, Gemini, Zappo, a number of other companies are building institutional infrastructure now. You saw a lot of the miners become industrialized, where you had Bitmain, you have a number of smaller miners that are all like sort of spinning up vertically integrated mining operations. And so if 2012, 2013 was consumer infrastructure, 2016, 2017 was institutional infrastructure, I think that 2018 and 19 will be what I see as the first wave of adoption. And what that entails for me is a lot of the user experience that's currently not that great but will be very great. I think that there's going to be a significant layer of abstraction above what people interact with. and, you know, what the technology is underlying, the same way we saw with consumer buying and selling and storage,

and then institutional buying and selling representing the asset, I think we'll see the same thing for using of these actual services. You know, that will be abstracted away in a way that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, like looking at Jack Mahler's Zap app right now, like if that UX and that- Oh, it's beautiful. It's incredible. And I've said this before on the podcast as well,

But I think y'alls.org is the best troll game in the Bitcoin space coming at yours. But, yes, that's what we need. I come from a design background as well, finance and design. And the UX needs to be there. And that's one thing I would encourage if you're sitting there like, hey, what can I do? And you're a designer, you're a UX designer or a UI designer. Start working on these projects. Is Marcel Nade to sleep?

Oh, I thought you were sleeping. Sorry. He's playing Candy Crush over there. Nah, just swiping. What a Friday night for you, kid. We got to get Blockstack Tinder. We got to get the Blockstack version of Tinder. Yeah.

Kevin Pham, who's very controversial on crypto Twitter, he threw out a crypto dating app. That guy is strange. That guy is very strange. He is very controversial, very strange. He talks about his love life a lot, which is interesting. His app is Hodlmy, if you're going to do a crypto Tinder. I'll put up the crypto Tinder, the bounty, one Ethereum for whoever gets a good proof of concept.

Heard it here first. And we just put out a bug bounty. Not a bug bounty, a bounty for a Tinder app on the blockchain. No, yeah, but Kevin Fam, yeah, he's controversial. A lot of people don't like him. I get what he's doing, though. I think he's trying to push the conversation to a certain area. He's trying to push the Bitcoin Overton window.

That's what he's doing. Yeah, yeah. I understand where he's coming from. Actually, I'd like to have him on here to get more into his head a little bit. I think him and Chris DeRose- They just did a podcast yesterday. They just did a podcast. I think they were shirtless for the podcast.

So, Marty, unless you want to take your shirt off, I don't know if that'll work out. I mean, I'm not what I used to be. That's a fact. That's a fact. I used to have like, yeah, I used to be pretty jacked. Not anymore. From jack to fat in 10 years. It's what happens when you tear your ACL and you never get it fixed.

Allegedly. Allegedly. Yeah, me too. That's why I don't work out. I used to bench four plates, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We've got Matt Brown who just joined us. Matt Brown, we shit on Tron earlier. Yeah, Tron's done. Sorry. Sorry, Tron's done. Matt Brown, get over here. Tron's done. I'm going to tag out with Matt Brown because I got to go home real quick.

Did you just get a confirmed swipe? No, I didn't. No, no. Oh. Oh. Oh. But follow me on Twitter at Burst on Nate. He just hit 100K.

He's looking to go to 200 in half the amount of time. Nate, safe ride back to Hoboken. See you, Nate. so i'm pretty sure tron's updated white paper they're actually already working on on uh tinder on the blockchain just just so you guys here we go just so you guys know you miss so much of this conversation already yeah i know i i like don't even know what to say because i know whatever i say is gonna sound so stupid the best was though it was yesterday it's like all these companies now like like local lytics was actually like a pretty big data company at one local lytics

yeah it's in boston yeah i work on the same floors though they're kind of going under and Andrew texted me yesterday, they're basically rejiggering the whole team to work on some type of blockchain or crypto thing right now. That's what Kodak did this week, too. Yeah, but the Kodak, I'll go on record, the Kodak miner will never fucking work. It's cloud mining. They have a cloud mining contract where they- They give 50% of the revenue.

50%, yeah, that will never work. There's no chance. So, shout out Kodak for trying to stay relevant in 2018. Shout out for Kodak stockholders who made like 300% this week. Hopefully you sold. Hopefully you sold. I'll be back. Lou's going to rip a piss.

We've been in here for like six hours now. It's been two hours. Have you guys really been purring for that long? No, two hours. This is more just like a hangout session on hot mics than it is a podcast at this point. It's gotten to that point. That's where we are now. So, Matt, meet Arjun.

It's nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Yeah, that was bad, bad radio, but we just shook hands. I've been pumped that you're coming in since I read the article. I am a noob, brought in basically by Marty and Lou. I started off just like Bitcoin chat hodler, then now I'm in that altcoin bubble fever phase, so right now I'm like 70% BTC, 30% Tron. Everyone listening, just go buy Tron just so I can sell it. How many of your listeners know what the term Chad means?

Unless you've seen me retweet a Chad tweet, I don't think very many. So Chad is a meme going around. A Chad Hodler is basically just a bro who has no idea what he's buying. That defines me. That defines me overall. I'm just a Tron Chad Hodler now. I don't even know what to do. I can't sell it at a loss.

I'm just going to hold it. You can't be a Chad if you're hodling Tron. You don't get the meme. You can't, yeah. That's really tough. It's Bitcoin specific. If I go on a date and I tell a girl, hey, I invested in Bitcoin, she's going to be like, yeah, cool, I know what that is. If you tell her you invested in Tron, she's going to be like, what the hell is that?

Is it like the movie? It's more like, oh, I got all these random alls. You don't even want to know. Vic probably hates your dick right now because you're all on Tron and shit like that. No, she doesn't care. She knows what Gucci is. She knows what Gucci is. That's the real

That'll be the real top When people start Mortgaging their homes To buy shit like Tron Is it just Complete dog shit It just has no product yet Right

Yeah no product Plagiarized white paper That was a little bit Eh They all are though Fucking Whoa Cardano

Not all of them Sorry Cardano is not plagiarized Cardano Shout out Charles Hoskinson So like Iota and Cardano Are like way better than Iota

Iota They They had a They had a I don't want to say falsified, but they had a little bit of a Microsoft hype that may not have been entirely accurate. Yeah. That and a team of MIT developers audited their code,

and they tried to create their own cryptographic hash function. That was something you should never do. That was absolutely savage. Shout out to the MIT DCI. So bright side on Tron, they have no hash function to even evaluate. So let's just pump it. All right. I mean, this obviously isn't going to make the air.

What do we want to get on to next? How much time do you have, Arjun? Dude, I got all the time. I don't know how much longer I can go, guys. Yeah, yeah. It's hot. Marty, I know you can do this, like get high and do this forever. I'm not high.

I haven't smoked pot in like two days. I'm getting tired. All right. All right. Let's do some closing questions here. We're almost three hours in. It feels like seven. let's it's like we're in fucking zero gravity dragon ball z where you can just

yeah it was a bad analogy i actually tried to make that analogy earlier in this podcast series and it didn't work that time either um let me see what i've written down here so all right back on the rails arjun let's give three i know we've given out a lot of advice tonight but for Let's just consolidate it for newcomers getting into this space. You're going to dollar cost average in. What would you recommend for people coming into the space to go about research, how to find good projects versus bad projects? Let's basically go over your non-technical token evaluation sheet that you wrote up for everybody.

Yeah, I think that for new projects in the space, you want to really like if you're if you're totally total noob, you want to do a couple different things. You should follow at least what a couple of these funds are investing in, because some of the funds, not all the funds, but some of the funds put out research on projects that they think are really good. and uh you know some of them like multi coin has put out a lot of research on something on uh zero x for example i think they've also written about funfair um and you know sort of why they're investing you know that'll help you um you can look up youtube videos on a lot of the projects you have to be careful because a lot of them are sort of hype marketing promo but you can usually tell you know just uh what what's a sort of james altucher type hype video and what's actually legit bit connect that was one of my favorite videos i love i love the part where all the indian people especially are in the video and they're like you know it's uh for those of you

that don't know bit connect was actually a legitimate podsy scheme coupling as a blockchain pyramid scheme straight up pyramid scheme it was uh it was it was it was bad uh the bit so you know that'll help you separate sort of the bit connects from the world and just sort of thinking through who are the users going to be? What is the token sales structure? How much does the founding team have? Did they get it all at once or is it being distributed over time? I think all of those questions, thinking through them critically, are really, really important. And that'll help you start to separate what's an obvious get-rich-quick scheme from a longer-term get-rich-quick scheme. Because ultimately, that's what a lot of these networks are, because people are building

networks because they want to get rich maybe down the short term maybe on a 10-year time horizon which you know if they build something valuable over 10 years i have no personal problem with neither do i um and that's one thing that that fascinates me is how how caught up in in all the buzzwords that that people people can be like the amount of should i buy ripple text that i got that i got like the last month is like yeah it's dumbfounding the if if you can't understand what the token does or how it'll go up in value how it'll generate value beyond speculative demand then you probably shouldn't buy the token maddie brown here everybody's talking about maddie brown here

told me that ripple is going to 300 not realizing everybody's talking about banks are going to use ripple everybody's talking but nobody can explain how banks will use ripple why that value will accrue to the XRP token, and why it makes sense for a consumer to hold XRP as a result of that. I think that starting with that base set of questions is going to really help weed out what's valuable and what's not, because maybe people will get lucky and maybe people will make smart trades and capitalize on the spec of demand, but more often than not, a lot of the newcomers to the space are going to get wrecked as a result and have bad experiences. not good and with ripple specifically like that's what people need to know

that there's XRP and then they have it like another like technology without the token that probably will most likely I mean not most likely like if the bank's going to use XRP or this technology it's not gonna be the token it's gonna be an infrastructure and on top of that they control a large amount of the XRP 60% 60 percent the free float is actually pretty limited and a certain amount of that hits the market every single month that they release. And then you've got to take into account the unit of account, how many tokens, what is the supply of tokens for these?

So Matty B last week was like, yeah, Ripple's going to $300. I was like, if Ripple went to $300, that'd be a $30 trillion market cap for it. It's been a long week. I've learned a lot. I think that one of the valuable resources here, and this site's been going on all week, so I don't mean to give it more volume, on my on-chain FX, everybody stop using CoinMarketCap, use on-chain FX, even though they have so

much demand, their site keeps going down. On-chain FX, they take into account how much supply there is, what the market cap is when it's fully diluted, and they take all of these things into account, and it frames a much better picture for what the reality is versus CoinMarketCap, which is easily manipulated. manipulated and that actually moved the markets earlier this week when market cap took the korean exchanges off of their index and bitcoin fell like two grand that's reasonable yeah exactly um and then another another one of my favorite tweets that was going around this week is uh like uh if these coins had the same 21 million uh supply that bitcoin has like what they would be valued

ripple would have been valued at like fourteen thousand dollars a coin yeah exactly shout out ryan selkis i'm pretty sure he tweeted that out i spent too much time on twitter because i can recognize these things without you ryan ryan if you're listening idiot stupid idiot you're getting in the studio soon i've been bugging you i've been bugging you for months it's time yeah yeah i've met ryan i've i've had the pleasure of meeting ryan in person once uh this summer yeah he's starting up a new uh company called masari they're trying to build an edgar database for crypto fully, you know, they'll disclose things like how much does the founding team have, what's their distribution schedule, all of these things matter.

So, he's bringing, he's being good cop to this industry, which is awesome. Yeah, yeah. And he's actually somebody who writes a daily newsletter. He's somebody that trailblazed the road for me. I sort of unknowingly followed in his footsteps. Absolutely. All right. Let's get some closing questions here from you two.

Lewis, anything? I mean can you come back can you like maybe work from this office sometime like like what do you do every day can you just like come hang out with us like that that would be that's what I mean that's what we need we know we're like not even yeah what's what's the handicapper fee here I will come back as often as you guys will have me well okay so every week every day if you want come in yeah i'll be back i'll be vexing we're like yeah like let's just come back like let's like hang out here like let's just we want we're trying to build i'm trying to team light switch stays late let's and i'm trying to build the like i like the smartest maybe group of people i can

build like in the moment like everyone's like we have a pretty good amount of people like i know Andrew's super smart. Marty's super smart. Matt Brown, he's learning. We're getting there. Just come back. Let's all come back. I'll be back.

Let's come back. I want to do a whole Barstool line of crypto apparel. We're working on it. We're working on it. Caleb's got some ideas. We're thinking about doing future Fridays. We've got some ideas in our hands. One coin, one buy.

Future Fridays. Everybody knows the rules. Matt, anything? No. No. I think we're good. All right. Arjun, where can we learn more about you?

Twitter at Arjun, B-L-J, A-R-J-U-N, B-L-J. And, yeah, that's it. Please don't DM me targets. But that's it. Again, I can't thank you enough for coming into the studio. It's been an incredible perspective that this podcast was desperately in need of. Like Lewis said, we're definitely going to have you in here again at some point. um forever all you freaks out there follow me on on twitter at marty bent subscribe to my newsletter

link in my bio uh subscribe to this podcast if you have people looking to learn about bitcoin learn about crypto send them this way um and if you're out there and you're looking to ask questions my dms are always open as well like argent said don't ask me for targets i'm not a traitor um but yeah we're gonna end it there peace and love