TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #25: Patrick Stanley

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Patrick Stanley, Growth Partner at Blockstack, to discuss Blockstack, decentralizes applications, how Blockstack differs from Ethereum, education in America, and thinking different. Follow Patrick on Twitter: @PatrickWStanley Follow Marty on Twitter: @MartyBent

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here on a friday night uh we're done with the sober podcast we're back drinking here we've got we've got some bullet bourbon frontier whiskey i think it's my favorite these days it's definitely my go-to um it's 420 the barstool office smells like a fucking grow house right now there's people toking up all over the place i have not indulged yet today because i'm very excited for this conversation we have somebody from block stack in the studio i'd like to introduce you all to patrick stanley the uh the growth partner at block sack patrick welcome to the pod hey how's it going and thanks for having me thanks for coming on i'm really interested we

I had to interrupt the conversation we were having before we started recording because you were giving out too much good information that I didn't want to miss here on the podcast. And I know your time is limited. You got a boxing match to get to tonight. So let's jump right into it. This is Tales from the Crypt. How did you find Bitcoin? Yeah, so actually I was living in Chicago ago at the time and i think i was in my early 20s i think i was like 22 i think every young man at some point starts to dive down the rabbit hole of you know what is money and um i was kind of going down this rabbit hole learning the sort of austrian side of economics i'm not even sure where i first heard about it but i remember being incredibly skeptical and then uh the more i

looked into it um the more i became uh very optimistic on it and i remember my brother was a commodity trader in chicago and i was telling him about it and this is when bitcoin was i think like i think it was about ninety dollars at the time it's like 2012 2011 yeah and he's kind of like a prodigy trader i mean like um he's very good and he just decided to you know buy like fifty thousand dollars worth of it boss uh and he held on to it and actually um it came in handy for him um and i think there's some there was like a time when um when uh he was in like a little bit of a pickle and the bitcoin actually saved saved him really yeah um so what uh what part of chicago were you living in i was living in old town old town yeah all right i uh went to

depaul university so i discovered bitcoin in chicago around the same time that's a very interesting story i was uh slumming it in lakeview but that's sort of where i fell down the rabbit hole i was working at a managed futures fund not too much different than what your brother was doing but uh i was the crazy analyst in the office screaming we should be focusing on bitcoin we should be buying this uh i got laughed out of the office but uh my old co-workers hit me up and are asking for advice so i think they've turned to leaf oh man i think like there's probably so many listeners right now that were like that bitcoin person for so many years and made fun of for so many years um shout out to everyone that was that bitcoin person shout out to the chads out there

that that uh that gruesome tough skin it wasn't easy it wasn't easy getting ridiculed it was uh it was something that uh is very taboo i would say it's still taboo to an extent but yeah i think like honestly um the time it takes to get people to speed on what bitcoin is and how valuable it it was just, uh, was too long. And I started adopting like the kind of like, uh, I'm a crazy person, uh, like Kanye style, uh, you know, kind of approach of explaining Bitcoin, um, just to keep it short. Um, and you know, I think, um, I think, you know, probably confused a lot of people in the process. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. I confused a lot of the people in my office cause that was or in like the alt run of 2014 where people were like going crazy and i had like i said people

laughed at me there was a couple that like sort of got it and dove in with me and then we got we all got wrecked in the altcoin uh explosion of 2014 2015 um do you do uh do you are you interested in any coins outside of bitcoin uh monero yeah uh the privacy coins because i think fungibility is very important uh from uh from a monetary perspective uh so i like to see projects that that really put that uh on the pedestal and and work towards that so i like monero um there's just too much to focus on a bitcoin i think to sort of like to go out there maybe maybe i've got my head in the sand not focusing on it uh other things but uh i tend to stick I consider myself a maximalist to an extent um I am a maximalist I'm gonna come out and say it

I'm loud and proud now I've been very tepid about it but I'm a maximalist I would say what what makes you a maximalist I see like it's like I I see this on Twitter like self-proclaimed maximalist and I I I'm I kind of treat this like politics I don't really go into kind of what my favorite things are or how much what i'm holding or whatever but and i i find funny parallels um i find funny parallels in bitcoin maximalism and you hear a lot of um you know kind of people who are self-proclaimed carnivores and and it's almost like uh it's kind of similar in my mind it's kind of similar to like the epicureans like they were like a vegetarian cult and that's the way you found out about um sort of like pythagorean's theorem yeah um sorry did i say epicureans

you did say epic yeah yeah pythagoreans yeah yeah um and i i wonder if there is a parallel here like the the the like the people who are eating meat and um i i definitely think there is i think i mean i'm not a carnivore by any means i i'm a nominivore i'll leave whatever you put in front of me a garbage disposal if you will um yeah so what makes you maximalist sorry again we're dealing with software here and i've explained this a couple times on the podcast but we're dealing with software here and these protocols are securing value they're securing money money is very important and that security should be paramount to every project and i just think bitcoin is the only project to date that does what it markets it will markets that it will

do which is enable peer-to-peer resistant or excuse me peer-to-peer censorship resistant distributed uh transactions or transactions in a distributed network excuse me um it's worked as marketed since january 3rd 2009 the day it was launched and has produced uh blocks roughly every 10 minutes uh there was maybe one or two slip-ups where like the 82 million block reward or whatever that was that was quickly resolved um and i did i just believe that the conservative approach of bitcoin in particular is uh is the wisest approach and it will will win out in the long run because as soon as you bastardize the the security of a network which i would argue happened with the dow hack and the solidity hacks that have been going

on in ethereum in particular um i think that's paramount and on top of that like you get into things like hash power this is this is a zero-sum game for energy there's only so much energy until we get dyson spheres in space or we combine asteroids or we find a renewable energy that's that's that's easily uh um that's easily what's the word i'm looking for um stored and then and then trends transferable as well um so i think it is blockchains are zero-sum game to an extent and i think bitcoin's combination of the lindy effect the conservative approach to development um the hash rate that's going on right now it's up to like 33x a hash a second which is a crazy insane secure network i don't think anybody or any other project in the space is

even close when it comes to hash rate and security and then um again the talent of the developers working on the protocol like the hardcore cypherpunks that built the technologies that sort of led to bitcoin uh just using that as a heuristic uh sort of the people that built the foundations for these things um believe this is this is the the penultimate example of a sound money in the digital age what are your thoughts i i i agree on the um the security aspect i mean I think Bitcoin has some pretty valuable properties and I think when used right can unleash a lot of creativity and innovation and I kind of see I can see Bitcoin as being this sort of this like prime mover this big gear that turns a lot of other other gears in the sense that

because you can rely on it you don't have to rely on something that can be changed or is sort of high entropy i think it provides something that um a lot of creativity can can can come from in in the form of um you know layer two protocols um decentralized applications etc it's actually one of the things that drew me to block stack um and while you know i have an appreciation for ethereum like i think the community is is like vibrant i think ethereum is is very is very cool And I think there's a lot of innovation happening there and and more and more, you know, every day and week and year. I do like what attracted me to Blockstack was they made a very important design decision. And that was to rely on rely on a block chain that is the most secure for putting names in there and pushing all logic to the edges.

and um and bitcoin serves uh serves the the purpose very very well there um you know it's it's the sort of most reliable blockchain at the moment if bitcoin ever dies block stack could move on to another blockchain yeah you're a blockchain agnostic right exactly um and that's a good segue let's talk about the sort of sort of stop saying sort of marty um the like the the founding of block stack like maneeb and ryan they worked on name coin and i love that you brought up like the security of the chain because they found that there was there like so name coin was one of the first all coins right it's like one of the first five i'm pretty sure right am i correct in saying that i think it was the yeah it might have been the first

it might have been the first it's like them or pure coin or something like that i think it was the first yeah um and so ryan in particular was working on that right um i'm not sure who was working on it i um you know i started working at blockstack a year ago but the founding story uh you know i've i've heard secondhand only only a few times um yeah they were they were working uh on uh you know creating a decentralized naming system with one name uh what they found was that the security of the network uh wasn't very good uh and what was happening is uh there was like a 51 attack uh possibility for a long or extended period of time and this was on namecoin yeah yeah and um you know it's funny like they they learned a lesson very early on and um decided

to create a virtual chain that could live on top of bitcoin and put uh hashed zone files uh which are essentially um kind of like little address cards that you can put information in that are similar to um you know that is used in dns and um into the bitcoin blockchain and the virtual chain is able to you know look over that record and you know kind of spin up a cohesive kind of phone book of who's who and rely on it because you can rely on the security of the Bitcoin blockchain. Yeah, and that's what fascinates me

about Blockstack is, number one, your focus on the edge cases is moving all the logic to the edge, right? It's like, don't mess with the protocol level. This is one thing I was preaching. It's called the end-to-end design principle. The end-to-end principle. Yeah, and this is one thing I saw.

Uh, somebody was, I don't want to say, somebody invited me to give a guest lecture at, uh, Brouch College. I always, uh, butcher the pronunciation of that college, Brouch, Brouch, whatever it is, Brook, Brook, Brook College. And so I was talking about this a lot today. So I did this this morning, um, and talking about how I think Bitcoin should be slow and dumb at the protocol level. just enable peer-to-peer censorship resistant distributed transactions and be extremely secure

and then you move everything to second layers like the lightning network and block stack so let's talk about how block stack works as a second layer like what um so you guys have a browser that lives on my server correct um your your browser is running locally on on your own computer yes yes my my computer and then so i have a bunch of block stack ids oh nice which ones do you have i have quite a few oh you're hoarding block stack ids i'm hoarding block stack ids what's your favorite one uh amazon you have amazon.id yeah wow i looked up twitter.id today someone's taking it chloe kardashian.id is available though yeah we should tell lewis downstairs i don't know if i want do i want

people to know i have amazon i actually went for two letter names so i have like mdrd oh nice marty yeah rachel nice well what's like how how like at a high level uh how block sack works is it provides you it provides you with your own identity that's rooted in the blockchain and um it gives you a human readable name that you can use inter app it also provides you with a wallet so you can send bitcoin and soon you'll be able to send send stacks uh the native app token of block stack um and then um it also provides you with a nice kind of api for access to your own personal data storage so um yeah don't want to cut you off there but let's dive into that like personal data storage is a hot topic in the news we had somebody on last week talking about the

data problems at facebook and google so this is probably the main topic that we should dive in here is blockstack's whole ethos is basically we're giving your data to you and you control it as opposed to having your data sit on google and facebook servers and this is something revolutionary and you guys are really building the decentralized internet that you're trying to build on silicon valley correct yeah and you're and you were telling me before the show you're actually uh advising them yep yeah we're advising them um yeah the personal data storage thing i think is um you know at the end of the day it's giving people back the right to you know effectively own their data and their information uh and their identities and their money um

on the internet if you think about you know what do you own it on the internet today you know most people would um it's actually funny like most most people were surprised when when they answer that question because they never thought about it it's like it's like that it's like the kind of like uh what makes money valuable question all right like you got to dive down the rabbit hole there for for a second um and um and i think um i think what's what's interesting here is like you know we've we kind of um just taking a step back uh we created this this internet thing fairly quickly um we've benefited from it dramatically uh i think we would all agree that the internet has been a net positive for humanity agreed yeah but i think in you know when

it was first created uh you know that's like web 1.0 uh kind of uh vision was that people would be very creative on the internet they'd uh they'd be able to you know create create pages and not just bookmarks and um you know they'd be able to innovate very very um very fast you know but in practice uh really like that wasn't happening you know like unless you you were like a hardcore you know kind of uh developer you you weren't really creating and so people were just kind of observers on the internet um just kind of watching it form and then web 2.0 came along which was like you know in our eyes it's effectively these like social networks that allow for creativity but within walled gardens yeah so you can post picture uh you can post a

blog um you know you can share videos um but you don't get to own it and as a byproduct of you not owning it uh and and the um and the you know sort of these monolithic uh large uh companies owning it they also control uh how the developers can innovate with that data um and so you know we've we've kind of like drank this sweet poison um because it gave us this this awesome uh this awesome ability to create but we've we've locked ourselves into a local maxima i would say um and what the promise of web 3 is all the creativity of web 2.0 without the walled gardens it's this chance to take back ownership take back identity start from scratch and allow for true innovation like true unbridled innovation to happen like in my my feeling is that there is going to be

a cambrian explosion of innovation once uh top talent developers start finding out about this and i think um i think i think like um i think things like block stack will will really will really uh sort of usher that in yeah because you guys have i mean people like to talk about dApps on ethereum but you guys you guys have dApps to market already like my podcast is on the dot podcast app yeah in the block stack browser yeah we've been like so you guys have coin you have portfolio trackers you have google docs but you have like excuse me uh like a google docs competitor um you guys have working dApps am i wrong with that assumption or we have working daps and um and more importantly they're scalable

to millions and billions of people right that's incredibly important so like when i came when i came to blockstack in january of last year you know it was like four people working at blockstack and you know it was like it's like a team of phds and distributed systems from princeton and um they just had their heads down working very quietly for like three years and i mean that's all changing now um and so you know i think people can hear more and more about blocks like especially as like you know you see this sort of like um you see i think you're gonna see this surprise kind of come out of nowhere is my is is is what i i'm i'm seeing uh starting to happen um and i'd also say like um the apps that exist on block stack today uh are only made

possible as recently like the like the kind of apps in which you share information with other people was only made uh possible as recently as february of this year so like here are some apps that exist on Blockstack that are undiscovered and some that are, you know, in stealth mode. So we have .podcast, that's an uncensorable podcasting network. We have a community development app that we actually just launched this Wednesday

that we've been giving out Stacks tokens for community contributions. You sign in with your Blockstack ID, you earn Stacks tokens, and then, you know, later you can cash out. We have a fully decentralized Google suite. You know, it's like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets. That also has a communication app in it as well.

None of this relies on any centralized servers. So let's talk about how huge this is. Like, Google has access to all of your information in your Google Docs, technically. Yeah, not in Graphite, they don't. No. I mean, there's a huge Wired piece that came out on Graphite. the the author of uh the piece tom simonite wrote the whole piece in graphite really yeah i'm like sure you know you can share it with his his editor through graphite um and um you know we have we

have like we have tons of apps that are gonna like catch people like people are gonna not be expecting them um we have we have fully decentralized um we have a fully decentralized twitter that's that's being created right now i've been playing around with that um how's that blocking so it's it's being it's being developed by um it's a princeton kid right yeah and like this so apparently this kid is like the best cs student that princeton has ever had no well that's what the professors are saying really yeah um that said you know they're they're young team um they're building they're building a decentralized and uncensorable twitter um and the interesting thing too here that i think like people have a hard time like sort of grokking

is it doesn't require any money to post a tweet because you own all your tweets and people literally just everyone owns their own tweets and your feed is made up of all the tweets that people own in that you follow so like by comparison like i think a lot of the lenses that people look through when they think about decentralized apps is like okay this app has to touch the blockchain at every point it's like you need to fund your tweet with gas or something like that yeah and like that that that that might lead to other innovations um but my my my sense is that um low friction is actually better when it comes to doing things that um you do on the toilet and then leave you know um like not not to not to speak ill of any uh of any uh apps that are paid

to post i think you know um maybe maybe there are some some business models that that come out of that or some something that's uh that's positive um but i think when it comes to um when it comes to preserving freedom of speech when it comes to low friction low payments um this this decentralized uh sort of version of twitter i think it's gonna be very very interesting i think almost like the social ramifications that come out of that are gonna be interesting too like i don't even know if i'm prepared for that yeah like anyone can post anything and you can't yeah you can't can't kick weave off of the decentralized twitter what's weave weave he he was the hacker who got i forget who he hacked but he got sent to prison uh i don't know if he was radicalized in prison

but he came out he's on twitter he's like a terrible anti-semite like white supremacist that's the worst place to become radicalized yeah yeah um i don't know if it happened at prison or like his time in prison just hardened him but um yeah like he's somebody who's been kicked off twitter like the alt-right um you know okay so this is this is like i think a very interesting thing um and this is something that um this is something that i think is worth talking about you know the people who are being censored on platforms are not always nazis sometimes they're sex workers sometimes they're uh political dissidents you know um and my like the reason i'm so excited about uh the decentralized twitter and all this decentralized social networking i mean

blogging etc etc is we're no longer trusting a company to preserve a record of human consciousness and i think we're gonna look back on today with twitter and just like think this was the craziest thing to trust a company with collective you know human consciousness right and and i think it's worth getting steps on soapbox i think it's worth worth preserving uh this for you know our grandchildren and and and and you know generations to come because you know whether you agree with something like a trump or not i think it's important for us to be able to study how things like that happen and if you know if the information is not available or it's censored or you're not getting a true uh ordered uh kind of um you know view of that

um you're not gonna be able to make sense of reality i think understanding ourselves is a very uh is a worthwhile kind of pursuit i would 100 agree and that's something that scares people it was like things on twitter like people are like twitter's too toxic like I mean, Bitcoin and crypto Twitter in particular. Maneeb had a tweet that had some replies. And then it said at the bottom of all the replies said, show more tweets. These are like the censored ones. And two of the tweets said, fuck.

And then one tweet said, punch. Right. And I'm thinking, who do you have to be to be that triggered by that speech? but i you know on the flip side of the coin is what do i not know that led to that decision to to to you know to hide that yeah but the i i think at the end of the day uh users should be able to opt into that experience that they want to yeah it's like that's the thing i tell people about twitter like twitter is like too confusing it's like it's one thing twitter could do better is teach people how to use twitter so if you're not using tweet deck and creating list and sort

of filtering the information flows that you're getting on the app i don't think you're using twitter correctly like you can mute people you can block people you can really filter out keywords you just got to learn how to build up your sort of curation tool that's what twitter is i would argue that outside of the censorship twitter is the best communication tool ever created is why we're sitting here today i mean it's really nuts like if you i mean i'm sure probably the majority of the listeners have you know thought about what it would be like to live in the 1940s 50s 60s and think about something like twitter existing it's absolutely mind-blowing right say that you can broadcast something to everyone in the world should they care to listen to it um is

is is mind-blowing and it's great this sort of like thought meritocracy where an individual can can rise to the top if their thoughts are are good you know it's funny um yeah i mean like they i i heard this somewhere twitter is a place where you gather around thoughts and then meet in person afterwards and facebook is a place where you meet in person and then gather around a social network and um i i think i think i think i owe a lot of where i like where i am today to twitter and being able to network with people so easily and so quickly because it really is a meritocracy i remember um on the last podcast you had with santee in i think it was november 6 or something around there uh he said he was like it was the craziest thing i was able to ask um uh who is who

is the evolutionary it was evolutionary it was richard dawkins richard dawkins uh if he's ever tried lsd or psychedelics and i just thought this was so amazing and so he asked richard dawkins if he had ever tried uh psychedelics richard dawkins said no but i've been speaking to uh i think a woman who um who's who about this and now i'll get back maybe i'll get back to you or something like that um i forget what he actually said i remember listening to after that podcast and i got to check in on that and see if he got back and he didn't so i asked did you try out psychedelics and you know maybe he'll respond and i think that's like it's fascinating you can like collar someone and just pull them down to your level right also that someone someone who's trying to learn can

about something that maybe you know can ping you it's like a complete level playing field um and if you if you approach these people that you're trying to get information from in the correct way that i've found that a lot of most people are like willing to interact with you Absolutely. I mean, there's old videos of Steve Jobs describing how he used to go through the phone book when he was 12 years old and call up Hewlett and Packard in Palo Alto. And he was like, most people just have a hard time, you know, kind of getting up the courage to just ask for something because usually people will just do it. You know, and I think that that pertains mostly to just like, you know, asking a question. but um regardless like twitter is twitter is like twitter proves that on a daily basis i would not be sitting in the seat right now without twitter i would not be where i am without twitter i owe a

lot to to the app you built jack um i met lewis the dude who convinced me to run this podcast via twitter dms i met every single guest i just ran through that in my head every single guest that has been on this podcast has initiated a relationship via dms you know yeah and it's crazy and the cool thing about twitter too is it shows sort of your meritocracy i think i think obviously it's not like um it's not like um directly correlative to the value you're adding but let's say this podcast gets really popular well marty's got 5 000 followers in six months marty's got 10 000 followers you're able to get better guests you know like you know it's like um it's actually it's actually a good case for why there should be a decentralized twitter

for example if you're a marketer you should have a right to own your email lists and own your your followers and to even like charge for protected tweets and things like that uh you know like what i'm i'm now just thinking through the decentralized ones like what twitter doesn't allow you to do is like is is actually like um is i think is is is probably um something that is worth exploring for app developers that are building decentralized apps um the onset durability is one thing the kind of patreon like subscription models is another thing um but um you know it's crazy like this this company this this company uh is only worth you know eight ten billion dollars or something like something like that but has an outsized impact on society yet is not capturing

all of it and uh like what what that tells me is that uh it's actually not uh providing enough value for its users um and that those users should be capturing the value instead i mean that i'm a little anarchist to twitter in a sense but also appreciative of it um that's it i would actually say it seems like jack's like going through like a bit of a transition right now like he's very like with with cash app in particular like he's very pro bitcoin very bullish on the space which is very interesting because like i look at jack as i mean i i like i i absolutely respect the guy as a founder i but i do look at him as a bit a bit a bit um i don't want to say maybe virtue signally uh it like just just to like call it like it is yeah yeah um i

would agree i like i just i think the he caves easily under enough pressure yeah yeah he does he does cave easily and i think um that can be a feature for some and a bug for others and um you know it's it doesn't affect me that's one thing directly no it probably affects some some other people who get banned it probably you know uh elevates some people who shouldn't be shouldn't be elevated um i'm curious i'm curious to see what goes on behind back doors i think he's got pressure from some powerful people you think so i mean if you're a government twitter is probably the most disruptive tool like oh yeah in the world and i'm sure facebook maybe it's like we're on twitter so yeah but i think facebook might be facebook as well twitter second if if twitter

had as many users as facebook i think it'd be no no uh no question yeah yeah that's another interesting thing like the quality of but jack but jack did make that he he's he's taken a stance on bitcoin which like and i think it's very interesting because his his stance on cryptocurrencies does not uh i don't say doesn't align with his his his sort of social stance or maybe he's just a very complex individual uh but i i i typically uh maybe unjustifiably categorize uh bitcoiners as uh fairly uh libertarian or conservative and um and i think um you know other uh sort of like other other other cryptocurrency branches as um other derivations of that uh or um you know just maybe maybe more more liberal or more like socially socially conscious uh you know i i think

there is actually a political division at uh as as well as a crypto division right i think that exists oh it definitely exists and you see the different types of politics uh congregating around different chains like i would argue like ethereum's got more of a a keynesian uh i would supposed to say socialist mindset uh to an extent um very virtue singly in my mind yeah um and then bitcoin hardcore conservatives you know absolutely i mean um i i i would say absolutely in the sense that um that that from a quick glance i i yeah i mean i will say i think there are probably a lot of libertarians in in ethereum and there's different lenses in which you can look at ethereum and there's different trade-offs uh you can you can you can take um

you can you can take on on the on on ethereum but i think i think that's i think that's kind of fair to say yeah yeah yeah i would agree and it's interesting i mean this is a huge psychological experiment on this you see who yeah who's gravitated to what who gravitates to what um but at the end of the day it's very i think the dream is very community-minded very very very but i say i say the community is is is is the strongest aspect of of of of ethereum like i mean i i think its biggest feature is its community yes and i think uh bitcoin's biggest feature is its security and immutability yes and i would argue that like you shouldn't like you should value security and immutability above all else community should

be way down the line because these technologies exist to let people that hate each other utilize them in the same fashion so no matter that's that's that's the important point exactly so it's not hey let's all buddy buddy kumbaya get together and bring each other out from our bootstraps this is a technology to enable anybody no matter your religious creed your socioeconomic status your political beliefs bitcoin was created just so anybody could utilize it it doesn't that's the thing people don't realize is like these blockchains it's code software running on hardware like it doesn't understand the politics happening outside of it It just produces blocks at a set pace and runs the rules that are dictated by the software.

And Bitcoin has no idea about the debates that go on outside of the protocol. Everything you just said is why we keep having Nick Szabo come to our conferences. Let's jump into Szabo. I love that, man. I was pumping Szabo a lot this morning when I was giving that lecture. I say Sabo is Sabo is a very nice individual uh it was really funny um we had we had the block stack uh we had the block stack summit in Menlo uh Mountain View in July of 2017 and it was like Coachella for crypto was awesome it was like one of the best days of my life and then the Berlin event was like one of the other best days of my life um shout out to uh Shannon

Voigt who put on both those events don't try to steal her she's the best conference person in the game really uh absolutely yeah she was she used to run like um massive date like multi-day events at food and wine magazine oh she just got she's just like you know she's like an artist with it crushes it yeah uh yeah and she's a one woman team there's like she has no other team really like that's the most that's the most mind-boggling thing um so we've had sabo at both of those um at the first uh conference sabo is about to go up to speak and he's a man of very few words he'll he'll just say okay yeah thank you okay so i need this okay good and he just like goes he's very much in his own head he just kind of like stands up there and just like you know uh and just kind

of it just kind of comes out of him you know um but before he went on stage he was like oh can you hold this and he like handed me his wallet and his phone and his keys and i was like is this Maybe this isn't Satoshi Nakamoto. For all you freaks out there, a lot of people think Nick is Satoshi or part of the group that is Satoshi. Why do you call them freaks? I don't know. I don't know. It's just like something that...

So I write a daily newsletter too. Oh, nice. Marty's bent. Marty's bent. And it's something that... So what I try to do with this podcast and the newsletter is basically create an olive branch between the uber technical side of bitcoin and blockchains and the masses that want to learn more like people are like holy shit yeah like maybe i should know more about this and i try to

teach people with uh by not taking myself too seriously yeah you do a great job joking around with people you do a great job i mean uh i've been listening to your podcast thank you yeah i mean like you you you know where to sit back and kind of let someone let someone go in you know and you else know when to change up the topic yeah i don't want to change up the topic here though let's stick on zabo sabo yeah um actually no let's not stick on zabo he likes being elusive i'll tell you that i would love to get him on this podcast so nick if you're listening he's not listening the invites up it he's definitely not listening he might be listening i have conversation with one one-sided conversation with vitalik like once every third episode on this podcast

do you yeah vitalik i know you're listening you can come on too yeah um i i can intro you to nick um he yeah he likes his privacy that's for sure i mean like it's crazy like we'll get him at these conferences and he's like yeah just don't post the video i'm like really don't post the video we all right all right it sounds like he won't want to come on this thing but you know um it it's good to have it it's good having him there i mean like he's kind of like the og that's like you know like you know bernie sanders like they say that he's like the old grandpa that's like you know warning warning about like uh you know like an asteroid coming to hit the earth like nick sabo is not a grandpa but he's kind of like an og that

um has thought through the stuff for many many decades uh and you know he knows he knows what he's he knows what he's talking about so he's got also what does he do he teaches at george mason doesn't he is that is that or was he at one point i don't know i don't know either um i'm pretty sure at one point he was teaching at george mason could be wrong um but he's somebody who like really knows this shit like he's got a law degree a computer science degree like a cryptography master like he's at he if anybody like i say many times on this podcast there's no experts in the bitcoin space like if there is somebody that's close to an expert it's nick zaba yeah definitely he wrote the paper describing smart contracts yeah he like uh and then the god

protocols paper he wrote too was another incredible that's a mind-blowing one right so if you freaks out there have not read any of Nick's work yet like go on the Nakamoto Institute their literature page I believe or their research page excuse me their research page has all of Nick's

white papers and technical writings and blog posts from the past and then check out his blog unenumerated it's just unenumeratedblog.com yeah or .org I can look it up

we'll find it yeah i think it's i think i think it's worth giving him the yeah um but definitely like read his stuff like shelling out the history of money unenumerated dot block stack sorry dot blogspot.com unenumerated dot blogspot imagine how many times i say the word block stack per day unenumerated dot blogspot.com there was um this is actually a funny story about block block uh block stack ids i was trying to get overstock um but in haste i wrote over stack and i was like fuck so i bought like an id that i didn't think would be valuable and then keep it and i was like over stack i was like this is on block stack like maybe somebody comes up with an

over stack block one day i'll tell you what we have like we have like uh we have like hundreds of uh kind of like apps that people did in a weekend and they all named them block something or stack something everything's block party block tweet block block x block you know it's like okay so the word block actually uh shouldn't be used in everything it's like there's there's no there's no naming creativity in in this space which which actually tells me that there needs there needs to be a lot more um we need to bring in uh real designers we need to bring in real engineers into the space and um i think it's such early days that um sometimes i i think i think the first go at some projects um where really great designers or really good engineers um kind of uh kind of

attack the blockchain uh kind of or kind of like sort of approach the blockchain thing is their first attempt and i think on the second attempt our third attempt uh they'll get it right and we'll start seeing some applications that are just like absolutely mind-blowing and like what i get excited about is especially just bringing this back to block sack it's like what it's part of what i know is like because the users own their own data they can swap apps and not be locked in like at all so like imagine you're using uh imagine using um like a notes taking app you know like evernote and you want to use another app that's much better but uses all that same data like today you'd have to like take it out there's this like huge very frictionful process

yeah in the block stack world you literally just press login to the other app and it'd be as if you've been using it the whole time you know i think like what like my my my sort of vision for uh what it's like people don't know what they're people don't know what they're missing out on yet and i think it's still already is so like it's it's a little tough you got to squint a little it but like um i think we're going to have like a much more seamless magical sort of internet experience because we're going to take back ownership yeah so let's dive into that push versus pull so blockstack is a very push oriented sort of data structure and then whereas pull is what facebook and google are they're pulling our data from their servers and presenting it to

us where block stack which is the beauty of it and sort of the whole um mentality behind the decentralized internet is that you hold your data and you push it out when necessary so like how much data control are we going to get because of these technologies no i mean like um you like you i mean you can have terabytes of data that never see the light of day um and so you'd have control over that data of course that's on one end of the spectrum that's like um single player apps we'll call those similar to like single-player games where like solitaire solitaire doesn't need to run on a server it can just like run on you know like you know and any device um yeah it's just logic right exactly um and then when you get into the world of multiplayer uh you're now

sharing um data with other people obviously those people can like screenshot data but what we're what we're getting at here is something that's more like how the real world works like if i show you a picture of me and my girlfriend on my phone beautiful girlfriend no one can see that but you and me i didn't need to ask facebook i didn't ask any third party when blocks like you're able to do that and know that person on the other end is who they say they are i think that's and you can prove it on the blockchain exactly and people are doing it today um i'm doing it yeah he's doing it um and how long do you think this takes like what what like what are you guys talking about a block stack like how long do you think before like block stack gets

like a a considerable user base like i i'm just going on do you think there needs to be like an event that triggers like like wakes people up and says holy shit we can't use these centralized apps anymore well if you think about it from like just think about this from an application perspective if you get 100 million users who whatever that is built on is the winner for all intents and purposes there needs to be a breakout in order for a breakout winner to exist there needs to be scalability there also needs to be um uh sort of features that weren't previously accessible um now those are i mean those are like those are really important and you know how much time it's going to take before we have a breakout out um i i don't know but my

gut is that as we get better and better at exposing new developers to the tools to create scalable global applications that don't require third third-party servers that allow for a better user experience than what their people are used to today like i think that last part is very important um i could see something happening happening this year that catches everyone off guard let's put it let's put it that way okay um i like that and and and and and the and the i i love being able to say with confidence that even if an application was successful beyond our wildest dreams the network wouldn't hold it back right you don't have a crypto kitty situation exactly which yeah and that's beautiful and that's why i've been drawn to like just let

you know i've been a fan of block stack and ryan and maneeb for years like i remember them in name coin i think i went to the first ever block stack meet up in new york where um i know you're you got we've got like 10 minutes uh 15 okay cool um and i there's something like like you said like their very head down like get shit done type mentality and that's what i respect the shit uh that's i respect the shit out of benebe and ryan for those reasons they've just been very quiet head down building this out and actually bringing something to market that's scalable and then the whole pushing everything to the edge where you don't interact with the protocol just logically makes sense to me i mean we're using the same principles that the people who

created the internet and worldwide web used yeah and and we're pat we're patching that so like the i'll probably i'll probably butcher this but the end-to-end principle is uh i believe david clark um early pioneers of uh of you know of in of the 80s and in the internet and um was essentially like you want to push um you want to push all the logic and all the complexity to the edges uh of a system uh of a distributed system in this in in the case of like the internet and uh when you put all logic in the center like uh you get sort of log jams um and and like you know ryan and maneeb um you know their backgrounds uh informed them of this ahead of time so they were able to build something and um i was i i i spotted that from afar because i i was having

my reservations of uh about ethereum uh as as like really the go-to like next thing like um at the time uh they have really great marketing incredible marketing they have really great marketing and um also i think like um i i have a lot listen i have a lot of respect for i have a lot of respect for ethereum um and i think there'll be met i don't think it'll be winner take all by the way like i feel i really don't feel any competition with them i like i like i live outside of a world of uh zero sum with with ethereum or eos or anything else i'm just i i i really think that um i'm kind of just focused on block sack and like well i i'm not gonna put words in your mouth and i'm not gonna

speak for you i'll speak for myself but i think you guys are attacking this from a design perspective from a system design perspective in a much wiser way than ethereum and everybody else trying to do everything on chain this year applications will be able to create tokens later this year applications will be able to use smart contracts when an application hits the platform that's that's going to allow for it to be successful is one that's going to allow it to scale maybe it has its own token maybe it needs its own blockchain block block stack will allow you to actually create your own blockchain that has all the security benefits of bitcoin really how do you guarantee that well you'd have like so why not just use bitcoin at that point like could you

use it via the lightning network like use like a maybe create like a dap on okay yeah um so this is something that this is something that's uh in development but there's a very clear path and um you know we'll we'll we'll make some announcements later this year and i think um it will i think it'll be it's like uh you know create create a blockchain create a blockchain on demand essentially um and and not be tied to one it's like you never know if a blockchain is going to survive even if it looks like a huge winner today yeah and if you think that there's gonna be a block you think a blockchain is gonna survive you know decades to come then like i think i think i think that is unwise um i think that perspective is is like um is one that's not

founded on on uh on reality and and there's not enough reality there's not exactly and there's not enough reality to take from to make to to extrapolate into the future yeah like we can't we can't expect um we can't expect all blockchains to live on forever and so if we're building something as important as the internet we need for it to be stable yeah you need to be agnostic to an extent which i agree that's like one of the yeah and if bitcoin is does stay around for decades and centuries and it's still completely applicable to block stack it's a great start right all right um wow fascinating shit like like i was saying like i've been i went to like the first block stack meet up in new york when i first moved here from chicago and i've always just been

really impressed by the way like ryan and maneeb approach approach it and the way they handle themselves publicly and blah blah blah blah like they they i think they have like a good approach to how to build like a decentralized application ecosystem on top of bitcoin in particular and then if bitcoin fails other blockchains yeah i don't think bitcoin will fail but i think i think all the better that you guys made it all agnostic in case it does exactly yeah i'm always questioning my something like i'm always questioning my assumptions like i i don't see bitcoin failing um but i leave i leave room for being wrong you have to you have to absolutely like if i got one knock on maximalist it's that like there's no reservation right yeah

yeah there's got to be you got to leave open like anything's possible anything could fucking happen yeah but i don't think it will but i acknowledge the possibility that it could which is it's always stressful it's always stressful in this place i don't know all right what are you stressed about i feel zero stress well well like as far as well you're actually building something i'm just talking shit about the people building stuff and that's where i get stressed out it's like all right i'm just a mouthpiece i'm just uh what do you stress about specifically like man i'm misleading people like the people that read my newsletter the people listen to this podcast like i'm just afraid of misleading people um because i don't know all the answers freaks

i don't that's why i like to have conversations with people like you tell me get a better understanding of everything um so that was uh yeah that was a 420 uh heart to heart on on tails from the crypt wait are you high no i'm just kidding not not yet not yet i'll save that for after the podcast the podcast that ends with an accusation of the other being high for the whole podcast um yeah if you want to roll a joint we can do that right now before you go to this boxing match no i i don't think i don't think i can do that you don't want him but i can't represent block stag in that way uh you're so professional yeah i thought this was decentralized that doesn't matter well you know i'm kidding i'm kidding we're open to we're open to anything

as long as you're not hurting anyone right no no uh it's actually crazy chuck schumer representative from new york today came out said he wants to completely decriminalize marijuana at a federal level let's go chuck schumer announcing it on 422 very savvy politician there very savvy very smart if he figures out how to abolish student loan debt or absolve I don't think anybody has to do anything I think that's just going to run its course there's no way I know but it is so painful for people coming out of college

to pay $500 per month $1,000 a month it's unsustainable and it's going to get to a point where it's like hey let's take a step back here is this even wise as a macroeconomic policy

to force uh the the most productive uh demographic of the workforce to to have to pay off this debt immediately as they join the workforce i mean like doctors oh my buddies that went to penn i can't like my buddies that went to ivy league schools like and like were true like blue collar like had to take out loans we punish people who are trying to make us healthy right it's really it's really nuts it's really fucked up yeah um god let's do we want to jump into the corruption of the education system what do you think what do you i mean sure happy to what has enabled this is government government grants or the government sort of trying to coerce people to go to college

the government moving slowly can be a feature or it can be a bug and i think in the case of education it has been a bug because well in in the sense that they've taken something that uh they perceive people as as valuing deeply and have extended uh extended resources for people to get that thing for probably far too long and and i think it's a goddamn racket and i also think the reality is like, uh, college education is not one size fit all. And, you know, I think like when you, to look at the, the, like the reality is usually dealt in numbers, right? Like, and if you look at, uh, university education, student loan debt, um, you know, it's gone up at four X, the rate of inflation since 1980. Um, so that, um, I mean, obviously that's unsustainable.

um but we're also it's also a hostage situation because you know you have parents who feel like bad parents if they don't send their kids to college and you have students who feel like luddites and dumbasses if they don't go to college um and i and i think you know um well it's it it it's it's tough because you end up with this like huge burden of debt afterwards that's it's unabsolvable that you can't wipe off your record it's it's gonna come to a head at some point like it's just like a a known fact that like the people taking out this debt are not going to attain positions that allow them to reach a salary that pays off that debt like especially like english art majors stuff like that i'm sorry if any of you guys are english art majors but like

it's just like it's just like it's just it's it's a fact like the the salaries that you're i mean so like coding boot camps for example they price the uh price of becoming a designer at like general assembly at less of a cost than they do uh a full stack engineer that they're you know bringing to the course i went to it i went to a digital design boot camp we don't allow we don't allow that in university because i paid two grand for 16 weeks 12 weeks excuse me or 16 four were virtual and then 12 were in the classroom two grand and i learned more in three months than i did at four years of college for something i wanted to learn about ux design i went to johns hopkins and i thought that education was shitty really yeah i

i feel like i had like a like a renaissance period after graduating and i'm wondering and i was wondering why didn't i have that during college and i think right i felt the same thing i think it was part of the fact that you're getting the best local professors i mean this is true to any any school you you're like you're getting the best people that are willing to be on premises so that's not that's scarce right like the very best can't be everywhere and um i mean like that's i like oh and then oh yeah i don't want to blank on that it must be the bourbon um and and also you have it through it you you have you have it's like completely antithetical

to uh what an autodidact would do which is like uh you'd have you'd and and let's explain autodidact it's someone who teaches themselves someone who teaches themselves and is you know someone who's curious and teaches themselves and betters themselves and and uh you know learn skills that are valuable and learns information that's valuable like when a university gives you a hundred different majors those majors don't actually map to the real world those majors map to ideology um that's a great point and and and the problem is that ideology is um is is is uh is it comes that comes at a high cost we'll just say um and so yeah very ironic speaking to a bitcoin maximalist yeah it's a very ironic i'm talking to a bitcoin maximalist

here yeah let's say i'm very ideological for some things i go back and forth is that like i mean why is there are there actually was thinking about this exact thing yesterday i was thinking about the bitcoin maximalism i really have a lot of respect for bitcoin maximalists like um bitstein out there safe dean cipher dean cipher dean michael goldstein yeah michael gold michael goldstein carnivore uh safe dean carnivore by the way must be noted when when when you when you mention them oh um oh no they'll laugh at you if you don't yeah so they uh i mean like the bitcoin maximalist thing like i was just kind of like thinking about this and i was thinking like and i tweeted yesterday like if you aren't constantly asking yourself how do i know i'm right

like and really trying to find out the little nooks and crannies uh and where they might exist because those nooks and crannies might be everything and if you're wrong on that then you've been you've just made yourself into a useful idiot yeah well i will come to the defense of michael and cypher dean here and i think those are two people that have really really really thought about how they could be wrong cypher dean just wrote a book about it like the bitcoin standard go buy it on amazon he wrote a book and well i would say like basically i i i didn't say they were incorrect i didn't say i didn't respect them i think i think uh you know they they might i was not assuming that you oh yeah you said come to the defense i just wanted i wanted to

cover my statement with like uh have a lot of respect for those guys also i have a lot of uh respect for andrew desantis like i love andrew that that guy he thinks different he's got it tattooed on his wrist i know he does think different he like they're they're i last thing say i'll hop off i've spent probably over 40 hours talking on the phone with andrew desantis and that dude is um there are very few people in the world like him very very few that dude is he's thinking on a completely different that dude is very lucid but not without his not without imperfection you know like he's one of those guys that i think uh i was alluding to like the acting like a crazy acting like a crazy person uh like kanye west when you first look at him or you first

like read his tweets you're like oh this is a crazy person um but if you get the closer and closer you get to him the more you realize he is he is very lucid when you see some when you see i had the pleasure of meeting him in person this around this time last year he spent the time he spent time in my house in san francisco and in new york boss really i mean like he's a i i love that guy he's he's a like shout out like andrew if you're listening i doubt he's listening if he may be andrew might be listening it's the end of the podcast he goes through these whole things andrew if you're listening you've definitely had an indelible mark in my life and i very much appreciate you uh i could say the same i mean i only met i only had the pleasure of meeting

andrew once and that was about this time last year and uh the conversation we had at jg melons on the upper east side was one of the most life-changing conversations i've ever had and like you said he's very cryptic in his tweets but when you meet him in person and he describes what he's thinking it's very lucid and it's very straightforward and i walked out i actually met him with santiago and we had a conversation like the two like santi and i walked out andrew hopped a cab and Santi and I were walking on Lexington or third Ave on the Upper East Side and we were just like what the fuck just happened like that was the most insane conversation we sat at a table for three hours the three of us like hashed out a bunch of shit I was so like mystified by the

conversation we had just had like I got on the NQR to go back to Brooklyn and I went three stops in the wrong direction like I went uptown for three stops and then realized holy shit I'm going the wrong way had to get off the subway walk across the platform and get on the like get on the train to go downtown because i was just like still thinking about the conversation we had had and it blew my mind like if you ask santi santi about the religion we started he'll say jg mellon is our church yeah i i always cite andrew um when i was finding people that were predicting predicting the future with high accuracy i was finding andrew a lot and um and so you know i spent a lot of time with him and he really kind of like gave me a different

lens on reality for that i'm very thankful and i i would just say like if you're willing to dive down the rabbit hole you will find some things there that will um change the way you look at the world for sure yeah and if there's i think if there's one thing we can we can glean from this conversation about andrew in particular is think different like don't be afraid to think different um don't be afraid to think about edge cases to dive into topics that that may be taboo um that may go against the grain of the mainstream um yeah this has been an incredible conversation patrick i really appreciate really appreciate coming through uh we're gonna have to do this again because i only had you in here for like an hour and 20 minutes we have a lot more to talk

about where can we find out more about you or actually first do you have a parting note for the freaks out there yeah sure so uh if you liked what you heard about uh block stack and you think it's going to be the future or you don't uh still go to contribute.blockstack.org and you can actually contribute to the block stack ecosystem and earn the native token of block stack it's called stacks also check out block stack.org um some books you should definitely check out uh knowledge and power by george gilder and sovereign individual um follow naval and ravikant on twitter and um follow block stack on twitter and where can we follow you on twitter i'm patrick w stanley on twitter but um you know i'm kind of a block stack shill so you get what

you just named two books that are on the tails from the crypt book club list yeah also uh here's an andrew desantis book that is me it's hard to get through it but ged uh not go to lusher bach it's um the bias of communication is written in 1951 by harold ennis he's like some canadian dude and it goes through uh kind of time and space bias communication and it's part of the reason i found block stack and part of the reason i feel like those guys are at the finish line and no one else uh realized it but will bang bang and let's end it there uh if you like this podcast please rate subscribe share follow the newsletter follow me on twitter at marty bent uh we'll be back next week peace and love thanks marty sorry sorry for keeping you so long yeah