TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #49: Alex Liegl

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Alex Liegl, Founder of Layer1 Capital, to discuss his mental framework for valuing cryptocurrencies, Grin, Bitcoin's inception, what it means to be part of a team, and much more. Follow Alex on Twitter: twitter.com/alexanderliegl Follow Marty on Twitter: twitter.com/MartyBent Download the Cash App today! https://cash.app

Well, hey there, freaks. Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty, here to introduce this week's sponsor before we get on to the incredible interview with Alex Legal. I think you freaks are really going to enjoy it. But first, you already know the Cash App is the number one finance app in the App Store. What you freaks already know if you've been listening to this podcast for a while is that you can also put the Cash App in your wallet with the cash card. If you're relatively new to this podcast, you're welcome for telling you about this fact i've been a very happy cash card user for the last several months uh and this is because it's the only debit card that offers instant rewards and comes packed

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free cash card it is fresh as well you can customize it uh okay hope you freaks enjoy this episode with alex i know i did what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here on a tuesday night back in the studio at dig.com offices uh it's been a while since i've been in here i've been been locked up in my studio my wife kicked us out of there though i'm really excited for tonight's conversation we're gonna go beyond bitcoin i'm getting some privacy coins I want to introduce you freaks to Alex Legal. How's it going?

Welcome to the podcast, man. Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate you for coming out, coming all the way to Brooklyn. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. Thanks for being so patient. You freaks didn't know this, but it just took me about 25 minutes to get the SD card cleared and into the mic. But here we are. Alex, you're in town.

You've stopped by. Before we dive into what you've been working on most recently, for you freaks that don't know, uh alex managing partner uh yeah managing partner better founder ceo yes founder ceo uh at layer one capital which is based in san fran uh recently raised fun with uh peter teal was involved as well as um jeff tarrant a couple great angels as well yeah really pumped about our investors yeah and you guys are uh a cryptocurrency investment company uh activist cryptocurrency investment company excuse me uh you've done hedge funds and tech firms in the past yep your grin bull yeah i'm really excited about that too but how the hell did you get into all

this that's a good question so um to backtrack grew up in munich germany um shout out to that anybody who's listening uh who might be german um hallo you gets not sales and uh moved to uh california for university went to stanford um there i studied applied math and philosophy and during my time there i actually started a quant fund called vessel capital which traded um index volatility derivatives so options uh futures etfs etns basically um got my first uh foot in the door in the space in terms of what does it mean to manage a daily pnl what does it mean to be involved in traditional asset markets what does it mean to deal with lps we're institutionally funded after that i worked at stanford management company the stanford

endowment fund 25 billion was uh actually the first undergrad they ever had oh yeah yeah after After that, it seems like they started a great program, really pumped about that. I think that's really important for an endowment fund who effectively, you know, has a mandate of improving the financial well-being of the school while also making sensible investments to integrate current and former students as fast as possible. That's really important. After that, I went more towards the tech angle, actually, you know, shifting my focus from finance to technology started a company called apex labs um shout out to my former teammates

uh effectively that was uh a company that wanted to become a volunteer for tax agencies which is actually the diametric opposite of what my focus is nowadays you're trying to seize money now you're working on unseasonable yeah basically you know uh cathartic event going from the dark side to the to the good side um from the from the good guys to the from the bad guys to the good guys um working with tax agencies running um artificial intelligence technology in order to structure unify their data and then you know effectively better allow them to better understand how tax fraud occurs and then in the meantime um i think i got my first real solid understanding of bitcoin in 2013 um ran a small or my electricity uh arbitrage play in stanford because electricity

is free in your student dorm so you know um you know very very small mining up just making a couple couple bitcoins um was it bitcoin or it was only bitcoin yeah fuck yeah i'm sorry he's kind of allowed to say that yeah you can curse all right good good um and um you know reflecting back on sort of my path which has always been oscillating between finance and tech and then realizing that cryptocurrencies lie at precisely that intersection right exactly where financial markets meet technology markets and retrospectively my background you know for better or for worse was always at that intersection so i came to the realization that it was just the ideal fit for me and it's really where i see myself going forward in future

maybe forever um just because um there is this whole industry that's just developing and emerging and it's going to develop in ways that we can't even predict or foresee and it's incredibly exciting that all of a sudden you find something that you really resonate with on a very deep level on an intellectual level philosophical level psychological level and so you said philosophical level you studied philosophy in college i did uh do you think that helped lead you to bitcoin or i actually think um it might have been more important than studying math i think specifically in thinking or trying to think um rigorously and trying to really come from first principles in deducing how to put all the different pieces together right we're dealing with something

that nobody really knows what they're doing everybody's really trying to understand and emulate others and and and the the system and the industry and right there's no valuation framework that exists there's no sort of established rules or infrastructure everybody's engaging in this massive multiplayer game in real time and you know people are taking directional bets and we'll see how that works out i think there's better bets you can take there's worse bets you can take um but the interesting thing is you really have to create a coherent framework personally in order to really systematize all the stuff that's going on and for that reason i think philosophy really helped me because the main you know sort of objective of philosophy is just to

think critically and rigorously about things right so basically what you want to do is list a couple of premises you know whatever your argument rests upon and then draw a reasonable conclusion and that's it and then you can just repeat and you know rinse and repeat and and and do the same playbook all over again and all that really matters is just that you can come to the core truth of something and then everything else falls into place yeah um you're providing a perfect segue for me uh your your paper that you wrote with hasu uh where you basically approached uh bitcoin and cryptocurrencies from first principles perspective and deduce that uh the only token worth investing in by the end of the paper we come to find is a store value token that's

censorship resistant and is probably enabling legal or frowned upon activities yeah and the whole idea that sort of inspired this essay or this paper was trying to understand how economic value accrual is actually justified right these frameworks are well established for traditional asset classes for stocks you have discounted cash flow statements for credit you have others for currencies you have you know sort of fiat currencies you have some other forms all of a sudden you're tasked with understanding and creating a framework for something entirely novel and in the meantime it's entirely in flux right every all the parameters are changing nobody really knows what the end game is going to be so the objective was to create this valuation

framework at least as a guiding principle towards better understanding how can i rigorously defend value accrual for a specific coin and the conclusion was quite simple which is for any coin the only thing that really matters is the removal of an outstanding supply in terms of improving the price and that's only possible if it functions as a competitively superior store value and then you're additionally faced just with the overall i guess end game that all these currencies abstract away any of the fragmentation that is produced in fiat currencies and with with that you're left with a winner takes most or winner takes all market and um that is really going to be in my opinion the you know sort of the correct way of thinking about how value can

even flow and accrue in in in this industry yeah so how long did it take you to come to this conclusion do you think uh all my life no but seriously um it was definitely an iterative process um sort of that you know takes perhaps even years to manifest itself and really understanding the material at an increasing level of depth um specifically also just because i always had crypto in the back of my mind but i never you know professionally engaged it within it in the sense of having a business and you know actually making investment management decisions and then so over the summer time i started thinking about how can i you know also just create value for for the space you know if that's crypto twitter if that's telegrams or whatnot the people that i

talk with and my friends um there's a lot of discussions going on but i felt what was missing was just a very rigorous clear understanding of what are the premises that you should assume from first principles and then what is the actual conclusion that you can logically draw yeah and i think uh it's been a good product of this bear market as a lot of people in particular are uh sort of consolidating the pitch i would say i actually read about today basically sharpening the pitch and making it so that it's easier to understand more direct to the point and it's funny like you said like crypto twitter telegram many people are contributing from different areas like dan held uh siri four-part series that was awesome on bitcoin species and

bitcoin season and all that um like what you and hasu wrote what nick carter's been writing or iterative capital iterative capital their tome that they wrote their tome that behemoth yeah 104 page white paper it was more of like a manifesto or something like that um it was really good but uh that the bear market has allowed people to sort of all right sit back and think why are we in this and to prepare for the next bull market how are we gonna because we are charged with marketing this i guess like i don't even uh know how you would say it because there's no central authority saying here's how we market it here's yeah it's all people bouncing ideas off each other and uh destroying fud like uh deflationary currencies mining fud uh distribution

fud whatever it may be it seems like people are sort of going down the list of of the tropes that mainstream media and other naysayers like to throw a bitcoin and and handily trying to destroy fud piece by piece which has been good to see um so hopefully during the next bull run there will be more wise investment do you see it getting as crazy as it did last year um i i do think you know sort of the groundwork is being set for it to be a more mature bull market going forward right you have sort of the fidelity announcements you have like backed you have you know the golden saxes of the world getting established you have really sort of key infrastructure players getting involved thinking very smartly about how to stratify this entire industry and i would say

that the last one was basically everybody it was very retail focused and for that reason also less mature or less well you know i guess structured and um it's interesting because you definitely just cannot look towards past cycles and try and project it on towards future ones i think the task is really better understanding what is the fundament being laid currently and it's heavily skewed towards inter institutionals and that's also how it's going to play out which is right they're going to run a much tighter ship well significantly better organized and you know for that reason probably also returns how they're distributed over multiple assets are going to be way more concentrated um because of better capital

allocations high leverage amongst the players uh generally also you know hopefully what you were addressing right better valuation frameworks um better ways that people are able to think about where value uh even has a chance of accruing in the first place yeah and uh probably some proper due diligence while i'm sure the space as well i won't just be bitcoin talk forum people scouring and believing anonymous devs and stuff like that yeah exactly that's why like from working at a fund i was an analyst as well and you realize that the due diligence that goes into the back end especially if you're like a fund to fund or something like that the compliance that you need to follow uh is uh extraneous yeah is that is that

the right word i don't know could be you really have to be pedantic i guess for due diligence um it's not going to be the wild west any longer which is a good thing like i feel like a lot of people are disappointed that perhaps you know some of that i guess ethos will be lost going forward but from a you know 30 000 foot perspective it's probably what's necessary just to achieve the next step yeah so speaking of the next step what do you think it is you think uh what do you think pushes bitcoin to the floor is it a geopolitical situation uh a global financial crisis uh it seems like the the trade war that we are uh enacting on china is beginning i mean uh with a combination of other things that china has uh bestowed upon itself is beginning to to show cracks in china's

economy in particular yeah gross beginning to slow there um there's a lot of weird things happening around the world latin america turkey iran wherever it may be a lot of places uh where bitcoin can help out um is it ready for that stage do you think um you know i think it's like very easy to romanticize bitcoin into being this savior against all corrupt governments of the world and you know sort of being the instant and final remedy against all these problems i don't think it's ready yet um i think i would agree whole institutional intermediary step is is imperative for it to to be so in future um you know i can put my finger in the air and and come up with a number of how many years i think in the future it could have a chance of competing against you know

what is effectively sort of the final bosses right if that's the us or china or whatnot that's going to be 10 or 20 years somewhere in that time frame yeah um i think for the next step if a financial crisis were to occur bitcoin is still a risk on asset absolutely i think it's still highly speculative i think once there is a solvency risk issue with uh you know prominent central bank i think then something like bitcoin could be interesting however it seems like a you know 20 sigma event yeah in terms of probability that i i just cannot fathom that it would actually be the case in future i think if there's going to be an equity downturn bitcoin is likely going to just because it's you know basically leveraged risk exposure for most of these uh managers

yeah um i was speaking with jack mallers last week and we were just laughing at like how bush league uh bitcoin and all coin exchanges are yeah compared to like you're crazy you're running the like flashboys uh exchanges where the uh the traders will get as close to the exchange as possible so their fiber optic cords with like laser lights can get their trades in as quickly as possible and crypto uh exchanges are using like node.js to send yeah trades v api api calls and stuff like that yeah it's crazy i mean i still had i mean you know these are all exceptionally smart people but basically them on their laptop at home running stat are you know models in which they just arbitraged on different crypto exchanges and made a lot of money which just the just alone

that that actually is still an opportunity opportunity for these guys is is the prime example and and even proof that we're just a far way uh away from you know it being on the same level as as traditional asset classes yeah no i would agree um but that's the uh that's a tough thing for especially for people that are like really in the big like a lot of people want it to happen really quick and that's one thing i've been pontificating upon uh here and in the bent in particular the last couple months is we're not going to get everything out of the box at once uh it's people who expect this technology and like you said it's more about like first principles and i would argue like this is more of a psychological movement

at the end of the day because we're changing money so you have to like change minds at the end of the day and this is like changing the psychology of the masses it's going to take a while yeah um so we're 10 years past the white paper do you think we're you became enthralled around 2013 are we ahead or behind where you're where you probably thought we would be back then Well, assuming I just turned 26 five years ago, I was 21, so probably a lot more naive about my outlook. I thought I would personally be able to conquer the world back then and more so even probably Bitcoin. So I do think my outlook has matured a lot since. It's funny how that happens.

i was uh i was sure as we're around the same time as as i was an analyst i was sure the economies of the world and the currencies were gonna we're gonna melt down within the next like three years and i was like all right you little asshole you were uh you were jumping the gun a little bit there yeah i thought yeah i mean i was you know still talking about bush leagues man like back in the day when i was trying to sort of play around with you know sort of my quant fund and then directional investing you know sort of more long term and then coming to the conclusion that this is all you know shit's about to hit the wall uh hit the fan um also me and english idioms sometimes i just screw them up you know being being german um and um you know back then i

thought wow like you know all of a sudden you have a type of money which effectively cannot be influenced by a single sovereign or entity anywhere right and for me it also had a little bit of like a personal background story like my grandfather lived in bohemia during the second world war had to flee when he was uh 16 um basically was out of school and you know away from his family for two or three years and then with the end of the war was effectively left with nothing right and that was purely a function of you know something akin to bitcoin not being there for him all of a sudden he had to lose his financial wealth his assets his family's assets and so forth he was left having to complete high school the last two years with 19 you know i mean

his path was you know one of extraordinary success thereafter but i spent a lot of time after coming across bitcoin reflecting on how would have how would life have been different for him given the opportunity that it presents to people currently right which is you know a way of storing asset value or wealth in a way that cannot be influenced by any form of government or entity you can securely store it from a technological perspective it's portable it's divisible you can go with it across borders you can even save it in your brain if you just memorize the private keys right that's absolutely insane to run a brain wallet right turn around naked with millions of dollars that's hilarious yeah basically you know got money on my mind literally

literally literally oh dude i've been listening to a lot of kanye um uh life of pablo the one line i forget what song it is but he's like i got treasures in my mind oh i love them yeah i always i'm such a bitcoin fucking nerd i think of trezor t-r-e-z-o-r i got treasures in my mind man my phone out of correct so all the bitcoin lingo now as well so it's real bad i always gotta you've got a back pedal and it's like oh no that's not what i meant actually decentralized is not what i went i was talking about i don't know distilling or i don't know whatever it was a decent football play i swear i'm watching but uh no it's funny it's uh and that's actually one thing i read about today in an article is like uh with everything going on in the world like like

you just described your grandfather's story and uh what would have happened if it was of it with bitcoin was available back then like it is available now which like begs the question like do you think our generation because it is really i would argue our generation leading this charge in particular do you think we're going to take advantage of it do you think uh do you think this is sort of a once in a very long while opportunity yeah to to change the world for i hope so i do think though the actual action of taking advantage of it is you know going to take some time usually i guess actions are interpreted as something that happens very quickly right in the sense of like a physical action and then i guess expanding that or multiplying that to

however many people conduct that action but i think embracing and emulating a bitcoin ethos as much of an action of taking advantage of you know the optionality that it provides as if i actually store wealth in bitcoin and am able to evade government sanctions or something like that going forward um the latter being you know perhaps not as commonplace as it could or should be but on the other hand circling back to the whole infrastructure development And it's purely a function of that, right? I think, you know, easily in Africa or, you know, if you want to say like the sort of reductio ad absurdum would be why doesn't Zimbabwe just go all Bitcoin? Because they don't have any infrastructure yet, right?

And then I guess you're faced sort of with adverse selection, which is the people that are sort of most likely to emulate the mindset are the ones that live in the US or live in Europe. they don't they don't need to worry right now about being debased by their government to a level that is you know happening in zimbabwe or in venezuela or whatnot um so you know basically putting into the context of my grandfather would and projecting it onto 2018 what's the country closest to eastern europe nowadays as it was in the second world war and then if you i guess go to the extreme and put it equal to zimbabwe or venezuela where clearly the infrastructure doesn't yet exist to an extent where the the people are truly able to take advantage of it perhaps he might not have been able to take advantage of bitcoin if it existed then but um i think there's

just because there's been a proliferation of wealth in in especially in the bitcoin community of early adopters and because of the bitcoin ethos people are very altruistic in their ambitions that they're laying the groundwork so that hopefully in the near future these types of people in venezuela or whatnot do have the opportunity to take advantage of it and from a capital allocation perspective they will very likely will have the option to do so hopefully in the next five years yeah and that's what i wrote down while you were talking there was optionality and the option wasn't there before so is it do you think it like i this is what i believe i believe it's just like a matter of time but like this optionality has didn't exist 10

years ago and there really wasn't any other option other than maybe gold if you wanted to to hedge personally but you weren't probably ever going to be able to spend it anywhere unless you're doing, like, a peer-to-peer OTC trade or something like that. The optionality that exists now, like, to me, it's, like, obvious, right? This is a better option. It's just, like, it's going to be a matter of time before people realize that.

And what I think we're at a point right now is where people don't realize there is optionality and there are other options, and that's, like, the part of the cycle that we're in is we're trying to, like we were talking about earlier, make everybody aware of the optionality. That's why I love bear markets, you know, because all of a sudden people are less focused with the price and marketing and, you know, making the money and they can focus on what truly matters. Critically, education is one of the core pillars of that, right?

And, you know, sort of people being aware of the optionality and then moreover having, you know, the ability to take advantage of it is purely a function of education and being aware of what they have. And, you know, like you said, we're going through this checklist, this bucket list of what are the things that we want to crank out in terms of maturing this industry, increasing the audience and so forth. And, you know, of course, it's easy to criticize the choices people make in terms of what their priorities are or not. but if you really put it into the context of the last 10 years the graph has really been going upwards and to the right right and i think that's incredible yeah i'm a big believer in the hardest price movement for bitcoin was from zero to one dollars like as soon as that happened uh i just started a cascading effect that'll that'll be inevitable over over a long period of time um but yeah like it has gone up and to the right like people people shitting on bitcoin

or so the year it's had like it was only above where it is now for like 40 days 50 days maybe that or yeah probably uh yeah because we we dipped down we went up to like 11k then we dipped down back to like eight yeah so we're probably actually above like 60 to 65 days we're above where we are now yeah i'm totally making this number up but it's somewhere around there i think the ballpark in the long scheme of things out of 10 years that's such a minuscule percentage of the total lifespan um but even the numbers of like what people like how many people own bitcoin you know it's not even just the fact that people actually decided to exchange you know other money they worked extremely hard for their entire life and said hey i'm gonna put it into this asset that

maybe i don't even fully understand um i mean that's incredible we're talking of like tens of millions of bitcoin owners at this point you know like i was able to to tell my mom what bitcoin is and she's fully aware and she owns some even right now right and she's really you know bullish on it alex i'm letting you into my personal life here you can see a picture of me and my wife here look at what our friend texted us this morning i love it first fifty dollar let's kill bitcoin purchase on cash app hodl i love it this is a 20 or a 30 year old woman who's buying bitcoin fifty dollars every paycheck now that's awesome realizes it's the bear market not the most technically capable woman i know but uh she's in that's fantastic right uh but and that's like

where i've been getting a lot i've been getting a lot of my friends who are like always like in our arms length around bitcoin like oh that's interesting i should probably learn about it at some point and uh more recently more people have been been reaching out like hey i'm thinking about this more seriously now and that's like uh marad's been on this podcast and saying we're going to be in a two-year bear market and i'm just like i don't it's like so hard to call yeah i think people are becoming more comfortable with it uh it's becoming more normalized in pop culture as well like i was taking the train last week it's the third time you freaks are gonna hear the story this podcast but i don't think alex has heard it last week halloween trick-or-treating hobo can

come back to take the train back to brooklyn waiting on the platform and they have like a tv with like nbc which is one of the biggest corporations in the world and like the news items of the day and it was 10 year anniversary of the white paper and it was like one of the three news items uh so to think that was gonna happen like 2013 like that would never happen like back then but now it's becoming more and more normal it's big getting dropped in rap songs beginning reference to movies yeah the meme is spreading right and becoming established it's probably not even a meme any longer it's just a fact of life currently right uh blocks are being produced every 10 minutes nobody's stopping it yeah and you know for people i think it was still

significantly more a toy or something surreal or even alien while the price was so incredibly volatile and high right because that for them signaled irrationality and signaled gambling and signaled you know basically casino now you have something which still exists and is blossoming from an infrastructure perspective despite right i mean bitcoin is what down 65 percent from the all-time high roughly like that and even then people are getting the headlines left and right every single day of what awesome stuff is being developed and i think once they start to reconcile their previous notions of bitcoin as something that is mainly for gambling with all the real development from a rational perspective that you can understand as such they're going to start

embracing it even if just them accepting it as something that has a right to exist and something that justifies a value proposition not even you know if they own it or buy it or whatnot but it's actually a thing that has its place in the world and it's a fact of life that bitcoin is right it's not bitcoin is something it's just bitcoin is bitcoin is and that is enough our friend beauty on likes to uh expound that message in the world yeah that's i didn't know he said that but that's that's actually really nice right bitcoin is and that is enough but the right to exist i'm happy you said that like is like and that's uh another ongoing question i typically have with other bitcoiners like we imagine there will be a point where governments uh especially governments that

are threatened by bitcoin attack the network but do you think there will ever be like is there a threshold where as a society we can say hey this has a right to exist and we have a human right to utilize this technology have we passed it uh if not is it close or maybe does it exist does it not exist um that's a tough one i think that's as much a function of you know how current government agencies are thinking about bitcoin as is how much power do the people have of actually influencing governmental decisions okay um i think i can only speak for the former less so of the latter just because frankly i'm not that knowledgeable on the u.s sort of government system politics etc a rather you're lucky i'm also not that educated on the german one you know a big uh big announcement

uh merkel stepping down from the christian democratic yeah ruffled some feathers recently yeah um but i mean you know talking about europe in terms of late adopters they're still you know i still i go back home and it's significantly less well established than the u.s i think on on every previous technological cycle if that's cryptocurrencies bitcoin or before that you know mobile apps or before that ai or or just the internet in and of itself you know the us is predominantly the leader and you know europe definitely has a multi-year lag uh but speaking of you know sort of how you know does does bitcoin have a right to exist in terms of meeting a final boss and and then even standing a chance of survival

on one hand i want to say it has sufficiently permeated society in a way that just the notion of bitcoin will exist forever and that you know the ethos that is sparked of something you know demarcating money from states right all of a sudden you can conceptualize it has completely turned on the notion of money on its head right all this before i wouldn't even say turn the notion of money on its head it has uh incepted the idea of money and people say it has people thinking about money whereas they never did think about money they were just born into the system they just started running they're like oh that's money it works this is money what are you talking about they don't it just works yeah that's a great point um i i you know

also sort of i guess i try to sort of read a lot of economic and technological history and you always romanticize about what would have been whatever what would have been like to be around for you know the time of the steam revolution or manufacturing revolution electricity revolution and so forth and all of these revolutions completely disrupted things that we just took for granted as a fact of life right and now all of a sudden we're entering an age where the concept of money as we were used to it for the past you know let's say like the hundred years you know however many generations suffice in order to span that time horizon you know is completely turned on its head in the sense of what is truly money and the that's why

crypto is like drawing everybody in from all different types of backgrounds right because money touches everything in our life right and you know if that's computer science politics economics finance uh arts music and so forth money you know money makes a good world go around right um and for that reason cryptocurrencies are so incredibly fascinating because they hold something for everybody and the notion of money applies to everybody so um in in this case we actually now have the opportunity to participate in a technological revolution, which is completely changing our understanding of what money is and then also how we will apply it going forward in the future.

Right. You made me think of an incredible Urban Arson tweet that came out over the weekend, which was Bitcoin is a Gordian knot of interlocking incentives. Yeah, that's a great one. just draw like as soon like again like as soon as it went from zero to one dollar as soon as value was imbued on the network in some way like boom started off the the uh cascading effect of all right miners can see okay there's a little value there maybe i'll spend some electricity to start mining and uh you know what hey i'm gonna liquidate it create markets and slowly but

surely over time we're here and we're at a point where i would argue bitcoin has bootstrapped itself and its incentive network to a point where we might be locked into this motherfucker forever yeah it might be you know in escape velocity already right exactly um and we just don't realize it uh and that's um no there was a especially in the bear market is also making people like fight with each other so like bitcoin maximalist going after each other all coiners bitcoiners snapping at each other's feet and big debate and uh side telegram channel of like if altcoins are healthy for the overall ecosystem just from a competition

standpoint. I think everybody would agree that or not everybody would agree. I would agree that I think alts drive a healthy amount of competition. I do not agree with all of them, but something like Litecoin proving that Segway could work and

basically proving the way is okay. What Monero just hard forked to put at Bulletproofs. I don't buy the argument that decentralization uh is equal to altcoins existing no i don't think that's the case i don't think the ecosystem is decentralized as i think was like a big debate on twitter a couple weeks ago or what that whatever um of you know if the ecosystem really wants to be decentralized

then altcoins need to exist i think from a sort of crypto darwinian perspective it's it's even not only important but a requirement a necessity for altcoins to exist to just have you know constant pressure on top of bitcoin and let's call them like premium altcoins um in order for you know like inertia is you know the enemy of everyone right and anything so as as long as altcoins exist they will create competitive pressure towards bitcoin in a way that will lead to an improvement of bitcoin on whatever dimension that may be um so i think i think just alone for that reason and that reason has so many you know multi-faceted consequences um altcoins should exist um i do think that inertia would be probably can be reduced to

the main reason of what could kill bitcoin going forward if you imagine all altcoins would just go away tomorrow i think that would be terrible for bitcoin it's just have all eyes on it yeah i saw solely locked on it at all times on this yeah so that's like altcoins also provide like some some cover for bitcoin as it confuses regulators and everybody else trying to figure out what's legitimate what's not it's like uh so it's uh safety by confusion maybe uh which could work out in the long run i mean bitcoin has proven like through all these cycles boom and bust cycles probably four or five up to this point uh bitcoin has remained number one and while the top 10 all coins have cycled pretty pretty consistently yeah i also think from a regulation perspective right

like you know short-term gratification is the key objective of politicians so if they're faced with bitcoin versus low-hanging fruit of who they can go after then you know probably altcoins to your point um can actually you know i guess uh be an intermediary between bitcoin and regulators and just allow for bitcoin to develop and and be safeguarded by them um you know putting it back to the gordian knot it's all about incentives right and political incentives are mostly short term and if as a politician you can establish yourself very quickly regulating something on short term that is a low-hanging fruit very easy to go after versus the the big guy right bitcoin i think you'd rather choose that option yeah definitely um no and i would argue like it is

like with these technical upgrades too with like bulletproof somewhat grids knowing what mimble wimble yeah um it's going to be important to see this play out in the wild see hey maybe we should we uh implement them in the bitcoin um might not be possible for all these implement or all these solutions but um interesting to see like what could be potentially um or what you should strive for so let's just use this opportunity to drive straight into grin yeah what uh so for you my audience probably doesn't know i mean actually you guys are well educated out there maybe free some credit i'm sure a lot of you know what grin is but uh for those who might not know what grin is i'll give the high level it is the first implementation of

Mimblewimble, which is a highly private cryptocurrency implementation, correct? Yep, that's precisely correct. So Grin is interesting because, and obviously that's a point of contention amongst proponents of multiple privacy-focused coins. Generally, its objective is to provide a more scalable solution as a privacy coin than existing alternatives, right? I mean, Zcash, you know, is doing well now with having sapling and whatnot, but, you know, a little bit TBD on on executional risk and whatnot. Well, they are just integrated bulletproofs. However, if you project, you know, what would performance be like with significantly more usage, it has different constraints. um grin is effectively a self-truncating blockchain which means that um all the transactions are summed into one and sort of one big block and that allows for a lot more

cutting away of what does not matter in terms of how blocks are constituted and it calls itself a cut through in this case and um it's it's more so even interesting you know besides sort of the technological aspect of it sort of the ethos the genesis of of grin which frankly is as close to bitcoin as you can get right um an anonymous anonymous entity person he she um dropped this white paper they called themselves tom evils juidor or jezidor the french name for tom riddle from harry potter really mimble wimble is actually the tongue-tying spell from harry potter and grin is short for gringots the wizarding bank this is very interesting i never knew this everything you know sort of if the flippening is uh grin surpassing monero's market cap maybe then

the flapping is grin surpassing jk rowling's net worth that's hilarious i never knew that yeah yeah it's all in the spirit of harry potter for whatever reason and then so mimble wimble came out by tom hill's jesidor and uh that was i think on on bitcoin talk or i think that form dropped it there all of a sudden people started implementing um a currency called grin which is the implementation of uh the mimble wimble protocol led by an anonymous uh core dev called igno pevero and um it's it's fascinating because there's no pre-sale no ico no pre-mine or anything it's a purely decentralized volunteer driven development effort by people that are just so ideologically driven about creating something which you know frankly is just if

you objectively think about it very economically irrational in in contrast to you know sort of i what what leads people to create icos or actual sort of equity-based companies because these people are not going to get uh you know financial payoff or compensated by it um and you know for that reason it already resonates very heavily with a lot of people because it actually sort of has the core elements of what a true cryptocurrency should aspire to and then secondly i think the notion of privacy is something and you know you mentioned that earlier of all kind of pressure are these things that bitcoin should implement or not you know a lot of people are of the opinion that just total fungibility total privacy for bitcoin is just not achievable and that's fine

right it has different ambitions well somebody say it's not achievable and then others would say it's not worthwhile at the protocol level because then you want to be able to track inflation uh in some cases with some upgrades yeah i mean you can still track it with privacy coins um like what bulletproofs in particular correct like you there might be it might be it might be different for bulletproof so i have to look into that i'm not entirely sure yeah but you know so i think the idea and then also circling back to the valuation framework i think really sort of fungibility privacy is something that at least in its current state bitcoin cannot encroach upon from a addressable market perspective and that privacy coins that have all other sort of serendipitous

features into place can really carve out their own percentage of the store value market and and really have a shot at even justifying their own existence and their survival in light of this juggernaut that is that is bitcoin yeah so let's jump into a couple questions about grand number one no no cap right yes it's uh one minute per second one room per second one minute blocks so 60 per block exactly um there's no plans to cap the supply no how do you expect this network to accrue value or this token excuse me well you know empirically inflation for the first four years is similar to bitcoins or moneros for the first four years and value clearly occurred accrued i mean in in in that time frame for those networks i think what's really important

mostly is transparency of monetary policy less so um you know what is the specification of that monetary policy what really matters is do i know how many bitcoin there will be at x you know point in future will i know how many grin there will be on january 31st 2025 that's what matters um i think then there is sort of arguments you can make both ways about how does that actually influence sort of low level um participants in that network of how they allocate wealth and store wealth in that network yeah so how like bitcoins uh marketing like we were talking earlier as a deflationary currency where you know that you can store your wealth and not have it uh you know you're purchasing power eaten away over time how how can we expect this with grin well you know its

inflation rate is also relatively deflationary even though there's a fixed tail emission for the rest of time from a percentage perspective it will decrease and be deflationary are there block rewards or there are block rewards and transaction rewards i mean block reward havings excuse me uh no they're not but what i mean right is let's say you know if there's 100 grin today and it's going to be 100 more tomorrow that's going to be 100 increase versus if there's a million grin and then there's going to be another 100 grin by tomorrow right as a percentage of the total existing grin the inflation rate is going to be minuscule yeah at that point it's interesting um so what grin has not officially launched yet how's it isn't launching

no prospectively is somewhere around the beginning of next year yeah and so all right where do i want to start so one where do you see grin fitting in uh is a complimentary bitcoin is directly competitive uh do you see it overtaking bitcoin uh and then two how are you looking to take advantage of this launch if you're so willing to speak about it um yeah sure um i don't think it's gonna be a big competitor to bitcoin and there's multiple reasons for that right bitcoin has been around for 10 years grin even has to launch um bitcoin has an enormous market cap developers network effects and so forth it's just and you know i know some people that would disagree um like morad um you know shout out to you um you know it's not fungible and there's

always going to be a market for people that want a decentralized swiss bank account versus you know a very transparent payments network that you can obscure through multiple layer two solutions however you know my opinion is that if faced with the decision between something that guarantees privacy versus something that might have good enough privacy you're probably going to choose the latter of course that's contingent upon other dimensions being satisfied like is there enough market depth and liquidity is it stable enough in value is there a great engineering team substantiating the development and what so forth but for grin it actually checks most of those buckets right it has like probably great tech um it has ideologically driven people it has

no scammy way of profiting from a pre-mine or pre-sale or ico anything that even incur sort of regulation risk it has an anonymous founder which i think is incredibly important for privacy focused currency even if that's you know many years away where there might be repercussions towards privacy coins just eliminating that risk from the start is the greatest thing that you can do and very much in the spirit of satoshi nakamoto yeah um and then for us you know we we're seriously considering how can we add to it how can we help grin going forward in terms of growing into its value proposition into its potential and then how can we support the network from a you know hash rate perspective from the start how can we find a way in order to get many people involved as soon

as possible from the very outset how to get grin into as many hands as possible um one of my partners casey has a great idea of making grin sharia compliant so that might actually be an interesting avenue but bitcoin's um i think yes sure you know yeah i think it is it's halal i think it is halal yeah yeah um next step is grin making that as well happen um but you know for us i think we do want to have exposure as soon as possible i i mean you know of course i can't really talk about the specifications of such but we think about it as a multi-faceted effort to support the network from a actual sort of computing power perspective how do we how much electricity how much sort of dollars do we burn in order to support this this uh this network and

And additionally, how can we think about creating tech that is for the best of Grin and expanding its addressable market and just, you know, does awesome stuff, right? If that's on the custody side, if that's on an asset exchange side, if that's layer two solutions, I think there's a lot of very interesting avenues of how as an individual entity that is not the central entity, right? that's a significant difference can really add towards growing something in a very proactive super additive even manner right and um we really want to help grow this into its potential and effectively be the dark silver to bitcoin's gold the dark silver i think that's hilarious um so you guys solely grim focus are you doing any like bitcoin investments bitcoin infrastructure investments or anything like that or it's outside the scope of the the company um you know we think of very ourselves as taking very concentrated bets also thinking about how can we you know

differentiate ourselves well i think so we all personally hold bitcoin and you know maybe as a funded would make sense but since we have very focused approaches towards things outside of bitcoin where bitcoin is effectively sort of the the watermark of the entire industry it lies outside of our scope currently that's interesting this is uh obviously a bitcoin focused podcast and i'm what you consider a maximalist at the end of the day but it is interesting to see how something similar to bitcoin might launch and uh how people are interested in that's like so that's the thing i'm interested in are you worried about like so there's only so many mental resources that can focus on these technologies are you worried about

spreading those too thin across too many projects or yeah maybe it's like so isn't andrew palostra palestra uh i mean he's the author of uh i think well he was the first guy who reviewed the mimblewimble white paper when it dropped yeah he also actually corrected critical mistakes um so he kind of made it into what it is right now um you know he's been involved in the sense of things like confidential assets um how would that look like on the mimblewimble uh level specifically also i guess under the the purview of uh liquidity and you know block streams um product otherwise yeah you really see sort of bitcoin ogs being incredibly excited about grin it's really the first currency the first altcoin that really resonates to people just because of all these

features right that make it very similar to bitcoin in nearly all dimensions yeah that's interesting because that's uh it's one of the theories that i strongly believe in is that like i know you don't think grin's gonna flip in bitcoin but maybe you do i don't um but if it were to does that create like a crisis of confidence in the whole concept of a cryptocurrency because like if grin can overtake bitcoin uh what's to stop something from overtaking yeah i was thinking about that a while back in the sense of you know it's important for bitcoin always to be in the front seat because if it ever does get usurped as an investor that's a binary event right all of a sudden what you thought was the store of value in the crypto world has been

replaced by something else so what prohibits you then from thinking that the successor is going to be displaced by something else yet again so effectively that creates this sort of crescendo of discounts that you have to apply to each of these assets and frankly it's kind of like a a russian doll game where all of a sudden you're left with something you know that is an asymptote to zero right um so that actually sort of has this weird game theoretic conclusion or sort of i guess effect on the crypto space where everybody's incentivized to keep bitcoin at number one because if that is no longer the case everything falls apart right everything everything is based on bitcoin being number one if that's no longer the case all of a sudden people are left

with complete disbelief in anything that should be its successor or does succeed it well that's that's where i think it's important to de-alienate between that scenario which i completely agree if something with bitcoin was uh producing blocks every 10 minutes and didn't have any major congestion or critical bugs that brought about its demise but it was just a pure flippening of people picking uh the next shinier coin over bitcoin um those are two different scenarios where bitcoin has a critical bug um which is possible we found that out well three two months ago yeah um uh i don't think that is a death that i don't think that

would mark a like a death knell in the space as much as a flippening wood actually yeah there's some nuance to it in my brain at least yeah i think it's really important to you know distinguish between the two yeah um now it's interesting now grin is like grin people have been talking about memo and grin like like you said like the smartest most pure uh cypher punks i've been talking about grid for a while so i'm excited to see it in the wild and most particularly like hopefully if it is successful like maybe we'll be able to pull some features into bitcoin down the road who knows yeah that would be awesome i mean originally started out

people thinking that it should be a just a side chain to bitcoin yeah why didn't they why didn't they do that you know because frankly i don't think people get that excited about side chains yeah right i think you know creating a currency don't tell uh paul that yeah fair enough uh well i guess you know i think i think you know we talked about it earlier like money touches everything around us side chains are a subset of a cryptocurrency where cryptocurrency is you know sort of isomorphic with money side chains are a subset of money hence people are just going to pay less attention to a side chain yeah um a cryptocurrency has all the features that gets a lot more participants involved right if that's mining i mean if it's proof of work which

you know is the real deal only thing worthwhile um if that's custody if that's developers if that's owners if that's consumers and spenders um it just has an you know orders of magnitude larger opportunity set for people to engage in than you know anything that is just frankly a upset yeah um it's uh it's fascinating let's pivot here i got a tweet up you tweeted it hours ago and i found it fascinating cryptocurrencies are the first bridge between religion and science yeah what the hell are you talking about man without sounding too laconic and i think somebody accused me of being a plato or something like that i like that i would take that as a compliment hopefully now that's that's nice um i mean

effectively right is it's this weird combination of qualitative belief in a store of value which you know has qualitative factors like immutability like um you know monetary policy like the quality of engineers working on it the brain trust behind bitcoin um the fact that it has a fair launch versus an ico right those are sort of you know it's like politics it's sort of like qualitative statements to make for why you think something is superior to the other and then that's akin to religion right it's a it's a belief system in something that you cannot sign you know quantitatively justify and then cryptocurrencies that belief is met with a scientific rigor

when it comes to the technological implementation, when it comes to transaction throughput, custody, security, cryptography in general. I truly think that money is the intersection of both and for that reason, cryptocurrency is as well. Yeah. It's, no, that's one thing we like to do here is get cosmic uh and that's what i read about last week like we're talking about the cordian

knot this is symbiotic relationship between technology and flesh uh and then you can get heavy with it like bitcoin it's helping us discover like some weird things about like help me learn like i've said this many times on this podcast bitcoin is going to change us more than we change it over time yeah because it changes your time preference it changes the way you look at the world um and i don't want to get too heady here but like your threat like it merges religion and science like it is making us think very hard in a scientific in a scientific endeavor like the crunching data like thinking about like what might be best for society and then at the same time it only works because of the religious like you like you've been describing

uh inception and immaculate conception that has sort of created this lore and a roar around it which is uh yeah and you have apostles right you know if that's raising my hand here you right if that's people like beauty on or or even wenson casillas who a lot of people in silicon valley have to thank for their bitcoin investment i'm not one of the top 12 apostles you know i'm probably like the late later stragglers but uh no and it has an evangelist uh out that's why this podcast fucking exists like um you have sects you know right very yeah sex within like uh bitcoin cash god bless them they're gonna throw some things right now they're still around uh scientology of bitcoin right um now it's funny that they think people care about themselves i don't want

shit on bitcoin cash too much but six percent of hash power of shot 256 hash power like uh no the market has spoken uh i think so too yeah so we'll see how that drama plays out next week yeah but you know like the interesting thing is i really believe that you have a you have a belief system resting on ideological practices that all of a sudden is equally matched with technological implementation of it which is purely a function of scientific labor right also speaking about proof of work offline physical commodities meeting an online digital asset it's it's a combination of both and i think that when people project the future you know you can look at sort of what the people think where we'll be in 2018 100 years ago

they were making up crazy things right and spaceships and whatnot entirely novel things and i think the beauty of like what bitcoin did was combine well-known things in a novel way and that's also on a high level what cryptocurrencies do they they it combines well-known qualitative principles with scientific implementation and rigor and and applications in a way that we've never seen before and the result of that is that our understanding of money what it is what it means what it will be going forward is is is completely changed yeah for for those of us who are bought in especially um up to this point yes it's definitely changed for me uh and just like that's so that's the thing that goes running through my mind circles day through day through

day uh can everybody uh that's too pompous of a framing um do for do enough people care like is is apathy too much of a thing right now like that's that's what i think bitcoin's biggest enemy right now is apathy of the masses where yeah they don't even know they should care i think a lot more work has to be done yeah i think you know people talk about how strong networks effect or um i think they can unravel just as quickly right and interesting why well you know it has to be well established um i think most of these you know if you think about what a network effect is it's basically just like exponential growth and uh if it's not on solid bedrock then that growth can actually turn into reduction at an equally you know equally steep slope

and i could definitely see a world where if apathy just takes place and no resources are deployed in a way that spreads the word and educates people on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies it can just fizzle out right i think we're nowhere near beyond that point in time i think we're making great strides towards making sure it does at some point but my opinion is that we're not there yet no and i would completely agree as like i said it scares the shit out of me like apathy yeah could really destroy this real real quickly yeah it's frightening yeah um and other than my friend uh who who we read her text earlier but a lot of the people i talked to don't give a shit yeah i don't care still laugh some some are turning but um it is like that's what i wonder

like is there's a need to be a cataclysmic event in the traditional markets that that sort of draws people to to have an awakening and an aha moment to to not be apathetic i don't even think so right you know we mentioned the idea that all of a sudden bitcoin has been as a meme as an entity as a thing established in the world and it's become very convenient for people to justify holding Bitcoin or speaking about it, right? A couple of years ago, it was like, everybody was sneaky sneaks about it,

more or less, in the public, right? Sneaky sneaks, I like that. It's a nice little German translation there. Sneaky sneaks, I like that. You know, people didn't really talk about Bitcoin with their families as much. It wasn't a thing. It was still this weird sort of drug dealer,

you know, criminal currency. now people can openly talk about it in public it's very easy for them to transition to it as just a topic of conversation and i don't think that people need a cathartic like i don't think the late adopters what you know i guess from a statistical perspective will be the majority of people will need a cathartic experience in order to start embracing and purchasing and owning bitcoin or using it as a money i think actually the opposite which is we have to make it as convenient and frictionless as possible for them to actually make that set because they're lazy as fuck quite frankly right people are super lazy and you know talking about apathy like you know

sort of path of least resistance you're always rather going to go with what's the easier path than what's the harder path and the hard path right now is buying and owning and using securing and yeah all right and we want to make it as convenient as possible so they don't even have to think about it you basically want brainless people to do a brainless thing which is own bitcoin and use it as a money and at some point likely that will be the case but we do have a lot of work ahead of us yeah and that's why i'm excited to see lightning a year in uh apps being built people experimenting at hack days being blown up around the world uh with people excited to to build uh making it lightning network having made it made made it easy to build um but yeah i do

think we are far away from having bitcoin and cryptocurrency at a point where people don't even realize they're using it um maybe the cash app has opened my eyes a little bit it's like using their bitcoin buying functionalities and how their boost program works like i can see them working it in some way where people don't even realize they're using it but they're benefiting yeah um at the app level but then obviously key custody and having true custody over your bitcoin and making that UX impeccable is the holy grail. Yeah, I think, and maybe I'm biased because of sort of having a more finance background,

working in hedge funds and sort of like capital allocators. That's why I like Fidelity, et cetera, going into the space and building out great products because I want to see 401ks go into Bitcoin. I want to see people embracing Bitcoin as something that you obviously have in your portfolio right people thought that a 60 40 stock bond allocation is just the norm that's the way things are i want to see that you know integrate i don't know if that's 50 40 10 bitcoin i want to see that happen going forward and i think

once you just have things like this occur in daily lives and people just start taking it for granted And I think people assimilate pretty quickly to these types of things, especially in a world with, you know, increasing velocity of information exchange through technology, right? Through social networks, through mobile phones, through the internet. I also think that things can establish themselves at a significantly faster pace than they did 10, 20 years ago. So that endgame is up for grabs for Bitcoin, right? it's it's it's for it in order to establish itself in such a sufficient way that people don't have to think twice about owning it and integrating it into its uh wealth management yeah well thank you for bringing this up because that is what i wrote about today too

is describe bitcoin as the currency for the common man this has been a something we've been building on the last like three podcasts here uh me and several guests so bitcoin as a currency for the common man so to make it simple you're basically between the deflationary and inflationary monetary system we're in the inflationary system to save your purchasing power throughout time what you need to do is go invest in stocks bonds mutual funds you can't just park your money in a savings account or inflation will eat away at that purchasing power and to keep up with that purchasing

power hopefully increase it over time as you prepare for retirement whatever it may be you have to go invest in stocks bonds uh mutual funds whatever it may be and it takes extra research extra money paying an advisor whatever it may be uh and it's a it's a heavy lift especially for the common man who's typically got a pretty grueling nine to five family to raise uh and little disposable income outside of what he's willing to save um so if bitcoin were to take over maybe these portfolio decisions were would be a little easier if you know that you're investing in a deflationary uh currency where your stake of the total pie is pretty constant you can prove via code um

where and that just that fact alone where you can store your purchasing power throughout time and i'm using purchasing power particularly because a lot of people get confused with like price value and purchasing power um that is that creates a base from which people uh who have to go uh preserve their their wealth via investing these days this makes it easier for them to climb the economic ladder because they have to think less and they can just have certainty knowing that if they are good savers and uh frugal enough they they will save their value over time and they don't have to go into all that uh overinvestment shit yeah i think you're you're you know addressing the the core forcing function that drives people into

multi-asset allocations right which is just to you know keep pace with uh reduction of purchasing power right and if you remove that core cause right that that that that ultimate reason for why you're making these decisions everything changes and none of that is necessary anymore and i can't even fathom what the repercussions of that would be right that's what i'm like that's what is like starting to dawn on me this week like this week in particular first two days of the band and the conversations that i had last week on the podcast like it's really been like holy shit like it may be this simple of a framing to have like to have people come to an aha moment a lot quicker and that's like what i'm becoming more convinced of by the hour by the second now

after that uh that reaction from you is like it's maybe the best framing like hey right now joe schmo down the street if you want to save your money you're purchasing power over time you cannot put your money in your savings account you have to go be active in the markets you have to do research you have to figure out learn how to do a dcf flow or a dollar yeah discount discounted cash flow excuse me um and learn about ebit multiples and like what's fucking palatable as an investment and then actually sign up on a brokerage account and make individual stock or mutual fund or etf investments imagine not having to do that and and interestingly right that's whole like vanguard's business right is effectively saying or mutual like etfs uh index funds etc

their old business is look you're not going to make any alpha picking stocks yourself why don't you just use us to invest in a basket of stocks but even that can be reduced to an even simpler proposition which is you're going to invest in bitcoin and all of the above doesn't even matter anymore because you're only investing with wangar not only because okay maybe you're not a good stock allocator but frankly all you want to do is just not lose the value of wealth right you maybe you want to increase it right but bitcoin abstracts away even that reason for using a vanguard which is your purchasing power will not be debased over time because of its nature and uh that is just i guess diametrically opposite to any of those you know i guess

archaic business models right and i want to make it clear that i'm not negging on investment practices i think people should be able to invest and should invest in these products if absolutely If they have to be, but we have to de-alienate between investing and saving here, where right now people have to invest because they are unable to save their purchasing power throughout time. A Bitcoin world would work change that where you would not have to invest to maintain purchasing power. Exactly.

You could invest for added benefit to your portfolio. Yeah. And, you know, frankly, if it's outside your circle of competence, you don't have to make the decision towards trying to keep pace with and you know your lack of purchasing power or even trying to make money you're rather going to likely lose money right so you completely get rid of that problem altogether it's it's no longer a fact of life it's actually an artificial and problem imposed by the way things just kind of turn out to be right the the the the the alien conclusion of centuries of economic development completely eradicated by a novel technology and it was just

fucking dropped on a forum out of nowhere on halloween 10 years ago it's crazy yeah we're fucking on a podcast talking about it like how crazy is it that like it has driven us humans this crazy unbelievable right that's like and we're getting drunk i'm drunk at least i've been chugging way faster than you have gotta keep up here no you do not do not i gotta i gotta slow down um but it's like holy shit like what if maybe it could be an alien technology where like the aliens are just looking down on us or like hey these idiots just need this one thing to coordinate and how are they this slow right why aren't they way more ahead of where they are currently it's figured out how to make a email address and get into the cypherpunk uh mailing

list and just dropped it on us it's uh that's a fantasy i like to uh to uh appease every once in a while probably not highly highly highly or maybe bitcoin is just the ultimate artificial intelligence you know that's right maybe the other the other interpretation you could take did you see we were pretty uh harvard basically confirmed that we found aliens i did not see that know yeah yeah there's a there's a there's a an object floating through our solar system around saturn i believe in particular and a team of harvard researchers are pretty certain that is an extraterrestrial uh vehicle that's fascinating so aliens are here i'm a big alien guy big fan well then it's only one step away from believing that they intercepted bitcoin

right where are we here we're only 120 in what else you want to get on when uh what interests you outside of bitcoin what'd you do growing up what did i do growing up so i grew up in you're tall you're a lot taller than i was expecting did you row uh i was actually a walk-on at stanford i didn't enjoy it very much for crew uh for crew yeah um you have it you have a i i knew you did crew just somehow you have the fucking perfect like crew body that's funny yeah um i guess tall enough and you know if if you have sorry i'm fawning over you no if you have you know i guess if you're somewhat athletic you know they kind of like trying to recruit you yeah i i think you know i never really did crew

before stanford and then i didn't enjoy it as much but i did have a lot of important takeaways and quite frankly you know one of the most important being and that has been a life lesson is that you can't just as in any other sports sub yourself out once you're on the water once you're you know in the boat with your colleagues with your teammates you can't just throw you know you can't just say screw this i'm not gonna row anymore i'm just gonna throw my paddle in the water because that fucks up everything for everybody else yeah right it literally halts the boat if you play soccer or football or basketball you can sub yourself out right you can just pretend to be hurt you can say coach i don't want to play any longer with throwing you

have to pull through to the last second and give it everything you got because there's just extremely concave payoff like you know sort of repercussions which is or it might even be binary which is you stop everybody else has to stop any other sport you leaving you stopping your input will not as so much influence the outcome of anybody else yeah and you know even though my time on this team was short because frankly i didn't get recruited that wasn't like the main reason i came to stanford i had other interests um that really sort of imprinted itself on me and sort of how i think about teams how i think about um organizations and and and how you really work together in a super additive manner which is everybody has to pull through because the

repercussions of a single party not doing so can even cause a binary event which is sort of termination of everybody else's outcome yeah affect the whole um that was i was a lacrosse player and our big uh excuse me our coach's uh biggest theme was you're only as strong as your weakest link so everybody from the the best d1 recruit to the last man on the bench had to have their job down pat whether it be a practice player uh that's critical putting the water in whatever it may be uh you're as strong as your weakest link everybody has to be on the same page and health it builds self-accountability which i think is huge absolutely and maybe lacking in this world to a certain extent i think even yeah i mean you know sort of like a softer form is just

i do believe that physical exercise or at least the attempt to be healthy eat clean you know exercise or do sports at least whatever is sort of the realm of your possibilities is not only important but it's a signal right it's a signal to everybody else that you take yourself seriously because the health repercussions are very obvious and you know are detrimental and if if you don't take your body seriously your mind will suffer right they're intrinsically this is so true one thing i've been doing more recently i've been big bike guy recently you freaks know that uh but hopping on the bike i've been doing like 20 mile bike rides in an hour and that's impressive you do it you do it you do it you put like a youtube video and you find like

a you find like an hour podcast yeah like over the weekend i'll listen to stefan lavera's second shout out to this podcast with a samurai wallet uh one of the the heads of the samurai wallet not the dev but uh the business guy uh and the idea guy but uh i feel like when you're exercising and listening to like you're a little bit more intent and you're trying to distract yourself from like the pain of exercising so you're you're uh listening a little bit better and a little bit more focused and then after that like that's actually one of my favorite times to like get work done is like uh the luxury of working from home and having a gym in the apartment building able to work and then get up and that's when i get most of my work done it's like the hour

two hours right after my workout yeah i'm significantly more happy and productive if i do physical exercise 100 yeah and then otherwise like you know music has always been a big element of my life i played a lot of piano i dj'd at stanford which was a good time i tried to bring the you know the european german house and techno to to the to the west coast what was that like uh at least a lot of friction and i feel like people got used to it i just kind of like did my thing and then eventually people got it you know and and and at some point like you know i i think there was an there was an audience at the end was there booth bodies by the end no comment

uh i'll take that as a maybe no but you know i think it's important to have different interests right you know quite frankly i think yesterday at lately my my life has been very much revolving around work i think it's you know people say life is a marathon or a sprint i think sometimes you have to sprint in order to be able to run a marathon um that actually reminds me of another one of my favorite quotes from lacrosse like to get fast you have to run fast yeah to get fast you have to run fast it's like a simple as like sounds like what the hell do you mean but it's simple but profound you literally have to try to run fast exactly like people think oh this is like tautological

like this is like super obvious but you know frankly the older i'm getting like the more aphorisms grow on me and like the more all these sort of statements hold a lot of value and you just have to put into work to to really sort of get to where you want to be and you know like i guess over time you sort of converge upon what your main passions and interests are currently it's just full-on work mode this is all i think about this what i dream about this is what i want to achieve this is what i want the team i work with to achieve going forward and build something that can really grow into its potential and there's a beauty in that right because it's purely super additive like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

and that's incredible if you have the opportunity to actually see different elements of what constitute a company come together and then all of a sudden it actually is right it's existing and there's value and people endowed with value there's no better feeling than being on a successful team or yeah part of a successful company that just crushes it like and you realize in retrospect that it would not have worked out that way unless everybody was fully bought in and holding themselves accountable it's incredibly gratifying right um and then once you find a group that like you just are on the same wavelength and you're like fully aligned you don't even have to say it you just know it yeah there's no feeling like it and it's very it's rare it's rare it speaks for

you know humans just being social animals like if you're on the same wavelength with anybody nothing else compares because things just click and things are seamless and frictionless and they just go the way they're supposed to and you're in the flow and good things come from the flow yeah i think that's a great place to end the good things come from the flow yeah big fan of the flow alex it's been a pleasure man thank you marty thank you for coming by likewise thank you for having me really appreciate it i really appreciate you have a parting note for the freaks um buy bitcoin that's a good one that's a good one um that's all we have this week freaks peace and love Thank you very much.