The Breakdown - Taylor Monahan on Crypto’s Divergent Possibilities in 2020

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

Taylor Monahan is the founder and CEO of MyCrypto. In this interview as part of The Breakdown’s end of year coverage, she argues that the level of discourse in crypto matured in 2019, with more focus on things that actually matter. That’s important, because in 2020, she predicts a major fork-in-the-road moment, where the industry as a whole could either stay on the path set out in its cypherpunk roots, or be significantly co-opted and corrupted by the entrace of corporate and government actors into the space.

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDisc. Welcome back to the Breakdown's end-of-year extravaganza, and we have finally reached our final episode in this series of end-of-year interviews and look-forward predictions. And we're going to close it out with Taylor Monaghan, the founder and CEO of My Crypto. And the reason that I chose this interview to close us out is that we get really big, right? We're not talking about these small little topics. We're talking about a very existential question, which is what the future of crypto holds. In Taylor's estimation, this year is actually a dividing line potentially.

Between on the one hand, the cypherpunk censorship resistant, permissionless non-sovereign sort of values that we all came into this industry with, versus the potential for co-optation and corruption by the introduction of new types of corporate actors or government actors into the digital currency space. Which will it be? Is this a fork in the road moment? These are the questions we get into on this interview. I hope you enjoy it. And if you do like it, you should subscribe to the breakdown. We're back tomorrow with our standard format, which is an everyday analysis in breaking down of the most important topics in crypto and Bitcoin. But before that, let's hear from Taylor.

Let's get into this interview. All right. I am here with Taylor Monaghan of MyCrypto. MyCrypto.com. How are you doing? What's going on? I'm pretty good. You know, this space is, it's insane.

It's amazing. But, you know, it's a good way to wrap up the year. Yeah, it's definitely, I feel like it's been, like, bored for a little while. And now it's like, well, I'm going to toss you around a little bit this week just to just to end the year. Exactly. And we should, I shouldn't be surprised by that anymore, but, you know, I am. It's amazing how fast this, like, the space lulls you, especially because we're so, like, it's so determined by price action. I feel like, like over the last few months, every time it's gotten to a consistent level, regardless of where it is, regardless of whether it went up or down,

if it was there for like three weeks, people are like, I'm so bored. This is stupid. Like, this is boring. What's going on? And then it, like, crashes $3,000. And you're like, like, oh, I like being bored. Oh, yeah. That was the silly thing to feel. Yeah, and I feel like, like, the last price action there is the more people sort of seek out other ways to be dramatic, to fulfill their inner desire for excitement or whatever. Yeah, totally. But then when there is price movement, you have like a doubling of.

of, you know, oh my God, the price, all, everything that comes with that. But then you also still have the people drama, the social drama, the, the governance drama, whatever it is on top of it, which is, yeah, welcome to crypto. It's a trial by fire for sure. Well, in that light, so as I was telling you, doing these kind of quick little micro interviews for the end of the year, just two questions. And I'm really interested in, you know, smart people who have a lot of different perspectives on the space, their thoughts on this. So the first one is just, what do you think the narrative or story of 2019 was?

When the history books write the story of 2019 crypto, what are they going to say? That's, it's hard because I think that every, maybe not every other year, but a lot of the years we had a very strong overarching narrative that was, that was pretty obvious. And all the other sort of like littler narratives stemmed from the big one. So obviously 2017 was the ICOs. And there was a lot that came from that and a lot of these narratives that stemmed from it. But really the overarching thing was this very, very bullish market, the bubble, the ICOs, etc. And then 2018 was the opposite, right? It was the crashing and the burning and the realization that, you know, yes, it was a bubble.

And yes, what we did was maybe not super responsible. And maybe all the promises that were made can't actually be kept. But when I look at 2019, it's neither of those. It's like it's much sort of more subtle. And I think that the overarching, I guess, feel. of 2019, for me at least, was a more, I'll use the word thoughtful, but I'm not convinced that's the right word, but like a more thoughtful grappling with who we are, what crypto is, and perhaps like what promises we want to keep and how sort of our promises and our identity

and the products that we build, how that fits into the real world or the traditional world or the larger universe that we play a part in. Yeah, no, I think that that's true. I think, you know, someone who spends a lot of time watching the state of the conversation, I feel like there was a lot of consolidation around, you know, if I'm still here or if we're still here, it's like, what are the things that matter to keep us here, you know? Even the, even the fights, I feel like going back to what we were talking about before we dived into this or dove into this is they're more fundamental in some way.

They're not like nibbling around the edges. They're very core questions of what's the point. And I think you're seeing this obviously between communities, but you're also seeing it even within communities. You know, like recently, there's been an interesting conversation triggered most recently, I guess, by Jill Carlson's post last week about the, you know, is crypto about, does it actually have the purpose of mainstreaming or is it really for censorship for censor transactions? And this reflected to me, there's been another conversation that I think people like Joe White. Weizenthal from Bloomberg have tried to kick up that even within the Bitcoin community, people have, I think, for the first time in some cases, ask themselves, like, do I care more about the censorship-resistant aspect of it? Or do I care more about the kind of sound money, like non-debaseable money, right? Because there's a scenario in which you're fine with it being kind of, you know, captured or co-opted to some extent by the larger system and integrated into all these institutions if you believe that it's going to be the future reserve currency of the world or whatever. So anyways, this is a long-witted way of saying that I have seen,

it's like, that's a very different conversation than just, this is a scam, that's not a scam, this is stupid, that's not stupid. And I think that that's interesting. No, it's super interesting. And Jill's post and even more so the response from her post really, really encapsulates this, right? Because she personally has a really interesting experience where she's been in Bitcoin and the ecosystem for a long time. She's seen the sort of cyphor punk mentality sort of come and dominate and go and come back a little bit. And she obviously, like personally as an individual,

is grappling with, you know, wait, if we want mainstream adoption, does that, like, what is lost? And if we, you know, if you lose, the things that matter to us, then is it still worth it? And I actually think that Jameson Lopp, a while back, had a tweet where he was responding to CZ from finance, and he just said, you know, no, adoption at all costs is not worth it, period. You know, and that's sort of like the grappling, the back and forth, the determining why we're doing what we're doing and what matters at the end of the day, it affects and impacts sort of every single chain, every single

network, every single project, every single person. And that's why I do say that's the dominating narrative, even if it's not as strong or as obvious as some of the prior narratives. Yeah, it's almost like a tonal shift more, right, than a narrative in some ways. I remember that Laptude, actually. I think it was after CZ asked if we were going to thank President Xi for being excited about blockchain, which obviously provoked a real response. Because I think, to your point, part of what is driving some of that more existential contemplation is the fact that the emergence of Libra and then the response to Libra from China, and then the response of all the governments of the world to both Libra and to China's response to Libra is raising the stakes,

you know, and that's forcing the people who have been in this industry for a while, who have been talking very philosophically and theoretically, in some ways, about what the future of money looks like. It's like, holy shit, the future of money is here now. Like, that's a conversation we're having. So I like that. I think that's a great answer to this question. Yeah. And actually, what you just said sort of brings you nicely into your next question, which is what do we think 2020 is going to be? and I would say 2020 is going to be more grappling, but also it's probably going to be by the end of 2020, I would say that it's going to be pretty obvious which path we're on. Right now we sort of have, I would say that we have a variety of options of which path to take,

but I think that I think 2020 will be sort of the deciding factor right and when I talk about the paths I'm talking about you know it's possible that the Libras and the Chinas

will come to fruition and will be sort of that will be what blockchain technology is and the other path is one where the people in the

space now and the Jill's and the Jamison's, that philosophy or that mindset wins. And blockchain remains something that maybe it doesn't have, you know, mass adoption, but it maintains its identity as censorship resistant and a thing that rebels against societal norms and the governments and the big private corporations, et cetera. And I think it'll be very interesting to see how that path changes, how it evolves, where that path actually leads, because, yeah, if, you know, the Chinas and the Libras and probably a variety of propositions by all sorts of people to basically mash up blockchain technology, throw out the philosophies and, you know, continue doing pretty much exactly what the existing systems do.

But now with the blockchain, I think that's a very real possibility. And we'll see who fights it. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I feel like it is almost totally inevitable. The cat is out of the bag, I think, with central bank digital currencies. I think they're happening and they're coming. And if there was any chance that they weren't, that's been eliminated by China's response, right? I think to me, one of the really interesting things is going to be to see how the U.S.

responds to a digital U.S. because I think they have to in some ways if they have any hope of retaining the world's reserve currency status. So to me, I think that you're right that there's these very seriously potentially divergent paths. I guess the question for me, and this is, you know, maybe you have an answer. Maybe it's just more theoretical and we leave it for pondering. but is, you know, in the context of a world in which those projects are happening, right? Corporate chains, maybe it's not Libra because that one gets caught up in bureaucratic red tape,

but, you know, other corporate coins. But particularly the kind of raft of central bank digital currencies, can that coexist? How does that shape and change the direction that we're in? You know, does it just co-opt? It does it just totally blow out that mainstream use case and leave it to be, something for the margins, something for the edges, something for the censored transactions, or is there actually a world in which people are using Bitcoin for things that aren't just censored transactions and the digital yuan and the digital dollar and Libra exist? I don't know

the answer to that question. Yeah, I definitely don't know the answer, but it'll be very, very interesting to see where it goes. And I think that one, sort of one interesting path that could or one interesting result that could come from this divergence is that you actually see the concept of blockchain or the concept of this, the identity that we currently have, that that actually sort of forks. So that when I say, hey, I work in blockchain, I don't, that doesn't mean the same thing tomorrow as it means today. And you'll actually have, you'll have it, like in the same way that you, you can say like, I don't know, I work for a tech company that doesn't really have an identity tied to it. It could mean that you're working for Google or you're working for Facebook,

but it could also mean that you're working for any technology company ever. You could be using that technology to solve the world's problems. You could be using it to, you know, in evolving economies. You know, there's so many different things. And so then where does our identity stem from? And in the same way that a person who, say, works building technologies for an NGO doesn't identify as a technologist, that'll be the same way that people who use and build with blockchain technologies for, say, censorship-resistant stuff, they're not going to identify with the blockchain in the same way anymore. if the blockchain identity has been sort of co-opted by the governments and the corporations. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And you already see it, right? These different segments of this

industry are desperately kicking against each other, trying to have their own space, right? And you see it, obviously, with the Bitcoiners who, you know, it's Bitcoin not Crypto. You see it with the folks who just want to spend their time focused on Defi, but then even, you know, one of the conversations that I've been having a lot in these interviews is whether Defi has, is it outpacing Ethereum in some ways? Is it bigger than any one chain as a concept? Because it feels to me like we're likely to see people who identify as working on decentralized finance, not working on Ethereum, even though they'll obviously retain a big overlap. So I think that you're spot on and we're already seeing some of that Balkanization. And I can't imagine that that doesn't continue just as, I mean, and probably in a healthy way, right?

it's like as things mature, people figure out what the actual sub-segments of industries are and how they relate to one another or how they don't. And, you know, they do their own thing. So, but interesting times ahead no matter what. So listen, Taylor, I really appreciate the time and all of the interesting thoughts. And it sounds like you like me are, are fascinated to see what happens next, let's say. I am indeed very, very fascinated. And I am, I think the one hope I have is that we I think that we need to maybe diversify where our identity stems from so that if a word is co-opted by someone else, we do not have a crisis in identity because that could be personally destructive and also destructive to groups of people who could work together, you know, who could work together to make the world a better place. but because we are having an identity crisis, we end up fighting and rebelling against one another

and end up destroying ourselves as a whole. But yes, I am fascinated. I'm fascinated by the overlaps of people in technology and we'll see what 2020 holds. Well, very interesting thoughts. I think wise words. So thank you so much for your time. And look out for Taylor in 2020.

Thank you. Take care, Nathan.