The Pomp Podcast - Ben DiFrancesco, Founder & CEO of ScopeLift: Blockchain Engineers' Biggest Problems

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

Ben DiFrancesco is the founder and CEO of ScopeLift. In this conversation, Ben and Anthony Pompliano discuss the current state of blockchain development tools, where the big obstacles for engineers currently lie, how smart contracts work, why they are so important, and what the future of blockchain development will look like. -----Curious about Cryptocurrency but don’t know where to begin? Storm Play is a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for you time. Simply download, register and discover microtasks that meet your interests and be rewarded with Storm Bolts. These Bolts can then be converted and withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including Storm Token, Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC.).  Earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool products! Download the app to start earning crypto here! https://bit.ly/30pSxh9 (Available for iOS and Android).

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Ben DeFrancisco is the founder and CEO of ScopeLift. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of blockchain development tools, where the big obstacles for engineers currently lie, how smart contracts work, why they are so important, and what the future of blockchain development will look like. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Are you curious about cryptocurrency and you don't know where to begin? I've got a great way for you to try. You can use Stormplay, a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for your time. That's right, you don't necessarily have to make a financial

investment to begin. You can simply download, register, and then discover these micro tasks that they present you that meet your interest and then you're rewarded with these storm bolts the bolts are then converted and can be withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency including the storm token ethereum or my favorite bitcoin if you go and download the storm play app today you can earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool new products it's worth a try and it's a great way to get started remember go check out storm play in the app store today anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital

or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Hey, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Ben here. I'm super excited to talk about this. I think Ben's got a really unique perspective coming from more of a development community and understanding kind of where we are in the state of blockchain development. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk about this, Ben. Yeah, thanks, Pomp. I'm excited. Thanks for the invitation. For sure. So maybe let's just start with your background and how you're spending your time day-to-day today so people can really understand where you're coming from. I think it's kind of a unique perspective. Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Ben DeFrancesco. I'm a software engineer and

developer. Right now, I'm running a small consultancy here in Philadelphia called ScopeLift. I've been doing that for about five plus years. So we do a lot of native mobile development, a lot of traditional web and backend development. And then over the last two years or so have been doing more and more crypto and blockchain related development as well. So I originally discovered Bitcoin probably it was about 2012, I would say. If I'm remembering correctly, I think it was a hacker news post or something that originally drew my attention to it. And I really fell down the rabbit hole and continue to fall down the rabbit hole seems to be bottomless. Because I was really just fascinated from it coming coming at it from that technical perspective that

perspective of an engineer of a developer and i was just really curious to see how someone and if someone had really managed to solve this problem of digital scarcity of creating a digitally scarce good um so you know i went out i read the white paper dove into the bitcoin source code and just kind of um you know went deeper and deeper from there uh spent a little time trying to mine altcoins. There were not very many of them back then, but there were a few and trying to write some software to do automatic mining and different kind of adjustments based on various things for mining and learned an important lesson very early when, so I was mining some alt coins and converting them to Bitcoin. And then the exchange I was using got hacked and everything

that I had made got lost. So learned the not your keys, not your crypto lesson very early. but really it has just been a continuing um continuing kind of uh interest and falling down the rabbit hole like i said as uh as things have progressed and of course it's it's really just been a wild ride especially the last couple of years where it has entered the mainstream consciousness in such a in such a big way and in such a violent fast fashion you know for years like bitcoin was something that you literally couldn't pay people to care about i mean people would host meetups and events where if you went, they would send you a few Bitcoins and teach you how to use them and set up a wallet and stuff. And, you know, they were only worth a few bucks

at the time. Now that would be worth thousands of dollars and people still, you know, you'd be lucky to get a dozen people in a room. And so I still kind of pinch myself when I, you know, see on MSNBC or something, the Bitcoin ticker at the bottom of the screen, it's hard to believe that it's real. So a couple of years ago, when things started exploding, fellow developer and consultant and friend of mine, Ryan Finley, and I here in Philadelphia, we started a meetup called Philly Blockchain Tech. The reason we started it was because of the hype that was growing, and it was getting harder and harder to kind of separate the signal from the noise with everything that was going on. So we wanted to create a community of people who are primarily interested

in it coming from that technical perspective and not just looking to get rich quick, but really wanted to go deep into how this all worked and what it might mean for the future. So I've been doing that for a couple of years. We now have 900 plus members, a lot of developers, a lot of technologists, but also a healthy contingent of folks from other industries, professionals from other industries, definitely finance, a good amount of people from the medical field, education, people who are interested in how crypto and blockchain whatever you want to call it might might one day impact what they're doing so between the business and the meetup things are are it keeps me busy and i just love working in the space because it's such a a wild ride day to day it's

there's never a dull moment absolutely and part of the reason why i wanted to do this is it feels to me like where you sit in the ecosystem you're getting to see a lot of different projects both on the consultancy side, but also organizing the meetup. So you get to see both the entrepreneur side and also the developer side. So maybe let's just start with, you know, like a state of blockchain development today, right? In your work, where do you think we are, you know, kind of the evolution of the tools, the infrastructure, and some of the things that are really necessary to have strong development in blockchain technology? Yeah, great question. I mean, the short answer is that there's a ton of hype and interest in it amongst developers. There's a lot of developers

that are curious. There's also a contingent of them that are kind of turned off by it because they think it's just pure hype or maybe, you know, just another example of kind of an overhyped technology. But amongst the contingent that is interested, there's a lot of interest and a lot of excitement, but we're really early. I mean, really early. Coming from more traditional tech stacks, like, you know, for example, I mentioned we've done a lot of native mobile and iOS applications over the last few years. And that technology stack, you know, it has its challenges and its issues without a doubt, but compared to the tools that you have available to you in the crypto world, it's a night and day difference. I mean, everything is just so new. It changes

so quickly. And the tooling is really raw and rough around the edges for the most part. So there's a long way to go in building out the infrastructure. Now, I will say, like I said, it moves quickly and it improves quickly too. We've seen, compared to where we were two years ago, there's been a lot of development. And compared to where we were four or five years ago, it's night and day. So things do move fast and they do compound and improve quickly, but there's still, um, an enormous amount of, um, of, of work to be done. For sure. And so one of the concepts that you shared previously is this idea that crypto provides like a new set of tools, maybe elaborate a little bit on what you mean by that, um, from

a developer's perspective. Yeah, absolutely. So, so for me, the, um, the thing, like I said, initially the thing that drew me to, to Bitcoin was the, just the technical reality that someone had created, solved this problem of digital scarcity. And so I've been following crypto since then. But what really started to expand my mind even further about what it was, was the fact when Ethereum was getting ready to launch and eventually launched, understanding and learning a little bit more about what was possible with smart contracts. So I had played around with Bitcoin smart contracts, written some simple things in Bitcoin scripts to do various things like multisig. But what Ethereum demonstrated was possible was this kind of rich statefulness

on the blockchain that would allow you to build really new kinds of software that weren't possible. Now, I want to say, I'll pause real quick just to say that I really, I love Bitcoin and I love Ethereum. I think they're by far the most interesting projects in the space right now. I do think Ethereum has a really good head start in terms of becoming the standard smart contract platform. But like I said, we're still really early. And I think even that is still kind of up for grabs. There are future universes I can imagine where maybe everything collapses back to Bitcoin and to the extent to which we do smart contract development, which I think will be a lot, I think it's going to be very important, that it'll be done on maybe like layer two,

trust minimized layer two solutions on top of the Bitcoin network. That's certainly possible. I think it's very possible that Ethereum and Bitcoin coexist and complement each other and that Ethereum becomes kind of the standard for trust-minimized code. But the thing I'm absolutely sure of is that smart contracts are going to be really, really important. And when you mentioned like tools or capabilities, another word that I use for them are primitives. Historically, in the history of computing, anytime you've given developers and entrepreneurs a new set of primitives that they can work with, you know, a new tool in their tool belt, a new capability that they never had before, What you end up seeing is this explosion of creativity and the creation of products and businesses that are really unexpected and leverage those capabilities in ways that not even the creators of those capabilities could have imagined.

And the people, you know, the platforms themselves are just leveraged in very unexpected ways. So certainly we saw that with mobile, for example, things like GPS, things like the fact that you had a camera in your pocket attached to a supercomputer at all times. you know, they've enabled all kinds of new products and businesses that we take for granted today, but would have seemed fantastic even, you know, 15, 20 years ago. And I think we're at the very, very early stages of seeing that again with crypto and with smart contracts. And in particular, there are three things, I've spent a lot of time trying to boil it down to the raw essence, like what is the bare set of primitives that we actually have? And the three things that really stand out in my mind are, first of all, digital scarcity, right? So Bitcoin introduced that as

the first digitally scarce asset. Today, you can create digitally scarce assets on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. And of course, on top of the Ethereum blockchain with things like ERC-20 token standards, it's very easy to create additional digitally scarce assets that live on top of existing protocols. So digital scarcity is number one. Number two is trust minimized code or unstoppable code is what I call it. Basically this idea that you have code that you can deploy that once it's deployed, not even the person who created that system can change the rules of how it works. And this is fundamentally new. This is, this is something that we've never been able to do before. You know, at the end of the day, like software that is running on my servers or that's

running on your phone, but I control the app store listing. I can push an update to that at any point. I can edit a row in a database at any moment and change the rules of how that software works. And now it's possible to write some kinds of software. Again, it's still very limited. It's very expensive computationally to do it. But some software can be written where not even the person who created it can change the rules. And I think that's very profound. And we're only just starting to understand the implications. And then the third kind of primitive or tool in the tool belt that I look at, um, that is probably the least explored, um, and for good reason, um, but may end up being important or not. We'll see, um, is the idea of immutable and kind of timestamped and validated

data storage. So you can store data on the blockchain. Um, it can never be removed and you know exactly who put that data there and you know, when, um, they put it there within the range of the block time creation. Um, and again, that's, uh, you know, it's obviously very expensive compared to like cloud storage, orders and orders of magnitude different. But there are certain use cases where that is valuable. Timestamping is a simple example, but we may figure out more exciting and interesting things to do with that primitive as well. So I look at those three things, digital scarcity, trust minimized code, and immutable data. And I'm just excited to have those tools as a developer, as someone who likes to work with startups and entrepreneurs who are

trying to create new forms of software. And I just see it as another progression in kind of software eating the world it gives software the ability to to to eat things to build systems that weren't possible before yeah look it's fantastic summary and i appreciate you kind of um having it so clearly defined um one of the things that you talked about was this change of power right the idea that in the centralized world the creator has uh has power when they create and then they maintain that power through the life of the system so if you look at apple's app store you know Facebook's algorithm, things like that. Um, and definitely moving from a world where the centralized creator has power to a world where, um, the system itself maintains and governs that

with that power, right? So kind of whatever you build in the beginning, um, is the system, uh, for a long period of time. I think that, um, that concept, uh, is both really empowering and exciting to some people and then really scary to a bunch of other people. Maybe talk a little bit about how you see, is it good? Is it bad? Is it both? Is it maybe even neither? Like how do you think about that shift and maybe some of the ramifications it could have on the way that we build technology products in the future? Yeah, absolutely. So I think you used the absolutely the key word and the word is power, right? So, you know, we throw this word around in this space a lot, decentralization. Is the network decentralized? Is the protocol

decentralized? So what does that really mean? It's one of those words that you say it enough times and it kind of just becomes meaningless. It means everything and nothing at the same time. And so I've tried really hard also to distill down what does it mean for something to be decentralized? And coming back to what you said, what it means to me is does this thing disperse concentrated power in some way? And so when I look at the space, the kind of ethos that I think is imbued in it, which I fully agree with, and which I think was there from day one, Satoshi posted this on the Cypherpunk mailing list, is this idea that we ought to be finding ways in the modern world to disperse concentrated power. Because historically, anytime we've seen

concentrations of power, bad things have happened. And as we're building this increasingly more connected world, we just see increasing greater and greater concentrations of power into fewer and fewer hands. And I think that, you know, having a connected world where people can collaborate freely across borders with whomever and however they want, I think that that's on the whole a good thing. But if it's enabled only through centralized platforms, that is a little bit scary. And so I see primarily the movement toward a more decentralized world, a movement where things are, where power is dispersed. And yet, you know, we're able to collaborate at these large scales because we have these trust-minimized networks that enable that collaboration. So,

you know, Nick Sabo talks a lot about social scalability. I think that's a key idea, right? We can scale socially without having to place power into a centralized entity's hands. What's interesting is that, you know, coming into the space as primarily a technologist, um i look at the world and i see concentrated powers in the hands of a few of these great you know these large tech aggregators and that worries me a lot um you know facebook uh google to some extent twitter uh youtube which is of course a part of google amazon you know these handful of companies have increasing um increasingly large uh you know sway on on how the entire world functions um and then in china there's a whole ecosystem of other companies because china has

not allowed those Western companies to enter there. And those companies are controlled primarily by the state. And so it's even scarier there where you have this kind of weird combination of both corporate and state power and a population of well over a billion people. So that kind of worries me a lot. And I see crypto as primarily addressing that. And I see the decentralized future as trying to break that power up and make things more dispersed. And what's interesting is that within the crypto community, we seem to have this divide around people who are primarily worried about those large tech aggregators and about the kind of network effects that accrue and allow them to gain incredible power. And then there's another group of people that are primarily worried about

governments and in particular central banks and the control that they have over monetary policy and how that affects the entire economy. To me, it just feels like two sides of the same coin in terms of the modern world and how that power is concentrating. And I see crypto as a solution to both. Now, one thing that I'll say, I'm not a utopianist. I don't think that everything that comes of these decentralized networks will be de facto good. I hope that net net everything will be good. But I think we've seen with the history of the internet that there are actually downsides that play out as well. You know, it causes disruption in the literal sense of the word disruption. And we should really be cognizant of those things. I think that there are futures

that are pretty dystopian that come about due to the adoption of crypto. And as people working in the space, as technologists, as engineers, we should think about that. We should think about the second and third order effects of the things that we're building and creating and try to make sure that the future that we end up with is a good future. But net everything, I am an optimist. And I do think that the adoption of of crypto and these crypto decentralized crypto networks is going to be a net positive for the world. For sure. It's pretty crazy to think through the ramifications on a lot of this stuff. And part of, I think, what draws so many smart people to the space is we don't know. Right. And there's so many different paths that the technology can take in those ramifications that people want to have a hand in figuring it out.

or, uh, or in creating those, uh, those kinds of final States. And so it's pretty, um, pretty cool to kind of see it develop today. Oh, absolutely. Like I mentioned earlier, it's just, um, it's one of the great, uh, great things about working in the space. There's never a dull moment. It's definitely the wild, wild West. Um, and that's, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of bad scammy gross stuff that comes along with that, but it's also just super exciting and, uh, exciting to play a small role in kind of shaping that future. For sure. So you mentioned smart contracts a number of times. Maybe just give us kind of your perspective as to where we are with smart contracts today, how easy they are for developers to actually build them or integrate them into

different applications. And then what you see as the obstacles moving forward before we can get them to be more pervasive. Yeah, absolutely. So my experience with smart contracts is primarily writing some very simple things for Bitcoin, so Bitcoin scripts, and then a lot of experience more recently with Ethereum and Solidity and smart contracts on that network and that platform. As far as I can tell, and having my finger on the pulse of the community a little bit, running the meetup and just being plugged into the text world and seeing generally, Ethereum definitely does have a large lead in terms of developer mindshare, in terms of tooling, in terms of standards, in terms of network effects. That said, again, it's very, very early.

And so those things can change. As I mentioned, the big thing with Ethereum is that it introduced this concept of statefulness, rich statefulness on the blockchain, which enables a whole new class of applications that aren't possible on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is primarily, smart contracts are primarily focused on kind of being basically rules around who can spend coins and when. And I think that's actually really good. I think that Bitcoin as a network should focus on being the best money it can be. I think that's a perfectly rational approach for Bitcoin to take and minimizing the attack surface, therefore, is probably paramount. But Ethereum, as a complement to Bitcoin, I think offers this rich set of capabilities. How hard is it to write a smart

contract? Well, I'll say this. It's actually, in some ways, it's a little too easy to write a smart contract. And what I mean by that is that when you write a smart contract, you're doing software development that is very, very different paradigm from the kind of software development that we've gotten used to over the last 40 or 50 years of computing history, right? So the whole movement around agile development and everything was, the point was that software can be iterated on really quick and you can write bugs and correct them and deploy a new version and you shouldn't spend a lot of time futzing around trying to get everything perfect. But with smart contracts, when you deploy them, like we said earlier, what makes them interesting is that when you deploy them,

you can't change them unless you encode rules around how you can change them, which brings up a whole nother discussion around the extent to which that's desirable or not. But regardless, you can't change the way that the code works once it's deployed. So it's much more akin to developing a piece of hardware that you're going to ship out into the world that you're not going to be able to touch once it's in your customer's hands. It's much more akin to that. And so I think we're really just in the very early innings of learning about how to do that the right way. There have, of course, been a number of very high profile, very damaging hacks where people have lost millions of dollars. The DAO hack, of course, on the Ethereum network, I think really damaged

the credibility of Ethereum's claim to be immutable. I think it was the right thing to do to reverse that once it happened. But it is a black stain on the history of Ethereum that continues to hurt it today. It's frequently brought up as a negative and a kind of proof point of centralization of the network. Unfairly, I think, but you can't blame people for looking at that incident. So the tooling around smart contracts, I think it's going to change dramatically over the years if they become as important as I believe that they will. There's a whole bunch of academic research about programming languages that can be provably correct. So those kinds of languages are much more difficult to write software in and take much longer to write

software in. So they haven't made sense outside of an academic environment in a world where you can just patch a bug and ship an update in 10 minutes. Why waste a bunch of time writing provably correct software? I think in the long run, you know, the tooling around smart contracts is going to tend toward things that can be very easily formally verified and be shown provably correct for most scenarios. So that's just one example of how I think dramatically things could change. What's definitely the case, though, is that right now we're seeing an enormous amount of experimentation in the space. And it's really exciting. You know, the whole DeFi movement that has evolved primarily on the Ethereum network over the last, basically over the last year,

I would say, has been really fascinating to watch. And, you know, you now have hundreds of millions of dollars locked into these smart contracts. So there's a huge honeypot out there for would-be hackers or attackers against the network in general or against the smart contract code itself. Um, so, uh, whatever the best practices turn out to be, we are well on our way to, um, to figuring those out and we're going to learn them one way or the other. Hopefully it won't be too painful along the way. For sure. And so part of that DeFi movement, you know, to me, it is, I kind of have a nuanced view, I think, in that long term, it's incredibly exciting, right? It feels like this could be the future of banking and a lot of financial products, etc. Short term, I am bearish, but I am bearish for probably different reasons than some others. I'm bearish because one, the user experiences are still pretty elementary, right?

In terms of they just don't look and feel like other products that consumers use. So that makes it difficult and have a lot of friction. The second thing is they're very untested. So I would say that like outside of the hardcore user or somebody who is very much paying attention to blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies and DeFi, the trust level is very low. So if you talk to kind of a random person on the street, the idea that you're going to take your money and lock it up with software versus put it in a bank is still a nascent idea, right? And that's kind of unproven. And then the third thing is capacity constraints. So it's great if, you know, somebody wants to put anywhere between, you know, $10 to maybe even a couple of single digit millions, but for the really big institutional investors in the world who want to write, you know, $50, $100 plus million checks, it's hard for them to participate today.

And so what you end up getting is, you know, the power law of in the traditional finance world, that's, you know, majority of the transaction volume is large players, right? And so you've got to kind of work your way there. So over a long period, it seems like we can get there. But in your opinion, what are the one or two obstacles that if you could wave a magic wand and solve, DeFi would go from kind of the experimentation phase that it is in right now to, oh, the random person on the street at least could participate in a way where they trusted it and kind of put bigger dollars to work? Yeah, I think you touched on one of them, which is the user experience and usability

That's a huge one. One that you didn't mention, but I know we probably both think a lot about is the regulatory uncertainty. So if you could wave a magic wand and just have regulatory certainty in the US and in the other important jurisdictions around the world where these big financial players and developer communities exist, I think that would do wonders for adoption of this stuff. Because as a consultant, for example, I see a ton of projects that come to me and they have an idea and I say, okay, it's not the worst idea could work. Um, and they say, how hard would it be to build? And I say, honestly, not that hard. Um, but there is enormous amount of, of regulatory risk. It's unclear if, uh, what you're trying to do would violate securities law. It's

unclear, um, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So there's, I ended up, um, telling people like, look, I don't, you know, I would love to build this for you and we could. Um, but the first people you need to talk to aren't technologists and developers. It's lawyers and regulators to try to get some clarity around what you're doing because you don't really want to be the first man or woman up the hill who takes the bullets to figure all this stuff out. So that's another one that I would point to that would do wonders for the adoption of this stuff if it was cleared up, I think. For sure. And then is there, outside of the regulatory component, is there anything else that you say, hey, this is a huge hurdle that if we can solve would kind of be an inflection

point? Yeah, absolutely. Well, the obvious one is scalability, right? I mean, you talked about capacity. The Ethereum network, yesterday I went to try to deploy a smart contract and it was completely congested. Gas fees were through the roof on what I would have had to pay to deploy my smart contract was probably 10 times what it would be at a different time. And it was because one, it looks like most likely scam kind of project was airdropping a bunch of tokens to people spending millions of dollars on gas fees. So when one scammy project can clog up the whole network, it's pretty tough to feel confident locking hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of value into that. So scalability is another big one. That's one, by the way,

that we don't know. It's not guaranteed that that is going to get solved. This is maybe one of my more controversial opinions in the crypto space, but having a truly decentralized censorship resistant network, um, may just be, uh, may just be fundamentally at odds with, um, with, uh, you know, in terms of technical trade-offs with, uh, the kind of speed that users are used to in other sorts of, of products. Um, there's a reason that the internet has centralized around a number of these, uh, services. Um, and that's one of them. So, uh, we'll see. I mean, it may end up getting solved on, you know, like we talked about on layer two and other kinds of solutions that make trade-offs in terms of security and decentralization. But as regulatory things get

cleared up are acceptable enough to build these things on top of. So yeah, scalability would be another huge one. For sure. All right. And then as you look out kind of on the consultant side, where do you see people building today? So obviously DeFi is an area that people are focusing on and then just the use of smart contracts in general. Anything else that you're kind of seeing as a trend that's becoming more popular right now? Yeah, that's a really good question. So I'll say there's one thing actually that I see is a trend that is on the wane. And I think it's relatively good that it's on the wane. There was this idea for a while of like enterprise or private blockchains or whatever. For basic, you know, so the way that I look at kind of enterprise or, you know, permissioned blockchains is basically as a technology that is iterative as opposed to disruptive, right? So I remember talking to someone who had worked with IBM and they'd, whatever, done something with an internal blockchain and hyperledger and they'd made some internal process at a hospital like 40% more efficient.

And that's awesome. Like making things 40% more efficient is great, but that's not something that I'm excited about in the, you know, I'm as excited about. So what I see is what I see is brand new use cases emerging as opposed to just applying the technology to existing things. I don't think it's fundamentally, I don't think it's the kind of technology that if you have an existing business, you probably don't need blockchain. And it's kind of weird for me to say that as a consultant, but it's basically true. Like if your business is working now, you probably don't need a decentralized crypto network on top of it. What's going to be interesting is all the kinds of businesses that are and even things that aren't exactly businesses, you know, products, but maybe not necessarily traditional businesses that are enabled by these networks. um one kind of weird little niche that i think is is fascinating and sometimes maybe overlooked is

the uh um crypto collectibles kind of space the non-fungible tokens and and uh you know cryptographic art um i have some folks here and some some of my friends here in philly work on some projects in that space and are very fascinated by it and so i'm not a big art person i don't really understand um that's just my you know it doesn't tickle my the parts of my brain You know, that's not how I was designed. But but for the folks that are, there's actually a large contingent of people who are interested in this idea of of like kind of somehow owning art on the blockchain. And so I don't fully understand it, but there seems to be enough there kind of percolating below the surface where it's an interesting and interesting thing. And one other thing that I'll mention where I think, you know, we could see something approaching mainstream adoption at some point is gaming. Also through the meetup, I've gotten to know a number of developers who are interested in building games on top of the blockchain.

Various ways of owning your own assets, interoperability, game state on the blockchain such that various games and forks of games can coexist. And so different developers can develop their own takes on the same game by interopting with the game state that's stored and managed on the chain by smart contracts. So things like that, I think, are unexplored and maybe targeting the right kind of demographic where people might be able to deal with those early usability and technical challenges because they'd be interested in playing this game and are already tech savvy enough to be involved in this community. So those are a few things that interest me. But yeah, really, really, to me, the most exciting things, it's a little bit of a cop out answer. But the most exciting things are the things that we're not thinking about, that are just going to come out of left field, and are going to be uniquely enabled by the by those primitives that we talked about earlier. For sure. All right, before I finish up, I always do rapid fire questions. What do we think the most important company in crypto is right now? Um, well, so actually, I'll, I'll kind of give a, I'll echo what I just said. It's kind of a cop out answer. But it's probably some company that we haven't heard of yet, maybe hasn't even been created yet, and is going to be to do something completely unique. If I just, you know,

if I if I don't give that answer, and I give a more direct answer, it's hard not to say Coinbase, it's a boring answer, but it's probably correct. I'm gonna put you on the spot and say if there was a company that we don't know what it is yet, and it would be doing something new, what's the wildest idea that you have that somebody could build and there could be value accrual there? Oh, man, I wish that I knew. I mean, I'd be working on it if I knew. It's a really hard question to answer. So there's a lot of examples that you can give here. One of them is like Uber, right? So when you think about giving everybody a phone in their pocket with GPS, you think, okay, that would be useful for

making maps apps you know like a navigation app maybe a couple other things but you don't think of uber and you don't think of pokemon go and you don't think of a handful of other services that are uniquely enabled by the fact that everybody has a gps enabled phone now in reverse you know looking back on history as things always do those things seem obvious but they were completely not obvious um you know at the time the iphone came out and nobody would have guessed and be able to tell you. So, so I don't know. I wish I knew for sure. What, um, what do you think is the one regulation that you would change or improve if you could? I think probably, uh, we talked about earlier, I would just love to see more clarity around, um, you know, who I'll say this

clarity around how to, uh, how on-chain assets can, um, on-chain representation of real world assets. So I think I, you and I probably share the opinion that everything in the long run is going to be tokenized and managed by software on blockchains um but obviously there's some interaction there between the uh the the wet code of of the the legal system and the dry code of of smart contracts um you know and how those things interact you know just having that all worked out would be would be huge that's interesting i think that's definitely fair what's your most controversial thought in uh crypto i know you kind of hinted at one already but uh any any other ones I think this is something that I said earlier, but I think it might be that there are future universes where Bitcoin and or Ethereum and other crypto networks become widely adopted that most of us living today would agree are dystopian, so that there are possible bad outcomes that arise directly from this technology.

I think a lot of people are naturally optimistic, bordering on utopian, and I think that can be dangerous sometimes. So I would say that's somewhat controversial. I think that's fair. What's the most important book that you've ever read? I would say it's probably any of the books by Nassim Taleb. So, Black Swan, Fool by Randomness, his whole Encherto series really changed the way that I, not changed, but kind of gave language to the way that I think about things. Helped me understand some intuitions that I felt like I already had, but didn't have the kind of vocabulary and allowed me a clearer way of thinking about the world, thinking about the uncertainty of the future, that sort of thing. Is there anything like one idea from one of the books that really stands out to you?

Man, there's a bunch, but I guess just probably just the fact that, so one point that he makes that I think is just so fantastic once you see it is that history, we put this narrative to history, But history is almost by definition, a collection of the things that were unexpected, right? Things that are expected, they're expected. And so we accommodate for them, we're prepared for them. History is basically just this collection of things that came out of nowhere, right? And then we go back and we assign a story and a narrative to why it happened. Um, but nobody ever predicted those things in advance, despite this nice narrative that we wrap around it, um, in, in, in reverse. Right. So that just, you know, gives you enormous amounts of humility. I think when you recognize that in terms of, um, how to prepare for the future, the short answer is that like the most important things that are going to happen in our lifetime, we have no way of preparing and knowing what they are by definition, tautologically, because the most important things are going to be the ones that surprise us the most. And so to prepare for that, the best thing to do is just try to be robust to many possible outcomes and anti-fragile if you can even. But I just, that point I think is so profound when you really understand it. For sure. Aliens, you know, this question is coming. Believer, non-believer? so so i actually i have i don't know if this is controversial or not but i i actually i think that there's a very a very good chance that we are alone in the universe that we're

literally the only that the only life in the whole universe is right here on earth um i think that there's a good chance of that the reason is um i mean i'm sure you're familiar with uh the idea of uh fermi's paradox of course i can't ask that question not get told fermi's paradox about half the answers. Exactly. So, you know Fermi's paradox, your listeners probably already know Fermi's paradox. And the point is like one of the possible solutions to Fermi's paradox that I don't ever hear discussed is that one of the coefficients in that equation that we don't know the answer to at all is how likely it is for life to form in the first place. So, you have all the conditions for life to form, you have the proteins, you have the correct atmospheric, you have the presence of

water, you have the correct temperatures, but what actually causes in that mixture of all the right ingredients, what causes a replicator, basically a form of proto-DNA to kind of come into existence randomly? We have no idea. We don't even have good theories as far as I'm aware scientifically. So, that's just a huge unknown in the equation. And it could be, it could turn out that the answer is it's extremely, extremely unlikely. It could be so unlikely that even when you account for all the trillions of stars and all the, you know, all the planets where life could have, uh, you know, sprung up that it would still only be, you know, a 50, 50 shot, for example, of it happening ever in the history of the universe. Right. And we know this, like numbers

can be really big. Odds can be really small. Like we know this in cryptography, we create systems where even if the entire, every atom in the universe was part of a supercomputer, you couldn't break, uh, the, the cryptographic, uh, you know, encoding because the, the, um, you know, the, the odds are so small. And so it could be that we're actually lucky, um, that the life even exists on earth. Um, and what's, I don't, you know, this is obviously a wild guess. I have no clue. We, we might figure out in 10 years with new science, exactly how, um, these proteins formed initial strands of DNA and then started replicating. And we may be able to reproduce it in a lab, but, um, you know, if, if it turns out to be the case, I like it because it's an interesting

thought experiment, which is like, if you knew for sure that earth was the only place in the universe where life existed, like how would that change your perspective and your perspective on what we should be doing, um, to move forward? You know, we should probably be like sending spaceships out with genetically engineered bacteria to try to plant them on other planets as soon as possible, because if things go poorly here, uh, life may never exist again in the whole universe. So anyway, that's again, kind of an unconventional opinion. We may have some work ahead of us. Yeah, for sure. I think so. All right. So wrap up. You could ask me one question. What do you got for me? Yeah. So I, as I mentioned several times, I come at this from the perspective

of a technologist and engineer. One of the great things about crypto is that it introduces you to so many other topics. So I've learned more in the last five years about law and about finance and about economics than I probably ever would have learned if it wasn't for falling down this rabbit hole. So, you know, as someone who knows a lot about economics and finance, what kind of resources, books, podcasts, whatever, would you recommend for someone who wants to go deeper in understanding that self and trying to teach themselves a little bit more about it? Teaching themselves more about a specific topic or what? Finance and economics, kind of broadly speaking. Got it. So, I'm going to go with a probably unpopular answer. There are three books that

I read, I think I was 19, 20 years old, something like that. And I always talk about, I read the three books back to back to back. They were a recommendation from somebody that I trusted and looked up to. And it was a combination of what the books, the information in the books, and also the time in my life when I read them. So it was, I kind of didn't have a ton of information about finance, economics, personal finance, generational wealth, all that kind of stuff. So, um, you know, moldable, if you will, um, and so the three books, uh, the first was a rich dad, poor dad by a Robert Kiyosaki. The second book was, uh, the richest man in Babylon. Uh, and then the third book is think and grow rich. And those three books, I think, um, kind

of reading them together at that time in my life, uh, what they did were, uh, they kind of set the mindset right which i think is kind of uh the biggest thing when it comes to um understanding more like personal finance and and wealth uh creation and things like that so it's less about like macroeconomics or the financial system and more i am one participant in this system and like how do i play the game to optimize it for my outcome right and so what i think i got out of reading those books at kind of a high level was, uh, one, um, the idea that, uh, you have a couple of resources at your disposal and how you leverage them is, uh, going to determine, um, the level of wealth that you built, right? So if you simply trade the hours in your day, uh, directly for

dollars, um, that's not going to be very scalable and therefore your upside is limited, right? If you're able to leverage other people's time, right, you can definitely create more wealth. But if you can eventually leverage both the assets that you own, the money that you have, and other people's time, kind of, you know, multiple assets that are at your disposal, then you can really start to build serious wealth, right? And so I think it goes from a mindset of I need to do everything to a mindset of how do I use the resources available to me to create wealth? And I think that that one kind of mindset shift really changed the way that I thought about work, that I thought about building things, that I thought about kind of my goals in life, et cetera. So I always talk about those three books. The other two books that I would suggest that they're kind of tangentially related to finance, but I found them to be quite good. Or actually, there's three book recommendations I'll make. So one is Super Forecasters. It's basically a belief that crowds do a pretty good job of predictions or forecasting. And so I won't spoil it too much, but that's the general premise. I read that in tandem with Algorithms to Live By and the idea that, again, you know, there's just pattern recognition and things that machines and algorithms can do better than humans, right? And so kind of reading those two books back to back were, you know, it was pretty fascinating.

And then the third book and one of my favorites is a book called Seeking Wisdom. And it's about from Darwin to Munger. I think it's this guy, Peter Bevelin, I think is his name, if I remember correctly. And that book is more about mental models and frameworks to use to make decisions, evaluate situations, certain biases that you'll have, et cetera. And so to me, when somebody says, hey, how do you learn about finance and economics and all this stuff? I always look at it as, um, you know, can you understand, uh, one, the mindset, the goal setting, the, you know, use the resources at your disposal. So that's kind of the first set of recommendations. And then the second is, um, really just how to think. Right. And if you can understand, um, you know, how decisions are made and the accuracy of those decisions, how machines interact with humans and that decision-making, and then you can understand the frameworks and mental models and the biases. I think that you kind of have a toolbox, if you will, that you're prepared to kind of go out into the world of finance and be successful. The work you got to do after that is then you got to go get domain specific knowledge.

Right. So whether you want to be a public equity investor, a private equity investor, you know, fixed income, whatever you want to do, you got to go kind of understand that stuff. uh and um whether good or bad i've found that um books aren't necessarily the best way to get educated on the domain specific stuff i think some of it is it's really hard to put nuance into books uh and then the other is that markets change so rapidly um at that time you know book gets written some of the stuff's changed and so where i get a lot of that information from uh is more shorter form content uh usually either blogs um annual letters that people write like investor letters um a lot of youtube a lot of podcasts um and then things even like uh real vision which is like a subscription video service um but i think all of that stuff what you're doing is you're

essentially hearing directly from the people doing what you want to do or you want to learn about so it's kind of the practitioners um that are investors um and they're sharing with you you You know, very similar to how you're sharing information about, hey, here's the state of blockchain development from, you know, the ground truth, right? From the developer perspective, I think what you get to hear is you get to hear from the investors. Here's the ground truth. Here's how it actually works, right? You're not reading it in a book. So I find that more helpful for the kind of domain specific knowledge.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I love, first of all, your suggestion of like, here are some resources to kind of just get in the mode of thinking and the kind of like underlying principles of how it works. I think that's very true in like software engineering, for example, there's always some new technology or some new, new set of, you know, domain specific knowledge that you're going to need to build something. But if you kind of understand some certain core principles of how to build good software, you know, you're going to be able to, to approach those things and figure them out. But then, yeah, with regards to that domain specific knowledge, I think that's a lot of what, where I get hung up on as well. Um, like I said, I think I've learned more about, uh, finance and, um, you know, the mechanics of it, um, than I ever would have if I, if I didn't fall down this crypto rabbit hole. Um, you know, even things when it comes, like things that you and your listeners would probably consider very simplistic, like, you know, how do options work, you know, like that kind of thing. Like that's all stuff that it's like, I, you know, it's like, okay, I see people talking about this. Let me go

try to figure it out. And like you said, there's not necessarily tons of great books or resources. And so I feel like I've, I've learned a ton, but I feel like my knowledge around this stuff is kind of fragmented and not really, um, it, you know, it's one of the many reasons why I don't trade actively. It's just, uh, just hold. And, and, you know, cause I know that there's, I'm very unsophisticated when it comes to this stuff. for sure look and part of this also is um you know there's a book recently that came out called a range and it basically talked about the trade-off between being a uh domain expert versus a generalist right i'm actually about halfway through that book it's it's excellent yeah yeah i think it's pretty good right and the the thing that to me um you take away from it basically it's making the argument for generalists right um in a nutshell and uh for me it's you know what is the tools of a generalist right it is the way that you think it is the frameworks it is the way that

you can apply uh intelligence to different domains right and kind of um pull from different parts and put them together uh when you're looking at a situation and so i think that uh we spend a lot of time trying you know especially the education system trying to hit um domain specific like milestones or information uh retention so yeah hey if you want to be a chemist right there's certain formulas, you just got to know, right? And that's great. But we don't do a lot to kind of arm people with a great foundation of how to think. And so if we don't get that in kind of your traditional training, if you will, or education, then I think it's really important that people are intentional about doing it outside of that traditional training. And I think it just

gives you a leg up on kind of all the domain specific stuff when you're building, you know, when you're building a house on a strong foundation, if you will. Yep. A hundred percent agree with that. Work man, Ben, I really appreciate taking the time to do this. This is fascinating and, um, and super helpful for me to learn, um, kind of how, how you view the world right now. So, uh, just thank you so much for taking the time to do it and we'll have to do it again in the future.

Absolutely. Pump. I really appreciate it. Um, if you don't mind, I'd like to just plug one thing real quick, if I could. You're more than happy to. Awesome. So I write a weekly newsletter. Um, it is focused on, It's an email newsletter focused on, you know, looking at crypto from that technical and engineering lens. It's usually about a thousand words, just focused on one piece of news that has happened in the last week. You know, approachable, but technical, technically focused. So if that sounds like something that any of your listeners are interested in, they can go to newsletter.buildblockchain.tech and sign up for that.

Awesome. Newsletter.buildblockchain.tech. All right, man. I appreciate it very much. Thanks so much. Thanks for all you do. Are you curious about cryptocurrency and you don't know where to begin? I've got a great way for you to try. You can use Stormplay, a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for your time. That's right. You don't necessarily have to make a financial investment to begin. You can simply download, register, and then discover these micro tasks that they present you that meet your interest.

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