The Pomp Podcast - Muneeb Ali: Abuse of Power through Centralization Pt. 1

Episode Date: August 29, 2018

Muneeb Ali is the Co-Founder of Blockstack, a new internet for decentralized apps.  In this conversation, Anthony Pompliano and Muneeb discuss the problems with today’s internet giants, why you should care about decentralization, and what scares him about the future built on a blockchain.

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. Muneeb Ali is the co-founder of Blockstack, a new internet for decentralized apps. In this conversation, we discuss the problems with today's internet giants, why you should care about decentralization, and what scares him about the future built on blockchain. Muneeb is incredibly thoughtful and has many unique life experiences. It was great learning from him, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. 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. All right, Muneeb, ready? Let's do this. So for those who don't know, why don't you just go through some of your background and then we can kind of talk through how you got into the crypto space. Hey, everyone. I'm Muneeb, co-founder of Blockstack. so I have a PhD in distributed systems from Princeton University before entering this space I basically worked in distributed systems for those who don't know what that is these are the

people who have built you know a lot of the computer networks out there or the data centers that resulted in cloud computing and even if you go back all the way to the 90s people who built kind of like the first generation of internet protocols so that was the research community that i was part of and more specifically like the distributed systems people they like to actually build a real system and then deploy them and study them so it's not like a very theoretical part of computer science got it and so in that at what point does the distributed systems work intersect with blockchain you know kind of this decentralized crypto ecosystem yeah that's a good question so i think if you go back into the 90s you would notice that there were a lot of efforts

that were talking about peer-to-peer systems or designing systems in a way that there are no single points of failure and in the 2000s we started seeing kind of like if you remember the time of like the limewire or these different file sharing protocols people were downloading a lot of like pirated songs from there and interestingly at that time the interest from the top research community was extremely high like there were lots of conferences lots of people were publishing papers building systems and by like 2005 2006 most of that interest started drying down because there weren't there wasn't a lot of industry adoption of the technology and a lot of the same people and these are people that i highly respect started moving into cloud computing and

cloud computing was just starting but companies like google or facebook could actually bankroll all the research and development there and you started noticing how these same kind of like bright minds were now going to the large companies and helping them build their cloud infrastructure and and in a way the centralization was a byproduct of that right so these companies kept becoming bigger and bigger they started hiring better and better people and most of the computing infrastructure kind of like got centralized under a few companies got it that that makes sense and so for you uh you're at princeton right you go in uh and you get your phd um in distributed systems at what point did you kind of discover uh crypto and kind of what

drew you to uh what was going on there um it's funny i actually did a search in my inbox to see when i got exposed to bitcoin for the first time this was uh 2011 i think and then uh arvind And he has a course on Bitcoin that a lot of people go through. And he also wrote a book about it. So he's a Princeton professor and he was just joining at that time. And he sent out an email to everyone that I'm interested in doing research on this technology. I marked it as interesting, read later. And then my advisor pinged me that it seems like something you should really look at.

And I was like, yeah, I've already marked it. I'm going to take a look at that. And it took me like more than two years before I rediscovered some of the technology on a completely different path. Right. So this is me about to finish my thesis, but kind of like decided that I don't want to go into academia. And I started a company with Ryan Shea, my co-founder that I met at Princeton. And it was basically the team came first and we knew that we generally want to work on like core problems with today's Internet. but it wasn't really clear what exactly and and the team came first and we were starting to work on some of those issues that hey what's wrong with today's internet how can we

make a meaningful impact and rediscovered bitcoin and the blockchains and started like putting two and two together that maybe some of these technologies can be used in different ways and that eventually became what is a block stack today got it and so this is like 13 14 what were some of those early problems with the internet that you guys looked and said you know we might not know exactly what the solution is going to be but but these are definitely you know problems that we can identify and want to go work on yep so let's say you're a you're an entrepreneur or developer and you want to build something innovative on top of what's available today compare that to larry and sergey back in the 90s like they could actually write a web crawler

download all the information they need from the internet and study the web graph and then innovate on top of that and build the google search engine but if you want to do that today you can't even get access to the data that facebook has or the data that linkedin has or twitter has so we are trying to to like a get that data and try to do something interesting with it but we are getting hit by rate limitations by twitter or like terms of service issues with linkedin and other stuff and we started thinking that these companies are in a way like barrier to innovation because you need to be employed at one of these companies to be able to use the massive social graph or information that Facebook is setting on. So if you're not a Facebook engineer, it's almost like

I don't even have a right to innovate. I first need to join the company before I can do anything with it. So we started thinking of how can we make this information and these social graphs more decentralized, just like the internet originally was supposed to be fully decentralized personalized and open, uh, to all the developers. Got it. And so really what you guys were doing was you were hitting the walled garden, right? Of, I want access to that information. That information could be a resource to me so that I can put it together with other, um, information and resources. And if I can do that correctly, then I can, I don't even know yet what I can create, but that's my goal. And if I can't get the information, I should actually just start

solving the problem that's right in front of me. Right. Yeah. And, and I think those, some of the problems are more concrete um like i know you're you're a big twitter user so am i so imagine that um you love twitter but you hate certain features in the twitter app absolutely for me like you know i get really distracted by notifications i feel like if there could be something like a minimalist twitter i would love to pay for that app and use that client instead uh but because twitter is a company and and the information that they're sitting on only they can use it it's not a marketplace it's not like developers can go and build different clients that are compatible with the data that twitter has right and it wasn't like this in the beginning like in the early days of

twitter there were like some other clients available some of them were better than the actual twitter app and one by one either they got acquired by twitter or got shut down same with uh the meerkat versus periscope thing right so meerkat was this app that was going viral on twitter and Twitter bought a competitor, Periscope, and then shut down access to Meerkat. And I think that kind of like speaks to the problem that we have today with a few big companies having a monopoly on innovation. Got it. So let's talk about this idea of decentralization, right?

And when you think of that, what does that mean to you in today's world, right? So you've talked a little bit about these walled gardens that major internet companies have around their data and their social graphs etc but when somebody says to you you know why are you working on a decentralized world you know what's your answer to that and then kind of go from there yeah so i think this this uh this word decentralization it's not very clear to the a broader audience like what it means and more importantly like why would they care right so like sometimes i try to have the conversation in terms of ownership rights or freedom of choice like those are things that i think people understand better so if you ask

someone that would you like to own property and let's say you own a house and you can put all of your belongings there the answer would be yes i would like to have like people understand that property rights are a good thing and countries where you don't have property rights they are usually struggling with you know some sort of a dictator doing generally bad things to the population and i think similarly people understand that freedom of choice is a good thing right so if there are 10 different competing products for the same thing usually is better for the consumer and they have the freedom of choice that they can stop using one product and start using something else and decentralization to me is a combination of both these things right when you have ownership

of your information your data or even software that you downloaded it's yours now combined with freedom of choice in the sense that there there aren't like big monopolies who control access to information and developers are basically competing on the quality of their products when they want to convince you that you should download my product or buy my product so so the more competition there is and the more more freedom of choice there is for consumers that's generally a better thing do you think that um there's a uh diminishing set of returns in terms of if there's one twitter and we're all using it whether it's the best product that we could possibly find or not uh the value we get from the social network or the social graph and that lock-in uh cannot be replicated if all of

a sudden you know there's 15 different twitters everyone's using a different one and we're not able to actually interact to get the same amount of content like how do you what's that trade-off look like i think there are two things there let me comment on the first one uh chris dixon actually wrote a really interesting post about how uh internet services generally which are free are net beneficial for everyone right so they're providing a free service users are getting some utility out of it and the service is growing and it's a net positive for everyone but at some point it kind of like tips over where now they're in the business of knowing more and more about you and and usually most of these things are powered by ads right so at some point it tips over where

the service is actually becoming harmful for the user and it the relationship between the user and the service kind of changes right so that's one thing that i feel like most companies that are providing a free service and monetizing user data kind of like go through that curve right so keeping that context in mind i'm going to switch over to the actual question and and that seems to me that hey can a single company build a better product than a market and i think i am of the view that if you open up something to a broader market the market would generally deliver a better product right so it's not about having disconnected networks that there would be like 50 different twitters it's about having some sort of a common decentralized graph that everyone can be a part

of but they can publish their products on the same network and users all of them can be part of the same network without being users of any single company got it very interesting and so how does power in the traditional sense play into this right so when you describe these walled gardens let's say that the the large internet companies today they've got a lot of power right They set the rules, you can choose to play by the rules or not. And there's not necessarily a great second option, right? And so if you want to connect with people all over the world, and with real identity, and be able to chat with them and post and interact with businesses, etc. Facebook, one of the best ways to do that, right? Because they have that mass buy in, right, or the mass social graph. how does power change when you move to the decentralized world by the people who create these products right are they still the ones that you think will set the rules and and really kind of drive the conversation or do you or do you see some other power mechanism that plays out

yeah so i think first we should like try to understand um how much power these companies actually have right because like we started back in like 2013 2014 and back then uh this was not a common conversation that people would have they would be like hey what's wrong with facebook or what's wrong with google um and at that time like sometimes i'd say that oh facebook has this campaign where anyone who's using in there they were giving out free internet service in india but you could only use facebook and anything that your friends have shared on facebook you You can access that, but nothing else. So a result was that people thought that Facebook is the internet, right?

And people would find it interesting, but they wouldn't be alarmed by it. And just to clarify, so I worked at Facebook at 14 and 15, right? And what I think you're describing is this idea that they were trying to give access, right, to the internet. And if I remember correctly, they were subsidizing the data cost, right? So if you downloaded their specific app for this, you could get on. And I think it was like you could access Facebook, get the feed, et cetera. And then I think that there was maybe some partner websites that if, you know, there was like a Wikipedia link in the Facebook feed, you could click and that you could see that.

But you couldn't go outside of their partner websites. And then I think their pitch to the data providers or the cell phone companies was, hey, actually, this is a great way to onboard people into using the Internet. And if they want to leave this enclosed, you know, ecosystem, they'll then buy a data package from you. Right. And then they're off to the races. And so it's an interesting experiment that they did. Right. With, you know, kind of various outcomes, depending on the geographic region and what perspective you have on, you know, what ultimately their goal should have been. yeah i think there are arguments on both sides that one argument is that they're giving people a free service that they would never have access to otherwise right and they're getting access to so much information you know the other argument is that hey they're seeing a walled garden and they're actually not seeing the full picture uh and and what kind of control facebook would have down down the road i think they they got into some trouble with the indian

government on the program and and so on but i think generally the concept of um you know one company having that much control over access to information people wouldn't would find it interesting but they wouldn't think that this is something that they should be concerned about absolutely until the u.s election happened right and where now there's a serious concern that can facebook actually manipulate uh people's perceptions to the extent of you know impacting even results of an election and that's something that people are generally concerned about to the extent that now mark zuckerberg is sitting in the congress testifying and and it's a very different world right and there are certain things like um i think mark zuckerberg sent a message to

facebook users and then retracted it that people don't really understand the gravity of what that kind of power means like imagine if the u.s government was able to retract some emails from all the inboxes of the citizens i think there would be an outcry that how can the government do this like this email was in my inbox how can they remove it without my permission but mark zuckerberg basically did an equivalent of that on the facebook network and people aren't really noticing it so i think my general point is that the amount of power that large tech companies have on users is largely underestimated right now would it be fair to say that um so i think that there's enough academic studies now that show if you show certain types of information to somebody

right not only can you uh affect their political leanings their um you know their kind of uh thoughts on certain issues but but also you can affect their mental health you know etc right would it be fair to compare that to let's say 20 30 50 years ago with traditional media and newspapers right so let's say for example that if Facebook shows me a bunch of right or left leaning articles right versus if I have a subscription to the New York Times and there's a bunch of right or left leaning articles what's the difference there yeah I think it basically comes back to freedom of choice and in my view um like i i grew up in pakistan um when i was a teenager we had a single tv channel that was state sponsored and it was a very interesting learning

for me when i grew up and found out that the version of history taught to me was actually not correct right and and and if you if you go back to pakistan now people have freedom of choice like there are so many private channels and they can choose to subscribe to whatever they want to subscribe to but in general once you have freedom of choice it fee things become less manipulative right like or your uh the power of any single entity reduces and that's the entire point of decentralization right decentralization doesn't mean that no one is in control but the number of there are a number of entities instead of just a single entity and and going back to your earlier question about what happens in this world i think people need to think hard about uh basically

structures or points of power in even decentralized networks and ecosystems because it's not that you just introduce a blockchain and magically you know we are now living in a fairy tale there are very very complicated issues which we don't have answers to right now a lot of projects either are already struggling or will struggle with these problems like before any of them actually takes off and and has mass market adoption absolutely so uh i'm going to push you on this idea of choice because i because i agree with you that without choice right there is a whole can of worms that um i think a lot of people have a hard time arguing that no choice is good right um i would argue that you choose to use facebook and then once you create an account

right you choose who you connect with both from individuals media sites that you know you like their page people that you follow etc you do not choose the rank of the algorithmic feed right and you do not choose the actions with which your friends take that could also put content into your feed right so that you know munib liked this post whatever it shows my feed where's the line and can't we draw a line right at any point where we say choice matters up until this point and after this point you're using a private company's service and they you know they have kind of free reign at post this point right like that that choice um that you could draw a line in the sand on is blurred to me right and i don't know how you think about it um you know kind of from this view

yeah so i think just the first point here is a choice between different companies that hey can there be facebook or something else and i think a big problem with tech is that a lot of these large networks tend to be winner takes all the market absolutely agree so i think that's the first issue where we we get stuck that this is not a market where um this would be the case that But AT&T, if AT&T is successful, it would just take out all of the competitors. It's the monopolistic nature of a social network, right? If you get enough users, you reach mass adoption. The lock-in is too strong that you don't get value by joining a separate network because nobody's there.

Yeah, right. Same with Google, right? The more users are using the search engine, the better data they have on the users and the better they can serve them. So I think there are these inherent winner-take-all kind of dynamics that are in tech that we need to acknowledge that this is a new world. The next thing would be, I think that's a great question, that where do you draw the line? I would say that just like when the internet was starting and there were certain things that were kind of like part of the core DNA, One of them is that ISPs cannot differentiate between different types of traffic, which is the net neutrality thing. And, you know, now it's not exactly there in the same format anymore, but still people are aware of it and they feel that it's a right that they should have.

And ISPs should not be able to differentiate between traffic. I think similarly, that thing didn't happen for the application layer of the Internet. like there was no concept of a kind of like a universal login that you have or some sort of social graph that you have that you can take anywhere to any application right so it's not very easy for you to exit facebook whereas it's very easy for you to exit an isp and just get a different connection absolutely so i think defining some of those like core components that belong to the user and actually don't belong to the company is something that we never got around to doing well and what you're describing is uh the incentives for the company are not in alignment

with the incentives for the individual right because the incentives for the company is to get that flywheel started get adoption of their network start building that out lock people in right and what you're essentially describing here is that works and that helps that company build And while they're using that data to make the service better, more enjoyable, provide better quality and accuracy, et cetera, it's a good thing. But at some point, you do hit that diminishing return, right? And so if you do not have aligned incentives from the beginning, there's some period of time where individuals are willing to sacrifice their incentives or their value for the value that they're receiving from a network, right? But once you get that diminishing return, it catches their attention. Wait, wait, wait.

The incentives here are misaligned, and therefore, I think that's what we're seeing at some of these large internet companies. People saying, I no longer want to be entered into this contract that I have with you as a service, but there isn't another option because you locked us all in. Yeah, and I feel like another big trend that I'm noticing is with internet companies or tech in general, people have this mentality of trust by default. right so they would just like trust everything by default unless something goes wrong and and and that's playing out in terms of people are not realizing how much power some of these tech companies have like i'm using uh an iphone and it's mind-boggling if you think about it that this is such a powerful computer uh i cannot just like write a new program and run it on this computer it's like fairly locked down like apple can even like remove apps from my device or just

uh not allow them on on the app store even big companies like uber i think there was a famous incident where apple threatened uber that we'll just kick you out of the app store and uber had to comply like like it's a it's an 80 billion dollar company and it can just disappear like this because another bigger fish says that i i have so much control that i can decide that you can no longer be on on on the devices of people yeah it's the platform risk right i mean look we Facebook, Apple, they all have this, right? So part of the business model is when people build these technology services or products on top of them, right,

there is that risk that at some point they can change the rules, they can require you to adhere to certain criteria that maybe wasn't part of, you know, the initial agreement. And so it's a risk, right? Let's fast forward, right? So I think that it's fairly well understood now that, look, there's issues that companies are going through. Do you believe that the current iterations of these large internet companies are, one, going to be able to identify, hey, these are real problems, right?

And then, two, course correct and figure out how to change in order to not only, one, solve the problems, but, two, create a better value prop for users with better aligned incentives moving forward? Or do you think they have to get disrupted? I think it's very unlikely. Why? It is likely that they start realizing that this is a problem. They might start addressing the problem in their own ways. Like, for example, I think there was some effort from Facebook and a couple of other companies to have some sort of a common format in which people can extract the data out and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, this is a business decision.

So I always try to imagine a Facebook board meeting where there's a board approval to kill the Facebook business model, right? And that's a very unlikely event that Facebook just says that, hey, we're going to stop monetizing your data at all. It is possible, given, you know, how Mark Zuckerberg has been really good at identifying potential threats to the company and then proactively going after them. It is possible that they try to do the same thing with these crypto-based networks and try to establish themselves as a large player in the ecosystem. So that's one possibility where they can come out ahead. Absolutely. I think that's fair. And to your point, I think that a number of these executives that have faced these issues, obstacles, crisis before, they and their teams have done a pretty good job of navigating it. Right. That's how they get to, you know, these big, powerful positions. And this is another obstacle has a little bit of nuance to it. Right. But it will be very interesting to see how they deal with this moving forward.

what um so let's keep fast forwarding here and so whether those large internet companies are successful or not what does the 30 to 50 year out view look like in terms of you know your view of the world of decentralizing a lot of this power etc has come to fruition what changes in the everyday life of you know humans in terms of how they interact with technology that's a that's an interesting question like i feel like if you would have said what does it look like 10 years from now you might have heard positive things when i start thinking about like 40 to 50 years from now we'll start 10 start with 10 first then we'll go to 40 or 50 okay sure uh so i think like 10 years from now i think i at least i am really hopeful that we are able to solve the problems that we

created in the last 20 years okay so it's like one of those things that technology creates problems and then there's new technology that tries to solve those problems. The thing about the 30 to 40 year timeline is that I'm very concerned about the problems that the new technology is going to create. Okay, so before we get to 30 to 40 years, in 10 years, what has changed in my or your life

with the way that we, our relationship with technology, right? Is it that we're using a Facebook, social network, able to call a car from our phone, all this stuff, but it's just there's no centralized company that's behind it or what is different yeah i'm gonna uh put on my lens of uh kind of like an internet infrastructure researcher and answer the question that way that i think that there were there are certain problems with the traditional

internet like think of that as like um like take the analogy of a building that there were some structural flaws with it and we just decided to duct tape it around and and decided to just work with those things for decades and now with the new capabilities that we have we might be able to actually address those problems and those problems are like for example you know there's a company VeriSign that everyone blindly trusts whenever you see that green lock sign you know most of the time it's a single company saying trust me you're talking to the right right party or you know when I'm sending a message to my friend on Facebook it's not really a private communication it's not like i'm taking a walk with my friend and that's a conversation between just

me and my friend facebook engineers can take a look at it any government agencies can take a look at it any hackers that hack that information can take a look at it right so some of those like very fundamental things that we don't have a concept of like some sort of user credentials that are truly owned by users that can be reused online anywhere like this this entire concept of like creating passwords everywhere resetting them things getting hacked all the time these honey pots of data so the the companies are basically creating these honey pots of data because there's no better way right if users can actually keep all that data in a reliable way with themselves and give access to some app on a on a need basis that's a much better security model in general

than seeing all these hacks that happen all the time so basically like these base these internet infrastructure problems where we could have done things in a different way but we didn't and now we are kind of like trying to handle the the consequences of that i feel very hopeful that over a 10-year timeline and especially given the amount of capital that's flowing into some of these crazy decentralized projects some of them would take off and actually end up upgrading the internet to something that we kind of like always deserve the thing i'm fearful of is in the process of doing that like when cloud computing was starting i remember i was a i was an undergrad i was really excited about the technology at that time we did not think about all these byproducts

all these negative externalities that came with that technology. And the same might happen with blockchains and crypto. There are things that we are just not afraid enough of. Absolutely. So in that 10-year timeframe where I, as a user, I own my data, right? And if I want to use a service, I can basically permission them to access maybe all of my data or some subset of my data. One thing I've thought a lot about is rather than go the universal basic income way of if automation actually exists and humans start to lose their job, the government would have to pay to basically allow them to survive.

If I own my data, just like at a job, when I create value, I'm compensated for that value. If a service wants my data and they pay me for the ability to use my data, you, one, have a more secure, more user-centric data model. And two is you're now solving some of the socioeconomic issues that could potentially occur with the adoption of these technologies, right? How likely do you think that scenario is versus that's more of a, you know, a utopia view of the world from a technologist perspective? No, I think it's actually very likely. And there are two points here. The first point is, if you look at the general perception of tech and Silicon Valley, I think any anyone would agree that the images of like these companies have a lot of money. People who are early in tech actually ended up doing really well for themselves.

but if you look at all the users they pretty much have a miserable life looking at all these ads that are being shown to them all the data uh that that is being tracked and monetized and they don't really have a stake in that economy right absolutely so in a way their data is in a way highly undervalued and all they're getting is free products in return for that whereas that data is actually a lot more useful plus the market that is being used for moving all that money around like if you if you study ad networks there are like you know nine or ten different parties involved before a single ad is even shown to a users it's a fairly inefficient market right if you can make this a more efficient market where someone wants to show you a piece of information

and is willing to pay you for your time, I think that kind of models would evolve in the next five to 10 years. And it's a model where these internet users now become a part of the economy. So they can actually earn some of the value as well. And I think a second point is a little bit more high level that just like we are now realizing

that attention is one of our most scarce resources, i think in general with a more decentralized world and a world where people start valuing the the value of their own data right they would start valuing their attention as well that that all these advertisers out there all these companies maybe they want me to take certain actions or they want me to watch something or whatever it would be that's valuable to someone else in the economy if i'm giving them my attention i can actually monetize that right so i think we we would end up broadening the uh economy as a whole and make the internet users a part of that economy got it and so um it's very interesting fast forward more we're now in the 40 50 year

you know time frame what does that world look like and what scares you about it there are a lot of things to start off i think um this is like one of those things where you know some people think that oh this is like you know too late in crypto the ship has already sailed and and and my view is that it is just too early in crypto right now and what i'm scared off is actually that the people even the first million or two million five million uh 10 million that's a very small number compared to the rest of the population right if you look at some of these distributions that are happening with tokens they favor early adopters a lot more than we have seen in other industries absolutely right so if you imagine this world 50 years down the road

a um we were joking about bitcoin becoming the reserve currency of the world there's a there's some probability that that might actually end up happening i'm just trying to imagine that some people being rewarded just because they accidentally they happen to discover a technology before someone else right so that's a that's a troubling thought but hold on two questions here so one what you think the probability 50 years out bitcoin is a let's say major global currency or the global reserve currency where would you put that probability number at right now just from the top of my head i would say like five to six percent that is the number that uh keeps coming up so that makes sense uh and then a lot of people use this uh you know notion that because

somebody is early they're lucky right and i think that many of the people who are early say they were lucky right and so um it kind of gets okay put on the shelf we both agree and we move on from the conversation but i would challenge that discovering the technology could be a moment of luck right you randomly came across a website a friend in passing told you about it right there's a whole bunch of things that are just serendipitous about discovering the technology acting on that discovery right is much more intentional so whether you start mining you purchase you know some tokens etc that is more of a self-directed or self-initiated action and then also the ability to have the discipline whether by accident because you forgot that you own the tokens or whatever

or intentionally to hold as that technology becomes more and more valuable over time is still somewhat self-initiated right and so what percentage of people do you think that have either already benefited or stand to benefit in the future is truly luck versus their serendipitous you know discovery of the technology but then they actually take action and they should be rewarded in some way for that action no i i definitely think that uh people deserve a lot of credit it's not that you just like randomly showed up and and we wish and got lucky uh there are many people who were early and they ended up like selling their tokens or they didn't believe in the technology enough so i i definitely want to give credit where credit is due uh i think my

the reason why i feel uncomfortable is the the dynamics of the distributions in the sense that if there is a new invention sure the inventor gets some credit and ends up making some fortune out of that and then there are people who kind of like worked on taking that invention and commercializing it to the rest of the world or let's say that you are you're a kid and you're becoming an engineer you're learning about this new technology and you hope to get a job in that sector right all of that is a slightly different model from a purely token distribution mechanism that here's the initial distribution we're just locking it in uh for the rest of time and without much thought in in most times like when we were doing our token distribution we actually like

spent you know months and months like agonizing over how this should look like um and and actually ended up taking the least amount of tokens for the project creators out out of like most major projects out there and that was one of the reasons for it um but i feel like not we don't even have the models to actually able to study the long-term implications of some of these distributions absolutely i i think that um admitting that we don't know yet right is a big step for a lot of people. Um, and then we've got to really focus on figuring out because there, there's a, uh, there's an intersection of what is right, what is fair and what is economically sustainable. Right. And so it's not a very, it's not a simple decision. Um, and I don't think we've

had enough experience watching some of the previous attempts at token distribution play out to really know what the impact even is of those attempts. Right. And you just gotta go through the cycles over a couple of years to really figure that out yep and um i was going through my list of fears and the next one is interesting that i feel like because i work in crypto people sometimes assume that i am against governments like i i might i might have my personal views on you know governments are inefficient or they shouldn't be like too large or this and that but i think people just assume that i'm an anarchist i'm not uh and at the same time like uh i feel like personally i feel like i'm somewhere in the middle right um but we don't realize the implications

that what if governments cannot collect taxes anymore right like some people get really excited about that notion but i'm a little bit scared by notions like these that if governments are unable to collect taxes that means that some sort of a new structure would have to evolve for people to self-organize in the physical world and usually when there is large disruptions like like these there are uh like periods even decades uh of of uh of basically chaos right and we might end up seeing those periods in our lifetime if this actually happens right so this is like one of the fears as well. And it's fear of the unknown, right? Less fear of this is what's going to happen. I don't like that from happening, right? It's more of if we do get to a situation

where governments can't collect taxes, what happens? I don't know. It sounds like you don't know either, right? And so that is scary, right? I think that's completely fair. I want to go back to something you said earlier, the other time about government in growing up, right? And so this idea of a single channel where you're getting news history etc and you're getting a very specific a very politicalized view of the world what was it from your memory the first time you realized that there was other narratives right or other perspectives on whether it was news history etc like what do you remember what that was and kind of walk us through like what that feeling is like because i don't think most americans ever get to experience that yeah i can

i can share a personal story yeah it's basically i think um one of the first times that i uh was out of the country i think it was i got a paper published somewhere after my undergrad i was out of the country it was in canada somewhere and there was a cab driver who was from bangladesh and i was being very friendly with him and i even said something like you know uh like like like pakistan and bangladesh are are super close and he just gave me a weird look uh and and the the story there is that they used to be the same country with india in the middle and there was a war uh after which bangladesh was separated from the country and so my dad um he actually served in the army right so not only that i had that single uh state-sponsored channel like my dad

and all his friends also had this view of the war. You had the army-sponsored stories. Yeah, the army-sponsored story that, you know, Pakistan actually tried helping Bangladesh. Absolutely. India was trying to meddle around, and they ended up, like, taking parts of our country and made it like something else.

And I completely missed out on that entire story about how there was a movement by the local people who were being suppressed to actually gain freedom from Pakistan. And the Pakistani army was actually blamed of genocide, right? And this is a very tricky topic to bring up in my household. Like, I'm not going to, like, basically have a conversation with my dad that you were part of this war. Absolutely.

No one ever told me that, you know, that there are allegations of genocide there. uh so i think it's stuff like that that when when you read material um that where you have the freedom of choice like i can go and and try and read an indian author or a bangladeshi author or a neutral party and then then a pakistani author as well like i think i'll end up walking away with a better understanding of what might have happened versus if um if if you have very limited sources or limited options but for me personally that was like you know i i was old enough i was like early 20s or so that it suddenly made me start to question any belief that i help right that that it's like an eye-opener that oh no the world is not how you think it is always

be on guard and always be looking out for things that you just missed out on and assume that they are a certain way there's a point in most people's life right where they realize uh there is a separation between belief and fact and for the most part right some of it is just social control or you know uh some of it is uh it's much easier to teach kids with stories than you know hey this is the fact uh but you grow up believing the stories right so you have belief in things and this is everything from religious to you know christmas you know all kinds of stuff right and then when you get the facts it all of a sudden you start to question your beliefs and then it makes you almost want more facts, right?

You almost become addicted to the facts and it's, you know, if you tell me every single fact and then I'll make my own decision, right? And I think that one thing that we tend to here in the United States in a very Western centric world, it's a very, you know, nationalistic view of the world, right? And so we're presented with a set of facts

but if you take those same facts and you present them to somebody somewhere else in the world, very different perspective, right? And I think that part of crypto and the beauty of this is this is a global phenomenon, right? This is technology now empowering not just access to information and access to choice, but it is allowing people with very different perspectives in life to collaborate and build technology, right? And so you who grew up with this state-sponsored television channel have a view on certain things that somebody who didn't grow up with that don't have. And so just the simple idea of a powerful government being able to dictate a message has an impact on your views, right? And so I think that there are probably things that you and I believe today that we don't yet realize are actually inaccurate or we will evolve those thoughts as we get presented with more facts, more access to information, and a more globalist view, right?

Yep, absolutely. And I think it's very hard to do that, right? Like it's very hard to always be questioning your own beliefs because you also don't want to cross over and cross the line of paranoia. But I think it's generally it's a healthy thing for your brain if you're just a little bit on your guard all the time. Absolutely. So speaking of that, what is one belief that you have in the crypto space that you think a high degree of other people, a high number of other people would disagree with and so it would be a controversial belief uh i'm gonna rephrase that so i'm gonna i'm gonna rephrase you have to answer it though to um it's it's the same question but uh i'm gonna rephrase it to what's the one belief that

i had that if i tweet about it people are going to start yelling at me okay perfect uh so i think the belief is that um regulation might not be bad for the industry right like it's uh i think again all all the anarchists and and and people who are on one end of the spectrum in the space might might disagree that no this is why we came to crypto to begin with and no good can come out of regulations but um i just think that not all regulations exist like regulations some of the regulations exist for good reason absolutely and i completely understand that things become bureaucratic over over a long time uh some of the things that needed to exist 50 years ago 100 years ago they might not make sense today but i think it's a spectrum

and i'm somewhere in the middle of the spectrum than on either end and i actually think that where we are today crypto has such a bad reputation in the general press uh that it's actually holding us back to reach the broad markets and and uh just like a like a broader user base because of this um clash almost or the story that is being painted in the media that here are a bunch of anarchists who are fighting with governments here are a bunch of people who want to have these crypto tokens that cannot be taxed or you know regulators can come down and and scrutinize these projects because they don't know where the creators are and and so on and so forth i don't think that's healthy for the ecosystem right so give me an example of

a piece of regulation you think would be good for the industry that maybe other people would disagree with uh so i think again i there's something on which i cannot get too specific but let's just say that um there's a lot of discussion about utility tokens that you know these tokens are like arcade tokens and you need them to go play an arcade game right so there is no reasons for regulators to come in and try and regulate these tokens because that just doesn't make sense but i think if you look at the reality on the ground usually these tokens are being developed by a team usually under a corporation right and without that corporation these tokens wouldn't be worth anything or the protocol would never get developed right so if the regulators are

are coming in and asking questions there are good reasons for doing that right because there is actually so much bad behavior going on in the industry in general that it's it's giving us a bad name absolutely so i think just because someone something has a utility and it looks more like an arcade token doesn't mean that under certain circumstances uh some regulations don't apply yeah the example i usually use it and i think this is what you're saying is um so imagine if somebody wanted to build an arcade right they said to potential investors give me money and i will give you arcade tokens i then take your money and while you're holding the arcade tokens i go and i buy a piece of land i start a business i build a building right i build out the arcade and on day

one i open the doors and i say hey congratulations i used your money and i you know built this business come use your arcade tokens right the idea that those arcade tokens are securities when you're using them probably doesn't fly right because they're an arcade token you're using it you're getting value out of it, right? All this stuff. The idea that you gave me money and I went and I built all this stuff with it and you have no ownership, right?

Or no claim to, I think is a bad investment opportunity, right? And so I think teams have actually done a pretty good job in terms of in their documentation, explicitly saying you have no ownership. This is not debt. You know, they really are putting the disclaimers in. But I think that where the question becomes is if I am selling you as a potential investor, these arcade tokens, and I don't deliver on what I said, again, where is the line, right?

What repercussions should you have even if it is not equity, right? And if you do not have any recourse, that is a huge incentive for bad acting, right? Because you basically gave me the money and I just don't feel like doing it anymore, right? Well, that's not a good situation for you. And I think that's where regulators are really worried about is there's money transacting or changing hands. How do we protect the people who are giving up money, right, in exchange for these, you know, RK tokens, et cetera? Yeah, I think that's a great example for the RK token versus actually the act of building something that starts having a utility down the road. Yeah, for sure.

um what um what company do you think is one of or the most important company to the kind of sustainability of crypto over the next you know 10-15 years i feel like um i'm a little bit biased in the sense that i always end up giving the answer zcash and filecoin mostly because i'm pretty close with both zuku and juan and and for me the reason is a little bit like um like they understand what the challenges are and they're pretty much grounded in both kind of like the technical limitations and uh they understand the the what the enormous challenge it is to get any of these things working over a long run and get them in the hands of millions of people Whereas I feel like without taking in names, usually if I'm at a crypto event, there's a lot of excitement, but it's a little bit disconnected both from technical realities and market realities, right?

So I think those two people, they have already done great work, and I feel like that they will continue to do so. Got it. And so this is an interesting point. What you're really talking about here is there's the technological success, right? So you have to build something that works. And when you do that, it really only matters if people actually use the working technology, right? If you build something that works and nobody uses it, it doesn't really matter if it works or not, right? I think in 2016, I raised some red flags on scalability of blockchains. I said that without taking names, there are certain projects out there that if you look at the technology, it just simply does not scale to the extent that you know it wouldn't even get a million users on

the platform right two years down the road now i think at least that challenge is well understood like if you're in crypto everyone is now yeah you know blockchains don't scale and now there are a bunch of projects we're working on right like some capital went in people are now trying to solve that problem like similarly i think that's just like one particular problem with one particular layer of of what we're trying to build and there are other challenges like that that are not getting enough attention and i usually have respect for people that that are aware of those limitations and they're actually very few absolutely how do you think the um user adoption is going to play out for uh the d apps right so these decentralized applications

that are being built on top of blockchains um let's say that the technology gets solved so products work there's a scalable solution that's in place that we can go from you know no users to billions of users how do teams think about that today and what do you think is going to be the successful path um to really get that adoption yeah so i think on the technology slash infrastructure side i don't think we're there yet i think we're going to stay in that phase for a while um so we at blockstack have roughly done like four years of r&d work just on that problem right on the infrastructure infrastructure scalability specifically right and we have taken the work we have done and we have taken it uh to traditional distributed systems researchers

and have published that at peer reviews venues so i feel like fairly confident that the work that we have done it got the approval of what i consider the experts in those particular problems and and and our our new new blockchain would actually scale out much better than some of the existing solutions that you would see out there uh and and that's not it like i i alluded to this earlier that's not just the problem that the blockchain there it's also a discovery like how do you actually discover if you're not putting data inside the blockchain you're putting it somewhere else how do you discover where that data is and is that reliable would it scale out if millions of people are actually trying to now discover these pointers to to different location

and then persistent storage, right? Like you get free services from Google and Facebook. What you don't see is these massive factories and these massive armies of engineers that they have that are working day and night to keep that data reliable so that you can access it in a really fast way. And you need to solve those problems in the decentralized world.

But I feel confident that, you know, in the next year or two, we would start emerging from this infrastructure phase. and the next two challenges in my mind one is you know this idea of user education and the ux of these decentralized applications people have no idea what private keys are people their tolerance for going through onboarding steps is is is not that high right so it needs to be like super easy for anyone to sign up it needs to be super easy for people to understand like what my credentials are how can i reuse them what happens if i lose access uh

everyone's used to just saying like hey forgot my password send me a new one uh those are those are some like classic things that everyone talks about but i feel like one thing that we don't talk about that much is what's the utility of the decentralized apps right like is it just the fact that it's decentralized okay so what i literally tell people all the time i say uh Just because it's decentralized doesn't mean anyone cares, right? And would you agree that you have to, if you want to displace Facebook with a decentralized version, you have to build a better Facebook that also is decentralized?

Or do you think that the decentralization with a comparable product is enough to get people to move? I think it has to be equal or better. Equal or better, okay. But some functionality that Facebook cannot give you today, right? And that functionality actually gives utility to people. Interesting. That makes sense. And so in this decentralized world, right, how do you think about leadership? Right. So I'll give you an example. Ethereum, right, is considered a decentralized network. There's plenty of people who I'm sure will yell at us for even mentioning that. And there's plenty of people who will agree with us. but vitalik right is seen as a leader if not the leader of this network and so there is still some

single points of centralization even if it might not be in true governance right but but he is the leader how does that evolve over time if we're going to build truly decentralized networks do we always have to have a pseudonymous leader like it with bitcoin and satoshi or is there a world where kind of leadership as we know it today can interact with these decentralized networks and that's okay. Yeah, so one thing I've seen in open source products in general,

this is outside of crypto, that generally the concept of a benevolent dictator ends up working pretty well. Like someone that has authority not because of anything legal or... Social capital. Like just because of their social capital or people believing in what that person is saying it tends tends to work out pretty well plus the

uh plus like market pressure on the technology where you could fork it and and something else can happen right so and those are like checks and balances on the on the leadership team and and i think like in general um the trade-offs are that if you are a startup you know not a crypto startup like straight up traditional company with a strong leadership you can actually move fast you can build things absolutely and and there are a lot lots of benefits for that and on on one side you know you have cases like bitcoin no one knows who stoshi is or a group like who those people are and then at the same time you know they are so decentralized that it's very hard for them to agree on any any single thing there are benefits of that approach and maybe for what bitcoin is

trying to do that's the right approach for that technology but i think in general uh you my view is that you need certain organizations in an ecosystem that have strong leaders and that can actually move fast and build stuff but because there are multiple organizations and multiple parties with different amounts of control and power that keeps like a check and balance on any single entity in that ecosystem i think that makes sense and you can almost have different types so you can have the centralized companies the decentralized companies and if you build the entire ecosystem correctly they coexist and are both successful right yeah and speaking of ecosystem i think that's a change in mindset that a lot of people need to have like also like

entrepreneurs who are thinking of starting companies here you really need to start thinking about how to build an ecosystem and not how to build a startup you would actually find a lot of advice out there from you know silicon valley or vcs about how to build a company i don't think there's any advice out there about how to build thriving ecosystems and that is something that we will start seeing more and more and when you're talking about ecosystem there you're talking more about the community and and the networks and and all these things that tie in around a project that can help make it successful yeah i mean again let's take ethereum uh for example uh there are many companies there's consensus here in new york there's the ethereum foundation there are the

parity people and then there are other uh companies who started like either ethereum events or started consulting with with different governments uh there are people who actually poured a lot of capital into it right people who formed funds and their developers who started building smart contracts or applications on top of ethereum and these are like different entities but they all kind of need each other right so if someone is trying to design a kind of like a crypto ecosystem you would end up having similar needs that you need capital sources you need developers you need people to build on your platform and then your platform itself needs to be decentralized so there might be multiple entities that are needed to actually contribute to the core platform those

are very different challenges from hey i want to start a company i'm going to hire an executive team i'm going to hire engineers right like so that's um that's something i feel like where we as an industry would evolve and best practices might emerge or people might start you know passing uh guidelines to younger entrepreneurs and so on just like we uh what happened in silicon valley in the late 90s and and so on yeah the transfer of information experience right is super important what um what do you do on a daily or weekly basis that you think is important in terms of forming your opinions about the space i feel like um i'm actually this is a personal thing that i've i've been actively trying to disconnect from everything like this is um it might sound

stupid that when i tweet i have to first install the twitter app i tweet and then i delete the app what why uh why that explain that i i i just i just can't take the notifications i can't take the feed and there's no no other way of doing this and in general what i've noticed is that we are just like hyper connected all the time and we are not even realizing it so even if i it's not like i'm i'm going somewhere and having like sitting in a corner having deep thoughts about the industry just by disconnecting actually sometimes give you a better perspective when you come back or or when somebody uh tells you that oh this happened and that happened if you were not like too deep in the day-to-day and like something might appear strange to me which

might not appear strange to me if i was like very actively participating in everything and it's like oh yeah everyone's doing it this way right so i don't know if it's a good strategy but it's a strategy that i've been i've been trying to apply for the last six or eight months is it just twitter or they're like is it kind of technology in general no i i don't read any news i unsubscribe from every single thing it's also about like like just generally i try to minimize information flow coming to me and there are people at block sack you know if there's a lunch conversation going on I would just pick up on something and just hear their version of what's going on. Absolutely.

Has that changed your perception of the accuracy of the news, right? So if you used to, let's say, read the news every day and you're kind of following a story or some sort of trend at detail versus you're at lunch and you hear just that one conversation and it's coming from somebody that you know, what's the difference there, right? In terms of like how you perceive that information. Yeah, I think that made me realize that for that approach to work, you need to surround yourself with really, really good people, right? So it's like, so Jude Nelson,

he did a PhD with me at Princeton as well. And he's one of the core developers on Blockstack. And I feel like I get summaries of what other projects are doing from him. But because I trust him blindly, like i i know that this 10 minute 15 minute conversation uh would fill me in on like 60 70 percent of what that project is up to and if i'm interested i can like take take a deeper dive myself but absolutely like if you're relying on other people for information then who those people

are become extremely extremely uh important absolutely now that makes sense um what's been your biggest surprise over the last three four years that you guys have been uh been building in the space in terms of you know what's already occurred right what happened that you didn't expect um i think a lot of people in crypto kind of take this recent uptick in prices and the amount of capital that came in as like oh we always knew that was going to happen but taking a long enough timeline i think we should take a moment to appreciate that open source software never got any funding um researching new protocols never got any funding like i remember writing a hundred page uh grant application for the for the nsf for something like i think 400k out of which 60

would have gone to princeton as overhead for managing the grant and so you're roughly talking about like 100k to go off and do research on new protocols right whereas if you look at the number of projects who are coming up with ambitious new ideas and people are just throwing money at it like real capital where to the extent that you know some of the projects i was having having discussion with juan about potentially funding research centers like we are at a position where we can actually fund actual research at top universities right i think taking a moment to realize that just two years ago um there was a event decentralized web summit that recently happened in san francisco and it's a it's by the internet archive guys and uh they did a great job

of like inviting uh sir tim berners-lee windsurf like some of the actual internet fathers and putting them in the same room as some of these crypto projects and they did the same thing in 2016 as well and i was just um remembering that in 2016 zcash didn't launch right zuku was still working on least authority um and and and transitioning to zcash juan uh with filecoin and us we were both um graduates of y combinator from 2014 we both had seed rounds of like roughly like a million dollars it's a very small project uh just two years ago and then something happened last year where there was this like crazy amounts of capital coming into the ecosystem so many projects starting so many people getting interested and and i don't think that um the the industry

deserved it or that uh we earned it uh it's something that just happened and i think we need to take a moment to realize that we should be grateful and we should try to act responsibly for what we would do with this opportunity that we have now. Very interesting. So last question for you. What is nobody working on that you think needs to get built? Um, I think there's a lot of talk of, you know, the decentralized web, um, and different projects kind of like have their own disconnected internets almost right. And I don't see an effort where someone is trying to build, uh, either like a search engine that goes across all these different sources and gives a unified experience to

the end user like imagine like uh what the early search engines like you know alphabista did for the early internet users like that they were the gateway to all the information right so it's a search engine that looks up information on let's say if it's on ipfs or swarm or block stack or anywhere else and becomes kind of like a window for these new users i i don't think i've seen a project a true index where you can you can actually get discovery uh that makes sense man um all right you can ask me uh one question and then uh and then one this thing uh i have a very basic question like i feel like um you appeared on twitter as like a storm uh and suddenly you know it's it's it's very hard to actually avoid thoughts coming from you like how did you get

into this ecosystem but more importantly like what was what's what drives you because that one thing i appreciate about you is that your tweets are always like full of energy right like they so my question is always like you know what drives you and how did you get into this yeah so so getting into it um we were early stage investing and uh we started to see more and more founders that wanted to start companies looking at the space looking at technology And the aha for me was one or two of our companies had some of their top talent leave. And so you fund a company, and next thing you know, you know, whatever, top engineer leaves. You're like, what's going on that I don't know, right?

And it was less about they were running from something and they were running to something, right? And so somebody early on had told me, you know, follow the talent, follow the money. And so we started looking, and this is 2016 or so, right, kind of beginning of 2016. and we just kind of like i don't get how an investor plays in this space um and it really was coming down to a lot of the investment opportunities at the time uh that were picking up were these icos and so that you know going back to that arcade example i didn't want to give people money for them to go buy the land build the building build the business and then i just can go use the arcade tokens um and so we start out mining right and this idea that um i'm very

familiar with the data center business and so that i could take a piece of hardware stick it in a space put power uh and then have a subscription cash flow model and not deal with customers right was super interesting right because it's basically a better mining or a better data center business and so as we started to build that um it was in hindsight uh very valuable but we didn't plan for it to be because it allows you to then discover the rest of the ecosystem so the example i use is well if you're mining then you've got to ask yourself what do i do with the tokens well i gotta go get a wallet right so okay where do i get a wallet and then once you get the tokens in the wallet should i sell them into fiat should i hold them in what i'm mining should i diversify

well what are my other options right so you start discovering other projects and you kind of just slowly um you know in a very uh serendipitous way discover a lot of this stuff i don't know if that's possible if you start on kind of the opposite end of the spectrum right if you start from the liquid tokens etc for us it was very natural to start at really the base layer of the infrastructure right and come up um i wish that we could say that we meant to do that right but we didn't um and so i think that that was an interesting way to do it and through most of 16 i didn't have enough confidence to talk intelligently about a lot of it right because i think that it was one of these things where okay i know that we're mining and i get that

business because we're doing it. But could I really describe in detail what that machine is doing? Probably not. Right. And so I think that once I started to gain that confidence of talking about it, I tweet once, tweet twice. Right. And then I realized, oh, wow, people care about this. Right. And you see the engagement, et cetera. And all of a sudden I just said, look, I think that we're going to spend a bunch of time here and let's really double down. Right. And so the stuff on Twitter was really a lot of people in the space are technologists. They speak at an incredibly intelligent level, but it's a lot of jargon, right? It's a lot of kind of deep thoughts, et cetera. And I said, I'm not technical like that, but I have just enough intelligence where

I think I can understand the high level concept. I can't hang with the engineer and describe it in detail, but I get the concept. And if I can take that concept and I can share it, I bet you there's a bunch of people like me out there who would love to understand, you know, these concepts at a high level, and how they apply to their world, right. And so when I started sharing that, I think that kind of drew a bigger audience. And then the really kind of tipping point for me was understanding, it sounds very similar to you that you don't have to be an anarchist to believe that a lot of this will happen right and actually there is a freedom to saying what everyone else is thinking right and so i i really do credit a lot of you know kind of on twitter and stuff if you

see the things that everyone engages with you know these tweets that explode it's because i'm just saying what people think right and so the the uh the one that always uh cracks my partners up is when i say uh the currency of choice of you know money launderers terrorists criminals around the world is a u.s dollar well that's just an aggregate data-based fact right and you can make data say whatever you want you know and all this stuff but a lot of people who actually believe that right because it's true and so when you say it they're like wow i can't believe he said that and then they engage with it it takes off and so um the flip side of the negative side of that is there are a lot of things i want to say right and there's a lot of things you want to say and

So you, you, you do learn to, uh, you know, say a lot of it, but there's some things that just, you know, not worth saying. Um, but, but I do think that, uh, that aha around Twitter, um, really drove a lot of the growth and the engagement. Um, and you know, frankly, Twitter's probably been the best tool for when I put these ideas out. I mean, you know, I'm sure just like you, I get people who absolutely love it and they agree and they think it's, you know, this great idea.

And I get people who literally think that I'm an idiot and it's the dumbest thing they've heard on Twitter. And then they tweet that at me, right? You're an idiot and that's the dumbest thing I've heard today. And so what it does is it allows these ideas to go through like some attrition, right? And really kind of get beat up and see where your beliefs are once you watch all these different people respond. And then it's brought a lot of people, right? So, you know, people will reach out and say, hey, I saw you said this, right? I disagree, I agree and all this stuff.

And so it is, it's a very interesting way of engaging on a topic. But I think that my thoughts have evolved a little bit of like, Twitter and the internet in this decentralized world is a little bit like a coffee shop, right? It's rather than in the 90s and early 2000s in Silicon Valley, everyone goes to the same coffee shop and they talk and there's all these exchanges of ideas and collision of people and relationships, etc. Well, now everyone, for the most part, if you're a user of Twitter, you get the opportunity to participate in that to some degree, which I think is powerful, but it allows people to go from completely off the map to well-connected very quickly. yep and just to uh go back full circle on how i've been consuming information these days uh this actually came up in those lunch conversations where someone brought up you know something you said on twitter oh man someone else brought up on a different day i'm like wait a minute who's this guy and then i actually went and and looked you up but it's been a pleasure it was great connecting with you on twitter absolutely well hopefully uh at least one of

them said i was smart the other said i was stupid so you got both both sides of the argument there no man but but thank you so much for coming i really appreciate this i think that um you know hopefully this was helpful to a lot of people and uh you've got a very unique view of the world so so keep going because i think a lot of us are cheering for you awesome thank you so much this was fun hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a

long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain