The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin & Ethereum Will Never Die | 99% Of Tokens Will | Jeff Garzik, Co-Founder Of Bloq

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

99% of tokens and chains will die, but Bitcoin and Ethereum will prevail. What other tokens and chains will come out on top? Only time will tell. Jeff Garzik, Co-Founder of Bloq and contributor to Bitcoin Core, joined us for an incredible discussion about our future. We talked about the current state of the Metaverse, whether or not crypto is ready to scale, and how humans are exploring further and further into space every single day. Jeff continues to to push boundaries as he helps develop infrastructure and applications for Web3 at Bloq. JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS ►► Have you ever had your exchange go completely offline during days of high volatility? Of course you have. We've all been through it. Those days are no longer with Bullish. Bullish is a new breed of digital asset exchange that empowers users to trade with deep and predictable liquidity across highly variable market conditions. They also have incredible automated market-making and industry-leading security. I can't get enough of this platform and it's fully regulated. Sign up here: https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bullish/youtube Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U.S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. EPISODE LINKS Jeff Garzik: https://twitter.com/jgarzik Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c

The things I was worried about in 2010, I'm not worried about anymore in terms of just a complete ban. You know, in the early days when something is very small, regulators, we were feared that Bitcoin would be seen as competition to the dollar. And Department of Treasury would just say, nope, no competition. Goodbye. Private money, sorry. Sorry. Yeah. But happily, the United States had a very healthy history of private money. And, you know, back in the 1800s, some banks would issue their own currencies, stuff like that. And that history carried forward into today. This episode is sponsored by my good friends at Bullish. Stay tuned for more information on this amazing company later in the episode. Rarely do you have the opportunity to someone who interacted regularly with Satoshi Nakamoto. But today I had the opportunity to speak with Jeff Garzik,

whose resume is longer than the Constitution of the United States. This is an absolutely whirlwind conversation that will blow your mind, including how we get to Mars and how soon that's going to happen. So, I mean, you've obviously done basically everything. Yeah. Right. That's why I joked that you haven't slept. Why Bitcoin and why so early? Because most people at that time saw it and said, you're all nuts.

And dismissed it for another five or six years until the price was high enough for them to say maybe this is a thing. Yeah. Yeah. We can talk about that. Are we live? You have at it. We like to get all the personality at the beginning before you know you're being recorded ah very sneaky yeah yeah the the early bitcoin stuff

there's there's tons of stuff to talk about there um i uh you know being a nerd there was slash.org as a website called news for nerds and that's how i and many others, Jed McCaleb of Mt. Gox and Stellar fame, a bunch of developers found Bitcoin, all from that one post. And, you know, Bitcoin, a decentralized currency. And I'd been waiting for that for like 10 years. As I read a lot of science fiction, I encourage people to read science fiction. Nonfiction is like always backwards looking. Science fiction is always forward looking, optimistic, looking at the future, how to build the future. And so it's always been a really good inspiration. And I knew that decentralized currency was coming. You know, I've known for for 30 years now. It's just a matter of when and how, not if. And so when I saw that slash.org post,

you know, in my egotism, I said, it's not a decentralized currency. It's got to be like five servers in AWS and that's it. And happily, you know, it was open source. I downloaded the source code and proved myself wrong. You know, it was not just five servers in a data center that coordinated leader election with the Paxos protocol and stuff like that. It was truly something new and novel and different. And the cool thing about open source is, you know, nobody knew who Satoshi was.

He doesn't have a CV. What's his resume? What is his credentials? Who knows? You know, I didn't know, but I was an engineer. So I could download the source code, look under the hood and say, you know, this is not bullshit. Can we say that on? Yeah. Yeah. This is not bullshit. It is a bullshit. It is a, you know, it is as what it's claimed to be. And obviously there were a lot of, you know, ways that Bitcoin might

not succeed in 2010. There were a thousand ways that it could get over-regulated. It could just get totally adopted like Liberty Reserve or Pecunix Gold with the criminal community and nothing else. You know, there was this worry about the Stamp Act and all these other early regulations that people might or might not think apply to crypto. Lots of risk. But again, open source means you can peer under the hood. You don't have to care about somebody's CV. You don't have to care about their reputation. It's all about the code and it's all about the merit.

And, you know, coming from, you coming from well over a decade in open source, Linux kernel, I worked under Lena Storvalds for about a decade, the inventor of Linux. And it was the open source process. Just show up, propose a change in the form of a patch and send it to Satoshi. And so the very first day I did. And it was calculating how many transactions per second does Bitcoin need to do in order to hit PayPal's limits.

So my first change that I proposed was maybe this is like foreshadowing was a block size change. Oh, boy. It was like, we got to do 4,000 transactions per second in Bitcoin or this puppy is not going to go anywhere. That was literally my first proposed change to Bitcoin. Obviously, since it breaks consensus, it was immediately shot down, of course. But again, that's the open source process. As you propose a change, people review it.

Just like in chemistry or biology, it gets peer reviewed. And if it's good, it goes in. If it's not, it goes in the trash bin. And, you know, again, that was a not good patch. It went in the trash bin, but Satoshi got back to me immediately. And it wasn't just a screw off it was you know this is not right but here's the reasons um but you know keep contributing and so i did i did a lot of other changes i made uh back in the day for example you had to download the

entire blockchain and it took forever and so i made this like more than twice as fast. And so all of a sudden people could use Bitcoin more quickly than they could before. Or ripping out the CPU miner from Bitcoin. The early, early Bitcoin was just a big hairball of Windows software. There was a user interface with a wallet and a node and a miner. You could like go to like file mining, click the checkbox and it'd have a little, you know, mining icon breaking rocks type of thing. And all of that was stuffed together in like five source code files, which were the ugliest spaghetti code that you ever saw.

And so that really told me that Satoshi was absolutely a genius, but he was also self-taught. It was super clear that it wasn't formal, unit tested, regression tested, stress tested, fuzz tested, heavily software engineered code. It was someone who taught themselves coding and they put this together. He did what was absolutely genius is he took algorithms that were cryptanalyzed, well-tested off a shelf, you know, proof of work, hash functions, network functions, and then put it all together in something completely unique. And that was when I knew that, you know, this is literally the decentralized currency that I've been waiting for.

It really is decentralized. It really does not depend on somebody's CV. It does not depend on an angel investor, you know, making a Series A commitment or anything like that is pure technology and purely based on people's adoption people's interest you know people's philosophy totally craig wright right definitely describing him no no i got like five no no no all. Let me give five notes to that. And if I get five cameras to say no to you. Totally in jest. Interestingly, though, what you just described at the beginning of Bitcoin and all the things that you just went around about, not a Series A investor. Well, now you're actually describing everything else being built in crypto now.

Is that problematic or is that fine now because we started at Bitcoin? Oh, that's a tough question. You asked tough questions, sir. Sorry. My answer has become a bit more complicated. One of the things that we see a lot of is we see a lot of people today as we sit recording this not building on Bitcoin. And part of the reason for that is Bitcoin is doesn't include that extra token, obviously, but that also impacts the economics of building businesses on Bitcoin

is that if you want to build on Bitcoin, you can't just release a token and have some extra or some NFTs and have some extra juice to give you some runway, you either are breaking out the credit cards or you're hitting venture capital. And so, or you're, you know, a college student who's enjoying ramen as I did many decades ago. I still enjoy ramen. And you're kind of, you know, just self-funding with your own time and energy and stuff like that. But it's really hard to build a business on Bitcoin without that extra juice. And so just natural economic incentives, people are going to go the NFT route, the play to earn route, the what's the latest A16Z trend route, you know, that sort of thing.

I'm a big fan of A16Z, by the way. But that fundamentally is a handicap on bitcoin as bitcoin is you know it's it's my my heart that's what got me started but it's also kind of ossified and it's economically difficult to build on it versus building on some of these other systems where there's more funding or more developer energy or just flat out my knowledge as a developer it's literally harder to build on bitcoin than on other systems just from a maybe that's a good thing engineering it is it is no you're absolutely right it is so that that's the kind of you know the yin and the yang of building on bitcoin so it's's not an easy answer.

You talked about for you that a decentralized currency was not how or when, you know, get the idea. Are there other things like that now that you think are inevitable that are coming that we haven't seen yet? Personal, they call it AGI, Autonomous Generalized Intelligence, basically like the friendly Terminator type robot AI stuff. You're making me smarter. That kind of thing's coming. You'll have an AI personal assistant on your phone. You'll pull out your phone and you'll be like, whatever you call it, like, hey, pal, you know, call such and such. And, you know, already my Google assistant can literally do what I just said

just from basic voice recognition, but they don't have context. They don't have, well, Jeff said, call Momo. Who the heck is Momo? You know, a personal assistant would know that, but a computer doesn't. So it, robots that start to learn your personality and start to be able to interact on a quasi-human level, that's coming and that's going to be enabled by crypto. Because if you can store a random number on a little piece of flash drive, that can be a self-sovereign entity thanks to crypto that could be a private key which controls funds which controls smart contracts which actuate all sorts of things in the real world which can hire people so you'll have uh you know i'm i'm definitely on the robot future where robots will be hiring people which will be hiring robots and and and on and on down the line we'll be in the autonomous cars that bid for lane space on the roads and uh okay i'm in

well no hands i'm in my tesla yeah no hands that's right assistant and it's like uh sir garzik would you like to use use the VIP lane for an extra Bitcoin? I'll be like, heck yeah. So it'll bid for lane space and go. So that's the kind of autonomous, robot-driven, crypto-infused future that we're headed towards. Well, I like because you said that nonfiction is looking in the rear view and this is science fiction. I actually had the pleasure of sitting with Neil Stevenson. Which is fantastic.

Huge fan. Everybody in crypto is a debt to Neil. Yeah, which was absolutely amazing. That future sounds incredible, but there's some potential dystopian aspects to that too. Sure, sure. Absolutely. I definitely refer uh everyone uh listening or

watching to check out a commercial called alice it was uh produced by uh the chobani yogurt company but it's a uh it's a near future vision uh it's it's very pastoral this video it's uh you know there's a lot of permaculture, there's a lot of naturally grown stuff, but then you see a drone fly into the video to deliver some food. Then you have an autonomous vehicle, you know, drive you to your friend's house. And, uh, I like to think that that's the kind of future that we ought to head towards. It's not just like Blade Runner, you know, no green. It's all robots and metal. And, you know, it's very much and I notice a lot of the especially the Bitcoin maxis robots and machines and you know connecting humans

and ubi and you know improving how humans live in the world today that's i know we're getting into like cliched startup territory but that's that's pretty much uh i think where where we need to be heading and that's kind of my positive vision for the future i love the jetsons as a kid and i feel like yeah absolutely because we don't have even a flying car so we do have moving sidewalks we do very much have moving sidewalks which is true very popular in in the jetsons what was your favorite book uh neil stevenson snow crash uh correction that's my second favorite book my first favorite book is neil stevenson's zodiac nobody's ever heard of it nobody's read it it was his first book and you know if you thought snow crash was you know well plotted well paced so zodiac's like 2x that i've actually never read

zodiac of course read snow crash yeah you have the feeling that somebody dropped acid and wrote this book because it's like i wish i could have asked him if he wrote that book. But I can't go back in time, unfortunately. And I know in your current capacity, you're actually investing in metaverse. You have a metaverse portfolio. What excites you about what's actually being built in that space now? Is there anything that terrifies you? Is there anything that is just not going to work and it's totally broken and well uh part of my part of my core philosophy is it's it's uh i i refer to darwin a lot meaning that uh a lot of people through a lot of projects out there and just like the venture capital power law uh 90 will fail and then 10 will succeed

yeah or maybe you know five percent will like limp along and then five percent will be uber and lyft and unicorns and and all that stuff that's where we are with metaverse is we're trying to figure out what the fuck we want throwing stuff at the wall yeah we're i use that literally i i use the phrase throwing spaghetti at the wall all the time and to see what sticks i've uh i own land in decentral land uh since it uh came out um it reminds me of second life from a decade ago which is i say that all the time people are like what's that we've been here before i played the same yeah yeah it's like we've been here before a decade ago um but uh there there's at the same time, we're all trying because we all want it to succeed. We all want there to be that.

Oh, shoot. What was that Steven Spielberg movie recently? It's not Ender's Game. It was the Oasis. Oh, yeah. Help me out, audience. Ready Player One. Thank you, audience. which i reference all the

time and just blank yeah i just don't put me on jeopardy i know the answer is so so we all want ready player one oasis you know haptic suit type stuff um you know that fully immersive experience there's uh a lot of benefits uh that are purported, claimed, hoped. And we all at least want to try. And so I'm never going to like shit on someone trying to innovate, trying to reach that goal, even if they don't. That's specifically one of the reasons why I dislike the word shitcoin. There are a lot of shitcoins out there. Yeah, we can both admit that but at the same time if i'm just assuming blankly j random developers building

a shit coin that's doing him a disservice because he's most likely you know honestly trying to figure out stuff he's trying to build something that he finds personally rewarding and maybe change the future as well so uh you know, I dislike shitting on innovation. And so while metaverse stuff is kind of nascent and not very exciting and second lifey, you know, I don't want it to go away. I want those efforts to continue and build on each other. You talk about the term shitcoin and hating it and it becomes all encompassing. And obviously, then every good thing gets thrown in the bucket. I would argue that in this space, we have a huge language problem in general. Shitcoin is terrible.

Cryptocurrency is the worst term in the history of mankind because 99% of them have no intention of being currencies and it pisses off regulators and governments. Oh, yeah. Right? Algorithmic stablecoin. Right? So I actually think that maybe we need better PR for the entire agency or something. But I think we actually have a huge problem with language. We do. We do. And like scam is another thing.

Everything's a scam if it doesn't work. Yeah. And like, you know, the Bitcoin max is like everything is not Bitcoin is a scam and stuff like that. And to me, that like helps the real scammers hide. Because if you're like this legit project and BitConnect are both scams, you know, I just can't take that person seriously because it's not helping regulators or normal people sort the wheat from the chaff, which is really, I i think the core crypto problem today is like how do you know what's what is a scam or a ponzi versus what's uh quality versus you know just new and hopeful and naive right we get a lot of something someone just tried and it didn't work exactly damn exactly exactly and so how you know i think a lot about uh as I build Vesper.finance, which is DeFi Dapp really focused on kind of average people just using DeFi very safely. I think about all the ways that that can go wrong.

And then I think, how do we protect people just coming into the space? And so that's like one of the biggest questions I asked myself this year is, you know, new person, Joe or Jane just heard about crypto. They probably heard like some random crypto that's awful, but that guy, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that brings them into crypto. Okay. What's step two that helps them sort the wheat from the chaff, sort the good from the bad. I don't have an answer. Right. Well, the good news for you is that we've now been through all the iterations of shit that breaks. And it seems right now to be breaking left and right and terrifying. The bad news is that people are getting hurt when that happens. But what you just addressed to me is outside of our vernacular, which we talked about, the biggest problem is UX UI. That obviously trickles

down to what you just said, security and being able to do these. But if the average person opens a screen and says, what the hell is this? They never even start because it's too confusing. So how do you build something? You said, how do we get as fast as PayPal? So how do you build something that's as simple as PayPal? Yeah, that I don't have an answer, but I asked that question of myself many times when we're building Vesper.finance. You know, we ask ourself, you know, what mistakes might users make and how do we avoid that? You know, how do we avoid a fat fingered click? How do we avoid? I meant to type in one Bitcoin, but I actually typed in 10 Bitcoin and, you know, then boom, I suddenly 10X my transaction. But they might've done themselves a favor. Exactly. So that's, so absolutely UI UX is

number one, we have a lot of rough edges. edges we got a lot of work to do in crypto broadly wallets still feature long strings of incomprehensible numbers hashes public keys and that's you should never show that to an average person ever ever they have no way of knowing if that's legit or not you know i, I as a developer, I have to like run some command line stuff just to know if this hash really belongs to Scott or it belongs to some Eastern European criminal, you know. And so the average person has no hope. So again, UI UX is so critical and we still got a long way to go.

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You should check them out immediately at bullish.com slash melker. Yeah, and then I would say the next obvious challenge from there, okay, we get the UI, UX right, and now we have the next 100, 200, 500 million people come in. Can anything we've built actually scale to service those people? Yeah, that's another good question. million people come in. Can anything we've built actually scale to service those people? Yeah, that's another good question. Right now we have mentally imaged one of those champagne fountains in your mind is we have like an L1, a layer one blockchain Bitcoin. Okay, it's a champagne flute that fills up. Well, now it's going to start to spill over. So that's what happens

with fees and blockchains as they get used quite a bit. Okay, Ethereum's fees are high, so people are spilling over into BSC and Polygon and Avalanche and Optimism and some of these other L2s. Well, they didn't solve the problem. People just moved, you know, to a less full champagne flute. Well, that champagne flute's going to fill up, meaning that once people are there, fees are up, and then people are just going to move to the third lily pad and fourth and fifth. And it's kind of hopping lily pads to find a ghost town with low fees. But then once everyone moves into the ghost town, it's no longer a ghost town and chain fees go up. So we haven't solved that problem. It's just a cycle. I don't know if it's the Lion King cycle of life or not, but you know, there's a chain with no usage,

then it gets usage, fees get high, and then people economically respond to those incentives they either do less transactions or they find an off-chain l2 roll-up or something like that or they just go somewhere else you know they go to go to end up at like layer five exactly layer one layer twos and now it's zk roll-ups optimistic roll-ups and is it then literally layer three layer four layer five or is there i think paypal is like a layer three right so sometimes you get the the plasma network the lightning network stuff like that so you'll have like the blockchain settlement then you'll have your high speed contract negotiations that sit on top of that and that's where you can scale the payments but they do all have to eventually settle somewhere yeah i don't know if that's what bitcoin or ethereum or ask any leader of any l1

maybe they're right i don't think any of them win i think we'll live in a multi-chain world and whoever actually wins figures out interoperability will probably be the winner but i mean is do we ever get to a layer one that can do everything or is that just an impossible technology? No, no. So it will be the champagne. Despite the fact that Bitcoin maximalists

will give you a different answer, which I love, but there's not going to be one winner. There's going to be a few winners. Again, power law applies. 99% of the tokens will die. 99% of the tokens will die. 99% of the chains will die. But that other 1% is going to be like one or two or three chains. There'll be a Bitcoin. I don't see Bitcoin ever dying. There'll be an Ethereum, you know, there'll

be one or two others. And then there'll be like all the babies that are competing to be a big boy. But that's just, you know, how incentives, network effect, all that winds up concentrating. So you got, you know, the throwing spaghetti at the wall innovation side on L1s, L2s, DApps. But then you have the mature chains. And so far, Bitcoin is kind of the granddaddy. Ethereum is kind of grand central station where bridges and other chains interconnect through Ethereum. And so besides those two, there are not any other obvious winners with staying power. Does the merge concern you? No, it's you know, it'll it'll happen or it won't. And either way, transactions will keep going.

You know, it'll explode or it won't. And either way, transactions will keep going. You know, it'll explode or it won't. And either way, transactions will keep going. You know, there are people that are highly motivated for things to just keep working. You know, people always ask about Bitcoin even like what happens in the event of a hack? What happens in the event of a 51 percent attack? You know, my answer is always a rhetorical question of, are all these holders just going to give up and go home, you know, and not fight back for their assets to be continue to be worth something? No, you know, they're going to engage developers, they're going to engage, you know, everybody to make sure that their blockchain, their assets

continue its integrity following that hack. Certainly doesn't make us very popular with regulators and governments when things break. It doesn't. It doesn't. But that's Darwin at work. You know, this is the natural cycle. They just have to recognize that, you know, we're we're throwing spaghetti at the wall. We're seeing what works. We're seeing what doesn't work um i would like to see a little bit more again getting back to a little bit earlier in conversation uh some more self-regulation self-identification of these are obviously scams and ponzi's and you know using ui and other things to help steer the average Joes away from that stuff. And, you know, maybe there, you know, I'm making this up.

Maybe there needs to be like an expert mode in every wallet that, you know, you can't trade outside of a white list, you know, without that. You have to log 100 hours. Exactly. Exactly. Video games have it and we're treating everything like a video game now anyway. So that makes perfect sense and what i find kind of interesting is that everybody talks about the scams you know and all these things as if they've never existed before oh yeah it's it's money you know scams have have existed as long as money has existed. And so that's definitely frustrating.

I understand, you know, we talk with regulators at Block and Vesper, and we get their frustration. They just see average folks getting hurt. They're not wrong. And so, you know, it's kind of like maybe a rough, super rough analogy is customer support. Nobody ever calls customer support when they're happy. Yeah. as long as you guys know you've been doing a great exactly so like you know congressman congress people only hear like when something blows up or f's up or

something like that um you know they're they're kind of like uh police they only see like the bad part of society and i think that can give a skewed view. But it's it's again, it's Darwin. It's it's a sign of maturity that regulators are looking at crypto. If crypto was small, they'd either just ignore it or ban it. If you had said, hey, there's going to be an executive bill from the president of the United States just about this space. Even two years ago, people would have probably sent you off to the. Exactly. We called it a loony bin. But but I mean we're on the grandest stage we really are and and it's uh it's humbling thinking back to to 2010 of uh you know we where we worried about government

attention you know we we just wanted uh bitcoin, you know, kind of continue to slowly bubble up, to slowly mature. There was a very specific incident in Bitcoin's history. Wikileaks wanted to use, or excuse me, one of the Bitcoin Talk Forum users was contacting Wikileaks to get them to accept Bitcoin because Wikileaks had just had their payment processing cut off. They're like, you're evil Wikileaks. And so PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, they just boom, you know, debanked them. And so, you know, obviously Bitcoin was very early. Few people had heard of Bitcoin. But the people that knew, they were like, hey, this is an alternative. Satoshi very clearly said, no, let's not.

Don't bring it on. You know, we want Bitcoin to mature, to slowly get out in the community, to get adoption in a way that ensures a survival. You know, in 2010, I was a long-haired programmer hippie, worried about, you know, getting arrested for violating the Stamp Act, simply for coding on Bitcoin, because you just didn't know in those days. And, you know, thankfully, in March of 2013, there were Senate hearings, there was regulatory clarity, and that actually, much to libertarian chagrin, helped Bitcoin succeed just about burning down all the institutions. This is about building a currency that's going to work, going to be resilient and going to survive, you know, regardless of what institution, you know, burns down or builds up. There are echoes of what you just described and what's still happening now with regulation and

government. You said you were afraid that you were going to be in violation of the Stamp Act, and then you got some clarity. Well, now on a much larger scale, I think the entire industry, anyone who's building anything, trying to start a company, still has no clarity and is afraid, in the United States at least, to even attempt to innovate, attempt to operate here. Now we're starting to see pushes. We're seeing bills proposed. But don't we still have the same problem, just on a bigger scale? No, it's a good point, and I think that's true to a certain extent. One of the things that people complain about as we record this today, the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. is very much focused on not providing guidance, just providing enforcement. And there have been a lot of complaints about that approach is, you know, a crypto company that literally the position they're in is we have to hope and pray

that we're not a security because, you know, the SEC isn't going to give us any guidance. They're just going to bring the cops when we, you know, break the law. Five years. Yeah. Yeah and so there there is that uh climate but at the same time the things i was worried about in 2010 i'm not worried about anymore in terms of just a complete ban you know in the early days when something's very small regulators uh we were feared that bitcoin would be seen as competition to the dollar and department of treasury would just say, nope, no competition. Goodbye.

Private money, sorry. Yeah. But happily, the United States had a very healthy history of private money. Back in the 1800s, some banks would issue their own currencies, stuff like that. And that history carried forward into today. Other countries, you know, China and Russia, notably, they have a law that basically says the official currency or nothing. And United States, thankfully, is, you know, we have a legal tender law, but it doesn't say or nothing. Right. And so that was the, that was the hole through which all the cryptocurrencies survived.

But yeah, today we still have those worries, but there are more of us. Yeah. And so I'm not a lot more money with a lot more money. So I'm not as worried that just like, and, and it's more about average holders too,

is like, just think through a ban of cryptocurrency. They just say, we don't like it anymore banned and think about every you know it's like 20 25 i've seen stats of americans have used crypto at some point in their lives do you want to piss off one-fourth of the entire nation no but in 2010 it's like do you want to piss off three long haired developers who, you know, are probably pissed off anyway? We don't care. So I think in 2022, crypto companies are in a similar lack of clarity situation. But there's so much more of us and so much more capital that we have the ability to fight back.

I mean, back then you had to worry about them banning it. Now you have to worry about them making a really crappy copy of it in a central bank digital currency. That's right. That's right. Or they think that, you know, love them to death. They think they're helping, but they write the regulation really poorly and it turns out not to help. And so they got a lot of people just, you know, this staff, this staff, this staff,

this lobbyist, this lobbyist this lobbyist and then ripple being like uh funding all this and now we have to like wait for what happens to see what's going to happen to everyone else i thought we'd be in that position i mean if there's people i try to have i've had this argument so many times you're like i want ripple to die i hate ripple i'm like actually you really want them to win or else your thing will probably also be deemed a security. Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, Ripple's been my classic, this is obviously a security example since it's been in existence. And if Ripple can exist, then that means, by implication, others, which are much less obviously a security, are in, I hope, a better place. Right.

I guess what I just said, it speaks to the fact that, and we touched on this earlier, there's this massive tribalism, right? Bitcoin maximalism, Ethereum maximalism, XRP army, Link Marines, whatever it is. Aren't we just way too small not to be completely working together and focused on pushing the entire ecosystem forward? We are. We need that in our competition. Yes and yes. together and focused on pushing the entire ecosystem forward we are that inner competition yes and yes is uh you know we need that competition it's very healthy it's very darwinian um it's very natural the you know the winners will bubble up etc i wish there was more working together specifically like i said on scams and stuff like that. But, you know,

we all get kind of reflective after many years and it's it moves into the philosophy side of tribalism is in our DNA. You know, look at sports teams, look at politics, look at stuff outside of crypto. You know, you know, I'm going to disinherit you because you're a Democrat or I'm going to disinherit you because you're a Republican. And it's all just tiresome. It is really. I think that's the best way. It's just absolutely exhausting. You can see why people want to go plug into Ready Player One and opt out of this world entirely.

Or, you know, out of this world. That's why we launch satellites. I've been a sci-fi nerd, you know, since I was born. I grew up going down to Cape Canaveral watching space shuttle launches, stuff like that. And so that was the impetus for let's get a open source node in space. So I created the first, as far as I know, open source satellite. Real quick history, there's something called ITAR, I-T-A-R, export controls, where if you have a technology, in the early 1990s, this included encryption. You could not send it outside the United States, otherwise they put you in jail for a very long time. Well, the Clinton executive order in 1996 said that we could export encryption.

That was a sea change. It opened up cryptocurrency. It opened up the Internet. it really changed so many things because before that Clinton executive order, there were crippled versions of encryption that were for U.S. people. And there were non crippled versions of encryption that were for non U.S. people. And if you wanted to get the better version, you could download it. That's fully legal, but you couldn't transmit it elsewhere as an American citizen. And this encryption executive order really, like, totally changed export controls.

And fast forwarding to 2014, satellites are under those same export controls as encryption. I wanted to say this is totally ridiculous. I'm using off the shelf hardware, off the shelf software, open source cryptocurrency software. You know, China, Russia, North Korea, anybody can download this tech just off the internet. This is ridiculous that I can't post it to the internet. And so I went through Department of State, Department of Commerce, and got an exemption letter saying that, yes, you can post your satellite design to the internet.

And that was the story of the world's first open source satellite that eventually made it into orbit. I was a space camp kid. Oh, cool. My dad is the head of the emergency room at the University of Florida, and they randomly got the space shuttle contract when I was a kid. And so he de facto became the head doctor for the space shuttle program.

Oh, that's fantastic. Every single launch when I was a kid in the early 80s. Absolutely incredible. So I could share that. I think it was really informative to be able to see that. Yeah, wasn't it an experience? It's like 1983, and there's people going into space. And now you're launching nodes into space.

What else are we going to do up there? Are we going to Mars? Absolutely. We're going to literally go into the moon next year. Not physically, but we're sending hardware in a rover. And we're going to just do some test transactions, test communication, stuff like that. But fundamentally, you know, we as a human race are moving outward into the solar system. We're going to, outside of a decade, land more people on the moon. Outside of 15 years, we're going to land more people on

Mars. We're literally right this second, Elon Musk, Starlink, some other projects are wiring our solar system for networking such that once you go outside Earth's gravity, it's very easy, backing up a second, it takes a lot of rocket fuel just to escape Earth's gravity. But once you escape Earth's gravity, you can go to the moon, you can go to Mars, you can go to the asteroid belt. So this is developing depots in space, fuel depots, space stations where people stop by and then, you know, kind of bus stations in space. All of this is coming in the next 10 years. And it's all due to economics. And that economics is all due to Elon Musk. And that, I drill it down to Elon Musk posted the price of a Falcon 1 rocket launch on his website. You know, most people listening to this are like, okay. But for the space community,

these launches usually cost billions of dollars and they're secretly negotiated between defense contractors, which are absolutely huge. And he totally rebooted space economics with that one rocket pricing. And all of that has kind of trickled down from what he did on that day with Falcon 1 pricing. So now we see startups like Space Chain, which is one of our portfolio companies that sends the aforementioned satellites into space. We can do that for $100,000, $200,000. Ten years ago, that would be $10 million, $100 million to do literally the same form factor satellite.

So the cost of a kilogram to space is falling like a rock, which means that average people's access to space is increasing every single day. And as a science fiction nerd, as a space nerd, that just makes me so happy. Technology is deflating yeah yeah it's amazing you know computers are getting cheaper space access is getting cheaper all of the all of the the information uh technology related economics are are just going down and that that that means nothing but good for humanity i can honestly say that this conversation blew my mind they should just let you talk to everyone all the time. Thank you so much for doing it. Absolutely. It was fun. Thank you so much for listening to

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