This Week in Startups - Web 3 is Going Great with Molly White | E1396

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

First, Molly Wood quickly sums up crypto donations flowing to Ukraine (2:03). Then, Jason and Molly chat with Molly White, the creator of the website "Web 3 is Going Great." We discuss the problems she identified with Web 3, speculation vs. building, DAOs, decentralization and more (7:01). (00:00) Molly intros today’s episode, crypto in Ukraine, Jason and Molly interview guest Molly White (02:07) The ways crypto has been used to help Ukraine (07:01) Molly and Jason interview guest Molly White (10:32) Mercury - Banking built for startups. See more at https://mercury.com/twist (12:02) Molly White talks about her website, web3isgoinggreat.com (14:07) Molly White talks about newer technologies in web3 and their future (17:06) Grifting in web3 (18:35) What it takes to truly understand web3 (20:38) RealGoodFoods - Go to https://realgoodfoods.com and use code TWIST for $15 off! (22:06) Bitcoin toxicity, brigading, and wash trading (25:34) Melania chimes in (25:43) Categories of grift in NFT’s (30:47) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist (32:03) Jason predicts NFT lawsuits in 2023 (33:06) Toxicity in the bitcoin cult (35:00) What are good uses for blockchains and the web3 shift (35:55) Jason’s defense of bitcoin (36:42) Molly White’s counter to Jason’s defense of bitcoin (38:17) Problems with energy consumption in bitcoin (40:22) Can bitcoin help store monetary value in authoritarian countries? (42:39) Are DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) a good idea? (48:27) Questions companies need to be able to answer in the life of their product (49:39) The downfall of Enron: “How does this company make money?” (52:16) The caveats of being ok with true decentralization (55:10) Doxxing in crypto (01:04:03) Brigading in crypto and social media Check out Web 3 is Going Great: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everyone, we have a great show for you today, and it's kind of accidentally on trend with the way that things are going in the world. We have an amazing interview. Jason and I talked to Molly White, a longtime Wikipedia editor, but most recently, she's gotten pretty well known as the creator of the blog feed and the Twitter feed. Web3 is going great, where she breaks down the scams and the hacks and the pump and dumps and some of the questionable claims around the value of Web3 and crypto. it was a really fun conversation. It's a great back and forth, a really pretty in-depth, and frankly, I think, fairly measured and analytical exploration of this whole like mix-em-up madness world around crypto. But just in the days since we talked to Molly White,

lots of the things we talked about are starting to play out in some form on the global stage. Obviously, we have all been following the conflict in Ukraine. All I do is like a Twitter all day, every day. And in the tech and Web3 and crypto world, there have been all kinds of developments and donations and speculation about how Bitcoin and crypto could or could not help out the people of Ukraine. Now, Molly White is a skeptic. And yet, with the situation in Ukraine, we seem to have found a couple of examples of crypto helping out. It's going to be a great episode. Stick with us.

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and Our Crowd. Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join OurCard for free at OUR-C-O-WD.com slash twist. All right, let's get to some of these developments in the crypto world with respect to Ukraine and where it might actually be providing value and not in the pump and dump way. As of Monday morning, when I'm recording this, Ukraine had already received about $20 million in crypto donation. What does that actually mean and can they use it? Well, let's break it down on Saturday.

Ukraine's official Twitter account and their vice prime minister tweeted the following, basically soliciting crypto donations. They said, stand with the people of Ukraine, now accepting cryptocurrency donations, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT, and then gave wallet numbers so that you could do these donations. Coin desk published an article earlier this morning tracking a bunch of these donations and withdrawal activity by Ukraine. Because remember, all of this data is on chain. And so we can see one of the big factors and conversations that we had with Molly White is like,

it's great if you get Bitcoin and you have some sort of cryptocurrency in a wallet. But if all hell is breaking loose and the power's out, can you actually access it? It looks like if we are able to get insights on whether or when Ukraine withdraws funds, we'll find out. And we'll also find out if it's potentially dangerous that we'll Russia can track these transactions as well. Data so far, according to CoinDesk, shows that Ukraine has received about $4.2 million worth of Bitcoin and have withdrawn about $3 million of that in cold hard cash, one assumes,

about $6 million of various crypto in their Ethereum-based wallet, including $1.1 million worth of tether, which they hopefully cashed in immediately and hopefully is not sketchy, about $100,000 in USDC, which is Circles stable coin. There are different reports and differing reports on how much of this money has been able to be withdrawn, so it's hard to save the actual amount, but it does appear that these donations may actually be finding their way to the Ukrainian people, which is obviously what we hope is happening. Also on Monday, Binance announced that it would donate $10 million in crypto to Ukraine and launched a crowdfunding portal to encourage users to donate as well. Over the weekend, the Russian Art Collective Riot helped form a decentralized autonomous organization,

you know, a Dow that raised $3 million in ether for the war effort and humanitarian relief, and a separate wallet for donations to the Ukraine Army run by the charity Come Back Alive, has raised $6 million since its inception in mid-21. So here's where things get a little interesting in terms of decentralization and control. Another big topic in the interview that you're going to hear after this. Donations are being distributed from the government's digital wallets, which is set up by the Keeve-based crypto exchange Kuna to other digital wallets before being spent. We don't know exactly why. It could be a safety measure.

It could also be the kind of thing that ensures that money is getting to where it's supposed. to go instead of being intercepted, for example, en route or used for things other than what it's intended for. According to Kunis founder, the funds are being used to buy gas, food, and water for the people who are evacuating. So, listen, like, if this is working, that's great. And it does prove one of the sort of foundational promises of crypto, which is that it's a really easy and fast way to move money across borders. And all in all, it sounds like about $20 million. in crypto has been raised for Ukraine from various sources. If you compare that to the largest GoFundMe ever, America's Food Fund, that raised $45 million to help people struggling with food

insecurity during COVID and over a longer period of time. That doesn't mean that there aren't tradeoffs. And it doesn't necessarily, for example, when we look at the way this money is being distributed and it seems to be being funneled through the government, it doesn't necessarily mean that pure decentralization is the best use case. But it's a kind of a nice lead-in into this conversation we had with Molly White about the tradeoffs that there are dealing with crypto and what is the promise and when is it going to live up to the promise? Maybe this is the moment, right? These examples could either be exceptions or they could be an example of how cryptocurrency can create real value that's more lasting than some of the NFT shenanigans and

questionable consumer use cases that Molly covers on Web3 is great. So without further ado, Molly White from Web3 is Going Great.com. And in case it's not obvious, we talked to her on Friday just as Russia was starting its invasion of Ukraine. So these are not, unfortunately, topics we could talk to her about, but I think you'll get the larger gist. Here we go. We're live and we are super excited today.

We're going to be having just a pure fun, but also, I'm. I think future analysis conversation with Molly White, who runs the Twitter handle and newsletter articles blog. This is so like legit and old school the blog called Web3 is going great. Her Twitter handles are at Web3 is great and at Molly 0XFF. And many of us of a certain vintage, if you will, have made the comparison between Web3 is going great and the old company from the end of the glory days of the dot com boom,

because it has that same vibe where it's just tracking the things that seem to be cratering to Earth like meteors. Yeah, I mean, people are trying to make sense of Web 3. If you criticize Web 3, you will get ratioed, get harassed, an army of people, if you make even the most modest criticism of,

hey, should this project be worth $10 billion with three developers working on? on it, that makes no sense and zero revenue, or should this company have raised $100 million with just a white paper, makes no sense. And when I put out those even modest criticisms, warnings, if you will, with the ICOs, I got absolutely demolished. Of course, I was right. And now, while the legal action against ICOs is coming, and I think we'll see something

similar with NFTs, doesn't mean NFTs are not real technology. Just this thing is polluted with grifts. And so, like, to a level we have never seen. Absolutely. Like, at least in the dot-com boom, they were publicly traded companies cratering, but not just sort of like, this is a remarkable compendium of scamps, really, and in a lot of ways, not completely, but a lot of ways. I'd love to talk.

I'd love to talk to Molly White today. Oh, we're going to, oh, she's here? Oh, that was what I say. I'd love to meet this founder of this website. We should totally get her on, like, right now. Popper up, boom. Askin, you shall receive. There.

Hey, welcome, Molly White, as opposed to Molly Wood. My co-host, welcome to the program. Thank you. Molly, where did you come from? How did you start doing this? I mean, I've been... I know, by the way, that you are a Wikipedia god. So I assume that there's some...

Wow. I know. Yeah, I mean, I've spent a long time sort of gathering knowledge and stuff online as a member of Wikipedia. That's sort of where I got my start in sort of encyclopedic coverage of things. I'm also a software engineer by trade,

and so it was a little hard for me to escape the Web 3 conversations that were happening towards the end of last year. I had heard about Bitcoin, and there was sort of the 2014 boom and then the 2017 boom of cryptocurrencies. And as a techie, I sort of was aware of those things, but uninterested largely.

But as sort of Web 3 started to come about, you know, recently, the sort of new term, I started to see it sort of broadening very sort of frighteningly. And so that was when I sort of started to say, like, maybe I should dig into this because, you know, just because I don't like something doesn't mean I need to necessarily speak out against it, but when it starts to sort of affect the common person and I see friends get sucked into it and I see fellow software engineers start to think that this is the future of the web and that kind of thing, that's when I sort of started to pay attention to it.

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So I would launch the website in mid-December. I think it was like the second week of December. And the reaction has been really great. People, I expected it to just be one of my sort of dumb little software projects that like gets, you know, 10 hits and then no one really pays attention to and I just sort of keep doing my thing. But it actually took off a lot more than I expected it to. I think it sort of filled a niche a little bit of, you know,

people seeing these scams, you know, on Twitter or the occasional news article or whatever, but not getting a great sense of quite how prevalent they really are. Also, not totally understanding them, right? I mean, because the value here is that not only are you doing this public service of saying this was a scam and now it's gone or this looks like a scam or this was a very, very bad decision by the Associated Press, which we'll talk about in a minute. But it's really, it's your deep understanding of this technology that lets you explain it in a way that isn't easy to dismiss at the dinner party as like someone who just doesn't get it.

Yeah, I think that helps a lot. Although you would be amazed at how many people are willing to dismiss, you know, people who do understand it, even people who understand it much better than I do. Yeah. I think just, you know, oh, you don't understand. You need to do more research is very common in the field. It's very true. They're always willing to send you the research.

That's so nice. Let me dig up some articles and send them to you because you obviously don't know what you're talking about, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So before we do the greatest hits of like things you found that were the most egregious, because now you're becoming, I would assume when you create a publication like this, you're now becoming the nexus and the super router of all grifts. So people must be sending you tons and tons of, hey, look at this,

or you might want to turn over this rock because it's pretty gnarly under there. But before we get into that, I'm curious when you look at the space, Are there things that you think are on a technological basis, because you're a developer, are inspiring, interesting, important in the collection of technologies known as Web3? Because there certainly are some things there that are noteworthy, maybe even important, or perhaps even inspiring. I mean, I think what I would say about that is there are a lot of technologies that have been sort of grouped into this Web3 umbrella and sort of repackaged as this fancy new

future of the web that are not. new. We've had decentralized hosting for a really long time. You know, the internet kind of started that way. That's nothing new. We've had ledgers, you know, and databases and things like that. We've been able to send money to people through the internet for a very long time. I think those are all very important. I think Merkel trees are great. You know, I think those things are great, but they're not, they're not new to Web 3. The things that are new to Web 3 are cryptocurrencies, you know, speculative currencies based on the blockchain. I don't think there's a future in those.

I frankly don't. And I think that trying, you know, the majority of what Web 3 is is trying to take, you know, some technological problem and sort of slap a blockchain on it and then get a couple million dollars from VCs. Few of those projects actually benefit from the blockchain, aside from the fact that it attracts VC investment. most of them could probably be implemented better with a different database and a different structure.

And if they want to be decentralized, if that's the goal, then go for it. If you want to be immutable for some reason, go for it. But the fact that there's a token associated to it or a speculative currency is not a beneficial thing. And I don't think it will continue. The enthusiasm for these projects, you know, it seems to be time. to when you bought the coin and at what price. So what we've done is we've taken objectively what would be considered an inferior technology in many cases.

An immutable database that you can't change is not a good feature in almost 99% of applications. Being able to change the database if somebody puts something, I don't know, confidential in it or etc. would be a necessity in a society that's functioning and peer to peer and nobody being in charge also is a liability in almost the overwhelming cases. So I'm curious in your mind, how much of the enthusiasm is useful idiots on one side who got caught up in this mania versus grifters who are specifically pumping this technology to the bagholder useful idiots because they paid one penny for it and it's worth $100. And then if you put this in

the third group, early true believers who actually are technologists who believe this technology is important. If you were to bucket those, what is the state of Web 3 today in terms of percentages of those three groups? Or do you think there's other groups in there that are important to note? It's hard to say. I mean, you know, there are definitely people where it's really clear that they're grifting. And then there's a lot of cases where it's really hard to tell if they're a grifter or if they actually believe in it or if maybe they have too much money sunk into it. And so they need to be overly positive about it so that they can try to, you know, get their money out. You know, I feel like the true believers are somewhat less common these days.

I don't see them as much. I mean, they definitely exist, and their talking points have been taken on by a lot of people who are very deeply invested in Web 3. But oftentimes when you actually sort of push those people on, well, why do you need to have a decentralized system here? Or how do you plan to account for the negative parts of decentralization? or, you know, those things, then those things all sort to sort of fall apart. The people, you know, there are definitely true believers out there and they don't tend to be

the people who are, you know, shilling NFTs. They tend to be, you know, the bitcoins and the Minero people and, you know, those folks. Really true believers. Yeah. So are we still in a position where there are, you know, six to 100 people who actually really understand how this technology works and everybody else thinks they're going to make money on it. I mean, you still have people sort of casually saying, well, like, this is better on chain. And yet, we have yet to find a thing that is legitimately better on chain versus all of this

kind of smoke and fire about tokens. Yeah. Well, I've said this before. You know, it's, it's kind of a unique space. It's not unique in this way, but it is unusual in that in order to say that you truly understand Web 3, you have to have a deep understanding of technology, of law, of economics, you know, sociology. You know, there's so many things in play when it comes to building token economies and building on the blockchain and, you know, decentralized structures and all these things that is very tough to say confidently that you have a true understanding of all of the ways that Web3 sort of interacts with the space.

It is difficult, I would say, to understand the technology in some cases, but I think a lot of Web 3 projects sort of play on people's lack of understanding and sort of willingness to accept that it's a difficult to understand technology. And so people, you know, if they're seeing something and they think,

well, that doesn't seem quite right. There's sort of a willingness to say, well, I probably just don't understand it and I need to go do more research, but I'm sure it's fine. You know, people, people are sort of encouraged into that by by the prevailing belief that this is very difficult to understand. Well, you also say it so gently. They're encouraged into that when in fact, the response usually is, no, no, you're the dumb,

dumb, you just don't understand. And like, you're saying, if you push really hard, I mean, there are literally people already in our chat saying, like, it's just because you don't understand and you're not a serious software person. But if you did, you would see how obvious it is. And I'm like, and yet, you can't really explain how obvious it is. I would say that, you know, people should, in a normal world, people would be very concerned if they're trying to sell something that they can't explain to people. Like, that should give people pause or VSEA pause.

You know, if you're investing in a company and the CEO can't tell you why it needs a blockchain, like that should be like a record scratch, you know, pump the brakes moment. And yet it's common in the Web 3 world right now. We all know how hard it is to eat healthy when you're working crazy hours. I do. Startup founders do anybody in our industry. But thankfully, Real Good Foods is here to help. They make nutritious foods more accessible to improve all of our health. And they're one of the fastest growing frozen food brands in the U.S. In fact, they just went public back in November under the ticker, RGF. So congrats to the team on the IPO and making great products. They got a ton of food you love. Mexican, Italian entries, pizza, breakfast sandwiches. I tried

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you find a bag holder is so prevalent in this and it's such an effective technique. that when the pumps happen, and literally there's countless rooms on signal, pumping coins, and, you know, all kinds of financial malfeasance going on here, that even if the project did have good intent, did have great technology and did have great founders, they quickly seem to get taken over by these drifters who pump and dump them. I was wondering, and the toxicity, I think was a great point, Molly. If anybody questions anything, Bitcoin toxicity is an explicit philosophy that's been codified at the Bitcoin Miami conference, there was somebody advocating,

it is our duty that anytime anybody questions Bitcoin to attack them relentlessly en masse. So they're in signal groups or on discords. And if Molly or I or you say something negative about Bitcoin, they will drop the link in there and say attack. And so I don't know what they call those social media attacks. You're women, so you experience them every day. We're like, yeah, it's brigading.

It's a thing. I don't experience brigading because. Our IPR mentions, again. Well, no, I mean, they don't brigade guys because, yeah, they're not like, immature, misogynistic assholes. But these are these people who are doing it are immature misogynistic assholes. But it is a specific technique which shows you Molly White what their intention is. It's to squash descent, but they can't squash your descent because you're in this for a noble and playful fun reason, it seems. So I don't get the sense that they

could stop you, which makes you just the perfect foil for all of this. On the website, for people who haven't been to it, Web3 is going great.com, there is a filter. You get to drop down the filter and you can categorize things. Molly cares deeply about the environment. I'm sure she'll want to talk to you about that. But one that I saw miles away for the last decade, and I've been bringing it up, is wash trading or painting the tape. There's a number of terms for creating fake trades to manipulate markets.

You have a drop down for wash trades, and you've been looking at this in NFT specifically, which is a great place to do wash trades. Explain to an audience of Neophytes what a wash trade is and what the damage it can cause. So wash trading, at least in NFTs, involves creating another wallet, another cryptocurrency wallet that is not directly tied to you. You know, you might have one that's publicly known to be owned by you. You create another one that is not known to be owned by you. And then you do a trade where you sell your NFT or whatever,

be to that cryptocurrency wallet for some amount of money, but it's actually just you behind the scenes transferring money between two wallets that you control. And in doing so, people from the outside see this and they don't know necessarily that you are the one who controls that wallet. And they say, oh, you know, someone thinks this JPEG is worth $100,000, you know, maybe it is. And it's basically a way to artificially pump the price of these NFTs. And we've seen some really high profile examples of it. I'm thinking of Melania Trump. That's a good one. Melania Trump recently did it with her. Yeah, so she tried to sell like an NFT of a watercolor painting of her.

And I think there may have been a physical hat involved, maybe. Not really sure. Be best. But someone did a bit of a deep dive into the actual blockchain transactions and they were able to uncover that looks a lot like Melania Trump just bought her own NFT. You're bullying me for my NFT. Don't bully NFT. Be best.

Be best. That's a great grift. I mean, it's so brilliant. That's just phenomenal. Like, and it takes advantage of sort of exactly the benefit. Yes, it's practically built in. It's basically built in. It's like you can't do this with stocks because it's not like Robin Hood trades or e-trades

are published underneath the stock, right? I mean, maybe for large insiders, but not for the public. So you could, I imagine if you could buy, you know, some SPAC, like, Joby Aviation, which I love that company. I think it's a great company. But if under the Joby stock ticker on Google Finance or Yahoo Finance, it showed my trade, everybody else's trades, and then I was going back and forth, training it with myself to make people think that this is like got volume.

It doesn't really have. When you see that volume, Molly White, that is an indication of stability and a vibrant market as well. So not just you're upping the price. You're showing people that, hey, if I'm I buy this, I could get out because look at how this. This isn't gets traded 20 times in two weeks. It's going to trade 200 times in the next month. I'm good. I'm not the bag holder. Look, but those 20 trades represent one trade, an insider trade. Yes. And just because someone will buy that

NFT doesn't mean they might buy your NFT in the same project when you want to cash out. So it seems like there are a couple of categories of grift here. There's the very specific on purpose kind. And I mean, we don't even know to what extent it's on purpose. Like maybe nobody wanted Millennia's NFT and she didn't want to be embarrassed. So they did the wash thing. So there's on purpose. There's maybe like, uh-oh, I biffed it. And then there seems to be a category that I'm calling the ding-dong celebrity NFT grift,

which is just like where they pop something up. The most recent one, I think, is Deer and Fox, the Sacramento Kings player, the least that I saw on your site and Twitter feed, where like this NFT project went up and then a bunch of people bought it and then he just stopped doing it but didn't refund the money. Like what happens in those cases?

Are people just in over their heads here or not making their money back? Like, what is that? That's a rugpole, right? Yes, that would be a rugpole. That's the rug pull. Okay. But is it an on purpose rugpole?

That's a great question. You know, it's hard to say if he decided, you know, I'm going to make this cool NFT project and I'm going to scam my fans. Like, it's possible to get into it with that. But yeah, I would suspect not. But it's really hard to say. I mean, you know, a lot of his reasons for abandoning the project are kind of questionable.

You know, like he is talking about how he's so overwhelmed with the NBA season that he doesn't have time for this NFT project, which I am sure it is exhausting and overwhelming to be in the NBA. Like, I am not questioning that. But it's hard to tell people. Well, and it's, yeah, it's hard to tell what he specifically is doing. Like, I don't think anyone is. under the impression that he, the basketball player, is like coding up the smart contracts behind the scenes or like drawing the Fox, you know, JPEGs. I don't think that's quite what

anyone expected. And so I'm not sure why he suddenly decided he needed to sort of dip out of his own project. I would say it's a couple of those thing on celebrity dips. I would look at them as reckless indifference. Like you, if you're going to take the public's money, you have an obligation to be considered in that. So if not outright fraud, and you intended it, you have an obligation if you take hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, even if the people know that the project might go under, that would be like me selling, I don't know, non-refundable tickets to a conference and then, you know, like, hey, the conference isn't happening and you're the bagholder, sorry.

Exactly. You kind of have the obligation. I hope that these people sue on mass. Have there been a lot of lawsuits? Yeah. That's kind of an interesting thing I've noticed. that there seems to be this really prevailing, you know, belief among people who are running Web3 projects that, like, normal laws just don't apply. You know, laws around fraud, around

disclosing. If you have a, you know, if you're pumping a project up and you have a financial investment in it, copyright law is a big one where people is like, copyright just doesn't apply for some reason because it's on the blockchain. And people are like, what? No, that's not true at all. I think, you know, the legal system is a very trailing thing. It takes a really long time to file a lawsuit. You need to have some capital to be able to put that in there or to file a lawsuit, you know, and you need to be willing to go through the enormous cost and pain and time that that requires. So I think it'll be a while before we start to see the actual outcomes of lawsuits around, you know,

pump and dumps and these, you know, rug pulls and things like that. But I think it's coming. You know, we've seen there's a couple of lawsuits that have been. filed class action lawsuits against celebrities like Kim Kardashian is facing one for basically pumping up a token and then, you know, the token crashes and the investors are left with nothing. So I think we'll see more of that and I'm really curious to see how those actually play out. It's time for another Our Crowd deal of the week. Right now you can join Our Crowd's investment in Shift. Shift combines AI and fintech to automate the moving experience. We all know

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Yeah, having been an expert in this area, the way it goes down is about two or three years after, you know, everybody loses their money, either an attorney general and a state that wants to make a name for themselves going up against another, a new technology, because this happens across all new technologies, will say, oh, I found three people in my jurisdiction who lost their money and some, you know, folks in, you know, Sarasota, Florida, whatever. And the attorney general files the lawsuit. And then other attorney generals realize, oh, well, I have six constituents because here's the list of people who are bagholders. And then obviously, you get multiple attorney generals and then SEC gets involved and, you know, whatever. And all of a sudden, and you see that with the ICOs. All these ICO lawsuits, the XRP one predates the ICOs. There's a lag of probably three years. So we're in the middle of the ICO ones, but nobody talks about those lawsuits.

the NFT and the next ones will be, you know, 20, 23 or something like that. But we have the toxic clip. I think we should play this and get Molly White's reaction. And you just check out every single one of Elon's tweets. And man, you just see a bunch of bitcoinsers going at him. And there's no other way, right? So not only do I think Bitcoin toxicity is important, I think it's absolutely necessary. And if you're against Bitcoin toxicity, you're against Bitcoin.

And if you're against Bitcoin, you're against freedom, period. I mean, it's a cult, Molly White. How good that and badly? That's incredible. Oh, my God. Did I make the site? Is my submission going to be on the site? I mean, I can't see how anyone who's involved in Bitcoin for any good reason can see that and be like,

yes, this is my community, you know? That's incredible. That was, by the way, Nico ZM, the founder and CEO of BitVolt, a Bitcoin mining hosting startup that helps clients secure their mining hardware talking about people shouting down Elon whenever Elon tweets about Dogecoin. And also like, any, the rhetoric that's like you're against freedom, like you're just asking for that to escalate to absurd degrees. That's unbelievable.

You hate puppies also. You can explain it, right? Like, again, you cannot tell me. why? And for fairness and journalism purposes, I feel like I have to say, there are all these people on the internet and elsewhere and even in our chat saying a lot of people only see the bad side. I'm quoting from someone one of our notagang. A lot of people only see the bad side without looking at the potential of the underlying technology. And what did people say about the internet when it was first invented? Now, Bitcoin and the blockchain have been around since what, the mid-2000s

at this point. It usually takes about 10 years for a consumer technology, at least, to find a market. Molly White, what don't we understand here? Yeah, I'm still waiting for someone to find me a good use of the underlying technology. People say this a lot that's like, oh, you are like the person who was the naysayer when the internet was first invented and, you know, look what, you know, you're going to be eating your own words in 10 years. Maybe. You know, that's sure, that's possible. But when the internet first came to be, there were so many things that the internet had the potential to unlock. And sure, there were negative things that it could unlock. It certainly has.

But with blockchains and, you know, this sort of Web3 shift, I don't know what potential it's unlocking. And it seems a little bit unbelievable to me that people can say that this is going to be the future and you just are, you know, it's still early and you just don't understand it. but they can't really come up with any compelling use case for it. Let me give you my defense of Bitcoin and you tell me if it makes any sense. I think Bitcoin is a good store of value. The system has existed for over a decade and has not been hacked at its core. And if you want to have money that is easily storable in a place that is not as easily accessible, you could put it into Bitcoin as a store of value.

It might appreciate it. but putting out the appreciation, if it was even just stable or modestly increased, like the stock market does, it's a good place to, you know, like gold or diamonds, have a store of value that is digital and easy to trade.

Is store of value in your mind completely irrelevant or just a minor use case? Because people are using it for that. Yeah, it doesn't seem like a primary use case. Most people aren't putting, it feels like most people aren't putting their money into Bitcoin and saying,

I hope this remains the same in 10 years. I would argue that the history of Bitcoin also hasn't been very friendly to the idea that it's a good store of value. You can sort of pick two points on the line and say, look, you know, then and then it was the same amount. And so any one who invested right then and took it out right there probably didn't lose any money or make any money. But it's been wildly volatile. Most of these cryptocurrencies are. And so as long as you're not hoping to be able to obtain the same amount of money you put in, you know, at any particular point in time, then go for it.

You know, why not? Sure. Which can be set of gold. Gold fluctuates in value too. But okay. So I think it's a reasonable. Yeah, exactly. Some people like to hold some of it as a store of value, you know, against economic collapse, right? But again, that's a very, it is. That's one thing I really don't understand it is, is people are talking about Bitcoin. in this sort of Mad Max scenario where like the world is on fire and everything's collapsed and

we're all, you know, out there with, you know, sticks and trying to make campfires and stuff. And they're like, but I'll have my Bitcoin and it's like, what? You know, you're going to have what? Apples will work better. It's not, it's not a coin. You want a dozen apples. Those have no one gold in that scenario. I don't know what I would do with gold there. Some potatoes would be good. Yeah, exactly. I want cans of beans. Yeah. It's actually where I invest my money for a stable That gets to kind of exactly the, you know, the blog post that I've been working on for two weeks, which is that on top of all of that, as a store of value that doesn't necessarily need to exist, it's environmentally indefensible. And your tagline on your website is like, you know, this is like the world is on fire and it's pouring gasoline on it or something. I don't need to pull it up the exact. Yes. Definitely not an enormous grip that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.

Like, I remember when my friends were mining Bitcoin and then stopped because the energy, that literally the power bill, right, that my buddy Trent got was higher than the what the Bitcoin was worth. And that you could even argue that the evolution of the technology, because it was so energy intensive, destroyed the entire original premise, which is that it's creatable by anybody. It's totally decentralized. It's completely democratic.

And now on top of this, you have. have a scenario that has only increased in energy consumption and only seems to exist as a potentially dubious store of value or short-term hugely profitable growth. Absolutely. I mean, that's how proof of work works is it has to be energy intensive or it doesn't work. And it has to be increasingly energy intensive or it doesn't work. And so 10 years ago, mining Bitcoin on your home computer, you know, it was reasonable. You can do that. It might bump up your energy bill a little bit, but like, you know, kind of negligible. These days, it's not even possible to mine Bitcoin on your home computer without joining a mining pool. And, you know,

you have to basically pull resources to compete with these extremely sophisticated pieces of equipment that are running in these huge mining farms, you know, next to power plants in China or Kazakhstan or, you know, Russia or various places. I mean, some of those places have since. Where they had to migrate in search of cheap energy and found a lot of coal-powered cheap energy. Or bootleg energy is always good too. If you could steal it, like in China, they were basically stealing it. That worked pretty well.

You know, for, I guess I'll give one more counter here. If you're in a authoritarian country or a country where it's not stable, it does seem to me that a store of value that is not controlled by Venezuela, El Salvador, you know, Saudi Arabia, China does have some value in the fact that you can do it just by memorizing a couple of words and unlocked your Bitcoin anywhere in the world is super valuable to those people. You wouldn't argue against that use case, would you? I mean, I would. I do think it is valuable for people to have, you know, for people in those situations to have

a store of value. And I don't think that there are great solutions to that at this point. I don't think it's great that their store of value is enormously, beholden to say the U.S. stock market. And so, you know, right now, if you look at the Bitcoin value and you look at the stock market, it's kind of, you know, following a lot. Yeah, pretty much. And so, you know, those people are, you know, being exposed to different risks,

probably not, you know, the same as the risks that they're facing with, like, the banking system in their own country. But, you know, they have to be, there are these sort of other issues involved. There's also major issues around actually, using that store of value that they have. So if you have, we saw this with a Canadian trucker convoy recently. They were able to collect something like 20 Bitcoin in donations, which is a huge amount of money that could have provided gas for that trucker convoy for a very long time.

And so they were going to distribute their bitcoins to these truckers, which is like, great. You know, that's the point. We collected it from them. But when it came to actually taking those bitcoins, those, you know, bytes connected to a cryptocurrency wallet, and like taking that and converting it into the diesel fuel that needed to go into their trucks, everything falls apart. There's no way to do that right now.

And so in those authoritarian regimes, you know, the idea that, you know, someone might be able to put their money into Bitcoin and then escape the, you know, oppressive regime as a result. They have to be able to do something with that Bitcoin. And largely today, that's hard to do. It's hard to buy a gallon of milk with your Bitcoins or to. buy a ticket out of the country with your bitcoins. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's better than losing everything.

And you probably could find somebody to give you, you could give the Bitcoin to on a wallet, peer to peer to get cash for 90 cents on the dollar or something. They give them some huge Vig. They'd probably do it. One thing I've been enamored by is Dow's decentralized autonomous organizations. Yes. Because I have an investment syndicate, the syndicate.com, where we have 9,500 members. They all pool money together.

they read a deal memo, and they decide on average to put $7,000 into a startup. We did it with a startup like com.com as an example. And so the idea of having one of these that exists on a global basis, people can put cryptocurrency into it and they could invest in 100 businesses, maybe they were female-led businesses or environmentally conscious businesses, whatever the theme is that people want it to support, and then they could vote on it and have some sort of structure. do you think Dow's, because there have been some scammy ones, obviously, these new platforms seem to draw Gryfters for some reason, but do you think that fundamentally an organization that could vote on investments or what to do with the money and exist in the cloud, you know, through smart contracts, etc., is a bad idea or just one that doesn't require this type of technology? How do you think about DAWS? DOWs are a great example of what I was saying earlier in that a lot of the ideas here pretty good.

You know, I'm into the idea of decentralized communities and, you know, voting and, you know, controlling the future of the community from the community. I've been about that practically my whole life. I think that's great. I do not see where smart contracts are required, where blockchains are required. it seems like the downfalls of a lot of these DAOs have been because of those smart contracts on those blockchains. That's actually true. Explain that to the audience. So, you know, when you have a DAO, you are basically saying, buy this token. I mean, this is a generalization, not all of them work this way, caveat, asterisk, but often cases, you say buy this token and this token represents one vote in our community.

and through that you can control everything in the community. And we saw recently how someone actually used that to take over the community because they were able to get enough votes and basically divert enough attention from their proposal that was trying to pass to say, I'm the leader now, I have total control over this Dow. And because it was on the smart contract, you know, it was codified, codified, as soon as they got enough votes. It was both codified and codified.

Both of those. As soon as they got enough votes. It was over. They were the owner and they drained the treasury. They took all the money and everyone was sort of left in the lurch. This is a classic 51% attack. Yeah. And compare that to, for example, the communities that you're talking about in which

Wikipedia users or Redditors or open source software developers have decentralization, lots of autonomy, and votes, and they didn't need to buy a token to get it. Right. And it's, I won't pretend it's an easy problem. Community-led communities, you know, self-governing communities are extremely difficult. And trying to take those rules and those ways that those communities work and turn it into smart contracts and put everything into code is impossible. And that's kind of what's happening in a lot of Web3 projects is this idea that you can take social problems like the difficulty of community governance and solve it with these smart contracts. And that is almost always not the case. And you almost always shoot yourself in the foot

trying to do that. So governance is messy. Newsflash to people who believe they can wave the magic web three wand and solve humanity's biggest problems. But to explain the 51% attack, It's very interesting because let's say you have $10 million sitting there. You got some well, it's got a billion dollars in crypto. They come in and they need to have whatever, 60% of the votes. They buy $30 million worth of the tokens. Now they have 75% of the votes. And then they sweep that $10 million from the original folks in it.

They have no recourse because somebody came in just over the top and it's like a hostile takeover of a company. Exactly. In hostile takeovers, there's a process. And you would, you know, it would be much harder to do with a public company, let's say. Right. But I think in this case, actually, it's a little interesting, and I haven't been able to get too much clarity on exactly how this happened. I'm not actually sure if the attacker here had to buy or, you know, basically obtain 51% of the tokens here. Because there's a very common issue with Dows, which is that if you don't have enough participation in a vote, it's very easy to control that. You don't need the 51% of all the tokens. People aren't paying attention. People aren't paying attention if they aren't voting against. against you, then the vote passes. And on the flip side, if you try to say, well, that's not possible because we're going to make it so everyone has to vote, that doesn't work very well either.

Because what if they're up in the mountains somewhere away from their phone? Are they going to hold up the whole vote? What if somebody dies? Like, that's something that a lot of these DAOs haven't taken into account. It's like, if you want to have these tokens, there's a set amount of them and then someone dies, who takes their tokens and starts voting for them? There's no succession plan there. It's like a low turnout election. Like we, everybody's like,

Chesa Boudin get into office. And it was like, it was like, well, that happened to be one of the low turnout elections, I believe. And that maybe that wouldn't have happened in a high turnout election. You get some weird behaviors that can occur. I mean, it's, you know, I think it, it's like it comes down to when we think about how we evaluate a company, right? Or the, like, when I think about storytelling with a company, like there are, there are

questions you should be able to answer at some point in the, in the life of your product. And those companies are, how does it work? What is it good for? And how does it make money? And I think the sense is that if we're like this far along into this operation and every time we say, how does this work? How is it better? All you get is a toxic brigade.

And you have an entire blog, blogs worth, right? Media property's worth of scams and grifts and fail. and failures, that these are fair questions, more than fair questions to be asking. Yeah, and I think in traditional technologies, people who are operating in good faith, who believe in the technology, who want the technology to succeed, embrace skepticism and criticism and questions, because that's how technologies improve. And yet that seems completely, you know, forbidden with a lot of these projects. I am a big fan of the story of Enron.

The conversation that kicked off the downfall of Enron way, way, way back in the day was this Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, who was going around asking investors and people at Enron, how does this company make money? She just was like, I'm going to ask the dumb question here. How do you guys make money? Seems like there's a lot. Wrote an entire piece for Fortune about the fact that no one could answer that. question. And that was it, right? And it led to this like massive downfall that turned out to just

be a complete grift at the heart of it. And so like, you know, I am, yes, I am pre-answering all of the tweets that we're going to get as a result of this conversation. Yeah, the brigading is. Yeah. But this is just that simple, right? How is it better? How does it make money? Who is it good for? And if you can come up with a good answer for that, like there are, when I hear all the objections to the DAOs, I look at them as a technologist, as an entrepreneur, as an investor, and I say, okay, yeah, that's a good one. How do you deal with death? Okay, if the person doesn't respond over this many times to this many votes, their vote go, you know, the vote is removed and they have this ability to, and they have to put in, you know, a secession plan. So in order to be part

of this Dow, you have to have three secession plans, or you have to pre-vote for certain things, or, you know, you could come up with some rule system there. You know, kind of like, like you do in any technology company. So I do feel there's, there could be something there still with the Dow's, but not in the way they're currently constructed. Like, I think that's the, there's this weird philosophy. And I think it's perpetuated by the grifters, imitating the early true believers, because the early true believers were libertarian type people, in some case, anarchists. I mean, I met them, had them on this podcast in 2009, 2010, the early Bitcoin folks when it was under a dollar. Like, they were really those weird people who don't believe in like, there shouldn't be

speed limits. There shouldn't be insurance for cars. There shouldn't, you know. Sovereign citizens. Sovereign citizens. These are the people who want to make a C state, you know, like they want to have a tax free autonomous C state, right? So they're interesting people to have dinner with. I mean, you know, maybe not twice a week, but you know, twice a year. And they might have some interesting ideas to make you think, hey, yeah, maybe there shouldn't be a speed limit.

Yeah, no, they should be. They seem to have like that knucklehead who was like, yeah, you got to be toxic or you don't believe in freedom. They seem to be like, like, like, parroting that gestalt and that philosophy, but they don't actually have that belief themselves. So that's why it comes out as so toxic or weird. Untrustworthy. I think that's exactly right, actually. Like, there is, in order to believe in like pure decentralization or pure immutability, you know, with no exceptions, with like no centralization, no ability to remove things,

you have to be pretty extreme. Like, you have to be willing to say, yes, that's okay to some really bad things. And so, you know, the true believers, as you put it, a lot of them are willing to make those tradeoffs. And like you said, they come off pretty extreme and a little bit weird. And like most people are like, well, we do live in a society where that's not acceptable. But like, good for them. You know, they have strong beliefs. They hold to them.

But I think... Some of them were anarchists, you know. Right. It was libertarians and anarchists. you know, and less government people, you know, live free or die people, you know. Yes. But like, I think the people who are sort of trying to parrot that are, you know, fairly probably reasonable people in a lot of ways and sort of understand that like pure decentralization

and pure immutability has some serious, serious problems. And so when they're confronted with that, they have to say, well, maybe a little centralization, maybe just a little bit of deletion. and then everything sort of falls apart because it's like, why do you want a blockchain then? You know? That's such a great. And I think that's sort of a problem. It's literally like the conversation I keep having with my kid about communism, right?

There's theory. It only works if you've got like 11 people. After that, you got to start to have some stratification and there's starting to be hierarchies. And, you know, yeah. If you go through the thought process, the people who came up with the immutable blockchain, if you said, hey, what if people got docks, you know, and you put people's home addresses on a blockchain, and you couldn't delete it. They would say,

okay, you know, like, I don't have an issue with that. Whereas anybody who's reasonable, but be like, wait,

because the same crypto people who want an immutable blockchain are unwilling to say that I'm the founder of, you know, angry lions, board apes, whatever,

you know, whoever, they claimed they were doxed, you know, like, oh my God, you know, we were doxed as the creators

of board apes. It's like, it's a billion dollar franchise you're raising at $5 billion dollars from Andreessen Horowitz, reportedly. Your names are going to be

corporate paper somewhere. Yeah. So you can't not have your name on it in America. Like you can't be an anonymous officer of a company. That's not how the world works. But they wanted a beautiful blockchain. The twisting of the word doxed in the crypto community, I could go on for probably an hour about that alone.

No, we'll go on for a minute. Go on for a minute. Please go on for a minute because I think it's a pretty hilarious one. There's so much complaining about it. You know, it's like live free, do whatever the hell you want with zero. consequence, kill anybody who disagrees with you, but then get mad when people don't like that. I have security concerns because I own so many NFTs. It's like, because I am so wealthy, yes. I'm so well. Get security, dummy. Yeah. So the idea of doxing in like the broader internet context. It's not a new word.

It's not new to Web 3. It's not new to crypto. Uh, is that, you know, someone publishes your home address or, you know, very personal information about you. They take pictures of you without your consent. put them up. You know, they, there's, it's a very serious, egregious piece of harassment. It's happened to me. It's awful. It's terrible. Me too. And, but within the crypto world, doxing is a good thing for some, for a lot of these things. They advertise that they're fully doxed. And it's like, when I first saw that, I was like, excuse me, you're what now? And it, what it often means within the crypto community is, oh, our founders aren't anonymous. So we know that it's Joe Schmo running lions, whatever. Um,

and that means that's doxing. And so I was like, okay, weird to use the word in a totally different way, but go for it. But then there was this whole thing with the board apes where they were not fully doxed. They were anonymous. No one knew who they were until a wonderful reporter at BuzzFeed did a little bit of digging. Not that much. It was public information business records. She called up the company and they confirmed that these were indeed the real identities of their anonymous founders.

And so she published an article about that. did not contain their home addresses. It did not contain much information about them at all. Honestly, she went a little bit into like publicly available information about these people, but it was not, you know, this is their date of birth and there's a social security number and they live at, you know, this address and go knock on their door. And then suddenly a lot of people, including very respected people in this crypto community, absolutely lost their minds and were like, she docks them.

and they were using doxed in the traditional meaning of the word. The actual definition. Yeah. The actual definition. Yeah. Targeted harassment. Reality. In reality.

What dox in Jesus. You know, basically said that she's this terrible person and they started to, they started to basically docks her in a way. They started to say, this is her parents' address. Maybe you should go knock on their door. And it was this, it was like, are we living in his, like,

what is happening right now? Words don't have meaning. someone took a childhood photo of her and made an NFT out of it. And that person is currently listed prominently on Andrew Yang's Web3 lobbying website right now. Because apparently there's just no consequences for harassment in these communities. And this, honestly, I think this gets to the other point, which is like, even if you could answer my simple questions, what is this good for? Why is it better than what currently exists? You know, how do you make money and who benefits?

I don't understand why I should have to listen to any of those arguments if that's how this community behaves. Like this sense that not only is there no accountability, but there shouldn't be. And P.S. You and me, the Mollies, are the ones who are wrong here? Is I think also what's baffling. Like the total lack of, like, are these all toddlers? The total lack of awareness of the concept that like if you are an asshole, people won't want to do business with you. and that is a natural consequence, by the way. That's not anybody being unreasonable.

Like, that never gets through. There still is just this sort of profound, like, you know, you got a brigade. You got to be toxic. That's the way to get this through. And I would argue that as a matter of business and humanity, that's actually not that effective. Yeah, bad strategy. It's a bad strategy. So even if the answers were all there, I still wouldn't want to do business with a lot of these people because, like, they're dicks.

I got a rule. Actually, when you ask, are they toddlers, I think a lot of them actually are very, very young. I have talked to a few people who, like, do know the identities of people behind projects. And it's like, and that person is 19 years old. And he's controlling $2 million. It's like, what? Right. And nuance and subtlety has not said in at that age.

I'm just, it's neurologically true. Science. Yeah. Frontal lobe still developing. And I just checked my dashboard. it turns out 21% of Web 3 participants are in cells on subredits right now. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear who this audio, who that toxic group is. And again, I don't think it's the entirety of it, but there is a group that's toxic.

And actually, after that toxic clip, in fairness to a lot of the Bitcoin folks, they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't want this toxic. We want Warren Buffett to buy Bitcoin and hold it. We want, you know, Jack and Square to be buying it. We want more participation because, you know, the cynical version of more participation is, you know, more bagholders. And the charitable one and a completely legitimate one is network effects. If everybody had Bitcoin, then the idea that you could, you know, buy gasoline with it would actually come to pass. If everybody had Bitcoin on their phone right now, yeah, sure, people would QR code and swipe it and pay for things with Bitcoin.

just hasn't reached that critical mass that anybody on the purchasing side needs to. But I think Jack would square will, if every square device allowed you to transact in different cryptocurrencies, then when you went to Phil's coffee and you swiped a square, it could give you the option to do it in Bitcoin or not.

Yeah. I mean, I will say, you know, I don't think it's fair to take an entire community and sort of define it by the actions of the worst people in it. No, not at all. But they are the loudest and it does do damage. and Jack, for example, would do well to acknowledge that.

Exactly. That's what I was just about to say is that any community encounters that problem. You know, you see it with political parties, you see it with activist groups. You see it all over the place. Every community has bad apples. But it is the responsibility of the other people in that community who want to be taken seriously and who want to, you know, define the future to get those people out of their community and say, no, what you're doing is not okay.

And within the crypto community, there is not a lot of that. there is a lot of, oh, well, we just won't deal with them and we'll do our own project over here. But there's not a lot of people who show up when some crypto bro is in your community telling you how, or in your Twitter replies, you know, telling you how awful you are to say, hey, cut that out. That just doesn't seem to happen very much. Yeah. Yeah. The self-policing is critically important.

And that's something where I think the crypto community can do so much better, do better. Be best. But, I mean, it's holding themselves back. Like, no, I'm just making it worse for myself. But there's a lot of, it's like the Venn diagrams. You know, there are crossovers. This has been an effective technique for lots of things on Twitter to just sort of like chase naysayers away. The all right.

Like Tesla fan boy is crypto. Cancel culture on the left. It's fan boy, right? At the end of the day, it's fan boy. Like, I remember this happening way back when it would be like Xbox versus PlayStation. But it has worked on the internet and there has not been a lot of accountability for it. And so it's become a popular, I would argue, technique. And because of a lot of the proponents of cryptocurrency are young white men.

And this isn't like a real problem for them. I don't think, I even think that Jack is like sort of a couple steps removed from the concept that that toxicity can do harm or the reality of it. Yeah. I mean, you see that a lot with a lot of these sort of high profile people. Elon Musk, you know, for example, seems to have sort of no understanding that what he says on Twitter actually has like real impacts on people. It's just a game, you know, and I think people don't realize that. Yeah. The brigading is a serious issue.

People have accused me of it and I'm like, my people don't brigade. I mean, you might get a couple of people who agree, a couple of people who disagree. I think there's something like in the scale of this that also becomes, Although people are saying that some of my followers are doing it more often now because my follower account has gotten a little bit higher since all in podcast on top of this week and startup starting to get popular. So I don't know. How am I supposed to deal with that, Molly?

How am I supposed to just admonish them when they do it consistently? Yes, definitely. I get it. I mean, you get the audience that you cultivate or that you allow, right? So if you... With 500,000 people, Molly, if one percent are mentally ill, like severely mentally ill and 10 percent are contentious, you know, it starts to become a little. have big numbers, I think. Like, I know I have mentally ill followers. Like, I, if it, just message to my

followers. If anybody does something stupid like that, please DM me and show, show me the tweet so I can go admonish them and block them from following me. But also, I mean, let's be careful with our broad brush of mental illness, right? Like, some of them might just be jerks. And you can agree, I agree. I agree. And also still be a nice person on the internet. Like, yeah. And I think also that there is a response, I mean, we've sort of done a little bit from Web 3 here. It's an, to just social media problems in general. But I do think there is a responsibility as someone has hundreds of thousands of followers or something like that to be very careful in what they do.

And so, you know, it's something I've had to account with a little bit as I've gotten a couple more followers recently where it's like now if I retweet that 200 person, you know, 200 follower account that said something dumb and I dunk on them, like suddenly a lot of people are seeing that and are joining in and are in that person's replies and they're saying, yeah, that was a stupid thing you said. I'm like, that feels kind of bad. So I think you do have to be, you know, conscious of that. And then, yeah, I think what Molly said is you do have to say, you know, when one of your

followers says something awful, you know, jump in there and say, no, no, no, no, that's not acceptable, you know, and go on. Yeah. It definitely is when you get the follower account going up, you have to think, like I got into a little back and forth with a journalist, I don't know, two nights ago about like the pandemic ending and like, pandemic's not over. And I dunked on her and she dunked on me. And then all of a sudden we basically brigaded each other,

became like a civil war where all the people who believe there's still like a crazy pandemic and then all the people who are like, listen, it's an endemic. We're just personally attacking her and personally attacking me. And then another journalist, I probably journalist just like, the two of you just need to stop because you have a difference of opinion. Exactly. Instead of putting it on Twitter. Well, exactly.

It's like, but that was kind of the magic of Twitter was we could publicly debate, but I think it's like, I kind of feel like that magic moment is over and that's, I'm just going to have debates on the pod from now on. It's over and it's sad. Honestly, though, I mean, it's better on. Don't you think Molly, the solution is podcasts? I mean, we're going on a little tangent here, but I feel like on podcasts, even when you disagree with somebody, at least it can be more thoughtful and less brigadeish. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, look, arguing with a series of words on your screen.

It's never going to like you're not going to interpret it well and you're not going to respond to it well. But I do think it's good to point out that like even though it feels like we have diverged a little bit from our original conversation and we sort of have, we also kind of haven't because crypto is fundamentally like a social media phenomenon in addition to all of the other things that it is. So like the culture around it kind of can't be separated from the business at this point, right? Right. Yeah. If Twitter didn't exist, if Discord didn't exist, if Reddit didn't exist, then I don't think crypto would be half as popular as it is. Yeah. All right.

The blog is amazing. Molly White. The blog is amazing. You're doing God's work out here and we will endeavor to protect you on the internet whenever we can. And I think it's great that there's somebody who is a backstop against the grifts because I do think there's some reasonable technologies here and some people with great intent. and for people who are like, oh, it's, it's, it's too much criticism. If somebody consolidates all the criticism, when you're being criticized, it's an opportunity to learn and to plug weaknesses in your industry. And you want to police yourself, not be policed by government agencies.

So Molly White, what you're doing here actually is a mitzvah for those people because now they can just look at the website and say, you know what? Yeah, we need to not do wash trading. Yeah, we need to figure out a solution to block wash rate. Oh, yeah, we need to have something for Dow's that fixes this problem. So I encourage people to look at this as the change log, the bug list, you know, what to fix next, which is what the company became when my friend Phil Kaplan started it. There was a lot of criticism, but it was like, hey, you're treating your employees really bad. You just laid off a bunch of people with no notice.

There was like all kinds of bad behavior that occurred. And it basically became like an HR master class and a management masterclass. It wasn't about grifting back then. It was more like how we treated people and customers and employees and partners. And I was like, hey, here's how to do better. So I think people should, if they're in the industry, actually cherish what you're doing. I certainly would. If somebody told me, here's how to be a better podcast or I'd be like, great, thanks.

You know, so I look at it as a very constructive project. I hope people take that way. I have had people. If you end up accidentally saving it from itself, that will be potentially. The true irony is when I enable Web3. It really will be. Well, you said people have to actually express this to you, Molly White? Yeah, I have a bunch of people who follow the site who themselves work in and on Web3 projects

who, you know, are taking it as like, wow, yeah, we do need to make some changes here. And I think that's great. I mean, I don't personally have much hope for Web3. But I'm glad that there are people within that community who are receptive to feedback and who are questioning their own beliefs and who are willing to see that, you know, it's not the, the perfect example of, you know, the technology of the future. I notice you link at the end of the stories to the tweet threads, which is great. It's like great, in a lot of cases, resources.

Have you thought about putting a comment thread there? Because that's when the company really exploded is they had threads and you could have a debate about that. And it also got out of control. Girl, don't do it. I know, like, don't do it. Yeah, I actually had someone bring that up yesterday to me. And there is, I don't know if you could pay me to put comments on that website.

The pointing people to the threat on Twitter is a power move. Yeah. Yeah, that's been sort of my compromise is like, if you want to discuss this, go over to Twitter where I can block you if I have to. But I don't feel like becoming a community moderator in any way. Yeah. So much upside in hosting those discussions. Right.

All right. Thanks, Molly White. Thank you. Thank you. Allie White. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you.

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