Unchained - The Chopping Block: Google’s Willow Chip, ICO Resurgence, and Crypto Dev Trends - Ep. 750

Episode Date: December 15, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week, the crew explores the resurgence of ICOs through Echo sales, diving into MegaEth’s record-breaking sale and the shifting meta of token launches. They also discuss Google’s quantum computing breakthrough with the Willow chip and its potential implications for cryptographic security in crypto. Tarun doubles down on his critique of Decentralized Science (DeSci), sparking a lively debate on its viability and accountability. Finally, the team unpacks Electric Capital’s developer report, highlighting Solana’s dominance in India and the global trends shaping crypto development. Show highlights 🔹 ICOs and Echo Sales Resurgence:The crew debates the return of ICOs, now rebranded as Echo sales, and their impact on token launches. Is the shift from airdrops to pre-sales a sustainable new meta for crypto? 🔹 MegaEth’s Record-Breaking Sale on Echo: A detailed analysis of MegaEth's $4.2M Echo sale that sold out in seconds. With a $200M FDV, the sale sparked discussions about community involvement and valuation dynamics. 🔹 Airdrops vs. Echo Sales: The panel dissects the shift in sentiment around airdrops, questioning their fairness and efficiency compared to community presales. Are Echo sales the new paradigm for engaging retail investors? 🔹 Quantum Computing and Crypto’s Future: Google’s breakthrough with the Willow chip sparks a discussion on quantum computing’s implications for cryptocurrencies. Is public key cryptography under threat, or do we have time to adapt? 🔹 The Satoshi Dilemma: Speculations about Satoshi Nakamoto’s coins and what would happen if they were ever moved. Could quantum computing make those coins vulnerable? 🔹 Decentralized Science (DeSci) Debate: Tarun doubles down on his criticism of DeSci projects, arguing they lack accountability and meaningful use cases. The team explores whether DeSci can evolve into something impactful. 🔹 Electric Capital’s Developer Report: Reactions to Electric Capital’s 2024 developer report, highlighting Asia overtaking North America in crypto developer activity, Solana’s dominance in India, and the growing trend of multi-chain developers. 🔹 Developer Efficiency in Crypto: Despite the plateauing number of developers, crypto projects demonstrate incredible efficiency. Fewer hacks, more battle-hardened code, and a shift toward higher-quality deployment signal a maturing space. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Disclosures Timestamps  00:00 Intro 01:52 The Return of ICOs 07:29 Airdrops vs. Community Sales 19:27 Quantum Computing and Crypto 28:18 Bitcoin Addresses & Quantum Computing 32:24 DeSci Debate 42:56 Electric Capital Developer Report 51:35 Developer Efficiency in Crypto Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crypto kind of repeatedly moves through these phases of here is the virtuous way to distribute your token. If you're going for the airdrop meta, you can't keep delaying your launch. How do you get as many fans as possible who actually have some skin in the game with as like little of the cap table or as a little sort of value we could just pop that? That bull market is up and delayed gratification down. 2025 is when America becomes a crypto country. And a lot of people move back to the U.S. and repatriate and develop. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two clon.

Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm named trading firms who are very involved. I like that EAT is the ultimate pump. DFI protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day.

So quick intros for us to go Tom, the defy maven and master of memes. Hello, everyone. Thanks a god Robert, the crypto connoisseur and czar of Superstain. Good morning. We've got Tarun, The Gigabrein, and Grand Pubaa at Gauntlet. Yo. And I am Haseeb, the head hype man at Dragonfly. So we're early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is legal advice, life advice, or investment advice.

Please, jocobloch.com, blog, for X, Z for more disclosure. Financial advice? I was trying to go from memory, and somehow I got them in the wrong order. You do this every week. I know. And seriously, you would think that I could do this from memory, but I actually can't. I don't know why. But we actually have a teleprompter, which we're not using.

Yeah, that is correct. So I'm in New York, so I thought it would be good to us to get together before the end of the year. It is the season to be grateful because crypto has ripped. It's continuing to rip. It's like unripped for about half a day. There was like, never mind, back to bull market. So things are going super well. And in the spirit of things going really well, it seems like ICOs are back, or at least they're trying to be back.

So at the end of the last show. Initial Kobe offering. Yeah. Okay, there's a new... Initial echo offering. Yes, IEOs. IEO. That's good.

So at the end of the last show, there was a short clip where I think Laura asked like, oh, what the ICO's coming back? And then I like ripped into ICOs. Yeah, you said ICOs are dead. They'll never come back. Yeah, ICOs are definitely not coming back. And when I said that, I realized that I didn't know what people meant by ICOs. And so when I thought ICOs, I assume what people meant is that 2017,

here's an address, send money, no KOC, no, you know, no account. know anything, and then just we all invest. There's no legal contracts. You get your tokens the next day. Exactly, right? To me, that's what an ICO is. And coinless sales and, you know, echo and stuff like that. Like, that's not an ICO.

That's just like a pre-sale. That's a crowd sale, right? It's a crowd sale. There's crowd sales and, you know, there's crowdfunding and other stuff in other industries as well, not just in crypto. But these have been going on forever, right? Coinless kept doing stuff, you know, through the bear market. So anyway, apparently these are ICOs now.

So I put out a tweet where I was like, do people think ICOs mean? I mean, hold on. That phrase is broken because it's not initial for most of these things. Right? The I in ICO means initial. True.

Right? I think people are misusing the term ICO. It's also not a coin offering. You know, you're buying equity. You're buying a safe. Right. For Echo, it's a save.

For coinless, I think it's just the right to tokens. Okay. I think there's a warrant also. There's a warrant. But it's still like you aren't literally buying a coin, you know? Yeah. And the coins are liquid, right?

So ICO is meant liquid. It was like basically liquid, the moment it was live. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's like you're in the stack of all the VCs. You're just investing alongside VCs in a private investment round, right? Which is what Echo is. But anyway, when I was lamb-baseding ICOs, I was talking about that, then I wrote this tweet and it got a ton of engagement.

And half the people were like, I mean what you think I mean, which is like 2017-style ICOs. A lot of people want those back. But then the other half people were like, no, I mean things like Echo and Legion, which are like basically just, you know, pre-sales, like in the VC stack. Yeah, I also don't understand my Legion is getting lumped in here. It feels like when, you know, VCs tweet like that list of like great companies and they like insert their own like company in there to like try to elevate a little bit. And I'm like, Legion is just like an OTC platform. It's like, you know, forge or like there's a million of these things.

You're just buying, you know, equity or token secondaries. Like it's not sort of, you know, it's not like echo. It's not like. Wait, is it a secondary platform? Yes. primary? Yes. Well, I thought the whole idea behind Legion was that you get points for, like,

being a great community member and... Secondary marketplace. Yeah, yeah. There's a little bit more to it. Yeah, but, like, you can go in there and buy some, like, locked celestial if you want.

It's, it's not like Echo. And maybe there are some something like... I think actually, I shouldn't totally cast away on it. I think there are some, like, primaries on there, but like,

also just, like, the quality is kind of crap. So I'm like... Okay, all right. So you're firing shots already at... I don't know. No old thing's fucking stupid. Okay, all, right, right.

So... And even if you go on a site and it's like, buy our token, it's on Mexie, gate, and uniswap. And I'm like, dude, just fucking stop. Okay. All right. I'll just start somewhere, Tom. That's right. That's right.

Hey, yeah, eventually someday buying this is the dream, but you got to start where you start, you know. So, okay. So, so all the talk of the town right now is Echo. Echo is Kobe's platform. Kobe, of course, crypto, celebrity trader, guy, something, something, Lido. Jordan Fish. Co-founder? Co-founder of Lido.

And so Kobe, so he launched his platform, there's no token. It is purely just a, he has said very clearly no token. Every platform before they've launched the token has said there's no token. Not every platform, but many of them. Let's say two thousand. Okay, fine. Okay, sure. So anyway, he has this presale platform where you can go on there,

your project that you want to raise capital, and you want to diversify your cap table to also get some non-VCs. You can go on Echo. And lately, Echo has been blowing up. So the most recent deal that went on Echo was Mega-Eath, which, you know, Disclosure, I think all four of us had investors into Mega-Eath. So Mega-Eat is like a high-performance layer two. And Mega-Eath, their sale, they had supposedly $3 million that was supposed to sell on the platform.

It's sold in like... It was 4.2 in the first tranche. 4.2 million. 5.8 in the second. Yeah. So initially it was only supposed to be $4.2 million. It's sold in like 56 seconds. Yeah.

So there are a bunch of people who are lined up of like, yeah, I want to buy. I want to buy. And it's like the maximum was $3.7,000, $1,000. Which is one ether. Yeah, exactly. So I think that is the other. That's a cap per account. Per person.

Per person. Which is, I think, the more impressive part. It's not like you have some whale going and blowing through the whole thing. That's a lot of people who are going through it actually person. A lot of people were clicking. Yes. Yeah. And the site was failing on all this.

That's right. Let's back up. It did feel like a shoe drop. Yeah, but this is why I felt like a shoe drop, right? and why everyone was clicking and the site went down, et cetera, for two reasons.

One, the valuation was below market. So, you know, the FDV of Megheth on the platform in this sale was $200 million, which is below where

it's currently marked, right? Well, no, that's a lot. There's a last round price, but it's below where the market would play today.

It's where the market expects that it is, right? Yes. They've had a lot of traction sands and all this stuff. So everyone thought that this was basically free money. And the amount of free money you could get was limited to one ether's worth. So everybody was ferociously trying to get their one ether in at a very stale valuation.

Right. This does feel like one of those meta shift moments, kind of like the compound liquidity mining moment, where all of a sudden, meta's changed. It's not air drops anymore. Now it's, oh, you go and you do a thing. saying maybe it's on Echo, maybe it's on one of these other platforms. But now you do the community sales. And people are really mad at airdoll.

Like, it's the one thing I saw consistently in the comments, is that people are now mad at air drops. They don't like air drops. They think they're extractive. They think they're gamified. They think they don't really serve the community. They serve these like professional air drop farmers. So, you know, recently there was the Magic Eden AirDrop.

And I saw this thing about like some, some guy who had 1,500 wallets who got like millions of dollars in the air drop. Yeah. And it's just like the people see this, right? like it's the most viral content is the illegitimacy of theirdrop. And this idea, you know, crypto kind of repeatedly moves through these phases of here is the virtuous way to distribute your token that makes it fair, right? And now, like, you know, is it fair that the person who clicks the fastest on Echo, who gets the one Eath, like, I don't know, whatever.

You like find ways to do things and they eventually get gamed over time and, you know, they get more bots and they get more people, you know. There's already people trying to sible. That's right. That's right. So Kobe was talking about how some guy signed up like 19 of his relatives and neighbors in the span of a day.

And then like he waited for him to create all these accounts just to ban them all at the end. So we know that that is immediately going to start happening on all of these crowd sales sites if this does become the meta shift. But I am seeing sentiment-wise. It does feel like the meta-shift has happened. And some people were asking me is like,

oh, okay, you're like super against ICOs because you don't want, you know, normal community members or retail to get access. And I was like, no, no, look, I was in support of airdrops. I thought air drops are totally fine. I just thought they were going to get gamed. And at the end of the day, like, even as investors, totally you want

the community to be involved. And you want to reward the people who are helping you. And some of those people are professional investors. Most of those people are just people in your community and your Discord and you know, devs and just, you know, people who are helping build that ecosystem. You want to be able to reward them, but it's hard when you use a simple criterion.

And first, the simple criterion was, okay, the airdrop criteria, which is just really easy to fix. You know, what's the law called where like any metric will get gamed? A good heart's law. Goodheart's law, right? So good heart's law. Okay, so it's like, oh, if you post on my Discord, you get there. Well, okay, well, then people are just going to fucking post in your Discord every single day

and create Discord bots. I'm going to say something that maybe people will be unhappy to hear. But if you're going for the AirDrop meta, you can't keep delaying your launch. I feel like another reason that people dislike AirDrop. is a lot of people would like make you play all these games to get the airdrop and then they would keep delaying their launch and then they would keep you know stretching it out whereas these echo sales feel like there's an adversarial relationship yeah yeah and I think I think that aspect of airdrops not just this I mean there's obviously the sibling

issues but this this delayed gratification thing it seems like a big component well eventually it's shifted from people farming the air drop to the air drop farming people yeah which on some level, it's like, okay, once it's no longer normal people getting the air drop and farming the air drop, it's kind of like, well, good, fuck them. You know, like, if you're a professional air drop farmer, why shouldn't a project? Well, what's the difference between, like, when do I become

a, like, on the spectrum of like, I'm, you spend at least 10 hours a week doing stuff for airdrop. Look, if you have 1,500 wallets, okay, like that, then you're an air drop farmer. That's, you're on, you're safely on that side of line, you know? But I think the, the interesting thing is if you look

at hyperliquid, right? So obviously hyperliquid has been, just ripping. It's now close to, what is it, 17 bill FTV? Now it's like 19 and a half. Yeah. Okay, okay. So, it's like 20 billion.

Since we like, you know, talked an hour ago. Yeah, okay. Well, there you go. So hyperliquois has been doing amazing. And so, you know, they did massive air drop. Depending on when you count the value that was airdropped, biggest air drop in history or top five air drop in history. They air dropped 33% of the total supply of hyperliquid.

And hyperliquid, if you remember, before they actually launched the token, people were complaining that they were just keeping, doing more of these programs and they weren't dropping the token, right? So the sentiment on HyperLeaks was actually negative when they did like round two of the points campaign and all this stuff.

And then once the air drop happened, pretty much the onlyirdrop I've seen where just uniformly positive sentiment. But I also feel like they gave pretty reasonable expectations on launch. Like they were like, we're definitely launching before end of 2024. Whereas I feel like a lot of the other programs

So I've just been like years. It feels like they just keep stretching them. I think that the echo thing lets you short-circuit that. Because there's some instant gratification. Oh, I got it. I got into the sale now. Yeah, yeah. I think that that time aspect is like the thing that is shifting.

People just don't want to have delayed gratification anymore. I can see that. Bull market is up and delayed gratification down. Yeah. That's at least my interpretation of it. Maybe. They also kind of talked about like the weird dance between, like wanting to anti-sibble, but then also like more people for value.

And I feel like hyper-liquidid is very straightforward, right? If you're providing liquidity, if you're doing volume, like, yeah, you get compensated. And it's not sort of this weird like, oh, well, if you got to like... If you say GM in my Discord. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I feel there's no surprises or no like, oh, I, you know, thought I was going to do it because I traded $1. Like, where's my money? It's like, no, that's not how you get compensated.

So... Okay, what's surprising to me is that usually in crypto, I feel like the meta, is always on the move and it always like explores some new part of the meta space, right? Because if you go back to a square you're already at, we kind of already know how to exploit that square. Right.

Okay, so we moved around and we started, okay, first ICOs and no ICOs, then we did this, then we did that. And then, okay, now we got these like points programs. And then from points programs, going back to just, okay, we're going to do community presales again. Like, it kind of feels like,

well, why do we move away from that in the first place to air drops? Well, I think the reason we moved away from community pre-sales is because they were done in the ICO form factor. Well, no, but we had like, you know, there was coinless sales and TokenSoft and all these platforms that were doing this. And that was the default way to get a token out for quite a while. Well, it was one piece of the way to get it. Yeah, yeah, it was part of the pipeline. The interesting thing is that was like popular in the bear market post-2017 to buy all these like private round L-1s.

Right. Right. That was like, I feel like the coin list kind of growth. Whereas this is weird because it's in the bull market, people want this. That's why I'm saying that I feel like there's a little bit of this delayed gratification thing. That's quite important to this. Yeah. I don't know.

I think we'll see. I think it's too early to declare victory. I think there's almost like a little of a spectrum or maybe like just like multi-access kind of tradeoff here where I think having this broad swath of hold. is probably overall better for like sentiment around the token and the token price. And I think, you know, if you look at the mega sale, for example, it's a very low cap per account almost intentionally, right? You want as many people as possible. You want sort of this loud roaring stadium of fans and not like one mega whale.

But, hey, if you think about, you know, the money, the dollar value of the market price of those tokens, could that have been spent to actually, you know, make the product better? could have intended to encourage more developers or liquidity for an example of hyperliquid. Probably those people aren't necessarily going to contribute the most liquidity or volume to like a new perp-dex. So I don't know, it's this I think weird artifact to the fact that

the market doesn't necessarily reward improved metrics or traction or something like that. There's this sort of divergence. That's interesting you say that because it does because this is the thing that we talked about on the previous show when we talked about, you know, hyperliquid points programs versus L1's L2s. What we might see is this bifurcation of the meta

where you see when you run something like a hyperliquid or a fantasy top or whatever where it's really clear what the bottom line metric is, like what the North Star metric is. You just incentivize the North Star, you do a points program. If there's no clear North Star metric, like you're a layer one, you're a layer two, then you just do, you do echo, presale,

you just basically get the roaring stadium of fans because that's the thing that you're really optimizing for is people. And it feels like that probably makes sense for certain projects and not for others, right? Like Hyperliquid, it wouldn't really make sense for them to do that same strategy. They really did need not people to own. They need traders.

They need liquidity. They need flow. Right. And that comes from just getting people to come and trade on the platform. And it's really hard to run a developer grants incentivization program. I mean, we've talked about this for like a new L1, L2. It's like you don't know what you should be incentivizing or like if there's actually, it's a very lossy process to like give out money or value and turn that into like value

and absent activity on the chain. And it's almost so lossy that maybe it's not even worth it in a lot of scenarios. Yeah. I mean, another thing to think about is like, you know, you're saying maybe they could have taken the $10 million and used it for product development. But I kind of actually feel like if I compare the $10 million that was sold. Well, they get the $10 million.

Sorry, no, no, no, no. I meant for the market value of the assets and using that for like a grant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't mean that the $10 million doesn't get it. I meant the like the users who are participating are creating transaction volume, right? They're not creating transaction. from this, right? But there is some sense in which

it's not that expensive and Meggieath didn't really raise that much money relative to the rest of the market. So I actually feel like on a cost basis, even if it like 10x is plus, it's not that expensive relative to

hyperliquid in the dollar sense of like how much was given out. 10x is it's 100 mil, right? 90 mil. If you assume it's a 10x and it's like 90 mil of gains that go to the pre-sell investors. Yeah. Which I'm just saying is like a lot less than the gains for some of the other

air drops. That's true. So I kind of feel like it's actually, it's not, I don't feel like they're like spending too much of their token cap table on this. That's sort of what they're selling. I mean, I definitely think that there's a difference between, you know, one process that raises capital, right? If you're looking at Echo, a project is raising capital versus another, it's,

distributing ownership. And they do seem like very different activities. It's, you know, it's very StarCraft-like. This is like the Zerg strategy. You want like many Zerglings out on the map as possible. And then, you know, you have like the Prototh strategy and you just get like one fucking carrier. Which is which?

Yeah. So can you explain this for the audience that doesn't play StarCraft? This is, okay. Only the Terra Luna audience was really into StarCraft. Yeah, that's, yeah. Oh, okay, good. You know, I was going to say, I think, yeah, in one scenario is your point.

It's like, how do you get as many fans as possible who actually have some skin in the game with as like little of the cap table or as little sort of value we could just possible? That's the Zerg. That's the Zerg. I was just like, that's the army. That's like, how can you sort of manifest

a Link Marine kind of situation? Yeah. Well, the Link Marines were Terrans for sure. Yes. Let's not complicated this analogy already. It's already gotten pretty deep. You know, versus, hey, how do you? I guess, I don't know if there's really like a, you know,

sort of protost equivalent. Maybe this is a little bit, you know, stretched. But yeah, I think it's, to your point, it's, it's maybe that maybe that's the most value extractive kind of thing. It's like, who's going to be the highest dollar bidder? How can I get the most cash, you know, into my treasury as quickly as possible? That's the carrier build. That's the carrier build.

What are the pylons? What are the pylons? The pylons are your community. Okay, okay. All right, all right. You know what? Speaking of pylons, I think it's the time for us to change topics. We're going to go to talk about Google's willow chip.

Okay. So I don't know if you guys. It's a hard pivot. Yeah. But it's guys, it's Proton's vibe. I think the Proton's vibes. Quantum actually fits in very nicely. So, okay, so let's talk about Willow.

So there was a lot of hype this last week about this Google launching this chip called Willow, which achieves a significant breakthrough in error correction and qubit stability for quantum computers. Okay. So very, very briefly, we're not going to go into the depth about quantum computers, but quantum computers, they are a new form of computing that, you know, uses quantum properties of superposition in order to compute things that are very difficult to compute using classical computers.

One of the things that is very much at risk, so there are a lot of positives from quantum computers like, you know, biological simulations and, you know, fiscaling physics. But one of the downsides, depending on who you are, of quantum computers, is that they can break a lot of classical

cryptography. And crypto, cryptocurrencies, are built on a lot of classical cryptography, specifically the public key cryptography. Also, not just cryptocurrencies, all of your banks. Oh, totally. Yeah. Any SSL. The whole world. Yeah. Old SSL frames that your banks holding onto can get

decrypted if we end up breaking, you know, RSA and a lot of this stuff. So there was a lot of, so there was a lot of excitement because Willow operated a quantum computer of the size of 105 cubits. I believe those are logical cubits, not actual qubits.

Which is impressive. But it's also like way, way, way smaller the number of cubits you need in order to actually break anything. For now, but if there's Moore's Law effectively for quantum computing in like a couple of years, I mean, I've done the math. No, not in a couple of years. Not in a couple of years. So if there is a more, so right now, the way that people are modeling out the quantum computing stuff is that if more, if there is a Moore's law like trajectory to quantum scaling, then we can consider breaking like RSA-based cryptosystems in about 20.

years. So we have a lot of headroom assuming that we have Moore's Law like scaling and that it continues all the way like Moore's Law like scaling, which is to say, you know, a bunch of people were asking me about this and my answer to them was that, look, it's impressive what Google did, but you should not be worried about crypto systems getting broken today. The question is not, is quantum getting better? Of course it's getting better. We expected it to get better, right? The question is, is it getting better faster than we expected it to? And the answer is, is not really. It's getting better roughly at the pace that people are expecting,

which tells us that, like, if you look at actually a metaculous, which is one of these non-monetary prediction markets, I think the median estimate right now for when a quantum computer can break one of the RSA numbers or a factor one of the RSA numbers is in, I think, 2040. So 15 years. 15 years. That's kind of soon. I mean, yeah.

So it means you have 15 years, right? Which, like, even if you get that, it's possible for, for almost all modern cryptocurrency to move away from elliptic curve cryptography, which is mostly what they use for public encryption. You have to transfer, you have to do a big migration. I mean, hard for everything. Yeah, you have to hard for everything. Yeah, you have to hard for it.

And then if you have a ECC address or ECDSA address, you would have to transition over to a new address in the new format that's post-quantum. And of course, we don't really know what the post-quantum thing is going to be because everything we have right now is super inefficient, but 15 years from now, it would probably be fine. I mean, we have some things that are right. Yeah, they're like the NIST's proposal. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but they're all much slower than... Give it 15 years. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are easy to... Like, you could imagine special purpose hardware or, like, GPU acceleration. Sure, sure.

I'm not worried about that. Right. So, like, I would say this is still slower than I expected. Like, when I graduated college and was, you know, almost at a, one of the PhDs I was going to do is in quantum computing. How many PhDs were you going to do?

Well, I got in two different programs. One was like pure theoretical physics and math, and one was like quantum computing. But this weird type of quantum computing, which is called topological quantum computing, which doesn't have this error correction problem. But we haven't been able to isolate the physical system that can do it to survive for more than like a few microseconds.

Like the problem is like you can generate the thing, but then it like almost like a nuclear type. of thing, it decays and you can't hold the state for very long. Right. But it's a pretty big accomplishment because most people always thought error correction doesn't scale with the number of qubits. Like the idea is like, you know, people were making these like one to four qubit systems in the 80s and 90s, like, or late 80s, early 90s.

So like, you know, Feynman kind of defined a quantum computer in 1982. This is why I think it's like funny that people are like, oh, it's such a new form of computing. people have known about it for a while. We just haven't been able to build stable devices, like things that either don't decay or have these compounding errors. But then, yeah, Shores' algorithm when it came out 94, which is like the thing that showed how to factor RSA,

that sort of led to this whole boom. And then there's been a bunch of boom and bus cycles, a little bit like AI. But I think, like, when I was graduate, so it's like 2010, everyone was like, in 10 years, we'll have 1,000 qubit systems. So like I actually What was this? Toney 10.

Okay. So like we're not really, we're like still a little slower than what people don't. Pretty good. But it's, it's still a lot. I think the biggest number

the quantum computers are factored is like 27 or something. Yeah, it's not, it's not particularly. Yeah, yeah. So like, I mean,

RSA numbers are extremely large compared to the number 27. So, but, but it is one of these things that like once you start, once you actually start the Moore's Law thing,

you will see it improved. I mean, the real problem and like this is sort of like the 10,000 foot view is like as I add new qubits yeah the each new cubit unlike a classical bit entangles with all the other things so I need to like kind of have a little bit of its state isolated but then each computation kind of makes them interact and so I have to do these like steps that are like do a computation then remove it try to remove error do a competition remove error. And as you grow, historically, all of the remove error steps grow much faster than the number of qubits.

Right. And so you spend more time and more energy. It's almost like something like nuclear fusion where it's like, yes, we can do it, but we can't do it efficiently. Like we have to put in more energy. It's put in more time correcting the errors than we're actually doing real useful computation. Now, I do think that Google blog post was like a marketing marvel. It was ridiculous. I mean, like, first off, they're like, oh, this proves the multiverse.

I saw that. I was like, also, secondly, they don't cite, like, any of the physicists from the 30s and 40s who fucking invented all this. They cite a living guy who's a professor at Oxford, but he wrote a Popsai book and they, like, link to the Amazon link to buy this popular science book about the multiverse. You mean, Dave George. Yeah, as opposed to, like, anyone who actually invented this stuff. I found that, like, kind of.

You were going to make a lot of people very angry. by describing David Deutsch that way. I've met a number of people in crypto who are very hardcore David Deutsch. It's not that I don't think he deserves it, but it's like, come on, he's not the inventor of this. Like, that's crazy to me. Did they have a photo of David Shore or something?

Or maybe his name dropped him in the blog post. No, Peter Shore deserves a lot of credit. Yeah, yeah. Because the Shore's algorithm is like a very surprisingly simple. Like, you don't actually need much more than high school or early college when your algebra to understand how it works. but Peter Shore definitely deserves to be.

But David Deutsch is like, he didn't invent most of physics. He like told a story that lets you like interpret it in a certain way. But all the people in the 30s and 40s invented that. There's no, there's no one like at the heyday of. All right, Google shoutout was a bad shoutout. Yeah, of the, you know, at the time when people were fighting about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics in the 20th. Yeah, that was, that's when this stuff was invented.

This is what I was like this. Okay, so let me bring this back a little bit to crypto real quick. I have to have a science rant every episode. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. I hope I didn't butcher the explanation of quantum computing. No, we're cutting in a D-side, but give it a sec. So I want to contextualize for people because I was getting a lot of people paying me about this. For folks who were like, okay, quantum computer is scary.

It means the end of cryptocurrency. No, it doesn't. Cryptocurrencies can adapt by just moving away from the public key cryptography. The only exception to that is old Bitcoin addresses. So Bitcoin addresses before 2012. Satoshi. Yeah, including Satoshi, did not use hashing. So hashing is not vulnerable to Shores algorithm.

So if you hash an address, you're good. As long as you like, the UTXL model, you like move the address around and you never use, reuse an address again, you should be fine, even against a quantum adversary. But old Bitcoin addresses are basically just raw public keys. And raw public keys, they're out there forever. Everybody can see them. And then you can just run Shores algorithm and do the, inverse elliptic or whatever it's called.

Quantum Fourier transform. Quantum Fourier transform, obviously, on tip of my tongue. And break those keys. So that would be right now the most obvious prize to developing a quantum computer is that there's roughly a billion dollars of Bitcoin. No. No, no, sorry, a billion of Bitcoin. I'm sorry.

There's a million Bitcoin. A million Bitcoin. I'm sorry. Yeah. Bitcoin is worth $100,000. Right. Okay. So that would be how much?

$100 billion. $100 billion. of Bitcoin that is a potential prize for somebody who develops a quantum computer. Now that being said, one possibility is that Bitcoin could just do a migration and say, once we move to a post-quantum algorithm, you have three years to move old, I think it's called the pay-to-public-key addresses. You have three years to move paid-to-public-key addresses over into post-quant format. If you don't, they can no longer be moved.

In which case, you would just black hole everything that doesn't move within three years, which is probably a good proxy for these are lost points. So now we need again to the speculative question, which is will Satoshi imagine they have to show up to do an action? Will they show up? Well, they can still show up anonymously to do this. Yeah, yeah. But do you think they will?

Because the amount of attention, scrutiny is very different than it was. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think pretty clearly not. I mean, I'll say this. The transaction that's broadcast to the mempool to move Satoshi's coins that's signed correctly is going to be analyzed every which way. Yeah, I mean.

Here's the... It would be, to be catastrophic to the Bitcoin price. If a transaction showed up moving to Tosci's coins, that would be like, Bitcoin price would nuke. I know. Bitcoin will nuke from 3.9 million to like 3.1 million. Exactly. Right when that happens. That's right.

Someone was actually asking me yesterday, like black swans in this cycle. What is the new FTX Luna? And like, nothing seemed obvious to me, but I was like if Satoshi gets doxed or like... I don't think Stozy getting docs would do it. I think that would be really... Yeah, I'm a believer in the... Totally, totally, totally. Very likely Serti's dead.

But like if Satoshi moved their coins to Binance. Oh, to buy... That would be true black swat. I mean, imagine if the Binance K-Y-Sys system denied by default. Right. That would be a real public service. I get most exchanges prohibit like Satoshi signing up. That would be amazing.

I cannot imagine what the compliance department of Binance would do. Right. I am Satoshi. Yeah, call CZ. Well, they would sign up in their real name. And then they would just happen to move Satoshi's Bitcoin. Yeah. How would you even verify?

Yeah, this is why I said. The speculative aspect of this is actually more entertaining because there's so many ways this can go wrong. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the least likely scenario, and I'm just saying this as like a thought experiment. the least likely scenario is that Satoshi is an AI from the future that time traveled backwards to create the incentive to develop quantum computing and the advancement of everything necessary to create the AI in the future. Are you a screenwriter? I created an AI meme coin around this concept.

I hope not. Yeah. If I did, we're about to. Yeah. Yeah, clearly Robert needs 20%. Screen. So you're, I feel like this is a good way to make a movie though. Yeah.

like the Satoshi future coming back. Okay. Maybe we could like collectively commission like a script. Yeah. Okay. Well, so all right. So quantum computing aside, Tarun,

you have been on a rampage. We talked last time about your, your anti-Di sentiment. You gave a little bit of a rant. He is like the general of the anti-Di army. Yeah. So what's now, so apparently like that wasn't enough for you.

And there were maybe a few D-Syci sentiment. people in your comments saying like, hey, what do you have against DSI? And you just, you didn't double down, you quadrupled down and just have been nonstop shitting on DSI as a concept. So real quick, for those who didn't tune in last week, DSI says for decentralized science. It's basically kind of people funding science projects or science experiments. It's GoFund me with, for most of these things, it's GoFund me that tells you, hey, we're going to do this experiment, but you have very little accountability. They'll do it. Right.

And so the thing that I saw you last night, I was telling you, dude, your rants against D.Sai are honestly right now, you're like the biggest DSI influencer. You're bringing more attention to DSI than it ever had before he started talking about it. What do you have to say for yourself? You know, every time now that any of the DSI coins go up, I get these, I have the reply guys, the like 10 reply guys. Dunking on to Rue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just like, oh, like, you know, like you shit on D-Side, but the coin's still going up. I'm like, all right. Well, nothing I think. Have you had a D-Sy thing, like, send you some tokens yet as like a... Brib? No, but just as like elect you as the unofficial ambassador. If you hear T-Roon tweeting positively about this one particular coin?

Yeah. Yeah. If you shit on a D-Side project, the token should go. No, no, no. The only D-Side thing that people call D-Side, but I really do. don't even think of it. I just think it as like some tools to better science research or like the thing Brian Armstrong funds research hub, which like, that makes a lot of sense. It's just like a better, better crowdsource tooling for open. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes total sense, right?

Is there a token? No. Oh, well. Yeah. Exactly. That's my, that's my problem is like all the things that are actually like improving scientific methodology don't have a token, don't need a token. All the things that are just scams for grad students have a token. That's like the... Wait, scams for grad students or buy grad students? Scams by grad students. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm seeing a two by two here

and it's an open gap in the matrix. You need the good stuff with a token. Yeah, I need to make the four by four matrix. It's a good meme. If there's the good stuff with a token, would you... Can you imagine a good thing with a token inside?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What would it look like? I was telling you, like, the specialized prediction markets for like... Okay, other than that, that's very... Is that even D-Sai? Yeah, why do you need a special platform for that? Well...

Just put on play market. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not saying you need a special token. I'm sure someone will... Will launch it. Okay. It's kind of like hard to imagine something where token incentives, like, so early, make that much sense. Like, you don't really need a decentralized network.

Like, maybe it's something like, okay, I have to fund participants in a clinical trial. And, like, there's some way that, like, the token is used for doing that. But it's very hard to construct It's very hard Yeah, yeah, but fundraising You need some form of accountability Like if you're just raising this money Saying you're going to do the science experiment off chain

And then you never really do it Then it's like a GoFundMe that just rug pulls you But is this not the same core objection As the ejection to ICOs that we were talking about earlier It's a denticoin It's a different denticoin. No, it's better than denticoin. Because denticoin was so obviously

stupid and a scam that's what most of these are. You read the prospectus. It's like someone who lived in Brock Pierce's village in Puerto Rico was like, oh, I read this longevity drug and like, I'm going to make a coin. And then they find a grad student to send a check emoji and then like that's the project. Like a lot of these things are like embarrassingly bad. Like I think like there's there's people who are earnest idiots and they're like, oh, well, you know, like this is a way to fund all this reason. that I want to do.

And I don't have to do NSF grants. So like, yeah, like, let me just do this. But again, you have no accountability. In NSF grants, at least there's like, oh, I have to renew the next year. And like, I'm not saying that that system is good. There's no accountability, but are there the right incentives, right? So, like, hypothetically, wouldn't there be the incentive to go out and do the right research and experiments if it makes coin go up in the researcher slash science thing?

Well, it's a popularity contest, right? which like canadian beauty contest doesn't find truth necessarily i mean that's true but there should still be the incentive for someone to actually go do actual science it's a loose incentive yeah it's a very yeah yeah that that that's the real it's like in the it's one of the potential things you could do to make the coin go out if you say if you said if you said there's a lot of other easier ways to make the coin go out that's yeah yeah yeah exactly that's basically yeah all right so tom give us uh what let's do like a sort of rfp what what kind of a D.S.I company would you want to see for you to be like, yeah, Desireole.

You're like, I'm out. I'm out. Well, I was going to ask you, what would the Echo, what would the Legion even of D.Sai look like for you? That's a good question. I think if there were, you know, like in a really crazy future, if a lot of lab devices could cryptographically sign, like, oh, we were used, these are the outputs. And you could basically have something where the outputs are posted on chain by the devices. It's like trusted device, like trusted execution enclave for each device. And then that would be the proof that, oh, someone did the experiment. So unlock funding. Like, oh, for, you know, the first round of experiments are done. Here's the results. Results satisfy some constraints. Okay, now this, have some proof that

the devices were used. Now unlock. Okay. So scientific fraud detect. Yeah, exactly. That type of stuff makes sense, but it's all so complicated compared to the low effort. It sounds like incredibly expensive. Compared to the low effort scams we see. Okay, okay, okay. But let's steal man the positive case for the echo of D.Sai. Like, it does seem to me that, okay, one thing I hear complaints from scientists all the time is that grants, grant process is broken. Like, what's the thing that Tyler Cowen does?

Oh. They're like express grant thing or they give you. Fast grants, fast grants, right? Everybody I know who knows anything about the grant system is like, that's awesome. We need more of that of just extremely streamlined, direct capital source grant system. That's great. That's patronage. That's not, I have a meme coin that has to go up.

I think this stuff is kind of like patronage, though. Like, you kind of think about like NFT market versus the art market. And like, it's a separate kind of thing. And you're kind of like making this weird shit that people want. And you're like, yeah, all right. Like, if you're going to pay me money. This reminds me of SBF tweeting about how Constitution Dow was a, like, back when that was happening, was a, what's the EA thing? The certificate.

Oh, certificates of impact? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was his argument with the constitutional token, basically, meme coin, was a certificate of impact. I think if you, if there had not been a token, though, the concept. It's crowdfunding, you know. Crowdfunding is fine. but usually there's some notion. If you're using an echo like thing, right,

then you can put the legal contract. You can like tie some value to the enterprise. But basically just say like, look, this is a science startup experiment launch pad. It moves fast like fast. But now we're just turning it back into science venture capital funding, which is like that you're starting to look more like that, which we already know.

That's fine. Yeah, but it's crowds. I think the meme coin part is the problem. I don't really get the point of the coin. So the coin represents people's, perception of the value of this thing. Ownership in the scientific endeavor. I mean, like, back in the day, scientific...

But these IP things, right? So one area of D-Syte where you'll get these long threads of, like, haters of mine who are... Because, like, now I've been getting, I've been getting like one of these every other day. They're like, oh, well, like, you know, biotech IP sucks. It's not very decentralized. Imagine if a Dow held the IP and then you could distribute... I'm like, this is so idiotic.

Like, if the IP was valuable, whatever the off-chain company that actually holds the rights to legal trial would just rug you. Why would the Dow ever get the payments from them? Unless it's, the IP is transferred early on. How do I enforce it, though?

If it's like a fee stream from IP also, you can't do it like, that's clear security. Yeah, yeah. That's a whole separate definition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then then 50% of these bio-IP projects are, which they might be. I don't know.

I don't think you think about it as an investment platform or science of capital. It's like a donation. Now we've gone back to Certificative Impact though. Yeah, yeah. Well,

here's my prediction for 2025. Tificate of impact is not a security, thankfully. I think in 2025, Tarun finds one D-Side project. Maybe this is like a New Year's resolution we need from New Year's to find one good D-Side deal. I am giving Tarun the New Year's resolution

of finding one D-Side thing that he doesn't hate. Doesn't have to love it. All right. Doesn't hate. You have to invest. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Not only that. We'll tie this full circle. Rojoad Ventures will put it on Echo. Okay. Okay. Well, you can't put on Echo. They have to put on Echo. They'll put it on Echo in our...

But your group is like one of the one. Oh, you sponsor. Oh, okay. Yeah. Once Turun finds something that he doesn't hate. Yeah. It doesn't mean he's going to like it. Yeah.

So if you are a DECISI founder, the best way he got to talk to him on Twitter. On Twitter. Oh, God. Get in his reply. I will say I do appreciate that D-Side people have better diction than meme coin people. That's the nicest thing I can say about that. Better diction? Yeah.

Wow. Okay. They write diatribe. I like that. That's good. That's a good way to curry favor with your new entrepreneur base. Okay, cool. All right.

So one more story that I want to get through. So Electric Capital, friend of the show, Avichel's been on before. electric capital, they release their annual developer report. So it's always a big event in crypto where they release a big trove of data where they analyze going through all the GitHub commits and all the repos that are currently active of which where are developers, what's growing, what's shrinking, what ecosystems are actually winning developers at the margin. I'm going to run through some of the basic numbers.

Then we can go around and get reactions. So first, North America got flipped. It is now Asia is the number one continent for developers as of this year. Totally believe it. Yeah. It's hard to believe. If you said the other thing, I would, yeah. No, yeah.

So North America has dropped. I mean, I guess in some level, unsurprising. US right now actually is the number one country by developer, market share, which is 18%. India is at 18, or sorry, 12%. UK 4%, China, 4%. Canada, roughly 4%. But, yeah, Asia, on the whole, just so many countries.

2025, that might flip back. Because 2025 is when America, becomes a crypto country. There you go. And a lot of people move back to the U.S. and repatriate and develop here in America. At the same time, I think the U.S. is raising the status for crypto everywhere. So I don't think it's just a...

The other thing to remember is that U.S., you know, we are 4% of the world population. So we're a very small country. If you're talking about developers by number, there are... And the other thing, too, is that in America, we're going to have access to a lot of AI tools before other people around the world are, which means that I think outside of America a lot more developers

are going to be scaling just by pure number and in America you're going to have access to the devins and clods of the world that are just going to be automating a lot more

smart contract development but anyway share of new devs so these are total market share of devs America is 18% at India's 12%. But if you look at new devs actually India is number one

by new devs. You have to give Solana a lot of credit for that. That is primarily Solana. So the really interesting thing there is that if you look at developers, look at developer marksha by chain,

in almost every single country, US is number one. Sorry, US number one. And almost every single country, Ethereum is number one. Solana is number two. And the third chain differs by country. India is the only exception

where Solana is number one and Ethereum. I mean, you got to get props to super team. And like the Salana Foundation in 2021, I remember invested extremely heavily in like hackathons, events. Totally.

In a way that everyone else didn't. Like, in Ethereum, I actually have gone to both a Salonac Conference and Ethereum conference in India, and it's like night and day difference in number of attendees. It used to be Polygon in India. Right. But then once they kind of got moved to Dubai, it's just like, there is, like, there is, there are a bunch of Ethereum conferences. Yeah. But they're really small comparatively.

And I think I just kind of, you can tell that there's like a much larger Solana community in India. It's like just going to the conferences, it feels like it's like night and day difference. Yeah. I mean, fees just explain a huge amount of it. If you're a random person in India, Ethereum transactions are so expensive right now. But like, yeah, of course. Well, I don't think there's actually been as much of active courting as there was and continues to be. Like, Solana has a ton of hacker houses there.

Right. Super team, like, by building this like community developer relations group, which has now spread to other countries. Like, I thought that was like a very genius move. At the time, it wasn't, like, obvious to me. Like, Lily was, Lily, the head of Salon Foundation, was kind of explaining this to me. And I didn't totally get it until sometime, like, last year, 2022. But, like, it makes so much sense.

I basically have, like, in the L1 almost has, like, a outsource developer relations tool. So, like, let's say you start a project and you're in India. They will help you, like, do your marketing, help you, like, find devs, help you with, like, tutorials and stuff like that. And I don't see a lot of L1s. Ethereum is very decentralized. There's not like any core of that.

And I think in other L1s, you see them pick one country and like completely stick to it. So I feel like for the move chains, they all went to Korea and Cosmos was also Korea. But Solana made a bet in 2021 that India would be the place. Europe though. Europe is like the Cloud of Stronghold. For sure.

That's true. I guess I'm thinking like including all the Terra developers. If you added them at that time, We have to subtract them out now. They're all gone. Well, I think a lot of them went to move, actually. A lot of the old Terra Cosmos developers are now move developers. Yeah, okay.

Well, Solana, unsurprisingly, was the number one ecosystem for new developers. A total of 7.6,000 new developers. Ethereum is number two, 6.4,000 new developers. One in three devs are now multi-chain, which is up from 10%, less than 10% in 2016, now up to 34%. Ethan, the EVM ecosystem, of course, still dominate. And more than half of Ethereum devs now work on Ethel2s. In 2022, it was only 25% that we're on L2s. So obviously, the EVM ecosystem has fragmented quite a bit.

And of course, base playing a very, very outsized role in terms of bringing a lot of those developers. 42% of Bitcoin devs are working on scaling solutions. And fastest growing ecosystems by overall developers in just percentage terms, not in total numbers. in percentage terms, number one is eigenlayer. Then number two is Aptos. Number three is Solana.

Number four is ICP. Number five is base. ICP being... Dividing by zero is infinity. Just never forget. If you have a small base, you will arrive at a big number and increase. Yeah, going from two to five.

Yeah. So any big... Oh, so this is interesting. So, okay, yeah, top ecosystem for all continents, but one had Ethereum. And number two, is Solana. But the number third for each continent was different. Tell us what they were.

So South America and Asia, the number three was Polygon. In Africa, the number three was DFINITY. In Europe, the number three is, anybody? Pocodod. Pocod. Pocod is number three. And then North America, the number three is... Hmm.

Number three is base. I was going to say general EVM. Yeah. Yeah, I was trying to figure out which all too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's base. So, yeah, overall, surprising, not kind of... Not that surprising.

Yeah. I mean, the only things that are, like, surprising in there would just be, like, the fact that, you know, pretty much everywhere except for India, like, it's, like, you know, Ethereum number one, Salana number two. I would think there would be, like, a little bit more geographic turmoil in the rankings. Yeah. You know, it's interesting to see that, like, Ethereum and Salana are just... so fundamentally dominant. Yeah. Yeah.

I was more surprised about like absolute number of devs kind of plateauing over the past like two years. I feel like that's right. If you look back very closely, it's like a slightly lagging indicator of price action basically. And it feels like, hey, we've been on this crazy run. But like, dev numbers are flat, but also not down. Yeah, I don't know. That was a bit.

I think what it, what I take away from, that is I remember in 2017, when we first started seeing some of these developer numbers, there were so many analogies like, oh, but look how many developers are up for JavaScript and how many developers are for mobile and how many developers are for, you know, VR. And like, you know, we're here and VR is here. And then mobile is way up here. And then web is way up here. And it's like, obviously, we're going to go through this curve of exponential growth in developers. And that was a lot of the motivation for investing in a lot of developer platform and developer tooling companies in crypto. And very few of those have panned out,

because of the fact that the absolute number of developers is just not that big. Well, also your other point about the AI piece. Yeah, but that doesn't really arrive. Well, the counterpoint being the infrastructure for developers and the tooling are different L-1s. And all the new L-1s have succeeded. True, true, true.

The point I was going to make is that, I think if you had told me that in 2017-2018, 2018, that there will be roughly a 4-Xing of devs in the space and then it's going to stabilize. I would have thought, wow, crypto is going to die. That just means that we don't make it. And so as a no, we made it. Still, people are building new stuff.

But the reality is that crypto is extremely developer efficient in that we just don't need that many devs. And it's like if we added another 10,000 devs, is there actually that many good ideas for them to work on? Yes, I agree. I think also there's obviously been a big shift towards applications as a sort of sync for developer activity, which I'm guessing are not being counted. in this, like having looked through some, like, they have a GitHub, which has their whole like taxonomy with these like schemas for the product that they scrape. And it's very much still in this kind of like, 2021 meta of like, oh, you, if you're a developer in crypto, you are developing solidity for a new protocol or you're, you know, developing a new blockchain.

And like, that's kind of the stuff that's in there versus, yeah, if you're making a new wallet or like a new project. Yeah, you have an app that's you live or something. Yeah. Yeah. You're not getting, you're not getting, or even like, hey, if you're, you know, working on stable coin payments at some more traditional company or it's like that's not that's not in there and so I would be actually curious to see a almost like a meta analysis of like the projects that they scraped the GitHub's for I mean that they have that whole

the the sort of web of companies that they scrape in their GitHub like what do those projects look like are those protocols or those new chains or those L2s because I feel like that would actually maybe tell you with what's showing up in the network. I think actually a great methodology to verify, did they scrape this correctly, is to just like take, you know,

20 or 30 projects that everybody knows are like these are real crypto projects. Say how many of these were in the database? Yeah. I mean, to add on to your point, though, like in terms of methodology, you know, if Coinbase adds 2,000 engineers. Yeah, those are so on. That shows up his zero new developers in this methodology, but there's

probably 2,000 people who are now working on building crypto things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I guess the, obviously, the way the methodology behind this report is very biased toward on-chain code. Yeah. Right. Like you have a smart contract deployed on a blockchain somewhere, or you're building the blockchain itself. And I think this kind of methodology, it does seem true that there are less people writing code on chain.

The growth in the number of those people is less than I would have expected. And I think that's probably for a good reason, which is that it doesn't make sense like the web to have like a million different people deploying like various quality of websites to the internet because in crypto, the on-chain stuff is extremely scary, right? It's super battle tested. There was somebody posted, I think actually Arthur, Arthur Chong when he posted his DeFi renaissance thing, he pointed out that the number of hacks in defy has actually dropped a lot over the last two years, right? So if you look at, you know, 2020, 2020, 2021, like you just see this chart that's really high, lots and lots of hacks. And then 2023 goes down and 2024 it goes

down even more. And I think part of the reason why they've been going down is that we're just deploying less shit on chain. And the stuff that's there is more battle-hardened. And people are just like, the reality is that I think I talked about this before at DSS, the Security Summit at DevCon, is that more and more hacks these days are private key hacks and private key leaks rather than smart contract hacks. And that's also a function of fewer people are writing on-chain code, which is good. You know, it's like how many people are writing COBOL? like a very small number of people. There's still a lot of really important cobal

that runs the banks and governments and all sorts of stuff. But the people are writing it really know what they're doing, which is in a way good, right? The JavaScript that you write, like, you know, go into a random website, open your Chrome console and just see all the,

there's like a massive number of errors and all sorts of crazy stuff that's going on on every website. But it doesn't matter. So who cares? Yeah, we can have thousands of random, you know, boot camp grads writing JavaScript for us or, you know, crappy AIs

writing JavaScript and having all all these errors and it doesn't matter. No one cares. TravelScript devs are the Zergs of, uh, I mean, they are the Zerglarv. Right. And Salinity is the Protas. Yeah, wait, who's the Protas?

Salinity devs. No way. It's like Haskell devs are the Protas. No. Well, no, they're definitely not a big enough part of the overall. Fine. O'Camel. Oh, Camel.

Yeah. Still, they had, I mean, Main Street made $18 billion dollars last year. They're like an expansion. I'd say more like a best. I'd say russ. Per dollar, per revenue, per developer, has to be the highest for it. Rust is Protos. Rust is Protos.

What is the Terrans? Terrans. Terrans. Go? Go. Python? I don't know. Python.

This analogy feels pain. Yeah. Okay. We're losing more and more of the audience. Yeah. Our audience does not want us. Okay. I think that's probably enough for the week.

So we're going to wrap next week with end of year predictions. And we're also going to go back and look through. our predictions for this year, which sneak preview, we all got fucking terrible scores on our predictions for this year. But we'll come back to all of them and we'll review them next show.

But until then, thanks everybody, and we'll be back next week.