Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 3, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:28:37

Freedomain Investment Roundtable 2: CRYPTO ROUNDUP!

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, it's Steph.
	And I appreciate you guys dropping by.
	It's funny, you know, I feel almost bad.
	Like, hey, there's people who support the show.
	But let me lean on you further for your expertise.
	But I think it's a useful exchange of ideas.
	I'm not too bad on crypto as a whole, Bitcoin in particular.
	But some of these other floaters, I don't want to say floaters, but some of these other coins.
	To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what...
	Problem they're trying to solve, where their value add is.
	And one of the reasons why it's great to chat with you guys is, I mean, I'm sure there's some holders here, maybe even some hodlers here.
	But when you go to, let's say, somebody who's really keen on Ethereum, well, they're really keen on Ethereum and they'll give you the sales job on Ethereum, which I appreciate, but I would like something a bit more neutral.
	So either people don't know about it They know about it and don't like it, in which case you get the case against.
	They know about it and hold it, in which case you'll get the case for.
	And I just would like some sort of more well-rounded ideas or approaches to these alternative coins.
	And also, I thought there was something interesting in the text discussion about how is it a good thing or a bad thing, economically speaking?
	Or there even seem to be some morals floating around about I don't know.
	But as far as some of the others, Litecoin, Ethereum, Doge, and other things, it's been so long since I've looked into them that even since I've looked into Bitcoin, I got some corrections the other day.
	So if there's anybody who wants to bring up any of these kinds of topics, I'd love to hear.
	Check, check. Can you guys hear me okay?
	Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I saw your message you're asking about.
	Hey, welcome back. I recognize that voice.
	Nice to chat with you again. Thank you, Steph.
	If anyone, by the way, if anyone wants to, like, ask me anything or reference me, you can just, my name's Jared, so that works.
	And again, please correct me if I go wrong.
	All right, so I would like to give a quick crash course.
	Sorry, Jared, just before you start, I'm sorry about that.
	Could you just say the word who white for me, please?
	White. Just kidding.
	Okay, go on. That's an inside joke.
	Okay, go on. Oh, no.
	I'm familiar. All right, so quick crash course in Litecoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.
	All right, so Litecoin is one of the earlier coins came after Bitcoin, and essentially what someone did was They said, okay, while you're processing these Bitcoin transactions, which require this hardware and so on and so forth, there's also pieces of machinery that you're going to have to have in your computer or your server, whatever, that are going unused, that can be used to mine this other cryptocurrency.
	Alright, so for example, your Bitcoin is being mined via doing these mathematical problems, and that's primarily on like a GPU, or now it's primarily done on what is called an ASIC, A-S-I-C, and what that means is, it just means it's a piece of machinery that's made for processing, you know, cracking that mathematical code.
	I'm trying to avoid getting into too many obscure topics on that.
	Can you ask about asynchronous by chance?
	I'm sorry? Is the acronym AS, the part of it, is it asynchronous by chance?
	Just geeking out here.
	I'm not sure myself what the acronym breaks down to or for.
	Doesn't matter. I'm just curious. And so those are basically, you can look up, they're called Bitcoin miners and they're ASIC miners, another way to reference them.
	Basically, someone made Litecoin so that while you're processing Bitcoin transactions, what's called mining, you can also be mining this Litecoin as well.
	It costs you nothing.
	You're already running the hardware.
	I forget what part of the machinery Litecoin is using.
	It may be the CPU. It could be the RAM. I'm not quite sure, but it's just another part of the machine.
	And so... Sorry, just to interrupt.
	RAM can't process. It's only for storage.
	So I'm going to guess, unless there's some funky little math coprocessor down there, which would probably be hooked in if it could be to Bitcoin, I assume it's just...
	Because, you know, if you play a video game, your GPU can be operating at 100%, but your CPU might only be idling at like 20 or 40%.
	So there could be some CPU cycles left over while you're grinding through the GPU stuff.
	That's my guess. But anyway, go ahead.
	Excellent. Yeah, thank you for the correction.
	So that's Litecoin in a nutshell.
	And one of the arguments for Litecoin has been like, you know, if Bitcoin's gold, Litecoin's the silver.
	And we use Litecoin as more of an experimental test chain.
	You know, so that's essentially what Litecoin is and how it's come about.
	it doesn't seem to be too innovative.
	I'm getting into opinion, but I'll just, yeah.
	So that's just, that's Litecoin in a nutshell.
	Okay, so Dogecoin is...
	Sorry, I didn't drop this.
	So the technicals I get, but in terms of the valuation, right?
	There are about a billion cryptos out there.
	We're talking about these because they have some valuation.
	So what's the business case side or the use case side for Litecoin?
	The use case type for Litecoin is, okay, we can use it as a test chain to run anything we're thinking of developing on Bitcoin.
	Well, we can do it on Litecoin, you know, at a lower risk, you know, and Litecoin is used in the marketplace and it's got a high, it's got a valuation.
	So there's the equity.
	Economic incentive to attack.
	Founder, like, sold off a big portion of his Litecoin, and I haven't been following it personally to see what goes on from there.
	But, you know, if I were doing a crypto hedge fund, I'd have a little bit in there, just purely on my perspective because it does have market recognition and, you know, We're good to go.
	You know, I don't know why it's never been touted as more of solving that role.
	That is one argument for its place in the economy, but it doesn't seem to come up because usually when that comes up, people in the Bitcoin core community don't say like, oh, we'll just use Litecoin.
	They say, oh, no, go use the Lightning Network, you know, which the joking meme about the Lightning Network is kind of like, oh, yeah, it'll be done in six months, which, you know, folks have been saying for several years, you know?
	So, the Lightning Network is the coffee and donuts purchase scenario for Bitcoin?
	Yes. And to be fair, the Lightning Network is technically usable, but it...
	Sorry, I accidentally muted myself.
	It requires a bit of technical know-how to use the Lightning Network.
	It can get a little bit complicated.
	I come from the software field.
	I know what technically usable means.
	I know exactly what that means.
	It means if you've seen daylight in six months, good luck using it, right?
	Kind of. It's about there.
	Right. Okay, so, but Litecoin, I mean, do the transactions settle faster?
	I mean, so, you know, you've seen an egg race, right?
	And an egg race is, you know, the kids with the spoons and the eggs and all that.
	And to me, Bitcoin is like an 18-wheeler.
	Like, if you've got a haul, 100,000 eggs, that's your thing, man.
	You've got an egg race, 18-wheeler, it's going to do you much good.
	I'm going to tap the crowdsource here because I don't know the exact detail.
	If someone could chime in, like just look for Lightning Coins resolve time, that'd be awesome.
	Lightning Coins? Because we got, hang on, sorry, we got Lightning Network, Litecoin.
	I misspoke. Litecoin.
	Litecoin, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because again, the coffee and donut scenario is something to get Main Street adoption.
	That's something that's kind of important.
	I mean, the fact is everyone, of course, has a CPU and a GPU in their pocket on their cell phone.
	So it's pretty wild that – I mean, crypto and cell phones, of course, are pretty wedded at the hip.
	You really couldn't have one at least – On the coffee and donuts scenario, you couldn't have one without the other.
	But yeah, so is anybody here who knows Litecoin?
	Yeah, I wouldn't mind jumping in on that one.
	Yeah, please go ahead. Thank you. Yeah, so Litecoin, its block time is about 2 minutes and 30 seconds, whereas Bitcoin is 10 minutes.
	So it does make it easier for, you know, the donuts and coffee types of transactions.
	And it has a relatively high transaction per second compared to some other things.
	But I think the reason why it never really picked up as a...
	As a usable currency is, I don't think they have the community to go out and push it to a lot of these stores and retailers to utilize it.
	A lot of that community is still really behind the Bitcoin side of things, and they've been pushing for Lightning Networks as the true payment processor in this regard.
	So for those of you who don't know, and I don't mean to tell you anything that you could explain better, but the way I sort of look at it is, is the Woz Jobs continuum?
	Like, so every technical innovation, you need your Wozniak, like the technical genius, and then you need the Jobs, who's the marketing genius, the marketing and design genius.
	And that's what I look for in a particular crypto, is do you have an evangelist as well as the technical brilliance behind it?
	And it seems to me that Litecoin has the technical brilliance, but I don't see the marketing jetpack.
	And then, unfortunately, it's a cave painting somewhere under the earth.
	It's like, it's beautiful, man, but nobody knows where it is and no one can see it.
	I got something to add onto that mix as well.
	Litecoin. Go ahead, thanks.
	So Litecoin is also a bit faster than Bitcoin in general because no one's really using that road.
	So of course you're able to drive as fast as you can to use that analogy.
	And part of the reason why I don't think a lot of people are able to hop on the Litecoin train as well, because as Jared had mentioned earlier, Litecoin uses a memory hard problem, whereas Bitcoin uses a processor intensive algorithm.
	So, memory intensive Coins and networks won't have the same hash rate, which is the way you calculate the speed of a network as coins and or networks that use CPU intensive problems because those networks just don't scale as easily because you need bigger buffers and Lots of other things falling down the chain,
	as you know, you're a tech guy.
	Let me just see if I can translate this into something that I can fathom.
	So if you've got a GPU or CPU process, then you've got Moore's Law, which is going to double CPU time or GPU time every 18 months.
	So it's much more scalable.
	But memory, while it certainly does get faster, I don't think memory gets faster at the same rate as Moore's Law.
	And so it's not going to be quite as scalable.
	And again, so Litecoin as well, of course, if it's got fewer transactions, it's going to seem faster.
	But again, if the coffee and donut scenario or paying for a toll scenario comes up, then it could conceivably be overwhelmed.
	Is that right? Correct.
	Yeah. As soon as the same amount of people jump onto Litecoin, it wouldn't be as fast because the transaction just can't get up to the same speed.
	Right. And so if the architecture is based on memory, the more people who get involved in it, the less scalable it is, the more bottlenecks you're going to result in.
	And therefore, does that give it a bit of a niche?
	And just, by the way, sorry, I forgot to mention this at the beginning.
	None of this is investment advice.
	Nobody's saying buying or sell anything.
	We're just talking architecture and general philosophy of alternative coins.
	So don't buy or sell anything based on what anyone says here.
	But is that sort of the concern?
	That it's based upon an architecture that's at least what I would call RAM-based rather than CPU-GPU-based or processor-based?
	And therefore, it's just...
	It's like pushing a waterbed.
	It's just a big bag of slow.
	Well, it does get some benefits from it being a memory hard problem.
	For instance, as Jared had mentioned earlier, it makes it a bit more resistant to the application-specific hardware.
	So it's slower to mine, so people can't just quickly accumulate it.
	But again, that's that double-edged sword, which means the network can't ever be as fast as Bitcoin could.
	Well, everybody who wants a benefit without a cost is living in a fantasy land of socialism, right?
	So I got all of that.
	And do you know, I don't want to, you know, like diss on anyone in particular, but I do remember the story where the guy who was foundational to Lightcorn dumped all of us.
	Do you know anything about the backstory of that transaction?
	I do not. Go ahead, if anyone else knows that one.
	I can share, like, the bit that I do know.
	And this is pure gossip, not even economics, just so everyone knows.
	Yeah, yeah. Okay, go ahead. He's a public figure, and so I'm going to mention his name, and I don't think it's, you know, any kind of doxing or anything like that.
	His name is Charlie Lee, and...
	I actually worked with him for a little bit at Coinbase.
	I never interacted with him.
	I think he may have left by the time I got there, but he had worked for Coinbase for a little bit, which is one of the most popular crypto exchanges in the US. I don't know.
	I can't argue so much the truth of the situation, but again, I can share the rumor mill.
	So take everything with a grain of salt.
	Essentially, Litecoin got incredibly high.
	He had a lot of it, and he sold an overwhelming majority of his share in Litecoin.
	He's been a big Bitcoin core evangelist for a long time.
	And that's about it.
	That's what I know. He made an obscene amount of money, sold it at the top.
	I personally don't take any moral qualms with that.
	It's not a moral thing.
	It's not a moral thing.
	He can buy and sell whatever he wants.
	I suppose the issue is everybody who's involved in something groundbreaking and important veers between it's a calling or it's a gig.
	It's a calling or it's a gig.
	The calling would be live aid.
	The gig would be playing a wedding.
	So, I guess with the Litecoin thing, the issue is that if the founder sells a whole bunch of his shares, then it's good for him.
	Obviously, he makes a lot of money, but it does signal a lack of faith in the growth potential of...
	Like, you know, he may have made his money, and I think then the concern is that it kind of crippled the perception of the growth potential of Litecoin.
	Absolutely. Yeah, once the founder kind of bails, it's like, do I still want to be here?
	As far as application of the coin goes, is it mostly used for paying people, online transactions?
	Is there anything on a phone and any retail applications or does it still remain mostly digital?
	Certainly, there's wallets that will hold, like, any number of coins.
	And it's very trivial for them these days to add service for these coins and more coins.
	And so, yeah, there's countless wallets that can be used.
	And a wallet is a program for managing your cryptocurrencies, just to clarify that.
	So, yeah, there's countless applications to use Litecoin on your phone.
	I get that. I understand the push side of things.
	I'm just in terms of, okay, so I've got a phone with a Litecoin wallet and I'm wandering around a mall.
	I know you can't do much with Bitcoin either at the moment.
	That's probably not a great example.
	But is there a place where you could hire a graphics designer for Litecoin or where is the other side of the transaction other than holding it but spending it?
	Yeah. How much is it actually used in the marketplace?
	I don't believe very well.
	I would assume anywhere that there is...
	If someone accepts Litecoin, I also expect them to accept a wide number of other cryptocurrencies.
	That's fine. Yeah. I mean, that makes perfect sense to me because it's not like it's a huge amount of hassle to accept more than one.
	Okay. But there are places where you can spend it and it does have a circulation.
	Is that right? Yeah, that's true.
	And the main investment or the main value means of Lightcoin at this point, just from my witnessing, I could be absolutely wrong, is just a speculation.
	Now, is it speculation where there's a momentum, or is it just people looking at graphs saying, oh, it's gone down for a while, it could go up, or is there a part of a general evangelistic, you know, because you need the insane, dedicated nutjobs, and I say this with great love and affection, having been one myself with philosophy, right?
	But you need the insane nutjobs who are just going to be out there 24-7, living, breathing, and...
	Propagating this stuff.
	And is there that momentum?
	I mean, again, I'm not asking if I want to be a total expert.
	That would sort of be my next question is, okay, technology's there.
	There's a market cap. There's a buyers and sellers market.
	That's great. But in terms of the general blur, you've got the King Kong of Bitcoin.
	And, you know, you've got these little...
	By planes flying around Bitcoin.
	Is there anyone who's like, Litecoin is the greatest, it's the best.
	I'm going to name my child Litecoin.
	I've got it tattooed on my forehead.
	I live, eat and breathe.
	You need those kinds of people in order to have the architecture grow or the crypto go.
	And there certainly were, of course, the Bitcoin gurus early on.
	I had a lot of them on my show back in the day.
	Oh, by the way, I just read this little article about how, I'm sure you guys know this story, but do you remember the 10,000 Bitcoin pizza?
	Anybody remember this story?
	Oh, yeah. Some guy spent 10,000 Bitcoins for a couple of pizzas back in 2013 or whatever, now $400 million.
	And there was the other guy who lost $240 million worth of bitcoins because he had them in one of those secure wallets that only gave you 10 password attempts.
	And he tried everything he knew, but no luck.
	That's rough, man. That's tough to get up and go to work when you've got that sitting in a drawer, right?
	Bye-bye. Anyway, a lot of people have stories of crypto that's gone to the wind.
	It's gone to the dust. Anyway, so with Litecoin, is there an insane individual slash group of individuals that are pushing it, or is it just a follow-the-graph kind of thing?
	My opinion is that it's at the very least a Pareto distribution of the majority chasing the graph.
	Your opinion. Yeah, no, of course.
	Yeah, I mean, and I'm sure I'm going to get emails from someone who's like, I eat, live, and breathe Litecoin.
	In which case, you know, dude, come on the show.
	Like, make the case. I mean, I think that's the more the merrier, right?
	But I do get the sense that unless you have a particular, you know, I hate to say it's sort of fetish, like that's a bad thing.
	But, you know, if you're really that good at evangelizing, you'd probably go to Bitcoin or at least Bitcoin Cash if you were that good at it.
	But again, you know, I... I loved the Atari computers, even though they were the underdogs, the home computers, just because that was my particular – that was my first real computing environment, and I just loved those computers, and I was willing to evangelize them past all sanity until it was cheaper to get an entire computer than one hard drive for an Atari environment.
	But anyway, so, okay, yeah, that's sort of what I wanted to know in terms of future growth is that I assume the technology is great.
	I just assume the technology is great in general for these things.
	But it's the Woz side, the Wozniak side, I think is covered, but it's the Steve Jobs side that is where the real value-add is.
	And that's kind of frustrating, right?
	Because a lot of people are like, well, I have the greatest technology.
	It's like, yeah, that's really cool, but if nobody uses it, it's not great.
	It's great. It's like, yeah, but there's utility in these things.
	And if the utility is not there, the technology doesn't really matter.
	Okay. As you're trying to sell someone on using a thing, there's a, I don't mean this in any way disparaging to others, but there's kind of like, It takes an IQ level to explain the value of something very technical and complicated that you'll realize the value of longer down the road or having to make more economic arguments to convince others of its value versus like, oh no, this will practically in your life today, right now, make life so much easier.
	And here's how. So you'd have to know the Bitcoin standard well enough to know its weaknesses?
	And if you know that Bitcoin standard well enough, you probably have a bunch and don't need to work that hard.
	That's the problem. The people who know crypto and could evangelize are probably...
	Well, it's the old question, like, what do you do when you get some money?
	A lot of people are just like, woohoo!
	They don't want to be that 24-7 evangelist anymore.
	Was it Antoine Antonopoulos?
	I think he was a Bitcoin evangelist I had on the show, but I think he ended up not really having any, which was kind of tragic.
	But anyway, I want to add on that because Antonopoulos And he's done a lot of evangelizing for Bitcoin in the past.
	It came on the show and was really helpful.
	Unfortunately, it seems like he's one of those woke people now.
	But on the topic of him not having Bitcoin, when the Bitcoin community found out that he didn't have any or had very little, they were so appalled that everyone donated enough Bitcoin to him where he was at least a millionaire post that people find that out.
	That's good to hear. Well, I'm better now, even, right?
	Yeah. All right.
	So, does anybody have anything that they wanted to add to Litecoin?
	And just, obviously, remember, this is totally exploratory.
	There's nothing definitive. We're just, you know, men and women sitting around chewing the fat.
	Because I don't want anyone to think this is something definitive about Litecoin.
	It's all just opinions, right? But if anybody has anything to add about it, that would be great.
	It's not specific to Litecoin, but I wanted to give some context around the coffee and donuts example.
	Context. Hang on. Let me just write this down.
	Okay. February 3rd, 2021.
	Free Domain Radio. Gets context.
	Achieved context. Oh, you know what?
	I even write that word.
	My hand bursts into flames.
	Okay. Sorry. Go ahead. Alright, so this is like two years ago, but basically, so if you look at Visa, right, you know, basically a lot of, we do a lot of transactions with Visa every year, and that company says they can handle 56,000 transactions per second.
	PayPal in 2015...
	In what geographical region?
	Sorry, in what geographical region?
	The whole company, so that's the world.
	Oh, so in the world, they can do 56,000 transactions a second, right?
	Yeah. Okay, got it.
	You know... Even though there's a lot of people in the world, that's a lot of transactions.
	Not everything's happening at the same time.
	So PayPal... If your transaction takes two seconds as opposed to one second, it's usually not a big deal, even if it's five or ten seconds.
	It's just like everybody's had that, you know, processing, processing, and then, right, you get the confirmation or whatever.
	So it's not too bad. Exactly.
	Yeah. You might even be just waiting on network latency and all those other things that just take a little while.
	But PayPal in 2015 took 450 transactions per second on Cyber Monday.
	They don't actually, they haven't disclosed how many they could actually, you know, handle.
	But, you know, you have to step pretty far down.
	They certainly helped me take some of the burden off their transaction handling as a whole.
	Yeah, just a little bit there.
	But, I mean, even if you look at Bitcoin and Ethereum, they're both too slow.
	If you were to say, like, one of these technologies is going to basically replace Visa, Neither Bitcoin or Ethereum are the ones that are going to do that.
	So I think there is space for a third, one that can, you know, kind of approach maybe Visa or PayPal in terms of the number of transactions.
	And that's when you're really going to get kind of a coffee and donuts type situation actually happening.
	I think the driver for that is this constant de-platforming, which at some point is almost certain to go financial, right?
	So the constant de-platforming is going to open up a sort of second economy of blockchains.
	But, of course, the problem – and, you know, please jump in because I'm, like, right at the edge of knowledge of both environments.
	But the problem, of course, is that Visa is simply processing within their own servers.
	They don't need a public blockchain.
	They don't need to update everyone else.
	They don't need all these confirmations, right?
	So they're just, wham, bam, you know, here's your coffee and donuts.
	Here's your three bucks. Boom, it's in our database.
	And there's nothing public, nothing confirmed.
	I mean, obviously, you have confirmations within the database and all of that, but that's handled – At a local level, like Oracle, the SQL Server, something like that.
	So that is the challenge, right?
	That you've got this public blockchain, you have all these confirmations, all this processing that's required outside the actual transaction in order to confirm the transaction.
	And that's just not scalable, which I think is one of the issues that's going on with Bitcoin at the moment.
	And, you know, that's my question is, okay, but how can you make that scalable?
	If you need a public blockchain, how on earth could you possibly end up competing with With Visa, it doesn't have the requirement.
	Well, Ripple and Stellar can both do more than a thousand transactions per second.
	So I don't think you need to replace these.
	So tell me more. Tell me more, if you can, about how this stuff works.
	So Ripple and Stellar, right?
	Yeah, instead of a fork of Ripple, the Ripple team claims that, you know, they literally hit 50,000 transactions per second.
	So I think if I was to place bets on which ones are going to be, you know, I think there's a space for Bitcoin being the gold.
	I think there's a space for Ethereum to be the silver.
	And I think there's a space for a third to basically be like the cash alternative or the fiat.
	And I think it's going to be the one that can handle the transactions per second.
	But I don't know. And this is particularly true in the realm of COVID. Like, you know, every now and then, you know, I'm in a store and my daughter's like, oh, I'd like something, you know, and let's say it's COVID time, right?
	Oh, I forgot something, you know, it's like, and I'm like, I hate putting a buck or two on Visa.
	I hate it. Yeah.
	Because it feels like such a ridiculous level of overhead.
	Very expensive for the store, expensive for everyone.
	But now, of course, stores don't take cash.
	A lot of them, anyway. They prefer some sort of credit because of the concern that COVID is going to be spread through cash.
	So when I was younger, you would use your credit card for larger purchases.
	Sort of like a two-person dinner and up, but you wouldn't use it at McDonald's.
	You wouldn't use it for coffee and donuts.
	In general, right? And often there were restrictions on those things, like a $10 minimum.
	You can still see some of that in convenience stores and places like that.
	But as, of course, I mean, the government prefers things to be on, like, they prefer it to be digital because they can track it more easily, I mean, in terms of Visa and Interac and so on.
	And there is, of course, a big demand for that from the people who want to try and keep their clerks safe from the perception or the reality that you can transfer COVID on On cash and all of that.
	So there is going to be a big demand and driver that Visa is going to be able to scale to handle pretty well.
	But of course, the transaction fees for Visa remain constant to a large degree, regardless of the size of the transaction, right?
	So, you know, the penny candy on a Visa thing is like they've still got a big overhead.
	And the smaller the...
	In terms of the monetary value and the lower the overhead, I do see that as something that could potentially do that.
	It's just everyone has a visa and it works, but we saw with Laura Luma, she got the platform from a bunch of places and the finances became a challenge.
	And if that process continues, then there will be a huge demand for the coffee and donuts scenario with crypto.
	Yeah, and the cryptos that can best handle that case, I think, are the ones that are most likely to get adopted by a Visa or PayPal or Stripe or those payment processors where, yes, those individual payment processors might de-platform people, but they can't de-platform the decentralized network.
	So you just came up with something very interesting there that I just wanted to back up on.
	Not that what you were saying before wasn't interesting, but this is a particular fascinating part for me, which is you're saying so like Visa and PayPal and other places will start to interact with crypto, right?
	Now, that's not exactly what I mean by avoiding the deplatforming, right?
	Because you can be deplatformed from PayPal, as I know, and so on.
	So the question is, if financial deplatforming becomes more of a thing, which it seems kind of, you know, could be, right?
	Which crypto is going to be able to replace Visa?
	And I don't think that's Bitcoin, which has its great value.
	And I love Bitcoin, as you know.
	But you're saying in sort of the Ripple world, or Stellar was the other one, right?
	That there's a possibility that these could be more self-contained because then the moment you start to overlap on places like PayPal and Visa, then you're in the potential deplatforming scenario again, right?
	Yeah. Exactly. But what's needed is the one that can keep up with the transaction volume, right?
	So, you know, it's easy for Visa because, like you said, it's just they're moving stuff around in their own servers, right?
	Same thing with PayPal. But to do the decentralized kind of blockchain thing, that's what means you can't de-platform it, right?
	I can hold that. I can move it around.
	I can give it to somebody directly.
	Or, you know, potentially you could work with these payment processors where they basically handle that last mile where it's going to the retailer.
	And the only way that would be undeplatformable would be if the payment processors were willing to process things without identifiable information, right?
	Like, here's a wallet. Here's a transaction code.
	Here's a transfer of some crypto.
	I don't care who it's coming from.
	I don't care who it's going to.
	Then you would be in a situation.
	So any payment processor that would be willing to handle anonymous-type crypto transactions would be beyond the pale of deplatforming, as far as I understand it.
	But then, of course, you know, the usual thing would happen.
	Some criminals would start to use it, and then there'd be all these requirements for identification and all that kind of stuff, and usually that's how they kind of Nip that one in the bud.
	Basically, the way they choke you off is where you exchange dollars or Canadian dollars or whatever for the currency.
	That's where they choke you off.
	But if you just owned that particular crypto and you mined it or whatever, you could spend that with somebody who's accepting that and they can't de-platform you from that.
	Right, right, right, right.
	Okay, so again, unless there's some parallel place, maybe even offshore, that would be willing to do those kinds of exchanges because, you know, still got to pay your taxes.
	Although I think, is it in Miami?
	I think Miami is, the mayor of Miami is a very forward-looking guy.
	Florida is kind of like a little slice of American penis paradise, so to speak, geographically speaking.
	But I think the mayor of Miami is looking to allow employees to be paid in crypto, allow taxes to be paid in crypto, like Wyoming is trying to become a crypto haven for companies and investors and so on.
	And Miami, I think, is trying to at least allow some government business to be transacted through crypto, which, man, that's something else, man, because if you can start to transact your business with the government through crypto, that's pretty wild because that's what a lot of people need their fiat for, right?
	Yeah, exactly. But if you listen to, like, Jeanette Yellen, I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
	She seems pretty adamant that, you know, these cryptos are her competition, which it's true, they are.
	I don't know. I mean, that's, yeah, I mean, the relationship between fiat and crypto is more complicated than, you know, my relationship with my mom was.
	So we'll go into that perhaps a little bit later.
	Just for those of you who don't know the fork concept, right?
	I mean, the hard fork and the soft fork.
	I wonder if, because you mentioned earlier that Ripple, was it Ripple was a fork from Stellar or was it the other way around?
	The other way around.
	Yeah. Okay. So Seller was a Ripple from Ripple.
	So could you just explain?
	I'm always happy to hear it again, but if you could just explain this whole fork concept for people.
	Sure. So basically it works based on consensus, right?
	So just like, you know, if somebody's running Windows 7 and someone's running Windows 10, the way most of these networks work is you have a certain number of miners running a version of a client.
	And in order for that to get, um, you know, accepted or changes to be propagated to the network, a certain percentage of the people on the network have to take that new version of a client.
	So if they don't, um, what can happen is a fork.
	So I don't know anyone who's been holding like Bitcoin even a little bit over the last couple of years has probably seen this in like Coinbase where, you know, they're holding Bitcoin.
	And then there's a fork on that network and now you've got like Bitcoin Cash or some other crypto that you basically just ended up with because you, you know, the network just decided to go two ways.
	So now you're holding two pieces of these different assets that are, you know, one half of the network, this is Bitcoin, the other half of the network is now something else.
	So that's how those forks work.
	Usually, that's a pretty good thing.
	If you had 10 Bitcoins during the fork, then you could end up with 10 Bitcoins and 10 Bitcoin Cash.
	Usually, it's a pretty good thing.
	Of course, if it's not a good thing, then people don't adopt it and it doesn't go anywhere.
	Yeah, basically it's democratized, right?
	So it's like, you know, you don't have that same ability with fiat, right?
	If they just decide to change the value overnight, they can do that.
	But with these, you don't take that.
	It affects all of your currency, right?
	It doesn't just affect the new stuff, right?
	Exactly. Now, a hard and a soft fork?
	I don't know enough to add details around that.
	Okay. Does anybody else know a good...
	I'm not... I wouldn't be able to explain it too well, the difference between a hard and a soft fork in a crypto.
	We will... I will look this up.
	Oh, sorry. You got something? Go for it.
	So, in a nutshell, a hard fork versus a soft fork is where they're pushing out a change to the network that will irrevocably...
	Split the network if people don't adopt it.
	And a soft fork.
	Let's see. I'm going to Google that myself.
	A soft fork. Is a change?
	Yeah, dot dot go.
	Thank you. A soft fork is a change to the software protocol where only previously valid block transactions are made invalid.
	A software is a change to the software protocol where only previously valid blockchain blocks and transactions are made invalid.
	Going forward, they're compatible with both, is that right?
	A hard fork, as it relates to blockchain technology, is a radical change to a network's protocol that makes previously invalid blocks Got it.
	One, you can continue to use it.
	Yeah. In both scenarios, another one, you can't.
	You have to do the upgrade, right?
	That's the way it sounds to me.
	Got it. I'm sure I'll get a bunch of emails about that.
	I appreciate those emails too, so please keep them coming in.
	Explain it to me.
	Okay, so now, back to our good Stella Ripple friend.
	If you know anything about the community as a whole, do you have the humanoid-facing evangelists that are keen to not just have great technology but get it out to people?
	I wouldn't say that it has that same kind of cachet, right?
	Because the mainstream media has picked up on Bitcoin, obviously, and Ethereum.
	I don't feel like there's that same kind of push for...
	It wouldn't come from the mainstream media.
	It would be from somebody...
	I'll tell you a tiny story here, right?
	So this is something that I remember reading about very early on in my software career.
	And it's really, it was a life-changing tiny story for me, so hopefully it'll be, whether you need to do it or not, but it's important to know this way that technology works.
	So if I remember rightly, and I'm probably paraphrasing like crazy here, but this is the essence of the story.
	The guy who invented Ethernet, right, as a standard of transmission of data over a, usually a wired network, right?
	So the guy who invented Ethernet.
	He made a fortune off Ethernet, and he ended up teaching at a university, I think.
	And he would have his students over for dinner, and they'd talk tech and all that kind of stuff.
	It's a really charming evening and all that.
	So anyway, one night he's living in this big, beautiful mansion, and he invites all these students over, and one guy comes in and says, oh my god.
	This place is incredible.
	Look at the size of these ceilings.
	This is a palace.
	Man. Man, I wish I'd invented Ethernet.
	And the guy stopped him and said, no, no, no, no, no.
	No. Don't think like that.
	That's not the case at all.
	Look. I didn't get this mansion because I invented Ethernet.
	There were tons of people who had network protocols.
	Tons of people. Some of them are better.
	Some of them are worse. I didn't get this because I invented something.
	That's typical technical thinking.
	Look, I've got the best widget thing, algorithm, whatever, right?
	He said, no, I got this mansion because I worked for years I was on the road.
	I presented at conferences.
	I exhorted people to take it.
	I wrote white papers.
	I had tests done.
	The invention was 1% of this mention.
	The other 99% was getting it in front of people, convincing them to take it.
	And once I got that momentum going, then it became a whole lot easier.
	You know, like figuring out the width of the first set of train tracks is one thing.
	It's pretty easy. Pretty tough to figure that out, but once you've got half the tracks laid with that width of train track, it's pretty easy to figure out the width of the rest because they've all got to connect.
	The train's all going to go on the same thing, right?
	So the typical technical thing is to say, oh, look, I invented this, that, or the other, right?
	And you think that that's going to get you the mansion.
	It doesn't. It doesn't because you have to get it in front of people, and that's by far the majority of the work.
	Like I've said about the beginning of this show that I spent the vast majority of my time Promoting what it is that I was doing because I remembered that story.
	And so when I hear great technology, I mean, part of me is like cool, like the propeller head part of me is, that's great, right?
	And I would go through these cycles.
	When I was in the business world, I would do, you know, a couple of months of hardcore R&D, total propeller head coding, the greatest thing since sliced bread.
	And then after a couple of months of doing that, Which I'd sort of do four days a week, and then I'd spend a week in the office.
	And then we would have this great new software, and then I would spend about a year, sometimes less, sometimes a little more, I would spend about a year going to trade shows, doing presentations, writing.
	I wrote technical articles for environmental magazines where I would sort of gently highlight the value of what we did and would sort of put links to it.
	And you would just try and add as much values.
	I mean, the number of times I was at booths, at conferences, you know, with a little jar which we would take people's business cards and we would, you know, give them a prize back then.
	I don't know. It was some sort of Zen player, I think.
	But we'd give them sort of a prize in return for their business card.
	And then you'd email them and you'd call them and you'd do presentations.
	So the creation of the software was a third to a quarter of the amount of time.
	That you spend promoting it.
	And having the best doesn't mean anything.
	Inventing Ethernet doesn't get you the mansion.
	Spending years on the road.
	Because lots of people love to invent things in their basement.
	That's great. We've all done that kind of stuff.
	We've had great ideas and invented things in our basement.
	That's not what gets you. But how many people are willing to spend years actually just promoting the living crap out of things, right?
	And that is the big difference.
	So sorry for the long speech here, but that's why I keep coming back to, hey, I'm thrilled that the technology can process a bajillion transactions a second.
	But that's not, you know, software doesn't get up and walk itself out of the door, right?
	Somebody's got to be pushing, like, mad.
	And this is why, like, after UPB, I said this just the other day, you guys went in there and published a show, but after I came up with UPB... I did live speeches on it.
	I did PowerPoints on it.
	I did how to talk to kids about UPB. I did Q&As, debates about you.
	I did so much to promote it.
	It was certainly successful in the family realm in terms of kids not getting hit, but it didn't take effect in academia, which I was never expecting it to.
	But the promotion is the key, and that's When I think of where I might put my, you know, hard-earned or hard-saved or hard-donated dollars, my question is all around the technology.
	Yeah, it's necessary but not sufficient.
	But if people think the technology is going to get up there and walk itself out into the marketplace, that's never going to happen.
	And you're going to lose every time to the people who are willing to do the evangelizing and be out there on the road.
	I was out on the road for three weeks a month, sometimes promoting software.
	And I mean, I love nothing more than coding, but I was out there.
	In people's faces and talking about it because the code doesn't get up and introduce itself to people.
	You've got to do that for it. So I guess that's why I keep coming back to that question of, okay, but I get the Wozniak side.
	Do we have the Steve Jobs side?
	And I guess that's my question with Stellar and Ripple as well.
	I don't think we have either of those yet.
	I completely agree, right?
	And I'm kind of approaching this with the kind of the trader mindset of like, I'm just going to watch and I'm going to see what's going on.
	At the same time, you could be out there evangelizing for something that doesn't go anywhere.
	Yes, but the evangelizing is such a specific skill.
	This is why I was so good at the software field, because I knew the technology inside and out.
	I coded most of it. I'm a very good communicator and understand the economics and client value side of it.
	If you're smart enough to know the technology and be a good evangelizer, This is the funny thing about being the evangelizer.
	You have to be so smart and so technical and so good at communicating and so passionate.
	It's a really, really rare skill set.
	People believe evangelizers in part because they know those evangelizers could do just about anything.
	If they've chosen this particular thing, It's like, well, why do people go see movies with Brad Pitt or whatever, right?
	Because Brad Pitt could choose just about any project.
	So we're going to assume that if Brad Pitt chooses this project, it's probably in line with what he likes to do, which is what people like to watch him do and so on, right?
	So the evangelist sells because people know that they're in the presence of such a valuable and unique skill set that if they've chosen to attach themselves to this, say, ripple...
	When they could be attaching themselves to anything, then the fact that they have attached themselves to that when they could be doing anything makes people believe in it almost in and of itself, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	I mean, it's like you see occasionally these ads for like, Girlfriends of basketball stars, right?
	Now, you know, basketball stars can date just about, what's it, Wilt Chamberlain had 10,000 women acclaimed.
	So basketball stars can date just about anyone.
	So you never expect to look at the girlfriend of a basketball star and see a Trigglypuff, right?
	Like you're just never going to see somebody who's not very attractive, right?
	And so... That's the expectation.
	If you have your pick and choice, whoever you pick and choose is going to be great in terms of attractiveness.
	It's the same thing with the evangelists because they could be out there pumping anything and bringing their golden touch to anything if they choose some obscure crypto.
	This happened too.
	You saw this with Steve Jobs.
	He would attach himself to things And people would be like, okay, I'm investing because, you know, he could attach himself to anything.
	So if this is where he's choosing to spend his time, it must be super valuable.
	At least that's the perception. And it's not, no, it's not particularly wrong in many ways.
	So that's, yeah, that's my question.
	But of course, a lot of people are, again, it's a lot more fun to work on the technology than it is to go out there and try and get the interest of an indifferent crowd.
	I mean, I remember once, this wasn't me, but one of my employees had to give a speech.
	And The room was empty.
	I mean, so he had to get up there.
	I shouldn't laugh. But he had to get up there and start giving.
	And he called me, right?
	And he was like, the room is empty.
	What should I do? And I said, listen, all you do is, I appreciate the question, all you do is you give the speech like it's full of cheering people and people will come in.
	And so he did. You know, you just, like you're a crazy person, you just go out there and give it a great speech as if the room is full of thumpy, cheering, happy people ripping their tops off like they're at a Queen concert in 1978.
	And then what happened is people started coming in because it was just an unusual spectacle to see it and it worked.
	So yeah, you need that. Well, I mean, that goes along with, if you look at what Elon Musk is doing with Dogecoin, right?
	Literally tweets about it.
	Sorry, with what? You cut out there, with what?
	Dogecoin. What is Elon Musk doing with Dogecoin?
	Sorry, I may have missed that one.
	He tweeted about it. He's the CEO of Dogecoin and those sort of things.
	Pretty much everything he touches, for better or worse, people just seem to pile into because he's got that sales.
	He's a salesman. He's got that reputation of the Midas touch.
	and listen i mean the fact that i was very interested in bitcoin very early on was not it was not inconsequential to where bitcoin went and uh because you know people know that i'm technical and and also good at communications and and understand the economics and all that and understand fiat and austrian economics fairly well so yeah so i mean having that golden touch is really powerful and you know i would just say this to all the crypto developers out there um you need you need that dude you Maybe it's a woman, maybe it's a man.
	Usually it's a man, but you just need that guy.
	And a lot of what you do isn't probably going to amount to much if you don't have that person.
	Or maybe you can become that person.
	I don't know, because a lot of coders are kind of shy.
	I did that for philosophy, right?
	Just this mad commitment and standing in the face of the storm and roaring barbaric syllogisms to the rooftop of the world.
	You need that crazed commitment.
	And if you don't have that, it's really hard to think that it's going to be anything other than a slowly declining graph-watching exercise.
	Shall we move to Ethereum, or is there more that you wanted to add about those others?
	No. Ripple is no longer traded on Coinbase.
	But you can still buy Stellar, and that is trading for, it's like the fourth most popular on Coinbase.
	And the physical market for that, and by that I mean not just people buying and selling it for speculative purposes, but it's actual traction in the exchange of goods and services in the marketplace?
	Well, the way to look at this now is it's going to come down to what, like typically if it's on Coinbase, most retailers are going to accept it.
	If that makes sense, because which ones these clearing houses pick are the ones that they're able to trade to cash.
	At the end of the day, companies are paying their bills in cash and US dollars.
	Do you know what happened to Ripple that got it delisted?
	I believe it was a lawsuit.
	Well, that'll do it.
	I'm sorry. Somebody else?
	Yeah, yeah. Stellar got defined as a – it was an illegal security, and that's how it got delisted, essentially, and several exchanges have delisted it.
	Do you know what the mechanics behind that are, or how does that come about?
	So basically what happened was when the people were starting Stellar, and again, this is my, you know, obvious understanding.
	When the people were starting Stellar and trying to go out and get people to invest in it, they violated SEC definitions and means of doing so.
	So, like, Bitcoin didn't have to go and get a fundraising thing because you just ran the software.
	You know, you didn't invest your money into it, whereas when Ripple was getting started, they were going out and asking people to invest.
	In order to process high volumes of transactions, you'd need a lot of hardware, which means capital, right?
	I mean, there's a little more technical to that.
	I don't want to comment on that at the moment.
	I was just curious, and we don't have to delve into that, however fascinating that story may be.
	I appreciate that.
	Should we shift to Ethereum, which seems to be pretty popular these days?
	Oh, yeah. I'm all ears.
	Okay, so Ethereum, oh man, I got a big dog in this race.
	It's my favorite coin of all.
	So, Ethereum, Ethereum, why is it different?
	So, compared to Bitcoin, uh Ethereum allows you the ability to not only store a public ledger of all the transactions but the unique thing about Ethereum is that it also lets you put code in there so basically the network can also execute instructions and so the entire network also becomes like a giant digital vending machine imagine like Sorry to interrupt,
	but it's kind of like what I talked about, which I thought Bitcoin was going to develop in back in the day, which it didn't.
	I think it just became a leisure stored value.
	So you can do things like if my obituary shows up in this particular online site, you can transport my Ethereum to so-and-so because that's my will.
	It becomes a programmed environment.
	Is that right? Correct, correct.
	Are there cool things that it can do?
	When we say programmed environment, people will kind of glaze over, but like in terms of practical things, I guess you can execute buy and sell orders based on price and you can bid things based on price and have triggers and cascades and all these kinds of things.
	Yeah, so imagine just paying your bill and not having it go through some sort of intermediary process for, let's say, your electricity.
	As long as you keep paying that bill and sending your money to that specific address, the lights will be on, all completely automated through a contract.
	That can't be changed at all.
	Once the contract is on the network, you have to be sending your money to a different contract for it to be malicious.
	So that's the beauty of it as well.
	These contracts are completely immutable and they're validated by everyone else running machines.
	It also doubles as a global computer network executes these contracts.
	And I assume that they're timed and opt-outable and I guess there are certain penalties that occur if there's not enough Ethereum to cover the bill, that kind of stuff.
	I think that would depend on the contract.
	Do you know anything more about that?
	Of course. I'm not saying what is everything.
	That'd be like saying what's every cell phone contract in the world.
	But these features could be part of the programming environment.
	I mean, of course it would be.
	Sorry, you wouldn't create that and then not allow these things to occur because these are the natural vagaries of transactions.
	So it is.
	It is a programmable environment.
	Now, how interfaceable is that?
	Is that programming environment?
	In other words, I assume it's not down at the assembler slash binary level that there's got to be some interface for you to create these contracts.
	Is that right? It compiles down to some sort of bytecode that I have not played with the actual language that it uses.
	I mean, so does Windows, right?
	But what I mean is that there's a...
	I assume you don't need to hire a...
	dedicated coder to create a contract.
	There's got to be some, maybe not quite as nice as drag and drop, but some sort of user interface to define these contracts at a more user-friendly level.
	As of now, I believe you do have to hire a dedicated coder.
	I don't believe there's any sort of simple UI to connect things.
	For the most part, there's Solidity developers, which are focused specifically on developing smart contracts and interactions on the Ethereum blockchain.
	There are a few companies that are trying to create plug-and-play, let's say, drag-and-drop solutions.
	I think Betty Blocks is one of them that's currently working on that.
	It's like a no-code smart contract development platform.
	That's fantastic! I mean, that's...
	My soul, she saw us like an eagle on an updraft.
	No, that's fantastic because it means that if it's still hard to use, but the capability is there, then the value remains potentially quite high, but it's not actualized yet because the user interface isn't there.
	That's a pretty good time to know something, right?
	Unless it's not. There was a long pause there.
	In which case, correct me if I'm going astray here.
	Oh no, that's definitely a good time to have that skill set under your belt.
	I mean, we haven't quite reached the level of WordPress development where anybody with two extra hours a day can pick it up and build a website.
	No, you want to invest in Microsoft before Windows, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
	Okay, I got it. I got it.
	Okay. I feel there's a lot more to say about Ethereum, but I don't even know what questions to ask, so feel free to just ramble away.
	Yeah, do you mind if I add my experience with Ethereum here?
	Because I was following Ethereum back in 2013 when it was an idea.
	And the founder's name is Vitalik Buterin.
	He has some notoriety in the Liberty world, like he went to the Free State Projects, stuff like that.
	So when I've been looking to evaluate a coin, I'm looking at the people behind it, largely.
	But again, just from my, you know, rumor mill opinion, he definitely seems to fall more on the left-leaning side of things.
	And Ethereum, the community, does seem to be falling more into the more socialist, more left-leaning side of things.
	And again, my opinion...
	Now going back to like the contract stuff, these contracts can, like the code is no better than how it's written.
	So these contracts can have flaws in them.
	One great big example is back in 2016, they tried the Ethereum community and tried to launch the DAO organization, DAO. And what that was, was it was supposed to be a like a decentralized organization.
	And they were going to, you know, come together as a community and plan different things, build different things.
	But it was like kind of like dead on inception because in the contract code and I am I'm someone who invested in this.
	Not necessarily because I believed in the project, because I just knew at this time, 2016, you could throw money into anything, it would blow up and you could get your money back out really quickly, you know, an easy game.
	So what happened was, though, the contract that they built, and the way it works is, you know, I send my Ethereum to the contract address and I get so many DAO coins in return, which represent my ownership in the network.
	But there was an error in that contract, which was exploited by someone, and they essentially, for free, paid themselves like, you know, virtually infinite, you know, DAO coins.
	Actually, it wasn't infinite DAO coins.
	They were paying themselves Ethereum out of the community pool.
	Yes, that was a bit of a whoopsie.
	And it was such a troll, the way the guy presented it.
	He's like, oh, I noticed this feature to reward such and such people, and I just want to thank the community so much for being so generous and giving all this to me.
	It's so nice of you, because obviously this was your intention, because before that, The Ethereum community's big thing was, the code is law.
	And he's like, oh, so you meant to do this.
	That's just great, you know?
	What hurts most more, the financial loss or the passive aggression in your face?
	Yes! Yes!
	And so now this was a challenge of the community.
	So there's two things you can go about this.
	I'm so glad this came up because, like, there's the code, but the code is no better than the people behind it.
	It's like the Constitution and the people next to it, you know?
	Any contract, right?
	Any contract. I mean, I remember...
	Yeah, sorry, I promised this would be helpful.
	I also promised it would be short, so bear with me for a sec.
	So once I quit a company, I had a non-compete.
	And of course, I went to a lawyer who looked for loopholes in the non-compete because I didn't want to be locked out of the industry for whatever time it was.
	And the contract was written, I guess not by a super great lawyer.
	There was a loophole and, you know, a way to the races, right?
	So yeah, I mean, contracts are not physics, right?
	They're just the human constructs.
	Absolutely. Yep.
	Yep. And so this was a challenge to the Ethereum community because here's what you can do with a blockchain like this, with any blockchain.
	Bitcoin could do this.
	You can go back or you can just delete these transactions and essentially hard fork the network and say, we're going to invalidate all of that transaction and pretend like it never even happened.
	And so now there's this question in the community.
	It's like, okay, well, do we keep our integrity by honoring the contract in that way?
	I'm not saying that's like overarching the definition of integrity, or do we accept that we screwed up and this guy, you know, got our money?
	That's a tough call, man.
	And there's the immediate gain there of we want our money back.
	And then there's a long term gain of, you know, live by the sword, die by the sword, the contract is law, we're going to abide by it, even with a loss, which builds faith in the community going forward, but also builds a greater incentive to exploit it.
	So yeah, it's tough. And I've actually changed my opinion on it.
	And I guess I was an investor at the time.
	So I'm like, well, this guy was obviously malicious.
	Nobody intended to do this.
	You know, this is obviously a flaw in the contract.
	We shouldn't honor it. And hey, that's one of the features of blockchains or potential feature is that we as human beings can correct these things, you know.
	But in retrospect, I don't know if that was necessarily the right way to go in the long run for the community.
	But anyway, so I'm getting an opinion.
	That doesn't matter. The other thing, too, is that if you can claw back a bad contract, the incentive to create better contracts goes down, right?
	Like, whoops! Like, back in the day, when I first started, there was no automatic...
	Like, you sent out your software on floppy disks, and there was no auto-update, right?
	I mean, Cyberpunk, with their auto-updates of Infinity, like, they can let out a less-quality product because they can update it later.
	So, yeah, I mean, you just lower the quality of what there is if you can claw it back later, and general chaos could ensue.
	Great, great point. Yeah.
	Quick question. Is that the explanation for Ethereum and Ethereum Classic?
	Is that the hard fork? Yes, it is.
	Thank you for getting to that.
	That's where I was going next.
	Wait, what? Yeah, that caused the community to fork because some people didn't agree with that decision.
	So the Ethereum community in general stayed on.
	They deleted those transactions that they thought were, you know, wrong.
	And... Wait, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Sorry, sorry. Let's go back here for a second.
	This is important. I don't mean to interrupt your flow.
	I mean, so, I mean, the blockchain is the blockchain.
	What do you mean they deleted? I mean, this is because I know the Bitcoin one better.
	It's kind of impermeable.
	Like you send it, you can't pull it back, right?
	I mean, if I understand it rightly.
	So what does that mean?
	They deleted the old transactions?
	I mean, they got their money back or how did that work?
	They pushed an update that you could either accept or not, and if you accepted it, then it would roll back those particular transactions, but it created a new currency in the process.
	And this is the classic versus Ethereum current?
	Exactly, yeah. Mind blown!
	Mind blown! Please go ahead, this is great.
	Oh yeah, Ethereum is actually the fork.
	Ethereum classic is the original chain.
	That's a matter of opinion.
	Well, that's the conventional wisdom on it.
	Yeah, look it up. Fight, fight, fight, fight.
	No, I'm just kidding. No, I'd like to hear more about this.
	What is the battle?
	Which is the real Ethereum? Well, the market will define, you know, who's got the branding name, you know, and essentially Ethereum won that one.
	Yeah, it's already kind of decided.
	Yeah. Same with like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Core.
	Bitcoin Core won the marketing and they get to keep the branding, you know.
	So is it like, so wait, but Bitcoin Cash is like a parallel.
	I guess this would be Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
	These are sort of parallel, both tradable, both transactionable and so on.
	Sorry, in what way? Yes, they're essentially trying to do a very similar thing, and they're copies of each other to a degree, although they've changed over time to be more divergent.
	But yeah, that's kind of a parallel, essentially.
	Now, does one of them have the architecture which allows you to go back and undo transaction and the other one doesn't?
	Is that the difference? I mean, I'm sure there's more, but is that the main difference?
	I believe that's a feature of blockchains in general, is that transactions can be rolled back.
	So that's what I was saying, like, even Bitcoin could do this.
	You know, they could decide that they don't want to have, they don't want to honor this.
	And this was actually part of the argument for Bitcoin, what Andreas Antonopoulos made back in the day, and others I'm sure, that let's say the NSA throws all this hash power on the network and all of a sudden can control the Bitcoin network.
	Well, the Bitcoin network is going to notice this new hashing power come online.
	They're going to know that it's not coming from someone in the free market.
	And it's like, okay, all they're going to do is roll back the chain and be like, okay, guys, do you want to be on FedCoin or do you want to be on the real Bitcoin chain?
	I remember seeing him at a conference with slow claps, sardonic applause.
	Oh, congratulations. You threw a billion dollars of hardware at a fork that nobody's going to follow you on.
	Yay, good for you. I just remember him doing that.
	Okay, so that makes sense. Okay. Yep, yep.
	And so any blockchain can essentially do this.
	Yeah, which, you know, there's the code and then there's the people, and the code is only going to be as good as the people in the community.
	Okay, is there more that we wanted to, or I say we, the royal we, is there more that you wanted to talk about?
	I love this stuff, so, you know, all day if we need to, but is there more that you want to say or other people want to say about Ethereum?
	I've got some more thoughts on Ethereum, but I do kind of tend to monopolize the conversation if somebody wants to jump in.
	Give a couple of seconds, see if anybody else wants to jump in.
	Otherwise, you know, go for it.
	It's a free marketer chat, so go for it if you want, but let's give if anybody else wants to jump in.
	Well, another cool use case of Ethereum that's really started to blow up over the last year or two is non-fungible tokens.
	So whereas like Ethereum, Bitcoin, these things are fungible, meaning they're divisible into smaller units.
	On Ethereum and now on some other blockchains as well, you can do non-fungible tokens.
	So they're typically used for like digital collectibles.
	And the vast majority of NFTs on Ethereum are art pieces, tradable art pieces.
	So think of them like...
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	So you've got digital collectibles and then what, RFPs?
	So please feel free again, like I'm five years old and I have to pee.
	What does this all mean?
	Yeah, a non-fungible token.
	It's a non-divisible token that's a piece of digital property, basically.
	No, I mean, I sort of get that, but a collectible?
	What does that mean? It's just sort of the prevailing use case right now is people will incorporate an original art piece with the NFT and then they can sell their art in a digital, like a rare digital form.
	So, like, you can buy, in a sense, I guess, a copy of the art, but it's a collectible item because it's a limited edition is the way they used to have it.
	Yeah, think of it like a lithograph from an original artist.
	Like, it's signed. A signed lithograph.
	Exactly. So you know that it's an artist.
	I'm only going to sell 100 of these blobs of art.
	I'm sorry to use the word blobs.
	I'm just thinking digitally, not visually.
	But I'm going to sell 100 of these blobs of art.
	And of course, you know, you don't saw the Malalisa in half and have half of its value on either side.
	So it has to be a blob that's altogether I'm only going to sell 100 of these, which I guess could be baked into the Ethereum contract matrix.
	And that's...
	Okay, I got it. I got it.
	That's very interesting. It could be limited edition poetry books, or I guess just about anything, right?
	Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's starting to make its way into video games.
	Like, so, say, for instance, you know, you find a rare sword in a...
	In an online game, you can then take that and sell it or potentially bring it into other games, and it's a piece of property that you own.
	It's also being looked at in property deeds and titles.
	Copyrights for sure, right?
	I mean, if you've propagated it first, you did it first, right?
	yeah yeah so i think that this is one of the most interesting applications of uh of smart contracts um you know it's not a currency now we're talking about different forms of property um and it's actually probably my biggest uh fascination at the moment in the in this realm uh part of my sort of digital brain goes into okay so Entire movies, giant blobs of data, having to propagate across the blockchain.
	Oh, it all slows down.
	I mean, how's that dealt with?
	Well, you don't necessarily store the contents of the NFT on the blockchain.
	You can store the contents that people have access to on a centralized server.
	You can store it on IPFS, which is a decentralized world server, so to speak.
	Okay, so they're pointers rather than the actual thing itself, right?
	Precisely, yeah. But you need the cryptolope or you need the key to get into the...
	Okay, if I understand this, there's some cryptic key that gets you into these assets that allows you to say it's definitely mine.
	Okay, and then you can trade those, right?
	So you can say to someone, I'm tired of this piece of art.
	I'm willing to sell it to you for X amount of Ethereum and then you can transfer it to someone else and then they have it and you don't.
	Obviously, that's the way it works, right?
	Right. That's very interesting.
	So I could do like a...
	Only 100 people can ever listen to this podcast and I could sell that on Ethereum, right?
	Yeah, you definitely could. So OnlyFans.
	That's all I need to say. Perhaps we should talk offline about this because that clearly is my next businessman.
	And that's the only thing for me. By the way, this stuff is the only thing that ever competed with philosophy for me, which was like, yeah, philosophy is great, but getting into this crypto space, knowing how good I am at evangelizing technology, boy, that could be pretty damn lucrative.
	But I was like, no, no, no, it's a calling.
	Yeah. There's lots of people in the crypto space, but not so many people in the philosophy space, and I think it's – anyway, so just everybody knows that.
	That was my fork, so to speak, to use a crypto term.
	That was my sort of big fork. My alternative universe was a crypto evangelist and I guess owning an island in the Bahamas, but instead I'm – Locked in my house in Canada.
	Anyway, fine.
	It's fine. I'm very happy with my choice.
	I am, actually, but it wasn't an easy one.
	I'd be happy to talk with you more about that offline if you ever wanted to.
	I actually have a couple of ventures in the...
	Absolutely. Listen, I mean, if I can...
	I mean, it would be, for me, a fascinating experiment to see, okay, because I've never charged for shows, right?
	Yeah. Maybe I'm terrified to know what the price would be.
	I don't know, whatever. I've never charged for shows.
	It would be really fascinating to do a podcast, throw it out, and figure out how to do this and just see what went on.
	That, to me, because I have way more content than I've released.
	I have literally 500 shows I've never released, and some of them are really great.
	And... I just have never quite got around to it.
	That's not quite the same incentive as doing shows in the here and now.
	So, yeah, if we could, man, just give me a ping.
	I would be fascinated to explore that.
	I think that would be really neat. And it wouldn't be a subtraction from what I do, but it would be an interesting sidebar.
	Yeah, yeah, I'll definitely hit you up.
	Thank you. All right, all right.
	Sorry, somebody else was either going to jump in or jump back in.
	Just give him a sec.
	Sorry, we just give him a sec in case there is somebody slightly shyer because, you know, we always got to lure the technical people out like squirrels with nuts.
	Has anybody else wanted to jump in?
	Thank you.
	I got something I want to throw in if you don't mind.
	Yeah, please do. Alright, so something I recently found out about Ethereum, which I think is really awesome, is that Ethereum lets you also borrow the network for other sorts of cryptocurrencies.
	So I found out recently that...
	Oh, did you say borrow the network?
	Yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry, go ahead.
	A coin is basically a cryptocurrency that has its own network.
	But then there's this other term called a token, which is a cryptocurrency that lives on another network.
	It doesn't have its own network. Like, for instance, the BAT tokens, if any of you have ever used Brave, the basic attention tokens that they give you for looking at ads, I would really recommend the BraveBat token system.
	It's very interesting and a very cool way to fund a tech organization without selling your soul in terms of data.
	Sorry, go ahead. Indeed, no, I agree.
	So those BAT, or BAT, ATM machine, BAT tokens, those tokens basically, they live on Ethereum and they use that network basically as a piggyback.
	And so the neat thing about any other token that lives on the Ethereum network is you could swap them almost instantly in decentralized websites and applications like Uniswap.
	That also runs on an Ethereum contract.
	It's like Ethereum all the way down.
	It's really cool. We're still always.
	So to speak, right? I mean, you can hijack or piggyback, in a sense, the network, and it's like, yeah, that's totally fine, right?
	Correct, correct. That was another neat aspect of Ethereum.
	I mean, to me, the more open, the better.
	But that tends to be...
	I mean, if you don't allow trucks on your highway, you're not going to make as much money from your highway.
	So I think the more traffic there is, the more the underlying architecture gets valued, and then the more value Ethereum as a coin has, I assume, right?
	Yeah, that's why it shot up in early 2018 to the heights that it did at the time, like 1400.
	It was because everybody was building their ICOs on Ethereum.
	What now? Their ICOs, the Initial Coin Offerings.
	I got that right after you said it.
	So yeah, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, so when you started seeing, you know, thousands of new coins come out, the vast majority of them were built on Ethereum using something called ERC-20 contracts.
	So it allows you to create a contract that you mint another parallel set of tokens on that all run on Ethereum.
	Yeah, nobody ever look up Sexy Steph Coin.
	That's an abandoned project for obvious reasons of aging and sagging.
	Anyway, okay, that's great.
	So is it more that people wanted to add?
	Sorry, the original fellow wanted to come back, but if there's anything else that people wanted to add, that would be great.
	I just see someone in the comments wanting a clarification of proof of work versus a proof of stake.
	I think you're better at that, Jared, than I would be.
	Oh yeah, yeah. Except nobody asked me to explain it, which is totally accurate and fair.
	Okay, so proof of work versus proof of stake.
	And there is actually kind of a third one that I'll touch on briefly.
	So proof of work is what Bitcoin Core is and many other cryptocurrencies where they pick this cryptographic algorithm, this complicated algorithm that's, you know, machine intensive to solve these problems.
	And by solving these mathematical problems, that's how you secure the network.
	That works by showing that you have to have invested in this process.
	Like you literally got to burn electricity.
	You've got to organize these capital, you know, your capital.
	You have to be productive in the real world and burn that energy, both your mind and literally, to – you're proving that human work was done to solve this network.
	And that means that anyone that wants to try to compromise that has to similarly compete and add a greater amount of work to try to do that.
	And so essentially what happens is the network Can, for in the moment at least, you know, burning a couple thousand dollars worth of effort, can make it cost for someone else to try to undo those transactions a nearly infinite amount, it seems like. It's actually, you know, millions of millions of millions of dollars to try and lie on the network, essentially.
	You know, so for a very low investment...
	I sort of call this, I call this fraud friction.
	That there has to be some friction to fraud, I guess, which was not the case with the Ethereum fork that we were talking about earlier where somebody just exploited it without any particular labor.
	So yeah, fraud friction is really important because there are just a bunch of assholes out there, frankly.
	The asshole tax of fraud friction is necessary because there are so many people who want something for nothing without any ethics.
	Sorry, go ahead. So that's, that's proof of work.
	Okay. And now proof of stake is where what you're doing is you're proving that you have skin in the game.
	Okay. So it's not as hardware intensive to validate these transactions, but what happens is you run a staking node and I actually do this.
	I run a staking node for the Tezos, uh, uh, blockchain and you're running your hardware, your machinery and validating the transactions as they come by.
	But, uh, You have to prove that you have so many of that token on the network.
	And that's part of the incentive not to harm the network is that you have this token, but there are some added cryptographic elements that I don't quite understand that still add for validation or that validate the network.
	And when proof of stake came out, people were very skeptical, like, you know, well, this isn't proof of work.
	You know, how is this, you know, is this going to be as secure as Bitcoin, anything like that?
	And at least in the sense that there's millions, if not trillions of dollars held in staking networks, it is kind of showing that it does offer a comparable kind of security.
	So, Ethereum started out as a proof-of-work blockchain and they're actually trying to make the transition to a proof-of-stake network.
	Did anyone have any questions about how I was explaining proof-of-work versus proof-of-stake?
	Did that help clarify things?
	Is there an analogy from the more physical world that would apply?
	Oh, you are the analogy master.
	That one doesn't come to my mind.
	There's also one more type.
	Yeah, that's what I was going to mention.
	And it's a really small market cap.
	I think all the coins all together are like $2 billion.
	But basically it's like, do you have physical data storage?
	That you can store these tokens and then, you know, prove that you basically are storing them.
	So you could literally just have racks of servers that just have, like, hard drives that aren't even spinning, and those are your coins.
	Right, okay. I will mull over the analogy.
	Maybe we'll run over it next time.
	So the third option, so there's proof of work and proof of stake, and then there's having validation nodes.
	And that's kind of how Ripple works.
	It's not quite proof of work or proof of stake.
	You've got these...
	Sure, I'm going to get a detail wrong here, so someone please correct me, but you've got these essentially authorities on the network that when a transaction's getting processed or validated, you know, it's their job to be like, oh, yeah, that's good.
	That's legit. That's not, you know, and that's how the network works.
	That's their means of, quote-unquote, securing the network.
	So in some senses, arguably, or some would argue, things like Ripple or Stellar aren't actually blockchains because they're not cryptographically validated block by block in these means.
	But again, that gets into opinion both ways.
	Is there anything else that we wanted to add with regards to Ethereum?
	Oh, yes. Go ahead.
	So what Ethereum sells itself as largely was like a world computer and a smart contract platform, which means that what they were offering was a Turing-complete programming environment,
	which for someone who's not computer savvy, what Turing-complete means is that you've got enough programmability in the language To basically code or write whatever you want, you know, given enough effort, essentially.
	And so Ethereum is one of many platforms that offer this environment, these smart contract networks.
	So now what's happened is it's not that you can go to one coin for these particular things, it's that many coins are offering this, including the NFTs, including decentralized finance, smart contracts, tokenizing, offering tokens. Offering stable coins, which is something that hasn't been mentioned.
	Essentially, a stable coin is, let's say I want people to be able to transact US dollars on my network, you know, or in a way, transact US dollars on my network.
	Using complicated financial means, I can set up a smart contract that automatically trades assets to keep this token worth one US dollar.
	So now we can transact, you know, through this digital token, some kind of fiat or whatever you want and keep it relative to what the market values this token.
	Does that make sense? Yeah, I get it.
	I get it. That's sort of the function of gold, right?
	I mean, the function of gold is, well, I mean, the degree to which fiat actually represents value in the real world, I mean, that's obviously pretty sketchy, but at least if you want to have future predictability about the value in dollars, if you've got a $1,000 bill in a month, do you want to transact something now?
	You want to make sure that it hasn't gone up or down by too much.
	It's a way, I guess, of hedging future value by saying, however we settled this, it's still going to equal $1,000.
	Is that right? Okay, that's great.
	It's very helpful. And something that even the dollar doesn't provide.
	Yep. And so also these tokens that exist on one network, okay, they can migrate and move from one network to the other.
	So right now, like Ethereum is going through a similar growing pains that Bitcoin did, and their network fees are going up and their network is getting bogged down.
	And so there are some developers who are moving to other networks where the transaction fees are a lot cheaper to actually process, you know, what they're trying to do.
	I think that's an important point, too, to remember that cryptocurrencies are an ecosystem.
	It's not like one thing or another with these big giant silos that particularly value can shift between the two, which is good because, as you say, if Ethereum is getting too clogged down and slow, people will go to somewhere else, which, again, starts to raise the value.
	If they're stuck on Ethereum, the value of Ethereum will go down unless there are off-ramps to other digital currencies to take the load off while they upgrade.
	Yep. And like if I were a developer, I would want to be writing my idea in such a way that it's network independent.
	Either I've got my own or I can, you know, jump from one network to the next, you know, depending on my needs.
	Or potentially, and there's people that do this, there's projects that do this, you can offer on both networks or multiple and interchange between each other.
	That's great. That's great.
	Okay. Now, I don't know about how you guys – I have a certain amount of cup runneth over with regards to knowledge because what happens is I take your new stuff and forget the earlier stuff.
	So whether that's an aging thing or just me, I feel full of knowledge and I hugely – first of all, massive appreciation to you guys coming in and sharing your expertise.
	Very valuable to us as a community.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	So thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
	If other people are not full, maybe I've got a small cap, but if other people are not full, that's great.
	We will definitely keep this conversation going if other people are willing to, but I just want to say from my standpoint, I think I noticed myself starting to gap out at the end, like, hmm.
	Am I hungry? Do I need a coffee?
	And that's not because you guys aren't telling fascinating things.
	You certainly are. It's just that that's my usual indication that I've hit my max learning moment.
	So if it's okay with you, I'll close it down now.
	But I really, really do appreciate, appreciate, appreciate this community discussion.
	I think it's going to be progressively, I guess that's a double meaning of the word, progressively more important as we move forward.
	And thank you, everyone, so, so much.
	For dropping by these conversations.
	It's incredibly valuable to me and I'm sure for other people as well.
	Thank you so much, Steph.

▲