#270 : Looking Back on 5 Years of Epicenter

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure configure and deploy a consortium blockchain network in just a few clicks with pre-built configurations and enterprise grade infrastructure spend less time on blocking scaffolding and more time building your application to learn more visit a kms sloshed epicenter i and welcome to episode a my name is perelman crane and we're now five years in basically of doing this

podcast so we wanted to come together for a kind of a special episode we've just just a host basically everyone except me who still on leave so yeah I look forward to discussion we're gonna speak a little bit about the some announcements we're gonna have some questions from listeners that we gonna respond to and then we're gonna speak a little bit about sort of our take about blockchain space where we're at and where things are going so hopefully you'll enjoy that so just before he gets started and into the meat of things I do want to mention I was at the hyper luxury global forum in December in Basel Switzerland and I was infected by the Linux Foundation to do some interviews with some people there and recently

released those interviews so I there are five interviews that were released with brian behlendorf Liane camp Matthew Davie of a company called Kiva Doug Justin podían a company called circular and Jesse Jannard of Minette ago and you can find those on our YouTube page so they were published by the Linux Foundation and hyper ledger book there's a playlist on a YouTube page and you can also read a takeaway article that I wrote on our medium comm slash episode of podcasts and all the takeaways from that event are there including the videos if you want to find them so I was it was really interesting event definitely very different from the other events we had attended in the

recent months you know the DEFCON four and web three and everything it was a very different vibe but all nonetheless very interesting so I hope you'll enjoy those interviews and in the content from the conference so with that just wanna maybe spend a few minutes on the the recent announcement that we returned five and so we mentioned the last week's episode but I mean us a little bit on on the last five years of the show I mean from for me when I first started this when I first got introduced to blockchain and Bitcoin particularly back then I was working as user experience consultant it's you know a

very very different career I guess trajectory that I had in front of me but this is discovering this space like just totally changed my life and I guess for the better I learned a lot I think that's one of the things that didn't mention last week of thinking about after listening to the episode is that just how much I've learned in the last five years been just tremendous not only about your science and cryptography but also just generally about finance and economics and the way that global finance works and this sort of thing and that's been really really really fascinating what about you by true yeah I guess that's something that maybe

become smoke clear when you look back on things no Chris just so interviewing so many people and you know you always do a few hours of research and then you interview them it is a great way to learn I mean that was initially one of the reasons why I wanted to do the podcast because I you know back there and I learned about Bitcoin I was like oh this is amazing I want to do something in the Bitcoin space as it was called back then and didn't really know what to do but of course I felt like okay learnings learning is gonna be key meeting people is gonna be key and interviewing them is a great way to do both so I think it certainly succeeded in in that regard well any any favorite moments during your five years at epicenter both of you there's a lot of

great moments I think for me it's it it's not one moment particular but it's it's you know the five years has been punctuated by moments where I felt incredibly grateful and humbled to be speaking with the person that I was speaking with and I remember getting that on a few occasions and one was the first time that we had David humble photo on the podcast three years ago I think getting the opportunity to speak to a central bank economist and to people asking questions and open forum where I've have no formal training in economics or finance don't

come from academia it was just really really a very intense experience also speaking with people like Brendan Eich like founded Mozilla and even like brian behlendorf like when i speak to for me that the most humbling moments were those moments where I got to speak to people that founded the web and created the web and who were there at that time and there's there's a lot of other occasions I think when that happened one moment I think this sticks up the most which is kind of a funny kind of an anecdote I was in Toronto once with a friend and we'd been out drinking and we were in a taxi and we got in this taxi

and after a few minutes in the cab like an uber actually after a few minutes in the uber the guy looks in the rearview mirror and although we had been speaking about nothing of a blockchain or anything he looks and if your rear-view mirror and he says hey man do you do a block during podcast and he was actually like watching consultant you know side job uber driver and I've heard my friend who's didn't know much about the podcast kind of looked at me I was like wait wait a minute is this guy recognizing recognizing you in a taxi that was one of the funny moments I think I remember the most last five years well that's super cool yeah I think that's I I think it's you know speaking to people who are experts in

something other than you are an expert in that's one of the homework homework of this of this ecosystem right because it brings together so many diverse people that in most instances when you talk to someone interesting and then expert in something and it's usually not the thing your next button so yeah I totally I totally get that what about you Brian but what do what are your favorite moments I mean one thing that came to mind when you ask that question them is so you know years ago the space was was much smaller and back then some people will remember that there was the whole Bitcoin scaling debate which started many years ago and I I remember

when we did an episode of my turn and in the episode and at the time it wasn't really obvious that there was so much conflict with in Bitcoin development like I think people weren't aware of it and then he had you said this thing or Bitcoin development had ground to a halt and afterward services reddit discussions like hundreds of responses and you know it feels a little bit I mean I may be wrong about this but at least you know it looked like that kind of came to the public attention like all of these rifts that they were in the different directions you know that later led to the split within to pick on cash and and Bitcoin and then you know Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn and all this

kind of leaving the community so I felt like you know the podcast we did back in with you know if these people had this role in that I think that's kind of you know an interesting thing and then without to me I remember that standing out to me as having of course in hindsight but at the time thinking wow we're getting some attention because of this it was just it's kind of surreal that this discussion that we had with this person on a Skype call was now making all these waves and getting noticed on reddit and all these other forums and also an effort was very cool or cool in some weird way was when the sec wrote this paper about the dow and then like quoted

or f so it was like everything's that the dog was a security so I thought that's pretty funny that was also fantastic okay so today I learned you both like drama and causing drama and stirring up drama that's we haven't we haven't caused that much drama I think we've been pretty drama-free considering generally people don't come on epicenter to cause drama there are other places where they can do that but there's definitely some cases where people have said things where you thought huh this could maybe cause some drama but then didn't that much wait for last week's episode for the father introduction five five-year episode you

said that you didn't see this coming so five years ago this would have said daunting knowing that you would actually have to put out an episode every week consistently for the next couple of years and what was the point in time when either of you realized that you would be doing this for a while now I think I'm still realizing expense I mean it might be worth mentioning that that you know I I live Stratham earlier this year and I spent most of the year kind of traveling and not really paying attention to blockchain very much and when I started coming out of that like later in the year sometime around

September October the only real thing that I felt like I wanted to do at this time was to spend more time on epicenter and spend more time kind of like growing the business and growing the podcast and you know it's sort of generally working on the more business side of things bring on you host potentially but yeah until then it really felt kind of like a side project you know we were obviously had sponsors and we're generating revenue but never really paid ourselves or or you know guess 20 maybe 14 2015 when both Brian

and I were not spending time in other projects hadn't really felt that this was something that you know we could do more long-term but now I now more than ever I think like feel that okay there's a little still lots to do when I want to have sort of my checklist of all these things that I'd to check off in order for epicenter to become a great business from the beginning you know I thought this is something you have to do for kind of an extended period for it to make any sense I didn't so many ways like first of all you get better over time and then you know that building up an audience is a very gradual thing I mean your service I mentioned it a little bit like kind of podcasting is it as a business but I think podcasting is

a business still today is in it's like infancy right you really have the first companies you know bigger podcasts turning it into proper businesses in the last you know two years three years maybe there were very few that a bit earlier so I always felt it could be this like long term thing and so III mean maybe I miss remember but I don't think it's so unexpected to me that we ended up you know doing this for such a long time and I know maybe your abuser had changed about this though because I remember when we were first started talking about this early on my recollection is that and and maybe you were right at the time is my

recollection is that you felt that this wasn't really a business that you could scale that much or at least if you were gonna scale it you had to have like massive audience but it's true that that has definitely changed in the last few years with the growth of podcasting in sort of the more general you know population whereas before it was kind of a niche thing yeah I also one thing that I just think very strongly here is that podcasting is so limited at the moment by the technology that it's run on so basically the delivery through RSS feeds so I think if you didn't have that so that has a lot of implications right

like we can like we don't know exactly how many people you know listen to the podcast we don't control the experience that the kind of user experience of the way that people consume it right so that is extremely limiting and I do think yeah that's kind of just a way podcasts are delivered you know it's just guesses historically based on Apple and iTunes and the decision they make and lavishing RSS standard I think that's really confined podcasting enormous Lee and I think if it wasn't like that you you would see so much more innovation in activity around podcast so I think still the back of my mind always waiting is like when it's an alternative gonna come and it's interesting because

I recently read an article I don't know if this data point is true but it wasn't this article that in the US the you know the industry size of podcasting is something like 300 million you know so that's the revenues across like all the podcast so it's really yeah it's kind of tiny industry but that in China it's I think 20 times as big right even though China is a much smaller economy and you know much more not technologically as as advanced or in some ways maybe this but just because there's totally different ways that podcasts are delivered if consumed there and so yeah that's that's

one of the things I'm still you know hopefully somebody will crack this but it's of course extremely hard problem because people are so used to that the way they consume podcasts so creating something difference I think it is changing a little bit and we've seen it's more in the last few years and there's a shift now tors it kind of started with stitcher and we're now people are consuming with with Spotify and they're consuming with with with stitcher and Google Play and all these different platforms I of course the majority of listeners still listen through the good old fashioned RSS feed but we are I think seeing kind of a shift and what would be interesting is if if really

the audience is sort of flattened out across all these platforms well essentially what would happen then is that we'd have a very decentralized type of distribution where as you feel look at sort of video distributing video today the only game in town really is YouTube if you're you know outside of China or like any market that has kind of a specific platform and you can get deep platformed or like you lose your revenue very easily whereas with podcasting it the way things are going I think that maybe in five to ten years things will be much more resilient and you'll as a content creator you'll have this multitude of platforms where you're publishing and maybe revenue streams coming from different places yeah I I

don't think that's really the point because even something like Spotify you actually have no no control whatsoever about the experience and you know in many other industries or mainly with many other products you can say okay I'm producing this and I can like give you this product and you give me let's say $1 or something like that right which is something that for example in podcasting is basically not possible really in the way it's it's delivered and I do think that's a big you know for example that has meant that podcasting is largely advertisement driven and for example here in China the way the reason why this is so much bigger industries because people podcast producers can

just charge people for listening to podcasts no I see what you mean yeah okay so more on that yeah I agree on the business model side of things it's it is difficult to produce stuff and in charge for it I mean there are platforms to do it but but it's not inherent to the experience of the way that people listen to podcasts which most people isn't the podcast today which is the RSS feed but yeah this is a whole lot of discussions so we got some questions submitted from some of you so we wanted to address some of those questions so one of them was okay so looking ahead to 2019 are there any guests in particular that you really are going to have on the show or I think sort of related question to

this maybe like are there any areas that you're particularly interested in doing episodes about what an idea that I've honestly been like no just like kicking around in my head for a little while now is I thought it would be really cool to have a pseudonymous guest on the show so like you know I'm talking about think about like you know like you know Satoshi hasn't been like you know very public for the past few years kind of hard to get a hangout get-get-get reach of but you know I think it'll be really cool to like there's some very cool interesting pseudonymous teams working out there right now so for example like the Avalanche team or a lot of the grin team and so or you know even some individual

contributors such as like there's a guy named Dexter and in the etherium classic community or cobra big coin is that you know he's very popular on Twitter so I don't I just thought it would be really cool and like a novel interesting experience to get a new like a pseudonymous person on and I also think it'll be just a very interesting technical challenge for us to like figure out how to do like how are we gonna do this is it gonna be like some garbled speech thing is it gonna be a text-to-speech I don't know how this is gonna work and I just don't think that would be a very interesting and unique experience that I don't think I've ever seen any podcasts do before yeah you're mentioning that in a slack channel it I think the most interesting aspect of that is is how would we actually prove

that this person is who they say they are and how do we convey that to our audience in a way that they could trust that this person is actually who they say they are that's true I mean how do they how do these people can like convince that anyways like when they're like just posting on message forums and stuff how do we know that the Cobra Bitcoin on Twitter is the same as the one on Reddit yeah I mean I guess they could they could just kind of tweet and say like hey I was on Emma center this week and this is actually who I am yeah I guess they'd be one way to do it yeah and then if and beyond that another thing I really like was um I like so far this year we started doing a lot more like you know spreading out a little bit

from just like cryptocurrency projects and we've been doing a lot of book authors lately which I ball which I actually really found fun I don't know maybe something about like pea who are really good at like writing their thoughts out on like like hundreds and hundreds of pages also really good at like speaking or something but I always thought the conversations we've had with book authors have always been really good so I'd love to have some more of them on yeah I agree what about you fell again I look forward to so basically if you look at the the cryptocurrency projects currently that have a lot of users there are exchanges so what I'm looking forward is to cryptocurrency projects so that that build gaps that have a lot of users so

basically if you look at the usage of the apps currently it's at most a couple of hundred users per day for the very top for the very top tabs and that's mostly decentralized exchange associate ID X or so but I mean that's bound to happen so we're bound to see depths where say fifty thousand daily users probably you my guess would be like sometime mid this year and I find that actually having users using a platform typically matures projects a lot so if you look at the profit professionality of of people running big exchanges that there really is a gap to people who are

building gaps just because there's I mean basically you grow with with with your number of users and the experience grows and your problems grow and hopefully you find solutions and I think that's going to be that's going to be a super exciting first having someone on withered app that has a ton of usage the other thing that that I really look forward to is seeing zero-knowledge application application and interviewing people who are building them just because there's a whole different set of challenges that comes with that such as often ceremonies and toxic waste and thinks that most of us

don't think about most of the time the one thing that comes to mind that is I've been wanting to do for quite a while it's just more episodes on Bitcoin I feel we you know Bitcoin was very you know one point something we talked about a lot and I feel we've you know done a really lot on it here and I think we've become sort of too overweight on ethereum and haven't covered back on enough so I'd be interested in doing some episodes about you know what's going on in Bitcoin development like what are some of the technical things people are working on I would be interested in doing some Lightning work Network episodes I mean we've done I

think maybe two before but it's been the last one was probably two years ago and I think there's a lot of development there that you know Seamster maybe finally be somewhere near actual usage so yeah I would like to to do something some things on that yeah I echo that and what I answered in one of the reddit questions is I feel that we've been we've been commandeered by all the web 3 stuff and first you know it's a some extent have kind of neglected Bitcoin I actually like I'm honestly pretty misinformed about what's going on in that space at the moment you know there

was that whole thing with Bitcoin sv a little while back and we probably should have covered it that's not what it no no that's not what you mean what but still like there there are things happening in the Bitcoin space and we haven't been paying particular attention to it but also like on the technical side what's the state of being able to build apps on on Bitcoin that sort of thing or you know what's the state of like a network you know what's the state of the different implementations there are people being able to process payments this sort of stuff so yeah maybe we should make that a goal for 2019 is to

do please five episodes about Bitcoin [Music] if you've listened to previous episodes with Marley Grey and Matt Turner you know that Microsoft is committed to providing enterprise-grade tools and infrastructure for blockchain developers well the azure blockchain workbench is perfect for organizations building consortium networks take the etherium proof of authority template for example it's ideal for permission networks for consensus participants are known and reputable if the area manager has on chain network governance that leverages parodies extensible proof Authority client each consortium member has the power to govern the network or delegate their consensus participants to a trusted operator and parodies webassembly support allows developers to write smart contracts and for many

languages like C C++ and rust Azure blockchain workbench was created on the same principles that drive all production services in Azure so you know you're relying on secure redundant infrastructure that can scale and with built-in services like authenticating api's off chain databases and secure key management services you can scaffold your infrastructure in just a few hours to learn more about Azure blockchain workbench and home Microsoft is advancing blockchain usability and enterprise check out akms slash epicenter and start building today we'd like to thank Microsoft Azure for their support of epicenter given that the question was which guests in particular who would be maybe like you know let's say you could have like one dream guest

on that like oh my god that would be such a reach like I'll be amazing if we could I would love to do an episode with them who would that be for you guys for me I think early on and I maybe this was a little bit more revel relevant a few years ago because he's a bit more vocal about it I was getting someone like Richard Branson or his name escapes me but the former greek Finance Minister that'll fact this yeah go focus and recently we kind of throw doubt on the idea of maybe getting kissed inna gal'd on the show which would be just amazing to people speak to someone sort of that

level of visibility it's a political experience and yeah i think those will be on my list I second that so I I would I would also have fun with real web people because it feels like people within this face there they're usually super happy to come on so there's no one really who is so far really resisted so it's uh yeah it's it's it's it is the people who are shaping the financial the financial word out other you know aside from from cryptocurrencies that would also interest me most for me I guess III would have to choose either between the first would be Peter

Thiel because I just know I love his book zero to one and I just really like how he thinks yeah it's like a bear you know he's just like very you know pretty libertarian but like you know he has this like only little interesting take on it which I always thought was a bit cool and then my second choice would be a Rick Falkvinge who was the founder of the pirate party I always I was like was super fascinated by the pirate party once again I really liked his book which is called swarm wise and I even liked so when I was a student at UC Berkeley we had this like little student government thing called the ASUC and so I actually created a pirate party so at Berkeley there were there were like already political parties and stuff like two big

ones and so I just you know me and a couple of other friends we created up a new political party called the pirate party at Berkeley and we ran and we actually won one of the seats on the student government which was kind of cool so I don't know Rick Franklin just seems really interesting to me every like how he thinks and I really like a lot of his work on like swarms I think it's a really there's a really cool like comparison to be made on like you know swarms and dows to me seem like two different types of decentralized organizations but with like very different designs to me like dows are like safety favoring decentralized organizations while swarms are liveness favoring decentralized organizations which i think this is like a cool

concept I don't and you know a lot of people in putting a lot of effort into like you know structuring using GAO's I think swarms are another really cool opportunity to explore as well so we'd love to have have him on interesting anecdote about Rick Falkvinge is one time a long time ago I think probably in our first year we were short a guest and we needed the guests for the following Monday and I don't know why Rick Falkvinge came to mind and I'm one of his website and there his website was his mobile number and I texted him I was like Rick we're a blockchain podcast or a Bitcoin podcast back then we'd love to have you on the show can you come on this week and he never responded

yeah yeah I'm sure that's possible yeah we should have a mall I suspect that we that won't be an issue yeah if you think you I guess to actual people that come to mind one is you've all her re so he wrote this book called sapiens and Homo Deus which basically this book about sort of you know human history and the future of humanity and it's just like a credible mind yeah the amazing books and he thinks so much about the trajectory of Technology and where things are going and and actually one of the things that you know stood out to me in his book is like where's blockchain and you know it was

kind of missing but I heard him her native him more recently where he did mention it a bit so I think he's probably become more familiar of it since she wrote this book so I would love to have him on and learn a bit about sort of his faults about how blockchain and cryptocurrencies fit into these broader technological and societal narratives another person that comes to mind is you know Brian Armstrong he I think hardly gives any interviews right you never see him on any podcast or anything like that but it's just he's built such an incredible company with coinbase that has such a huge influence on the space so you know he would be great to have on and then the third one

comes to mind but I don't know a particular person here but I would be interested in hearing from somebody who comes maybe from a kind of a military background and who has some faults about you know like cyber warfare and you know the role that blockchain and cryptocurrencies could play in that and how kind of you know these type of organizations you know that think a lot about your geopolitical conflict and how to get advantages over you know other nations how they look at blockchain and cryptocurrencies so yeah you know body Swiss is asking about how to like

you know use cryptocurrency for war yeah war or maybe defend defensive right you could potentially also use some blockchain system maybe to make your own country more resilient but you know I also remember you know years ago I read this book called currency wars where he spoke quite a bit about you know when I heard of the way people can or countries can manipulate currencies in you know economic warfare in a way so be interesting to hear how you know how people like that think about it although presumably it would be very difficult to find somebody you know to come on to

actually speak about that one thing that just came to mind and I think probably worth mentioning because as listeners you you don't really get access to this but you know we've been consistently putting out episodes every week for 270 weeks now except for one week earlier or sort of in September of 2018 when we released an episode but there have been a lot of times where it has come down to the wire where you know it's Monday or Tuesday and we don't have a guest or a guest cancels or something happens so

yeah just just know as a listener that there's a lot of effort that's gone into making sure that every week there's an episode and there's no a lot of near misses and there's a lot of times where I'm sure I've lost hair overthinking of what we're gonna do this week but yeah I think it's gone pretty well but there's a lot of oh it's a lot of a lot of sweat has been shed from try and get episodes every week sometimes so me going question about and I think I'll you know that's the question I'll also briefly answer it and maybe some of you other people can also weigh in but what criteria in forum or choice for guests and topics and I think there's a few

things of course you know how interesting is the idea is it's something big and novel and if it works could it like fundamentally change the blockchain space or the world so that's certainly one thing and they knew the quality of the project you know they have to work on this for a long time or they like serious about it it was just just showed up and wanted to be nice here or something and then something that has changed at least for me is that I now really kind of prefer projects to come on a little bit later in their life cycle so I think in the past we often have projects on when it was just like a white paper and at the time that was

necessary because projects was just much early on in their in their stage right so there were fewer projects that were more advanced and there was just less going on into space but now I feel like you've gotten to a point where there's really a lot of quality projects and they tend to be further advanced and you know when we have a project on generally we have to want once and only if they become something huge like let's say cerium we have them on again so I feel you know when people come early on often I'm like you know let's would be visited in like six months or a year and I I don't think I've ever regretted that I

think it's always been good that they have some more time to like actually build out something it was something you can actually use and see I mean Dharma is an example here right we did the Dharma episode I mean I met the Dharma almost a year ago when they were just starting out and I think right zero at the time was like say hey meet these guys you shoutmon epicenter and and you know when I met them it was clear okay at some point probably I born I should have mom but I think it was good to wait for them to develop and I think it was a better episode because of that yeah I totally agree and and I do want to say that Brian you've been a really great filter for filtering out potential bad content on at the center I

know myself you know my hair and and all of us who suggested episodes and you've been really good it's like putting your foot down and saying no we're not gonna do this because I don't think this is interesting and we still have to go back into or go back to the drawing board and try to suggest something else as a as an episode thank you for that okay so another question was okay what what ten block chains will be around five years from now free do we care what are your faults that's been picking on me like that yeah so there are capital where I am fairly certain they're going to be around some pretty schooi theorem and some shape or

form is going to be around but he's your bitcoin is also going to be around and this is this is a little bit where the unsaid where the uncertainty for me creeps in so there there are a number of contenders after that things like z cash and yeah then there it goes downhill quickly from there so there are a lot of so five years actually you know you know what let me rephrase so i think in five years a lot of the a lot of the change that we see today are going to be around i don't think a lot of them will have died by then and i think a lot of them will have become marginal though so I'm

pretty sure that things like EOS and Z cash and one arrow had and all their friends are still going to be around in some some form and I just don't think they their stake is going to be as big so I've made it to five um so maybe now Sonny can jump in so I guess you know my vision is always that I think that there's be a lot of change in a couple of years but you know I would say one of the things that I definitely think is the things that have the most staying power is are the things that have the most meme power and so the things that have the strongest memes are probably going to stay around for a long time so

I think Bitcoin has a great meme around it like this whole like digital gold thing it has going on I think litecoin has like a great meme around it it's like you know it's the silver to bitcoins gold is it like any technologically better horrible me men I don't know it's working it's been working for like years and like what explain to me why like coin is like you know top five on coin market cap or whatever it is now like but like you know it's I always found like coins so fascinating because it's just like you know it is provided breeding almost nothing to the table from a technological standpoint it is the only thing it is bringing to the table is this pure meme and that somehow has been giving it back this like you know let's

if we put this in question in the reverse which coins from five years ago are still picking it today and like coin is one of them right like it is one of the coins that's like over five years old that's still in like you know the top five top ten and coin market cap so you know mean power works then so you know that's why I'm still long dogecoin I think that also ties into an interesting question which is how do block chains die and I think for a long time people had this idea Oh block kids are always around right there's always going to be like some kind of trading or block chains and you know somebody mining it even if nobody uses it and I think what we are seeing now and I think

what we will see a lot is actually blockchain is dying and I think we're seeing it a little bit with you know we see sort of the process by which has happened at least for proof-of-work block chains this may be different for proof of sake block chains but why for proof of work law chains if they all use the kind of same mining hardware it becomes extremely cheap to attack right into like double spended so then I think you have exchanges trading these coins and easily an attacker can go in and they can you know for little money they can do a huge reorganization and basically scam the change and that just happened to a few theorem classic which you know isn't even such a small chain so and then I think last year it happened quite a bit with smaller block

Saints but I think that's gonna probably happen like you know at scale and then they get the listed for me changes then like a you know there's really no point anymore mining it right there's no revenues so I think you will have this kind of gradual death of many especially a small or proof-of-work chains and and of course developers abandoning the chains happens all the time but I think that we thought for a long time yeah I mean this was you know I've been like you know relatively decently like you know involved with the theorem classic community for a while and you know it's been very interesting to see the the state of that chain in the past year so everyone's you know there's a lot of

hoopla around like the whole 51% attack this week but I think one thing that may have went under the radar for a lot of people was about a month and a half ago like there's a huge like you know kind of like split between a lot of the dev teams and so one of the things that happened in classic was there was like a lot of dev teams working on it but then like it seems that like over time a lot of the dev teams have started splitting off and working on like other stuff like you know I ohk started working on like her you know kind of like shifting 100% of their focus towards Cardno you know there was a lot of the conflict on like some of the stuff and so yeah I think to me I think really think it's like when

the developers stopped caring about it and the community is just not there ready to pick it up that's kind of when things start to die off which will be the myspace blockchains in five years it's like to your point Brian is when black teens start to die well what what constitutes the dead blockchain and by what metrics do you qualify a blockchain to be dead you know if there's still some activity on it or not one question I think maybe is interesting is to consider what new types of block chains might emerge that we might find unlikely so I was recently like I said at this event and there's this blocking in Switzerland that is

that was built by like Swisscom and the swiss post and it's regulated and people are building applications on top of it for training like equity basically so will we see this type of nationally controlled per se block chain emerge and some places and some markets and will the reason even if it gets a significant activity there is maybe one possibility oh I actually have an another interesting story about dead block chains so one of my co-workers and friends Chris goes he works with me on

cosmos but he has a side project called wyvern it's like a decentralized exchange he's built on top of etherium and for this exchange project he wanted a token that for purposes of governance like he wanted out that kind of controls like that the upgrade a path of the chain but you know he didn't want to do like an IC o---- or anything like that and so what he did was he went on Bitcoin talk and like just went to like and just like flipped through like super old dead threads of like dead chains and he found this one called wyvern of this like coin from like 2014 or something 2013 of like a proof-of-work chain the

chain schematically dead no-one's mining on it it's like just a completely halted chain and he just like message to that Bitcoin thread forum and he's like the conformed there thread and he's like hey I'm launching this new project I want to I want a token distribution are you if I just airdrop all my all these tokens to like you know the last known distribution of this chain would you guys be like reeling to jump on and like take over this like project like that like you know be the DAO holders of this wyvern decks I'm building and like you know it worked somehow and like you know yeah I was like a little community kicking around just from like reviving a dead project which I thought was kind of like very interesting now that we've covered all these questions from the AMA and

thank you to those who asked questions let me spend a little bit of time on 2018 and the events of of last year so maybe to all of you I would ask what is the most important thing that happened in 2018 what sticks out in your mind is the most significant event but I think the most important thing certainly is the bear market right so the complete collapse of prices you know I mean the change that's gone through is so enormous no you had all of these mainstream people and I remember like Christmas last year everybody was asking about blockchain and Bitcoin should I buy they say nobody cares so you and and

then prod you know you have is he going after project so I think just that this bear market is is it's like a huge thing and it's not clear exactly what are all of the second and third or the consequences so I I also remember reading some articles where people talked about you know for example crypto funds right when crypto funds like collapse in their assets on the management like economically it doesn't really become that meaningful anymore for the fund managers to like keep going because they have to go up so much until they actually make money or they earn too little to pay for the operations right so what happens when all of these crypto funds shut down so that could be

sort of a second-order consequence but I'm really curious what what are these consequences that we're not seeing yet of this bear market yeah I also think it's the bear market but I see a different different Fassett as well so now that a lot of the investors and blockchain tourists have departed it it changes the energy of of the space in in the way that it makes it more amenable to which people who actually build stuff and gives them time and takes off the pressure and to present done projects and it just gives

gifts people to actually build time to build solid technology and of course there's a flipside to that so in the past couple of weeks we've seen huge layoffs in many big established companies in the space and obviously there's a lot of fat that comes with that but I think for the ecosystem as a whole and this has the potential to be really good thing so yeah kind of like going off of that you know what I thought like despite the bear market what I thought was very like promising in 2018 was we saw the launch of a lot of big project so you know we saw a launch of a lot of big gaps like 0 X augur

maker makers kind of in the tail end of 2017 but like you know December so really that kicked off in 2018 and then as well as a lot of new platforms like iOS and tezo so you know this is kind of it despite it it was you know in heart heartening to see that like despite the bear market like people who are still building stuff and launching stuff and you know the space is still moving forward despite the price crash I think it will force companies to really you know think differently about how they're building products like one thing that I would say it's probably a good thing is to try to solve your own problems I think that's a very underrated aspect of like building a product is building

something that's meaningful to you and building products that normal people can use so in this in this bear market where resources are now all of a sudden for a lot of people very scarce learning how to be frugal and experimenting with with less and being more lean I think it's probably a good thing for the ecosystem as a whole and it would be interesting it'll be interesting to see what comes out of that so in the next let's say this bear market continues and we enter a crypto winter much like the one of 2014 when Bitcoin was hovering around two hundred to three hundred dollars if if we stick into this bear market for maybe two or

three years once again or or more who knows that it'll be interesting to see what what people will have built during that time and and how that will have affected so the team's building things I think if the bear market just going to last that long and I don't think that's impossible and I think it'll it'll impact the ecosystem in a third way and that that's not going to make projects xena that's going to make a lot of projects dead so so there be year there'll be places spaces to feel that were previously occupied by other companies that somehow didn't make it I mean often it is said

that there's a second mover advantage to people just because the first mover has so much stuff to figure out and I think it that'll also mark the influx of a whole different set of new people with new ideas and tackling old problems another question we can address here so what are what are the most important things that you feel are going on you know today in the blockchain space or in the year ahead so let's maybe start with you Silesia if I look back on the last you know five years and when Bitcoin began you know when I drink when I became interested in

Bitcoin I remember people telling me that one of the major barriers to entry for them as sort of a mainstream adopter was the price volatility and to that extent I think that stable coins I mean people are talking about stable coins an awful lot within the space but outside at the space and in the more general population I think has a massive potential for really making apps usable and apps adoptable in a sense where someone comes in and to the ecosystem and wants to use an application of course there has to be products for that

I very much ties to my my previous point about building things that people want to use but having a stable currency that allows people to lend money for money and kind of ties into the decentralized finance space but that's kind of the base layer that that the entire ecosystem needs should it have aspirations to build communities with hundreds thousands and hundreds of thousands of users I have two things that come to my mind um you know it's kind of like really big impactful things going on I mean first of all and you know Sonny could even speak much more about that but I'm very excited about the launch of cosmos and

of course you know I've been started working on cosmos over two years ago and and first that the calls was team and then independently or of course one and now it's finally like almost there with game of stakes and there's like a live network with 200 validators and it's like super active and it's it's working really well it seems at this point so that's that's really exciting and I think that is going to be a major major thing because you'll be able to have proc chains that are you know highly performant and highly secure and fast and can scale so I'm excited about that and another thing that comes to mind is just the ability to earn earn money you

know using your crypto so staking on tasers right it's like one example you can say cute AZ's and earn some money and any theorem lots of things are emerging where you can like Glenn dieter and stuff like that and I think that's that's gonna be also a huge favor in the future soon you'll be able to earn probably money where on much of your cryptocurrencies and and there's like so many different types of infrastructure and applications that need to be built around that so yeah thanks for the shout out for cosmos you know obviously I'm very excited about cosmos as well like a lot of and we're doing a lot of stuff on the proof of stake side of things so I'm pretty excited to see proof of stake hopefully actually like you know work in

like a large public setting with you know with like the full incentive systems that we've been working on and then another part of cosmos that I'm actually pretty excited about though is the application-specific blockchains and that's not even like a Cosmo specific thing it just uh no general ecosystem thing where you know I I like this shift that I'm seeing in a lot of things like whether it's in cosmos or polka dot or like lume for example a lot of projects have been like starting to shift towards like a framework of like application-specific blockchains where you're not running your applique on a smart contracting system you're instead running it on a specialized chain that's like custom-designed for your use case which I'm pretty excited about and then the

other thing that I'm pretty excited about that I see a good trends going on right now is a lot of development in new cryptographic primitives so I think there was like a set of cryptographic primitives we had access to ten years ago when Bitcoin first came out with like you know we had like you know Merkel trees and public key cryptography and whatnot but and I think we've kind of explored the entire design space of like putting together these like existing technologies and like different configurations and like I think any like new development at the protocol level are coming from and will have to come from newer cryptography and so it's

really you know promising to see a lot of people doing a lot of work on like zero knowledge proof stuff I think like RSA accumulators are gonna change a lot of like make things a lot more efficient and like open up a new realm of possibilities a lot of cool stuff happening right now with like MP multi-party computation and threshold signatures so yeah I just you know hopefully seeing a lot more cooler cryptographic primitives that will enable much more interesting protocols cool so with that we're at the end of the episode well thank you all for for being here today and for coming on the show to talk I really like these these these episodes where was just us hosts

we don't do it often but it is it is nice to do it once a year and kind of wrap up and and get to talk amongst ourselves amongst each other rather so thank you to our listeners for tuning in and thank you for being with us for the last five years and hopefully you'll stay with us for the years to come we'll be happy to continue bringing you episode every week and yeah being a voice in the space of thanks again and we look forward to speaking [Music] [Music]