Chat 2: Chats with a new Etherean

Transcript

okay okay so every time we somebody does these like you have a setup before like we would chat for five or ten minutes before the recording yeah but that's that's the most valuable part I don't want to lose that like oh okay like sure I'm super this is Jason we're talking about ethereum this is our second chat uh we did this yesterday right we did what did you think um well I mean Beyond just uh recapping what uh it was it was definitely brought to my attention to reframe uh one's perspective away from uh

I think if you you need to focus on uh community and uh you need to focus on something more than just uh what is happening uh on in terms of uh the ticker and the market value and uh you know the equivalent of the Wall Street guy with uh the headset on uh on the phone by and then short uh selling and uh things of that nature so it definitely brought to my mind okay so there needs to be a feeling of community so now I'm wondering what is that Community what are the tenets of that Community what are the components is it just people that get online and make investments but

I can't help but think that it's broader than that and uh what are the ethical implications of it uh does the I guess the things that are floating around in my mind right now I love this so um you you need to know that I'm not opposed to markets I don't think that markets are wrong or broken or that like you should never do them um I think that now or in general markets are not the thing that bring value and success in cryptocurrency if that makes sense clearly so like you have all of these people who think or who want crypto to be like stocks like

um there's a company and I'm gonna I'm gonna invest in this company and because I gave them my money they're gonna grow and make more money and then I'm gonna get money out of it and everybody wins well you get on Robin Hood and uh I mean it looks like the the two uh areas are right next to each other there's no there's not much distinction other than a line on the screen uh between the two and it looks extremely similar there's not a lot of uh distinction that the the common man would see yeah yeah uh and so I don't know the best analogy I'm kind of thinking maybe crypto is maybe a little more like Kickstarter where so you go to a Kickstarter project and

there are number one there are thousands of Kickstarter projects there are thousands of cryptocurrencies uh and so you're looking through them and you're like hmm which of these kickstarters do I do I wanna do I you're not you're not looking to invest in a Kickstarter you're looking to uh participate in something that's bigger than you like you want to combine your money with a lot of other people who will then you know give the opportunity to build something and when that thing is built you're gonna get one uh and that's that's your payout your payout isn't like I gave somebody 50 on Kickstarter for a widget and then I

became a millionaire your idea is I gave somebody 50 on Kickstarter and now I have this cool thing that I can play with sure great do I do I I don't know what to do in these times are you there or not I'm here sorry okay I just I'm like I don't know if I should continue myself or what I'm in earshot okay um so it's like a Kickstarter um maybe and you know every analogy has holes but the idea here isn't that we pour money into a company and sell

shares and get money out of the company the idea is that we work together to build something bigger than all of us and all of humanity kind of gets the benefit uh and what we haven't really talked about is like what that benefit is okay it's more than just buying and selling tokens right so what are then uh those benefits how is how is uh this currency what are the advantages of it uh as opposed to like a government-backed currency like a dollar or a Euro yeah that's that's cool I I would say like to begin with

well big picture I only talk about ethereum I don't really talk about I have knowledge and experience with hundreds of other cryptocurrencies but I don't care about them I only care about ethereum it's the only thing to me that seems to be uh to have the potential to change the world right now and so the question is what what is interesting about ethereum that makes me want to participate in that and I want to I should begin by saying uh disruption is the key disruption of of the existing uh not just Financial ecosystem but

Financial social like uh business disruption of all of these industries and I'm so hesitant to use that word because to me disruption means you're gonna break something like you're here to destroy the old and bring in new I don't think I don't think of ethereum like that I think of it as uh kind of an additional layer to bring uh greater value to existing platforms so uh in terms of banking like a a currency ether as a currency or a stable coin that is controlled by thousands uh hundreds of thousands of

individuals around the world rather than a central bank has more impartiality it it cannot be rigged it cannot be used against you the rules cannot be changed you cannot be like unfairly penalized it essentially offers freedoms that don't exist now for everyone in the world okay that I would say is is one of the like beginner first use cases of cryptocurrency like access for everyone I so I also think of it like that that Financial aspect is first but we're moving into other things now um digital ownership is is super

interesting uh I I guess you know about nfts um okay so nfts like right now are essentially jpeg art they're like a you know a graphic thing that you that you own and you trade and sometimes they trade for hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't really understand it like I literally don't understand it um but the future of that kind of Commerce is like um nfts representing real world things like houses and cars um buildings and so that when you're trading an nft that nft is a legal transfer of ownership of something

physical in the real world so yeah instead of having a car title that gets lost or um having to go through an escrow company to buy a house it's literally exists the ownership exists as an nft and it's visible to everyone instantly um because it's it's right there on the network foreign what happens if there is uh like last night I'm watching this uh uh conspiracy video about solar flares what happens if there's some sort of uh uh event of great magnitude that puts uh you know the systems that we rely on to

convey that information what it what happens if if those systems are temporarily uh compromised I don't know like even just a cyclone or a hurricane or you know something where work availability is goes from plentiful to uh hard to acquire yeah very cool um so right now almost all of the records that are kept are kept digitally anyway um and so it's not like by using a different digital system that we're introducing more risk uh right now you know your county clerk's office has a digital record of who owns what uh and I guess maybe they have papers that can be filed that could easily be wiped out in

a tornado or hurricane or whatever so what we're adding is a layer of decentralization so that those records are stored all over the globe oh it's even easier to recover them in the event of uh exactly yeah so they don't just exist in you know your local uh you know record Keepers office they're available globally anytime there is a real likelihood of like a global disaster that like knocks off half the world uh and the the reason that that we're so I'm so big on decentralization is because I don't want those things to disrupt

service I think that we should plan for those things we should honestly plan for world wars that cause countries to say we're cutting off internet access and I believe that networks decentralized networks should be able to uh permeate that and I don't mean that in a way that is like foreign that is pejorative to governments I mean it in a way that people should have access to their their data and Records no matter what that the needs of human individuals should transcend the desire of governments to control things

you know historically prior to World War uh to uh you know the value of currency has been a big precursor and sometimes uh you know a catalyst into World War events uh is there what are the implications of uh what I guess is uh kind of a dynamic nature uh of cryptocurrencies for political stability or for political instability yeah you know I don't have a big like geopolitical view um I I'm less interested in so for me governments are conglomerates

of people who seek to serve a broader group of people like that's what a government should be a government should be I give Jason and his team a hundred dollars and everybody else gives them a hundred dollars and they build roads and schools and yay we all win we get stuck in this idea that governments are uh are competitive bullies and I just I don't I'm not like I'm not interested in pursuing that narrative I'm interested in empowering people to have uh the opportunity to control possessions and be

um I I still encourage participation in government like I'm not anti-government by any stretch I just believe that governments exist to empower people in the same way that I think cryptocurrency exists to empower people okay and maybe the idea there is like we tend to put government as like the first layer of importance and really the first layer of importance should be people with government as a support structure the same way that cryptocurrencies a support structure not we all exist to serve a government correct but I get I guess the question I am asking uh was was more about the

importance of I guess stability the security of stability and uh does cryptocurrency offer um uh more stability than uh than traditional I don't know what to call governmental currency uh uh does it offer more is there potential for more Security in the future although is it the insecurity of potential dynamism that got everybody involved in investing you know is is is that what you want uh is will it incentivize uh geopolitical instability or will it help uh solidify it uh yeah I guess I'm asking you to predict a lot yeah there's there's

something uh we call Lindy time that's l-i-n-d-y Lindy time and it is the longer something exists the more faith you can have that it will continue to exist so right now when you look at the US government I guess it has been in existence for like 350 years so uh yeah so I can have that I can have some amount of certainty that when I wake up tomorrow it will still exist because of the 350 years of History ethereum has been around since 2015. so it is about seven years of Lindy and in that seven years it has been stable and predictable like uh I'm not talking about markets I'm talking about the

chain the protocol has worked stably and predictably so that that gives me seven years of Lindy time that I can wake up tomorrow and know that that's the likelihood it will continue to exist um now in terms of like the robustness of systems uh a smart contract platform or a platform like ethereum is you know a thousand times more robust than a group of guys in a back room who are like represent the fed and they're like arguing and debating how things are going to work Okay so so 350 years of of guys you know

chatting about how things are going to work versus seven years of programmed rules that are followed flawlessly um they both have some level of certainty that they're going to continue there's a point in the future where we're going to have more or less faith in cryptocurrency to do the things that people have done for 350 years I don't know when that point will happen it could be in a week it could be in you know 100 years but odds are that it will happen uh well within our lifetime yeah just because it is so it's so such a more

robust system but it still needs Lindy time to guarantee that the likelihood to continue let's see uh yeah YouTube comments sorry I'm sorry do you ask me a question yeah did you see the YouTube comments I did um or at least I saw a couple of them um and I think I was trying to uh allude at least to the first few questions uh to the one you pointed out to me just about you know why the advantages of this versus a

government-backed uh you know currency and uh why why it might be in one's interest uh to you know consider that yeah over I I can't I can't iterate enough that like the goal of ethereum the uh the historical goal of Bitcoin was to replace Fiat money like we're going to replace all the money in the world with Bitcoin I don't really think of of ethereum in that way our goal is not to take over anything our goal is to improve everything so I don't see it replacing the US dollar I see it supporting and improving what exists as the US dollar

and then over time um like making those systems better not saying uh you know you shouldn't take US Dollars you should only take ether um I just I don't see that future coming soon okay well to piggyback on that um you mentioned yesterday a few ways applications of using uh ethereum in uh in real life situations I mean you mentioned poapps uh and I think uh D5 but I I can't recall exactly what uh what application what do you see on the horizon in terms of broadening potential applications do you see what exists now

you know practically speaking other than sitting there and looking at values uh jump up and down and deciding when to invest and when to withdraw how can you use it in the real world yeah so that's that's still a leap um that that we haven't accomplished co-app is something that I would like to get into uh in one of our future chats and even like do a walk through and demo um but I have seen a lot of potential for things like uh crowdfunding and crowdsourcing and the first example for me of that it's a it's a terrible Fair failed example but uh it would have been so cool if it worked out uh was Constitution doubt and uh about six months ago a copy of the U.S

Constitution went up for auction uh and some people developed a smart contract on ethereum called Constitution doubt where you could put your funds in anyone could put their funds in and they would get a fractional portion of that bid uh so um I I want to say they raised like 40 million dollars that's a guess I don't really recall um so you have people from all over the world who are uh crowdfunding to put money into this contract to say if we win this this auction we're going to buy the Constitution down the Constitution this copy of a printed copy of the Constitution and then it will be electronically owned by all of the people who hold

um those bids those bid receipts that's that's called fractionalizing uh it would be fractionalizing ownership of that copy of the Constitution yeah and I guess I see that more and more where people can invest in small shares I don't know I get a lot of ads for art uh investment where you can own a shared piece of art people can all grow as it appreciates interest but yeah I've seen and I guess Kickstarter campaigns very similar to that yeah you can see like um a lot of things a lot of ownership even Revenue generating ownership there have been several attempts to do things like uh real estate purchasing uh or even like renting apartments and then you get a fractional payment of of the

rent uh generated from that um I I don't I don't want to suggest that we're there like all of this is going to work right I'm interested in test feature implications we're building it like it is it is going to happen in the future um it's not and I guess you know that's what participating in ethereum is do you believe that this is possible it's going to happen or do you believe that it's a bunch of uh goofballs who are just like making these huge false claims that will never go through to get your money that is like that's the the big dilemma at hand um for my observation really awesome things are are going to happen soon because I observed

them being built every day I can also understand people who are like uh this is a fad that's gonna disappear uh they just don't get it yet um well this is hilarious I'm trying to think of uh how to ask this question and every line uh the expression is monetarily all right so I'm like so what is the bottom line you can be you don't you don't have you don't have to for my sake you don't have to ignore markets I I'm sharing like what I believe is is the the best approach but if if you need to talk about money then I'm okay with it no I don't need to it's all just embedded in the language uh you know you're talking

about if you believe in it um and the Expressions that cut I mean I want to ask you how do you show that you believe in it but the first word that comes into my mind is how do I invest in the idea so then you have the monetary term of investment and then I think of the expression put your money where your mouth is which is also talking about a monetary a monetary investment but I'm trying to frame the question I can do this okay I I can the question you're answering is how how do I get involved right the only thing you can see is is money like the only thing that that people begin with is this concept of buying in um but I would honestly say the economy is terrible and so like

Expendable income in an investment sense is just uh sort of across the board not as uh available as it as it was um so investment is difficult and I have a feeling that investment is how you get involved I mean there's some truths to that like I it from my perspective uh the most successful people are the people who um participate in the ecosystem by building things and as you build things and when I say build people immediately assume it means I'm a developer and I'm founding a company to build a project and that's how I'm going to make money

building is is what we're doing right now we're building awareness we're educating people people are listening to this and they're like I did I didn't know that was how that worked that's pretty interesting so I I think there's this guy called whack Whack Attack um he uh that's just his name he doesn't he he isn't a developer or a coder but he was so passionate about uh things that were happening in an ecosystem that he just like created a podcast and like every day for 30 minutes he just talks about the things going on in that podcast in that in that community He is building in his own way by providing education by sharing

information and now that Community is um setting up a grant for him so that he'll get regular payouts to do that kind of work uh for continuous work yeah and so that that is a way to get involved you do not everyone thinks this is about putting money in taking money out I believe it's about putting effort and energy in and getting results and a platform out like I if hearing to me is not about like selling tokens and getting money it's about how is this going to change the world so that things will be interestingly different and better in

and yes I have financial investments that I I hope do well but because I don't want to like I don't want to lie about it but that's just not why I'm here it's it's just a it's a silent part of it gotcha but yeah that that was a curiosity but I see what you're saying the more legs the stool has the harder it is for it to uh tip over and uh you know getting information out is one of the most difficult things in all of ethereum and it's because things build so quickly there are thousands of things going on um it's difficult to uh distill information down into

bite-sized packets and get that to everyone so that is the role of the community that is like all of us working together to to put these things to use well I'm gonna be honest those are the questions that I put together uh last between last night and this morning I had some older ones from uh our our first talk but those those I think we've uh pretty much covered the the things I was wondering about um but however however we want to move forward uh from this point what do you think I mean I'm I'm I feel

like a lot of today's chat has been just like bouncing off those questions but like well the ones I have now are a little bit more specific a little bit more refined these the these first ones were sort of broader uh and generalized and then uh the couple that I had were a little bit more specific like I was wondering if you could elaborate on Dao I'm not exactly clear about what Dow is uh if you want to talk to me about that I would love to have a bit standing yeah that's a really great one uh and it what what we find a Dao is a kind of A New Concept that became possible because of smart

contract networks so uh the most important thing to acknowledge is it is a concept in its infancy uh so there are ideas about what it is what it will be but um I guarantee you in in five years it will look radically different um so Dao stands for distributed autonomous organization or decentralized that one day maybe tomorrow we'll talk about the difference between sorry it that sounds conceptually very similar to what blockchain is yeah yeah well and I I misspoke because I I was recently joking about this uh it is a

decentralized autonomous organization a distributed would mean there are like five participants decentralized means that there are essentially in infinite participants um the infant is not there not the correct word but numerous participants um so it's a decentralized autonomous organization the core idea is that it is a group of people who are unrelated to each other who have a shared Interest Who kind of participate with a contract uh to make governance choices uh and so let's talk about Constitution doubt uh so Constitution doubt are if someone

creates a smart contract that says this contract will take uh bids for the Constitution if the bid is successful then the Constitution Dao will own that copy of the Constitution and all of the people who made bids will get fractional ownership all of that can be programmed into a computer it can be executed by the ethereum smart contract um as long as like the the people part of this is like the physical copy has to legitimately not be acknowledged to be owned by a smart contract so somebody someone somewhere has to make that leap in that

mental leap like it will be in a museum and the owner of record will be Constitution down and so me as as a home person like I have a computer and I I participated in this now uh and so I have been like one percent of that Constitution and what the Dow does is is like it makes decisions like what are we gonna do with the Constitution where will it be on display when will it be moved should we submit it for cleaning it it makes the same kinds of ownership decisions that a person would make but it makes them through a smart contract

governance process that can be distributed uh my question and concern would be that that would slow the process down agonizingly so does it seem to uh the process to a frustrating rate that so that's a great question um you there are a couple sides to that the first thing is you can do quick voting you can say this vote will be up for 12 hours and we're going to take a majority of whoever votes okay what does happen is you end up with you can have like uh weighted governance where you find out that one party controls like maybe I control 53 percent of it and so whatever I vote on is

effectively going to to be the outcome uh that that's one issue with it you had said does it make government slow um we also have like ideas of Delegation so uh for example I'm a delegate of something called the ens Dow there are hundreds of thousands of holders and maybe like 50 delegates people say hey I trust him he's going to be my delegate he'll read all that and Check Yes or No after some existing sort of uh you know yes understandable relatable governmental systems like uh like we see you know using the delegate system for example it really just take takes it to

the next level with codification and programmability so that it can be streamlined efficient accurate trustworthy things like that are the code writers the rule writers uh what is the relationship between somebody who uh Tech you know technologically embeds the rules into the system versus someone who ideologically formulates or dictates uh what those rules might be yeah this is great uh so uh most ethereum smart contracts or ethereum smart contracts are written in a language called solidity uh it's the code sorry this is code I don't know I'm not yes yes it is uh it's it is a

programming language where you you literally write rules if someone has this address they may do this they may not do that uh and so an actual computer program or someone who understands solidity would take these intentions and and write them in code and then they would submit it uh to the smart contract network uh and so they would like upload that contract to ethereum and then people can choose to participate uh they will they can download the code if it's open source they can look at what the the contract does um they're usually for example me like I'm relying on other people who I know can read the code uh better than I can to see implications for literacy going

on because I we're we're marginalizing [Music] very very few people have the literacy skills to uh even understand or or or use that particular language yes there is an awesome literacy program uh developed by Austin Griffith hey friend um he is uh he has a a platform called speedrun ethereum.com I think it's.com uh but it is essentially like uh modules that help you learn it's it's really designed for existing developers but anyone could do it uh with with enough interest uh and they it's a step-by-step like videos and tutorials about how to

develop smart contracts on ethereum and the beauty of that is also the risk um because it is computerized governance there can be bugs in the code and that's one of the things that we as as a as a community struggle with right now like if there is a bug in a code it could mean that um you know that we accidentally we bought the Constitution we clicked some buttons and oh no we accidentally sent ownership of this constitution to uh the wrong person on accident because it was coded wrong in place or uh in development I mean if we know that if you guys know that

there's a problem I'm assuming they're a safeguards that's called smart contract risk uh it is a thing it goes back to Lindy time again like the longer something is on the network the law the the more faith you have that it's going to work uh if someone develops a smart contract the first thing they need to do is have it audited by um smart contract Auditors these are people who are like combing through the code and looking for errors and potential problems uh and then the people who write it will improve that before they put it on the network and once you deploy it excuse me once you deploy it to the network you have this expectation that it works as as you expect but then you still need to give it time

because uh there are there are lots of people who want to profit so they're going to attack that smart contract and they're going to try to to break it or make it do something malicious about hackers or I don't know I mean what is that you know they they're nice guys who just want to make a profit okay I I I'm not I'm not really I'm not interested in like framing them as I people who poke at smart contracts aren't necessarily bad or evil they're just curious uh and maybe they're looking for trouble it I don't I don't really in that they're not trying to uh you know steal or damage they're just poking holes it's an expectation okay

if if the smart contract acts as it's expected and it's you know it's been online for six months and it continues to act as it's expected you can have a fair amount of certainty that it's going to continue doing that for the future um there's also a risk that uh you know someone will discover a bug and they'll be like hey we discovered this we have to upgrade it or change it I mean that's typical every time there's a software rollout at least I know from my phone there's the bug period you know for a month or two afterwards where there's like a fix every couple of days I can only imagine the case anytime there's you know maybe with Shanghai when it comes out there may be a period of you know a week or so it's funny you say Shanghai so we have two minutes I'm

gonna I'm gonna tell you why this is very very relevant to the ethereum community yesterday I mentioned that there was an ethereum fork in 2016. um that ethereum fork was caused by the first Dao it was actually called the Dao uh that like we didn't have like then Dallas for like Constitution it was just the Dao uh and it it that Dao contract took in a tone of ethereum um and it was uh it was it was exploited someone drained a ton of ether from that Dao into personal wallets they they found a hole

in it they were like hey this smart contract doesn't work I can drain funds it's essentially like um you have a company and you have a bank account and some other person goes and makes withdrawals from that account this is a code vulnerability that was a code vulnerability yes okay so a group said this was the way the contract was designed it was not hacked it was doing what the code was supposed to do and they said essentially yeah they are the code is Law Group like if if the code said that we're going to send Oliver ether to the wrong person uh

then code is law we're gonna stick with that they fought as ethereum classic the rest of us said code is an expression of what people think it should do so if I wrote code to do this job and it doesn't work then the code is flawed what we really wanted to do was do this other thing so code is an expression of community will we're going to time out but hey it was fun I'm gonna do it again tomorrow or well soon yeah we can do it tomorrow okay all right later we'll put it up I'll link you to it sounds good talk too

much all right see you buddy later