DC Investor | Layer Zero

Transcript

[Music] welcome to layer zero layer zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community crypto is built by code but it's composed by people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and layer zero focuses on the people behind the code because crypto is people all the way down and it always has been today i'm talking with dc investor who lives up to his name as a guy who has been in the investing world and also lives in dc so we go through that history of what it was like to learn how to be an investor while also being a w-2

employee and i think we a lot of people in the ethereum community in the crypto world can definitely understand what it's like to go to work for their nine-to-five and then really think hardly about how to make their money work for them and how to make sure that their money is working as dc said as hard for them as they worked for their money i really enjoyed their framing we talked about dc's early exploration into using the internet before the internet is what it was today while we we as a society were still trying to figure out what the internet is and how those behaviors and skills that he learned while navigating the early internet was able to be translated into the world of crypto uh we also of course go into dc's first entrance into

crypto which involved buying bitcoin at the top selling it at the bottom and what lessons he was able to learn from that expensive mistake which has kind of turned into a rite of passage for almost everyone in the world of crypto we also of course talk about dc's background uh as it relates to nfts and if dc famously has one of the most stellar nft portfolios that is out there and we also get into the world of crypto gaming and what dc likes to do in his free time so i hope you enjoy this conversation with dc investor but before we get into it we have to talk for a moment about one of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of

a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the uni-swap ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again dows have money and they are in need of labor if you think that you have something to contribute to the uniswap dao apply for a grant to uniswap just look at the size of the uniswap treasury it's almost three billion dollars this mountain of capital

is looking for labor do you have something of value to contribute to the uniswap dow no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply for a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer unit swap in the direction that you think it should go that's exactly what we did to get uniswop to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same for your project thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless the era of proof of stake is upon us proof of stake systems like ethereum terra and solana allow the industry to move away from the hot loud and wasteful proof of work systems and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators and that is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized individuals must play their part in

crypto network validation and that is what lido is here to do lido makes sticking accessible to everyone at the click of a button by delegating your stake to lydo's network of nodes you can access the yield offered by proof of sake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards do you have 32 eth and want to stake it to ethereum but running a node sounds intimidating or maybe you have less than 32 eth and you need to pool your eat with others so you can access baking yields lido offers a solution for both simply go to lido.fi choose which assets you want to stake and deposit them to the lido validating network lido is working to make sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible and is committed to decentralizing its own validating

network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol so if you want to stake your eth terra or soul and get liquidity on your steak go to lydo.fi to get started hey dc how's it going hey david how's it going man doing well pretty good pretty good i'm over here at nft nyc but bummed the end of the nft guy wasn't actually able to see you this weekend i know i wasn't able to make it this week but i definitely hope to be able to make it to to some events in 2022. yeah man uh i want to start with uh dc investor where'd that name come from so it was just a handle that i created back in the day because a lot of the forums i'd been

participating in were kind of financially oriented i was on forums like the bogle heads which is like a financial investment site using like vanguard funds so i've always been interested in this idea of investing and my philosophy behind that has been pretty simple as someone who is a w-2 wage earner for most of my life for 15 plus years my philosophy was always if i'm going to work hard for my money which i worked very hard for my money i wanted my money to work hard for me so i always kind of had my mindset of i want to be able to invest and grow my earnings beyond just the work that i'm putting in directly and then what about the dc side of things so the dc i'm actually based in dc and um based in the dc area and i've lived

up here for about 15 years now so it's pretty much my home i grew up in southeast virginia so been in this area kind of my whole life i'm about four and a half hours away from where i grew up but i love the dc area it's a great metropolitan area i'm sure a lot of your listeners might even live there but it's great because we've got kind of the hustle and bustle of a bigger city and the culture and arts that you expect from a city like dc but it's also like a lot more laid back and chill than a city like nyc which i love nyc i love new york it's a great city but every time i visit there when i come home i'm like oh it's nice to be back at home too so oh my gosh everyone that i've been talking

to here in nyc is saying the same same exact things this is the first week of nyc i've been learning to like pace myself and i was also learning like one week in dc in in new york is more than enough like it's more of a five-day thing for me but it's fun while you're there there's no other city that has that feeling so that's that's very true yeah it's very much a play hard work hard environment uh okay so speaking of play hard work hard if you are and you say you you worked very hard being a wt employee working hard for your money and then obviously you want your money to work hard for you uh has this been uh something like a work ethic that you've had like your entire entire life as in like you've always been focused on like you know going to work doing your w-2

and then funneling that into you know actually investments has this been you know who you are for like uh the last 15 years that you would say pretty much i mean when i first started out working and i'm sure a lot of your uh listeners can probably relate to this i didn't have like a ton of money you know you don't have a lot of disposable income when you're coming out of college and i i came out of college i had actually started off as a chemistry and comp sci double major then september 11th happened and i was a senior and as a junior in college and i switched my major on the spot to government just because i wanted to do something more involved with that so i changed my focus completely did the whole government major in three semesters and then got my

master's in public policy so i was kind of like destined for this track of working on public policy related issues here in the dc area but when i first came out of school it's not like i had a ton of disposable income but i did kind of prioritize saving a little bit and one of one of the pieces of advice that i try to give people who are younger just getting into this and might have like professional jobs is try to save some of that money into your 401k i know this is the opposite of what a lot of crypto people will say but it's like save a little bit in that because as you build up that lower risk um asset pie it allows you as you grow older to take bigger risks that's kind of the philosophy that i approached um investing with crypto investing and just

stock investing i wanted to build up that nest egg so i can take on bigger risks as i got older yeah famously people will always say hey if you're young take risks right because why not like you have you have very little to lose and everything to gain but but what you're saying is well if you keep that steady 401k you get to continue with that strategy for longer and into your life yeah and also like i mean i think a lot of people don't really understand compound interest and how powerful it really is like everyone will say they get it but like until you like look at the numbers and how like saving a little bit when you're younger how much more valuable that is compounded over time um so i think that's one piece of it but i wouldn't say like it doesn't mean like

don't take risks while you're young it means don't put everything into risky endeavors like make sure that if you like invest in something that's more speculative or risky you still got something to fall back on and i think that's what that's kind of been my philosophy is i always wanted to create that security because that's what's given me the confidence actually to hold on to these crypto assets because i don't really care about the volatility as much if that makes sense absolutely one thing that comes to mind is like everyone in crypto is and even this is also true for the legacy stock market now with this whole like the gme ape culture that you know has gone outside of crypto is like no no one has enough patience for compound interest like i know you say like you know compound interest is very

very like you know powerful but also at the same time people are trying to like get it rich everywhere not just crypto did you have you thought about like the implications of like what happens when like the culture around investing goes from you know steady reliable long-term compound interest to like trying to catch that moon bag so i definitely have and i think a lot of this has become a lot of finances become gamified and it was happening even before crypto and it really started i mean and by the way the phenomenon that we're seeing they're not necessarily new i mean if you go back to the 30s and the roaring 20s right and a lot of that was fueled actually by a overheated speculative stock market which which all of a sudden allowed

retail participation and retail was buying in and they were buying into very high valuations which kept going higher because there were always new entrants coming in right but once the new entrance and the new money and now it fueled one of the most lavish decades in like modern history basically um you know that whole period and so but when you look back at that time period and you look at the parallels of today and you see the same kind of like gambling mindset a lot of it is fueled by like the apps i mean even if you look like the way that the robin hood app is structured for logging your trades versus like the schwab app they're they're different right they're get they're aiming at different experiences and robin hood is almost like trying to provide you like entertainment through

investing is how i would put it and crypto does that too so and i and i there is a market for that but i do think if you have too many people with like the get rich quick mindset like a lot of them are going to get burned badly at some point most likely i mean just the law of market dynamics says that like not everyone can make that kind of money over time and it might happen you know definitely crypto has been cyclical in the past we've seen bear markets evan flow and i think we'll probably continue to see that to some degree even if the bearish periods aren't quite as stark for some assets they will still be very harsh on some assets so i think that overall that whole gambling mindset all investing is a form of gambling but i think it's just about how

you manage the risk which is what differentiates it there's a book that our mutual friend eric connor got me to to read uh called the devil take the hindmost i don't know if you've read yeah okay sounds like you've read it yeah i haven't read that but i read a similar book which is reminisces of a stock market operator so but the eric's book is on my list as well and yeah that whole both of those are just about that whole period and how evaluations just went crazy right double take the hindmost is about like financial bubbles at large like going back to i think as early as like the 1200s or 1400s and it was the biggest takeaway i had is that like financial bubbles that happen are like they're bit they are barely basically guaranteed to happen because they're

based in like human dna right like the tulip mania like there was nothing about tulips that created the financial bubble it was all in the brains of the humans right and so like it's kind of like programmed into our like our greed right our greed factors and like i think it's like when enough people start to have that sort of like ape culture that get rich quick culture it starts to actually become part of the fundamentals of the market right like well because you're aping and i'll apen and then because they're raping in i'll ape in but eventually like somebody is the last person to ape in right and then they mark the top uh and like but there's like this some some somehow like something about the rubber meets the pavement and all of a sudden it changes the culture around the people that are

investing in it as it's just logically rational because everyone else is doing it to also do it and it just creates like a self-fulfilling prophecy yeah and there is a rationality there because the number keeps going up you're like well i want to be on board this train rather than off it but the problem is that you know it's not sustainable as you pointed out i actually wrote a tweet kind of along touching on some of these topics earlier today and i i'll read it here because i said more than anything else being deep in crypto has taught me basically four things one all valuations are a meme and some of those memes are more durable than others two there's a difference between a marketable product versus a true product market fit and we have a lot of marketable products in crypto we have a very few products

with dream product market fit um the third is everything takes either much less time or much more time than you thought to happen in the world of crypto like there have been some things i'm like oh this will happen this year and it takes like three years there's some stuff that i was like oh this will take 10 years it takes like three months you know i mean literally that's how crypto works and then finally the cyclical nature of human greed which is we we inevitably as humans get into these boom and bust cycles we're chasing the run up and then we're chasing the run down and you know you just have to acknowledge that that's how your own mind works perhaps and that's how others minds are working and you just have to adapt to that kind of environment so dc when you were investing way back

before crypto uh again back when you were a w-2 employee uh and being an investor when you're a double wt employee is very much different than when like i would say like anything else right because you're not paying attention to the markets you're going to work right and then you come back and like it has to be in on your own time as you learned how to invest in that world how much of that knowledge were you able to actually carry over into the crypto world or when you came into the crypto world was it like a brand new game that you had to relearn from scratch i think there are a lot of parallels it is a different game in some respects so traditionally those other types of investment markets that we're talking about we're only talking about equities right and a lot of what i was investing in and still

hold are diversified index funds however i would buy individual equities here and there i would actually say that the public information asymmetry around those types of corporations actually much bigger because there are insiders who have a lot more knowledge and crypto actually it's more of an even playing field because more of the information is out there in the public so that others can see it but i think looking back on that time um you know i a big lesson that i learned in participating in those kinds of markets is just appropriate risk management and i've really carried that forward with me into crypto and my philosophy with putting money into crypto has never put in money that is more than i could afford to lose so i don't want to be

economically bankrupt or put into like a really dire situation because i invested too much in crypto that said i put a lot in crypto i mean i've and it's grown bigger obviously over time but even my initial investments were extremely large as a percentage of my net worth and i kind of just accepted i was like okay i had i had gotten to that point in my life where i was like well i have enough saved where i can afford to take a couple of big swings here for these higher conviction assets and i think another big lesson that i learned from those kinds of markets is you really there's value in playing the long game um and i think in crypto probably what i didn't adapt to as well is how much money can be extracted in the short term to be honest and not necessarily that i want

to get into that game because it's a little too it's not the type of i don't enjoy that kind of stimulation that much like it's not that exciting to me to like buy into something that's like oh a 2x overnight i'm gonna sell it now like that's just not that interesting i would rather buy something and it goes like 10x or 100x over a few years like that's just a more interesting and feels more sustainable to me but i think like i was not prepared for how much just pure untethered mimetics kind of drives value it happens in financial markets but those memes are kind of pushed on us by wall street they tell us stuff like oh yeah price earnings matters that's what you should be paying attention to or growth matters or or or value matters and the narratives kind of shift over

time shifting into a crypto mindset it's like okay even assets with really strong fundamental value like ether when it was like under 200. you were buying i was buying no not many people were buying them but like not many people really saw the fundamentals so i've always been like that was that to me was probably the biggest asymmetric bet of my life was going big on ethereum when it was under 200 during the bear market just because i knew it was undervalued for the fundamentals and it kind of ties back to that way of thinking that i just articulated with uh you said that the crypto markets are inherently more like fair because all the information is out there do you think that's like a fundamental truth about how crypto works or do you think that's maybe just true just because

we're early in the history of crypto and everyone's still learning how to figure out what the hell all this stuff is i think part of it is fundamentally true and maybe more of it than people realize because even as we scale up i think a lot of activity is going to be done in the open it's done on the public internet and people can kind of see and browse that information i don't but i but i do think we run the risk of having more actors playing more centralizing roles in some of this and i think that over time and we already see that a little bit sometimes you see like vcs getting better deals and are they really bringing any value to the table in some cases not really they're just like they're putting their logo the project is putting their logo on their

website and saying oh look who's backing us what they don't tell you is they're literally like in everything right and for those funds they actually make a lot of their money on the upfront buy where they get preferential terms there and i think like unfortunately the way that the icf mania kind of imploded in 2017 2018 and the sec action that resulted from that actually moved the industry more towards relying on vc funding i think the pendulum is starting to swing back a little bit but actually like icos like in their premise are a very egalitarian way of like raising funds not necessarily in practice in terms of what we saw but the idea of anyone being able to invest in anything anywhere without any barrier like if you're a project and you need to

raise 10 million dollars and maybe you want to raise it actually from users versus some vc that's gonna like you know pay you favors and stuff like that you know maybe you're better off actually raising the money from 10 000 people and giving more people the opportunity to participate so i do i do hope that we swing back more towards those models but we're gonna have to fight that kind of centralization risk like any industry in my opinion you said um the whole like buy something watch it two three x sell it in a day later daily or two a day or two later it's not it's not interesting to you and i think what you you may mean by that is that well if you're making those trades uh you don't care about the asset you just want to you care about the candle

right whereas if you buy something and you're holding it for a year maybe you actually are are like intrinsically curious about the nature of that asset like there's something to read about there's like things to unpack and explore was there an ever an asset first off is that would you say that that's true and then uh was before crypto when you were still investing in the legacy stock market was there an asset like that that you like had a true deep conviction in or was that something that you more recently discovered in crypto um you know just going back i think that if you look at crypto assets as a whole they're more speculative in their nature than a lot of fundamental investments right so when i think about like

why why i'm interested in crypto i am still looking for that fundamental value personally as someone with that kind of mindset going back to my stock training um and and other investments um but a lot of the value is falls into that speculative bucket right and i don't fault anybody necessarily for like seeking that i get it i mean the money is out there but in order but like it's hard it's harder for a lot of people to have an edge in that kind of activity because a lot of these traders are very sophisticated and actually a lot of the traders that you see on crypto twitter i'm convinced they're not making money so you also need to like be aware of like the larping that goes on which is quite there are some traders who are very

successful i mean there are some traders who are very successful a lot of them are not like super active trading daily candles either they'll trade like shorter time frames than what i'm trading but they're still like you know focused on more market movements that are based on reflexive price action than anything else i didn't really get involved in that kind of investing in the stock market because in the stock market i feel like it was even harder to have an edge there and you have to use more exotic instruments and i wasn't really doing that as a personal investor there were some specular sectors that i got into kind of early on that were very exciting like 3d printing like i got into that when it was like hitting like the hype narrative and i was up a lot in that and then i watched it all decline a

lot i mean i still i still i still made out more than i put in but it was kind of one of those things where i look back and it's like you know what i probably should have taken some profit off the table because it's like even though the fundamentals were strong uh or like the ideas actually i should say the ideas were good the fundamentals were not necessarily there i think we have that challenge in crypto sometimes too however over the past like 10 plus years that that cryptos kind of existed i feel like fundamentals have been increasing and it makes sense now to actually look at crypto from a more fundamental basis in my opinion well one of the things that i really like about this crypto thing and i only started getting in into investing maybe like 18 months before i went from like

investing in the stock market to investing in crypto so my stock market investing like um knowledge base is very very limited um but the big difference that i noticed with crypto is that with crypto assets there's communities around these things uh and the one asset that i really actually cared about was uh amd which also actually had like a community there was like a subreddit based around it uh and one of the cool phenomenons and you and i we we share some discord channels we share some telegrams and a lot of them are our eth-based uh like communities right and that's like a for me i'm pretty sure that's a big first in the world and like this also started with bitcoin of course um where like all of a sudden it's not just the fundamentals it's also like the

community and so many communities in this uh in the crypto world like it's weird that so many communities are based around financial assets how have you uh going from the the world of you know stock market investing to crypto investing how how has the fact that communities are around these things like you know change your mental models about how to evaluate these things so i and i do think communities have existed in like the traditional markets like even some of the communities that i was like involved with mostly as a lurker like the bogo heads that i mentioned earlier they're based off like they're like acolytes of jack bogle who founded vanguard and they're just people who are like talking about how to allocate among index funds and there's a community that's sprung up around that and a lot of people you know you can get a lot of

value just by reading and following those communities i think in crypto it definitely becomes or runs the risk of becoming more cult-like or tribal like than even with equities and there are various reasons for that but i think fundamentally because a lot of the value of crypto assets is socially driven i think a lot of i think a lot of people especially a lot of developers might not actually appreciate that they're like more just focused on the technology and they're like oh this does this but it's like at the end of the day the value that we're creating in the space is ultimately about social legitimacy and being able to disintermediate activity trustlessly in a way that is reliable and i think that different people have different views of

what that trust means and different people are going to prioritize different elements that value proposition and you know i obviously have my own point of view which i think is right and but there's somewhat there's someone else on the other side of the fence that has an equally strong view that also thinks that they are right i mean the market is going to decide these things in the long term but i do think that it's important to kind of look at the market through that lens and understand that different people i mean just because someone likes some other token that might be different from me doesn't necessarily make them like a bad person i think in crypto a lot of the times people kind of turn that into like a personal argument and it's honestly not as bad during like nice bullish periods like we're having

right now david you know where everything's going up so it's not like the end of the world but like during more bearish periods as you will remember from the last beer market it gets it can get unpleasant and i i think that is unfortunate i mean especially like i i basically created my twitter account because i got tired of like the misinformation that was being propagated about ethereum i know that was a big reason why you and ryan really like pushed bankless forward as well because the amount of disinformation not not just misinformation just pure disinformation was staggering and people just didn't understand what was happening in ethereum for a fundamental basis so that's where i felt like actually being in that tribe a little bit helped me because i was able to see through all that bs i was able to see the true fundamentals i was able to like

filter out the random crypto trader who knows absolutely nothing about the technology saying ethereum's going to zero and i was able to hone in on what i felt was like a valuable long-term value proposition and it turns out i was i was right or have been right so far with the community aspect aside like removing the investment and and you know number go upside of of assets how has the community side of things and changed your life the community has been huge and the ethereum community has been in particular and i think the crypto community overall because even though we have things that separate us there is a lot that unites us right and a lot of us have common views of the type of world we want to see from crypto not universal

but somewhat common for me being involved in the ethereum community has just been a huge positive and i started off actually mostly participating on reddit and back in the days of eath trader and then on eath finance i would write up more longer form pieces there and i would just kind of share my investment thesis on why i was interested in ether and beyond that why i thought it was like a world changing technology and a lot of this we can talk about this if you're interested but like a lot of that goes back to just my experience of growing up during the rise of the consumer internet and i saw just so many parallels of what was happening with ethereum and most of it like 90 of it was organic it didn't feel forced it didn't feel like it felt like this open free collaboration

trust layer and i didn't see anything else that was doing that and the community being involved with the community helped me understand that better it helped me make more connections to learn more about what was actually happening with ethereum and it helped me kind of refine those theses and share them with more people and then i kind of shifted my emphasis more to sharing that information on twitter just because the reach is a little bit bigger than just you know the the 100 or so people who might stumble upon one of my comments on reddit on twitter it's it's a much bigger impression base and for me it was really not about like establishing a personality it was just i want to get this information out for people because i believe in kind of what ethereum is trying to achieve yeah talk about the uh your transition

into the world of of crypto so you spent a number of years uh you know uh uh sharpening your teeth by investing in the normal stock market at some point you stumble into the world of crypto maybe that's where you started to get to comparisons of crypto and uh you know the rise of the consumer internet can you talk talk about just your crypto moment absolutely so it was back in 2013 and prior to that by the way i was aware of bitcoin you know i had heard about it and i was like okay this doesn't really the idea of digital scarcity did not make sense to a lot of us and it still doesn't make sense to a lot of us but especially for someone who grew up with like the 90s consumer internet literally you could copy paste anything and now we're in this world where you're telling

me that you can have like a digitally scarce asset on this decentralized ledger which supposedly nobody controls it's a huge mental leap right and so i dismissed it for a long time and then it was around november 2013 bitcoin hit like a thousand dollars and that's when i really started paying attention i was like wow i remember when this was trading for like a couple of bucks and i was like of course i wish i had bought them i didn't but like but i was just like well you know i let me try to learn a little bit more about this i didn't go like super deep but i went deep enough to be like okay i'm gonna start putting some money into this so i bought a bunch like close to the top back then okay it happens to all of us and of course in my mindset and and

being a w-2 wage earner back then and you know i so i was earning my income i was like well i'm just going to dollar cost average and do this i don't care about the volatility that was what i told myself right and then so i kept buying from from that point and it kept going lower and lower and i was like okay what's going on now and then eventually at some point i decided a couple years later i decided i wanted to buy a house or buy a condo and i was like well i might as well just sell this bitcoin it's never going back up so i sold it for between 400 and 200 something dollars okay so let's say average average sale price was around 300. and i had lost money on that so i've got the tax write off i was like

that's cool and then so fast forward of course now bitcoin's worth over 60 000 and that was a huge like wake up moment for me of like okay i like well in hindsight from now looking back i was like that was a big wake up moment for me because i was like i realized in 2016 2017 as i started to dive into ethereum and that so the way i learned about ethereum by the way is i heard bitcoin had gone back above a thousand again and i was like damn i sold it and i was like well let me log into coinbase and see what's going on i saw this new coin called ethereum on coinbase and i started to explore it and i you know went on to the forums i learned about i was like programmable blockchain what does that really mean and as i

started to dive in just that dynamic energy the open source mindset the sharing the collaboration the vision it all reminded me a lot of like this early consumer internet which like at the time those types of things were like incredibly novel on a global scale right now we almost take it for granted that those kinds of communities can form but back then when i saw the early consumer internet and i saw i remember going through that probably before your time david but i remember going through that process of like getting online with like a 2400 baud modem and like going up and then eventually getting to like 56k or whatever it was and it was like wow that's so much faster and better and

then you know just the promise of different technologies that were well before their time but eventually became viable like on-demand video like i remember this conversation really well in college with a call mate of mine who was a comp sci major and he told me he's like i'll tell you what the internet will never be able to support on-demand video streaming and i was like never is a strong statement he was convinced he gave all these technical arguments for why and i was like i think if it's important enough we'll adapt and we'll learn how to make it happen and i felt like that dynamic energy has always been part of what's propelled the internet forward and similarly i feel that same dynamic energy with ethereum and what's moving it forward and you know obviously you

and i have probably similar views about this but how we're using these technologies today is not necessarily how we're going to use them tomorrow but what's important and what you can't fake is the quality of that community and how are they bringing that energy to move things forward and i did feel like bitcoin was doing that at first like back when i bought bitcoin in 2013 i got that same feeling right when i first sent bitcoin from one address to another i was like that was like the same moment that i first got my first email or sent my first chat message to someone it was like it was like oh [ __ ] moment it was like wow that's like insane that i was able to do that and i i didn't have as many moments like that with bitcoin from that point on just because it became

kind of this more ossified creation whereas with ethereum i still have the you know especially during the bear market i was having those types of experiences like every few weeks i was like wow this is incredible from using d5 and all of that and i still have a lot of those experiences and so that's that's kind of how the mindset relates if that makes sense as an early consumer of the internet as it was coming into fruition even before we all knew what the internet was or could be what were some of the things that you're doing on the internet a while back then i was just like online chatting with friends um i mean just learning about stuff like the amount of knowledge information that was on the internet and it wasn't nicely curated there wasn't even google

back then search engines were very hit or miss right it was hard to use if you got outside the aol walled garden basically which a lot of people chose not to do in the earliest days but that's where you really like found a lot of this information out there and to me it was just incredible that people could interact like this and that i could chat with someone that is halfway around the world and now similarly with like public blockchains you can interact with them economically halfway around the world and i mean so all of those things but yeah i was just chatting with people i was playing a lot of games like i was playing um you know a lot of those games had started to go online and there were a lot of them were over ipx which was like a now defunct like local

networking protocol which is not really used much and and so there are emulators that allowed you to do that over tcp ip so i was playing like doom online with my friends warcraft warcraft 2 i was playing quake you know i was just a huge nerd so i was just playing all this stuff and having fun on the internet and it was like it was but there was nothing else that was like that at that time it was truly like this pioneering freewheeling spirit i was on irc chat forum so it's actually not that different like discord a lot of people like wow discord's like great it's like this is literally exactly like irc except for you can have emojis and messages now or like images in your messages now but it's like basically irc like reinvented for like the 21st

century so uh you playing world of warcraft 2 and doom that is where our histories over the internet will will begin to overlap one of the uh the first things that i would ever do on a computer was sit on my dad's lap and press the five button which would be the shoot button and he would do everything else for doom he would figure everything else but i would just see the alien on the screen and i would just press five and that was my first entrance into computers and internet yeah see but that's i mean yeah a lot of people had and and by the way using computers back then was not easy it was actually like really like especially from the age that i was i'm talking about so like late 80s when you turn on your computer you're confronted with a

black screen and a command prompt okay and if you're like an eight or nine year old you're average eight or nine year old you're gonna be like what the heck do i do now and i never really got into it much except for one day my dad was like oh our hard drive which was like i think it's 40 megabytes at the time is a 40 megabyte hard drive for this 286 computer he's like we need to delete some files can you figure that out and i was like oh man this seems like it's going to be really hard he had no idea how to do it so i'm like reading the instruction manual and when i figured it out i was like oh wow it's like that sense of accomplishment i feel like using crypto like that is like very similar today it's like you're

confronted with terrible ux it's really hard to use you can't expect most people to even want to figure it out if they do it's often by necessity or they just have that interest naturally and so i think that we're moving forward though into a more consumer-facing era and i'm excited i'm excited about the possibility of that yeah that's actually a thread that i definitely want to pull on because a lot of this conversation has been like oh dc investor he was good he learned how to invest in the stock market and he took those skills to crypto but also it's like oh you watched computers figure out what the hell computers were and you watch the internet learn what the hell the internet was uh and so talk just elaborate a little bit more on developing those early computer skills and and how it's helped you navigate the

world of crypto well and for me i was never as like technically adept as a lot of my friends or some of them i should say because there were some people who are like truly like you know they went on to become awesome coders and stuff like that i'm not sure i had that level of discipline or aptitude but i did learn how to program a little bit and i did some of that but like i was kind of like a level below those folks but as someone who is kind of immersed more and what does this technology mean for us and how can we use it versus like how can i manipulate every aspect of it and for me i think that has served me well in crypto because i tend to think more about these adoption arcs and what they're going to look like like i

remember their distinct period of the consumer internet which was focused on dial up and what you could do during that period was very limited but we really pushed it to the absolute limit where you were like downloading little video clips by even by the end of the era there was like real player which some people may recall which allowed you to stream video and that was like a huge deal it's like wow but like at that time it was hard to conceptualize that everyone would have something near like a t1 fiber connection coming into their home right it just didn't really occur to us that that might happen one day um but as you saw the use kind of catch up with that you know you remember and everyone's seen that kitchen clip of like um al roker and the today show and

katie curry and they're like what is the internet why would anybody at is that the internet i mean and and i mean that mindset was extremely prevalent back then it was prevalent among my some of my friends a lot of my family they're like what are you doing on here like my friends are like what are you doing on the computer like what are you doing you're just tying up our phone line but they didn't get it and i was like look i'm like learning about all this stuff what was really valuable for me in those early days was being able to use the internet to learn more about any type like i could search about like how to learn about how to do something on my computer and i could find an answer on the internet like that was huge like back in the day you could not like do that you

had to like know someone who could like tell you something like that so i sound like really boomer here as i reminisce on these things that people take for granted now but that's so i don't take anything for granted in crypto i realize that we're on this journey where we're at the hardest to use period right now or the second hardest to use i would say the epic of like the hardest to use is probably past a little bit now with like metamask and hardware wallets and stuff like that it's getting better but the future is really going to look dramatically different from what we're doing today and it's not going to involve us directly interacting with these protocols most likely it's probably going to be we're working through like a layer two you're probably gonna have some kind of multi-signature wallet so you want to

manage your keys and it's gonna be fast it's gonna be cheap i mean we're still like some time away from that um but i think like it's kind of like a lot of people don't because they haven't had that experience of looking back on that internet period they only have the skepticism and they're like well we'll never get there there's no point what problem does this solve why am i using this and the early internet didn't solve a problem the problem that it solved was actually sharing big files between darpa facilities that was what it was designed for and there and that was reflected in how the early internet was used the early internet was mostly going on web one was like viewing static text and images that was it and that was

still a huge value proposition but it was more like an evolution of the printing press than of like true collaboration fast forward into the web 2 era and that's where everything got a lot more interactive where you had apps basically in your web browser that was like a huge thing that did not exist before like these were not at the beginning of the internet fast forward to today where you have the internet basically being used as just like going back almost to that data layer we're just streaming data of all kinds across it and we've kind of gone back more to that infrastructure element interestingly enough which is where the internet started and now it just has become embedded in almost everything we do and everything we use and i think crypto may take a journey that's somewhat similar

to that yeah i think that probably i would assume when you got into the world of crypto and discovered ethereum it all of those experiences and all that like experiential knowledge that that you learned going through the early clunky days of the internet probably helps you become not skeptical about ethereum right like seeing the same patterns the same writings on the wall talk a little bit about that a lot of it just comes down to the fact that i used a lot of those early internet products and i remember how hard they were to use at the time and just early personal computing in general and how unpolished it was a lot of people today who are growing up today they haven't really used a personal computer in like they never had to troubleshoot one they just

have phones they get the software updates they're super stable they have almost no problems back in the day when you're when you can connect to the internet or something like that you had like some serious irq conflict or whatever you had to like know a little bit about like what you were doing and you had to like dive into the innards of it and really understand it and so i feel like with crypto you have to do a lot of that today still the ux is definitely getting better but it's still like not great i mean we could use before eip1559 just the idea of having to clear a transaction that got stuck it's like what the hell is this and why would i have to do that it's still it is still like an annoyance which you know i mean there's all kinds of ux elements like that in crypto

across the board and i saw a lot of those things in that early internet early personal computing journey and so it just gave me that perspective of okay this is what the technology looks like now here's what's being used for it feels frivolous but when you think about what it could make possible it's like civilization changing and that was my view on crypto and it started with like that bitcoin as that discrete unit of value and it kind of progressed into that programmable world computer which i'm not a huge fan of that kind of terminology but like let's just say ethereum is that global trust layer because that's what i really view it as and when you think about what what are the things that that could make possible

it's a lot of things and there's gonna be some bad things that come from that but i think like the good will outweigh the bad is kind of my feeling some more to similar to the kinds of challenges we went through as the internet became mainstream i always think it's pretty funny when uh i don't really see these anymore because definitely after eip1559 a lot of these problems are fixed but there are other things like it too where somebody will say like oh i've like i made a transaction it had the gas fees went up it hasn't cleared i tried to make another one and now i have seven stuck transactions like this technology is never going to work and like jumping from like oh i have stuck transactions to this technology is never going to work i always think it's so funny it's like you are missing the

force for the trees dude like like you just gotta zoom out a little bit like that is a solvable problem like calm down well and i i you know just from their perspective and they're limited their limited perspective i see where they're coming from right because they're just like this technology is hard to use and how is this going to scale so that we have millions of users and you see this playing out now in some of the narratives of these alternative layer one blockchains as well they're saying like ethereum doesn't have the capacity we do what they're not necessarily telling you is as soon as they hit their threshold capacity they're going to have the exact same problem so we basically have to turn ethereum more from this app and execution layer into this trust layer

and i think that is that's what layer two is all about and it's a very logical progression was ethereum designed for it from the ground up no but i mean neither was the internet the internet wasn't designed for a lot of things that has now taken on being able to do and so i do imagine a world where we have multiple layers being built on ethereum abstracting away some of the complexity so that the end user is just basically using an app and they may or may not even be aware that they're using ethereum and are there going to be other changes that are part of that probably you know i don't know which change they'll be there's a lot of things that i've seen in my time in the space that because they're seeing very strong but they end up being flashes in the pan i do feel

like bitcoin and ethereum both have like some staying power and unique value propositions for other stuff and this goes back to a lot of my training as a consultant i'm like crucially focused on like that value proposition so when i talk about fundamentals that's a lot of time what i'm talking about like what is the unique value that a given chain network or asset provides that no other chain asset or network can provide and i can see that for ethereum i can see it for bitcoin in just the minimally complex asset layer i don't necessarily see a unique value proposition for a lot of other projects in this space and that's why i generally will choose like not to

invest really anything material into them and i don't really hold any of these other layer one tokens right now would i ever trade one i mean maybe but it's not really the type of investment that i go for typically let's pick up the threat of uh where we left before we went down the the internet rabbit hole where uh you were dollar cost averaging into bitcoin until you wanted to buy a house you sold it forgot about crypto for a while then you saw bitcoin reached its all-time highs you opened up coinbase and discovered this ethereum thing how did that lesson of buying bitcoin at its all-time highs getting wrecked by it which is like the rite of passage for everyone in crypto it's always the most expensive lesson how did that how did learning that lesson uh impact the way that you

thought about the industry moving forward when you opened up coinbase again and saw bitcoin and ether so it changed my mindset because i realized that i was wrong to sell the bitcoin when i did and my initial thesis was actually correct but i did not have the fortitude or the positioning to be able to stick with that and actually had i not bought that house i probably would have held it and so it kind of goes back to and i tell people this today it's like don't put money into crypto that you need in the next few years or might need right and at that time like buying a place wasn't necessarily on my radar but i kind of fell into the peer pressure of like oh you're at this age you should be buying something and i was like okay fine i guess i'll buy a condo or something and

so i ended up selling it at a loss and you know so so if you need money in the next few years don't put it into crypto i think that's probably the lesson that i took away from it and so the way that i approached it in 2016 2017 was okay i'm going to put money into this that i truly don't need you know and i had more assets that accumulated by then from working and i was like i'm going to take a risk here because and especially as i started to learn what ethereum could do and a lot of it was more promises of things that we see today versus stuff that had actually been delivered i just got really excited about the potential future vision of ethereum and ethereum has delivered a tremendous amount of that i don't think it gets enough credit for how much it

has delivered i pretty much like at this at that time as i got into it though i also saw the ascent of all of the ico mania and i mostly stayed out of that because i just kind of like stuck to my like fundamental thesis i'm like okay what's the fundamental value of this and i did so i didn't really buy a lot of those tickets i just bought as much ether as i could i held most of it like i and i accumulated a lot more during the bear market because my view of the fundamentals hadn't changed and having that experience in 2014 2015 made me realize that like i'm not going to make that mistake again you know i was just like i'm buying into this because this these are like world-changing technologies not because i'm trying to make a 2x or a 3x and i

think i had to kind of shift my mindset out of that that time and space that i had kind of lost out and adapt for what was happening then it's very clear that you have a long-term mindset with your investments right when you tell people it's like oh don't put any money into crypto that you'll need in the next few years i feel like a lot of the younger generation be like years what years that's too that's too long and i definitely got into crypto and started like playing the token game because that was when i got into crypto right during 2017.

looking at blockfolio roughly 2 000 times a day just like feeling the emotional whiplash of tokens go go up and down and one of the biggest things that i've learned in this bowl cycle is to just like not feel the impulse not feel like the fomo from the tokens because that's what lost me a lot of money in 2017 is going hopping from token to token to token on a whim just because one was pumping and like it's not only was it actually financially a better choice for me to not get whiplash by these by these tokens and just not and be more zen about the fomo but yeah it was it was also a massive reduction in stress right so like not only does it actually make my my

portfolio overall more healthy my tax liabilities go down but it also makes my stress go down do you have similar experiences absolutely and i think a lot of it a lot of this comes down to like a lot of people really don't truly understand the power of compound interest you know what i mean and they don't realize how much drag like selling an asset um you know with with high capital gains taxes if you're in the u.s or similar jurisdiction can hurt your potential earning potential and yeah the stress just upholding something that you don't really believe in right yeah yeah you don't know you're just like kind of taking a guess you're buying it because it's a momentum play it's like you know every day i held something like that i wake up being like is this the day that i need to sell this because it's just

like is this going to like collapse tomorrow and it just wasn't a mindset and i didn't find it like mentally stimulating to like be engaging in a lot of that stuff and so for me and again i understand that i entered the market probably older than a lot of current participants but it's all relative and it scales to what your current net worth is to what your earning potential is right i think that i see a lot of young people taking on what i would consider to be unreasonable amounts of risk like it's never something that i would recommend to someone it's like look if you can't if you don't have that much money to invest in crypto then don't invest that much money in crypto like you just can't like you know don't take like don't do stuff like go and borrow a lot of money and try to like buy in

right now i mean i would never suggest stuff like that to people because i've seen what happens i mean we saw in 2017 what happened when a lot of people piled on with credit card debt and at that time coinbase allowed you to buy it with credit cards and i i bought i bought some myself but i was like okay i can pay this off in a month or two but there are people who took on years worth of debt that that they probably you know that they ended up defaulting on and so on so like my my philosophy always been like i want to succeed but i don't ever want to put myself in a position where i might face like economic ruin have to move in with like relatives or something like that to me was just like a logical like okay that's the amount of risk i'm willing to

take but it's worked out and being a little bit longer term has actually helped me say stay in the space sustainably instead of just like okay i got my pound of flesh and now i'm moving on which is what you do see with some folks but more often you don't see are the folks who lost everything and there's people are out there there's not vocal or visible and it's definitely the time of the market the parts of the market cycle that you're in it's easier or harder to have long-term focus right um right what a constant theme that i'm talking to with people out here at nft nyc specifically the the people that i know like i i'm not here for the conference i'm here to hang out with your friends and the friends that i have are friends like about that i met around the same

time i met udc which was in the bear market right and a lot of us well the bear market hurt it was very demoralizing time now a lot of us are like oh the bear market it was so quiet then it was just us it was just the homies do you have like similar like bear market nostalgia totally yeah i missed those times because it was smaller a lot of the people who were around back then were really committed to the longer term vision because you kind of had to be it was like okay these assets are hitting like low after low after low so it's like as long as that's happening you kind of had to be invested in that long-term vision and so i i liked a lot of the people that i met during that time and i think like we will see coming

out of you know whatever happens with this current market if maybe it's a bullish period that continues for a while maybe it's one that's punctuated by diff there will be bearish periods of some type right and the people who stick around through those are the ones who i'm going to pay attention to and i think there are a lot of i've seen a lot of like promising folks but i kind of want to be like well let's see if you're still here in like a few years like yeah but it's like and i feel like a lot of them are not necessarily going to be because they never got into the value proposition or the right mindset right and i i think we're going to see that a lot in the nft space unfortunately right because a lot of people have put money into nft and nfts are even like more

dangerous and you know you know i talk about this stuff like all the time despite being a huge proponent of nfts a lot of nft investors are going to get burned because they viewed them as these fungible investments that they could just get the money out of any time they're like storing their eats which is like a terrible meme and they're going to realize that like they didn't store anything because there may be periods in the market where nobody wants to buy those at basically any price then what right i mean i think it's like kind of like so i hope those people i hope there aren't a ton of people like that but just in talking with people there's a lot of people like that so it's something i'm wary of yeah there was a point on the weekly roll up that i talked to with ryan where he said um he

had a tweet where he says he thinks over 50 of the people in crypto have never seen a bear market and that's and if we're talking about the nft community it's got to be like 85 of like the nfc community has never seen like assets meaningfully like go down and really like you know get them to feel pain for the first time and that's also a terrible asset to have that be true about because of the very illiquid nature of nfts yeah and a lot of the nfts are going to be like a lot of what we saw with like ico tokens of that era they're just never going to recover you know like whatever magic they may have had is long lost forgotten some of them may make a resurgence later you know you never know there are stuff that comes back from the dead but most of them will

but you're also going to see people who hold a lot of like let's just call them like higher ender what people call like blue chip nfts so let's say like punks auto glyphs ringers vedenzas like stuff like that right you're gonna see people who are forced to sell those you know like prices go down when people are forced to sell and when you have people who might be over leveraged and they're there then at that point they go into a survival mode and it's like look i'll take any price for this it doesn't matter as long as it's above what i paid which might have been like a couple of ether you know maybe they're getting 10 ether and they're like okay i'm happy with that right you're gonna see periods like that where people are in rapid sell-off mode and you'll see that happen a few times as people go

through the psychology of like okay this is gonna go up and no it's not going up i gotta sell this you know but there will be like tremendous buying opportunities for some nfts and i'm hoping to like maybe be able to take advantage of those i hate to do that but like if i can help someone else pay off debt that they have to pay off because they made poor decisions you know i'll do it but like it's not again it's not something that i would suggest that people take on a lot of a lot of people just don't understand what they've bought and the risks associated with it yeah i know i definitely have in my in the back of my head it's like hey there's definitely going to be a time where i can finally snag a fidenza and an autoglyph and if i can get those two

paired with my punk like boom like i can check check my nft boxes and like go back to deep i where i feel at home well those are great nfts to have so if you could only if you have the means and can afford those but you know david the prayer the paradox is the more people that think like you the less likely this is to happen so i don't know i don't know you know there will be floors and there will be they will be caught on the way down i mean i don't know a lot of this is guessing based on previous crypto experience but there's no doubt i think that a lot of nfts are over hyped beyond what they should be and a lot of people are going to sell and then they're going to watch them go 100x again and it's going to be very

difficult for those people and i i feel for them in advance because it's yeah i've been there i sold my i sold that bitcoin at like average 300 and it happens hey guys i hope you're enjoying the conversation with dc thus far there's so much more to talk about in the second half of the show we get into the nft conversation we get into crypto gaming and then of course we also get into some of the lessons and guiding principles that dc has picked up along the way that makes him keep a level head on his shoulders ride these uh turbulent waves of crypto without getting stressed uh and overall learned how to have a good time in crypto so we're gonna get into all of that and more in the second half of the show but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that

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that's brand new for you or like what about your background like lended itself towards nfts so i've always appreciated art in general i appreciate like artistic energy and maybe it's because i'm not like a very artistic person but i do consider myself to be a creative person like i'm always like have different kinds of ideas i just express it in different ways i mean like one of the things i was known for in my 15 years of being a management consultant was creating like the prettiest powerpoint slides like you'll ever see and i was like a powerpoint ninja i was really good at it i really take pride in like doing the graphics on them and stuff like that obviously i'm not going to turn any of those into nfts but the point is like i had like this creative energy and i was looking for

outlets in which to if not apply it to stimulate it and so i've always been like interested in art i've never been like an art history aficionado or anything like that but i've liked art and i've also enjoyed the idea of collecting stuff and i didn't really collect a lot of assets to be honest like i have like some magic the gathering cards some of which are like great and stuff like that i used to collect baseball basketball cards and stuff like that as a kid um you know i had a lot of like different trading card game cards and stuff like that and so i always thought this idea of like buy something that's gonna become more important later was like something that's kind of like ingrained in me i think it's actually like ingrained in our dna to like want to do some of that to be honest

and so as i kind of got into this crypto space i wasn't initially drawn to nfts i didn't really get deep into nfts until like january of this year okay and there are a lot of people there are actually a lot of people who have way more impressive collections than me you may or may not know about them but there are people with tremendous collections out there but i like to think of mine as like my own like special collection which reflects my personal taste um which is and when i bought it like you'll probably recall they weren't really worth that much at the time a lot of them and i was still spending amounts that were a lot like i i played like 20k for my hoodie crypto punk which was a lot at the time now it looks like a bargain of a century people i remember

uh people like just denying buying a crypto punk at a thousand dollars like why would i ever buy a thou like a crypto punk for a thousand dollars like a thousand dollars is a thousand dollars why would i ever do that and like it doesn't matter what the prices are it's people are just not convinced by these things very for like almost by default uh exactly giving up 20k is something else right well i kind of and i and the way by then by january february i kind of started to more understand how these nfts were transcending their art and they were becoming like store of value assets like collectible assets pieces of that internet history which i know you've talked about in the past and when i kind of like connected those dots it was kind

of like i need to buy some of this because i don't know if there's going to be like another chance and if i'm wrong then i'm out that money and whatever but if i'm right these are going to become like priceless artifacts and right now it looks like we're leaning towards that second outcome is my guess and so i never started with this i don't have a lot of art experience i more just kind of applied my um artistic inquisitive nature with that with that economic side of me and the crypto economic side of me and i just kind of decided that these were something interesting to me i'm sure you've seen on twitter uh especially around nft nyc all these people buying up the billboard space in like times square putting their crypto punks putting their fidenzas uh what do you

what do you think about that i think it's like the way that i liken this was like it's almost like um you end up like if you're in new york and you're on good morning america you like call your friends and say hey tune in to good morning america and see me on there it's almost like this like it's like the sign of you haven't like necessarily made it but it's like this hey look at this this is like you're seeing me in this unexpected context that that changes perhaps your perception of me and i think that's how people are viewing a lot of their nfts being displayed in these public spaces and i've actually done a little bit of this myself with save art space i participated in one of their events where they were featuring punks all over new york city my punk was

featured in times square as part of that and so i think it's kind of like this sign of like even though we're paying to do it it's like this juxtaposition of saying this this digital thing that only we've cared about hey a lot more people are starting to care about it now and you're kind of like sharing it with the world and it does show you that like we're not in that metaverse layer completely where we want everything to be pure digital we want to see this this juxtaposition of these assets alongside real world stuff and and that somehow makes it more important in some people's minds i think that's part of the psychology behind it to be honest and i think it's i think it's cool i think it's great if like if some of these big collectors want to like splash their

collections up in times you know you're gonna at least see some people walk by and like oh what's that and then they've got those pictures and can say hey this was in times square so it helps it helps increase the cultural provenance of some of these assets by bridging them more into the real world same dynamic applies as these items are being auctioned by sotheby's and christie's it's the same kind of thinking and mindset even though we don't need those auction houses even though a lot of times the prices that they fetch are lower due to kyc barriers and stuff like that um it's still considered to be prestigious by some because it's like hey it's almost like it's this rationalization or justification uh let's just say it's like an acceptance of the work that has been done by by crypto digital artists

by these famed houses do you have any plans for your gallery in the future with like in real life exhibits metaverse type exhibits well what's the future of dc's gallery going to look like so right now i do have my collection on gallery.so slash dc investor and that's right i met one of the founders last night by the way oh you did okay awesome yeah i know those guys well and they're doing great work and i think um but but i so i've got my gallery on here that's the one that i curate and i kind of keep my pieces up to date and i'm always rearranging little things long term i would like to be able to do more in terms of 3d i think the technology is getting there but it's still not like exactly where i

want to be like on cyber has some really cool stuff i haven't created any galleries there but for me it's like i don't really want to do like these 20-piece galleries i kind of want to do like a here's like hundreds or thousands a thousand pieces in my own little museum or part of someone else's museum and like you know i've got like a wing of it or something like i want to be able to curate like a true experience for somebody and eventually one day maybe i i i'm confident that we're going to get there probably sooner or later i'm really interested in projects like nifty island for that reason you know i want to have i would love to be able to like host events in my virtual space one day and have people artists and collectors come and we can just kind of

chat so i'm kind of preparing for that vr metaverse world to some extent but for now you know i'm always happy if people want to exhibit some of my pieces as part of some kind of collection or something happy to at least consider that but that's kind of how i see it i've also like i'd love to get you know i contacted the herschel and they haven't gotten back to me but i'm trying to get like i'm trying to like work with some artists to get more of our nft art featured in installations like that because again that's part of what brings that broader awareness and acceptance around what's being created here one of my buddies from from college who now also works at me with me at bank list he does uh vr children's books at pika

but i'm gonna start bugging him about like because his uh his pitch for this is that um it's like disneyland rides but in vr right so there's a bunch of like disneyland rides you go into you hop into the car and then it takes you through the story of the movie right i'm not talking about like splash mountain or like the roller coasters right just like you follow a trail and you go through the story of the book but you're in vr right and so right and so the uh maybe i should uh get a bug in his ears like hey you guys should make like a little journeys vr journeys to tell a story of like the genesis of the gallery maybe maybe that's an interesting uh uh proposition for them nice yeah i love it yeah the other aspect of crypto that i think we're about to go

into that i know you uh are definitely probably paying attention to at least a little bit is is gaming um and dc i know i know that you're a gamer so before we go into crypto gaming what games you like to play um i like to play a lot of um i play some first-person shooters like non-competitively like my reflexes just aren't what the ten-year-old kid on the internets are what they used to be but i love playing like you know gabe's like i like fortnite minus the building you know i play games like call of duty i hate the building in fortnite it's such i hate it yeah it's kind of like trying to be off to the whole game like i once i got to a certain skill level i was like okay every every end game is a build fight i'm like i'm out but but i also like to

play like platformers a lot of what i like to play is actually like strategy games and it has like kind of i think it's actually back then they're like video games are bad for you but in my mind like basically they're like little simulations that train your brain to work under different situations and succeed and thrive so huge fan of games like civilization the new age of empires just came out so i like to play a lot of games like that kind of more on my own but i'll play some of these other games like socially with friends do you uh when you play these games you also imagine a world where there's a bunch of crypto assets inside of them or have you kind of like separated those two worlds i think that so a lot of the types of games that i play i'm not necessarily

sure that i will see that but i do think with like trading card games which i do play like some magic arena and stuff like that like in hearthstone i played that in the past like games like that will benefit from these models i think a lot of like um i haven't i am not like a big mmo gamer but i have some friends like anthony like grew up playing like world of warcraft and he's like huge i never got into that stuff because i was like my mindset i was like if i get into that i'm just gonna lose my life and i'll just stuck it there although a lot of people that like a lot of crypto people did grow up playing that stuff and they got a lot of economic experience doing that you know they like learn how to trade and stuff like that and so i think that

over time like i could see those kinds of those kind of games benefiting from nft based assets and there's going to be entirely new kinds of games that don't really fit any genre that we have today that are more like economic simulations where people are interacting with each other i mean even this idea of like a vr metaverse is going to become like a meta game where people are exchanging nfts they're trading crypto assets like there's going to be whole economies that are set up around ether as an asset like that is like the metagame of like the whole thing is a game we're in the game right now david yeah uh are there any specific crypto games that that you're looking forward

to yeah so god's unchanged is one that i'm continuing to like kind of watch as it evolves but i think that trading card game piece is really interesting i also think guild of guardians which is going to be like an rpg which is coming out by fuel games that'll be another really interesting one and then you've got kind of all the stuff from like what axe infinity kind of continues to do and so on so it's not a space that i'm like super immersed in because i i'll be honest i'm not sure i see myself playing a lot of these games but i want to understand like the value for the people who do right i think i think the biggest mistake that crypto investors make is look at stuff just like from what they would do versus like what others and that's what others would do and that's

why i think a lot of people like missed nfts because they never they don't understand like i think as a collector of stuff you kind of have to accept that the stuff that you value is not the same thing that everyone else is going to value but maybe the stuff that other people value is even more valuable than the stuff that you think is interesting so as a collector there's always like a fine balance of like focusing on stuff that you're interested in versus what the broader market is interested in but i think i think we've like scratched like barely the surface of nft gaming to be honest david and i think we're held back a lot by like various laws we're held back a little bit by the technology although that's changing with layer two but you will see in five years if when

we have this conversation it's gonna be like a crazy discussion because you're gonna be talking about how like the economy of this game just crashed and it's in a recession and it's gonna come you know i mean like those are the kinds of economic terms i expect we're gonna use oh i i 100 agree and when we were talking to chris dixon he was talking about how slp tokens from the axi game are actually just being used as a generalized medium of exchange in the philippines like unrelated to the actual game people are just like say hey like pay for this haircut using slp tokens it is super crazy and like when we have like so many like the promise of crypto gaming's crypto gaming is to exactly what you said to create economies right and when we have so much of like the

third world that's going to be able to be financially compensated via crypto gaming's like i'm kind of worried about like what happens to the local like real world economies when half of the workforce are playing video games like online like it's a little bit dystopic and i'm like kind of like yeah i'm not too worried about it but like kind of want to know what happens well we're kind of in a phase of our evolution as humans where productivity is accelerating at such a rate with like automation and ai and and there is huge amounts of like job displacement that is a reality right we're seeing and it's not in over time like most dynamic economies can adapt to that what is different right now is the

degree and the pace of change it's like uns it's like unabated right you can learn a skill today and in like 10 to 20 years it's like obsolete then what right and even like the manual labor and stuff like that that you could always like get a job like doing doing some of that all of that stuff is being automated first right so you're going to have a lot of people that might not necessarily have stuff to do which is why you see stuff like universal basic income taking off in those discussions happening but that's where i see like a metaverse economy actually growing out of that to actually pick up some of that uh some of that economic slack now is it value adding for someone to participate in those activities from a raw productivity sense maybe not but if

someone else values a digital good that someone's creating like an nft artist then you could say that that is productive in the sense of it's creating value for someone else even if you're not creating a distinct output so i'm not that worried about real world productivity i think the economic incentives will always keep us there but i'm very bullish on this idea of these virtual global economies emerging and they may actually evolve in ways that promote more equitable global income distribution i don't know because these things can be played potentially from anywhere anyone can play them i mean i don't necessarily think it's a good life for someone to spend their time like farming items in an end game but a lot of real world jobs are also not great i mean to be honest and then if someone is doing that it's because the other

alternatives available to them are so bad that this is like a better option for them and i just think we're going to have these economies that emerge and a lot of people are going to dismiss them as fake or not real or not meaningful but as we start to live more and more of our lives in that digital sphere what's real and what isn't like you know at what point if you're if you're creating value-adding services for people in that digital life then i would argue that that is productive and it can potentially be beneficial yeah the quicker that people can just get over the hump and it's the same hump that people have to get over when they accept that crypto's real they accept that nfts are real eventually they're going to also have to accept that in-game economies are real and like one

of the one of the things that really allowed my conviction about d5 and ethereum to stay rock solid during the the bear market when bitcoiners were flooding like d5 and everyone else was fighting crypto at large was that i made i took a loan out on maker dow and i was able to send that money to my bank account and the number in my bank account went up and i was like how can you say this isn't real like the number in the bank account went up like of course this is real uh and so i think it's just like it's a matter of like experiencing it for yourself and hopefully crypto gaming is where actually a lot of people do get to experience a lot of the things that they previously thought were fake because gaming is one of the greatest onboarding tools that you know i could really think

of for crypto i think so and i think you're going to have that people already are ready to participate in these experiences we've already seen that with a huge success of like different mmo games and i've said crypto is kind of like a medic game on this i think there is a subset of people that's not trivial that are ready to participate in stuff like this but beyond that i think there's also going to be more of these outside of gaming like truly digital economies that occur where there are digital services that we can't conceive of right now like for example one of the things i'm thinking about doing is i would like to create a 3d gallery and like nifty island am i going to want to place every wall in that gallery myself and do that probably not i mean you know it's not necessarily

like a skill that i have but like can i pay someone that's like young motivated and wants to like do something like that yeah a virtual destruction man yeah exactly and it's just like now i'm paying someone to do something for me in that digital context and it's adding value for me and i can pay them for that service but you're going to see more services like that stuff that i can't really imagine right now that is going to emerge over time totally so zooming and getting ourselves out of the metaverse dc what do you do when you aren't in the metaverse like ride your bike walk around the park what's up i like to walk around town and i love i love being in the dc area because there's always like a lot of like fun stuff to do and certainly pretty coveted

you know i mean postcode but i think we're all trying to like find our groove and like you know reconnect with people that we haven't seen for a while so i really enjoy traveling and i haven't gotten a chance to do much of that right now but like especially traveling overseas and getting different like life experiences seeing how different people live that's something that i really enjoy doing so i'm looking forward hopefully 2022 is going to be a better year for that because there's still like there's still onerous travel restrictions in some jurisdictions but yeah that's something i'm really just looking forward to getting back to will i see you at denver 2022 in february fingers crossed although i that one's not on my calendar actually so i don't i wouldn't make it to some ethereum events

in 2022 to count on that and hopefully hopefully denver we'll see do your in real life dc friends think that what you're doing is super weird or have they like wrapped their heads around it yet i mean i'm not too like vocal well some some of my friends definitely are pretty much fully aware of what i've focused on because they have some similar interests and i think some of them thought it was crazy at first but i was like you know a lot of them were surprised at the time when i quit i had like 20 000 followers on twitter which seemed like a lot people were like what you have 20 000 people following you and now that number's grown further so i you know but for me it's not like it's funny because people are like so is that like your brand and

i was like i don't really try to manage as a brand and i get like people who are like doing like with bank list you have to manage the brand and you have to like do it as a brand right it is a brand right i mean like but for me i don't consider like dc investor a brand it's just me my persona engaging with people and in that way it's not that different from like i feel like i'm like 14 again in the sense of like i'm spending a lot of time on the internet talking to strangers and learning about what's going on and i'm looking for opportunities to engage and but i but i've gotten a lot of value out of like engaging with different project teams learning what's going on in the space helping to relay messages sometimes i i deploy angel capital and stuff like that

and it's just it's just fun for me to be able to help grow the space and the formative period that we're in now so i'm not ready to go back go back to being like a w-2 employee yet maybe one day never say never but for me you know i've also been working for 15 years straight in a pretty competitive grueling industry and so i'm like you know i can take a year off and i can just kind of think about what i want to do next and that's been kind of my philosophy mm-hmm dc i think if you went back to being a w-2 employee you'd be one of the few people that i knew that went you know quit their job paid way more attention to crypto and then decided to go back do you actually think that's a future possibility probably not

but it might be something it might it might take a different form you know like and you know i definitely wanna i for me right now my focus remains on crypto is that what i'm gonna be 100 focused on forever maybe not in like 10 years you know maybe in 10 years crypto just becomes this boring thing that's just like involved in everything and that's what attracted me to crypto to begin with right that interdisciplinary nature and i'm really i'm a huge proponent of like interdisciplinary thinking and i wrote a couple tweets about this a few days ago as well where i just talked about the value of like like even a liberal arts education where like whether you get it from college or you just learn it yourself learn about math learn about history learn about biology learn about chemistry like all of these things have fundamental

relationships with one another and i really view crypto as being that interdisciplinary exciting space so as long as it remains that it's hard to imagine that i would like get out of that to be honest when it becomes boring and people just accept it then i might like be ready to move on to something different sure dc are you a optimist or a pessimist i would say i'm pretty much an optimist so i think most people would say that about me i'm pessimistic on certain things at times but in general i lean towards the glasses half full what about the world uh makes you optimistic i think that i think a lot of it actually comes down to just my experience from investing and how over hundreds of years in millennia

humans continue to become more productive right and so when you when you buy things like stocks like a lot of people are like oh you're just buying shares in corporation you're kind of betting on the f you're really what you're really betting on is that humanity is going to continue to be productive and that we're going to continue to be able to take the same amount of capital assets and do more productive things with that and i i've just i've always been amazed by human ingenuity in general and how we continue to boost the standard of living and i know we see a lot of doom and gloom headlines but the reality is like poverty is that especially pre-covered to be honest like was that has been at lower levels than it has been ever historically we don't necessarily see or

realize that i've traveled to a lot of these countries when i was younger and i've seen the difference myself where it's just like you know like a lot of these countries have transformed themselves and yeah they're not at american standards and they're not even close to be honest but it's still a lot better than things were and so i am optimistic about us as a species being able to continue to improve our condition and hopefully improve the planet along with that in more sustainable ways but i am kind of forever an eternal optimist for those reasons i think if there was one wish or one thing about the crypto world that you could just snap your fingers and change or get everyone to realize uh what's what's the thing about crypto that frustrates you that you would want to

see changed i think the po one of the things that frustrates me is how much short-termism there is in the space and i find it annoying as someone who's really excited about like the fundamentals of where we're headed where you see projects that kind of spring up they're basically designed to extract value they're they either don't have a plan to deliver something useful or they're going to be incapable of it most likely and a lot of people just kind of legitimize that stuff and i'm not talking about any one project in particular but like we've seen this dynamic play out so many times and so i wish that there were more fundamental long-term thinkers in crypto they're out there but like they don't necessarily control all of the fun flow and as long as there's a huge amount of money that's

available to extract or grow you're going to kind of continue to see that and it's just kind of up to others to just share a different vision and that's really what i try to do i i'm very up from like look you're not going to agree with every take you read on this account but i'm always just going to tell you what i from my own life experience how i see things playing out and that's all i'm really interested in sharing to be honest i'm not interested in like preserving deal flow with some project or whatever like those things like don't matter to me if you're doing good work and you're advancing the space then i'm interested in supporting you if i feel like you're being more value extractive then i'm not going to be interested probably is there a like rule of thumb or just idiom or

phrase that you wake up in the morning and say to yourself or maybe not that maybe not that early in the day but like something some just good piece of advice that you always check yourself against that that you think is worthy of being shared i don't know if i have an idiom i'm sure i could think of some if i had like more time to think of that but i think the one thing that i always try to focus on is the long term because i've seen the costs of being a short-term thinker and i know that underscores a lot of comments that i've made in this episode it's very easy to say that you're gonna be like long term it's a lot harder to say you're gonna be long-term after you bought something and it goes down in value a lot right and so

i i've just kind of made it my mantra to be that longer term thinker because there's always a lot of noise around and i do miss things sometimes right there are things that i thought would peter out that end up becoming huge and it's like okay but then long term i'm still proven right because it like disappears right and so for me being a long-term thinker is incredibly valuable and crypto because there's so much short-term thinking i would say like 75 of people in crypto tend to focus more on short-term than long-term and even of that 25 very few are thinking about this as like a multi-decade movement of i know you guys at banquets obviously do but a lot of people are not there yet and they may never get there and they're

going to miss out on a lot of opportunities because of that dc this has been a fast and fantastic exploration into how you think and and what you're up to so thank you for coming on to layer zero and sharing that with the bankless nation yeah thank you dave it's been really great chatting with you cheers hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks

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