The Difference Between 2016 Crypto and Today's Institutional Wave with NotSoFast

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the crash that happens will still end up flooring a new bottom higher than we are right now. Like this there's just it feels like the new flywheels the the new institutional flywheels are just getting going. >> How do you look at the the evolution of institutions coming into the space with regards to the core ethos the and the reasonings as to why why we're here? >> Where do you think we are in the cycle if you will? Do you even still believe in the four-year cycle? If so, where are we? If not, you know, what what is your what is the right way to think about this?

>> Welcome back to the Rowup. We are your hosts. I'm Andy. I'm Robbie. And this is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. >> Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world. Not so fast. Good to have you, man. been a longtime follower. I think Rob and I discovered your account together in the library in university uh in like late 2016, early 2017. So, good to have you, man. >> Oh, thank you for the welcome. It's uh so you've you've been uh subject to to a a pretty long arc of um kind of the the tail end of spec mining and uh into kind

of whatever's going on now. So, thank thanks so much for the welcome. Uh it's means a lot for me to be on here. Thank you. >> Absolutely. It means a lot to have you on, man. We were just kind of saying you're part of that that 2016 that crew the I am nomad the uh Jibus uh Kobe like you know Kobe's kind of achieved like kind of this other worldly status up only really did really well. Um but I consider you guys all part of the same crew. Like that was those were the OG guys back then. And I got to say I learned I learned a lot uh from you guys. I didn't I didn't spec mine myself, but when it came to picking winners and losers and looking at the fundamentals, things back then were much more closely associated with the fundamentals. And I think a lot of those

lessons still ring true today. And one of the things we wanted to we wanted to talk about today was kind of what's changed. Like what was it like back then? If you could kind of give us a portal into the 2016 world, I think you could do a better job than Andy and I could. Like how would how would you describe 2016? And you know, we'll we'll contrast that with with uh the era here and now. >> Yeah, sure. Well, the kind of like the tide of legitimacy was so much lower then. Like we'd come off the pump of Bitcoin to USD at the end of 2013 and it was, you know, oh, a Bitcoin's like $1,200 and then it looked like throughout 2015, Bitcoin would just

be between $2 and $300 until it died forever. And uh Ethereum took a lot of people's Bitcoin and then just kind of had a uh pre-token trading on centralized exchanges, but unless you were really looped into the Ethereum ecosystem, it was just another cash grab that people weren't really working on. And and and to most people's accounts, it was just something else to trade. Um, the survival of everything, Bitcoin and everything worse than it was not guaranteed. Most people didn't know or care. The price wasn't going up at all.

Um, and so it was just a place it was much the same a degenerate place to play as the current kind of meme coin market maybe. like there are some parallels with that, but you had more um I guess believers in the fundamentals of technology and you could experiment with stuff direct directly like you would have to download a wallet executable and try sending like shielded or anonymous payments yourself or like try to amass a certain number of coins and run a elevated status master node in a network and you know see see the fundamentals for yourself and convince yourself that

they were any better than just kind of the narrative that they were that they were proposing. So much smaller still pretty degenerate. um you had, I think, a little more pie in the sky belief, but some of those things that were pie in the sky have played out, I know, beyond my wildest dreams, like institutions buying Bitcoin and Ethereum and even like Litecoin and other stuff is crazy to me. Like, I don't believe it. And had you talked to someone back in 2016, as you guys would know, that would be unbelievable to to to imagine back then. Well, that was kind of like the meme back then, right? It was like the institutions are going to

come and buy your bags. It it only took what, nine years for it to actually happen. >> That is a long time. But like at the time it felt like never, you know, it felt like ah am I am I deliluding myself by like investing my time and effort and sometimes money into this stuff. >> Yeah. Introducing Summerfi, one of DeFi's oldest and most battle tested platforms. Summerfy automates your exposure to DeFi's highest quality yield so you can sit back and enjoy this summer. Deposit stable coins at USDC or USDT and let Summerfy route your funds into optimized lowrisk lending strategies. With over a 100 million in instant liquidity and support for over

34 protocols across Ethereum, Arbitum, and more, you always stay in control. Choose from a wide range of curated strategies reviewed by independent risk experts all in just a few clicks. So why work hard for your yield when you can be lazy? Start earning now at summer.fi, the home of the lazy summer protocol. Dude, so what was some of your best plays back in the day? like like you found a coin through like like like how did you find like so today we have pump fun we have Twitter we have uh like people going on you know block explorers and like trenching hard and trying to find you know you know through different telegram bots and different telegram apps you've got like all these ways of

like sniping coins and like you know bundling things and like it's it's absolutely exploded into a whole another world but back then like how would you find your next potential play. What were you like looking for? Um Yeah. And like you know what what were some of the best or biggest plays that that you had from spec mining and like talk us through it like like the process. >> Sure. Okay. So for specifically a spec mining play um discovery then was so much simpler and so much slower. Um, you would go on the Bitcoin talk forum, uh, their kind of tertiary altcoin board. I think the number was like 159.0.

Uh, it was they barely tolerated altcoins and altcoiners, but they wanted just a place for it all to happen. So, you would um have alerts set up for new coin announcements, and that would actually work. like you would get an email about a new coin announce uh announced or something and then uh you you could uh quickly verify like the source coast related to GitHub yourself and everything. So, uh, a really good play would have been, uh, right at the start of 2016, um, there was an announcement by, uh, dev called seven hacks with the e changed to threes and the a changed to a four. And that was for DNET, short for

darknet. So it was an anon uh an anoncoin proof of work uh with a view to I guess going proof of stake later which you could do uh after some distribution. So um I mined the the heck out of it and even like bought on some centralized exchanges and back then the um everything was based in Satoshi's like there was no real stable coin market so uh you were trying to grow your Bitcoin stack with all these plays. Anyways, I mined I mined a bunch of DNET and eventually it pivoted and rebranded itself into Pivix and um I'd been mining on my own computers and then because I'd set up a

wallet uh some of the stuff that I'd rented other people's computers and GPUs to mine uh I had just lazily and with poor OBSSEAC sent to that wallet and uh those GPUs were on a computer or like next to a computer I connected to a hard drive on a computer that was in a storage unit in like uh this old like uh renovation company where I had like a plywood locker with like a threedigit combination lock on the door. And so in 2017 when Pivix was going from like nothing to like $60 a coin, I'm thinking about this computer. I'm like, "Oh my god, there's $2 million on this computer. I have to go get it." So, I'm

like strolling into this like crappy company where everybody's stealing like everybody else's equipment and I'm looking at this locker room. I'm like, "Please be there. Please be there. Please be there." And the computer was there. So, that was like one of the best plays. It was um by the skin of my teeth like rescued a giant fat bag from a hard drive uh dusty dusty machine and like uh the the drill was gone, the computer was there. >> Wow. Dude, actually I remember PivX from 2017. It was like one of the Bitrex coins that was like hot for no reason other than >> Yeah, it was um pretty decent. They had like you know the all the the good flavors at the time like a master node

>> enable god Rob what woman that came to our our Bitcoin club who was doing that master node program and Pivex was one of them. >> Yeah. Yeah. It was >> crazy >> because you want to know how Pivax died? Um, it got fully civil and uh some dudes in like related to some company in Barry, Ontario, which is like a just a lakeside college town uh around here. They got most of them and they were just farming the Bitrex chart. I still to this day don't know if they knew someone at Bitrex or whatever, but they got most of it. They lion shared all the rewards and then they just like um they they paid for or organized the Binance

listing and then just dumped it to death over time and nobody could vote any differently. Um one of the funny things with like master node stuff is there's like the blockchain prints you a budget just like the Brock block reward every month and the master nodes get to vote on how that bud budget is allocated. It's like protodow stuff. Yeah. >> So, you would have like these people saying, "Oh, I'm going to do like a marketing budget for PIVX in a marketing program and I'm going to like say uh it's worth like a thousand PIVEX and I hope they'll pay me." And so, they would like petition the DAO or the master nodes and uh get them to vote on it. And surprise surprise, you know, that it the the DAO would vote and they their their idea would not get voted for. It would

get voted down. Then the guys in Barry would submit a similar proposal but for like a hundred,000 Pivex and it would pass. So like they would steal the ideas of submitters and then charge exorbitant amounts and steal all that super block for themselves and then like just dump it on the on the Binance market. >> Wow, that's hilarious. >> Barry, Ontario, that's insane. >> That's where my parents are from. >> Yeah, >> so random. What the >> Maybe they know the running masterive marketing campaigns.

>> So random >> not so fast. I I got one question based on on kind of that on that arc there >> back then like you're saying everything was was denominated in Satoshi's because th those were mostly the source of liquidity rather than USDC or or other stable coin pairs. Are you still denominating your strategies against Bitcoin to to for the for the motivation the goal of uh increasing your Bitcoin stack because that that was the main strategy back then and it's sort of fell out of favor as we've gotten more stable coin strate stable coin denominated pairs. How what is your what's your approach to this in terms of

like your your general strategy? So, um, I still keep like a private offline spreadsheet that I can flip to denominate in >> to BTC or uh, dollars. And I think with the rise of stable coins, it's unlocked a whole lot of doors. It's dampened a lot of volatility because something moving against Bitcoin is kind of not as good as something moving against dollars. So, it really has put a cap on like low-end stuff and it is harder also for new people to sort of force their own mindset to denominate in Bitcoin because the

the strategy still should be that if you're not going to outperform Bitcoin with a trade or with like a long-term play that's venture-like or something, you probably should just be buying Bitcoin or you should just be putting half of that investment into Bitcoin and half into the venture. So I try to maintain that and actually I've started I have I have this mental model where a coin gets sufficiently lindy that you know it's never going to die. So, Ethereum kicked over. I think we can say that it kicked over kind of right now with this um shot at or near all-time highs. And I believe SA Salana is going

to be next there. So, I have ways to flip my portfolio into base Ethereum and base Salana too to see what I'm kind of um what everything is uh profitable relative to. And I still do look at dollars, but if I if I make profits, it's got to go into um it's got to go into Bitcoin or one of those. And then I kind of rewe the mix depending on how how well I think each is doing relative to the other. So that's the way the strategyy's changed, but it still is. And I think um not enough people make it when they should. All about Bitcoin um as your denominator. If

you're not outperforming Bitcoin, the kind of uh thing that's leading the Lindy charge, then you should really be re-examining. >> Introducing Extended exclusively on Stark, a nextg per curb trading platform live today with 50 plus trading pairs from crypto to tradi. You get the best experience on chain today. Deposit in the community vault for attractive returns and engage in a fully unified experience for spot trading, lending, and perp trading exclusively live at extended.app on Starknet today.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I think uh that lesson has been learned again this this last 18 months, right, with the Bitcoin bull market, Bitcoin dominance bull market. Um, what what's funny is that everyone learns that typically at the time when Bitcoin dominance is reaching its peak, which was like in in in the last few months or at least, you know, for the short term. It's just funny how everyone's like so bold up on Bitcoin and like think alts are going to go to zero and die forever right before >> they kind of have their their part of the cycle. Um, kind of looking into something of of more uh current times. I saw you saw my post about Stripe yesterday. Um, and today Circle came out and announced that they have uh are are

launching ARC which is a L1 chain for payments, stable coins, etc. What's your take on institutions launching blockchains for payments for uh, you know, bringing their customer base, you know, from Stripe, from Circle, uh, you know, PayPal, etc., and and launching these payments chains. Um and I think the like the lens of this question is you come from a a position you know even just saying things like you know offline spreadsheet right things of of obssec of decentralization of kind of like this you know anti-fragility mindset you know how do how do you look at the the evolution of institutions coming into the space with regards to the core ethos the and the

reasonings as to why why we're here. You know what? Um I like it because number go up, but that's that's sort of the water that we're swimming in. So that's that that doesn't need to be said. Um obviously we can attack the methodology and say, well, it's no it's not much better than a sort of internal spreadsheet reconciled across a few different departments. And the only thing that it has going for it beyond that is compatibility with existing onchain stuff like um like bridges and everything. And I think the compatibility with stable coins too is

kind of the only reason that you would set up your own corporate chain and like who are the validators going to be? Well, it's going to be people that you handpick may all be internal to this one company. Uh, could they all collude and roll back the chain a bunch or stop new blocks from being produced? Well, yeah, they could. They're not going to. They're all on the same side. So, it's chainlike infrastructure. It's uh but it but everybody is able to sort of collude on it. And then you can get into the weeds on um on how everything works under the hood. And honestly, I don't really even like I couldn't tell you what the difference is from ARC versus what Arbitum is doing.

And I I almost don't really uh want to or need to know because the the impetus is to make it work like a normal blockchain like everybody else expects whether or not it is like a really centralized solution because it is honestly underpinned by the less centralized stuff like Bitcoin which is underpinning Ethereum which is underpinning Solanda which is underpinning Cosmos and all that um the more decentralized stuff being directly tradable with the slightly less decentralized stuff all the way down the tail um helps keep the whole thing afloat. And to be honest, this is what

outgrowth of the entire blockchain ecosystem looks like. >> Yeah. >> Into compatibility with slightly less decentralized stuff by chains launching their own L1. Well, an L1 is just an in-house compatibility module for other blockchain stuff and especially stable coins now and that's really all it is. So, it's okay. It's not okay from a cipher punk angle, but the cippher punk angle stuff is handled and the rest is compatible and that's all that matters. >> Yeah. And so with the rise of institutions coming into the space with more favorable regulations being put forth in in you know the US legal framework these are things that one if you had talked about them being a

reality back in 2016 people would you know think you were crazy. Now you know this is reality and typically that these would be considered top signals right if if we were looking at this but it feels like a new paradigm from your perspective. I'm curious, are these top signals, do where do you think we are in the cycle, if you will? If do you even still believe in the four-year cycle? If so, where are we? If not, you know, what what is your what is the right way to think about this? >> Yeah, that's a really good question. Like I I'm of the mindset that the four-year cycle probably still matters just because we've all been trained on it and everyone else has sort of been trained on it. Um the four-year cycle

started with uh lock step to bitcoins having cycle but now the new number of bitcoins that are being produced are so much smaller than previous cycles that even though the value is up it's not up relative to the entire market capitalization of all crypto. So that matters less fundamentally but still maybe narratively it does matter. And I have to be honest with you guys, my wildest dreams were surpassed so long ago that I can no longer imagine. Like my imagination's too small. Um I have no creativity left to predict how big things can get.

>> Brother, we're bringing every asset on chain. Every single asset is coming on chain. >> Like that stuff. I I need you to give me that idea because I don't have it. Like I can't wrap my head around stuff. everything that I could wrap my head around is already like one shot of me, you know? So, uh, so if I had to choose what top things are going to look like, um, it really has to be retail driven. And the reason why I don't think we're anywhere near the top >> is that retail doesn't care.

>> Uh, retail is not involved, not interested. Everything that's going on right now is sort of the new crop of CT, which is CT plus a lot of web 2 uh salary type people and startups and ventures and VCs and all that just kind of in this mass watching all these other institutions on board because they're chasing yield and fiats doing fiat things like denominator going to zero type things and they're all sort of agreeing on a new shelling point that okay, we have to be investing in stuff that is on this narrative of underpinned by Bitcoin and uh denominator not going

to zero and not being worthless. So I think once all those treasury companies are established and then it starts getting into normie like pension plans and everybody's super overinvested in all these treasury companies then at some point the overleveraged that's happened to borrow to fund all this repurchasing is going to come to a head and I can't really predict how but there will be some crashes and there will be some normies who bought the top using their apps because they're trading and their uh their AI agent is making those trades for them and then we'll have some kind of crash. But I believe and I would

bet that the crash that happens will still end up flooring a new bottom higher than we are right now. Like this there's just >> it feels like the new flywheels, the the new institutional flywheels are just getting going. And when you see something like you shake your head and you're like, "How is this massive company and all this money doing what they're doing, like re resurrecting this old coin that I mined 12 years ago, for example, to make a treasury company based on something that I know was just made by some idiot on the Bitcoin talk forums?" Um, that's a top signal to me, for example, that I can wrap my head around.

>> Yeah, I saw >> we're not seeing anything like that yet. There was a Bonk meme uh treasury company started that was like that was a that was pretty good. It was small but >> Bonk's a big asset and I feel like that's not as top signingly as them really scraping the bottom of the barrel in the long tail >> like some 100 mil market cap thing. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um is are you just sitting on like a pool of dead coins now like that have zero liquidity are just completely fried like >> Oh my god. like uh there are hard drives and USB drives of >> I'm not exaggerating when I exaggerating when I say probably 200 dead L1s

of just chains that are never going to be alive again unless I kickstart them because we you know a few years ago we figured out how to like restart a proofof work chain that hasn't produced a block in every in a few years. Uh we figured out how to do that. Is there a point to it? Probably not. But maybe if like somebody really really wants to grift off an old coin narrative, that's uh gonna be a reality. Um yeah, there's hundreds of dead proofof work chain coins just lying there dormant. Uh there are many dead tokens, but that's a more popular thing. Lots of people have that story, too. Yeah, I am a graveyard. For a while, my narrative was, well, if I'm the buyer of last resort, then maybe thing these things can have another bite

at the apple. And in nearly every case I was wrong and my my net worth suffered for it and my Bitcoin stack suffered for it. It was not the right move. >> So So basically you would have to like take the risk as to like okay where where in the like how do I want to use my hardware and allocate my my basically my my my power. Uh, and that would be like the the kind of risk that you would take outside of obviously like um you know investing in or or you know trying to sell at the right time or whatever it is. But it was more about like you you could either be mining Bitcoin or mining other uh coins and and kind of like the trade-off would would be that uh you

know the spec mining plays would pay off much bigger. >> Yeah. Well, um the different proofof work algor algorithms meant that um like the SHA 256 would pretty much always be mining Bitcoin and um if you tried to make a SHA 256 altcoin um there was a trivial amount of Bitcoin hash that you could rent and reroute it and 51% attack the chain and it would kind of die in the cradle anyway. But there were a lot of other ones like the Litecoin script algorithm and then like a whole bunch of different GPU algorithms. So, what you would be trying to do is use this latent hash rate that wouldn't be redirected and redeployed to kill the speculative coin that you were mining. Um, rent a

bunch of it for cheap, mine a bunch of the early blocks before the difficulty shot up, and then you'd have a lower cost basis than everyone else. And then you would just kind of hope and pray and meme and post that a centralized exchange would list it so that you could access liquidity. Like we are spoiled by tokens that are speculative having liquidity from minute one from purchase one. That was not the case. Like you had to wait weeks and sometimes you would mine something and it would just never get listed and it would die and it was over. >> There was no decentralized exchange to to add liquidity to yourself.

>> No, exactly. >> Well, NSF man, it's been a pleasure, man. We got to wrap as we're coming on on on a time. want to be respectful of your time as well. Enjoy the ETH at 4500. Um, and uh hopefully hopefully some of these uh that are down in the dumps on the hard drive get a treasury company for you. That would make you that'd make your year. >> Thank you so much, gentlemen. Eat to the moon. >> Thank you, brother. >> Cheers, man. >> Bye. >> Speak soon. Bye.