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Crypto Market Forecast: Institutions, TrueUSD, Hong Kong, Regulation.
Recorded: June 28, 2023 Duration: 2:20:42Space Recording
Full Transcription
the more altcoins will start pumping.
The regulation-ready altcoins,
not just the regular altcoins.
Can I throw a wrench in the works here, Noah,
on what people are saying about the spot ETF?
Just wanted to,
the most comparable example we have to this,
I'm not even going to speak to it,
I just want to know what you guys think.
The most comparable example we have to Bitcoin spot ETF
is obviously the gold spot ETF, GLD,
which was launched in 2004.
And on the day that that was launched,
the price of gold was $445 per ounce.
And then over the next seven years,
it skyrocketed into 2011 to $2,300 per ounce.
And so I'm having a hard time understanding,
given that that's the only comparable,
the most comparable spot ETF example that we have,
that people don't think that having mainstream money
come into an asset that is supposed to be held,
like gold is supposed to be held in your safe, right?
It's supposed to be self-custody.
That's the way it was forever, right?
But as soon as it was institutionalized
or made available through this spot ETF,
the price jumped from $445 to $2,300.
I'm having a hard time discounting that historical example.
And I'm just curious to know the panel's thoughts on that.
Is that comparable to Bitcoin spot ETF?
Or is there some fundamental difference there?
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
I think MindUbiz probably has a rebuttal to that.
So I'm going to pass the mic to him and then go to Victor.
Yeah, sure.
And I apologize for interrupting.
I know you had a flow that you had in mind for the show.
So apologies for the distraction.
But the initial response is that,
no, they are fundamentally very, very different.
So thank you for framing that with that final question, Andrew.
If it's fundamentally different, yes, it's fundamentally different.
It's fundamentally different in a few different ways.
There's the intent of gold as a bearer asset.
It's not, for all practical purposes, gold is not a bearer asset.
In order to denominate gold or divide gold into the amounts that would be necessary to have,
had it be useful in some meaningful way in everyday commerce,
you'd have to fractionalize it down to the point of literally carrying around gold dust
and having a digital scale, right, or a triple beam scale with you everywhere you went.
You simply cannot compare them.
Bitcoin is superior in so many ways.
And I love also that you brought up the historical price of gold.
How has it done since then, since that initial run-up?
I'm sure you already know the answer, but not super well.
It hasn't been exactly stagnant, but it hasn't done super well in the last 10 years.
Comparing to Bitcoin, which has done, gosh, what is it, 84,000x?
It's, yeah, it's just not, they don't even come close to comparing at all, like not even a little bit.
So I'm glad you brought that up.
The spot ETF, you're probably right.
It will probably experience a pump, and that's net bullish for people in the short term.
In the long run, it leads to not just regulatory capture,
but custodial capture of this sovereign bearer asset.
You don't have to have a safe at home in order to own 12 words.
You don't have to have a triple beam scale and bring fractionalized gold dust with you everywhere
to be able to send dust transactions on a blockchain.
And I'm taking for granted that everybody here in this room has equal education on how blockchains work.
That might not be the case, so I'll try not to presume that everybody here is educated in that way.
But it's not easy to compare gold to any blockchain, least of all Bitcoin.
People who even call Bitcoin digital gold, that comparison kind of falls short.
Bitcoin does so much more.
And I think the recent push into ordinals has kind of reminded everyone
that there's already been sort of lost wisdom within the Bitcoin development community
of how to use OP return and OP check-sig, multi-sig.
Some of these primitive programming are these native programming primitives
that are built into the protocol.
And again, a reminder, Bitcoin is not just one thing.
There's uppercase Bitcoin, the asset, which is what we're talking about, seeing a spot ETF.
And then there's lowercase Bitcoin, the network, which is the rails.
I think it's the other way around.
I think it's the other way around.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you so much.
Yes, correct.
Yeah.
So the point is, it is multifaceted.
So there's Bitcoin, the asset.
There's Bitcoin, the network or the protocol.
And they do so much more than just sit there like a lump of elemental metal.
So, yeah, very, very different fundamentally.
I appreciate the opportunity to offer a total battle.
Thanks.
I'm going to pass it to Victor.
Sorry, Victor.
You've been waiting for a while.
No, no, no worry.
It's okay.
You know, there's been so many great points.
I've been just listening in and thinking, is my point even that valid?
But, yo, I appreciate everybody for having me.
And then shout out to the WhaleCoin talk and Aquarium and Noah for hosting the panel full of legends.
I wanted to say that, you know, the crypto is going to rise up eventually regardless just because people will understand the underlying value of us using it on a daily basis and how better it is and superior to the current monetary policy that exists.
And that's just anyway is going to happen.
But when not only institutions are going to come in, but the regular consumers will start to use it on a daily basis, we'll see an incredible growth of the gaming and NFTs.
It's just because this industry didn't have, you know, the way to be verifiably resell assets on chain.
That wasn't possible before NFTs.
And now the market that already exists where the people buying the skins, buying the memberships, etc. in the games, they would start to do so in crypto and owning an NFT.
So, eventually, yes, the Bitcoin goes up because of all the value that we pour into that, people got to take the profits and rotate them in something smaller, something that actually makes sense as well.
And Bitcoin Original has actually been a great invention that brought so much volume to the Bitcoin chain.
Other than that, you know, there is right now nothing that Bitcoin has to do extra of what it already does to be appreciated.
But an out of 10 to 100x, but that's going to take a lot of time.
And if Bitcoin is going to do 10x, gaming industry is going to do more than 100.
And I'm going to be keeping an eye on that.
And by the way, shout out to you, Luvium and the whole team.
Last run, that was a right.
And waiting for the next one.
Let's go.
Sorry, go ahead.
Victor, did you have something to say there?
I didn't mean to cut you off.
No, no, it's okay.
I don't mean to turn this into a Luvium space or a gaming space, although we can totally go in that route.
But I've always been a big gamer.
And the idea of blockchain and video games finding a way to fuse and just come together in unison has always gotten me very excited.
Obviously, the play-to-earn model didn't work.
That was the early inception.
So, would love to know, Andrew, what does Luvium have cooking up for 2023 and going into 2024?
Sure.
Yeah, I just shared a tweet.
So, when anybody talks about video games in the Web3 space, go actually look at their gameplay and go play the game yourself before you believe anything they tell you.
So, that's really important.
So, that's why I pinned that tweet up there.
It's our actual raw gameplay.
I record it on my computer here in my studio.
And then you can go actually beta test all of our games right now.
So, here's what Luvium's cooking up right now.
So, we're currently beta testing Luvium Zero, our mobile town builder game, and Luvium Overworld, our open world collection game, which is the pinned tweet up there, and then Luvium Arena, which is our auto battler game.
And all of this is going to go into open beta.
Our target was to have all three games kind of open beta simultaneously in 2023.
That's the plan.
And Luvium's differentiator, and the reason why people get excited about it, is we have the best graphics, equivalent to, if not better than, most mainstream video games.
And these games are all being played right now by thousands of players, testing them as we polish them up and get ready for the launch window.
And so, what we're cooking up is the first time that's ever been done by any studio on earth, designing multiple video games in the same intellectual property and in the same universe that are going to be interoperable with each other on the blockchain all at the same time.
All of our games are designed to interact with each other directly from the ground up.
Never been done before in gaming.
And so, there's a lot of talk.
You guys have probably heard, you know, when people talk about the metaverse, they talk about Ready Player One, and you guys have probably seen that movie.
If you haven't, it's great.
You know, every video game you've ever loved is in Ready Player One universe, right?
It's all there.
And you can play as an Overwatch character or have Transformers there, and you have digital money, and it's incredible.
This is interoperability between different video games all in one economy.
That's way out in the future.
And anyone that talks about that type of interoperability between different intellectual properties, different video games, is lying to you.
Because no one yet has taken the first step of having their own video games within their own game universe, within their own intellectual properties, be interoperable with each other first as the first step.
Illuvium is the industry first doing that.
And so, just to paint a simple example there, in Illuvium Zero, our town builder game, you can earn fuel from your town.
That is minted as an NFT on the blockchain.
You take that NFT fuel and bring it into our overworld game.
You pay fuel, and that unlocks an experience for you to go explore the open world.
It's wild, sort of fantastical, sort of like Pandora from the Avatar universe.
And in there, you capture Illuvials, which are sort of like Pokemon in our universe.
You mint that Illuvial as an NFT.
You then take that, through the blockchain, to the next video game that we're releasing, Illuvium Arena.
Then in the arena, you play that Illuvial.
You battle it, you climb the leaderboards, and you gain, you know, stature and different rewards.
So, the reason why I'm sharing that simple example is, that's the big, maybe it's a step forward, maybe it ends up becoming the model for the industry moving forward.
But that's the big innovation Illuvium is delivering, and we're looking to open beta this year.
The first ever video games that are actually interoperable with each other on the blockchain, AAA graphics, free to play, and that's what we're doing.
So, if anybody wants to play these games themselves, please don't believe anything I'm saying right now.
Just go to the Illuvium website, play.illuvium.io, and go play the beta versions of all these games.
Please test them, and please help us refine them.
And we're hoping that this vision for video games, and taking the step toward that ready player one future that we all want to happen in the metaverse,
we're hoping that we are taking the first step for the industry, creating the model, and then everyone, if our model works out,
everyone will copy-paste our model, and then build on top of that.
Andrew, you guys are building on Ethereum, correct?
It's obviously, it's a part of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Our tagline is Fight for ETH, so we're very ETH-friendly, but all of the transactions that are happening in our games is happening on ETH Layer 2, IMX, Immutable X.
So that means, obviously, near-instant transactions, nearly gasless and costless, which we're going to need,
because we're planning on onboarding millions of concurrent players with our games.
We've already got millions of followers and registrations already, so we needed a Layer 2 solution to actually facilitate those transactions.
And so far, Immutable X, IMX, has, it's the highest volume gaming, you know, Layer 2 out there.
Obviously, Polygon's coming up, and Polygon's doing well, but so far, Immutable X has proven that they are,
so far, they're the most viable scaling solution for video games.
So, with that said, Dave, DJ Dave brought up earlier the fact that Bitcoin, even in its rallies, has seen altcoins bleed against it,
and we've seen this in the previous bear market as well.
It was even more aggressive, where most altcoins lost 99% of their value,
even when Bitcoin went through these kind of crazy summer rallies where people thought the bull market was back on.
Do you guys think this time it's different?
Would you put ETH in the altcoin category anymore, or is it its own category, just based on how much adoption it's gotten,
based on all the L2s that are building on top of it, based on all the, you know, there's a lot of nonsense in this industry,
but then there's also a lot of great stuff being built.
Well, I would say less great stuff being built, but a good example of that is Illuvium.
So, would love to hear the panel's thoughts on whether ETH, it has been getting slightly weaker against Bitcoin during the bear market,
but not as much as it did last time.
Indigo, and then back to Victor.
Sorry, I just wanted to touch base with Andrew in regards to bringing privacy into the gaming sector on top of the EVM.
Is this something that you could contemplate?
And then also, back to your question about ETH, being an altcoin, or some kind of altcoin season, would it trigger it?
It depends how far you go within categorizing it to be an altcoin to be something for return of value,
because of the position that it's in.
But we could also contemplate the networks such as Layer 2 coins that are roll-ups out of Ethereum
that could have a repel against its take-up on the altcoin season.
I wasn't able to catch all of that last part.
I guess the reason I bring up ETH and some of these L2s is because I think a fair bet right now is –
I wouldn't say a fair bet, but – well, maybe I will say a fair bet –
is trying to find the infrastructure, right?
So, a lot of the great things that will be built on blockchain have yet to be seen,
but maybe you can predict which ecosystems those builders will choose to plant their seeds on.
So, infrastructure is interesting to me, ETH, and various Layer 2s and Alt Layer 1s, potentially.
I think ETH is always going to be the go-to architectural framework with the EVM.
I don't think there's anything else in the market that can beat the EVM,
and there's anything that's compatible against the EVM.
We know, obviously, it's an improvement to Bitcoin's ecosystem.
And, yeah, I mean, for somebody to roll out and do something different than Solidity and EVM functionality,
I think is virtually quite far in front of our vision, if that makes sense.
But I think EVM is always going to be the go-to power for developers such as myself and other people in the industry.
And Ethereum will always lead the way in that sector.
I love to hear that. Victor?
Yeah, I wanted to say, circling back to the Bitcoin dominance,
that overall in the bear market, the Bitcoin dominance always got to be performing well comparing to all others.
But we're going to see less separation with things as Ethereum.
I think Chainlink, Solana, and a couple other big blockchains would fall into the same pedigree eventually.
But for now, yeah, whenever we are in the bear market, the altcoins are going to struggle
because people look for a safe haven at least not to lose, you know, 99% of the value as they're aware of what happened before.
So they re-roll it into the Bitcoin.
And then once everything starts pumping, they lock these profits.
And there is a little time gap separation between, let's say, the Bitcoin pumping
and then the little gaming projects and altcoins pumping.
There is like a week to a month time frame that you can actually re-roll your profits from one to another.
And I believe in cycles.
And, you know, so far it's been proven working this way.
Until it's proven otherwise, I wouldn't be even guessing.
So whenever we are in the cycle and we already touched the bottom, we're approaching the halving.
I think from there, if it starts going up, it's in only up mode.
And that's got to exist for like a year or about that.
And we're going to be capturing the best moments.
Well, that's how I utilize that.
And I believe in the cycles.
And I think that the great power with that is going to continue for like another 100 years.
And Bitcoin is going to be still remaining the dominance in the bear market times.
Mind your base.
Yeah, I wanted to touch on what was brought up by Indigo earlier.
And I love that there was a question.
I think maybe we glossed over it.
But a question about privacy or at least a layer of anonymity and zero knowledge for user accounts.
When we talk about any type of metaverse or any type of play to earn or play and earn, regardless of, you know, how that's framed, depending on the marketing spin that's used by publishers.
There's a very real issue with privacy in these ecosystems.
And there is, whether it's acknowledged or not widely, there's a de facto digital identity that's being created in these ecosystems.
And so understanding the privacy implications of having in-game assets, and especially now having intraoperable in-game assets.
What I love about Ethereum is that smart contracts can use zero knowledge proofs.
And as was mentioned earlier by Indigo, the EVM is very hard to beat from a programmatic perspective because you have open standards that are usable by everyone.
As it is today, I can already take my ERC 721s, my NFTs, and I can list them on any platform I want.
I'm not locked into OpenSea.
I'm not locked into Blur or LooksRare.
And the same is true, broadly speaking, of any asset that I mint as a token on the EVM.
In fact, I can bridge it to other chains, too.
If I feel like using a second layer, I can.
If I feel like if the publisher is, well, whether or not they're okay with it, these are open standards.
I can take those assets and I can bridge them and wrap them on other chains.
Interoperability already exists on chain.
And broadly speaking, that's not something that a publisher has to concern themselves with.
If they want true interoperability, if anything, what they possibly need to be roadmapping for, and I love that Indigo brought it up, is protecting the identities of their users from any kind of regulatory overreach or any kind of de facto digital identity scraping.
Because there will be a dragnet, if there isn't already, in those ecosystems, as the value of those assets go up.
Thank you, Mike, for your comment.
I wanted to just touch base in regards to, like, these decentralized exchanges.
We also have to be aware and be careful that they're not masking our IP addresses.
So, even if we're moving into the world of privacy and stuff like that, then they're still scraping the IPs of the users and they still know who's moving and operating through the DEX exchanges.
So, I do believe and I do actually think and understand that there is something that's going to be the first privacy kind of intellectual architectural framework rollout layer one blockchain that's about to touch the market.
And it's going to be, it'll be beneficial for the NFT space, it'll be beneficial for the gaming industry, it'll be beneficial for anything that's kind of within the DEX interfaces and that kind of market.
So, let's hang on tight and wait to see what happens.
But, yeah, as of today, I don't think there's anything that's 100% privacy within an EVM compatible network.
But we shall see.
Interesting times ahead.
I think we got DJ Dave and back to Andrew and then I can get to Vincent after that.
Yeah, I just want to actually touch on a couple of things that were just said.
As far as Ethereum being an altcoin, I'm going to say yes.
As far as original proof of work, Ethereum is an altcoin.
Gas prices are unsustainable.
People are not going to keep paying them.
Alluvium has sidestepped that problem by building on Ethereum 2.0 and they're able to keep the gas prices low and get massive adoption without it costing them a fortune.
As far as digital identity, Oasis Network, Oasis Protocol has been working with Equifax for last year and they now have an EVM compatible security layer that can be added to all smart contracts.
It can hide mass transaction information without keeping all the other information, would the other information still being available?
If it be incompatible, it can be put on any blockchain and installed on any dApp currently.
That was just announced, I think, a couple of weeks ago.
You can look it up on Google.
But the digital identity is something that's being worked on by them.
And it has been for the last couple of years.
Binance is currently on 20% of their market or 20% of their available tokens.
And they do a lot of work in Southeast Asia and China, as well as having contracts for DARPA and Pentagon for identification or for information storage and identification.
Hiding, rather, for digital ID purposes.
But, you know, that stuff's coming slowly but surely.
I think as adoption of the digital identity part moves to other parts, especially the gaming where you've got to keep everybody's stuff separate.
And you've got to remember it, I mean, I don't know where I'm actually going.
I hope you get to just what I'm saying, because I'm trying to mix these two together.
But Ethereum, I don't see gas making it.
I just, I really don't see how it's sustainable.
I don't see people, especially people coming from Web2, being willing to pay $30 gas for a $50 NFT or a $50 purchase.
But as far as Illuvium goes, I think they're fantastic.
I'm actually going to buy as much of it as I can, as soon as I can.
And the digital ID part, you know, that was a little inside information from a coin that I've been watching for the last four or five years.
And that's where I see that going right now.
And we'll see, I guess, in the future.
Andrew?
Yeah, since you guys are talking about buying ILV tokens, not financial advice.
And this is my own personal opinion.
So anyway, on the topic of, you know, privacy, I think like as a game, or even as like a service provider, or even a platform that's trying to offer Web3 services.
And this is just my personal opinion.
But I think the best thing you can do is to offer as many ways to, let's say, connect with your service or your game or your offering as possible.
And in my view, there are kind of three, let's say, tiers of privacy that a user could decide to opt in at.
So starting at least private, this tier would be going through like mainstream gaming onboarding platforms or ecosystems, like onboarding into a game through App Store, Play Store, Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, Epic Games, EA Play Launcher.
That would be the least private, right?
And you will be subject as a user in onboarding in that way to whatever information collection those platforms decide to take.
And then you can go ahead and onboard into a Web3 game through those platforms.
That's already happening.
We're already seeing Web3 games now on Steam and App Store as well as Play Store.
The, let's say, middle in terms of privacy option would be, let's say, signing up to play a game directly through a studio or a DAO like Alluvium, and then you choosing which information you provide directly.
So that could be your email.
It could be other information as you decide to opt in through providing personal information if you choose to provide it.
So that's middle of the road tier.
Then on the, let's say, most private level would be strictly connecting with your wallet.
So Alluvium supports browser, web, and hardware wallets, in which case the only information you're providing there to be able to play Alluvium games or any, let's broaden it out, or any service or game or ecosystem would be whatever information can be scraped or that you scraped from that wallet or on the blockchain.
Or whatever personal information you provided that wallet provider.
So I think the best option, at least that's available right now, is to provide users with all three options so that they can choose how much privacy and how much information they want to provide when they engage in blockchain games and blockchain services from least private, let's say, mainstream centralized platforms, middle of the road, opt-in options directly with the service or game.
Or wallet, which you'd provide, or wallet, which you'd provide the least amount of information depending on your wallet selection.
I don't see how games or folks creating metaverse experiences can quote-unquote solve the privacy issue.
I think the role of something like Alluvium DAO or other games is to just offer all of the options as other players solve the privacy issue and people decide how much privacy matters to them.
And if we look at the trend over time, in gaming in particular, privacy has not been a major issue for gamers.
They just don't care.
They just want accessibility.
They want to be able to play instantly and they want as little friction as possible.
So, though privacy may be a trend here in Web3 Gaming and people will care more, I think that overall, people, the vast majority of users will not care about their own privacy and they'll just want to have fun, accessible experiences.
And whatever gets them away from having to click more buttons and go through more windows to get into experiences, I think they'll move away from that and just go for the easier, more fluid option.
I was waiting for Mind Your Business hand to go up and it went up.
I'm going to just pass it to Vincent really quick and then we can hop over to Digital and then back to Mind Your Business.
Well, man, no, that's a really good point that you brought up, Andrew.
I feel like that privacy sometimes is a business decision when you're operating as a company.
And sometimes a trade-off for that from the user side is probably additional features.
I mean, like you said, you're kind of like the middle of the road for the account signups, right?
You have emails where you can basically, you know, from your marketing side, it's more so being able to send them updates, right?
And send developments and also tell them to opt into something.
And that's kind of what I see it becoming, right?
Even to Indigo, when you're talking about DEXs and privacy around that, market makers are mainly on DEXs and they're mainly regulated proprietary training desks.
They're licensed and all.
They usually move DEX assets to centralized exchanges, so they mostly need to be compliant.
This is why Monero also got delisted from a lot of the exchanges just because of the obfuscated nature of how transactions go.
But, I mean, even back to, like, the additional features and kind of like the trade-off for privacy,
we're building on the Kava chain and we're about to actually launch a lending protocol primitive and this is around late August.
It's called Hover Market.
And we're pretty focused on privacy in terms of, you know, keeping things as mutual as possible, right?
All you have to do is sign in via your wallet.
But, again, right, you can have opt-in features that can grant more features to your users, right?
For example, if you want to learn more about your loan health, you wouldn't necessarily get back from your wallet,
but you would opt in via your email and then be able to, you know, get updates on your loan health,
get updates on, you know, new APYs or changes in APYs or changes in governance.
And this is where we have that as an opt-in function, but primarily it would be, you know,
giving in a bit of your privacy for, you know, either, like, push functions or more features.
And that's kind of how I see privacy, at least from that side of things.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Sorry.
No, no, no. Go ahead, Indigo.
I was just going to say, do we really care about all of these centralized exchanges delisting privacy coins?
Because, I mean, it's far from being private if people are taking your KYC and understanding on who's purchasing the privacy coins.
So where is the privacy factor if you're listed on a centralized exchange?
I think we should be more focused on privacy, EVM, compatible tokenomics within the actual decentralized market.
And I believe decentralization should equal some capacity of privacy, which I think a lot of people get mixed up.
Should be able to see people's finances and see their balances.
I mean, if you want to pay for one of these crypto hotels and set up a payment in some sort of Satoshi from your wallet,
you don't want the hotel to understand how much is inside your balance and then you're going to go to sleep.
Or you don't want to go to the shop up the street from where you're currently staying and make a payment for some goods or some kind of service.
And then the people understand how much is inside your wallet.
I mean, it's something that everybody needs to elaborate.
And decentralized, again, should equal privacy at some extent.
So I don't think we should be worried about privacy coins getting delisted from centralized exchanges, which all are a massive fraud by themselves.
Yeah, so I feel like I can co-sign pretty securely everything that Indigo just said.
I'm a relatively staunch privacy advocate.
That said, to make sure that we have a bit of a bit of, well, I don't want to be a complete dick to my co-panelists.
I can understand how from a marketing frame, these are necessary evils.
And this is something that I struggle with in that I have two years of professional marketing experience in Web3.
First, with the first agency of record that helped launch Polygon, and then also at a billion-dollar marketing agency that specializes in influencers and in KOLs called Viral Nation, as the only Web3 educator there internally.
So I struggle with that balance, right, of how do you advocate for user privacy?
Because most people simply don't know that they need it.
And when it comes to these burgeoning economies that we're just calling play-to-earn games, that we're just calling metaverses right now, when you tell somebody that there's a financial incentive at the end of their gameplay, as opposed to there being any other in-game asset, which we've already seen right before Web3, and before even Web2 was coined as a phrase, we saw that in-game assets had their own markets made.
And that there was incentive to go and farm gold, right, at scale.
And so, I mean, that's kind of the founding story of one of the co-founders of Tether was their background in farming in-game assets at scale.
So if you know that there's value there, you know that there's an economy there, eventually people will show up to start mining that value at scale.
Now, you pair that with an immutable ledger that it's totally public, and like Indigo says, it's highly anti-competitive for somebody who's a high net worth individual or a corporation to have all their finances publicly viewable on-chain for just anyone to stop by and take a look at.
And I do think that it shows a little bit of, I think that we need to put more thought into it.
And I mean, I'd say that as somebody who, you know, got paid to go and try to harvest people's data as much as they were, you know, foolish enough to surrender.
And I mean, cookie stuffing, email list building, every possible, you know, piece of personally identifying information, you know, marketers will find a way to exploit it.
I know, I definitely understand and have real empathy because it does make the task as a marketer that much easier down the line if somebody has surrendered that data.
Now, there's also open source intelligence, and that's the category that open blockchains and that a lack of privacy in blockchain technology, that's the opportunity.
That's the threat model there is that it winds up becoming part of a larger open source intelligence database once it's correlated with a user's profile.
So whether or not somebody has downloaded a game from Steam or from some of the marketplace, or they've associated a credit card in a credit card or username or personal identifying information or, you know, or actual name, docs and street address, all the rest in that marketplace account.
And then that has also been correlated with the user ID that's used in that game, which is then further correlated to a blockchain address, whether or not that's all been correlated yet, it will be.
And that's what's happening right now.
So if we fail to think that far in advance, then we're doing users of these platforms a huge disservice because there is growing value in the assets that they're harvesting from these games, from this gameplay.
You tell somebody to grind for 100 plus hours on their first exposure to a game with the promise of some type of asset after the fact, maybe it's just a badge, right?
A simple NFT badge.
But if it ever has a market made for it, that person is now a sitting duck, right?
They have a target on that account on chain.
And if there's no thought given to it at all, I think that's massively irresponsible from a corporate perspective.
And again, I say that with empathy.
I say that with love because I struggle with it myself as a professional marketer.
So that's what I wanted to mention on privacy.
I want to pass it to Fidgetal and then over to Andrew.
I guess I'll combine two quick topics that were talked about, which is privacy and then also Ethereum gas prices and stuff like that and adoption.
At the end of the day, it's all going to be a tradeoff, right?
It's a cost-benefit analysis to any cost scenario, a paradigm that will exist.
What mine was just referring to is kind of a problem that exists currently, right?
We give up information in situations where we are the product, right, a free service, a free game.
And the value of the proposition is us, our information.
And currently we have the problem that exists anyhow whereby our information is not either understood in terms of what it's being exchanged for.
And certainly in the first instance and certainly not in the long-term instance, which is what mine was referring to.
How your data is correlated, repackaged, resold, reused, and the long-term value of what you're really giving up.
The good thing is, and it's funny that you mentioned Tether because I remember 10 years ago with the founders of Tether talking about global reputational networks and tokenizing assets and digital identity.
And I think it was called Fraggle Rock back then.
I think they were working on it.
Or Fraggle Network, I believe it was called.
And ironic that it's still not out 10 years later because it is a huge, huge problem.
But the tech is getting to a point where we are starting to see true versions of DID coming out, which, you know, blended with superior ZK technology might actually get us close to being able to, at the end of the day, what mine is referring to.
And then, and they go on everybody is not that your identity is, quote unquote, truly protectable, but just that you are understanding what you're giving up and when you're giving up and the value proposition of when you're giving it up.
And through the three paradox, we can, i.e. decentralization and transparency, we can have a better idea and a better understanding of what we're giving up, when we're giving up, and why we give it up.
Right?
That doesn't mean we won't give it up again.
We will give it up when it's worth it to us, as long as we know what we're getting in exchange.
I do think that within that, that kind of, not to use the word matrix, but we are getting closer.
I don't think we see an L1 solution for quite a while, based on the second part of what I'm going to say.
But everybody here knows that Polygon had a billion dollars into their tri-pronged ZK protocols, ZK-AVM being the first one.
And so we are starting to see, and I've talked to them about it, right?
They're not actually providing the solutions, they're providing the rails.
So we're going to see more and more ancillary tools built around Polygon ZK protocols that will help us get a better understanding of what we're giving up and when we're giving it up.
So I'm excited for that.
And kind of a similar paradigm to, or concept to the idea of people saying, well, ETH is an altcoin and it'll never work for gaming and gas prices.
At the end of the day, each chain and the cost associated are associated with safety and protection, security, and identity and stuff.
So you will pay $50 in gas when it's worth it for you to pay $50 in gas.
You will pay $60 for a SAT inscription when the data that you want is worth becoming truly immutable versus being put on IPFS, right?
So I think that's something that people need to really understand at a core is the cheaper the transaction, usually the less safe the transaction, both in terms of time horizon and stability, as well as short term, right?
Even look at most bridges suffer from that exact issue.
So it's funny that Illuvium's up there if you remember, what was the other game?
What's a game that got hacked?
Whatever it was.
Sorry.
Axia?
Yeah, Axia Infinity.
The fact is, the cheaper it is to bridge, the higher likelihood of getting 5150, right?
Or otherwise hacked.
So I think we're going to see a cool future where our identity is properly valued, our transactions are properly valued, our data is properly valued.
And each job benefits its own cost parameters.
I'm not a huge proponent of proof of stake in terms of true safety, but it serves its purposes.
So sorry for the ramble.
I'm done.
I'm going to pass it to Andrew and then Indigo.
Love the rambles.
I love all the privacy minded people that are speakers on the stage here.
And I also have an admission to make to all of you.
I am also a marketing person.
I've been a marketing executive for 15 years.
And I've seen the transition and kind of like the golden real estate for marketing solicitation over that period of time.
And by the way, I signed with Viral Nation, great agency.
They represent me.
Thanks for bringing that up earlier.
But what I'm talking about with the goal.
So it's good to be privacy minded and always focus on that and always have a contingency of people that want to push for more privacy.
But I can tell you from experience, marketers are really smart and we always find a way to put our message and to put our solicitations in front of you, no matter what the technology is.
So, for example, their physical mail.
Physical mail is now stuffed with physical ads.
What's the filtering method for physical mail?
You as a human looking at your mail and throwing out the ads and keeping the real mail.
Is there a sidestep for that technology?
Yes.
Create a P.O. box.
Email.
It's now stuffed with digital ads.
What's the filtering method for that?
Programmed filtering through things like Gmail.
It goes to your spam box.
What's the sidestep for that?
Creating a new email address as a sidestep.
Now wallets are the next one.
They're going to be stuffed with NFT ads, pushing NFTs to your wallet.
There will be AI filtering.
That filters out the bad ones for you and helps you look at the good ones.
What's the sidestep for that?
Multiple wallets in the future.
So the point of sharing this is to say, no matter what technology is created, no matter how privacy focused it is, marketers will find a way to shove their message into the golden real estate right in front of your face, no matter what happens.
And you can say, well, we can use blockchain technology here.
We can use AI here.
We can be smart.
If it's designed by humans, marketing focused humans will find a way to get their message in there and to market to you.
Just wanted to share that.
So be prepared if you have not already experienced it.
Be prepared for your wallets, plural, to all be stuffed with NFT ads.
People looking to solicit you for various things and get ready for there to be a whole lot of businesses that help you filter those out and then get ready to create your P.O. box, if you will, for your wallet in a second wallet.
And then whatever the next technology is after wallets, marketers will shove the message in there as well.
I'm already seeing some of those messages come into our team wallet.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Mind your biz.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
I appreciate that the conversation has kind of taken a turn towards privacy and maybe a little bit towards corporate accountability.
Because when it comes to having there be a large centralized group that's working with these standards and that's working with this technology, we can be a part of that solution, whatever comes next.
So we don't have to be subject to the worst practices of marketing if we're in charge of the way that signals are being routed inside of ecosystems such as a metaverse or video games or distribution of both.
So as far as there being blockchain technologies that assist with privacy, the cool thing about blockchains is that they do offer some really good privacy.
And same with email, right?
We've had pretty good privacy, pun intended, or literally look it up, PGP, if you're not familiar with it.
We've had it locked in to, I think, its final version since 1997.
We're not lacking in what's necessary to properly encrypt our communication.
And PGP works really well on messaging services, too.
Or I should say it works pretty well, right?
Or GPG, if you want to go with the open source version, non-licensed version.
But there's so many ways to reclaim our privacy, which is generally viewed as a fundamental human right.
Like if you're at, say, a secondary school or even a post-secondary school and you see students passing paper notes to each other,
most people don't think that it's their business or their responsibility to go intercept those paper notes and read them before the recipient gets a chance to tear it up or burn it, right?
Or, you know, in the case of the secondary students, like maybe chewing it up and eating it.
I mean, no accounting for taste, I guess.
But, I mean, privacy is, we all seek after it, right?
You don't shower with the door open, generally.
You don't change your clothing with the window shade open.
I mean, I do, but, you know, I like to spice things up a little bit.
Most people don't, though.
Most people just naturally seek out privacy.
And it's not considered a strange thing to want more at all.
It's not considered strange.
When you ask people and you give them the option, or if you leave something private by default, if you make that the default operating mode of a given system, most people simply won't object to more privacy.
And I think we need to be a lot more mindful of it, especially it can be client-side, it can be protocol-side, so many ways to do that.
I love that Andrew brought up the fact that physical mailers still exist.
You would have thought that in an email world, in a post-email world, especially post-Web 2.0, that physical mailing would die.
Totally didn't.
For marketing, physical mail is still, like, extremely well-utilized, right?
Like, and it converts, depending on the vertical that you're in.
I mean, one case study in Web 3.
Now, I don't know how the panel will feel about me even bringing up the name.
But the Hex community, somebody from the community, found the Ledger leak.
It's now considered open-source intelligence.
They found the Ledger leak when Ledger wallets had their full database hacked.
They found the Ledger leak, and they realized, oh, my God, everybody on this list would be a qualified buyer of digital assets.
And they physically mailed, like, shill content out to all these people, a high-converting copy, right, direct-response copy.
They physically mailed something to everybody on that list internationally, and they gained a ton of opt-in for their project.
It was pretty brilliant.
Obviously illegal, right, if we ever figure out how they obtained it or who exactly funded it, but also secretly brilliant.
But it's just, again, it's the province of marketers to do things that are just barely on the edge of legality to make a quick buck.
I think we can be better than that in Web 3.
I still get tons of – I'll apply for a credit card and subsequently get tons of spam mail from all these different companies, and it's so frustrating.
Indigo.
Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to say thank you to mine.
It comes with some great knowledge.
I totally agree with what he's saying.
Privacy is in our total human rights, and we shouldn't be turning our backs on it.
And I think the people with the real wealth and the real kind of go-to players in the game of crypto do want privacy.
I mean, people that want to have everything on show, they're not quite aware of the repercussions on what can happen and what does happen in this space.
So I think privacy is an important aspect, and it's needed much more, and the industry shouldn't be turning their back on it, although everybody wants to go to for the transparency.
I don't believe that for one moment.
I also wanted to touch base in regards to, like, the gas fees for Ethereum.
I always questioned myself, being an EDM developer for almost a decade, in regards to basically, like, with their gas fees being so high, when they can adjust the gas fees and change the gas fees and make it more spendable and more affordable for the people that are always complaining about the high prices of gas fees.
And then second of all, I wanted to get everybody's opinion in regards to proof of stake as a consensus.
What does everybody think about proof of stake?
Do you think this brings more centralization into the network?
Do you think it gives downfalls?
I think my personal opinion, it gives more clarity of control to the foundation of Ethereum, and it makes it more of a centralized network.
And therefore, I don't like the aspect that ERC-20 can be pulled and adjusted and transactions frozen within the architectural framework.
So, yeah, there's a few points there, if anybody wants to elaborate.
Sure.
I read in passing that Ethereum devs were talking about raising the validator cap from...
2,000 Ethereum.
Right, and so, well, I guess two parts to answer your question.
One, I do think that proof of stake makes it more centralized simply because, from just a token allocation basis,
simply because with proof of stake, you stake your tokens in a validator or you run your own validator,
and any interest that you earn is just, unless you choose to sell it, is going to be re-staked back into that validator.
Whereas with proof of work, miners still need to dump a degree of Bitcoin onto the market to cover electricity costs,
to cover hardware costs, to cover all the other costs that come along with running an operation.
And so there is a degree of democratization when it comes to just the allocation of the token.
As far as the algorithms, I don't know.
I'm not an expert on proof of work.
I know how it works from a high level, but I'm not an expert on the algorithms, proof of work and proof of stake,
to the degree where I can talk about how much more decentralized a network is when you have miners securing the network
versus validators securing the network.
But the other point was, yeah, I recently saw them trying to raise that cap.
And the argument for it was, hey, well, a lot of these exchanges that are centralized entities
that are allowing retail to stake their Ethereum are having to validate or having to do that across multiple validators.
This will let them centralize in one validator.
Well, my rebuttal to that is, look, let them allocate it across multiple validators.
It's better to have more validators than less of them.
So it kind of goes back to your point.
I do think Ethereum is going to become more centralized over time, though, but would love to hear if anyone has any disagreements.
Mind your business.
Oh, sorry.
If you wanted to respond and then I'll go to mind your business.
Yeah, sorry.
I just, I think like I've actually coded a number of different blockchains, worked around all kinds of different consensus mechanisms and stuff.
And I think like a proof of stake consensus compared to what's out there and what's been achieved in the actual very far past,
there's a lot of different and better and faster consensus systems proof of stake.
And I think proof of stake allows the foundation to actually host and stake their own coins within their total supply
when in breaking up their tokenomics.
So I think a lot of the foundation coins are being staked personally.
And I think this is how they're able to raise the bar and take control of their own consensus within the foundation
to validate their own transactions.
But yeah, anyway, thank you.
Yeah, I don't know too much about that.
I'm going to pass it to my new business here.
And it's like, I don't know too much about that.
I just wanted to note that Ethereum is the second most decentralized blockchain out there by a wide margin.
Just I think that's just important to note.
Yeah.
So just the fundamental difference is between proof of work and proof of stake.
There are some game theoretical problems with proof of stake that proof of work simply doesn't suffer.
One is being able to quickly capture the means of production.
So you figure it's as simple for me to transfer my entire wallet to you as writing out the private key onto a piece of paper and handing it to you.
That's it.
Done.
It's there are no other steps needed or surrendering my 12 word seed phrase to whatever the wallet is.
Or, you know, maybe some more complex instrument, multi-sig, maybe there are multiple wallets.
Maybe there's maybe I've used Shamir secret sharing.
If anyone's familiar with some of these security paradigms in cryptocurrency, maybe I've done something a little bit more fancy to split up my keys.
But it really is.
It kind of boils down to that.
I can give you my private key and then you have full access not only to read what's in my balance, but now to control my wallets.
Now, the game theory problem here is that when it comes to proof of stake, the only thing that's necessary is to own the coins or to have control of the wallets that are staking to the validators.
Well, based on what I just told you, this is a very, this is kind of a, kind of a morbid thought, but, but, you know, bear with me here.
And imagine, if you will, that I've got a $5 ball peen hammer in my hand and you are zip tied in your kitchen.
And we're looking at each other face to face.
And I've tapped you just once gently on your forehead with this ball peen hammer.
How many times do I need to tap you on your forehead before you decide it's a good idea to give me your private keys?
Probably not that many.
I'm, I'm probably a bit like you.
I don't fancy the idea of physical torture.
Now, that's, that's an extreme example.
Let's just say that instead of me tapping you on the forehead with a ball peen hammer, I just say, no problem.
I am now going to garnish your wages for life because I am the United States IRS or as in Canada, it says CRA.
Is that right?
Um, uh, revenue authority, um, in Canada, uh, CRA.
And, and I've just served you with papers saying, you don't want to give me your private keys.
No problem.
I am going to garnish your wages for life.
You are now an indentured servant of the state until you surrender your cryptocurrency.
How many times do I need to garnish your wages?
And what percentage of your wages do I need to garnish before you decide it's a good idea to give me your private keys?
This is the, the game theory problem with proof of stake.
Proof of work requires ongoing investment into the infrastructure.
So we'll take the same example.
Let's say that in this case, you run a large scale mining operation.
Um, you know, on the order of like a riot or a compass mining, or one of these large hosts, right?
They're core scientific that is no longer in business, but they, but they were once right with the, the, well, the former, um, executive from Microsoft at the helm.
You're one of these large scale mining operations.
And the same situation plays out.
I've got you either through, through duress or through, you know, threat of, of, uh, you know, of financial penalty.
I tell you, give me your mind.
Okay.
No problem.
Authority.
Here's my mining operation.
Well, now what?
You would have to go apply that same threat to the local electrical utility.
You would have to convince them that it's okay to give, just, just give you free and clear, uh, in some cases, six figures of services monthly ongoing in order to execute some type of 51% attack against the network.
And you'd have to do this at to multiple entities, or you have to be able to do this to a mining pool operator.
And once it's discovered that the mining pool is, has been taken over, you'd have to convince all of these mining, uh, companies not to simply switch their hash power to a different mining pool or to run their own proxy and have their own mining pool.
So the, the game theory behind me as an authority, whatever is, uh, either a white hat or a black hat coming in and just taking your stake much simpler to execute.
And it's irreversible versus proof of work.
Me trying to capture all of the means of production and then pay for it ongoing.
So as far as there being a security question, that's always the fundamental problem with proof of stake.
And there is no amount of fancy validator infrastructure or, or validator architecture, right.
Or, or architecting a new network fabric or architecting a new consensus mechanism with fallbacks and checkpoints and notarizing against Bitcoin.
There are so many exotic ways of saying, no, no, no, no.
It's different this time with proof of stake.
Like that fundamental question of, yeah, but did that person's keys get taken over by a nation state or by a bad actor?
That's that doubt is always going to remain in the back of my mind.
And, um, hopefully I I've introduced a, a, a cogent enough argument to help that doubt exist in the minds of, of your audience too.
Now I'm going to clip that bit.
I thought I was again, love the way you formulate your thoughts, man.
And then you subsequently convey them.
Um, yeah, I, I, I guess this is, you painted an extreme example, but the fact that it is a possibility is enough to cause a degree of doubt in anyone's mind.
And, uh, I was always told that Ethereum couldn't carry out its, uh, its full vision without transitioning to proof of stake.
I don't know if anyone has any insight on that or if that is true, or is it more of something that's fed to, um, to the majority just to make them go along with it.
Mind you, biz.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry to dominate the conversation.
So my, my background in, as a, as a creator, in terms of getting more serious with content creation and web three was with, with mining and proof of work oriented content over the years.
I've, I've been fortunate enough to sit on, on round table live streams where we've had members of the Ethereum core developer group and where we've had people who have written, uh, most recently I was in, uh, at a public private round table with policymakers in Eastern Europe with the author of the ERC 721, um, standard as well.
So, and so, so I've, I've done, I've done not nearly as much time on task as Indigo and actually wrestling with solidity.
Um, God love you.
I couldn't do it.
I couldn't, I couldn't be me day in day out.
Um, dealing with, uh, you know, bug fixing solidity contract, but, um, but we had a really great mining round table on YouTube between, um, uh, an OG in the space, Bitsby Tripp and Michael Carter.
Uh, if you, if you follow that content publishing crypto mining content since 2013, which is a very rare thing, um, uh, son of a tech red panda mining, so many others.
And then we, we had a couple of Ethereum core developers and we were discussing the ramifications of EIP 1559, which was, which proposed to, to bring gas fees into a predictable sort of channel gas fees.
As of the DeFi summer one were just insane, right?
Everybody here, if you were participating, uh, then you remember, right.
Where you, you might look at these incredible AP wise that were being offered on these, uh, these, these farming rewards, these LP, uh, mining rewards, right.
Where you look at them and think, Oh my gosh, it's, it's gotta be too good to be true.
But you'd look at your balances and, you know, 24 hours later, a weekend later, a week later, you would try to take profits and the gas fees just like smacked you back into reality, right?
No, yeah, it was too good to be true.
Like I, I, I paid it all to the tax man, right?
I paid it all to the gas fee ecosystem.
Um, so that, that was a big problem and EIP 1559, they, when they, when they implemented the, uh, the burning of the fees, we pretty much predicted this, this round table of miners and everybody panned the, panned this conversation.
Cause they said, well, yeah, you're interested, right?
You, you're not objective because you get paid mining fees.
We said, no, we're really trying to sound the alarm here.
EIP 1559 does not get rid of maximum extractable value.
And at that time, the narrative in the Ethereum core developer group was that MEV stood for minor extractable value.
They made it seem as though the miners were somehow front running everybody committing the sandwich attacks and, uh, and, and manipulating the gas fee marketplace.
Well, that may have been true for a couple of mining pools possibly potentially, but guess where?
The most popular mining pools went after proof of work disappeared from Ethereum.
That's right.
They coordinated validated infrastructure and staking pools.
So the same people who were front running everybody during the proof of work times are still front running you today, right?
Jared from subway is still getting a ton of your money for free.
What value does he provide to the Ethereum network?
None.
What is he doing for, for any of the things that we're trying to build in these ecosystems?
And again, this is where I've got a lot of empathy for, you know, for, uh, for the alluvium team.
And I, and I get the design choice to, to seek lower fee chains.
Um, but, but even still, once anything is written back to the main chain layer one, you have these, these bad actors who are trying to, to take, right.
And plunder the, uh, the, the gas fee ecosystem, the gas fee marketplace.
So there's, there've been some serious problems in, in Ethereum by way of the gas fee marketplace.
And the transition from proof of work to proof of stake didn't get rid of those.
And you, your core question was Ethereum needed to get to proof of stake in order to fulfill its ultimate destiny.
I disagree.
Ethereum needed to go to proof of stake to fulfill its original promise to ICO holders.
And I've, I've met, um, you know, and know several ICO holders who have been patiently sidelined waiting for their thousands upon thousands of ether coins to be, uh, to be earning them passive income by simply staking.
They didn't want to get involved in running mining infrastructure and running any kind of proof of work infrastructure.
And they, today, they still don't want to get involved in running validator infrastructure.
They want someplace to simply park their coins, set it and forget it, and then see that there's some type of yield so they can get ahead of inflation.
Now they've already done just their bags have done phenomenally well, right.
From the bit, not from the Ethereum ICO, but like any other savvy investor, they want them to do better.
So I disagree that Ethereum needed to go to 2.0 to fulfill its, to fulfill its highest purpose as a chain.
It's becoming more abundantly clear that sharding, that all the speed increase, the promised speed increases of Ethereum simply will not be delivered on time in the same way that even just the move to proof of stake was not delivered on time.
And the Ethereum ecosystem, for better or for worse, is pretty much still going to be totally dependent on side scale, side chain scaling solutions like Polygon and second layer solutions like Arbitrum, Optimism, Immutable X, et cetera, et cetera.
That Ethereum, even Ethereum 2.0 simply can't do it on its own, and it might not ever be able to do that on its own.
It might not ever become the promised chain that the original ICO holders are maybe holding out for.
But in the meantime, at least they'll get some yield.
So basically what you're saying is things like sharding could have been achieved with Ethereum remaining a proof-of-work blockchain.
That's 100% accurate.
Yeah.
Stake was not necessary for sharding to occur.
Andrew.
Got it.
A couple points here.
So number one, don't forget that a lot of at least the public announcements about switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake was happening during, let's call it, peak ESG.
And there was a lot of FUD.
And potentially this provided pressure, maybe not, on a changeover to happen because proof-of-stake, at least in the media, is covered as being a more environmentally friendly way to operate.
So that's something to always keep in mind is that there will always be that political, media, social pressure to move toward proof-of-stake as long as the environmental angle is a part of that.
I'm not going to share my opinion on whether that's true or not.
We can go into all sorts of side discussions about that, but just keep that in mind as a major factor potentially for some decision makers across the board in terms of which chain they're going to be building on top of, which one they're going to be adopting, and what changes they would make.
Number two, if Bitcoin were able to properly implement, maybe it's some combination of ordinals and lightning network and let's say some new technology that can be built on top of Bitcoin.
If they were able to implement proper smart contract technology and even somewhat comparable functionality and utility to what Ethereum offers, I think there would be a lot of developer interest, gaming publisher interest, and builders that would want to build on top of that.
But I'm not seeing that in the midterm, at least right now.
Obviously, ordinals were a surprise, if you will, to the market, and there was a lot of pushback from people in the Bitcoin community on that.
But Bitcoin is obviously moving a lot slower in terms of innovation when it comes to being able to build things like video games, metaverses, and high throughput, smart contract-y type stuff.
So maybe we'll see that toward the end of the decade, maybe we won't.
And so what's the point of sharing all that?
It's to say that I think Ethereum and Layer 2s and sidechains on Ethereum will just continue to run away with it.
And like Metcalfe's law states, the network effects will potentially become unstoppable with Ethereum eating up more and more of the market, with Polygon and IMX eating up more and more of NFT volume.
And most importantly, NFT value transacted through Ethereum continues to be king.
It's going to be difficult, I think, for, let's say, something like Bitcoin, even if it does generate, let's say, comparable functionality five, six, seven years from now.
The network effects of Ethereum may just be unstoppable at that point, and Bitcoin may not be able to break into this part of the market.
Maybe it doesn't need to, right?
Maybe it doesn't need to, and maybe there's going to be certain chains for certain utility and certain functionality.
But I think Bitcoin's moving so slow that Ethereum seems to be running away with this, unless there's some sort of black swan event with Ethereum that would force builders to go onto other more secure chains like Bitcoin.
Yeah, I wanted to say that, you know, I agree with you.
I think Bitcoin moving slow, it's a good thing, because then it can truly be as a store of value.
And we could have the safe haven, where it doesn't rely on to the use case of, you know, transacting the NFTs as much.
But at some point, if they go to develop and potentially scale, and the volume is going to come in, the network of Bitcoin can explode with that.
It's just the question, do we really need it?
Will it be developed soon?
And if yes, will it be adopted?
Because there is no infrastructure yet built around that.
There is like the first Bitcoin originals marketplaces, you know, only start to be informed.
So it's very early to speak, but they have a big community of true believers.
And those people may want to execute on that.
The good question is if that will happen or not.
But, you know, I think that the scaling solutions for the Ethereum and Ethereum ecosystem itself are going to dominate this particular market of the NFTs and then gaming and many other sectors.
And then Bitcoin would stay as a store of value and become a fuel for the DeFi ecosystem.
I see it more happening this way.
Or if the Bitcoin is going to be changing a little bit, then we're going to get the new features.
That's going to probably happen slow because people wanted to ensure that they are secured and okay to use.
And there is actual benefit to that.
Finsital.
I think it's important to kind of remember that there really aren't NFTs on Bitcoin right now, right?
There's JPEGs inscribed on Sats and even inscriptions aren't truly immutable right now.
Stamps are closer to, SREs are closer to immutable inscriptions, I guess you want to call that, or immutable data.
The Bitcoin network wasn't made to be a transaction layer, so it's okay that it doesn't become, will it have smart contracts on top of it?
That's already in the works and they'll be used for their use cases.
The fact is, in terms of the network effect that Andrew was talking about, Polygon has spent an egregious amount of money on partnerships that haven't actually started really using the chain.
So, everything from Starbucks, it's true, right?
It's all been marketing.
And that's what Sandeep's a genius at.
From Polygon to, I'm sorry, from Starbucks to, I can't remember, there are tons and tons of...
Yeah, Disney was another one, I think, or there was a part of the accelerator program.
Correct.
And they'll keep on stacking those Web2 relationships, and they will eventually create transaction ecosystems on top of the Polygon, ZKEVM, and regular L2 EVM or sidechain network, or both, should I say.
So, I don't think that Bitcoin, especially because it's decentralized, is ever going to truly try to compete with that.
I think at the end of the day, it'll migrate back to what it's meant to be, which is not just a store of value in the terms of the way we think of it, in terms of purely money and digital gold, but I think it'll also be digital informational gold.
I look at IPFS and inscriptions, I mean, sorry, I look at inscriptions and stamps as the holy grail of data storage.
And so, I think we'll see a lot more of that.
And as somebody said earlier, in terms of privacy, and I think it's important to always correlate privacy to value, right?
Gas, cost, safety, privacy are all highly interrelated.
Proof of stake is, by definition, less safe than proof of work.
And that's why it costs less, right?
You're giving up one thing for the other.
That's the laws of nature.
So, in situations with gaming, where privacy, as somebody said earlier, isn't as important, right?
Which is why most gaming isn't truly Web3.
It doesn't necessarily need to be truly Web3.
It's Web2 with Web3 pockets when effective and when not even necessary, but desired, right?
Interoperability for assets, data storage, identity, stuff like that.
That's when they'll be Web3.
But in general, where privacy isn't necessarily necessary, right?
You're going to go with the aspects of Web3 or blockchain technology, smart contracts, that are the cheapest because that gives you the biggest reach.
So, I think EIP is like 6551, 3225, 2335 in terms of multiple asset ownership and scaling potentials is really where we're going to see Ethereum and other L2s.
And I don't think anything but EVMs actually survive at the end of the day.
You'll have like Chia's and other little chains that have their – I like Chia – that have their niche value propositions.
But in terms of where we see this going, you'll have Bitcoin for high-value assets, whether it be money or the data equivalent information.
And you'll see EVMs in different forms for their use cases, L1s like the Ethereum network itself for the assets that you transfer in between ecosystems.
And then Rails like Polygon, probably near, and stuff like that.
I know it's not.
I don't have to say it.
For the transaction layers.
I know that's common sense, but I want to make sure everybody knows that.
I love it.
I'm personally okay with that.
I might be biased.
80% of my portfolio is Bitcoin and ETH.
But I'm okay with Bitcoin being that store of value and Ethereum being that pseudo store of value, but also world computer that everyone's building on.
Indigo and then back to Mind Your Biz.
By the way, so Bitcoin is your bank account.
Ethereum is your wallet.
And Polygon is loose cash.
Let's go to – I like that.
I like that analogy.
I'm going to clip that as well.
Let's go to Victor and then Mind Your Biz.
Wait, you said to me?
Yeah, I thought you had your hand up, no?
Oh, sorry, Indigo.
No, no, I didn't.
My brain is – I'm not getting enough sleep.
Indigo and then Mind Your Biz.
Sorry about that, man.
I just wanted to say goodbye and thank you for allowing me to come up and speak and share my thoughts.
And speak to you guys.
It's been a pleasure.
And also, I will drop a link to my GitHub respiratory and you can take a look at the latest blockchain I'm about to bring into the market over the course of a few days.
And I'm sure it's something that everybody here in this group is going to absolutely love and enjoy.
And it's something that's never been accomplished or achieved in our space today.
And it tops out the TPS on top of Polygon, running above 300,000 TPS at the moment.
So I'm excited to share it with you guys.
Thank you so much for allowing me to come in and speak.
Appreciate it.
Speak soon, guys.
Take care.
Yeah, right on, man.
Cheers.
And drop it.
Love to check it out.
Mind Your Biz.
Take care.
Yeah, so I definitely appreciate that.
And Indigo, if you're still in the audience there, it looks like maybe stepping down to listener at this point.
But hit me up in DMs.
I do, as a public service, I do free developer interviews for anybody who has a privacy focus.
So that's unlimited free press for anybody who's actually championing privacy.
But I wanted to bring it back to just as briefly to this question of like the viability of ordinals, the viability of using these more established chains like Bitcoin as a programmatic layer, right, to be able to do more with them.
And then also the question that Andrew brought up, he brought into the conversation about ESG.
Trends.google.com.
Look up the term ESG and look up its common parlance.
The trend is your friend.
When the Ethereum ICO was launched and when there was a promise, transition to proof of stake, that was clear back in 2014.
I'll let you look up the record, right, the historical record of whether or not ESG was in common parlance then.
I won't spoil the ending.
But with ordinals, I think there's a huge opportunity there as far as Bitcoin being a little more ossified and there being a little bit less of an opportunity to program on it.
I mean, there was rootstock stillborn.
There's stacks, right?
Citicoins kind of latched onto that.
Where has that gone?
You've had guys like Francis Suarez out in Miami really latching on quickly to that programming layer that's on top of Bitcoin with stacks for Citicoins.
Didn't quite go the way he wanted it to.
Lots of backlash.
And a lot of the Bitcoiners were the most vocal critics.
So one of the biggest hurdles to doing anything programmatically on top of Bitcoin is not the protocol to actually the culture.
So people who are diehard, you know, self-described toxic maximalists in Bitcoin are going to be the first to tell you, we don't want you developing here.
Which is, it should, it would seem crazy because I agree with Andrew largely that Metcalfe's law kind of does apply.
We do need to see the value of these networks go up based on utility, based on people actually wanting to use them for cool and interesting things.
Not just speculative value, but also just using it a lot every day, trying to use these networks for, you know, for practical things and for non-practical things, right?
Just recreation.
We need more people using them.
But a lot of the Bitcoin, you know, BTC maximalists don't want that.
They just don't want any further development.
They want it to become as ossified and as, you know, and as old and boring as possible.
They want it to look like a lump of gold.
They don't want it to be anything more than that, unfortunately.
They don't want to refine right into circuitry, so to speak, to use the gold analogy and extend it a little bit.
They don't seem to want that.
Interestingly, most people don't know this, but the whole push into ordinals was done largely.
The two biggest wallets and marketplaces of ordinals were programmed by BSV maximalists, by developers from the BSV communities.
So regardless of anyone's views on Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV, a lot of innovation has taken place on those chains that is just now making its way into Bitcoin because of the taproot upgrade.
As soon as that upgrade was made available across the network, there was enough of a lever for them to latch onto and inject new functionality back into Bitcoin.
Now, you could do OP return.
That was already an uncontroversial way of creating a de facto NFT if you were willing to use something like IPFS as your storage.
But you could already do that on Dogecoin.
You could do that on Litecoin.
A Ravencoin made an entire ecosystem based on that one trick of forking Bitcoin and making it something you could do inside the wallet.
It's like, oh, cool.
You can write to your OP return using the wallet client.
All right.
Sure.
Okay.
We'll let you make a new coin based on that one idea.
But it always existed inside of Bitcoin, Litecoin, and every derivative UTXO coin or fork.
So where I'm going with that is to say that the innovation didn't come from the diehard Bitcoin community.
It came from people outside of it who were already trying to, air quotes, break what we currently think of as Bitcoin.
Because prior to 2016, we were all on the same page.
We all thought that Moore's law would take over the way that Satoshi described it in all of the communications, that block size would grow because compute power and storage of the average computer user would grow.
I mean, I've got an eight terabyte hard drive sitting on my desk right now.
It cost me $100 at a local electronics store.
That's uncontroversial.
I could run an eight terabyte version of Bitcoin if I really felt like it as an enthusiast.
It wouldn't break the bank.
So all these people who sort of took up the side of Blockstream and these companies, and Adam Back, who, brilliant guy, but for whatever reason, he chose that side of the debate to maintain a certain block size and only a certain functionality.
Bitcoin didn't have that.
If you talk to somebody in 2016, it wasn't obvious that that was the only future for Bitcoin, that that was the only path forward.
So we're just now starting to see people who were long term in the Bitcoin development community say, OK, we're going to break it and we're going to bring some of our innovations back.
And we're just now scratching the surface with ordinals and stamps, like Vigital mentioned.
So could we see a lot more development done?
Yes, absolutely.
Will the Bitcoin maximalists accept it?
I contend we don't need them.
It doesn't matter whether or not they accept it.
There are no gatekeepers.
These are permissionless protocols.
And if we just make something that is interesting enough and fun enough, such as writing ownership details or writing personal inventory from a gamer's account onto Bitcoin, if that was interesting enough and there was enough incentive, then we might see it shift.
I don't think that it's written in the stars that the EVM will win as of 2030 and beyond.
I think that it's still anyone's game.
Can it be, I'm going to get to Vigital here and it's like, but does it have to be even be a zero sum game?
Does there have to be one winner and the rest lose?
That's precisely my point.
That's exactly.
I mean, we already live with a plurality of internet standards for different types of things.
Like we, I mean, you can no longer use HTTP without, without an SSL certificate.
Most people, like you don't even think about this anymore.
Five years ago, you actually had to think as early as five years ago, you actually had to think about whether or not the site you were visiting had SSL and you were seeing HTTPS in the corner of your browser versus HTTP.
So we haven't totally funneled to just one standard yet.
And when it comes to using the internet, you don't just use HTTP.
There are so many other standards that you're using behind the scenes.
And you're right.
Bitcoin, EVM, maybe IBC, right?
Maybe Polkadot ships something that we feel like is worthy of inclusion to a, to sort of a blockchain standards group, but, you know, some kind of ISO certification for all of these things.
But, but yeah, there's no one clear winner for, you know, for all things blockchain.
Digital.
Sorry.
I think I had my mic unqueued the whole time.
Hopefully you weren't getting a lot of feedback.
No, I'll give a perfect example that, that kind of issues away from JPEGs, which I think is where everybody gets kind of lost in the sauce is that we think of NFTs as pictures.
For those who have heard me ramble about it before, like Sarah in the audience and everybody here knows pictures were just used because it's an existing identifiable asset class that people just never really had access to before.
And that, that gives, that, that is an easier learning curve for understanding an appreciative store of value, right?
And instead of fractalizing expensive art, you can have access to art that you'd, you'd never walk into a thrift shop and go, that's a really cool piece of art for 10 bucks by an artist I don't know, I barely know, but that could probably, that could be worth $1,000 in two months, right?
That never existed before.
But the idea of art increasing in value and drastically was a concept that, that could exist in our minds.
And it was a great onboarding tool.
But when I talk about like value versus data and which chain you choose to utilize, think about the fact that, so I put a property, I put title in a property into an NFT.
And then I use that NFT and then I use that NFT as the beneficiary of an irrevocable trust, right?
So whoever held, it's kind of like a, a, a, a BB in, in finance terms, right?
And so whoever holds that NFT in any time is the owner of the property, which means you don't need to go necessarily down to the city to change title because the owner of the property always remains the same as far as like the chain goes.
That data, I used, I used, I did it once before I stored an IPFS.
Because I then, the most recent one I did, I inscribed on, as an ordinal.
Why?
Because yes, it costs more and it's more complicated to transfer from owner to owner, but it's worth it because I know that block, Bitcoin's only going down, the Bitcoin network's only going down if everything goes down.
So if I'm storing, you know, 700,000 plus in value on a chain, I'm going to use the blockchain, the Bitcoin network, simply because it is safer.
And it's, regardless of where I point to, right, I can, this technology that I can then point to other, other, other documents and IPFS, which are, you know, mutable, that, that could be upgraded and stuff like that.
But that's really an example of how, what we think of NFTs, which is really just programmable data that has its, you know, fixed or unfixed, right?
And that's really where the next phase goes to in terms of smart contracts is fungible and non-fungible tokens simultaneously existing.
I think 6551 is a simple example of it, although it's not non-fungible, I know.
But that's what we're going to see is smart contracts and the way that we use different chains in business, which is where this is really all going, right?
Pictures are cute, but being able to automate real business with AI and streamline accounting firms and services, streamlining legal firms and services, real estate and stuff like that.
That's when, when we're talking about real, real non-speculative value or less speculative value that we have more tangible connections to in the real world.
And we build businesses on top of chains.
That's when I think we'll really start to see, and again, web two businesses, that's when we'll start to see where large institutions are making preferences based on functionalities.
I'm excited for that.
Yusuf, welcome there.
Hey, Noah, how are you?
I'm good. How are you?
Yeah, yeah, I'm doing good, thank you.
I just stepped in like a moment ago and I heard people talking about originals and taproot upgrades.
Personally, I'm going to take a different take.
Everyone's quite optimistic about this, but just my own perception is I see the taproot upgrade as more of a negative thing for the Bitcoin network.
Excuse me, I'm a bit ill, so my throat might be messed up.
But basically, with the taproot upgrade, while it allowed the creation of ordinals and it created basically increased privacy on the Bitcoin network, I feel like it depends on what everyone's perception of Bitcoin as the coin's utility is.
I think there's people who believe it should be a medium of exchange and there's people who believe it should be a store of value.
I'm somewhere in between that.
I believe while Bitcoin works as a beautiful store of value, it also can be used in a medium of exchange because while, yes, TPS is an issue because of the one megabyte block size, it's also an issue.
So, still, if you compare it to like Swift and other traditional banking networks, it is much, much faster, right?
Bitcoin can take up to an hour for transactions while, you know, some bank transfers can take one to two days.
So, Bitcoin still far supersedes that, not to mention that with Bitcoin, all I have to enter is a wallet address compared to a sort code, account number, etc.
And I think that's why the company, the fact that Bitcoin is, what's the beautiful thing about is how stable Bitcoin is.
It's a reliable network because of the simplicity of Bitcoin.
You can always rely on it.
Bitcoin won't ever be down or shut down like Solana where the blocks are halted for some reason.
Bitcoin has never had a severe hack, right?
And while BSV, you know, has had some sorts of innovations that Bitcoin hasn't in Bitcoin Cash, BSV has also suffered many security vulnerabilities over the years, such as like 51% attacks, right?
So, I can see the benefit of ordinals and, you know, the taproot upgrade definitely increases, you know, interoperability and adoption for Bitcoin.
But at the same time, I'm on the side where I think Bitcoin should be left as it is, right?
Like, when Satoshi created the white paper, it was stated that he wanted Bitcoin to be a decentralized, permissionless medium of exchange.
And I feel like this upgrade removes that.
It doesn't remove that utility, but adds extra features onto it, which are not needed, right?
So, I can definitely see the, you know, the applause everyone's giving or the taproot upgrade.
But I feel like it just adds unneeded security vulnerabilities compared to just keeping the Bitcoin network as it is.
Because Bitcoin network, it is overly simple.
And I don't know why Adam Back and all the other people pitched the one megabyte block size and kept it the same.
I do believe it should have been larger, especially now with the innovations we've had.
Like, back when Bitcoin was created, I can definitely see why, you know, there's issues with the mining power.
And blocks being too big could lead to, you know, attacks where hackers basically created like one gigabyte blocks.
But I think now, while, you know, I think the size of the blocks are an issue, I think the taproot upgrade isn't the solution to that.
But I feel like, you know, adding all these features, you know, it's like what Vitalik Bootsman said, you know, like when bridges came along.
While bridges greatly increased interoperability, they add unneeded security disadvantages.
So, I don't know, I think this could have a lot of negative externalities in the future for Bitcoin.
I'm going to pass it over to Andrew.
I just wanted to say thank you for having me on the space today.
I have to get back to work.
I can only spend two hours with you today.
So, thank you for the fantastic conversation, everyone.
And I look forward to being on future spaces with you.
These are, honestly, these are some of the best spaces in the crypto and blockchain space.
So, thank you so much.
Hey, thanks for the kind words, Andrew.
And thanks for spending two hours with us.
I know you're quite busy over there at Illuvium.
And Yusuf, I'm in the same school of thinking.
I want Bitcoin to be simple.
I want it to be a store of value, decentralized way for people to not have their money supply tampered with.
And inflate it by centralized entities.
I love it as a programmatic monetary policy that exists in cyberspace that allows people to just hold it and move it across space and time without it eroding.
I'm a big fan.
However, it does seem to me that the majority of the community doesn't want that.
And I think the big argument is that if the majority of the community wants these things to happen on Bitcoin, then why not?
The miners seem pretty happy about it.
So, we'd love to hear some thoughts on that.
Of course, the miners are happy about it because of the increased fees, yeah.
But at the same time, I feel like Bitcoin was created to be simple.
It was just created to solve the issue of decentralization.
It goes back to the issue of the scalability trilemma, right?
You can choose security, scalability, or privacy, I believe.
And, you know, Bitcoin, adding the ordinance upgrade takes away from the decentralization and security aspects.
And while I completely understand the thinking, while it is positive for Bitcoin adoption, I feel like it could definitely harm Bitcoin in the long term.
There's definitely unforeseen circumstances.
Like, there will be issues like with BSV because it is a very large update, a very large add-on to the Bitcoin network.
And even the privacy-oriented aspects of Taproot are not too agreeant on.
But, like I said, you know, the crypto, the beautiful thing about the crypto network is it's very large, right?
We already have Ethereum, a very, I mean, not compared to Bitcoin, but a very decentralized alternative that has smart contract functionality.
So, I don't understand why people are trying to turn Bitcoin into like a hybrid smart contract platform.
I feel like we have Ethereum, we have a bunch of other alternatives for smart contract platforms.
And I know someone else brought up the fact that, you know, I'd be more confident sending, you know, NFTs over the Bitcoin network if it's like $700,000 because the Bitcoin network is secure.
And if Bitcoin collapsed, the whole market would collapse.
But the fact is, any top 10 coin collapsed and the whole market would pretty much collapse like it did with Luna, right?
If Ethereum collapsed, the crypto was done for it pretty much.
So, I feel like any of the large smart contract platforms are viable alternatives.
You know, we have Ethereum.
And if you want to go faster, more centralized, you have like Polygon.
I feel like making Bitcoin into a smart contract network is counterintuitive because the purpose of Bitcoin by Satoshi and all the programs who worked on it was for a permissionless decentralized network.
They didn't talk about speed or scalability.
They mostly talked about how secure the network itself was.
And I feel like this is a security vulnerability.
So, that's why I'm against it personally.
While I don't think it's all bad, like there's definitely positives for it, I feel like overall it's something that shouldn't have happened.
Yeah, just a quick devil's advocate rebuttal.
I share the same view as you, Yusuf.
I was just trying to push back and see what you had for me.
Mind your base.
Yeah, so, I mean, when it comes to direct comparisons between Bitcoin and anything else, there's no real direct comparison.
The net hash on Bitcoin has been industry leading for pretty much its entire lifespan.
I mean, you're not going to have the same nature of problems with BSV as you have with Bitcoin or BTC because it controls the majority net hash.
And at this point, it's pretty much safe to presume that it always will.
So, in that respect, BTC is viewed by most people as like air quotes, the genuine Bitcoin.
Anything else is merely a fork, right?
That's trying to develop in a different direction.
So, BSV, when it did suffer its 51% attack, the one time that it had a 51% attack, it was catastrophic.
I mean, it was really, really bad in large part because it had already lost the hash rate war between BSV and BCH.
Even among people who are okay with a Bitcoin fork, people were less okay with BSV than they were with Bitcoin Cash.
So, Bitcoin Cash already had the lion's share of that sort of like conscientious objector hash rate, if you will.
So, they already had so much that they didn't have that same problem.
As soon as that became an issue on BSV, it became a downward spiral of fewer miners feeling confident in mining to the correct chain.
And then the mining pool operators themselves not knowing how to respond to the 51% attack and the chain reorg that was happening on BSV.
It's safe to presume that something as trivial as a taproot upgrade is never going to cause that big a fundamental security flaw for Bitcoin, BTC.
So, I don't think it's appropriate to even use that as a basis for critique because hash rate is king when it comes to proof of work.
So, you're not going to have that same issue.
As it is right now, there are plenty of small block advocates who, yeah, feel like ordinals are a threat and they feel like taproot was a problem or that it was unnecessary now.
I think taproot on its own is harmless.
I think that there's been a massive exploit in the form of ordinals and purchase inscriptions at large.
But, yeah, with the gas fees going up, right, with the transaction fees going up, most people were curious as to why we didn't see proper bottom support somewhere closer to, I don't know, between $9,000 and $11,000 for Bitcoin.
I contend that part of the reason is, I mean, in no small part, was because of the early experiments with ordinals and then the massive run-up with ordinals and the gas marketplace or the transaction fee marketplace beginning to run back up.
We still haven't seen the historical four-year cycle play out the way it normally does in getting that full drawdown to what is the typical, I think it's 85%, right, drawdown until we finally find bottom support, in large part because the fee marketplace was interrupted.
So, you had economic activity on Bitcoin that broke the mold.
It didn't fit the previous fractals.
It didn't work at all with the previous narratives.
And beyond that, there was an upcoming existential threat to Bitcoin's sovereignty.
Now, it won't be the problem of anybody, you know, here on this call, right?
None of us will be alive in the year 2140.
I mean, unless you manage to achieve escape velocity, you know, from death.
But, like, into the year 2140, when Bitcoin emits its final block reward for miners, it will be a fee-only mining ecosystem.
And ordinals kind of proved that with additional use cases, with something of an elastic fee marketplace, that there's a real case for mining at scale, as opposed to fees only in an ecosystem where you have, say, like, BlackRock owning all of the Bitcoin and not moving it.
Or the Lightning Network sucking all of the Bitcoin into lightning channels and then not moving it.
So, there would be no transactional throughput at all.
So, I cannot disagree more strongly with the argument brought up.
Although, I love that Yusuf articulated it so well, I think it's fundamentally flawed.
The gas fees or the fees that have come up as a result of Taproot being passed and now ordinals becoming a reality and new economic activity on Bitcoin literally saved Bitcoin from future obsolescence and from future chain death because it proves that we will have fees if we continue to innovate on top of Bitcoin.
But if we don't, if we call things like lightning innovation, if we call, you know, coming out of Blockstream and Adam Back's mind, and if we call things like this upcoming ETF, if we call that innovation and mass adoption, pardon the expression, but Bitcoin is screwed.
We absolutely need native fees and we need more innovation in order to improve the number of those fees that are being paid because Bitcoin security model requires it.
So, I'm going to go to Gregory and then I'm probably going to wrap things up after this.
It's been a two-hour space and fantastic conversation, beautiful inputs by a lot of the guests here.
So, thank you all so much for coming.
What you were saying about privacy resembles a lot in my heart.
I spent a lot of time during my professional career in finance, but I started as an IT specialist.
And, I mean, I totally commit to the thesis that internet has evolved massively by using different protocols and combining them.
I remember using the modem to dial up to a thing called ATS, right?
And it was just an information exchange system in text.
And then what I wanted to really share here is that I viewed all my professional career as a way to learn different credit instruments and the way finance works.
And I was fascinated when credit default swaps were introduced because it's a measure to gauge some sort of a risk associated with your counterparty.
And then when blockchain came into force, especially this proof of work type of networks, I had so much similarities in the way that when you measure the security of your counterparty, you look at the thing called credit default swap.
And it's basically a measure of how much does it cost to ensure against the default of your counterparty.
So in blockchain or proof of work blockchains, this concept can be really well established as well by gauging how much does it cost to try to mess with the network.
And in proof of work blockchains, it's very easy to calculate how much actual resource you need to contribute to try to mess with the network.
And it could have been a perfect tool to gauge the credit worth of a network because imagine institution putting some significant transaction, say worth a billion or two billion or I mean, name a big, just a big number.
Institution wants to make sure the counterparty or the network it uses is secure enough, is safe enough to put that transaction through it.
So the same, same with banks, when the bank transacts with other banks, it wants to make sure that the risk associated with the transaction is much, much lesser than the expected return.
So, yeah, just to give you some concept of this, that in finance, there were instruments invented to gauge this.
And finally, they could have been brought down to people, to community, to gauge the actual security of the network through which you, as an individual, settle, clear and custody your assets.
Fortunately or unfortunately, we are moving to more proof of stake or delegated proof of stake concepts.
But I believe Bitcoin will be this one major settlement network that will store ultimate value of reserve currencies for governments going forward longer term.
So, I really enjoyed this conversation today, although it was totally off topic about the networks and their evolution, but not on institutions or regulation, which announcement was made.
I have a bit more expertise on that front, but happy to explore this topic at a later space maybe.
Yeah, of course, I, you know, I highlighted some of the things that I was seeing in the news of being institutions getting in through the spot ETF, the collapse or not collapse, but the deep hacking of true USD, you know, Hong Kong continuing to build out that East, Eastern crypto hub infrastructure.
Sure, we touched on some of these things early on, but then ultimately, the conversation went down multiple tangents, which I'm super happy with.
I really just wanted this to be an open discussion.
So, I want to thank everyone again for coming on.
We do these every week at 4 p.m. UTC.
If you have any ideas of topics that you'd like for me to explore, go ahead and DM me.
If anyone wants to co-host these and help organize panels, you're more than welcome.
I love co-hosting these things, and, you know, if anyone has any other ideas and wants to collaborate, just shoot me a DM.
WhaleCoinTalk, we're always open.
Well, shoot me a DM on my personal account, but at WhaleCoinTalk, we're always open to collaborating with any and all folks in the industry.
So, thank you all again so much.
It's been an absolute pleasure having you on, and I wish you all a great week and looking forward to seeing everyone in the next one soon.
And remember, really quick, audience members, everything you hear on these broadcasts is meant for educational purposes only.
Nothing is financial advice.
I don't know how important it is for me to say that at this point, but just putting it out there.
Take care, y'all.
