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Private Transactions, Proof of Work, and Making Mining Easy with @tari
Recorded: April 2, 2025 Duration: 1:12:58Space Recording
Short Summary
Tari is launching a new Layer 1 blockchain focused on privacy and accessibility, with innovative features like a native P2Pool implementation. The project emphasizes organic growth and user engagement, avoiding traditional token generation events. Privacy and usability are central to Tari's approach, addressing current ecosystem oversights and setting trends for future blockchain developments.
Full Transcription
everybody i am here today with two of the founders uh atari which is a new l1 uh blockchain that is
coming out mainnet very soon coming this month april um and i think more than ever tari is
hitting a a point that i think has been overlooked for so long that's that's interesting which is
around the idea of privacy on the blockchain um right now everything is so open ledger and you know it's almost inherent you expect like oh somebody does
something i can see how much they have in their wallet i can see how much they're making i can
see what they're buying and at the end of the day like do we want everything to be fully transparent
um i'm not sure if that is the case and you guys are are, I think, really asking that question and addressing it.
And there's some other points here that are very interesting around proof of work.
There's around how do you make mining easy?
How do you...
There's all these very interesting conversation points that I would love to get into.
I think, firstly, though, a little bit about you guys, introductions, and then why Tari?
Do you want to start, Fluffy?
Sure.
I'm Ricardo Spani, also known as Fluffy Pony.
I've been in the space the minute I started with Bitcoin in early 2011.
Built a bunch of things along the way.
Did a bunch of stuff in the mining space in the early 2010s, eventually created and
built and invented and built an open air, black packable stackable mining rig. And from
that got involved with Monero at its outset in early 2014, built a bunch of other things,
and that brings us to where we are today.
Amazing.
Yeah, I started off studying computer engineering at Purdue.
I dropped out.
I could only get through one year there,
so it didn't last very long.
But then I bootstrapped my first company actually in the music space. So I got this like crazy
opportunity to do some work for for Linkin Park running their like website and, you know,
collaborating with them on their fan club and a bunch of other, you know, things did
that for a long time and then had the opportunity to work with a lot of other amazing artists like The Killers and, you know, Bon Jovi and Carrie Underwood and many,
many others. I bootstrapped a logistics company, put a project of mine, you know, through Y
Combinator. So I've been around the block, built a lot of different things, tried to run lots of experiments, failed a bunch, failed a whole heck of a lot of times along the way, and then got into crypto in
2016 actually as a Monero miner. And that's how I met the esteemed Fluffy Pony. He was in LA attending a Monero meetup and we had lunch and we realized that we had a lot of the same ambitions and dreams and goals and were very, very much cut from the same cloth in many different ways and decided to start contributing together to this new thing called Tari.
Incredible.
I mean, at the end of the day,
I think it comes down to,
you know, you guys are builders.
You guys are people that ask questions around
how can I do something differently,
better, faster,
you know, address a problem
that hasn't been addressed quite completely.
And I think Tari at the end of the day
is the product of that questioning of you guys looking at, all right, here's the entire ecosystem of crypto.
A new L1 needs to come around to address some oversights.
That's right.
So I think that we always try to look at things from a first principles perspective.
try to look at things from a first principles perspective. So when we were thinking about Tari
and thinking about, okay, yeah, like, why does the world need another L1? There's a kajillion L1s,
like why? Why a new L1? You know, what about the existing L1s makes them deficient in some way,
shape, or form, or creates opportunity to create something that's not incrementally better,
but something that's exponentially better, right?
And it really came down to three core things for us.
So there are like three things that really make Tari
fundamentally different than everything else out there.
So the first thing is accessibility and usability. So one of the things
and Ricardo has the same experience in some of the businesses he's built in the past too.
But there's this basic concept that the more friction you add to like any user process or
user journey, the fewer people are going to do it. It's like crazy concept,
crazy concept. It's pretty damn obvious. We would think that it's pretty darn obvious.
And yet, for whatever reason, in crypto, we continuously design these really, really,
really complicated systems, really complicated processes, and expect lots of people
to do it. And then when we talk about these things, we say, well, this is just how it is,
right? So a good example of this is the onboarding process now for proof of stake systems,
which unilaterally requires KYC, right? Like, because somehow,
some way you have to get tokens in order to participate in a proof of stake system.
How do you get those tokens? You have to buy them. You have to buy them. And in order to buy them,
it's a financial transaction. And that means now you're going through this whole like KYC process,
liveness check, all this stuff. And that creates this extraordinary barrier. So we've done a bunch
of research on this. And the shortest onboarding process we found was 15 steps, right? 15 steps.
So which is crazy to think about, like when you think about that, and it includes a KYC step where
you're actually having to present government issued ID. And the drop off rates on this stuff are just nuts. And
no one wants to admit it. Like none of the on ramps ever want to disclose the data. No one ever
wants to actually talk about this because it's really bad. Like it's really, like if anyone knew
how bad it actually is, then people would all of a sudden be like a
lot more bearish, you know, on these systems, right? So you'll never see on-ramps talking
about their conversion rates or any, it just doesn't happen. And so, okay, from a first
principles perspective, well, how do you minimize the number of steps? How do you design a system?
If you could start over, if you could say,
oh, we don't need it to, doesn't need to look like an existing animal, it can be a new animal.
Sure. How would you design the system to make it easier for people to participate?
And still be civil resistant and, and allow people to get tokens and allow them to participate in the easiest way.
And so when Ricardo and I started like having this grand debate about like, okay, well, how the hell do you do that?
There was one answer that became very clear.
I was like, wait, this is the way.
And the answer is proof of work, right?
proof of work right the answer is proof of work so why why is the answer proof of work well if a
The answer is proof of work.
So why?
Why is the answer proof of work?
proof of work system is designed properly um it can actually be designed to be asic resistant
right so if you think about classical like nakamoto consensus like you know bitcoin style
well the problem is that you know bitcoin requires custom silicon in order to mine it you need asics
in order to mine bitcoin profitably otherwise youICs in order to mine Bitcoin profitably. Otherwise, you're never going to mine any Bitcoin, really. It's like a lottery.
I remember the first time I was like, oh, I want to mine Bitcoin. And then I was like,
okay, if I want to do this actually competitively with any chance of making real money here,
it's a real financial investment. 100%. So imagine a proof of work system that is ASIC resistant.
So you can mine it on commodity hardware.
You can mine it on your laptop.
I mean, I'm on this call with you right now on my laptop,
and I'm mining Tari at the exact same time on the same device.
On the same machine.
On the same machine.
So you can still do your work, still do stuff while you're mining.
You can still, you know, still do stuff while you're mining. You can still,
you know, whatever. It's beautifully designed. It's incredibly easy to use. So it's three steps.
You download the app, you install it, you run it. It automatically creates a wallet for you,
automatically connects to the network, automatically syncs state, automatically joins you to a decentralized pool. We have a native P2Pool implementation baked into the system.
And we've got to talk about that.
I think that for me, when I started digging into it was like,
I didn't realize how significant P2Ppool was to have integrated.
It's also not trivial to integrate in.
So it also explains why like when you look around, it's like, okay,
this is why everybody's not like in the, in the-of-work world isn't just integrating this, like, overnight.
I mean, explain, I think the mining, we can't overlook the mining perspective of, like, how you guys have reduced the friction to it.
Yeah.
Rick, you want to take that one?
Yeah, I mean, Peter Poole, I think, is really interesting because basically one of the challenges that you see everywhere, and Bitcoin, by the way, is susceptible to this too, is the risk of a single mining pool or with Bitcoin, several mining pools that appear to be different but all operated by the same entity, getting a very large portion of the hash rate.
It's a danger that's well known, it's well documented.
You'll see sometimes, like historically,
when a pool has gotten close to like 40, 45% of the hash rate,
then there's like this call for miners to go to other pools,
to other pools, you know, because of the risk of 51% attacks.
you know, because of the risk of 51% to tax.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And frankly, even, you know, something as large as 15% is dangerous
because there's, it just introduces risk.
You know, there's all sorts of things from censorship.
A pool can decide to censor transactions, which we're seeing.
I mean, there's, there are OFAC compliant pools, which is the most absurd thing in the world,
to just additional information
that I don't think anyone needs to know,
like, oh, well, this miner, this is his IP address
and this is the address that he's mining to,
information like that, that's kind of dangerous.
And there've been attempts at fixing this
through leveraging various pool technologies, but ultimately the risks is still there. You know, information like that, that's kind of dangerous. And there have been attempts at fixing this through various,
leveraging various pool technologies,
but ultimately the risk is still there.
The risk is still attached.
And so P2Pool just blows it up.
And it says, what if pools were decentralized?
What if there was no, I mean, nothing stops you from solo mining.
Nothing stops you from having a centralized pool.
But what if the bulk of users use Pizza Pool?
And Pizza Pool basically runs almost like a side chain
for each pool, each group of miners.
And they all come to an agreement
about lower difficulty shares that are mined,
which is the same that a centralized pool would a block, then that share chain is the proof of which
miner did a certain amount of work and they get paid out proportionally.
And it's all consensus driven.
So no one can cheat and be like, Oh, I want to get paid out more.
And this is really old tech.
This was proposed and implemented for Bitcoin in 2011.
So this is not new.
But it's not new.
But it's not new. And it's out more. And this is really old tech. This was proposed and implemented for Bitcoin in 2011.
So this is not new.
It's just been, I think, very overlooked, very ignored.
The largest Peterpool base today is Monero, which is sub-1,000 miners,
but still significantly bigger than any Peter people base Bitcoin has ever had.
And yet it's such a vital technology. And the issue, the reason, the primary reason that it's
not been successful has been because it had been, it's so difficult to set up, it's so difficult
and challenging to use, you know, even for more sophisticated miners.
And so it's kind of been mired in a usability issue.
And as a result, the upper bounds of what can be done with P2Pool hasn't been tested.
So, you know, there's this whole aspect of it that's almost like unexplored because there's
no domain experts that have been able to do that.
Right. And you guys, it seems that from the test
net side you guys have started to get above those previous bounds and get thousands of users using
it i can say from personal experience i was mining uh daily at a machine that was just you know
isolated and running um the miner it takes a few clicks, you literally download a
centralized program that has, you know, your apps, your wallet, and the miner all in one app,
you can just click start mining, it starts mining for you, and you get paid out. And yeah, I think
anybody can do it. You don't need to be an expert. You just literally need to understand how to click download and sign up.
Yes.
If you know how to install an application on a computer, then you can use Tar Universe.
And I think that's a very important point that you raise because that is therefore the lowest bar that one can possibly have for someone to become an on-chain user.
In our industry, we like to talk about onboarding the masses.
And we joke internally that you're never going to onboard the masses if you're going to route
them through a KYC flow.
Like, that's just bullshit.
Not going to happen.
But if you can make it so easy that
people can just download free open source software from the internet and install it on a Mac or PC
that they already happen to have, well, hey, you got a better shot. You know, you got a better
shot of onboarding a heck of a lot more people that way than you do running them through the
gauntlet of KYC and, and you know crazy onboarding flows that everyone
thinks have to exist because you know that's the only way it's the only way is the solana way or
the ethereum way it's the only way hunter it's like well no what's so easy but i think a lot of
people are like oh it's so easy other people are doing it they're making millions we'll just you
know we'll we'll do a five percent different product and we have a higher chance
because everybody's like,
oh, that other thing did well
and this is a little bit better.
So this might do a little bit better.
Like it's such a,
you guys have taken such a riskier approach
to building in the space,
which again, applaud it.
I think I love that you guys are so contrarian
to, you know, the current meta of things.
But like I said, the beginning,
all of a sudden, this has become a raise like, well, actually, this is the, you know, the,
the outlier, and we should look at the outliers as being possibly the new leaders in this case.
So, so I think there's a lot of confusion in the industry about where value comes from.
of confusion in the industry about where value comes from, right? Like what actually makes
something valuable, you know, whatever, token, NFT, like whatever it is. And our hypothesis
is that value comes entirely from emotional connection. When a human being has an emotional
connection to something, they deem it to be
valuable. And, uh, it doesn't matter whether you're a person who's into cars, a person who's
into watches, a person who's into baseball cards or magic, the gathering cards or Pokemons or
whatever it is. Why, why do these things have value? Well, because there's a bunch of humans
around it who genuinely love them and it's more
than speculation to them it's something that they like actually have passion for uh and and and the
hilarious thing about crypto is that instead of making it an emotional thing for people we constantly
make it a logical thing so we'll say things look, guys, you should buy the token because it has a burn. The supply is going to be lower. And I start thinking, I'm like,
okay, logically, I get that. But why am I making the emotional decision to buy the thing in the
first place? Because universally, human beings, when they choose to buy something, it's an
emotional decision. It's not a logical decision. It's an emotional decision. So basically, the way that all these things are constructed, we think is frankly,
largely like not actually compatible with how human beings work. And therefore, it's very
difficult that I mean, think about this way, you've been in the industry for a long time.
The last 12 months, I think, have been a very interesting time for
our industry. You have on one hand, you know, regulatory clarity and like administration here
in the US that's very pro-crypto and bullish, bullish, bullish, bullish, you know, all these
things. Put the macro aside for a moment. And that's like one part of it. On the other hand,
over the last 12 months, the majority of tokens that have debuted
on the large centralized exchanges that have this traditional proof of stake orientation of 50% of
the supply owned by investors and the team, low flow, high FDV. I mean, look at the charts, man.
It's been like this, you know, for most of these things, right? And it's very, very difficult for these projects
to build any form of emotional connection. With Tari, Tari starts in a completely different place.
It's completely grassroots. You download the software. It's beautifully designed.
That's objectively true. It's incredibly easy to use. You're putting in the work.
true. It's incredibly easy to use. You're putting in the work. The average session time for Atari
miner is over five hours a day. There are thousands of people concurrently mining on the network right
now. Almost 60,000 people have downloaded Atari Universe just in the last couple months.
And it's completely organic. There's no paid shills. There's no VCs talking about it on the timeline.
There's none of that.
It's not about that.
It's about, hey, let's actually start over and build something that is more foundational
and fundamental and elemental in nature.
And let's start with the idea of trying to build something that people really fall in love with
and build an emotional connection to. And therefore, that's where the usefulness
and ultimately the value of the system comes from.
I certainly can get where you're coming from with the fall in love because when you reduce
all that friction, it's very easy to be like, oh, that's so simple. So it feels light, it feels
fresh. And yes, I totally understand that. But value at the end of the day, like fundamentally, there are there is a like a fundamental for having value of like, it does x, y, and z, and it, you know, will generate this much revenue, and it's attracting this IP, and these builders.
um and so i i think it's a balancing act but to an extent like you're saying like we're coming in
from this almost in a way where you guys are probably like not prioritizing but you're making
sure that that is one of the pillars instead of an afterthought to how you build it okay well
well let me give you a let me just nudge there a little bit on this. Okay. Okay. So let's take a publicly traded company like Amazon.
Sure.
Back when Jeff Bezos was CEO and running the company,
Amazon lost money for years.
Years, you know, pre-AWS, Amazon,
I don't think there was a quarter where,
I mean, I could be wrong on that, but I don't.
It might've had close quarters or, you know, very slightly in profit, but before AWS, no,
it was a.
Yeah.
So if you're looking at it from a fundamentals perspective and say, well, okay, Naveen, what's
the PDE ratio of the Amazon stock and what's the, you know, what's their EBITDA and what's
their, like, it didn't matter because, because there was a person, okay, there was a person.
There was a person.
So people were betting on Jeff Bezos, who's a legendary leader and icon.
So in that case, there's a persona.
There was a vision, right?
Like obviously Amazon is inventing amazing things.
One click checkout, Amazon Prime, Kindle, AWS,
the advent of AWS, and all these other things like over the course of time. And clearly,
there's this like huge thing kind of brewing. But to say that, like, I would argue that
fundamentals are just as much of a meme as anything else. And really, at the end of the day,
the person who's buying Amazon stock,
when the company is losing money quarter after quarter after quarter, is still making an
emotional decision. Because there are no fundamentals there either. You're looking
at something that is supposedly growing in all these ways, according to their own metrics.
But it's still an emotional decision when you're buying a stock like that.
Look at something like Tesla.
You know, Tesla is another great example of now you've got this like polarizing situation where,
you know, do I like Elon? Do I not like Elon? Well, maybe that depends where you're on the political spectrum. Maybe it depends on something else. Who knows? And, you know, okay, I think
Tesla is absolutely a meme stock. Like without question, it's a meme stock. And it really comes
down to how emotionally connected you feel.
And if you feel emotionally connected to what's happening at Tesla and Elon's vision and his brilliance and all these other sorts of things, then maybe you're an owner of Tesla stock.
But if you don't, then you're not.
Yeah, I again, I think it is.
I think there is.
It's a spectrum of how you value something.
And I think at the very top layer of that is how do you feel about it?
And what, you know, do you, do you, do you like it?
Do you want to own it?
But the nice thing about crypto is that nothing is 100%, right?
Like we've seen, you can have things that are like, hey, we are a revenue focused chain.
And that's, you know, that is how we establish our base layer. But then you have things like, you know, Pepe or Do bitcoin and the early days and how things have been
done yeah um and in some ways again back to this idea of privacy bitcoin has been around and set
kind of the standard for like this is the og way things have been done and i think a lot of for the
most part the majority of every l1 that we've seen pop out has kind of been a flavor of that.
This is an idea.
Everything by default is private,
which feels like a,
it's a very, again,
contrary into the initial thesis of open, visible, provable,
still have the provability part.
Blockchain is still there,
but let's say I'm a business i want
to i want to figure out how to pay salary in crypto because this is the pitch you gave me
i'll never forget we had a very interesting conversation probably back in like july or
august last year and you made this this this point i thought it was very interesting do i
want to pay everybody's salary on Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana?
No, because immediately I've just basically doxed everybody's salary.
You need a better solution.
If you guys solve that,
I think the question I'm trying to get at is explain the privacy part,
explain who you're trying to hit with that um and who the target kind of like builders
and users around privacy that we probably haven't even seen come in might see this and be like okay
that that is an application uh all of a sudden blockchain has become application for us yeah
rick do you want to do you want to start that one
um i i think i mean you i'd love to hear your take first, and then I've got some stuff I want
to add to it. All right, Pony. All right. Okay. So I think there's a couple of different ways to
view this sort of privacy conversation. One is there's an ideological perspective here, which is how do you define freedom?
You know, can you really be free if everyone can see every action you've ever taken throughout
your life?
What does that mean for people in terms of freedom?
What does it mean in terms of self-censorship?
Like if does it become a panopticon where, you know, because everyone knows
that they might be watched,
it starts to change their behavior.
Like, okay, maybe I don't want to buy this thing
or donate to this cause or participate in this way,
vote in this way in a DAO or do these other things
because look, I might be watched here.
So I kind of can't be my true self. Well, if of can't be my true self well if you can't
be your true self are you free um is anyone on ethereum able to be their true selves
i would argue not really um because of the design of the system i i think that to throw it back to
bitcoin uh look there is a small section about privacy in the Bitcoin white paper.
I think Satoshi very clearly cared about privacy and commented on Bitcoin talk on a number of occasions on privacy and the importance of even adding more privacy to Bitcoin.
And in fact, if you read the section on privacy in the original paper, he talks about ways for people to achieve more privacy with Bitcoin, you know, and gave some specific ideas.
A lot of the technologies that have been built around privacy in this industry are really about
essentially automating those ideas, right? So his idea of like, ensuring that you have a like,
essentially a fresh wallet, you know, if you want to a fresh wallet or a fresh address for every single transaction.
It's like, well, okay, in Monero land, you've got this sort of ring signature scheme where you essentially get lost in the crowd with every transaction you do.
With every transaction you do, there's these, you know, these, you know, sort of false outputs,
you know, within the decoy outputs within the Monero world. And therefore, you know,
you have plausible deniability, like what transaction is yours in sort of this stream
of transactions, no one knows, you know, a lot of it is sort of automating the original ideas that
Satoshi had. Put the ideology aside.
Now let's talk about the reality, you know, real world.
Privacy is about safety.
I mean, on what planet do you want everyone to know how much money you have,
you know, as you're walking down the street?
That's crazy.
It's been a real concern for a lot of people.
A real concern.
It's a massive concern.
And as you see in our industry, more and more people getting their homes invaded.
The executive at Ledger had their finger chopped off.
I don't understand why people think it's a good idea that you can just Google any Ethereum
wallet address and see the balance. On what planet is's a good idea that you can just Google any Ethereum wallet address and see the balance.
Like on what planet is that a good idea for individual people?
I mean, the idea of privacy on Ethereum is sending capital to a centralized exchange and then sending it from there to a fresh wallet.
And, you know, are you at that point, you're still kind of like doxing that new wallet to the centralized exchange, but nobody knows. But that is, that is the user experience of like, okay, I'm,
I have an anon wallet all of a sudden. Well, well, the idea of privacy on Ethereum is weird.
It's, it's, it's a optional privacy regime always, right? I don't care if it's Vitalik's
mythical privacy pools concept, which is one of the dumbest ideas we've ever heard of in our lives. I don't care if it's, oh my god, here's a new L2 that is the privacy L2. It's still optional. You've got to move funds into it in order to get the benefit. I don't care if it's a mixer like Tornado. You still got to optionally use it. It's not default. So now you're making a choice. Well, who gets to use those things?
You know, does everyone in Vitalik's privacy pool world? It's like, well, sorry, bro. If you have
some bad coins in your wallet, you can't use it. You know, it's like, well, who decides what's a
bad coin? Who decides what's a bad address? Who decides what parameters, you know, allow you to
gain access to privacy?
And why does privacy become a privileged thing, right?
Like, why isn't it just available for everyone?
Yep.
Right?
So you have all these very weird thoughts in Ethereum land.
Like, it's a bunch of academics sitting there trying to contort themselves, you know, like,
well, we're trying to comply, you know, we're trying to comply.
But at the same time, you know, privacy, it's like, bro, take the trade-off.
Take the trade-off. There's a trade-off here. If you're going to create a system that is pro-human
and pro-freedom, it has to be default private. Has to. And the final thing is the business
dimension, which we talked about on our call, which is, well, okay, well, wait a minute here.
If you're trying to build a system that ultimately other people are going to build on,
there are two business issues, okay?
First business issue is,
do I get to own my user base?
So what Ethereum and Solana
and all the other protocols have said
is that you don't.
You don't get to own your user base
because anyone can vampire attack
anyone else's user base.
You build a really successful dApp, great.
Within seconds, I'll have a dashboard on Dune and I'll be able to stack rank your users by volume, by whatever other, by holdings, NFT holdings, token holdings.
And I can vampire attack that user base until the end of fucking time.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
And when you kind of zoom out and think about that for a second, you start to think about even publicly traded companies, are they like actively disclosing
their entire customer lists? Like, do we know Amazon's customer list for AWS? I mean, we know
some marquee customers that they have on their right, but you don't know, okay, here are all
the vendors for, you know, beach towels. Okay, Okay. Delta Airlines. Hey, Delta, can you stack rank your
diamond medallions for me based on revenue? Oh, that Yeah, that's crazy. When you ask that
question, then you think about how things are right now? How insane that sounds? Who the fuck
is going to do that? Hunter? Who name business, name a single business that is actually going to do that.
And the answer is, it doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist.
And so then you start to think about, okay, well, why are these systems being built?
Like, who are they being built for?
And then you start to get into the weird field of dreams conversation.
You know, you start to say, well, if you build it,
they will come. And you're like, well, who's going to come? Who, who? If it's not real businesses
who actually need to protect their information, they need to be able to build a moat.
So the cool thing about something like Tari is like, well, look, it's default confidential.
Let's pretend like you build an app on top of Tari and you're very successful at acquiring lots of Tari users to use your app.
And say Ricardo comes around and goes, wow, you know, Hunter's built a really dope app.
You know, I'm going to make some incremental change, copy pasta, one click, copy paste, and I'm going to launch the same thing.
Well, how does he vampire attack your users?
Well, he can't, right? So now all of a sudden, you can actually have value accrual on the app
layer. Think about it. All the VCs in this industry, they're not investing in apps most
of the time. They invest in protocols. Why? Why do they invest in protocols? Because that's where
the value accrues. The value doesn't accrue usually on the app layer. And that's why you have essentially this barren desert of apps where the only way apps get funded is through fucking grants. That's the only way it happens.
weird, perverse set of incentives and this unbelievable adverse selection problem that
no one wants to talk about because God forbid you talk about it and you're putting your
bags at risk and you're putting some of the core assumptions, the foundational assumptions
that everyone has staked their claim to at risk and no one wants to have that conversation.
It's such an interesting way to look at it again if i'm building a service all of a sudden my users can
be vampire attacked but the same way like i think we've kind of seen this with um like openc even
has just launched like a a loyalty program where like if you have items listed on another exchange
you don't get as many rewards which again it's it's they're utilizing the current landscape
but you know again a real business are they going to move from web 2 to web 3 and be like okay that
now all of a sudden our users are are at risk of using another service.
It's very interesting.
Who is going to do that?
Name the one business that's going to do that, Hunter.
I want to know.
I want to meet them.
I want to be like, you know what?
It's got to be like a charity thing.
It's got to be like, you know, look, man, I built this whole thing, and I just want to share.
I just want to be open kimono with everyone. You want to steal my customers, Hunter? You want to be able to stack my customers?
Customer, did you know that I have a customer concentration problem? Did you know that 40%
of my revenue comes from these five undisclosed customers over here? Yeah. Did you know that?
Well, now you do and here's their information. You can just fucking call them.
But in some sense, it's like, okay, but that's just the, I think we've accepted that is now you do and here's their information you can just call them you know it's but in some sense it's like okay but that's just the i think we've accepted like that is if you want to
participate if you want to build on eith like that that's the way it is yeah but but it limits it's
it's a limiting factor in the success of the system that's what we would argue we would argue
as tari contributors that okay that. Look, that's cool.
You wanted to design the system that way.
That's your call.
All good.
But we think that limits the potential of the system because we think there is a smaller group of people that are ultimately going to be okay with that.
And there's a far greater number of people that would want to be able to build a moat around their business.
Right.
And keep these transactions confidential and be able to run a business in a manner where not everything is exposed.
Because otherwise, it's very, very hard to run a darn business.
Right.
Well, I'll take it one step further.
I have a core belief that I've discussed publicly before, but it bears repeating. And that is that not only are these systems hostile to business, but I think ultimately they're going to be hostile to regulators.
regulators don't like privacy coins. What happens when regulators wake up and go, oh, GDPR right
to be forgotten, California Privacy Act, POPI, all of these privacy enhancing laws are
unenforceable on blockchain systems that do not have privacy. Then it becomes frightening.
that do not have privacy.
Like, then it becomes frightening.
Not only is it problematic from a regulatory perspective,
but we have seen in more recent years
a really interesting thing,
and that is that users suddenly wake up.
Suddenly.
Like, one day they wake up and they go,
Facebook has all our data, and there's a mass exodus.
Okay.
Now sometimes it's dumb and there's a mass exodus to Instagram.
So that's just out of the frying pan into the fire.
But like, you know, it's still, it's still interesting to see, you know, we see young
people go, Oh, um, we're gravitating towards Snapchat because it's ephemeral.
Okay.
Now they're not really going like, oh, it has it has end to end encryption,
but they're going, I don't want my messages permanently stored.
Right.
You know, on on someone's device.
Right.
I want to know it takes a screenshot.
I want to I just i want to have understanding
that my privacy and the things that i'm creating or sending or transacting they're exactly yeah
so so my thing is my thing is like what happens when users wake up and go oh everything i'm doing
is traceable on base or sweet or you you know, mega ether,
whatever the flavor of the day is.
And, and when there is that awakening and someone writes an op-ed in the New
York times and it goes viral,
or there's a viral Tik TOK post that goes that, you know,
everything,
and it just got blows up and has 10 million views.
People will on mass walk away from it
because that's how it works.
It just takes that one little girl or journalist or whatever
to evoke the emotion in them.
And they will walk away and it'll be, you know, as a land full of crypto zombies and all of the retail users
will go to other chains that have privacy. And that's the reality in the future that
developers and designers and architects of these systems fail to see.
I have one other add to what Ricardo was saying here.
I love this. I love this, by the way.
So keep bringing it.
So I have one other little thing here.
So, you know, obviously people love to speculate on crypto assets, right?
Like that's a dominant thing that people do.
They love to go long and short and leverage.
And leverage is bad, but leverage. You know, they love to do all these things. They love their leverage. They love to go long and short and leverage and leverage is bad, but leverage,
you know, they love, they love to do all these things. They love their leverage.
They love it. They love their leverage. You know, think about like all the vast
trading shops and hedge funds and all these companies out there and how they typically trade, you know, in public equities markets where, you know, things are meaningfully more obfuscated than they are in our industry.
And they're able to implement their own strategies.
You know, here in this industry, you have tools out there that are built where
bounties are paid to discover wallets. It's like, oh, I really want to know this investment firm's
wallets. Oh, I'm going to pay a bounty on Arkham or whatever, and I'm going to figure it out.
We've built this industry around pocket watching and playing this like cat and mouse game of trying to find wallets,
right? And that's a whole part of the business. Well, imagine a world where like, those firms
can actually come on and trade and have their own proprietary strategies. And they can still trade
majors as synthetics or whatever it is. What platform are they going to choose? You know,
that's why they continue to trade largely on the centralized exchanges,
because the centralized exchanges offer some additional dimension of confidentiality.
We've seen the counter to this a lot recently where it's like,
okay, that wallet is, you know, 17 million P&L for the month.
They have a strategy.
I'm just going to copy it because they're doing well.
100%.
It's great for me, but for them, that might not.
Not good.
Now it's an issue because they're like, okay, our strategy is inefficient because people
are following it.
Well, you also have strategy honeypots where literally people will create a wallet, implement
a strat, know that it's going to be followed, and then meanwhile, they're trading against
the strat in other wallets.
So you have all this predatory shit going on.
Okay.
Then you have another thing happening, which is agents.
What do they call it?
Agentic.
It sounds so majestic.
Agentic, you know, startups, you know, and using LM models for all kinds of things.
This is actually a fun thing to do.
Go on like quad or chat GPT or whatever
and ask the question, say, hey, look, hey, chat GPT,
if you were a trading bot and you had a choice
between a default surveillance blockchain
that has all the same capabilities as Ethereum
and something that's default confidential,
which would you
choose 100 of the time the ai agent says default private 100 of the time like literally 100 of the
time and why why well it makes sense because if you have an army of agents uh running on these
systems which is like now the thing that all the like ethereum people talk about it's like well
wait you end up in a world where, you know, these agents essentially lose effectiveness
as they start just like copying each other. And you want the agents to be able to operate
in a way where they're maintaining their like their duty to their creator, you know,
in the best possible way. And so when you think about Tari's potential in the future, you say, okay, well,
wait, okay, the system is built to be default confidential. Now, it also has programmable
confidentiality features. So for example, we won't announce this officially yet, but you could have
a world where there's actually a stablecoin issued on Tari, for example, because, you know, the issuer of the stablecoin can have full visibility into the TX graph for their token and therefore comply with all their money transmission licenses and other regulatory things.
But it's still default confidential peer to peer. Right.
So you can have these hybrid scenarios to on Tari that create like very interesting potential outcomes in the future,
right? So it's kind of a very unique system design that, to your point, you know, everyone in the
industry is kind of zagging and we're zigging over here, kind of doing, going in our own kind
of direction. The whole Tari community is kind of going in this other direction. And yeah, we'll see,
you know, we'll see.
Is it a direction that more people ultimately want to go into or not?
You know, time will tell.
Right.
It's, again, it is such a fascinating moment for the idea of this privacy.
And, you know, I even asked somebody because of something I'm building and was like, okay, everything is just so public now. And is it always going to be public? The idea of privacy becoming more and more important. I ended on a different note, which is instead of building an L1, there has been a new implementation of like, how do you keep like, how are certain people handling privacy and verifying that something's actually
doing what it should be doing even though you can't see it do you have a counterpoint to like
why like ethereum or these l2s can't like where do tees stop right like tees offer this idea of
like there is like you can't you can't access and see it, but it's happening. We know
it verifiably.
What's the counterpoint
for that?
Because I think some people would be like, okay, why don't we just
use TEs for some of these transactions?
Yeah. I mean, I can
speak to that.
The counterpoint to that is Intel
SGX.
Hey, SGX is the TE.
That's the TE.
Okay, it has been riddled with so many exploits
over the last decade that it is fundamentally broken.
Okay, we simply cannot create a trustworthy TE today.
Now, I'm not saying we can't do that in the future,
but now we start getting into the realm of moon math
or, you know, like FHEs or whatever,
you know, like stuff that can exist in the future that might solve this
in other ways. And no one's saying that that's not possible. It's just that it doesn't exist
today. Like there is no TEE that exists that is widely distributed except for SGX and SGX is
broken. Like it's embarrassingly broken. Every year at DEF CON, there's another SGX and SGX is broken. Like it's embarrassingly broken.
Every year at DEF CON there's another SGX talk.
It's just at this point in time Intel should just stop producing it.
Interesting take.
I was not expecting that take,
but I will admit TE technology is a little bit,
I understand what's happening,
but the actual fundamentals of like exploits and
security are a little over my head so that's that is interesting to hear um i think the other
counterpoint is i think why why not from just the basis of the protocol just be private um is also
an interesting counterpoint uh where ethereum is great and all but it just at it at its basis
isn't private um well at its basis um it's not accessible it's very hard to use
it's default surveillance and it doesn't it doesn't help developers win. And those are the three things where, or the three and a half
things where, you know, we believe that, you know, Tari can be meaningfully better. And it's not to
crap on Ethereum in any way, shape or form. It's simply to say, hey, look, you know, these are a
set of choices. These are a set of design decisions and trade-offs. And maybe with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been
engineered differently. You know, like that's entirely possible, right? Like Tari is, you know,
emerging years and years and years later. You know, we have the, we have the luxury of, of having this,
you know, being able to see how things played out and therefore
have an opportunity to contribute to something that we hope will be really impactful in these
specific areas. Do you think, do you think while we see all these decks is basically playing on,
you know, Ethereum and the other, like, do you, do you see this
ending up where you guys become an aggregator for a lot of this Dex volume?
Because all of a sudden it's on chain and you can do these swaps, but they are private.
So one of the things we did is we started interviewing, um, lots of like S tier traders,
um, in the industry.
And I'll never forget, I had one conversation with such a trader in Dubai.
And I asked him the question, I said, look,
how much time every week do you spend manipulating your wallets
so that people aren't like pocket watching and tracking your activity
because they know that you're like a famous trader.
And they sat down and they're kind of like thinking about they're like, no one's ever asked me that question before.
I said, OK, well, I'm asking you.
So, you know, if you can quantify it for me, I'd be really helpful.
He's like, man, hours, hours and hours and hours.
And I was like, wow, every week, huh?
He's like, yeah, every week.
And we started thinking about it. They're like, wow, that's remarkable. People aren't even aware
of the amount of time they're spending just to deal with the fact that the systems are default
surveillance systems to try to avoid people watching their moves. And if you could just have like your single
wallet, whatever your trading wallet is, or if you have a couple wallets, whatever you
got, it's fine, whatever. But know that no one can see what's happening. How does that
change your behavior? How does that give you more time either to trade more time that you're
not spending trading, freedom know, freedom from it,
or whatever you choose to do with your time, but it can give you like meaningful time back,
it can enable you to implement strategies that you wouldn't feel comfortable implementing
on a default surveillance system. So, so yes, do we do we think that there is a,
there is an opportunity here to create a world where people have a preference over time, you know, trading in various ways on something like Tari because of not only the confidentiality benefits, but also the usability benefits?
The answer is, yeah, you know, we think that's possible and we're excited about that. Right. From a, I'm curious on a governmental standpoint.
And these are just, to people that are listening, like, these conversations are, like, so from the hip.
And I'm just kind of, like, sitting here.
It's such a, like, it's such a abnormal solution that you guys have built here that I'm just, like, I don't even know how to approach the conversation in some ways.
I'm just like, I don't even know how to approach the conversation in some ways, but let's take this way.
But let's take it this way.
The government side and something that I think everybody has concerns about.
It's top of mind for some people and for others.
It comes after the end of middle of April, which is taxes.
The government likes to know, okay, what have you made?
What have you traded?
All of a sudden on a privacy chain, though, I can go make all this money and nobody knows what, how, I mean, what is it? And I've seen this
term float around on X and maybe it's not the right term. So I don't know, like, but like
anti-fed, it is an, like, I've heard people say it's anti-fed.
I'll start.
Tari is not anti-fed.
Tari is not here to enable people to break laws.
I think that's actually been one of the core issues with how privacy technology has been marketed in the industry.
So we talk about this all the time internally, but look, there are two ways to sell a knife,
right?
You can sell a really, really, really sharp knife as a great way to cut food.
Oh my God, it's Japanese steel, Hunter.
God, it's Japanese steel, Hunter.
It was sharpened by artisans using, you know, many thousand-year-old rocks that came from this volcano, right?
Like, or whatever, right?
And look at, you can cut anything with it, you know?
You see the videos.
Hunter, have you ever seen them market a knife like that as a murder weapon?
I have not. Okay. I a knife like that as a murder weapon? I have not.
Okay.
I have not seen that.
Okay.
Well, so to us, we don't sit here and say, gosh, privacy, that means break the law.
It's like, no, no.
If you owe taxes to the government, pay the taxes that you owe to the government like and and that's
important you know pay the taxes like follow the laws that you have in your jurisdiction whatever
those laws are that's not what tari is here just because you own a gun for hunting doesn't mean you
can go you know break the law with it that's a good point that's a good point yeah like like
they don't they don't advertise automobiles as murder murder
you know tools either but like look if you're driving down the street at 120 miles per hour
you know is there a shot that you're going to potentially kill someone the answer is yes
absolutely but that's not how it's promoted it's not how it's talked about so the way we think the
way we communicate this we say look i want you to imagine Tari as a Coachella poster. And you got
Ariana Grande or The Weeknd or my personal favorite
Rage Against the Machine as the headliner.
Then you got this random electronica tent in the corner.
Not the main one. I'm talking about the one on the corner, like the back by the
parking lot. Yeah, like back back by the parking lot. Yeah.
Like back by like Sahara.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I want you to imagine like the lowest rung on the totem pole.
There's some DJ.
It's like,
you know,
you know,
Reese's peanut butter cup,
you know,
or whatever the DJ name is for the DJ.
And they're,
they're like,
dude,
I get to play Coachella,
you know?
And,
and they're just, they're on the list, but it's not the headline.
Just because Tari is default confidential
doesn't mean it has to be the headline.
It doesn't have to be.
It's a feature.
It's a feature of the system.
And ultimately people are going to use it
how they're going to use it.
But we're not here saying that it should be used for ill intent or for people to do bad things or people to escape their obligations.
No, it's like it's built to keep you safe.
It's built to enable you to build successful businesses on the protocol.
It's built to enable you to do things that you couldn't previously do.
It's built to make you free, so you can actually be free and free in whatever your trading
decisions are, your choices on chain, whatever those choices are. That's what it's here for.
Just as much as the sharp knife is here to enable you to cut your stake,
not kill someone you don't like.
Right?
Makes sense.
Makes sense.
What a crap.
I was not expecting us to get onto that.
DJ, where do you come up with DJ?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Whatever.
whatever it is his brain just works that way uh on the idea of headliners and you know who's in
Whatever it is.
His brain just works that way.
who's in the disco tent down the street can you highlight i guess like as you guys are coming to
mainnet here you are going to have some some headliners that are are coming i assume and
you're gonna have some ip coming and builders etc can I mean, I don't know who you're allowed, if you can tell who that's going to be.
If not, can you explain, I guess, like the categories of what to expect and, you know,
what the early days Atari should look like? I mean, I have a view on this and that is um the the playbook that i've seen is um launch an evm clone and then um you
know take the token because you've got a giant token allocation and give it to a bunch of projects
to just fork their project and launch it on your evm clone and so then you end up with like oh well yes our version of uniswap
here's our version of you know like the usual suspects there's our nft marketplace etc etc it's
very boring and it's almost like you know if you walk into any casino in vegas all of the casinos
have got the same machines they've just got like different themes yeah you
know this one's like you know it's the 50 slot machine that's like water themed and then this
50 50 slot machine is avatar themed you know like it's not very exciting it's just different themes
it's different skins yep and tari is not evm compatible so that already means we're not going
to get the usual suspects.
Okay.
Nor are we trying to incentivize the usual suspects to bring their casinos over because that doesn't really lead to anything. What we want on Tari as contributors, we want to create a culture that embodies and empowers builders who build beautiful applications.
That's the first thing.
Beautiful applications that are easy to use
and build real-world applications.
You know, applications that actually, like,
touch the lives of ordinary people,
not applications where we're basically just empowering
the game of musical chairs that's happening in crypto where there's no new money coming in.
We're all just, it's just trading hands
and people are slowly peeling millions of dollars off.
Right.
I think, I also think that,
I mentioned it really briefly earlier in this conversation,
but I think there is a massive
adverse selection problem uh with regards to the application layers of these protocols um if
so i'll frame it to you this way if you look at the last four y combinator batches
how many crypto companies are there
in those batches?
It feels like it's gone up.
It's very small.
I can verify this
after this meeting, but
it's like a handful.
Max.
If the average Y Combinator batch is called
150-200 companies, something in that range, let's just say 200 to make an easy math. max so out of out of okay if the average y combinator batch is called i don't know 150 200
companies something in that range you know let's just say 200 to make a easy math so four they now
do four batches a year yep so that's 800 companies how many of them are in the crypto space i would
venture to bet you that it's less than 20 total for the year. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So why? Why is that? Well,
when you attend the, you know, the, I don't know if they still do the dinners on Friday nights,
but when I was in there, you know, we do these dinners on Friday nights, you know, the partners
are cooking up, you know, food for you or whatever. You know, the thing that you would
talk about with all the other founders and with the partners is how much you grew that week.
How much did you grow?
And if you're not hitting some kind of like meaningful double digit percentage, like growth percentage every week, you're kind of dead.
You're not going to be successful.
And every startup's in their own level.
Some people are pivoting and they got no growth for the week because they're just figuring shit out.
Right.
Some people are launching and some people,
so everyone's in their own trajectories.
But it's entirely like what YC teaches you
is that the number one thing that matters
is build something people want
and go find a fuckload of those people
as fast as you can and as cheaply as you can.
So that's the end.
It's like build something people want
and find them, you know, right? And, and it's really fucking hard to do that on salon
and Ethereum and all that. Like, it's hard because you've got to do all the distribution work
yourself. And, and you have two choices. Basically, you actually you only get to like,
vampire attack existing users, you basically have existing on-chain users
and look, it's a meaningful number of people.
I'm not going to say otherwise.
It's meaningful.
But then God forbid you want to try to attract net new people
and now you're routing them through a KYC loop of some kind
and your conversion rate is going to be trash.
So first principle says, well, okay,
well, how do you build native distribution
into the core infrastructure around
the protocol? How do you do it? Well, to us, it's very simple. You know, we have this mining
application called Tara Universe. It's beautifully designed. Well, the current version of it is very
simple. It's just about mining. But a future version of it is going to have a native app
launcher baked into the product. So now all of a sudden, you'll be able to
download Tari Universe, install it on your macro PC, run it with one click, start mining some Tari
tokens on your commodity hardware, and have access to all the apps right at your fingertips that are
built on Tari. You know, there is no app store for Solana. There's no app store for Ethereum. How do
you search? Hunter, during this call, there could have been an app that launched on Solana.
How the fuck would you and I know about it?
No idea.
We'd be like either chronically online, paying attention to the timeline.
Or you'd have to be in a Discord group.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
So basically what you have now is i think it's it's very interesting when a when
a builder comes to a protocol and says hey i want to build this app on your protocol
and you go cool man how can we help you and they go uh how about a grant you're kind of like
why are you really here you know like are you are you here just for the grant money? You know,
because you want to like pay your rent or like, like, what's the situation? And look, I'm not
saying that like investment isn't required. Obviously, like investment is required. But
grant grants are challenging because the grantee does not necessarily have upside in, in you
building something, right? Like, it should be a venture investment. It should be
like you as an angel investor, me as an angel investor, Rick as an angel investor saying, oh,
gosh, you got to build this amazing app. That's a great idea. And I really believe in you and your
team. And you know what? I want to own a piece of that. That's not called a grant. That's called
an investment. So to us, we think that the whole thing is kind of born wrong.
And if you actually say, no, we're going to build native distribution into the protocol from the
get, we have a North Star metric that the whole community can watch and see grow over time,
which is the number of miners that are mining Tari. It's literally on the goddamn block explorer.
If you go to the block explorer for Tari, it's like right there above the fold, the number of currently active miners.
So people can literally watch this number kind of expand over the course of time.
And then they can make their own decisions.
Do I want to build an app for this group of people?
Yes or no.
And if you do, it's open source.
Go get it.
No problem.
And then it's interesting because you can actually own your user base.
You can build a moat around your user base.
You can't be vampire attack.
You've got distribution baked into the system.
It becomes a much more.
I want you to put yourself.
Just put your angel hat on for a second here.
And evaluate two stories.
Story A is the one else to build on Solana or Ethereum.
You know they have no native distribution.
They're going to be using an airdrop mechanism or some kind of token to try to get users they're going to be paying their users
a fortune there's gonna be a bunch of symbols bunch of bots yeah very little like uh uh very
little retention okay or atari builder who comes to you and says hey hunter guess what i'm going
to be a featured app in the app launcher for the month of whatever. And look,
dude, look at the growth of miners, there's now like x 10s of 1000s or 100s 1000s, whatever the
number is minors, you can look at it yourself. And look, man, all those people who end up being my
customer, they're my customer, they're not going to be Rick's customer, they're my customer.
I think it creates a completely different type of conversation from an investment perspective.
And that creates a new generation, a new style, a new vibe of builder to want to come into
the Tari ecosystem versus all of the other protocols.
We've seen this a little bit, a flavor of this with abstract so far um who obviously luca and you guys have had conversations
and of course um but i think i think there's a lot to learn from okay when there is a central
hub to discover um and to find and to feel like okay uh this i didn't i didn't have to be in some
chat and have exclusive access it It was there for me.
It works.
It solves a huge issue of, okay, not only am I building technology,
but I also have to become a marketing company and figure out how I'm going to,
you know, go attack my,
basically you end up like having to figure out how do I attack my competitors
in some sense.
Yeah.
It changes things.
It changes things.
And you not only have to be a marketing company for your own product you have to market the chain too
which is it's like wait i woke up and i was like i'm gonna build an app on insert chain here and
it's about my app and my brand and my story and my product but oh i gotta it's so weird it's like oh but i gotta sell them on solana too
yeah it is weird unless unless you are like unless you're on like doing it on a chain where it's like
okay natively we all get it we like that chain you at the end of the day end up becoming a more
like a marketing arm for you know you're gonna build i'm not gonna name any act like they're not
good but like you know yeah the end of the day you're like okay you're going to build, I'm not going to name any act like they're not good, but like, you know, yeah. At the end of the day, you're like, okay, fuck, I have to convince
people to make a wallet here. Or if they're already on it to like, why,
why they should move more capital over or yeah.
It's that's right. There are misalignments and it's
very, very exciting to see that you guys have said
basically, fuck it.
We're doing it this way.
This is the better way.
We don't know if it's going to work.
Okay.
This is a set of experiments.
We're out here swashbuckling, trying to figure it out. But I think that I have a very, very strong belief,
very high degree of conviction that we're attacking the right problems. These are the
problems to attack. Make it easy for people to get into the damn thing. Yes. Make it private.
Keep people free
don't let everyone become a fucking hunter
we don't want everyone to be an NPC
do we?
it doesn't work that way
let people be free
and protect businesses
let businesses build valuable fucking things
it's not just about the value of the protocol
it's gotta be about the value of the things
built on the damn protocol
and then give the developers and artists and everyone else distribution let them celebrate
the out of them and make it about them and i don't know man it doesn't look this isn't rocket
scientists i'm not the smartest guy out there look i'm walking around with a high school diploma man okay i'm definitely not the smartest i'm not the smartest guy out there. Look, I'm walking around with a high school diploma, man.
Okay.
I'm definitely not the smartest.
I'm not the brightest bulb in the pack here.
It seems pretty obvious to me.
And we have a lot of conviction in it.
And that's why Tari exists.
Well, you are a smart person.
We all know that. You're very humble.
But you're also surrounded by very, very smart people and very dedicated builders.
That's true.
And that is true.
Look, guys, I've enjoyed this conversation so much, and I appreciate your time coming on here.
I'm excited for Atari.
Mainnet is weeks away, maybe days away.
I don't know.
At some point.
Weeks, weeks.
Yeah.
It's not a stealth launch. There's going to be ample notice. I don't know. At some point. Weeks. Weeks. Yeah. It's not a stealth launch.
There's going to be ample notice.
It's very important.
We're getting closer to being able to share the date with everyone.
It's weeks away, but the target is April.
It's still April.
And you guys will have a TGE at some point down the road, correct?
Well, the main...
So this is very interesting.
Tari L1 is proof of work,
so there's no TGE.
There is a Genesis block that's mined,
and from that moment in time,
people who are mining
are mining mainnet tokens.
So there's no magical room
where someone's going to hit the button,
and all the tokens now come into existence
and are born from the birth from someone's keyboard. It's like, oh my God, I made all the tokens.
It's like, no, there's a Genesis block that's mined. And then the community is securing the
network and getting paid a reward along the way, block by block by block by block. So
the network builds in a very organic authentic fashion
good clarification i know a lot of people were i always give messages like when when's tge what's
going on here so a clarification um i don't know if you guys have anything else that you want to
leave leave us with or any alpha insights hints at what to expect expect as we get closer to mainnet and the future.
Rick, anything cross your mind?
No, I mean, nothing.
Like, you know, Tari's coming soon
or launching mainnet soon.
There's a lot of fun still to be had on testnet
before launch.
And, you know, like pitch up, help us,
and let's have fun.
Let's build something cool.
Yeah, I just want to say thank you to Hunter for having us.
It's a super fun conversation, bro.
We love you, really appreciate you.
We're huge fans of you and very grateful to be here.
And we want to give a huge thank you to the whole Tari community.
You know, mining on the testnet is for people.
Some people have been mining on the testnet since October.
And it's, this is hard.
Like this is something that no one has done before.
So the testnet has some like ups and downs.
It's not, look, it's Hunter.
It's not like we can just spin up an aws instance and and fork op and be like yo you know here we are you know it's like i like i said
again you guys haven't just gone and been like okay we're gonna clone what's been done already
and make it five percent better you guys are you are venturing into new territory and having to go
back and take even stuff that's been built before, like, you know, the pool has been done,
but not like this. 100%.
So, look, we're building on the shoulders
of giants here. We're not
suggesting that we, you know, invented
time travel,
but this specific
form factor has not been done before
and has many, many, many
unique challenges. And so,
we're very deeply appreciative of the whole
Tari community for rolling with the punches, continuing to help us battle test this test
net. This is a real test net. We're all testing it together and making it better and better and
better by the day so that, you know, when main net is here, it's ready. And it's, it's, it's,
you know, always going to be a work in progress, but it's in a place where we all feel really,
really good about it as a community. So, so yeah, we're just very, very thankful. And
this is so much fun being able to contribute to a project like this with, with Rick and
all the other contributors and the community. So that's it guys. I can't wait. Obviously I'm a fan
of what you guys are doing. Um, you guys have been vouched for by a lot of people that i highly respect which i think i
should make that clear um and i'm just excited i think innovation needs to happen we need to think
contrarian in the space and that's what you're doing um if you haven't you're listening please
go check them out go find them on twitter at tari um download, just experience it. I think that is part of also why this conversation
is so important. Just because it's different, just even if you're like, oh, I'd never use that,
or I don't, just go experience what these guys have built. Because it's, for me at least,
it made me think of some things differently. I think you guys have put so much time into the UI
and the user experience.
Again, even if you've heard this and you're like, I don't get it yet, please take the time to check it out. Guys, thank you so much for coming on. We'll have to have you back on after mainnet. I'd
love to have an update conversation and get to know more once things are underway. But I'm looking forward
to it. And again, just thank you.
Awesome, Hunter. Have a wonderful day, man.
Thank you so much for having us and
we'll see you really soon. Amazing. Well, thank you everybody
for tuning in and we'll catch you
on the next one. Cheers, guys.
