158 - You're Not Bullish Enough on NFTs with Punk6529

Transcript

in an extreme example people go and die for their natural flat in less extreme examples people go tailgate every week in a football game and other less extreme examples people will pay ten thousand dollars for a watch from a 50 watch will do the same thing and I'm not here to tell you this is bad this is fundamental to human Nations how we are identity matters Community matters emotion matters nfts are the moments where we can take all of those feelings from an off chain World punching welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet Finance this is how to get started how to get better and how to front run the opportunity this is Ryan Sean Adams and I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless guys the most well-known pseudonymous

brand in crypto is on the podcast today punk6529 that is this person's Punk number not his nation-state name is the ID of a crypto Punk uh he says on today's episode the nfts will represent every single digital non-fungible token that exists and there's going to be a lot of those a few benefits and takeaways from listening to this episode number one he talks about the benefits of using an nft backed pseudonym instead of his state name number two we talk about why the freedom to transact is an essential human Liberty one that will lose without crypto number three we talk about how the metaverse is just a visualization

layer for nfts number four we talk about why nfts are more important than defy this is according to punk6529 of course he says nfts are probably the most important thing crypto has produced thus far David in this episode he calls himself probably the most bullish single individual in the world on nfts uh what's your take on that and your take on this episode as folks get into it yeah what does it mean to be the world's most bullish person on nfts I think if I put myself inside of punk6529 shoes he just means that the reason to Mint an nft the reasons will be so broad so infinite that almost an infinite number

of nfts will eventually become minted and he'll walk you through the thought process I think in this episode uh punk6529 really takes his time to fully on unpack a thought and so there's really only four or five questions throughout this whole entire podcast but pay attention to each one because they do layer upon each one as they go we first start talking about what does it mean to have a digital identity Punk 6529 as a digital identity in the metaverse is one of the foremost people exploring the worlds of online only identities and then we get into one of his first principles tweet threads that he put together the freedom to transact and how the ability to transact financially in the world is a is a statement of self-expression which leads

into how NFC T's can also help people Express themselves so pay attention as we walk through some of these subject matters because if you're if you lose each one you'll start to lose some of the benefits of layering each one on top of each other is what I have to say to the listener I really I really like the way this guest thinks um you know one of those first principles thinkers as well and David I think we've got a lot to discuss during the debrief like particularly this idea of nfts being more bullish than maybe the rest of crypto I mean he went as far as to say it's the reason crypto exists almost in a way and of course premium subscribers you can access that debrief show right now on the bankless premium feed if you're listening to that if you're not a

premium subscriber click the link in the show notes and upgrade and you can get access to that David this episode is also coming out as an nft collectible so on the day that this is released the Monday that it's released you have an opportunity to Mint this episode and collect it so if Punk 6529 is bullish on nfts maybe this episode as an nft is also bullish question mark I think it's definitely fitting his thesis and we're definitely proving it out yeah we're minting it and seeing what happens so uh so far that the community has been really excited by these and and you can pick that up if you're interested later guys we're going to get right to the episode with punk6529 but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made

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best home for your nfts Phantom has a complete set of features to optimize your nft experience pin your favorites hide your uglies burn the spam and also manage your nft sale listings from inside the wallet Phantom is of course a multi-chain wallet but it makes chain management easy displaying your transactions in a human readable format with automatic warnings for malicious transactions or phishing websites Phantom has already saved over 20 000 users from getting scammed or hacked so get on the Phantom waitlist and be one of the first to access the multi-chain beta there's a link in the show notes or you can go to Phantom dot app waitlist to get access in late February hey bankless Nation if you're listening to this it's because you're on the free Bank list RSS feed did you know that

there is an ad-free version of Bank list that comes with a bankless premium subscription no ads just straight to the content but that's just one of many things that a premium subscription gets you there's also the token report a monthly bullish bearish neutral report on the hottest tokens of the month and the regular updates from the token report go into the token Bible your first stop shop for every token worth investigating in crypto bankless premium also gets you a 30 discount to the permissionless conference which means it basically just pays for itself there's also the airdrop guide to make sure you don't miss a a drop in 2023 but really the best part about bankless premium is hanging out with me Ryan and the rest of the bankless team in the Inner Circle Discord only for premium members want the alpha check out Ben the analyst

Degen pit where you can ask him questions about the token report got a question I've got my own q a room for any questions that you might have at bank list we have huge things planned for 2023 including a new website with login with your ethereum address capabilities and we're super excited to ship what we are calling Bank list 2.0 soon TM so if you want extra help exploring the frontier subscribe to bankless premium it's under 50 cents a day and provides a wealth of knowledge and support on your journey West I'll see you in the Discord bankless Nation excited to introduce you to our next guest this is a pseudo Anonymous guest goes by the Alias Punk 6529 on Twitter he's a leader in the crypto space and he's heavily focused on the world of nfts the metaverse he's

also known for putting out some extremely Punchy and thoughtful Twitter threads I think some of these threads reveal how he thinks about the crypto space particularly from a first principles perspective uh Punk 6529 it is a pleasure to have you on Bank list how you doing today oh I'm doing great and it's a pleasure to be here and I'm glad we're able to uh get the scheduled I'm looking forward to it yeah I know we've been wanting to schedule this for for a while um ever since I started kind of reading more and more of your just Banger tweet threads about the space and we'll talk about a few of those as we get in but I think the first question on my mind and maybe some listeners mind is a little bit about you so you're pseudo-anonymous of course you have a voice distorer in

this interview this conversation that maybe listeners uh have noticed what can you tell us about yourself about who you are Punk and uh what you care about um well I can share the following I think professionally I have I was historically and the uh Finance industry on the um Consulting industry um but then I took a shift quite some time ago into crypto and certain other areas and so it's been a long time since I've done those those

first two things and I have spent a lot of time on you know initially Bitcoin and then more broadly cryptocurrency since 2013. um back then was when I first summer 2013 is when I first really dug into Bitcoin I had come across it in 2011 and that I'm really pay any attention to it but in summer of 2013 I dug into it some more and I was convinced from them that the big idea here wasn't that we can now do wire transfers faster or cheaper or

that you had Global money good settlement all of these things are amazing things right they're great but that it was a very much bigger idea than that that you had now for the first time a second way you can store data now we've had a database and now we have the proper blockchain and that this was not only a major breakthrough in distributed systems a major breakthrough in computer science that would have all types of technical offshoots But ultimately you know it's an underappreciated fact that technology platforms which

their operators might be operating them mutually you know a database administrator a software developer the head of a firm that has databases and software develop run software Developers is almost certainly just trying to run their business and just trying to you know compete in the marketplace and that keeps everyone very busy and it's hard running any type of business but a world that digitizes has the internet and is structured on databases actually ends up centralizing and very oddly you know what people would think of as

back-end technology choices that you know nobody in the social political sociological field has thought about for one second actually end up reshaping The Contours of society and this was clear to me back then I thought it was going to be a 30 40-year pathway before we actually saw the full potential of what we can do with uh decentralized logical distributed blockchains with public cryptocurrencies does whatever you call them it's basically all the same thing and the

horizontal technology like this takes time to get integrated I think it was going to be a long haul but it was very important and so August of 2013 I swear there was a meaningful shift and things I spent time on I still spend time on some other things but uh I have spent the non-trivial a lot of my time since 2013 broadly on this topic six five two nine you uh you say a lot of words that always get me really excited especially when you say

re-architecting the fabric of society and and things like this and I think this is definitely a topic we I'd love to explore with you but I I first want to get into that conversation through you as an identity because the world of crypto is no stranger to pseudo-anonymous people we have pseudo Anonymous people on crypto Twitter all the time but I think you've really taken your digital identity further than most people have and you see this in the Tweet threads that you write where you refer to yourself as six five two nine um and you you have a whole brand around 6529 you have this voice modifier so you're St you still are a very public identity the identity is there and it's

very digital because of the nature of How It's manifested on the internet and it's also extremely Anonymous as in like you do a very good job kind of covering up your tracks you use a voice modifier you don't slip up and so I kind of want to explore just the why behind the digital identity aspects like what why lean so heavily into this world of digital identities and perhaps unpack why crypto has the tools behind crypto that has enabled you to actually have a digital identity sure um I'm gonna go forward I'm gonna go backwards on this so the the reason I started doing this turned

out to be only part of the reasons that I actually ended up continuing doing it and then I actually think it's not that crazy in a historical context but let's let's start with the basics I started getting very intrigued by nfts the Second Time Around in kind of late 2020. I I had of course up to the nfts in 2017 and I think like most people with my profile was like okay that's cool someone made like a cute game for kids or whatever it's crypto Kitty is fine I mean this isn't the important stuff I mean great I'm glad people are experimenting on a blockchain and that's great but who cares and in

late 2020 I started thinking well you know I've missed something here this is a much bigger idea and I started getting involved and I bought an nft and then I bought another nft and then I bought a lot of nfts and I was I had seen folks like g-money and punk4156 that said oh here's our my pfp is a profile picture I said all that that kind of makes sense I mean if we're going to go to some type of hybrid digital space it makes sense that people are going to have profile pictures or avatars later when we're in 3D and it also makes sense

that not all of these are going to be your LinkedIn photo with your nice suit on or something right like why would they have to be that and it makes sense that they could be something you own right like the fundamental idea behind Bitcoin is you can own something that you'll actually own and provably own it and versus just uploading a JPEG to Twitter because you can do that right you can but you can be sued Anonymous on Twitter and not on an MST right you can just upload any random picture

oh there's something to this so yeah this is my picture but I actually own this picture and I provably owned this picture but oh this is this seems like an emerging um thing that people are doing let's try and I have this General approach to technology the when you're not sure you should just try it it's most errors on the technology side like most people that start missing changes in technology is because they try to read about it and figure out by reading about it if it

makes sense and my experience is that just doesn't work like you can't read about in summer 2013 about Bitcoin and so about does Bitcoin make sense you have to download a node and send someone a Bitcoin maybe another side of the world and then you can say like oh wow that that was amazing I can't believe that just happened right and you can't read about oh look people you know with crypto Bros have lost their minds again and they're spending a lot of money on cartoons and it's probably some type of scam I mean all this stuff right like let's read about it that's what your takeaway is I

don't know okay people use pfp avatars let's use a pfp avatar and see what it feels like all right so it started like that now pretty shortly thereafter I realized another thing which I sort of knew but I didn't really know it until I started treating a 6529 that like you and I think like anyone have a variety of interests of more or less differentiated you know here is where I like to have dinner and here's my favorite pizza or whatever right and at a first approximation nobody

cares about anything right my family cares my friends care I don't think you would have invited me on Bank list to tell you where my favorite pizza is because I don't think my views are particularly differentiated on that topic right and is it Domino's Punk is that why yeah exactly you know well they're on the flip side I have a Facebook account right and I have LinkedIn account another Twitter account on the weather like pre-existing identity and the flip side is also true if all of a sudden I started spamming everyone there 47 times a day with nft posts

you know questions might be raised about my you know mental stability right like what happened to him like and so the I think it's awkward I'm gonna come here and talk about nfts and I'm going to continue the rest of Life I'll go on Facebook and like like my friend's post because they got married or something right right and that sounds very simple and it sounds very obvious but it turns out that it's a very big deal I feel I check in and check out of two different ecosystems the ecosystem one is my ecosystem before

July 2021 when I started putting a 65 tonight I'm includes my prince to professional life my friends my family you know where I eat pizza etc etc etc and that's normal it hasn't changed right it's fine and it's real and I have a variety of relationships and they're all real and important and nft Twitter and Discord there's now a completely other ecosystem and community of people some of whom I know who they some of whom are eponymous some of whom are pseudonymous some of whom are pseudonymous and they happen to know who they are now because we've

agreed to meet or what have you some of whom I work with formerly some of whom I work with informally some of whom I kind of feel sometimes I mean I get on Twitter and it's like going to Cheers but I'm like a massive scale there's like the same a thousand characters and I know who's gonna agree with me and it was gonna yell at me and even though some of the people are yelling at me it's comforting right like it's a coherent world and one of the worlds is even in a world of Zoom is still a little bit more physically based and the nft Twitter boy is not at all physically based I mean

the one thing that is for sure the case I never have any idea where anyone lives or where they might be from time to time right but what it turns out it doesn't matter at all like the big breakthrough this is fun let's try it but the big breakthrough is I have noticed no difference if anything a positive difference in how well I can formally or informally collaborate well a bunch of people around the world where in most cases or in half the cases all I know about them is their cartoon character right there's jpeg

and it doesn't matter because they're repeat players very coherent personality and I can model them just like I model people in a physical work environment and I can interact with them and that was a little surprising to be honestly then I wouldn't say I expected that at first then I think there is this is a bit of a crypto bug naughty feature it you know I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how this can be fixed I think it's actually fixable there's probably an aspect now that's security related you know I have a lot of nfts both directly through the fun

someone could the nfts are different because they're on chain right maybe I do or maybe I don't have a lot of uh fear you'd never know right it could be it coinbase or Finance or somewhere Unchained you'd never know but when I'm running around saying oh look I bought this really expensive credenza isn't it beautiful everyone knows I own a very expensive friends right and many other expensive nfts or are somehow related with um other pools of those nfts and there's probably something around is

that super great from a security perspective if awesome people can like you know walk up to my front door probably not now it's interesting because if they walk up to my front door it's not like I have the keys here but how do you provably prove that to someone so they don't hit you over the head all right well that's it's an interesting security flaw and I think it's solvable but the the way to solve it isn't that you're somehow gonna hide that you own nfts I mean nfts have a huge identity component they're fun but you have to be able to incredibly say like look you can beat me over the head but it's not going to matter like they're they're somewhere else right and and this is something that's an infrastructure topic that'll be solved

by multi-cigs you know rfts are in a multicent to begin with but like Minnesota multisigs with known signers so you can say look it's this guy or it's this even Bank it doesn't matter if they're only one signatory doesn't matter right um so you can actually sell the camera yeah sure there's a lot of stuff there and it's protected by cryptography and you can't get it out of my bedroom right like so and then this is the going forward the interesting thing is you look back I remember being on bulletin boards 20 years ago 15 years ago um I just got some different things and I realized I didn't know the

state ID of any of those people right that just had handles sure they didn't also have a cartoon picture but their handles weren't John Smith social security number 93 527-4343 it was like you know Doom breaker 11. and that worked fine right and this worked fine and I'm often asked by sometimes if I'm speaking to a conventional audience the starting one is like oh my God this is so weird this person's coming here and my what I tell them is you know what

it's not weird at all you're all gonna do it it's all gonna happen in the next three or five or ten or fifteen years you will also do this because there is people are multifaceted and people present differently online already right like what you say on LinkedIn and how you present on LinkedIn and how you present on Twitter and how you present on Instagram and I present on Facebook are probably different and this is a natural next step there and in a more genuine authentic and provable manner without the nft you don't know if 6529 is this account right like the nft there's only one Punk

six five tonight the jpeg they're gonna be unlimited right you can still attack the jpeg you can't still attack the nft so it's probably a pretty long answer for what you expected but um I think I was here that that's good I mean that's very helpful I I almost think you you gave sort of the case for why people should experiment with uh with digital identity handles and particularly nfts this one part separation of brand it's another part kind of a an experiment uh it's another part um your opsec uh protecting your security uh and it's another part just like if you actually want to understand

this crypto space you actually have to use it you know I haven't said this in a while but we used to say David at bank list like um don't trust anybody's opinion on crypto who hasn't used uniswap right it's just because like I mean if you're not actually using the stuff in immersed in technology how the hell do you know anything about it you don't know what you're investing and you don't know what you're talking about and so I also see what you're doing with um 6529 as kind of a testing of nfts and identity online uh we want to get back to kind of go to the nft topic and um but before we do you said something which I I found interesting that the purpose of spitting up this Twitter

account 6529 and going uh Anonymous was released so that you could talk to nfts and you didn't have to like um I don't know annoy your your friend's social network or your family on on Instagram or Facebook with with these sorts of tweets um as you're talking about nfts though you're also unlocking I think something something deeper I remember a a thread from earlier last year that really impacted me uh something that you you put out there and the topic was about freedom to transact and you start the Tweet thread this way I don't know if you recall this from February uh 17th of 2022. there are no other constitutional rights and

substance without freedom to transact no other constitutional rights and substance without freedom to transact and you go on you describe the other constitutional freedoms that we have such as rights to speech assembly religion that people are innocent until proven guilty that the state cannot punish people without due process most western Liberal Liberal democracies have this embedded in some form of a constitution you say all of that is meaningless unless we have the freedom to transact we go on further in your thread and sort of emphasize how crypto helps give individuals the freedom to transact

and how important that this Freedom actually is uh you can't even have freedom of speech without freedom to transact I want to get back to kind of the why you're in crypto Punk like what why are you spending so much time on nfts because um I think somebody might look look at your account some days and just be like well you know uh Punk likes getting wealthy you know and there's massive investment opportunities in crypto FTS are super fast growing and uh you know that's why he's in the space I'm sure there's an element of Truth there but I also get the sense that you care deeply about some of the values in shrined in crypto and being being here in the early days um that must have been why you started to enter in at least in no small part

sure it was a database uh that that was new but also it was a freedom giving database can you talk about the values underlying crypto and in particular this idea that unless individuals on the internet have the freedom to transact they actually don't have any other rights okay that was about 17 questions so um let me let's start with freedom to transact because that's a general crypto point then we'll talk about nfts and why we're here but the freedom to transact point is the same point that I said at the

beginning it's the 2013 point um what is happening is a progressive erosion of Freedom that is happening very quietly very much in the background without anyone particularly thinking about him and it is being driven it's the technological equivalent of the medium is the message and the medium in this case is large-scale Big Data companies that have Network effects right and then secondarily in some countries governments

um I'd like to illustrate this with a trivial example and an example of I don't think I've heard anyone other than me ever use so that you don't get into very high-minded topics it's not a trivial attempt I used to live in New York and New York has yellow caps and you hail them off the street and you hail them off the street and the yellow taxi stops and you jump in and they take you wherever they're taking you give them 20 bucks and you get out right and the only way someone can stop you from doing that

is by arresting you right like you can be prevented there's no particular way that any actor including the state can say hey Ryan you're not allowed to use a taxi anymore right that's just not a thing that they'd have to come you'd have to be deprived of your freedom emotion to be deprived of that you have to be because we have strong constitutional protections you have to be charged with a specific crime and there's a probable cause and you'll get a lawyer and a jury of your peers and all of those things right now I think the market sure now of uber and Lyft in New York and now that the taxi cabs have their own app I think it's like 50 then it's growing and

someday it's going to be all of them right like someday everything is going to be app intermediated now what is needed for Uber to say I don't want Ryan using my service anymore absolutely nothing it's a private service you have zero rights whatsoever to be on Uber's servers to shail taxis using Uber system I mean arguably correctly right that's private property it's their property it's not your property and so if you violate their terms of service but honestly if the CEO of uber wakes up and says I don't like the look of that guy's face you're off the platform no due process no what have you

because something that was decentralized in the physical world killing a taxi in the physical world is a decentralized exercise there's taxes walking around and people walking around in cash right that's how New York Works in all periods until maybe I don't know five eight years ago and it's fully decentralized it is now becoming centralized with a centralized chalkboard okay and you might be blocked for purely private reasons or as we have seen on Twitter which is not the least surprising thing I have or you know the government might lean on private choke points right and maybe

within their constitutional parameters I don't know I mean we don't let them get into all these taxes right into these Movers okay thankless after all kind of sketching that's right he works a bank with her sketchy and what's happening is that is happening everywhere Google has centralized media right Facebook is centralized interpersonal communication Twitter has centralized another version of that um eBay a centralized under the yard sale plus uh YouTube is a huge percentage Now video

communication and so you take all these things at work decentralized and they become centralized that's one bucket the second bucket that has gone along with this and it's one of these things that there's nothing wrong with it per se it's just when you put it all together you end up with a weird outcome is Post 9 11 the US has put an incredible amount of effort into AML kyc and this is one of those things I am actually not like some weird Anarchist thing I do not believe that AML and kyc in principle is inappropriate right but we have over a 20-year periods very visible to me because I have I take

interest in the inners of the financial systems we have gone from a point where cash was viewed neutrally to cash is now viewed with suspicion there is no chance cash could have gotten launched today if it didn't already exist right let's say cash did not exist and then so once again Federal government's going to come up with this really cool thing it's a piece of paper there's no kyc there's no AML you can take it with you there's no record of what you're doing if you don't have to like uh kyc your counterparting you don't have to you don't have to send reports you can just use it but never get watched right

and it is progressively being pulled out of the system there's some European countries that now you know cash transactions over two to three thousand dollars are illegal now they have a reporting requirement they're just illegal you can't do the money right and so the net effect is being shaped by the technology stack the reason this is happening now and not in 1975 it was impossible in 1975 to have a global cell phone intermediated smart app intermediate detectors and so tax is because you couldn't do

the global part because the global part needed first of all the internet and then you know high performance Computing of some type right without that you couldn't do it and so taxes were decentralized now taxes aren't just centralized New York they're centralized around the world like you get banned from Uber you're banned from Ataxia many many cities no I'm not gonna get banned for Uber I have a 4.7 rating whatever why why does this matter this is only for weirdos and annoying people that's not the point right the point is this trend is showing no signs of solving it is not dramatically changing from day to day

but every day the last 20 years it's going in One Direction only and what happens at the end the end state of this is you will have X firms where X is not a number like 13 522 but a number uh 20 or 50 or maybe it's a hundred and why government services which is a number less than 10 which might include cbdc's and all of those very large databases will intermediate everything and once that choke point exists once that Honeypot exists

there is a danger it will be exploited the I spent quite a bit of time I'm in Europe right now there's a fighting at the time talking to a major governmental institutions in Europe and the logic is like oh look once we have cbdc this is going to be great we're gonna end um my wondering and we're gonna end crime we're gonna end tax evasion and in fact we're going to end all types of social ills because we'll encourage you know eating vegetarian food and eating less meat and all this stuff right and and that's well intentioned for most of these people

it's just no thinking about the second order effects and the second order effects is that well before we end all crime and enter a golden age of happiness someone will gain a whole some very ambitious politician will gain control of the Central Banking note for their country and when it's election time their opponents won't be able to buy a tomato because you're going to have this unreviewable system that can instantly programmatically statistically shut down large numbers of people

and if you can shut down transactions you shut down everything else right I had been saying this before the episodes of cat in fact when I I would say this example it is how I'd say hungry be like oh yeah I can maybe sort of Imagine hungry that might happen with Hungary or turkey or Russia or one of those places and it wouldn't happen to the United States of course whatever and you know for the purposes of this example the Canadian example is perfect Canada does very obviously not a dictatorship like I don't think Justin Trudeau was some evil leader or anything do I think the truckers I suspect my

political views are probably borderline the opposite of the truckers right I suspect I would dislike almost all the truckers when you find them extremely annoying right none of that's the important part right the important part is like you know a leader who is a you know fairly liberal and like Canadians are all super nice right gets into a pickle thinks about it for a little bit you know not the first thing you know what I'm just gonna like cut off their Banking and the banking of everyone around them people have to go home and that's what happened they had to go home and the problem isn't I mean I have a lot of liberal friends are jerks like

now I understand that that's not you've got to think of fresh principles because like tomorrow this could be I don't know black lives matters protesting and Donald Trump's back in offices hello it's a great idea I learned this from Justin Trudeau want to freeze everyone's bank account the man you're not gonna like it anymore this is the end of the thing is all of this stuff is running outside of due process right the whole AML complex is the AML complex did it start with good intentions yeah I think so right they're trying to prevent terrorist Finance I think so but then it grows and grows and grows at getting bureaucracy and you know it runs outside I mean you if

some Bank says you know you can't have a bank account here I've restored you you're too sketchy you know you're in a podcast called bankless that sounds very problematic you can no longer bank at you know first Third Bank of Idaho or whatever right well you can't go to court and get your bank account back all right it's just gone and this in this infrastructure that is getting set up bit by bit when it's getting set up not because Business Leaders of America are evil that's always happening it is an

artifact of the technology that is available to us and that technology the internet leads to network effects everyone knows is right all VCU is like oh I want to buy the business with that what investment business Network investors are all going to get very rich right because the distribution the fact that you have zero cost Distribution on the internet means that if you're slightly better you'll win all the business right Amazon wins everyone's business and so you'll end up instead of having 2 000 bookstores you have one right I'm simplifying but it's that right and so you get these Network effects and those Network effects in a digital economy become sharp points and so exactly in the opposite way

if crypto survives all crypto has to do with survive if crypto survives its own network effects its own technology architecture its own way it shapes its social environments will be a huge calculator because the way you know there is no CEO of Bitcoin right there is no CEO of ethereum and the council close right but he's not really the CEO right nobody can prevent you he cannot decide oh 6529 can't use ethereum for this purpose it's not within my corporate strategy

right it's not like the CEO of Google and so the fundamental permission lessons of architecture will lead over time to significant different and in fact the opposite of what I'm worried about uh social structures around it and that's very very good and as I believed before nifties right the freedom to transact stuff was a pre-nft Theory it does not involve any nfts and um I think it's really important to be honest I'll take a break there and then we'll talk about it I mean look as do we that's why this show is called is called bankless right uh no intermediaries no

in between you and and kind of the money system anybody can open a Bitcoin address and eat the dress anywhere in the world all they need is an internet connection um I mean that that's powerful social technology and I think I guess the point you're you're making is that all of this is happening in the background and it's not necessarily a kind of Nefarious Conspiracy set of actors causing it it's just the network effect of the internet and digitization and if we're not careful if we don't establish decentralized protocols and embed that in our internet protocols and kind of our internet Constitution then we may inadvertently lead to a world that is

incredibly centralized and Incredibly fragile in fact that's the world that we are moving towards and I am surprised like you 6529 that more people don't think in first principles don't think as the you know founding fathers the framers of the Constitution originally thought about balance of powers and what we should include in the Bill of Rights and these sorts of things and they just seem to be thinking about the um the first order consequences and nothing else Downstream uh I feel like we've lost that but I feel like crypto's preserved it and indeed it may be the case that and I think it probably is going to be the case that there will only be two types of money in the world free money and crypto

and then controlled money everything that comes out of the nation state but but let's uh let's switch gears a little bit towards nfts because uh you're right I think I embedded about 17 questions my earlier question we talked about the freedom to transact and how that underscores all of the the values that interest you in crypto um but there's more to the story here uh what about nfts do you see is there is there a link here continue the story if you will yeah I actually think nfts and this is probably the most controversial thing I believe and it's certainly the most controversial thing I believe among long time crypto people I think nfts are

are Best Shot or if if not our best shot an equally good shot is everything else combined and achieving this decentralization that's why I started 65 tonight and I don't know what the thesis is doing uniswap is the largest on-chain Marketplace for self-custody digital assets uniswap is of course a decentralized exchange but you know this because you've been listening to bankless but did you know that the uniswap web app has a shiny new Fiat on-ramp now you could go directly from Fiat in your bank to tokens in defy inside of uniswap not only that but polygon arbitrum and optimism layer twos are supported right out of the game but

that's just D5 uniswap is also an nft aggregator letting you find more listings for the best prices across the nft world with uniswap you can sweep floors on multiple nfts and unisop's Universal router will optimize your gas fees for you uniswap is making it as easy as possible to go from bank account to bankless assets across ethereum and we couldn't be more thankful for having them as a sponsor so go to app.uniswap.org today to buy sell or swap tokens and nfts arbitrim1 is pioneering the world of secure ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the web 3 landscape hundreds of projects have already deployed on arbitrum 1 producing

flourishing D5 and nft ecosystems with a recent addition of Arboretum Nova gaming and social dapps like Reddit are also now calling Arboretum home both arbitrim1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive familiar and fully evm compatible on arbitrum both Builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees with arboretum's recent migration to arborstone Nitro it's also now 10 times faster than before visit arbitrim.io where you can join the community dive into the developer docs Bridge your assets and start building your first app with arbitrum experience web 3 development the way it was meant to be secure fast cheap and friction free how

many total airdrops have you gotten this last bull market had a ton of them did you get them all maybe you missed one so here's what you should do go to earnify and plug in your ethereum wallet and earn if I will tell you if you have any unclaimed airdrops that you can get and it also does poapps and mintable nfts any kind of money that your wallet can claim earnify will tell you about it and you should probably do it now because some airdrops expire and if you sign up for earnify they'll email you anytime one of your wallets has a new airdrop for it to make sure that you never lose an airdrop ever again you can also upgrade to earn five premium to unlock access to airdrops that are beyond the basics and are able to set reminders for more wallets and for just under 21 a

month it probably pays for itself with just one airdrop so plug in your wallets at earnify and see what you get that's e-a-r-n-i dot f i and make sure you never lose another airdrop can I ask you first though I I just want to push back because people are hearing that at the beginning of 2023 and I think the uh 2022 um nfts have left that year with kind of a stain at least in the mind space of what I would call Mainstream so if you go to your friends 6529 that aren't on crypto Twitter that don't even know who 6529 is they just know you as you whoever you are in the real world and you ask them about nfts my guess is they're going to have a negative response to just even

the term nfts scams frauds pump and dumps all these sorts of things now here you are at the beginning of 2023 and you're saying that um this is fundamental that this is extraordinary technology that this is good for Humanity uh your viewpoint on this hasn't changed or been shaped At All by 2022 no of course sir like let's let's start with I have been broadly speaking and in Fairly public ways promoting these principles since summer 2013.

do you know how many times I've been told crypto is a scam do you know how many times I've been told crypto is all wash trading it's money laundering it's a pump and dumb ethereum is a scammer it's a pre-mine it's a blah blah blah blah blah I mean my view of my average friend's capability to think extensively about ethereum is zero I I value my average non-crypto views views on nfts about as much as I value it on ethereum which is literally absolutely nothing they're completely clueless so the fact that they read that where money laundering monkeys or

whatever they think we're doing is no different than in 2013 when they thought that for some strange reason 2013 6529 had lost his mind and was super excited about buying a tulip bulb bubble that only heroin dealers care about and since I'm not you know like a heroin user or anything like that they basically thought it had lost my mind or had been like caught up in some multi-level marketing scheme or some Ponzi so the idea that that has any impact on me in 2023 this year this is the classic this is the classic argument against

crypto the thing that I find funnier is a lot of people who believed in Bitcoin couldn't get there to believe in us here and a lot of people who lived believed in ethereum can't get there to believe in nfts I am not surprised that my area friend who has used none of these Technologies thinks that have teaser scam What cracks me up is that people who use ethereum or maybe defy and not just nfts sometimes try to convince me that nfts are a scam and I'm like you looked yourself in the mirror have you actually like are you do you have any slightest self-awareness of what industry you're in if you have the

slightest self-awareness that like literally every single person says has said the exact same thing about every stage of crypto development from the time they've heard of Bitcoin it's all a scam of bubble a pump and dump it's over it's done it's dead why would anyone touch that stuff if they cared about their reputation ever again I am a hardened veteran of being held up the idea of it like people might have read something in I don't know the new Republicans don't like nfts now who cares this means nothing okay so so so let's let's talk about the Hawaii yeah let's do that let's see that it does it does interest me that people in

cryptos tend to get off the train in a different uh different station right and some people get off on bitcoin some people on D5 some are still riding the train you know I think for for me and many bankless listeners we sort of embraced all of it so far um but there might be a future stop on the you know on the on the on the train uh that we we get off in our net able to proceed um but but give us the case I found nfts was a huge blocking point for a lot of people I know who were very sophisticated about crypto I mean people who were mining Bitcoin in 2012 and like have a portfolio of 50 fungible tokens and no like obscure side chains of

whatever like super deep technical like crypto lovers should nfts and they're like and I understand it sounds like that one's doing something like okay whatever that's cute but like who cares like why why I mean it's just a JPEG I'm not into art oh why would I want this like why would I want this kid stuff right like why no this isn't important what's important is automated market makers that's really important that's the important stuff right and actually think in practice it's going to be the opposite and I'll explain why you explain that so let's take it this is a multi-part Theory uh but and you kind of have to like take

the parts together for it to make sense the first part I have spent an awful lot of time onboarding people to crypto for lost like an awful lot and the whole period I knew the following I was in the pre-product market fit era of a technology why because you're just talking about the technology ethereum is proof of stake and Bitcoin is proof of work Solana does more transactions per second but it's more centralized you know who cares about this nobody this is literally like saying imagining people are going to say look at this

amazing New York application it's called Instagram did you know that they're using python on the back end literally not a single person has adopted Instagram because it uses python Instagram does use Python I've checked but who cares right you don't get to a consumer Scale app by telling people about your technology stack right and all of crypto pre-nfts is literally just harassing regular human beings with your technology stack now I like learning about proof of stake and proof of work and how mining Works forever but I'm a computer nerd right like that's different no normal human being cares

about the stuff they all fall asleep a second you start talking about it it's like it's like those ads you see in the airports of like should you use an Oracle database or IBM database Solutions faster and those are really just targeted to the ctOS right and say yes no one else cares So when you buy a crypto book so stick with the exam right everyone knows it's settled on the ethereum blockchain right everyone knows that ethereum but I bought my product to use proof of work and now use proof of stake but it's not why you're buying it I didn't buy the one with the cool hoodie because of some technical at all but these are cool right like for example oh I love these cool blue glasses I like that color

and everyone else that I got into this with is actually talking for the first time one layer up the Technologies in the background doing something you know terms of all the things it cost to give give you confidence that you actually own that token but the whole discussion in nft space is that the quote unquote application letter and I have had people who I've known for a long time who have shown no interest in learning how pancake swap works and why should they be like oh yeah find that one for me it's cool I'd

like to I I like that one right and I've had very sophisticated friends with lots of money and not enough time nonetheless like discuss with me which for Denzel or Punk or whatever to buy right it's an application letter and this is a truism in Tech bulge when you start talking about the application not the technology you are at the beginning of the consumerization so that's hey one eight one b unlike every previous form of crypto assets large organizations have an incentive to get involved in nft space

Again by example Allison nft NYC semi-undercover and I was invited to the [ __ ] Nevada party in Fall of 21. the only thing that matters in that sentence is that Dolce Gabbana was in a crypto conference I've been to a lot of crypto conferences but I've never seen [ __ ] about the crypto conference is why would they come to an ethereum conference why are they doing conference what would they do in a Bitcoin conference what would they tell Adam that what would they tell them don't shoot about it right I assume Dolce Gabbana also doesn't go to host parties at Cisco network administrator conferences even though they probably use routers somewhere in their business but because nfts are generic carriers for intangible assets and Dolce Nevada

owns an extremely viable and tangible asset their brand reputation customer base uh sense of style they come transport some of that latent and tangible value into a more tangible token and earn money from it and so they did and they won't and it is why you see artifact of Nike and Adidas and over the next two or three years you'll see a lot of people in the lifestyle fashion eras start onboarding and if areas start onboarding nfts and from there it will go to every other area that has large groups of customers sports teams and

it's already happened right but it'll happen more um religious groups University alumni associations right donate to the Ohio State University you don't just get an email receipt you get this Buckeye super Buckeye gold tipped thing to put in your wallet to show that you're the ultra Buckeye fan right you're gonna say like these applications aren't very serious I am here to worship Lord Satoshi and vitalik I'm doing very complicated things but like consumers are not adopt very complicated things if you want widespread option widespread option of crypto looks like this it does not look like something that requires a PhD in computer science to

work with nothing right and so bucket one I think there's a pathway contingent on intentional we don't end up with legislation that makes crypto in general unusable well this lesson is going to come into place in January 1st 2024 arguably makes crypto unusual in the United States right but if you're doing a transaction more than 10 000 it is a felony if you don't report if you do not report your counterparties kyc information within 10 days right it's absurd what's what specific legislation while we're on this just pointed out uh uh it passed the infrastructure Bill last year uh I know what you're talking about yes

it's the transposition of the cash requirement transaction to crypto but it is written extraordinarily aggressively right and I don't see how you could use actually a defy exchange if that comes into all right like you don't know what the counterpart is yes my understand from our kind of our crypto lobbyists and and the people fighting in DC is that there's still hope that this gets stripped out out of kind of like finalized versions of this but um yeah yeah but okay but this is like we've lost and we're hoping it gets stripped out like it's in the LIE of action it becomes the law on one one 2024. and you know it would be it's a little bit more survivable and

nfts because what will happen is I don't know open C or kyc or something so you can sell enough to use that are more than 10 Heath right and it's sort of into the reporting for you because like they don't do their point for you everyone's gonna go to jail I mean this report the report the counterparty in 10 days where it's a felony is a very very strict list they can't send everyone to jail can they well I was just no they're not they don't need to sign up with the show right they just need people to pull back right people do not like committing felonies right saying like oh your committing felonies is bad for adoption and if you buy if you buy your you know whatever nice generative Art Online you've now

concluded a felony it's running out for offshore crypto right but it also means like when you're on the other side of an exchange where you don't know at all what the kind of party is and you have more sense of what the counterparty is but an nft then you're doing it in a decentralized exchange right the central has to change if this continuous results are finished okay you'll have to they will have to become completely cd5 uh kyc the blah blah blah blah to be compliant anyway so contingent on crypto does not become unusual I believe there are gigantic consumer apps for nfts that do not exist for functional tokens it is not a surprise and it is

not some type of you know I've been at this 10 years tell me Pro crypto gentleman Rich large organizations are using Bitcoin and ethereum in their day-to-day operations with large numbers of people I will tell you which none foreign but also because they're more expressive you could I'll give you an example you can represent don't give a totally stupid example I'm not saying this is a good idea I'm just saying it's an idea you can do with nfts that you cannot do with ethereum you can have an nft that is your

employer ID that it says David has these access rights that's something right there in the metadata and Ryan there's other access right so it links to your access card and if you have this one if you get it opens the door but this very simple dumb idea you can't deal with ethereum you can't do with Bitcoin right you have to go back to all of these like colored coin early 23 24 stuff that's clunky and doesn't really work and you know the Bitcoin Community doesn't want you to do it on bitcoin anymore anyway right they're kind of like they all were all fully we're just doing transactions okay fine so nfts are

like infinitely expressive and so you can do you know there's this open discussion if we're going to have nft gaming there is no open discussion if we're going to have fungible coin gaming because obviously we're not going to have functional coin gaming it's impossible to have fungible coin game right you need non-functional objects to do to do game right so the next part the other the next part is you know all this talk about metaverse right and metaverse is another one of those if you talk to 50 people and everyone's imagining something different and mostly people are imagining oh I don't want to wear VR goggles all day

and anyway I put the VR goggles and I went to some of these metaverse sites and they all suck like I don't want to do this this sucks right and I have a much more abstract definition but with better visualization visualization has been getting better the whole history of the internet you know I'm watching you live and Global video streaming and we could have done this 20 years ago but it's still the fact that you're like two inches in size on my laptop screen is a bug not a feature but I'm pretty sure you're more than two inches it's like the

Picasso thing like you know and basically I'm more than two inches in size right in a decade we'll have the glasses the bronze wearing going to be mixed reality glasses and we'll have this meeting and let's say I wasn't pseudo or maybe you'd see me shoot on YouTube we'd see your full size in 3D either in your recording studio or on the top of Mount Everest or in the 6529 Museum or what have you right so visualization is going to get better with visualization getting better there will be more need and use for persistent digital objects water persistent visual objects well pfp an avatar

a piece of art a three-dimensional space anything right and because nfts are one of those things that are deceptively simple they don't look like very much or just a token with some metadata but that very simple structure allows you to represent anything with them and we start with something as simple as let's say I build my own three-dimensional space right it's my office it reflects my personality should I be able to own that the same way that I can run a web server and own my web server or do I have to only do it as a page on Facebook

right and it's a 3D page and this would be like if the Internet only allowed you to make Facebook pages right you couldn't have your own you couldn't have your own website that wasn't allowed right and so if we think the issues we have now with centralization of social media right which I mean they're amazing issues all right they're a complete failure of Internet architecture notice how we have had zero Republican versus Democrat debates about who gets to have an email account okay and the reason is of course often email is less important than

tweeting much more important and it's a more important technology and you can survive without Twitter you cannot really survive in the modern world without email but no one has come and said my favorite political opponent shouldn't be banned from having an email account and the reason is not because they don't want to say that it's unfeasible because email is SMTP and sure Google might ban you and Outlook might ban you but some email provider will take you and even if no email provider takes you you can learn your own email server right the architecture of web one came out of Academia and because it came out of Academia it was all Open interoperable Standards and that's why web one is basically okay on the centralization

aspect we have two came out of Silicon Valley for a bunch of people who think carefully about Network effects and value capture and the second generation of Internet protocols ended up being accomplished Facebook is medium-sized Twitter is short form messaging LinkedIn is your paragraph all of these things could have been protocols should have been protocols Twitter came the closest uh Fred Wilson talked to us all the time he was on the board done with Jack and they knew this would be a protocol they couldn't see how to do it this was like 2009 2010 that if we had understood Bitcoin better we would have made it a

protocol and if Twitter was a protocol right the whole idea that who is allowed to use the dominant short form text messaging protocol in the list should be determined by who the CEO of Twitter is from time to time is ridiculous all right you imagine thinking from first principles that's how you should architect the internet right like it's bad enough to think we should have some type of political decision on who gets to use the internet but the idea that political decision should be some random decent size but random company in California that decides this it's nuts

all right like why would you do it that way and it was because these protocols got captured as companies now if this was bad when I hear this is bad think what happens in a decade right the metaverse in a decade is going to be your all-encompassing ambient digital environment right you'll be primarily in augmented reality your field of vision will be infused with data images conference calls whatever you're gonna have AIS assisting you in there it's going to be great once a while you go to VR Barcelona show it all off and just see the world as it is but you'll be mostly in augmented reality and

you'll do it because it's super convenient will helpful your productivity goes up for the same reason we're all now addicted to throw phones right the people say I'm not going to do that they can just safely ignore that they all said they weren't going to get smartphones and now everyone has a quote unquote smartphone right and if that is a centralized firm that controls that digital space getting kicked out of that digital space is like being cast out of the into the darkness right your whole work life will be that your personal life will be there your family life is going to be there and it's even worse right because how does all how do some of these Technologies work they work by pointing a camera into your field of vision right like that's what the harmful in reality works um think of this as a thought exercise

imagine if I sent him I have no objection to my Zuckerberg he's just useful CEO of a social media company and he was right my beloved guy but imagine if I said to him like four cameras and I said hey I really appreciate this if you stuck it on your head and your wife said in your kid's head and just streamed the video of everything you're seeing back to the six five to nine servers there's nothing to worry about there's nothing to worry about I have a privacy policy as you can see on the bottoms the website was a privacy policy and so of course you'd be happy to stream your daily life to us right and of course I'm you know get told go jump in the lake but that's what the new office goggles are and whether the octos

goggles are clunky they work they don't work it doesn't matter eventually the hardware is going to work right and eventually when the hardware works if these are backed by a centralized company what you're going to have is not only everything we discussed so far but biometric data field of vision data all streaming to one place once you have that honey pot someone is going to abuse it right my view is not that I am naive about human behavior it's not like the people who care about fighting crime are the cynical hard asses and I'm naive quite the opposite I'm more cynical I'm more cynical that really smart

criminals will say oh wait I need to become CEO of this company or I need to become head of the central bank or I need to become the political leader and if I become a political leader and then co-opt these large companies in the cbdcs what have you I will have power unknown to even the most powerful dictator of 80 years ago Joseph's Fallen couldn't press a button and make someone three thousand miles away unable to buy a tomato but with cbdc coming soon to a western democracy here you'll be able to do that right it's a lot of power and when there's a lot of power eventually some ill-intentioned person is going to take advantage of all right who knows gonna

happen so you put this all together you say okay well which of our crypto Technologies I'm not saying this is easy is actually going to do the trick do you think the next decade we're going to have a super explosion of fungible token applications that for some strange reason the whole crypto industry has forgotten to forgotten to invent for the last decade I don't think so they're not coming I spent almost all day for the last 10 years in crypto where are they I think to myself how can I use crypto by the end

of their life and other than accepting fundual tokens for payments and you know occasionally swapping some currency for another currency that's great that's unusual super um that's great and stuff it's Travelex right but better right no matter what all right and so my view is we have a moment in time that moment in time is two to three years it's right now and it is while people think this is a joke let me go back to Twitter example when Jack and Fred were having deep thoughts about if Twitter should be a protocol or a service the average

media view of Twitter was like this is some stupid service that like Tech grows in California tweet out they're gonna go get a ham sandwich for lunch who cares who cares about the stupid service right and it turns out I mean that was Twitter in 2009 and it turns out from that point 11 years later the president United States considered it the most important tool to have this is disposal right now people look at nfts conventional people and say oh look it's a bunch of overpriced Bubbles and random bad heart

or whatever leave aside to know that's actually true even if it is true it's irrelevant there is just as clear a path that how you go from tweeting about your ham sandwich to Angela Merkel announcing her new economic policies on Twitter there is just a clear path from nfts being for you know glitch artists two nfts representing every single digital non-fungible object which is a lot of them right we're going to have a lot of digital objects our economy is not going to get less digital it's going to get more digital and right now because there is

Twitter it's over you're not going to go to the decentralized Twitter because they have the network effects right you're not going to build a decentralized Facebook who have the network effects it's very hard to break them the network effects for metaverse type stuff are not built yet nobody nobody has figured it out and so we have a period where the underlying technology or platformer API that will be the network effect is Up Programs so it could be just to simplify is that a chapter to simplify it could be that everyone issues a digital options entities or everyone issues them as digital collectibles on the Facebook Horizon API

right now Facebook has not won this technology shift right these things happen technology shifts you have a new scramble usually another firm went here we have an opportunity to actually win a technology shift we have an opportunity that the default way to issue additional object design nft we actually do not I believe as much as I'm an old school Bitcoin Maxi I do not believe we have any practical opportunity over the next handful of years that Bitcoin is going to displace State money I actually don't think there is the demand for this despite State money and

on the off chance it started to the state has a tremendously powerful set of tools to fight back do I believe ethereum is about to become the global Computing platform oh Amazon web services ethereum is useful for many very interesting permissions applications but most computational loans are going to run on AWS not in the third is it an open question where you can or the database of arbitrary non-financial digital objects yes it's an open question it is an opportunity it is an opportunity we can win not to have like point one percent market share as

we're doing like payments and banking but 70 market share and there's one last thing be quiet for a second there are of course you can make an nft into a security because you can basically make anything into security right you could make a you could literally make a banana into security through said the right things but you can make an nft until not a security in fact you can make an nft into protect First Amendment protected speech if x copy makes an nft and says hey this is me saying I don't like the government it is going to be very hard in the United States of America for the SEC to

say you cannot make that piece of art you need to get pre-approved from the SEC I think there is a non-zero chance of a new how things play up some nft case actually goes to Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds people try to lose with Bitcoin and the Bitcoin speech and math speech on bitcoin's like a money type thing it's not speech but art it's going to be very hard to say like you're an ex-conv piece of art is not speech right if that's not speech what is speech and so there are places and it's my concern about defy defy looks like regulated entities option right

we might not like that we might not want to think about that but uniswap will look to the eyes of the system as the type of thing but when it's off chain they regulate The in-game Sword in some on polygon in some blockchain game is that something that today there's a huge Federal apparatus to regulate the in-game objects and Riot games no uh is there some huge Federal apparatus to check what galleries in New York are selling and make sure the buyers don't buy overpriced anti-war Hall Prince no I

think these are things that are outside of the race you know there's some AML stuff even in galleries right but that's not it and it's not there's you don't have a very heavy regulatory infrastructure so my view is to summarize it is a possibly our first true consumer application second it is possible you can tip over the large organizations to say it is in our business interests we will make more money issuing this digital wearable as an nft than running it through Facebook and one and two will work in tandem with each other and three

it is in a part of the world that is not as threatening as this to the state right so you're not telling them I'm going to replace the Federal Reserve okay every time bitcoiners say that I want to just like don't get them over the head as if that's you're going to go to politics I'm going to replace the central bank right what here you get to say instead is look do you really want Facebook extracting 50 of the digital economy for the next 50 years as a regulator as a politician does that sound like maybe Facebook shouldn't own everything for the next 50 years right it's an easier sell right and possibly possibly question mark possibly we can actually

have some productive relationship with the regulatory state in this regard so I'm sorry that was one but um and I grant you I am probably the single most bullish person of identities on planet Earth but all right the first two quarter first half of 2021 I concluded this and everything six five to nine but don't take a bridge and now for questions is to get this message out and it's obviously working because a year and a half ago you am and here I am in the show right 6529 we've hopped

around on various different topics and I want to make sure that uh we haven't lost listeners around the way because um if they weren't paying close attention they might think that we have touched on very different topics throughout the podcast but actually I think there's a very solid through line here and I want you to help me kind of weave this together as we come to a close here we started talking asking you about your your digital identity your pseudo Anonymous nft Punk 6529 base identity then we talked about uh the freedom to transact and how um the freedom to transact is individual self-expression and you talked about the homogenization of the decentralized network of taxi cabs into the centralized network of Ubers and I think the idea was to really extrapolate that out to any sort of web 2 service like

with the idea that our freedom to transact is being lost through the centralization of all these web 2 apps and now we have nfts and nfts are this potential because the cost to Mint an nft is so low that it can really resemble the counter Force to the homogenization of web web 2 it presents the uh a Cambrian explosion of individual expression for web3 and there's something that we haven't touched on yet in this podcast which is just like humans just have this part of this brain that nfts just light up and we just like them for some reason and among other reasons that we've talked about so far on this pod like it just seems to be um people just have this uh that when

they get into the world of nfts that yeah it's just going to take over inevitably and maybe they can't really articulate that but it's something that a lot of nft people really feel so as we take this home can you let's dive into that last part of the subject matter of nfts and this incoming revolution of like digital Commerce and free digital Commerce that I think we all see coming around on this metaverse which I agree with your definition is just a visualization layer with a bunch of digital objects but what about nfts seems so inevitable you've given the case for why they should come and what what we have to lose if they don't come but what about just like the human relationship with uh what our brains is and how we like to collect things like

what about the world of nfts you think is just so inevitable so in early Bitcoin dates people would say you know when Bitcoin Bitcoin 2013 had I don't know like a five billion dollar market cap in the fall nfts today about 10 billion dollars and back then people would say oh look what's the comp it's gold Gold's 10 trillion sometimes I know it's not cold it's m0 it's 20 trillion well it's a very big numbers for a valuable things right intangibles on corporate balance sheets are about 70 something trillion dollars bigger than gold bigger than bigger than money supply

and there's an endless number of intangibles that are nowhere to be found on a balance if you are an American and you believe in Freedom and you see the Statue of Liberty or you hear about the land of the free of the home of the bridge you see the national anthem do you feel good I think the Patriotic my girlfriend feels good playing fields right is that valuable to you as an individual as far as a viable to the country does the country work better if people are proud of it and happy well of course right there are intangibles everywhere it's why people buy the Nike sneaker not an unbranded sneaker it's why people go to the ball game of their University and cheer right they're fundamental to Human

Society it's a very interest subjective myths all right that the way any society of more than a couple of hundred people works is we believe a bunch of things in common and when we believe these things we feel emotion about them and because if we feel as emotional I mean in an extreme in an extreme example people go and die for their natural flag right I mean in less extreme examples people go tailgate every week in a football game right and other less extreme examples people will pay ten thousand dollars for a watch from a 50 watch and we'll do the same thing and I'm not here to tell you this is bad this is fundamental to human Nations how we are right identity

matters Community matters emotion matters nfts are the moment where we can take all of those feelings from an off-chain World punching the reason people's eyes light up is exactly the same reason people's eyes light up when they're engaged in some activity that is lighting up their emotions in the official we now just have a technology that can arbitrarily carry out so that can carry around any arbitrary intangible on the internet well if you think the internet's a big

deal I think there is a pretty big deal and I think intangible assets are a big deal and they're a pretty big deal that I think they're the most important thing in society right you start with it intangibles that's what drives human behavior I use this example sometimes yes we can and make America great it don't sound like much right but each of those two things gave the person who thought them up access to enough nuclear weapons there's no nuclear weapons are important things now the important thing is who gets access to those nuclear weapons right and the way you get access is nuclear weapons wasn't by writing some complicated policy paper on nuclear weapons that's by saying yes we can and

hope and change and make America great and red hats and all these things things that bind humans together emotionally it's how actually all large studies were you talking about the meme layer of society I call it memes heard it calls it interest objective realities are myths right it's you can call it social construction there is no question it's how anything other than very small family groups of people organisms it's how nation states are organized why do you do the Pledge of Allegiance every day in class in elementary school why like is there any reason other than this of course not why do companies have logos why do

universities have emblems why is there a Statue of Liberty in New York City right sometimes people particularly people like us were like Google spreadsheets in math and computers or what have you think like that's the important thing well no the thing that's Upstream of all those things is can you are people interested in putting in the work for a certain objective right and those objectives are all socially constructed there isn't anything that we do religion art nation states all those things are socially constructed and what comes Downstream is you know you do something in Excel because you're an Excel guy right so the fact that everyone who goes down to

nft Rabbit Hole might something like this is because you're just tapping that part of the brain that is the underlying fabric of society and now for the first time we can make it composable on the Earth and it's a very big deal and it's very fragile right like I don't think like oh cool we can lay back and nfts or or crypto we're going to win because it's my biggest it's my biggest um point of I know almost all the origin crypto people almost all of them both are like developed some of the business types

and my biggest point of disagreement with them we're just automatically going to win it's inevitable I don't think it's enough nothing in life's no bad decisions get made by societies and Society goes back 30 years right and there is if we can if the path depends on the next few years goes in a certain direction I think nfts will change the Arc of History I actually believe it in a good way another one Punk 6529 I think we're gonna end it there uh this has been a fantastic

conversation with you and uh I think there has been as David said a single through line to this entire episode and uh don't know who you are in real life of course um but you Echo many of the I think mental models and and great thinkers in crypto that we've had on the podcast in in the past uh you know the Balaji srinivasans and the Chris Dixons and that sort of thing that have been exploring the space from the from the early beginnings and really see the long-term future I think uh some will hear this episode and um they'll still think that we're out to lunch honestly all of us crypto people uh but I I guess um 10 years ago when you're talking this

way about about Bitcoin maybe the early Believers uh they they said that about them too and so I think ultimately history will be the judge of whether you're bullish position on nfts move the single most bullish person in the world on nfts whether that position is true or not um we're certainly certainly excited for it on Bank lists and the one thing I would say to listeners is if this is not the way towards more decentralization what other alternative do we have name me a better alternative that gets Society to an outcome that we're all hopeful towards so Punk 6529 we appreciate you being on bankless and uh thanks thanks for your time today well thank you for having me and putting

up with my ranting and raving about anything and um um I appreciate your time thankless Nation hope you enjoyed this episode I'm gonna link to a few of punk 6529's most famous threads the freedom to transact we mentioned it here we'll also linked to some of his metaverse threads as well he also has some fascinating life advice that we didn't get to in this episode but I think you should look through a couple of threads one called making it what does it mean to actually make it in life and another threat on the shortness of Life uh give him a follow as well uh guys gotta end it here of course with risks and disclaimers crypto is risky you could lose what you put in nfts are risky as

well but we're headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from Banks and gain your financial Independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and Community as a bankless premium driver to get the most out of your bank list experience you'll get access to our market analysis our Alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bank list token for airdrops Raffles and unlocks if you're interested in crypto the bankless community is where you want to be click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber

today also don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders ask me any things and weekly Roll-Ups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the bankless nation