#280 Jackson Palmer: Dogecoin – wow! so meme. such community. very charity. much story.

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure do you have an idea for a blockchain app but are worried about the time and costs it will take to develop the new asher blockchain dev kit is a free download that brings together the tools you need to get your first app running in less than 30 minutes learn more at AKA ms slash epicenter and buy cosmos cosmos is building the Internet of blockchains an ecosystem where thousands of flock chains can interoperate creating the foundation for a new token economy if you have an idea

for a DAP visit cosmos Network slashed epicenter to learn more and to get in touch with the cosmos team hi welcome to epicenter my name is Suresh Nick with you my name is Sonny Agarwal hi sunny how's your trip in Europe going oh it's going pretty well you know on the fourth leg now I'm here in London recording this and you know we had a great time cosmos launched while I was in Switzerland and so that was fun and you know dealing everything's been going well on that side and it's been a very fun exciting trip so tell tell the listeners a little bit about the cosmos Lawson what has been that experience

like for you working in cosmos in the last week it's been very real as in that like I don't know it just feels so weird that there is this like public blockchain that I have code that like you know I coded and it's like people are like doing stuff for like real economic value on it it just feels very weird to me and but no I'm very excited because you know the system has been running smoothly there has been no halts of the system no bugs found not out of all the validators no one has even gotten slashed yet you know I was worried that some browsers might miss configure something and someone will get accidentally slashed and so you know you know Brian and me here is validator

chorus has been doing quite well I have evaluated called sitka which is also doing quite well so you know overall it's been a really good experience yeah I've been staking my atoms disclaimer I have atoms and yeah it's but it's been interesting it's kind of cool to see yeah to see the the rewards accumulating they're really interested in seeing like it's the first proposals come through I think there's one proposal to fix the block time something like that so to be really interesting to see that you know that whole process unfolding with the voting and everything yeah it's it's really really exciting to see campos cosmos finally launching so i

think you had an announcement to make about some speaking engagements you have coming up yeah so I'll actually be at Edie Khan in Sydney at the second week of April so if anyone in any of our you know I feel like you know I've never been if we've never given our southern hemisphere listeners some love and so you know if anyone wants to meet up down while I'm down there let me know and happy to meet up and you know just meet some of you guys cool that should be exciting and coincidentally our guest today is from Australia that doesn't live there but is from Australia so I guess today's Jackson Palmer who is the co-founder of dogecoin and when when we

started speaking with him at like it's it's crazy that we've never had him on before when we've talked about dogecoin quite a bit over the years and in fact I was going back into early episodes we did an episode where we mentioned we talked quite a bit about dogecoin on episode 5 of epicenters so this was 275 weeks ago in back in early 2014 just as dogecoin was launching at the same time it was like aetherium was also like the white paper was being released and so if you're just to go back and listen to episode 5 if you you know want to get a feel for what things were going on back then also get a good laugh because their production value it was pretty pretty low and we were quite quite novices at doing a podcast but

yeah it was a really fascinating conversation I think for a couple of reasons one the he started this thing that was kind of a joke and to him and was in his mind you know he saw it as sort of a rejection of what cryptocurrencies were becoming but what ended up happening is that dogecoin end up being quite successful in having a market capitalization which at one point it was upwards of two billion dollars and the other reason why it's interesting is because he doesn't work in the crypto space I mean he works for a software company and which you know it doesn't operate encrypt like it you know traditional software company and and so

he can he kind of has this this view of crypto from the outside world is in some ways kind of critical about where things are going so it was I thought was really fascinating conversation and one that I think everyone will appreciate yeah I mean so you know dogecoin yeah like I said like I said you started off I started off as a joke but you know I think it actually did a lot of good hindi for the ecosystem and you know I I say that because personally the first time I heard about cryptocurrency was because of dogecoin I was in up one of my high school classes and one of my friends was telling me he's like hey do you know this is like digital coin called dogecoin and it's like funded that you're making bobsled team and I I

was just like what that's so weird that's like yeah it was a weird joke and then I like you know went home and I'm like I looked up what is this dogecoin thing and then that's kind of really the first time I really heard about Bitcoin in the first place and so you know in a way dogecoin helped push me down that path and so I'm thankful to that I guess so doge doge coin is in part responsible for cosmos becoming into existence because I thought you cosmos probably wouldn't you know wouldn't be where it is today visited and interestingly and we go to this episode's j-kwon actually had quite a quite of an impact in the very beginning because him and and Jackson knew each other and J also

contributed to some discussions on we get into the into the episode so here's her interview with Jackson Palmer we're here today with Jackson Palmer Jackson is the co-creator of the dogecoin project hi Jackson hey thanks for having me on thanks for coming on the show so let's start by asking the question that we typically ask people who come with the podcast how do you first get involved in crypto yeah I I read about crypto wolf specifically the Bitcoin white paper like I would say 2011-2012 when I saw it posted on hacking news probably but I kind of dismissed it because I was in Australia back then it's where I'm born and raised and the

Internet is sort of bad back in Australia that just downloading a blockchain even if it's a few gigabytes was unrealistic over a poor ADSL connection back then and so I dismissed it until around 2013 and then somebody that I was working with actually was really into litecoin and kind of pumping like coin when it was doing its first first big pump I think you might have gotten up towards $30 or something and so I like okay I got to check this stuff out I didn't even know there was multiple coins and that kind of led me to coin market capcom which then threw me down the whole spiral of oh my gosh okay this is there's a lot going on here and so this early interest that you had in

crypto what were you interested in we're using the technology or more of the financial aspects yeah really the technology I've always been you know my background is actually in kind of marketing and data and analysis but I've always been extremely technical and developed side projects etc and so my interest was really just in like I would evaluate any other open source kind of software you know whether it had legs whether there was people for you know that would want to use it and I just looked at it that way like I look at any other kind of tech startup really and as I kind of got into it I started to

realize that maybe it had some interesting kind of political ramifications and kind of that interested me as well you know regarding like financial institutions and financial crises and thing like that so yeah that kind of kept me interested for awhile but from the very beginning I have to say I was I was very alarmed or skeptical of it because of the speculation and so you know a lot of people I think like to think that one at one point in time I was like a huge you know crypto maximalist fan that was never really the case I always came into it with a skeptical eye from the beginning were there like you know other interesting

open source projects or decentralization kind of stuff that you were like really looking into like I know you know I was on your Twitter the other day you said you had some guides for like mastodons and stuff so was bitcoin sort of the first like made like open source project you started looking into or was it yeah not really I been like interested and and kind of involved with with BitTorrent for for quite a while and obviously being a user of BitTorrent but looking at its applications for peer-to-peer kind of communications and things like that never anything that really specifically related to currency because I was like hey we've already got this currency thing solved like why would I think about that so it's more about communication file-sharing things like that you know a project that I'd

launched I guess a year before dogecoin I was really into memes like from the beginning and and gifts and so I created this this site called gift based calm which was was rather popular and actually kind of predated giffy I should I really should have gone pitched at distant VCS but I didn't think about that so yeah I've always been kind of involved in software development and and the memory of it all and you know I guess that that's kind of a nice segue into how dogecoin came to be so yeah let's let's talk about that how did your love of open source software have a baby with Doc Mimi yeah so no I a lot of it kind of came you know that the

person that that I knew that was into litecoin that I was talking about you know didn't wasn't the most technical person and then so that immediately gave me skepticism about a non-technical person Schilling something that is that is highly technical so I was like ah this this seems like gambling and so I went to coin market Capcom and I noticed that there was like at that point maybe under a hundred crypto currencies out there like a lot of the forks that some of them aren't alive these days and I noticed the new one was being added pretty regularly and at the same time the Doge meme was like kind of taking off and Adrian Chen a journalist over at Galka had written this article basically

saying dogecoin is the best meme it is not publish point Doge is the best name because it's kind of this uncorruptible face you cannot kind of take Doge and like you know Doge can't become Pepe it's just not going to happen right and you know the Pepe was a thing back then really but and so I just had those two kind of tabs open in my browser and and Doge and coin just kind of blended together and sorry that started as a tweet just like me kind of in Australia we have this thing called taking the piss which is really just kind of throwing shade at something or just like making fun of something and I just you know did this piss-take tweet where I

was like gonna invest in dogecoin I think it's the next big thing and that that kind of sparked the whole thing that's interesting it and when you when you took this piss of a tweet what was the really yeah it's a Australian slang flowing around here yeah the reaction was very much um a lot of there were a few people are like oh my god create this and then I guess it got shared around some like crypto circles on IRC and stuff I very immediately I'm one of those person that if I people were that if I have an idea I'm like I gotta buy the domain name so have like way too many domain names like I know there's a lot of other people that have similar addictions oh it's I had the same addiction at some point

such a waste of money right anyway so I was like I'm gonna you know register the domain dogecoin calm because somebody else is gonna steal it so I may as well and then I just put I went into kind of Photoshop and put a Trent you know a 50% opacity image of the the dog or for a like a google image search of a coin and just threw it up on like this static HTML page and it just said you know the point is the parody cryptocurrency favored by Shiba inus worldwide and I didn't think much of I was just like it was a joke and a lot of it was a joke between me and my friends as well because like we were all kind of making fun of crypto back then and so we share it around like whenever anybody else but Bitcoin like ha ha look dogecoin and

then in this hyper condensed period of time that kind of got shared more and more and more and more within actual crypto circles and IRC and stuff and then this random dude called Billy pings me on Twitter with a screenshot and is like hey you can change the the font in the Bitcoin QT client to Comic Sans we should make this a real thing and so that kind of you know it was let me down the spiral so how did like you know Billy saw your tweet or something and so is it someone you knew or like a friend of yeah so the website itself I think had my Twitter handle on it and it got shared in IRC and so he just you know

put two and two together and that's that's how he got connected and so yeah he he reached out to me we added each other on like a Google Chat or something and then very rapidly you know I think I made the tweet on the 27th I think of November in 2013 I want to say and I think within about five or six days there was a there was a binary released for the dogecoin I see and I remember you were mentioned to me before the show that Billy was actually you know an anonymous guy yeah do you do you by any chance know at all who he is or oh yeah no I I know who he is and I've met him several times in person but it's a lot of people it's very interesting actually

he's kind of a faceless name which i think is how he prefers to keep it and he got out of the project very early on I think you know he didn't really want to create a new cryptocurrency because you know a lot of people say I'm skeptical of cryptocurrency he's even more of a skeptic than I am of cryptocurrency like and then that's what we were having a lot of these conversations when we first met online and so yeah he is you know it's kind of a she's not shadowy figure but he doesn't hasn't played a role in it really outside of the first couple months of the project I see and so you know he's the one who kind of like you know you started it as this Joe but then he's the one who's like oh wait you know

there's the open source code base just actually start playing around with it yeah yeah so basically the the what happened was that I kind of came up with a name and an idea and then we kind of brainstormed over the next few days we're like how do we make this as ridiculous as possible because we even had the foresight we were like you know he especially was like we don't want to make this something that people actually care about this should be something that people don't care about so how do we make it as undesirable as a as a cryptocurrency so that it doesn't become serious and so you know you asked me before the show like why did we just why was that their decision to fork lucky coin which was itself a fork of like coin which itself is a fork of of

Bitcoin and that's because lucky coin had this whole notion of random block rewards built in and so our whole thing with with those parents like how do we make this so that miners are going to get angry with it and not keep mining it because it can't be profitable I know let's put a random block reward between zero and 1 million for every block so it's like totally a gamble right like nobody with nobody serious would ever actually mind that right and and that was supposed to be a protection system so that it didn't become a thing unfortunately it didn't really work as intended so we might say until in there no so so that was eventually removed because it was causing a variety of

problems and and people didn't like it but you know and we ended up with a actual kind of block reward schedule but we made all these kind of like wacky decisions like a hundred billion coins all this stuff and then he did the coding work so I didn't touch like for the Wando and I think the one don't want I didn't touch the code to begin with he did that work and then just shift it up on Bitcoin talk and and get up and talk about the initial release of of like when this first binary came out and you know how did it become this thing because in a

very condensed period of time so you said that late November 2013 this thing emerged and then I think early December is when the network launched and I mean I was talking about this before the show in early 2014 when epicenter was just starting on Episode five we did an episode where we talked about the Jamaican bobsled team sponsorship so within within the amount of like eight weeks already the community there was enough Jewish coin going around and it had sufficient value for people to be sponsoring you know Olympic teams without tens of thousands of dollars like what happened there how

did this thing become such I think is a right place right time kind of thing in the you know that time at the end of 2013 that was kind of bitcoins first big run-up and you know I think it hit $1,000 and everybody was super excited it was shortly followed by the GOx thing but you know at that point of time there was so much interest in crypto but the difference between say 2013 and 2017 is that all the people that were interested in it weren't just speculators they were developers right and so I think when when dogecoin came out and it was on Bitcoin talk which is like obviously very popular with with developers and people that are more technical in nature

the there was just this community of people that were like hey finally he is like a thing we can play around with I think that dogecoin didn't have any value at that point it wasn't on an exchange or anything like that and so people were like hey like this is cool a cool way that we can learn how to interface would say the Bitcoin D kind of json-rpc you know we can do all this stuff with a real live main net without the worry of losing money on the Bitcoin main net especially at the time because Bitcoin was so expensive you know so expensive a thousand dollars but you know so I just think was a right place right time thing and and very quickly after it launched you know so this is a thing like Billy and I we didn't even

you know he had an NVIDIA GPU that could do CUDA mining I didn't have a good GPU at that time and so he like just put his minor pointed his minor at it there was no pre mine or anything pointed at it for the like the first 24 hours after the the main net launch and within 24 hours like the hash rate was just like it was it was too much you couldn't solve a mine anymore it was like you had to pull mine and all these poles popped up the tip bought on reddit popped up like in the space of about a week after it launched and I think it was just because right place right time like the developers were there and ready to go this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and the azure

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maybe in part this this reddit tip but had a had a role to play with it dogecoin so quickly became this this uniquely altruistic community within the crypto space so we mentioned the Jamaican bobsled team sponsorship there was some other Olympic team I think that which was sponsored the dogecoin has been involved in funding wells in kenya and all these other things did you play a role in initiating this this altruistic nature and the community else where did you see that come where where'd I get merch from I think it was actually a combination of me but also Billy I'm in that once we realized it

was a real thing right like we thought that we had set the cryptocurrency up in a way that after its launch people would you know get sick of it after a week and then stop caring about it right and that obviously didn't happen and so at that point we were kind of like oh crap how do we make sure that this thing doesn't just become another you know kind of not like a thing that people are gambling on speculating on because that was like out one of our biggest you know joint criticisms of cryptocurrency and and something we hated about it and so we thought you know the real way to do that is to just continue kind of sharing this message with people that the thing is is

light-hearted the thing is about giving it's not about getting rich and so just I think through that kind of messaging it just bubbled up to people saying hey we should sponsor things hey we should donate these things you know it might not be worth a lot of money but maybe we can help and so there was the the Jamaican bobsled team and as soon as that happened you know I had a friend back in Australia and I was like you know I was working a full-time job during all of this by the way and so I was I said my friend hey do you want to like help with the reddit community and like you know organizing you know sponsoring the Jamaican bobsled team and so now we did several things

like that but it was all community driven it was all honestly not me it was the community and I think it highlighted the power in a way like this is the one thing that kind of you know I was over as I said I was skeptical coming into this the one thing that got me interested in encrypter like that the dogecoin helped further my interest was you have a community of say a hundred thousand people on the dogecoin subreddit back then that's what it was at and you know if if you give those people an easy way to give 20 cents right or $0.50 let's say 50 cents in a way that there's you know very little to no transaction fee it's rather instant

secure all of that stuff make it easy for people and the reddit tip bought allowed them to do this then you have 50 thousand dollars there that you can give to you know a charitable cause or something like that and so the power of that is actually like the one thing that kind of Drew me and father with with dogecoin or indie crypto in general is kind of like the use of it for for altruism and in kind of bettering society and I I thought and I had hoped that that would be the direction that it kept going in but you know despite best efforts I think of several community leaders and the dogecoin foundation and everybody to keep it to being this charitable light-hearted thing I think

the lesson we've all learnt with cryptocurrency is that all roads lead back to you know speculation price gambling it's very hard to force people or force a community to not have inertia towards that and so that's unfortunately what I'm you know like all other crypto currencies dogecoin it descending into so you know one of the other people who are friends with in the crypto space who's also really into this whole like altruistic nature of cryptocurrency is drift green from the giveth project and so you know he often tells me a lot about how he's very inspired by like the Burning Man culture and just like me

dislike you know idea of a gift-giving culture and stuff so what I've actually never been to Burning Man myself but you know he seems to love that experience and that the community that that's built around that was this at all an inspiration for you or you like have you ever participated in that or no I honestly I think burners are the worst but oh and try no it's kind of just not really because you know I III don't really think of a burner isn't burner ism kind of altruism is in a way I think a fake altruism because it's a lot of people fit there's billionaires there with like private jets at Burning Man so is it really an event for the

people probably not no I wasn't really inspired by that I was more inspired by just you know I've always kind of believed in redistribution of wealth of social causes and so I think I came into it with that and you know also I just think in Australia there is more of an emphasis on that that was one thing that surprised me when I moved to America is that there seems to be a lot of a less less of a focus or an acceptance of social systems and then opposed to say Australia or other you know European places and stuff like that so definitely not inspired by Burning Man that's right and so you know kind of ask to delve into that a little bit more like you know I know on your Twitter you kind of

do mention sometimes like you know more I don't know if you like socialistic but you know you have a different philosophy political philosophy then you know the prevalent Bitcoin political philosophy we could say and I'm not sure if you ever actually used the word communistic but I feel maybe you use the word socialistic and like kind of like I guess where do you see like you know did is was that like you know a version to the Bitcoin political philosophy what kind of led to this and then also how do you see like aetherium just like community in relation to that yeah yeah I know that's that's a really good question I think you know I I haven't always had the clearest kind of political thoughts I don't think a lot

of people do I think that there's this typically political beliefs or journey that you develop over time and I think that when you live in a country like Australia or some a place that has pretty good welfare systems but is still very much a capitalist society you kind of fall into this kind of like centrist liberalism where everything's comfortable right I like to tell people that I moving to America made me a socialist because you you know moving moving here really demonstrated to me you know the the inequalities of capitalism right which one is so pronounced in in a in a more liberal centrist community such as Australia and

so if America specifically San Francisco we're know specifically San Francisco is like the ultra you know version of that right you have people riding around on like you know a thousand dollar like hoverboards and scooters and they're dodging like homeless people it's it's absolutely nuts but I think Bitcoin actually did you know I felt early on was more aligned with some you know kind of anti-capitalist anti-intrusion kind of belief systems like I used to know a lot of people that were encrypted some of the people that were in early early dogecoin as well were came from the Occupy movement in New York and those as

person been dawn Burke who was you know really into into dogecoin was great and and and and had a lot of these beliefs and actually I think was held with the chapter of Occupy those people all kind of got you know not shouted away but dissing heart you know disheartened by where Bitcoin moved because there's there's two kind of ways I think of looking at and all of this and I think unfortunately Bitcoin has trended a lot more towards being this kind of an cap you know like very hyper capitalist kind of still anti state but but also hyper capitalist system and I don't think a

lot of people that are subscribed to that belief really realized that the big institutions a you know that that's part of the system that they're promoting so it's an interesting dynamic but yeah definitely identify as kind of socialist a student of Marx and yeah I I would tend to agree with you there and recently was discussing this with with someone who comes from that that side of Bitcoin and I guess like an early bit corner and and this is somewhat represented I think sometimes in like memes between Bitcoin and etherium where and you know I I don't want to cast judgment on anyone but where Bitcoin is

seen as this very like the rightly right-wing libertarian flavor I guess of libertarianism where it's highly individualistic but highly capitalistic and maybe a theorem is somewhere else on that spectrum I wouldn't say totally you know left left left wing idealistic and and and libertarian but there there is very much a difference there in terms of a political ideology that they that shines through quite a bit and and dogecoin maybe was more I guess on the altruistic side and less on the capitalistic side so maybe even not on that spectrum but somewhere else another axis so rich coin has a tower in like z-axis you know but

no you're absolutely right like I think aetherium and the people this is one of the reasons I really like the etherium community and typically why I like communities that aren't maximalist in nature people that are like open to any cryptocurrency is is really because they they typically have a broader more educated belief system and and I think vitalic I think Vlad a lot of the people I met from the etherium community I I definitely you know aligned with certain agree with politically more so than I do like the Bitcoin maximalists that only eat meat you know because they also you know there's this there's a strange thing where the all those carnivores seem to have a very certain set of political

beliefs as well which is kind of strange that ones diet would represent their political beliefs but yeah it's an interesting dynamic and it's something that I feel is only and maybe it was always there but I feel like it's something that's maybe being more polarized or kind of just come to light more in this kind of like whole like boom and bust cycle the bear market is people's true colors the factions have kind of become very clear you mentioned the Deloitte foundation a few minutes ago tell us what what's what's this all about and what's the story behind this foundation so the dogecoin foundation was a loosely extremely loosely organized group of people whose kind of community volunteers who just tried to

steer the community it was basically the reddit mods kind of saying hey here like we have a community of people that want to throw small chunks of money at good causes how do we give it a boost and so there was a bunch of volunteers that did that ben dornberger I mentioned previously was one of them who's played a very big part in that and then what happened after that was that there was kind of a lot of turmoil you know so I said that we did a bunch of altruistic things we did the Jamaican bobsled team we did another thing which is probably what I'm most proud of which was called Doge for kids and that whole project was all about raising money for training

dogs assistance dogs for blind and autistic children which is honestly I think the best thing that dogecoins have had done to give back to the world and then we did Doge for water which was working with charity water to build wells in Kenya Eric Nakagawa who actually created I Can Has Cheezburger com was the one that ran that so lots of meme overlaps and beyond that then you probably have heard about the NASCAR right like that's the thing that you know I actually don't like to talk about a lot because that was when there was this you know we started to see this influx of more people concerned with price fluctuations people getting greedy and there was this this third

party not kind of company that latched on to the dogecoin community called moolah and a lot of people probably know the full story there but in a nutshell the whole thing was a scam and they unfortunately were one of the biggest funders of the NASCAR and kind of tried to co-opt the foundation Co up to the community take all that goodwill and instead try and point it towards funding their scam and so that kind of blew up in the face of the dogecoin community and that's when I and many others just kind of walked away and was like you know we don't want involvement with this anymore this is this is not especially because we'd warned the community before all of this happened not to trust this company but you know people don't listen well maybe can you talk a bit more about

that because I'm not fully like clear on what happened there oh wow yeah so this is a it's a story so that was this company called mula that kind of came out with essentially kind of a Shopify like an e-commerce experience very lightweight very buggy that accepted several crypto currencies I think but mostly dogecoin was the market they went off there and it had this kind of mysterious figure at its helm who went by the name Alex green and you know what a fake name right and he was obvious and he was very active on on the reddit community on the IRC several places and back in 2014 they announced this thing called mula Pi which was basically it's kind of like an ICO in a way you you

would basically send them dogecoin and you would get like a GPG signature that was then you won't you'll stay your how your holdings in that company right so obvious scam to any rational person but a lot of people to the tune of about $750,000 if I remember correctly sent money to this these scammers and at first like I was a little bit skeptical as I was like this is bad and we got super skeptical when they started sponsoring events like throwing around huge sums of money people started saying they were getting dividends so they would get paid back money I'm like oh gosh like classic Ponzi right like it's it's clear what's going on here but because these people were giving back

dividends and they they go into like the the IRC channels and they'd shower everybody in dogecoin tips the community loved them as soon as you know myself or anybody else was like hey guys maybe practice and healthy skepticism and with this they're like how dare you you know leave Millar alone they're great people yada yada yada so eventually I and others got shouted out of the community people were just like shut up Jackson you don't know what you're talking about moola is the best and moolah did the NASCAR you know which they also got their logo on which a lot of people don't like to talk about and then flash forward a few months this is actually a really interesting story so

Ben dawn Berg and myself as all this was going down basically got met tried to get them on a Skype call so we could see this guy's face because nobody had ever seen this Alex Greene's face right and so we we finally convinced him to get on a Skype call and he's like threatening us basically saying you know you guys should stop questioning me because you know what typical scammers are like right like the Craig what Craig rice of the world they'll uh they'll threaten to sue you et cetera et cetera somebody in that call I don't know who it was it actually wasn't me recorded that call and posted it on YouTube and so everybody knew all of a sudden what this guy's face was like still nobody

knew who he was unfortunately flash-forward a few months after that call and surprise surprise Muller announces that they've gone bankrupt they got hacked or something the guy lost the keys you know the typical thing sorry all your money's gone and they'd actually bought an exchange at the time as well called mint pal and run off with all the money from that exchange as well and I didn't come back you know I could have come back I mean like told you if so guys humble pie all of that but I didn't I kind of waited in the wings and so TechCrunch surprisingly ran a news article that was just about this moolah going bankrupt because it was a pretty big deal it was a few million dollars missing etc etc and I guess because TechCrunch didn't have any other images of this guy they

went to this YouTube video of the Skype call and screen shot at his face because of that some ex-girlfriend of of this the scammer in in the UK randomly emails me out of the blue and is like that's not Alex green his name's Ryan Kennedy and he's a serial scam artist he had a whole encyclopedia dramatica you know like page written all about him he was running Magic the Gathering scams like of course right you know so so on brand with Bitcoin and and so and there was a bunch of info and so this all kind of got shared out and Ben and I were like hey folks maybe you should look up the name Ryan Kennedy and then muler

employees started coming out and saying oh yeah we knew his name was Ryan Kelly I'm like how do you not know that's a scam so all of this happened and it kind of imploded the community as you would imagine and at the same time I wasn't really welcomed back because people were like oh yeah you were right Jackson but a lot of people don't like to admit that so that's the history in a nutshell what was like the time frame that this was happening all happened in a year this was 2014 it was an extremely busy year and so it was like same around time as Mount GOx trauma yeah I was like I would say it happened six to eight months after the GOx thing okay so you know it seems that you know like you said the community kind of had this like implosion for a while but

you know I when I actually met you for the first time because that Doge Khan which is this like really fascinating conference I've been to I went to it was last year I think in June or so June 2018 it was held by this co-working space in Vancouver called D central or D control and very fascinating community but they held this like conference just on Doge Khan and I will say it was not the most educational conference I've been to it was not the most academic or productive conference I've been to but it was definitely the most fun conference I went to and literally we had these like decentralized dance

parties and like like you know scavenger hunts and it does a lot of fun so you know do you do you know how like this hold essential community kind of you know and you know I bet I went to there hackerspace and have like paintings of like the Doge God or like on their thing and said you know what how these guys kind of like I kind of I don't know it seemed that they are kind of trying to revive the community and kind of like the more fun-loving aspect of it yeah I'm not sure if it's a revival so much as it just is a they always are into into doge coin and I think the the Doge con although it was the name of the conference there was a lot of stuff other than dogecoin talked about they're like

toshi-kun was really even talked about the most out of all the things there it was it's cool because I think to me after all of those speculators the greedy people kind of got flushed out of the dogecoin community after all that drama i was talking about i think the the oh geez will left right like the original people that were in it for the memes in it for the fun will left over typically a more technical group of people as well a bit nerdy a bit geeky and so it was kind of nice because it was kind of a return to roots if anything and yeah they reached out to me and said hey you want to come up to Vancouver for this this conference by Ronnie and I I honestly I didn't think they'd have that many people but there

ended up being a lot of people there which which really surprised me and yeah I think it's just you know people people like memes and I you you'll sometimes see you know vitalic for instance often wearing a Doge shirt or something like that he's a big fan of it as well like the meme in general I think Doge it you know separately to - dogecoin but also just dogecoin being under that umbrella just represent the belief that there should be light heartedness and humor and community and togetherness just you know within open-source software and i

think it's kind of used as a as a symbol in a way like the symbolism to represent people who are like-minded in that belief and so to me that conference was just bringing those people together so yeah there was a lot of fun it was the weirdest and wackiest crypto conference I've ever been to but that was cool yeah I mean like he said like you know I I don't know how much we actually talked about dogecoin specifically but like I think what it really did was by like calling a Doge Khan it attracted a certain type of person to the conference just like this these very fun people essentially then like who were there to have a good time and so there was there was a panel from memory unlike the deconstructing memes like mammalogy and there was a there was a potty shaman

there like it was just like it was just completely different to any crypto conference and it was cool because nobody was sitting around talking about icos or what what what to pump you know is it was just very much down-to-earth and cool people this episode of epicenter is brought to you by cosmos the Internet of blockchains cosmos is live and we couldn't be more excited to see so many projects already building on it blockchain technologies are evolving fast and development shouldn't be one size fits all as a DAP developer you need the tools that will allow your debt to scale grow and evolve over time the cosmos SDK is a user-friendly modular framework which allows you to customize or adapt to best suit your needs it's

powered by tenement core an advanced implementation of the BFT proof of state protocol cosmos takes care of networking and consensus and allows you to focus on building your application in your language of choice if your iam smart contracts will be supported soon and the SDK makes it simple for you to connect to other blockchains in the cosmos network if you have an idea for a DAP and would like to learn more about the cosmos SDK or if you'd like to connect your existing data cosmos there's a cosmos network slash epicenter for epicenter listeners the cosmos team will reach out to answer your questions and help you get started we'd like to thank cosmos for those supportive epicenter the reason I actually wanted to do this episode was we kind of a few a few months ago we did our five-year

epicenter AMA episode like anniversary episode and one of the questions was about like you know what coins maintained their value and Brian and I kind of got into a little like back and forth about the value of mean coins and that like and you know by mean coins I don't mean it specifically just like the funny memes like dogecoin but I like just in general this like a Bitcoin is a meme coin or like litecoin is a meme that's like the silver to bitcoins gold what does that even mean no one knows but it's like somehow imbued it with like billions of dollars of value and same with dogecoin at some point not today but like you know if a few months ago dogecoin also had billions of

dollars of value and so what do you you know I know you see like you said you're skeptical about this idea of like you know the speculation do you think that there's any value in like this concept of like memes bringing together a community and value being created from the the fact that an interesting community exists yeah yeah it's kind of sad to me the community's like that Khan exists in lieu of like a market cap and I think that is the that is the thing that I like to try and like separate is having a good community from you having a good community because the price right now you know gets people excited which is actually why I like the

bear market in a sense because it means that the people that are still around are somewhat genuine in in their beliefs at least and so it's some I think that in terms of the those coins existing like I don't really like my challenge with all crypto currencies is that I think they've that they're extremely overvalued and when you say that litecoin has billions of dollars at value it has billions of dollars in nominal value um that you know sitting on it on coin market Capcom with a whole bunch of fake volume and who knows you know what would happen if there was actually a you know run on that price and people tried to sell off so I don't

know like I feel like I like to separate out the community pace from the money pace and this is one of the biggest problems I think that crypto has is that it's the first kind of software movement where you have open source software that has an intrinsic financial incentive attached to it and most other open source projects have that like BitTorrent or say you know communities like the rust community like for the soft the language rust they can flourish and be these really like supportive communities of cool developers and they can have codes of conduct they can do

all this cool stuff and there's no financial incentive attached to that necessarily right there's no part of that code that they could change to potentially game it in a way that they get more money and I think that's just a huge it just shifts the incentive schemes for all of this right and then this is like why I have trouble with any encrypted currency that stops having like very corporate interest it's why I like had some issues with block stream it's why you know I freaked out a little bit when I see Jack Dorsey like saying hey I'm gonna fund Bitcoin core developers I'm like oh interesting like what's the incentive scheme look like they're for for how decisions are made and so I really wish that we could get back to a

point where cryptocurrency was treated more just like communities were run just more like traditional open-source communities hard to do though because of the financial incentive so I don't really have a solution for that problem but I think it's just something that everybody should be aware of because there's a lot of bias in this stuff that people don't have a lot of self reflection on and kind of then relating a bit to financial and economic incentives you know one thing that I guess dogecoin tried to do in order to make it less speculative is it takes a very different approach to monetary policy as opposed to most cryptocurrencies and you know I personally like it a lot where like it's this not hyper deflationary coin and Wow and you know so could you talk a little

and I know actually like you know from what am I reading it the monetary policy actually changed a couple of times and so could you maybe go into that and like you know you like we said we started off with that whole lucky coin randomness but then what was the decision around like making it this more or maybe first can you maybe describe the monetary policy so the monetary policy that a lot of people like to talk about with doge coin is that after it was mined out to a hundred billion coins the code works in such a way that there's a static block reward of $10,000 $10,000 $10,000 per block into perpetuity right so it's it's it's infinite it's inflationary but it's

deflationary inflation if you think of the right as the as the total supply and you know a lot of people like to think that this was some amazing genius decision that that I or Billy made it wasn't it's actually a bug in in the code so when we defined the you know when you when you back in the day when you used to lie just for coin and make an old coin there were a series of magic numbers right some like variables in the code which you would change like max max money I think was the one that we changed and we just thought that putting a hundred billion there would mean that the cap of the coin was a hundred billion we didn't know we didn't know what we were doing and so a funny story actually there's a

a great github issue thread with literally hundreds of comments on it guess so it was started by j-kwon founder of cosmos because he pointed out he was the first person to report this issue he said hey guys your coin isn't actually capped oh wow I didn't know this Dana then Jay Jay suggested j-kwon literally said I don't think you should remove this bug I think you should leave it in and have inflation to assist with lost coins hacks things like that and and just you know inflation can sometimes be a good thing so you know the genius decision to leave it to its going to be inflationary is actually a product of j-kwon I never knew this he is about this cool okay I guess and then

you know another interesting event that came along in the technical timeline of dogecoin was this decision to start merged mining with my coin and suddenly that brought a lot of hash power to dogecoin and so could you maybe like talk about that like you know but back when that happened merge mining wasn't a common thing it's I guess it's really still not even common today even but you know when you ask someone named to merger mine coins it's usually named coin and dogecoin yeah so yeah one's name named coin was the first coin to really do merged mining I think Satoshi might have even been involved in that too it a very early degree and what much money does is it basically takes two

cryptocurrency protocols or block chains that are using the same hashing algorithm for proof of work and basically shares that work across the two chains so you can get a reward you can submit proofs and secure the network for both of those coin and also see receive a block reward on both as well so it increases your chance of making money for minors everybody wins the in dogecoin what led us there is that dogecoin being a fork of light coin and using s script as the hashing algorithm like a lot of others do we got to a point in I would say it was in 2014 where maybe 2015 where there was so much hashing power on the light coin network

but so little on the dogecoin network that it became very apparent that if if just one random you know litecoin miner with some assets wanted to 51% attack dogecoin they could in a heartbeat it would be very easy and this is the problem with shared you know a proof-of-work algorithms and you know the 51% attacks happen and so chali lee actually creator of light coin actually came to us to the the dogecoin community and said you guys should consider merge mining it's a great idea like you'll inherit our security model he's a fan of dogecoin let's protect it and at first I was actually pushing back on it quite heavily because you know like coin the

future of light coin wasn't super clear back then chali wasn't active on the project he was working at coin base and you know I was worried because when you stop merge mining you you have to go and convince all the - to start doing it and then those two coins I like joined at the hip right the success of those coins and the security model is joint of the hip and I'm like if dogecoin does this it has to everybody has to accept that if light coin fails dogecoin hence fails basically or its security model fails and so i pushed back on that for quite a while this was in a world where the price of all these crypto currencies was a lot lower and so the the risk was not as big as it is today but eventually the

community kind of got together and I said yeah this is probably a good idea I didn't have any bearing on it because I haven't been the developer or I'm not on it for like since early 2014 and so the developers that the currently maintained it made the changes and organized will - and merge mining was implemented and ever since it's had extremely good resilience in terms of security on the topic of development it seems by looking at the github repo that there hasn't been a whole lot of activity in the last year and since 2015 and I guess is when activity kind of trickled down can you talk a bit about that what are your

thoughts here and how do you think this is affecting the project going forward yeah yeah so I after Billy kind of backed away like after the first month or two of dogecoin I suddenly inherited this like unwieldy C++ code base that was based off an old version of litecoin that you know had all sorts of known bugs and it was it was kind of like an oh [ __ ] moment and so I very quickly had to rebase the entire kind of code of dogecoin off it was 0.8.0 I coin and and release that the next few bills and but I was working with a team of kind of contributors

notably one called max who goes by the handle Langerhans and we kind of you know for a few months there we're doing most of the development work patching you know pulling you in updates from upstream code bases like bitcoin and litecoin and then over time I just I didn't have the time I didn't have the time because I work a full-time job I'm also not a professional C++ coder and so I probably didn't have a right to be in there fiddling with things but also I didn't want to have a control over this system I didn't want to have any kind of say in future decisions about it because those

decisions can weigh on you when you're making like decisions like should we merge mine like that's a huge decision that I frankly don't want to have to own and so it was I kind of a lot of back and forth and then eventually I think it was in the late 2014 or early 2015 I handed over full github permissions to max and to other developers Patrick and Ross and they took over they became the dogecoin full-time development team well full-time and you know it's still a hobby for them but they become the maintain as of it I removed myself from the github repo so I have no access no permissions and kind of left it to them

and then they stood up I think a dev fund and a whole bunch of stuff like that like any crypto project does I think what happened was you know it's a hobby for them and you have to remember that after 2015 there was a huge lull in crypto until about 2017 when the whole aetherium iceo thing happened and so there just wasn't a good reason to really update the dogecoin source code it had everything was working like if it ain't broke why fix it and then I think there was some renewed interest in in 2017-2018 around hey update because there might be some critical security issues with it with the current code base but you know again

it's their it's their hobby it's not their full-time job and so I just think they haven't gotten around to it now I get a lot of flack for saying this but there hasn't been an on beta release of dogecoin since 2015 you know since shortly after I left and that's worrying to me I think it should be warned everybody but they're awesome like there is some progress on like some betas that I think they're releasing I think you have to change the branch on github that Ross claims to be releasing soon so we'll see but in terms of the codebase I would say it's almost in maintenance mode it's just like security patches only rather than it being a a new like any new features of development

or anything like that but again I'm not officially speaking for the project anyway so people don't get cranky at me yeah so I don't know exactly when this was but I think it's in within the last year and correct me if I'm wrong but there was this announcement that there would be this this side chain on aetherium can you talk a bit about that and it strikes me that maybe having a in theory sidechain yeah everybody moves their dough's over to to etherium well you no longer have to maintain the code base for dogecoin yeah this so for many years people have talked about there being a dosed aetherium bridge or a you know we even

back in the day Jake Juan and I used to talk about a tender mint to Doge bridge a lot actually some people what ended up happening is vitalic and others actually funded a bounty program so I think vitalic and a few others through what ended up being because the etherion price run up about a hundred thousand dollars or so in bounty just to create a working prototype of the Doge ether bridge right so that and it that that that obviously fueled a whole bunch of excitement because developers like hey there's 100k on the table hell I'm gonna do this so a bunch of people spun up different projects to try and do it and essentially what it would be is a bridge where you can send your dogecoin over to aetherium and then it exists on the

etherium network and send it back and vice versa right so dogecoin exists in two places instead of one and you know the the reason that I don't really see a point in this is because it would exist is essentially an EOC 20 token on the etherium blockchain that you would be able to push those into and out of there's so much overhead to do this work but aetherium as a network actually has higher transaction fees than dogecoin so like what's the hope what's the point of doing this dogecoin has a 60 second block time like nia zero transaction fees what's the benefit that uses of that cryptocurrency get out of switching it over to the etherion blockchain very little and so for me the way I kind of

adjudicate or assess these things as I say well what's the benefit to end users how would this help cryptocurrency get mainstream adoption or actual real-world usage and I don't think it would I think it's a cool pet project I think it's a cool hackathon idea but a lot of people you know I think cuz they were they they had a whole bag of dogecoin they were hoping it would pump the price for like theory and bridge a theory and bridge and what's you know that that's crazy it's like I said it's a hackathon idea it's not actually something that I think people really use on the regular so you're saying you don't want to be able to collateralize your maker die using dogecoin oh no so I mean I guess that leads into the question of like

what are your like thoughts on how like the crypto space has evolved in the last five years or and no maybe the last one year and you know we see this movement towards defy or and then you know the year before that was the D web and like what do you what are your thoughts on just like this general movement in the crypto space and these new ideas that are coming around yeah for sure I think it's a it's a it's been a game of shifting narratives I think I remember and you remember as well because you've been around for a long time in this industry years ago people were talking about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as an actual medium of exchange you know this is going to be used to pay for at restaurants and pay for food and there's a lot of people

that like to claim that they never said that I need to try and dig up recordings of them from presentations where I know that they said otherwise like I'll be like epicenter episode you could start digging in hey great idea great idea but you know this is it seen a shift in narratives right and so the the whole medium of exchange thing didn't happen because you know scalability was kind of the scapegoat for that I actually started starting to question whether scalability was the real reason that Bitcoin didn't take off for real tech retail commerce but so then that shifted and then it moved to this whole store of value thing right so oh no we never said that crypto is a is a is a thing you should actually use as a currency you should be using it as a place where you

know it's akin to gold right it's just a thing where you store your wealth and it goes up in price over time and then that didn't really work out because they realized that you know hey gold actually exists and so do stocks and so they're like oh okay actually it's about defy it's about you know rebuilding for rebuilding banks essentially and and large financial institutions in the blockchain which you know west to get into this comical territory where it's like hey guys all those financial institutions you said you were going to completely demolish and you know all the hierarchies you said you were going to demolish and because the blockchain would make people it would give people

liberty and they'd be able to be their own bank you want to recreate all that bad stuff inside the blockchain it's like okay like you can see where this is going I don't really see the value in that I think the that already exists uh-huh and so the value of recreating it on a blockchain to me doesn't have a lot of benefits because it actually makes the thing less efficient you know it's centralized for a reason and that's because it can be super efficient you know especially when you get to like these collateralized like loans and things like that I just don't see a reason for doing that on encrypt oh so you have that whole side of it and then and I like to think of those people as as the newcomers

right so the whole dphi movement typically people that I see have come into crypto late to the game probably like 2016-2017 onwards and so you have people like that that pump guy who's like yeah like crypto Liberty like let's recreate Bank since I crypt wait what and then you have the oh jeez right so you have a whole bunch of people that have been around for a long time the book Bitcoin core develop is the lightning folks but then you look at what they're doing and they've kind of like hunkered down in a bunker and they're creating like these Rube Goldberg machines for sending you know transactions and it's baffling to me it's like the the scaling solutions that we're coming up with like lightning and

and all of that are so so so complex that there is you know Bitcoin is hard enough to get an average user of a venmo of Apple pay etc to just understand the concept of public and private case backing up a seed phrase using a Bitcoin wallet then you have to layer in lightning channels and the fact that you need to have you know all these lightning channels established routing needs to happen multi-hop like from a user experience but perspective I don't see a way that they can kind of hide that efficiently that works and uses and so it's a little bit

sad to me because I feel like you've got people building impossible chaos machines in a basement and they're cool developers that they're very smart like I don't want to take away from from what lightning and the likes of those teams are doing and then you have like the institution folks who are all like D Phi D Phi let's let's turn this blockchain into it into a you know corporate capitalist thing III really don't see a sizable enough population of people in the middle kind of saying hey what about using cryptocurrency to actually transact it's gone it's gone it just doesn't exist anymore and I think the fact that we're at a point like I hoped that aetherium was going to establish a lot of this and do a lot of

this but the fact the theory am is now rebranding is a theory m20 which a lot of people don't realize is it's completely different to a theory and this isn't like just a patch to a theory no it's like no guys theorem was a failure sorry we need to completely react attack the whole thing I think that speaks volumes to how challenging it's going to be to actually just buy a cup of coffee with cryptocurrency so I don't know that's where I stand and as an outsider like I have no financial incentives for this I have no it's not a job that I work in and so I like to just call it as it is like as a product right now I don't see how cryptocurrency is going to establish market fit or adoption yeah totally I mean we actually

so we are just a few weeks ago we did an episode with Amar'e such at who is one of the core developers of Bitcoin cash and yeah you know I might get some flack for this but I think like you know the Bitcoin community seems to be kind of trying to hit that middle ground you're talking about like something you know just really focusing on scaling basic payments and so you know I I'm kind of hopeful there a little bit I am too you know the sad thing that like I I absolutely agree with you there I think that there are some good good goals I think the intent is with things like Bitcoin cash I think unfortunately the ego that surrounds the characters involved on a in every way everywhere you look is really

disappointing but if it didn't have that attached to it I think that would be actually really compelling yeah totally so with all that where do you think where do you think crypto is going and do you see any light at the end of the tunnel proverbially and and and do you see any positive things come out of this space yeah yeah I do III think that ultimately cryptocurrency is made up of several parts right like satoshis original invention wasn't completely net new it was it was it was so Toshi was the glue that held together existing concepts such as public key cryptography you know

hash chains inner linked lists essentially you know proof of work which had already existed it brought together these these several components to make something that was you know sum of all parts and I think that some of that can be extracted and used to improve the quality of users lives and improve society and so I still think that you know one thing that that we've seen a huge need for just globally has been an increase in user security right people need to care more about secure passwords authentication you know having some

level of security over their own identity things like that there are so many kind of pieces of work that are going to cryptocurrency get that can be used for those purposes it doesn't need a blockchain does it need a proof-of-work backed or a proof of stake back network to do that absolutely not but can some of the the the contributing parts be extracted out and contribute back to society yes I like to see the the cryptocurrency networks as they currently stand like things with a token or a huge network is really kind of like the the super forward thinking kind of like ventually where you're just experimenting with stuff but out of that should should should develop hopefully

new developments in cryptography and just the way we think about security that can benefit everybody even if it doesn't have to end up being on a blockchain and so that that's how I try to like paint the silver lining with this stuff is that it's started a conversation in many cases about you know individuals having better control over their identity their security their money which i think is a good thing so I'd like to circle back to you and so you mentioned that you don't work in cryptocurrency or you don't work in the blockchain space and so you know why did you step away from the project and you mentioned the OL NASCAR thing but was it something greater than that or was yeah

yeah so I've always had a job outside of crypto and so it wasn't really a matter of me like leaving cryptocurrency as a job to booth back into into just regular tech which is what I do it was more just that was always what I was doing and crypto is my side project it's always been the case and what kind of made me and the way that I work you know crypto hasn't been my only side project I've had many side projects over the years the way I decide to work on a side project is if it gives me personal joy to work on that or I get something out of it in terms of like I'm learning and I think what's happened the kind of

peaks and troughs in my involvement in crypto have really correlated to how much I feel I can learn from the current industry and so when I left and moved away from crypto in 2015 I had very little involvement in crypto in 2015 or 2016 it was because I felt that all the conversations had shifted to these kind of startups that were like pitching it's this on a blockchain and it was just I wasn't gonna learn anything from them other than how to sell snake oil and so I moved away when a lot of the stuff started happening in 2017 with smart contracts and a hope bunch of new concepts I was like I can learn something again I'm gonna go back

into that I'm gonna create an educational youtube series about it as a hobby because you know when I the thing I don't think a lot of people realize this the YouTube videos that I create are not just for my audience but also for me because in researching them I am learning about that thing and so that's the main reason I did it it was because I learned something and then what happened I found is that in late 2018 after I'd been doing it for about two years I noticed a patent as I started reviewing these different blockchain projects I was like they're all that they're all the damn same and so I stopped learning anything again and so more recently I've kind of backed away

from cryptocurrency again you'll notice that my youtube channel we were talking before the show is shifted to mechanical keyboard reviews because you know I find interest in that I'm learning about something different cryptocurrency doesn't have anything to offer me personally right now and that's kind of selfish in a way but that's fine like I should only spend my time on things that I actually care about yeah I kind of agree with you on some points there and it was similarly when when when I started at the center and when was Brian and when we met it back in 2013 or something my goal was very much to learn about the technology I mean I had been in this

space for less than a month when the podcast started so so in that sense I understand but I feel that I've constantly been learning things I mean I've learned so many things like continue to learn things and my pins of shifted and I think that over the over the years I've had periods where I've had doubts about the technology and about its ability to you know bring good into the world and then other periods where I'm quite hopeful and I see interesting things happening oh yeah I still you know a lot of people think I'm just a negative Nancy pessimist about everything I do often say things that get me excited I just you know they're few and far between

this YouTube channel that that you've been doing now I guess for about a year I did it for about I don't for about two years actually yeah so you're you're doing sort of these short reviews of blockchains or like I mean you've also done some reviews of like hardware wallets and this sort of thing and it's also somewhat tied into gaming I feel like you're reviewing these mechanical keyboards like what's the goal here what do you what do you see this becoming in the future is it just another side project or do you have a bigger goal here of maybe you know turning this into a business or an educational venture or something like that ya know III have no I'm definitely not gonna become a full-time youtuber

because spoiler alert it doesn't pay very well unless you're you know some sort of like video game streamer or something but no again like as I said it's a way for me to learn and so I I will post things on there from time to time now when I'm I have something to talk about but I'm not going to become a professional tech youtuber or something like that it's really much just a hobby for me and sorry I'm one of those people that I get really excited about things for about a year or so and then my okay on to the next thing so I wouldn't be surprised I'm currently trying to find another side project I'm thinking of doing something with decentralized social networking again because nobody's cracked that not yeah that's that's the

one thing that perpetually I think keeps coming back and that people can't really find a solution to it yeah it's high very few have yeah and so you mentioned that you you don't work in crypto and you it's it's known that you work at a big software company do you have any ambition to maybe work in the crypto space come back into the crypto space I'm sure you've gotten you received many job offers over the years is it something you've considered I'm not really I I don't have a strong enough belief in the in the future of cryptocurrency to aren't working on it full-time yet it's the same as like if somebody said hey do you want to go and

work for a VR startup I'd be like no and I just it's it's too cutting-edge for me and unproven so no real desire to you know III toyed around with the idea of like potentially going and working for one of the the the larger kind of more established and regulated companies in encrypted currency but yeah I'm glad I didn't because I think they've kind of what I've noticed at least is a lot of those bigger companies have kind of lost their heart a little bit and in the name of profit so I'm glad that I've kind of the other reason I'm glad about this is because it also not working in

cryptocurrency reduces the bias I think that I had I worked at cryptocurrency companies the last five years that I've been in the space would have in some way even if indirectly contributed to some bias in my opinions about things and I'm glad I haven't had that it's kept me grounded to not be involved in it day to day and so you know we mentioned at the beginning of this up you know you're one of the domain name squatters when you have an interesting idea and so any of those domain names like you know that are particularly interesting to you and you know anything that you know the viewers might find

intriguing or at least amusing and anything any of those side might be turning into side projects anytime soon what's in your wasn't your GoDaddy account it's funny you mentioned that I literally just went through and turned off order when you on all of my all of my domains I don't have a good one right now I I was working on a side project for a little bit there called chyme which was kind of a Twitter alternative and it was open source III why would I think my next thing will be getting back into that you mentioned Mastodon earlier I am a big fan of Mastodon which is a decentralized social net will a federated social network I should say I kind of want to get back into that area

because I think that there's an increasing increasing demand for an alternative to say Facebook specifically and that company is just evil at this point and so there needs to be an alternative I wholeheartedly agree with that statement but we're gonna have to leave it there and I Jackson thanks for coming on today and it was great to talk to you and hopefully we will have you back on at some point in the future if you decide to come back in the crypto maybe you'll launch the the next meme coin and you'll have to come back no no thanks for having me guys thanks we release new episodes of epicenter every week click

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