Blockchain & Decentralization: Expectations vs. Reality | Epicenter Insights Panel Discussion

Transcript

[Music] thank you so much for joining us tonight for our first edition of epicenter insights so as you probably know epicenter is a podcast focused on blockchain and decentralization technologies and this podcast has been around for about four years it's exploring like highly technical aspects of blockchain projects and diving deep into white papers at least however we thought that you know it's good from

titles from time to time to take a step back and take a look at the big picture of the space and think about like where are we at in terms of like our efforts of Reda centralizing the web and that's why we organized this event and today we'll focus on the concept of decentralization which is one of the most frequently used concepts in the space and I think everyone is kind of like getting a little bit lost when we think about like what aspects and levels of decentralization do we actually care about while building blockchain projects and decentralized technology and that's what we'll explore tonight so we have a panel debate here our guest this is florian the blockchain lawyer

blocked a lawyer this is lease from least authority LED founder of a scone ravi from early bird venture capital and bryan the founder of epicenter huh yeah and we also have yeah I would like to thank you as well for to our sponsors shapeshift early bird and to the family for hosting us tonight yeah so we wanted to you know take this evening and this discussion to sort of take a step back a little bit and not necessarily talk about which coin is gonna go high as in the next month but but more think about what what are some

of the longer-term implications of all of this technology and and how do we think about that as people working in this but maybe before we get started we can just do a brief round of introductions and everybody can speak like I need two minutes about what they do and kind of what they find most interesting in this place sure so yeah I'm Florian blockchain lawyer is indeed my domain which I'm very proud of I don't know how many top-level domains there are but it's a small cup of people that have a blockchain not something domain I suppose so yeah I bought that one in 2015 and it has been kind of a crazy ride since then because I kind of

then got really early into this blockchain versus law problem which has many different facets and most recently I've been concerned with basically helping actually the German government to understand what blockchain is because they ended up giving themselves the political mandate to develop a regulatory framework here in Germany if you download the coalition agreement between cdu/csu and SPD you will find the word blockchain mentioned seven times in that document and what that really translates into is all the ministries in Germany doing like workshops on blockchain and like developing like writing kind of white

papers for them internally and they kind of run them by this new Association that I co-founded which is called the blockchain bundesverband and we basically advise them from a kind of technical perspective on what makes sense what doesn't make sense so it's quite interesting and that's more or less what I do I'm loose dining er from least Authority we do security audits and we also do software development in the open source space mostly focused on privacy and security aspects we believe that privacy is a right for everybody to have and so we pursue things to that goal but yeah that's least authority hello my name is

ELISA arias and I'm the co-founder of OS coin our ciccone is a project out of Berlin and what we attempting to do with it is we're building a community owned and operated network for open source collaboration and centralization so we're basically going after the problem of sustainability of open source specifically targeting maintained errs I've been in Berlin for some time was at SoundCloud was an early employee there I've been living here loving Berlin for the last seven years hi everyone my name is Ravi I'm with earlybird venture capital a VC fund basically I should say at this point traditional VC fund based out of Berlin and Munich and Istanbul so we do seed in series a investments across

Europe or have been doing this for the past around 20 years we as a fund have been interested in crypto for a while and so our first investment in the space was a big chain DB in 2014 where we let the seed round and then of course we're proud investors in shapeshift where we did the series a about a year ago and yeah we we are actively looking for or looking to invest in the space because we are generally yeah highly convinced that you know decentralization and web 3.0 are is the technology and movement that that is going to be sustainable in the future and it's going to be a play a big role in the future that said of course we are currently balancing kind

of the crypto and decentralized world with the more traditional VC world in several ways so as you can imagine icos and in token sales are affecting us in several ways there are of course a competition to our to the more traditional VC model in some way and of course also we are investing also in other businesses that are I want to disrupting industries in more traditional ways like for example we are in an investor in n 26 which many of you may know the digital bank which is disrupting the banking industry but in a different way of course than the more kind of complete decentralized way so this is kind of some of the things that

we are balancing right now and me personally I got involved in in crypto and in 2013 then kind of yeah didn't you know what that was mostly privately and then I'm kind of got into it also from a professional side when I joined earlybird about two years ago and and I'm leading the efforts in our in our firm in this regard oh that's sick so I thought maybe we can start here so you mentioned decentralized technologies right so that brings all this word decentralized now especially curious with ula like what this decentralized mean you know like why it's important and if you look at our a scone how will you know whether you succeeded in

building something decentralized it's interesting I think like starting from this whole centralization vers decentralization I just want to start with something very fundamental I think like for the last 20 years of Technology even like earlier the other thing we experienced this you know very centralized force on the internet where basically everything in a way were centralized I think what we're experiencing right now there's this resurgence around decentralization that doesn't mean that decentralization is a panacea that you know fits everything so but I think that right now we actually like you know going from the one extreme to the other extreme where you see lots of teams out there you know basically like you know pitting the world

centralization without even meaning what that could mean I think eventually you know we're gonna end up being a bit more balanced things that actually make sense to be centralized will centralize things that don't make sense to be centralized they will be decentralized now specifically to what I'm excited I think at the core of it there is that what I call the Internet infrastructure I think you know when when when when we like when we matting myself in there or wasn't there when we created the Internet as a society I think the fundamental idea behind this was this exchange of information without an intermediary and no one getting in between that and a thing actually while we started in a great way eventually what happened was I think we've seen

this like like we've seen basically a few companies on the internet owning owning the space and owning us owning our personal data owning our interactions and this paradigm were basically two of us can can transact without any intermediary actually like didn't like didn't end up happening it actually end up failing in a way so the first thing that I'm actually very very excited about is decentralized internet infrastructure going back to this idea that indeed you know we can be transacting safely like you know and we can be you know respecting our individual Ike you know our individual nature in a way without actually anyone interfering between that okay so we're going back to fundamentals like privacy on top of that you have other things like what we call you know distributed

technologies in a way where indeed you have a lot of benefits in having more of a decentralized infrastructure our classic example that I think a lot of people used and I also myself used a lot of times to pitch the space to friends that we're actually more skeptical is take storage for example right like you know we all having all of these resources in in our hand we're using you know like we have all of this computational resources and all the storage resource that actually we're not utilizing so what actually if we if we if we were able to do something much more interesting that that is much more fault tolerant as we're saying in computer science so there's these aspects of data store it's just one component and the third thing that I'm personally much more excited about is what I call decentralize ownership in a

way I think a lot of people talking about centralization but they forgot they forgot to decentralize ownership indeed where we going is in we're going towards community owned networks on the internet I hope that that you know where we're moving towards and that's for storage for computation for open source collaboration for transcoding live peer you know I hope that we're going towards that and what's exciting to me about that world is you know this distinction between capital and work is actually blaring a lot try like take Bitcoin for example you contribute to the protocol and I know that actually right now it's actually quite hard and it's being said isn't again but the whole idea of contributing to a network and being incentivized natively from that network for your work

and getting to see ownership with within that network this is this is fascinating to me I really hope that for example I spend years on the music industry I hope that you know we eventually end up to create you know a community on Spotify or a community on soundcloud where the value creators will get to see some of the benefits of ownership that until now only the capital was saying so yeah I think this these three these three areas are the ones that immediately come to my head so he said this kind of ability to transact with each other without intermediaries it is more information meant for money right like that's the big play of blocks and of course you know like know just about information but for money that which one are the second one centralized infrastructure

for the internet call it computation call it storage and the third one is much more community community owned they're open and operating networks of all sorts of kind so what about you Florian and do you think like a legal perspective brings something to that that people generally miss in a sense yeah because the the invention of blockchain in a sense was culturally possibly a reboot for how we want to design legal systems right because from historically we've built legal systems based upon this idea of a monarch or some dictator or some centralized force

of power that exerts that and can create rules that become binding by somebody having the monopoly of force and suddenly the blockchain pivoted a system that does not at all depend on force but merely economic incentives and it it is a new governance tool for big amounts of people maybe even bigger than nation-states have ever managed to scale up to and I think what people in the blockchain space who realizes the potential and now very excited about this what Dame is is that rebooting this we also get rid of a lot of interesting in useful things that

have been actually invented in the legal systems that we had traditionally and really it's about and trying not to reinvent the wheel where we don't have to I think and so the famous Dao theorem hard folk discussion right it's the prime example that showed even in a decentralized system like the blockchain if something goes wrong and with technology we all know there is always something that can go wrong suddenly you fall back into this basic primal human mode where you like you know no it was you know it's my money I for those and those reasons and you write angry reddit

posts right for those reasons it's my money and I want that that to happen and somebody somebody else has an opposing view and ultimately what you need is some kind of rulebook by which and an independent arbitrator would kind of you know say well it's like this or like that and everybody no sticks to that result right so there's kind of the reinvention of a legal system in disguise and it would probably expediate the process if people in the blockchain space were more aware of certain solutions that have been designed in law beforehand and on the other hand positively I do think there are actually startups working around that and in that space

[Laughter] so what about you Liz so at least Authority's been around for a long time and building sort of privacy centric technology and now with with blockchain right we're adding a monetization which is changing so much so do you think there's things that are like you know we're sort of forgetting that were actually important insights because all of a sudden now there's money in it um yeah yeah money makes us forget things right money makes it money can distract us money isn't the solution to all of our problems either but coming back to

the beginning of your question about about the money being out of the problems that we're solving one thing that we work a lot with is distributed decentralized data storage and how we can have privacy how that can enhance people's ability to have privacy around their data and control over their own data and looking back at the history of that space has really helped me as an individual to understand that yeah we are part of a bigger context that this is a wave of technology that's happening but is happening on the shoulders of giants of the past and like Florian was saying about when it comes to the legal space it's really important to look at

yeah we want to disrupt the system we want to change it but are there aspects of the previous system that maybe weren't so bad that we should keep what should we keep that's good what do we want to change that's bad and when it comes to like the distributed data storage space it has helped me to look back and to talk to other people who have tried to solve the problem before and to see and to see how looking back like even 20 years that this this is not a new problem that people have been trying to solve it that money even the idea of digital digital money is something that people were trying to solve well before Bitcoin came around and it's just it's really helpful to look back at those problems and see how they solved it and I think that money can help in terms of incentives of how

you want to incentivize particular behavior and governance like you were talking about if projects is really an to then also reinforce particular behavior in systems and that as we move forward in the blockchain space it's really important for us to all consider yeah these different levers for creating the behavior and the outcome that we want so if we have a goal for a particular type of world or a problem to be solved to think that we have these governance levers these legal levers we have these financial levers and how can we put all these pieces together to create a better world or a better solution so do you think there's something inevitable about blockchain and decentralize technology to lead to

this and to lead to kind of you know more maybe privacy-preserving and free world or do you think this is you know key design decisions have to be made so that we end up there and we don't end up in like a very different outcome so do I think it's inevitable or do we have control yeah I mean is it inevitable is this sort of where you know the market in telecom is just like driving us there or is this you know does it depend on the design decisions that people make I think that one big thing that's interesting there's there's been a lot of money in smart people that are now focusing their efforts in the decentralized space and so that

inevitably will have some sort of important outcome in our world that there will be some sort of impact from that if you put lots of lots of dedicated smart people and lots of money to drive them you're gonna get something and then as far as like as far as our control over that outcome yeah we need to think about what we're doing we need to think about like what we were trying to achieve by the decisions that we make and technology is not neutral technology does push towards a particular outcome you can incentivize people with your your mechanism design and your tokens and you can you can influence people with how you arbitrate the problems that come in your community you're gonna influence the outcome there and so yeah every everything that we do it matters

and it's going to be amplified by all this attention on the space Sarabi right you guys have invested in or earlybird I guess maybe before you has invested in all kinds of businesses and and I guess he had you if disruption was always you know as always Sarah even try to invest in sort of the next new thing now with Bloch and many people have this expectation that it's you know not just sort of a more efficient way of I don't know delivering groceries or selling books or something but that it will you know we wire a society so do you think that as investors there's sort of a different role and maybe different responsibilities or is it just about you

know what what is a more efficient system it's a that's a good question so [Music] I think I'm not sure if we have a different role I mean I guess what what hasn't changed is that of course we are in West we invest other people's money to make again essentially right so that hasn't changed but I think what really excites me about the space is that first of all I absolutely think that the degree of innovation the degree of change that this technology can bring is much much bigger than than anything else we've invested in I mean you're

absolutely right yeah I mean it compared to you know the ten thousand ecommerce company which is a very little exciting this technology can can bring you know as you say right change not only to tech and to to business model but also to to democracy or to political systems and all those kinds of things so and I think in that sense our role might be different because the companies that we invest in have to have have a much bigger potential to shape our future and I mean this is something that in excites me about being a VC in general that I get to invest hopefully in companies that you know will have a positive impact on the future and I think in in

the decentralized world this is possible to a larger extent and also possibly to an extent that is not necessarily so profit driven because I mean um before every company that we've invested in is centralized and essentially is locking in the profits or if it's a successful business then it will lock in the profits and the profits will only go to very very few people writing obviously including us but then if you if we invest in decentralized companies um the much bigger group of people can benefit from this and I think decentralized projects have a much bigger potential to to make things better without and spreading basically

the the gains from it on a much larger on to a much larger group of people which i think is exciting because and again i mean this is kind of a I guess it conflict here a little bit since we are like I said we are investors and our business is to make money but on the other hand I feel sometimes this old world is really really wrong in many ways right so that this kind of investment hypothesis over the last of the last ten or twenty years to invest in these big centralized companies that create data monopolies cool and so in in the blocks in the vlog shades face so in the blockchain face it seems right in the last in the last two years at least

there's been so much money rather than everybody doing I see oh they're raising lots of money and even even people raising in venture rounds raising lots of money at you know early stages so it seems like maybe capital isn't so scarce anymore doesn't that completely undermine the the VC business model I think it does I mean it does create competition to some extent in that you know there are projects that we might have been have wanted to invest in that just didn't raise VC money so absolutely I think so first I think two things so one is I think the market is it's getting more realistic and kind of reasonable again so these you know times

where companies have raised you know hundreds of millions of dollars without anything really except a white paper are seem to be over to a certain extent so and I think this is also a situation it's more reasonable again for more likely for VCS again to come in and possibly invest either you know through through equity but also of course to tokens and the other thing is that I think many companies also do realize that capital is not everything I think this is a pretty well understood argument actually that you know obviously B C's or investors in general can provide two things they can provide capital which you can get much easier

today through a token sale from the crowd but it's also experienced in working with startups and in scaling tech companies and basically any decentralized project is also to a large extent just a tech company that is building a product and that is growing and and this is something that you know we and many other receipts of course have a lot of experience in and then there's the component on top of it which is the decentralized parts of the business model which of course we have to learn as everyone else and newly yeah but if you think like even further ahead you know not not like at the moment in the next few years like do you think

it's possible that there will be a world where capital ish is completely abundant and it is not scarce anymore at all and what happens then yeah we had a discussion earlier about this and I think so I I don't think so because or my argument would be at least raising capital is not going that capital is not going to be for free because capital by definition is has value and people are going to try to get more I'll get something for it so they're not just giving it we're gonna give it away for free and even if there are many more people that are willing or the the pool

of capital that you can that you can order the the pool of people that you can raise from it's much bigger I think the market will regulate itself in the way that if people invest in bad projects they are going to lose money and this is going to stop to some extent so I don't think that it's going to continue that you can just raise bad projects can continue to raise money what Ellie said earlier today which I thought was really interesting is kind of the aspect of an economy worldwide or a state where economic growth is not the most important factor anymore or not even existent anymore which would then you know certainly have it's at

different yeah would have a different kind of drive or or create a different kind of driving forces I guess in the in the entire economy which I really I mean I've heard this kind of line of thought before but I really feel like I I'm not sure what that would imply for for the investment business yeah can explain it I mean what what we're talking viewing lunch actually is based on Albert Albert from US v that wrote this book were lost our capital right so what he's arguing about is that actually we've already living in a poor scarce world right and of course this is very hard to to measure right now but the idea behind the concept is that the key thing about

our like you know the hierarchy of our needs potentially there's enough capital and enough resources to be able to satisfy that globally the problem is distribution right so the problem is how do we distribute that across the world because right now this is not it captured by view and it's not captured by by the rest right so I I can I can envision a world that works like that it's it's very hard to think about you know what happens there though but I actually I am a bit on Albert I the thing that we approaching that state and distribution is the key the key problem and I'm actually excited to see how this whole blockchain world reshuffles and redistributes in a different way if we accomplish that right buttons we might not accomplish that and we have again

the same greedy intrapreneurs that just capture everything for themselves and then we back to centralized stuff yeah if anyone was to add in that protocol now so you will have choices around how the economics work who gets how many tokens etc so how does that work yeah how are you gonna make those decisions right I think the way they weighed I prefer to thing about all of these new networks is that all of us are designing Konami's right at the core of the protocol there's a monetary policy that distributes that value some type of work and incentivize certain behaviors I actually yeah I prefer to think about like that because actually that's that's what's that's

what's really happening in taken network like we were discussing or like during last live peer for example same story I like what we're doing with the Wescoe and we try to incentivize open-source maintainer basically distribute ownership and value back to back to open-source projects so what I think that is very interesting with that is that you know all of us now we need to start thinking about these questions while previously the model and web 2.0 was okay you're building a product value capture value creation value capture right now it's not just about that right now you need to think this is a network versus a corporation in a way so you need to think about holistically how this how this economy operates and why this economy will actually be sustainable right so what we're doing with with with the ESCO and it's very

specific is targeting of the massive problem of open sustainability for the people in the room that are least technical you know we have one of the big holes of the Internet where almost every digital organization from schools hospitals fortune 500 companies depend in an open source code base somewhere down the stack but down there if you look there you have usually one person maintaining late at night sweating this infrastructure while all of these different players you know make money of that so we try to rethink how that paradigm works and we try to basically take a real problem and make it better actually I prefer I prefer the people that start with that they start with real small local problems and then design economies around that so that's

that's what we're going after yep sorry if this is a protocol right and then if the end you have this token that gets distributed and let's say there is some percentage that then gets in letting succeeds in the large-scale and then you know let's say there's some B C's that investigators some people understand they own like a percentage of that protocol I mean the example of HTTP is often a right like okay what if HTTP could have been monetized right and what if someone owned 5% of like oh yeah that sounds like a nightmare like the way you describe it but I can give

you like like a practical example so what a lot of projects actually doing right now is that they're raising capital because the one they want one thing one like on the one side they want money to actually be able to bootstrap that Network they Crisium for example use case right but on the other side they weren't actually the signaling that private investors do right like this network is valued X and then what they do is we start seeing a lot of this idea of inflation funding being played out on the space what's the idea is that you know the protocol means new tokens and then distributes them based on a rule set and what variance thing there are a lot people dunce then is that what the way that you write your rules what what happens is that actually devaluing

everyone else and usually you devaluing the capital that you know originally bootstrap the the network in north it's almost like inflation but you redistribute that inflation to the people that contribute is the long-term sustainability of the economy right so I'm actually ok like we've done the same thing with the project I'm actually ok if there are two things the one is if you're principled ok if you have very clear principles about for example in our case we're saying that the open source community from day one it's to own the majority like it needs to own the majority of the network right 51% needs to be owned by the open source community not us not investors when we spoke with investors we told them that this is the case and then the second one is you know if you're honest with them you tell them do you want to play on

that yes or no you know are you okay with that right so what I like about the space is that we start having this more principled oriented conversations because it's about an economy right in the end if the economy is incentivizing the wrong players the whole network won't survive so that's one thing we'll be thoughtful about the second one is be transparent as well that's the beauty of blocks in a way this is codified right anyone can see what are the things that you value and what are things that you don't value so yeah that did answer your question I went a bit off okay okay cool Florian were your thoughts on what what do you want to know I think that aspect of distribution and how one

should think about that well I mean we're in the middle of a period where we're suddenly making the distribution of a coin within a network the decisive power in that network actually because we're switching from proof of work to proof of stake or actually many network many new network springing up actually use it from the get-go a proof of stake based system which really means that your influence in the network depends on how how much of a fraction of that network you effectively own so it kind of is a is a form of governance that rewards rich people versus poor people in a sense right if

you want to kind of put it to the top it's more nuanced but I think it's problematic and the question to me is whether we are really building a future that is truly decentralized or whether we are blindly running into a new sort of trap that then we will need the web 4.0 revolution forward to kind of you know let's reread II centralize the web right and recently there was a very interesting blog post by some researchers that looked at certain delegated proof of state networks deepest networks and just looked at who are the people validating the blocks in

their network and what it turns out is that basically the employees of the companies building those networks are validating the blocks in the network so what what's actually happening is we're running a big fake smoke screen and what's really happening is there's companies running centralized systems claiming that you centralized to get all the benefits from you know not being regulated by the financial market authority and the rules applying to it because it's decentralized because there's no issuer and all that stuff is all based on that those are decentralized networks but if ever if if all the people in the network are identical in person it kind of stops being decentralized so to be

very provocative I really I really questioned sometimes like what is it actually that we're building so that brings me to another conversation that I had with a friend who's here in the room actually he's a UX designer and we've been discussing the value of user experience design in blockchain because how do you really empower the people in a blockchain system to start using their the fraction of what they own to stay it in the system and to vote to vote on blocks or to participate somehow in the governance of the system how do you do it and today really you need to be able to you know write command line stuff you need to be able to understand code and

read documentation son get up and all that stuff right so if we solve that user experience issue and make every person that doesn't even know what a production is capable of participating in really important decisions being taken in that Network then maybe we are getting closer towards that dream of decentralization Hey yeah you got ego I can say one more thing yeah the one thing that I wanted

to add that that that goes like I think it's close to what Florian was saying and what Travie was saying before is that I think one of the exciting things right now is that there's no poster child okay and what I mean by that is that you know like for the ones of you that have been working developing for companies during the web 2.0 days you know you would always look at like okay what Google is doing what Facebook is doing this is the way that I need to do stuff you know it is what Robbie was saying before one of the positives of the space is that you know you have this very like you know a group of many many smart people that Liz mentioned that actually now they're going after big problems and there's no poster child that tell you like this is

how you should do this you know like we actually running this big scale experiment with monetary policy in a way in each of these networks and we're figuring things out as we go that doesn't mean that you know especially the good people just like don't look at the past we look at the past and try to learn as much as we can but the good story here is that you really have to rethink you know it's a new paradigm spending time on rethinking existing problems different tools what could we do differently nothing that gives me hope on the one side on the other side of course this so much hype and so much you know so many scary teams right now in the space that make you feel like okay what do I have in common with all of these people you know like it's you

know it's weird but but I think these are the pros and the cons and just gonna say actually for those of you were at consensus what you get when you put a lot of money and apparently smart people into a room then when you get a crazy boat party where they give away free cars right so it's just totally insane I mean it was just thick like the kind of things that the that I mean I was just I'm just still amazed by this how some of the companies there were kind of just throwing away money by throwing away but like spending money like crazy and on these kind of things but actually what I wanted to say is that and I think and I think you're exactly right

in the way that we have to figure everything out and what excites me about this so much is it especially around kind of token design and designing how to incentivize the different the different ecosystems and I think yours is a really interesting example and because there are just kind of clear roles and there and you know several different roles that in in this in this ecosystem that have to be incentivized and kind of coordinated I think another interesting is example as app coins which is kind of similar to you in the way that you have people who develop apps you have people who have to test them and so on and all these kind of frameworks or the the the things that

are being used to build these incentive mechanisms come from so many different fields that are here that are combined here right you have game theory you have economics economic policy and all those kind of different fields and that have to be and minted into code and I think this is what really excites me about this a lot and I wish I could kind of spend most of my time and kind of thinking about how to build these incentive mechanisms yeah I think this is really fascinating and I want to enrich this discussion with an anecdote where last November I had the pleasure to actually visit the country of Brazil for the first time in my life and

because I was invited to speak at a conference at the counter at the country's capital called Brasilia and the funny thing about Brazilians is that it's a completely artificial city in the sense that it has been designed by a single person and then actually been built subsequently and it's like a guy like vitalik Buddha Rijn sitting a genius in his field sitting at his desk and designing the perfectly incentivized economic system governance future RISM everything together prediction markets you know just a perfect system to rule the perfect society and this Oscar Niemeyer the guy who designed the city he was really a genius and he

there is a meaning behind every building in the city it's super sophisticated very metaphoric but when you go to the city you you in less than 60 minutes you're severely depressed because the city is dead there's not a single person doing anything interesting anywhere in the street actually the streets don't even have names the streets have numbers because it's more efficient and it's also that all the hotels are in one block it's the hotel block and all the restaurants are in another block it's a restaurant block and all the residential it's crazy so and when I drove through the city I had this idea that this is the world we're currently designing with

the protocols that we currently have it's like you know people that are genius and one thing like computer science and economics and that have read all the you know all the crazy guys have got Nobel Prizes and they are designing supposed to be a world where all the people you know of the world should be happy in and unfold themselves in it's quite unrealistic so as you rightfully said it is a highly interdisciplinary endeavor to build a functioning economic social protocol right and I don't think we actually even have a clue of what it really implies because we don't haven't seen yet any

such protocol really deployed at scale true scale and probably a lot of stuff is lacking and every lawyer would tell you yeah arbitration governance you know all that stuff but let's keep that aside probably even the mere economic policy of the coins the monetary policy is probably also I mean even the guy Vogel is right who is I mean he's kind of a hero he he even says that you know you can't just run a country on a monetary policy that is a hundred percent deterministic and algorithmic right even that guy and I'm not that I'm not the person to charge this but it gives it makes me think so I I don't think we're really at the

stage yet where we know what we're really doing but I think we're on to something that's I just challenge you a little bit on one point like Amex we are the same page I actually don't think that you know we haven't seen any of the systems are secure so I don't think that anyone that pretends to say that like hey this is what we're after like that's exactly what I meant with the poster child there's no posters out no one has done successfully right what I was arguing about is much more I think the key feature here is this you know the ability for massive experimentation you know like each of these things our economy is that now we can fork and modify and change like to to an extent that previously we weren't able to do

that you know like we weren't able to have this massive scale experiment so that's the one thing that gives me confidence not the fact that we know what we're doing is much more that actually is almost like an evolutionary process that hopefully will lead us to some of this economy is that indeed it would be stronger to some of this you know experiences and economical you have today with I was thinking about the the evolution and and how we're doing this grand scale experiment and it makes me think of that game telephone I don't know if this is a cultural reference that doesn't pass over to Europe but there's this game where a group of a group of children will sit together and one the first child comes up with some sort of saying and then they say it to

the next child and they and they pass it through all the people and that by the time it gets back to them everybody giggles because it's a completely different and sentence than what was originally started and that makes me think about how the evolution in the space that there's this original intention that was set out and that each of us probably have our original intentions of why we're participating in the space but we should all be very conscious of how we're passing that to the to the wider circle of people as as this grows as this starts to make its way to the actual users the the real people who will participate in this in this new world that we're we're building that are we making sure our message our intentions are being seen and it goes through both the

communication how we represent ourselves and how things evolve organically because we can't architect them perfectly now but it's exciting but it's also something that's you know very we have to all be cognizant of that there's pressure on us in that way - yeah I mean one thing that was coming to mind before when when you're giving your brasilia example is that you know in a way where people are trying to design is the system that then will come to life right and they will be decentralized and there would be these different parties orchestrating that and even if you look at things like you know something a key theorem like how decentralized etherium well you know there is certainly a small

group of people right they have like an enormous weight in just making decisions on code changes there's maybe two clients that gaff and para or something like that that actually have significant usage among miners so there's actually still a ton of centralization even if something like etherium now bitcoin may be a bit better than aetherium but then many of the new projects you know they may have a foundation we have hundreds of millions or tens of millions in assets and that this one development team and one claw and and and and it's it's hard to see how you're gonna go from there to assistance that is actually doesn't turn out into some sort of you know brazilian some so that city

were there was the assumption people will spring up and will come to life and it never actually ends up happening and it's actually also kind of anti-capitalistic right because that's in some sense what planning economies in soviet systems try to do right they try to plan the economy and we all know it's absurd economies are efficient by you know organizing decentralized information efficiently and maybe we run into the same trap right we linked decentralized protocols but in a centralized way you might actually might not absolve you from the problem maybe and i mean this is what some highly anticipated projects promised like Tasos like saying well we built the

governance then directly into the protocol every block you could completely change the constitution of this network potentially right so maybe that needs to be thought into the protocol much more deeply I don't know what it is I really like this evolution idea I I think it's the the missing piece to make sense of it for sure yeah I agree maybe as a kind of adding on to that I think I fully agree with what you said earlier that we there's a lot of stuff or this is very all very promising but no one has figured out yet and I think the key is to design these systems in a way that they are flexible enough to kind of learn or that the developers or whoever evolves those systems are able

to effectively implement all the new learnings that we gather along the way and I think this is so basically it's kind of not designing the perfect governance or or incentive mechanism but rather designing the governance in a way that it is actually possible to implement changes in an effective way I think this is kind of the main for to me this is the main foundation I guess for or one of the very important foundations of a project going going forward yeah and just add coming back to open source software and usability that that industry has learned that there needs to be a feedback loop that you need to you

need to be adaptable you need to actually reach out to the users and find out how they're using it what changes they want and then feed that back in and I think that those kinds of lessons are things that we need to not forget if I can have the one thing that awards me and the exact same conversation is like we talked before about capital and like how much money exists on the space right now like one of the biggest fears that I have is that this is especially the institutional capital that's coming in and like has very specific expectations about what needs to happen here very quickly and that's why you see the conversation about like you know hey we need the apps that work with you know hundreds of millions of people today and then you know like you ask yourself like hey have you tried to develop on this

infrastructure you know it's like it's actually still very early on it's very ugly right so I hope that I hope that somehow in all of this inflow of capital doesn't lead to this you know basically imbalanced expectations like in a way and I hope that you know we give a bit more space a bit more space to to the infrastructure because we're learning like like you know thing about oaken Engineering what what trend does here in Berlin it's it's fantastic right like you know we tried to learn how to design the systems and we're not ready yet to actually go and have like these apps with billions of people like you know you shouldn't be comparing like you know right now the

decentralized web with you know the experience I have on Google because the infrastructure isn't there you know so I hope that people in the room understand that and I hope that especially the season three months than that and you know and and and and play accordingly I mean I fully agree I mean and and this is also something that I think I hope pcs or investors in general can I mean I I mean Trent maybe to just to add on this I mean Trent is Trent co-founder of big chain DB and ocean protocol and is basically has started this whole kind of I wanna say community or you know just kind of movement in general around token engineering and has basically also said

you know that engineering and the the incentive mechanisms and so on and governance mechanisms is really important and I think that for us because at least I think one of the questions also in the in the event description was kind of how can we cease at value in the future and I think it could be around this because we see um several projects or if we invest in projects we work together with several projects that all have this challenge and at least so the value that we add or that investors can add in general comes from having the comparison of multiple projects and you know if we make these

these experiences of token engineering and so on across multiple projects and this could be something that investors or kind of more general participants the ecosystem that don't just work on one project would be able to contribute because you just make multiple experiences in that in that field you can transfer knowledge across products so originally writing in the India crypto space there was a lot of sort of an ER case thinking all right and and today maybe it's become more mixed but the question of course is still like you know what what what does regulation and and existing nation-states and and

democracy like how do those interact so what is your fault on that floor and do you think there may be just a transitionary period where like they have power to change the course of this or do you think this is like there's going to be some sort of ongoing interplay between those the nation-states you mean yeah you know kind of existing normal governments their regular their regulatory entities you know the lawmaking power and this kind of you know new decentralized world well you know I think blockchain has this ability to reveal the true nature

of things and part of this ability means that for example at least my experience my personal journey was I never even questioned what money was that just didn't come to me for some reason but as soon as I stumbled upon Bitcoin and then blockchain and started to read about all of it suddenly thinking about the nature of money was a natural thought to me because it shifted my perspective on everyday reality in a sense and I feel that blockchain technology and its wider application will have a similar effect on the concept of what a nation-state is and what community means what identity is

and are all those very fundamental questions we don't even think about them because we're born into a functioning system that serves us some answer to those questions and nobody teaches us to even the question and blockchain is this completely new narrative that as soon as a mind has absorbed it just makes you question a lot of fundamental things and I think a lot of the constitutional concepts of a nation-state are being called into question by this technology so I think inevitably yes we will see you know the true nature of what the wider community we live in which here is

Germany right it's it's I mean it may be it's our our our flat mains then it's our maybe quite a family it's our our district we live in the city and then maybe you know at some point it's Germany the country it's part of the community that we're part of here and it will reveal its true nature what it really means right do we still need Germany as a concept in the future do we need an organizational unit of that size is it maybe you know not big enough to really serve us and not small enough to really service do we maybe need you know a government of Berlin and a government of the world right do we even need something in between I have no idea but I think those you know things that we

took for granted around the concept of nation state will slowly dissolve as the digital reality kind of takes over our perception of the world in general I guess that's a general thing happening yeah I cannot that I think I think Florian spurred on with this idea of questioning indeed you know right now a lot of people on the space are questioning stuff that doesn't mean that doesn't mean just like disregarding again to your early early point that even for even even for for for people that actually like you know don't believe in state at all like you know still there are many people especially

like take German for example there are a lot of people that believe in that institution in a way right so you need to observe about what's happening but I think it's very healthy that like a lot of smart people start questioning stuff and like I think you go you went much further than that I'm more I'm much more excited with fund things which like hey how can we upgrade fundamental processes that we use today like take voting for example like does that work you know like like could we do this better for example right like take fundamental processes that we've been using on a day-to-day basis start evolving them with this nice new piece of technology that we have right now and then and then of course you know like I think I think I think yours are right on the bigger play I think you know science

is evolving so fast like you know science like a mountain that is you know getting taller and taller every day I think it's it's it's a very relevant question to ask like could we have you know like a few individuals like governing basically such like such a mass population could that work I don't know but I think I'm much more excited by things like democracy earth for example what Santiago is doing etc like let's let's try to upgrade our processes and where that would lead to be seen I don't think at anyone anyone else the future yeah yeah I think one interesting question when you talk about this kind of future is so you know before you also talk about coin Cohen voiding and kind of coin government so I said this is of course one thing that you know

potentially puts a lot of power into you know kind of early creators and investors in those networks and I think the other thing that we have is just the complexity and and in this all being technology German and the complexity is so high for a lot of this blockchain stuff and at least my impression is it's just getting more and more and more complicated at an ever-increasing rate so it seems to me that you know if we will reinvent all of those concepts it's not going to be a process that will have mass participation right it will be driven by a very small group of people do you think do you agree with that or

do you see that differently no I I do agree that it is an e light again an elite creating those initial rules and it's not for no reason that I think there's a lot of call to you know ethical software development ethical development of algorithms I mean we in our blockchain bubble over there is the artificial intelligence bubble and they think way more important than us and they actually might be right so there's we're just one bubble I'm like multiple that thing they would change everything and somebody probably will at some point so yeah I don't have a solution for this fundamental problem except maybe making

people aware if they aren't already that we shouldn't you know fool ourselves into thinking that just because there's the blockchain tag on it it brings anything new or different so far the blockchain hasn't really disrupted any real system except maybe the venture capital system actually I don't know if another one that has been disrupted like I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist but I would argue store a value like you know the story that I always say is that I'm originally from Greece I heard about Bitcoin 2011 increase not in Germany you know and there was a reason for that you know like you know there are states

indeed today that you know people have lost their faith in government and having the ability to use Bitcoin is a killer app so you know it's being able to actually store your value somewhere and trust that even if that thing fluctuates is not it's much better than the constant you know devalued of your money call it when Israel I call it like you know I don't know like China I call it please call it Cyprus so don't don't forget that on please because it's important I think for for love you yeah I was just gonna add that I think revolutions require discontent like you're saying thing you need to be discontent in some form to seek out a better solution and I think that if we are gonna have any kind of revolutions we need people on board to get people on

board this needs to be something that they can see value and connect with they need to find some sort of user usability use case for it and have a good user experience that is better than what their discontent with and so if we really do want to change things we have to look at it from that perspective and also if you look through history every time there is any kind of like major change within how humans operate the Industrial Revolution the information revolution you look at those it doesn't disrupt every aspect of people's lives it only disrupts a selection of their lives - so I think it is a bit foolish in our bubble for us to think that we're gonna change everything in the world but we do have an opportunity to change some

stuff and yeah you've got to get the people on board cool I would say let's also open for questions if anybody has any questions so the past little bit we've seen Facebook and Google really coming under fire for some of their practices which I think everyone in this room has probably been waiting for for a while but to the rest of the world it's kind of a new thing we've heard about Brasilia already today in kind of a dystopian future so rather than talking about the ways we can make the world

better how come let's really conspire how can we make the world worse what are the things that we're going to do that will be really bad and in 10 years time everyone will be saying why didn't we come after those ball chain people sooner I can freestyle it but like one one idea comes to our to my head is I was actually discussing it with a friend before is this idea that look at what is happening right now in the world I like you have like initial country offerings you know like like Venezuela basically is giving their own cryptocurrency which is obviously not centralized right like you know so you get all of the all of the bad of the currency that everything is tracked everything so far is transparent and are you putting it into

that context and that's like clear dystopian future that I want to think about I mean another one that potentially you might be coming is the same idea but from corporations right like apparently Facebook is working on blog same stuff I don't know what that might be but you know like basically again you see you take that you take some of the features of that thing you remove the key underlying technology now this thing is basically a nightmare so that is one way that this thing can actually go very wrong and then you know you should have been like hey why the fact we didn't like you know spokespeople earlier so yeah that's one I think this also often-quoted example of the Chinese citizen scorecard that is

basically this idea that every Chinese citizen has a score of it's social value and if you think about the blockchain with this immutable identity system then yeah that's obviously an awful idea to do to remove every facet of privacy or anything from a person's life I guess that's truly what we could ruin I guess there are more ideas so there's this television show called black mirror I think we need to do a few episodes of that but yeah that you made me think of that with the the writing episode but we could do more yeah and and maybe actually convincing I mean that's also

something I find interesting right so and I actually read it here again on this manifesto of this base it's like the first time in history that the young are teaching the old and it's kind of true um and you know we could just convince actually everybody that we should now you know put the euro on the public key theorem chain and then the next day there's just a 51% attack of somebody right I mean it's probably possible I don't know actually I thought about that and I wanted that use case if if you really think what happened like since basically last like June with the spike in prices you know we actually convinced a lot of mainstream users to join the space somehow right and then we

screw them over kinda right like the markets basically the markets just you know like took the money of the average Joe right and and and and where I'm going with that is that you know I don't think that we were ready for that if you really thing about what the space did it enabled us to transact directly around money and financial information away but you know I don't think that the world has been ready yet all that at scale so this apparently like you know there's a lot of manipulation in the markets right now and the counter-argument is a bizarre take the existing markets is their manipulation yes or no I don't know but one of my fears is that indeed like you know we generated so much excitement about this thing we're not delivering a lot of value and then also

we just screw over all of this you know just you know average investors that just came in because they thought that this is exciting and I don't know where that would lead I have no idea but potentially that Mitel something but I also have some ideas so really I think one of the interesting things about about cryptocurrencies is that you can't really seize it so easily right so the government can't really just take it away from you of course that is great in many ways but one of the implications may also be that you can't really collect taxes well anymore so I could totally see that maybe we have this huge crypto economy massive

amount of the economy and we should shift into that the people you know a small small number of people kind of control that they managed to avoid taxation to a huge extent and then you have the the kind of traditional democracies nation state like you know going bankrupt I'm able to meet there you know social you know pensions all of those obligations and then you just have this you know world left where many people don't understand what's going on feel like they have absolutely no say in what's happening and and sort of these familiar structures like falling apart I

totally see that happening well I'm you know I'm sure it has many good sides but also I'm sure it would be seen by many people as you know very bad outcome maybe so I think there's I mean it's

decentralization is not 1 or 0 right it's it's a it's a kind of spectrum of how you build governance of these things of these of these networks and I think it's just going to again I think things are going to be figured out on the way and we are going to hopefully find solutions on how to govern decentralized networks in a way that are responsible but at the same time decentralized and I think that so one concept here that I think it's very interesting that is not new as liquid democracy I mean this this has existed before and there's actually and it's it is an interesting combination with crypto because so

liquid democracy is basically being able to transfer so it's a democracy where it's one person one will vote but it's possible to transfer votes to other people and blockchain obviously is a good it's a helpful technology to enable this because it allows to transfer votes securely and there are projects that are that are that are trying to build this so and I think liquid democracy where people who actually know like bluntly said know what they're doing have more power is a great way of or is an interesting tool um to to use for governance of any either state or decentralized economy or something like that

I think another thing that just comes to my mind is how like in the early nineties when you were checking out the internet and there were startups doing IPOs like everything the same kind of like now but selling stocks the problem that they had was among I mean many scalability issues whatever is that user behavior was not really trained to understand what the internet is right what are the possibilities and just even the trivial thing of putting your credit card information into web browser in 1995 I don't know how many people would have even trusted the web browser or whatever with their credit card details

and today I feel like I enter my credit card details once a day into some form online and it's kind of like that with the blockchain how do you teach people to you know capture all the options that they now suddenly have with this new infrastructure I mean it starts with installing currently in an identity management solution in your web browser like meteor mask right I mean even being aware of that and then I'm starting to use your voting possibilities in a network and so on so this is a lot about teaching people with you know you UI UX design and with I don't know really basic narratives about their new digital

freedoms and stuff about what they can do and until we haven't done all that basically spent all those ICO millions on education campaigns for the users will probably won't see the world-governing themselves with this technology but I think it's actually an option if we would do that name hello so I'm for him and I had two questions one on the technology side so my question is as you know that the crypto market has been really unstable in the past few months and it is still a very unstable so how important is the stability of the crypto market for the development of the blockchain technology in general and my second question is on the legal aspect I'm from India so as

you already know that India has become hostile towards crypto currencies so doesn't it go against the idea of decentralization that a third party is able to control your access to it so my two questions yeah the first one was that the crypto market is very unstable right now how important is the stability of the crypto market for the development of the blockchain technology in general so I think Chris Dixon is talking about that and he he was arguing in one of his recent blog posts that you know the space is evolving primarily because this technology has win the heart of

developers right so indeed there are a lot of people that have been excited about this for some time it's not that you know the fact that like last year we solve the spike suddenly like you know of course that has impact right but I don't think that these two things are like like couple tightly in a way so I and then I mean the funny thing that's happening also and maybe Ravi can talk about this is that this year that the public market appears to be very unstable or not performing as well the private markets are going crazy actually right so you have like it's a very complex world I think to be able to to to connect them but I would say at the core for every foundational like technology and every every new paradigm shift the course like can you in the heart of the crazy ones of the

innovators right and I think crypto has succeeded on that now the question is what we couldn't do with that right like can't get can we can we create something something interesting from that and of course you know the the influx of money is both of a pro and a corner so we discussed like it comes with a lot of benefits sort of drawback so you had to be seen so in your second question maybe someone else wants to go for it yeah so my second question was that India has already become hostile towards cryptocurrencies and it is slowly banning it it has already asked the banks to stop all transactions related to cryptocurrency purchases so my question was that doesn't it go against

the idea of decentralization when a third party like the government controls your access to it yeah so how do you how do you how do you ensure that it does not happen oh yeah I mean I think that there's I think the answer is it depends on what that third party is that's blocking the the action if the third party is a government that's a different equation than if it's a private company the the levers that we have to pull to influence that will will vary yeah I mean it's it's difficult because we are citizens of countries and so there were residents of countries we need to be within a government's power this currently so I think that if it's

government that's blocking it then I guess you have to find some sort of way to influence your government or to have a voice in the government yeah you could build technologies that work around the government too and there's a reason there's the so called crypto Valley Conference in a few weeks as well so a lot of people went to Switzerland because their local government wouldn't help them do now zero so I guess the answer is it depends and it depends on what your what links you're willing to take and what you want to support in terms of change in the world but yeah I mean I think true decentralization would mean that you would not have another party blocking you hello Vincent speaking sorry the lawyer on the right

hand side I'm curious when you speak about Brasilia you speak highly of it when you speak about communist planning you speak poorly of it Brasilia is centrally planned do you know how much of the population in Brasilia or employed by the government a high percentage for sure above 60% yeah that is as central as you could possibly get the only reason why Brasilia hums if it does is because everyone else in the country is paying for it okay appreciate it yeah necessary just with regards to centralization reality thanks leo hi I'm Lorenzo thanks thanks a lot for

this really interesting discussion I think yeah for me like it's it's something that has been missing sorely from the conversations that have had this topic about the fundamental so what are we what are we talking about what are we trying to build and I think we may be one one little element that maybe is missing from this conversation is what we could maybe define as some historical perspective in the sense that if we look back at where like technologies like Bitcoin come from and and the emails that Satoshi wrote for example there is a very strong kind of what we could define as US libertarian

right-wing libertarian anarcho-capitalist streak to to the people who were to the cypherpunks who were like building the technologies that we all use today and I think that it's very important to recognize that they encoded values that they believed in in these technologies and and and that we are either willingly or unwillingly creating the world that they wanted to create and I think it's very important that this type of conversation is explicit when we talk about this ntral ization for example so what kind of their centralization like when you say we could imagine a world where we only have CDs and there is nothing at the

state level that's great but are we talking about talking about a form of the centralization that is like Peter Thiel like that is like Mari Rother Bert I'd like or are we talking about rojava you know and these two things are very different and and I think yeah I'm really appreciate is this event and I think we can and should go deeper and a sense yeah I think when we were preparing for the panel we did talk about the different levels of decentralization and and how just everybody uses the word right now and they can mean a hundred different things but I would also say well it's important for us to think critically about why but the technology is not neutral

technology's not neutral and that the the cypherpunks who started out some of this they had original intentions but we should also question are we really fulfilling those intentions do we want to be fulfilling those intentions I would say it depends on the project it depends on the company the effort that's going on is to whether or not they are and whether or not they want to be and I think that that's again thinking back to that telephone game that you know as we try to like talk to our neighbors our friends our family about the stuff that we're interested in how are we conveying that message and how are we teaching them the the critical thinking skills that were mentioned here too about these projects and and what they're supporting I also think that you know the values

that the cypherpunks imprinted onto the technology we're using now it kind of stops at a certain level and it stops kind of with cryptography because everything that was built on top of the cryptography meaning the blockchain is kind of decentralized syncing mechanism between thousands of computers it's just one arbitrary solution to an intractable problem and there have been many or different kind of a Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithms for decentralized distributed databases even before the blockchain so it's really arbitrary and I don't think there's necessarily a cyberpunk a residual cyberpunk value system sitting in there

it's just that they gave us the tools to actually build it which is very cool so a symmetric cryptography and so on is very powerful and gives us that but the way we want to keep the network running the way we want to invent or keep issue this the monetary policy we want for like Bitcoin the monetary policy because it models the exploitation of gold mines somehow that's so arbitrary why not silver why not you know it's arbitrary I don't think there's something necessarily cypherpunk about it except of cryptography though like I think I think I think this as you said that I know okay I just yeah I think the you know using

cryptography at the core of this is I it's probably the only thing that indeed you know is like like it has that but to turn to your to answer your point like you're right like you know we codifying values and principles and these things the good stories I'll be doing this transparently right like transparently if you're an engineer and you can go able actually and and then interpret that that that goes what goes down there right so like my take on you is that you're gonna see everything that this world has now like you're gonna see all sorts of stuff in there you know you're gonna see at times for universal basic income is I think there's a team in Berlin that does that for example and you're gonna see attempts to just you know like like don't want to be POS or I think like you're gonna see but you get

a set times like hey like we capture everything going out with like a decentralized brand but in practice we own 8 percent of the network like you know three individuals so you're gonna see everything I think the point is another if you're an engineer I think the point is that you know we've been saving the future in that sense now so I think that's the ability that Satoshi gave us to be able to experiment and go back to some of its fundamentals and codify some of this some of the principles of valuation you know hopefully you know the right ones will evolve like I don't know what right ones means for you might mean something different from me you know but I think that's the main thing that that Satoshi gave us yeah q my question is actually related to the

last comment which is regarding the word decentralization because this in transition mean different things for different people and I wonder if the word itself is misleading we use the word in a way of a get this common denominator to continue making these tools right like you cannot disagree with these centralization because it's too good so we all kind of force in this agreement on this word without actually being specific about what we mean by that so you're continually moving without having these conversations without being specific about the world they're intending to build no I I agree with you I think this is one of the many terms that are being misused or being misinterpreted by different people like we also to be yeah some of them centralization is one governance which is a very hot topic on the space-like

means 25 different things for it 25 different people right so I agree with you I I mean I think we should put it in context and I don't know if Brian you want to do that to continue this conversation we tried at the beginning I don't know if you were here like the first question of Brian was like what does the centralization mean to you but you know that was still to me I don't know you wanna know okay we're gonna have the conversation of their own like what it means for you and have a conversation about basis I think just generally to added is like decentralization is the idea of moving

responsibilities away from some center that was thought to be necessary to the people that are actually concerned with the outcomes of the decisions that need to be taking right that's somehow and the idea the very principle idea behind it it's just a stab at it I'm not sure I'm just gonna say it doesn't have to be people though it's that idea yeah cuz it could be because they're you know people could accurately use the word that they decentralize it away from two other organizations but yeah I think it's like the term security to that you know you can say something secure you can say something's decentralized but you should always follow it up with a question of like how is it secured or how is it decentralized on what

are you speaking about because you couldn't surely make the claim on some level but not maybe every it's true like even uber and airbnb appear to peon networks right nobody cares that they run on centralized infrastructure they appear to PA economies happening on a centralized infrastructure yeah I would challenge it too but it's it's it's kind of like acknowledged and acknowledged fact almost I would say you're a lawyer it's debatable I have a great question to segue into this security and decentralization bit that you're on the cost of a 51% attack on either proof of work or proof of stake systems is not really that high the infrastructure is

not secure endpoints are riddled with security flaws even before a Spectre attacks etc are we building on sand from a person from a security perspective unsanded talk to anybody who works in the security industry and they'll tell you that nothing is 100% secure so it's all about risk management you got to figure out tolerance level you got to figure out what your threat metal threat model is and of nothing's 100% secure so but that's not a reason to give up on security it's just to make sure that we all understand that it depends on the circumstances and the threat models and everything so yeah if you're storing I

don't know really really really sensitive data I 100 million 100 billion dollars or I'm sorry Bitcoin hundred billion dollars worth of Bitcoin on your hair on your mobile phone and maybe you should think twice about that versus like if it's just you know some emails that you don't care if they've become public but anyway it just depends and don't stray the point again like I agree with Liz there's no perfect security like on the other side though okay like if this guy arguments coming from another centralized were like take all of the data hacks that have been happened as well right like you know are these people are building on sun maybe sometimes you know like we have this massive data breaches that happened that you know really like put people's data

in in in in in in a difficult position so I think the questions probably coming because of the timing like I think the last week there have been a lot of attacks actually I mean different smaller coins I think that's probably where it's coming from I would argue that indeed today we have cars like Bitcoin and I think that have proved over time that they are you know secure enough you know they have like basically said like they have survived from from from from significant attacks on the other side indeed right now yeah we have like on the outgoings we have coins that obviously are not secured enough so again it's not black or white you know there are a lot of items that are happening on the space to make sure that you know we we taking security as we treating security as important as as

we should be treating yeah yeah I have some thoughts on that I mean I was very worried about that with Bitcoin like years ago because it like sort of game theoretically that the security of Bitcoin is not particularly good and the cost of attacking relative to the value securities is is fairly low even even though of course an absolute term is very high and and it's kind of going down over time as inflation decreases so and I think it is maybe also concerned that almost is not enough attacks on the central network so you have a lot of these systems that may have weak security models like delegated proof of

sake is another thing that like this is some questionable security models but but because then nobody is attacking these networks that it almost doesn't get exposed and so I do you think there's actually a big risk in that like people build insecure systems nobody really attacks them and maybe at some point in massive and then they get attacked and that then a lot of these things come down crumbling but but I do think actually a proof of stake theoretically it could be extremely secure right if you have security bonds and so I think one will be able to build really secure systems and I think anybody judging companies in that space needs to take into account that for the

first time in history really that those companies are a hundred percent transparent about what's happening they to be actually because they're in the inner workings of their company in a sense are online and transparent to everybody so actually you should probably run your project on that blockchain that has been attacked the most and not the least absurdly but cool well thanks so much everyone I think we can wrap up here and thanks so much for coming do we still want to is there kekeke away time for this all right does anybody have the Satoshi is female bag

with them this is not a trustless system so there could have been a 50% attack but re here is going to announce the winner here all hold the bag and you can pull out the names alright so we're gonna see who our keep queue winners are and I apologize in advance if I butcher your name Lorenzo [Applause] Lorenzo again number two Vincent James riddle you're going yeah okay so thanks

so much again for shapeshifter earlybird the family Ola and everyone for helping organize this and thanks so much to all of you for coming [Applause] [Music] [Music]