DappCon 2023: The Five Obstructions To Crypto Mass Adoption - Maksim Izmaylov

Transcript

ah I was running here sorry I'm still catching my breath um I have a few disclaimers so one is that this presentation has been prepared without any use of any AI tools whatsoever so it's 100% human-made content so it's pretty cool I think uh another disclaimer is I know we're televised there's a live stream we're shooting it I don't want this presentation to be used by any AI tools and analyzed by by them that's just the thing that I say before any presentation that I give my

apologies uh so yeah my name is Max been in crypto for a number of years now and uh I don't know somehow increasingly I become more and more frustrated because I want crypto to be a little bit further ahead not in terms of the price right but in terms of adoption in terms of I want my parents maybe my friends to start using crypto for Fun and Profit but they still don't do that what's happening and uh over the course of the years and again I've been in crypto since 2017 is I sort of collected a number of

stories and some have some ideas about what may be happening I see some problems that are happening within the crypto space and that's what I would like to share with you today but first seep seep my wife says that she'll love it um anyway so why are we not further along I see this problem and uh I work on a project where we absolutely require normal people to have crypto wallets to be able to operate with crypto and again and again and again they don't right I

have a good friend of mine who I taught about crypto uh we registered his first crypto wallet a number of years ago several years ago and I visited him recently he's a uh managing director of a big hotel in Switzerland so and what I saw in his office is his seat phrase pinned to the wall of his office so I'm like okay we're doing something wrong here some what is happening and so I see this problem as this you go to a person on a street and you tell them hey register a crypto wallet have a crypto wallet it's amazing right and so you have to problems right

away first of all it's so stressful to operate one right again management of your seed phrase sending transactions you have to verify everything a number of times uh but let's imagine and you know a friend of mine who just walked in he's saying that hey we're getting there the ux is getting there it's going to be there very very soon time is it um but the second problem let's say you give that person a cped wallet works amazingly it's a no hassle why would they do that why would they register a crypto wallet because the only use case that we see today that's working quite well is pretty much gambling hey buy Bitcoin and then wait for the price to

go up or maybe go down ether same I look at the anyway um so the only use case is gambling and defi is uh sort of like in the same realm kind of maybe not really and so today I wanted to talk to you about the five obstructions uh to Crypt Mass adoption right what is happening um I think I I I was so inspired you know when uh we were starting working on our project when I got into crypto about this sort of selfless vision of Satoshi

nakam who just gave us this thing right Bitcoin and and completely disappeared it was amazing on so many levels right of course we don't have our expectations attached to you know person who may say something online or may not uh but yeah it's the selflessness of this act that was so inspirational to me and and when we were starting our project we did the crowdfunding and and again it was so great because now we are detaching from the investors in silan Valley from VC I thought uh and and we no longer uh are in their realm of control right because I mean what's

happening really is um that the money controls your project when you take a VC funding right so of course you're familiar with the concept of fiduciary duty uh that if you take money from the Seas if someone else is investing uh then you are obligated legally to operate in such a way as to increase their uh Roi and that's it and if you don't do that you may be uh going to go to jail right and so the first obstruction I think is the greed that uh many oft times is attached to decentralized projects decentralized projects that

then take VC money right which is a it completely doesn't make any sense right Bitcoin does Bitcoin have VC money no does ethereum have VC money no uh and there was a number of project of course before that we use today projects you know like the personal computer the uh or just the idea of a computer that they Tred to patent and they couldn't the worldwide web is in public domain like we're enjoying all the tech that we're using today because all this chain of Technologies up until today doesn't have this attachment of greed doesn't have this expectation of profit at the end of the day right and

so it's it's a little bit laughable when I see a decentralized project that claims that uh they're decentralized at the same time they have the see money um and so another problem here that uh many of you crypto anarchists are familiar with is the fact that today uh and that's been happening for for decades now since since 1970s that return on investment uh basically makes more money than return on labor so you're much better off not doing anything but just having a bunch of money than doing an honest men's work right uh you can look it up and and there economical studies

from McKenzie I saw recently 2022 I think where they analyze that this sort of economical disparity um there is a paradox here right the Paradox is that uh our whole capitalistic economy set up in such a way that we're optimizing for one single variable and in my previous talk in in Prague at eth Prague I was talking about how uh it may be a type of AI that we programmed already incorrectly right uh

where we're optimizing everything not to make paper clips if you're familiar with the concept of paperclip maximizer but with money maximizer and so that uh strong AI takes everything around you all sorts of different resources including humans and converts everything to a number in a database um and and I simply call that behavior you know like you look at how animals behave in the nature right they have their algorithms they have their programs they they fight for territory they fight for Domination they fight for resources in order to survive we no longer have to do that right uh and so I I sort of the fight that we fights that

we see today between different companies it's kind of like as humans we could behave in a humane way but we decide sort of to let the greed run the show I call this super animalistic right like using all the human powers all the human resources and Ingenuity we're still behaving like animals just fighting for resources that um as they say you make money uh to buy things that you don't need to impress people that you don't like Anyway second obstruction is a lot of the stuff I you know my friend is speaking uh in Singapore um today I guess

and I was just looking at the list of speakers there as well and the the titles of the names of those projects worldcoin the tools for Humanity you know it's like I'm going to save the planet that says on everywhere everyone's face over there and so the second abstraction is is narcissism and I think you know in a lot of cases and in a lot of people and I have the same problem as well sometimes that we're like no I'm smarter than that other guy and so therefore I'm going to build a b better and bigger version of whatever they're doing or whatever right and that prevents us from working together from from collaboration and again that's the

name of the game it's open source bit Bitcoin is completely open we have to work together in order to run at ethereum the same right and I think this kind of altitude altitude attitude um prevents us from from working together uh and from creating really great things um elephant in the room right so we are my project uh is is in the travel space which is completely dominated by a few large corporations really a

handful and uh they will fight us tooth and nail not to make the decentralized anything happen so we talk about I don't know what is what is interesting what is hot today there is self- soverign identity you know uh again another friend of mine acquaintance I guess uh working on identity project supposed to be completely the centralized in completely everything but no Microsoft comes at the end of the day and they say hey no we going to do it and and of course all the other companies all the other governments uh who are they going to trust some Rando off the street or

Microsoft who's going to provide them with sort of self- sovereign identity service which you know with a ton a ton of strings attached like I don't believe in that at all that Microsoft is going to give you your unique self- Sovereign identity at all and the governments why would they allow for uh money that they cannot track for identity that they don't control for any type of solution that prevents them from tracking you and from really acting as a corporation because at the end of the day again they have to act like that they have to make money it's uh they have to make a profit

right so that's the third obstruction I don't have a lot of time so I'm going to just threat right so fourth obstruction is the Ridiculousness of web 2.5 it just doesn't work right if you want to do something that's truly decentralized and and we say okay let's compromise in this one part right now and and by the way we're going to raise money for that tiny part that's compromised it just simply doesn't work there is no motivation after to change things up uh at all don't do web 2.5 please and five and I guess that's related to to narcissism is is we want to save the world somehow and

and recently uh another good friend of mine uh recommended me this book seeing like a state by James C Scott he's a professor of agricultural studies at Harvard read that book don't try to save the world um and if you remember that book the sovereign individual which was supposed to be I guess it was for a while the Bible for for Bitcoin blockchain Community um it says the sovereign individual so maybe just maybe and I don't know maybe you will tell me later that that blockchain was never meant to

be was was never meant to be adopted andas right it's a tool for individual liberation use it today for your Fun and Profit um it's hard the mass adoption is hard and well you know so five problems I have a few ideas five antidotes to those problems so and I would like to spark a discussion maybe you we can uh you can ask questions a little bit well right now in about a minute or grab me later and we can talk about those things right uh first problem if you remember was greed and there is this amazing thing uh from the Western uh sorry from

the Eastern philosophy that's called The Law of karma right uh I don't know how familiar all of you are but basically you're not supposed to make new Karma actually your goal to achieve enlightenment is to shed all of the karma to get rid of all the Karma and that's how you achieve enlightenment Karma literally means doing so you do things all the time therefore you create new Karma never going to get there how do you do things that do not create new Karma you don't have any expectation about the result don't have an expectation of monetary result any type of result do things that you

otherwise cannot not do just do them do them because you have energy because you have uh the ability to do them don't don't expect things right the moment you attach an expectation uhoh Karma so that's one um I was reading up a little bit of psychology um literature and how to how to deal with narcissism well they say selflove and self-compassion right because narcissism uh comes from I guess you not loving yourself enough you are just fine just just as

you you are you don't have to achieve great things to be loved just just saying uh the third the corporations and and government well you know a picture comes to mind from The Matrix the movie where uh Neo is in that pod and all sorts of cables are attached to it and I'm thinking about my phone in the same way so every app is that cable that goes right into my brain and controls uh all sorts of chemicals in my brain the dopamine all sorts of uh hormones and stuff right uh so just give you that picture think about what you want to do

with it uh fourth problem was web 2.5 just don't do web 2.5 just just do web 3 um and the fifth uh problem is save the world and one of my favorite philosophers really of all time his name name is George Carlin if you're familiar you would know George Carlin saving the planet it's on YouTube look it up so he says how arrogant do you have to be to say that you're going to save the planet no you cannot even save yourself and you're trying to save the planet just be humble be be kind and do what you can

without any expectation so that's it questions guys thank [Applause] you thank you Maxim uh does anyone have any questions we have about three minutes thank you very much I would like to know why um we always look at satosi as one person individual and we don't assum maybe he's entity he's company yeah or group and also we don't speak uh at all about how greedy uh to mine about 1 million Bitcoin uh estimated so why

don't we also look uh from this perspective thank you but um but what's the question so um yeah so this is like a philosophical point of view mhm I would like to know your take on this since you talk a lot about the adoption and not to be greedy while I see like the Bitcoin Creator whether whether it's a company or a person was so much or too much greedy so was he how I I don't know teach me elate me okay the estimation uh tell that there is one address that mind Bitcoin up to 1.1 million yeah okay which is um most likely done by satui Nakamoto whether a

group or a person so this is very I see a greedy uh step to that's an interesting take because if he ever takes that money it will I mean what's going to happen to bitcoin I don't think anything good is going to happen and therefore the value of that Bitcoin is also going to drop and and everyone sort of will see I think it's going to stay there you know if that topples everything is lost guys go [Laughter] home more questions unfortunately we don't have more time for questions right thank you so much for the great presentation please a round of [Applause] applause