Epicenter - 10-Year Anniversary Livestream. Ep. 527

Transcript

welcome to epicenter with the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution this is phenomenal today is epic Center's 10th birthday and we're very pleased to be doing this special edition live stream with lots of special guests uh and um and as you'll see here a special co-host uh who I'll introduce in just a second but um first I just want to say just how exciting this is that you know 10 years ago Brian and I were releasing the very first pilot episode of epicenter so throughout this live stream we'll be bringing in people it's sort of a call-in show we'll have like lots of

friends listeners and former uh guests of the show come in uh give their thoughts or share their Impressions on the industry and also share some excit interesting anecdotes we've also got some epicenter trivia and we'll go back down memory l I've got some stuff prepped here uh to keep everything exciting but um first yeah welcome everyone how's everybody doing great good so 10 years crazy stuff yeah so I I want to just introduce uh the person down on the on the on the on the bottom right here so Adam be LaVine who um some I'm sure the ogs will

remember as the host of Let's Talk Bitcoin and people who have been listening to the show long enough will know the story of how um Brian and I met back in 2013 through let's talk Bitcoin So Adam wants to just introduce your briefly here and uh we'll um we'll get started sure thanks s yeah uh I'm Adam B LaVine uh I've been on basically both sides of like disruptive technology journalism and entrepreneurialism uh about 11 years ago at this point I started uh let's talk Bitcoin uh in the spring of 2013 and that uh was kind of immediately right place right time fifth Bitcoin podcast i' started at a point at that

point there was really no other shows around that were talking about this stuff and then as we uh came into the end of the year we were very popular growing very fast and I was annoyed that there were no other shows that I could listen to outside of myself and I do like listening to my own voice but uh but uh that led me to start a contest uh through the network that had about 20 submissions and I will I think we can confirm at this point that epicenter is the longest lasting greatest success that came out of that batch but it was a pretty good batch and a lot of those shows lasted for a few years so that was sort of the you know another Catalyst moment uh I like to do that whenever I can and I'm very happy that you guys

have had such success and I'm very happy that I was able to help you guys get started so congratulations on 10 years it's a huge accomplishment yeah absolutely I mean when I got into Bitcoin it was basically just when you guys started uh let of Bitcoin maybe like a month after that and I was like writing my master thesis at the time so didn't have like too much time except whenever I was like cycling somewhere I was living in Berlin at the time uh you know I was listening to let of Bitcoin right so listen to like all of the episodes and it was like really uh really great way to to kind of get into it and it was super exciting and then uh and I you know was just a fan of bit of podcasts right because like it was

for me kind of the the one of the main ways of learning about Bitcoin early on so then when I was like okay I want to work fully in in this area and you had this contest and I was a fan of the sort of podcast format and felt it was such a powerful way to to learn you know to build a network to you know speak with interesting people and then the the chancellor launch our own podcast was was you know was exciting and then I remember I think he had this call out and it said like okay there's going to be a call for anyone interested in participating and uh it was only like maybe five six people on this call and I think Sebastian and I were the only ones

in Europe we didn't know each other yeah at the time and then we were like okay let's let's try to do this thing together yeah and yeah did that pilot episode and then and it was surprising actually how many people still ended up doing the pilot episode right because in that in that first call you you did um you organized there was not a lot of people in there yeah but afterwards yeah quite a lot of episodes came through and yeah I'm excited we kept going yeah I think it was about 20 episodes I think we had about 20 Pilots that came out of that and I think we want the intent was to be like hey this is going to be the you know the top two or three shows and I think we wound up taking on seven or 8 because we were like oh actually you

know this is this is all pretty compelling and yeah I remember that call that we that I remember the kickoff call and I think that the way that that uh that you guys started working on the show together was I was like well you're both in Europe you should probably just do the pilot together because this is hard I'm pretty sure that that was that uh that that I said something to that extent you guys were like okay you know why not yeah I think I think that was basically it it was just like why don't you get like these Europeans work together yeah but um yeah I also remember that call I remember I was like kitchen like where I used to be living and uh and you know Brian and I afterwards like had another chat and then got to know each other and then we

only actually met in person like two or three months later actually in February um of of the following year at at the LA talk in Berlin and like it you know for me that that that whole period was such a transitionary period I had been working in sort of web design and product development web product development before that e-commerce and it was such a whole new world and I remember Brian I don't know if you remember this but you we we went to this dinner uh I I don't think it was let's talking I I don't think it was at inside Bitcoins Berlin I think it was at the Amsterdam conference in 2014 and we went to this dinner and there were all these sort of like VC types and it was organized by Matt rosac and Brock Pier

folks from the that was in Berlin right so yeah it was roock Pierce and mattt rosac organized that the exactly yeah yeah and like um um uh block um blockchain Ventures uh guys were sitting next to us and like at some point like I remember you looked at me you said okay Seb from now on from this point forward we're we're now co-founders because I think before that we had sort of you know envisioned this as sort of being a a bit of a hobby and kind of a thing that we did on the side but then at that point you're like okay this is something that we're really going to pursue because you know this is like you know basically Bitcoin and blockchain are going to change the world and like we want to be part of this and

and and we want to sort of you know project ourselves as entrepreneurs in this space and not just hobbyists and I remember that was like an important sort of you know mind shift for me from that point on like okay now you know I'm working in blockchain fulltime and and and that's sort of what happened from that point on yeah yeah and it was also very good I think like combination two of us together because you you were very good also at the whole like you know website figuring out the whole like technique all of the sort of you know how to actually produce a podcast put it out the audio all of those things that was like very helpless with so it was like I think we were like a great uh you know I was more like interested in the reading

the white papers and preparing questions and stuff but like I think we were like a great sort of yeah great complimentary uh skill set so I think that you know allowed us to you know to produce this thing consistently and then of course you know we started having more hosts right I think mahair joined as the third host in I think it was like 2015 actually so this is my first trivia question so so I've got some trivia questions here and then we'll start we'll start bringing in the uh the guests here so uh the first the first trivia question is is for all the all the co-hosts actually so we when when did Mare first join what was Mare's first episode you Mah you're also you

know open to welcome to to answer this question but I don't know if you remember but yeah maybe Bri maybe you remember I don't remember the first episode I think it was like 2015 that he joined if I remember correctly but I don't remember what episode so it was episode 97 it was with Paul St all right the the truth drive chain drive chain there you that's Drive chains truth coin truth back then back then truth yeah and um and sunny do you remember your first episode okay does anyone else remember I didn't remember I remembered Mah's but I didn't remember yours or

F's I I I'll say I'm pretty sure it was Charles hoskinson I wish I had a I wish I had a bell I I think uh Brian knew I was like really into ethereum classic at the time and so then he like asked me like hey do you want to do this one with Charles hoskinson I think that's how was how I did my first episode yeah yeah yeah we did that one together yeah yeah Sonia and I met uh so I was working at tenament in uh 2017 and then we had this uh retreat in the summer of 2017 in uh Canada and then Sunny was like I don't know like 19 at

the time or something something like that you know that was my next question how old was sunny when he first joined up AER the correct answer was not old enough to drink yeah depends where yeah in Canada yeah and freder what do you remember your first episode I I I was going to look it up now but I didn't I think it's coin fund and I think it was in 2018 and it's also super funny because I Brian and I we had actually known each other for a while um and uh we had worked from the same office um the E de office in Berlin for a while and then we actually started a

co-working space Together full node um in Berlin in 2017 um and but the way the the way I actually got on the podcast the first time is when I met mahare at a dinner and he said oh you should join enter yeah yeah yeah I think it had sort of come up as an idea and we had discussed it and then at some point I think M was like asked you and then yeah I'm super happy that that worked out and that you know youve become a key invaluable host and part of the show so yeah and it's such a pleasure yeah and uh yeah Felix isn't here yet but his his first one was with

uh Dan Finlay of a mask he joined a bit later in in 2022 uh hopefully he'll join the live stream in just a bit um but uh yeah let's get some of we've got some people here in the in the green room um that we wanted to bring on uh so yeah who who's who's on first I think Trent I think Trent is first yeah right all right let's bring him in hey Trent great to be here hey how how you doing I'm good and first of off congratulations 10 years it's hard to believe wow I I was I loved

hearing these stories already from what you guys are sharing uh you know a lot of Berlin things yeah yeah absolutely I mean I think Trent was also you know one of the first uh people right in in Bitcoin in Berlin and uh started you know a whole sequence of uh startups was a scribe the first one or uh yeah it was a scribe which pivoted to Big CH B which pivoted to Ocean so I've been out ocean for six years I guess now yeah and a scribe a lot of people will not know a scribe but the Scribe was basically doing something like nfds right on uh on the Bitcoin blockchain so they were

basically uh you know taking these artworks and sort of uh you know tracking the OWN ownership of these artworks on chain and I remember having lots of discussions there I was always like but does this make sense because like I mean you know sort of the image is there anyway and anyone can copy it so you can't really protect that but Mak sense to protect ownership and I was always like at the one hand I thought was very cool and the other hand I'm like does it really make sense and then of course you know nfts became absolutely massive but I think that was really the first the first project and you guys were doing cool things right working with you know interesting artists and Galleries and uh you also like you know way ahead of of your time

with that project yeah it was really fun I mean you know we had decent traction but you know we were too early for the money side of things so we had to Pivot and interestingly you know like nfts took off in Bitcoin what a year and a half ago and you know now they've been spreading the mechanism brc2 is sort of not much different than a hash on on the output transaction um and uh uh it sort of you know taking advantage of the witness stuff but then people took the idea and dumped it into the other evm chains for basically lower uh transaction fees and it's been spreading it's called inscriptions right if you guys are following this it's hilarious and there's big complaints about dust and all the other chains and you know Breaking Chains one by one every week it

seems um but it's actually fascinating because bc20 is actually very similar to the school protocol we developed back in the day and you know for us it's like we're really happy that FS finally took off maybe it wasn't us but you know we're still playing in blockchain and building so it's great to see yeah absolutely and then I think you've also been on the show a whole bunch of times know I think we did a scribe so I guess we did all of the things know we they describe B ocean I think several ocean episodes maybe and yeah uh yeah definitely I remember uh probably one fun1 it was uh consensus 2017 I had just come off stage and I had a um an interview lined up with Sebastian and um I'm I randomly met Fred

uram right at the tail end of my talk and he's like Trent we need to talk co-founder of coinbase right and I'm like okay I'm going have to do um uh uh um an interview with uh epicenter do you want to join me because I knew he had already been writing about um uh decentralized data markets and the interview was going to be partly on that so so I basically hijacked Sebastian with uh with Fred and I remember this I I yeah I remember I remember you came on and like I think already you know I was sort of on edge cuz it was like the first time I did an episode solo cuz like usually you it's always Two Hosts right so in the early days like when I do an episode solo I always just like be a little bit self-conscious about it and then and

then you bring on this other person randomly right and I was like okay but yeah it end up being really good yeah it was a really Lively discussion Fred's ball of Energies so it was really fun yeah so actually this is sort of related to the to the next uh trivia question here which is um who has who who have been our most frequent guests I think it's vitalic how many times has he been on five times Mah says no Maha says no who who's our most freaking guest TR

really could be I mean both could be true any anybody else any other guesses Martin's also been on a bunch of times he has I'm gonna I'm gonna throw in a guess I don't know if it's right but maybe goon I think so so actually a lot of these answers are true um so vitalic has been on six times all right goon has also been on six times and this is this Trent this is your sixth time as well I'm in very good compy so uh so you're in good company and I mean not

excluding of course uh although you know she was more of a of a host at sometimes but Sean Jones who was a frequent uh contributor to the show in their early days who would come on to talk about you know regulation and the shifting regulatory landscape um yeah and then but yeah Martin Martin's been on Martin's been on three times so I mean as a guest I don't know maybe as a host also he's been on as a host once or twice before this before this call I was reviewing some of the episodes and the early episodes from good were on on consensus and really fun I always love those but then there was the one he had with um with vad um on the worries about the Dow this was before the Dow hack

after the Dow hit 150 million but before the Dow hack so that was a really pivotal episode a really fun one oh yeah and that episode actually there's also some like funny uh yeah how that turned out a funny story around that so you know the SEC published this um paper right the first thing they published on crypto which was basically the Dow is a security and and they cited that podcast we did with goon and cl Samer in that uh in that paper as evidence that it was security because they were basically talking about how you know it's kind of centralized and you have these curators and they have this kind of control and uh yeah so it's

funny how do ended up being U you know cited by the SEC as a the US government watches epicenter yeah wow I I remember actually the week that the do Haw was going down I actually was in Ukraine not Berlin at the time and Vlad was there it was a and um so him and I were sitting like watching it and like he was having to run away to help you know fix things as well and then at the same time it was the same week as of Bitcoin happening so there was I forget the name but it was one of the Bitcoin Maxi guys really interesting dude and you know he was really excited with the havening but there's also this Dow and you know from him it was a bit of Shad androy as well but overall highly interesting week uh that week um you know havening was 10%

of the stuff the hack was uh the big thing but also the the outcome ethereum clastic was already mentioned all this right um a lot of really interesting things and that was really sort of when ethereum started to grow up um in a good way right you've got to have trial by fire to really be successful so um it's I think it's really cool how the community came through Adam I wanted to ask you as well like I mean like in your in your podcast Journey you know what has been the most significant or transformative change that you've seen uh in the last like 11 years of of doing crypto podcasts the biggest one is definitely the move to tokens uh if you remember back in you

know when when you guys were just getting started this was right after mastercoin had come out with the first meta token layer uh which was awful and it was right before I think um counterparty had come out so these are both uh metal layers for tokens on top of Bitcoin and before that the norm was if you want to create a token you need to figure out miners you need to figure out distri bution and there was just all this complexity and infrastructure that went along with it and after that it was not the case it was different economics that in that unlocked a lot of stuff so that was a really significant one one of my favorite uh one of my favorite things that I did there was for a couple of

years we ran it as a full uh kind of news desk um and you know did investigative journalism and stuff like that and I remember in the runup to the final collapse of Mount gaau I spent uh I think in uh a very late evening working with Charlie shrim and Napoleon can't remember his last name uh but basically ripping through all of the documentation around Mount goau and trying to figure out what it all meant you know in kind of the the I think it was a few weeks before the thing actually fully collapsed because there had been all sorts of rumors circulating and stuff like that there were a bunch of things like that um you know that just like those early days there's something so fundamentally fun and interesting to me about doing journalism in areas of

advanced technology that nobody understands and like that's true about technology generally but when you're talking about something like crypto you're really talking about really complex you know like multifaceted group dynamics uh and you know leaderless systems right like leaderless systems are just wild things um and so it's again like uh yeah I mean like even outside of just crypto like that's probably some of the most fun journalistic experiences that I've had is just kind of trying to run that stuff down and figure out what's real and what's not cuz it's so hard to tell yeah and and the token stuff that you guys were doing really early on let's topic like I I've told that sto I've talked about that with people like

so many times recently I mean because like there there's this new I mean I guess it is started becoming more productized like this idea of providing some sort of a token or nft for like doing some kind of action so it could be like interacting with a brand or listening to a podcast or something like that there's like you know lots of products kind of entering the market space um that that do sort of similar things and you know I always think back to like this LTB coin and this magic word that we used to have on the podcast like Brian you probably remember this but like we we used to do this magic word at every episode so we'd say like okay today's magic word is I don't know pickles or whatever like you know not pickles but miners or like Bitcoin or you know transaction fees or whatever

and then at if you listen to the episode you you take that magic word pop it into the L Topic website and then you'd get some tokens um as like proof of listenership and like this is such a I mean this was in 2014 I this was such a Forward Thinking idea um and I think maybe it was just too early uh you know for for for how how the market was evolving but like one of one of the things very Innovative yeah one of the things that I've uh like for better so I'm super experimental as you guys know right like we did all kinds of stuff that was just absolutely ridiculous like we built a whole uh token powered content management platform right and content uh uh like expression platform uh that had tokens baked into it at kind

of a base level in 2014 and so like that was so fun to do but the the thing about it that I think is challenging around all this stuff is that there was this really brief period of time where all of this stuff was possible but before it became obvious that there was so much money attached to it it and there was so much ability to do that and you know we gave away that token explicitly because I was concerned that later on it would be something that would be used against us and so again like our token had an end of life in 2017 where it was retired and changed out for another token like none of like no projects do any of this stuff even today so no it's again like the the greatest privilege that I I had in kind of all of this was being in a

position where not only could I explore my ideas but I could do so at with other content creators and with a community of a couple tens of thousands of people you know at a time before the the money came in and just muddied the water there's nothing wrong with the money but it does complicate things in ways that they just weren't complicated when we were working on stuff our problems were that we were too early but everything else I'm pretty pretty happy with how we got right yeah yeah I know it's yeah it's interesting how the tokens changed everything like I I mean I remember like you know being very involved in ethereum early on and uh and I was just like okay but so you're going to build these dabs

on ethereum and at the same time you have all these you know issues with user experience and scalability and all that and I was like this is going to take forever until you're actually going to be able to build sort of consumer grade applications on that and of course that's true right we still basically even today right just sort of on the verge of being able to do that uh but of course what I totally did not see and I I think hardly anybody saw at the time was how tokens just kind of crew so much value even when there's little usage and the app isn't really there and that can then you know

basically keep projects funded for years and years spilling all kinds of stuff like before there's really product Market fit and I think that's of course for ethereum was absolutely crucial right otherwise this ethereum would have died right uh or uh yeah wouldn't have made it and yeah I think that was super interesting it's a blessing and a curse right it it's a blessing in that if you're a Visionary founder who really has something to build out it means that you have a bit more time to get product Market fit before you're run out of cash and the curse is that you have a bit more time which means that you might not have that sense of urgency right and the way to um to to resolve that is simply strive really hard to maintain

that sense of urgency even though you have the cash right um and you know if you're a strup funer I mean you guys all know this too cash is King right um there's usually a harrowing point in the time of the startup where it's really really tough to to get through so um tokens actually really help to to get you past that right and the good news is you know maybe it took a few years from the time of the icos to the stuff that got built but think of it from 2017 till 2020 2022 now um a lot of the the really Visionary stuff did get built right that took a lot of infrastructure building and took it for years but that happened because um of you know there was enough funding um that came and there was enough Runway and road map and it

happened and of course there was all the scams and whatnot but a lot of really great stuff did get built precisely because of the token funding yeah and and of course you also have the situation right that if you have a good enough store and the token gets enough value you can really keep this thing going of like having something you're working on that actually doesn't have any traction any usage for like years and years and years right and even today right we still have projects that are like you know top 10 top 20 assets with billions and billions of market cap that basically have you know zero usage uh how many devs do light light chain Litecoin have now is it half Dev still it's amazing well I'm surprised

some people haven't hijacked that yet I think that we learned a couple of things from it all which is one being early is really really valuable because anything that comes after the earliest the earliest success Point has to compete with all of the other things that want to displace it and that's just in practice really really really hard to do the other thing is that the the one of the challenges with the money is that and this was especially true early on I think it's a little less true today although not entirely true is that the value of what was raised appreciated so quickly that it made it so that people who were building stuff yes they could take their time but they could also just

do nothing and that was fine too as far as like the deal that they had made with people and there are many early projects that fall into that bucket and again like the I was involved with some of the the early ethereum stuff and wound up getting kicked out of the uh the the early Skype group chat chats uh because when we were talking about the pre-mine and stuff like that right the founder allocations and stuff I was like guys this is just a bad idea like you're you're creating centralized problems stuff like that not well received exited from all of that so I mean like you know like I think for all the good that was done by the funding mechanism early on we thought about it as crowdfunding we thought about it as a pure analog to taking a crowdfunding campaign which has

this indefinite period of time after you funded the thing before you actually have something that is a thing and sometimes people just needed to you know sell that because they no longer were in a position where they could have it sometimes people missed the campaign and so adding tokens made a lot of sense there but the money when the money just Stacks up so so high just changes the incentive structure and again for every project that's out there that you know really delivered on something that was interesting I would argue that there's probably a hundred projects out there that just took the money and did nothing whether through you know malicious intent naive or or whatever like the hit rate for that relative to money I would constitute I would consider almost all of it to be malinvestment that we just

got lucky on a few times so I don't know man the years have really made me quite jaded as far as uh just kind of the incentive structure as it as it all goes but I am happy overall with kind of the way that that things have gone and the fact that it's still around again there were lots of scenarios where this got much more aggressive much faster and none of those really manifested much to my pleasure so I know you guys have many guests um and with that I will say thanks for having me on here and thanks for having me on so many epicenter episodes I I I love the show I listen to it all the time it's really great to be a part of it and congrats again on on your 10 year anniversary thanks thank you Tren yeah and looking forward to many

more episodes with you Trend absolutely and we also have someone new on Sebastian from hoer just joined hi Sebastian hey for and team and uh I guess Happy Birthday everyone and yeah thank you for being uh my personal educator on this journey for almost 10 years um it's been invaluable you know I just thought it's so weird because podcasts exist in all spaces right but in all spaces you also have this competitor called universities nowadays maybe there's some University stuff out there but back when I joined there w a universities there was like epicenter was the only way

how he could learn about crypto and not get scammed like the second part was kind of important so yeah it's that's been pretty valuable for me at least when did you start listening to the show up actually for me it's I I was thinking about it before it was hard it was kind of hard to tell because like I was talking to Meer a lot who you know was I always say personally responsible for dragging me into this crypto rabbit hole and then um yeah me me was telling me about this epicenter thing and I think it was in late 2014 that we came I I did kind of my weekly shopping and my weekly shopping took exactly two hours which

was exactly the time to listen to two episodes so that was good because I had quite some catching up to do and yeah it was that was when I started that's a very long weekly shop oh yeah yeah that's happens when you live in a country but yeah maybe it was also two hours because that's simply how long it took to listen to two epicenter episodes Mah how did you guys uh know each other I didn't realize that there Mah was the connection here yeah he was doing a PhD in Basel oh okay exactly got it it was it was the Basel connection the desert

connection and um yeah all the all the funny ideas that that may had and many people had back in the days and it all sounded kind of crazy right there was Bitcoin and there was all these crazy ideas and I also remember like I think me was the first person who I witnessed to be like properly obsessed with something and the first thing that I saw me being obsessed with was actually maker and like there was this time when Mayer would join all these calls and listen in about like what's going on at maker and like nobody could really find out what was going on because early on it was was a bit obscure it still is very obscure yeah yeah a few days ago Sebastian and I

were talking about how the llms would have would struggle at understanding the maker code base maker and herbit code bases are the hardest for llms that's my claim but so it is for humans right so maybe maybe you know llms are the way to make uh these these kind of uh very funny code bases available to to some other Minds except for the handful of people who coded it so I mean uh you mentioned the episode that you like that that was the first episode you listened to I guess like this this this interesting I want to ask like here and Frederica as well what are like what's your like most

memorable episode that you listened to before you joined as a host for me I I think it was uh like in 2017 like the one with Jimmy song and it just like explained like scaling Wars 101 I think that was just like so helpful to just be like okay here's like the you know anyone who needed like understanding scaling Wars I just sent them that that episode because it's like okay it was a one hour just like obviously you know somewhat pretty biased view but it was a good uh explanation of scaling Wars I hate listening to podcasts Segway you had it here first guys I'm

never listened to an epicenter podcast I think I can't believe you waited 10 years to tell us this maybe it's good you didn't say that earlier me looking for an opportunity to fit it in I go read the white paper now I go read the code base last podast episode I remember hearing is a medical one but I've never heard epicenter I yeah no you were listening to epicenter like before you before you joined us no I think so

that's what he told you told us I mean maybe I might have scouted like epicenter okay okay what's up but you know I yeah listen the jingle that plays in the beginning because you don't hear that as a host recording it would you recognize it [Laughter] may so speak speaking of Jingles speaking of Jingles this this uh this will lead lead us to like the next uh trivia question here uh does anybody remember the title of the pilot episode I remember you were called

epicenter Bitcoin at the time this is true this is true as I get constantly reminded by uh every time I go to a Bitcoin conference like people like you know I still like epicenter but you know you got sold out by dropping Bitcoin from the name and I no our Twitter handle still says BTC in it so you know so just just one thing here so I have here uh the the in the first message that Mah sent us uh and it was like hi Brian and Sebastian I love your show in interviewing style so you were listening or just tailoring himself to get a job no he was proposing himself as

a uh so you were working on this hyperledger we're involved in this project called hyperledger which has nothing to do with the later thing called hyperledger that ended up you know this Enterprise blockchain stuff and uh it was some sort of I mean May you'll be able to describe it more but you you were basically uh proposing us to do an episode about this and yeah I think that was like some point in 2015 well that would have gone over better than well I've never listened to your show before but I'd like to come onast but I'd like to come on and talk about the project I'm working on so good job good job that's an excellent

approach so does anybody remember the the name of the first the pilot episode sorry why don't why don't we just play it then regulation regulation future this is epicenter Bitcoin a weekly podcast about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies the pilot episode recorded December 20th 2013 regulation and the future of Bitcoin this episode of epicenter Bitcoin is brought you in collaboration with the let's talk Bitcoin podcast who did that

intro he know said that was my attempt at a radio voice oh wow I would not have recognized you yeah I didn't recognize that it as you yeah start all episodes like that now yeah that's right and that was that was the theme music for the first couple of episodes yeah um I think I think I think when I go back and listen to myself from from back then I I think I think my my my Canadian accent used to be much much stronger for some reason but um yeah that was the first episode the the the the regulation of the future of Bitcoin um I have a semi trivia question here so at some point you guys started doing

doing ads in the show but these ads are typically not very you know not not very crypto scammy ads like what were the worst applicants that you got for like doing ads on the show I mean we got a lot of applicants for doing ads on the show I mean like I I think during during the the Ico uh kind of like period we we were getting a lot of queries to do ads on the show uh our our very does anybody remember our UHD who's our who who does uh social you know community and uh and and sales is commenting and say don't

even ask um but uh no but our our first sponsor our first sponsor was shapeshift and I mean this was shapeshift before Eric Vorhees was even like was it I I think easy as putting on your slippers I remember that I I I may I may Maybe I'm Wrong here but I think the first sponsor was uh was Fairley that's right sorry yeah yeah you're right so it was fair the first one what is fair yeah yeah Bas prediction Market that uh it was like uh by Martin and Stefan right who of course you know found co-found there was prosis yeah yeah there was prenosis so

wal yeah as opposed to a protocol so the nois connection goes way way way back then actually met at at a Bitcoin Meetup in New York and he and he was telling him about fa and Joe said this sounds cool um wh why don't why don't you join consensus and build the same thing on ethereum that's that's not live yet but it's going to be live soon and it's going to be awesome this is how Martin and Stefan became employees two and three of consensus wait and fair is still running I'm looking on the site right now it says it has like 32 Bitcoin of volume in the last 24 hours oh yeah so it at some point yeah yeah yeah there you go yeah

okay you guys never got the the cloud miners were always the ones that that most got in my uh like that was that was the worst advertisers right because the cloud miners were almost always scams because they'd just be like basically they would just run a Ponzi scheme but then they would be like no we're we're we're putting your money into buying hardware and then now you're going to get the seal from the hardware I think eventually some of them came out that were better but the first couple of years when everybody wanted to do mining that was like these were the people pre Ico who had money to spend on marketing because they didn't actually have a product most of the time behind it and everybody wanted it so that was my memory of the worst I I I remember getting some queries also like talking

to some Cloud mining folks and I I think Brian you were like no this doesn't make any sense yeah yeah yeah I mean the issue was even even when the cloud mining thing was like honest or something that generally you know you know you'd basically pay some amount in you know dollars to then buy some amount of hash rate over some time like a year or two years and stuff and then if you would sort of calculate like how many Bitcoins you got from that you know generally you always better off just like buying the Bitcoin up front instead of putting in thisone money to you know buy the stream of Bitcoin over time so it was always like this is like under what there there always like no

scenario in which you'd actually be better off doing this Cloud mining thing but so somehow they could still like sell it everybody wanted to do it remember sometimes yeah remember sometimes they say well you know but you can uh you know you can sort of like maybe just buly through your company and say it's like Cloud expenses or and then you keep the Bitcoin out of the company or you know basically some kind of you know scammy approaches that maybe made it make sense but yeah so I think I remember for me like it wasn't the cloud mining but I remember one of my early exposures to bitcoin was with like you know 21 or what they called 21

back then I think yeah they were like like pitching like oh here's like this like Raspberry Pi that you're going to like plug in and like your you know your toaster is going to be mining everything yeah the toaster was the craziest thing it's like how many how many hours a day does the average human use a toaster yeah that was that was one of my that was one of my first moments when I was like starting to challenge what I hear and yet it didn't make sense because there were all these very smart people right and they all were like they they were speaking like very eloquently and I'm wondering how many minutes I use a toaster in an average day but yeah anyway I think that's part of the crypto

education Journey the water heater was always the better path yeah water heers yeah one one of the first Bitcoin conferences I went to was in Amsterdam in like maybe October 2013 like vitalic was selling his Bitcoin magazine there and then we had I met Adam back at that conference it was his first Bitcoin event where I think he didn't have any Bitcoin at the time still he was sort of like watching from the sideline but I had dinner with him and Manny Rosenfeld who's also been on the show sometimes he was kind of the original Bitcoin guy in Israel and uh and during the dinner the two of them went on and on in this like crazy tangents and and but I remember

that was the one thing Adam was talking a lot about that yeah like at some point Bitcoin mining economics is going to be that yeah you going to mine Bitcoin with your heating device at home and things like that yeah I mean to answer your your your question Sebastian like the come to come back to the sponsors I I think one thing that we always try to to do is is you know throughout 10 the 10 years was also always be very very mindful of the sponsors we we got on the show and like you know you know even in the beginning you know like Brian and I would would talk quite a bit about like

whether or not a sponsor was good for the show if we were using if if we would use or recommend this product and and um yeah I sometimes joke about how like had we accepted all of the money that people were trying to throw at us during the Ico period uh probably would have made like quite a bit of money you know but it just didn't feel right and and I think like uh it was the right decision to like just be very very careful with with sponsors especially like in this space no I mean honestly especially over such long time periods I think it you did an impressive job there at not selecting the ftxs of the world right it hasn't always been obvious let's also be honest about that right like the biggest that the most painful Ponies were the

ones that were nonobvious and yeah no cudos on that I we did have one we did have one that was like it was this Guppies thing I don't know if you remember this Brian we we did this this these ads I thought that's the thing that step not an actual we didn't have him as a sponsor I think we had him as a we did have him we did have sponsor yes yeah no no sorry sorry sorry no it wasn't the guppies no no no we did have we had the Guppies on but we didn't release the episode but we did this thing called gems which was kind of like a social app but it wasn't a scam but it just they were doing kind of a sale Ico and it failed yeah it was not it was I mean I think I still have some kind of

an interesting idea so yeah it was an interesting idea yeah guys I know Adam has to dash Adam it is it's been so lovely uh to have you on for this and uh yeah and maybe one day we can meet in person that's a distinct possibility guys you're doing a great job keep up the good work uh again you know like it's uh it's important I'm happy to see that you're you're being so successful so have a great next 10 years thanks so much and thanks for your rolling all of this yeah I'll see you in 10 years bye guys cool and we also have two new

guests um Griff and left Terrace hang on let me bring you guys on hey guys gmgm hey hey wonderful to see you all hey hello can you hear me yes okay that's great guys I guess I'm going to head out uh now there's people who are funding public goods and uh supp privacy and local software before you go I wanted to say something super juicy that I don't know if you ever knew this and I I don't I don't know how left terce is even going to feel about me saying this but uh back during the day so obviously left

terce and I were part of slockit and and the Dow and manage the Dow hack to the white hack group but uh the two of the top or sorry there were there was the the top person that was predicted to be the Dow hacker back in the day with that we were told was actually you Sebastian and marer and Andre vilka back in the day this was these you guys were the top suspects I heard that I heard hair yeah I didn't know you I heard there was people accusing there was people accusing me of that and I was like guys I actually wasted five eth on like spamming the network on running this

thing that Steven Tu was just sending this thing guys run this we need to like Counterattack the network and I wasted five Precious eth on it which back then was way less money than it is nowadays obviously um so yeah it was good it was a good it was a good cover story is it is it is it still alive hypothesis or is it dead because know who was I think yeah that's a good question but when I first met Sebastian I I think that this is what you asked me right like why why the heck would uh uh yeah when we met in in person in in fredin in in Berlin he asked me so some people

said that I'm you know uh the D hacker was from what was it the company name validity Labs validity yes yes from us back in the days yeah yeah I don't remember where the theory came from but there was a theory yeah I want to say it was like uh it was one of the exchanges they said that somehow some gas money was connected to validity Labs that's possible but yeah that's funny actually it's really funny thanks for thanks for bringing it up but you're also in Good Company because alexe was also the other suspect right Alexi akuno so uh I remember I I've heard those

theories before I never heard Alexi being the no I think Alexi was the first to post about it on Reddit yeah he he' posted like something Funny's go going on like the contracts are being drained or something and uh yeah yeah and he's like you know at the time like there amount of people who like knew the evm well enough to find it much smaller set than it is today and Alexi was definitely like in that set so awesome G anyway awesome to to bring up good stories soan claim to fame not the Dow hacker not the D haer exactly anyway

thank you so much for having me on and uh yeah all the best for everyone involved see you around thanks Sebastian so after accusing him of uh stealing bilon dollars no it was that was a very nice start in the in the conversation hey by the way I remember the first time I met Sebastian it was like it it was like we were uh at a conference and it was me Jory and lefas and we're all talking to him and it was like oh my God we're talking to the Dow hacker is so awkward I I I wouldn't have thought to

be Sebastian to kind of be the person who kind of gives gives off like this super villain Vibe but uh yeah yeah it wasn't actually it wasn't a Sebastian it was and there was no villain kind of thing it was another younger guy from validity Labs uh and it was bonx um that suggested that the I don't remember his name but particular guy who was talking to stepan TW and yeah yeah but it was pretty up like uh it's been in in um

[Music] um in the cryptops the book that um in sankai after uh the hack uh the guy that was suggested this being the hacker by poonix was in in Devon to in sankai and he talked to me and I was like oh my God I'm talking to the guy that supposedly was the DOW hacker and he was saying yeah well you know the D hacker probably also feels very bad for what he did because he just got into the situation it was very difficult and for him was like oh my God it's him it has to be him look at how he's defending the doher but yeah in the end it was all just stuff in people's mind even though as as uh uh as was mentioned before

who is a dow hacker we just have this other Theory um that that Laura posted in the book but well it's not possible to prove anything with 100% um um certainty right so I guess we will always remain uh with this question yeah when you guys mentioned poon ex I can see why so because like the Dow hack happened and mhm mhm the first thing like when I came to know of the Dow hack I actually sold a large chunk of my ether on poon so maybe it's like

that that might have triggered them to have such an H hypothesis yeah yeah so the the hypothesis was pretty simple uh that they had taken a huge uh sword position that was being built over the days that the HCK was um happening and that they executed it right after the hack but let's be honest like this is extremely weak evidence and if I remember correctly the price movement it was really a time to sort if I didn't know anything about trading back then but now that I see how trading works I mean had just doubled in price in the week or so so I guess it's a sorter Paradise so just from that saying that okay these guys must be it yeah I

don't think I don't know I I like it better when the identity is a mystery I feel like the Dow hacker is like you know it's on like Satoshi like the Dow hack like these like core anons of crypto history like it's just better for it to remain faceless well the Dow hacker did prove that there's a distinction like code code is Law and social consensus is is law so import important distinction yeah yeah that's a very very big um contribution to the ecosystem by the I mean my do hack story which is uh

I was not I was barely involved at at that time but I I you know I was just really into Bitcoin at the time and uh I was at a hackathon that summer in you know 2016 and then I was tell my friend uh I was like hey I heard about this like ethereum thing like I heard you can like build applications and stuff on top of it like you know we should we should check this out I mean because we were like bitcoiners only at that time and so you know at the sack ofon we open up Reddit and the entire like page is just talking about the Dow hack and like oh the world is burning like you have to Fork the chain and and we were like yeah this community is crazy this like what is this e like this is some and

so we like turned it off and I like didn't look at ethereum again for like another year yeah you you were saying before that you were an eth classic guy I was an eth classic guy for a while uh you know just I like the code is Law and all that so yeah okay no no I I I guess my my my my my more specific stance was that I think it was unethical for the ethereum foundation to like Leverage it ownership of the ethereum trademark to declare the fork to be the to be ethereum my my take was that the classic chain should have

kept the name ethereum and the ticker and then the fork chain should have a new name yeah you know I'm surprised that more things weren't built on ethereum classic like really sketchy things like a dark Market or you know it's like all of a sudden you had this chain that's like oh yeah hey this is clean no one's going to mess with this okay like like let's do illegal things like it never happened I feel like crypto has in general this like really like nefarious Outlook or people think that it's so bad but the real Builders generally don't build bad things I mean there was a huge opportunity there yeah exactly that was part of my thesis on Etc as well but never panned out yeah even even the you know like the criminal smart contract

paper the assassination markets all of these the dystopian ideas that I've come across have actually never been built and yeah it's an interesting observation about actually Humanity that actually most of us are either trying to build interesting things or are just trying to scam and just make a little money and just switch off none of us are trying to do like the really evil stuff like where are the professor mores of the world like there's a serious lack of Professor Mor AR of the world of the super villains I mean my thesis would be here also that you know if you wanted to

build like I don't know dark Market I don't know assassination Market or something like that well privacy really has to be like completely impenetrable and and that's just not the case right and and then I think of course you also see you just see how hard it is to build anything anonymously and uh I mean Satoshi Managed IT which is still like astonishing uh that that feels like I mean obviously the intellectual achievement of Bitcoin is is like immense but like him having having been able to do this without leaking his identity in any way is also just like

incredible and you know I think people have not even even when they tried right mostly they fail uh even things like that don't get the kind of attention that that Bitcoin did so I still think in the end it it will it has to happen right we will have to see things like dark markets that are like fully decentralized and all that stuff but it's just yeah but you right I think it is surprising that it hasn't happened so you you like it's down to Logistics complexity of staying anonimous and if that is solved we'll have a lot of super villain crop up I mean of course of course you're absolutely right that like most people don't do this kind of thing right most people want to build like good things

and stuff like that but obviously I mean look at dark markets right like they they exist right and they keep making new ones and stuff right so but I guess well I mean for dark markets I guess also like one of the main business models of dark Market seems to be the exit scam right where people uh put in uh you know C Bitcoin or or Monero or something into something that's basically hit hidden centralized website and then you know they can trade drugs and then at some point when enough people have been using it they just shut down the site and run away with the coins right and of course if you decentralize it actually like you can't do that so I guess but but in the end I I yeah like it would expect that thing

to happen and then of course also something we did episodes about right there was the hack ofth project called Dark Market by like Army itaki at some point and then and then they even ended up getting well there was the project open Bazaar right that kind of took this and ended up getting Venture funding from like Union score Ventures and a6c like high you know very reputable funds and and of course I think the expectation was you know that okay someone's probably going to like Fork this and build a dark Market because that's obviously the biggest use Cas I mean the biggest Market probably for something like that at least in the short term but yeah never happened I do want to say though that um

I think we used to think that being anonymous is way easier than it actually turned out to be so I think kind of back in the days of the Dow hack people people did assume they were Anonymous to a large extent which I think this kind of predated like you know all the CH analysis like companies of the world right so and uh then if you don't have very sophis icated block explorers and nansen and whatever it's really difficult to actually uh to actually uh Trace everything fully on chain so I think there was a reasonable expectation that things would be private and things still didn't get built so may maybe

something more deep seated here yeah I feel that um privacy is probably the the um it it's it's it's it's really it's really unfortunate that like we still don't have reasonable options for privacy in the space I mean ah we'll we'll get them so this is something that I for the next 10 years so with with um CK proofs and fhe and MPC I think kind of we're going to get there

yeah and we also have Felix on now so Felix is the late host hey Felix hi thanks thanks familyy and congrats to 10 years to all of you guys so happy that I was able to join as a host and take over some of the episodes that maybe Sunny would have done otherwise that's that's a burn if I ever heard one so yeah Felix uh what's your um what's your most memorable episode I was looking earlier and it looks like you've done well you know you you haven't done as much as Sunny so you still have some catching up to do but you've done uh something like 25 episodes maybe

29 what's been your favorite so far um yeah I really like the dydx episode I did with Brian um it was like just very Yeah clean episode we kind of everything it was very yeah a good great product you know big success and we kind of went over everything inspiring like sort of story from Anthony and like sort of the Journey of DX and yeah really enjoyed that episode yeah who would you who would you like to to to get on in the next couple of months oh yeah I think jeto I was trying to get Lucas on actually but then they were way too busy

with the airdrop and and everything and um yeah I guess it's it's kind of me being like in this staking niche of epicenter um and I I think now I guess yeah many people are probably interested you know what's how is jeto doing like because got like much bigger much more attention right and um yeah maybe like kind of a counter to this like sort of the Lio and flashboards episode that we also had with Stefan and bili back then so could be a very cool one excited for that one yeah Griffin leis I want to ask you because I mean you guys are like so OG into ethereum and you know like still

very much into that space like how much how much do you pay atten how much attention do you give to like other ecosystems or like whether it's Cosmos or salana or like you know maybe some of the stuff happening over on on polygon or some other ecosystems like do you pay any any attention at all to what's going on there or you just like still very focused on ethereum uh it's a theum alignment question I can smell [Laughter] it I can smell it yes it's a trap um for me I Dam it's very difficult like so many different stuff pop up it's

impossible to follow um but I personally try to look at all the different ecosystems but I can't even claim to know anything as well as I do ethereum which is kind of sad like being honest I look the most where I have uh uh interesting or a bug in so if I have lots of tokens of something I'm well interested to see if if that bug is going to be worth anything um and also because I'm doing Rodi I am trying to focus on um everything that people uh ask for which

besides CVM Chains would be um well Cosmos and substrate so these are our two biggest tasks and then there is some people who do who want also definity and then Solana but I I don't know anything about Solana though I would like to find more time like it's also interesting like I really like everything but no time yeah I'm I'm kind of like left terce I mean I definitely Chase my bags uh no but uh also I I I follow more of like the regen space so regen Network I I I'm I follow relatively closely and

I'm always watching what's going on and IO in Cosmos also I was checking them out but um but un unless it's so I'm like salana I haven't seen any region projects on salana there probably are but I don't know but actually gith is going to be one we're going to integrate salana um so that you can donate on giveth because I don't I didn't I think there's an opportunity there so you know there's not a donation platform that I know of there so hey why not um I I wish I followed I I followed polka dot in in the in in the web3 foundation space early on but I haven't seen a whole lot developed there um so mostly I follow in the evm space because that's where I

know people who can do cool things and that's definitely where the regen spaces I'm very close with polygon optimism and arbitrum and and uh public goods Network and all the l2s so I I consider all of that ethereum though like even polygon I mean if it's evm you know ethereum is the E right so uh I don't I don't know if that should really count I agre you guys um do like you know Lether is talked about alignment earlier um do you do you think that you know everything will that will converge to ethereum and basically like all of the other ecosystems will borrow

security from ethereum in one way or another whether through reaking or or um or mesh security or some other sort of like novel security mechanisms I do not I I I do think that there is going to be a power law distribution but I don't think that there will be a like everyone uses ethereum that would just be dumb like why would we centralize around that we need diversity in the space and I also just think there's enough incentives for uh Challengers to always be there uh that's a very good question it's very difficult to answer uh because ethereum has amazing stank power I would not have imagined that it's so easy so so many things are built around ethereum

and even though other ecosystems really come up with novel ideas and pretty interesting uh Concepts we seem to still do stuff on the AVM though it has its flaws and I don't know why we seem to just focus on it a lot more than anything else like yeah about raking I really don't know enough to even give an informed opinion but from the problems that we have with ethereum stating um somewh suggesting that uh we can do something that I think both Cosmos and and and the substrate ecosystem does I don't remember the name

but that you are validating your stake to someone um um that probably has a name I just don't know it which you cannot do in ethereum you have to either uh stake on your own or or do the liquid stating stuff right what what's the name of that thing in in Cosmos in okay yeah that is a good name for delegating your stake yeah I mean the liquid saking stuff in Cosmos or what or just delegation to to validator the concept that doesn't basically right yeah yeah this so for example when I got my I delegated it to Larry things someone uh for for staking right and

with substrate it's exactly the same thing like if you don't want to run your own validator you have to uh you have this option of of delegating the stake yeah you were uh you made you made a bit of a face there while I was asking that question like uh like maybe you had something to to add here you do I made a face yeah uh on on what the question about like eth alignment or just um yeah or maybe when when Griff uh was saying that uh things wouldn't um align with ethereum oh

um I don't know I mean I think ethereum has done a good job of building this community around it I I've just not always been a believer in like multi-polar systems I think that like you know Sana has built quite a bit of a cultural center I think Cosmos has grown a cultural center um at the end of the day I honestly just don't I know uh I think on some on on I think from a cultural standpoint I don't know I just find my my maybe just like by nature of when I got involved with the space I just like in my heart I just like feel like a bitcoiner I don't know why like if I tell anyone it's like you know and I I feel like part of it like when I just go talk to like friends and stuff

it's like if I try to pitch them on trip people who are not like drinking the Kool-Aid right like I feel like I can explain Bitcoin so easily and they like get it right like nothing very else very little else is like easy to explain like I it's like so hard to explain like eth like I don't think and you know I think people just start asking questions I you know I I I can explain Bitcoin really well and I can explain like certain defi apps really well right I obviously I can explain osmosis really well and like what the value prop here is right but like you know if you tried to ask me to like pitch eth to a norm me I actually don't know how to like do that uh so I don't know that's kind of I I'm a Believer in Bitcoin and I'm a

Believer in like applications yeah I mean and I I think that's a really fair stance because Bitcoin has like a very clear application and it is its own application effectively of like decentralized money and it does it really well but like the other like ethereum and salana and Cosmos I mean it's just you're talking to normies about why mongodb is better than another database framework and it it it shouldn't also why mongodb is a uh you know 500 billion dollar product yeah I I exactly I I think in the end different product these different products will all exist because users don't care our tribalism is in in the crypto space and that's like super Niche and what's going

to win is is the applications that are built on top of it that are useful yeah I guess the problem is that you're trying to compare Bitcoin which is more like a you can you call it an application right it's it's easy to understand while ethereum evm Etc it's a platform to buildups on so it's it's much harder to explain to a to a Normy probably MH cool thank you guys for being here Griff and left teris um I know left teris you you're joining us from the middle of nowhere and as uh as uh can be seen by your very blocky picture and I I

I I I can I can I can vouch for the fact that left haris us usually doesn't look so pixelly so um thank you both for coming on um and it's been a real pleasure thank you for uh allowing us to you know participate in your 10th year anniversary birthday yeah happy birthday guys enjoyed you guys since the very beginning thank you for doing all this work thanks thanks guys than thanks much guys okay time for our next guests right so we have Anna and Sam hang on let me bring you guys on hello hi hey hi can you hear us okay yeah yes good good so just brief

introductions here uh so Anna Rose who is the host of the ZK podcast also very popular podcast and one of my favorites and uh Sam who I met a couple of weeks ago in Istanbul and he had such a crazy story about EP about like his experience listening to epicenter that I just wanted to get him on to tell that story here um on the on our on our live stream so yeah thanks for coming guys cool nice to be here my first podcast ever oh great nice there are so many hosts I when I first joined I thought there was like a ton of

guests but no it's like it's are you guys at six now yeah nice seven if he count sunny sunny is a sort of you know uh is a depending on the weather host but yes cool all right yeah Sam Sam tell tell tell us a bit about yourself and um yeah when you started listen to podcast I uh I've worked in trafi for about 20 years uh so I've just gone I guess you would say crypto native um I think um I think the only other one of you that I've met in person maybe uh Sunny we actually met uh um you were on my flight back from uh

from ECC we chatted in line um but um I started uh so I got in the space right around when feda joined as a co-host um I started the first macro fund that could trade liquid crypto and um so my background is in trafi and and and macr trading um you know kind of from like economics perspective and um I traded the first option on ethereum back in 2018 when it was or 2019 when it was at like 120 bucks um and uh most recently I ran crypto for a one of the largest and oldest Global macro funds in the world and um and then um during that period I um we invested in

scroll and um I have now joined full-time as an advisor to them congrats yeah so what's what's this um yeah tell the story about uh uh I think it was about I think it was you said you were listening to the episode with Laie Ben suon yeah so I was telling so I um I was telling him that I oftentimes listen to podcast when I'm in the shower and fed recently interviewed uh Ellie and you know I was literally so the obviously and I'm listening to it on

my phone which I have like you know put up like this and you know obviously the sound is not super loud you've got the water and everything and she's asking him this very delicate question which I'm a bit of a eath maxi just as a disclosure and you know there is some suspicion within I think parts of the ethereum community about how aligned maybe starkware may be and she's asking him this question about where they're posting the data uh and he goes well we're posting it to you know our this state availability committee blah blah blah and she goes so you have another L1 and I literally was like I like I was like shampooing my hair and I like stopped and he

goes uh well had really thought of it that way but I guess so and she goes oh that's very interesting and and then I was waiting for him this is where I think it might get a little bit spicy but I was waiting for him then to turn around and be if he wanted to snipe at and be like well don't you work for another alt L1 as well nosis is it nosis alt L another L1 but it didn't go in that direction but it was it was the first time I've heard anybody really challenge him on this and I thought it was so it was very interesting to me and I related the story he thought it was funny because I was in the shower at the time do you take do you take like 90 minute long showers or like the the full

episode or well you know I think this sprung out of I think it's sprung out because I used to like to go to the sauna in the steam room and take a lot of reading you know there's no distractions there's no TVs you can't use your phone right and so it's just this like you know this deprivation and after Co you know during obviously all the gym shut down and whatever and you know we now we're you know during that Co period and afterwards it's like you're just surrounded by your screens or televisions or your phone and so the I think the shower became this like deprivation place where like if I was in the shower I'd put on something where I could just listen and you know your mind's lot the whole shower thought thing so any I think that's where it came from but I'm not

sure do you remember this episode do you remember this uh this what are you talking about I remember it it was not so long ago right no it was it was actually during Paris that's when I listened to it during e but you may it was very long ago but I don't actually remember this specific question but kind of I'm I'm all for kind of putting things very plainly so it's uh yeah but I I have to say you know I recommend epicenter so I've been listening probably maybe I started listening like 2016 2017 but I I mean I'm I listen routinely since then and I refer new trafi people trying to learn about the space to listen to epicenter um and to also when they're trying to

learn they'll ask me about a project or something and I'll say why don't you go find the epicenter you know podcast with that project from maybe it was years ago but it's you guys have become almost like a a reference material um and I think by the way I'll give credit to Anna I listened to her show religiously as well oh thanks certainly in the ZK space you play that role but for the trafi people that's a little they the knowledge level is extremely low in trafi I I can't emphasize this enough a little bit to Sunny's point you know the understanding of what ethereum is for example should you know the the the really the level of understanding is that it's a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin with some utility and and that's really it and so I actually think that

epicenter plays a really important role um and uh from an education and introduction standpoint and I I you know I use it personally as a kind of an encyclopedia of the space but I refer try people as well to euse it that way well thank you well I guess uh I guess uh I guess if we uh if we if we encounter people from trfi uh that listen to the podcast I'll ask them if they come from from Sam cool yeah well thanks for coming on and telling a story um and yeah thanks for thanks for being a loyal

listener yeah I guess good Segway to the other podcast no the yeah yeah when did you get started with CK it's been a long time as well no yeah so I was thinking about your questions of like when did we first when did I first hear about epicenter for sure it's 2017 for me probably before we started the show um I know that like I mean you guys you guys were a lot bigger than us back then you were like the big we were just like for our you know for our friends in the office it was very very small um but I know I was for sure a listener by Devcon 2017 in Cancun because Brian

that's when I voice recognized you on a bus and like weirded you out and went over and was like are you Brian from like I did that yes I remember I remember girl like away um like you had nowhere to go it was like this this bus that was taking us from a place to a another place that was like not moving anyway um but yeah that was for sure so by then obviously I'd been listening for a long time and I was also thinking about what were those guests that like I remember I don't know that I that I listen to that would have changed something and I have a few that I picked out one was for sure like matter and Alex G I think I had already had him on

my show but I think it was like a a phase shift in the project that I learned about through epicenter I remember the episode with danrad in 2021 for some reason that one stands out and you guys have covered herbit often which I still don't understand um but I I always listen to those ones ran this is your chance yeah tell us more about I've listened to that one and I don't understand it either I can explain it I can expl it okay let's have explain it yeah yeah Sunny what what is it okay okay do you guys know secure scuttlebutt you familiar with secure scuttlebutt yes it was a dag based

social network instead of a blockchain you know you pewter pure gossip with other nodes and eventually you have this like eventually consistent view of the network it we also did an episode with them I did too actually it does not solve a double spend problem episode 290 but because it's a social network what is a double spend right it's just oh you told us one person you like to post another person you dislike to post like whatever right it doesn't really matter um okay put secure CLE butt on the side for a second Bitcoin wanted to build this like thing this like decentralized money project and in order to do this invented a new decentralized data structure

called a blockchain right and it's like okay really fast finality or relatively fast finality and like solves this double spend problem ethereum comes along and it's like oh cool decentralized data structure what if we put a generalized VM on top of that and like have it run arbitrary applications I think the best way to think of herbit is take secure Scuttle butt the decentralized data structure that is secure a Scuttle butt and it's like why are we only running a single social network platform on top of this what if we actually instead slapped a generalized VM on top of this and made it so like okay here's a platform that people can build peer-to-peer applications right like so you have a bunch of people right now trying to

build decentralized social networks right you have like foraster and you know blue sky and everyone but right and everyone's like building specialized P2P like networking like most P2P daps don't need a blockchain right you don't need Global state for most for a lot of social applications herit t is like hey instead of building custom P2P stacks for everything and like let's build One OS and then people can deploy applications on top of that that is herbit for you and this Scuttle butt this gossip part is that at the core of bbits like architecture this sort of way yeah to it's not communicating everywhere there's no Global State it's

just local yes closer okay yes another way I think I think of like you know for Cosmos people to think about it is Imagine everyone had their own personal kmm chain like I had Sunny chain you had Anna chain and then like you know we all use IBC to talk to each other and if I wanted to build a messaging app I would deploy I would write the km bosom contract for it or the smart contract for it and I would deploy it on my chain and on your chain and then we send messages over IBC between our chains okay but only there kind of like not if you don't need broadcast Global state everywhere okay we need we need Sunny back to do more episodes I think maybe

this is this is kind of uh the petition here yeah another another sort of way of explaining herit is the idea that it's it's a sort of system that's where you know the idea is that computation is focused around the personal server right so that you have sort of your server and all of your data on your app applications live on your server and then it's like network with other servers right so like an application developer develops their app it gets you know shipped to all everyone's server and then there's like an identity system peerto peer messaging and then um and and yeah it has some of this kind

of blockchain e features This Server right in that um you know you can prove all this you know it's like deterministic right and you can always prove the state um yeah if if people are interested in it so at at course one we've been uh you know we've been sort of building a urbit hosting product oh uh and you can go to Red horizon.com and then you can onboard onto herbit and we give you like an herbit ID and you can try it out it's like super simple you you can be on there in like two minutes and then you can try it out and let us know what you think so maybe that's the trick of

herbit you gotta you got to try it to understand it yeah definitely that's yeah that helps yeah okay so yeah it's red horizon.com so r d and then Horizon h o r i z o n.com super nice cool Anam it's been an absolute pleasure having you on with us uh for quarter of an hour or so it was uh yeah super nice wonderful holidays thank you for yes and congrats again everyone to the 10th anniversary it's fantastic now we're only missing AI epicenter host side to

like soon catch up to you yeah let us know when you have your 10 when is your 10 year coming up it's also not that far no no well we just did three I did 300th episode with a bit of a look back that just came out a few weeks ago um but yeah we started I mean officially like weekly TW it was uh beginning of 2018 so what am what am I at first episode six years almost oh okay the first first episode was in 2017 but it was like on Soundcloud and then we re okay published it elsewhere but yeah okay so uh three something like that yeah there you go well I hope I can invite you guys for

that I would love to first five years are the hardest so you're you're you're past the hump it's amazing that you guys stayed with it for 10 years yeah yeah thanks that's the secret sauce is just keep going don't quit anyway we hope we hope we can continue providing you with shower content for for another 10 years well you know I've got to break you know I can't get through a full episode so you know it uh it's it it scales well the shower you know CU I get about three showers per episodes you do take long showers I'm sure your water supply company is really happy with this yeah the US you know the

the incremental water it's it's very cheap so [Laughter] again and andna we'll have to do another crossover episode at some point true I I saw I was listening to that the other day there was like I don't know if people know it was recorded we like kind of made a thing of it we released it on both of our channels on YouTube Yeah from 2019 yeah yeah cool all right well see you have a good rest of your session thanks okay and we have jny hey hello anything congrats guys hey thank

you I remember I remember when I mean at the beginning very beginning when I started to be in the community in the and and uh I mean I think it was the first podcast that I heard about uh Bitcoin by the time and it was in 2015 or or something around there so yeah just still there in the top so that's uh yeah I think it's that's a good job guys so Jordy how long you been in the space now I mean I was I was reading the Bitcoin paper in

2013 but actually I was trying to do smart contracts by the time and and uh you you very soon you discover that Bitcoin was not uh prepar very much prepared mean all the all the all the all the scripting language was very limited and even most of the codes of the off codes just didn't work by the time was very very very frustrating everything super slow and just abandoned somehow and was until 2015 that I discovered ethereum very in a very strange way I mean because I was just having another job and a lot of work and uh I remember that in like in 10 minutes I was able to just uh create the solid smart contract and what I was trying to

do in 2013 was so easy in 2015 that I just get get engaged and from there was like for me was like a drun I mean just reading understanding discovering just learning all this uh just what's behind the technology behind the U you you you just discover the community discover by the time was uh the da and and and people just building around and there was um bunch of people just trying to develop things and remember I mean talking with people from from swarm and were all these s start happening and from a developer perspective I think eum was uh it was incredible because it's like

you have like a new toy and then you can start building a lot of decentralized things on top of that I mean if Bitcoin was was fine I mean it was great but it's it's just money transfer you just okay which is important but it's just that and ethereum opens the space to these decentralized uh applications and from from the developer perspective this opens a huge World a new world and and for me was I mean this is where I enter uh in and I'm I'm still here I mean I'm still learning so uh yeah that's how I how how I uh Eno it hey Ryan hey guys how you doing good to see everybody hey Ryan we also have Ry who's joining us

now um this this was actually kind of your idea like you you when when when we had you on I think it was last year uh you you mentioned that we should do this I don't remember it was like on the podcast or like after the podcast but then this is like we sort of ran with it and yeah yeah it's interesting you know it like I I find epicenter to be this this compelling um kind of historical record of the space right where there are moments in time where you know the name was kind of um very opportune because it was the center of the discussion in very

critical moments so for example like the Dow hack which obviously you you know Jordy sat at the the eye of the storm of and and and was was so critical in in recovering the funds and and all the work that that he did in that as well as the other things with like the parody wallet hacks and so on and so forth when people needed critical information about what was going on either prior to the Dow hack because I think Vlad had a had like a like a a warning podcast with you guys about about it and then it happened and then Jordy saved it or saved most of it and then Jordy came on after and like if you wanted to stay up to date with it which I did because I I deployed Capital into it epicenter was the thing and

there and and there has been these moments in time where where epicenter has has sat at the center of the conversation of of our space which has been really critical um and so yeah I'm super happy that you guys are doing this that that that that that that chapter that thing was blad anding aming talking about the the all the D flows and and all the problems and what to do and and and ha didn't didn't happen yet I mean was in that moment that was the the the there was like two weeks before yeah yeah yeah that was but for me I mean that was personally I think that that moment was the most

interesting moment uh on the Dow history because it's like okay people realized that there was like a bunch of money there and uh smart contract contract was uh I mean was very primitive and uh it was a lot of problems people start looking at that very seriously and I mean a lot of flows just happened again this is what just before the the rancy attack happened I mean this was just before that and um um this episode I mean this when the mean and and and and bl just took a little bit the leadership of the community and saying hey guys um this is cool but uh here there is a lot of of

problems that we need to solve and we need to fix and we need to talk about and and and I mean I think that was one of the the the the important moments uh from the the the history of the Dows at that point and the I mean that specific chapter with with with BL bline I think is one it was an important it really um and the people really understands uh understood at that point uh uh how incredible could be the house but at the same time how difficult is to to build them and uh I mean we are still not there yet and and that chapter

explains a lot of things the number of re-entrancy attacks that happened in 2023 is frankly embarrassing for our industry like like the fact that we still are not getting it right as an industry is like come on guys like it's 2023 like we gotta we gotta get this sorted out here um but I will never for the rest of my life forget I actually had fallen asleep listening to I think that episode I was living in in Rio de Janeiro at the time woke up the next morning which was a Saturday and was at the beach with my girlfriend at the time and I got this call from Alex vesan and Jordy Bina neither of whom I knew at all and they're like d we need

your Dow tokens because like we're going to do the same attack that that that the guy did and this this this catalonian has devised the attack just from like observing the attack going on and I kind of like you know sort of uh slap my girlfriend on the butt who was laying beside me I was like hey baby we got to go home I gotta send these the Spanish guy some tokens and we go I remember that that I mean I was nobody there I mean nobody kns me and and and and I mean I just was I deployed I mean some attack just trying to the DA attack and uh somebody I mean some some some whale uh just sent me

like I don't know like 200k or 300K which was a huge amount of money uh uh without even knowing me and and and without understanding and and just to recover I mean for me was like uh that moment was like in a movie I mean it's I could believe where what what happened I mean just a random guy that I don't even know his name and and uh just sent me some some funds to recover uh to my address and and and and well it was a crazy uh I mean if you think in if you put it in perspective uh uh it was like everything crazy but all that all that time I mean was this was just the beginning another guy just s like after

after recording all the funds of The Da just send like uh like half a million dollars again back to the DA and and then then just trying to rec I it was like a crazy crazy moments uh uh uh By the time it it it it's one of these things that you know and and epicenter is really very emblematic of this right when you meet people who come into the space and and spend say like a year in in crypto they always come back to you and they're like oh my God like it's been so crazy like so much has happened like I can't even believe like like this is wild and you're like actually no like it's just kind of always like this like it's just sort of you know every year is

is just as wild uh not more not less but just absolutely wild in its own its own unique way which is why you know crypto is a strange addiction right it's it's something that you couldn't you couldn't really decouple yourself from even if you wanted to at this point um and so so that's interesting I you know one of the questions that I've always asked myself um the the I remember the first the first episode I listened to from you guys was the predictions of 2014 cuz I was kind of like I was mining at the time and I was like okay like what else is out there that's like

Beyond just like mining this was episode one by the way what was it I mean so there was the pilot episode and then our predictions for 2014 was was the first like you know numbered episode it's like episode 001 it came out in January yeah but when it became a regular thing for me was was actually almost a year later with the vitalic episode because I was fortunate enough to see vitalik's um first ever presentation of of ethereum um in in Toronto at at Anthony diorio's place and seeing his Evolution as kind of like an entrepreneur and a presenter

over the sort of like nine months of that moment in time where like his slides were all we're all just like code based he's like that is an insurance contract and D is a is an options contract we're like what like what is this guy doing to the conversation that he had with you guys where you guys were able to really like kind of pull out a more human side of him and then shortly thereafter from the vitalic episode it went from episode or epicenter Bitcoin to epicenter and it kind of felt like you guys were the defining group that had realized that there was more Beyond Bitcoin and this is like you know this is 2014 right like it's still Bitcoin maximalism wasn't

even a term at the time right because it was everybody was a Bitcoin maximalist unless you were like really a scammer and you into namecoin or something like that um uh what caused that move for you guys like what what caused the opening of the door that like hey there's a lot of cool things here going on in crypto and we should embrace all of that rather than continue on this narrative around what you know what Bitcoin did last week yeah I mean I can answer that I mean I think for me and I think Sebastian was similar in that we were just like curious about stuff happening right I mean even when you know even when you got into Bitcoin

or I got into Bitcoin right you already had you already had you know alternative all chains you know where there was you know there was thing okay can we like innovate on bitcoin a bit you know do we decrease the block time or you know you had things like pure coin that was trying to do some proof of stake like thing and of course he had the things building on top of Bitcoin that were trying to do like applications right so counterparty Master coin coins yeah and and then the I mean the ep the ethereum white paper right that came out in December 2013 it's basic basically right when we started the podcast and we were pretty much immediately like oh this is

interesting so I think we did our first ethereum episode this is like very start of 2014 I mean we we got some you know people on that uh I don't remember who we got like you you had you had gav on really early like I remember gav a gav thing where that was the first time where I was like okay this guy smart like like this guy knows what he's doing and it's not just metallic um like yeah but the name change was actually a bit later right so we but I think I mean it was similar in Berlin name change was was 2016 I've got the article here was it that late yeah but but we were doing all kinds of podcasts like from 2014 on I think in terms of like uh doing other

topics I think you're totally right we were there already and you were you were the launch moment I felt like for the narrative around what protocol Labs had built Beyond ipfs like like I think it was the first time that Juan Benet discussed filecoin publicly um if I'm not yeah that was an amazing episode I remember that was episode 100 we had Juan on and he talked about like yeah ipfs and filecoin and stuff and that was that was really a fantastic episode that was a that and again like you know as a capital allocator like these were really seminal moments for me like I I left that episode with a mission to go to Dev K to and just like

Hound Juan until he just like allowed me on the cap table I was like I am going to like figure something out to convince this guy that I am like good to be around um after listening after listening to that so it's it's great you know the longevity is important we in dialectic we talk all the time every single day we talk about the importance of compound returns right the strongest force in the universe is compound interest this is true in nature with the golden ratio it's true in finance with compound interest it's true in in relationships it's true in skill development and and it's like compounding that you've had now over a decade which is an eternity in crypto is

really valuable I mean it's been it's been pivotal to to my career you know I I happen to be skiing with my family and my my favorite ski chalet here uh in Switzerland which has only been enabled because of the alpha that I've been able to acrw from upset well there's a lot of credit but yeah thank you so [Laughter] much yeah this is a story I've heard many many times Well my whole family's in here geez my my mom and my dad are both watching yeah first the first did the pilot episode it was also I was also in Switzerland in you know apartment in

mountains you know just before Christmas it was like in the middle of snow so um if if you go back to like a point in time for for for you guys how has how has the Pod changed your lives right like obviously it's changed our lives and that we've gotten like a great intelligent open-minded condensed uh information on a topic that we could like listen to say in the car in the shower working out or whatever but how how has it changed your lives overall I mean okay I can I I mean I think it was you know of course like

crucial right like meeting all people in crypto I mean definitely investing in crypto as well the first you know the first time I had kind of a job with a startup you know and it was this compony erors Industries and you know we had them on the podcast and then applied and and reach out to them and the founder was a podcast listener right and then later you know I think sort of 10 m was also kind of connected with that and then of course mahare was a co-host here and then we started course one together and I think it's like so many times right it was really um also through relationships right and through people meeting uh through hosting podcasts that that

played so yeah it played absolutely massive role I think in my life and in the last 10 years yeah same um I mean before this I was building websites and writing CSS for responsive emails right like I mean I mean not not the building websites and responsive emails is not like a something that people should pursue but um yeah it's totally like changed my career path uh change my Outlook on sort of like on the world and sort of like learning about Finance learning about economics I these are these are topics that I had very little knowledge about before uh starting epicenter and like just getting to talk

to like incredibly smart people every week uh about you know all these topics that I thought were really P were really interesting right that I was really passionate about um have just like totally changed my outlook and then and then of course um you know enabled me to like start several companies so like you know a lot of people know this but I started this company called Strat um about 5 years ago that no longer exists but you know was was a a crypto company um and and now running a fund right I mean like the fund interro Ventures would would not exist had it not been for you know the time I spent um like just building a massive network of people in the space so so yeah it's

been U it's been absolutely you know life-changing for me too it's also humbling right because kind of like every other week or so we kind of get to speak someone to someone who's super smart and super passionate passionate about something and kind of really wants to see something through and I think this kind of puts kind of like all the things that kind of we as as I mean for all of us this is kind of a side gig right so kind of we all have day jobs and I think kind of this puts a lot of things into perspective and I think to me that's been um that's been a wonderful experience by the way is Jordy your most frequent guest I think jordy's had what four four

episodes we we we talked about it before the most fre guests are can you guess can you guess Trent Trent mccon for sure Trent I I feel like Trent's almost co-host and from there Jordy bolina and maybe vitalic I don't know so so uh six episodes is vitalic Emin guner and then Trent if you count this episode it would would have been his sixth so he did like five full episodes and and you know dropping in here so I would say kind of yeah vitalic goon and then Trent that's I mean vitalic goon Trent and Jordy as your as your most popular

most frequent guests like that's as good as a lineup as as you're going to get like like talk about a a St studded cast right just a group of Legends in this game just I I would like to to explain before before we leave because it's um uh so when I've been I've always been in the in the episodes as a as a interview with I mean um always when I finish the the interview with you is uh I I get with the questions I mean those guys um are doing the right questions I mean they are so it's like I didn't feel fully comfortable I mean it's like okay these guys are are going

to the point are going to the the the the questions that are arguable I mean they're going to the values and and and and they're going deep to the to the to the to the project to the to the thing that you are talking about and this is this is very very very comfortable and I think this is one of the one of the secrets of of of this podcast I mean it's not uh when you are there you are not uh just uh I mean just say just explaining random things to people that you I mean that you go to the point uh in in in in in all the projects and yeah so that's you get the feeling when you get

that and that's why I think the people love to be here too because I mean when we this with this with this grossome with this interview where is like okay you are you're asking I mean it's it's it's good it's where you really put your your your thoughts and your your what you are building or what you are doing in really in okay they put you the things on on the table and and you need to explain and defend what you are doing and this is I think this is amazing ah this means so much uh J especially coming from you especially coming from Jordi Bina that means quite a bit more yes indeed that's that's what it is

yeah I think I one of the things you coming back to your question earlier about like how it's changed us I I think for me one of the things that I've noticed is that doing the podcast has made me like a better a much better listener and um and just the ability to like you know I I I find myself and my my wife my wife is like the first to complain about is like always asking questions and uh and sometimes asking too many questions but uh yeah but my wife's complaining that I'm a listener not complain about that of all the list of complaints that my wife has listener is not one of them but no but

like asking a lot of questions right like trying to get to the bottom of everything and and and that's I think something that I've picked up from from doing the podcast for sers like asking question over question over question to to get to the bottom of you know what people are doing or how things work or yeah I'm trying to understand the thing is that the point is because I mean you can you can make questions and so but it's like no no you are trying to understand you're trying to get to the point you're trying to to to to see what's the newty that's happened here why this is important why is this really is done this way or this other way or or or contrasted with different ways to do things and this I mean I think this means more means means means a lot and and and and

and uh I mean uh I think I mean when what for this for the people that's listening to this I mean they are learning and they are they are understanding what what the projects and what's the point of the project what's the point of the what the people is building and I mean this is value that you are adding to the community so this is so yeah I've always felt that you guys asked the questions that like as I was listening as a capital allocator you guys had asked the questions that a capital allocator should ask and it's interesting that we've watched essentially all of you in some way become capital allocators in the space and and that that now in retrospect seems obvious because you've

been asking the questions of of a smart money capital allocator for a long time and so you get good at it and you you know you start to get to get confidence in it um and that's been you know that's been why the long form of your interviews I think have have survived and thrived versus versus other podcasts that have that have sort of fanned out well my my other podcast the interop is basically just the forcing function for me to do DD on projects I mean to some extent you know right like I mean more so I mean it's more than that but but uh it is it does Also Serve this this purpose sometimes uh and also to to get a feel for how

like for how the founder expresses themselves and sort of pitches their product and their project outside of a you know like Zoom call Setting right in more in a more kind of like public facing setting um but yeah Jordy to come back to what you were saying earlier you know the the a asking questions and trying to understand how things work like for me was not always something that uh came naturally like in in the first three or four years of doing the show I and this changed that after after some time I was really coming to the podcast like trying to over prepare in order [Music]

to um give the impression that I knew more about the topic that I actually did right and it was sort of like this thing where I was I was trying to understand the entirety of the pro of of of of this of the topic at hand in order to to be asking smart question questions and sort of like look smart but then I realized at some point like this this is absolutely ridiculous like I mean this is stupid I should come to I should come to this with like you know some amount of preparation but but really be asking questions as they come as if I was having a conversation with someone you know around around around a dinner table or or at a bar or something right and and and that's when that's when I think my whole outlook on interviews changed

is like when it was just sort of like asking questions from like a real place of wanting to understand things and um also not being afraid to look stupid right so basic don't get something it's fine to ask again because kind of like yeah so I I had the same fear uh and uh yeah it it it also took me a while to kind of shed it yeah yeah not looking stupid was a huge fear yeah for a long time yeah did you guys ever think of shutting it down is there ever a moment of like d we're doing too many things like let's wrap this up and do something else not yet there's never that conversation so then that leads to the next conversation

because you never if you if in 10 years you haven't thought of shutting it down that means that it's likely to survive for the next 10 years what do you want out of it for the next 10 years but but I think kind of what we have done is we have added more hosts right and we we also do more solo episodes so I think kind of like um the the um owners on every one of us has decreased somewhat um so because basically back in the day we did an episode everyone did an episode every other week and kind of obviously that takes you know preparation and so on and now uh we maybe do an episode every three weeks or so and I think uh yeah so I think kind of the the overall workload is at least for me has decreased um same for you

guys right yeah yeah yeah I just want to become a better Capital allocator Ryan that's that's uh that's why I keep doing it yeah um Ryan in the next 10 years I would like to have an egi as a co-host and I would like to have I would like to have built that system bu of both of you to assume none of us is AI so we're going to bring on our our last guest we're we're running a little long here uh but that's great because these have been great conversations so

we're going to bring on our last guest which is uh Ryan your head of fabric Ventures and um and uh yeah welcome welcome Ryan uh Richard sorry I got I got upgraded to Ryan there for a second I don't know why Richard [Laughter] up the yeah I'm I'm super good thank you um everybody's have been list a little a bit in the back um and I've been um listening to the um the voices of of my youth someone already said that they kind of yeah Brian you got outed on a on a on a bus or whatever in in Cancun voice but it is incredible how

how you know that that kind of resonates I guess not really my youth I guess it's in my early 40s but I I I got recognized on the side of a mountain once that that was that experience yeah a exactly that's strong I was wondering if Ryan's voice had got graffer naturally but I I can see now he's training it with h [Laughter] with and and actually see the chat you're just having just now is G give me an idea which is like you know if you're Sebastian you're using it as a forcing function for your DD and um if um if if voices are so important to to people

they so motive you can have something like a competition where you have to do your Capital allocation based on listening to somebody um you know talk about their project and and just that and you have to kind of make the choice you could be a fantasy Capital allocation if you want um so it's kind of like a speed dating Audio Only uh with no prep and no prep actually it's a that's a benchmark Capital thing they kind of nobody's allowed to kind of prepare for the the pitch from the from the from the founders in that kind of weekly investment uh meeting so this kind of I guess the notion is there's a bit of s Level Playing Field and no preconceptions no cheating and checking stuff up and whatever have to come out it with an everything so you could you could do a little we could spin that out

and make make it into a d probably yeah that's an interesting security huh would it be a security it's be a game probably all it's probably all security but whatever if you ask scary yes now there's one there's one guy I hope maybe we'll have on someday Gary G that would be fun for the 20th year anniversary yeah um from J Elizabeth Warren maybe I know you get I know you got to jump Jody as always it's been such a pleasure and honor to have you

on thank you very much guys and congrats and continue moving forward we are not there yet onwards and upwards actually one last thing on that on that Journey uh I always take uh the opportunity to publicly thank Jordy for everything that he's done in this space people have no idea just how many times Jordy has saved all of our bacon that we're all here in part because of the benevolent um extraordinary Talent of of Jordie bolina um and so uh it very very sincerely thank you for for everything you do we're we're incredibly grateful to you um uh what leave us leave us with one

thing where do you want to take ZK evm and what do you want to see in ZK evm in the next year I want to scale I want to scale ethereum so my goal here is uh so I want to uh reduce the gas cost of about 50x in the next year and that's what I'm working for compression compression mainly compression and and faster proofs is that also like lower um lower latency proofs like proofs down to a few bytes do you think

or or or is it going to stay in like kilobyte territory or like where where do you think you can take it uh lower latency lower latency um it's May so may not be so I mean it's a good thing to have and if you have low latency in the proofs that's of course you will get better um better compossibility between change mainly so that's a good thing and we're working on that but uh we are finding ways that you don't necessarily uh need uh low latency so for me proofs are more about uh uh proof cost and and throughput that uh that the latency because in the consensus you can um you you can keep

the consensus and you can have a lot of things in the consensus in the in the consensus layer in the temporary consensus layer so uh low lenc is a very good to have an important thing to have but for throughput and for scalability maybe it's not 100% required uh on that that's I mean this is what we're working on in the aggregation layer in in polygon and this is the things that we are investigating uh but yeah I mean regarding the Z KVM I mean we we want to scale ethereum and we want this to be uh so people should be able to use ethereum uh without having to worry about the gas price for most applications and this is what we're working on so maybe this is what the Ryan's getting at but but outside of um

you know scaling ethereum if you're looking at um using ZK on inferences from large language models they kind the the kind of presentation layer and the user experience then latency is is important um and so it's interesting looking at the collision between the two kind of value chains um on the data side and on the on the kind of computation or the algorithmic side between you know blockchain and and Ai and I think in some parts of that then latency is going to be be credible I don't know if you're looking at that though yeah latency latency um the thing is that in for for usability in general we are talking about latencies that goes in a I mean uh about a second few seconds uh something

that's that's what uh usability is is about I mean blockchains we are a little bit I mean having aity of 15 seconds we accept that uh uh in ethereum World on that but we are talking always about few seconds uh in the proofs right now we are in a I mean uh right now we are in about 100 seconds so we need to get one one at least order of magnitude uh better for getting to that uh phrase I mean it's perfectly possible I think that in the next year two years this is will be it's going to be even better especially for when the hardware Hardware acceleration

starts uh hitting I mean starts being a reality on there there are some difficulties there it's more about band with and special Hardware but uh yeah I mean this is the this is the the path that's this is is the of work that's happening right now in the in the zi space the other place where uh uh proof generation speed is really important is when you start like using it for privacy stuff right because like when you want to actually like you know that that actually you need it to be fast not just on like on like on consumer level Hardware exactly I mean one especially when you want to do that in a mobile phone that's that's another that's another front uh uh when you want to build the Privacy proof in a mobile

phone and but uh the cool thing is that I mean the ZK technology is evolving so fast I mean where we were two years ago and where we are now is is uh we we did a 2X I mean two orders of magnitude Improvement in in the proof generation in the last in the last two years and and and and this happens in the I mean in big servers but this happens also in the in the mobiles but it has literally not been time for building uh the the libraries for optimized for mobiles I mean we are building those now and and and this is happening uh at this point

and I mean we are seeing a point that the the technology is advancing so fast that the engineering that in generally is going fast uh cannot I mean it requires its time to build all these things and and and and and and uh I mean we're see that the the the investigation the the the research is going faster than the engineering uh currently which is interesting interesting it's an interesting moment because this is not is in general doesn't that doesn't used to happen so consumer privacy on the on the device was kind of what I was getting out with you know imprints for llms um so I think it's a really interesting use case but so I'm interested Jord are you

looking at Hardware acceleration that might be necessary on the consumer device itself or you're not yet looking at that I mean I think that not necessarily maybe I mean here maybe in a mobile mobile phone maybe it will take like I don't know maybe if you 30 seconds to build a proof I mean if you accept that which is in most of the cases this is uh could be acceptable uh you can actually build depending what you want to prove but I mean you can build a privacy uh privacy proof uh uh relatively relatively easy privacy complex privacy uh proof on there now for a is working a lot on that

on that front and uh here porting all the Starks things that we're building to the to the to the mobile phones this is are are happening of course if you have Hardware acceleration that's that's better but in general the problem is that I mean Hardware is a long process I mean building an Asic this is a at least uh at least a one year one year two years uh project uh itself and and what happened now is that in two years in crypto uh there is a new protocol that's using something different that you have to throw it away uh what you have been investing investing I was gonna say before crypto one or two years wasn't too bad but now with crypto it's a problem but at some point this will this

will get more stable and and yeah but not now now I mean we're seeing here things I mean uh two years I mean one month ago two months ago there was this vus thing I mean all these Starks with binary Fields I mean Super interesting and but this is already change uh uh what we were doing now with prime fields in the stars but I mean things are happening and and and you need to to check or even recovering all protocols like I mean l people recovering the GDK the gkrs algorithms I mean they are putting them together it's a lot of things happening so for example here

investing a lot in in Hardware is I would say is quite risky because technology is is is is is is changing a lot so you don't know for sure um what's going to be the right uh way to do and and I mean or Pro itself I mean was super fast but next Generation that we are building is even faster so it's it's it's um you are discovering a lot of small tricks and a lot of things that are happening so it's it's going really fast and and and and uh keeping up uh from the engineering perspective I mean keeping up in all the newal things that are happening uh is is it's not easy and even selecting them I mean

there are so many research and okay this thing is is a good thing or is not a good thing and sometimes you need to go really deep and actually Implement there and then you realize that maybe that not as fast as uh promised and then you need to step back or then somebody just gets with a with a trick that uh okay but doing this the think this way then this is super fast and then you you come back and this is the I mean you're you're going back and forth uh all the time and and and yeah I mean this is this is a CP this is the crypto the the crypto craziness uh uh when you

are when you are when you are developing and when you're in this space but this is also the good thing I mean this is amazing I mean for engineering perspective this is a is a heaven so so I heard Brian say that he heard the prediction episode at the beginning of 2014 I don't remember listening to to to that one but I I did um I do remember the Tom Cruz episode um and I went back to listen to it and and um do you remember Brian you like you know you you actually sort of you basically said a few things about like you know all this ethereum thing sounds like science fiction it's all

going to become a kind of reality and they're going to be these agents are going to be able to transact economically on our behalf but the real problem is that we're not able to get the accurate data to them to make sure that they you know they they represent our needs and the right way and I think I think that's I think that was pretty um uh sort of that showed great foresight I guess in jary January there about sometime early 2014 you also said you were you were pretty skeptical about investing in ethereum if you remember that about what investing in ethereum seemed a bit seemed a bit complex oh did I say that I got to go back and listen to these episodes man I think that was

episode three it was like Tom Cruz fights to protect the blockchain I don't remember why we called it that maybe because maybe because during the episode we like fantasized about a Tom Cruz movie where he was protecting the blockchain or something I don't know it was it was a tiny sliver was something to do with what how Bala had pitched ethereum anyway like rather kind of bizarre context some the other had too much regulatory content for me I couldn't get into the on let talk Bitcoin at walking me through stuff you know we did have a lot of regulatory content in the beginning yeah um guys I know you have to yeah thanks so much for

coming on it's been a pleasure having you so much yeah but yeah I mean I guess this whole thing of yeah agents acting on the blockchain it still doesn't exist quite right for people they have that kind of thing but U feels like we're getting closer slowly no I mean it doesn't it doesn't exist yet but I mean there's a lot of people now kind of innovating obviously with llms to kind of build those you know yeah Bots that will kind of represent your interest or you can talk to um and and you you feel like they're you know having a personal conversation with you or whatever so but I guess whether or not that's will require some

intersection of AI and and blockchain depends on whether how fool Hardy we are as humans like I mean whether we just we start trusting um these Bots out there in the same way as we're trusting the big brands of of web to you know just a kind of a general social consensus oh it's a bot built by some so that's fine I'll I'll work with it not knowing how it's been trained or whether you know what it's doing with any of your kind of personal data okay that's one of the big debates I think of of of today um how we're going to make sure that we don't kind of of further fuel the techn feudalism um you know yeah this in this next phase you know whether web we can

actually help AI to any degree um but there's and there's another side on the box which is that I mean I don't think any of us would say that um love to hear opinions on it that they kind of decentralized governance has quite got to kind of mainstream yet um sort of simple governance still pretty complex to handle and um and so the other technically speaking or socially speaking or both do you think it's a technical problem or a social problem I mean it's definitely a social problem um also mechanism design problem no sorry yeah also mechanism design problem so I think kind of like the simple Dow models

that we have now basically they all don't appreciate um uh that attention is kind of the scarse resource here I think this is something that Dow had figured out super early on um unfortunately uh they went out of business but uh yeah I I look forward to kind of having uh those sorts of efforts back well well I think some of it's coming so Ilia you know co-founder n who's got a great llm background he he um he talks um you know openly now about the desire to kind of build uh you know Dow presidents in in bot form so that you can delegate you know to some

intelligent agents to of various different descriptions to represent you because there's no way if we have if we're going to have corporations as code popping up everywhere um and we're going to be interested in for some sliver of our existence in the the the effective governance in those you know DS or dacks or whatever then you know this it can only scare if we're going to CR these these these twins these yeah absolutely so basically specifying your values or kind of having an AI extract your values for you and kind of your economic interests and so on and then kind of uh doing kind of like a liquid delegation to those kinds of AIS yeah absolutely totally with you here

yeah 100% yeah I mean personally I feel like in the in the cosmos space G's working like pretty well right I I think we have like Cosmos hubs at like 800 governance proposals osmosis tons of governance proposals and with like you know High participation both in terms of you know stake that's voting so it's like secure from some whale coming in and likes you know like because often on ethereum mapping in dollars right you'd have like 3% 5% of dollar tokens voting in the governance and then you know some big whale can come and skew the vot but you don't have that issue in the cosmos governance thing and then we have you know regularly definitely like thousands

of accounts I mean there's always a lot of like bot accounts worlding to I mean Sunny probably has better idea on this but there's definitely a lot of people participating in these votes and and I feel that's actually working pretty pretty well uh yeah Ryan I think you need to run we're going to I do guys proper sign off thanks so much for joining being a loyal listener all these years yeah well thank you guys for for everything you do for the important education the like technically sophisticated education that you provide to this this ecosystem it is very important more important than you know um and so uh I'm incredibly

grateful to all of you um for keeping faith and keeping with it and just compounding on all of our knowledge um and and so thanks again I that thanks for helping with all the weekly shopping trips and showers to run getting people through Liv generally thanks so much Ryan great well I think um I think we're we're about ready to wrap up wrap this party up it's been it's been two and a half hours um thanks for thanks for sticking around uh Richard um so yeah Where Do We Go From Here

what's uh are we shooting for 20 years is that what we're doing yeah I know you just not just one AI host but just all of you it's you know back back to the previous conversations you're just going of capture generally your values and your interests and and it and it the bot sort of sucks up everything your you're reading as you go along through your glasses or contact lenses and then it can you just you don't have have to do it at all you can be doing like 10 podcasts a day each you know that's so then you can go forever well I wish I could even I wish I could do three sometimes two is too

much and we could actually synthesize a much better podcast toast right I mean b we could take like the good parts of all of us and uh you know synthesize them into you know uh my hair working on this yeah exactly like like the thing I do is I would for a project I would collect the entire sort of information about the project white paper website the entire code base I would put everything in a retrieval augmented generation Pipeline and then it's like figure out how to simulate Freer or how to simulate me like somehow like fine tune an llm so that it is able to simulate me and then

it's able to ask questions from the documentation and generate an episode by itself right like and then when can I invest when can I allocate Capital I'm more than an llm rapper that's always the key question it's also funny how how you kind of become an llm rapper for your co-hosts to a certain extent so kind of depending on who I host with I know what they're going to ask next so kind of I have like this llm representation of them inside my head H and uh yeah so before we end this uh are there

any any final thoughts anything anybody ESP special anyone wants to share well I I mean if nobody's going you I do I'd like to yeah I mean I I just want to say like I absolutely appreciate all of you I've love doing the podcast with with all of you I mean it's it's it's always it's what's great about epicenter is like I think we all have like like you were saying for you know we all have this sort of like Dynamic right so there are you know end number of Dynamics here when when we all sort of like do podcasts together and that's been really fun and uh I really appreciate like um yeah getting to learn so much from you

know being able to co-host the podcast with with all you week so um yeah I hope we I can keep doing this with you guys for for the next 10 years absolutely what how does this work I didn't even know that works that's crazy the heart here we go here we go yeah you have to update your Mac so before before we end this it it wouldn't be a 10-year anniversary episode without the obligatory Green Day

Good writtens Time of Your Life photo slideshow so I had no idea this was coming oh okay so I'm gonna oh move this over here room 7 seven [Music] MH

I had to add Felix in here at the end [Laughter] I saw that there's no picture of all six of us right no there isn't but there is now I think Felix is like a little bit larger than the you know in terms of kind of like body proportions I think kind of we have to shrink him down by like 10% I have some there on my arm too it's sunny let's let shrink him by let's shrink them by [Laughter] 40% oh God yeah I um yeah hope you guys

like that it was I had a bunch of pictures from years I appreciate you putting this together yeah well you can you can thank iOS for that throw a bunch of pictures into into Apple photos and yeah great guys well uh thank thanks uh thanks for everybody who tuned in there's been tons of people here in live stream um I think we probably like hit two two 300 people on the live stream over the course of the the two and a half hours so yeah thank you and we'll be back next week awesome as always as every week except for the one week that we missed that's right oh that

was my last that was that was my last trivia question oh I I know this one which you know this one Christmas week 20 I don't know 19 I I know it's definitely Christmas week yeah I was so upset I was sad I [Laughter] cried well we won't miss this this Christmas week that's and and then we reran the David Chom episode remember that no no no no it wasn't David Chom it wasn't David Chomp who was it uh it was yeah okay okay some OG I remember that we're like okay this is an evergreen episode we can run it

anytime yeah yeah he was old then he is old now no one will noce oh all right how you going guys thanks bye thanks everyone