Rethinking the Justice System: A Digital Jurisdiction for Decentralized Organisations #371

Transcript

[Music] hi I'm Sebastian quiro and you're listening to epicenter the podcast where we interview crypto Founders Builders and thought leaders on this show we dive deep to learn how things work at a technical level and we fly high to understand Visionary Concepts and long-term trends if you like epicenter the best way to support us is to leave a review on Apple podcasts and if you're on a Mac or iOS device the easiest way to do that is to go to Epic center. Ro slapple and if you're new to the podcast be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen well the

holidays are now Among Us and I think you can all agree it's been a very interesting year and we're all taking a well-deserved break here at epicenter over the holidays the entire team has worked tirelessly to bring you the podcast every single week and yeah everyone's taking uh some well-deserved time off so but we still have something special for you nonetheless uh back in July I was invited uh by the cogx and fabric Ventures team to moderate a really fascinating discussion with leis quend who's the founder of Aragon who's been on the podcast before and Tim Draper the uh famous investor and founder of Draper Associates this

discussion was around how we should think of the judicial system in the context of crypto and web 3 increasingly life and business are happening in a virtual space and of course this has been accelerated by the covid crisis web3 infrastructure can play an important role in providing the foundations for a digital jurisdiction and we're already seeing the seeds for this Vision you know in the web 3 world rules are enforced by a decentralized system of governance and the most basic example of this is to look at the rights to one's funds those are insured by the control of the private key at a most basic level if we expand on this idea Dows allow for a group of stakeholders

to participate in governance of an organization that has no affiliation to a nation state so how do we treat that in the judicial system and where does that sit relative to existing National jurisdictions so this session starts with a brief introduction from Lewis and a longer conversation between the three of us so I'd like to thank the fabric Ventures and cogx teams for giving us permission to share these sessions with you I know that they're big fans of the show over there and I'd like to invite you to check out what they're doing cogx is one of my favorite event series they put on really fascinating events and

actually we'll be releasing another uh panel next week from one of their event series from this year so thanks to them and I hope you'll enjoy this conversation between leis gend Tim draer and I and before we go to that conversation I'd like to wish everybody happy holidays and a very happy and prosperous New Year 2021 so I'm going to be talking about uh a digital jurisdiction for digital organizations which is what we are building at Aragon so to get started a digital jurisdiction sounds kind of like very science fiction so let's like break down what these digital organizations are in the first place and why they need

a digital jurisdiction so we've seen this movement of daos uh these new kinds of human organization that have popped up in the in the latest years enabled by blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies and so the idea behind Theos is that you can create these entities that are decentralized that have no Central leadership that are autonomous in a way that they can incentivize um people to work for them to actually achieve their goal and that are also organizations like they have their own rules and kind of like own boundaries I think the most basic form of Dao we can think about maybe Bitcoin where Bitcoin is decentralized there's no central leader satosi like you know it's not the CEO it is autonomous

because it has an incentive mechanism that enables uh like miners to come into the network and give their computing power to actually made Bitcoin happen make this idea of a sensorship resistant the store value happen and at the same time it is kind of an organization because it has its own rules about how the software works so what we're trying to do is we're are trying to take that model and apply it in a way that it can be generalized so you can create your decentralized organization very easily and so right now there are um around 1,400 decentralized autonomous organizations out there some of there are not fully decentralized some of them are autonomous there is all like very early experiments but you can read more about them in power by. ar.org or api.

one.org and see what they are up to so the way I see it is that web one the first version of the web allowed us to basically share ideas across boundaries like kind of blogs and then web2 enabled us to actually ser and discuss those ideas so like social media and then now web three is all about DS It's all about we can share ideas we can discuss about them and then we can take action because like these ideas don't deserve to just be in the internet and not be implemented at all there's a lot of chitchat in social media and a lot of it doesn't actually resol in change so if you put together all this social capital all the people that are thinking about stuff and discussing about stuff and they have attention and interest

towards the topic with financial Capital with actual funds that you can have in one of these decentralized organizations because they can control funds they can control cryptocurrencies they are native to cryptocurrencies and if you can put both together you can actually uh enable people to take action in ways we haven't seen before so it might have be seen in the next decade movements that are totally Grassroots and they are able to pull funds they are able to recruit people towards a common cause and they're able to cause social change without a hierarchy um without central leadership and being totally autonomous in nature and therefore very hard to corrupt over time which I think that's what uh web 3 is about

and like an exercise that I'm doing these days is I'm I'm asking myself what do people feel like they belong to that is like a very existential question but that that is for me a very important thing um in how I frame my thesis around decentralized autonomous organizations more and more the answer is not nation states and that's what is surprising to me and with the recent events that are going on all around the world I would say this is even accelerating more so like when you ask me Daniel um where do you belong like I think right now some people may say well I belong in like the theorum Community I belong to this uh subreddit I belong to this uh internet community and we are

going to see that accelerate until the point that nation states will not be the thing that people feel that they belong to the most I think we already seen that but that's going to accelerate drastically so you think about these communities to like kind of personify them a bit like some of the commun commities we've seen um because we were doing this campaign called Power by Aragon kind of showcasing know the creators of these communities and we all already seen this so like for example here um in the right we have like Stan from the centraland the centraland is this virtual world it's like if you have watched like a a Ready Player One this movie about like a a future in which everyone lives in in VR basically in virtual

reality they have basically taken that future and put it in the hands of users so that they can create their own virtual reality world and they have added a decentralized autonomous organization powered by Aragon in order to enable their users to fully govern that world so this like science fiction um squirt but it's like a virtual reality um world that is powered by a decentralized autonomous organization and that is that is life today like you can uh that is out there today it's kind of mind-blowing and people really belong that they like really feel that they belong to that Community to de Central Community for example and um like right now we we've see more than this like 14400 dios created and like one one kind

of thought that I wanted to to bring up here is as we are able to collapse the costs of creating and running a firm to instead of creating a company with all the bureaucracy and uh all of the issues that we have uh creating entities in the legal world if we're able to collapse that cost in smart contract and in blockchains then you basically get to a point where like Aragon has incorporated more entities than Panama or par um in the last few years and this is not a fair comparison for many reasons like one of them is obviously incorporating a company is not the the same as creating a piece of software uh or creating a new decentralized

organization where the cost may be like 10 bucks and therefore if it's 10 bucks and not a thousand more people are going to create it right also maybe not Fair because the economic activity of these companies in like Panama parway maybe more than in Aragon like Aragon organizations right now hold around1 Million worth of assets but it just shows the potential like it shows the potential that we can create a framework for people to organize that is way more efficient way more powerful easier to use and therefore it may actually outcompete nation states uh and their framework that they have for people to organize which are like you know companies nonprofits all that different legal entities that you can create and

we can streamline this um a lot but the kind of problem that Theos have today is that it's like living in a skyscraper like it extremely modern it is like science fiction but it is like living in a skyscraper in the middle of a totally dysfunctional City like Theos today have a bunch of possible attacks like for example there is no minority stakeholder protection so if you're in a company and you invest in a company then if you are the minority shh holder the majority shh holder cannot just kick you out like that is illegal in Theos today as they are basically controlled by computer code there isn't anything that uh disallows that so basically if you're a minority

stakeholder a majority of participants can decide to basically kick you out or just steal all of the organizations money for them there are other problems for example like right now because of ethereum and how High the the network um the gas fees are and how congested the network is it takes like $5 to vote on a proposal which is crazy so there are like a bunch of kind of dysfunctional pieces here because everything is early the things we're working on to try to um counterbalance that and make daos very kind of like easy to use and straightforward and actually reach the mainstream are two different tools one of them is AR on court which is this dispute resolution

mechanism that basically enables these decentralized autonomous organizations to apart from having this smart contract this computer code which is extremely efficient but also extremely narrow in what it can do they can Define like English written agreements so they can say hey this is my Manifesto these are my bylaws um and for example I am not going to allow that majority participants steal money from Minority participants something so simple as that that we uh keep for granted in the legal system in companies when we create a company like in the US or or or in Europe doesn't exist today in the AOS and that is exactly what Aragon Court enables them to have stuff like uh this kind of like subil rules that you cannot

encode in computer code and Aron cor has a potential to really become like one of the kind of like backbones of the uh new legal system that is being created right now on blockchains and then there is Aragon chain and Aragon chain basically is this block chain where daos can run very efficiently because it is directed towards them so like if you think about um etherum today as I was saying it is great it's extremely secure but then it is very expensive for certain interactions so I think some daos will choose to stay on E theum but some others that may not need that high of a security uh that ethereum offers um or that kind of like hyper connectivity may want to switch to Aron chain so the way

I'll compare it is that you have like Manhattan which is like kind of a theum it is very expensive um and you can get an Studio there but like it is expensive and you get probably like a small Studio or you can move to the servers you can move to get a house with a pool and a garden but then you will have to commute if you want to interact with many of the like ethereum native protocols right so they're like kind of trade-offs but we still believe that coupling these things together uh we basically make uh Theos viable so going back to our own course because this is extremely exciting if you take a look at how we are engineering the product so that daos can use these subjective agreements this is a this is how it will look like so

basically like this is an Aron organization this is the front end for it you have um different apps on the left like boting tokens the finance of the fun management for the Dow and then in the middle you're able to create an agreement and so that agreement is basically like a bunch of like English written text um that then you can reference and when you create a vote when you create a proposal on the organization um the proposal has to adhere to that agreement and if it doesn't then any member of that organization can open a dispute so for example if I'm trying to pass a proposal to withdraw all of the organization's money and send it to a terrorist organization then someone can say hey no I want to dispute that action and so you

open a dispute you say hey this is not in compliance with a Manifesto or with the bylaws that we all agreed upon I want to dispute it and then it goes to the Aron Court and this is how Aragon Court looks like um it's been running for a few months in kind of like a test environment so like there's um a few real disputes that it has um already arbitrated but it's mostly kind of like internal um disputes because we're still like testing it out but it's been working incredibly well and we have more than 300 ERS that are Anonymous people on the internet that thanks to cryptoeconomic incentives are able to make decisions on real things so for example here there's a dispute to add an app to um at rewards like a program so basically like developers build apps and

then they can claim rewards and the idea here is that uh to choose whether that app was eligible or not to for those rewards and so the apps have to have certain requirements for example they have to even Source they have to have documentation these things you cannot check with computer code right they need humans they need uers and so uers have been creating that list and it is a very early use case but I'm so excited about it so the idea here is basically as Nick Sabo one of the kind of like inventor of like Benny smart contract like names and kind of nomenclature he puts it as dry code this is like computer code Wet code that is human language and then uh the way I'm looking at it is that both dry code and wet code are incredibly

important to arrive to truly decentralized autonomous organizations and finally um ENT as we look at it is like basically the Network store of value so like it is the the token that gets so together and is able to um like incentivize participants in the network to do their job the master plan that we have for the network is basically these four lines here so I love how like El musk put together a master plan for Tesla um because I love Simplicity I love like getting just very complex things and having them very simple so the idea is we are building software for decentralized organizations to exist and then we're going to use that software to let a bunch of them exist in the first place and then with

that market were able to provide services to them that actually make them way better that make these decentralized autonomous organizations way better and so with those uh profits at the network that the community makes we can actually increase the AO adoption and eventually what we can do is we can build this new way of people to organize that goes Way Beyond nation states um and it's basically a digital jurisdiction so that's what we building a digital jurisdiction for digital organizations I think this is a lot of things to swallow so I I'm looking forward to like the panel and like kind of um putting it in a more comprehensible way but basically I think the the tldr the the summary is that Theos are a very new exciting way

of organizing via communities and Grassroots organization and using blockchain Technologies we can actually make them happen and I think right now they are really needed in the world because of everything that's going on and Theos Ena Society to actually tackle problems that we couldn't tackle via an nation state uh or because most of them are just kind of really crooked or via any any centralized company and Theos add a huge new opportunity that we have to reinvent the kind of socialist um fabric of our society and how we organize so I'm extremely excited about them and extremely excited about how we can create a digal jurisdiction for D organizations amazing thank you so much I am so excited um to see a new Aragon

jurisdiction at some point soon and perhaps even citizenship and passports and all of that um so hopefully that's coming and now we have a panel discussion on the same topic where Louis will be joined by Tim Draper and venture capitalist and the founder of Draper Associates and Sebastian coutur um co-founder and host of epicenter podcast thank you Anastasia hi my name is C I'm the host of epicenter we're one of the leading crypto podcasts and we've been around for over six and a half years I'm very pleased to introduce our panelists today for conversation about rethinking the judicial system a digital jurisdiction for decentralized organizations um so our first panelist

Tim Draper is ventor capitalist and the founder of Draper Associates and Draper University he is a pioneering investor who's been involved in just about every successful internet company since the internet came about I'm not going to start listing them and he's also a bitcoiner as his Tai indicates I don't know if you want Ty there Tim l quend Project Lead at Aragon it's a platform that allows people to create and govern Dows and recently they launched Aragon Court uh which arbitrates on subjective disputes and that require you know human judgment and on his days off and also at his herum conferences he is a DJ but thank you for joining me today gentlemen and U looking forward to this conversation yeah thanks Al terrific

yeah thanks for having us subastian and cogex were I'm thrilled to be uh talking to the audience so LS during your talk you mentioned that increasingly young people I think you you perhaps said Millennials feel less and less connected to the place they are born and you know as a millennial and you know living abroad and you know have not having country where I was born for the last 15 years I do kind of you know feel that and I sort of associate with that Trend why do you think this trend exists and why is it accelerating well I think na states are like these huge places where like you have millions and millions of people and it's just very hard for the human brain to empathize with people you like don't

know at all right and so like nation states back in the day uh maybe they were smaller maybe they were the people on the planet um I don't know exactly what like kind of moved the needle maybe it is the internet right like right now I can feel more attached to someone I don't know that lives in like Australia and like literally the other part of the world that I haven't met physically than someone that lives next to my place and so I think that trend is just accelerating more and nation states haven't been able to adapt to it Jim I don't know if you have anything to add on this yeah I have a I have a um picture and this is where Lis and I sort of dovetail um the internet opened up the world the um the geographic borders fell up uh benefiting in a great way we all

uh became wealthier uh quality of life improved things went incredibly well for many many years and then and then the the uh then Bitcoin came along and there was a decentralized currency and uh the nation states the the uh governments were were um allowed the network to kind of flow but when when they they realized that there was a better currency out there than what they were providing to their to their citizens uh many of them were threatened and they wanted to pull back and go from that global society that we had back to tribalism and they created these walls

and barriers and trade barriers and whatever at the sacrifice of their own people uh one way to look at this is let's say there are only two people on the Earth and I have a house and you have a farm well um if we don't trade I die of starvation and you die of exposure so if um and and so we need to trade around the world and and multiply that by eight billion people all those people can provide different things to each other and we all benefit in a in an enormous way and if you're a you're a government that isolates and creates this um isolation you are hurting your

own people uh if you're a government that's free and open you are helping your people become wealthier and and healthier so I'm looking and I'm saying oh wow this DC centralized world that started with Bitcoin and moved to the blockchain smart contracts um and now actually governing can be done sort of in an artificial intelligence way it's going to change the nature of what a government is and governments like businesses are going to have to compete for their constituents they're going to have to provide better services for the taxes they provide because the genie out of the bottle we're Global all of US citizens the World we're

Global we're in a really interesting time here where it's the it's the Roar of the dying lion it's the Roar of the the death of tribalism and they're saying no stay in place no we're a mask be be our people you know be trapped in our little location stop travel um and and maybe it was covid that did this but maybe you know some countries are sort of taking advantages by trapping their citizens in place and all of a sudden this globalism that we had that was booming and really building an extraordinary economy around the world is now um being isolated and trapped and

I think that's a temporary phenomena and when the roaring lion dies uh there is going to be this new world and the new world is going to be peaceful loving open and we we are all going to be able to benefit from each other and so I got very excited when Louis uh brought up uh Aragon because he showed us the way to a new form of governance that is uh that is much more um open and transparent and crossborder than any government that we've ever seen and it and he's hitting the judicial piece of it you know where another company on Unstoppable domains is making

it so we get free speech for the entire world we uh other Bitcoin is making it so that we have a currency that we can use anywhere in the world without any friction across borders uh or or any friction within the bank the bank takes two and a half to four percent every time you swipe your credit card but with Bitcoin it's actually a free and open and transparent uh we have the beginnings of this new open transparent and very frictionless world that can create the kind of liquidity that we only dreamed of and that that open world is going to have governing that is sort

of C across borders the Estonian government they came up with this idea of an e-governance and I'm actually the third virtual resident of Estonia the prime minister of Estonia came to Draper University and made me a virtual resident which meant that I could be in effect a citizen of Estonia without living in their physical territory and I could do business anywhere in the EU without living in that physical territory so I think that kind of thing is going to force other governments to think whoa wait you could actually virtually provide governance to people it doesn't have to be landbased and most

of what governments do is insurance you know whether it's Health Care insurance or workman's comp insurance or unemployment insurance which is a big one now all those Insurance products can be provided virtually and they can be provided across borders so we're looking at a time when suddenly governance can be provided 11 miles offshore or from up in space and it can provide us the same kind or actually better services for our taxes than our physical landbased tribal governments are providing today it's an anthropological advance that humans are

about to go through they've been tribal the tribalism protected them for many years and all of a sudden we have this opportunity and and uh if you can go dystopian it ends up just being a bunch of nation states if you go utopian it opens up the world if you're an optimist you realize this opens up the world and everybody benefits so so we have the opportunity now to take a Quantum Leap anthropologically uh as humans and this is our chance it's a big opportunity so I'm supporting everything that goes after that I can see that can actually penetrate this and drive this

decentralized world uh forward and I think so much of the you know the current situation also kind of applies to this here and I think you know covid perhaps accelerated some trends that were already in play in in in in effect and and certainly you with the with the events happening in the US and around the world right now around you know the social and racial inequalities that of plague our societies you know we're seeing that the Moes right that governments have tried to put around us we're seeing them really digging their heels in and making sure that sort of people stay in their place um so also sort of you know a proponent of of this this more open and decentralized system whereby you know people are free to

choose wherever they want to do business or wherever they want to live or wherever they want to raise families one of the things here that I think as technologists and as sort of you know people who you know live and operate in a sort of privileged space um is how do we ensure that these decentralized Judicial Systems you know things like Aragon are building how do we ensure that these systems as we kind of reboot Society you mentioned this anthropological upgrade how do we ensure that as societ as a society we make sure that these new systems are egalitarian are diverse and don't create the same types of tribal Natures that we've seen

you know throughout history only now it's in a smart contract only now you know you can't go and and and complain or you can't go and and and file a complaint or U or or some sort of physical you know um action against someone how do we make sure that the future this utopian future is utopian and it doesn't turn into dystopia you know I think that there's a um there are a couple of people thinking about it in a lot of different ways Andrew Yang was working on a universal basic income I actually think that a universal basic income in crypto might end up being the thing that actually Rises um the idea that you do Universal basic income in

any of these Fiat currencies will bankrupt whatever country uh tries to do it uh but you could provide a base level for the world and then provide a very free market above that uh which is um which would uh limit the restrictions people put on other people um I'll give you one example uh the 40 Act and the 33 Act of the SEC those are 80 years old but they're basically PE keeping impoverished people down they are keeping people from being able to get that first rung of the ladder they are

keeping people from being able to invest in private companies that have high growth rates they are forcing people uh the only people who can invest in Venture Capital are millionaires why did that happen where did that come from they're trying to protect us from ourselves the more the government protects the more they keep people down uh we need actually everyone to be able to participate in this new world and um and pretty much we all have smartphones so we're starting from a pretty good base now we don't all have smartphones I think it's now up to six billion of the8 billion people on the

planet but I think within two years we're going to have all eight billion of us will have a smartphone so that we'll have we'll all have the ability to use this thing to send Bitcoin to to use Aragon for our Justice to provide our input for a Judicial System to provide our voice to an Unstoppable domain where where the they guarantee of a freedom of speech where you cannot stop it they can't stop it no one can stop it no one can can censor it you know now you're starting to see censorship on Twitter censorship on uh people are saying that the

Facebook is is favoring one group or another you're seeing uh you're seeing bullying from the major networks where they're saying you have to think this way or else you're you know you're you're an outcast or whatever but boy I don't always think the way the the news thinks I'm always thinking five or 10 years out maybe 20 years out and I'm thinking well wait a second if if you shut down the entire economy rather than just isolating the people who have the virus or H are at big risk with the virus you are G to have bigger problems than you would ever have had if you had um I me you're going to bigger problems if you shut down the

economy than you would ever have if you um if you just isolated few a few of the people who are at risk this Mass driving force that seems to be the media and it's and it a and it has a point of view that you have to comply with that's the most dangerous thing going but the good thing about this decentralized world is that everybody gets a voice so I think we are headed into a utopian frame of mind we're going through some serious speed bumps on our way because the existing Powers the the old line media the governments the banks

they are all trying to keep it the old way and uh but and they're trying to keep people down because they are up I think we we're about to head into a time where uh where it's an equal opportunity for everybody in this new environment I think I'd like to I'd like to bring it over to you briefly and ask you if you within the work that you're doing at Aragon if you're also thinking about this and and the you know kinds of Frameworks that that yeah Aron are being built upon are you you Consulting with say like historians anthropologists you know ethics committees and stuff to to make sure that the systems that you're building don't produce the same sort of

inequalities and fractures that we see in our current sort of social system but also Judicial Systems yeah I mean I'm I'm definitely the the doer type so like I really like to get something working and then people like can try to destroy it um and that's what happens with like smart contracts us something people try to destroy it but I think like we can make a lot of advancements not even like talking to to those people we can just make advancements by having some common sense in the beginning like for example following up to what team was saying Facebook has paid a $130 million to create their own moderation court for Content uh it almost makes me laugh because it's like it is a centralized court or like arbitrator or whatever that they have paid a bunch of money to do and in the end what they are doing is

basically censoring people like that is a deal they are um for much less we have built a fully decentralized Court permissionless um so far so it's been working uh and and I think that is exactly what we need to do like we need to get these things out we need to start using them I think the very important thing is that people who create the systems have the right intentions at heart I think that is super super important there this Paradox in kind of decentralized systems where on one hand you want to make sure that intentions don't matter because that's the whole point right like you want to see that satosi goes away and nothing happens right because the like he's not a leader anymore in that space But at the same time people who are working on this space right now and creating those tools

need to have very strong like intentions and the word intentions at heart and so I think it is important to do that to apply a lot of common sense because like you know Stu like National States and like these big companies web two companies that are censoring the internet have completely eroded our perspective on common sense so then just doing that is a very good step and then after you have it out after you get some users prod Market fit um then I think it's a good time to start iterating on feedback and obviously being Community run the community can decide what to do with it there is no Central Power that has dictatorship over the protocol and I think that is the most important thing talk about some of the applications that are currently being built on Aragon and some of the early uh use cases that

you've seen for the Aragon Court which you came out just recently yeah I mean our own court is like very uh kind of early and doing like baby steps like you know is creating this cute list of like developers that are going to get a reward in this kind of like Rewards program uh it is probably going to be able to moderate messages so that is extremely baby steps but I'm super excited about it like I think it will be open for anyone to open disputes like in the next couple of months um and then the idea is that like or my dream at least that like 10 years from now like I see no reason why the entire like legal system maybe not the entire because like this is the thing with the centralized C systems right like they are fully limited liability like you cannot put

people into jail that is the good thing and the bad thing as well because like if you have a terrorist or like a rapist you want to put them in jail right uh you don't want them to just lose some cryptocurrency on the internet but on the other hand that is the amazing thing about decentralized Justice systems like there is no violence it's just poor cryptoeconomics and that's also what I love about it yeah that's also perhaps one of the limits of of this system unless at some point we start having you know private police also uh you know sort of embedded within arbitration agreements and things like that I don't know if that's a future towards which we want to go but you we can kind of like perhaps extrapolate here a little bit more and and talk about where you know where Aragon court or or even even a dow

you know built on on Aragon where where does it sit within the existing you know legal and and judicial framework is it extrajudicial or is it some some sort of a subset or trying to replace it maybe Tim you want you want to address this I think Louis can do a better job of that I think like the everything that we're building right now like the Paradox is it is gonna at some point replace the existing systems because it's just like way better but at the same time it needs to leave with the systems something we there so like one example of that um I was trying like different onramp solutions for crypto because like I am very frustrated with the fact that today if you want to use a crypto product you have to go through like many Hoops to actually do it so like you cannot use

into your credit card and that's it right you have to like buy tokens kyc with an exchange all of that but that is needed right now because there is just no other way like how do you translate your dollars to like you know crypto or Bitcoin and so I think we will have like a few years in which we will have to deal with this things very carefully and also invest into like just kind of like compliance with the existing system until we're able to completely overthrow it but that's what like got me excited right like I didn't get into crypto to like do KY compliance but as we wrap up here you we're we're nearing the end of our panel um you know Tim you you've invested in lots of companies too many to name here but several companies in the crypto

space why why did you buy into the ant uh token model and where do you see the future of this platform going well when I I first thought thought about Bitcoin I thought oh well that's going to be interesting virtual currency it'll be it'll be more liquid it'll move faster it'll create more liquidity and people will become wealthier and I thought it was going to be just sort of the games would turn into eventually a currency that we all agreed on but then Bitcoin came along and it had this decentralized pie p and it also had this blockchain that kept perfect records and then from there you could build smart contracts all of a

sudden um this changes all of Commerce all of Finance all of banking and the thing that went off in my mind was well first when a bunch of Bitcoin was stolen in Mount Cox I thought that was the end of Bitcoin but there was a whole bunch of use of it and it only dropped about 15% um in value on that news and I thought wow people really need this and then I thought how would I use it well I would love to have Bitcoin that came uh raise money in Bitcoin invested into entrepreneurs in Bitcoin have them pay their employees and suppliers in Bitcoin

and then have um the entire like if a company goes public or gets the entire waterfall in Bitcoin wallets and automatically done uh it's amazing how accounting bills and legal bills and auditing bills and bookkeeping bills have gone up over time as regulations get heavier and heavier and heavier at least in the US it's pushing people away from the US and I started to think wow this is really necessary for the world economy we are going to be so much better off if we've got some form of d centralized currency that's Global and open and transparent and keeps perfect

records and does a the whole Ledger and and uh and then the idea that you could have a smart contract built into uh software which you no longer need to have lawyers and all of the all of the battles and all that stuff over because you know that it was built into software and you agreed to it and you both agreed and that was it that's a world where I'm thinking this is going to be a much more peaceful loving World far less complex many fewer battles many fewer disputes uh fewer regulations which allows freedom and that freedom allows uh encourages entrepreneurship

and creativity uh I think that's a world I'm I want to see and so I have uh I have put a a lot of my effort and a lot of my Venture money into uh crypto opportunities into Bitcoin opportunities into wallets and exchanges and U and then into these new governing businesses um like Aragon or Unstoppable or many others who are sort of thinking about how government what will that look like who will Who will be your tribe in this global environment will they be cross

borders will will they be sort of a community of people who kind of think in a certain way or will it be just a a random selection of people that end up uh feeling like hey this is a great way to go I'm excited about that future I think we need to drive toward it I think we've got we we really need to this is one of those things where in the military they say freedom isn't free you have to fight for it this is one of those times you've got to fight for Global Freedom uh so that we aren't just kept down by regulation and and uh and too much governance and too many intricate overlapping laws and too much

uh too many forms to fill out and too many regulations to overcome in trying to create a better world we need to fight for this thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find And subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to Epic center.tv subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen and while you're there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us the guest or

other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes it helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week [Music]