The shifting narratives in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – Jackson Palmer on Epicenter

Transcript

It's been a game of shifting narratives. Years ago people were talking about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as an actual medium of exchange. You know: "This is going to be used to pay at restaurants and pay for food." The whole medium of exchange thing didn't happen because scalability was the scapegoat for that. Then that shifted and then it moved to this whole store of value thing. "We never said that crypto is a thing you should actually use as a currency. You should be using it as a place way you know, it's akin to gold." And then that didn't really work out because they realized that gold actually exists and so do stocks. And so they're like: "Oh, okay actually it's about DeFi." It's about rebuilding banks essentially and large financial institutions in the blockchain.

We're starting to get into this comical territory where it's like: "Hey guys. All those financial institutions you said you were going to completely demolish and all the hierarchies you said you were going to demolish because the blockchain would make people 'It would give people liberty and they'd be able to be their own bank,' you want to recreate all that bad stuff inside the blockchain." It's like okay. You can see where this is going. I don't really see the value in that. I think that already exists. And so the value of recreating it on a blockchain doesn't have a lot of benefits because it actually makes the thing less efficient.

You know it's centralized for a reason and that's because it can be super efficient. So you have that whole side of it. I like to think of those people as the newcomers right. The whole DeFi movement are typically people that I see have come into crypto late to the game. Probably like 2016-2017 onwards. Then you have the OGs right? So you have a whole bunch of people that have been around for a long time. The Bitcoin Core developers the Lightning folks. But then you look at what they're doing and they've kind of hunkered down in a bunker and they're creating these Rube Goldberg machines for sending transactions. It's baffling to me. The scaling solutions that were coming up with like lightning and and all of that are so so so complex.

Bitcoin is hard enough to get an average user of a Venmo, of Apple Pay, etc to understand the concept of public and private case, backing up a seed phrase, using a Bitcoin wallet. Then you have to layer in Lightning channels and the fact that you need to have all these Lightning channels established, routing needs to happen, multi-hop. From a user experience perspective, I don't see a way that they can hide that efficiently that works for end users. It's a little bit sad to me because I feel like you've got people building impossible chaos machines in a basement. And they're cool developers, they're very smart. I don't want to take away from what Lightning and the likes of those teams are doing. And then you have

the institution folks who are all like: "DeFi! DeFi! Let's turn this blockchain into a corporate capitalist thing." I don't see a sizable enough population of people in the middle saying: "What about using cryptocurrency to actually transact?" It's gone. I hoped Ethereum was going to establish a lot of this and do a lot of this. But the fact Ethereum is now rebranding as Ethereum 2.0, which a lot of people don't realize is it's completely different to Ethereum. This isn't just a patch to Ethereum. No it's like: "No guys Ethereum was a failure. Sorry we need to completely rearchitect the whole thing." I think that speaks volumes to how challenging it's going to be to actually just buy a cup of coffee with

cryptocurrency. So I don't know that's where I stand and as an outsider I have no financial incentives for this. It's not a job that I work in and so I like to just call it as it is. Like as a product right now I don't see how cryptocurrency is going to establish market fit or adoption.