Richard Moot: It’s kind of funky, because I think most people think of it as separate companies. And I think they were kind of operated functionally that way… But as far as I’ve understood this, it’s all Block. And each one of these other things are brands that are part of Block. But I joined before we became block, so it’s I still have this thing burned in my brain that I work for Square … Recently that’s changed a little bit, so I work on all Block products, doing developer relations now.

So yeah the relationship is each one of these divisions kind of focused on a different audience in the economy. Square is focused on businesses, and trying to run small businesses, midsize businesses… We even have some enterprises. And then cash is all about consumers; trying to give financial tools to people who are “Hey, I want to go invest in Bitcoin”, or “I want to go buy stocks”, or “I want to send money to my barber.” It really helps essentially act as a consumer banking product. And so that’s kind of where there’s a little bit of – getting both sides of the counter is kind of what we talk about.

And then we have our other brands, Tidal with streaming… And that’s kind of focused on artists, and we’re trying to figure out what ways can we enhance artists… Because they kind of operate their own business. And then we’ve got some of the more out there things, like Spiral doing Bitcoin grants, and open source Bitcoin, trying to really transform Bitcoin into the digital currency of the internet. And so yeah.

Brendan Eich: [35:47] Yeah, so that’s the really radical idea, and it’s not fully implemented. Brave, with the right opt-in - we wouldn’t wanna surprise users with this, but Brave should be your personal Google; it should be your personal data set and machine learning, which adds value to the data.

You know how people say “Facebook sells your data”? They don’t, because if they did, it would all get quickly arbitraged to a low price, and it’s seasonal enough, there’s enough repeated behavior among users that it wouldn’t be necessary for them to keep selling it. It would be extracted and in bulk. Facebook doesn’t sell all your data. What they do is they say “Come onto our platform and do ads”, or “Come onto our platform and transact in a very limited way with the data.” That’s what Google does with the web. Google is a really brilliant, once-in-a-generation business. They started with search ads - very clean, because when you’re searching, you have strong intent, you’re looking for something, you’re willing to see a promotion, especially if it’s algorithmically well-placed. It could be better than the organic results that Altavista would have found in ‘98. That’s why Google started rising fast then, and they did search ads even then; they were making enough money they got the famous angel investment from Andreas Bechtolsheim. He asked them, “How do you make money?” and Sergey said “Placed results, search ads.” Andreas said, “I’m using Altavista, but they get tricked by pages that put a little dictionary in the HTML comment, and suddenly that page is authoritative for every word in that dictionary, and they get undue search rank in Altavista. What do you do about that?” Larry Page said, “Oh, we take care of that because we count incoming links to do reputation, pagerank.” Then Andreas said, “How much are you making?” This was like ’98, when Sergey and Larry were still I think on Stanford campus. They said, “A hundred thousand a month and growing”, and Andreas said, “Let me go to my car and get my checkbook”, and he wrote a famous angel investment check which paid off very well.

That search ad business is still strong for Google, but search is kind of flattening out. The smartphone is less of a searchy device, it’s more of a social and bespoke search, or custom app experience. Voice is rising, AI is changing things… Search is flattening. It’s gonna be a challenge for Google to keep satisfying Wall-Street’s needs as a public company.

Google also did something clever - in 2008 they bought DoubleClick, because they saw if you didn’t convert all those search ads on the search engine result page, those quality texty result up top that were clearly identified at ads, but sometimes could be better than the organic results – if you didn’t click on those, you went off into the organic results, and you visited publisher sites and ecommerce sites… You kind of got distracted and surfed a bit for fun, celebrity-stalked somebody a bit… Then you came back to your major purchase, but maybe you did it through an ecommerce site and Google had no piece of that action. So they bought DoubleClick, because DoubleClick had a display ad business. They were all over publisher sites, they were on a lot of ecommerce sites. And they had cookies, they could be audience profiles by tracking people across sites.

[38:59] That gave Google a more complete model of the user, from search, through browsing to various sites that DoubleClick had cookies on or other footprint on, and Google’s been integrating things ever since - YouTube’s gotten big… In some way they’re the web, eating their own ecosystem, but they’re also getting a more complete user model.

I think you may have seen, even Chrome will now be mixing your history into the advertising model if you don’t opt out, I believe. Powerful business, but it’s got some downsides. Increasingly, Google and Facebook own 90 cents of every marginal ad dollar spent. Every extra ad dollar being spent this year above last year, 90 cents out of it goes to Google and Facebook. And that’s not a stable setting, even if you don’t mind those two being the new duopoly on search and ads, or social and ads, because Facebook’s coming after Google, and Google’s search business is flat. So there’s a problem there.

Also, there’s a huge privacy problem. People just don’t like being tracked that way. They get retargeted by bad ads, they get creepy ads, ads that make your eyes bleed, parasite pictures, belly fat reducers, wrinkle reducers… And they get malware now. Malware is actually being placed, and has been for a few years. This is kind of an under-reported story, because a lot of it works by being ransomware - it holds your PC hostage, encrypts the disk and says, “Here’s how buy Bitcoin and send Bitcoin”, and it charges not too much. So grandma paid $600 or $1,200 to get her pictures back of her grandchildren, and she’s too embarrassed to admit it.

There was a hospital in Southern California where all the systems in the hospital were thrown by ransomware. That gets you more on the FBI and Interpol radar, but these are criminal gangs hiding in nation-states that don’t necessarily prosecute them. They’re using very sophisticated exploit kits; that’s the payload that downloads and tries a bunch of vulnerabilities.

The ones we know about from the last year and a half, Angler in particular, used Flash and Silverlight and Java plugin vulnerabilities. Brave turns off plugins by default. The plugins should die, Steve Jobs was right. Thoughts on music - he was right about DRM; thoughts on Flash - he was right about Flash. God bless Steve Jobs. [laughter]

I’m not gonna endorse everything he ever did, but he did two solid things there for the web and for security. These exploit kits now are trying browser vulnerabilities. I’m pretty sure Neutrino is the one that superseded Angler and it’s trying browser vulnerabilities, because every sophisticated endpoint software is endlessly vulnerable, and you have to keep patching it. That’s what Chrome does, that’s what Firefox does, that’s what Microsoft does now… It was one of the lessons of the last 15 years in browsers, that you have to release all the time to keep ahead of the exploits. You have to fuzz-test your codebase with travesty JavaScript-generated JavaScript that finds all the safety bugs.

[42:01] These exploit kits are out there, and they’re coming in through ad exchanges. How do they do it? They actually create fake ad agencies. These are fake businesses, with fake CEOs and CMOs, fake people pictures, bios, and they go and buy ads… They put custom creative ads into ad exchanges. They pay the fees to get into the exchange, and then in real-time bidding processes automated ad exchanges place these ads on publisher pages, sometimes even gateway to other exchanges. They get onto a Chrome ad exchange at a low price, but they can claim to guarantee some conversion or some performance to the publisher who wants to sell the ad space for the ad. And the publishers fall for this every time, because they wanna fill out every space they can with ads, even at the bottom of the page, where the parasite pictures are. And they generally don’t directly sell that to brands or agencies; it’s not good space, so they say “Oh sure, programmatic ad partner. Come on in and own my space and put whatever you want in there.” Programmatic means automated, if it means anything. So he goes and says “Okay, let’s use this ad exchange…” It’s AOL, or OpenEx or Yahoo!…

Pretty soon, you don’t know where those ads are coming from. They’re coming from Russia, but they look like legitimate ads. And here’s the crazy thing - sometimes if you scan their JavaScript, they all come with JavaScript, for tracking pixels to confirm that the ad was viewed, things like that. You don’t see anything overtly bad; you might see some funny little image, a processing loop that maybe is commented innocuously look like it’s doing something to do gamma correction on the image. What it’s actually is taking a graphic decoding of an exploit kit loader from image pixel perturbations. In other words, it’s taken out of the hiding, some kind of signal, a covert message in an image or a picture is being done to hide the guilty code that’s gonna load the Angler exploit kit.

This leads to the New York Times, BBC, AOL and other top sites in late March having ransomware malvertising on their properties. If you think about it, this is actually an outrage, right? Why should world-class online publishers tolerate this? Why should they not control the quality of the ads. Why shouldn’t they have only direct, trusted relationships? Well, as I say, the bottom of the fold, and even the middle of the fold (middle of the page) ad spaces just aren’t as valuable as the top, and even big publishers that have direct sales forces and their own tech teams and do beautiful, custom sponsorship ads…

[44:48] My favorite example, Louis Vuitton handbags on Elle.com. That takes up the bottom half of the frontpage, it looks nice, it’s a trustworthy ad as far as I know - there’s very little third party about it; there’s some tracking… It’s a custom video ad from Questra or somebody, but it’s pretty legit. That’s not the problem. It’s the stuff below that that all the publishers want to fill their space and make a little bit of money. Otherwise, if they leave the space dead, they’re just leaving money on the table. And that leads to malware coming on the pages.

To get back to Brave, we saw this coming. We said ad blocking - even in 2015 when we started - was rising. We started May 2015. We didn’t know that iOS, thanks to Tim Cook, would start making ad blocking easy to use with Safari. They make it an app install model, instead of a browser extension model. They make it content blocking, and it rose quickly to the top of the app store last fall and it became very popular until it saturated short-term demand, and it changed the whole conversation. It made people across the ecosystem - from the marketers who spend on advertising, to the publishers who rely on whatever of that spend is left after all the middle players and the parasites have taken their skim - it made everybody say “Oh no, ad blocking is not going away. It’s not just AdBlock Plus or uBlock Origin. Now it’s iOS. It’s Apple. And Apple had walked away from advertising as a business I think twice. But it wasn’t just because ads are annoying or unaesthetic; that’s a very shallow way to characterize it. Ads are actually dangerous, because they’re over delegated through these ad exchanges, and there’s no contractual relationship.

Doug Crockford knew this. If you remember Doug’s work at Yahoo! with AdSafe, which was a static verifier for JavaScript and was kind of like before Google Caja, which became Secure EcmaScript, AdSafe was Doug’s very picky way of trying to get Yahoo! ads not to contain malware. This has been a longstanding problem, and as I said, it’s under-reported because ransomware - the price the criminals extract is low enough people are embarrassed and they can pay it, get their system back… It’s very hard to track these criminals down. But even ignoring the ransomware threat, just the privacy problem that your data profile is constantly being sucked out of your machine and you’re not benefitting from it, you’re actually suffering from increasingly worse ads, even ignoring the malware; just annoying ads. Retargeting, which is when you get hammered by an ad you’ve already seen… Because it sometimes nags you into buying something you wouldn’t, or in the best case reminds you of something you forgot you do wanna buy. It has a little bit of lift, like a fraction of a percent, and that means that it’s gonna get done; it’s not gonna be left on the table. That money is not gonna be left on the table.

So advertising has become this toxic parasite system, in my opinion. It’s over delegated, there’s too much principal versus agent conflict of interest, there are layers of that, and along with that, there are layers of confirmation bias in the data that’s extracted in the model.

[47:54] They say they have great data, all these ad tech companies; they wanna go public or they wanna get bought by Oracle, and they say they have magnificent data which will increase yield. But if you look year to year, the actual performance of advertising, the so-called yield, doesn’t really go up. Money just goes from one pocket to a different pocket. Publishers are still suffering, and there are long-term negative externalities, like secular trends that are bad for everybody, like the rise of ad blocking and the rise of malvertising.

Brave is trying to address this, but not just - I’m being very negative here - we’re not just gonna cure something that’s bad; we wanna make things actively better. We wanna make this anti-Google, personal Google. We want you to be in charge of your data, and that means not only should you not have bad ads or annoying ads or dangerous ads, you should have a piece of the action. You should get revenue, you should be able to control the terms of the economics. And if you don’t want ads, you can donate, and then you can block guilt-free.

Jack Dorsey: Yeah, so our purpose is economic empowerment, which as you said, is a way of saying “How do we build tools to allow people to participate in the economy more, or better?” In the early days of Square it was just like “I need to accept credit cards, and my bank is not allowing me to.” They didn’t have the infrastructure to do that, or they chose not to. So we enabled millions of businesses who otherwise couldn’t get a credit card – an acceptance account to get one. And that was purely access. The same thing was true for Cash App, which is access to fast, speedy, simple financial rails to send money peer-to-peer. But then we started holding balances for people, so they could effectively get a savings account with Cash App, or a checking account. We issued Visa credit cards for them that works at ATMs, so they can get extra paper cash, rather than buy and sell Bitcoin… All these things go towards that purpose.

[16:00] And that’s where we decided - you know, we have these four business units now, and each one of them effectively has a CEO, and each one of them can do whatever they want in terms of the culture, the values, the operating principles… But the one thing they must align around is our purpose. Are they serving more access to the economy? Are they serving more economic empowerment? And that’s why Tidal made sense for us, is because if we get this right, then we’re empowering economically artists, which has been the biggest issue for artists, and musicians specifically. The label takes so much from them; they’re not making a lot of money from a stream, they’re making money from merchandise, and touring… They don’t have a lot of options to make that part easy. That part is hard. And that’s the part that we made easy with Square, for eCommerce sites, and in-person, and services, like touring, and ticketing, and whatnot… To give them all that infrastructure, for any artist, whether they be very small, or very large, and to put it into one download, and to have an API associated with it. The point of this conference is, I think, pretty incredible.

Jack Dorsey: [15:55] Yeah, so our purpose is economic empowerment, which as you said, is a way of saying "How do we build tools to allow people to participate in the economy more, or better?" In the early days of Square it was just like "I need to accept credit cards, and my bank is not allowing me to." They didn't have the infrastructure to do that, or they chose not to. So we enabled millions of businesses who otherwise couldn't get a credit card – an acceptance account to get one. And that was purely access. The same thing was true for Cash App, which is access to fast, speedy, simple financial rails to send money peer-to-peer. But then we started holding balances for people, so they could effectively get a savings account with Cash App, or a checking account.

We issued Visa credit cards for them that works at ATMs, so they can get extra paper cash, rather than buy and sell Bitcoin… All these things go towards that purpose. And that's where we decided - you know, we have these four business units now, and each one of them effectively has a CEO, and each one of them can do whatever they want in terms of the culture, the values, the operating principles… But the one thing they must align around is our purpose. Are they serving more access to the economy? Are they serving more economic empowerment? And that's why Tidal made sense for us, is because if we get this right, then we're empowering economically artists, which has been the biggest issue for artists, and musicians specifically. The label takes so much from them; they're not making a lot of money from a stream, they're making money from merchandise, and touring… They don't have a lot of options to make that part easy. That part is hard. And that's the part that we made easy with Square, for eCommerce sites, and in-person, and services, like touring, and ticketing, and whatnot… To give them all that infrastructure, for any artist, whether they be very small, or very large, and to put it into one download, and to have an API associated with it. The point of this conference is, I think, pretty incredible.

Chris Beams: …and I like to think that we’ve done a pretty decent job of that, but given that we’re actually adding quite a bit of complexity into the picture… Like you said, Coinbase, or Bitstamp, or any centralized exchange that people might choose to use today, are extremely convenient, by comparison to what they were a few years ago, and indeed, by comparison to Bisq. It’s just a higher sort of profile of engagement that we have to ask the user to understand and comprehend, and so on. There’s a kind of essential complexity to doing this in a peer-to-peer way that I don’t think will ever be lower than the essential complexity involved in interacting with a centralized exchange.

We also don’t think that that’s a fundamental problem, that there’s that greater complexity, because what you’re getting for it is greater privacy. Indeed, much greater privacy with Bisq, and that’s really the core value proposition or reason that Bisq exists.

We’ve talked about security so far, right? Using Bisq, and using all these other things that we’re talking about is a great way to make sure that your funds don’t get stolen and can’t be stolen; you’re eliminating a trusted third-party, you’re eliminating a security hole by taking a centralized exchange out of the loop - that’s great, that’s security, right? But then there’s privacy, and that’s where we get back to the beginning with Bitcoin, and saying “We have this amazing global blockchain etc. It’s all permissionless, it does for money what the internet did for information.” The blockchain and Bitcoin have the potential to do for money what the internet did for information.

[28:04] If you think about pre-web, we had a select set of gatekeepers, media organizations - TV, radio, news outlets etc. Post-web we have an explosion of people becoming their own TV, radio, news and consuming the TV, radio and news of other self-producers and self-publishers. That dream of the internet and the web has been totally realized and continues to be realized to ever greater degrees today. And where we are now, certainly where we were in 2008-2009 was very much like we were in the media landscape pre-internet, with regards to banks and money and finance and so on. There’s gatekeepers - there’s a few banks, there’s financial institutions, there’s governments, there’s regulatory bodies etc., and they have a whole lot to say about what’s possible with your money, with money in general, and so on, and that’s why Bitcoin has been so deeply exciting to so many technologists.

A glance at the news today is all about the price and all about an 18-year-old kid who got rich because he bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin when he graduated high school, or whatever it was five years ago. Those are fun stories, and of course it’s sensational, and it’s all also true, right? People made a lot of money. But why did all of these people get engaged and why have all these people been in this space now for years and years? It’s because of what’s possible. It’s because of that amazing promise of what happens when we have essentially the internet of money, if you will, or more broadly, the internet of value exchange. We now have the possibility to exchange value at a distance, with people who we don’t have a high degree of trust with, and that was simply not possible prior to Bitcoin without having a trusted third-party, some intermediary, a Paypal if you will, in the middle.

So if that’s what Bitcoin made possible, it starts to make sense why we thought Bisq was so important, because you wanna have the ingress and egress from that system, right? Getting into Bitcoin from fiat - people call it national currencies “fiat” in the space, if people aren’t familiar with the term. So US dollars, yen, euros, whatever - that’s all fiat money… Getting into Bitcoin from fiat, so buying Bitcoin for dollars, getting out of Bitcoin, selling your Bitcoin for dollars or euros - that’s a really important part of the system. It’s not Bitcoin itself, this kind of ancillary thing at the edges, but it’s incredibly important, because as people exchange that money, and if they’re doing it via, say, a centralized exchange, if they’re doing it anything other than a person-to-person or peer-to-peer over the internet way, then somebody else besides you and your counterparty knows about that transaction, has a record of that transaction, and centralized exchanges are - the vast majority of them - subject to regulations that say they have to know their customer, they have to get ID verifications… This isn’t perfectly true, but in many cases - most cases - you’re dealing with requirements where people have had to give their identities to these organizations. That information can get out, and does get out. It can get out via hacks, you can get doxed, it can get out via government requests, it can get out in a number of ways. It’s just as vulnerable as the Bitcoin that you’re storing there, actually.

[32:06] When you couple that privacy risk with the fact that Bitcoin is itself a totally transparent system of value exchange, in that it’s a perfectly trackable, perfectly treaceable, you can follow the coin through every single transaction on the blockchain - putting your name, having the possibility of putting your name and personal information on any one transaction, especially the first transaction where you buy your first Bitcoin, or anytime you buy a new Bitcoin, that means that it’s possible for entities that you might not want to be able to, to track that coin all the way through the Bitcoin blockchain, and that does happen; that technology is getting more and more sophisticated as we speak. The so-called chain analysis systems and companies - that’s what they do.

So Bisq’s raison d’être here - really why does it exist - is for the protection of individual privacy, to give people who want it, people who need it, people who value it, the ability to get in and out of Bitcoin without ever putting their personal information on these transactions.

Drew Wilson: Crypto will be great for collectibles, and hopefully also another spot, like through Bitcoin, the name brand crypto, will be another spot for super-wealthy people to move money, and so that way they don’t have to move it into real estate, and harm the real estate industry… In that by doing so, by buying up a bunch of properties, it makes property go up everywhere; property values go up everywhere, and it makes it harder for regular people to buy homes at an affordable price… That’s one, if we’re staying on the crypto train. If we’re not staying on the crypto train, another hard belief - let’s see… Maybe a hard observation, how about that? I still think it’s interesting that design and engineering are now a regular job. I was always the young guy in tech, and so that will never kind of go away from me. But this idea of getting into tech and it being a job, and not like a hobby and something that you want to do is still so strange to me… Especially when you get into running companies and having employees or having teams, and you start to realize that “Okay, this person does one thing, and they’re probably only ever going to do one thing.” And maybe they have aspirations of being really good at this one thing, but they don’t really want to spread out, and like think of tech as one thing, and there’s many aspects to it. They think of “I’m a designer” or “I’m an engineer” or “I’m a product manager.” So that’s the segue into my hard belief. Here comes my hard belief.

Song: [04:47]

One day I asked my teacher, What use is math to me?

She answered: When you’re older, someday my boy you’ll see…

There’s a world of computer systems out there

Full of valuable data and not secured with care

And you can make a fortune in ransomware…

With a little bit of math!

It’s called encryption,

Just a little bit of math,

Cause a conniption;

Lock the data, hide the key;

They’ll pay up eventually,

It’s all just math.

Ransomware is big now

Because it’s organized.

You can buy it as a service

And sell it for a prize.

There’s a whole world of tempting targets to hack -

Governments, hospitals, schools to attack

And they pay up in Bitcoin, hard to trace back…

It’s all just math!

We call it crypto - just a little bit of math.

No need to tiptoe,

Hackers whisper, don’t be nervous,

We take pride in customer service…

Well then I told my teacher, I’m feeling terrified;

How can we protect ourselves from all this cybercrime?

She said, “Don’t click weird links, or use “password123”.

Make offline backups, invest in security.”

And that’s when I realized how screwed we might be…

Just do the math!

So many systems.

If they all took a bath,

Wouldn’t we miss them?

Next time there’s no meat or water or gas,

And we slide a little closer to the day of wrath

You can blame IT, or some Russian sociopath,

But personally, I blame math.

Jerod Santo: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting how larger – specifically on the NFT train, which is running in parallel to the Bitcoin train, but on different tracks… The NFT train - it’s interesting how quickly large organizations are hopping on this one… The skepticism level is much lower. Like I said, NBA is doing their top shots, and then you have – was it the New York Stock Exchange, or was it the NASDAQ? They just announced they’re gonna start selling the moment that a new company IPOs. You can buy that moment. So today is actually the Coinbase IPO, and you could have bought the Coinbase IPO as an NFT. They’re selling those things.

Part of it is because it’s easy money right now, but also, there’s no skepticism from - it’s either NASDAQ or NYSE; I’m not sure which one. They’re just like “We’re in. Let’s do it. Let’s sell some times.” So it’s interesting.

Preethi Kasireddy: [34:23] Yeah, I wouldn’t completely turn off tokens as a valuable application; I think tokens are incredibly valuable depending on how they’re being used. I’m not sure if people are familiar with Ethereum, but Ethereum is a blockchain just like Bitcoin, and one of the things Ethereum makes it super easy to do – you can do this on Bitcoin too, but Ethereum makes it super easy to create basically alternate currencies, which are what you’re referring to as tokens… I think there’s a lot of actually interesting use cases for these tokens, which I’m pretty excited by.

For example, there’s applications that – one example is there’s the Brave browser, which you might have heard of, which Brendan Eich is working on (Brendan Eich was the creator of JavaScript), and they’re going to be using a token in their browser to align the incentives of the end user versus the content publishers versus the browser itself, in the sense that unlike Google Chrome, where they take the user data and they sort of sell it to the publishers, and publishers are allowed to monetize on that data and kind of suck eyeballs and attention, but the users don’t get really paid for the attention, what Brave is doing is using a token system to align the incentive so that users still give their attention to these publishers, but they get paid for it with these tokens.

Similarly, the user can also choose to pay the content publishers for their quality work if they want to, and then the browser also takes some cut of that. In that sense, tokens can be used to align incentives within an application in a really interesting way that was just never possible before.

It’s like all these applications can now have this digital currency that aligns incentives in a certain way in a completely secure, open, trustless manner… Which I think is very interesting.

If we’re talking non-token stuff, basically one thing that I’ve found really interesting recently is I think about a company that’s trying to bring basically real-world real estate assets onto the blockchain. Again, the blockchain is just a ledger, so they would basically maintain these assets on the blockchain and allow users to transact on the blockchain to trade these different assets, or buy and sell various portions of these assets, and so forth.

I think that’s pretty interesting, if you can just have the entire world’s real estate on the blockchain, and it’s completely open and you don’t need to log into these proprietary real estate systems to figure out how much a certain property costs or how much it costs to [unintelligible 00:37:10.03] and bid it, and so forth.

Mikeal Rogers: There actually is a company right now doing mortgages in Bitcoin, but if you buy that house, it’s – say you put $5 into Bitcoin really early on, and that’s worth half a million dollars. So you buy a half a million dollar house with Bitcoin, with that mortgage, you’re good until you sell that house. Then when you sell that house, you owe capital gains from the $5 that you initially put into the currency.

Jerod Santo: So one aspect of the idea of using cash - I’m talking about actual, physical cash - is privacy concerns. So you talk a lot about government espionage, spying etc. and of course, digital currencies are easy to spy on what your citizens are doing etc. Now, Bitcoin, public ledger - of course, that’s easy to spy on and track as well.

Johan Vos: No, but there might be signs… For example, with the same quantum computer you could also trick the whole Bitcoin system and do the mining… So you would see that in the Bitcoin price, for example. Now, not to worry people, but even if we think that breaking encryption is ten years away, that is still something to worry about today.

Jerod Santo: That’s interesting. I didn’t realize that they had figured out that much. I also wanna point out just the highlights of the community, with people like FallingSnow, but also the others… Like you mentioned, so many people digging into the code, and really the reverse engineers come out, right? And do all their Sherlock Holmes work to figure these things out. It’s really quite amazing how fast and successful they are at tracing the trail here.

Also, what’s up with @right9ctrl? Don’t they know that Bitcoin is crashing right now? Come on, what’s the deal…? The value is way down.

Jerod Santo: And you’re like “Wow, this is actually a pretty nice layer, because I can just shove whatever else I want in there as long as it conforms. Now I cannot just do Bitcoin.”

Jerod Santo: Yeah. I think there’s definitely – I mean, the more different things we try, the more innovation happens… So there’s definitely people trying to do those things. In the good old days you had a forum. To use a blockchain example, you had your Bitcoin Talk, which had their own website. They had a forum on there, and that’s where you’d have your tribe, on Bitcoin Talk. Well, maybe that’s still going, but now everything’s just on Reddit. So it’s like, Reddit took over forums… And forums were a big part of the community, I think. And maybe we’re talking about slightly different things here, Amal, but I feel like forums that were hosted on people’s own websites, and they would moderate their own forums, was working pretty well.

But maybe - again, the tooling, the moderation tools, trouble with spam… Things that happened where if you had a centralized entity like Reddit helping you out - although they’ve got all sorts of problems over there, too - they become attractive. And you can also build your audience, because you know, if I’m on this Subreddit, I hop over to that Subreddit, now I’m on both - it’s nice, as a user. So it’s a hard problem…

Brian Bondy: No, originally it was Brave, and we used Bitcoin as the back-end… So before BAT even was a thing, everything was already built out on Bitcoin; that was part of the value prop, that we already have the system that is proven with Bitcoin, and we can just use BAT instead. Now, we did BAT back when the transaction fees for Bitcoin were insanely high, like you’d have to – yeah, it just wasn’t working very well [unintelligible 01:23:11.27]

Ian Bernstein: [01:03:57.29] Yeah. I mean, it’s so easy to get wrapped up… And it kind of reminds me of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was going crazy; you’d just check the price of Bitcoin every five minutes… It’s kind of like that now. It’s hard to not let yourself every five minutes go on and see what the latest predictions is. “When is it gonna end? How many cases are there in Colorado, and in the U.S. versus other countries?” It’s so easy to get sucked into that.

Emma Wedekind: I mean, that’s unfortunately what happens in most companies. Agile is hard. It’s all the rave right now; it’s in the same category with blockchain, and Bitcoin, and all those buzzwords.

Kevin Owocki: Yeah, I think that starting a double-sided market, as you noted, is kind of a chicken and the egg problem, right? So how is Gitcoin gonna do that? There’s the short-term strategy and there’s the long-term strategy. I’ll start with the short-term strategy, so you can see how we’re getting the wheels turning.

Gitcoin has now partnered with ConsenSys, which is a large blockchain venture studio based out of Brooklyn, New York. They also happen to sponsor some of the best projects in Web 3.0 and the Ethereum ecosystem; projects like Metamask, or Truffle, or ConsenSys Diligence, Grid+ are using Gitcoin to incentivize action on their repositories. Those names might not mean a lot to a lot of your listeners, but if you’re in Ethereum, then those are A-list brands.

I think that having Gitcoin being used on some of those amazing projects, some of those foundational projects has really started to juice the wheels on the double-sided market. Right now, since we’re all in the same portfolio, blockchain venture funds, due to all being involved in ConsenSys, there’s kind of – I don’t wanna use the word synergy, but I’m just gonna use it because I can’t think of anything else…

Adam Stacoviak: I guess what was a little unclear to me - and is maybe still unclear - is how Code Fun sits inside of Gitcoin or ConsenSys… Because you’ve said “you and a developer”, and “we” a couple times, and I’m trying to track how that applies in payouts. Is it autonomous, is it by itself, is it part of Gitcoin, is it a subproduct? What is the state of Code Fund right now as it pertains to Gitcoin, or even ConsenSys at large.

Techno Tim: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. To get the fastest machine, to get the best frame rates, to get the lowest latency. Yeah, it pushed a lot of things forward. But I also feel like, man, that kind of like pigeonholed what a machine is possible of, and everyone optimized probably for cost, to get less lanes, smaller motherboards. It’s been happening over time for a long time. But yeah, it’s crazy to think - like, everything depends on the GPU now, too. No matter what you want to do. I mean, when you think of AI, when you think of Bitcoin, when you think of video rendering, creation… Everything depends on the video card. And everyone’s competing for them, at least with the 5080, I think. The 5080, what NVIDIA did was basically say “No, this one’s specifically for gaming.” They basically gave it gaming performance, like the previous generation for the cost, I think, less than the previous generation, but without the CUDA cores for the ML and AI.

[01:48:03.27] So I think – I mean, I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do, but it was a smart thing to do, for NVIDIA to say “Nah, this one’s for gaming. If you’re going to do AI, this is not the one to get.” I think that that kind of segmented their audience. I wish they would go wider. I wish they would go wider. Say “Hey, here’s the creator edition. Here’s the AI edition”, or Bitcoin edition, whatever. Call it whatever you want. “And here’s the gamer edition.” And then optimize for those things.

Honestly, it’s hard to discern between media creator and gamer, because really, you just need GPU, you need that encoder. You don’t need the 3D aspect, but you need that encoder, and you need video RAM. So you don’t need any – well, the funny thing is you still need some AI capabilities, even for creation today. If you think of Photoshop… When you say remove, or blur, or anything like that. They’ve been doing it for a long time. So that’s offloaded to your GPU if you have one, is to be able to do Gaussian blurs, or blurs, or even replace, or auto select this person, or cut this person out of the photo. So those are still needed, even outside of video, if you’re just doing static art… But yeah, I don’t know. I wish they would – I don’t know. I don’t know what they should do.

Jerod Santo: …that it’s going to be a stumbling block, or something you’ll have to overcome. Now, if it starts to work and work well, and it’s on Ethereum you said, so that’s proof of stake, so it’s not proof of work like Bitcoin, which a lot of people have problem with energy draw… So it doesn’t have that particular problem, and maybe you can overcome some of the anti-crypto stance of the developer community at large. Is that fair to say?

Paul Vixie: I would like to say so. [unintelligible 00:35:26.26] ever taken on something that was going to be clearly possible… [unintelligible 00:35:31.23] And at the time, I left nonprofit service and went back into the commercial world in 2013. I was trying to do exactly what say. I was trying to figure out “Well, if there were a replacement to the DNS protocol that you could opportunistically adopt…” So you as an information publisher, you as let’s say a smartphone maker, just creating a lot of DNS requests, you’re going to fetch a lot of information, and just try to enumerate all the different entity types in the entire DNS economy, and say “Well, how could they speak both for some transition period”, which by this time is 30 years, “but anybody who was an adopter would immediately get some improvement [unintelligible 00:36:21.16] performance, less resource use”, whatever it is that would be the incentive to adopt. And in a way, that’s how HTTP/2 and now QUICK (HTTP/3) are doing it. And so I was really tinkering hard with this, at the time that I just kind of said that “That’s it. I’ve done 18 years of nonprofit service. I need to go think about my retirement” and I went back into the commercial world.

But I’ll tell you, the biggest impediment to this is that everybody wants to be the creator of that. So you’ve heard of crypto, and Bitcoin, and digital currencies… All of them followed each other along this model of “We don’t like the fiat currencies. We want to be able to have money via a matter of private contracts, without governments being able to either inject money into the economy, or control interest rates”, or whatever. And the problem is nobody [unintelligible 00:37:21.09] came in later and said “It’s a really good idea. I’m going to adopt [unintelligible 00:37:26.02] most popular.” What they did is they came in and they said “Whoever owns this is going to be a trillionaire”, and they created [unintelligible 00:37:32.20] Why would you use an existing one instead of submitting your own?

So some of those very same people have come along and said “Yeah, we could use the blockchain to encode domain names, so that takedown was impossible. So that no matter whose trademark you were infringing, or whose intellectual property you were infringing, there’d be nowhere to target a lawsuit, as you [unintelligible 00:38:00.03] There’d simply be nowhere to go to request takedown. And wouldn’t that be better than having government? I’m not sure it would be, but I’m pretty sure that that type of anarchy might do more harm than good. [unintelligible 00:38:18.25] opportunity.

Samuel Goff: So a couple of things… First of all, look at who is the primary beneficiary of Bitcoin. A lot of it comes down to these ransomware gangs, and people who want to be able to move illicit substances on the dark web, and things that. So believe it or not, if you map out the parts of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that are actually profiting and benefiting are different parties, it’s particularly nefarious when it comes to Bitcoin and other currencies that are based on that.

The other thing is, I’ve actually invented a blockchain-based technology that generates a ledger of renewable energy. In fact, part of the idea behind it - and I came up with this over a decade ago - is the idea that when you walk into a coffee shop, you don’t have to get approvals. You don’t have to go through a multi-step process to connect to the WiFi, right? It just automatically discovers, it’s zero config… It’s super-simple. Well, right now, if you want to add solar to your roof, or wind, or anything to the local grid, you have to go through a month-long process, and you have to get all kinds of different people involved, get different stamps of approval. Because our grid was designed over 100 years ago, and it hasn’t been updated since then.

So the concept was to basically take some of the brains of the Internet where it’s self-configuring, it’s able to automatically discover the capabilities of all the different devices around it, and it can also self-heal. So take that resiliency and put it into an electrical grid. So when you hook up your solar panels, you don’t have to go through all of the government red tape, and the solar panels communicate with the local electrical grid, using Blockchain as a way to actually preserve a historical record of the capabilities of the production of that system.

[50:03] So first of all, the right people get paid, but also, that’s more valuable to the grid, to know what that system is capable of historically. And then also to move more intelligence away from a command and control structure, and move more intelligence into the nodes around the electrical grid. So if there’s a terrorist attack, or if there’s a natural disaster, it becomes far more resilient, more secure, more fault-tolerant, and it’s able to respond much faster than one person, Homer Simpson, watching a dial and adjusting levers and knobs… You can actually automate a lot of that stuff in the way that a lot of the internet, the backbone of the internet is actually capable of self-healing and rerouting traffic. You can do the same with electricity.

Kris Brandow: Yeah, I’m curious as to like – because you know, it’s easy to be hyper-fixated on what the hype cycle is currently occupied by… I’m interested of “Well, what happens when the hype cycle inevitably moves on?” Which I think everybody right now - because we’re in the hype cycle - is just like “The hype cycle is not going to move on.” But I don’t know, I’ve said this before; it’s been an unpopular opinion before. It’s just like, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was also the huge hype cycle that everybody was talking about, and it’s now been replaced with AI. And before that – there’s always a hype cycle, and there’s always something.

[01:17:56.10] I think there’s a lot of interesting things that come out of the – like, once the hype cycle has moved on, you’re left with these technologies, of like “Well, what can you actually do with these technologies? What are interesting applications of them?” I think that’s happening now with blockchain and how people are thinking about blockchain in kind of new and novel ways. Or even the components or the concepts of a blockchain, irrespective of the implementation of it. And I think that AI as a space has the same sort of potential, where it’s like once we can actually really kind of get into the nuance of it… So I feel like that’s kind of what follows those big hype cycles, is the hype cycle is the lack of nuance, and that lack of nuance allows us to imagine literally anything. And people doomerize it, people are super-excited about it, but everybody is just like – there’s a whole lack of nuance around most of it. And then you start getting a lot of that nuance, and the hype comes down, and you start being like “Oh, these are the interesting places where this technology can actually go.”

And I think that Go as a language, it’s positioned in a special place, and I think it is – I mean, as the language of the cloud, I feel like it’s gonna play a role in all of this, but a different role, a complementary role. So I don’t think it’s gonna be the language you use to necessarily write large language models, or do the things that other languages are currently good for. But I think it’s going to be somewhere in there, probably playing a very foundational part. Kind of like with the cloud. Go is certainly not – you don’t have to write all of your services in Go. In fact, you might not even write Go in general, but most definitely, it’s all over the place in the cloud world, and in that whole thing. So I think there’s space.

But yeah, it’d be super-interesting to explore that on the podcast, and have people in… I think it was – I don’t remember who brought it up, but someone brought up the idea of not necessarily debate, but different viewpoint episodes, where you bring in people that have not necessarily opposing views, but differing views, and you have a conversation. I think that would also be interesting in this space, but also just in general for us as a Go podcast, because there’s a lot of things in Go where it’s like “I don’t know, the answer is it depends.” There’s two episodes basically of this on Changelog & Friends. There’s the “It dependencies”, and then there’s an “It depends” with me. So listeners, if you like that kind of “I don’t know, the answer is It Depends”, go over to Changelog & Friends and listen to that.