Nader Dabit: Yeah. I think it’s important to 100% be clear about this not being some panacea (or however you pronounce that), that there are trade-offs. I think that’s one of the problems that you see in the Web3 space a lot of times, that people are only acknowledging the positives. And I think that that is actually not a good thing. And what you end up having - it’s people that see these discussion from the outside and they think everyone is just full of crap, because all they’re talking about is the good stuff. So yeah, it’s extremely important…

And just to clarify on the number of countries from that thing I referenced earlier… I did a quick Google search, and it said that there are at least 72 countries in the world where women can’t open a bank account, and that was written in 2019… So I don’t know the exact number, but yeah, it’s still a problem. Anyway…

In addition to some of the stuff I mentioned - yeah, I’m really interested, I’m excited about play-to-earn gaming. You’re starting to see a lot of people in the gaming industry that are really high up, like the head of Zynga, the head of YouTube Gaming, and a handful of others publicly talk about them starting to implement these ideas in their games, via NFTs, via cryptos, and maybe via some other mechanisms… But the idea is there.

When you see Axie Infinity going from almost nothing to over two million daily active users, 500 million dollars a month in transactions, 95%of that money sticking with the actual users, not going to the centralized platform - it’s a very compelling case, I think, for a lot of people to take notice.

[51:49] I mentioned accessible and stable currencies - we talked about NFTs for a little bit… We didn’t really talk about them a lot. They’re very controversial. I think that the fundamental technology that empowers and enables NFTs is really interesting. I’m not the type of person that thinks that selling and buying images on a marketplace like OpenSea, which by the way just surpassed Etsy in volume, which means that a lot of other people are interested… But it’s not maybe the most interesting thing to me for that use case. But I do think that what you’re gonna see is people using NFTs as ways to put real-world assets on a digital marketplace and make them accessible to the world, just like DeFi has.

One really exciting example that I am actually diving into and trying to figure out myself and be part of if I can are people that are doing fractional real estate. Let’s say you want to be a real estate owner in New York, but you’re making like 100k a year or 50k a year - you’re essentially just completely locked out. You have no way to really participate in that market. What people are doing now, and it’s already been done in certain parts of the world, but I think we’re gonna see more of it, is that people are buying a building or a real estate via either a DAO or some other type of organization like that… And they’re taking it and they’re fractionalizing it in the form of ERC20 tokens; they’ll attach that piece of land to like an NFT and then they’ll fractionalize it… And then anyone can buy and sell ownership into that piece of property on an open, liquid market.

So let’s say you have $1,000 to invest, you really think that this part of New York is gonna blow up in the next 2-3 years based on you living there and understanding the community… You can actually just take $100 and just buy ownership into that in an instant, and then resell it the next day if you want to… But also anyone in the entire world can do that. And I think that that implementation of what NFTs might offer is interesting.

I also think of the idea around creators and people being able to buy into a community and have some type of community ownership for a few different use cases like fundraising, like people just monetizing their work, and things like that are interesting.

One really good example of this is this artist - I forgot his name, but I tweeted about him not too long ago… He’s actually a JavaScript developer, but he created this generative art using JavaScript, and he created an NFT collection, and he sold over 3 million dollars in NFTs over the course of like a few minutes, and he gave all of that money to the JavaScript community that wrote all of the open source libraries that he built his career upon.

Now, why wouldn’t he just ask people for that money, if he really wanted to do a fundraiser? Well, it’s kind of hard to get people to hand over three million dollars. But when you give them an NFT that they can put and sell on a liquid marketplace, it provides some financial incentive for both parties… Because not only are you just handing over money to this platform or to this person, but you’re getting something back in return. If you had bought one of those NFTs at the time, it’s probably worth maybe double of what you bought it for… But it’s kind of like a win/win situation. If someone wants to help and participate and buy into helping someone else succeed, and then they’re getting something that they can kind of hold on to, a value out of it. And I think that, again, ownership - you’re gonna hear this idea of ownership over and over again… That’s pretty interesting to me.

And another thing around NFTs is definitely the environmental impact, and I think we’re gonna talk about that when we talk about the trade-offs, and also get more clarity as to what that discussion is.

Mikeal Rogers: There’s a few ways to look at fractionalization… One is to say “Okay, why don’t you just do a series of individual NFTs that all have things slightly different with them?” rather than relying on the protocol to fractionalize it.

Jerod Santo: Real quick, while we talk about history… Here’s ancient history. I don’t know if you know this, Nathan, but Adam, I know you know this, because we were just talking about it recently… There’s a new movie coming out on Apple TV Plus called Tetris. And it’s a fictionalized, dramatized version based on the true story of Tetris, and how it was brought to market. And the main character in that is Henk Rogers, played by some actor; I don’t know his name. And it just so happens, when we talk about ancient history, that Adam - not the editor, but Adams Stacoviak, interviewed Henk Rogers on Founders Talk episode 7, back in 2010. Ancient history. And Adam, you told the Tetris story before it was cool.

Jerod Santo: Well, speaking of learning by experience, you had a heck of an experience as the Vice President of Engineering at WeWork before this startup of yours… WeWork’s been in the news, it’s been fictionalized…

Eric Normand: [46:05] Yeah, they’re making components that are very object-oriented, they are like doing all sorts of stuff in the lifecycle methods, that’s like Ajax fetching or setting some variable… They’re doing something that’s very procedural and effectful.

I’ll just tell a little story, I was hired as a contractor to functionalize some React Native code, so what I did is I came in, I added Redux, I started stripping out all of the effects from all the components, removing bugs in the process. I would finish up with one class, one component, and I’d go work on something else. Then I’d come back and find that the component I had just functionalized two weeks later was like all sorts of state everywhere… That has been my experience with trying to do functional and JavaScript. The problem I guess is commitment, lack of immersion, lack of understanding of why you wanna reduce the number of side effects, things like that.