WholesomeCrypto Podcast

By WholesomeCryptoBusiness Technology

WholesomeCrypto Podcast episodes

December 08, 2021 Michael McGuiness - Co-Founder of GM.xyz
Michael McGuiness - Software engineer, former investment analyst and co-founder of GM.xyz
Michael and his brother, Matt, have been tirelessly working on GM and their story has just begun.
Topics we discuss:
* Steemit vs Twitter vs Discord vs GM
* NFTs as PFPs
* Learning how to be a software dev
* Community safety and moderation
* Moving from Bitcoin to Ethereum
* Managing fast growth on GM
* and much more!
Find all my episodes here!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wholesomecrypto.com
50 min
November 29, 2021 dcbuilder.eth - Analysts, Researcher, Full Stack Blockchain Dev
DCBuilder.eth has already accomplished so much for the crypto industry as a researcher, analysts, and self taught full stack blockchain dev. At only 20 years of age, he left university to dedicate an exciting career into the Ethereum ecosystem.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wholesomecrypto.com
54 min
November 14, 2021 Justin Leroux - GridPlus Hardware Wallet
Justin Leroux is the marketing & business development lead at GridPlus. Justin has been in the cypherpunk community since the 90s. Which naturally guided his path into the crypto industry. Initially GridPlus was an energy subsidiary and transitioned to the leading innovator of hardware wallets.
Links:
GridPlus
Twitter
Discord
Just Leroux

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wholesomecrypto.com
38 min
October 26, 2021 Kirill Kutakov - Co-founder of Stakewise
Kirill, originally from Estonia, is the founder of Stakewise, a liquid staking platform on Ethereum. Always interested in economics and finance, he initially was not interested in Bitcoin due to the lack of friction in the financial system in Estonia. However, he quickly came to understand the importance of Bitcoin in countries with corrupt governments, as it allows people to own their money and transact without fear of it being taken away.At university, Kirill became interested in Ethereum and invested in it. He saw the potential of applications that could be built on top of it, and was not happy with the growth opportunities in the traditional financial sector. Therefore, 11 months ago, he quit his job to work on Stakewise full-time. Today, the team has grown to five members and the product is seeing gradual adoption in the DeFi space, such as being included in the Fuse Pool.The idea for Stakewise originated from the need to make it easier for the average person to stake their Ethereum. With the requirement to have 32 ETH, the task can be daunting. Kirill and Dima developed Stakewise with a token that was the first to launch on a public test net. They are dedicated to helping people avoid crypto scams by educating them on the potential dangers and the most popular ways to scam people.Kirill is passionate about Stakewise and ultimately wants it to be the leading staking platform. He is excited to meet people he has only chatted with online when he goes to Lisbon next week, and he recommends diversifying one's investments across multiple staking services in order to reduce risk. He also educates others on basic security questions, such as never sharing one's seed phrase or private key.Kirill is satisfied with his career move, despite the initial shock from his parents when he no longer had medical insurance. He is proud to be part of a decentralized system that requires a lot of people to fail at once in order to break, and is aware of the potential of governments developing their own blockchain protocols. He is hopeful that Stakewise will help people hold on to their money, and ultimately make their lives easier.
Links:
Stakewise
Twitter
Discord
This following post was generated using AI via dubb.media 🤖
Transcript
[0:00:00] Rudy: Hey, Karill, thank you so much for joining me on Wholesome Crypto podcast today. It's a beautiful Friday morning here. I know it's a Friday afternoon for you in Estonia. Thank you very much for joining me.
[0:00:13] Kirill: Hey, Rudy. Yeah, it is my pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me over and giving me the opportunity to appear on your podcast. Of course I'm excited for of the conversation.
[0:00:26] Rudy: Of course. That's my pleasure too. Yeah, I mean, you have a great background working with Stakewise. You and your co founder Dimitri have done a lot of work there. Before we start getting into all what Stakewise does, I love to learn a little bit more about you and what you've done in your past and your history that led you up to working and starting up Stakewise.
[0:00:47] Kirill: Yeah, interesting question. So I'm originally from Estonia, and I think I've been always interested in the economics and financial sort of dealings of just like, companies and businesses. And this led me to pursue an economics focused degree. And later on, I ended up working for an investment fund here in Estonia.
[0:01:16] Rudy: Sorry, I said no. Was it the challenge of solving a mathematical equation for you? And obviously money is a fun thing to solve because so many people love it so much. But what part of the challenge that got you was getting you excited about economics and making you focus your studies on that?
[0:01:39] Kirill: It's an interesting question. I tend to think that it has to do with my love for solving puzzles. Oftentimes I'm not a fan of just, like, crunching numbers for the sake of, I don't know, accounting, for example. I'm mostly interested in crunching numbers to try and model some scenarios for the future. So it's more like trying to understand how the different components of one big system come together and finding a way to approximate their dynamics individually and to see what sort of global result this can end up with. So I don't know whether this is the sort of pursuit of certainty about the future or it's just the process itself. It always drew me towards economics, and I think a big part of it is also like the behavioral aspect. So trying to figure out how people's behavior influences just economic outcomes, that's super.
[0:02:56] Rudy: Interesting in crypto, because emotional behavior is a hefty player in the game after people underestimate how much emotion is used in crypto.
[0:03:08] Kirill: Yeah, no, 100%. I think crypto is just one big experiment on people's attitude towards money and behavior. It's like a giant gambling machine. And although it's still sort of an infancy, I do think that a lot of what we see in VFI is driven by just pure game theoretic sort of behavior, and it can be modeled as such. And then there's this element of uncertainty still where community and wholesome values somehow still overrule, just like parasitic behavior or some sort of self.
[0:03:56] Rudy: Yeah, it's like a win win because self is behavior. Everybody that's investing in crypto early on, of course, wants their portfolio to increase in value, but they also do care about the mission of giving everyone the power to be able to take full control of their assets and their value and their money. So, yeah, it's definitely going to see that happen and play out and perhaps.
[0:04:24] Kirill: Occasionally also not letting something obviously bad happen to others in the community. Basically trying to deter people from making a mistake or just making sure that everyone's on the same level playing field. It does interest me how sometimes these actions are driven by just altruistic motives. But again, I think it's like a small section of crypto. There's still a big section out there that is purely just optimized for the best personal outcome and don't care about the ethics at times.
[0:05:02] Rudy: Yeah, for sure. And again, if something bad happens to a network or protocol a coin, if it happens to happens to everybody, everyone gets affected by that one issue. It's not like, oh, someone got scammed at their bank, therefore everyone else is still safe. Just that one person screwed. Now everyone is affected if there's a protocol level issue or a community level issue or anything like that. So it's always important to remember there's like one for all.
[0:05:35] Kirill: Most certainly, even from the sort of financial perspective, it will play a much bigger role simply because you start getting assets that are sort of composable across the system. Which means that out of, say, 100 units of capital, you might end up with, like, 600 units because you can rehypothecate whatever you have in different protocols, just stacking things on top of each other. This creates just this massive value. But at the same time, if one of these domino pieces falls, it can puncture the bubble, so to say. So looking after each other, perhaps at some point they need to self regulate basically as an industry within this system will probably drive people to act against this bubble being punctured.
[0:06:41] Rudy: Yeah. And I have strong faith, hopefully in the community to work together on that one. You're loving economics. This is what you're starting to figure out what your passion is in high school and then in college you focus on that. But when did you hear about Bitcoin? Was it during college?
[0:07:03] Kirill: Yeah, I think like many people at first heard about Bitcoin while still at high school, but like everybody else, I just didn't see the proposition. At that time I was, I don't know, pretty happy with the financial system. I did not sort of encounter much friction in terms of how you need to interact with various intermediaries. And I would say that perhaps it is because Estonia is pretty developed in that sense. We have the Swedish banks that represent the majority of the, like, financial system here is in from the banking side and they have created relatively few frictions and I cannot say that they have been too charging to have TFC or anything like that. And at that time, I wasn't really sending money abroad too much or having money yeah. Doing anything that bitcoin solves. So I just didn't see much of an appeal. Especially because you couldn't transact with it in stores.
[0:08:13] Rudy: Exactly. That's like the huge thing I've always recognized is like, especially in America too, there's so many ways to send money to people for free. Like, I can use venmo PayPal, I can now use Facebook to send money to people and they make it so easy. It kind of makes you forget why bitcoin was so important. Why would I want to pay a transaction fee for every transaction for this digital money that don't even know has any backing towards anything? It's very easy to speculate, but when you look at it through a perspective of a different country where government regulations are much more corrupt and it's not easy to send money, it's not easy to even store your money or know if the money that you saved is going to stay there for you tomorrow. And that's when bitcoin really or ethereum or most cryptocurrencies come into play, is that you get to have that ownership and you get to show that you own the money. You can send the money whenever you want and no one else can take that away from you, no matter how corrupt the government is.
[0:09:20] Kirill: Yeah, a monetary sort of argument comes into play here as well, I guess. It seems to me that I've only come around to the need to manage the monetary supply to make sure that inflation is kept in check and you don't sort of pump a lot of hot air into the system. Just recently with the pandemic and the limited supply or, I don't know, a slowly growing supply or some sort of algorithmic side to how the supply is changing, which makes it predictable. It's important to have if you want a currency that is not going to go away in like 100 years just because you as a nation state somehow lost the appeal on your floating rate currency. It's just being devalued constantly. But, yeah, coming back to your original question, I discovered bitcoin, like, relatively early on, but I just didn't was it.
[0:10:25] Rudy: A friend that saying, hey, Karl, you have to look at this, or how did you find it? How'd you hear about it?
[0:10:31] Kirill: I think it was just like randomly browsing through the Internet. Yeah, I guess bitcoin came on everyone's raiders multiple times, but everyone sort of brushed it off multiple times because you're like, oh, whatever. This just random coin that is being transacted with nowhere, so what's the point of having it? And now you recognize that, okay, perhaps this was a good bet, but in the end, I didn't act on it and I came around, I think, as most people did as well in this early 2017 cycle, or mid 2017, but not for bitcoin, for ethereum. I just got some once I got out of university because I loved sort of the idea of various, essentially applications that it is possible to build on top. So just got some. But yeah, again, I was, like, sitting underwater for the longest time ever after that.
[0:11:38] Rudy: Yeah, you got it then, I guess. Bitcoin was always on your radar. You're kept hearing about it and I guess you never felt like you had to invest in bitcoin or ethereum immediately. But it was always something you're kind of just keeping an eye out, watching and seeing what's happening in the industry as it was slowly, slowly picking up.
[0:12:02] Kirill: I would say that it was only just for the fun of it when I opened it. I cannot call myself like, a crypto maxi until, you know, only recently that I came around. I think for for a long time it was just like to watch the price for fun, to like, you know, ponder on the question how much you could have made.
[0:12:25] Rudy: That's the worst. Don't do that.
[0:12:27] Kirill: Like 2012 or something.
[0:12:29] Rudy: Oh, man.
[0:12:29] Kirill: But here's the deal. The majority of people would have never held it from that period of time until now. For example, I remember friends bragging how creative and great they are of traders because they bought it for, like, 100 and sold several weeks down the line for 400. You're like, oh, man, I made four X.
[0:12:52] Rudy: That's pretty good. If they held it, they could have made way more.
[0:12:58] Kirill: Yeah. So I honestly don't know what sort of mindset you need to be in to hold from, like, the very first instance to the current days, and I'd be interested to talk to such people, but in the end, you have to.
[0:13:16] Rudy: Just buy I forget it. You can't even think about it because it was just driving nuts. The what if.
[0:13:22] Kirill: Yeah. So he came on my radar again when the whole buzz around it started picking up. And at the University of Friends, he basically said, hey, so there's this new currency that was released not that long ago. That still a very attractive proposition. Like price wise, you can get a lot for relatively little, and it has this appeal and the technical sort of foundation for being universally used. So look into that. At the time, we looked at the ICO boom and thought, okay, some random projects are getting lots of money. Some random factories in Russia, just like, collecting money for expansion in crypto, just.
[0:14:17] Rudy: Churning out fake ICOs just to make some money.
[0:14:21] Kirill: Yeah. Loads of advisors on board.
[0:14:26] Rudy: Yeah. I have nowhere. So many advisors came up. I'm like, how are you an advisor? Crypto just started. How could you be an advisor? I can be an advisor at that point then. But that was just yeah.
[0:14:42] Kirill: Literally all that mattered were the traditional sort of signaling mechanisms. The longer your tenure, the higher the position. The sort of catch, here the company you're at, or the educational organization that you graduated from, the better, like, oh, these guys are from MIT. They must really know their I am.
[0:15:09] Rudy: From Boston right now. But yeah, it's exactly how it is. Ex google Engineer x something engineer well.
[0:15:17] Kirill: These things are still broadly appealing because I actually don't know why. I guess on the surface, if you compare people who haven't had that experience and some that had, you will go for the latter. But back then, yeah, all kinds of things were considered, like, noteworthy and investment worthy. Not all, but most of it turned out to be hot.
[0:15:47] Rudy: Yeah. And it's all exposed eventually. So I'm kind of worried about that happening in the NFT space right now. With all those it's automatically computer generated art, and there's only 10,000 pieces. And so, myself, I'm like, It's good, it's great. But what do you get out of it? What's it supposed to bring to you in terms of utility, in terms of art? It's fine. If it looks beautiful and you're it's really appealing to you, they should get it. Sure. It's nice to have that kind of ownership, but sometimes it's like, what are you really getting out of it? Sometimes it's just a fun, loud community and it's cool to be part of it. But I guess for me, I'm also worried about there's a lot of NFTs that are coming out that are just trying to make their money and make promises that they won't ever deliver on.
[0:16:42] Kirill: Yeah, well, I guess it's different. It is difficult to have innovation in the space when it doesn't promise this outsized gains to people. In order to come up with something like relatively risky, where you're potentially wasting a lot of time and resources on building something, you need to have a long chance of striking. It's super big. This tends to attract speculators whenever it's a proven concept that it actually works, and the chance that you make it big is much higher than you anticipated. But yeah, within the the I think I couldn't come around for, again, a long time, I have been in, like, brief conversations with different people who were obsessed with NFTs very early, and I just couldn't get the appeal besides just the art components of it. And oftentimes I still don't. I think I'm more sort of interested by the speculative side, too, like how NFTs came around. But down the line, I think the biggest appeal is if they actually managed to cross into the metaverse.
[0:18:02] Rudy: I think it will. I hope it will. That's the whole point, right?
[0:18:06] Kirill: Yeah, exactly. So fingers crossed. I'm curious to see how it develops. I don't hold any NFDS at this.
[0:18:15] Rudy: Moment, but yeah, maybe stakewise community will start developing NFPs. Maybe stakewise community will start developing NFTs for fun.
[0:18:28] Kirill: Yeah, well, we actually have at least one. It's a semi NFT. It's this proof of attendance protocol type NFD where we didn't even develop them. I think the rocket pool folks made this meme about Stakewise helping rocket pool avoid the potential exploit. And they made it into a meme and then into NFT. So I don't know if you've claimed.
[0:18:56] Rudy: Yours I actually did, yeah, because I saw it on your discord. I was like, oh sweet. I love these pops. They're fun to collect and they're free. It's not like they cost anything else. You want them into it.
[0:19:09] Kirill: No, very true. I have one of my own now, but okay, I have it.
[0:19:20] Rudy: Well, it's nice because now you can say I was there for that event. Imagine when there was co ops for when Ethereum launched and then you can say I was there for the launch date. It's cool. So now when Stakewise maybe adds on or develops with layer two, you can launch a pop saying, hey, we launched everyone that wants to improve their attendance for this. Just enter your ETH address. So wholesome crypto e. You can see all my pops there.
[0:19:55] Kirill: Yeah, I'll actually look it up.
[0:19:57] Rudy: Yeah, they're pretty fun. I've made a few just for other communities, but yeah, sweet. So you're out of college. We'll go back to that. You're out of college, you're working in a financial company. Could you go a little bit more about what you're thinking at that time, what you're working on, and when you started maybe going back and forth in your head of traditional finance or crypto finance?
[0:20:25] Kirill: Yeah, so I think those started when I began playing around with DFI, or at least the early sort of how would they call this?
[0:20:39] Rudy: Exchanges? Decentralized exchanges.
[0:20:43] Kirill: Yeah. DEXes. Yeah, Dex is just playing around with that and yeah, it was pretty fun. I have to say. It was nice to finally be able to do something with you either. I think at some point just was just observing what's happening. And that was around the same time that I was not super happy with how growth is in the financial sector. Like personal growth, basically, be it career progression or the kind of stuff that you get to do, you're always sort of building on top of the existing system, which is just at times, like, irrational and down the line. I just didn't feel like I want to do this for the rest of my career. At that same time, I think Demi, my friend Dimitri, who is the founder of Stakewise, came back to Estonia from Sweden for the Pandemic. And yeah, we sort of met up just as friends and he told me about Stakewise and from there it kind of was a very natural progression of me going into DFI with Stakewise.
[0:22:16] Rudy: When did you make the full jump over to Stakewise?
[0:22:22] Kirill: Yeah, actually roughly eleven months ago. So on the 9 November I quit my job to work on it full time. We were approaching the launch of e two as an ecosystem. And at that time, we were going into our second sort of the final beta on the final test, and we were trying to raise and there was a lot of stuff to coordinate, and I couldn't do it in my free time anymore like I did this whole time before throughout 2020. So, yeah, I just quit, said, okay, all or nothing. And, yeah, I'm glad it worked out. It was super exciting.
[0:23:13] Rudy: Do you have family members saying, what are you doing with this? What are you talking about? My parents are like they're kind of support and not supportive at the same time.
[0:23:21] Kirill: But I didn't tell anyone. Still, I didn't tell anyone, and I'm glad that I didn't. My parents found out super randomly because my mom called up my what is it called? GP, like, at the hospital. And it turned out that I don't have medical assurance. And she's like, what the hell? Aren't you working price to price? I no longer work.
[0:23:51] Rudy: That's the risk you take for entrepreneurship. You just got to go, and you're young, you're healthy, it's fine, you'll figure it out.
[0:23:58] Kirill: Yeah, she didn't tell anyone what she knew. In the end, that's love. But yeah, no regrets there. I wouldn't have told, I think, if it didn't work out, but it did, so it's all good.
[0:24:20] Rudy: How many team members are in state wise?
[0:24:25] Kirill: So right now we are five. So we have myself and DEMA, two other engineers, which are both called Andre.
[0:24:35] Rudy: Andre and Andre.
[0:24:37] Kirill: Yeah. It's difficult to differentiate between them and calls for, like, Andre, what is it? And then we have a person from the US. He thinks Brian and he's been helping out a lot. We actually were quite lucky with our community because many people were helping out a lot. Their names were I mean, they are from Europe and the US. There's Sasha, who helped us moderate this court and help with setting up some just community things. There's Blood, who was of immense help for just the UI and big portion of things we rolled out over Spring when we were very strapped for resources, just human resources and a bunch of other people who were always super responsive to the community. And we still are maintaining communication with them. And so I don't count them as part of the employed team, but they're definitely a part of the core statewise team. This is no debate.
[0:25:52] Rudy: Yeah. And it's always amazing having you're working on something you love so much and sharing that love with other members is just an extraordinary feeling.
[0:26:03] Kirill: No, absolutely. Yeah. Nothing to that for me. Just really glad that they came around and they discovered us and we somehow managed to strike up a friendship with them. And I just hope it continues. I'm very keen to meet them in person at some point, so yeah, I got it, too.
[0:26:27] Rudy: Well, you're always welcome to the States here.
[0:26:31] Kirill: Yeah, that would be lovely. I actually considered coming to Boston because of a friend who is beginning his studies there. He invited me over. So, yeah, I might as well arrive unexpectedly.
[0:26:49] Rudy: We'll get some lobster rolls and clam Chowda. So you're in this state of developing, working on stakewise, and Demetri founded the company. So how is it that the idea of we have to solve or help Staking on Aetherium? Did Dmitri say, hey, it's going to be difficult for the average person to stake their Ethereum on a note or on a computer or create their own node at home? And even alone, having 32 ETH is a lot of Ethereum. So were you immediately convinced that this was a problem that needs to be solved or how is that for you?
[0:27:37] Kirill: Yeah, I think in terms of the product market fit, I think it is an operator that you need to somehow pull assets together because not everyone wants to earn passive income from EIFER, has the necessary 32 EF and is able and willing to run their own infrastructure. And like, going further, it's also a no brainer that if you have an opportunity to earn interest from your Ether while you're actually also using it in various D Five applications, you will do it right. And there's this lock up requirement you would want to avoid as well. So the idea of building a Staking service with a token came very naturally. And at the time that I joined Dima with this, I think we had an Alpha product which is basically like shared validators. What you could do is spin up a validator with several people, but there was no token. And we developed a lot of things on top, basically, but the sort of core functionality was there. And Dima, I'm not sure how he managed to pull it off, but in the two years before I joined, he was building this on his own in his free time working on steakwise. And because of this, we were actually the first to launch on a public test net to give people a flavor of what east to Staking can be with the sort of defy oriented service. It's pretty amazing that we expected that EF Two is going to launch in July 2020. So we were like, okay, we need to rush with certain things. In May, I think we launched on the first test net, or it was the second test net, but we launched like a working product, essentially, and we started trying to get people to try it and get some community. A lot of people were excited about rocket pool, and it didn't really matter that we had the working product, they just were very convinced that rocket pool is the way, so they didn't even pay attention. But yeah, I think slowly, like, one by one, some people started coming around and testing it and yeah, in the end, I think this this head start back in May gave us a really good sort of runway to build a community that is sufficiently large to to get us off the ground, like, relatively quickly. Back when we actually launched in March 2021, yeah.
[0:30:37] Rudy: And I love I think Stakewise and Rocket Pool are my two favorite communities and staking platforms, probably. And you guys are kind of also like friends, which is kind of cool, especially with helping out Rocket Pool in terms of like that's what we're talking about before. Even though you are two different platforms doing two different ways of staking, it's overall good for the community that you both succeed versus trying to drown the other one. It doesn't help either of you. Yeah, and I like seeing that between the community. I think that's very wholesome that's just like what Ethereum is pretty good at too, is keeping kind of a wholesome community.
[0:31:26] Kirill: I hope that we will be able to maintain this sort of relationship going. It wasn't always like this, I can tell you, because oftentimes a lot of people used to talk down and take wise on Reddit and I vividly remember basically reading those comments because I signed up for notifications every time Statewise or Rocket Pool or any other staking service was being mentioned on Reddit. And I would read all of them and it would be a good sort of gods for the sentiment around different projects. But yeah, I think this slowly changed. We never tried to be I don't know, we never tried to be confrontational. If people discovered us and they wanted to try us and they wanted like a fair assessment of what's been happening in two different products, we'd always try to offer this fair comparison. Right. And we were always relatively transparent about what we see out the risks with their product or the advantages of our product and vice versa. In the end, what I believe an average taker can benefit from is just sticking with several services at once. This is good for differentiating your risk. It's like not keeping all of your eggs in one basket.
[0:32:56] Rudy: Exactly. Yeah. That's needed. I think it's important. If you're not a company with competition, then you're not probably needed at all. So it's good to have competition. It's good to have friendly competition.
[0:33:13] Kirill: Yeah, it is. With this in mind, basically, you can think of us as competing products and we are competing products, but for the average Staker, we actually sort of don't think that they should choose either or. It's probably best to be using, I don't know, two or three just to make sure that you are relatively safe in terms of how safe your capital is. Obviously we do our utmost like everyone else to keep it secure. It's literally a very big commitment that we make. That being said, there are always risks with innovation like this on the client side somewhere else, like we discovered with Rocket Pull and Lido, for example, who would have thought. We started looking into decentralizing our protocol, starting to look at how our competitors are dealing with certain things and it turned out that, okay, there's this glaring hole in how to do this that allows the steal users funds, I'm confident, but I still hope that we don't have any spots that we missed in what we do. If they're out, they will be as sort of friendly in reporting them in a timely manner. But down the line, what this means for the average staker is that it's best to not keep your eggs in one basket, especially as ifer appreciates because it has a high chance that a good chunk of your net worth will be in EIFER by, I don't know, 2025.
[0:35:08] Rudy: That long.
[0:35:10] Kirill: I mean, I don't know how people sort of diversify between crypto and other assets, but I'm just thinking just longer term, what's the point of just emotionally being invested in just one platform when you can be sort of more rational with your investments?
[0:35:29] Rudy: That's why I worry. It's because we definitely something people forget is putting all eggs in one basket is not a sound move to make because it's just traditional investing diversify and make sure you're able to stay safe in case of anything happens. And that's like what's the tough part about two is. You know, there's a lot of bitcoin maximalism going on around. I love bitcoin. I think it's what kind of brought everyone here. Even ethereum was started off just because bitcoin was there. It's like an idea that derived off of bitcoin and I think it's always important to remember that. Yeah, bitcoin is important, ethereum is important. Many other coins are going to be important, hopefully, or they're going to phase in and out, but there's a place for everything and I can't imagine a world where one coin will be the ruler of them all, that it's not going to be one coin for everybody. There's always going to be a handful of things to choose from, most certainly.
[0:36:38] Kirill: And I think this also opens up good discussion on what coin or what blockchain will, if ever, governments or public institutions adopt. And it seems like there will be no winner. So the bridges between different networks are all the more important.
[0:36:57] Rudy: Yeah, and that's the thing. I think bridges are becoming a newer industry. People are trying to create more bridges and more coins just because that's what they're seeing is that there's such diversity out there that it's hard to talk between the two. So now it's all about Bridging. But I don't know, ethereum kind of solves a lot of that because you can create your own app on Aetherium, you don't need to bridge. Then again, you're putting everything on one blockchain. So if anything ever happens on ethereum, it's probably going to affect every single other token out there, which is not safe.
[0:37:37] Kirill: Yeah, well, I think therein is the appeal of a decentralized. System. In order for ethereum to break you basically need a lot of how to put this. You need everyone to fail at once, which is very difficult to imagine. So from that perspective it's actually perhaps okay if everything is built on one network like ethereum because it is super decentralized already. I think what is perhaps an argument in favor of why this might not happen is because in the end the decisions are made by people and people are influenced by other people. You can offer all sorts of financial incentives to those who are in charge or in power or they can make just faulty judgments or maybe they can make right judgments but this may lead to other chains being chosen over Ethereum whenever, say, the traditional world adopts crypto or blockchain in general, at least in my opinion.
[0:38:54] Rudy: Yeah, I have a hard time imagining countries who are so power hungry letting their power be decentralized. I feel like it's always going to be they might just develop their own blockchain.
[0:39:08] Kirill: Yeah, I think that is a very sensible sort of prediction.
[0:39:15] Rudy: Yeah, I've been wrong before so we'll see what happens.
[0:39:19] Kirill: Yeah, you cannot always talking about the future. If everybody had a crystal yeah, it.
[0:39:27] Rudy: Would be pretty awesome. But again, all this crypto industry talk you've been in this industry for a while so I'm sure you've learned a lot about how people act and talk and what kind of, I guess way that people handle each other on the internet. So I want to know what is your crypto pet peeve?
[0:39:54] Kirill: Yeah, it's people scamming other people. Yeah, it is taking advantage of the lack of knowledge or of trust into communication in crypto. I think that's the thing. The community is so open and it is so helpful that some people might, I don't know, lower their guard, so to say. And because of this it invites all sorts of scams and fraud. So yeah, I hate seeing that. I hate people losing money because a random impersonator of myself or somebody else messaged them and sent them a link that asked them to input a twelve word sort of sentence. It's pretty upsetting to see at the same time, perhaps it also is a pit PEEF to see people not like educate themselves on just the basic security questions.
[0:41:04] Rudy: Never share your seat phrase. Never share your seat phrase. Never share your private key ever.
[0:41:10] Kirill: Yeah, let's just put it out there again, this twelve word phrase you have. Don't share it ever.
[0:41:18] Rudy: Ever. Yeah, it must be pretty hard for you too because you're working so hard to make an awesome community and awesome representation of yourself and then some scammer comes in impersonating you and it's just tough.
[0:41:38] Kirill: Yeah, I mean honestly it's not as tough on me as on the people that actually lose their savings because of this. There's only so much that I can do to prevent this. Like I legit cannot influence every single person and something really about myself in general. No one can protect others other than trying to educate them on the potential dangers and the most popular ways to scam people. So yeah, I on my part do most that I can to just help people avoid that. So whenever we recommend linking ledger to MetaMask to make sure that hardware wallet is easier to use in your browser, I'm always giving them the correct link to MetaMask because there's always a chance they will Google MetaMask. Google Ads will show up, will show some sort of scam project that says mask meta and they will accidentally download it.
[0:42:49] Rudy: That's hard. Even I think MetaMask even tried to help out with having a verified whitelist of links that are correct in case you go to something like, I don't know, some defy exchange or something, it would be like this is an actual link, you're good to go. Or it gives you warnings.
[0:43:15] Kirill: I think it's more on the Google's end, basically. It's very hard on their end, I guess, to just whitelist all the ads oh yeah, because there are so many. But at the same time the crypto scams are so prevalent with random projects impersonating bigger projects to scam people routinely showing up on the ad sort of side. You would think that, okay, maybe hire one person and try to check for this kind of stuff for just like the popular names. It will save people a lot of money.
[0:43:55] Rudy: That's tough. There's only so much you can do now that you're in this industry. Do you think you can ever go back? Do you ever want to go back maybe when you retire?
[0:44:14] Kirill: I mean, the only thing that is, is the only thing that is not and I don't know how to put this into words like there is one thing that I would change in when, when working in crypto and this is this 24/7 connectivity and especially when, when you're a founder. So I honestly love everything. Even when this 24, with this 24/7 connectivity I I have no complaints. I'm like, you know, grateful. I do feel lucky to be in this industry and, you know, be able to make a difference. But at the same time it does require you to regulate your screen time because otherwise it is pretty easy to get yourself burned out very quickly. So if somehow down the line I actually managed to not feel guilty for taking my eyes off like the mobile phone or the laptop for some time during the day and yes, forget about social media, then I think there's really no reason to switch. I love it. It gets down to me.
[0:45:34] Rudy: I know exactly. I used to be a community manager for two years. And, yeah, I would be glued onto my computer, onto my phone and just could not leave a telegram, chat, making sure everyone knows what's going on, making sure nobody gets scammed. And then at a certain point, you have to make a process out of it or you hire more team members or hope the community is strong enough to regulate itself. But that's always tough. So, yeah, there's definitely a way around it. But again, in the beginning times it's really hard. I definitely feel you on that one.
[0:46:13] Kirill: Yes. But overall, I think it's amazing what we're building collectively and us Stake wise, like, privately. So I'm just very keen to be a part of it and a growing part of it.
[0:46:29] Rudy: And it's awesome that you are helping out with a community like that. What do you do on the side then, as a hobby or how do you live life outside of crypto?
[0:46:42] Kirill: Yeah, we have been over this in a private chat, but I think I really don't feel any affinity for anything else other than Stakewise right now. So I am fully dedicated to this from the morning.
[0:47:01] Rudy: Spoken like a true entrepreneur. Spoken like a true entrepreneur.
[0:47:08] Kirill: Yeah. This is all the podcasts I previously talking now, but no, this is coming straight from the heart, actually. I occasionally think that, okay, it's maybe healthy to have a balanced life, basically to spend more time with friends or, I don't know, go to the gym or whatever. And perhaps this is true. So I do try to do my fair bit of exercise or seeing friends occasionally. But in the end, I can tell you that this is truly a passion. I really want Stakewise to succeed and be the leading staking platform on ethereum, like liquid staking platform. So I don't think that I will comfortably rest or pick up any hobbies until this is true. So, yeah, we'll see how long it lasts.
[0:48:03] Rudy: Yeah, I think you're going to do just fine. I guess I'll leave with the last question. What made you smile the most recently?
[0:48:15] Kirill: Yeah, again, I think in the private conversation we kind of went over this and I would feel disingenuous if I said the same thing. So I'll try to come up with something else. Yeah. I previously said that I was genuinely happy for Dima, getting recognition for being an amazing builder in the space and building Stakewise and advancing the values that we share as a community in the vulnerability that he disclosed. But now I would say what makes me smile is Statewise getting gradual adoption, like receiving gradual adoption in the D five space. We just randomly learned about being included in the fuse pool. Even though it's small, it's actually good that people are starting to notice. It's honestly been pretty or not noticed. People have been noticing us for a long time. And I know that a lot of people know about Stakewise, but somehow we have not generated significant amounts of TVL yet from it. But I do know that after this recent thing, I think we're definitely being treated more seriously. What made me smile or happy is this recent inclusion into the fuse pool. It's a small win, but the win nonetheless. And, yeah, like all the other things that are going for us, we need to capitalize on them.
[0:49:52] Rudy: That's amazing.
[0:49:53] Kirill: And I'm also actually very excited about meeting all the people that have been previously only chatting via the Internet when I go to Lisbon next week for the call.
[0:50:01] Rudy: Take pictures.
[0:50:04] Kirill: Yeah. I'm not a fan of pictures somehow, like, a lot we're taking, like, other people. But, yeah, if I am on any.
[0:50:13] Rudy: I'll share them, give their community what they want. Thank you so much, Carol, for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. I'll let you get back to enjoying your Friday.
[0:50:25] Kirill: Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much, Rudy. And thanks for the great questions and the great chat. Enjoyed it a lot. And yeah, you have a good week.
[0:50:34] Rudy: Thank you. You too. See everybody.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wholesomecrypto.com
42 min
October 20, 2021 Brantly.eth - Director of OPs for ENS Domains
Brantly.eth shares his stories about bringing crypto into the Catholic church and working for ENS Domains, all while raising 6 kids!
Brantly.eth
ENS Domains

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wholesomecrypto.com
35 min
October 14, 2021 Hudson Jameson - Ops at Flashbots, Co-Founder of ETH Cat Herders, Tabletop RPG podcaster
Hudson Jameson is a veteran of the crypto space, having been involved in the industry since 2011. Over the course of his career, he has worked for the Ethereum Foundation, co-founded the Ethereum Cat Herders for educational purposes, and was recently a candidate for the Zcash Open Major Grants Committee. Despite his struggles with OCD, ADHD, bipolar type two, and anxiety - which came to a peak in 2020, leading him to voluntarily enter a mental hospital - Hudson has shown that if someone has initiative, is willing to learn, and has relevant experience, they can make meaningful progress in the crypto space.In a recent podcast conversation, Hudson opened up about his mental health journey and his experience at the Meninger Clinic in Houston, Texas, where he stayed for three weeks to receive treatment and be evaluated. He is open about his mental health and how it has affected his career, but emphasizes that he is still able to contribute and make meaningful progress in the industry.Hudson's career has been focused on blockchain technology since college, where he discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and followed his interest in network security and penetration testing into the industry. His first job out of college was at USAA, where he worked on a proof of concept for Ethereum, which he then went on to work for after attending Defcon One in 2015. He was responsible for revamping the EIPs and restarting the all core dev calls while he was there, and has also been involved in the Zcash community since at least 2016. Ultimately, he left the Ethereum Foundation in April 2020 and took some time off, during which he joined Flashbots for their work in democratizing and minimizing Major Extractable Value (MEV) on the blockchain.Hudson is passionate about the progress of the industry and takes joy in the small moments in life. He is a multi-coin believer and hopes that in the future, everyone will have their own blockchain on their phone. In his free time, he enjoys watching TV, hanging out with friends, going to bars, playing Overwatch, and hosting a podcast called Tabletop Squad, which is a Star Wars Edge of the Empire role playing game. He is also part of a Discord group called Web Three Baddies, which is a place for underrepresented groups in crypto to collaborate, learn, and meme. Hudson believes that the lack of representation in crypto is due to a lack of care, rather than ill intent, and is passionate about addressing oppression and sexual assault in the community, as he has experienced many crypto conferences and heard stories of assault.Hudson's story is one of resilience and perseverance. He is an example of how showing care and taking initiative in the industry can make a big difference and continue to drive progress in the crypto space.
Links
* @hudsonjameson
* FlashBots
* Ethereum Cat Herders
* Tabletop Squadron
Transcript
[0:00:00] Rudy: Hi, Hudson. Thank you for joining me. You have an extensive background in crypto projects, so I'm really glad that you took the time out to speak with me today and love to learn a little bit more about you. So, again, glad that you're here.
[0:00:15] Hudson: Thank you so much for having me. This is really exciting.
[0:00:19] Rudy: Yeah, it is for me, too. There's so much you've worked on and done. So, before we get into your background of being in the USAA, ethereum foundation, ethereum Cat, Herder, Z, Cash, flashbox what were you doing before you even heard about cryptocurrencies? Before you even heard about Bitcoin?
[0:00:37] Hudson: Well, I guess I've always been, as a kid, really interested in computers and video games. Before I had friends, I would just be on computers, joining online communities like a lot of people, and got into like, RuneScape and a thing called Cartoon Orbit.
[0:00:54] Rudy: RuneScape was good. I remember that.
[0:00:56] Hudson: Yeah, RuneScape was awesome. And after middle school and getting into high school, I joined all the computer classes I could in high school. None of them there were programming classes, but I grew up in northeast Texas, in the US. In a smallish town called Texarkana. So the options weren't super available for computers and programming classes that were sufficient to actually teach you. It was kind of like they just throw a book at you.
[0:01:27] Rudy: Good luck. Here it is.
[0:01:29] Hudson: Yeah, but I did, in high school play around with network security and got really interested in hacking and network security and penetration testing and stuff like that. So I did a high school advanced credit project with War driving, where I put, like, an antenna on top of my car and plugged it into a laptop and drove around and mapped out the city's WiFi and took statistics on how many were open networks versus secured by this protocol versus another protocol and did a whole report on that. So that was a fun thing to do. And my whole idea before crypto was I was going to do network security, penetration testing, that kind of stuff, and that's what I was training for before I fell into crypto.
[0:02:19] Rudy: Wow. It's pretty awesome. I can just imagine you driving around in a car with an antenna. Sticky. Now we have our cell phones that can just do that for us, which is pretty insane. Did you ever look into cryptography before that, or was cryptography just new to you when you heard about crypto?
[0:02:37] Hudson: Cryptography definitely was interesting to me. I ran one of the earlier versions of hashcat to crack passwords and stuff, so I had to look into stuff for like, what does this mean? What are all these different types of things you can password crack, and why does it take longer for GPUs versus CPUs and stuff? And so that was kind of a way that I got involved in enjoying cryptography topics, but I never got deep into the math or anything. It was one of my favorite college classes. I had a computer science degree and I did computer security, network security and cryptography. And it was enjoyable and I learned a lot that I kind of carried over into understanding some crypto things today, but I never applied it viably for work.
[0:03:34] Rudy: Did you have a job right out of college that you were working out before getting into crypto?
[0:03:39] Hudson: Yeah, so I discovered crypto, specifically Bitcoin in 2011 while I was in college and did some projects in college around mining and just kind of kept up with it. But my first job out of college was a bank and insurance company called USAA. And that job was really cool because it was one of the better banks in the US to work for. They were really relaxed about the needs of their employees, or not relaxed, but they supported employees, basically. And the first year I worked in the entrance department doing mainframe development with Cobalt and stuff, and I sucked at it. I was never a great developer in the first place. I guess early on the plan was to get a computer science degree or this is kind of my plan, plus Mom's plan, like, we work together on this, where it was like, get a computer science degree so then you can manage people.
[0:04:35] Rudy: She knew what she was talking about.
[0:04:38] Hudson: Yeah, definitely. So then I basically annoyed my bosses at USAA about my cryptocurrency obsession and stuff with smart contracts and blockchains enough that they moved me to the Innovation Department to lead their blockchain program in 2015.
[0:04:55] Rudy: Wow.
[0:04:56] Hudson: So, yeah, it was pretty early for USAA, so while I was there, I worked on proof of concept six of Ethereum. So this was early 2015 or something like that. We did some internal hackathons where we made some smart contracts to do check representment, which basically means you would compare two checks using the Ethereum blockchain to see if they've been deposited at a.
[0:05:22] Rudy: Different banks to prevent now they're still using us today. Do you know if they are?
[0:05:28] Hudson: Oh, it was a hackathon project inside USAA. They never put in production. There is a patent for it that I did get awarded, like my name on it. But USA owns the of course, they.
[0:05:39] Rudy: Refunded the whole thing. Yeah, it's awesome. I don't have any patents under my name, so that's pretty cool. And that's awesome how they actually were allowing you to innovate and go out with this because so many companies just shut down the idea of blockchain or cryptocurrency immediately.
[0:05:56] Hudson: Yeah, absolutely. It definitely has had its up and downs. Innovation used to be a big part of USAA, I've heard recently. It's kind of waned, but yeah, they were very open, at least while I was there, to blockchain stuff and having me get involved in different initiatives to study different consortiums. And, like, this was before we had Cosmos and before we had a lot of different things. There was just, like, bitcoin and then there was like, one private blockchain, like Consortium Blockchain project that used tendermint and it was called Aris Industries and they renamed themselves to something else later. But it's just really weird to think back to. And consensus was just starting out too. So we had calls between USAA, USA executive, myself and like, Joe Lee back in 2015 that did not go anywhere.
[0:06:52] Rudy: But it's still a good conversation to have because now they're thinking about it, oh, you could have done things so much more differently, but everything is hindsight. So then you're working at USAA and then you moved into Ethereum Foundation because of your work there and you got recognized for it.
[0:07:17] Hudson: Here's what it is. During my time at USAA, I got really obsessed with Ethereum. Like, the white paper really stuck out to me and I got involved in the community moderating, the subreddit, and I saw that Defcon One in 2015 was happening. And so I scrounged some money together and flew overseas to London and went to Defcon One. And the first day I was there, I got there early and I saw that there were not enough volunteers. There was just a lack of people being able to do stuff, and everyone was running around panicking. So I said, how can I help? And I got put in charge of helping with badges. I helped do some of the scheduling, I sold T shirts. I was a timekeeper I helped interact with AV and the convention, like the center, the building staff, stuff like that. So basically sorting around, doing just whatever they needed me to do. And in that, I got recognized by the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation at the time, Ming Chan, who kept in touch with me and offered me a job a bit after I was there. I should say I got offered the job like months after, but I had to wait a few more months after that because of work. But I left in June of 2016 from USAA to join the Ethereum Foundation initially to work on DevCon too, and to do DevOps work were the two primary things. But while I was at the EF, I did like a bunch of different stuff.
[0:08:52] Rudy: Yeah, I feel like that's a great way to describe your startup story, is just jumping from different job to job, talking to people, networking, and I think it's pretty difficult to accomplish that now because now you really have to show your credibility, your proof of work on GitHub or whatnot. And it's awesome that you had the opportunity to actually scrounge up enough money to go to a Def con. That's an awesome story.
[0:09:19] Hudson: Yeah, really. Interestingly enough with the theorem, especially in the early days, if you showed up and you contributed code to GitHub, if you contributed volunteering at conferences on managing discords or discord, wasn't it? So managing Getter or any of those kind of chat channels or Reddit and being prolifically posting on Reddit or Twitter, you would get somewhere. And that still applies today to an extent. It's a little harder to navigate. But we're so thirsty for talent in the crypto space within the jobs that we are like the jobs and startups and projects that we have that if you show initiative and have any kind of relevant experience or even if you don't. But you're willing to learn and you put your time into getting certifications that might be relevant from coursera. Then you get somewhere. It does happen, I guess. I would agree with you, though. It is more difficult to do just because we're larger, so it's hard to know where to start and who to talk to.
[0:10:24] Rudy: Definitely. And I definitely had an experience like that myself back in 2017, just being super active in the Ethereum subreddit. And I think they started their own Telegram channel or Chat and I was super active in there and then also made a bunch of friends and, you know, stay connected. That's what kind of helped me network in the cryptocurrency industry and I'm still using that today. So yeah, for anyone listening to always just stay active and contribute quality material.
[0:10:54] Hudson: Absolutely. Ethereum is super unique in that even though we've grown, it still feels small to a lot of people and there's a lot of now subcommunities that are very welcoming. So, yeah, it's a good deal all around. Early Ethereum was different because we all were very wide eyed and idealistic, and a lot of us still are. But there's been so many events that some of the veterans or old timers for Ethereum are kind of battered and beaten now to the realities of SEC enforcement and major hacking incidents and people losing a lot of money and crying.
[0:11:40] Rudy: To them and getting scammed. And it's not our fault. We're trying to help, but we can. Yes, that's the thing about crypto too, is you really own your own money. It's yours. No one else can help you bring it back. It's yours. So your responsibility. Yeah. That's awesome. And then, so you're in the Ethereum Foundation. You're working there. What's your next step? What's your next move? Are you hungry for more?
[0:12:07] Rudy: Are you just looking for opportunities?
[0:12:10] Hudson: Yes. In 2016, I joined the Ethereum Foundation. Devon Two was in Shanghai, and that was successful. Me and my spouse, Lillett, worked Defcon Two and did a lot of things to help run it during that time. Also, I was kind of put to be responsible for revamping the EIPS Ethereum improvement proposals because they weren't very active at the time and the EIP One had been stagnant. So I rewrote EIP One in 2016, 2017, like maybe early 2017, and got some more editors together. I also started up or restarted, however, the all core dev calls, which are the every two weeks there's a zoom call with all the Ethereum core developers from different client projects and stuff like that. And we figure out when there's security vulnerabilities, we talk about it, we talk about what's going to be going into hard forks, how to do network improvements and things like that. So I ran that until April of this year and then Tim Bico took over. So that was kind of another thing I picked up while I was at the EF. And then our communications lead, George Hallam left sometime around 2017. So I took on their role as the communications lead for a year and then through other circumstances I became this security lead. So kind of like the person who makes policy decisions for security in response to internal hacking incidents. I did that for a few years, so I got experience there in the middle of all that I always forgot. I did a start up with some friends called Oak and Innovation, which is an IoT and blockchain startup where we kind of got our start by doing hackathons, including hacking a Tesla to make it pay for itself when it goes through a toll road using Aetherium.
[0:14:13] Hudson: And we want to do a buy like worldwide hackathon for like $100,000. And that was our store.
[0:14:19] Rudy: Wow, that's awesome. So you guys and your team, I guess, hacked a Tesla. How does that even work? How would you yeah, so I say.
[0:14:28] Hudson: Hack a Tesla because that's kind of like the line to go with. But in reality we use the odd port or odd port which is basically yeah, it's like under the steering wheel usually and it'll give you data from what the car is doing at that current time, like where it's going, how fast it's going, if it's turning. Yada yada. And we're translating that data into and attaching GPS data to it in order to figure out where it is on the road and if it's going through a tollway. And then we also have the receiver, what's it called? We had like a little fake toll road yeah, like transponder in the middle of the window and it would indicate when it went through the toll road. We could combine that with the cars data from the port and then pay for it on Aetherium without going through a bunch of different silos. That's the thing I wish I would see more of is like I want Startups to use Ethereum to be the middle person. disintermediator. More like to be something that breaks down these business silos that have been like whenever you pay for a toll right now, you have your credit card attached to some page for your toll road, and then they go through, like, probably six different systems, some of them probably as old as the 1970s, in order to process the payment and process the information about where you are on the tollway versus when you get off the tollway. And that goes through like old school IDM systems and all this other crap and it's like, take all that away, have one smart contract that is also the payment Rails, and think of how much simpler that is. That's what people used to look at Aetherium now. I've said, like a Rambling holding. That's what they used to think. That's what people used to think about Ethereum.
[0:16:14] Hudson: Yeah, like four years ago. But now it's kind of changed to, like, that's still kind of an idea.
[0:16:24] Rudy: But it's not that's always a battle, too. You always hear people saying, does it need a blockchain? Does it need to be on a theorem? Does it just need a basic database? So it's always that, is it worth it or not? And it's always anything with tolls and government regulations tough to crack into.
[0:16:42] Hudson: Yeah, I did Open Innovations while working at USAA, and that was a mistake because that's a lot of work and I got burned out. So I quit Open Innovations after a year, but then I helped them a little bit after that, but not unofficially. And I went back full time to Ethereum Foundation. And when I went back to the Ethereum Foundation, there was a transition from the old executive director, Ming Chan, to the new one, Aya Miaguchi. And so I did some help in facilitating parts of that and getting on boarded. And yeah, I think after that I kept working with DevOps. I did some community initiatives. I co founded the Ethereum Cat Herders in 2019, like January 2019 with a few people, and that's been very successful. They're basically an educational and coordination organization with an Ethereum that does notetaking at meetings and also releases YouTube videos with education.
[0:17:51] Rudy: Is this an automated software you develop with your team? Or is it like team members who help with project management?
[0:17:57] Hudson: Oh, it's team members who help with project management. Like a Dow, but we're not really Dowified yet. It's just people helping with project management and kind of becoming experts at a theorem. It's a good way to onboard yourself to Ethereum because if you're a note taker for the core developer or E two meetings, then you learn a lot. We publish those notes to the GitHub repo so everyone can see them and correct them if they need to and stuff like that.
[0:18:26] Rudy: You're going to so many different places in the industry. It's pretty amazing how quick you transition. Then you're still doing all this, and then you have time to be also part of a Z cash open major grants.
[0:18:39] Hudson: Oh, yeah. So just for timeline's sake. So I guess I did I think it was between 2007 and 2008 is when I did Open Innovations. I was still at the EF, and then Catherine's was January 2019. And then I got involved in the Zcash. I've not been officially involved in the Zcash community, but I've been adjacent to them since at least 2016 because that's when I met, I think, Zuko and a few other of the Zcash scientists who were developing an early iteration of Zcash on Ethereum. I think this was a little bit after the Dow, it was called Baby Zoe and it was a way to put Zcash on Ethereum. But there would need to be a lot of updates with low level pre compiled and the client code that weren't there. So it was a proof of concept. But all that to say, from there I went to ZCON Zero, which was like the first Zcash conference. I think that was a year or two later. And so I got to know more of their team and I spoke there on how Ethereum and Zcash are kind of cooperative. And really I feel like of all the other blockchain projects, zcash is the most friendly to Ethereum and we're kind of like besties. Zach and Ethereum were besties. So we have a lot of back and forth.
[0:20:06] Hudson: We share technology, we've done partnerships with them within the EF. So then in 2020, I ran for the Zcash Open major Grants Committee, which was an election that the community voted on for who would decide where grant funding goes. Oh, and this is important. The grant funding comes from a block reward subsidy in Zcash. The Zcash block reward used to have part of the block reward go to founders and then that expired after, I think, two years. So then it was like, well, what do we do with that part? Do we give it back to minors or do we do like block reward funding? And so they decided on block reward funding where a portion of it goes to the Electric Coin Company, the for profit Z Cash Company, zcash foundation, the nonprofit, and then ZOMG, which is technically under the Z Cash Foundation but independent entity, and that it makes its own decisions.
[0:21:03] Rudy: That's a long hierarchy.
[0:21:06] Hudson: Yeah, so anyways, each of those have a different block reward. And our block reward is in the millions by now, like accumulated and we've given out millions. But it's a five person committee. I'm running for reelection right now for that and that's going to all voted.
[0:21:21] Rudy: On under the Zcash blockchain.
[0:21:26] Hudson: So the election isn't actually none of the voting happens there right now. The Z Cash blockchain is pretty simple compared to Ethereum in that it's a UTXO blockchain like bitcoin, it's a fork of Bitcoin. So they don't have like Dows or voting mechanisms that are advanced. They have very simple smart contracts.
[0:21:45] Rudy: Got you. Wow. So now you're here and now you're still working for or still part of Ethereum cat herders and you've also recently moved to Flashbots and helping their community.
[0:22:02] Hudson: Yes. I left the Ethereum Foundation in April. 5 years was a long time to work in crypto anywhere continuously for me at least. So I left and then I took some months off. I had a stint in a mental hospital. I voluntarily put myself in for the month of July.
[0:22:22] Rudy: Wow, that was exciting. Can I ask more about that.
[0:22:25] Hudson: Yeah, I'm very open about my mental health and happy to talk about it.
[0:22:29] Rudy: Yeah, I guess. Why did you was it just too much going on in your life with work and you had to take a break, or is it more?
[0:22:38] Hudson: Yeah. So I guess why I went. I had also been voluntarily entered one the year before in 2020, and both times it was because my mental health problems had gotten to a peak where I felt it was best that I was in a safe place where I could be evaluated. And my mental health problems consist of OCD, ADHD, primarily an attentive because they have new designations now for ADHD. And then there's also bipolar type two, and I think I might be missing one. Yeah. Anxiety. So basically I have this mix of stuff and I'm on medicine for it. And the medicine sometimes doesn't work or not like, sometimes doesn't work, but after a while it will wear off.
[0:23:30] Rudy: Yeah, you get used to it.
[0:23:33] Hudson: My body gets used to it and stuff. So I was taking a variety of medicines and I came to a point where things were overwhelming. I wasn't getting out of bed. A lot of my symptoms revolve around suicidal ideation. So not actually going and committing suicide or trying to or anything like that. It's just like obsessive intrusive thoughts. So they thoughts that you don't want to have, but they're just going to happen.
[0:24:03] Rudy: Okay.
[0:24:04] Hudson: So basically they were just happening and happening, laying there for like four or 6 hours, not being able to stop thinking about it. I was like going to put myself somewhere safeguard, put myself somewhere where I can get evaluated. And so I went to a very good clinic. So the first time, I guess in 2020 this happened, I went to a place that wasn't as good. It was still the best one in my area, but it was like an actual cycle. Yeah. This one I went to recently in July was called Meninger Clinic in Houston, Texas. And it was a three week stay and had a lot of great amenities and excellent food. Everyone was nice. I had a doctor and psychiatrist and therapist designated to me, like, assigned to me, I guess, to evaluate me. And we did genetic testing and all kinds of neuropsych testing to figure out where my root issues were and what medicines I should be on.
[0:25:04] Rudy: I'm glad they looked into their root issues too, instead of just trying to put drugs on you, like, hey, Garrett, go on with your day. It's good that they're actually trying to help the mental health. It's good that you went on yourself too. It's amazing. So congratulations on that.
[0:25:19] Hudson: Thanks. Yeah. I recommend everybody do research before you go. I didn't do as much research in 2020, and I ended up having to pay a large ambulance bill. When I got to a place, they didn't have room and they had to bring me to another facility. And then also I didn't realize certain facilities. Once you enter, you can't leave till they say so.
[0:25:37] Rudy: That's scary, especially if you're putting yourself in.
[0:25:41] Hudson: Yeah, exactly. So it just really varies place to place. But if anyone who's listening has any questions on this, my Twitter DMs are open. Like I'm an open book, and you can ask me questions about this or about Meninger Clinic or anything.
[0:25:52] Rudy: Amazing. Yeah. If anyone else look into that, please take that offer up.
[0:25:57] Hudson: Yeah, I went to Flashbots in September. That's where I was getting at. So after I left there, I joined Flashbots in September, and I've been there for about a month, almost a month and a half, I guess.
[0:26:09] Rudy: Yeah, I remember you posted on Twitter saying that you're joining Flash bots. So I looked more into it too. It feels like it's going so unnoticed and it's kind of a big deal what they're doing. Am I the only one, or is it something that I'm not seeing it the way I'm supposed to be seeing it? I'd love to hear more about it.
[0:26:29] Hudson: The reason it's going unnoticed is because it's a very low level, protocol level concept that's like very technical, I guess, for listeners who don't know what flashbox does is they do research and development for Democratizing and minimizing mev, which is Major Extractable value. And what that means is when you submit a transaction, it goes to the miners and they put it in blocks and the blocks go on the blockchain. When you submit that transaction before it goes to the miners, it goes into what's called a transaction pool, and they line up all the transactions and then whichever minor is elected to create the next block, they get to pick and choose transactions based on your transaction fee. So, like, they might pick a transaction fee that's higher than someone else's. However, major Extractable value is any value that can be extracted by the miner that may or may not be seen. And what I mean by that is maybe the miner sees a transaction that hasn't hit the chain yet, that someone is attempting to buy a coin for one coin of Hudson token for $50 on unit swap. So then the miner will rearrange the transaction or submit their own transaction ahead that says, oh, I'm going to undercut them, cause the price to go up on unit swap, and then reap the rewards in that same block. So that's like kind of front running, and then there's multiple kinds of mev, but like, front running is one of them where you kind of go ahead of someone trading and then bump the price up to reap the arbitrage opportunity. There, there's many others. And before what it was is if you were a large mining pool with the resources to hire a developer for guest or client that could do me the extraction, they would just do it and no one was tracking it. And only the big minoring pools could do it because they have the software necessary and the money to hire the software developers. So these little mining pools were maybe getting more transaction fees, but this invisible arbitrage money like this dark forest people call it, was going undetected and they were making a ton of money. So now what flashbox did was they said, well, this is a problem that we can't solve right now at the protocol level. There's not a way to solve it at the protocol level that we know of, and it will take years of research. So instead, let's make it visible to everybody.
[0:29:01] Hudson: So you can use Flashbot software to go in and submit what's called bundles, which are like arbitrage opportunities and other things to minors and get rewards for the miners using your opportunities. It's all transparent. Anyone can become a searcher. The majority of mining pools on the network use flashbox. And because of that, we've been able to run a lot of good data. We have data products that take in statistics on this stuff. And it's incredibly interesting to see the proliferation of it and also to see the strategies some smart contracts and projects are using to avoid this. So there's stuff you can do with the smart contract level. Flashbots also released an API or an RPC interface. And what that means is you can go into MetaMask and you know how you can change from like maintenance to Robston or whatever. You can change it to flashbox RPC. And what that is, is that's a direct line to a minor. You kind of bypass the Min pool in a way, and you don't get front runner mev extracted.
[0:30:07] Rudy: Wow. I guess it sounds like it could or was a problem, but I heard that Aetherium too isn't going to necessarily fix this issue where people can distract those values. So this is going to just be something that we're going to have to live with and hope that it becomes commonly used and kind of like the entire network is just kind of dispersed using Flashbots to kind of even the playing field.
[0:30:41] Hudson: Yes. For ETH two, I'm not as intimately familiar with the research, but there are some good ETH research form threads and also the flashboards discord might have some discussion about this. Basically, there are multiple ways you can set up the client and proposer, like block proposer separation with any two to make it more or less viable for Flashbots to work democratically. I don't know all the details. I know that during the recent trip that theorem core developers had, mev did come up and Flashbots, we had Flashbots people, a flashbox person there to kind of direct the discussion towards solutions. And so I think that it may not be in the first iteration of the merge, but that is being kept in mind for sure. Like it's not top priority. But it's being kept in mind so that we have the most fair, most equitable solution to something that is really hard to fix.
[0:31:48] Rudy: Yeah, it sounds like it. And I guess what motivated you to join Flashbots? What was the factors? Just doing a social good, helping out the community.
[0:31:59] Hudson: Yeah, so when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I thought to myself, I don't want to be on a DFI or NFT project. Probably because I don't like the greed and blockchain. And that's not to say every NFT and DFI project is greedy, but it's very hyper capitalistic, which I don't really jive with. I want to do something that's like solving a really important problem and also working with a team of really nice people who I get along with. Those are kind of my big things. Another factor that helped a lot was like a team that has diversity is an important trait when hiring or when building out their team and community and keeping that in mind. And I felt like Flashbots had all three of those important problem, awesome people, diversity, interest.
[0:32:50] Rudy: It's awesome. Yeah. And I'm part of the flashbox Discord channel, so I'm definitely just trying to learn as much as I can. But yeah, it's super technical and I'm like, oh man, I got to a lot to learn because I'm definitely understanding it in a high level view. But when you get into the code, it's like something else but a lot of fun. I'm glad to actually learn something that's going on in the protocol level versus just the trading level. Yeah, you have all this going on. Like, what do you do for fun then? So how do you spend your time?
[0:33:25] Hudson: So I live in Texas right now with my spouse and three cats, and we like to watch different shows. I like to hang out with friends, go to bars. As far as hobbies, I'm trying to find more hobbies, something that me, my spouse, and my therapist have evaluated. Is that Hudson? You've been doing blockchain for so long, you don't have hobbies, you just have blockchain. You're just on Discord all the time and Twitter. And I'm like, you're right. You're calling me out. You're right. So I do have a few things that I want to pick back up on is VHS to digital conversion. So like VHS tapes, I have like professional tape decks and time based correctors and stuff like that and software and like a really good computer to take my old home movies and other tapes and convert them into YouTube files and their files for YouTube and stuff. Also there's something called Lost Media Wiki, which is where people collect lost media, meaning like, maybe it aired once on TV and you can't buy it now, so it was never seen again. So I was going to dig through boxes of old VHS tapes that I find at garage sales and stuff and look for maybe taped recordings of stuff that happened on TV but were never found. And then people contribute to that wiki. So I'm like, oh, I have the equipment for that.
[0:34:58] Hudson: I like to travel to, but other than that, oh, I guess to play Overwatch. So, yeah, that's fine.
[0:35:06] Rudy: Overwatch guy, that's pretty good. I've played that once but wasn't too into it. I'm definitely more of like a single player RPG types game because I'm just like, give me the story. I want to hear it and I want to actually beat it because sometimes I spend too much time on video games. Like, I have to stop.
[0:35:25] Hudson: I also have a podcast called Tabletop Squad that I do with my spouse and two friends. It's a Star Wars Edge of the Empire role playing game podcast where I play a Wookie. So basically, my friend Nick GM's is the game master and they build the story and then we participate in kind of an improv like way, and we have it as a podcast and we've been doing it for like three and a half.
[0:35:49] Rudy: That's cool. So you play the game kind of live and just, well, record it.
[0:35:53] Hudson: Yeah. So it's like it's Dungeons and Dragons, but Star Wars.
[0:35:58] Rudy: That's a beautiful thing about the game, right? You can kind of just make whatever type of theme and scenario you want.
[0:36:03] Hudson: Yeah. And it's not the same company as Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, but it's similar in that you're improving and stuff like that. So, yeah, that's pretty good right now. But the new season of Bob's Burgers is on and also what we do in the Shadows, those are both two excellent shows.
[0:36:19] Rudy: I've watched a few episodes of Bob's and I have not watched into the Shadows yet.
[0:36:25] Hudson: What we do in the shadows is awesome. You might watch the movie and then watch the show.
[0:36:31] Rudy: I know the movie. Okay.
[0:36:33] Hudson: Yeah.
[0:36:34] Rudy: Worth it right now. I was actually watching Vikings the first time.
[0:36:40] Hudson: I think my spouse, Lillett, watched that. And was there like, just like, a lot of gay characters or am I thinking of the pirate show?
[0:36:48] Rudy: I think we're thinking of the pirate show.
[0:36:51] Hudson: Okay.
[0:36:51] Rudy: There wasn't any gay characters. There maybe one or two, but okay.
[0:36:56] Hudson: I'm thinking of this. Someone in the comments of your podcast is going to be like, I know the show he's talking about. It's that pirate show.
[0:37:02] Rudy: Someone clarify it for us, please. Yeah, we need to know now. Wow. You're spending all this time in crypto and you have all these great hobbies, but for me, it's always like to ask everybody, what is your crypto pet peeve? What kind of drives you nuts in the industry that you wish would just change?
[0:37:20] Hudson: Oh, yeah, a crypto pet peeve. So there's a few things. One of them is that I feel like there is a lack of understanding around. I'll put it this way, I'm getting really annoyed lately at bitcoin maximalist who have a lack of understanding about the mechanisms and the governance and how decisions are made around other coins. There's like the assumptions that Vitalik makes all the decisions and that we're centralized. I've heard that stuff like that. The most recent one the most recent one I heard was that and this is from Pete Rizzo, who's a friend of mine, and I need to talk to him more about this. But like he's now kind of pushing this narrative that Bitcoin will never hard fork again. And because of that, it has a distinct advantage over other coins because in Bitcoin, even if you disagree with the upgrades that are happening, they're all soft forks, so you don't lose your coins. Whereas if you are in ethereum, you are coerced to upgrade or else you lose access to your coins. And I'm like, I can see the middle gymnastics you did there, but it's not the same if you're not going to innovate or allow for hard forks. Bitcoin wasn't immaculately conceived. They've had a ton of hard forks.
[0:38:53] Rudy: Even early on they've had it. I remember being through them. It's pretty common.
[0:39:00] Hudson: Yeah. And it's like they might have more stringent ways to measure community sentiment about it and stuff. But to say that they won't hard fork again, like, bitcoin is great as it is. It won't need a correction when there's like quantum crypto coming and stuff like that.
[0:39:16] Rudy: Yeah, definitely. I love Bitcoin, I love Aetherium, I love them both. I think they're each great for their individual reasons, but I don't see one coin ever ruling them all. I don't think that's going it's just not a human nature. Not that it can't happen, but humans like to compete. They like to try different things and experiment. It's just bound to happen.
[0:39:36] Hudson: I'm definitely a multi coin feature kind of guy. Like, much in the future, vision is going to be something like everybody, and this is going to sound silly and technically not a blockchain, but I think it'll morph into this. I think everyone will have their own blockchain on their phone, that they will have a consensus mechanism we haven't dreamed of yet that will let you have only your friends be a part of it, but can share data from a main public chain. Electively.
[0:40:07] Rudy: I'm excited for this one.
[0:40:10] Hudson: Yeah, there's a lot of holes in what I just said, but I guess I'm kind of thinking like as we have multichains and stuff like Cosmos coming up that allow for cross chain swapping of assets and knowledge and information and also solving some composability problems. It will be a no brainer to have these kind of bring back the concept of consortium chains where you have a subset of people who may not need the same security requirements as the main chain. Use a subchain that is a little less strict.
[0:40:49] Rudy: I think you talk like that as if it's going to be a long time before it happens, but it just might not be. Things are moving so freaking fast nowadays, it's hard to especially with different blockchains like helium network where they're really trying to get people to run a node at home easily and kind of have proof of coverage where hopefully one day we won't even need to rely on ISPs anymore. We kind of just run our own internet or intranet. Yeah, I don't know how it's going to work, but that's exciting for me, I think because most of the arguments now it's that crypto is taking too much energy. Okay, we're going to proof of stake. Okay, but what happens if the internet and power go down then? Okay then yeah, we don't have anything but there's bigger problems to worry about if we don't have internet and power than money.
[0:41:40] Hudson: Yeah, absolutely. If the power goes, it's like I want bitcoin for when the world collapses. I'm like, so what, are you going to access the satellite somehow?
[0:41:49] Rudy: What are you going to do? It's exciting but we'll see how that goes on. One of my last questions for you is what made you smile the most recently? What just gave you an ear to ear smile? Anything doesn't have to be crypto.
[0:42:12] Hudson: I have a couple of answers. Probably one of them is seeing my cat be really cute. We like petting our cat and that's always a good time. And I was on a Twitter spaces last night and some people joined and one of them was from a discord group I joined recently called Web Three Baddies and let me pull up what was said. So basically it's the hot girl metaverse is what they call themselves. It's a place for girlies gays, non binaries and baddies and web theory. So basically it's like a place for underrepresented groups in crypto to kind of collaborate, learn meme around, stuff like that. And I joined that and it's really fun in there, everyone's really nice and so a few of them joined the spaces and one of them asked me, why did you join Web Three Betties? And I was just like, well, I'm bisexual as f**k and you all seem really nice and open to clinician and so now I'm just quoted on the.
[0:43:26] Rudy: Discord, I'm bisexual or put a meme of you.
[0:43:31] Hudson: Yeah, there's a big camp.
[0:43:33] Rudy: That's good. At least they're nice about it.
[0:43:37] Hudson: Yeah, it's actually weirdly enough coming out because I was kind of worried about coming out a couple of years ago in crypto because people can be jerks. Everyone was pretty supportive besides some people with frog icons who weren't real people, like anons and even then it didn't bother me that much. It wasn't that thing. I think diversity is important and people are always like, well why aren't there any black people? I'm like, well, you have to kind of lift up their voices and their content and stuff like that. Same thing with any other diverse group or why are there no women in crypto or any of that stuff LGBTQ? And yeah, you just have to put out there like, I support this. I think diversity is important and put actions to your words.
[0:44:28] Rudy: Yeah, it's amazing that you're doing that and pushing that forward because yeah, I also see a lack of that too. And it's not because that doesn't exist. It's just that we have to look for it. We have to actually keep our eyes open, not just follow the top ten crypto influencers. There's plenty of more people contributing awesome information.
[0:44:48] Hudson: Yeah. And the other thing, this is something I came to realize after a few years in crypto, the lack of speaking up for diversity in crypto, I don't believe is primarily ill intent. And the reason I say that is because many people in crypto are libertarians. And when I talk to them about it or when I hear what they have to say about it, they say, I don't care what you do. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you're black. I don't care if whatever you can be in crypto. And it's like, that's great if you're that welcoming, but if you're not also taking into account the fact how much oppression that those groups have had in recent times, then being in this middle ground of like, I'm not outwardly supporting what you're doing, but I'm not supporting it. It's kind of like this weird middle ground where it's like a lack of care but it's not malicious. It's a weird thing. It's like in order to satisfy the libertarian ethos, they're not going to support you if it's not in their interest, but they're not going to not support you either.
[0:46:00] Rudy: It's weird. Yeah, I guess it's just an easy way to say and do what you want, I don't care, but I just don't want to deal with it type of thing.
[0:46:10] Hudson: Kind of that for some people. Others, it's like they don't realize that there's oppression. They're just like, well, I've never seen it, but I'm like the number of people where we were talking about sexual assault. The sexual assault came up on Twitter or something and people were like, well, I've been to many crypto conferences and I've never seen it. I'm like, well, yeah, you're a white dude. Of course you haven't seen it because you're not a target. And the reason you haven't heard probably is because you aren't following people who have talked about that. Or if you are friends with people who have been assaulted for one reason or another, they haven't told you because they don't feel that your personality or ethos is trustworthy enough to have that information and have a good response to it. I guess like a ton of people have told me all kinds of awful s**t from crypto conferences and no one believes they're like, no one's going to believe me. And I'm like, you're probably right. It's messed up, but there's some stuff happening to help with that. And I think I've heard of some stuff behind the scenes where there's going to maybe be like, code of conduct at crypto conferences eventually. And yeah, that's just something I'm kind of passionate about where I'm just like.
[0:47:23] Rudy: Enough is enough, right? It's like, come on.
[0:47:27] Hudson: Otherwise, other than that, I'm feeling really excited about the future of Ethereum in particular, especially after the core developer thing that just happened. I kind of have always hung around the protocol level stuff. So beyond the gaps and use cases and kind of mind share that's coming into crypto and all the devs we're stealing from Google and Facebook, I thought I was like, you are. Okay. Other than all that, the protocol level stuff is also like it's hard to see because it's kind of boring sometimes, but it's incredibly exciting and everyone should be really excited for the merge coming up next year.
[0:48:10] Rudy: I'm definitely excited for that. I think it's going to be like a huge from what it looks like, it seems like the theorem team is really taking their time with it, which is what's most important, working out all the kinks and bugs. So I'm excited for them. I think it's going to go smoothly and yeah, I mean, I'm also excited for what you're doing, what you're working on. Definitely will continue to follow you and cheer you on as you go on.
[0:48:36] Hudson: Thanks. This has been one of the better podcasts I've recorded on and for anyone listening whose podcast I've been on, where I've also said that that was true for you too. Basically, my outline is if a podcast lets you kind of, like, talk about who you are as a person and they're chill, I love it.
[0:48:54] Rudy: So this is Crypto is about thank you so much, Hudson. I appreciate your time.
[0:49:02] Hudson: No problem. Thank you so much, everyone.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wholesomecrypto.com
46 min
September 28, 2021 Robin Ebers - CPO of Polkastarter
Robin Ebers provides a unique insight into the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, drawing on his own experiences in the industry since 2013. With gripping stories and eye-opening advice, Ebers talks about the highs and lows of investing in crypto, the best projects to invest in, the importance of taking profits off the table, and how to navigate the bear markets. He also speaks about the latest trends in crypto, such as land sales and games, and his opinion on NFTs in the industry. Don’t miss out on this riveting podcast for essential cryptocurrency insights!
This following post was generated using AI via dubb.media 🤖
Transcript
[0:00:00] Rudy Dogum: Welcome, Robin. How's it going? Thank you for coming on the Wholesome Crypto podcast. It's been a long time since we've chatted. I know we've been friends for quite a while, but I'm glad to have you on the show and get to learn a little bit more about you.
[0:00:16] Robin Ebers: Pleasure to be here, man. Happy to talk to you. I always happy to talk to you.
[0:00:20] Rudy Dogum: I know, man.
[0:00:20] Robin Ebers: So yeah, man, I'm happy to be thanks.
[0:00:22] Rudy Dogum: It's always great to talk to you, too. Know you're in Dubai now, but just to get into how you got there and your whole history, I know you've been in a part of a lot of different projects and you've come a long way in the crypto industry. We've been talking to each other since 1716, even earlier.
[0:00:43] Robin Ebers: Yeah, something like that. Something like that. I think we yes, I think so.
[0:00:47] Rudy Dogum: For those of you that don't know, me and Robin have been we first met on the Reddit Telegram crypto channel for Ethereum. Was that that's true?
[0:01:03] Robin Ebers: Eth Trader.
[0:01:03] Rudy Dogum: Eth Trader. And there's like, only a couple hundred people, maybe even a thousand people talking on this channel. And Telegram was just starting out, too, and it was us just being the most active users on there, just chatting away and just shilling Ethereum as much as we can. It was a great time. And then yeah, even though I barely knew you at that point, where were you in life and what were you doing? I mean, I was just new into crypto, too, and so were you. So I would love to learn how it's going for you.
[0:01:42] Robin Ebers: Sure. I love to talk about this because as almost everybody that enters crypto, everybody has, like, super high expectations and it's like, super excited, and everybody does a lot of mistakes, right. Makes a lot of mistakes. So in my case, I actually got into crypto, so I'm from Europe, right. I'm originally German, and originally I'm still German, but I flew to Germany a long time ago. I don't feel like I belong to any country these days, right. But so I at some point, I moved to Malta in Europe, like small islands just underneath Italy. And I had, like, two friends, pete and Martin. There's like, two crazy guys that I work with. And together between the three of us, we discovered Bitcoin in 2013 and late 2013. The price then was about $200 per bitcoin and about like $1.50 or $2 per litecoin. I mentioned those too, because it's like, it's like I love talking about this because to me, like, it was yesterday, but so much has happened in that time. Right, but at that time, when you went to Coin Market Cap I don't even know if Coin Gecko was a thing back then, but I don't think so. When you went to Coin Market Cap, it had like ten or twelve coins or something like that, like some crazy small amount. And yeah, we decided we can gamble a little bit.
[0:03:10] Robin Ebers: So we each took about €500 back then, which is, I don't know, like about $600 or so, approximately. And yeah, we decided that we're going to buy some bitcoin. But then the issue was that at the time, you just couldn't buy it. There was just no way to buy it. Right. So we were researching this for, like, a week or two, and while we were researching this so, mind you, if you look if you look at the bitcoin chart for late 2013, you see that there was one of the first major bull runs, right? So bitcoin went from about $200 upwards, and we literally got to see bitcoin be it, like $200 and think, wow, that sounds like an interest.
[0:03:59] Rudy Dogum: It's kind of expensive.
[0:04:02] Robin Ebers: At this time. I really thought so. I was like, wow, man, this stuff was a couple of dollars not that long ago. Right? Now, it's like $200, but $500, like $600, it's not the world, right? Like, if you have a full time job, it's not that big. So at that time, I was a web developer. I was working. So that was, like, rather dispensable income. And then after two weeks of, like a week and a half or so of really looking, where can we buy it, we just equally saw bitcoin just go up all the time. So it went like, to 253. It's not like today. So all the options there then were bad. Right. At that time, there was one big exchange, which is in famously known Mount Goggles, which at that point was still very much operating.
[0:05:02] Robin Ebers: Right. And we didn't want to go there. I don't remember why. It's not like they had a bad reputation. They had a very good reputation at the time. Right. So I think it was fee related, something like that. And then there was an alternative, which was super shady. So that was like, BTC.
[0:05:22] Rudy Dogum: I remember that.
[0:05:24] Robin Ebers: Yeah, of course, man. They now got busted, in retrospect for actually laundering much of the money that was stolen from Mount Gox, right? So they face trial if they haven't gotten to jail yet. At some point, the guy behind it was captured, and it was a whole story. But these back then allowed to fund a Ukrainian bank account via Swift transfer, which was annoyed me because they're super expensive. So we did that. We went to the bank, and you can imagine if you, like, go to the bank and say you want to make a transfer, they ask you, why would you make a transfer? And it was just $1,500. Like, less than $2,000, less than $2,000. Together, it was like $1,500.
[0:06:15] Rudy Dogum: Let me just put my money.
[0:06:18] Robin Ebers: Yeah, exactly. And they're, like, asking all those questions, and if I'm sure if I want to send money to the Ukraine, dangerous, blah, blah, blah. Right? So we paid all those fees. They gave us like a quote for the fees that they will take. But because of the swift transfer, there will also be a fee on the receiver's end which will also be deducted from the money that we're sending. So that took another week or like ten days easily. Right. So in total we're now talking about like three to four weeks from bitcoin, like $200 on us making the decision of actually buying some to then the money actually arriving, which was at about $650, if I remember correctly. So tripled in price. And then our money arrived, but only about 80% because the rest was just deducted in fees. Thanks. But then we finally managed to buy it, right? So we each bought like, I don't know, like $400 or so worth of bitcoin then. And that wasn't even a full bitcoin at that time anymore.
[0:07:17] Robin Ebers: Right. So we were really frustrated at this point. And then, yeah, we saw bitcoin go up to about $1,100 or so and we thought we were freaking geniuses, right? And then naturally the cycle was over and it dumped really hard. It was one of these days where it doesn't happen today anymore, where bitcoin goes down like 30% or so in a day. It just doesn't happen anymore. Right, but back then that wasn't ongoing, right. There wasn't a lot of value, a lot of volume. And then actually what happened is that one of those friends told me that he wants to get out and if I want to buy it, and so I did. So I bought his share of bitcoin for about the same that we paid for it.
[0:08:07] Rudy Dogum: Now I suspect that was good.
[0:08:11] Robin Ebers: So that was my first interaction with crypto. And then the market was over and I was trying to get into trading, but the fees were like crazy high and much higher than they are today and there were not that many assets to trade back then. There was like feather coin, name coincoin. Yeah, exactly like these type of coins. Right. And I was trying to be smart and this is something that I see with everybody in crypto now. They are trying to trade and be like the master trader of the century, like trying to outsmart everybody. That kind of works when you're in a bull market because anything you buy will eventually pump, but it doesn't work when the cycle just ended. Right. So I lost some money. There probably about like 50% or so what I held at the time and that was it for my crypto at the time. Right. So in the end I got stuck in at least litecoin and not like namecoin or feather coin or something like that and yeah, that was it for a couple of years and then that was roughly at the time when I met you as well. A friend of mine, a very good friend of mine asked me if I've ever heard about ethereum. Ethereum?
[0:09:22] Robin Ebers: Never. Right. Because it didn't exist then. And he told me, yeah, it's this, like, coin similar to Bitcoin, but more complicated. At that time, the concept of smart contract was super arbitrary, right. People didn't really understand. Everybody was just thinking, that not much, really. They just thought it would be like.
[0:09:48] Rudy Dogum: Yeah, no one thought much of it to it.
[0:09:50] Robin Ebers: Yeah, there was no DFI. There was barely any tokens on it yet it was super cheap to interact with the theorem at the time. It literally cost cents back then. Like, it's like BSE today. It's crazy. It was so cheap. And so I bought some for two or $3.
[0:10:08] Rudy Dogum: Wow, nice.
[0:10:09] Robin Ebers: And then not a lot though. Like $200 worth or so, but yeah, that was a lot, right? Yeah. So then with my, like, I don't know, 50 or 100 ethereums or so, I was barely monitoring it. So it's not like today where you, like, refresh your portfolio every day. We're like, yeah, locked down. The market wasn't moving that fast then, right? So at some point, like two weeks later or so, I realized that I don't actually remember the time frame, but I realized that the theorem was like $12. So I was like, whoa, I quadrupled my money. So I sold it naturally, as people do, and that was it, right? And then a couple of months later, or maybe a month or two later, so the same friend asked me, so, man, do you still have your ethereum? No, but I saw that it made four X super nice. And then he told me it was $50. And I was like, classic. Right?
[0:11:05] Robin Ebers: So, yeah, long story short, right? That's when I rebought ethereum. And then I started really getting into it, right? And I really started to try to understand what we can do, start hanging out with like, like minded people. And that's exactly when we met. And I think at that point we started talking a lot, right? I don't even know what we were.
[0:11:32] Rudy Dogum: Just chatting and speculating. It was a whole market and just us, just what's going to be the next one to pump. And I feel like me and you have been through a lot of burns over the years. You've lost some cash. And it's just like, that's when I really learned, like, I'm just going to huddle. I don't care anymore. I don't want to make any more money. I don't care. I just want to huddle with what I have. Because at this point, personally, I just truly believe in the cryptocurrency industry, in the cryptocurrency space, that it's going to change how the world works completely. And it's like, I don't even care about dollar value anymore. I just want to have some crypto just to be part of the industry, part of the space, and learn from other people. Because now it's all about, you know, where the tech has taken us. And I think there's less trade talk and more tech talk, from my opinion, though.
[0:12:24] Robin Ebers: Yeah, I think it depends who you speak to, right? I think there's still a lot of people that trade on a daily basis. Of course I see them, right? And the thing with just buying and holding is that it's an incredibly boring strategy, right? And people don't like that, even though I keep telling them. So whenever somebody talks to me and asks me, hey, can I buy some bitcoin? Or whatever, right? Then the story is always the same. They're always like, okay, how do I buy? Tell me when I can buy. And it's always like, the same story. It's like I have like 5000, 10,000, $20,000 or whatever, can I buy now? And I'm like, don't just like DCA, just buy regularly, set up coinbase, set up binary, it doesn't matter. There are so many tools now, there's even some defy tools. But of course, the people that ask me how to buy bitcoin, they don't know what defy is.
[0:13:25] Robin Ebers: But it's a very boring strategy, right? So it's really, really hard to convince people and though I do my best to convince people to just buy regularly, don't trade hold. But greed is like, if it's not the most powerful, then it certainly is among the most powerful emotions, right, or desires.
[0:13:51] Rudy Dogum: More like one of the seven devices.
[0:13:53] Robin Ebers: Yeah. I have a friend also in Germany now who's asking me for very small amounts, right? So he doesn't want to be bothered with coinbase or whatever, so he's just, like, sending me some money. And he's a good friend, right? So I don't mind doing that, but he's just sending me, like, some PayPal and I sent him like, some ethereum, right? And we're talking about like 50 or $100 minor amounts, and even this guy, right? So, like, one day he's buying ethereum, two weeks later he's buying some bitcoin, and then after three or four weeks, he's starting showing me some screenshots of some s**t coins. It's like, man, see if I would.
[0:14:36] Rudy Dogum: Have bought, if I would have, if I should have, could have, would have. Of course you could have. Of course you would have. It's. Everything is clear in hindsight.
[0:14:43] Robin Ebers: Yeah, exactly. In all 2020 and yeah, but that's that's just such, like I it's I would I would blame them for that if we wouldn't have made the same mistakes, right? We were in so many altcoins in 2016, and now 17 and 18 as well. I lost so many paper games just by not selling into ethereum, bitcoin or even like, dollar that I've just learned that I'm an extremely conservative investor now. But the narrative is always the same. Every time I speak to somebody and I tell them, listen, just by the year and just by bitcoin, they always tell me the same thing, right? They always tell me, yeah, you can do that because you've already made money. But for somebody that hasn't made money yet, they cannot make money with your theorem in bitcoin. That's the narrative, right? Even now you see this, right? There is a reason that they are all in NFTs and altcoins, right? And that bitcoin is not rallying, even though a lot of people come in. So the narrative around bitcoin is even worse because they are like, always talking about how bitcoin is so slow and this is like the boomer crypto. Why are you talking about boomer crypto? And crypto is ten years old.
[0:16:00] Robin Ebers: What are you talking about, man?
[0:16:01] Rudy Dogum: You know, it's like dog years. Every year in crypto is like seven years.
[0:16:07] Robin Ebers: Yeah, it's really nuts, right? But luckily I do, you know, I hope anyway that I go that I get through to these people that want to get into crypto and I hopefully give them some insights and some I always remind them of the simple fact that ethereum was $80 last year. Wow. Last year was it last year during the COVID dip, right, you had like one or two days to buy a theorem at that price, between like 80 and $100. And now it is like, what, three and a half? But you cannot make money with those mainstream coins anymore. Right. It just isn't true. But people want to get rich quick, but get rich quick schemes poorly for.
[0:16:52] Rudy Dogum: Most people don't fall into it.
[0:16:55] Robin Ebers: Yeah.
[0:16:58] Rudy Dogum: After all that, we started looking for positions in the crypto industry. I remember me talking, I think you were developing some crypto portfolio manager and that was pretty awesome. And then I think you led into the next thing, which was you Trust, right?
[0:17:19] Robin Ebers: Yes.
[0:17:19] Rudy Dogum: So what were you doing there?
[0:17:24] Robin Ebers: Let's back up there, because that might be something that your audience is actually interested in. Right? So the reason I got into working with you, trust, was that I didn't actually try, I didn't try to find a job in crypto like a lot of people do now. A lot of people right now, they are constantly asking me, how can I find a job in crypto? I want to start in crypto, right? Like, how can I find a job here? And I didn't try at the time at all. So what happened there was very simple. The company UTRUST, which is like the PayPal of crypto, highly recommended. Check it out. They had a presale for their initial coin offering back in 2017. I want to say I want to say it was sometime like in August, august 17, something like that. And I was part of their presale, so I participated. I bought $1,000 worth of preset or something like that, and then naturally, to protect my investment right. I was very active in their community.
[0:18:28] Robin Ebers: So back then it was very common for projects to have slack channels. Today it's more like discord and telegram. But back then it was mainly slack and I was just very active there. So what happened then is that a lot of people were asking questions. And because I was so active, I answered those questions before the actual team could. Right? And eventually they picked up on that after like a week or two, literally, the CEO of this company DM me and said, hey, man, I wanted to say thank you. I see how much you help out our moderators here. I really appreciate it, and I wanted to ask you if you're available to work for us. And that came completely out of the blue. Right. But the moral of the story is that if you really want to get involved with any crypto projects, then provide value to them, right. It is very hard to find people that you can rely on. Right. This is not only true for crypto, but everywhere.
[0:19:32] Robin Ebers: So if somebody sees that you are in fact valuable, right? That you're trying to help them, that you're trying to answer questions, that you maybe do something for them, maybe you create some graphics for them for fun, maybe, I don't know. There are so many ways to contribute meaningfully to a project, and if they are in fact looking for people that do what you offer, they'll hire you, no doubt, because it's very hard to find them. Right. So that is exactly what happened with Utrecht. So then they made me an offer that they would hire me and pay me for doing what I was doing already for free. Right. So I was very happy about that, and that continued. And I think at some point, they started like a telegram channel as well, and like a reddit. And I think that's when you got involved.
[0:20:23] Rudy Dogum: Yes, and that's when I got involved in trying to work with you on community management and some reddit moderation, which I minorly do today. But it was a really enjoyable experience because both of us were just into the crypto project. And I think that's a message for everyone. If you love a project, just be part of the community. Be contributing member to the community. You will be recognized, you will be seen, and someone will try to pick you up, especially when there is a need.
[0:20:57] Robin Ebers: Yeah, that's it exactly. Yeah. I think then what happened is just very natural progression. We were just working for them. And at some point, it was a bit more complicated for you because you're not in Europe and UTRUST has an office in Portugal. So at some point, the same person that you have to me from Utrecht asked me if I wanted to come to the office, which was like, again, totally out of the blue. Right. It just goes to show that when you are valuable and you work, that's important. Right. So, on the one hand, you have to provide value, but on the other hand, you also need to work with a team that appreciates value, which is not always the case. Right. So it is very easy to get exploited, right?
[0:21:44] Rudy Dogum: Yes.
[0:21:45] Robin Ebers: So you need to be a bit self aware about that.
[0:21:47] Rudy Dogum: Work for a legitimate company, legitimate team.
[0:21:50] Robin Ebers: Yeah. Know your value. Right. Which is, again, this happens so often. Like literally a couple of days ago, somebody from Telegram Group that we're both in, by the way, did YM me and said, listen, I would like to work in crypto but I don't know what I would charge or what I should charge, et cetera. Right. So, yeah, I just gave them some tips because again, I think people naturally tend to more often than not undervalue themselves, but occasionally also overestimate how much they are doing. Right. It is very hard when you're younger and you don't have that much experience as a contractor or in any way of measuring your time or your efforts or your contribution or value, then it's very hard to really measure what you can do. So it will take some practice, maybe you get lucky, maybe a bit unlucky, but over time just always keep grinding. Right. Like always try to see what others are doing, try to educate yourself and if you think that somebody isn't appreciating your value as much as it should, then move on. Right. But generally that's a good way to get into crypto.
[0:23:06] Rudy Dogum: That's the thing everyone talks about proof of work in the crypto industry and that's exactly what you have to do as a person is show proof of work that you can actually do something. In the crypto industry, there's tons of job boards now that have crypto jobs and a lot of them are asking when you apply, they ask, okay, do you have any material that you can show us that you've done? And in the beginning it's really hard because I didn't have anything either. But my only proof of work was here's my proof of messages and interaction with the community and that I'm knowledgeable. So the first one is the hardest and keep growing from there.
[0:23:47] Robin Ebers: Yeah, that's a good point because that's exactly what happened. Right. So after going to the office and getting a bit more involved with Utah, I really just started working a lot closer with them. I got really close to the CEO who now is one of my best friends, literally like my absolute inner circle. So this was just a very good experience where you provided a lot of value, you learned a lot. I still learned from that guy. Right. It's always good to learn from people, but even over the years I'm still learning that's good from the same person. Yeah, for sure. Exactly. Very awesome. And at some point I left UTRUST and started working on some other things. And then a couple of years later, two years later or so, we had, like, a talk and he wanted to do something but that he couldn't because he was involved in UTRUST and he didn't want to sacrifice any of the time that he's putting into UTRUST. But he had this idea together with me where you would have a crypto card, Visa card, and you could just it's similar to Coinbase, right? In a way that you had an app where you could exchange crypto and whatnot and you could borrow against it, which is something that Coinbase of course doesn't do.
[0:25:25] Robin Ebers: Then again, just long story short is a crypto Visa with some app, right? So I did this with a bit of support from him and some other people. So that's again, like where the connection from UTRUST? Or like the person that I threw you trust came into play and just developed more. And then I learned a lot in this position, founding this company, which then funnily enough, was later actually acquired by Full Circle and then once again after this was done and I learned a lot. Again, that was in 2018, right? And then it was acquired in 2019, 2020, I don't remember exactly now. And then in the year of COVID 2020, we slowly saw crypto come back to work and very quickly with the power of what's now known as defy, of course, and automated market makers. That was just an incredible revolution. So nobody was talking about NFTs or something at that point, even though they fully existed, this technology. Everybody thinks NFTs were just like but.
[0:26:42] Rudy Dogum: They'Re still NFCs.
[0:26:48] Robin Ebers: They use the same standard, man, it's crazy. So it's like really they have been around forever, but because we are still in such quickly maturing yet still so like an industry that it's complete infancy, even though it's been around like twelve years now, 1011 years or something like that and it's a complete infancy, right? But yeah, it's developing so fast that people tend to forget what was crypto like a year or two ago, which is every time you do this, at every point in time, if you compare crypto today to like two or three years ago, your head explodes because so much has happened.
[0:27:34] Rudy Dogum: No, I was like I said, it's definitely a huge change between every year. It seems like there's a new thing to rave about and try to get your money into.
[0:27:44] Robin Ebers: Very much like, for example right. So then after I took a break again so usually I disappear in the bear markets, which is something that a lot of people don't do. Right. They really do work. They build a huge network of partners or just general connections and whatnot during the bear market. Because that's really when the people are around that really care about the space, right? I really care about the space. I still don't want to be around the bear market for one single reason that people tend to ignore when the bear market is there, right? Which is when the bear market is there, then you have a lot of time, right? It's literally just you build, right? You focus on building what you are out to build or I don't know generally speaking, if you compare the bear market to the bull market, when there's bull market, essentially you can work like 20 hours a day and you still think you're behind, right? So there's just so much happening in such a short time frame that most people, not me, I make a point not to be like that, but most people just they sacrifice their sleep, they sacrifice their health, right? They sacrifice everything. Because the fear of missing out during the bear market is just so intense that people are just going crazy, right? Every business going crazy, every individual goes crazy, and it's getting worse and worse and worse until it pops.
[0:29:19] Robin Ebers: But then during the bear market, you finally have time to breathe, right? And people tend to forget how the bull market was during the bear market and then they just don't do it, right? I don't know. They cry over their pain per game they lost or they do so much, but they don't travel, they don't spend some of the money they make, they don't have fun in life, right. Instead, they are just looking forward to the next bull market, right, and I'm not like that at all. But yeah, that's why I'm like usually taking a break during the bear market because that's the time to do it, right?
[0:29:55] Rudy Dogum: Yeah. Taking like that too ball so the bear market is a great time to get yourself into the latest projects and projects probably reinvest classic Warren Buffett, right? You just buy when it's down and low and calm and then wait for the bull to sell. Of course, bear market is so underrated and how much value you can create for yourself.
[0:30:20] Robin Ebers: Yeah, of course, because nobody likes to buy it when something just depreciates by.
[0:30:27] Rudy Dogum: 50 or 60% to buy it.
[0:30:29] Robin Ebers: But at the same time but at the same time, right. Even though I tell everybody to DCA, like dollar cost average all the time on a weekly basis without checking the price, etc. Personally, if I would use DCA, which I don't against my own advice, but if I would DCA all the time during the bull market, I wouldn't touch it during the bull market. But if we're like in a confirmed bull market and things would genuinely be corrected by like 40 or 50 or 60% yeah, I would increase those weekly prices. I would increase the big time. I would funnel a lot more money into the space than right now. Right now. It's such a risky time to get involved, not get involved in crypto, but to make big investments, right. Like to get involved in crypto is never a bad time. It was never a better time than like today, right. But yeah, I would take it easy with taking like big chunks of money and throwing them at crypto at this.
[0:31:29] Rudy Dogum: Point in the cycle, for sure. It's all also a learning experience. It gets so easy for us to say it to. You, because we also live through it. And I have many friends who are looking at me like, oh, what about if I just buy it on the low and sell on the high? I'm like, you can't just do that. It's not that easy. It's really hard. And I mean, I encourage them to like, all right, if you really think you can do it, take $100 or whatever you're willing to lose and test it out. Test your theory never works because it's too hard to time. That's why I'm a hoddler.
[0:32:08] Robin Ebers: Even if it would work the first time, they would lose all their money on the second time. It just doesn't work.
[0:32:15] Rudy Dogum: There's only a handful of people that just rave on Twitter saying how much they've made so quickly on some coin. I'm like, don't listen to those people.
[0:32:22] Robin Ebers: They know those are usually the same people that make calls every day, five times, and then delete the ones that didn't work. So it looks like they're always right. But yeah, there's so much that we could talk about when it comes to crypto, particularly for newbies, right? There's so much. But really the best thing is just to get involved with, as you say, as much as you're willing to lose. With that said, I just recently got a friend of mine here in Dubai involved in crypto, and he was always telling me, yes, he had a few thousand euros, whatever, how many dollars? And he was like, can I get in now? Can I get in now? I don't care about the money. And I was like, listen, you're investing so much money, what you're experiencing is formal. If you really, truly do lose 50% of this money, you would kick yourself. So now it starts buying on a weekly basis and it's like, yeah, so.
[0:33:22] Rudy Dogum: That'S better now, I guess, for you. Are you at a time where it's trading? I mean, obviously trading is still important for you and everybody is just something you want to do to make money. But right now, what are you really focusing on in the crypto industry? How are you spending your day to day?
[0:33:41] Robin Ebers: Sure. So moving on from that story earlier, from the visa and crypto, when the market picked up again last year, I started trading, got involved into D five, really educating myself on what has changed. What was the delta between me leaving and me entering again? Right. And that was a lot as expected, and it took me maybe like a week or two to really get familiar with what is uniswap, what are liquidity tokens? Yeah, I was crazy at the time, but I was so profitable, too. But then after like two months or so, I once again talked to a friend of mine who it's good to have friends in crypto, right? Let me just get this out. So particularly people that have companies in crypto and whatnot, right? Because they know a lot of people. So I then talked to one of my buddies and he was like, he is in touch with the people at I don't know if you heard about it, there's a company in Crypto that is very similar to Kickstarter in the traditional world. They're called polka starter. So they're taking these ideas from tomorrow and they help them raise money, like Kickstarter essentially, but for crypto. And I really like this project. I was actually following this project for a while and then this body was like, oh yeah, I know the CEO.
[0:35:17] Robin Ebers: Do you want me to arrange a call? And I was like, are you kidding me? And of course I want you to arrange a call, right? And so I just jumped on a call with the company at some point and they interviewed me, they liked me and a week later so I started working for them. And that is what I do now, right? So they are, as I said, they are crypto fundraising companies, essentially, where people conduct things that are called IDOs initial decentralized offerings. So while I say they are like Kickstarters, just the concept is the same, but they are firmly decentralized. So you don't need to sign up or anything. You can literally just go on the website with any web, three wallet like MetaMask and participate in these initially centralized offerings, right? And get access to these ideas of tomorrow today. And I started there as a market analyst. So this company pride itself so Poker Starter pride itself with essentially vetting companies. So not everybody can raise funds on pokerstarters or similar, very similar to Kickstarter. So there are very few very highly vetted projects that get to raise funds on Pork Starter. And I was one of the people that actually vetted those companies, right?
[0:36:45] Robin Ebers: So it involved a lot of calls and just due diligence on projects, like really going deep into economics and understanding what their marketing plan is, what their team is like, getting a really good there are so many data points that we try to collect it. And I did that for a few months, like three months, I think. And then the company essentially decided that we would like to have a product guy that really focuses on, tries to understand what the market wants and then coordinates with Tech and the leadership team to combine essentially what we're technically feasible for and what, you know, like our executives and leadership wants to do, right? And so I became their Chief Product Officer, CPO, and that has been three months now. So on a daily basis, really what's happening is focusing the market, focusing on the market, trying to understand not on project like prices or market movements or something like that, more like identifying trends, understanding what works in the market, right? Maybe analyzing some new ideas that are out there. Like for example, right now, of course there are NFTs extremely hot. So we are now actually just planning a big launch, like a V Two porkista launch, which is going to introduce so many features. But yeah, basically that's what I do, right? Like really focus on the product, listening to users, coordinating with our tech, our leadership team, and making sure that Poker Starter is the best it can be.
[0:38:29] Rudy Dogum: Yeah, I mean, there's no one better than you for that position. So I'm glad to you all right. It's pretty amazing. Like, all these new companies are coming up, especially Pocostarter is a pretty big one and how they're all contributing differently to the DFI and crypto space. And I think as more and more is happening, it's starting to really click for some people. Like, oh wow, this is world's changing. Before it was just, oh, we're changing money and then we're changing like legal contracts and now we're changing how people experience almost any interaction through the blockchain, through crypto. Right now it's really a race between who's going to do it first mover, doing it properly and having a strong uptime. Recently there was the outage with Solana and arbitrary. Some people take that as like a bad hit where you can't recover from but I think you can recover from those things. It's a learning experience. Cryptocurrency is all programmed by human beings and human beings can make mistake. It's not some it is a shadowy supercoder, but it's a human being who's doing the coding. And it just goes to show that we need more people in the space contributing, trying and helping out rather than just discussing trade tactics.
[0:40:02] Robin Ebers: Definitely, man, I think to quickly go into these down times, right? I think there's a lot of things that can be said about this, right? Whenever something like this happens, I mean, I have a strong opinion on this, right? But it's not the place. But whenever something like this happens, people try to defend their positions, right? When this happened went short, for example, they will just try to destroy Solana, right? They are the failures and they'll never recover from this. Right. They are like, this is the scarbage, decentralized, you know, this is over. And then on the other hand, you have people that hold Solana and they just say the opposite. They say, wow, Solana so strong it's collapsed under like 400,000 transactions per second. Both of these statements are wrong, right. I think in the end it's a bit of a timing thing. So in their cases, I absolutely think they will recover because we're still in a bull market, right. And I think if this would have happened three years ago during like a firm bear market, I think they could be dead now's.
[0:41:15] Robin Ebers: Right. But they're not. Right? And also what people forget is that both of these have so much backing, right. So it really depends on who does it happen to, right? Solana is enormous backing from FDX and whatnot and are we trim? They have so much picking from the entire world of the year. So, yeah, both of them was the wife, of course. Right. Still, it's not ideal, but yeah, of course humans make mistakes and we will learn. And again, if you look at all this in this like two or three year time span that we were talking about earlier, nobody's even going to remember.
[0:41:55] Rudy Dogum: That moves too quick. People are going to forget and how this industry is. Would you say cryptocurrency has changed your life, the whole industry? Did you ever even expect to even go this, like when you first heard about Bitcoin, did you even think, this is going to be my world?
[0:42:20] Robin Ebers: I think that would be the understatement of the century, man. I think I I have absolutely no idea what I will be doing in life with Paul. I was a web developer at the time. I haven't developed anything for the last five years. I got pretty much burned out, I think, and I was burned out for a long time when I stopped too, crypto came just back into my life at the very right moment, right? So when this conversation from earlier, like when my buddy was like when I was buying ethereum at like two or three or $4, I don't remember exactly. And then later when my body was talking about it again and asked that told me it's like $50, I was already done with developing at that time, but at the same time, I was one of the lead developers in a company in London. So at that time it's just this like bull market of like 20, 16, 17 man, it was, it was, it was my exit ticket, you know, it was just so perfectly timed that exactly, man, here was my golden ticket. I honestly don't know where I would be today because I was already unhappy with what I was doing, right. And I'm sure I would have figured it out, but I sure wouldn't have the gains that crypto had provided me.
[0:43:48] Rudy Dogum: So now that you've been in the crypto industry for so long, I have to know, what is your crypto pet peeve.
[0:43:56] Robin Ebers: Right now in general?
[0:43:57] Rudy Dogum: Now? Whenever? NFTs.
[0:44:00] Robin Ebers: No, right now. Okay, so I say NFTs, but NFT is just the current one and it's always the same reason. It's the lack of innovation. And that is always a very short term annoyance to me because there is absolutely no shortage of innovation in crypto on a macro level. So if you look at crypto on a year, as we just said, again and again, right, if you look at it in like a year, two year, three year time span, it just keeps reinventing itself, which is insane. But on a day to day, week to week, or month to month level, it is sometimes so difficult to see the good. NFT is just the latest grace, right? I just wrote about it, like this morning. They start it with something decent, like crypto punks, for example, right? I don't agree with crypto punks. I don't know why people buy them, but fine, at least they were original, right? But then what happened now is that people literally on TikTok, I watch way too much.
[0:45:17] Rudy Dogum: I don't have that download.
[0:45:19] Robin Ebers: Yeah, don't, don't, don't. It's a huge time period of your life. Don't do it, man. It's fun though. But my TikTok algorithm knows me very well. So I see a lot of crypto content and literally on a daily basis, I see people explain how to do NFTs, how to make a lot of money with NFTs. Creating NFTs. Not only buying and selling, but creating NFTs. Right now, you have this craze of just like, painting or drawing a few sprites and then using a software to generate like you paint. If you look at these, their current they call them like profile picture NFDS like PFP, where you just have a head and, like, different accessories, whatever, different dress. And sometimes there's a cigarette in the mouth, stuff like that. Exactly. So they just paint all of these or draw all of these individual sprites, which might be a couple of hundred. You can literally go to fiverr and do this for a couple of then you use a software to generate 10,000 unique NFTs based on those sprites. It's like just random combinations of them, right?
[0:46:31] Robin Ebers: And then you sell them. And that is what's happening right now, right? There's. Like complete garbage, in my opinion.
[0:46:40] Rudy Dogum: The ones that have some type of enhancement where you can have different utility of like maybe joining group chats or having access to something. The ones I like a lot are trading card games. That makes sense.
[0:46:56] Robin Ebers: Actual games.
[0:46:57] Rudy Dogum: That makes sense.
[0:46:57] Robin Ebers: Exactly.
[0:46:58] Rudy Dogum: But just having profile pics is kind.
[0:47:01] Robin Ebers: Of like okay, but even because the general in the space, they always talk about JPEGs, right? JPEGs. Even though I disagree with the valuation of current cordless or JPEGs, I understand that they are collective items. So if I have a real artist that painted something like this guy in the UK recently who said he designed or he just painted a lot of, like, paintings. And now you can make a decision. If you buy one, you can either get the original or the NFT. If you take the NFT, he will destroy the original or vice versa. I kind of get this. I'm not like an art guy. I don't have paintings. Maybe one day I'm not in that space. But I understand the space exists, right? And it has existed for a very long time. So this I understand, but I'll try to understand. But what I don't understand is these like auto generated composite NFTs, right?
[0:48:07] Robin Ebers: They just make no sense. And the thing is that they are just clones and clones of clones, right? And that is why I say that my pet peeve was always right. Now it's NFTs, but before it was NFTs. It was just projects cloning other projects, doing minor iterations, like changing the name, changing the fee on transfer, stuff like that. Right. So it's always copies of copies of copies of copies for a while, and then there's a new trend and the thing resets and it happens again. Right. So this is my pet peeve. But this is how innovation works, I suppose, right? You just have people experimenting fast, but yeah, it always ends up in while there's a new trend. This is amazing. Let's make a lot of money while there's a lot of clones and while there's a lot of clones of clothes while this trend is dead next, we're.
[0:48:59] Rudy Dogum: Going to see a lot more of that, for sure.
[0:49:02] Robin Ebers: I wonder what the games games is the next thing, right? Like now, games, it's extremely hard, right?
[0:49:08] Rudy Dogum: That like play games and renting out digital space in a virtual world.
[0:49:14] Robin Ebers: Oh, yeah. Land sales and games, both of which are happening on pokerstarter right now. But yeah, we are always on top of those trends. And as you say, land sales and games are super huge right now. So what you can expect is that a lot of land sales will be copied cloned, cloned, cloned, cloned. Right. A lot of will happen with the games. People will clone games, clones of clones, and then the trend dies next. But it is really like that. It's just people somebody plants a lemon tree. The lemon tree has extremely juicy lemons, so everybody starts planting lemon trees. Right. And that's exactly crypto, man. Until there's an X trend. It's a never ending story, I suppose.
[0:50:02] Rudy Dogum: So to end it off, what made you smile the most recently? Ear to ear smile? It could be anything not crypto related. Just like maybe you just saw a puppy and you got super excited.
[0:50:18] Robin Ebers: No, I bought an apartment in Dubai with crypto, I might add. Right. So I was very happy about this because it took me hard work, a very long time to get not only to the crypto gains that I've made today, but also, and that is very important, taking profit, right? It is like greed is again, I say that again and again, but greed is such a strong desire that people just never cash out. For me, it's easy to say because previously I lived in Portugal where there are no crypto taxes. Now I live in Dubai where there's no taxes at all. It's easier for me than for others, naturally. But taking profits off the table, particularly when your entire profile I literally know people that from last year or like from two years ago that turned a couple thousand dollars, like $5,000 or so into a million in the cycle. Right. And they still don't take major profits. And that is just such a dangerous game, because when the cycle is over, these paper games are going to disappear. I had to learn that. I think you learned that, Too. Rudy. And so when I did take this money out and I bought an actual apartment with it, I was very happy about this.
[0:51:47] Rudy Dogum: Your hard work.
[0:51:47] Robin Ebers: That means that this apartment nobody can take from me. Bear Market. I don't care. I don't pay rent. Yes. This was a big deal for me.
[0:51:57] Rudy Dogum: Congratulations, man. And thank you so much for spending time with me here today. And it's always great talking to you. I'll speak to you soon. Thank you. Everybody else.
[0:52:06] Robin Ebers: Thanks, man.
[0:52:07] Rudy Dogum: See you.
[0:52:08] Robin Ebers: Thank you very much. Bye.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wholesomecrypto.com
48 min
September 20, 2021 Lefteris Karapetsas - Ethereum developer and creator of Rotki manager
Lefteris Karpetsas - A developer from Berlin who’s solving a large pain point in the crypto world.
Working on Ethereum since 2014, Lefteris has been heavily involved in the cryptocurrency industry. He studied at the University of Tokyo and is the author of rotki, refulang, and emacs-solidity.
Find out how he has time to do all this while having a family and preparing for marathon races.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wholesomecrypto.com
38 min
September 10, 2021 Ben Prentice - Bitcoiner, Producer, Podcaster, Musician
Ben Prentice - the producer for What Bitcoin Did and author of WTF Happened in 1971, has always been an enthusiast of technology. Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, his father had an impressive setup of up to five or six computers in the house, a peculiar sight at the time. Ben was able to explore the possibilities of technology at a young age, using DOS and playing games with quarter inch floppies. His father even ran Ethernet cables through the house to connect to the Internet when it became available. Ben's enthusiasm for technology, along with his background in the restaurant industry, 3D graphics, media production, video, and audio production led him to his current job working for Peter McCormick, host of the podcast What Bitcoin Did. Ben reached out to Peter and offered his media production background, and the rest is history.Having read Slash Dot heavily between 2011 and 2012, Ben had a vague awareness of Bitcoin, but had no idea of its potential. His research into the currency and its implications eventually led him and his co-author to write WTF Happened in 1971 to explain why Bitcoin is important as a monetary technology.At its core, Bitcoin is a monetary technology and the technology that makes it work surrounds that. By removing the central authority and introducing a new paradigm of money, it eliminates inflation and reorganizes society through the price system, making it very hard to kill and giving people hope for a better future.However, Ben cautions people to be cautious when investing in NFTs, believing there is still a lot of hype and money chasing the craze and that NFTs are merely digital autographs. Digital signatures, however, are important and are used in many different ways, such as end-to-end encryption and Bitcoin.The use of Bitcoin has been growing exponentially in developing countries due to the need for a store of value, and projects like Cardano and Bolt Twelve are pushing the agenda of cryptocurrency into Africa. Despite this, Ben believes the main obstacle preventing wider use of Bitcoin in the Western world is taxation. Bitcoin and Lightning are payment technologies, and every single time they are used, there is an onerous reporting tax burden. Such regulation could put a damper on their use, particularly for smaller transactions.At the end of the day, Ben Prentice is an optimist when it comes to Bitcoin and he believes the technology is making the world a better place. He is thankful for the currency and its potential to make the world a better place and he is excited to see what the future holds.
Producer - What Bitcoin Did
Co-Author - WTF Happened in 1971?
Podcaster - Bitcoin Echo Chamber
This following post was generated using AI via dubb.media 🤖
Transcript
[0:00:01] Rudy Dogum: Welcome. Ben Prentice, thank you for being on the wholesome Crypto podcast. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. For those who don't know Ben Prentice, he is a producer for what Bitcoin did and he also is the author of WTF Happened in 1971. Thank you for coming on.
[0:00:22] Ben Prentice: Thanks, man. It's good to see you, Rudy.
[0:00:23] Rudy Dogum: It's good to see you too. I know we've we've chatted up a little bit over dinner a few weekends ago and it's good to see you here in Boston. So it's been a pretty wild ride so far in the crypto industry, especially now. What's going on with the new amendment.
[0:00:40] Ben Prentice: Yeah, the infrastructure bill, which by the time this episode drops, will probably already have been decided. But yeah, it's crazy stuff.
[0:00:49] Rudy Dogum: It's going to be pretty wild how it's going to change how America works with cryptocurrency. And I'm pretty excited. What's going to happen? I honestly don't think much will change since the whole Bitcoin or cryptocurrency industry is supposed to be decentralized. And I feel like it might just be one of those foot flop threats where they're going to try to stop it but then change it around again. So we'll see what happens.
[0:01:21] Ben Prentice: Yeah. Well, even if it does pass in some onerous way, it seems to me that they have no idea what they're talking about and they're being so ambiguous in the language because they have no idea what they're talking about. And because some of the stuff that will be so unenforceable and detrimental to innovation in America, I think it will be fought very hard, even if it's just at the lawyer and the judge level or if they're appealing it or whatever. And none of this stuff goes into effect until like 2023 or 2024 or something like that. It's just a whole lot of just frustration right now. That's all.
[0:01:54] Rudy Dogum: That's the growing pains of crypto. We're going to figure it out eventually. But yeah. Before we get deep into the cryptocurrency topics, I want to get to know more about what you were doing before Bitcoin. What was life for Ben Pre? Bitcoin?
[0:02:13] Ben Prentice: Oh, man. I worked in restaurant industry for a very long time, but I've always been interested in lots of different things. I was into 3D graphics and media production, video, audio. I was in a rock band for 13 years, actually.
[0:02:35] Rudy Dogum: What did you play?
[0:02:36] Ben Prentice: I play the electric guitar. I mean, I know a few other instruments too, but I play a lot of lead, like classical rock, heavy metal, stuff like that. A lot of grunge alternative rock.
[0:02:48] Rudy Dogum: Did you sing at all?
[0:02:49] Ben Prentice: Yeah, mostly like kind of more backups. But I can carry a tune from point A to point B.
[0:02:58] Rudy Dogum: How many years did you do that?
[0:03:00] Ben Prentice: Yeah, I mean, I played music for over 20 years, but I was in an actual active, like, band playing shows and making albums for over 13 years.
[0:03:11] Rudy Dogum: Oh, wow.
[0:03:12] Ben Prentice: Yeah, and then I also eventually got into Bitcoin, but so I've always had a lot of different interests and stuff, and I learned a few languages along the way.
[0:03:29] Rudy Dogum: What language do you know or did you try to learn?
[0:03:31] Ben Prentice: Well, I speak Spanish and Portuguese, like, pretty fluently.
[0:03:35] Rudy Dogum: Yeah, especially in Boston. You have a huge community of Portuguese people, so that's awesome. And that's probably a good language to know around here, too. Spanish is always a clutch language to have. For sure. Sweet. And then I guess we're always an innovative person. We're always trying to find the latest tech and jump on the bandwagon and really learn about it. Or was Bitcoin the one that just hit you really hard and you went rolling with it?
[0:04:04] Ben Prentice: Yeah, it's a good question. I have always been into technology for as long as I can remember. My dad, when growing up, had like, five or six computers in the house, which is unheard of. I mean, we're talking about the late 80s, early ninety s and stuff, and there was, like, one room in my house where there was, like, at least three computers in that one room. And these are old CRT monitors, right? So, like, the monitor monitors themselves took up, like, a fair amount of space in the room. So you walk in this one room and I used to joke to my friends when they come over, I was like, yeah, then this is mission Control over here, because you had all these computers everywhere. But I remember even, like, we were 1011 years old, my dad had computers in each one of our rooms, so we had, like it was Dos at that point. It was dos right. And we were, like, playing, like, tech space games, like Ukral and quarter inch floppies. Yeah, 100%. And and at some point, I remember, too, like, when the Internet was starting to come out, he eventually, like, ran Ethernet cable, like, through our house. So we'd even have, like, Internet in our room.
[0:05:11] Rudy Dogum: You had Ethernet back then?
[0:05:13] Ben Prentice: Oh, yeah, he's running cat five thick cable. Like, he even, like, drilled some holes through the ceiling and ran some up and down the stairs and stuff.
[0:05:22] Rudy Dogum: But would I do computers on all the time?
[0:05:26] Ben Prentice: No, you would turn on the computer just to do something, then you turn it off. Right?
[0:05:31] Rudy Dogum: Things were running 24/7 back then.
[0:05:33] Ben Prentice: No, definitely not. And you have to wait for the computer. So you turn the computer on, go make a cup of coffee and come back, that kind of thing. But we know what I remember really well is being like, 1011 years old, and there's that have you seen that clip of, like, I think it's Good Morning America when they're like, what is the internet, anyway? In the app sign or whatever. It's like I remember being yeah, I remember being ten and eleven years old and being like, I would have had such a better answer than those people who are like literally like on TV adults, and I could have given them a much better answer. They called internet, like a computer billboard or something. And it was obviously this network that at the time you could not move a lot of data around. It was very limited by bandwidth. And I could see even from like ten to eleven to twelve years old, I could see the band. You know, I went from like a 14 four modem to like a 56K modem or something. And I saw that progression. I was like, well, extrapolating out here, you're going to be able to send like HD video all around the globe at near zero cost in the near future. And I was trying to figure out what types of things that would enable.
[0:06:46] Rudy Dogum: And that's what always amazed me the most now, is that now we have so much data available in data speed storage space, it feels like it's almost infinite. But that also worries me is are people and developers taking into consideration creating the most efficient application? Just because we have all this capability, are we still trying to create our apps more efficiently? I download the Facebook Messenger app on my phone. It's like a couple of hundred megabytes. And there's other gaming apps or over gigabyte file sizes. I'm like, do we even need this stuff? Is it even taken into consideration of downsizing as much as we can, we.
[0:07:32] Ben Prentice: Are in the too much information Age. And I grew up in the information age, so after I kind of started going to college and stuff like that, I remember I had a PDA. There was an original, like the Palm Pilots were like a monochrome screen, like those old Casio watches, right? There wasn't even a backlit. Yeah, it wasn't even backlit. And then eventually I saw the evolution of those devices and I had something that was like a precursor to what an iPhone was. It was like a Sony CLI PDA. So it was like really one of.
[0:08:07] Rudy Dogum: The I remember those.
[0:08:08] Ben Prentice: Yeah, it was like one of the last evolutions of PDAs before like smartphones came along and just wiped them out. But I remember carrying this thing around with me all the time, always looking for WiFi because I didn't have a cell chip in it and walking around school. And I was a weird person for having a computer in my pocket. I remember being at work, whatever, and maybe reading something at work. People were like, why do you have a computer? Put your little computer away, right? And it's really funny that you saw now that we're all in the smartphone generation and as you said, that the too much information age. We're all trying to come to grips with that, but I think it's a good thing for society. Rudy. I think, you know, we, we see this like this fake news era, right? I think that's really just a realization where we already were and we're starting to see the narrative come apart that these centralized news organizations or whatever had any kind of authority in the first place. But we are like children in this Internet age and this too much information age and we're trying to sort through it now. Maybe I push back on your kind of like, are we creating too much data? Because I think in the long run that's deflationary. I think we're not really going to have a storage problem, but the sorting problem is a real problem.
[0:09:27] Ben Prentice: And connecting people and figuring out what's good versus bad information, that's still something that we're still figuring out and hopefully.
[0:09:35] Rudy Dogum: We will figure it out. But yeah, we will test something in the near future. I don't think it's a large enough problem yet for us, especially with all the cloud computing. Just no one even realizes that the giant mega data centers that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have and how much information they're hosting for most of the globe.
[0:10:01] Ben Prentice: Yeah, that's fair. But I think hard drive space is cheap. I think maybe we're doing too much replication. I think cloud computing is going to kind of go away in the future. I think because technology is getting cheaper all the time and because we're losing our privacy to these services and being able to replicate the same functionality at home is going to be just as cheap. I think we'll stop giving it away to all these organizations that want all our data and are trying to encourage all that.
[0:10:37] Rudy Dogum: As these industries keep changing and you're starting to see a different trend and pattern growing than you first hear about bitcoin, what was your first reaction? Like, is this the endall be all? Is this going just some weird cipher punk news that you're listening to and just kind of brushed it off? How was it for you?
[0:11:01] Ben Prentice: Yeah, more the latter. I was reading at the time, probably in between these two periods I was talking about, I was reading Slash Dot very heavily. So Slash dot news for nerds. It was like the hub of like, you know, computer developers and stuff in the, in the, you know, the article I think the first article on Slashdot came around 2011 or 2012, I don't remember, but I definitely remember it coming around. I remember reading vaguely reading discussions of like, people that are much smarter than I am trying to understand why this thing is important. And you have to understand that even the Internet's understanding and even the geeks understanding of what Bitcoin was then, it was absolutely nowhere near what our understanding of it is today. And I think our understanding of it today is still somewhat flawed and still somewhat like, naive. But obviously we've made a lot of progress. But I got to give you guys credit. They understood there was something really important there. I think I'd also say that I couldn't grock the technicals of what a, the problem itself was, and b, how elegantly it solved that problem. So I think my overall take on bitcoin was like, that looks interesting. It's some kind of internet money thing, but it will probably never work. I mean, you got to understand, reading slash, it was like, every day you're inundated with like, oh, this is a brand new battery. Technology is going to solve all of our battery storage every single day with something like that.
[0:12:31] Ben Prentice: So I was like, yeah, it's a really cool idea, but it'll probably never work. But I think a lot of people take multiple touches to bitcoin and to really come to it. So again, in 2013 or 2014, it's like, oh, people are actually using this thing to buy drugs, the internet. And I almost went and bought some drugs on the Internet with it, but I thought it was anonymous. I thought bitcoin, the whole purpose of it was like, it's specifically an anonymous, kind of like what monaro claims itself to be today. So when I went to mount cox to buy bitcoin, it was like, okay, so give us your license, your bank account, basically, KYC, this is an anonymous. So I basically forgot about it again until, you know, 2017 and number grow up brought me back.
[0:13:15] Rudy Dogum: It reminds me how you're saying how, you know, people were just kind of talking about whatever and might be putting their own comments and opinions on bitcoin if it's going to work or not. That reminds me of today of hacker news, how a lot of crypto posts are usually talked down on by very educated people who are really good in their industry, really understand how technology works. And I always see their comments of going back and forth that just won't work. People don't understand how much data it's using up or how much energy it's consuming, or if just straight out politically and human beings might not be able to work together to make it work. So it's really interesting seeing different types of opinions on that and watching it grow and develop.
[0:14:04] Ben Prentice: I think it's fascinating that you point that out because I would 100% agree. I think there are very smart people that reject bitcoin today. And I joke that number go up brought me back to bitcoin, but number go up brought me back to bitcoin, because I saw that the price of this thing kept going up. And I said to myself, why is the price of what's supposed to be a money changing at all? Aren't money is like a stable thing against which we measure other things, right, that sometimes change in price, right? And that didn't make any sense to me, so I had to go down a rabbit, a personal rabbit hole of my own just to say, what the heck is bitcoin and why is it here? And for the same reason, I think those people that reject bitcoin today, even I had to figure out was that Bitcoin is a monetary technology. And it's something that I've kind of talked to you and side channels about, but it's a monetary technology first and foremost, and that the technology that makes it work surrounds that. And some people that come to Bitcoin come to it just for the technology that surrounds it. Like, oh, they solved the almost just said the surgeon, the Byzantine general's problem. They solved that. That's so cool. Or like, oh, they're working on bulletproofs and cryptography. Some people come to it just for that. But I came to it to understand as a monetary technology, and I've spent most of my time doing research on why it's important as a monetary technology, and that requires real investment of time.
[0:15:35] Rudy Dogum: Is that what led you to write about WTF happened in 1971 100% it.
[0:15:44] Ben Prentice: Was doing research on? Because when you try to understand what money is, you have to at some point take a look at what the system of money we have today is. My background here is all these fiat currencies. You have to look, what is the history of how did they come to be and how do they function? One of the things you must eventually come to in research of the fiat monetary system is 1971, when Richard, obviously Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard. And I thought to myself that if Bitcoin is a better money because it has a hard caps 21 million supply, that when we took ourselves off the gold standard, then things probably would have gone worse because that was the last kind of reins on the system. And if you go to like the Bretton Woods page or the Nixon Shock page, you'll see some of the first few charts that we put up on the website. And that didn't start the genesis of the website, but we started kind of collecting things like that and said, look, here's why Bitcoin is important. Here's some of the data. And we would be like, arguing with people on the Internet and stuff. And we eventually collected enough of these things that were like, man, it's annoying to constantly go through our phones and we just like, my buddy. So you mentioned that I was the author of it, but I made it with my buddy. Heavily armed clown. We have our own podcast. The Bitcoin Echo Chamber.
[0:17:04] Ben Prentice: So we co founded websites, and it was his idea to kind of stick it up there and put the question at the top and not explain any of it if your viewers aren't familiar. It's just a bunch of data that shows how objectively some things have declined. And there's an inflection point in the data in 1971 where things are like, society is getting worse, at least in these particular areas. And our thesis, obviously, is that because inflation and other things too, I think there's a lot of second order effects that kind of trickle down from that, things that you wouldn't even consider.
[0:17:38] Rudy Dogum: Yeah, and I definitely visited your site and it's a ton of good infographics of all correlating to a single time in history. What's going on with our money? Why is it changing the value so dramatically? And it's something I wasn't fully aware of until I saw your website and kind of shows you that money is changing quickly, especially in 1971 and then 2008 in the mortgage crisis when bitcoin was released. And even now, it's still changing. With your background, you can see the Venezuelan currency is just no longer valuable. And it's something that bitcoin is definitely proving to show that currency is going to change in a way where it's a globally accessible option. And for me, it's kind of what really struck to me is like, wow, the entire world can share one currency. The entire world can control it together, but we're still facing the struggle of power. Who wants to be able to control it? Who wants to be able to handle it? And I think the biggest struggle right now with humanity is understanding that people can have power, the power of the people. We don't need some specific entity telling us what the value is anymore.
[0:19:12] Ben Prentice: Yeah, well, I think if you look back at the history of money, it's a really interesting story, because obviously we tried a bunch of different monetary technologies, a bunch of them not, and it didn't end up working out so well for a lot of civilizations and saw the downfall of those civilizations, and we converged as a globe on gold. And even gold had a lot of shortcomings. And that's a lot of the thesis of 1971 is some of the prehistory before 1971. You know, 1971 is just a precipitous event. And what I'm getting at here is that gold has a number of drawbacks, especially when you compare it versus something like bitcoin, one of them being verifiability. So if you go back, we've been using coinage for quite some time, and it was a way of unifying codifying money. So they had like equal units, like, you know, this is a piece of a or this is Danarius or all these different things where the society can now had better economic calculation. But it introduced, as you were kind of pointing out, that there was somebody who had to organize that in the first place. And that, as Satoshi says in the white paper, history is full of breaches of trust of the central authority. So by removing the central authority, we're in a new paradigm of money. And the implications of that are far reaching and probably beyond the scope of this podcast.
[0:20:40] Rudy Dogum: Sure. And there's a lot of good information out there on that. And again, much to discuss on that topic, but we can continue to you and your co author wrote WTF happened in 1971. When did you first, you know, start working on what bitcoin did. It's one of the top ten podcasts about cryptocurrencies in the world. So it's a you definitely had some transition period and some history period going into that. So if you want to explain a little bit more about your road into there.
[0:21:16] Ben Prentice: Yeah, well, I'd like to joke that I was working in the restaurant industry, and I wanted to get out of that. I'd like to joke that I mean my way into this job because we kind of created WTF happened in 1971 by accident, and it's a pretty prevalent meme in the bitcoin world now. And it ended up getting big enough that eventually Peter found out about it and invited us on the podcast, peter McCormick, what bitcoin did. And he ended up getting us on even twice. So I had a relationship with him, and eventually I reached out to him and I said, hey, I got a bunch of background in media production. Do you need any work done for me? And he eventually offered me a job working for him and producing for him. So that was in the beginning of this year, and I started actually working for him full time in March. And I love it. I think Peter's hilarious. He's a good guy. He's trying to help educate people. He stands for really important topics. He's a bit of a nut sometimes. He gets a lot of hard time, but I really enjoy it.
[0:22:25] Ben Prentice: I get to research and talk about bitcoin and work on bitcoin.
[0:22:28] Rudy Dogum: Did you always expect to become some type of influencer or someone who really isn't motivated?
[0:22:39] Ben Prentice: Oh, my God. No. I hate that word. I never wanted to be one. I've never tried to be one. No, I had to stop there, because, listen, I remember very specifically when I started getting I started on Reddit and realized, like, reddit is not as great as Twitter for really understanding bitcoin and getting into the conversation. But that was my goal. My goal was to be part of the conversation, at least, even if it was just as a student, to be at least close enough to the people that were smart enough that I could learn about bitcoin. And then that progressed into now I want to be able to be able to bounce ideas off other people. That progressed into now. I want to be part of this conversation of what bitcoin is, where it's going and why it's important. And I've never, like, wanted any kind of fame. In fact, like, I think my follower number is getting kind of high now. I've thought about already, like, putting, like, you know, some people, like turd dermis or put it protected. I don't want hundreds of thousands.
[0:23:42] Rudy Dogum: It's not a choice.
[0:23:43] Ben Prentice: Sometimes that's not good. No.
[0:23:45] Rudy Dogum: If you want to be active, it happens.
[0:23:49] Ben Prentice: Yeah, but does that make sense? I hate that, the idea.
[0:23:53] Rudy Dogum: You just want to express your ideas and opinions, but you don't want people necessarily taking you so literally, maybe on every word or I just want to have a conversation. I just wanted to get the most followers through the conversations. I mean, it's so hard for somebody to have a conversation maybe online on Twitter with Elon Musk, but maybe Jack Dorsey Elon Musk made reply to each other on Twitter. So sometimes it is the number of followers gives you the right or the pathway to speaking with other individuals. But it's very true.
[0:24:27] Ben Prentice: But in order to play that game, you really do have to play that game. Because I spent probably a year researching all this stuff and I made this really long inflation thread after a lot of work, a lot of conversations I had, and it gained a lot of attention. I think it got up to 1.7K likes and 300,000 impressions or something like that. It's pretty good, whatever. I had like 4000 followers at the time, so it's not bad. And then the other day I put a meme up and the meme was the two guys are at the booth and one booth has a bunch of guys at it and the other one doesn't. And the one where the doesn't is like 30K bitcoin and then the one with the booth with all the people at it is the 60K bitcoin. And that post got as many likes as my super long intellectual threat. So it's like if I wanted to get the number higher, I could probably just keep doing memes and stuff like that.
[0:25:23] Rudy Dogum: Meme is a job on its own. I've seen tons of crypto projects put job postings for meme. Maker, meme Generator or meme Lord. That's how we get people's attention nowadays, is just by meming. And I fall for it too. Sometimes I get sucked into the memes and start laughing at them and try to create my own. But people are kind of losing out on the intellectual part of the conversation where it's beyond just trading prices and more about what cryptocurrency and bitcoin is doing for the population in general.
[0:25:59] Ben Prentice: Well, I think memes are very important because it kind of goes back to the conversation we're having earlier about Too Much Information, right? The reason a meme is so powerful is because it's concise. It can get a very complex idea, sometimes across to a very large audience very quickly and sometimes even has a hint of entertainment at the same time. A meme can just be a sentence, right? We think of a meme as like oh, it has to be like this graphic with like a caption and it's like, that's not a meme is something that's memetic that kind of programs your mind and is viral. And I think that's useful in the too much information age that we can get an idea across in that way. I think part of it also is that our culture is so high time preference, which is that Austrian economics term that means that you favor the short term versus thinking long term. That we are like an instant gratification generation and we're not willing to read a 30 page paper. But if you have a funny graphic with a guy on it, stick figure, then I'm all ears for that. Right. So I think there's a lot of kind of things that are competing there.
[0:27:10] Rudy Dogum: Yeah, that's true. But it's definitely, I think overall better if it's used wisely. But yeah, it's something that the internet is always crazy about, so hopefully people try to use it more efficiently than just for the likes. But yeah, I want to also know more about since you were a musician, you still play some music. Was there any part of you or any type of time where you wanted to correlate your cryptocurrency knowledge with your music? Would you ever consider somehow putting NFTs on the Bitcoin network or Ethereum network or have you had any ideas of bringing music onto the chain?
[0:28:04] Ben Prentice: I don't think so. I might at some point for the meme of it, like make a Bitcoin kind of song or something like that. But NFTs for me, I don't see a lot of use for them. I think of NFTs like a digital autograph, and I don't see it as anything more than that. And for what it's worth, autographs and collectibles, it's millions of dollars, a billion dollars, I don't know what the number is. It's a huge industry and a lot of people are into that. I've never been into it myself. I don't really see the value myself except for a way to sell something to people, and I've never really enjoyed selling my art. And if you want to take donations, bitcoin already makes that very easy to me. I don't see the appeal of NFTs because I think they're just a digital autograph and I think there's a lot of hype around this concept of people saying, oh, it's going to do like royalties and DRM, and I haven't seen that yet.
[0:29:08] Rudy Dogum: Yeah, I think I'm very excited for the part where it's beyond just the price for a painting or a picture or some type of artwork, not to devalue art. I think we obviously have art that's in history, it's pretty much priceless like the Mona Lisa. It's just something we all appreciate and have and treasure. And I think that aspect is a whole different aspect than what NFPs can bring to us, where, as you were saying, it might just be a digital signature, but a signature is everything, especially now with any legal requirements, legal documents, if I sign any paperwork, it's all about a signature. So being able to bring the physical world into the digital world and have some type of signature I think is still crucial for our development. And I think it doesn't have to be about the price or what type of monetary value it brings. It's more that proof of signage.
[0:30:11] Ben Prentice: Well, I mean, digital signatures are very important. I'm not trying to belittle digital signatures at all. I think there's so much hype and money chasing this NFT craze right now that if somebody is thinking about it from any kind of economic sense, I would caution them to kind of take a step back and let some of this foam and fervor die down and really look at what's actually happening. Because digital signatures, we use them all the time. We use them on our cell phones, all end to end encryption. Everything uses digital signatures. Bitcoin uses digital signatures. Everything uses digital signatures. That's important. I think the NFT scene, people think that it's way more than it really is. And for me, that's an echo of the ICO boom. It's like, oh, well, now we can you know, I just made a bitcoin, but it's like, faster or whatever. It has more TPS and more transactions, and we saw that whole hype die down, and I'm seeing a lot of echoes of that and a lot of mal investment, which is another Australian economics term where people are like, people are putting their money in anything because they can't put it in dollars, right? And that kind of spills over into these things. So I'm not saying that they're completely useless to everybody.
[0:31:25] Ben Prentice: I just personally have no use for them currently, and I think there's way more hype than they deserve at this point.
[0:31:33] Rudy Dogum: That makes sense. And, yeah, it's totally right on. That where people are definitely finding places or any place to try to put their money in just to make some type of profit. And usually that doesn't work out too well. I know I've fell into some poor ICO projects back in 2017 that I truly regret and probably could have just kept it into bitcoin and would have been much guilty. And then anyone that says they're not guilty, I feel like, yeah, you got to have something because it's just too hard not to try. But it's all about good marketing nowadays. So, again, going back on to what bitcoin did, who was the most wholesome guest you've had on the show? Some guests. You're just like, wow, this guy is some societal good.
[0:32:24] Ben Prentice: Well, I would like to say Nick Carter, but I don't know if you followed Nick Carter escapades apparently he's destroying the planet. So it couldn't be Nick Carter. So it has to be Alex gladstein. He's probably the golden boy of bitcoin right now. If you're not familiar with Alex Gladstein, he works for the human rights HRF human rights foundation. He's the chief. Oh, my God. I'm just blanking on him right today. But he's amazing. He is an advocate for human rights around the world. He talks about how bitcoin helps people escape from authoritarian governments. He's written some amazing articles. He wrote a great article on the petrodollar system. He just came out with another one recently, palestine. And I think that the wholesome mission of this guy to help people around the world, the people that need this technology the most.
[0:33:25] Ben Prentice: One of my favorite things that he'll do is he'll find somebody that's like how we were talking about people that kind of crap on Bitcoin or whatever without understanding why this technology is important. There they live in a place of privilege. So he wrote an article called Check your financial Privilege. So if one of these guys comes out like, I can't believe all these crypto bros are into this thing that's like just destroying the planet or whatever, he goes like, you need to check your financial privilege. People in Nigeria are using this like people in Venezuela are using this to survive dissidents in other countries are using this to escape authoritarian regimes. People are using in Hong Kong to help protest against the government. So I think that is one of the most compelling stories in all of.
[0:34:08] Rudy Dogum: That'S a beautiful thing because I feel like as an American, it's pretty hard for me to make sense to use Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency on a day to day basis. It's just transactions still cost money even no matter how little or how much it is. I still have PayPal, I still have Venmo, I still have cash, app, Zelle. I have all these different ways of doing financial transactions within America and within Americans that are free, no fees, no wait time. It's pretty instant and it's hard to convince myself and convince the American population that crypto is important. And when you look at the biggest selling point for me is I look at other countries that need this to escape their authoritarian government or need this to store their own value for their hard earned work.
[0:35:05] Ben Prentice: Listen, I agree with you, but that's my point is that Bitcoin is not a payments technology, it's a monetary technology. And that just like you say in the western world, we live in a state where we have plenty of payments technologies, right? And they work really well in the Western world for privileged people like you and me, what we do not need is payments technology. But I think what's actually preventing Bitcoin from being used more widely in places in the Western world is tax regulation. There's onerous reporting tax burden. It's not so much paying the tax. It's like every single time you spend with Lightning, for example, you can play a lightning video game and earn one sat at a time and you might do that 100 times a minute. And technically you have to report and collect all the information of every single time. When you would collect each one of these things, the cost basis of it, and when you sold one of them by paying some kind of video game or any kind of thing, that's really what's preventing it, I think, in my opinion. Because yes, while you're saying that PayPal and Venmo are zero fees, right, lightning is getting very close to being like a very almost negligible fees. One satoshi is like zero point, something like that, right? So the cost is not the problem. But Lightning as a technology, as being an open technology, is going to make. Like, for example, I don't know if you've seen the stuff with lightning authorization where they're using like, ln URL to do authorization so that I can now sign into a web page by opening a lightning wallet. And the web page that I'm trying to sign into will send a challenge to my note or my wallet and my wallet to give a cryptographic response so that I can now log in without a username, without a password.
[0:37:06] Ben Prentice: And I could do this now to a bunch of different websites, and each one can get a completely different username and password, so to speak, a public and private response from me. It's a much better system. You don't have to worry about passwords at all. These things can't track you across multiple things. I mean, think about Google auth and all these things. So I think the technology is already going to be exponentially better than what we use for quote unquote payments technology today. But it's really the regulation that's getting in the way of it going back to even the infrastructure bill and all.
[0:37:40] Rudy Dogum: The crap is happening right now. It's tough to manage all the microtransactions that are happening within cryptocurrency and bitcoin. There's too many going on too fast where it's hard to keep track. But that's where the other side of it comes in, when we start developing better machine learning technologies that can read all those transactions and calculate the taxes for us without having to do it ourselves or even double check it.
[0:38:08] Ben Prentice: Yeah, but across a bunch of different wallets on a bunch of different devices, and then you have this machine learning algorithm that's collecting all your data, and that becomes another honey pot that's worse. What we need is a de minimis exemption from the regulations, right? Like, at the very least, exempt transactions under $1,000 per day, right. So that like or maybe even $500 per day, so, like, you know, I can pay for a cup of coffee on Lightning and not have to, like, you know, worry about trying to, you know, using a machine learning algorithm to to collect my tax information.
[0:38:39] Rudy Dogum: But the thing is exactly that, like you're saying using Lightning or using some type of payment processor, that is the future eventually, one day, once bitcoin grows to a point where it's a common household money that everyone has or has some part of where people are getting paid in bitcoin. I think that's the real goal in life is once we start getting paid in bitcoin, that's when things start turning around and people would look at it more of a payment platform, payment use, rather than just an investment or a monetary hold.
[0:39:17] Ben Prentice: Yeah, the volatility makes that a little bit hard for people. But it's one of these things that I think it's putting the cart before the horse to worry about payments. Now, again, bitcoin has to become a money before you can worry about that stuff. And that process of monetization is a process that requires volatility because it has to get bigger and it getting bigger is part of that volatility. So it's just a process that we've never seen happen in real time before. So we don't know what it looks like because we don't have any precedent.
[0:39:48] Rudy Dogum: For, yeah, that makes sense. Hopefully one day we'll see it sooner than later, but that's what we're all working for.
[0:39:56] Ben Prentice: Well, you mentioned the amount of people that use bitcoin in the United States, for example, that number has been basically doubling for every year or two. So in two to three years, half of the US population will at least have bitcoin. Right? And then a few more years after that, it gets really hard to be a politician that has anti bitcoin standard.
[0:40:22] Rudy Dogum: Especially when our generation starts going into more political positions. Hopefully anyone listening, hopefully you can ask your boss or your employer that you can get paid in bitcoin that will get their gears going, hopefully adopt it.
[0:40:40] Ben Prentice: You can use bit wage or whatever, so you can send your direct deposit to bitwage and they'll even send you some of it in Fiat and some of it in bitcoin too, or Stack, TCA, whatever. There's options for everybody. You don't have to pressure employer again. It's like the kind of the merchant adoption thing we were doing in 2017. We're like, oh, look like Microsoft's accepting bitcoin now. Like bitcoin is going to the moon. It's like, no, that's not how it goes. It has to become money first. Use it yourself for the way that works for you, which is going to be different for somebody who uses it in Nigeria or El Salvador or whatever. Right.
[0:41:18] Rudy Dogum: How would you say cryptocurrency changed your life then? Is it a total shift? What would you be doing now if it wasn't for learning about bitcoin?
[0:41:30] Ben Prentice: Well, I think the biggest thing that it did was give me hope because I always kind of looked at the world and tried to ask myself, like, why, despite all of this technology, because, like I said, I've always been a technology. I think technology is amazing. Why, despite all this technological progress, and even what seemed like social progress, if you just look in this really narrow view of like, oh, we used to have slaves not that long ago and now we don't, so that's also better. Right, so even these two kind of narrow prongs of society are marching forward in some way. Why does it seem like things are getting worse for average Americans? Why does it seem like even in the span of my lifetime, I feel like I've worked hard, I've had decent kind of jobs and it's hard to even save money at all, right? It's hard to buy a house now. It's like, why are these things happening? And obviously, I think bitcoin is a sound money. I think it eliminates inflation. I think it reorganizes society because money is a coordinating function of society through the price system. And I think that that's ultimately given me hope that a lot of this stagnation and kind of downtrend has been a problem of the money itself. And bitcoin fixes this and bitcoin is very hard to kill. So I am very hopeful.
[0:42:43] Rudy Dogum: It definitely goes back to what you were saying before about too much data and people are being fed a lot of information very quickly, and most of the time it's negative information, sometimes it's positive, but no matter what it is, it's just we're being fed a lot and it's a lot to learn faster and faster. It's kind of like we might be in a great society where we kind of have all of our needs met, but what we're learning about is so much more that we're missing. And that kind of brings you find a way to bring us back to reality, back to being grounded and saying we have it pretty good and we need to share that and bring it to different parts of the world and create it a more accessible way to attain this type of life.
[0:43:33] Ben Prentice: Yeah, absolutely. I think realigning human cooperation globally is definitely the number one goal. And I think you're already seeing that we are talking about we're being privileged, being in the western developed kind of places in developing countries. Look at bitcoin volumes, peer to peer trading volumes. Argentina, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, Venezuela, all these places. It's just skyrocketing, right? These people are desperate for a store of value. And like I said later, it has to filter into actually becoming a money there and becoming a unit of account and a medium exchange. But it's just a process, and I have a lot of hope for those places because I think inflation has ravaged specifically Africa. Africa has been one of the and I think that's like a really long history of money kind of story. But I do think Cardano is really.
[0:44:25] Rudy Dogum: Pushing their agenda into Africa. So I'm curious to see how that goes.
[0:44:32] Ben Prentice: What's the cardano agenda?
[0:44:34] Rudy Dogum: They're bringing themselves the Cardano coin. They're trying to bring that into Africa and try to have that as the coin to use in that country.
[0:44:46] Ben Prentice: Why do you think that would be better?
[0:44:47] Rudy Dogum: I don't know if it would be better or worse. I'm just curious to see how it's going to go. I'm always curious on every project. I wait to see who proves themselves to be better. I think Carl's a scammer.
[0:45:00] Ben Prentice: Did you see him on Lex Friedman?
[0:45:02] Rudy Dogum: I did not.
[0:45:04] Ben Prentice: Go watch that. I think he's a scammer. I think Charles I don't trust him at all. And I don't I don't think he makes a good argument.
[0:45:13] Rudy Dogum: Maybe we'll have him on the show one day. But yeah, from there, are there any new exciting projects that you're looking on, excited about, reading about.
[0:45:26] Ben Prentice: Right now? Bolt. Twelve on lightning is amazing. It basically the idea that in 2017, oh, here's a donation bitcoin address. So you can just like generate a single address, but it's like, it ends up being really bad for privacy. But it's really useful. You don't need like a whole BTC pay server just to use the thing. I think Bolt twelve does that not only for Lightning, but also in a private way. So you basically have a QR code. It's static. You don't need a web server at all. And when your wallet sees the QR code, your wallet looks up the node using the Lightning network messaging system. So the web page at all has nothing to do with this. It goes and talks to the node using the onion routed network, finds out that you can get an invoice from the node or you can get this thing to pay. This could be used in the ATM where you withdraw stats from the ATM by scanning the QR code.
[0:46:22] Ben Prentice: And all of this hides the node IDs from each other. So it's private and it's just amazing for being able to being donated very small amounts, which bitcoin is not good for today on chain. So I actually think that's really fascinating. So it's called bolt twelve. You can go to Bolt twelve. Bolt twelve, you can go to Bolt twelve. It's specifically the offers part of it, but Bolt twelve has a whole bunch of other stuff in there too, like merkelized trees, so you can prove something about a payment without revealing other details about yourself.
[0:46:58] Rudy Dogum: That's a new thing. I've been seeing a lot in the crypto industry is the privacy aspect that people are realizing, like you said in the beginning, that bitcoin is not necessarily anonymous coin, neither is Aetherium or any public chain. But it's always great to see that there's different layers being added on or different protocols that have been worked on to try to make it into a more anonymous coin, but still keeping the flavor of crypto that you love so much.
[0:47:29] Ben Prentice: The privacy battle is going to be large, and I mean that in two ways. I think there's going to be a big battle to get privacy on the base layer in bitcoin. I personally tend to think that privacy is coming on the second layers and it isn't something we need on the base layer. But I also mean that the privacy battle in the regulatory regime, I think they don't like this privacy technology. I'm telling you about this Bolt Twelve thing. You've been into bitcoin and crypto for how long? You've never heard of it? Like, these people have no idea what we're talking about. They don't even know what a second layer is. Let alone privacy technology. So once they start to figure that stuff out, they're going to be like, wait a second, you're saying they have anonymous transactions?
[0:48:14] Rudy Dogum: It's going to sound worse.
[0:48:15] Ben Prentice: That's going to be a whole other battle as well. But it's really hard. At the bottom of WTF happened in 1971, we have a quote from Hayek that says, I don't think we'll ever have a good money again. That is, until we take the thing out of the hands of governments and we can't take it out violently. We have to instead introduce some sly roundabout in some sly roundabout way, something that they can't stop. And I think having anonymous payments is good. I think, yes, criminals can use it, but criminals can use clothes and cars and guns, and we don't ban those things either, because these tools are really important for society, and ultimately most people are driven to crime because their situations are bad anyway. But this privacy fight is going to be huge, and I hope the technology is good enough. I don't like fighting, but at the same time, if things are completely unenforceable, they're really hard to regulate anyway. And sometimes it's like BitTorrent, right? BitTorrent was like, you know, the whole BitTorrent story where it was like napster and then LimeWire and all these things, and BitTorrent came along and they were kind of like, I guess there's nothing we can do. So I kind of like, hope for.
[0:49:30] Rudy Dogum: That type of sad thing. They always try to make an example of some person that uploaded some movie or like Ross where he was jailed for creating the Silk Road. It's just trying to make examples out of people that doesn't necessarily help and just brings more attention to try to give people more intention to work with that software, work with that type of technology.
[0:49:57] Ben Prentice: 100% sweet.
[0:49:59] Rudy Dogum: Last thing I wanted to ask you to end it in a wholesome way. What made you smile the most recently?
[0:50:06] Ben Prentice: What made me smile the most?
[0:50:08] Rudy Dogum: What gave you a grin to grin ear to ear?
[0:50:13] Ben Prentice: Bitcoin. Something today that's made me smile. Man, I don't know if that's very wholesome or not, but I think bitcoin getting bigger is great for the world. So in a sense, that's what makes me happy. But I'm also a good person, I guess.
[0:50:29] Rudy Dogum: We all seem to increase in value, so it's always fun. Thank you for being on the show then. I appreciate your time. And then for everyone else, please visit his WTF happened in 1971 and what bitcoin did. Thank you for listening. See ya.

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