Building a Crypto Civilization with Balaji Srinivasan

All right, everyone, welcome back. This is Ryan Selkis and you're listening to Musari's Unqualified Opinions, where each week I interview crypto's top builders, investors and personalities to discuss the key trends in the industry. You can discover more about Messari at Messari IO, but for now, let's get right into the episode. It's going to be a good one. This podcast is presented by blockworks Group, one of the top blockchain events and media production companies I've worked with. For exclusive content and events that could help you with insight into the crypto and blockchain space, check them out at blockworksgroup IO and you will not be disappointed. All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Musaru's Unqualified Opinions. I'm Ryan Selkis at two Bit Idiots. I told you we got a great season coming up this year. And joined by none other than Balaji Srinivasan, who's now the editor in chief of Nakamoto, which has made quite a bit of noise after its auspicious launch just week and a half ago on the anniversary of the launch of the bitcoin network Balaji, I assume many people in the industry will know and find familiar. He's been a pioneer in the space. He's a serial entrepreneur, was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, was The founder of 21, which became Earn, was of course acquired by Coinbase, where he was most recently the cto. So I've crossed paths multiple times with Balogy over the last six and a half years that I've been in the industry, and he's always a treat to learn from. And the thing I think that everybody's probably most interested in right now, apology, is what exactly is Nakamoto and why did you decide that this was going to be the next project that you tackled? But just to maybe put a little bit more skin on the bone from my intro, would love to hear your origin story within crypto and maybe the two minute version of how we even.

Got to this point.

And really what's helped shape your opinions of the industry so that you know that this is the kind of next right path for you as an entrepreneur.

Totally. Yeah. So thanks for that kind intro, Ryan. One thing I might just start off by saying is crypto is certainly important to me and it might be 99% of what your audience knows about me. But prior to getting to crypto, I got my PhD at Stanford, I taught statistics and CS there, founded a genomics company, sold that for 375 million. Also investor in, like, Superhuman Soylent Lambda School, you know, a bunch of tech startups and so on. And, you know, so I do tweet about that stuff, but for a reason. Everyone wants to record all the time, which is great, right? But I also like genomics. I like machine learning. That's other stuff I'm into. On the topic of, like, you know, how I got into crypto, I think, you know, there's a few different threads, but one of them was in doing genomics, I. I learned what the state really was. So, as an academic, the worst thing the government can do is basically not renew your grant. The worst thing it can do is not give you money. As an entrepreneur, it's quite different. Essentially an arbitrary decision by somebody. If you think Apple or Google is arbitrary sometimes in their platform decisions, those at least are private companies. You can get out there and appeal. The US government can be 10x or 100x worse. And that was something that I learned in that space. And people saw some of this where there are conflicts between the State and the FDA and 23andMe and so on. But that was definitely something. That was an experience where I realized how serious that was. And the other thing was, of course, financial crisis. And one of the things I've been thinking about for a long time, I tweeted about this, was that perhaps you might want to denominate things in J O U L E S joules as like, a fundamental currency. Because now that would be something that even if there was inflation, you could say, okay, how many joules does it take to assemble this iPhone? And that'd be something you could compare. So I was thinking about the nature of money as well. So those are the two things that led me to crypto. To your question about Nakamoto itself. What are we trying to do with Nakamoto? Why do we set it up? Basically, when I'm building with Nakamoto, is something, well, first that I enjoy doing, which is I enjoy writing and teaching and learning about Crypto. Back in 2013, I had a MOOC course through Stanford that I think was one of the first courses to teach anything about bitcoin at scale. And we had more than 250,000 students. Some of those folks actually went on to contribute to Bitcoin.org, like Will Binns and so on. And this was something which I think helped. I think it was useful on the margins. Then I got busy with other things, and I didn't have the time to do education. That's Basically my first love is both learning and kind of teaching. And so that's kind of the first reason I did. I wanted to do something that I enjoy doing every day, number one. Number two is I wanted to have a way to bridge various gaps within the community. As we'll get to probably later in the conversation. I understand the rationale for crypto anarchy, but I believe in crypto civilization. Okay, it's a good quip. It's a good quip, right? So that's, you know, if you actually take crypto seriously and you realize how powerful it is and you realize that it is true that the crypto will inherit the earth, I think that we really want to think about what sort of society we want to build in 2030 or 2040. And, you know, I think crypto anarchy is better than anarchy for sure, because crypto provides some band aid on that. If you just look at what anarchy means in the dictionary, it means disorder, chaos. It's all negative pretty much. Right? Crypto anarchy provides at least some order on top of the anarchy. But I think what people actually want, I mean, you don't really want a trustless society. A trustless society means when you go and buy a cup of coffee, you have to go and put a dipstick in it to see that you weren't poisoned. You know, like that's bad, right? Like, like, like people who have escaped, you know, in places in South America or what have you, there's kidnappings. That's what a low trust society looks like. And people who've escaped those societies don't really want that. So it is good that you can have a technology that functions with a very low amount of trust or no trust. But really what I think of is crypto isn't about or shouldn't be about trusting no one. It's about giving you a choice of who to trust. Because you can always exit. You can move your currency out, you can opt into something, and then the question is, what do we opt into? What is that future we're building? Is it Mars or Mad Max? And I'm interested in Mars and I'm interested in the individual and I'm interested in technology. I'm interested in what I think the true spirit of crypto is. And that's why I want to build and not come out of a community that's focused around those values.

It makes sense. And you got off to a phenomenal start. Obviously the guiding vision post that you laid out was one of the more popular ones recently in recent memory that was A rallying cry of source for why the community should actually contribute and take seriously this new education resource. And you have a very impressive list of contributors early on, some 60 of the top thinkers and tinkerers within the space. It strikes me that we went through phases in Bitcoin where the early phase and and forum was bitcointalk. It was for the hardcore developers at first, and then ultimately some of the libertarians started to join and really early gold bug investors in bitcoin. And then we kind of saw the slightly more open jump to Reddit. Bitcoin talk was still important. Reddit, this open community, I'd say was kind of phase two, especially until the bitcoin fork wars. And that's when things really started to get toxic because it was around the same time that Ethereum launched. It was around the same time that other alternative assets started to pick back up in prominence. And you saw the bitcoin dominance go from 90%, I think, during the last bear market and gradually eroded through the ICO boom until it fell below 50%. That's when Twitter really took off because you couldn't trust the Reddit forum moderators anymore either. So at least Jack and Twitter are objective and neutral in the chaos of the conversation. Knock them. In some ways it seems like it's full circle where you're trying to create this meritocratic discussion forum where individuals that actually have some street cred are able to contribute. But the guiding principle has to be that there's some type of civility and people aren't talking past each other and just shit posting like you see on the social platforms that are just no moderation. Right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So how do you see this working in the short and medium term as this gets off the ground? And then maybe there's a longer term question for how do you grow the pie and continue to make this a vibrant community versus what tends to happen, which is this community started great and then it hits a certain number and then it just evolves.

Great question. So actually I've thought a lot about this. It doesn't mean we'll be successful, but at least I've thought about it. So a few thoughts. One is, I want to actually discuss this concept of civility. And the idea here is there's kind of like an A B and a C. So people will call for civility and discourse and then fairly sophisticated radicals of many different political persuasions will argue against this and they'll say, you know, like, you know, there'll be folks on the left or the libertarian right will say, oh, civility is just a tool to control the discourse. It's just a way for power to censor people. You just want us to shut up, and so on and so forth. Or you're normalizing bad behavior. Or you're normalizing bad behavior. Exactly right. And now we have a food fight where whether Republican or Democrat or with anything, the sick burn, the dis, the distortion, the strawman, the clickbait, that is what gets attention, you know, And Twitter is metabolizing, it's digesting the trust that exists within society. And just as an example, if you know, like it is completely normal, it's considered totally normal for someone to go up to somebody else in a Twitter thread and just yell F you at that. Right? But you wouldn't go to Starbucks and do that in person, right? Like, you wouldn't just go up to some random stranger even if you overheard their conversation. You just go up to them and just scream F you in their face. Right? And now you know exactly what I'm talking about.

I know a few people within crypto that might do that at a conference, but maybe not to a random stranger, right?

So the thing that I realized is Twitter is not real life, but it will be. So this is the thing that's concerning to me. So if we break that down and then I'll come back to like, how we plan to deal with this in a first problem and then possible solution. The problem, I think is in non Trail Part 1 of Incentives on Twitter. If you start a fight that gains you followers, that gains you likes, and that gains you attention, and that's monetizable, right? In the real world, if you start a fight that gains you police attention, which is often not valuable, right? However, we're starting to see with this new wave of social apps like TikTok and so on, is just to give you a sense of escalating severity. There's a guy who's standing on the edge of a ravine and running back and forth for likes. There's another guy who's dangerously driving on the highway, like swerving underneath a tranquil trailer. He's like, I risked a lot for this, please like this. And in extremists, you have folks like these shooters who literally go and post their video on 4chan for people to give them a thumbs up. Because humans are social animals and these folks have become acculturated. People talk about falling into the wrong peer group. That's what that is, right? You know, you get, you know, like likes for going and shooting somebody up or, you know, dangerously driving on the highway and dangering a lot of lives. Right. Another example of that, with some of the riots that happen in Portland. I think we're going to see a lot more, unfortunately, of that where these online incentives basically radicalize people and they do crazy things in the real world for the reinforcement of their peer group. So I think we're going to see actually a lot more than this. You know, that's an edge case of stuff that I mentioned right now, but I think we're going to see a lot more of this, unfortunately, in the 2000s. So it's in moments like that that you're like, okay. And everything I said, we've got proof points. Everything I just mentioned is in a rearview mirror. Unfortunately, we're going to see more and more. So at that point, you're like, okay, actually, maybe there is something to the stability. Just to give you an example, your body does an immense amount of work with processes called, for example, feedback inhibition or the maintenance of blood sugar levels. We're keeping a parameter, your blood sugar within a certain range. It should not be too high nor too low. Either side is very bad for you. Right. So in certain systems, moderation is an absolute. It's an essential, you know, like. Like often people will, you know, deride centrism as being simply an interpolation of things. It's not pure enough and so on, but it's actually a situational thing. Sometimes if you're too extreme, you will die. And so you can't just go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, you could argue that this is kind of baked into most social platforms now. There's always the potential that you could have bot armies that are upvoting or liking or retweeting, and that certainly has happened. But by and large, moderation is baked into just about any good product.

Right.

I think the. I want to let you finish on this point, but I don't think that that was necessarily the issue with Reddit or Twitter or Bitcoin talk. Probably not really as relevant because that community seems like it's more or less stay put, and it's very narrow in its applicability. But the moderation systems exist. What you're talking about is a very different culture. There's no guiding culture for Twitter or Reddit or any of the other communities that have really emerged. So getting the culture right. It seemed like there was a very good first step with the launch of Nakamoto. Massive interest. A lot of discussion in telegram group the first weekend. But I want to triangulate on that in particular, because I do think that part of the culture, it sounds like you're trying to build. There's a strong emphasis on healthy moderation, where you strike that balance rate.

That's actually right. That's absolutely right. How is the real question right. Okay, a little more on what I think is wrong with Twitter in particular, and then what we'll do to fix it. What I think Twitter does is it results in quantifiable, uncapped virtue signaling in any community. Okay. For example, you can't be woke enough. And, you know, this is something that started in academia but now has gotten out there where folks are literally talking about how, you know, math is white supremacy, which would be a big surprise to the, you know, Arabs who invented algebra and Indians and Chinese and, you know, math is a universal culture. Like, lots of people contributed to that. Right. So they're so woke that they've actually, like, inverted and perverted whatever they think they were doing, which is tolerance. And I think that that is true within lots of other cultures. For example, you know, Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, communism. You know, these folks would just compete because it was a pure status ladder. You could never be pure enough. They come with some new purity test. Okay. And part of that is it's, you know, status is a zero sum game. And if you want to be at the top of the Twitter leaderboard each day, you, you know, it sounds where you're contributing value, you're contributing words, not a scarce resource. You're contributing, and you're basically trying to out compete others. And I think that that has come to the crypto community within maybe completely. Obviously, the purity testing is getting more intense in all of the subcultures. I'm not trying to call any particular group out, and I think that's an incentives problem. And so what's the solution to that? Well, first is, and these are all tools, which I did a tweet on this actually yesterday, where there's like 10 tools that I want to apply, and we're going to experiment. And I'm not saying that I've got the perfect solution or anything like that. Okay. But some macro concepts, number one is I want Nakamoto to be focused on learning and earning. Why? Because if you're just there to socialize and there's no purpose that people have, you know, there's that saying, like, idle hands are the devil's playground.

Right.

I think there's significantly less trolling, for example, on, let's say, GitHub or in Google Docs, so to speak, because they're kind of workplaces. Right. And an interesting question is, can we get a productive site that also has some degree of positive socialization, for the most part, like in a small company's corporate slack, People aren't trolling each other. They're having productive discussions and what have you. And I'd argue that's because there's economic alignment there. Okay, so this gets me to the second question. One thing I've thought a lot about is that crypto allows us to scale cap tables. You know, the cap table took, you know, all these people from around the world and aligned them to build Facebook and Google and, you know, Dropbox and all these amazing Silicon Valley companies. And that was just really aligning a few hundred people from. From everywhere. Right. Crypto allows us to build cap tables that have not 100 people, but 100,000. So one of the things I'd like to do with Nakamoto is have an admissions criteria. And this is something we're going to, you know, announce and experiment with. I'm not saying this is final. Okay. But let me float it. Which is proof of HODL and proof of biddle. Proof of hodl. The idea is to put a cap on virtue, signaling. We encourage every Nakamoton to hodl up to 1 BTC. Now, we recognize that not everybody can afford that. That's like seven or eight thousand dollars. We recognize that for some people, the number might be 0.1 BTC. For some people, even 0.01 BTC. Or even less than that if you're in the developing world. Okay. But you essentially acquire that amount of Bitcoin and you pseudonymously prove via a digital signature that you hold that amount. And there's different ways to do that. You can do that with a time lock. You can do that with something where you keep it in an address, and if you move it, you're logged out or something. And I might start it, for example, with just the dumbest trust mechanism, where I just trust people to say, yes, I hodl this much. And they say, okay, we're going to roll out the challenge authentication version of it in a few months. You want to recode it? I don't want to rush it out. That might be a V0. Or we use Coinbase. Fine. So we do proof of hodl. And the great thing about that is once you have hodled that certain amount, let's say it's 1 BTC or 0.1 BTC or whatever is a consensus, then no one can test you anymore. Okay? That is no longer the dimension on which you're being tested. Your purity is no longer being tested. You paid your dues, right? You're a dues paying member. Okay, so then. But that's not sufficient, right?

That is.

That is necessary, but not sufficient. The second component is proof of biddle. So buidl. And what that means is, all right, you hodl, but are you a builder? Are you somebody who's a positive sum person? Are you generally constructive? Are you polite? And one way of thinking about this, there's this one liner. And people will quibble it with it, but just let me give it as one liner. People will say, in engineering, your GitHub is your resume. Right. So one thing I think about for Nakamoto is if your GitHub is your resume, your Twitter is your character. If. Yeah, I'm not saying. Right. Okay, let me.

I like that.

Keep going.

Because there's a few things that we're going to. A few threads that we're going to pull on here.

Good. Okay. So the thing is, I recognize also that people sometimes get in fights on Twitter. People sometimes, you know, they succumb to the sick burn. You know, they'll diss somebody, they'll first strike. I get that. That happens from time to time. But if it's a pattern of behavior, like, if you're just like a mean person, you know, and that's something which is hard to quantify. I mean, you could probably run sentiment analysis on people's tweets, but it's something where, over a period of time, if you've shown yourself to be a core character, if you're somebody who is driven by, like, hatred. And unfortunately, there are some people who are like this. And this is not like one particular community or anything like that. You know, these people exist on Twitter. There's some crazy, crazy. If you're not a builder, and this is the broadest sense, by the way, that could be an engineer, of course, but it could be a founder, it could be an investor. It could be a writer. It could be a professor. It could be. It could be a plumber. It could be a tradesman. It could be a journalist, even. Oh, my God. But basically, it's just somebody who has a positive attitude. And that's something where. How would we define that? I think what we do is we have initial seed group of Nakamotons. Like a Nakamoton is someone who's at Nakamoto. Initial seed group of Nakamotons. And they would Basically do proof of bill, almost like a proof of stake vote to kind of approve. These three people say, this person is good. Let's let them in the community. Now if they let somebody in the community who is later than, you know, misbehaves or is, you know, like, like banned or what have you, then those people may lose their ability to invite for six months or a year, for example. That's a strong man for what I think of as the initial mechanism, proof of hodl plus proof of battle. So let me pause there, get your thoughts on that and I can give one.

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a ton to unpack there. So, you know, for, for starters, the learn and earn concept, it resonates, right? And for many reasons, but one of not the least of which is many people at this point are not going to be able to buy a full bitcoin and economy. So you have to start re engineering how people acquire their initial crypto, which 99 times out of 100 is probably going to be bitcoin, and then it trickles down. So I buy that thesis that if you're long crypto, you're almost inevitably long bitcoin, because if bitcoin goes under, if it's flipping by eth anytime and the near medium term, I don't think people realize what a disaster that would be just from a narrative standpoint, from cultural and kind of mainstream investment standpoint. But what's maybe more interesting is the way that you're thinking about making sure that people are bought in. And I think this is probably where some of the pushback came from, as many people objected to the use of the name Nakamoto because there were some contributors that had built eos and bitcoin cash and a handful of other, you might argue, complementary, but others might argue competitive ecosystems. And if the litmus test was you only have to own One Bitcoin and EOS, Block 1 did a $4 billion crowd sale that they sold and then mostly sold for bitcoin that they now hold in Treasury. Well, of course they owned plenty of bitcoin. That doesn't necessarily mean that the community is just going to wipe the slate clean and say, oh, well, this was a worthwhile experiment if they think that it was a scam. I'm not singling out block one, but this, I think might apply to any token team. That is part of the early conversation. Let's forget about the early contributors. But part of the early conversation because it's almost impossible for them to not own a certain amount of bitcoin. But the incentive misalignment could still be rather extreme, where they're either pitching their own book or they don't necessarily have great intentions. And some of the loudest critics might have the best of intentions, even if they're obnoxious. In calling out and shedding light on some of the discrepancies with contributor stories or the ethics of how they bootstrap their projects in some cases.

Because we're.

Talking about financial assets, it's hard to separate the two, I guess. The tech angle I understand, but because they're financial tech and there are associated tokens, how do you extricate those two things? Because you do need to have some type of steel man bull bearer case. And an actually interesting debate about some of these projects that are going to be covered, but I don't know that a litmus test is necessary or even possible.

So several thoughts. First is, I think our philosophy is bitcoin and not bitcoin or. And that's actually where I think the community is in practice in the sense of. At Coinbase, no matter what community I met with, and you probably experienced this yourself, they may be in privacy coins, maybe people who are competing privacy coins, competing smart contract platforms. Everybody knew, respected and held bitcoin, but a lot of those folks recognized that bitcoin was digital gold. And if you go back and you read actually all of Satoshi's own writings, and this is a point that I'm making in this post opening sentence, Satoshi Nakamoto was not a troll. Satoshi Nakamoto was calm, cool, pragmatic. In pro technology, he avoided confrontation. He avoided confrontation with WikiLeaks. He never yelled at anybody. I mean, the most he ever got, the closest he ever got was he said, oh, you know, if you don't, I don't have the time to respond to you. But even then he provided a link, and that was actually a discussion, a technical discussion with Dan Larimer on micropayments that you can go and look at. It was actually. It's sort of taken out of context. He's meant to sound more dyspeptic than he actually was in that conversation.

What was that comment directed at Dan? Or was it just part of the thread with Dan?

It was part of a trend with Dan, I think. I believe so, yeah. So you can go back and look at that and it's just something that's quoted out of context as if. But over hundreds of posts, over years, he basically never lost his temper, never lost his Cool. Never yelled at anybody. He also said things. He was a supporter of Meme Coin. He said, hey, we can't put everything on the same chain. Bit DNS and bitcoin. It makes engineering sense. You have multiple chains right now, of course, he also said things like, he said both, you know, and I don't want to litigate this. Okay, but he said both, yeah, we should increase the block size. But he also said, hey, we shouldn't have multiple clients. And so you can find things in his sayings which are like, you know, scriptures that arguably contradict each other. Now, I'm not extremely enthusiastic about, you know, treating Satoshi like Jesus and going back in his writings like a religious figure, even though, frankly, that's kind of where some folks in the community are going. I think of Satoshi as a phenomenal engineer and somebody who I respect. Like, I respect Newton or Maxwell. You know, these are phenomenal, you know, scientists that discovered something. But the reason that we named the site Nakamoto was after that Satoshi. You know, the original satoshi, who was an engineer who engaged with people who was positive sum, who was neutral and pragmatic and pro tech and try to use the best tool for the job to advance freedom, even if that meant bit DNS and bitcoin. Right. And he was a pragmatist about it. Okay, now then, getting to your point about other platforms. Well, it's interesting because lots of the folks who are prominent now in crypto were some of the earliest folks who were talking to Satoshi, for example. So just the other day, there's a thread where Satoshi Thanks Zuko in 2010 for writing one of the first blog posts on bitcoin and has a discussion with him about how awesome it would be. He didn't know how to add zero knowledge to bitcoin. Nobody did at the time. But he's like, yeah, this would be pretty interesting if we could use zero knowledge proofs here. I'm not sure how you do that. And, you know, so insofar as if you think of bitcoin as digital gold, I do think there's room for other things, but I don't. What's the right way to put this? I don't really want to argue that with people who think it's a zero sum game. If you think it's a zero sum game, then there's certain fundamental libertarian principles which are like, wealth creation is non zero sum. If you believe it's something where there can be different niches and that one person's gain is not necessarily another person's loss. There are zero sum games, but I don't believe this is one. So what I'm trying to do with Nakamoto is to create a community where everybody can win. Now, I'm not kumbaya about it. I recognize that, of course there's going to be some degree of competition somewhere. There's going to be places for fights. I'm sure people are going to fight on crypto Twitter, and I'm not going to be able to stop that. But within Nakamoto, I want it to be civil. Okay, now you made another point, which is, okay, what about a large company which has some stake, Bitcoin, but has a larger stake in something else? Okay, so frankly, almost anybody who has an investment in anything that's usually true of, you know, most people will have more in US Dollars than they do in bitcoin. Most people will have, you know, they're not going to have their full net worth in Facebook stock, even if they're a Facebook employer, even more than 51% of it. It's an unrealistic threshold to say, okay, it's a majority. All right, so the next question is, all right, well, maybe it's not a majority, but it should be the single biggest thing that you're working on for your whole life. All right, so my response to that is. And I had a thread on this ProbTC that is to say there's a thread with me, Pierre Rochard, a few others a few days ago, I think let's just start with the premise. Crypto Twitter is not a representative sample of all the bitcoin holders out there. There's like millions, tens of millions of bitcoin holders. They have voted with their capital to buy and hold this cryptocurrency, and they put in 100 or $1,000 and they went about their lives. And that's actually quite valuable and good. We should support that. We don't need everybody to obsess and put out a thousand tweets a day. In fact, it's kind of unbalanced. I'd rather have somebody $1,000 rather than a thousand tweets a day. Because, and this is critical, that thousand dollars that they buy in hodl materially, quantifiably, and numerically benefits the entire community of bitcoin holders, right? So whatever else you can say, this person, whatever their stated preference they're expressed, they may say something. What they're actually doing is benefiting other BTC holders. And the thing about this is, it's a two by two, right? Like, you can find folks who are big hodlers who also talk in the game, but you can also find folks who are big holders who are completely silent on social media. And conversely and interestingly, folks who are not that large as hodlers, but who style themselves as defenders of the faith or what have you. What I'd like to do is try an alternate experiment. If you have a community, let's say we can build Nakamoto into a community of 100,000 or a million BTC hodlers. Well, that's good. Guess what? Everybody now has something to talk about that they have in common. For example, you get in a taxi today, people used to say, oh, the weather or sports. Those are apolitical. But they're political. Now, some people will talk about. I'm not taking any position on this, okay, Please. But they'll talk about climate change or they'll talk about kneeling, right? Like in sports. Weather and sports are now political, right? So by having a shibboleth, by having a community where everybody is a BTC hodler, that's something that's in common. It's a rooting interest. It's a cultural thing over time that arises, but also puts a cap on virtue signals. Now, there's another aspect which I didn't talk about, but let me float it. I also want to have sub communities, okay? So let's say we have 100,000 total people here. So we have a thousand people who are into zero knowledge proofs. And it might be proof of holding bitcoin and proof of building to be part of the main community. But to be part of that zero knowledge subcommittee, you might need to pass an exam on zero knowledge. Right? Or you're part of a zcash subcommunity and you hodl zcash. Or you're part of an XYZ subcommittee and you hodl that. Or you're like a longer term. You're part of a physician subcommittee and you have a medical degree. And the point being that we have this common thing, which is everybody is a holder and everybody's a builder, as reflected in letters of recommendation from other people. But then there's sub communities that build off of this. So it's literally bitcoin and not bitcoin or. And we're trying to build crypto civilization rather than crypto anarchy. Okay, let me pause there. Get your thoughts.

So it sounds great, right? Because it's day one, and aside from some mean tweets and some folks that were trying to hijack the chat. Over the weekend, Telegram group grew from zero to what, 7,000 or Twitter went to 7,000.

It's like 10,000 now.

But yeah, between, between, between the two. It's, it's, it's, you know, over 10,000 now.

Yep.

You know, it's, it's easy to launch the way that you did in terms of getting the contributor base lined up and having, you know, people that you've known, that you've done business with kind of rally around this and say, yes, we're sick of, you know, all the distractions of Twitter. But what, what hasn't proven out yet and I'm curious when it really comes into play because today it's just very high quality articles that are getting posted. But if that's it, then that just becomes propaganda.

Right?

There's no steel man case against or there's no check against claims that are being made in this education resource that is very much a pro growth, pro crypto community. And as soon as you start to go into the critiques or the not even critiques, I would just say if you had a prospectus for each crypto asset, you could get the business description and risk factor just by taking the big holders and all the people that would shit on a crypto Twitter, you'd have all of the pros and cons for the investment case. For these things, there's signal and some of that noise. It's on Twitter. But how do you replicate and at least make this same so that it's not all one direction or the other? Because I'd argue it might even be a little bit more dangerous for people to go in without eyes wide open about some of the risks. Again, because these are financial assets, not just underlying communications technologies like the Internet.

So my short answer is I want to outsource that to Masari, which is doing a phenomenal job.

That was not planned, but sure, fine.

But sorry, IO go, go. But my longer answer is we're not an investment community. We don't offer a Buy XYZ button. We don't plan to do that. We're not making investment recommendations. I probably like if we ever run, I shouldn't say never ever, but if we ever run anything on technical analysis, we'll be focused on stochastic processes, Brownian motions, you know, arma calculations will be focused on the math of it as opposed to like, you know, the orange coin causes the phase of the. Let's go ahead.

Orange coin go up.

Yeah, but exactly. Or because of the phase of the moon like, and these Bollinger bands, you should buy this at this time, you know, like, that's fine. You know, people make their stuff on that. I know. I have no interest in that. You know, So I want to keep. I want to keep price talk out of there. I want to keep buying and selling crypto out of there. I want to focus on learning and earning. And that's different actually. Right. Like, it's the difference between speculating in a foreign exchange market versus, you know, an honest day's work for an honest day's pay or academia, you know, it's just a different culture. And, you know, in terms of critique, like, I would welcome, for example, technical critiques of things that are phrased constructively. For example, here are five technical considerations that XYZ's proof of stake will have to consider. Or this is a security hole that we reported and fixed with this smart contract. And here's our postmortem. That type of stuff. Constructive criticism. 100% would love to do that. But we're not trying to get folks educated about investment. I intentionally want to push that out. And one way of thinking about that is the difference between ETH research versus ETH trader. If you're familiar with those two communities.

Yes.

Right. So maybe that answers your question, or I can go further.

No, I think that's helpful. And maybe let's take a step back from just Nakamoto. I think most people that have been in the industry for a while, in particular the people that are kind of in the day to day chaos. I started as an Internet troll, right? That's how I broke into the industry, because I was anonymous and I could just talk shit. And that's how I learned. But for most people, it's a massive distraction. I can brush most of it off because I've been around the scar tissue, but it is intimidating to kind of come into the information fold and just have all this thrown at you. So I think it's obvious that there's value and that a community like this should exist. And most of the builders in the industry would like to see something like this existing that isn't focused on clickbait or the negative, but a little bit more sober. Almost like a replica of what you would expect to have in person if you could meet folks on a conference circuit. Which is basically, I think, why people travel the world and go to all these same conferences. Because it's just one continuous conversation that's not really been filled in the virtual world. It's just you have to go from Meet space. To meet space.

To your point also, you know, you're probably aware of this. You know, maybe some listeners are. But crypto Twitter is way more civil and interesting in person. And there's folks who are fundamentalists online who are actually very much not so in person. Yes. Yeah.

Everybody's their worst self on Twitter, I guess.

Yeah.

Although I might have the record for this because I've met so many people online or in person that say you're not. Not so bad in person. Which is.

I think part of the. So first is Twitter's incentives get you more likes and tweets for more exclamation marks and more yelling. That's a big part of it. The other thing is, I think Twitter and social media turns people into actors. They're playing a caricature of themselves. It's like method acting where they're just never out of character. Right. Like their audience expects a certain tone from them and it reinforces that in the same way that you, you know, you go to Chipotle and you expect a certain flavor. And if that flavor has changed on you, you're like, huh, I didn't come here for this. Right. And the audience will give you negative feedback. And so you become a more and more like, you know, concentrated version of whatever this caricature is. But go ahead.

You're saying, well, I'd love to know how you view the crypto information landscape period, right now. Right. Because I think this helps on the community element. But you know what? There's been a significant level up on the data side, on the research side. There's obviously dozens of sub communities now for all the different protocols. Where do you see Nakamoto continuing to grow and kind of fill this community niche? And what would be some of the first third party integrations that you would hope to do? Because you mentioned having some other crypto native features to this over time.

Absolutely. So first, let me say what it's not. Right. So it's not a competitor to like the block or CoinDesk, which is breaking news. We're not doing the kinds of dashboards and data analysis that you guys are doing at masari or that CoinMarketCap is doing. I mean, we may publish like interactive widgets and so on, but not price focused type stuff for investment decisions. Obviously we're not building an exchange like Coinbase or Kraken or Binance or what have you. And we're also trying to not be the food fight of crypto Twitter and Reddit and what have you. Okay, so that's all things we're not. What are. We're basically a positive sum community for folks to ask dumb questions. And, you know, for example, one. I mean, that's just one way of doing it. But to ask dumb questions, to get smart, to learn and to earn. So that's the hole I think we fill. And, you know, Ryan, I can't show you all of these DMs and signals that I got, but, like, my resolve to build something like that. I probably got 200 something like that. DM signals, telegrams, ET cetera, for people saying thank you. I'm so tired of having to, like, slug it out. Including, interestingly, some people who have a Persona that's actually very different than this. Okay. Which is interesting. Right? Like, it actually. Kind of. Go ahead.

Yeah. I mean, you. At some point, you want to have a sober source that you can read. Right. Even if you're going to carry on.

Twitter, it is exactly, honestly, like, you know, somebody raised in a Christian fundamentalist sect or what have you. And again, I've got nothing against Christianity. I'm not trying to dis Christianity or what have you. Okay? I'm neutral on it. But it's somebody, like, raised in a fundamentalist sect who has to repeat certain kinds of things, but would also like an environment where they can find out about molecular phylogenetics and learn about evolution. And maybe this thing is something interesting and important, you know? And that's actually related to another point, which is, over time, what I'd like to do at Nakamoto are build crypto native features. Let me give you some examples. So one big one would be pseudonymity. Okay? So if you're a beginner or you have some reputation which is at variance with. You're curious about zero knowledge, but you don't want to be called out for that because, oh, you're showing interest in a coin that your tribe doesn't like or whatever. Right? Capulets and Montags, so to speak. Okay? So you put on a pseudonym, and you come in and you discuss it and you learn. Or you're somebody who. You're a professor and you think you should be expert in compilers, for example, but you're not totally clear what the softcode thing is, but you also don't want to reveal that. Okay? Then you, boom, you come in, and you come in under a pseudonym. You ask dumb questions. You can learn. So that's like one crypto native. Future is, I want to allow for pseudonyms as shields, not swords, because satoshi used pseudonymity as a shield. Not a sword. Did that make sense? Right. You're not attacking someone from behind the pseudonym. You're using it to sort of just be able to ask questions without facing personal assaults. Number one, and I gave a talk on this a while back, the pseudonymous economy. Number two, the kinds of things I'd like to Second example of a crypto native feature. Again, this is over time, but prediction market sell bets small amounts of money. But simply to put it on the record that I think this. I think that you start to build a portfolio of the things you believe or whatever over time and again, you can do this under a pseudonym and it's really meant more for kind of personal accountability or what have you. Like I called this. I didn't call that. Now there's obvious retorts to that. What if someone places a thousand bets and they only surface the one that they won on and whatnot. And there's ways to deal with that, meaning you bet on both the win and the lose outcome and you only claim the win outcome. There's counter arguments which are, well, first, if you did that across 10 things, you would have to have two to the 10th different accounts and starts to cost you real money to be able to bet on all those things. And second is it'll be a combination of signals. It's not just prediction markets. But the point basically being that these are things people have talked about for a long time is building crypto native features into things. What I've started to realize is it's probably not going to be done by most sites and if we build up a positive community here, that's actually like the first prerequisite, then we can roll these kinds of things out as number two. And I've got more ideas on this, like being able to earn crypto, of course, earning pseudonymously, other kinds of things. But I want to build the future that I want to live.

Well, it's a worthwhile project, definitely aspirational in its focus, and I think it's going to really continue to pick up steam, particularly as you continue to roll out features and added the contributor base, which the content has been phenomenal so far. So definitely appreciate you coming on and sharing a little bit more info here. Where can people get involved and sign up for early access?

Well, you can just follow us at twitter.com nakamoto and you can view us at nakamoto.com everything will be put out on the Twitter feed and you can also follow me at OLGs and DM me if you have any questions.

Apology always a pleasure. Hopefully we'll run into each other in person soon. Or at least on Nakamoto. So thanks again.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you for tuning in.

Until next time. Peace.

That's a wrap. Thanks for listening. New episodes of Unqualified Opinions go live weekdays at noon Eastern time. You can follow me in the meantime on Twitter 2bitidiot if you want to continue the conversation or troll me otherwise, I'll see you next week.