Decentralized Currency, Internet, Everything! | An Interview with Brock Pierce

I've been meeting wonderful people here at Block Show. Great entrepreneurs from Asia from all over the world are here and working on many exciting projects. I like to think of this industry as one big family or community. My partner, Dan Larimer, came up with this concept known as a DAC, or a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation. I like to call it a Decentralized Autonomous community because that's what this is all about. It's about building community. It's not trying to figure out what's best for you and what's going to serve you. It's about figuring out how to serve others. And in doing so, you're going to end up building a big community, and that's what will make your project successful. And so there's lots of fantastic entrepreneurs here working on wonderful things and growing this big community of tribes and family. Jobless world we're moving into, where all of us are going to be unemployed, which is a good thing. It will allow us to go back to basics. Prior to the industrial revolution, over 90% of the world's population were entrepreneurs. You only had two big centralized institutions, the church and state. And the Industrial Revolution is what gave rise to the mega corporation, which is what has solely been turning all of us into robots, machines. So in that world, we're going to be able to go back to building things that last instead of trying to hack together minimally viable products in a weekend to make money, because that's our goal. We're going to go back to basics. And in those basics, there's this wonderful concept known as ikigai. It's a Japanese term which means to figure out what you love. You know, what are the things you're passionate about, figuring out what you're good at. You know, there's a lot of things that some of us love, but you just might not be. You know, I'm never going to be the best basketball player. Just wasn't in the cards for me. But figuring out what you're good at and figuring out what the world needs, what's going to serve others, and if you can figure out what the world needs, what you're good at and what you love, you'll find eventually that center area there, which the Japanese call ikigai, which is finding your real life's purpose, which instead of spending one or two or three years working on something or three days, you'll spend your entire life developing and perfecting skills, things that I like to call superpowers. And that's what will eventually make you a superhero. And so it's figuring out those things and figuring out then with those things, those are your gifts that you can then serve and give to others. And once you've found that, you're going to start to build amazing things because you're going to go from being an amateur to being a master, being a wizard, being a magician. Money is that thing that very sadly, most people spend their life in pursuit of. And, you know, the funny thing about the whole blockchain space is most people come into this in pursuit of money because they see great economic opportunity. And yes, there is, and lots of money is being made, but that's not really what this is all about. We're reinventing the idea. And so money is this very sad thing that a lot of people think that if they have it, it's going to bring them happiness. And so a lot of people spend half their lives in pursuit of money thinking it's going to bring them happiness because of advertisements that have been convincing them if they have this thing, you know, it'll get them that thing that they want. And, you know, happiness will be there. And for those fortunate few, those lucky ones that actually, you know, get that money, that goal that they're pursuing, they. They actually accomplish it. What's really sad is a lot of those people then spend the rest of their lives miserable in fear of losing it. You know, money is a tool. Money isn't a bad thing. You know, guns don't kill people. People kill people. Money isn't bad. It's what we do for it that is, you know, life is about being in the now. It's about being present, because that's the only time there is. And in the now, you don't need very much, you know, so money is that thing that still has. It's an important tool. It's, you know, something that, you know, we all need some of it, not a lot of it, but you need enough of it, you know, to live your life. And, you know, fiat money is still very important, you know, because we still need to be able to transact in these local places. And we don't want prices and things going up and down. I mean, blockchain currencies yet are not replacing sort of transactional money yet. You know, Bitcoin is a store of value. It's really more like gold 2.0. And if you understand the origins of money, precious metals were the primary form of money for the last 5,000 years. Gold, silver, copper. And they were the primary form of money for very specific reasons. It had attributes that made them very useful for 5,000 years. And that is that it needed to be sufficiently scarce so that you didn't need truckloads of it to buy a loaf of bread. It had to be transportable, it needed to be malleable. You had to be able to take it apart, put it back together again, fungible. Like diamonds weren't a good form of money because they weren't all the same, non spoilable. You wouldn't want money that if it was put in a safe a year later would have gone bad. And so gold and silver and copper perform these things very well. If you look at Bitcoin, it actually has all of those attributes, it's just better at all of them. And the only difference between something like gold and Bitcoin or potentially other cryptos in the future is that it's intangible. And I'd say that tangibility is not a positive trait, it's an actual flaw or a fault in comparison. I'd rather have an intangible thing because I can send it anywhere instantaneously. I can't really do that with something like gold. And then fiat money is this kind of thing we've only had for, in its current form, less than 50 years. The entire monetary system of the world is a 50 year old experiment, something most people don't know. I want to see us decentralize all the things, decentralize everything. We're in the beginning, sort of phase of all of this. Think of the Internet. If I were going to describe so one of my superpowers, you know, we all have them. And if you don't know what your superpower is, I encourage you to spend some time actually dwelling on that. We all have them and we can have many of them. But one of my superpowers is that I'm fairly good at taking complex ideas and distilling them down into simple concepts that I could describe to a child, to anyone. I can find your vibration and learn how to communicate with you in a way that you'll understand. And I'm a reasonably good storyteller. And so the Internet, if I wanted to describe it in three words, is a data transport protocol. The problem is it's an insecure data transport protocol. What the blockchain is doing is it's upgrading the Internet into a secure data transport protocol, meaning the new Internet, the upgraded Internet, and the former Internet, the one we use today because it's insecure, has really only been able to do things around the movement of information. All of the really amazing things that can be done with the Internet haven't been possible yet because it hasn't been secure. And it wasn't, you know, that the people that were building the earliest of protocols that make up the Internet weren't smart. It's that we didn't have the processing power, we didn't have the ability to secure the Internet. And now we built the entire thing wrong. And everything is going to have to be rebuilt. So when we get scalable blockchains that secure everything that are fee less, eos, I think, is going to do a very good job of that. Come June 1st of next year, the Internet's going to start to fulfill its full potential. Right now, it's only a small part of what it's able to do. And soon we're going to be able to do all the things, which means there's an infinite number of opportunities. And just ask yourself, not what can you build, but what should you build? Don't build things because you can build things because you should, with a purpose, with intention, with meaning, hopefully, to serve others. And if you do what you love and you do what you're good at, and you're doing it to serve others, I promise you, money and all the things you want will follow. Thank you.