blockchain

“The thing that we're excited about Bitcoin is, A, the, obviously, the currency, but what's more interesting is even the block applications of the blockchain, right? It's the first time when we have sort of an append-only database that's kind of you can put thi…”

“I very much believe this, and I think we all do as a firm, a blockchain without a cryptocurrency literally makes no sense, because there's no incentive for their participants to host the blockchain.”

“Most people that are talking about blockchain, they're really looking for a database.”

“Okay, so that's not what a blockchain is. At least not how we use it. And every time there's a major movement, there often is a lot of hype.”

“And now I just saw this a couple of weeks ago. There was a publicly listed company in the UK that added blockchain and then its shares went up by 394%.”

“Blockchain is not meant to be cloud. It's meant to be, ah, a series of not intermediaries, but a series of effectively untrusted intermediaries on the internet that you don't know, and you don't have to know them, and it's not stored in one place.”

“They're actually very friendly. They don't want to like harm the system. They like, don't want to like kill blockchains. Like they actually want to figure it out together.”

“And we're, we, we're seeing both traditional assets being tokenized and then the idea of securities tokens, like why not put equity on a blockchain, right? So I think that's going to be a big trend moving forward in the next two years.”

“The one that is still missing is that of social signals. There's still no real good mechanism for reputation or for identity on the blockchain, and that's one of the things that many people are working on, and that's a building block that will be needed. Going…”

“And I think what's different about blockchains is all these services, the interface is open, but also the implementation is open. So, you know, it's not only can you like benefit from its utility, you can like pull back the covers and see how it's working in r…”

“It's again, you know, it's, will be compounding innovation that is unprecedented, you know, in the open source movement for that.”

“Blockchain doesn't work without Bitcoin, because you need an economic incentive to keep that network running and those services up.”

“And if Bitcoin became really a serious, well, ok, it you'd be amazed at how quickly whatever freedom you think you're getting via the blockchain would disappear.”

“And it is in fact expensive to make transactions. It's, ah, the, ah, the actual implementation of the blockchain is, ah, ah, is one that is hard. It's hard to do transactions in Bitcoin.”

“I don't believe that blockchain is going to undermine Amazon or any of these people, because The reason I use Amazon is not because of power, or the, not the power of Amazon, but the power of laziness.”

“The blockchain has never been hacked.”

“And I'm here to tell you that without it, we never would have caught these guys. In fact, without the blockchain, they would have still been sitting in the federal government today instead of in the federal penitentiary.”

“In the Bitcoin white paper never says the word blockchain, so I just want to make that very clear.”

“I think companies is a terrible way to explain this, but I think software agents that have these capabilities, including the ability to essentially transact funds, ah, would make a huge difference.”

“Bitcoin is a solution to that, because it outsources that role, that intermediation of trust, to the entire community. And it finds a, you know, a fascinating, unique instrument that, you know, that is the blockchain and the consensus process through which the…”

“When I hear people talking about creating all sorts of other currencies and putting it on the blockchain, I'm always, I'm a little bit skeptical of that. I think what they're talking about really is like, you can digitize any various types of assets and transf…”

“If the Greek government is talking about Making some kind of their own currency and having on a blockchain. I think they don't really understand what blockchain means when they say that.”

“I think Bitcoin will be the currency that, that everyone ends up using on the blockchain, and they probably don't quite understand what they're saying when they say that.”

“Well what the blockchain is going to do is unlock those And make it very fluid to move them around, to have them on your smartphone, to use them in new ways.”

“There will be a over the next year, year and a half, a lot of people that Take half measures and they just don't get all the, they don't do it what we would consider the right way. And they won't have great results and they'll kind of be like, ah, we tried tha…”

“I think most in general, what we envision, you know, over time is a much smaller financial system, actually, because many of the players in that in the financial ecosystem are there because they are helping to clear and settle, helping to Ensure there's no fra…”

“So a blockchain is a database, so we shouldn't overthink it, but it's different from a traditional database in two critical ways. First of all, it's shared. So in other words, it's distributed to every participant who is participating in the network. And then …”

“You'll see the first few networks going live next year. And then I think by 2017, you'll start to see some of the first winners. In other words, you'll see that if you, by 2017, in a particular market, if you don't have a network running, then you're behind. Y…”

“My observation is that the banks want to improve themselves. But they don't want to disrupt themselves.”

“No, it doesn't matter because the technology is already in the wild. It's already on wheels. It's flying. It's a nonstop kind of set of computers. Blockchains, once, once you turn them on and they are bona fide blockchains, it's, that's it. They cannot be stop…”

“All of those old ways of verifying things by being physically present are going to be replaced by the blockchain.”

“In the long term, blockchains are going to be invisible. And when they become invisible, then I think we will know that they are doing something useful.”

“Because what the blockchain does, it unbundles trust. And whoever was performing a trust function now is going to be threatened because trust can be accomplished by the network.”

“I think the blockchain stuff is actually right at the top of the Gardner hype cycle, and I think it's gonna crash down, like, towards the second half, you know, of this year when people actually try to implement it.”

“We are going to go more towards a distributed record-keeping system because we can now, and that's what's really exciting about blockchain.”

“And I wouldn't even call it a misstep, because we know when there's any fundamentally disruptive technology, there's a bunch of incumbents and legacy operators that come to this town to try to co-op government to sustain their advantage, and that we've seen th…”

“I think it won't be 10 years. I think in five years we'll look back and be surprised at how much the world changed. Much You know, similar to something like the iPhone or the internet itself, how quickly things changed in response to that.”

“We used to actually try to do on the whiteboard the description of how A series of nodes actually talk to each other and how it stamps and time those things, and I realized there's no reason for that. You just now explained, here's the benefit.”

“We worked on a concept for using blockchain or distributive ledger for scheduling at the VA to deal with the fraud issues of people were sneaking in, changing the schedules, and the benefit of, hey, there's a timestamp. You would know who touched it, when, and…”

“Actually, the greatest battle today is the threat to the current bureaucracies. Whether it be on the right or the left, you often defend your own personal income stream, your own job, your own bureaucracy, It's hard to say, hey, this is a great idea. You just …”

“It has massive ramifications in the developing world for the unbanked and the untitled.”

“There was no effort or way or manner of educating our colleagues about blockchain. So we really got together and said, look, let's formalize it so we can take out rooms and do briefings, which is effectively what that means, and provide a forum for other membe…”

“Many on the left, like myself, don't want corporations to play that role either, but frankly, the blockchain is a way to address both of those concerns from the left and the right.”

“There's like billions of files moving through the network and in some capacity, a lot of people in the blockchain space are using IPFS because it fits extremely well with the blockchain model.”

“We've integrated the blockchain now into our next generation market infrastructure technology, so we can basically support any market from pre-trade risk management through to settlement on the blockchain in any market, so including non-financial markets.”

“I think mining, like, miners controlling a network has proven to be pretty problematic. And so I think kind of aligning stakeholders and miners and putting them, you know, as one will be important in terms of, you know, progress in making changes to protocols …”

“And so I think as business models evolve, as we make this transition to the cloud, as blockchain becomes more widely deployed, security starts to become more of a feature and less of a product. And I think we start thinking less about kind of the specific tech…”

“Many of the smartest programmers and mathematicians and economists and theorists and systems builders in the world and Photographers in the world are obsessed with this. Like they're just magnetically drawn to it, not because of the money or this or that or th…”

“Blockchain is the first new third thing in, I don't know, probably 40 years, right? Free software open source is like 40 years old. It's the first new structure in 40 years, and it's an interesting one because it's a hybrid.”

“And we, blockchain's never been hacked. Some of the cryptocurrency exchanges have been hacked. You know, Mt. Gox, Coincheck more recently, Bitfinex, and others. But the blockchain itself has never yet been hacked.”

“The one that is still missing is that of social signals. There's still no real good mechanism for reputation or for identity on the blockchain, and that's one of the things that many people are working on, and that's a building block that will be needed going …”

“One of the hardest problems in the space is mapping cleanly one, ah, public key or address on the blockchain to an actual human being. So this is known as the civil problem. The problem that any one participant can create multiple addresses for themselves and …”

“With blockchains, the default setting is to reference the canonical, because it's harder not to. It's harder to break the rules than to follow them.”

“The analogy would be in blockchains that the more people are using the network, like, the more valuable the currency, because the currency is what powers all the commerce, and that, that's sort of like the tax, and that goes, you know, to the value of all the …”

“This openness in terms of both data and the code itself and the ability for anyone to contribute improvements to it and also just reuse it. It's again, you know, it's, will be compounding innovation that is unprecedented, you know, in the open source movement …”

“On blockchains, we get one canonical thing that multiple parties converge on, and, you know, in traditional open source, you know, everything is fractured into its own silo.”

“Some of the blockchain Models and some of the token economy stuff that, that you've written about as a way of creating sustainable business models for open protocols, basically, which is what we really kind of need.”

“Seeing it as this emergent, accessible space, I think, is really, really compelling for not only banks, but, like, tons of different finance companies and different enterprises in general to suddenly become these transnational actors that they weren't before, …”

“I think that the reason that stablecoins matter is actually very related to the reason that blockchains matter, which is that because it has so many implications for other applications, I think will be a really interesting like skip level technology, similar t…”

“If these two very large projects are approximately the same size, or one is a little bit bigger than the other one, or one is twice as big as the other one, or something like that, it's in the economic interests of everyone who holds coins in the bigger projec…”

“Today's governance systems and sort of blockchains and crypto networks, the way that they exist today will likely devolve into plutocracy simply because the mechanisms for vote buying are so effective as you've described.”

“Blockchains can be used to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of bribery and vote buying.”

“Your systems need to be strong even in the presence of economically motivated adversaries, and they need to be secure assuming people are rational rather than honest. So we don't get to lean on this sort of honesty that we have in the real world in blockchains…”

“Blockchains today are a drop in the bucket of like the world financial system, and the incentives just aren't there yet. But if we are to use these technologies, and if we are to scale things, I think these are absolutely realistic scenarios and potentially ni…”

“The way these mechanisms that people are building interact with the blockchain is very complex and opens the door for external actors to make a lot of money from front running them and make a lot of money from doing algorithmic trading on the network and every…”

“Right on schedule we get the arrival of a new open technology, which are blockchains that directly challenge The proprietary data business model, just as the internet and Linux challenged the proprietary software and distribution business model.”

“Even if it's been 10 years since the publishing of the Bitcoin white paper, this is still very, very early days, because I think that it's only been recent, it's only recently that, that people have begun to conceive of blockchains as computers, as opposed to …”

“Yeah, I recently gave a talk on this in a way of looking at this as a separation of consensus and state but really it's a separation of the consensus layer of a blockchain accounting system from the storage layer you know, where the, you don't have to have the…”

“There's a reason that every, you know, I think 2017 was a major year of fundraising. And 2019 is a major year of launches, and there's a reason that every blockchain that's launching today is mostly using proof stake.”

“This is the sort of idea to me, the key idea of a blockchain is that the code continues to run as designed and it has sort of game theoretic guarantees that it will. Right? And that gives code this autonomous, at least autonomous, not in the sense of like AI a…”

“This transformation will take a while, ah, we're the sort of, we're in the early stages, and so that's why I put 20, 30 in the title. But, ah, but I think all the pieces are in place, and we're on a clear path to get there over the next, next decade.”

“Every single node can construct an auditable, verifiable database view on top of this append-only ledger. This is really the key insight here. And the reason that it's auditable and verifiable is because we're using cryptography, hash functions, and digital si…”

“They're not a system for data storage. They're not a database. They're a piece of a puzzle, an anchor of trust. And so I think the real way we should be using blockchains is we should put as little on them as possible.”

“Zero knowledge proofs might be a breakthrough to solve the scaling problem that has stopped all the blockchains so far. Because the scaling problem is, you remember, everybody wants to be sure of everything that goes into the blockchain. That means the more pe…”

“You can't apply this encryption to blockchain, because all this encryption from Julius Caesar to Alan Turing to Netscape is point to point.”

“In the same way that the internet made media accessible and programmable, the technology of the blockchain does the same for money. It makes money accessible and programmable.”

“Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain and smart contracts more generally give the tools to create all of these. Payment rails, inexpensive remittances, credit histories, escrow, et cetera, for the billions of underbanked.”

“Gaming has really led the way in terms of technology development for many of the past, ah, important waves in technology. So anything from social to mobile to cloud, and, ah, I think blockchain is the next wave of that.”

“One way to think of what a blockchain is, a simple way to think of it, it's the first time that we've had a concept of a community owned and operated web service. One that's truly owned by a community, right?”

“In fact, various national, state, and county level governments are looking at actually putting records, land records, on the blockchain because it's far cheaper and more efficient than the alternative, old system.”

“Applied to Iraq, this means that the sender of the military aid, which in this case was the US, would have been able to trace along the whole path that that aid took and ensure that it got to its intended recipient. And if anybody tried to siphon it off along …”

“Quantum computers are ever built. Yes, they will be able to affect the signature algorithm that's used for securing assets on blockchains today, but not to worry. We have other signature algorithms that are actually quantum resistance. So even if you have a qu…”

“Without any obstacle around customs, foreign exchange, wire transfers that would have perhaps, perhaps made this interaction impossible without blockchains and without foundation.”

“Oftentimes projects will kind of come out of thin air and start trading on OpenSea without us ever having to go and do special integrations with them because it's all kind of built into the blockchain.”

“The same thing that internet has done to information, I think blockchains will do to the world of value, to the network of pages. We can exchange value directly without intermediaries overcoming the trust issues between people without involving third parties, …”

“So what a blockchain would do in particular, I think for the royalties is you could just have these contracts be open. Published on the blockchain. Have the money come into a smart contract and then get sent out to all the participants automatically. No third …”

“And luckily we have a perfect technology for establishing and tracking provenance in a way that is unbiased and can't be corrupted, which is the blockchain crypto technology.”

“She is basically licensing, so if you want to do AI Grimes which is you know, basically train an AI on Grimes' voice, and then make your own Grimes song, she'll auto license that to you and she'll do that, you know, using blockchain, and then She will basicall…”

“AI is what communism actually is a massive concentration of power and blockchain is what communism is advertised to be, which is power to the people.”

“It's a shame that, that a lot of, that some folks on the left have decided they hate blockchains because they're basically opting out of participating in this world. When they could be contributing to it and sort of nudging it in the direction they want. Inste…”

“I sort of think one way to think about blockchains is they're doing for the service layer, what open source software did for the software layer for like, for software running live in production, you know, you can now have services that are open and committed t…”

“Particularly if we get better blockchain crypto regulation, that we actually have a very good technological approach particularly for politicians and people in, you know, public figures to basically digitally sign content they're in, put it on the blockchain, …”

“It's a kind of technology that inverts the power relationship between the software and the hardware. Whereas historically, the hardware has always had power over the software because whomever controls the hardware can turn off the software or change it in some…”

“But what's happening now with Farcaster and other kinds of things is with the increase in block space, you could put more and more kinds of data on chain, and we're going to have to because you're going to need crypto instruments, and you're going to need cryp…”

“There's the blockchain stuff that doesn't really make sense to me. I'm a big, big fan of crypto, but it's like, crypto exists, like, if you're trading things that are purely in that are purely digital, works great. If you're saying, I'm going to represent some…”

“If you self custody your stocks, you're immune to outages from the broker. You can just sort of like easily replace one brokerage for the other, and you don't have to The blockchain would have to be down for you to lose the ability to trade, which I think is v…”

“Are you gonna trust Google? Are you gonna trust Meta? Are you gonna trust the US government? I think you wanna trust the kind of mathematical game theoretic properties Of the blockchain. So I think that's going to be just a very, very important part of the inf…”