crypto

“The last thing that really excites me is that you can have users and developers experiment with entirely new governance and economic systems at a much faster rate than we've ever been able to experiment with before.”

“Something that's particularly relevant today with what we've been seeing with what's happening with Facebook is that you can now have people Own their own identity and reputation data without having this to be in the control of centralized parties.”

“Given, you know, personally, given the choice, I still think that the U S is a relatively good place to be doing business and be in crypto because in the U S you know, if you disagree, you can go to court in other jurisdictions. If you disagree, you go to jail…”

“This is not just a technology, this is a movement and like understanding the why is pretty important.”

“So the flip side of the dark side of all the kind of get rich stuff around crypto is that this is also now finally, we have a financing model for these open networks. And I think that's a very positive thing, right? And if, and open networks can now enjoy the …”

“I think Netscape at their peak was, like, fifty million users or something. I mean, the numbers, like, crypto's probably above that right now.”

“Catherine, who gave, I think, that's the best defense of crypto that I've heard”

“The same is true of crypto. We are in the dial-up days, and the critics out there confuse the current state of innovation with the end state of the innovation, and I think that's one of their biggest mistakes.”

“My guess is, however, that I think I don't actually believe that we're at the dawn of a new age. I actually believe that we're at the that that most of this 10 years back, 15 years, 15 years from now, it will look a lot like Pets.com.”

“It's not at all clear even now that there's anything that you can do with crypto that you can't do other ways. But, you know, obviously if something comes along that I, I'm happy to see it, but I don't see it now.”

“And this was the best, far and away the best defense of crypto that I've heard.”

“You can imagine the governments, if they start to see the seniorage eroded by crypto, will say, okay, well, we'll offer you government-validated crypto, ah, which, not sure at some point why that's any better than government-validated other stuff, but, ah, The…”

“Now we have two new fundamental layers. We have crypto, and we have machine learning, which among other things will swing away from centralization.”

“It's like, we've got to get the scalability of the networks up. The volatility of the coins probably needs to come down, or stable coins, which is like this whole, you know, area of research happening right now with like a dozen teams is going to be a really g…”

“I mean, so there, there's only about forty million people in the world today who have a little bit of crypto, and most of them have gotten into it by buying a little bit as an investment.”

“Stanford has this elective computer science class, and like, you know, the number one class is AI, and the number two is crypto now, in terms of an elective for computer science, so.”

“In fact, you know, I started a charity that's making small direct cash payments to people in places like Venezuela with crypto which we can talk about.”

“So I think most of those people in the world, they don't have, you know, disposable income to kind of invest in risky new technologies. They're going to get crypto for the first time by, you know, completing some task or job because they want to earn money or,…”

“I think the status quo is now, I mean, a good analogy would be like, you know, hey, you want to write Photoshop, but with photo sharing, you know, you first have to implement TCP IP before you can get that done. I mean, that's kind of the world we live in righ…”

“So in that respect, we think that our experience at OkCupid is very helpful for moving into something like getting crypto to be popular for more people. There's a lot of common elements of user recruitment and user onboarding and making people like the product…”

“Yeah, I think we're going to see the same thing in crypto where there's all these ideas that are early and there's no infrastructure and in 15 years they're going to be amazing.”

“I'm more optimistic about the crypto stuff happening sooner because it's software-based, meaning the hardware's already built out, and now we just need to, like a few quick, you know, A few clever incentives and some nice software, and you suddenly have, like,…”

“Oh, yeah, exactly. I think your point about positive externalities in the case of cities, how people, like, no one individual wants to fund, like, a public good. So that's super interesting, because we often talk about how, what's exciting about this new techn…”

“And I think some of the things that we think are interesting are, for sure, AI, crypto, computational biology, engineered biology, and then the proliferation of computers as it relates to all of those.”

“Almost all the people that participated in those things were technical people that were into crypto. I mean, the vast majority were.”

“I reject that idea, and I think what's powerful about crypto is that they're the same thing, that using and investing are the same thing that they, and you don't have to be a user to be an investor, and you don't have to be an investor to be a user, but if you…”

“I think crypto is, is the one innovation out there that feels highly disruptive because it's a real change in business model. It's not just a technological change. It's a fundamental change in business model. You're not monetizing with ads. You're not monetizi…”

“I think the same thing's happening with crypto, where it's really a new way to build digital services that are owned and operated by Communities instead of being owned and operated by companies.”

“And we actually custody a lot of crypto, you know, ten billion or more of crypto”

“I think still 90% of what people are doing with crypto is investment or speculation, and that's great as an initial way to get people's interest into crypto, but it's more interesting to think about, you know, the utility phase, which is this 10%”

“Developer attention is the most valuable resource, I would argue, within crypto right now.”

“I think we will see an evolution of value capture within crypto, where value will start to move up the protocol stack.”

“It's very early because this is actually probably one of the hardest problems in the space to tackle. Like, how do you decentralize even the networking layer, the communication between different nodes, and to not have it depend On centralized internet infrastr…”

“When people talk about decentralization in the world of crypto, they mean decentralization of human control. Not decentralization of, ah, computing in a geographic sense. It's not decentralization in any other way that you may think. Like, the key thing about …”

“Whereas if you had identity and if you had reputation, you could turn all of those one-off prisoner dilemma style games into iterated prisoner dilemma style games, which are far easier to solve. You have like the long view of relationships. You can have a trac…”

“These problems have become replicated in crypto as well, and they are, therefore, like, fundamentally difficult problems that have been unsolved for millennia. So, so it's not as if crypto will solve any of that. It'll just have to figure out the right mechani…”

“Crypto today has no sense of identity. That people are pseudonymous. People can create multiple addresses and pretend to be different people. People can abandon identities that, that maybe have a bad reputation and move over to new identities that don't. And t…”

“And so I think with every successive wave of computation that we've seen throughout the history of computing. Normally, the new paradigm tends to suck at first and tends to be pretty bad at most things that the old paradigm is very good at. But it happens to s…”

“Tech is often misunderstood, but this is by far the most, at least that I've worked in, by far the most, the delta between the reality and the perception”

“A lot of people like me think we're now entering web three, which is primarily around sort of things like crypto.”

“One way to think about crypto is it's like those open protocols of the first year of the web, but then it adds a whole bunch of interesting, new, very powerful features.”

“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.”

“Those three ideas, frustration with Wall Street, distrust of institutions, and for lack of a better term, fanger, gave crypto the opening it needed to get started.”

“Amazingly, it's held product zeitgeist fit for the better part of a decade, which has given it this insane unfair advantage as it's woven its way towards product market fit.”

“I believe we're on the precipice now, not just crypto, I think AI and virtual reality, and there's a bunch of really exciting things happening, but we're about to hit that point where you get kind of the iPhone moment”

“And so what we unintentionally created that is incredibly interesting is the fact that crypto right now is the world's largest bug bounty.”

“Crypto is ushering a new era of research in distributed systems, in security, and in cryptography. And all of these technology advances are actually making its way towards the internet into a safer internet.”

“Something that works well for building some type of social networks or some type of systems where you can easily revert any mistake. This approach doesn't work for DeFi or Crypto.”

“The internet followed this exact trajectory. Like, you know, crypto, cryptocurrency, blockchain, web three is following this exact same trajectory. Social networking followed this exact same trajectory. Like, I've now seen this pattern, you know, out of 50 tim…”

“I don't invest. I don't even invest in crypto. I don't invest in stocks.”

“In the motion picture business, they have this lovely term called a waterfall, which is in a contract for a movie. When revenue starts to happen it cascades down and gets diverted off to different people, and there's a whole structure in place for this. So how…”

“So crypto is a, you know, I'd say one of the most important, if not the most kind of important technological breakthrough that will lead us to, you know, hopefully a fairer, better, more productive, more entrepreneurial, more techno-optimistic society in that …”

“It's probably the, it's by far the most inclusive financial technology we've ever had.”

“I really think it's a travesty and I think the US falling behind on crypto is not dissimilar from what we've seen with chips and what the, what we're having to do now with the chips bill. I think it's like five G. I think it's a national security issue and thr…”

“I mean, one of the things that blows people's minds when I tell them, there's fifty-two million Americans that hold crypto.”

“The good news from energy is these systems lend themselves to centralization of data centers, right?”

“First of all, you know, the sec has lost, I think five cases in a row. So, you know, like some of their like arbitrary enforcement of things that aren't laws is not working.”

“So we'll, you know, look, we're working on that in Britain. And we look, we've got some pretty good reception from the UK government. There's you know, a lot of very, very smart people there. We're working with them, you know, tightly on their AI and crypto ef…”

“We're, you know, in representing little tech, we're not a pure libertarian, anti-regulatory kind of You know, force here. We think we need regulation in places. We certainly need it in drug development. We certainly need regulation in crypto and financial serv…”

“And I think there's something serious here going on, which is like, this is a, this is an example of maybe the first example of like a convergence point, basically between AI and crypto.”

“I think the good news is the education curve on AI is on a much faster ramp than it was on crypto which is nice. People are just now understanding blockchain and crypto issues.”

“And so I think of that with AI, crypto, and maybe, you know, new devices, the other kind of probably robotics and self-driving cars and VR and things. I think of those as kind of the three interesting things going on. And I think they all kind of complement ea…”

“One way to think, one sort of simple heuristic is anywhere where there's a, where you want to build a network, and it's a challenge to sort of build the early phases of the network, crypto can be a really useful way to help, ah, bootstrap that.”

“Crypto is a new, this is what my book's about, is it's a new way to architect internet services, a new way to build networks that has a bunch of different properties, which I argue are beneficial for a bunch of reasons and can do a set of things you couldn't d…”

“So every piece of network infrastructure you need to make AI work, Is, is in this new technology that's invented”

“There's no way those same six people are going to know everything about crypto. It's not even possible. It like these fields are too deep and not only the technology, but also the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem. And so you need separate teams to address these…”

“I think of crypto as being a second order effect of social media.”

“What crypto is really about is not about intelligence, it's about coordination, right? It's about collective, it's solving collective action problems and coordination problems, which is, I think of as an orthogonal set, a different set of kind of problems to s…”

“Crypto, you know, became incredibly politicized, and the government, US government basically launched a full-on war against it, tried to kill it.”

“And they can get credit cards. You have to be a human being to get a credit card. So the only way they can make money, spend money is with crypto.”

“There's going to be billions of AI agents in the world that are going to need to transact, and so you're going to need crypto, you know, you're going to need AI-native payments”

“None of them got to crypto in any real way. They, you know, they're trying on AI, but they're way behind. And they definitely, you know, and they mostly missed American dynamism entirely.”

“For the most part, I don't think so. I think for the most part, the AI labs, they're just running with AI, and there's so much that's exciting in that world that I think crypto is not, Doesn't really factor the actor in at all”

“Google would not touch crypto with a thousand foot pole unless it was like a very, very kind of vanilla, like we will like run and run some like note or whatever.”

“Crypto can help decentralize the power structures that are emerging in AI.”

“Crypto is, like, a fundamentally Radical set of technologies that is very, very hard for incumbent players to adopt and run with precisely because it is so fundamentally disruptive to the way that, that they do things.”

“Tokens are part and parcel of what's valuable and interesting about crypto. And so if you remove that piece, it doesn't make any sense.”

“There's a crypto angle to at least three of them, because obviously there's a crypto angle to money, there's a crypto angle to AI in terms of constraints. This crypto angle to the drones, because you're going to want the control plane for the drones to be on c…”

“I think, like, EI strikes to the heart of people's insecurities more than crypto ever could, and so I think that this is the big battle, and I think it's going to be bigger.”

“AI makes everything fake and crypto makes it real again. Because AI is a probabilistic technology and crypto is a deterministic technology.”

“I think that there's going to be, there already is An anti-AI backlash that's like the anti-crypto backlash and will be part of the anti-tech backlash because a lot of people are not using AI for what we're using it for. They're using it for like therapy or th…”

“If you over-financialize things, it loses the social side of it, which crypto does a lot.”

“It's like literally the most transparent form of payment that there is in the world, like more than visa, more than dollars, more than anything.”

“The whole point of crypto is actually to protect consumers from software developers.”

“I suspect that there will be a convergence of One side of crypto and core financial services be that exchanging you know, like checking accounts with dollars in them for checking accounts with USDC in them, wallets with USDC in them or similar.”

“I think there's actually going to be quite a few intersections between AI and crypto.”

“AI within the trusted tribe increased productivity. Between trusted tribes decreased productivity. So you make more money perhaps within the tribe, but then you have to spend it on verifying stuff between tribes. So crypto is for between tribes and AI is withi…”

“You need a bare instrument on the internet. You need internet money for these AIs to be economic actors, and I think that's very likely to be crypto.”