Sep Kamvar

Founder, Celo · 0 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

Sep Kamvar is the founder of Celo and co-author of its original whitepaper. He is a former professor at the MIT Media Lab, consulting professor at Stanford, and former personalization lead at Google.

11statements → 6claims → 0claims resolved → average certainty → average debate potential →

4 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 5 assertions · 1 opinion · 4 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Sep argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Kamvar: 3.5 billion people globally lack active bank accounts
“1.7 billion people in the world don't have bank accounts. And about three and a half billion people in the world don't have active bank accounts.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 1:14 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Kamvar: Tether users cannot inspect code to verify its operations
“Now, the drawback to Tether is that unlike the open source cryptocurrency that I described previously, it's, there's no way for a user of Tether to inspect the code to see that it is doing what it says it does.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 5:24 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins

How they sound: speaking style how? →

223 words/min while actually speaking · 11.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Sep Kamvar: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,435 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Sep Kamvar said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Kamvar: Fiat-backed stablecoins misunderstand the true potential of cryptocurrency
“And the second limitation, and this is subtler, but I think it's even more important, is that all they can be is a proxy to fiat. And I think this misunderstands the true potentiality of cryptocurrencies.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 7:04 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kamvar: Money will inevitably become diverse ecologies rather than single objects
“The whole story is we're moving inevitably to a world in which both store of value and medium of exchange are ecologies rather than objects.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 10:27 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Insight
Kamvar: Smart contracts enable financial infrastructure for billions of underbanked
“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.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 1:46 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Insight
Kamvar: Bitcoin volatility renders it unsuitable for long-term financial contracts
“And it equally doesn't feel great to denominate a contract in bitcoin. If you denominate your mortgage in bitcoin, you might find that your mortgage payments triple from month to month.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 2:22 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Assertion Contradicted
Kamvar: Tether users cannot inspect code to verify its operations
“Now, the drawback to Tether is that unlike the open source cryptocurrency that I described previously, it's, there's no way for a user of Tether to inspect the code to see that it is doing what it says it does.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 5:24 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kamvar: Tether maintained stability and pioneered fiat-backed stablecoins
“Now, despite that drawback, Tether has remained remarkably stable over the few years that it's been running, and it laid the intellectual foundation for a class of stable coins that I'll call fiat-backed stable coins.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 5:50 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Insight
Kamvar: Stablecoins are necessary for smart contracts and community currencies
“It's because they not, not only are stablecoins necessary for micropayments, for peer-to-peer insurance, for any kind of smart contract, but they are necessary to enable, at scale, stories like Korachiba.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 12:24 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Insight
Kamvar: Blockchain makes money programmable just as the internet transformed media
“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.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 14:37 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Assertion Supported
Kamvar: 3.5 billion people globally lack active bank accounts
“1.7 billion people in the world don't have bank accounts. And about three and a half billion people in the world don't have active bank accounts.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 1:14 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kamvar: First credible stablecoin proposal was Robert Sams' 2014 Seigniorage Shares
“And the first credible Sablecoin proposal was in 2014 by someone named Robert Sams, and he called this proposal sign your shares.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 3:02 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kamvar: Crypto-backed stablecoins can be fully open-sourced and decentralized
“Because it's all in crypto, the protocol can be written entirely in code, open sourced, and operated in a decentralized manner.”
Sep Kamvar Aug 29, 2019 ▶ 9:09 Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins

Played on the show (1)

Episodes where a recording of Sep Kamvar was played rather than Sep taking part, or where the tape carries an address with nobody putting questions to them. Listed because the words are on the record, kept out of every score on this page because they were not said on this show. We read this off the tape: who was spoken to, who was asked something, who answered whom.

EpisodeDateOn tapeWhat it is
Taking Crypto Beyond Volatility: Stablecoins Aug 29, 2019 12m aired address
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