Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Benet: Silicon Valley dismissed Bitcoin by missing its core value of verifiability

Juan Benet · a16z Podcast | Trends in Cryptocurrencies · Jan 2, 2019 · at 10:03

Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, explains why traditional tech investors underestimated Bitcoin's architectural breakthrough in its early days.

0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so it's partly for that reason, I think, that Silicon Valley effectively dismissed a lot of the potential of Bitcoin. It just looks like such the wrong thing. If you could, you know, beat the throughput of Bitcoin with a SQLite database in your phone, why is this thing useful? And so everybody kind of missed the point. The point was to establish this Different kind of computing contexts where you have public verifiability and immutability”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Juan Benet

Assertion Contradicted
Benet: Academic research proved doubling Bitcoin block size has minimal impact
“The debates that have been raging for the last two years are about relatively minor things, so increasing the block size became this huge holy war, and when you step back and look at what they're talking about, it's just increasing one factor, either by, you k…”
Juan Benet Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:19 a16z Podcast | Trends in Cryptocurrencies
Prediction Held up
Benet: High-throughput blockchain scaling implementations will be live within two years
“So expect that to happen over the next year or two. Already there's a bunch of academic results that show this is not only possible, but it's provably so. So now people are building those Implementations, and we'll see them live in the next two years or so.”
Juan Benet Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:39 a16z Podcast | Trends in Cryptocurrencies
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Benet: 2017 ICO hype cycle peak will lead to greater investment rigor
“We're seeing probably, like, hopefully this is the peak of the hype cycle. Hopefully this will not get worse next year. So hopefully we have now peaked this and it's gonna go back down. And then suddenly we'll get a lot more rigor in investing.”
Juan Benet Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:55 a16z Podcast | Trends in Cryptocurrencies
Insight
Benet: Democratic voting in open-source software often drives projects into the ground
“People did try to come up with voting systems for a lot of open source, and it ended up going worse. So there's some open source projects that were running to the ground effectively by just communities of people effectively using democracy to kind of drive the…”
Juan Benet Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:17 a16z Podcast | Trends in Cryptocurrencies
Assertion Supported
Benet: Catalan government used IPFS to bypass Spanish censorship
“Yeah, so, Catalonia tried to declare independence and tried to vote for it. The Spanish government censored the website, and so then the Catalan government Put their website on IPFS and distributed it that way. So it was pretty cool to see the Catalan presiden…”
Juan Benet Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:31 a16z Podcast | Trends in Cryptocurrencies
Assertion Supported
Protocol Labs bypassed Turkish censorship by hosting Wikipedia on IPFS
“So recently Turkey decided to block Wikipedia and it was very easy for them because all they had to do was intercept, you know, the connection between all Turkish users and the Wikipedia servers outside of Turkey. And so that was like very trivial blocking, bl…”
Juan Benet Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:06 a16z Podcast | Getting Applications Into People's Hands
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.