The Ledger, every show

“I'm not, you know, defending this practice, but I'm just noting that a lot of these emissions are either sort of latent or a large part of the energy mix of proof of work mining is from renewables.”

“And so I think this is a really profound idea where it's going to change the way that people come to work and that they won't have to go and become a full-time employee to earn some ownership value for the value that they contribute to the platform or service …”

“The more general the service of a crypto network, the more it should be ossified. So again, coming back to this, IP is ossified, Bitcoin has ossified, maybe a general computation substrate is better ossified because it lends itself to the trust that the develo…”

“What's critical here is, like, there's no collateral backing this. There's nothing behind it. It's just people's belief that it will stabilize itself based on this adjusting supply and demand.”

“Contrast that with royalties in the music industry, which is like a completely opaque system with many layers of middleman that are each taking a cut, right? It's a wildly more efficient architecture. That's uniquely made possible by blockchains and smart cont…”

“One way to think about what's happening with NFTs is we're building this universal open media library on top of which any developer can build the next Spotify or build the next Instagram or build the next Facebook. And when there's a lot more competition, ther…”

“So I would say that the number of times a file has been reproduced on the internet is directly correlated to the value of that file's NFT. Meaning the more times a piece of media gets shared online, the more social value it has.”

“So you can see this idea going a lot further where new big ideas enter the world as blog posts and people crowdfund those big ideas that they want to see happen in the world and become part owners in the blog post that becomes the sort of canonical representat…”

“And I think that plus is really key because it's a very strong incentive to become a patron in the first place. So patronage plus may end up growing the market way bigger than patronage that we saw in web two.”

“NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are an embodiment of the same idea, where you have a canonical identifier for a thing. It could be an image, a song, you know, a you know, anything, literally anything. And hooked to it is metadata, and the metadata is arbitrary, and…”

“This is, I think, fundamentally better for creators than the way things work today, where it's like this very clunky manual process where you have to coordinate all of these relationships in, in contracts, and there's tons of middlemen and lawyer fees, and lik…”

“I wouldn't encourage, you know, blockchain projects that want to go and compete with Spotify directly, but there's this new territory that's opened up to figure out new sort of modes of creative expression that benefit from these properties, and hopefully we'l…”

“One of the amazing properties of open source is that someone can put an idea out there and then galvanize developers to finish the idea, and that's in fact one of the features of open source that you know, you get, and it gets to this idea that Dennis talked a…”

“Not every one of these projects necessarily needs its own token. Some of these projects could be just sort of core infrastructure at the base layer of the protocol.”

“And not every one of these projects necessarily needs its own token. Some of these projects could be just sort of core infrastructure at the base layer of the protocol but there's not an incentive or there's at least no mechanism by which the community can for…”

“NFTs are a way to make digital files ownable. Instead of a financial asset, you can now own a digital media asset on the internet. And that's why the file metaphor is apt. You can now own a JPEG, own an MP three. And what you're essentially doing when you crea…”

“The secondary resale of an asset can be programmatically constructed such that any time the NFT changes hands, a portion of the resale value goes back to the original creator.”

“Whereas today, think about an image you see on Instagram. You could screenshot that, you know, crop it, and then paste it on another platform. So like, repaste it on Facebook. And as soon as you do that, you break its entire history, its entire provenance. You…”

“And I think very soon we'll see that these owners are credited socially on platforms where that work is distributed.”

“So we now live in a world where roughly 10% of Americans own cryptocurrencies.”

“Markets drive, you know, they're volatile and they drive these speculative frenzies, but they also drive infrastructure and mental models that stick”

“And I think we're going to see a lot more of that.”

“In one sense, you could argue that blockchains actually make the job of forensics a lot easier because all the information is publicly accessible and available to anyone.”

“Ethereum participants own the token, and therefore, you know, have an emotional connection to, you know, the values of the infrastructure, and what, you know, its goals, and what it aims to achieve.”

“So I would argue that the base layer of the system being more general lends itself to this sort of single token model a little bit better. But as you move further up the stack, I think you do want this separation between sort of the management and the users be…”

“I would make the argument that general computation platform would lend itself to that same process, because you want it to do this very general thing, and a thing that is very deterministic.”

“Well, in order for decentralized applications, which are deployed on top of blockchains to reach millions and millions of users, the experience needs to rival that of, you know, a traditional web two startup. And, you know, in most parts of the world, we have …”

“That's really cool because there's this flywheel where Dive has already sort of improved the user experience of today's early applications on the blockchain, and, you know, that in turn fosters adoption of those applications, and increased adoption in turn lea…”

“Maker's sort of a wrapper for all these other asset types, so fiat-backed stablecoins are one type of asset, but there will be others, gold and, you know, real estate, et cetera.”

“Also, also just, like, raw engineering power, like, Facebook has hundreds of engineers to deploy something like MySQL, you know, and then the weekend hacker has to do it themselves, and it's just, like, there's an asymmetry in terms of, like, how you leverage …”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“In practice, the way that a lot of these services operate today is is more like, I would say traditional companies with a decentralized open back end. There's still like a, an organization responsible for the smart contract, but their back end is open and tran…”

“Just about 45 days or so before Casper FFG was set to be deployed the Ethereum Foundation decided that they were gonna pull that recommendation to the network. In favor of sort of a joint update between Casper, FFG, and sharding, which is another project that …”

“Now it's possible to send ownership value, whether an NFT or ownership of the Bitcoin network, which you can now send that anywhere in the world instantly. And as a result, you can make anyone an owner on the internet.”

“If we talk about a project like Ethereum, for example you know, early on, there was this amazing white paper, and it described this profound vision about what the platform could enable. And at the time, you know, the code hadn't been written. There was There w…”