The Ledger, every show

“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…”

“I think in 2013 and 14, a lot of the blockchain tech was being built in New York and Europe and far ahead of Silicon Valley. And I remember having a lot of conversations with people here in New York and Europe and just the level of thought outside of Silicon V…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“If you instead thought of Twitter as a protocol token, Twitter, the company, or like the group developing the protocol could totally continue to exist just fine with as many developers on top as you can think of.”

“I mean, the reality is that it's going to be super hard for a lot of people to do the diligence on these networks and understand which of them are actually valuable. And there will be bad actors that are going to take advantage of that system and try to scam p…”

“Bitcoin came in and gave us the answer, which is you create cryptographic assets that allow everybody in this entire ecosystem to share in the upside of creating this value.”

“So I think it's gonna take about a year or two before you start seeing these things get mainstream consumer use.”

“VC is not built for long-term investment in things that are Extremely high risk and building some deep foundational technology. VC is tuned for 10 year returns, which means that in two, three years you have to, like, show very strong you know, sign of, like, m…”

“My claim is you couldn't build something as free and open, and that works as well as the internet today because no group would fund it. and what you would end up with is a massively stunted version of something that is highly centralized and controlled by a c…”

“If Elon hadn't been personally wealthy, both projects would have probably failed.”

“So if Ethereum continues to be useful five, 10 years from now, you're going to have, and continues to accrue continues to grow, right? So if Ethereum becomes more and more successful, continues to solve a whole bunch of problems, then an ether is going to be w…”

“The company is fading away, or not fading away, but rather a new thing has come in, which is the network or a market that, that is not a company, but it functions kind of like a company. And so you can think of Ethereum not as a company, but rather as a, as th…”

“You can't measure knowledge work in hours. Somebody's investment over a decade can put them into the right perspective to make the right contribution at the right time, that creates something like Ethereum or Bitcoin or whatever. And, you know, how do you corr…”

“Our bet there is that yes, that there's a whole bunch of places and cases where Certain individuals or groups in the world have access to either really cheap storage or storage that's positioned well in the network that is kind of like, you know, somewhere bet…”

“Think about it in terms of company equity. When you're thinking about building technology and so on, it can pay people salaries and dollars and so on. And you can give them equity, which gives them a share of the thing you're creating. And that's what protocol…”

“Really I think, like, the only option was either, ah, university or Google, and in the university case, it would have been killed in, in the, you know, publish or perish world where, like, hey, this is way too ambitious. Focus on this, like, one little thing, …”

“I think this kind of tech is stuff that Google might be interested in funding from the perspective of Google funds a lot of protocols and funds a lot of research, but it also kind of runs counter to basic Google positions around, you know, data, control of dat…”

“I think we have, like, this massive addiction to human readable naming where it shouldn't be used in a lot of places because it brings in a whole bunch of baggage around, hey, now you need a consensus system. Now you need, like, a network stack. Now you need, …”

“Eventually we're going to get to a point where it might actually be cheaper to ship around stuff to consumers.”

“What Bitcoin and Ethereum did was allow you to create Any kind of, you know, financial instrument extremely cheaply and with, you know, almost free verification of correct proceeding of this financial instrument, which is not normally a consumer need.”

“And so it's, what's, what happened with the blockchain stuff is that software began to eat finance and law in a way that had never happened before.”

“I think San Francisco and Silicon Valley got interested when the ICO craze happened. When you suddenly had projects raising tens, you know, 20, thirty-five, hundred million dollars, suddenly everyone was like, what the hell is going on? What's happening? And i…”

“Google Brain and Axe are much more focused on, on shorter term Valuable things than Bell Labs was. I think both Brain and X can't yet afford to innovate on the multi-decade time scale. They're innovating in like single decade time scales on their own.”

“That kind of funding model allows people to remain very close to the actual protocol layer and to think deeply about the protocol itself and its concerns without having to think about a product or a service on top. So this is precisely what protocol apps' busi…”

“I think this is, you probably won't see the creation of a Bell Labs like the one before. It's possible that someone like Google and so on creates it, but I think what we'll have instead is, is a much more distributed version of it, where you will have smaller …”

“I'm kind of bothered by the fact that in crypto, right now, you're seeing the normal issues with capital flood in, which is that if you're a speculator that has a lot of capital, you can afford to get much greater rewards than the people that actually build th…”

“Having a million dollars does not mean that you know what cryptocurrency network is gonna be better, or what cryptocurrency network actually will work.”

“The other case is, hey, like, if there's some really popular piece of content, and suddenly it gets replicated to tons of people, now the DOS attack gets way harder, right? Like, now, now you have to DOS, Thousands of people. And so it's not fundamentally, in,…”

“It's like the best interaction to the future, I guess, than Bitcoin ever was or that kind of stuff.”

“One is, these things in volume are not actually free, so if you try to store hundreds of terabytes or petabytes in Amazon S III, you're gonna have a bad time. Just thinking about the bandwidth alone, ah, if you actually want to access all that data, it's gonna…”

“Yeah, last we calculated it was more power expenditure than all of Slovenia and so, I think it's much more now because of the recent spike, a lot of miners came in in the last couple of months, so it's a lot of power,”

“I would say, in the short term, things like formal verification coming to smart contracts, so we don't have single line bugs that lock up hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“And so the point here is all content should be self archiving and should be distributable and servable by anyone.”

“So there's a lot of innovation, and I think the browser is a really cool platform because you can deploy a full IPFS node directly into a browser tab.”

“But I think today we can We can make a much more effective system by just using currency to mediate that exchange of value.”

“There's massive inefficiency right now in how the storage market actually works of if you have spare bytes in, you know, in some disk somewhere, the process that you have to go through to try and sell that in the network is kind of crazy. And so you have massi…”

“A huge chunk of the ideas for IPFS were already discovered long before, and they were just not implemented in a way that people could use them. And it was up to us to take these ideas that have been around for 1020 years, and then put them in such a form that …”

“People want to address things by what they are, not where they are. Like, it's really time, it's kind of like, it's time for the internet to move from location addressing to content addressing”

“If you want to participate in the Filecoin consensus and maintain the Filecoin blockchain what, what's counted is not your CPU raw power as your influence over the consensus, but rather the amount of storage you are providing to the rest of the network.”

“And I would argue that it's easy to roll out a website today because you're, We're working on top of decades of centralized engineering, whereas we haven't had the same level, deep level of engineering on the peer-to-peer side.”

“Like, there's exabytes of storage that are not in use right now, and that if you were to add them to the market, you would drive the price down significantly.”

“Breaking Bell apart effectively stifled and killed Bell Labs.”

“IPFS is not something that we plan to monetize directly. Like, IPFS is a large scale infrastructure project That happens to be at a layer where you should not put money in.”