22 Burst results for "David Hoffman"
CoinDesk
Lidos LDO Token Sinks 10 Following Rumors Crypto Staking Service Received SEC Notice
"1 a.m. Sunday March 5th, 2023. Leto's LDL token sinks ten following rumors crypto staking service received SEC notice. Crypto podcaster David Hoffman spread, and then retracted a rumor that the SEC had delivered a wells notice to the decentralized staking service.
Cointelegraph
Sorry for spreading a rumor, says podcaster on Lidos FUD
"7 p.m. Sunday March 5th, 2023. Sorry for spreading a rumor, says podcaster on Leto's. David Hoffman apologized for spreading rumors about what he called a wells notice carpet bombing targeting crypto firms.
Bankless
"david hoffman" Discussed on Bankless
"I've been in crypto for ten years. I think Ethereum is the right balance between decentralization and pragmatism. And I think building things that people can use are an underrated thing in crypto. I think a lot of people tend to focus on the ideology, which is important, but what I showed up to work at coinbase and now what I'm doing with forecasters, I want to build a protocol that has a billion plus people using it. But I want to do it in a way that doesn't compromise on the decentralization and the sovereignty at the user account level. Maybe it's a fool's error, but that's what we're trying to do. Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. This is how to get started how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams, I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Do we really need decentralized social media, our guest today, Dan Romero says yes, and he explains why. We talk about the rise of decentralized social networks. A few takeaways for you in today's episode. Number one, why Dan thinks social media isn't broken. He uses a different term and we discuss what he means by that and why and number two, we talk about what's new with decentralized social media. Why should people actually care about this? Not the hardcore crypto people who love decentralization. But the normal people, the masses, number three, we talk about how decentralized a social media network actually has to be in order to work. What should be on chain and what doesn't need to be on chain. Number four, we talk about why a protocol, not a company, is really the way forward and finally we conclude the conversation about how all of this will fundamentally change the Internet and the trajectory of humanity. David, what should listeners pay attention to this episode? Dan Romero is of course building farcaster, but I think he also really just lays out the blueprint for any decentralized social media network, any protocol. And so while this is under the context of far Caster, I think whatever decentralized social network does emerge out of the web three space. It's largely going to be synonymous with the blueprint, the map that Dan has laid out in this episode. This episode, I think, is actually going to be relatively timeless, even if forecaster for some reason doesn't see success. Some other social media decentralized protocol will eventually, and it will largely follow the same blueprint that Dan lays out in this episode. So I think that's really the thing to pay attention to is, as you are listening to this, understand what primitives will be true no matter what flavor of social media protocol comes out of this space because I think if you're bullish on the space, you are certainly bullish that eventually one will come out, but maybe it's forecaster, maybe it's a few others, maybe it's others we haven't heard about. But there are largely going to follow some of the same primitives and same first principles that we're communicated on this episode. In the debrief David and I are going to discuss what we think about our experience with current decentralized social networks as well. So stay tuned if you're
Bankless
"david hoffman" Discussed on Bankless
"Welcome to thankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, I just realized we talk about Internet money and Internet finance in the intro. We should also add Internet identity to the list of things we are covering in Bangladesh. Today's episode is about Ethereum. Its ability potentially to take back our identity on the Internet, we're exploring that topic with wing Chang, who is a researcher and a core dev behind the sign in with Ethereum project. If you haven't heard about this project, this is the episode to pay attention to. A few things to look out for. Number one, why Google Facebook and Twitter are actually banks for your identity. And of course, we are bankless. So is there an alternative? Number two, we talk about why Wayne thinks Ethereum can disrupt the Silicon Valley tech companies and become the standard way you sign into every application and social media platform on the Internet. Number three, we talk about how this leads to a more sovereign decentralized and free Internet for the world. Crypto has been called. You've heard us talk about this before. Separation of money and state, this is the separation of identity and state and is perhaps even more profound. David, why is this topic so important to you? Why do we set up this conversation? I know you were very excited to bring Wayne on and talk about signing with Ethereum. Yeah, sign in with Ethereum. It's like one of those small holes as a rabbit hole that once you go through the hole, it only gets bigger and bigger and bigger as it goes. The implications of a simple swap of sign in with Google or sign in with Facebook when it turns into a sign in with Ethereum, it seems so simple, but the downstream changes of how that completely changes the landscape of the Internet and how users on the Internet are able as a result of that to go from a commodity to the big Silicon Valley apps to an actual user once again a free and sovereign user of the Internet. It's quite profound. And it really does go down to the depths of what does it mean to have an identity to be a person. And Wayne is a deep thinker, both as a developer as to how do we come up with standards to implement this sign in with Ethereum vision. But really, what does it mean to authenticate? What does it mean to be a person as it goes to the Internet? And these are conversations, Ryan, that we had in the debrief about human identity is a infinite boundless thing, yet we know that it is captured by the current status quo of the Internet because so much of what makes up users on the Internet is defined by Facebook is defined by Google is defined by Twitter. So what happens to the Internet when we can unlock it from the constraints of these web two apps. And finally, make a version of ourselves. That's as limitless as the kinds of assets that we can mint on Ethereum. I think it's such a fantastic conversation. So if you want more of that conversation, you can sign up for the debrief podcast, which is the only podcast that exclusively comes out on the bank list
CoinMarketRecap: Daily Crypto News
"david hoffman" Discussed on CoinMarketRecap: Daily Crypto News
"That's true, but you know, if you remember the eth merge special podcast that we did, we spoke to someone that had worked on Ethereum for a long time. And I'm pretty sure this was baked from bankless. Not to make. Yes, David Hoffman, which was that people that have staked on Ethereum for so long are sort of the bullish people. Not the ones that wanted not the kind of people that the second, it becomes possible to remove their staked eth. They're going to pull it off and sell it instantly. Like these are people that believe in the longer term vision because they were willing to put up so much money in the first place. And I've seen similar arguments tangentially with mount gox because many of the people who own Bitcoin in 2014 were early adopters and early believers in Bitcoin. So when they start to receive Bitcoin back, 9 years after the hack, it's not necessarily guaranteed according to some that leaves people will sell their Bitcoin. I believe that less. That has been a 9 year frustrating process. I imagine that they might just need to buy food and stuff. I'm sure they do. I'm sure they'd found other ways of getting food. But other upgrades include sharding, like turning a two lane road into a 12 lane motorway, so more traffic and transactions can pass through. Attention is also being paid into reducing the amount of data that each transaction uses. So more of them can be fitted into a block and this is crucial for a GCP's. Vitalik Buterin believes transaction fees could fall as low as 0.002 cents through roll ups Molly chain. Do you think we'll ever see this happen? There is a lot of talk about ZK rollups and CMCs crypto 2023 playbook, which will be out by the end of the year. We discuss or one of our partners, read your partner discusses how 2023 will be the year of roll ups. Wow, I stuttered so many times in that one. That was beautiful. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you. Last question. Please. The merge made ether a security.
Bankless
"david hoffman" Discussed on Bankless
"SPF coming home, extradited to the U.S., prison wasn't so great for him. So he wanted to work his way home. Brian Armstrong makes a regulation proposal so that we wish that we had and also Visa steps into the Ethereum frontier. What does that mean? It is the Friday before the holidays. David, what time is it? Oh, it's the bankless Friday, weekly roll up Brian, where we cover the entire weekly news and crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, and we are almost at the finish line of 2022. Thank the lord. Yes. And so if you have not yet grabbed a morning coffee to enjoy the weekly news and crypto with us, please do. Put some baileys in this one because let's get festive today. Why not? All the calls I've been having with people have been like, they've been at their parents house or something like visiting family this week. And you are there too, right? So you're on the West Coast today. I am a freezing my absolute tail off in the bottom of my sister's house with a sleeping baby in the next room, so this is the kind of weekly roll up. Guys, I want you to know this level of dedication, all right? This is what David Hoffman does. On his holiday, while he's with family, sleeping babies, it's the crack of dawn when there's no sense in the west coast. There's no sun out. And we're still getting a weekly roll up to you. Of course. Right before I take off myself. All right, David, so what are we going to talk about this week? What are the topics? Of course, there are some SPF updates. He is no longer in The Bahamas. He is in New York. With hanging out with the FBI. So that's what she's visiting family too. Just visiting temporarily. Or perhaps more permanent. So we'll talk about all of the SPF drama. Caroline Ellison apparently cooperating with the fed. So we'll talk about that too. Brian Armstrong proposes crypto legislation that we wish we had. So we'll unpack all of that. And also Visa is taking a big step into the frontier of Ethereum protocol development. We'll talk about all of that. And more. One of the things as well that's going on this week is binance is talking about bailing out Voyager, doing the thing that SPF promised to do, but was never able to manage. So that's an emerging story as well. David, we got our friends and sponsors kraken to tell you guys about today. Kraken is a crypto platform that did not rug us in 2022. There are a few crypto platforms that I recommend coming out of that crazy year that we just had to people. And kraken is one of those. Can you tell them why? Yeah, cracking is one of these few exchanges that are living and breathing the ethos of crypto to the best of their ability while also being a centralized exchange.
The Breakdown
OFAC Backtracks (Somewhat) on Tornado Cash Sanctions
"First, one of the most significant tipping points in the regulatory discussion this year happened when the office of foreign asset control or ofac sanctioned tornado cash. Tornado cash is a mixing service that adds privacy to crypto transactions by making it difficult to see inputs and outputs. The sanctions brought up some serious questions. In fact, I would argue that they were one of the most galvanizing actions the government has ever taken against crypto. One of the big questions was did ofac actually have the authority to sanction a smart contract. This was completely new territory and caught a lot of people off guard. We've seen sanctions in the past, but they've always been for individuals, but not for entire protocols or smart contracts. Another question was even if effect did have that authority. Is it technically feasible in the case of digital asset addresses are of course public, meaning that people could be sent tainted assets against their desires? That is in fact exactly what happened in the hours after the sanctions were announced. Last week, I had David Hoffman from bankless on the show to discuss the lawsuit that he coin center and others were party to against the treasury. The lawsuit was focused on the compliance requirements now placed upon him for life because he was dusted with tornado cash related eth as a prominent public figure. Anyway, this is obviously been a situation that people are watching closely, and this week we got some updates. The Department of the Treasury who runs and who is responsible for maintaining the sanctions list has delisted and re designated tornado cash. This is perhaps in response to legal challenges, but it also could be a measure to turn up rhetoric regarding North Korea. The first sanctions happened in August and again the big issue was that the quote unquote designated person being sanctioned appeared to be the actual smart contract that governs the operation of tornado cash rather than a person or organization as required theoretically by sanctions legislation. In what appears to be a step to rectify the situation, the treasury has clarified that the organization being sanctioned is the tornado cash organization. The treasury goes on to describe the organizational structure consisting of tornado cash's founders and developers, as well as the Dow formed around the service.
Bankless
"david hoffman" Discussed on Bankless
"And the OP stack optimism is what Opie stands for. Layer two is my idea, my claim. And this is what I'm bullish on, is that layer twos are also going modular. And the OP stack is going to be going to be the great motivators to get this done. So layer twos are also going to be broken apart into their component parts. And this is what the op stack is. It's like the scaffolding. For people who don't know, Opie does stand for optimism. Yes, yes it does. Yes it does. The optimism OP stack is this scaffolding for modular layer twos. And so the idea is the secret sauce of all these layer twos are going to be broken into little modules. Arbitrage fraud proofs. Optimism is fraud proofs. ZK syncs prover, where's the data held? Is it off chain on? Are we on chain like a roll up? And so all of the ingredients that make up a layer two are going to be broken apart into little modules. L two Legos? L two Legos. L two chain Legos and the OP stack is like the build a bear workshop that build a layer two workshop for stitching all of these layer two modules into each other. And so it's like this abstraction layer that allows the modules to interoperate with each other on a seamless way. And so what's happening here is we're breaking layer twos into their minimum viable component parts like tiny little jeans. Some genes and these genes are going to compete. And so this is a reference to selfish gene. Once we can break apart layer twos into their modules, it's not the layer twos that fight anymore. It's not these monolithic, very vertical layer twos that fight in these layer two wars. It's the modules that fight, the little genes that fight. And these layer two teams are just competing to put out the best. That's better because we get progress that much faster. Faster evolution, faster progress. The OP stack is like the ERC 20 token standard of layer twos. And so I'm bullish on this Cambrian explosion of many different layer twos from all of these different permutations of modules that could be put together. And that's what really just gets my juices flowing Ryan is when I see the next person. Bio mimicry exactly. Biomimicry composability and competition in the market, which is what DeFi is. It's like the biggest competition marketplace of all time. And it's the same thing as the survival of the fittest. But now we have modular layer twos and the little modules can fight over each other. You like little things finding, don't you? Little tiny. Yeah, this is the theory. Oh, all you little DeFi apps fight over my ear. Fight. Fight fighting. Exactly. Anyways, that's what I'm excited about. What are you excited about, Ryan? Music NFTs, David. No fucking way. I'm excited about music. One sees this week. So David, the bankless team put together a newsletter issue titled begged us to issue title finding the ex copy of music NFTs, ex copy, of course, is famous NFT artist, sells one of ones. And the question is if it's so early stage in music NFTs, can you find the next ex copy? Oh, by the way, I'll watch this video too, my friend David Hoffman also made me bullish on top of this. But I watched that video after I read this post and made some purchases. Finding the ex copy of music NFTs. And so I decided to do some exploration myself. I went to sound. I researched some of these artists and I found some things that I liked. Yeah, largely they were suggestions on this article, okay? So I'm still curating my own taste. All right, so I'm aping the taste of others as a first step. But it was really fun. Like the process of going to sound and open sea and actually purchasing some NFTs, like here's kind of an NFT wallet I have and collection that I'm starting to build. It was fun. It was easy. When you pair that with what your video was saying with the Cooper was saying about like a stock market for music NFTs. And for artists, another mechanism for compensation. I was researching these artists. I mean, these are not like the Taylor swifts of the world. These are kind of like small time artists with fantastic music. And what they can do is they can use web two and Spotify as the distribution mechanism, but use NFTs as part of their monetization mechanism to find their true fans. And I'm just repeating back what you're saying to me, I feel like, and what Cooper is also saying. But I guess there's a difference between hearing it and actually doing it and building a collection. I don't know, it just feels like one of those things that's obvious. And it's obvious because it was fun, I'm convicted. There's a monetization mechanism. I think this is going to be big. And when that tweet was put out, I think bakers put out the tweet and a bunch of people are like, I don't think NFTs are going to take off at all. Why? Because the only reason JPEGs have taken office because they're so easily shareable on social media on Twitter and they're viral and sound requires like a music NFT it's a three minute song or whatever else. It just echoed of what I've heard in the past of all three years ago, two years ago all the 10,000 reasons why JPEGs would never take off in the NFT world. The exact same sorts of arguments, right? And I don't know. So I feel like it's super obvious. I've switched on to bullish, maybe because I've built my own starting to build my own collection. And it's just like a lot of fun, honestly. So the most fun I've had in crypto in the last month, I would say this one. Fun is a huge alpha indicator. So if you're having fun. That's how you know. I was definitely one of those people that was like music, NFTs are just bearish and comparison to JPEGs because JPEGs, you can see it all like that. Oh, like instantaneously. A picture is worth a thousand words. You see the picture, and you like the picture. But for music, you have to listen to it for three minutes to determine if you like the NFT or not. And so that's too slow. That's not viral. I used to be one of those people. But then the response of bro it's music. When you and I are not in zoom Ryan doing pink list stuff, there's music playing in my apartment. Oh, yeah. All of the time. Yeah. And all attached to these artists, too. Yes, yes. Is there any creator that you're more attached to? Any artists that you're more attached to than there's no visual artists that I'm more attached to than exactly my top 50 music artists. And that's all it takes. Do you want a piece of that? You want a piece of their community? You want to bet on these artists too. Like your tastes. Like David has great taste in music, right? He knows he does. So now you can bet on it. We'll see what the rest of the world thinks. The rest of the world likes the chief talks. So I have my NFT frame. And I have to go turn on my NFT frame to go look at my visual NFTs. And I'll go do it. I also have to go turn on my speakers, so listen to music. But I turn on my speakers every single damn day. And so again, don't overthink it. It's music. Well, there's a reason why we call it the Billboard Top charts. But before top charts, it's just like the precursor of the future stock market for music. Guess what I was doing in 2020 when we had those episodes and people were giving some bull case for NFTs before they were a thing before Jimmy Fallon or anyone in the world cared, right? I was overthinking JPEGs. Yeah. A lot. Yeah. And I was like, but right click save. You know? And then I'm not going to make the same mistake. It's fun. It's pretty easy. Gobbling. Goo is fun. This is fun. Music NFTs. Anyway, bullish this week, David. Should we be the first ones to make music gobblers? Music gobblers? I don't have any music. This is not my talent. But we'll do a podcast NFT that can gobble other podcasts. We do that. I think we can. All right, so maybe the week time. What is this from Jameson lop? Yeah, this is the shrew meme, and it's the European Union. What I say is shrewdness.
The Breakdown
"david hoffman" Discussed on The Breakdown
"Yeah, yeah, I kind of expect if this fed pivot does happen and crypto might lag behind the stock market for a while, the traditional equities market, maybe I'm definitely not an expert. But I mean, people just feel hurt by crypto. Like retail is exhausted, they need time to recharge, and we need to build new things for them to get excited about. And regardless of macro, building new things takes time. However, it does seem to be like the golden age of building. The private markets are flush with cash. No team that has an idea can't find funding, and so the application layer development that's kind of going on beneath the scenes is unprecedented levels in crypto's history. Yeah, that's one of the things that I find the most sort of optimism as well is that coming off of the ICO boom. There was no money left. Nothing. For a variety of reasons, but not least of which was that everyone kept their own money in their own token. So the treasuries were war, but there was nothing, right? It's such a different scenario here, and obviously the money that is being plowed into new projects and new things being developed is exactly what sort of going to see that next round of exciting projects. 100%. Well, David, awesome to have you on the show. We should definitely do this more often. I love getting your thoughts on where things are, but thanks for coming by. Oh, and I'll W always happy to do it, my man. All right guys, back to NL here. There's a ton that we could discuss in this wrap up. But I do want to hone in on this question of what we expect versus what we don't expect in bull markets. And in particular, how NFTs may be demonstrated a model of how broader adoption might work, or what tradeoffs have to be made for that broader adoption to happen. It is notable as we discussed that NFT communities didn't necessarily pick up or willingly accept or engage with the biases of crypto people who had been here for a cycle before. Instead, they developed their own Moors, their own conversation points, and concentrated on what mattered to them. Now as we discussed, we have a situation where millions of Reddit users have discovered digital collectibles without picking up any of the old norms or discussions of NFT Twitter. There are many in the crypto community who think that this obfuscation, this powered by crypto, this crypto inside, but not apparent kind of version of crypto is problematic that if people don't understand exactly how to use private keys and wallets right away. And if they're not self sovereign, if they're not bankless right away, that somehow they're doing it wrong. Only point out that the guy who started bankless was here today talking about how these things provide on ramps for people to get in. And maybe it's all part of a path that we have to go through. Anyways, I think that this idea of cultural anthropology and how it fits with crypto and what it tells us about crypto is fascinating. And going to be more and more relevant in the years to come. For now I want to say thanks one more time to David for being on the show. For next to IO, circle and FTX for supporting the show, and of course to you guys for listening. Until tomorrow be safe and take care of each other. Peace
The Breakdown
"david hoffman" Discussed on The Breakdown
"What do we need to build? And of course, I focus on the Ethereum ecosystem. Most of all, simply because I think it upholds the values of this industry the best, and there are certain teams out there that are building solutions that if Ethereum had these things at the start of the bull market in 2020, 2021, the bull market would have looked completely differently. The Ethereum was not ready to scale to support the last bull market that happened. And as a result of that, many newer chains came up that were much shinier and spiffy, and now there's this long tail of alt layer ones like aptos and sui and sway. Just all trying to do the whole like we are the super fast shiny new blockchain game. If Ethereum had its layer to ecosystem with its app chain ecosystem on top of that, ready to go, DY DX wouldn't have wanted to go off of cosmos. And people like people who wanted to play in DeFi games wouldn't be complaining about Ethereum, gas fees. And so optimism got this OP stack optimism's bedrock, where we can have modular layer twos in the same way Ethereum is creating modular layer one. We can now have modular layer twos. But this is more than just a layer two. This is like people are probably familiar with layer three, but it's really more like this like tree structure that all comes down to Ethereum. And that's built with this primitive called optimism's OP stack. Optimism's bedrock. And all of a sudden, we have this ability for people to make chains on chains on chains to the degree that they want. We also have ZK roll ups coming up, which, again, super technical. But in a very simplified version, a ZK rollups produce the UX that we would expect crypto to have if we were coming from web two. Just as long as we build out the applications and the things to do on top of them. And so in this bear market, I think the Ethereum community is just like ready to build out all of the structures, all of the platforms needed to host an entire bull market and not let that bull market go away because we lost the energy due to an unsustainable mania. And so that's definitely what the Ethereum community is focused on. That goes from all the way from the protocol layer from EIP four 8 four four, which allows rollups to turn on afterburners to actually allowing more rollups to occur so that building on Ethereum is the easiest place to build. And that's kind of where I expect Ethereum to leave this coming bear market is that the barriers for building on Ethereum is so incredibly low. You just won't consider anywhere else. I definitely agree that we've had this sort of it always happens. But there's a slow acceptance process of a bear market not turning around, you know, we're not having a specific catalyst, particularly the thing the thing that obviously makes this one different is the extent to which it is driven by much larger forces. Macro. I think even within that though, once you sort of accept that that's the game, you kind of keep an eye on maybe what's happening with those macro forces, but still it's not like the fed starts to pivot and everything just rips to new all time highs. I mean, I guess that's plausible or at least possible. But I do think that crypto is going to need its own narrative and real catalysts even when the macro kind of real lines. Something to get people to come back in and get excited about other than just number going up because presumably the number for everything is going to be going up at that time.
The Breakdown
"david hoffman" Discussed on The Breakdown
"And this is in stark contrast to while we are watching these wartime Fiat economies of the United States, the European Union, Japan, Russia, throw their currencies at each other in a race to who can devalue their currency the most. Sometimes with actual straight up warfare, we have this wartime or this wartime economy where our economies are devaluing because of the just the warring nature of nation states. Meanwhile, we have this Ethereum system that goes to no wars and secures itself with minimal costs, and so while one set of one category of money Fiat currencies is losing value, we have this different category of money, which is crypto assets, which don't have to deal with any of this stuff. So the contrast here, it's a wide thing, it's a very disparate things to connect is the wartime economies versus the Ethereum monetary policy. But when I see the juxtaposition of Ethereum securing, it's global economic system for $1.4 million over 40 days versus the United States and Russia and Ukraine and Euro all going head to head over how to secure their own economies and it's costing them trillions and trillions of dollars a day a month or whatever. The juxtaposition here, I think, is insane. It's just a matter of time before people realize that. Yeah, I think maybe to try to bring those two things even a little bit closer just for the people who are skeptical in the audience or rolling their eyes. Yeah, please help me here. I like big, I like big comparisons too, so I'm totally down with it. I think so for me, part of the excitement about the crypto space in general has always been, you know, not these sort of overly simplistic narrative of Bitcoin or any of these, any asset like this as inflation hedge, per se. It's more the opt out of the monetary system that you happen to have been born into. And that for the first time, there's these sort of things that operate natively on the Internet world. That you can partially or fully opt into that get you out of, even if just in part, that the sort of wherever you are, I think that what part of what you're pointing out is or an implicit or an implication of part of what you're pointing out is that we speak
The Breakdown
"david hoffman" Discussed on The Breakdown
"There are no fixed minimum fees, no ACH transaction fees, and no withdrawal fees. One of the largest exchanges in the U.S. FTX U.S. is also the only leading exchange that supports both Ethereum and Solana NFTs. When you trade NFTs on FTX, you pay no gas fees. Download the FTX app today and use referral code breakdown to support the show. I noticed the
The Breakdown
"david hoffman" Discussed on The Breakdown
"Has always been the promise of crypto is to find its ways into consumers lives into different businesses to enable them to do things that they weren't able to do prior. But without really having to force that person into being a crypto person or manage your own private keys or do all these things. And so crypto is just like a virus, just fitting itself into the corners of the Internet more and more these days. You know, it's funny, there's been a lot of tug and cheek kind of lighthearted making fun of the digital collectible rebrand. But digital collectible is a much more accurate rebrand relative to what. It is actually just a better marketing scheme for what they are now. NFT obviously once you get into it, what it can mean is obviously much broader than digital collectibles, but they are actually, in fact, describing what they're offering, right? A 100%, yeah. Like NFT is going to be like the technical way to describe this that encompasses many more use cases. I think digital collectibles is going to be the way that we use to describe these things in ways that I think are just going to be far more relevant to use cases that we talk about. Gaming, for example, we'll use digital collectibles there. We won't use the word NFT. And a lot of these are just broad consumer applications. Things that generally don't violate securities laws will probably use digital collectibles. Yeah. That's an interesting distinction. It's fascinating. When you think about just hanging on NFTs for one more moment, when you think about everything that's new, goes through a hype cycle, tries a bunch of stuff, some stuff looks ridiculous in retrospect, and then there was something underlying it that was actually powerful. We don't like to talk about it, but I think you can make this argument even for ICOs, where there's clearly something powerful about the money coordination mechanism that it unleashed.
The Breakdown
"david hoffman" Discussed on The Breakdown
"It's a wide thing. It's a very disparate thing to connect is the wartime economies versus the Ethereum monetary policy. But when I see the juxtaposition of Ethereum securing, it's global economic system for $1.4 million over 40 days versus the United States and Russia and Ukraine and Euro all going head to head over how to secure their own economies and it's costing them trillions and trillions of dollars a month or whatever. The juxtaposition here, I think, is insane. It's just a matter of time before people realize that. Welcome back to the breakdown with me and I'll W it's a daily podcast on macro Bitcoin and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by nexo IO, circle, and FTX, and produced and distributed by coindesk. What's going on guys? It is Monday, October 31st, Halloween. For many of you, my guest
The Breakdown
David Hoffman: A Crypto Culture Anthropologist
"You describe yourself in your Twitter bio as a crypto culture anthropologist. I'd love to hear just what that specifically means to you. Yeah, sure. So I'm David Hoffman, cofounder of bankless, bank of this big media organization, largely focusing on Ethereum, but also just crypto more broadly. Trying to teach people how to live a life without banks. But banks are, of course, just the start of it. Banks are really just like the archetype for an intermediary. So what does a world look like when we have more individual power and individual control and individual influence over our own lives? And that kind of leads into the whole crypto culture, anthropologist thing. I think the thing that I specifically focus on the most, like my little niche in this broad crypto industry is the relationship between culture and code. And the way that if we design these systems to do this thing downstream, net effects of that are this kind of culture emerges out of the space. And so the very distant things culture and code are actually very much in the same spot in the same place in this world of crypto. And so I try and unpack that the most and talk about the ways that culture impacts code that code impacts culture and why it's important to be considering culture in the first place when we talk about these crypto economic systems that we all operate by.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"david hoffman" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"But there's a slow acceptance process of a bear market not turning around, you know, we're not having sort of a specific catalyst, particularly the thing the thing that obviously makes this one different is the extent to which it is driven by much larger forces. Macro. I think even within that though, once you sort of accept that that's the game, you kind of keep an eye on maybe what's happening with those macro forces, but still it's not like the fed starts to pivot and everything just rips to new all time highs. I mean, I guess that's plausible or at least possible. But I do think that crypto is going to need its own narrative and real catalysts, even when the macro kind of real lines. Something to get people to come back in and get excited about other than just number going up because presumably the number for everything is going to be going up at that time. Yeah, yeah, I kind of expect if this fed pivot does happen, then crypto might lag behind the stock market for a while, the traditional equities market, maybe I'm definitely not an expert. But I mean, people just feel hurt by crypto. Like retail is exhausted, they need time to recharge. And we need to build new things for them to get excited about. And regardless of macro, building new things takes time. However, it does seem to be like the golden age of building. The private markets are flush with cash. No team that has an idea can't find funding, and so the application layer development that's kind of going on beneath the scenes is unprecedented levels in crypto's history. Yeah, that's one of the things that I find the most sort of optimism in as well is that coming off of the ICO boom. There was no money left. Nothing. For a variety of reasons, but not least of which was that everyone kept their own money in their own token. So the treasuries were warped, but there was nothing, right? It's such a different scenario here. And obviously, the money that is being plowed into new projects and new things being developed is exactly what sort of going to see that next round of exciting projects. 100%. Well, David, awesome to have you on the show. We should definitely do this more often. I love getting your thoughts on where things are, but thanks for coming by. Oh, and I'll W always happy to do it, my man. All right guys, back to an LW here. There's a ton that we could discuss in this wrap up. But I do want to hone in on this question of what we expect versus what we don't expect in bull markets. And in particular, how NFTs may be demonstrated a model of how broader adoption might work, or what tradeoffs have to be made for that broader adoption to happen. It is notable as we discussed that NFT communities didn't necessarily pick up or willingly accept or engage with the biases of crypto people who had been here for a cycle before. Instead, they developed their own Moors, their own conversation points, and concentrated on what mattered to them. Now as we discussed, we have a situation where millions of Reddit users have discovered digital collectibles without picking up any of the old norms or discussions of NFT Twitter. There are many in the crypto community who think that this obfuscation, this powered by crypto, this crypto inside, but not apparent kind of version of crypto is problematic that if people don't understand exactly how to use private keys and wallets right away. And if they're not self sovereign, if they're not bankless right away, they somehow they're doing it wrong. I'll only point out that the guy who started bankless was here today talking about how these things provide on ramps for people to get in. And maybe it's all part of a path that we have to go through. Anyways, I think that this idea of cultural anthropology and how it fits with crypto and what it tells us about crypto is fascinating. And going to be more and more relevant in the years to come. For now I want to say thanks one more time to David for being on the show. For next to IO, circle and FTX for supporting the show, and of course to you guys for listening. Until tomorrow be safe and take care of each other. Peace
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"david hoffman" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"But I do see a path where the overreach of this particular set of sanctions end up being seen as one of the best things that could have happened. A because of getting crypto's guard up much faster than it might have otherwise been. I think there's been a market shift in the tenor of the conversation subsequent to the tornado cache sanctions. Two, in terms of creating a context to go have the battle in courts. This is something that I feel like over the last year crypto is really realized that it's just going to have to avail itself of the legal system and not an un antagonistic way just in a this is where decisions are going to get made and just waiting around for everything to be kind of regulatory determined is not likely to work. Again, not even contentiously. Weirdly the grayscale suit against the SEC, I think it's antagonistic in the sense that grayscale feels like there's a significant problem there, but it's really just trying to get clarity. That is not available to it currently, that will. But then I think third also in terms of the specific reckoning, not just the legal precedent as it relates to whether ofat can sanction a protocol or a smart contract. But also teaching the courts and this system how to handle a fundamentally new phenomenon, IE, a public address where you can receive something without your will, right? These are all kind of new things that it has to grapple with. You know, again, like I said, nothing is predetermined. It's impossible, it could go very badly. But it seems sort of like so egregious in some ways in correctable ways, even within the framework or the paradigm of opac as currently established, that I think that there's room for optimism there. Yeah, and there's no way I would undergo this suing of the government without a very high degree of confidence that we would actually win this case. And I think a large part of the crypto industry, at least the very talented legal minds are kind of just like chomping at the bit to have the opportunity to do something like this. Because we haven't had we haven't had any other doors open up to get clarity or get good regulation. Other than suing people, like Congress hasn't done anything. We haven't pushed we haven't pushed some sort of formal crypto Bill through Congress that we actually like. And so really the only actual doors that have opened to us are through lawsuits. But if that's what we need to do, we'll do that too. Crypto people are fighters. We're going to defend our territory and no one cares about our territory better than we do. So we're very happy to take them to the courts. And we're very confident that we know our industry better than the government does, because we live and breathe in it. Couldn't agree more. And I'm excited to see what plays out with that. I will refrain from asking you more detailed questions, but excited that you're taking it on. As we sort of round the corner and start to wrap up here, as you look out across the rest of however long this bear market is, what do you think is sort of most important for Ethereum? And then maybe same question, but for kind of crypto writ large. Yeah, I think when we hit the merge and the merge went through completely successfully and everyone was super stoked and then ether went from $1800 down to $1200 as a result as quote unquote as a result, people all kind of realized like, oh, this bear market is not going to be short. This is going to be long. I think that was a collective realization in that moment that this is not something that we are just going to bounce right out of. And so I think mine's immediately turned to all right, what do we mean? What do we need to do? What do we need to build? And of course, I focus on the Ethereum ecosystem. Most of all, simply because I think it upholds the values of this industry the best, and there are certain teams out there that are building solutions that if Ethereum had these things at the start of the bull market in 2020, 2021, the bull market would have looked completely differently. The Ethereum was not ready to scale to support the last bull market that happened. And as a result of that, many newer chains came up that were much shinier and spiffy, and now there's this long tail of alt layer ones like aptos and sui and sway. Just all trying to do the whole like we are the super fast shiny new blockchain game. If Ethereum had its layer two ecosystem with its app chain ecosystem on top of that, ready to go, DY DX wouldn't have wanted to go off of cosmos. And people like people who wanted to play in DeFi games wouldn't be complaining about Ethereum gas fees. And so optimism got this OP stack optimism's bedrock, where we can have modular layer twos in the same way Ethereum is creating modular layer one. We can now have modular layer twos. But this is more than just a layer two. This is what people are probably familiar with layer three, but it's really more like this like tree structure that all comes down to Ethereum. And that's built with this primitive called optimism's OP stack. Optimism's bedrock. And all of a sudden, we have this ability for people to make chains on chains on chains to the degree that they want. We also have ZK roll ups coming up, which, again, super technical. But in a very simplified version, a ZK rollups produce the UX that we would expect crypto to have if we were coming from web two. Just as long as we build out the applications and the things to do on top of them. And so in this bear market, I think the Ethereum community is just like ready to build out all of the structures, all of the platforms needed to host an entire bull market and not let that bull market go away because we lost the energy due to an unsustainable mania. And so that's definitely what the Ethereum community is focused on. That goes from all the way from the protocol layer from EIP four 8 four four, which allows rollouts to turn on afterburners to actually allowing more rollups to occur so that building on Ethereum is the easiest place to build. And that's kind of where I expect Ethereum to leave this coming bear market is that the barriers for building on Ethereum is so incredibly low. You just won't consider anywhere else. I definitely agree that we've had this sort of it always happens.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"david hoffman" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"I don't think really the industry understands the magnitude of this metric. The security efficiency ratio is the most important metric in crypto. How much does it cost for you to secure your blockchain? And if you can get that as close to zero as possible, you have any efficient blockchain. And this is in stark contrast to while we are watching these wartime Fiat economies of the United States, the European Union, Japan, Russia, throw their currencies at each other in a race to who can devalue their currency the most. Sometimes with actual straight up warfare, we have this wartime or this wartime economy where our economies are devaluing because of the just the warring nature of nation states. Meanwhile, we have this Ethereum system that goes to no wars and secures itself with minimal costs, and so while one set of one category of money, Fiat currencies is losing value, we have this different category of money, which is crypto assets, which don't have to deal with any of this stuff. So the contrast here, it's a wide thing. It's a very disparate thing to connect is the wartime economies versus the Ethereum monetary policy. But when I see the juxtaposition of Ethereum securing, it's global economic system for $1.4 million over 40 days versus the United States and Russia and Ukraine and Euro all going head to head over how to secure their own economies and it's costing them trillions and trillions of dollars a day a month or whatever. The juxtaposition here, I think, is insane. It's just a matter of time before people realize that. Yeah, I think maybe to try to bring those two things even a little bit closer just for the people who are skeptical in the audience or rolling their eyes. Yeah, please help me here. I like big, I like big comparisons too, so I'm totally down with it. I think, you know, so for me, part of the excitement about the crypto space in general has always been, you know, not these sort of overly simplistic narrative of Bitcoin or any of these, any asset like this as inflation hedge per se. It's more the opt out of the monetary system that you happen to have been born into. And that for the first time, there's these sort of things that operate natively on the Internet world. That you can partially or fully opt into that get you out of, even if just in part, that the sort of wherever you are, I think that what part of what you're pointing out is or an implicit or an implication of part of what you're pointing out is that we speak about that in the context of places like Argentina, a lot of the times, or turkey experiencing kind of rampant inflation. But the reality of the sort of the broader system is that there are certain constraints in certain norms of how things are built. And I don't think you have to be sort of you don't have to necessarily compare Ethereum as the example you used. And the economy of Russia, one to one, to understand why having this thing that exists separately and outside of that world economy or this world economy is incredibly valuable for individual citizens wherever they happen to be. Yeah, a 100%. It's simply a matter of the Ethereum priority is to secure Ethereum. And the United States priority is to be dominant. And the United States priorities will sacrifice the value of the U.S. dollar in order to make sure that it has supremacy. And that comes at a cost of holders that comes at a cost of bondholders who have to bear the brunt of inflation. Where in contrast, Ethereum, again, it's number one job. It's a secure Ethereum. And if it's doing a good job, then holders of ether actually are rewarded, and we're seeing that in the .008. Oh, excuse me, .007% yearly inflation rate that Ethereum has had since the merge. And if this trend continues, this two and a half week trend continues, it will actually start to be net deflationary soon enough. So one of the things that I end up reading a lot of analyst notes and stuff like that from tried fi. And there's sort of two things that have wrung out pretty clearly. One is surprise at how without hitch. The merge went. And then second was a surprise that it didn't affect the price more. I thought that was such a crazy thing to be surprised about in the context that we're in. And also, you know, not to make a one to one comparison here either, but the having is always like this as well. Any time you have these events that sort of change fundamentals kind of structures of the economics, it's not like they show up the next day as a trade. That's just not the nature of it. It's a waiting game. Yeah. But anyways, I want to move to something else, though, because it's obviously a big thing going on in your life. Talk to us about the tornado cache suit that you're a part of now. Yeah, so there's not too much I can talk about, but I can just talk about the white one down, right? You can attract it and not do too much on your particular piece of the pie. Yeah, so I and many like me who have their Ethereum, their Ethereum addresses on their Twitter handles. Got dusted as in somebody sent .1 ether to me and many, many, many other people from the tornado cash address. According to the Department of the Treasury and the rules, that makes me in violation of, which is a very serious offense. You don't violate. I was not in control of whether I violated. And I also fundamentally disagree with the concept that a smart contract on Ethereum can even be illegal in the first place. And so since someone has made me a criminal outside of my own control by interacting with a tornado cash address, the illegal tornado cash address, as a result of that, I had to file a form about this illicit funds that I received and detailing it all. I had to put it in a special wallet. Now it's like firewalls from the rest of my money. And I had to file this forum, send it to the treasury. And now I have to do that process every single year for the rest of my life. So just to reaffirm, like, hey, treasury, still not a criminal, and the treasury has said that they will de prioritize people that got dusted in terms of going after them legally. They use the word D prioritize, but they did not say, oh yeah, we're not going to go after the people that illegally engage with the tornado cash address. We're just going to deprioritize them. It was wild. This is the IRS saying you're low on our audit list. Yes. But on our audit list. But still on the audience list. Yeah, right. And so as a result of that, and with much support of coin center, all of the support, basically. I've decided to sue the department of treasury and Janet Yellen for making a neutral piece of technology illegal and injuring me in my time that takes me to do this forum every single year for the rest of my life. And so rather than spending 30 minutes once a year for the rest of my life, I decided to sue the department of treasury. In no way is this for sure.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"david hoffman" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"Show. I noticed the other day that I can remember it was the other day or weeks ago at this point. But you had mentioned that you would finally gotten music NFT pilled. And it's interesting because when I first kind of started talking about NFTs on the show last year, this was the context of we're in the heuristic of big picture power shifts. It's basically exactly kind of the way that you had framed it, which is that the music industry is so ruthlessly exploitative that it doesn't necessarily take that much for this to be massively disruptive. And I think for me that the big thing why it sort of makes such sense to me is almost from just a pure market perspective where if you are a creator of some kind, God bless Patreon for existing and at least introducing the idea of sort of fan supported things, but there's no way in the Patreon model really to express extreme preference. Specifically of the type that someone like a super fan of a musician is, right? If you are both wealthy and the biggest fan of DJ X or DJ Y in the world, it's not easy to pay as much as you would for the experiences you would like, right? Sure, you could follow them on tour, but if you're rich, you're probably busy, and maybe there's some kind of elite experience one off, whereas having the sort of uncapped thing, really that sort of trades on the market that can be as valuable as the fans make it. It just makes sense. There's been a market gap for that, you know? I mean, even before patriot is even worse, it was just that it was literally a concert ticket. Maybe a backstage meet and greet. And a CD is all you had to do. So I think it's definitely an area where, again, at various points, I wouldn't be surprised if now and in the future the hype runs ahead of itself, but I don't think at the end of the day that diminishes what is likely to happen kind of even on a smaller scale. The word fidelity definitely comes to mind as in these NFTs, these tokens, tokens allow for a more high fidelity relationship between fans and artists. Consumers in creators. The reason why is because tokens are little vehicles, little places to insert code into. And if you can imagine something, then you can put that into a token. And you can make different supplies of tokens, you can make different form factors of tokens, but it really gives creators the tools to create something that is exactly what their fans want. And it gives their fans the voice and the expression to return back to the creators and say, hey, we like that. Give us more of that. And so whether that is like ten tokens for ten fans or a hundred tokens were a hundred fans or it gives you as an artist or a creator, so many different levers to pull on that they never had access to before. So many different tools of power to be able to do things that Spotify will never let you do. It will give you direct access to the who values you the most. You can be much more surgical about it. And so this is kind of why I've always considered the relationship between NFTs and creators and their fan base as some sort of spark that can create some revolution in specifically digital culture. Some new renaissance and digital culture because it's specifically the digital artists that are really uniquely enabled by NFTs. And so this is why I wrote this article called the digital culture revolution, which actually I think that you read one time on the breakdown. Yeah, I think I did actually. Yeah. Let's talk about the merge for a minute. How has it gone relative to both your and the community's expectations? And I think that could be from a technical level from a monetary kind of structural level or it can be from a narrative level. Sure. Well, the merge win completely flawlessly, I think I was expecting a few hiccups, but even the biggest hiccups that I kind of was expecting were not ever going to be that big. And the merge executed even more beautifully than that. It happened during a bear market, which is always coming out of a massive bull market. It's always a little bit bittersweet. It's like, damn, could you imagine if the merch had happened during the bull market? But it is better that it's better for the foundations of everything that the merge happened during the bear market when we can be quiet and just let this thing run for a little bit. We have this fantastic new website that almost everyone in Ethereum is looking at called ultrasound money, which is just the analytics platform for ether, the asset. And while we started issuing ether post merge because of the demand for Ethereum block space wasn't sufficiently high to burn burn ether, we are actually almost back down to the place where we were when we merged. So since the merge, 41 days ago, Ethereum has issued a net 1000 ether. So that is about $1.4 million. So Ethereum has paid $1.4 million in cost to secure itself over 41 days, making it by far the most efficient blockchain that exists.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"david hoffman" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"On money and finance. This is clearly where the next bull market is going to be. And it kind of was for 2020, but the NFT bull market just put the DeFi bull market to absolute shame. And that's actually really where you saw kind of what you alluded to like the schisms in crypto, where the DeFi crypto Twitter circles versus the NFT crypto Twitter circles. Those are non overlapping Venn diagrams. The NFT side of things. First off, it's way bigger. And there's just like two different communities here at this point in time. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it's for those who kind of traverse between the two. There's definitely something refreshing about it. About a lot of kids just got to sitting around vibing, even if it was like, if it got maybe it's sin was instead of aggression, it replaced it with maybe like a little bit too much like early morning Twitter spaces, expounding on the secrets of the universe because your profile picture went up, but by and large is sort of such a different thing. And I do think that we're recording this now as yet another moment of sort of a an NFT community generating almost upon itself kind of without warning that separate from even the other NFT communities with the Reddit NFT stuff going on. It's fascinating that there's clearly something here that people like if they are not kind of presented, depending on how they're presented it, right? A 100%, yeah, and I think this is also indicative of really where crypto is as a whole is that we have, this has always been the promise of crypto, is to embed itself into different corners of the Internet more or less invisibly. It's not an NFT. It's a digital collectible. Your wallet is an Ethereum wallet that you don't actually have to worry about. And this has always been the promise of crypto is to find its ways into consumers lives into different businesses to enable them to do things that they weren't able to do prior. But without really having to force that person into being a crypto person or manage your own private keys or do all these things. And so crypto is just like a virus, just fitting itself into the corners of the Internet more and more these days. You know, it's funny, there's been a lot of tug and cheek kind of lighthearted making fun of the digital collectible rebrand. But digital collectible is a much more accurate rebrand relative to what. It is actually just a better marketing scheme for what they are now. NFT obviously once you get into it, what it can mean is obviously much broader than digital collectibles, but they are actually, in fact, describing what they're offering, right? A 100%. Yeah, like NFT is going to be like the technical way to describe this that encompasses many more use cases. I think digital collectibles is going to be the way that we use to describe these things in ways that I think are just going to be far more relevant to use cases that we talk about. Gaming, for example, we'll use digital collectibles there. We won't use the word NFT. And a lot of these are just broad consumer applications. Things that generally don't violate securities laws will probably use digital collectibles. Yeah. That's an interesting distinction. It's fascinating. When you think about just hanging on NFTs for one more moment, when you think about everything that's new, goes through a hype cycle, tries a bunch of stuff, some stuff looks ridiculous in retrospect, and then there was something underlying it that was actually powerful. We don't like to talk about it, but I think you can make this argument even for ICOs, where there's clearly something powerful about the money coordination mechanism that it unleashed. And clearly there was something about the demand that it tapped into. What is your sense for, you know, looking back on kind of this particular wave, the first mainstream wave of NFTs, what sort of stands out as this is going to be a thing versus other things where you feel like they might kind of fade into new explorations, let's say. Yeah, I think actually I have a ton of thoughts on this. I think we can use the history of the crypto industry as a guiding lesson here. The first wave of NFTs. The first one to really come back from wearing existed in the first place, crypto punks, which were born in 2018. Crypto punks were the first NFTs to come back. And that was like Bitcoin coming back on its second bubble, right? Bubbles don't bubbles don't come back. That's not what a bubble is. So crypto punks had their first second bubble in the NFT mania. And that's what really triggered the whole rest of these NFTs. And so we had this collectible NFT mania. These things that are just pictures, like monkey pictures, crypto punks. They're just things that you collect. And they're kind of like non productive assets. They're non productive digital collectibles. And the same way that crypto industry started off with Bitcoin, this non productive bearer asset that is a store of value. I think the NFT industry is starting off there too. And it will progress. And you can only have so much of those. There's only so much room for a non productive store of value asset, kind of like the gold standard of the asset. This is why people call crypto punks like the Bitcoin of NFTs. I think all future NFTs are going to be much more productive as in is going to take a team or an organization to instill some sort of utility into these things. What do these NFTs do? What do they unlock for me? And this is really just a promise of NFTs at large as it relates to creators, whether you're Justin blau, the DJ, or you're some musician or some artist, you have NFTs, and it's going to unlock some sort of community for you.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"david hoffman" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"Dot LY slash breakdown pod. Also a disclosure, as always, in addition to them being a sponsor of the show, I also work with FTX. All right, Friends, David Hoffman is one of the cofounders and main voices of bankless, which is building a little mini crypto media empire that may not be so many for long. Bankless focuses primarily, although not exclusively on Ethereum, and in this conversation, we talk about reflections on the last bull market, the eth merge, and the future of NFTs. David, welcome to the breakdown. How you doing, man? And I'll W, it's going to be back, my man. Yeah, I'm so I'm so glad to have you here. So we were just chatting about life and what we were going to chat about. And kind of what I thought would be fun to have you back on the show is just to kind of get the David take on where we are in the cycle cycle narratives. You know, like you kind of have, I think you share with me this sort of interest in both the discrete and the specific, but also these kind of big picture questions. And so where I wanted to start, I guess, you know, I'm mostly positive that most of my audience will know you, but for those who might not be familiar with a super quick intro to bank list. And then I also love, you know, you describe yourself in your Twitter bio as a crypto culture anthropologist. I'd love to hear just what that specifically means to you. Yeah, sure. So I'm David Hoffman, cofounder of bankless, bank this big media organization, largely focusing on Ethereum, but also just crypto more broadly. Trying to teach people how to live a life without banks. But banks are, of course, just the start of it. Banks are really just like the archetype for an intermediary. So what does a world look like when we have more individual power and individual control and individual influence over our own lives? And that kind of leads into the whole crypto culture anthropologist thing. I think the thing that I specifically focus on the most, like my little niche in this broad crypto industry is the relationship between culture and code. And the way that if we design these systems to do this thing downstream, net effects of that are this kind of culture emerges out of the space. And so the very distant things culture and code are actually very much in the same spot in the same place in this world of crypto. And so I try and unpack that the most. And talk about the ways that culture impacts code, that code impacts culture and why it's important to be considering culture in the first place when we talk about these crypto economic systems that we all operate by. Love it. Well, we're definitely going to get into some of that today. A few kind of choice little nuggets there. But where I want to start is almost like a really big picture of the last bull market. And what I wanted to ask is I haven't had a chance to ask you this. This sort of, how did it play out as you would have expected going into it? And if not, where did it diverge? Yeah, and I remember starting my content production career during the bear market last time. And it was the bear market last time was really the bitcoiners in the Ethereum's just going at it. And that was what crypto was back then. There was no other ecosystem beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum that really made it through the 2018 bear market. And so how did the cycle go according to plan? Did it go according to how I thought it would. In some respects, absolutely. And then in other respects, like holy hell, absolutely not. Some of the things a lot of the things that happened that I think went exactly how I kind of thought it would it be Ethereum's maturation of starting to embody some of the best of Bitcoin while still keeping a lot of the best of what Ethereum is. And so the solidification of the Ethereum monetary policy, the mower coherent vision of Ethereum as an ecosystem. I think a lot of Ethereum gained a lot of ground versus Bitcoin in this cycle. And I think that victory really happened very early in the cycle. And you kind of saw that because there are 2018 to 2020 bear market, it was bitcoiners and Ethereum's yelling at each other on crypto Twitter. And then as soon as the bull market happened, the community is just diverged. We just started paying attention to our own things. And we finally shipped proof of stake recently. EIP one 5 5 9, all of these things that really solidified ether as an asset. What blindsided me and many others in the Ethereum ecosystem was the rise of alt layer once. That came much to the surprise of everyone here did not really expect we expected the fight to be against Bitcoin or Bitcoin versus Ethereum and turns out it was the fight was between Ethereum and Ethereum copycats such as compromised on decentralization. And so that was the new thing that really threw me and a lot of people others for a surprise that it wasn't actually like, is it DeFi versus sound money? It's more like centralized DeFi versus decentralized DeFi. And that was a fight that we weren't really prepared for. But that was towards the end of the bull market. I now here we are once again in a bear market. Taking a time to reflect upon how we got here. Yeah, I think it's super interesting. I agree entirely that. There's a lot of time for bullshitting in the 2018 2019 bear cycle, where it's like the else you have to do. There are some people that, you know, to be fair, there were some people sort of researching harbinger taxes. And like all these really deep, but then there are a lot of us on Twitter who are just, you know, being assholes. But I feel like the divergence almost started to happen. I think one of the things we don't talk about that much is that I think it's pretty inarguable to me that the crypto bear markets or the crypto bull market specifically started to take shape with DeFi summer, right? Like that was the reemergence, even though there wasn't enough of a kind of generalized bull market for us to really consider that. It was very clear that that was a different kind of crypto specific thing that was drawing in new energy and excitement, and then that sort of proceeded into obviously everything that happened around the great monetary inflation thesis and sort of Bitcoin finding its own kind of narrative space in the context of post COVID policies. And then there was even more divergence though in terms of splitting off into kind of NFTs and things like that. It was really fascinating to the extent to which this bear or bull market rather was one in which, although, you know, you sort of do have this surface level perma conversation. There's a lot more time just spent within these ecosystems on the things that people really excited about building. Yeah, a 100%. And the DeFi summer of 2020 was one of the big reasons I take to people as evidence as to why you need to stick around during the bear market because the people that were playing in DeFi summer 2020 games knew that the 2021 bull market was inevitable. These people saw the incoming mania a year ahead of everyone else. And that was really their opportunity to capitalize on because the DeFi bullard, the DeFi summer, shenanigans, AirDrop seas and yield farming was like the show before the show. I think another thing that blindsided a lot of Ethereum people and just like the people that were stuck around during 2018 to 2020 was NFTs. We always thought they were like, oh, this thing called maker. Oh, uniswap, compound in aave, DY DX. This is clearly the future of finance. This is clearly a step order
The Breakdown with NLW
Can NFTs & Crypto Create Cultural Revolutions?
"What's going on guys. It is sunday march twenty eighth and that means it's time for long lead sunday now. The question we're exploring today is can crypto create cultural revolution's. I've said frequently on this. Show that the way i think about what i cover is fundamentally about shifts in power quiet. Cover bitcoin so much that i think it is a significant meaningful part of shifting power at a global macroeconomic level. Why cover other things. Less in the crypto industry is that it feels to me like many of them have potential but certainly aren't macro forces yet in other words yes one can see how defy might leave traditional financial processes in the dust but it hasn't really started to chip away at them as yet despite massive growth over the last year and if tease i've covered them have been primarily in the context of power such as the power to break the record label business models in the music industries. So when i saw someone write a piece about why some of these areas can and will inspire cultural revolution's fundamentally about shifts in power. I thought it was worth giving it a read. The piece is the digital cultural revolution. By david hoffman and it appeared first in the bank lists newsletter. If you are interested in defy or anything in this space bank is an absolute start at media juggernaut. They're putting out an insane amount of content so go check it out with that. Let's read the digital culture revolution. The crypto currency revolution is typically viewed as a revolution in. Money and technology crypto economic systems promised to usher in a new age of unbridled value transfer and value expression via the improvements in both scarce financial assets and technological mediums for leveraging these assets together technology and money composed so much of what makes society society when we change these things. We change everything. Much of what defines a society is mediated by the technological tools. We have available to create cultural expression. The crypto currency revolution is a revolution money in technology but the legacy of crypto will instead be a renaissance in human culture