Venture capitalists steal from the future with David Z Morris

In this episode I spoke to David Z Morris, Chief Insights columnist at Coindesk who wrote a really nice book review of Block Radicals and creator of the Crypto Crooks podcast. David's been following the crypto space since near the beginning when he reported on the gold bug community's interest in bitcoin a decade ago. He is also the author of a book called Bitcoin is Magic.

During the discussion we talk about how the crypto space has evolved with the rise of venture capital, the insanity of the last crypto bubble, and socialist finance. One of the main things we conclude is that most of these big finance and VC think boi influencers are not nearly as smart as people think. In fact, if you're a listener of the podcast, you're probably smarter than them and less detached from reality.

Big thank you to Dallas Taylor for helping edit this episode!

If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@theblockchainsocialist@social.coop) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:14

Hi again everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I'm Josh, and for today's guest I have David Morris. He is the Chief Insights columnist at Coindesk and the creator of the Crypto Crooks podcast, which you can find also through Coindesk. So I'm really excited to have you on, David. I think you're an interesting person, since you've been involved in the crypto space for such a long time and have been involved in Coindesk, which is one of the largest crypto news sites out there. But I think it'd be interesting if we can start from the beginning, David. How did you first get into crypto?

Speaker 2: 0:54

Thanks, Josh. Yeah, Exciting to be here. I really love your project and so I'm really happy to be involved and we'll get into the, I think, politics at some point. But as far as, like me, getting into crypto, so I think, somewhat like you, have a sort of a philosophical academic background and interests. I have a PhD in social science focused on the history of technology. That I earned in 2011. And it has gotten even worse since then, but even at the time, the situation for people who are trying to have a professional life in academia was looking pretty bad, and so I finished my PhD and did a few postdocs after that, which was super great, I shout out to the University of South Florida and Tokyo Gages to Daigaku, where I spent about three years total.

Speaker 2: 1:57

But after that I kind of got the sense that there were some limited opportunities in academia, especially as somebody who really cared about writing like I do. So I decided to get into journalism, made contact with a former academic colleague who had made their way to Fortune magazine and I started off as a. And I got very lucky and started off in journalism very high up the rungs as a contract freelancer for Fortune and one of the very first things I wrote. Well, the very first thing I wrote for them. Actually, this was in 2013.

Speaker 2: 2:32

So people my age will remember that during the financial crisis of 2008, gold was a huge, huge point of interest for particularly people who were sort of more right-wing and interested in hard money. People in crypto are very familiar with Hayek and the that school of Austrian economics, and so I wrote about the gold standard and gold bugs and from there I actually was exposed. I think I maybe had already heard of Bitcoin, but that was how I got the connection between Bitcoin and sort of political ideology and that started to deepen the interest for me, Although what really happened was after that. I got familiar with the technology and it was really ultimately which I think speaks to the value of your project For me, it was ultimately the central promise of the technology itself that got me to really commit to pursuing and keeping an eye on things.

Speaker 2: 3:44

So I wrote for Fortune Freelance for quite a while, but also during that time I wrote a couple of articles for the Atlantic Slate, some other outside outlets, and then from there I gained a reputation as somebody who covered crypto well and had a few jobs in there, including going on staff at Fortune for a little while and then wound up at CoinDesk, which were not only, I think, the largest well, I'm actually not sure whether we're the largest outlet or what that metric might be, but we are, I think it's safe to say, the leading professional publication covering crypto. Our reporters won two Polk Awards this year, which was in recognition of our coverage of FTX, which people might be familiar with as this huge scam, and we were basically the people who uncovered that and brought down the biggest fraudster, probably of his generation. So it's a place I'm very proud to be and I don't think there's any other crypto focused publication that matches it in terms of the quality and scale of the work that we're doing.

Speaker 1: 5:04

Yeah, I definitely remember CoinDesk very early on being a leading place to find news about the cryptocurrency space, but I find it really fascinating that you started off with the gold stuff like learning about gold, writing about it in Fortune and made that connection with Bitcoin, because that is often, maybe at this point, I think, kind of forgotten about. If you have gone into crypto because of Ethereum or Web3 or whatever else this kind of association with Bitcoin and the Goldbug movement, which was largely very right-wing libertarian Were you interested in gold yourself, or was it sort of like this what were your politics at that point? Was it like because you were also maybe a libertarian looking into gold or just because you wanted to write?

Speaker 2: 6:01

about it. No, it was very much from the outside. So, for anybody who's curious, I still think this is a pretty good article that I wrote at the time. Frankly, I wrote it as and it turned out to be pretty good as a bit of a freak show piece. Frankly, I went to this essentially survivalist conference that was taking place in Florida, which is where I was living at the time. I met people who were very much like fed conspiracy theorists, and some good people for sure, but it was a strange venue in many ways, and particularly on the financial conspiracy theory front.

Speaker 2: 6:45

The gold people I think they have maybe some like a lot of, I think, social impulses on the right. They're rooted in a really healthy and well-founded skepticism. It's just the conclusions that they reach tend to be, and the reactions that they have to that skepticism tend to be, maybe not as coherent because it's not founded in a real analysis that confronts the way society actually works. These gold people really are committed to conspiracy theories that posit these small cabals of people making self-interested decisions, rather than this much more complex system whereby these things happen because of to use a word that we'll hear again these decentralized forces of capital, basically these anonymous channels of influence that accomplish things in ways that are depersonalized and strange and require a real theory of history. That is not in the gold thesis.

Speaker 2: 7:57

I think that's my perspective when I was coming into gold and, frankly, when I was coming into Bitcoin, as I said, it's the technology itself that seemed so revolutionary to me on its face. When I started out this was in 2013, was when I was writing about this stuff so I've spent almost a decade now really wrestling with how to reconcile my politics, which are not communist but definitely Marxist, and people will know what that distinction means. Hopefully, with this technology that, on the one hand, has, I think, some real transformative implications on its face, but also it has become really tied to a completely different set of politics than mine, and for a while it really was so. For example, later on, I got very intrigued by Ethereum very early on, because it was clear that I wouldn't necessarily call it a political project that was embedded in Ethereum, but certainly a different mindset, a different worldview and a different community.

Speaker 1: 9:02

Yeah, I think I share a lot of those feelings. During that time at least, I think it's really interesting that you had a PhD in the history of technology and then therefore looking into the technology in 2013, which is Bitcoin, which is pre-smart contracts, I'm curious were there any precedents or antecedents to your knowledge of the history of technology that you feel is similar to crypto? That made you think differently than what was the Goldbug people were thinking about Bitcoin.

Speaker 2: 9:44

Well, I should say I've actually written a book about this already, although it was just a quick self-published project, and I would encourage people to look it up, because it's called Bitcoin is Magic, and maybe we can add a link to the show notes here. But one of the things that I have a chapter about in there is Marshall McLuhan, and I think McLuhan, for me, became the most useful framework for understanding the stakes of well, and McLuhan, via his teacher, walter Ong, and they sort of as part of this Canadian School of Media Theory, had an idea about the functions of media on two axes. So McLuhan and his predecessors talked about media that is time-binding, on the one hand, and media that is space-binding, on the other, and an example of time-binding media, and one that we might not think about as media, is the pyramids in Egypt. So monuments are communications medium. Right, they're sending a message. The Washington Monument would be another example, at least in theory, because they don't communicate very far. They only communicate directly to the people who are standing in front of them, but they're intended to communicate over time, they're intended to last forever, and in contrast to that, on the other hand, you have space-binding media that usually are very fast and can travel long distances, but are ephemeral and don't last long. So even if you think about a written letter on a piece of paper, maybe that will last like 100 years if it's in the right circumstances. But a lot of the time it's just trash, it's gone after somebody reads it, throws it away, and so the purpose of that kind of media is to travel over a long distance very fast, and for me, looking at a blockchain and thinking about the way that it was maintained, it seemed to be something that combined these two features in somewhat of a novel way. It is time-binding. I talk about it as a digital obelisk. It has features that make it extremely durable under certain circumstances I mean we can talk about.

Speaker 2: 11:58

The blockchain does rely on a market structure, basically because you have to pay maintainers, but assuming that underlying thing where there are people who want to make money which I guess it's hard to think of a future scenario where that stops being the case unless we have complete societal breakdown but under the circumstances where there are people who want to make money, a blockchain becomes this very long-term, enduring thing because it just maintains itself, it's paying for people to maintain it and that becomes this way to keep something lasting a long time and at the same time, it's space binding because it communicates very fast.

Speaker 2: 12:42

A blockchain signal propagates around the world, depending on how you define it, in like 10 minutes max, which is pretty good, especially for a multiple confirmation financial transaction, which is a whole other aspect to this. So to me that immediately seemed revolutionary at the sort of very high theoretical level that, like this, is a novel media structure. And then what that actually meant on the ground also struck me right from the very beginning as totally novel, because it can seem like just propaganda that is being sent out by crypto scammers. But it's very true that crypto does transcend these national boundaries, these institutions that have interchange fees and various barriers and are controlled essentially by governments. I mean, all of that is completely true, and the reason that there's this connection to gold, obviously, is that before basically the colonial era, where you're interacting with societies that haven't been brought into like a Western hegemony yet, you have gold as this way to cross that barrier right.

Speaker 1: 14:00

Sorry, I lost you for like 10 seconds there, can you?

Speaker 2: 14:06

remember where I stopped.

Speaker 1: 14:10

You were talking about gold. You were about to make the explanation that I think you just did.

Speaker 2: 14:14

OK, yeah, so hopefully you can cut it back in. But this is where there's a common ground with gold, because gold in the colonial era allowed for trade with countries or societies I mean, and trade in big giant scare quotes, because these were not necessarily honest deals, obviously but it allowed for a certain degree of trade with societies that had not been brought into the then emerging markets for, like debt, joint stock companies, global credit markets, things like that in the 15th to 16th century. So gold at the time had this capacity to transcend the boundaries of the system as it existed, and I think crypto has that capacity now, and Bitcoin specifically. I'm very open to ideas about other blockchains, but I should emphasize that I think that Bitcoin remains pretty singular in my view in terms of the way that it emerged and its ability to act as kind of a gold like commodity, because it doesn't have these founders and etc. So that's where I'm coming from, on assets specifically. So that's I think I might be trailing off a bit here, but that's my thought on the gold front.

Speaker 1: 15:41

Right, I was going to like for me when you're talking earlier. You know, there's sometimes this annoying thing I get from whatever progressives criticize where I'm libertarian, like ostensibly libertarian people will say, like you know, which does sound like crypto hype or something that, like Bitcoins, can transcend nation states or like whatever else, and then there's that kind of sometimes sort of lazy critics would be like no, it doesn't, you're lying, you know, in a kind of like lazy way and then, but to me it's sort of like you know, you know, that meme was like the worst person you know just said something that was correct or something like that.

Speaker 2: 16:23

It's a lot of this.

Speaker 1: 16:26

Yeah, yeah, it's that, but it's also like, still that can be true, while also like avoiding the conclusions that they make.

Speaker 2: 16:33

Right, yeah, I think that there is a point there, right, in the sense that it's more complicated than just I sent Bitcoin to somebody in another country. The person in that country in the present day does have to, for example, probably cash that Bitcoin out to be to a local currency to allow them to perform daily financial tasks, right, like we do have a serious technical barrier in terms of using Bitcoin on a transactional basis. So you know, like there is a point to be made that no, this isn't actually like. You know, this isn't actually just point to point. There is like an extra step, there is some risk, but you know I would say that A there are some solutions on the table even for that.

Speaker 2: 17:24

And you know I'm not even talking about like lightning network. You can imagine a future, a not too distant future, where there are all kinds of different branching systems that come off of a Bitcoin basis and don't necessarily require base chain transactions to work, like in a local jurisdiction. Like maybe somebody prints like trustworthy secondary Bitcoin paper money of some sort that like only works in Ghana or whatever. So there are all of these things that are possible to imagine. The underlying stuff still holds. Again, I've lost the original question, sorry.

Speaker 1: 18:02

There's also, like I mean even, the markets in Istanbul, like in Turkey, like everybody there's a I mean word on the street is like it's not very difficult to go to these peer to peer markets where you can sell your cryptocurrency and receive just cash right there. They have giant markets for that and in countries that are not in America or in the US specifically, or in Europe or Western Europe. Yeah, and then I also wanted to briefly mention just the way that you describe the space and time boundedness of a blockchain. I don't know if. Did you ever read, like Nick Land's paper on Bitcoin? Was that something that was?

Speaker 2: 18:44

no, but I have to. I didn't realize that existed.

Speaker 1: 18:47

Oh it's, I mean it's wild. Nick Land for me is kind of a difficult person to understand, to read and understand, but he kind of like claims a bit I don't know a bit, maybe provocatively, that like Bitcoin solves time and like this type of thing, and but he's basically saying it because Nick Land, I mean he's just like, I mean clearly he's like very right wing, like very just like is on the side of techno capital, I guess, and like wants to be turned into like a cyborg or whatever. But he kind of like sees Bitcoin as like the ultimate solution to capital, it's like the ultimate form of capital, because it will last forever and it is itself capital, like it's, it's yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 19:32

I, my relationship to land is very similar to like. I'm also like I've written a few scholarly pieces about HP Lovecraft, who is another like horrendous, right winger, who's also utterly fascinating to me Because you know he, nick Land, you know, you could maybe say Carl Schmidt are people who, like, actually go all the way and that makes them very, very useful to read. And, yeah, like the like, let's just immerse ourselves in the end times and become that is is a like, you know, yeah, fascinating, and yeah, I mean that's very interesting. Yeah, and there is, you know, I mean, it's worth, in that context, noting that, like, depending on the level of your analysis, there is a nihilism baked into Bitcoin. Right, like, there's a huge segment of people who support this stuff that you know you can take it from an is to an ought if you push too far.

Speaker 2: 20:34

We're worried about the breakdown of these international systems and we want to build this robust monetary layer that can withstand all of these disruptions, right? So, for example, like you can look at what's going on with Russia right now, where, you know, right or wrong, you have these two big global entities that are like cutting each other off from their various systems and it's creating this crazy disruption that you know we dodged it, but Europe was very worried about energy supplies and stuff like that, and Bitcoin is one example of how we kind of grow a more genuinely global interconnected network. At the same time, people who like Bitcoin are often like, yay, the end of the world is coming. It's great for my back.

Speaker 2: 21:19

And so you have to like be intellectually able to like cut that knot and say like you might not like it, but this is what peak end times performance looks like, I guess Like our society is collapsing Some, or it's like always society is always collapsing, right.

Speaker 1: 21:41

Is that the positive way of looking at it?

Speaker 2: 21:44

I mean genuinely, you know, and I mean to be to be clear on another point I'm actually like quite a social optimist, like I think things are going pretty OK if you take a step back, but also like the, the Bitcoin position is really that like, bitcoin is kind of a backstop and a disciplining force for governments and, just like the global system, it becomes an outlet that people can use if, for example, their leaders get really, really irresponsible with local banking systems and things like that. So so this is kind of like it's a worst case scenario option, but it's also a check against the worst case scenario, and that can be complicated to think through if you're coming at it from like an ideological rather than practical perspective.

Speaker 1: 22:34

Right, a materialist one perhaps? Yes?

Speaker 2: 22:37

materialist, I think, is the right word. Yeah, and you know, since I said it earlier and I don't want to leave people like I don't know eager to wave a finger that's what I mean when I say that I'm a Marxist but not a communist, and you know the Marxist analysis of history right is essentially like, to a large degree, technology drives history, which is kind of the premise on which I got very interested in in crypto in the first place. On a deeper level, obviously, it's like capital or social structures drive history, and I think that is what is basically missing from a lot of both on the right and left. A lot of thinking about Bitcoin is just to say like, OK, what is this thing, what are the actual material implications? And so people there's just very few people who who write about this stuff as like this exists, what's actually happening and what will happen based on what we know about the world, and that's what I try and do.

Speaker 1: 23:39

Yeah, that's fair. So you've been in the crypto space since 2013.

Speaker 2: 23:46

I would say 2014 to be cautious. That was when my first piece came out.

Speaker 1: 23:50

OK 2014. I'm wondering, like, how for you, has it changed since you started keeping up with it? Has it gotten like in your eyes? Has it gotten better or worse in certain respects?

Speaker 2: 24:04

Man, the change is like mind boggling. It's a very weird sensation because, you know, when I looked at this stuff and started writing about it in 2014, I think the first or maybe the second piece that I wrote for Fortune the title was something like Bitcoin is Napster for finance, and it was clear from that point that, like I mean, napster had already had explosive impacts at that point. And now we've seen, you know, in its descendants of streaming services and things like that, we've seen it's had, like, just completely ground clearing, absolutely transformative impacts from like, how the music industry works to how we, on a day to day basis, consume the media. I am disgusted, frankly, by what has happened to music and I wish Napster and streaming had never existed. I hope the outcome of Bitcoin is a little bit better, but it's because it's not art. I think we're a little bit safer, and so you know, these just huge changes do happen for material reasons and you can't get caught up in what you think should happen. You have to look at, like, what actually really is going on.

Speaker 1: 25:17

No, that's interesting. You say that the the one of the first blogs I think I wrote. I think in like my socialist blockchain, one on one. For socialists, blogs are like the first things, were the first things I wrote. I tried to make the comparison with Napster and like the material, the fact that, like the social relationships embedded in the peer to peer network created materially different outcomes, like specifically in in music. You just like see like.

Speaker 1: 25:52

There's a graph of like when Napster came out, like the, the revenue for music companies or record labels like plummeted. So it was a very real material change, like the fact that this technology, which you know, ostensibly you can say like oh, we could have done whatever Napster did without a peer to peer network, like, of course we could have done that, but we weren't doing that, so it doesn't really matter. So, like the, the fact that it was accessible and like used and with these particular social relationships, create a very different relation, very different outcomes. And I think that I just tried to compare that with and you know, just to like expand on that slightly.

Speaker 2: 26:33

I mean, it's worth remembering that, even though Napster is gone, we still have BitTorrent, which is a protocol that, like Bitcoin, you're really never going to be able to get rid of.

Speaker 2: 26:41

And as long as somebody can run like one server somewhere without the police knocking their door down, bittorrent is going to be like a feature of human life, or some version of it is going to be a feature of human life going forward, right, and and even though it's, like you know, you can't go to like bit torrentcom and download an album or whatever it's like complicated. There are some barriers, there's some technical barriers, sort of similar to the barriers to using crypto, but it still has, like some serious impacts, right. At the very least, it lets people who are willing to put in work get access to things that would not be accessible at all without that. And, by the same token, you know, crypto for people who are willing to put in some work opens up doors that simply, like, absolutely would not exist without it. It's a step change, and that's how you have to think about the scale of the impact.

Speaker 1: 27:31

Yeah, sometimes I get. I'm sometimes like astonished by critics using that criticism of like oh well, it's like unusable as if they were like a UX designer. They sound like the VC is on Twitter talking about how crypto needs to improve their UX, you know, like in order to get real adoption, or something like that. Not really, I don't know. Accepting that like doing a little bit of work. Okay.

Speaker 2: 27:59

Well, I think that highlights the point that I actually forgot to pursue about. You know what has changed so much over the last 10 years and though, like UX and adoption, conversation is part of, I think you know the obviously fairly toxic thing that has happened, which is you get to a certain point, crypto goes from being frankly early on like the proof. There's a, there's a book that I recommend immensely by a scholar named Finn Brunton, and actually let me do you know the title. I'm forgetting it off the top of my head.

Speaker 1: 28:37

It's called digital cash.

Speaker 2: 28:38

Right, digital cash. The unknown history of boy I'm still hurt hunting here because the full title is important the unknown history of the anarchists, utopians and technologies, who, technologists, who created cryptocurrency. So this is super important to keep in mind in terms of the arc of crypto history. Right, it was. There was, like you know, 10 to 20 years of groundwork that took place before Bitcoin was launched in 2009. And a lot of that was by, like, true political radicals speaking of your book, right, and they're not necessarily radicals who, like you and I would agree with a lot of them would, you know, definitely qualify as, like, libertarian cranks or, at best and people closer to sort of where I come from, anarchists, as Brunton has in his title, and that, from like 2009, with the launch of Bitcoin, until you know, basically about 2018, I would say that like anarchist spirit or some descendant of it, that, like very radical perspective, was still an extremely powerful part of the entire crypto ecosystem. I mean, one of the biggest and most the biggest causes among crypto advocates until like 2018 and still to this day very powerful, is trying to get the Dread Pirate Roberts out of jail Ross God, I'm forgetting his real name Ross Ulbricht right? So everybody in crypto not necessarily including myself, but a lot of people in crypto really want Ross Ulbricht released from prison. They think he's been unjustly imprisoned for running an online drug market that accepted Bitcoin early on and that really was like a catalyst for the growth of adoption of the technology.

Speaker 2: 30:32

And you know, there are other things. I mean I got to interview and this is a little bit, a little bit less radical, but I got to interview Edward Snowden at our annual consensus conference last or just like a couple of months ago. He's a regular on the on the crypto circuit because people really do have that perspective that he represents of like we want total transparency, we don't want governments to keep any secrets, and that's kind of part of the package, of the kind of original crypto ethos. But you know, when you hear people talk about things like UX, that's when you to quote another insightful right winger that's when I reached for my revolver, because that's when you are dealing with venture capitalists and when you're dealing with people who are primarily concerned with crypto as a financial asset that is going to grow in value versus the US dollar, and that has always been part of the game, part of the crypto community, but especially, you know, especially starting in 2020.

Speaker 2: 31:38

But even going back to 2017, with the ICO initial coin offering craze that was a huge part of that has become an increasingly huge part of what what crypto is about, or where attention goes in crypto, and you know it has led to complete disasters like FTX and the Terraform Labs, which were primarily promoted by and co signed by venture capitalists who, you know, didn't really understand anything that was going on.

Speaker 2: 32:10

At the end of the day, yeah, and that I think has been the biggest change is is that, you know, we, we all saw the institutions coming and then they came and they kind of fucked it all up and we're still trying to see how that looks afterwards and it will obviously still involve venture capitalists and they do have a role.

Speaker 2: 32:32

But I think that that's a that's a huge dividing line in the history of crypto is, up to a certain point, it was just us. You know, there was like an inside group of people who were working on this, who were focused on it, were committed to growing it, and then the finance bros came and you know, I'm pitching a book right now about that specific point, which is that once finance gets involved with kind of anything, there's, you know, some generally grim implications, and obviously crypto is money from the start, so it makes it even easier to financialize it and and with, you know, predictable boom bust effects that were amplified by the lack of regulatory safeguards around it, which venture capitalists were were as happy to exploit as any criminal, I have to say.

Speaker 1: 33:24

Hi everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend and join the crypto leftist communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you're enjoying the episode or find the content to make important, you can pitch into my efforts, starting at $3 a month on Patreoncom, slash the blockchain socialist, to help me out, enjoying the nearly 100 other patrons that contribute financially, which really helps, since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode and access to bonus content like Q&A episodes. You can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer and I'll give my thoughts in roughly 20 minutes.

Speaker 1: 33:57

The current bonus episodes have so far explored plenty of topics, including how co-ops and dows relate, whether there is a socialist blockchain, a review of previous crypto events I've been to and recently, a video reaction to an episode of the D program. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this episode to help spread the message that blockchain doesn't need to be used to further and change capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. Yeah, that's one thing that I remember as well, like I mean, for me it was in 2016, 2017, when I was starting. That was whenever, like right when the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance was started. Who knows if that's. I don't know if that's still going on or that still exists or not, it may still exist, but, yeah, that hyper ledger.

Speaker 2: 34:45

There were various corporate, I mean, ibm went big on blockchain in 2017. I don't think that's still really a going concern and these are all examples of, you know, maybe there, I mean, there is value for enterprises in blockchain in some sense, but the thing that they rarely seem to get and that the venture capitalists don't seem to get either, is that, you know, the value comes from the fact that these are public entities or public systems. You know it's open source, the. You know we talk about VC chains, layer one blockchains that are backed by specific people and have these like very tight cores of entrepreneurial lot. I mean, swe is one that just came out of the Facebook code base recently as a venture capital backed chain.

Speaker 2: 35:38

I mean, there's no future in these efforts like, or at best, very marginal. There are a few exceptions, something like there are some blockchains that are specifically built for NFTs and you know there are a few little niche cases like that where they do come out of the ecosystem and so maybe a you know, having your own layer one makes sense, but ultimately, at the end of the day, there's going to be very few layer ones and the fact that VCs are chasing these layer ones is really just because they have liquidity events that venture capitalists can, can, can leverage, not because they're actually going to be viable long term, and I think that's against VCU. This divide between, you know, there's like real crypto and VC crypto, and that's an oversimplification, but it's one that can be usefully applied in a lot of situations.

Speaker 1: 36:24

Right, yeah, I just I just remembered this, this point whenever there was a very big influx of VCs, it was interesting, just like it was for me. I noticed like first came the enterprises, they kind of gave a bunch of hype but also fucked it up, and then came the VC money, like crazy which is. It was an interesting series of events to kind of see and fold.

Speaker 2: 36:50

Yeah, it was almost like an. There's something to be learned there, I think. I don't know what it is, but the fact that it's like sort of inverse, that that like, yeah, ibm and Hyper Ledger and Ethereum Alliance, those came along first and then there was like, I mean, there was VC in early days, right Like, but but it was basically like individuals. I mean, the earliest blockchain VC I don't know how many people know this story it's a guy named Roger Ver who was a, an entrepreneur who had a, you know, relatively modest online computer hardware retail operation, so he had, you know, income of his own and then he funded a variety of very early startups, but it's just genuinely one guy. And that was VC and crypto for a long time, where that was like a representation of what VC and crypto looked like. And so, yeah, the like large scale, the like big push by entries and Horowitz over the last couple of years, that's all new and does, I think, represent a different, a different perspective.

Speaker 1: 37:55

So then do you think, I think in that regards, it's made things a bit worse in some respects. At the same time, it has brought on I don't know if the VC were a part of it, perhaps partially in bringing more people into crypto, but that also means more people, I think, who didn't I don't know didn't come knowing about, like, I guess, what you call like the real crypto, or like having knowledge about all this other stuff, so made easy, easy victims.

Speaker 2: 38:28

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's complicated and, frankly, it's morally complicated for me because you know, like there's no denying that the VC entrance like elevated the entire space and the amount of money in the entire space and not just on a temporary basis. Right, obviously, we've had this huge crash, but I mean we're still, if we want to talk like market numbers, which are, you know, vulgar, of course, but proxies for certain other things you know, bitcoin people forget this. Bitcoin in like 2018, 2019 was at $3,000 a token. It was just absolutely in the trash relative to where it had been, even in like, I think early 2018 is when it was still around like $20,000 a token. Crashdown to $3,000, went up to $70,000 because of, basically, a lot of this hype. And then, you know, crash when it was, when it turned out that a lot of the hype was fake. But we're still trading at, right now, 10 times the price of Bitcoin, as that was seen in 2019. And a lot of that has to be credited to the involvement of VCs. And you know, that's not some measure of like we've got adoption that's wider, but it does suggest that there is some wider adoption, especially on the Bitcoin front, because, like, we don't have. You know, there's not like a Bitcoin ETF now. That didn't exist five years ago. There's still like essentially no or very few direct public channels for investors to bet on Bitcoin without actually buying Bitcoin. So like this still reflects like people who actually own Bitcoin. But the point I was going to make further is that you know, there is this expansion of the monetary base that's in crypto, but at the same time, I think some of the VCs were so misguided and said so many foolish things that misled people that it's hard to say you know whether that money like represents honest increases in interest in the space.

Speaker 2: 40:41

The example that I always cite, and that will all that I will always cite, and that I think leads into another sort of stuff you wanted to talk about, is Mike Novigratz, the head of a firm called Galaxy Digital, and he became, you know he for a couple years. He was actually a fairly early crypto VC. I think he got involved maybe as early as 2015 or 2016. And for a while had a really solid reputation, but then in the last cycle, became a huge fan and booster of this thing called Luna and Terra, which was, it turns out, a giant scam, and not just a giant scam, but like a scam that was pretending to be something that wouldn't work even if it had been honest if that makes sense which is an algorithmic stablecoin, and it's a great example of you know.

Speaker 2: 41:30

People who had been paying attention to crypto knew that people had tried to build this algorithmic stablecoin which I won't even go into what it is, it doesn't matter, it's just a bad idea. People had tried to do it before. People had tried to do it as long ago as 2014. And every single time it crashed. And then you have a VC like Mike Novigratz coming in and saying this is brilliant, this is amazing, this is innovative. It was exactly the same thing that, like 10 other people had tried and failed before. Novigratz just like ignored that and blundered through and said incredibly dumb and embarrassing things on stage, which, by the way, if you want to hear I mean, I'm from Texas, I don't know if I have any, if you have any listeners who might be fans of screwed and chopped hip hop music, like I am, but in our Crypto Crooks podcast, we we took some of Mike Novigratz's dumbest statements and turned them into an audio collage of screwed and chopped remix that I am really a huge fan of, so check that out.

Speaker 1: 42:28

I'm also from Texas.

Speaker 2: 42:30

Oh, ok, cool, so so yeah, I mean, and that's just one example but you had VCs out there saying really dumb things. You had, you know, suzu of three arrows, capital, which not a VC, but a hedge fund. Same difference saying that Bitcoin now was going to go up forever, which I mean, that's essentially what they were saying. It's incredibly ridiculous. And so all of the people who listened to that kind of nonsense and then, like, lost probably a lot of money because, right, if you bought the top, if you bought Bitcoin at 70,000, you're still way down and really unhappy, even if you didn't sell which you know, hopefully you did because, like, you got to get into this stuff for the right reasons.

Speaker 2: 43:11

What Warren Buffett always says is don't invest anything you don't understand, and I wish people took that advice.

Speaker 2: 43:16

When it came to crypto, I wish this had grown a lot more slowly, but this is where we get into.

Speaker 2: 43:23

You know, it's not about crypto, it's about capitalism, and capitalism is about, like, leveraged financial growth.

Speaker 2: 43:30

It's about bringing that future growth into the present, which is another thing that I write about pretty extensively that you know, finances form time travel, and the VCs and hedge funds who got involved in crypto wanted to take this stuff that is going to take like decades to grow to its full potential. They wanted to then like, reach into the future, grab those future profits and have them for themselves right now, and to do that, you basically have to lie, and that's what they did. And so I think that the impact of this huge VC on rush and there are a lot of legitimate VCs out there who really know what they're doing and are honest actors and are involved for the same reasons that others are but there are also a lot of VCs who just want to take the money and run and I think they had dominance in this last cycle and ultimately a lot of the you know scams and fraud can be laid at their feet for not being responsible, for not really looking at what they're selling people and, you know, just eating off hype, basically.

Speaker 1: 44:35

Yeah, you heard it here first venture capitalists steal from the future.

Speaker 2: 44:39

I mean, I think it's quite.

Speaker 1: 44:41

Yeah, absolutely. I honestly I think you would love. You would love the Nick land. They are very curious what you're thinking about the Nick land article. Yeah, I will check it out. So yeah, I wanted to talk a bit about Terra Luna and its crash. Since you've been covering a lot in your own podcast and crypto crooks, Do you want to share a bit? Like what is the latest on Doquan at the moment? I know that there was some recent news about his arrest.

Speaker 2: 45:09

Yeah, he's doing a couple months in Montenegro for having a fake passport, and then he'll get extradited either to Korea or the US I don't know where, where he's going to wind up, where the chances are. Before we get into the current state of things, though, I actually do want to make another point about, about Luna, to your listeners, who I think I would assume are, you know, more likely to be people who are serious thinkers maybe you're into history, maybe you're into literature, whatever, if you're listening to this podcast, or obviously into politics, right, you're thinking about Mac bookings. The takeaway that I had from the Luna chain of events was you know, I'm a humanities PhD. I'm not like trained in finance per se, like academically, and yet I saw that this structure was bullshit, while a lot of these supposed finance professionals were still out there saying it was brilliant and genius, and so I think I want to just really try and drive home to your listeners who are these like more critically minded, right, like you're doing analysis, and you may think that you're just like over here in the humanities examining stuff that's soft, but you're also getting like training that will let you see things that people who pretend to know what they're talking about can't, and that applies even to, like, hard finance and so like. Keep that in mind. There are no barriers and a lot of the people who pretend to be experts are not as smart as you are. If you're the one who has been reading history, you're going to walk away with more than the guy who has an MBA, and you should go in there throwing punches because you're probably going to knock him out. So I want people to have that takeaway.

Speaker 2: 46:53

But as far as Doquan, yeah, like, the comparison that I always make is to Elizabeth Holmes, right, who had a bad idea and then lied about it. That's the amazing thing about about Doquan is that like, even the thing that he was saying out front was was really bad and stupid. But then he also was like committing vast fraud on the back end to make it seem like it was working, and we've learned a lot about that since last last year when the system actually collapsed. So we know that he was like directly ordering people to fabricate blockchain records to make it look like there were payments being processed on Terra that there weren't actually. The biggest thing that we know is that, in fact, a US based trading firm that our reporting indicates was Chicago based jump trading was actually bailing out Terra USD, the stablecoin, as early as, I believe, june of 2021. That was not disclosed to the public, which means that after June of 2021, every representation of Terra USD as quote unquote stable by either Doquan or anybody else who knew about this bailout was active fraud. And we still haven't seen you know, criminal charges against jump, possibly because they collaborated with the SEC and others in putting together the charges. In other words, they informed on their business partner or perhaps somebody within jump did all of this, by the way, is detailed in Crypto Crooks, the podcast that we spent four long episodes diving into, doquan and Luna. So if you're curious, check that out.

Speaker 2: 48:39

But yeah, after he gets out of Montenegro and jail which I'm sure is just a barrel of laughs he will be extradited to Korea or the US. If it's Korea, hard to say, because you know he is politically and economically connected there. He's part of the South Korean elite. He's a student who's been to a preparatory school that sends more people to Western Ivy League schools than Horace Mann in New York City to give some sense of the level of his privilege, which you know. Side issue that we can pursue if you like, but I think between him and Sam Bankman freed.

Speaker 2: 49:17

And you know you can look at other examples like like Elizabeth Holmes and this pattern of elite fraud. These are not people who are coming from like desperate circumstances of poverty to run scams. These are people who under, who have every opportunity to be successful in legitimate businesses and instead their fraudsters on a massive scale. And you know, with with SPF, we get to talk about a whole other set of things where, like his parents, were these ideological champions, these Stanford professors, putting forth the groundwork for what then became their kids active scam and you know, at least in the case of the father, got him blanking on his name.

Speaker 2: 50:04

But anyway, spf dad also seems to have maybe had a hand directly in what was going on. So we have all these elite people who are who are now just giving up on even running businesses with their privilege and just leveraging it to run scams, which is another part of what's going on here. That's interesting. So anyway, if he gets extradited to the US, I think that there's a really good chance. Doquan does like what I call an Enron sentence, which is 10 to 20, gets out when he's, you know, 45 or 50 years old. So so that's life.

Speaker 1: 50:37

Yeah, it is pretty astonishing, I mean like I don't know what type of like I don't know I have, like maybe I don't know if it is an unpopular opinion or not, or like a bit too rude. But I think a lot of people who do come from these very elite backgrounds I just find tend to have these like I don't know crazy, like mental health issues and like I don't know issues of like lacking within themselves that they have to do like the most insane shit possible, yeah, in order to like feel anything in their lives because they have access to so much shit that they need to do like. They have to constantly be, you know, like pushing the boundaries in some way, usually in a way that is like extremely toxic.

Speaker 2: 51:14

Yeah, I mean, that's one read for sure and I'm like endlessly fascinated by these people as characters.

Speaker 2: 51:21

I think there's the like, you know, boredom or ennui of like you know, I have to commit a crime because I'm I'm, you know, spoiled, but I think it's also, you know, I think Elizabeth Holmes is very illustrative here because, well, I mean, sort of her father was also kind of involved in some shady stuff, but generally she was like part of this Silicon Valley bubble where you have to be successful, right, like maybe that's as much of an issue as anything is just the assumption that she seems to have been born with that she was going to be a billionaire, no matter what, and then you get caught up in fraud because you have to prove that and you have to actually like you know, like failure is not an option.

Speaker 2: 52:06

Failure is such a like terminal situation that you just start lying to people and and I think you can also make maybe an extended argument from there that when you look at just like the macro trend of declining real returns on investment across the entire US economy, you know you have the middle class of people who are kind of educated elites who no longer can find jobs that fit their training. I think you also have the hyper elite where, as declining real returns continue to compound, like not everybody can run a billion dollar startup, even if your dad did right, and so you have people who are doing the fake version of that.

Speaker 1: 52:53

Yeah, I had a. I mean, I went to. I went to university with a lot of very, very rich kids and like one of the things that I saw found like fascinating were like the amount of kids who already had parents who were extremely wealthy, like beyond like anything I had ever like encountered before, just like millions of millions, close to billions perhaps. But when you talk to them they're like I need to be richer than my parents, like they. You know, I just have like several like memories of talking to these kids and they're just like so sure of themselves that they're going to be more successful than their parents, that they have to be more successful than their parents. And yeah, it lead to a lot of like really fucked up ways of thinking and just completely detachment from reality and therefore I think then like justifies themselves to committing crime while at the same time, you know like shoot, you know cutting, you know a poor person, like stealing food or something like that.

Speaker 2: 53:51

Right, yeah, yeah, I mean, and I can empathize with that as like a basic kind of American thing right, like I, you know I was brought up kind of middle class to upper middle class and I mean like actually upper middle class, not upper middle class as code for stupid rich, like I grew up in the regular as suburbs. But you know, I certainly, like you know, went through college being, like you know, even though I'm choosing this weird path of like being a scholar and writer. I would really like to be as successful as my, as my dad, who was the primary breadwinner of my family. So I mean I can empathize with that. But yeah, I think it's also, you know, it really it's hard to make these generalizations right and it's irresponsible too, but you do have to also start looking at, just like the certain strain of winking and omnipresent criminality that underpins the capitalist class.

Speaker 1: 54:58

You know Sure yeah.

Speaker 2: 54:59

And I'm right up against it. You know, these days I, you know, I see it, I'm moving those circles, not I mean not like as a member of them, but like I'm in the room and there is something to that, not to say. And I mean again, like a lot of people who are involved in finance and certainly business more generally, are good people who are like fascinating. And you know, the flip side is that, like people like me who actually do the work in finance, I find to be some of the most interesting and like creative and fun people in the world, cause, like you, have to think like a complete crazy person to really understand how this stuff works in the first place. So everybody's got a beautiful mind when you're on the financial side of things, but like the people who control the money, like you know, every great fortune is built on a great crime, right?

Speaker 1: 55:55

Yeah, yeah. But so like, yeah, you've due to reporting for so long. Of course, you've seen like a lot of crazy scams and theft over the years. I'm curious like how, yeah, how do you stay interested in it when you have to report on so many scams?

Speaker 2: 56:21

Well, yeah, I mean it's definitely like depressing and kind of demoralizing that I mean I consider it. My mission like probably 50% of my overall mission is just to like push back against these bad actors enough to preserve some little sliver of what I believe to be the real promise of crypto. But it's impossible, right, like there's this constant stream of scams where, like it's impossible to target the actual individual actors. With very few exceptions, like sometimes they'll get big, and I was very proud that, like this whole Doquan Luna thing, like you know, I saw it coming, I knew what was happening pretty much exactly and I wrote about the way it was gonna unwind before it did, and so in that case I was able to specifically save some people's money. But, more generally, the way I make myself feel better about it and this also gets into sort of more of my anarchist sensibilities which is people are going through the ringer on this stuff. But there's no better teacher than failure, and so when you get ripped off, there are gonna be some people we know who are always just gonna keep going back and doing the same thing again and again and they'll never learn. But there are also people involved in this market and if you're, you know, if you're self aware you're like speculating in crypto in a way that is not going to like destroy your life if you get something wrong. Not everybody is doing that, but I'm like out there sending that message and also trying to like teach people basics of how to evaluate whether it's individual character or the financial details of something, or how to do the research to like get a sense of whether something is legit, and kind of providing examples of like hey, here, this is legit, this is a real application that makes sense from a technological perspective and here's not. So, people who are going through the like speculative process of whether you're like betting on an ICO and there's nobody there to tell you like okay, like the SEC, this has been filed. This is like quote unquote regulated or quote unquote unregulated, which you know.

Speaker 2: 58:41

Okay, I'm going to unleash the real anarchist thesis here, which is financial regulation is kind of fake and I mean, if you look at the charts of like Peloton is one of my favorites, right this is a publicly traded stock for a stationary bike manufacturer that for like a hot second in 2021, like three months after the start of the pandemic was worth like $8 billion In fact, I'm going to look it up right now and you know, if you talk to like Gary Gensler or whatever, they would say, oh, this is like. You know, this is a regulated market, right, but that doesn't help anybody, because you have to look at Peloton and be like, oh, this is some weird distorting effect of like one freaky historical event that has driven this stock up to a market cap of, or the stock peaked at like $160 in December of 2020 or January of 2021. And then it went down, down, down, down down. Right now it trades at $10. So that's a stock that a publicly listed stock that has lost more than 90% of its value over the course of two years, and no regulator is going to be able to tell you that that's what's going to happen. You have to use your own judgment, and so my case for ICO markets and other totally unregulated decentralized markets and crypto quote unquote equities is that when this stuff is out there and people who have the right evaluation of their own risk are experimenting and are investing, they learn to pick stuff and to evaluate things way better than people who are participating in public markets that are regulated and have these guardrails that make it look like it's legitimate when, in fact, you're just about to lose 90% of your money. And this does actually hold up if you look back at, like, the ICO market.

Speaker 2: 1:00:48

There are certain ICOs that were unregulated, illegal securities offerings, let's just say it. But that were good investments that have had amazing returns since then because they were issued by real teams who were honest and actually they were honest in the sense that they actually intended to do the thing that they said and then they did it, even if they were quote unquote breaking the law, right. And the same goes for something that I'm gonna oversimplify my views because there are some good aspects to it. But if you look at accredited investor rules, right, these are basically rules that if you don't have a million dollars or I don't know exactly what the number is right now but if you're not already rich, you can't invest in certain kinds of assets. That is like richness is a proxy here for an intelligence test, and it's hard to think of anything less economically democratic on its face than that. Now, I think intelligent or accredited investor rules do really protect people from scams. So I'm not saying that they're like completely a bad thing that I wanna trash. I think that that gets oversimplified.

Speaker 2: 1:01:55

But the broader point is that if you don't let people participate in markets, then they're never gonna learn how to participate in markets, and I think that there is a legitimate case there.

Speaker 2: 1:02:06

If you believe that there should be such a thing as a security that represents a stake in a collective enterprise, then there might be better levels of threshold for letting people speculate in those instruments.

Speaker 2: 1:02:21

And globally, whatever the US does, there are going to continue to be these ICOs and people are going to learn to distinguish between what's good and what's bad in them.

Speaker 2: 1:02:30

And over time, my thesis as this is the anarchist thesis that, like, if you have an unregulated financial market, over time you do have scams kind of squeezed out simply because you have an educated investor base that has been just pummeled into learning what's going on because they've lost so much to scams over time. And that's an oversimplified and, frankly, not entirely sustainable argument because, again, there is always gonna be some base of people who are getting tricked into participating in these markets without any kind of even the most basic knowledge, and so they're gonna continually get robbed, and so you have to have some kind of protection for those people. But I think it's an example of how crypto forces us to ask these really basic questions about the way things work right now and at least like question them and say like there could be another way right, and I think that there's something very productive to that in the long term too.

Speaker 1: 1:03:29

There's a lot to say about that. I agree. Crispo crypto does force us to ask these really difficult questions that we normally just wouldn't ask. We just like accept as being the only reality, I guess. But I kind of have this tension inside of like whether or not we should be encouraging people almost to be like financialized subjects or subjects to financialized capitalism, so that in the efforts that they will like become better at it and smarter at it. But at the same time I do think that there is perhaps a big benefit to knowing more about finance generally for the general population, for various things not just related to finance and how to make more money, but like how to think about the future, because I think what finance like is is kind of like it has a lot to do with trying to predict and create particular futures of what that is invested in it requires critical thinking For sure.

Speaker 1: 1:04:38

And it requires complex systems thinking, and I think that like I tried to think of finance as more about like how, like decide everybody kind of deciding where to put resources. Except right now, like the financial system is really more like a few guys with a lot of money get to decide where resources go.

Speaker 1: 1:05:02

So, like I would be, I just think that in a like, in my, you know, in the socialist future that will of course come, comrade, like you know, the they're still going to be financed, like there's still going to be people deciding where we're going to put our resources in particular directions, and, of course, ideally that would be one where there is a lot more like governance, through like, not just through capital, not just through having money, but like governance over these resources as a form of, like, socialist finance, or however you want to call it.

Speaker 2: 1:05:43

Yeah, and there are different ways that you can envision that future, and certainly one is like some more direct democracy. I mean, we that's. That's sort of a separate or a slightly distinct discussion. Like, I don't necessarily I am. I guess this is worth laying out for people who might listen to this because I'm on it and not be too familiar with the nuances. But you know, I'm a, I'm a like European style democratic socialist in terms of my, my actual substantive political agenda. I'm sort of a sentimental anarchist, but I think that you know that that's a slightly more theoretical stance. And so, yes, like in this, in like my vision of this sort of very moderate euro socialism.

Speaker 2: 1:06:30

There are still financial markets, for sure, but you know, you start to have to think about, like, how do these financial markets work in a globalized setting, for example? And you know, like right now you have things like I mean, I'm I don't know if this is specifically true, but you know there is like an Argentinian stock market there is for, like, argentine companies. There's a Brazilian stock market for Brazilian companies. There's a Canadian stock market for Canadian companies. That does not make sense anymore. You know, like, obviously there are regulatory regimes in those separate countries that have, you know, the ability to structure the markets, but, like just those borders are already distorting in terms of our like collective societal investment motivations. So, you know, you think about like skewed incentives in finance in the United States because of the way the Fed manages the monetary base. That's a real thing. I mean, you get bankers doing things that actually are not good for society long term because there are kind of like local distortions in the way the market works. And the same goes for I don't know like a company that gets a lot of money from a certain set of government contracts or something like that.

Speaker 2: 1:07:49

Like we have to think about and this is where crypto really unleashes its superpower is, if you can, then and I know you're interested in DAOs, so this kind of aligns with that I mean, if you can basically just like harness the wisdom of everybody right, like it changes the way risk works globally and you will have people who are getting washed out because their judgment is not good and the crowd goes the other direction. But you can have like a kind of economically democratic sort of-ish. I don't want to overstate my claim here, but like for people who have capital, who are participating in a theoretical global investment market that seems to point towards smarter allocation of human resources than we have in this very fractured local set of markets for Argentinian and Brazilian stocks, right. So if you have like a truly frictionless global system for guiding investment that doesn't have these barriers that are impossible for small investors in particular to bypass, then I'm pitching like the hypercapitalist layer in the socialist cake, I guess.

Speaker 2: 1:09:08

But I think there's something there that, like, if you're looking to truly coordinate humanity I mean, I don't know where you stand on this particular thing, but I think it's another distinction when talking about socialism is that, like I could not be more anti-communist on just a purely technocratic level that you cannot have a managed economy, like it does not work, at least in a modern setting. And so I think that some kind of like this distributed wisdom of the crowd, collective direction of social resources towards things that we like altogether, not just because the Politburo says so, but that we altogether genuinely support, I think in theory is promising. I think we have to like take a step back and say, like the reality involves a lot of scams, a lot of waste, a lot of bullshit. Maybe that's not like actually a workable thing, but, like at a theory level, I find it very interesting and appealing.

Speaker 1: 1:10:09

Yeah, I mean, I think. I mean yeah, I guess on my side it's that I think that the economy is always managed Like. There's the Like in the US, for example, we just take that like the whatever the kind of like legal structures that are in place, like kind of decide the railings of, like the regulated market at least, and also defines what is the unregulated market in some extents. So in some ways, like economies are always planned, it's just about for me, like who is planning it? Billionaires get to plan a large part of the economy because they get to decide like the amount of they put a shit ton of capital on making widgets. The economy is going to make widgets. So like this is like basically the. They are like central planners of the economy in a lot of ways. What I think is what, how? For me, crypto blockchains kind of complicate the.

Speaker 1: 1:11:07

This association of like communism with Soviet style planned economy is that like I mean one. The Soviet managed economy like has its issues. It did some things well, some things very well. It didn't last. Ultimately it fell, of course, but like, what it did provide is like a shared. It was like a shared platform. You know it was a centralized one, but it was a shared platform. That was kind of like, yeah, things were done with that.

Speaker 1: 1:11:42

I think a blockchain is also a type of shared platform for economic activity in which you can plan to use it as like purely free market kind of dynamics, as like it usually is done, but you also have like all these seeds of like more what I would argue to be like many planned economies within like or between different dows or whatever else, and so I think like imagining that like to me, if we think of like to me, the definition of communism is like a stateless, moneyless and the stateless, moneyless and classless society. So like it complicates more the like Soviet style of reaching communism, I guess, than it does like communism as an ideal. But yeah, I mean, I think that there is a lot of interesting experimentations that need to be done that just like haven't been done yet Because, like the people who are A lot of people who are involved in crypto are just kind of like the free market fundamentalist types or people who are very influenced by neoliberal ideology and such.

Speaker 2: 1:12:54

And the other thing that is like just the most deeply and hopefully we can wrap up in a couple of minutes here but the most deeply fascinating thing to me about crypto is that the mechanism design of proof of work, mining incentivized the creation of this global platform, as you're saying, right, like the mechanism and the game theory behind it to get everybody participating.

Speaker 2: 1:13:25

To get everybody participating is maybe the most important and interesting thing to me, because it just opens up this design space for borderless anything and global anything that like if you, if you write it, if you design it right over the internet, you can get people engaged in this stuff, and at a very, very broad level.

Speaker 2: 1:13:50

That, I think, is the most exciting thing, because you can then like build on top of Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever, a lot of different kinds of tools or spaces or whatever. And I think that again falls into that bucket of like it's a step change, right, like there's never been anything that is as globally interoperable and accessible as the Bitcoin network. I mean literally, like maybe somebody could come up with some example. But global systems are always patchworks up until this point, right, you have like even a global postal system involves a series of handoffs between, between national systems, and you know there are discontinuities and breaks and costs and things like that. And so, just you know, if you envision Bitcoin as this, like network encircling the globe, it's the first thing of its kind and I think that in and of itself is radical, to quote your title.

Speaker 1: 1:14:58

Thanks, Well, yeah, it's been really nice to talk to you. I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your thoughts.

Speaker 2: 1:15:06

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Speaker 1: 1:15:09

Now I mean, I really appreciate it and enjoyed the conversation. Maybe, if you want to, just we can close it off if you want to share with people where they can keep up with you and where they can listen to Crypto Crooks.

Speaker 2: 1:15:23

Yeah, so I. It's actually kind of a long list. I'm on Twitter at David Z Morris. I have an intermittent sub stack that might appeal to listeners of this show because it's more theoretical and in depth than my day to day writing, and that's at David Z Morris, dot substack, dot com. I also obviously do a lot of stuff at coin desk, including Crypto Crooks, which is I would make a big pitch. It's a it's a narrative produced podcast. I narrated and wrote the whole thing. A friend of mine did some really great music for it. It's scored like a movie, so it's a very entertaining show that also gets into the weeds of the crypto stuff.

Speaker 2: 1:16:06

And then finally, as I mentioned, I have a book called Bitcoin is Magic that you can just find on Amazon. Unfortunately, I haven't really worked to get it published through any other outlet. It's just a self published thing, but it goes into a lot of weird little sort of historical comparisons, including the McLuhan essay and also a big essay about a guy named Johannes Trithymias, who was one of the pioneers of cryptography in 15th century Europe and wrote a book called the Stegonographia, which is one of the foundational tomes of cryptography, but who was also a priest. And so I talk a bit about. You know the sort of overlap between religion and code and politics and and that you know that's in that book and might be of interest to people. So those are the four I would say.

Speaker 1: 1:17:05

Nice Thanks and I'll have those in the in the notes. Awesome, all right, thanks, so much Thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:17:12

It was great coming on Josh.