100 - How to Survive in Crypto | Cobie

🎉 Happy 100th Episode 🎉 Cobie, fka Crypto Cobain, is a cultural staple in the crypto space. Wearing many hats as a narrative investor, thought leader, and memelord, we dive into the brain of one of our favorite crypto characters. Having been in crypto for nearly a decade, Cobie tells us his keys to surviving in crypto and what it takes to last long term. We also dive into how much decentralization matters, roles and responsibilities in shaping the world around us, and his outlook for 2022 and beyond. Cobie advises a healthy dose of skepticism and curiosity, and describes himself as a reality maximalist. He’s gone on an absolute tear recently, dropping a series of excellent thought piece articles that establish mental models for understanding narratives across the ecosystem. We also go through moral alignment charts and ask Cobie the big question… What does he think of Bankless? ------ ✨ DEBRIEF ✨ | Ryan & David's Unfiltered Thoughts on the Episode https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-cobie ------ 📣 ONJUNO | Crypto from your Checking Account! https://bankless.cc/OnJuno ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot 🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 5:30 How Cobie Survives in Crypto 13:41 Early Discoveries 21:22 Reality Maximalism 32:38 Responsibility & Roles 43:39 Tribes, Decentralization, Utility 53:10 Profit Maximalism 1:01:31 Staking & Incentives 1:10:42 Wins and Losses 1:19:20 Crypto Brain & Culture 1:28:45 Wealth & Purpose 1:36:18 Chaotic Good & UpOnly 1:39:58 Judging Others 1:54:00 Bullish or Bearish in 2022 2:00:42 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Cobie on Twitter https://twitter.com/cobie?s=20 UpOnly https://uponly.tv/ Cobie’s Newsletter https://cobie.substack.com/ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Because if you spent like the last 18 months actively trading and investing and you could have just held Ethereum, it's like you just wasted, it could have been outside having like a nice time with the sun.

• 0:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams and I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, fantastic episode. The title is Understanding Crypto. We get inside the brain of a crypto trader. One of my favorites on crypto Twitter. This is Kobe coming at you. We talk about a few things. Watch out for them. Five, what it takes to last in crypto, not for the short run, but for the long term. Kobe's been at this for 10 years. He goes through that. Second, does decentralization really matter? We get a conversation, perhaps

• 0:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  a bit of a debate on that topic. Third, what does Kobe actually think about Bankless and its thesis? He puts that to the test. Fourth, we do a fun exercise like character alignment. People in the crypto space, are they lawful good? Are they chaotic evil? Are they neutral good? We talk about a few folks there. And number five, we end with outlook and predictions for 2022. Is it going to be a bullish or bearish year? Stay tuned for a fantastic episode. David, what did you think about this one?

• 1:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think calling Kobe a trader is underselling him. And I think if you ask Kobe what he is, he would also undersell himself too. I think that's kind of part of his character. He's definitely a part philosopher, I think. He's a trader philosopher type, if you will. And there's a dynamic, a pendulum back and forth, I think, where like, oh, he's in trader mode or philosopher mode. And I think that's one of Kobe's great strengths is he can trade on, he uses philosophy to trade and it's definitely worked out for him. And overall, he just has very long form answers, in-depth answers that pull in so

• 2:04David Hoffman?

  many different bits of knowledge from different corners of the crypto world to provide Evidence for his, his answer and it's just an impressive feat of brain power, I think. And so I just enjoyed picking Kobe's brain as somebody that is, as somebody that a lot of people look up to in this space for just leadership and just an example of how to, how to survive in crypto. I, I think if there's anyone that's survived through the most slog, the biggest slog, it's, it's Kobe. And so, and he's still around kicking, um, just kicking ass and maybe he's around for another decade after this, who knows?

• 2:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I believe that, man, that, that, look, that's another good episode title, how to, how to survive in crypto, because that's really what we went through and you, you mentioned the word depth. I think that was a key insight for me too. Kobe does have a tremendous amount of depth. And though, though we called him trader, he's a trader in the outset, he definitely narrative trades in a way that you and I don't, but he also has a long-term thesis for this space. And so it was really cool to see him push against our theses and challenge some of our ideas. And there was some fantastic back and forth there about the value of decentralization, how much that really matters, both from an investment perspective, but also from the future of what we're really building in crypto. So guys, stay tuned to hear all of that.

• 3:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course, as usual, if you're a bankless premium member, David and I will be talking, doing a full episode debrief of all of our thoughts on the episode. That is available on the premium podcast feed. So if you're a premium member, you can tap into that as well.

• 3:37David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, this was a really fun conversation. I think you guys are going to enjoy this one. Some people said that Kobe would never show up on bankless, yet here he is today on the show. So let's go ahead and get right into that interview, right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. Over 250 projects have already deployed on Arbitrum and Arbitrum's DeFi and NFT ecosystems are growing rapidly. Arbitrum increases Ethereum's speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into Ethereum's level of decentralization and security. If you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users, visit developer.

• 4:20David Hoffman?

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• 5:03David Hoffman?

  and is also operational on Polygon, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, and other chains. Trading on Matcha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me in a single, easy-to-use platform and allows me to make a limit on-chain orders. So you can set and forget your DeFi trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. So when you're making a trade, head over to matcha.xyz/banklist and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Banklist is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price.

• 5:45David Hoffman?

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• 6:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Banklist Nation, we are super excited to introduce our next guest. It's the guest you thought would never happen is now happening. We've got Kobe on the podcast, formerly known as Crypto Kobe. You probably know him from Twitter. Maybe you've read his Substack, maybe you've listened to Up Only, which is his podcast. He's been in the game, the crypto game that is, since 2022. We're going to talk about what he's done since 2022, his philosophy on things, any beefs with Banklist he might have. I don't know, we're going to just lay it out here, not really a strict agenda. We're just going to talk about whatever comes to mind. Kobe, welcome to Banklist. How are you doing, man?

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Hello, mate. How are you doing? I trolled you on Twitter before I joined, sorry. I just like to create entertainment for people. It's not a beat.

• 6:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it is entertaining. Yeah. So Kobe, before Twitter, I was like, hey, we're having Kobe record on the podcast. What questions you guys have? And Kobe's like, I'm gonna be at the beach, guys. Was that, was that actually today? And for a split second, I was like, okay, I don't know if he's coming or not, David, but it's just Kobe. It's, that's what you do.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  No, I feel like the entirety of crypto Twitter has got a handshake agreement that we're all continually being mean to each other as a joke. But I've recently realized some people don't realize it's a joke. They're not even joking themselves. They've been serious.

• 7:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some people are really mean?

• 7:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, some people just don't, just don't see, they see the Twitter and then it's, oh, that's just them being toxic. God damn, why are they always so toxic all the time? And then they don't realize that like, oh, we're just shitposting, having a good time.

• 7:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think it though, it's, it's, um, look, it's, it's a rough game out there. I mean, surviving in crypto takes a lot, right? And you've been at this game for like, what, is it like 10 years now, Kobe?

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, like a little bit less, I think, but it's getting to the point where you may as well just say 10.

• 7:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so a decade in crypto, what does it take to survive in crypto? How have you made it so long? I'm talking volatility. I'm talking about like crypto Twitter, you know, pain. I'm talking about, you know, very, everything, everything that comes within this industry. Dealing with idiots, dealing with everything you have to deal with, the information, uh, like flood into your mind every single day. You go, you missed an hour in crypto and it feels like you missed an entire week. All of that. How'd you last so long? What's your secret?

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the, the idiot thing, that was not a problem five years ago. I think that like, uh, the politicization of everything over the last decade has 10x probably three times. Um, like Twitter used to be, I'd never thought about using the block button, but like now the experience is virtually unusable unless you press it a few times a day. But crypto specifically, um, I think when, when people...

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Ask this question, it's very easy to, um, to like, use this like sort of hindsight bias and we're like, oh, well, I did this and I thought this about the world and blah, blah, blah. But it's, it's sort of similar to that, you know, that photo of a plane, an old warplane that they used to like, try and figure out where they should reinforce the armor so that their planes would survive longer. And then they were putting the armor in the wrong place because the only, the only planes that came back were the ones that survived. And they go, well, we need to reinforce where they're getting hit. And really the planes that didn't. Yeah, exactly. And you can like, think about like, I can think all these things like, oh, what did I do differently to other people? Um, or like, what did like, I have in my character that meant I could survive? And then

• 9:40Speaker 00

  I don't know if it matters too much. I think it's more useful to observe all the people I know from that time that didn't, um, like, get to this point in the market and went and did other things. Some of them very successful other things and, um, some just left the markets entirely. Um, and then the people that did from, uh, from my, my like cohort or, um, graduation class or whatever. And I think the first thing was that most people that survived through the markets have or had is like a healthy balance of skepticism and like curiosity because it's really easy to poke holes in everything, right? You can, I can tell you a million reasons why

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Bitcoin could probably fail. Ethereum is not going to do well. Why Solana is like fucked and stuff. It's really easy to come up with those things and I understand that mindset. It's also really easy to turn something into, uh, like a religious sort of group and be like, I'm so convicted on this thing. I'll, you know, this is going to, and then you disregard everything or criticism as like food or, you know, whatever. And I think the people that did really well and, and made it through um, multiple cycles of it going to infinity and then going to zero over and over, um, were somewhere in the middle where they were able to think really skeptically and say, okay, what could go wrong here? What are the things?

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Um, uh, uh, might invalidate why I believe in this thing, but at the same time, they were able to be optimistically curious enough to go, okay, maybe I'm a natural skeptic and these things might happen and that's all bad. And yeah, like, um, these are the things that could go wrong. But also, on the other hand, if the world changes in these ways, how can it be different in the future? And I think those people were the ones that saw past Mount Gox dying and the centralized exchanges blowing up and seeing, okay, does this matter in the bigger picture? Like, maybe it matters today, maybe it matters for the next two years, but maybe not in 10 years. And they saw Ethereum's ecosystem change from the

• 11:44Speaker 00

  2017 era of like, people just doing like felonious Kickstarter projects into being, okay, that's actually a type of product built on Ethereum. Yeah, maybe it's an illegal fundraising platform at the moment, but that is one product that you can build on Ethereum. And then they saw other products start to get built on Ethereum through 2019. And sometimes the new products look like the old one, but they were curious enough to understand the differences. So I think that's like one thing that like a lot of people that were able to make it through the markets had. And the second one is like, people don't like to talk about it so much because they like to think that they're smart and stuff. But it's just like luck and not like won the lottery, flipped a coin luck,

• 12:25Speaker 00

  but it's a sort of like cosmic, right place, right time, right life circumstances kind of luck where they didn't have to become a forced seller of this thing they believed in because they had a kid or because they had a health issue or something. Instead, they were, you know, the right age so that they didn't need to, you know, rely on their investments to pay for a house. Or they had it like, in my case, I was at university and the amount of money I put into crypto was so small that when I got a job, it didn't matter. I didn't need to ever cash it out to like, do something. I could increase my lifestyle and I could have that lifestyle bloat by getting a promotion and getting

• 13:10Speaker 00

  a new job. And I was lucky enough to have a few like well-paid jobs in tech, which meant I didn't need to ever sell my crypto in order to fund some part of my life. And I think most people that didn't make it, that back then believed, became forced sellers somehow, either over leveraging life circumstances or something like that. And I think a lot of it's down to that, just the right age, right place, right time, right like life circumstances, right education or whatever, that people don't like to admit so much.

• 13:41David Hoffman?

  What about a like a North Star or this guiding principle when you learned about crypto? Was there anything like, you know, distant in the horizon in 2050, everything's going to be on crypto? Or was there any sort of like thing that you really resonated with you about crypto that you discovered early on?

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, not, I never thought about 2050 and I still don't think about 2050. We'd probably all be underwater, not just in crypto underwater. I mean, like the entire world's underwater. But um, I, I was at university when I first got into crypto. And I went to like a university in the UK called University of Bristol. It's kind of like where you go if you don't get into Oxford or Cambridge. It's like 50% or maybe more than 50% like people with trust funds and they're like very posh. And they don't worry about money so much and they're having a nice time at university. And then the other half of people that I knew were all very deeply in debt.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  The banks like hook you in by giving you the student overdraft, which in the UK. Do you have overdrafts in America?

• 14:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:50David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Fine.

• 14:51David Hoffman?

  That's why. So bankless, we hate banks. Yep.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. So like they give you the student overdraft, which is just like free debt. You, they give you like three grand. You can do whatever you want with it. You don't pay any interest while you're a student and the first two years after you stop being a student. And all the people that I knew at university, all my friends that didn't have like family money. They instantly said, okay, cool. I've got £3,000 for free. That's my money now. And like zero was no longer zero, it was minus 3,000. They just went, cool, that's, that's my money. I can do whatever I want with that. And then they left university and all of a sudden you've got interest payments on this and everyone's like, you know. So I, I met those two types of people at university.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  And then in my family, like people in my family, they lost their pensions in the like 2008 financial crisis and stuff like that. So I was. I had this sentiment around banks, but also just like the financial system, which seemed to overlap with the political system in general. And I was very like emotional about it and like maybe a little bit naive about it as well. But I was sort of looking for a way out. So seeing crypto as seeing Bitcoin at least as this impartial, non-state money that there was, there was no guy in a like an office tower block in Canary Wharf or wherever in New York, I don't know the geography of New York well enough, that was going to

• 16:17Speaker 00

  make decisions about their own P and L that would impact, you know, my family and they don't give a shit about that. They just care about like unwinding their position because they fucked it. If there was a money where there wasn't a guy with that power, I was more interested, I was interested in that. And I wanted that to be like how the world worked. I wanted there to be a system where there wasn't someone dictating, you know, how much of the, how much rent they get to like cream off the like normal population. So I felt emotionally like super invested in this idea at the very beginning. And that's like what was the initial spark for me. But yeah, I didn't know our stuff was going

• 17:02Speaker 00

  to be in 2050, mate, I'll be dead by then.

• 17:06David Hoffman?

  The, I think this story resonates with a lot of people because this seems to be just the, the system, I'm in disenfranchised, I'm not part of the system, there's no way that I can get wealthy in the system. Therefore, like I might as well look elsewhere. This, this thing's not going to work for me. And so there's this new thing that's going on and I'm going to just gravitate my, my attention there. I think a lot of people have that a similar story. Just that the, the old ways of gaining wealth is not going to work. So I might as well just put wealth literally anywhere else.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's like two-fold. It's like partially that, right? Like, and I think that's why you're seeing the rise of Robin Hood and retail options traders and why Elon was was able to resonate so well with Dogecoin because that is the story of like normal people now. They don't, they think the system is, it is impossible for them to break out of it. And they see house prices, they're up like four or five X in the last 30 years, but wages are stagnant. And they just see their goals slipping away and becoming unachievable. But the, the part of it that I think was more triggering for me was that it seemed intentional.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  It wasn't just like, oh, this is the system and I can't like, there's no lever I can pull to like win. It was more like, wait, the people who seem to be responsible for the like financial crisis also seem to be the ones that did the best. Like, how does that make sense? Like, they seem, some of them made a profit. What, like, how come none of them lost their job? How come they're just like doing the same shit like five years later? So it, it was more that if there are central parties and there are people in charge, that humanity is often corruptible in, in search of privatized profits. And just the fact that there was like, yeah, like, sure Satoshi, the ghost of Satoshi or whatever,

• 19:02Speaker 00

  maybe still around, but the lack of that was what was attractive to me, I think.

• 19:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  So is that, is that still a big driver for you then, Kobe? Kind of like at the system?

• 19:14Speaker 00

  I don't know, man, because like, I was early twenties back then. I'm getting old now. So I was just in, I was just in my like, you know, where I line a phase, listening to rock music and stuff. But, um. Like, I think a little bit, but I think also I've capitulated a little bit on

• 19:34Speaker 00

  how easy it is to fight back. Cause like, you've seen a lot of it, it's like very relevant now, not just with like the financial system, but with everything like the dissemination of information and, you know, public trust in institution, government, big tech corporations, even game publishers. I've been in arguments with people on Twitter about games like for the last few days. And it's like, it's all time lows that people really, really don't trust large centralized power and that sort of F the system thing feels like it's been bubbling, I don't know, since like the 60s or 70s or something.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  And then it's reaching a point now where it, their incompetence or

• 20:24Speaker 00

  lack of respect from the people in power is so large that it just feels like they don't care. They're like, you can't do anything anyway. Like, like everyone knows now that there is massive corruption. In the UK, we have like all these Tory peers, the like, the government party, the peers just like giving themselves COVID relief contracts for like hundreds of millions of pounds and stuff. It's like, they just don't give a shit. It's not like they're trying to hide it. It's not like the, you know, they're like, oh no, if they find out about the cryptocurrencies, they'll take us down. They're just like, nah, we don't care. We'll, we'll just keep doing it. No, there's no like form of accountability anymore. So I think in some ways it's like,

• 21:07Speaker 00

  it, it, I feel, it feels still important to me, but I feel like I've capitulated a little bit on, or at least become complacent in like fighting the fight. It's like half the time you're fighting against your own people these days.

• 21:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, so yeah, you know, talk a little bit about that, that capitulation, right? Cause like, I think what we really want to do in this, in this episode too, is like, also understand how you think, how kind of a trader thinks, right? Because I think, Yeah, it's somewhat, Dave and I have discussed this before, but we sort of see Kobe and Up Only as kind of like a ying to Bankless's yang, right? It's like, it's like, the crypto world needs both of these perspectives very much. It's sort of like narrative trader versus what we try to think of ourselves as like a bit more fundamentals investor, right? But like, we try to stay open-minded and realize that we also don't have the like end-all thesis on this thing and like, no one actually knows what fundamentals are.

• 22:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, we really appreciate your perspective on this. But so let's get into that, into the idea of capitulating a little bit on that ideal, right? So our philosophy, or like, the Bankless thing would be like, hey, we acknowledge and we see the nihilism, right? Like, shit sucks, man. Institutions totally failed us. This is worldwide, this is in the US, right? You know, the banks, baby boomer generation, they've all screwed us. And we might very well be underwater in 2015, and guess what? They don't care. They're gonna be gone. They don't give a shit about us. They don't care about the next generation. So we see that, right? And that's like a existential, you know, existentially, that's a hard place to be in

• 22:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  because you're like, okay, well, nothing matters. None of this matters anymore. And so then you go and you're like, okay, how is the game played? Let me go figure out the game and I'm gonna play a game that I can actually win for a change, right? So maybe get into crypto, maybe start figuring stuff out. But like, for Bankless, it's a bit more than that because we haven't yet, I feel like, capitulated on the thing that we are trying to build, which is a new, disintermediated financial system for the world, right? Like, we actually, we don't believe all of the hype around Web 3, okay? It's like, I mean, I hope we're not naive. I don't think we're naive. Like, we know tons of ways this could go wrong, but we hold out hope that we actually have

• 23:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  a shot in our generation to actually get this right and rebuild the system from the ground up. So I like to think like, we haven't yet capitulated on that. Now, there's days where like, I'm like, oh shit, it's over. Like, I've fully capitulated. Like, we're never gonna make it. Like, this is not gonna work. What am I even doing here? There's definitely days like that. But I feel like we haven't given up. Are you still there yet? Or do you feel like, hey, this crypto thing? I don't know if it's gonna work out or not. Whatever, the institutions always win in the end, so might as well play the game.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel sort of like crypto itself is inevitable. And not so much a capitulation, like, I don't care so much about what happens. It's all pointless. But more that the individual contributions are much smaller than I previously calculated. Like, I don't think the world revolves around me. I don't think the, what, like, we put on openly makes a difference in the world whatsoever.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  I think it at best can entertain a bunch of people and allow them to remain interested in something. But I definitely don't think we should be telling people, you know, what to care about or how to think. I think that Bankless, I think it's great that you're very principled about what you care about. And it's clear that you, you know, make content about what you're interested in. But I think in that, there's also in another, like, set of biases, which is

• 25:21Speaker 00

  like, being unequally critical, depending on what crypto project we're talking about, right? And in the grand scheme of things, Bitcoin people would tell you by promoting Ethereum, you're actually capitulating because Ethereum has much more of a, like, a structural similarities to the old system than the new one. And then Bankless might tell you that by talking about Avalanche, you're capitulating. And, you know, like, I think there's a big spectrum and

• 25:57Speaker 00

  In general, I think at the moment for most crypto projects minus a subsection of, you know, the market that I think we could probably all agree on and identify pretty quickly. I think most serious intelligent builders have similar goals because it all stems from Bitcoin, right? They were all inspired by the same mission Bitcoin was or Ethereum was. And they thought, oh, I can do this in a different way or I can do this better. And I think if I'm totally honest with myself, I believe that most serious builders are not just trying to enrich themselves. And anyone in crypto is generally on a similar type of mission.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  And I, I think crypto is probably inevitable. I think it's inevitable that there is a permissionless and trustless system that underpins how society transacts because the old system worked so poorly. And there's obviously groups of people and smarter, increasingly smarter people that can see a future that will work in this way. But I don't necessarily believe the chain that we all live on 100 years in the future even exists yet. It might not. I don't know if it would be Ethereum

• 27:20Speaker 00

  or Solana or Bitcoin Cash or whatever. So instead I've transitioned, I think, a little bit towards like what I like to call reality maximalism, where instead of applying my personal politics and what I want to happen or what I think is the best thing to happen to the market or to my investments, instead I just like to observe what is happening and try and understand why that's happening and, and kind of take it from there. Because if you go back to my Twitter account, not my Kobe one, my normal one, before, like early 2017, I think, like I was early to Ethereum

• 28:04Speaker 00

  because I was a Bitcoiner. They sold to all Bitcoiners. We like bought the ICO and then by 2017, I was hugely disappointed with Ethereum because

• 28:13Speaker 00

  I was a big believer in this decentralization and obviously we had the DAO hack, we had the roll back the chain moment and had the fork. And then Ethereum seemed to be becoming this platform for illegal fundraising. And no one seemed to give a shit, no one seemed to care. So I had this personal and political anti Ethereum stance and a personal and political very pro privacy coin, privacy token, privacy technology type stance. And if I'd applied those things to my investment thesis more than I did, it would have been a huge mistake because Ethereum did really well and Zcash went to zero. It's like slowly went to zero, right? It's on its way.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  But like from that point, I tried to, instead of applying like these personal politics onto my investments, instead just go, okay, what is happening? Why is it happening? And what are the underlying growth mechanisms behind what's happening? And what can I learn from what is happening? Right? And that's why, though, if people were like incredibly politically motivated by the concepts of decentralization throughout the last year, they got totally screwed versus market participants because they owned Bitcoin and Ethereum as the most decentralized assets in the whole space. I think Bitcoin maybe, and Ethereum too, definitely Bitcoin. Ethereum, Ethereum I think is gray area and you could argue.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  And I think we'd probably agree on the argument, but I think those are the two assets that only, the only ones, whereas if there was a massive state attack today on censorship, they're the only two that would reasonably survive, right? Like Solana, you have the memes, the chain goes down. I think it's down again today. Like there's a very central core team who are very important. If Toly goes, who knows what happens to Solana, right? And the thing is, that's the same place Ethereum was not so long ago. Like as crypto projects are born, they start out very centralized. Bitcoin did as well. You remember the, I don't know when you got into crypto, but there was an inflation bug in Bitcoin and a billion Bitcoin were released or something. I don't remember when it was.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  It was slightly before my time, but I remember reading about it.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Like they had to come together and fix that very quickly and then at some point Satoshi left and at some point it didn't matter so much anymore and at some point it became resilient. And Ethereum is going through a similar thing in that Vitalik still has a very important political role in Ethereum, but less so over time. Now he writes sort of these roadmaps for the future to inspire the people doing the real work and it's not so much him, you know, sitting in a bedroom in his pants anymore, just doing like some blockchain coding. But I think Ethereum and Bitcoin are the only two that would survive a state attack today. In 10 years, that might not be, that might not be the same, that might not be true. There might be more things that have crossed this chasm because the people behind those

• 31:14Speaker 00

  chains have the same set of values as the people building Ethereum or the people building Bitcoin did. So I think inter-crypto capitulation on those things is sort of void. I mean, unless you're, you know, like promoting like hard centralized platform tokens, which is like sometimes good trades, but you know, not necessarily for me. Then I don't think it matters so much where, like where you place your interest within crypto. Because decentralization as a thesis is a bet that in the future it will be incredibly valuable for this system

• 31:55Speaker 00

  to be decentralized. There are also other bets within blockchain about why something might be valuable. And one of them is like usability. Ethereum for the last year has created a massive like competition vector for other blockchains because people care about using blockchains more than they care about decentralization right now. And betting on decentralization suggests that you think that will change in the future. And I think it will. I think decentralization is hugely important, but I also know that I shouldn't tell people what to think. They'll make their own minds up. And right now, clearly, it has been less important than them being able to participate in the ecosystem at all or being able to afford to.

• 32:38David Hoffman?

  So I see this, the big difference between your disposition and Bankless's disposition is like you, I feel like are a leaf on the wind, right? Like crypto will do its thing and you're just gonna ride it and see how it falls. And the Bankless side of things is like, we kind of want to cover and talk about and discuss decentralization and decentralized related things of that nature. And we have certainly, as a media entity, gotten plenty of just blowback for not discussing like the rise of the alt-layer ones as much as the crypto markets have turned their attention towards it. Where the crypto world has, you know, started to focus on things like Solana and Avalanche

• 33:19David Hoffman?

  and, you know, insert your new, uh, new smart contract blockchain here. Bankless has kind of continued to do the thing we were doing prior, which is kind of just focus on the, I think, deeper fundamental technologies. And the, the, the conversation of Bitcoiners pointing at Ethereum and being like, "Oh, it's a centralized scam chain." And then Ethereum's pointing at like the next chain down the line going, "Oh, it's a centralized scam chain." Like, we're on like iteration number three of that right now. Like, we have, we have the, all the new L1s where all the other, the incumbents are pointing at the disruptor chains and saying that disruptor chains are a bunch of like centralized scam chains. And like, who knows? Maybe there's iteration

• 34:00David Hoffman?

  number four of that. And maybe it actually just keeps on going for the rest of time. But the, I think the justification for why talk about decentralization and decentralization and only things that are decentralized or related to that, those subjects, is that like crypto is supposed to be an infinite game. We're supposed to be playing this game of crypto for hopefully the rest of time. Hopefully our kids are playing the crypto game, their kids are playing the crypto game, and hopefully that just becomes the new normal. And I think, me and Ryan think that if we let centralization, if we, if we're just a leaf on the wind and the wind just blows us wherever we go, it might actually blow us into an outcome where the game ends because it ended

• 34:44David Hoffman?

  up centralized. And it's kind of like, Chris Dixon has that line where like, if you ask people what they wanted in like the 1800s, they would have said a faster horse rather than a car, right? And, and so like, we think that we have some sort of responsibility to...

• 35:01David Hoffman?

  Only talk about decentralized things because then our kids can also play this game and their kids can play this game and it continues. And so like, maybe, maybe the strategy here at Bankless is like, only talk about decentralization. And when Solana and Avalanche do cross that chasm, maybe we do talk about it then. But I think we'll continue to decline to talk about that until the day comes. And maybe that's our role in the ecosystem. Maybe, maybe if, if, you know, Solana wants an appearance on Bankless, like, well, they're gonna have to work on their centralization. And as soon as they do, maybe we do invite them on.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I got like three main responses in my head while you were talking. The first one was like, imagine if like this leaf in the wind blows and lands in this centralized power world. I feel like it would be arrogant of myself to be like, ah, if only Up Only TV had covered more, been more sensitive in their coverage of decentralization. We might have ended up somewhere totally different. I'm pretending to be Kirk Bain on the internet for ages. And if it relies on me not talking about Solana, then I think we already failed, maybe. The second was what you said, it's like a spectrum, right? There's a decentralization spectrum and people draw the line in different places.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  And I understand drawing the line at Ethereum because I think it's the, probably the only other asset apart from Bitcoin that could withstand state attack or, you know, large coordinated attacks. But, and I understand it also because if you draw the line after Solana and Avalanche and Luna or whatever, then all of a sudden people from like Harmony and Nea come knocking on the door. And then if you include them, then all of a sudden it's like further down and it's like, where does it stop?

• 36:42David Hoffman?

  By next chain.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. It starts to get blurry for an audience. So I kind of get that perspective because you say, oh, well, they talk about Solana and this looks exactly like Solana. But there are fundamental differences that retail investors can't understand so well.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  So I understand drawing the line there. But my third, my third thing is like, as we've acknowledged in, earlier in this podcast, a lot of, a lot of the reason people get into crypto is not necessarily because they're looking for a trustless, permissionless way to interact online. Some people do, you know, I'm sure some people in El Salvador and Cuba and Venezuela, I think they do look for that. But. One of the reasons, as we said earlier, that people get into crypto is because they see this system that is rigged against them and they can't afford to buy a house. And the billionaires doubled their net worth or tripled their net worth in the pandemic. And they're looking for a way out. And if you shill them Bitcoin, they just hold Bitcoin like, what?

• 37:43Speaker 00

  It's been up 5% year to day or something like it was. Maybe it was even higher this time last year. And if you shill them Ethereum, they buy someone Coinbase and then they try and buy an NFT and they spent more on their gas fee than they did on the NFT. Obviously not now, but like in the, you know, peak of mint season last year. And they can't really do anything. And then you sort of lose them as audience and they're good people. They're not like, you know, they're not looking around trying to like scam people or they're not trying to shill other chains. They're good people who were also just looking for a way out of the circumstances or the system that feels rigged against them. And they end up on Solana because it's what they can afford to use, or they end up on Avalanche because it's what they can afford to use.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  And if you tell them they're on a centralized scam chain, they're like, I no longer really respect you as a broadcaster because you're rejecting my experience of not being able to transact on Ethereum. Oh, I don't care. It's decentralized. I can't use it. I can't afford to use it. And I think in their eyes, you go, it's like, what was it like for you when you joined crypto? And for me, I like, you know, put a couple of hundred quid into crypto and that was my entire inflow ever. And if Ethereum was in its current state, I would not have been able to live on chain very well. Maybe I could have used some of the L2s, which have their own UX issues and stuff.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  But back then it didn't matter because we just used Crypto and Mintpall and the exchange fees were just transferring like which blockchain you use and you could just use Litecoin. So it was fine. So I do, I don't, I totally understand it and I respect it. And I think that there probably will be podcasts for each of those blockchains too, right? Like there's a what Bitcoin did, there's a bankless, maybe there'll be a soulless for Solana.

• 39:38David Hoffman?

  I was talking to Ryan earlier. It's like, we get so much flack for not, for not covering all of these L1s. They need to just make their own podcasts in that case. Like we're leaving the door open for them. Please go forth.

• 39:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think so. I guess a couple of things as you were speaking, Kobe, and like things that I feel like we're probably 100% aligned on, right? So like 100% aligned on the fact that maximalism, chain maximalism is a trap. Like it's a toxic tribal trap from an investment perspective, but also from like a mind cage perspective. Like it's just kind of dumb. Okay? I would say that our thesis is different, right? It's not chain maximalism. It's decentralization maximalism. And I think that is definitely an investment thesis, but it also might not be,

• 40:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  especially short term, the highest ROI profit maximalization investment thesis. So that's one piece of it. The other hard agree that we would have for you is like, from a user perspective, hell yeah, users should use whatever chain they feel like using, whatever chain is cheapest. We just had Vitalik on the podcast and he was talking about a trip to Argentina he had. And he was like, hey, who, what do you think was the, the top used blockchain? Okay, right? It was, ended up it was Binance.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Central is exchange Binance, though.

• 41:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's fantastic. And why is it fantastic for people in Argentina? Is because Binance, as much as you have to trust one guy's database, as Vitalik said, like it's better than the status quo, isn't it? And it's cheap and it's better than Ethereum, obviously, for that particular use case.

• 41:25David Hoffman?

  And the same conversation exists about the Chinese central bank digital currency too. It's going to work wonders for empowering a bunch of people to be included in the financial world. It's also going to be the Chinese central bank digital currency.

• 41:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  But so like, so here, here's where we might have the, so, so decentralization, maximalization, but like not chain maximalization, totally with you there. And like users should use whatever chain they feel like using and they shouldn't feel There shouldn't be some like religious pressure on them from people like Bankless or anybody in crypto to say, no, you shouldn't do that. That's like, that's sinful to use this chain. This is a bad chain. Don't do that, user. Our message is more to people who are designing these chains and pretend to be decentralized when they're not, Cobie. Because we think that that is actually like, um, okay, so the, the outcome that you're

• 42:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  talking about, the, the idea that decentralization is inevitable, I'm not sure that that's actually true. I'm not actually sure that things do naturally decentralized over time, decentralized over time, unless you have a layer zero, a group of individuals and people that actually fight for that decentralization. You were talking earlier in the episode about the Bitcoin inflation bug, right? At the, at the root of things, how did that get resolved? It gets resolved at the social layer, the layer zero, like below the layer one, where people are like, no, Bitcoin is 21 million fixed cap. Of course, we're not going to let this inflation bug go. We're going to fix this in code. Code is not law. It's all backed by layer

• 43:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  zero. And that's why I actually think maybe you sell yourself short a little bit with Up Only when you talk about the lack of influence that you have in the crypto world. Because we are pioneers, we are early. It's, it's kind of like saying, I'm not saying we're the founding fathers, but like somebody like Vitalik, right? We're here during the revolution. Sorry, this is an American, you know, kind of thing, but like, uh, 1780s, right? 1790s, you know, founding an entire country and the people that were there had a ton of relevance. Like they set the layer zero for an entire nation state. And that's why David and I at Bankless feel like we have a tremendous amount of responsibility to do that because ultimately the layer zero enforces it. So the question of whether

• 43:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  we're going to have a good, disintermediated, decentralized crypto system for the world or not, what does that ultimately rest on? People. It rests on the layers there. And because we're here first. We actually have a responsibility to be like, no, these values are important to us. We should embed them in the protocol. We should embed them in the social layer to the extent that we can so that we can have the good outcomes that we all want later. Oh, and you're new? You just joined in 2021 and you don't know these things? Let's talk about why they are so important so that you can come like aboard this thing. And that's how we grow a movement, I feel like. And I think the people who are here first actually do have a ton of influence in shaping the next decade.

• 44:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, I think you do. I think Bankless does. I think people like Vitalik does. Satoshi definitely does. Like, all of us here do. It's so early that we can have an outsized impact and it won't just naturally happen. We've got to be intentional about it. What do you think about that?

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Maybe, yeah. I like my two main thoughts, honestly. Like, the earlier in your, in your speech, very inspiring speech, by the way. Earlier in your speech, you, you said you don't think things like tend to decentralize naturally over time. And like, evidence would suggest from crypto projects, at least, that they, they do. And evidence, evidence would suggest in a web two world or pre crypto world that they don't, like wealth centralizes, power centralizes, et cetera. Until there is a need for, for that decentralization and then it becomes super important and people are able to much more easily quantify its importance.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  If there is suddenly state attacks on, on blockchains, that layer zero are gonna, are gonna react because they're human beings, they understand incentive structures, they understand what's important to the world. They're gonna say, okay, we can't focus on user experience or scalability right now because the most important thing to work on is decentralization.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Whereas right now, the most important thing in crypto is perhaps not decentralization, because there are very decentralized assets in the space, but they're not usable to like people that might need to use them. Like, you know, most USDC is done on Tron or something. Like, Udi told me that the other day, and I was like, "Oh, God, Udi was trolling Tron like 2019." And he's using this as a reason that he was right, even though everything else fell apart, even Justin left. It's like, Udi's like, "I was right, look how much tethers on Tron, fuck's sake." But, like, so I think it does just decentralize over time. And as humans coordinate what's important, using, you know, the current flaws or the current

• 46:41Speaker 00

  weaknesses in the ecosystem, that's what Layer Zero builds for, which is why no one is trying to out-compete Ethereum on decentralization, because they're doing pretty well on decentralization, but they really struggle on like, how usable it is for retail people. And now there's a focus, especially for the last couple of years, from builders who know that that's really important. So you see all these Layer 2 teams now and doing really great work. But I do think the Layer Zero adjusts for what is important in the world. And I also believe if there is huge data attack, and all the existing blockchains were somehow

• 47:25Speaker 00

  erased from existence, the Layer Zero would collaborate to create a new decentralized way to transact with each other, because it would be the most important thing in the world to have. And so I think that was one of the thoughts I had while you were talking. The other one was that if, like personally, if I believe decentralization is important, which I do, I think the best way to onboard people onto that idea is not to just continually shout at them. I think it's like, if someone came to me with an idea that I didn't care about and just kept saying, "Yo, Jordan, this is the most important thing. Look at

• 48:08Speaker 00

  this, it's the most important thing." But all the evidence in the market, or in like what people were interested in talking about, and where the intellectual capital was being spent, was not that thing. I would just be like, "Oh, this, can you please stop? Can I try and focus?" And I think it's better to like-

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Acknowledge reality and keep these principles over time and have them as guiding principles, but not the most important thing. Like, you know, people are super interested in how to make money in crypto. What DeFi is. DeFi on Avalanche has tons and tons and tons of users and they're learning what DeFi is. They're learning how an AMM works. They're learning how, you know, like what Uniswap is, but they don't know it's called Uniswap because the code's been copied and pasted. But like they, they're being on boarded to those ideas and being comfortable with self custodying and being comfortable with trading between crypto assets.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  While sure Avalanche is maybe a bit of a smokescreen and is not maximally decentralized. And they made a nice new consensus algorithm, but then they didn't really use it because it had some problems or something. Like, like all that stuff, I get it, but the net impact on real people on boarded into the ecosystem and using decentralized finance or maybe decentralized only in name because the copies of actual decentralized finance. But that onboards people into an ecosystem and that helps them understand how these products work. And I think that can have also a net positive impact over time.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  The same way, you know, being guided by these principles or having these principles, but it not being the most important and only principle. And instead being more like neutral and reality Maximalism, I think is probably the superior way in onboarding people over time. So the idea that, you know, a decentralized world is better. I don't care. Like loads of people got into Bitcoin because of Silk Road. Like that's clearly not, well, I'm not going to do a podcast about how Silk Road was like the greatest invention in human history or anything. I was like, the drug market should be decentralized and use permissionless money.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  But it was very good for onboarding lots of people and showing them the value of a decentralized currency. So I, I just think that it's a similar goal approached for it in a different way and you onboard different people, right? Like if there was only Bankless, if there was only Up Only TV, people, different people watch different ones and they'd go like, you know, um, I don't like Up Only TV because he's always drunk and he don't take anything seriously and he like thinks everything is joke and he goes like early and now he got rich, so he don't care about his principles anymore. And like, more recently, I got people saying I'm a trust fund kid. Like, some fiction, like clearly he's got rich parents or something. Um, some people don't like that. Some people don't watch it because of those reasons and they maybe enjoy Bankless or maybe

• 51:17Speaker 00

  they enjoy, you know, some, something else. Um, we've got a much smaller audience than you, so that we're in the long tail. But, um, then a lot of people won't watch Bankless too because they'll be like, oh, it's a weird religious group where they've got Ethereum diamonds tattooed on their head. And like, so, uh, I, I just think it, it, it's, I think in general in crypto, the tribalism and stuff is so silly because isomorphically, all groups are 99% the same and inspired by the, uh, the same set of principles, whether they're on, whether they're Bitcoin maxies, Ethereum maxies, there's the red triangle fucking people on Twitter, whether they've got

• 51:55Speaker 00

  the Solana, oh, like, you know, all the, all the way down, mostly, those groups are virtually the same thing, but because they've got a different ticker for their investment, they're incredibly mean to each other and hostile on the internet. And it don't make any sense to me because it's like, if, it's like, it feels more like sports teams and like football than it does. Uh, like, in general, everyone really likes football as crypto, but because they like Manchester United instead of Man City, they're going to punch each other in a bar, where the bar is Twitter, it doesn't make so much sense to me that all these people just have the exact same interests, they have the same, um,

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Or similar ways of viewing the world, they reject fiat money in the same way. Like, sure, there's some nuance between the groups, but generally, you're much more similar to each other than the no coiners or people anti crypto or the anti NFT sort of people. So really, you're kind of on the same team. And instead, it just becomes this weird civil war over nothing, really.

• 53:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know David wants to jump in here and talk about this argument over decentralization over time. But I have one quick question. First of all, I hard agree that all of these other chains and everything else is net accretive for crypto in general. It's bringing more users, like another hard agree on that piece. But I guess my question to you is like, what about all of the profit maximalists who are just here to fake decentralization? Do that for a few years and then do the Justin Sun thing where I'm leaving Tron, I'm a, you know, bye bye project. Like, we've seen this happen every single cycle so many times where it's too easy to fire up some chain

• 53:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  or some white paper for that matter, but for a new chain in the cycle, to talk about decentralization, to copy and paste a whole bunch of projects and then to dump on retail and leave VCs in the lurch. That's why, from our perspective too, it's also a matter of like, yes, these narratives are working now, but are there actual fundamentals behind these narratives? And how is retail going to feel the next time this narrative, kind of this attention from your recent blog post? This attention on this thing evaporates. They're going to be left high and dry because we've seen it play out before. And I know you've seen it play out multiple times being in crypto for the last decade. What are your thoughts on that? The profit maximalism and like, who's going to push back against that stuff?

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that, again, the best way to push back against that stuff is to at least acknowledge the game everyone is playing, right? Like, if you tell those people who are going to fall for those things, who are going to fall for buying You know, some project which only real goal is to enrich the founders and early investors. And there's a lot of them now, you know, like we're late in the crypto historically boom bust type cycle. So people who have spent the last 18 months and haven't made the amount they want, start going shit. Well, all these VCs have got tons of money. So maybe I can raise, maybe I can build a project like I didn't make the 100 million I wanted to make. So there's another way which is

• 55:15Speaker 00

  just to steal it. So that always happens and that those, those projects generally launch late cycle. But those projects are normally not very successful over time. Like in general, I think the market is clued up to those things and figures it out. I think there's enough knowledge of the importance of decentralization and technological benefits that over a long enough time period, it washes out. Sure, some people will lose money along the way and they always do. But they also lose money on things that are like, like technically good ideas too, right? Like Zcash, like no one's going to say that the Zcash founders were to personally enrich themselves. But that chart is the worst chart I've ever seen. It is just, just a straight line down,

• 55:57Speaker 00

  especially when you chart it against Bitcoin or Ethereum, who themselves did not have the most remarkable year versus market average. It is terrible. But like the tech behind that was incredible, like incredibly useful. And old Zook, I like, I know he had the grocery tweet, like people mocked him, but I don't think the point of building Zcash was so that he could personally be rich. I genuinely think he believes that like shielded transactions and privacy is missing from a blockchain. So there are always going to be bad investments and retail are particularly bad at analyzing the fundamentals because they don't understand like the tech,

• 56:42Speaker 00

  like technological nuance. They're bad at analyzing charts because they don't understand complex, you know, financial primitives, nor do they understand tokenomics very well. You see people, you know, rushing into Cardano and Cardano being the biggest YouTuber, crypto YouTuber type coin. And it has like a low price and people are tricked because, oh, low price. What if Cardano goes from $1, $2, whatever it is today to A hundred dollars like Solana did this year, what if it does that and they don't take into account market caps and stuff? I think there's tons of education that is needed, but those projects that fake decentralization, they don't seem to last long over time.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Like the projects that have obsolete tech don't last long over time either. I don't think it remains a, like a, an enduring problem. I do think that if you're worried about people losing money, the biggest issue in crypto now is probably the regulators' lack of clarity for founders such that there is no reasonable way to do Ethereum's launch anymore. Because when Bitcoin was launched, right, you had this sort of immaculate conception moment, which can never be reproduced now because it was a thing that went to a mailing list of hobbyists

• 58:10Speaker 00

  who did not necessarily have a financial interest, they didn't know what was going to happen in the future. And as the information disseminated over time, people were able to see something and go, this is important to the world and they were rewarded for that. And people were able to put in some work in order to get coins in exchange. And then when Ethereum launched, it, obviously crypto was, it was 2014, the ICO won it. Though crypto had been through a couple of market cycles and people understood there was a lot of money to be made in crypto now. So offering to everybody in crypto on the same terms, the ability to buy, was probably fairer than launching a mining-only initiative on day one because

• 58:54Speaker 00

  like mining-only initiatives have the same structure as an ICO anyway, and funding a team is probably useful.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  And as we've transitioned from those days into ICOs, ICOs mimicked that Ethereum initial distribution and then the SEC started to enforce against ICOs. So projects would start to raise in private. And as they raise in private, now the only people that can buy a good idea on day one is like VCs, professional investors, insiders, people that are already rich, me and you, who have podcasts, who people listen to them. So maybe they should put them in the round, you know, like, and retail investors, they can only buy on market when, you know,

• 59:42Speaker 00

  people are already up 100x or so. And I think that dynamic is much more important to retail buying scams, because retail know they want to be early. And the only people who have the risk tolerance to do a fair sale to retail are the people who have the risk tolerance to do a, like a scam project that's enriching themselves. Like, if I sell to retail, they'll buy my shit, I'll be rich. Maybe they get rich at this project as well, but I don't care. Whereas the founders who have long-term visions for their projects are maybe going, shit, regulation is unfortunately something that we have to contend with. Maybe we should raise from professional investors until we get it right. And the, the dynamics that have been

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  introduced by that, I think, are more damaging to retail over time. At the top of a bubble now, like, we have lots of people who are already rich and they can do fair launch projects again, and they can accept that reg risk because they can kind of say fuck you to the regulators. They can move to, I don't know, wherever the new regab location is. But I think that, that is the biggest problem for retail losing money is the unfair terms of entry, of taking a risk. And you got, you got, you know, the parental guidance of the US tells you you're not allowed. And then because of that, the projects that are launched more fairly, launched from not

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  necessarily the best projects always, or they've taken a big risk to be able to launch in that way. But yeah, I think it's an interesting problem. Obviously, people losing money is bad.

• 1:01:22David Hoffman?

  There's a lot to unpack there. We

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  It's time to humble, sorry.

• 1:01:27David Hoffman?

  No, that was great, because that definitely leads me right into what I wanted to talk about. First, you were talking about just the users, right? And I just want to reiterate that users should just do whatever they want, and they can go and do all the things. This is not a question about what users are up to, but more what Ryan was saying, which is the actual designers of this system. And I totally agree with you that the regulations are getting in the way of creating fairly designed, fairly distributed projects. The concept of decentralization and regulation are oil and water. You can't have decentralization if you also have regulation. Regulation is kind of a centralizing force anyways, because then you start playing the game of who can navigate the regulatory waters better than others, and that requires expertise, and expertise is centralized.

• 1:02:13David Hoffman?

  And so, you talked about how Ethereum started off centralized and moved towards decentralization. And I think Ryan and I would say that, well, that's also because of a very important role of decentralization in the actual culture of Ethereum. Now, we have this very unfortunate reality where a lot of these newer L1s, the only way that they could have gotten started is by spreading out the capital towards VCs. And the other unfortunate thing is that in order to compete in the world of crypto, DeFi, smart contracts, is you have to be faster than Ethereum, because Ethereum's got a monopoly, almost a guy has a monopoly on decentralization. So like, your competitive edge is now throughput.

• 1:02:57David Hoffman?

  And throughput at the protocol layer, this is when some of these conversations start to get technical, throughput is centralization. And so, now you are compromising on decentralization in order to exist at all. And then, maybe we can decentralize later. But you have this unfortunate interaction behind how these fast chains need to be centralized in order to be fast, in order to compete with Ethereum. But also, in order to start up these systems, you have to sell to VCs, or to centralized parties, right? Because of regulation. And so, we have, especially with now, all of these chains are also proof Of stake, we have centralized capital allocation towards centralized parties running centralized nodes.

• 1:03:38David Hoffman?

  And yes, we have seen many, many things throughout crypto's history tilt towards decentralization. But I think it's, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that, well, this time we haven't seen that in this specific case. We have VCs with an outsized portion of proof of stake assets where, where the nodes themselves are also centralized. And it's, I, I find it, I find it hard to see a path of that actually becoming decentralized, especially with delegated proof of stake where so much inflation, because of how the centralized chains are operated by inflation, so much of this inflation stays in the hands of, of the people that already had the capital in the first place.

• 1:04:19David Hoffman?

  Uh, and so while historically throughout crypto, we have seen things tilt towards decentralization. The specific parameters, the combination of regulation, central, uh, high throughput chains and also VC owned token supply. That, those, those are three big, heavy marks towards being able to tilt towards decentralization. And we haven't, I don't think we've seen that before in the crypto space. So that is a chasm that I don't think, uh, we can just take on, on, on faith that that actually will be crossed by the dynamics of how these systems got started. And also like, um, it's very unfortunate that regulation create, created this. And it's definitely not the fault of the founders that regulation exists, but it kind of doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that like, uh, it's not the fault of the founders.

• 1:05:02David Hoffman?

  It, these systems got spun up in the way that they got spun up regardless. Any thoughts on that?

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think you can look at the, the staking design and say like, the mistakes were made. I think you can look at Ethereum's staking design and equally say mistakes were made. You know, we've had a beacon chain, uh, rollout without a ton of staking diversity, where the top stakeholders were all centralized exchanges that already have, um, you know, huge, important roles in the ecosystem have just been handed even more power. So. The beacon chain suddenly has like these sort of horsemen of like Binance and Kraken and stuff where like not only are the major like the the main onramps, but now they're responsible

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  for chain security as well. And you've seen the introduction of liquid staking as a response and get like huge, huge market share like very quickly. I think Lido is now the second

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  largest staker after Binance or Kraken or something. I need to do my disclaimers because I was It's Kraken. It's Kraken, yeah. I was a founding member of Lido, I worked on Lido for in like 2020 to 2021. Not financial advice. I don't want to go to jail. I don't work anymore, but the like people that work are all very handsome. But you've seen you've seen that happen with Ethereum. And you know, a lot of the choices Ethereum made so that solo stakers can participate and the chain stays healthy can also lend itself towards centralization over time. They made it like very scary to be a solo staker. You know, that Kane from Synthetix lost lots of

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  his Ethereum by setting up his shit wrong. So like, I, I, I think there are a lot of design decisions that are made in all chains that can lead to some centralization. I do think that the way current L1s are launched are completely suboptimal, like, and it would be much better if they were launched in the same way Ethereum was launched. And I think Ethereum being proof of work for some period of time after the sale also helps with, with distribution and decentralization before moving to proof of stake. But I think like, you know, node requirements for Solana. Over time, just become a non-issue, right?

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  Like, technology is ever-increasing. It's not like these are gonna, like, maybe they're a high barrier to running a node today. It's not gonna be a high barrier to running a node in 20 years. So, and you have to think about how old these things are as well, right? Like, Solana was 2018, 2019? I don't know when the first, uh, non-block, whatever the fuck they call a block, was mined, but, um, like, I don't know when the first proof of history was printed. That's like, sounds really pretentious. That's the main reason to not like Solana. Proof of history is a pretentious name. But, I don't know when that first happened. I think it was 2018, maybe 2019. But that means that two or three years into, um, existing, and two or three years into Ethereum

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  existing, it would, like, if the ICO was inception, it was 2014, and if it was, um, like, first block mined a bit later, but the, the DAO hack stole, was it like a third of supply or something? It was like a third of all Ethereum? I feel like if that happened today on Solana, or Avalanche, or, uh, whatever, it would be absolute scenes. It would be comedy. People would be, like, from the roof laughing at these centralized scammy, like, chains who've, like, totally fucked it up. LOL, one-third of all supply taken in a single hack. Ha ha, what are you gonna do? Roll back the chain? That's what the discourse would be like today. And everyone participating, it would be, it would be fun. I'd enjoy Twitter that day.

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  I'd have some good jokes, I'm sure. Um, and I think that shows that the attitude over time does lend towards decentralization. People do care about these things. Maybe it's just our, uh, sub-community, no matter, like, how you participate in it. Um, but in reality, that actually did happen to Ethereum, which has, uh, decentralized, like, decentralization as principles, and...

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  I just think if like, I don't think the coverage of a similar event today would be as fair. And I definitely don't think anyone would expect a chain to be able to go from strength to strength after that. I should also disclose that like when that happened, I did do those same tweets and I was like Ethereum cash is the future. Ethereum classic, Ethereum classic. I was like, it was me and Barry Silber were like that clearly Ethereum classic is the decentralized Ethereum. So like, uh, I applying decentralization above all else as the primary principle, um, it like failed in that specific case because the primary principle was people create value and Vitalik and people around Vitalik,

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  create value, naming, name provenance is important. Um, all those kinds of things were more important than decentralization in valuing Ethereum versus Ethereum classic, despite my political and personal bias towards Ethereum classic. Um, that was just wrong as the investment thesis and as like historically wrong, like Ethereum classics is zero right now, despite Barry still trying to pump it.

• 1:10:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm actually curious to talk about that. So I think we talked about a lot of like decentralization versus centralization, your thoughts on that. But you, you mentioned Ethereum classic as being sort of a, you know, a loss. And I'm curious to tap into kind of your brain over the last 10 years and some of the things that you've gotten wrong over the last 10 years that you can help us with because I feel like what happens is we're all humans and we all make the same mistakes every cycle. So you meet someone new in crypto, like class of 2020, class of 2021, you're like, oh, I know exactly what mistakes you are about to make, right? And so maybe people listening, Koby, can avoid those mistakes by hearing from some of yours. And then also would love

• 1:11:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  to hear about some of your biggest wins. So some of the things that you've been really right about. But first let's talk about those, those losses.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I've made every possible mistake you can make in crypto virtually, like. All of them, as new ones are invented, it means they're probably invented by me. Um, like I've done virtually everything wrong. Often in crypto, you do something for like, you do something wrong and you get rewarded for it. So I've had those as well. I think my biggest wins and my biggest losses were all by making mistakes. Um, because my biggest portfolio wins were making like throwing risk management completely out of the window. And, uh, like doing something that now I would no longer do because I didn't understand properly then. I didn't, you know, uh, I didn't know what I was doing or what was important.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  My first two trades ever after buying Bitcoin, my first like investments in other things were my biggest like portfolio multipliers ever. I did like, like 200, 300 X in my first few months in crypto by buying some altcoins that were just like completely trash, but at the time I didn't know why they were trash. Like I bought something called Quarkcoin, which was promoted by a YouTuber called Bill Still, who's like 150 years old. And he's like a doomer, like, like finance guy. He promoted Quarkcoin and it had like seven different hashing algorithms. And I was brand new and I was like, seven seems like a lot, so let's go all in that. That seems like seven times better than Bitcoin.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  Um, and like, because loads of people saw this Bill Still thing. And then other people started going, oh, Bill Still might be on to something. Uh, it went, um, parabolic and during the like time it went parabolic, I researched like, okay, why would you need seven hashing algorithms? And it turns out you don't, like, it turns out that's not a useful thing. And it was just like a, like a small story someone had told, an experiment someone had done. Um, so I sold it and I managed to sell like virtually at the top. And then I did the same thing again on like some, something else. Um, and all of a sudden I'd like lucked my way into massive portfolio multiples and could take the game a little bit more seriously.

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  Cause I'd gone from having like zero money and being in debt to, um, having like something substantial. Um, but I also did that on stuff where the opposite happened and you know, I like lost like a third of my portfolio in a single trade. And honestly, over time,

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  You can just look back and at everything. It was like, oh, that was a really good moment for me. That was a really good moment for me of these like small compounding wins. But the main thing that I would attribute to, like attribute to at least my investment style was like, trade things and return to value, where originally I thought the only value was Bitcoin, right? I was played altcoins from as soon as I got into crypto, but I, my long-term thesis was Bitcoin is the only real value in this space so far. And I'll trade attention or narrative or whatever. I'll participate in the waves in order to get more Bitcoins. I need to get as much Bitcoin as I can before everyone else figures out that Bitcoin is really valuable.

• 1:14:48Speaker 00

  People don't know right now. I know I need to get as much as I can and I don't have any money, so I can't just like buy it. I'll, I'll trade my way there. And then over time that evolved and I learned about Ethereum and I thought, okay, maybe Ethereum now has crossed this chasm into being value too. And I think maybe there's a handful of five, 10 things that fit that sort of description today of like value that you should try and own before everyone figures that, figures out how valuable it is.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  And by taking this sort of approach of

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  like everything else is actually worth zero. As much as you can trick yourself in real time or FOMO or whatever, if you have this at the back of your head, this is all worth zero apart from these value assets, you're basically flipping

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  penny stocks in order to like buy more Apple or Amazon or whatever. Then you're happy to take a 5X in something else and move on. You never go, oh, I got this like really great trade where I held it for a billion percent because you don't subject yourself to those things. You go, I made a profit, I get more value. I make a profit, I get more value systemically over time. And this also helps me like avoid the massive Ls as well, because I took, you take a sort of Horcrux approach to investing where you split your soul into like

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  A million different pieces across everywhere because you know the only thing you have to do is like, like retain this value. So you can't lose all of your Bitcoin in a hack. You can't lose all your Ethereum in, you know, like some smart contract.

• 1:16:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that what you still do? By the way, Kopey, do you still like denominate in Bitcoin?

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  I denominate in Ethereum, Ethereum from 2020 onwards, basically.

• 1:16:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you still denominate in Ethereum, then you still denominate in ETH, all your, all your wins?

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, because like the way I think about it, right? It's like, you've got to consider, what do you think is the most liquid asset? That you could hold your entire net worth in. So in 2020, like May 2020, you go, okay. If you think crypto is going to get really hot now because the inflation narrative is becoming mainstream. That was one of the early things that I understood, like, you know, they're printing money and Bitcoin should therefore appreciate over time because the denominator gets, is worth less and less over time.

• 1:17:16Speaker 00

  If you think there's going to be a bull run, you should denominate in that asset that you think is liquid enough for your entire net worth. But that will perform the best. So I thought in 2020, Ethereum will outperform Bitcoin. So I should put my entire net worth into Ethereum. Because I think that will perform the, the best, but it's more liquid enough for me to enter, to enter and exit in a moment if I need to. And then I should spend the bull market trying to outperform Ethereum because I should be only deploying when I think something is going to perform better than Ethereum. And I can't put my entire net worth into other things I think are going to perform better than Ethereum because when the time comes to sell,

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  I might slip the entire chart to zero by trying to sell. So you, so you then position based on, like what you think liquidity requirements are and stuff. So like I was, not as early as everyone else. I didn't buy any of the seed rounds or anything, but I was early-ish to the all L1 trades. But I miscalculated how liquid they become. I didn't realize that, you know, Sam was going to go full, like Solana Jesus. And I didn't realize that three arrows were going to become, you know, the, you know, the, the legion of avalanche factions. So I, I didn't know that they would be so liquid.

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  So maybe it was a mistake. Maybe in December 2020, you could have said, actually, you put full net worth in Solana now because it's going to perform better than Ethereum, and it will be liquid enough to exit. I actually don't know if it would have been. I didn't check. Don't like to look at my mistakes. But yeah, I denominate it Ethereum because I call Ethereum effectively the like market average, like the market performance. That's the thing that you should be trying to outpace if you do this full time as an investor or trader. Because if you spent like the last 18 months actively trading and investing, and you could have just held Ethereum, then it's like, you just wasted. It could have been

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  outside having like a nice time with the sun, which I haven't seen in a long time.

• 1:19:21David Hoffman?

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• 1:20:06David Hoffman?

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• 1:20:50David Hoffman?

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• 1:21:34David Hoffman?

  Download Brave at brave.com/banklist and click the Wallet icon to get started. Kobe, you have so many, like, your history in crypto is so rich. And when we ask you questions, you pull in things from so many distant corners of crypto in order to elaborate upon why you think the things that you think. And something that has, I've coined in my own brain is this term I've been using: crypto brain. You have like crypto brain. Just too much crypto going in the brain. You wake up, check the prices. You check Twitter. Like, you learn about, you read a white paper. Too much crypto. And like, you've been in here for almost a decade now.

• 1:22:16David Hoffman?

  I'm in my fourth year and my second bull market. And oh my God, is this bull market just like kind of draining? Exhausting. It's so exhausting. How have you dealt with crypto brain? Because like crypto brain is like, it's like I have like toxic levels of crypto in my brain. Like, I think about it like 16 hours a day. All my friends are in crypto. My entertainment is crypto Twitter. When I'm done with that, I go up and pull up crypto YouTube. How have you dealt with like crypto brain? How have you managed the like depressive toxicity levels of crypto in your brain?

• 1:22:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I got several answers for this, but my first observation is, in a way, what you're describing is not a crypto phenomenon. In fact, everyone in the world is currently experiencing the same thing, but with their hobby of choice, and some people have chosen crypto, some people have chosen GameStop, some people have chosen video games, some people have chosen anti-NFT parading, some people have chosen coronavirus vaccine, like, opinion groups or whatever. And I think it is a result of the world coming increasingly digital and online communities, like, formation,

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  like, how that's changed over time, plus the pandemic and people being inside quite a lot, and loads of stuff that people do to socialize, being closed for a year or so. So I'm hoping it actually goes away a little bit, as, and if, the world goes back to being a bit more normal.

• 1:23:52Speaker 00

  But for me, I tried for as long as possible to have crypto as a hobby and only a hobby. So I always tried to have another job, even if I didn't need a job. I had, like, an investment portfolio and then I, like, was working on building something. And I tried to make sure that something was never in crypto, despite, you know, always getting job offers or having, like, stuff I wanted to build in crypto. It was, it felt better to me to have my entire net worth and attention and, like, spare time in crypto, and then this hedge of real world,

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  where if this weird drug money stuff that I got involved in a while ago went to zero, I would at least have a normal career and other interests and be, like, able to do other stuff. I think it really helped, and, like, having a routine and having people, friends with, like, normal hobbies that were not related to, like...

• 1:24:55Speaker 00

  Self custoding internet tokens in a massive online casino. It was, that was very healthy. I gave all that up, so now I don't have any of that anymore.

• 1:25:06Speaker 00

  And, yeah, I mean, I think you've just got to be disciplined, like all things. The people that do best in crypto have like massive self discipline anyway. And for me, I'm just like disciplined about spending time with family now and going to the gym and like, like playing video games and enjoying myself and stuff. Because I think that it makes me do better at the crypto stuff anyway, if I'm not like way too deep and in a, in a massive hole. Especially now that, like, especially crypto Twitter curates you the winners. Like, your feed every day is the people that, like, won for the day or the person who's Bored Ape got stolen. That's all crypto Twitter is.

• 1:25:49Speaker 00

  There's loads of people who, like, just hit them, like, out of the park, 10,000 X in a day. And they're like, screenshot, here's my games for the last six hours. And you're like, well, I'm doing terribly. And then there's like a dude who gave his seed phrase over because someone offered to buy it for double as long as they gave the seed phrase. Like, that's all crypto Twitter is. So if you spend too much time on there, I think that you just, your mental gets a bit messed up. You focus on, like, people having the worst possible time and people having the best possible time instead of just like, what do I need to do today? I do, I do think there is one thing that, like, crypto has really fucked up in my head, which is like, a, a lot of my friends now, people I talk to and people who have been

• 1:26:32Speaker 00

  doing crypto for 10 years or, you know, are all like now like deck of billionaires, right? So like, Suzu messages me sometimes to get my opinion on the market and I'm like, I don't know what his net worth is, but I'd estimate it's like 20 to 50 billion or something. Maybe I'm massively overestimating. People always do that to me. And then there's like, you know, these exchange owners and like, I'm in these like group chats of like OGs who in the bear market would just sit and cope with each other and be like, are we dead? Like, did we believe in the wrong thing? And now they're all just... So rich that in my head it fucked up the like what a lot of money is or like what the

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  value of money is. And I think that's the like weird most toxic thing. And even crypto Twitter does this, right? Where you follow these people who are all buying these like million dollar watches and like insane houses and stuff. And I live like a much more normal life, I think, to those people. I did well in crypto. I didn't do as well, Suzu or Sam or the Alameda guys. But I don't buy like silly watches and stuff. And like, I find myself sometimes being completely disconnected from what a lot of money is. And like, that's the thing I try the most to like, reset often, because having been in the markets for 10 years and doing all right puts you in a massive place of great privilege. But all of my friends

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  and family did not listen to me. They thought I was weird and that this thing was like I was getting scammed in a MLM scheme or something. So the people around me in real world have really normal lives and normal socials and they know what a lot of money is. And you know, they have like money problems and stuff. And then my friends on my phone are all like deck billionaires wondering, you know, if they're gonna need to build their own, I don't know, waterfall or forest so they can have clean air and water or something at some point. So like, I think those two things like really like difficult to reconcile. I don't want to become like a weird person. No offense to Sue, I don't think he's a bit weird, but whatever.

• 1:28:44David Hoffman?

  Does wealth weigh on you? Or, yeah, does wealth weigh on you?

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  I don't think so. I mean, in some ways, I think that it highlights how much of a scam everything is. Like, I knew it was before having any money. I did all right in crypto. People always massively overestimate my net worth. I only I get two things, like huge, massive, ridiculous overestimations and then like, like just some slight overestimations. It's like, no one ever underestimates it. But I, I did all right. And, you know, I'm very comfortable now. But

• 1:29:29Speaker 00

  Before I had money, I thought everything was a scam and it was all rigged and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now having money and being able to help my family out, for example, and seeing my parents' personalities change because they don't have to worry about certain things anymore, like making ends meet, or like what's gonna happen when they retire, or, you know, these kind of things. Seeing their personalities change and getting to know them more as people because some number changed on a screen makes me, A, like, everything seems like a giant scam, but B, feel like I was also slightly robbed of experiencing

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  that while I was growing up or while I was younger because they had these burdens and had to worry about them. So it doesn't weigh on me so much, but I do think a lot about about that. Like, it feels like everything is a bit of a scam for some, like, weird numbers on a screen and it means that people, like, live their lives in ways where they don't get to properly know the people around them because everyone's always worried about short-term stuff. But I don't know. It's a good question, though.

• 1:30:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let me ask you, though, Koby, so like, where do you, where do you find your purpose after you, like, reach that point?

• 1:30:45Speaker 00

  God, we're going deep, aren't we?

• 1:30:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right?

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  My purpose at the moment is to get to Diamond in League of Legends. It's been my main purpose for eight years and I'm still in Silver.

• 1:30:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, but seriously, so like, I, I see lots of people and, you know, once you get past that post-sarcity mindset, right? And like, it just, it just becomes, one of the first Bankless episodes we did, we were trying to talk about money, like, what actually is money? And I remember David said something in that episode, and I don't know whether, David, you got it from your brain or you just, like, you know, saw that somewhere, but it's like, basically, money is just a point system. It's, we're, it's high score, man. We're all competing for high score. And that's eventually what kind of the deck of billionaires get to. It's just like this big competition for high score. And so you see someone like SBF who's like, oh, once I reach my high score, whatever that number is, I'm just

• 1:31:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  giving it all away, right? It's like, Like, maybe that's become SBF's purpose in life. But it strikes me that that's, that's a hard thing for a lot of crypto people to, to figure out. Once you get to the post scarcity point, like, what do you do? Like, what's the purpose? It's no longer, you got enough points. You really want to compete with the Suzu on, on, on the scorecard? Or what do you do with life?

• 1:32:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I, I think it certainly is a point system at the, the high end. I think on the, the low end, it's not a point system at all. It's like whether people can, uh, like, live in a comfortable and secure place and like whether they can eat and stuff. But, um, I, like, fortunately for me, I've always, I find it very easy to be interested in stuff. Like, I find it easy to, um, like, be curious and then explore things and, um, have fun, uh, reading about and doing different stuff. So I kind of got into crypto in the first place. So, um, I don't struggle too much, uh, with, with that. Like, I, um, there's tons of stuff that I, I find really interesting. I'd like to explore.

• 1:32:44Speaker 00

  There's tons of things where, um, I want to build things or I like to, uh, know the people building those things. And, uh, like, talk to them about their challenges and stuff.

• 1:32:58Speaker 00

  And I think there's loads of stuff in the world that is, like, at the end of the day, while many of the crypto OGs that had the sort of, um, origin story that I described of like, oh, wow, the, um, the system's a scam and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:33:17Speaker 00

  They invested in Bitcoin for these reasons. And then like, yeah, they got rich, but like, the system didn't really change. So I think a lot of those people still have the same motives and they're figuring out how to apply them in different ways. And, uh, and how to, you know, um, at least network and stay friends with the people that all have the, um, have those motives. I, like, a lot of my Twitter account and up only podcast stuff, it's not like.

• 1:33:50Speaker 00

  Like, obviously, like, it's just a bunch of thoughts and like, it's not very sophisticated or well put together. Like, you know, you do research and stuff and you're like real podcast people. Me and Ledger don't know who the guest is gonna be half the time. Like, we just turn up and like, what we're doing, oh god, do you know who this person is? No, you? That's like, kind of what ours is like. But the purpose behind doing it is to have, hopefully, an engaging and honest way for people to keep up with what they're interested in. And I write stuff on the Substack because, um, hopefully, it's interesting to other people who have similar interest to me and wanna go through a similar, you know, um, sort of set of experiences and it might make it easier.

• 1:34:32Speaker 00

  Um, and, um, the stuff I'm funding, not in the crypto world, stuff I'm like trying to find founders that are building or, um, uh, put teams together to like incubate ideas, they all have a similar kind of mission. Um, but from a different perspective, like, I'm very well exposed to crypto now and I, I hope that, um, crypto can continue to do, uh, good in the world. Um, but I also think that there needs to be, um, a bunch of like well-funded capital and intellectual capital spent on non-crypto, uh, things that are solving the same problems.

• 1:35:13Speaker 00

  Um, and I think over the last few years with how Western governments have handled the pandemic and exploited, um, the inability for people to know what's real anymore, especially on the internet, um, in order to sort of plunder, um, the, uh, current generation for like private, um, private wealth of like the mates, um, stuff like that is like, I, I'm not convinced that if it was on a blockchain, it wouldn't have happened. I think we'd be able to point to the transaction and they'd still go, I don't care. Yeah, so what? Sorry, we won't do it again.

• 1:35:58Speaker 00

  Um, so I spend a, a ton of my, um, my time now, uh, doing stuff not in crypto. I spend like three days a week on crypto these days. Um, I spend a lot of time in real world, uh, other things, um, doing other stuff mostly.

• 1:36:18David Hoffman?

  Ryan is gonna pull up this alignment chart, Koby, which I think you'll be familiar with. This is out of Dungeons and Dragons. And so people will, people might be familiar with this. There's a, it's a three by three grid. And on, from left to right, it goes lawful, neutral to chaotic. And then from top to bottom, it goes good, neutral to evil. So nine possible outcomes, like lawful, good, chaotic, neutral, neutral, evil, et cetera, et cetera. So if you're listening on the podcast, you can check this out on the YouTube, but it's pretty self-explanatory. You can just Google it. Koby, which are you?

• 1:36:51Speaker 00

  I don't think anyone's gonna accept I'm anywhere in the, the left or the middle. So we're instantly in the right. We're in the chaotic column. I would like to say chaotic good, but I will concede likely chaotic neutral. I, there's a guy that I, my old boss at my old job, who I really respect. He's had a really, um, uh, like successful, um, career in, in tech. Was, uh, built some of the most important tech companies that currently exist at like really pivotal moments in, in the, um, sort of history.

• 1:37:33Speaker 00

  Once he told me I was chaotic good and I was like, that's just, I feel chaotic good now. And I feel on reflection, I'm actually probably chaotic neutral, but you got the chaotic part, right? I just liked it when I was chaotic good. So like chaotic neutral, aspiring to be chaotic good. But then there's like the other shoulder, sometimes like just do the evil thing. I'm like, yeah, go on then.

• 1:37:52David Hoffman?

  What about your podcast co-host Ledger? Where's Ledger?

• 1:37:56Speaker 00

  Oh, he's lawful good, isn't he?

• 1:37:58David Hoffman?

  Ledger's lawful good?

• 1:37:59Speaker 00

  Good. Yeah, come on, he can't be anywhere else.

• 1:38:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Koby, isn't it true you've never met Ledger in person?

• 1:38:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're never gonna meet.

• 1:38:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  You do it a podcast without meeting your co-host in person? Wow, that's amazing.

• 1:38:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's crazy. Who does that?

• 1:38:12Speaker 00

  When, have you met, have you two met?

• 1:38:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've never met. We live in the same country, so there's absolutely no excuse.

• 1:38:19Speaker 00

  How far away in the same country?

• 1:38:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Different coasts. Yeah, it's not like David's next city over, but yeah, different coast. But like, we started it in COVID and then, you know, we just, I don't know. If you met Ledger, would it destroy the podcast? That's what I'm worried about David.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  We just agreed that would be the end. It'd be weird. I don't know how tall he is. I like to imagine he's like eight feet tall. He's like a Teletubby. So if he's like shorter than me, I think it'd be really weird. But yeah, again, we started COVID as well. So it was like, and we didn't really mean for it to be a podcast, actually. Do you know Bitlord? The Australian guy who's like got deplatformed when he was, he was in China when COVID started happening. And then he posted this weird video of him like smoking in a hospital after catching COVID in like January or February of 2020 before COVID was like a thing. And then he just disappeared from Twitter. Like that was it. He was gone. And for like a year or so, he was gone. It was like super strange.

• 1:39:17Speaker 00

  He was in China doing these real weird videos on COVID. I think most of them were satire or like satirical commentaries on, I have no idea. It was extremely internet, like deep internet content. And they disappeared for a year and then he DM'd me a year later, like I'm back. And I was like, we've got to do a stream to say like what you, what has been happening to you. And no one knows where you went.

• 1:39:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God.

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  And then I couldn't make the stream work because I'd never done it before. So Ledger was like, I'll host it for you. And we hosted it and loads of people watched it. And he was like, do you want to do this again? And we were like, yeah, all right, cool. Sure, fine. I've got nothing else to do. I'm locked in my house. That's kind of how it happened.

• 1:39:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, so I think we might, you know, I'm not done with this grid though. Like, but you know, I don't know. We might have to cut this next part of the show out. We'll see, we'll see how it goes, David. But should we, should we name some other crypto personalities?

• 1:40:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

• 1:40:11Speaker 00

  What do you reckon?

• 1:40:15Speaker 00

  Barry Silbert?

• 1:40:17David Hoffman?

  I don't know Barry Silver all that well. Uh, lawful, I think in the lawful camp.

• 1:40:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Definitely lawful, definitely lawful. I'm, I'm, I'm tending towards the bottom left, uh, square there. Rectangle.

• 1:40:29David Hoffman?

  Oof, like all his products are, all of his products are neutral, but I think when you combine them all together, it's too, it's too big. It's too much of a oral, oral Baron type guy figure. Could be lawful evil.

• 1:40:41Speaker 00

  Look, he bought, he bought $80 million of Zcash with other people's money. He goes in lawful evil.

• 1:40:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not even a question for Kobe.

• 1:40:51Speaker 00

  I think he's probably neutral or good, but he gets into evil just for that one alone.

• 1:40:55David Hoffman?

  Okay, uh, what do you think about Three Arrows Capital as an entity? Where, where does Three Arrows Capital fall?

• 1:41:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, you gotta do people, not entities.

• 1:41:02David Hoffman?

  Why not?

• 1:41:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does it work for entities?

• 1:41:03David Hoffman?

  You can do entities, sure.

• 1:41:05Speaker 00

  I reckon true neutral.

• 1:41:07David Hoffman?

  True neutral?

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think true neutral. I think, um, I think they don't have,

• 1:41:16Speaker 00

  I think they watch how the world works and try and act on that. And they don't necessarily try and dictate the future as much as people think they do. Um, I think probably true neutral. I think you'll have a lot, a bunch of people watching and saying like, they're definitely in the evil category.

• 1:41:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, uh, How about, how about Vitalik? Vitalik Buterin?

• 1:41:40Speaker 00

  Neutral good?

• 1:41:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Interesting.

• 1:41:44David Hoffman?

  How about, um, Anthony Sazano?

• 1:41:48Speaker 00

  Uh, I don't know enough about Sazano. I don't know where you would put him on the lawful chaotic stuff, cause I don't know enough about him. But he like makes like really, really, really, he like works really, really hard on his content and like no one watches it. So he's like, I think, I think.

• 1:42:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, he's gonna feel bad.

• 1:42:07Speaker 00

  But I'm like, I mean, he can see it. He can look at his view count like it's not, it's not a secret that no one watches it, but he does it anyway. So I think, I think that means he's like securely in good because like he has principles and he wants to share about the things that are really interesting to him. Um, I don't think he's chaotic, so I would go lawful or neutral, but I don't know him enough. And I didn't mean to diss his, he's got very good content, just people don't, I think it's because of how he looks, they don't like it.

• 1:42:36Speaker 00

  I'm joking, I'm joking. It's the flat cap. People don't like flat caps. They don't. People don't trust people with flat caps on.

• 1:42:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who's another one?

• 1:42:45David Hoffman?

  What do you think about Kyle Samani?

• 1:42:56Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:42:59David Hoffman?

  This is fun.

• 1:43:01Speaker 00

  Neutral evil?

• 1:43:04David Hoffman?

  Neutral evil? Why evil?

• 1:43:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  We don't have to answer that.

• 1:43:10Speaker 00

  Neutral evil or also true neutral, maybe?

• 1:43:15Speaker 00

  Maybe lawful evil?

• 1:43:17David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 1:43:17Speaker 00

  Or no, lawful neutral.

• 1:43:20David Hoffman?

  lawful neutral?

• 1:43:20Speaker 00

  lawful neutral, yeah, because like evil is like doing stuff against other people intentionally, right? Like, it's like, uh, going out of your way to harm others and like, there's no chance he's doing that. Um, neutral is like just for self benefit, right? It's just to like, uh, like, don't care if it's good for other people, don't care if it's bad for other people, mostly just interested in self. Um, and good is like trying to do things for the benefit of others. So I don't think you can get a VC and put them in the good category at the top because, um,

• 1:43:58Speaker 00

  uh, uh, best, I think you can probably get neutral and multi coin, very lawful, they've gone, they've bought all the seed rounds very fairly. Um, sold them very fairly, I imagine. Um, so, although they're in crypto, so shit. Maybe you can't be lawful if you're in crypto. This is too hard. Let's just stay with neutral evil.

• 1:44:21David Hoffman?

  How about, um, Michael Saylor?

• 1:44:25Speaker 00

  Uh, Saylor. Um, I think Bitcoin people that watch that will argue that he goes into good as well. Um, but I would say probably lawful neutral. Um.

• 1:44:41Speaker 00

  So convicted criminal though, isn't he? Is he a convicted criminal?

• 1:44:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, no idea. I don't know about that history.

• 1:44:48David Hoffman?

  That would be new to me.

• 1:44:50Speaker 00

  I think he got done by the SEC for in, in the, in the, in year 2000. But I don't think he's a convicted criminal. I think that's too strong language. But I think he got in trouble for some security stuff in the dot com bubble.

• 1:45:06Speaker 00

  So I don't know. I don't know. Honestly, I, I think what he's trying to do now is motivated from a place of good. So I will probably say lawful or neutral good.

• 1:45:22Speaker 00

  Probably for Sailor. I think Sailor is really, really interesting in that no matter what happens. He is like, it's a great story, right? Like I was thinking about this the other day. I watched back his clip on, you know, you know, mortgage your house, take all your assets, sell them, put it in Bitcoin, like lend against all your stuff, put it in Bitcoin. And like since he did that speech, I think Bitcoin price is basically the same. And on a long enough time horizon over, over time, which is I think what he's intending to say. I think he's probably right about that. But imagine if he'd done that speech about like Solana.

• 1:46:05Speaker 00

  It's like Solana was like $1. Now it's $200. He'd be like an icon. He would be the, it would be the most cool fucking thing on the internet. But this dude just was like, put everything in, go all in now. So I, no matter what happens, if Bitcoin goes to zero, what an amazing story. He like raised multiple billions to like just mark it by. And if it goes like where I think we all believe it should be going over the next sort of 10, 20 years, again, what a legend. He's just borrowed the cheapest debt in like sort of history to buy something that's actually worth more than the paper he paid for it. So either way, I think it's like.

• 1:46:48Speaker 00

  Just what a legend. And did you see the picture he posted the other day when he used to work at McDonald's?

• 1:46:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I did.

• 1:46:55Speaker 00

  It was fucking amazing.

• 1:46:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Wait, what did it say on it? It said something on the picture like...

• 1:47:00Speaker 00

  Doing everything, doing everything it takes or something like that?

• 1:47:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, everything it takes, something like that.

• 1:47:05David Hoffman?

  Since 92.

• 1:47:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  It reminded me of those McDonald's memes, though. Like, I'm getting my McJob back because I, you know, failed in crypto.

• 1:47:13Speaker 00

  But I mean, I like that he's able to post that because I think it means he can,

• 1:47:19Speaker 00

  he appreciates, I think, some of the like self-referential humor in crypto more than I thought he might have done. He's an interesting character because if you talk about him in a nuanced way, like what he's doing is like totally insane, like insanely cool, but it's like, that is pretty out there. But there's obviously the people that watch your podcast but for Bitcoin, Peter's podcast, they get like upset if you say nuanced stuff about him. So I find it difficult to talk about

• 1:47:52Speaker 00

  my feelings on Sailor properly because of that. But like, no matter what, like what a fucking legend. And especially at the start of the year when he was like hosting these big talks for other CFOs to like trying to expose them to the

• 1:48:09Speaker 00

  the light that he has seen.

• 1:48:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's a legend.

• 1:48:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, two more and then we'll wrap this up. Charles Hoskinson.

• 1:48:22Speaker 00

  You know,

• 1:48:25Speaker 00

  for this, you have to question whether

• 1:48:32Speaker 00

  like what his intentions are, I think. And that's always really, really difficult to know.

• 1:48:39Speaker 00

  I think what I like about Charles is this sort of weird lack of self-awareness. When he has these interactions in public that are just objectively hilarious, but he doesn't seem to see that. Like, you know, remember the MetaMask thing is really obvious now?

• 1:48:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:53Speaker 00

  Um, where he said, like, you're asking me to the founder of, uh, the CEO of I H K. The founder of Ethereum and Card Energy's support email.

• 1:49:04Speaker 00

  But like, he's talking to like a support person at the time. Like, it's not like the CEO of MetaMask was saying, please do this. It was like a support person was referring you to the correct support person. Like, I think there are a lot of things like that where there's a lack of self-awareness. That makes it objectively funny and that makes it, um, you know, possible to meme about. I think what he believes he is doing is for the good of the world, right? I think he believes what he's doing is to make the world a better place. He's just taking a different road to get there that takes a longer time to get there than everyone else. Um, and maybe in doing that, ignoring wisdom from history about how to build things that interact with real people quickly.

• 1:49:49Speaker 00

  And, um, you know, efficiently.

• 1:49:53Speaker 00

  But I don't think it would be unreasonable for people to take the opposite opinion and say, actually, he's promoting something in a dishonest way. And he's selling it as something that it's not. And potentially, um, risking, uh, both portfolios and opportunity cost of his YouTube subscribers by doing that.

• 1:50:19Speaker 00

  I think I'd lean towards the good. I like to naturally try and see the good in people. So I think I'd like to pretend or make myself believe that he's doing it to be good. So I'll say he's neutral good, but he might be true neutral. Don't think he's chaotic. Don't think he's lawful.

• 1:50:38David Hoffman?

  Fair enough.

• 1:50:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a very charitable take.

• 1:50:41Speaker 00

  What do you, what do you say?

• 1:50:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm a little bit towards the bottom.

• 1:50:48David Hoffman?

  Actually, all the way into the evil camp?

• 1:50:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, like neutral. I totally agree with that.

• 1:50:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't think he's evil.

• 1:50:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:54David Hoffman?

  I haven't, I haven't seen him do any evil stuff.

• 1:50:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Flirts with it, you know?

• 1:50:58Speaker 00

  You know, my favorite Charles moment was when, um, someone, he posted a video because, um, very sad. The coffee shop he went to had like a, um, gun attack there or something and some people died and he used to go to that coffee shop all the time. And he posted, um, a video on the thoughts of it. And it was titled something that made it sound like it was about Cardano. And the first reply was like this guy being like, not gonna watch. I guess it's gonna be more delays or something like that. And he just went off of this guy. He like unleashed.

• 1:51:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like Steve Jobs style.

• 1:51:32Speaker 00

  Brewing. Yeah, you know, it'd been brewing inside him, like getting like these jabs on the internet from all these people over the years, making jokes about Cardano. And he was like, I'm just gonna let it all out on this one guy. And I was like, wow, I really like Charles now. Like he's just let go. And that's what I want from Charles. I want to see the authenticity. I want to see him go like, shut the fuck up. I'm trying to build something in the way I want to build it. And I think this is the best way to build it and you're all fucking chirping while you don't build fucking anything. That's what I want him to say, but he doesn't say that. And because it just, because it's like veiled and, uh, instead just talks about how great things are going.

• 1:52:11Speaker 00

  Um, I, that's where I, I struggle more to, um, believe it's, uh, authentic. Cause if I were him, I'd be like, yeah, we have missed the year of the alternative L1. Like all these platforms have had huge booms and it was a failure of ours to not be ready. Um, at the same time they were ready, um, and not to onboard millions of users during a year where millions of users are onboarded into crypto.

• 1:52:42Speaker 00

  Um, like our product wasn't working, um, and we had a head start on all these other L1s. Um, but here's why it's that way and here's how we're gonna make it in the future. But instead it's just like, you think DeFi is hard? DeFi is fucking easy, dude.

• 1:52:57Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:52:58David Hoffman?

  All right.

• 1:52:59Speaker 00

  I like to believe these people have good intentions.

• 1:53:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I agree. I agree. I do think that humans are inherently good. So it's actually difficult to find yourself at the very bottom. All right, all right, last one. Bankless. Where's Bankless?

• 1:53:12Speaker 00

  Um, probably lawful good, like, like goody-two-shoes kind of thing.

• 1:53:22David Hoffman?

  Teacher's pet?

• 1:53:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, teacher's pet, exactly. Yeah. Cause like, I think what Bitcoin did, right, is probably neutral, good, lawful, good. And then Bankless is like lawful, good, you know, going with the like, big chain that everyone's allowed to use, like not the spicy ones that where people can, you know, where there's a bit of nuance in whether you can make money there. But um, I think that that's probably where it lies. I think openly probably chaotic on the right again, don't know where chaotic neutral probably, we just get drunk.

• 1:54:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Kobe, this entire podcast has been a lot of fun, but we're also recording it at a time where the crypto market is not having much fun, right? It's like, people are looking at their portfolios and I don't know how far prices are down at this point in time. But, you know, Jerome Powell said some things, he sneezed and it looks like crypto is headed towards a bearish start to 2022. Do you think it ends there? Are you like up only? What do you think for the year? Like just zooming out and being like, okay, 2021 was fantastic for crypto. What do you think 2022 has in store for us? Is it overall going to be bullish or bearish?

• 1:54:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at Ethereum's chart, it looks super weird because of the last 10 weeks have been the worst price action for like three or four years, just like a slow grind downwards where like everything was just sold into every time it looked good, it just got sold into. Which is pretty interesting because even though you've had big dumps, you had the May dump and stuff, it didn't look as bad as this. It was just like a correction after a parabolic move, whereas this walked its way up and then walked its way down and at no point really started accelerating. So that looks pretty bad. And if it doesn't bottom, if we don't get like a washout bottom soon, I think it starts to look like pretty horrible. If you look at the Bitcoin chart though,

• 1:55:25Speaker 00

  I mean, it's had, while the price has been up all year, it's had kind of a bearish year, like comparatively to market, but that looks more normal and a bunch of all layer ones actually look okay, like Atom looks really good and Neo looks good and stuff like that, where they, they just don't seem to care as much about this like downturn at the moment. And I think that might be the story of this year, which is a sort of dissemination of markets or a decorrelation within crypto. I think Bitcoin, Ethereum just don't have the adoption yet. So they're trading like risk assets, like hyper-collared to stock market and stuff. But within crypto, you're not going to get the same, everything

• 1:56:08Speaker 00

  moves together anymore. Because everything moves together when there is a net inflow into crypto, right? The crypto industry generally is growing because people are just pouring money into everything, everything goes up together. And I think throughout this year, there will not be uniform flows into everything. I think people are going to be more selective about where they put their money. I think you have tons of unlocks happening this year in a bunch of alt layer ones, DeFi protocols, GameFi protocols, Metaverse tokens, across the entire like landscape of crypto. And they're brutal. They're like things that

• 1:56:53Speaker 00

  have $20 billion fully diluted valuations, but a market cap of a billion or something. So like the flow is super small compared to what is being unlocked over the course of this year. And I think those assets have a very difficult time. And one thing that will be important to watch is if that has a knock on impact on like stronger, stronger things. So I think there'll be a dissemination of capitals. Some things might continue to do well. Some things will literally go to zero. I don't think this, I think this is the first, the first time we've had.

• 1:57:32Speaker 00

  Uh unlocks that like the froth of a bull market, right? Like, because in 2017, everything was ICO, everyone bought on the same day, immediately unlocked. It wasn't this is locked for several years. And when that fundraising style changed and people were buying locked coins in 2018, 2019, those are starting to come unlocked in a bull market for the first time ever. Stuff came unlocked before the bull market was frothy, before valuations were really high. And now it's unlocks are happening into retail populated markets. And that didn't happen in 2017. And in 2017, stuff was able to go minus 95%.

• 1:58:13Speaker 00

  So a lot of those tokens can go minus 95% and the VCs will still be up 5, 10x. So they can go 95% again and then they break even. So I think there's going to be a lot of pain in particular parts of the market. And when that happens, I think there's generally a lot of people who just go like, fuck this market, I'll sell everything. So I don't think it's going to be as exuberant as, uh, as the last couple of years was. But equally, I am not willing yet to be committed to, um, to being bearish. If the cycle ended here, it'd end in a really strange place because we had a blow off top and then recovered and made new highs.

• 1:58:57Speaker 00

  And that's like never happened in history. And I like to be like an anthropological type trader, just look at what's happened before to make finances about the future. So I think it's going to be a weird year. Like, I think anyone making like up or down bets from here, they could just both get embarrassed if you get both. So, um, I think it's gonna be like-

• 1:59:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think it all depends on like macro conditions? Like what central banks do?

• 1:59:22Speaker 00

  I don't know, because I think that's a thing that people currently have convinced themselves they care about a lot. But macro conditions-

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  Prior, like Bitcoin and Ethereum have like gone more parabolic through worse macro conditions in the past. So it's just this thing that's changing and people have agreed as important, you know, as they, as they do. Like everyone agreed EIP 1559 was super important. You had this massive run up to, and then it's like, everyone was like, oh, that's over now. We need to care about something new. And then it actually starts to matter because there's a slight change in economics of the supply demand. So I think macro will be important. And I think the Fed is showing they're gonna, you know, start handling inflation, inflation, they're not calling it transitory anymore and stuff. But I think there'll be,

• 2:00:13Speaker 00

  I think there's a bunch of stuff that's undervalued and there's a bunch of stuff that's overvalued that will correct throughout the year. And hopefully, you can see recoveries in like major Bitcoin Ethereum, like the boring assets. But if they're unable to recover in the like first half of the year, then I think it's like truly gonna be Goblin Town.

• 2:00:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Could be Goblin Town, maybe not though. Kobe, this was a lot of fun, man. This was a blast. Thanks for coming on Bankless. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing this with us. We had a great time.

• 2:00:47Speaker 00

  No problem. When do I come back?

• 2:00:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  When are you available? Look, we have an entire 2020.

• 2:00:53Speaker 00

  I don't have a job, mate. I just don't do anything. I play video games and then go talk to some people who are building cooler stuff than what I've built in the past.

• 2:01:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Enjoy your weekend, man. You know, so I actually think Kobe, you might be a bit more, like, I'm gonna agree with your boss on this one. I think you're a bit more chaotic good than, than first lets on.

• 2:01:11Speaker 00

  Maybe. But I'm like, it's easy to appear chaotic good when you're being curated, right? You're on a podcast, so you think about what you're saying. Much more easy to be chaotic evil when you're in like a bedroom by yourself and you're pissed off with someone and you're like, I don't get it. So, so yeah. I'm happy to stay with neutral.

• 2:01:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, okay, you fit in whatever corner of the box you feel like, but it's been a pleasure to have you. We really appreciate it. And for Bankless listeners, of course, you gotta follow Kobe on Twitter. He's a must-follow from my perspective. Some other action items for you as well. Check him out on Substack. So this is kobe.substack.com. Recently learned that Kobe is also a phenomenally talented writer. So some of the articles he's put out, and I don't know Kobe, whether he went through some kind of like, you just punched them out. Pounded these out. It's like five, six articles all at once. It's fantastic.

• 2:02:09Speaker 00

  What else you gonna do?

• 2:02:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, there you go. So some extra time, go check those articles out. Also subscribe to the Up Only Podcast. Maybe Bankless's sister podcast? Maybe the yang to Bankless's yang? I'm not sure. But fantastic podcast. Dave and I listen to it often as well. Risks and disclaimers, of course, guys, we gotta do the lawful good thing and give you these disclaimers. ETH is risky, DeFi is risky, all of crypto is risky. None of this was financial advice. Don't think for a second it was. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 2:02:47David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where

• 2:03:30David Hoffman?

  we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.