# Minting Billionaires and the Religion of Bitcoin | Meltem Demirors, CoinShares

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VcQbILTF-s
Duration: 1 hr
Language: English
Words: 11757
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/0VcQbILTF-s

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[0:00] wow that was a crazy episode that we just filmed with melton demir's absolutely insane unfiltered she has no filter which is what i love about her unbelievable she lives in the future yeah she's crazy smart has some like pretty mind-bending ideas about ways to take crypto and how crypto as a religion can actually start to promote the space broadly so we got into it deep it was crazy fascinating i know you guys are going to enjoy it a lot so let's just dive right in by now you know that i love going down rabbit holes and today i get to share one of my secret tools with you tigus

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[2:21] i feel like you're more crypto than i am right now because you're wearing the wagon i wore it for you wow what is he opposing is he is he you know what's up i wore it for you am i opposed to wear a wacky shirt like i could be like yeah maybe he's like yeah maybe i'm a wolf in sheep's clothing i don't know wow that's what the w stands for yeah no i did i literally wore it for you have you trapped this nft game wolf no what is it like a wolf game and their sheep and like you shave the sheep and you get well like

[2:50] honestly people will say a word any word and it triggers me because there's like a crypto thing that involves it okay like say a word say a random word uh baseball okay uh they saw nfts nfc baseball cards you say a word um it's surprisingly hard to come up with a random word on the spot by the way i struggled with that i was like uh uh i mean pants pants um ooh like fashion nft for for pants yeah and also unisofts to go of course 115 000 pair of socks do you know about uni socks no fire what what are unison it's how many socks did they

[3:31] issue like 500 something like that yeah yeah so una swap issued a token called unisox that entitled you could redeem the token for physical pair of like white knee-high socks that have the pink unicorn on the side that's actually kind of fun and those tokens are now trading at anywhere from like 115 to 140 000. do you still get the physical socks no you just get the token so you redeem you have to redeem the token yeah but like when people go to an event they'll wear their unisocks and it's the biggest flex ever because there'll be a guy in the corner wearing like a fancy watch and

[4:03] like head to toe designer whatever and there's like a random crypto person in the corner wearing their uni socks you're like that person's literally wearing you know a range rover on your feet right now but that's kind of fire that's like i went to the ether rocks party that you hosted which was absolutely fire great party melting throw this absolutely bomb party so if you ever get invited to one you gotta go i went to this party and like the biggest thing with it that i came away with other than the fun time was like this whole idea of we're all status signaling monkeys at the end of the day

[4:34] that's what we we go through life whether we know it or not whether we're willing to admit it or not just like trying to stat a signal that we are like attractive that we're rich whatever just so that you can procreate and have sex like that's human nature or whatever it's the reality of it but that's why i bought an etherox so the minute i looked at etherox is like this is the perfect digital flex because the image itself is a free clip art image there's zero originality in it um the metadata it's not even the erc721 token the metadata associated with the etherox like very

[5:06] vague because it was built in 2017. it was one of the first nfts i didn't know that yeah and so it's so interesting that of course i got rock number 69 um and what was what did you pay for that i paid nine eth okay when i bought it it's now probably worth like the ether rock just sold for um 200 east kane warwick bought rock number 62. so my neighbor but what was really interesting about it is we've built this community now around ether rocks we call it stonehenge so there's a bunch of different people in it some people got into ether rocks early some people got into it later

[5:39] harella bob right um bob he bought four of them because he's a complete chad um but what's really funny is they've kind of built this community around etherox there's only 100 of them there's about seven of us in the chat together and one of the things i realized like wait a minute this is a community right and a lot of what's happening here is you're signaling you're belonging to a tribe and what's the ethos of the etherok tribe like it's fun it's weird it's a little bit sassy because it's basically you're lighting money on fire which is a flex in and of itself and that's why i wanted to do the

[6:11] event we're going to do an event here in miami as well that'll be you know similar but slightly different from the one we did in new york but ether rock ownership is like membership in an exclusive club and what's really funny is so i got an apple watch just to show off my ether rock and i was out with my friend he was wearing his rolex i was wearing my apple watch the ether rock on it we took a photo i was like which one of these is a bigger flex i write a rolex like thirty thousand dollars and ether rock at that point in time was

[6:41] three million dollars so it just helps sort of reshape our perception of value and so much of value is societal right it's memetic um and again scarcity is artificial right like rolex can make as many watches as they want gucci can make as many pairs of shoes as they as they want right um and so again i think what's been really interesting to explore is like there's a whole cadre of people in crypto who have made money but they're not motivated by the same status symbols as prior generations they don't want to buy yachts they don't want to buy private jets they don't want to buy you know

[7:16] houses they want to buy digital rocks they want to buy unisocks they want to buy membership in daos they want to build cool things so i think what's been really cool to see and what i'm excited about like my vision is in the next decade i want to mint a million new billionaires who have a radically different view of what we should value as a society i have a question about security okay so

[7:47] this has been on my mind so i just i was in the bahamas this weekend okay did you visit the ftx campus i did not okay that's on the main island right fdx campus that's right yeah so you were in what harbor island it's like a tiny little tiny little little wedding there and a little vacay i had a little vacay and jack butcher you might know um basically sold a bunch of like nouns uh sort of apparel yeah and i've got some cryptos you've got some kryptos i'm not staking my crypto but i've got i've got ones the nouns ones which are the most high valued so i bought some of

[8:27] the merch anyways i i'm packing for my trip and i'm thinking to myself like do i want to wear my nouns hat and because i'm kind of signaling to the world like i've got a wallet right i've got like some expensive stuff in it and i'm curious like you know in this world where we're all you know a lot of people are flexing status digital goods wallets like do you feel ever kind of like oh my god i don't want other people to know that i have this like how do you think about that yeah i mean i um i certainly am never gonna wear a shirt that says

[9:01] swag me i don't wear like crypto swag because again i think when i'm out in public i don't necessarily want people to look at me and be like oh this person has has crypto this is kind of a poser shirt though to be fair like this is like the i'm poor but i like crypto guys um but no it is something to think about one of the areas i've been investing in a lot is opsec and infosec so one of the things like i've been doing this for eight years professionally now right this has been a hot minute and so through that process you know my bitcoin

[9:33] i managed through a company called casa which i'm an investor in um which is a multi-sig storage long-term storage solution for also a customer amazing how do you find it great great experience we need to build the equivalent for ethereum right but basically the idea is like long term the things the value things you want to hold you want to hold them in a secure way so that's opsec and having good operational security um having a ledger or hardware wallet or a uv key linked to your software wallet right so that your assets can't be stolen um it's worth actually saying um on casa as it's an

[10:07] interesting example of this for like you don't even have to have like that much crypto in order to make this worth it but basically like casa as i understand it it's multi-sig so rather than like right now if you have cash you go put it in a bank account you trust that the bank is able to keep it safe for you and you just hope that that's true and if like the government one day freezes all your bank accounts and you don't have it you don't have access to that money and if you go to the bank account and they've done that in the past right like

[10:29] it's happening the great depression yeah when i want to spend my money at chase i've actually had multiple instances with jp morgan trays so i think with where i can't send wires and i have to go to physical bank branch they lock my account i have to go to a physical bank branch with two forms of id i have a lot of questions why are you sending this wire where is it going to what do you do for a living and i'm like this is your business 10 000 at a u.s bank account they have to flag it to the federal government yeah ten thousand dollars yeah

[10:55] absurd if you're gonna get ten thousand dollars in cash but casa allows you to completely own the security of your crypto well right now it's just bitcoin i would guess in the future they expand into other assets more assets but the other cool thing is they've also built an inheritance protocol right so if something should happen to you god forbid right they have a solution they've built that allows you to share some of the keys with family members a trusted lawyer third party instead of something wherever to happen your bitcoin would be passed to your next of kin um but the other component that i think is really

[11:27] important that you're touching on is infosec information security and this is where actually twitter has been a really interesting tool for me so i'm extremely visible online and i share a lot online like god bless you i talk to people they're like i feel like i know you because you share so much of your life that was how we became friends that is how we became friends through the internet um but the what i'm doing effectively is people are not curious about me because they feel like they already know me so it makes it easier to hide in plain sight and you practice really good info

[12:00] sex so i don't receive mail at my house i receive it at a registered agent who receives my mail for me and forwards it on to me packages get sent po box right you just have to think a little bit more about what you're disclosing and be really selective i never tag locations on things typically if i'm at an event i won't share anything about it until i leave the event so i think when you're in in crypto and again as the world shifts and more and more of our lives become digital like forget crypto like everything in our lives is digital we as a society just have to become more

[12:32] mindful of information security operational security and how we safeguard like these very important components of our identity our our privacy um and again i think people are just now starting to build the tooling and infrastructure it's not all crypto related either right a lot of this is just basic knowledge and teaching people how to have good opsec and go to infosec this is an interesting area what's the difference between opsec and infosec so operational security is having processes in place so for example whenever i use my metamask i'm going to plug into my ledger and that's operational security it's process driven right so when i'm performing

[13:11] various functions i have a process that helps me be secure in how i do it so it's like having manuals and guidebooks and a step-by-step process for how you do certain things to do them securely information security infosec is how you keep data secure and how you obfuscate certain pieces of information like pii personally identifiable information to help you maintain information security by the way if someone hasn't coined the term practice safe infosec yeah yeah that's good someone do it like someone dude that's pretty like that's the new practice

[13:59] we've been on that journey together for almost three years now i mean um it's been interesting because the mentality around security is shifting right a lot of people initially were like oh i'm not going to spend 125 or 1800 or 5 000 or at the different pricing tiers on this but as the value of crypto goes up and as people have nfts and baseball cards that are digital or maybe they have like i now have digital furniture right people start to think a little bit differently because again we're not accustomed to digital security we think a lot about our physical security but we never think about

[14:32] our digital security so i think there is a fundamental paradigm shift and actually i think one of the really interesting things something i've been really excited about which i want to get into is like i do feel like we're building the tools in the infrastructure to start to enable new models for small communities to organize to become more self-sovereign and to build resilience and security through decentralization and permissionless like infrastructure in new and novel ways and so i got a place in new hampshire earlier this year i've been spending a lot of time there with other bitcoiners i'm trying to get a lot of bitcoiners to move to the area

[15:09] the slogan for new hampshire is lit free or died so it's very like apropos that was where i used to go as a kid to buy fireworks to do stupid [ __ ] was because like new hampshire in massachusetts you couldn't get fireworks and so we'd drive up to new hampshire and buy a bunch of fireworks to go do our dumb [ __ ] right and that was like you were allowed to and you couldn't there was no sales tax no sales no government theft and so we were able to drive up there and go do that stuff well the government's very small right so what's interesting about new

[15:36] hampshire is the government's very small um for example like my trash gets picked up one day a week and then on saturdays i drive to the town dump and you like take your own recycling so it's very much like it's like libertarian it's much more liberating um so talk about this idea i want to go down the rabbit hole on this a little bit with you because it's fascinating so sovereign city-states okay and crypto and let's take one step back please so um one of the things i've been really interested in lately is belief right so money is a collective fiction right we and we can we don't need to get into

[16:10] this whole history of money like let's start with the number zero humans are narrative we're storytelling creatures actually right like mythos mythology stories that's how we've transmitted history through time that's how we remember who we are right and the stories are really just like fragments we've pieced together they've changed and evolved over time to fit whatever narrative we're trying to create i mean it's always the victors who tell the story right tell our history um but there is this really interesting movement so historically right people organized around religion around belief like around their perception of what's happening why we exist what's going on um we have this really interesting shift

[16:49] that started to happen where our societies are no longer driven by organized religion right it's no longer really driven by your belonging to your nation state or like nationalism is is not as prevalent as it was probably 20 30 years ago and so what's really interesting is there's this huge religious movement that's taking place it's the spiritual but not religious movement or sbnr and the harvard school of divinity has done a lot of great research and writing on this and under their estimates they estimate about 40 of the u.s population is spiritual but not religious they don't belong to a religious organization they're not a part of a church

[17:25] and what's really interesting is globally this trend is also growing right with secularization of society with people becoming more you know technologically oriented so there's this really interesting spiritual void that's been created and people are filling it in different ways i think crypto i think bitcoin was actually the first technocratic religion which is super interesting right you have the the myth of satoshi which is sort of the origin story you have sort of the early days of bitcoin in the bitcoin talk forum which is like our gospel like people quote satoshi on a regular basis i have like a set of satoshi quotes i like to use um

[18:02] and so we've built this mythology and this rich pantheon of characters around around bitcoin and what starts to become interesting right is how do we start to give this movement like its own mythology we already have our own terminology our own lexicon we have our own rituals we have our own icons right the ops like an infosec it's a ritual plugging your ledger into your computer like you going to church and doing your revolutions or you going to synagogue and like going to to pray so um i think there is this interesting sort of thing that's emerging and i think people are really uncomfortable by the term religion but religious

[18:37] organizations are not necessarily about religion in the traditional sense they're really just about belief systems right and people having shared identity and community right exactly about shared identity shared beliefs shared goals and that community you build and our community is on twitter which is great it is i mean you're blowing my mind a little bit here because i've never thought about it in this context but if you really do like i read um you've all know a harare had that book sapiens which was like an amazing treatise and all this stuff he didn't really get into bitcoin much i don't recall around money because i think it

[19:14] was written before a lot of that happened the second book 21 questions right or which one no yeah the follow-up to sapiens has had us a little bit on it but what's really interesting um right is if you look at bitcoin not through a technology lens but one of the interesting things that happened right in like 3000 years ago in ancient greece the way that philosophers and scientists looked at knowledge right there were two branches there was real physical knowledge which is chemistry and math right like observing and understanding the physical world and then there was the esoteric right and the esoteric was like philosophy but it was also

[19:52] magic and astrology and divination and all this like weird [ __ ] and somewhere along the path we focused only on the hard sciences and we forgot about the esoteric right but we're like literally creatures living on a rock that's hurtling through space at 60 000 miles per hour we need the esoteric and so it's been interesting is people are getting really into esoterica and crypto kind of combines the two because it has elements of mysticism and esoterica in it but it's also based on on math right on verifiable mathematical computation and so by combining these two together it's sort of like a reunification of these

[20:29] things that were separated long ago that belong together as a whole so i actually think there's a really cool opportunity i'm going to bring it back to new hampshire so there's a really cool opportunity to micro dose before this okay okay if you're if you're not watching this video if you're like listening to this in your ears literally we might create a meme out of the face i just his mind is blown continue sorry no no no so i just want to versailles bring it full circle to new hampshire so what i think is really interesting one of the things i'm going to try to do over the

[21:04] next few years is build a church so when i say a church it's a religious organization which enjoys certain tax benefits under u.s tax code and if we think about the wealthiest institutions of this country the religious organization the mormon church church is fantastically wealthy the largest landowner in america the church of scientology fantastically wealthy the vatican fantastically wealthy so if we can build a new religious organization a set of shared beliefs a shared it's a set identity around this new like technocratic money movement called bitcoin what we can start to do is amass a large amount of financial capital that helps us shift the political climate in this country to put

[21:46] new leaders into place to build a new political party which i think is really important it helps us shift culture by funding new cultural institutions which also enjoy tax benefits but think about like the state of education today we all know it's fundamentally broken that how do we fix it we can create new educational institutions that are funded by a religious organization and then lastly we can create new social structures and the social structure is this idea of a small community right of self-sovereign individuals who have um who adopt bitcoin right or other cryptocurrencies as their currency but also use open source tooling and infrastructure whether it's dowse or

[22:25] other primitives that are being developed or things we haven't even dreamed up or quoted up yet and they start to use these tools and you couple that with distributed computation publicly owned internet infrastructure isps telecommunications infrastructure and small-scale nuclear reactors right with companies like oakland start to bring that together and you start to see the development of a new type of city-state right that is self-sovereign that becomes a haven a refuge for people who are like-minded and these can start small but they grow over time and that experiment's happening across the world as these crypto people and their capital are going to these different places flocking together and building these

[23:05] small communities but we can start to to scale that and it's starting online too right so you're like yeah it's digitally it's it's you start online and then you gather the people and then you're like okay it literally starts on twitter yeah exactly but that's why i got on the party like the ether rock party right one of the realizations i've been sort of working through and thinking about is like these conferences we have and these events we have they're really like us going to mass totally right totally what's mecca energy that gets created right yeah it's going like going it's going to make it yeah exactly

[23:38] like that energy that gets created and the connections that get created they catalyze and like compound over time but that has existed like the thing i so i it's not i think no no but i like i think about all these things in like i'm a i don't know i'm a peon like whatever i i come from like a traditional world and i'm trying to understand all of these things and so for me i'm drawing analogs to what has existed i think about like what you're saying there um berkshire hathaway like warren buffett is a religion for a lot of people people literally 50 000 people a year go to

[24:10] omaha nebraska to go worship at the shrine yeah worship at the time and i've gone to it it's amazing and it's an amazing event you go and you meet a bunch of other people who have also worshipped at the religion of this like value investing whatever it was and what it is now now apple sort of a religion like people i'm there are a billion people in the world that have an iphone when i hold an apple iphone and there's someone on the street in india holding an iphone that's like a poor person on the street we have something let's talk about apple for a second so here's the

[24:38] next extension of this which i think is so interesting so we started with cathedrals right like cathedrals were the first monumental structures that got built after the pyramids so the pyramids were built it wasn't until four thousand years later that humanity was able to build a structure taller than the great pyramid of giza that's crazy why is that why is that do we know because of slavery dark ages and the rise of organized religion right and if you've read um the immortality key by brian moresku it's a great book about um ancient cultures and their relationship with the esoteric right this super interesting book i'm sure the mortality key the more the mr

[25:20] mortality all right i'm gonna check it out and it's about humans like our relationship with the divine and the inexplicable right um but organized religion basically like sought to crush the esoteric and when that separation happened there's another great book um called man's search for meaning by albert kessler one of the best books i've ever heard yes so good but it's about that separation right but so think about this it wasn't until 4000 years later we built a cathedral right and then cathedrals became the things that civilizations built now the cathedrals of capitalism right are skyscrapers if you look at the way apple is using architecture in the apple

[25:55] stores right this is a concept that like kerbasia was really passionate about and what heath like was building as an architect is these halls that felt like churches it's the sparse marble it's minimal it feels vast and kind of isolating but at the same time it feels inspiring like going into an apple store is in many instances like a quasi-religious experience and so this physicality of it and the structures we build is also so interesting which i'm really curious to see again as people in crypto start deploying their wealth into building small-scale cities into like moving to islands or other locales and building things like what will we build

[26:37] together but there is this like really interesting linkage if we look at all these artifacts around us right they're all a product of belief system and what we're trying to convey i have an interesting idea that i want to throw out here because i think you guys will have thoughts so one of the issues i see with all of this massive new wealth that's been created within crypto is because of our current fiat tax system there's not a great like re-onramp for all of that wealth to be put to productive use like there's so much wealth that's been created those people would love to build companies on the

[27:13] back of it build new protocols build uh like create jobs do all sorts of things that like create massive build great new cathedrals but like create massive wealth but currently because if they go use it or try to redeploy it there's like someone that's trying to go grab pieces of it there's not a great way to do it so i wonder whether the government or tax authorities whatever should basically create like a tax jubilee where people that have amassed a certain degree of wealth within crypto can like almost repatriate it into productive uses for free like no tax on the capital gains that they've created if they

[27:49] redistributed opportunity zones right totally like an opportunity zone for crypto okay but how about we don't give any money to the government which is absolutely incompetent and engages in a tremendous amount of grift yeah right because some of the worst capital allocators the system is just too large right it's gotten so large and so cumbersome like it will collapse under its own weight it's inevitable once we instead gave that capital to a religious organization and you got a tax deduction or the religious organization invests that capital it effectively becomes a hedge fund housed inside of a non-text entity and grows wealth there and deploys capital along you know the the spiritual or like

[28:29] um sort of societal aims of that particular organization so as long as that organization then was like community owned and governed so it's not like one person is the king of that religion and gets to decide where it goes i agree or the queen sorry yeah well be community i would be the queen it would probably be you so if it is myself a cult leader although i do joke like i'm going to start a cult but it's interesting to think about like a community owned amazing decentralized you missed that one she's like i'm not a cult leader but i you know i do joke that i like i'm starting to get

[29:01] called i am starting a goal i do run a cult but i'm not a cult leader no but if you could have that be community owned so now like people are able to contribute their the wealth creation into this entity that is community owned and can make decisions on behalf of this massive religion this is called a doubt right exactly as an autonomous organization and again the tooling around dao is still really primitive i'm a member of a number of dows i've run a number of dows um and um you know it's it's still really early stage dow's by the way like crypto is not a panacea to all of the

[29:34] challenges that exist in trying to build tools for social coordination like kryptos is not a panacea for anybody else in society it's just a tool that we can use but it is a really interesting tool it's being used in really interesting ways um then i think one example of that you know constitution doubt maybe is a bad example of that i think that you know it's funny yes like lol's but you had some good hot takes on it poorly organized um but you know that's an example of a group of people banding together i'm part of another dow called hashes dao where we collect generative art and

[30:06] that's been really interesting um so we created these substructures called permutations where you elect a team to run a specific permutation they get an allocation from the treasury and then they provide updates to the community on what they're doing and then anyone can propose to run their own sort of permutation i'm part of friends with benefits which is another doubt it's like a social club and so they've been doing a lot of cool stuff and they've had all these spin-offs and different programs that have come out of that but i think again we're at this really early stage of experimenting and i do think we're living through like this digital

[30:38] renaissance where you have crazy people on the internet who now have capital right we have financial capital we're going to buy some political capital we have a lot of social capital and we're going to use it to try really interesting new things and i think the other like the other thing i really focus on and this is where we get back to mythology our perception of reality right we collectively get decide what get to decide what reality is like all of us are collectively responsible for building the reality that humanity lives in um and a lot of us abdicate that responsibility right we like sit down

[31:11] turn on netflix and just tune out because it's really [ __ ] scary sometimes but i think one of the really cool things we can start to do with crypto and crypto capital and crypto wealth and these new structures is build new narratives and shift people's perception of reality to create a more optimistic and hopeful vision for the future and that's happening what's happening i completely agree that all of the people that are out there saying like crypto is a scam all of that like all the negativity around it if you actually go spend time at a crypto native event like i spent a bunch of

[31:46] time at nft week i was like reasonably deep in nfts and spent some time but i went and spent a week there and just spent time with people you know i'm laughing why i'm laughing because you're wearing a wii with a w-a-g-m-i and why is it wag me new york new york i stole it from one of the bars like they had these t-shirts from some like some venture firm that was trying to like say they were a big crypto venture firm i went and just grabbed the shirts do you know what wagner is of course yeah you're gonna make it yeah we're all gonna make it the a is really important

[32:14] yeah we're all going to be yeah you know what my initials are what are they gmi gm yeah there you go we're good you are mine but like my point these people um in general it's a very positive sum and very optimistic future group and so that's the funny thing that i think is like if you went and talked to a bunch of people that are working in crypto working in web 3 building these future things all of them are driven by like we're all going to go do something right this is collective that was constitutional we can say we hated it we can say we liked it it's kind of cool to

[32:50] just see people coming together around something no matter what because we don't see that often around positive around normally it's like i'm going to come together to take down this other group because i hate them and whatever it is and it's kind of cool to just see it in a positive spot i want to do i mean greg and i have this whole idea about going and taking uh a board seat at twitter with a dow to like go fix twitter because we think it's broken and so we like form a doubt but you use twitter you love twitter greg doesn't like greg's that's not twitter

[33:19] we're in the same boat if twitter was a better prop like if twitter could improve its product it would be so amazing but twitter can never improve itself because it's a public company um with shareholders and twitter doesn't serve as customers it serves as shareholders but what if a community dao was one of the board seats or or like had a significant building on the board like i serve on boards like the board is not really like culture yeah the culture at a company is really driven by its leadership but i'm actually really sad that jack stepped down from the ceo role at twitter because he

[33:51] really was the culture and say what you will like maybe they didn't ship anything new but i think twitter's primary appeal was that it was unchanging and it was uncompromising in its approach and now we've like lost this bastion of free speech right just today the new ceo came out and said you can no longer post um images of people in public which means you can't post police brutality videos you can't post protests you can't post memes you're right it's actually insane that can't be right though think about what that does like free speech dies in darkness yeah right democracy dies and darkness and democracy is [ __ ] dying

[34:30] right now look i there are certain people on the internet that i don't like i don't agree with a lot of people's viewpoints but that doesn't mean that they don't have the right to share their perspective right we have the biden administration coming out and openly saying we're looking at banning the social media accounts of people who do not believe in vaccines that's crazy the fact that no one thinks that's absolutely bonkers right yeah it is mind-blowing to me it's like [ __ ] crazy we're in a society without censoring free speech openly yeah and people are like yes let's do that i'm like this is crazy this is what

[35:09] happens in fascist countries yeah do you think much about decentralized social and where that's going yes and no um i think that decentralized social is something i don't really understand to be totally honest because it's to your point right like the network effects of social are so important and because we've all and this is actually like i think one of the core issues is like reputation and clout and how you take your accumulated reputation with you as you move from platform to platform um i just invest in a really cool company project that's working on enabling platform-less applications by bringing back the rss feed do you

[35:48] remember the article of course okay and then like all of the platforms basically realized if i don't if i have an rss feed people are not going to be on my platform i don't get their eyeballs and i don't get to monetize these these customers these users so the rss feed right all the major websites all the major like news sites all the major platforms turned off rss and so um the same challenge exists in crypto right like you have all these wallets you have all these sites you have to visit there's no like rss feed for web3 but the ultimate vision i think is we need infrastructure and tooling

[36:21] and developer tooling in particular that will help you pull in all this data and effectively like gather information from a variety of different sources but surface it in any application so effectively you have platform-less applications where you don't require the platform and you don't need to visit the platform the data gets pulled into whatever front end you want to use or build or interact with but i think until we resolve some of the underlying like infrastructure issues around how these apps work it's really difficult to imagine decentralized social because again i think it's very difficult to say to someone who's invested thousands of hours of their life of building up a

[36:57] persona and a following say okay go here and start from zero what we need is something that makes the twitter platform irrelevant and effectively enables us to pull in like discord and twitter and instagram and all of these sort of data points as well as our web 3 data like our web 2 and our web 3 footprints and bring them together and surface them in any application right have you looked at dso i have looked at diesel what do you think of that what is diesel sorry i don't know what it is decentralized social it used to be called bitcloud oh um they changed the name of big cloud

[37:29] the clout yeah so nader al-naji who built um another project before like a stable coin basis that that got shut down um raised like 150 million dollars or something for big cloud for for his last company he like i think he was working at google or something he was working at um he was a quant trader at de shaw okay there you go him and jeff bezos okay raised like 150 130 million dollars first stable coin startup ended up giving back like most of the money started bitcloud as this anonymous decentralized social network but the thing that big clout did that also handshake did right so handshake is a

[38:09] dns protocol so domain name service protocol um basically what they did is on big clout they allowed anyone with a twitter existing twitter profile to claim the equivalent on big cloud right so you wouldn't have the zero start problem and then it enabled people to basically buy creator tokens for anyone on twitter right and twitter was the first platform they sort of linked through to so people can buy melting demires tokens i have not claimed my clout account and i i don't plan to sorry i touched my microphone sorry you're good you're good you're good you're good you're good um but i think the challenge again is like

[38:46] all of the actions on twitter so why would i invest hundreds of hours into building up my big cloud and the idea was if we incentivize people with free money then they'll come and they'll stay i know what happened is people came they claimed their free money they cashed out and then they went right back to twitter shocker it was a brilliant growth loop to be fair like for it was it was brilliant and that it played into the like think boy vc narrative of like everybody tweeting about how amazing it was and you had to tweet to claim it so all of a sudden a bunch of bc's a bunch

[39:15] of people were tweeting about it yeah we have a group chat that a bunch of vc think boys are in but not not bc think boys you guys are think boys what am i we're not think boys we're not big boys there's a bunch of like guys that started companies and things i don't know what i'm doing in it but i'm in this thing and all of them were like so hyped for one week it was like everyone pouring money into bitcloud like we're gonna get rich off big cloud and then i literally didn't do anything because i didn't understand it and a week later big cloud got like rug pulled everyone

[39:43] lost their money on it no well what happened again is like um effectively they were trying to bootstrap a network using greed as the incentive right and actually that's what it works really well about crypto and bitcoin right like the thing that gets people into crypto is not the tech it's greed like let's be very honest right like yes the the tech and the vision and like the narrative is super compelling for a lot of people degree is a big part of it and as they get into it they stay not because of the greed but because of the community and like how fun and wild and cool this alternate

[40:14] reality is right like when you step into crypto twitter yeah you step into like through a portal and you're like in wonderland right or maybe it's a little more dystopian and weird somewhere in between through a mirror and you're like what did i just walk into but it's cool it's exciting it's like exhilarating makes you feel something i think the issue with um like using greed in social applications is what else is there this is actually my big issue with play to earn games like literally play to earn games like axi doesn't need to have anything in the game all they need is just a box that

[40:44] you click thousands of times the box just gets smaller and smaller and yields go down and down and down and down that's what play to earn is right that's what a lot of the d5 stuff is is like a lot of the hopping from like ethereum now people are migrating to solana like the majority of avalanches growth has been driven by people hunting for yield right because they don't give [ __ ] about the platform they don't care about like what it is they're just looking to maximize the roi on the time they spend on these things so it works but there has to be something more there

[41:14] the goal is is that the the greed and people coming in for the money will build community and that the community will be strong enough right and the mythology around it and the narratives and the symbols and like the shared identity will be strong enough to keep people there and the issue with big clout was it just wasn't there i feel like the the point you just made of the greed in my mind it's like gartner hype cycle like you have greed draws a ton of capital flows into this which then the greed collapses because the market will collapse at some point like you'll have a drop but the reality

[41:49] is all that capital flowed in and so then people that are real believers and the tech and the people that are building can use that to build what the future is and then every low ends up higher than the prior level so this perez is at mit wrote a book called um technology revolutions and financial bubbles which is basically about this phenomenon right new technology comes out new thing comes out people pour ton of money into it really excited but the actual product itself right like the ability to deliver real value isn't there so there's all this paper value that gets built then there's a crash

[42:22] there's correction and then the real value gets built a great example of this is chain link right chain link is a project that started in 2015. i knew the founders like we used to go to the bit devs meetups and eat free pizza but projects started didn't really have a clear vision got um really popular and they made a bunch of money and they were able to use the money right to build something really innovative and that's actually useful today but there's sort of this interesting challenge with chicken or eggs like do you start with a capital or do you start with a product and a lot of

[42:53] crypto today uses this model of financial bootstrapping where they use greed as the mechanism right and they have like liquidity mining and air drops and all this other [ __ ] to incentivize people to pay attention but the issue is there's so many things that are doing it that if you're a profit maximizer you're just going to go from thing to thing to thing to thing so at the end of the day really what gets people to stay is the community right and it's the stories the mythology it's the experiences so i think the communities that do best or the projects that do best or the protocols or the

[43:24] ecosystems that do best are those that are able to figure out how to build that community so what advice what advice do you have we have a lot of listeners who are into web three they want to build they want to build something what advice do you have for designing mythology um okay so one thing i've been really fascinated by is the role of historians um not many companies today employ historians but i think every company every project should employ a historian and like a chief storyteller um so i think having someone who is like the spirit animal of your business like a coin share is my business i'm our

[44:05] spirit animal i write our mythology i write our narratives right like it's and you're also my spirit animal for what it's worth so happy to do that no but but it's really important right like someone needs to keep receipts and again like the the people who have power in the present they write the story of the past right it's always in that way now with bitcoin we have the ability to record historical information with fidelity which is like so cool but we don't need to get into that but um yeah i would say like having a storyteller and really thinking about intention i think at the end of the day

[44:38] the other thing is like intention and the energy you create people feel that so i always like to joke that i'm not a venture capitalist i'm a vibe capitalist which sounds a little bit cheeky and like shout out to jeff lewis um at bedrock you know he's a fellow vibe capitalist but i think vibe capitalism like for me when i interact with founders i don't care about your product roadmap the vision is what i want to understand and i understand why you personally are excited to build that vision why you think it needs to exist like vcs do a lot of performance art right or they do this weird like power flex that

[45:09] they're the stage entrepreneurs or they're like oh show me a business plan like calculate your tan i'm like i don't [ __ ] know what their tam is because nobody's ever built this before like what are you doing this is like an academic exercise to see if you know how to use excel it's whack so i think um it's really about like what is the intention what's the vibe and then for me one thing that's really important that may not be important for other people i think having fun is really important and there's like this sort of levity and like lightness that has to be there um so i think remembering like the

[45:39] fun components really important but having a storyteller and really investing in storytelling is important and physical events like bring people together in physical space and see what happens when you create a good container like let the magic happen organically there it's almost like there's i have three things from that one you need like a chief community officer someone like that that really understands community that was my first job in crypto chief narrative officer is the other one somebody that's like in charge of the storytelling in charge of the narrative around it because of how powerful that is it's just like that can be a huge unlock for you if you figure that out no

[46:14] companies in traditional world are thinking about that they're like trying to cobble together actually so i did i went on a little search um herman miller the furniture company has a company historian and internally in their office they have a museum where they gather and collect and archive all of the sketches and like products of the past a lot of design houses will have this but i think tech companies need to have it and communities right like i'd love to see like uh you know and discord a channel that's just like our museum right like what's the cool idea yeah well it's one thing it brings the conversation full circle

[46:54] we can talk sports at the very beginning one thing sports leagues have done incredibly well is the hall of fame like you can go to cooperstown if you're a baseball fan and go experience the history of baseball you can go and get the nfl and get the whole mythology behind this religion that you're buying into you can go like green bay packers stadium has a museum yeah where you can go and experience baseball what i love is they give people like um like honorific titles right like babe ruth like what was he known everyone has like a nickname yeah the babe the baby i don't know like people are known for a

[47:26] thing or they have a nickname um you also have baseball has this really unique thing foul balls no one talks about this foul balls are the most unique thing in baseball because there are hundreds of thousands probably millions at this point of people out there who have a piece of history from the sport that they display and people go catch the foul ball you go with your dad do a game you go with your mom to a game and you have your glove and you catch a foul ball and it's like this i mean i remember when i first caught a foul ball i like still remember the day and it was

[47:54] 25 years ago but that carries with you that history so by the way this is why i think sports teams and sports franchise are great investments because they have intergenerational product market fit so if your grandpa was a patriots fan you're a patriots fan your child is going to be in trouble it is right and so many things in our world are like cults of belief why not money why not communities like it's not a crazy leap to think about all of these different things like quasi religions it's just that we attach religion to like this very structured sort of abrahamic religion that we've had in our world today but so i do want

[48:29] to close out that conversation so the religion of this church that you're talking about building what is the actual um application how are you going to actually do this like is the government going to allow you to go create bitcoin church or whatever it is crypto church and declare it as a tax tax-free entity so the process um there is a process um and actually there's a group of people um out west who created the church of marijuana so they went through the process and like the church or the pasta monster what is that called like pastafarianism like a joke yeti monster or something like that yeah

[49:06] there was like a south park episode about this yeah that i loved and again like think of how scientology started right like around hubbard went to his friend he's a sci-fi writer yeah exactly so shout out tom cruise um so there is a there's a process um so from a like administrative perspective you file something called a 1040 form in the 1040 form there are specific things you have to share um you have to share your organizing documents like the underlying philosophy the the religious texts of your religion right um and then uh yeah from there it's just it's an administrative process like anything else like setting up a 501c3 there's a

[49:42] little bit more leg work involved but so are you doing this yeah i'm pretty interested in tracking this i feel like this is a really interesting thing because it does present a way where people can contribute the wealth creation into a productive set of means because the church will presumably be deploying this into a bunch of job creation a bunch of infrastructure creation interesting things being created cities whatever it might be and you can do it in a tax efficient way where you're not relying on the government to allocate by the way this idea is not unique right like a lot of people are working on different

[50:11] permutations of this but i think again um right we've we've lived for so long with this religion like this thing with no name but we all feel it we share a certain affinity right like when you meet someone you share that affinity where you're like oh this person is like me right because you feel a certain type of affinity because you don't have any strong sort of affinity with any other large organized group but it's never had a name it's never had an identity it's never had like any organizational structure around it so one of the interesting questions and i recently went to this weekend retreat um with

[50:45] like people from the divinity in theology space with technologists with like social activists where we talked about this right we were like okay if we created a new religion what would that look like and one of the questions is would it be like this large hierarchical structure like the one we have today will institutions of the future look like institutions of the past or can we create an open open source blueprint complete with open source money that will allow people to build this at small scale for smaller communities and it's more decentralized it's like a mesh of these little cells that are all slightly different and slightly unique to the

[51:18] people who are parts of those communities and like the regions where they live and their preferences but are sort of unified through the underlying open source infrastructure they use because it's all compatible right so there are these interesting questions around like how we how we organize um but i'm here for it it's fun and i learn by doing i learn by doing that's my job like i literally just do a bunch of weird stuff on the internet you're the best job in the world i love your job yes and no i have bags under my eyes often yeah but that's because you're working on cool [ __ ] and that's a good reason

[51:49] and like what's the most fun for me is when i talk to an entrepreneur and we start working on something and i'm like yes but then add this add this i'll introduce you to this we'll bring in this and then we'll go get this money here and put it in this and then all of a sudden when we work together and like mind meld and share that same wavelength we can take something that was like a 5 out of 10 idea and make it a 10 out of

[52:08] 10. bags under the eyes but prada shoes on the feet yeah this has been amazing um where could people find you i know you're an amazing twitter follower so even if you hate twitter you are a great twitter follower yeah i love twitter i'm just an idiot on twitter i just like tweet random stuff um i'm at melt underscore dem dms are open so happy to chat with people if anyone's working on any of this like happy to to chat um on twitter or just give out my phone number to people as well this is a burner by the way so don't worry you're not gonna

[52:43] bob capitalism yeah vibe capitalism um yeah i'm just here to vibe and then um coinshares.com is our our company um and yeah that's it this was awesome thank you so much thank you so much you're the best awesome blew my mind on a bunch of stuff and i'm looking forward to the future of this bitcoin religion i know are you gonna join the i'm in i think it's super interesting i would contribute a bunch of my capital gains into it i think that's fascinating i had a question actually so you mentioned bitcoin specifically do you think like how are you thinking about other cryptocurrencies versus bitcoin

[53:16] yeah that's a great question um so i'm not a bitcoin maximalist but for me bitcoin is sort of unrivaled and unparalleled um in the pantheon of cryptocurrencies and um it's funny i get a lot of criticism from i get a lot of person from everyone period like being a woman on the internet with strong opinions is everyone's like hey [ __ ] you like cool cool bring it oh it's great come at me i love it i love controversy i love it you're not afraid of it no i love it i'm happy to fight i'll tussle um and i bring receipts check the receipts yeah call me i have cvs they're seats

[53:50] they're long as [ __ ] a bunch of coupon codes shampoo by the way also you said this i love it my memory is very good i keep a long tracker but to me like bitcoin right in the pantheon of all cryptocurrencies what bitcoin has done and what bitcoin does is unique and a lot of it centers around the myth of satoshi the fact that there is no central organizing entity every other protocol has a central organizing entity it has leaders it has rulers it has kings it has monarchs right and they're all men as monarchs bitcoin is the only thing that doesn't have that structure right and proof of work in and

[54:32] of itself is actually i think going to be one of the things that brings humanity into new age of energy production right um because bitcoin is effectively a money battery it enables you to balance like power on the grid and i used to work in energy before i worked in cryptos like brings my two worlds together but i think bitcoin is like if we think about cathedrals right bitcoin is a digital cathedral it has intergenerational product market fit in a way that no other cryptocurrency does because it's made it 12 years it survived all of these assaults and attacks and nobody has been able to co-opt bitcoin yeah right and so i think

[55:09] again um if i want to make money and i'm motivated by like greed and this fun like flywheel bitcoin's not the place to do it i think bitcoin is really like long-term where i want to hold my wealth where i want to hold my information right information about like who owns what like the ethereum network has been rolled back ethereum's not immutable these other chains are not immutable right so i think again when we think about like humanity what we're trying to achieve bitcoin is the only thing today that i know of that is able to give us the security guarantees the settlement guarantees and the info second offset

[55:41] guarantees right from a network perspective from a computational perspective in a way that no other crypto network can so that's why i still spend so much of my time on bitcoin cool i like it yeah so i've got a wrap because i drank three tequilas all right man crazy episode what was your one big takeaway from today um i really like the framework for how she thinks about kind of looking at religion and applying it to crypto communities so um instead of a bible you have a white paper um instead of holidays you have a roadmap instead of rituals you have things like gm and we

[56:22] are gmi um and i think there's a lot you can do if you're trying to create a popular crypto or web3 project just looking at religion as a way to give you some ideas i loved that too i thought it was really interesting and it stretched my mind a little bit thinking about it and like the analog of sapiens which is one of my favorite books which if you haven't read is amazing and tons of good discussion points around it i thought the religion angle is really interesting and then just in terms of like tactical application if you're going to build something in web 3 all of melton's

[56:57] points around having a like real chief community officer and a chief narrative officer were super interesting to me and so just as like a structural framework for building a company and building a business around web3 i thought that was fascinating absolutely so if you're crypto curious this is an amazing episode for you but i will say uh melton does live in the future so i'm sure a lot of people are gonna listen to this and be like no way and there's some people are gonna be like absolutely so i wanna hear from you all like let's let's talk about in the discord and just hear you know

[57:36] do you believe in what she's saying or is this just is this just a pretty future yeah we got to go deeper on it there's so much to talk about here and the future is a little crazy and sometimes it looks completely insane in the present so i would encourage you as you listen to it to stretch your mind a little bit and start thinking about could this be real even if it sounds nuts and let's get into it it's going to be fun we'll go into the community let's start jamming on it and go deeper see you in there 2022 is a great time to take control of

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