In this panel, speakers will share their thoughts on the bigger picture that DWeb paints, and why this technology is critical especially in times of rampant deplatforming and censorship
Transcript
(00:01) [Music] [Applause] [Music] kinetic is a blockchain crypto investment firm based in hong kong and puerto rico [Music] founded in 2016 they were the first fund in hong kong and one of the earliest in asia with a portfolio of over companies they were seed investors in such projects as ethereum parity and polka dot solana ftx and of course handshake in name base [Music] founder johan chu was an active investor and supporter of the handshake ecosystem over one hundred thousand domains co-founder of d-web foundation co-founder of handicon and sponsor of
(00:52) the handshake house at miami hack week 2022 [Music] okay we are live live or loading live how’s everybody doing is our first panel of this of the handicon all right bird is here got some great feedback from everybody i’m gonna pop off stage and give the show to chango chango unchained thank you all right what’s up everyone thanks for showing up to our session about the philosophical importance of the decentralized web first of all let’s do a round of intros with everybody here you start with anyone really why don’t
(01:34) we start with john john biggs howdy howdy uh john biggs i’ve been in crypto since about 2011. i’ve covered it for techcrunch gizmodo coindesk pretty familiar with everything that’s going on that’s about it very nice hey guys hey guys uh i’m stephen mackey if you’ve been in the handshake space for the since since inception you know who i am um but i’ve been in crypto now going on 10 years as a builder as an investor as a thinker researcher writer kind of like everything under the sun it just
(02:14) depends on what the day is um and yeah so i’ve been a really big part of helping grow the decentralized web philosophy and helping to bring about this jargon and this perspective on like how to like merge this interoperably with the rest of the greater crypto space um and it’s been a lot of fun and i look forward to chatting more about this today excellent and what about you prashant yeah everyone i i’m i’m still not legend into this space uh it’s been only three years now with me in the crypto but
(02:44) prior to that working and working a lot over the space as well um so just to add on top of uh what i bring on the table is when we joined a decentralized ecosystem as a hacker and now are working as a founder and building a cool product around the space which basically allows a lot of things to take on the infrastructure side and that is where that is where we contribute more um we are opening the gate and the floodgate for a lot of devs to get onboarded on hns or you can call on any kind of infrastructure protocol which
(03:17) which we are supporting today and myself i am a director of the d-web foundation alongside jahan and the two of us are working on getting handshake to be the foundational layer for what we call the d web yeah right now there’s about 100 people in this session it really feels like early days of bitcoin here it is great it is such a quaint little community and all of us have the alpha that the majority of people in the crypto space don’t have and so you know in you know five ten years time from now the stuff that we’re going to be talking
(03:54) about today is what’s going to be uh realized in the future and so the important stuff we want to talk about is first i want to provide a concrete framework about what decentralized web is because i think right now the word web 3 has been co-opted by the masses and i think it’s really diluted what we are building here um yeah i think the word web 3 is confusing and people don’t necessarily know what it means outside of like nfts and so we want to talk about defining decentralized web just to build
(04:28) a foundation there why don’t we start somebody yeah yeah yeah i’ll go ahead that would i would describe web 3 or kind of the overarching kind of like parent thesis as i say is a decentralized web which is like all the functional interoperable protocols that help exchange value and more means than just like peer-to-peer like value exchange so uh bandwidth computation storage and essentially energy and value in different formats and then being able to aggregate those together in a sensible manner to where it creates a actual
(05:08) usable tech stack so just as we have the traditional like web 2 stack um you know where we have the traditional full stack developer you know building building along that we needed to replicate those exact same systems and that infrastructure over in the same decentralized interoperable manner but though these systems can be interdependent on each other not they’re not codependent so therefore they’re loosely coupled they’re modular they’re substitutable and we can have many different storage protocols computation
(05:38) protocols but ultimately the one thing that needs to remain constant and static is the universal name space by which all these communicate with each other in this case that would be handshake so i would like to think of handshake as like the grandfather or kind of the the main anchor um by which it makes the actual decentralized web uh actually uh a whip um you know beyond that they’re just these different disparate communities that don’t necessarily have a universal means to speak to each other and web 3 or rather the d-web is what
(06:10) will enable us to do that font want to weigh in here yeah hey um so could not agree more uh what steven has said but i also uh when when we started building to the victory space um i always got swamped up with a lot of d5 protocols getting built and nfts as an art was getting built around the ecosystem which really amused me uh like how we as a web 3 guys even not since i was we’re not very older i was a child at that point of time into the space are trying to figure out a lot of things into the space but
(06:49) uh when we when we when we got into one of the bitcoin session uh i was talking to a couple of founders there and and the as steven was clearly mentioning regulatory uh is not about what you are seeing now it is about it is more deeper than that in terms of the infrastructure space um and when we started building into this space the first thing which we did is like why the web 3 is not been spoken in terms of the infrastructure uh which is the hardcore of it where if for example today on the domain perspective
(07:19) just take a domain for example our domain got censored once by icam and we are the culprit of it uh we we we were the victim of it and we were viewers we seen that trend to happening a lot of other protocols and that has really opened up our mind itself to uh why can’t we just enable this web 3 stack so even building the composable item it’s great leaving handshake in rv a lot of infrastructure protocols which are getting built around the compute layer dbplayer everything is great but once it comes to the user side what they
(07:49) basically look for is it is it something which is a composible item is it something which is not ready to be get used now or is it something a one platform where you just go and uh you don’t have to worry about anything others other than this so that is where uh we started figuring it out how exactly we can aggregate them together and bring that decentralization to the a lot of uh other folks or developers who are building to this space and uh and and proud to say that we we built into that direction we we
(08:18) built that uh uh idea into the life uh have been working into this for past two point five years still struggling to find the right recipe here but that is what we see as a web 3 going forward and i’m personally more bullish on the infrastructure space which is going to be supporting a building block of this entire crypto space which we are talking today so yeah so that this is my take on the three as such going forward wnc gives says clarification is key because the term deweb can potentially be misinterpreted as dark web
(08:54) so that’s a good thing to remember uh john biggs what have you to say in terms of web3 uh i mean look it’s it’s it’s the idea that we can have a lot more control and we a lot more granularity in terms of our in terms of what we are using in the cloud i think it’s i think it’s a helpful i think it’s a nice thought exercise i don’t think we’re quite there yet and any in any capacity uh the vision for web3 i think is still being built i don’t know if it’s handshake i don’t know what else it is
(09:30) uh but i’ve seen a lot of up i’ve seen a lot of people talking about it but no actual stuff but yeah like you said it’s a decentralized the idea of a decentralized web that allows for potential censorship proofing of the network which is in practice is going to be impossible and also potential uh potential self-control of your uh of your produce your products your your i don’t know your videos all that other good stuff which again given human nature is also going to be impossible so that’s why i’m a little
(10:04) bit bearish on the concept i want to provide a different perspective which is i do think that given enough time this the tooling that supports decentralized infrastructure throughout the entire internet stack is going to be possible and you know i i think that in 10 years time it could entirely be possible on this vision that we’re espousing right now is you know can be realized and all the infrastructure is kind of already there it’s just a matter of improving the user experience to and scalability to get it to the same
(10:47) level as what users are used to right now but i think the issue um with getting us there is the lack of user demand because if we like all of us in the audience here care about privacy and we care about censorship resistance but if you talk to normies they really don’t care you know they’re like ah just like take all my data i don’t care like i just want i just want to be able to monetize on my content i i want to you know have all the convenience in the world um so you know how do we get there you know
(11:21) from where we are which is like the early 90s of web 2 and how do we get to um the 2000s except for web3 we have to start with like one like realizing and i might have said this in other venues and like things like that before but like we all think that we need to build the infrastructure and then there and with the infrastructure will follow like applications that will actually like you know breed like more like mainstream activity and interest and just as you mentioned like django like over the course of five years or 10
(11:54) years we will see that tooling emerge but you have to think just retroactively like historically where do we have a reference to even believe that well now previous previously with bitcoin right like we moved from peer-to-peer value change to the assurance of value in motion with smart contracts to that bread the fun you know decentralized financial primitives uh to now to the point where like okay well we’ve got this decentralized ecosystem of liquidity and you know capital infrastructure and additional
(12:20) efficiencies that would make sense to make it more censorship resistant boom there comes the d web well what does the d web mean well we have to have some places for the front end something something to store at the back end we need a means by which to have a database of query we need to have like bandwidth we need to be able to like you know get around any potential like censorship on like the isp level yada yada all those people all those places like just come together and so now we’re going to have this emergent application then
(12:48) infrastructure sort of like evolution because we have the pieces here but until we start getting experimental and hybridizing and kind of gluing these things together um like we’ve done with handy hose as we’ve seen with these experimental like handshake compatible web browsers um you know that integrate like ipfs uh gateways and et cetera like we’re all just trying to take these different um you know disparate technologies and smash them together to see what we can make right literally throwing things at the wall and seeing
(13:16) what sticks uh and then what sticks and you know that that’s what leads us to say okay back to the infrastructure drawing board this worked um and so now how do we reverse engineer or how do we now engineer um you know a better foundation by which we could we can not only do this application that we know was useful um but also allow us other people to do the same much more easier lower that barrier of entry provide those abstractions and that distillation down um that you know make this much more you know easy uh and so like yeah
(13:44) it’s it’s a it’s an iterative evolution um that like has to happen and we can say where is it at right now today um but that would just allow us you know existing in this like present moment right like that manifestation that creation of that future comes as that imagination uh you know follows you know uh interesting you know experiments in the space just to add to that because if we’re trying to follow the trajectory of how web 1 and web 2 evolved into the internet as we know it today you know there were
(14:18) browser wars you know and subsequent wars for these companies to kind of monopolize certain portions of the internet so do you think that for decentralized web in the next 10 years that something like that will happen you know will we have a war over something will there possibly be a root zone war right right now we’ve seen that handshake kind of sparked this um explosion of like super governmental superpowers like russia like china trying to build competing root zones against icann so that they have more control over the
(14:54) internet so do you like what sorts of wars do you imagine will emerge and will a root zone war potentially happen i’m not concerned with something like a roots or zone war occurring um because you know as as with bitcoin right that was like the um advent of like peer-to-peer value exchange right ethereum was the advent of us getting like the concept of like smart contract rights um and then handshake is this artisanal advent of what is a universal you know referral only backwards compatible uh name space look like that
(15:36) is essentially a soft fork of i can’t right how many times do you need to get that right um before someone else is going to copy that and then when you get into the deep architecture of things now the only way to compete against handshake would be to create something exactly like handshake because well as we’ve learned with like generalizable smart contracting chains and once you create something say like ens on top of ethereum now you’ve got this ethereum utility ie ens competing against everything else and all these other
(16:08) applications that are you know running on top of ethereum for that scarce block space um and so like you can’t finally optimize ethereum itself to specifically be the best root name space so in that case you would have to go back to the drawing board uh once you realize that this referral only kind of uh universality of handshake is what gives it the power to be this uh reapplicable like root zone for any other different type of use case and then you realize that sharding all these other like sort of like disparate
(16:41) layer two scaling technologies while they’re all great for you know scaling like you know encumbrances you know of like state updates and call data and all this stuff that’s awesome um however at the same time if you could just simply refer back to a zone right there’s a reason why dns works as well as it does right handshake saw that for what it was like look we don’t need to go back to the drawing board we’ll just copy over this thing that works and reapply it to a technology that’s already been sustained
(17:07) i eat like bitcoin right so it took these two technologies merging them together to create this new wave that i think like functioning even when you go to say i want to compete against handshake you’re hardening and validating that handshake is something to compete with right uh in the same cases you know banks opting into bitcoin you are saying that bitcoin is this thing to compete with and so yes it’s that continued lindy effect so at the end of the day like human psychology and game theory kind of make best anyone
(17:36) that might come after because the entrepreneurial window was so small and we you know got through like with the skin of our teeth and i don’t see anything but success going forward all right we’re going to make this panel ultra engaging with the audience and so we’re going to just be taking questions as they come in so a asks john web 2 obliterated publishers revenue how do you see the future of publishing and communications in the d web era honestly i don’t think decentralized web has any has a place in
(18:10) publishing the idea of censorship resistant publishing is cute but it already exists you can basically just make a web page anywhere you want so that’s not important and then you’re going to have loads of i mean we’ve already tried a bunch of these journalistic efforts civic is the one that comes to mind as the as the nicest failure um the the the as you say the obliteration of of most media organizations in terms of for the ability to raise cash there’s raised to to pay people to actually write objective things is almost
(18:46) impossible now but i don’t think i don’t think decentralized web saves it i think what we do is we basically end up in something like a micro payment sort of situation where somebody who creates something gets a gets a small payment for it that should be that should exist right now but again i think also journalists are super lazy and they don’t really care about alternative methods of getting cash there are some who do but the vast majority don’t they just want to write so you’re kind of stuck at this you’re
(19:15) kind of stuck in this uh weird limbo where all these interesting ideas are popping up but no one’s going to use them okay a also asks steven proof of work extrapolated to its natural conclusion by default centralizes proof of stake has been proven to be as secure yet more efficient and default and by default decentralized sustainable the spv tri argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny thoughts yeah absolutely so when you think about proof of work and proof of stake i mean mathematically on how you like model
(19:54) these different like topologies is important right the important of like these emergent complexity sciences has nuance and i’ll try and like simplify it as quickly as i can given how complex these two systems different types of systems are but essentially with proof of work you have individuals that are like making like you know a hardened effort in the physical world they’re making an actual like hardware specific investment uh in this case if it’s an asic uh application specific integrated circuit then there’s some cost investing
(20:23) in a particular type of hardware and or chip design um that is only going to solve a particular type of like hashing algorithm in this case with handshake it would be blake 2b shot 3 right so you’ve got individuals that are investing new things on the foundry level and creating of chips they’re paying for um electricity they’re they’re vying for you know uh regulatory like oversight and in each regional area in which they operate um you know they are seeking to get the lowest cost in like green energy
(20:51) right in order to get the lowest amount of like capital expenditure so there is a deeply rooted creation that manifests through proof of work you have individuals that are hardened by the on-chain incentives that happen block per block but then you have all the people that are creating the chips that are creating the hardware that are running the hardware um that are you know reselling it the secondary market the proof-of-work ecosystem is beautiful and it’s artistic and you have to understand the nuances of how it
(21:21) works it’s not just burning and expending energy to create value right you’re also teaching humans on how to create value you know through technology and the expenditure of energy at the same time now there when you have like proof of stake yeah great you can have like the you know lower capital uh efficiency you can anyone can run a validator node uh you know get there and compete with the network as long as they can afford like whatever is necessary a minimum stake that’s great you get a many different like validator sets that
(21:48) can provide security on the network but again you just have validator validator specific security right at the end of the day you’re going to have networks that are scaling in two different ways so if i’m going to create something that is say regional or um not necessarily generalizable so say i’m going to focus on the child that wants to help with like sustainability stuff it would make sense to make that like a proof of stake chain and put that on cosmos or something that like that right i can get a earned stake of you know
(22:19) potential like group members and then they can operate as validators in that network and then we can scale that workout accordingly why yes of course that makes sense to make proof of stake now if i’m going to create a universal drop-in replacement uh dns for the entire planet and essentially seek to soft fork the entire internet over right like which is like trying to change a tire on a car you know during nascar in the middle of a race right there is no pit stop here so we need to get people you know buy in in the real
(22:46) world physically and not only that all the places regionally in the world where we want this internet to persist right this new alternative web needs to be able to exist and persist in russia and in china and so those people those dissidents that are going against like you know the legal the rights to actually have this backwards compatible internet to connect with the west they need an incentive right they need to be able to buy names they need to be able to have this decentralized ecosystem where they can mine it and you know
(23:12) assure their value they need to be able to make a capital investment into this and no it’s not going anywhere proof of work is specific and it is usable for a certain type of chain right bitcoin a reserve asset proof of work makes sense ethereum a reserve smart contracting system essentially a decentralized cpu proof of work that makes sense we need that as distributed as possible and as safe as possible in as many regions as possible and in this case handshake as well so it all depends on the architecture and like what your end game
(23:44) is and ultimately like yeah like is this going to be something that the entire world is going to be observing or only a small piece of it and if it’s only going to be a small piece of it then i would say a proof of stake validator set it’s fine to emerge and grow as it becomes like more viable as whatever it is you’re attempting to do but when you know it’s going to work day one i.
(24:04) e the world needs a peer-to-peer value chain system the world needs a universal name space because the dns is like you know it’s always on its way out then you need you architect it in such a way where you work with proof of work so it as any educated person would say in the case of a lawyer it depends uh and a lot of people are make bad decisions when the architect change but it’s hard stuff all right and we’ve got 10 minutes so let’s just move uh forward pretty quickly with the other questions there was a richard curtin kraken doll
(24:38) question right uh richard curtin kurt sorry perkin doll the ceo of namecheap asks what’s the solution to fighting against things like abuse if everything is truly decentralized does anyone wanna yeah i can i can take an attempt but i would love someone else to first yeah so i’d love to add on this because yeah because we have been working on this architecture for a long longer time and trying to get through how exactly we can basically defend all these things so i think it’s it’s really good question because we
(25:15) have raised this question in multiple forums so far in five point and rb even all other places as well uh even we’ve been going with the hms we haven’t able to raise it yet but again it’s also a question um so one of the novel architecture which we wanted to come across is like if you see how exactly the decentralized ecosystem is built upon it’s on the foundation side you have a lot of miners databases and things running around right and uh and and just let’s imagine the scenario where um when when you are going to serve the
(25:41) data how exactly how exactly we are going to serve it we are going to serve it or access data by some of the miners who are storing those data or uh if you if you want to access via domain there is a gateway which is which will involve into serving that data in um so we wanted to build a model which basically allows people to report these kind of contents uh to a specific forum uh which should be eventually linked to a dao and dow decides like if on the basis of the abuse the level of criticality and another thing which basically attached
(26:10) with the incentive layer with that uh go and vote for it and gateways and the miners just blacklist that particular content which they have stored and the beauty of it like the the blacklisting uh thing on the decentralized ecosystem is much easier than it is listing on a centralized ecosystem the reason being is like if you are storing on a decent life side you have a hashes which is getting generated and now you have a clear trace of that hash where exactly it is and which minor nodes and things are storing it and just go and ask those
(26:39) miners not to basically serve those contents by either by enforcing the tao mechanism on top of it or enforcing it with coming up with some other idea behind it but still this space is yet to see the change how exactly we will be doing it but this is one of the thing which we have introduced or we are going to be introducing on our platform where if a web application and things are getting served via our notes of gateways uh people can go and report those content and abusive accountants and we won’t be serving it by our own our own
(27:09) gateway um and and this question i always get like so the d-vape can become a dark whip soon um and this is also related to the same but if you see uh even today as a dark wave right a lot of people i have seen they are using into an encryption model to basically support it uh even in civilized server as well but once you go into the rebate uh decentralized ecosystem infrastructure part you can just completely avoid it by uh just going into the market saying mine is okay this this hash should not be there so a lot of thing has to be worked upon and
(27:43) this is something which we have introduced which we are planning to introduce soon uh viaspheron itself directly where anyone wants to bracket some proper contents serving from that particular gateway they can do so by raising the flag there yeah i just want to i’ll speak from it just from a general network topology standpoint right so because we have these different different layers in the stack right and because we have so much substitute ability right computation storage bandwidth um individuals can define essentially what is the
(28:20) decentralized web to them and this is what’s like really powerful right what’s going to happen in the future is when we say the internet now it’s this very blanket thing where we try and like create this objective standpoint of the internet but in actuality the internet has never even been fundamentally one thing right you’ve got facebook as a silo twitter as a silo um pinterest of the silos snapchat none of those things like speak to each other the individuals that operate in these networks might gossip peer-to-peer
(28:49) amongst themselves as humans right but that information is effectively like silo right and then it depends on you know the the means of which how people operate in the real world on where the if the information actually disseminates now so when you say we want to be able to block certain things for the internet well it depends on what we’re talking about if we’re talking about like you know inappropriate like video content and picture content well then that’s going to come down to what decentralized
(29:15) storage protocol you’re going to use and there’s not going to be just one right there’s psy file coin r weave right um stores there’s many different ones so then the means by which one how you’re going to practice moderation of those protocols is not going to be at the state level it’s going to be on the social peer-to-peer level right if one particular protocol and it’s in its culture that brings on a lot of you know nefarious activity and you know content then you can easily modularly swap in
(29:43) and you know the community can migrate to another one just like you can hardwork a chain you can move one community who is storing their you know information on one chain and migrate it over to another it’s at this point where you are paying like this is where we give power back to the people socially defensively online when they say you guys need to self-regulate well that’s what this looks like right by having functionally all these different pieces separate from each other except for the namespace and even the namespace itself
(30:13) right handshake is universally reapplicable so that means that as a resolver if you build a resolver that’s going to operate as backwards compatible with handshake you can choose how it is you know what names on handshake you want to whitelist and if your resolver happens to get large enough in usage then effectively you you’ve defined a certain segment of the web and you have siloed how people will actually interact with it and it’s up to people to like you know change their provider swap that to another resolver
(30:42) run their own handshake themselves run their own handshake like like client and so it’s up to the unique person to decide on what view of the web they’re going to ultimately end up seeing so when it comes to policing the web so to speak though it’ll get harder there are incentives there to ensure that those systems like are as sensible and as good-natured as possible uh because otherwise their network effects are limited if you only serve a dark nature a dark segment of like humanity you know with a certain level
(31:15) of like you know illegal fetishes and things of that nature then your network can only grow so big but those cesspools those gray areas are always going to exist and persist on the internet right they will find a way all we can do is find a way to make those bigger happier alternatives right um that are you know more free and are more cognizant of being conscious of what content is on it uh are the ones that actually proliferate and that’s what we’re doing by being these like-minded enlightened individuals to
(31:46) understand kind of you know where this network technology needs to go and realizing we can’t control the future all we can do is be as mindful as we can in the present on what we want these technologies to be and try to spread that ethos as far and wide as possible because ultimately that’s what’s going to be the main narrative all right what do you have to add to that john if anything not much all right bird says we lack the attention of the crypto community do you think listing in the exchange is
(32:20) important i think that uh that exchange uh is only the exchange rate of an asset is is only a useful descriptor of its success if its utility hasn’t found success right so for instance if therian did everything that it did today but only existed on its decentralized exchanges and was on no mainstream centralized exchanges would it still have value absolutely so i would say that like as the greater decentralized web akash dvpn saya file point handshake as they all continually work together to be greater and greater and censorship
(32:59) resistance and utility to each other then the value becomes you know you can’t it’s non-neglible and at that point everyone is going to just like buy into not just the assets but the ecosystem and the infrastructure and the stack uh and so we’re creating something wholly different right just like bitcoin and it’s early days created a wholly different new period of your financial exchange we’re creating a whole new different information value exchange right a whole a whole different ball game so
(33:29) actualizing this is an important part of that and then the price appreciation will come later and and as things remain lower longer now and we all become um solidified if this is the way forward then all we’re doing is like leaving the table open for as many people to bring up chairs and that table is going to get bigger and bigger and there’s going to be more and more chairs so eventually like things all take off at once and then everyone is much more better off right it took it took quite a few years for the nft stuff
(33:59) to pop off it took quite a few years for um uh you know smart contracts and you know the security around those to like become like more viable for people to build on it so everything just takes time and we’ll continue to be having these exact same conversations and probably saying the same similar things next year because things are going to grow and the complexity of this is so large all right i’m going to end with the last question i’m going to marry two questions into one directed at john john you’re in the hot seat
(34:29) because you haven’t spoken much in this panel so someone johnny asks why are you so bearish on d web and i’m going to couple it with another question with vic this question especially as namecheap has gotten a majority stake on the name base on the name base uh merger and offering h s tlds so what’s your what’s your vision i mean look the the human nature doesn’t allow for a lot of this a lot of this stuff to to work uh i’ve seen enough uh essentially content control and and managing managing comments and all
(35:09) that other good stuff and and abuse as well uh in the space and none of what we’re talking about solves any of that in fact it exacerbates that there’s a there’s a certain libertarian bent to this whole thing that says if we can decentralize it then we can i don’t know stop people from being mean to each other and implicitly they’re going to be even worse i think i think what we’re looking at is you just you mentioned earlier the idea that uh that this is this is web 2o uh again right the uh web20 originally was
(35:43) was was supposed to be first thought best thought you’re supposed to put everything you want on the internet and that’s where facebook came from and what did we get we basically get uh facebook being complete garbage and uh and etc etc the the same thing happens over and over again it never it never uh never changes what i foresee potentially is that we have some sort of management uh through ai that takes the human out of the equation that way the ai is going to be impartial and is not going to be picking and choosing what it
(36:17) stops but again if the question is about abuse the question is about control decentralization never going to happen human nature doesn’t allow that we can pretend it’s decentralized and we can have fun making decentralized products but it’s not a thing that exists i like the idea of the d-web but i’m not exactly sure what it looks like in uh in practice and i haven’t seen anything thus far uh and everybody says this is early days but crypto’s been around since about 2008 and uh and even earlier than that if you want
(36:51) to talk about uh digital gold then we’re and and nothing has really changed since then so that’s why i’m that’s why i’m a little bit bearish right now maybe it’s going to get be a lot better next year but then i guess we can just keep having events and talking about it so skeptical about this technology well i mean i i’m i would be curious to know like what your understanding of like proof of work is in the context of decentralization because like if you if you look at the most censorship resistant form of
(37:28) money it would be bitcoin and so i would hesitate to say that like decentralization hasn’t been solved and so for something like handshake to um mimic the properties of bitcoin and have the same sort of i mean architecture it’s not the bitcoin isn’t isn’t censorship proof bitcoin still needs i mean this this is one of the biggest problems that i ever had with with people sending like bitcoin to ukraine in ukraine you’re on the ground you’re getting there 10 people got shot in a breadline today
(38:00) sending them some bitcoin is not going to get them more bred it’s basically going to get them some some bitcoin that they cannot convert into fiat currency eventually absolutely we’re all going to be zapping bitcoin to each other and it’ll turn into a u.s usd coin it’ll be the happy babies but it’s not happening right now and again the for the folks who are in in control of fiat currencies aren’t going to allow the the themselves to be removed as arbiters of trust what’s a bank but an arbiter of
(38:30) trust we trust the bank not to take all our money and throw it in the river or take it and spend it on a maserati which they do but there’s that’s the way we assume that they’re not going to do it too often and with too much intensity so there is no way to uh there’s no way to use this technology in the way it’s intended right now and that’s going to change and it’s going to change in ways that’s not going to make a lot of these people happy you’re going to be in us you’re going to
(38:56) be in a position where the bank is going to say that you can’t cash in your bitcoin because you didn’t pay your taxes it’s going to happen and it’s going to uh it’s going to suck and all of this this decentralized dream is just that it’s just a dream because there still are going to be controls and regulations put in place that are going to be uh that are going to be not so exciting for a uh for the folks who are dreaming of this to be a libertarian fully uh fully decentralized paradise
(39:28) all right now we’ve got many different views in this panel today thank you all for your diverse perspectives we are at time so we’ve got to hop off fistful yeah thank you guys so much for showing up giving your insights and opinions um and you know hopefully we can continue this conversation uh elsewhere on twitter and our discords you know it’s always important to have these conversations and i definitely appreciate uh john big’s opinions even though they were quite negative and bearish on our space it’s always good to
(40:02) have insight from the other side of the river you know um but yeah let’s uh let’s wrap it up here and we’ll go into a short break uh before uh derek hammer talks about loom okay yeah thanks john thanks steven thanks chango thanks for shot thank you everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music]