YouSaid · the spoken record

Arthur Breitman

lines on the record: 61
first: 2022-05-20
most recent: 2022-05-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, no, I don't disagree with that. There's a lot of, it's very circular. The way I phrase it sometimes is that you see a lot of innovation in DeFi from a technological perspective or even from a financial engineering perspective. But the point of DeFi cannot just be trade DeFi tokens. And right now, that is mostly the point of DeFi. So you need to, I think you need to anchor it to some actually a real use case. real domain comes from”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a fair cognition of the way it's practiced. If you weight by volume or by prominence, then yes, it's a fair characterization. I would insert a baby with the bathwater. I think there's something there. The more generous way of looking at it is, let's say you want to launch a token, you want to distribute it in some way, you want to get some liquidity. So you use part of your token supply as a way to initiate to incentivize people for providing liquidity for it. And you could see a company doing this. You could do this with equities. You could say, look, I have some equity. business will be more appealing to investors if there's liquidity around this equity. So I could set a way, you know, I could set aside some equity and incentivize my investors to provide equity.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I understand the perspective. I think from the Bitcoin perspective, there's a big risk if you let people change the ledger that the changes that you end up having are not merely technological improvements, but actually change the nature of Bitcoin and change its economic properties. So, I think what Bitcoiners, all of Bitcoiners feel is that if they open the door to technological changes, they're also going to open the door to social control of the economic properties of Bitcoin, which is something that they absolutely do not want. So, in some sense, they felt like they had to shut the door completely, almost completely on changes in order to preserve the economic properties.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a big part of it is pride, but I also think part of it is sour grapes. For a while, the narrative was very different. For a while, people in Bitcoin circles were saying, you know what, all these altcoins is just laboratories. They're going to find the best ideas. And we can always integrate those ideas into Bitcoin. And we move from that to, oh, all those ideas are bad. We couldn't benefit from any of them in Bitcoin, which I think is a little sad because a lot of these ideas are good and important of how product market fit.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry. I got interested in doing Teslas because of my interest in proof of stake. Around 2013, there were a lot of innovation in the space around proof of stake, smart contracts, privacy. People were coming up with, it was an explosion of research and innovation around the space. And one thing I noticed early in the Bitcoin culture is that there was not a whole lot of appetite in trying to integrate any of these upgrades to Bitcoin.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For all this because it doesn't serve a purpose to have more gold once you have a given supply. I guess we could argue that having a city in a monetary supply can have some value, but I didn't see it that way. So when cryptocurrencies come around, I multi notice bad criticism around it. So people always say like, oh, it's backed by nothing. And I'm like, no, that's great. That is what you want with the currency. I was interested in the cryptographic aspect because I also had, you know, I have a mathematical background. I was interested in cryptography. The individual sovereignty aspect was also something that appealed to me from a political standpoint. So it really attracted me early on.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My background is in computer science and statistics, and my first jobs I was working on as a quant. So I started out in statistical arbitrage, and then I moved to 2009, I moved to Goldman to do high frequency training, worked on ETF market making, natural gas market making. I also wore that Morgan Stanley and a few other places on these topics. I've also done some robotics after that, but it was quite different. The thing that attracted me to cryptocurrencies is it was at the intersection of a lot of centers of interest that I had. I have been interested in the theory of money and banking for a long time. So how does money arise? What makes good money? What makes bad money? And I remember way before Bingcoin, you know, convincing myself that the best money possible is backed by nothing, right? If you use gold, for example, there's a problem with the fact that if demand for gold increases, you get more mining. And so that's a waste, you know, because gold is used as a monetary instrument in an ideal world, we would have mine all the gold and increase demand doesn't create.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, some people will try, of course, especially, I would say, there's going to be a cottage industry of there already is in crypto of people who want to deal with more traditional investors and who reassures them that no, no, no, it's all going to be fine. I mean, we see it. You could buy Bitcoin and even hold it with a custodian if you're worried about self-custody risk, right? But nonetheless, you'll find funds which charge you management fees for holding this. Some people are always going to want that, but it's still putting some pressure down on costs.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you know, I think everyone who's in business likes to make more profit and likes to charge more fees. And people are going to charge whatever amount of fees they can get away with in general. So at some point there's competitive pressure, right? And in finance, it's true that sometimes a lot of the competitive pressure is not present. You'll have people pay 1% commission on a trade because they're doing it through a private bank and the trust of the private bank and we'll do good execution and so on and so forth. And that nonsense, it doesn't cost that to execute a trade. Not at all. But the reason that they're doing it is because, well, they feel that they need the trust of this very prestigious intermediary. If you remove that need, if you remove that notion of trust, I think you get something that's more competitive because if the thing is going to work regardless of who you routed through and reputation doesn't matter all that much, it limits the ability of intermediaries to charge.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And monitoring that fraud has a lot of costs. And also you have to deal with only a few people who are going to be trusted. If you can get rid of that, you can actually generally reduce costs. So I do believe this part of the story. I don't know that it's going to save the planet and do all this grandiose thing. The story I have about this is I once gave a talk at some sort of deadlock event and it was about the promises of blockchain. And I gave an example for some of the overhyped ideas. And I said, well, imagine, for example, we're going to put plastic bags are killing turtles, but the problem is we don't know where they came from if we could identify who licks a plastic bag. You know, it solved the problem. So let's put the plastic bag in the blockchain and we'll save turtles. And I gave that as the example of like some of the nonsense you could see. And someone pitched me that exact.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of it is true, and some of it is false in terms of reducing the fees compared to traditional financial infrastructure. I actually think this is one of the real ones that we can actually do this, yes. We can lower the entry costs for creating financial products or financial systems, make it a lot more innovative and develop these things much faster than they have in the past. I do believe that you can remove a lot of intermediaries and a lot of the friction in the financial system comes from the fact that you need to rely on trusted intermediaries. As an intermediary, you have oftentimes a big opportunity for fraud.”
2022-05-20 · Odd Lots · Arthur Breitman on the Biggest Problems in Blockchain Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source