YouSaid · the spoken record

Elizabeth Stark

lines on the record: 52
first: 2018-07-16
most recent: 2018-07-16
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

“Certain coins. I mean, nobody knows it's really one of the modern mysteries. Like, we don't know who Satoshi is. I'm perfectly happy for that to stay that way unless Satoshi ever wants us to know who he, she or they are. But if anything, of course there are going to be potential attack vectors. I think one of the most fascinating things about being in this world is we haven't seen the types of major attacks that we could have seen on the base protocols. Nation-state actors could come in. They could try to attack the network. They could try to buy up hash power in a variety of networks. They could try to manipulate markets. And I'm sure there's certainly some market manipulation going on now. But to me, one thing that I think is so fascinating is the incentive structure is built such that there are so many people that are incentivized to not have the network, the network be attacked, that we have not seen that happen as of yet. And I believe as these communities and these currencies grow, we'll see even more of that where there will be a lot of people who in”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a little bit more nuance there. Bitcoin is not ruled by a benevolent dictator. So, Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin actually left the community in very early 2011 and has not been seen since. One thing that I think is really fascinating is that there is no leader. The Ethereum community does have a bit of a different structure with more known leadership. But I think in a lot of ways, this is all new. I mean, one of the things that I love about what I'm doing in our team is like, we're doing things that nobody's ever done before. Like there was a software we were working on and we didn't know how long it would take. And then it turned out, of course, it took longer than we thought it would. And we were like, wait, nobody's ever built this. So we just didn't know how long it would take. So we're really seeing these issues of first impression. As mentioned, there are different models for communities. And I think it'll be interesting. I mean, Satoshi didn't want to be a benevolent dictator. I think Satoshi didn't want to be in a spotlight. There are some people believe Satoshi owns.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space as well. It's a hybrid model, right? Because you do have to trust. For example, let's say I want to invest $1,000 in real estate. Well, I need to trust that actually I'm investing in the real estate and it's not like some scammer coming along and pretending that I am.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the idea, so that's some people call this traditional asset tokenization or something. So taking like real estate assets or something, I think it's a really interesting area. It's sort of different than a lot of the other stuff and it's a little more kind of real world meets crypto world or something than some of the other stuff. But to me, the benefits to have a lot of the benefits of an open network would be realized this way. So you could have like So Harbor has this idea of our tokens or kind of tokens that are that can only be traded under the right they have to check the regulatory status of the counterparty and things like this. But you could imagine getting many of the benefits of an open network where you have sort of a competition among exchanges and data providers and you have sort of global liquidity. And I think that could be, you know, I think it could have a democratizing effect on kind of the ability to raise money and the ability for people to invest in things. And so I generally, I think it's.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To come down to usability, there's this kind of divide between usability and security. And if you want to make, say, your key secure and hold currency in a decentralized way, it turns out that can actually be more difficult than having Coinbase store it. So to me, the answer in this lies in developing better ways for things like key management, but then also just generally better user experience and better usability for those that want to have a more decentralized model. And we're working on it. A lot of us are thinking about it, as Chris mentioned, getting the folks that say maybe we're doing UX at Apple Facebook and coming into this world that can really think through these problems and develop compelling user experiences, I think is going to be a big part of it.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agreed. Awesome question. So, this is something that I certainly struggle with as well, and I think a lot of it actually comes down to some of the issues around usability. So in the world of cryptocurrency, there's a new paradigm where your private keys represent money. And as a result, if somebody were to compromise those keys, well, your money's gone. And the base layer of these protocols are irreversible such that if your money's stolen, you can't just call a bank and say, okay, please give me back my money. Right. And that's part of what makes them so interesting and cool, but there are certainly risks around that as well when it comes to the broader security infrastructure. For example, I've had a variety of friends whose phone numbers have been ported because it turns out the phone cell phone system and the carriers don't have good security in place and then people try to get access to their email and whatnot. By the way, anybody involved in this community, please call your phone provider and put a password on your account. So I think a lot of that is going to be...”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. It is a risk that all of this sort of utopian stuff we're talking about ends up, we end up 15 years from now with the same kind of outcome, in this particular case of Coinbase, so I'm involved with Coinbase. I'm on the board of Coinbase. I will say, I mean, I think they're phenomenal companies doing incredibly well, but they are relatively, I mean, there's a lot of exchanges. There's a lot of things that happen off exchanges. So it's still, you know, I mean, they're a great company and they're doing super well, but it's a very broad space. And I would argue pretty fragmented today. But it's a good point. I mean, I think one thing, there's a lot of discussion in this community around things like governance they talk about, which is the idea essentially let's make sure we get these models right so we don't end up in the same place 15 years from now and then instead of you know markerberg it's whatever vitalik in front of congress or something or satoshi year i don't know you know”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The barrier to entry that in certain other fields where you might have to have a decade or more of experience, we don't have here. So that's part of why I think there is this really massive opportunity.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And hackers and things. And in terms of getting involved, so if folks are encoders and aren't technical, there are actually so many ways to get involved. So, for example, in our community, there are people that help with testing, they help with UI UX feedback, they help with documentation. There are just so many different ways for people to contribute, helping educate others, even just educating yourself. So one really cool thing is in terms of getting involved in this world, There's nobody that has 10 years of quote-unquote blockchain experience because blockchains have not actually been around for 10 years. I mean, the Satoshi White Paper, exactly, except for Satoshi. Satoshi White Paper came out on Halloween in 2008. So we're getting there. We're very close. But the point is, it's actually...”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of great, but yeah, there's a few 90s movies about the net and hackers and things. But for the most part, it's just thing that doesn't, you know, it barely registers, right? I think Netscape at their peak was like 50 million users or something. I mean, it wasn't, I mean, the numbers, like crypto's probably above that right now. I don't know. I mean, the scale now is so different. People expect if you don't have 4 billion smartphones, you're like nothing or something, right? But so I think it's super early. So if, you know, people here are thinking about getting into it. I think it's super early and there's tons of opportunity and it's obviously I think it's going to be a fantastically, I think it's going to be an awesome kind of space.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally agree. I think it's very early. I think people now think that a lot of people kind of remember this revisionist history that the web kind of came out fully. You had YouTube and it was not at all like that for people that are old enough to remember that. It was like this incredibly slow loading thing and it was like, yeah, it's actually funny to go watch movies from the 90s because no one uses the internet because no one had phone nothing. And when they do, it's like, I'm going to go on the internet. And it's like this event and you have these noises come out of the computer. And then they go and they check their AOL email and then they leave. And it's like, it's kind of like the way this world is today, right? I mean, it's like there's a lot of work to do.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I am seeing more interest in building out the infrastructure, but we can't put the cart before the horse. I think a lot of people wanted to build certain apps where the infrastructure wasn't ready yet for them to exist. So now we're seeing people finally realize that and hopefully invest in building the infrastructure to make all of these use cases possible in the future. But like I said, it's still so early that it's definitely not too late to get involved. You will still be on the early side of all of this.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we're in the mid 90s when it comes to internet time, right? So 1995 was a year that Netscape IPO'd and the year that was seen as, say, the web going mainstream. So, you know, there were people using it, but it wasn't like everyone in the world was on the web yet. But it was still, you know, you look at the historical arc in the context, there was still so much left to come. I think a lot of people actually wanted us to be more in the, I don't know, the 2010 realm. And we're just not there yet. And building this stuff takes time, right? I mean, so in terms of the tech we built with Lightning, people are like, oh, why isn't it ready yet for a while?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would also remind folks in terms of narrative, I have learned so much listening to both podcasts and writing that Chris has done and a bunch of the work that Elizabeth has done and interviews she's given too. And so there's a ton of more rich stuff to dig in from both of them, as well as all of our other speakers. Maybe we'll wrap up on one or two points and give you all a chance to ask questions. We started on a historical perspective of a deeper history that's led up to where we are now. Can you help us understand where we are now relative to perhaps what's to come? Is it still really early days? Are we in the infrastructure cycle? Is it overhyped? How should we think about where we are now relative to kind of the potential of the space?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were some great articles from the mid 90s where people wrote the internet will never be a thing, some interesting quotes around so the internet's impact on the economy will be less than that of the fax machine. And I think we're seeing some of that now as well, where, you know, you're always going to have doubters, but there's so much potential and yet we just need time to really build it out.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we have a lot of work to do as a community to kind of get the proper narrative out there. And there is a lot of focus. I mean, it is naturally focused on kind of the some of the negative things and the prices. And look, the tech stuff is complicated. And a lot of it hasn't been realized yet. So you need to talk to reporters and you're like, look, this is what this could do. And it hasn't happened yet. And so I'm very focused on doing what I can to help see those things happen and like what Elizabeth is doing is fantastic. And like if you get out there and we start getting lots of people using Lightning, that will help us change. And that'll be a great case study to change the narrative. So I think that's to me that we're in this kind of weird kind of early phase where we don't have enough things to point to to kind of say, hey, look at this other thing. It's not just about money.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be a female in blah, no, I just want to talk about what I'm building. So that was awesome. And then I think the media likes to focus on the prices. You know, it's like, oh, like Bitcoin is up, Ethereum's up, Bitcoin's down. That is the catchy thing. But the narrative is so much broader and the potential is so much broader. I think it's easy to get caught into this whole price narrative. But to me, for my team, we say we have this saying ignore the noise. We just kind of try to not, you know, look at the bullshit. And the price prices will go up. They'll go down. But the long-term potential of this technology is real. It's here. And so it would be great if people could really talk about the broader vision and less about just prices and get rich quick schemes, but it's hard to sometimes sell the media on that.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see a lot of narratives missing the point. That's why it's so great to be here today. So, for example, in January, the New York Times published a piece about cryptocurrency and how all the men were getting rich on cryptocurrency. And it's a boys club, right? I had spent nearly an hour on the phone with that journalist, and she didn't include anything I said in the article, nor did she mention me. And I actually went on Twitter, of course, you know, as we like to do on crypto Twitter and was like, I'm a busy CEO. I spend 45 minutes on the phone with you and you didn't even include me, and now you've written that it's all boys. So actually that narrative to me is very tired. There are a lot of really amazing women in the cryptocurrency world, and there are just a lot of really amazing women in this space. There was a glamour article, and I never actually thought I'd see the day that I was in Glamour magazine that came out yesterday that profiled nine women. I was one of them in the space. And to me, talking about the work that women are doing is what is needed, not like, what is it like?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we've talked a little bit about the duality of some of these narratives. I mean, crowdfunding is one where there's different perspective and it's all quite nuanced. Are there other media narratives around the space that you think really represent what's going on? Or are there narratives that you feel like are sort of missing the point or any myth that you think is worth debunking?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a restaurant, instead of going to a bank and having some impersonal process, should be funded by the people that live in the neighborhood. I think crowdfunding now can go wrong for sure. And a lot of the ICOs have been like that, or even in traditional crowdfunding, where people order an electronics product that never gets delivered, right? So we need to figure that out as a community. How do you harness that force in a positive way? But I think the idea that you have these sort of gatekeepers that decide on what gets funded, I would love to see that replaced with a different model. And I think crowdfunding is very promising.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm a big fan of crowdfunding in general. I think it's a very powerful thing that has to be done right. So, for example, if you look at Kickstarter, I think crowdfunding works fantastically well in certain categories. So, for example, independent video games and books are great categories where a lot of the contributors are avid fans who know the author, say to take books as an example. Like it just makes so much sense to me that the fans of an author would fund that author and not have to go to a VC or not a VC, you know, we don't fund books usually, but a VC type person. But like, you know, a publisher, a publisher is kind of like a VC, right? Like you have to go to some intermediary who decides. So I love the idea of.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've said publicly there's And from my standpoint as a founder, we chose to actually, we did a normal seed round, which was like contrarian in this world. And we got angel investors in seed funds. And the experience has actually been amazing. All of our investors have been super supportive back, you know, back when there was Bitcoin Winter and the price was like $200. Things were very different than now. But I can see that not everyone has access to those types of connections or investors. And there are We do need new models to fund projects, but they shouldn't be models where founders are able to cash out or they raise way too much money. And in fact, there can be perverse incentives because now there's so much money and they're not actually able to ship a product. One thing that we recently announced are fundraise when we released the beta of Lightning for the main Bitcoin network, the first implementation to be used with real Bitcoin and beta. And people tweeted like, wow, a blockchain company raises a normal...”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And are you, to some extent, these crowd, the ability to crowdfund or do an ICO is a different model than traditional venture funding? And you chose to raise equity. I'd be curious to what extent do you feel like firms will adapt? And we've publicly know that some firms are participating in ICOs. Is that sort of to be feared or embraced? And could you imagine in the future potentially launching a token and doing a crowd sale there? Is it just too early to know how that will all play out?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so my feeling is it's kind of come in different waves. So, in sort of 2012 to 14, there were kind of the more ideologically driven founders, you know, kind of the cipherpunks, et cetera. And then kind of with the rise of Ethereum and this sort of idea that you could have these other kinds of protocols, the types of entrepreneurs became, they're very technical but kind of interested in distributed systems and protocol design. I think there's now a new wave starting. I'm starting to see, which is kind of I've been working at Google or Facebook or some company like this. I moved out to the valley to like do something cool and new. I'm working at X large company and I'm employee 8002 working on ad targeting or whatever. And like I just not, this is not what I signed up for. This is not like the kind of the Wild West, the pioneer, the frontier kind of thing. And I, you know, I've been hacking on whatever, pick your project on the weekend. And this feels new and fresh and fun. And so I get that a lot now.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you've seen Chris on the investment side, the teams that traditionally venture folks pattern match quite a bit, or there's a certain lore about that. Are you seeing the teams that you're backing and that are working in this space? Do they fit the old patterns or to what extent are the teams and companies you're investing in feel like they're from a slightly different mold in this space?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We care much more about what you're capable of doing and being a fast learner. We have folks that dropped out of college. We have folks that have degrees in CS, but for example, to apply for an internship for us, we say, okay, contribute to the open source code. We don't necessarily care about your background. We just want to see what you can do and how you can contribute. And that's actually been an awesome way to get some really talented people that we wouldn't have found otherwise.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then interestingly, in terms of the community, a lot of it reminds me of back in the 90s when I was first getting on the internet. So we have the Slack community for Lightning. We have 2,000 developers and testers on there. And I don't know where the folks are. They have pseudonyms, right? And they, for example, we have one member of our Slack. Her name is Molly, and she tests the Lightning software every day. And she just loves it. Like, this is her passion. And she's like, we know that if something goes wrong, like Molly's going to catch it, right? And we have, I don't know where people are located. You know, they have these pseudonyms and they're all just united around this belief and this passion for the technology. And I think that's really cool. We don't care where you went to school, where you're from, how old you are. There's a 14-year-old in the Bitcoin world. His name is Saleem Rashid. He's found multiple vulnerabilities in various hardware wallets as well. And he's like, I'm just 14, you know. So it just doesn't matter. And then even as a company,”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Projects, you know, this is much more than just sort of your regular kind of level of passion for these things. And a lot of these different cryptocurrencies embody different kind of ideologies. And so there's many more things kind of uniting them. And it's also, you know, I think of it kind of as uniting some of the great powerful things about the internet, which is the ability to create kind of these community sort of affinity groups using kind of social networking and things, but also open knowledge sharing, sort of the open source side. And so you're sort of uniting those two very powerful kind of streams of sort of momentum of the internet and together. And then you're adding onto the dislayer with all these other kinds of interesting technology and money and everything else. And so it definitely is a very powerful mixture and hopefully that'll go in the right direction.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, no, I think for sure. I mean, and by the way, there are pros and cons to this. So you have these sort of tribal wars that go on in the crypto world. It's a lot of drama. Yeah, there's a lot of drama. There's a lot of tribal. That's sort of the negative side. I think the positive side is people are very passionate. And if you just go to like the subreddits or the telegrams or whatever of each of these.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned the passion people hold for this space. In my last chapter, Twitter, where I was leading acquisitions, I would spend all my time with entrepreneurs and I would try to figure out where is the world going, where are the most independent, brilliant technical minds working, and meet those people and try to figure out what they're building. And I would just try to learn and understand. Crypto is fascinating to me partially by how passionate these communities are, as you mentioned. And I've wondered openly, is there something, I think Preti maybe used the phrase earlier, referring to this as a movement. Is there something bigger going on around the globe that if anything living in San Francisco were maybe underexposed to, where people almost feel a sense of identity with this space? And are we going to, in five or ten years, have a bunch of folks coming of age where they conceptualize of their identity in a slightly different, more global manner?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Passionate about. So for my startup, we've raised a normal seed round. And in terms of recruiting, we found that if you get people, you give them ownership in our company, we give people equity, which is so old school of us, that can really get them involved and motivate them. And one thing that I will say I absolutely love about being in this world is people really are so passionate. This is not just something that they do once in a while. It's something they really believe in. And that's what kind of gets me up and going in the morning and gets me excited every day.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm actually an ICO skeptic. I tweet a lot about my skepticism of a lot of what's out there. I see actually some different incentives. So the community, so I'm very involved in the developer communities, and people are actually very motivated by both ideology but also social change, which I really think is amazing. And a lot of the open source communities in the past, we'd seen that people were not contributing for money. They were contributing because they love what they were doing. Now, of course, that excludes people that couldn't afford to contribute otherwise. So I think there's a happy medium that needs to be struck. But there's a world in which, okay, there have been ICOs where on day one the folks involved made, say, tens of millions or more of dollars, and they hadn't even shipped a product. So I would argue we're way too far on the scale. of things. Personally, so in my experience, a lot of the technical community that I work with, they want to work on something they really believe in in a project that they're”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would you mind breaking down? I mean, I think one of the most profound things about this broader movement is the notion of an incentive structure that aligns the people that are doing the early work of a platform. And traditionally, we've seen this in terms of developer ecosystems that are created alongside centralized companies. But in giving an incentive structure where the developer community and also the early adopters can benefit as owners of a broader network, can you break down just a little bit about how that works and what the promise of that is?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, in the last year, you know, if you'd told me that my lift driver on the way over, we were having this fun conversation about Bitcoin. If you had told me that even a year ago, I wouldn't have believed that. But it's gone mainstream, and yet we're still in the early days, and there's still so much.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pay somebody that wrote an article, it could be built in at the browser level. We actually didn't have the technologies to make this possible, and the financial industry didn't build and they didn't innovate. Why do I send a Venmo payment to my friend and it takes three days for it to get to their bank account? That's super inefficient. We can do all sorts of other things on the internet, but it turns out it takes us three days to send money in this country. Other countries, I will say, do have a little bit of a more efficient system. So one thing that I'm really excited about with the technology we're building with Lightning is the ability to have this native transaction layer of the Internet. A way to send and receive money, you know, have a new model for the internet where it doesn't necessarily have to be dependent upon advertising, where artisan creators can be paid by the end users, and also a means for developers to build on top of this. There was no way to build value directly into the internet back then, and now we finally have the possibility to do it. And we are, though, in the early days.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recently, I was quoted as saying we're back in a Bitcoin not blockchain world because back when I was fundraising for my company Lightning Labs, nobody cared about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. People would laugh us away, they wouldn't take meetings with us. Things have changed dramatically in the last really just 12 months. And that is the nature of this type of thing, right? So one of the key components, you know, a lot of folks want to say, oh, blockchains only, but actually when you have the incentive mechanism that is tied to this base layer currency or token, if you will, that actually maintains the decentralization of the network, this part is key. And I think people are finally coming to realize why this is so significant. But from my standpoint, part of what we got, what got me interested in this whole world in the first place, not only the decentralization aspect, but turns out the early creators of the internet envisioned, or the web especially, that there would be a way to pay online. So if you wanted to give like 50 cents to musician who song you listen to,”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's a very positive thing, right? And if open networks can now enjoy the same kind of economic flywheel that for-profit companies have. If you can look at the companies like Twitter and Facebook, one of the reasons they can get so large is they get this feedback loop where they get bigger, they raise money, they generate revenue, they feed it back into R&D, and they have these giant R&D budgets. And so now what's so exciting to me is that the open world now has a similar, potentially a similar economic flywheel and can kind of compete on a level level playing field.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so you alluded to the sort of the ICO craze, and there's a lot of negative elements around this. And some of the press narrative is true that there's sort of this get rich quick aspect. On the flip side, if you look at how Wikipedia every year has to put these banner ads up that sort of ask for money, right? So it's this amazing, wonderful resource, right? I mean, it's anyone in the 4 billion people now have smartphones that can instantly get all this information. And the fact that they have to put a banner ads is just, you know, it's kind of depressing, I think. And then, you know, or you look at, there was a famous bug in SSL called Heartbleed, which is SSL is sort of the main encryption protocol. And it was, you know, it turned out that that bug happened that there was a half a developer working on that project or something. It was woefully underfunded, right? So the flip side of the dark side of all the kind of get rich stuff around crypto is that this is also now finally we have a financing model for these open networks.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chris, on that note, you've mentioned before that part of the promise of crypto is it's sort of this open, the principles of open source software, but with a business model. Can you talk a little bit about app tokens and sort of how that stitches together?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me around technology, distributed software, global groups of technically minded people collaborated in some fashion, and maybe trying to build a more equitable distribution of power. And what is it in our industry? And I spent almost nine years at Twitter and I led many of our acquisitions around the world and saw how much of our industry is actually dictated by access in a small number, relatively small number of people that hold influence. And part of what's exciting to me about crypto is those very ideas are being debated and innovated. And folks are trying to change, I think, in some ways build things that feel like they're more accessible to people all over the world and you don't need to be on just Sandhill Road to fundraise or you don't need to be in Silicon Valley to necessarily build a company.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is one of those conversations. Part of what is fascinated me about crypto is there are so, because it is such a mosaic of a space, there are so many different narratives that coexist in crypto for which there is a community and there is truth depending upon what you're interested in. And so there's a narrative around crypto that's very money centric, that's very get rich quick. And you may have seen that in press coverage of people who are now crypto semi-millionaires and people on the cover of Forbes and whatnot. And there's truth to that narrative. But that conversation to me is appealing to some and maybe obnoxious to others. And then there's a narrative around a political ideology, part libertarian, part anarchist, and depending upon your views, that might be inviting or it might be sort of something that doesn't appeal to you. But then there's also a narrative in crypto, and this is one I feel like you both have been incredible educators.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and the early creators of the internet, and there were a lot of utopians, folks that were looking at this as a utopia back in the day, envisioned that the internet would be this democratizing force. I was and am one of them, but I think what we've seen is this evolution of centralization that has meant that there are a whole lot of gains that are concentrated in a very few number of people. So the cryptocurrency movement really is a reaction in many ways to that, part of why I got so interested in it was I saw the power of open decentralized protocols. I didn't want all the power to be in the hands of a very small few. And I really do see this as a new opportunity. This is in a way a means to make up for the centralization that occurred, say, in the last decade or two. And we can kind of flip the switch and go the other way around. And that's part of what gets me so excited about this.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's weird because on the one hand, yes, open source is so dominant and these open protocols are so dominant, yet these large companies have managed to kind of take subordinate those open technologies. And so to me, a lot of the crypto movement is a reaction to that. And it's interesting that a lot of it is coming, for example, out of places like Europe and Asia. And actually it's not really centered in Silicon Valley. And I think that's partly why is it's kind of a counter movement to what's happened.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These networks are very important, right? I mean, they affect elections, they affect people's businesses. I mean, the media talk to people in the media business and how it's affected them. And I think we kind of stumbled into this situation without realizing it maybe as a community and as a world or whatever these very important networks are governed in these kind of opaque ways that we don't fully understand.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that sort of irony, right, with it, so the internet is, you know, the original internet is designed with and governed by these decentralized protocols like TCPIP and HTTP and H. And these have become massive, right? I mean, there's tens of billions of IP connected devices. And open source, as I mentioned before, is massive yet. We live in a time where I think we have probably the greatest concentration of power on the internet that, I mean, or in the technology world since probably Microsoft at its peak in the 90s. And that's Google Apple, Facebook, Amazon companies like that. And we see the issues, you see it in the press, right? You see these issues around who controls, how are these algorithms controlled, who decides this sort of de-platforming, demonetization. You hear these kinds of debates, like who, you know, what's the process by which we govern these networks? I think people are starting to realize.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Chris, can you elaborate a little bit on what historically has the open source software movement historically has had this massive following and a distributed groups of people all over the world have been collaborating to build software together? But if you look at our current internet landscape, like how has that group, can you just talk us through the transition of that group and what sort of a missing and how crypto put some of those pieces together in a different way now?”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? There was also some other thing that happened that year. And this pseudonymous individual or group of individuals named Satoshi Nakamoto releases paper to the world to basically no fanfare. Nobody cared. Satoshi sent this paper to a mailing list and the response was nobody really noticed a few days later somebody responded actually saying that one of the biggest issues could be scalability, which is what my startup is working on. But to me, it's really fascinating and interesting how Satoshi and those that were involved early on were influenced and they really came out of the cypherpunk movement. And if I had to bet, I think those folks were on these mailing lists early back in the day and they were working with that community as well. It's amazing how things have changed. First, nobody cares and then everyone cares and maybe nobody will care again and so on and so forth.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Individual freedom. So there was this movement for this freedom-oriented cypherpunk culture, but then there was actually this counter movement, which was the US government. So in the 90s, the U.S. government actually banned the exporting of strong cryptography. Does anybody remember having to download Netscape and selecting whether you were in the US or non-US? Does anybody? Right? And that was because you actually could not export this cryptography under U.S. law. So if you're outside of the US, you could not have stronger cryptography, so you couldn't have better privacy and better technology. So the Cypherpunk movement was really fighting against this. Ultimately, luckily, they prevailed and they won. And Bitcoin and cryptocurrency more broadly really evolved out of that perspective. So along comes the year 2008, a major event in the history of the global financial world occurred. What was it? Bitcoin white paper.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, thanks for being here. This is great to see everybody here in the audience and also great to see like 80 85% women here. So awesome. So with Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency movement, a lot of this resulted, again, from the 80s, interestingly. I actually was recently looking into this and reading some of the historical's perspective. And it's pretty amazing. If you read some of the writings of people from the late 80s and early 90s, they sound so applicable today. You would not have guessed that they were written back in the day. So there was this movement called the Cypherpunk movement. And the goal of the movement was to use the power of cryptography, known as crypto, that's what it used to be called. We're actually fighting a battle on our team because we still think crypto means cryptography in the technical world, but it has gained other meanings. And the perspective was that the power of this new type of technology in cryptography could enable people to have greater privacy. It could be empowering. And it enabled...”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of ways as similar to this, it actually sort of started a little bit, I wouldn't say right wing, but a little kind of libertarian and cypherpunk kind of thing, which Elizabeth can talk about. And so I think that, and it kind of got branded that way. And a lot of people still think of it that way. But I think of it in the same way that the open source movement kind of morphed into a tech movement, I think that's what's happening here and it's becoming much more, I mean, there's still these political elements and it's a very complicated nuance. I see it as a movement towards a new way to build digital services that are owned and operated by communities as opposed to owned and operated by a private company. And that's a very big general idea. And it's a sort of a big tent that can include lots of different political orientations and technology orientations and other kinds of things like that.”
2018-07-16 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Decentralization and Crypto, the Big Picture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source