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Nick Szabo

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2017-06-04
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2017-06-04
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  1. “A lot of that just belongs on the blockchain. I don't think you're going to have bankers in Bermuda doing this 20 years from now.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Dry space or from the real world into computers to have them do these things. You can see the insurance markets being completely overhauled by blockchain computers. And insurance is a huge industry.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “In prediction markets are people can actually make predictions and get paid if their predictions are correct or lose money if their predictions are wrong. And then these prediction markets can also serve as arbiters of truth and pricing into these smart contracts. So for example, in Nick's case, Nick's example, you tie in directly to the hotel's books, the hotel has lost revenue, and so you know whether or not to pay the hotel. But if there's a flood, I want to say, was the hotel in the affected area? Was the hotel itself affected? You need now what's called an oracle. You need someone who's basically going to go in there and say, like, yes, this happened. No, they didn't. And prediction markets through very sophisticated engineering, which I think is beyond the scope of this conversation, basically try and pay that person for telling the truth in a reliable way. And so you can use that to cross the divide between the wet space and”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, I mean, so you could have people loaning each other money or creating credit instruments or engaging in prediction markets and things like that.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, I think just talking about blockchains in general, so we started with Bitcoin, the blockchain, which is around transferring money. There's Ethereum blockchain and others like it, which are about computation and running very slow but very trust-minimized reliable contracts. What other uses can you see for blockchains coming up that you think, maybe a little far-fetched, maybe 10 years out, but what's the possibility space?”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Acting in self-interest who are going to secure that the scarcity of that money and hopefully their tax is going to be a lot lower.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Yeah, if tomorrow we all believe that the US dollars is a green piece of paper and I can't eat it, I can't do anything with it. Or if aliens came and took over the world and we offered them little green pieces of paper, they're just using to start a bonfire or something, right? So the money is just a concept. And we have to agree on what that scarce element is. And today, that scarcity is enforced by governments with guns and central banks, and it breaks down national borders. And the people who secure that money for you take a huge tax, roughly a third of the economy in exchange for it. And eventually it will be a distributed network of”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So that is a process. And eventually, you'll be able to use Bitcoin without knowing anything about it, just like you can use US dollars without knowing how the federal reserve open market committee works and does lending and issues treasury bills and all that stuff. There's only a few geeks who need to know that in the world of finance. And you can just use money like it's money.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “No, of course not. The challenge for the industry is like today, Bitcoin has all these advantages over gold. It's more easily transmissible, it's more subdivisible, it's more easily stored, it can be communicated by computers. But to the average person, that means nothing. All they need to, what they need to experience is they need to receive some Bitcoin in a transaction and then send some Bitcoin transaction, had that experience be so much better than every other experience they've had with money or with gold. And the tools just aren't there yet. Like right now, securing your Bitcoin for yourself is still difficult. The hardware wallets are getting better, but it's still kind of a nightmare. So I think the industry still has a decade of work to do to make cryptocurrencies live up to their potential. And the idea space is so large. There are all these companies working on it. But every year it gets a little easier to use. It has a few more use cases. It gets a little easier to store. And the smart contracts that are built on it become a little more interesting.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Yeah, one of the problems and opportunities here is that going back to that earlier thing, it's about money being the bubble that never pops. Bitcoin is kind of a Ponzi scheme that starts with smart people. So the smartest people understand it first, then they sell it to the people who need the cryptography explained to them, like me. And then we sell it to the people who need it at the next level down. And the whole thing could pop and end badly. So I'm not saying go put all your money in Bitcoin. But I think to understand blockchain computer, you sort of have to get into the math and the code and the hard stuff. But if you wait to figure it out by the time everyone can figure it out with the same tools, it'll kind of be too late from an investment or earning perspective.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “He's a guy who created, he's a lead developer on Ethereum. He's actually an interesting guy, young prodigy, probably like 20 or 21 now, started when he was 18. Absolutely brilliant”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yeah, you're an interesting one because you combine law and computer science to do unusual things. And what you're basically saying is you can combine traditional finance and now computer science to do unusual things. And somewhere in that intersection set, you can take a process that's entirely paper and move the part of it that belongs on the blockchain, on the blockchain while plugging in the paper part”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Words, if you're connecting your smart contract to the real world, you need to know what happened in the real world to decide whether or not to execute your smart.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Yeah, I mean, this is, so now I think we've done a lot of backgrounding, and I think what people really want to hear from Nick about is a little bit more of the advanced stuff, right? Because you did Bitcoin, you did smart contracts. So they kind of want to know where you think the future is headed. And I know the future is impossible to predict. And again, it's not investment advice, but very generically, what platforms are you most excited about? Where would you spend your time if you were like a young, fresh person walking into this space?”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “I think it just crossed like eight or nine billion today. The market caps are fuzzy because if you calculate it properly based on the future issues of the coin, it might actually be approaching Bitcoin's market cap. It might be in the 20 billion range once you take inflation into account.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “It's a much more flexible computer, so you can talk to it in many, many more ways. You can inject bad code in, you can hack it in many, many more ways.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I think Bitcoin itself may suffer because it has governance issues. And another currency like we should talk about Ethereum and some of the others that are coming up might take its place. But the idea that blockchain computers are going to go away is ridiculous. That's like saying the internet's going to go away. It's just too fundamental of a technology. Barring a total mathematical breakthrough that obsoletes all encryption, which would also be the end of the commercial internet as we know it, I think that some kind of blockchain computer will dominate currency, store of value, contract law, and any kind of financial instrument, prediction markets, all kinds of things in the future. So to my kids, they will choose electronic gold. They will choose Bitcold and its successors over real gold”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Yeah. So, I mean, there's a finite number of Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is electronic gold. There is a generation of kids who will grow up that as long as they've been alive. Like my son, when he's older, as long as he's been alive, there will have been gold and there will have been Bitcoin.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Catastrophic story. Oh, sure. There's stories of people with digging through garbage dumps with bulldozers trying to find that old computer which they threw out, which had 10,000 Bitcoin on it.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Or you're trying to defend it, you're trying to hide it from hackers. You come up with some really elaborate scheme on how to secure it, and then you lose it. Or people have lost the computer that it was on, you know.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yeah, they definitely are a store of value because Bitcoin's only going to be 21 million ever. The way the protocol is designed, you can't create a single one more. And a bunch have been lost. Because they're hard to secure.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Yeah, when the Fed wants to distribute currency, they give it to the banks. And guess what? The banks have sticky fingers and then they allocate it out to the rest of us very sparingly. And the new bankers are the miners, the new Fed”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I would not be thinking about going into investment banking right now because a lot of that job is going to be automated, commercial banking automated. You know, the bankers were the miners of the last generation. They got paid in the currency to secure the currency. So when the Fed wants to...”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Just like the internet took out Hollywood with Netflix and Spotify, and it took out newspapers with publishing and Twitter and Facebook. And it's taken out all kinds of industries. The internet is going to fundamentally change and possibly take out the finance industry as we know it. And the new finance industry is going to settle wherever the home of innovation is for smart contracts and cryptocurrency. This is my belief, obviously, not investment advice. But I think this is Silicon Valley's replacement of a lot of the infrastructure of finance. And so if New York chooses to drive that out, then New York will no longer be the center of finance. Every time I got to New York, I'm actually highly entertained because I see all these huge towers, I see all these peoples in suits, and I know that 90% of them will be obsolete within 20 years.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “It's already happened to some extent. A lot of the ICOs that are happening are happening out of Switzerland or Gibraltar, those teams are leaving the US, actually, because especially a places like New York have been very heavy-handed in their regulations. So you're just driving out innovation.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “He was so subtle. I didn't even know how to caught on to him. But yeah, so. I don't think governments can really shut it down. Not only that, but any government that really embraces Bitcoin or any of these cryptocurrencies doesn't have to be Bitcoin. They could even kind of start up a new one if they wanted to, is just going to benefit so much from really owning the money that's native to the internet. I call Bitcoin the Internet of Money because it's really native to how code works. So if you really want to future proof yourself, it's like, imagine if the US cracked down on it and said no more cryptocurrencies. That would be saying no more HTTP, right? And the country that did adopt HTTP and by the way, this is the HTTP of money would end up so much better off that you'd just be shooting yourself in the head. So I think smart people, smart money in the US already recognizes that. And so it's seeping up into the government where they're figuring out like, yeah, we could be draconian about this. We'll just drive it out of the country.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “They'll drop helicopters in your house in New Zealand. Ask him.com for violating copyright law, even if you've never set foot in the US”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Today, you do that through an exchange. There's also sort of local meetups. There's like these sites like local Bitcoins and there's a few others. There's a big one coming up in China now where you can just sort of coordinate a meetup with somebody in a dark alley and you exchange cash for Bitcoin. So people can fall back to that and the volume on those kinds of distributed exchanges has gone up a lot. If you look at BitTorrent, which is the file sharing technology, which accounts for like a ridiculous amount of internet traffic Bram Cohen invented it, that thing on a given day can account for being a quarter to half of internet traffic. And you can bet the governments have been trying to shut that down because right now the governments are overzealous and nothing in so much as enforcing copyright law. I mean, you want to drive, you know, you want to drop the full weight of the federal government on you. You either engage in terrorist activity or you violate copyright law. They're like roughly equivalent.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “In a way, I think you had a definition of social scalability in your article. It's not precise, but close enough where you basically said one way to estimate how socially scalable a technology is, is by how many people can use it. And when it comes to cash today, like the US dollar, it's accepted probably the most widely accepted currency in the world, but we're still talking hundreds of millions to maybe a billion people can really use it in their everyday life, whereas Bitcoin, in theory, when it's adopted, can be used by anyone to pay anyone as long as you're connected to the internet and everyone's connecting to the internet. It scales better.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Exactly. Yeah, the 150 people done bar numbers. So you're basically trading computational scalability for social scalability.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Stepping back for a second, what separates humans from other animals is that we are social across genetic boundaries. So even Neanderthals, you can have 150 Neanderthals on a battlefield because they're all genetically related, but you can have 5,000 Homo sapiens on a battlefield because they believe in the abstract idea of Christianity. And they can communicate that story to each other. Right. And so Bitcoin enables a form of social scalability where it allows now humans who don't know each other, who don't trust each other, who may never see each other again and don't even reveal their identities or locations to each other, to still transact securely, not just with money, but also with contracts, any complex logic they can dream up that they can code up, they can do it through this very slow and very inefficient computer.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “That's the luminary. They cited your social scalability article. And so the social scalability argument, I thought, is a really powerful one. I don't know if you want to try and summarize that for the listeners.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “And go to proof of stake or a few other kind of ideas that have been thrown around. And then Nick just recently wrote this brilliant piece on social scalability. And by the way, you've got a doctorate recently, an honorary doctorate.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Basically, one computation, one vote is the way to think about it. And actually, one of the problems that people have with the Bitcoin network is designed. So basically Bitcoin, you have all these computers around the world that are joining together to create this shared blockchain computer. They get votes in proportion to how much CPU power they're allocating. They vote on what the valid transactions are that then go into this ledger and get sealed in the amber of the blockchain. And the whole system kind of works. But a naive person looking from the outside, as you said, like the hippies coming to blockchains, one of their first objections is you're wasting all this computer power. You're wasting all this energy. You're wasting all this network resources because they're constantly chatting with each other network. These computers are broadcasting packets to each other all the time. And they just say it's wasteful. And I think that was an argument that a lot of people make. And even I kind of fell for that one where I was like, okay, you know, eventually someone will come up with a better solution than proof of work.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “And so, whoever created Bitcoin, probably a group because it looks like a very sophisticated effort, did it pseudonymously or anonymously. And the name that they used was Satoshi Nakamoto.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Yeah, whoever created Bitcoin obviously built on Nick's work, built on Hal Finney's work. There were a couple of great computer scientists who did this work. But whoever actually built the working implementation, because I think, Nick, you had the theory of Bitcoin, but you're not a serious enough programmer to create Bitcoin.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “So, you basically have puzzles to solve. The Bitcoin network, the algorithms give the computers puzzles to solve if the computers solve the puzzles, they can prove that, yes, I put economic value, time, heat, power, computation into solving this problem. So now I get a vote on what the ledger looks like and I get a chance to be paid in coin. So this is what the miners do. The miners do the work to secure the network using computers. They provide that proof to the network. The network pays them in new coins that it's minting.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Proof of work is basically you have to have people here who are basically laying down the layer of amber on the fly, right? And so they have to basically commit resources to do it. It has to be costly to do that. You need scarcity in the system, right? So that scarcity is created by the costliness of the computing power that you throw at it. So basically the more computer power you're willing to throw at the Bitcoin network, the more seriously the Bitcoin network takes your vote. And we have to know your computing power is dedicated to the Bitcoin network. It's not off surfing the internet or doing something else. So you have to commit it to doing work just for the Bitcoin.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Right, fiat currency is just a paper that's backed by nothing. So before it was shells, then we went to gold, then we went to gold-backed paper, and now we're down to just paper.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Bitcoin fundamentally what's going on. So Nick first created bit gold, right? Do you want to talk about what the innovation in bit gold was or how the bit gold system worked? And then we can layer on Bitcoin on sure.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Basically, changing that ledger, right? It's like you can't change the ledger. The beauty is the fly and amber analogy, the great one, because once you and I have done a transaction, the network has agreed on the transaction, going back and doing it is nearly impossible. But while that amber is being laid down, there can still be some mischief. So one of the big misconceptions of Bitcoin is that, well, if 51% of the computers in the network, which are run by people called miners, they're called miners. This is the old announcement, they're digging for gold. So they're digging for Bitcoin. But really what they're doing is they're laying down that amber. If 51% of these people collude, then does that mean they can go back and change the ledger? No, they can't change the existing ledger, but they can cause mischief with the current transactions or the current layer that's being laid down. It's one of the big misconceptions. So sorry to interrupt.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Incentives are everything. It's like Charlie Munger says if you can be working on incentives, don't work on anything else. And it's, you know, going back to Bitcoin, the Bitcoin design for a second, Bitcoin is brilliantly designed because the underlying game theory and incentives.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Yeah, I think the worst Twitter is Trump Twitter, where everyone's getting outraged over politics all the time. But the second worst Twitter right now is blockchain Twitter, where you will have PhDs from Cornell and University of Maryland and all kinds of credential places literally calling each other horrific names online, casting aspersions on other people's moral character, calling them trolls, dragging them through the mud. And they each have their little local tribal mob behind them over things like the block size debate, which as Nick says, you know, it's actually in the parameter settings in a nuclear reactor.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Yeah, one of the problems with Bitcoin is that because a lot of people hold a little bit of Bitcoin, everyone has a financial incentive and they're all talking their own book and they get really emotional about it. Nick had this great tweet that I liked said, best way to destroy your investment in Bitcoin is to gather an internet mob to go and redesign Bitcoin. And that's a little bit of what's happening right now.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “So the debate is should we keep allowing more and more transactions? Because what if people, everyone wants to buy a Starbucks using their Bitcoin? Or should we only limited to very high value transactions and instead preserve the diversity of people who can run the code?”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “At a very simple level, if every computer is throwing a copy of every transaction. Then you can't have an infinite number of transactions because the computer will explode. And so, what you do is if you keep increasing the number of transactions too quickly, then you only allow a smaller and smaller shrinking set of computers to run the code, which reduces who's actually in charge of security. Before you might have had a million computers, then you're down to 100,000 big computers. Then there's only a few thousand large players, then eventually down to five people who can store the entire history. And then you're basically back to central banks.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Right. Now there's a big train development in China that causes political change that causes the futures market in China to shift, that causes the US stock market to go down, right? Computers are getting better and better at absorbing that information, extrapolating out the consequences. And so the markets are becoming more and more volatile. So over time, we should see bubbles form faster, pop more quickly. And I think they'll fall into a power law distribution. Like there'll be ones that'll be really large. There'll be ones that'll be really small. But this idea that the future is going to be very smooth and linear and predictable is a human illusion.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “If I believe that you're going to accept this as money, then I want to put more money in and you want to put more money and the network effect sort of creates a bubble. And as Nick said, the future is in an uncertain place. So sometimes we'll be wrong or we'll have to step back. There'll be a little bit of a releasing of that energy. I read something a couple of years back that showed that as the stock market is becoming more efficient, it's actually becoming more volatile. It's not becoming less volatile, it's becoming more volatile because it's reacting faster and faster to information changes.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Especially these are reflexive industries where the notion of reflexivity is like my prediction alone changes the potential outcome. And the extreme example is like a prediction market predicting the death of somebody. If there's enough money on that, it turns into an assassination market. So bubbles are inherently, I think, just a part of any system that involves network effects. If I think, and money is the ultimate network effect, I accept US dollars as money because you accept US dollars as money and so on. If we all believe that, if we all believe tomorrow the tulips were valuable, again, we'd be trading in tulips.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “But most of the times, it's really just the developers have an incentive to create a token bolt it on and try and capture the value. But it's an interesting model for funding open source software and protocols that didn't really exist before.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT