Podcast notes: Balaji’s $1M bet on Bitcoin and the BitSignal (Bankless podcast) – “America is new Argentina”

Put up the BitSignal – pay $1M to 1000 contributors for memes and stories
Made public bet that BTC will be worth $1M USD in 90 days times

“This is the crisis Bitcoin was built for”

Sounding covid alarm in January 2020, covid hit (the US) in March

On covid
Mental chessboard in his head, if X happens, then Y, Z, etc will happen
Viruses are exponential
Background in genomics

Same frame of mind now – “we’re in the fiat crisis”
All the centralization and opacity of fiat – it’s all blowing up
Will have wrenching transition to crypto economy

RSA: “fiat fire alarm that you’re pulling”, “the all at once moment”

Exact state of world in 90 days will be very different
Not bet on Bitcoin price but on falling value of US dollar

Today USD is no longer too big to fail – there’s RMB, there’s bitcoin

Financial engineering led to house of cards, “the money is gone”
If today, all depositors withdrew money, banks can’t liquidate assets to give them enough dollars

Time bomb was growing, regulators were aware of it

“Uncle Sam Bankman Fried”

Reality: Fed Reserve gave guidance to banks to buy certain assets that then dropped in value (due to rate hikes)
Fed gets lagging data, changes single parameter, highly political process
“Fed bankrupted the banks”

“There are 333 banks where the money is gone”
Also foreign banks who bought US treasuries – global Central Banks using emergency USD swap lines
These banks’ insolvency intentionally hidden in a footnote

Now the can can’t be kicked
Holding a flaming bag of dog poop
Every crisis powers them up – failures mean they get bigger – “more failure more funding”

Do you have an alternative regulator? Don’t you want one that will tell you if your money is still there?

New era, final era – can’t hike rates anymore – printing tons of money to give to banks through BTFP, swap lines
Initially said $25B injection, now it’s up to $2T, it will effectively be infinite

All the small banks, tech banks, will get wrecked
Big banks w/ Fed help positioned as saviors – “both arsonists and firefighter”
At end, will only have 4 giant banks in US, govt rolls out CBDC – now “too big to fail banks” become “too big to escape banks” – government now has control

On other side of this – bitcoin is gold, ethereum is the financial system
Lot of people will be converted overnight into bitcoin maximalism, will be bitcoin jurisdictions

Bitcoin is ONLY thing that Fed does not directly or indirectly administer
Tradfi – Fed has root access – can stop or delist any financial product (except bitcoin / crypto)
One honest signal that they can’t fully fake is Bitcoin – which is an expression of peoples’ desire to exit the (existing financial) system
Thus Operation Chokepoint / fog of war – kill the crypto connected banks like Signature, Silvergate

Lot of fiat banks will go to zero, or become like fiat flytraps

2008 Financial crisis
Rest of world paid for it through inflation, food price spikes
Democrats effectively taxed Republicans, and foreign dollar holders, to pay for the bailout
“Cost was shunted to the invisible”

Foundational macro view is a little inflation is good, deflation is very bad
Bitcoin’s view is deflation is good if caused by Moore’s Law (technology making things cheaper), even a little inflation is bad
American Keynesianism is bad, just like Soviet economics, but it’s just less bad

David: “Bitcoin during times of war, Ethereum during times of peace”

Bitcoin will be protected by enough governments, bitcoin is well understood

“Final digital devaluation of the dollar is coming”

This is not the make money time – everyone will be a lot poorer soon
“America is new Argentina” is not a bad mental model
Dollar holder is bag holder

Many countries (like India) will become gold backed after this

David: Ray Dalio’s macro cycles, 4th turning, all lining up
There are only two banks – Fed Reserve, and Bitcoin

Bitcoin is Schelling point

Hyperbitcoinization is collapse of all fiat currencies against bitcoin
Speed of transition will be shocking, even to Bitcoin maximalists
Most empire transitions happen gradually – eg, Britain > America
Internet is next America

Powell has turned America into Argentina
People will learn you can’t trust the state

Important to understand severity of situation, take calm conscious steps to insure yourself against it
Americans are running old scripts – Powell is doing 80s formula of Volcker hiking rates

Lot of countries that trusted Fed – holding a lot of Treasuries, US dollars – the money is gone

(US citizens) paid for all the regulation but got none of the protection

Hiding bank insolvency in a footnote – it’s a corrupt regime, it’s a betrayal

Russia and China will be unleashed
Taiwan could be captured without a shot

Two Degens crypto podcast – latest episode with Steven from PressStart Capital

Hi, I’ve been recording podcast episodes 1-2x a week with my cohost George (crypto OG, started WeTrust and CitaDAO), and in the latest episode we invited our friend Steven to discuss web3 gaming, state of the market, AI, and a grab bag of miscellany.

Podcast website is here.

Do have a listen:

Let me know what you think. Still a long way to go to improve our comfort level and my skills as a moderator (which is totally the opposite of my ADD-ness), but we’re enjoying it and we have a lot planned!

Podcast notes – Solana with founder Anatoly Yakovenko – Bankless: $20M valuation for Solana at seed round “was ludicrous”

Guest: Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana founder
Hosts: Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman

2017 – was following crypto, wanted to build a faster crypto miner
Family left Soviet Union, saw the devastation of a bad currency and economy

Ethereum demonstrated an application platform

Qualcomm, Perl engineer who helped build platform for all those original mobile games

Mining crypto while building deep learning hardware
Had a eureka moment – encode passage of time as a data structure
At that time, it existed as a “verifiable delay function”
Quit job, met Raj Gokal
Raised $3M in seed, network price at that time was $20M – “thought it was ludicrous” – included Multicoin
5 cofounders, colleagues from Qualcomm
Built single node – was doing 100K+ TPS – prove potential of network
Raised $14M Series A in the “last vapors” of the 2017-2018 market
Competitors during that time were raising $100M+ (eg, Hashgraph)

Censorship resistance is like a communication channel – it guarantees delivery

Wireless protocols create a schedule – from X time to Y time, A gets to talk, then B gets to talk, etc
Very ordered and structured, gets you 100% utilization

Tendermint – 100 validators – each has 1 vote, there’s a known block producer who proposes a block, 2/3 vote on a block

Hired a lot of coworkers from Qualcomm who he worked with for 10 years

Solana thesis – smart contracts are good for finance, and finance depends on info propagating as fast as possible around the world
Solana data can move as fast as a piece of news travels

Currently ETH validators have same bandwidth requirements
With sharding the requirements will be reduced

Trustlessness comes from full nodes that can validate

Bitcoin and Ethereum see themselves as money – what about Solana?
Store of Value is a social construct, a meme, and important not to be tied to a sovereign (a nation)
The function of a token is to prevent spam

In PoS, once all full nodes have finalized, you can’t go back – you can only fork – which is a socially messy process

Store of Value that is awesome can be built on Solana, that can surpass bitcoin

How to bootstrap an ecosystem without piggybacking off Ethereum – was a huge unknown when Solana started

2020 – had 9-10 months of cash left, market crashed, thought they might be done

It was Solana’s second hackathon (Break Point) where he really believed they had something
Quality of builders went up, attendees went up

Solana was worth ~$100M at network launch

Thinks VC branding is dumb – most of the “crypto VCs” in last cycle were simply Ethereum ICO investors

Alameda’s balance sheet leak was first time Anatoly learned about the troubles

Sam had supported Solana a lot – especially saying they’d build Serum on Solana drove a lot of defi and builder interest

Bear market is a purge

Bitcoin supporters said Ethereum was full of mercenaries in early days — same criticism that Ethereum supporters had of Solana

“Getting through this phase sucks for sure”

NFT community is very thriving — second to Ethereum – very proud of it

Exhausted by negative news — want to see wins, see people building cool shit

David: Solana is one of only blockchains after Ethereum that has a second client (Firedancer + Jump)
Anatoly: you’re trading liveness for safety; Ethereum’s goal is 4 clients (can maintain liveness if 1 client goes down)

Still focused on monolithic chain with no sharding

Innovation in next 12-18 mos will probably be more than everything that’s come before in crypto

“Pretty sure” Solana can do more TPS than all ETH L2s combined

SBF’s planned congressional testimony was wild: “I am, and for most of my adult life have been, sad”

Just sharing a few memorable excerpts below. Full testimony here.

b) In addition to being false, the claims do not make sense to me. Alameda Research’s own insolvency was triggered by a market crash, which in turn triggered FTX’s insolvency; it would have been absurd to create a market crash in order to take out 3AC, and then in turn bankrupt my own businesses.

7) Various claims that I created a hard-partying culture at FTX
a) Our ‘parties’ were mostly dinner and board games
b) I didn’t have my first drink until I was 21, and to my knowledge have never been drunk

b) I have a prescription for Emsam, and have for roughly a decade. I use it, daily, for its only on-label use as an antidepressant. It is not generally the case that people are expected to talk about their private medical conditions, but enough paparazzi have snapped photos of my belongings and theorized about it online that I guess I have no choice.

On Twitter, CZ claimed that “we decided to pull out as an investor” in a thread chalk full of lies.
a) In fact, I reached out to CZ in 2021 to initiate discussions about buying them out of their stake in FTX.
b) I initiated these discussions because, among other things, it was becoming increasingly difficult for FTX to operate with CZ as a significant equity owner. CZ was not cooperative in sending his KYC information to regulators that we were applying for licenses with.

c) The last few months have been difficult enough for everyone that it feels unremarkable to me, in comparison, that I need to put on the official Congressional Record that I am, and for most of my adult life have been, sad.

Podcast notes – Nick Johnson, ENS lead dev – Bell Curve podcast

Guest: Nick Johnson, ENS lead dev
Kiwi; Lived in New Zealand, Ireland, the UK

Goal never was to launch DAO, goal was maximally achievable decentralization — at that time there was only “The DAO” and not a lot of examples or playbook

Launched purely as governance mechanism – what to do with funds raised from registration fees?

Started with generous ETH Foundation grant

ENS is public good, non profit, goal is to leave as much value behind for users as possible

Believes protocols should all be public goods – things like ETH, L2, infrastructure
“If you want people to innovate on your platform then your platform should be open”
Makes exception for apps eg, DeFi, DEXes

Grew up with internet in 90s – open governance at the time, thing that everyone can improve on, left big impression on him

In 90s AOL didn’t succeed because it was walled garden, too much friction, extracting value that wasn’t re-invested in ecosystem

Attitude in web3 that working in nonprofit / charity gets paid badly and need sacrifice — totally reasonable to pay market rate

ENS token
-best tool we had available, but have shortcomings – eg, tendency to plutocracy
-intentionally launched as governance token, not a profit-accruing token
-wrote ENS Constitution explicitly states that revenue will not return to token holders – instead used to re-invest in ecosystem

ENS didn’t launch as a DAO – felt DAO ecosystem, tooling, examples weren’t there
What changed – use of OpenZeppelin contracts; human control of ENS had been reduced

Can be frustrating to run DAO – differing visions

Lots of parallels to corporate governance, but built more like a co-op than a for-profit
Delegation is still necessary – you don’t want token holders voting on every single decision

What if VCs buy a lot of tokens?
“Probably our biggest risk”
Defenses are social (lots of tokens given to long-term contributors, core team) and financial (would need to spend too much relative to value of $ in treasury)
“Constitution as friction mechanism”

ENS Labs is centralized, get budget and is “hired” by DAO
Hope to see other development orgs funded to help ENS (besides ENS Labs)

Quadratic voting is elegant but only works if you can solve Sybil problem (prove it’s a real human, not bots)
Imagine a good ID system, can still offer $50 to stranger on street to use their ID

Voting escrow tokens (lock tokens to get more weight or just participate in voting) – provides way to show long-term commitment to organization

Tough to design token economic / voting systems that can’t be gamed

Cares about financial privacy
KYC doesn’t reduce money laundering but does reduce financial privacy
Tornado Cash is great example – the devs actually built in compliance mechanisms – but OFAC / Dutch prosecutors ignored that and still charged them with money laundering

Optimism is public benefit corp – very encouraging
More skeptical of StarkNet (raised a lot of VC)

Just share the code, even if its messy – so many benefits from open source

Need more DAO tooling for day to day governance, a unified platform
Helpful to have OpenZeppelin’s version of the governor contractor – based on Compound’s – ENS DAO was one of first to use it

Will see more professional DAO delegates

What excites him
see DAO move to long-term vision, setup an endowment to last 50-100 years
-integrating with DNS
-offchain names – names w/o reg fees
-happy to see Ethereum hasn’t fallen into trap that Bitcoin did which resists any change

DAO provided meaningful outlet for community to contribute eg, small grants program
“Giving them permission to be involved”

Often low participation is because people have selected themselves out of it – you don’t have to be prominent to make a contribution