Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, it's Michael.
Speaker: Welcome to Keyword Crypto.
Speaker: This week I interview John from ChiaLinks and NanoLinks.
Speaker: And there are a couple weird edits.
Speaker: That's just because his dog was barking and then I had some sirens going on.
Speaker: So if the jump feels weird, that's why we just cut that out.
Speaker: Other than that, there are zero edits because, you know, I don't like to edit.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: Enjoy the show.
Speaker: Ping me if you want to hear anybody else in particular or if you want to come on the show and chat.
Speaker: That's what John did.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Enjoy the show.
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to keyword crypto.
Speaker: This is Michael.
Speaker: I have a special guest today, John from ChiaLinks, and he wanted to talk about a couple of things after I roasted Chia a couple of years ago or a year ago.
Speaker: He wanted to come on and talk about it because he's also a nano fan.
Speaker: So we interact in the nano world a little bit.
Speaker: Welcome, John.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks, Michael.
Speaker: I wouldn't call it roasting.
Speaker: I think I re-listened to that episode.
Speaker: I think you're completely fair.
Speaker: I think given your perspective and your experience.
Speaker: I think it was a very fair assessment of Chia, but I am interested in coming on and dispelling any misconceptions and really giving it a fair introduction.
Speaker: Well, I appreciate the compliment.
Speaker: I'm always open for those.
Speaker: So why don't you introduce yourself and, or, you know, not introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be ChiaLynx and was also Nanolynx?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I can give you the full story there.
Speaker: So I got into crypto in 2012.
Speaker: So like pretty early on as a I was a Bitcoin maxi.
Speaker: I mean, back then you couldn't really be anything else, right?
Speaker: You use either Bitcoin or nothing.
Speaker: And telling all my friends about Bitcoin, I got into a bit of mining.
Speaker: I was like hustling on the side trying to sell Bitcoin, you know, meeting people at coffee shops and stuff like that.
Speaker: Got got rugged by Mt.
Speaker: Gox at the time.
Speaker: But when I found out about Ryblox, so like, you know, the original version or the original name for Nano, I sold all my Bitcoin because I'm like,
Speaker: Bitcoin makes no sense in the light of, you know, Nano and the block lattice structure.
Speaker: It just felt like a technological leap.
Speaker: In hindsight, you know, bad idea.
Speaker: But, you know, it is what it is.
Speaker: So, you know, a lot of friends, you know, might think I'm a big Bitcoin whale because I started so early.
Speaker: In fact, quite the opposite.
Speaker: I'm a terrible...
Speaker: crypto investor.
Speaker: So I think safe to say none of this is investment advice.
Speaker: If anything, it's terrible investment advice.
Speaker: It's advice of what not to do.
Speaker: Do not follow.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that's been a constant of mine where, you know, I follow the technology and that's not where the money is often.
Speaker: Which is interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, we can get back to that.
Speaker: But yeah, sorry, keep going.
Speaker: Yeah, so, you know, very much into Nano.
Speaker: I'm a software developer by day.
Speaker: So, you know, I work in traditional finance.
Speaker: You know, we've dabbled in Ethereum, you know, built some dApps there.
Speaker: We have some patents.
Speaker: I'm on some patents around some specific use cases of blockchain in finance.
Speaker: But Ethereum really isn't the right place to build secure, like really just trustworthy dApps or decentralized applications.
Speaker: And how I got into Chia was I was actually looking to build a website to really help sell Nano and like really compare Nano to all the different cryptos out there in terms of
Speaker: security, energy efficiency, speed, all that.
Speaker: Because I honestly believe, you know, Nano has basically every other payment crypto beat.
Speaker: And I think you'd probably agree, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then when I was researching Nano, I came across Chia, which was a, at the time it wasn't in mainnet yet.
Speaker: So it was early on in the testnet phase, but it was also a green crypto.
Speaker: But the differentiating factor was it is a smart contract platform, unlike Nano.
Speaker: So I started looking into it, and it was really easy to get started.
Speaker: You just need a hard drive.
Speaker: So I became an early farmer with Chia.
Speaker: And there was one resource I really liked in the nano community, and that was NanoLinks.
Speaker: It was by a guy named Johansen, I think.
Speaker: He goes by JSON.
Speaker: And he built this great directory of just literally NanoLinks.
Speaker: It was a giant page.
Speaker: And that was my inspiration for building ChiaLinks because there's a ton of Chia resources out there, especially early on when everyone was trying to figure out how best or how to plot as fast as possible and to do it economically and efficiently.
Speaker: So I wanted a place to compile all these resources.
Speaker: So I really modeled that after NanoLynx.
Speaker: And it wasn't until about a couple months ago, Johansson was looking for someone to take over NanoLynx.
Speaker: He didn't want to maintain it anymore.
Speaker: So I stepped in, I refactored the whole thing.
Speaker: So if you look at the two sites, they look very similar now.
Speaker: And so, yeah, I maintain both sites.
Speaker: But that's kind of how I got started with Nano and eventually into Chia.
Speaker: Well, I'm sorry for your loss.
Speaker: It wasn't a loss.
Speaker: I mean, like early Bitcoin days, I made like 20 times my money and you can't say no to like a 2000% gain.
Speaker: Could have been far higher, but no regrets.
Speaker: That's insane.
Speaker: I just as easily could have bought more.
Speaker: But I believe in following the technology and I think the market will come around to that, but it hasn't yet.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it goes back to my old saying of like Tesla versus Edison.
Speaker: Took 100 years for the technology to come around, which is scary as a Nano fan.
Speaker: So why don't you think that Ethereum is a good place for decentralized apps or decentralized apps?
Speaker: Yeah, a lot of it comes from my experience building a dApp on Ethereum.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Honestly speaking, it was too easy.
Speaker: Like Solidity as a smart contract or on-chain programming language is so easy to write.
Speaker: I like to call it like the JavaScript of crypto.
Speaker: You know, anyone can write something, but it's hard to write something well.
Speaker: And we've seen so many smart contract exploits, whether it was malicious or just like a gap in the code.
Speaker: It's just not...
Speaker: what I would consider a secure language to program in.
Speaker: Very easy to get started.
Speaker: And I think that that really helped the Ethereum's network effect to really just be the place where everyone can build quickly.
Speaker: But I don't think it's the place where
Speaker: important use cases should reside.
Speaker: NFTs are one thing, but if you're talking about actual traditional financial banks and stuff, building things on the blockchain, it just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Speaker: For that particular DAPT that I was building at work,
Speaker: also couldn't scale, it didn't have the necessary TPS.
Speaker: Layer 2s weren't a thing yet, and sharding was in the roadmap, but it also wasn't quite there.
Speaker: So a lot of gaps, and eventually we did abandon the project, we got some patents out of it, but overall it didn't work out for what we wanted it to do.
Speaker: I think if we were to build it today, we might look at something like Solana that meets the TPS requirements, but that also has its other problems, right?
Speaker: Where it's not nearly as decentralized as other blockchains out there.
Speaker: So what about, would it be possible to, so this is, I'm not a techie, so does every layer two on Ethereum have to be coded in solidity?
Speaker: The individual layer twos, no, but they'll all have to roll back onto or settle on the L1 eventually.
Speaker: So there would be some component of solidity there.
Speaker: But you could like code the main blockchain in Rust or something like that or whatever, or something more secure that does scale?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I follow the Ethereum space from a distance.
Speaker: I haven't tried developing anything in any of the L2s or building an L2 myself.
Speaker: Yeah, Ethereum, its move to proof of stake is an interesting one, right?
Speaker: I have some thoughts around there.
Speaker: I know you do as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What are your thoughts?
Speaker: Lay it on me.
Speaker: I think at this point, I think everyone who listens to this show is pretty aware of my thoughts on it also.
Speaker: Are you familiar with Sinatis's articles from the nano community?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So he's a pretty prominent, I guess, Reddit poster.
Speaker: He's got some Medium articles around the problems of proof of stake.
Speaker: I think the big one is centralization over time.
Speaker: kind of the rich cuts richer argument.
Speaker: And I've seen the proof of stake kind of counter arguments to that, right?
Speaker: Like anyone can stake, everyone gets the same percentage, which is true, but it's also not true that anyone can stake, right?
Speaker: In Ethereum, you need
Speaker: 32 ETH or you join a pool that has a, that's got some fees.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And if you're like a, if you're holding just a little bit of ETH and you actually want to use the ecosystem, then you can't really lock up too much of it, right?
Speaker: You can lock up maybe what, like half of your, half of your bag.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Versus a whale that can lock up 99% of their bag.
Speaker: And that's if you live in a developing, a developed nation, if you don't live in a developed nation, the chances of you being able to lock up like a dollar worth of ETH, I find that to be,
Speaker: slim to none, like the chances of that being slim to none.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: You can't even cover gas fees, right?
Speaker: So I think there's definitely centralization.
Speaker: That's a problem that Nano solves, right, by just not having block reward.
Speaker: So Nano, it's not proof of stake, but it's certainly closer to proof of stake than proof of work.
Speaker: And I think that's how, that's why I'm
Speaker: very sorry nano solves for that by just not having block rewards so there's no monetary incentive for validating right yeah I mean sorry keep going
Speaker: No, go ahead.
Speaker: Well, it's an interesting... I've never really thought about it in those terms that you said like, yeah, a rich person can stake 99% of their wealth and only need 1% on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker: And that's the argument against a flat tax is that the more money you have, the less damage a flat tax does to you.
Speaker: So it's really...
Speaker: detrimental to poor people, it's great for rich people.
Speaker: And that's kind of what proof of stake is all about as well.
Speaker: It's just like the more money you have, the better proof of stake is for you.
Speaker: But also the same thing with proof of work.
Speaker: It's like the more money you have, the more money you can put into buying these really expensive miners and actually getting money out of it, which kind of went back to my whole thing with Chia.
Speaker: I was just like, ugh.
Speaker: dude like i'm a middle class person and develop in a developed nation and spending you know six hundred dollars after two or three weeks i still didn't have a single chia and i was just like and it was saying like it was like getting one shea was like a year away i was like who who's who's gonna be able to afford this
Speaker: Yeah, and that's completely true.
Speaker: That was the experience early on in Chia.
Speaker: And yeah, maybe we can pivot to talking about that.
Speaker: Chia, it's...
Speaker: I think they made some missteps or not, not so much missteps as they didn't forecast the, the hype and the adoption of it so quickly.
Speaker: So when she was first released into mainnet there was no concept of pooling, right?
Speaker: So you were, everyone was solo farming on their own and farming is a term that we use instead of mining in the chia community.
Speaker: And that's not just like, you know, greenwashing it's,
Speaker: They're very different processes, right?
Speaker: So to take a step back, you know, when you're mining Bitcoin or Ethereum, you are using up compute cycles, whether it's on the ASIC or GPU, every block, and then you're throwing that away and then you're redoing the same thing.
Speaker: And it's like a global competition.
Speaker: to see who can find the next block.
Speaker: Just constantly throwing away resources.
Speaker: By wasting as much energy as possible.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And that's really akin to traditional mining of mineral or gold.
Speaker: You're digging a hole.
Speaker: You don't find anything.
Speaker: Then you dig the next hole and you just get a bigger and bigger hole in the ground.
Speaker: You're destroying the environment.
Speaker: You're using up a lot of resources.
Speaker: Versus farming, you're doing that proof of work up front in a way.
Speaker: And when you create that plot, kind of like planting a seed, and then you're just waiting.
Speaker: After you created the plot, your hard drive sits there.
Speaker: It's idle 99.75% of the time.
Speaker: And occasionally you get lucky and you can harvest the rewards for that block.
Speaker: And then your plot is still good to continue farming.
Speaker: So that's really where the energy saving comes from is you're doing that proof of work,
Speaker: once up front and you're not throwing it away every block.
Speaker: You're just reusing it over and over again.
Speaker: But to get back to your original point, so yeah, when mainnet first came out, it was possible to find a block as a solo farmer, even with like say, you know, 16, 20 terabytes.
Speaker: That was perfectly reasonable, but there was so much hype around it and the net space, which is like kind of what we call the network hash rate, if you will,
Speaker: grew exponentially.
Speaker: So as you were creating plots, you would find that your time to win would go from like one day to one week to a month to a year within the span of a couple of weeks.
Speaker: You just can't plot fast enough to keep up with how fast the rest of the crypto or the Chia world was plotting.
Speaker: Had they come out of Mainnet with pooling, then you would have been at least getting fractions of a Chia, right?
Speaker: Like the same way that
Speaker: GPU or Bitcoin or Ethereum pooling works.
Speaker: The big difference with Chia pooling, however, is there's no centralization that comes with pooling.
Speaker: So even in a pool, it's the farmer themselves minting the block.
Speaker: So you're not giving the pool your hard drive space.
Speaker: Instead, you're just giving the pool your portion of the reward for them to distribute to other people in the pool.
Speaker: So it's
Speaker: In Bitcoin, you can do a 51% attack if four pools collude or three.
Speaker: What's the Nakamoto coefficient?
Speaker: Right now, yeah.
Speaker: I think it's four, but I don't know off the top of my head.
Speaker: Yeah, whereas in Chia, pools don't amass that percentage.
Speaker: It's very...
Speaker: a much better pooling solution, but they didn't have that on mainnet launch.
Speaker: And so a lot of people bought hard drives.
Speaker: But more than that, a lot of people bought really expensive plotting machines because it was so important to plot quickly to keep up with net space.
Speaker: And there was like a ridiculous ROI for Chia, right?
Speaker: Like you could buy a hard drive and pay it off in like a month, which is,
Speaker: In hindsight, when you look back at it, obviously that was unsustainable, right?
Speaker: Like GPU, ROI is like, what, like a year and a half or two years?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So back then it made a lot of sense for people to go out, spend three times the retail MSRP for hard drives, you know, drop $10,000 on some like, you know, some epic plotter just to make those plots quickly.
Speaker: But yeah,
Speaker: you can't keep up with exponential growth, right?
Speaker: Nobody can.
Speaker: So I understand kind of your feelings towards it, given your experience.
Speaker: Certainly wasn't a smooth mainnet launch from the farmers' perspective,
Speaker: Yes, so I understand it from your perspective.
Speaker: Certainly wasn't the smoothest farming experience out the gate.
Speaker: But things have changed a lot over the years, over the last year, I should say.
Speaker: There is pooling now, right?
Speaker: So even with like one terabyte, you can get fractions of a chia.
Speaker: the coin price has dropped a lot.
Speaker: And I think this is something that is in common between the Nano and the Chia experience.
Speaker: There's like a newcomer coming in, they look at the chart
Speaker: And it just looks like a rug, right?
Speaker: Like if you look at Nano, you know, it was like 30 something dollars and now it's like $2.
Speaker: So it doesn't look like a good project or a good investment.
Speaker: Same thing with Chia, right?
Speaker: But both of those cases I think are driven by just really low liquidity initially.
Speaker: I think
Speaker: back in the Ryblox days, uh, it was only available on one exchange, right?
Speaker: Bitgrail.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's the only place you could buy it.
Speaker: Everybody wanted it.
Speaker: So the price drove up and then, you know, the, the Bitgrail hack happened and then the price came crashing down.
Speaker: Um, I guess we shouldn't call it a hack anymore.
Speaker: Cause it wasn't, it wasn't hacked.
Speaker: It was, it was a rug pull.
Speaker: Inside job.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was like the original rug pull.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And then, yeah, with Chia, it was only on a couple exchanges and there was hardly any supply out there.
Speaker: So the price skyrocketed.
Speaker: There was no hack, but some interest and hype died off from there.
Speaker: And the price has dropped like, what, like 90, 95% since then.
Speaker: But a silver lining to that is...
Speaker: unless you bought in at the top, the farmers themselves weren't losing out on anything because...
Speaker: I guess unless they went out and like, you know, bought overpriced hard drives.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean.
Speaker: But what it means now is, you know, right now, the only people that are getting into farming are the people that can find affordable hardware.
Speaker: So like, you know, used drives at a very low cost.
Speaker: Electricity isn't really a concern in Chia.
Speaker: I think in many parts of the world, Chia is still more profitable to farm compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Speaker: Just because those are so sensitive to electricity prices.
Speaker: So if you're in Europe, it makes zero sense, right?
Speaker: To compete with people that are mining off of excess energy or even like negatively priced energy for Bitcoin.
Speaker: So I guess the question comes back to though is like, are people still using drives just for that?
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: So I'd say anyone that bought a new drive
Speaker: during the hype, initial hype, they're probably still farming or they've sold off their drives.
Speaker: Anybody new coming in certainly should be using used drives and
Speaker: From out the gate, the Chia team had said, it's not going to make sense to buy new drives to farm this.
Speaker: Everyone should be farming on excess capacity that they already have or recycling used hardware.
Speaker: That was always the intent, but I think the reality didn't play out that way.
Speaker: Chia is still trying to recover from a lot of that initial bad press because, yeah, people were buying new hard drives and it was adding to the e-waste problem.
Speaker: But we're in a much better spot now.
Speaker: All of the new drives coming online are typically used enterprise drives.
Speaker: Chia has partnered with Seagate Western Digital to get recycled drives from data centers into the hands of farmers.
Speaker: to secure the network.
Speaker: So I think now this is more in line with what the original expectation was.
Speaker: And now we can really start, you know, pushing that green narrative.
Speaker: Whereas it was really tough before when people were
Speaker: not doing what they were supposed to, but it, you know, financially it made sense at the time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I can't blame them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I guess my, my, my, the complaint I still have with Chia based on what you said is that any dedicated, any, any drive dedicated to farming is,
Speaker: or planting or whatever is, even if it's an old one, like a repurposed one, it's still a dry that's not being used for something, I don't want to say productive because people who believe in Shia think it's productive to come up with this new system.
Speaker: But like,
Speaker: the energy used, even though it's a fraction of a fraction or whatever, it's still energy that's being used, it's still hardware that's being used that's right now currently only helping like 0.00001% of the population.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: I don't think that's an inaccurate statement.
Speaker: The drives that the project is trying to target, and again, what they're trying to target and what's actually happening could be two different things, but what they're trying to target are drives that were going to end up in the landfill.
Speaker: So I think in some sense that's reducing e-waste and putting that to good use, but your electricity argument is still apt.
Speaker: If Chia didn't exist, that is energy that wouldn't be used for this purpose otherwise.
Speaker: I think there's two arguments to be made against that.
Speaker: One is you can have farmers that are farming on their, say, home PC, their gaming PC.
Speaker: They could still be turning it off at night, but while it's on, you could be farming Chia on the side.
Speaker: I imagine that's not a very large proportion of the net space currently, but that's certainly part of their original intent.
Speaker: And then the other side of this is Chia is trying to
Speaker: replace or flip Bitcoin and Ethereum and saving the electricity cost going into there and repurposing it into Chia, which would result in a net reduction.
Speaker: Now, how realistic do you think that is?
Speaker: I think that's a different question, but something needs to be done, I think, about Bitcoin's energy usage.
Speaker: And chia may or may not be the answer.
Speaker: Frankly, I'm interested in the experiment.
Speaker: I don't consider myself a chia-able, to be honest.
Speaker: I can see a lot of ways that chia can fail or chia could not hit that target.
Speaker: But I think it's an experiment that's worth trying.
Speaker: And that brings to another interesting point is that
Speaker: like some it's hard being a tech enthusiast in the crypto space because any mention of of the technology that we enjoy or that we think could potentially work down the road all of a sudden it's a shill and especially after a rug pull they're like oh you know you're just trying to like pump up your pump up your bags or whatever and it's just like
Speaker: Yeah, it's true.
Speaker: Like, you know, when I'm in Twitter spaces about Chia, I don't talk about Nano.
Speaker: When I'm in Twitter spaces about Nano, I don't talk about Chia.
Speaker: I don't want to come off as a show.
Speaker: I don't think.
Speaker: Well, just in general, like even just on Twitter at all, it doesn't have to be a Nano space or a Chia space.
Speaker: It's like, how do you talk about technology that works?
Speaker: or that is, you know, attempting to do something slightly different without trying to come off as a shill.
Speaker: But at the same time, Bitcoin is an environmental disaster.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And something, like you said, something has to be done.
Speaker: Ethereum, environmental disaster.
Speaker: Hopefully, proof of stake will fix a lot of that.
Speaker: But, you know, it's a big but.
Speaker: Like, I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt that they're at least trying to
Speaker: But if it doesn't work, that's it.
Speaker: Like, got to find something else, you know?
Speaker: And so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't understand Bitcoin maxis.
Speaker: Like, I don't understand the maxi attitude because, I mean, I get it.
Speaker: You know, you want to pump your own bags, but, you know, just as easily you can buy a bag and the other thing.
Speaker: At that point, it's a cult.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Anybody who's all in on Bitcoin is in a cult.
Speaker: They're exhibiting cult-like behavior and it's somebody to avoid because eventually they're going to try to get you into their cult.
Speaker: It's no different than QAnon, seriously.
Speaker: Because anytime somebody says like, this is the one way to do it,
Speaker: then that should be your biggest, you know, that's how, and you know, no offense to anybody or to you if you're religious, but most religions are that way too, that where they say like, no, no, no, this is the only legitimate one.
Speaker: Anytime somebody says there's only one way to do something, I just turn around and run for the hills.
Speaker: Just because it's like, how do you know?
Speaker: None of us have died.
Speaker: None of us know what's going on.
Speaker: We're all just kind of like floating around trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work.
Speaker: But we can also easily see what doesn't work.
Speaker: And Bitcoin doesn't work.
Speaker: So at that point, if you're still shilling Bitcoin, it's like, and it doesn't work after 14 years now, that's a pretty good indicator that you're probably in a cult.
Speaker: Yeah, I completely agree.
Speaker: I think you had one episode where you talked about Bitcoin maxis and how they're just like gaslighting and it's always the same arguments that they're just regurgitating.
Speaker: And they're just using the same arguments from big tobacco and big oil.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You got to keep an open mind.
Speaker: Like, you know, if something comes along, that's better than nano, better than chia.
Speaker: And, you know, I do my research and I think it is, I'll switch over.
Speaker: Like, I don't, I'm not, I'm not so invested in either of these things that, you know, I'm not, I'm not losing my life savings and I can sell my bag and buy another one.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If it's something I truly believe in.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I don't, I don't get the maxi attitude, but.
Speaker: I stay away from those conversations on Twitter for the most part.
Speaker: What I do get nervous about is that maybe you need cult-like behavior for something to actually gain traction.
Speaker: Because I see it in the NFT space also.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Where it's like this fervent, you know, or like the Chainlink Marines, the Link Marines, and then the XRP Army or whatever.
Speaker: I think most of it were bots.
Speaker: for XRP link people, they just got in early and they're like, yeah, we're making a ton of money.
Speaker: But at the same time, it's just like, it didn't really have any value.
Speaker: Like you didn't really need either of those two things to actually, for things to be successful, like for the project to be successful, you didn't need the value of it to go up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I, that I can't agree more.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: I don't think the success of a project is related to its coin price.
Speaker: I mean, I guess it could be correlated, but I think in the crypto world today, the measure of success really is, you know, how, how much money you've earned.
Speaker: I think most people in this space are probably in it for the money.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Very few people are in it for the technology or to like, you know, truly wanting like a better solution.
Speaker: And you know, that, that,
Speaker: It might be a good pivot to what I think is the bear case for Nano and the bear case for Chia.
Speaker: Because I always think if you can't articulate a bear case for your project, then you're not being very genuine or you're not being honest to yourself, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: TJ on the show, when I interviewed him, TGZ, he always said to me in forums and stuff or on Twitter or on Discord or whatever, he's like, dude, if you can't fudge your own project, you're probably in a cult.
Speaker: Like essentially, that's what he was saying.
Speaker: Yeah, either that or you don't understand your project and you're just in it to see the price move, right?
Speaker: Well, because every single project at this stage has a lot of downsides.
Speaker: A lot.
Speaker: If it's a crypto project, it has a lot of downsides.
Speaker: So there is no ifs, ands, or buts.
Speaker: And so if you can't see any of the downsides of your project, you're being blinded by something or you're choosing not to see it or whatever, you know.
Speaker: There's all these ores, all these ore possibilities.
Speaker: So, all right, so lay it on me.
Speaker: Let's FUD, Nano, and Chia.
Speaker: Yeah, where do you want to start?
Speaker: How about, okay, so Chia, just a bunch of wasted space.
Speaker: Wasted e-space, wasted energy space that could be used for something like... What's that project that Banana works with?
Speaker: That it runs on your computer in the background and you help solve scientific problems.
Speaker: You use the extra bandwidth to... Yeah, folding at home.
Speaker: Folding at home, yeah.
Speaker: So I think that could be...
Speaker: the greatest way of offering rewards to people.
Speaker: And actually, if you actually wanted like a proof of work type project, that could be the greatest way.
Speaker: But then again, people could just go out and buy computers and start doing it that way, you know?
Speaker: So it's just like, anytime you have any kind of proof of work or
Speaker: running technology to create a currency, like using tech, like using hardware and using energy to create currency, you're going to have this race to the bottom.
Speaker: It's a completely centralized project.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: maybe we can touch on the, uh, the folding at home piece.
Speaker: Um, cause I, and Benano great project, obviously very centralized still, because they haven't fully distributed their supply.
Speaker: Um, but what I love about their approach of distributing, uh, based on your folding at home is, you know, they can control how much you're getting.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: It doesn't make sense for someone to go out there and buy a bunch of GPUs to speed up their folding because the banana team on a whim can just not give you as many bananas as you should be awarded to kind of stem that behavior.
Speaker: There is a coin actually called Gridcoin.
Speaker: It was never big, but that was the general idea is you would contribute your CPU power to these projects and it would have a client to distribute in mid blocks based on those proofs.
Speaker: So not distributed from a central place like Banano, but actually like a proper blockchain.
Speaker: But it didn't gain a lot of traction.
Speaker: I don't think it's a very compelling narrative.
Speaker: Did you say grin?
Speaker: G-R-I-N?
Speaker: Grid.
Speaker: G-R-I-D.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I haven't heard of that one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like it's page like 20 on CoinMarketCap.
Speaker: But I mean, the idea existed.
Speaker: I don't know why it didn't work out.
Speaker: So I had an idea for a project similar to Nano.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Essentially, proof of work is once a day on your account, you're allowed to be rewarded for a transaction and then you get a percentage of the block that day.
Speaker: But you can only... So at that point, it's not really in your best... It's not financially viable to go out and buy like a thousand phones and do a thousand transactions on a thousand different phones because then that just like spreads out
Speaker: You're just diluting how much is rewarded and the chances of you being able to pay back what you invested in the phone would be pretty minimal at that point.
Speaker: And so you probably would never be able to pay off all those phones.
Speaker: And little things like that, where how do you encourage people to use the project and
Speaker: but not encourage people to waste resources on the project.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think the problem with that is you just end up with like people are using the project, but not using it productively, right?
Speaker: They're just using it for the sake of getting this reward.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But that's the thing.
Speaker: If you only have them, if you only reward them once a day, it would encourage people to like, Hey, you know, I can just, I can just do something stupid once a day.
Speaker: Or, and my thing is, is like, if you have somebody use it once a day,
Speaker: They're on it.
Speaker: They're on the app once a day, even if that thing only takes like two seconds.
Speaker: But if they start doing it every single day, a repetition, like once it's like, and they have an alarm on their phone, five o'clock, all right, make a nanotransaction or whatever it would be called so I can get a little piece of reward.
Speaker: They're like, oh, wow, it really is so fast and didn't cost me anything.
Speaker: And then when someone says, oh, hey, can you do this?
Speaker: It's like, oh, I've been using this thing, blah, blah.
Speaker: It's just like it's in their headspace at that point.
Speaker: So how do you get stuff, how do you get a project into people's headspace and keep it there?
Speaker: That's the only reason why I was thinking like the once a day thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, like what you're describing is like trying to like drive organic demand through artificial means, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like WeNano does a really good job of this, right?
Speaker: You log on every day, it's just like get your 0.01 nano from their kind of like geode.
Speaker: GPS based like geocaching application and then you see the speed of it as well right see that's the worst marketing ever because I didn't know that's what WeNano does oh have you not used it I've seen like you can walk over to this one space and you can collect something but I was just like
Speaker: okay, so I need to walk around, I need to find a place somebody has to actually post the reward there.
Speaker: What if there's no reward within a 10 block radius?
Speaker: Is it even worth me walking around for 0.01 nano?
Speaker: It's just like, it didn't make sense to me to do that.
Speaker: Yeah, and people are walking around for much less than that, like Pokemon Go or Ingress.
Speaker: Yeah, but those are fun games.
Speaker: That's why, you know,
Speaker: But that's the thing, they're games.
Speaker: And it's not just like, here's two cents.
Speaker: You're getting a Pokemon character or a Niano cat character.
Speaker: Let's pump up Niano cats a little bit.
Speaker: No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: WeNano was really good when people were dropping spots in Argentina.
Speaker: um, you know, when they were going through hyperinflation, uh, people were using that as a way to donate to the country really.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, um, I think it's got a lot of potential.
Speaker: They also have the ISS, you know, you can try to catch it, uh, coming over, uh, where you live and then you get like a, like 0.1 nano or something like that.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I had an alarm set up whenever the ISS was over my head.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: That's how you know you're officially a nerd.
Speaker: Which, you know, not a bad thing, but it's like, I just would never have thought of doing that.
Speaker: And I'm kind of a nerd.
Speaker: So that's like, that's like exponential right there.
Speaker: To get back to your question about like economies of scale, I guess is what you're asking about for proof of work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Chia, again, the intent of Chia is you can't compete with free or over-provisioned storage, right?
Speaker: The average person out there probably has, well, like half a terabyte of free space on their computer, on their computer that is on anyways.
Speaker: And so the idea is- Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Speaker: Let's go back.
Speaker: Did you say, make that statement one more time.
Speaker: The average desktop computer might have half a terabyte of free space.
Speaker: I don't think that's unreasonable.
Speaker: I mean, have you ever bought a Mac?
Speaker: The average Mac comes with 256 gigabytes.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: A terabyte costs like an extra thousand dollars or something.
Speaker: It's insane.
Speaker: Maybe it's like 500 bucks now.
Speaker: Talk about like overpriced storage, right?
Speaker: Yeah, it's absolutely insane.
Speaker: And so as more Macs are out there, I think Chia becomes, if they're going off of a half a terabyte of free space.
Speaker: So let's say I have a Mac Mini and I have 250 gigs of
Speaker: of space on my Mac mini and I have 38 gig or 39 gigs free.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're not putting a plot on there.
Speaker: But I think the crux of it is, you know, storage is a fungible commodity, right?
Speaker: Like your, your terabyte of space is the same as like a, a Chia whales terabyte of terabyte of space.
Speaker: Unlike, you know,
Speaker: ASICs, right?
Speaker: Like your CPU cannot compete at all with an ASIC.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or your CPU can't compete with a GPU farm, right?
Speaker: Yeah, but- But a terabyte is a terabyte and your terabyte was free.
Speaker: Well, that's like saying a yacht is a yacht.
Speaker: And anybody can buy a yacht.
Speaker: It's like, okay, well, no, not everybody can buy a yacht.
Speaker: Like less than 1% of the planet, less than like 0.01% of the planet can buy a yacht.
Speaker: So if you're comparing a yacht, like I would go on a limb and say that maybe like 60 to 70% of the planet can't afford a one terabyte hard drive.
Speaker: I think that's a reasonable estimate right there.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, when you talk about
Speaker: the whole planet, I think that's reasonable because that accounts for just all the different standards of living across different countries, right?
Speaker: In the developed world, a terabyte of storage costs like what, 20 bucks?
Speaker: I think if we're thinking about decentralization,
Speaker: Chia is already the most decentralized blockchain.
Speaker: They have the most full nodes across the world, like orders of magnitude more than Ethereum or Bitcoin, solely because you can get started with 100 gigabytes of space, right?
Speaker: And it's much easier to have that versus an ASIC or a GPU.
Speaker: I don't think, you know, there are certain parts of the world where, yeah, you're barely able to make ends meet.
Speaker: You're trying to put food on your table.
Speaker: You're not going to go out and buy one terabyte.
Speaker: hard drive to find.
Speaker: This is why I still have that idea of a project where it's proof of work on a daily basis and if you make one transaction on the phone on your app... Yeah, that's Wii Nano.
Speaker: You go out there, you get.01 nano.
Speaker: Yeah, but that's completely based on donations.
Speaker: I'm talking about an actual
Speaker: proof of work type thing that just like the inflation, whatever.
Speaker: So it starts off kind of big in the beginning just to get people interested in it.
Speaker: But like, you know, something like that where I like, there's a really funny meme about Bitcoin and they're like, wait a minute.
Speaker: So you're giving the biggest block rewards to people who got in early when nobody else knew about it.
Speaker: And then you're telling me every four years you cut that in half.
Speaker: And so as more and more people learn about it, not only do the rewards get diluted between everybody, but then you're cutting the rewards in half.
Speaker: So you have all these mega oligarchs who got into Bitcoin early, except for you.
Speaker: I'm sorry, John.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: I think if you have diamond hands and you can hold that long, I think you deserve some of those riches.
Speaker: Well, but that also goes back to...
Speaker: Diamond hands are usually people who have money.
Speaker: Yeah, you can afford to have diamond hands, right?
Speaker: You don't have to sell your crypto to pay for groceries.
Speaker: Or to buy pizza.
Speaker: Or to buy pizza, yeah.
Speaker: And that's the thing.
Speaker: Diamond hand people don't respect the people who actually used the currency and got it to where it is.
Speaker: There should be a two-pizza currency
Speaker: A two-pizza day, two-pizza Bitcoin day where people donate money to people who actually used it.
Speaker: Like the two-pizza Bitcoin guy.
Speaker: The fact that he's not a millionaire right now, when you have billionaires because of Bitcoin, that people haven't donated to him for actually using it, that just blows my mind.
Speaker: I'd be tipping that guy.
Speaker: If I was a billionaire, I'd be tipping that guy a million dollars every year.
Speaker: Have you seen the news interview with that guy?
Speaker: I read something about him where he's just like, I don't care.
Speaker: Yeah, he says he doesn't care, but I think he can tell on his face he cares.
Speaker: I mean, that's insane, right?
Speaker: It's just like he'd be close to, like when it was at 60,000, he'd be like close to a billionaire.
Speaker: It's just like, fuck, not a billionaire, but like 100 millionaire or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, your idea about, like with any blockchain, there has to be proof of something, right?
Speaker: And if you're thinking about like, you know, proof of, like ideal blockchain is you can have some way to do proof of a person, right?
Speaker: So every person on earth
Speaker: is one vote, right?
Speaker: Yeah, Satoshi's idea about proof of CPU was good in theory, but that's not how it panned out, right?
Speaker: We're just building faster and faster CPUs and basics.
Speaker: And that was back when still not everybody had computers or cell phones.
Speaker: And so now we're at a point, you know, 13 years later, 14 years later, where most people on the planet have a smartphone.
Speaker: Yeah, I...
Speaker: I don't think proof of smartphone will work because like you'd be subject to like, like civil attacks and people just buying up SIM cards.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And faking it that way.
Speaker: Maybe, you know, I mean, you got to figure it like, it has to be a proof of a commodity that everyone has equal access to.
Speaker: And it costs the same, um, for everyone to acquire this, uh, resource, uh, better yet, it's cheaper for, um,
Speaker: for the smaller fish to acquire this resource.
Speaker: Well, see, and that goes back to my point of like, I don't want people to have to acquire something.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I want it to be something that everybody already has.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So if you have- My argument is storage is in the right direction.
Speaker: Definitely more so than CPUs and GPUs.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that's kind of the idea behind Chia.
Speaker: And like proof of storage is not new, right?
Speaker: Like there was a coin called Burst.
Speaker: There was HDD coin or not HDD coin.
Speaker: I think like Bitcoin HD or something where they were also doing proof of storage.
Speaker: And the idea was you would, same thing, you would buy hard drives and put proofs on them.
Speaker: But what turned out happening was it was faster to create
Speaker: They weren't called plots, but it was faster to create these proofs in real time and throw them away instead of buying the hard drive to store them.
Speaker: And then so this proof of storage coin just became a proof of work coin because it was more economically efficient to get GPUs and throw them away every block instead of saving them.
Speaker: So the reason Chia worked was because the inventor of Chia, Bram Cohen, the guy that invented BitTorrent,
Speaker: invented new math to make proof of time.
Speaker: So Chia isn't just proof of space, it's proof of space and time.
Speaker: And part of that is to make this type of attack not possible, right?
Speaker: So that you can't just grind out plots faster than, or more economically than storing them on hard drives.
Speaker: So I guess this is my complaint is it's still not progressive enough to me.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think that's where I see Nano playing a role because Nano takes it to the extreme, right?
Speaker: No, like zero block rewards, minimal, minimal protocol, no smart contract layer.
Speaker: And that's actually key, right?
Speaker: You can't incentivize people to run a node if it's expensive to run a node.
Speaker: And you're not giving them block rewards for it.
Speaker: But there's also no incentive to actually...
Speaker: do anything with Nano.
Speaker: That's my pro, like that's me flooding Nano.
Speaker: Yeah, let's, let's flood Nano.
Speaker: I mean, so this goes back to the, this goes back to my, my, my crypto idea of like, so Nano, but with block rewards, like actual block rewards, not donation awards with We Nano, actual block rewards.
Speaker: So instead of doing that CAPTCHA,
Speaker: for what was it like a year?
Speaker: Did he do it for or 11 months?
Speaker: Instead of doing that and having everything dispersed all at once, do that and then do that for a year and then have block rewards go on for an infinite amount of time.
Speaker: And just as you don't change the block award, it's always gonna be whatever like 10 a day or whatever, 100 a day for infinite.
Speaker: But at a point,
Speaker: There's so much Nano and the block award is so small in relationship to that.
Speaker: It's like almost not, it's not like non-existent.
Speaker: People are not even aware of it.
Speaker: Because there's no reason, like if I'm not using Nano and nobody's accepting Nano right now, there's no reason to use it first off.
Speaker: And with a deflationary cryptocurrency like Nano,
Speaker: There's literally no reason to use Nano because potentially it's going to be worth more tomorrow than it is today.
Speaker: So why would I use it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sinatus has a really good article about this on his Medium page.
Speaker: Like why an inflationary currency, like fiat is inflationary and
Speaker: Part of the theory is that's meant to drive usage of it, right?
Speaker: So people aren't holding it.
Speaker: He can articulate this a lot better than I can about why a deflationary currency can also work.
Speaker: So maybe we can table that part of the discussion.
Speaker: I think what you're describing is a fundamentally different design of a blockchain than Nano.
Speaker: It wouldn't be just something that we can just add on to Nano as is, right?
Speaker: No, it would need to be a whole new cryptocurrency.
Speaker: And for people listening, and I'll rebut one thing that you said that he said, because like you said, I don't want to get too into it because I haven't read it either.
Speaker: But if he says deflationary currency can work, that just means it hasn't worked yet.
Speaker: And it goes back to when I interviewed Colin, he said, I called him out on it and he finally admitted, he said, yes, nano is an experiment.
Speaker: Deflationary currency has never worked.
Speaker: Yeah, and he goes into that, into the article, like the history of inflationary currencies and deflationary currencies as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But you know what I think the biggest reason why Nano might fail is it relies too much on the users to keep the network healthy.
Speaker: Users are expected to actively manage their representatives.
Speaker: Um, and we have this big Binance problem, right?
Speaker: Where Binance holds so much nano, um, that they are pretty like, I think them and one other party, uh, could, uh, collude for a 33% attack.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think the 33% number is overlooked as well, right?
Speaker: Because yeah, you need 67% for consensus.
Speaker: But if you control 33% of the voting weight, then the network can't move forward.
Speaker: You can't reach consensus.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it just says you can't create consensus and you also can't change your reps because that's a, that itself is a transaction on the, on the block.
Speaker: Seriously?
Speaker: Yeah, changing reps requires validation by the network as well.
Speaker: So then suddenly the networks- Oh my god.... frozen in place.
Speaker: In their defense, they're working on it to make it somehow like a off chain.
Speaker: I don't know what the solution looks like there, but just requiring users to be on top of their representative.
Speaker: We can't even get half the population to vote.
Speaker: Oh, I know.
Speaker: Yeah, it's insane.
Speaker: I think that's probably my biggest FUD against Nano.
Speaker: It relies on the users to care too much.
Speaker: I mean, and that's also like the representative stuff.
Speaker: You can easily have apps that force you to do that.
Speaker: Say, hey, you're not using a healthy representative.
Speaker: You can't use this app until you change it.
Speaker: Yeah, Natrium can change it for you even, right?
Speaker: If it sees that your rep is down or your rep has too much voting weight.
Speaker: I think the other problem with Nano and like with proof of stake, like any crypto that relies on the asset as a means of consensus is just very vulnerable to hacks.
Speaker: I'd say if Binance got hacked, suddenly this malicious party controls what, like 25% of all Nano?
Speaker: Then suddenly, you know, we're they're like a couple million dollars away from stalling the network.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Same thing with Ethereum, right?
Speaker: Once Ethereum goes proof of stake, then suddenly, you know, it was a what was that smart contract?
Speaker: I was like hacked by North Korea and suddenly North Korea has got like a couple hundred thousand.
Speaker: Oh, I don't remember.
Speaker: And then suddenly they have a big.
Speaker: they carry big weight, right.
Speaker: In terms of a validation network.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: True.
Speaker: And that's where I see like, you know, proof of work does have that benefit, right?
Speaker: Like you can't just take over, um,
Speaker: I guess you could physically take over a mining operation, but that's harder than to hack.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, Russia can physically take over power stations in Ukraine by hacking them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Proof of work mining is so centralized already anyways.
Speaker: Especially if you believe the narrative that they're moving towards, what's it called, a captured energy.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: I mean, those are all in the same places, right?
Speaker: Or they're using like excess energy from the grid.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like what happens if you hit like a heat wave and everyone turns on their AC?
Speaker: It's all greenwashing, man.
Speaker: These guys are just like, I mean, they're just so deep in the cult that they're like, oh, this is going to be good.
Speaker: How is using more gas, how is drilling and mining for more gas and oil better for the planet?
Speaker: Well, we're not, we're not, we're just, you know,
Speaker: We're using the burn-off.
Speaker: No, you're incentivizing drilling more because now you're paying somebody for that burn-off.
Speaker: And it's just like, but they don't, they just, either they're not intelligent enough to understand that or they don't want to see it.
Speaker: And so-
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But what I think the bigger problem with Bitcoin is, and here, I guess we're moving to FUD Bitcoin.
Speaker: There's no blocks-based demand.
Speaker: Like if you look at the transaction fees on ETH, that keeps on going up because people are using the chain for real purposes.
Speaker: In Bitcoin, they're trying to push their narrative as a store of value.
Speaker: Like you don't move money around if it's a store of value, right?
Speaker: And they're trying to move all their transactions to the Lightning Network.
Speaker: And that's not creating very much traffic on their base layer.
Speaker: So what happens when after enough happenings, there's no more block rewards and all the miners are doing are mining transaction fees.
Speaker: But then there's barely any transaction fees because no one's using the network for anything aside from store of value or opening or closing the random channel.
Speaker: Very, very high fees.
Speaker: Very high fees.
Speaker: So, like, yeah, there's... They're going to be, like, mining nothing, and then it doesn't make sense to keep the mines on.
Speaker: So I think trailing emissions.
Speaker: I think one thing I like about your idea about if nano were to turn into proof of work somehow, there should be emissions forever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then also, I think the other problem is
Speaker: The reason why deflationary currencies can't work is because something that's deflating means that something else is inflating against it.
Speaker: And when it comes to money and long-term value, you're going to get rid of the thing that's deflating and
Speaker: Sorry, you're going to hold on to the thing that's deflating and not buy the thing that's inflating.
Speaker: I think the counter argument to that, and I think Sinatus uses this as well, is... Oh, Senatus.
Speaker: Senatus.
Speaker: And I'm not saying his name on the Senatus.
Speaker: It's like big screen TVs, right?
Speaker: We know they get bigger and cheaper every year, but we still buy it.
Speaker: Well, rich people buy it.
Speaker: I still have a TV that's 13 years old because I don't need anything more than 37 inches because my living space is so small.
Speaker: I tried something bigger and it was giving me a headache.
Speaker: It was so big.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I have a 37-inch TV just for that reason.
Speaker: And it's a dumb TV, so it can't listen to me talk.
Speaker: So I'll probably never upgrade because I don't want to buy a smart TV that can hear me.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, you can say rich people buy it.
Speaker: Like people are buying TVs every day, right?
Speaker: Even though they know it's deflationary in that sense.
Speaker: And then if you can't afford a TV, like you're forced to
Speaker: to spend your crypto if that's like the primary in this future where crypto is the primary money.
Speaker: Fiat is inflating with or without a deflationary currency for forcing it to.
Speaker: And I think it's a tough road for Nano, I think, to try to replace an inflationary fiat currency
Speaker: And I guess like Colin says, it's an experiment.
Speaker: He thinks it's an experiment.
Speaker: I think it's an experiment worth considering.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, back to what Senators is saying is people are buying TVs because of inflation, because they're using an inflationary currency.
Speaker: That's the reason why people are buying TVs every day.
Speaker: That's the reason why TV manufacturers are competing against each other to improve the technology.
Speaker: when you switch over to deflationary currency, instead of buying a new TV every two or three years, people are going to start buying a new TV every 15 years.
Speaker: And that slows down progress because there's just not enough liquidity to spend on R&D.
Speaker: I mean, there's a reason why we went from
Speaker: like almost, you know, really, really, really low inflation up until about the 70s and then massive inflation in the 70s, we had one like real technological advancement and that was going to the moon.
Speaker: But like,
Speaker: Technology was interesting and it was moving, but the level of growth in cars or planes or all those things or cell phones or computers, those skyrocketed once massive inflation hit.
Speaker: Since the 80s, technology has been on an absolute tear because people have more money.
Speaker: People are buying it.
Speaker: Companies are constantly trying to outdo each other
Speaker: and push innovation because people have this more money to spend on these types of things.
Speaker: So I guess that's my point is like, if you look at the first half of the century compared to the last half of the century and think in terms of innovation, like it's night and day, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Asset inflation has been a reality and it's been a driver of the economy really, right, for the last however many years.
Speaker: So I guess that's my fear is like, but then it goes back to the question is like, does that necessarily make society better?
Speaker: Does consumption at that pace, is it sustainable?
Speaker: Well, no.
Speaker: Now we have massive landfills and e-waste and this and that and like, you know, an island of
Speaker: of plastic out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Speaker: That's like the size of Texas because of overconsumption.
Speaker: It depends on how you measure the society's health, right?
Speaker: If you're looking at happiness, I don't think people are generally happier.
Speaker: If you're looking at wealth creation, then yes, wealth was created.
Speaker: I don't think it was created equally across all different classes, but yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, these are almost existential questions.
Speaker: I'm not an economist.
Speaker: I live my life.
Speaker: I'm happy enough farming chia and talking about nano.
Speaker: It's not a great laugh, but it's a, well, what's that meme about farming?
Speaker: Yeah, it's honest work.
Speaker: Yeah, it's honest work.
Speaker: It ain't much, but it's honest work.
Speaker: I guess that's my fear.
Speaker: of the cryptocurrency space in general is that there isn't enough thought about those topics in the grand scheme, in the long term.
Speaker: It doesn't seem like anybody on those teams is thinking about the ethical ramifications or the moral ramifications.
Speaker: I don't like using moral because moral is...
Speaker: personal, everyone's morals are going to be different.
Speaker: I think ethical, I think ethics is a word because it's like, okay, are people, are more people dying because of this?
Speaker: Are more people being sick because, like getting sick because of this?
Speaker: Like, I don't think, I don't think Facebook is an ethical project because it's showing that more kids are, you know, and also Instagram because more kids are becoming depressed and suicidal because of this.
Speaker: So is it, is it, is a long-term ethically, like ethically long-term
Speaker: boon for society?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I think Moro is the right word to use.
Speaker: Going back to Nano and Chia, I think both the core teams have good intentions.
Speaker: Colin is trying to make the world a better place by creating Nano.
Speaker: It's not a pump and dump.
Speaker: They barely have anything in the dev fund.
Speaker: such a lean operation because I don't think they want that image.
Speaker: And also, it's not a security, right?
Speaker: They never sold any of... They never did this to get rich.
Speaker: Chia is a little bit different.
Speaker: Chia has a company behind it that's looking to actually go public.
Speaker: They have a giant pre-farm of 21 million Chia and
Speaker: But they're also not looking to pump and dump, right?
Speaker: That pre-farm is not circulating.
Speaker: It's not going anywhere.
Speaker: It's going to be legally can't move anywhere once they go public.
Speaker: Or they'll have a lot of restrictions around it, I should say.
Speaker: But Bram, when he created BitTorrent, he didn't do that to get rich, right?
Speaker: He was...
Speaker: I don't know him personally, but I get the sense that he just likes to solve problems and he likes to solve problems that improve the world from his perspective.
Speaker: It's very much a tech focused perspective.
Speaker: And Chia has the same thing, right?
Speaker: He saw Bitcoin, he wants to do it better.
Speaker: He saw Ethereum, he wants to do it better.
Speaker: And Chia is trying to be kind of best of both worlds in the security of Bitcoin with the smart contract layer of Ethereum.
Speaker: And they have like real use cases.
Speaker: Like they're partnered with the World Bank to build a carbon credit tracking system for the Paris Climate Accord.
Speaker: So that countries are actually using Chia to track their carbon credits.
Speaker: That's a real use case that they're going after.
Speaker: I don't think those use cases are going to drive up the price of Chia.
Speaker: I don't think, I think it gives it legitimacy, but it's not there to,
Speaker: pumping the price of chi is not their primary goal.
Speaker: That's kind of my take, which I respect.
Speaker: I respect they're trying to solve real problems with the blockchain.
Speaker: I think a lot of blockchain projects out there exist for the purposes, like they're finding problems to solve, instead of finding a problem and creating a solution for it.
Speaker: So that's why I'm bullish on the project.
Speaker: But again,
Speaker: Being bullish on a project doesn't mean being bullish on the price necessarily.
Speaker: Well, I mean, so to clarify what I mean about like moral and ethical, I think it's ethically sound to allow people to transport their data to and from other people that they want to do.
Speaker: So like creating technology to allow people to transfer their data to somebody they know in a safe, secure way, you know, that was unheard of back then.
Speaker: But is it moral to take something that you have that you bought to use one way and then you give it to every single person in the world?
Speaker: Is that moral?
Speaker: Because, you know, I think that's the difference.
Speaker: Like some people are like, yeah, because we don't believe in ownership.
Speaker: Some people are like, no, because somebody created that and it's immoral because you're essentially stealing from that person because they sold you one copy
Speaker: and you're making a million copies and giving it to all your friends.
Speaker: That's immoral.
Speaker: You're essentially stealing.
Speaker: So that's why moral becomes a gray area.
Speaker: Or like, you know, a religious zealot would be like, gay people are immoral.
Speaker: Well, obviously that's not true, but to them it is.
Speaker: But that's why I try to separate the word moral from ethics, because ethics is like a really, like a defined, you know, thought process or like,
Speaker: educate, like form, like, you know, school of education type thing.
Speaker: It's a subject we study, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think intent matters as well.
Speaker: When Bram created BitToyn, I don't know any of this personally, but I imagine when he created BitToyn, he didn't do it so that people can pirate movies or businesses or movie studios would go out of business, which obviously they didn't.
Speaker: But he was doing it to solve a problem.
Speaker: And how people use that tool is...
Speaker: I wouldn't put that on him.
Speaker: Maybe he should have had the foresight to see it.
Speaker: Maybe not.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I think that's what, and I think that especially since the 90s, the 80s, when we've become so focused on how much money a company can make, they've gotten rid of the ethics department.
Speaker: Like, is the technology we're creating ethical in the long run?
Speaker: Like, what are the long-term ramifications for society if this tool becomes mainstream?
Speaker: Like, what could go wrong?
Speaker: Have you seen World War Z?
Speaker: Is that the zombie movie?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I vaguely remember it.
Speaker: So he goes to Israel and is trying to get information from this one guy.
Speaker: And he goes, I'm the 10th man.
Speaker: He's like, what's that?
Speaker: He's like, well, so in any kind of debate, if nine people all agree with the same thing, you have to pick one person to be the 10th man to disagree with it.
Speaker: And to come up with all the reasons why it shouldn't exist or it can't work or blah, blah.
Speaker: And like, I feel like we don't have enough of the 10th man in society right now.
Speaker: And we used to have, like it used to just be, you know, on it, like open debate and between scholars or between people who like respected each other and,
Speaker: You know, like the whole thing with Nano, it's like I can have a debate with Colin about it because it's an experiment.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: And we can talk about what could go wrong and why it might not work and blah, blah.
Speaker: But like he didn't seem even remotely perturbed when I called him out on a lot of possible...
Speaker: like attack vectors or this or that, or not, not attack vectors.
Speaker: I'm not that technical, but just like ethical ramifications of it.
Speaker: And he was like, yeah, that's totally possible.
Speaker: Like he was open to admitting that.
Speaker: And most people in nano were like, yes, if something better comes along, I'll leave, which must be scary as hell for Colin and George.
Speaker: But at the same time of like, that's who they've been catering to is like the hardcore tech nerds who are literally just want the best technology.
Speaker: And so, whereas like Bitcoin people are the exact opposite, they're not tech nerds at all.
Speaker: Because if they were, they wouldn't be using Bitcoin.
Speaker: Yeah, you just can't have like a good faith discussion with them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's weird.
Speaker: I mean, it's not, this is not like high school debate class, right?
Speaker: You're not assigned a viewpoint and you have to defend it to your grave, right?
Speaker: Like, I don't, I don't, I don't get it.
Speaker: Yeah, it's insane.
Speaker: It literally is insane.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Can I ask you about Nanocats?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I did not pay him to ask this question.
Speaker: Lay it on me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're mincing that on Ethereum, right?
Speaker: That's the goal right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm very curious to hear about your experience with Ethereum.
Speaker: I mean, I've heard your recent unfortunate events that have happened.
Speaker: But more about, I guess, the minting process as an NFT creator.
Speaker: How has that been?
Speaker: So, I mean, honestly, I haven't done anything yet for it.
Speaker: So I've got a person who knows how to do smart contracts.
Speaker: I have a person who knows how to build websites that can connect to Web3.
Speaker: And so they're doing all that, and it seems fine so far.
Speaker: I've been involved in a lot of projects that were minting, not on the team side, but as a buyer.
Speaker: And there's been some really horrible experiences and some great ones.
Speaker: I mean, the reason why I wanted to give everybody, so if anybody owns an original Nanite, you know, I was like, I said, go on the Discord, use Collabland, and then you'll get the roll because then you'll get a free mint because that was one of the worst experiences I've ever had using Ethereum.
Speaker: Because he was just like, he was just kind of figuring out as he went along.
Speaker: So he would make a bunch, he would spend the money to list them one by one,
Speaker: And then people had to like gas war fight each other to try to get that one.
Speaker: So people were losing like hundreds and hundreds of dollars and ended up not getting one at all.
Speaker: Because it was just like, this is back before MetaMask, which so right now OpenSea will check if it's available.
Speaker: So you click that you want it.
Speaker: It'll check that it's available.
Speaker: It'll hold it for you.
Speaker: You buy it.
Speaker: But back then, it was just like, all right, there it is.
Speaker: And if 10 people all click buy, nine people lose gas fees.
Speaker: And only one person gets it.
Speaker: Isn't that what happened with the recent Moonbirds mint?
Speaker: Like there's just a whole bunch of wasted gas fees from people trying to get in.
Speaker: I probably, I wouldn't be surprised.
Speaker: There's ways around that now and really good projects know how to deal with it.
Speaker: And, and, but most don't.
Speaker: And I'm just, I'm just surprised.
Speaker: So like when I did it with, uh,
Speaker: I think Tubby Cats.
Speaker: No, it wasn't Tubby Cats.
Speaker: What was it?
Speaker: It was something.
Speaker: Yeah, so even Tubby Cats messed up.
Speaker: Tubby Cats, he gave, he had, there were 20,000.
Speaker: He gave away like 14,000 for free and then just put the rest on open market or anybody can mint.
Speaker: And he didn't, he had it so the website you could only mint like 20, but he didn't have it on the smart contract side.
Speaker: And so people were going in there just buying like 1,000 all at once.
Speaker: And then people who were trying to buy got stuck and then they lost their gas fee and it was kind of a mess.
Speaker: And there's just so many, yeah, there's so many, this is, I mean, and this is the dangerous.
Speaker: The reason I'm doing it the way I was thinking is because I want to avoid a lot of those things where, like I want to give people a discount if they want to buy ahead of time.
Speaker: which is like the complete antithesis of cryptocurrency because it's about like, you know, verify, don't trust.
Speaker: And if somebody buys one ahead of time, they're essentially just trusting me, but they're getting a discount and they're guaranteeing that they're going to get it.
Speaker: And they're not gonna have to worry about the gas war thing or anything like that.
Speaker: So it's like, I'm trying to like do this weird experiment where I don't want people to lose money on gas fees.
Speaker: But the thing with Ethereum, so there's another project I'm in called Samurais, Lost Samurais, where they were giving away free ones to people who have gotten rugged in other projects or the other project just kind of like went to zero or disappeared or just, you know, just some art projects go away.
Speaker: It's just, that's what happens with art.
Speaker: You know, like the artist is like, no, I made this, you bought it, now I'm going on to the next thing.
Speaker: And that's totally valid.
Speaker: So what they did was they minted everything on Ethereum, but they're doing their whole game on Arbitrum.
Speaker: And Arbitrum can read, can view the Ethereum contract, so it can see that you have it.
Speaker: And so you have the land and all the weapons and all that is on Arbitrum, and it just adds it to your one on Ethereum.
Speaker: And so Ethereum just sees it that you've added it to it.
Speaker: And so it's there, but you don't have to like interact.
Speaker: So you can store it on the Ethereum website.
Speaker: You can put, you can lock it up.
Speaker: And then at that point, you can do everything in Arbitrum.
Speaker: And it just, it periodically pings the Ethereum chain to see that it's still there.
Speaker: And that's kind of what I was imagining for Neonocats is like, instead of trying to pick a winner, a layer two winner,
Speaker: and mint it there and then have that go away and be forced to have everybody move their neano cats to a different chain.
Speaker: Have it on Ethereum, which I don't think is going to go anywhere.
Speaker: And then whatever L2 kind of takes off, that's where it could be.
Speaker: And if that L2 goes away, you just kind of like transfer the game itself to a different L2 and then have that ping the Ethereum chain and get all the information.
Speaker: And so they won't have to worry about constantly moving stuff around.
Speaker: That was my thought process behind it.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker: For any sort of use case where you need to move things, L1, it's just not gonna fly in Ethereum right now.
Speaker: Where are you storing the assets themselves?
Speaker: Are you putting them on IPFS?
Speaker: Yeah, IPFS, and then if,
Speaker: They sold enough.
Speaker: If they sold well enough and I had the money to do it, then I would try to have them actually be put on chain.
Speaker: Because that's a whole financial undertaking.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Crypto punks cost like $10,000, $20,000 to put on chain.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like in gas fees.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, if the project sold out, I would have that money to do it and I would go back and do that.
Speaker: So it would actually be on chain.
Speaker: Just that way nobody has to worry about.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, in that Twitter space is where we first chatted.
Speaker: I had mentioned, you know,
Speaker: NFTs are coming to Chia.
Speaker: I think it's worth exploring, minting this on the Chia network as well.
Speaker: It's very early.
Speaker: I think the NFT standard is not being released until next month or so.
Speaker: So a lot of projects right now are
Speaker: similar to what you're doing, right?
Speaker: They're issuing tokens.
Speaker: So kind of like ERC 20 tokens, but on Chia, they're called cats.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Ironically enough, issuing cats that you can redeem for NFTs later.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And the redemption process is very unique because Chia has this feature called offer files, which is, I believe it's like a game changer in the crypto space where you could do
Speaker: truly peer-to-peer decentralized swapping of assets.
Speaker: So you don't need to do something on like SushiSwap or Uniswap.
Speaker: You can just generate a text file that you post on Twitter
Speaker: print it out, mail it to a friend, whatever.
Speaker: And then any party that has that file can take the other side of that offer and then it gets executed on chain simultaneously.
Speaker: So there's no counterparty risk.
Speaker: There's truly decentralized peer-to-peer trading of assets.
Speaker: So you could trade a token for an NFT or you could trade an NFT for an NFT.
Speaker: Well, I hope they will be
Speaker: careful because a lot of scams have happened that way in Ethereum lately.
Speaker: In what way?
Speaker: They'll make a fake one.
Speaker: They'll make a fake board ape, put it on OpenSea.
Speaker: The person won't click on the collection to see that there's not 10,000 and then they'll trade it for $100,000 or $200,000 or whatever it is.
Speaker: And then they get this fake board ape and they just paid 100 Ethereum for it.
Speaker: and now they're shit out of luck.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I think that's a UI problem, right?
Speaker: That's a, that's not, there's no way to enforce that on the blockchain.
Speaker: You know, like what's a valid project and what's not a valid project, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But that's the thing is like, so when you're trading NFTs outside of out, like, you know, like you said, through a text file on Twitter or something like that, how do you, how does somebody
Speaker: verify they're actually getting the real one versus a fake one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You load up the offer file on the, on the UI, on the, on the chia GUI.
Speaker: And then it would be up to that GUI to, you know, give you enough information so that you're comfortable that you are getting the exact thing you're, you're expecting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's all scary.
Speaker: I'm, I'm not going to lie.
Speaker: It is all scary stuff.
Speaker: And that's why that was part of the,
Speaker: the reason I kind of held off for a while on doing something like this is because it's like there's just so it's just there's so many opportunities to get scams
Speaker: But I feel like the Niano community in general, the nano community and Niano community are pretty technical people, like technically savvy people in general.
Speaker: And if I put enough information out there, I feel like if any community is going to consume that information, it'll be the nano and Niano community.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Yeah, what I'm hearing from how you describe your experience is there isn't a clear cut way of doing this right now.
Speaker: It's like everyone's still trying to figure it out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker: I mean, like, I can't keep up with like DeFi and all the different projects, right?
Speaker: Let alone the average Joe trying to get into crypto.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: That's actually one thing I really like about Nano is it's so simple to explain.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I mean, that's also maybe some would call it a disadvantage that it can't support all this smart contract and different layers and stuff.
Speaker: But it wouldn't work as a project if it did support these things.
Speaker: Well, I mean, we'll see.
Speaker: I think Vite is an interesting experiment as well.
Speaker: And it's taking all the good stuff from Nano and adding in smart contracts.
Speaker: And I think that'll be an indicator to see if it works or not.
Speaker: last I looked into it, they had a centralization problem.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I think they're still working on that.
Speaker: That's still, you know, but I think like, didn't nano have a centralization problem in the beginning?
Speaker: Like, well, yeah, I mean, one account held every nano until they were able to distribute it.
Speaker: And then also running nodes is like, you gotta have, you know, how do you, how do you get that and be able to run nodes in the beginning?
Speaker: How do you,
Speaker: IOTA is still trying to figure it out.
Speaker: How do you get rid of the centralized authority?
Speaker: It still hasn't happened yet, has it?
Speaker: what's it called uh centricide whatever i forget what it is but it's so fun yeah yeah it's it's a meme at this point right it's like it's like eth merge it's uh it's just a meme um yeah nano was running their own uh reps for a long time um so i think one thing on that nano has going for it actually is like time right it's been around for so long it's had the chance to decentralize and to like really
Speaker: get nano out into the hands of, uh, you know, different people.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I got to run.
Speaker: I'm excited, man.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No worries.
Speaker: I'm excited for nano cat.
Speaker: Thanks for the, uh, the mint.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I mean, it's just, you know, it's, it's a, it's a long and tedious process.
Speaker: And, you know, I think like with any, with any art project, there's always the chance of just like,
Speaker: I don't want to say it won't happen because it'll happen, but like, you know, there's always, there's so many things that can go wrong along the way.
Speaker: And as the guy who used to work in theater, it's just like,
Speaker: You know, they say the show must go on because it literally has to because you have a bunch of people who bought tickets and they're sitting in the audience.
Speaker: You can't not do the show now.
Speaker: You have to figure out a way to make it work.
Speaker: And that's just what you do.
Speaker: You just keep on figuring out how to make it work.
Speaker: I'm going to hold you to it.
Speaker: But like, honestly speaking, it's one of the better art PFPs I've seen.
Speaker: Like, I really like the Indiana art.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I don't like board apes or like, you know, crypto punks.
Speaker: I like board apes, but I'm not, I'm not a big fan of crypto punks.
Speaker: I think it's very, it's very subjective.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's the thing.
Speaker: That's all art is subjective.
Speaker: And that's the, it is, but yeah, no cats are like objectively cute.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And I, you know, that's, yeah, I'm, we'll see which one I get happy with what they, with where they are at this point.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: All right, cool.
Speaker: So how can people get a hold of you if they want to learn more about Chia and Nano?
Speaker: Yeah, Chialinks.com is a website.
Speaker: You can find a ton of resources on there.
Speaker: You can message me on Twitter at Chialinks.com.
Speaker: I don't know who's at Chialinks, but mad about it.
Speaker: You should reach out to Twitter and have them get you that.
Speaker: While it's still centralized.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Good talk.
Speaker: I'm glad.
Speaker: I love talking to people who are open to talk about the positives and the negatives of stuff.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: And we'll chat again soon once, you know, as if she ever takes off or if Nano gets, you know, more expensive or whatever, you know, and come back.
Speaker: Sounds good.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thanks everybody for listening.
Speaker: See you on the next one.
Speaker: Bye.
