In a hybrid episode, CoinTalk and Let's talk bitcoin headed to Sunny South beach Miami to cover the first ever BTC Miami conference. Here we have a debate of giants with Ethereum's Charles Hoskinson, MasterCoin's David Johnston and Invictus Innovations Dan Larimer.

Transcript

[00:03] SPEAKER_00: Hello everybody, and thank you for tuning in to a very special edition of Cointalk, the cryptocurrency show. Today's episode is a hybrid episode. We headed to sunny South Beach, Miami for the North American Bitcoin Conference and got the opportunity to sit in on a three-way panel organized by Let's Talk Bitcoin. Guests on the panel included Ethereum's Charles Hoskinson, Mastercoin's David Johnston, and Invictus Innovations' Dan Larimer. On top of this, Jason King from Sean's Outpost led and moderated the panel and he did a fantastic job. So Cointalk is proud to bring you the video feed for what will surely go down in the record books as a spirited powerhouse debate where all representatives had the opportunity to speak freely on new platforms the likes of which could change the world forever. Also, stay tuned for Cointalk's conference coverage which will be unrolled over the coming days. And if you haven't yet had a chance to check out the Ethereum talk that Vitalik Buterin gave, find the link at ether.org or if you're watching on YouTube at the bottom of the video for this episode. Without further ado, here we go.

[01:12] SPEAKER_01: So welcome to a very special edition of Let's Talk Bitcoin. My name is Jason King and I'm very excited here. I'm here in Miami right before the North American Bitcoin Conference. What we've got in store this evening is we're going to have, hopefully a very spirited discussion on what I'm going to call DAXs, which would be distributed autonomous, whatever, if you want to be distributed. Autonomous applications, distributed autonomous corporations, organizations. Distributed autonomous fill in the blank. We happen to be joined here by three people sort of doing the most exciting things right now, or at least some of the most exciting things in this space. Very, very privileged to be joined with you guys and get to talk to you. So we're just going to kind of go down the line and have you just introduce yourself. Just name and company right now, if you will. And we'll start at the end.

[01:57] SPEAKER_02: My name is Daniel Larimer. I'm CEO of Invictus Innovations.

[02:02] SPEAKER_03: David Johnston. I serve as the executive director for the BitAngels and I sit on the board of the Mastercoin Foundation.

[02:08] SPEAKER_04: I'm Charles Hoskinson. I'm the director of the Bitcoin Education Project and a core developer on the Ethereum project.

[02:14] SPEAKER_01: All right, so these are our three wonderful guest speakers here tonight. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down the line and I'm going to give you guys each three minutes to describe to me what your project is, sort of what you think of the core value proposition is. And then once everybody's gotten a chance to introduce themselves, we're going to go in and do some actual more in depth speaking about DACs as a whole.

[02:36] SPEAKER_03: Okay.

[02:37] SPEAKER_02: All right. The project I'm working on is called BitShares. And BitShares is a very broad concept. It's the concept, instead of looking at a blockchain as a currency, we look at it as shares in a decentralized autonomous company. And that changes everything about how you actually design and build these decentralized systems. Like all companies, you need to focus on doing two things. Maximizing revenue, minimizing expenses. And to that extent, everything we're doing is eliminating mining from the equation to minimize expenses. And then the transaction fees are the revenue in our system. So we want to maximize the incentive for there to be transactions and the value provided by executing transactions in our decentralized businesses. Our flagship business is what we're calling BitSharesX. It's a banking exchange and it will allow you to earn 5% or more on anything, whether it's gold, silver, Bitcoin, Mastercoin or Ethereum. So that is, in a nutshell, what we are doing. And we're very excited about the potential for using the BitShares concept in every different industry from smart property to banking to insurance to gambling, voting, you name it. There's all kinds of applications that can be developed using that model.

[04:05] SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much. David, you want to go?

[04:07] SPEAKER_00: Sure.

[04:07] SPEAKER_03: So the master protocol is basically a protocol built on top of Bitcoin. I think JR used a really good analogy in his original paper about thinking of Bitcoin as TCP/IP and thinking of this master protocol as HTTP, meaning that Bitcoin gives us a lot of things automatically. It gives us a timestamping service, it gives us a universal token system. It gives us this backend that solves a lot of these basic cryptographic problems. And like Dan was mentioning, if you've got an application where you don't necessarily need mining power, say smart property, or you want to issue digital tokens to keep track of some asset, then you don't necessarily need your own blockchain. What you need is these backend services. And so the goal with the master protocol is to create these features that let people easily do this on top of Bitcoin. The first couple of features that are really important to emphasize are number one, the distributed exchange that lets you trade Mastercoin for Bitcoin for any user generated token that people create on top. And the thing I would emphasize is this is a big debate in the community. What's the right approach? Should we build this on top of Bitcoin? Should we build something else as a blockchain? The approach with the master protocol is to build on top of Bitcoin. And this is really possible now thanks to a recent update to the Bitcoin core client, described by Gavin in his update number five that talks about provably prunable outputs, but without getting into the tech, it makes it easy for you to encode this metadata on top of the Bitcoin ledger. So that's the approach for the master protocol.

[05:49] SPEAKER_01: All right, great. Charles.

[05:51] SPEAKER_04: So to understand what we're doing with the Ethereum project, it's really useful to think about the history of Bitcoin and where we started. So when we started there were three things you could do and Satoshi Nakamoto decided to test two of them at the same time because he thought there's a wonderful marriage there. So the first thing he thought about was a decentralized database. This idea, let's put something into a ledger that is immutable, that we can't take out, that it's completely transparent and everybody has a copy of. So let's do that first. Second, let's create a transaction system that allows people to move value between parties without any intermediaries, no third party interaction. And that's a really big piece of stuff to bite off if you think about it. Because at the time it had no economic value. There was a lot of code that had to be written. The concepts were completely untested. But there's the third thing that Satoshi could have done, which is having a robust scripting system. This general notion of saying, hey, instead of just sending transactions, you can go ahead and send anything you want. You can have contracts, you can have smart property. That's a wonderful thing to propose. But there's some security implications because it requires Turing completeness in the language. And also there's implications with things like blockchain bloat and so forth. So Satoshi took a step back and he said, all right, I'm going to focus on the core experiment. I don't want to spoil it. And at some point we'll later revisit this topic after we've built a sizable ecosystem that has economic value.

So it's been five years, there's been a tremendous amount of innovation. The market cap hit $10 billion. There's tons of companies all across the world. There's some wonderful entrepreneurs in the space who are doing great things. And so now people are saying, let's go back to that, let's go ahead and find a way to put that Turing completeness back into the system. So there's a lot of ways you can do that. One way is to lay it on top of Bitcoin, which requires you to change Bitcoin, do some things. It's a time consuming process and I really respect the amount of effort Mastercoin's put in. JR and these other guys have done some absolutely amazing work. Another option is to take the BitShares approach and create your own blockchain, your own paradigm. But really what we see in the ecosystem is a lot of isolation, a lot of fragmentation and a lot of cost of innovation. Whenever you want to do something, it costs half a million dollars. You have to put a team together. It takes months, if not years. There's a lot of testing. And so those are usually the symptoms of a disease. And the disease is you don't have a proper foundation to go ahead and do this.

So the general concept, the notion of Ethereum is to say, throw away all the features. We don't want to release something with features, but rather let's just have a beautiful foundation that has a Turing complete scripting language and that has this idea of a contract, a fundamental computational unit. And then let's go ahead and give that to people like you give a programming language to somebody. And let's use that to go ahead and enable people like Mastercoin, Colored Coins, BitShares with DAXs to build anything that they want.

The second part of that project is a kind of a social contract to have a very strong user experience. So you can't just go ahead and build some protocol that has elegant and beautiful code. Gavin's been writing amazing code back there. You have to actually have a foundation that everyday people can use and everyday people can develop for just like the Android experience. So the second part of the project is to build a base foundation so that when we've launched for mining, it's like a large catalog and it's one click installation for everything. One click installation for Bitmessage, one click installation for Open Transactions. Who's a partner of ours. One click installation for Ripple and basically anything that you want, a wallet, it's one click installation. And if you want to build apps for this catalog to have the same application development experience that people have with iOS or with Android. So these two things together, this beautiful foundation that's featureless and Turing complete, which removes the isolation, the fragmentation and reduces the cost of innovation, plus a really nice user experience, I think it's going to give us at least a proper direction for a base foundation for the cryptocurrency space.

[09:27] SPEAKER_01: All right, let me jump in here. Okay, so in all three of your descriptions and thank you guys very much for doing that, I think that we kind of went high level on what you guys are speaking of. Right. So why don't we pretend in this audience you need to explain what the value proposition is of DACs in general to people like they have no idea what you're talking about. Andreas Antonopoulos has this great thing and you guys mentioned the TCP/IP, HTTP thing. I think that's a great analogy. But he said that Bitcoin technology currency is the first app and it's everything that's coming after that that's really going to be the game changers for everything. And you guys are definitely working in this space. So why don't we back it up out of your individual projects and let's just talk generally about DACs as a whole. And I would just like to hear your thoughts on what you think sort of the next killer apps that are coming out for this are, and why you think there's value to them in the system.

[10:17] SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I'll start. Generally speaking it's a better idea to look at what's been done in society and ecosystem first and say what can these do to improve what's been done instead of what's the revolutionary feature? Because it's hard to know ahead of time what's going to be important. I don't think very many people would have predicted Twitter. So what's been done is we have organizations like WikiLeaks, like Wikipedia, like ICANN, that serve basically a public good or a public utility style format, but yet they're constrained by a jurisdiction. So where this technology is going, all of our approaches in some way can enable an idea of taking these organizations and removing them from whatever jurisdiction they live in and uplifting them into the cloud, uplifting them into the Internet and taking the rules that constrain them and put those rules into algorithms instead of people.

[11:02] SPEAKER_01: So focus that down for me. Give me an example of one use case for that where it would have a wonderful effect on the world if someone were to take that.

[11:10] SPEAKER_04: WikiLeaks is a great example. If you can uplift WikiLeaks and put it into the cloud, then you functionally can't shut it down. All the services, utility, the financials, they're all transparent, they live in a blockchain and there's no central point of failure. So that's an example. Other things that you probably don't want to have geographic bias like ICANN, it's based in America. America has tremendous influence over the management operations of ICANN. You can uplift that, put it into the cloud and define the rules, parameters, the voting system in a free and fair way that can't be coerced retroactively. So those are tangible examples for nonprofit style organizations. But there's also great examples. We were just talking with a guy from Cuba. He runs the Bitcoin Miami meetup. And his parents are from Cuba. He lived there for a while. And Cuba has this terrible situation where most commerce is controlled by the government. And similar with China, there's a lot of gray area businesses because if you want to actually do business, you have to be an insider. So you have two options right now. If you're an entrepreneur in a developing nation, the first option is to be cozy with a politician and get the bribes done. Or the other option is to go off the books. And that's no good for anybody. So when you have this idea of a decentralized autonomous organization, you now have a third option. Once all the tools are there and the user experience is correct, you could very quickly create an organization that outsources the trust of the operation of the business and makes the business transparent, but removes it out of the jurisdiction of the country. That's not favorable. So I think this is going to be a godsend for a lot of developing nations.

[12:34] SPEAKER_03: Sure. And I would definitely echo that. I think you're right about what Bitcoin accomplished was it created this open source program that couldn't be globally censored, meaning that you had enough copies out there in the ecosystem that people could adapt it to their particular jurisdiction. And so people building an exchange in the US could take a different approach than people building an exchange in China, et cetera, et cetera. But the core protocol wouldn't be shut down because it was distributed. And so for me, the next thing that I want is a distributed exchange. And so this is the very first feature that I see as the next killer app. Because this is already a problem in the ecosystem. We've had a while. Yeah, for sure. Right. Bitfunder has closed. BTCT is closed.

[13:25] SPEAKER_04: Right.

[13:25] SPEAKER_03: All these different central approaches to I want to buy some tokens in this particular application or in this particular project have closed down because how do you do regulation globally. Right. It's really, really tough. Right. Because everywhere has different rules and that's a problem as long as you have a central server. Now imagine you don't have a central server and it's all P2P. It's all person to person exchange of these tokens. That's why, partly why the master protocol started focusing on that first is because it's been a huge problem for the community. I think that's why a lot of people are excited about that particular killer app.

[14:06] SPEAKER_02: I'd like to talk about that particular killer app because that's our primary killer app in BitSharesX. I mentioned earlier that you could earn 5% or more on anything. I like to step back and look at what viewing a blockchain and the shares allocated in the blockchain as a company allows you to do. We can actually create dollars the same way that your bank currently creates dollars. It lends them into existence on collateral. You can do that on a blockchain where the blockchain controls the collateral. So whenever you borrow money from a bank, you expect to pay interest. And whenever you lend money to a bank, have a deposit at the bank, you're lending the bank money, you expect to receive interest. Using a blockchain, we can completely cut out the middleman which allows you to receive a 5% return on your dollars. If you can lend dollars into existence, you can lend gold, silver, oil, anything. Bitcoin or Mastercoin can be lent into existence on a blockchain using the exact same business model. Unlike a bank which normally lends on your house, this is lending on stock in the bank. It would be like going to Bank of America. I'd like to borrow $100,000. I got $200,000 worth of your stock. You get a loan.

[15:24] SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I'm already a little bit confused on it. So, you know, go into the next part here. Why don't you describe to me sort of exactly how BitShares is going to implement that in a way so that we can all sort of grasp that concept.

[15:40] SPEAKER_02: With BitShares, you use it just like you would a Bitcoin wallet or online banking. Exact same user experience. You say, I want to send dollars to someone, you send dollars to someone. I want to send ounces of gold to someone, you can send ounces of gold. This is the value of an ounce of gold, not actual ounces of gold. These are not debts that cannot be defaulted on because they're backed by the blockchain, which can do margin calls just like a bank would. So the user experience of this is like Bitcoin, except we're combining it with another product. We have Keyhotee, which eliminates the need to use Bitcoin addresses. And that's an identity management application for the blockchain technology. Global consensus on who owns what name.

So from a banking perspective, it works just like a bank. Now, we can use the same business model to implement other types of businesses. So if you have a company, a very traditional company that's doing a lottery, it sells lottery tickets, puts the money in a pot, draws a number every now and then, and then you have a winner. Very traditional business model, makes millions or billions every single year, you can implement that on a blockchain. The characteristic of everything we're doing is that we view the blockchain as shares. We pay dividends to the shareholders. So we try to maximize the value proposition to the shareholders of the blockchain and we try to minimize the expenses.

[17:06] SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is the part I think I'm getting confused on. So in a bank, I go and I put cash into the bank and I have handed over physical control of my cash. And yes, they can now make representations of that dollars and lend them out however they want to. So in your example of gold or oil, say I've got thousand barrels of oil and I want to implement them in BitShares. How does that transaction take place?

[17:28] SPEAKER_02: First of all, the system works even if you don't have 1,000 barrels of oil. All you need is, like, if you have Bitcoin and you want to sell some, I want to bet on whether or not gold is going to go up or down relative to Bitcoin. So you both put 100 bitcoins into a pot, and when the price moves one direction or the other, eventually you make or lose money proportional to the price movement. So you get the purchasing power of a barrel of oil or ounce of gold without actually depositing an ounce of gold. But what it allows you to do is a system like LocalBitcoins. The problem with LocalBitcoins is that you're trying to simultaneously match a bid, an ask and a location. We match all the bids and asks on the blockchain automatically. And so you have a BitAsset where like BitUSD. Now all you have to do is match location. You no longer have the huge spread that you have in the centralized exchanges. So you can meet someone on Craigslist and swap $100 for 100 BitUSD and the price will fluctuate right around the dollar, and it protects you. It's a way of hedging. All this can be implemented on blockchain, complete with other features that day traders like ability to do options and the full trading environment can be done on a blockchain. Other applications you can implement on a blockchain would be auctions. You can put an end to domain name squatting by auctioning off the names. Now what's different about our approach is that we view all the names as belonging to the shareholders and they want to maximize the value they get for selling their names. And we don't want to have people buy a name and squat on it, we want to auction it off just in time. And so that's another way that you can implement something on a blockchain where everyone doesn't want to own a name, they want to own all the names. And so the names can get allocated to the most efficient application.

The core thing that I want everyone to take away from all this is that you have to view blockchains and decentralized applications from a business perspective, from an economic perspective. If you take the billion dollars a year that Bitcoin is currently spending to mine and secure their network and you were to apply that to development of decentralized applications, think of the good things that could happen. Bitcoin as a business model is growing only so long as new capital is funneling into Bitcoin. It's being diluted at 12% a year right now, paid to new miners and in the future 100% of all revenue. The transaction fees are being paid for security. But if you can turn the Bitcoin model into something that's profitable, where 100% of the revenue goes to the shareholders as dividends, you eliminate the need to dilute the shareholders, you increase the value proposition. It's a self sustaining system.

[20:22] SPEAKER_01: Let me jump in here and I think it's a good jumping off point for something I'd like to talk about here. You're talking about profit, you're talking about revenue, you're talking about development expenses. And so you guys are all working on sort of next generation of blockchain technology. So the successor to Bitcoin in terms of functionality here, I say the augmenter. The augmenter. Okay, yeah, that works for me. And I'm just going to preface with this is that you guys are all doing fundraising of some sort. And I think we can all agree that Satoshi Nakamoto didn't really have to do this because none of us knew if blockchain technology was going to work. Right? So it's like he had the luxury of being laughed at for a while and being able to mine on his own and sort of it developed naturally. Right? But we all can agree that blockchains work now. We at least have this one killer app, Bitcoin, on it. It's my understanding that you guys all now believe that you can't pull value from these projects that you're releasing just by releasing them openly. That you need to have some model up front to fundraise for the development of your project. And you guys all have different ways of fundraising. So let's just talk about fundraising right now. Let's just go down the line again. We'll start with Charles and we'll talk about how you guys plan on funding your model.

[21:40] SPEAKER_03: Okay, cool.

[21:40] SPEAKER_04: Go for it. We looked at this for quite some time. There's certainly a lot of different economic models that can be embraced. So there's kind of this just start mining and try to acquire some of it and sell it when the market's high style funding model, which in practice doesn't actually work terribly well. And then there's the 100% premine model where you sell out. And there's something to be said about that model for bootstrapping an ecosystem, but not necessarily for long term durability.

So we took a step back and we said, well, how has fundraising been done over the last 50, 60 years in general? And if you look at Silicon Valley, you look at venture capital, generally speaking, you have some founders, they initially have a large amount of control over the company, the ecosystem, and then they give a slice to it to the people who initially invest. And then over time the investors and the founders divest. So what we did is said we want equitability in our money, we want a large distribution of our money. And we don't have a situation where one person owns 10 or 15% of the currency base, which has implications across the board. So let's go ahead and embrace first a persistent linear inflation model where we create a fixed amount of coin per block indefinitely. So over time your inflation rate decreases, but you have a linear increase in supply. So all the sins of the fundraiser, if one wants to call it that, disappear over a five or ten year period. For the most part, 95% of the coins in distribution were mined, they were produced. And their opportunity to acquire coins year 10 or year 15 is the same as the opportunity to acquire coins year one or year two. So we embrace that.

We're going to go ahead and do an IPO style, fundraiser style, starting on February 1st. It's inspired by Mastercoin, which you guys did, which I think it's quite good. With a couple of modifications. We're going to run a two month fundraiser. We have a hard cap of 30,000 bitcoins, so if we raise that much money we'll stop, or 60 days.

[23:33] SPEAKER_01: If we just raise 30,000 bitcoins.

[23:37] SPEAKER_04: If we, you know, I say, but you know guys, to be fair, it wasn't too long ago that we were buying pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins.

[23:43] SPEAKER_01: So, you know, in Bitcoin time. That was a lifetime ago.

[23:46] SPEAKER_04: Oh, that was a lifetime ago.

[23:47] SPEAKER_01: Seriously.

[23:48] SPEAKER_04: So basically we have two options. Window A is 60 days, window B is 30,000. And we'll have a full prospectus ready to go on February 1st, with all the terms, conditions and how the investment is going to work. And they should be available for liquidity, meaning you actually trade them and sell them when the genesis block launches, which should be Q3 or Q4 depending upon how long it takes to vet our security model, amongst other considerations. But the important thing to take away from this is that the insiders, the founders of the organization, will have around 6, 7% of the currency base year five. Second, we have endowed an organization that will turn into a decentralized autonomous organization, with enough reserve so that when the Bitcoin supply runs down, it can pay for long term development of the ecosystem.

[24:34] SPEAKER_01: And so what's your time frame on actually, what do you plan on Ethereum actually becoming its own DAC?

[24:42] SPEAKER_04: Okay, that's a great question. So unfortunately, the infrastructure and technology to build a proper decentralized autonomous company, it's not quite where it needs to be yet. And especially not if you want to stick $25 million in it, right? You want a little bit of certainty behind this, so you have to do things the traditional way at least now. So what we're going to do is start an organization and a jurisdiction, most likely Canada, but it might be somewhere else. We're still in talks with lawyers about where the best place to do this is. And then we're going to be working with Kyle and a couple of other partners. And over a 12 to 24 month period, we're going to go ahead and convert that organization systematically, step by step, into a decentralized, autonomous entity or organization. And we'll produce a documentary and a manual and then we'll give it to the community and say, hey, pick Wikipedia, pick all these other guys, show them the merits of what we've been able to do here.

In the meantime, we're very concerned about transparency. We have Anthony DiIorio with us and he's kind of set the gold standard for the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada. So we're going to submit to quarterly audits by independent accounting and we'll also have in house counsel and in house accounting with the organization. So we feel it's the best balance that we can provide today. And it's something that's productive because we can partner with everybody who's interested in DACs about this process to build.

[25:51] SPEAKER_01: DACs, let me stop you here. We got off a little bit and I know that I did it, but I want to talk about the fundraising model of these other two, then I want to come back and if I don't remember, remind me. I want to come back and we'll talk about jurisdiction on these, okay?

[26:00] SPEAKER_04: Oh, absolutely.

[26:01] SPEAKER_03: Okay, cool.

[26:02] SPEAKER_01: So let's go. So Mastercoin. So you guys are already available. Like, you guys have already done some fundraising, right?

[26:06] SPEAKER_03: It's already out there in the market.

[26:07] SPEAKER_01: Okay. So, yeah, so why don't you go through how that is and then like how I acquire Mastercoin today if I wanted to be involved with it.

[26:13] SPEAKER_03: So the question is, if you don't need mining, then how can you fairly distribute tokens? And the way that JR set it up was to create this almost Kickstarter like, 30 day period where anybody could send BTC to a particular address, the genesis address or the Exodus address is what he called it. And during that period.

[26:34] SPEAKER_01: That's funny.

[26:36] SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the Exodus address. So anybody that sent. And this started August 1st and ended August 31st, 2013. Anybody that sent BTC to that address and it was publicly advertised and, you know, all the Bitcoin community comes, if you believe in these features, if you want these new projects to succeed, send Bitcoin to this particular address. And that generated 100 Mastercoins for every one Bitcoin. So at the time, price of Bitcoin was about a hundred dollars. And so it was essentially a dollar per token for Mastercoins. And it created two pools. It said, okay, anybody that contributes, they're going to get this amount of tokens and then we're going to create an additional pool on top for developers. It's called developer MSC and it's given out on a regular predictable basis based on an algorithm to developers every month that contribute to the open source implementation. And so these are the two pools, okay, people that provided value and money to develop the stuff and then a long term pool of, okay, here are tokens for everybody that contributes over the years in the future to the further development.

And so that's how you got both of these sets of tokens out there. And similar to what Charles is describing is our goal is to have this done in a completely decentralized way. We don't want a foundation that has any control whatsoever over this process. And so what we said is, well, we certainly don't want it centralized around JR. So let's create a nonprofit foundation, okay? The foundation will hold the funds and distribute them to developers. What we're implementing is a proof of stake system that lets everybody that holds Mastercoins vote on the new version of the protocol. And the second part is a distributed bounty system. So anybody can put up, you know, we auto code this next and the community can decide based on consensus who should get the developer coins, what should be paid out, who should get role based bounty. So all the things that the foundation is doing right now basically dissolve as it goes forward. And it's the same as Bitcoin. And the foundation has no more control over the protocol than say the Bitcoin Foundation.

[28:44] SPEAKER_01: So like the 51% attack on Mastercoin is just buying a shitload of Mastercoin, right?

[28:48] SPEAKER_03: You would have to buy 51%. It's similar to proof of stake systems which would be really expensive if you tried to buy all of them. Right, you would drive up the price.

[28:57] SPEAKER_01: I'd be happy with that for a while. Yeah, that would be cool. Okay, let's move in a bit.

[29:03] SPEAKER_02: We actually have a hybrid model. We started with one model and we pivoted to a Mastercoin style model with some changes. The initial model we had is what we're calling BitShares PTS. It was a new Bitcoin clone without any premine that anyone could go and start mining. And that took off. We launched November 5th and it's been wildly successful. Reached 20 million plus market cap, but it hit 31. Yeah, briefly, yes, for ProtoShares. Yeah, that was also when Bitcoin was at 1200. So it used to be ProtoShares. I'm calling it BitShares PTS now. And that was good. That allowed our community to go from nothing to 10,000 people. Half in China, half in our forums, at BitShares Talk, and probably many more that we don't even know about that are involved because they learned about ProtoShares.

And what ProtoShares allow you to do is they get a stake up to at least 10% in every future decentralized business that we produce. And of course we're trying to encourage others to do the same things to get the community support. But that actually didn't help us. What we realized from that is that mining people spending $100,000 a day, paying Amazon cloud service or their electric company to mine these ProtoShares and all that money is just being burned up. It's ridiculous to destroy your seed money in the allocation of your shares. And that gave us the idea, well, what if we could capture all the money that was being spent in mining because people are spending this money anyway, and repurpose that to the development of decentralized businesses that actually give value to the ProtoShareholders. And that's where we came up with AngelShares, or BitShares AGS. Each and every day you mine with your money instead of for your money. There's a fixed allocation of 5,000 for Bitcoin and 5,000 for ProtoShares or BitShares PTS holders. The more money that's contributed to the angel address, which is like your Exodus address on a given day sets the price. So there is an actual market operating each and every day that's establishing the price. And it's got the same social contract as ProtoShares. At least 10% of everything we do in the future, with the initial BitSharesX our bank and exchange, you're going to get 50% going to ProtoShareholders, 50% going to the AngelShareholders. That has been wildly successful. Now, depending on the price of Bitcoin, we've probably raised $2 million in the month of January alone, through this, a combination of ProtoShares and Angels.

[32:12] SPEAKER_04: Cool.

[32:12] SPEAKER_01: Okay, so what I wanted to come back to is jurisdiction. So first I would like to just, everyone just give me just a short answer of where you guys are based out of.

[32:20] SPEAKER_04: We really don't have a geographic location. Colorado.

[32:24] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but what I'm saying is your company's going to be formed like you're going to be forming an organization in Canada, right?

[32:28] SPEAKER_04: Yeah. The holding company that's managing the money. So the fiduciary entity most likely will be in Canada. We've looked at a couple of alternatives, like Switzerland, for example. We really want to go to a place where the rule of law is strong and regulation is coherent.

[32:41] SPEAKER_01: Okay. And Mastercoin.

[32:42] SPEAKER_03: So same kind of deal. There are a lot of Mastercoin foundations all around the world. There's one in China, there's one in the United States, there's one in Israel. But the one that holds the original Exodus address funds is a nonprofit, incorporated out of Delaware.

[32:57] SPEAKER_04: Okay.

[32:58] SPEAKER_02: Invictus is a Virginia company.

[33:00] SPEAKER_03: Okay.

[33:01] SPEAKER_02: And we are looking to find the best jurisdiction, just like Ethereum.

[33:05] SPEAKER_01: And so why I asked that. Right, because I know what you jumped into is we're based everywhere. So we talk about all these wonderful things that distributed autonomous corporations, distributed autonomous organizations are going to create too. But just like with Bitcoin, facilitating lots of evil so called, there's the ability in these things to also create kind of some horrible shit. So we jokingly talked about on the way over here of distributed autonomous assassinations, you know, like quadcopters with zip guns or you know, like, you know, small amounts of explosives that you just, you know, put in an address, pay some coins and they fall.

[33:40] SPEAKER_04: I think the US Government's on board now.

[33:42] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly. You know, so, but so I mean, that's real things. I mean this, you know, I believe in if there's an exploit, like let's talk about the exploit now, because the exploit's going to happen eventually, right? So one of the things that's going to happen is when someone utilizes one of your platforms for something terrible like this, this because it'll happen, is that they're going to come after you. Someone's going to want someone to hang for it. That's sort of the difference. We had a long talk last night about this, is that Satoshi didn't have to deal with this. He just disappeared. We can't go, oh, let's go get Satoshi. He had damn bitcoins. He's gone. We can't go do that. But I can grab Charles and I can shake them real hard and do all the stuff that US government, you know, does real well for it. So go for it.

[34:27] SPEAKER_03: Well, let me address this one. A couple of things. First, as a foundation, what we've said is we're never going to get involved in any of the operations. So we're not going to run an exchange, we're not going to be a market maker, any of that. We only and purely support the open source development. So that's step one. Step two, I believe everybody on this panel is a member of the new CODA organization, which, if anybody hasn't heard of it, it's the Consortium of Decentralized Applications. And this is a legal entity we've created just to focus on these regulatory issues that you're bringing up and the legal issues. So they're creating basically papers on what's the legal view of this. They're talking to the regulatory agencies. And so we've taken some of our funds and put it aside specifically for that issue to get way ahead of it before six months from now, something like what you're talking about. Right.

[35:15] SPEAKER_01: And so for six months, I think that probably makes sense. You know, I think a good Band-Aid thing, but I think that ultimately the reason that your platforms all exist is because we all realize that we really need something that can't be stopped, that's jurisdictionless, that doesn't exist in one jurisdiction, and no one can actually have control over.

[35:31] SPEAKER_04: Lucky money doesn't sit in a jurisdiction, it's in Bitcoin.

[35:35] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's definitely cool.

[35:39] SPEAKER_01: Like you said, Charles, Ethereum already has a plan to eventually sort of level up like Pokemon into a DAC, you know, as its core function, as its core company. I think that's cool. Have you guys thought about that or you guys think that there will always be something like that?

[35:55] SPEAKER_03: Yeah, just like I described, we're taking a similar approach where the foundation will have zero power whatsoever over the protocol. And the sooner we can get to that, the better. Not like Charles said, not all of the tools to completely get there exist today, but I think they will in the next 12 months or so. And so this is, like you said, got to be something that lives in the cloud and doesn't have a central point of failure.

[36:19] SPEAKER_01: Do you want to weigh in on that?

[36:20] SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Well, like Mastercoin, we are trying to focus only on being the software producers. We are producing the platforms to allow other people to launch their own systems. With our goal being to lower the barrier of entry so that anyone can launch a new DAC. If you have a high barrier of entry, for example, requiring millions of dollars worth of ASICs to mine your hardware. You can't release another SHA-256 based coin without the existing powers that be in mining world controlling it. And it doesn't matter what your proof of work is, that's going to be the case. So we want to lower the barrier of entry to allow anyone to launch a decentralized application. And then the free market is the ultimate form of decentralization and if we provide the tools, the market will do the rest.

[37:09] SPEAKER_04: I love providing the tools. In fact we can do Namecoin in five lines of code on our platform. That's something we like to mention. It's really important to have the tools, the proper developer experience and it's really important to interface with your ecosystem and have that nice interplay and ask them what do they want, what don't they like. And I think we have a nice balance here. I love that Dave is doing some interesting things with Mastercoin because we're probably going to talk to them on a pretty regular basis. We're going to probably talk to them on a pretty regular basis to help us decentralize our organization because it's important that the knowledge gets out there. That's our primary focus.

[37:44] SPEAKER_01: You brought up something interesting here. And I think it's like the main differentiator between Ethereum and Mastercoin BitShares here is that Ethereum has implemented a Turing complete script system into it, right? And then you two guys have basically, your companies have basically taken a feature set, right? And then there's a feature set that's useful to it, but there's not particularly a language to make it completely open for it. Am I misinterpreting that?

[38:08] SPEAKER_03: There is and there isn't. So the master protocol is taking a specific standard for encoding the data into the blockchain. So you could say that that's sort of our approach to letting people easily encode this particular type of information into the blockchain. So another project like OT or Colored Coins is taking a different technological approach to encoding that information. So what we have here is really four different approaches at least that I'm aware of that people are testing out. One is okay, you can build on top of Bitcoin and you don't have a token, right? That's Colored Coins. You build on top of Bitcoin, you have a token. That's the master protocol. You do your own blockchain and that is either Ethereum or BitShares. And then if you have no relation to a blockchain, whatever. That sort of OT, though, being an open source project, it's going to end up getting pulled into all of our efforts because it adds a lot of volume of code when it comes to great contract work. Chris has done an incredible job with OT and really add a lot of value to community. So those are the four things that are getting tested, right? Open source, no blockchain, open source, no token, open source on top of Bitcoin, and then open source on top of your own blockchain.

[39:17] SPEAKER_01: All right, so here we've got the people here to talk about it. So why don't we talk just about just that specific value proposition and each one of you guys go out and I'm going to give you just a couple of minutes and tell me why that value proposition as a way to get to this next level of blockchain technology, or lack of blockchain technology, is what's going to be the driving force behind adoption for your specific entity.

[39:37] SPEAKER_04: So it starts with asking the question, what is your blockchain supposed to do for you? What's the kind of the purpose of the blockchain? Is your blockchain supposed to be where the features live? Is the blockchain where your identity management system lives? Is where your decentralized entities live? Or is the blockchain supposed to be something that there when you need it, but interfaces usually with a decentralized application that runs on the client side?

So we've been talking a lot with Johan and Chris Odom about integrating Open Transactions into our ecosystem because they've done some absolutely phenomenal work. They've really worked hard. And so we say, well, they have this problem with voting pools and you have to audit the voting pools. Well, that's a trust feature. And the argument they give is if you have enough players in the pool, eventually it keeps people honest. And when we look at Wall Street and other entities, that's not necessarily completely true. So you say, hey, wait a minute here. Auditing can be done by the Ethereum blockchain that's very, very easy to implement. That's just again, a few lines of code. So you can take all of your decentralized trading, you can take that price discovery, you can take all the bloat that you would normally incur with running a decentralized chain and outsource it to Open Transactions, but has the same level of trust that you would have as if you ran everything on a blockchain.

So that's really the key is finding those value points and saying, is it going to live on chain? Is it going to live off chain? Where is the application going to be? So the philosophy we take with Ethereum is we have no features. We're like Minecraft. It's just a big open world and you can build on top of it. If you want to build a computer in Minecraft with Redstone, you can do that.

[41:00] SPEAKER_01: Do you have creepers?

[41:01] SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah, yeah, we have creepers in the space, man. It's great.

[41:04] SPEAKER_01: I believe I met the team. I believe you guys have creepers.

[41:07] SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah, a couple of them. But anyway, that's the approach we take is we say, hey, it's this big open ecosystem. It's a Lego in essence, that you use to build on top of, and the key is incentivizing people like Mastercoin and Colored Coins to see the value proposition in eventually developing on top of our platform. It's showing the BitShares guys, hey, you can do a DAC a minute. If you want to use proof of stake, you can use proof of stake and you can run all that logic and connect it in a very creative way. So the bloat either lives on a small blockchain that is only handled amongst the people who are relevant, or if you want to pay the expense, it's handled on the Ethereum blockchain. So there's a lot of options that everybody has, and if we give good tools and we're very diligent with this process, eventually those options will become very satisfying, we think, to people. And, remember, our goal is to reduce the fragmentation, reduced the isolation in the system. We want people working together. It makes no sense to me that every time we want to do Bitmessage, we have to rewrite Bitmessage. Why not just have Bitmessage as an app and have an API to talk to Bitmessage? Why re-implement Open Transactions? Just have Open Transactions as an app and just talk to it through an API. It makes a lot of sense to do that because everybody can focus on the user experience, they can focus on their core mission, and they can focus on the fiduciary duties that they have to the people they've taken money from.

[42:21] SPEAKER_03: Sure.

[42:22] SPEAKER_01: You want to jump in?

[42:23] SPEAKER_03: No, I think he described it well, especially for the master protocol. The core value proposition right now is we have this enormous resource in Bitcoin. It's by far the world's most powerful distributed network. And so when you talk about level of security, it's hard to beat something that's been as well tested as Bitcoin. And so at least for the value proposition that the master protocol offers is, okay, you can build here on a platform where you know and you trust the implementation that's already been built with Bitcoin, you know and trust that it's going to have the largest network effect. And that's sort of the immediate approach is you have these tools, let's build on top of them. And it's not as experimental I think, as some other approaches, though the experimental approaches may be more powerful in the long run. And that's what we're experimenting with is right, you know, we know what Bitcoin can do today. And so I see the master protocol as sort of a bet that the blockchain will continue to dominate as a platform. And these other projects are experiments with, okay, we can build different platforms, that have different attributes.

I think somebody, I can't remember who brought up the great analogy. The question is, is Bitcoin TCP/IP or is it SMTP? Is it a protocol that was built just for email, or is it general enough that we can use it as TCP/IP? And that remains unanswered. So it really is going to depend on some of what the core devs do. If the core devs decide Bitcoin is only going to be Bitcoin, then it may end up as SMTP. If they decide, okay, we are going to allow, and it seems the direction they're going in with this new update with 0.9 supporting metadata embedded in a way that doesn't bloat the blockchain. And anybody can prune out those records if they don't want to store the extra data. It seems like they're slowly moving in that direction where Bitcoin could not only be a payment network and a store of value, but also a general ledger. So that's what we're going to find out.

[44:27] SPEAKER_02: Well, what we're building is a software library which is in a Turing complete language that allows you to build any type of DAC very quickly. One of the things that we're focusing on is the efficiency, the economic efficiency of the system. Recognizing that you cannot maintain a decentralized system processing all the transactions from exchanges from every single business model on a single chain using a single currency. But if you provide the tools and APIs and software, you can build an entirely new blockchain very quickly. And if you don't have to depend upon mining for security because you've got proof of stake combined with Ripple style consensus, then you don't have all the expense or the need to centralize into a single blockchain.

You can achieve much faster transactions, much lighter weight transactions. Which is a critical reason why if I was going to build a decentralized banking exchange and I had to pick a platform, would I build it on that library that eliminates all the other overhead? The fees I'd have to pay to process transactions, to the Bitcoin network, pay their miners, or the fees I'd have to pay to pay the Ethereum miners or create a whole new blockchain that doesn't have those fees. And therefore I can offer greater value proposition to both the users and the shareholders in the decentralized bank and exchange. And so the key is to maximize competition instead of trying to build one blockchain to rule them all, whether it's Bitcoin or some other blockchain, we want to have many blockchains, each of which is very lightweight so that someone who only cares about playing a blockchain based game or gambling or voting doesn't have to process all the bids and asks of the New York Stock Exchange. That's the key to decentralization, is many blockchains. Because blockchains are not scalable beyond a certain point when you only have one chain, you have to go parallel. And to do that we are developing a software toolkit and trying to teach people the process of.

[46:37] SPEAKER_04: I'm sorry, to clarify, you hold on for two.

[46:41] SPEAKER_01: I know we got started a little late. How are we on time?

[46:44] SPEAKER_04: You got the day.

[46:46] SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, cool. I just want to make sure because I guess we got stuff I want to talk about and I just wanted to make sure.

[46:50] SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we could go that long.

[46:52] SPEAKER_04: Just a clarifying question. Your software library, you say it's Turing complete.

[46:56] SPEAKER_02: What I'm saying is that with C or Java or whatever language you want to use, if you can rapidly put together a new blockchain, I can encode the Namecoin transactions in a few lines of code, modifying an existing library and then release a new chain. So there's a lot of value for the core Ethereum concept, which is effectively a metered computational engine for doing general purpose transactions. And I believe there's demand for that. What I'd like to do is work with people like the Ethereum team to create a version of your blockchain that takes your core technology and combines it with our profit model of minimizing expenses, eliminate the mining and allow Ripple style speeds. Then you can get all the benefits you currently have today only, with the benefits that we bring to the table, which is a sustainable economic.

[47:50] SPEAKER_01: I would like to applaud all three of you guys because all three of you guys are, for lack of a better word, competing companies. But I have heard all three of you in one way or another say we would really like to work with these guys. We'd really like to work with them. We think this would be great with that. And I would just say that's the way to go because the truth of the matter is that none of us have any idea how this is going to work out. We have really good hypothesis on how this is going to turn out. I think that's great, this working together. I think that's going to be fantastic. I like that you guys organically said that. We didn't have to beat you over the head with it for that.

[48:20] SPEAKER_03: That's the beautiful thing of this all being open source. Parts of one Ethereum are going to get doing, are going to get dragged into the master protocol and parts of what BitShares are doing are going to get dragged into Ethereum and parts of what OT is doing, we're going to get dragged into all three. Right? It's not the solid lines of I'm on this team and I don't like the other team. If you're intellectually honest, we all know that these are experiments and that some of them succeed and some of them will fail, but we'll learn something valuable each time we run these different experiments and that will add to the ecosystem as a whole. And I think the thing that bonds us together is we have the same core philosophy, at least with a lot of the folks I've talked to is the goal here is to build these decentralized systems and to disrupt the old systems which become corrupt, which have become very hierarchical, whether we're talking about banking or financing. And so that's our core goal. We're going to try a lot of ways to get there and some will work and some won't, but we can learn from every one of those experiments. And so I really like that about this community.

[49:26] SPEAKER_01: I think there's a good bridge here for something that I think is kind of a hot topic around this and especially around your three companies. And it's going to piss some people off here. It is open source and anyone can grab it and fork it at any point in time. So, I make the argument, to a degree. And that's why premining for any of you guys, I think, is a dangerous concept to a degree, because you guys are taking a great amount of risk. You guys are putting a lot of effort into it. And you guys are, for lack of a better word, however you guys want to phrase it for something in your fundraising model, there was some amount of premine of what you guys are going to have value in your system. You had an auction for it, right. But it was already existing.

[50:10] SPEAKER_03: There was no portion that was set aside for founders that wasn't part of the auction. Everybody equally participated.

[50:16] SPEAKER_04: Okay.

[50:16] SPEAKER_03: I do think that's an important.

[50:17] SPEAKER_01: So that's great. So, yeah, so I'm going to ask you guys to come in and you guys can talk about specifically for Ethereum, you guys have been very open about how you guys are going to do the distribution of this initial portion. And so I worry with everyone, everyone that I see doing hard work on it. I worry of that issue of you guys are relatively small companies. You guys are all big players in this space, but you guys are relatively small players, and you guys doing a lot of awesome work. Then another company coming in, grabbing all of your hard work, cutting out all of your fundraising, portion of it, and taking the value proposition and moving it and then putting a lot of scale behind it and moving forward and creating this wonderful ecosystem that we all want, and you guys are no longer really a part of it. I understand a lot of the arguments to that, but let's just talk about that. Let's talk about why you guys think that, what reasons there are. Why you don't think that's going to happen to you, or how you think you're going to mitigate it, or how it's irrelevant and it doesn't matter whatever. But let's talk about that.

[51:16] SPEAKER_04: Okay, well, we can take a look at it from a couple of different angles because this is a very good. And it's a very poignant question. First we look at incentives. So we probably don't like the US Government very much, or, you know, at the very least, we say the US Government has a benefit from.

[51:30] SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, there we go for the.

[51:31] SPEAKER_01: NSA listening right now.

[51:32] SPEAKER_04: But I'll say, I'll say we as.

[51:33] SPEAKER_01: In army person, I served myself.

[51:36] SPEAKER_04: But I'll say we as in the Bitcoin community. There's a little bit of resistance there. They don't like things like PRISM, and yet the US Government is actually a fairly robust shareholder of bitcoins. They have over 200,000 of them because of the Dread Pirate Roberts seizure. And so there's a very strong incentive for the Bitcoin blockchain to have a fork and that position to be simply divested, either just simply removed, or for that position to go ahead and be reallocated by a faucet or some mechanism. It really is. Because who wants the US government to hold these coins and have control over the ecosystem? And you can pick any possible actor, but a fork is not just pushing a button, releasing code. It's an ecosystem. You have people, they live there. And people have financial incentives. In our case, miners have an incentive to mine. There's chain A, chain B, whichever one they can actually sell on an exchange and make money with.

And in case of the investors who bought into the IPO, they're going to stick with the people who deliver value. So what you're proposing, where they fork it and they cut out the premine, is basically firing the founders, right? So what I'm saying is let the market decide. If the founders haven't done a good job, there's probably going to be a fork.

[52:40] SPEAKER_01: And the market's going to decide. And I think we can all.

[52:42] SPEAKER_04: Hang on, let me finish. But let's look at the ecosystem as a whole. Let's say a hard fork does happen. The only person in the world that screws are the founders. Think about that. Because let's say Ethereum A and Ethereum B happens, and for some reason Ethereum B is really popular. It cuts out the founders premine. We still have Ethereum, it still exists, it's there. Does that matter to anybody who's using the ecosystem? You know, it really doesn't matter to anybody who's using the ecosystem. The only guy who gets shafted is me. I'd probably be a little pissed off about it, but, you know, honestly.

[53:10] SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to back up to what you just said when we were talking about the Dread Pirate Roberts coins and how like we could technically cut those coins out and falsehood, but we never did.

[53:18] SPEAKER_04: But.

[53:18] SPEAKER_01: So that's the issue though, right? So in that example that you're giving, right, you're talking about actually messing around with the fungibility of Bitcoin, right? Because if at any point in time we all know that the stuff that we have, that we have control of. Yeah, but I'm saying. But if we know the coins that we have control of, that the core team at some point in time can just decide that we no longer have control of those, and we're going to reallocate them to that. Well, I think that network effect, if that's our money, that would probably destabilize the whole network just by doing that. But what you guys are building with DACs is that the core value being money is not as important as all of the applications stuff that you're talking about. Whereas in Bitcoin, as Bitcoin stands right now, the money is what it's about. Okay, so there is a little difference there into what you're saying. I just wanted to point that out there. So when you're talking about, let's cut that portion out of it, because Bitcoin does operate a little bit differently. Because right now, Bitcoin's about the money. Get them dollar bills, y'all.

[54:07] SPEAKER_02: All.

[54:08] SPEAKER_01: Stack bids. Go for it.

[54:10] SPEAKER_03: Well, I just wanted to say I spent a lot of time thinking about this question, and this is the question I had to ask myself as the lead for BitAngels. I led the due diligence for the master protocol when it came through our process. And I had to ask myself, like, really, really hard, is this going to have any value, or is somebody going to copy this and fork it and create another version that will have all the value? And it took me a while to wrap my head around that question because you can say, well, is Bitcoin just this oddity? Is it the only use case where, you know, creating a fork isn't as valuable because all the values in the infrastructure and not in the code? Or can we apply this model generally?

And what I eventually became convinced of is that we can apply this model generally. The value is not in the code. The value is in the people that build on top of the code. It's in the infrastructure. And that was a big revelation for me because it opens up this model for all kinds of things that aren't cash, that aren't currency, aren't a payment network. I'm not saying that this model will work for everything. I think there might be small enough niches where if you can copy it and there's not much infrastructure on top, maybe it doesn't make sense. But for anything that's widely used enough that there's infrastructure being built on top, people will say, well, should I go with this one that has all the nice infrastructure and the libraries and the tools and all these businesses that are integrated with it? Or should I go with this new network that has none of that? And I think rational actors will pick the one with the infrastructure.

But what that tells me is that the first mover advantage is enormous in this area because if you're the first one to do a fair distribution in a transparent way and build a new technology, people are going to opt into your system over somebody else. That comes later. And so that's what I encourage people to do. People think that this revolution is going to take three or four or five years. This revolution is going to be 12 or 18 months. Everything you can imagine decentralized. The first version of that is going to get built in the next 18 months. And I'm following 26 protocols under development right now.

[56:13] SPEAKER_01: My hair is just using this great.

[56:14] SPEAKER_03: Using this new model, right? This is going to move really, really fast. I don't think people appreciate how quickly this can move because once you have it in place, people are going to opt for that first category. As long as it's been done transparently, it's been done fairly, where everybody could participate. But people are going to experiment with different versions. Pool for developers, pool for the Kickstarter, a pool for some user behavior if you still do need mining or something else. So people are going to. I think best practices will emerge based on what people opt into. If people said I'm not going to participate in that model, people aren't going to adopt that model. The master protocol has been really successful and so a lot of people are adopting that Kickstarter model and mixing it with a similar dev pool. People will create variations of that. But I think best practices are slowly emerging.

[56:58] SPEAKER_04: I agree completely. It's all about the community that you build. And I like the fact that community has the ability to fire the founders. That's a pretty cool fact. Think about it. That's what a fork does. If you remove the premine.

[57:09] SPEAKER_02: The thing we're adding to the mix is we also recognized, of course, the network effect is incredibly important, which is part of the reason why we launched BitShares PTS in November. So we could capture the network effect, build the cloud community, start getting some infrastructure around the BitSharesX exchange idea. But one of the things we're doing now is now we're building an open source library and toolkit where I actually have a software license that if you're going to use our toolkit to build something, you have to honor the founders. So even though it's open source, you can do that. Now that doesn't stop someone from creating an entirely new language, entirely reimplementing it. But that's of course, first mover advantage. If you're going to build something new from scratch. You're going to have to go through all of the legwork that we've gone through and it's going to set you back dramatically. And so someone else can come along, allocate 20% to the creators of the open source library that you're using and take the other 80% and distribute it however they need, if they need to raise funds for development, any of those things. And of course it's in the software license.

[58:10] SPEAKER_01: Okay, so, you guys are sort of this next gen technology here, and I'm going to use a really probably poor example here. So let's just say an application. We had Friendster and then Friendster sucked and we built MySpace and then MySpace. Everyone had MySpace, right? And they're like, oh, MySpace is going to be it. And then Facebook was just there and then Facebook became ubiquitous and everybody had Facebook. So there was this iterative process of like, you had the core functionality. The core functionality of Friendster wasn't particularly different than Facebook. Right. But no one's on Friendster anymore. I think there's some random countries that are still on Friendster. So sorry to you guys. And now Facebook is more and more coming. We have some upstarts that are starting to take market share away from Facebook. So on that, do you guys feel that you're just one iteration in the growth of this technology and you guys will see additional currencies or additional blockchain technologies built on top of you guys or built to supersede you guys, or is this it? This is going to enable the building of the whole future?

[59:13] SPEAKER_04: Well, I think it would be hubristic to claim that Netscape 1.0 was the final web browser. But I don't want to be Facebook and I don't want to be Dropbox. I don't want to be any of these services. Those are applications. I want to be the web browser. I want to be the foundation layer. And I want to get everybody behind the idea that we need a foundation layer. And let's talk about how to make that foundation layer work. Let's talk about how to make that foundation layer scalable and easy to develop on top of. And it's a process, it takes a lot of effort and there's some philosophies on how to do that. But ultimately, I think the best value proposition that can be offered to the cryptocurrency space right now is unity. That's it. We need to start working together. We need to start acknowledging that the problems of BitPay are similar to the problems of Coinbase or similar to the problems that we have that BitShares has, that Dave has. And we wake up every day, it makes sense to me to rally behind some core principles. And our principles are real simple. Simplicity is one of them. Modularity, universality, non discrimination, agility. These are principles that I think everybody in the space can like.

I think also we recognize that Bitcoin is quite valuable, but it still has a very small ecosystem compared to global population. The real growth hasn't happened yet. We're not at the billion person stage or the 2 billion person stage. So how do you get between 2 million people and 2 billion people? That's the user experience. And you're never going to get a wonderful user experience if you have 26 protocols and 26 standards and 150 coins floating around. So whether your approach is to have a licensed library or your approach is to build the Android or the cryptocurrency space like we're trying, one of these will eventually, when something will solidify and then the user experience will very rapidly get better and eventually you're going to have all the creativity come on in. Because you think about how many really bright people are in this space who are not phenomenal coders, who aren't really hardcore programmers who write assembly code every day, but they're great designers. The magic of the web was to give these beautiful tools to people, to build amazing websites, amazing web pages without having to be a hardcore developer. We gave them that. And that's kind of the goal here. Say, let's give these amazing tools, whether it be a library, whether it be a platform, whether it be a really robust protocol, or maybe some composition of all three, so that you can walk in there in a very small period of time. Three weeks, six weeks. Whatever your dream is, whatever you want to do, you can get it done. That's what I'm trying to get done in this ecosystem. My hope is Bitcoin starts competing with us because in the process of competing with us, it's actually going to make the Bitcoin protocol significantly more robust. So that way everybody wins, the whole ecosystem is going to win. Value goes up, it's a rising tide effect.

[1:01:47] SPEAKER_03: I think that's well said. I would agree with Charles on a lot of points. And I think the goal here is to build these new systems in a way that can serve the most people. And I think he made a really good insight about user level. This is sort of how technology works today. My own view is that what we're going to see is more and more protocols built on top of each other. So you buy a computer, the computer is hardware, it's a platform itself. You have an operating system that works on top of the computer hardware. The operating system has a number of different technology stacks. Let's say you're in the Apple technology stack or you can use the Google technology stack and that's sort of a third layer. And then on top of that Google offers a huge plethora of applications from its app store. And most people are here at the fourth level. They're not in the hardware, they're not in the OS, they're not even in the tech stack. They're using those end user applications.

And so that's sort of what I've described for those that have read my decentralized applications white paper is I see these different layers emerging for the Bitcoin ecosystem is we can think of Bitcoin as that bottom layer. We can build layers on top of that. That makes things easy to build. And then most people will be at that third or fourth layer where the users end up going. And so that's really where it gets exciting. And so we're really early days concerning Bitcoin is that first layer and here we're talking really about that second layer. I think in 2015, 2016 going to get to that third and fourth layer and that's really where you hit mass market.

[1:03:28] SPEAKER_01: So I'm actually going to jump into another question. I'm going to get you to go ahead and answer it there. So what you guys have been talking about, and I guess I'm just pointing at someone and that's not going to really, that's not going to transfer here on the radio. So Daniel, what I would like to talk about is that let's say that this 18 month period has gone by and we have this mass adoption somewhere of DAC. So why don't we give us a look into the future. Let's look at five years down the road. What is it going to look like? What are we going to see here in the world? Because someone's going to win. This technology is out of the box. Someone's going to do this. So what are we going to see? What's going to be different for a normal person and how is this going to affect them?

[1:04:09] SPEAKER_02: I don't think someone's going to win. I think everyone's going to win.

[1:04:12] SPEAKER_01: That's a good way to put it.

[1:04:14] SPEAKER_02: And like you asked earlier whether or not we were worried about someone replacing us. And my primary vision is to teach how to make all these things happen. And I believe that there are so many creative ideas. It's like going back to the beginning of the Internet and imagining, Google and Facebook and all these things that happen. You can't predict five years out because things are moving so quickly in. My personal mission in all this is to secure the life, liberty, and property of everyone through decentralized solutions. And we're all going to win, no matter what.

[1:04:52] SPEAKER_01: Okay? So I'm not going to hold any of you guys to this, okay? But what I want here is I want sort of some pie in the sky, big ideas of, like, how this is going to make it all better. Okay? And take it out as far as you need to 50 years in advance tell me what life could be, possibly be like if everything went well.

[1:05:09] SPEAKER_02: Where I am going is a world where all interaction with our fellow man is entirely voluntary. We no longer need to rely on government to settle disputes. In fact, decentralized technologies will make governments entirely irrelevant, ineffective in being able to do anything, because we now have, with communication, the ability to communicate with everyone in the world, an ability to reach a global consensus about who owns what and how to settle disputes and how to do coordinated, decentralized justice without having to rely on taxation or force.

[1:05:43] SPEAKER_01: I can hear the cheers from New Hampshire. From here, actually. Like, I can already hear them.

[1:05:47] SPEAKER_02: That is my mission. I have various decentralized applications, dozens of them, on a roadmap of how to get there from where we are today. And it's going to be an amazing new world. And my primary goal is to teach people how to apply these principles because I know that I don't have enough creativity to see everything that's going to happen. But I do believe that we are eventually the free market will find a way to provide that particular good and service, security and protection of all our property from everyone, including organized crime, like governments.

[1:06:22] SPEAKER_01: Awesome. David, where are we going, man?

[1:06:24] SPEAKER_03: All right, all right. Put my preacher hat on.

[1:06:28] SPEAKER_01: And if you guys can't tell this over the radio, we have a big crowd here. We have packed this studio out. People are interested in this, and that's fantastic.

[1:06:35] SPEAKER_03: So let me imagine with you a world where the idea if you have one job is antiquated. In fact, even the idea that you would go to one place or work on one project for years at a time is entirely antiquated to the way we think in this future world. Because if I can immediately earn tokens for whatever value I'm contributing, if I'm contributing to a decentralized Dropbox by the 3 TB sitting on my desktop, or if I'm contributing to a new application by writing some of the code, I'm immediately getting compensated with those tokens, which, unlike stock in a company, are immediately liquid. I can sell them on any exchange in the world, and it can immediately turn into any other asset or any other fungible currency.

And so imagine a world where you don't need to have a job in the traditional sense or earn equity in the traditional sense, but you can participate in all these decentralized communities and all these decentralized applications, whether it be the decentralized Dropbox, the decentralized Amazon, the decentralized whatever you're doing, you can be universally compensated for that in a way that you're talking about where arbitration and courts become a thing of the past. And that's, I firmly believe, where we're headed. The first people that are going to get there are the programmers and the people that have these abilities that can immediately put into use. But as this gets to higher and higher levels, you have more and more everyday things built on top of all these layers that everybody can participate in, whether they know a line of code or whether they're just doing their everyday thing. That's, I think, where we're going.

[1:08:18] SPEAKER_01: All right.

[1:08:19] SPEAKER_04: I have no idea. I want to build tools that give the world the ability to tell me what's going to happen. I don't have an economic philosophy here. We've tried to pick a balance in basically everything that we've done and everything we've designed. We have no features. The goal here isn't to remove governments. The goal here isn't to change the world. The goal is to give the people who want to change the world the ability to do that, no matter where they live, in a completely transparent way. And also the goal is to get the people who want to change the world to collaborate with each other, to talk to each other, and to have these experiments run in a very transparent way. That's my goal. That's what I want. I can't predict the future. No one can. No one has ever been able to do that. IBM would be a pretty rich company right now. I guess they're rich, but they don't. Microsoft and Intel, if they could predict that there's so many examples of these people. Look at Xerox, for heaven's sakes. Instead, all I want to do is say, come to me. And I want to make that experience so magical and so insanely great that everybody just wants to come to me and build the new world on top of this platform. That's my goal.

[1:09:23] SPEAKER_01: Okay, so two things here. One is, I would like to say that, you guys all have interesting propositions, but as I have said before, I think that Dogecoin is going to institute Turing complete scripting language in there. And I think that is totally much Turing mini complete. And I think that that's probably, that's going to make all of you guys irrelevant. Something all three of you had said. And it's cool because it makes things a little simpler here. But you've all used the term me and I and things like that. But you all have awesome teams. You guys all have great people that you're working with. So can we just take a minute and talk about the people that you guys work with that are helping build these projects? I can't be here. I run into this all the time. Right? So I am Jason King from Sean's Outpost. So people think that Sean's Outpost is Jason King, and that's not true. Sean's Outpost is a ton of people. Like, Jason King is not in Pensacola right now. And guess what? People are still getting fed right now. So let's talk about your team, if that's cool. If you guys should just take a minute, talk just about that.

[1:10:18] SPEAKER_04: We've got a really wonderful team. So on the fiduciary members side, there's myself, Anthony DiIorio, who's the executive director of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada. He did Satoshi Circle. He does CryptoKit, which by the way is one of the most amazing applications you need to download. It's incredible. So he does CryptoKit. We obviously have Vitalik, who I guess has developed the reputation of some sort of android from the future, sent back in time to save us from the dystopian government. He's an amazing guy. I've heard that one. It's true. Yeah. Vitalik T1000. They're going to make a graphic novel.

So Vitalik is absolutely amazing. And then we have Mihai. He works for Bitcoin Magazine. He does Egora. He's a really, really phenomenal person. And then kind of the ecosystem that we surround ourselves with. We have a really healthy balance of people. We have some quantitative analysts like Dr. Emmanuel Costa who worked for Goldman Sachs, he's running a hedge fund in Asia. And we have Joe Lubin, who also is helping us out on the financial side. They're actually studying how to implement clearinghouses and do everything you'd want to do on Wall Street, on Ethereum, to see if the scripting language is robust. We have some great marketing people like John Mohan who is really helping us build a community. We thought that was really important from day one to bring people in to interface with communities.

Gosh, there's so many people on the list. I think we have a total of 15 or 20 core developers. There's Dr. Gavin Wood, who's a game developer, he's built game engines. I think he got his PhD in computer science and he specialized in, and he's going to be really angry at me because I'm going to get it terribly wrong. But taking basically algorithms to visualize music. And he's done some absolutely amazing things. He wrote our entire C++ client in a period of like six or seven days while drinking some Robert Madhavi. So he's the kind of guy that you want to get to know.

We even have a few philosophers. And we even invited Tatiana, she did the Bitcoin song. She was at our beach house that we rented, and we had some fun. So it's been really an amazing experience to be on this team. In fact, I think it's the best team that I've ever been on in my entire life with any project that I've ever worked on. Just because there's just so much passion and diversity, there's so much clarity of thought, and there's so much vision which is so rare. There's so much vision in this team. And my hope is we can continue to attract that as we move forward and work with people who have vision like the people here.

[1:12:48] SPEAKER_03: That's awesome. Yeah. No, give a quick shout out to Peter Todd, our chief scientist at the foundation. A lot of people know Peter Todd from his work as a Bitcoin core developer. Really respect a lot of things he's done and he's been going after this question of Bitcoin scalability and how do you properly embed metadata for a while now. So really glad to get him involved in the foundation. Our executive director for the foundation is Ron Gross. A lot of folks know him as Ripper234 from the BitcoinTalk forums based in Israel. Real great guy, very passionate, very experienced in the space.

Also want to talk about J.R. Willett of course wrote the original paper. It's been exciting to see he's recently come full time on the project and been able to leave the day job which is the vision of every founder, ever, ever. So I also want to talk about Sam Yilmaz sits on our board. He's one of the co-founders of BitAngels. Michael Turpin leads all our media stuff. He's also another co-founder of BitAngels. The guy that back in the 1.0 days of the Internet founded MarketWire, the company, the first Internet company to do PR stuff.

Also want to talk about a few of the other board members. A lot of people know Brock Pierce, who's sort of the grandfather of virtual currency, having been doing this since the late 90s, the early 2000s. So a lot of people know Brock. Jonathan Yantis, also Anthony Vo, all very passionate and so it's been great as we've brought on more and more core developers. Craig Sellars recently came on as the sort of CTO of the foundation full time and so we've similarly just the team has been exploding. We've now got I think north of 10 or 15 full time developers. Maran, a lot of people know from, he has created the most popular Mastercoin Wallet and there are three or four other great core developers. I'm going to forget a few names but it's really been exciting to work with a team that had that varied and interesting talents.

[1:14:54] SPEAKER_02: I'm working with a great team that's growing very rapidly. We've got so many people I can't even name them all working all over the world on many different things. Bo Shen is a Chinese partner of ours. He's all the China aspects. We have a huge community in China. He's doing it all on his own. It's wonderful to be able to work with people that are autonomous and just make things happen. They're great partners. Recently Brian Page joined us, met him in Vegas and he's been completely revamping our marketing in a way that you guys are going to appreciate in the coming days and in the year ahead. Arlen has come on board and he's going to help us manage all of our bounties, organize all the technical teams. And of course, Dan Notestein. He's a CEO for another company that basically has a whole team in Poland of developers that he's heading up to help develop and manage Keyhotee and BitShares and all these things. So we've got an incredible team that's growing, and I'm very excited.

[1:16:08] SPEAKER_03: I can't forget Taariq Lewis, who's in the audience, our smart property lead. Otherwise I'd be remiss.

[1:16:14] SPEAKER_04: And actually, I forgot to mention, Wendell from HIVE is also in the audience, and he's been working so very closely with. I'm sorry, Wendell, for not mentioning. I feel really bad.

[1:16:23] SPEAKER_01: So I would like to take advantage of the fact that we have a bunch of great people in the audience right now, too. So if you guys are cool, I'm going to open it up to some questions and we're going to take some questions. Is that cool?

[1:16:32] SPEAKER_03: Great.

[1:16:33] SPEAKER_01: Anybody got anything? You know, I just gave you.

[1:16:36] SPEAKER_03: Okay, cool.

[1:16:36] SPEAKER_01: Thank you.

[1:16:38] SPEAKER_03: Stan Larimer.

[1:16:39] SPEAKER_01: I just was very impressed with each one of you who were basically talking about how well you cooperate together. And I'm just wondering if maybe you could talk about, is there some way.

[1:16:50] SPEAKER_03: This wonderful triumvirate here can put together.

[1:16:53] SPEAKER_01: Some type of a joint project that can show how you can work together? Okay, so I want to restate this, because I don't know how well that's getting picked up on the mic, but so basically, the gentleman said, okay, just. Just for my own peace of mind, the gentleman said he was very impressed with all three of you. Is there some way we can get, like, you know, a super group together and you guys can all riff and we can. You guys can work on a project together?

[1:17:18] SPEAKER_04: Is that something you're looking right? A few months ago, I did have a plan to establish the cryptocurrency research group with Virginia Tech, and we never quite could get that accomplished. But I think there are a set of common problems in this ecosystem, no matter who you are. Bitcoin, BitShares, or Ethereum. Like blockchain bloat, coin fungibility. The idea of the user experience of mobile clients, how you want to handle mobile clients and that trust model that we all suffer from. 80% of the world is on mobile, and Bitcoin doesn't do mobile very well. So I think that's a really natural place of collaboration for everybody in this space, is to invest some money into resolving these kinds of problems.

We're going to probably take the lead on that and we're going to make it very easy for a lot of people to join quickly, in a way that we can distribute these costs and not just for us. I think these are problems that BitPay and Coinbase, and other large companies that are starting to get a lot of revenue can participate in. That's number one. Number two, I think we're already all participating in CODA. At least I got the memo on that. So we're already working together on legal projects and regulation and we're going to try to help sculpt the legal definition of a decentralized autonomous organization. Because as much as we want to move everything to the cloud, governments still do have kind of a say on how they respect smart property and those generic attacks in the system.

And then also we're going to work really closely with people to try to build things on top of Ethereum, when that adds value to both parties. I think there's a really strong value proposition for both Colored Coins and Mastercoins in certain respects that would benefit both their investors and also their core mission. And so we'll be in talks at some point with Dave and other people in the project about, if we can do that. And I think there's definitely room for DAXs right now. There's no point, click one click way of doing DAXs libraries. A good start, but I'd really like to improve the user experience as much as possible. So I think we might collaborate on the libraries and might collaborate on the approach, if anything, just to ensure interoperability between what you're doing and what we're doing, so. Absolutely. Stan, I think it's a very good question and I think over the next six months you'll be really happy with the amount of collaboration we have.

[1:19:22] SPEAKER_03: Stan, the man that coined the term DAC. Yeah, absolutely.

[1:19:26] SPEAKER_04: Yeah. He is the man who coined the term decentralized autonomous corporation.

[1:19:29] SPEAKER_03: Though it seems, it may be helpful to note for the community, it seems like everybody's moving away from corporation as a frame. I know you guys are talking about, decentralized communities, DA consensus mechanisms. And I think that's important just to spend a moment on. And this is something we've all been talking about. It's part of why I put my white paper out there, and made the argument for decentralized applications is we want to be careful. Language is really important and setting precedent is really important. And these are entities that have no employees, they have no shares, they make no profit, they're not incorporated anywhere. I mean the protocol itself. And so I'm trying to move it to a frame, where it's something more tangible to people and something more accurate. And so applications given it literally is a piece of software I'm downloading on my computer and using like a regular application is a good frame to use.

And so there's nothing a perfect consensus yet on what the heck we're going to call these things, you know. But I think we're moving towards the right, frame and thinking, we're all thinking about that. So yeah, Charles highlighted the CODA partnership. I think that's really important. And I was just talking to Peter Todd yesterday about the research we can do together on the consensus stuff. And so I think there's going to be a lot of cross collaboration between the projects.

[1:20:51] SPEAKER_04: I like DAO, by the way, because I can write the book the Tao of DAO.

[1:20:54] SPEAKER_03: The Tao of DAO?

[1:20:55] SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the Tao of DAO.

[1:20:56] SPEAKER_03: The Tao of DAO. I thought there were going to be shirts here. The Tao of DAO. The Tao of DAO may have already been printed.

[1:21:00] SPEAKER_04: It's better than the Tao of Poo.

[1:21:03] SPEAKER_02: What I would like to see us work together is to focus on taking these really good ideas and making them self sustaining. All living organisms need to produce more than they consume or they eventually consume themselves and die. And therefore all of these decentralized, autonomous, I'm calling them companies because that's a concept instead of a corporation which is a legal entity, they do earn a profit based upon services they provide and how the transaction fees they're charging. So I believe what we can bring to the table is taking some of our software tools that do Ripple style consensus combined with a new form of proof of stake with something like the Ethereum's Turing complete pay as you go calculation engine and to build more efficient systems that are actually as profitable as can be so that they can be as viral, self sustaining and economically efficient as can be. And if I can bring anything to the group and to the community, it's actually to teach the economics of building self sustaining systems.

[1:22:09] SPEAKER_04: Rock on.

[1:22:10] SPEAKER_03: Well said.

[1:22:11] SPEAKER_01: Next question, anybody? I said you guys were a wonderful audience and full of bright minds. So if you guys could not, you know, make me a liar up here and someone could actually contribute, that'd be awesome.

[1:22:26] SPEAKER_03: No pressure.

[1:22:29] SPEAKER_01: Really. Do we do that?

[1:22:30] SPEAKER_02: Good at.

[1:22:30] SPEAKER_01: John, we got one more. Oh, here we go.

[1:22:32] SPEAKER_04: John.

[1:22:33] SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So what do you think of all the joke, the running joke that a decentralized autonomous corporation could, in 10, 15 years, merge and grow and become the next Skynet. So what do you think of this whole, like, decentralized autonomous corporations run amok? Once you give computers the ability to run themselves, won't they own us?

[1:22:51] SPEAKER_02: Let me address that. There's been a lot of confusion about what a decentralized autonomous company can do. All it really is is means of people to coordinate a consensus, to reach an agreement about the state of things. And there's a difference between a, what I like to call a vending machine, which can be thought of as a centralized robot that goes and has some business, and with these decentralized autonomous companies, which are all about consensus and information, they can do nothing on their own except allocate, or reallocate balance within their blockchain. The goal is to engineer economic outcomes, economic incentives to motivate people to take the actions necessary to implement the business without having any one person in control. So a system like you're talking about, where it becomes an artificial intelligence taking over the world, Skynet type situation, is more like a vending machine run amok than a decentralized autonomous company.

[1:23:52] SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you would totally need a Turing complete scripting system and a decentralized currency to do that.

[1:23:58] SPEAKER_03: Well, I've actually thought about this a lot, and maybe this is a controversial idea, but my view of AI is that people will still be at the center. We're still giving the AI a will. We're imbuing it with goals and desires and the program. At least from the AI development I've seen so far, nobody's really solved the hard AI problem. And so we're getting better and better and more advanced languages and more computational power. And I actually do think in the next 20, 30 years, we'll cross that point where the majority of the world's thinking is done by machines. If you just pure number of calculations in brains versus number of calculations in machines. But I actually think that's a good thing. That's similar to the tipping point of the Industrial Revolution, when before the Industrial Revolution, the majority of labor on Earth was done by people or it was done by livestock. And today the majority of thinking on Earth is done by people. Even if it's repetitive or very manual or very rudimentary sort of thinking, people still have to do it because computers aren't that good. And I think when we cross that, that'll be a huge benefit to humanity. But I think we'll still be at the center and we'll be imbuing it with goals and will and all that thing.

[1:25:16] SPEAKER_02: Can I say one more thing on that topic real quick about people being in the center? A lot of the technologies, world building with BitShares involve prediction markets. You can think about it as a global human mind where the prices are the coordinating factor, where you can price anything, abstract ideas, patents, you can figure out how to allocate resources. So all of human effort will now be coordinated through a decentralized consensus mechanism by prices. So it basically takes the intelligence of each and every human and combines them all together to be something more intelligent than any artificial AI could possibly be.

[1:25:56] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but truthfully, isn't that what the robots would tell you to tell us? Seriously?

[1:26:02] SPEAKER_03: I'm actually a. I believe that.

[1:26:04] SPEAKER_04: Well, I, for one, welcome our machine overlords. But, you know, there's a lot of wonderful projects in academia and in private industry that have done some amazing things, like Deep QA with David Ferrucci over at Watson. We got to watch a wonderful Jeopardy episode. Pete Morgan is doing great work at Carnegie Mellon University with NELL. This whole idea of building a program that can read the Internet, and there's a lot of government projects as well as academic ideas that have come around. I think that the notion of strong AI requires a different unit of computation. So we can build with a Turing complete system, a lot of things that emulate human behavior, that do a lot of amazing, make a lot of amazing decisions. But I don't think we can actually get cognition without a better unit of computation. So I'm not terribly worried about any of these systems implementing that.

But I think it's a noble goal. I think Dave's right. Generally when you build these kinds of technology, they tend to make our lives better. If you think about the standard of living today, globally, for the entire world, it's significantly better than it was in the beginning of the 19th century than it was in the beginning of the 20th century. So this progress tends to make it easier to live well regardless of where you're from and how many resources you have available. So my conjecture is that strong AI could actually do the same thing. But that's something for Ray Kurzweil and other guys to kind of figure out. I'm just building Android here.

[1:27:30] SPEAKER_01: All right, let's do one more question and then we'll wrap it up. Someone, someone give me something good. I got one. When all of these technologies together lead us towards a future in which.

[1:27:42] SPEAKER_02: There is no scarcity for humankind on Earth. What will it mean to live.

[1:27:47] SPEAKER_04: A life on Earth?

[1:27:48] SPEAKER_01: What will the. We go deep here at the end. We go deep.

[1:27:53] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

[1:27:53] SPEAKER_04: So a scarcity free economy like the Venus Project resource base, I don't know. I mean economics is like the study of scarcity, right? So I guess we just look at the models and we remove the scarcity factor.

[1:28:04] SPEAKER_03: I know something that will still be scarce, our time.

[1:28:08] SPEAKER_04: Oh, there you go.

[1:28:09] SPEAKER_03: Right. So even if, I mean look, just look at what's happened with agriculture.

[1:28:13] SPEAKER_01: Right.

[1:28:13] SPEAKER_03: We've moved from a society where 95% of people are involved in agriculture to 2 to 4% of industrialized countries are involved in agriculture. And so we've shifted from first agriculture, then to industry and now to services. And most services that you won't be able to replace are ones that are time based. People will still need nannies, people will still need people to do the physical things that are interacting with other people. It's an experienced, more, it's more of a knowledge and experience based economy. You still want to go kayaking yourself and not, you know, outsource that to somebody else, right? So you know, there's a lot of things like that where our time is still scarce. And so if you want some of my time that still, it becomes more and more the most important resource and we're less restricted by oil or once.

[1:29:02] SPEAKER_01: We download our souls into DAC, then time's going to free up too, right? It's not going to be so scarce. Then we're going to really be living in a truly scarce free society, right?

[1:29:12] SPEAKER_04: Well that depends if it pays dividends or not.

[1:29:15] SPEAKER_02: Well, as long as there's enough profit motive, I'm sure someone will come up with a flux capacitor and solve the time issue.

[1:29:21] SPEAKER_03: Exactly.

[1:29:22] SPEAKER_01: 1.21 gigawatts.

[1:29:26] SPEAKER_02: But I don't believe that there's always going to be human demand. Isn't that insatiable? There's always going to be scarcity for what people actually want. There's going to be scarcity of spaceships to go travel the universe and therefore that's what people are going to be working toward. So I think that's the case.

[1:29:42] SPEAKER_01: That's great. I said I was going to end it there, but I want to do one more thing. I want you guys to just go through real quickly and say your company again and tell me how I can get involved. Tell me how if I'm interested and I want to get what I could go do right now to go take a stake in your company.

[1:29:57] SPEAKER_04: Hi, I'm Charles Hoskinson. I'm a core developer on the Ethereum project. We'd like you to go to ethereum.org, E-T-H-E-R-E-U-M dot org.

[1:30:06] SPEAKER_03: I'm David Johnston and I'm one of the board directors for the Mastercoin Foundation. And you can go to mastercoin.org to go to the community website. And we have a separate foundation website, which is just mastercoinfoundation.org for those that want to see all the transparent records. Everything is public record with the foundation, whether it's our books or the developers working on it or all of the development discussion. So really just encourage you to engage. We don't run any exchanges ourselves. You can't get MSC through either of those websites. But there's a link to the wiki that lists all of the different exchanges that trade Mastercoin for Bitcoin. So all those links are at mastercoin.org.

[1:30:49] SPEAKER_02: My name is Dan Larimer with BitShares and Invictus Innovations. You can visit us at invictus.io, check out our new website. It's dramatically improved over what we've had in the past. And if you want to get involved in the future of decentralized businesses, you should look into our angel addresses.

[1:31:09] SPEAKER_01: Guys, this has been a lot of fun. I think that I've had a lot of fun here running this panel. Thank you guys for all coming out here and everyone that's here. I want you guys to just realize that this is like, we're on the cusp of something here. You're going to look back at this conversation, these conversations, and this weekend, five, ten years from now, and we're just going to be like, wow, that was it. We were right there right before everything went crazy. So thanks, everyone for coming out. All right, this has been a Let's Talk Bitcoin production.

[1:31:42] SPEAKER_00: Well, that's it for today. I want to thank our guests and Let's Talk Bitcoin for arranging such a great event. For more information on Ethereum, visit ethereum.org. For Mastercoin, mastercoin.org. And for Invictus Innovations, check out invictus.io. We'll be back with our next episode with more coverage from the Bitcoin Miami conference. Until then, I'm Kyle Kobegovich and thank you for watching.