Is Your Religion Art or Technology?: A Conversation with Aaron Lammer

Feb 27, 2018

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Is bitcoin still operating in a vaccuum? How do we trace it back to market value? What does startup technology and bitcoin have in common? Paul and Rich talk to Aaron Lammer about smoking weed, the similarities between startups and bitcoin, and the future of the blockchain as a post-national project.

Photo by Anna Rose

It’s healthier to see it as gambling: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade sit down with Aaron Lammer to talk about his new podcast Coin Talk. We discuss the stability of bitcoin, the value of human satisfaction, and the similarities between bitcoin investors and startup founders (spoiler alert: it’s that you have to be a bit insane). Rich also grills Aaron on his shift from marijuana enthusiast to financial advisor!

4:00 — Aaron: “[bitcoin] combines a lot of stuff that I’m really interested in. It has elements of startup technology media world, but it also has some game theory, and some like . . . just like gambling-y stuff. And I also think that people who are like, say, investing their own time and resources in startup technology are doing a form of gambling.”

4:41 —Paul: “It’s healthier to see it as gambling; if you see startups as a business, you’re an idiot.”

8:17 — Aaron: “There are a lot of currencies in the world that are less stable than Bitcoin.”

8:53 — Aaron: “I believe really strongly in like experiencing these things…like you don’t want to get lectured about Twitter by someone who’s not on Twitter. You really have to like experience technology to get it.”

14:36 — Rich: “I think today [bitcoin] is nonsense. Eventually there has to be a dotted line to actual value, whether it be services or resources. Bitcoin is in a vacuum, as I see it today, and eventually somebody is going to want to trace that line. It leads to nothing today.

17:45— Aaron: “It could potentially be a post-national project, in the same way that many opensource software projects are post-national. The blockchain is really just the lowest layer. Once you take that idea of an immutable server that everyone can access without anyone controlling it, whether the project succeeds or fails is whatever people can build on top of that. And the first thing that they’ve built on top of it that’s truly been viral is money.”

26:16— Aaron: “Is your religion art or is your religion technology? And where will it be in a hundred years? Will it be with a technological religion or an art religion?”

A full transcript of this episode is available.

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Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.

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