Village Global Podcast

Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean), the author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, joins Erik for a very interesting and highly quotable interview. He expands on a number of topics from his book but also gets into a lot that isn’t in the book. He recounts the story of money from an Austrian perspective and describes why the world never really had a complete gold standard. Saif explains how government became addicted to printing money, how Bitcoin could turn out to be a better version of gold and how it might replace central banks entirely.Saif talks about why Silicon Valley has been and may still be mistaken about Bitcoin and blockchain, and why the analogies of the early days of the internet don’t really apply. He also talks about why the blockchain as a concept has been overhyped and why Bitcoin won’t be as instantaneous and low-fee as you might think.He also talks about what kinds of threats Bitcoin might face, how the world will change when Bitcoin becomes the new standard, and how personal finance and capitalism might evolve in a Bitcoin world.(Murray Rothbard is the economist that Saif references early in the episode).Quotable lines from this episode:“You can’t omit the fact that you took a sledgehammer to the laptop before complaining that it doesn’t work.”“Ever since then it’s been a wild ride of governments having discovered this addiction to printing money to finance themselves to do everything.”“It’s a choice for people to opt-out of the modern nation state with all of its hefty bill that it sends you every year in the form of inflation.”“Gold’s emergence as a money happens on the market, not because of government decree.”“You can’t systematize human action and behavior into mathematical equations that allow you do calculations to predict an outcome.”“The real problem is the fascination with all the buzzwords around all these projects that hang around Bitcoin pretending to be the next big thing, which we’ve been seeing since the beginning of Bitcoin. It’s the same story always and always ends in the same sad way.”“Everybody wants everything to do everything they’ve ever read in a sci-fi novel.”“Everybody is not capable of reasoning just beyond an analogy.”“People think of Bitcoin as a brand… and it’s only natural to think that if it’s Pepsi, it’s going to have its Coca-Cola — but we have the internet, and we don’t have another competitor, because it’s a protocol.”“All of these other uses that people want to attach to blockchain, I humbly submit the thesis that none of them actually matter.”“I don’t conduct criminal activity but if I did I would definitely make sure I would not record it on a ledger accessible to millions of people instantaneously around the world.”“Without a lender of last resort, fractional reserve banking is not going to work.”“Every cent of investment will have to come from a cent of saving and people think that’s a horrible thing, but that’s a great thing, it’s how any society thrives.”“The laws of economics don’t stop functioning just because government just said they should stop functioning in that sector.”“Capital is just a market good like any other, there’s supply and there’s demand.” “The amount of gold today that is held in global central banks is many times larger than what was held in central banks during the time of the gold standard.”“If governments want to kill Bitcoin I think the best strategy would be to return to the gold standard and to offer everybody free markets in banking.”“I know it’s cool to go around on college campuses and talk about destroying capitalism and all of that stuff but really it makes no sense. It’s an insane kind of suicidal death wish.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Vijay Boyapati (@real_vijay), software engineer, crypto thinker and proponent of Austrian economics, joins Erik on this episode to talk about a number of interesting topics.They start with a primer on Austrian economics, what makes it different from other schools of economics, and why economics is a unique science with different schools of thought — “there isn’t a Chicago school of physics or a Marxist school of chemistry.”Vijay speculates on why Austrian economics has become a niche school of economics and analyzes Bitcoin and current economic policy through the lens of Austrian economics. He gives his opinion on the fed, fractional reserve banking and debunks some misconceptions that people have about Bitcoin.They finish with a lightning round discussing what famous economists like Hayek or Friedman would think about Bitcoin. Vijay also discusses the Bitmain IPO and what Facebook entering the cryptocurrency space might mean for the “incumbents.”Quotable lines from this episode:“You look at academia and there’s probably 10 Keynesian economists for every Chicago economist and there’s probably 10 Chicago economists for every Austrian economist.”“It’s sad that political expediency has trumped the pursuit of truth.”“There isn’t like a Chicago school of physics or a Marxist school of chemistry.”“Austrians really believe that an economy grows through investment, capital formation and entrepreneurial activities [rather than through consumption].”“The monetary premium is the value and purchasing power that it has that isn’t explained by its use value.”“All monies throughout history are bubbles and the bubbles don’t necessarily need to pop.”“I think it’s [Bitcoin] the most important innovation in money in a thousand years.”“The thing that’s exciting about Bitcoin is that it gives you a property right but doesn’t require anyone to enforce that property right.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik is joined by two very exciting guests for this episode — Bill Tai, venture capitalist and director at Bitfury, and Derek Hsue (@derek_hsue), investor at Blockchain Capital.The three have a very engaging discussion about the mining landscape in cryptocurrencies, the similarities and differences between now and the early growth of the semiconductor industry, as well as the issues, obstacles and misconceptions standing in the way of new entrants to the mining sector.They get into the details on mining operations, how the architecture of certain coins impacts the equipment that mining can be done on, and how the underlying math is different between Ethereum and Bitcoin.There are also a number of impromptu history lessons courtesy of Bill, including how Wall Street got its name and went from a place to trade furs to the NYSE of today.They also discuss the future of exchanges, why buying into an ICO means buying into a community and a belief rather than something immediately valuable, and why we are headed for a massive reset of capitalism.Quotable lines from this episode: “In the start it’s kind of like riding a little bicycle and you see a pothole, you just go around it, but pretty soon you’re driving a freight train on a track and you can’t get off.” - BT“You’re going to have to come up with a check for 50-100 million dollars to be noticed by a semiconductor fab.” - BT“An upstart two years from now is probably going to have to take down 1000 megawatts just to start.” - BT“It’s really hard to get a venture type return from a mining operation, unless you’re really early on in a chain, or just extremely, much better than everyone else at producing hardware.” - DH “It all boiled down to, can you bribe a politician with an empty city in China to give you his power plant for a bit of money every month? …It turns out that Ethereum is a more concentrated mining ecosystem than Bitcoin.” - BT“Programming in Bitcoin is a bit like programming in assembly or DOS, where Ethereum is like programming in a high-level language that anyone that has done an iPhone app can work with.” - BT“If you look at the largest asset managers in the world, they don’t have a huge incentive to trade in a peer-to-peer manner.” - DH“It’s not about creating a product that is tailored to the world’s current behavior, it’s about providing that option for non-custodial and a trustless financial interaction.” - DH “We’re at that point today where we’re all standing under that buttonwood tree with our virtual assets, trying to figure out where to go.” - BT“The total of all debt in the world is 275 trillion, which is 3.18 times world GDP, it’s growing at 25 trillion a year, and is growing way faster than world GDP is growing.” - BT-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Erik and his co-host Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) of Decentraland interview Nic Carter (@nic__carter), partner at Castle Island Ventures and co-founder of Coinmetrics.io.Nic explains why Bitcoin might end up like gold, where everyday people have little day-to-day interaction with it but it has a big influence on the monetary system, and how Bitcoin can be a check on the behavior of central banks.He explains why he started Castle Island Ventures, explains its philosophy and how they plan to invest. He also explains his take on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and whether any of the altcoins will turn out to be worth anything.He explains why he is bearish on DAOs in the short-term but in the long-term is very bullish. Nic also talks about how projects can improve their governance structures and how users can spot potential governance problems within projects. Quotable lines from this episode:“You don’t need the ‘gold standard’ to be the day to day currency, just like in the era of the gold standard people didn’t transact in units of gold.”“I eventually think we’ll get to this world where we have the advantages of the cryptocurrency capital raise mechanisms together with the guarantees of equity — we just need to marry those concepts.”“I’m kind of heretical in that I think there is a really big role for financial institutions to play in the crypto asset story.”“I think that voting makes people feel more comfortable being governed because they think they have buy-in into the governance system.”“The highest ROI on these projects is transparency — to be so transparent that it hurts.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Trent McConaghy (@trentmc0) returns for another interview with Erik. He’s the founder of Ocean Protocol and BigchainDB. In this episode, he starts by explaining Ocean Protocol’s mission and gives us a history of how the overall philosophy of the web has changed over the years, going from what could be called Web 1 to Web 2.0 to the yet-to-be-written story of Web 3. He explains how the web started out as a tool for democratizing access and how Web 2.0 created some undesirable effects when it comes to the siloing of information, questions about privacy, and the prevalence of advertising. Trent is hopeful though that Web 3 will be a return to the roots of Web 1. He lays out a compelling case for why several of the web’s biggest names should be tokenized and how that will remedy the current case of misaligned incentives between company and users. Trent also helps us imagine a world where AI and blockchain are working to amplify each other and what kinds of changes for society that might portend. He explains a number of scenarios related to digitally autonomous organizations, self-driving cars, road infrastructure, medicine and art.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), CTO of Coinbase, joined Erik on stage in San Francisco at the Founders Embassy Borderless Summit in June 2018 for a fascinating conversation about the coming impact of blockchain technology. They discuss how the world will change as work and entertainment — but especially finance — become virtual. Balaji explains why governments will need to compete for the best individuals and explains the new role of government in a “borderless” world. He also discusses his recent exits and his new role as CTO of Coinbase. Balaji gives his surprising advice for new grads looking to start a company and explains why your “personal burn rate” is one of the most important metrics to track. Erik talks to Balaji about Balaji's lesser known history buff side and they discuss world finance, world history, and China.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Today’s guest is Jimmy Song (@jimmysong), crypto developer and teacher. He is a venture partner at Blockchain Capital and creator of the Programming Blockchain course. Jimmy has been a crypto developer for a long time now (in crypto terms), teaches programming blockchain, and has written a number of influential posts on crypto. He talks about how he got into crypto and what about it was so appealing to him. He explains how an economic lens, rather than a technical lens, is what brought him to blockchain.Jimmy and Erik discuss the merits of Bitcoin versus other coins, why Jimmy believes Bitcoin will win, and what misconceptions VCs have about blockchain. They discuss what makes a good store of value, the biological impulse humans have to hoard that which is scarce and the potential impact of Bitcoin 30 years from now. They also discuss a good amount of economic history, what makes a true “hard money” as well as why war led to the gold standard going away. To apply for a scholarship for Jimmy’s Programming Blockchain course, visit www.programmingblockchain.com.Quotable lines from this episode:“Money is strengthened when it doesn’t change whereas tech is strengthened when you iterate and try different things and see what works for the market.”“The big thing that Bitcoin brings to the market is hard money, which is what disappeared when Roosevelt seized gold and all that other stuff.”“It’s not just armies against armies, it’s entire countries against entire countries now, very literally speaking, because the government can take away all the money and wealth away from the populace and use that for their war effort.”“You don’t have to believe that it has value, it’s enough that other people value it. I might not value Bitcoin but as long as other people value Bitcoin I will value Bitcoin.”“The things that make it a good medium of exchange are totally different than what makes it a store of value.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

In a first-ever two-hour episode for Venture Stories by Village Global, Erik talks to two of the most interesting crypto thinkers around: Arjun Balaji (@arjunblj), crypto investor, trader and incubator, and Murad Mahmudov (@MustStopMurad), crypto analyst and angel investor.In this wide-ranging and mind-expanding interview, the three discuss a number of topics relating to cryptocurrencies, effects on government, economic history, and predictions for the future, among many other things including:- The arguments for Bitcoin over other cryptocurrencies and whether Bitcoin can be toppled- Why Bitcoin is less like digital gold and more like “digital nuclear weapons”- Whether Bitcoin will be “the MySpace of money”- A history of the Austrian school of economics- The impacts of hard forks on a community- How competition between monies accelerates capitalism- Whether blockchain as a technology is overrated or underrated- The parallels between cryptocurrency and the Asian construction bubble- Institutional movement into cryptocurrencies- The psyche of crypto hedge fund managers- How crypto changes how countries compete for tax revenuesQuotable lines from this episode:“The creation of a non-sovereign sound money system has the potential to be one of the most significant events in our lifetime.” - AB“I view money as a good, just like anything else, and I don’t believe we have pure capitalism until we have competition among currencies.” - MM“Cryptocurrencies in general and in particular Bitcoin are a higher quality form of money.” - MM“Through the fat money lens, all tokens are cryptocurrencies.” - AB“The whole market is like a prediction market for which one or few coins will be the long term money winner.” - MM“Bitcoin is the Schelling point of the market”. - MM“Despite all the fancy bells and whistles that blockchains enable, the fact that nobody can print more Bitcoin is the greatest innovation here.” - MM“The idea that money has to be continuously in circulation is completely non-sensical.” -MM“We’re not trying to build another PayPal here, we’re trying to disrupt central banking.” -MM“Miners don’t control Bitcoin, businesses don’t control bitcoin, users and full nodes control Bitcoin.” - AB“As time goes on, everyone is going to become a Bitcoin maximalist whether they like it or not.” - MM“The number one thing that we can learn from economic history is that if there is an actor that can create more money, they will.” - AB“If there’s free competition around money then the market would never naturally converge around something [the US Dollar] that is expanding at 6% a year. It’s totally irrational.”“Just as we witnessed the separation of church and state, in the next 20-30 years we are going to witness the separation of money and state.” - MM“People who say capitalism is dead or that we are entering the end of capitalism don’t know what they are talking about, because capitalism is going to go into overdrive.” -AB“What previously took a 200-person team in 2000, took a 100-person team in 2007 and takes a 5- or 10-person team now.” - AB“We’re entering an era where businesses will be able to be built and run on the internet by one person.” - AB“These tokens suck as money or are absolutely and utterly useless.” -MM“Almost all of these tokens were unethical fundraising scams by the founders.” - MM“This whole thing [the ICO boom] was a form of IQ arbitrage, where people took advantage of these overvalued shit tokens… Do you want to walk around New York and use a different form of currency at each store?” - MM“Erik, if you’re looking to hold your wealth in the equivalent of gift cards to the Gap, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.” - AB“The hype around blockchain is nothing more than an indicator that Silicon Valley is largely oriented less around the original counterculture movement and much moreso positioned as a form of opportunistic greed behaviours.” - AB“The monetary premium that is embedded inside [altcoins] is purely psychosocial, it’s purely cognitive. It’s almost like an ongoing hallucination of our collective unconsciousness.” - MM“The recurring selling of narratives that Murad mentioned is the core business of most crypto hedge funds. They’re not active traders, they’re just early investors that then sell the dream and then sell their bags on many retail investors.” - AB“One of my favourite things that Murad has ever said is that blockchains don’t create revenues, they destroy revenues.” - AB“If your product is open source and your rent is too high, you risk getting forked or re-architected by someone else charging less, and it becomes a race to the bottom.” - MM“Let’s be honest, on-chain governance is essentially the rule of the rich.” - MM“No governance is the best governance, or at least for neo-gold.” - MM-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Joining Erik for this episode are Felix Feng (‪@felix2feng)‬, founder of Set Protocol and Nadav Hollander (@NadavAHollander), founder of Dharma Protocol.Felix and Nadav explain their respective companies and what they are looking to do for the open financial system. They talk about how the coming wave of decentralization in financial services will bring the same accessibility and ease of use that individuals are accustomed to with Web 2.0 services to financial services as well.They discuss the opportunities for blockchain and cryptocurrency to scale given that as big as it has gotten over the past few years, they still account for only a minuscule portion of the value of the entire financial system. A lot of attention is focused on venture capital and how that could be disrupted by blockchain, but they talk about how debt financing is many orders of magnitude larger than VC.Felix and Nadav explore what the implications of everything being tokenized might be and Erik also asks about what they are excited about in terms of products and protocols in the space as well as what they would love to see built in the future.Quotable lines from this episode:“If the cost of issuing an asset goes to zero, what happens when everything is traded? Then things get really interesting when you add derivatives and loans on top of that.”“Imagine you’re in a virtual reality world and you’ve made a virtual piece of art that’s hanging in a digital museum and you get revenue from people visiting it every so often. Now imagine you tokenize it or draw a loan against it, and pay off your mortgage in the real world.”“If you look back on this podcast in 20 years, it’s probably not going to age well because everything [that will be tokenized] is going to be even weirder because we have had no idea what these things are going to look like.”“I think that blockchain is going to create new asset classes that will be tremendously more valuable and will look like almost nothing we’ve seen in the traditional world.”“If there are going to be monoliths that emerge from this in some capacity, they’re going to have to capitalize on some irredeemably scarce resource that can’t be traded or commoditized, and I think it’s likely that resource will be trust.”“The high end estimate for the value of all derivative contracts is 1.2 quadrillion. I didn’t even know that was the number after a trillion.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Alan Curtis of Radar Relay, a Village portfolio company, joins Erik to talk about what Radar Relay is working on and to discuss what is needed to get bring the world into the token economy. Alan explains the four main categories of tokens: utility, security, collectible and currency. He then compares and contrasts centralized and decentralized exchanges for those tokens.Alan gets into what a relay is, why it matters, and what the future of Radar Relay will be. He explains market makers in crypto, why he decided to build on top of 0x and discusses the pros and cons of a business built on another company’s platform. They also discuss what the bottlenecks to widespread adoption of crypto are, what kinds of moats he hopes to build as well as what kinds of moats the incumbents in the traditional finance have.Quotable lines from this episode:“The ethos around blockchain is about self-agency — it’s about efficacy.”“Talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not.”“For any cool project online there will always be those 1000 true fans, but if you’re not thinking deeply about how this crosses the chasm and how you get your next users, your project is probably going nowhere fast.”“I think most people underestimate the power of brand in the long term and overestimate it in the short term.”“A decentralized exchange is an imprecise term that people have been using as a noun when in fact it is a verb.”“We’re moving a world where the centralized exchanges become fiat brokerages.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.