 When the crypto bubble burst in 2018, you pointed out that five key factors which crypto needed in order to succeed as a technology. Can you briefly tell us about what these factors are? Scalability was one of them. None of the technology has really scaled, although we started to see some changes in that over the last couple of years. This is not a simple problem. It's not like we can just go down to the bookstore and get the O'Reilly book on scaling decentralized systems. It is an unsolved problem, and people become very impatient waiting for these problems to be solved. We've been trained by Wired Magazine to think that technology changes every 15 seconds, but problems that are unsolved still take a long time. The internet was 25 years before anybody was really using it in the mainstream. That's a long time, 25 years. I also talked about the user experience. The user experience is atrocious in this space. If you can get your mom to use in exchange in under two weeks, you're a super genius. We needed to eliminate centralized choke points. That's actually a battle I think that the crypto space is losing. The distribution, I feel like Satoshi figured out how to do consensus without centralized authorities. But the distribution model of Bitcoin and most of the coins after it is exactly the same. It's top-down. I felt that was a missed opportunity. We can change the way that money is distributed, particularly with gamified money. I wrote an article on gamifying the delivery of money. A lot of people have used that term now to just think of it as like reward bucks, but it can actually change radically how we distribute money across an economic system. I think that's going to be one of the biggest game changers if folks can get that right. A killer app is something that's definitely missing in this space. We can't even get the user interface right, so I don't know how we've gotten to the killer app. We certainly have not reached that Netscape moment. When Netscape came out on the internet, people understood the power of the internet. But before that, it was very abstract to people. People can understand text and pictures and reading and sending things out to people without a central intermediary. That's really what Hypertext Transfer Language was all about, right? Hypertext Transfer Markup Language. And we don't have that in the crypto space. The crypto space is still out there hawking the equivalent of TCPIP and DNS. It's like, hey, do you want to buy some TCPIP? No, I don't. I want to buy stuff on Amazon and I want to read digital books and I want to send cat pictures to people. I don't care about TCPIP or DNS or any of the other stuff under it. I care about it as an engineer, but the average person does it. And the last thing is to transcend the net. To transcend the net was a call to arms that I think is probably the farthest out from the five things that I was talking about. And that's because the internet has become a series of centralized choke points as well. We like to think of the internet as something that's incredibly decentralized and distributed and it was designed that way initially. It was designed as a way to route around countries getting wiped off the map from a nuclear strike. It was designed by DARPA and all those universities back in the day to route around significant disaster. But it's become just a centralized system and it can easily be cut off as we've seen in many countries where there are just protests and they've managed to shut down most of the internet or most of the communications in that country by killing the routing and switching centers. So I believe we need to have a peer-to-peer distributed system that transcends the internet that is unstoppable. That's very interesting. So nowadays in the latest few weeks, months, Bitcoin started surging again. And so do you think that's a sign that we made some progress in this checklist that you made? So is the surge connected with some improvements regarding those key points that you mentioned? So from a trading standpoint, I never look at it like that. I tend to look at it as the market is simply moving in one direction or another and I'm largely indifferent to it. That said, there have been a number of things in world events that have started, I think, to move us back towards a bull. You start to see a lot of capital flight out of China as currency controls come in. There are other places where tremendous amounts of currency controls are strangling the population in Venezuela and places in Turkey where you have sort of this decline in democracy and this chaos and this currency control. So that is where decentralized cryptos start to see a lot of capital flight. And you also do have some progress in this space. I would say it's a little premature to start calling it true progress. I think there's been progress made over the last year and a half as we've been through the bear. But I'm not sure that it's enough to justify the resurgence. That said, there are interesting things like, you know, Radix the other day did a cool publicity stunt where they ran the entire history of Bitcoin transactions in 15 minutes. So that certainly addresses scalability. That's still an alpha technology or a beta technology. But that shows some level of progress in a permissionless decentralized system. So I think we're starting to make progress and certainly even we'll talk about Libra. But Libra in some ways represents progress as well in that the mainstream is starting to get involved in it in a way that we've never seen before. Alright, so getting about talking about Libra, which is the Facebook's coin everyone is talking about nowadays. In your latest article, you define the advent of Libra as an extinction level event for the old financial world order. What do you mean by that? I think it could dramatically change it. So for instance, they're setting it to a basket of currencies as opposed to a specific currency, which means they can adjust that monetary policy at any time that they see fit. They can drop a currency or add a currency, which would punish that currency, which would be a nation state currency. So that nation state currency, they may be able to influence a nation state currency's policies in order to be included in the basket of currencies because they want to participate. In addition, if you start to think about maybe half of the people on the Bitcoin network having 100 Libra each, which is incredibly conservative, that money gets minted or destroyed when Fiat comes into it. So the equivalent Fiat is going to be something in the range of $80 billion for that, which is just sitting in the banks and accruing money. They can play the different banks off of each other in order to compete with them. And in addition, the Federal Reserve banks are not going to have as much power over their individual currency if an international sovereign currency in many ways is able to influence people's behavior and has a tremendous amount of buying and selling behind it. And on the back end, they also have a secondary coin, which is a deflationary coin, which rewards all of the oligarchy behind the situation. So that's going to be very interesting in and of itself in that you really have a secondary monetary policy that's that's stealth and can mop up even more of the Fiat in the world. So they're going to have tremendous amounts of reach if the platform is successful. They have the potential to be doing trillions of dollars worth of transactions and mopping up and moving that Fiat money into their system and hoarding it in their coffers, which means they get to buy a lot of lobbyists. They get to change what banks are able to do because they're able to rewrite the laws in their favor. And it's always been the province of banks to influence how the laws have been made in their favor. So that's going to start to change as they face giant multinational corporations. Still, Facebook promised that Libra would be completely disconnected from real real life identities. And that's why it's reassuring people that it will not use their data as it used to do in the past. But still, you fear for people's privacy. Why? Again, this is anybody who thinks that they're not going to tie an ID to this is insane. There is a 0.0 percent chance. They've already said that the calibre wallet, which is the first wallet that will be released, is going to go through Know Your Customer anti-money laundering. They're going to face tremendous pressure from governments everywhere, especially if the platform is large to conform to existing KYC ammo laws. I have my own personal challenges with them or problems with them. I think KYC laws are a misguided attempt to stop a very real problem, but they have created more property theft combined than all other property theft in the world. So I think they're a very flawed system because we basically centralized all of the data and the hackers know right where to go and steal it. So you have Equifax, Luz, half the data of the United States, and they're still trusted. So there will be other wallets on the system. But again, if you look at the folks that are behind this, they're all from the old world guard. They all have to deal with existing laws. They're going to face tremendous pressure from governments. There's just a 0% chance. In addition, they're going to make a lot of money from understanding the social dynamics of how the money is being used using predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, ML. That's really how Facebook has made its money. And a lot of these other companies have made their money. If you look at Visa and MasterCard and all these companies, they've made it by understanding your behavior better than you understand your behavior. So even if they don't have an KYC ammo process, they're going to be able to peer through your wallet into the other bits of your social life that are tied together. And they're going to be able to understand your behavior and track it across the network. You envision a kind of cyberpunk dystopia where Libra has established Libra and Facebook, established a kind of global domination over people. But you also envisioned a way out of this situation where people can preserve their freedom. And so what is the possible way out from this kind of cyberpunk dystopia? Well, having worked in open source for a decade, I believe very strongly in open source. I've seen it win out over proprietary technologies. I was working with Linux when we were still talking to companies about it. And they were like, why would I use this crazy communist open source cancer? That's evil. Why would we will just use Solaris or a proprietary Unix? That conversation is over. Linux and open source have absolutely eaten the world. Everything from the public cloud to your smartphone runs on open source software. All of the innovations in the world from artificial intelligence to big data start in open source. So open source often starts out uglier. Open source developers tend to be hardcore engineers. They want to work on the back end and the engine and they don't always think about the interface. So it takes a little bit longer for it to come to fruition. But oftentimes open platforms start, like I said, they start off uglier, but they start to gain their momentum and their understanding and their strength and foundation over time. Proprietary platforms usually take an early lead and open source software often is able to overtake them in the long run. And we end up seeing an open internet versus a proprietary corporate internet. But more often than not open platforms went out in the end. And so I'm hopeful that it continues to go in that direction this way as well.