Hey, guys! Welcome back to a Saturday morning--
is it Meta Money?
Is it BitBoy Crypto?
What do we call it these days?
Saturday morning sit-down.
It's been a while.
Saturday morning sit-down, I think that's right.
It's the must-have after Saturday morning cartoons.
Oh, man, so if you still got your bowl of cereal,
just refill it back up if you got a little more milk because we're going to keep it going right now.
Alright. Let's do it.
The topic today is there's this, like, a lot of pain, right?
I think that trying to, like, identify myself as a retail person,
but-- because I am too in some ways.
I lost a lot of money in this Celsius thing.
Feeling, like, sad, but I'm like, whatever. I'll make it in crypto somewhere else.
So there's a lot of pain there.
People have also lost a lot in the market.
The markets are down.
And now it's kind of going back up.
We don't really know what's going on, so, like, what next?
Like, how do we get people to believe in crypto again?
In the last episode we had,
we talked about kind of like we felt like we could be missionaries again.
But with all this stuff going on,
how do we do that now?
Well, I think the important thing is, is the message that you're giving to people.
Because, you know, the message that we get from everything
that has gone on over the last couple of months is
"Not your keys, not your crypto."
Like, it's pretty simple, you know?
So, when you're talking to people about crypto and trying to onboard them,
at this point, you have to put a lot more emphasis on custody and owning your own crypto,
especially for you guys that, you know, have lost money in some of these ordeals.
You guys know better than anybody, you know.
You know what you should have done now.
We're included in on that as well.
We were way too trusting of exchanges.
- And so I think the problem is not crypto. - Yeah.
I think the problem is,
the same thing that crypto was started to fight,
is centralization.
And so when you have these third-party platforms and exchanges,
you're having to give them trust,
it's defeating the whole purpose of what we're trying to do in the world of crypto.
So, I think that, you know, you're looking at a multi-faceted thing here
when it comes to how people are feeling,
and they're sad and they're trying to make their money back,
but then also just the message like,
is crypto safe?
Crypto is safe.
- Third-party exchanges are not. - Right.
And, you know, I think that, especially if we want to focus maybe more on like the idea,
because, you know, Bryan and I talked a lot about the metaverse and Web3
and what's going on there and how we can relate it to there is,
you know, as you said, self-custody.
You know, you've got to, you know.
You've got to be your own custodial service of your whatever.
It's your crypto. It's your metaverse land.
It's your NFTs. Whatever.
So, that's the important message I think moving forward, is like,
alright. Now, you know what happened.
You trusted someone else.
You got wrecked.
- Now, you've got to figure it out for yourself. - Yeah.
- Yeah. And-- - And that's your digital identity as well moving forward.
So, like, you're not only protecting your assets, but you're protecting who you are.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, Web3 ties into identification, for sure.
And I think that, you know, it's really interesting because metaverse, NFTs, like,
everything's Web3.
It's really kind of the cutting edge of where things are going.
And I talk a lot about how, you know, there's things that we don't know that we don't know, right?
So, in the future, how all this ties everything together,
how all this secures everything is yet to be seen,
but we know that, in some way, it's going to happen.
And I think, you know, data and privacy are things that we really have to put much bigger emphasis on
over the next, you know, not just a few years, but over the next few generations
because we've ruined privacy for multiple generations,
thanks to Facebook.
Keeping in mind how data works in Web3 is going to be really interesting.
Something that we've been looking at and tossing around is, you know,
kind of trying to add like a privacy layer between all your interactions with websites.
So, basically, how the websites are able to get your information in a filtered kind of way
so you're only allowing them to see, you know, exactly what they need for you to do the transaction.
- So, you're not signing a blanket? Okay. - Exactly.
Interesting. I think we need definitely privacy, like, builders, people that are building it out,
because it can't just be up to you.
We need the people that are smart,
that are actually building these applications and platforms to have privacy in mind,
which is cool that you're doing stuff like that.
- We actually just talked to Seth of Mind Your Biz - Yeah.
about that same thing, about the importance of builders within the Web3 ecosystem,
specifically with privacy in mind.
Alright. So I think this is, like, centralization, right?
We're talking, "Yeah, decentralization."
I feel like that's such a buzzword in the crypto-savvy community
and everyone's like, "Yeah!"
But I personally believe history is going to repeat itself,
and we're going to have tons of centralization in this space.
And it worries me.
But at the end of the day,
it's going to be-- like, the responsibility is up to us, right?
But at the same time,
how do you get new people in?
Because these new people,
it's hard enough for them to just make a crypto wallet.
Now, we're like, "Oh, and you have to be extra careful and worry about your privacy,"
which at the end of the day, people don't want to do.
Yeah.
Well, I mean if you just go back to the beginning of the internet,
at the beginning of the public web,
there's definitely a lot of parallels between where we're at now and where we were at then.
I mean just think about all the barriers to getting on the internet you had back in 1991.
You basically had one browser that you could use.
Everybody was using AOL at that time.
You thought AOL was the internet.
Search engines were not really available at that point.
You know, they developed quickly over time, but you couldn't even search things on the internet.
Think about that.
Before the public web,
all of this existed,
and nobody could use it, right?
Unless you were like a computer scientist, you know, or something like that.
So, where we're at now with blockchain,
the problem that you're talking about is going to go away.
At some point,
there won't be a large learning curve to use crypto or to buy NFTs.
As it becomes more accessible,
and there are more and more, you know,
you know, apps or dApps that are built on top of it that people are using every day,
that learning curve is just going to slip away.
Right now, it seems so drastic.
I mean, imagine if in 1991,
okay,
the third day the public internet was available,
you sat down to do a book report.
Okay?
Or to do a science project or an essay on something.
Would it have been easier for you to get on the public web
and try to figure out how to find all that information
or to go sit down at your local library and do it?
Well, it'd be much easier to do it at the library at that time, right?
That's where we're at.
We're still in the library stage of all this, in my opinion,
where it's easier to do things not on blockchain than it is to do things on blockchain.
But eventually that goes away.
And I think with your centralization, you know, comments there,
it's important to remember there's no such thing as decentralization.
There's really no such thing as centralization.
It's a continuum.
You have these two endpoints.
This is fully centralized.
This is fully decentralized.
Everything falls somewhere on that continuum.
So, the point is,
we just need to move it further to the decentralization side
from the centralization side.
It's not ever going to be perfect
because you're always going to have people that make decisions.
Like with Bitcoin,
everybody says Bitcoin is the most decentralized currency,
and, you know, of course, it is.
It has the largest decentralized network.
But somebody had to come up with a name.
Somebody had to create it.
- Somebody had to-- - Design the logo.
There has to be trust somewhere.
And, of course, with Bitcoin, it's very, very close to decentralized,
but even if you look at the way that Blockstream works
with the "volunteer" developers on making changes to Bitcoin,
you know, you could say certainly there, there are some centralization issues.
You could certainly say when it comes to the largest Bitcoin influencers,
you know, your older OGs,
your Matt Odells,
your Saifedean Ammouses,
- Max Keisers? - you know-- Max Keiser.
Like, these people's ideas,
you know, they're only their opinion, but they put them out to the whole community,
so, in a way, like, you could argue that's centralization
because you've got big thought leaders pushing certain topics.
So, really, you just want to fall more on this side than that side.
It's never going to be perfect.
And I understand what you're saying about repeating the past.
We don't want history to repeat.
We don't want this to become something that's used against us
and not used for us.
And I think that is a very important thing for people to keep in mind.
It's a war.
There's ton of battles on the way.
We've lost a lot of battles.
We've lost tons of battles.
We've won some.
But we've lost a lot.
Right now, we're at the pivotal point in history with regulation.
Like, are we going to win this? Are we going to lose this?
You know, when the digital dollar comes out,
that's going to be a big loss, for sure.
So, you've just got to think of it long term and fighting the fight and, you know,
just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Yeah, I agree with you that, you know, it's going to become easier.
I still think that self-custody though of your data and your own crypto will always be "hard."
It's always like the extra step that everybody has to do,
so, you know, make sure you do that.
You know, privacy matters and protecting your assets matter.
- So, do that. - Absolutely.
- I think that's it for today. - That's all we got.
Alright.
Alright. Well, have yourself a great rest of the weekend.
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